WHEN HUMPHRY DAVY'S CONSOLATIONS IN TRAVEL WAS FIRST PRINTED posthumously in 1830 it evoked mixed responses reflecting its disjointed 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 compelling passages on geology and the life sciences, but ultimately escaped into metaphysics. The popular press considered it dry and technical. Most of all, it evaded classification by its participation in multiple discourses: religious, 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 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 present, and an alienating artifact tempting us to retreat in befuddlement. Generically, the text displays markers of four discrete genres, the philosophical dialogue, the travel narrative, the scientific treatise, and the medieval consolation, without synthesizing or completely integrating them. For instance, 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 of organizational strategy, one which I call, in light of the interstellar 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, cognizable only to an advanced, perhaps even alien, form of humanity. Importantly, this deferred genre has more value as a catalyzing goal motivating reflective reading than as a stable classification system with recognizable contours. Thus, rather than merely striving to arrest the text in the present, to delimit its generic characteristics, 1 argue that the Consolations tempts us to take up a practice of utopian reading, one in which we perpetually pursue textual unity via repeated generic interpenetrations, while keeping in mind its inevitable displacement into the future, reminding ourselves that we must change the way we read before we can read the text for itself. Ideally, this awareness of the distance between the present disjunctive text and the future cohering genre would refocus our thoughts on conceiving experiments (generic and ideological permutations and combinations) that might accomplish such a development. For Davy, this textual method serves a concomitant social imperative, rounding out the political dimension of his utopian investments; he addresses, attempting to countermand, the directions science was taking during the early nineteenth century: rapid professionalization and the increasing tendency to divide the arts and sciences into disciplines, the results of which we recognize in today's compartmentalized university. …