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I am of the generation caught between those two geniuses, R. L. Stevenson and Thomas Edison!
If you ask people for the name of the world’s most translated writer, the best-seller of all time, the only popular writer to have increased in popularity over more than a century,1 you will get some surprising answers. If you further enquire as to the identity of the only Frenchman to have achieved universal renown and which of his fictional heroes and vessels are often quoted without even naming the work, some odd looks may be forthcoming.
Verne, Nemo, and the Nautilus have entered the world’s collective memory; but the three remain so far away from real recognition that they must necessarily exist in some deep subconscious fold of it. The only signs of their existence, dragged up from the murky depths, are invariably confused or mistaken. These blinking apologies for a reputation need to be immediately put out of their misery. Thus Verne is not a science-fiction writer: most of his books contain no innovative science. He did not write for children. The poor style often associated with his name is not his. And Nemo does not speak with a mid-Atlantic drawl.
In order to try to understand how these ideas came to life, how such an outstanding literary figure should have acquired such a poor reputation in Britain and America, we should start by briefly disposing of the author’s life, and then studying Verne’s publishing history.
Jules Verne was born and brought up in Nantes, studied and worked in Paris, and then spent the rest of his life in Amiens. His first foreign visit was to Scotland in 1859, an experience which deeply marked his works. From about 1870, Verne displayed an increasing pessimism about many of his early enthusiasms, with the previous admiration for technology replaced by apprehensions on social and political issues, and with the British, the heroes of his first two novels, sometimes now the villains. The Franco-Prussian War and the Commune of 1870 seem to have been the most important external catalysts for change. In terms of the individual works, The Chancellor (written in about 1870, but published in 1873) was the clear turning point; but signs of uneasiness may already be visible in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas (written in 1865-6 and 1868-70, and published in 1869-70).
From the beginning, recognition for the Extraordinary Journeys was slow in the English-speaking countries. The first novels of Verne’s to be translated in book form came out after Verne had already written most of his best work. It must have been disappointing for the author of the British at the North Pole to see this book unavailable to the British themselves.2 But when the works did begin to appear, it might have been better if they hadn’t.
The books were generally chopped by between twenty and sixty per cent. The translators, frequently anonymous, often did not understood the French, and so mistranslated it. In the process, they produced some wonderful howlers. In the English Verne the hero visits the ‘disagreeable territories of Nebraska’ or ‘jumps over’ part of an island; reference is made to ‘prunes’ or ‘Galilee’; and Napoleon dies broken-hearted in ‘St Helen’s’. Verne himself wrote of ‘the Badlands of Nebraska’, ‘blowing up’, ‘plums’, ‘Galileo’, and ‘St Helena’! Nor is such abuse of the rights of the author yet over. A great majority of the current English editions of Verne continue to be of an unacceptable standard. And this, I would claim, is the main reason for Verne’s poor reputation.
If we examine Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas in particular, there have been hundreds of editions of this work, perhaps making the English version the most frequently published novel ever. Lewis Mercier’s 1872 translation was typical of the time: adequate on ‘style’ but extremely weak on details.3 Also, about 22% of the novel is missing! Since then, over half of the editions have reproduced Mercier, with many of them making further minor changes, without, unfortunately, referring to the French. Adaptations of Mercier’s truncated version probably constitute a best-seller in their own right. And often those editions that protest the most about poor translation are themselves the least faithful and the most Mercier-like!
There has also been a low level of comment on the Extraordinary Journeys in the English-speaking world, often produced by monolinguals studying the truncated and inaccurate versions of the novels. Even Verne’s most distinguished novel has not received the treatment that other works of the English or French literary canon get by right. Nor has basic textual work been done. The different original editions of Vingt mille lieues sous les mers have not yet been compared; there is no properly established text; and to date noone has studied the manuscripts. These three omissions are all the more surprising when one considers the position this novel occupies in the history of ideas and the resonances the work continues to produce on successive generations.
Let us therefore proceed cautiously. If we are to understand the work translated as Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas, we need to be especially wary of secondary sources, even of the published French text. As an introduction to the novel itself, we will start by briefly examining the plot, before studying the origins of Verne’s inspiration.
Twenty Thousand Leagues is Verne’s most ambitious novel in terms of the breadth and diversity of its themes and psychology. It recounts a circumnavigation by submarine, with Captain Nemo (‘nobody’ in Latin) as the sombre hero. It includes many dramatic episodes: the underwater burial of a dead crewman, an attack by Papuan natives, a battle with giant squid, a passage under the Antarctic ice-cap, a farewell to the sun at the newly discovered South Pole, and a vision of the underwater ruins of Atlantis. But much of the interest comes from the intense if distant relationship between Nemo and his passengers, Dr Aronnax, Conseil, and Ned Land, and from the anguish gripping the captain. Nemo seems to have an unhealthy interest in shipping lanes and in vessels in distress. On occasion he demands that Aronnax return to his cell. Further mysteries are the portraits in his room of patriotic heroes and of a woman and children, later revealed to be Nemo’s murdered family. At the end of the novel, the captain is attacked by an unidentified ship, and retaliates by sinking it. The three guests escape as the Nautilus sinks into the Maelstrom.
According to the author’s grandson, Jean Jules-Verne, Verne’s original idea was simply to write a ‘poem’ to the glory of the sea. Maurice Verne is reported to have said that ‘at bottom, my uncle Jules only had three passions: freedom, music, and the sea’. We also know that in 1865 the novelist George Sand suggested to Verne that the sea was the one area of the globe where his ‘scientific knowledge and imagination’ had not yet been put to use.
Much of the inspiration for Twenty Thousand Leagues came in fact from Verne’s own experience. He was born on an island in what was then a major whaling port; and while preparing the book he spoke to mariners in Nantes and Amiens, including his brother Paul, a retired officer. In 1865 he bought a fishing-boat of 8 or 10 tonnes and used it as a study while sailing along the Brittany and Normandy coasts. In 1868 it was refitted and baptized the Saint-Michel; in September, he sailed to Gravesend on it, where he wrote ‘I’m just finishing the first volume of Twenty Thousand Leagues [. . .] How beautiful [the scenery] is and what fuel for the imagination!’ His wife is meant to have sardonically commented: ‘How can Jules write all those things [about the sea’s marvels], when he turns his backside to them all the time?’
For two of the major scenes of Twenty Thousand Leagues, Nemo’s elevated surveying of the ancient ruins of Atlantis and claiming of the new continent of Antarctica, it is no exaggeration to say that, mutatis mutandis, the author is drawing inspiration from Scotland and in particular . . . Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh. On Verne’s second day outside France, the volcanic King’s Park is the first mountain he has ever visited. Imbued as he is with Scott and romanticism, immediately in love with this exotic land, he generates a sublime vision from the classical and marine view, one which will be recycled endlessly in his novels. Equally surprisingly, Nemo’s domestic arrangements in the heart of the raging depths are drawn from Verne’s visit a couple of days later to the rain-swept but luxurious ‘château’ of ‘Ockley’ in Fife. While this building has remained mysterious to date, it can be identified here for the first time as Inzievar House in Oakley. A reading of chapters 27-9 of Verne’s Backwards to Britain (written in about 1859, but published only in 1989) and the most cursory of visits to Inzievar House clearly demonstrates the source of Nemo’s plumbing, furnishings, artistic preferences, and general lifestyle. Verne indeed acknowledges the debt when he presents Nemo ‘us[ing] only the black keys, giving his melodies an essentially Scottish tonality’: in Backwards to Britain Verne’s adored Amelia had told his companion to ‘play using only the black keys’ (ch. 24).
Verne’s written sources are wide-ranging, taken from literature, science, geography, and history, and are often acknowledged quite openly. Literary inspiration is undoubtedly the most important. While elements may be taken from Fenimore Cooper and Gautier, there is clear influence from the Bible, Homer, Plato, Hugo, Michelet, Scott, and Poe. Moby-Dick presents many affinities in details and in plot. But we must be slightly sceptical about thematic similarities between Verne and his predecessors. Since before the Book of Jonah, people had dreamed of the sea; legendary stories of kraken had existed for many centuries; and so had the idea of a sunken Atlantis. Life underwater was indeed a common literary theme, as shown by the title of Poe’s poem ‘The City in the Sea’ (1831). Even Flaubert had declaimed ‘I want to walk on the bed of the Ocean!’
The most important non-literary sources are Maury, Cuvier, Figuier, Mangin, Larousse, Agassiz, and Renard. A remarkable number of the naturalists Twenty Thousand Leagues quotes, including Buffon, Gratiolet, Lacépède, Milne-Edwards, d’Orbigny, Quatrefages, and Tournefort, were professors at the Muséum of Natural History in Paris. Although Twenty Thousand Leagues cites one nineteenth-century encounter with a giant squid (at the time dismissed by science), an unquoted source, Denys de Montfort, is surely the main origin of the captain’s epic battle. And if the description of Nemo himself is taken from Colonel Charras, exiled from 1852 until his death in 1865, his life must be based partly on Gustave Flourens, a freedom fighter in several countries praised in Verne’s second book, Paris in the Twentieth Century.
Many commentaries have concentrated on the originality of the Nautilus, but it should be emphasized that Verne’s technology is not at all innovative. Nemo’s presentation of his vessel provides more than enough information about its length and size, but his only explanation of its motive power is in terms of an electricity ‘not of the common sort’, multiplied ‘by a system of levers’! Submarines had in any case been used for centuries. Underwater vessels were used in the American War of Independence and Civil War; Verne’s mathematics teacher had built a working submarine; and even ones named Nautilus were commonplace, including a vessel that the author saw during his formative visit to the Paris Universal Exposition of 1867. Again, a piece in the Musée des familles of 1857 ascribed to Verne, ‘Submarine Locomotives’, humorously foresees that man might domesticate whales and harness them to his underwater vessels. More than three books with titles like The Depths of the Sea, Submarine Adventures, and The Submarine World were published in French in 1867-9 alone. So crowded, indeed, were the submarine deeps that Verne was accused of plagiarism.4
Verne himself was categorical: ‘I am in no way the inventor of submarine navigation’. He even claimed he was ‘never specifically interested in science’, only in using it to create dramatic stories in exotic parts; and indeed his reputation in this area is grossly inappropriate.
Amongst the many tales of submarines, only Verne’s has survived—undoubtedly because of the living nature of his text, because he integrates both his own experience and his literary and scientific sources. His originality does not lie in creating a vessel or underwater exploration, but in his unbridled literary imagination.
Verne’s correspondence is vital for an understanding of the work. A succession of letters reveal his mounting excitement:
In addition to the novel as ‘machine’, we may note the sustained metaphor surrounding what Verne heatedly holds in his hands and the ‘abundance’ of his textual production. The letters clearly show his excitement about the novel’s depth and the idea of ‘the unknown man’ which gels perfectly, and his fears that the challenge of the ‘absolute’ subject might not be met. But we can also observe the emphasis on sea-based self-sufficiency, the biblical reference, and the indeterminacy of the captain’s fate.Chantenay, 10 August [1865?] I am also preparing our Journey under the Waters, and my brother and I are arranging all the mechanics needed for the expedition.
[1865?] It is certainly serious, very unexpected, and noone has ever done anything like it before.
[Early 1867?] I’m working hard, but as you say, my dear Hetzel, after 15 months of abstinence [while writing the Geography of France (1867)], my brain greatly needs to burst: so much the better for the Journey under the Waters, there will be overabundance, and I promise I’ll have myself a good time.
[Spring 1868] I’m working furiously. I’ve had a good idea that emerges nicely from the subject. This unknown man must no longer have any contact with humanity [. . .] He’s not on earth any more, he manages without the earth [. . .] the sea must provide him with everything, clothing and food [. . .] Were the continents and islands to vanish in a new Flood, he’d live the same way, and I beg you to believe that his ark will be a bit better equipped than Noah’s ever was. | I believe this ‘absolute’ situation will give much depth to the work. | Oh, my dear Hetzel, if I don’t pull this book off, I’ll be inconsolable. I’ve never held a better thing in my hands.
Paris, 10 March 1868. My dear father [. . .] I’m in the middle of [. . .] Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas. | I’m working on it with tremendous pleasure [. . .] In three or four months, when I have the proofs, I’ll try to send you and Paul the first volume, so you can hunt out the mistakes and imperfections. I very much want this machine to be as perfect as possible.
[June 1868] Yes, I’m slogging hard and the first volume will be finished by the end of July [. . .] But let’s agree on one thing, I’ll have to rewrite it from beginning to end. It’ll be ready by the end of August and I hope we can begin publication with the new volume on 20 September. | Oh my dear friend, what a book if I’ve pulled it off! How many good things I’ve found in the sea while sailing on the Saint-Michel. The hardest thing is to make all that seem so plausible that everyone will want to go there. Well, we’ll see.
[Summer? 1868] As for the ending, the carrying off into unknown seas, the arrival at the Maelstrom without Aronnax or his companions having any inkling, their idea of remaining when they hear that sinister word, the boat carried away with them despite their efforts, it will be superb, yes superb! | Then the mystery, the eternal mystery of the Nautilus and its captain! | But I am heating up while writing to you! A little calm so as to embrace you. | Yours with all my heart.
[September 1868?] Oh the perfect subject, my dear Hetzel, the perfect subject!
Turning now to the manuscripts of Twenty Thousand Leagues, it is surprising these have received almost no attention to date for many parts are in fact quite different in MS1 and MS2.
Thus the daily phrase, ‘Nautron respoc lorni virch’, was originally ‘Nautron restoll loui virch’, perhaps even harder to decipher. The location of Nemo’s home port, which he takes such pains to hide, is given away in MS1 as being near ‘Tenerife’. A debt to Dumas fils, Verne’s friend and collaborator, is acknowledged in the manuscripts; and there is also a quotation from Scott. MS2 contains a different agreement with Nemo governing Dr Aronnax’s life on board: it has three conditions rather than one and makes the three passengers ‘prisoners’ rather than ‘guests’, with Aronnax formally promising never to try to escape. But in the final dialogue, Aronnax throws in Nemo’s face his moral right to leave, and Nemo throws back: well, leave then! The ending is generally much fuller in MS2. Thus we visit the seabed of the English Channel, and the narrator conjures up medieval visions from the shadows on the cliffs near Le Havre. The three escapees think of landing in Scotland, an irresistible idea for Verne; and the Nautilus forms part of a poetic scene of happy dawn and sunny tranquillity off Dover, whose omission we can regret, especially as its very existence has never before been suspected.
We see, above all, a different Nemo, more independent and more intransigeant. In addition to being an engineer, naturalist, collector, writer, and freedom fighter, the earlier Nemo is an original composer as well; and the music he prefers to ‘all the ancient and modern’ is his own! The often incongruous Christian element is generally absent from his life; and the published Virgin by Leonardo is here ‘a half-dressed woman’. When scores of Papuans start to invade his ship, the captain simply electrocutes them, deliberately and without remorse. Nemo describes the all-important Vengeur as a ‘Republican’ ship: a red rag designed to enrage Hetzel. Whereas in the 1871 version Aronnax suggests the captain should change his ways (‘may hate die down in that wild heart’, etc.), in the closing words of the manuscript he is praised as ‘the Man of the Waters, entirely free’.
Probably because of Hetzel, Verne excised all of the above ideas. In his letters, he mentions further imposed alterations changing the sense of the novel, and in particular Nemo’s mission. Thus on one occasion he reminds his publisher of his regret for what he calls the ‘best’ idea, namely the captain versus society at large. He also points out his preference for a second idea of Nemo as a Polish patriot against the Russian tyranny, his wife having been murdered and daughters raped. He points out that both ideas were rejected for the wrong reasons; and he says how little he thinks of the publisher’s suggestion of the captain attacking slave-transporting ships. To Hetzel’s proposal that the Nautilus be trapped in a cul-de-sac, Verne scathingly riposts how implausible that would be. Unfortunately we do not have his response to his mentor’s unhinged idea of placing a Chinese boy on board so as ‘to cheer things up’!
Many of the changes can indeed be regretted. The image of Nemo as a creative artist is a striking one: playing his compositions to console himself in his self-constructed submarine forms a powerful image of creative movement short-circuited back on to itself. Similarly, his original behaviour with regard to Aronnax, the Papuans, and his enemies’ ships is revealing. But it is not clear what Verne would have done on his own, nor whether Hetzel’s interventions were always misplaced. We do not seem entitled, in sum, to argue that the stronger images are invariably what Nemo and the novel are ‘really’ like. Trying to produce an edition of Twenty Thousand Leagues to restore the author’s intentions would be difficult, if only because of the knock-on effects of putting the deleted passages back in.
What is clear, however, is that the 1871 version contains echoes of nearly all of the omitted ideas, and that all the deletions help us understand the novel. The work which forms such an important part of the modern imagination cannot be fully understood without assessing the original ideas from which it grew.
Too much attention to the early stages of Verne’s imagination would nevertheless obscure the power of the imagination itself. The letters show that he himself knew this novel would be exceptional. Verne’s mastery of the genre is indeed demonstrated in the interlocking and superimposing literary devices and the many vibrant episodes presenting new settings. The number of themes is also impressive: technology of course, biology, the study of the seas, exploration of unknown areas, life on desert islands, history, biblical themes, mythical ideas, even international politics. The characters, too, are more complex than in many of Verne’s works.
The complexities of the plot may in fact leave the reader confused on first reading. All information is filtered through Aronnax’s first-person narration, and although his observations attempt to be scrupulously exact, his interpretations and forecasts are invariably wildly out. Many of the events of the novel are indeed beyond the ken of a naive bachelor from a sheltered background. The episodes of Atlantis, the underwater burial, and the Maelstrom are typical of scores of others in being misinterpreted by him until nearly the end—when it is too late to study the evidence. The central enigma, above all, remains unsolved, for we never know Nemo’s real name or nationality, his past life, or his reasons for going round sinking ships.
One initial way of coping with the complexity is simply to study the movements of the submarine itself. Its very freedom and power mean that to create interest, it must encounter dangers of some sort. Most of the threats to its shiny self-containment fall in fact into four categories: perforation, invasion, immobilization, or suffocation. (Mechanical problems are out of the question. That the hatch might let in water never seems to cross anybody’s mind either.)
Thus it risks rupture by man’s most advanced ballistic technology or by massed sperm whales and intrusion by giant squid or hordes of people. The most frequent problem, however, is that the ‘cigar-shape’ has an uncontrollable desire to slip into passages for which ‘it’s too big’, as Farragut’s sailors put it. This enables it to reach its refuge via an underwater tunnel and to seek out the passage connecting the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, and hence visit the seven seas without retracing its path. But under the ice-cap its bold thrusting creates dangers, for the submarine manages to get into a tunnel which is not only closed at both ends but shrinking by the hour. In another incident, potentially involving all four dangers, it chooses to pass through the ‘most dangerous strait in the world’, duly gets stuck on rocks, and attracts ‘all the savages of New Guinea’.
Getting into so many scrapes does imply something is going on. At the beginning, when the Nautilus keeps exposing itself to ships, rubbing up against them, or even penetrating them, the captain may indeed be drawing attention to his marvellous machine. But quite apart from the sexual subtext, Nemo has a secret agenda that will become clear only at the end.
The Nautilus conditions the whole structure of the novel. Because of its hothouse atmosphere, because of Nemo’s aversion for setting foot on land, those occasions when he does leave the submarine are the more heightened. During such episodes, Aronnax has to be there as well to tell the tale; but Conseil and Ned are usually excluded. Typical is Nemo’s sudden night-time invitation to visit the underwater realm. This poetic experience helps us understand how individual scenes are put together. It is worth therefore studying in detail.
Aronnax is fidgety from the start. He jumps when he hears rain pattering on the surface and feels acutely conscious of his leaden feet crunching a ‘bed of bones’. He wonders at the giant furrows on the ocean floor, the distant glow, and the clearings in the petrified forest. His overexcited mind starts imagining castles and cities—even seabed friends for the captain. His hyper-photographic vision sees everything in fine silhouette and his movements are light: leaping tree-trunks, breaking creepers, flying over chasms. Aronnax’s exaltation, Nemo’s pace, and the imperfect tense produce a strange mood. A metaphor converts the sea into the land, the living into the man-made, tentacles into brush, crabs and lobsters into suits of armour. After a climb up a volcano, after the vegetable and animal kingdoms have led up the Great Chain of Beings, Aronnax again envisions human works.
But an eruption suddenly steals the scene—and with it the revelation of a lost city. In an elegiac vision and the longest sentence of the book, teasing glimpses appear of technology and religion, Greece and Tuscany, triremes and temples, even a sea within the sea. All this is an unusual chance for Nemo and Aronnax to communicate, for although they cannot talk, they do touch, speak through their eyes, and even use the intimate second-person singular form; above all, Nemo uses a convenient piece of chalk and rock-wall to write an inscription: ‘ATLANTIS’.
Feverish as he is, Aronnax runs through the whole gamut of legends about the sunken continent. He imagines, pell-mell, biblical and prehistoric scenes, a land bridge to America, the giant contemporaries of the first man. He conflates geological, biblical, and mythological time to return to the origins, where paradoxically man was most evolved. But he is simultaneously careful to leave his mark on the living past, subtly changing the landscape so as to prove to himself that is not all a dream. The transcendental scene closes with the spotlight on a rare relaxed Nemo. He is ‘leaning on a mossy stele’, as on a reading desk in his library, contemplating time past, empathetically ‘turned to stone’ in ‘his’ landscape. ‘Was it here that this strange being came to plunge into memories of history and relive ancient life—he who wished to have nothing to do with modern times?’
And this is the Verne who has been argued to be a pure positivist, a scientific apologist, a blind technological anticipator! He is in fact a high romantic, with his poetic language, nostalgia, and yearning for significance. The grandeur of the novel, then, comes not only from the many ‘privileged’ locations the submarine takes us to but also from its reference to a higher destiny.