TY - JOUR
AU - Wallace, Elizabeth Kowaleski
AB - In The Matter of History, Timothy Le Cain reminds us that “embodied human beings interact with material organisms and things that have lives, histories, and trajectories of their own” (14). The import of Le Cain’s approach lies in the specific words “material organisms” and “things,” terms that take us beyond human-to-human connections now familiar to us through fields like postcolonial criticism, to explore vast interconnected, material terrestrial networks. In many ways, his project participates in wider new materialist movements that—in the words of Iovino Serenella and Serpil Oppermann—“analyze language and reality, human and non-human life, mind and matter, without falling into dichotomous patterns of thinking” (2).1 For Le Cain as for critics like Iovino and Oppermann and others, the networks in question must include both animate and inanimate material substances. (See Morton and Alaimo.) Le Cain, for instance, connects human history to livestock, to silkworms, and to copper. His overall objective is to explore how “humans are both far more embedded in material things than we had previously realized and … these things with which we are entangled are far more dynamic and creative than we once had understood” (8). In this way, his book is among the earliest attempts to deploy new materialist themes and methods in the context of a traditional, humanist field like history, often to yield surprising and powerful results. Yet Le Cain’s book also implicitly invites still other disciplines to follow his lead. How, for example, does the field of literary studies reconfigure itself when the “human” at the heart of humanistic discourse is placed within networks of materiality? How does the human assume new forms when it is seen as entangled with materiality? (See Hodder and Ingold.) How do well-known stories about the human, conveyed most often within a western European literary tradition and context, open up as a new understanding of the human comes into view? In this essay, my interest lies in exploring how classic texts begin to look different when we take seriously the idea that humans must be known first and foremost for their placement within a world of vibrant materiality. Following a line of recent new materialist thinkers, I argue that the eighteenth-century, western European realist novel that gives birth to one culturally specific concept of the individual—a construct that has subsequently been at the heart of academic humanistic literary study for a long time—proves resistant to acknowledging the very sort of connections that preoccupy Le Cain. Far from making accessible the mutual embedding of human and material, since its founding the western European realist novel has consistently worked to banish the representation of the human-material interconnection and establish instead discrete, bounded, and autonomous mythopoeic human beings. These are subjects—so we are told—who exist by their own powers alone and who owe little to the vast terrestrial networks that in fact facilitate their existence. Thus, this essay takes up the case of Robinson Crusoe as a foundational realist novel in which the banishing of the human-material connection is obvious on many thematic levels—from the protagonist’s wanton disregard for the island’s fragile ecosystem, or his gleeful destruction of the island’s many animals, to his extravagant depletion of its tropical woodlands. (See Chow and Macintosh.) Yet beyond these obvious transgressions—now only too apparent to the ecologist’s eye—the protagonist’s very humanness rests upon the improbable fact of his complete isolation from one vitally important aspect of the material world—namely, insects: where are the mosquitos, the wasps, the worms, or the pests that should be ravaging Crusoe’s island? For that matter, where are the beetles, the honeybees, or the ladybugs that would surely have formed a significant part of his island’s ecosystem? Obviously, it can seem a little perverse to discuss a novel like Robinson Crusoe for what it does not represent. Yet here I take my cue from Amitav Ghosh in The Great Derangement. In this now often-cited book, Ghosh highlights how the modern realist novel was complicit in the process of naturalizing a carbon-based (and specifically a petroleum-based) economy. He concedes, “if novels were not built upon a scaffolding of exceptional moments, writers would be faced with the Borgesian task of reproducing the world in its entirety.” Then he continues, “But the modern novel, like geology, has never been forced to confront the centrality of the improbable: the concealment of its scaffolding of events continues to be essential to its functioning. It is this that makes a certain kind of narrative a recognizable modern novel …. The very gestures with which it conjures up reality are actually a concealment of the real” (23). Following in the footsteps of Ghosh, this essay will first address the long-standing question of Robinson Crusoe as a “realist novel,” especially now that new senses of the “real” begin to close in on us. Second, it will describe how insects would limit Crusoe’s mythic stature. Third, I will consider the ways in which the invisible work of insects makes it possible for Crusoe to be the hero he claims to be. If there appears to be considerable tension between those last two topics, we will see how they nonetheless exist at the very heart of the realist tradition. Part One: Robinson Crusoe and “Realism” It should be said that when Ghosh indicts the modern “realist” novel for its crimes of omission, he is mostly attuned to nineteenth and twentieth century authors. He specifically mentions Gustav Flaubert, Harper Lee, Herman Melville, and especially John Updike. In this way, he’s deploying the term “realist” as the adjectival descriptor for the established literary period often known as “Realism”—in other words, the movement located first in mid-nineteenth-century France, then Russia, then elsewhere. This “realist” tradition defined itself in opposition to early century Romanticism and it is commonly said to have turned to “the real” for its non-idealized potential. However, I am obviously not the first critic to define the “realist” novel somewhat differently and to locate it much earlier—namely, at the early-eighteenth-century beginnings of the novelistic tradition itself. In fact, since the second half of the twentieth century, the appearance of “realism” as a specifically eighteenth-century literary event has been the subject of a lively critical conversation. M. H. Abrams anchors the debate with a textbook definition. The realistic novel like that appearing in the eighteenth century, he writes, is “the fictional attempt to give the effect of realism by representing complex characters with mixed motives who are rooted in a social class, operate in a highly developed social structure, interact with many other characters, and undergo plausible and everyday modes of experience” (228). Yet a voluble debate ensues, with a range of critics offering very different pronouncements on the precise nature of the “real.” While Abrams’ definition encourages us to look for the real in the reflection of ourselves as social, sociable, and psychological creatures, John Richetti looks more broadly for the evocation of a phenomenal world (Richetti). Virginia Woolf famously responds to the appearance of “real” objects that ground the scene and that convince the reader that something “real” is happening (Woolf). In one early essay, Ian Watt discovers the “real” on the level of narrative process, as Robinson Crusoe does what other powerful western myths “really” do (Watt). Agreeing that eighteenth-century novels possess a valuable mimetic function, critics disagree mostly on the nature of what the text can be said to reflect. (See also Backscheider, Bender, Novak.) More recently in the twenty-first century, the question of “the real” at the heart of realism, or what the novel can be said to “reflect,” has taken on additional urgency, as new materialist thinking has called for an even wider consideration of what ought to be recuperated in “realistic” representation. Bruno Latour, for one, has described how in the past “realism became even more abundant when nonhumans began to have a history, too, and were allowed the multiplicity of interpretations, the flexibility, the complexity that had been reserved, until then, for humans” (Latour 16). While Sean Silver has explored the material specificities giving rise to an eighteenth-century “real,” Lynn Festa reminds us that early “novelistic realism depends less on the mimetically exact representation of subjects and objects than on the tailoring of the depicted world to a distinctly human eye” (Silver, Festa 16). Moreover, she maintains, “the novel’s claim to verisimilitude issues less from mimesis than the fact that it describes the world in accordance with human interests and needs” (221). Yet, as Ghosh would hasten to add (and Festa would surely agree), a “distinctly human eye” proves extremely selective in what it chooses to see, and verisimilitude is not always the best indicator of what terrestrial creatures need. Thus, what’s happening now is the urgent sense that the “real” should reflect forms of human experience (catastrophic climate change and pandemics) that are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. We have arrived at a moment when it seems imperative that our realist fictions take up a “real” that no longer seems to have human interests at heart. It seems equally important to develop fictional forms that explore and enhance a nonhuman perspective, and there are signs that such a project is underway. (See Olfill, Serpell, Powers.) Ghosh’s argument additionally identifies a long-standing cultural bias among western critics who have aggressively promoted one idea about “real” characters at the expense of alternative views of human agency. For example, negatively reviewing Cities of Salt by Saudi author Abdelrahman Munif, John Updike had decreed that Munif’s novel evinced “almost none of that sense of individual moral adventure—of the evolving individual in varied and roughly equal battle with a world of circumstance—which since Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe, has distinguished the novel from the fable and the chronicle …” (77). In other words, argued Updike, Munif’s novel privileged “men in the aggregate” at the expense of the individual. This criticism allows Ghosh to expand his point about the real even further: why shouldn’t “realistic,” plausible, and even successful works of fiction engage with the collective? Why should western literary forms that focus on the individual moral adventure like Crusoe’s receive aesthetic and social preference over those that explore the nature of the collective? Moreover, what possibilities of human life have been persistently overlooked in a western literary tradition that has insistently turned away from fictional works engaging with the collective to embrace instead “the individual moral adventure”? Ghosh here distinguishes between western and non-western literary traditions—specifically, the Indian epic in which he finds a pervasive and profound interest in non-human agency and the western literary tradition that isolated the human from other kinds of terrestrial agents. He writes, “But even within Christianity, it was not until the advent of Protestantism perhaps that Man began to dream of achieving his own self-deification by radically isolating himself before an arbitrary God. Yet the dream of silencing the non-human has never been completely realized …” (65). Referring to the ways in which our electronic devices—our iPads and iPhones as well as a broad popular obsession with vampires, zombies, and so on—suggest an implicit awareness of non-human capacity, he continues, “So the real mystery in relation to the agency of non-humans lies not in the renewed recognition of it, but rather in how this awareness came to be suppressed in the first place, at least within the modes of thought and expression that have become dominant over the last couple of centuries” (65, italics added). To summarize, Ghosh raises several crucial questions with relevance to any discussion of Robinson Crusoe as a novel often positioned at the dawn of the western realist tradition. With him, I want to ask, how does Crusoe’s singularity, his western-European, Christian “self-deification” not only turn away from the collective, but also rely upon the silencing of the non-human? How does he become most “real” in the very moments when he turns away from recognizing the non-human forces that invisibly empower him? Lastly, how does an awareness of non-human, terrestrial agency come to be suppressed, and what are the consequences of a consensus to accept that suppression as part of a “real” story that we tell ourselves? Part Two: Crusoe and His Insect Enemies In the case of Robinson Crusoe, a significant part of the “real” that is concealed is the intricate and necessary dance (to borrow a term from Jane Bennett) between human and insect agents. Were the novel in fact attentive to Crusoe’s entanglement, it would have had to pay attention to a balanced ecosystem with creatures—like insects—both inimical and beneficial to humans. Let’s start with the inimical, recognizing that most humans are more inclined to recognize insects as a nuisance or detriment to human purpose. To begin with the obvious, as an invader, Crusoe would surely have attracted a number of pernicious critters, all eager to bore into his flesh. These would have included varieties of sandflies, biting ants, and biting midges (“no see ums”). Once sheltered, his torment would scarcely have ended, as arachnids such as biting spiders, including at least one or two poisonous species, might have followed him indoors. Ticks would have most likely proved abundant. Bedbugs, apparently a terrestrial presence since the time of the dinosaurs, are also likely. Within his various shelters, Crusoe would have found himself coexisting with a broad array of bugs and insects competing for his precious stored foodstuffs: weevils, for instance, would surely have found their way into his sacks of barley or rice.2 Crusoe’s beloved domestic animals would also have suffered from various insect infestations, including the obvious fleas. Even Crusoe’s famous goatskin attire would have drawn various beetles that, even today (in a time when arsenic treatments have been outlawed) afflict taxidermists. His efforts at agriculture would certainly have been vexed by aphids, armyworms, and stinkbugs. Houseflies would have bedeviled Crusoe during the day, and mosquitoes by night. Certainly, it is possible to think, “but of course, all this insect nuisance is obvious, perhaps so obvious that the text doesn’t bother to mention it.” Indeed, any eighteenth-century household manual/receipt book (which are often the same thing) provides ample testimony to the omnipresence of insects in human existence at the time of the novel. It is easy to imagine the early modern period as a time when people accepted insect intrusion into everyday life as inevitable and unavoidable. They lived with insects and insects lived with them: most likely, everyone tolerated insects to a degree that would no longer be accepted in most parts of the developed world. Indeed, we might even say that western modernity distinguishes itself from other less developed parts of the world through its mostly successful efforts to contain insect activity and to keep insects mostly isolated from the domestic sphere. Unlike Crusoe and his contemporaries who endured bothersome insect activity constantly, we are likely to consider a single housefly an impertinent invader, a rogue indoor mosquito an affront to our personhood. Perhaps, the novel doesn’t include what seems so readily apparent, so much a part of the very fiber of quotidian human life, that it can be banished to the un-narrated background: Crusoe (like Selkirk, on whom Defoe may have partially based his novel) must have had to deal with myriad insects that he was able to readily ignore as a mere fact of terrestrial existence. Perhaps this fact is simply not important to the larger story. Yet evidence suggests that insects drew the notice of Crusoe’s author himself and that for him they were at times an important part of an ecological story. In a passage from A Tour of the Whole Islands of Great Britain (1724–27), for example, Defoe’s narrator pauses to reflect on the extraordinary presence of swallows in Southwold, and this soon leads to a conversation with a local man about the necessary balance between swallows and gnats. Echoing the wisdom of his native informant, the narrator assures himself: Certain it is that the swallows neither come hither for warm weather nor retire from cold; the thing is of quite another nature. They, like the shoals of fish in the sea, pursue their prey; they are a voracious creature, they feed flying; their food is found in the air, viz., the insects, of which in our summer evenings, in damp and moist places, the air is full. (Defoe, Tour, 80) He then describes how the seasonal fluctuation in insect populations leads to the disappearance of the swallows: They come hither in the summer because our air is fuller of fogs and damps than in other countries, and for that reason feeds great quantities of insects. If the air be hot and dry the gnats die of themselves, and even the swallows will be found famished for want, and fall down dead out of the air, their food being taken from them. In like manner, when cold weather comes in the insects all die, and then of necessity the swallows quit us, and follow their food wherever they go. This they do in the manner I have mentioned above, for sometimes they are seen to go off in vast flights like a cloud. And sometimes again, when the wind grows fair, they go away a few and a few as they come, not staying at all upon the coast. (Defoe, Tour 81–82). In this way, it becomes clear that an ecological understanding of insects—and especially their necessary role as food source for higher life forms like swallows—was accessible to Defoe. Indeed, Defoe’s amateur observations take place alongside an emerging curiosity about insect life elsewhere, a curiosity that would eventually lead, in the second half of the eighteenth century to the founding of the modern field of entomology. Though William Kirby—most commonly cited as the “father of modern entomology”—would not be born until 1749, the pioneering work of Dutch naturalist Jan Swammerdam (1637–80) entitled Historia Insectorum Generalis had already made significant inroads in the exploration of insect life. Defoe’s own contemporary René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur was already closely observing caterpillars in the 1720s in France: in 1734–42, he published his massive six-volume study Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire des insects (Egerton 74–77; See also Terrell.) A longer study than this one would account for the emergence and development of insects as the subject for serious scientific investigation in the eighteenth century. But in this instance, our focus is the disappearance of a crucial life form from the pages of realist fiction. Why do insects become invisible to the project of western European fiction-making at the same time that they become highly visible to a burgeoning group of naturalists? To some extent, this disappearance can be read against a growing body of work from a number of disciplines exploring the nature of the human-insect connection. Such work helps to explain how insects resonate in the human consciousness, and it can help to contextualize an impulse to isolate the human from insect activity. One of the most impactful works has been Insectopedia by anthropologist Hugh Raffles. Beginning with a meditation on the sheer numbers of insect species, Raffles cites their extraordinary multiplicity and reminds us that “everyday, above and around us, the collective voyage of billions of beings” is occurring (12). To reckon with insect numbers and their myriad activities is to be forced to reconsider the size and scope of human life. Precisely because their numbers are unfathomable—unlike, for instance, the number of mammals in the world—insects can threaten the fantasy of a unique and unitary human being. James Hillman similarly hits upon a common psychological response to insects, especially as they manifest in dreams: “Should the bugs take over, we become mere bits of crawling, leaping, fluttering matter. Their very numbers indicate insignificance and worthlessness as individuals” (59; See also Lockwood.) Furthermore, while insects challenge us in the sheer fact of their numbers, they also differ from other animals in how they appear to humans, and this can make their placement within the field of Animal Studies challenging.3 As Jamie Lorimer explains, unlike cuter or cuddlier animals with recognizable appeal (which he calls “nonhuman charisma”), insects present a form of “feral charisma” that isn’t easy to identify with and that puts pressure on our efforts at comprehending their existence. Insects, writes Lorimer, do not totally lack that “gift of grace” (in Max Weber’s definition of the term) that allows us to enter into a symmetrical relation with them. But, they have very different affordances—or inherent ecological characteristics—from humans, and this makes it hard to see how they live in the same space and time as we do. Certainly exceptions occur. For example, asserts Lorimer, we can identify with butterflies because we too orient and differentiate ourselves visually. We might also think of the obvious ways in which bee colonies have seemed to model human sociality. For Lorimer, Jacob von Uexkull’s stunning account of the life of the tick proves that an ethological perspective foregrounding the important common property of human and insect bodies is possible (Lorimer). Yet such an ability to see into the lives of insects is rare. Most of us are more likely to agree with Hugh Raffles when he writes, “We simply cannot find ourselves in these creatures. The more we look, the less we know. They are not like us. They do not respond to acts of love or mercy or remorse. It is worse than indifference. It is a deep, dead space without reciprocity, recognition, or even redemption” (Raffles 44). Social ecologist Steven Kellert is very much on the same page as Raffles when he opines that “many people appear challenged by the radical autonomy of invertebrates from human will and control” (43). For Kellert, as for Raffles and Lorimer, insect strangeness proves alienating, as insects have “vastly different ecological survival strategies, spatially and temporally,” from vertebrates (57). Insect shapes and forms appear “monstrous”—they evince an absence of feeling or mindlessness. For Renissa Marwani, insects in their fecundity, ferality, and inscrutability vividly display a disorienting yet potent plasticity (“Insects, War”). In short, as Franz Kafka brilliantly depicts in The Metamorphosis, insects behave in vexing and mysterious ways that we simply do not understand and cannot process relative to our own understanding of embodiment. To return to Robinson Crusoe, it becomes clear that Crusoe’s arrival on an island teeming with insect life would be more challenging than arriving on an island inhabited only by quadrupeds and the occasional human others. Cannibals may use Crusoe’s beach for their grotesque barbecues, but insect species would be much more insistent, “monstrous” co-inhabitants of his space. They would take up much more space and make even more insistent demands on his person, his foodstuff, and his livestock. They would demand his constant attention and unceasing vigilance—in effect, they would threaten perpetual war. To be sure, to some extent, Crusoe already feels embattled by other troublesome critters on his island and these battles threaten to undermine the text’s assertion that Crusoe holds absolute dominion over nature. He is vexed by the cats, for instance, that manage to reproduce by some creature whose identity is mysterious to him. At last, narrates Crusoe, he “was obliged to shoot them”—and “did kill a great many” (108). When birds conspire to steal his precious corn, Crusoe kills them as well and “serve[s] them, as we serve notorious thieves in England—that is, hang[s] them in chains for a terror to others” (85). In both of these instances, Crusoe conveys a sense of accomplishment. He feels he meets the challenge laid down by the animal kingdom, and—though modern readers are likely to mistrust the efficacy of a dominion founded on such cruel and brute force—Crusoe believes he has won. Though a novelistic subtext may signal otherwise, Robinson Crusoe repeatedly invites the reader to celebrate with Crusoe as he claims mastery over nature. Arthropods, however, would have constituted another level of opposition, and it may well be the case that Crusoe himself could not have pretended to subject them to his rule. Compared to cats, birds, or other mammals, insects evince simply too much radical independence. Nowhere is the evidence of such radical insect autonomy more evident, perhaps, than in the case of the mosquito, AWOL from Crusoe’s tropical island, yet an omnipresent and powerful force in Caribbean history at large. Make no mistake about it: the Caribbean mosquito had long been a problem for humans, and Defoe surely had the testimony of Selkirk, who documented how voyagers to the islands were “pester’d and stung grievously by Muskitoes” during their travels (Rogers 112). In Mosquito Empires, John McNeill describes the extraordinary agency of this tiny species, asserting that it “underpinned the geopolitical order in the Americas until the 1700 s …” He reminds us that Crusoe’s forests and woodlands would not have been primeval, since before 1492, Amerindians had managed their lands with fire. Once Amerindian population declined, reforestation took place (23). Though mosquitoes re-appeared with the regrowth, the most devastating impact of the species would come later, after the time in which the novel is set, with the rise of the plantation: quick cutting of forests led to the spread of weeds, particularly of invasive species. Downpours resulted in gullies carrying soil and silt that led to the creation of marshes—in other words, ideal conditions for mosquitoes (McNeill 28). The most pernicious of these, the Aedes aegypti mosquito (responsible for yellow fever as well as dengue), is thought to have come to the Caribbean aboard slaving ships, as the species prefers to breed in water—barrels, buckets, cisterns, pots (McNeill 41). In other words, here we have the kind of story that interests Le Cain and others: here, both human and non-human agency can be seen at work. The two are entangled, and both are recognized as potent and dynamic forces, though here that entanglement results in debilitating human circumstances. So what’s missing when there are no mosquitoes on Crusoe’s island? We could say that omitting this insect in particular allows the novel to sidestep a much larger ecological and geo-political reality and to ignore one of the many ways in which humans have not been in total control of their environmental circumstances. Certainly, during the eighteenth century, other writers deploying genres other than the realist novel made space to discuss insect foes, especially in Crusoe’s own particular Caribbean setting. In James Grainger’s georgic poem The Sugar Cane (1764), for instance, the poet recognizes the agency to be found in the insect world, but his purpose is to deplore their inimical stance against human purpose. Grainger’s georgic personifies an “insect tribe” who make their appearance on the West Indian plantations, especially citing locusts who appear as “plunderers” “hatched” in a distant clime in order to steal the valuable Caribbean crops. Yellow flies attack and destroy stalks of sugar cane, while the cochenille bug is forgiven its damage to the Indian fig because it possesses “worth that harm repays” in the form of dye for the scarlet uniforms of the British soldier. In Grainger’s account, the insects of the Caribbean are “innumerous as the painted shells, that load/ The wave-worn margin of the Virgin-isles.” They are “bugs confederate, in destructive league.” As ants join their “republic,” they become a “villain crew” as countless as the waves. For Grainger, insects are the “perdition of the isles.” A poem like Grainger’s can help us to further understand why Crusoe’s story omits insects, and it perhaps further suggest why the realist novel that follows from Defoe’s foundational fiction could not accommodate insect life: in a genre where (quoting Updike) the whole point is to represent the exploits of an “evolving individual in varied and roughly equal battle with a world of circumstance” (emphasis added), the purpose could simply not be met in factual environmental circumstances. The power clearly does not always lie on the side of the individual human, and the battle is frequently unevenly pitched. Part Three: Crusoe and His Insect Friends Nonetheless, it is not enough to end the discussion of “the real” here, for the true story of human–insect entanglement is only half told. Sinister though insects may be, even Grainger implicitly acknowledges that they have purposes and intelligences that defy human reasoning and that hint at alternative ways of being. The evidence of that extraordinary purpose and those alternative cognitive possibilities can be quite overwhelming—as for instance, in the case of the termites that were an object of study for Henry Smeathman. In Deirdre Coleman’s recent account, we discover a man driven by both an abiding curiosity and financial necessity to dedicate himself to an entomological purpose. Smeathman’s own narrative “Some Account of the Termites which are found in Africa, and other hot Climates” (1781, written as a letter to Joseph Banks), veers between nearly breathless, detailed descriptions of the towering structures built by the African termites (which do indeed appear to have been marvelous) and appalling depictions of the insects’ ruthless capacity for destruction. (See Margonelli.) Yet in the end, despite their terrible inconvenience and cost to human economic activity, Smeathman comes to accept—and indeed to marvel at—the ecological necessity of the termite to the cycle of life: It seems apparent, that when any thing whatever is arrived at its last degree of perfection, the Creator has decreed it shall be totally destroyed as soon as possible, that the face of nature may be speedily adorned with fresh productions in the bloom of spring or pride of summer: so when trees, and even woods, are in part destroyed bytornedoes or fire, it is wonderful to observe, how many agents are employed in hastening the total dissolution of the rest; but in the hot climates there are none so expert, or who so do their business so expeditiously and effectually as these insects, who in few weeks destroy and carry away the bodies of trees, without leaving a particle behind, thus clearing the way for vegetables, which soon fill up every vacancy. (264) Smeathman’s astute observations could easily be seen against the backdrop of a “physico-theology” which—as Peter Harrison explains—emerged during the seventeenth century in the wake of an allegorical reading of nature. Such a philosophy moved the emphasis from passively reading the stuff of the material world as “signs” of divine providence to actively investigating natural phenomena to uncover their utility. (See Harrison.) Such a shift in emphasis also allowed space for the principle of the “balance of nature” that still operates today. (See Egerton.) Yet it is not the purpose of Robinson Crusoe to express such an ecological awareness, even though the smooth running of a tropical plantation such as his would indeed have been very dependent on a host of tiny critters, both visible and invisible, working on his behalf. Those same flies that before we acknowledged as bedeviling him would have also had an absolutely critical function: Crusoe’s existence would have depended on a host of flies, including detritivores that feed on decaying organic mold, coprophages that feed on animal waste (including Crusoe’s own), and necrophages that are necessary to rid the earth of decaying flesh—including the cats, goats, and birds that Crusoe so gleefully slaughters. (See McAlister.) If, as Raffles and Kellert and others point out, the extraordinary multiplicity of the invertebrate world in all its generative potential seems to threaten a human concern for individual identity and self-hood, then indeed we begin to see how Crusoe and his insects cannot co-exist: what kind of mythic hero would want to acknowledge his reliance on countless creatures whose purpose it is to eliminate rot, poop, or flesh itself? To acknowledge the work of Crusoe’s flies would be to recognize that he necessarily exists “in the aggregate” of non-human forces that make the illusion of his singular accomplishment possible. Moreover, insects would challenge Crusoe’s sense of supremacy over the lush materiality of the island. They would undermine his sense of control over his own body and the bodies of the animals around him. Finally, to include the fact of arthropod life on Crusoe’s island would be to acknowledge his reliance on countless material forces—many of them invisible in their agency but nonetheless crucial to his very existence. Indeed when we turn to a key scene in the novel, we can see that the banishing of insects from the western realist novel is more insistent and purposeful than it might first seem. For example, many readers will recall the scene where Crusoe discovers that, through no clear intention of his own, he has managed to grow both barley and rice. He tells us that when the rats had devoured his corn (for animal antagonists are acknowledged in the novel) he shook out what he believed was an empty bag: It was a little while before the great rains, just now mentioned, that I threw this stuff away, taking no notice of any thing, and not so much remembering that I had thrown anything there; when about a month after or thereabout, I saw some few stalks of something green, shooting out of the ground, which I fancied might be some plant I had not seen, but was surprised and a little astonished, when after a longer time, I saw about ten or twelve ears come out, which were perfect green barley of the same kind as our European, nay as our English barley. (63) How to explain such a miraculous event, not to mention the other “straggling stalks” in the vicinity that soon prove to be rice similar to a plant Crusoe had seen growing in Africa? Before remembering the apparently empty bag he had turned out, Crusoe is inclined to believe that some sort of miracle has occurred: “that God had miraculously caused this grain to grow without any help of seed sown.” However, upon remembering the situation with bag and the likeliness that he himself had thrown out the seed, his “religious thankfulness to God’s providence” begins to abate. Yet soon enough he recognizes that he ought to be thankful to God nonetheless: for it was really the work of Providence as to me, that should order or appoint, that 10 or 12 grains of corn should remain unspoiled, (when the rats had destroyed all the rest), as if it had been dropped from Heaven; as also, that I should throw it out in that particular place, where it had been in the shade of a high rock, it sprang up immediately… (64) In other words, Crusoe sees fortuitous coincidence, a series of lucky circumstances that seem to show God’s kindly intentions towards him. What he does not see is the evidence of any kind of natural process, any sign that here human and non-human agents have worked together in order to produce the miraculous grain. First, the climate itself would have had to provide the right balance of water, oxygen, and temperature. Germination requires the capacity of the seed to wick moisture through its coat. In a sense, we could say that the seed has to cooperate. This “affordance” (James Gibson’s term) of the seed—its ability to absorb moisture—allows the exterior of the seed to crack, further allowing for the radicle or the root to emerge. Without personifying the seed, we can nonetheless perceive the agentic capacity that is the true miracle behind Crusoe’s barley: the hypocotyl or stem elongates, pushing upwards and forming the leaves of the seedling. Yet Crusoe sees only two agents involved in germination—himself and an anthropomorphic god. To him, non-human agency is simply invisible. This inability to acknowledge natural process up close is crucial, for it severely handicaps Crusoe. By remaining ignorant of the non-human actors at work in the miraculous production of barley, he also makes absent a natural force larger than himself. By underestimating that force, he also makes himself vulnerable to its vagaries. When the assemblage that is germination is absent from human consciousness, so too is the kind of enlightened relation that just might have helped him be a little less vulnerable to its intentions—to work, perhaps, in cooperation with it, rather than against it. My discussion has sidetracked to plants, but worms (though not technically insects) immediately reenter the scene: they too are part of the absent assemblage that has brought the barley into being. (See Schwartz.) Earthworms would have been a vital part of the process: their excreted material or “casts” would have unlocked nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorous, making the soil ready for the fortuitous sowing of the seed. Their burrowing would have aerated the soil, facilitating germination. As they began to grow, the survival of the barley plants would have depended on helpful insects such as ladybugs that might have attacked harmful aphids or mites. Green Lacewings also would have helped with not only aphids, but also white flies. Ground beetles might also have been part of a natural defense against pests. Barley, of course, does not require pollination, but many other indigenous plants on Crusoe’s island—he mentions cocoa, orange, lemon, and lime trees—would have been dependent on a healthy population of bees or perhaps butterflies, which also serve as pollinators. Yet Crusoe’s island is curiously silent, devoid of any atmospheric thrum, whine, or buzz. Here we turn back to Ghosh, who reminds us that “This then is the irony of the realist novel. The very gestures with which it conjures up reality are actually a concealment of the real” (23). Yet the concealment turns out not to be a total suppression. Instead, what we think we have concealed looks back at us, demands our attention and insists that we notice it, for it takes the form of the uncanny. Here the uncanny does not take the form of the strange or alien. Instead, “[its] uncanniness lies precisely in the fact that … we recognize something we had turned away from: that is to say, the presence and proximity of nonhuman interlocutors” (30). Ghosh continues, “we have always been surrounded by beings of all sorts who share elements of that which we had thought to be most distinctly our own: the capacities of will, thought, and unconsciousness” (30–31). Yet for Robinson Crusoe to take up and engage with this version of the uncanny would be to undermine the very principle upon which Crusoe’s extraordinary humanity is constructed. Let me reiterate that my purpose is not to bemoan Defoe’s lack of verisimilitude. Of course, as Ghosh concedes, certain things are necessarily left out of realism, and insects are not the only things left out, as well as a number of unlikely things put in. There are countless ways we must suspend disbelief in order to read Robinson Crusoe: a shipwreck that just happens to proffer essential tools? I would also quickly acknowledge that the novel eclipses other forms of non-European human agency: for example, Crusoe’s pride in his own ability to make a number of items, including pots, baskets, and canoes, ignores the fact that Amerindians (and especially the Tainos) had long before him mastered those skills in the exact same location. The celebration of Crusoe’s ingenuity, his technological triumph over clay, straw, and wood, erases the expertise of generations of indigenous artisans before him. Once again, Crusoe emerges as an extraordinary individual at the expense of a previous collective whose agency is made to disappear. However, I want to go further to contend that when the western European realist novel fails to attend to the essential work of other non-human agents—and of insects in particular—something more than a simple suspension of disbelief is being called for; something other than the tacit vanishing of actions done in another time, place, or context is underway. In Crusoe’s insect-free island, we are encountering a necessary and willful ignorance that becomes only too apparent when we consider, as already mentioned, that the close study of insects was already in process elsewhere. Moreover, insects had already been closely observed and rendered—for example, in the exquisite watercolors of Maria Sybilla Merian (1647–1717), whose work is situated in a tradition of naturalist drawing that had been launched by Albrecht Durer’s famous etching of a stag beetle in 1505. (See Neri.) Granted, specific breakthroughs in entomological science were still a way off: the role of bees in pollination, for one, would not be fully understood until the pioneering work of Christian Konrad Sprengel in 1787. (See Vogel.) Yet with centuries of human experience with agriculture already behind it, Robinson Crusoe disregards what had to have been basic, practical agrarian knowledge, even while it omits everyday observation from those who worked in the fields. Thus, it seems fair to suggest that the turn away from insect life in western realist fiction was crucial to its specific task of defining one kind of human. That is, if the western European individual who makes himself known in Defoe’s novel is by definition discrete, bounded, self-enclosed, and self-determining, then the presence of insects would belie that definition. Insect action, both positively and negatively rendered, would insist on a different understanding of the human individual. It would demand the recognition that all humans are now and have always been universally reliant on what lies outside. Insect action would also belie an entire process of western mythmaking dedicated to the creation of a distinctly autonomous “man,” someone who could not only exist outside the collective, but who could also easily make the natural world bend to his will. Despite what Robinson Crusoe asks us to believe, human self-determination has always been simultaneously in league with and in conflict with other terrestrial forces. Thus, our insect brethren, as the antagonists and protagonists of our terrestrial existence, give the lie to the idea of a human-nature binary: far from existing in opposition to nature, all humans live within its sphere, entangled as we are with all its forms of terrestrial life. (See Haraway.) I have already mentioned that although insects were banned from the realist novel, they can readily be found in other literary genres—the georgic to be sure, but also the it narrative and subsequent forms of children’s literature, in political prose, and in Smollett’s exaggerated and outsized farce, with its room for the grotesquely comic. Moreover, it is certainly true that insects continue to do cultural work elsewhere and that they continue to allow human beings to think through all kinds of things. However, the realist trajectory in the western European eighteenth-century novel that will lead us through Clarissa on the one hand and Tom Jones on the other and on through the novels of Jane Austen will continue the work of Robinson Crusoe: novels like these will also banish thoughts of human–insect entanglement. With very rare exception—think Uncle Toby’s sentimental liberation of a fly—novelistic heroes and heroines will never have to contend with their insect kin. Harking back to Robinson Crusoe, the western realist novel will henceforth define its human as existing where the insect is not. Only now, several centuries later and on the brink of insect Armageddon, have we come to understand the tragic and self-defeating dimensions of that definition. 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TI - “The True State of Our Condition,” Or, Where are Robinson Crusoe’s Insect Companions?
JF - ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
DO - 10.1093/isle/isaa207
DA - 2021-02-11
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-true-state-of-our-condition-or-where-are-robinson-crusoe-s-insect-cLMgIcvlDo
SP - 470
EP - 488
VL - 30
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -