PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0019 Projection and Recasting of the Self in États et empires du Soleil by Cyrano de Bergerac D ANIEL J. W ORDEN F URMAN U NIVERSITY In this article, I would like to share some thoughts about casting images, whether in light or metal, performance or narrative, and the psychic impact of such creations on those who perceive them. These notions converge on the word “projection” as it relates to Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac and his contemporary Athanasius Kircher. We can start by acknowledging that the word appears twice in the extant writing of Cyrano, in passages that closely mirror each other. The author evokes a casting powder, “poudre de projection,” consubstantial with the philosopher’s stone, purportedly enabling a mortal to transmute common metals like copper and lead into silver and gold, and generating nearly limitless wealth. In Cyrano’s letter “Pour les sorciers,” for example, the firstperson narrator dialogues with a sorcerer in the depths of a ruined castle. The magical adept claims to have extended his life thanks to three flasks of prodigious substances gifted to him by a certain king of the Fire Demons [“roi des démons ignés”], containing “or potable,” “huile de talc,” and “poudre de projection” (Lettres 82). An image of three flasks containing these substances also resurfaces in Cyrano’s tale of a trip to the moon. The text of États et empires de la lune makes an ironic allusion to the picaresque novel Le Page disgracié as the narrator speaks with an immortal extraterrestrial calling himself the Daemon of Socrates. This figure claims to have offered three flasks of these same substances, potable gold, talc oil, and casting powder, to the author of Le Page disgracié, Tristan l’Hermite (L’Autre Monde 60). Didier Kahn, following Madeleine Alcover, has read this allusion as a complex joke at the expense of both Tristan l’Hermite personally, and alchemical ideas in general (Kahn 153). Here as elsewhere, Kahn observes, Cyrano enjoys appropriating terms associated with alchemy, and redeploying them ironically, thereby ornamenting his texts’ discussions of materialism, and enhancing their burlesque humor (157). Daniel J. Worden PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0019 270 While the word “projection” does not figure in the surviving, censored versions of États et empires du Soleil, and no uncensored state of the text has come to light, I am nonetheless curious to evaluate how the term and its attendant notions may be heuristically useful for interpreting Cyrano. For this purpose, in my view, the much-commented passage in the Sun novel in which the narrator engineers a spacecraft presents a promising starting point. This flying machine relies on a complex optical projector, described as an icosahedron, for propulsion. This assemblage of crystals, lenses, and other extraordinary mechanisms enables him to evade imprisonment and cast light on worlds that would otherwise remain invisible. In order to better understand how the word “projection” may have resonated for Cyrano, Antoine Furetière’s Dictionaire universel provides some circumstantial clues, as long as we acknowledge that its usage may have evolved by its publication 1690, some 35 years after our author’s untimely death. If we take appropriate caution here, it nonetheless remains useful to note that Furetière presents four major senses in which the noun “projection” could be understood in late-seventeenth-century France. The lexicographer associates each of these uses with a particular technical domain. He gives the impression that the term mainly served specialists versed not only in mapmaking, as today’s readers might expect, but also artisans preparing three main types of products involving heating and mixing. Foundry workers would use the term in a practical sense as they cast metal objects like statues, medallions, or even mirrors in sand or wax molds: “Le Fondeur a été heureux en la projection de cette statuë, de cette medaille, de ce miroir” (Furetière n. p.). For different purposes, in a pharmaceutical context, crucibles could work similarly to such molds, as apothecaries melted down substances to create medicines. An early modern pharmacy specialist might sprinkle a few fine grains at a time onto a puddle of liquid at the bottom of a heated crucible. Such work might yield a syrup or ointment, sometimes to be dried again into a new powdered remedy: On appelle aussi projection en termes de Pharmacie, une preparation qui se fait de quelques substances, en jetant à differentes reprises dans un creuset posé sur un feu violent quelques drogues convenables au dessein de l’Artiste. (Furetière n. p.) Within this context, the word could also carry a pejorative connotation, calling to mind charlatans and would-be alchemists who sought to exploit the gullible. In fact, Furetière directly evokes quacks seeking to beguile superstitious folk: Projection and Recasting of the Self in États et empires du Soleil PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0019 271 PROJECTION, en termes de Chymie, se dit d’une certaine poudre chimerique que des Charlatans disent avoir la vertu de changer une grande quantité de metail imparfait, comme le plomb & le cuivre, en un plus parfait, comme l’or & l’argent, pour peu qu’on y en jette parmi. (Furetière n. p.) This reference to feigning the transmutation of lead and copper into gold and silver evidently confirms a cultural association between the word ‘projection’ and depictions of the philosopher’s stone. One such depiction features in États et empires du Soleil and links back to the Daemon’s reference to projection powder. On the Sun, the river of Imagination contains the same three substances as the alien’s flasks, as Kahn affirms (155). In this river, flows and eddies of potable gold froth with talc oil, while numerous philosopher’s stones litter the riverbed, suggesting that these pebbles rest on sand-like mounds of casting powder (États et empires 323-324). The interpretive problem of how seriously or ironically to read Cyrano’s allusions to technical disciplines, including alchemy and astronomy, pertains to a wider critical debate on philosophical discourse in the author’s work. In recent decades, a point of contention in Cyrano criticism has centered on how best to account for the contradictions and paradoxes that burgeon as he juxtaposes clashing depictions of theoretical phenomena. These polemical and puzzling collisions of images pose an interpretive challenge that scholars have taken up in many different ways. A number of critics have approached this challenge by drawing heuristic comparisons between Cyrano’s mode of describing imagery, marked by his disorienting irony, and the operation of early modern optical devices that combine mirrors and lenses. Some of the most influential studies in this vein have come from Jean-Charles Darmon, Isabelle Moreau, and Frédérique Aït- Touati. Darmon developed heuristic comparisons between early modern optics and Cyrano’s narrative style, further integrating reflections on a series of related topics. For example, Darmon draws analogies between the operation of Cyrano’s images of Nature, including interplanetary vistas that the narrator witnesses during his flights, the impact of telescopic viewing, and experimentation with mirrors on early-seventeenth-century amateurs of optics (Philosophie épicurienne 233). On Darmon’s reading, Cyrano’s images of Nature not only reveal otherwise invisible features of the cosmos, which they magnify and draw closer, but also reflect and display human shortcomings, which they hold up for contemplation and critique (Philosophie épicurienne 233). At the same time, Cyrano’s use of these images recalls for him the throwing of dice, in that the author recasts and recombines them so as to suggest that the value of creative play and experimentation outweighs that of intellectual critique and elucidation (Philosophie épicurienne 233). Daniel J. Worden PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0019 272 Furthermore, Darmon observes that many of Cyrano’s images of Nature, such as the birds’ description of humans as featherless monsters in États et empires du Soleil, can be understood in multiple ways at once, and suggests that the contradictions emerging from this polysemy invite a particular reading style, privileging irony, that refuses to settle on a definitive import of any such mental picture (Philosophie épicurienne 236-237). At length, Darmon posits that Cyrano’s endless recombinative play with imagery and narration can be most usefully compared to a kaleidoscope, combining mirrors, lenses, and angular fragments that tumble and interact like dice (Philosophie épicurienne 262). The oft-commented propulsion device in États et empires du soleil, the icosahedron, has become a logical focal point for such interpretations of Cyrano’s work. While the author has attracted many more readers than was once the case, it remains useful to offer some context within the novel and plot here. In this passage of États et empires du Soleil, the narrator-hero Dyrcona has just escaped imprisonment in a tower in Toulouse, where he had been awaiting condemnation and execution for witchcraft. His friends Cussan and Colignac had facilitated his evasion by bringing him a wide variety of objects, including crystals, lenses, and geometers’ tools (202-203), which he builds into a flying machine. He accomplishes this under the gaze of a bribed guard who does not imagine how these sundries could be exploited as escape aids (204-205). In this context, the narrator uses his considerable natural philosophy expertise, notably in Cartesian physics, to build a large, stellated and faceted, upside-down, crystalline urn (203). This device features twenty triangular lenses, described as convex and concave, and joined all sides to form an icosahedron. The shape is a Platonic solid composed of twenty equilateral triangles. Dyrcona affixes this structure to the top of a small flight cabin (203). According to Nicole Gengoux, this icosahedron operates according to Cartesian theoretical principles as it refracts and projects sunlight in twenty converging vectors, heating air that generates upward propulsion (302). At the same time, the narrator’s description of this device juxtaposes imagery borrowed from disciplines as diverse as cosmology, physics, geometry and optics and from source material including Plato’s Timeas and Kepler’s solar system model (his Machina coelestis), as Aït-Touati notes (67- 68). Moreover, as the text alludes to notions of natural philosophy, it redeploys additional imagery from Aristotelian, Lucretian and Cartesian approaches to the field as it evokes debates on the existence of void or vacuum, as Darmon contends (“L’Imagination” 234). Darmon suggests that the icosahedron transcends its intradiegetic function and affecting readers, becoming a “machine à imaginer” (Philosophie épicurienne 258, “L’Imagi- Projection and Recasting of the Self in États et empires du Soleil PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0019 273 nation” 234). For Moreau, references to magnetic phenomena in these lines also allow Cyrano to create and maintain tension between these and other theories of matter, perhaps even extending to alchemical ones (Moreau 209). In a different perspective, while this fusion of imagery may at first appear chaotic, an attentive and detailed analysis by Gengoux allows her to show that the passage can ultimately be read as an internally coherent thought experiment, demonstrating theories that Descartes had expounded in his Principes, Dioptrique and Discours de la méthode (Gengoux 302-303). In any case, as Aït-Touati observes, Cyrano’s interplay of description, imagery, and narration allow a reader’s mental image of the spacecraft to be “gradually constructed by an accumulation of technologies over the course of the narrative” (Aït-Touati 68). Moreover, for Aït-Touati, this and other combinations of images in Cyrano operate indirectly to expand the range of cosmic phenomena that readers hold to be hypothetically plausible. She argues that, instead of communicating expository claims to be accepted as true, images like the icosahedron, which are fused and multifaceted, prompt readers to visualize cosmic phenomena in ways that make paradoxes appear like common sense claims, and recast fantastical and miraculous occurrences as credible, believable possibilities (65). Cyrano’s fiction thus offers quasi-visual demonstrations, not of the truth-value of philosophical notions, but rather of their verisimilitude, prompting readers to imagine circumstances under which, hypothetically, propositions like Copernican or Keplerian heliocentrism could be proven true (Aït-Touati 64-65). For my part, such interpretations of the icosahedron lead me to ask further questions about how this function of Cyrano’s text might have impacted an early reader’s sense of self, in relation to the material universe. How might the text have reshaped early modern readers’ self-concepts, and could it even have prompted them to recast their roles in the cosmic order? While such vast inquiries evidently resist being resolved in a short article, I would like to outline an approach that appears promising, and one that I have underway in my current book project 1 . I am interested in rereading Cyrano’s work in light of these questions, while drawing analogies to Jill H. Casid’s interpretation of Athanasius Kircher’s magic lantern shows and their psycho-social function in seventeenth-century Rome (67). In Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject, as part of her interpretation of a wide seventeenth-century primary corpus, the visual studies scholar examines illustrations of Kircher’s performances that the famous Jesuit polymath published in the 1671 edition of 1 The working title of this project is Impostors and Projectors: Thought Experiments in French Writing before Science Fiction (1650-1720). Daniel J. Worden PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0019 274 his work Ars magna lucis et umbrae 2 . In these engravings, darkened rooms contain large boxes, themselves enclosing lamps. Their lamplight reflects on mirrors, refracts through lenses and traverses painted slides. The rays in turn escape an aperture and project large images on walls. The specific examples of projected imagery that Kircher chose to represent in his printed volume are significant. One such image displays the unclothed upper body of a man engulfed in flames, while another features an upright skeleton holding an hourglass and a scythe. Casid analyzes these illustrations of projected slides to posit how the shows likely impacted their audiences, contending that: […] the demonstration of image-projecting apparatus in the dark room worked to effect not only internalization of a lesson about optics but also a self-surveillance for and routing out of any signs of gullibility or belief in the illusion projected. (54) Casid builds upon readings by Michael John Gorman and Paula Findlen here, suggesting that projecting these images may have created a dual impact on readers. On one level, these optical projections probably functioned as “planted jokes” (Casid 70), in that they likely introduced divisions between initiated viewers who understood the mechanics of the optical illusions, on the one hand, and on the other, they sidelined spectators less equipped to rationalize in this way and suppress fears that these sights likely induced. On another level, however, the projections of the images may have also “functioned to manage fear by a certain dividing and distancing projection of what the viewer is encouraged to refuse to become or recognize in himself” (71). Casid evidently plays on both optical and psychoanalytic senses of the word “projection” here. She hypothesizes that “the specters such images conjured may have cut close to home” (71), since, for example, viewing the graphic burning man image in this context likely evoked the gruesome fate of Giordano Bruno, and by metonymy, that philosopher’s banned ideas, along with those of Giambattista della Porta and Galileo Galilei. If this was the case, then magic lantern shows may have acted indirectly on each spectator’s psyche, in two operations. They would have first prompted viewers to disavow any desire to delve into unorthodox or heretical notions recalled by the natural magic at work in the illusion. Secondly, the performances probably stoked fears of being punished for such impulses, and led viewers to project these outside of themselves, onto the target images. 2 Casid reproduces these images, p. 768 and 769 of the 1671 edition of Ars magna lucis et umbrae as figures 13a and 13b in Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject, p. 68-69. Projection and Recasting of the Self in États et empires du Soleil PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0019 275 By way of conclusion, I would like to offer a brief demonstration of how borrowing aspects of Casid’s approach could help bring out additional texture and dimensionality to readings of Cyrano. Evidently, such a hermeneutic move requires accounting for looming differences between the printed illustrations of Kircher’s performances and Cyrano’s peculiar and distinct variety of prose fiction. For this type of heuristic comparison, serious distinctions must be made with regard to ideological orientation, intended audiences and textual genre, to list only three of the most obvious criteria to consider. After taking such precautions, however, even tentative and relatively superficial experimentation with this comparative perspective highlights remarkable parallels. For instance, analyzing Dyrcona’s point of view in the icosahedron passage alongside Kircher’s viewers’ sight of the projected burning man promises to generate a variety of intriguing observations. While I aim to develop such similarities in detail as part of my book project, I would like to leave you with a first look at them today. Both in Kircher and in Cyrano, technical layouts of an optical projection mechanism prepare groundwork for a display of contentious imagery. Whereas Kircher’s illustrations next reveal the man on fire, who could also be seen as a damned and tormented soul, then the grim reaper, Dyrcona looks out of his vehicle, his gaze paralleling the converged sunrays escaping the icosahedron, through the same aperture in the floor of his flight cabin (États et empires 206). Cyrano’s narrator witnesses a succession of images, as though watching a slideshow, as the earth visibly rotates to reveal countries of the world, from west to east. First Italy, then Greece and the Bosporus, and then Persia, India, China and Japan all appear on the circular horizon (212-213). Next, he contemplates Venus, then Mercury, as these planets wax and wane in the sunlight in a demonstration of heliocentrism (213- 214), much like the moons orbiting around Jupiter as seen through Galileo’s telescope. For mid-seventeenth-century audiences, both Kircher’s slide sequence and Cyrano’s parade of cosmic phenomena, which followed Kepler, and Galileo in contradicting what “la vieille astronomie a tant prêché,” (213) would have initially intensified anxiety, however conscious, linked to their sense of self. Uncertainties would have surged about what audience members believed, how accurately they perceived the universe, in whom they placed trust, how death would take them, and what might become of them thereafter. As Casid suggests for Kircher, and for Cyrano’s readers as well, a “dividing and distancing projection” (Casid 71) would probably have emerged to defend against such threats to the ego, identifying them with exterior targets outside the self. In both contexts, the showman manipulating optical projection leads onlookers to cast fears of fiery self-destruction outside, in a movement of psychological projection. The damned soul and Daniel J. Worden PFSCL XLVIII, 95 (2021) DOI 10.2357/ PFSCL-2021-0019 276 grim reaper fade into darkness, as though evacuating purged anxieties with them, and Dyrcona explains why approaching the sun purportedly will not burn him or anyone else (210). Plot events soon prompt readers to identify themselves projectively with Dyrcona’s fearless ego, walking with confidence and free of pain, inside a solar inferno. As relieving as this reading or viewing experience may be, however, the incendiary images still haunt the audience, as Casid suggests (71). Such a defense against self-destruction cannot fully extinguish the smoldering cosmic terrors in the psyche of each of Galileo’s admirers. Phantom fears linger, like smoke above a projector. Works Cited Primary Works Cyrano de Bergerac, Savinien. Les États et Empires de la Lune et du Soleil. Edited by Madeleine Alcover. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004. _____ Œuvres complètes. Tome II: Lettres, Entretiens pointus, Mazarinades. Edited by Luciano Erba and Hubert Carrier. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2001. Furetière, Antoine. DICTIONAIRE UNIVERSEL, Contenant generalement tous les MOTS FRANÇOIS, tant vieux que modernes, & les Termes de toutes les SCIENCES ET DES ARTS […]. The Hague and Rotterdam, 1690. Secondary Works Aït-Touati, Frédérique. Fictions of the Cosmos: Science and Literature in the Seventeenth Century. Translated by Susan Emanuel. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011. Casid, Jill H. Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Darmon, Jean-Charles. “L’imagination de l’espace entre argumentation philosophique et fiction, de Gassendi à Cyrano.” Études littéraires, vol. 34, no. 1-2, 2002, p. 217-240. _____ Philosophie épicurienne et littérature au XVII e siècle. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1998. Gengoux, Nicole. Une Lecture philosophique de Cyrano. Gassendi, Descartes, Campanella : trois moments du matérialisme. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2015. Kahn, Didier. “L’Alchimie dans Les États et Empires de la Lune et du Soleil.” Littératures classiques, Special issue to supplement no. 53, 2004, p. 137-157. Moreau, Isabelle. “Guérir du sot.” Les stratégies d’écriture des libertins à l’âge classique. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2007.