Animals and Other People. Heather Keenleyside
“creature” to mark the epistemological predicament that results from conditions of both perceptual obscurity (“we could not see”) and conceptual uncertainty. Even when they “saw” the creatures, Crusoe reports, “we knew not what to call them”; again, when he “perceiv’d” the creature at only two oars’ length, he still could not identify it (“whatever it was”). Crusoe’s arrival on the island is marked by a series of similarly indistinct creaturely encounters—with “two or three Creatures like Hares” and “a Creature like a wild Cat,” as well as with “two Fowls like Ducks,” “a Sea Fowl or two, something like a brand Goose,” and “Hares, as I thought them to be, and Foxes, but they differ’d greatly from all the other Kinds I had met with” (44, 45, 58, 76, 87). In all these moments, Crusoe would seem to use “creature” to mark his uncertainty in the face of the new.23
From the start, however, Defoe indicates that “creature” signals something more than a terminological solution to the problem of classifying unfamiliar particulars. A few pages after Crusoe and Xury encounter the “vast great Creatures” that Crusoe shoots at but does not name, they meet natives, whom Crusoe calls “People” and “Negroes” (25, 26). This second encounter suggests that whatever the earlier “vast great Creatures” were, they were not human, a species that Crusoe seems able to recognize and to designate as such. But this designation falters momentarily when Crusoe describes what happens when “two mighty Creatures” once again run into the water, and Crusoe once again fires his gun: “It is impossible to express the Astonishment of these poor Creatures at the Noise and Fire of my Gun; some of them were ready to dye for Fear, and fell down as Dead with the very Terror. But when they saw the Creature dead and sunk in the Water, and I made Signs to them to come to the Shore; they took Heart and came to the Shore and began to search for the Creature” (26). Only after a moment of indistinction between “these poor Creatures” and the “two mighty Creatures” does Crusoe distinguish human from animal, going on to relate how the “Negroes” dragged the creature’s body to shore to discover “a most curious Leopard” (27). In his descriptions of both nonhuman and human responses to his gun, Crusoe extends this sort of creaturely indeterminacy further still. Of the first encounter (with the “vast great [nonhuman] Creatures” at the mouth of the river), Crusoe writes: “it is impossible to describe the horrible Noises, and hideous Cryes and Howlings, that were raised … upon the Noise or Report of the Gun, a Thing I have some Reason to believe those Creatures had never heard before” (22). Of the second encounter (with the “poor [human] Creatures” on the shore), he writes: “it is impossible to express the Astonishment of these poor Creatures at the Noise and Fire of my Gun” (22, 26). Human and nonhuman creatures alike are astonished by Crusoe’s gunfire in a way he finds “impossible to express” and “impossible to describe.”
Set together, these scenes signal that the term “creature” does more than index Crusoe’s epistemological uncertainty. It is also the novel’s word for an ontological determination effected by exposure to external force. The creatures in these episodes are identified as such because that is what they are, not simply because Crusoe does not know what else to call them. The humans who are astonished by Crusoe’s gunfire, the “vast great Creatures” at which Crusoe shoots—as well as the “Creatures like Hares” and “Creature like a Wild Cat” that will later come under Crusoe’s fire—are all creatures in the sense that Julia Reinhard Lupton outlines in her discussion of “the politico-theological category of the creaturely,” which associates the creature with embodiment, vulnerability, and especially, with subjection to a radically superior power (the Creator).24 It might appear that Crusoe is patently unlike the creatures he encounters, given that he wields the gun that constitutes them as such. But in both of these scenes, Crusoe’s gunfire is followed by a striking symmetry of response. Unable to describe or express the response of different creatures at the noise and fire of his gun, Crusoe is as incapacitated and astonished as they.25 Ultimately, Crusoe’s gun serves to indicate his insecurity rather than his sovereignty—to indicate, most simply, that that he is a creature too, one vulnerable living body among others. In Defoe, “creature” works much as Thomson’s personifications do in The Seasons, to identify all beings under (and in contrast with) “Mysterious Heaven.”
To make this claim is again to work against one dominant strain of both secular and religious readings of Defoe’s novel. Critics often dispute the sincerity of Crusoe’s religiosity, but they usually agree that he proceeds by means of a set of analogical relations—between literal and metaphorical, material and spiritual, human and divine—toward God, whom he becomes or becomes like, as he ultimately achieves a quasi-divine mastery over others.26 Critics also agree that the turning point in Crusoe’s movement toward mastery occurs during his illness, in the moment of conversion when he first conceives of himself in relation to God. Crusoe marks the start of this moment with a question: “Lord, what a miserable Creature am I?” (72). He marks its conclusion, in turn, with God’s answer, which Crusoe discovers when he opens the Bible and reads at random: “Call on me in the Day of Trouble, and I will deliver, and thou shalt glorify me” (75). On this reading, Defoe configures a relation of resemblance that will come to facilitate Crusoe’s movement between positions: a creature with respect to his Creator, Crusoe becomes Creator with respect to the rest of creation.27
I am arguing, by contrast, that over the course of the narrative Crusoe’s development proceeds toward not divine omnipotence but creaturely identification with the humans, lions, leopards, hares, and cats that are subject to his gun. This is indicated by the vocabulary of creature indeterminacy that sets in as soon as Crusoe leaves European society. It is also signaled at the moment of his conversion, for the psalm to which Crusoe turns is as likely to prevent as to promote his identification with God:
Hear, O my people, and I will speak; O Israel, and I will testify against thee: I am God, even thy God.
I will not reprove thee for thy sacrifices or thy burnt offerings, to have been continually before me.
I will take no bullock out of thy house, nor he goats out of thy folds,
For every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills.
I know all the fowls of the mountains: and the wild beasts of the field are mine,
If I were hungry, I would not tell thee: for the world is mine, and the fullness thereof.
Will I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats?
Offer unto God thanksgiving; and pay your vows unto the most High:
And call upon me in the day of trouble: I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me. (Ps. 50:7–15)
It is this last line that Crusoe cites in the text, and on its own, the line seems to accord with a fairly conventional schema in which one submits to God and becomes master of others. Defoe certainly invokes this schema here, but his particular textual choice complicates that gesture. By stressing the impropriety of merely physical sacrifice for a God who, unlike humans, does not feed on flesh, this psalm emphasizes a significant difference between Crusoe and God—a difference that turns on relations of owning and of eating. The way that the beast and cattle and fowls are God’s is fundamentally unlike the way that Crusoe makes them his, with decidedly undivine acts of material eating and drinking. Similarly, Defoe does not simply mark a moment of regression into doubt when Crusoe goes on to compare himself to the children of Israel who asked, “when they were promis’d Flesh to eat, Can God spread a Table in the Wilderness?” (75). He also articulates a relation between creature and Creator that is not one of distance but of categorical difference, of kind and not degree: between God, who will not eat, and human beings, who must.
Eating may not seem a likely or sufficient ground for the sort of “radical separation of Creation and Creator” that Lupton outlines in her work on the creature, and around which Defoe organizes his novel.28 But Robinson Crusoe is a novel obsessed with eating, in both its metaphorical and literal senses. This is most obvious in Crusoe’s seemingly inordinate preoccupation with cannibalism. Many critics point out that Crusoe’s fear of finding himself as food for another is less extravagant if one understands it as the displacement of his quite plausible fear