The Robinsonade in the Age of Reality TV

Drew Basile reads the new English reissue of French author Michel Tournier’s novel “Friday.”

By Drew Basile December 11, 2025

• Fiction

“I WAS JUST sitting here minding my own business,” Jake Latimer says, limping up the beach as a snake glides along the shoreline, its black-and-white stripes glimmering on the dark sand. “It came up and just, like, latched on to me.” The camera zooms in on his foot. Producers begin to swarm. The snake—a banded sea krait, native to the Mamanuca island chain where several seasons of the hit TV show Survivor (2000– ) have been filmed—is one of the most dangerous animals on the planet. The tiniest drop of its venom is enough to paralyze the respiratory system in minutes. “Look,” Jake says to his tribe, holding out his leg, “you can see two little marks.”

The island adventure show trades on the possibility of something going wrong. Jake was medically evacuated but lived. His wound was what’s called a dry bite, meaning the snake never injected its venom. By virtue of shooting in the jungle, Survivor has had its fair share of close calls. Thirty million viewers watched Mike Skupin fall into the campfire during The Australian Outback, the show’s first-ever emergency evacuation. Caleb Reynolds was evacuated with heatstroke in Kaoh Rong. Jake competed on Survivor’s 49th season this fall, and its landmark 50th season will air in the spring. Survivor is near-synonymous with the castaway today, and its success is owed in large part to the island. Set off from the mainland, it’s a dangerous place, and this danger is proof that it’s primal. On the island, anything can happen. On the island, you could become someone else.

But Survivor isn’t the only desert-island drama on offer these days. Love Island (2015– ) took the United States by storm last summer, generating a tidal wave of online discourse. Deal or No Deal Island (2024–25) gave away $5.8 million as its grand prize earlier this year. And that doesn’t account for the imitations—Temptation Island (2001– ), FBoy Island (2021–23), Bachelor in Paradise (2014– ), Ex on the Beach (2014– ), and others. We are, quite literally, running out of islands. Survivor host Jeff Probst told The New York Times that the show now struggles to find suitably isolated locations, and there’s fierce competition with other reality programs for the remaining few. The island’s appeal is its potential for self-transformation. As the philosopher Gilles Deleuze once wrote, “dreaming of islands […] is dreaming of starting from scratch, recreating, beginning anew.”

French writer Michel Tournier (1924–2016) thought that it all boiled down to Robinson Crusoe. If Helen of Troy was the face that launched a thousand ships, then Crusoe was the man responsible for a million islands. Daniel Defoe’s evergreen novel was a cultural sensation when it debuted in 1719, and it quickly became the prototype for the island adventure story. By 1731, the German writer Johann Gottfried Schnabel would term the genre the “Robinsonade” in Crusoe’s honor. The name stuck. We find permutations of Crusoe in Johann David Wyss’s The Swiss Family Robinson (1812) and the Robinson clan of CBS’s Lost in Space (1965–68), in Muriel Spark’s suspenseful Robinson (1958) and J. M. Coetzee’s thoughtful Foe (1986). Even Survivor was spun off from the Swedish program Expedition Robinson (1997– ). For Tournier, this long influence signaled that Crusoe was more than just a character in a novel: the castaway was “a mythical hero” who served as a cipher for the Western world and modern life. “Crusoe is one of the basic constituents of the Western soul,” Tournier wrote in his 1977 autobiography The Wind Spirit. “Each new generation, apparently, has felt a need to tell its story through that of Robinson Crusoe and by so doing to discover its own identity.”

It’s only natural, then, that Tournier’s debut should deal with Crusoe. Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique (translated by Norman Denny as Friday, or, The Other Island) was published in 1967. Tournier won the prestigious Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française for the novel. The win was something of a miracle. Tournier was 43, a failed philosopher and a fitful journalist, and Friday was an obscure novel of ideas considerably distant from the spare, cool style of the Nouveau Roman, then in vogue. His debut rewrote Robinson Crusoe as a searching and spiritualized work of philosophy. Where Defoe had named Crusoe’s isle “the Island of Despair,” Tournier rechristened it “the Island of Hope,” or Speranza. Where Crusoe considered the island a repository of raw materials for rebuilding the civilized world, Tournier’s Robinson responds by embracing nature, by viewing the impenetrable jungle as a “forest of allegory,” by ascending into metaphor and personal mythology. Marx once described Crusoe as the consummate Englishman. Much of Friday—its lush symbolism, its free-spirited eroticism, its penchant for abstraction—is quintessentially French.

But Tournier also intended Friday as a comment on the wider world, on the appeal of the island more broadly. He realized that there was something counterintuitive in the continued success of the Robinsonade. The further removed we were from the shipwreck—from the castaway and the cannibal and the privateer—the more relevant the desert island seemed in the popular imagination. “As riches piled up, social bonds fell away one by one,” Tournier explained in Wind Spirit, “and the emancipated individual found himself standing naked, expectant, and alone, with no one to whom he could turn for help in the nameless, faceless crowd.” Economic and technological factors had converged to produce a society of atomized individuals, beholden only to efficiency and profit. Isolation had become a structural fact of modern life. Today, Tournier wrote, borrowing from Max Weber, “we live locked in glass cages of reserve, coldness, and self-containment.” His insight was that the Robinsonade spoke to this modern condition of solitude: everyone is isolated; everyone is alone; we’re all castaways, stranded on our own desert islands, in search of fleeting semblances of community. Tournier’s response to this situation was uncharacteristically engagé: “The glass cage must be broken. And in order to break it we must first discover for ourselves that it exists and convince ourselves that it is neither inevitable nor good.”

That’s where Friday came in. The novel was reissued this month by NYRB Classics (in Denny’s original ringing translation from 1969). It’s didactic, much like Robinson Crusoe was. But whereas Crusoe obeyed the Protestant ethic—taught us, in Rousseau’s words, “to judge of everything […] by its real utility”—Friday demonstrates that this instrumental approach to life is little more than a blind alley. If this seems intuitive today, it marks a major reversal for the Robinsonade, which has long prized practicality and survival skills over the touchy work of soul-searching and self-discovery. But the world has changed since Defoe. Where the island’s absence of capital struck Crusoe as immoral, it strikes us as a reprieve. Whether Friday or Survivor and its TV progeny, the contemporary Robinsonade boils down to a fairly simple bargain: modern life is deeply unfulfilling and profoundly disorienting. The desert island offers the chance to begin anew. Love Island promises the hottest British or American singles the opportunity to “explore connection” in a world primed for love rather than labor. Survivor’s Probst explains that his show is “a social experiment” about “Americans forced to work together to create a new society.” Friday tracks Robinson as he slips from the productive world into “the other island,” a mythic state of harmony with nature. The enduring success of these works, whatever their flaws, hints that we’re still invested in what such a new world might look like.

In Friday’s case, the world is waterlogged. The novel opens with the wreck, with Robinson stranded on a desert island off the coast of Chile. He attempts to build a boat to escape, but after months of effort, he realizes that he has constructed it hundreds of feet inland. Subsequently, he retreats into the mire, a fetid swamp that narcotizes him from “the demoralizing effects of solitude” (according to Tournier: madness, addiction, even death). It’s hard not to feel that Tournier was 60 years ahead of his time, that the mire isn’t a retreat into animality per se, as Roger Shattuck once suggested, but rather a drug or an algorithm or a screen, yet another in-turned world wherein “the toxic emanations of the stagnant water drugged his mind.” The force of solitude is so powerful that the modern castaway finds himself searching less for “escape”—which is also the name of Robinson’s grounded boat—than for the easiest way to succumb.

Slowly, carefully, Robinson raises himself out of the mire. He creates the rudiments of a society—he passes laws, plants crops, turns the untouched oasis into an English colony. It isn’t easy to function in profound isolation, but he manages. Yet beneath all this order and routine, he glimpses “another island […] a place more living, warmer and more fraternal, that had been concealed from him by the prosaicness of his daily preoccupations.” Tournier describes, in considerable detail, Robinson’s efforts to tap into this new world. He descends deep into a cave, a symbolic womb, and reenacts his own birth. He has sexual relationships, first with a tree and then with the earth. He adopts a new religious creed, a loose syncretism that involves reading the Bible and worshipping the sun. The logic of these events is sometimes mystifying, but Friday works because its language is hazy and sumptuous, because its world seems full and deep. If Tournier ascends into mysticism, then there’s a certain pleasure in watching from the ground.

For all its weirdness, Friday shares certain presumptions about self-discovery with the more contemporary Robinsonade. In a world in which accumulated prosperity and rationalization have stamped out the pulse of life, the island’s scarcity could be, paradoxically, a means for rebirth. As a philosopher, Tournier came from a phenomenological tradition that saw moments of pressure, intensity, and decision as both more authentic and existentially revealing. In Robinson’s isolation, Tournier explains in Wind Spirit, “the very roots of his life and being are laid bare, and he must then create from nothing a new world, groping in the dark, feeling his way toward discovery, clarity, and ecstasy.” If isolation is toxic, if the castaway experience has leached into our collective mindset even when in groups, then a concentrated and intensified experience of deprivation might be powerful enough to snap us out of this obsession. Probst has called Survivor “the most physically demanding and emotionally taxing game on television,” explaining that the sheer pressure of island living “strips you to your core while offering the opportunity to prove what you’re made of.” On the desert island, authenticity derives from danger, from isolation, from trembling decisions that determine who you really are. The costs of this encounter can be severe. Jake is bit by the snake. Robinson almost dies. “[F]or those who lose,” Probst commiserates, “the consequence is often a relentless nightmare of what-ifs that never ends.” But at their very best, these breathless moments of authenticity might identify a truer way of life. They might even inaugurate a new world.

The premise is risky, not just because there’s always the chance we might fail. Robinsonades often end up reinscribing the world they’re trying to escape. Love Island’s position in our commodified social media ecosystem adulterates the romantic connections it seeks to build. The bombshell castaways are motivated less by love and intimacy than by brand partnerships and online adoration. Survivor, for all its strengths, ties self-actualization to winning the game. Life in the tribe, ever since Richard Hatch in season one, has resembled political horse-trading or corporate dealmaking more than a refuge from the modern world. If these shows are utopian in theory, then this utopia has somehow miscarried. Watching the modern-day Robinsonade, endlessly repeated across an array of cable channels and streaming platforms, one gets the distinct impression that there is no alternative.

If there’s one reason to read Tournier’s Friday today, it’s because it stays the course. Tournier never gives up on the goal of shattering the glass cage. Halfway through the novel, Robinson unwittingly rescues the Araucanian character Friday from a ritual of human sacrifice on the beach. Poised somewhere between the noble savage and Rousseau’s “natural man,” the boy is 15 years old and incorrigible. He shirks his chores and pilfers Robinson’s tobacco. He has a natural kinship with animals. He, too, enters into a sexual relationship with the earth, infuriating Robinson to no end. But the coup de grâce occurs late in the novel, when Friday accidentally detonates a store of gunpowder hidden within the island, turning all of Speranza into an impromptu volcano. Robinson’s society is destroyed, and the message is clear: there’s no going back to the European way of life. Kicking and screaming, Robinson is led into a different world. He takes cues from Friday and sheds his clothes. He communes with the island and the sun in a strange, symbolic ménage à trois. Things turn alchemical. Objects transmute into symbols. Moments rearrange in some higher eternal order. At times, it’s hard to follow what exactly is supposed to be going on, and maybe that’s the point. In a world of castaways, Robinson has finally left us all behind.

Friday is not the perfect novel. Its language is beautiful and sonorous. Its vignettes are charming. It sometimes seems motionless, more akin to a fable or tableau vivant. But the novel is a welcome corrective for the modern-day Robinsonade. The island adventure today is bingeable, formulaic, and eminently commercial—so well-packaged a commodity that it has lost its distance, strangeness, and hope, those ideals that made the island an intriguing setting in the first place. The island ought to promise a new world. Friday just might be the first step toward getting there.