Language, Money, Father, Phallus in Cyrano de Bergerac's Utopia

Abstract

THE BELLIGERENT NARRATOR OF Cyrano de Bergerac's LAutre Monde, ou voyage sur la lune, describing a voyage to an World made possible by the invention of a fantastic machine of springs and rockets, reports to us in minute detail the customs and institutions of language, money, paternity, and the phallus in lunar society.' At first glance, these institutions and customs seem as strange and absurd as impossible country where men walk on all fours, build moveable homes, deny the existence of God, believe that matter is made of atoms and that cabbages are intelligent. Even the wildest fantasies, however, have their coherence; there is no fiction, just as there is no delirium, that does not have in a certain sense its own formality. Cyrano's utopian writing, set in a remote Elsewhere that is, he says, this world upside down (125), betrays a desire for reversal too unrealistic to be hoped for in the here and now, but one that possesses its own logic. Between theology, which places the sovereign good in heaven, and revolution, which brings it by force to earth, lies utopia, neither vertical nor horizontal, neither in heaven nor on earth but between the two, on the moon. Technology makes such a voyage possible: the artificial wings and flying rockets of an erectile automatism allow new Icaruses to defy paternal injunctions and to mount an assault on a universe of which little earth is no longer the center. Cyrano exemplifies new technician; his scientific imagination promises an escape from that which is-and an encounter with the Other World. It becomes possible to hope for an inverted universe-but what does such an inversion mean?