Fictions of the Cosmos

Fictions of the Cosmos FICTIONS OF THE COSMOS Science and Literature in the Seventeenth Century FRÉDÉRIQUE AÏT-TOUATI Translated by Susan Emanuel The University of Chicago Press * Chicago and London Publication of this book has been aided by grants from the Bevington Fund, Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne, the Centre de Recherche en Littérature Comparée of Paris IV, St. John’s College, Oxford, and the Ludwig Fund of New College, Oxford. Frédérique Aït-Touati is a teaching fellow in French at St. John’s College at the University of Oxford. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2011 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2011. Printed in the United States of America 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 1 2 3 4 5 isbn-13: 978-0-226-01122-6 (cloth) isbn-10: 0-226-01122-4 (cloth) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Aït-Touati, Frédérique, 1977– author. [Poétiques du discours cosmologique au XVIIe siècle. English] Fictions of the cosmos : science and literature in the seventeenth century / Frédérique Aït-Touati ; translated by Susan Emanuel. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-226-01122-6 (cloth : alkaline paper) isbn-10: 0-226-01122-4 (cloth : alkaline paper) 1. Cosmology in literature. 2. Literature and science. 3. Cosmology—History. 4. European literature— 17th century—History and criticism. I. Emanuel, Susan, translator. II. Title. pn56.c68a5813 2011 809ʹ.9336—dc22 2011004410 o This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). To my parents contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 part one * cosmic imagination 1 Kepler Sets the Earth in Motion 17 Genealogy of the Dream: From Ludus Philosophicus to the Game of Fiction, 20 * The Dynamics of the Voyage: A Thought-Experiment, 27 * Vision in the Voyage, 31 * The Place of Fiction, 36 2 Godwin, Wilkins, Cyrano: From the Optical Voyage to the Mechanical Voyage 45 The Man in the Moone, 46 * A World in the Moon, 56 * From Heavens to the Sky: Cyrano’s Other World, 63 * Conclusion: Dreams and Fictions, 71 part two * conjectural machines 3 Fontenelle: Unveiling the Spectacle of the World 79 Machine and Spectacle, 81 * Order of the Narrative, Harmony of the World, 84 * Fontenelle’s Visions, 87 4 Huygens: The Theoretical Voyage of the Cosmotheoros 95 Hypotheses, Conjectures, Fictions, 97 * Architectonics of the Narrative, 114 * Conclusion: Hypotheses and Narratives, 125 part three * observing monsters 5 Robert Hooke: “The Armed Eye” 133 Micrographia, 134 * From Enargeia to Evidence, 148 * Hooke the Astronomer, 158 * Poetics of Proof, 169 * Conclusion: Instruments and Images, 172 6 Margaret Cavendish: The Battle of Instruments 174 “A High Heel to a Short Leg,” 175 * A Teratology of Knowledge, 178 * The Empire of Fiction, 183 * Conclusion, 189 Conclusion 191 Notes 203 Bibliography 229 Index 259 Acknowledgments This work owes much to Simon Schaff er, who introduced me to history of science. I am grateful to him for the patience and enthusiasm with which he revealed this fascinating new world to me. François Lecercle followed and supported my project with curiosity, critical acuteness, and insight. In the further course of my research, I have been most fortunate to have benefi ted from the deep insight of Bruno Latour, to whom I am very much indebted for his most generous intellectual support and illuminating discussions. I am very grateful to Peter Galison who off ered detailed and enormously constructive comments. Pierre Daubigny read over much of the completed manuscript and made a number of penetrating criticisms. A special note of thanks is due to Jonathan Morton for revising and correcting the translation with such accuracy. Numerous colleagues and friends provided encouragement and enthusiasm, discussing my work with me at various stages of my research and writing, for which I am grateful. I would especially like to thank Terence Cave, Lor- raine Daston, Ann Jeff erson, Stephen Gaukroger, Fernand Hallyn, Philippe Hamou, Robert Iliff e, Isabelle Moreau, William Poole, Michèle Rosellini, Filippo de Vivo, David Wiggins, and Catherine Wilson for many valuable comments and reading recommendations. I warmly thank my editor, Karen Darling at the University of Chicago Press, for all her support, patience, and encouragement. I am very grateful to the various institutions that made this research and this book possible: Trinity College, Cambridge, for the award of a Knox Scholarship; the His- tory and Philosophy of Science Department at Cambridge University; the Whipple Library; the University of Paris- Sorbonne (Paris IV); New Col- lege, Oxford, and the Ludwig Fund; and my current institution, St John’s College, Oxford. To David Bornstein I am indebted for the greatest gift : uncompromising scrutiny of my writings and unlimited aff ective support. * ix * Introduction In 1610, during a pause in the confl ict between Emperor Rudolph and his brother Archduke Matthias, Johannes Kepler off ered a description of a fl ake of snow to Johannes Matthias Wackher von Wackenfels as a New Year’s pres- ent, entitled On the Six- Cornered Snowfl ake.1 He opens it with his declared wish to off er his protector and friend something he liked more than anything else, Nothing (Nix). But Kepler, who had gone looking for Nothing in the snow squalls of Prague in winter, found Everything; in the snowfl ake he saw the structure of the universe revealed. The snowfl ake is an example of the architectonic force that governs the construction of forms; its hexagonal structure is a perfect geometric fi gure, a “cosmopoetic fi gure,” in Kepler’s words, literally “that which fashions the world.”2 Seeking to identify such fi gures in nature, one could gain access to the mystery of the world and its construction. In the seventeenth century, and especially for Kepler, cosmology was, at its core, an examination of forms, of what makes them and of what they themselves make in turn—a poieisis. Minute yet indispensable due to its architectonic function, ephemeral but permanent in its geometric structure, the snowfl ake was presented to Wackenfels in the form of paradoxical praise, following the Mannerist aesthetics of the day. It was certainly meant as an entertaining game, but this game, this Nothing, contained the essential question of the construction of the universe. Thus, Kepler’s New Year’s off ering is simultaneously and irre- ducibly a gift , the evocation of a perfect geometric form, a refl ection on the structure of the world and the exposition of a literary form. It is the association of aesthetics, cosmology, and poetics that is of chief interest in my investigation, which is indebted to Kepler for both the term and the idea of cosmopoetics. A demiurgic game, a meditation both geometric and poetic on creation and on the Creation, a paradoxical association of nothing and * 1 * everything passing from the infi nitely large to the infi nitesimally small—it is in the conceptual space opened up by Kepler’s snowfl ake that I would like to situate this study of the poetics of cosmological discourse. The year 1610 also saw the publication of Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius. Pointing his telescope up at the sky for the fi rst time, he discovered moun- tains on the Moon and spots on the surface of the Sun. With this and similar proofs and despite the trial of 1633, Galileo overthrew centuries of Aristote- lianism that had maintained the incorruptibility of the superlunary world, and at the same time he confi rmed the inability of the Ptolemaic system to explain the universe. Already shaken in the previous century by Copernicus, geocentrism was defi nitively thrown into question by the works of Galileo— Sidereus Nuncius (1610) and Dialoga sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo (1632)—and of Kepler—especially De Stella Nova (1606), Astronomia Nova (1609), and Dissertatio cum Nuncio Sidereo (1610). Their eff orts opened the way for other astronomers by revealing to contemporaries an immense and unanticipated fi eld of exploration. These upheavals in the domain of astronomy constitute one of the elements of what, aft er Alexandre Koyré, has been called the “scientifi c revolution.”3 Astronomy became inseparable from new thinking about the nature of the cosmos at the beginning of the seventeenth century and so became fused with cosmology. Their conjunction will be at the heart of this study, which will consider the term cosmology in its wid- est sense, so as to enable us to consider the diff erent investigations into the structure of the universe made by the century’s natural philosophers. These investigations were not limited to astronomy; they also engaged with micros- copy, optics, and, to a lesser degree, physics and cosmogony. Interest in the interactions between science and literature is not new. In 1925, Alfred North Whitehead remarked that 1605 was the year of the publication of both The Advancement of Learning by Francis Bacon and Don Quixote by Cervantes.4 Michel Serres has illuminated many aspects of the parallel development of scientifi c, philosophical, and literary works that made the seventeenth century one of the privileged “passages”5 between the human sciences and the exact sciences. Thus in Feux et signaux de brume, he stresses the need to move beyond the barriers placed between science and literature. At a stroke, he reunites the history of science and the history of literature, both of which are subsumed under the vast movement of Western history more generally: If there exists a history of literature and if there exists a history of science, the subject of history, in both cases, is born and develops in a society that has its 2 * introduction own divisions, its means of production, its customs, manners, politics, and its own biophysical environment.

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