The Triumph of Human Empire: Verne, Morris, and Stevenson at the End of the World by Rosalind Williams (review)

Describing the recent launch of the satellite Sputnik as an event “second in importance to no other” in the prologue to The Human Condition (1958), Hannah Arendt nevertheless expresses surprise that the primary response to the event is not pride in human accomplishment, but rather relief at this first tentative escape from an earth conceived of as “a prison for men’s bodies” ([University of Chicago Press, 1998], 1, 2). It’s by way of tracing the emergence of this attitude of world alienation in an earlier “event of consciousness,” the 1887 publication of the Jubilee Atlas, that Rosalind Williams turns to Jules Verne, William Morris, and Robert Louis Stevenson, authors who lamented “humankind’s imminent conquest of the geographical unknown” signaled by the Atlas, but also, of necessity, participated in the web of modernization, the “human empire,” of which it forms a part (2, 15). These authors are linked both as practitioners of romance in an age of realism and as travelers on water—a conjunction that, for Williams, is by no means coincidental. By placing each in his “envirotechnical context” (a concept she borrows from Sara B. Pritchard), she connects romance particularly to estuaries, coasts, beaches, and other littoral zones, where human efforts to command water through canalization and other technical interventions regularly meet with elemental resistance (22). The “distributed frontier” of water—experienced by Verne aboard his beloved Saint-Michel (in three generations) and in his geographic romances, by Morris in his epochal voyages to Iceland and in his identification with the course of the Thames, and by Stevenson in his experience of coastal engineering and in his long residence in the South Pacific—forms the setting of a literary response to human empire, a “littorature,” so to speak, that seeks in romance sometimes an imaginative compensation for the alienated mapped world and sometimes an ethic for facing it courageously, if tragically (23).

While Williams stresses commonalities among the three romancers, Verne seems the odd man out, and it’s surely no coincidence that he didn’t produce the extended theoretical reflections on the romance mode that Morris and Stevenson did. Verne poses a stern challenge to Williams’s biggest claim about romance, that it “resonates, with relatively invariant, universal, powerful, human propensities that gave rise to epic literature in the first place and that resist the ‘civilizing process’” (31). Much of the case for Verne’s resistance to civilization rests on the dystopian Paris in the Twentieth Century (unpublished until 1994), with its picture of a Paris connected to the sea by a massive engineered canal. In regards to the many popular geographical novels, with their love of technology and their celebration of unhindered movement through abstract space, the argument for romance as a counter to civilization comes under more stress. In the central enigmatic figure of Captain Nemo, Williams traces a tension between an authoritarianism similar to that of those other sea-faring agents of world empire, captains of slave ships, and a quest for freedom which drives Nemo (and, in imagination, Verne) beyond the boundaries of mapped civilization. The romance of Nemo’s enclosed submarine world, with its rejection of humanity, surely, though, is not only the supplement of the project of human empire, “what it lacks,” but a crucial component of that project, a moment in the romance of civilization (109). Williams’s investment in Nemo’s defiant individualism as a residue undigested by the forces of bureaucratic modernization is perhaps reflected in her use of the biographical form in treating each of these authors, as envirotechnical context gives way to the development of a personal ethos mapped onto the narrative of a life span.

It’s in her treatment of Stevenson and, especially, Morris—writers who seem to be thinking along Williams’s track rather than, like Verne, posing a problematic case for it—that the...