#95 = Volume 32, Part 1 = March 2005
Timothy Unwin
Jules Verne: Negotiating Change in the Nineteenth Century
Jules Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires,
the vast corpus of novels written over a forty-two year period from 1863 to
1905, are quintessentially a document about a changing world and the new
possibilities—social, scientific, or political—opened up by progress.1
As travel and technology move to center stage and become in every sense a
“motive force” in the storytelling process, Jules Verne lengthily records the
nineteenth century’s fascination with the machine and its miraculous power to
shrink the globe, enable communication, facilitate construction, or, in some
cases, precipitate destruction. At the same time, while colonial expansion
changes the century’s perception of the geo-political map, so too the boundaries
of fiction itself are redrawn by Verne in a groundbreaking vision that shifts
the novel from local to global concerns. This is partly because, writing to the
pedagogic remit assigned to him at the outset by his editor Pierre-Jules Hetzel,
Verne deliberately aims to instruct and enlighten his adolescent reader through
a series of fictional journeys beyond the frontiers of the homeland. His
focus—with a few interesting exceptions—is rarely on France itself, already
amply covered in the school curriculum. It is significant that, in Around the
World in Eighty Days (1873), the crossing of France is entirely elided in
Phileas Fogg’s outward journey. Nor is there any reference in that novel to the
terrible recent events of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune, which are no
doubt far too close to home for a reading public in need of escape and wishing
to be enlightened about more far-flung places.
With its shift to technology, travel, and the
international arena, the world that Jules Verne portrays is immediately distinct
from that of most “canonical” nineteenth-century novelists, though there are
interesting parallels to be found in the work of writers such as Emile Souvestre—whose
1846 novel Le Monde tel qu’il sera (The World As It Shall Be)
involves the very Vernian theme of a floating island—or the better-known Albert
Robida, author and illustrator of the influential Le Vingtième Siècle (The
Twentieth Century, 1883). Nor should we forget that a host of imitators such
as Louis Boussenard, author of Le Tour du monde d’un gamin de Paris (Around
the World: The Journey of a Parisian Boy, 1892) pay homage to Verne through
their titles and their use of the pedagogical format.2
While Baudelaire, Flaubert, Hugo and others develop a complex poetic concept of
travel and its artistic implications, however, Verne concentrates above all on
its practicalities, focusing on the technical details of locomotion,
communication, and what we nowadays call “lifestyle.” From the submarine to the
ocean liner, the train to the motor car, the balloon to the airplane, the
phonograph to the telephone, the photograph to the moving image, virtually no
aspect of contemporary technological experiment or development remains
unmentioned or untouched in his writings. Yet he also opens his reader’s eyes to
the political dimensions of exploration and colonization, since he takes a
strong interest in the issue of nationalities, both in terms of particular
national characteristics (the British and the Americans are subjected to
especially lively characterization in his novels) and in terms of national
uprisings and the oppression of minorities. Nemo, among many other characters in
Verne’s work, is famously the champion of an oppressed group.
It is often hastily deduced that, because Jules
Verne depicts a changing world, it is also by definition futuristic; but the two
notions are far from being synonymous. True, there are a number of stories in
the Voyages Extraordinaires that evoke a world at some distance in the
future. One notable example is the text entitled In the Year 2889,
written in 1889, probably in collaboration with Jules Verne’s son Michel. It
describes a brave new world of videoconferencing and helicopter travel in which
commerce is king and brightly colored advertisements are projected onto the
clouds. But this type of story is the exception, since most of Verne’s novels
move explicitly from events in a recent past to a narrative present that
coincides with the actual moment of the book’s writing. Where there is
speculation in his work about the future possibilities of technology, as in the
story just mentioned, it almost always takes the form of an implicitly ironic
commentary on the author’s own century. This is also the case with that more
recently published text that resulted in the flow of so much ink, Paris in
the Twentieth Century. Despite its apparent foretelling of new technologies,
this early Jules Verne novel (most probably written in 1863) was conceived very
much within the zeitgeist of the mid-nineteenth century. Even the
so-called inventions in that story—notably the fax machine—were being developed
in the 1860s, and Guillaume Caselli’s “pantelegraph,” which was the acknowledged
model for Jules Verne’s device, can today be seen in Paris at the Musée des Arts
et Métiers.3 Jules Verne is not quite the father of
science fiction that he is so often claimed to be, for when he writes of global
travel and technological wizardry, it is firmly in the context of
nineteenth-century values and expectations, and almost always with contemporary
developments in mind. His space travelers are, to adapt William Golding’s
felicitous phrase, “astronauts by gaslight” (Haining 79). They wear top hat and
tails, and drink a Côtes de Nuits in the ordinary manner from glasses—without
apparently having to contend with weightlessness—once their craft is in space.
But despite the obvious elements of fantasy and the many scientific mistakes,
Verne’s focus is almost exclusively on what is already known, and his novels are
nourished above all by existing scientific, geographical, and historical
documents. In a 1903 interview with the American journalist Robert H. Sherard,
Verne declared that, while H.G. Wells invented new metals and defied gravity, he
himself needed to invent nothing and respected the laws of physics—though he
stressed (a little disingenuously, perhaps) that this was less a criticism of
H.G. Wells than an affirmation of their difference of approach (“Jules Verne
Revisited” ).4 What is unknown is by and large
avoided in the work of Jules Verne, who used the high-circulation scientific and
geographical publications of his day—Le Magasin pittoresque, Le Musée des
familles, Le Tour du monde, La Revue illustrée, and others—and the
popularizing works of scientists such as Louis Figuier or Camille Flammarion as
the documentary basis of his writing. On more than one occasion, Jules Verne
pointed to the central importance of written sources as a trigger to his own
creativity.5 This is perhaps another way in which he
is a barometer of the mode and the mentality of the nineteenth century, for his
writing is a compendium of its scientific discourses, indeed a patchwork of its
different voices, as Daniel Compère has so convincingly and eloquently argued
(most notably in his Jules Verne, écrivain). Rather than being truly
futuristic, Verne’s work is in many ways about his own century. Marie-Hélène
Huet goes so far as to affirm that “Jules Verne’s real originality was not to
have imagined the twentieth century, but to have portrayed the realities and the
aspirations of the nineteenth” (177).
Some commentators have taken this a stage
further and argued that, far from being obsessed with the future, Jules Verne is
in reality fixated on the past. His novels have produced rich results when read
as texts that celebrate an era of mythical innocence or a return to primitive
origins. Simone Vierne observes that “Jules Verne is far from being, as is all
too often claimed, the champion of technological progress” (“Introduction” 28).
Throughout her work on Verne she demonstrates how ancient myths are reused and
recycled by the novelist in a modern framework. The figures of Prometheus,
Vulcan, Icarus, Orpheus, Pluto, Janus, and others reappear with all the
trappings of modern scientific discourse and the apparel of new technology; and
Verne’s machines, far from being well-honed and efficient devices, are more like
mythological monsters (Mythe et modernité 77-78). From this it might be
easy to draw the conclusion that even as they celebrate change and contemplate
advancing technology with that sense of its miraculousness so typical of the
century, Jules Verne’s so-called novels of anticipation are in fact a journey
back in time. That the past is a fundamental and recurring feature of his
world-view is certain, and it is nowhere more explicitly underlined than in
Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), which turns out not to be a
departure to a brave new future at all, but a return to prehistory. There,
Verne’s travelers go downwards through the earth’s crust and backwards in time,
as they discover the evidence of ever more distant animal and mineral eras. If
ever there were a story about the return to lost origins, this is it.
Accompanying this valorization of the past is a
sense that “science,” as a modern or futuristic instrument, is of dubious value
in any case. In a one-off piece on Jules Verne, Michel Foucault once claimed
that the best scientists in Verne’s work are the ones who make mistakes and thus
reveal their humanity (10-11), rather than those who coldly calculate with
unswerving logic. Foucault’s argument carries the clear implication that error
and inaccuracy, as a central part of Verne’s system, are a necessary stage in
the discovery of knowledge, since knowledge is only relative and can only be a
process of gradual correction of previous errors. As Lidenbrock points out to
Axel in Journey to the Center of the Earth, “science, my boy, is made up
of errors” (213). So science, too, is in some senses a backward-looking
discipline in Jules Verne’s work, full of quirks, eccentricities, and downright
absurdities. While his astronauts defy gravity, his famous submarine is powered
rather over-optimistically by electricity and carries within it a vast library
and art collection. Meanwhile, his flying machine in Robur the Conqueror
(1886) is an ungainly amalgam of helicopter and hot-air balloon that loudly
proclaims its lack of airworthiness to any but the most naive reader. Jules
Verne gets very few points for accurate prediction of the future. He is quite
aware, however, of the imperfections of all science, including his own, and he
takes pleasure in reminding us that “the present state of our knowledge” (as
Claude Bernard famously referred to it in his Introduction to Experimental
Medicine, 1865) is provisional, always subject to revision in the light of
new discoveries.
Verne’s precarious and sometimes frankly
untenable science has led some commentators, notably Michel Serres, to challenge
the technological validity of the Voyages Extraordinaires, and to see the
author as someone behind his time rather than truly in tune with contemporary
developments. Starting from the position that Jules Verne is not a
science-fiction author at all, Serres goes on to draw some interesting
conclusions:
Verne’s fictions are, we are told, a form of science fiction. That is quite
simply wrong. Not one single rule of mechanics is bypassed, and no natural laws,
laws of physics, laws about the resistance of materials, or laws about biology,
are extrapolated. Overall, the scientific content is well behind the times.
Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet are encyclopedists of a different order—much
better informed, much less childish. Far from being novels of anticipation,
Verne’s novels are, on that point, not even up to date. Just think of it: they
are still celebrating the discovery of steam and electricity! As far as
technical wizardry is concerned, they offer a retrospective view while seeming
to look ahead. (82)
It is true that the laws of mechanics and
physics are by and large (though not always) upheld in Verne, and that his
novels are not anticipatory in the way we might expect of some science fiction.
Yet it is probably an exaggeration to claim, as Serres does, that Verne is not
even up to date scientifically, or that he is scientifically naive. All the
evidence of his working methods suggests that he was a man exceptionally well
attuned to the developments of his day and curious to record in his fiction all
manner of recent information. While steam had been replacing sail since Verne’s
childhood in Nantes, electricity, contrary to what Serres curiously claims,
was still a novelty in the closing decades of the century (its rise as a new
form of energy and technology was triumphantly recorded in the International
Electricity Exhibition held in Paris in 1881, and further celebrated in a
different form two years later in Robida’s The Twentieth Century). And
since Serres makes a comparison with Bouvard and Pécuchet, it should be said
that Flaubert’s two drudges, unlike Verne’s scientists, pursue a false quest for
the impossible synthesis of knowledge, a search for the philosopher’s stone that
will lead them to some kind of absolute. They are constantly shown up as naive
and deluded, the hapless victims of a defective scientific method, and menaced
by impending, encroaching, omnipresent “bêtise,” or stupidity. Verne’s
scientists, on the other hand, deal with specific and well-documented topical
problems, all to do with science and exploration, and to that extent they are
men of their century. They are invariably at the pinnacle of their discipline,
and as they search for a solution to a problem, they pursue whatever means they
can to solve it. They are armed with relevant and recent knowledge about their
subject, as well as being conversant with its history.
Typically, these men are geographers,
mathematicians, astronomers, or engineers, and sometimes they are comically and
entertainingly obsessed with their discipline. After all, Verne was trying to
promote the interest of science, and humor was, as Arthur Evans has shown, an
important and surprisingly flexible pedagogical aid (Jules Verne Rediscovered
143-47). The most engaging of Verne’s scientists, rather than trying to engineer
some brave new world, seek above all to find the answer to a single question.
Barring a few exceptions, they are harmless monomaniacs, seen as such by the
other characters within the fiction. Their eccentricity is summed up by the
figure of Palander in Adventures of Three Russians and Three Englishmen in
Southern Africa (1872). A mathematician who disappears at a particularly
dangerous and delicate point of the expedition, Palander is discovered a few
days later in deep meditation, blissfully unaware that he has been surrounded by
a group of deadly crocodiles about to pounce on him. Unaware, too, that he has
been saved by his fellow travelers, Palander delightedly exclaims that he has
just found an error in the decimal of the 103rd logarithm in the Wolston tables!
This is the harmless stuff of which Verne’s scientist-travelers are made. Part
of their interest, however, is that they are capable of getting things absurdly
out of proportion, both in human and in scientific terms. The case of Palmyrin
Rosette, the astronomer-mathematician in Hector Servadac (1877), is also
typical. The ultimate eccentric, he pursues his demonstrations and calculations
with dizzying and exuberant showmanship, refusing his listeners a moment’s
pause. To the suggestion that a breathing space might be a good idea, he
retorts: “But, sir, nobody stops for breath when it comes to mathematics!” (80).
And despite their huge knowledge and almost magical skills, Verne’s scientists
can also make the oddest of mistakes, proving both their own fallibility and the
relativity of their science. In The Children of Captain Grant (1866-68),
the geographer Paganel sets off on a journey in entirely the wrong direction,
while in The Fur Country (1873), the astronomer Thomas Black, in search
of an eclipse, rather unwisely advocates the use of a lens to look directly at
the sun. The lesson is that even the best science, in human hands, is an
imperfect instrument, like the rickety and shaky machines that Verne creates for
his traveler-explorers. Technology and science, it seems, will never be better
than the imperfect mortals who exploit it.
Yet there are also, as Foucault suggests, more
dangerous scientists in Jules Verne’s fiction, those who go so far beyond the
pale of normal interaction and who are so obsessed by their technology and
knowledge that they can see no better use for it than to manipulate it for
personal or political gain (10). This darker side of science, or rather of its
uses and abuses, is one of the cornerstones of Verne’s work, and if there is
prophecy in his writing, it is not so much in the simple foretelling of new
technologies and their functioning as in his focus on the potentially
destructive and alienating effects of science. The era of mass conflict, already
ushered in by the Crimean and Franco-Prussian wars, is one of the future turns
of history that the Voyages Extraordinaires might be seen to predict more
accurately. Where we come across evil scientists in Verne, they are almost
always pursuing wealth or power or both in order to promote an evil regime or
destroy a good one. Such is the case of Herr Schultze in The Begum’s Millions
(1879), who, after receiving an implausibly large inheritance, creates the
chillingly named city of Stahlstadt (Steel City), devoted to the pursuit of war
and destruction. Schultze—who is created in the still highly emotive political
climate following France’s humiliation at the hands of the Prussians in
1870-71—manufactures a huge cannon that is directed at the neighboring city of
France-Ville, founded by the philanthropist Sarrasin. It is a grim albeit
schematic prediction of the clash of opposing ideologies and of the consequences
that can result. And in a similar vein, in Facing the Flag (1896), the
pirate Ker Karraje, pursuing a series of almost random acts of aggression
against merchant ships or nation states, builds weapons of mass destruction that
include a missile-carrying submarine. His mission is not ultimately to create,
but to destroy, to replace order with anarchy. Scientifically, none of the
technology is described in very sophisticated terms, and we are a long way from
the more fanciful descriptions of modern science fiction. But there is here the
clear foreboding of conflict between nations and of terrorist activity that is
the more extreme and negative result of the theories of utopian socialism that
had influenced Verne in the aftermath of 1848. It has often been said that Jules
Verne becomes increasingly pessimistic about the world as he gets older,6
and these novels show him pursuing social and political speculations to almost
nihilistic conclusions. It is true that, whereas in his early works Jules Verne
tends to describe the more liberating aspects of travel, as his career
progresses he focuses increasingly on the political problems caused by
exploration and its technologies, and he comes to some dispiriting conclusions
about the progress of humanity. The 1895 novel Propeller Island describes
the almost mindlessly petty rivalry and bitterness between two communities
aboard a vast floating island—a sort of giant pleasure cruiser equipped with all
the technology and comfort that the rich and idle could wish for, including
virtual theaters and concert halls. The two communities eventually rip the
island apart as they try to propel it in separate directions, the rift down its
middle symbolizing that irreversible sundering of different world-views unable
to achieve even the most provisional accommodation. If such a vision of humanity
is to be read as a prediction of the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries,
then we might be inclined to conclude that it was one area in which Jules
Verne’s judgment was more or less right.
So while Jules Verne’s novels clearly document a
changing world, and while they give detailed descriptions of the technological
changes that are occurring, it seems that they are futuristic only in so far as
they foresee an era of conflict, anarchy, terrorism, or mass destruction. There
is certainly a deepening of Jules Verne’s social and political vision as he
grows older, and a shifting of the focus from the mechanics of travel to more
somber political realities as he becomes more critical of the direction in which
civilization is moving.7 Frequent, too, in the later
novels is the reference to the corrupting power of money, along with the refrain
that gold, especially, is the ultimate fool’s currency—a worthless product that
produces worthless speculation (see, for example, The Golden Volcano and
The Hunt for the Meteor, published posthumously in 1906 and 1908
respectively) rather than the positive economic benefit that can come only from
a careful and thoughtful sharing of natural resources. So, too, in his
novel-writing Jules Verne appears to believe less in the worth of speculation or
the value of “futures” than in the importance of solid and well-documented
groundwork. His future is less one of whiz-kid gadgets and machines than a less
glamorous one in which communities, societies, and nations have trouble managing
the inventions that the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath have produced.
But what of the future of the novel itself? What
kinds of changes are occurring in the narrative form that Jules Verne is using,
and what further changes are heralded or foretold by his own approach? Does
Verne’s own obvious interest in technical, industrial, and social change extend
to an awareness of change in literature or to the desire to promote a new genre?
More especially, what impact does his concept of the novel have on the
development of the novel more generally?
The answer to such questions begins with a
truism. Jules Verne, working in the realist tradition, believes axiomatically
that the writing of fiction requires a process of preliminary documentation. As
a result of this approach, the artist’s invented world links up at many
different levels with a verifiable reality— factual, scientific, topographical,
historical, and so on. We would not need to dwell on this, however, were it not
for the fact that the process itself is massively problematized in Verne’s
novels, where documentation often becomes so overwhelming that it reshapes the
entire storytelling process. Scientific discourses on occasion occupy the whole
of the foreground, while the more traditional elements of fiction—character and
plot development—recede into the background. This occurs, for example, when the
author enters into detailed historical and anthropological information about
different peoples in Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863), or in the
disproportionate descriptions of marine life in Twenty Thousand Leagues under
the Seas (1870), or in the extensive calculations of planetary positions in
the lunar novels. At this level, extreme realism can mutate into pure scientific
or encyclopedic discourse, and that supposedly “neutral” scientific voice to
which Foucault drew attention—he describes it as “another, more distant voice
which challenges the narrative or shows up its fictional status” (8)—moves to
center-stage. The novel’s claim to be “fiction,” a fable invented to entertain
or instruct, is in danger of being lost amid the mass of scientific detail. This
may not be science fiction in the sense of speculative, futuristic writing, but
it is scientific fiction, in other words fiction that is accompanied by,
and sometimes overtaken by, science.8 Knowledge of
all kinds gets relayed, apparently for its own sake, quite independently of the
narrative, sometimes indeed in defiance of all known fictional conventions.
Jules Verne himself was not unaware of this contradiction in his style, from
which he eventually deduced that the novel, as a genre, was in some danger. In
an interview given to a journalist from the Pittsburgh Gazette in 1902,
he asserted: “Novels are no longer necessary, and even now their worth and their
interest are on the decline.... Journalists have become so adept at giving a
colorful account of daily events that, when posterity reads what they have
described, it will find in it a more accurate picture than any historical or
descriptive novel could give” (Lacassin 383). Yet what is interesting here is
that Jules Verne’s affirmation about the novel’s prospects (a spectacularly
inaccurate prediction, let it be said) rests on the unquestioning belief that
the novelist’s primary role is to instruct and to provide knowledge, rather
than, say, to offer a dramatic story or insights into the behavior of
characters. What Jules Verne does not appear to focus on at all is the fictional
quality of the novel, notwithstanding the fact that his own stories can
themselves be exaggeratedly self-conscious dramatizations of the fictional
process. It seems that his critical view of the novel has, like his novels
themselves, got out of proportion. But perhaps we must see this as part of the
major shift of the novel to new territory that he himself initiates.
Interestingly, though, Verne’s comments in the
Pittsburgh Gazette interview indicate that he considers the instructive
content of fiction to be where his true originality lies. It is certainly the
case that his approach is characterized by a monumental shift towards science,
geography, physics, astronomy, history, or documentary journalism. The
preoccupation with technology and learning was, when the Voyages
Extraordinaires were launched, still something that it was possible to
consider as contrary to art, belonging more to the domain of journalists and
pedagogues. Gautier’s celebrated affirmation in the 1836 preface to
Mademoiselle de Maupin, that “nothing beautiful is indispensable in life,” had captured the sense of a fundamental division—relayed and re-echoed by so
many writers and poets—between the practical concerns of life and the gratuitous
quality of beauty. With Baudelaire, it is true, that had begun to change, as art
was seen increasingly to be compatible with the trappings of modernity. But with
Jules Verne, the discourses and the technologies of the nineteenth century all
at once loom massively in the frame. Verne’s editor, Hetzel, had to his credit
seen this novelty and had defined the originality of his protégé’s approach in
the famous preface to the 1866 publication of The Voyages and Adventures of
Captain Hatteras: “Art for art’s sake is no longer sufficient for our era,” he wrote. “The time has come for Science to take its place in the realm of
Literature” (7). Here we have a deliberate and conscious shifting of the
novelist’s art onto more technological territory, for reasons that are at once
both commercial and aesthetic. Hetzel’s lack of embarrassment about turning the
novel into a money-making venture is obvious—but then, by the 1860s the French
reading public was well accustomed to the popular blockbuster, with Balzac,
Alexandre Dumas, and Eugène Sue among the best known trailblazers. But the sense
that the modern world is also a fitting and appropriate subject for art is now
clearly articulated in Hetzel’s preface, which, doubling as a manifesto on
behalf of his protégé, constitutes a defining moment in the history of the
novel. Artistic capital, which, as Pierre Bourdieu has shown in Les Règles de
l’art (The Rules of Art, 1992), was at one stage a reverse image of
the mechanisms of economic and industrial capital, now establishes itself
alongside them, the more so since with Hetzel and Verne the novel itself becomes
a mass-marketed commodity.
With Verne, the novel moves very conspicuously
toward new artistic frontiers, at the very same moment as it depicts within its
pages the exploration of remote geographical frontiers. The writing process
itself expands outwards and conquers new spaces, imitating at the stylistic
level that sense of a quest for new territory that is embodied in so many of
Verne’s heroes. Perhaps this helps to explain why Hetzel so summarily rejected
in 1863 the manuscript of Paris in the Twentieth Century, in which the
garret-dwelling hero of the story tries desperately to live in a world of art
and poetry for their own sake—for such a view of art and of the modern world was
radically opposed to the whole thrust of the Voyages Extraordinaires.
Verne’s innovation is to have made the notion of “expansion” into a defining
principle of his approach. For the first time, narrative and geographical space
are brought together in a unifying structure, which is also a dynamic vision of
modernity. There are, it is true, authors such as Zola who dismiss Jules Verne
as irrelevant to the literary concerns of the mainstream—an attitude that has
pursued Verne right through to the present day—but it is no doubt also the
monumental shift that Verne heralds in the French novel that enables writers
such as Zola to find their own niche, and which will produce such sustained and
serious interest in Verne among the writers and intellectuals of
twentieth-century France.9
Although it was Hetzel who did so much to shape
this new vision of the literary in Jules Verne, it is also abundantly clear that
Verne himself had a real sense of his artistic and stylistic mission. While in
the Anglo-Saxon world in particular he is still often seen as a writer of
adolescent literature, or distortingly and simplistically viewed as the father
of science fiction (despite the many novels in which he represents entirely
conventional modes of travel), there remains the sense—both in his utterances
about the novel and in the style of his writing—that he is rethinking the
frontiers of the genre. This astonishing novelty has perhaps never been
expressed so clearly or so powerfully as in the groundbreaking article that
Michel Butor wrote on Verne in 1949, which did so much to focus subsequent
attention on the deeper undercurrents of the author’s approach. That Verne
wanted his work to be considered a mainstream contribution to literature is
moreover underlined by the many overt literary references he makes throughout
the Voyages Extraordinaires. These have the far from naive function of
positioning his work within a literary context, of giving it resonance and
identity within a literary tradition.10 Verne’s
rewritings of the Robinson Crusoe legend and of the stories of Poe—the latter
most notably in the continuation of Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
in The Sphinx of the Ice (1897)—are just two indications of his extensive
literary culture and his highly self-conscious manipulations of it. In fact,
there are literary references and echoes everywhere in his work, giving not
merely the sense that this author is hobnobbing with the great writers of
history and modernity, but also the impression that he is consciously weaving
his individual path through the intertexts of literary history and, like his
near contemporary Flaubert, making a modernist statement about the collapsing
relationship between writing and rewriting.
Just as revealing as the process of situating
his own stories in a literary tradition are Jules Verne’s own remarks about his
style and about his wish to make a lasting impact on the genre.11
As early as 1864, as he is writing The English at the North Pole, which
is to be the first part of Captain Hatteras, he affirms to Hetzel: “What
I most aspire to become is a writer, a worthy goal of which I am sure you will
fully approve.” Later in the same letter, he adds: “All this is to emphasize to
you how much I want to be a stylist, a serious one: it is my life’s aim” (Dumas et al. I:28). It is indeed an ambition that he will retain throughout his
writing career—though clearly it is expressed with an awareness of the paradox
that it needs to be expressed—and it becomes the source in later years of
a regret, as he sees himself passed over in his wish to be elected to the
Académie Française and senses that proper recognition of his stylistic
achievements has yet to come about. In an 1894 interview with the journalist
Robert H. Sherard, Verne claims that the great regret of his life was that he
had never been considered as taking a serious place in French literature.
That this author who documented all kinds of
change in his own century was also a major force for change in the novel is
surely beyond doubt at this stage. For all that, Jules Verne continues to be
misread and classified as a marginal literary figure. This is partly because he
has in the past been so badly served by his translators, partly because his work
is so adaptable to other media, but partly too because he directed his writing
at the young and encouraged his readers not to think of literature as separate
from other pursuits and disciplines. He crosses the boundaries, defies
expectations, and blends genres. Yet that porousness and flexibility of the
“literary,” which Verne adapts to all manner of purposes and which he makes into
such a broad and inclusive category, is surely one of the great points of
interest of his work. Like the other canonical novelists of nineteenth-century
France, Verne constantly asks through his innovative approach to the novel what
“literature” is, whether as a category or label it is of value, and how it can
help us to understand or structure our reality. He breaks with fictional
convention, disrupts narrative order with scientific or geographical
interpolations, and sometimes turns realism inside out by making of it a subject
of comic and ludic investigation. In so doing, he always forces us to question
the purpose and the meaning of the conventions he departs from and to think
self-consciously about the traditions within which he is writing. In this sense,
despite George Orwell’s assertion that Verne was “unliterary,” he is the most
literary of writers, for he understands implicitly that the language of fiction
is itself the ideal laboratory in which to view, experiment with, and negotiate
the many changes to which the nineteenth century bears witness.12
NOTES
1. The present article was
researched and written during a period as a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellow.
The author gratefully acknowledges the Trust’s generous support for this and for
the broader project of which it forms a part. All unattributed translations from
the French are my own.
2. G. Bruno’s Le Tour de la France par deux enfants (Around
France: A Journey by Two Children, 1877) was an interesting and hugely
influential variation on the “around the world” theme; it brought the focus back
to France in a publication that was also an official school manual.
3. For further discussion of this subject, see Timothy Unwin,
“Technology and Progress in Jules Verne, or Anticipation in Reverse.”
4. Verne returns more lengthily to this subject in an interview
the following year, where he says:
The creations of Mr. Wells ... belong unreservedly to an age and degree of
scientific knowledge far removed from the present, though I will not say
entirely beyond the limits of the possible. Not only does he evolve his
constructions entirely from the realm of the imagination, but he also evolves
the materials of which he builds them. See, for example, his story The First
Men in the Moon. You will remember that here he introduces an entirely new
anti-gravitational substance, to whose mode of preparation or actual chemical
composition we are not given the slightest clue, nor does a reference to our
present scientific knowledge enable us for a moment to predict a method by which
such a result might be achieved. In The War of the Worlds, again, a work
for which I confess I have a great admiration, one is left entirely in the dark
as to what kind of creatures the Martians really are, or in what manner they
produce the wonderful heat ray with which they work such terrible havoc on their
assailants. (Jones 669-70)
To this it should be added that in 1934 H.G.
Wells restated very much the same distinction between himself and Jules Verne (Haining
62-63).
5. Quoted in the Chicago Evening Post of March 25, 1905,
Verne is reported as having stated: “I think that a careful reading of the most
carefully documented works on any subject is of more value than practical
experience—at least insofar as writing novels is concerned” (Compère et Margot
232).
6. Marie-Hélène Huet in particular stresses that the earlier
phase of characters inspired by utopian socialism and a love, above all, of
freedom, gives way to the creation of dangerously anarchic individuals rebelling
against the world in general (163-67).
7. The progress of Verne’s pessimism should not, however, be
exaggerated, nor should its presence in some earlier works such as Paris in
the Twentieth Century be underplayed. Magellania, a recently re-edited novel
(1987), interestingly shows a character who, although an anarchist in spirit,
does not espouse violence and retains the sense of an ideal. The character is,
we are told, that happy exception, proof that the belief in the power of
political idealism is not entirely dead, even in this outlaw who is also “a man
of generosity, fascinated by the most advanced systems of collectivism, and to
whom all means of improving the social state seemed justified” (143).
8. In a discussion of the similarities and differences between
science fiction and scientific fiction, Arthur Evans develops the point that
whereas scientific fiction tends to incorporate or to implant science within a
fictional discourse, science fiction engages in the fictional exploitation of
science (“Science Fiction vs. Scientific Fiction in France” ). In such a
typology, Verne’s pedagogic mode of writing clearly falls into the category of
scientific fiction.
9. Zola writes in Le Figaro Littéraire on December 22,
1878 that Jules Verne is “simply of no importance to the contemporary literary
movement” (reprinted in Les Romanciers naturalistes 356-57).
10. This point is more fully developed by Arthur Evans, who
provides an important series of examples showing Verne’s conscious echoing of
literary writers (“Literary Intertexts in Jules Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires” ).
11. Jules Verne’s very real sense of his vocation as a writer
is expressed as early as January 26, 1851, when in a letter to his mother he
speaks of his decision not to pursue a legal career: “Don’t think I am having
fun with this: there is a fatality that binds me to it. I can become a good
writer, but I would be a poor lawyer since in everything I see only the comic
side and the artistic form, and do not sense the serious reality of things” (qtd.
in Dumas 285).
12. Orwell writes: “It seems strange that so unliterary a
writer as Verne should have behind him the familiar history of a
nineteenth-century Frenchman of letters. But it is all there—the early tragedies
in imitation of Racine, the encouragement of Victor Hugo, the romantic
starvation in a garret” (qtd. Haining 17).
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