Joseph Slaughter
Joseph Slaughter
Department of English and Comparative Literature
Columbia University
(workshop version)
The Textuality of Human Rights: Founding Narratives of Human Personality
Two Watts, both grappling with the legacy of the eighteenth century at the end of the 1940s, converge on Robinson Crusoe as a signal literary achievement marking the emergence of rationalized individualism. The literary critic Ian Watt, studying the "relation between the growth of the reading public and the emergence of the novel" (7), was writing what was to become his seminal work, The Rise of the Novel, at St. John's College, Cambridge. Alan Watt, Australian delegate to the Third Committee of the United Nations, sat in conference between Lake Success, New York and the Palais Du Chaillot, Paris in the final revisory stages of the text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). As a member of the UN oversight body, Alan Watt shared responsibility for reviewing the product of three years of drafting, and for approving the final legislative form and language that would be adopted by the General Assembly on 10 December 1948. During the discussion of Article 29, the sole statement of human duties to remain after three years of drafting, Watt proposed to amend the language under consideration—"Everyone has duties to the community which enables him freely to develop his personality"—by replacing the relative clause after "community" with the more restrictive "in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible" (Third Committee 658). The debate elicited by his proposal centered around the terms of debt that the individual owed to society for having developed "his personality," and around the nature of the community to which some obligations subsequently attached. It is to clarify these issues that Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe makes its remarkable appearance in the debates.
Or, this is one way to construe the history of the confluence of literature and the law, as they combine in human rights, by staging a dramatic re-convergence, after two centuries of estrangement, of twin disciplines through the narrative mechanics of a novelistic "meanwhile"[1] that puts two Watts—Ian and Alan—at two tables, explicating the same text in the same year. This both is and is not precisely how it happens, but it offers as good a place as any to essay an analysis of the interdependencies and interdevelopment of literature and the law.
Writing of the novel as genre, Ian Watt would produce the famous insight that might aptly describe the rise of liberal human rights legislation if we replace the words "novel" and "literature" with "law" and "jurisprudence": "The novel's serious concern with the daily lives of ordinary people seems to depend upon two important conditions: the society must value every individual highly enough to consider him the proper subject of its serious literature; and there must be enough variety of belief and action among ordinary people for a detailed account of them to be of interest to other ordinary people" (60). Meanwhile, across the English Channel, Alan Watt's proposal, foregrounding the social character of the individual, was greeted warmly by the Soviet and Latin American delegations, who had consistently lobbied the committee to frame the Declaration as a social contract with explicit statements about the individual's obligations towards the society that makes possible legal subjectivity, the development of the person as a bearer of both rights and duties. Watt's proposal had the added advantage, for these representatives, that it moderated what was seen to be a document inclined to excessive individualism, by reminding the individual "that he was a member of society, and that he must affirm his right to be deemed a human being by clearly recognizing the duties which were corollaries of his rights" (656).[2] Belgium's delegate, Fernand Dehousse, raised the first substantial objection: "the [amended] text proposed by the representative of Australia contained an inaccurate statement, for while there was no doubt that society contributed to the development of the individual's personality, it was no less true that the development was conditioned on other factors" (659). In response, China and the US (in the persons of P. C. Chang and Eleanor Roosevelt, both among the select "Nuclear Committee" of primary drafters) advised dropping the word "alone"; Lebanon concurred, with the caveat that "the words 'his personality' should be replaced by the term 'human personality'. That new wording would avoid the danger, already pointed out by some delegations, that the text might be interpreted as implying that the individual had duties to society only in so far as the latter secured the full development of his own personality" (659). While the delegates held various opinions about the dynamics by which the personality of the human individual develops in relation to the community, each seems to have worked from a sociological presumption that their legislative project constituted an attempt to protect the integrity of human personality.
Watt's proposal ignited an ideological debate, taken up in the old literary thematic terms of man versus society, that culminated in antagonistic readings of Robinson Crusoe. Belgium ventured the first explication du texte in an attempt to make vivid what he saw as a deterministic error that the wording of Watt's amendment "might give rise to": "It might, first, be asserted that the individual could only develop his personality within the framework of society; it was, however, only necessary to recall the famous book by Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, to find proof of the contrary."[3] In a conservative defense of a proto-cultural relativism, Dehousse added that "A second error might be made so . . . as to give the impression that it was the duty of society to develop the human being's personality; that principle, might, perhaps, be in harmony with the philosophy of certain countries, but it might equally well run counter to that of other peoples" (659). Attempting to trump competing national philosophies, Dehousse cited Defoe's novel as, presumably, empirical evidence for the eternal and universal nature of humankind. Alan Watt, apparently persuaded by the Belgian interpretation of the novel, retracted his delegation's suggestion, finding perhaps insurmountable the ideological "difficulties its amendment seemed to have caused." Taking up the amendment "in the name of his own delegation," Alexei Pavlov of the USSR contested Dehousse's reading, arguing that the restrictive language of Watt's amendment "rightly stressed the fact that the individual could not fully develop his personality outside society. The example of Robinson Crusoe, far from being convincing, had, on the contrary, shown that man could not live and develop his personality without the aid of society. Robinson had, in fact, had at his disposal the products of human industry and culture, namely, the tools and books he had found on the wreck of his ship" (659-60). Instead of offering up a transparent meaning to resolve the question of the interdependency of the individual and society, the novel became itself a medium for the expression of ideological conflict. Pavlov's interpretation proved the more compelling to the majority of delegations, causing the UK, France, and Lebanon to withdraw their objections. China called for a separate vote on the word "alone," whose inclusion in the final article passed 23 to 5 with 14 abstentions; human personality, as the dynamic product of the individual's social development within a collective, was subsequently enshrined in the Declaration with no objections and six abstentions as Article 29: "Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible."
It may be only an accident of legal drafting and the contingencies of debate that the interpretive conflict over the nature of "human personality" happens to instrumentalize Robinson Crusoe as an ideological litmus test. But it is no accident that the nature of the "human person" emerged once again in the final debates as a source of dispute, because it is charged with the theoretical questions about the grounding of human rights that had dogged the drafters for three years. Although these disputes often fell out along the lines of a nascent Cold War contest between capitalism and communism, it would be a mistake to render the debates in such stark terms.[4] The ideological battles do not completely front along the bipolar lines of a full-blown geo-ideological conflict, but they do often intimate those politics, with the first and second worlds each asserting their claim to moral authority in their designs for the human resources located—even if accidentally, as Robinson castaway in the Orinoco effluence—in the third world. In the long view from this side of the Cold War, it may be possible to assert with Michael Ignatieff that "The Communist rights tradition--which put primacy on economic and social rights--kept the capitalist rights tradition--emphasizing political and civil rights--from overreaching itself," but in 1948 these two traditions shared at least as much as they contested (Ignatieff et al. 19). Their interpretations never concern Friday (or the other "savages"); instead, the competing interpretations each read Crusoe's shipwreck as a story of self-determination, of the rationality of individualism, of the triumph of civilization manifest even in the isolated individual, and as a polemic illustrating the necessary terms for a nurturing accordance between the individual and society. It may be, as I said, accidental that Robinson Crusoe obtains the position of ideological privilege in the UN committee's political discussions of modern individualism so often assigned it in literary accounts of the rise of the novel, but the novel is not set off by the drafters as a rarefied object of merely aesthetic and cultural value; it becomes for the drafters a product of "human industry and culture," serving their aspirations for a new civilization as the tools and books served Crusoe on his island. The Committee entertains no doubts about the seriousness of the novel's attempts to grapple with the social anxieties of a transition from customary collectivism to modern, economic individualism. The delegates cite the novel as an artifactual authority on the nature of humanity and civilization, but the divergent interpretive investments in the text reveal a crisis of authority in the human rights project itself, because they threaten to reveal the delicate consensus established on a commitment to human personality that serves as a crucial basis for the articulation of modern human rights.[5] In part what the Crusoe episode risks exposing, beyond the fragility of consensus, is the superficiality of having solved the questions of the authority and source of human rights through a substitution of human personality for natural law rationalism and divine sanction. As one of the primary rationales enabling human rights, "human personality" appears to replace both the organicism of natural law and the possessive individualism of liberal economic materialism; but the act of substitution effectively cleaves "human personality," causing it to serve simultaneously as the foundation and the aim of human rights. Thus "human personality," as the Declaration has it, is both antecedent to human rights—what the species being brings to the world that is distinct from all other entities—and is also (con)sequent to human rights—what is to be fostered by their codification and observance.[6] Human rights in such a conception aspire to enable a developmental sequence that follows a posited originary human personality through a teleology that will arrive at some expressive civil manifestation of this personality. Full demonstration of the logic effected by this double substitution, a logic I will ultimately call by the name of narrative, is complicated; and so to trace something of the operations of human rights as they emerge from a notion of human personality, I will begin where two Watts converged, with a consideration of personality in Robinson Crusoe.
"Rich in Subjects": Civil Personality in Triplicate
Most recent histories of "personality" trace the term back to its Latin and French roots, where it denoted "the quality of being a person and not a thing" and had a collective connotation, so that it signaled the quality humans share as a species, not a characteristic of the individual per se (Williams 194). The word derives from the Latin persona, which, as the name of the mask worn by an actor, allies it with the cluster of theatrical words that associates "character" with dramatis personae and foregrounds the figural act of representation contained in the word. Medieval usage carried a theological sense of embodiment (derived from theories of the Holy Trinity) and of the aspects that belonged to that body.[7] In each of these early uses, the word retains something of the trace of its origination in mimetic reproduction, so that whether it names a physical stage presence or a species characteristic, personality in some ways always represents something else, always refers to a feature imagined either to mask or to emerge from (and stand in for) a body. Raymond Williams dates the emergence of the current romantic individualist meanings to the eighteenth century, where he finds a transformation of the word from describing a shared quality of collective beings to describing characteristics discharged differently in distinct human individuals. Williams, however, does not account for the jurisprudential contribution to this shift effected by the rediscovery of Roman law which, Robert Elliott finds, prompted the "essential step in the achievement of our Western idea of the person as an independent entity," naming the capacity of such a personal entity, in practice the citizen, to bear civil rights and duties (Elliott 24-5). The Enlightenment turn to Roman jurisprudence makes it possible for Kant to characterize the "person" by its qualities of dignity and rationality in his formulation of the categorical imperative: "Beings whose existence depends not on our will but on nature's, have nevertheless, if they are irrational beings, only a relative value as means, and are therefore called things; rational beings, on the contrary, are called persons, because their very nature points them out as ends in themselves, that is as something which must not be used merely as means"(Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals). In this jurisprudential tradition "person" will predominate as the name of a "right and duty bearing subject," with "personality" denoting the capacity to be, as it were, represented, or to make representations, within the law.[8] Elliott locates the shift by which the modern subject becomes a moral person as the agential subject of law (as opposed to a pure subjection to divine law) with Kant,[9] characterizing as "one of the greatest curiosities in the history of the language" the transformations effected to make the word originally naming a mask "the term incorporating the moral essence of human beings" (19). Elliott, fortuitously for my argument, understands the Kantian transformation of the subject as a process of incorporation, and his use of the word to describe a metaphysical synthesis of submissive subjection and agentive subjectship hints at what I will be elaborating throughout this chapter—that incorporation becomes the tropic operation of human rights law itself, imbued with the figural capacity to embody the seemingly boundless abstractions of the human personality within the discrete body of the legal/physical "person." I can only for the moment gesture towards the work of incorporation (since this is, in some sense, what the entire book attempts to elaborate), so for now it must suffice to note that Elliott's characterization intends towards a reunification of the legal person with its theatrical counterpart by drawing attention to personality as a mode of representation of an abstraction and by suggesting that this mode operates as a trope, a figural use of language that makes possible the representation of an abstraction. The figure of the person that emerges from these discourses is a figure of integration and substantiation, a figure incorporated by discourse as an entity with independent existence that becomes the primary subject of human rights.
Defoe uses the word "person" on remarkably few occasions in Robinson Crusoe, and it appears most often in its then pedestrian sense, signifying the physical body and aspect of the human being: ". . . the captain knew the persons and characters of all the men in the boat, of whom he said that there were three very honest fellows . . ." (254). Defoe distinguishes here the material form of the person from what we might think of today as the abstract moral qualities of personality, but even in this rather ordinary use of "person," the term marks these particular sailors as a special class of beings, prefiguring and foreshadowing a future encounter when these human subjects will prove to be capable of making legal representations on their own behalf, of concluding civil contracts, and of being subject to representation within the law. The logic of legal representability so importantly structures the notion of contractual personhood for Crusoe that having exhausted his supply of ink on his diary produces anxiety over his status:
I gave him [the Spaniard] a strict charge in writing not to bring any man with him who would not first swear in the presence of himself and of the old savage that he would no way injure, fight with, or attack the person he should find in the island . . . ; but that they would stand by and defend him against all such attempts, and wherever they went, would be entirely under and subjected to his commands; and that this should be put in writing and signed with their hands. How we were to have this done, when I knew they had neither pen nor ink, that indeed was a question which we never asked. (243)