Why Read the Classics? (14 page)

If one puts Galileo’s passage about the alphabet of the book of Nature alongside this eulogy of the small changes and mutations of the Earth, one can see that the real opposition is between mobility and immobility, and it is against that image of the inalterability of Nature that Galileo campaigns, conjuring up the nightmare of the Gorgon. (This image and this topic were already present in Galileo’s first astronomical work,
Istoria e dimostrazioni intorno alle macchie solari (The History and Proof of the Spots on the Sun).)
The geometric or mathematical alphabet of the book of Nature will be the weapon which — because of its capacity to be broken down into minimal elements and to represent all forms of movement and change — will abolish the opposition between the unchanging heavens and the elements of the Earth.

The philosophical thrust of this operation is well illustrated by this exchange in the
Dialogue
between the Ptolemaic supporter Simplicio and the author’s spokesman Salviati, where the theme of ‘nobility’ surfaces once more:

[1985]

Just at the time when Galileo was clashing with the Papacy, a Parisian follower of his put forward an intriguing version of a heliocentric system: for him the universe was like an onion which ‘protected by the hundreds of thin skins that surround it, conserves the precious bud from which tens of millions of other onions must draw their own essence … The embryo inside this onion is the little Sun of this little world, which heats and nourishes the vegetative salt of the whole mass.’

With those millions of onions we move from the solar system to the system of infinite worlds put forward by Giordano Bruno: in fact all these heavenly bodies ‘both visible and invisible, which are suspended in the blue of the universe, are nothing but the scum of the various suns as they purify themselves. For how could all these great fireballs exist unless they were fed by some substance which nourishes them?’ This ‘scumogenous’ theory is not really so different from the explanation given by today’s experts of how the planets formed together from the primordial nebula and how the stellar masses expand and contract: ‘Every day the Sun discharges and purges itself of the remains of the matter which feeds its fire. But when it eventually consumes all the matter of which it consists, it will expand in all directions in search of other nourishment, spreading to all the worlds which it constructed in the past, particularly to those nearest it. Then that great ball of fire will melt all the spheres together and relaunch them all over the place as before, and having gradually purged itself of all imperfections will start to act once more as a Sun to those other planets which it will form by spouting them forth from within its own sphere.’

As for the Earth’s movement this is caused by the Sun’s rays which
’when they strike the Earth make it spin with their circular motion, just as we get a top to spin by striking it with our hand’; or else it is caused by the Earth’s own vapours which, having been first heated by the Sun, ‘then struck by the cold of the polar regions fall back to Earth and being able only to strike it obliquely, thus make it go round’.

The imaginative cosmographer behind these theories is Savinien de Cyrano (1619-1655) — better known to us as Cyrano de Bergerac — and the work quoted from here is his
L’autre Monde, ou les États et Empires de la Lune (The Other World, or the States and Empires of the Moon)
.

A forerunner of science fiction, Cyrano feeds his imaginings on the scientific knowledge of his time, as well as on Renaissance traditions of magic. In this way he comes up with prophetic ideas which only we three centuries later can appreciate as such: the movements of an astronaut free of the pull of gravity (he reaches space in the first place thanks to jars of dew which are attracted upwards by the Sun), rockets involving several stages, ‘sound books’ (the mechanism is wound up, a needle is placed on the required chapter, and then one can listen to the sound that emerges from a kind of mouth).

But his poetic imagination stems from a true cosmic sense which leads him to reproduce the emotional affirmations of Lucretius’ atomist philosophy. Thus he celebrates the unity of all things, living or inanimate, and even Empedocles’ four elements are but one single element, with atoms that are sometimes more rarefied and at other times more dense. ‘You are amazed how this matter which is a purely haphazard mixture, and governed only by chance, can have produced a human being, since there were so many things essential to the construction of man’s being, but you are not aware that hundreds of millions of times this same matter, when it was on the brink of producing a man, stopped and formed a stone, lead, coral, a flower, or a comet, all because of the fact that too few or too many patterns were necessary to plan a human.’ This system of combinations of basic patterns which determines the variety of living forms links Epicurean science with DNA genetics.

The various methods for going up to the Moon already offer a wide sample of Cyrano’s inventiveness: the Old Testament patriarch Enoch tied underneath his armpits two vases full of the smoke of a sacrifice, since it has to rise to heaven; the prophet Elijah made the same journey by settling himself into a little iron boat and throwing up into the air a magnetic ball; as for Cyrano himself, he spread an unguent based on bull’s marrow over
the bruises he had sustained in previous attempts, and felt himself being raised towards the Earth’s satellite, because the Moon usually sucks up animals’ marrow.

The Moon contains amongst other things the so-called Earthly (but it should be Lunar) Paradise, and Cyrano lands right on the Tree of Life itself, his face plastered with one of its famous apples. As for the serpent, after original sin God confined him inside the body of man in the shape of the intestine, a serpent coiled round itself, an insatiable animal which dominates man and binds him to his wishes, tormenting him with his invisible teeth.

This last is the explanation given by the prophet Elijah to Cyrano who cannot resist a salacious variation on this theme: the serpent is also the one that sticks out of a man’s belly and extends towards the woman in order to spit out its venom at her, thus causing her to swell for nine months. But Elijah does not appreciate these jokes of Cyrano at all, and at one of his most outrageous impertinences chases him from Eden. This only proves that in this totally jocular work, there are jokes which must be taken as truths as well as others which are only there for run, even though it is not easy to tell one from the other.

Once he has been banished from Eden, Cyrano visits the cities of the Moon: some are completely mobile, with houses on wheels so they can have a change of air each season; others are more sedentary, and are screwed into the ground, so they can delve deep into it during winter to escape the harsh climate. His guide will be someone who has been on Earth on several occasions in different centuries, namely Socrates’ ‘daimon’ about whom Plutarch wrote a short work. This wise spirit explains why the Lunar people not only abstain from eating meat but also are very particular about their vegetables: they only eat cabbages which have died a natural death, because for them to decapitate a cabbage is murder. For the fact is that there is nothing to say that after Adam’s sin men are more precious to God than are cabbages, nor that the latter are not endowed with greater sensitivity and beauty and made more in God’s likeness than men. ‘Consequently if our soul is no longer in God’s image, we are no more like Him in our hands, feet, mouth, forehead and ears than the cabbage is in its leaves, flower, stalk, root and outer covering.’ And as for intelligence, although they may not have an immortal soul, they are perhaps part of a universal intellect; and if we have never gleaned anything regarding their secret knowledge, this may be only because we are not capable of receiving the messages they send us.

Intellectual and poetic qualities converge in Cyrano to make him an extraordinary writer not just for seventeenth-century France but for all times. Intellectually he belongs to the ‘libertine’ tradition, a polemicist involved in the upheavals which are in the process of undermining the old conception of the world. He is in favour of Gassendi’s sensism and Copernicus’ astronomy, but he is fired most of all by the sixteenth-century Italian ‘natural philosophers’: Cardano, Bruno, Campanella. (As for Descartes, Cyrano will meet him in the
Voyage aux États du Soleil (Journey to the States of the Sun)
, the sequel to
The States and Empires of the Moon
, and have him welcomed into that empyrean by Tommaso Campanella who goes over to embrace him.)

In literary terms he is a baroque writer — his ‘letters’ contain bravura pieces, such as the
Descrizione di un cipresso (Description of a Cypress Tree)
in which it is as if the style and the object described become one and the same thing. But above all he is a writer to his very core, who does not want so much to illustrate a theory or defend a thesis as to set in motion a merry-go-round of inventions which are the equivalent in imagination and language of what the new science and new philosophy were setting in motion in terms of thought. In
The Other World
, it is not the coherence of his ideas that counts, but the fun and freedom with which he takes hold of all the intellectual stimuli which appeal to his mind. This is the beginning of the
conte philosophique:
and this does not mean a story with a thesis to prove, but one in which ideas are taken up and dismissed and mock each other in turn for the fun of someone who is at home enough with them to be able to play with such ideas even when he takes them seriously.

One could say that Cyrano’s journey to the Moon anticipates in some episodes Gulliver’s travels: on the Moon as in Brobdignag, the visitor finds himself surrounded by human beings much bigger than himself who keep him on display like a pet animal. Similarly the sequence of disastrous adventures and meetings with characters who possess paradoxical wisdom is a forerunner of the ups and downs of Voltaire’s Candide. But Cyrano’s fame as a writer came much later: this book of his was published posthumously and was ruthlessly censored by friends who feared for his reputation and was only published in its entirety in this century. The rediscovery of Cyrano took place in the Romantic period: Charles Nodier was the first, and then notably Théophile Gautier, on the basis of one or two anecdotes, fashioned a portrait of the jocular, sword-fighting poet,
which the brilliant dramatist Rostand transformed into the hero of the popular play in verse.

However, Savinien Cyrano was in actual fact neither noble nor a Guascon, but a Parisian bourgeois. (He himself added the Bergerac element, drawing on the name of a farm owned by his father who was a lawyer.) He probably did have the famous nose, especially as we find in this book an ‘encomium of important noses’, a eulogy which although belonging to a very widespread genre in baroque literature is unlikely to have been written by someone with a small, snub or pug-like nose. (The inhabitants of the Moon, when they want to tell the time, use their natural sun-dial, their nose, which projects its shadow over their teeth which then function as the dial.)

But it is not only noses that are flaunted: the Lunar nobility go around naked and as if this was not enough they carry round their waist a bronze pendant in the shape of the male member. ‘ “This custom seems so extraordinary to me,” I said to my young guide, “because in our world the sign of nobility is to carry a sword.” But he was not astonished at this and simply exclaimed: “My little man, how fanatical are the grandees of your world, wanting to display a weapon which symbolises the executioner and is only designed to destroy us, in short the sworn enemy of all that lives, whereas they want to hide the member without which we would not be alive at all, the Prometheus of all living beings, the indefatigable healer of all of nature’s weaknesses! What an unfortunate land yours is, in which the symbols of procreation are the object of shame while those of destruction are held in honour! And yet you call that member ‘the shameful parts’, as though there were something more glorious than giving life and something more infamous than taking it away!”’

This extract proves that Rostand’s quarrelsome swordsman was in reality an expert at ‘making love not war’, although still inclined to indulge in a procreatory rhetoric that our contraceptive age can only consider obsolete.

[1982]

Thus the frontispiece of the first edition of
Robinson Crusoe
, printed in London in 1719 by a publisher of popular books, W. Taylor, ‘at the Ship (in Pater Noster Row)’. No author’s name was given, for it purported to be the genuine memoir of a shipwrecked sailor.

This was a time when tales of the sea and pirates were all the rage. The theme of shipwreck on a desert island had already caught the public’s attention because of an episode that had genuinely taken place ten years previously, when a Captain Woodes Rogers had discovered on the island of Juan Fernandez a man who had lived on it all alone for four years, a Scottish sailor, Alexander Selkirk. This inspired a writer of pamphlets who was down on his luck and short of money to tell a similar tale in the form of an unknown sailor’s memoir.