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Re: Nemo's name

From: Rick Walter~at~comcast.net <rick1walter~at~comcast.net>
Date: Mon, 2 Aug 2010 08:25:38 -0600
To: "Jules Verne Forum" <jvf~at~gilead.org.il>

Craig--

This is one of the clearest, best-balanced summaries of Nemo's realities
that I've read. Many thanks!


Warmest regards,

Rick

Frederick Paul Walter
Albuquerque, New Mexico




----- Original Message -----
From: "Craig Weatherhill" <craig~at~agantavas.org>
To: "Jules Verne Forum" <jvf~at~Gilead.org.il>
Sent: Sunday, August 01, 2010 10:26 PM
Subject: Re: Nemo's name


> 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 - 17:25:49 IDT

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