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Re: Nemo's name

From: Craig Weatherhill <craig~at~agantavas.org>
Date: Mon, 2 Aug 2010 17:32:46 +0100
To: Jules Verne Forum <jvf~at~gilead.org.il>

Many thanks, Rick. Your translation was the best I've read and it
helped me hugely while writing 'Nautilus'.

Craig


On 2 Est 2010, at 15:25, Rick Walter~at~comcast.net wrote:

> 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
>

--
Craig Weatherhill

Received on Mon 02 Aug 2010 - 19:35:34 IDT

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