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The Dream of a Literal World: Wilkins, Hobbes, Marvell

This article explores one aspect of the linguistic utopianism of the seventeenth century, what I call "the dream of a literal world." Thomas Hobbes and John Wilkins both offer distinct versions of what a world without metaphor would look like—a world wherein each object has a precise literal name unsusceptible to the vagaries of history and the eccentric inflections of individual speakers. The different proposals of Hobbes and Wilkins are held up to brilliant satire by Andrew Marvell. Marvell directly engages with their theories in his prose, countering their topdown model of linguistic control with his own vision of a world in which metaphors are constantly created and submitted "for trial" to a community of speakers. Finally his poetic practice reflects the theory of his prose, revealing metaphor not simply as a linguistic practice but as our basic mode of orienting ourselves in the world.