SOURCE: “Language, Money, Father, Phallus in Cyrano de Bergerac's Utopia,” in Representations, Vol. 23, Summer 1988, pp. 105-17.

In the following essay, Goux explores the reversal of earthly values in the utopian society on the moon depicted in L'Autre Monde.

The belligerent narrator of Cyrano de Bergerac's L'Autre Monde, ou voyage sur la lune, describing a voyage to an “Other World” made possible by the invention of a fantastic machine of springs and rockets, reports to us in minute detail the customs and institutions of language, money, paternity, and the phallus in lunar society.¹ At first glance, these institutions and customs seem as strange and absurd as this impossible country where men walk on all fours, build moveable homes, deny the existence of God, believe that matter is made of atoms and that cabbages are intelligent. Even the wildest fantasies, however, have their coherence; there is no fiction, just as...