"The Other World": Telescopic Vision in Descartes and Cyrano de Bergerac

• In Event: Vision and Its Instruments in Early Modern Literature III

Abstract

In 1609, the refinement of the telescope by Galileo and his subsequent observations take Europe by a storm by challenging Aristotelian and Christian beliefs. But they also uncover a peculiar universe due to technical and visual issues that René Descartes discusses in Optics (1637): to use a telescope, one should cover one eye, accustom oneself to the dark and ready one’s imagination so that the eye would open all the more and the considered object would appear all the greater. This new mode of vision becomes a driving aesthetic force in Cyrano de Bergerac’s The Other World (1657), which showcases the narrator’s trip to the moon and the sun. By surveying this work, which is, at once, highly fanciful and grounded in recent scientific discoveries, I aim at uncovering the aesthetics of a telescopic vision first formulated by Descartes, which cuts across traditional time and space divides.

Author

• Valentine Balguerie, Colby College