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Re: Verne review in Washington Post

From: Brian Taves <btav~at~loc.gov>
Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2006 19:19:48 -0500 (EST)
To: Jules Verne Forum <jvf~at~Gilead.org.il>

Peter mentioned this review in his message "Verne in Bloomington," but I'm
not sure if it has been posted to the Forum. The review prominently
appeared in Sunday's Washington Post Book World, and is by Michael Dirda,
a well-known Post columnist of classical literature. He attended the North
American Jules Verne Society conference here at the Library of Congress in
2004.


Michael Dirda

A new edition of an 1879 novel takes readers back to Jules Verne's complex
and hazardous future.

By Michael Dirda
Sunday, March 5, 2006; Page BW15 THE BEGUM'S MILLIONS

By Jules Verne

Translated from the French by Stanford L. Luce

Wesleyan Univ. 261 pp. $29.95

Jules Verne is, after Agatha Christie, the most popular writer in the
world. Neither -- until recently -- has ever gotten much respect from the
academic or critical establishment. What they share, along with some
warm-hued period coziness, is a gift for absolute storytelling, for making
a reader want to keep turning page after page to see what happens
next. Christie does this through her mastery of plotting -- not only
eventually revealing "who done it" but, better yet, how it was
done. Verne's strength can be elicited from the overall title he gave his
works, "Voyages Extraordinaires."

To begin to understand his narrative magic, simply call to mind any of the
best known Verne titles, of more than 60: A Journey to the Center of the
Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869-70), Around the
World in 80 Days (1873), The Mysterious Island (1874-75). These are all
tales of marvels and monsters or eyewitness accounts of realms from which
no traveler has ever returned, till now. Verne (1828-1905) lived through
the great heyday of colonial expansion and global exploration. Back in
Birmingham and Lyons, industry and technology were also busily developing
new forms of transportation, communication and destruction. So Verne's
fiction neatly, imaginatively joined the wonders of geography to those of
the foundry and the laboratory, without neglecting an enlivening breath of
the sublime or the fantastic.

Indeed, long before Hollywood discovered computer graphic imaging, the
books of Jules Verne provided the 19th-century equivalent of industrial
light and magic. Verne's brisk, clear prose deftly mixed the real and the
almost real, often by employing a fact-filled style that was sometimes
journalistic, at other times scientific, but always replete with news
items, historical events and leisurely descriptions of how things
worked. As a result, the reader, especially the youthful [reader, not only
marveled, "Can such things be?" but might also murmur, "I wonder if I
could build one of those myself?" Little surprise, then, that Werner von
Braun, Robert Goddard, astronaut James Lovell and many other pioneers of
the space effort testify that From the Earth to the Moon (1865) first set
their imaginations soaring upward.

Still, Verne's work has suffered three grievous literary
misfortunes. First, it was badly translated into English, occasionally
bowdlerized and sometimes actually rewritten. Second, it was largely
relegated to the children's bookshelf, even though Verne aimed for an
audience of all ages. Third, much of the late and posthumously published
fiction was written either entirely or in large part by Verne's son
Michel, who blithely signed his father's lucrative name to the title
page. Such cavalier publishing practices soon created the common image of
Verne as a sloppy, tin-eared writer for the semi-literate.

It probably didn't help that he was also soon dubbed the father of science
fiction (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley being the mother). In fact, Verne's
books are more accurately what he himself called "novels of science," and
many are essentially realistic travelogues to distant lands, or even
ludic, experimental texts (like the 1899 Will of an Eccentric , in which
the human characters are all players in a kind of Monopoly game using the
United States itself as the board. No wonder that some of the most
innovative 20th-century writers, such as Raymond Roussel and Georges
Perec, look to Verne as an inspiration). Several of the visionary writer's
more interesting later books even display despair over what science might
do to the world, as much as for it. Certainly, The Begum's Millions
(1879) is best read as a cautionary political fable, part dystopian
satire, part Dickensian social tract.

A begum is an aristocratic Muslim woman -- in this case, the widow of a
maharajah, who leaves a vast fortune to two European savants, a German
scientist and a French doctor. Each decides to set up an ideal community
in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Kindly Dr. Sarrasin
envisions a germ-free, sanitary city where public health is the chief
concern of the government. By contrast, Prof. Schultze wants to prove the
superiority of the "Saxon" over the "Latin" by building a "City of
Steel" devoted to the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction. (He is
obviously based on Alfred Krupp, the German munitions king.) Eventually,
Schultze declares that Sarrasin's neighboring utopia must be destroyed as
an example to the world of German superiority and of his own unstoppable
technological power. To do this he constructs a super-cannon whose
gigantic shells deliberately break apart to rain down fire over vast
areas. But he has, in reserve, an even more insidious weapon: a special
projectile filled with compressed liquid carbon dioxide that, when
released, instantly lowers the surrounding temperature to a hundred
degrees below centigrade, quick-freezing every living thing in the
vicinity. As Schultze proudly says, "thus, with my system, there are no
wounded, just the dead."

Will this proto-Hitler succeed in his plans? Will he use his early version
of the neutron bomb? Opposing him, Verne gives us Marcel Bruckmann, an
Alsatian whose natal land is, after the Franco-Prussian War, under the
dominion of Germany. But can this young Theseus even gain access to
Stahlstadt's inner sanctum, the Tower of the Bull, let alone slay its
modern Minotaur?

In The Begum's Millions , Verne presents his first truly evil
scientist. (Captain Nemo is a romantic anti-hero, with good reason for his
depredations.) He also announces a theme that will recur in his subsequent
fiction: the potentially dire effects of science on society. As early as
the lighthearted Dr. Ox's Experiment (1874), a callous researcher
transforms a placid village into a raging cauldron of emotion by piping
pure oxygen into homes and public buildings. Every feeling is intensified,
metabolisms are sped up, and an opera that normally takes six hours to
perform is zipped through in 18 minutes. In Master of the World (1904),
the once relatively thoughtful hero of Robur the Conqueror (1886) returns
as a megalomaniac who spreads shock and awe with his powerful battle
station, a combination tank-plane-ship-submarine called, simply, The
Terror. Finally, in The Barsac Mission (1919) -- announced as the last
"Voyage Extraordinaire" -- we are taken to a fortress city in Africa, from
which a criminal mastermind uses the inventions of a brilliant, if
blithely unaware scientist to wreak global havoc and mayhem.

The Barsac Mission was completed by son Michel Verne, though it almost
certainly reflects Jules's increasingly pessimistic outlook. That despair
reaches its acme in the famous short story, also by both Vernes, "The
Eternal Adam" (1910): A scientist of the far future named Zartog
Sofr-Ai-Sr is chastened to discover that archaeological evidence reveals
that the men and women of the inconceivably distant past -- that is, of
our era -- were intelligent, civilized and almost completely wiped out
when the oceans suddenly rose and totally engulfed the continents. There
is, concludes Zartog, no progress to history, only unending, senseless
repetition.

Like some other prolific writers (Alexandre Dumas, Jack London), Verne
himself occasionally took over another man's plot (duly paid for) and
reworked it to fit his own obsessions and standards. Thus, The Begum's
Millions builds on a story originally drafted by a prolific hack named
Andre Laurie (who eventually gave the memorial address at Verne's
funeral). All these and many other fascinating matters are discussed in
the scholarly apparatus accompanying this handsome edition of this
surprisingly dark (and prescient) novel: Peter Schulman's introduction
fills in the historical and interpretative background, while Stanford
L. Luce's "modern and corrected" translation is overseen by the eminent
Verne authority Arthur B. Evans. What's more, The Begum's Millions is only
the latest offering in Wesleyan's admirable "Early Classics of Science
Fiction" series, which also includes Verne's Mysterious Island and the
less familiar Invasion of the Sea (1905) and The Mighty Orinoco (1898).

To read Jules Verne is one of the great treats of childhood. To read Jules
Verne later in life is to discover a writer just as satisfying but even
richer, one who is not only a natural storyteller but also a mythmaker, a
social critic and an innovative artist. In France, Verne is now studied as
a major literary figure, and thanks to fresh translations -- from Penguin
and university presses at Indiana and Nebraska, as well as Wesleyan --
more and more of his work is available to American readers in reliable
texts. Give The Begum's Millions or one of the other novels a try this
winter. There's a lot more to Jules Verne than what you find in those old,
albeit quite wonderful, Disney movies. ·

Michael Dirda is a columnist for Book World. His e-mail address is
mdirda~at~gmail.com, and his online discussion of books takes place each
Wednesday at 2 p.m. on washingtonpost.com.

On Wed, 8 Mar 2006, Peter Schulman wrote:

> HI Art, thanks for the reference in the Washington Post! How exciting! Tim
> Unwin has expressed an interest in creating a panel for this year's
> 19th-century colloquium which will be held in Bloomington at Indiana U...he
> wants to talk about ships, and since you're a vehicular expert, perhaps you
> would like to be on the panel as well? the theme of this year's conference
> is SO Jules Verne: it's on Invention! So we have to go :-) Let me know,
> Amities, Peter
>
> Dr. Peter Schulman
> Dept of Foreign Languages and Literatures
> Old Dominion University
> Norfolk, VA 23529
> tel: 757-683-3323
> fax: 757-683-5659
>
>


Brian Taves
Motion Picture/Broadcasting/Recorded Sound Division
Library of Congress
101 Independence Avenue, S.E. Washington, D.C. 20540-4692
Telephone: 202-707-9930; 202-707-2371 (fax)
Email: btav~at~loc.gov


Disclaimer--All opinions expressed are my own.
Received on Thu 09 Mar 2006 - 02:20:04 IST

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