In Robinson Crusoe, however, Defoe develops something quite different: a representative novelistic character that is not derived from empirical particulars but is a direct representation of the species—a character that is at once abstract and realistic or, in Defoe’s terms, both allegorical and historical. It is Crusoe who describes his character this way, in the third volume of his narrative, Serious Reflections During the Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe:
I have heard, that the envious and ill-disposed Part of the World have rais’d some Objections against the two first Volumes, on Pretence … that (as they say) the Story is feign’d, that the Names are borrow’d, and that it is all a Romance; that there never were any such Man or Place, or Circumstances in any Mans Life; that it is all form’d and embellish’d by Invention to impose upon the World.
I Robinson Crusoe being at this Time in perfect and sound Mind and Memory, Thanks be to God therefore; do hereby declare, their Objection is an Invention scandalous in Design, and false in Fact; and do affirm, that the Story, though Allegorical, is also Historical; and that it is the beautiful Representation of a Life of unexampled Misfortunes, and of a Variety not to be met with in the World, sincerely adapted to, and intended for the common Good of Mankind, and designed at first, as it is now farther apply’d, to the most serious Uses possible.
Farther, that there is a Man alive, and well known too, the Actions of whose Life are the just Subject of these Volumes, and to whom all or most Part of the Story most directly alludes, this may be depended upon for Truth, and to this I set my Name.14
Few readers make much of Crusoe’s peculiar assertion that his story “though Allegorical, is also Historical.”15 From Charles Gildon to Catherine Gallagher, they tend to argue that Defoe is caught in a lie and belatedly tries to switch genres, recasting Crusoe’s castaway narrative as the secret history of Defoe’s own life.16 This reading resolves the apparent incompatibility between Crusoe’s two claims—that his adventures are “literally true” and also that they are “allegorical”—by taking Crusoe to mean that his adventures refer indirectly but truthfully to a particular living person.
Such a reading has the benefit of resolving Crusoe’s curious formulation into good common sense. But it does not exhaust the possibilities of this passage. Against those who charge that “there never were any such Man … or Circumstances in any Mans Life,” Crusoe insists that Robinson Crusoe is the true “Representation of a Life,” the real and historical story of “a Man.” In light of the novel’s interest in the logic that organizes both inter- and intraspecies relations, I think we are invited to read the indefinite article as such, and take “a Man” to mean not this man (Defoe) but simply a man. In other words, we might read Robinson Crusoe as Coleridge suggests, as the story of “a representative of man in general.” Though Gallagher herself does not read Crusoe in this way, her work on the novelistic character is helpful in considering what it would look like if we did. In “The Rise of Fictionality,” Gallagher begins where Watt’s account of the novel’s rise most clearly falters: with Fielding, and in particular, with Fielding’s claim (from Joseph Andrews) “that he describes ‘not men, but manners; not an individual, but a species” (341). Gallagher identifies Fielding’s claim as a major turning point in the emergence of fiction, which clearly distinguishes the realist novel from the factual historical narrative by articulating a set of ambitions for the new genre—above all, its capacity to “refer to a whole class of people in general” (342). Against Watt’s sense of the novel’s commitment to particular individuals, Gallagher gives us the realist novel as a genre shaped by the logic of the general, the type, or the species.17 Intriguingly, novelistic generality takes two slightly different forms in Gallagher’s account. On the one hand, Gallagher presents Fielding’s “species” as “a whole class of people,” understood as a collection of logically prior individuals—much like Coleridge’s “specific class” or Watt’s “aggregate of particular individuals having particular experiences at particular times and at particular places.”18 On the other hand and more unusually, she presents Fielding’s “species” not as an effect of aggregation but as an entirely different kind of figure: “the form of the fictional Nobody, a proper name explicitly without a physical referent in the real world.”19 Citing Barthes and Searle for different versions of the idea that in fiction, proper names “refer to what they … are simultaneously creating,” Gallagher suggests that this new novelistic character is not a collection of particular and prior persons, composed by aggregation or induction (353). Created in and by the fictional text, the novelistic character is a general but crucially not a collective form. It is the nonempirical and indefinite species creature that Gallagher calls a “Nobody.”
On Gallagher’s view, Defoe comes too early to participate in the Fieldingled rise of fictionality. Still, he articulates something close to the general form of Gallagher’s Nobody when he has Crusoe identify his story as both allegorical and historical, the real story of “a Man” or “a Life,” “to which I sign my Name.” Crusoe’s allegorical logic is not simply the one-to-one correspondence of secret history (Crusoe stands for Defoe), nor is it the one-to-many correspondence of class (Crusoe as the sum of many individuals, their lowest common denominator, their average or mean). It is a species logic that understands “species” not as a collection of particular individuals, but as an abstract and indefinite term: a Man, a Life.20 At stake here is a logic of literary characterization that is neither individualist nor humanist but is nonetheless realist, claiming some reference to historical and material reality. As a representative of man in general, Crusoe is closer to an allegorical personification than a particular person, the embodiment of an abstraction (Man) rather than an aggregate or average term (a representative of men).21 What’s more, in the indefinite generality that forgoes the specifics of class, character, and circumstance, even the specificities of species begin to give way. A general form that does not start from individuals need not stop, it would seem, with the human species. Crusoe is thus the representation of not only “a Man” but also “a Life”—a more inclusive and indeterminate category, which Defoe designates by the term “creature.”
Turning to the narrative itself, we can start to apprehend more precisely what it means to conceive the character Crusoe on the model of the creature, as the (abstract and material, allegorical and historical) “Representation of a Life.” Creatureliness is a major thematic preoccupation of the novel, and the central telos of its plot.22 At the start of his adventures, Crusoe is a “young Man” in the company of men (6): his father, “a wise and grave Man” (5), a host of “Seafaring Men” who are also called “Seamen” or simply “Men” (8, 10–13), the ship captain, “an honest and plain-dealing Man” (16), and the Moor and Xury, whom Crusoe calls “the Man and Boy” (19). Yet the moment that Crusoe departs from known territory, making his escape with Xury—the “Boy” whom Crusoe promises to make “a great Man” but ends up selling to slavery—he encounters other beings, which he calls “creatures” (21). These appear for the first time when Crusoe and Xury drop anchor for the night, at the mouth of a river near shore:
We heard such dreadful Noises of the Barking, Roaring, and Howling of Wild Creatures, of we knew not what Kinds…. In two or three Hours we saw vast great Creatures (we knew not what to call them) of many sorts, come down to the Sea-shoar and run into the Water…. We were both more frighted when we heard one of these mighty Creatures come swimming towards our Boat, we could not see him, but we might hear him by his blowing to be a monstrous, huge and furious Beast; Xury said it was a Lyon, and it might be so for ought I know….