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A Machereyan Reading of Francis Godwin's the Man in the Moone

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A Machereyan Reading of Francis Godwin's the Man in the Moone Archive of SID A Machereyan Reading of Francis Godwin’s the Man in the Moone Ali Salami Assistant Professor, University of Tehran [email protected] Midia Mohammadi Graduate Student, University of Tehran [email protected] Abstract 1 Seventeenth-century Britain was going through plenty of transitions, and science was gaining respect as a force that was enhancing changes by shattering the ideas that the church had imposed since the Middle Ages, forbye providing man with new inventions and advancements. The Man in the Moone is one of the first utopian science fiction novels, and it successfully landed a sixteenth-century Spaniard on the moon only to find a utopia there built by Lunars. By the time Godwin’s book was published, the Copernican Revolution had brought authorities into turmoil, and the discussions on the probability of extra-terrestrial life had already begun. The book expresses these novel ideas in a subtle narration and criticizes the institutions of its own time by providing a utopian alternative on another planet. With an eye on the historical context of the work and the scientific advancements of its time, it will be examined in a closed Marxist reading, primarily based on Pierre Macherey’s theory which highlights “the ideological project” of a literary work by focusing on “gaps”, “silences”, and the “unsaid” in the text which shape its “speech”. Macherey’s theory highlights “the ideological project” of a literary work by focusing on the “unsaid” in the text, which shapes its “speech”. Furthermore, regarding Macherey’s ideas on the link between ideology and narrative, the article sets out to find the narrative’s central topic to describe the imaginary/symbolic system put into the ideological project’s service. Keywords: Marxist Reading, Pierre Macherey, Theory of Gaps, Utopian Fiction, Science Fiction www.SID.ir Archive of SID Introduction The Man in the Moone or A Discourse of a Voyage Thither by Domingo Gonsales was published in 1638 pseudonymously and posthumously in the same year The Discovery of a World in the Moone by John Wilkins was published. The book was written by the English divine and Church of England bishop Francis Godwin (1562–1633) and is considered the first English science fiction utopian novel. The work itself claims to be a non-fiction travelogue written by Domingo Gonsales in Spanish and later published by Jesuit missionaries he visited in China after returning to the earth. Gonsales, the protagonist of the work who is a Spaniard forced to escape the country after killing a man in a duel, narrates the story. He then goes on a voyage to East Indies, the island of St Helena, and then flies to the moon, depicted as a utopian paradise inhabited by Lunars. Francis Godwin’s imagination explored beyond new scientific advancements of his own time and limned a new utopia through which many of the seventeenth-century institutions could be criticised. In order to scrutinise the book concerning many concepts it has concealed in its silence, the article is going to rely on Pierre Macherey’s notion of “silence” or “narrative rupture” and the Marxist view which accentuates the interrelation between literature and its context. Francis Godwin (1562-1633), born in Hannington in Northamptonshire, was the second son of Thomas Godwin, Bishop of Bath and Wells. He attended Christ Church, a constituent college of the University of Oxford and there he received his degrees in Bachelor of Arts in 1581 and Master of Arts in 1584. Being a perseverant scholar, Godwin then attained the higher degrees of Bachelor in 1594 and then Doctor of Divinity in 1596. His father, Thomas, had been variously an academic and a 2 schoolmaster. After the Catholic Queen Mary’s accession, he was obliged to leave the school and retrained in Medicine at Oxford University to support his family. He was nonetheless harassed for his Protestantism by the authorities. Later upon Queen Elizabeth I’s accession in 1559, he returned to divinity and rapidly became a popular preacher. The Queen was so pleased with him that he was appointed Dean of Christ Church in Oxford in June 1565 and when she visited Oxford in 1565, Godwin was one of the four divines appointed to hold theological disputations before her. The winter after her visit, Queen Elizabeth promoted Godwin to Dean of Canterbury, a post he held for 17 years (1567-1584). In 1576 he became one of the ecclesiastical commissioners. Early in the 1590s, Francis Godwin started compiling biographies of all the English bishops from the beginning of Christianity in Britain to his day. He published his Catalogue of the Bishops of England since the first planting of the Christian Religion in this Island finally in 1601 and excused his passion for “the study of histories and antiquities” as “somewhat greater, then was needfull for a man that had dedicated himselfe and his labours unto the seruice of Gods church in the Ministery.” (Godwin, A Catalogue of the Bishops of England (London: George Bishop, 1601). He also published Rerum Anglicarum Henrico VIII., Edwardo VI. et Maria regnantibus Annales which was later translated and published by his son Morgan under the title Annales of England (1630). His other famous work is Nuncius inanimatus which was originally published in 1629 and the reprinted in 1657 Godwin’s reputation in English Literature is to his last period and not to his youthful student days, and he is best known for The Man in the Moone, his science fiction novel written in 1620s. “Godwin was a good Man, grave Divine, skilful Mathematician, pure Latinist, and incomparable Historian.” (Fuller, 284) His book inspired many celebrated literary texts in later centuries such as Gulliver’s Travels written by Godwin’s great-great-nephew, Johnathan Swift; The Emperor of the Moon (1678) written by Aphra Behn and three satirical science fiction novels written by Cyrano de Bergerac in 1650s later credited by Arthur C. Clark as the first description of rocket-power space flight. Godwin’s science fiction owes a lot to scientific texts such as William Gilbert’s De Magnete (1600), and Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum (1627) and also the prior existing imaginary notions such as the idea of flying by birds which was as old as the myth of Alexander the Great’s bird-powered www.SID.ir Archive of SID flight or The Flying Throne of Kay Kāvus written in Shahname in the tenth century. Moreover, Godwin’s information of China gives his work one of its setting and gives him the idea of a language whose meaning relies on vowels and tones. Robert Burton (1577-1640), who earned a reputation in English Literature because of his Anatomy of Melancholy, was another influence on Godwin’s writing and his Digression of Ayre gave him the details for his astronomical speculations, the height of El Pico, bird migration, Tenerife, locust swarms, devils in the air, et cetera. It is not clear when Francis Godwin wrote The Man in the Moone; however, based on the details mentioned by Gonsales, it is estimated to have been written in 1620s. “Domingo Gonsales mentions in passing real events such as the battle of the Isle of Pines (1596) and concludes in China in late 1601 in the company of identifiable members of the Jesuit Mission.” (Poole) William Poole confidently dates The Man in the Moone to “the last decade of Godwin’s life, and most probably to after 1628.” Godwin must have read many travelogues, scientific texts, literary texts on imaginary lands and utopias, folklore texts and other writings, but what influenced him the most to invent his masterpiece must have been Robert Burton’s texts in which he could find ingredients for his well-prepared product. In his most celebrated book, A Theory of Literary Production (1966), Pierre Macherey draws attention to the “unsaid” things of a literary work. He states that the speech of a literary text is shaped by its “gaps” and this is associated with political, historical context of the work and its ideology: The speech of the book comes from a certain silence, a matter which it endows with form, a ground on which it traces a figure. Thus, the book is not self-sufficient; it 3 is necessarily accompanied by a certain absence, without which it would not exist. Acknowledge of the book must include a consideration of this absence. (Macherey, 95) Macherey goes beyond drawing a line between the visible and the invisible in the text by creating a distinction between the conscious and unconscious of the work in which the latter is what the work is trying to depict in its unsaid. He believes that the unsaid is not always the result of the author’s entailed decision but could be left out or “missing” unconsciously. He states that “the work encloses a meaning which must be released; the letter of the work is the mask, eloquent and deceptive, which this meaning bears; a knowledge of the work is an ascent to this unique central meaning.” (Macherey, p.86). Based on this distinctions, a Machereyan reading would be answering two questions about the text: if “the work originates in a secret to be explained” and if “the work is realised in the revelation of its secret” (Macherey, p.107) Thus, taking into account that the writer’s presentation of the theme is a “mask”, applying Macherey’s notions on a science fiction work that was produced in the time of “censorship’s great moment”1 is illuminating. 1. The Sound of Silence: Pierre Macherey’s Theories Looking for the “unsaid” in the text is a firm ground all that Macherey’s reading strategy is constructed upon.
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