SOURCE: “Cyrano's Machines: The Marvelous and the Mundane in L'Autre Monde,” in French Forum, Vol. 18, No. 1, January 1993, pp. 37-46.

[In the essay below, MacPhail analyzes Cyrano's rejection of “the marvellous and the verisimilar” in L'Autre Monde, arguing that the author saw them as literary conventions that restrict the imagination.]

In the conclusion to his Essay on epick poetry composed in English in 1727, Voltaire attributed the lack of an epic tradition in France to the skepticism of his countrymen toward mythical or supernatural elements in fiction. “It is almost impossible for us to venture on any Machinery,” he observed. “The ancient Gods are exploded out of the World. The present Religion cannot succeed them among us.”¹ One work which anticipates and encourages this sort of incredulity at the same time as it literally mass produces “machinery” is the novel L'Autre Monde ou Les Estats et Empires de la Lune (1657) by Cyrano de Bergerac. Through the motif of machinery, both literal and figurative, Cyrano's lunatic novel explodes all divinities out of all worlds while simultaneously contesting both the supernatural embellishments disdained by Voltaire and the vaunted “vraisemblance” that French Classical taste preferred to the “merveilleux.” The various contrivances by which Cyrano's characters travel to and from the moon are neither supernatural nor verisimilar but rather purely imaginary, suggesting in their fantastic flight the autonomy of literary truth from traditional notions of referentiality and authority. When he reworked his “Essay” in French in 1733, Voltaire reformulated the French distaste for machinery as an enlightened quest for truth: “On cherche le vrai en tout; on préfère l'histoire au roman.”² Eighty years earlier, Cyrano's cosmic philosophers had recognized the redundancy of this quest with their maxim, “touttes choses sont vrayes” (177).³ The paradox of literary truth, particularly as it informs the genre of the novel, is one of the most intricate mechanisms at work in L'Autre Monde.

“La machine,” as a literary device, was an object of much controversy among seventeenth-century legislators of narrative fiction. The term itself derives from the stage machinery used in ancient drama to produce the illusion known as “Deus ex machina.” In seventeenth-century literature the term ordinarily denotes the apparition of either pagan or Christian deities in tragedy or in epic, the novel being thought to distinguish itself in part by the absence of divine intervention. While most of the debates over epic machinery, especially the quarrel between Desmarets and Boileau, came later in the century than L'Autre Monde, Cyrano's contemporaries did discuss “la machine” in their literary criticism. A typical instance is the preface to La Pucelle (1656) where Chapelain invokes the tension between the marvelous and the verisimilar: “Et qu'on ne pense pas m'objecter, comme une chose considerable, que le concours du Ciel est une machine qui choque la vraisemblance et qui, en la choquant, détruit l'imitation.”⁴ This passage identifies one of the crucial dilemmas confronting the seventeenth-century French epic and one which goes a long way to explain the unpopularity of the genre among critics and the general public, namely the incompatibility of verisimilitude and epic machinery.⁵

A more curious and less conventional use of the term “machine” can be found in Guez de Balzac's Entretien 38, “Du stile burlesque,” which was composed around 1653. Balzac disparages burlesque humor as lifeless and unnatural: “cette Raillerie … anime une carcasse, pour obliger les gens à avoir de l'attention; c'est à dire elle use de machine, faute d'esprit.”⁶ Opposed to “esprit,” “machine” seems to signify an automatic style of writing dependent on convention and cliché, but at the same time it evokes the willfully implausible or unrealistic character of burlesque writing. In other words, Balzac recognizes in burlesque machinery a deliberate challenge to realism or verisimilitude, and this insight certainly applies to Cyrano's machines, which constantly draw our attention to the fictionality of the text.

Perhaps the most important treatment of the marvelous and the verisimilar among French critics from Cyrano's era is Chapelain's prefatory “Discours” to Giovambattista Marino's epic romance l'Adone (1623). This essentially Aristotelian treatise on poetics in the form of a dedicatory epistle is remarkable for its sheer audacity and incongruity, for never was there a poem more indifferent to the neo-Classical doctrine of verisimilitude than Marino's myth of Venus and Adonis. In fact, the Adone may well have been on Chapelain's mind when in the preface to his “Pucelle” he denounced the Italian romances for their unbridled imagination and excessively amorous intrigues. Nevertheless, in the “Discours,” Chapelain proposes to demonstrate the Adone's conformity to “les regles générales de l'épopée” including “la vraysemblance.”⁷ The logic of this demonstration is too torturous to admit of paraphrase but Chapelain does manage to establish, at least to his own satisfaction, the Adone's strict adherence to Aristotle's doctrine of poetic truth, expounded in chapter 9 of the Poetics and interpreted by Chapelain in a moral and allegorical sense.⁸ By expressing moral truths, Chapelain would have us believe, the story of Venus and Adonis deserves our “foy et creance.” This argument is itself quite incredible, for no one could suspend his disbelief in the story of the Adone, a work which, like the Metamorphoses from which it derives, solicits our recognition of the author's virtuosity rather than our faith in his veracity. Yet, despite the impertinence of Chapelain's argument to his subject, his preface has the merit of situating the question of fictional truth in relation to “foy,” a term which recurs often in the “Discours.” In effect, the reception of fiction, particularly marvelous or mythical narrative, depends on a sort of literary fideism, and it is just this fideism that Cyrano proposes to subvert in his otherworldly novel.

What is at stake in the process of reading implied by Chapelain's discussion of the Adone is individual freedom, the freedom of the reader to challenge the authority of the text. The epic solicits a fideistic response, an automatic adherence that reduces reading and the reader to a sort of mechanism. It is perhaps not inappropriate to recall Pascal's definition of religious belief as a “machine” or automatic response conditioned by habit.⁹ Cyrano resorts to machinery precisely to discredit fideism and to liberate narrative from its automatic reception. His flying machines are anti-mechanistic and thus, to evoke yet another connotation of “la machine,” anti-Cartesian.¹⁰

There are many ways to reach the moon in Cyrano's science fiction, some more efficient than others. The protagonist's first attempt involves a kind of belt consisting of “quantité de fioles pleines de rosée” (9) which enables him to rise up in the air under the power of solar attraction but only carries him as far as Canada. His second attempt involves a more complicated machine, which he declines to describe in any detail and which, when modified by rockets, launches the hero into space. Once aloft, he is able to continue his ascent due to the ox marrow which he had applied to his wounds from an earlier flight and which the rays of the moon eagerly drink in, drawing the narrator to his destination. In both cases, the fantastic flight depends neither on technological progress nor on divine aid but rather on universal natural forces (solar and lunar attraction) interpreted in accordance with poetic rather than scientific logic. By contrast, when the narrator arrives on the moon, he hears of the “industrieuse charette” (47) which transported the prophet Elie to the Earthly Paradise by rather laborious and prosaic means.

Elie's lunar ascent is a perfect example of Cyrano's irreverent, explosive use of machinery. The prophet's homemade “machine de fer” (48), propelled by a magnet continuously tossed forward by the passenger, is neither marvelous nor plausible but simply, mundanely ridiculous, a satire on both religious faith and literary representation. Cyrano's episode burlesques the biblical story of the prophet Elijah, who rode into heaven on a “chariot of fire and horses of fire” (2 Kings 2.11). In the secular version, he has to construct his own chariot and supply his own locomotive force following the blueprints revealed to him in a dream by “l'ange du Seigneur” (47). Moreover, the fiery appearance of Elie's chariot is strictly due to its reflection of the sun's rays (49). In sum, his lunar flight is a purely mundane procedure as he himself acknowledges: “Je ne vois point de merveille en cette avanture” (48). This explicit denial of the marvelous echoes Elie's earlier description of Enoch's ascent to the moon by means of two large vases attached to his underarms and containing sacrificial vapor “qui ne pouvoit que par miracle penetrer du metal” (42). In other words, it would have been a miracle if he had not made it to the moon. Such is Cyrano's irreverence toward biblical machinery and Christian credulity that Henri Lebret thought it prudent to remove the term “miracle” from his expurgated “editio princeps” of L'Autre Monde.

At the same time as he parodies biblical miracles, Cyrano also targets an opposite literary tendency, that of realism or verisimilitude.¹¹ Parodic realism might best describe the technique whereby Cyrano meticulously rationalizes and demystifies each detail of Elie's voyage without in any way enhancing the verisimilitude of the voyage itself. The illusion of reality is not illusory; no one is fooled. Despite the mechanistic precision of Elie's industrious chariot, his trip is less real, less true than the purely imaginary flight of Adam, the first of the lunar voyages that the prophet describes to the narrator in the Earthly Paradise. According to Elie's explanation, Adam escaped God's wrath by imagining himself in another world and arriving there. He reduced his machinery to the pure force of imagination, or as the text has it, he lightened his mass “par le feu de cet anthousiasme” (39), “anthousiasme” denoting in this case not divine inspiration but alienation from divinity. The image of fire, which plays such a prominent role in Cyrano's novels,¹² cannot help but recall the biblical chariot of fire, the archetypal literary machine. Cyrano proposes to liberate us from both the marvelous and the mundane with the fire of imagination.

In effect, L'Autre Monde lays bare the machinery of fiction, exposing the mechanism whereby the literary text solicits our belief. The credibility of fiction, by appealing to faith or probability, inhibits the imagination, which thrives only in the purely incredible narrative. Cyrano cultivates the type of novelistic art denounced by the anonymous author of an early eighteenth-century “Lettre sur les romans,” a letter which equates self-conscious and thus unconvincing fiction with obtrusive machinery:

L'auteur d'un Roman, qui y étale un art peu ou point enveloppé, ressemble au Machiniste d'un Opéra, qui dans le moment que nous croions voir des nuages, un enlèvement, ou une descente, nous découvriroit malicieusement quelques rouages, ou nous crieroit: “C'est une machine” …¹³

Like the machinist who cries, “c'est une machine,” Cyrano proclaims, “c'est une fiction,” in the best tradition of the comic novel exemplified by Cervantes and Sorel.¹⁴ In fact L'Autre Monde inscribes itself in this tradition by repeated allusions to Sorel's Histoire comique de Francion. When the narrator inquires of his guide, “le démon de Socrates,” why he pays an innkeeper in verse, the explanation that poetry is lunar currency provokes a reference to Sorel: “voilà justement la monnoye dont Sorel faict servir Hortensius dans Francion, je m'en souviens” (87). We should remember that Hortensius, as an eccentric poet who dreams up a fantastic adventure novel set on the moon (Francion XI), is a fictional precursor of Cyrano.

Moreover, in the episode immediately following the description of lunar currency, the narrator of L'Autre Monde encounters a Spanish space traveler modeled on the protagonist of Bishop Godwin's The Man in the Moone of 1638 (Un Homme dans la lune, trans. Jean Baudoin, 1648). The encounter with a fictional character on the moon certainly undermines the verisimilitude of the text while blurring the boundaries between fiction and the real world to which fiction purports to refer. In addition, Cyrano might be responding to Godwin's own pretension to realism based on the newly acknowledged possibility of an inhabited world on the moon.¹⁵ Of course you can find inhabitants on other planets, Cyrano concurs with Godwin, Bruno, Wilkins et al., but only if you imagine them there.

The self-reflexiveness or malicious uncovering of “rouages” reaches its apex when the “démon” offers the narrator some reading material to peruse in his leisure. Being of a didactic bent, the demon eschews light reading such as popular novels and offers instead profound philosophic fare imported from the sun, including one work entitled Les Estats et Empires du Soleil (176). That is to say, a character in Cyrano's novel shows the narrator the sequel to the novel he is narrating. Cervantes would have approved. However, the effect here is more disconcerting than comical, and some editors hesitate to identify the title with Cyrano's own work.¹⁶ Nevertheless, despite chronological objections to this identification, Cyrano in referring to his own work is merely conforming to a prominent tendency of the comic novel that Jean Rousset following Gérard Genette has labeled “interventionnisme” and that Mikhail Bakhtin characterizes as “the auto-criticism of discourse.”¹⁷ By naming within the narrative his own fiction and that of others, Cyrano insists on the fictional status of his text and resists the idea that literary discourse derives its value from the faithful reflection of external reality. Instead, the novel reflects itself, creating a play of illusion similar to what the narrator describes in the Earthly Paradise, where he sees a river that mirrors the heavens and alarms the animals on its banks:

Les animaux qui s'y venoient desalterer, plus raisonables que ceux de nostre monde, tesmoignoient estre surpris de voir qu'il faisoit grand jour sur l'orison, pendant qu'ilz regardoient le soleil aux antipodes, et n'osoient casi se pencher sur le bord, de crainte qu'ilz avoient de tomber au firmament.

(36)

Like the readers of Cyrano's narrative, the animals who gaze into the specular waters experience a sense of dizziness and distraction that derives from the confusion of heaven and earth, depth and altitude, interior and exterior.¹⁸ This sense can be defined, in contradistinction to the effect cultivated by nineteenth-century novels, as the unreality effect or “l'effet de l'irréel.”

In its self-reflexiveness, then, the demon's present to the narrator is not just a book but a machine, revealing its own mechanism. Therefore, we should not share the narrator's astonishment when he opens his new book, which he has not narrated yet, and discovers a literal machine:

A l'ouverture de la boëste, je trouvé dedans un je ne sçay quoy de metal casi tout semblable à nos horloges, plein d'un nombre infini de petits ressorts et de machines imperceptibles. C'est un livre à la verité, mais c'est un livre miraculeux qui n'a ny fueillets ny caracteres. …

(178)

This mechanical book is a curious conflation not only of fiction and reality, of mechanization and imagination but also of literal and metaphoric significance. Books are machines so Cyrano invents mechanical books, which of course appeal to some of his readers as prescient precursors of the tape player or record player. He literalizes the metaphor of “la machine” by imagining a book full of machinery, “un livre miraculeux,” or an implausible metallic text. We should not forget that the function of this particular book is to keep the narrator busy while his friend and guide constructs a machine to transport a lunar inhabitant to the earth to be converted to Christianity (175-76). Such intrepid faith is surely the least credible machine in the whole universe of L'Autre Monde.

The proliferation of machinery only intensifies as the story draws to its conclusion. In the absence of his friend, the narrator encounters some curious lunar characters, including a naked nobleman who delivers a message on behalf of the government requesting the narrator's help in constructing “une certaine machine” (187) which is supposed to draw the earth up to the moon. In effect, the lunar magistrates have commissioned a huge mechanical metaphor, a device for bringing together disparate, distant entities. The narrator has already anticipated this machine when at the outset of the story he affirms in paraphrase of Sorel's Hortensius, “que la lune est un monde comme celuy-cy, à qui le nostre sert de lune” (5). Such a statement, as Mireille Calle-Gruber has remarked, exemplifies the Aristotelian definition of metaphor as a figure that transports a name from one domain to another, in this case from one planet to another.¹⁹ Similarly, the machine designed to transport the earth to the moon realizes the function of metaphor but only by inverting the literal and the figurative. It is a metaphor for metaphor, referring us to the world of language not to the world outside of language.

Cyrano's last machine in Les Estats et Empires de la Lune is the “voicture” (208) that conveys the narrator back to earth, namely the Devil. Such a spectacularly implausible dénouement, a “Diabolus ex machina” as it were, thoroughly discredits the intrusion of the supernatural in fiction just as it interrupts and perpetuates a very curious conversation on miracles and the imagination. Before his diabolic departure, the narrator initiates a debate about the credibility of miracles when he makes an awkward attempt to compliment the son of his host: “‘C'est un aussi grand miracle, luy dis-je en l'abordant, de trouver un fort esprit comme le vostre enseveli de sommeil, que de voir du feu sans action” (194). The word “miracle” provokes the indignation of the irreverent interlocutor, who attributes all so-called miracles to natural forces, especially to “la force de l'imagination” (195), in keeping with a Renaissance tradition of rationalism and materialism.²⁰ We should note that the compliment which proved to be so insulting alleges inactive fire as an exemplary miracle. Since fire for Cyrano so frequently represents the imagination, the idea of “feu sans action” may be seen as opposing miracles to imaginative activity, suggesting that miracles extinguish the imagination. Cyrano discredits miracles precisely because they command our loyalty and adherence and threaten our intellectual independence, the precondition of imaginative enterprise. Cyrano's libertinism is an essentially literary or poetic vocation.²¹

One of the more provocative features of this final episode is the narrator's rhetorical inferiority to his atheist adversary, inferiority that can only be remedied by the miraculous intervention of the Devil. Like an inept precursor of Pascal, the narrator responds to his opponent's irreligious questioning with a premature version of the “argument du pari” but to no avail (204). He is forced to recognize his own discursive defeat: “je ne me sens pas asses fort pour vous respondre” (191), suggesting a failure of logical demonstration that parallels the failure of miraculous or supernatural demonstration. In short, the narrator's arguments are no more credible than the Devil's appearance “ex machina.” In Cyrano's libertine vision, incredulity triumphs not only over religious faith but also over rhetorical standards of believability or verisimilitude.

Throughout his novel, Cyrano relentlessly exposes the literary conventions that inhibit the imagination as they define the truth. One of the miraculous books that the demon presented to the narrator (before constructing a chariot to take a young woman to earth to learn the truth of Christianity) contained the marvelous maxim: “touttes choses sont vrayes” (177). There are as many truths as can be imagined. Falsehood derives from the constrictive force of verisimilitude or the coercive force of miracles, forces which purport to reveal or to resemble a unique truth, an objective reality to which literature must subordinate its creative impulses. To escape this coercion, this automation of literary representation, L'Autre Monde assembles and at times disassembles a vast array of machinery that keeps our imagination in perpetual motion.

Notes

1. Voltaire's Essay on epic poetry, ed. Florence White (New York: Phaeton Press, 1970) 150.

2. Voltaire, Œuvres complètes, ed. Louis Moland, 52 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1877) 8: 362.

3. All references are to L'Autre Monde ou Les Estats et Empires de la Lune, ed. Madeleine Alcover (Paris: Champion, 1977). The publication history of Cyrano's novel is a complex and polemical one marred by censorship. The first edition, prepared by Henri Lebret for the publisher Charles de Sercy, appeared in 1657 two years after Cyrano's death under the title Histoire comique par Monsieur de Cyrano Bergerac. Contenant Les Estats et Empires de la Lune. Lebret's edition omitted or emended several passages, including the conclusion, which were not restored until two seventeenth-century manuscript versions of the novel, the Paris and Munich versions, were rediscovered and published in the early twentieth century. Alcover, whose introduction explains the publication history of the text, adopts the Paris manuscript as the basis for her critical edition.

4. Chapelain, La Pucelle, ed. Emile de Molènes, 2 vols. (Paris: Champion, 1891) 1: liii.

5. Bernard Tocanne discusses this esthetic dilemma in his book L'Idée de la nature en France dans la seconde moitié du XVII^e siècle (Paris: Klincksieck, 1978) 313-15.

6. Guez de Balzac, Les Entretiens, ed. Bernard Beugnot, 2 vols. (Paris: Didier, 1972) 2: 499.

7. Marino, L'Adone, ed Giovanni Pozzi (Milan: Mondadori, 1976) 12, 22.

8. For this aspect of Chapelain's “Discours,” see Aron Kibédi-Varga, “La Vraisemblance: problèmes de terminologie, problèmes de poétique,” in Critique et création littéraires en France au XVII^e siècle (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1977) 325-32.

9. Pascal, Pensées, ed. Philippe Sellier (Paris: Mercure de France, 1976) pp. 41, 43, 338.

10. For Cyrano's role in the debate over Descartes's theory of animal automatism, see Leonora Rosenfield, From Beast-Machine to Man-Machine (New York: Octagon, 1968) 114-18. In more general terms, Christian Barbe contrasts Cyrano's “vitalisme” to Descartes's “mécanisme” in “Cyrano: la mise à l'envers du vieil univers d'Aristote,” Baroque 7 (1974) 49-70.

11. While these two terms are not synonymous nor even contemporary, they both refer to the effort of fiction to cultivate an illusion or impression of truth, which is an ambition that Cyrano repudiates.

12. See Joan DeJean, “Method and Madness in Cyrano de Bergerac's Voyage dans la lune,” French Forum 2 (1977) 224-37.

13. Cited in Réal Ouellet, “La Teoria del romanzo in Francia alla fine del XVIII secolo,” Paragone 25 (1974) 55.

14. See Joan DeJean, Libertine Strategies (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1981) 169-83.

15. For the question of extraterrestrial life and its pertinence to Godwin and his contemporaries, see Karl Guthke, The Last Frontier, trans. Helen Atkins (Ithaca: Cornel UP, 1990) 154-55.

16. Alcover prefers to interpret the title Les Estats et Empires du Soleil as an allusion to Campanella's Civitas Solis, instead of accepting it as a “mise en abyme” of Cyrano's own writing (Cyrano 176).

17. Rousset, Narcisse romancier (Paris: Corti, 1973) 82, borrowing from Genette Figures II (Paris: Seuil, 1969) 195-222. Bakhtin associates auto-critical discourse with what he calls “novels of the second line” in The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P, 1981) 412.

18. Jean Rousset examines the literary motif of the “miroir d'eau” in L'Intérieur et l'extérieur (Paris: Corti, 1968) where he refers to Cyrano's letter “Des miracles de rivière” but not to his novels.

19. Mireille Calle-Gruber, “La Métaphore: une machine à voyager en utopie,” Cahiers de Littérature du XVII^e Siècle 3 (1981) 45-62. This extremely insightful article includes a marvelous discussion of “les machines à voyager” (55-57), which however does not discuss the actual machines that Cyrano encounters on the moon.

20. For Cyrano's place in this tradition, see Henri Busson's introduction to his own translation of Pietro Pomponazzi's De incantationibus (Paris: Editions Rieder, 1930).

21. Of course, there is also a politics of imagination as well as a poetics, and it is by no means my intention to subordinate the former to the latter but rather to link both the ideological and the esthetic dimension of Cyrano's libertinism to the primordial value of imagination. The freedom of imagination, far from serving merely as a pretext for espousing atheism or materialism or any other controversial belief, must represent for Cyrano a fundamental civil and artistic liberty superior to any of these philosophical movements, which he treats as topics not truths. For a more thorough reading of Cyrano which emphasizes his ideological position, see Erica Harth, Cyrano de Bergerac and the Polemics of Modernity (New York: Columbia UP, 1970).