#95 = Volume 32, Part 1 = March 2005
George Slusser
Why They Kill Jules Verne: SF and
Cartesian Culture
Zénon! Cruel Zénon d’Elée
(Zeno, Zeno, cruel philosopher Zeno,
M’as-tu percé de cette flêche ailée! Have you then
pierced me with your feathered arrow
Qui vibre, vole, et qui ne vole pas! That hums and flies, yet
does not fly!
Le son m’enfante et la flêche me tue! The sounding shaft
gives me life, the arrow kills.)
—Paul Valéry, “Le Cimétière marin” (trans. C. Day Lewis,
“The Graveyard by the Sea”)
In 1978, Bernard Blanc published a curious yet significant book, Pourquoi
j’ai tué Jules Verne (Why I Killed Jules Verne). Described by a reviewer as
a “mixed bag of criticism, anecdotes, stories, extracts from round-table
discussions, and interviews” (PC 12), Blanc’s book offers more than the
hyperbole associated with generational revolt. Despite its polemics, it asks us
and all those interviewed in the book to take the killing of Verne seriously, as
an act of cultural consequence. Indeed, there is a strong cultural current for
such acts. Verne is designated the “father of science fiction,” so the killing,
for Blanc and fellow writers, is a patricide. But Verne the father is both
patriarch of sf and, as such, material tyrant. His killing harkens back to
revolution and regicide, the fall of divine right, and the subsequent rise of
new, “Romantic” tyrants: Constant’s despot Napoléon, and Balzac’s Centenarian,
the 400-year-old patriarch who will not die and who uses material science to
sustain his life and tyrannical rule. The Jules Verne that Blanc presents is in
this lineage, a figure who can only be deposed by violence and murder.
There is a deeper current here, however—one suggested by the Valéry epigraph
and its fascination with death and rebirth in the Eleatic realm of mind. In this
sense, the first act of “killing,” in which the individual mind deposes the
divine right of authority, is the Cartesian cogito. In a very real sense
the individual, by stating “I think, therefore am,” declares itself, against the
tyranny of matter, an entity absolute in itself, qualitatively other.1
In overthrowing authority, the cogito establishes two irreconcilable
domains—one of thought, the other of matter. In the Eleatic context Valéry
evokes, “killing” becomes the act of shifting from the physical level of things,
where the arrow kills, to the mental level, where the arrow flies and does not
fly. In this interval, ever prolonged by an act of rational mind, killing the
patriarch is simultaneous with the birthing of a new entity, the cogito as
Cartesian child. This cogito, in the boundless realm of imagination, can
become father to the man, creature of paradox. In the killing of Verne, then,
the mind reasserts power over a world, but no longer a world of extended matter,
the world commonly seen as that of science. Blanc is a French sf writer, asking
sf writers in this French context to kill Verne. As this act of patricide
involves the violent substitution of a mental for a material world, it is the
act that defines the particular form of French sf. Further, this substitution,
or a desire to do so, defines a particular French sense of science, marked by
constant evocation of the cogito in realms of investigation where
material process holds sway. Valéry not only traces this tendency back to
Descartes but also describes it as an act of “killing” matter: “The substitution
of numbers for forms ... [results in] the depreciation of all forms that
cannot be translated into arithmetical relationships” (225). The killing of
Verne is a problem not just for sf writers, but for French culture at large. Let
us pursue the treatment of Verne in the broader context of his popular image.
Jules Verne, Father of Science Fiction. Claims for Jules Verne as “father of
science fiction” may be a post-World War II phenomenon. Indeed, the term
“science fiction” was current in France only after the 1950s. During this period
Verne, whom Gernsback had recycled as an American author and who subsequently
influenced “Golden Age” writers, was repatriated to France in the context of an
American “invasion” of sf. The main point of contact was the magazine Fiction,
which began publication in 1953 and ceased only in 2001. Fiction began as the
French version of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, with the
primary task to publish translations of American stories. A coup d’état soon
occurred, however, at the editorial level of the French magazine, and articles
began to appear that sought to define a native tradition of sf, in contrast to
the flood of American writers. This native tradition needed its own ancestor.
Verne was the obvious figure. But Verne from the outset was a problematic father
figure. For in this “American” context, his materialism and positivist vision
stood out in an overwhelming manner. The first to declare Jules Verne the
“father of sf” was critic Jean-Jacques Bridenne. Almost at once, however, in his
presentation of Verne, the father appears as a tyrant who resists being deposed.
If comparisons with rivals Wells and Poe cannot do so, Verne’s own material side
will be pushed to its maximum, so that it collapses upon itself, revealing a
radically opposite presence within.
Bridenne, in his column “Les à-côtés de l’anticipation” [“The Side Issues of
Anticipation”], was the critic assigned to establish lineages and pedigrees for
French sf. His article, entitled “Jules Verne, père de la science-fiction?,”
which appeared in issues 6-8 of Fiction, significantly poses a question.
Indeed, in this article doubt leads to a logic of negation that portends later
acts of patricide. Bridenne, in his inquiry, first measures Verne against
arch-rival H.G. Wells. The comparison, while claiming Verne’s paternity,
curiously diminishes his authority. For Wells writes for adults, while Verne
writes for adolescents: “Thus is Wells audacious in a very different manner from
his so-called French model. What is more, he addresses grown-ups, even very
well-educated grown ups” (II, 109). Wells the writer is an adult speaking to
adults. While both are prone to share the “big questions” of science, the
philosophical consequences of scientific discovery, Verne speaks to readers who
are, at their stage, only interested in the “consequences techniques” [technical
consequences] of science: “Wells was more responsive to the enigmas of science
than to simply learning it ... but he did not use these enigmas as others did to
merely horrific ends ... he was particularly concerned with their impact on
human beings” (II, 111). Bridenne has in a sense moved Wells away from material
science, in the direction of a sort of Asimovian humanism: “big” ideas and their
maturely conceived human repercussions. Verne, on the other hand, is interested
only in “learning” science at the level of material processes, in conveying this
morally neutral information to morally neutral readers.
Bridenne now invokes another “rival,” radically contrasting with Wells—the
immature materialist Poe. In contrast, Poe is pure tinkerer, not interested in
ideas but in material objects and how they work. Verne is seen sharing Poe’s
materialism: “[Verne] speculated especially in the area of mechanical devices
and believed implicitly in the continuity of the material advancement of
humanity” (II, 111). Verne is much more than Poe, however, not his imitator but
his “émule original” [original emulator]. He emulates by taking Poe to the
limit, so to speak. When, for instance, he rewrites Arthur Gordon Pym in
his Sphinx of the Ice, he roots out and “explains” all remaining doubts
in Poe’s work: “What is certain is that Poe leaves us in the most somber
uncertainties and that Verne claims to extricate us from these ... and extricate
us by positive, if not positivist, means” (III, 114).
There appears to be a rhetorical strategy behind Bridenne’s search to define
the nature of Verne’s paternity. Verne is first placed on a sliding relative
scale between his two rivals: he is less adult than Wells, but more adult than
Poe. Such comparisons, however, prove problematic. We learn, for example, that
Poe is better than Verne at transmuting the material things of science into
“mystical or hermetic elements.” In other words, Poe regresses too rapidly
toward childhood. But Wells grows old too fast. Wells may be better than Verne
in terms of extrapolation, yet “Wells rapidly evolved from scientific
anticipation to an anticipation that is rather sociological prophesy” (III,
114). On such a comparative scale, Verne is definable only in terms of two
negative propositions that, as they cancel each other, resolve into a
paradoxically positive statement: “Neither the popularizer, nonetheless
invaluable, nor even the anticipator (overtaken and outmoded by the science of
the scientists) should make us forget this ‘visionary haunted by cosmic poetry’
that M. Fouré speaks about in the magazine Arts and Letters” (I, 112).
Bridenne’s use of negatives evokes the rhetoric of Pascal—notably the device
of the renversement continuel du pour au contre [continual reversal of
for to against] by which Pascal attacks the excess of quantitative or
relativistic comparisons through vexatious cultivation of what he calls
contrariétés, continual, reductive dialectical oppositions. Pascal applies
this process to the material aspirations of mankind: “If he exalt himself, I
humble him; if he humble himself, I exalt him; and I always contradict him,
until he understands that he is an incomprehensible monster” (Pascal 420).
Trapped in this quantitative flux, mankind is an inscrutable monster. In a
paradox within a paradox, however, it is through understanding or knowing
itself as incomprehensible that mankind raises itself to another level of
reality—that of always, of absolute categories of being. Bridenne, in terms of
Verne, suddenly resolves his comparison between Verne and Wells with a shift to
the superlative: “Great both of them, they have evolved, the one in a fixed,
three-dimensional universe [Wells], the other in a multi-dimensional, constantly
shifting, universe. Verne is the father of science fiction period [tout court],
Wells is the father of science fiction today” (II, 112). We notice that the
“Wells” of this opposition now stands in the shoes of the material Verne, ruler
of the “fixed” dimensions of space-time. In absolute contrast, however, a new
Verne holds sway in a “constantly shifting” universe of disproportion and
Pascalian reversals. Here, logical operations create a multi-dimensional space
in which our Verne tout court is subject to oppositions of maximums and minimums
that, when combined, form oxymorons. One minute, we see that “despite his
overflowing imagination ... [Verne] never anticipates except from a base of
inventions that have already been invented.” The next minute, the opposite is
asserted in equally absolute manner: “The example of Jules Verne proves
that with known positive science ... it is possible, in alternate manner,
to cause anxiety and amuse the reader, to alienate him, to surrealize the
real” (I, 113).
In Pascalian fashion, Bridenne subjects Verne to violent reversals, until at
some magic point mind emerges from matter, and the material father gives way to
the Cartesian child. The new Verne, able to surrealize the real, is itself the
creation of paradox, where nothing in terms of matter becomes all in terms of
mind. Pascal’s “thinking reed” offers a clearer model for this violent shift of
orders of reality. In relation to the material infinite, the reed operates from
a position of absolute weakness. The reed is the feeblest thing in the
universe; a drop of water suffices to crush it. But the reed knows it is
crushed, while the universe knows nothing. Bridenne’s operation is analogous. He
proclaims Verne the absolute father of sf in order to conjure the eternal
juvenile at the center of his work; he annihilates the materialist writer
between Wells and Poe, only to resurrect him as a surrealist. What seems the
weakest element in any material equation, the surrealist mind, finds itself
suddenly on a par with the farthest reach of Verne’s physical explorations. In
this newly constituted Cartesian space of action, material elements are
transmuted into objects of wonder: “By the sole virtue of his varied and solid
knowledge and the extrapolations they allowed him to perform, Jules Verne often
arrived at a strange grandeur, a serene exaltation of the beauties, oddities and
rages of nature, at an astonishing and concrete apprehension of
Tomorrows” (II, 115). Proclaimed father of sf, Verne is “killed” in the sense
that his materialist tendencies are maximized to their authoritarian absolute,
then cancelled in favor of their minimalist opposite. Verne is the surreal poet,
all mind, now empowered to exalt “the beauties ... and rages of nature”—because,
as surrealist, he is absolutely powerless to make any material change in them.
Verne’s Tomb and Descartes’s Stove. Bridenne’s “father of sf” is the Verne
we see on his famous cenotaph at Amiens, the bearded patriarch depicted as
bursting the boundaries of his tomb, rising to further conquest of matter. Yet
as with Bridenne’s portrait, this stone image embodies a paradox, where the
author is presented both rising and held forever in the act of rising. The
paradoxical oppositions in Bridenne’s article are themselves a form of
entombment, a French reading of Verne’s statuary. As with Descartes’s famous
“stove,” article and tomb alike form a material capsule, from which the only
issue is into the alternate world of mind.
Verne’s tomb was misread by Hugo Gernsback, who used it as the logo for his
magazine of ‘scientifiction,” Amazing Stories. His vision of Verne as
material force pushing back physical boundaries yielded the expansive “American”
Verne extolled by Isaac Asimov: “Jules Verne ... breathes optimism in his tales.
His heroes probe the air and the sea depths; they penetrate ... to the height of
the Moon and to the depths of the Earth’s center.... There are barriers to be
hurdled, and the hurdling’s the thing” (105). The monument’s inscription,
however, suggests a very different interpretation: “Onward to immortality and
eternal youth.” Here, suspended in perfect antithesis, we have the two
irreconcilable terms of Bridenne’s analysis: on one hand, the eternal father,
the old tyrant who refuses to die; on the other, eternal youth as mind, ever
revivable in the way Descartes’s cogito is ever declarable at the zero
point of the stove, after methodical doubt has annihilated all attachment to the
physical world.
Science, in nineteenth-century France, increasingly appears to commentators
to be “killing” literature. This killing, moreover, is associated with a
developmental, even “parental” model of thinking in Auguste Comte, whose theory
of the stages or “ages” of development of human thought and institutions openly
speaks of the “age of science” as that of mankind’s maturity. To Comte, the
earliest, “theological” stage is cast as “the earliest infancy of the human
mind” (Lenzer 23). The intermediate “metaphysical” stage is more troubling yet,
because in the form of “romanticism,” it overlaps in the nineteenth century with
the age of science. In Comtean terms, it constitutes an adolescent rebellion
against the advent of scientific maturity.
Comte’s view of science as ordained condition of cultural maturity was
decried by proponents of literature, and his formulation of the “laws of
phenomena,” which reduced all knowledge to physical relations of similitude and
sequency of events, spawned reactions that seem “juvenile” by the petulant
manner in which they reject science. An example is the journal entry of Edmond
and Jules Goncourt, dated July 16, 1856. Using the example of Poe’s stories,
they describe what they call the “scientific miraculous,” in essence what will
become the “hard” sf of the coming century: a form of writing where cold
science, with authoritarian lack of imagination, corrupts the human process of
fiction. What is more interesting is the sense that, for the Goncourts, the
impact of science is turning literature, once the place of adult emotions,
itself into an infantile form. It becomes a “story by A + B,” where “things will
have a greater part than men,” in a sense the sick, sequestered child of a
scientific twentieth century to come, a century that will finally entomb
humanity in matter (Goncourt 18). As will be the case later with Matthew Arnold,
the scientific spoiler is America, in the form of the writer Poe. A few years
more, however, and the Goncourts would have an example of this tyrannical
scientific fiction close to home. Verne and his brand of scientific narrative
were on the horizon, ready to bury “real” literature forever.
This maximizing vision of science fiction and its despotic hold on humanist
literature echoes the radical situation of Pascal’s reed. Lost in vast physical
immensity, “man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature ... a drop of
water suffices to crush him” (Pascal 97). Yet at the point of absolute material
disparity, readjustment occurs on a different level of reality; man is more
noble because “he knows he dies and the advantage the universe has over him; the
universe knows nothing of this” (97). Verne’s tomb, all unthinking
matter, buries literature. But within its iron constraint, by virtue of
Pascalian paradox, it becomes the place where the physical tyrant is absolutely
displaced, where the weakest overthrows the strongest, and (in a strange French
version of Wordsworth’s romantic proclamation) the child becomes father to the
man. Tellingly, for the Goncourts, the literature born in the iron grip of
science is “a literature that is sickly and lucid” (18; my italics).
Material conscription must reach its tyrannical maximum before the
counterbalancing mind emerges.
An analogy can also be drawn between the Goncourts’ vision of literature in
the age of scientific realism and the process of radical doubt that leads to
declaration of the Cartesian cogito. In both cases reason affirms its
existence, thus its active identity, through withdrawal from the extended
world in what is an act of entombment (the Cartesian “stove”). But where
Descartes’s is a figurative burial, the Goncourts, in a century haunted by
Pascal’s sense of the human condition, see a literal one—Poe’s premature burial,
with its horrors of sickness unto death. But there is, in this grimly
existential context where science the killer (the material Verne) must be killed
in turn, a sense that we revisit the Cartesian gambit or feint. Measured
against the physical world represented by the confining stove, reason adopts a
stance of radical weakness. The famous “method” of doubt, transposed to Verne’s
century of dominant materialist science, can be read as a process whereby mind,
entombed in matter, systematically peels away all vestiges of its extended being
through what seems a violent disembodiment.2 For example, in a famous
passage in his “Méditation seconde,” Descartes doubts not only that what he is
looking at is wax (that is, has the essential quality we call “wax”), but that
he has eyes to see it with: “For it can happen that what I am seeing is not in
fact wax; it can also occur that I don’t even have eyes that see any object at
all” (152). For Descartes, doubt is a tactic that allows him to think himself
out of contact with extended existence, while thinking himself into existence,
on the level of being which is that of pure mind. For Verne’s contemporaries,
however, the stove becomes Verne’s tomb. For the Goncourts and others, this
tomb, rather than a place that celebrates the material self, becomes the context
in which that self is killed so that in the place of Verne the father, a new
creature of mind, ruling over purest mindspace, can be reborn. In this sense,
the Cartesian cogito, as process, accommodates this particular French
form of Romantic revolt against the coming of age of material science.
A French “reading” of Verne’s tomb, then, would be in terms of the Cartesian
entombment of the Goncourts’ nemesis Poe in Mallarmé’s poem, “Le Tombeau d’Edgar
Poe.” The American writer is depicted on Mallarmé’s imaginary monument as
wielding a naked sword. This wielding, however, is more an act of paradox than
of physical defiance: “The Poet arouses with naked sword/His century terrified
at not having known/That Death triumphed in that strange voice” (189). As with
the funereal Verne, the material world has defeated Poe, the tomb contains him
in the same manner as res extensa that encompasses Descartes’s cogito or
Pascal’s reed. At this level, statue and sword neither speak nor triumph but
simply exist in mute material finality. “Voice” or “triumph” belong here to an
alternate realm of activity, where death is not a material fact but a
personification, a figuration of non-material mind. As this mind-matter duality
emerges, we realize that the scientific century that entombs Poe could not
know the voice described here. It is the product of paradox, a voice that
triumphs (like Pascal’s reed) in knowing it is entombed, indeed in knowing that
this triumph is the necessary result of entombment. Poe’s tomb, like Descartes’s
“stove” or the physical body subject to the process of Cartesian doubt, provides
a material space that, once its limits are circumscribed by rational process,
allow the mind that it encloses free reign to shape its counterintuitive ideas,
to translate stone into personification. With this insight, we now see that the
very granite in which materialist America seeks to contain Poe’s spirit is
itself impregnated, at its origin, by mind, “fallen” from some cosmic, yet
remembered, cataclysm. This stone (“calm block to earth fallen from some
disaster obscure”) is part of Pascal’s fearful infinite silences. Yet one need
only invert the proposition, in the manner of Pascal’s reversals (renversements).
Now this block, as boundary of the tomb, does not contain mind, but shelters,
excludes it from material extension, offering sanctuary to this avatar of the
thinking reed. It marks the negative limit to the process of material reduction:
(“Let this granite at least forever reveal his limit/To those dark flights of
Blasphemy scattered through the future”). This limit marks Pascal’s zero-point,
the place of reversal where nothing joins all, here in the ambiguous grammatical
turn of à jamais [never-forever].
To entomb Poe in Mallarmé’s hermetic verse is to conflate physical burial and
mind-born rejuvenation. The Goncourts’ materialist poet is killed and confined
forever. These absolute limits, however, are needed if we are to liberate the
mind buried in matter, to allow it future “dark flights,” adolescent acts of
defiance, but now in the non-material realm of symbol, Blasphemy with a capital
B. In the French context, it seems, such burial is always necessary and always
premature, but in a particular sense. The tomb is not, as with Gernsback, a
place of life extension in the physical sense. Nor is it (as with the
materialist Poe) the horror of being entombed “before one’s time.” In Mallarmé’s
vision, as in the Verne cenotaph, to kill and bury the material man is to
consign his “maturity” to the material world of measurements and limits. As
such, it is abolished, but only to be replaced by the antithetical idea of
“pre-maturity” as a state not only anterior to, but fundamentally different
from, the order of extended things. Seen in light of this radical reversal, the
tomb no longer holds matter in. Instead, it keeps the material out, forms a
refuge and enclosed space in which mind is free to play.
Mass Murders: The Image of Verne in French Popular Culture. Verne’s own
nineteenth century would gladly have buried the materialist tyrant and used the
tomb as means of effecting, along lines of a Cartesian dynamic, the emergence of
their own French version of the Romantic child as father to the man. Yet in
Verne’s case, the image of the patriarch remains on the tomb in Amiens. This is
the image of the forceful, bearded patriarch of the famous Nadar study, a
photographic portrait that already in Verne’s time became an icon of material
progress. Mallarmé did not have to contend with a strong visual presence in Poe.
It was easy for him to move from a blank block of granite to the mysterious
realm within, where it is easy to re-constitute the rebellious Poet outside all
limits of physical reality. Verne’s tomb, however, has a face. And that face
remains to command, not only Bridenne as he seeks an ancestor for science
fiction, but numerous situations in popular culture where, in the clash between
tradition and technology, the latter must take a concrete form. Material science
is ever the adversary of the Cartesian cogito, and Verne the tyrannical
patriarch is available to be “killed” and “buried,” again and again, so that the
cultural “soul” of France may be reborn, as explorer in its own mental spacetime.
The persistent use of the Verne icon—an image in a sense “killed,” frozen in
time—raises the question of anachronism and its uses in the Cartesian culture.
Verne is presented not only as the father of sf, but as the father of tomorrow.
To depict this, the bearded Verne is regularly thrust into depictions of some
technologically transformed present or future. His archaic “laboratory” is made
to co-exist in the same frame as modern scanners, computers, and the like. These
compositions are visual paradoxes. For Verne here is no figurative presence, a
Father of Tomorrow. His bearded image is thrust into that tomorrow as intrusive
physical presence. The man who physically inspired tomorrow insists on hanging
around in the world he created and in the same physical form, asserting
his presence as the old patriarch who will not die. Verne in this role is the
avatar of Balzac’s Centenarian, another scientist who refuses to yield his
material body to future generations. Like Kronos of old, the Centenarian feeds
instead on his progeny, drawing from them the energy needed to sustain his aged
body, a body itself compared to a funereal statue. In like manner, this
anachronistic Verne acts as vampire on the very future he is said to sire.
However much Verne is said to incarnate technological advancement, his
constant representation as bearded patriarch serves in fact to halt all promise
of transformation, to freeze past and future in a fatal dualism. An example of
this is found in a Toshiba ad in Le Figaro (November 13, 1988). The ad
has this innocent-seeming caption: “Jules Verne imagined the 20th century,
Toshiba creates today and tomorrow” (34). The ad’s stated intent is to laud
technology as an organically developing process. Yet what is visually presented
as Verne’s “imagining” of the twentieth century is in fact a period-piece lab,
where machines such as x-ray equipment, depicted as they were invented in his
time, provide the setting for the familiar bearded figure. Verne is said to be
the father of the future. Yet what these archaic graphics seem to express,
filling the entire composition as they do, is total resistance to change, an
aggressive sense that the old is unwilling to die at any cost. Once this
interdictive anachronism is in place, the sole way of dealing with it is to
superimpose images on top of the closed frame. With no space available to
present a series of changing forms, the ad thrusts shimmering modern Toshiba
appliances dead into the center of Verne’s laboratory, creating a sharp
dichotomy. In visual terms, Verne rules absolutely over his world of senescent
science, whose images fill the page, leaving no space for anything modern. The
code evoked by this nineteenth-century apparatus is that of historical
“realism,” signifying science and technology at their material apogee. The new
machine, appearing in the “window” at the center, exists in fantastical
juxtaposition to Verne’s “world.” In a Cartesian sense, it is an entity by
“imagination” or mind, in response to the tyranny of matter. This subliminal
duality constitutes the visual field in which the Verne icon is presented in
popular imagery.
The same icon may appear as a figure in written texts as well, where it often
functions as a mask placed on flamboyant modern technocrats, making them avatars
of Verne and his protagonists. An example is found in a Paris Match
article (July 5, 1975), entitled “Jules Verne au Mont-Saint-Michel.” Once again,
the mere name “Jules Verne” stands for technological progress. Moreover, to cast
progress in his image is to depict it as patriarchal aggression against the
natural world. More, however, is at stake here than just nature, for the piece
of real estate up for transformation in this case is a sacred cultural shrine
for the French. Verne, the material tyrant who will not die, is reincarnated
here in the paternalistic technocrat Albert Caquot, who is proposing to build a
huge hydroelectric project off the coast of Normandy. The language describing
this project is clearly that of devourer and devoured:
France is hungry for
electricity, oil is expensive, and the idea was born to block off the bay by
means of a giant dike 100 kilometers long in order to make use of the ocean
surge that pours into this natural funnel. By the dozens, beaches would be
sealed off behind concrete, and life along 200 kilometers of coast perturbed. As
crazy as this proposal might seem, it has its defenders. (30)
This is a terraforming project worthy of Verne. It does not, however, blow up
Mt. Kilimanjaro or Cape Canaveral. Much worse for a French public, it violates
both the natural and sacred rhythms of this “eternal” location in French
cultural history: “For ten centuries the Mont-Saint-Michel has testified to the
permanence of things” (31). At the time of writing, permanence is measured in
terms of beaches and tourists. As with the natural tides, the tourist season
brings a measured ebb and flow of visitors to this place. The article
characterizes the opposition here as one of “Jules Verne against the ecology,”
and the choice of terms is significant. The Greek root of the word “ecology” is
oikos, house or home. As described here, the Mont-Saint-Michel is a
“dwelling” occupied less by people than by a cultural presence. If this modern
Verne assails home and family, these have become ideal entities, belonging to a
France of the mind. These are sites whose permanence is guaranteed by the
cogito, even as material France is attacked and devoured. The problem posed
here is not one of change and the future. It is choice between good and bad
“ecologies,” families run by good or bad heads of household. The implication is
that the good home, in this case the sacred order, is one regulated by the
cogito, in the sense that, just as the pilgrim must always be able to return
to its shrine, or the tourist to its monument, so the self at any moment is free
to create its space of rational thought, outside all attachment to res
extensa. This latter, in contrast, is the bad home, a place “deregulated,”
in the sense that it is given over to unthinking material process—in this case,
the cold equations of diminishing energy supply and increasing demand for oil
and power. In this realm, the image is not one of mind, but of mouth. France is
said to “hunger” for electricity. The giant dike will channel ocean waters to
rush into the bay’s “natural funnel” as if it were a gluttonous maw.
In like manner, Verne’s sf is seen to ingurgitate great draughts of
“science,” a flood of facts and figures that drown out the more evanescent
problems of the human heart and mind. The Goncourts, a century earlier, describe
this process as “monomaniacal,” echoing the detested monist materialism of
science. They see, this time in the realm of the French literary patrimoine,
a like devouring of the intangibles of literature—the “heart” and those human
qualities whose permanence is guaranteed by the operation of Cartesian reason.
In Verne’s shadow, writers of literature become home and sanctuary to the
cogito. Literature safeguards the duality between reason and nature,
preserving the human privilege to proclaim itself unique and unchanging in a
world vast and unyielding, the world of Jules Verne the father of sf. Because of
the insatiable appetite for material things associated with his name and image,
Verne becomes, in the mind of the French, a Kronos figure, the father who,
devouring his cultural progeny, destroys the possibility of the cogito
that forms the heart of the culture.
In this polarized climate, the conflict between matter and mind takes on
mythic proportions. And in terms of the myth, we begin to understand why they
kill Jules Verne. For killing Verne is the path whereby the cogito is
reborn, and that which is essentially human is snatched from the maw of matter.
Above, as the Mont-Saint-Michel is contrasted to Verne, an ideal France is
reborn, given a youthful élan as mind reclaims parity with matter. We find
visual examples where the patriarchal image of Verne is literally erased, as an
image of youth is radically substituted, in an act of découpage, for the
classic icon of Verne. An interesting example is the cover of the Verne “special
issue” of the literary magazine L’Arc (1963). Here, where we expect the
Nadar portrait, we find a very different period piece—a photo of what appears a
contemporary figure, a dandy with a parasol, which could be that of the
“Romantic” Verne, pre-Hetzel. In the place of the stern bourgeois technocrat, we
have the affectedly irresponsible young man, exotically mulatto of feature, more
Dumas than Verne, certainly more “fils” than “père.” Turning to the masthead, we
learn that this photo is taken from a film by Karl Zeman entitled “Aventures
fantastiques.” Just as Bridenne turned the materialist Verne into a surrealist,
so here his portrait mutates before our eyes into that of the arch-Romantic.
Much is made in this issue of the “real” Verne as romantic outsider and “poète
maudit.” The cover photo casts off the Urizen exterior and presents the youth
buried in the image of the mature tyrant.
A more recent example of this “greening” of Verne is the controversy
surrounding the discovery of the Verne manuscript Paris in the Twentieth
Century. Dated 1863, five years before the first Hetzel novel, this is a
true piece of “juvenilia.” It is also not an optimistic techno-adventure, in
“human” terms much more mature than the works that follow. It presents
twentieth-century Paris (c. 1960) as a dreary world of machines whose
materialism crushes the protagonist, the last poet and classical scholar,
casting him forth to die alone in harsh winter. In light of this youthful
maturity (again the paradox), the Verne who wrote the Extraordinary Voyages
was the dull creation of commercial necessity. The man who became sf’s patriarch
is now forced to yield his naïve faith in technology to this reborn Romantic, a
Verne so much younger but infinitely more mature. Critics, if we believe jacket
comments and press reviews, were seduced by this Pascalian reading. But it is
possible to read the facts in Comtean manner as well. The novel is apprentice
Verne, and its pessimism is exactly what it seems: a last melodramatic gasp of
Romantic rebellion in post-1848 France. In fact, hints of the older and less
positivistic Verne show through in this text. It displays keen, even
premonitory, insight into the machines that will comprise the technology of the
future. This future is bad for the out-of-work hero. But with its visions of
internal combustion engines and subways and advanced transport systems, the
novel begins to sketch the dynamic world of Verne’s later fiction.
The most significant articulation of the rejuvenated Verne comes in Roland
Barthes’s meditation on French popular culture, Mythologies (1957). The
occasion of his essay, “Nautilus et Bateau ivre” [Nautilus and Drunken Boat] is
the fiftieth anniversary of Verne’s death. Barthes enacts the now-familiar
radical reversal of the Verne image, once again evoking the popular view of
Verne as “devouring” father, only to convert immediately his material feats into
acts of play, juvenile power fantasies. Thus the twists and turns (péripeties)
of Verne’s adventures operate so as “to play fast and loose with cosmic
distances. . .and to test the power of men over spaces and times [les espaces
et les horaires]” (81). For Barthes, Verne’s “playful” fascination with such
all-consuming technology is a vestige of the Romantic age. Romantic bravado,
however, proves to be little more than bourgeois pretention: “And on this planet
triumphantly devoured by the Verne hero, who is a kind of bourgeois Antaeus
whose nights are innocent and ‘recuperative,’ we often find some desperado
hanging around ... a leftover from some romantic age forever gone, and who by
contrasts causes the health of the true owners of the world to explode” (81).
Making the familiar association of technology with eating, Barthes chooses a
significant anti-titan to displace devouring Kronos. This latter functions as a
primitive perpetual motion machine, siring and consuming progeny in a material
loop that (in Barthes’s words) “relies simply on some delightful accident of
geography.” Antaeus, on the other hand, is a dualist entity. Its days are spent
consuming energy; its nights however, in diurnal manner, are spent in “innocent”
restoration of that energy. Once more, this entity that displaces father Verne
is associated with childhood, Antaeus touching “mother” Earth. And, as a good
Cartesian, Barthes emphasizes the contractive side of Verne’s work:
The imagination of the voyage
corresponds in Verne to an exploration of the enclosure, and the affinity
between Verne and childhood does not come from some banal mystery of the
adventure, but rather from a shared contentment with the finite, which one sees
manifest in the childish passion for cabins and tents.... The archetype of this
dream [of enclosure] is that almost perfect novel, The Mysterious Island,
where the child-man reinvents the world, fills it, encloses it, closes itself
within in, and crowns this encyclopedic effort by assuming the bourgeois
attitude of appropriation—slippers, pipe, and fireside—while outside the storm,
that is to say the infinite, rages uselessly. (80)
In this portrait of Verne-Antaeus, the cogito is explicitly linked to
dreams of childhood enclosure. In this light, the scientific titan collapses
into his “nightside” other, in this case the bourgeois, France’s debased
Cartesian everyman, for whom the adventure of the stove or tomb becomes nothing
more than the return to slippers and pipe.
Barthes’s example is the Verne surrogate Captain Nemo, who roams the seas
collecting scientific data only to enclose it in display cases in his
comfortable Nautilus. Not only is the adventurer in the end merely a
bourgeois homebody, but (as such) the patriarch is revealed to be an “homme-enfant.”
Once this paradox is in place, Barthes is free to engage in another Pascalian
reversal. The Nautilus now yields to Rimbaud’s “Bateau ivre,” a
vessel whose explorations take place not in the physical but in the imaginary
world, that of a mythologie de la navigation at whose helm stands the
enfant-homme, the Cartesian child-man. Once again, Verne the tyrant father
must be eliminated in order to restore the reign of mind, the rule of the
rational subject at the center of a world of extended matter. As Barthes puts
it, “there is only one way to exorcise the possessive nature of man in relation
to the boat, and that is to suppress the man, and let the boat sail alone” (82).
The material man is violently removed (the French word is “supprimer”),
so that the lone boat can enter the realm of the figurative, where it functions
as a mind form, a personification like Emerson’s “transparent eyeball,” whose
space of operation no longer knows material bounds: “Thus the boat ceases to be
a box ... an object possessed; it becomes a traveling eye, brushing against
infinities” (82). For the vessel to “brush against infinities,” all its physical
aspects must be annihilated. It is at this degree zero of matter that the
cogito is reborn, as totality, but in an alternate realm of mind in which
“infinities” are as multiple as reason can conceive. Indeed, the cogito
Barthes describes is less an assertion of being—I think, therefore am—than the
declaration of an intransitive linguistic subject: Rimbaud’s “bateau qui dit
‘je’ [the boat that says ‘I’].” This self exists only when uttered; once
uttered, it becomes the object of psychoanalysis, a science where mind
contemplates itself. Verne’s voyage to the center of the earth becomes a
reflexive journey, that of the subject to the center of its own mind. Seen
through this psychoanalytical lens, Verne is a “maniac of plenitude” [maniaque
de la plenitude]. Its opposite is Rimbaud’s childish assertion of self,
which echoes the revolt against material fullness of another famous
(quasi-)patricide, Hamlet, who, though he knows himself bound in a nutshell,
still counts himself king of infinite space, a space that exists only within the
confines of his mind.
The Time Machine as Zeno’s Arrow. One can argue that “science” as defined in
the positivist nineteenth century is literally written into French culture in
the form of Verne’s patriarchs, who dominate the natural world. Rimbaud
rediscovers the Cartesian subject, as Barthes sees it, by uttering
alternate worlds—his famous je est un autre [I is an other]. Arrayed
against this, there is the bulk of Verne’s writings, in which a very material
other is immutably inscripted. More than Rimbaud’s utterance, it seems, is
needed to kill Verne, for he has multiplied himself and his tyrannical science
in the many patriarch doubles of his work—Lidenbrock, Nemo, Barbicane, Robur.
Michel Serres, in his book Jouvences sur Jules Verne (1970), brings an
interesting perspective to the problem. To Serres, Verne’s science, the science
of spatial limits of LaPlace and Comte, has written the world. Verne, in turn,
strives to reproduce this text of science, described as a fichier géant
[a giant catalog], in his works. Verne’s textual universe, however, is circular:
“There is no straight line in Verne, not a single one” (10). And as the first
author of such a universe is God, Verne’s model is the ur-patriarch:
The ancient father, the
ancestor, wrote the first voyage; the second voyage consists in deciphering the
tale of the first, and that is what science is. A thread, a reed, a stream, a
name, a number or a key, the loop is again closed, and that which is inscribed
decoded. Galileo already said it: the world is written in a language that we
must read. Science is the totality of all the written legends of the world. (14)
But how, then, does one escape from this world of tyrannical science if that
world is a totality? If the task of nineteenth-century science was (as Serres’s
says) “the exhaustion of totalities,” tracing “the circle of circles,” how do we
reach beyond these limits? Serres again poses the problem in terms of Pascalian
extremes: the inscipted science is a tout that must be countered by a rien.
The game is one of all or nothing, one does not simply write over Verne, one
must dissolve his work totally, so as to reconstitute it absolutely. Thus the
word “jouvence,” where rejuvenation issues from dissolution, as one
immersed in the fountain of youth emerges young and whole. Once more, the gap
that separates old from new, matter from mind, the patriarch from new-born
child, is the absolute one of death: “Adult for so little time, adult for so
long a time, I have wanted to rummage in those few remaining parts of that
bitter corpse I carry inside myself: the child” (9). In this sense, Serres’s
fountain of youth promises to produce small assassins. This, we will see, is the
situation in the opening story of Blanc’s Pourquoi, “Amiens, mars 1905.”
French sf has discovered a famously Cartesian device for breaking the
inscribed world of Vernian science—H.G. Wells’s Time Machine. In French hands,
this machine à explorer le temps is used to roam vast mental realms
outside, or more often inside, the boundaries of physical spacetime. Moreover,
the Time Machine is a weapon of choice for killing Verne, especially when
killing means (in Serres’s sense) substituting totally new “script” for Verne’s
physical writings. The iron laws of time travel, of course, allow no changes in
the past; there is no stepping into Verne’s shoes, no changing of a single line
of his writing. There seems no possibility, even by means of a material time
machine, of the child physically becoming father to the man. The time arrow
remains inexorable, but the machine allows the “traveler” to weave paradoxical
arabesques around the fixed event, hoping somehow to cheat or change time, in
Heinlein’s words to “paradoctor the paradox.” In relation to killing Verne, the
Time Machine’s trajectory is that of Zeno’s arrow, inscribing its realm of
mental play between shadow and act. Here there are two possible scenarios. One
is to re-enact Verne’s death, substituting one’s “agency” for the work of
natural causes, as do the time hunters in Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder”
(1953). This is Blanc’s mode. The other scenario, however, is that of Blanc’s
respondent, Gérard Klein: to kill the work. The time trail is vaguer here. We
have a work. But the traveler can hypothetically alter the context and
conditions surrounding its creation, and who but the traveler can verify these
things. Klein’s traveler kills Verne by disconnecting the man from the printed
page, which of course is what time does anyway.
Blanc’s protagonist specifically uses Wells’s device to revisit the moment of
Verne’s death and to re-enact it. He, like the “Bernard Blanc” who speaks in the
rest of the book (Blanc, born in 1951, was 27 years old in 1978, date of the
publication), claims to be a victim of Verne’s books, as was his generation of
sf writers. The scenario is now familiar: technocrat father corrupts his
literary progeny, instilling a technical bravado that leads to environmental
destruction, again the conventional French “home”: “If, in thatched huts, people
get excited about putting a foot on the Moon, it’s all your doing, right? It’s
you who spread this nasty virus among the lowest levels of society” (15). The
bad father sows bad seed that corrupts the popular mind. Verne’s real progeny
are the writers, however, and here the seed corrupts sf itself: “And all those
who follow you, did you think of them as well. You have seen what you did to
science fiction? It’s as if you had given birth to a monster” (16). Time travel
carries this monstrous son, “dressed as a punk, with torn tennis shoes and
filthy pants,” back to a 1905 Amiens that is itself a place of anachronistic
contrasts, as sf visions of “an interplanetary rocket ship ready for the Big
Trip” blend with the spires of Amiens cathedral. Despite his switchblade, this
traveler knows Bradbury’s lesson well: he arrives at the exact time of Verne’s
recorded death and “kills” him by feeding him sugar to provoke a diabetic
seizure, the true cause of his death. What follows is patricidal theater, in
which the child can play father to the man. For as he reviles the patriarch for
the bad things his novels will bring, ritually calling him “Monsieur Jules
Verne,” he spoon-feeds him, as one would an infant, the sugar that will kill
him. The venerable Verne, in turn, is described as the old-man-become-child: “He
drools, he’s got it all over him. What an old slob! He’s filthier than Bukowski”
(17).
Blanc’s “killer” must play time’s script. He does, however, tweak the paradox
in order to keep the game of Verne’s killing open. He swipes the original
manuscript of Around the Moon (“one never knows, maybe one day I’ll need
bread to buy heroin with”) and puts a few hairs of Verne’s famous beard in the
book he is carrying. If the book in question is The Time Machine, then
these hairs, like Weena’s flower, may deflect the tautology ever so slightly,
causing the arrow to veer from the straight path of material homicide into the
alternate realm of Zeno’s paradox. The actions of Blanc’s protagonist cause no
physical change in his present: he finds the same depressing 1978 that he left.
The strands of Verne’s beard instead deflect action into a symbolic realm, that
of the propagation of the image of the bearded patriarch among Blanc’s sf
contemporaries: “Most of the writers temporarily or permanently bearded have
accepted to act out his role for a time. For obvious reasons I can name no
names, but the resemblance between old engravings depicting Verne and recent
photos of Philippe Curval is striking” (27). On the physical level, killing
Verne remains a tautology. And in terms the survival of his works, Blanc’s
protagonist learns how misdirected his actions have been: “Hung around in a bar
and flipped through a paper. There, in a color ad paid for by Hachette:
“1828-1978. For the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Jules
Verne, Hachette, his editor since 1914 ... has published the complete works ...
Initial price, 29 francs.” (18). The game is futile, time’s arrow inexorable.
Gérard Klein, responding to Blanc’s call to kill Verne in the section
entitled “Quelques complices” [A Few Accomplices], is fully aware that the time
arrow must be replaced with what Valéry describes as an arrow that “quivers,
flies, and does not fly.” He also sees that, in physical terms, there is no
Verne to kill; there is only his work. But is it “his”? What, in the Eleatic
mindspace of time travel, does “his”mean? As Klein sees it, something has
been written. If all the temporal manipulations in the world cannot remove it,
they can perturb or delay the transfer of its content by endlessly generating
reversals in the realm of virtual authorship. Klein’s game of death is one of
erasing and re-writing Verne’s opus, a game whose purpose is to sustain
indefinitely the interval inscribed by Valéry’s arrow of paradox between shadow
and act. Klein, however, is enough of a materialist not to realize that
generating such time loops is a temporizing strategy at best. Too much the
skeptic, he knows the arrow did hit its mark, Verne is dead, his work written,
its damage done.
In Klein’s scenario, Verne’s arch-rival Wells comes to him in his machine in
1924, to enlist him in a plot to suppress Verne’s work. Wells does not know
French, hence needs Klein to write a “watered-down” (affadi) version of
the original opus. This gives us the work we know today, the only one we can
know. In this sense, “time crime” is perfect crime. Only Klein, the traveler who
went to the past, knows what the original was. Only he can speculate on why
Wells wanted to suppress it:
The main justification he set
forth, and which convinced me then, was that on one hand Verne in his work had
abolished all the themes of science fiction and put an end to the genre, and on
the other hand that the relations between literature and society, as we well
know, being those of subordination of the second term to the first, the result
of this for the 20th century would be a series of tyrannies, massacres and
cataclysms, such that any humanist of conviction could only wish to prevent.
(26)
Here the mind-game of substitutions and erasure begins. Klein’s “real” Verne
is given the social agenda of the Wells we know, who did believe in the power of
literature to alter society. But reversing “true” for “false” Verne only tips us
back in our world, where literature goes from having cataclysmic effect to
having no effect on society. This view, however, justifies not only the killing
of Verne’s work but of all writers and works, for all of these reveal themselves
to be nothing more than creations of an individual mind, which that mind is free
to destroy at will. Yet it turns out, in another reversal, that all these
worlds, like that of the Verne we know, end up looking like our world after all.
Klein’s temporal game links the re-writing of Verne to the act of writing sf,
and both of these to the process of doubt that creates the Cartesian cogito.
Whatever we claim to do to Verne, his work (as Blanc testifies) does have an
impact on the physical world. To “destroy” that work in the realm of time travel
is analogous to mind doubting it away. Material reality yields to logical
argument, where, once the literary work is judged unable to affect the physical
world, the writer becomes free both to create his or her own world and to
destroy that world at will. In the end, however, the sole freedom left to
Klein’s de-classed author is the freedom to kill. It is no longer Verne the man
they kill, but an image of the world Verne wrought, a nightmare place of
technocratic oppression, a horror of the mind destroyed by an act of mind. In
such a scenario, patricide and literary suicide are one. Klein cites a phrase of
Michel Jeury, where death proves the common bond between the individual and
totality: “I prefer to die with everyone else than to die alone.” Bernard Blanc
might wish to see Jeury’s remark as a true communitarian response to Klein’s
megalomania. He cannot think outside the Cartesian box, however, and his
response only reverses the cogito: “Gérard Klein has simply forgotten one fact:
that such generalized pollution EXISTS” (304). Caught between Cartesian extremes
of being and nothingness, Blanc’s response is to reformulate the dualism as one
between patricide and suicide. Blanc’s “activism,” a time travel jaunt to kill
the man who generated all this mess, proves futile. His response to Klein’s
chaos of Cartesian cataclysms—with each author, creator, and destroyer of its
own world—is for the writer to suppress itself: “If one serves no purpose at all
any more, simply to arbitrate between a few internecine wars between monopolies,
what’s left but to knock oneself off (se flinguer)” (302).
Conclusion: The Cartesian Pendulum. French culture has apparently
over-reacted to Verne, to his facts and figures, to his scientists’ pretense at
experimental method. His French readers have believed in, trembled at, his
fascination with American entrepreneurs, his call for explorations of the
extended unknown. They do not have to go so far as kill Verne, however, for
Verne, in his novels, kills off his own scientific patriarchs. This should be
obvious to his French readers. But, it seems, the material sweep of his
adventures is so vast that they react with almost Pascalian terror. Faced with
this void, they seem driven to enforce, with maximum violence, the Cartesian
division that substitutes a world of mind for that of matter. But they need not
do so. For Verne himself enforces this same duality at the end of his great
adventures. Let us look at the fate of Captain Nemo in Barthes’s perfect novel,
The Mysterious Island.
The novel seems to be open-ended. Nemo may decide to let the treasure trove
of knowledge in the Nautilus perish along with him. The American engineer
Cyrus Smith stands by, however, and what Nemo bequeaths him is the desire
to make new discoveries. Throughout the novel, Smith and company are guided by
the invisible hand of Nemo. In the end, it is Smith’s practical ingenuity that
masters the island; as with the transposed beards, one strong patriarch seems
replaced by an even stronger father figure, in this case an American, even more
directly associated with the tyranny of material process. But the novel does not
end here. The island that Smith has mastered proves to be an active volcano.
Despite all their efforts, it erupts, destroying all they had wrought, leaving
but a small rock in the sea on which they are now stranded. Nemo may have warned
of impending eruption. It is through the eyes of Nab, however, the “natural
man,” that Smith comes to see that even if Nemo were there, he could not help
them. Despite all their material skills, he and his men are in the same
situation as Pascal’s reed, helpless when a drop of fire threatens to crush
them: “‘Master,’ Nab asked, ‘if Captain Nemo were still alive, do you think all
this would have still happened?’ ‘Yes, Nab,’ Cyrus Smith replied” (499). The
scientific odyssey of material conquest ends with absolute affirmation of its
impossibility. What occurs here, at this zero-point, is transfer to a realm of
activity, this time controlled by mental structurings. Reminiscent of Mallarmé’s
version of Poe’s tomb, all that remains of the physical Nemo and his island is
“a piece of granite battered by the waves of the Pacific, the tomb of him who
was once Captain Nemo” (504). Beyond the material finality of this tomb,
however, it is the spirit of Nemo that continues to act, a Cartesian
ghost who guides Smith and his band to an end that is more utopia than reality.
It is Nemo’s note, left on “L’Ile Tabor,” that allows them, stranded on
the piece of rock under which the Nautilus lies, to be miraculously
saved. Nemo’s chest of precious stones allows Smith to recreate his lost island,
but now in the middle of Iowa, where the survivors huddle to re-enact, in a
space more of the mind than the land, the original adventure.
Nemo’s tomb, the final image of Mysterious Island, is the closed
space, the Cartesian stove, from which utopian Iowa springs, a world ever young
because a world of the mind. Verne’s other conqueror-scientists undergo a
similar conversion. Barbicane and Nicholls, in the illustrations of From the
Earth to the Moon, appear as archetypal bearded patriarchs. But if their
experimental vehicle takes off to explore the unknown, it proves able only to
circle the moon, where the ship becomes a theater for the poetic musings of
young Michel Ardan. These patriarchs of science are ritualistically “killed” in
a significant moment, as the ship passes over the dark side of the moon. On the
verge of observations never before made, they suddenly encounter a blinding
meteor that all but destroys them. They are destroyed in the sense that the
light seems to strip away all sense of material extension, leaving them in the
midst of this darkness visible to function only as mind: “If thought had not
been destroyed in them, if their brain was still functioning in the midst of its
terror, they must have thought themselves lost!” (Around the Moon, 374).
Blinded by physical light, they are summoned to their “senses” in a new world,
more of imagination than physical reality, by Ardan’s poetic turn of phrase:
“The invisible moon, visible at last.” In their brief glimpse of the moon
between light and renewed darkness, the “real” phenomena they see are hopelessly
tinged with phantasms of the mind, and science speaks with the voice of Ardan:
“Then [they saw] immense spaces, not just arid plains, but veritable seas,
oceans vastly distributed, the liquid mirror of whose surfaces was reflecting
all the dazzling magic of the fires of space ...Was this an illusion, an error
of the eyes, a deception of the optical nerve?” (375). Material science returns
to the Cartesian stove of doubt.
In the history of French literature, there is no other writer who, with his
flying machines, submarines, and rocket ships, makes such claim to the
exploration of res extensa. Verne may not deliver on that promise. But it
is the cultural image of Verne that, between the Cartesian poles of matter and
mind, promises to swing, in a terrifying manner, to the material extreme of the
pendulum. As with Descartes, Pascal, and their rationalist century, the response
is a radical reversal of terms. In this maximizing logic, Verne is made absolute
monarch of that literature of matter, sf. This material tyrant is overthrown,
annihilated, so that the cogito may be restored, at the other extreme, as
mind-world unto itself. This image of patricide in connection with Verne, where
tyrant succumbs to Romantic child so that child can again be Cartesian father to
the man, points to the tenacious grip of dualist logic on scientific activity in
France. This Cartesian pendulum continues to regulate scientific and literary
explorations alike of what the French call res extensa, that realm of
terror without, in which things exist deprived of the presence of mind. In the
shadow of such a place, Verne must die, and to kill becomes a supremely human
act.
NOTES
All translations from the French are my own unless otherwise attributed.
1. Here is Paul Valéry’s sense of this Cartesian “revolution”: “Il [Descartes]
demande au Ciel d’être confirmé dans son idée d’une méthode pour bien conduire
sa raison, et cette méthode implique une croyance et une confiance fondamentales
en soi-même, conditions necessaries pour détruire la confiance et la croyance en
l’autorité des doctrines transmises.” [“He (Descartes) asks the heavens to
confirm him in his idea of a method to guide his reason correctly, and this
method entails a belief and a fundamental confidence in oneself,
conditions necessary to destroy confidence and belief in the authority of
inherited doctrines.”] Variété V, “Une vue de Descartes,” 218.
2. Another materialist “re-reading” of the Cartesian process is found in Ray
Bradbury’s story “No Particular Night or Morning” (1951). Here in a stove of his
own, the vacuum of space, protagonist Hitchcock describes the methodical and
violent process whereby he denies the material existence of all his bodily
parts, willing them away into the void: “No more space ship now. Never was any.
No people ... no plants, no stars. No hands, I haven’t any hands anymore. No
feet. Never had any. Can’t prove it. No body. Never had any. No lips. No face.
No head. Nothing. Only space.” (111).
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