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Re: Kéraban

From: Nejat Bayramoglu <neckobay~at~ttnet.net.tr>
Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 22:45:47 +0300
To: "Jules Verne Forum" <jvf~at~Gilead.org.il>

Dear Tim,

I knew you would have something at hand and, in my opinion, it proved to be
very valuable.

But I have an objection to your categorizing Fogg “implausible” along with
Kéraban.

I believe Fogg is plausible whereas Kéraban is not.

“ -- Un bon Anglais ne plaisante jamais, quand il s'agit d'une chose aussi
sérieuse qu'un pari, répondit Phileas Fogg.” (ch. iii)

This certainly is an exaggeration, but we believe that “rentier” English
gentlemen at their clubs may very well speak this way. So it is
 “plausible.”

Kéraban would also be plausible if Verne had made him an Albanian.

As I have written in a personal correspondance to Jan Rychlik, it is the
Albanians who are famous for being stubborn or obstinate. Not an Ottoman
Turk.

(But even being plausible could not have made Kéraban's story better
literary-wise.)

This is how Verne describes Kéraban at the beginning of vol. i chap. iii :

“Le seigneur Kéraban, pour employer une expression moderne, était un «homme
de surface», au physique comme au moral,--quarante ans par sa figure,
cinquante au moins par sa corpulence, en réalité quarante-cinq; mais sa
figure était intelligente, son corps majestueux. Une barbe, déjà
grisonnante, à deux pointes, qu'il tenait plutôt courte que longue, des yeux
noirs, fins, acérés, d'un regard très vif, aussi sensibles aux impressions
les plus fugitives que le plateau d'une balance de précision à des
différences d'un dixième de carat, un menton carré, un nez en bec de
perroquet, mais sans exagération, qui allait bien avec l'acuité des yeux,
une bouche aux lèvres serrées, ne se desserrant que pour montrer des dents
d'une éclatante blancheur, un front haut, bien encadré, avec un pli
vertical, un vrai pli d'entêtement entre les deux sourcils d'un noir de
jais, tout cet ensemble lui faisait une physionomie particulière, la
physionomie d'un homme original, personnel, très en dehors, qu'on ne pouvait
oublier, lorsqu'elle avait, ne fût-ce qu'une fois, attiré l'attention.”

And here is a passage I translate from the “Albania” entry of the
“Encylopaedia of Islam,” Turkish ed., vol. I, p. 575:

“In general, Albanian male is of long height, with a wide chest,
well-proportioned and nimble; mostly with a narrow forehead, sparse eyebrows
and a tough look. He doesn't have a notion of pleasantry and he doesn't like
jokes. He can endure walking long distances. He moves swiftly and easily on
mountains and stony areas. He climbs rocks like a goat. His manners are of a
wrestler. His gestures are pompous. His nature is rough and offensive. With
all these characteristics, the Albanian male is a warrior by birth.”

As I have said to Jan, Kéraban looks like an Albanian landlord rather than
a Turkish merchant (and a Turkish merchant is an anachronism in the year
1882). I don’t know which source or sources (like memoirs or travelogues)
Verne used for modelling Kéraban so I can't say anything further.

Best,
Nejat

----- Original Message -----
From: <tunwin~at~onetel.net.uk>
To: "Jules Verne Forum" <jvf~at~Gilead.org.il>
Sent: Wednesday, October 27, 2004 12:02 PM
Subject: Re: Kéraban


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 - 21:45:02 IST

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