VERNE, JULES

The French novelist and playwright Jules Verne (1828–1905) was born in Nantes on February 8 and died in Amiens on March 24. He is best known for a series of novels published under the inclusive title Voyages extraordinaires (Extraordinary journeys). Some of these works have been interpreted, especially in English-speaking countries, as early science fiction, or used to stimulate discussion of ethical and political issues related to developments in science and technology—views that are at best only partial appreciations of his achievement.

Verne earned his licence en droit (master's degree in law) in Paris in 1850. After twelve years producing plays, opéras comiques, operettas, and short stories, he became famous in 1863 for his first published novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon. Verne subsequently published some fifty-three novels, among the best-known titles being Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), From the Earth to the Moon (1865), Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas (1870), Mysterious Island (1870), Around the World in Eighty Days (1872), and Michael Strogoff (1876). After Verne's death, Hetzel, continuing the Voyages extraordinaires collection, published several novels, still under the name of Jules Verne, but all modified by his son Michel Verne, who added new chapters and new characters; Michel Verne even wrote a complete novel, L'Agence Thompson and Co. (The Thompson Agency and Company), which was edited under his father's name.

The objective of Verne's novels was primarily to teach geography, history, and the sciences to the French family. To make such dry disciplines attractive, Verne created initiatory stories happening in different geographies, such as: a judicial error and the innocence of the supposed culprit demonstrated through a cryptogram during the descent of the river Amazon in The Jangada (1881; also known as The Giant Raft); the cryptogram opens the novel, but cannot be solved during the whole story, because the key was considered as lost (after the discovery of the key, Jules Verne ends the novel with the readable message hidden in the cryptogram at the opening of the story); a jeu de l'oie (goose game, kind of snakes and ladders), allowing the reader to discover the United States inThe Will of an Eccentric (1899); or even a search for the missing link of human evolution in the African jungle in The Aerial Village (1902; also known as The Village in the Treetops). Writing for the French middle-class family did not prevent Verne from putting into his novels his views about colonialism, politics, and the society of his time. Antimilitarist and against the death penalty, Verne also denounced the misdeeds of slavery. He condemned British Victorian imperialism in such novels as The Kip Brothers (1902). During his lifetime he became known as a writer for children and was considered a scientific prophet. These two erroneous opinions continue to persist in the early twenty-first century. In reality, Verne was a writer of his time, using a style in which wordplay and hidden meanings were abundant; his work nevertheless heralded the structure of the modern novel.

Well into the twentieth century, Verne's works were so badly translated in the Anglo-Saxon countries that his readers could appreciate only his rare "futuristic" views, supported by a few extraordinary machines used to support the novelistic intrigue. Since the early 1960s, however, new translations by Walter James Miller, Edward Baxter, and William Butcher have allowed English-language readers to appreciate Verne as a true writer—a precursor of surrealism and other literary movements of the twentieth century such as the Collège de Pataphysique. (Pataphysics, an absurdist concept coined by the French writer Alfred Jarry, is the idea of a philosophy or science dedicated to studying what lies beyond the realm of metaphysics. It is a parody of the theory and methods of modern science and is often expressed in nonsensical language. A practitioner of pataphysics is a pataphysician.) Many scholarly studies in Europe and the United States show the modernity in Verne's novels, where irony and cold humor are always present.

Verne's many plays, usually written in collaboration with other authors, such as Charles Wallut and Adolphe d'Ennery, and most of his vaudeville works, operettas, and so on have grown old and would fail to have appeal in the early twenty-first century. Journey through the Impossible (1882), however, is a modern masterpiece, written at the juncture of the optimistic and pessimistic periods of Verne's life. This three-act play, cowritten with d'Ennery and inspired by The Tales of Hoffmann, a grand opera by Jacques Offenbach (1819–1880), is one of the main peaks in Verne's output. For the first and only time, the heroes do the impossible, when in the novels they did only what was extraordinary: The heroes from Verne's novels, including Nemo, Ox, and Ardan, meet onstage and go to the center of the earth in the first act, to the bottom of the Sea in the second, and to the far planet Altor in the third. The principal hero is the son of Captain Hatteras, who was the first discoverer of the North Pole. During the three acts, his fiancée Eva shares his adventures and difficulties—an unusual fact in the Voyages extraordinaires—and he hesitates between love and knowledge, the same way Hoffmann hesitates between love and art.

Verne's work has provided scenarios for more than four hundred films and television programs, not only in Hollywood but also in countries as far away as China. In many instances they have continued to provide a popular introduction to the wonders of science and technology, propagating the image of Jules Verne as science fiction author. Jules Verne wrote his novels during the time when steel and steam engines became popular, when electrical power was used more and more, and when the Eiffel Tower was built, and he uses all these new technologies in his novels to be an integral part of the adventures he was telling his readers.

There are two ways in reading Jules Verne: the first level is the initiatory story with an adventure and sometimes more or less unusual and fantastic machines. Because of the bad English translations, it was the only way English-speaking readers could enjoy Jules Verne. The second level is appreciating the use of technology and science as narrative tools, enjoying the imaginary solutions of problems and desperate situations of an adventure happening in a world where war, confrontations and intolerance exist.

JEAN-MICHEL MARGOT

SEE ALSO Science Fiction;Science, Technology, and Literature.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Evans, Arthur B. (1988). Jules Verne Rediscovered. New York: Greenwood Press.

Taves, Brian, and Stephen Michaluk Jr. (1996). The Jules Verne Encyclopedia. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.

Verne, Jules. (2002 [1898]). The Mighty Orinoco, trans. Stanford L. Luce, ed. Arthur B. Evans, introduction and notes by Walter James Miller. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Originally published 1898. This novel is one of the most modern novels; the subject of the story is transgender, the transformation of a man into a women.

Verne, Jules. (2003). Journey through the Impossible, trans. Edward Baxter, introduction and notes by Jean-Michel Margot. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.