A version of this article was first published in Contemporary Authors (Gale Research Company, Chicago, 1991), pp. 462-65, with, however, more than half the text missing, and false information inserted at the beginning of the article. The original version appears here, therefore, for the first time.
Jules Verne has a very considerable renown with the public, but one that
often has little to do with his writing, and is not always even internally
consistent. If one asks the man in the street who “Jules Verne” is, a reply will
always be forthcoming. To the average American, Verne was the inventor of
science fiction, and predicted much of the twentieth century, including the
exploration of the depths of the sea, of the interior of the earth, and of outer
space. He is also meant to have foreseen the submarine, the aeroplane, and
perhaps the motor-car. But the same person will rarely be able to name the
actual books where this happened, will be vague as to when the predictions were
made, and will virtually never offer any information about the writer himself.
Indeed, he may assume by default that Verne was an American. After all, Djools
Vurn is an all-American name; and how many foreign writers have adopted local
names?
If one poses similar questions in other countries, one gets
remarkably similar replies, with one important variation. The Italians have
their Giulio Verne, the Spanish, Julio Verne, and so on—exactly as if he were a
native son of the whole world. Only in his own country, France, does the name
“Vairn” produce a different reaction, centred more on the man and especially his
works.
Much of Verne's reputation—even his perceived
internationality—does contain a small grain of truth. Accordingly, we will use
the popular conceptions as a sounding-board to approach the real writer. Thus,
after studying both the most famous and some less well-known work, we will
briefly examine Verne's life. Then some of the myths surrounding his name will
be analysed, before the “meaning” or “message” of the works is examined: their
religious, political, social, and personal perspectives and—perhaps the most
important—their influence as literature.
Amongst the novels with a more or less scientific theme,
three or four stand out for their originality and their popularity. Thus
Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (“Twenty
Thousand Leagues under the Seas”) (1869-1870) recounts a journey by
submarine, with Captain Nemo (“nobody” in Latin) as the enigmatic hero. The
novel includes dramatic episodes such as the passage under the Antarctic icecap,
the planting of a flag on the South Pole, and the discovery of the ruins of
Atlantis; but much of the interest comes from the intense if distant
relationship between Nemo and his guest/prisoner, Dr Aronnax, who is also the
first-person narrator. De la Terre à la Lune (“From the Earth to the
Moon”) (1865) is perhaps the first serious literary attempt to present a vessel
capable of escaping from the Earth's gravitation. The initial impulse is
provided by a giant cannon, constructed as a concrete-lined hole in the ground
and filled with huge amounts of explosive. Verne realised the problems that
would be produced for the passengers by the rapid acceleration; but his only
solution is to use water-filled, collapsible compartments designed to absorb the
shock. The novel ends with the launch of the three passengers towards outer
space. A sequel is, however, provided in Autour de la Lune (“Around the
Moon”) (1870), where relatively accurate solutions are found to the problems of
airlessness, weightlessness (believed at the time to occur only at the
equilibrium point between the Earth and the Moon), and the navigation of the
conical-shaped projectile (by expulsion of hot gases). Both space volumes are
light-hearted in tone, due partly to the presence of the character Ardan
(anagram of Nadar, close friend of Verne's and a famous French photographer). In
Voyage au centre de la Terre (“Journey
to the Centre of the Earth”) (1864, 1867), Prof. Lidenbrock and his nephew
Axel (but not his fiancée, except in the film version) descend into an
extinct volcano in Iceland. They eventually discover an underground world
containing plants, fish, but also a marine dinosaur, and finally human beings: a
dead white man, apparently a previous explorer, tantalising glimpses of a Giant
Shepherd herding Giant Mastodons. The final episode, where the heroes ride a
volcanic eruption on a wooden raft, is typical of this book—and many others—in
describing unlikely events in the most plausible way possible.
A second category consists of novels which are only slightly
less well-known or which contain less science or none at all. Thus Le Tour du
monde en quatre-vingts jours (“Around
the World in Eighty Days”) (1872) describes the journey undertaken for a bet
by an eccentric Englishman called Phileas Fogg. The mood is again humorous and
the pace fast-moving, with counterpoint provided by Fogg's acrobatic domestic,
Passepartout, and the young Indian widow rescued from suttee; but there are also
serious points to the work. For Verne, the shrinking of the world, caused
notably by the end of the age of exploration and the building of the railways,
is of radical importance; but also, as shown in the denouement where Fogg
“gains” a day by having crossed of the International Date Line, space and time
are inextricably linked. In contrast, Cinq semaines en ballon (“Five
Weeks in a Balloon”) (1863) conducts its heroes across the still-unexplored
areas of Central Africa, while playing games with the dates of real exploration,
and also with those of its own publication (just before the final events of the
novel). Voyages et aventures du capitaine Hatteras (“Travels and
Adventures of Captain Hatteras”) (1866) takes the obsessed captain of the title
ever further north over the Arctic icecap. Like many of the novels, it involves
murder and cannibalism; even the hero was meant to die at the Pole at the
end—that is until Hetzel, Verne's publisher, stepped in and made him bring
Hatteras home again. In Les Enfants du capitaine Grant (“Captain Grant's
Children”) (1866-68), the younger Grants receive a half-effaced
message-in-a-bottle giving the latitude of their father's shipwreck, but not its
longitude; thus prompting a straight-line round-the-world trip through South
America, New Zealand, and Australia. L'Ile mystérieuse (“The
Mysterious Island”) (1874-75) represents the culmination of many
long-maturing Vernian ideas. It deals extensively with the desert-island dream,
closely associated in Verne's mind with the ideal community; but is also
designed to show up the facile and implausible manipulation of the plot in
Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. It presents the “re-invention” of the whole
technological history of mankind; and it re-employs characters from Capitaine
Grant but also Nemo, revealed at the end of the novel to be the reason why
the settlers were so successful in all their endeavours. Nemo dies at the end,
victim of his attempt to solve the problems of society by fleeing them: “I die
because I thought that one could live alone.” Robur-le-conquérant (“Robur-the-Conqueror”)
(1886), finally, centres on the still-vigorous debate between the protagonists
of the “lighter-than-air” (balloons, etc.) and the “heavier-than-air”
(fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters). Robur is a rebel, a spiritual descendant
of Nemo, a man whose brilliant aeronautical ideas are ignored and who resorts to
violence to prove his point. His aircraft is memorable for its ship-like
characteristics and its 37 horizontal propellers on masts, which manage to leave
unruffled the headgear of the passengers on the deck just below.
Although popular attention has concentrated on the above
novels, few of the remaining seventy or so works can be considered negligible.
One of the reasons is that the works from a continuing progression—or, it
sometimes seems, regression. First, the short stories from before 1863, although
often derivative, have been shown by Delabroy to contain in embryo many of the
Vernian themes, ideas, and obsessions, and are often brilliantly written. The
period 1863 to 1875 includes all but one of the works discussed above, and is
the most complete presentation of the author's primary themes. From 1875 to
1905, on the other hand, the novels undergo a large number of transformations.
The subject is less often exploration or scientific innovation and more often
mere tourism; the mood is more pessimistic, ironical, or bitter (although
Verne's early optimism has been much exaggerated, being rather the result of the
pressures of the age, and particularly of his publisher); the British and even
the Americans are no longer presented in favourable fashion; the novels often
close with the death or madness of even the sympathetic protagonists; the few
machines that are shown finish up utterly destroyed; and in real life, as
Charles-Noël Martin has shown, the novels sold progressively less well.
Nevertheless, some critics, like Raymond, defend the later works. They point
out that their irony, scepticism, and self-analysis are more “modern” than in
the more straightforward novels—and more revealing of what Verne is really
concerned with. As just one example, the theme of cannibalism, which had
occurred regularly but briefly in the previous novels, receives a full and
systematic treatment in Le Chancellor (“The Chancellor”) (1875), a
transcription of the terrible events on the hunger-bound raft of the Méduse.
This same novel has also been claimed to be the first one in Western literature
to be written in the present tense—a remarkable self-conscious device that would
be hard to imagine in the earlier, happier period. Verne himself recognised that
there were changes, writing to his publisher in 1883: “I don't have any subjects
left whose interest is in the extraordinary: balloons, Captain Nemo, etc.” One
sign of the lack of primary invention was the number of sequels he
produced—whether to his own previous novels or to works like Wyss's Swiss
Family Robinson or Poe's Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838).
Verne's novels of his final thirty years, in sum, work less well as adventure
stories, but many of them may be considered interesting or important in other
ways.
The six or seven works that appeared after Verne's death were different
again. Les Naufragés du “Jonathan” (“The Survivors from the Jonathan”)
(1909) goes much deeper in its analysis of anarchism, socialism, and communism
than any of the previous works; and seems to conclude that solitude is the only
satisfactory social or political solution. L'Etonnante aventure de la mission
Barsac (“The Astonishing Adventure of the Barsac Mission”) (1919) presents
an authoritarian anti-Utopia in darkest Africa, complete with self-correcting
aircraft and robots. The (long) short story “L'Eternel Adam” (“The Eternal
Adam”) (1910), above all, is a masterpiece: it ranges 20,000 years forward, and
back to the very beginnings of human history. On the way, it observes the Flood,
Atlantis, and a total destruction of civilisation in the third millennium AD.
One of its conclusions is that all man's “efforts in the infinity of time” are
destined to be fruitless, that we must realise “the eternal recommencement of
all things”. But the story's structure, which is unique in being equally divided
between two widely separated eras and two protagonists of equal stature, points
the way to a divergent conclusion. Only by contemplating the apparently endless
cycle, it implies, and by benefitting directly from the experience of elders,
can man begin to escape the cycle and hence achieve true wisdom, situated
somewhere between a hopeless pessimism and a blind optimism.
For a long time, critical opinion was divided as to why most of the
posthumous works should be so different. One school of thought, including
Verne's own grandson, Jean Jules-Verne, considered that the author had delayed
publication of his most radical works until after his death so as to avoid a
possibly unfavourable public reaction. But another school believed that Verne's
son, Michel, had in fact written whole chunks of them (though he claimed merely
to have put the manuscripts in order). Only in 1978 did Piero Gondolo della
Riva, settle the question. He discovered very considerable differences between
the 1905 typescripts of the posthumous works and the published works; ones which
had to be ascribed to the efforts of Michel. Thus La Mission Barsac was
shown to be mostly by Verne's son, and “L'Eternel Adam” probably entirely by
him!
Critical opinion does not seem to have entirely recovered from the shock. But
it would seem necessary to accept that Michel Verne is an authentic writer in
his own right, and one of considerable merit. But his contributions to Les
Voyages extraordinaires were published under Jules's name, and in fact
fooled most of the people most of the time. Even if with the benefit of
hindsight we can see a certain ironical distance from the other works (and
sometimes direct attacks on them), the general spirit of Michel's works would
seem sufficiently close to that of his father's as to permit us to consider the
Voyages extraordinaires as a single entity. Other creative works by two
or more people do exist, after all. For the critic the advantage of this
position is that he can then view the works as a curve with a pleasing upturn at
its end.
Other circumstances of the publication are important. With the exception of
the first two, all of Verne's novels were first published as serials in
periodicals. Many of them appeared in Hetzel's Magasin d'éducation et de
récréation, whose twin goals were reflected in its title and whose
readership was designed to include both adults and young people. Hetzel often
played a major part in the production—writing whole pages for his author, for
instance, or insisting that Nemo's nationality be changed from Polish and the
reason for his misanthropy, from Russian atrocities to international ones. Verne
made large numbers of corrections at each stage of the proofs, and indeed
between the serial and first book publication (18mo), which was usually
unillustrated.
The famous illustrations, drawn by independent artists under the supervision
of Verne and Hetzel, appeared only in the octavo edition, usually a few months
after the first book publication. It is these octavo editions which have become
the main target of collectors, with prices sometimes reaching $2,000 a volume
(for those that sold fewest copies, and therefore often are the least
interesting to read).
As for Verne's life, it is interesting mainly insofar as it informs his
writing, and less for any intrinsic originality. Virtually his whole life was
spent either writing, or preparing for it. The following account is drawn mainly
from the biography by Jean Jules-Verne.
Born as the second child of four in a middle-class Nantes family in 1828—on
an island in the river—Verne's schooldays were reasonably successful without
being brilliant. From 1848 he lived in Paris (narrowly missing the revolution of
that year), studying law in preparation for joining his father's law-firm. But
at the same time, he started writing short stories and, above all, a large
number of plays. In 1859, still living in cramped conditions in the Latin
Quarter, but now with his pregnant wife and two step-daughters, he was invited
by a friend on a free trip to Scotland and England. Considering himself of
“Celtic” ancestry on both sides, Verne accepted; and was delighted by his visit,
which was to be reflected in much of his later writing. In 1862, still
unsuccessful as an author, having meanwhile become a stockbroker, he presented a
manuscript to a publisher in the Rue de la Seine. According to the story, Hetzel
was immediately impressed; and from that point on, Verne's livelihood was
guaranteed by successively more lucrative contracts, although requiring him to
produce between one and two books each year.
For the next 43 years, in Paris and then in Amiens, Verne wrote steadily.
Often he would be changing the published serial version of one novel while
correcting the proofs of another, writing the manuscript of yet another, and
planning the extensive reading required for a fourth. In 1866, he bought the
first of a series of successively larger yachts on which he travelled through
the Mediterranean, the Baltic, and the North Sea. His marriage was not totally
happy; and he seems to have had mistresses. At various stages, also, his son
Michel caused him problems, eventually culminating in his being packed off to
India as a midshipman; and in 1886 in mysterious circumstances, one of Verne's
nephews shot him in the leg while insane, rendering him lame for the rest of his
life. In 1905 he died of diabetes, having become perhaps the most famous
story-teller of all time.
The simplicity of Verne's life is thus in opposition to—and perhaps the
reason for—the complexity of his works: a complexity demonstrated, above all, by
recent critical reception.
Verne soon received positive appreciations from writers such as Baudelaire,
George Sand, or Tolstoy. But from then on, his subject matter, genre, and
audience seem to have caused him to be completely ignored by those writing about
mainstream literature. The paradoxical result was that for about a century the
best-known of French writers was also one of the least-known. Doctorates were
written in Germany and the United States—and sank without trace. There were
brief studies in the 1950s, but a wide critical awareness developed only in the
1970s (and then only in France). In the Anglo-Saxon countries, in particular,
despite pioneering articles by Ray Bradbury, a few mostly derivative
biographies, and an excellent bibliography in 1980, serious literary study of
Verne has been very slow in coming. Three English-language doctorates (all
written partly in Paris) have been produced; but at the moment of writing [1986]
there has still been no original book on Verne in English.
The studies carried out in France have given us a multi-faceted vision of the
writer. Raymond and Compère have written perhaps the fairest account of “Verne
Studies”, and the following is indebted to them and to Gallagher et al.
After René Escaich's general survey, classification, and evaluation in Voyage
au monde de Jules Verne (1951, 1955), Marcel Moré pioneered the detailed,
literary analysis of the individual texts. In Le Très curieux Jules Verne
(1960), he argued for a strong link between Verne's works and his life: Nemo,
for instance, shares many traits with Hetzel; the numbers in the cryptograms
dotted about the works correspond to important dates for the writer; and
fictional fathers and brothers closely reflect Verne's severe lawyer-father and
beloved naval-captain-brother Paul. In Nouvelles explorations de Jules Verne
(1963), finally, Moré studied three particular themes: the evolution of
twentieth-century music, as foreseen by Verne; his influences on Villiers de
l'Isle-Adam, Huysmans, and Bloy; and the writer's misogamy, as reflected in his
constant disparagement of the idea of marriage and—claims the critic—in a strong
undercurrent of homosexuality. If, in fact, many of Moré's ideas have since been
considered tangential or mistaken, they did give an impulse for subsequent
studies of Verne.
Thus Jean Chesneaux's Une Lecture politique de Jules Verne (1971)
(“The Political and Social Ideas of Jules Verne”) (1972) argues for the
influence on Verne of contemporary political views such as Fourierism and Saint-Simonism,
and in particular his early faith in science, his belief in the subjugation of
Nature, his attention to contemporary independence movements, and his surface
optimism. The book is, however, selective in its choice of subject-matter. And
because it ignores the tensions at the very heart of many of Verne's positions,
it neglects the specifically literary aspects of the works, such as the
interaction of form and content and the role of ambiguity. Simone Vierne's
750-page Jules Verne et le roman initiatique (1973), in contrast, adopts
a subtle psychological approach, arguing that all the Voyages present a
hero's initiatory quest, divisible into three stages: the preparation, the
journey into the sacred, and the subsequent rebirth of the hero. Vierne's
central thesis is perhaps over-systematic (in the Gallic tradition), but the
book is full of sensitive insights into the meaning of the works. Other studies
followed in rapid succession. Marie-Hélène Huet's L'Histoire des “Voyages
extraordinaires” (1973) is a competent survey of history in the works,
especially the conflicts of interest between the European powers. At the other
extreme, Michel Serres adopts brilliant but idiosyncratic positions in
Jouvences sur Jules Verne (1974): by analysing the scientific or
mathematical structures very much in evidence in the Voyages, he argues,
for instance, that the tension between horizontal displacement and vertical
displacement is vital; but he simultaneously throws off illuminating sparks in
the directions of Verne's verbal play and, amongst others, the Odyssey
and James Joyce.
Daniel Compère's Un Voyage imaginaire de Jules Verne: “Voyage au centre de
la Terre” (1977) is a useful and reliable survey of methods and results
bearing on the rich novel of the title: as just one detail, it points out the
frequency of anagrams of the name “Verne” in this work—a sign of its constituent
self-reflexiveness. Jean Delabroy's 1200-page thesis, “Jules Verne et
l'imaginaire”—unfortunately not published—is a perceptive and wide-ranging
“psycho-” and “socio-thematic” analysis of the works written before 1875. It
argues that there are two sorts of time for Verne: a controlled and scientific,
but vacuous and ultimately dead one; and one where “every moment counts”, where
vitality and intensity are paramount. The necessary synthesis of the two
conceptions leads paradoxically, back into the past; but it eventually
culminates, Delabroy argues, in a recognition of the futility of searching for a
totally coherent solution to the problem of time.
It will thus be seen that recent critical work has concentrated on
historical, social, personal, and metaphysical themes more than on
“anticipations”. But it is also clear that any attempts at synthesis are impeded
by dichotomies in the works. Amongst those demonstrated by the critics are: a
respectable conservatism combined with a support for oppressed peoples from the
Québecois to the Australian Aborigines; descriptions of technological progress,
but also analyses of its pernicious effects on human society; the use of
conventional happy endings with everybody married off, but also the presence in
the texts of a strong sensuality; and direct borrowing from many contemporary
sources, but also influences of classical mythology and of Scott, Dickens, and
Stendhal.
It is this perspective of their literary functioning that is perhaps the most
valuable way of approaching Verne's anticipations. Great care, however, is
necessary.
A first point is that the Voyages were not, in general, set in the
future. The first work to have a setting after the year of publication was
Robur-le-conquérant (1886). Although seven or eight others may be observed
after that date, it was perhaps only Verne's decreasing success with the general
public that led him to adapt these works to his own reputation!
Whatever the reason, there certainly are many bold innovations in the works
from 1886: an aeroplane/helicopter, a pneumatically-driven train under the
Atlantic, a giant cannon designed to correct the Earth's axis, perfect
audiovisual reproduction, a Trans-Siberian railway, a motorised floating island,
and a project to turn the Sahara into an extension of the Mediterranean. One
short story, first published in English (by Michel) and called “In the Year
2889” (1889), describes such innovations as: the disappearance of horse-drawn
transport, trains at 1500 km/hr, worldwide news in colour, weather control, a
life expectancy of sixty-eight years, communication with the planets, algebraic
“compteurs” (computers?), aerial publicity, skyscrapers, and a reduction of the
chemical elements first to three basic units and then to one. In “L'Eternel
Adam”, the major novelty is that “the secrets of the phenomenon of life had been
successfully explored [...], and the tremendous discoveries that had ben made
allowed one to foresee that organic beings could soon receive the gift of
immortality”.
But the works set in the future do not have a monopoly of “predictions”. In
the other works, as well, one can observe such innovations as: the extensive
role of electricity, various submarines, an explosive which is claimed by its
inventor to be capable of blowing up the globe, and laser, telecontrol,
artificial rain, radiotelephone, and torture by means of electric shock. Amongst
particular events “predicted”, the most striking is the fact that Verne's
moon-rocket is the same height and weight as Apollo 8, like it is launched from
Florida and observed by means of a giant telescope in the Rocky Mountains, and
splashes down in the Pacific at a point only four kilometres away from that
where Apollo 8 did.
Critical judgement is necessary, however, in assessing Verne's “predictions”.
First, care must be taken not to read too much into the texts—as certain critics
have done. The element of chance has also been forgotten by many commentators,
as undoubtedly in the case of the splash-down. The Einsteinian (or anti-Einsteinian?)
hint of “their speed [...] reduced their weight” and the nuclear hint of “water
is the coal of the future” are probably also due to mere coincidence.
Similarities between fact and fiction must be considered in the perspective of
the many remarks in the Voyages that go very wide of the mark.
Thirdly, many of the ideas were not original to Verne. Submarines, for
instance, were built and tested between 1796 and 1801, and were used in the
American Civil War: even the name Nautilus probably came from the
prototype built by Robert Fulton. Jules Verne himself pointed out that his
reading about contemporary scientific developments was the source of most of his
ideas. In any case, virtually all of the ideas had already appeared in fiction.
“In the Year 2889”, in particular, seems to have plagiarised Albert Robida's
Le Vingtième siècle (1882). More generally, Versins claims that in at most
three of Verne's thirty-one novels of anticipation, the basic idea had not
already been used in fictional works.
Fourthly, the vision of the future is often merely the result of
extrapolating past and present tendencies. This method does throw up many
accurate projections concerning giant artefacts or improvements in land-,
water-, or air-based transport. But its philosophy is basically conservative, in
accordance with Michel Verne's belief that “nothing ever happens that has not
been determined by what came before, and the future is produced by the
continuation of the past”. This uncritical attitude works better in the area of
applied science than in international politics or the arts: if the general
prediction of the increasing dominance of the United States is correct,
those of its physical absorption of Britain and Canada are as wide of the mark
as Verne's repetition of the nineteenth-century conventional wisdom of paintings
being replaced by photography and novels by newspapers.
The final limitation of the “predictions” in Verne's works is that, despite
their use of extrapolation, they do not seem to betray an awareness of the
acceleration of history, the exponential rate of technological innovation, and
so their time-scale is all wrong. They speak, for instance, of a “constant
progression [...] of ‘industrial and commercial development’ ”. Thus the
inventions of “In the Year 2889” will take a thousand years (Robida placed them
in 1953); and coal resources will be exhausted in about “a hundred centuries”—or
just when “far-sighted nature” has had time to produce more! Perhaps concomitant
with this tendency, the machines themselves always break down or break up, and
every trace of them is invariably lost, almost as if inventors and inventions
had never existed. The “predictions” usually come to have instead the nostalgic
whiff of what might have been.
Nevertheless, these reservations as to the accuracy, originality, and
permanence of the scientific innovations in the Voyages cannot completely
destroy their importance. Verne's works do demonstrate a shrewd awareness of
technological implications, an “instinct for the direction of science”, as Blum
says. From his extremely wide reading, Verne selected the ideas he found most
plausible. Florida was chosen as the launching-pad because it was the
southernmost part of the United States, the Rockies for the telescope because
they were the highest. Since Verne played relatively safe, many of his
scientific extrapolations have worked—at least until recently.
Because of their lucidity and their clairvoyance (in the non-mystical sense),
the Voyages have above all had a popularising and educational role. Verne
himself claimed: “my aim [...] was not to prophesy, but to spread knowledge”.
Explorers, geographers, and scientists acknowledging their debt to Verne include
Nansen, Lyautey, Simon Lake, Von Braun, Marconi, Gagarin, and Richard Byrd. In
sum, Verne's presentation of future scientific developments is far from naive.
What, finally, is Verne's ultimate contribution to literature? In certain
genres, there has been demonstrable influence. Verne has probably had a very
wide influence on that considerable proportion of mankind which has come into
contact with the Voyages at a formative age. But what of Verne's
contribution to “serious” literature? And what reputation is he likely to have
in the future?
Verne's distinctiveness is in his avoidance of the detailed description of
interactions of human beings, and the resultant lack of development of
personality. Bildungsromans, the Voyages certainly are not. The
characters do not progress, but regress from a stable and fair-to-middling
humanistic position to a precariously solipsistic, aggressive, or desperate one.
But, in compensation, as Vierne, Delabroy, and Andrew Martin have all
convincingly shown, the observation of the interaction of the individual and the
material (although apparently sentient) environment, is acute. It presages many
aspects of the modern era, and is apparently still of considerable interest
today, to judge from the sales-figures.
Many of Verne's positions and factual observations are on the surface naive.
Their value is in their oblique but unmistakable posing of many questions which
remain vital today. His adolescent dream of recounting the whole world, for
instance, gives way, in a deeper analysis, to an understanding of the ideas of
exhaustiveness, obsession, and even totalitarianism.
Despite the “objectivity” of the style, then, the Vernian vision of the world
is an intensely personal one. The political, historical, scientific, and
geographical themes act principally as vehicles for a profound angst.
Nihilism—or at least systematic scepticism—is one of the few common threads
running through all the Voyages. Understanding the works must therefore
pass through an understanding of the subject within them, and hence not
the surface themes.
Verne thus remains attached to the nineteenth century but also continuingly
relevant; more French than has generally been recognised but also universal;
intimate but an “outsider”; obvious but discreet; light but deep; annoying but
attractive; and finally readable and memorable. As the twenty-first century
edges closer, Djools Vurn's reputation outside France is surely due for a most
radical revision.
Books:
Kenneth Allott, Jules Verne, Crescent Press, London, 1940
Rene Escaich, Voyage au monde de Jules Verne, Editions Plantin, Paris, 1955
I. O. Evans, Jules Verne: Master of Science Fiction, Sidgewick and Jackson, London, 1956
Marcel Moré, Le Très curieux Jules Verne, Gallimard, Paris, 1960
Marcel Moré, Nouvelles explorations de Jules Verne, Gallimard, Paris, 1963
I. O. Evans, Jules Verne and His Work, Twayne Publishers, New York, 1966
Jean Chesneaux, Une Lecture politique de Jules Verne, Maspero, Paris, 1971
Jean Chesneaux, The Political and Social Ideas of Jules Verne, Thames and Hudson, London, 1972
Marie-Hélène Huet, L'Histoire des “Voyages extraordinaires”, Minard, Paris, 1973
Jean Jules-Verne, Jules Verne, Hachette, Paris, 1973
Simone Vierne, Jules Verne et le roman initiatique, Sirac, Paris, 1973
L'Herne: “Jules Verne” [Paris], n° 25, 1974
Michel Serres, Jouvences sur Jules Verne, Editions de minuit, Paris, 1974
Jean Jules-Verne, Jules Verne: A Biography, MacDonald and Jane's, London, 1976, trans. and adapted by Roger Greaves
Jules Verne 1: “Le Tour du monde”, Minard: Lettres modernes, Paris, 1976, ed. François Raymond
François Raymond and Daniel Compère, with the collaboration of Olivier Dumas and Christian Robin, Le Développement des études sur Jules Verne (domaine français), Minard: Lettres modernes, Paris, 1976
Daniel Compère, Un Voyage imaginaire de Jules Verne: “Voyage au centre de la Terre”, Minard: Lettres modernes, Paris, 1977
Peter Costello, Jules Verne: Inventor of Science Fiction, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1978
Europe [Paris], n° 595-96, “Jules Verne”, Nov.-Dec. 1978
Jules Verne 2: L'Ecriture vernienne, Minard: Lettres modernes, Paris, 1978, ed. François Raymond
Jean-Michel Margot, Bibliographie documentaire sur Jules Verne, privately published, Ostermundigen (Switzerland), 1978
Charles-Noël Martin, La Vie et l'oeuvre de Jules Verne, Michel de l'Ormeraie, 1978
Marc Soriano, Jules Verne, Julliard, Paris, 1978
Jules Verne et les sciences humaines, UGE, Paris, 1979, ed. François Raymond and Simone Vierne
Jean Delabroy, “Jules Verne et l'imaginaire”, thèse d'Etat, Univ. de Paris-III, 1980
Edward J. Gallagher, Judith A. Mistichelli, and John A. Van Eerde, Jules Verne: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography, G. K. Hall, Boston [USA], 1980
Jules Verne 3: Machines et imaginaires, Minard: Lettres modernes, Paris, 1980, ed. François Raymond
Jean-Michel Margot, Bibliographie documentaire sur Jules Verne [Vol. II], privately published, Nyon (Switzerland), 1982
Jules Verne 4: Texte, image, spectacle, Minard: Lettres modernes, Paris, 1984, ed. François Raymond
Arthur Evans, “Jules Verne”, Ph.D., Univ. of Columbia, 1984
William Butcher, “A Study of Time in Jules Verne's Voyages extraordinaires”, Ph.D., Univ. of London, 1985
Bulletin de la société Jules Verne [Paris] [BSJV]
Individual Articles:
Ray Bradbury, “Marvels and Miracles-Pass It on!”, New York Times Magazine, 20 March 1954, pp. 26-27, 56, 58
Ray Bradbury, “The Ardent Blasphemers”, in Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, Garamond Press, Baltimore, 1962, pp. 1-12
François Raymond, “Jules Verne ou le mouvement perpétuel (Essai de Patanalyse appliquée)”, Subsidia pataphysica [Paris], n° 8, 22 sable 97 [1969], pp. 21-52
Darko Suvin, “Introduction”, in H. G. Wells and Modern Science Fiction, Bucknell U. P., Lewisburg [PA], 1977, ed. Darko Suvin, with Robert M. Philmus, associate editor, pp. 9-32
Piero Gondolo della Riva, “A propos des oeuvres posthumes de Jules Verne”, Europe, n° 595-96, pp. 73-88
William Butcher, “Le Sens de ‘L'Eternel Adam’ ”, BSJV, n° 58, 2e tri. 1981, pp. 73-81
Ross Chambers, “Cultural and Ideological Determinations in Narrative: A Note on Jules Verne's Les Cinq cent millions de la Begum”, L'Esprit createur, Vol. XXI, 1981, n° 3, Fall, pp. 69-78
William Butcher, “Le Verbe et la chair, ou l'emploi du temps”, in Jules Verne 4, 1983, pp. 125-48