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Re: Nemo's name

From: Craig Weatherhill <craig~at~agantavas.org>
Date: Mon, 2 Aug 2010 05:26:19 +0100
To: Jules Verne Forum <jvf~at~gilead.org.il>

Having Nemo as an Indian works far better for Verne and the book as a
whole. Russia would be most unlikely to have ships patrolling in the
areas where Nemo sinks the two warships, but the Royal Navy certainly
would. There are many light-skinned Indians who could be mistaken for
Europeans, and Aronnax suspects that the captain hails from southern
latitudes. The Mysterious Island tells us that he spent several
decades studying in Europe, so it's quite likely that much of his art
collection was European. I suspect that several of his crew were
followers from those days: the crew member killed by the squid calls
for help in French. The dying crewman that Aronnax is called to
examine was an "Anglo-Saxon" type. This doesn't mean to say that the
man was English: Anglo-Saxons hail from northern Germany. Then, of
course, there's the incident on the Manaar Banks when Nemo saves the
life of an Indian pearl diver and makes that deliberately ambiguous
statement about them both being natives of an oppressed land. The
mystery of Nemo's origins is beautifully maintained throughout 20K,
and it's a major feature of the book, with Aronnax trying every which
way to find out, and Nemo stringing him along, always one step ahead
of him. That one aspect of the book leads the first-time reader to
anticipate an eventual answer. Verne plays exactly the same game as
Nemo. He brilliantly strings the reader along all the way through -
and, of course, there is no answer at the end. That won't come until
you've got through 3 volumes of the sequel and, even then, the reader
doesn't realise it's a sequel until the last chapters of Vol. 3.

I think it's this ongoing and unanswered mystery in 20K that really
qualifies Nemo as one of fiction's greatest and most fascinating
character creations, as well as the inner turmoil of his mind, which
he only allows to surface on a handful of occasions in the latter part
of the book when his mental state is visibly degenerating. Most
brilliant of all is the maelstrom of emotions that eventually lead him
to pilot the 'Nautilus' into the real Maelstrom.

When freed from the awful and perpetuated Victorian translations and
editing, and re-presented properly in translations such as Miller and
Walter, it's features like these which make 20K one of the finest ever
works of fiction.

Craig



On 2 Est 2010, at 02:31, Tom McCormick wrote:

> Dear vernian friends,
>
> I guess it's not strange that there is a confusion about Nemo's
> identity, since we know that (1) Verne originally conceived him in
> 20L as a Polish rebel in the 1863 revolt against Russia; (2) the
> idea was nixed by publisher Heztel who didn't want to offend Russian
> readers; and (3) in MI Verne eventually made him an Indian rebel in
> the 1857 Sepoy rebellion against Britain. This is best regarded as a
> compromise on Verne's part: he was able to fulfill his aim of
> portraying Nemo as a rebel against tyranny, although he had to
> change the answer to the question "a rebel of which nationality, and
> against which tyrant?"
>
> Of course, this change creates inconsistencies. Nemo in 20L can
> hardly be an Indian and indeed resembles a European: he plays the
> organ (not the sarod or sitar), his pseudonym "Nemo" and his motto
> "mobilis in mobili" are Latin (not Sanskrit), and his art collection
> is European (not South Asian). Furthermore, we are told in MI that
> Nemo, when he lived on land, always refused to set foot in Britain;
> but in 20L he tells Aronnax he studied engineering in London.
>
> Verne's strange footnotes in MI tell us we will eventually resolve
> the chronological and other inconsistencies betwixt the two novels
> in which Nemo appears. I suspect he meant we'd eventually figure out
> the truth behind the apparent contradictions and solve them for
> ourselves. Responding to this challenge, I prefer to think of Nemo's
> autobiographical narrative in MI as written in a kind of code to
> baffle Hetzel: for India I read Poland, and for Britain I read
> Russia. For Tippu Sahib, perhaps we should read the name of a great
> Polish patriot . . . maybe Kosciuszko?
>
> The game of companionating fictional characters from different
> authors is fun to play, but it obviously doesn't tell us anything
> about an author's intentions. (I once wrote a fantasy about Nemo in
> which he turns out to be Inspector Javert from Hugo's Les
> Miserables, who became an undersea avenger after repudiating his
> faith in Law and faking his suicide in the Seine. Ripping fun, but
> nothing more.)
>
> From: JUAN GONZALEZ <modmyth~at~hotmail.com>
> To: jvf~at~Gilead.org.il
> Sent: Thu, July 29, 2010 6:28:28 PM
> Subject: Re: Nemo's name
>
> Very funny reply. I fell in love with Verne's works through Captain
> Nemo, so the notion that he was Moriarty was repulsive to me.
>
> I think many people have elaborated on the Wold Newton concept, I
> think it was 2 or 3 carriages, a few people on horseback, and a
> dog. I am smiling a little as I write this. Farmer (RIP- he
> recently died) was a big fan of Doc Savage, and Tarzan. His Wold
> Newton ideas connect the 2 characters, among many others. Holmes,
> James Bond, The Avenger, the Shadow, etc. Interesting ideas.
>
> Juan
>
>
> From: harryhayfield~at~googlemail.com
> To: jvf~at~Gilead.org.il
> Subject: Re: Nemo's name
> Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2010 00:10:25 +0100
>
> You have got that so right. According to the theory, this is what
> happened:
>
> In 1795, a meteor landed in the village of Wold Newton (not far from
> Market Rasen in England) and exploded just as a carriage was passing
> containing about twenty different people (to which I say, it must
> have been a very large carriage indeed then). When the meteor
> exploded, it did so with such brightness, heat and noise that the
> horses reared up and forced the carriage to roll over. Whilst the
> passengers and riders were recovering they were being "ionised" by
> the radiation given off by the meteor which would enable them to
> give birth to people such as Allan Quatermain, Harry Flashman,
> Phileas Fogg and Colonel Moriarty.
>
> To which I say (in the style of Lord Guinness from "Around the World
> with Willy Fog"): POPPYCOCK!!!
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-jvf~at~Gilead.org.il [mailto:owner-jvf~at~Gilead.org.il]On
> Behalf Of JUAN GONZALEZ
> Sent: 29 July 2010 11:58 pm
> To: jvf~at~Gilead.org.il
> Subject: Re: Nemo's name
>
> Hi all,
>
> I believe, and I may be wrong, but this name may come from Phillip
> Jose Farmer's book -The Other Log of Phileas Fogg- in which the
> preposterous notion that Captain Nemo was really Professor James
> Moriarty (Sherlock Holmes' nemesis). I think this is one of the
> seminal works for the Wold Newton Family concept, a Farmerian idea
> that many literary characters are part of a large family, all
> descendants of a few people affected by a meteorite that landed in
> Wold Newton, England.
>
>

--
Craig Weatherhill

Received on Mon 02 Aug 2010 - 07:26:32 IDT

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