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Umberto Eco’s third novel, The Island of the Day Before (1994), is both a feast of postmodernism and a playful reworking of seventeenth-century literary culture, offering an insightful account of the rapid rise of Baconian science. The adventures of the young nobleman Roberto della Griva, stranded on a nearly deserted ship in the southern hemisphere, become both a physical and an intellectual journey through the Baroque Weltanschauung and the exhilarating new perspectives opened by telescopic astronomy, cartography, and mechanics.
Drawing on meta-literary devices and a dense network of references ranging from Descartes and Tycho Brahe to Athanasius Kircher, Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac, Marino, and Fontenelle, Eco ironically deconstructs the tropes of maritime romance and Crusoe-like shipwreck narratives while simultaneously offering a remarkably precise representation of post-Galilean astronomy, whose “perilous proximity to pedagogy” was famously noted by Marina Warner in her 1995 Los Angeles Times review.
This paper explores the novel’s astronomical dimension, arguing that Eco’s interest lies less in the contemplation of celestial phenomena than in the narrative and epistemological structures generated by early modern astronomy. In this respect, Baroque cosmology becomes both a sophisticated storytelling device and a powerful strategy for producing the secular epiphanic moments characteristic of Eco’s fiction.