Utopian Geographies and the Early English Novel by Jason H. Pearl (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...