Cyrano's Posthuman Moon: Comic Inversions and Animist Relations

Abstract

Seventeenth-century comic writer Cyrano de Bergerac's fictional journeys to the moon (L’Autre Monde) and to the sun (Les Etats et Empires du Soleil) include critiques of humanism and human exceptionalism that can be usefully recontextualized within twenty-first-century theoretical discourses related to ecocriticism and posthumanism. Cyrano's main weapons in his satirical attack on humanism include the critique of anthropocentrism; a poetics of misanthropy that also leads to a revitalizing rediscovery of human animality; images of hybridity and monstrosity; human/nonhuman interconnections and interactions; the personhood of animals and plants; animist materialization of natural environments and atmosphere; materialist relativism; and comic inversion. Though Cyrano's concerns were vastly different from our own, his works of early modern science fiction nonetheless resonate with the problems that define the anthropocene. The freedom of early modern comic fiction thus usefully informs the present-day era of environmental crisis with unexpected insights into humanity's existence on earth.

Keywords:

• anthropocentrism
• comic
• early modern
• ecocriticism
• humanism
• hybridity
• misanthropy
• posthumanism
• science fiction

Notes

¹See the Alcover edition of Cyrano de Bergerac, Œuvres complètes, tome I: L’Autre Monde ou les Etats et Empires de la Lune, Les Etats et Empires du Soleil, Fragment de physique. As Alcover explains in this recent edition of Cyrano's works, three manuscripts, discovered in Paris, Munich, and Sydney, respectively, are known to exist, in addition to the first posthumous printed version (CI–CXVIII).

²For Sankey, “[t]he form of the narrative, in its openness and absence of an authoritative voice, works toward both indeterminacy and reconciliation. It mirrors, as it were, the play of texts at the material level and thus invites readings which take account of the ruptures, the gaps, the silences and the laughter” (399).

³Quotations from the Voyage dans la lune will refer to the Laugaa edition and will be cited parenthetically within the text. Quotations from the Etats et Empires du Soleil will refer to the Kiesler edition and will be cited parenthetically within the text. Cyrano's sun-to-earth ratio of 434/1 vastly underestimates the disproportion. Today's scientific observations hold that the earth could fit inside the sun approximately 1 million times, thus only reinforcing the point that Cyrano makes in this debunking of earthbound human self-importance. See http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/970518a.html.

⁴On climate change, see the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report (AR5): http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/index.shtml. See Kolbert for an overview of what biologists the world over increasingly agree is the planet's sixth major extinction of species.

⁵Lambert assesses the complex and partial influence of Descartes on Cyrano, in the context of the vigorous seventeenth-century debates on cosmology in which Cyrano participated: “In the Lune and the Soleil, Cyrano (through his anagrammatical namesake Dyrcona) explicitly argues in favor of a plurality, even an infinity of inhabited worlds. Cyrano bases his argument on the scientific theories of his time, particularly on Descartes’ atomistic cosmology of vortices, which postulates the indeterminate extension of matter. Unlike Descartes, Cyrano explicitly assumes the existence of as many Copernican planetary systems as there are suns” (107).

⁶Watson provides further context in his study of Reformation doctrine regarding the status of animals as guiltless and outside the symbolic order that indicts humanity: “Martin Luther argued that, while the Fall had disastrous consequences for human beings, it left animals relatively untouched: ‘Among the beasts the creation or nature stayed the way it was created. They did not fall by sinning, as man did […] they do not hear the Word, and the Word does not concern itself with them’” (55).

⁷See Mackenzie for a discussion of Ronsard's elegy and environmental literary criticism.

⁸On the revival of animism in contemporary literary debates, see Everenden (101) and Manes (17–18) in The Ecocriticism Reader.

⁹In Joseph Meeker's The Comedy of Survival, this ability to laugh is connected to the crucial capacity for adaptation that can make or break a species, including Homo sapiens: “Comedy is careless of morality, goodness, truth, beauty, heroism, and all such abstract values men say they live by. Its only concern is to affirm man's capacity for survival and to celebrate the continuity of life itself” (24).

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Notes on contributors

Roland Racevskis

Roland Racevskis, Professor of French at the University of Iowa, is the author of Time and Ways of Knowing: Molière, Sévigné, Lafayette (Bucknell UP, 2003) and Tragic Passages: Jean Racine's Art of the Threshold (Bucknell UP, 2008). Racevskis's research interests include early-modern literature and cultural history, modern narrative, and ecocriticism. His teaching centers on French language, on ancien régime literature and culture, and on ecological approaches to fiction.