It may seem surprising that the writer who inspired Edmund Rostand narrated a trip to the moon, two centuries before Jules Verne. Some consider this work to be the first French science fiction novel.
Cyrano de Bergerac? Everyone knows. His big nose, liveliness, talent for swordsmanship… the audience already knows it all Edmund Rostand ChampionWhether he discovers it on the board or under the appearance of Gérard Depardieu in the cinema. So he wouldn’t be particularly surprised by the character Peter Dinklage played in the new mod coming out on March 30th. Once again, Cyrano, who is in big trouble, will work behind the scenes to help the handsome Christian seduce Roxane, whom he himself is madly in love with. This famous story makes the few who knew the real Cyrano laugh sweetly, the one who was undoubtedly going after Christian, not after his sweet cousin. And this is not the only surprise that this cadet of Gascony hides, moreover, it is not Gascon for a penny.
From the Earth to the Moon, 200 years ago
Born in 1619, Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac was at least as remarkable, if not more so, than his theatrical counterpart. So adorable that it inspired Alain Ayroles for his comic book series Of gowns and crocodiles. “This faltering poet, scholar, and philosopher seemed disproportionate to Rostand’s characterremembers the screenwriter who discovered the play before looking at the writer’s real work. He was a free spirit, incredibly ahead of his time. In his writings, he fought with weapons of humor and fantasy against obscurantism and fanaticism. This warrior was a pacifist and was already conjured in the middle of the seventeenth centuryAnd the Century, the idea of a “citizen of the world”. Like his theatrical double, writer Cyrano hasn’t lacked skill! »
And he was not lacking in imagination. Among the emancipated writer’s texts, came Alan Ayröls The other worldalso titled Comic history of the states and empires of the moon, which gave the author a continuation, solar, this time. Published in 1655, it is undoubtedly the first work of science fiction in French literature. “This is in my opinion, because Cyrano uses the scientific discoveries of his day to feed his imagination, and, under the guise of imagination, poses philosophical questions, as in all the great works of science fiction.”confirms Alan Errolls.
And he’s not the only one who thinks so. Even serious Hard SF author, Arthur C Clarke, revives Cyrano’s imagination in Greetings, Two Carbon Feet!introduced him as one of the first to describe space travel and to think of the concept of a jetpack with its steam-powered glass “rocket”… In short, since all that time, we’ve had our first science genius – French fiction under the nose, barely unnoticed.
Rostand error?
To listen to Claudine Nédelec, Professor Emeritus of French Literature and Language at the University of Artois, it is all partly due to Edmond Rostand’s fault. The resounding success of his work “He overwhelmed the author, especially since the play does not give much importance to Cyrano’s journey to the moon”. But the playwright is not the only one responsible. According to the seventeenth specialistAnd the century, author Cyrano de Bergerac between science and imaginationthe work of the arrogant poet would have been forgotten for its originality.
In the nineteenthAnd the A century we underestimated everything in the century of Louis XIV that cannot be considered classic. We appreciated Cornell and Racine, but the authors of the second ray were considered literary curiosities, and we marginalized them…” Libertarian, gay, rebellious time, and author of Flight to the Moon that blends science, philosophy, and satire, Cyrano had it all to land in this category. But over the course of more than a century, things have changed and researchers have studied his work, with this question unleashing academic passion: The other world Is it science fiction or a knowledge novel?
Intention is the most important
Cyrano’s work looks no less “science fiction” than that of George Lucas, thanks to his selenite quadruple intellect and steam-powered spaceships. The Frenchman is stricter from a scientific point of view than his father star Wars With their cool flashlights and X-Wings that make noise in space. Only, Cyrano de Bergerac relies on the science of his era. “He invents extraordinary machines that operate according to principles that were thus proven or conceived in the seventeenth centuryAnd the century. Verne states that he elicits some of the things discussed in his day by imagining that we have found the solutions. Moreover, what struck me in the various editions of the text was that what was most represented were his instruments. »
But for Arnaud Brunet, all this is not enough. This science fiction critic is a regular contributor to the magazine Bifrostrefuses to attribute the designation “SF” to Cyrano de Bergerac, for a simple and good reason: science fiction, in the writer’s time, did not exist. I’d like to point out Norman Spinrad’s definition: any text written as science fiction must be considered science fiction. » Arno Brunet still recognizes certain qualities in Cyrano. “He imagines an entire physical, biological and even political system based on the principle that the Earth in relation to the Moon is the Moon in relation to the Earth. He tries to imagine a system invested in a certain coherence, which is so characteristic of science fiction.” Only, it seems without being one, because it is not written with the intent of making it…
Claudine Ndelek also criticizes the outdated aspect of the label, but she chooses a third path. “I think we can use the term science fiction knowing that we are not designing a well-established, later genre, but a mixture of science and fiction.” Everyone will be satisfied and booksellers will be able to mark correctly The other world to pull it to the appropriate radius. Because, after all, that’s the problem: In which box do we put the Cyrano de Bergerac? It’s really a French-French debate, because native English speakers have a lot of apprehensions about his work situation or the dreamJohannes Kepler’s lunar account written in 1608, in the category Science Fiction.
“What weighs most in France is this classicism of the nineteenth centuryAnd the centuryClaudine Nédelec, sorry. It froze things both in the concept of what a genre is and, later, in the separation between the fields of science and literature which is very strong in France, much more so than in other European countries. » Arnaud Brunet joins her on this point. “Now we like to put labels: there are mathematicians, philosophers, physicists … In the time of Cyrano we had the concept of the culture of the honest man, the individual who knew all the knowledge of his time without putting up any barriers. It is true that we find this interdisciplinarity in the imagination Scientific, a literature based on scientific concepts.Only, in their time, Kepler and Cyrano did not know that this genre would exist, but if they had known, they would undoubtedly say: “Yes, that’s what I do.” »
Finally, Cyrano may not have been a science fiction author, simply because he wrote some of it “Before it was cool”.
