Exorbitant Optics and Lunatic Pleasures

Thus, in the beginning all the World was America

—John Locke, 1690

The whole world’s a ball

—the Manxman in Moby-Dick

Washington Irving claims he stayed up late at night wondering if scientists on the moon would discover and civilize our globe. He sympathizes in Knickerbocker’s History of New York with the humanity of American Indians by satirically equating the arrival of European ships with the aerial invasion of earth from the moon. These visitants find our “obscure little dirty planet” to be a “howling wilderness” whose denizens imbibe their gift of nitrous oxide and “are utterly destitute of tails, and of a variety of unseemly complexions, particularly of horrible whiteness, instead of pea-green.” The imperial Man in the Moon commands his settlers “to use every means to convert these infidel savages from the darkness of Christianity, and make them thorough and absolute Lunatics.” When we humans resist they “hunt us with hippogriffs, transfix us with concentrated sun-beams, demolish our cities with moon-stones,” until the converted remnant is offered a refuge in either the desert of Arabia or the ice of Lapland.¹

Irving’s imagination exemplifies exorbitance because it delivers an extraplanetary ambit that distances cultural habits in ways that reveal outlandish angles of fresh perspective. The widely circulated image of the earth taken from Apollo 17 in 1972 materialized a parallax view of the planet from outer space as a “blue marble” that opened up new dispositions for planetary allegiance and environmental activism. My notions of both National and Geographic were exploded after I unfolded that magazine’s 1983 map of a “Journey into the Universe Through Space and Time,” which graphically dramatized several mind-blowing leaps of scale: the Earth nested within the solar system, but then the Sun becoming a speck circling the Milky Way, which itself was then made minuscule within the ironically named “Local Group” of other clustered galaxies whose mighty magnitudes themselves paled before receding quasars. Even before this map, David Bowie’s “Major Tom” who is “floating in a most peculiar way / … Far above the moon” and Elton John’s “Rocket Man” who is “burning out his fuse up here alone” sang the existential fantasy of loners speaking back to “Ground Control” from the special sweep of space.²

The Irish-Mexican philosopher Edmundo O’Gorman mused that the emergence of the peripheral American hemisphere in European world-views first invented the capacity to view “the whole surface of the terraqueous globe … as a continuous whole.”³ Such powerful perspectivism helped to enable the designs of global imperialism, yet these horizons also unmoored the latitudes of imagination from the physical contours of the planet itself. Paul Giles’s The Global Remapping of American Literature posits the period before the Civil War as a transnational era when the boundless boundaries of the United States were unstable in ways that rendered its literary productions incapable of being contained by notions of the national.⁴ The unmapped aspects of antebellum America licensed literary writers to spawn inordinate vantages on the world. These exorbitant imaginations exposed readers to replenishing scopes and scales that refracted sublunary provincialisms within more cosmic, critical, and, in Irving’s case, comic relief. Thoreau, an exemplar of this earlier extravagance, writes how the strange irradiation of moonlight not only affects the tides of ocean and thought but also deracinates all humans “intellectually and morally” into an absurd collective of “Albinos.”⁵

A fascinating invocation of interorbital imagination can be seen in a lesser-known work often considered the first American work of science fiction. George Tucker was a Bermuda-born three-term congressman whom Thomas Jefferson appointed as the first professor of moral philosophy at the University of Virginia. (Jefferson described his interdisciplinary job offer as “mental sciences generally, including Ideology, general grammar, logic and Ethics”—belle lettres, rhetoric, and political economy were added later!) In 1827, when Tucker was living in Pavilion IX on the Charlottesville campus, he penned his Voyage to the Moon, his account of “the people of Morosofia, and other lunarians.” One of Tucker’s students was Edgar...