Through the Deamon’s Gate: Kepler’s “Somnium,” Medieval Dream Narratives, and the Polysemy of Allegorical Motifs (review)

Johannes Kepler, the seventeenth-century mathematician, astronomer, and astrologer, has long been a central figure in the history of science, linked as he is with Galileo and Copernicus as a leading mind of the new astronomy, where he is often viewed as a champion of empirical reasoning and a founding father of modern scientific methods. However, within the last twelve years or so, more attention has been paid to Kepler’s work within the field of literary studies, particularly his posthumously published Somnium. Among the more influential studies of Kepler by literary scholars are James Paxson’s “Kepler’s Allegory of Containment, the Making of Modern Astronomy, and the Semiotics of Mathematical Thought” (1999) and his “Revisiting the Deconstruction of Narratology: Master Tropes of Narrative Embedding and Symmetry” (2001), Mary Baine Campbell’s “Alternative Planet: Kepler’s Somnium (1634) and the New World” (2002), and Ladina Bezzola Lambert’s Imagining the Unimaginable: The Poetics of Early Modern Astronomy (2002). Literary interest in Kepler has opened the Somnium to an examination of its fictional, mythic, and supernatural qualities, aspects of his work that are often dismissed by scholars seeking to present Kepler as the practitioner of an emerging scientific method.

Using the kind of literary approach to Kepler articulated in works like these, Dean Swinford explores the ways the scientific informs the literary, and vice versa, in the Somnium. Swinford’s study undertakes an interdisciplinary examination of the transformation of the narratio fabulosa as a genre, embodied specifically in the medieval cosmological dream allegory, from one that seeks to map the cosmos according to a Christian Neoplatonism deeply wedded to the super-natural/divine to one more firmly based in modern science. Rejecting the belief that such a transformation was a strictly linear process culminating in the seventeenth century, Swinford argues that the transition from Christian philosophy to science was much more recursive, with the supernatural and scientific worldviews continuously informing, writing, and rewriting one another. Such a process is evident in Kepler’s Somnium, which, Swinford illustrates, draws from a mixture of classical thought and Christian philosophy/theology articulated in the medieval dream narratives in order to advance a more scientific understanding of the forces governing the universe. His analysis of dream narratives, in general, and the Somnium, in particular, focuses on the unique aspects of the genre of cosmological dream allegory and reveals one of the primary concerns of this study. More than simply providing a reading of a specific seventeenth-century text, Swinford is interested in a “semiotic analysis of motifs and genres mutated by scientific developments” (5). Through a discussion of the generic qualities of the cosmological dream allegory, its motifs and rhetorical features, Swinford explores the ways that allegory creates meaning. Ultimately, Swinford claims that the genre of cosmological dream allegory adopted by Kepler, with its mixture of supernatural and fantastical elements, combines with the more quantitative and mathematical approaches of the emerging sciences to create a multilayered text that offered multiple significations that “helped to promulgate an emerging scientific discourse and consciousness” (9).

Swinford situates his examination largely within the critical framework of narratology, drawing on the work of Gerard Genette and Tzvetan Todorov to guide his analysis. He divides his argument into two parts, with the first part (chapters 2–5) comprising a discussion of the generic qualities of the cosmological dream allegory, and the second part (chapters 6–9) devoted to an indepth examination of the Somnium itself. This organizational pattern allows Swinford to address those aspects of cosmological dream allegories that are essential to his reading of Kepler’s work. After outlining the nature and scope of his study in chapter 1, he turns his attention in chapter 2 to the problems of the sublime and movement within dream narratives. Swinford acknowledges that the concept of the sublime is problematic when applied to medieval texts, with many, including C. S...