SOURCE: “Cyrano's Machines: The Marvelous and the Mundane in L'Autre Monde,” in French Forum, Vol. 18, No. 1, January 1993, pp. 37-46.

In the essay below, MacPhail analyzes Cyrano's rejection of “the marvellous and the verisimilar” in L'Autre Monde, arguing that the author saw them as literary conventions that restrict the imagination.

In the conclusion to his Essay on epick poetry composed in English in 1727, Voltaire attributed the lack of an epic tradition in France to the skepticism of his countrymen toward mythical or supernatural elements in fiction. “It is almost impossible for us to venture on any Machinery,” he observed. “The ancient Gods are exploded out of the World. The present Religion cannot succeed them among us.”¹ One work which anticipates and encourages this sort of incredulity at the same time as it literally mass produces “machinery” is the novel L'Autre Monde ou Les Estats et Empires de la Lune...