by Steven Moore
Thereafter, as in most utopian fiction, the narrator encounters one wonder after another, all of which provide occasions for Cyrano to satirize the lunatic customs of Earth. Drycona lands in a luxurious garden that he soon learns is the original Garden of Eden (the Tree of Life broke his fall); he’s told by groundskeeper Elijah that when Adam and Eve were evicted from Eden, they went to Earth. Like a blasphemous midrash, this section has fun with the stories in Genesis, and when Elijah explains that the tempting serpent became man’s intestines, Drycona jokes:
“Yes, indeed,” I said, interrupting him, “I have noticed how, as this serpent is always trying to escape from man’s body, you can see its head and neck emerging at the bottom of our bellies. Furthermore, God does not suffer man alone to be tormented by it: it was His will that it should rise up against woman to inject its poison into her and that the swelling should last for nine months after the bite. And the proof that I speak according to the word of the Lord is that He curses the serpent, saying that in vain will it cause women to stumble by hardening itself against her, for in the end she will bruise its head.” (38)
Elijah is not amused.
Later, Drycona is captured and made the moon queen’s pet—the lunarians are giants—and specifically as a mate for her other toy human, who turns out to be Domingo Gonzalez, the wee protagonist of Francis Godwin’s English novella The Man in the Moon (probed later in chapter 4), which was translated into French in 1648 and was Cyrano’s initial source of inspiration. (Accepting his role as mate to another man, Drycona drops the first of many hints that he is gay, as was his author; for Cyrano, an alternative world would tolerate alternative lifestyles.) From Godwin’s novella comes the most unusual feature of this novel: while commoners run about on all fours and communicate via full-body sign language, the upstanding aristocrats communicate via music—switching to instruments when their throats tire of singing—and instead of having proper names are designated by music phrases, like Wagnerian leitmotifs. Thus a rival king is called , a lady-in-waiting who takes an interest in Drycona answers to , and for one moonman we’re given both forms of his name: “the wicked , whose name in the common people’s jargon was a fillip of the finger on the right knee” (94). Specific rivers and streams are likewise notated musically (88).46
Throughout, Drycona has erudite discussions with a variety of beings, one of whom identifies himself as Socrates’ demon, on a variety of topics. Just as Scudéry’s novels replicate the better conversations in the salons of Paris, The Other World echoes the cutting-edge discussions among intellectuals of the time on religion, cosmology, physics, the status of women, moral relativism, environmentalism, philosophy, geology, animal rights, health care, parent-child relationships, genetics, euthanasia, sex—all with a freedom that wouldn’t have been allowed on Earth. Despite its Alice in Wonderland tone, The Other World provides a liberal education in mid-17th-century French thought.
Cyrano reserves his most radical material for the end of part 1; in a series of discussions with the well-educated son of one of his hosts, Drycona plays the Catholic straight man as the moon-libertine mounts increasingly blasphemous arguments against religious beliefs, provides a scientific origin of the universe, and advocates atheism. At that point, a black demon arrives to take the freethinker down to hell at Earth’s core; Drycona latches on for the ride, bails out over Italy, then makes his way back to France.
Part 2 is both more realistic and more fanciful. The first 25 pages read like something from Sorel’s Francion, which Drycona cites in part 1 (53). After Drycona returns to France, a friend encourages him to write and publish the story we’ve just read, which results in being hounded and imprisoned by the authorities as a sorcerer, all in the comic-realist style of Sorel. (Though played for laughs, this sequence dramatizes the very real persecution libertine writers risked at that time, and the reason Cyrano didn’t publish his novel; DeJean notes, “As late as 1662, Claude Le Petit was condemned to be strangled and then burned for the alleged libertine content of his works.”47) Near the end of part 2, Cyrano revives the literalization of love imagery from The Extravagant Shepherd. Like Scarron, Cyrano’s narrator is fond of sarcastic asides—stuck in a dank, rat-filled prison cell, he cracks, “I think all I need to be the complete Job was a wife and a potsherd” (123)—and like his crippled friend was an early combatant in the battle of the ancients and moderns. For all its philosophical discussions and visionary inventions (trailer homes, audiobooks with players and earphones, light bulbs), The Other World is a comic novel like those of Sorel and Scarron, even a kind of sci-fi picaresque, with far more adventures and capers than most talking-head utopian fictions. Given the popularity of Sorel’s Histoire comique de Francion, it’s not surprising that Cyrano’s first editor published part 1 as L’Histoire comique, ou Voyage dans la lune.
Drycona builds another, better spacecraft (involving mirrors and vacuum pressure) and escapes from prison; over the next 22 months he travels past the moon, Venus, and Mercury, to land on one of the sunspots, which Cyrano regards as satellites of the sun. A source of intense light rather than heat, the sun refines Drycona of his earthly dross and renders him diaphanous. He meets a solarian, who explains the lay of the land, then ventures out on his own. Here Cyrano’s language and imagination soar—“This land is so luminous that it resembles snowflakes on fire” (151)—as he encounters jeweled trees and talking pomegranates, all of which “disintegrated into little men that saw, felt, and walked and, as if to celebrate their birthday at the very moment of their birth, began to dance all around me” (154). They reassemble into a beautiful young man, who praises the power of the imagination, which Cyrano displays in spades. Drycona then falls afoul of some birds and is tried for crimes against avianity, but is rescued at the last minute by a parrot who he had freed back on Earth.48 Then he encounters some Greek-speaking trees that/who, like the birds, criticize humans like him for mistreating them under the arrogant assumption they have dominion over all the earth (see Gen. 1:26). Reveling in “the other world” of the imagination, Cyrano then tells an Ovidian fable about same-sex relationships, a homosexual origin myth that leads to examples of other unorthodox couplings. Learning that the sun is paradise for Earth’s greatest philosophers, Drycona meets Tommaso Campanella, author of the utopian dialogue The City of the Sun. Together they welcome the latest arrival, René Descartes (who died 11 February 1650); Descartes begins to speak when the manuscript breaks off.
About 30 pages longer than part 1, it is likely part 2 didn’t go on much longer, but who knows. This part is even louder in its celebration of liberty and the freedom of the imagination, even harsher in its condemnation of humankind. During Drycona’s trail by birds, they poop on man:
Briefly, it is a bald beast, a plucked bird, a chimera compounded of all kinds of creatures and which brings terror to all; man, I say, so stupid and so vain that he is convinced we were made only to serve him; man, whose mind is so perceptive, but who cannot tell sugar from arsenic, and will swallow hemlock, which his fine judgement tells him is parsley; man, who maintains that reasoning can only be based on the evidence of his senses, but who has the feeblest, dullest, and most faulty senses of all the creatures; man, in short, whom nature created out of pieces of everything, like a freak, but whom she inspired with the ambition to rule all other animals and exterminate them. (166)
An intriguing metafictional ploy that presumably would have been explained in the missing conclusion is the reference to a book Socrates’ demon gives Drycona before he leaves the moon, namely The States and Empires of the Sun—the full title of part 2.
Though incomplete, The Other World is a milestone in French fiction: it is France’s first major science-fiction novel, its first major philosophical novel (especially regarding libertinism before that term became equated with sexual predation), a radical call for the rights of women and animals (and even trees and vegetables), for liberty and imagination, for rational thought over religious dogma, all conveyed in lively prose th
at caroms from slapstick to scientific to psychedelic. It anticipates (if not directly inspired) Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Voltaire’s Micromegas, Sade’s libertine novels, and any number of later sci-fi fantasies, though it’s closer to those of Vonnegut than Verne. This is the Cyrano de Bergerac who should be famous, not the sentimental hero of stage and screen.49
Another overlooked milestone in French fiction is La Prétieuse, ou Le Mystère des ruelles (1656–58), a complicated, 800-page novel by Michel de Pure (1620–80) that unfortunately has not been translated into English.50 The title roughly translates “The Pretentious Woman, or The Mystery of the Salons,” though ruelle denotes a more exclusive, intimate gathering.51 Harth describes it as “a kind of Bildungsroman which records a protagonist’s journey through the world of the salons. . . . the male character Philonime, who is initiated into the feminine world of the ruelles by Agathonte, learns early that conversation reigns supreme in the salon” (35), as opposed to the male world of the academy, where writing reigns. Poor Philonime endures nearly 80 stories narrated by women, including stories within stories (within stories (within stories)), organized, Maher explains, into “more or less sixteen ‘chapters,’ each one of these being set off not only typographically but also spatio-temporally as an afternoon session hosted by one particular précieuse . . . which excludes twelve abstract narratives and thirteen instances where potential narrators evoke, but do not actually tell, a staggering total of 1,027 potential narratives,” and which includes “an embedded novel, ‘le Roman de la Pretieuse,’ in which many of the characters functioning in the embedding novel are depicted. These excerpts are read aloud in a ruelle in the presence of these very same characters” (129). This sounds like an astonishing feat of narrative architecture, one left open-ended at the end, for the concluding sentence is “there must not be any conclusion to this novel; as in France kings never die, the Prétieuse must not end” (trans. Jaouën, 124).
As de Pure exposes the private world of ruelles, he goes “about solving a problem that is fairly technical in nature,” as Jaouën explains: “how to break free from previous models, how to do away with the mythical setting of d’Urfé’s Astrée and the remote historical background of Scudéry’s Cyrus, how to write a ‘realistic’ novel without falling into burlesque (Scarron’s Roman comique, 1651–57), or satire (Cyrano’s États et empires de la lune, published posthumously in 1657)” (116). De Pure’s novel is both a critifiction—like the women in Segrais’s novel, les précieuses discuss gender issues in language and literature—and a metafiction, for after listening to the embedded novel La Prétieuse, they criticize it at length in a way that doubles as a critique of the larger novel that contains it. Several of the women express dissatisfaction with current fiction and want “something different,” as one of them says. “At stake in this debate is simply the future of the genre,” Jaouën insists. “How to break away from the heroic novel and its lovelorn characters without falling into the trivial account of everyday life? The novel is caught between an aristocratic ethos yearning for the epic adventures of exceptional heroes and a bourgeois appeal for a more realistic kind of narrative” (123). La Prétieuse certainly sounds like “something different,” and since a new critical edition was recently published in France, I’m hoping that an English translation will someday follow.
Though it’s probably not what the ladies had in mind, Abbé de Pure followed La Prétieuse with the first novel set in the future, Épigone, histoire du siècle futur (Epigone, Story of the Future Century, 1659).52 This is essentially a heroic romance in which Prince Epigone goes into exile to escape the civil war in his own country, accompanied by his fiancée and his mentor. After the usual storm at sea, they wind up in Clodovie and undergo the usual adventures. While previous heroic romanciers set their novels in ancient lands in the distant past, and often faced charges of inverisimilitude for taking liberties with known history and geography, de Pure solved that problem by setting his novel in the unknowable future. This also freed him to mix in some fantasy elements, such as a crystal translating device that allows Epigone to communicate with strangers, and the tribe of Mignones (coquettes) who occupy one headland. The latter are the butt of a cruel joke when Epigone’s mentor is told that possessed women are beheaded, but prior to that their craniums are opened and their brains sacrificed to evil spirits. When he asks “why it is necessary to behead the prisoner, since removing the brain is surely fatal, he is told that experience in the land of coquettes has amply demonstrated that brains are not necessary to live and live happily” (Alkon, 36). De Pure doesn’t envision any technological advances, and in fact Epigone is closer to other genres of the time (imaginary voyage, political allegory, utopian fiction) than to what “futuristic fiction” evokes; he seems to have been more interested in injecting new life into the dying heroic romance genre than in inventing a new one. Though labeled “Part 1,” Epigone was abandoned after 224 pages, and it would be more than 70 years before anyone else thought of setting a novel in the future.
There are two more comic novels to be savored before the French novel lost its sense of humor for a while. Both mock the moribund roman héroïque, for even though novelists had stopped writing them in the 1660s, there were plenty of readers still lapping them up, especially women. Our next two novelists set their satiric sights on those naïfs.
Clearly inspired by Scarron’s Roman comique, a writer named Antoine Furetière (1619–88) published in 1666 Le Roman bourgeois, translated five years as The City Romance.53 But the title needs to be rendered The Bourgeois Romance to identify the main target of Furetière’s satire: not city-dwellers but the social climbing, pretentious members of the middle class known as the bourgeoisie. As Thomas DiPiero puts it, Furetière mocks the “ironic appropriation of aristocratic values by characters who fail to understand the class they try so desperately to imitate” (169). Furetière’s related target is the aristocratic novels these booboisies take their cues from, which is where the real fun is: wryly exposing the worn-out devices of romantic fiction, this avant-garde antinovel looks back to The Extravagant Shepherd and forward to Tristram Shandy. Furetière’s third target of satire is the law (which the author practiced briefly when younger): the novel is thick with lawyers, advocates, law-clerks, litigants, and judges; there are no courtroom scenes, just the ludicrous mating calls of lawyers in love and pettifogging negotiations over contracts and wills, qualifying The Bourgeois Romance as one of the first legal novels, as well as a textbook example of critifiction. And finally there is money: everyone and everything has a price in Furetière’s city, and he shows us the price tags.
The novel is divided into two unequal, seemingly unrelated parts, a deliberate departure from the structural uniformity and narrative continuity of the heroic romances. (As for the relationship between the two parts, the flippant narrator says he’ll “leave the care of their connection to him that binds the book” [160].) The first and longer part tracks the quest for husbands by two bourgeois girls, a streetwise orphan named Lucrèce, who has earned a seedy dowry working in “the fogs on the River Loire,”54 and a sheltered girl named Javotte. Passing around the collection basket at church one day, where her prettiness attracts cash with overtones of prostitution, Javotte catches the eye of a foppish junior lawyer named Nicodème; he knows her lawyer father and begins to court her with high-flown phrases from Scudéry’s Cyrus and Clelia, which only baffles the simple girl. He soon proposes marriage, but the banns are challenged by his former flame Lucrèce—the opposite of her virtuous namesake in Clelia, the author notes—who has since then been knocked up, or given a “green gown” as the translator puts it (44), the result of some splendor in the grass with a young lord who then disappeared. While Nicodème tries to pay her off, Javotte’s father welcomes another suitor for his daughter, yet another lawyer named Jean Bedou, a middle-aged miser. How cheap is he? So cheap people said he put bread crumbs in his pocket with his money “to keep it from rusting, as knives seldom used are kept bright
in bran” (66). Javotte cares as little for him as for smooth-talking Nicodème, and is encouraged to start attending a Scudéresque salon, where she meets a fop named Pancrace, who sends her all five volumes of Astrea so that she can learn to play the game of love. Falling under its spell, she of course identifies with Astrea and sees Celadon in Pancrace (who bones up on d’Urfé’s novel to remember how to act); “Pancrace sent her other romances,” we’re informed, “which she read no less greedily night and day, and made so good use of her time that she quickly became one of the nimblest cacklers of the parish” (136). Javotte’s father, outraged by her pert refusal to sign the contract to marry Bedou (unlike earlier novelists, Furetière specifies the paperwork involved), sends her to a nunnery in the suburbs, where she meets Lucrèce, hiding there to deliver her illegitimate baby. After Pancrace helps Javotte escape so they can elope, the jilted Bedou, insisting “that he would never marry unless he lighted on a wife that came out of some strict nunnery” (156), winds up marrying the scheming Lucrèce.