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Re: Kéraban

From: <tunwin~at~onetel.net.uk>
Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 10:02:58 +0100
To: Jules Verne Forum <jvf~at~Gilead.org.il>

Thanks to Nejat for the over-flattering reference to my
powers of literary analysis... I'm not sure whether I can
rise to the challenge, but I do think that the case of
Kéraban is a very interesting one in terms of Verne's
techniques of characterisation (the same problems return in a
different form with characters like Lidebrock, Fogg et al).

By exaggerating a single trait -- pig-headedness -- in his
character for the sake of the narrative which depends on it,
Verne blocks any attempt we may make to enter into
psychological empathy. This is a big gamble. While Verne
succeeds admirably in extracting a gamut of comic effects
from the character, he also perpetually runs the risk of
forcing his reader to draw the conclusion that Kéraban is a
deeply unattractive and uninteresting person, unworthy of the
novelist’s interest or the reader’s attention. Kéraban so
often imposes unreasonable demands on his entourage, and so
signally fails to respond to the needs and feelings of
others, that he (almost) has to be seen as a man who has lost
his humanity.

The challenge to Verne the novelist is to turn such blatantly
unappealing material into a credible fictional entertainment,
and to make the reader want to enter that uncomfortable space
of imagined closeness to the character. This is precisely
what Moliere and others had done, and it is interesting to
see how Verne has learned the lesson of his predecessors. In
order to solve the problem, he must not only exaggerate the
comic qualities of Kéraban -- which he does without question -
- but also contrive to make him likeable, at least at some
level. He does this by stressing Kéraban’s good and humane
qualities, even when we may be disinclined to believe that
they are genuine. The obvious admiration and esteem in which
Kéraban is held by Nizib and Van Mitten (who nonetheless
suffer greatly at his hands) also acts as a corrective and
just about rescues him from total unlikeability.

This could seem like a concession, a necessary pay-off by the
novelist, or at least as an uncomfortable balancing act. In
order to work as a narrative function, Kéraban has to be
implausibly schematic and single-minded -- in other words,
unsympathetic. In order to remain readable, though, he has to
shed some of that single-mindedness and become less
mechanical. In the end, I would say, the 'rescue' of Kéraban
is something of a tour de force by Verne, but it graphically
illustrates one of the difficulties he faces with his
techniques of characterisation. Novelists who resist empathy
with their characters will frequently pay the price with
their critics (as the legacy of Flaubert, for example,
shows). Like Fogg, Kéraban _has_ to be an implausible
character for the story to work at all.

Of course, what some may see as a fundamental weakness could
be held by others to be a sign of modernity in Verne, who in
this text as in so many others alerts us to the fact
that 'characterisation' is in any case nothing other than a
convention, an artifice, a device, a literary game...

Tim Unwin
Received on Wed 27 Oct 2004 - 11:03:10 IST

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