Fictions of the Cosmos: Science and Literature in the Seventeenth Century by Frédérique Aït-Touati (review)

From the moon, Africa looked like a head bending in a kiss toward Europe. Europe was a young girl in a long dress, stretching out her hand to reach a leaping cat: Scandinavia. No: Europe was a pear, with a bite removed. And South America was a bell, hanging from the rope of Nicaragua and Mexico. And then the earth turned, and everything changed again.

These are only a few of the striking images that emerge from Frédérique Aït-Touati’s Fictions of the Cosmos: Science and Literature in the Seventeenth Century, a book as sweeping as the epic journeys from earth to moon and beyond that it traces from antiquity to the scientific revolution. By returning to this peculiar early modern genre, which is populated by witches, space-traveling demons, and aliens who wander the lunar surface while gazing at the spectacle of the globe above them, Aït-Touati tells the story of how the rotation of the earth became an established astronomical fact and a demonstration piece for the mathematical procedures that characterize modern scientific method. Across Europe—from Johannes Kepler in Prague, to Francis Godwin and John Wilkins at Oxford, to Robert Hooke in London; from Cyrano de Bergerac in Paris, to Bernard de Fontenelle in Rouen, to Christiaan Huygens in the Hague—the earth’s movement and its grand orbit through the heavens became a captivating problem for scientific and literary authors alike and a central fulcrum for the larger transformation of ancient cosmology into the new astronomy, as Aït-Touati describes it in one of the book’s broadly Kuhnian arguments. But if Thomas Kuhn presides as a tutelary spirit here, it is Kuhn as he might have emerged from seminars in Paris with Griemas and Foucault, after sharing a cigarette with Feyerabend and grooving on his “anything goes” attitude. For Fictions of the Cosmos is, by turns, a subtle literary history of a forgotten genre and a risk-taking, ambitious exercise in the history of science, one that sets out not simply to describe a paradigm shift in astronomical thinking but to sketch a revolution in the status of “fiction” itself. Its goal is to recover a moment in the history of European thought when familiar distinctions between “literary” and “scientific” writing were far more blurry than we have become accustomed to, when literature still had the right to say something serious about the composition of the world and its consequences for those who lived in it, and science, as it stepped toward heterodoxy, did whatever it needed to stay alive.

For some time now, historians, literary critics, political theorists, sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers, and others who come to trade in the interdisciplinary zone of “science studies” have been conducting an ongoing conversation about the nature of scientific knowledge and what debt, if any, it might owe to the humanities. What, finally, makes a statement about reality “true”: Is it mere belief, or is it something more? And into this ongoing conversation—often technical, always lively, and sometimes controversial—Aït-Touati throws a provocative hypothesis. What if fiction has been handling the big ontological problems all along—the questions about what is and what is not, about what kinds of things “are” and to what degree they are with us? Has not fiction gone even further, making beings and setting them before us to reflect on their peculiar condition? What, exactly, does fiction know? What can it tell us or teach us?

Fictions of the Cosmos approaches the question by returning to what is perhaps the single most irrefutable and iconic example of inquiry into the nature of reality in the history of Western science: Copernicus’s announcement in his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543) that the earth rotated on its axis and orbited the sun, along with the moon...