1
Verne’s Journey to the
Centre of the Self:
Space and Time in the ‘Voyages
extraordinaires’
William Butcher
2
For a couple of decades now, there has been huge interest in France in this writer, the bestselling author of all
time, the most translated, and the only Frenchman to have achieved truly universal renown. But in Britain the
real Verne is virtually unknown. It is this amazing disparity that my book tries to reduce.
It shows that the complexity of Verne’s themes and structures has been grossly underestimated in Britain, and
that Verne’s works should be considered primarily as literature, albeit of a very readable nature. It tries
therefore to establish the specifically literary devices used by this decidedly surprising writer. Although the
book is a scholarly one, it never loses sight of the huge audience that Verne has maintained despite labouring
under the misconception of being a writer for children and/or of science fiction.
THE WORKS OF JULES VERNE have undergone a major re-evaluation in France in recent years, based on a
recognition of their sustained literary value and their unique influence on subsequent creative writers. In
Britain, however, no full-length scholarly study of Verne had appeared before 1990.
It is this remarkable gap, where the bestselling writer of all time—and the only Frenchman to have achieved
truly universal renown—is either unknown or travestied, that Dr Butcher brilliantly fills here. His detailed study
of the themes and structures shows that they all lead ineluctably back to the author: that the self is at the centre
of even the apparently most impersonal works.
WILLIAM BUTCHER lectures in French Literature at the University of Buckingham. He was previously Senior
Lecturer at the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, and has also taught in Malaysia and at Saint-Cyr, the INSEE
and the ENS de Saint-Cloud. Dr Butcher has published extensively on French Literature and is co-author of
Mississippi Madness: Canoeing the Mississippi-Missouri. He is currently preparing English editions of Journey
to the Centre of the Earth and Backwards to Britain.
Malcolm Bowie: ‘Meticulous and original’
Ross Chambers: ‘Eloquent and powerful’
Edward J. Gallagher:
‘A paradigm through which to study Verne . . . Intriguing, provocative, stimulating . . . Any further study . . .
will have to come to terms with [Butcher]’
3
The works of Jules Verne have undergone a major reevaluation in France in recent years, based on a
recognition of their sustained literary value and their unique influence on subsequent creative writers. In
Britain, however, no full-length scholarly study of Verne has ever appeared.
It is this remarkable gap, where the best-selling writer of all time — and the only Frenchman to have achieved
truly universal renown — is either completely unknown or travestied, that Dr Butcher brilliantly fills here.
Another original feature is the full analysis of a recent discovery: Michel Verne’s posthumous, and often
tongue-in-cheek, contribution to the Voyages extraordinaires, including the masterpiece ‘L’Eternel Adam’
(1910). Journey to the Centre of the Self argues that the very large number of journeys undertaken by the
protagonists of both of the Vernes, whether under the seas, through the airs, or into space, represent a desire for
transcendence. All the searches for the human, animal and mineral curiosities of the globe are also a search for
lost time. One novel indeed, Voyage au centre de la Terre, employs an extended spatio-temporal metaphor to
transport its heroes through the vertical layers of the past and into a primordial time-before-time, thus
constituting a dramatic and convincing portrayal of travel in time.
Verne’s obsession with cannibalism — and corresponding currents of abnormal sexuality — has clear
psychoanalytic roots; but this study looks at the precise structural consequences of the deviant acts and thus
arrives at some remarkable conclusions.
Verne is also highly innovative in the stylistic area. Le Chancellor (1870, 1875) is the first novel in
continuous prose to have been written in the present in French (and possibly in any Western European
language); and L’Ile à hélice (1895), the first in the present and the third person. This discovery of Dr Butcher’s
leads to an observation of genuinely experimental writing, for the present tense, with its ultimately destructive
self-reference, perfectly expresses Verne’s self-consciousness, introspection and tendency to self-destruction.
The conclusion reunites these divergent spatio-temporal strands, in terms of such recurrent obsessions as
inside-outside, self-others and plausibility-creativity. The most salient event of the nineteenth century is
observed to be the closing of space represented by the closing of the age of exploration. What begins therefore
as a journey of exploration becomes the journey into the past and finally ends up as a journey to the centre of
the self. This ‘message’ is relayed, in subtly rewritten or pastiched form, in the posthumous works — and thus
makes Jules-and-Michel very much more modern than has been realised.
Dr Butcher’s dense and wide-ranging study will revolutionise thinking about Verne in the Englishspeaking countries.
Prof Malcolm Bowie: ‘Original, impressive [. . .] and intelligent’
Prof Ross Chambers: ‘Eloquent and powerful’
Prof Edward J. Gallagher: ‘A paradigm through which to study Verne [. . .] intriguing, provocative,
stimulating [. . .]. Any further study [. . .] will have to come to terms with [Journey to the centre of the
Self]’
4
JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE SELF
Dr Butcher has also co-written Mississippi Madness
JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE SELF
TIME AND SPACE IN VERNE’S ‘VOYAGES EXTRAORDINAIRES’
William Butcher
© William Butcher
To the memory of my Father and Grandfather
5
CONTENTS
List of figures
Foreword by Ray Bradbury
Acknowledgements
Reference System
1 THE WARRIOR OF THE UNKNOWN
2 IN SEARCH OF LOST STRUCTURE
Lost Between Two Shores
The Strogoff Syndrome
Le Verbe et la Terre
Go Anywhere, Do Anything
Splitting the Difference
The Pleasure and the Pain
3 THE SHAPE’S THE THING
Plots and Intrigues
In and Out
Diversions or ‘Divertissements’
Putting it All Back Together Again
4 THE PAST IS A PLACE
Past Masters
Man and Less-than-Man
The New Country
Going Back
5 THE SHAPE OF THINGS GONE BY
Living in the Past
A Strange Dream
How to Travel in Time
6 STARTING AND STOPPING
Straight and Round
Return to Sender
Getting Things Going
Posthumous Cycles
Time Will Have a Stop?
7 ONE AND ALL
The Body Metaphoric
Violence and Sex
6
Friends and Relatives
The Terminal System
Knowledge and the Lone Individual
8 PAST REFLEXIONS
Past Present
Self-Conscious Narration
It Was Tomorrow
Will There Be a Reply?
Breaking Out
9 NOW OR NEVER
Things Going By
Supporting Role
Narration Impossible
Towards a New Novel
10 ‘SO UNLITERARY A WRITER AS VERNE’?
The Closing Down of History
Michel Meets Jules
Why Him?
Appendix A: The Time of the Novel
Appendix B: Michel Verne
Notes
Bibliography
Primary Works
Critical Studies
Index
7
LIST OF FIGURES
Note: Because of the geometrical nature of some of the arguments of this study, a number of figures are
introduced. Their functioning and meaning are fully explained in the accompanying text.
3.1 Graphs of Narrative Time v Fictional Time: Global Forms
(a) ‘Un Drame au Mexique’
(b) Voyage au centre de la Terre
(c) Le Chancellor
(d) ‘In the Year 2889'
(e) Mistress Branican
(f) ‘L’Eternel Adam’
3.2 The Beginnings
(a) Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours
(b) L’Ile mystérieuse
(c) Le Château des Carpathes
(d) Mistress Branican
3.3 The Endings
(a) De la Terre à la Lune
(b) Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours
(c) Le Château des Carpathes
(d) L’Ile à hélice
3.4 Synthesis
The General Structure of a Verne Novel
6.1 Cyclical Structures
(a) Water Evaporation and Condensation
(b) The Life of an Iceberg
(c) Man-Eider-Bird Symbiosis
(d) Vertical Movements in a Fluid
(e) Security System for Ships
(f) Self-Compensating Aircraft
(g) The Cycle of History
9.1 Variations in Tense with Nature of Transposition and Degree of Narratorial Intervention
App.1Ricardou’s Diagrams and an Alternative Presentation
(a), (b) Variations in Speed of Narration
(c), (d) Jumps in Narrative and Fictional Time
(e), (f) ‘Normal’ Segment, Anticipation, and Flashback
(g), (h) L’Emploi du temps
App.2The Two Presentations Compared
(a), (b) Standard Speed of Narration
(c), (d) Fictional Time that Has ‘Fallen Behind’ Narrative Time
(e), (f) Same Text in Two Segments or in One
8
Foreword
Ray Bradbury
William Butcher proves in this book that we are all, in one way or another, the children of Jules Verne. His
name never stops. At Aerospace or NASA gatherings, Verne is the verb that moves us to Space.
He was born in the future we inhabit as our present. Once born he ricochetted back to the 19th century to
dream our dreams and cause us to realise his possible improbabilities.
In one way or another Butcher shows us how Verne has structured our ideas and reared up the architectures of
our lives even as Walt Disney, an equally improbable god, has blue-printed new cities from old ruins, and
taught us how to run them, amidst doubts and derision.
Back in the early sixties when Verne was the unacknowledged ghost writer for President Kennedy, I
described Verne along with his influence, Herman Melville, as the Ardent Blasphemers.
Melville struck God’s sun because it insulted him.
Verne very quietly suggested that the sun should not be struck, but plugged into, utilized, its energies
borrowed to move and light the world.
Melville’s maniac Captain ran forth to kill a whale.
Nemo, with a more serene madness, said no, do not kill but build a whale. Run up a steel skeleton, skin it with
iron, illuminate its interior and swim forth as Nautilus to be mistaken for and dubbed Moby Dick, in tribute to
the American master.
Melville had a most sad ending. In a poem based on a terrible regret, a few years ago, I advised Herman,
much too late, to ‘stay away from land, it’s not your stuff’.
Instead like an old god, its energies reversed, he made permanent landfall where gravity seized him. Instead
of rejuvenation from contact with the earth, Melville was stake-driven down record straight and do some
housekeeping in the rummage left behind by one-eyed screenwriters.
Butcher’s journey to, around, back and away from the pachyderm approaches the literary beast from as many
directions as a well-meaning analyst can conjure. And if we do not in the end completely find the animal, that is
good. For Verne turns out to be less creature and more unexplored territory. The metaphor of the elephant is
insufficient. The fun and the mystery of Verne is the fact that after you have traversed great distances across his
time, he always runs ahead. Like other novelist-explorers before and after him he could not resist going in a
journey. And the journey itself is all. He acted out what I describe to my friends as the Aesthetic of Lostness.
He does not want to arrive any one place and truly know where he is. The effervescent boy-man in him longs
always to be at odds, not to know where he came from, where arrived or where going.
We share that leaning into adventure.
If women want to stake their tents and stay, it is the man who is always grousing around the campfire because
he knows only too well he is putting down roots and is discomfited by a knowledge of self as well as place.
He must be up and going, off and gone, long before dawn.
The wise woman drags after the absolute fool. It is man, not woman, who claims he climbs Everest ‘because
it is there’. An insufficient reason, if I ever heard one.
A better one, that Verne implies is, we go there because we are nearer the stars, and if we reach the stars, one
day, we will be immortal. I think this is all submerged in Verne. I risk criticism for bringing it out. What is the
use of life if it isn’t immortal? The rage to live underlies everything Verne says and does. And to live at the top
of one’s blood, heart, soul, and breath. Verne’s gift to us is the best: he makes us want to live forever. And we
shall do so, one year, because he lifted our spirits in Le Géant in which he flew over France in a basket filled
with liquid spirits, spiced chicken and, one hopes, an occasional female.
Which is why, of course, Verne is suspect among not all but many intellectuals. Life is too serious to be taken
frivolously, they say. No, says Verne, life is too serious to be taken seriously. Life can be won with a good
heart, high fevers and walked with tons instead of pounds of invisible flesh. He died not knowing his fame
9
beyond century’s end, stamping and stamping and stamping the United States customs in.
Verne, contrarily, as Butcher proves in chapter after chapter, died in the midst of families. His own, with its
lights and darks, but more important the world’s and all those young locomotive, diving-bell, cloud-staring men
who would almost rather stoke engines in lieu of exasperated fiancées and wives.
Resultantly, he has never died. His family on his last day, was immense, and remains so.
We young romantics who once read Tarzan have found that Burroughs was for our boyhood jungle years and
can not be revisited.
Verne, when we sit at his feet, remains our technological St. Nicholas, dispensing old gifts made freshly new
on turning a page.
When I made a brief appearance on APOSTROPHES the leading intellectual French television hour, 11 years
ago, I found myself in a squabbling hen-yard of pontiffs mewing and muttering about Verne’s this, that, and
t’other, with some homosexual innuendos tossed in to spoil the hour. In the midst of the exchange I advised
everyone to be quiet.
‘Gentlemen’, I said, ‘you want to talk about the ants. I wish to talk about the Elephant’.
I went on to say what I have said early on in this preface. Without Verne there is a strong possibility we
would never have romanced ourselves to the Moon. His immortal dust should be divided in separate and equal
parts to be lodged in that first footprint on the Moon, and tossed to the winds that blow across that great Martian
ravine that can hide our continental United States and swallow our imaginations.
It is only appropriate then that William Butcher comes at Jules Verne from just about every angle one can
image. There are ants aplenty at his picnic. But in the main he skins and mounts the pachyderm without making
it resemble the nine different kinds of animal described by those blind men of India.
It is just about the most complete work on Verne I have seen, and I saw a plenteous lot when the New York
Times, more than 30 years ago, asked me to celebrate his life. Since then, Verne has been rediscovered by
Hollywood, and on several occasions by TV, not always to his advantage. Butcher is here to set the humour.
Otherwise the Will sinks, the ship is not built, the city lifted, or the rocket promised for some future noon.
All this, one way or another, is in Butcher’s book, fastened in place by his bright wits, or tangentially implied.
Since the 50th anniversary of Verne’s death, a score of books have examined his life. Butcher does the work of
all those books, and more. For, as I have said, he describes more than the inkstained beast and tries for Verne’s
territorial imperatives.
During this century we have fired at and ricochetted radio sounds off the Moon. But Verne arrived there long
before us. Why then should we be puzzled when all those sounds return with a French accent?
Butcher has captured those grand sounds and told us what they mean.
Ray Bradbury
2 January 1990
10
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My most heartfelt thanks are due to those without whom this book could not have existed in its present form:
Malcolm Bowie who offered his eminently sensible and constructive support over a long period; Ross
Chambers, who gave me tremendous help and encouragement; François Raymond, who had the generosity to
commission four articles, and the patience to suggest improvements to them; and Nicole Saou, who helped me
more than perhaps she knew by deciphering handwritten pages and by her assistance with the articles and the
diagrams. My sincerest thanks must also go to Chris Thorpe for help with the illustrations, and Armelle Achour,
Jean-Philippe Dubois and Ho Tjing Jung for help with the manuscript, together with those who were able to
make sufficient sense of the earlier drafts to encourage me, Simone Vierne, Daniel Compère, Michel Blanc, and
Michael Moriarty. My gratitude goes finally to those who commented on individual sections: Jacques
Alexandropoulos, Serge Antoine, Ninette Bailey, William Barber, Colin Bartlett, David Bellos, Jean Bessière,
Kay Bourne, Sally Butcher, Dominique Gérard, P. Hansen, Peter McNaughton, Andrew Martin, P. Petitmengin,
Gérard Rapégno, Jean Ricardou, Jean-Charles Rochet, Richard Smith, David Steel, Harold Wardman, and
Dominique de Werra.
REFERENCE SYSTEM
References to Verne’s works will generally be of the form ‘VCT 10'. The first group represents the title —
Voyage au centre de la Terre in this case — following sigla indicated in the Bibliography (p. 345). The last
group is the page number. When the edition used is not Livre de poche (about 5% of cases), the reference is
made in such a form as to be verifiable in any edition: as ‘IH I ii 10' or ‘PD ii 10', the upper-case Roman
numeral (if any) being the part number and the lower-case one being the chapter number. When several
references are made to a single idea in my text, they are separated by commas, whereas references to successive
ideas are separated by semi-colons; the siglum is not repeated when there are multiple references to the same
work. Verne’s quotation marks are always maintained (although the responsability for utterances is not always
identified). Quotations within quotations should not therefore be taken as representing the narrator’s view. Even
where quotation marks are not present, my text is often a direct paraphrase of Verne’s (as indicated by the notes
or references in brackets). My emphasis of words within quotations will be indicated by the use of SMALL
CAPITALS, whereas italics indicate emphasis in the text quoted. Square brackets within quotations indicate my
intercalation of material. For the sake of continuity, a few brief quotations have been translated (my
translations), but only when the English corresponds clearly to the French. References will contain the place of
publication only when it is not London (for books in English) or Paris (for books in French).
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
BSJV: Bulletin de la société Jules Verne
tri.: trimestre (quarter)
§ : New paragraph (within a quotation)
n° : numéro (number)
1
THE WARRIOR OF THE UNKNOWN
11
erne’s characters are at a crossroads in history, since space is shrinking so rapidly in the nineteenth century.
The demand for virgin territory can clearly not be satisfied for much longer in an era where ‘to go around
V the world has become just a tourist trip’ and even Himalayan peaks are covered with inscriptions like
‘Durand, dentiste, 14, rue Caumartin’ (ER (1882) 43; MV (1880) 277).1
Would-be explorers will very soon find themselves in a post-Romantic cul-de-sac, and Paganel is anticipating
only slightly when he declares: ‘Everything has been seen, everything reconnoitred, everything invented, there
are no new continents or worlds remaining; and we latest arrivals [. . .] haven’t got anything left to do!’ (CG
(1866–8) 81–2). The Voyageurs — and the author — feel therefore compelled to visit the few remaining scraps
of unexplored territory before the real-life explorers get there.
The general manifesto of the Voyages extraordinaires is to describe journeys of exploration throughout Les
Mondes connus et inconnus. But once the unknown worlds have disappeared, some sort of compromise will
clearly be necessary. Travellers will have to consider themselves more as ‘perfecters’ than as ‘inventors’ (CH
119), their aim more to ‘join up and finish off’ (5S 10) than to discover new worlds — more, in sum, to be
exhaustive on a second level. The ‘other’ intention of the Voyages, announced in their fourth volume, and
repeated regularly afterwards (for example, TO 365 (1895)), is thus the Balzacian one of summarising the
whole of human knowledge: ‘[leur but] est [. . .] de RESUMER TOUTES les connaissances géographiques,
géologiques, physiques, astronomiques amassées par la science moderne et de REfaire [. . .] l’histoire de
l’UNIVERS’.2 This announcement by the publisher Hetzel has often been commented on, but the critics have
never fully explained how such an operation happens within the space of fiction — how a universe may be
covered by the lines on a page.
And yet a first observation seems fairly obvious. The stark choice between on one hand limiting oneself,
while it is still possible, to what is absolutely new, and on the other restricting attention to what has already
been explored in the non-fictional world does have an advantage. Verne’s characters normally feel a bit lost. By
means of this choice, the multidimensional complexity of the world will be either of relatively limited
dimensions or structured by previous explorers’ endeavours. Each potential journey will be made substantially
less arbitrary. Nevertheless, the two options still remain slightly paradoxical, for their union is of course the
whole world.
Responses to the general question of plots in literature have often employed terms like ‘a slice of life’, ‘train
of events’, ‘narrative thread’ or ‘point of view’. Their use of
metaphorical objects that are already of dimension two, one or zero means, however, that the key question of
dimensionality is often begged. The vital problem, in other words, still remains that of knowing how mappings
can take place between the world and a one-dimensional succession of words, how space, even when divided
into two, can begin to be ‘temporalised’.3
In simpler terms: how is the choice of particular journeys in time and space made? Trying to analyse the two
components separately undoubtedly makes for less understanding, not more. Thus when time in Verne’s works
is examined in terms of the explicit pronouncements, it rapidly becomes clear that it cannot be conceived of as a
tangible and measurable phenomenon. ‘Because of’ a double reductionism carried out in the seminal short story
‘Maître Zacharius’ (1851), time seems to exist in the Voyages only by entering into a symbiosis with some
The two quotations are from L’Ecole des Robinsons, p. 43, and La Maison à vapeur, p. 277. The system of
reference to Verne’s works is explained on p. xvi and in the Bibliography.
2
‘Avertissement de l’éditeur’, Voyages et aventures du capitaine Hatteras (only in the first edition, 1866).
3
Jean Ricardou, Nouveaux problèmes du roman (1978) (pp. 24–36), makes a first step towards analysing
how a solid object can be ‘generated’ by a linear description, but only as regards a brief (and largely
parenthetical) passage.
1
12
other element of either the physical world or the fictional structure.4
This applies particularly to the naive view that Verne’s works are in any real sense about the future. The
works were virtually always set in the past; and the ‘anticipations’ were rarely both ahead of their time and
original, and can now be seen to have been largely pretexts for interrogations of historical, social, personal and
metaphysical themes.5 Here especially, time on its own is a useless path along which to approach the real
Verne.
If we therefore return to the idea of space and time in the works, we are however soon presented with an
almost embarrassing richness of examples. Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (1872) is a prime example.
As Fogg and Passepartout travel eastwards trying to prove that the world can be girded in eighty days, their
clock-time no longer coincides with the time of the sun, but they indignantly refuse to touch their timepieces
(TM 48, 209). The result is the ‘gain’ of the twenty-four hours that provides the final coup de théâtre and wins
the bet; but it is at the cost of 24,000 miles of space. Similarly, Sans dessus dessous (1889), recounts the
building by a megalomaniac government and an eccentric scientist of a giant cannon, designed to fire a very
heavy projectile from Mount Kilimanjaro and thus, using the recoil, right the Earth’s axis. If the idea was
successful, time and space would be jointly affected, for the seasons would disappear, and the sun’s course in
the sky would be changed (SDD 194). Again, Hector Servadac (1877) describes the travels round the solar
system of a populated fragment torn from the Earth by a passing comet. The distinction is made between
context-sensitive timepieces like pendulum clocks and context-neutral ones like spring-based watches; but the
major consequence of the travels is the lengthening of the seasons and the shortening of the days, and the
problems this causes for eating habits and rates of pay (HS 54; 126–7).6
The Voyages extraordinaires, then, often highlight the interdependence of the two elements making up both
the journey and the plot. Even so, Le Tour du monde, with its explicit interrogation, remains an exception. In
general, there still remains a considerable gap between our observation of the importance of space and time in
Verne’s novels and a detailed knowledge of how they actually work together.
A survey of the existing literature shows that although short — and brilliant — pieces concerning time have
been written by Raymond, Vierne, Delabroy and Roudaut,7 no-one has yet looked coherently and sustainedly at
Verne’s spatio-temporal structures and themes. This applies almost by default in the English-speaking world,
for studies on Verne have been almost non-existent — and Britain especially seems poorly endowed with
A fuller account of ‘Maître Zacharius’ forms part of my Chapter 6. Many other writers have addressed the
notoriously slippery problem of time (see, for example, A.A. Mendilow’s useful analysis, Time and the Novel
(1952), pp. 145–7.) What I am attempting at this stage is to approach Verne’s position — and not solve the
perhaps insoluble problem of the nature of time (on this subject see, for instance, Hans Meyerhoff, Time in
Literature (Los Angeles: 1955), esp. pp. 4–8).
5
See William Butcher, ‘Les Dates de l’action des Voyages extraordinaires: Une Mise au point’, BSJV, n°
67, 3e tri. 1983, pp. 101–3. As regards ‘anticipations’, Pierre Versins has argued that at most three of Verne’s
novels are based on ideas that had not already been used in fictional works, let alone non-fictional ones (‘Le
Sentiment de l’artifice’, L’Arc, pp. 56–65).
6
As Verne says of Jupiter: ‘les journées ne sont que de neuf heures et demie, ce qui est commode pour les
paresseux; et [. . .] les années [. . .] durent douze ans, ce qui est avantageux pour les gens qui n’ont plus que six
mois à vivre’ (5S 59).
7
François Raymond, ‘Jules Verne ou le mouvement perpétuel’, Subsidia Pataphysica, 22 Sable 97 (1969),
n° 8, pp. 21–52, and ‘L’Homme et l’horloge’, in L’Herne: ‘Jules Verne’, n° 25, 1974, pp. 141–50; Simone
Vierne, Jules Verne et le roman initiatique (1973), pp. 604–30; Jean Delabroy, ‘La Machine à démonter le
temps’, in Jules Verne 3 (1980), ed. François Raymond, pp. 15–23; Jean Roudaut, ‘ “L’Eternel Adam” et
l’image des cycles’, in L’Herne: ‘Jules Verne’, pp. 180–212.
4
13
studies of time in general.8 It is this triple lack which it will be the main aim of the present book to remedy —
together with understanding the how and the why of the Voyageur himself.
Given the exhaustive theme, it would be a shame to omit any of Verne’s works. My corpus will consist
therefore of all seventy-nine Voyages extraordinaires (1851–1919), together with the most important of the
other prose, poetic and dramatic works (a list appears in the Bibliography). Special attention will nevertheless
be paid to the seventeen short stories and about a dozen of the best-known or interesting novels.
The novels can conveniently be classified into three categories. On the one hand, the first four in the series,
Cinq semaines en ballon (1863), Voyage au centre de la Terre (1864, 1867), De la Terre à la Lune (1865) and
Les Voyages et aventures du capitaine Hatteras (1866), with their exploration of such clearly new territories as
the heart of Africa, the underground depths, space and the North Pole, are the densest and richest texts in verbal
terms, often showing a remarkable power of invention.
The four books typical of the middle period, however, generally mix the known and unknown much more. In
Les Enfants du capitaine Grant (1866–8), the heroes search round the globe looking for a man whose latitude
but not longitude is known; Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1869–70) shows a voyage into the underwater and
other areas of the globe, in the company of the mysterious Captain Nemo; Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts
jours (1873), a journey through mostly known areas from London to Singapore and back to London again; and
L’Ile mystérieuse (1874–5), the systematic exploration of life on an invented desert-island. Although this period
is the most successful in Verne’s life, the texts lengthen considerably, and often show signs of underlying
tensions.
The remaining texts are less well-known: Le Chancellor (1875) presents the successive catastrophes of a ship
attempting to cross the Atlantic; Robur-le-conquérant (1886), a machine which is half helicopter, half
aeroplane; L’Ile à hélice (1895), a miles-long pleasure-cruiser-cum-millionaire-community; Face au drapeau
(1896), submarine warfare; Le Village aérien (1901), the discovery of a missing-link tribe in the equatorial
forest; and L’Etonnante aventure de la mission Barsac (1919), a technological and social dystopia in the heart
of the African desert.
A large number of commentators have in fact pointed out important differences during this later period. Verne
himself, in a much-quoted remark, wrote ‘Je n’ai plus de sujet dont l’intérêt soit dans l’extraordinaire: Ballons,
Capitaine Nemo, etc. Il me faut donc chercher à intéresser par la combinaison’.9 Other signs of change are that
apparently sympathetic presentations of scientific themes are replaced by criticisms of science and by scenes of
mere tourism, that ideas from the earlier works are re-employed in ironic fashion, and that the political views
become less pro-Anglo-Saxon and at the same time less optimistic.
The reaction of the public was demonstrated by drops in sales, particularly severe in the case of Le
Chancellor (1875) and the 1890s.10 Some modern critics have shared this unfavourable impression: Jean
Bellemin-Noël, for instance, goes as far as calling Sans dessus dessous (1889) a ‘fiasco’, noting apparently
unintentional errors in the calculations that form an essential element of the plot.11 But other critics have
8
The significant primary studies on Verne in English are quickly listed: principally articles by Ray
Bradbury, Ross Chambers, Andrew Martin and Darko Suvin, and books by Kenneth Allott, I.O. Evans and
Arthur Evans (see Bibliography for further details). For the lack of studies on time, see Stephen Jay Gould,
Time’s Arrow (1988), p.16.
9
Letter of 3.12.1883, concerning L’Archipel en feu (Bibliothèque nationale, Département des manuscrits,
‘Jules Verne’ (hereafter B.N.), vol. 73), quoted by A. Parménie, ‘Huit lettres de Jules Verne à son éditeur, P.-J.
Hetzel’, Arts/Lettres, ‘Jules Verne’, n° 29, sept. 1966, pp. 102–7 (107).
10
L’Ile mystérieuse (1874–5): 44,000, Le Chancellor (1875): 26,000; e.g. L’ILe à hélice (1895): 6,000 (the
Hetzels’ sales figures in 1904, quoted by Charles-Noël Martin, La Vie et l’œuvre de Jules Verne (1978), pp.
280–1).
11
‘Analecture d’un fiasco double: A propos de Sans dessus dessous’, in Jules Verne 3, pp. 137–56 (146).
14
defended the same works: François Raymond argues that the irony of Sans dessus dessous and its revelation of
how it is constructed together help to constitute a self-consciousness that foreshadows more recent literature.12
Without at this stage attempting to evaluate these opposing views, it is clear that there is a major discontinuity
somewhere in Verne’s production.
But the choice of studying all the works is in fact far from unproblematic. It has recently been proved by
Piero Gondolo della Riva that not all the Voyages extraordinaires were written by Jules Verne.13 After his death
— and even before — his son, Michel Verne, rewrote or wrote parts of or even the whole of many of the
Voyages extraordinaires, although they continued to bear Jules Verne’s name. To complicate matters further,
Michel did so in the general manner of his father — on one level at least.
The consequences of Gondolo della Riva’s discovery, have not yet been fully worked out,14 although all the
more important given the facinating nature of some of the posthumous works. Fortunately, access has been
acquired recently to five of the original, i.e. Jules’s, manuscripts, for they have been published by the Société
Jules Verne.15
A secondary aim here, then, is to begin the study of Michel Verne, especially the short story ‘L’Eternel
Adam’, apparently totally from his pen. My initial policy will be to accept the son’s contribution as an integral
part of the Voyages extraordinaires. But at the same time, it is clear that the posthumous works often act as a
well-informed commentary on the rest: as a discourse at a second level which extrapolates tendencies from the
previous works, occasionally to the point of pastiche. The name ‘Verne’ will consequently be used for aspects
common to the two writers; but ‘Jules Verne’ or ‘Michel Verne’ as a shorthand way of underlining aspects of
one or the other.
‘Postface’, in Sans dessus dessous (Grenoble: 1976), pp. 181–90 (181–2).
‘A propos des œuvres posthumes de Jules Verne’, Europe, n° 595–6, nov.–éc. 1978, pp. 73–88; ‘A propos
du manuscrit de Storitz’, BSJV, n° 46, 2e tri. 1978, pp. 160–3; ‘Encore à propos du manuscrit de Storitz’, BSJV,
n° 58, 2e tri. 1981, p. 72. See Appendix B for a fuller presentation of the ‘Michel question’.
14
Despite individual articles: William Butcher, ‘Le Sens de ‘L’Eternel Adam’, BJSV, n° 58, 2e tri. 1981, pp.
73–81; Lucien Boia, ‘Un Ecrivain original: Michel Verne’, BSJV, n° 70, 2e tri. 1984, pp. 90–5; Olivier Dumas,
‘La Main du fils dans l’œuvre du père’, BSJV, n° 82, 2e tri. 1987, pp. 21–4; Christian Robin, ‘Les Débuts de
Michel Verne’, in Jules Verne (Nantes, 1984), ed. C. Robin, pp. 1–3 and 9–13.
15
Principally Le Secret de Wilhelm Storitz (1985), La Chasse au météore (1986) and En Magéllanie (= Les
Naufragés du ‘Jonathan’) (1987), Le Beau Danube Jaune (= Le Pilote du Danube) (1988), and Le Volcan d’or
(1989).
12
13
15
2
IN SEARCH OF LOST STRUCTURE
Lost Between Two Shores
In the beginning is the void. The
initial situation of each Vernian
hero is the confrontation of his
minute physical being with the unstructured space of the whole world. It is his search for some means of
apprehending the globe, deciding on meaningful movements, coping with time. The division explored–
unexplored, we have seen, is essential in this respect; but it does not explain how structure and significance are
injected into space. Let us accordingly start again from first principles.
The situation at the beginning of each Voyage is free movement over the globe; and this is viewed with
immense pleasure by many of the heroes — who usually have enough money to enjoy it. They happily
contemplate the uninterrupted visual field, where surface and sky are described as tending to infinity together.
Their attention is especially drawn to the uncharted areas on the maps, ‘ces grands vides [. . .], ces blancs à
teintes pâles’ (RC 152), offering as they do an unlimited range of possibilities for mind or body to wander.
But they are just as much drawn by the regions of the globe which cannot be mapped out and appropriated.
The open sea is typical, for ‘comment nommer [. . .] un espace d’océan indéterminé? Comment planter en
pleins flots le pavillon de son pays?’ (CH 552). Because the waves — despite Britannia’s claim — have no
intrinsic structure, the heroes can follow their whims and ‘go where they please’ (SG 23); in other words, ‘la
mer libre, [c’est] [. . .] la liberté’ (CH 476). The polar regions are similarly protected by the difficulty of
establishing any sort of permanent mark on them16 or on their maps — a protection reinforced by the
association between blanc-blank and blanc-white (RC 152, CH 213, etc.). Three-dimensional domains, above
all, not only offer an infinitely multiplied number of potential paths, but are again virtually unchartable —
hence perhaps the predilection for the ocean depths in Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, the underground
domains in Voyage au centre de la Terre and Les Indes noires (1877), and the air and space in at least seven
works (DA (1851), 5S, RC, MM, TL, AL, HS).
The euphoria of unrestricted movement seldom lasts long however, and boredom is always threatening to set
in. The monotony of occupying the ‘mathematical centre’ of an empty circular horizon is in fact a complaint
frequently heard in the mouths of Verne’s heroes (VF 66, cf. IM 132, VCT 263, 5S 222). Without fixed points to
focus on, they judge their freedom excessive; tending to infinity means never actually getting there; a total
choice is almost the same as no choice at all. Openness comes to compare unfavourably with the richness,
plenitude and security of compact tropical islands with their ‘mille ressources variées’ (CH 418). In the later
novels of tourism, especially, advanced methods of locomotion afford the characters great liberty, but one from
which little benefit can be drawn in the absence of any motivation, of any sense of direction.
Frequently, the fear of emptiness takes on the form of an agoraphobic reaction to a sensory void. This may
seem surprising given the role of the journey in Verne’s works. Nevertheless, mariners, polar explorers and
airmen all express their dread of the empty perspective, ‘[l’]éclat uniforme’, ‘[le] mal de la blancheur’ (HG
240; CH 292; 292). Even contemplation from a high place causes a corresponding ‘mal de l’espace’ (VCT 72):
at least eight characters — plus Hatteras’s dog — suffer a textually identical ‘vertige’ when faced with an
Marie-Hélène Huet, ‘Itinéraire du texte’, in Jules Verne et les sciences humaines (1979), ed. François
Raymond and Simone Vierne, pp. 9–26 (20).
16
16
identical ‘abîme’.17 In virtually each case, the hero further undergoes an ‘attraction de l’abîme’, ‘[la] tent[ation]
de s’y précipiter’ (VCT 146; C 116). In other words, a lack of tangible objects in the hero’s field of vision
seems to provoke an attempt to reduce the emptiness of space, however suicidal the consequences. Open space
is far from an automatic route to salvation.
Three-dimensional space may, nevertheless, be brought down to size by the cunningly simple expedient of
eliminating the odd dimension, the vertical one. The aircraft in fact normally stay close to the ground, and their
movements are often considered simply in terms of a conventional map. Similarly, life underground is often
represented as an imitation of the planar world above, with the third dimension serving merely as a transition
between the two: one hero even finds his way around down there by associating locations with features on the
surface (IN 135). Exceptionally, in Voyage au centre de la Terre and ‘Un Drame dans les airs’, the vertical
dimension is retained — but often at the price of both of the horizontal ones being normally ignored.
In the more typical case of space that is already two-dimensional, there is no distinctive dimension that could
be eliminated, for latitude and longitude occupy comparable positions in the scheme of things (in non-polar
regions at least). So Verne’s characters have to seek some other form which will provide at least a pretext for
travel. The most obvious physical feature, whether on the terrain or on the map, is the division between land
and water. The simplest solution is thus for the Voyageurs to hug coasts ‘as closely as possible’, to follow what
is characterised, with some originality, as ‘un fleuve qui n’aurait qu’une rive’, ‘[une] route [. . .] à la fois
fluviale et maritime’.18 This compromise between sea and river constitutes a vital element in the Vernian
imagination. It avoids two of the sources of anguish visible throughout the corpus, agoraphobia and
claustrophobia, and helps to create a semblance of both security and free-will.
But from the narrator’s point of view more variety is needed to give life to the plot, and accordingly many
novels embroider on the basic situation. In Le Phare du bout du monde, as an interesting example, the hero’s
efforts to delay the villains’ departure involve not only obstructing their attempts to build a boat, but also
preventing other vessels from entering the only bay, while at the same time using the open space on the island
to avoid falling into their hands himself. The novel thus essentially pivots round the closed form of the bay and
its opposition to the open structures of the land and the sea.
An episode set in Africa in Un Capitaine de quinze ans (1878) ( C15 331–41) provides a more developed
example. Having survived various vicissitudes, the heroes are in a closed native hut round which flood-water is
getting higher and higher and into which it is also slowly flowing, stopped only by the internal air-pressure.
Sooner or later, they will have to make a hole in the hut to attempt to replenish their air. But the problem is that
the water inside will of course rise to the level it is at outside or to the level of the hole, whichever happens to
be the lower. Making a low hole is clearly less dangerous, but a high hole has a greater chance of success. In
the event however, the heroes forget all about their calculations, and choose the most risky course of action of
all, a hole right at the top. They thus take a bold view on the land–sea problem.
Where however the frontier between the two elements does not naturally exist, the situation is often
transformed by means of a rhetorical device that is fundamental to the Voyages: the metaphorical interchange of
sea and land.
Sometimes it is the element itself which is affected. Thus land is described as having shoals, undulations,
eddies, ripples, foam, white horses, a swell, and pitching and rolling, with the result that one can drown on dry
land.19 But conversely, Verne’s water takes on surprisingly terrestrial characteristics: the Amazon is a ‘garden’,
and Nemo talks of ‘game’ in the ‘sub-marine forests’ and ‘herds’ grazing on ‘the immense prairies of the
ocean’ (J 97; 20M 102; 102, cf. 427). The oceans are therefore conceived of as ‘the sixth continent’; but, in a
reapplication of the metaphor, ‘les flots aériens’, ‘la mer céleste’, ‘l’océan atmosphérique’ are then in turn ‘the
17
5S 222; VCT 72, 146; IN 149; C 116; DJM 127; MS 107; CH 572; VF 59; CH 605.
HG 233, cf. C15 203, PF 111; PBM 4; RV 34; cf. also VF 97, 20M 565; PD iv 66.
19
VCT 101; 137; TM 218; 218; VCT 137; TM 218, B 356; 430; CG 133; TCC 188.
18
17
seventh’, with clouds acting as icebergs and whirlwinds as maelstroms.20
Consequently, in the organic world, elephants are whales, to be harpooned; but as if to compensate, the sea
contains a whole menagerie, with ‘chiens [. . .], chevaux [. . .], ours, [. . .] lions’, ‘dragons’, ‘renards marins’,
‘papillons’, ‘loutre(s)’, ‘cochons’, ‘dromadaires’, ‘crapaud[s] de mer’. 21 Birds are sharks or hunting-dogs, and
grasshoppers, ‘les crevettes de l’air’ (5S 269; TCC 266; 5S 330). ‘Poissons-mouches’ or ‘poissons volants’,
finally, form a fully living missing link in a chain of evolution re-enacted on land, and even constitute one of
the stages of metempsychosis — without however always taking on the proportions of ‘une baleine volante’.22
The means of transport are similarly transformed. Camels and caravans navigate, pedestrians are blown offcourse, and helmsmen direct a land-yacht and a wind-powered wheelbarrow (TCC 307; CC I iii 38; B 356; TM
281; TCC 163). The Nautilus moves like a balloon pushed by the wind, or escapes from ocean-bed labyrinths
like an aerostat, and air-ships are endowed with deck, hull, anchor, sails, masts, or log-book, drop a message-ina-bottle, or undergo ‘naufrages’.23
The comparison between the terrestrial and fluid elements is therefore a recurrent and dramatic one. Nature
seems little more than an elemental metaphor. Verne is undoubtedly influenced here by pre-evolutionary
biological theories. The seventeenth-century biologist De Maillet, for instance, observed that many land
animals had equivalents in the sea; and other scientists deduced from this that they must originally have come
from there (Jacob, ch. 3). But I would argue that at least as important in understanding what is going on are
psychological factors in Verne’s make-up — the need for evasion, for objects that can move with equal ease in
different environments — but also his creative compulsions — his tendency to produce new objects from old
and to invent unexpected metaphors, often by simply applying the metaphor to itself.
It is possible to surmise that the real aim is to create imaginary coastlines within a single element and thus
reach a similarly ideal mix of freedom and constraint as in the real coastlines, one that is even displaceable at
will. This is undoubtedly why so many Vernian seas contain currents or even ‘rivers’: the effect being again to
superimpose purposeful but comparatively free movement onto the wider space. But the main consequence of
the land–sea metaphor is perhaps simply the blurring of the distinctions between the elements, or between
planarity and linearity. In any case, the end-effect is to add variety to the narrative, to subdue the anguish of the
completely free choice, to quell the vertigo caused by the empty horizon or map. Space and time are rendered
slightly less frightening.
The Strogoff Syndrome
But the boundary itself sometimes lacks interest or significance. The problem is that one point on it looks very
much like another. This is especially clear in comparison with other linear forms in the Voyages, ones involving
some sort of progressive quality. In accordance with the traditional identification in literature between the
downhill flow of water and the onward flow of time, the river without branches plays the role well. Such a
topos crops up nevertheless in surprising places: in the coastal and mid-ocean rivers already mentioned, but
also, for instance, applied to the United States, for ‘le système orographique de ce grand pays se réduit à deux
chaînes de moyenne hauteur, entre lesquelles coule ce magnifique Mississipi’ (TL 319).
Sometimes, the function of the river seems to be to allow the character to abandon himself to the current on a
20
RC 72; DA 192; SG 200; TL 237; RC 72; SG 200; RC 169, IM 3; cf. RC 238. The basic land–sea metaphor
is of course used frequently in travel literature — but Verne systematises it, extends it, and integrates it into his
wider conceptions of space.
21
5S 138–40, cf. 20M 498; CH 556; 20M 426; 381; 492; 184; 291; 291; 293; cf. 120.
22
20M 178; 447; EA 256; FR 14, 15; C15 72; cf. MM frontispiece.
23
20M 427; IM 364; RC 66; 66; 193; DA 190; RC 68; 171; 142; 216, 5S 313. Simone Vierne points out this
substitution of air for water, p. 523.
18
comfortable raft or boat — the basis of extensive waterborne episodes in at least seven novels (5S, J, 500, VA,
PD, WS, MB). But the Vernian water-course also permits the presentation of ever-changing scenery; and, above
all, allows a progression, whether from imprisonment to freedom, from archaic backwaters to civilisation, or
from banal modernity to mysterious roots. The water-course is thus at the same time the means and the
embodiment of the progression. It allows, more precisely and most importantly, an association between the
temporality of the river and that of the character (and also that of the narrator). The force of this solution is
however its weakness. Leaving control of events to the flow of the water means vulnerability to obstacles, and
especially to the cataracts which feature in a surprising number of Verne’s works.24
An episode in Mathias Sandorf (1885) is a virtuoso illustration of the progressive linear structure in general
and the river form in particular. Sandorf and his two companions are in prison at the top of the Pisino Tower,
due to be executed at dawn. They manage, however, to loosen the bars on the window and start to climb down a
lightning conductor, despite a violent storm. As Sandorf argues, ‘il n’est pas douteux que le câble [. . .] n’arrive
jusqu’au sol, puisque cela est nécessaire à son fonctionnement’, ‘[et donc] au bout [. . .] il y a la liberté’ (MS
116; 111). His idea proves correct, but in an unexpected way, for it is the conductor itself that becomes
‘LIBRE, flottant, abandonné dans le vide’ (MS 112), meaning the heroes are forced to let go. Fortunately, there
is a pool at the bottom. The three avoid its ‘tourbillons [. . .], ces suçoirs liquides’ (MS 127), but are then swept
away into an underground river, managing all the same to seize a passing tree-trunk. Their control of affairs is
again strictly limited, for not only are there no junctions, but the trunk avoids the rocks by itself, ‘rien qu’en
suivant le fil du courant’ (MS 136). Sandorf profits from a lull to reiterate his optimistic prediction: ‘en quelque
endroit que se déverse ce torrent, [. . .] nous y arriverons’ (MS 131). This time he is right, for the river
eventually leads out into a vast stretch of stagnant water, not far from the open sea (MS 138).
Much of the
impact of this episode derives, I would claim, from its alternation between linear and (approximately) circular
structures. The round cell is followed by a structure which is not only physically one-dimensional, but also
provides a linear route for both the electricity and the three heroes.25 After the open structures of the air and the
round pool, the river presents another three-fold linearity — its intrinsic structure, the path of the normal
occupant and the heroes’ route. Its similarity with the first stage is further emphasised by Verne’s description of
electricity as a ‘fluide’ (MS 121), as involving, exactly like the river, both a ‘fil’ and ‘courant(s)’ (MS 124; 136;
120, 121; 136).
Linear progressive structures are thus particularly reassuring: space-time leads somewhere and not just back
in a circle to the starting point; but Natural forces are employed and so this somewhere will not be merely a culde-sac. At the same time as constructing plausible adventures, Verne is exploring real problems of space-time,
seeking both tangible reassurance and transcendental solutions.
The works also employ a large variety of linear forms intermediate between the physical and conceptual
domains. At least two novels are literally generated by the lines on the map: Les Enfants du capitaine Grant
follows the line of 37° 11' latitude south round the world; and Aventures de trois Russes et trois Anglais pursues
the 24th meridian east across Africa. The characters’ constant concern to know their spatial coordinates, already
visible in Lidenbrock and the mad balloon stowaway, becomes a veritable obsession in the case of the polar
explorers. Hatteras, in particular, argues from the fact that ‘every meridian leads to the pole’ to ignore the
longitude altogether, and thus, logically but perversely, converts the whole region into a purely linear structure,
24
E.g. MP x 292, A3 xxiii 199, VA xi 128, VF 158, MM xiv 400. In this respect, Philippe Bonnefis has
argued that the reason there are so many cataracts in the works is that Verne had problems with his eyes (‘La
mécanique des chutes’, in Jules Verne 3, pp. 67–90 (79))! But the explanation in terms of spatial structures
would seem more plausible, especially given that there is a forty-year gap between the first cataracts in Verne’s
works and the first ones in his life.
25
Vierne (p. 253) mentions the existence of the two ‘chains’ and of the ‘gouffre du Buco (bouche)’.
19
a space where the lateral dimension is totally lacking (CH 216).26 This gives him the force to get to the Pole,
but it blinds him to everything else — how, in particular, to get back. The consequence was that Hatteras died
at his destination. Hetzel, however, perhaps over-concerned for the good reputation of his publishing-house,
made Verne resuscitate him and bring him back again. In the circumstances, the author made the best of a bad
job: Hatteras goes mad, while still retaining his polar and linear obsessions: ‘Le capitaine, une fois arrivé à
l’extrémité de l’allée, revenait à reculons [. . .]. John Hatteras marchait invariablement vers le Nord’ (CH 624).
For Verne, then, the linear obsession can be dangerous.
Very frequently, the difficult task of choosing a path is accomplished by simply following a route established
by someone else. Children follow their fathers, fathers their children, mothers their children, and wives their
husbands with remarkable regularity, as Verne himself self-deprecatingly pointed out.27 Nemo further draws
attention to the ‘rule’ by proving the unique exception to it, by never stepping on ground where anyone has ever
been before (20M 490). But in general exploration in the Voyages is often merely the cognitive one of
following predecessors, in many cases real-life ones who have written books describing their routes. In Cinq
semaines en ballon, for example, the heroes are following in the footsteps of 129 authentic explorers, listed in
alphabetical order, and including a ‘Werne’ (pronounced ‘Verne’) (5S 8–10)! The heroes’ declared objective is
of course to overtake the predecessors. But following ‘les traces (des) devanciers’ and making use of their
experience (5S 90; CH 123) frequently seems to become an aim in itself — as if to compensate for the lack of
new ground to be broken. In extreme cases indeed, what is called ‘exploration’ involves following slave-traders
or telegraph lines (C15 443; B 299)! Even when apparently novel exploits are accomplished, they often prove to
be not really new: Axel and Lidenbrock do not in fact diverge from Saknussemm’s path towards the centre of
the Earth; an entomologist’s belief that he has discovered butterflies unknown to South America collapses when
he realises that he is in Western Africa instead; and travels on a comet round the solar system or in a pneumatic
tube under the Atlantic turn out to be just dreams (VCT 324; C15 257; HS 524; ExA 136). Ennuyeux dixneuvième siècle!
In the polar regions, predecessors’ routes are followed even in temporal terms, for a common alternation
between wintering and frenetic activity is imposed on all travellers. When Hatteras tries to steal a march on
previous explorers by starting earlier, he ends up in exactly the same spot at the same season (CH 184, cf. 40).
This synchronism is a defining feature of the curious Le Sphinx des glaces (1897), which is a sort of
interpretation, adaptation and follow-up of Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838). Verne’s hero starts
by following the same route, which means that Poe’s account is checked (and nearly always corrected). 28 He
experiences the same seasonal variation as Pym, plus the same dislocation on the 29th of February; and even
when he discovers new regions, twelve years later, he does it within the existing time-scale. Sometimes, indeed,
the twelve years disappear altogether, leaving only micro-variations: on one occasion, the difference between
the two ships is reduced to exactly ‘eighteen days’ (SG 217; cf. 304, etc.). The aim of Verne’s novel seems to
be to completely superimpose itself on Poe’s one, to cover it so completely as to virtually block it out.
In a few cases, lastly, the temporal structure exists independently of a physical space. In L’Ile mystérieuse, the
settlers’ constant model is not only Robinson Crusoe but the whole of the technological history of the world.
The settlers ‘invent’, in strictly linear succession, the complete range of techniques known to man. The only
exception is dynamite, which cannot be discovered in the novel in 1865, says Verne (IM(1874–5) 226–7),
because it was only discovered in 1866!
Many different varieties of linearity exist, then, but I would claim that there are two overall categories. The
Dominique Lacaze, ‘Lectures croisées de Jules Verne et de Robida’, in Jules Verne et les sciences
humaines, pp. 76–90 (86–8), gives an illuminating account of the ‘semi-metric’ in Verne.
27
Letter to Hetzel fils, Amiens, 29 juillet 1898, B.N., vol. 74, quoted by Jean Jules-Verne, Jules Verne
(1973), p. 323.
28
Huet, p. 17.
26
20
first one is constituted by a well-defined linear subset of the universe, inherited from the past; the characters
who choose to limit themselves to it drastically reduce their personal world. Such a choice is defended by the
argument that emulating — and verifying — past efforts is a precondition for a different future; but often this
different future is never actually achieved. Indeed, the characters in a one-dimensional universe are destined
merely to bump into each other even after thousand of miles of separation, like Fogg and Passepartout in Hong
Kong or Glenarvan and Paganel in the Pacific. In a purely linear world, Providence replaces chance, necessity
ousts improvisation. Later science-fiction novels have made great play of adapting space and time and studying
the consequences — for instance reducing the dimensions of the invented world. Verne is already doing this in
the nineteenth century — but within the additional constraint of realism.
But the linearity of existing structures may also be by-passed. The corollary of the infinite capability of the
human mind, says Verne, is that no situation is ever lost. Despair is never justified, and prisoners with sufficient
intelligence and will-power can always escape.29 Indeed, the conditions of the gamble are such that, as in a sort
of converse of Pascal’s wager, where the existence of God would be so infinitely rewarding that it must be
assumed, risks must be taken in these circumstances. After the escape has duly succeeded, the operation is then
often repeated over several episodes: mortal dangers arrive one after the other, the hero is constantly faced with
‘une dernière extrémité’ (C15 167), but constantly manages to survive. This second sort of linear structure, in
other words, is distinctive in being constructed segment by segment, without its continuance assured
beforehand; it is defined essentially in present/future time.
Between the two extremes of the pre-defined physical configuration and the created, zigzagging spatiotemporal form, there are nevertheless intermediate structures. Sandorf’s escape draws in fact upon both Natural
forms and his imagination; the lines of latitude and longitude are both pre-existing and artificial, non-physical
and non-zigzagging; and following previous explorers’ routes — whatever the nature of the paths they
discovered — is also in theory pre-defined, but often in practice hard to do. Between ‘l’inflexibilité de la ligne
droite’, ‘[de la] ligne loxodromique’, the path that is ‘un capricieux, un fantasque, un lunatique’, ‘ne cherchant
pas [. . .] le plus court chemin [. . .], et ne violentant pas la nature’, 30 many structures are thus based on a happy
medium, a controlled sinuosity, an undulation that also moves forward. Having created the opposition between
a geometrically unyielding and a topologically devious linearity, Verne’s works then seek to recreate an ideal
form synthesising the qualities of the two, a linearity which is ecologically and erotically integrated with the
rest of the space.
The popular impression that Verne’s works merely describe positivistic journeys of discovery is thus
particularly inaccurate. Rather, they centre on the division between the Mondes connus and the Mondes
inconnus, trying to make the former more extraordinary and the latter more ordinary. But the known–unknown
division would seem to be ‘overdetermined’ by two related tensions. First, Verne’s obstinate desire to remain in
known territory may be interpreted as a lack of confidence in his own powers of invention. But at the same
time, it may be an attempt to expose the relative lack of merit of the explorers being imitated. If somebody else
can do the same thing as 129 explorers, then either these predecessors must be considered fakes, or else modern
explorers are superior, or both. In this way, the second tension is clearly indicated. Realism in the novel means
for Verne reproducing reality as closely as possible. Taking this to its literal extreme means that nothing that is
not known in the real world can be depicted — but then the very genre of fiction would fall down. By means of
a reductio ad absurdum, Verne would seem to be demonstrating the cul-de-sac of extreme naturalism — and
thus anticipating on the general crisis of confidence that the novel will later undergo. Verne ‘anticipated’ in
surprising ways.
Le Verbe et la Terre
29
MV 274, CC I xv 186; e.g. VCT 345; e.g. CG 756, 20M 287, 572.
30
VCT 156, cf. TL 175; VF 45; MV 92; TM 229, cf. 10, 243.
21
The search for a global linearity is often conjugated with the desire for locally one-dimensional forms. One
interesting case is the written form,31 which often appears in the most unexpected places.
Thus the commonplace notion of the firmament as a book occurs in the Voyages, with the stars and planets
laid out ‘like the letters of an immense alphabet’, as if by the ‘Author of all things’ (CG 520, etc.; HS 71; IM
48). More specifically and more Vernianly, Scotland’s history is written using islands and mountains as
gigantic characters; a volcano forms an immense sundial; and labyrinths take on the form of an ampersand or of
letters spelling out ??’xxUxPHC,qui signifie “région du sud” ‘.32 The natural world, in other words, is made
Word. It is highly appropriate that running water should taste of ink, that fossils leave ‘leur impression nette et
comme “admirablement tirée” ‘, and that there even exists a tree which produces printed leaves (VCT 192, cf.
316, 325; IN 21–2; MV 276).
The written form is in fact an essential part of discovery, since the act is consecrated for Vernian man by the
act of inscription, on the map but even on the object itself. In the early works, the signatures are modest: ‘A.D.’
(Andrea Debono) on a rock near the source of the Nile or ??’ ‘ and
?? ‘ ’ (Arne Saknussemm) on the route to the centre of the Earth (5S 155; VCT 324; 141). In the later works, by
contrast, the act of appropriation is applied to sets of natural objects, the name is mass-produced. Thus Benedict
dreams of the glory of attaching his name to a new insect, the ‘Hexapodes Benedictus’; and the eccentric
scientist Xirdal enters posterity with the chemical element Xirdalium (C15 430, 433, 524; CM 131). Reducing
the quality of the discovery implies increasing its quantities. Worse apparently means more.
But nomination (and with it discovery itself) proves to be a less definitive act than it might seem. A
remarkable number of geographical entities in Verne’s works require multiple appellations, either because they
are so extensive — three successive names are barely enough to cover the Amazon (J 52) — or else for
national-ideological reasons, like the Falklands/Malouines (SG 132) or Tabor/Maria-Thérésa (CG 861). ‘Denomination’ also occurs surprisingly frequently: the carefuly built-up nomenclature of the Mysterious Island is
destroyed with the island itself; the names of the ‘promontory’ in Le Pays des fourrures (1873) also melt with
the object; and the Tsalal Islands discovered in Arthur Gordon Pym are carefully ‘balayées, lavées et relavées’
in Le Sphinx des glaces (SG 298), presumably so that they can then be rediscovered and renamed by Verne’s
hero.
In certain cases, a raison d’être for the link between the word and the world is made more explicit.
Clawbonny argues that after explorers have left their names on the icecaps, the spatial configurations will then
generate their entire history for those coming afterwards (CH 60). The land will be endowed, in other words,
with an intrinsic and coherent narrative structure. It will thus follow the example of the moon, where the
successive ‘Seas’ are presented as charting out an entire human life, culminating in ‘ “(la) mer de la
Tranquillité” [. . .] dont les flots se déversent paisiblement dans “le lac de la Mort” ‘ (AL 158). It would seem
that the character’s problematic choice of path is henceforth solved, and the author has a story that will write
itself. All one has to do is follow.
Nevertheless, such complete ‘temporalisations’ of space are illusory, for the difference between the onedimensional logos and the multi-dimensional world is too great to be bridged by a mere pirouette. Clawbonny’s
eponymy does not in fact retrace the history of an area of the globe, but only that of a coastline; and lunar
‘waves’, even moving ‘peacefully’, are an absurdity in a world that is dead throughout, and not just in its
terminal stages. The world is too big to be encapsulated in a mere story. The attempt to use the past to solve the
problem of the present does not here work — and the mere attempt may, with hindsight, seem a little derisory.
In the nineteenth century, the written form was clearly linear (with the exception of the paratext — cf.
Chapter 3). Recently, the development of hypertext on computers has created the possibility of escaping the
formal linearity of the text.
32
IN 191; VCT 143; IM 42; SG 82, cf. 253–4, Arthur Gordon Pym, ch. XXIII.
31
22
But it will prove productive elsewhere in a new guise.
But the word appears in other, potentially more powerful, forms. Often the logos swallows up the person
instead of adding to his glory. The character, for instance, is converted into a caractère, a gigantic question
mark; or else he becomes, in an image with sexual undertones, ‘un livre toujours prêt’: ‘libre à vous de me
feuilleter tant qu’il vous plaira’; a tatooed Maori Chief is even on his fifth edition (CG 812; IM 292; CG 159,
cf. TCC 4; CG 715).
In some instances, the two tendencies we have seen, namely the personification of natural objects and the
conversion of man into logos, are even placed in series. Thus Cap Matifou and Point Pescade are two
promontories forming the Bay of Algiers, named after real-life people called Matifou and Pescade; but they are
also, following the examples of Atlas and Everest, the names given in turn to fictional characters (MS 192; 192;
A3 passim; MS 192). Again, the similarly authentic and eponymous ‘cap Hatteras’ mentioned with remarkable
frequency in the Voyages (20M 567, C 15, FD 52, CM 215, etc.), is reproduced in the ‘invented’ name of the
hero of Voyages et aventures du capitaine Hatteras. Between ‘cap’ and ‘cap.’ is only a small point. Matifou,
Pescade, Atlas, Everest and Hatteras are in other words the names of people, names which are given to places,
which then serve in turn to name other people. A series is created connecting people to places then to people
again, with the word providing the cement. It is as if people can only interact with people via objects. Verne’s
invention is closely tuned to the ‘real world’ but in devious and unforeseen ways. He is at the same time closely
derivative and inventively original.
The linearity of the written form, then, is sometimes present within the Voyages in curious ways. Most simply,
the aim implied by its introduction is to name the territory and thus attach it to zero-dimensional man. The
intention is to replace the passivity of most of the other linear forms by a positive act of appropriation — a
personalisation or individualisation of part of space. In these terms, it may be considered to succeed, for the act
of naming does impose some measure of significance on the featureless void of the unfamiliar world.
But a more ambitious project is sometimes also visible. Clawbonny’s vision was of the sprinkling of the
fictional world with its own image in miniature, of the happy union of individual endeavours with substantive
parts of physical space. The hope is present that some procedure may be found for connecting the images up,
perhaps by means of some sort of pointilliste procedure, and thus finally structuring the whole of space. In
support of this attempt, the Voyages adduce the case of double eponymy, where the word serves not only to
map man onto space, but also to map space onto man.
But the more ambitious project can never totally succeed. The formal finiteness of the logos means that it can
never impose a continuous, connected structure onto the whole of the multi-dimensional world, can never
calibrate it, can never totally recount it. THe two poles of Verne’s imagination, ‘conter’ and ‘compter’ can
never be totally fused. But, on another level, by some sort of alchemy, the act of naming and appropriation does
seem to successfully infiltrate the whole of the fictional world, thus giving it some overall meaning. By
displaying its own building blocks, Verne’s verbal universe produces a certain amount of significant structure
by means of its very self-consciousness. Person, word and world are not necessarily sundered for ever.
Go Anywhere, Do Anything
Another opportunity for getting away from the empty uniformity of space and time occurs when two
constituents of the physical world come together in intricate fashion. This feature occurs in a surprising number
of situations in Verne’s works, and its recurrence seem to imply some special significance.
Thus the rivers nearly always have multiple mouths, multiple sources and many features in between. The
Amazon has for instance ‘des canaux, des lagunes, des lagons, des lacs’, ‘des iguarapes [. . .], des lacs
temporaires’, ‘[le tout formant] un inextricable lacis’ (J 50; 179; 179; cf. 5S 323). The sea and the land also
make complex inroads into each other, as in Tierra del Fuego or Greece, with their ‘[côte] toute effilochée’ and
their ‘indentations, profondes et multipliées’. Even the lunar ‘Seas’ have ‘rivages tourmentés’ and ‘côtes
23
anguleuses, capricieuses, profondément déchiquetées, [. . .] riches en golfe et en presqu’îles’ (NJ I ii 14; AF 91;
AL 154). The same sort of interpenetration occurs in the ‘mille détours’ and the ‘passes and impasses’ of the
polar icefields, with their irregular hummocks and tortuous valleys, their ‘vast plains, broken in a thousand
places’, their panoramas where ‘tout [. . .] est déchiqueté, déchiré, mis en morceaux, sans aucun ordre, sans
aucune logique’ (CH 268; HG 245; 259; CH 136).
Similar structures occur in the organic world. Plants are often described in terms of networks of overlapping
segments, ‘frondaison(s) [. . .] entrelacée(s)’, ‘tortis capricieux’, ‘inextricable(s) réseau(x) de cordes et de
nœuds’, ‘lianes échevelées’ or ‘étouffantes’.33 Such ‘lattices’, whose particularity is to be so dense as to ‘fill up’
the whole of space, are also visible — in much more regular form — in man-made domains. American towns
are repeatedly described as being built ‘carrément’, as constituting vast chequer-boards.34 This is perhaps not
surprising given what was happening in reality. But in Le Testament d’un excentrique (1899), the whole plot is
based on the rectilinear divisions of the map of the United States. The will of the title decrees that the seven
characters are to visit the States of the Union, following the rules of a jeu de l’oie where the States are
represented as squares on a spiral-shaped board. As a much more concise variant of the same idea, in ‘Martin
Paz’ the world is considered as consisting simply of four squares, two of which are named ‘hasard’ and two,
‘sort’ (MP vi 268). In other words, Verne is here radically experimenting both with the physical space in his
novels and with the naturalistic conventions. His claim is that extreme codification and invention can on
occasion work together, that the tendency of Romanticism to lack of structure is not always a necessary part of
creation. Once again, radical ideas are concealed under an innocuous surface.
In terms of the search for structure, the use of the lattice, whether called ‘tortis’, ‘lacis’ or ‘réseau’, and
whether made up of land and water, ice and non-ice, plant and air, or grid and squares, constitutes another stage
away from the monotony of empty space. The potentially sterile symmetry of the elemental boundary or other
line is replaced by a complex interpenetration, and the safe but potentially stultifying one-dimensional form by
a richer two-dimensional configuration. Verne’s imagination is here a poetry of Cartesianism.
But all is not yet perfect. If the preponderance of one element makes travel within the space possible, it is still
clearly not sufficient to determine a choice of route or to construct a coherent narrative. No matter how fine the
mesh, the criss-crossed jumble or squared-off space remains obstinately without a centre and without distinctive
paths. Space is still ‘sans aucun ordre, sans aucune logique’ (CH 136); the journey still tends to consist of a
random walk across a randomly constructed space by Pirandellian characters in search of an elusive goal. An
additional transformation remains necessary before any real mapping could be conceivable between the two
dimensions of space and the one dimension of time, before the world could begin to be satisfyingly
‘temporalised’ and ‘narrativised’.
It is some element of significance to guide the travellers that is missing of course. Ultimately, they are looking
for some sort of model with which to order space — order it in the weak sense of mentally organising it, but
also in the strong sense of putting its components into order.35
One brief idea of what is being sought is provided by the maps, or rather by the construction of the maps. The
Voyageur finds a sustained and inestimable pleasure in starting from ‘côtes inconnues’, ‘pointillés, [. . .]
désignations vagues, qui font le désespoir des cartographes’, to end up producing well-formed traces: ‘D’abord,
les lignes terminales sont [. . .] brisées, interrompues [. . .]. Puis, les découvertes se complètent, les lignes se
rejoignent, le pointillé [. . .] fait place au trait [. . .]; enfin le nouveau continent [. . .] se déploie sur le globe dans
toute sa splendeur magnifique!’ (CH 367; RC 152; CH 367; CG 81).
33
VA iii 36; v 57; H 152, cf. VA v 58; MS 107; CG 802.
TM 240; RC 98; cf. 500 67; 67; 152; TM 240, cf. CG 322.
35
Mathematicians have distinguished between ‘total ordering’, i.e. complete seqentiality, and ‘partial
ordering’, where any two elements are not necessarily ordered with respect to each other. Both sorts are in
evidence in Verne.
34
24
This euphoric vision gives an indication of the structured unity required, and pinpoints the physical features
of the world as being propitious to the search for a principle of significance. But it does seem nevertheless to
skirt the essential. It indicates the point of departure and the destination, but not the intermediate steps of the
recurrent problem of structuring space and time. Above all, it hides the ambitiousness of a project of going from
a featureless void to a satisfying spatio-temporal plenitude. The thorny question of dimensionality is still not
answered.
Splitting the Difference
A first solution to the problem of the significant structuring of space is sometimes to be found in Natural
shapes. The configuration of the Andes, for instance, presents a form which is both unified and twodimensional: ‘La chaînee [. . .] se divise en deux branches qui accidentent parallèlement les deux côtés du
territoire [. . .]. (Plus loin), après s’être divisée en trois branches, elle va se perdre [. . .]’ (DM ii 433).
Comparable branching structures with a similar potential propensity for guiding Vernian man are visible in the
most varied of fluid domains: waterways have affluents and sub-affluents (the term is Verne’s); the Gulf Stream
‘se bifurque en deux [. . .] bras [. . .], dont l’un [. . .] va [. . .] former la mer libre du Pôle’; a lava flow from a
volcano at the North Pole forms an incandescent river with branches; so does a domesticated lava flow, diverted
to improve a cave heating system; and the electric fluid produces ‘[des] éclairs, [qui] se bifurquent’, ‘des
zigzags coralliformes, [. . .] des jeux étonnants de lumière arborescente’. 36 The main street of a village
resembles ‘un large fleuve, [. . .] ayant pour tributaires [. . .] des torrents sur l’une de ses rives’; and Paganel
suggests, gratuitously but imaginatively, that a message-in-a-bottle discovered in a shark’s stomach in midocean could have come down any one of a myriad branching rivers (MS 249; CG 92–3).
Many of these arborescences are methods of finding one’s way through labyrinths, of which examples are
legion in Verne’s works: the possible routes across the Andes, through forests or jungles, amongst ice-fields, or
through uterine undergound domains or underwater ice-labyrinths.37 What characterises all the routes is their
contrast with the complexity of the surrounding forms. Only potential paths from A to B are considered; there
are no loops, for the structures do not generally intersect with themselves. In the simplest cases, indeed, they
amount to little more than a few paths branching off the main route, which is very frequently chosen by means
of an Ariadne’s thread of some sort.38
All these structures are situated securely in the physical world. Their arboreal imagery has concrete force, as
indicated by the vocabulary of ‘ramifiant’, ‘branches’, ‘embranchements’, ‘bras’, ‘bifurcations’, ‘arborescents’.
But the arborescence is also frequently in evidence in the conceptual world. Marine biology, for example, is
conceived of as an exhaustive classificatory system with spiders, squid, or coral divided into ‘des
embranchements, des groupes, des classes, des sous-classes, des ordres, des familles, des genres, des sousgenres, des espèces et des variétés’ (20M 179; 560; 174, 177; 277–9; 20). It has the same multiply branching
structure, in other words, as the underwater organisms it studies! More generally, the many apparently
unstructured lists in Verne’s works often prove, on closer inspection to consist of a similarly detailed tiered
system. Arborescences can also be seen in the hierarchies of command, in both dictatorial and democratic
36
TM 74; 20M 565; CH 601; HS 333, cf. TCC 157, IM 254; VCT 287; CG 278. Similarly, coral consists of
‘arborisations’, of ‘ramure(s)’, of ‘ramifications articulées’, of ‘arbrisseaux’, of ‘arbres’ (20M 277, 278; 279;
278; 278; 279).
37
DM iv 443; VA xii 137; J 79–86; SG 68 and passim; e.g. VCT 196; 20M 516–31.
38
E.g. 500 140, VA xii 137; Vierne demonstrates the importance of the labyrinth and the Ariadne’s thread in
Verne’s works (pp. 137, 152, 170, 171, 185, 189, etc.).
25
systems, with, in each case, the social order being backed up by precise tangible forms.39
Again, in two curious scenes in separate novels, a conceptual branching structure is constructed stage by stage
by means of an interrogation of a dying man so weak that he cannot speak, only answer ‘oui ou non du regard’
(B 229, cf. CH 334). Such an occurrence may be frequent in the nineteenth-century novel — and indeed in real
life — but Verne gives it a remarkable development. In both scenes, the questions do start off as binary, but
then give rise to questions with a numerical answer and thence, via reporting in an indirect style, to answers
expressing the most abstract of concepts. Two extracts from much longer passages will show how little in the
end the dying men are hampered by their limited means of expression: ‘Le Porpoise [. . .] devait avoir résisté, et
il serait possible de sauver sa cargaison. [. . .] Si lui, Altamont, survivait, c’était véritablement par un miracle de
la Providence’; ‘il s’était jeté à travers les régions du centre, se cachant pour éviter de retomber aux mains des
indigènes, épuisé par les chaleurs, mourant de faim et de fatigue [etc.]’ (CH 334–6; B 237). Information, in
other words, is to be found at the end of the ‘branches’ of what is remarkably similar to a transformationalgrammar ‘tree’, with each successive ‘twig’ representing a question and a two-way response. Human
communication is represented as capable of being broken down into simple yes–no questions, but at the same
time as infinitely reconstructible and synthesisable.40
The plots themselves of the Voyages, lastly, sometimes form arborescences of connected enigmas. In L’Ile
mystérieuse, for example, a series of five questions centres on the nature of the land discovered by the
balloonists: whether or not it is an island, an uninhabited island, one that is nevertheless visited, one that is
visited by whites, and one that is visited by friendly whites (see Figure 8). A total lack of information is
transformed stage by stage, until the island is completely ‘covered’. There are thus two distinguishing features
from the mystery that will later become characteristic of the detective novel: the number of distinct enigmas,
and the fact that the solution to one is the basis for the posing of the next. Here again, a relatively complex
structure coexists with a simple two-value logic system.
The arborescence is in sum a characteristic feature in Verne, from the natural objects in the works to the plots
of the works. Of course, it could be objected that the idea occurs frequently in reality — and also in man’s
description of reality. It was particularly ‘in the air’ in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century science, both in the
various theories of evolution (for example, Buffon or Darwin) and more generally: Darwin argued that all true
classification was genealogical (Jacob, p. 182). But just as in all these cases the arborescence was only one
element in a distinctive theory, so Verne seems to adapt it to his own ends: placing it at the centre of his debate
on the idea of travel, and thus emphasising its spatio-temporal characteristics. Its main function in the Voyages
seems to be to serve as an antidote to the continuing problem of unfilled space. In marked contrast with the
lattice, which is endowed with at least as much complexity, significance is encpasulated within the structure.
The arborescence has a distinctive tension between unicity and multiplicity, which enables it to avoid the
uniformity and monotony of the lattice. Being a connected structure, it represents a certain coherence; being
also a linear-based one, it contains a certain directionality.
In order to further understand the specificity of the arborescence, it is useful to examine the advantages and
disadvantages of the various spatial forms.
The Pleasure and the Pain
39
E.g. the successive routes leading through the fortifications to the centre of Stahlstadt, the concentric
obstacles protecting the heart of Blackland, the threads of communication used by conspirators, the detonating
wires for the moon rocket, or the telecommunication lines of Franceville (500; MB; MS; AL; 500).
40
When some of these ideas were presented in public, a colleague argued that they were grossly materialistic
and unpoetic. The best reponse to this, it would seem, is that the whole of science, and especially computer
science, is also in many senses hopelessly materialistic, and that the poetry of Verne’s writing is inseparable
from his reductionism.
26
Underlying all the forms is the attempt — by both the character and the narrator — to take ‘les connaissances
AMASSEES par la science’ and transmute them into a new ‘HISTOIRE de l’univers’ — in other words to
convert a pile of relatively incoherent information into a cogent and universal narrative. The nub of the problem
is the disparity between the extension of space and man’s point-being: his lack of dimensionality, his apparent
insignificance. Vernian man has an excess of free-will, he tends towards random behaviour.
What the character is looking for is some sense of mission that will involve overcoming physical obstacles. In
Les Mots (1964, pp. 107–8), Sartre brilliantly points out that Michel Strogoff is the canonical example of the
well-determined geographical quest. The character often fixes on complicated structures like the ‘disposition à
la fois orographique et hydrographique’ (MS 294), in the hope that they will help reduce the anxiety of having
to choose a path. Maps similarly give the character aid in coping with space. But neither idea is sufficiently
dense nor sufficiently coherent to solve the problem; for neither really comes to grips with the essential
questions of time and significance.
The two catalysts that help Vernian man to ‘temporalise’ space are to be found instead in the Natural world.
Nature provides an antidote to the obsessional fears of emptiness by offering structures of as much irregularity
and complexity as could be wished. But she simultaneously provides a certain unity, in the form for instance of
‘fluid’ entities endowed with a will of their own, and so capable of choosing their own paths. Even Zacharius’s
clock is endowed with spatio-temporal autonomy — in the obvious sense of not being totally subject to
chronological time — but above all in the sense of actually moving round in time and space, as a clock-devil
endowed with legs.
But this innate tendency to motion is not limited to particular structures. It subtly permeates, I would claim,
all the physical arborescences and conceptual hierarchies. More precisely, despite their varied nature, these
forms all share precise morphological characteristics with the free-flowing water-courses.
The fundamental feature is a main ‘trunk’ or linear core: the mountain chain, the main waterway, railway, or
roadway, the Ariadne’s thread, or the conceptual path finally chosen. But because of the repeated parting of the
ways, the structure is also multipartite. Indeed, the extent to which the bifurcation continues is remarkable. The
Andes divide and blend into the plain, the waterways split and broaden out to become the open sea, the rivers of
lava unite with their beds, the coral forms solid masses, the mazes multiply indefinitely, the hierarchical
classifications englobe the whole of Nature, the yes/no routines integrate normal discourse, and the enigmas
exhaust the Mystery of the Island. The process, in short, carries on ad infinitum, it in the end fills up the
available space, reconstructs the material and conceptual worlds, whether two-, three- or multi-dimensional.
But it seems to do this only at the cost of abandoning its constituent form, the line, in favour of a form which is
in most ways its opposite: the plane. Even in its spatial characteristics, the arborescence embodies a
dimensional paradox.
The third and most important feature of the arborescence is its temporality, borrowed from Nature’s flowing
entities. The time-element would in fact seem to be at both the raison d’être of the structure and its most
elusive feature. It is often constituted by the time of a journey through the branching structure, as in all the land
and sea routes. But in other cases, the ‘temporalisation’ of the structure is more or less independent of any real
traversing of it, and becomes therefore all the more diffuse. In the case of the Andes, for instance, the
imposition of a directionality on the mountain-crests does not imply any sort of travel along them. It seems to
act instead as a metaphor helping to generate both the overall subject of the tale (the division of the Spanish
Navy into two) and the main element of the plot, the multiply-bifurcating path across the Andes. The dilution
often goes much further. Indeed the case of the plane completely filled by the arborescence is little different
from the completely unfilled plane. When the extra dimension is added, the temporal aspect is lost. A linearbased structure with a finite length can never be a ‘space-filling curve’ (as mathematicians call a structure
which, by some recursive feature, completely ‘fills in’ an area of space). There is no one-to-one correspondence
possible from the line to the plane.41 Space can never be covered. Two-dimensional time is an impossibility.
41
See Ian Stewart, Concepts of Modern Mathematics, (1975), pp. 136–41.
27
The arborescence is therefore an optimistic attempt to bridge the dimensional gap by instituting a maximal
activity in time and a minimal covering of space, a bold effort to reconcile purposeful movement and
considered choice. Its binary construction does not a priori exclude any element of the world at all, it holds out
the possibility of covering the whole of space; it entices man with the idea of a quantised but potentially infinite
freedom. The arborescence may represent the attempt to impose fictional qualities on reality: one cannot really
cover the whole of space, but in literature one can imagine doing so. Verne plays on time and space in what
would amount to a sleight of hand in the everyday world. His ‘realism’ is submerged by his desire to overcome
man’s temporal finiteness.
The espousal of unadulterated linearity, on the other hand, was the symmetric, pessimistic, tactic. Whether or
not created for the purpose, the linear form represents the conclusion that a choice which cannot be held in
abeyance cannot be better than no choice at all. It represents the belief that it is preferable to lose one’s illusions
immediately, to start as one means to go on, to act rather than to choose.
The arborescent and linear forms represent contrasting attempts at solutions to the problems of man and
infinite space, of the explorer and the empty world, of the writer and the blank page. They each represent a
reassuring continuity, and thus respond to the recurrent problem of temporality. Each draws inspiration from
the richness and temporal autonomy of Nature’s structures. What distinguishes them from the other attempted
solutions is that each steers clear of claustrophobic concentration and agoraphobic dissipation, of both manwithout-space and space-without-man. If Nature — and the author — can be everywhere at once, Vernian man
— and the narrator — are different. They share a capacity to visit any point on the globe, but an incapacity to
actually visit each point of the globe, or even of any substantive subset of it. Their freedom must in the end be
put to the test. They cannot have their cake indefinitely without eating it.
At this stage, then, there exists no perfect solution to the problem of space and time. The physical or
conceptual journey, however extraordinary, can never exhaust the known and unknown worlds, can never
‘temporalise’ the world in n easy stages; even the attempt has a certain derisory quality. The hero is forced to
oscillate between structures, to enjoy freedom to differing degrees and to rely on both chance and Providence.
Verne’s totalising project can apparently never reach a successful conclusion.
28
3
Plots and Intrigues
he search for signs of significance in the contents of the Voyages comes up, we have seen, against the
obstacle of the multi-dimensionality of the real world. But clearly the novels do manage to recount journeys
T more or less successfully. Starting instead from the finished form, might it not be possible to seek an
understanding of the spatio-temporal issues? Such formal features as the footnotes and illustrations may
prove illuminating; and there also exists a method for demonstrating the narrative and fictional times of novels
like Voyage au centre de la Terre or Le Chancellor. In other words, by graphing the internal time of the text
(the time of the events) against the ‘time’ or ‘space’ of the fiction (as measured by the amount of text
occupied), one can get a very good idea of the overall plot. (See Appendix A for further details of this method.)
As Genette has pointed out (pp. 225–7), it is a characteristic of ‘modern’ fiction to make great play of
undermining the opposition between the narrator, whose role is by definition within the fiction, and the author,
the real-life person who wrote the fiction. In this respect, Jules Verne may qualify as a modern, for he often
identifies the two.
Thus in summarising ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, he writes ‘un fruitier heurta POE d’une façon
brusque’; his narrator similarly remarks ‘Arthur Pym — autrement dit Edgar Poe’; and the first-person narrator
especially is sometimes represented in the illustrations as resembling the author himself.42 Moreover, footnotes
or maps are often marked ‘Note de l’auteur’, ‘J.V.’ or ‘Jules Verne’, and events are even occasionally reported
from his private life: ‘l’auteur a eu le plaisir de [. . .] visiter [le Telemark]. Il l’a parcouru en kariol’; ‘1. Au 12
avril 1867, l’auteur se trouvait à Buffalo, alors que l’Erié était pris [de glace] sur toute son étendue. J.V.’.43
Sometimes indeed, the author’s own
previous works are referred to:
THE SHAPE’S THE
Capitaine Hatteras and Hector
Servadac in Sans dessus dessous
THING
(SDD vii 98; xviii 189; cf. PF 302),
Les Cinq cents millions in Robur-le-conquérant (RC 10), and Vingt mille lieues in L’Ile mystérieuse (IM 801).
In this last instance, we observe the remarkable instance of Smith quoting the novel about Nemo to an amazed
Nemo himself! The tendency to refer to other works is completed by a striking ‘blurb’ within César Cascabel
(1890) which refers to the existence of the ongoing series of novels: ‘Tel est le récit de ce voyage que l’on peut
compter comme l’un des plus surprenants des Voyages extraordinaires’ (CC II xv 410).
Although such instances are relatively isolated, they do point to Verne’s tendency to extreme naturalism and
one of the paradoxes it provokes. Elements of the real world are depicted in the Voyages, but the Voyages are
published in the real world. The container and contained alternate, creating a potentially infinite regress of
reality/fictionality.
‘Edgar Poe et ses œuvres’, Le Musée des familles, avril 1864, pp. 193–208, reproduced in L’Herne:
‘Edgar Allan Poe’ [1974], pp. 320–45 (322) and in Textes oubliés (1979), ed. Francis Lacassin, pp. 111–53
(117); SG 78; e.g. 20M 39, C 7, MV 25, 91.
43
VCT 68; TL 119, SG 472, 489; CH 135, CG 215, 545, 20M 143, 405; BL ii 23; MM xi 357. If Hetzel’s
name seems to appear explicitly in the Voyages extraordinaires, in the illustrations (e.g. 5S 252: cf. IM 552,
802), this is in fact his son’s.
42
29
Probably as a result, the narrator’s temporal stance is normally close to the author’s. He employs authorial
omniscience, bringing in real-life events not accessible to the figures within the fiction. Thus he points out in
L’Ile mystérieuse that the American Civil War has ended, which the characters will only learn a decade and 800
pages later; he describes a real-life explorer as following in the footsteps of the (fictional) trans-African
explorers; and he often slips in reports of historical, geographical and scientific events that have happened even
after the end of the novel.44 In extreme cases, indeed, the dates within the novel and the real dates of publication
get tangled up, in a variant on the fictionality/reality alternation. Even the most tangible aspects of the Voyages
lead into complicated, self-referential systems.
The diagrams may perhaps give us further information about the narratorial-authorial role and the spatiotemporal structures. It is interesting to examine six of the works (Figure 1):
The main impression created by the first five graphs is undoubtedly their similarity. Despite the differences of
scale, the two short stories and the three novels all advance through the plot more or less without extended
anticipations, ellipses or flashbacks. The time of the narration is very closely modelled on that of the fiction.
Serres’s intuition about Le Chancellor, that it is ‘un récit [. . .] très unilinéaire’ (p. 103), is thus proved to be
true. Verne’s works are probably here typical of the period. Although these diagrams have never been applied
to them, writers such as Balzac, Dickens and France seem to have generally ‘started at the beginning and
carried on to the end’, with only relatively brief deviations.
What is possibly distinctive to Verne’s works is the very regularity of the graphs. The two short stories are
symmetrical almost by virtue of their simplicity, but the three novels are also constructed from two very similar
parts. In each half, there is an initial passage where the narration is slower (the graph is less steep), a passage at
an intermediate speed and a final acceleration.
The conditions of publication of the Voyages may be relevant here: many of the works were published in two
separate volumes. But in addition, the variations in speed correspond to important discontinuities in the plots. In
Voyage au centre de la Terre, the mid-point corresponds to the transition from normal existence to the
underground cavern; in Mistress Branican, it divides the heroine’s life into passive and active phases, into
waiting at home and going out and searching for her lost husband; and in Le Chancellor, it represents the
transfer from the ship to the raft, with the fluctuations corresponding not only to a destruction of the ship’s
fabric by fire and by water, but also to a destruction of the social fabric, by murder and by cannibalism. Serres
has already noted the symmetry represented by the equilibrium states of the beginning and end of Le
Chancellor (pp. 105–6); and Jean-Pierre Picot has observed that the social conventions also go from an initial
equilibrium via an anarchical state to a final equilibrium.45 What has been shown here, then, is that the
equilibrium is not limited to the end-points of the novel, but governs the novel as a whole, and that it constitutes
part of the structure and not just an aspect of the internal themes.
The one exception is ‘L’Eternel Adam’. As Figure 1(f) shows, this posthumous tale is set in two equally
represented time-zones, one in the third millennium and the other roughly 20,000 years later. Not only is it
remarkable then in being the only Voyage set outside the second millennium, but it is also the only one to give
equal weight to the first and third persons and to the presentation of two independent protagonists. This duality
represents moreover an essential part of the story, with the ‘three-dimensional’ perspective it affords being one
of the vehicles by which the tale proposes a cyclical structure of history (see Chapter 4).
This tale is thus radically and blatantly different from the other Voyages: in construction, in conceptions of
time, and in the role of the individual. Even as far as the form is concerned, Michel Verne asserts his
independence from his father.
44
IM 25; 5S 36; e.g. CG 480, 623, MV 165, 305, AF 34, 47, JMC iv 48.
‘Parodie et tragédie de la régression dans quelques œuvres de Jules Verne’, Romantisme, n° 27, 1980, pp.
109–28 (116). See also Chapter 6.
45
30
In and Out
The reader of the Voyages extraordinaires certainly perceives the relentless advance of the plots, but he may
also have an impression of a great deal of activity at the local level. There are two particular sections where
diversity in temporal structures is especially evident: the beginnings and the endings. Let us accordingly take
four of the novels and plot the narrative and fictional times of their opening pages (Figure 2).
Perhaps because of the bigger scale, there is here considerably more complexity. But whereas L’Ile
mystérieuse starts with a passage covering a great deal of fictional time — a beginning in medias res — the
other three works begin with the initially static time of a descriptive pause (in each case in the present tense). In
all four, there follow flashbacks, used for the past of each of the main protagonists, the historical situation, and,
in some cases, the relevant scientific subject. Only then does the action proper begin, coinciding with the
definitive introduction of the passé simple; in every case this is a distinct point (marked . in the diagrams). Each
novel examined therefore exhibits a careful and appropriate structure. Balzac’s incipits have attracted a great
deal of attention, in terms of tenses and their slow build up to a point de départ. But on the evidence we have
seen, they do not seem radically different from Verne’s.46
If we examine the endings of four of the novels (Figure 3), symmetrical observations can be made. The action
has a clear end-point as well — a dramatic ‘Cut!’. After this point, a variety of forms are visible, with
anticipations now more frequent than flashbacks. One possible reason for this complexity is that, in some
works, the winding up is in effect done twice: in L’Ile à hélice and Le Château des Carpathes, numerous
characters drown, are buried alive or go mad (IH II xiv 315–6; ChC 234–6; 239–40), but are then brought back
to life or sanity, and, in many cases, married off. This is undoubtedly a sign of the tension betweeen the natural
tendencies in Verne’s imagination and the more optimistic and ideologically conformist tendencies required of
him by his editor and his public. The endings are, then, sometimes less coherently constructed than the
openings — an observation that is supported by a remark in the early play ‘Monna Lisa [sic]’: ‘Vous êtes
toujours, vous, l’homme qui s’occupe Du vernis d’un tableau qui n’est pas commencé!’ (p. 43). The later
novels seem more fragmented than the earlier ones — thus confirming the overall tendency of the later works to
lesser ‘lisibilité’. More generally, the endings perform a similar, but opposite, function to the beginnings.
Instead of serving to unite different threads of the story, they ‘wind up’ each of them. They close down the
fiction — thus laying the ground for the impatient author to start the next one.
Diversions or ‘Divertissements’
Perhaps most typical of Verne’s general style is his treatment of what Genette calls the paratexte, that is the
novel not forming part of the main text. The titles, illustrations, and footnotes of the Voyages are vital for
studying the conventions of fiction, for they are all intermediate between the invented and real worlds.
No reader of Verne can help noticing the footnote, a persistent feature which few other novelists employ.
Typical examples are: (explaining ‘mark’: ‘1. 2 francs 75 centimes environ Note de l’auteur.’ or (explaining
‘acide azotique fumant’: ‘1. Ainsi nommé, parce que, au contact de l’air humide, il répand d’épaisses fumées
blanchâtres.’ (VCT 68; TL 117). It constitutes a voice that exists in all parts of the cosmos and in all modes of
narration. Associated with the narratorial point of view, it proceeds logically from the text, but is marked off
typographically, and is also temporally distinct. Of course, part of the function of the footnote is to mimic
scientific discourse. But in practice, the present and passé composé of Verne’s footnotes contrast with the passé
simple of the text, unlike the situation in scientific writing; and thus the main effect becomes instead the literary
See for instance Roy Pascal’s analysis of the beginning of Le Père Goriot (‘Tense and Novel’, The
Modern Language Review, vol. 57, 1962, pp. 1–10 (10)). (For a wider debate of opening scenes, see Mendilow,
pp. 103–6 (‘Preliminary and Distributed Exposition’).)
46
31
one of detachment.
One of the notes in ‘L’Eternel Adam’ pushes this effect to the limit. The civilisation of the distant future, it is
remarked, is familiar with planets not known to earlier stages. The footnote comments: ‘[. . .] Il faut conclure
qu’au moment où ce journal sera écrit, le système solaire comprendra plus de huit planètes et que l’homme en
aura par conséquent découvert une ou plusieurs au-delà de Neptune’ (EA 233). These unusual tenses can
apparently only represent the future of an authorial voice,47 and thus the isolation of the note from the
temporality of the main narration is further emphasised. The posthumous example — which seems to contain
elements of pastiche — pinpoints the essential features of all the Vernian notes: their non-integration with the
temporal flow of the text, their self-consciousness and their apparent gratuitousness.
The illustrations have a similarly ambiguous role. In most respects, they form part of the Voyages
extraordinaires (for copyright purposes, for instance); and for many readers, they are an inseparable part of the
text — possibly what is most likely to stay in the memory. But they are not, of course, by Verne. Perhaps
because of this tension, there are a number of problems associated with them. Many of them may of course be
true of illustrated fiction in general; but certain follow on from such distinctively Vernian features as the
enigma, the hyper-realistic tendency, and the attempted depiction of ‘future’ machines.
The first problem has to do with the position of the illustrations. Not only are they often placed several pages
away from the corresponding text, but they are virtually never mentioned in the text.48 One reason, of course, is
that, unlike the maps, the illustrations were apparently conceived after the texts.49 But where the illustration
precedes the text, there is a danger of losing the effect of surprise. In general, the loss of suspense is minimal,
for the illustrator plays the narrator’s game loyally, as François Raymond has pointed out.50 But the enigma of
the lamp-extinguishing Spirit of the Mine in Les Indes noires, which is apparently meant to be solved only at
the end (IN 233–4), is in fact undermined by an earlier illustration showing a bird (IN 95). Similarly, the heroes’
apparently supernaturally fast movements in Mathias Sandorf, Face au drapeau, Robur-le-conquérant or Maître
du monde — movements carefully built up over several chapters — are no longer mysteries if the reader notices
the submarines or aircraft in the title-page illustrations. It is as if suspense and mystery were for Verne not
matters of concealment of information, but of ostensible concealment — Roland Barthes’s ‘jupe qui baille’
47
Roudaut observes the existence of these future tenses, but interprets them in a strange fashion, arguing
that, since a voice is speaking from ‘outside’ (in fact ‘before’) the future civilisation of the tale, this is a reason
to say that the civilisation will be destroyed (pp. 182–3).
48
Georges Borgeaud (‘Jules Verne et ses illustrateurs’, L’Arc, pp. 46–9 (46)) states that the pictures come
after the corresponding text, an affirmation repeated by Alain Buisine (‘Machines et énergétique’, in Jules
Verne 3, pp. 25–52 (35)). In fact, the very early Hetzel in-8° works are mostly accompanied by vignettes on the
same page as the appropriate text; and, in the others, the illustrations normally appear in regularly-spaced facing
pairs, on pages 1, 8–9, 16–7 and so on (undoubtedly as a result of the binding process): consequently, only
some of these illustrations follow the corresponding text, with an approximately equal number preceding it.
49
There are nevertheless three works where an illustration preceded the writing of the text: ‘Les Premiers
navires de la Marine mexicaine’, written to order as a textual complement to Morino’s engravings of Peru
(Marc Soriano, Portait de l’artiste jeune: Suivi des quatres premiers textes publiés de Jules Verne (1978), p.
10); ‘Un Voyage en ballon’, apparently based on the eighteenth-century drawings mentioned in it (Daniel
Compère, ‘Les Nouvelles de Jules Verne’, BSJV, n° 54, 2e tri. 1980, pp. 233–8 (238)); and Le Chancellor,
inspired by Géricault’s painting of the raft of the Méduse (see for instance the illustration on page 137 and
Verne’s reference to the painting as less ‘terrible’ than Le Chancellor (letter to Hetzel, Le Crotoy, mercredi 15
février 1871, B.N., vol. 73 (quoted by Jules-Verne, p. 167))).
50
‘Tours du monde et tours du texte: Procédés verniens, procédés rousselliens’, in Jules Verne 1 (1976), ed.
François Raymond, pp. 67–88 (79).
32
outclassing total nudity.
A second problem concerns the depiction of elliptic or possibly unreliable text. Sometimes the first-person
narrator is unconscious or otherwise prevented from recounting his tale — in which case the very
incompleteness of captions like ‘Etendu sur un divan’ (20M 530, cf. VCT 260) serves only to emphasise his
incapacity and to create doubts in the reader’s mind. In other cases, objective reality is completely replaced in
the text by the imaginings of a character in an ecstatic state. Even so, they are usually fully translated into
pictorial form, including, for instance, Ardan’s ideas of free-flight in space, playing pygmy to the inhabitants of
the sun, or observing the cattle capable of ploughing the giant furrows on the moon’s surface, Hatteras’s dogcaptain or a Carpathian teacher’s dragons and fairies (AL 106; 130; 179; CH 73; ChC 27). Even dream passages
with several periods of time concertinaed together are faithfully transcribed in a medley of juxtaposed images,
as in a mother’s idea of a day in her son’s life or Axel’s vision of different stages of prehistoric animal life (500
86; VCT 260). The search for extreme realism thus often culminates in a complete reversal: the irruption of the
fantastic.
The last two examples typify the general problem of condensing an extended segment of text into a single
illustration. As Lessing pointed out,51 one of the ways in which the pictorial form differs intrinsically from the
written one is that it is normally apprehended either in its full two-dimensionality, without any predetermined
sequence of perception, or else in its gestalt. This problem again seems to find particular solutions in the
Voyages. Sometimes, the discrepancy between text and picture is avoided because one particular moment
serves to represent a static or repetitive scene (‘Il risqua vingt fois sa vie’ (20M 437)). But when there is
movement, this solution tends to produce the unfortunate result of immobility, suspending in mid-air such
diverse objects as horses, men, waves, sand and rocks, stopping the propellers of the Albatros, or causing the
moon projectile to burst out of an observatory instead of crashing into it!52 Accordingly, what many characters
are described as observing in practice is often shown instead, namely ‘traits continus, [. . .] un réseau de lignes
mouvantes’, ‘raies éclatantes, [. . .] sillons de feu tracés par la vitesse’ (VCT 337; 20M 361; cf. VCT 254, 20M
578, DO 103, IM 856).
Two theories of instantaneity are in competition here. On the one hand, a physics-based theory assumed that
time was infinitely divisible, and that the best way to depict motion was not to depict it at all — despite the fact
that, given the rudimentary state of photography, it was difficult to observe a ‘stopped moving object’, and that
the mathematics of the continuum were not fully developed until 1875.53 On the other, the common-sense of
actual observation treated ‘the present’ as having a certain psychological thickness, as containing blurred
movement.
But neither of Verne’s solutions can totally hide the intrinsically synchronic nature of the pictorial form and
its consequent dissonance from the text. As if to compensate, his illustrations often employ a mise-en-abyme,
by emphasising, for instance, their own pictorial nature, showing written forms, or photographers and painters
at work, or pictures-within-pictures (CG 461, VCT 142, etc.; IM 563, 592, etc.; RV 101). Thus, as Nemo dies,
the naked female figure above him progressively lowers her head (IM 797, 809, 813, 820). Once again, Verne
seems to solve the problem by subdividing it into other problems.
A last dissonance of the illustrations is their greater explicitness, which means that they are more tied to their
epoch than the text is. Even without anachronisms like a steamboat in pre-Reformation Geneva (frontispiece to
Le Docteur Ox), the illustrations, particularly those showing ‘futuristic’ clothes or machines, tend to have a sort
of period charm for the modern reader: they remain largely fixed in the era in which they were created, whereas
the text evolves and accumulates new meanings. More generally, the illustrations are necessarily in a fixed time
and space, whereas the text is not, constituting yet another dissonance.
51
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laokoon: Oder ~
uber die Grenzen der Mahlerey und Poesie (Berlin, 1766).
HS 47; 31; EA 237; DA 182; IM 77; RC 64, 67; AL 71.
53
MS 102–3, C 109–10, 20M 608–9; TCC 90; 92; SDD (1889) xviii 190–1.
52
33
The notes and illustrations contrast then with the rest of the text. The main text consists, formally, of a single,
advancing form; whereas the notes and illustrations can adopt a more ludic attitude to time and space. For
Verne, opposing aspects of time and freedom are often meshed together.
Putting it All Back Together Again
As in most nineteenth-century ‘impersonal’ fiction, an authorial figure occasionally openly intervenes in the
Voyages. But most of the time, the origin of the narration is shrouded in mystery — even the minimal
intervention of a non-chronological order on events is absent.
There are, however, three important exceptions. The first one is so blatant as to seem deliberate (and it seems
surprising therefore that it has not provoked more critical commentary). ‘L’Eternel Adam’‘s double
focalisation, its narrative-within-a-narrative, necessarily draws attention to both its own narration/authorship
and its date of writing. It is as if, having made the decision to write ‘in Jules Verne’s manner’, Michel is then
tempted to demonstrate the difference in as many ways as possible.
The second exception is the openings and endings, whose relative complexity is undoubtedly the sign of the
multiple, and symmetrical, connections necessary for entering and leaving the fictional universe. The final one
is the footnotes and illustrations. Both escape the one-dimensional structure of the main text to constitute a sort
of antechamber between the fictional and the real worlds. Unlike the text, they are not directed towards some
external goal, such as making a pedagogical point or setting up a clou — they are defined instead by their
temporal qualities of divertissement or diversion. The paradoxical effect of Verne’s tendency to hypernaturalism is to escape from some of the constraints of traditional narration.
The constituent parts of the Voyages extraordinaires thus have varied temporal natures. Their interrelations
may nevertheless be explored by plotting them all in a single, idealised graph, where the individual features are
slightly exaggerated. The beginning and ending may be shown as branching structures; the notes and
illustrations, proceeding from the text but without further interaction with it, may be depicted as bifurcations
leaving the structure; and the linearity of the main body and its points of symmetry may be indicated as such
(Figure 4).
What we have established, then, is an overall structure which summarises the formal temporality of virtually
every work in the series of the Voyages extraordinaires.
But the reductionism of this diagram is clearly only part of the story. Verne’s imagination often exhibits
concrete and anti-theoretical tendencies. His strength may be simultaneously in the temporal and spatial
structures of his novels, and in the manner in which he ‘fills in’ the story, the way he accumulates temporal
details until they finish up by creating a universe. We are as likely to remember the temporal foibles of a
Zacharius, a Nemo or a Robur as the time-scales in which they move. Verne’s time is as much a human and
subjective one as it is a scientific or objective one. The structures exist in the context of much wider concerns.
34
4
THE PAST IS A
PLACE
Past Masters
n a remarkable number of cases in Verne’s works, time is considered in a topos which neatly counters the
form-contents opposition: in the opposite order from that of its normal flow. Typical examples include: the
I time-scale of the past relived, where characters see their whole lives flashing by; the one implied by the
‘running out’ of time, as in traditional expressions like ‘days being counted’ or ‘having only a few hours to
live’; or the one constituted by the countdown (which Verne may have invented), as in the launching of the
projectile in Sans Dessus Dessous.54
In certain cases, the time-scale is linked to a material object that is theoretically measurable: the finite space
of the unexplored globe, or its more concise embodiment in the form of a virgin river; declining numbers of
natural objects, such as whales, elephants, furs, or coal deposits; or reducing amounts of commodities vital for
the hero’s existence, such as air for balloons, oxygen for breathing, fuel, or above all food. 55 In other cases, it is
the time of the text itself which is affected, as in the cryptogrammes that are solved when it realised that they
are simply written backwards: ‘[. . .] terptsetuot’ or (in dog-Latin) ‘[. . .] tabiledmekmeretarcsilucoYsleffenSni’
(MS 80; VCT 25).
If the exact nature of many of these time-scales is difficult to identify, they do have important shared
characteristics: they are all in some sense retrogressive and they are all defined with relation to their
culminating point. They not only resemble therefore the first methods of measuring time, such as candles,
sandglasses and waterclocks, but also contribute to the suspense of the story and to fuelling the anxiety
syndrome manifest in many of the characters.
The logical deductions in Verne’s works are based on a similar psychological and temporal regression.
Amongst the more curious instances one can observe, slightly at random: the inference of each stage of a ship’s
past from a pile of bones, fragments of paper, an empty bottle, or a piece of flotsam; the deduction of the interoceanic route of a piece of floating mahogany merely from its position in space; and the reading of five years in
the life of a group of men from a rusty knife and a few other remnants. 56 In each case, the paucity of the
evidence is matched only by the copiousness of the conclusions. Verne’s imagination often overtakes his
naturalistic caution.
Amongst the characters using the deductive method are many of the scientists, more or less imitating Cuvier’s
famous reconstructions of whole prehistoric animals from scraps of bone or cartilage (VCT 259); but also
various professional detectives — a novelty in the nineteenth century, and probably due to the influence of
Poe.57 At least eight different works in fact present positivistic detectives using material signs to re-create a
whole series of events (TM, J, CF, FSN, FN, DL, PD, DJM).
Un Drame en Livonie is representative of this exploration of the past, with its murder behind a locked door,
the disappearance of the victim’s numbered banknotes, and the discovery of clues including blood-stained ashes
in the grate. After various false trails, the blame eventually falls on Prof. Dimitri Nicolef, for he had a plausible
54
C15 3, 20M 466, 545; VA iii 31–2; PF 17; VCT 174, 20M 443, IN 3, 22–3, IM 457–8; e.g. VCT 97, 295,
338, 343–6.
55
SG 250–1; CG 11–19; BL xiii 121; B 159; CH 52–3; B 191–202.
56
See Francis Lacassin, ‘Jules Verne et le roman policier’, in Le Pilote du Danube (1979), pp. 5–18 (6–8).
57
TL 243; HS 53; 157; MB I xii 222; CM 131; cf. 20M 406.
35
motive, was in the inn at the time of the murder and is caught with the banknotes in his possession. And
representative of the confidence of all the investigators is the explanation of how it was inferred, Sherlock
Holmes-like, that a carriage was used and that ‘the lead horse is missing a nail in its front right shoe’: ‘Rien
n’est plus simple. [. . .] On avait [. . .] besoin d’un véhicule [. . .]. J’ai donc cherché ce véhicule et je l’ai trouvé
[. . .]. Il a plu la nuit dernière et [. . .] la terre [. . .] a gardé fidèlement les empreintes’ (PD ix 146–7).
Both the miraculous geographical deductions and the detectives’ step-by-step inferences thus take place in a
drastically simplified, almost closed, system. Not only are uncertainty and ambiguity virtually absent from the
investigations but each event is above all considered as caused by exactly one other event. The essential feature
is the presentation of a linear chain of actions going back through time. But because the sequence is linear, the
events can then neatly be summed up in the forward direction. The floating mahogany’s route is typical of
the perfection of the finished product:
‘Il a été charrié vers l’océan Pacifique par quelque rivière de l’isthme de Panama ou de Guatemala; de là, le
courant l’a traîné le long des côtes d’Amérique jusqu’au détroit de Behring, [. . .] [par] les mers polaires [. . .],
[par] cette longue suite de détroits qui aboutit à la mer de Baffin [. . .]; il est venu par le détroit de Davis se faire
prendre à bord du Forward pour la plus grande joie du docteur Clawbonny’ (CH 53).
Because post hoc reasoning is used, with all causes sufficient, all effects necessary, and all mysteries explained,
these instances avoid arborescences of causality. A world is created with no loss of information, no multiple
causes and no chance variations. Justice is a machine with ‘engrenages’ (PD xiv 226), where events may be
traversed indifferently from either end — it is a world free of the vagaries of time, but without its variety either.
Verne’s didactic intentions are undoubtedly visible here, reinforced by the general determinism of the era.
An extension of post hoc linear reasoning consists of analysing situations only after the event. This important
Vernian tendency consists of explaining them, in other words, as if they had to be so and, above all, as if they
had always had to be so. Archetypal in this respect is the complacent philosophy of five of the characters:
Michel Ardan — ‘Rien d’inutile n’existe en ce monde’ — Ben-Zouf — ‘C’est comme ça, parce que c’est
comme ça! Si le Père Eternel l’a voulu, mon capitaine, faudra s’en arranger tout de même!’ — Palmyrin
Rosette — ‘Va bene! All right! Parfait!!!’ — Amédée Florence — ‘Quoiqu’il arrivât, il s’en applaudissait’ —
and Zéphyrin Xirdal — ‘Comme tout sert dans la vie!’.58 This facile sort of ‘just-so’ reasoning is above all
visible in the comments made on ‘Providence’. The term is very often used as a shortcut way of accepting
events on (present) face-value, and ignoring the possible events of the past that may have led up to them.
A similar tendency exists for Nature’s works: ‘La nature est logique en tout ce qu’elle fait’, ‘[elle] ne fait rien
à contresens’, ‘ayant le temps, [elle] économise l’effort’ (CH 331; 20M 40; IM 160). Each Natural object, and
each species and race, is presented as perfectly adapted to its environment:
‘C’est [l’]instinct [des moustiques], cousine Weldon’, lui répondait-il en se grattant jusqu’au sang, ‘c’est leur
instinct, et il ne faut pas leur en vouloir!’ (C15 463); ‘les Arabes [. . .] ont reçu de la nature un merveilleux
instinct pour reconnaître leur route [dans le désert]’ (5S 315); combien la nature s’est montrée sage en [. . .]
ayant donné [aux natifs du Kamtchatka] aussi peu que possible de nez dans un pays où les débris de poissons,
laissés en plein air, affectent si désagréablement le nerf olfactif! (JMC ix 97).
All efforts to change the world are therefore useless:
‘Nous sommes bien où nous sommes, et [. . .] il est inutile de courir ailleurs’ (CH 592); ‘[tout n’est-il pas pour
58
See Jean Delabroy, ‘Jules Verne et l’imaginaire’, (Univ. of Paris III doctoral thesis: 1980), p. 1110.
36
le mieux] puisque nous voilà tous les trois en bonne santé? Par conséquent, dans tout cela, nous n’avons rien à
nous reprocher’ (5S 306); ‘il n’y a qu’à suivre les événements et on se tire d’affaire! Le plus sûr, voyez-vous,
c’est [. . .] d’accepter les choses comme elles se présentent’ (5S 309). [En un mot,] ‘il faut [. . .] considérer ce
qui doit arriver comme arrivé déjà’ (5S 20).
The main bodies of the works may well present didactic and deterministic conceptions of time but the
dénouements work in the opposite direction. Thus, at the end of Un Drame en Livonie it is revealed that the
blood-stained ashes had been thrown down the chimney (!) and that the real culprit is the innkeeper. The logic
of the hoofmarks is correct as far as it goes, but its subsequent identification of the culprit is erroneous, being
based on an unfortunate homonymy (PD v 153). . . . In virtually all the novels, the ‘logical’ conclusions,
established by the seemingly most rigorous methods, prove in the end to be wrong or else irrelevant.
L’Ile mystérieuse, especially, consists of a series of fortunate incidents which are apparently due to mere
chance or Providence, but which become of increasing improbability, and eventually culminate in the washing
up of a trunk containing objects that cater for the settlers’ every need. Just as in this case a hidden secular
agency has been at work since the beginning (Nemo), so elsewhere things are not so simple as they might seem:
balloons are subject to both divine will and the prevailing winds, but phrases also appear like ‘le hasard, ce
‘nom de guerre’ ( . . .) que prend quelquefois la Providence’, ‘un hasard providentiel’ or ‘ultra -providentiel’, or
‘Aide-toi, le ciel t’aidera’.59 Thus, although the simplistic explanation in terms of Providence is not entirely
done away with, it is at the same time treated with a certain irony, and very rarely accepted as a total
explanation for events. In many of these cases indeed, Verne may be pastiching his contemporaries or
predecessors, Defoe first and foremost. He is possibly objecting to the manipulation of situations in defiance of
plausibility (and often scientific truths), and implying that a novel which relies too much on coincidence is a
poor novel.
In fact, both the general and the specific fatalistic arguments are usually placed in the characters’ mouths, are
followed by exclamation marks and are expressed in emphatic fashion. There would seem to be reasonable
grounds, therefore, for detecting an expressly ironical intention. Sometimes, indeed, the characters themselves
provide a bitingly explicit and sceptical commentary:
‘Quant aux [. . .] mots [. . .] "Va bene! — All right! — Parfait!!!" ils ne signifient rien . . .’ § ‘Si ce n’est [. . .]
que l’auteur [. . .] trouve que tout est pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes impossibles’ (HS 160); ‘[tout]
cela me rappelle l’histoire de ce grand admirateur de la Providence, qui la louait du soin qu’elle avait eu de
faire passer les fleuves au milieu des grandes villes!’ (5S 316).
The four reductionist tendencies often converge therefore on a single issue — and the reader who remained at
this stage of analysis would have totally missed the point. Verne is at least partly tongue-in-cheek. In their
various ways, reasoning by post hoc or just-so methods or in terms of Providence or Nature all rely too much
on the idea of necessity, and do not leave enough room for chance or other unpredictable factors. By declaring
the present to be the best of all possible worlds — or even the only possible world — they assimilate the future
to the past, they attribute too much importance to teleology and they above all ignore time as a medium in
which major changes could be possible. One can surmise that this tension between determinism and free-will
59
5S 22; J 374; CH 108; FD 194; 500 166, cf. IM 411.
It is ironically appropriate that another narratorial comment — ‘La Providence, pour ceux qui croient à
l’intervention divine dans les choses humaines — le hasard pour ceux qui ont LA FAIBLESSE de ne pas croire à
la Providence —, vint au secours des naufragés’ (RC 241) — has been interpreted by two independent critics in
diametrically opposed ways: literally, by René Pillorget, ‘Optimisme ou pessimisme de Jules Verne’, Europe,
n° 595–6, pp. 19–27 (25), but ironically by Marcel Moré, Nouvelles explorations de Jules Verne (1963), p. 94.
37
may be part of a self-reflecting debate in the Voyages on the nature of fiction — on the author’s quasiProvidential manipulations limiting the freedom of his characters.60 The undeniable attractions of such total
determinism do not, however, compensate for the absurdity it produces when confronted with the unforeseen.
In all four areas, inflexible behaviour — like that of music-boxes which have to be broken before they will stop
(MZ 117) — is ultimately judged inappropriate and ridiculous. Systematically compressing the loose time and
space of the real world into a fictional straitjacket is contrary to Verne’s imagination.
Knowledge of past time proves in the end to be incomplete, the machinery of justice eminently fallible and all
the retrogressive chains of deduction infinitely less uniform than had appeared.
Verne is undoubtedly using ideas derived from Voltaire’s Pangloss to make fun of the simplistic explanations
of some of his contemporaries. More specifically, he seems to be questioning scientific theories that ignore the
hypothetico-deductive method, that enounce an internally coherent explanation, but without taking into
consideration under what conditions it could be refuted. Even more specifically, he may easily be arguing
against Lamarckian theory, with its supposition of a link between correlation and causation (as in the case of
the Eskimos’ noses) and its consequent introduction of the idea of intentionality into the Natural world. Verne
is proposing instead a relatively modern counter-theory, whose axioms are simpler, being without teleology or
transcendence; but whose specific explanations are more complicated, as they must always take in
consideration what could have been as well as what is — where, in a word, contingence is involved. Verne is
thus close here to one of the central arguments used by Darwin in On the Origin of Species (1859, translated
into French in 1873), namely that animal species could easily have been different from what they actually are. 61
The Voyages seem to have set a trap for the unwary. Appearances are rarely to be trusted; the legal model of
the world can only hope to codify, not discover the truth. Time, above all, must not be neglected. The events of
the past cannot be traversed and re-traversed without time taking its revenge. Linearity is far from the whole
truth. Behind Verne’s deadpan narration lurks an attack on the positivistic assumptions of many of his
contemporaries — and of his readers in the twentieth century.
Man and Less-than-Man
One of the problems with the scientists’ and detectives’ deductions was that they were physically static. For
Verne, this makes for bad science and for bad fiction: space simply cannot be ignored. A more appropriate
structure might be one where aspects of the historical or scientific past could be presented in a suitable spatial
form. More precisely, if the world contained some sort of representation of bygone events, many of the
problems of interest and significance would be solved.
Racial differences apparently satisfy this condition for Verne, since, throughout the Voyages, the different
groups are presented as varying in their degrees of modernity. Because they seem to embody stages of the past,
the way might be open for exploring a significant ailleurs.
Thus within the European group, certain races are argued to possess cultural and spiritual values inherited
from the past — especially the ‘Celts’, a term that is sometimes used to include the French or Québecois. The
temporal aspect is emphasised by conventional remarks describing the customs of Quebec, for example, as
identical to ‘celles DU XVIIe siècle [ . . .], “[d’]une France du vieux temps” ‘ (FSN I iv 81). In a similar way, the
North American Indians are presented as sympathetic but archaic. In contrast, the Germans, English and
Americans — collectively ‘la race saxonne’ (500 55) — are described as dominant in technological and
60
Hints of this debate are sometimes visible in the texts themselves (the title, for instance, of the last chapter
of Les Tribulations d’un Chinois en Chine (1879) is: ‘ Que le lecteur aurait pu écrire lui-même, tant il finit
d’une façon peu attendue!’ (TCC 317, cf. HS 524).
61
François Jacob, La Logique du vivant (1970), p. 170.
38
geopolitical spheres and destined to triumph increasingly in the future. 62 At a cursory glance, Verne’s views
would seem to be variously and indiscriminately gleaned here from Gobineau, Rousseau, Saint-Simon or
others.
But in the remaining cases, the logic works the other way round and behaviour considered typical of the past
produces a forceful denigration. The Jews, for instance, are subject to vituperation, with one of them described
as: ‘Trafiquant de tout et partout, il descendait en ligne droite de ce Judas qui livra son maître pour trente
deniers [etc.]’ (MP iii 242; cf. MP passim, HS passim, ChC passim). There is thus an incontrovertible streak of
anti-Semitism in Verne’s works, which cannot be explained away, as various commentators have attempted to
do, by appealing to events of Verne’s life.
The Spanish are also attacked, especially in ‘Un Drame au Mexique’ (1851), ‘Martin Paz’ (1852), Un
Capitaine de quinze ans and Hector Servadac, possibly on the basis of an underlying comparison with the
Blacks, for Spaniards in these two novels are called ‘Negoro’ and ‘Negrete’ (C15 246; HS 198). The various
Black races themselves, above all, are the object of a special attention.
On a first level, a patronising benevolence is visible, as in comments like: ‘Ses traits CORRECTS le
rapprochaient plus du blanc que du nègre’ (MS 4). Especially revealing in this respect are the opening chapters
of L’Ile mystérieuse, which contain a number of generous remarks, but at the same time reveal a strange
reversal of roles between Nab the Negro and Top the Dog. Thus Nab swims in dog-like fashion and, to dry
himself, shakes himself vigorously (IM 33). Unable to find Smith, he refuses to eat: ‘[Il] ne voulait plus vivre’,
‘comme le chien qui ne peut quitter la place où est tombé son maître’ (IM 56; 64). Whereas Nab is often mute,
Top manages to convey a message and reply to questions, and saves Smith, washed up on a beach, where Nab
could not (IM 88; 85; 85; 90). The double comparison is finally made explicit in the phrase ‘le dévouement de
Nab [. . .], l’intelligence [de] Top’ (IM 95) — and is reinforced in a later novel with a comment describing a
Black servant as ‘fais[ant] office de chien’ (ER 200). In the second part of L’Ile mystérieuse as well, Nab is
compared to another creature with a monosyllabic name, Jup the Orang-Utan — Jup is called, to give only one
example, Nab’s ‘superior’ (IM 415). In sum, even if many comments are meant to be spoken in jest, and even if
many are accompanied by liberal or progressive sentiments, there is still an undeniable tendency to assimilate
Blacks to the animal kingdom — and not even its highest echelons.
This blatant racism is of course typical of the period, and of the genre from Defoe onwards. But at this first
stage, it is not clear what the temporal implications are: the Blacks, in Verne’s view, could represent a precise
stage in the past evolution of European man; or they could correspond in a loose manner to some past stage; or
else they could be unlinked with the past of European man. The search for an operative space-time relationship
is clearly not yet over.
On a second level, the biological aspect is made more explicit. One obsessional passage, for instance, lists
various possibilities of ‘miscegenation’ between Spanish, Indians and Blacks, with names for each combination
down to the fourth generation; and it then assimilates certain human beings to animals by evoking the offspring
‘né[s] d’un coyote et d’une mulâtresse [ou] [. . .] d’un coyote et d’un Indienne’ (DM iv 445). It is amazing that
this passage escaped censorship, from the public censor but especially from Hetzel when it was published in the
Voyages extraordinaires — even without a reference to white women in the same context of union between
animals and humans, which appeared only in the first edition (‘Les Premiers navires de la Marine mexicaine’
(1851), p. 70).
Similarly, in many works, the idea of men with tails or simian in other respects is evoked; and in general, the
various groups of natives are often characterised as being as close to animals as to men. 63 Australian Aborigines
and Hottentots, for instance, are described as having a facial angle and an intelligence very close to that of
orang-utans (IM 382), and Mac Kackmale [sic] is caricatured in terms of ‘ses bras démesurés, [. . .] ses gestes
For an analysis of the Anglo-Saxons in Verne’s works, see Marie-Hélène Huet, L’Histoire des ‘Voyages
extraordinaires’ (1973), pp. 82–9.
63
E.g. VA v 61; J 173, 5S 103; CG 506, B 447, cf. IM 503.
62
39
d’anthropopithèque, le prognathisme extraordinaire de sa mâchoire’ (GB iii 308). What would seem to be in
fact Verne’s general position appears in a passage in Capitaine Grant, again on the Australian Aborigines: ‘[Ce
n’est] pas sans raison que M. de Rienzi proposa de classer ces malheureux dans une race à part qu’il nommait
les “pithécomorphes”, c’est-à-dire hommes à formes de singes’; ‘on ne pouvait nier [. . .] que cette race touchât
de près à l’animal’ (CG 508; 510).
A third level — which does not entirely confirm the tendency of the other two — consists of the exploration
of the transitional area between human beings and animals, and occurs principally in Le Village aérien. This
novel, published in 1901, presents a missing-link tribe discovered in the heart of Africa, governed by a mad
European anthropologist, and superior to the animals but less developed than homo sapiens. The extension of
the racial hierarchy into the animal kingdom is reinforced by a hierarchy of age, as in comments on Blacks like:
‘Puisque les deux [hommes blancs] avaient adopté le JEUNE indigène, il était bien permis à celui-ci d’adopter un
PETIT singe’ (VA xi 118–9). In other words, the non-white races are being compared to children — another
prevalent comparison in the nineteenth century, one which imposed a temporal order on the races, and thus a
potential path for explorers. But the supposed childishness of non-whites still poses a fundamental problem: are
they juvenile because they are younger — of recent development — or because they are older — that is, they
developed first?
The question is not directly answered, but there are instead many remarks tending to diminish the distance
between white and Black, as if to ‘make room’ for the third group below them both. Thus not only are the two
heroes ‘négrifiés’ and ‘africanisés’ by the sun, but their Black companion has ‘le teint presque clair, la
chevelure blonde et non la laine crépue [. . .], le nez aquilin et non écrasé, les lèvres fines et non lippues’ (VA i
8; v 60; i 12).
When the inhabitants of the Treetop Village are discovered — characteristically the first to be seen is a baby
— it does prove very difficult to classify them. There are many indications tending to set the Wagddis apart
from the animals, icluding their facial angle, shape of nose and forehead, body hair, clothing, family structure,
smiles and tears, language, and religion.64 On the other hand, this language is described as being extremely
primitive, as offering ‘des parallélismes frappants avec le babil enfantin’ (VA xiv 161); and their objects of
worship are similarly derisory, consisting as they do of the mad Dr Johausen and his flat barrel-organ with its
missing notes. The narrator in fact explicitly concludes that the creatures do not demonstrate a clear moral or
religious sense, a sine qua non of the human condition (VA xiv 157). The Wagddis, then, seem to be presented
as being, like Java Man (VA xiii 146), neither totally in the animal nor totally in the human camp.65
There are thus three levels of association between human or humanoid beings and animals; plus in fact a
certain number of cases of degeneration — Johausen himself or Ayrton castaway on his desert island (VA xvii
193; IM 503). But real evolutionary ideas are very seldom quoted with approval. The Village aérien is not a
‘village Aryan’. Conceptions of the origin of animal and human species tend instead to be Biblical (20M 15,
VCT 261, etc.), and to involve the acquisition and inheritance of at most superficial characteristics (C15 398, B
319, etc.), in line with pre-evolutionary ideas. Darwin’s theory of evolution is indeed explicitly rejected;66 as is
Vogt’s, according to which ‘l’orang[-outang] [. . .] serait [. . .] l’ancêtre des Négritos; le chimpanzé, [. . .]
[celui] des nègres; [. . .] [le] gorille, [. . .] [celui de] l’homme blanc’ (VA xiv 156) (although, of course, the mere
fact of mentioning it gives its racist aspects some credence). Even when species are shown as mutable, as in the
64
VA xi 125; xi 125; xi 125; xiv 154; xiv 162, xv 171; xv 167; xiv 161; xv 171.
In an interview, Verne himself described the novel as follows: ‘J’essaie d’y reconstituer la race
intermédiaire entre le plus parfait des singes et le moins parfait des hommes’ (TO 377).
66
For example VA ix 103, xiv 156; cf. ‘Je suis loin d’arriver à la conclusion de Darwin, dont je ne partage
pas le moins du monde les idées’ (TO 377) (although, elsewhere, Darwin’s views on non-evolutionary concepts
such as atolls or the populations of the ocean depths are quoted with approval (20M 201; RV 129; cf. VA xiii
146)).
65
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fantaisie ‘La Famille Raton’ (1891), where human beings become rats or oysters following the ‘laws of
metempsychosis’ (FR 2), the movement up and down the animal scale is not continuous but follows discrete
‘échelons’ (FR 2). Only in Voyage au centre de la Terre is the possibility of human evolution alluded to, when
it is stated that the Giant Shepherd may be ‘un PROTEE de ces contrées souterraines, un NOUVEAU FILS DE
NEPTUNE’ (VCT 318). But this remarkable idea of a parallel evolutionary branch — with all its consequences of
anti-Creationism and all its science-fiction possibilities — was never to be followed up. However one looks at
them, then, Jules Verne’s works do not contain a coherent scientific theory, but a set of heteroclite ideas
designed to fit the needs of the story rather than biological science. In terms of the continuing search for a
spatio-temporal structure, the racial variations certainly provide material for an exploration of the past, but
perhaps for religious reasons, cannot provide a totally coherent context.
‘L’Eternel Adam’ (1910), with its multi-millennial plot and its presentation of different stages of human,
animal and vegetable life, provides a very different perspective on the same problem. It amplifies the
evolutionary hints of the non-posthumous works, but to such an extent as to, so to speak, distort the signal.
After a catastrophe destroying virtually all land-based life, plants and animals are described as re-emerging in a
remarkable scene of Lamarckian instant evolution, ‘[une] transformation sur le vif’: ‘On voit d’anciens
animaux [. . .] marins [. . .] en train de devenir terrestres. L’air est sillonné de poissons volants, beaucoup plus
oiseaux que poissons, leurs ailes ayant démesurément grandi [. . .]’ (EA 256; 256).
Michel’s description builds on his father’s predilections for flying fish and dramatic oddities of all sorts, but
to produce a most un-Julesian and implausible but poetic scene. As far as man himself is concerned, however,
the tale seems to hesitate — as if Michel was not quite sure what his father’s views were, or how far he could
go without revealing his own role. Thus on one hand the anonymous narrator comments ‘We are no longer
men’ (EA 259), and predicts: ‘Il y aura d’autres adultes et d’autres enfants, [. . .] toujours plus proches de
l’animal, toujours plus loin de leurs aïeux pensants’ (EA 259). Similarly, twenty thousand years afterwards, the
deeper the archeological excavations go, the smaller the human craniums discovered become, indicating
diminished mental capacity and human qualities (EA 223), in line with the contemporary view that the size of
the brain was all-important. On the other hand, the craniums of the deepest strata are as big as craniums ever
have been (EA 223); and man does always seem to retain certain characteristics, a vestige of language
especially: the names Hedom and Hiva, for instance, go back to the anonymous narrator’s civilisation and even,
as the title of the work clearly implies, to the very origins of humanity (EA 226, 261–2). This is perhaps why,
despite his pessimistic prediction, the anonymous narrator talks of future men (EA 259), and why the Zartog
insists on the ‘abîme infranchissable’ ‘entre l’homme et les animaux’ (EA 221; 221), concluding that the people
are right to consider themselves as having had exclusively human ancestors (EA 262).67
Michel’s representations of evolution would thus seem to have two facets. On the one hand, in line with a
general posthumous exaggeration of the themes of all the Voyages extraordinaires, the ‘densification’ of animal
evolutionary tendencies may similarly represent Michel’s privileged, but not infallible, extrapolation of what he
believed to be his father’s views on this subject. But at the same time, ‘L’Eternel Adam’ attempts to remain
close to the limits of plausibility defined by the previous works — hence undoubtedly the continuing
evolutionary immunity of the white man.
If a certain number of Noble Savages exist within the non-posthumous Voyages, most of the non-white races
seem instead to be somewhere between representing a different group within humanity and constituting a
different species. There are therefore more than sufficient grounds for accusing Verne’s works of a position that
Jean Delabroy (‘Discussion’, pp. 314–26 (317), after Françoise Gaillard, ‘ “L’Eternel Adam”, ou
L’Evolutionnisme à l’heure de la thermodynamique’, in Jules Verne et les sciences humaines, pp. 293–313) has
suggested that the Zartog might be the product of a new evolutionary process — like the Giant Shepherd — but
there is apparently no evidence for such a view.
67
41
is insulting towards the non-white races.68 But Verne’s works do not seem to conform to any single biological
theory, being rather a re-working of De Maillet, Mauperthuis and others. Darwinian natural selection is notably
absent; and if the early works do exhibit an adherence to Cuvier’s creationism, based on Genesis, the
representation of a human missing link in Le Village aérien goes against Cuvier’s theory. To complicate
matters further, the Lamarckian elements of ‘L’Eternel Adam’ seem to be unrepresentative of the Voyages as a
whole. In the end, there remain apparently only two constant factors: the white race as an isolated and
immovable phenomenon (even if individuals are not immune to deleterious influences); and ‘the scale of
animal life’ (VCT 169) as defined by its intrinsic inferiority to this ‘summit’ of the scale of being (VCT 169).
The views on evolution seem to form instead part of the Vernian search for an ‘elsewhere’, an exoticism
which will show up the banality of nineteenth-century France, and which will contribute to the ‘recherche de
l’absolu’. One vital effect is that the variation of human species enables the space of the globe to be covered
with a significance-bearing pattern. What is more, the pattern is to a certain extent based in time, and is thus an
improvement on the detectives’ and scientists’ narrowly spatial tramping-ground. But the temporality remains
ambiguous — its ‘beginnings’, especially, are still shrouded in mist.
Discovering the Past
The inanimate vestiges discovered throughout Les Mondes connus et inconnus are, on the other hand, most
definitely situated in time. They thus help to give a strong sense of purpose — and mystery — to the
explorations. Sometimes the vestiges are purely imaginary: Hatteras is presented with visions of icebergs
which resemble ‘la chapelle d’Henri VII ou le palais du Parlement’; the trans-African balloonists imagine
‘d’immenses animaux antédiluviens pétrifiés’; Axel and Lidenbrock observe underground formations
reproducing ‘les contre-nefs d’une cathédrale gothique’, ‘les cintres surbaissés du style roman’, ‘[ou les]
ouvrages des castors’; and Clawbonny, finally, perceives a vast Romantic ‘cimetière sans arbres, triste,
silencieux, infini, dans lequel vingt générations du monde entier se fussent couchées à l’aise pour le sommeil
éternel’.69 But in other cases, it is a real and detailed past that is visible. Under the sea, for example, Aronnax
observes ‘[des] squelettes d’animaux des temps fabuleux, [. . .] [des] arbres [. . .] minéralisés’ (20M 423). The
polar regions, especially, conserve multiple vestiges of the past, including such various organic items as food
supplies, human bodies, a rhinoceros, or a Siberian elephant, but preserve even the landscape itself: the
Antarctic landmass ‘est restée ce qu’était notre sphéro~de
i pendant la période glaciaire’.70
Whether mineralised or frozen, real or imaginary, close or distant, the past is thus a vital store of vivid images
for Verne. Remoteness from the present is in fact generally related to distance from Europe — time is linked
with space. And since the space of the globe often in turn determines the journey, Verne’s characters and
narrators thereby have the potential basis for structuring existence, for linking past time to the time of the
narration. The adventures have a possible raison d’être. With any luck, history will be the story.
But these links are at best episodic, and cannot in practice sustain the narration for more than one or two
scenes. The project of using the past for the story can only work if space contains significant and sustained
structures. It might therefore seem that the use of the dimensions of space as intermediary was redundant after
In this connection, Oliver Dumas has argued that Verne’s attitude towards Blacks was ‘no worse’ than that
of his contemporaries (‘La Race noire dans l’œuvre de Jules Verne’, in Jules Verne et les sciences humaines,
pp. 264–72), but he quotes as examples only two extreme novelists, Driant and A. Dubarry, and therefore even
his minimal case cannot be considered proven.
69
CH 63, cf. 218, 110; 5S 355, cf. 97; VCT 161; 163; 163; CH 275, cf. Ardan’s vision of ‘un immense
ossuaire sur lequel reposeraient les dépouilles mortelles de mille générations éteintes’ (AL 172).
70
CH 137, 144; 303; 587; 587; SG 181, cf. CH 558.
68
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all. Would it not be easier, in other words, for the two one-dimensional temporal scales to be directly
associated, for past time to govern present time, for natural history simply to be recounted?
This solution has a certain elegance, and is in fact frequently adopted for the mise en scène of the geological
past. In such cases, it is naturally enough the temporal aspects of the globe’s history that are at the centre of the
presentation, although in two markedly different ways:
Peut-être [. . .] l’astre du jour n’était-il pas PRET à jouer son rôle [. . .]. Les ‘climats’ n’existaient pas ENCORE
(VCT 173); les eaux [. . .] se précipitaient en arrachant aux roches [. . .] de quoi composer les schistes, les grès,
les calcaires (IN 21); ‘pas de trace de végétation. L’acide carbonique, vomi par le cratère, n’AVAIT ENCORE EU
LE TEMPS [. . .] pour former, sous l’action de la lumière, LES matières organisées’ (CH 599); c’étaient partout
d’énormes massifs d’arbres, sans fleurs, sans fruits, d’un aspect monotone, qui n’auraient pu suffire à la
nourriture d’aucun être vivant. La terre n’était pas PRETE ENCORE pour l’apparition du règne animal (IN 19); la
terre INCOMPLETE ne pouvait suffire ENCORE (à l’homme) (VCT 261).
Un jour, quelque graine [. . .] tomba [. . .]. La végétation gagna peu à peu [. . .]. Les oiseaux nichèrent dans les
jeunes arbres. [. . .] La vie animale se développa; le premier singe apparu à la surface du globe [. . .] gravit les
cimes ardues; l’homme apparut (20M 202; VCT 261; 20M 202).
The impression created by such quotations is of a strange, didactic tone that is rare in twentieth-century fiction.
In the first five quotations, absence, negativity, or monotony are emphasised, reinforced by the continuous
tenses. In the last three, by contrast, purposeful organic life is established, and the process is characterised by its
internal momentum, as indicated by the progression of the passés simples (even though explanations of cause
are still scrupulously avoided). In them, but also in certain longer continuous passages (for example, VCT 128–
30), the past of the globe is narrated in linear terms, as a coherent sequence, with each stage described as a
function of the following ones. Teleology and anthropocentrism combine, in sum, to produce a ‘highlynarrativised’ past where content can finally govern form — a history of the globe that starts with a long and
pregnant descriptive pause, but finishes up with a strong ‘story-line’ and a satisfying climax.
Despite the coherency of these instances, the fictional recounting of mere scientific facts can cause two
particular problems. The whole tradition of the novel — as Robbe-Grillet has convincingly demonstrated —
encourages readers to expect a human presence, a specific point of view; and yet this is by definition absent
from most of Verne’s descriptions of remote and arid events. But also — and as a consequence — the knownunknown tension is lacking here. Because contingency is ignored, because ‘alternative futures(in-the-past)’ are
neglected, the temporal thread is too well-marked — there is no room for conflict or suspense. Of course, the
primary aim of the whole exercise was to employ the security of perfectly well-defined structures; but for
narrative purposes, it would clearly be better if some freedom was also involved.
It is possible that some of these problems might be solved by considering the future of natural ‘history’
instead. Although the ‘internal’ temporal structure is perhaps the same, the relation with the observer and the
‘beginnings’ and ‘ends’ are very different. Verne’s narrator in fact takes great delight in extrapolating
geological events forward far beyond the present era. The extrapolations are facilitated by the similarity
between the passé simple and future tense forms,71 and also because many adverbs may be employed for both,
even ones like ‘bientôt’ and ‘dans un temps rapproché’ — undoubtedly another example of Verne’s deadpan
pedagogical humour. Straits will thus ‘shortly’ close up again, islands join together, or new continents form;
life on the globe ‘will’ come to an end, due to a complete cooling of the globe, a near-total flood, or else an
71
41.
Paul Imbs, L’Emploi des temps verbaux en francais moderne: Essai de grammaire descriptive (1960), p.
43
explosion.72 Support for these predictions is drawn from a comparison with other heavenly bodies: if certain
planets, such as Venus and Mercury, are still in the past — in the immature, vegetation stage — the comet
Gallia, dying of cold, and the moon, already dead, are described as being signs in the present revealing the
future of the Earth (IN 19; HS 414–5; 20M 386, IM 276). Ultimately then, it is the predictable and didactic
aspect of future geological events that is emphasised — and so more or less the same problems as before are
present.
The tendency for past and future time to be accelerated and spatialised does present huge advantages in
dramatic impact and clarity. But it still leads back to the conundrum: is the past younger or older than the
present? And then what about the future? More generally, geological ‘history’ allows Verne to consider the
world-without-man, and thus to relativise the importance of humanity — a vital stage in the development of
nineteenth-century thought; but it still does not easily lead to the construction of a sustained narrative. It is
lacking in human interest — it is merely expository or pedagogical. Rational-scientific time is too uniform,
spread too evenly to produce a satisfying fictional effect.
Such instances stand therefore in contrast to the frozen or petrified vestiges of the past, for these do constitute
a dramatic time, in and of the moment, defined by its brevity and changeability. In short, the mise en scène of
time in the Voyages normally involves the sacrifice of either completeness or tangibility, of continuity or
extraordinary effect — and thus fails one or other of the goals embodied in the title of Le Magasin d’éducation
et de récréation. As so often, Verne’s attempt to encapsulate the totality of a given problem in a nutshell seems
to culminate in the production of two antinomic conceptions. Where exhaustiveness is emphasised, time loses
its significance and becomes a scientific and un-novelistic scale: where intensiveness is accentuated, time loses
external referentiality and tends to the hermeticness and incoherence of the quasi-instantaneous.
The topoi of this chapter may all be seen as attempts to answer the question ‘What is the past, and how can one
come to terms with it?’ In every case, the answer begins with the observation of the link between form and
content, time’s intimate dependence on space, and the consequent necessity for the past to be discovered
progressively. For Verne, the exploration of the past cannot exist independently of a physical medium.
At a first stage, a single object or location enables scientists, detectives, or others to (re)construct a conceptual
chain of events going back into the past, or forwards into the future. In either case, the movement, away from
the present and towards the unknown, satisfies two requirements of the Voyages (and the genre in general). For
the characters, it represents an escape from the world they are familiar with (although at the same time fuelling
their anxiety); and for the reader, it produces a steadily increasing suspense. But principally because of its
conceptuality, this sort of (re-)creation remains of limited scope. It does not totally involve the characters, and
nor does it lead to the direct presentation of dramatic or exotic features of the globe.
The second stage, presenting the Earth as a museum of anthropology and ethnology, does in contrast imply
contact with extraordinary features. ‘L’échelle des êtres’ (B 454) defines a hierarchy of every living being in
terms of both race and species, whose be-all and end-all is the white man, immune to the indignities of
biological change. Quite a long way down are the other human groups, with the ones closest to the animals
being on or below the ‘dernier degré de l’échelle humaine’ (CG 508). In other words, the human part of the
scale is both distributed over space and intrinsically ordered. But it is not clear if the gaps below the white man
are bridgeable — whether by degeneration from above or regeneration from below. Nor is it clear to what
extent the lower beings represent the past of the white man. And finally, there is a hesitation as to the
directionality of the scale: primitives are also on the ‘PREMIER degré de l’échelle humaine’ (VA xvii 188) — the
first one up as well as the last one down. This ambiguity contributes further to the confusion; and so, for all
72
20M 378, CC II i 208; 20M 378; 20M 423–6, IM 277, IH I xii 134; 20M 386, IM 276; EA 240–6, cf. C
220; 5S 124, cf. IM 231.
Such catastrophes were of course the planks on which were built many of the evolutionary theories of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — but this is hardly the reason for Verne’s interest in them.
44
these reasons, the space-time association cannot yet be fully operative.
Man’s doubt about his origin combines with a frustration about his destination. His total supremacy means
that he has no worlds left to conquer, and is therefore in a racial cul-de-sac as well as the geographical one. The
only way he can compensate for the unfair advantage his forefathers gained by being born into earlier eras is to
attempt to conquer remote domains. The only antidote to the monotony of modern existence is to search, in the
last unexplored regions of the universe, for novel creatures from the past, a counterbalancing primordial
superiority, an original noble state. The past is the ultimate challenge for modern man.
45
5
THE SHAPE OF THINGS GONE
BY
Depuis la veille, la création
avait fait un progrès évident
(VCT 169).
Living in the Past
e Pays des fourrures (1873) comes very close to reconciling the twin goals of Le Magasin. In this novel of
travel through the Arctic, the heroes venture onto a promontory in the north of Canada, whose longitude
L and latitude then begin to change! The ‘promontory’ is really an ice-island, built up from ‘gelées
successives’ (PF 313), and as the island moves into warmer currents, the layers melt, starting of course with
the lowest ones.
In terms of Verne’s search, this idea would seem to represent a major breakthrough. By means of the ice, past
time has been materialised and conserved in frozen form, with the year 1868 superimposed on 1867, 1867 on
1866, and so on. But history can then also be re-activated in the present, brought back to life, and at a rate many
times faster than the ‘real’ speed. An efficient ‘accelerator’ has been invented, fifty years before Wells. A
reconciliation between tediously drawn-out scientific time and satisfyingly intense literary time seems possible
after all. The vital differences here are that not only is (vertical) space the ‘container’ of time, but also the
(horizontal) movements in space determine the temperature of the water, the speed of melting, and hence the
rate of release of time. The perfect space-time link at last?
But there is a huge problem. The lowest layers are also the oldest ones, and so the heroes never in practice
discover any layer except the top one. The unfortunate result is that the device lacks all progression and hence
narrative interest. The problem is perhaps to do with the very transparence of the ice — it hides no mystery, the
story it recounts is empty, the heroes are stranded in the derisory thinness of the present. This device is
ultimately a heroic failure.
But all is not lost. As so often in Verne, the later novels, representing retreats from earlier-held positions, may
lead us back towards more clear-cut successes. A structure already exists with the required characteristics of
vertical space-time and total opaqueness. Axel and Lidenbrock’s visions were in inverse chronological order:
‘gothique’, ‘roman’, ‘castors’ (VCT 161; 163; 163). More generally — and this, I would claim, is the key to the
remarkable success of Voyage au centre de la Terre — the geological layers they pass through are past time.
The heroes discover the layers stage by stage and in inverse order. Even the names emphasise the linear
ordering: the quaternary era, the tertiary, the secondary, and then the primary.
The problem of the journey in space and time is thus brilliantly solved. The tangible vestiges of past time may
be discovered in progressive and therefore satisfyingly dramatic fashion.73 This work represents the culmination
of the search of the seventy-nine Voyages extraordinaires — even though it was the second in the series to be
Given the importance of the device, it is worth making the spatio-temporal ‘variables’ explicit. They are:
the past time the geological layers were formed in; the space they occupy (in the present); the time of the fiction
(the personal time of the characters); and the time of the narration. All four scales run ‘parallel’ — at least when
the characters are descending.
It may also be remarked here that my claim is not that the basic idea was original to Verne — the notion that
spatial descent was equivalent to going back through time had already been formulated by, for instance, Lyell
and Humboldt (Jacob, p. 178). But Verne’s execution — and the consequences he draws — may be.
73
46
published.
What distinguishes this device from the discovery of the prehistoric remnants is that the space involved is no
longer two-dimensional. Vertical space is the support, in accordance with the linear obsession of Lidenbrock,
‘l’homme des verticales’ (VCT 196). And what makes it different from Le Pays des fourrures is that this onedimensionality is put to active use, is at the same time the reason and the place for the journey. The discovery
of the past is thus highly structured, is both exhaustive and non-repetitive. Because the characters are immersed
in the very substance of history, the dullness of mere didactic recounting is avoided. Unlike ‘L’Eternel Adam’,
finally, where the conceptual exploration of the past (the excavations) is separated from the presentation of
them (the document), Voyage au centre de la Terre can successfully and coherently integrate such oppositions
as telling and showing, knowledge and discovery, and science and adventure.
But the device goes further. Because the association is complete, without residue, its middle term (vertical
space) tends to disappear, and as the heroes descend, personal time and geological time are often directly
identified in Verne’s language. Days, in other words, are equated with entire eras. If this goes some way to
explaining why the Creation took only six days, its main consequence is that the heroes actually live an
accelerated version of past time. Sometimes the experience is relatively static, as shown by throw-away
remarks like: ‘Nous étions en pleine période de transition, en pleine période silurienne (VCT 165); ‘nous voici
arrivés à cette période [. . .] [des] premières plantes et [des] premiers animaux’ (VCT 166). But in other cases
verbal play is made on the identification between the flows of geological and personal time, particularly when
their directions happen to coincide: ‘Nous sommes ENCORE à l’époque primitive; mais nous montons! [. . .] A
BIENTOT [. . .] l’époque de transition’ (VCT 347). Axel takes such a perfect opportunity to, above all, pose the
conundrum of directionality and improvement in time: while moving upwards and forwards towards ‘un ordre
plus parfait’ (VCT 169), he observes, whimsically and sacrilegiously: ‘Depuis la veille, la création avait fait un
progrès évident’ (VCT 169).
Verne’s treatment of the apparently simple idea of the spatial descent thus contains a subtle and sustained
representation of time and space. In particular, the dissonance is examined between the Christian opinion that
the Creation took only six days and the scientific opinion that it took thousands of years. Verne adds a major
dissonance of his own — that between scientific and personal time — juxtaposes the two — in the same way as
he often opposes pairs of monsters — and hence, with a certain amount of verbal brio, makes them cancel each
other out. Scientific time is evacuated, and Verne presents the heroes as directly experiencing the days of
Biblical Creation — with all the tongue-in-cheek that this implies. Further irony is directed at the hackneyed
expression of ‘days seeming like centuries’. Elsewhere (CG 500), Verne says that metaphors are one of the
most dangerous things on Earth. His attempt here is to render the overworked metaphor slightly less dangerous
by reversing the direction of the comparison and by makking it absolutely literal.
Another idea passed through the Vernian mill is that of progression. The individual days of the Creation
culminated in the perfection of the white man; but on the other hand, this end was presumably inscribed in its
beginning: an omnipotent divinity does not make ‘progress’, at worst It just switches attention from one task to
another. In other words, Verne here seems to be pointing out the absurdity of anthropomorphising the process
of the Creation — and at the same time posing the conundrum of the beginning of time, whether in a
Creationist view or otherwise.
But Verne’s imaginative play on space and time is still far from finished — and indeed the preceding may be
considered just the build-up. Once the heroes arrive at their underground destination, the downwards and
backwards linear tendency is interrupted, for the world discovered is fully three-dimensional. It thus serves to
summarise and synthesise the imaginary graveyards of the other novels: ‘On eût dit un cimetière immense, où
les générations de vingt siècles confondaient leur éternelle poussière. De hautes extumescences de débris
s’ETAGEAIENT au loin. Elles ondulaient jusqu’aux limites de l’horizon et s’y perdaient dans une brume
fondante. Là [. . .] s’accumulait TOUTE L’HISTOIRE DE LA VIE ANIMALE’ (VCT 303).
In these few brilliant lines are expressed some of the most distinctive features of Verne’s vision of the world.
‘S’étager’, in particular, would seem to be an original use of scientific vocabulary in a novel: not only is it a
47
reaction to the diffuse Romantic sépulchres of the preceding tradition; but, by its dimensional quality, it also
contributes to the fundamental metaphor of the Voyage au centre de la Terre. Time is layered, made up of
discrete objects, in an echo of the geological strata; but it is also then covered with what is simultaneously a
traditional representation of time and that ultimate symbol of the continuity and breakdown of matter, namely
dust. Time is ‘twenty centuries’ deep, but the generations come together in an ‘eternal’ synthesis. Time’s
vertical components go off to the horizon but also disappear there (the mist being the fluid equivalent of the
dust). The attempt of the Realist hero to achieve a total vision is thereby firmly put into place, put into
perspective: the physical relation between objects is perceived from the subjective point of view of — through
the distorting prism of — the visionary individual. Scientific space-time and its opposite, personal time-space,
are superimposed — with all the paradoxes this equation implies. A whole new vision of the sensible universe
has been proposed. Axel perhaps does for the physical world what Fabrice did for war.
But there is also room (or time) in this world for vegetable life, and the preparatory chapters begin to pay off
even further, for verbal brilliance leads to yet more verbal brilliance:
[. . .] de grands palmiers, d’espèces aujourd’hui disparues [. . .]. Tout se confondait dans une teinte uniforme,
brunâtre et comme passée. Les feuilles étaient dépourvues de leur verdeur, et les fleurs elle-mêmes, si
nombreuses à cette époque [. . .] qui les vit naître, alors sans couleurs et sans parfum, semblaient faites d’un
paper décoloré sous l’action de l’atmosphère (VCT 316).
‘Feuilles’ ‘brunâtre[s]’, ‘papier décoloré’: Verne’s world is a textual world, but one where the logos has
undergone the physical ravages of time. The trees are similarly ‘rongés par le temps’ (VCT 317), and the
general effect is ‘as if faded’ (VCT 316) — or, to make the pun explicit, ‘as if past’. Indeed, the world is not of
‘aujourd’hui’, but dates from a distant and imprecise ‘alors’, is both diluvian and antediluvian (VCT 317; 320).
It contains fossil fish; and the characters themselves are also described as antediluvian or fossilised (VCT 257;
284; 202). This world is dead and gone; but at the same time, since the heroes are actively witnessing its
existence, it is vividly present: it undulates, and even contains flowers. It is, in Verne’s word, ‘reborn’ (VCT
318).
Great play is being made specifically on the interaction between present and past. Because all this is
happening now, things are living; but because scientifically it is in the past, the things in it — like those in
Lidenbrock’s dusty ‘museum’ — are old and visibly worn out. If one dimension of space was enough to
represent the time of the descent, here there are two dimensions, capable therefore of accumulating huge
amounts of different sorts of time, juxtaposing great stretches of history and prehistory. Past time is there to see.
But Verne’s demonstration is still not finished. The Underworld is even more vividly present than it seemed,
for animal life is represented in it. The fossil fish are in fact fully alive, and Axel and Lidenbrock also encounter
living sea-monsters; and they even discover a (dead) human body, one that is ‘incontestablement caucasique, [.
. .] [de] race blanche, japétique’ (VCT 312). Were it that of an authentic inhabitant, reasons Lidenbrock, then
humanity could no longer be considered a latecomer to the scene of the world, and evolutionary theory would
have to be completely revised (as it is initially in ‘Le Humbug’ (1910), where a giant fossil man is discovered).
But after playing with the possibility for a while, Lidenbrock reluctantly admits that the quaternary era man is
out of his time — may even have arrived as a scientist or a tourist (VCT 313)! Built into the sense of wonder is
already an ironic awareness of the massification of travel.
The Professor’s honesty is rewarded, for he and Axel do subsequently observe authentic terrestrial specimens
of the era: first a herd of mastodons, and then a Giant Shepherd to go with them, one who is menacingly alive,
with a mane like a lion’s and a head like a buffalo’s (VCT 320). The scope of Verne’s invention shows him not
to be just a realist.
The Shepherd’s world is past and present: it exploits the dead-living, space-time and old-new paradoxes to
the maximum. Because the inhabitant, this time, is completely at home in his environment, scientific theory is
resoundingly upset; but also and more importantly, the space-time quest is brought to a climax. The ultimate
48
proof that Axel and Lideenbrock have finally got somewhere is that they have discovered something which is
unexpected. The Shepherd’s world is both the culmination and the denial of the association between past
geological time, modern spatial order, the time of narration, and the time lived by the characters.
As such it shares characteristics with other climactic locations in the Voyages extraordinaires which, even if
they are not prepared in exactly the same way, similarly transgress the limits of realistic time and space.
Virtually every novel before 1875 in fact presents scenes where some sort of transcendent element is present.74
But most notable are those of the underwater ruins of Atlantis in Vingt mille lieues and the Arcadia at the North
Pole in Capitaine Hatteras, for both involve a time and space beyond the well-ordered traces left in the modern
world by the march of history. The plurals of the recurrent phrases ‘[les] temps antéhistoriques’, ‘[les] temps
fabuleux’, ‘[les] premiers jours du monde’75 are one revealing sign of this undermining of traditional temporal
succession. Another indication is that, modern creatures being only ‘des réductions affaiblies de leurs pères des
premiers âges’, primordial beings are invariably ‘vastes’, ‘collossa(ux)’, ‘construits sur des gabarits
gigantesques’ (VCT 267; 20M 15; VCT 268; 20M 15, cf. 5). Perhaps surprisingly, their general ‘superiority’
(20M 465) or ‘perfection’ (VCT 259) of the earliest beings also includes man. The Giant Shepherd is in fact
over twelve feet tall; Lucerne Man is nineteen feet; the posthumous fossil man is over forty metres; and the
Atlanteans were not only gigantic, but lived for well over a hundred years (VCT 319); 310; H 176; 20M 423).
Even contacts between man and the animals were better at this ‘time’: despite his fearsome appearance, the
Shepherd peacefully herds the mastodons; and ‘the relations of the first man with the first animals’, still
preserved at the North Pole, are/were positively idyllic: ‘Ces jolis animaux [. . .] couraient, bondissaient et
voltigeaient sans défiance [. . .]; ils s’offraient d’eux-même [aux] caresses [etc.]’ (CH 498; 498). The oldest
regions of the globe retain elements of a paradise where men and animals are, in Verne’s recurrent paradox, still
in their first youth.
Once again, an explanation for these scenes could be found in the Biblical assertion that species were created
once and for all, with only minor variations especially deteriorations thereafter. But other explanations would
seem to be possible: the psychological one in terms of the huge prestige of the father figure,76 transmitted more
and more to each successive ancestor; but above all, the deep streak of pessimism permeating even the earliest
works.77 These attractive regions only exist in extremely remote — and in any case past — places, and thus
serve to underline the humdrumness of nineteenth-century France. The world has gone downhill from the
beginning. But because Verne’s characters attain such stature from their modest starting point, their quest is
thereby all the more heroic.
Verne’s most exciting novels would seem to be defined less by their precise historical resonances than by
their escape from the contemporary social settings.
A Strange Dream
In spite of the contrast between scientific time and the youthful time of the beginning of the world, the two do
reach on one occasion a synthesis, or rather an apotheosis, in the form of a time going back to the very origin of
74
In this respect, Les Indes noires (1877) is a borderline case. Thus the setting is underground, and it is
constantly hinted that deep mysteries are going to be unearthed. But in practice, transcendence remains merely
potential or latent — ‘[comme] ces êtres antédiluviens qu’un coup de pic délivre de leur gangue de pierre’ (IN
153) but which never actually come to life. The experience remains obstinately on a purely physical level, the
observer is never transported into the past.
75
20M 419; 423; 382, IN 21, 20M 176, 386, CH 558, VCT 183.
76
Despite the ‘failure’, in Verne’s life, of his own father — see Marcel Moré, Le Très curieux Jules Verne
(1960), ch. 1, ‘Les Deux pères’.
77
See, for instance, Vierne, pp. 632–43.
49
the universe. The mise en scène is prepared by a short but seminal passage in Capitaine Hatteras:
Hatteras se prit à rêver. Sa pensée rapide erra sur toute son existence; il remonta le cours de sa vie avec cette
vitesse particulière aux songes, qu’aucun savant n’a encore pu calculer; il fit un retour sur ses jours écoulés; il
revit son hivernage [. . .]. Alors il retourna plus loin dans le passé; il rêva de son navire [. . .]. Son imagination
[. . .] plana plus haut encore [. . .]; puis, sa pensée reprit un nouveau cours [. . .]; il se vit [. . .] déployant le
pavillon du Royaume-Uni [au Pôle Nord] (CH 562–3). Beneath the standard language of the late-Romantic
dream is, I would claim, an opposition that is particularly instructive. The dream’s basic structure depends on
the space-time association (‘remonta le cours’, ‘retourna plus loin dans le passé’), but above all contains two
opposed modes of considering time. The first, characterised as ‘pensée’, is linked to the past, reproduces real
events and is exhaustive (‘TOUTE son existence’). The second, a time of ‘rêve’, ‘songes’ and ‘imagination’, is
incalculable, is linked with merely potential events in the future, and appears under the sign of selectivity and
liberty (‘erra’, ‘plana plushaut’).
50
Both modes are nevertheless limited to the time and space that Hatteras can easily imagine. In contrast, the
definitive visionary experience, that of Voyage au centre de la Terre, uses the same opposition to trace the
entire prehistory of the globe.
Axel is day-dreaming — significantly on a fathomless sea — and, after his vision of the collection of the
‘grands mammifères des premiers jours’, starts to relive past time: he moves back through the ‘époques
bibliques de la création, bien avant la naissance de l’homme’, sees first the mammals disappear and then the
birds, reptiles, fish, crustaceans, molluscs, articulates and zoophytes (VCT 259–61). Axel is now totally alone:
‘Toute la vie de la terre se résume en moi’ (VCT 261). He undergoes another acceleration:
Les siècles s’écoulent comme des jours! Je remonte la série des transformations terrestres. Les plantes
disparaissent; les roches granitiques perdent leur pureté; l’état liquide va remplacer l’état solide sous l’action
d’une chaleur plus intense; les eaux courent à la surface du globe; elles bouillonnent, elles se volatilisent; les
51
vapeurs enveloppent la terre, qui peu à peu ne forme plus qu’une masse gazeuse, portée au rouge blanc, grosse
comme le soleil et brillante comme lui! § Au centre de cette nébuleuse, quatorze cent mille fois plus
considérable que ce globe qu’elle va former un jour, je suis entraîné dans les espaces planétaires! Mon corps se
subtilise, se sublime à son tour et se mélange comme un atome impondérable à ces immenses vapeurs qui
tracent dans l’infini leur orbite enflammée! (VCT 262)
Verne’s time-traveller probably goes faster and farther than any of his predecessors — and perhaps successors
— in the history of literature.78 Part of his art is the verve of the narration, his involvement in the backwards
movement through the very substance of time. The motion is inscribed in the language itself, with ‘la série des
transformations terrestres’ not only transplanted from a scientific context to a literary one, but also considered
in the opposite order from the normal one. The same holds true of the phrases ‘plus intense’, ‘L’état liquide VA
remplacer l’état solide’, ‘la terre [. . .] NE forme PLUS qu’une masse gazeuse’, ‘courent’ and above all
‘s’écoulent’. The progressively more vivid, linear and irreversible temporal imagery of ‘courir’, ‘couler’,
‘écoulé’ and ‘s’écouler’ were of course commonplace in nineteenth-century literature; but only Verne applies
the most expressive terms to past time and the flow of a physical substance representing past time. This
movement does not consist of a finite series of instantaneous images, as might have been expected from a precinematographic era, but is continuous, resembling a film run backwards. Each of the stages of the Earth’s
history has apparently been analysed, reversed and then put together again. Verne succeeds the remarkable
innovation — absent in Wells, and rare even in modern fiction — of showing time as flowing backwards.
This vision starts from a pedagogical premise — hence the anomalous ‘forward’ temporality of ‘[. . .] ce
globe qu’elle VA former UN JOUR’; it improves on Hatteras’s space-time association (‘Je REMONTE la SERIE’),
perfecting the identification between scientific and personal time-scales; but it above all culminates as a
mystical liberation from the constraints of conventional time, a blurring of the distinction between the self and
the world, a floating in a time-before-all-time. Like the geological exploration it completes, this vision
reconciles linear time and circular space. Axel not only retraces the entirety of history, but is also absorbed into
the transcendent, amniotic origin.
Principally in Voyage au centre de la Terre, then, but also elsewhere, Verne takes a number of contemporary
lieux communs, totally transforms them in the light of his own personal vision, and produces what he himself
accurately calls ‘rêveries scientifico-fantaisistes’ (VA v 62). ‘Faire du nouveau avec l’ancien’ was one of the
mottoes of Le Magasin; and a number of commentators have similarly commented on Verne’s bricolage in
other areas.79 Verne’s peculiarly anxious, sceptical attitude makes him mistrustful of pure introspection, and
insists that realism and the physical world must remain the basis for intersubjective communication. But at the
same time, a particularly sensorial force, a great tension between the individual and the universe pushes him
towards the hyper-romantic, the ‘recherche de l’absolu’. The result is the physical explicitation of a
simultaneously inferiority/superiority complex, the annihilation of the romantic-realist opposition, the
magnification of the atom and the reduction of the cosmos, the poetry of space. The Vernian quest is a quest for
all or nothing.
The Space-Time Paradox, or How to Travel in Time
The conclusions of the present chapter follow directly on from those of the last, for they take the observation of
In H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), the spatial and temporal limits of the globe are not crossed
(Pan (1978), pp. 24–5, 90, 93, 95). A full comparison between the time-travel in these two works would be a
revealing study. Here we can merely note that, whereas the heart of Wells’s demonstration is an avoidance of
the issues of space and time, Verne’s method is a systematic working out of the underlying philosophical
concepts.
79
E.g. Picot, ‘Véhicules, nature, artifices’, in Jules Verne 3, pp. 103–26.
78
52
time’s intimate dependence on the past further than the first two stages.
The problem then was that science shows man to be a modern phenomenon, who cannot therefore be
discovered in the distant past. Verne’s constant desire for verisimilitude means that elaborate preparation is
necessary before any potentially implausible scenes can be presented. First — and this is the third attempt at a
total space-time association — modern man must construct a mise en scène by means of continuous processes
in space and time. He must indulge first in the pursuit of detached scientific analysis, the retracing of ordered
history, the carrying out of conventional exploration.
But mere finiteness and persistence cannot on their own afford access to an elsewhere and ‘elsewhen’: titanic
men and animals can only be reached if modern man accepts the risks of participation and relinquishes the role
of mere observer. The fourth and ultimate stage can only be achieved if the present impinges on the past. Only
then can the authentic origin emerge, ageless monsters be called up from the deep, primeval innocence be
encountered, and undiluted cosmic existence be experienced. The genuine living past is impossibly ‘distant’
from modern eras, is ‘below’, ‘before’ or ‘beyond’ any real time. It does not contain order, progression or cause
and effect; it is probably even unchanged by man’s participation — the participation which transforms man
himself. It is both the ultimate bourne of past time and oneirically timeless.
Verne’s demonstration is so convincing that it all but hides the basic données, namely that man can only
participate in the past by means of time-travel, and that time-travel is generally considered to be a logical and
physical impossibility.80 Let us therefore search the mise en scène again to see how the trick is carried out.
In the third stage, the equivalence between the dimensions of space and the traces left by past time was still
strictly limited. The witnessing of frozen or petrified vestiges, normally isolated, but on occasion forming
complete panoramas, does give an inkling of further possibilities. Some of the instances in fact contain
improbable sequences of remnants from distinct eras, and the hero sometimes carelessly destroys or removes
pieces of the past. But no physical law is broken, for an odour of death permeates each of these scenes. Time is
only imperfectly spatialised, and its corridors are not yet fixed enough for an active participation by modern
man.
In Voyage au centre de la Terre, on the other hand, only one dimension of space is involved. The narration
can therefore associate it with both the historical-scientific and personal time-scales, without residue in either
case. Because two temporal scales are associated to the spatial one, they can be associated to each other. It is
this short-circuited identification between the historical and personal time-scales that is the precise cause of
realistic space-time being by-passed and hence initiates the paradox of time-travel.
Three additional illustrations may provide an extra perspective on the problem. At one stage in Hector
Servadac the eccentric scientist Palmyrin Rosette gives a striking gloss on space and time: ‘Supposons un être
doué d’une puissance de vision infinie, et mettons-le (dans l’espace) [. . .] à une distance que la lumière emploie
dix-huit cents ans à franchir, il assistera à cette grande scène de la mort du Christ [. . .], (aux) désolations du
déluge universel. Plus loin enfin [. . .], il verrait, suivant la tradition biblique, Dieu créant les mondes’ (HS
423).81 The monn-bound Ardan, in one of his zanier moments, goes even faster and farther than Rosette: he
claims that people will soon be travelling to the planets as rapidly as they wish and concludes that, as a result:
‘La distance est un vain mot, la distance n’existe pas!’ (TL 239). In the particular case of the lost white man,
lastly, accepting appearances, as Lidenbrock was at first inclined to do, would mean considering the body as
that of an authentic native. In other words, one would have to identify together the quaternary era its physiology
implies and the primary era it is discovered in, to equate, in other words, its personal and historical
characteristics. The ordering of time implicit in modern science would thus no longer be operative.
80
E.g. J.R. Lucas, A Treatise on Time and Space (1973), p. 50.
Borrowed directly from Camille Flammarion, ‘Lumen’, in Récits d’infini (1892) (Arthur Evans, ‘Jules
Verne and the Scientific Novel: A Study of Didacticism and Fiction’ (Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University:
1985), p. 400).
81
53
The ideas of Rosette, Ardan and Lidenbrock are certainly laconic and eccentric, but they brilliantly
summarise the argument behind the transcendent scenes, and especially the spatio-temporal underpinning of the
route leading to the Underworld. In all these cases, the space-time association is taken to its most literal limit.
Because historical time is identified with a spatial dimension, it loses its dynamic characteristics, is
‘detemporalised’, becomes a fixed scale. Because it is fixed — in the form of Rosette’s ‘light-year-rays’ or the
space-time geological strata — man can travel through or along it. The (spatio-temporal) ‘distance’ separating
Rosette from Christ and from God, Ardan from the planets, or Lidenbrock and the white man from the Giant
Shepherd can be mapped onto — conjugated with, substituted for — personal time. It is this asymmetric
equating of distance and time that is necessary for unconstrained travel, both ‘up’ and ‘down’ the time-scale —
and it is this that goes beyond what is normally thought possible.
Once one has travelled to a given era, however, a ‘retemporalisation’ is needed to begin to live in it. Before
normal-speed history and biography can resume a joint course, a ‘despatialisation’ is required, followed by a
shaking of the temporal clock to set it going again. In the case of backwards travel, the same segment of time
thus plays two contradictory and successive roles: a medium to travel back through; and thus a durée to be lived
forwards in. This duality is the weakest link in the logical chain, and this is why Axel, Hatteras and Aronnax
are all ecstatic or unconscious on first arrival at their destinations. It is this ultima thule of the backwards
motion, the unique point at which a U-turn and a thousand-fold slowing down are executed, that constitutes the
highest degree of initiation, the ‘point suprême’. This is where Rosette can imagine the Creation, Ardan
visualise life on the planets, and Lidenbrock take part in the living past. Only for Axel’s cosmic dream does the
handbrake-turn-cum-retemporalisation not take place, because he is already dreaming, because he never leaves
the fixed space-time scale, because the beginnings of time-space are themselves timeless. In his ultimate
voyage, he succeeds in escaping the constraints of time and space altogether.
An incidental effect of the downward and backward exploration is to ironically show up the nineteenthcentury view of progress on and up towards some undefined goal — that is, progress as associated with the
vertical dimension of space. Verne stands this idea on its head.
Such situations are, then, physically impossible: if the inconsistent status of the historical time-scale is the
logical explanation why, Lidenbrock’s temptation also implies a potential paradox that concretely shows up the
contradiction. In Lidenbrock’s mind, since quaternary man is a racial ancestor of modern Europeans, his
existence at the appropriate time and place on the surface is necessary for them to have been born. (A similar
argument may possibly apply to the Giant Shepherd.) But the discovery of man in the Underworld would
destroy this possibility of his having had descendants on the surface at the appropriate moment — it would
create a time-loop (to use a term much employed in modern science-fiction). And consequently, the scientist
who claimed that quaternary man was an authentic inhabitant of the primordial world would create a
contradiction, and thereby, if words really were acts, himself cease to exist through lack of recent ancestors. . . .
Thus although Verne does not at this stage make explicit the problems of causal loops across time, he does set
up the precise conditions of the paradox.
At the same time, he takes every possible precaution to fit in, wherever he possibly can, with nineteenthcentury science. Thus the problem of encountering man in the distant past, in particular, is acknowledged, and
incorporated into the presentation, in at least four different ways. The space-time confusion just analysed is
fundamental (the mise en scène is still in the nineteenth century, and therefore humans can be discovered). The
dead body is not in its own time-zone, and consequently no permanent damage is done to scientific theory.
Doubt is in fact subsequently thrown onto the very existence of the Giant Shepherd. And the final union
between man and the cosmos is rendered more acceptable because Axel travels alone — and it is a one-off,
without precedent or successor.
Despite all these precautions, Verne’s works do transgress the scientific norms. In particular, they start by
establishing what might logically be thought the basic requirement of time-travel, but which has virtually
always been neglected in science-fiction, namely a time to travel in. Only after replacing the traditional
conceptions of space-time, by inventing the successive stages of an operative and integrated — and therefore
54
un-Wellsian — time-machine, do they push against the limit of verisimilitude. On occasion, they cross it,
allowing the travellers to arrive, to go beyond mere voyeurism, to participate in the past, and to be changed by
it.
The past is thus treated as another ailleurs, time resembles space, and man travels in them conjointly. Verne’s
works demonstrate an awareness of the paradox of time-travel, the impossibility of changing the past, of
ignoring the one-directional laws of causality. But they manage nevertheless to subvert these constraints in
subterranean manner, replacing ‘verism’ by verisimilitude. They replace the division proposed by Newtonian
physics between perfectly definable space and perfectly definable time with an awareness that time and space
simply cannot be perceived or measured independently. The essential distinction is between the spatiotemporally near and the remote, the here-and-now and the there-and-then, the observer and the rest of the
universe. Egocentrism is an essential part of understanding even the apparently most objective features of the
world. In this way, Verne also proposes one of the surprising planks of the General and the Special Theories of
Relativity: that observations of the physical universe are linked in profound ways with the position of the
observer. In particular, time and space behave very similarly, with pay-offs possible between them, meaning
that ‘distance’ must be defined in simultaneously spatial and temporal terms, that it is not a straight-line concept
but only definable in terms of concentric spheres. Of course Verne did not produce a scientific theory; but his
sensitivity to the essential problems, I would claim, allowed him to define the conditions for one.
Faced with the apparently infinite and immutable horizon of space-time, the Vernian hero compensates for his
own infinitesimal dimensions by participating in accelerated versions of other eras. The mapping between space
and time leads to a subversion of the traditional categories, a ‘subtilisation’ of scientific terminology and a
sublimation of the hero. It enables the virtually non-personifiable to be personalised, the tragically finite to be
integrated with the superbly infinite, and the self to encompass the cosmos. Transcendence is occasionally
possible after all.
55
6
STARTING AND
STOPPING
Lorsque quelque ami voulait [. . .]
arrêter [Ardan] en lui prédisant une catastrophe prochaine: ‘La
forêt n’est brûlée que par ses propres arbres’, répondait-il (TL
127).
Straight and Round
t was seen in Chapters 1 to 4 that time for Verne is often conceived of in a simplified and spatialised form.
The physical forms involved are frequently independent of the characters following them, and leave little
I room for randomness, subjectivity or ineffability. Time is pared down and abstract, virtually devoid of
entropy or significance: safe from surprises, but robbed of most of its essential defining qualities. It is a
clean machine.
Certainly Verne’s works are not unique in this respect — but because they have a strong degree of
structuring, they do avoid the pure picaresque of much of the ‘adventure’ genre with its tendency to aimlessness
and lack of form. The unity of the Voyages, we have constantly seen, stems from their being novels of
exploration and about exploration, with the opposition connu-inconnu constituting at least a minimal structure
for the whole of space and time.
Many of the topoi observed may in fact serve to spin out the reassuringly simplified form. The sinuous line,
the path where success leads only to greater difficulties, or the calling into doubt of predecessors’ achievements
can all be considered strategies of suspense.82 They all allay the dread of a final cul-de-sac or fiasco on arriving
in port. But what they cannot do is totally mask the extravagance of the linear form. Because it ‘uses up’ space
so quickly, it will have to cede all the sooner to some fundamentally different structure.
The clearest example is the straight line on the surface of the globe, for it necessarily ends up by coming back
to the exact point it started from. This is a key element in the plot of Le Tour du monde, but also of Les Enfants
du capitaine Grant: Voyage autour du monde, Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, Robur-le-conquérant, and many
others.83 As so often in Verne, the new leads back to the old, the global runs counter to the local, and the
explicit effect conceals an implicit one. But the flashbacks, anticipations, notes, and illustrations also come to a
stop, the retrospective deductions invariably cease, and the scientific-historical explorers, however far they go,
always end up by coming back to modern existence. In sum, although the spatial structures examined up to this
point are all more or less based on the linear form, an element of ‘circularity’ is seldom absent.
Examination of the Voyages shows that in fact the purely physical structures form merely the tip of a much
bigger iceberg of systems defined, in one way or another, by some degree of closure. Often the circular image
is the vital one; often it is simply some element of concavity that serves to define the system; but in other cases,
Such strategies are of course universal in writing, from the schoolboy’s ‘padding’ to Stendhal’s slow and
deliberate build-up to the climax. But in Verne’s works they take on great importance because of their explicit
modelling of the collective theme — the exhaustive covering of space.
83
For a further analysis of this element, see Daniel Compère, Approche de l’île chez Jules Verne (1977), p.
12, and Jules Verne 1, passim.
82
56
the closure operates on a dynamic principle. Verne explores systems that are closed, static, and timeless; that, in
them, space and time do not continue indefinitely, cause and effect interact, ‘output’ affects ‘input’, and some
sort of internal ‘feedback’ is involved.
It might seem that this concern with systems and processes were unliterary and arid. But one of the makor
advance caused by ‘structuralism’ is the realisation that ‘structure’ is a vital component of all human concerns,
including the psychological and the social. Three seminal studies, in particular, have already shown this general
connection, and will therefore form an excellent underpinning to the analysis of the next two chapters: Douglas
R. Hofstadter’s analysis of logical and living systems in terms of self-awareness and ‘self-consciousness’;
François Raymond’s demonstration of the frequent occurrence of ‘auto-regulating’ systems in the Voyages; and
Roland Barthes’s description of Verne’s ships as characterised by ‘l’enfermement [. . .], la clôture [. . .], le
bonheur commun du fini [. . .], la plénitude [. . .] encyclopédique [. . .], (dans) un espace connu et clos’.84
Return to Sender
The appendages of Verne’s living entities possess a remarkable tendency to ‘introversion’. Mangrove trees
grow branches which take root as soon as they touch the ground; characters cross their legs or arms or thrust
their hands into their pockets with a surprising frequency; and one of them puts his hand so far into ‘le pavillon
de son cor’ that it will not come out again.85 ‘Cor’ or, three lines later, ‘corps’? The word-association is not
gratuitous, for a letter written by Verne to his father reads:
[. . .] Un Anglais vint un jour [. . .] commander un emblème de la taciturnité la plus absolue; le grand statuaire,
après avoir longtemps songé aux moyens d’exprimer le silence le plus complet, imagina un homme qui aurait
UN DOIGT DANS LA BOUCHE ET UN AUTRE DANS LE DERRIERE; [. . .] c’était [. . .] assez commode pour son modèle,
parce que, quand il aurait été fatigué d’avoir un doigt dans la bouche, il aurait pu changer de main. 86
Much of the humour derives of course from the deadpan disparity between the artistic aims and the down-toearth, scatologically-tinged methods; but it also comes, I would claim, from the eccentric and introverted idea
of the closing off of a part of space.
Introjection is in fact an obsessionally recurrent feature throughout the Voyages extraordinaires. It is visible
in such characteristic closed objects as the ships, the vehicles, the caves, and the islands. It can be observed in
the constant dream of the characters to be ensconsed in sea-shells, with its accompanying vocabulary of
security, independence, and — paradoxically — liberty.87 It is also evident in such varied ‘introverted’ forms as
lighting-coils, propellers, staircases, the jeu de l’oie, watch-springs, or even cog-teeth ‘à surface
épicycloïique’.88 But it is especially visible in moving natural objects, since, in Jules Verne at least, the sun
tends to spiral inwards, and whirlpools and whirlwinds always possess an intrinsic and alluring centripetality,
with their ‘trou circulaire’, ‘gouffre [. . .] engloutiss[ant]’, ‘suçoirs liquides’, their ‘puissance d’attraction’,
‘aspiration puissante’, ‘succion irrésistible’.89
Go
~del, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: 1979); ‘Jules Verne ou le mouvement
perpétuel’, p. 48; ‘Nautilus et Bateau ivre’, in Mythologies (1957), pp. 80–2.
85
DM iii 440; VCT 88, etc.; Marcel Moré (Le Très curieux Jules Verne, p. 106) lists the crossed arms of ‘the
traitor’ (J), Robur (MM), Killer (MB), and Nemo (20M), but there are many more; TL 11, etc.; DO 59.
86
Letter to his father, 15 nov. 1852, Guillon collection, quoted by Jules-Verne, p. 34.
87
E.g. 20M 249, 296, 337, 388, 439, 296, 387, 177, 24, CH 27.
88
129, MB 329, VCT 198, MZ 169, MS 22; TE I vi 64–5; MZ 123; 139.
89
HG 261, 20M 501, SG 218; HG 241, CH 244, 567; 20M 611–2, MS 127; CH 572; 572; MS 127; 20M 611;
CH 572; 572; cf. RC 243. Clearly, a sexual interpretation is possible here.
84
57
The recurrent ideas, in sum, are autonomy, introversion, and (en)closure. But these are not limited to
particular objects, for in Verne’s works they very frequently exist as an entity which functions as a closed unit
but without a fixed form. What will here be called the cycle seems to have as principal function to isolate a
given system from the rest of the world. Biology is often a pretext, but we may again suspect that Verne’s aims
are usually elsewhere.
The conventional cycle of sea-water/water-vapour/rain/river-water/sea-water, as a first example, is
remarkably self-contained, self-sufficient, and self-regulating (the double antecedents indicating a similar
overloading): ‘Il se nourrit lui-même avec les vapeurs qu’il émet, dont il alimente les sources, qui lui reviennent
par les fleuves, ou qu’il reprend directement par les pluies sorties de son sein’ (RV 129; cf. 20M 334, CH 341–
2, IN 178–9). Again, icebergs are presented as starting their existence in a quasi-timeless perfect equilibrium
near the North Pole, but the open sea slowly undermines them and they turn upside down; this stable
equilibrium is once more gradually eroded and destroyed; and so on, until the icebergs disappear completely
(HG 244; cf. CH 63).
Similar cycles abound in Vernian man’s manipulation of nature, with in each case a comparable twist of
introjection. For instance, the feathers shed by the female eider-bird to prepare its nest are gathered by a
‘hunter’ each year; the male eider-bird then sheds its feathers but the hunter leaves them; ‘le nid s’achève donc;
la femelle pond ses œufs [. . .] et, l’année suivante, la récolte de l’édredon recommence’ (VCT 92). Again, for
their vertical movements, many of Verne’s vessels imitate animals, especially seals, which swallow stones to
sink, and then regurgitate them to come back up: the Nautilus, for instance, uses taps and reservoirs; the
Boynton wet-suit-cum-autonomous-vessel (a typical Vernian bricolage), its level of inflation; and the various
balloons use hydrogen and ballast with great virtuosity.90 Indeed, the second half of Cinq semaines en ballon is
determined by the complex system of cycles and sub-cycles comprised of ‘real’ ballast, structural parts
jettisoned from the balloon, gold and other material picked up and abandoned again, or parts or wholes of the
passengers themselves. Verne was clearly a structuralist before the letter.
Not all the cycles last for ever; sometimes, indeed, there is built-in obsolescence. In one significantly
eccentric case, the deliberate sinking of a ship provides the first stage of a harbour, which will then prevent
other ships from sinking (MP ii 234); in another, fifty-three years later, the only way to stop boats being
wrecked is to make smoke signals — using wood taken from boats that have already been wrecked (PBM 132).
In yet other cases, the entity in question uses feedback to counteract environmental changes. Thus, ‘[un missile]
vole pour ainsi dire de ses propres ailes à travers l’espace’ ‘[et] entretient lui-même sa vitesse et l’accélère
jusqu’à l’arrivée au but’ (FD 180; 179); and posthumous flying-machines possess an ingenious system of quasiorganic ‘reflexes’ which enables them to overcome all fluctuations and to remain stable in three dimensions
(MB II vii 340–1).
What is common to all such cycles is that they link cause and effect together much more than is normal in
Nature. But also, because there is in each case an alternation cause-effect-cause-effect, each cycle is made up of
four poles. Figure 5 is an attempt to present this idea in geometric form.
The interest of the cycles undoubtedly comes from their tension between reductionism and vitalism. In each
case, a carefully-selected physical reality is described in regular, rhythmic terms that perhaps mimic the process
itself; in each case, a hyper-economical, ‘ecological’ solution is sought; and in each case therefore, the effect is
that of a comically independent system, where a simple mechanical-biological perfection explains everything
(or nothing) — but in any case ironically shows up more elaborate systems.
But not all the cycles in Verne’s works are defined in terms of the full double symmetry, for in some the four
poles collapse to two. One of the duels, for example, consists of two men mutually hunting each other,
becoming ‘à la fois chasseurs et gibier’ (TC 271). Again, wintering ships contain two closed cycles in parallel
— the inhalation and exhalation of the air, and the evaporation/condensation of the water (CH 228–9).
90
CG 703; 20M 130; 81; TCC 261–5; 5S passim, IM 1–11, DA 178.
58
Similarly bipolar is the eternal and universal cycle that consists of the equivalence of matter and energy (CM
(1908) 127).
A still compacter system where the two poles act so much against each other as to virtually collapse into one
may be observed in a hyper-stable Flemish town where the entire industrial production — barley-sugar and
whipped cream — is consumed locally; where even fire and flood never accumulate enough momentum to
become dangerous; and where the typical inhabitant is so inert, so ‘décid(é) [. . .] à ne rien décider’, that his
clothes, person, and even his marriage hardly ever wear out. Other remarkable uni-polar systems include: one
where water is heated by the apparently naive method of burning water; a corresponding, posthumous, ‘pile
électrique capable de se régénérer d’elle-même par des réactions successives’; a system where insulation
proportional to the cold is provided by Nature, in the form of extra ice and snow; one where damage done by
sea-water to the Transatlantic Cable merely serves to strengthen the whole; and — on a larger scale — the cycle
of life on Earth: ‘la vie disparaîtra [. . .] du globe [. . .]. Peut-être, alors, notre sphéroïde se reposera-t-il, se
refera-t-il dans la mort pour ressusciter un jour dans des conditions supérieures!’.91
All the cycles seem to depend largely on reciprocal reaction, rather than on mere action; they are all more or
less closed; and therefore the possibilities for real change are severely limited. An apparently huge benefit is
obtained from the introversion of the system for, given that output is conditioned by input or even fully
determined by it, no mismatch can ever result. At best, the cycles may result in perpetual motion. At worst,
cause and effect get tangled up and, even if the lack of external influence means that the frameworks will last
‘probably for ever’ (20M 585), all internal activity tends to damp down.
Verne may here be operating a reductio ad absurdum on certain nineteenth-century idées reçues like the
searches for a human mid-term between the artificial and the natural and for a perpetual-motion machine. But in
any case, the result is structures which surprise because of their extreme economy of means, and because the
reader suspects there is a flaw somewhere, but is given too little information to find it. Verne’s imagination is
defined by its re-invention of the current scientific theories and by its humorous exaggeration.
As for the real usefulness of such systems, the author is ambivalent. On one hand, they are presented as the
most economical and efficient ones possible; but on the other, they produce conservatism and complacency and
are in the end the enemy of passionate, human concerns. Verne is both attracted to and repulsed by the idea of
ultimate order in the universe.
How to Get Things Going
The cycle with no input of energy is thus presented as being totally stable in the long run. But in many cases,
there is a hidden leakage of energy which, after a deceptive ‘calme plat’ (TCC 248), will end up converting the
cycle into an open system of positive feedback. The equilibrium lasts longest when equal and opposing forces
are involved: those engaged by the duellists, for example, but also those of rivals like Fogg and Proctor,
Hatteras and Altamont, the Three Russians and the Three Englishmen (A3) or bâbordais and tribordais (IH).
Verne delights in delivering a come-uppance to excessively obstinate or arrogant individuals, by the satisfying
means of confronting them with other versions of themselves. Sustained rivalry between machines is also a
dramatic feature in many novels: the Albatros and the Go a head [sic] (RC), Arraje’s submarine and the Royal
Navy one (FD); but also between machines and natural forces: Fogg’s train and the bison, Nemo’s submarine
and the whales, Robur’s flying-machine and the birds or Maucler’s steam-elephant and the real elephants.
The more endogamous the conflict, in fact, the more equally balanced; and accordingly it is when a single
force is turned back on its own origin that the situation becomes the most stable in the short term — but the
most unstable in the long run. This applies to communities, for the self-denying order of Verne’s Utopian and
dystopian cities — centralised, compartmentalised, and specialised — conceals a remarkable tendency to
91
DO 3; 14; 14, 13, 10–11; IM 459; CM 132; CH 226; 20M 585; IM 277. This last example may perhaps be
as much a reflection of the collective imagination as an original idea by Verne.
59
explosion.92 But it is above all true for the individual, since the self-censorship and mutism of the characters
invariably leads to violent outbursts, self-control to ‘disequilibrium’ — a behaviour that is all the more
‘impatient’, ‘absolute’, ‘impetuous’, ‘fiery’, ‘volcanic’ or simply ‘insane’ for having been long-repressed.93
Verne’s underlying debate would again seem to be the natural-artificial one. In nature, monsters are
automatically eliminated, presumably by means of reproductive mechanisms or by meeting their mirror-images.
But man-made monsters — and human ones — have no such mechanism. The only way that they will be
destroyed, Verne seems to say, is by a reflection of their internal tension: by their own images in the mirror.
The often impressive order of the artificial, the cold, the unspontaneous and the insensitive is the very means
whereby reality is lost sight of: because these systems secrete their own perfection, they lose touch with natural
input, which is however the only valid one, and in the long term, the only halfway efficient one. Order
ultimately leads to chaos.
In other situations, an untrammelled positive feedback comes to exist. Virtually every Voyage presents
examples of what is often called a snowball effect or geometric progression: the multiplication of vegetable and
animal life, fires and explosions, entry into strongholds; the increasing effect of gravity on ships being
launched, on spacecraft, on pyramids of acrobats, on tottering buildings; or the accelerating progress of
monomania, of the drunkard’s thirst, of technological capacity or of fame and fortune.94
Once started, these processes fuel themselves and will require therefore no external assistance. What does
remain mysterious is how they begin. How, starting from scratch, can one attack the strongholds, escape from
the gravitational equilibrium point between the Earth and the moon or build up a financial empire? 95 The
Mysterious Islanders repeatedly meet this vicious circle: ‘pas un instrument quelconque, pas un ustensile’, ‘le
premier marteau manquait à ces forgerons’, ‘ils ne possédaient même pas les outils nécessaires à faire les
outils’: ‘de rien, il leur faudrait arriver à tout’ (IM 63; 201; 160; 63). Just one ear of wheat, it is said, would be
worth 400 billion, one match an entire shipload; with sulphuric acid, saltpetre could be made, with saltpetre,
sulphuric acid; with bricks, an oven could be produced, with an oven, bricks (IM 265; 59; 220–2; 161–2).
By posing the problem of multiplication in such dramatic, insistent and economically humorous terms, Verne
is not altogether falling into a naive scientism. He would in fact seem to be questioning such systems with their
own arguments, applying the reflection process to the thrust of the argument itself: if multiplication is as simple
as Linné and other biologists had claimed, then how does it stop, but above all, how did it manage to start? The
problem is the transformation of inertia-bound systems into accelerating systems endowed with a life of their
own: it is the insertion of the variable ‘time’ into the physical world.
Verne’s first four prose texts give us a broader perspective on this problem of starting processes off: they all
explore the mystery of the creation of modern techniques, ideas or institutions, as Delabroy points out with
great pertinence (pp. 2–106). Thus ‘Un Drame dans les airs’ describes the hazards of the first ascents in
balloons, ‘Un Drame au Mexique’, those encountered in starting off the Mexican Navy, and ‘Martin Paz’, those
of establishing the Peruvian Nation; and ‘La Destinée de Jean Morénas’ (published in 1910, but probably
written in the early 1850s and then revised by Michel) shows the problems of inaugurating an autonomous
personal existence.
Amongst the solutions proposed, the most frequent is the discovery that the means of starting the process off
were present after all, that novelty
Alain Buisine, ‘Circulations en tous genres’, Europe, n° 595–6, pp. 48–56.
93
Simone Vierne, ‘Paroles gelées, paroles de feu’, Europe, n° 595–6, pp. 57–66; FD 9, VA xvii 192; VCT 2;
27; 7; 299; 34.
94
E.g. TCC 177; e.g. ER 12, cf. IM 266; CH 419, 20M 58–82, IM 265 and passim; DO 105, DA 213, MB I
xiv 438; IM 375, GB iv 311, MB II xiii 416; MS 208; AL 123–4; TM 206; 100; CH 602; PD xvi 262; IM passim;
MS 216 (‘la Renommée, cette femme-orchestre aux cent bouches’), cf. PD vii 102; H 170, 20M 6.
95
IM 375, GB iv 311, 500 64, 206–7, MB II xiii 416; AL 12; H 170.
92
60
had been somehow built into the system. Thus strongholds are usually betrayed from within; the settlers are
fortunate enough to find a single ear of wheat and a single match, and make maximum use of other items that
happen to be at hand, like watch-lenses to make a fire and a sharpened metal dog-collar as a knife; the Mexican
Navy is just part of the Spanish Navy rebaptised; and the Peruvian Nation had ‘always’ existed (potentially).
Again, hardly any of the balloonists in history can be said to have invented anything, for they all simply copied
previous constructs (DA 189).
The diametrically opposite solution is the arrival of the deus ex machina, the mysterious opening up of the
system to an external influence. It is Dr Ox’s presence in the Flemish town that gets things going and makes
fires and passions burn brighter; and it is Nemo’s hidden interventions that are in fact the main cause of the
settlers’ progress — to such an extent as to destroy the whole validity of their self-contained Utopian
experiment.96
Both ‘solutions’ — from the inside and from the outside — seem to avoid the central problem of novelty, by
concentrating on the ends to be achieved rather than the means towards it. But the two are reconciled in a third
category, which adopts the interior-exterior dichotomy as its very operational principle, by incorporating the
vicious circle wholesale into the process of take-off. Thus the settlers’ first coarse attempt at a hammer serves
to construct a ‘real’ hammer; their oven-brick dilemma is solved by an ‘enormous brick oven which will cook
itself’; and speculators make their first million by inventing fictional share-values, which then become totally
real (IM 201; 168; H 170). As Ardan cryptically argues: ‘La forêt n’est brûlée que par ses propres arbres’ (TL
227). Attempting to restore the multiple logical steps his argument jumps over, we can identify a situation
where radically different agent and action are, as it were, chain-stitched together — that is their input and
output fused, producing an infinite and instantaneous va-et-vient, an infinitely quick computer alternating
between complementary states. A static, endogamous situation may then come, by magic, to create its own
validity and generate its own autonomous process of positive feedback. The fire burns itself; and without
material to burn, fire would never start. The dichotomy is still there. Novelty simply becomes.
One particular work seems to take this problem as its central theme. ‘Maître Zacharius ou L’Horloger qui
avait perdu son âme’ (1854, 1874) pinpoints the difficult transition from a lethargic ‘vague immense’ (MZ 146)
to an energetic, chronometrised, and frenetic society.
Set in pre-Reformation Geneva, this short story recounts Maître Zacharius’s invention of clockwork, his
explanation of the human body in terms of a mechanical comparison, the subsequent breaking down of all but
one of his clocks, and an accompanying reduction in his own vitality. The sole surviving clock is to be found in
the mountain lair of a clock-devil, and Zacharius follows it there, but arrives only to experience its destruction,
and, with it, his own death.
It is clear that Verne is once again a long way from his reputation of the pure adventure novel. He is
undoubtedly influenced by Hoffmann and the Gothic tale and, more generally, by ideas drawn from the
Enlightenment, such as the conception of the universe as deterministically defined from the creation onwards
and the debate between vitalism and reductionism.97 But Verne in fact goes much further on the specific subject
of time and the problem of starting processes off. He interprets even the most exalted spheres of existence in
terms that are resolutely secular, and indeed explicitly temporal: religious practice is equivalent to filling the
day with precisely-timed ritual, and love is defined, with a sexual undertone, as being merely two hearts that are
‘isochrones’ (MZ 167, 168; 138). But time itself s to be in turn defined in terms of material phenomena. Thus
the accuracy of each of Zacharius’s clocks is guaranteed by a self-regulating pendulum, ‘[qui retrouve] sa force
perdue par ce mouvement même de l’horloge, qu’il [est] chargé de réglementer’ (MZ 133). Force gives
movement, and movement force; the clocks — and Zacharius himself — are ‘logically’ in perpetual motion
(MZ 173). Furthermore, this clock-time is meant to control the sun (MZ 143), but the sun remains obstinately
This is one of the main conclusions of Delabroy’s thesis (pp. 1121–86).
See Jean Delabroy, ‘La Machine à démonter le temps’, pp. 15–23, and Raymond, ‘L’Homme et
l’horloge’, passim.
96
97
61
irregular, and therefore clock-time is instead adjusted to it (MZ 143). Clock-time and sun-time also form
therefore a hermetic couple.
Zacharius’s inspired method, in other terms, consists of reproducing what already exists, namely the
mechanism of the human body (MZ 131, 134), itself a reflection, in Biblical terms, of divine being — and the
advice his apprentice receives is to imitate his master’s method, that is to produce a third-degree copy (MZ
131–4)!
The fault in the system, I would argue, the one that causes Zacharius’s downfall, is consequently in its very
conception. Just as the description of the clocks is dangerously overloaded, with ‘qu’‘ and ‘il’, both again
referring to multiple antecedents, so the defining ideas are themselves vicious circles, mixing cause and effect,
measurement and control, and materialism and hypostatisation. Zacharius’s overblown attempt to establish
perpetual movement thus produces the fatal short-circuit. Nevertheless, the immaterial idea of the invention will
in fact ultimately succeed, enthralling the whole of society to time and hence forming the very basis of modern
civilisation (MZ 130).
In this work, then, modernity stems from the idea of applying materialistic reductionism, first to the most
exalted spheres of human existence, reducing them to their being-in-time, and then in turn to time itself,
reducing it to mere mechanical movement. But the conundrum of time is still thereby far from solved.
Ultimately, the attempt to account explicitly for the phenomenon just throws up a paradox: everything is time,
but time is nothing in itself. And modernity, above all, came from both inside and outside. Both novelty and the
medium in which novelty might come about are unanalysable.
Verne’s delight in all such systems is thus evident. But behind the materialism of these varied examples, and
especially in ‘Maître Zacharius’ is a debate on the ongoing nature of time. Does time merely mark a constant
revolution, in the old-fashioned sense of a simple re-arrangement of what went before? Or are revolutionary
revolutions possible, with accompanying thresholds, breakthroughs, and take-offs? Biology and mechanics
often serve as a frame of reference for the question, but its main thrust is the attempt to ‘test’ hypotheses
concerning history in quasi-scientific fashion. The underlying problem is — variously — that of knowing how
the physical universe came into being, as a moving, dynamic entity; how organic life, with purposeful
movement, began; how human life emerged, with intelligence, responsibility, self-consciousness, hammers and
stock-markets; and on a last level, perhaps, how the process of literary creation happens. The whole debate is an
optimistic veneer on a pessimistic base: the depressed suspicion is that nothing can ever work, that all attempts
to act are doomed; and therefore the last thing to do before giving up is simply to prove that suspicion. Verne
attempts to reproduce the essential events in all the incipits, and thus to isolate the points of rupture — if they
exist at all. If any part of the procedure can be identified, then at least some knowledge will have been gained.
One might even have learned to change things.
But in fact Verne seems uncertain what the answers should be, and soon introduces elements that vitiate or
rather half-vitiate the experiment. The idea of authentic discovery is undermined but without being totally
destroyed. As in the case of exploration, Jules Verne seems determined to defuse the whole question by
inserting as many borderline cases as possible. The oppositions discovered-non-discovered or original-imitative
are swamped by such other dichotomies as theoretical-pratical, physical-conceptual, natural-artificial, insideoutside, divine-temporal, until in the end they are completely submerged. The only positive conclusions seem to
be that although the undeniably new is often merely the old tacked together, large amounts of novelty often
simply cancel out — but that a mere fictive or fictional object can on occasion create an objective reality.
Verne’s response to whether real change in time is possible is to sit on the fence. Clearly, the real constructs
in the world today represent changes in the past; but, almost equally clearly, present changes are almost
impossible to implement. The very question disappears into an infinite regress.
Posthumous Cycles: Whither History?
62
This is where Michel steps in. He takes the already involved line of division between new and old, and, as it
were, threads it through itself again, but then pulls it all out to produce a different conclusion.
One of the first signs of the change is that in ‘his’ works, the spirals invariably spiral outwards (PD viii 124,
CM 131, MB II x 387, etc.). In addition, whereas the idea of the cyclical death and rebirth of the Earth is
apparently unique in Jules Verne’s works, after 1905 repeating structures are often mentioned in a philosophical
or social context. The language, above all, is new: thus the description of the equivalence of matter and energy
in La Chasse au météore (1908) begins ‘la substance, éternellement détruite, se recompose éternellement’, and
man’s analysis of matter into elements is similarly characterised as ‘éternellement à recommencer’ (CM 127,
126). Le Pilote du Danube (1908) remarks on the ‘perpétuel recommencement de l’éternelle bataille pour la
vie’ (PD iv 64). And Les Naufragés du ‘Jonathan’ (1909), lastly, contains the following comment: ‘l’un après
l’autre, (ces hommes) étaient repris par la terre, creuset [. . .] qui, continuant LE CYCLE ETERNEL, referait de
leur substance d’autres êtres, hélas! sans doute, pareils à eux’ (NJ II xi 219). These differences are sufficient
themselves to demonstrate that a new pen is at work, one perhaps influenced by Nietzschean, turn-of-thecentury conceptions of constant transformation. But the change is here mainly on the level of language, making
explicit ideas about cycles which, I would claim, were already to be found in the non-posthumous works,
although embodied in the action rather than in philosophical form. Michel certainly has no monopoly on closed
systems or pessimism.
Another sign of change is that cyclical repetition is occasionally used in the plot itself: in ‘La Destinée de
Jean Morénas’ (1910), for instance, twice a man is murdered while writing, twice the murderer proves to be the
hero’s brother, and twice the hero goes to prison to save him, with the two series of events forming a sort of
stereoscopic counterpoint. But only in ‘L’Eternel Adam’ does the idea of the cycle become a structural motif, in
this way marking, I believe, a radical discontinuity in the Voyages extraordinaires.
The short story starts off in the general style and ideology Verne has traditionally been associated with. The
Zartog in the twenty-third millennium pronounces a dithyramb to the benefits of science; and the anonymous
narrator in the third millennium similarly praises man’s ‘glorious destiny’ (EA 234; 217). Both are here
progressivists, observing a positive feedback in human affairs, an autonomous motor of history, with inventions
leading to further inventions (EA 218), driving man on and up (EA 262). As for the question of knowing how it
all started, the first, the vital, step out of the bloody morass of prehistory is analysed by both men as having
involved, paradoxically, an intensification of the slaughter (EA 216). This belligerent pacifism (also a feature of
the earlier Voyages) thus employs the vicious-circle method of starting off the historical process: plus ça reste la
même chose, plus ça change.
But in fact, the idea of uninterrupted progress is subsequently undermined. The Zartog and the anonymous
narrator will be forced to change their minds, and will end up adopting a more pessimistic view of human
affairs. The author, it is true, does warn us, in a footnote signed ‘M.J.V.’ (Michel Jules Verne), of the unusually
‘pessimistic’ conclusions of this tale ‘of Jules Verne’s’ (EA 213).
Both heroes start by observing that the advance of civilisation creates its own difficulties, in particular an
overdeveloped hubris, as embodied in the desire to give ‘l’immortalité [à] des organismes animés’ (EA 233).
Because it overstretches its capacities and encroaches on divine domains (a frequent Jules-Vernian theme),
civilisation produces the seeds of its own destruction. Both men come therefore to regard the ascending course
of history as only part of a repeating structure: what goes up must come down. From the observed and repeated
evidence of the events of the third millennium, Atlantis, and the Flood, they deduce that there have been peaks
and troughs every 20,000 years. They even catch a glimpse, behind the decline and fall of these three
civilisations, of ‘une infinité d’autres humanités’ (EA 234; 255). This leads them to deduce that there is an
irremediable cyclicity in history, that like his descendant the Wandering Jew, the Adam of the title is indeed
destined to travel eternally, and that anonymous narrators and scientific panegyrists will alternate for evermore.
Even the illustrations show the degeneration of the colony in Old-Testament style and the Zartog in Classical
surroundings (EA 257; 213). The conclusion proposed then by both of them — again using the posthumous
language — is that man must acknowledge the inescapable evidence of the ‘vains efforts accumulés dans
63
l’infini du temps’ and ‘l’éternel recommencement des choses’ (EA 263; 263): that he can do nothing but
stoically endure.
In ‘Jules Verne ou le mouvement perpétuel’ (p. 27),
F. Raymond has argued that such a periodic structure ‘abolishes’ the problems of the directionality of history
and the origin and end of man by substituting an infinite and universal ‘oscillation’, with a precise geometrical
underlay. In terms of the presentation of this chapter, the ‘course’ of history, as presented by Michel, could be
fitted into the cyclical schema so often used by Jules. Even the number of stages would fit (fig. 30).
These desciptions have undeniable advantages in synthesising the views expressed in ‘L’Eternel Adam’. But to
remain exclusively at this level of analysis would, I believe, be dangerous, for it would be close to falling into
the ‘inductive trap’, to assuming that because something has been true n times, it will necessarily be true the
n+1th time. It is more or less reductionist:98 it has the disadvantage — a crippling one — of implying that,
since history has been regular in the past, it will necessarily be so in the future; and it also falls, heavily, into the
trap of accepting what the text says, and ignoring what it shows.
Reexamining the content and the form suggests that the elegant symmetry of ‘L’Eternel Adam’ is in fact
destroyed at — or rather by — its very construction: the Zartog can only know about the repetition of history
because it has been communicated to him. Science redeems itself here, for not only did a motor-car carry the
anonymous narrator to safety, but it was an aluminium container which protected the vital document — apart,
ironically, from the scientific part of its message (EA 260). The nub of the story is thus, I would claim, the
communication of a pessimistic message: a communication which itself provides grounds for a certain guarded
optimism.99
Michel’s footnote may contain therefore a double trap: its ascription of authorship to Jules, but above all its
emphasis on the ‘pessimism’ of ‘L’Eternel Adam’. The tale certainly seems to argue that the historical cycle —
summum of all the previous cycles — exists, but at the same time that it can always be subverted. Indeed, selfknowledge for humanity may consist precisely of this vital short-circuit administered to the cycle; and, if so,
written communication — with the help of technology — is the means by which it is effected.
‘Michel’s’ short story is thus surprising in many ways. With its temporal structure divided between two
protagonists separated by 20,000 years, it contains many-layered debates on such diverse temporal subjects as
the origins of human civilisation, the nature of repetition, the importance of literature, the role of science, and
the future of mankind. Of course, it could be argued that the works analysed are not entirely Michel’s. But I
would claim to have identified sufficient distinctive features to demonstrate at the very least a change of
emphasis from 1905 onwards, even if remaining in the same wide framework. It could also be argued that the
specificity of ‘L’Eternel Adam’ was linked with the period in which it was written. Such an argument contains
an amount of good sense — and in any case would be very difficult to refute — but is less important, I believe,
than the personal circumstances of the publication of the work — the debate between father and son, carried out
98
See Jacques Derrida, La Fors (1970), pp. 10–20.
The two-dimensional figure of the cycle is therefore largely inadequate for conveying what would seem to
be the real import of the text: it cannot easily represent evolutions of the cycle, as distinct from phases within
the cycle. If we wish to show the effect over time of the positive-feedback process or communication, the
diagram can be improved by depicting the circular motion in a third dimension as well — in other words as a
spiral. The closed cycle is equivalent to a regular spiral, and the cycle which contains positive feedback
becomes a spiral which enlarges with time:
(Butcher, ‘Le Sens de “L’Eternel Adam” ‘, p. 78, contains a fuller account of the spiral in ‘L’Eternel Adam’,
in particular of the nature of its constituent dimensions.)
It may also be noted here that my conclusions (which obviously benefit from Gondolo della Riva’s
discoveries) go against those of the majority of previous critics — for a fuller account, the reader is again
referred to my article.
99
64
in paternal style but from a filial point of view. ‘L’Eternel Adam’, I would argue, draws much of its force from
simultaneously forming an integral part of, and standing in ironic contrast to, the Voyages extraordinaires. It is
de but not par Jules Verne.
Time Stabilised or Time Accelerated?
What is common to the topoi studied in this chapter is that they all avoid the fuite en avant/arrière of the
linear structures. They substitute ones involving an element of ‘mixing of levels’, ones which it is not too
fanciful to conceive of as corresponding to a certain self-consciousness. Much of their importance resides in
particular in their attempt to simulate human behaviour in terms of a finite number of variables or stages.
History, especially, is typical of this treatment, for it is initially presented as comprised of ultimately only two
phases: an archaic one where objects and ideas merely ‘circulate’, without opening up any new perspectives;
and a modern, dynamic one where there is some sort of progression, with events producing events indefinitely,
and so on, up towards some unseen goal.
This stereotyped nineteenth-century view of historical progress is taken by the Vernes as the starting-point of
their attempt to escape from the theoretical, verbalistic ideas of most of their contemporaries. They argue that
such a twofold representation necessarily depends on a satisfactory account of the transition between the
phases, or, at the very least, a realistic reproduction of it.
L’Ile mystérieuse, in particular, addresses this problem. In the first half, the settlers do manage to recreate the
dynamic from the static; the second half, however, demonstrates that the experiment was vitiated from the
beginning, both by the germs of civilisation that they had brought with them and by Nemo’s meddling. But
what if this was the only way to get things going, if civilisation and contamination were inseparable, if the
germs could only come simultaneously from oneself and from elsewhere?
Such a hypothesis would seem to be central to ‘Maître Zacharius’. The Jewish clock-maker is a member of an
‘archaic race’, and imitates the First Clock-Maker, but he operates in the Mecca of innovative Protestantism. He
copies his own workings, in an effort to make sure that his material self will survive; but merely hastens his
own end guarantees instead the survival of an immaterial idea. And he tries to subject time to being merely an
imitation of celestial events — or even of its own previous workings — but fails miserably, and succeeds by
mistake in completely opening time up. Historical progression would seem to be merely the result of multiple
misunderstandings — repeated interlocking and superimposed counterfeits, which together, and completely
unintentionally, in fact comprise the most original step conceivable. The whole process of intentional change is
to implement in the present, and impossible to define for the past, for the process itself rests on undefined
elements. In other words, any attempt to analyse or even reproduce the massive vicious circle of the starting off
of historical progression — or the difference between novelty and imitation — is bound to fail. It simply breaks
it up, like a bubble in a test-tube, into the corresponding number of smaller vicious circles. Man’s past has a
mystery at its centre.
Nor is it clear which of the two phases is preferable, either in the case of history or in the general case of
novelty-imitation. The well-ordered, self-contained cycles resist wearing out — but the time they conserve is
virtually dead. Although pre-Reformation history was safe from surprises, it was boring. The multiplying
processes, on the other hand, consist of an invigorating density of events — but they are extravagant, and
possibly out of control. Although creativity requires a vital spark, sparks can be dangerous. Oxygen intoxicates,
says Verne, but it is also etymologically, a ‘generator of bitterness’. Ideally, therefore, one should seek a middle
situation between immobilism and freneticism, and between self-absorption and self-dissipation. But the cusps
in Verne’s works are invariably of infinitesimal thickness, including that between the cycle and the non-cycle.
The moment of inauguration of all the vicious circles — but especially of historical innovation — is
undetectable, and probably undecidable, and so moderation proves virtually impossible to achieve.
Only in ‘L’Eternel Adam’ does the tension between recurrent and non-recurrent situations receive a certain
resolution. In the process, partial reconciliations are also found for such typically Vernian oppositions as
65
exploration and knowledge, the Natural and the artificial, science and literature, optimism and pessimism, and
the reductionist and the transcendental. While undermining such varied dichotomies, the posthumous tale
incorporates self-knowledge into its contribution to the joint problem of story and history. Its modernity, in
other words, resides in its seeking for solutions to the problems of life in the literary form itself. Its conclusion
— which has a certain validity for the whole of the Voyages — is that the cycle can also spiral outwards, that
the future is irreductible, that time itself evolves, and that humanity may be both the working out of an initial
design and self-generative. The validity of the questions posed in 1854 is resoundingly confirmed in 1910.
66
7
ONE AND
ALL
Et voilà qu’il sentit au plus profond de son être
se creuser comme un gouffre [. . .]. Puis tout à
coup, on le lâchait, et il tombait . . . dans son
propre estomac, c’est-à-dire dans le vide (MS 197).
Où le cannibalisme est traité théoriquement (CG 666).
The Body Metaphoric
he closed systems in the material world examined up to this point are not the only ones in the Voyages.
Interaction between the individual and the environment exhibits many of the same features; and the closed
T human systems point in fact to even more surprising conclusions concerning space and time.
One of the most striking features of Verne’s works is their degree of personalisation of the physical
world. Plutonic domains, for instance, are described in a vocabulary normally reserved for the human body,
with Axel and Lidenbrock’s penetration into the Earth being typical of the multiplication of sexually-charged
terms: ‘fente [. . .] entrailles [. . .] masses mamelonnées [. . .] fluides [. . .] sein [. . .] flancs [. . .] chevelure
opulente’ (VCT 129–30).
Delabroy quotes this passage at great length, and analyses it with perspicacity (pp. 410–1);100 but he does not
seem to have noticed other passages in both terrestrial and marine areas. Particularly interesting are the
description of the volcano in Hector Servadac, the island at the North Pole in Capitaine Hatteras, Axel and
Lidenbrock’s exit from the Earth, and Aronnax’s departure from the submarine:
Boyaux [. . .] flanc [. . .] orifice [. . .] grondements [. . .] transsudait [. . .] pores [. . .] bouche [. . .] exutoire (HS
224–6).
Vomissait [. . .] s’agiter [. . .] secousses réitérées [. . .] respiration [. . .] flancs [. . .] embouchure bouillonnante [.
. .] ondoyait (CH 575).
Cette formidable étreinte [. . .] ‘symptômes’ [. . .] ‘repoussés, expulsés, rejetés, vomis, expectorés’ [. . .] le sein
de la terre [. . .] ‘l’orifice’ [. . .] ‘respirer’ [. . .] volupté [. . .] agitation [. . .] mouvement giratoire [. . .] ondula [.
. .] ronflantes [. . .] bouche [. . .] je roulais sur les flancs [. . .] nous étions [. . .] à demi nus [. . .] splendide
irradiation (VCT 351–9).
Extases [. . .] soupir [. . .] sanglots [. . .] [je] pénétrai [. . .] l’ouverture [. . .] l’orifice évidé [. . .] ce gouffre
justement appelé le ‘Nombril de l’Océan’ [. . .], [où] sont aspirés non seulement les navires et les baleines, mais
aussi les ours blancs des régions boréales [. . .;] les roches aiguës du fond, là où les corps le plus durs se brisent,
là où les troncs d’arbres s’usent et se font ‘une fourrure de poils’ (20M 609–12).
100
Cf. Andrew Martin, The Knowledge of Ignorance: From Genesis to Jules Verne (Cambridge UP: 1985),
pp. 166–7.
67
With the benefit of modern eyes, we may detect in these passages a blatant sexual undercurrent with virtually a
whole catalogue of before-the-letter Freudian symbols and sensations. We may even suspect that Verne is
deliberately laying it on a bit thick. But what is more interesting is perhaps the admixing of other metaphors:
the idea of childbirth, in the last two passages (‘repoussés, expulsés, rejetés’, ‘l’orifice évidé’, ‘Nombril’); but
above all the process of eating/drinking, as indicated notably by the vocabulary of mouths, breasts, spitting,
vomiting, entrails, bowels and orifices. These instances of an alimentary concern are in fact by no means
isolated — we have already seen ones like the ‘gouffres engloutissants’ and the ocean ‘[qui] se NOURRIT luimême [. . .], (et) ALIMENTE les sources [. . .] sorties de son SEIN’ (RV 129).101
It is already clear, then, that Verne’s characters enjoy a relationship with their environment that goes well
beyond the merely instrumental; and that his reputation as ‘just’ a children’s and/or adventure-story writer is far
from the whole truth.
Further evidence is to be found in the anthropomorphic passion hidden in many of the material objects, but
especially in the ships. At a preliminary stage, their diverse constituent parts — ‘t^ete’, ‘flancs’, ‘hanche’,
‘membrure’, ‘œuvres-mortes’, ‘œuvres vives’, ‘ventre’, ‘quille’, ‘talon’, ‘jointures’ — variously ‘tremble’,
‘vomit’, ‘suffer’, ‘are carried away’, ‘wounded’ or ‘assuaged’.102 The helmsman is the soul of the boat, is
welded to it, forms part of it: its flesh is his flesh, and the destruction of a boat amounts to murder.103
Some of this is standard marine vocabulary, of course; but, apart from the density of reference, what is
remarkable is the way in which the metaphor is adapted, to emphasise the identity between food and fuel. If the
vessel is identical to the man, then the man must be identical to the vessel. Many Vernian characters boil with
impatience, as if there were fires within them (TL 227). Indeed, their level of activity — their intensity in time
— is governed by their ‘stoves’, which require constant replenishment with coal or wood (CH 230; 321; 319;
cf. TM 176). And one comments: ‘S’il faut recevoir des boulets dans notre carcasse, j’aime encore mieux les
boulets du Nord. Ca se digère mieux’ (FB ix 80).
The sexual allusions are again interesting. A woman is described as ‘la charmante cargaison que j’ai
rapportée’: ‘elle me retourne comme fait la mer d’un bâtiment en détresse. Je sens que je sombre’ (FB x 88; vi
50). Despite the existence of ‘human safety valves’, frustrated fiancés fascinatedly follow a boat’s ‘longs
pistons [. . .] qui se précipitaient l’un vers l’autre, en s’humectant à chaque mouvement d’une goutte d’huile
lubrifiante’ (CH 22; VF 72). One character even exclaims of a boat, voluptuously and longingly: ‘Que n’en
suis-je la machine! Comme je le pousserais contre vents et marées, quand je devrais éclater en arrivant au port!’
(BL v 48).
As if the exploration of the separate metaphor was not enough, food and sex are united by a shared bodily
need, one that is the key to a strange series of events disrupting the peace and quiet of the self-contained
Flemish town. It all comes to a head in an operetta performed with exceptional force: ‘Un feu inaccoutumé
dévore (l’un des interprètes). [. . .] Il est embrasé [. . .], le public [. . .], enflammé [. . .]! Toutes les figures sont
rouges comme si un incendie eût embrasé ces corps à l’intérieur [; il y a une] surexcitation infernale’; ‘[le chef
ressemble à] quelque Méphistophélès, battant la mesure avec un tison ardent’ (DO 58–9; 68). The reason for
the alimentary and sexual vigour, it is revealed at the end, is an excess of oxygen in the atmosphere, which
makes the passions stronger and which controls all human functions — even the soul (DO 108; cf. AL 101–19,
CH 556, 20M 517–31). For Verne, then, man and boat, food, fuel and sex are virtually interchangeable.
This general idea of a man-machine had of course been common since the Enlightenment; and as Meyerhoff
points out (pp. 2–3), it enjoyed a particular vogue throughout the nineteenth century, being undoubtedly one of
the key inspirations of such figures as Darwin, Marx or Freud. Verne’s aim is similarly to demonstrate the
Confirmation is provided in Jules-Verne of an obsessive ‘boulimia’ in Verne’s life (passim).
20M 127; FB ii 12; 20M 520, FB ix 82; ix 79, JMC xv 159; TM 304; JMC vi 67; TM 292; JMC xv 159;
xv 159; FB ix 84; 20M 53, FB ix 79; 20M 53; TM 142; JMC vi 67; CH 221.
103
CH 568; 568; 568; 257, VF 108; NJ III xv 442.
101
102
68
material underpinning of all aspects of human life: to show the naivety, in robustly Rabelaisian or Flaubertian
manner, of the idealist view of abstract essences, of disembodied sentiments or thoughts; to demonstrate, in a
word, the earthy pulsions of human beings. The apparently scientistic naivety of studying ‘la machine humaine’
(MV 97) will have further surprising consequences in the areas of morality and the identity of the self.
Cannibalisation and Cannibalism
Despite the mechanical metaphor, various commentators have pointed out that industrial production is almost
totally absent from Verne’s works; and this also applies to non-industrial areas. Boats are sailed rather than
constructed, children adopted rather than conceived; and fortunes spent rather than earned. Even the material
employed by the various ‘machines’ is apparently never created, and very rarely acquired at all. The systems
exist almost without input.
When we examine the fate of Verne’s ships, another striking trait emerges. Just as camel excrement is not
discarded, but used for fuel (55 314), so none of the ships’ constituent material ever seems to be abandoned. In
a few cases, the boats are simply burned, in a literal application of the Classical metaphor (for example, VCT
328, TL 226). But in most cases, they have the singular destiny of providing materials for the needs of another
vessel: they are cannibalised.
Non-production and recycling are of course closely complementary. But what is remarkable is the degree to
which these principles of economy are taken, in the form of internal recycling of material. The term
‘autocannibalisation’ would seem appropriate for this process.
Sometimes, the idea is episodic, as when the vessel is chopped up, either to provide its own heating or, even
neater, to produce motive power by ‘devouring’ its own ‘œuvres-mortes’ (HG 304; CH 255, CH passim, TM
304). But in Le Chancellor the idea structures the whole novel. First, a fire starts spontaneously in the hold and
begins to burn faster and faster (C 50–1; cf. C15 412, 414). The only way to halt this multiplying process —
what Verne calls a ‘combustion progressive’ (FD 179) and Serres, a ‘positive feed-back loop’ (p. 114) — is to
flood the vessel. Here again the process threatens the whole ship, although the feedback is now a negative one,
that is each successive stage counteracts the process, making it slow down. But then the singularly unfortunate
vessel begins sinking, and has therefore to be taken apart, so that a raft can be produced from the remains. Still
the passengers’ problems are not over, for they have nothing to eat and in desperation try to devour the sails and
wooden and leather parts of the raft.
In other words, the structure of the whole work is determined by the catastrophic metamorphoses of the
eponymous ship. Each of the four stages follows rigorously on from the preceding one; and in each stage the
vessel is bodily reduced. A quasi-mathematical materialism governs the narration. The successive
developments of the autocannibalisation constitute a precise convergent series. The material of the Chancellor
is the material of Le Chancellor.
So much attention to the fate of the vessel clearly points to some sort of deeper symbolism, but it is not
immediately apparent what this could be. In fact, if we add on the man-machine and food-fuel metaphor, we
obtain an automatic and striking result: instead of ships ‘consuming’ each other, humans: instead of
cannibalisation, cannibalism! It is obvious that yet another Vernian extended metaphor is at work here. This
theme occurs in at least thirty Voyages, often on the flimsiest of pretexts. In order to determine the extent of the
equivalence, let us now examine the ‘internal economy’ of the cannibalism in the Voyages.
In Verne’s works, anthropophagy is considered relatively banal when carried out between primitiv e tribes as a
means to exact revenge or to satisfy hunger (for example, CG 669). It is when the idea occurs among Europeans
and between acquaintances that it seems to take on interest and indeed a life of its own.
The theme is introduced in extremely innocuous fashion. Sometimes, as in the traditional metaphor, curiosity,
ambition, anger, impatience, jealousy or desire make the character ‘devour’ his fellows or else these feelings
69
‘devour’ the character himself.104 Often, the sentiments are deflected from an external object back towards
source and internalised as humiliation, anxiety or nervousness, and cause the gnawing or biting of ‘bridles’,
fists, thumbs, nails, beards, lips, or a general ‘self-devouring’.105 In these examples the body eats itself from
without. But the body may equally well be digested from within. Notable examples include the scenes of
oxygenation (‘un feu [. . .] à l’intérieur’, etc. (DO 58–9)) but also the introjective dream where a character falls
into the bottomless pit of his own stomach (MS 197–8).
If we examine actions of eating in the literal sense, we notice a corresponding progression from external to
internal object, whose complete range is again to be found in the decidedly complex Le Chancellor. The initial
situation, anodyne once more, is that Kazallon and his companions on the empty raft are famished and wish to
catch fish. Using the fish caught as bait, they know that a geometrically multiplying amount could be caught, if
only the vicious circle could be overcome, if only the closed system could be opened up. The means to do so
are eventually realised to have been at hand after all: first flesh taken from corpses, and then flesh cut from
living people — ‘œuvres mortes’ and ‘œuvres vives’ again! These relatively ‘exogamous’ solutions do not
work, however, and the starving passengers are constantly about to perpetrate acts of assault or murder on each
other followed by full and unmitigated cannibalism. In the event, this sort of thing does not happen, in the
published versions at least. It very probably did in the manuscript, particularly since it occurs in the two main
sources of the novel.106 But to compensate, three remarkable variations on the theme occur instead.
At one stage, the passengers draw lots to determine who should be killed and eaten; an invalid loses, and is
about to serve as victim, when his father intervenes and offers himself instead, or rather his arms; and only a
‘chance’ incident prevents the sacrifice being carried out. Earlier, the Black cook had gone mad, presumably
through lack of culinary material to work on, and offered his own substance to his companions as a substitute
sustenance: ‘[. . .] sa rage se tourne contre lui-même. Il se déchire de ses dents, de ses ongles, nous jetant son
sang à la figure et criant: § “Buvez! Buvez!” ’ (C 213). Kazallon, lastly, undergoes the torture of thirst and
finishes by cutting his own vein and drinking from it: ‘me voilà me désaltérant à cette source de ma vie! Ce
sang repasse en moi, il apaise un instant mes tourments atroces; puis, il s’arrête, il n’a plus la force de couler!’
(C 221). The system starts by flowing maximally before the short-circuit terminally short-circuits itself. This
act — which gains considerable force because it is also a terrible temptation for three other characters, namely
Kennedy, Axel and Shandon (5S 225; VCT 217; CH 35) — represents a shocking but satisfying terminus to the
progressively more cannibalistic, violent and self-centred activities.
104
20M 38; TL 229; 252; 20M 568, TL 197; 263; MP i 226; TL 24, PBM 110, CH 333, MP i 227.
5S 225; TM 176; TL 224; 20M 54; CH 35, VCT 265; 20M 597.
106
The two main written sources of Le Chancellor seem to be Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym (ch. XII contains a
scene of total cannibalism) and the various accounts of events on the Raft of the Méduse (esp. A. Corréard and
Jean-Baptiste Henri Savigny, Naufrage de la frégate ‘La Méduse’ [. . .] au Sénégal en 1816 [. . .], 4th edn.
1821).
François Raymond’s statement that there are significant differences in Le Chancellor between serial and
book form is erroneous (‘Feux croisés sur Jules Verne: D’un colloque à l’autre’, Europe, n° 595–6, pp. 184–7
(185)): virtually the only features changed between publication in Le Temps (17.12.1874 — 24.1.1875) and the
final book form (in-8° illustrated, 1875) are the heading (‘Journal du passager J.-R. Kazallon’ is added (C 1))
and a few letters: ‘j’essaye’ becomes ‘j’essaie’ (C 120, 121), ‘Je me lève, et accroché [. . .]’ becomes ‘Je me
lève. Accroché [. . .]’ (C 121), ‘Le ciel’ becomes ‘Le Ciel’ (C 131).
‘Si l’on en croit la correspondance, l’auteur a édulcoré ce récit dramatique qui dans sa première version
(inédite) était d’un “réalisme répugnant” ’ (Jules-Verne, p. 205) — Hetzel may also have played a part in this
pre-serial-publication censorship, as he did elsewhere.
105
70
A whole gamut of successively more endogamous solutions has in this way been tried: paracannibalism, then
cryptocannibalism, then necrocannibalism, and finally, after a flirtation with the real thing, 107 autocannibalism.
The mere mention of any of these individual acts would have created scandalised havoc in any drawing-room
of the period, but Verne accumulates them in successively more horrifying behaviour, integrating them at the
same time into a single sequence. Each successive term is obtained from the preceding one by taking the
process one further stage along the path of endogamy, bringing the process closer and closer to home. The
actions again constitute a convergent series — and one which is ‘taken to the limit’. The final stage represents
the most radical act, but at the same time the most balanced one in physical terms.
A certain sexual undertone may perhaps be detected in the progressively more morbid bodily acts. This is
indeed confirmed in various ways, and ones which further illuminate the endogamy.
Elsewhere in the Voyages one can detect a certain sexual/cannibalistic innuendo. Conseil says to his master
Aronnax: ‘ “Vous, anthropophage! Mais je ne serais plus en sûreté près de vous, moi qui partage votre cabine!
Devrais-je donc me réveiller un jour à demi-dévoré?” § ‘ “Ami Conseil, je vous aime beaucoup, mais pas assez
pour vous manger sans nécessité” ‘ (20M 227). But it is in fact also possible to detect parallels with precise
sexual acts. First, that other crime of taking over the body of another person, rape, is evoked a surprising
number of times in the Voyages extraordinaires. Thus in addition to the traditional obsession for white women
to die rather than be separated from their menfolk, texts as distant in time as ‘Un Hivernage dans les glaces’
(1855) and La Mission Barsac (1919) involve protracted and explicit scenes of full-blooded attempted rape;
Zacharius asks his daughter to give her body to the clock-devil for his sake; and the passage listing the various
results of of ‘miscegenation’ also refers, obliquely but unmistakably, to ‘les belles goélettes blanches que plus
d’un flibustier abordent par le travers!’.108 It is no coincidence that none of these works was produced during
the period of Hetzel père’s supervision: the ‘goélettes blanches’ sentence was indeed cut when the story was
published in the Voyages (as ‘Un Drame au Mexique’ (DM iv 445)). When allowed to, sexual violence rears its
head surprisingly often in Verne.
Similarly, just as Moré (ch. 3) has detected a strong streak of homosexuality in the Voyages, so autoerotic
hints are also amazingly transparent, given his audience and social context. If in the vegetable realm sago-palms
innocently ‘croissent sans culture, se reproduisant [. . .] par leurs (propres) rejetons et leurs (propres) graines’,
the branches of certain African trees have ‘feuilles [. . .] de six à sept pouces, doublées d’une écorce à substance
laiteuse, et dont la noix, lorsque le fruit est mûr, fait explosion en projetant la semence de ses [. . .]
compartiments’.109 In the same way, in the human realm, one can observe descriptions like: ‘Kin-Fo rêvait déjà
[. . .], et [. . .] senti(t) une sorte de chatouillement à sa main droite. § Instinctivement, ses doigts se refermèrent
et saisirent un corps cylindrique légèrement noueux, de raisonnable grosseur, qu’ils avaient certainement
l’habitude de manier [. . .]’.110 A certain amount of similar evidence is available in Verne’s letters, for Soriano
has quoted ‘[des] aveux na~fs
i d’auto-érotisme’, for instance: ‘[mon propriétaire, Jules Verne,] a perdu
l’habitude de m’élargir en fourrant ses doigts dans mes profondeurs [. . .]. Monsieur votre fils, Madame, [. . .]
What Jean Delabroy calls ‘omophagie, nécrophagie, [. . .] anthropophagie’ (‘Une Transe atlantique
(Texte-échangeur et fantasmatique sociale)’, in Jules Verne et les sciences humaines, pp. 212–40 (212));
similarly, Soriano perceptively notes the role of ‘introjection’ and ‘incorporation’ in this novel (Jules Verne
(1978), p. 189).
108
E.g. CG 613–4, 738, MSt 314–6; HG 320–2; MB II xi-xii 400–8; cf. MP ix 285–6; MZ 172; ‘Les Premiers
navires de la Marine mexicaine’, p. 70.
109
20M 231; VA v 56 (partially) quoted by Olivier Dumas, ‘Le Secret du Village aérien’, BSJV, n° 53, 1er
tri. 1980, pp. 180–5 (181).
110
TCC 52, quoted by Daniel Compère, ‘Le Jeu du Chinois’, BSJV, n° 52, 4e tri. 1979, pp. 133–7 (134); cf. J
147.
107
71
rel(ève) sa moustache en croc, il la caresse un peu trop [. . .] mais [. . .] mes secrétions ne sont pas trop
abondantes (etc.)’.111
A first conclusion is that Verne here seems to go beyond the normal bounds of stories for young people — or
even for adults. In the case of the raft-bound cannibalism, he is undoubtedly reflecting contemporary reality, for
numerous cases were reported in the press throughout the period. But the number of times the anthropophagous
and sexual themes are repeated points at the same time to psychological or social — even psychoanalytical —
concerns.
It is here that the man-ship metaphor may reinforce our understanding of both poles of the problem.
Undoubtedly one of the most remarkable things about cannibalisation, cannibalism, and the ‘perverse’ forms of
sexuality is their displacement of the object of desire. Ships normally burn fuel, and people normally eat food
and often have sexual relations. It is only when the object is one usually considered more or less a subject that
surprise is generated. In other words, each of the three processes seems to be perverse only in so far as it limits
its choice to a severely limited subset of the universe for interaction, only if it defines the ‘inside’ and the
‘outside’ in a constricted way.
When Nature’s abundant external resources are so wilfully excluded, it is the material of the consumers
themselves which is brought into play, turning the system literally inside-out. But once the ‘consumption’ has
been made internal, the stage is set for a closed cycle of recursive activity. In theory at least, a fixed proportion
of the system will go in to be consumed, but emerge as turncoat ‘consumer’; but a fixed proportion will also be
used up at each stage, thus closing it more — and increasing the horror each time. Like Kazallon’s blood, the
resources will start by reducing relatively quickly, but will never completely be exhausted. Like Zeno’s arrow,
they will never be able to quite reach their final destination, although they will be able, given enough time, to
get infinitely close.112 A decreasing vestige of activity will always continue — an object cannot ever completely
absorb itself.
Verne’s structures are certainly fascinating, but may seem rather abstract and gratuitous. I would claim
however that a certain debate on social ethics is in fact present, and that the successive graduations in the
system may equally well be construed as a highly significant moral thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Cannibalisation,
cannibalism and sexuality are all so important for Verne because of their grounding in the most material reality,
because the basic acts can destroy others in the most physical sense. But a variation is provided in each case by
a directly opposed act: instead of the use of a foreign body for one’s own purposes, one’s own body is
unrestrainedly offered for the use of others. Zacharius’s suggestion that his daughter give her body for his sake
is thus a commentary on the egoism of the basic act; and so, above all, is the behaviour of the invalid’s father
and the frustrated cook. Verne is of course reactivating the cannibalistic sub-text of the Eucharism here, with its
curious mix of self-sacrifice and consumption of flesh and blood — as elsewhere in Le Chancellor, he uses
other Biblical imagery, such as the twelve companions, the crucifixion image of outstretched arms, and the final
baptism in fresh water. But more fundamentally, he would seem to be pointing to the hypocrisy of most of the
social tabous, whether Christian or not: if one should really do to others as one would have them do to oneself,
then why should all forms of cannibalism and sexuality produce such moral outrage? If in particular, the basic
act is always wrong (at least in fiction), then why is the opposite act not sometimes right?
Having posed the difference self-others in such stark and paradoxical terms, Verne then crowns his
demonstration by moving the goalposts a second time and converting the opposition into a synthesis. If the
basic act destroys the other, and if the opposite act is also immoral, then why not oppose the two monsters, why
111
Jules Verne, pp. 52–5, letter dated Paris, 31 Dec. 1852, Vaulon collection, also quoted by Jules-Verne,
pp. 52–3. An autoerotic tendency in Verne is one of Delabroy’s conclusions (p. 230), but the only evidence he
adduces is Verne’s letter about the sculptor’s model with its fingers and orifices (my Chapter 5).
112
More analytically, there is an inverse relationship between the number of consumers and the amount of
resources, defining a geometric progression of negative feedback. Even more analytically, a precise
mathematical definition is possible of ‘coming as close to the destination as wished’.
72
not abolish both problems by combining the two into a single pole, by identifying the subject and the object?
The autocannibalisation, autocannibalism and autoeroticism that result should logically remove any remaining
moral objections. The activity here is more or less self-cancelling — and thus represents the ultimate compact
cycle — but above all constitutes the final ironic showing up of the social tabous.
The effect on time and space is also undoubtedly surprising. Judged from the outside, less and less substance
is involved at each stage, meaning a slowing down of time, as in the formal cycles. But judged from the inside,
the process gets more and more self-contained, obsessional, and dense in time. It is because gratification can be
virtually instantaneous that the time outside and the time inside are divorced. The acts represent both an
absolute concentration and an absolute dissipation of desire. Verne’s pursuit of the eternal leads him back
towards the present and finally into an ultimate short-circuited spasm, a hyper-dense fragment of non-time. The
infinite is contained within the infinitesimal.
Kinship and Companionship
We have thus seen that, far from being sentimental or simplistic accounts of human relationships, Verne’s
works contain complex and unmitigated descriptions of physical interactions. The reader of the Voyages can
detect similar tensions in the purely social aspects of human relations; with, once again, the themes of
introversion, time and space being important issues.
As far as the family is concerned, the arborescence might have been thought to occur frequently as a means of
emphasising the continuity of extended relationships over time, in accordance with the traditional image of the
family tree. In fact, in the rare examples where the image is employed, it is the dissipatory aspect of vertical
relationships that is emphasised: ‘Depuis bien des siècles, les ramifications, sorties du tronc commun, s’étaient
écartées de la ligne du glorieux ancêtre’; ‘la famille s’était divisée et perdue en de nombreuses ramifications’
(RV 19; MS 34). In accordance with this loosening, the common literary theme of ‘transcendence of time by
means of progeny’ also receives short shrift in Jules Verne’s works. It is treated either in extremely
conventional terms — ‘Dans les enfants il reste toujours quelque chose de la vie d’un père!’ (MS 149) — or
else in subtly ironic ones: ‘Le bourgmestre se maria [. . .] dans des conditions excellentes . . . pour l’heureux
mortel qui devait lui succéder’ (DO 107). Verne is mocking, simultaneously and sardonically, the ideals of
progression, altruism and parenthood.
Many of the Vernian relatives are for this reason distant ones in distant parts — an Indian Begum or one of
the proverbial ‘Uncles in America’ (500; Un Neveu d’Amérique, p. 394). The idea of inheritance is similarly
affected. Wealth will be transmitted to the most unlikely of relatives (MS 229, etc.) — in Testament d’un
excentrique (1899), to the eccentric legator of the title himself. There is in sum a tremendous gulf between
much of one’s kin and oneself; inter-generation relationships are stretched to the point of disappearing.
Relationships within a generation, on the other hand, are very close in the Voyages. There is a strong
tendency for attraction to exist between siblings or quasi-siblings — confirming the importance of the
availability of the object of desire. Zacharius’s apprentice and daughter, brought up in the same household,
marry each other; so do the virtually identical twins M. Ré-dièze and Mlle Mi-bémol, Lidenbrock’s adopted son
and daughter, and Michel Strogoff and his mother’s ‘daughter’; Jean Morénas is in love with his sister-in-law
(and cousin, and therefore ‘cousin-in-law’); and Ferney is only very narrowly foiled in his posthumous attempt
to rape his half-sister.113
There are also a large number of male couples in the Voyages, whose dominant mode similarly oscillates
between the fraternal and the marital. Sometimes they are constituted of ‘deux frères Siamois’ — ‘deux
jumeaux . . . mais pas du même âge . . . ni de la même mère’ — and sometimes they are in Servadac’s situation:
‘ “Alors, nous voilà mariés, Ben-Zouf.” § ‘ “Ah! mon capitaine, [. . .] il y a longtemps que nous le sommes!” ‘
[MS 233; 205; HS 464]. Moreover, members of both heterosexual and homosexual couples are normally not
113
MS 138, 176; MSt 498, 496; VCT 20, 372; RM 94; DJM (1910) 133; MB (1919) II xi-xii 400–8.
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only without offspring, but are also themselves orphans or even, as in one indicative case, ‘véritables produits
d’une génération spontanée’ (MS 195).
Both underlying tendencies, the incestuous and the self-contained and non-productive, are, lastly, combined
in one brilliant example. In the static Flemish town, the ‘same’ married couple has existed since 1340, as
Michel Serres points out.114 Whenever one Mme Van Tricasse dies, a second one is chosen, ‘[une] cousine’
(DO 107), presumably the fruit of a previous stage of the couple. The same incestuous remarriage applies to the
husband, with widowhood and widowerhood thus following each other in strict alternation, indefinitely and, as
Verne says, ‘sans solution de continuité’ (DO 11). The problems of choice and freedom have apparently been
solved. The branches of the family tree have here been absorbed into the trunk — which they then split into
further self-searching and -seeking branches.
As well as amusing himself, then, Verne is expressing his views about marriage. Choice of partner is often
arbitrary and in any case irrelevant. One plus one does not always make two. The Van Tricasse couple(s)
combine(s) maximal endogamy with minimal production: they simultaneously exclude the temporal flux and
triumphantly overcome it.
More generally, a debate on the person is going on. As a phenomenon which occurs in nature, the twins and
all the other close couples appeal to the Verne of the early self-confident period (whereas mirror imagery would
seem more in evidence in the later, self-conscious period, with its emphasis on the allegorical and the artificial).
The use of twins has of course been common in stock situations in comic writing from Shakespeare to Tintin, as
a way of posing the questions of identity and difference. In Verne’s case, however, there is in addition the
general biological context. Jacob (p. 91) points out that Darwin, for instance, thought that the similarities and
variations represented by close relatives were the basis of all classification. But in fact Verne seems to re-route
the scientific or even social implications onto the specifically personal ones — emphasising, in particular, the
fragility of the concept of the individual. Everyone is defined in terms of others, but the others do not
themselves allow a precisae definition. Persoanlity also implies an infinite regression.
In the social group in general, there is a similar tendency to closure, and, with it, again a problem of excessive
introversion. Numbers are strictly limited, with a maximum of five or six full members, and an average of about
three — as Vierne says, ‘la vie protégée dans [. . .] une communauté privilégiée’. 115 The desert-island or other
totally self-contained community is thus merely an extreme expression of this tendency; and it is no
coincidence that the Mysterious Island has the form of a ‘ptéropode monstrueux’ or that Nemo’s submarine
takes its name from the nautilus (IM 135; 20M 295–6), given the complete self-sufficiency of these two forms
of animal life.
Within the group, altruistic acts are again often attempted, with their generosity once more being emphasised
by their corporeal nature: characters attempt to save their companions by such eccentric means as throwing
themselves out of balloons, going to prison when innocent, or trying not to use up oxygen for breathing (5S
270–1, IM 10; DJM 114, 142–3; 20M 527). But this recurrent ninenteenth-century watchword, of ‘being made
happy only by the happiness of others’ (J 37, CH 544, FB x 88, etc.), is shown up by an altruism which turns
out to be merely superficial. Thus the balloon stowaway switches from offering to throw himself out to
attempting to throw the hero out instead; Zacharius uses his previous ‘generosity’ to justify his present egoism
(‘Puisque je t’ai donné la vie, rends la vie à ton père!’); and Ox’s offer to provide free lighting for the peaceful
Flemish town proves in the end to have been a mere cover for his callous and dangerous experiment on human
beings (DA 201, 213; MZ 172; DO 16, 108–9).
Those who depend on the public for their living are particularly conscious of the danger of egoism/narcissism,
of the fragility of their links with the rest of the world. ‘Entertainers’ as varied as acrobats, a dancing teacher, a
‘Le Couteau de Jannot’, in L’Herne: ‘Jules Verne’, pp. 213–5.
Raymond, ‘L’Homme et l’horloge’, p. 144, points out the number of triplets in Verne’s social groups;
Vierne, Jules Verne et le roman initiatique, p. 541.
114
115
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Mormon preacher, a journalist and a scientist end up ‘performing’ without an audience; and Aronnax’s book is
read most intently by Aronnax himself.116
Clearly, a similar endogamy is present to the one visible in the cannibalism and other perverse processes; but,
as we shall see, the consequences are not always identical.
One particularly revealing case of professional introversion is to be found in ‘Frritt-Flacc’ (1884). This gothic
tale features an egoistical doctor who treats only those patients rich enough to pay for his services. One dark
night, he is entreated to attend to someone in the next village, but refuses to go until promised a large sum of
money. After travelling towards the village for a while, however, he has a shock: without changing direction, he
has suddenly found himself going back and re-entering his own house. He ends up attempting to treat himself,
or rather his own double lying in bed, but he is too late, and finally patient and doctor both die.
This strange Hoffmannesque story is thus not only another example of linearity becoming circularity, but
constitutes an original refutation of the idea of time-travel. It makes explicit what was hinted at in Voyage au
centre de la Terre: the argument that the whole idea of time-travel requires a splitting of the person into two
and is thus riddled with contradiction. More specifically, goes the argument, if time-travel is possible, then so is
meeting one’s ancestor before, say, his marriage. Then so is killing him; then so is preventing him from having
(had) any descendants; then so is preventing his descendants travelling in time — which is a blatant
contradiction. In ‘Frritt-Flacc’, this syllogism is taken to its concisest limit by observing the particular case
where one’s ‘ancestor’ is, egoistically, oneself. The doctor (accidentally) kills himself ‘in another temporal
state’, and thus creates a simultaneously self-contradicting and self-confirming spatio-temporal loop. (Did the
doctor travel and treat himself? How could he, if he was dying? But how could he avoid doing so, if he was
dying?) The person that travels cannot kill the one that stays at home, for he depends logically on him; but,
given that a contradiction exists in any case, what better person from an aesthetic point of view to kill the
doctor than himself?
The potential paradox set up by the time-travel of Voyage au centre de la Terre is thus explored after all. The
science-fiction of the twentieth century here covers ground that had already been explored by the Voyages
extraordinaires.
But the tale is especially a study in solipsism. The doctor’s division of the world, separating those who can
pay for his services from those who cannot, is shown to fall down by virtue of a set-theoretical formalisation of
the Cretan Liar Paradox. Since it would be absurd for the doctor to pay himself for his own services, then, by
his own egoistical logic, given that he does not pay, he cannot treat himself either. But he must treat himself
(since no-one else will) and he is therefore obliged to split himself into the two personae — payer and payee —
with the fatal consequences. Taking self-absorption to the limit thus results in losing part of one’s identity, in
being literally alienated from oneself — and ultimately disappearing up one’s own temporal vortex.
In case it be objected that Verne’s example, being comprehensible, cannot be of any profound philosophical
value, it should be pointed out that Bertrand Russell’s destruction of the logical coherency of set-theory as it
was then conceived consisted merely of considering this sort of example. Russell examined ‘The barber shaves
all those who do not shave themselves. Does he shave himself?’, the precise logical equivalent of ‘The set of all
sets that do not contain themselves (what about that set?)’. Following Russell’s example, not only
contemporary set-theory, but also the philosophical foundations of mathematics in general, were found to be
‘inconsistent’, that is that not all its propositions could ever be both true and provable.117
Verne’s works, then, set up a variety of closed social systems, and employ them to continue the debate on the
role of the individual and the nature of logic. The smaller the system, the greater the strain. When numbers go
below three, dramatic changes in behaviour result. And when the social unit is reduced to one-and-a-fraction
MS 205–7; ER 166; TM 238; MB I vi 105, I vii 127; CM 118; 20M 516. As so often in Verne’s structures,
an oblique comment is also undoubtedly being made here on the process of literary creation.
117
Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, Principia Mathematica (1910–3).
116
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persons, the logical foundation of arithmetic, geometry and set-theory are undermined, egoism interferes with
its own principles, and even time and space change. Closing all the exits produces unpredictable results.
Knowledge and the Lone Individual
The tendency to timeless and spaceless egoism is especially visible in the individual who cuts himself off from
his fellows. He is variously described as ‘[tout] en dedans’, ‘impassible, impénétrable, insensible’, ‘taciturne, [.
. .] concentré, [. . .] rejeté en lui-même’, ‘replié sur lui-même’, ‘aveugle pour tout ce qui l’entour(e)’.118
His solipsism is above all apparent in his speech acts. Thus he continues without transition conversations
interrupted hours before; he perorates subjectively or ‘à blanc’; he talks to himself, often taking both sides of
the conversation; he cannot finish his sentences, which must be completed by his twin; he systematically
contradicts previous assertions; or he speaks ‘au pluriel, afin, sans doute, de se donner la flatteuse illusion d’un
auditoire suspendu à ses lèvres’.119 He ignores, in other words, such conventions of dialogue as the
individuality of interlocutors, the beginning and end of utterances, and the progression of topic. What happens
as a result is that the very mechanism of communication is perturbed. Sometimes, the individual’s speech is
blocked; and sometimes it runs away with him instead. But on occasion both somehow happen together in a
remarkable pre-Freudian ‘explosive stuttering’, ‘aposiopesis’, ‘paroles précipitées’, stumbling over or
swallowing of sentences, or ejaculations, ‘non en longues phrases, mais par petites interjections’.120
Verne’s perceptive observation of certain psychological traits thus leads him to the heart of the problem of
social time. In the Vernian syndrome, there is an element of ‘angelism’ which takes the form of an attempt to fit
too much activity into a finite time or space. This would seem to be both a reaction to and a direct cause of what
is in many ways its opposite, a profound pessimism. The character is in a hurry because of his deep anxiety, the
anxiety that his audience may be snatched away at any moment, as it has so often before. He is a perfectionist
because of repeated previous setbacks, when his best was judged not good enough. As a result, whereas in the
cannibalistic and other processes, less and less material was chasing itself round and round, here the system
tends to be blocked by an excess of material. But, surprisingly, the effect is often very similar: abrupt
movements, an alternation of fullness and emptiness, a space-time that is both flying apart and crumpled up.
Occasionally the theme of solitude is evoked directly. A ‘Chinaman’s’ natural preference is declared to be
isolation (ER 257), and some characters are tempted by the idea of life alone on a desert island, as a ‘king
without subjects’ (5S 5). But those who actually experience such conditions are in practice soon disenchanted.
Smith concludes ‘Malheur à qui est seul’, and Nemo similarly declaims ‘Je meurs d’avoir cru que l’on pouvait
vivre seul’ — although he does not say if he would have done the same again (IM 513; 819; cf. CG 327).
Only the posthumous characters do not concur. The pilot of the Danube and the Zartog are shown as actually
preferring solitude; and the hero of Les Naufragés du ‘Jonathan’, especially, can find no permanent solution to
the problems of society other than the cloister (NJ III xv 442), a cell consisting of a bare and rocky island: he
decides to ‘vivre, libre, seul, — à jamais’ (NJ III xv 444). Once again, Michel’s conclusions extrapolate those of
his father to the point of exaggeration.
The problems of lack of integration in the time and space of society are particularly evident in the case of the
scientist. Mechanics, in paricular, is very prominent in many of the Voyages, with whole chapters devoted to it
in at least five different works (TL, AL, SDD, 500, HS). The scientists often claim that science is infallible (for
example, VCT 126), and mechanics in particular is described as having the almost magical power of predicting
118
MZ 115, TL 23, MS 230; CH 285; 297; 20M 326; PD xvi 254; cf. AF 54.
20M 190, RC 80; VCT 3; ER 166; AL 57; RV 3, TCC 108; CC passim; CM 118, cf. Lidenbrock’s
‘auditoire imaginaire’ (VCT 310).
120
VCT 3–4, 311; DO 13; 22; 58; 115; IN 91.
119
76
the future with perfect accuracy (for example, PF 265, CM 178–9). But the practice is frequently shown to be
very different. A predicted total eclipse is only partial, all the experts are wrong about the path of the moon
projectile, and the most competent scientists cannot agree whether a certain meteor will fall on Japan in June or
Patagonia in July. Science ultimately proves to be eminently perfectible (VCT 48), merely serving ‘à savoir, la
plupart du temps, qu’on ne sait pas encore tout’ (HS 494). Darko Suvin’s contention, that ‘science [. . .] was for
Verne [. . .] the bright noonday certainty of Newtonian physics’, is therefore far from the truth. 121
An identical division may sometimes be detected in the personality traits of Verne’s characters. There are a
large number of rigid characters, obsessed with rules and duty, defined in a word by their ‘mechanicalness’.
Thus Zacharius’s resemblance to a pendulum (MZ 113) is shared by Lidenbrock, ‘[qui fait des] enjambées
mathématiques d’une demi-toise’ (VCT 7), but also by the scatologically-presented Nicholl, ‘un chronomètre à
secondes, à échappement, avec huit trous’ (AL 16). But it is Fogg who is subject most often to mechanical and
chronometric metaphors:
Une véritable mécanique (TM 14), ce qu’il faisait était [. . .] mathématiquement toujours la même chose (TM 4).
Avec la précision d’un automate (TM 311, cf. 321, 331), il ne voyageait pas, il décrivait une circonférence.
C’était un corps grave, parcourant une orbite autour du globe terrestre, suivant les lois de la mécanique
rationnelle (TM 71–2). (C’était) un être bien équilibré dans toutes ses parties, justement pondéré, aussi parfait
qu’un chronomètre (TM 10).
Because they sacrifice human values, these men are often presented as being more efficient than their fellows.
But in practice, ponderous perfection normally tends to defeat even its own object. Zacharius is led to his death,
Hatteras to madness, and Nicholl and Fogg survive only by tempering their severity, by adopting some of the
flexibility of their ‘luxuriant’ companions.122 Whether as a scientific theory or as a mode of behaviour, then, the
systematism of mechanics is its very weakness, rendering it unadapted to the real world. Once again Verne
starts off with a relatively banal idea — mechanics was a frequent metaphor over much of the period 1850–80,
the apogee of scientism. But in fact, having put the conventional wisdoms of the day into the mouths of his
characters (and sometimes his narrator), Verne thens to proceed systematically to upset them. Ultimately, he
argues, mechanics solves very few problems — and time cannot be treated as a mere physical constant.
Thus, although Verne’s conception of science is that of an open system, the individual savant is constantly
threatened by the closure of his personal world. In the ‘worst’ cases, he lives virtually outside the space and
time of normal human activity. He omits to sign his letters — ‘Pouvait-on douter qu’elles ne fussent de moi?’
— does not know how to read a railway timetable, and forgets either days — ‘Tiens! mon dîner a passé vite’ —
or whole decades (HS 329; VCT 65; 40; 49). He attempts to subvert those time-pieces and other instruments
which do not read as he would have wished, to hurry up the time of the natural world, or to apply science to
himself (for example, RV 92; 20M 608, JMC i 13). In the early works, his concomitant ignorance of
psychology, finance and politics leads him into relatively harmless incidents and accidents; but in the later ones,
his parabolic, hyperbolic, or elliptic behaviour causes him to become the tool of unscrupulous villains and thus
to become a force for evil. His essential problem has to do with his division between scientific knowledge and
human knowledge. He cuts himself off from present reality,123 he denies his own subjectivity and his own
position in time, and even his science is self-centred (for example, HS 527, MZ 128, 158). The result is an
enclosure in the straitjacket of the present which is itself adrift in a sort of spaceless void.
‘Introduction’, in H.G. Wells and Modern Science Fiction (1977), ed. Darko Suvin, with Robert M.
Philmus, pp. 9–32 (21).
122
Raymond, ‘L’Homme et l’horloge’, p. 144. For further discusssions of the man-machine comparison, see
Jules Verne 3.
123
[Ce sont] des gens [. . .] qui ne font que marquer les points quand nous (autres) jouons la partie’ (TL 225).
121
77
But even the scientist who lives in time, ‘in touch’ with others and aware of such problems, is not thereby
totally exonerated. The Vernian savant is constantly subject to the dangers of relying exclusively on the past or
present and of falling into plagiarism or self-observation, especially when he is confronted with apparently
virgin lands. Thus territories that might have been thought to be most clearly uninhabited — the North Pole, the
depths of the ocean, the interior of the Earth or the dark side of the moon — often contain convincing evidence
of human activity, in the form of ruins, footprints or voices (CH 536–8; 20M 420–4; VCT 209–11, 219; AL
244). Even less remote and prestigious areas pose scientific problems in determining what is really new. Where
does the solitary savage discovered on the desert island come from (IM 503)? Is the giant human skeleton
authentic? What is the origin of the missing-link creatures’ culture? Are the logic, precision and subtlety of the
Australian Aborigines’ language, implying the possibility of a lost civilisation (B 457), further evidence of the
superiority of the first men? Is the Gaelic spoken by a girl discovered in a disused mine a natural language, one
spoken without ever having been learnt (IN 152)?
Some of the questions are never answered, but in a majority of cases, apparently convincing evidence of
unsullied savages merely proves to be due to a European presence: the ruins on the ocean-floor, for instance,
are those of Atlantis, the mummy in the interior of the Earth is a white man, the solitary savage is a castaway,
the culture of the missing-link creatures comes mainly from a resident German anthropologist, and the skeleton
is nothing but a modern fake. And where there are no convenient natives to act as resonator for the Europeans’
contact with their own culture, an extremely neat self-reflective device sometimes substitutes: voices heard
underground are actually in the character’s head; the lunar ruins exist only in Ardan’s imagination; and two
different sets of footprints in totally virgin territory are caused by the explorers’ coming full circle and
following tracks previously made by themselves (VCT 209–11; AL 244; CH 549, VCT 322)! Scoops are
therefore much rarer than it would at first seem, for explorers are often simply investigating each other or, in
the worst cases, themselves. Once again originality and a different future prove hard to find.
Although scientific knowledge is often presented as a powerful model for understanding the world, the actual
process of scientific/geographic discovery is thus shown as fraught with tremendous problems. Verne argues
that the question of authenticity cannot employ the logical categories used in established laboratory science, but
necessarily points back to the subjectivity and existence-in-time of the field scientist himself. Only by resisting
the tendency to the eccentric and the inhuman can the scientist hope to retain both his sanity and his scientific
effectiveness. There is no automatic test of originality, time cannot be circumvented, and the only conclusion is
largely pessimistic and self-cancelling: the vicious circle of authentic discovery depends on the need to exercise
systematic doubt, to transcend one’s own thought-processes, in short, to ‘bootstrap’ oneself up onto a higher
conceptual level.
Verne ultimately argues against the positivistic views characteristic of his epoch. His scientists are
individualists, who have apparently no need of sustained contact with external reality, but who remain in
practice vitally dependent on such a contact. Verne’s vision of ongoing scientific discovery is expressed in
terms remarkably similar to those of literary creation.
Individual and Society
The situations examined in the present chapter take on varied forms, but they all revolve around a single
concern — the relationship between the individual and the physical world.
There is an initial identification between Earth-mother and sexual/alimentary object, furnace and ventre,
piston and bas-ventre, the ship’s mechanics and the mechanics of sex. This fruitful material imagery of course
contributes to the vivacity of Verne’s descriptions of animate and inanimate objects, and represents another
example of his desire to break down the established boundaries. But it also has consequences for the role of the
person. The individual’s part is passive, involving mere stimulus-response reactions without the need for
initiative or foresight. The security of these compact systems is paid for by the giving up of any attempt to
control events or to come to terms with the future.
78
Then, in a more active stage, the endogamy is increased — the bodies burn or eat each other, and interaction
consists of egoistical but positive activities like cannibalisation, cannibalism or abnormal sex. There is next a
counter-variant based on pure altruism and reversing the same activities. But in the last, self-reflexive stage, the
poles of the sexual and alimentary cycles are superimposed onto each other: the appendage is absorbed into its
support, survival is fused with self-destruction, discardable object with sacrosanct subject, and the microcosm
with the whole universe.
Thus, although time and space are not the explicit object of Verne’s concerns, they do constitute much of the
prevailing force behind all these closed systems: it is the finite amount of resources and the absolute curtailment
of the future which are at the same time the reason for the eccentric behaviour and its inevitable result. Fear for
the future and retreat into a narrow present are inextricably linked in Verne’s world.
Social interaction follows an identical sequence, an identical withering away of the state of companionship.
There is again a ‘normal’ situation, consisting of the small group, which is isolated but otherwise
unexceptional. In contrast, interaction in the second stage, that of the ego~sme
i
à deux of the man-and-hisservant, man-and-his-wife or man-and-his-double, is no longer between autonomous entities but does involve
more than a single individual. The result is that time is all the more distorted and unpredictable. The final stage
again consists of the singleton, engrossed in a total solipsism that apparently excludes all possibilty of change in
the future, and who is again prone to take his self-centred view as representative of the whole world. Time will
however exact a spectacular revenge.
Personal concerns are thus vital in the Voyages. It is always possible of course to relate such concerns to the
life of the writer. But what is more illuminating, and what previous commentators on Verne’s works seem to
have missed, is the vital importance of the self, the blending together of passivity and activity, the central role
of autism. Much of the interest of the extreme situations resides in their exploration of the psyche, in their
exposure of the hypocrisy and cruelty normally hidden in the give-and-take of the social system, their
destruction of the pretence that morality consists exclusively of consideration for others. Why should
necrocannibalism be frowned upon, why should the sacrifice of one man to save twelve be forbidden, and why
should even the subject of autocannibalism be tabou?
Although Verne uses Biblical imagery, he is careful to pose his interrogation in general terms: can the
conventional morality of the nineteenth century be a practical basis for living? The Voyages show up the
contradictions inherent in even loving one’s neighbour as oneself.
Another aspect of the individual is to be found in the intersection of science’s two main functions — as a
passive repository of knowledge, and as an active mode of changing the real world. Applied, i.e. geographical,
science in Verne’s works consists of an attempt to put the claim to universal and objective knowledge into
pratice, and thus to go one better than well-oiled but piecemeal Natural systems. But the claim proves illfounded, and the attempt misguided. Often, the Vernian scientist’s assertions are merely subjective impressions
dressed up in impressive language, and his belief in his own infallibility leads him into monumental errors. But
even when the scientist is sane and conscientious, his restricted point of view can lead him into the trap of
believing that he has made authentic, exogamous discoveries, when he is merely observing a reflection of his
own civilisation or of himself. In every case, therefore, science and the scientist have an inescapable Achilles
heel. As would be proved rigorously by Go
~del in 1931, the most rigorous reasoning system proves powerless
when applied to its own base. Closing a system produces an essential epistemological incompleteness. The only
attitude is to accept that the scientific method is vulnerable and that mistakes are the price to be paid for
knowledge in an open system. Verne insists that the only important hypotheses are the refutable ones, that, in
contrast to Natural systems, human-based systems always contain an element of instability.
More generally, the example of the scientists underlines the fundamental choice between closed systems and
systems where behaviour cannot be circumscribed. Hyperfinite spaces in the Voyages present advantages of
predictability in the short term and as such would seem to be a sign of a deep insecurity, a desire to create a
watertight defensive shield against the rest of the world. But what happens, of course, is that the germs of
anxiety are all the more effectively incubated. The temporality that results is an obsessional cycle which gets
79
tighter and tighter, producing a semblance of faster and faster activity. But at the same time, there is less and
less real substance to flow, the semblance gets thinner and thinner, the time-of-events more and more diluted —
in external terms at least. The result that the system tends to is what Beckett calls the ‘last moment’ — the
(undefined) multiplication of an infinite intensity by an infinitesimal amount of constructive activity: an eternal
terminal moment unstably suspended between totalisation and annihilation. The closed cycle finishes by being
absorbed into its own object.
Verne’s conclusion is that the temptation of the perfect closed system should be resisted, for there is always a
blind spot situated between observer and observation, actor and action. The man within the scientist has to
accept the extreme contingency attached to the discovery of knowledge; and the scientist in the man must
accept personal and temporal relativity, and participate in the looser, partly self-regulating time of the social
system. Time must be left for what Fogg calls the ‘frottements’ (TM 100) engendered by human intercourse, the
repeated va-et-vient of real communication. Verne argues that if human beings distinguish themselves from the
inorganic through their capacity to reflect, and from the merely organic through their capacity to self-reflect,
they must nevertheless ensure that their introspection is not total. Only in this way can man transcend a passive
reaction and maintain an active and long-term equilibrium with his material, social and intellectual
environment. Time and space are one of man’s essential concerns.
80
8
PAST
REFLEXIONS
Employait-il le crayon multicolore afin
de mieux varier ses rimes rebelles ? (HS
21)
Past Present
hroughout the Voyages, there is a constant tension between the outward exploration and the inward search,
between a relentless progressive movement and a determined regressive one. It would perhaps be normal if
T a similar tension could be found in the ‘form’ of the text, especially the tenses. The apparently unified
fictional time-flow implied by the verbs may conceal more subjective modes of time. In this way the
highly-recurrent linguistic signs of ther tense could perhaps in turn provide further insight into ‘the internal
economy’ of the text. They may in particular prove one of the most revealing indicators of certain introverted or
‘self-reflexive’ qualities in the time and space of the collected works.
Studies of tense in fiction have not concentrated a great deal on the functioning of particular novels. 124 As a
result it is difficult to know when — and how — certain features entered a given language.
The research has shown, nevertheless, that the traditional novel belongs, at any given point in the text, to one
or other of two general modes, and that these modes strongly condition the events recounted. The first, the more
‘objective’, past-tense mode, consists in French essentially of the passé simple and the past anterior, what
Weinrich calls ‘temps narratifs’ and Emile Benveniste, ‘temps de l’histoire’.125 The other, the more
‘subjective’, present-tense mode, is made up of the present, the passé composé, the future, and their derived
forms, Weinrich’s ‘temps commentatifs’ and Benveniste’s ‘temps du discours’. The division thus separates the
passé simple from the passé composé, with the former implying a temporality removed from the ‘present’ (the
origin of narration), and the latter implying some sort of ‘collusion’ with it. The imperfect, pluperfect and
conditional, on the other hand, take on the value of whichever of the two modes they are in contact with (even
if in practice this is much more often the past-tense mode).
Until some time in the nineteenth century, the primary mode of every novel in continuous narrative seems to
have been the past-tense one, in both French and Western European languages in general.126 The main reasons
seem to be of a temporal nature. First, the juxtaposition of passés simples, even without an adverb of time,
somehow ‘produces’ a temporal progression, in the sense that the verbs are normally read as referring to
124
See for instance the surveys in Imbs, pp. 70–5, W.J.M. Bronzwaer, Tense in the Novel: An Investigation
of Some Potentialities of Linguistic Criticism (Groningen: 1970), chs 1 and 2, and Harald Weinrich, Le Temps
(1973, trans. from German by Michèle Lacoste), passim.
125
Le Temps, pp. 20–2, 36, 265; Problèmes de linguistique générale (1966), pp. 237–50 (239).
Hence the ‘twenty-four hour rule’, the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century prescription that only events
occurring less than twenty-four hours before the moment of narration should be recounted in the passé composé
(Weinrich, p. 291).
126
According to Weinrich (p. 40) and Christian Paul Casparis, Tense Without Time: The Present Tense in
Narration (Bern: 1975), p. 12. Sub-genres like the fictional diary and the novel-by-letters employ other tenses,
of course.
Since that period, novels have been written in the present (see Chapter 9 below), the passé composé (Albert
Camus, L’Etranger (1942)) and the imperfect (Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg (1924) (Weinrich, p. 57)).
81
successive moments — and the passé simple is probably the only tense to have this property.127 But secondly,
and as far as the absolute temporality is concerned, Käte Hamburger has argued that the passé simple in a
fictional context does not necessarily refer to a specific time-zone at all. It is not a past tense, but a zero-tense, a
neutral form, merely a highly convenient way of narrating. 128 Her thesis has, understandably, provoked a great
deal of controversy. To the extent that verisimilitude is operative, the fact that the passé simple in a nonfictional context refers to a definite time-sphere means that it will do so in a fictional context as well. But on the
other hand, in so far as the ‘suspension of disbelief’ contributes to the creation of a fictional world,
Hamburger’s thesis may be considered to have considerable validity — there is no direct connection between
fiction and fact. Without totally accepting either position, then, Verne’s examples may give us concrete
confirmation of one or other of the two positions.
The tenses rarely operate in isolation, of course — there are normally adverbs present, and in fiction
especially they often influence the mode. In particular, the opposition passé composé-passé simple is sometimes
reproduced in the adverbs. The best example is the series ‘hier’-’aujourd’hui’-’demain’ compared with ‘la
veille’-’ce jour-là’-’le lendemain’. The difference between the two is perhaps at first hard to seize — as
Bronzwaer points out (pp. 44–50), both series refer to an identical semantic division past-present-future. But in
the first series the period in question is implied to contain the ‘present’ (the period from which the narration is
taking place), and in the second, to be distinct from it. In other words, ‘aujourd’hui’ is as direct as one can get;
but ‘ce jour-là’ contains a distancing effect.
Accordingly, the first series — to which may be added ‘maintenant’, ‘actuellement’, ‘à présent’, ‘en ce
moment’, ‘ici’, ‘voici’, ‘ce [. . .]-ci’ — is normally used with the present-tense mode; and the second, together
with ‘alors’, ‘à ce moment’, ‘voilà’, ‘ce [. . .]-là’, with the past-tense one. In practical terms, ‘aujourd’hui, il
travaille’ and ‘ce jour-là, il travailla(it)’ may respectively be considered normal combinations (the first one
occurring most frequently in direct speech, and the second in conventional narration). The two series of adverbs
will consequently be referred to as ‘present-context’ and ‘past-context’ ones. (It should however be pointed out
that the vast majority of adverbs, whether ‘point’ ones like ‘puis’, ‘en 1870' or ‘une fois’, or durative or
iterative ones, like ‘longtemps’ ‘or ‘tous les jours’, are neutral in this respect.)
If the adverbs and tenses always agreed, the opposition would be of little interest. In fact, it is possible for,
say, present-context adverbs to occur in the past-tense mode. The resulting combination — ‘aujourd’hui, il
travaillait’129 — is intuitively striking. It may perhaps at first sight seem modern, psychological, slovenly, or
perverse. In fact, it has frequently been attested in the ‘best’ authors: it is encountered above all in the free
indirect style.130
Such a juxtaposition undoubtedly becomes all the more surprising when the adverb is one of future meaning,
as in ‘DEMAIN, il travaillait’. This occurrence is sometimes pronounced as incorrect by native or other
competent speakers of French. The general combination is indeed referred to by John Lyons as being a category
127
According to Imbs, p. 82 (Ferdinand Brunot accords this property to both the passé simple and the passé
composé (La Pensée et la langue (1936), p. 472) — but see infra for the unnaturalness of long sequences of
unaccompanied passés composés.) The sceptical reader may legitimately ask whether temporal sequentiality is
an ‘intrinsic’ property of the passé simple, or whether it has come to acquire it.
128
Die Logik der Dichtung (Stuggart: 1957). For an illuminating account of this study see Pascal.
Hamburger’s thesis is also expounded, and extrapolated, in Weinrich, esp. pp. 66–106.
129
The passé simple is rarely seen in such cases. In general in the following discussion, what applies to the
imperfect, which often forms an integral part of the past-tense system, will also apply, a fortiori, to the passé
simple.
130
See Bronzwaer, pp. 44–6. It does occasionally occur in normal narrative situations, but in these cases
there is always a hint of indirect style, an ‘empathy’ between narrator and character (Bronzwaer, pp. 47–9).
82
of construction which is self-evidently non-grammmatical.131 His affirmation is understandable, for it seems in
effect to be absent from novels written before the middle of the nineteenth century. 132 Nevertheless it has been
unmistakably identified in subsequent ones. It occurs only in narrative, and only in the free indirect style; and it
thus indicates that the context in question is to be interpreted not only as not part of the main narrative, but also
as being a subjective vision, and, above all, as being fictional.133
As such, its importance cannot be overestimated: this combination is apparently the only clear sign indicating
that an utterance is ‘not strictly true’ — or at least has a limited truth-value. Of course, the opposition fictional’true’ has been the object of much playful undermining throughout the history of literature (and film).
Nevertheless, this ‘demain, il travaillait’ combination — perhaps because it affirms intentions only accessible to
an omniscient and therefore necessarily fictional narrator — has remained a relatively reliable marker of
fictionality up to the present.
Self-Conscious Narration
In practice, the distinction between the past- and present-tense modes is not always watertight. As far as Verne
is concerned, the passé composé is occasionally seen accompanied only by the passé simple. At the ends of the
novels, for example, we read: ‘Harry Grant DEVINT l’homme le plus populaire de la vieille Calédonie. Son fils
Robert S’EST FAIT marin comme lui’ or ‘[. . .] cette dernière traversée FUT heureuse et rapide [. . .]. Ainsi S’EST
TERMINEE cette aventureuse et extraordinaire campagne qui COUTA trop de victimes, hélas!’.134
Such occurrences, indicating the transition stage of the closing scenes, are perhaps not exceptional in the
French novel of the nineteenth century.135 But in one particular case, Verne may be carrying out an original
experiment: when his passés composés ‘displace’ the passés simples over a complete passage. Previously, an
escape had already been recounted in the passé simple: ‘Les douaniers continuèrent [. . .]. Ce fut peine perdue.
§ Dès que le fugitif les crut suffisamment éloignés [. . .]’ (DL 7). But then it is narrated for a second time:
Pendant la nuit [le héros] s’est jeté à travers les glaçons [. . .]. Une ronde de douaniers [. . .] s’est lancée sur ses
traces, et [. . .] a fait feu sur lui. [Il] n’a pas été atteint et a pu se réfugier dans une hutte de pêcheurs, où il a
passé la journée. Puis, le soir venu, il s’est remis en marche, a dû fuir devant une bande de loups, n’a trouvé
d’abri que dans le moulin d’où un brave meunier a favorisé son évasion. Enfin, poursuivi par l’escouade du
brigadier Eck, [. . .] il a pu échapper en se jetant sur les glaçons en dérive de la Pernova. C’est miracle [. . .] s’il
n’a pas péri dans la débâcle, et s’il lui a été possible de séjourner à Pernau sans y être découvert [. . .] (DL
(1904) 178, cf. FD 115).
131
Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics (1968), p. 349 (Lyons uses English for his examples, but his
argument explicitly applies to other languages).
132
Laurence Sterne’s famous ‘A cow broke in (tomorrow morning)’ (The Life and Opinions of Tristram
Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67), vol. III, ch. 38) forms an isolated exception — one so self-conscious as to be
close to ‘pathological’. The question of knowing when such combinations came into general use does not seem
to have been answered by the critics — at best, one can cite analysts like Holger Sten, Les Temps du verbe fini
(indicatif) en français moderne (Copenhagen: 1964), p. 100, who quotes examples only from the twentieth
century.
133
Or at the very least highly fictionalised, as in romanticised biography or history. See Bronzwaer, pp. 44,
46, for examples and a fuller theoretical exposition.
134
CG 871; SG 496; cf. TL 361, ChC 239–40, MM xviii 440. Similarly, one may note ‘naguère’ (= ‘il n’y a
guère’) at the end of a story in the passé simple (DM v 452).
135
See Imbs, p. 104. (It has been attested in German for the eighteenth century (Weinrich, p. 229).)
83
The use of the passé composé over more than twenty verbs is undoubtedly a surprising innovation; but once
again the literature is lacking in historical analyses of the question. Despite the example of L’Etranger (1942),
where the passé composé plays such an important role, one may suspect that sustained sequences of this tense
have been — and remain — extremely rare, given the impression of strain that they generate. In spoken French,
as Weinrich notes (pp. 302–6; cf. Fitch, p. 35), either large numbers of imperfects are also used or, most
frequently, presents, which normally even outnumber the passé composé. The tense used by Camus’s firstperson character is, according to Sartre, a major reason for the lack of continuity between the sentences, and
contributes therefore to the reader’s impression of incoherence and absurdity in the individual actions; but B.T.
Fitch argues that the passé composé is virtually the only tense that could have been used to construct the
complex but largely coherent overall relationship between the character and the narrator. 136 The two views are
not of course entirely incompatible.
Verne’s use of tense has perhaps similarly divergent consequences. The hero’s actions seem to constitute less
of an automatic linear progression than a new achievement with each phrase, a new defiance of what the reader
already knows to be the conclusion — his capture. At the same time, the reader searches for the connection
between the narrator and the character implied by the passé composé (Imbs, p. 103). But since there is neither
an explicit narrative stance, nor an implied one (as there is at the ends of the novels), nor even a ‘je’ to create
some sort of connection, there remains an irreducible tension between what is being recounted and the manner
of recounting.
These brief experiments in the history of literary forms, involving the introduction of the passé composé, are
in fact particularly characteristic of Verne’s style elsewhere: in the narrow sense of the presence/absence of his
narrator; but more generally, in the play on naivety/sophistication and obviousness/deviousness that permeates
the whole of the Voyages.
In the general case, then, the literary distancing produced by the passé simple, its relegation of events to a
(semi-real) past, is
subverted. The later Verne may thus here be compared with Flaubert who, as Jonathan Culler says, ‘leads his
readers to expect an intelligible history and then fails at crucial moments to provide it’ (The Uses of Uncertainty
(1974), p. 42). A subterranean link is created between the narrator and events, and the objective, well-ordered
temporality customary in the novel of the period hesitates. The events come to seem slightly contingent, the
narrative spotlight to partially illuminate its own support.
It Was Tomorrow
The other principal past tense, the imperfect, has a standard function in narration: that of mise en relief for the
passé simple. Verne demonstrates his command of most of the normal varieties including the imparfait
d’ouverture and the imperfect used for future events, for example ‘un phénomène allait évidemment se produire
dans lequel l’électricité JOUAIT son rôle’ (VCT 349, cf. TM 129).137
But in other cases in the Voyages a succession of imparfaits pittoresques produces a remarkable stylistic
effect, contributing notably to the build-up of suspense. Particularly vivid examples include the scenes
describing the pursuit of a creeper through a dangerous section of jungle in La Jangada, the slow crossing of a
treacherous marsh in Michel Strogoff, the perilous descent of an underground river in Mathias Sandorf or the
discovery of the lost ruins of Atlantis in Vingt mille lieues (J 80–6; MSt 217–21; MS 131–2; 20M 412–20).
But the imperfect is especially striking when used in the presentation of Fogg’s race against time on his landyacht across the frozen prairie, and in the climax of Vingt mille lieues where the prisoners finally succed in
escaping from the submarine:
Situations I (1947), pp. 99–121; ‘L’Etranger’ (1960), ch. 3 (see also Weinrich, pp. 308–16).
137
See Maurice Grevisse, Le Bon usage (1975), § 717, and Imbs, p. 92.
136
84
Le traîneau volait sur l’immense tapis de neige [. . .]; il passait quelques creeks [. . .]. Les champs et les cours
d’eau disparaissaient sous une blancheur uniforme. La plaine était absolument déserte [. . .], une grande île
inhabitée [. . .]. De temps en temps, on voyait passer comme un éclair quelque arbre grimaçant, dont le blanc
squelette se tordait sous la brise. Parfois, des bandes d’oiseaux sauvages s’enlevaient du même vol. Parfois
aussi, quelques loups [. . .], maigres, affamés [. . .], luttaient de vitesse avec le traîneau. Alors Passepartout [. . .]
se tenait prêt à faire feu [. . .]. Mais le traîneau tenait bon, il ne tardait pas à prendre de l’avance, et bientôt toute
la bande hurlante restait en arrière [. . .] (TM 285–6).
Le Nautilus [. . .] décrivait une spirale dont le rayon diminuait de plus en plus. Ainsi que lui, le canot, encore
accroché à son flanc, était emporté avec une vitesse vertigineuse [. . .]. Nous étions ballottés affreusement. Le
Nautilus se défendait comme un être humain. Ses muscles d’acier craquaient. Parfois il se dressait, et nous avec
lui! [. . .] [Soudain,] un craquement se produisait. Les écrous manquaient, et le canot, arraché de son alvéole,
était lancé comme la pierre d’une fronde au milieu du tourbillon (20M 611–2).
The first passage is a well-developed example of Romantic imagery, with its desolation and its play on the
opposition dead-alive (the living skeleton, the dying wolves); and the second, one of ‘realist’ imagery, with its
familiar man-machine comparison and phallic and childbirth symbolism. But much of the power of both comes
also from their presentation of space and time.
In each case the protagonists’ movements are, or become, rectilinear, but in the first they contrast with an
empty space (‘déserte’, ‘blancheur uniforme’), and in the second, with a circular, introjective, one (‘spirale’,
‘alvéole’). Above all, it is the imperfects that are vital in both, creating two opposed but interacting times-ofevents. On one hand, succession and progression are emphasised (imperfect + ‘parfois’, ‘de temps en temps’,
‘alors’), in accordance with what has undoubtedly become a general tendency in the ‘realist’ and adventure
novel. But on the other, time seems to be hardly moving at all (the imperfect on its own), giving the impression,
as in the best Romantic tradition, of being ethereal, non-spatial or drugged.138 The effect of both passages, one
of great urgency in slow motion, comes therefore from their union between a certain density of internal events
and an overall lack of progression. As in the underground cavern and the hyperclosed spaces, Verne manages to
create a new mode of perceiving time.
Some of the other imperfects benefit from a similar loosening of temporal progression, but linked now with
an ambiguity in the narrator’s position. Thus apparently straightforward statements of fact are made using this
tense: ‘le chaland était complètement vide’; ‘il n’y avait plus de doute: le Dream venait de couler à pic’; ‘Duk
aboyait auprès d’un cadavre enveloppé dans le pavillon d’Angleterre’; ‘[Fogg] était bien et dûment ruiné’, ‘il
avait perdu’.139 Later events prove however that the ‘corpse’ was not really dead, that Fogg was not really
ruined and so on. But such inconsistencies are not in fact limited to isolated phrases: sometimes they englobe
whole scenes (although the narrator rarely produces total non-truths). They allow, for instance, Axel and
Lidenbrock to cross the underground sea only to arrive at the point they started from, Passepartout to be in two
places at once, and the Boy-Captain to see giraffes in South America when really he is watching ostriches in
West Africa (VCT 292, 298; TM 103; C15 238)!
Clearly, something strange is going on here. If total coherence is required, the reader is obliged to accept the
principle of ‘deliberate’ self-contradiction by the narrator (perhaps in many cases under pressure from his
publisher and his public to produce happy endings); or else to consider the utterances as being in some sort of
free indirect style — even in instances where it is very difficult to link them with any of the characters at all.
But in either case, they must be considered as belonging essentially to an instance of narration and therefore a
time-zone that is not fully part of the main narrative.
138
See Richard Glasser, Time in French Life and Thought (Munich: 1936, trans. C.G. Pearson, Manchester:
1972), p. 276. Poe’s Pym would seem a particular influence.
139
PD xi 182; ER 74; CH 579; TM 309–10; 312; cf. 20M 399, TCC 209, ChC 42–3.
85
The adverbs also set certain utterances apart from the main flow of the narrative. One can sometimes observe
the dissonances between the adverbs and the tenses noted above: ‘Les mécontents rallièrent bientôt à leur idées
le premier ingénieur, qui JUSQU’ICI restait esclave du devoir’; ‘le 24 mai DERNIER [. . .], le nabab avait été
prévenu’.140 These combinations, which are perhaps due once more to free indirect style, are certainly unusual;
but even more striking ones are occasionally visible: ‘la famille Cascabel arriverait [. . .] en juillet de l’année
PROCHAINE’; ‘cette opération devait être terminée [. . .] le 15 octobre PROCHAIN’; ‘ce fidèle et complaisant
satellite reviendrait APRES-DEMAIN’; ‘D’ICI LA, tous les préparatifs pouvaient être entièrement terminés’;
‘c’était DEMAIN’.141
What is distinctive about both categories is that the verbs remain in the normal past-tense narrative system,
whereas the adverbs imply a fictional immediacy, a time-zone that is meant to be ‘really’ present. When the
present-context adverb is one of future reference, producing an even more marked contrast with the surrounding
past-tense mode, as in ‘c’était demain’, the dissonance between verb and adverb becomes almost total. In such
cases the explanation in terms of the free indirect style is certainly useful; but it is, I would argue, insufficient to
account for the radical reduction of the temporal distance between narrator and narrataire. It is as if the text had
jumped out of itself and into an open-ended future. For brief moments, the text is self-sufficient.
As for the originality of the device, it is not impossible that this often disembodied flouting of the fictional
time-sphere might owe part of its introduction to Verne. Large numbers of commentators have pointed out the
use of the free indirect style in Flaubert, especially Madame Bovary (1857), but also in La Fontaine and La
Chanson de Roland (for example, Stephen Ullmann, Language and Style (1964), p. 134). But the peculiarly
disembodied free indirect style that Verne favours has rarely been identified; and in particular this rupture of
the traditional time-flow does not seem yet to have been identified in other writers of the nineteenth century.
Verne contains complexities in the most surprising places.
Will There Be a Reply?
The tense where narrative and fictional time come closest together, and which most combines non-sequential
and self-referential qualities, is undoubtedly the present. This tense is also the one that comes closest to our
immediate experience. It is a largely unmarked form, in the sense that it often consists merely of the stem of the
verb. Above all, it is one that can stand on its own, without other tenses or adverbial support.
In fiction, there are a number of situations where the present tense is normal: where the narrator or author
intervenes; in direct style, especially dialogue; in the historic present; and in the descriptive present. Verne’s
works make full use of these possibilities. But in certain cases, they go far beyond the conventional categories.
A first area consists of ‘visionary’ presents:
[. . .] Le curé [. . .] remettait ce navire entre les mains de Dieu. § Où va ce navire? Il suit la route périlleuse sur
laquelle se sont perdus tant de naufragés! Il n’a pas de destination certaine! Il doit s’attendre à tous les périls et
savoir les braver sans hésitation! Dieu seul sait où il lui sera donné d’aborder! Dieu le conduise! (HG 231; cf.
IM 60, VCT 339, 20M 398).
Ils moururent en hommes qui avaient fait le sacrifice de leur vie pour leurs pays. [. . .] Ainsi donc, trois
misérables [. . .] n’avaient pas reculé devant cette odieuse machination! § Une telle infamie ne sera-t-elle donc
pas punie sur cette terre [. . .]? Le comte Sandorf, le comte Zathmar, Etienne Bathory [. . .], ne seront-ils pas
vengés? (MS 182; cf. VCT 332–3).
140
CH 96, cf. 20M 472, DL 4, VCT 208, CC II iii 242; MV 473. When the context consists only of verbs in
the past-tense system, the continuous tenses, including the imperfect, pluperfect and conditional, may also be
considered part of it (see supra).
141
CC I xvi 198; 20M 245, cf. PD xi 107; TL 157, cf. BL xii 108, ChC 42; 20M 397; CH 510; SG 346.
86
Nous sommes au lendemain [. . .]. Un des canots est à la traîne . . . Je préviens le métis . . . Nous nous glissons
sans être aperçus [. . .], et le courant nous emporte . . . § Nous allons ainsi sur la mer toujours libre . . . Enfin
notre canot s’arrête . . . Une terre est là . . . Je crois apercevoir une sorte de sphinx [. . .], le sphinx des glaces . .
. Je vais à lui . . . Je l’interroge . . . Il me livre les secrets de ces mystérieuses régions . . . (SG 347).
Despite major differences, each passage seems to be situated somewhere between a prophetic present and a free
direct style. Above all, each creates a distinctive temporality within the general context of past tenses, for each
contains a present time-zone together with an autonomous future. The illusion is produced of non-determined
events (sometimes thoughts) being recounted as they actually happen.
Another area where narrative and fictional time come together is in messages-in-bottles and other documents
within the Voyages. In such cases, the communication emanates from a position of terrible need, as indicated by
both the laconicness of the language and the fact that the communication is often interrupted:
‘[. . .] continuellement en proie à une cruelle indigence, [les naufragés] ont jeté ce document par 153° de
longitude et 37° 11' de latitude. Venez à leur secours, ou ils sont perdus’ (CG 861); ‘[. . .] ce 26 avril [. . .], nous
sommes entraînés par les courants vers les glaces! Dieu ait pitié de nous!’ (HG 235); je vais prendre mes
dernières notes, et, lorsque les marins français débarqueront sur la pointe, j’irai . . . (FD 259); les derniers mots
relevés sur son carnet furent ceux-ci: ‘Un sudiste me couche en joue et . . .’ (IM 16); ‘. . . nourriture va me
manquer . . .’ (SG 101); ‘le Viken va sombrer! . . .’ (BL xii 106); ‘Vivres vont manquer, et . . .’ § Le reste de la
dépêche, déchiré par les coups de bec des goélands, n’était plus lisible (HS 259; cf. MV 471); [. . .] Quelqu’un
trouvera-t-il jamais le dépôt commis à la terre? [. . .] C’est affaire à la destinée. A Dieu, vat! . . . (EA 260).
The unfinished message is thus a characteristic mark of Verne’s narrative. It is an economical means to add to
the suspense, while leaving the reader’s imagination free to work. It also draws attention to the writing itself.
But in a variant on this topos, which occurs in both Jules and Michel, the idea is held up to ridicule. Sometimes
the ironic intention is indicated by an overworked situation and a too-regular punctuation: ‘Dans la main crispée
du cadavre, on trouva, en effet, un papier froissé, sur lequel, avant d’expirer, Alexandre Tisserand avait écrit
ces mots: ‘C’est mon neveu qui . . . ‘ (DJM 113). But sometimes it is the message itself that is devoid of
meaning, subverted by the use of too much technology. Thus one message, in an aluminium box, is aimed
directly at the Rue de Rivoli from an airship; another employs a box made of copper; Rosette sends hundreds of
virtually identical messages; and a bottle is rescued from a shark’s stomach using firearms (RC 138–44; VA viii
83; HS 329; JMC iv 43). The result of these unsporting methods is that the airship message produces no effect,
the notebook in the copper box turns out to be virtually blank, and the hundreds of messages are said to ‘mean
nothing’. And, whereas Grant’s message had proceeded directly to his children 11,000 miles away, the bottle
retrieved using firearms proves to be completely empty.
Written pleas for help are thus numerous in the Voyages. Undoubtedly the adventure genre contains many
similar instances, but in Verne’s case, the careful punctuation, the urgency of the tone, and the fate of the final
action — turned towards the future but destined to remain unfinished — should make us suspect that important
concerns are at work. It is as if the sincerity of the message were linked to the risk of its not being received. The
knowledge that even if it does arrive, it will be in a very different time and space, seems to free the writer from
his inhibitions. The more advanced stages of technology, on the other hand, destroy the risk and the protection
— and with them either the form or the substance of the message.
But the importance of the messages also resides in their temporal characteristics. For once, the narrator is
fully a character, instead of being merely a passive onlooker. Indeed, what he writes will probably determine
his destiny. But the very intensity of the form means that it cannot be sustained for long — the consequence of
bringing the narration right up to date is that it then has nowhere to go. The messages thus constitute temporal
87
balancing acts, and ones with a tendency to self-destruct. In the early works, they just come to a halt; but in the
later ones, the impulses are turned inwards, and it is the contents that tend to be destroyed instead. Only in the
Michel-Vernian ‘L’Eternel Adam’ with its message across the millennia is a certain synthesis found,
undoubtedly because the vital action here is the transmission of the message itself, and not any contents it might
have — making the emptiness here almost a virtue.
Ultimately, then, the messages illustrate all sorts of global themes. Their internal economy — and amazing
economicalness — reflect back onto a wider message. They may represent a mise en abyme of the Voyages.
A similarly precarious convergence of narrative and fictional time becomes visible at the ends of some of the
novels. The use of the passé composé and the recourse to anticipations we saw earlier may be interpreted in this
perspective as being signs of the tensions inherent in making the narration present its own demise. This is
undoubtedly a problem of all fiction, but seems to become particularly explicit at the end of Vingt mille lieues.
Aronnax is in Norway, waiting for the next ship back to France, and is reduced for a long period to total
inactivity, interrupted only by the revision of his manuscript describing his previous adventures. The present
tense here, in other words, constitutes the sign of a stagnation, a self-consciousness and a self-referentiality that
are unusual in the adventure novel.
But the ending of the very last Voyage, L’Etonnante aventure de la mission Barsac (1919), brings narrative
and fictional time even closer together. Throughout most of the novel, the narration was in the third person,
with only occasional extracts from the (first-person) newspaper articles sent back by one of the protagonists
called Amédée Florence. The final page, however, reserves a surprise:
Mais voici que [le narrateur] est parvenu à la fin de sa tâche. Bon ou mauvais, amusant ou ennuyeux, le livre
est là, maintenant. Sans inconvénients ni dangers, l’incognito peut être dévoilé, l’histoire peut être proclamée
véritable, et celui qui la rédigea, votre très humble et respectueux serviteur, peut la signer de son nom, Amédée
Florence, [. . .] avant d’écrire le grand mot, le mot sublime, le roi des mots, le mot:
FIN
This passage would seem interesting in more than one respect. As in much of the posthumous production, the
themes of authenticity and authorship are alluded to — by his play on person, Michel may also be implying that
beneath the apparently impersonal style of the Voyages, a more involved voice is detectable — especially in the
posthumous ones, his own. But also, the unique temporal situation of the closing of the sixty-eight-year cycle
produces the present-context adverbs like ‘voici’, ‘là’ and ‘maintenant’. The overall effect is embodied
especially in the build-up to the word ‘FIN’, whereby Michel finishes his father’s task, and in some sense also
finishes him off. It is thus both conventional and ironical, narratorial and authorial — it may constitute Michel
Verne’s having the last word in his debate with his father.
Breaking Out
Despite certain departures from the norms, the Voyages extraordinares do on the whole rely on the traditional
system of tenses. The passé simple outnumbers all the other tenses put together. The exceptions that we have
seen are therefore all the more interesting.
First, the use of the passé composé, without other verbs from the present-tense system, subtly distorts the
traditional, largely linear construct, by implying a narratorial presence. Where there are successive verbs in this
tense, the sequentiality of events is particularly reduced, distancing is much less, and the convention of
objective knowledge characteristic of prose fiction, past and present, is seriously weakened. Verne here
substitutes an element of self-reference and an allusion to a definite person, place and time. The passés
composés imply, but cannot create, a more involved time of narration.
88
Next, the extended imperfect affects instead the progression of events. It prolongs the duration of pointactions and reduces that of extended actions. It establishing a durée which is recursive, non-linear and
disembodied.
Thirdly, the constituent tense of Verne’s free indirect style neutralises much of the progressive quality of the
past tenses; but some of its constituent adverbs construct in addition a temporality which transgresses the norms
of the nineteenth-century novel. They thus go a long way towards replacing the ‘safe’ narration of successive
past events by an open-ended present with a remarkably undetermined future.
The visions, the messages and the endings, finally, subvert the temporal situation. Each topos starts with an
account of the past which leads up to the present. The abolition of the temporal barrier between the fiction and
the narration adds urgency and cogency. But at this vital moment — which is also sometimes the moment of
exhaustion of food or water — the topos is abruptly interrupted, and the reader is left to his own devices, as if in
a sort of textual coitus interruptus. Because the self-referentiality is so developed, there is a danger of shortcircuiting of activity, of a paralysed self-contemplation. The present-tense topoi should apparently be handled
with caution.
All four forms stand in opposition therefore to the well-established conventions of the objective narration of
past events, carried out within a largely linear temporality. Verne’s works contain an implicit critique of the
continuity and verisimilitude of the ‘realist’ novel. They secrete a self-reflexiveness and a self-referentiality
which underline ‘faults’ in the conventional system. They thus point the way to further experiments.
89
9
NOW OR
NEVER
‘Pour économiser les notes, il n’a fourré
dans sa boîte ni les ut ni les sol dièses!’ [. .
.] ‘C’est un crime’ [. . .]. Cette abomination, les Wagddis n’en
ressentaient pas toute l’horreur! . . . Ils acceptaient cette criminelle
substitution d’un mode à l’autre! . . . (VA xvi 183).
‘Si à chaque instant nous pouvons périr, à chaque instant aussi
nous pouvons être sauvés’ (VCT 341).
‘Nous sommes condamnés à l’inaction, et il est des circonstances
où il faut avoir le courage de ne rien faire!’ (C 50).
Things Going By?
s a result of the problems of using the self-referential present in narrative passages, it is difficult to imagine
how extended passages in this tense could ever exist. It would seem that the text would soon necessarily
A fall over its own bootlaces, grind to a paralysed halt.
And yet three of the Voyages extraordinaires are written virtually entirely in this tense. The novels in
question are Le Chancellor (1875), L’Ile à Hélice (1895) and Face au drapeau (1896). Le Chancellor is
apparently the very first novel in continuous prose written in the present, in French and perhaps in any Western
European language.142 What is more, L’Ile à hélice is apparently the first — perhaps only — one written in the
142
Such a claim to precedence would not stand, of course, if earlier examples were found. But Le Chancellor
(written in 1870–1 (according to Jules-Verne, p. 167)) certainly seems to predate the first authentic examples
quoted in the existing critical literature. Thus Casparis, The Present Tense in Narration, quotes The Mystery of
Edwin Drood (1870) by Dickens as the first novel to be written in the present tense: but the most cursory of
examinations reveals that over two-thirds of the verbs in this novel are in reality in the preterite. Again, Philippe
Lejeune devotes the first chapter of Je est un autre: L’Autobiographie, de la littérature aux médias (1980) to
the present tense in ‘Le Testament d’un blagueur’ (1869) and L’Enfant (1879) by Jules Vallès. In fact, ‘Le
Testament d’un blagueur’ again has only a minority of present tenses, and in any case, although Lejeune
presents it as a novel, is only 20,000 words long. L’Enfant is mainly in the present, but still often reverts to the
passé simple, apparently without reason. The critic is indeed forced to conclude that its tense system is
ultimately incoherent, referring to its ‘plusieurs systèmes de temps incompatibles’ and its ‘instance narratrice’
‘irréparable’ (p. 31).
Amongst the many subsequent novels, one can quote, slightly at random, Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson
(1939), Olivier Todd’s L’Année du crabe (1976) or J.-P. Chabrol’s Fleur d’épine (1977). On the other hand,
there are undoubtedly diaries or logbooks, whether fictional or not, dating from before 1875 and using the
present, with or without other tenses. Also, as far as verse genres are concerned, Michel Blanc has shown that
the dominant mode of La Chanson de Roland is the present tense (64.5% of the verbs), which he convincingly
compares to the present used by modern radio commentators (‘Le Présent épique dans La Chanson de Roland’,
in Actes du Xe congrès international de linguistique et philologie romanes, Strasbourg 1962 (1965), pp. 565–
78).)
90
third person and the present.143 Given the huge importance of tense in the modern novel, this moment, when the
rigid form of the past tenses was first abandoned, would seem to be vital for understanding further
developments.
But what is almost as surprising as the phenomenon itself is the critical literature on it. Serres reports his
impression that Le Chancellor is ‘un récit simple et naïf, très unilinéaire’; Delabroy declares that this novel is
the opposite of ‘l’habituelle écriture pleine de la narration, qui est l’idéal-type de la bourgeoisie’; Mustière
perceives it as being a transcription of an instance of a largely non-temporal art, the painting Le Radeau de la
Méduse; and Roudaut describes ‘L’Eternel Adam’ as ‘un récit dont le temps (time rather than tense) se confond
avec celui de la narration’.144 Despite these remarkable near-misses, not a single commentator appears even to
mention the use of the present in any of the three novels. And yet this is clearly one of the most radical formal
innovations in Verne’s works, and one which may allow us a unique entry into his ‘imaginary universe’, with
its highly revealing obsessions.
The phenomenon occurs not only in the three novels (except for three chapters in Face au drapeau (FD 1–
65)), but also in fairly lengthy sections of Voyage au centre de la Terre, Mistress Branican, La Mission Barsac,
‘L’Eternel Adam’, ‘Frritt-Flacc’, ‘La Famille Raton’ and ‘M. Ré-dièze et Mlle Mi-bémol’.145 In order to
understand the temporal structures implied by the present tense, let us start by examining a typical selection of
the opening passages, for this is where the author has to work hardest to establish the new usage:
Vendredi 14 août.- Brise égale du N.-O. Le radeau marche avec rapidité et en ligne droite. La côte reste à trente
lieues sous le vent. Rien à l’horizon. L’intensité de la lumière ne varie pas. [. . .] A midi Hans prépare un
hameçon à l’extrémité d’une corde. Il l’amorce avec un petit morceau de viande et le jette à la mer. Pendant
deux heures il ne prend rien [. . .] (VCT 256–7).
- CHARLESTON.- 27 septembre 1869.- Nous quittons le quai de la Batterie à trois heures du soir, à la pleine
mer. Le jusant nous porte rapidement au large. Le capitaine Huntly a fait établir les hautes et basses voiles, et la
brise du nord pousse le Chancellor à travers la baie. Bientôt le fort Sumter est doublé [. . .] (C 1).
Frritt! . . . c’est le vent qui déchaîne. § Flacc! . . . c’est la pluie qui tombe à torrents. § Cette rafale mugissante
courbe les arbres de la côte volsinienne et va se briser contre le flanc des montagnes de Crimma. Le long du
littoral, de hautes roches sont incessamment rongées par les lames de cette vaste mer de la Mégalocride [. . .]
(FF i 295).
Lorsqu’un voyage commence mal, il est rare qu’il finisse bien. Tout au moins est-ce une opinion qu’auraient le
droit de soutenir quatre instrumentistes, dont les instruments gisent sur le sol. En effet, le coach dans lequel ils
avaient dû prendre place à la dernière station du railroad vient de verser brusquement contre le talus de la route.
§ ‘Personne de blessé?’, demande le premier, qui s’est lentement redressé sur ses jambes [. . .] (IH I i 5).
As regards Western European languages other than English and French, see Pascal, p. 10.
In sum, and for the sake of clarity, I would like to emphasise that Verne’s extended present is not
accountable for in terms of the previous tradition, whether one considers its basic raison d’être (very different
from, for example, Stendhal’s historic or narrator’s present) or its persistence over a whole novel.
143
Casparis, p. 20, and Pascal, pp. 8–9, record no other examples to date.
144
Serres, Jouvences, p. 103; Delabroy, ‘Une Transe atlantique’, p. 227; Philippe Mustière, ‘ “L’EffetGéricault” dans Le Chancellor’, BSJV, n° 60, 4e tri. 1981, pp. 159–64 (160); Roudaut, p. 192.
145
VCT 256–91; B 378–412; MB I iv-vi 71–126, I ix-x 155–88, II ii-iii 255–86; EA 230, 240–2, 254–60; FF,
FR, RM passim.
91
Où suis-je?. . . Que s’est-il passé depuis cette agression soudaine, dont j’ai été victime à quelques pas du
pavillon? [. . .] Mais je raisonne dans la supposition que Thomas Roch a disparu avec moi. . . Cela est-il?. . .
Oui. . . cela doit être. . . cela est. . . Je ne puis hésiter à cet égard. . . Je ne suis pas entre les mains de malfaiteurs
qui n’auraient eu que le projet de voler [. . .] (FD 66–7).
Rosario, le 24 mai 2 . . .
Je date de cette façon le début de mon récit, bien qu’en réalité il ait été rédigé à une autre date beaucoup plus
récente et en des lieux bien différents. Mais, en pareille matière, l’ordre est, à mon sens, impérieusement
nécessaire, et c’est pourquoi j’adopte la forme d’un ‘journal’, écrit au jour le jour. § C’est donc le 24 mai que
commence le récit des effroyables événements que j’entends ici rapporter pour l’enseignement de ceux qui
viendront après moi, si toutefois l’humanité est encore en droit de compter sur un avenir quelconque [. . .] (EA
230).
At first sight, these passages appear to have little in common apart from the present tense itself. Even this usage
may not seem surprising: like the visionary scenes examined in the last chapter, some of the passages resemble
diaries or logbooks, some, lengthy historic presents, some, ‘fantasy-presents’, and some, narratorial presents. In
other words, each occurrence appears explicable in terms of the previous tradition.
But the reader who is confronted with this tense, paragraph after paragraph, page after page, chapter after
chapter, normally feels a sense of strangeness — as shown by the bemused reactions of the four critics. The
present tense is homeopathic in small doses, but proves highly unsettling in the long run. Indeed, reexamining
each of the explanations in the light of the extreme persistence of the tense shows that they in fact present a
problem.
The first two extracts, for instance, resemble a diary merely in having dated headings, rather than in terms of
their internal structures;146 and indeed the last one explicitly says that the diary form is a mere pretence,
artificially superimposd on the narration. In the wider corpus, direct or indirect apostrophes also undermine the
idea of a diary: ‘que ceux qui me lisent comprennent’; ‘[. . .] ainsi que le lecteur ne va pas tarder à l’apprendre’;
‘vous comprenez bien que [. . .]’; ‘[. . .] que l’on connaît’ (C 173; IH I i 6; I xiv 153; FD 98, cf. 121, MB I iv
71, etc.).
Again, the idea of a historic present is certainly a plausible one in the fourth passage, and Roudaut (p. 192)
has argued that the final passage is also in the historic present. But I would claim that the latter is in fact much
closer to a narratorial present; and that in any case the historic present is defined by its contrast with
surrounding past tenses, with the result that a prose work entirely in the historic present cannot properly be said
to exist.147 Ultimately, then, I would maintain that the traditional explanations, even taken together, are
insufficient to explain the recurrence of the phenomenon.
146
The question of tenses in the diary in general has been very little studied: even a volume like Le Journal
intime et ses formes littéraires (1978) contains almost no specific observations on the subject. On the basis of
an observation of a limited number of examples, a mixture of presents and passés composés seems to be most
characteristic of the genre.
As far as Verne in particular is concerned, the only study seems to be Christian Robin, ‘Le Récit sauvé des
eaux’, in Jules Verne 2 (1978), ed. François Raymond, pp. 33–55; but despite some illuminating remarks, the
critic consistently confuses an ‘authentic’ diary form, a form superficially resembling a diary, and normal firstperson narration!
147
As a further piece of evidence that some other sort of present is involved here, one can point out that
‘avaient dû‘ (IH I i 5) for recent actions is unusual in the historic present (one would expect more often ‘ont dû
‘).
92
If we examine the background material to this corpus it also proves unhelpful: nowhere in the Voyages does
the existence of the present tense seem to be hinted at — nor indeed in any extant part of Verne’s
correspondence nor in any other document.148
Let us therefore start again from first principles. Is it not possible that the present tense is used simply because
the action is in present time? Reexamining the opening passages in this light shows that such an idea is by and
large highly plausible: in general, they can easily be interpreted as ‘instantaneous’ narration — a sort of running
commentary without the commentary.
Nevertheless, there is one category of verbs that does not fit into this analysis, namely examples of the sort
‘pendant deux heures il ne prend rien’ (VCT 257). Elsewhere in the extended corpus, we can observe phrases
like ‘nous avons classe tous les jours’, ‘plusieurs fois, je rends visite à l’ex-capitaine’, ‘une heure s’écoule’ ‘je
consacre quelques heures à rédiger mon journal’ (RM 54; C 50; FD 110; C 74). All these verbs, in other words,
are durative or iterative. The time of the narration is more extended than the time of the fiction, and so the two
cannot be wholly synchronous.
Indeed, in certain cases, the present tense is used for events clearly finished before being narrated: as historic
presents within passages otherwise in the passé composé (for example, FD 115) but especially in mixed
sentences like ‘ “Le cher enfant!”, MURMURE M. Letourneur [. . .]. ‘ “Monsieur Letourneur”, AI-JE répondu, [. .
.]’ (C 11–2) or ‘quoique je fusse un enfant pieux, je ne suis pas recueilli, moi!’ (RM 92, cf. 55). Awareness that
the present tense is sometimes past time may also contribute to the analysis of sentences like ‘quel rêve! [. . .]
Ma main fiévreuse en jette sur le papier les étranges détails’ (VCT 267) or ‘[. . .] je consigne le fait sur mon
journal’ (VCT 264). The writing, it is clear, cannot be going on at the same time as the speaking, or indeed as
the writing described.149
Whatever the reason, greater scepticism would seem to be necessary: we have to ask whether any of the verbs
imply simultaneity between events and narration. A further examination of the works shows that the great
majority of the present tenses in fact contain very little indication as to their temporal status. Once again,
however, there are exceptions. The rest of the opening passage from Face au drapeau, in particular, stands out
because of its temporal immediacy, one where the form and content seem especially well-integrated:
[. . .] Je ne me laisserai pas succomber [au sommeil]. . . Il faut me ressaisir à quelque chose du dehors. . . A
quoi?. . . Ni son ni lumière ne pénètrent dans cette boîte de tôle. . . Attendons! . . . Peut-être, si faible qu’il soit,
un bruit arrivera-t-il à mon oreille?. . . [. . .] Enfin. . . ce n’est point une illusion. . . Un léger roulis me berce. . .
et me donne la certitude que je ne suis point à terre. . . bien qu’il soit peu sensible, sans choc, sans à-coups. . .
C’est plutôt une sorte de glissement à la surface des eaux. . . [. . .] Une nouvelle heure vient de s’écouler [. . .].
A présent, je me sens envahir par une sorte de torpeur. . . L’atmosphère est viciée. . . La respiration me manque.
. . Ma poitrine est comme écrasée d’un poids dont je ne puis me délivrer. . . § Je veux résister. . . C’est
impossible. . . J’ai dû m’étendre dans un coin et me débarasser d’une partie de mes vêtements, tant la
température est élevée. . . Mes paupières s’alourdissent, se ferment, et je tombe dans une prostration, qui va me
plonger en un lourd et irrésistible sommeil. . . § Combien de temps ai-je dormi?. . . Je l’ignore. Fait-il nuit, faitil jour?. . . Je ne saurais le dire [. . .] (FD 73–80).
One of Verne’s early poems does argue that the present (time) is the only reality, for the past and future
‘do not exist’, but its analysis does not go any further (‘Le passé n’est pas [. . .]’ (c. 1849), untitled poem quoted
by Jean Jules-Verne, ‘Souvenir de mon grand-père’, in L’Herne: ‘Jules Verne’, pp. 112–6 (113)).
149
Compère has quoted this last sentence, and commented that it is redundant in the pure form of the diary
(‘Le Fin mot, dans Voyage au centre de la Terre et autres récits’, in Jules Verne 2, pp. 165–71 (170), and Un
Voyage imaginaire de Jules Verne (1977), p. 46). Much of the redundancy is removed, in fact, by positing that
there is a certain temporal distance between the fiction (the actual taking of notes) and the narration (the
description of the taking of the notes).
148
93
Similarly, in the rest of the corpus, a few passages do give the impression of recounting events as they happen.
In the first of the three following passages, Kazallon describes, respectively, the sinking of the ship, the ending
of a long and desperate water-less period, and his decision to eat human flesh; in the last one, the narrator
describes his own death several decades after the founding of the last remaining human colony:
Impossible de dire toutes les pensées dont mon esprit est traversé en ce moment, ni de peindre la rapide vision
qui se fait en moi de ma vie toute entière! Il me semble que toute mon existence se concentre dans cette minute
suprême qui va la terminer! Je sens les planches du pont fléchir sous mes pieds. Je vois l’eau monter autour du
navire, comme si l’Océan se creusait sous lui! (C 109–10).
Nous sommes tous étendus sur les voiles [. . .]. Je souffre horriblement. Dans l’état où sont mes lèvres, ma
langue, mon gosier, pourrais-je manger? [. . .] Il est onze heures du matin. Les vapeurs [. . .] n’ont plus une
apparence électrique [. . .]. Ce n’est plus, maintenant, qu’un brouillard [. . .]. Nous sommes couchés à la
renverse, la bouche ouverte. L’eau arrose ma figure, mes lèvres, et je sens qu’elle glisse jusque dans ma gorge!
Ah! jouissance inexprimable! [. . .] Les muqueuses de mon gosier se lubrifient à ce contact. Je respire autant
que je bois cette eau vivifiante, qui pénètre jusqu’au plus profond de mon être! (C 198–9).
Ah! le misérable! § Mais non! Hobbart a sagement agi [. . .]. Il ne faut pas que d’autres viennent m’arracher
cette proie (de chair humaine)! [. . .] Il me la faut à tout prix, je la veux, je l’aurai! [. . .] Personne ne m’a vu.
J’ai mangé! (C 205–6).
De tout [sic] ceux qui débarquèrent ici, moi, l’un des plus vieux, je reste presque seul. Mais la mort va me
prendre, à mon tour. Je la sens monter de mes pieds glacés à mon cœur qui s’arrête [. . .] (EA 260).
What is striking about all these passages is their dramatic quality, their air of sincerity, their immediacy — their
unusual presentness. More analytically, it is possible to see that for once, the focus of attention is not on
external events: introspection now governs the speed of narration, as indicated by the density of first-person
pronouns, punctuation marks like the series of three dots, and constructions like ‘une nouvelle heure VIENT DE
s’écouler’. Transcribing these passages in the passé simple would produce a strange result: ‘A présent, je me
sentis envahir par une sorte de torpeur. . . L’atmosphère fut viciée. . . (etc.)’. But it would work for the
imperfect: ‘A présent, je me sentais [. . .] L’atmosphère était [. . .]’.
A hypothesis then presents itself: given their running commentary concerning the inner self and their affinity
with the continuous tenses, could these passages not be the thoughts of the character? In other words, could
they not possibly be in some sort of free style (or interior monologue or even stream of consciousness)?150
Once the question has been posed, the obvious answer is yes — reading all the passages quoted as examples
of free (direct or indirect) style is perfectly possible. But, because the tense does not provide any information,
as it does in the context of past-tense narration, it would be less easy to go further — by for instance saying
where in a given example the free style starts or stops.
One way of attempting to formally verify the hypothesis is to take the classifications generally applied to the
three voices of conventional narration, and see what result transposing them from the past into the present
gives. Figure 9.1 represents this attempt:
150
Principally concerned as I am with an analysis of the formal elements, I will continue to use the term
‘free style’ — approximately equivalent to interior monologue, but without implication that the thoughts are
subjective ones, as is the case in stream of consciousness. (For exact definitions, see Melvin Friedmann, Stream
of Consciousness: A Study in Literary Method (1955).
94
degree of
narratorial
intervention
‘Not free’
Free
nature of
transpositio
n
Normal narration
Je fus libre
Je suis libre
Indirect
style
Je sentis que j’étais libre
Je sens que je suis libre
J’étais libre
Je suis libre
Direct
style
Je sentis: j’étais libre
Je sens: je suis libre
J’étais libre
Je suis libre
FIGURE 9.1
Variations in Tense with Nature of Transposition and Degree of Narratorial Intervention
This figure151 indicates, for both the past tense (top line) and the present tense (bottom line) the degree of
transposition — that is the use of ‘normal narration’, indirect style or direct style — and the degree of
narratorial intervention — that is the use of free style (2nd col.) or simply ordinary style (1st col.). It shows,
notably, what would happen to the threefold opposition normal narration-indirect style-direct style if presenttense narration did follow the same categories as conventional narration. There would be no problem with the
‘not free’ case, but the distinction provided by the passé simple-imperfect-present would be lost in the case of
free style, for ‘Je suis libre’ would be found in all three modes (as underlined in the table). The same utterance
could be free indirect style, free direct style, or normal narration, without one having any way of telling the
difference. Indeed, if it were observed in reality, this threefold equivalence could conceivably be used as a way
of defining interior monologue in the present.
But even on this assumption that the traditional categories worked for the present tense, the verbs would be
powerless to help us identify the three voices. If we wish to demonstrate their existence, there remains only the
possibility that formal discrimination between the voices might be produced by the past- and present-context
adverbs, as it was in the case of the past tenses (cf. Chapter 8).
In practice, one observes that many verbs have no accompanying adverbs (‘la respiration me manque’, ‘je
souffre horriblement’, ‘je reste presque seul’, etc.), and may thus still be either normal narration, free indirect
style or free direct style. But on the other hand certain of the adverbs do give a precise indication. In the four
dramatic passages, all five — ‘à présent’, ‘en ce moment’, ‘aujourd’hui’, ‘maintenant’ and ‘ici’ — are clear
present-context ones. On the assumption that the same implications work as for the past tenses, our hypothesis
is then verified, and the existence of direct or indirect style confirmed. The dramatic passages are to be
interpreted as the thoughts of the characters. Some of the present tenses do mean present time, after all.
It now remains to counter-check our hypothesis by verifying the temporal adverbs in the rest of the corpus. In
certain cases, we may again observe clearly present-context ones: ‘c’est demain [. . .] que nous serons arrivés’,
151
Two remarks are necessary. First, this table remains largely theoretical (although it corresponds to the
conclusions of many commentators), and individual instances may actually function by undermining the
typologies. And secondly, for the sake of simplicity and concision, this table only covers the first person.
(Hamburger has in fact argued that a first-person free style cannot exist, but Bronzwaer has convincingly
proved the contrary (pp. 56–7).)
95
‘en ce moment [. . .] on marche à l’ouest’, ‘aujourd’hui’, ‘jusqu’ici’, ‘hier’.152 But there are also a large number
of past-context adverbs: ‘la brise est alors complètement tombée’, ‘le lendemain, 21 octobre, la situation est la
même’, ‘ce jour-là [. . .], j’aperçois’, ‘cette année-là [. . .] les Etats-Unis [. . .] sont dans l’entier épanouissement
de leur puissance industrielle’, ‘dans ce temps-là’, ‘à ce moment’, ‘la veille’.153 The present-context adverbs
occur normally in the most vivid scenes, the ones where the main character has an important role, and the ones
where the events are lived from within — the ones, in other words, where one might expect to have access to
the thoughts of the character. The past-context adverbs, in contrast, are most in evidence in less dramatic
passages where there are also durative or iterative ones — in those, in other words, most similar to conventional
narration. It would seem reasonable to assume that these instances are closest to being past time.
Beneath the apparent simplicity of the present tense, then, there is a considerable complexity, one which it is
worth summarising. We have seen that the great mass of verbs contain little indication as to their external
temporality. But a few of them, and many of the adverbs, do provide precise information, even if it points in
two different directions. On one hand, a non-synchronous aspect, or even a clearly posterior narrative stance,
combines with past-context adverbs and a generally objective or neutral tone and position. The cumulative
effect is to destroy the idea of simultaneity of action and narration, and to produce a compressed temporality
and a point of view like those of the passé simple. Most of L’Ile à hélice, with its non-deictic third person,
approximates to this mode: the strange tone of this novel may be that of a future ‘une fois’ — a science-fiction
effect on the level of the form.
On the other hand, the immediacy of many of the verbs and adverbs in the corpus, together with an unusual
introspection, produces a time which seems to be really present. In it there sometimes appears to be an
indetermination between the three voices possible in fiction. Within this, however, one can detect a more
personal voice. An effect is produced which moves between a sort of camera-eye technique and a stream of
consciousness, a bit like Robbe-Grillet crossed with Virginia Woolf.
The distribution of verb and adverb in the Voyages thus makes ultimate sense. In addition to establishing a
new sub-genre — the novel written in the present tense — Verne invents a multiply-defined temporal system, a
range of voices playing on the oppositions between narrator and character, posterior and simultaneous
narration, and reporting and participation. Verne’s three works are not only pre-Zola romans expérimentaux,
but introduce new conceptions of subjectivity and time into the novel. Meredith’s The Egoist (1879) and
Dujardin’s Les Lauriers sont coupés (1887)154 are not the only advances in technique during this period.
Supporting Role
The present occupies a surprising proportion of the verbs: over four-fifths of tense forms in the corpus. But an
analysis of the other tenses may also contribute to our understanding of the experiments.
As the passages quoted show, the next most frequent form is the passé composé. In the same way as the
pluperfect in conventional narration, it serves to describe events previous to the main line, even where free
direct/indirect style seems to be at work: ‘Hobbart A sagement AGI [. . .]. J’ai mangé (de la chair humaine)!’ (C
205–6). But its time-sphere is not always distinct from that of the present tense. This applies in the cases of être
verbs like ‘la mer EST ARRIVEE maintenant au trélingage’ (C 128), but is also the essential feature of a unique
152
FD 107, cf. C 119–20, 125; IH I vii 73, cf. FD 89, FR 16; C 198; 48, IH I vii 73; FD 109.
FD 106, cf. 107; C 37, cf. 102, 120, 125, 163, 165, FD 91, IH I ii 26; C 117; IH I i 8; FF vi 303; FD 93;
C 186, FD 106, IH I i 7. Of course, ‘cette année-là’ is deliberately ambiguous (as in the case of geological
‘history’): L’Ile à hélice is set in the future (IH I i 8).
154
Friedmann, p. 33, claims The Egoist as a major breakthrough in technique; for a brief analysis of
Dujardin’s innovative technique, see Genette, p. 193. (Genette also provides a useful typology of the temporal
options open to the narrator of fiction (pp. 229–34).)
153
96
scene where the narrator of Le Chancellor applies thought to his own moral behaviour. Having abruptly replied
to a young girl that stronger people die quicker under starvation, and that this is a consolation, he then switches
from the present to ask: ‘Comment AI-JE pu répondre ainsi à cette jeune fille?’; he resolves to reform: ‘j’ai
promis (de mieux agir)’; and he is later able to write: ‘j’ai résisté, et que ceux qui me lisent comprennent’ (C
170; 170; 173). The passé composé, not here replaceable by any other tense, thus creates a rare link between
past action and present reflection. Together with the ‘reader’s’ present (‘ceux qui me lisent’), serves to create an
impression of sincerity: of the narrator’s wish to gain a salvation going beyond mere survival.
The imperfect has a similar role of mise en relief of past events, but for durative actions: ‘Le second examine
attentivement celui qui jusqu’ici commandait à bord’ (C 48). But the fact that its time-sphere does not overlap
with that of the present means that non-motivated imperfects are occasionally visible: ‘[. . .] quand le
Chancellor, que le vent poussAIT alors rapidement, s’arrête soudain’; ‘j’aperçois ce personnage alors qu’il
remontAIT [. . .]’ (C 40; FD 145; cf. 103, MB II ii 256, etc.).155
Undoubtedly more surprising in the context of the extended present tense would be the passé simple, for the
imperfect and passé composé seem to cover most of the past between them. In fact, verbs like ‘demandai-je’,
‘m’écriai-je’ and ‘pensai-je’ (C 111; VCT 257; FD 102, 179) are probably not passés simples at all. They seem
to be spelling variations of the presents ‘demandé-je’, ‘m’écrié-je’ and ‘pensé-je’.156 Again, a few of the
authentic passés simples, like ‘ces détails, je les appris’ ‘C’est avec le pic [. . .] que furent portés les premiers
coups’ (FD 156; 191), are apparently due to inattention by author, typographer or editor.157 As such they
demonstrate the habits of several centuries of reading prose in the past tenses, and the difficulties of conceiving
novels that escape from them.
On the other hand, virtually all the ‘deliberate’ passés simples are used for flashbacks going further back than
the beginning of the novels, whether covering the past of the characters or historical events ‘J’obtins [. . .], je
partis et m’embarquai [. . .]’ (FD 117; cf. 116, IH I i 8–9, I v 49, I xi 115–8). When maintained over several
paragraphs without other tenses and with few adverbs a strange tone is created: ‘Pomaré protesta, les Anglais
protestèrent. L’amiral Dupetit-Thouars proclama la déchéance de la reine en 1843 et expulsa le Pritchard,
événements qui provoquèrent [. . .]. Pritchard reçut une indemnité de vingt-cinq mille francs, et l’amiral Bruat
eut mission de mener ces affaires à bonne fin’ (IH I xiii 148–49; cf. 148). It may perhaps be best described as
Voltairean in its remoteness and irony or Flaubertian in its flatness.158 It seems to gain part of its effect from the
contrast with the general context of the present, but especially from the passé simple’s great sequentiality and
inherent ‘non-reflexiveness’, the fact that it contains no intrinsic coherence, no ‘lateral’ links to give breadth to
the narrative thread. Verne’s experiment produces a common purpose between tenses and temporal structures,
to a degree that many novelists would envy.
155
Once again, centuries-old linguistic habits may lead us to interpret such extracts as being in the historic
present (where the imperfect would not be surprising (Imbs, p. 96) — and such an analysis would then lead us
to incriminate the ‘alors’ in each example). But the comparison with the ‘jusqu’ici’ of the preceding quotation
demonstrates at the very least an inconsistency in the system.
156
Grevisse, § 638, observes this substitution of -ai for -é.
157
‘Murmura André’ (C 85) is a misprint in the Livre de poche edition. Similarly the caption to the
illustration on page 113 in the first in-8° edition of Le Chancellor, ‘Elle imbiba les lèvres du lieutenant’, stands
in contrast to what is normally the identical phrase in the text with ‘imbibe’; and was itself changed to ‘imbibe’
in later editions.
158
Voltaire’s use of the unadorned passé simple is analysed in Robert Champigny, ‘Notes sur les temps
passés en français’, The French Review, no. 28, 1954–5, pp. 519–24 (522) (cf. Weinrich, pp. 117–8). Flaubert
uses the ‘flatness’ of the form in the famous passage at the end of L’Education sentimentale (1869): ‘Il
voyagea. § Il connut la mélancolie [. . .]. § Il revint [. . .]’.
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An isolated passé simple, on the other hand, is occasionally used for dramatic emphasis: ‘le roi redevint un
homme’; ‘[les] hommes que nous fûmes — car nous ne sommes plus des hommes, en vérité’ (IH II iii 190–1;
EA 259). Here, in contrast, the effect comes from the sudden introduction of a temporal ‘thickness’, the
addition of a longer-term perspective to the ‘flatness’ or the ‘thinness’ of the present.
In Le Chancellor, especially, all the passés simples without exception are highly significant, serving to help
define the overall structure of the novel. The events before the fateful voyage are recounted in this tense: ‘en
parcourant les quais de Charleston, je VIS le Chancellor. Le Chancellor me PLUT, et je ne sais quel instinct me
POUSSA à bord de ce navire [. . .]. Je me DECIDAI donc à prendre passage sur le Chancellor’ (C 2). The
transfer to the raft is also emphasised by means of a resounding preterite: ‘rien ne reste plus de ce qui FUT le
Chancellor’ (C 130). Once dry land is reached again, finally, it is remarked that ‘Robert Kurtis est et restera
toujours l’ami de ceux qui FURENT’ ‘les passagers du Chancellor’ (C 236; 236). All the passés simples in this
novel appear therefore structurally important. They are symmetrically arranged, and act in conjunction with the
loud ostinato of the name of the ship (and its virtual anagram, Charleston) to emphasise the three pivotal points
of the novel, the beginning, the middle and the end. They create a tight framework, defined in terms of normal
existence on dry land, within which the nightmarish events on the ocean may unfold. The passés simples may
be the sign of an ordered terrestrial existence in a definite time and place — and the present, its abandonment.
It is clear that, in our corpus, the three past tenses operate by instituting a contrast with the present, by
simultaneously providing relief and relief. Both the ‘accidents’ and the ‘deliberate’ occurrences thus create a
trompe l’œil background with which to foreground the main story. At the same time, many of them may
represent a temporary regression to one of the largely unconscious assumptions brought about by the long
tradition of narrative literature: that past events have to be recounted in the past tenses.
Verne, in his obvious-discreet way, simply ignores the convention. He thus confirms a version of
Hamburger’s thesis, namely that tense and time are not necessarily identical, that narration can produce its own
autonomous temporality. But the boldness of this experiment should not be allowed to pass unnoticed. Science
fiction has sometimes made play of the reduction of the dimensions of the world from three to two. We saw
earlier that Verne is again a precursor on this ‘content’ level. But his reduction of tense applies the same
principle to the form and the content — placing the characters on occasion in a time-capsule of both present
tense and time from which escape is not obvious.
The extraordinariness of Verne’s journeys is not always where it might seem.
Narration Impossible
Further evidence of the difficulties encountered in writing novels in the present may be found in the role of the
future. Here again, the traditional novel seems to act as a kind of anti-model for Verne.
A naive view of his experiments might represent the present-tense novels as being merely past-tense ones
without the past tenses (and with a pinch of narrative subjectivity added). L’Enfant, with its problems of
coherency, is apparently written in this spirit. Evidence against such a view in Verne’s case has already been
accumulated; but the future tenses — principally the forms va porter and portera — will also prove
illuminating in this respect.
On the theoretical and formal level, the equivalence between the two sorts of novel apparently does not cause
a problem, as there is a correspondence between their respective tenses. The present apparently takes on the
functions of the past; the past, the pluperfect; the future, the conditional; and ‘allait’, those of ‘va’.
But the practice is sometimes different. A minute, almost Borgesian, change in a past-tense passage of
Voyage au centre de la Terre points to one problem: in the 1867 edition, ‘J’allai donc prendre’ (VCT 300) is
substituted for ‘J’allais donc prendre’. The difference of a single letter, unnoticeable in the phonology of many
parts of France, may seem unimportant. But ‘J’allai’ describes a completed movement, whereas ‘J’allais’ shows
a gesture which is possibly going to be interrupted. The first, in other words, is spatial, and the second, spatiotemporal.
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In the present-tense narration the distinction is not always maintained, as shown by examples like: ‘Ma main
le saisir’ (FD 245), ‘je VAIS m’élancer’ (FD 257).159 In such instances, the spatial and temporal aspects are
fused.
One or other aspect may of course be lost. The temporal one disappears in ‘Les matelots VONT chercher les
pics’ when the illustration shows the sailors already working with the pick-axes (C 94)! Sometimes, the
ambiguity is undermined by an adverb, or simply by the following events: ‘A présent, que VA faire Robert
Kurtis?’ (C 72), ‘Je VAIS faire feu. Hans m’arrête d’un signe’ (VCT 270), ‘Je VAIS les suivre . . . § Une main
m’arrête’ (C 110). In other cases, the spatial aspect is excluded from the beginning because the semantic level
makes it clear that the assertions are ‘merely’ predictions: ‘cette minute suprême qui va terminer [ma vie]’ (C
110) or ‘Nous allons sauter!’ (VCT 290, repeated word for word on C 56).
These last two examples are in fcat very important. Such instances may perhaps of course be interpreted as
being in free indirect style; but such an explanation does not totally remove the problem. The future seems here
contingently ill-defined (as it is in conventional narration, subject to the whims of the narrator) but also
essentially and irrevocably ill-defined, undecidable. Taking these two utterances as literally true would be
equivalent to contemplating a narrative on the point of disappearing. Because of their very ‘monosemy’, these
two pinpoint the problem which the va form in general merely alludes to, but which is at the heart of presenttense narration: how can a future exist in a work of fiction? On whose authority can pronouncements be made
about events yet to happen?
‘Nous allons sauter!’ is particularly illuminating in this respect, for it is not in quotation marks, and its concise
and categorical affirmation implies its own contradiction. (If it is true, a) the story necessarily stops at that
point, and b) the communication of the affirmation to any sort of narrataire becomes impossible.) More
precisely, we can say that this self-contradiction is a sophisticated variant on the Cretan Liar Paradox, on a
specifically temporal plane. Instead of simply saying ‘I am lying’, the character affirms ‘I will have been lying’:
‘If I am telling the truth at the moment, then it will have been the case that I cannot have been telling the truth’.
By means of this convoluted self-denegation, doubt is ultimately cast onto everything the first-person presenttense narrator affirms. Verne exhibits a very modern and complex self-questioning.
In practice, of course, solutions are often found to the potential paradoxes of the open-ended future within the
present-tense system. First, occurrences of ‘vais’ and ‘va’ other than those already quoted are rarely in the
affirmative, except for events that are predictable in the short term, like the weather (VCT 282, etc.).
Sometimes, they are negative, interrogative or combined with ‘si’ (for example, VCT 287) — the slight
redundancy of this last formulation indicating the tension provoked even by hypotheses concerning the future.
But most often, other auxiliaries are used instead, like vouloir, devoir or pouvoir: the subjectivity of these
verbs, and their emphasis on present potentiality, means that they are interpreted more as intentions than as
affirmations, and therefore the paradox is largely avoided.
Secondly, the context is often vital. Thus if the isolated prediction ‘nous sommes sur le point de chavirer’
(VCT 272) may undoubtedly be taken at face-value, an iterative fatal prediction is such a contradictory concept
as to make the reader automatically assume it is in the past, as the full quotation shows: ‘Vingt fois nous
sommes sur le point de chavirer’. Similarly, the phrases ‘l’état liquide va remplacer’ and ‘ce globe que [la
nébuleuse] va former’ (VCT 262) may, if taken in isolation, again seem to be authentic pronouncements about
the future. But in fact, as we have seen, they form part of Axel’s vision of past time and thus, in addition to
operating in diametrically opposite directions, are both ultimately bounded by posterior events.
In this way all the occurrences of ‘va’ extrapolate the tendency of the unfinished messages and other terminal
situations: they remove the protection that consisted of the inverted commas or the impending end-cover. They
imply, even if only some of them create, a revealing paradox: that of the absorption of the narrator by his
character, a present-future that is open-ended, a fictional time-span of an unpredictable nature.
VA
159
This problem has been commented on by modern grammarians (e.g. Sten, p. 20 (cf. p. 54)). But no
historical analysis seems to exist, nor, especially, any analysis of its literary use.
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The paradox is in fact taken a degree further with the future tense itself. This form is employed to make a
number of even more categorical predictions about events on the millionaire cruiser with its resident orchestra
or about the rescue of Ratine from her life as an oyster:
Les plus riches gentlemen, Walter Tankerdon en tete, font merveille dans le sparties de golf et de tennis.
Lorsque le soleil SERA tombé perpendiculairement sous l’horizon, ne laissant après lui qu’un crépuscule de
quarante-cinq minutes, les fusées du feu d’artifice PRENDRONT leur vol à travers l’espace, et une nuit sans lune
PRETERA au déploiement de ces magnificences. § Dans la grande salle du casino, le quatuor est baptisé [. . .] (IH
I x 112).
Somme toute, comme ils n’ont pas réclamé contre cet enlèvement, il n’y a point eu échange de notes [. . .].
Quand il PLAIRA au quatuor de reparaître sur le théâtre de ses succès, il SERA le bienvenu. § On comprend que
les deux violons et l’alto ont imposé silence [. . .] (IH I xii 131).
Grâce aux sentiments d’humanité que les Malais AURONT su exploiter, sans éveiller aucun soupçon, Standard
Island RALLIERA les parages d’Erromango. . . Elle MOUILLERA à quelques encablures. . . Ils la JETTERONT sur les
roches. . . Elle s’y BRISERA. . . (IH II ii 179, cf. II ii 178, I vi 222).
Le porte-monnaie du quatuor est bien garni, et, s’il se vide à Standard Island, quelques recettes à San Diego ne
TARDERONT pas à le remplir (IH I vi 64).
Lorsque le banc SERA à sec, ils IRONT chercher la précieuse huître, qui renferme Ratine, et l’EMPORTERONT (FR
13).
One’s first reaction to these passages — above all if read in their context of present tenses — is surely surprise
and incomprehension. Even with the benefit of decades of narrative experimentation behind us, it is difficult to
see where the verbs in the third person and future tense ‘have come from’, especially given that there are no
adverbs and that the rest of the works is also in the third person. One’s surprise is undoubtedly further increased
by what they say, for it is destined to be essentially untrue: the fireworks are not mentioned again, the players
do not go back, the Malays’ attack fails, the players do not make money at San Diego, and the rescue of Ratine
does not happen as described. The utterances conceal, once again, a flagrant tendency to self-contradiction.
The problem of the open-ended future is therefore posed here with particular acuity. What is the point of these
utterances? And who is responsible for them? In the total absence of the usual markers, it would be hazardous
to interpret them as an ‘authorial’ intervention. Nor can one easily posit the transcription in free indirect style of
the thoughts of an individual or a group, since, in the third case for instance, nobody has any warning of the
Malays’ intention to attack, and nowhere else in the novel is their point of view adopted.
A first conclusion, then, is that this use of the future tense is a surprising departure from the literary norms —
even of the twentieth century. And secondly, given that no other explanation works, the only response seems to
be to posit a sort of free style, one that can only be the responsibility of the narrator. The free style is again
indeterminate between direct and indirect — indeed the distinction becomes meaningless here. But, because of
the tense used and the systematic unreliability of the information given, this style is necessarily distinct from
the principal voice; and must therefore be considered as forming a ‘second narrative voice’. These future tenses,
in brief, constitute another radical innovation, and one that coincides with the striking mode of narration of
L’Ile à hélice: its unique combination of deictic tense and non-deictic person.
Both the va form and the future thus extrapolate the narrative problems caused by a present tense which is
sometimes a present time. Often, it is true, the problems are eluded, for an apparently true present/future is
really guaranteed by a narrator-in-the-shadows, and is consequently firmly anchored in the past. But in other
100
cases, the problems of freedom in narration are squarely faced up to; and the narration then tends to blend into
the fiction itself. Of course, explanations in terms of authors’ ‘mistakes’ cannot be totally excluded. But in the
particular case of Verne’s futures, the occurrences are sufficiently distinctive and numerous to make us suspect
that some sort of aesthetic ‘plan’ is at work. Above all, they fit into the wider context of the use of the present
tense, which can clearly not be a mere ‘accident’.
Verne’s works are not only remarkable experiments in the novel, but point the way to later developments.
Their systematic doubt, loosening of structures, narrow social panorama, introversion and self-consciousness
are all aspects of anguished modernity.
Towards a New Novel
Le Chancellor, L’Ile à hélice and Face au drapeau must be considered as startling innovations in the form of
the novel. But in addition they pose the questions of time in literature and the nature of narration; and they also
go some distance, I would claim, towards answering them, towards creating a new system in place of the old.
The simple appearance of the present tense in fact conceals the existence of two modes, each with its own
adverbial system: an external one designed for the narration of adventures and a personal one suitable for
introspection. What is more, transitions between the two may be either gradual or sudden. If further evidence
were required of the care with which the tense system is constructed, it is provided by the passé simple
framework. These work in very close harmony with the symmetries we observed in the speed of the narration
and with the various stages of cannibalism and cannibalisation. Form and content here mutually reinforce each
other.
But the specific raison d’être of the experiments still remains largely mysterious. Even in the most radical
modern experiments, tenses are essentially defined by their variety, by their contrast with surrounding forms
(Weinrich, ch. 4). Why then are over four-fifths of Verne’s verbs in a single tense? The much-analysed passé
composé of L’Etranger, by way of comparison, makes up much less than two-thirds of the verbs.160 Why is the
present used rather than some other tense? Why do the experiments continue over some 800 pages or 25,000
verbs? Why do these novels employ this particular device?
The explanation in terms of the diary is clearly incompatible with the parts of the corpus that are not in dated
sections — and even for the dated sections, it does not begin to account for the persistence of the present, nor
for the dual internal temporal structure. Again, it might be thought that the tenses were linked to an unusual
distribution of past, present and future time-spheres. Whereas conventional narration can draw on two main
tenses, two for future events, and one or two for past events, the three works can draw on only one main tense,
two for future events and as many as four or five for anterior events. This sort of link could only be plausible,
then, if the works spent a great deal of time exploring the past in great detail. But in reality, they hardly exploit
the opportunities for flashbacks at all, whether personal or historical, or internal or external to the time of the
novels. Instead, the use of the present tense causes the narration to virtually ‘implode’, posing the problem of
the continuity of the narrative act in fiction. On this level, the tenses are positively counter-functional.
Is there anything then in the themes which might explain the present tense? Comparison with the rest of
Verne’s works — and with the ‘adventure’ novel in general — does lead in fact to the observation of a number
of unusual characteristics. The figure of Kazallon, anodyne first-person narrator of Le Chancellor, is typical of
the huge, almost Meursault-like, distance between the main character and the author. In none of the three novels
in fact is there a hero, in the sense of an admirable character who remains at the centre of the stage; in none is
any particular aim being pursued apart from the passive one of mere survival; and in none do all the
sympathetic characters finally survive. In addition, all three works are set at sea, out of sight of land; in all
According to Jean-François Cabillau, ‘L’Expression du temps dans L’Etranger d’Albert Camus’, Revue
belge de philologie, n° 149, 1971, pp. 866–75 (867). In fact, however, the passés composés seem to form only a
minority of the verbs.
160
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three, the main protagonists are there against their will, as unwilling passengers; and in all three, the future is
unknown, and will be determined by factors beyond their control.
Intuitively, one can see that the present tense is at least compatible with such characteristics; that spatiotemporal emptiness, lack of structure, negativity, pessimism, indeterminism and reductionism might easily be
all linked together. But this would still not seem enough on its own to justify the extent of the experiments.
We have seen that the three works themselves contain no hint of acknowledgement of their own formal
eccentricity. But in the other Voyages, a careful reading does occasionally throw up a potentially relevant
comment. In each case, formal reductionism and the very stuff of artistic activity are closely associated. Thus
when faced with the problem of pursuing rhymes ‘like deserters in a battle’, Hector Servadac attempts to
subject poetry to rigorous methods, using a colour-code system ‘afin de mieux varier les rimes rebelles’ (HS
21). Again, Scottish bagpipe music is described as exclusively using ‘les intervalles d’une gamme majeure, à
laquelle manque la sensible’ (RV 48). The mad king-anthropologist, lastly, is presented as having performed a
similar subversion on the musical scale of his barrel-organ: ‘Pour économiser les notes, il n’a fourré dans sa boî
te ni les ut ni les sol dièses!’ (VA xvi 183). The three-way convergence is striking. Colours, rhyming vowels,
notes: in each case at least seven primary values are possible, but in each case the range is reduced to a more
limited form of expression. And nowhere is any further explanation provided.
It is here that the tenses come into play, for there are again approximately seven basic values and the range is
again dramatically underemployed, nay decimated, once more without justification given. Even the dates
involved would seem to confirm a connection.161 My claim, then, is that after carrying out his experiments,
Verne cannot resist alluding to them — but in characteristically indirect fashion, by writing about colours, notes
and vowels rather than about tenses. For the passé simple, read G-sharp, and for the conditional, read green o.
In this light, we can also understand the (fictional) audience’s reaction to ‘cette abomination, [. . .] cette
criminelle substitution d’un mode à l’autre’ (VA xvi 183). They did not even notice. For untutored savages, read
the French reading public. This phrase is a scathing comment on the real public’s total blindness to the
experiments replacing most of the tenses — a comment itself destined of course to remain totally
misunderstood. The nouveaux romanciers have been much less discreet about their own formal innovations.
The public’s reaction did contain some information, nevertheless: the low sales-figures of the three novels162
may be taken as implying some sort of link between the formal experiment and the discontinuity in Verne’s
production that Bellemin-Noël and Raymond noted (cf. my Chapter 1). Such an idea is supported by observing
that what seems to ‘break’ in the Voyages is the temporal coherence — the overall sense of significance — and
that the experiments explicitly provide the means of expressing this in sustained and tangible form.
Consequently, I would argue that the break is more pronounced and happens earlier than most critics have
recognised — that it is Le Chancellor which inaugurates the later period, and in no uncertain fashion.
Cannibalism and unprecedented tenses are both signs of a deep despair.
Moreover, the spatio-temporal emptiness of the three novels and their apparently perverse omission of the
past tenses may tie in with other general features of the Voyages observed earlier. Their negativity and
reductionism, in particular, stand in many respects in opposition to the dynamic structures implied both by the
line and arborescence and by the passé simple. But they also share characteristics with the various closed
systems analysed throughout this work: the refusal to use external resources, most notably, and the bored
passivity that results. The ultimate effect of being an unwilling passenger (or perhaps a narrator without a
subject) is very similar to that of the solitary or starving individual: that of being trapped in the present, in the
situation of waiting, of waiting for events that are not only unpredictible but also beyond all control.
161
Le Chancellor was published in 1875, whereas Hector Servadac and Le Rayon Vert were written in
1875–6 and 1881; L’Ile à hélice and Face au drapeau were published in 1895 and 1896, whereas Le Village
aérien was written in 1899 (Martin, La Vie et l’œuvre, p. 276).
162
C.-N. Martin, pp. 280–1.
102
Here at last, then, is a precise link between the forms of the three novels and their contents. Waiting is the
sign that there are no adventures left; that, the past having been foreclosed, the future is thereby also poisoned;
and that, as a result, the problems to come can no longer displace those of the present, nor the practical
questions the existential ones. The present tense throws the characters back on their own devices. It is this same
fundamental situation, I would argue, that Beckett explores, from En Attendant Godot (1952) onwards. Beckett
exhibits the same emphasis on waiting, the same obsession with the closed physical space, the same curtailment
of the future, the same further reduction of the already reduced space and the same refusal to consider abstract
metaphysics directly.163 Instead of relying on delayed gratification — the perversely roundabout route, the
constantly retreating temporal horizon — the characters of both writers are reduced to a complete passivity —
to hoping that their sensory and metaphysical deprivations will go away, and to writing, like Flaubert, about
almost nothing. Action and narration together give them enough substance to exist, but only just.
Throughout the Voyages, indeed, there is a similar tendency to exist in the anxious expectation of catastrophe
— ‘la mort probable à chaque minute, à chaque seconde’ (MS 127). Most of the time, the characters under this
sword of Damocles attempt to adopt a pragmatic and phlegmatic attitude. They argue that, ‘si à chaque instant
nous pouvons périr, à chaque instant aussi nous pouvons être sauvés’ (VCT 341); or else that their very
powerlessness frees their minds for other matters: ‘ “Après”, c’est l’avenir, c’est ce que Dieu voudra! Ne
songeons qu’au présent!’ (C 61; cf 46). But the situation cannot really be considered symmetrical, for ‘being
saved’, whether one takes it in its moral or adventure-story meaning, amounts to continuing to wait for the
unpredictable future — to being ‘condemned to inaction’ (C 50). And thinking ‘only about the present’ is even
further from a solution, being merely a conciser formulation of the problem. ‘Que sommes-nous venus faire
ici?’ Verne’s characters ask in quiet desperation, ‘mais que faire?’ (RV 188; VCT 341). But the question is
answered at best by an unhelpful and passive ‘ce que nous faisons’; and at worst either by a nihilistic ‘il faut [. .
.] ne rien faire’ or by a suicidal ‘plus rien à faire’.164 Both ‘nothing to do’ and ‘nothing to be done’: a situation
both empty and desperate. The only response proposed to the problem of anguished solipsism is to indulge in
yet more anguished solipsism. And this is in the early, supposedly more optimistic, works!
Negativity and materialism have robbed the characters of all normal occupations, and it is in this
metaphysical dead-end that the regressive activities find one of their principal raisons d’être. The only
occupation at the disposal of the characters is to squeeze the maximum out of the resources remaining in the
system. After the successive stages have been passed through, however — after internal resources have also
been exhausted — the ‘que faire?’ question only comes back with greater force than ever. The despair of
Verne’s characters is then all the more complete for being concentrated into the pathetically restrained limits of
the present.
The tenses used in Le Chancellor, L’Ile à hélice and Face au drapeau would thus seem to be merely one
manifestation — but one that is ‘overdetermined’ — of the reductionist and self-annihilating tendencies visible
throughout Verne’s works. The avoidance of the normal mode of narration and the resultant temporal
stagnation barely visible in Vingt mille lieues and La Mission Barsac in fact underlie all the Voyages
extraordinaires. Beneath the enthusiastic pursuit of the adventure genre, there is often the opposite genre trying
to get out — and it succeeds over at least three novels. The present tense stands for the renunciation of three
connected facilités: the optimistic fuite en avant, the extravagant use of external material and narrative
resources and the retreat into the past or future. It substitutes instead a hopeless waiting, an existential void:
closed tenses and closed social systems are ultimately in tight correlation.
The rupture in Verne’s production points to one of the important problematics of the collected works. The
break of the structure is the result of going to the end of the cul-de-sac implied by certain versions of the
163
See, for instance, Colin Duckworth, Angels of Darkness (1964), pp. 87–8.
RV 188; VCT 341; CG 82; 82; C 50. Once again, the parallels with Beckett are striking — the opening
words of En Attendant Godot, for instance, are ‘Rien à faire’.
164
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naturalistic mode of time: ‘[the] slow, imperceptible pining away, the silent wearing out of life.’165 At the same
time, Verne seems to be taking part in — even anticipating on — the general tendency of the last quarter of the
nineteenth century to turn the novel inwards and to question the very genre itself.166
In so doing, he points up the arbitrariness of Weinrich’s and Benveniste’s names for the groups of tenses.
Although temps narratifs, temps de l’histoire, temps commentatifs, temps du discours are in general accurately
named, the effect of Verne’s radical subversion is to make the ‘commentative tenses’ into un-commentative
‘narrative’ ones, to produce a ‘discourse’ which does not discourse at all but instead tells a story.
François Rivière’s disappointed conclusion, that Verne’s writing is here equivalent to an ‘absence
d’intrigue’,167 must therefore be replaced by a recognition of novelty on a deeper level. The temporal and
spatial minimalism of the marine setting represents an escape from the structural looseness of much of the
picaresque and adventure genres. But it and the materialistic reductionism are merely the données of Verne’s
fiction. From them, the novels create a multi-level interrogation of the process of narration, a universe where
the form refers insistently to its own origin, a spiral of significance that points ineluctably to its own inner void.
Verne’s use of the present tense, with its concomitant distortion of the past and future, is not merely a formal
device, but represents an attempt to refashion the genre of the novel. His search for a way of expressing the
mood of three voyages leads him to a rejection of the ordered temporality of the nineteenth-century novel, and
to the creation of an ‘external interior monologue’, a personal but disciplined vision, an ongoing durée, closer
to man’s real experience of the tangible world.
This emphasis on present time anticipates a major concern of many modern works. Verne’s strength is not to
have predicted the science of the twentieth century, but to have laid the ground for some of its most remarkable
literary developments.
Arnold Hauser, ‘The Conceptions of Time in Modern Art and Science’, The Partisan Review, vol. 23,
1956, pp. 320–3 (326); cf. Georges Poulet, Etudes sur le temps humain (vol. 1) (Edinburgh: 1949), p. 43.
Similarly Proust says: ‘(Dans L’Education sentimentale, le temps du verbe sert à représenter) non seulement les
paroles mais toute la vie des gens. (C’)est un long rapport de toute une vie, sans que les personnages prennent
pour ainsi dire une part active à l’action’ (Contre Sainte-Beuve: 1954, p. 590).
166
See Mendilow, ch. 4, esp. pp. 38–40, and Michel Raimond, La Crise du roman: Des Lendemains du
naturalisme aux années vingt (1966).
167
‘Le Bateau-(l)ivre’, Le Quotidien de Paris, 5.7.1976.
165
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10
‘SO UNLITERARY A WRITER AS VERNE’?
The Closing Down of
History
ur journey through the Vernian universe has above all led us to discover a bewildering richness of material,
and one where the difficulties of searching for order are compounded by two distinctive traits. First, Verne’s
Oworks seem to consist almost exclusively of ‘one-offs’, of presentations of the non-reproducible peculiarities
of the natural or human worlds, of unique cases straddling the traditional classifications. Each Voyage is
apparently so constructed as to blur numerous distinctions: those separating God and man, man and beast, beast
and machine; space and time, inside and outside, open and closed; novelty and repetition, self and others, or
activity and passivity. The texts are at first sight nothing but stresses and strains.
Comprehension is seemingly further hindered by the other distinctive trait, the differences between the earlier
and later works. If most of the Voyages up to L’Ile mystérieuse (1875) offer relatively structured forms and
themes, those published after this date are characterised by a regression from earlier positions and an increase in
explicit irony and pessimism. Must one therefore consider them, like Bellemin-Noël, as ‘fiascos’? To answer
this question, the criteria involved must be made clearer.
If an explicit philosophical or ideological ‘message’ is being sought, then the later works do imply a certain
failure. Verne undermines more and more of the conventional wisdoms of the sixty-eight years when ‘he’ was
writing. As Raymond points out, the self-conscious works of the later period air obsessions that had previously
only been visible in outline, lay bare their own textual machinery, and so afford certainly fewer positive
conclusions but perhaps as much understanding of the Voyages as a whole.
Using the complementarity of the two periods to search for order is therefore the most suitable way of
approaching the Vernian cosmos. The heroes started with the challenge of coming to terms with an open
horizon. To be able to travel, their aim was to make some sort of connection between their own isolated ‘pointbeing’ and the whole of two- or three-dimensional space. They wished to find a structure that was continuous
but would also be able, by its planarity, to accommodate a geometrically increasing area of space. To a certain
extent, these conditions are satisfied in the arborescence, for it can be considered to ‘start from’ a single point,
but to finish by filling the length and breadth of the available space. But the projects are still far from being
completed, because the destination remains evacuated: without a fixed end, the fuite en avant of the branching
structure is equivalent to an avoidance of the issue. The mere covering of space, the later works belatedly seem
to conclude, cannot hope to produce significance, cannot, a fortiori, lead to the sacred. It merely dissipates
energy.
The structure standing in opposition, the linear path that ignores the vagaries of space and heads directly
towards a predetermined goal, is also a frequent figure in the Vernian cartography. But it often involves the
opposite problem, tending as it does to lead too quickly to the destination. If he wishes to use this form,
therefore, Vernian man must temper his desire to arrive in an unexplored region by employing artificial means,
by thinking about the joys of travelling. Self-restraint is part of gratification.
Novel destinations cannot however be invented indefinitely in an age where the speed of travel is rapidly
shrinking space. The age of exploration will soon have to be considered closed — and going too often to the
ends of the Earth means coming all the more abruptly to the end of the world. The days of the Voyages are
numbered from the beginning. (Verne is not of course the only writer to contemplate this ending of history —
but he seems to have been the first (and the last?) to make it the aim of his collected works.) Once the universe
has been totally discovered and described — if only in fiction — the series of Les Mondes connus et inconnus
will be bereft of its constituent tension. The heroes and the author are obliged from the beginning to eke out
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what is left of their peau de chagrin, but at the same time to indulge in bursts of hyperactivity when others look
like getting there first; and this double activity is overshadowed by the total passivity that will result when there
is nothing left at all. The dog in the manger is guarding a stable-door that is ineluctably closing. Verne reacts to
the acceleration of history by trying, alternatively, to slow it down and to speed it up even more.
The tensions between closure and openness and activity and passivity — and between the earlier and later
works — are thus not only psychological but historical. For Verne, the unique césure is between a world where
field exploration is still possible, where anything may yet be found, and a globe without even the theoretical
possibility of change, one limited to the dreary rehearsal of Les Mondes connus.
If we accept this hypothesis of the future as being ultimately a dead-end for all the Vernian travellers, it helps
us understand why the real and cognitive ventures nearly always finish by trying other time-zones. But even the
explorations carried out in the recent past, by means of logical deductions or scientific or historical mises en
scène, contain little mystery, and hence few chances of approaching the sacred. By default, the remote past
appears to be the only issue open to the nineteenth century, the only area where Nature can resist man’s
mechanical progress, the only ‘place’, paradoxically, where the journey is not spoilt by knowledge of journey’s
end. It is the only domain, in other words, where real and significant change is still possible. The consequence
— which undoubtedly chimes in again with Verne’s psychology — is that the search for the mysteries of past
time receives exceptional attention in the Voyages extraordinaires. But only in one book, Voyage au centre de
la Terre, do all three components slot perfectly into place: the spatio-temporal relationship — one-to-one and
exhaustive; the direction — backwards; and the range — all the time that has ever been. The time-travel of this
novel represents an impulse of the whole sixty-eight-year cycle. From the scientific point of view, nevertheless,
the long backwards and downwards path through the animal, vegetable, and mineral vestiges is overshadowed
by its ‘starting’-point — the white man. But the journey also culminates in the resurgence — ‘là-bas’ — of
something resembling modern man. The end is thus in the beginning. Time-travel seems to be both the only
novel experience possible and the ultimate symbol of the finiteness of existence and the closing-down of
history. It opens up new worlds — to visit rather than to conquer — but it also involves an unhealthy
entanglement of past and present — one containing an inherent tendency to implode.
Because even the spatio-temporal world proves in the end to be bounded, each attempt to go beyond it merely
serves to emphasise the circularity: all roads lead back home. Verne’s heroes are sooner or later forced back
into the present, and into the smaller, self-contained spaces that constitute both the ultima Thule and the denial
of the travel drive. The illustrations, with their tendency to the instantaneous, may possibly reflect this spatiotemporal frustration; but the major sign is undoubtedly the self-reflection, self-absorption, and self-destruction
which feature so prominently throughout the Voyages.
The tendencies occur in the most varied of ‘systems’, but exhibit vital shared morphological characteristics.
The fundamental claim of this study, then, is that the processes of Verne’s ships, social groups, and tenses
exhibit deep structural parallels, and ones that imply a common disruption of time and space. In each, a
preliminary step consists of the refusal to use the external resources normally considered essential to the
activity in question. The refusal is never justified or explained, but we can note that the act of choosing is
generally very difficult for the characters, and that this refusal obviates much of the need for choice. Then, after
the vital first step, the rest of the process follows on.
Two degrees of closure may be distinguished. The first one involves the self-contained group or alimentary
system; it undermines the linear time of events and reduces the distance between action and reaction. The high
degree of selectivity in the construction of the system permits exhaustive treatment within it. This
exhaustiveness will nevertheless lead to the exhaustion of resources, and necessarily culminates, therefore, in a
bored passivity.
The final stage of endogamy occurs when the selectivity becomes exclusivity, when the self-other division is
transferred from the social or ship’s body to the self-contained individual and when the past tenses are ousted
by the self-conscious present. The narrator now tends to lose all autonomy, and external perspectiveness and
resources to be completely absent. The fuite en avant is turned in on itself, it is a fuite en dedans. Narrator and
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character end up hopelessly tangled together. Caught up on the horns of a temporal version of the Cretan Liar
Paradox, they can consider the future only in the light of assertions which are either true or communicable but
can never be both together. The resonance now combines only too perfectly with the chamber; the systems of
autocannibalism, autoeroticism, and ‘autoreference’ are both the most naturally accessible ones and the most
dangerously and artificially isolated ones. Their constituent acts are atemporal ones on a high-wire apparently
held up only by the flow of time and surface tension. They are the last positive, self-assertive acts, and the final
negative, self-annihilating ones. They make up systems that are both open and closed, free and constrained, and
timeless and centred on time. They are in perpetual motion but also permanently self-destructing.
Michel Meets Jules
Verne’s works contain original and sophisticated systems; and they do this starting from a realistic, even
pedagogical, perspective. One of the consequences is that conventions of realism, at least as Verne interprets
them, sometimes lead to conclusions that fall outside the canon. But another consequence is on our perceptions
of the Voyages: Verne’s reputation as an ‘impersonal’ writer would seem to be very much weakened. Even if
conventional psychology plays little part in the works, much of their unity comes from this subtle and
systematic working-out of the situation of the person in the functioning of the universe. What begins as a
journey of exploration becomes a journey into the past and ends as a journey to the centre of the self.
Additional evidence for such a claim can be seen in two central figures of the Voyages. The writer in Jules
Verne’s works is one of the rare figures to be able to go everywhere and evaluate all modes of life and thought.
But in practice, at least as first-person narrator, he invariably deals with contingent matters: his subject is
always very much of this world and his rewards, if any, basely material. Put otherwise, the essential problem of
writing for Vernian man is in the need for scrupulousness. Writing leaves little time for action; and if it is not to
be pure confabulation, it must adhere closely to reality, but must avoid interfering with it, must avoid crossing
the frontier between the cognitive and the real worlds. The writer can thus never be a full actor, but must always
remain involved. The tension between doing and observing can be seen throughout the Voyages.
The Vernian scientist possesses the same conscientiousness, but taken to a higher pitch — Aronnax and
Clawbonny are also writers, but ones trapped in a narrow specialisation. As a result, their attempted total
objectivity — their separation of narrative knowing and active being — merely leads them back all the more
quickly and brutally to the ineradicable position of the individual. The hidden role of the person — and his
desire — is central to an understanding of science in the Voyages.
The writer and the scientist are both defined by their ontological incompleteness and their more or less
repressed subjectivity. Above all, they both have an ambiguous relationship with time and space, which
permeate all the concerns of the Voyages, but remain almost impossible to isolate. Even at the end of our
analysis, time and space in the Voyages, considered separately, remain largely mysterious entities. Neither is
material nor immaterial, neither, divinely-appointed nor created by man, and neither is detectable as a scientific
object nor constructable as a literary subject. For Verne the positivist, the frustrating lack of physical data tends
to lead time and space to be ignored; but for Verne the novelist-craftsman, they simply cannot be circumvented.
Instead, the problem is transferred, subsumed into such typically nineteenth-century concerns as the
relationship with other times and places, the nature of identity and difference, or the functioning of feedback
systems. Time and space in the Voyages remain a loose bundle of conceptions and perceptions, defined above
all in terms of each other. Although rarely imperceptible, they stay consistently and implacably unanalysable.
As a result, the long and tortuous search in Jules Verne’s works for meaning in and over space and time never
reaches a final destination, frustrated as it is by a blockage at the very beginning. The only reliable definition of
even such everyday conceptions as inside or outside or physical and mental is a circular one where each is
defined as the opposite of the other — as Verne puts it, ‘stomach and brain’ constitute the man (AL 119). In the
Voyages, hierarchical or top-down theories cannot hope to be sustained, because of the unpredictable effect of
natural oddities. Global views tie their authors completely in knots, but partial ones throw up more problems
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then they solve. Reflection alone is useless, and action heedless. In this way, the Voyages extraordinaires seem
to present themselves as a heroic and exemplary failure: they prove that even the most visionary survey of
Nature’s outstanding features cannot put the world back together again. This general scepticism is undoubtedly
a reaction to — and comment on — the overweening philosophical and social ideas of the time. Verne puts
another nail into the remaining encyclopaedic aims of the Age of Reason; and contributes massively to what
was to become the new uncertainty.
Ultimately, then, Jules Verne argues that all watertight, mechanical, or self-absorbed systems must be
avoided, that the only total system is the whole universe, and that man’s sole choice is in relativity. The
Voyages seem to conclude that man defines himself by contact with his environment and by informed
introspection. He must be neither too involved nor too detached.
Or at least, he must in the unrevised version. Michel Verne’s resuscitation of the Voyages in extremis subtly
alters the balance of the whole. The posthumous works are perhaps less Vernian than hyper-Vernian, in
constant danger of being so imitative as to seem tongue-in-cheek, of becoming ‘post-Vernian’.
The fifty pages of ‘L’Eternal Adam’, in particular, put the ideas of fifty years through a prism. They use the
form to argue against the ‘message’, to apply scepticism to the very principle of scepticism; and to conclude
that the scientist and the writer may together yet circumvent the evasiveness of time and the meaningless of
existence. In the posthumous creed, appearances are particularly deceptive. Cycles are not necessarily eternal,
for individual intelligence and collective wisdom, and faith in a future progress and knowledge of a better past
are not now antagonistic opposites. Michel Verne’s work faces up to the disasters man provokes by excessive
pride in advanced technology; but does not allow itself to become hypnotised by them.
Such is the synthetic force of the tale, indeed, that it acts in many ways as a conclusion for the whole
contradictory series of the Voyages extraordinaires. (For this reason, but also for Michel’s limpid and lucid
contribution to the collected works, it is my view that they should have both names on the cover. The corollary
is that Michel Verne ought also to have full status as a writer in encyclopaedias, histories of literature and so
on.) Bringing to a close one of the final volumes, ‘L’Eternel Adam’ shifts the ‘neither-nor’ towards a potential
‘both-and’. It proclaims that man’s essential task is to attempt to come to terms with time and space by both
reflection and action. The central debate of the Voyages — that between objectivity and subjectivity — is here
partly resolved. Man’s proper role is in a courageous and lucid search for theoretical and practical knowledge of
himself and the cosmos (EA 236):
La véritable supériorité de l’homme, ce n’est pas de dominer, de vaincre la nature; c’est, pour le penseur, de la
comprendre, de faire tenir l’univers immense dans le microcosme de son cerveau; c’est, pour l’hommme
d’action, de garder une âme sereine devant la révolte de la matière, c’est de lui dire: ‘Me détruire, soit!
m’émouvoir, jamais! . . .’.
Why Him?
Why, in the light of their subtlety and richness, have the Voyages extraordinaires suffered from such a
reputation for naivety and poverty, and from at best an admittance into a sub-literary genre? Why, even now, do
postgraduate students so often encounter such blind incomprehension?
Mere popularity often of course has little to do with literary merit. Nevertheless, any creative writer who has
been the most widely translated writer in the world, who has sold as many copies as Marx or Mao and who,
unlike all other ‘popular’ writers has been read so extensively over more than a century would seem to deserve
a minimum of serious consideration.168
It is true that Jules Verne’s works vary in interest, epecially
Marcel Destombes and Piero Gondolo della Riva, ‘Jules Verne à la Bibliothèque Nationale’, Bulletin de
la Bibliothèque Nationale, 3e année, n° 3, sept. 1978, pp. 115–25 (116); figures given by Marc Soriano, ‘Qui
168
108
towards the end of his life. Even in the richest works, Verne occasionally indulges in longueurs — and often
makes factual mistakes of the most elementary sort. More generally, such features as a patronising tone, a
tendency to conservatism and certain limits of the genre sometimes reduce ‘the pleasure of the text’.
But much of the responsibility, I would argue, must in fact be laid at the door of some of the commentators
themselves. Neglect of the creative aspects of the Voyages has led, for example, to trivialisations like Erich von
Däniken’s ‘Spirit-Telephone Conversation with Jules Verne’ or C.-N. Martin’s ‘Jules Verne = ½ de Fenimore
Cooper, ¼ d’Edgar Poe + ¼ d’Hoffmann’ or even to characterisations like George Orwell’s ‘so unliterary a
writer as Verne’!169
But it is also certain critics’ misunderstanding of the nature of science-fiction and indeed of science and of
literature that seems to have led them astray. Thus Verne himself, comparing his own works with those of H. G.
Wells, claimed ‘I make use of physics. He invents’; Wells throws the comparison back, arguing that Verne
avoids the fantastic and that ‘his works dealt almost always with actual possibilities of invention and
discovery’; Suvin presents Verne as a strict Newtonian, dismissing him with an unsupported remark about his
‘liberal interest in the mechanics of locomotion within a SAFELY HOMOGENEOUS SPACE’.170 Francis Lacassin,
lastly, extrapolates the ideas of these three, making a long list of science-fiction concepts supposedly absent
from the Voyages: ‘Equation espace-temps; univers parallèles; voyage dans le temps et sa conséquence extrê
me, le paradoxe temporel; promotion du règne animal ou végétal [. . . , d’]espèces animales [. . .]; définition
d’une nouvelle cosmogonie; mutants; robots; monstres; humanoïdes’.171
In assessing these ideas, one can begin by agreeing that Verne’s works are characterised by many positivisticinspired positions that exclude certain aspects of the extraordinary. Verne’s horror of the ‘danger’ of the
unsubstantiated metaphor generates many of the works. Plausibility and realism often haunt the Voyages. But I
would argue that the critics fatally weaken their case by an extremely unfortunate choice of terms. Indeed, it is
my claim that, on each point, the opposite assertion is nearer the truth. Verne’s works, I believe, on occasion
use physics in order to invent — more effectively than in the magic potions, black boxes and mechanical
justifications of many of his predecessors and successors; the side-effects include lucid analyses of science and
its effects on humanity, and intelligent guesses as to which of the ‘possibilities’ (everything is possible) were
actually probabilities; and Verne’s space, with its temporal force and its inside-outside duality, is anything on
earth but ‘safely homogeneous’. His scientific invention in fact meets most of Lacassin’s requirements —
whose list comes therefore close to providing a brilliant summary of the Voyages!
The incomprehension of the four critics may have a common cause. It may easily have been provoked by
mistaking the verisimilitude of the Voyages for ‘verism’, and science-in-fiction for science, almost as if Verne
were meant to be a scientist, and his works, papers in Nature. The invention of the Voyages occurs in reality on
both the literal and the literary levels. The new machine-gadgets are subject to metaphors, puns, ambiguities
and shifts in language before being allowed to vehicle new conceptions of space-time, alternative worlds,
monsters or subhumans. Science is judged for its coherence, originality and truth — as values in and of fiction.
‘At worst’ Verne employs science towards his own ends, sidesteps it, or ignores it completely. ‘At best’ the
était le vrai Jules Verne?’, L’Express, 22 au 28 mai 1978, pp. 188–223 (199), who is quoting the ‘Bourse aux
valeurs étrangères’ — see also the UNESCO Statistical Yearbook (1987).
169
‘My Spirit-Telephone Conversation with Jules Verne’, taken from Erich von Däniken, According to the
Evidence (1977), in The Jules Verne Companion (1978), ed. Peter Haining, pp. 90–3; Charles-Noël Martin,
‘Recherches sur la [. . .] science de Verne’ (Univ. of Paris VII doctoral thesis: 1980), p. 254; ‘Two Glimpses of
the Moon’, The New Statesman, 18 Jan. 1941, reprinted in Haining, pp. 17–9 (17). Such comments undoubtedly
reveal more about the critic than the works.
170
Quoted in Robert H. Sherard, ‘Jules Verne Revisited’, T.P.’s Weekly, 9 Oct. 1903, p. 589; ‘Jules Verne
and I’, reprinted in Haining, pp. 62–3 (62); Suvin, p. 20.
171
‘Les Naufragés de la terre’, L’Arc, n° 29, sept. 1966, pp. 69–80 (69).
109
Voyages are science-fiction — ‘rêveries scientifico-fantaisistes’ — for in them, narration governs Nature,
experiments are non-reproducible, and the mathematical creates the mythical. In Verne’s universe, the comic,
the cosmic and the cosmetic are literally contained the one in the other.
A few of the commentators on Verne must therefore be held partly responsible for contributing to his grossly
inappropriate reputation — despite the excellent work in recent years of Vierne, Delabroy, Raymond, Compère,
A. Martin and others. One of the reasons why so few English-language critics have taken part in this trend until
now may have something to do with the dismal quality of most of the original translations — often still the ones
used today. Not only are whole chapters missing from the English versions, but they contain such nonsensical
phrases as ‘with a lentil, he lighted a fire’, ‘the disagreeable territory of Nebraska’ (the Badlands), ‘the Passage
of the North Sea’ (North-West Passage), or using explosives to ‘jump over’ obstacles.172 I am suggesting, in
other words, that even university reading — or lack of it — in the Anglo-Saxon countries has all too often been
affected by the popular reputation of Verne, itself the product of the truncated and often nonsensical English
texts. My own personal experience has often revealed the depths of misunderstanding this writer suffers from
— even from those that, by their profession, should know better.
But even in his country of origin, the myth dies hard. A further explanatory, if again extraneous, factor may
be found in the half-truth of Verne as a writer for children — although La Fontaine, Defoe, Swift, AlainFournier and Saint-Exupéry have survived a similar accusation. Stage adaptations and film versions, often
bearing little resemblance to the novels, have also drawn attention away from the specifically literary qualities.
Another reason may possibly be Verne’s very position as a unique best-seller for well over a century: as Serres
ironically quips, Verne is read but not studied — which makes him the opposite of a great man.173
Certain other features of the works themselves may also have further contributed to misapprehensions. Their
length — approximately 8 million words — is certainly an obstacle to complete knowledge and appreciation;
but does not seem to have detracted from respect for what is possibly the only comparably encyclopaedic
attempt, La Comédie humaine. Verne’s image may have something to do instead with the distance between his
surface and ‘deep’ levels, the all-encompassing nature of his irony, which has often taken in the superficial
reader. Reinforced by his genre, his audience and his publisher’s censorship, Verne’s discretion tends towards
literal self-effacement. His networks of obsessions present symptoms but avoid the sore points themselves.
Personal and social concerns are camouflaged, desire functions in terms of an elsewhere, and truths are skirted
round rather than baldly enounced. As a result, Verne’s major contribution to the form of the novel has never
even been noticed; and possibly just as surprising, his claim to be adhering to the principles of physics when
writing an untrammelled tale of time-travel has also passed totally unchallenged.
The texts themselves therefore require a great deal of further unprejudiced analysis. Verne can only be
evaluated at his just worth if the examples of Tolstoy, Turgenev and Tournier174 are followed: if detailed
attention is paid to the literary aspects of the Voyages themselves, rather than to incidental matters in or around
them.
The first task of future research is thus to continue to dispel the mythical Verne. But a great deal of work also
remains to be done before we can possess the depth of accurate knowledge that exists for contemporaries like
Baudelaire, Flaubert, Proust or Gide. Fuller investigations are still needed of themes like cannibalism and
sexuality, reading and writing, and of such formal elements as the use of person, the ‘diary’ structures, the
Examples quoted by Walter James Miller, ‘Foreword’ and Notes, in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the
Sea (New York: 1976), pp. i-xxi and passim (xxi, 139).
173
Michel Serres, ‘Le Savoir, la guerre et le sacrifice’, Critique, déc. 1977, t. XXXIII, n° 367, pp. 1067–77
(1068).
174
Eugène Brandis, ‘Jules Verne en Russie et en Union soviétique’, BSJV, n° 5, 1er tri. 1968, pp. 2–16;
Michel Tournier, Les Météores (1974) and Le Vent Paraclet (1977).
172
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dialogue and the use of rhythm. Examining possible influences by Verne on twentieth-century writers like
Camus, Sartre and above all Tournier could throw up some surprising conclusions. Annotated editions of the
richest works would seem basic necessities. So would systematic literary evaluation of Michel Verne’s
contribution, especially novels like L’Agence Thompson and La Mission Barsac; including, for instance, the
internal theme of authorship and the father-son relationship.
Only if such studies are added to the growing number of serious ones in recent years can Verne’s peculiarly
down-to-earth and sensorial universe be properly understood. Only then can we gain a full comprehension of
the poetry of his gleaming machines and Romantic desolations and dissolutions; of his acute sensitivity and
sensibility, his kinaesthetic, almost neurasthenic, awareness. Verne shows man as caught between salvation and
desire, the beaten track and the unexplored horizon, the contentment of closure and the voluptuousness of open
space. In his best works, phlegm is inseparable from passion and the word from the spirit. Verne’s prophetic
literal-mindedness topples over into poetic ecstasy, and effects a subtle but far-reaching shift in our ways of
seeing and feeling the world.
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Appendix A
The Time of the Novel
J
ean Ricardou has indicated a method
of analysing the temporality of any
prose work. The aim here is therefore
to briefly examine this method and
determine whether it is in fact suited
to studying Verne.
Ricardou’s fundamental thesis consists of the distinction ‘Temps de la narration, temps de la fiction’,175 the
time taken to recount events (as measured by the space — concretely, the number of lines or pages in the book)
versus the internal time of the events themselves, measured in hours, years, etc. The interest of the distinction,
argues Ricardou, is that the two temporalities may then be compared, giving a precise indication of the speed of
narration of the text, measured as the number of fictional minutes, hours or years per line or page.
It will be seen that the method is relatively positivistic; but it does have the major advantage of putting into
objective terms criteria that have been argued about for many centuries. It thus holds out the hope of revealing
features of time that might be invisible to readers ‘in’ the fiction.
The critic goes on to define the standard speed as occurring when fictional events are narrated ‘at their own
rhythm’, when for instance direct speech is simply transcribed; in contrast, what Henry James calls ‘summary’
and ‘scene’ are respectively faster and slower passages. Description may in fact be so slow that fictional time
does not advance at all; whereas the converse, a jump like ‘Ten years later, [. . .]’, is ‘of almost infinite’ speed.
Ricardou plots rather complicated diagrams of these various possibilities, with the time of the narration and
the time of the fiction represented as parallel axes: thus Figure 6(a) shows the possible variations in speed; 6(c),
jumps in narrative or fictional time; 6(e), a ‘normal’ segment followed by an anticipation and then a flashback;
and 6(g), a particular example, in the shape of the multiple flashbacks constituting Michel Butor’s L’Emploi du
temps (1956).
Despite the obvious advantages of Ricardou’s method, there are certain problems, I would claim, in its
presentation. First, the trapezia constituting the diagrams are relatively difficult to visualise, especially as their
intersections have no particular significance. Also, the assumption of a standard speed, that of direct speech
(see Figure 7(a)), is normative (and therefore curiously at odds with Ricardou’s generally ‘objectivist’ stance).
It has the theoretical disadvantage of tending to subsume the novel to drama, but also a practical one: after a
passage at non-standard speed, fictional time may ‘fall behind’ narrative time, as one of Ricardou’s own
diagrams shows (Figure 7(c)).176 Thirdly, this presentation is best suited to texts which are already relatively
clearly segmented (Figure 7(e)): those that are not have to be arbitrarily cut, and this makes for slightly
discontinuous representations (as in Figures 6(a), (c), (e), (g)). It is perhaps because of these different problems
that the diagrams are put into practice on an extended scale only on one self-consciously structured New Novel.
None of them is intrinsic, however, and I would claim that a better presentation is possible. In my adaptations
(Figures 6(b), (d), (f), (h), 7(b), (d), (f)), the two axes are at right angles to each other, with the result that the
‘story-line’ now appears clearly as a . . . line.177 Its gradient indicates the speed of narration (Figure 6(b)),
Problèmes du nouveau roman (1967), pp. 161–70 (originally entitled ‘Divers aspects du temps dans le
roman contemporain’, in Entretiens sur le temps (1967), pp. 249–59).
This opposition is of course an important one for other theoreticians of the novel: it is used by Gérard
Genette, for example, as ‘temps du récit’ vs ‘temps de l’histoire’ (Figures III (1972), pp. 77–273 (77–8)).
176
Taken from Nouveaux problèmes du roman, p. 28.
177
This line is the diagonal of the trapezium (or rather rectangle) corresponding to the trapezium in
Ricardou’s diagrams.
175
112
jumps appear explicitly as jumps (6(d)) and anticipations appear simply as lines higher up (6(f)). There are no
longer the problems brought about by a normative speed (7(d)) (although this may be introduced, if required, by
tracing the diagonal equidistant from the two axes (7(b))).178 And lastly, the diagrams are less fragmented, since
the arbitrary cutting into segments is less in evidence (7(f)).
The adapted diagrams thus constitute, I would argue, a particularly concise method of studying the ways in
which narrative time and fictional time interact. In other words, they may provide a key to unexpected patterns
in Verne’s works.
178
This idea was suggested by Jean Ricardou in a private conversation with myself in 1978.
113
he aim of this section is to indicate the scope
of Michel Verne’s contribution to the
T
Voyages extraordinaires.
First, the short story in English ‘In the Year
2889' (1889) cannot be totally Jules Verne’s
work as he apparently could not read the
language, 1let alone write it. (See for instance Marie Belloc, ‘Jules Verne at Home’, The Strand Magazine, Feb.
1895, pp. 206–13 (210).) The letters imply that it was Michel who wrote this work, perhaps directly in English;
and it was possibly he who was also responsible for the 1890 and 1891 editions in French. The text itself seems
to provide ambiguous evidence as to the authorship of the original short story: although there are no
grammatical mistakes, the English is still rather mediocre, and could thus be either a poor translation (even by
the standards of the times) or a draft by a reasonably competent foreign writer revised by a native speaker.
Amongst the apparent Gallicisms, one can quote ‘Do you come (this evening) by tube or by air-train?’ (p. 676);
‘by a just turn-about of things here below’ (p. 670); ‘the telephote was got in readiness’ (p. 676); ‘the case stood
just as the reporter said’ (p. 677).
As far as the posthumous works are concerned, there exists both internal and external evidence of Michel’s
contribution — despite the existence of a letter where Michel requests geographical documentation from before
1905 so that there will be no anachronisms (letter dated 14 septembre 1910, collection Gondolo della Riva;
quoted by him in ‘A propos des œuvres posthumes de Jules Verne’, p. 75).
It is highly significant that some of the ideas in the works are characteristic of the posthumous period — such
as the equivalence of matter and energy, first postulated in Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity (1905): ‘La
substance, éternellement détruite, se recompose éternellement. Chacun de ses changements d’état
s’accompagne d’un rayonnement d’énergie et d’une destruction de substance correspondante’ (CM (1908) 127).
The vocabulary used is also indicative. Even if one accepts the hypothesis of posthumous authorship, certain
words still predate what the Larousse de la langue française: Lexis (1977) gives as their first usage: ‘électroioniques’, ‘subconscient’, ‘planeur’, ‘syntonisation’, ‘sans fil’ (EA (1910) 233; MB (1919) I x 183; II vii 341; II
vii 344; II vii 346).
In fact, articles by Piero Gondolo della Riva (‘Œuvres posthumes’; ‘A propos du manuscrit de Storitz’,
‘Encore à propos du manuscrit de Storitz’) have argued that Michel Verne’s role was much more extensive than
that of merely putting the manuscripts in order, as he claimed in articles in Le Figaro (2 mai 1905) and Le
Temps (3 mai 1905). The critic indeed ascribes to Michel the following additions: complete chapters of Le
Volcan d’or (1906), La Chasse au météore (1908), Le Pilote du Danube (1908), Les Naufragés du ‘Jonathan’
(1909) and Le Secret de Wilhelm Storitz (1910); virtually the whole of L’Agence Thompson and C° (1907) and
L’Etonnante aventure de la mission Barsac (1919); and ‘L’Eternel Adam’ (1910) in its entirety. Gondolo della
Riva’s arguments, based on the manuscripts (in the Jules Verne Museum in Nantes since 1981) and the
typescripts of the posthumous works (in his private collection in Turin) have recently been publicly proved. The
original (i.e. Jules’s) versions of Wilhelm Storitz (1985), La Chasse au météore (1986), En Magéllanie (= Les
Naufragés du ‘Jonathan’) (1987), Le Beau Danube Jaune (= Le Pilote du Danube) (1988), and Le Volcan d’or
(1989) have been published; and thus we now have full documentary evidence of the very major amendments
and additions by Michel.
But even though a precise set of words, sentences, and chapters has been proved to have come from Michel’s
pen, we can still not rule out the possibility of spoken or written material by Jules Verne being a source. In
addition, all the works in question were published under both the name Jules Verne and the general title Les
Voyages extraordinaires; and they were all intended, on one level at least, to be accepted as authentically
Jules’s.
Appendix B
Michel Verne
114
The ultimate ascription of authorship then, although immensely aided by the excellent work of the Société
Jules Verne in publishing the original editions, can never finally be decided. The best author formulation is
Jules-and-Michel.
Bibliography
By far the most useful critical bibliography and general introduction for the period up to 1973 is François
Raymond and Daniel Compère, with the collaboration of Olivier Dumas and Christian Robin, Le
Développement des Etudes sur Jules Verne (domaine français (1976), which also contains a list of Verne’s
works, with the years of publication in book and in serial form (the latter being usually a few months before the
former, most frequently in Jules Hetzel’s Magasin d’éducation et de récréation). (The exact dates of book and
serial publication are given in Martin, La Vie et l’œuvre, pp. 270–4, 278–80.) Two supplements to this
bibliography, covering 1974 and 1975–6, appeared in Jules Verne 2 and Jules Verne 3. But Jean-Michel
Margot, Bibliographie documentaire sur Jules Verne (Ostermundigen (Switzerland): 1978) and Bibliographie
documentaire sur Jules Verne [vol. II] (Nyon (Switzerland): 1982), with a total of 2600 entries, is more
exhaustive and up-to-date — if less informative and easy to use. See also the very complete Edward J.
Gallagher, Judith A. Mistichelli, and John A. Van Eerde, Jules Verne: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography
(Boston: 1980) and Piero Gondolo della Riva, Bibliographie analytique de toutes les œuvres de Jules Verne. I:
Œuvres romanesques publiées, II: Œuvres inédites (1977 and 1985). A selective critical bibliography will be
provided by my chapter on the Vernes in the Critical Bibliography of the Nineteenth Century, ed. David
Baguley (Syracuse UP (NY): 1994).
1. Works Published under the Name of Jules Verne
a) The Voyages extraordinaires (complete list)
The table below shows for each work the title, the siglum (following the system used in Jules Verne 1, Jules
Verne 2, and so on, the date of the first edition (all the novels were published by Hetzel, except L’Etonnante
aventure de la mission Barsac, which was published by Hachette), and the edition used here (LP = Livre de
poche; 10/18 = U.G.E. ‘10/18'; HA = Les Humanoïdes associés; R = Rencontre, Lausanne).
L'Archipel en feu
Autour de la Lune
L’Agence Thompson and Co
Aventures de trois Russes et de trois Anglais
Mistress Branican
Un Billet de loterie
Bourses de voyage
Le Chancellor
Claudius Bombarnac
César Cascabel
Clovis Dardentor
Le Chemin de France
Les Enfants du capitaine Grant
Voyages et aventures du capitaine Hatteras
Le Château des Carpathes
AF
AL
AT
A3
B
BL
BV
C
CB
CC
CD
CF
CG
CH
ChC
1884
1870
1907
1872
1891
1886
1903
1875
1892
1890
1896
1887
1866–8
1866
1892
LP
LP
R
Hetzel (1873 edition)
LP
10/18
R
LP
R
10/18
10/18
R
LP
LP
LP
115
La Chasse au météore
Un Capitaine de quinze ans
Cinq semaines en ballon
Les Cinq cents millions de la Begum
‘Un Drame dans les airs’ (in DO)
‘La Destinée de Jean Morénas’ (in HD)
Un Drame en Livonie
Un Drame au Mexique
‘Le Docteur Ox’ (in DO)
Le Docteur Ox (recueil)
Deux ans de vacances
‘L’Eternel Adam’ (in HD)
L'Ecole des Robinsons
L'Etoile du Sud
‘Les Forceurs de blocus’
CM
C15
5S
500
DA
DJM
DL
DM
DO
DO
2A
EA
ER
ES
FB
1908
1878
1863
1879
1851
1910
1904
1851
1872
1874
1888
1910
1882
1884
1865
Face au drapeau
‘Frritt-Flacc’ (in Histoires inattendues, 1978)
Les Frères Kip
‘La Famille Raton’ (in HD)
Famille-sans-nom
‘Gil Braltar’ (in Histoires inattendues, 1978)
‘Le Humbug’ (in HD)
Hier et demain (recueil)
‘Un Hivernage dans les glaces’ (in DO)
Hector Servadac
L'Ile à hélice
L'Ile mystérieuse
L'Invasion de la mer
Les Indes noires
La Jangada
‘In the Year 2899' (in HD)
Les Histoires de Jean-Marie Cabidoulin
Kéraban-le-têtu
Mirifiques aventures de Maître Antifer
L’Etonnante aventure de la mission Barsac
Maître du monde
‘Martin Paz’
Mathias Sandorf
Michel Strogoff
La Maison à vapeur
‘Maître Zacharius’ (in DO)
FD
FF
FK
FR
FSN
GB
H
HD
HG
HS
IH
IM
IMer
IN
J
JJA
JMC
K
MA
MB
MM
MP
MS
MSt
MV
MZ
1896
1886
1902
1891
1889
1887
1910
1910
1855
1877
1895
1874–5
1905
1877
1881
1889
1901
1883
1894
1919
1904
1852
1885
1876
1880
1854
LP
LP
LP
LP
LP
LP
LP
R
LP
LP
LP
LP
LP
LP
Jacques Glénat (Grenoble:
1978)
LP
10/18
R
LP
10/18
LP
LP
LP
LP
LP
10/18
LP
10/18
LP
LP
LP
HA
LP
R
HA
Hachette (1979)
R
LP
LP
LP
LP
116
Les Naufragés du ‘Jonathan’
Nord contre Sud
P'tit-Bonhomme
Le Phare du bout du monde
Le Pilote du Danube
Le Pays des fourrures
‘Les Révoltés de la Bounty’ (in TO)
Robur-le-conquérant
‘M. Ré-dièze et Mlle Mi-bémol’ (in HD)
Le Rayon vert
Sans dessus dessous
Le Sphinx des glaces
Le Superbe Orénoque
Seconde patrie
Textes oubliés (see Infra)
Les Tribulations d'un Chinois en Chine
Le Testament d'un excentrique
De la Terre à la Lune
Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours
Le Village aérien
Voyage au centre de la Terre
Une Ville flottante
Vingt mille lieues sous les mers
NJ
NS
PB
PBM
PD
PF
RB
RC
RM
RV
SDD
SG
SO
SP
TO
TCC
TE
TL
TM
VA
VCT
VF
20M
Le Volcan d'or
Le Secret de Wilhelm Storitz
VO
WS
1909
1887
1893
1905
1908
1873
1879
1886
1893
1882
1889
1897
1898
1900
10/18
LP
10/18
LP
10/18
LP
10/18
LP
LP
LP
10/18
LP
R
R
1879
1899
1865
1872
1901
1864
1871
1869–
70
1906
1985
LP
10/18
LP
LP
HA
LP
LP
LP
R
HA
Note: Virtually all the novels appeared in serial form in the Magasin d’éduction et de récréation, Le Temps or
other reviews, nearly always in the same year as the first edition or the year preceding it (Olivier Dumas,
‘Chronologie des œuvres romanesques de Jules Verne’, in Raymond and Compère, pp. 77–83 [79]). All the
modern editions seem to use the last edition corrected by the author(s). Although very many novels underwent a
large number of stylistic changes between the various editions, the only novel to undergo structural changes at
the hands of Jules was Voyage au centre de la Terre, where 20 pages (VCT 302–21) were added to the 7th
edition (1867, in-8°). (For further information on the editions, see Piero Gondolo della Riva, Bibliographie
analytique de toutes les œuvres de Jules Verne, plus the many articles by Olivier Dumas in the BSJV.)
Five of the short stories underwent major changes when republished in the Voyages: ‘Les Premiers navires de
la marine mexicaine’ (1851), renamed ‘Un Drame au Mexique’ (1876); ‘Un Voyage en ballon’ (1851),
renamed ‘Un Drame dans les airs’ (1874); ‘Martin Paz’ (1852, 1875); ‘Maître Zacharius’ (1854, 1874); and ‘In
the Year 2889' (The Forum, Feb. 1889), renamed ‘Au XXIXe siècle: La Journée d’un journaliste en 2889' (1910).
Page references to the original versions of the first three works refer to Marc Soriano, Portrait de l’artiste
jeune: Suivi des quatre premiers textes publiés de Jules Verne (1978).
b) Other works
117
‘Le Comte de Chanteleine’ (1864); edition used here: Histoires inattendues (1978).
‘Edgar Poe et ses œuvres’, Le Musée des familles, avril 1864, pp. 113–208; reproduced in L’Herne: ‘Edgar
Allan Poe’ [1974], pp. 320–45 and Textes oubliés (1979), pp. 111–53.
‘Un Express de l’avenir’ (1889) (in TO and Jules Verne 1, pp. 131–6).
‘Monna Lisa’ (play) (1854); reproduced in L’Herne: ‘Jules Verne’, pp. 70–85.
Un Neveu d’Amérique (play) (1873); edition used here: Clovis Dardentor: Suivi de ‘Un Neveu d’Amérique’
(1979).
‘Le passé n’est pas [...]’, (poem) (c. 1849), quoted by Jean Jules-Verne, ‘Souvenir de mon grand-père’, in
L’Herne: ‘Jules Verne’, pp. 112–6 (113).
Textes oubliés (1979), ed. Francis Lacassin; abbreviation: TO.
Voyage à travers l’impossible (play, with Adolphe d’Ennery) (1981), ed. François Raymond.
Nine articles signed Michel Jules Verne, which appeared in the Suplément littéraire of Le Figaro during 1888,
under the heading ‘Zigzags à travers la science’ (Piero Gondolo della Riva, ‘A propos de l’activité littéraire
de Michel Verne’, Cahiers du Centre d’études verniennes et du Musée Jules Verne, n° 5, 1985, pp. 14–22).
The letters to and from Jules and Michel Verne are to be found principally in the Bibliothèque nationale
(Département des manuscrits, ‘Jules Verne’, vol. 73–5), the Centre d’études verniennes at Nantes and various
private collections. Evans (Jules Verne Rediscovered, p. 173) provides a very useful list of books containing
significant numbers of letters. Olivier Dumas, Jules Verne (Lyon: 1988), reproduces all the letters to Verne’s
family discovered before 1987 (supplemented by BJSV, n° 88, 4e tri. 1988, ‘Spécial Lettres N° 5').
118
2. Critical Studies
a) Partly or Entirely on Jules Verne
L’Arc, ‘Jules Verne’, n° 29, Sept. 1966.
Arts/Lettres, ‘Jules Verne’, n° 15, 1949.
Barthes, Roland, ‘Nautilus et Bateau ivre’, in Mythologies (1957, 2nd edn 1970), pp. 80–2.
Bellemin-Noël, Jean, ‘Analecture d’un fiasco double: A propos de Sans dessus dessous’, in Jules Verne 3, pp.
137–56.
Belloc, Marie, ‘Jules Verne at Home’, The Strand Magazine, Feb. 1895, pp. 206–13.
Boia, Lucien, ‘Un Ecrivain original: Michel Verne’, BSJV, n° 70, 2e tri. 1984, pp. 90–5.
Bonnefis, Philippe, ‘La Mécanique des chutes’, in Jules Verne 3, pp. 67–90.
Borgeaud, Georges, ‘Jules Verne et ses illustrateurs’, L’Arc, pp. 46–9.
Bradbury, Ray, ‘The Ardent Blasphemers’, in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (New York: 1962), pp.
1–12.
— —, ‘Introduction’, in Around the World in Eighty Days (Los Angeles: 1962), pp. vii–xii.
— —, ‘Introduction’, in The Mysterious Island (Baltimore: 1959), pp. v–x.
— —, ‘Marvels and Miracles — Pass It On!’, New York Times Magazine, 20 March 1954, pp. 26–7, 56, 58.
Brandis, Eugène, ‘Jules Verne en Russie et en Union soviétique’, BSJV, n° 5, ler tri. 1968, pp. 2–16.
Buisine, Alain, ‘Circulations en tous genres’, Europe, n° 595–6, pp. 48–56.
— —, ‘Machines et énergétique’, in Jules Verne 3, pp. 25–52.
Bulletin de la société Jules Verne (BSJV).
Butcher, William, ‘Jules and Michel Verne’, ch. 25 in Critical Bibliography of French Literature: The
Nineteenth Century (Syracuse UP, New York: 1994) ed. David Baguley, pp. 923–40.
— —, ‘Crevettes de l’air et baleines volantes’, La Nouvelle Revue Maritime, mai–juin 1984, n° 386–7, pp. 35–
40.
— —, ‘Les Dates de l’action des Voyages extraorditiaires: Une Mise au point’, BSJV, n° 67, 3e tri. 1983, pp.
101–3.
— —, ‘Etranges voyages de la ligne: Fleuves, logos et logique dans l’œuvre de Jules Verne’, in Modernités de
Jules Verne (1988), ed. Jean Bessière, pp. 123–38.
— —, ‘Graphes et graphie: Circuits et voyages extraordinaires dans l’œuvre de Jules Verne’, in Regards sur la
théorie des graphes (Lausanne: 1980), ed. P. Hansen and D. de Werra, pp. 177–82.
— —, ‘Handle with Care’, Science-Fiction Studies, vol. 15, 1988, pp. 94–5, review of Simone Vierne, Jules
Verne (1986).
— —, ‘Jules Verne and Edinburgh’, Graffiti, n° 3, Spring 1981, pp. 7–10.
— —, ‘ “Jules Verne et l’imaginaire”, de Jean Delabroy’, BSJV, n° 60, 4e tri. 1981, pp. 132–5.
— — ‘Jules Verne revisité’, Europe, n° 616–17, août–sept. 1980, pp. 202–6.
— —, ‘Jules Verne’s Other Extraordinary Journey’, Graffiti, n° 6 [1982], pp. 6–7.
— —, ‘Jules Verne, Prophet or Poet?’, Publications de L’INSEE (1986).
— —, Notes de bibliographie: Etudes verniennes (material available at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris)
(1981).
— —, Review of Andrew Martin, The Knowledge of Ignorance: From Genesis to Jules Verne (1985), The
Modern Language Review, vol. 83, part 4, pp. 1001–2.
— —, ‘Le Sens de “L’Eternel Adam” ’, BSJV, n° 58, 2e tri. 1981, pp. 73–81.
— —, ‘A Study of Time in Jules Verne’s Voyages extraordinaires’ (Ph.D. thesis, Queen Mary College,
University of London: 1983, 1985).
— —, ‘Le Verbe et la chair, ou l’emploi du temps’, in Jules Verne 4, pp. 125–48.
— —, ‘Verne, Jules-Gabriel’, in Contemporary Authors (Gale Research Company, Chicago: 1991), pp. 462–5.
119
— —, ‘Vernet, Vernon, Vernier et quelques autres’, BSJV, n° 64, 4e tri. 1982, pp. 317–20.
Chambers, Ross, ‘Cultural and Ideological Determinations in Narrative: A Note on Jules Verne’s Les Cinq
cents millions de la Bégum’, L’Esprit créateur, vol. xxi, 1981, n° 3, Fall, pp. 69–78
Compère, Daniel, Approche de l’île chez Jules Verne (1977).
— —, ‘Le Fin mot, dans Voyage au centre de la Terre et autres récits’, in Jules Verne 2, pp. 165–71.
— —, ‘Le Jeu du chinois’, BSJV, n° 52, 4e tri. 1979, pp. 133–7.
— —, ‘Les Nouvelles de Jules Verne: Un Jeu de devinettes’, BSJV, n° 54, 2e tri. 1980, pp. 233–8.
— —, Un Voyage imaginaire de Jules Verne: ‘Voyage au centre de la Terre, (1977).
— —, and François Raymond, with the collaboration of Olivier Dumas and Christian Robin, Le Développement
des études sur Jules Verne (domaine français) (1976)
Däniken, Erich von, ‘My Spirit-Telephone Conversation with Jules Verne’, extract from According to the
Evidence (1977), reprinted without reference in Haining, pp. 90–3.
Delabroy, Jean, ‘Jules Verne et l’imaginaire: Ses Représentations et ses fonctions principales dans la période de
formation de l’œuvre romanesque (1851–75)’, unpublished thèse d’Etat (University of Paris III: 1980).
— —, ‘La Machine à démonter le temps’, in Jules Verne 3, pp. 15–23.
— —, ‘Une Transe atlantique (Texte-échangeur et fantasmatique sociale)’, in Jules Verne et les sciences
humaines, pp. 212–40.
Destombes, Marcel, and Piero Gondolo della Riva, ‘Jules Verne à la Bibliothèque Nationale’, Bulletin de la
Bibliothèque nationale, 3e année, n° 3, sept. 1978, pp. 115–25.
Dumas, Olivier, ‘Chronologie des œuvres romanesques de Jules Verne’, in Raymond and Compère, pp. 77–83.
— —, ‘Compléments critiques sur la thèse de Charles-Noël Martin’, BSJV, n° 59, 3e tri. 1981, pp. 107–9.
— —, Jules Verne (Lyon: 1988).
— —, ‘La Main du fils dans l’œuvre du père’, BSJV, n° 82, 2e tri. 1987, pp. 21–4.
— —, ‘La Race noire dans l’œuvre de Jules Verne’, in Jules Verne et les sciences humaines, pp. 264–72.
— —, ‘Le Secret du Village aérien’, BSJV, n° 53, ler tri. 1980, pp. 180–5.
Europe, n° 595–6, nov.–déc. 1978.
Evans, Arthur B., ‘Jules Verne and the Scientific Novel: A Study of Didacticism and Fiction’ (Ph.D. thesis,
Columbia University: 1985).
— —, Jules Verne Rediscovered: Didacticism and the Scientific Novel (New York: 1988).
Evans I[drisyn] O., Jules Verne and his Work (1965).
— —, Jules Verne: Master of Science Fiction (1956).
Gaillard, Françoise, ‘ “L’Eternel Adam”, ou L’Evolutionnisme à l’heure de la thermodynamique’, in Jules
Verne et les sciences humaines, pp. 293–313.
Gallagher, Edward J., Judith A. Mistichelli, and John A. Van Eerde, Jules Verne: A Primary and Secondary
Bibliography (Boston: 1980).
Gondolo della Riva, Piero, ‘A propos de l’activité littéraire de Michel Verne’, Cahiers du Centre d’etudes
verniennes et du Musée Jules Verne, n° 5, 1985, pp. 14–22.
— —, ‘A propos des œuvres posthumes de Jules Verne’, Europe, n° 595–6, pp. 73–88.
— —, ‘A propos du manuscrit de Storitz’, BSJV, n° 46, 2e tri. 1978, pp. 160–3.
— —, Bibliographie analytique de toutes les œuvres de Jules Verne. I. Œuvres romanesques publiées, II:
Œuvres inédites (1977 and 1985).
— — ‘Encore à propos du manuscrit de Storitz’, BSJV, n° 58, 2e tri. 1981, p. 72.
— —, and Marcel Destombes, ‘Jules Verne à la Bibliothèque nationale’, Bulletin de la Bibliothèque nationale,
3e année, n° 3, sept. 1978, pp. 115–25.
Haining, Peter, ed., The Jules Verne Companion (1978).
L’Herne: ‘Jules Verne’, n° 25 (1974).
120
Huet, Marie-Hélène, L’Histoire des ‘Voyages extraordinaires’: Essai sur l’œuvre de Jules Verne (1973)
(originally a thèse de troisième cycle, under the title of ‘La Machine à modifier le temps, ou Les Voyages
extraordinaires de Jules Verne’ [University of Bordeaux: 1968]).
— —, ‘Itinéraire du texte’, in Jules Verne et les sciences humaines, pp. 9–26.
Jules-Verne, Jean, Jules Verne (1973).
— —, Jules Verne: A Biography (1976), trans. and adapted by Roger Greaves.
— —, ‘Souvenir de mon grand-père’, in L’Herne: ‘Jules Verne’, pp. 112–16.
Jules Verne 5: Emergences du fantastique (1987), ed. François Raymond.
Jules Verne 2: L’Ecriture vernienne (1978), ed. François Raymond.
Jules Verne et les sciences humaines (1979), ed. François Raymond and Simone Vierne.
Jules Verne 4: Texte, image, spectacle (1984), ed. François Raymond.
Jules Verne 3: Machines et imaginaire (1980), ed. François Raymond.
Jules Verne 1: ‘Le Tour du monde’ (1976), ed. François Raymond.
Lacassin, Francis, ‘Jules Verne et le roman policier’, in Le Pilote du Danube (1979), pp. 5–18.
— —, ‘Les Naufragés de la terre’, L’Arc, pp. 69–80.
Lacaze, Dominique, ‘Lectures croisées de Jules Verne et de Robida’, in Jules Verne et les sciences humaines,
pp. 76–90.
Luce, Stanford L., ‘Jules Verne: Moralist, Writer, Scientist’ (Ph.D. thesis, Yale University: 1953).
Margot, Jean-Michel, Bibliographie documentaire sur Jules Verne (1978 and 1982 editions); now superseded
by:
— —, Bibliographie documentaire sur Jules Verne (Amiens: 1989), with a Preface by R. Pourvoyeur.
Martin, Andrew, ‘Chez Jules: Nutrition and Cognition in the Novels of Jules Verne’, French Studies, vol.
xxxvii, Jan. 1983, n° 1, pp. 47–58.
— —, ‘The Entropy of Balzacian Tropes in the Scientific Fictions of Jules Verne’, The Modern Language
Review, Jan. 1982, pp. 51–62.
— —, The Knowledge of Ignorance: From Genesis to Jules Verne (Cambridge UP: 1985).
Martin, Charles-Noël, ‘Recherches sur la nature, les origines et le traitement de la science dans l’œuvre de J.
Verne’ (unpublished thèse d’Etat, University of Paris VII: 1980).
— —, La Vie et l’œuvre de Jules Verne (revised edn, 1978, of Jules Verne, sa vie et son oeuvre, Lausanne:
1971).
Miller, Walter James, ‘Foreword’ and Notes, in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (New York: 1976),
pp. i–xxi and passim.
Mistichelli, Judith A., Edward J. Gallagher and John A. Van Eerde, Jules Verne: A Primary and Secondary
Bibliography (Boston: 1980).
Modernités de Jules Verne (1988), ed. Jean Bessière.
Moré, Marcel, Nouvelles explorations de Jules Verne: Musique, misogamie, machine (1963).
— —, Le Très curieux Jules Verne: Le Problème du père dans les ‘Voyages extraordinaires’ (1960).
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124
Aborigines (Australian), 50, 51, 112
see also blacks
adverbs
in general, 57, 119–20, 124, 125, 130, 131, 139, 140, 142
past-context, 120
present-context, 120
agoraphobia, 8, 9
altruism, 103, 106–8
Americas, 11, 14, 103, 124
Americans, 21, 30, 48
anonymous narrator (EA), 52, 53, 89–91
anthropomorphism, 96
see also man-machine
anti-Semitism, 48–9
see also Jews; racism
anticipations
scientific, 2
in plots, 30, 34, 76, 171
anxiety, 26, 42, 58, 99, 109, 114
arborescences, 22–5, 27, 104
Ardan (AL, TL), 38, 44, 71, 72, 75, 84, 113
Aronnax (20M), 72, 94, 100, 107, 161
Arthur Gordon Pym, The Narrative of, 14, 18, 29
author within fiction, 28–30, 37, 47, 90
see also narrator; Verne, Michel
auto-cannibalisation, see cannibalisation
auto-cannibalism, see cannibalism
Aventures de trois Russes et trois Anglais, 13
Axel (VCT), 61–70, 73–4
Balzac, 1, 32, 34, 166
Barthes, Roland, 38, 76
Beckett, Samuel, 152
beginnings of works, see openings of works
see also endings
Bellemin-Noël, Jean, 5, 151, 156
Benveniste, Emile, 118–19, 154
bibliography, 190
blacks, 49–53
see also racism
body, human or ship’s, 94–7
branching structures, 21–4
camera-eye technique, 141
Camus, Albert, 122, 149, 167
cannibalisation, 97–8, 101–2
cannibalism, 98–103
125
Capitaine de quinze ans, 49
Capitaine Hatteras, Voyages et aventures du, 4, 13, 14, 19, 30, 65, 67, 69, 111
Cartesianism, 21
chance, see Providence
Chancellor (the novel and the ship), 4, 5, 29–32, 98–100, 103, 132–55, passim
characters, see under anonymous narrator, Axel, Aronnax, Clawbonny, Fogg, Hatteras, Kazallon, Kin-Fo,
Lidenbrock, Nemo, Rosette, Servadac, Strogoff, Zacharius, Zartog
Chasse au météore, 88, 173
children, 165
Château des Carpathes, 33, 35
Cinq semaines en ballon, 4, 14, 78
Clawbonny (CH), 18, 19, 161
clocks, 3, 85–7, 92
closed forms and structures, 9, 76–80, 112–13, 157–61
coastline, 11, 18
Compère, Daniel, 165
corpus, 4, 10
correspondence from and to Verne, 193
Creation, 60, 62–4, 72
Creationism, 52, 53
Cretan Liar Paradox, 108, 146, 160
Crusoe, Robinson, 15
see also Defoe
Cuvier, 43, 53
cycles, 78–83, 88–92
Darwin, 25, 47, 51, 53, 106
see also evolution
Defoe, Daniel, 46, 49, 166
see also Crusoe
Delabroy, Jean, 3, 84, 94, 133, 165
De la Terre à la Lune, 4, 35
determinism, 47
diaries, 134–5, 149, 166
‘Docteur Ox’, 84, 107
‘Drame au Mexique’, 31, 49, 84
Drame en Livonie, 43, 45
dreams, 38, 67–71
eating, 95–9
see also cannibalism
editions of Verne’s works, 190–2
elements (principally earth and water), 10–11, 23–5
endings, 33–6, 129
see also openings of works
endogamy, see under closed forms; introversion
Enfants du capitaine Grant, 4, 13, 76
English, 48, 165, 172
equilibrium, 32, 82
‘Eternel Adam’, 5, 31, 32, 37, 40, 53, 54, 61, 88–91, 93, 127, 133, 134, 162–3, 173
126
see also Verne, Michel
ethics, 102
L’ Etonnante aventure de la mission Barsac, 4, 129, 133, 153, 167, 173
evolution, 25, 51–4
see also biology
Face au drapeau, 4, 37, 132–55
family, 104–5
feedback, 80–9
fictional time, 29–34, 168–71
see also narrative time; Ricardou
Figures III, 29, 36
flashback, 168
Flaubert, 122, 126, 152, 166
flying fish, 52
Fogg (TM), 3, 111, 124
see also Tour du monde
footnotes, 29–30, 36–7
fossils, 64–7
France, 54, 66
free indirect style, 120, 138–41
free style, 138–9
French
people, 48
language, 118–121, 133
future
time, 2, 46, 56, 57, 90
tenses, 37, 68, 144–8
Genette, Gérard, 29, 36
geometric progression, 83
Germans, 48
Giant Shepherd (VCT), 52, 65–8, 71–4
Go
~del, Escher, Bach, 76
Gondolo della Riva, Piero, 5, 172, 173
Hamburger, Käte, 119, 144
Hatteras, 13, 14, 19, 38, 54, 67, 69, 82, 111
Hector Servadac, 3, 49, 71, 151
Hetzel, Jules, 2, 13, 50
history, 1–2, 55–8, 66–74, 88–94, 156–9
see also past; prehistory
Hofstadter, Douglas, 76
homosexuality, 101, 105
humour, 81, 83
Ile à hélice, 4, 33, 35, 132–55
Ile mystérieuse, 4, 15, 24, 30, 33, 45, 156
illustrations, 36–40
Imbs, Paul, 122
imperfect tense, 123–6
incest, 104–7
127
Indes noires, 8, 37
indirect style, see under free indirect style
interior monologue, 138, 139, 155
introversion, 77, 82, 106
see also self-contained
Jews, 48, 89, 92
see also racism
‘just-so’ reasoning, 44, 46
Kazallon (C), 100, 102, 137, 150
Kin-Fo (TCC), 101
Lamarckism, 47, 52, 54
see also evolution
lattice, 21, 24
layers, geological, 61–6
Lidenbrock (VCT), 54, 64, 65, 72–4, 94, 105, 111, 125
linear forms and structures, 11–16, 19, 23–6, 42–5, 75
see also one-dimensional
logic, 42–8, 107–8
love, 85
machines, 82–3, 95–8, passim
Magasin d’éducation et de récréation, 57, 60
Maître du monde, 37
‘Maître Zacharius’, 2, 85–7, 92–3, 111
man-machine, 97, 98, 124
manuscripts, 5, 99, 173
Martin, Andrew, 165
Martin, Charles-Noël, 164
‘Martin Paz’, 21, 49, 84
Marx, 97, 163
mathematics, 8, 39, 98, 108, passim
Mathias Sandorf, 12, 16, 37, 123
mechanics, 86, 110–13
see also science
meridian, 13
‘message’ of Verne’s works, 156
messages-in-bottles, 127–9
metaphors, 10–11, 63–4, 94–7, 165
Michel Strogoff, 26, 123
‘miscegenation’, 50, 101
missing-link, 4, 51
see also Village aérien
Mission Barsac, L’Etonnante aventure de la, 4, 129, 133, 153, 167, 173
Mistress Branican, 31–3
modernity, 83, 93
monsters, 64, 82
Moré, Marcel, 101
music, 47, 151
narrataire, 126, 146
128
narrative time, 29–32, 168–71
see also fictional time; Ricardou
narrator, 29–32, 89–91, passim
see also author
natural history, 55
Nature, 22–7, 79–82, passim
Naufragés du ‘Jonathan’, 88, 173
Nautilus (20M), 10, 78
negativity, 150–3
Nemo (20M), 4, 10, 14, 46, 106, 110
one-dimensional, 2, 13–17, 61
see also linear forms
open-ended future, 148
openings of works, 33–6, 134
see also endings
optimism, see under pessimism
oxygen, 93, 97, 106
paratexte, 36
see also footnotes, titles, illustrations
passé composé, 118–122, 130–1, 141–2
passé simple, 36, 56, 57, 118–23, 130–1, 142–3
passivity, 152, 158
past
tenses, 118–31, 150–2
time, 47–50, 54–74, 156–60, passim
see also history; prehistory
pastiche, 5, 37
Pays des fourrures, 60, 61
perpetual motion, 81, 86
person, third, 132, 140, 148
pessimism, 66, 89–91, 156
Phare du bout du monde, 10
photography, 39
Pilote du Danube, 88, 110, 173
plots, 2, 29–41, 168–71
Poe, Edgar Allan, 14, 29
see also Arthur Gordon Pym; Sphinx des glaces
polar regions, 7, 13, 14
post hoc reasoning, 44, 46
posthumous works, see under Verne, Michel; ‘Eternel Adam’; Etonnante aventure de la mission Barsac
predictions, see under anticipations, scientific
prehistory, 61–74
present
tense, 112–13, 118–20, 127–55
time, 46, passim
prophetic, 167
Protestantism, 92
Providence, 28, 45–7
129
Pym, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon, 14, 18, 29
racism, 48–53
rape, 101, 105
Raymond, François, 3, 5, 76, 90, 151, 156, 165
realism, 15, 16, 25, 38, 63, 69, 124
see also Romanticism
relatives, 104–6
reputation, Verne’s public, 85, 163–7
Ricardou, Jean, 168–71
rivers, 11–13
Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 56
Robur-le-conquérant, 4, 37, 41, 76, 83
R Romanticism, 1, 21, 54, 69, 124
see also realism
Rosette (HS), 44, 71
Roudaut, Jean, 3, 133, 135
Russell, Bertrand, 108
Sans dessus dessous, 3, 5, 30, 42
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 26, 122, 167
science, 43, 73–5, 109–16, 161, 165, 166, passim
see also mechanics
science-fiction, 15, 52, 73, 108, 164–6
scientism, 83, 97
sea, 7, 9–12, 20
self-annihilation, 107, 153
self-contained, 78, 102–11
see also introversion
self-knowledge, 90, 93, 163
self-reference, 126, 129, 131
Serres, Michel, 105, 133, 166
Servadac, Hector, 151
set-theory, 103
sex, 96–104, 114–15
ships, 76–80, 96–8
see also boats
Société Jules Verne, 5, 173
solipsism, 107–9, 112, 153
solitude, 110
Soriano, Marc, 101
space-filling curve, 27
speech acts, 109
Sphinx des glaces, 14, 18
straight line, 76
see also linearity
strata, geological, 61–66
stream of consciousness, 138, 141
Strogoff, Michel, 26
structuralism, 76, 79
130
Suvin, Darko, 110, 164
symmetry, 21, 32, 34, 40, 79
tenses, 118–55
Testament d’un excentrique, 21, 104
third person, 129, 132, 140, 146
time-loop, 107–8
time-machine, 75
time-scale, 14, 42, 69, 74
time-travel, 68, 70–5, 107–8, 158–9, 166
titles of chapters, etc., 36, 53
Tour du monde en quatre vingts jours, 3–4, 33, 35, 76
tourism, 5, 8
Tournier, Michel, 166, 167
translations, 165, 172
two-dimensional, 8, 9, 21, 63
underground cavern (VCT), 8–9, 63–8
unfinished message, 128
verisimilitude, 69–71, 75, 165
see also realism
Verne, Jules, see individual titles; Voyages extraordinaires
Verne, Michel (son of Jules and contributor to the Voyages extraordinaires), 5–6, 40, 52, 53, 88–93, 110, 167,
172–3, passim
see also ‘Eternel Adam’
vicious circle, 84, 86, 92, 99
Vierne, Simone, 3, 165
Village aérien, 4, 50–3
see also missing-link
Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, 7, 30, 65, 76, 123, 129, 153
see also Nautilus; Nemo
Voyage au centre de la Terre, 4, 7, 9, 29, 31, 32, 61–74, 107, 133, 145, 158
Voyages extraordinaires, 1, 3, 5, 37, 61, 88, 91, 154, 156–60, 172–3
see also under individual titles
waiting, 152
Weinrich, Harald, 118–19, 149, 154
Wells, H.G., 60, 73, 164
white man, 58, 62, 158
see also racism
written form, 17–19
Zacharius, Maître, 2, 26, 41, 85–7, 92–3, 103, 105, 111
Zartog (EA), 53, 89–91, 93, 110