SOURCE: “Method and Madness in Cyrano de Bergerac's Voyage dans la lune,” in French Forum, Vol. 2, No. 3, September 1977, pp. 224-37.

[In the essay below, DeJean explores the dialogic narrative structure of Les Etats et empires de la lune, which leaves unresolved the contradictions between the different philosophies the work examines.]

Few works of French literature have known fates as curious as that suffered by Cyrano de Bergerac's Voyage dans la lune. The original edition of 1657 was mutilated by the efforts of Cyrano's friend Le Bret to exempt the work from censure. As a result of his solicitous cutting, the unexpurgated text was lost for over 250 years. Even after the publication by Frédéric Lachèvre in 1921 of the first edition of the integral text from the Paris manuscript, recognition of the extent of Cyrano's intellectual daring was slow to come¹. Those critics who do examine the philosophical and scientific originality of the Voyage generally fail to take into consideration the problems posed by the form chosen by Cyrano to display new ideas. Rarely do studies attempt to link the work's narrative and philosophical complexity. Jacqueline Van Baelen studies the circular structure of the Voyage. René Démoris and Maurice Laugaa contribute the most thought-provoking treatments to date of the form of Cyrano's novel, especially of such questions as the use of the first person and of description². Yet none of them discuss an essential problem encountered in dealing with the structure of the Voyage, the dialogic nature of the narrative. Nor do they confront the issues raised by Cyrano's penchant for techniques which render a “linear” reading of the text impossible, such as fragmentation and paradox³. Unless such questions are considered, it is impossible to appreciate the work's true formal and ideological intricacy. This complexity is designed to outwit the censor far more efficiently than Le Bret's hasty snipping and is equalled by only the most impressive products of the Enlightenment's polemical rhetoric.

The narrative structure of the Voyage prefigures in many ways the development of French prose in the eighteenth century. To begin with, the work is narrated in the first person in a break with seventeenth-century tradition made by only the most daring of libertine writers before Cyrano⁴. More importantly, the Voyage begins the revival of a genre of great importance in the eighteenth century, the philosophical dialogue. It is, indeed, more truly dialogic than any of the works that were to follow in its wake. As Rudolf Hirzel concludes, the philosophical dialogue flourishes in times of political and social upheaval and its very form is a reflection of the clash of ideas that surrounds its creation⁵. The Voyage may be said to illustrate admirably Hirzel's thesis. Like other philosophical dialogues, its subject matter is intellectual investigation and the exploration of contrasting viewpoints. Cyrano pushes the genre to the limit, however, by leaving these investigations inconclusive, even contradictory, and by imparting to his reader a sense of the suppleness of the philosophical system upon which his work is based. The dialogue is necessitated by the philosophy it describes, rather than being simply used to “dress up” otherwise monologic subject matter, as in, for example, Fontenelle's Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes.

This subversive construct depends first of all on a variation of first-person narration, one of the most unusual illustrations of manipulation of the reader in early French fiction. Authors of first-person novels, at least in France, immediately sensed the potential for multi-layered perception and deception on the part of a narrator telling his/her own story. Sorel's Francion, Tristan's page and Marivaux's Marianne, to cite but a few of the earliest examples, all present different combinations of insight and self-deception as they recount their life stories from the vantage point of the “present.” In the case of Cyrano's narrator, the trickery becomes far more elusive. The Voyage is not a novel, not the story of a man's life, at least not in any traditional sense of those terms. The narrator's journeys take him from philosophical system to religious discussion to political debate, rather than from one life experience to another. More importantly, narrative development is almost entirely subverted by the juxtaposition of episodes of conversation in the Voyage—very few of these segments of dialogue contain elements of storytelling. No less striking is the lack of self-analyzing tendencies on the part of the narrator. He draws no conclusions from all he has seen and heard; he is apparently unmarked by his travels; there is no (evident) goal for his journey.

In the Voyage, the narrator changes horizontally rather than developing vertically. Instead of maintaining the immobility of characterization standard in the classical period, Cyrano chooses to place the responsibility for the narration in the hands of an intellectually unstable main character. The narrator's ideas about various phenomena are contrasted with those of a series of ten interlocutors in the dialogues which constitute the main body of the Voyage. His own point of view in these dialogues is shifting; the reader never knows on which side of a particular question the narrator will take a stand. At different moments in the text, he is even capable of defending contradictory positions on the same question. For example, he is forced to leave the Garden of Eden when he makes what Elie considers a profession of atheism: “Abominable, dit-il (Elie), en se reculant, tu as l'impudence de railler sur les choses saintes. … Va, impie, hors d'ici, va publier dans ce petit monde et dans l'autre, car tu es prédestiné à y retourner, la haine irréconciliable que Dieu porte aux athées”⁶.

The final “return trip” to “l'autre monde” predicted by Elie in this scene will take place only because of a complete about-face in religious matters on the part of the narrator. His last dialogue in the Voyage is with the young man referred to as “le fils de l'hôte.” In the course of their discussion, the latter argues for the mortality of the soul, against the resurrection of the dead and finally against the existence of God. The narrator, in this discussion at least, consistently defends the point of view of Catholic orthodoxy against the “opinions diaboliques” of the man he feels may be “l'Antéchrist dont il se parle tant dans notre monde” (p. 116). Through the combined use of innocence—often far blinder than that of any of the heroes of Voltaire's philosophical tales—irony and provocation, Cyrano creates the most complex anti-hero in early French fiction.

He does so in the service of a philosophical system for which no static hero could be a worthy spokesman. The dominant philosophical thought in seventeenth-century France attempts to crush opposing systems by concentrating on their alleged inconsistencies, in order to prove them wrong. Cyrano, on the other hand, has a more complex vision of polemical writing in which his goal is not so much to refute certain viewpoints, but rather to integrate a plurality of discourse into a text with no clearly dominating context. Cyrano has been attacked because of the multiplicity of opinions expressed in the Voyage⁷, but this is to miss completely the (anti-) logic of Cyrano's system. All paradoxes are intentional here; the acknowledgment of their existence is the foundation for Cyrano's philosophy of relativism⁸. He extends the philosophical dialogue's potential by multiplying the narrator's interlocutors until the sum total of positions expressed resembles a manual of philosophical trends of the mid-seventeenth century.

Cyrano's goal is to reduce no voice to silence, but rather to make each point of view react to those around it. Thus, every speaker is always attentive to the narrator's possible objections and vice versa. When the Spaniard encountered on the moon presents his ideas on the existence of a vacuum, for example, he constantly makes place in his own discourse for the interventions of an antagonist. Even in a passage in which the narrator remains silent, polemical prodding abounds, as his interlocutor, incapable of presenting his ideas in a monologic context, creates a progressively larger and more hostile audience for his discourse:

Je vois fort bien que vous me demandez pourquoi donc … Mais je réponds que cela n'arrive qu'à cause que … Mais, sans m'amuser à répondre à toutes leurs objections …

(p. 69)

The result of such a persistent back-and-forth movement is to create a type of spontaneity unusual in prose fiction, especially in a period dominated by the more conventional logic and development of third-person narration. Just as the narrator fails to develop and to draw conclusions about his experiences, so the subjects of discussion are left unresolved. In the Voyage, Cyrano is not concerned with taking a stand on a particular issue, but rather with defending a multiplicity of opinions on every issue.

If truth exists, it is multiple. The demon of Socrates, the character who after the narrator's expulsion from Paradise becomes the narrator's mouth-piece and takes over most of the responsibility for defending daring philosophical stands, praises above all others the philosophers of his “pays natal,” the sun. According to him a work called Le Grand Oeuvre des philosophes is the most remarkable achievement of “solar” philosophy because it proves that “toutes choses sont vraies, et déclare la façon d'unir physiquement les vérités de chaque contradictoire, comme par exemple que le blanc est noir et que le noir est blanc; qu'on peut être et n'être pas en même temps; qu'il peut y avoir une montagne sans vallée; que le néant est quleque chose, et que toutes les choses qui sont ne sont point” (p. 103). Such a philosophy based on the union of opposites does not lend itself to a monologic context.

It is significant that Cyrano is the only French thinker of the seventeenth century to use such an open-ended narrative structure. A philosophical system aiming at a more traditional distinction between true and false does not require a new form. Descartes accepts as an innate principle the idea that “il est impossible qu'une même chose soit et ne soit pas (en même temps)”⁹. For him, therefore, the decision to write his Discours in French instead of Latin represents a sufficient break with philosophical tradition¹⁰. He simply translates into another natural language the same message voiced by his predecessors. Follow my method and mine alone, and you will be able to organize, to schematize the entire universe. For Cyrano, however, the task is not so painless. His break with those who maintain the authority of “livres anciens” is more complete than that of Descartes, and his non-system defies mere “translation.” The problem with traditional philosophy, as Cyrano sees it, is not that it is wrong, but that it is not flexible enough to contain contradiction, all that is “other.” He replaces conventional philosophical language with a new one, a composite of the colloquial, the romanesque and most important of all, the dialogic.

Unlike Descartes, Cyrano has no method to teach. He refuses to adopt one point of view on an issue at the expense of all others. On only one question is Cyrano dogmatic: any attempt to censor freedom of belief is wrong. So for Descartes's rational method which leads to an infallible distinction between true and false, Cyrano substitutes an appeal to the lunatic disorder of the imagination. He does so to defend a value forgotten in the majority of philosophical systems of his day: intellectual freedom.

It is because his imagination is not free in the intellectual circle he frequents that the narrator sets out on his journey to the moon. The Voyage begins as he and four of his friends are returning home from a place near Paris. “La lune était dans son plein,” the opening phrase, sets the stage for the prefatory conversation reported by the narrator in indirect speech in which two of the friends give their definitions of the moon: “une lucarne du ciel par où l'on entrevoyait la gloire des bienheureux”; “la platine où Diane dresse les rabats d'Apollon” (p. 31). The company apparently finds this burlesquing of various religious systems quite entertaining, yet when the narrator himself in the first direct speech of the text offers a definition certainly no more ludicrous than those of his companions, he is greeted by the loudest outburst of laughter thus far:

Et moi, dis-je, qui souhaite mêler mes enthousiasmes aux vôtres, je crois sans m'amuser aux imaginations pointues dont vous chatouillez le temps pour le faire marcher plus vite, que la lune est un monde comme celui-ci, à qui le notre sert de lune.

(p. 31)

This theory, unlike the others, is presented for serious consideration—“sans m'amuser”—yet, even though the narrator goes on to explain the theories of Copernicus, Kepler and others, his audience only laughs louder and louder. The reader is left to wonder if indeed the fact that the narrator chooses to display his ideas in the same amusing manner as that used by his friends does not close their minds to the very possibility of serious consideration of his theory. How can something heard in a comic context be taken seriously? Thus, Cyrano inscribes the familiar problem of the histoire comique in the opening of his work. The narrator's companions turn to tired mythological systems for their jokes, and lack the imagination necessary to integrate his translation into a relativistic system. If the moon is an earth, and the earth is a moon, then their moonlight stroll is perhaps not a unique phenomenon. The narrator, like all men with the ability to conceive of alternate systems encountered in the Voyage, is mocked because of his intellectual daring.

From time to time in the course of the Voyage, certain individuals such as Jean Faust and Guy de la Brosse are praised because they too were at least ridiculed, if not condemned to a harsher fate, when they tried to present new and often seemingly absurd theories. One of the few moments when the narrative tone of the Voyage becomes serious and elevated is reserved for Tristan L'Hermite, who is described by the demon of Socrates in a eulogy which ends: “C'est le seul poète, le seul philosophe et le seul homme libre que vous ayez” (p. 57). There is even a remarkable episode which constitutes a careful parody of Galileo's trial and subsequent renunciation of his theory, in which the narrator is accused of heresy by the priests on the moon because “j'avais osé dire que la lune était un monde dont je venais, et que leur monde n'était qu'une lune” (p. 79). The demon of Socrates comes to his defense by explaining that “s'il est homme, quand même il ne serait pas venu de la lune, puisque tout homme est libre, ne lui est-il pas libre de s'imaginer ce qu'il voudra? Quoi! pouvez-vous le contraindre à n'avoir que vos visions? Vous le forcerez bien à dire qu'il croit que la lune n'est pas un monde, mais il ne le croira pas pourtant” (p. 80). The demon is able through his oration to persuade them to do away with the death penalty, but that is replaced by another punishment. Despite the demon's warnings against dogmatism, the narrator is obliged to cry at every crossroads of the city: “Peuple, je vous déclare que cette lune ici n'est pas une lune, mais un monde; et que ce monde de là-bas n'est pas un monde, mais une lune. Tel est ce que les Prêtres trouvent bon que vous croyiez” (p. 81).

The narrator's fellow prisoner on the moon, the Spaniard, explains how he traveled around the world and finally left it for the moon because “il n'avait pu trouver un seul pays où l'imagination même fut en liberté” (p. 66). The demon meets Tristan L'Hermite in England; he, too, is condemned to wander because of the boldness of his thinking. “Je rencontrai un homme, la honte de son pays” (p. 57). And the demon himself is the archetypal traveler/seeker for freedom. He is still referred to by the name of his first “master,” Socrates, thereby providing a link with Cyrano's most famous predecessor in the art of dialogic reasoning—and in the unhappy fates to which it leads. The demon describes in some detail his past; he has spent the centuries since Socrates' death traveling from country to country advising imaginative thinkers.

The narrator has in common with these seasoned rebels the fact that he, too, undertakes (more or less of his own free will) his voyages to escape persecution. The implications of these comparisons between the narrator and historical individuals are enormous. Indeed, if paradox may be called the “negative” structuring principle on which the Voyage is based, comparisons such as these constitute its “positive” unifying device. We have already seen that the Voyage lacks the causal development of either the Cartesian philosophical treatise or the novel. The reader cannot expect to be led by means of traditional logic to a clearly interpretable conclusion. Cyrano's text is saved from being merely a hopeless muddle of disparate fragments by the presence in it of chains of metaphorical situations: the narrator's position is like the demon's, and the demon's is like Tristan's and Tristan's is like the Spaniard's, whose situation is similar to the narrator's, etc. Meaning in the Voyage is not the result of the rationality of a story-line. In Cyrano's aesthetics of fragmentation certain situations and images become obsessional. In order to comprehend the work's significance it is necessary to replace the links omitted by ellipsis, and to connect the obsessive repetitions.

It is already daring for the narrator to be compared to historical individuals persecuted for their ideas, since some of these men, such as Galileo, were considered dangerous thinkers in Cyrano's day. In addition, Cyrano's parallelisms enter the realm of blasphemy when during the course of his conversation with Elie in the Garden of Paradise, the narrator establishes by means of explicit and implicit comparisons illustrious precedents for his flights to and from paradise. In the Garden of Eden, as Elie explains to him, “n'ont jamais entré que six personnes: Adam, Eve, Enoch, moi qui suis le vieil Elie, saint Jean l'Evangéliste, et vous” (p. 44). It is apparent that the narrator's enterprise and therefore those of all his predecessors in intellectual daring are being compared to certain key moments in Biblical history. Enoch reaches paradise through a most original use of “le feu du ciel”—one reminiscent of the narrator's use of vials of dew in his first attempt at interplanetary travel. As the fire is consuming one of his sacrificial victims, Enoch fills with the vapor rising from the sacrifice two vases which he attaches under his armpits, sure that he will get to paradise because of God's words: “L'odeur des sacrifices du juste est montée jusqu'à moi” (p. 45). In much the same way as the narrator flees Elie, so Adam escapes the vengeance of God by “le feu de (son) enthousiasme” (p. 44). And since Adam is known to “les idolâtres” under the name of Prometheus (p. 45), the network opens up to include a pre-Biblical past as well.

Prometheus, who “fut bien autrefois au ciel dérober du feu” (p. 32), is the central figure in the narrator's genealogy. The Voyage sketches various possibilities for literal and figurative interpretations of the Prometheus myth. On the moon, the sexual connotations of the primitive fire myths become explicit¹¹. Nobles may be recognized because they have the right to wear not a sword, but “la figure d'un membre viril.” The host's son explains to the scandalized narrator the superiority of this symbol which instead of honoring an instrument of destruction exalts “un membre sans qui nous serions au rang de ce qui n'est pas, le Prométhée de chaque animal” (p. 108). The idea of procreation is converted by other codes into different forms of creation which range from inspiration, to vision, to imaginative thinking, to literary creation. The fire symbolic of Prometheus is mentioned frequently in the Voyage: “le feu du ciel,” “l'ardeur du feu de la charité,” “le feu de l'enthousiasme,” the “fievres chaudes” of the narrator's visions of “l'autre monde” (p. 32)—“notre imagination, plus chaude que les autres facultés de l'âme” (p. 100). All forms of liberating desire are equated, and the quest for fire becomes the unifying bond among those who make real and imaginary voyages in Cyrano's work. Those who give free rein to the powers of the imagination, like Enoch, John the Evangelist, Galileo and even the narrator, travel under the sign of fire.

The explorations of these new Prometheuses, especially those of the narrator, often seem no more than parodies of traditional quests for knowledge. The end results are sometimes nil. In his first attempt to get to the moon, the narrator simply falls back down to earth. Or as the moment of discovery arrives, it may be somewhat less glorious than might be expected. When the narrator finally reaches what he later learns is the Garden of Eden, “je me trouvai sous un arbre embarrassé avec trois ou quatre branches assez grosses que j'avais éclatées par ma chute, et le visage mouillé d'une pomme qui s'était écachée contre” (p. 41).

Furthermore, the nature of the Promethean journey is completely different from more rational undertakings. When Achab decides to leap from the ark and to swim towards what she, against all reasonable instincts, thinks must be the moon, Noah calls after her in order to “l'appeler cent fois lunatique, protester qu'elle serait cause qu'un jour on reprocherait à toutes les femmes d'avoir dans la tête un quartier de la lune” (p. 46). To travel under the sign of fire is to wander at random. Rather than forging on straight ahead simply because that is the most logical way of arriving somewhere, these travelers zigzag with the whims of their imaginations. Prosaic means of locomotion are replaced by methods more suited to the nature of the journey. Imaginative and imaginary voyages are accomplished by the power of different types of “vapors”—dew, smoke, odors—all of which represent the most powerful vapors with which the Voyage is concerned, those of the imagination. Only men who respect no constraints, who are slaves to no system have the ability to liberate the minds of their fellow men.

The sign of fire is also the sign of those most unscientific of all sciences, the occult¹². Many of the travelers praised by the demon of Socrates are among the most famous practitioners of the black arts in recent history: Corneille Agrippa de Nettesheim, the great theoretician of occult philosophy, Jean Trithème, Jérôme Cardan, and, of course, Jean Faust. Thus, one of the strangest groups of intellectual exiles in European history is added to the list of wanderers whose travels serve as a model for the narrator's in the Voyage. For Cyrano, the occultist is no more daring than a Galileo or an Elie; he simply tries to extend other horizons of knowledge.

The Voyage is not unique in the age of classicism in its fascination with the black arts. The heroes of the majority of the prose works in the tradition of first-person narration in the seventeeth century encounter individuals associated with the occult. Tristan's page spends one of the most important moments of his apprenticeship in the company of a magician¹³. Théophile's narrator exposes those who feign possession. Sorel goes one step further, as Francion, because of his intellectual daring, is frequently accused of being a sorcerer and even claims to be one in his attempt to cuckold Valentin in the novel's opening scene. One of the most important unifying features of these so-called “comic” novels may thus be the fact that they dare to confront a major contemporary issue, one about which dominant literary tradition is more prudently silent.

The treatment of the occult in the Voyage is, however, far more developed than the libertine nod of recognition it receives in other first-person novels. In the first place, the sorcerers who appear here are no caricatures set up as easily identifiable targets for ridicule, like the pedant or the bourgeois. Cyrano reserves such facile treatment for satirical pieces like the “Lettre pour les sorciers.” Instead, the sorcerers mentioned in the Voyage are historical individuals, one of whom, Guy de la Brosse, was actually tried and burned because of his alleged dabblings—a sudden intrusion of reality into fiction. Far from treating the occult as a joke, the Voyage is brutally frank about the consequences of such practices.

The occultist is like the other travelers discussed in the Voyage in that he explores uncharted realms. Yet the knowledge he hopes to attain would set him apart in a fearful way. He is the archetypal alien who, because he tries to transform, to work magic, must be persecuted. All that is “magic” cannot be understood or explained, so the magician is usually considered mad. All who try to broaden the frontiers of knowledge by allowing their imaginations total liberty must run the risk of being labeled insane, like Achab. To choose the moon as the destination of his narrator's voyage is to inscribe the notion of insanity in the text—such accusations as “lunatique” (pp. 46 and 64) and “avoir dans la tête un quartier de la lune” (p. 46) are always directed at those whose intellectual audacity leads them to the previously unknown.

It is in conjunction with the accusations of insanity that the uniqueness of the narrator's situation may best be appreciated. He, like his Biblical and historical predecessors, travels by unusual means to unusual places and has dealings with different kinds of supernatural powers. Unlike all but one of them, however, he deflects his imagination's desires into a form that is immediately tangible. Tristan L'Hermite receives special praise in the Voyage because he, like the narrator, is a creator of books. Although the narrator of the Voyage makes no reference to either the actual composition of his text or to his own status as a man of letters, he at least classifies himself as a cultured individual and a reader of novels. He mentions Tristan; he makes a joke about Sorel's famous pedant Hortensius and his use of poems as money in Francion (p. 64). At the end of the Lebret edition of Cyrano's text, the narrator begins to write the story of his travels immediately after his return to earth, working on it during his trip home to France from Italy and completing it in Marseilles¹⁴. In the unexpurgated text, it is not until the beginning of Les Etats et Empires du soleil that the narrator is identified as Dyrcona, the man who under the instigation of his friend Monsieur de Colignac, composes the story of his adventures under the title Les Etats et Empires de la lune.

That the narrator's adventures in the Voyage are mentioned in its sequel, Les Etats et Empires du soleil, is not at all surprising. But when the story of his subsequent travels to the sun is referred to while he is still on the moon, the effect is more disconcerting. In the Voyage, the host's son gives the narrator for his entertainment a copy of Les Etats et Empires du soleil without adding any information about the work's author. Such a mingling of reality and fiction is actually an anachronistic “in joke”—Cyrano is addressing himself to the reader who knows that he is the author of this continuation of the Voyage. The mixture of fact and fiction is characteristic of much philosophical literature and also of the seventeenth-century comic novel narrated in the third person. Speaking of Scarron, Jean Rousset has called such interventions “fenêtres indûment ouvertes sur le dehors”¹⁵. Since the outside onto which this window opens is the identity of the author not only of Les Etats et Empires du soleil but also of the Voyage, this problem is doubly complex—not only the libertine hero as writer, but also the libertine writer as hero¹⁶.

The narrator's adventures lead to a book and to the great Rabelaisian metaphor of “la Dive Bouteille.” The book does not equal the bottle in this case, and the vapors that rise from it continue the process of fermentation. For the creator of language, there can exist no barriers, no limitation of his powers. “Prométhée fut bien autrefois au ciel dérober du feu.” The daring of this intoxicating book is immediately apparent; both its logic and its themes could easily be called mad, especially by its contemporary public. Cyrano complicates this problem by suggesting the identification between the narrator and himself, thus introducing his controversial persona into his text. According to all accounts, Cyrano in real life created about himself a legend worthy of the hero of a novel. He became in part a creation of words. He treated himself and was treated by his contemporaries as a fictional character. The legends that surround his name (or names, since he adored combining the real elements of his name with imaginary ones in order to vary his signature and/or his persona—de Bergerac Cyrano, Hercule de Bergerac, etc.) began long before Edmond Rostand. For many, such conduct was not a rejection of conformity, but madness. “Je crois que, quand il fit son Voyage dans la lune il en avait déjà le premier quartier dans la tête,” said Ménage¹⁷.

For Ménage and others like him, the problem of the Voyage can be dismissed if it is accepted as the mad book of a madman. In this way, the audacity of the ideas it advocates can be avoided. Cyrano imparts this same liberating cloak of “mad” behavior to his narrator. He thus adds one more example to a class of characters familiar to readers of seventeenth-century French fiction—Collinet in Francion and the “extravagant” Gascon, like the narrator, are able to take liberties with those around them because they are believed to be mad.

In the case of the narrator of the Voyage, to be believed mad is to gain a cover and the freedom to pursue his explorations. Yet, at the same time, this freedom also brings on another kind of “madness.” How is he to cope with the disappearance of the intellectual barriers that limited the scope of previous investigations? The questioning released by the “madman's” freedom continues in ever-widening, vertiginous circles. The major unifying theme in all of Cyrano's works is that the supernatural depends for its existence on ignorance. Once man has the freedom necessary to ask questions, the entire universe is explicable. This is the basic tenet of “solar” philosophy—everything is possible, and there is no barrier between the true and the non-true—“toutes choses sont vraies” (p. 103). On the moon, the figurative becomes literal: “vingt ou trente alouettes churent à nos pieds toutes cuites. Voilà, m'imaginais-je aussitôt, ce qu'on dit par proverbe en notre monde d'un pays où les alouettes tombent toutes rôties! sans doute quelqu'un était revenu d'ici” (p. 64). Once the distinction between metaphor and reality disappears, everything that is said is true—if not in this world, in another.

Yet when the darkness of the unknown or the misunderstood is abolished, the comfortable belief in an anthropocentric universe disappears as well. And with that crumbles the foundation of humanism and all order(s) used to organize the forces of the universe. Scientific knowledge without the existence of the supernatural leads to a world with no intellectual security. Intellectual progess is thus seen as simultaneously thrilling and unsettling. By the time the drawbacks of unlimited knowledge have been realized, however, it is no longer possible to return to a world dominated by ignorance. The only alternative to the explorations set off by endless questioning is somehow to convert the energy required for the explanation of nature into a (comm)union with it. At the very beginning of the narrator's adventures on the moon, the reader stumbles upon a parenthesis which differs in tone and in form from the rest of the text: the long description of the “Paradis terrestre” (pp. 41-43).

In a text as bare of obvious rhetoric as the Voyage, this elaborate figure seems out of place. It is reminiscent of Cyrano's public letters, such as those about the four seasons, which with their carefully codified elegance are a far cry from the seventeenth-century comic tradition. The passage seems furthermore contrary in intention to the rest of the Voyage. It is the only segment in Cyrano's text in which the monologic manages to drown out the dialogic. And in a work devoted, if not to causal development, at least to unfolding narrative elements through repetition and addition, it represents one of those moments of stasis that challenges the flow of the narration, all the more remarkable because it stands alone in the text, rather than forming one link in a chain of ornamental descriptions. Static moments occur frequently in the seventeenth-century novel. Elsewhere, however, such passages are likely to consist of, to give but a few examples, portraits (Clélie), catalogues (Furetière) or the narrator's interventions (Scarron). Cyrano's carefully sculptured digression seems a more likely candidate for Scudéry's Ibrahim.

Precisely because it is unique, in this text and in its tradition as well, this description cannot be lightly dismissed. It is, in the paradoxical way of the Voyage, at the same time a utopia and an anti-utopia. A utopia, because it represents an idealized alternative creation. An anti-utopia, because it is based on a reversal of the harmony and symmetry characteristic of utopian description from More to Rabelais. There is no room for classical calm and organized nature in this Garden of Eden. Nature is instead completely untamed by man, luxurious in its freedom. Such a rejection of convention is necessary for the creation of a libertine utopia. For the philosopher shaken by a revolutionary vision of the universe which stresses a new concept of “natural” order, one possible escape is through a Dionysian union with the forces of nature. Thus, the description of the “Paradis terrestre” is structured around a glorification of the senses and the sources of gratification they find there.

It is interesting, however, that unlike its corresponding passage from Rabelais, the abbey of Thélème episode, Cyrano's alternative creation is placed at the beginning of his text. The narrator is evicted from the earthly paradise, never expresses any regret for it, and never attempts to find his way back to it. His reasons for never attempting to regain paradise are not made clear. Unlike Candide, he has no Cunégonde to inspire him to continue his journey. The only reward awaiting him on his return to earth is to be chased by all the dogs of the city “hurlant de plus épouvantable furie, que s'ils eussent fait l'anniversaire de leur premier Adam” (p. 117), since he smells of the moon—a far cry from Voltaire's peaceful garden-utopia of moderation.

Cyrano's elaborate descriptive passage would seem no more than an unjustified ornament in a text dominated by the necessity of choice. But in the Voyage, as we have seen, no such elimination of alternative solutions is necessary. If solar philosophy allows for a state of simultaneous being and non-being (“qu'on peut être et n'être pas en même temps”), then it must also have room for the combination of opposites set up in the Voyage, knowledge and union. The narrator's journey cannot end with his return to earth; his philosophical dilemma projects him automatically to the second volume of L'Autre monde,Les Etats et Empires du soleil. The true test of the aesthetics of fire cannot be made in the cold rays of the moon, so the narrator will inevitably be drawn to the world that is all fire and light: “Il est du sens commun de croire que le soleil a pris place au centre de l'univers, puisque tous les corps qui sont dans la nature ont besoin de ce feu radical qui habite au cœur du royaume pour être en état de satisfaire promptement à leurs nécessités” (p. 35). The narrator who seeks to unite the (apparently) contradictory ways of living in the new intellectual world which he describes in the Voyage could be seen as the next Prometheus for whom the Spaniard is searching on the moon: “Il nous manque un Prométhée pour faire cet extrait” (p. 73). The ultimate purpose of the Voyage may thus be to elucidate his goal—the reconciliation of “être” and “connaître.”

It may even have been that Le Bret sensed, if only vaguely, the true subversiveness of his friend's “histoire comique.” This could explain the inconsistencies of his expurgating described at the beginning of this study. The Voyage's principal philosophical “danger” is not in its religious libertinism, but rather in the totally unorthodox logic it proposes. It is no accident that the narrator's mentor and Cyrano's main porte-parole in the text is called the demon of Socrates. Like Socrates, Cyrano advocates a type of relativistic reasoning characterized by its opposition to the official monologism which claims to possess ready-made truth. In the Promethean logic of the Voyage, narrative is fragmented, causality is eliminated and opposites are reconciled. The reader accustomed to more traditional logic and structures has always been ill-equipped to deal with its apparent anarchy.

Perhaps Cyrano's most daring contribution in the Voyage is the insight he provides into the nature and the various manifestations of the “other logic” he proclaims. The principles upon which Cyrano's narrative is founded are also those that govern other phenomena which have no place in a monologic system, such as magic, madness and dream. The reader of the Voyage must be prepared to eliminate the traditional narrative aids of development and conclusiveness, and to replace them with a search for obsessive patterns of repetition in which such Freudian concepts developed for dream analysis as condensation and displacement are more relevant. Cyrano's Voyage dans la lune does more than adopt the form of a philosophical dialogue; it is, like dream, innately dialogic.

Notes

1. The best studies of Cyrano's uncompromising fight against all forms of unjust restraint and of his contribution to seventeenth-century philosophical modernity are Howard Harvey's “Cyrano de Bergerac and the Question of Human Liberties,” Symposium, 4 (1950), 120-30; Maurice Blanchot's “Cyrano de Bergerac,” in De Rutebeuf à Descartes, Vol. I of Tableau de la littérature française (Paris: Gallimard, 1962); and Erica Harth's Cyrano de Bergerac and the Polemics of Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970).

2. Jacqueline Van Baelen, “Reality and Illusion in L'Autre Monde: the Narrative Voyage,” Yale French Studies, No. 49 (1973), pp. 178-84; René Démoris, Le Roman à la première personne (Paris: Colin, 1975), pp. 45-56; Maurice Laugaa, preface to his edition of the Voyage (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1970).

3. Jacques Neefs makes useful observations on the function of paradox in one of Cyrano's letters in “Cyrano; ‘Des Miracles de Rivière,’” Yale French Studies, No. 49 (1973), pp. 185-96.

4. Sorel to a large extent in Francion, Théophile in Fragments d'une histoire comique and Tristan L'Hermite in Le Page disgracié. The only critic to explore the link between first-person narration and libertinism in the seventeenth century is René Démoris in Le Roman à la première personne. The seventeenth-century “roman libertin” has never been properly defined, and the question merits further consideration, as does the relationship between this tradition and that of “libertinage érudit” as described by René Pintard in Le Libertinage érudit dans la première moitié du dix-septième siècle (Paris: Boivin, 1943).

5. Der Dialog: Ein Literarhistoricher Versuch (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1895), II, 443-44. The most recent contributions to a study of the dialogue and the dialogic appear in the issue of Poétique devoted to literature and philosophy. Poétique, No. 21 (1975), especially “Dialogue des genres,” document presented by Ph. Lacoue-Labarthe and J.-L. Nancy, pp. 148-75.

6. Voyage dans la lune, ed. Maurice Laugaa, p. 53. Future references will be to this edition.

7. Pietro Toldo, for example, sharply criticizes the work for being only “un assemblage d'éléments divers et parfois opposés.” “Les Voyages merveilleux de Cyrano de Bergerac et de Swift et leurs rapports avec l'œuvre de Rabelais,” Revue des Etudes Rabelaisiennes, 4 (1906), 320.

8. Erica Harth devotes an important section of her book on Cyrano to a discussion of the seventeenth-century philosophical context of Cyrano's relativism.

9. Entretien avec Burman, ed. Ch. Adam (Paris: Boivin, 1937), p. 5.

10. “Et si j'écris en français, qui est la langue de mon pays, plutôt qu'en latin, qui est celle de mes précepteurs, c'est à cause que j'espère que ceux qui ne se servent que de leur raison naturelle toute pure jugeront mieux de mes opinions que ceux qui ne croient qu'aux livres anciens.” Discours de la méthode, ed. Geneviève Rodis-Lewis (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966), p. 95.

11. Gaston Bachelard in La Psychanalyse du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949) explores the sexuality linked with the fire myth, especially in the sections devoted to “Psychanalyse et préhistoire” and “Le Feu sexualisé.” One of his observations of particular interest for the Voyage concerns the link between the so-called “male fire” and alchemy—“une science d'hommes, de célibataires … Sa doctrine du feu est donc fortement polarisée par des désirs inassouvis” (p. 90).

12. Blanchot (hesitantly) stresses the link between the powers of the imagination and those of the occult. “Faut-il rappeler, faut-il oublier que Cyrano dans les ‘rêveries bizarres,’ rencontre parfois le même horizon d'image que la recherche occultiste?” (pp. 559 and 563).

13. None other than the demon of Socrates himself, according to the version of his life story in the Voyage, p. 57.

14. Madeleine Alcover discusses this change in the Voyage in La Pensée philosophique et scientifique de Cyrano de Bergerac (Geneva: Droz, 1970), p. 17.

15. Narcisse romancier (Paris: Corti, 1972), p. 76. Rousset gives the example of Scarron's reference to Don Japhet d'Arménie (published in 1653) in Le Roman comique (1656).

16. The problem of autobiographical intention in the seventeenth-century first-person novel is complex and merits further study-witness the example of Le Page disgracié.

17. Ménagiana (Paris: 1693), pp. 238-39. As Howard Harvey points out, accusations of madness are leveled only against Cyrano, and not against more cautious thinkers like Descartes and Gassendi, p. 122.