The exigency of character. Trees, tables, and triangles, drawing characters upon nature: Cervantes, Wilkins, Newton and Defoe

Most modern conceptions of character, even those conceptions of character that posit it as being nothing more than a "system of notation," assume more or less that the notion of character is a transhistorical entity. To a certain degree, this is a manifestation of the fact that most modern conceptions of character---whether that be the mimetic conceptions of character which equate character with "actual individuals," or the more thematic conceptions of character which define character as "carriers of meaning"---presuppose that a character is some kind of psychological being.; Using a methodology inspired in part by Gilles Deleuze's and Felix Guattari's work in Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, this dissertation attempts to look beyond such a conception of character in order to foreground the possibility that characters did not always serve the same mimetic or thematic function that they do in literature today. If the first conceptions of character were not as we like to assume psychological , what did characters represent, if not actual individuals, and how did they represent, if not by means of their inner lives? In short, if they were not psychological beings, what were they and how were they? Or, better yet, where were they? What epistemological space did the first characters belong to? And, how did that space confer on those characters a sense of being and a life that was not first and foremost psychological?; In order to answer these questions, I will draw upon characters not just from putatively literary texts, but also from putatively scientific ones: Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote with its emblematical characters; John Wilkins' An Essay Towards a Real Character with its "real" and "natural" characters; Isaac Newton's Principia with its mathematical and geometric characters; and Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe with its tabular and/or "plain" characters. For Cervantes, Wilkins, Newton, and Defoe, a "character" was principally an instrumental/public entity whose privacy and personality was an almost indifferent aftereffect of its public and plastic manifestations, and thus fell quite short of what us moderns might expect and might desire from their characters.