Animals and Other People. Heather Keenleyside
like a dog, but the conversation of someone to whom he might speak. By limiting society to those who can speak, Crusoe would seem to designate a solely human domain, quite different from the expansive animal system of Thomson’s animated earth.
As the narrative proceeds, however, Defoe brings the company of animate creatures and the society of “Some-Body to speak to” much closer together. According to his own narration, at least, Crusoe does seem to have “Some-Body to speak to” on the island, and this somebody is both like and unlike Noland’s Wilson. Early during his island sojourn, Crusoe reports that “I diverted my self with talking to my Parrot, and teaching him to Speak, and I quickly learn’d him to know his own Name, and at last to speak it out pretty loud P O L L, which was the first Word I ever heard spoken in the Island by any Mouth but my own” (94). Crusoe continues to pass his time on the island both speaking and being spoken to: “I had taught my Poll, as I noted before, to speak; and he did it so familiarly, and talk’d so articulately and plain, that it was very pleasant to me; and he liv’d with me no less than six and twenty years” (141). In spite of such descriptions of his creaturely company and conversation, critics frequently take Crusoe’s complaints of his solitary “silent Life” at face value (123). As Irene Basey Beesemeyer puts it, “not withstanding ‘conversations’ with Poll, the dog and cats, maybe even the goats, Crusoe is his own sole correspondent for much of the text.”6 David Marshall and Eric Jager similarly set Crusoe’s conversations with animals in scare quotes, identifying Poll as Crusoe’s “talking signature,” or his own “‘othered’ voice.”7 Such readings understand Crusoe’s animal companions not as “Some-Body to speak to,” but as products of Crusoe’s own projective imagination—“poignant yet humorous reminders of the absent conversation that he desires during his many years of solitude.”8 For Jager, most explicitly, Crusoe’s conversations are “conversations” because they proceed by means of personification. By “personifying the other,” Jager writes, “Crusoe acquires a ‘diverting’ semblance of society, though it is no more than a semblance.”9
Jager’s comments get at an important aspect of Robinson Crusoe: its interest in the operation that constitutes persons and society around conversation or the capacity to speak, an operation that is usefully thought of in terms of personification. Yet Cast Away helps us to be more precise about Defoe’s use of this device. For if Noland and Crusoe both personify the beings to whom they speak, the status of their personifications differs. Made from Noland’s handprint, of Noland’s blood, Wilson is literally an effect of his creator’s physical and psychological state, a projection that results from but does not end Noland’s isolation. Despite the vividness of Wilson’s persona or the animation of Noland’s address, there is never any question that Wilson is, in a strong sense, only in Chuck’s head. Neither monkey nor man, Wilson never does become “somebody to trade quips with” (in Hanks’s terms) or “Some-Body to speak to” (in Crusoe’s). The same is not true of an animate creature like Poll. Poll may be imprinted (and so given speech) by Crusoe’s voice, much as Wilson is imprinted (and so given face) by Noland’s hand. But Defoe locates this imprinting in the interaction of two living creatures, rather than with the action of a human being upon an inanimate object. The difference between talking to a volleyball and talking to a parrot signals that Defoe uses personification neither to index Crusoe’s psychological state nor, as critics often imagine, to divide true society from its mere semblance. Instead, Crusoe’s personification of Poll arises from uncertainty about the distinction between speaking and moving, and it ultimately opens the possibility that “the Society of … Fellow-Creatures” might be composed of animals as well as human beings. With its focus on a lone individual and a putatively presocial state of nature, Defoe’s novel seems a long way from Thomson’s vision of the great “social Commerce” of the whole “Earth animated” (A, 834; Su, 292). But like Thomson, Defoe suggests that personhood itself is a quasi-figurative status, and one that might extend to all animate creatures.
The stakes of this suggestion, for Defoe, are explicitly political. In particular, the connections Defoe draws between personification, speech, and animal motion make significant trouble for the Lockean political philosophy he is frequently seen to endorse. Locke’s account of civil society turns on the distinction between political authority (a relation between human persons that is constituted by consent) and property right (a relation between persons and things that is constituted by appropriation). In condensed form, Locke construes these two modes of relation as speaking and eating; these relations in turn rest on the putatively natural distinction between human persons and all other things. Locke’s own work often undercuts this simplified Lockean schema, as I argue in this chapter and at greater length in Chapter 4. But it is this basic Lockean paradigm that Defoe both invokes and undermines in Robinson Crusoe. Rather than picture a world divided into persons and things—on the model of Locke’s Second Treatise, and also Zemeckis’s Cast Away—Robinson Crusoe composes a domestic and creaturely society that does not clearly sort humans from animals, speaking from eating, consent from coercion, family from food. In this respect, Defoe’s social vision resembles Thomson’s, imagining as it does a society that extends beyond human beings, and granting personification a central role in its constitution. But the domestic society that emerges on Crusoe’s island is not the expansive and affirmative social vision of The Seasons. Instead, it is a sign of the breakdown, or the impossibility, of Lockean politics.
The claim that Defoe sketches a distinctly un-Lockean world may sound strange to readers of Robinson Crusoe, more accustomed to viewing Defoe’s text as a sympathetic novelization of Lockean political philosophy. There are good reasons to hold this customary view. It is certainly the case that Crusoe wants society to work as Locke outlines. An obsessive maker of contracts even in the most unlikely of circumstances, he seeks both to secure and to legitimate his dominion over other people by construing his dominion as Locke would construe it, in terms of consent. But Defoe undercuts the Lockean longings of his own protagonist. He does this in the narrative by replacing Locke’s category of the human person with the more capacious category of the creature, and by associating speech with the figure of personification, and with the creaturely activities of moving and eating. He does this too at the level of form—particularly, in the creaturely form of his “Allegorical, though also Historical” central character, a direct representation of the species “Man,” or even the more abstract and nonspecific “Life.” I will have more to say about what this means in the next section. For now, I mean to note simply that it is by novelizing Locke’s political philosophy that Defoe undercuts its logic. Character is the formal site of a conclusion that sets Robinson Crusoe apart from the political individualism of Locke’s Second Treatise (and, from the psychological individualism of Cast Away): the conclusion that it is impossible to be solitary or sovereign, secure in oneself and in one’s species, one who speaks and is not eaten. It does not matter where we are—on a desert island, at the center of an English metropolis, on a plantation in Brazil—we are incorporated in the kind of domestic society that Robinson Crusoe pictures, for this is simply what we are: lives made of and by others.
Fellow Creatures and the Novelistic Character
In his remarks on Robinson Crusoe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge commented that the greatness of Defoe’s character is that he is a “representative of humanity in general”: he “makes me forget my specific class, character, and circumstances, [and] raises me into the universal man.”10 Though in some respects Defoe clearly does attend to specificities of class, character, and circumstance, Coleridge’s kind of claim has followed the novel since its inception. Readers from Rousseau to James Joyce have continued to assert Crusoe’s representative status.11 In doing so, they celebrate an achievement that can seem at odds with Ian Watt’s still influential account of the genre, in which Defoe is the first novelist in part because he—like Locke, on Watt’s account—privileges “the discrete particular, the directly apprehended sensum, and the autonomous individual” over “the ideal, the universal, and the corporate.”12 Certainly, one might read Coleridge’s remark in a way that is wholly compatible with Watt’s individualist logic—if, for example, Defoe arrives at universal representativeness