“Transworld Underground: Casanova’s Icosameron and the Limits of Cosmopolitan Hospitality”

Didier Coste, Bordeaux Montaigne University, France

Casanova’s Icosameron, arguably the most important European narrative of its kind in the Enlightenment-
Early Romantic period, has never been much read, let alone critically. Besides a short 1992 dissertation in
German on the “destruction of utopia” and a very recent Polish doctoral dissertation (Warsaw 2023) on
the role of metafiction in the work, less than a dozen scholarly articles are available. The publication of
the book in Prague, 5 volumes, 1788, was a flop. The next edition appeared in Italy in 1928; then, after a
graphic adaptation of this “roman inconnu” [sic] by Lo Duca in 1977, came the Bourin edition in 1988,
without Casanova’s prologues, and an obscure edition by an esoteric faith group, Morya, in 2017. After a
forgotten 1922 German translation, without the commentary of Genesis, the only English “translation”
(1986) is an “abridged” version. Icosameron, a buried book, is thus “underground” in more than one sense.
“Casanovists” or not, the few scholars who manifested a serious interest in this work, have proposed
various explanations of its persistent relegation: either it is too long (i.e. boring), or it was totally eclipsed
by Casanova’s Histoire de ma vie and innumerable rewritings of his adventures, amorous or not. Another
problem is the difficulty of assigning it to a genre: is it a utopia, a dystopia, an imaginary voyage, a
philosophical tale, a political satire, an encyclopaedic survey of 18th century science, or yet an allegory of
Casanova’s repressed sexual ambiguity along with his many other ambiguities according to Lise
Liebacher’s complex psychoanalytic reading of the horizon of indifferentiation?1
In the present comparative paper I shall opt for “all of this and more” as an answer to this
question, but my approach will be spatial, postcolonial and cosmopolitan, these three centres of interest
being inseparable from the discursive structures of the text, the waverings of its modes of fictionality, its
represented plurilingualism, its multiple palimpsestic layers and intertextual suggestions, and the principles
of encounter, discovery and othering that constitute its driving force. What was it in Casanova’s airing of
the finally infelicitous nature of the meeting of two cultural, epistemic and linguistic models that made it
fail to attract attention? Why did this apparently shameless exhibition of an alternative world maintain it
figuratively underground, keeping it secret and unnoticed? A rhetorical analysis of the prefatory
dedication to Casanova’s “employer,” the Count of Waldstein, could provide some hints, but I will seek
further clues in a historical-counterhistorical reading of the seemingly counterfactual fantasy.

1 – Icosameron versus Other Hypochtonic and Allochtonic Narratives

We are tempted at first to compare the Icosmeron with its two modern antecedents or
contemporaries, the anonymous English Voyage to the World in the Centre of the Earth (London,
1755) and Holberg’s Voyage of Niels Klim to the Subterranean World, first published in Latin in 1741,
translated into French in 1788. If Casanova, thanks to his polyglot abilities could have
cognizance of these books, it is far from certain and it is not the point. The point is: what does

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one do with the topos of a voyage to the inner world, whether it is an inferno, a paradise or yet
something more akin to the “real world”?
Holberg, a well-travelled Norwegian author of comedies from Bergen, is supposed to
have written his Niels Klim in Danish but published it in Latin in order to deflect controversy.
The narrator is a student who, back to his native country with the usual degree in Philosophy
and Theology, dedicates himself at first to empirical “physics,” by which he means orography,
speleology and geology, exploring caves for this purpose. Endlessly falling through a natural well,
he first circles the central planet like a moon before landing in the country of Potu, drawn to the
ground of planet Nazar by the weight of a flying dragon he has killed in the air with his hook.
Please note that “Potu,” read backwards, gives Utop and Nazar sounds like a mixture of Nadir
and hazard. Potuland is peopled by conservative, utilitarian human trees who, in their great
wisdom and virtue, distrust innovation, despise precipitation and praise and practice slowness.
Among the Potuans, solidarity and the sense of general interest prevail over idiosyncracies or
even individualities which should be kept private. The Voyage of Niels Klim is a Swiftian satire of
human ways, particularly exemplified by the ridicules of the European aristocracy embodied in a
nation of monkeys. It is written by a single traveller, a bachelor, on his return to the surface of
the earth.
The anonymous English Voyage to the World in the Centre of the Earth borrowed some of the
features of Holberg’s Niels Klim. Its first-person narrator and hero, is penniless like Klim, and
takes to sea for sustenance, but, on arriving in Naples, his insistence to visit the Vesuvius and
peep through its mouth has the dire consequence of making him fall through at an incredible
speed until landing on a moonlike planet, “neither more nor less than a World like ours, for then
I saw Houses, Towns, Trees and Fields.” (11-12) If, like the Potuans, the people of this
communist, frugal and vegetarian Eldorado consider it blasphemous to venerate them, they are
nothing like monsters. Their pious peculiarities do not extend further than the Sikh custom of
not cutting their hair or beard, and ample Indian clothing. They believe that “every part of
Creation is absolutely necessary to keep together the Whole,” (33) and they laugh at the
underground location assigned to the damned by the Catholic church. Their subtropical Eden
where lions are as tame as house-trained puppies is lighted by “carbuncles” of a prodigious size
that we will find again in the Central world of the Icosameron. For the infraterrestrials—and the
visitors grown wise with time spent in their company—the infinite plurality of worlds is a
certainty, and all these worlds are inhabited like plums that house microscopic creatures. Sizes
and ages exist only by comparison and depend on the point of view of mortals.
In the Icosameron’s world, there are no quasi-angels or birdlike souls “inhabiting the air”
after their redemption as there were in the 1755 English Voyage. If there are indeed precious
stones in the Icosameron’s protocosmos, a couple of them being taken in the end to the outer
surface to attend the needs of the worldly creatures accidentally expelled from the underground
world, the two worlds do not communicate easily, the creatures who people them are vastly
different and belong to separate Creations. Moreover, the Icosameron is not a single man’s
relatively brief adventure as was Robinson Crusoe’s or Niels Klim’s or yet the one year spent
among the righteous inhabitants of the underground by the narrator of the Voyage, but it covers
nearly the whole lifetime of a brother and sister irresistibly driven by an exclusive incestuous
impulse. In this sense, the otherness of sameness characterizes members of both worlds.

2 – Otherness and Possible Histories

In his dedicatory epistle, Casanova immediately poses the question of otherness in terms of what
I call “genres of fictionality.” By this, I don’t mean to adhere to a “panfictionality” theory that
would not distinguish between modes and degrees of figurality in the representation of what is
given as “real” or “unreal,” neither do I limit the field of fictionality (vs. directly pragmatic
communication) to narrative discourse. Casanova’s play with the truth status of his narrative
(given as the translation of an English manuscript) is remarkably subtle. He begins thus:
“Nobody in the world is in capacity of deciding whether this work is a history or a novel, not
even the one who would have invented it, as it is not impossible for a judicious pen to write a
true fact at the same time it believes it is inventing it, just as it can write a falsity while being
persuaded it says only truth.” (my translation)2
The Aristotelian distinction between historia and mythos (non-arranged vs. arranged events)
underlies this provocative rhetoric, but does not exactly coincide with it when the novel replaces
tragedy in the opposition: the novel is “invented” in the sense of being fabricated by imagination.
But imagination, interpreting perception and informing memory) is also at play in the writing of
a “history,” so that the “truth” (to the real) of any story is aleatory, depending on whether there
is, was or will be a universe whose inventory coincides with that of the story, not the other way
around. Writing has the initiative; experimenting with possible worlds, its “truth” depends as
much on chance as winning a game of cards given a judicious laying down of one’s cards.
Among the possible worlds afforded by the apparent contradictions, gaps or interpretations of
Genesis, Casanova plays the less obvious one, locating it where it is best hidden, deep
underground, and exposes it to the incursion of chance visitors from the surface.

2 “Personne au monde n’est en état de décider si cet ouvrage est une histoire, ou un roman, pas même celui qui
l’aurait inventé, car il n’est pas impossible qu’une plume judicieuse écrive un fait vrai dans le même temps
qu’elle croit l’inventer, tout comme elle peut en écrire un faux étant persuadée de ne dire que la vérité.” (iii)
 The accidental nature of the fall into the cavity of the globe is shared, as far as I know, by
all the humans who discover it until Jules Verne’s mineralogist, and it is by chance that he reads
an encrypted Latin annotation in runic characters that unveils the entrance, in Iceland, to the
centre of the earth. The political unconscious of the 18th and even the late 19th century, at a time
when the second wave of the appropriation of the rest of the earth by the Europeans was well-
advanced, seems to have dictated screen stories to repress the deliberate, calculated nature of the
imperial enterprise. It was a kind of repeat of the story of Columbus who finds the Americas “by
chance” in his quest of the Western passage to the (East) Indies. In 1492, the official goal was to
open an easy sea route to the Orient—not to conquer it—while the final result was the
“destruction of the (West) Indies” and the enslaving of millions of Africans. In what is
conventionally called “literature of imagination,” voyages to the centre of the earth in modern
times, especially inhabited nether worlds, are no longer driven by a quest for the souls and bodies
of the dead, they vertically displace and euphemize the violent or insidious possession of
inhabited territories out of Europe, and they mime the development of mining linked to the
financing of international trade first, and to the successive industrial revolutions later.
What is symbolically extracted is not material riches, but knowledge, experimental
epistemic systems, a fancy linguistic diversity denied to humankind beyond the dominant
languages of high culture, from Latin to a few powerful European vernaculars. We should note
that, in all three 18th century voyages considered here, the acquisition of the language or
languages of the underground dwellers is vital. Language is not only a means of access to the
culture of the other, it is a key to their ways of thinking, their social bond, and even their
spirituality. Sometimes, its acquisition is arduous and the terrestrial visitors are schooled for
several months; in some cases, it is magical, infused by a philtre one has to drink (and, suddenly,
everything becomes clearer); or yet, it requires an analysis of deep structures and their (quasi)
anthropological motivations. Whatever their shapes, strange in a surreal manner, or familiar, all
the underground dwellers chat, and most of them write. Their languages can vary from a jumble
to a melody, they can rush through their discourses or speak sluggishly and ponderously, but, in
a universe of words, that of the tale, of allegory and metaphor, a limited alterity is marked within
the universal commonality of language practice.

3 – The Grandeur and the Risks of Cosmopolitan Hospitality

Among the corpus of subterranean modern voyages, the Icosmeron is a standalone piece in many
ways. It also differs fundamentally from other earlier or later narratives of exilic or adventurous
mobilities (Robinson Crusoe, mentioned in Casanova’s dedicatory epistle) and philosophical,
satirical, utopian and pseudo-scientific imaginary voyages (from Lucian to Cyrano de Bergerac,
Gulliver’s Travels, Voltaire’s Micromegas, Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, etc.).
First of all, the human traveller is not a single male: Édouard and Élisabeth are “a
beautiful couple” when they return, the “animated image” of what they were when, as teen
siblings (respectively 14 and 12) they presumably sank with their uncle’s ship near Norway,
eighty-one years before. As we shall see, this changes everything.
Second, the Mégamicres who people the underground world are neither fully human like
those of the 1755 Voyage nor hybrid creatures like the human trees and bushes of Potu or the
large human birds who once lived on planet Jupiter. They are neither one more lost tribe of
Israel nor a parahuman species, extinct on the outer surface, who took refuge in a hidden world.
Besides their smaller size and their better minds, morals or spirits, their main differences with the
Adamite humans on the surface are sexual, reproductive and nutritional: androgynous creatures,
they are always born by pairs and live their entire lives together as predestined faithful, fusional
couples; moreover, feeding on each other’s breasts, they cannot survive separately.
Third, if the Icosameron’s “protocosmos” (pre-world or early model for a world) is a
parallel “pre-Adamite” creation, it is neither an inferno nor a garden of Eden. The Mégamicres
are not victims of the original sin, not exiles from a better world, in no need of redemption.
Chronos, destructive time has never begun for them. Falling from the Fall, and thus cancelling
the Fall during their underground sojourn, the humans will never age during 81 earthly years. But
Chronos will rapidly catch up with them on their return while the Mégamicres down under will
suffer the catastrophic consequences of their presence: Édouard and Élisabeth brought the Fall
with them to the noble savages of the Protocosmos.
Fourth, if Casanova’s well-known preference for monarchies over republics is clearly
expressed and his theological knowledge applied to a very heterodox and esoteric interpretation
of the Bible and the sharp critique of superstition (shared by other libertines and Enlightenment
philosophers), his Édouard is neither an atheist nor a revolutionary. The forces in presence are
not Providence and Evil, or power and sensitivity, they are rather chance and science, especially
in its techno-practical incidence.
For all these reasons, any critical reading that follows a single red-thread (psychoanalytic,
historical, political, narratological, and so on) is not only insufficient, but also misleading in that,
paradoxically, there is no Centre in the Icosameron’s complex and intricate world of worlds. Its art
is one of manipulating and accommodating contradiction by fighting binaries without seeking a
dialectical resolution. Adding postcolonial as well as spatial, exilic and cosmopolitan readings to
those already attempted by “Casanovists,” Enlightenment specialists, historians of utopia, etc., as
I wish to do, will not solve the problem, but it might help us understand how a metaphorical
encyclopaedia of possible worlds (including the one we call “real” in the current epistemic
combination) can contribute to perceive our own contradictions and extract aesthetic value from
this perception, admitting the tiers inclu. Contrary to other underground voyages, the suspended
time of the Icosameron makes for an historical in-betweenness in which a possible future is always
already breaking the repetitive immobility of tradition and any regular, linear pace of progress.
In the preliminary dialogue, back on the surface, Mr. Howard declares: “I think that the
man who could conquer this new world for England would reach immortality with glory. I want
to speak to the King.” But Édouard retorts: “[T]his enterprise cannot be counted among the
possible ones. The world from which we come is sure of never becoming prey to the conquerors
of this one.” (141-142) And, more subjectively, in an at once moral and sentimental vein:
I love tenderly the freedom of that other world, whether it can keep it or it is destined to become
the prey of my descendants. Thankful as I am for the benefaction I received from them when
they saved my life eighty-one-years ago, I do not feel I could muster the strength of mind to
become so utterly ungrateful. I wish them well and God be my witness I desire that my children
live always with them in perfect peace. (142-143)3
We know that this wishful thinking—to which one member of the audience finds a “slightly
savage flavour” (144)—has never been honoured in human history, and, together with a
defensive Édouard, we can rightly suspect that it will not be after the introduction of history in
the world of the Mégamicres with a pure event, a radically disruptive one: the arrival of the
human pair. Despite the fact that the cosmological system of the Mégamicres has no centre and
the movements of this world have no identifiable direction, non-cyclic clocks start ticking for
them. In the long run, the Biblical virus of history will irreversibly contaminate a slow, preserved
culture. Just a few years after the American war of Independence and James Cook’s failure to
find the Austral continent, and just a few years before Kant’s Perpetual Peace, the Casanovian
mouthpiece, located back in the 17th century, pleads eloquently against colonial conquest: “they
don’t need us,” he says of the Mégamicres.
The Mégamicres offered unconditional hospitality to a shocked Édouard and Élisabeth,
prisoners of their leaden coffin at the bottom of an abyss after traversing the four elements. This
second birth coincided with the discovery of their sexuality and resulted into the exponential
proliferation of their species: generations and generations of male and female twins every ten
years. In return for the gift of a new, fulfilling life, the humans bring to their hosts some
inventions that should facilitate their lives, such as a simplification of their writing system (but
the scribes become redundant), cataract surgery, the elimination of the nasty snakes that their

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superstition held sacred, and finally gunpowder, used for mining, that will provoke an unwanted
explosion and propel Édouard and Élisabeth back to the surface of the earth with a single
Mégamicre—who will soon die of starvation and sadness.
The attenuated differentiation of the Mégamicres (many skin colours, except black and
white, for example), especially the fact that they escape the binaries of sexual and cultural
difference in similar, but not identical ways to Ursula Le Guin’s Gethenians,4 along with their
fixed, regulated twin courses, explain why they are not haunted by the (un-)certainty of death and
separation and therefore their universalist and cosmopolitan hospitality; but this effective utopia
is threatened and probably doomed by double-edged human inventions (the progress that should
have “improved” their lives) and by the multiplication of Adam’s immortal progeny on their soil.
Certainly, the precocious and adventurous English pair had a special predisposition to re-invent
themselves under new skies, even as they could be driven by the romance of Daphnis and Chloe,
an heterosexual version of Castor and Pollux, so that their fruitful contamination by the
generalized gemellity of the hitherto unknown world they fall in and fall for translates an
unconscious desire for the same projected as other, or vice versa. But the long term balance of
their narrative emergence from the repressed cannot but be fatal for the Mégamicres.
In 1788, the very year Captain Arthur Phillip sails into Port Jackson and establishes the
first penal settlement at Sydney Cove, the full-fledged underground universe of the Icosameron
both remembers the destruction of the Indies (Las Casas) and anticipates the tragic exoticism of
European colonial appropriation in the 19th century as well as the sinister aspects of
Anthropocenic globalization. Underground and in a buried, marginalized narrative, lies the
shocking, queer inner truth to be unearthed; above ground, it is already a non-viable underworld.