The Dark Side of Utopia: Misanthropy and the Chinese Prelude in Defoe's Lunar Journey

Having been pilloried, imprisoned, and financially ruined in 1703 for opposing religious persecution by the High Anglican establishment, the newly-liberated Daniel Defoe in 1704 began to channel his equally improbable fantasies of personal vindication and social transformation into The Consolidator. This text, published in March 1705, chronicles an imaginary voyage to the moon by way of China, with much of the work serving as thinly-veiled 'secret history' through which the author declaims on topical issues like religious intolerance, party politics, European war, and the limitations of contemporary scientific debate. But Defoe also uses the conventions of travel writing and the metaphor of the journey to raise fundamental questions concerning human nature, epistemology, and our innate [in-]capacity for self-awareness. Using Awnsham Churchill and John Churchilll's Collection of Voyages and Travels (1704) and Louis Le Comte's Memoirs (1697), this study draws on late seventeenth-century French, Spanish, and Italian travel writing on China to demonstrate how Defoe lampoons the popular image of the Chinese as a race of natural philosophers and technological supermen, but does so in such a way as to critique the philosophical assumptions which underpin travel writing conventions. Through the vehicle of his flawed narrator, the author dramatises the challenges posed by transcultural representation, as the clumsy cultural negotiations characterising the China visit foreshadow the more extensive exploration of the author's profoundly sceptical views on cultural interaction that takes place on the moon. Through tropes like a relentlessly efficient, progressive technology that renders human perception both perfectible and irrelevant, and a pandemic selective amnesia that afflicts individuals, interest groups, and possibly entire cultures, the text undercuts any lasting faith in man's ability to reconcile the perspectives separating cultures and communities.

Journey's Start: Facing East

In using China as a staging-post for his narrator's flight to the moon, Defoe constructs a homage to a predecessor in lunar travel writing. In Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moone (1638), the hero Domingo 'Speedy' Gonsales lands in China on his return voyage from the moon, residing there several years, and sharing what he learned of lunar culture and technology with his Chinese hosts before returning to Spain.¹ By imagining that interplanetary lines of communication have been maintained between China and the moon, The Consolidator picks up where Godwin's narrative left off. Thereafter, however, Defoe's text takes a different direction. Where Godwin's narrator briefly sketches a secretive society deeply suspicious of strangers, Defoe's delivers a sharp satire on Chinese learning and culture, but an even more acerbic commentary on Western travel literature.

English artists had expressed a growing fascination with China since the middle of the seventeenth century, and this had developed into something of an obsession by the 1690s. This passion was fuelled by the availability of a growing number of Chinese goods in British shops, but was based on very little first-hand English experience of Chinese culture.² Throughout the century, however, European travellers to China published their accounts with increasing frequency, and between 1690 and 1700 English translations of these texts began appearing in London bookstalls.³

Three types of publication offered information on China to readers in Western Europe: the collected letters of the French Jesuit missionaries working in China since the sixteenth century; the journals of ambassadors negotiating trade embassies with the Empire; and – though still rare – the memoirs (authentic and fictional) of the traveller-explorers.⁴

Both dominant types of the transcultural commentaries – from emissaries seeking markets and evangelists saving souls – project an image of China similar in this respect: that Chinese learning was powered by its reverence for the ancients, and its culture stressed the importance of tradition, hierarchy, and respect for authority.⁵ The achievements of Chinese ingenuity honoured the world over – gunpowder, the printing press, the magnet and compass – were attributed to a knowledge of the natural world that China had preserved from ancient civilisations, now lost to the decadent cultures of the West. The Jesuit missionaries routinely portray the Chinese as a naturally honest...