Verne, Jules

views updated

VERNE, JULES

VERNE, JULES (1828–1905), French novelist.

For many years, Jules Verne was routinely paired with H. G. Wells as one of the founding fathers of modern science fiction. It is increasingly clear that the true picture is more complex. In his "Scientific Romances," Wells composed extrapolations; the main axis of his work—as in most science fiction—is Time. Verne, who published fifty-five Voyages Extraordinaires between 1863 and the year of his death, was less interested in the fate of the Western world than in the explosive growth of Europe over the years of his career; his main axis is Space. Verne is perhaps the ultimate prose poet of geography. His early work in particular can therefore be understood as a geography of the European explosion; these early novels celebrate a sense that to travel the world is to possess the world. The explorers, scientists, military adventurers, and daring entrepreneurs who populate most of his early fiction transform the darkness of the world. They are light-bringers. Tales that have been understand as manuals for young imperialists include Cinq semaines en ballon (Five Weeks in a Balloon, 1863); Voyage au centre de la terre (Journey to the Center of the Earth, 1864); Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 1870), and Le Tour du monde en quatrevingts jours (Around the World in Eighty Days, 1874). Verne's novels have rarely been out of print.

Unfortunately for his reputation, however, Verne's work has persistently been misunderstood. Anglophone students have in general been reluctant, therefore, to examine his work for more comprehensive insights into that period (1860–1880) when the scientific and industrial progress of Europe seemed an entirely natural justification for imperialism. But even the most eager scholar would have found the texts themselves, as they have been known for a century or more, almost impenetrable, because the true complexity of Verne's imaginative take on the late nineteenth century has been deeply obscured by the notorious badness, until well into the twentieth century, of almost all translations of his work. It was normal for his early translators to cut up to 40 percent of the original texts and to bowdlerize what remained to render the result "suitable" for the juvenile audiences to which it was assumed Verne catered exclusively; moreover, the multiple ironies and ambivalences of these tales, which often sternly addressed political issues, were systematically expunged.

Furthermore, almost a century after his death, French scholars have begun to discover that even Verne's original French texts had suffered prior emasculations at the hands of his longtime publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel (1814–1886), who went so far as to reject an entire 1863 novel (Paris au XXe Siècle [Paris in the Twentieth Century]) because it took a mildly iconoclastic view of the "triumph" of Europe. As Verne's novels dealt directly with Europe's conquering of the world through applied science and technology, it is something of a tragedy that the full range of his understanding of these vital decades was so thoroughly obscured.

In later years, it became more difficult to conceal from readers Verne's examinations of the darker implications of the conquest of the planet—though even in the twenty-first century, Anglo-phone readers will have no access to the harsher implications of L'île à hélice (Propeller island, 1895)—as all political satire was stripped out of the English translation, The Floating Island (1896), though Verne's final, devastating image of the consequences of travel does remain. The two communities on this artificial island, unable to agree on where they should go next, rip their habitat apart. Verne's original French text has never been published; but the image of empires about to burst asunder did survive his censors.

There is, of course, much of Verne's work that combined didactism and a purer joy of storytelling. The dawn-like elation of discovering something new around the next corner of the world has never been so ringingly narrated. And the thousands of pages of his work as a whole constitute, in classic late nineteenth-century style, an exposition of the world, a glittering narrative of the world on display. In the end, Verne was his century's great romancer.

See alsoExplorers; Wells, H. G.