In the more than 150 years since Verne’s first novel came off the press, seven generations of scientists and explorers have read his books. “It is Jules Verne who guides me,” wrote Antarctic explorer Richard E. Byrd (Teeters, p. 50). Jean Cocteau re-created Phileas Fogg’s round-the-world journey, completing his itinerary in eighty-two days. Walt Disney was a Verne reader. So was Robert Goddard, the American physicist known as the father of rocketry, who stated in 1919 that humans would one day put a man on the moon. Auguste Piccard, the Swiss physicist who in 1932 ascended 55,500 feet into the stratosphere in a balloon, and his son Jacques, who in 1960 descended to the deepest depression in the Pacific Ocean in a diving bell, read Verne. “Everybody read Jules Verne and felt that tremendous power to dream, which was part of his erudite and naïve genius,” wrote the author Ray Bradbury. “I consider myself as the illegitimate son of Jules Verne. We are very closely related” (quoted in Lynch, p. 113).
Though the accolades come in waves—and millions of readers worldwide have dreamed, traveled, and soared alongside Verne’s pen—it would be a mistake to close the book on Verne so quickly. Verne was more than a talented writer, a crafter of adventure plots, and a master of the scientific imagination. Like his noble and tragic Nemo, Verne cannot be defined so easily.
After his death, Verne willed a half-ton bronze safe to his son. The safe stayed in the family from generation to generation, until his great-grandson, Jean Verne, discovered it in a dusty corner of a storage shed. In all that time, the safe had never been opened. When Jean Verne opened it, he discovered one of Verne’s lost manuscripts. Paris in the Twentieth Century was published for the first time in 1994; it sold 100,000 copies and rose to the top of the French best-seller list.
True to style, the last of Verne’s published books accurately forecast twentieth-century life. But instead of Verne’s characteristic optimism—“ All that’s within the limits of the possible must and will be accomplished” (quoted in Evans, p. 48)—Paris au XXe siècle (Paris in the Twentieth Century) presents the future as tragic instead of hopeful, and science as the great destroyer instead of the great hope. In the book, Verne’s hero—this time a poet, not a scientist—wanders the streets of Paris looking for a publisher. But the citizens of Paris have forgotten the humanities and turned instead to the sterile comforts of life lived through science. Jobless and homeless, Verne’s hero walks the perfect streets of the city destitute and alone. He spends his last penny buying a flower for his beloved, but when he delivers it he finds the house empty, the family gone. The book concludes with the hero lost in a winter graveyard amid tombs of forgotten novelists before he collapses and dies on the frozen, snowy ground.
What to make of this novel, of the dystopia it presents? In the context of Verne’s other works, in which science unites more than it divides, how should we understand the message of this book? For the forty years of his writing life, Verne fed his readers a consistent diet of fancy based on fact, an optimism rooted in a solid belief in the positive potential of the human mind. But during those forty years, he discovered a truth more troubling: Humans might not be saved by science. We might destroy ourselves rather than thrive because of it. For modern readers, who live in a world shaped by Hiroshima and September 11, Verne’s pessimism seems well placed. Just as in Verne’s time science was used as a political and religious tool, so it is now used. Underneath the general optimism of Verne’s novels lies a kernel of pessimistic truth: Science can do nothing but amplify the natural attributes of humankind, including hatred, violence, and vengeance.
It is interesting to note that even while Hetzel edited Verne to ensure the moral “wholesomeness” of his writing, he failed to strike the most violent and bloody scenes from Verne’s manuscripts. To the modern reader, some of these passages seem to be drawn more from a horror movie than an educational magazine. One of these takes place at the end of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea with the sinking of the British ship. “A large mass cast a shadow on the water,” Verne writes, “and that it might lose nothing of her agony, the Nautilus was going down into the abyss with her.... Her topmast, laden with victims, now appeared; then her spars, bending under the weight of men; and last of all, the top of her mainmast. Then the dark mass disappeared, and with it the dead crew, drawn down by the strong eddy” (pp. 288-289). Another can be read in Verne’s The Children of Captain Grant: “Sudden knife thrusts by six robust warriors, and the victims dropped to the ground amid a widening pool of blood,” Verne wrote. “A horrible scene of cannibalism followed ... a large mass of natives ... went into a bestial frenzy and pounced on the lifeless remains of the victims. In less time than it takes to describe it, these bodies, though still warm, were torn apart, chopped up and reduced to bits and pieces.... [The cannibals] fought over it, struggled, and argued over the smallest morsel. Warm drops of blood splattered over this repulsive horde, producing a red mist within which they swarmed” (quoted in Evans, p. 43).
Is this Verne? The same Verne whose books have been read with flashlights under tented sheets by seven generations of children? The Verne who wrote “there is logic to everything here on earth” (Evans, p. 52)? The Verne who thought that scientific discovery would allow man to “reign as master over [the earth], and bring out its very best” (Evans, p. 48)?
Indeed it is. Verne may have been among the first to write fantasy based on fact, but more importantly he was also the first to recognize the romance and lyricism inherent in science. He saw with clear eyes the way in which science and the pursuit of the unknown underscores fundamental qualities of the human condition: love, hate, envy, ambition, and the dangers of unchecked curiosity. Like the Greek hero Menelaus traveling across the Aegean for bloodshed, so too Nemo in his Nautilus. Verne’s scientist-heroes don’t always come home safely. After reaching their goal, some of them go insane.
It is perhaps because of this darker vision, hidden beneath the generally unbroken surface of his optimistic faith in science, that Verne continues to be read today. Long after the invention of the telephone, in a time when submarines cease to be remarkable, Verne’s books still educate as they entertain. They still have something to teach us. Nemo stands as a dark image of human vengeance. He shows us the dangers of fury, the negative potential of technology let loose on humankind. The book you hold in your hands is Verne’s masterpiece because even while he takes us to the limits of the human imagination, Nemo takes us to the depths of the human heart.
Victoria Blake has worked at the Paris Review and contributed to National Public Radio, the Boulder Daily Camera, a number of small literary presses in the United States, and several English-language publications in Bangkok, Thailand. She wrote the introduction and notes to the Barnes & Noble Classics editions of D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and Selected Stories of O. Henry. She currently lives and works in Portland, Oregon.
PART ONE
Chapter I
A Shifting Reef
THE YEAR 1866 WAS signalized by a remarkable incident, a mysterious and inexplicable phenomenon, which doubtless no one has yet forgotten. Not to mention rumors which agitated the maritime population, and excited the public mind, even in the interior of continents, seafaring men were particularly excited. Merchants, common sailors, captains of vessels, skippers, both of Europe and America, naval officers of all countries, and the governments of several states on the two continents, were deeply interested in the matter.