#76 = Volume 25, Part 3 = November 1998
Sylvie Romanowski
Cyrano de Bergerac’s Epistemological Bodies: “Pregnant with a Thousand Definitions”
1. Cyrano’s fiction in context: competing sciences at the dawn of the modern scientific age. Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-1655) wrote two highly imaginative texts of cosmic exploration and travel which defy all attempts at classification. Sometimes collectively entitled L’Autre Monde [The Other World], L’Autre Monde ou Les Estats et Empires de la Lune [The Other World, or the States and Empires of the Moon] and Les Estats et Empires du Soleil [The States and Empires of the Sun],1 they have been the object of debate and widely differing interpretations. They have been considered as critical and satirical (Mason), libertine (Chambers, DeJean, Spink), materialist and epicurian (Alcover, Laugaa), and hermetist (Gossiaux, Hutin, Van Vledder). Cyrano has been considered both as an epigone of Campanella and late Renaissance magical thought (Erba, Lerner) and as sceptical and “modern,” anticipating the eighteenth-century philosophers (Harth, Prévot, Spink, Weber).2 Yet Cyrano’s texts transcend all these labels. L’Autre Monde explores other spaces, and are themselves situated elsewhere, in another intellectual and critical space which, with Calle-Gruber, Philmus, and Suvin, I will take as belonging to the genre of science fiction: according to Ursula Le Guin, science fiction is defined by “its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants of our contemporary life—science, all the sciences, and technology” (Introduction, n.p.).
But which science? In Cyrano’s time, the first half of the seventeenth century, this question itself—let alone the answer—would be markedly different from ours. In our time, very specialized scientific fields focus on the many aspects of life and the cosmos: e.g., biology, chemistry, physics—all based on certain commonly accepted quantitative and logical principles born in the seventeenth century: “Science was becoming [in the seventeenth century], and has remained, primarily quantitative. Search for measurable elements among your phenomena, and then search for relations between these measurements” (Whitehead 47). In the early seventeenth century, however, the situation was quite different: rivaling methodologies were available to explore the universe, and they were not so cleanly partitioned into highly specialized domains. In Cyrano’s time, several types of interpretations of the world competed and influenced each other in rather complicated ways. Modern science, as we know it and recognize it in the works of its ancestors such as Galileo and Descartes, was actively engaged in debates with other alternative systems of thought—such as atomism, animism, hermetism—which we cannot truly label as “sciences,” yet which were seen as viable competitors in the intellectual debates of the period. In a French version of this essay, I called Cyrano’s writings, written during this unique period in western history, not so much science fiction as “savoir fiction” [knowledge fiction]—a phrase impossible to translate into English felicitously.
Cyrano’s point of departure in writing these novels was to critique, refute, and mock the traditional religious, Aristotelian, and Church-promoted scientific beliefs considered orthodox in his day and, in so doing, to satirize the society of his time. His eclectic and completely heterodox thought incorporated other competing paradigms: e.g., the mechanistic and mathematical view proposed by Galileo, Descartes, and Mersenne (still very new in his day); the atomistic explanation defended by Gassendi; and the animist, esoteric, alchemist traditions—very ancient but still continuing to enjoy a widespread popularity during the seventeenth century. From the perspective of the modern reader, the latter traditions may not seem worthy of being placed alongside those of mathematical and mechanistic science—or even on par with certain atomistic views—because our modern science considers itself as deriving exclusively from Galileo and Descartes rather than from the alchemists. But, as strange as animism and alchemy may seem today, in the seventeenth century these systems of knowledge were considered as competitors to Cartesian thought, and it was not clear which kind of science would eventually win out. The alchem-ists and animists were deemed worthy of serious rebuttal by such scientists as Mersenne, Gassendi, and Kepler. In the upheavals of science in the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries, alchemy, animism, and atomism must have seemed both interesting and tempting, without there being much means available through which to discriminate completely and persuasively among them. Even Descartes started out as an animist in his early works such as the Cogitationes Privatae. Frances Yates sums up the situation as follows:
Thus in these momentous years when the Renaissance world is cracking and the modern world is rising from its ruins, currents and counter-currents still running strongly out of the past swirl round the protagonists in the epic struggle, the outlines of which are not as yet clear to the spectators. Mersenne and Descartes were suspected of being Rosicrucians because of their recondite interests. And at the same time and place in which Hermetism is in retreat before the onslaughts of Mersenne...Campanella is prophesying at court that the infant Louis XIV will build the Egyptian City of the Sun. (447)3
To a person curious about the science of matter in the early seventeenth century, the “hands-on” experimental activities carried out by alchemists in their laboratories—filled with retorts, ovens, and water-baths, where they were busy burning, condensing, fusing, and crystallizing (Holmyard 43-58)—may well have seemed at least as interesting as the telescope or the microscope. Alchemy declined quickly at the end of the seventeenth century under the twin impacts of Cartesianism and Boyle’s chemistry, but in Cyrano’s time it was still very much alive and was indeed enjoying a last blaze of glory. In the fight against Aristotelian science, the alchemists were the allies of the materialists and other antagonists of Church-supported science in that they “ran counter to the Church in preferring to seek through knowledge rather than to find through faith” (Holmyard 164). Cyrano found fodder for his attacks on orthodox sciences in all the competing sciences of his day, those new and not so new: “in Cyrano de Bergerac’s view, Descartes and Campanella and others could appear to be travelling companions...did they not share in the rejection of a philosophical heritage still firmly implanted in the institution of the school” (Lerner 129). Cyrano was blessed with what Lerner calls a “decidedly ecumenical mind” (129-130) which allowed him widely different points of view—ranging from Pythagoras to Descartes, along with others like Cardan, Campanella, Kepler and Gassendi. He used these viewpoints in order to provoke his readers into thinking differently about the universe and its inhabitants.
2. An emblematic sentence. The complete sentence from which my title is taken will furnish the entry point into my description of Cyrano’s peculiar enterprise. At the very beginning of his first novel, observing the moon with four companions, the narrator lists several possible descriptions and definitions of the Moon, concluding: “je demeuré gros de mille definitions de Lune dont je ne pouvois accoucher” [I remained pregnant with a thousand definitions of Moon to which I was unable to give birth] (L 359). This statement contains three odd aspects: 1. the narrator is male and pregnant; 2. he has a thousand definitions; 3. he is unable to give birth. The first, a pregnant man, shows a reversal, while the second shows that he is going beyond mere reversals, with no less than a thousand definitions. The third part indicates the inadequacy of language, as he is unable to give birth, to produce one definition, let alone a thousand.
This sentence also indicates an important aspect of Cyrano’s vision: the close relationship between the body, knowledge, and statements about know-ledge. The narrator’s body, and all bodies, are intimately involved in the production of intellectual knowledge, for the body is not just a metaphor or a representation, but a knower. It is, in short, an epistemological body. While Cyrano is a convinced materialist, explaining all phenomena by the arrangement and movement of particles and atoms, he is also a seeker of purification and enlightenment which necessitate going beyond matter and into the life of the mind. Preoccupied with knowledge of matter and the nature of knowledge itself, Cyrano unites, in my opinion, two views: the materialism of the atomists and the idealism of the animists and hermetics. As Pol Gossiaux says, Cyrano tries to reconcile “his absolute materialism and his absolute animism” (594), though Gossiaux locates the reconciling image in fire, rather than in the body, fire being the traditional means of purification and place of enlightenment in hermetic science. But Cyrano is radically original in making the body the keystone which holds the composite edifice together, the place of juncture of both the materialist and the hermetic visions. Cyrano’s two novels can be viewed as a persistent effort to mix, even to reconcile, these two philosophies of the universe, the atomistic and the hermetic, without fusing their identities into some single new vision—his attitude being one of joyful inclusion and bold exploration of both the outer and the inner universes.4
Critics of Cyrano’s texts, however, have tended to emphasize either one or the other aspect. Madeleine Alcover has viewed Cyrano as a materialist, almost eliminating the hermetic side; others, such as Erba, Lerner, Gossiaux, and Van Vledder, have placed him in the esoteric tradition. I believe that it is more faithful to Cyrano’s strange enterprise—as historians of science fiction (Suvin, Philmus, et al.) tend to do when citing him as an early writer in that genre—to assume that he drew on several systems. While the new mechanistic views are given less prominence (despite his defense of heliocentrism at the beginning of Lune and the intervention of Descartes at the end of Soleil), the atomistic-materialist paradigm is adopted by Cyrano along with the esoteric one. In other words, he sought to consider these two explanations together in a unique worldview that had no equal in his time. Cyrano was choosing systems that were truly unorthodox, exploratory, and highly unconventional—but even more unconventional in that he drew upon these different systems at the same time. These twin aspects, which can be grouped as materialist/bodily, and immaterial/animist, come together in Cyrano who uses and sometimes transforms them to suit his own purposes. With the atomistic view, he refutes the Aristotelian tenets, and with the heliocentric view he refutes geocentrism; but he goes far beyond that new science, which was already dangerously unorthodox. He also develops a vision of the world based on a part of the hermetic tradition, which furnishes him with the exploration of an inner enlightenment, both epistem-ological and philosophical. This tradition, however, is stripped by Cyrano of any belief in the divine or in a Christian God, though not of belief in the soul. Through such reinterpretations, his doubly imaginative vision gives his works a rich and complex thickness which has not lost its appeal for modern readers. Darko Suvin sums up Cyrano by describing his “charmingly whimsical yoking together of elements from disparate fields” (106). I would differ with the idea that this was “whimsical”: I believe that Cyrano was playing a very serious game, one which Suvin himself says might have cost him his life, surmising that the writer died young in an act of “political murder by clerical enemies” (106). At stake were vast belief systems (e.g., Christian Catholic orthodoxy, cosmology) and questions no less vast, such as the place of humanity in the universe, the existence of an eternal soul, the possibility of an infinite universe, and the foundations of nature.
3. Reversals, binary oppositions. If Cyrano wants to jolt readers out of their orthodoxy and complacency, reversals are an obvious place to start: perhaps the moon is, as he says, a world like ours, and ours a moon for the moon. This hypothesis produces great laughter among his companions, to whom he replies that perhaps moon dwellers are laughing just as hard about us. It is shortly after this sentence that he meditates on the thousand definitions of the moon that he is unable to bring forth. Reversals are an easy way to amuse and to unsettle the mind from its usual perspectives, and are used more frequently in Lune than in Soleil. Inanimate objects become animate: books talk (the ancestor of the record player?) and plants talk. Pebbles become soft. Food becomes immaterial, producing no excrement, which might be a definite advantage. Sexual organs are revered as the givers of life instead of being hidden as shameful: one character, a naked man, wears nothing but a belt adorned with bronze likenesses of the male sexual organs, and a scarf sporting a medal with the same image. He explains that sexual organs are to be honored as givers of life, replacing the sword, bringer of death. Besides, such organs bring joy and should not be the object of shame: “Malheureuse contrée où les marques de generation sont ignominieuses et où celles d’aneantissement sont honorables!” [unhappy land, where the insignia of reproduction are shameful, and those of annihilation are honorable] (L 417). In a similar vein, the young are revered more than the old, and the son chastises his father rather than the other way around, for the son represents youthful vigor; and there are even houses and walls that move around with their inhabitants (mobile homes?) in this “monde renversé” [upside-down world] (L 407).
These reversals never fail to amuse, and they carry a subversive charge that is perhaps underestimated in our contemporary era, where multicultural views prevail. In the past, a hierarchized society would be more upset by, say, a carnavalesque reversal of authority and uprisings by the peasants and other lower classes.5 But reversal is not the most original vehicle of Cyrano’s vision of the other world. In Lune and especially in Soleil he uses many other means to imagine and make readers imagine other possibilities of bodily and intellectual existence, and it is to these that I now turn.
4. From binarism to multiplicity. The multiplicity of new possibilities emphasizes two aspects of body and mind that Cyrano uses with equal effect: first, matter in its many varieties, and secondly, the immaterial, which is both transparent and lightweight.
4.1. The many possibilities of bodily matter. His novels’ elaborate descriptions of other worlds seem to imply that one can indeed explore and represent other realities. But this knowledge and understanding will be limited—indeed, severely restricted—by fundamental failings in the sensory apparatus of human beings: only five senses, three faculties of the mind, one or two languages at most, and binary logic. All these capacities are hardly adequate for dealing with the multiple, startlingly different worlds encountered elsewhere in the universe. The difficulty is not rooted in a basic partiality or subjectivity, but in the inadequacy of the tools, mental and physical, at one’s disposal. In an age when new technologies and hands-on experiments were becoming more widespread, Cyrano seemingly was fascinated not so much by the new science in itself as by the gap it revealed between types of knowledge—the superior power of experimentation over the unassisted senses. Paradoxically, it seems that the increasing ability to know through mechanical devices made the human sensory apparatus seem all the more inadequate, even as knowledge itself was increasing. Humans are confined by five senses: “Il y trop peu de rapport...entre vos sens et l’explication de ces misteres,” says Socrates’ Demon, who goes on to state: “il y a dans l’Univers un million peut-estre de choses qui pour estre connues demanderoient en nous un million d’organes tous differens” [there is very little relationship between your senses and the explanation of these mysteries; there are in the universe maybe a million things which, in order to be known, would require us to have a million organs, all different from each other] (L 379-380). How can we know these million things, which the Demon perceives “par les sens qui vous manquent” [by means of the senses you lack] (L 380), if they have to be funneled through a mere five senses?6
Similarly, we are limited by our relatively poor linguistic tools. Not only is the original, matrix language of the world still in existence on the Moon, but trees and cabbages talk, and human language is not limited to the voice or to letters. The whole body talks: “certaines parties du corps signifient un discours tout entier” [certain parts of the body signify an entire discourse] and a finger, a hand, an ear, a lip, an arm, or a cheek can mean a whole sentence, while other parts or actions of the body convey meaning, such as frowns, twitching of muscles, stomping of feet, and contortion of arms. In a kind of balletic dance, the Moon’s inhabitants make all these parts move together so that the whole body is talking: “il ne semble pas d’un homme qui parle, mais d’un corps qui tremble” [it does not appear that a man is talking, but that a body is trembling] (L 381). Add to that the detail that people are “tous nuds” [entirely naked] (381), and a vivid picture emerges. Bodies in action are central to communication.
The philosophical basis of this multiple view of the human body is grounded in the atomistic theory of the universe, where all is matter, and all depends only on the arrangement of particles, not on souls or on God: “l’Univers infini n’est composé d’autre chose que de ces atosmes infinis tres solides” [the infinite universe is composed of nothing else but these infinite, very hard atoms] (L 408). Not only is everything a product of chance, but in a curious twist, Cyrano also imagines that everything that could have been but was not created is also a product of chance, so that what might have been is given equal weight with what might not have been: “aussy bien est-il impos-sible que de ce remuement il ne se fasse quelque chose, et cette chose sera tousjours admirée d’un estourdy qui ne sçaura pas combien peu s’en est fallu qu’elle n’ayst pas esté faicte” [so it is impossible that out of these movements something does not arise, and this thing will be admired by a scatterbrain who will not know that this thing very nearly did not occur] (L 409-410). The culmination of this expanded vision of the world occurs in the description of the multiple and infinite worlds: “il y a des mondes infinis dans un monde infini” [there are infinite worlds in an infinite world] (L 405), for just as we seem to be mites to large animals like elephants, there are mites, “cirons,” to whom we appear to be giants, and these in turn have their own mites. This materialist, atomistic theory of the universe (derived variously from Lucretius and Gassendi, among others) Cyrano elevates to a principle called “cette cironalité universelle” [this universal mitedom] (L 406) in which there is no stable point of reference anywhere. The materialist vision shades into a vision of the profound unity and harmony of the universe, an idea basic to hermeticism. The reader thus is prepared for the Demon’s affirmation that “touttes choses sont vrayes” [all things are true], that one can “unir phisicquement les veritez de chacque contradictoire” [unite physically the truths in each contradiction] (L 413)—both good hermetic principles—and that one should go beyond contradictions or paradoxes, however sophisticated. Creation is undifferentiated, flattened out, so to speak, without hierarchy, infinitely creative, and deeply harmonious. Matter is the only reality in the world: all the intellectual and mental processes result from the arrangement of atoms, to the exclusion of any other principle. Yet matter seems capable of transcending itself, of generating a soul: “l’ame n’estant que l’action de ces petittes bestes” [the soul being only the action of these little animals] (406).
If the body is made up only of matter arranged in such a way as to produce thought, then it seems logical that the transmission of knowledge is also conducted in a material fashion, through bodily contact rather than through teaching or lecturing or reading, especially when it comes to the most prestigious of learned people, philosophers. At the end of Lune, there is a rather startling episode of the epistemological body, in the description of the philosophers’ happy death. When a philosopher feels death approaching, he lets his friends know: they kiss him tenderly on the mouth in a kind of love-making among men. He then plunges a dagger into his own heart, and one person after the other sucks his blood from the wound. After everyone is satiated, young girls are brought in, and they all make love, so that “de ces embrassemens il peut naistre quelque chose, ils soient comme asseurés que c’est leur amy qui revit” [from these embraces something may arise, they may be assured as it were that their friend is living again] (L 415). There is even cannibalism: “pendant trois ou quatre jours qu’ils sont à gouster les delices de l’Amour, ils ne sont nourris que de la chair du mort, qu’on leur faict manger toutte crue” [for the three or four days that they are enjoying the delights of love, they are fed only by the flesh of the dead man which they are made to eat raw] (L 415). In this extraordinary passage, all functions of the body are simultaneously put to the service of the transmission of knowledge: kissing, bleeding, death, sex, procreation, and the eating of flesh.7 This passage is also an example of the melding of both the atomistic and the alchemic traditions. According to the first, particles of matter convey knowledge, and in the second tradition, this whole episode is placed under the sign of the Sun, to whom a sacrifice is offered before these proceedings—and let us not forget that the philosopher is a standard representation of the enlightened follower and practitioner of alchemy.8
Given the capacity of the particles of the body to carry knowledge, it is not surprising that if one can arrange one’s particles in exactly the same manner as another person’s being, then one has exactly the same knowledge as that other person. This principle is explained to the narrator of Soleil by Campanella, who serves as his guide in that world: “afin de connoistre vostre interieur, j’arrangeay toutes les parties de mon corps dans un ordre semblable au vostre; car estant de toutes parts situé comme vous, j’excite en moy par cette disposition de matiere, la mesme pensée que produit en vous cette mesme disposition de matiere” [in order to know you from the inside, I arranged all the parts of my body in an order similar to yours; being organized in every way like you, I excite in me, by this organization of matter, the same thought which is produced in you by that same organization of matter] (S 489). This passage has been interpreted (Erba 489, Lerner 126) as an example of Cyrano’s use of physiognomy taken from Campanella: it seems clear, however, that Cyrano reinterprets physiognomy to make of it something much more interior and radical, for Cyrano’s Campanella indicates that he rearranges the disposition of particles within his body, not his outward facial expressions (“j’arrangeay toutes les parties de mon corps”). This may seem odd, but the example that follows stresses the same point: that of twins who, though separated, do the same things in every domain, because “il estoit impossible que la composition des organes de leurs corps estant pareille dans toutes ses circonstances, ils n’operassent d’une façon pareille, puisque deux instrumens égaux touchez également doivent rendre une harmonie égale” [it was impossible that, since the composition of their bodily organs was similar in every fashion, they would not operate in similar fashion, because two equal instruments played in the same way must produce a similar sound] (S 489). Again, the emphasis here is on the inner restructuring of one’s organs to produce insight.
We have come a long way from mere reversals of perspectives and talking trees. In a vision that is materialist but not reductive, Cyrano challenges his readers to imagine a vastly different world from ours, a world where human beings are their bodies—are wholly material—but not in the least unintellectual. But there is more: along with this materialist vision of the human body/ intellect, there is yet another vision of what I call immaterial matter, where matter is transparent, light in weight. It is to this vision that I now turn. It is a vision that conveys esoteric meaning, the search for enlightenment, although it never renounces embodiment.
4.2. Immaterial matter. This vision, which draws more heavily on hermetic concepts, is developed in Soleil rather than in Lune, as if to provide yet another possibility to the materialist, atomistic option explored principally in Lune. The choice of Campanella (not picked at random by Cyrano as one of the principal officers of the Sun [Lerner 127]) as a mentor for Dyrcona underlines this new point of view: Campanella was known primarily for his knowledge of magic, astrology, and as the utopian writer of Civitas Solis. The Sun and the Moon, symbolized by gold and silver respectively, represent the higher goals of alchemists and other initiates into superior knowledge; of these, the Sun is the highest, the most enlightened and authentic world to which one can aspire. With this emphasis on light, the very old Manichean dichotomy of dark and light, matter and spirit, might reappear—though not without significant modifications in Cyrano’s texts. For on the Sun, there is no perfection: there is opacity, there is death, and in a curious passage I will evoke later, the Beast of Fire, who could be expected to be dominant on the Sun, is killed by the Beast of Cold. Conversely, matter is not hopelessly condemned by Cyrano, as it was in the Manichean tradition. On the whole, however, the narrator’s existence on the Sun, as well as his travel to it, exhibit a lighter, happier state.
This new mode of being is foreshadowed in a dream during which, before his second voyage, the narrator ascends towards the sun and feels lighter, delivered from gravity: so much so that he gets agitated and falls out of bed, landing naked on the bare floor with his eyes wide open. When he subsequently makes his real ascent towards the actual Sun, he feels strong, warm, and not at all burnt in the fire, in “le feu (cette poussiere quasi spirituelle)” [fire, this quasi-spiritual dust] (S 445). He feels emotions of joy, rapture, voluptuousness, and deliverance. To indicate that this knowledge is not pure spirit, but is embodied, he describes his body as becoming exquisitely transparent: “ma veuë...passa tout à travers...comme si mon corps n’eut plus esté qu’un organe de voir, je sentis ma chair, qui, s’estant décrassée de son opacité, transferoit les objets à mes yeux...” [my sight went through everything, as if my entire body was only an organ of sight, I felt my flesh, cleansed of its opacity, transferring objects to my eyes] (S 453). “J’estois devenu diafane” [I had become diaphanous] (S 453), but this diaphany includes volume and colors, for he sees all the organs of his body as if in an anatomical illustration: “aucun endroit...quoy que transparens, n’avoit perdu sa couleur naturelle; au contraire, mes poulmons conservoient encor sous un rouge incarnat leur mole délicatesse: mon coeur toujours vermeil balançoit aisément entre le sistolle et le diastolle; mon foye sembloit brûler dans un pourpre de feu” [though transparent, no place had lost its natural color; on the contrary my lungs still kept beneath a reddish pink their delicate softness: my ever vermilion heart moved easily between the systole and the diastole; my liver seemed to burn in a bright crimson] (S 453). He has used most of the synonyms for “red” that the French language contains. Besides being the color of blood, red, of course, was the color of the hermetic Philosopher’s stone.
This beautiful, red, glowing and transparent body is the effect of the being in proximity to the sun, and when Dyrcona leaves its immediate vicinity, he becomes more opaque again: proximity to the Sun means enlightenment in all the senses of the word—becoming lit, transparent, and light in weight, as well as enlightened in the mind, in a sense that was increasingly emphasized in the next century. Here, being dense in body also means being dense in mind, and gaining in lightness means gaining understanding. The philosophers again have a privileged status, just as in Lune, but in keeping with the new vision of corporeal transparency, their body is immaterial and their place is in the Sun, the highest principle of light and clarity.
Campanella thus explains the special status that philosophers enjoy because their souls are made of finer particles: “une ame de Philosophe est tissuë de parties bien plus deliées” [a philosopher’s soul is woven with much finer particles] (S 492), and hence, philosophers can be the Sun’s principal inhabitants. He explains that there are three kinds of spirits: “les plus grossiers” [the coarsest] who merely repair holes in the Sun’s girth, the “subtils” [subtle] who belong in the Sun’s rays, and the best, the spirits of the philosophers: “mais ceux des Philosophes...arrivent tout entiers à la sphere du jour pour en estre habitans” [but those of philosophers arrive whole to the day-sphere in order to live there] (S 493). They do so by a principle of resemblance, of light going to light, with an exceptional philosopher such as Epicurus having the extraordinary privilege of arriving in the Sun complete with body and soul together: “Epicure dans le Soleil est le mesme Epicure qui vivoit jadis sur la Terre” [Epicurus in the Sun is that same Epicurus who used to live on Earth] (S 493). Alcover finds it troubling that the Philosophers’ souls are superior to other souls and explains this in terms of the hermetic tradition.9 The possibility of enlightenment in the Sun, emphasizing the soul’s ascent towards light, is only the culmination of many other esoteric aspects and allusions to the hermetic tradition. As Philmus says, “there is a great deal of internal evidence that occult traditions inspired Cyrano’s manner of concealing his theories in myth and allegory,” and his work demonstrates “a conversance with the doctrines of alchemy” (129). Chambers, Gossiaux, Spink, and especially Erba and Van Vledder, have analyzed many of these aspects which I will not reiterate here. In my conclusion, I will return to the matter of Cyrano’s use of these and other views of the universe.10
In Cyrano’s novels, however, souls are accompanied by bodies—for Cyrano yokes together several systems of thought, obviously refusing to be confined by one system alone. Furthermore, even on the Sun there are not only transparency and lightness, but degrees of these qualities, “car le Lecteur sçaura que toutes les contrées n’en sont pas diafanes, il y en a qui sont obscures, comme celles de nostre Monde” [the reader will note that all regions are not transparent: there are obscure ones like the ones in our world] (S 500). Nothing is pure: even the province of philosophers is not exempt from opacity, but this opacity can be conquered by an effort of the will: “nous pouvons toutefois par une vigoureuse contention de la volonté, nous rendre diafanes lors qu’il nous en prend envie” [by a vigorous exercise of our will, we can, however, become transparent when we feel like it] (S 501). The embodiment of knowledge and the spiritualization of matter constantly co-exist on Cyrano’s Sun, where opacity is in fact necessary and never renounced. According to Ross Chambers: “To the question: is imagination material or spiritual? Cyrano does not decide” (“L’Autre Monde ou le mythe” 42). I would rather say that Cyrano sees a constant double interaction of the body on the spirit and of the immaterial on the material, the purification of the spirit from the body co-existing with the embodiment of ideas.11
There is a contrast between the Sun and the Moon: in the Sun’s domain, there exists a hierarchy, and matter can be transparent and weightless: on the Moon, there is no hierarchy, and materiality of thought is transmitted through blood, flesh, and sperm. Cyrano has imagined not one, but two universes, different from each other and radically different from our perceptions of the earthly mode of being. That he needed not one but two visions indicates the fecundity and generosity of his imagination, and also the difficulty of stepping out of our usual habits of mind. As Maurice Laugaa says in his “Introduction” to Lune, Cyrano “tries to reverse the Christian principle of an order based on irreducible differences among various parts of creation, but at the same time he must allow for slippage between these differences, for an expansion of the text provided by the cosmic theories of his time” (24).12
At the center of both visions is a meditation on the relation between the body and knowledge, a body that is more consistent than the “corps humoral” [body made up of humors] of Montaigne, more unified than Descartes’ double vision of the extended body and the immaterial mind. Perhaps Cyrano’s is the most modern, if one thinks of modern conceptions of the human being as stepping away from the division between body and soul towards a view of human beings as holistic; the physical and the mental intertwine in still imperfectly understood ways.
5. The difficulty of becoming enlightened. In concluding, I will refer back to my title and its source in Cyrano’s emblematic sentence, “dont je ne pouvois accoucher” [to which I was unable to give birth], which suggests the difficulty not only of attaining enlightenment, but of expressing new visions of the body and of the universe. Bringing forth is, of course, what Cyrano does in these books; hence there is an aspect of self-referentiality which is layered on top of his philosophical visions he gives us. The knowing body brings forth a text that comments on its own coming into the world. This is done by an overt reference to his own work: in Lune, Socrates’ Demon says to the narrator that he esteems very much a book, which we will read in the future, after Lune, entitled Les Etats et Empires du Soleil, which he says is nothing less than “le ‘Grand Œuvre des Philosophes,’ qu’un des plus forts esprits du Soleil a composé” [the “Great Work of the Philosophers” written by one of the very best minds on the Sun] (L 413). Here Cyrano counts himself among the best philosophers, and a reference to these people can be taken as a self-reference. It is also one of the clearest indications that Cyrano is placing his work in the tradition of hermetism: “Grand Œuvre” was the name given in practical alchemy to the transmutation of metals into gold, and in mystical alchemy to the personal purification and spiritual knowledge gained by the hermetist.13
It is not surprising that philosophers, who represent hermetic initiation, occupy a special position in these books: they are either bodies transmitting knowledge through various solids and fluids (in Lune), or bodies of light floating into the Sun’s rays (in Soleil). Such self-references become self-glorifying and very gratifying to the narrator, who is happy to learn that philosophers’ souls dwell in such high places. But there are also indications that such enlightenment is difficult both to obtain and to sustain. In Soleil, there are threats to enlightenment, one of the most significant being the battle between the Beast of Cold and the Beast of Fire, a salamander. One would expect the Beast of Fire to win, in good alchemist tradition, for fire is the superior and basic force of transmutation of base metals into silver and gold. But the Beast of Fire is vanquished and “le cœur de la pauvre Salemandre, où tout le reste de son ardeur s’estoit concentrée, en se crévant, fit un éclat si épouvantable, que je ne sçay rien dans la Nature pour le comparer” [the poor salamander’s heart, where all its remaining strength had gathered, burst and in so doing made such a horrible noise that I can’t compare it to anything in nature] (S 491). Heat and Light are the losers here, and the magnitude of such a defeat is underlined by the narrator’s incapacity to find a suitable comparison: it is no less than the incapacity of a being to achieve enlightenment, the falling back into base, dark, and cold matter. This is a catastrophe of monumental proportions for the universe, yet it does not dampen the enthusiasm of Dyrcona as he becomes more and more enlightenened in body and in soul on the Sun. If we remember, however, the context of this event, another signification emerges: for the trees, feeling threatened by fire, had called upon the Beast of Cold to save their precious lives—these oaks, the descendants of Greek oaks, have inherited the gifts of prophecy, speech, and divination (S 478-479). Thus the defeat of the Beast of Fire, even on the Sun, perhaps especially there, is a good thing for these oaks and for the transmission of their knowledge to the narrator and hence to the human race—as the oak says to Dyrcona: “je croy parler, en vous parlant, à tout le Genre Humain” [when I speak with you, I believe that I am speaking to the whole human race] (479).14 The fragility of the transmission of accumulated knowledge is such that only the very sharpest ear can hear the murmur of the trees and their mysterious speech, but the very embodiment of learning also assures its transmission to future human beings.
Conclusion. Cyrano’s identity is multiple: as satirist, as polemicist, and as defender of libertinism, materialism, heliocentrism, and hermetism. Such an enterprise relies on the power of the imagination that can be fully expressed only in fiction. In the unique situation of the early seventeenth century, he straddled two principal worlds: that of the soon-to-be-outmoded late Renaissance hermetism, and that of the new mechanical, mathematical science. And like proponents of both those views, he fought the traditional Aristotelian view. J. S. Spink sums up the Cyranian vision as “a wider synthesis...between the panpsychism of Italians such as Campanella and the atomistic materialism of Lucretius as revised by Gassendi” (“Form” 150). Campanella is a late Renaissance figure rather than one belonging to modern science, though he was in touch with modern developments and was an admirer and defender of Galileo. For Cyrano, Campanella was an attractive figure still belonging to the “late Renaissance magical/astral view of the physical world” that contrasts with the new, “modern empirical/mathematical view” of Galileo (Headley 179). In short, through his choice of Campanella, and all the allusions to hermetic authors, Cyrano shows that he does not yet adhere to the thoroughly modern camp, for “to those with whom the future lay...to Mersenne, Descartes... Campanella meant nothing” (Yates 396). Cyrano also presents Descartes as the other great mentor on the Sun, and it was a volume of Descartes’ Physics that lands Dyrcona in prison at the beginning of Sun (S 432). Again, Cyrano is making two visions coexist, and even interact. Campanella praises Descartes and is happy to welcome him to the Sun; in reality, Descartes was quite contemptuous of Campanella. It is this inclusivity that marks Cyrano’s attitude as quite different from the other reactions to science prevalent in this unique period. He did not align himself exclusively with either of the anti-Aristotelian views, nor did he experience a sense of loss and anguish at the breaking apart of the old world—an anguish that appears in authors such as John Donne and Pascal, and which has been studied studied by Koyre and Nicolson.15
It is important not only to examine the details of Cyrano’s vision, but also to explore its multiple sources insofar as they indicate his adherence to both materialism and hermetism, the two main and opposing visions on which he drew. I believe that the answer lies not in identifying Cyrano as an adept of either view, but as a writer of literature. Erba says it well: “the fortunate encounter of Cyrano with magic is defined and clarified under the banner of literature” (66); that is, as Erba explains, Cyrano’s work represents a “personal reworking” situated in literature that seems be more a “work of ‘literature on literature’ than a deep excavation and in-depth exploration of the living substance of the hermetic materials themselves” (59; Erba’s emphasis). I believe that what Erba says about hermetism also holds true for Cyrano’s other sources of inspiration. Cyrano’s work is truly a work of fiction, of imagination based on scientific views—as Suvin, Le Guin, and Philmus all agree—but one reveling in absolute freedom, freedom to wonder. And it is only by considering him within this framework that no injustice is done to this writer’s complex sf work.16
Beyond Cyrano’s yoking together of wildly different visions, there is, however, as I have tried to show, a guiding thread: to put it simply, knowledge matters. I take this in two ways, stretching the syntax of that phrase: knowledge is important, and knowledge is embedded in matter, in the material body. First, knowledge is not mere curiosity, and even goes beyond being an intellectual quest (Philmus 131; Chambers “‘L’Autre Monde’ ou le mythe” 29), for it has an impact on conduct and human life and history. Secondly, Cyrano’s two views of the body—of a solid, material body, and an immaterial, translucent and crimson body—both stress self-knowledge and knowledge of the universe of which they are a part: they both are epistemological bodies. For Cyrano requires two books to challenge the traditional, Christian, Aristotelian concepts. In both visions, the division between body and soul, matter and spirit, is undermined in favor of other corporeal visions: a body of material atoms and a body of light. Both visions, though apparently divergent, meet in a common view that there are no divisive boundaries between knowledge and body. Cyrano’s works are an optimistic, syncretic enterprise focused on the material body, but one which also glorifies the imagination: although he suggested that our five bodily senses were inadequate tools for understanding the universe, he affirms the power of our imagination to overcome these limitations, to transcend both the body and received knowledge. At the heart of any new vision, he says, our bodies must be at the center: imagine a new body, he says, and you will be able to imagine new knowledge.
Appendix - Brief summary of Cyrano’s two novels.
Since these novels may not be familiar to many readers, I will summarize briefly their content In Les Estats et Empires de la Lune [The States and Empires of the Moon], his first novel, the unnamed narrator wants to visit the moon, to prove that it is an inhabited world. He devises a machine using many bottles filled with dew to lift him up, but he succeeds only in landing in New France (Canada), where he meets with the governor and discusses such topics as heliocentrism, the earth’s rotation, the plurality of worlds, etc. On the 24th of June, on the feast of “la Saint-Jean” (Saint-Jean-Baptiste, still celebrated in Québec), a bonfire lifts him in a better machine powered this time by rockets, taking him to an earthly Paradise, where he meets the prophets Elijah and Enoch. As the narrator is expelled from Paradise after an impious outburst, and as he plunges into the darkest night towards the Moon, he steals an apple from the tree of knowledge. Now on the Moon, he first meets Socrates’ Demon, “le Demon de Socrate” (L 377), and then is taken to the court, where he is thought to be a pet animal. Put on trial in order to determine his true nature, the narrator is first found to be a bird, then a man, and for this latter offense, he is condemned to make a public apology. He then goes to the home of the Demon’s host, and discourses with two university professors and the young son of the host on an extremely wide range of scientific, moral, and philosophical topics: the respect due to old people, the thinking and talking life of plants, the eternity of the universe, the role of chance, the burial practices of the lunar people, and praise of sexuality. With the son of the host, who remains un-named, he embarks on a series of increasingly bold refutations of many standard Christian beliefs: he refutes the immortality of the soul, the existence of miracles, the spiritual nature of the soul, the resurrection of the body, and finally the existence of God. Upon this last declaration of atheism, the devil himself appears to cart off the young son to hell, and the narrator decides to accompany him in order to regain earth on the devil’s way to the underworld, landing in Italy.
The second book, Les Estats et Empires du Soleil (The States and Empires of the Sun), picks up where the first left off: the narrator returns to France and is taken care of by two noblemen. The narrator is also named: Dyrcona (taken to be an anagram of Cyrano). His tales of his sojourn in the Moon have attracted enemies, but even more dangerous than his tales is Descartes’ Physics, discovered in his belongings. Thrown into prison in Toulouse, Dyrcona escapes, then is recaptured and thrown into a worse dungeon, from which he is liberated upon the noblemen’s orders. They decide that he be held in a tower. There Dyrcona constructs a complicated machine that enables him to be aspirated upwards and reach the vicinity of the Sun. Landing first on a solar macula or sun cloud, he encounters a small, naked man who, speaking in what he says is the perfectly clear, original language of the world, explains the history of the earth, and the three principal faculties of the soul. After a longer voyage of 22 months, Dyrcona finally arrives on the Sun, where he encounters several strange beings. In a dark region, he meets fantastic creatures: a golden tree, a talking nightingale, fruits that fall from the trees and transform themselves into little men, who then unite together to form one young man. After arriving in the kingdom of the birds, Dyrcona is made prisoner by the birds, who put him on trial for being human and condemn him to die by being eaten by flies; he is saved at the last moment by Cesar, his parrot: Dyrcona had set him free and he now repays the favor. In a forest, Dyrcona listens to talking oak trees who tell him stories of legendary people in love. Finally, arriving in an open field, Dyrcona witnesses the combat of the Beast of Fire against the Beast of Cold, and he meets the philosopher Campanella, who discusses with him such topics as the souls of philosophers, the three kinds of minds, the five rivers of the senses, and the philosophers’ various degrees of enlightenment. A man and woman burst onto the scene, the woman demanding justice against her husband for not making love to her frequently enough. The woman, originally from the kingdom of Truth, now prefers to reside in the kingdom of Lovers, and she explains her preference for the kingdom of Lovers. As Descartes arrives, the novel breaks off, presumably having been interrupted by Cyrano’s death.17
NOTES
A shorter version of this article was presented at the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference in April 1997.1. For a summary of these novels, please see the Appendix at the conclusion of this article. For the sake of brevity, I will refer to the first novel as Lune and the second one as Soleil, abbreviated as L and S (page references are to the Prévot edition). I furnish the original French version only for Cyrano, and translations for other materials. All the translations are my own.
2. The division between critics affirming his materialism and those who interpret his work as a mythic quest based on alchemy is well represented by Ross Chambers’ “‘L’Autre Monde’ ou le mythe du libertin” and the sharp rebuttal of that article by Madeleine Alcover in “Le mythe de M. Ross Chambers.” While defending Cyrano’s materialism, Alcover does, however, have recourse to a promethean myth in an article of her own, “Cyrano de Bergerac et le feu.” I find myself wanting to agree with both these readers, approving Chambers’ reference to the hermetic quest and keeping Alcover’s vision of materiality, but including it even in the most spiritual world.
3. This interpretation differs somewhat in emphasizing competition among several possible sciences, from Chambers’ suggestion that there was a “conflict between new certainties and ancient convictions” (“‘L’Autre Monde’ ou le mythe” 34). The only science that seemed ancient was that of Aristotle, and it was no longer persuasive for people such as Cyrano.
4. This statement represents my one disagreement with Joan DeJean’s analysis of Cyrano: she maintains that “libertine heroes are alienated from their bodies” and “view them as objects with an independent existence” (Libertine Strategies 143). Yet she too discusses the significance of the extraordinary passage of Dyrcona’s transparent body, which I will discuss later in this essay. It is precisely the body’s “independent existence” which enables it to be an epistemological body. In the light of recent studies of the body, and of homosexuality, the embodiment of Cyrano’s ideas seems evident and interesting; see Albert-Galtier’s suggestive article on homosexuality as one element of Cyrano’s liberation from various orthodoxies.
5. See Christian Barbe’s analysis on the dangers represented by subversion.
6. Chambers analyzes the problem of the intermixture between senses, imagination, and the cosmos, and notes that Cyrano’s position is that “human consciousness should grapple with phenomena which are alien to it,” in “‘Que diray-je de ce miroir fluide...’” (124). But Cyrano is not alienated from the world because his whole being, body and mind, participate in and are transformed by all phenomena.
7. Alcover has noted the homosexuality here, and Albert-Galtier gives an interpretation of this passage that emphasizes the homosexuality of the philosopher and his lover; I believe that other bodily functions are included, as well as heterosexual love, but I agree with him that “the lover’s body is above all the body of knowledge” (326).
8. The alchemists called themselves “philosophers” and their goal, the magic substance which would change baser materials to gold, the “philosopher’s stone” (Holmyard 15). Transmitting the philosopher’s spirit through his blood derives both from animist and materialist ideas.
9. Her statement makes it clear that she does this reluctantly: “And so we resort to the hermetic tradition to give meaning to the privilege of the Wise men” (Pensée philosophique 133). She does not consider Cyrano’s work to be defined by occult or alchemist sciences, though she grants that he may have derived some inspiration from some alchemical practices (Pensée philosophique 147).
10. A detail not discussed by these critics is the reference to formation by heating, for example, the formation of the earth by three successive cookings (“coction”) by the Sun, followed by the formation of man also by three cookings (S 449-450), and the formation of the perfect seed also by the same process (S 485).
11. Here I disagree with Erba, who talks of Dyrcona becoming pure spirit (57) as he rises (not to the stars, as Erba says, but to the Sun). There is never anything pure in Cyrano.
12. What Laugaa sees in Cyrano is extended to the entire cast of libertine writers by Joan DeJean in her Libertine Strategies, where she successfully refutes any attempt to enclose those writers in a simple category, basing her arguments on their deliberate attempts at escaping definition and identification.
13. Alcover also disputes the reference to “Estats et Empires du Soleil” as a reference to Cyrano’s own future work, seeing it rather as a reference to Campanella. But the words are exactly Cyrano’s words for his work, so it is a type of amusing “flash forward” that is entirely in keeping with Cyrano’s self-referentiality. She also disputes that the words “Grand Œuvre” are a title; she rejects the possibility of a hermetic reference, or of a reference to Campanella, but sees rather a possible reference to the work of Giordano Bruno. I believe that the words themselves, “grand œuvre,” even if uncapitalized in all sources, were a stock phrase that would immediately have been recognized as referred to the alchemists’ work.
14. Vledder sees the fight between the two beasts as having an alchemical meaning, symbolizing the fight between flame and air, and earth and water (61). But the salamander is defeated, which Gossiaux interprets as showing Cyrano’s “dismay and anxiety” (598)—too negative an interpretation, in my opinion.
15. I thank John Woodward, who drew my attention to Nicolson and to the quotation from Donne’s “First Anniversary”: “‘Tis all in peeces, all cohaerance gone” (l.214; in Nicolson 120).
16. Other critics who emphasize Cyrano’s “advocacy of freedom” (Harry 207) of the imagination, rather than his construction of a cosmological or philosophical system, are Chambers, Gauthier, and Sick, though Harry reproaches Cyrano for not having offered a “viable alternative” (208) and for wanting only “to deconstruct, to desystematize” (209). Cyrano is more positive and syncretic than destructive. As Sick says, Cyrano is interested in the sciences for the new spaces they can open up, rather than for the sciences’ contents themselves (68).
17. Gossiaux speculates that Cyrano had planned to write a third, concluding novel entitled “Histoire de l’Estincelle” [History of the Spark] mentioned in one of the original editions, which would have furnished “the key to Cyrano’s ontology” (595). This “spark” is very likely a reference to the alchemists’ belief that there is a spark of light entombed in the matter of our bodies which must be liberated and returned to the source, the sun. In this aspect the alchemists and the manicheists are on common ground, so to speak, in opposing matter and spirit, dark and light. Whether we would have had a Cyranian “ontology” remains unknowable, since Cyrano’s work was unfinished, remaining, tragically and ironically, forever “pregnant with a thousand possibilities.”
EDITIONS OF CYRANO’S WORKS
Bergerac, Cyrano de. Œuvres complètes. Ed. Jacques Prévot. Paris: Librairie Belin, 1977.─────. Histoire comique des Etat et Empire [sic] de la Lune et du Soleil. Eds. Claude Mettra et Jean Suyeux. Paris: Pauvert, 1962.
─────. Voyage dans la Lune (L’Autre Monde ou les Etats et Empires de la Lune). Ed. Maurice Laugaa. Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 1970.
─────. L’Autre Monde ou les Estats et Empires de la Lune. Ed. Madeleine Alcover. Paris: Société des Textes Français Modernes, 1996.
WORKS CITED AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
Albert-Galtier, Alexandre. “Derniers embrassements et consommation amoureuse: un aspect des amours masculines chez Cyrano.” Le corps au XVIIe siècle. Ed. Ronald W. Tobin. Tübingen: Biblio 17, 1995. 321-329.Alcover, Madeleine. “Critique textuelle, Commentaire Critique.” L’Autre Monde ou les Estats et Empires de la Lune. Paris: Société des Textes Français Modernes, 1996. xi-lxvii.
─────. Cyrano relu et corrigé (Lettres, Estats du Soleil, Fragments de Physique). Genève: Droz, 1990.
─────. “Cyrano de Bergerac et le feu: les complexes prométhéens de la science et du phallus.” Rice University Studies in French 63 (1977): 13-24.
─────. “Le mythe de M. Ross Chambers sur ‘Le mythe du libertin.’” Rice University Studies in French 63 (1977): 1-11
─────. La pensée philosophique et scientifique de Cyrano de Bergerac. Genève: Droz: 1970.
Barbe, Christian. “Cyrano: la mise à l’envers du vieil univers d’Aristote.” Actes des Journées Internationales d’Etude du Baroque 7 (1974): 49-70.
Calle-Gruber, Mireille. “La métaphore: une machine à voyager en utopie.” Cahiers de Littérature du XVIIe siècle 3 (1981): 45-62.
Chambers, Ross. “‘L’Autre Monde,’ ou le mythe du libertin.” Essays in French Literature 8 (1971): 29-46.
─────. “‘Que diray-je de ce miroir fluide...?’: Text and its double in a Letter by Cyrano.” Australian Journal of French Studies 14 (1977): 121-140.
Crombie, A. C. “Galileo’s Conception of Scientific Truth.” Literature and Science, 132-138.
DeJean, Joan. Libertine Strategies: Freedom and the Novel in Seventeenth-Century France. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1981.
─────. “Method and Madness in Cyrano de Bergerac’s Voyage dans la Lune.” French Forum 2 (1977): 224-237.
─────. “Seventeenth-Century Libertine Novels: Autobiographies romancées?” Esprit Créateur 19 (1979): 14-25.
Delpuech Pinhas, Rosy. “Les machines cyraniennes: de la parodie au fantasme.” Revue des Sciences Humaines 186-187 (1982-83): 67-74.
Erba, Luciano. “L’incidenza della magia nell’opera di Cyrano de Bergerac.” Contributi del Seminario di Filologia Moderna. Serie Francese. Vol. 1. Milano: Società editrice Vita e Pensiero, 1959. 1-74.
Gauthier, Patricia. “A propos de l’idée de fragmentation dans L’Autre monde de Cyrano de Bergerac.” Discontinuity and Fragmentation. French Literature Series, 21. Ed. Freeman G. Henry. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994. 45-53.
Gossiaux, Pol. “La conclusion de L’Autre Monde: Conjectures sur une oeuvre perdue de Cyrano de Bergerac, L’Histoire de l’Estincelle.” Revue des Langues vivantes/ Tijschrift voor Levende Talen 34 (1968): 461-479, 589-615.
Goux, Jean-Joseph. “Language, Money, Father, Phallus in Cyrano de Bergerac’s Utopia.” Representations 23 (1988): 105-117.
Harry, Patricia. “The Concept of Freedom in the Works of Cyrano de Bergerac.” Ouverture et Dialogue: Mélanges Offerts à Wolfgang Leiner. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1988. 207-218.
Harth, Erica. Cyrano de Bergerac and the Polemics of Modernity. NY: Columbia UP, 1970.
Headley, John M. Tommaso Campanella and the Transformation of the World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1997.
Hervier, Julien. “Cyrano de Bergerac et le voyage spatial: de la fantaisie à la science-fiction.” Proceedings of the Xth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association (1985): 436-442.
Holmyard, E. J. Alchemy. 1957. NY: Dover Publications, 1990.
Hutin, Serge. L’Alchimie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France (Que sais-je?), 1966.
Jameson, Fredric. “Progress Versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?” SFS 9 (1982): 147-158.
Koyre, Alexandre. From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. 1957. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1970.
Laugaa, Maurice. “Cyrano: Sound and Language.” Yale French Studies 49 (1973): 199-211.
─────. Introduction. Voyage dans la Lune. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1970. 15-24.
─────. “Lune, ou l’Autre.” Poétique 3 (1970): 282-296.
Le Guin, Ursula K. The Left Hand of Darkness. NY: Grosset and Dunlap, 1969.
Lerner, Michel-Pierre. Tommaso Campanella en France au XVIIe siècle. Napoli: Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici, 1995. Literature and Science: Proceedings of the Sixth Triennal Congress. Oxford: Blackwell, 1954.
MacPhail, Eric. “Cyrano’s Machines: The Marvelous and the Mundane in L’Autre Monde.” French Forum 18 (1993): 37-46.
Mason, Haydn. Cyrano de Bergerac, L’Autre Monde. London: Grant and Cutler, 1984.
Neefs, Jacques. “Cyrano: ‘Des Miracles des Rivières.’” Yale French Studies 49 (1973): 185-196.
Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. The Breaking of the Circle: Studies in the Effect of the “New Science” upon Seventeenth-Century Poetry. Rev. Ed. NY: Columbia UP, 1962.
Philmus, Robert. Into the Unknown: The Evolution of Science Fiction from Francis Godwin to H.G. Wells. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1970.
Pintard, René. Le libertinage érudit dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle. Paris: Boivin, 1943.
Prévot, Jacques. Cyrano de Bergerac romancier. Paris: Belin, 1977.
Puech, Henri-Charles. Sur le Manichéisme, et autres essais. Paris: Flammarion, 1979.
Sick, Franziska. “Cyrano de Bergerac: le monde dans la perspective de L’Autre Monde.” Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature 21.40 (1994): 65-80.
Spink, J.S. “Form and Structure: Cyrano de Bergerac’s Atomistic Conception of Metamorphosis.” Literature and Science, 144-150.
─────. French Free Thought from Gassendi to Voltaire. London: Athlone Press, 1960.
Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.
Van Baelen, Jacqueline. “Reality and Illusion in L’Autre Monde: The Narrative Voyage.” Yale French Studies 49 (1973): 178-184.
Van Vledder, W. H. Cyrano de Bergerac 1619-1655. Philosophie ésotérique. Etude de la structure et du symbolisme d’une oeuvre mystique (L’Autre Monde) du XVIIe siècle. Amsterdam: Holland Universiteits Press, 1976.
Weber, Henri. Introduction. L’Autre Monde. Paris: Editions Sociales, 1968. 7-35.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World. 1925. NY: Macmillan, n.d.
Yates, Frances A. Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. 1964. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991.
ABSTRACT
Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-1655) wrote imaginary voyages to the Moon and to the Sun, both often titled together L'Autre Monde. These fantastic voyages, filled with extremely diverse events and beings of various kinds, both human and non-human, enable the author to imagine non-traditional forms of society, physics, travel, language, sensory perception, and philosophy. Generally, Cyrano wishes to refute the traditional Christian, geocentric, and Aristotelian views of the universe, and in order to do so, he bases himself in two alternative sciences, or visions of the world, available to him in his day, the atomistic and the alchemical visions. Critics have generally tended to view Cyrano as either materialist or hermetic, but I consider him to be interested in both these systems of knowledge. The body is the particular entity where these two systems of knowledge meet and interact, for it is Cyrano’s view that the body is part of knowing—i.e., for him knowledge may be a matter of the spirit, but it is always embodied. Cyrano wants to imagine new ways of thinking about humanity and the universe: to this end, he uses reversals, an easy way to jolt and amuse the reader, but he also goes far beyond reversals to imagine, with great freedom, multiple possibilities for understanding the body, the mind, philosophy, and the universe. (SR)
Back to Home