by Steven Moore
Written during the same decade as Hall’s utopia but not published until 1623, The City of the Sun (Civitas Solis) by the Italian philosopher Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639) is a dialogue between a knight of Malta and one of Columbus’s sailors, who describes an ideal city in Taprobana (Sumatra or Ceylon), a Catholic totalitarian state that reminds us that one person’s eutopia is another’s dystopia. Inspired by both Hall and Campanella (whose work circulated in manuscript), a Lutheran theologian named Johann Valentin Andreae (1586–1654) published Christianopolis in 1619, a kinder, gentler religious utopia than The City of the Sun. The author admits upfront “The structure of my Christianopolis has nothing artistic about it, but only simplicity.”150 In a more blatantly allegorical manner than most utopias, the narrator explains how, as a wanderer of the world, he boarded the ship Fantasy, set out on the Academic Ocean, and was blown off-course by “hurricanes of envy and false accusations” until he shipwrecked on the tiny island of Capharsalama, located near Hall’s southern lands. Examined for his worthiness and willingness to be born again, he is taken to the capital Christianopolis and begins to describe the customs of this predictably square-shaped city. It’s Squaresville, man! Everyone leads an idealized Christian life, a theologian’s daydream of what the world would look like if folks took his sermons to heart. At the end of the short novel, the visitor asks permission to return home to gather some friends to bring back to Christianopolis, allegorically implying it is to be found within.
In 1624, the English philosopher Francis Bacon (1561–1626) began writing a Latin utopia published posthumously (and in English) as New Atlantis (1627). A nameless narrator tells how his ship of 50 men, heading from Peru to China, was blown off course in the southern Pacific to the island of Bensalem, a Christian nation devoted to scientific inquiry. Bacon sprinkles his narrative with imaginative details, such as the Bensalem mode of greeting—raising the arms slightly to the side, like penguins—and that their brick is “of somewhat a bluer color than our brick.”151 Unlike Hall, Bacon dramatizes the visitors’ gradual introduction to Bensalemite customs, some explained by a Jew named Joabin, one of a small number of Jews-for-Jesus types. He tells the narrator Bensalem is the chastest nation on the Earth—“It is the virgin of the world” (173)—and that, like Ahmadinejad’s Iran, it has no homosexuals. (Bacon is suspected to have been gay.) After the secretive arrival of a spokesperson for Salomon’s House—which inspired England’s Royal Academy—the narrative turns into a lecture on Bensalem’s scientific researches, which is where Bacon abandoned the work. His surviving notes indicate the lecture would go on for some length, but not whether he would probe the uneasy coupling of conservative Christianity and scientific empiricism. There’s something fishy about the place, a secretive, suspiciously well-ordered country where informants like Joabin are sometimes “commanded away in haste” for unexplained reasons (175), and it’s interesting to speculate whether Bacon would have showed that religion and science are incompatible, or compatible only in some creepy Kafkaesque way.
Other scholars tinkered with other genres, one of them inadvertently inventing science fiction in the process. In 1609, the German astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) wrote a short narrative about a night when, thinking about magic and the moon, he fell asleep and dreamed he was reading a book written by an Icelander named Duracotus, son of a witch. As a lad, Duracotus studied astronomy under Tycho Brahe in Denmark (as Kepler had), and when he returned home to tell his mother about what he had learned, she takes him to a “daemon” who has visited the moon. At her command, the Icelandic spirit tells of his trips to what Moonlings call Levania. He occasionally takes a human with him, and describes what is now called g-force: “In every instance the take-off hits him as a severe shock, for he is hurled just as though he had been shot aloft by gunpowder to sail over mountains and seas. For this reason at the outset he must be lulled to sleep immediately with narcotics and opiates.”152 Unfortunately, nothing more is said of these drugged astronauts; instead the spirit describes lunar geography and what the heavens look like from the moon (the subject of a paper Kepler wrote in college in 1593). Of the moon’s inhabitants, he gives only Lovecraftian hints: monstrous size, rapid growth, short lifespan, amphibious, legs stronger than a camel’s, wingéd. “In general, the serpentine nature is predominant” (28). Shortly after, the dreamer awakes. The 1609 manuscript was carelessly circulated—resulting in Kepler’s mom being accused of witchcraft!—so Kepler returned to it in the 1620s and added over 200 explanatory notes and an appendix, all of which was published posthumously as The Dream (Somnium, 1634). It’s a “strange and bizarre” composition (as a friend of Galileo’s reported), a 90-page contraption welding occult sci-fi to lunar geography and astronomical data (including equations and diagrams). After initial rejection by the scientific community for its weirdness, The Dream came to be accepted as a valuable document in the history of astronomy, but it also plays a role in the history of science fiction.153
Another example of the somnia genre is Comus (1608) by the Dutch scholar Erycius Puteanus (Eerryk de Putte, aka Hendrik van der Putten, 1574–1646), an early example of the kind of fantasy novel in which a character undergoes a series of strange adventures until the clichéd kicker whereby he suddenly wakes to “find all this to be but a dream.”154 A wanderer in the dark woods encounters the Greek god of pleasure Comus, hermaphroditic and tipsy, who invites him to join the party back at his palace. Disgusted, the narrator prepares to leave, only to be whisked away to the palace, where he witnesses every sort of debauchery. He meets an old man named Tabutius, who had partied with Comus when younger, but now only watches and condemns. Don’t be deceived by what looks like a good time, he warns the narrator:
There is no love here, but dissimulation, no true friends, but lords and masters. Do you not behold their pleasant and jovial countenances? under those do they hide their envy and malice. If you be not cautious, their feigned courtesy will deceive you. Neither can you so much as admit of a benefit from them without hurt; Comus has banished candor and ingenuity, but he’s made dissimulation and deceit free citizens. They are courteous until they think they have obliged you; but then they assume the command, and if they have not a friend altogether conformable to their will, they begin to hate him. (45–46).
The middle third of the novel is dominated by Tabutius’s party-pooping discourses, which Puteanus’ translator took the liberty to break up with two embedded cautionary tales, one of an adulteress (76–99)—adapted, as Mish notes (39) from Decameron 7.8—and one about a romantic rivalry (140–63). Comus’s party, which has the same air of desperate hilarity that hangs over Trimalchios’s feast in Petronius’s Satyricon, comes to a messy end as two guys fight over a girl named Circe and the lights go out. Comus is a creative attempt to dramatize the old philosophical debate about the superiority of temperance over pleasure, a difficult task because the scenes of revelry—fueled by delicious food and wine, and attended by women with names like Riot, Luxury, Lasciviousness—are invariably more appealing than tedious lectures on the advantages of “severe virtue.” Puteanus enlivens the text with a number of poems, though in this regard he would be outdone when John Milton, after reading his novel, took up the theme for his masque Comus (1634).155
Nota bene some other Neo-Latin fictions to be briefly noted (because unavailable in translation): The Bavarian Jesuit Johann Bissel (1601–82) wrote two novels: Icaria (1637), a comic, autobiographical one set during the Thirty Years’ War, and Argonauticon Americanum (1647), an adventure novel set in South America, loosely based on an older Spanish travel memoir, and written in sensuous detail. As a Jesuit named Govea travels from the Canary Islands to Ecuador, he makes a horrific, Heart of Darkness trip north to Panama and then south along the coast to Peru that reduces him to an animal state. In his essay on the Argonauticon, Harold Hill says it is both “allegory and psychological novel” and presents a contrary view of America: “Here is no promised land, no new world of vast riches and exotic
wonder to justify the human sacrifice demanded by its conquest. America is seen as harsh and uncompromising reality, an arena in which men must solve the riddle of chaos before they can bring order to themselves” (662). Giovanni Vittorio Rossi (1577–1647), a friend of Barclay’s during his final days in Rome, wrote an allegorical novel (under the pseudonym Janus Nicius Erythraeus) called Eudemia (1645), a satire of 17th-century society in the manner of Euphormio’s Satyricon.156 Claude-Barthélemy Morisot (1592–1661), who published a sequel to Barclay’s Satyricon, also published a political allegory entitled Peruviana (1644) that sported with French politicians under Incan names.
An English Puritan named Samuel Gott (1613–71), a lawyer and Member of Parliament, attempted to steer all these genres—romance, allegory, utopia, dream—in a new direction in Nova Solyma (1648). This ambitious, 400-page novel is a dud, but an interesting one. It is set about 50 years into the future, when Jews who have acknowledged Jesus as the messiah have returned to Palestine and rebuilt the old Solyma (Jerusalem) into a utopia. (No mention is made of the displaced Palestinians.) As the novel opens, three young men arrive there in time for the annual Daughter of Zion parade, this year starring a beautiful Jewess who beams at them as she passes. We quickly learn that she is the sister of Joseph, one of the three arrivals; he had left to tour Europe with his tutor, but got no farther than Sicily, where he was robbed, then scraped by as a painter’s assistant until he was rescued by two students from Cambridge—stepbrothers Politian and Eugenius—who had run away from home to see the fabled Nova Solyma. Joseph is the son of a town elder named Jacob, at whose home the Englishmen stay for the next year. During that time, they both fall in love with Joseph’s sister, Anna, and nearly come to blows over her, but mostly they listen. And that’s the main flaw of the novel: in addition to listening to the convoluted tale of Joseph’s misadventures in Sicily, which is fine if derivative—part of it lifted, as its learned English translator points out, from a subplot in Montemayor’s Diana157—they and the reader must endure many lectures and Puritan sermons on a variety of topics: methods of education, filial duty, clothing, literature, “higher love,” marriage, the superiority of nature over art, dueling, “The Well-Regulated Mind,” money, and a heavy load of Puritan theology, all of which takes up nearly half of the novel. Some are delivered by the patriarch Jacob, some by local professors, but most by Joseph, a budding poet and theologian who sustains an attack of spiritual “ecstasy” early on and a “dark night of the soul” near the end. Joseph also treats us to many of the poems and hymns he has written.
These set-pieces stop the narrative in its tracks for lengthy periods of time, and are sometimes clumsily motivated; for example, after Joseph tells of the demonic possession of a sinner named Theophrastus, the author writes: “ ‘Now,’ said Eugenius, ‘why should we not hear a few remarks about the just punishment of sin which God has ordained, and which Theophrastus has illustrated by his frightful state’ ”? (4.7). I’ll tell you why, Eugene. It’s the novelist’s job to dramatize and aestheticize his themes—which in fact Gott does in parts—not to dump them on the page as long lectures. Gott’s conviction of the importance of filial duty is effectively dramatized in two ways: in the contrast between filial Joseph and the runaways from England (who have to be goaded to write home to tell their father where they are), and in the contrast in Joseph’s backstory between a princess named Philippina—a worldly, vain woman who falls in love with Joseph and defies her father to run after him, disguised as a young man, which turns messy when a 40-year-old widow hits on him/her, leading eventually to her suicide—and Joseph’s obedient sister Anna, who acquiesces without a word of protest to her father’s suggestion that she marry Politian. (Conveniently, she has a twin named Joanna, who is told to marry Eugenius.) With those two examples, only an author who mistrusts his material, or underestimates the reader’s intelligence, will feel the need to preface them by a formal lecture by Jacob on filial duty (1.2). The reader will get the point, and will also note that, aside from one sentence at the beginning, Anna and Joanna are utterly silent and passive throughout the novel, whereas Philippina is talkative, makes clever double entendres, and is daringly proactive.
The lectures on theology are likewise unnecessary, not to say irrelevant; even the translator, a conservative clergyman, interrupts the lecture on “The Origin and First Issue of the Created World” after a few pages to say, “These [ideas] are now so utterly out of date and out of all touch with our present knowledge, that it would be tedious to follow the lecturer right through to the end . . .” (4.3). The clean-living examples of Jacob and his family are enough to convey the advantages of the Puritan lifestyle, along with what appears to be the frugal, orderly life in Nova Solyma. (For a utopia, the author has little to say about its specific customs.)
But a fascinating set-piece near the middle of the novel suggests Gott wasn’t writing a novel for readers, but rather a tutorial for future novelists. During a visit to the local university, Joseph and the Englishmen listen to a professor describe the different colored pens he awards to his best writing students, based on genre.158 The best writer of plain, expository prose gets a pen made of iron; the best historian gets one of bronze; rhetoric: silver; poetry and drama: gold. Anyone else writing in 1648 would have stopped there, but the professor brings out one more.
This pen showed more variety than any of the others, both in shape and in the metals of which it was made. When he had sufficiently showed it to them, he said:
“This is for the most unfettered sort of literature we have; the ancients rarely exercised themselves in it, but of late it has been much praised. All styles of writing are permissible, and any subject may be included. It is akin to poetry, but written in prose with fragments of verse interwoven here and there.
“Many have lately written in this style specious tales of so-called love and honour, and by the interest and attraction of their plots have been the cause of many innocent young minds, whom the crude mention of vice or indecency would shock, becoming inclined to pride, luxury, intrigue, and such splendid sins of the world of pleasure. Wherefore in our republic all such books are put on the Index as the worst infection and plague that can be for the rising generation. . . .” (3.4)
And then, in a metafictional flourish probably inspired by the one in Argenis, the professor describes Samuel Gott’s attempt in Nova Solyma to discredit this trend—by having his romantic-adventure subplot about Philippina end not in marriage but in suicide, after being dragged through the mud of feminine immodesty, male homosexuality, mother/son incest, transvestism, and transgenerational lust—and then to convert the novel to Christian purposes:
“There are a few authors indeed who do not follow this bad fashion; one we have heard of who is trying, as doctors do, to extract an antidote from the poison, and to use this style of writing to make the world better rather than worse. . . . the author is not eager for notoriety, nor cares to cozen vain and foolish readers, but wishes to spread abroad solid, healthy, literary pabulum. . . . he simply presents an abundant succession of incidents and observations, which every reader, according to his power of comprehension, may dwell upon, or skip, or censure. . . .
“The argument of this book is the history of a life [Joseph’s] that is free, that has received a liberal education, and has been well and religiously brought up; it keeps within the limits of the humanly possible [like demonic possession?], and deals, as a rule, with the middle ranks of life, who are perhaps the best, and certainly not the least numerous. I would gladly extol it more, except that I should seem to be praising my own nation, for by a novel and daring fiction the scene of the tale is laid here in Nova Solyma and the author long ago described in his book, more as a prophet than as an historian, the life we lead in this present age. . . . But whether the work is fact or fiction is a minor point compared with the intention of the book—that is to say, the right ordering of a Christian’s life. (3.4)
I’ve quoted this passage at length because it i
s one of the earliest defenses of the novel, or rather, of the pedagogical potential of the novel. Just as his Jews come to embrace Christianity, Gott hopes future novelists will renounce profane fiction for more spiritual novels.159 In effect, Gott is theorizing the genre we now we call Christian fiction, those religiose novels that most booksellers shelve over by the bibles rather than with general fiction. That in itself is not admirable—for it demotes the novel from a work of art to a pedagogical tool, or propaganda—but one has to admire his recognition of the novel’s capacity (“the most unfettered sort of literature we have”) and of its future as the favorite literary genre of the middle classes. This is a real turning point in the cultural perception of the novel: a wrong turn in Gott’s case—his novel sank into oblivion, and “pabulum” is le mot juste for Christian fiction—but still, this ambitious attempt to repurpose the novel makes Nova Solyna not only a key Neo-Latin novel but a neglected voice in the 17th-century dialogue about the legitimacy of fiction.
There is one more reason an early modern novelist would have used Latin rather than his vulgar tongue: a snooping housemaid or curious constable would probably mistake a book entitled Satyra Sotadica de Arcanis Amoris et Veneris for a scholarly tome on some arcane topic. But the lucky Latinist would possess what one connoisseur has called “the greatest of the Neo-Latin erotica” (Legman, 396–97), Dialogues on the Arcana of Love and Venus (aka The Dialogues of Luisa Sigea, 1660?) by a French lawyer named Nicolas Chorier (1612–92). Written in dialogue form in emulation of Aretino’s Ragionamenti (name-checked near the end), this clever novel concerns the erotic education of women. The mother of 15-year-old bride Octavia has asked her married 18-year-old cousin Tullia to tell her what to expect on her wedding night, an opportunity the well-read and experienced Tullia jumps at because she has always had a crush on her little cousin. During the first two of the six dialogues, spent in bed, Tullia both lectures and demonstrates how couples have sex, laying emphasis on the link between knowledge and sexual fulfillment. Only uneducated, naïve women accept male notions of purity and virtue, and limit sex to procreation. Tullia chafes at (but doesn’t reject) the male perception that smart, well-educated women are promiscuous: “it is the role of a woman who is not foolish and whose heart throbs in her breast, to act and be acted upon,” she insists at the end of the second dialogue, adding later, “Every woman with a judicious mind should feel sure that she was born for her husband’s pleasure and that all other men were born for hers. The former you owe to your husband, the latter to yourself” (dialogue 5, my italics in both quotations). Tullia feels it is unfair that only men should have access to sexual knowledge (and to books like this one) and that men should be allowed to limit their wives’ sexual activity. (Chastity belts are a hot topic, and a lascivious priest flagellates married women to keep their sexual appetites in check, inadvertently inflaming them.) The two young women come together again two weeks after Octavia’s wedding; she not only dishes the details of her honeymoon but now agrees with Tullia that sexual activity makes a woman more intelligent: “The virile spear that opens our vulva also opens our reason concealed therein” (dialogue 5). Later that day they are joined by two studs for further spearing and sparring, and Tullia reiterates the importance of maintaining the appearance of honor and virtue, not from hypocrisy but from the recognition that those are the rules husbands expect women to play by in public; in private they’ll play by their own rules.