Review

Despite its relatively small size, Jason Pearl's Utopian Geographies and the Early English Novel aspires to tell a big and quite compelling story. This story is framed by the transition, followed here with a particular (but not exclusive) focus on English literature, from utopias, travel-framed descriptions of avowedly better social, political, and cultural arrangements and institutions, to euchronias, visions of improved worlds made possible by the secular course of historical progress. As it turns out—at least that is the story Pearl wishes to tell—between More's foundation of the genre as a form of spatial play in 1516 and Louis-Sébastien Mercier's transmutation of its speculative ontology in 1772 (in Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred), something fairly important happens in the annals of literary history: namely, the rise or emergence—however contradictory, fragmentary, and impure—of “modernity's signature genre” (137), the novel. In this bold new reconfiguration of the account we are accustomed to telling about literary narratives, the early English novel appears as something like a mediator between the waning impulse to invest in geographic unknowns and the rising (particularly after the French Revolution) preoccupation with the developmental dynamics of history. For a while, at least, and before “fictional settings started turning more insistently to national and domestic space,” the early novel is taken to have sublated the geographic utopianism of the Renaissance, both supplanting it and carrying forward “important features of early modern utopias” (4).Pearl proceeds to advance his central arguments through six chapters, covering English prose fiction from 1660 to 1740 and focusing on Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World (1666), Aphra Behn's Oronooko (1688), Daniel Defoe's Crusoe Trilogy (1719–20) and his Captain Singleton (1720), and, finally, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726, 1735). The first of these arguments is that early novels promulgated an aesthetic of disenchantment with the blank spaces of cartographic knowledge that had figured centrally in the imagination of Renaissance utopists; in this respect, the author argues, “geographic disenchantment” happens in fiction before it becomes the result of the exhaustion of imaginary cartographies in reality (2), and external causation is supplemented (indeed, anticipated) by relatively autonomous developments within fictional writing itself (42, n. 139). The second, analytically central contention turns around the implications of Renaissance utopia's sublation (rather than effacement) by the early novel: what Pearl, following Jameson, calls the “utopian enclave,” the notion of a “partially disconnected narrative space” that “enables the articulation of alternatives,” is effectively transcoded by being interiorized in the narrators or protagonists of the fictions in question and by becoming the ground for a transmuted model of sociability that lies beyond “the conventional demarcations of nation or family” (3–4). The third argument is, then, the broader hermeneutic one about periodization and pertains to the pronounced valence “utopia” has for the pre- or proto-“realist” novel and, by extension, to the significance of combining the insights of studies of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century fiction and of utopian studies (something the author does quite exemplarily in the scholarly apparatus he mobilizes in his analyses).The first chapter, “Utopia and Geography,” sketches out the parameters of the relationship between the two terms beginning in the Renaissance, briefly touching on the import of the enthusiasm for the unknown generated by the Age of Discovery for the geographic imagination of the early utopists. A first crisis of the Renaissance model occurred, the author argues, already during England's interregnum, when political upheaval and reformist zeal furnished the preconditions for shedding the initial generic protocol of the journey. Geographic discoveries, the improvement of navigational and cartographic practices, and the increased speed of the dissemination of information about parts of the world that were far from Europe contributed to the atrophying of Renaissance utopianism, as did the import of increasing state involvement in colonization for the convention of the solitary and socially unfettered traveler. Equally damaging was the dawning realization, through empirical discovery, that islands, especially, could not possibly host cornucopias of natural plenty or serve as homes to impressively populous societies.Central to Pearl's argumentation, however, is the notion of a “utopian remainder,” the idea that the “failure of utopian geography” does not lead to a simple effacement of utopian possibilities or modalities but, rather, to a setting up of “interior space,” the space of individual subjectivity so central to the novel, as “a site of recuperated possibilities” (11). This insight is taken up by Pearl's approach to the pronounced esotericism of The Blazing World and its Royalist author. Having, after the irretrievable collapse of absolutist monarchy, abandoned hope in the possibility of “overhauling the social totality” (53), Cavendish opts for an apparently solipsistic “empire of the mind” (54). Yet the geographically deracinated remainder of “utopian feeling” that animates the work uncovers the existence of a second remainder, a desire for “utopian sociability” (14) that is emblematized in the Platonic and cerebral relationship of Cavendish's personas of the Empress and the Duchess, the Emperor, and, ultimately, the reader as well.Utopian Geographies is not the only recent scholarly work to dwell on the affinities between The Blazing World and Behn's Oronooko, a work equally marked by monarchist sensibilities and flights of utopian fancy; both Amy Boesky's Founding Fictions (1996) and Oddvar Holmesland's Utopian Negotiation (2013) dwell on this relation. Pearl's approach emphasizes the two texts' shared tendency to replace “utopian geography” with an “inner utopia.” This latter is instanced, in Behn's case, in the multileveled project of “re-membering” paradisiacal promise mentally, corporally, and socially, through the narrator's textual salvaging of the dismembered “royal slave” and through the mnemonic reconstitution of the now violently lost precolonial paradise of Surinam. Indeed, Pearl argues, Oronooko/Cesar serves as the vehicle for the transformation of utopia from a place into “a mental state, an embodied presence, and finally a propensity for connective sympathies” (73) that bring together—both within the fiction and through the vehicle of its publication—a community bound by shared loyalty to the lost Royalist cause.The fourth chapter, “Urban Solitude and the Crusoe Trilogy,” turns to Defoe's foundational narrative and its two sequels in the light of the well-known ambiguity signaled by the figure of the desert island, which is both the protected and bounded space of an individuated paradise of contentment in the “state of nature” and an execrable prison of solitary confinement, an “Island of Despair.” This ambiguity, Pearl shows, is nonetheless supplemented by a second one, if one focuses on the last third of the first novel and its two sequels: the island, vital as it is at a certain level to the gestation of “a private utopian subjectivity” (77), is also revealed to be only apparently deserted, and the “solitary utopia” is increasingly demystified by “fact and history” (84) and a reintegration of what appeared to be a single-man enclave into the “Caribbean and Atlantic interaction” (76) Crusoe mistakenly thought he had left behind. On the one hand, it is eventually transformed into a multinational colony that repeatedly succumbs to violent conflict, and on the other, Crusoe's own fate after being reclaimed by a world marked by economic interdependency and conflict seems to be an endless and compulsive peregrination, as far away from both native and adopted homes as Siberia and China. Indeed, the decoupling of “utopian solitude” from any one determinate geographic environment announces its interiorization, even among “infinite Crowds of men” (89), as Crusoe notes in an almost modernist moment of Defoe's Serious Reflections.Though what Pearl views as a remainder of utopian sociability is only dimly visible in Crusoe's alternately mercantile and agoraphobic persona, Defoe's chronicle of pirate life, Captain Singleton, on which the next chapter focuses, provides Pearl with more fertile ground for his overarching hypothesis. On the one hand, pirate societies, as a number of scholars have shown, have tended to constitute models of a mobile, literally placeless community, governed by the principles of solidarity, equal and shared access, and democracy, however much they have also involved aggression toward the victims of European empire. On the other, the novel “reconfigures utopia as a subjective state,” a “resolute ideal, capable of being brought back to England” (110), albeit on the precondition of its becoming a secret shared by Singleton himself, his friend William, and William's sister, who come to reconstitute the egalitarianism and solidarity of the pirate community “in miniature” (112). There are indeed suggestions, Pearl notes, that the “utopian circle” of this unconventional and intentional family “could expand further,” at least as regards the generosity occasioned by Singleton's and William's compunction regarding their piratical deeds of violence and plunder.The last chapter of the study explores Swift's Gulliver's Travels through the lens of its subtle satire of geographic fantasies of alternative worlds; as Pearl puts it, “Swift dismantles geographic enclaves, revealing their permeability by the constants of human nature and thereby demonstrating the inability of geography alone to insulate radically different realities” (117–18). Travel, no matter how exotic and apparently unfamiliar the destination, only “gives us more of the same,” forcing the imagination to confront the disheartening persistence of a host of intractable problems Swift tends to attribute to human nature itself. On the other hand, and to the degree that Swiftian misanthropy ends up, at least in Gulliver's Travels, mutating into an extravagant “theriophily,” the disenchantment of the geographic imagination does not amount to an elimination of the impulses for the interiorization of the utopian enclave and for the construction of a utopian sociability. Pearl highlights a series of such instances, from the “small enclaves” on the islands Gulliver encounters, which are “in some ways preferable to the utopian worlds around them” (127); to Gulliver's internalization, even in terms of bodily behavior, of the Houyhnhnms' superior and rational model; to his attempt to re-create a theriophilic utopia in his stable, a compensatory space lying “outside the rubric of the pastoral and the domestic” (131–32) alike—outside, that is, both what the Renaissance utopia incorporated and what the later novel instituted as the fundamental space of narration.Pearl's commendably unpretentious and direct prose style is not incompatible with a striking degree of scholarly ambition: his study deploys an extremely broad literary, historical, and theoretical apparatus (suffice it to say that his bibliography extends for forty-three pages, or roughly one-third of the size of the text). In this respect, it is likely to serve as a very important resource for those interested in the intersections between utopia and the early novel and their mediation by specific generic strands such as the pirate narrative, the desert island narrative, or the lunar voyage. The book's fundamental insights are of great significance in enabling a fertile dialogue between scholars of the early novel, even beyond the English paradigm, and scholars concerned with the literary history and critical theory of utopia. As a study, it is perhaps more marked by the ambition to open up an investigative paradigm than by a penchant for close reading, as Pearl's decision to direct most of his attention to “a single convention,” that of the voyage narrative (6), imposes limits on the nuance and depth with which individual literary texts are treated. Likewise, the dialogue between utopia and the early novel is to some degree enabled by some vagueness regarding the central terms. Pearl notes that his book “treats the genre of utopia … as a working model with moving parts” that are constantly subject to revision (15) and maintains a similarly open-ended attitude about the definition of the early novel. Yet one finds oneself asking questions about what is specifically “utopian” about a number of the themes and figures Pearl explores or “novelistic” about texts such as the Blazing World—what determinate formal and sociohistorical content, however heuristically open to experimentation or revision, these terms are taken to possess.In his last chapter, Pearl returns to an earlier formulation, suggesting a displacement, within Gulliver's sensibility, of hope by desire: this seems like a premise worth delving into in considerably more detail, both because desire, rather than hope, is far more attuned to the individualist sensibilities of the novel and because, as Swift's text already demonstrates, it is never quite separable from the modality of disgust, an affect whose contribution to the drive for imagining enclaves at whatever scale (collective or individual and indeed corporeal) has possibly been quite underestimated, particularly in regards to the satirical excoriation of the existent that, from More onward, precedes the imaginative gestation of such enclaves. There may be a larger truth, in other words, in Pearl's remark that in Gulliver, “the sign of utopia becomes unsociable eccentricity” (128). A degree of that disposition is present not only in all the fictions he examines but also, and however paradoxically, both in the novel's romance with silent interiority and spurts of social withdrawal and in the utopian genre's foundational traveler, a decidedly choleric man—Hythlodaeus—keen to have done with his family and with all national and political attachments so that he can be free to discover a sociability that affirms itself as the negation of the world he has eagerly left behind.