Studies in Romanticism

KURTIS HESSEL Humphry Davy’s Intergalactic Travel: Catching Sight of Another Genre W HEN HUMPHRY DAVY S CONSOLATIONS IN TRAVEL WAS FIRST PRINTED posthumously in 1830 it evoked mixed responses reflecting its dis­ jointed nature: Davy was pious; he approached heresy. He lived in the “fantastic”; he was “purely scientific.” Yet whether he was a “dying Plato,” an “orthodox Christian or [a] skeptical free-thinker,” critics agreed on the text’s “desultory and disordered manner.”1 It offered scientists com­ pelling passages on geology and the life sciences, but ultimately escaped into metaphysics. The popular press considered it dry and technical. Most ofall, it evaded classification by its participation in multiple discourses: reli­ gious, scientific, and visionary. This confusion has likewise spurred modern critics to flee the text’s strangeness and read it almost exclusively through a biographical lens, considering Davy’s status as a “superstar” scientific performer or as a scientist peering through a poetic microscope.2 These I would like to take this opportunity to thank Dr. Jill Heydt-Stevenson for her support and mentorship throughout this essay’s development. 1. The Monthly Review 13 (March 1830) praised Davy, but denigrated the text’s “fantastic design,” charging Davy “with an unlawful tendency to veiy grave technical disquisitions, touching geological formations and chemical changes, when he proposed to be amusing. . . . [W]e should have sought him to forget the laboratory for a season, to cease to be purely scientific” (391)- In contrast, Cuvier noted, “that once escaped from the laboratory, [Davy] had resumed the tranquil reveries and sublime thoughts ... of his youth: it was in some measure the work of a dying Plato” (quoted in The Collected Works of Sir Humphry Davy, p:vii). Taking another position, The Gentleman’s Magazine 23 (1830) extolled the Consolations for embracing revealed religion (228—31), while the Medico-Chirurgical Review 12 (1830) ques­ tioned the text’s piety: “whether the lamented philosopher will be hailed by the orthodox Christian or the skeptical free-thinker, as supporting one or the other oftheir respective doc­ trines, we shall not attempt to determine; but we suspect that he is rather too Pythagorean for the divine, and too spiritual for the materialist” (401). The Edinburgh Journal of Science 3 (1830) complemented the Consolation’s geological passages, but didn’t extract from its cos­ mic jaunt because it was “so completely the work of imagination” (178). 2. Romanticism scholars tend to consider Davy as influencing the lives of canonical SiR, 54 (Spring 2015) 57 58 KURTIS HESSEL responses—both the modern and those contemporary with Davy— demonstrate the common perception of the Consolations as fractured. While such a view seems inevitable, my interest lies instead in exploring the reasons for and productivity of its fissile nature, which renders it at once an experimental text offering current scholars a laboratory in which to reconsider how we organize knowledge both historically and in the pres­ ent, and an alienating artifact tempting us to retreat in befuddlement. Ge­ nerically, the text displays markers offour discrete genres, the philosophical dialogue, the travel narrative, the scientific treatise, and the medieval con­ solation, without synthesizing or completely integrating them. For in­ stance, apropos to travel narrative it describes the countryside surrounding the ruins of Paestum: its “green hills,” “marble cliffs,” and “vineyards.”3 Yet it becomes scientific in offering a technical explanation of respiration: “By the action of air on the blood it is fitted for the purposes of life, and from the moment that animation is marked by sensation or volition this function is performed” (Davy 335—36). I will argue that this unruly generic excess and its varying and often opposed epistemological stances constitute a new kind oforganizational strategy, one which I call, in light ofthe inter­ stellar journey that opens the text, a utopian genre. In particular, Davy’s text incites utopian thinking through the interplay between generic construction and deconstruction. By this I mean that the text allows for several discrete but incomplete strategies of categorization, which encourage the reader to imagine, from the shambles of all the ways the Consolations might be classified, an unknown genre of the future, cog­ nizable only to an advanced, perhaps even alien...