January 16, 2020 33
was a little world,” they answer that
“if a Fly or a Worm was a little World,
then Man was so too.” This was more
than just a philosophy of the roman-
tic imagination. It was a philosophy of
consciousness.
“I confess that there are parts in
cheese in which there appear to be
no worms. But what prevents there
from being other smaller worms or
plants in those parts in turn?” wrote
Leibniz in 1699. Sachs recognizes
both the seriousness and the humor
of the seventeenth- century provoca-
tion that man, like cheese, contains
thinking multitudes. He resurrects
the conventions of the earliest comic
novels—Jonathan Swift’s satires of
rationalism, Henry Fielding’s chatty,
self-conscious narrators—to reveal
that human thought is, fundamentally,
absurd; that every mind is like the wob-
bly, distorted, and self-parodic mise en
abyme created by the mirrors in a fun-
house. Kepler may have been a genius,
the astronomer tells young Leibniz,
but he was also an unrepentant gastro-
nome whose mind was always “scream-
ing for bread dumplings,” making him
sleepy and stupid and causing him to
miss “untold astronomical phenomena
throughout his life.” The blind astrono-
mer’s father, imperial sculptor to Em-
peror Maximilian II, devoted years to
“gluing thousands or tens of thousands
of tiny mirrors to the inside walls of a
box” to create an “infinitely mirrored
microcosm of the cosmos,” only to re-
alize that the box was “basically just a
lot of mirrors.” The novel’s comedy de-
flates our heroic illusions about serious
men thinking serious thoughts. Ratio-
nality is always waylaid by man’s baser
appetites and illogical faiths, the “lu-
minous instincts” that reason can never
blind itself to, the desires that clarify
and obscure with equal intensity.
Capturing the recursive absurdity
of thought, as well as the centrality of
that thought to the human understand-
ing of the universe, requires a narrative
form that can expand from the inner
folds of the mind to the outer recesses
of the cosmos. The blind astronomer’s
story is nested in Leibniz’s written ac-
count of it, which is, in turn, nested in
the translation of Leibniz’s account
from Latin to English, a translation
performed in the present day by a mys-
terious, hovering narrator, his pres-
ence glimpsed in the commentary he
provides on Leibniz’s account. Con-
sider the story the astronomer relays
to Leibniz, and Leibniz’s translator
relays to us, of a story the emperor’s
court chamberlain told the astronomer,
which the emperor had told the court
chamberlain, about the emperor’s pur-
chase of a painting, Giuseppe Arcim-
boldo’s weird mannerist masterpiece
Water (see illustration on page 34):Once, many years later, as the Em-
peror’s Court Chamberlain and I
stood in the Castle before Arcim-
boldo’s Water, he told me the fol-
lowing story. He and the Emperor,
he told me, had once stood before
that very painting, just as he and
I stood before it now.... And the
Emperor told his Court Cham-
berlain how he came to possess
that spectacular painting, which
as surely you know, Herr Leibniz,
depicts the head of a woman by the
ingenious juxtaposition of a thou-sand beasts and beings of the sea.
The Emperor says to him: Many
years ago, one of my agents, a soi-
disant connoisseur of the art of
Italy, returned from a journey to
Florence and Milan with two paint-
ings for my consideration, each
portraying the head of a woman in
profile, but one which did so with
perfect grace, naturalness, and
simplicity, while the other did so
by the juxtaposition of fish, many
fish, “together the fish make a
head,” the agent told the Emperor.Like Arcimboldo’s painting, which lay-
ers lobster on stingray on shrimp on
octopus to create the painterly illusion
of a head, The Organs of Sense embeds
the voices of its storytellers to create a
universe of thought that seems at once
bounded and infinite, composed of
many alien points of view. The novel
can speak in the gently parodic inter-
jections of Leibniz’s translator, the
goofy exclamations of the astronomer,
the officious tones of a seventeenth-
century emperor. It can simultaneously
peer out, through the eye of the tele-
scope, at the splendor of the heavens,
and gaze in, at the refractions of its own
manic thinking.
In the first hour Leibniz and the
astronomer spend together, the as-
tronomer tells Leibniz about how he
once helped his father fashion “out of
pure matter a mechanical head that
could speak in a human voice.” His fa-
ther had planned to present the head
to Maximilian’s moody, supercilious
heir, Emperor Rudolf II, a collector
of mechanisms who was obsessed with
verisimilitude. The artificial head hadto be indistinguishable from a real
head, the astronomer’s father warned,
even though the two were to perform
very different functions: “One head
was to be looked into: the mechanical
head. The other was to be looked out
from: his own organismic head. The
former head had to speak, blink, and
chomp, the latter head to think and
see.” Face to face with the bored em-
peror, the mechanical head turns out to
be “worthless, a curio, an aristocratic
gewgaw.” The only organs worth sal-
vaging are the eyes: two convex lenses
that the astronomer plucks out and, in a
moment of desperate inspiration, holds
up to the light to invent the first tele-
scope and win the favor of the emperor.
What’s funny here is not simply see-
ing the human head treated like a ma-
chine. The alienation of body from soul
is an old party trick: no improvement
on the pneumatic head of Don Quix-
ote, which betrays its audiences’ secrets
by means of a man concealed within,
whispering through the pipes; as false
as Roger Bacon’s “brazen head,” which
claimed to voice the future in the thir-
teenth century. Rather, what’s funny
is realizing that the human head is a
machine of sorts. “Everything that
happens in the human body... is just
as mechanical as what happens in a
watch,” Leibniz wrote in a letter to
the philosopher Samuel Clarke. The
human head was never primarily “a
thinking thing,” the blind astronomer
concludes as he observes the real and
artificial heads of his father moving
in tandem. Rather, the head was “a
singing thing, a chomping thing, and a
blinking thing.” It was “a machine of
nature,” an assemblage of organs, each