Their feeble Tongues,
Unable to take up the cumbrous Word,
Lie quite dissolv’d. Before their maudlin Eyes,
Seen dim and blue, the double Tapers dance,
Like the Sun wading thro’ the misty Sky.
Then, sliding soft, they drop.
……………………………………………
The lubber Power in filthy Triumph sits, Slumbrous, inclining still from Side to Side, And steeps them drench’d in potent Sleep till Morn. (A, 552–64)
This scene of what Thomson calls “social Slaughter” is clearly marked by the reversal of agency that Knapp identifies as the primary consequence of personification (A, 561). In Thomson, however, the combination of animate things and inanimate humans does not result from an invasion of ontological territory, as Knapp would have it: human beings are not reified because things are personified. Instead, Thomson’s human beings have themselves abdicated their claim to personhood, by operating in a mode to which Thomson denies the status of action.
This abdication occurs during the hunt, when men are cast together with dogs as a “Storm,” a “Tempest,” and an “inhuman Rout” (A, 417, 428, 439). It happens elsewhere when humans plunder a beehive, and are described as “some dread Earthquake” (A, 1205). In The Seasons, these epithets are not only figures: to an apiarian eye, human beings are “some dread Earthquake” that seizes “a proud City, populous and rich”; to the “folded Ears; unsleeping Eyes” of a hunted hare, human beings (and dogs) are not persons, but a turn in the weather: “With every Breeze she hears the coming Storm” (A, 1201, 411, 417). With these shifts in point of view, Thomson makes body parts not only the objects or the means but also the subjects of personification, granting the eyes and ears of a bee or a hare the power to dispersonify humans. It is against the backdrop of these dispersonified human beings—human beings depicted and denounced as inanimate and destructive natural forces—that Thomson personifies the hunted stag. Driven by “the Tempest,” the stag is pictured “sobbing,” recalling good times with his “Friends” and “his Loves,” relations who now abandon him as they “With selfish Care avoid a Brother’s Woe.” When the stag finally surrenders, “The big round Tears run down his dappled Face; / He groans in Anguish” (A, 428, 441–44, 448, 454–55). In various scenes of conquest, human beings who exercise what we typically think of as agency become an impersonal and inanimate force: a movement of air or of earth. By contrast, as the stag is “singled from the Herd” by a “Tempest” that pushes him forward, he becomes an individual, a singular, even psychological subject (A, 426). He becomes a person, in other words, by being a patient.
Critics have often censured Thomson for prescribing patience: for urging readers to “yet bear up a While,” assuring them that this “bounded View” will pass and disclose “The great eternal Scheme” (W, 1065, 1066, 1046). On this reading, Thomson’s vision of social harmony and his personification of human beings denies both the necessity and the possibility of action.70 Yet Thomson aims to do something more complicated than evacuate action from his poetry and the society that it envisions. At its most challenging—from The Castle of Indolence’s allegory of the dangers of idleness, to Liberty’s effort to track the movement of a political idea through various persons and peoples, to the personifying system building that The Seasons performs—Thomson’s poetry works to conceive a social order that might include everything under the sun, and to imagine an ethics that could serve such an expanded system. In doing so, Thomson’s poetry insists that the kind of agency that we often ascribe to human persons is proper not to persons but to impersonal and divine forces like an earthquake, a tempest, or the indiscriminate and “unconquerable Lightning” (Su, 1147). Thomson advocates patience as an alternative not to action, but to this mode of agency that is structured around a subject and the objects that it necessarily acts upon: a structure that, Thomson suggests, leads inevitably to harm. Thomson advocates patience—which he alternately conceives of as passion and as animal motion or animation—as a mode of agency in which moving and being moved are impossible to parse, and a model of personhood that might harmonize the movements of all kinds of people. But he is not always hopeful, or sure. For this person is the product of often perplexing poetic labor, and it is a figure of vulnerability that is conceived against but also out of violence. In part, this is what Robinson Crusoe comes to sense during his sojourn in the wilderness: how easily the “Social Commerce” of all sorts of people can appear, to any particular person, like cannibalism. As The Seasons everywhere reminds us, wilderness surrounds.
Chapter 2
The Creature
Domestic Politics and the Novelistic Character
In Robert Zemeckis’s film Cast Away (2000), Tom Hanks plays Chuck Noland, a modern-day Robinson Crusoe who does what Thomson does with wilderness, though on a smaller and more intimate scale: he composes society, and he does so by way of personification. When his plane goes down somewhere in the Pacific, Noland is marooned for four years on an uninhabited desert island, where he survives with the aid of material remnants of the society he has lost: the contents of FedEx packages that wash ashore. Frustrated by his efforts to make fire, Noland picks up the contents of one of these packages—a Wilson volleyball—and flings it against a tree. Later, he notices that his bloodied handprint has given the ball a kind of face, whose features Noland then accentuates, highlighting the outlines of eyes, nose, and mouth. Finally, Noland animates this figure with a question posed in the second person: “you wouldn’t have a match, by any chance, would you?”1 In Hanks’s account of the film, from the moment that Noland addresses “Wilson” with this question, “there is a new person created in Chuck’s head.”2 Noland spends the rest of his time on the island in Wilson’s company. When Wilson is lost at sea, Noland grieves his loss.
In many respects, Cast Away is remarkably faithful to Defoe’s original castaway narrative. But there are significant differences between Zemeckis’s film and Robinson Crusoe. As Hanks tells it, he first conceived of Cast Away as a film of “pure behavior and action”: the tale of “a character who would spend the bulk of his time onscreen doing rather than talking.”3 He remembers being assaulted by “suggestions on how to embellish his spare drama by helping the protagonist find somebody to trade quips with. ‘It would be like, “Well, what if he had a monkey?”’”4 As one critic remarks, the “closest thing Chuck gets to a Man Friday”—or, to a monkey—“is a Wilson volleyball.”5 Noland’s island is notable for its lack of any living creatures. Crusoe’s, by contrast, is populated by all kinds of animals: “two or three household Kids,” “several tame Sea-Fowls,” which were “very agreeable,” three parrots including Poll, whom Crusoe describes as “a sociable Creature,” a dog that he calls “a very pleasant and loving Companion,” and “two or three Favourites” out of the cats on the island which, Crusoe says, “were part of my Family” (112, 141).
Despite the presence of so many animate creatures whom he describes in explicitly social terms, Crusoe, like Noland, often complains of his “solitary Condition” (110). Crusoe makes clear what is missing when a passing ship is wrecked on the rocks: “O that there had been but one or two; nay, or but one Soul sav’d out of this Ship, to have escap’d to me, that I might but have had one Companion, one Fellow-Creature to have spoken to me, and to have convers’d with! In all the time of my solitary Life, I never felt so earnest, so strong a Desire after the Society of my Fellow-Creatures, or so deep a Regret at the want of it” (147). Crusoe boards the wreck to see if “there might be yet some living Creature on board,” but is “disturb’d” and “desperate” with “Disappointment” when he discovers