William Butcher












         To the memory of my Father and
Grandfather

CONTENTS
          
Contents                                       vii
List of figures                                 xi
Foreword by Ray Bradbury                       xiv
Acknowledgements                                xv
Reference system                              xvii

          
1  THE WARRIOR OF THE UNKNOWN                   1 
          
2  IN SEARCH OF LOST STRUCTURE                 12
                   
Lost Between Two Shores                        12
The Strogoff Syndrome                          19
Le Verbe et la Terre                           30
Go Anywhere, Do Anything                       36
Splitting the Difference                       40
The Pleasure and the Pain                      45
         
3  THE SHAPE'S THE THING                       52
         
Plots and Intrigues                            52
In and Out                                     58
Diversions or 'Divertissements'                60
Putting it All Back Together Again             66
4  THE PAST IS A PLACE                         70
          
Past Masters                                   70
Man and Less-than-Man                          81
The New Country                                92
Going Back                                     99

5  THE SHAPE OF THINGS GONE BY                 102

Living in the Past                             102
A Strange Dream                                113
How to Travel in Time                          118

6  STARTING AND STOPPING                       128

Straight and Round                             128
Return to Sender                               131
Getting Things Going                           138
Posthumous Cycles                              149
Time Will Have a Stop?                         156

7  ONE AND ALL                                 161

The Body Metaphoric                            161
Violence and Sex                               167
Friends and Relatives                          179
The Terminal System                            188
Knowledge and the Lone Individual               
197

8  PAST REFLEXIONS                             204

Past Present                                   204
Self-Conscious Narration                       209
It Was Tomorrow                                213
Will There Be A Reply?                         219
Breaking Out                                   226

9  NOW OR NEVER                                229

Things Going By                                229
Supporting Role                                245
Narration Impossible                           250
Towards a New Novel                            259

10  'SO UNLITERARY A WRITER AS VERNE'?         271
          
The Closing Down of History                    271
Michel Meets Jules                             279
Why Him?                                       284

APPENDIX A: The Time of the Novel              297

APPENDIX B: Michel Verne                       295

NOTES                                          299


BIBLIOGRAPHY                                   345
         I   Primary Works                     345
         II  Critical Studies                  350
         
INDEX                                          362
          


LIST OF FIGURES
 
Note: Because of the geometrical nature of some of
the arguments of this study, a number of figures
are introduced. Their functioning and meaning are
fully explained in the accompanying text.

Plots/Graphs of Narrative Time Vs Fictional Time
    1  Global Forms                           55
         (a)  'Un Drame au Mexique'           
         (b)  Voyage au centre de la Terre
         (c)  Le Chancellor
         (d)  'In the Year 2889'
         (e)  Mistress Branican
         (f)  'L'Eternel Adam'
     2  The Beginnings                        58
         (a)  Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts
                   jours
         (b)  L'Ile myst{rieuse
         (c)  Le Chteau des Carpathes
         (d)  Mistress Branican
     3  The Endings                          59
         (a)  De la Terre @ la Lune
         (b)  Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts
                   jours
         (c)  Le Chteau des Carpathes

         (d)  L'Ile @ h{lice
     4  Synthesis
         The General Structure of a Verne Novel
68

5  Cyclical Structures                       135
         (a)  Water Evaporation and Condensation
         (b)  The Life of an Iceberg
         (c)  Man-Eider-Bird Symbiosis
         (d)  Vertical Movements in a Fluid
         (e)  Security System for Ships
         (f)  Self-Compensating Aircraft
         (g)  The Cycle of History

6  Ricardou's Diagrams and an Alternative
Presentation                                 291
    (a), (b)  Variations in Speed of Narration
    (c), (d)  Jumps in Narrative and Fictional
Time
    (e), (f)  'Normal' Segment, Anticipation, and
Flashback
    (g), (h)  L'Emploi du temps              
7  The Two Presentations Compared            292
    (a), (b)  Standard Speed of Narration
    (c), (d)  Fictional Time that Has 'Fallen
                   Behind' Narrative Time
    (e), (f)  Same Text in Two Segments or in One



TABLE
            Variations in Tense with Nature of   
                 Transposition and Degree of     
                 Narratorial Intervention     
241




FOREWORD BY RAY BRADBURY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My most heartfelt thanks are due to those without
whom this book could not have existed in its
present form: Malcolm Bowie who offered his
eminently sensible and constructive support over a
long period; Ross Chambers, who gave me tremendous
help and encouragement; Franois Raymond, who had
the generosity to commission four articles, and
the patience to suggest improvements to them; and
Nicole Saou, who helped me more than perhaps she
knew by deciphering handwritten pages and by her
assistance with the articles and the diagrams. My
sincerest thanks must also go to Chris Thorpe for
help with the illustrations, and Armelle Achour,
Jean-Philippe Dubois and Ho Tjing Jung for help
with the manuscript, together with those who were
able to make sufficient sense of the earlier
drafts to encourage me, Simone Vierne, Daniel
Comp}re, Michel Blanc, and Michael Moriarty. My
gratitude goes finally to those who commented on
individual sections: Jacques Alexandropoulos,
Serge Antoine, Ninette Bailey, William Barber,
Colin Bartlett, David Bellos, Jean Bessi}re, Kay
Bourne, Sally Butcher, Dominique G{rard, P.
Hansen, Peter McNaughton, Andrew Martin, P.
Petitmengin, G{rard Rap{gno, Jean Ricardou,
Jean-Charles Rochet, Richard Smith, David Steel,
Harold Wardman, and Dominique de Werra. 


REFERENCE SYSTEM 

    References to Verne's works will generally be
of the form 'VCT 10'. The first group represents
the title - Voyage au centre de la Terre in this
case - following sigla indicated in the
Bibliography (p. 345). The last group is the page
number. When the edition used is not Livre de
poche (about 5% of cases), the reference is made
in such a form as to be verifiable in any edition:
as 'IH I ii 10' or 'PD ii 10', the upper-case
Roman numeral (if any) being the part number and
the lower-case one being the chapter number. When
several references are made to a single idea in my
text, they are separated by commas, whereas
references to successive ideas are separated by
semi-colons; the siglum is not repeated when there
are multiple references to the same work. Verne's
quotation marks are always maintained (although
the responsability for utterances is not always
identified). Quotations within quotations should
not therefore be taken as representing the
narrator's view. Even where quotation marks are
not present, my text is often a direct paraphrase
of Verne's (as indicated by the notes or
references in brackets). My emphasis of words
within quotations will be indicated by the use of
capital letters, whereas italics indicate emphasis
in the text quoted. Square brackets within
quotations indicate my intercalation of material.
For the sake of continuity, a few brief quotations
have been translated (my translations), but only
when the English corresponds clearly to the
French. References will contain the place of
publication only when it is not London (for books
in English) or Paris (for books in French).


LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

BSJV: Bulletin de la soci{t{ Jules Verne
tri.: trimestre (quarter)
]   : New paragraph (within a quotation)
n[  : num{ro (number)











CHAPTER 1

THE WARRIOR OF THE UNKNOWN


Verne's characters are at a crossroads in history,
since space is shrinking so rapidly in the
nineteenth century. The demand for virgin
territory can clearly not be satisfied for much
longer in an era where 'to go around the world has
become just a tourist trip' and even Himalayan
peaks are covered with inscriptions like
'"'Durand, dentiste, 14, rue Caumartin'"' (ER
(1882) 43; MV (1880) 277).1 
        Would-be explorers will very soon find
themselves in a post-Romantic cul-de-sac, and
Paganel is anticipating only slightly when he
declares: '"'Everything has been seen, 
everything reconnoitred, everything invented,
there are no new continents or worlds remaining;
and we latest arrivals (...) haven't got anything
left to do!'"' (CG (1866-68) 81-82). The Voyageurs
- and the author - feel therefore compelled to
visit the few remaining scraps of unexplored
territory before the real-life explorers get
there.
         The general manifesto of the Voyages
extraordinaires is to describe journeys of
exploration throughout Les Mondes connus et
inconnus. But once the unknown worlds have
disappeared, some sort of compromise will clearly
be necessary. Travellers will have to consider
themselves more as 'perfecters' than as
'inventors' (CH 119), their aim more to 'join up
and finish off' (5S 10) than to discover new
worlds - more, in sum, to be exhaustive on a
second level. The 'other' intention of the
Voyages, announced in their fourth volume, and
repeated regularly afterwards (e.g. TO 365
(1895)), is thus the Balzacian one of summarising
the whole of human knowledge: '(leur but) est
(...) de RESUMER TOUTES les connaissances
g{ographiques, g{ologiques, physiques,
astronomiques amass{es par la science moderne et
de REfaire (...) l'histoire de l'UNIVERS'.2 This
announcement by the publisher Hetzel has often
been commented on, but the critics have never
fully explained how such an operation happens
within the space of fiction - how a universe may
be covered by the lines on a page.
         And yet a first observation seems fairly
obvious. The stark choice between on one hand
limiting oneself, while it is still possible, to
what is absolutely new, and on the other
restricting attention to what has already been
explored in the non-fictional world does have an
advantage. Verne's characters normally feel a bit
lost. By means of this choice, the
multidimensional complexity of the world will be
either of relatively limited dimensions or
structured by previous explorers' endeavours. Each
potential journey will be made substantially less
arbitrary. Nevertheless, the two options still
remain slightly paradoxical, for their union is of
course the whole world. 
        Responses to the general question of plots
in literature have often employed terms like 'a
slice of life', 'train of events', 'narrative
thread' or 'point of view'. Their use of
metaphorical objects that are already of dimension
two, one or zero means, however, that the key
question of dimensionality is often begged. The
vital problem, in other words, still remains that
of knowing how mappings can take place between the
world and a one-dimensional succession of words,
how space, even when divided into two, can begin
to be 'temporalised'.3 
        In simpler terms: how is the choice of
particular journeys in time and space made? Trying
to analyse the two components separately
undoubtedly makes for less understanding, not
more. Thus when time in Verne's works is examined
in terms of the explicit pronouncements, it
rapidly becomes clear that it cannot be conceived
of as a tangible and measurable phenomenon.
'Because of' a double reductionism carried out in
the seminal short story 'Matre Zacharius' (1851),
time seems to exist in the Voyages only by
entering into a symbiosis with some other element
of either the physical world or the fictional
structure.4 
        This applies particularly to the naive
view that Verne's works are in any real sense
about the future. The works were virtually always
set in the past; and the 'anticipations' were
rarely both ahead of their time and original, and
can now be seen to have been largely pretexts for
interrogations of historical, social, personal and
metaphysical themes.5 Here especially, time on its
own is a useless path along which to approach the
real Verne.       
        If we therefore return to the idea of
space and time in the works, we are however soon
presented with an almost embarrassing richness of
examples.         Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts
jours (1872) is a prime example. As Fogg and
Passepartout travel eastwards trying to prove that
the world can be girded in eighty days, their
clock-time no longer coincides with the time of
the sun, but they indignantly refuse to touch
their timepieces (TM 48, 209). The result is the
'gain' of the twenty-four hours that provides the
final coup de th{tre and wins the bet; but it is
at the cost of 24,000 miles of space. Similarly,
the dimensions of the Island in Le Phare du bout
du monde (1905) are manipulated by the lighthouse-
keeper so as to delay the departure of the
villains, but with little apparent result (PBM
181). In fact the few hours do make all the
difference, for reinforcements do arrive in time,
and the villains are captured in the end. Another
novel, Sans dessus dessous (1889), recounts the
building by a megalomaniac government and an
eccentric scientist of a giant cannon, designed to
fire a very heavy projectile from Mount
Kilimanjaro and thus, using the recoil, right the
Earth's axis. If the idea was successful, time and
space would be jointly affected, for the seasons
would disappear, and the sun's course in the sky
would be changed (SDD 194). Again, Hector Servadac
(1877) describes the travels round the solar
system of a populated fragment torn from the Earth
by a passing comet. The distinction is made
between context-sensitive timepieces like pendulum
clocks and context-neutral ones like spring-based
watches; but the major consequence of the travels
is the lengthening of the seasons and the
shortening of the days, and the problems this
causes for eating habits and rates of pay (HS 54;
126-27). Or, as Verne says of Jupiter: '"les
journ{es ne sont que de neuf heures et demie, ce
qui est commode pour les paresseux; et (...) les
ann{es (...) durent douze ans, ce qui est
avantageux pour les gens qui n'ont plus que six
mois @ vivre"' (5S 59).
         The Voyages extraordinaires, then, often
highlight the interdependence of the two elements
making up both the journey and the plot. Even so,
Le Tour du monde, with its explicit interrogation,
remains an exception. In general, there still
remains a considerable gap between our observation
of the importance of space and time in Verne's
novels and a detailed knowledge of how they
actually work together.
         A survey of the existing literature shows
that although short - and brilliant - pieces
concerning time have been written by Raymond,
Vierne, Delabroy and Roudaut,6 no-one has yet
looked coherently and sustainedly at Verne's
spatio-temporal structures and themes. This
applies
almost by default in the English-speaking world,
for studies on Verne have been almost non-
existent - and Britain especially seems poorly
endowed with studies of time in general.7 It is
this triple lack which it will be the main aim of
the present book to remedy - together with
understanding the how and the why of the Voyageur
himself. 
        Given the exhaustive theme, it would be a
shame to omit any of Verne's works. My corpus will
consist therefore of all seventy-nine Voyages
extraordinaires (1851-1919), together with the
most important of the other prose, poetic and
dramatic works (a list appears in the
Bibliography). Special attention will nevertheless
be paid to the seventeen short stories and about a
dozen of the best-known or interesting novels.
        The novels can conveniently be classified
into three categories. On the one hand, the first
four in the series, Cinq semaines en ballon
(1863), Voyage au centre de la Terre (1864, 1867),
De la Terre @ la Lune (1865) and Les Voyages et
aventures du capitaine Hatteras (1866), with their
exploration of such clearly new territories as the
heart of Africa, the underground depths, space and
the North Pole, are the densest and richest texts
in verbal terms, often showing a remarkable power
of invention. 
        The four books typical of the middle
period, however, generally mix the known and
unknown much more. In Les Enfants du capitaine
Grant (1866-68), the heroes search round the globe
looking for a man whose latitude but not longitude
is known; Vingt mille lieues sous les mers
(1869-70) shows a voyage into the underwater and
other areas of the globe, in the company of the
mysterious Captain Nemo; Le Tour du monde en
quatre-vingts jours (1873), a journey through
mostly known areas from London to Singapore and
back to London again; and L'Ile myst{rieuse
(1874-75), the systematic exploration of life on
an invented desert-island. Although this period is
the most successful in Verne's life, the texts
lengthen considerably, and often show signs of
underlying tensions. 
        The remaining texts are less well-known:
Le Chancellor (1875) presents the successive
catastrophes of a ship attempting to cross the
Atlantic; Robur-le-conqu{rant (1886), a machine
which is half helicopter, half aeroplane; L'Ile @
h{lice (1895), a miles-long pleasure-cruiser-cum-
millionaire-community; Face au drapeau (1896),
submarine warfare; Le Village a{rien (1901), the
discovery of a missing-link tribe in the
equatorial forest; and L'Etonnante aventure de la
mission Barsac (1919), a technological and social
dystopia in the heart of the African desert. 
        A large number of commentators have in
fact pointed out important differences during this
later period. Verne himself, in a much-quoted
remark, wrote 'Je n'ai plus de sujet dont
l'int{rt soit dans l'extraordinaire: Ballons,
Capitaine Nemo, etc. Il me faut donc chercher @
int{resser par la combinaison'.8 Other signs of
change are that apparently sympathetic
presentations of scientific themes are replaced by
criticisms of science and by scenes of mere
tourism, that ideas from the earlier works are
re-employed in ironic fashion, and that the
political views become less pro-Anglo-Saxon and at
the same time less optimistic. 
        The reaction of the public was
demonstrated by drops in sales, particularly
severe in the case of Le Chancellor (1875) and the
1890s.9 Some modern critics have shared this
unfavourable impression: Jean Bellemin-Nol, for
instance, goes as far as calling Sans dessus
dessous (1889) a 'fiasco', noting apparently
unintentional errors in the calculations that form
an essential element of the plot.10 But other
critics have defended the same works: Fran‡ois
Raymond argues that the irony of Sans dessus
dessous and its revelation of how it is
constructed together help to constitute a
self-consciousness that foreshadows more recent
literature.11 Without at this stage attempting to
evaluate these opposing views, it is clear that
there is a major discontinuity somewhere in
Verne's production.
        But the choice of studying all the works
is in fact far from unproblematic. It has recently
been proved by Piero Gondolo della Riva that not
all the Voyages extraordinaires were written by
Jules Verne.12 After his death - and even before -
 his son, Michel Verne, rewrote or wrote parts of
or even the whole of many of the Voyages
extraordinaires, although they continued to bear
Jules Verne's name. To complicate matters further,
Michel did so in the general manner of his father
- on one level at least. 
        The consequences of Gondolo della Riva's
discovery, have not yet been fully worked out,13
although all the more important given the
facinating nature of some of the posthumous works.
Fortunately, access has been acquired recently to
five of the original, i.e. Jules's, manuscripts,
for they have been published by the Soci{t{ Jules
Verne.14 
        A secondary aim here, then, is to begin
the study of Michel Verne, especially the short
story 'L'Eternel Adam', apparently totally from
his pen. My initial policy will be to accept the
son's contribution as an integral part of the
Voyages extraordinaires. But at the same time, it
is clear that the posthumous works often act as a
well-informed commentary on the rest: as a
discourse at a second level which extrapolates
tendencies from the previous works, occasionally
to the point of pastiche. The name 'Verne' will
consequently be used for aspects common to the two
writers; but 'Jules Verne' or 'Michel Verne' as a
shorthand way of underlining aspects of one or the
other.



CHAPTER 2


IN SEARCH OF TEMPORAL STRUCTURE


Lost Between Two Shores

In the beginning is the void. The initial situation
of each Vernian hero is the confrontation of his
minute physical being with the unstructured space of
the whole world. It is his search for some means of
apprehending the globe, deciding on meaningful
movements, coping with time. The division
explored-unexplored, we have seen, is essential in
this respect; but it does not explain how structure
and significance are injected into space. Let us
accordingly start again from first principles.

         The situation at the beginning of each
Voyage is free movement over the globe; and this is
viewed with immense pleasure by many of the heroes
- who usually have enough money to enjoy it. They
happily contemplate the uninterrupted visual field,
where surface and sky are described as tending to
infinity together. Their attention is especially
drawn to the uncharted areas on the maps, 'ces
grands vides (...), ces blancs @ teintes ples' (RC
152), offering as they do an unlimited range of
possibilities for mind or body to wander.
         But they are just as much drawn by the
regions of the globe which cannot be mapped out and
appropriated. The open sea is typical, for 'comment
nommer (...) un espace d'oc{an ind{termin{? Comment
planter en pleins flots le pavillon de son pays?'
(CH 552). Because the waves - despite Britannia's
claim - have no intrinsic structure, the heroes can
follow their whims and 'go where they please' (SG
23); in other words, 'la mer libre, (c'est) (...) la
libert{' (CH 476). The polar regions are similarly
protected by the difficulty of establishing any sort
of permanent mark on them1 or on their maps - a
protection reinforced by the association between
blanc-blank and blanc-white (RC 152, CH 213, etc.).
Three-dimensional domains, above all, not only offer
an infinitely multiplied number of potential paths,
but are again virtually unchartable - hence perhaps
the predilection for the ocean depths in Vingt mille
lieues sous les mers, the underground domains in
Voyage au centre de la Terre and Les Indes noires
(1877), and the air and space in at least seven
works (DA(1851), 5S, RC, MM, TL, AL, HS).
         The euphoria of unrestricted movement
seldom lasts long however, and boredom is always
threatening to set in. The monotony of occupying the
'mathematical centre' of an empty circular horizon
is in fact a complaint frequently heard in the
mouths of Verne's heroes (VF 66, cf. IM 132, VCT
263, 5S 222). Without fixed points to focus on, they
judge their freedom excessive; tending to infinity
means never actually getting there; a total choice
is almost the same as no choice at all. Openness
comes to compare unfavourably with the richness,
plenitude and security of compact tropical islands
with their 'mille ressources vari{es' (CH 418). In
the later novels of tourism, especially, advanced
methods of locomotion afford the characters great
liberty, but one from which little benefit can be
drawn in the absence of any motivation, of any sense
of direction.
         Frequently, the fear of emptiness takes on
the form of an agoraphobic reaction to a sensory
void. This may seem surprising given the role of the
journey in Verne's works. Nevertheless, mariners,
polar explorers and airmen all express their dread
of the empty perspective, '(l'){clat uniforme',
'(le) mal de la blancheur' (HG 240; CH 292; 292).
Even contemplation from a high place causes a
corresponding 'mal de l'espace' (VCT 72): at least
eight characters - plus Hatteras's dog - suffer a
textually identical 'vertige' when faced with an
identical 'abme'.2 In virtually each case, the hero
further undergoes an 'attraction de l'abme', '(la)
tent(ation) de s'y pr{cipiter' (VCT 146; C 116). In
other words, a lack of tangible objects in the
hero's field of vision seems to provoke an attempt
to reduce the emptiness of space, however suicidal
the consequences. Open space is far from an
automatic route to salvation.
         Three-dimensional space may, nevertheless,
be brought down to size by the cunningly simple
expedient of eliminating the odd dimension, the
vertical one. The aircraft in fact normally stay
close to the ground, and their movements are often
considered simply in terms of a conventional map.
Similarly, life underground is often represented as
an imitation of the planar world above, with the
third dimension serving merely as a transition
between the two: one hero even finds his way around
down there by associating locations with features on
the surface (IN 135). Exceptionally, in Voyage au
centre de la Terre and 'Un Drame dans les airs', the
vertical dimension is retained - but often at the
price of both of the horizontal ones being normally
ignored.
         In the more typical case of space that is
already two-dimensional, there is no distinctive
dimension that could be eliminated, for latitude and
longitude occupy comparable positions in the scheme
of things (in non-polar regions at least). So
Verne's characters have to seek some other form
which will provide at least a pretext for travel.
The most obvious physical feature, whether on the
terrain or on the map, is the division between land
and water. The simplest solution is thus for the
Voyageurs to hug coasts 'as closely as possible', to
follow what is characterised, with some originality,
as 'un fleuve qui n'aurait qu'une rive', '(une)
route (...) @ la fois fluviale et maritime'.3 This
compromise between sea and river constitutes a vital
element in the Vernian imagination. It avoids two of
the sources of anguish visible throughout the
corpus, agoraphobia and claustrophobia, and helps to
create a semblance of both security and free-will.
         But from the narrator's point of view more
variety is needed to give life to the plot, and
accordingly many novels embroider on the basic
situation. In Le Phare du bout du monde, as an
interesting example, the hero's efforts to delay the
villains' departure involve not only obstructing
their attempts to build a boat, but also preventing
other vessels from entering the only bay, while at
the same time using the open space on the island to
avoid falling into their hands himself. The novel
thus essentially pivots round the closed form of the
bay and its opposition to the open structures of the
land and the sea.
         An episode set in Africa in Un Capitaine
de quinze ans (1878) ( C15 331-41) provides a more
developed example. Having survived various
vicissitudes, the heroes are in a closed native hut
round which flood-water is getting higher and higher
and into which it is also slowly flowing, stopped
only by the internal air-pressure. Sooner or later,
they will have to make a hole in the hut to attempt
to replenish their air. But the problem is that the
water inside will of course rise to the level it is
at outside or to the level of the hole, whichever
happens to be the lower. Making a low hole is
clearly less dangerous, but a high hole has a
greater chance of success. In the event however, the
heroes forget all about their calculations, and
choose the most risky course of action of all, a
hole right at the top. They thus take a bold view on
the land-sea problem.
         Where however the frontier between the two
elements does not naturally exist, the situation is
often transformed by means of a rhetorical device
that is fundamental to the Voyages: the metaphorical
interchange of sea and land.
         Sometimes it is the element itself which
is affected. Thus land is described as having
shoals, undulations, eddies, ripples, foam, white
horses, a swell, and  pitching and rolling, with the
result that one can drown on dry land.4 But
conversely, Verne's water takes on surprisingly
terrestrial characteristics: the Amazon is a
'garden', and Nemo talks of 'game' in the '"sub-
marine forests"' and 'herds' grazing on '"the
immense prairies of the ocean"' (J 97; 20M 102; 102,
cf. 427). The oceans are therefore conceived of as
'the sixth continent'; but, in a reapplication of
the metaphor, '"les flots a{riens"', 'la mer
c{leste', '"l'oc{an atmosph{rique"' are then in turn
'the seventh', with clouds acting as icebergs and
whirlwinds as maelstroms.5
         Consequently, in the organic world,
elephants are whales, to be harpooned; but as if to
compensate, the sea contains a whole menagerie, with
'chiens (...), chevaux (...), ours, (...) lions
(...)', 'dragons', 'renards marins', 'papillons',
'loutre(s)', '"cochons"', 'dromadaires', 'crapaud(s)
de mer'.6 Birds are sharks or hunting-dogs, and
grasshoppers, '"les crevettes de l'air"' (5S 269;
TCC 266; 5S 330). 'Poissons-mouches' or 'poissons
volants', finally, form a fully living missing link
in a chain of evolution re-enacted on land, and even
constitute one of the stages of metempsychosis -
without however always taking on the proportions of
'une baleine volante'.7 
         The means of transport are similarly
transformed. Camels and caravans navigate,
pedestrians are blown off-course, and helmsmen
direct a land-yacht and a wind-powered wheelbarrow
(TCC 307; CC I iii 38; B 356; TM 281; TCC 163). The
Nautilus moves like a balloon pushed by the wind, or
escapes from ocean-bed labyrinths like an aerostat,
and air-ships are endowed with deck, hull, anchor,
sails, masts, or log-book, drop a
message-in-a-bottle, or undergo 'naufrages'.8
         The comparison between the terrestrial and
fluid elements is therefore a recurrent and dramatic
one. Nature seems little more than an elemental
metaphor. Verne is undoubtedly influenced here by
pre-evolutionary biological theories. The
seventeenth-century biologist De Maillet, for
instance, observed that many land animals had
equivalents in the sea; and other scientists deduced
from this that they must originally have come from
there (Jacob, ch. 3). But I would argue that at
least as important in understanding what is going on
are psychological factors in Verne's make-up - the
need for evasion, for objects that can move with
equal ease in different environments - but also his
creative compulsions - his tendency to produce new
objects from old and to invent unexpected metaphors,
often by simply applying the metaphor to itself.
          It is possible to surmise that the real
aim is to create imaginary coastlines within a
single element and thus reach a similarly ideal mix
of freedom and constraint as in the real coastlines,
one that is even displaceable at will. This is
undoubtedly why so many Vernian seas contain
currents or even 'rivers': the effect being again to
superimpose purposeful but comparatively free
movement onto the wider space. But the main
consequence of the land-sea metaphor is perhaps
simply the blurring of the distinctions between the
elements, or between planarity and linearity. In any
case, the end-effect is to add variety to the
narrative, to subdue the anguish of the completely
free choice, to quell the vertigo caused by the
empty horizon or map. Space and time are rendered
slightly less frightening.

The Strogoff Syndrome

         But the boundary itself sometimes lacks
interest or significance. The problem is that one
point on it looks very much like another. This is
especially clear in comparison with other linear
forms in the Voyages, ones involving some sort of
progressive quality. In accordance with the
traditional identification in literature between the
downhill flow of water and the onward flow of time,
the river without branches plays the role well. Such
a topos crops up nevertheless in surprising places:
in the coastal and mid-ocean rivers already
mentioned, but also, for instance, applied to the
United States, for 'le syst}me orographique de ce
grand pays se r{duit @ deux chanes de moyenne
hauteur, entre lesquelles coule ce magnifique
Mississipi' (TL 319).
         Sometimes, the function of the river seems
to be to allow the character to abandon himself to
the current on a comfortable raft or boat - the
basis of extensive waterborne episodes in at least
seven novels (5S, J, 500, VA, PD, WS, MB). But the
Vernian water-course also permits the presentation
of ever-changing scenery; and, above all, allows a
progression, whether from imprisonment to freedom,
from archaic backwaters to civilisation, or from
banal modernity to mysterious roots. The water-
course is thus at the same time the means and the
embodiment of the progression. It allows, more
precisely and most importantly, an association
between the temporality of the river and that of the
character (and also that of the narrator). The force
of this solution is however its weakness. Leaving
control of events to the flow of the water means
vulnerability to obstacles, and especially to the
cataracts which feature in a surprising number of
Verne's works.9
         An episode in Mathias Sandorf (1885) is a
virtuoso illustration of the progressive linear
structure in general and the river form in
particular. Sandorf and his two companions are in
prison at the top of the Pisino Tower, due to be
executed at dawn. They manage, however, to loosen
the bars on the window and start to climb down a
lightning conductor, despite a violent storm. As
Sandorf argues, '"il n'est pas douteux que le cble
(...) n'arrive jusqu'au sol, puisque cela est
n{cessaire @ son fonctionnement"', '"(et donc) au
bout (...) il y a la libert{"' (MS 116; 111). His
idea proves correct, but in an unexpected way, for
it is the conductor itself that becomes 'LIBRE,
flottant, abandonn{ dans le vide' (MS 112), meaning
the heroes are forced to let go. Fortunately, there
is a pool at the bottom. The three avoid its
'tourbillons (...), ces su\oirs liquides' (MS 127),
but are then swept away into an underground river,
managing all the same to seize a passing tree-trunk.
Their control of affairs is again strictly limited,
for not only are there no junctions, but the trunk
avoids the rocks by itself, 'rien qu'en suivant le
fil du courant' (MS 136). Sandorf profits from a
lull to reiterate his optimistic prediction: '"en
quelque endroit que se d{verse ce torrent, (...)
nous y arriverons"' (MS 131). This time he is right,
for the river eventually leads out into a vast
stretch of stagnant water, not far from the open sea
(MS 138).          Much of the impact of this
episode derives, I would claim, from its alternation
between linear and (approximately) circular
structures. The round cell is followed by a
structure which is not only physically one-
dimensional, but also provides a linear route for
both the electricity and the three heroes.10 After
the open structures of the air and the round pool,
the river presents another three-fold linearity -
its intrinsic structure, the path of the normal
occupant and the heroes' route. Its similarity with
the first stage is further emphasised by Verne's
description of electricity as a 'fluide' (MS 121),
as involving, exactly like the river, both a 'fil'
and 'courant(s)' (MS 124; 136; 120, 121; 136).
         Linear progressive structures are thus
particularly reassuring: space-time leads somewhere
and not just back in a circle to the starting point;
but Natural forces are employed and so this
somewhere will not be merely a cul-de-sac. At the
same time as constructing plausible adventures,
Verne is exploring real problems of space-time,
seeking both tangible reassurance and transcendental
solutions.
         The works also employ a large variety of
linear forms intermediate between the physical and
conceptual domains. At least two novels are
literally generated by the lines on the map: Les
Enfants du capitaine Grant follows the line of 37[
11' latitude south round the world; and Aventures de
trois Russes et trois Anglais pursues the 24th
meridian east across Africa. The characters'
constant concern to know their spatial coordinates,
already visible in Lidenbrock and the mad balloon
stowaway, becomes a veritable obsession in the case
of the polar explorers. Hatteras, in particular,
argues from the fact that '"every meridian leads to
the pole"' to ignore the longitude altogether, and
thus, logically but perversely, converts the whole
region into a purely linear structure, a space where
the lateral dimension is totally lacking (CH 216).11
This gives him the force to get to the Pole, but it
blinds him to everything else - how, in particular,
to get back. The consequence was that Hatteras died
at his destination. Hetzel, however, perhaps
over-concerned for the good reputation of his
publishing-house, made Verne resuscitate him and
bring him back again. In the circumstances, the
author made the best of a bad job: Hatteras goes
mad, while still retaining his polar and linear
obsessions: 'Le capitaine, une fois arriv{ @
l'extr{mit{ de l'all{e, revenait @ reculons (...).
John Hatteras marchait invariablement vers le Nord'
(CH 624). For Verne, then, the linear obsession can
be dangerous.
         Very frequently, the difficult task of
choosing a path is accomplished by simply following
a route established by someone else. Children follow
their fathers, fathers their children, mothers their
children, and wives their husbands with remarkable
regularity, as Verne himself self-deprecatingly
pointed out.12 Nemo further draws attention to the
'rule' by proving the unique exception to it, by
never stepping on ground where anyone has ever been
before (20M 490). But in general exploration in the
Voyages is often merely the cognitive one of
following predecessors, in many cases real-life ones
who have written books describing their routes. In
Cinq semaines en ballon, for example, the heroes are
following in the footsteps of 129 authentic
explorers, listed in alphabetical order, and
including a 'Werne' (pronounced 'Verne') (5S 8-10)!
The heroes' declared objective is of course to
overtake the predecessors. But following 'les traces
(des) devanciers' and making use of their experience
(5S 90; CH 123) frequently seems to become an aim in
itself - as if to compensate for the lack of new
ground to be broken. In extreme cases indeed, what
is called 'exploration' involves following
slave-traders or telegraph lines (C15 443; B 299)!
Even when apparently novel exploits are
accomplished, they often prove to be not really new:
Axel and Lidenbrock do not in fact diverge from
Saknussemm's path towards the centre of the Earth;
an entomologist's belief that he has discovered
butterflies unknown to South America collapses when
he realises that he is in Western Africa instead;
and travels on a comet round the solar system or in
a pneumatic tube under the Atlantic turn out to be
just dreams (VCT 324; C15 257; HS 524; ExA 136).
Ennuyeux dix-neuvi}me si}cle!
         In the polar regions, predecessors' routes
are followed even in temporal terms, for a common
alternation between wintering and frenetic activity
is imposed on all travellers. When Hatteras tries to
steal a march on previous explorers by starting
earlier, he ends up in exactly the same spot at the
same season (CH 184, cf. 40). This synchronism is a
defining feature of the curious Le Sphinx des glaces
(1897), which is a sort of interpretation,
adaptation and follow-up of Poe's Narrative of
Arthur Gordon Pym (1838). Verne's hero starts by
following the same route, which means that Poe's
account is checked (and nearly always corrected).13
He experiences the same seasonal variation as Pym,
plus the same dislocation on the 29th of February;
and even when he discovers new regions, twelve years
later, he does it within the existing time-scale.
Sometimes, indeed, the twelve years disappear
altogether, leaving only micro-variations: on one
occasion, the difference between the two ships is
reduced to exactly 'eighteen days' (SG 217; cf. 304,
etc.). The aim of Verne's novel seems to be to
completely superimpose itself on Poe's one, to cover
it so completely as to virtually block it out.
         In a few cases, lastly, the temporal
structure exists independently of a physical space.
In L'Ile myst{rieuse, the settlers' constant model
is not only Robinson Crusoe but the whole of the
technological history of the world. The settlers
'invent', in strictly linear succession, the
complete range of techniques known to man. The only
exception is dynamite, which cannot be discovered in
the novel in 1865, says Verne (IM(1874-75) 226-27),
because it was only discovered in 1866!
         Many different varieties of linearity
exist, then, but I would claim that there are two
overall categories. The first one is constituted by
a well-defined linear subset of the universe,
inherited from the past; the characters who choose
to limit themselves to it drastically reduce their
personal world. Such a choice is defended by the
argument that emulating - and verifying - past
efforts is a precondition for a different future;
but often this different future is never actually
achieved. Indeed, the characters in a
one-dimensional universe are destined merely to bump
into each other even after thousand of miles of
separation, like Fogg and Passepartout in Hong-Kong
or Glenarvan and Paganel in the Pacific. In a purely
linear world, Providence replaces chance, necessity
ousts improvisation. Later science-fiction novels
have made great play of adapting space and time and
studying the consequences - for instance reducing
the dimensions of the invented world. Verne is
already doing this in the nineteenth century - but
within the additional constraint of realism.
         But the linearity of existing structures
may also be bypassed. The corollary of the infinite
capability of the human mind, says Verne, is that no
situation is ever lost. Despair is never justified,
and prisoners with sufficient intelligence and
will-power can always escape.14 Indeed, the
conditions of the gamble are such that, as in a sort
of converse of Pascal's wager, where the existence
of God would be so infinitely rewarding that it must
be assumed, risks must be taken in these
circumstances. After the escape has duly succeeded,
the operation is then often repeated over several
episodes: mortal dangers arrive one after the other,
the hero is constantly faced with 'une derni}re
extr{mit{' (C15 167), but constantly manages to
survive. This second sort of linear structure, in
other words, is distinctive in being constructed
segment by segment, without its continuance assured
beforehand; it is defined essentially in
present/future time.
         Between the two extremes of the
pre-defined physical configuration and the created,
zigzagging spatio-temporal form, there are
nevertheless intermediate structures. Sandorf's
escape draws in fact upon both Natural forms and his
imagination; the lines of latitude and longitude are
both pre-existing and artificial, non-physical and
non-zigzagging; and following previous explorers'
routes - whatever the nature of the paths they
discovered - is also in theory pre-defined, but
often in practice hard to do. Between
'l'inflexibilit{ de la ligne droite', '(de la) ligne
loxodromique', the path that is '"un capricieux, un
fantasque, un lunatique"', 'ne cherchant pas (...)
le plus court chemin (...), et ne violentant pas la
nature',15 many structures are thus based on a happy
medium, a controlled sinuosity, an undulation that
also moves forward. Having created the opposition
between a geometrically unyielding and a
topologically devious linearity, Verne's works then
seek to recreate an ideal form synthesising the
qualities of the two, a linearity which is
ecologically and erotically integrated with the rest
of the space.
         The popular impression that Verne's works
merely describe positivistic journeys of discovery
is thus particularly inaccurate. Rather, they centre
on the division between the Mondes connus and the
Mondes inconnus, trying to make the former more
extraordinary and the latter more ordinary. But the
known-unknown division would seem to be
'overdetermined' by two related tensions. First,
Verne's obstinate desire to remain in known
territory may be interpreted as a lack of confidence
in his own powers of invention. But at the same
time, it may be an attempt to expose the relative
lack of merit of the explorers being imitated. If
somebody else can do the same thing as 129
explorers, then either these predecessors must be
considered fakes, or else modern explorers are
superior, or both. In this way, the second tension
is clearly indicated. Realism in the novel means for
Verne reproducing reality as closely as possible.
Taking this to its literal extreme means that
nothing that is not known in the real world can be
depicted - but then the very genre of fiction would
fall down. By means of a reductio ad absurdum, Verne
would seem to be demonstrating the cul-de-sac of
extreme naturalism - and thus anticipating on the
general crisis of confidence that the novel will
later undergo. Verne 'anticipated' in surprising
ways. 

Le Verbe et la Terre
         
         The search for a global linearity is often
conjugated with the desire for locally
one-dimensional forms. One interesting case is the
written form,16 which often appears in the most
unexpected places.
         Thus the commonplace notion of the
firmament as a book occurs in the Voyages, with the
stars and planets laid out 'like the letters of an
immense alphabet', as if by the 'Author of all
things' (CG 520, etc.; HS 71; IM 48). More
specifically and more Vernianly, Scotland's history
is written using islands and mountains as gigantic
characters; a volcano forms an immense sundial; and
labyrinths take on the form of an ampersand or of
letters spelling out 'xxUxPHC,qui signifie "r{gion
du sud"'.17 The natural world, in other words, is
made Word. It is highly appropriate that running
water should taste of ink, that fossils leave 'leur
impression nette et comme "admirablement tir{e"',
and that there even exists a tree which produces
printed leaves (VCT 192, cf. 316, 325; IN 21-22; MV
276).
         The written form is in fact an essential
part of discovery, since the act is consecrated for
Vernian man by the act of inscription, on the map
but even on the object itself. In the early works,
the signatures are modest: 'A.D.' (Andrea Debono) on
a rock near the source of the Nile or '    ' and 
'                         ' (Arne Saknussemm) on the
route to the centre of the Earth (5S 155; VCT 324;
141). In the later works, by contrast, the act of
appropriation is applied to sets of natural objects,
the name is mass-produced. Thus Benedict dreams of
the glory of attaching his name to a new insect, the
'Hexapodes Benedictus'; and the eccentric scientist
Xirdal enters posterity with the chemical element
Xirdalium (C15 430, 433, 524; CM 131). Reducing the
quality of the discovery implies increasing its
quantities. Worse apparently means more.
         But nomination (and with it discovery
itself) proves to be a less definitive act than it
might seem. A remarkable number of geographical
entities in Verne's works require multiple
appellations, either because they are so extensive
- three successive names are barely enough to cover
the Amazon (J 52) - or else for national-ideological
reasons, like the Falklands/Malouines (SG 132) or
Tabor/Maria-Th{r{sa (CG 861). 'De-nomination' also
occurs surprisingly frequently: the carefuly
built-up nomenclature of the Mysterious Island is
destroyed with the island itself; the names of the
'promontory' in Le Pays des fourrures (1873) also
melt with the object; and the Tsalal Islands
discovered in Arthur Gordon Pym are carefully
'balay{es, lav{es et relav{es' in Le Sphinx des
glaces (SG 298), presumably so that they can then be
rediscovered and renamed by Verne's hero.
             In certain cases, a raison d'tre for
the link between the word and the world is made more
explicit. Clawbonny argues that after explorers have
left their names on the icecaps, the spatial
configurations will then generate their entire
history for those coming afterwards (CH 60). The
land will be endowed, in other words, with an
intrinsic and coherent narrative structure. It will
thus follow the example of the moon, where the
successive 'Seas' are presented as charting out an
entire human life, culminating in '"(la) mer de la
Tranquillit{" (...) dont les flots se d{versent
paisiblement dans "le lac de la Mort"' (AL 158). It
would seem that the character's problematic choice
of path is henceforth solved, and the author has a
story that will write itself. All one has to do is
follow. 
         Nevertheless, such complete
'temporalisations' of space are illusory, for the
difference between the one-dimensional logos and the
multidimensional world is too great to be bridged by
a mere pirouette. Clawbonny's eponymy does not in
fact retrace the history of an area of the globe,
but only that of a coastline; and lunar 'waves',
even moving 'peacefully', are an absurdity in a
world that is dead throughout, and not just in its
terminal stages. The world is too big to be
encapsulated in a mere story. The attempt to use the
past to solve the problem of the present does not
here work - and the mere attempt may, with
hindsight, seem a little derisory. But it will prove
productive elsewhere in a new guise. 
         But the word appears in other, potentially
more powerful, forms. Often the logos swallows up
the person instead of adding to his glory. The
character, for instance, is converted into a
caract}re, a gigantic question mark; or else he
becomes, in an image with sexual undertones, 'un
livre toujours prt': '"libre @ vous de me
feuilleter tant qu'il vous plaira"'; a tatooed Maori
Chief is even on his fifth edition (CG 812; IM 292;
CG 159, cf. TCC 4; CG 715). 
         In some instances, the two tendencies we
have seen, namely the personification of natural
objects and the conversion of man into logos, are
even placed in series. Thus Cap Matifou and Point
Pescade are two promontories forming the Bay of
Algiers, named after real-life people called Matifou
and Pescade; but they are also, following the
examples of Atlas and Everest, the names given in
turn to fictional characters (MS 192; 192; A3
passim; MS 192). Again, the similarly authentic and
eponymous 'cap Hatteras' mentioned with remarkable
frequency in the Voyages (20M 567, C 15, FD 52, CM
215, etc.), is reproduced in the 'invented' name of
the hero of Voyages et aventures du capitaine
Hatteras. Between 'cap' and 'cap.' is only a small
point. Matifou, Pescade, Atlas, Everest and Hatteras
are in other words the names of people, names which
are given to places, which then serve in turn to
name other people. A series is created connecting
people to places then to people again, with the word
providing the cement. It is as if people can only
interact with people via objects. Verne's invention
is closely tuned to the 'real world' but in devious
and unforeseen ways. He is at the same time closely
derivative and inventively original.
         The linearity of the written form, then,
is sometimes present within the Voyages in curious
ways. Most simply, the aim implied by its
introduction is to name the territory and thus
attach it to zero-dimensional man. The intention is
to replace the passivity of most of the other linear
forms by a positive act of appropriation - a
personalisation or individualisation of part of
space. In these terms, it may be considered to
succeed, for the act of naming does impose some
measure of significance on the featureless void of
the unfamiliar world.
         But a more ambitious project is sometimes
also visible. Clawbonny's vision was of the
sprinkling of the fictional world with its own image
in miniature, of the happy union of individual
endeavours with substantive parts of physical space.
The hope is present that some procedure may be found
for connecting the images up, perhaps by means of
some sort of pointilliste procedure, and thus
finally structuring the whole of space. In support
of this attempt, the Voyages adduce the case of
double eponymy, where the word serves not only to
map man onto space, but also to map space onto man.
         But the more ambitious project can never
totally succeed. The formal finiteness of the logos
means that it can never impose a continuous,
connected structure onto the whole of the
multidimensional world, can never calibrate it, can
never totally recount it. THe two poles of Verne's
imagination, 'conter' and 'compter' can never be
totally fused. But, on another level, by some sort
of alchemy, the act of naming and appropriation does
seem to successfully infiltrate the whole of the
fictional world, thus giving it some overall
meaning. By displaying its own building blocks,
Verne's verbal universe produces a certain amount of
significant structure by means of its very self-
consciousness. Person, word and world are not
necessarily sundered for ever.

Go Anywhere, Do Anything

          Another opportunity for getting away from
the empty uniformity of space and time occurs when
two constituents of the physical world come together
in intricate fashion. This feature occurs in a
surprising number of situations in Verne's works,
and its recurrence seem to imply some special
significance.
         Thus the rivers nearly always have
multiple mouths, multiple sources and many features
in between. The Amazon has for instance '"des
canaux, des lagunes, des lagons, des lacs"', 'des
iguarapes (...), des lacs temporaires', '(le tout
formant) un inextricable lacis' (J 50; 179; 179; cf.
5S 323). The sea and the land also make complex
inroads into each other, as in Tierra del Fuego or
Greece, with their '(cte) toute effiloch{e' and
their 'indentations, profondes et multipli{es'. Even
the lunar 'Seas' have 'rivages tourment{s' and
'ctes anguleuses, capricieuses, profond{ment
d{chiquet{es, (...) riches en golfe et en
presqu'les' (NJ I ii 14; AF 91; AL 154). The same
sort of interpenetration occurs in the 'mille
d{tours' and the 'passes and impasses' of the Polar
icefields, with their irregular hummocks and
tortuous valleys, their 'vast plains, broken in a
thousand places', their panoramas where '"tout (...)
est d{chiquet{, d{chir{, mis en morceaux, sans aucun
ordre, sans aucune logique"' (CH 268; HG 245; 259;
CH 136).
         Similar structures occur in the organic
world. Plants are often described in terms of
networks of overlapping segments, 'frondaison(s)
(...) entrelac{e(s)', 'tortis capricieux',
'inextricable(s) r{seau(x) de cordes et de noeuds',
'lianes {chevel{es' or '"{touffantes"'.18 Such
'lattices', whose particularity is to be so dense as
to 'fill up' the whole of space, are also visible -
in much more regular form - in man-made domains.
American towns are repeatedly described as being
built '"carr{ment"', as constituting vast
chequer-boards.19 This is perhaps not surprising
given what was happening in reality. But in Le
Testament d'un excentrique (1899), the whole plot is
based on the rectilinear divisions of the map of the
United States. The will of the title decrees that
the seven characters are to visit the States of the
Union, following the rules of a jeu de l'oie where
the States are represented as squares on a
spiral-shaped board. As a much more concise variant
of the same idea, in 'Martin Paz' the world is
considered as consisting simply of four squares, two
of which are named 'hasard' and two, 'sort' (MP vi
268). In other words, Verne is here radically
experimenting both with the physical space in his
novels and with the naturalistic conventions. His
claim is that extreme codification and invention can
on occasion work together, that the tendency of
Romanticism to lack of structure is not always a
necessary part of creation. Once again, radical
ideas are concealed under an innocuous surface.
         In terms of the search for structure, the
use of the lattice, whether called 'tortis', 'lacis'
or 'r{seau', and whether made up of land and water,
ice and non-ice, plant and air, or grid and squares,
constitutes another stage away from the monotony of
empty space. The potentially sterile symmetry of the
elemental boundary or other line is replaced by a
complex interpenetration, and the safe but
potentially stultifying one-dimensional form by a
richer two-dimensional configuration. Verne's
imagination is here a poetry of Cartesianism.
         But all is not yet perfect. If the
preponderance of one element makes travel within the
space possible, it is still clearly not sufficient
to determine a choice of route or to construct a
coherent narrative. No matter how fine the mesh, the
criss-crossed jumble or squared-off space remains
obstinately without a centre and without distinctive
paths. Space is still '"sans aucun ordre, sans
aucune logique"' (CH 136); the journey still tends
to consist of a random walk across a randomly
constructed space by Pirandellian characters in
search of an elusive goal. An additional
transformation remains necessary before any real
mapping could be conceivable between the two
dimensions of space and the one dimension of time,
before the world could begin to be satisfyingly
'temporalised' and 'narrativised'.
         It is some element of significance to
guide the travellers that is missing of course.
Ultimately, they are looking for some sort of model
with which to order space - order it in the weak
sense of mentally organising it, but also in the
strong sense of putting its components into order.20
         One brief idea of what is being sought is
provided by the maps, or rather by the construction
of the maps. The Voyageur finds a sustained and
inestimable pleasure in starting from 'ctes
inconnues', 'pointill{s, (...) d{signations vagues,
qui font le d{sespoir des cartographes', to end up
producing well-formed traces: '"D'abord, les lignes
terminales sont (...) bris{es, interrompues (...).
Puis, les d{couvertes se compl}tent, les lignes se
rejoignent, le pointill{ (...) fait place au trait
(...); enfin le nouveau continent (...) se d{ploie
sur le globe dans toute sa splendeur magnifique!"'
( CH 367; RC 152; CH 367; CG 81). 
         This euphoric vision gives an indication
of the structured unity required, and pinpoints the
physical features of the world as being propitious
to the search for a principle of significance. But
it does seem nevertheless to skirt the essential. It
indicates the point of departure and the
destination, but not the intermediate steps of the
recurrent problem of structuring space and time.
Above all, it hides the ambitiousness of a project
of going from a featureless void to a satisfying
spatio-temporal plenitude. The thorny question of
dimensionality is still not answered.  

Splitting the Difference

          A first solution to the problem of the
significant structuring of space is sometimes to be
found in Natural shapes. The configuration of the
Andes, for instance, presents a form which is both
unified and two-dimensional: 'La chanee (...) se
divise en deux branches qui accidentent
parall}lement les deux ct{s du territoire (...).
(Plus loin), apr}s s'^etre divis{e en trois
branches, elle va se perdre (...)' (DM ii 433).
Comparable branching structures with a similar
potential propensity for guiding Vernian man are
visible in the most varied of fluid domains:
waterways have affluents and sub-affluents (the term
is Verne's); the Gulf Stream 'se bifurque en deux
(...) bras (...), dont l'un (...) va (...) former la
mer libre du Ple'; a lava flow from a volcano at
the North Pole forms an incandescent river with
branches; so does a domesticated lava flow, diverted
to improve a cave heating system; and the electric
fluid produces '(des) {clairs, (qui) se bifurquent',
'des zigzags coralliformes, (...) des jeux {tonnants
de lumi}re arborescente'.21 The main street of a
village resembles 'un large fleuve, (...) ayant pour
tributaires (...) des torrents sur l'une de ses
rives'; and Paganel suggests, gratuitously but
imaginatively, that a message-in-a-bottle discovered
in a shark's stomach in mid-ocean could have come
down any one of a myriad branching rivers (MS 249;
CG 92-93).
         Many of these arborescences are methods of
finding one's way through labyrinths, of which
examples are legion in Verne's works: the possible
routes across the Andes, through forests or jungles,
amongst ice-fields, or through uterine undergound
domains or underwater ice-labyrinths.22 What
characterises all the routes is their contrast with
the complexity of the surrounding forms. Only
potential paths from A to B are considered; there
are no loops, for the structures do not generally
intersect with themselves. In the simplest cases,
indeed, they amount to little more than a few paths
branching off the main route, which is very
frequently chosen by means of an Ariadne's thread of
some sort.23
         All these structures are situated securely
in the physical world. Their arboreal imagery has
concrete force, as indicated by the vocabulary of
'ramifiant', 'branches', 'embranchements', 'bras',
'bifurcations', 'arborescents'. But the arborescence
is also frequently in evidence in the conceptual
world. Marine biology, for example, is conceived of
as an exhaustive classificatory system with spiders,
squid, or coral divided into 'des embranchements,
des groupes, des classes, des sous-classes, des
ordres, des familles, des genres, des sous-genres,
des esp}ces et des vari{t{s' (20M 179; 560; 174,
177; 277-79; 20). It has the same multiply branching
structure, in other words, as the underwater
organisms it studies! More generally, the many
apparently unstructured lists in Verne's works often
prove, on closer inspection to consist of a
similarly detailed tiered system. Arborescences can
also be seen in the hierarchies of command, in both
dictatorial and democratic systems, with, in each
case, the social order being backed up by precise
tangible forms.24
         Again, in two curious scenes in separate
novels, a conceptual branching structure is
constructed stage by stage by means of an
interrogation of a dying man so weak that he cannot
speak, only answer '"oui ou non du regard"' (B 229,
cf. CH 334). Such an occurrence may be frequent in
the nineteenth-century novel - and indeed in real
life - but Verne gives it a remarkable development.
In both scenes, the questions do start off as
binary, but then give rise to questions with a
numerical answer and thence, via reporting in an
indirect style, to answers expressing the most
abstract of concepts. Two extracts from much longer
passages will show how little in the end the dying
men are hampered by their limited means of
expression: 'Le Porpoise (...) devait avoir r{sist{,
et il serait possible de sauver sa cargaison. (...)
Si lui, Altamont, survivait, c'{tait v{ritablement
par un miracle de la Providence'; 'il s'{tait jet{
@ travers les r{gions du centre, se cachant pour
{viter de retomber aux mains des indig}nes, {puis{
par les chaleurs, mourant de faim et de fatigue
(etc.)' (CH 334-36; B 237). Information, in other
words, is to be found at the end of the 'branches'
of what is remarkably similar to a
transformational-grammar 'tree', with each
successive 'twig' representing a question and a
two-way response. Human communication is represented
as capable of being broken down into simple yes-no
questions, but at the same time as infinitely
reconstructible and synthesisable.25
         The plots themselves of the Voyages,
lastly, sometimes form arborescences of connected
enigmas. In L'Ile myst{rieuse, for example, a series
of five questions centres on the nature of the land
discovered by the balloonists: whether or not it is
an island, an uninhabited island, one that is
nevertheless visited, one that is visited by Whites,
and one that is visited by friendly Whites (see
Figure 8). A total lack of information is
transformed stage by stage, until the island is
completely 'covered'. There are thus two
distinguishing features from the mystery that will
later become characteristic of the detective novel:
the number of distinct enigmas, and the fact that
the solution to one is the basis for the posing of
the next. Here again, a relatively complex structure
coexists with a simple two-value logic system. 
         The arborescence is in sum a
characteristic feature in Verne, from the natural
objects in the works to the plots of the works. Of
course, it could be objected that the idea occurs
frequently in reality - and also in man's
description of reality. It was particularly 'in the
air' in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century science,
both in the various theories of evolution (e.g.
Buffon or Darwin) and more generally: Darwin argued
that all true classification was genealogical
(Jacob, p. 182). But just as in all these cases the
arborescence was only one element in a distinctive
theory, so Verne seems to adapt it to his own ends:
placing it at the centre of his debate on the idea
of travel, and thus emphasising its spatio-temporal
characteristics. Its main function in the Voyages
seems to be to serve as an antidote to the
continuing problem of unfilled space. In marked
contrast with  the lattice, which is endowed with at
least as much complexity, significance is
encpasulated within the structure. The arborescence
has a distinctive tension between unicity and
multiplicity, which enables it to avoid the
uniformity and monotony of the lattice. Being a
connected structure, it represents a certain
coherence; being also a linear-based one, it
contains a certain directionality. 
         In order to further understand the
specificity of the arborescence, it is useful to
examine the advantages and disadvantages of the
various spatial forms. 

The Pleasure and the Pain 

          Underlying all the forms is the attempt
- by both the character and the narrator - to take
'les connaissances AMASSEES par la science' and
transmute them into a new 'HISTOIRE de l'univers' -
 in other words to convert a pile of relatively
incoherent information into a cogent and universal
narrative. The nub of the problem is the disparity
between the extension of space and man's
point-being: his lack of dimensionality, his
apparent insignificance. Vernian man has an excess
of free-will, he tends towards random behaviour.
         What the character is looking for is some
sense of mission that will involve overcoming
physical obstacles. In Les Mots (1964, pp. 107-8),
Sartre brilliantly points out that Michel Strogoff
is the canonical example of the well-determined
geographical quest. The character often fixes on
complicated structures like the 'disposition @ la
fois orographique et hydrographique' (MS 294), in
the hope that they will help reduce the anxiety of
having to choose a path. Maps similarly give the
character aid in coping with space. But neither idea
is sufficiently dense nor sufficiently coherent to
solve the problem; for neither really comes to grips
with the essential questions of time and
significance.
         The two catalysts that help Vernian man to
'temporalise' space are to be found instead in the
Natural world. Nature provides an antidote to the
obsessional fears of emptiness by offering
structures of as much irregularity and complexity as
could be wished. But she simultaneously provides a
certain unity, in the form for instance of 'fluid'
entities endowed with a will of their own, and so
capable of choosing their own paths. Even
Zacharius's clock is endowed with spatio-temporal
autonomy - in the obvious sense of not being totally
subject to chronological time - but above all in the
sense of actually moving round in time and space, as
a clock-devil endowed with legs.
         But this innate tendency to motion is not
limited to particular structures. It subtly
permeates, I would claim, all the physical
arborescences and conceptual hierarchies. More
precisely, despite their varied nature, these forms
all share precise morphological characteristics with
the free-flowing water-courses. 
         The fundamental feature is a main 'trunk'
or linear core: the mountain chain, the main
waterway, railway, or roadway, the Ariadne's thread,
or the conceptual path finally chosen. But because
of the repeated parting of the ways, the structure
is also multipartite. Indeed, the extent to which
the bifurcation continues is remarkable. The Andes
divide and blend into the plain, the waterways split
and broaden out to become the open sea, the rivers
of lava unite with their beds, the coral forms solid
masses, the mazes multiply indefinitely, the
hierarchical classifications englobe the whole of
Nature, the yes/no routines integrate normal
discourse, and the enigmas exhaust the Mystery of
the Island. The process, in short, carries on ad
infinitum, it in the end fills up the available
space, reconstructs the material and conceptual
worlds, whether two-, three- or multi-dimensional.
But it seems to do this only at the cost of
abandoning its constituent form, the line, in favour
of a form which is in most ways its opposite: the
plane. Even in its spatial characteristics, the
arborescence embodies a dimensional paradox.
         The third and most important feature of
the arborescence is its temporality, borrowed from
Nature's flowing entities. The time-element would in
fact seem to be at both the raison d'tre of the
structure and its most elusive feature. It is often
constituted by the time of a journey through the
branching structure, as in all the land and sea
routes. But in other cases, the 'temporalisation' of
the structure is more or less independent of any
real traversing of it, and becomes therefore all the
more diffuse. In the case of the Andes, for
instance, the imposition of a directionality on the
mountain-crests does not imply any sort of travel
along them. It seems to act instead as a metaphor
helping to generate both the overall subject of the
tale (the division of the Spanish Navy into two) and
the main element of the plot, the
multiply-bifurcating path across the Andes. The
dilution often goes much further. Indeed the case of
the plane completely filled by the arborescence is
little different from the completely unfilled plane.
When the extra dimension is added, the temporal
aspect is lost. A linear-based structure with a
finite length can never be a 'space-filling curve'
(as mathematicians call a structure which, by some
recursive feature, completely 'fills in' an area of
space). There is no one-to-one correspondence
possible from the line to the plane.26 Space can
never be covered. Two-dimensional time is an
impossibility. 
         The arborescence is therefore an
optimistic attempt to bridge the dimensional gap by
instituting a maximal activity in time and a minimal
covering of space, a bold effort to reconcile
purposeful movement and considered choice. Its
binary construction does not a priori exclude any
element of the world at all, it holds out the
possibility of covering the whole of space; it
entices man with the idea of a quantised but
potentially infinite freedom. The arborescence may
represent the attempt to impose fictional qualities
on reality: one cannot really cover the whole of
space, but in literature one can imagine doing so.
Verne plays on time and space in what would amount
to a sleight of hand in the everyday world. His
'realism' is submerged by his desire to overcome
man's temporal finiteness.
         The espousal of unadulterated linearity,
on the other hand, was the symmetric, pessimistic,
tactic. Whether or not created for the purpose, the
linear form represents the conclusion that a choice
which cannot be held in abeyance cannot be better
than no choice at all. It represents the belief that
it is preferable to lose one's illusions
immediately, to start as one means to go on, to act
rather than to choose.
         The arborescent and linear forms represent
contrasting attempts at solutions to the problems of
man and infinite space, of the explorer and the
empty world, of the writer and the blank page. They
each represent a reassuring continuity, and thus
respond to the recurrent problem of temporality.
Each draws inspiration from the richness and
temporal autonomy of Nature's structures. What
distinguishes them from the other attempted
solutions is that each steers clear of
claustrophobic concentration and agoraphobic
dissipation, of both man-without-space and
space-without-man. If Nature - and the author - can
be everywhere at once, Vernian man - and the
narrator - are different. They share a capacity to
visit any point on the globe, but an intrinsic
incapacity to actually visit each point of the
globe, or even of any substantive subset of it.
Their freedom must in the end be put to the test.
They cannot have their cake indefinitely without
eating it.
         At this stage, then, there is no perfect
solution to the problem of space and time. The
physical or conceptual journey, however
extraordinary, can never exhaust the known and
unknown worlds, can never 'temporalise' the world in
n easy stages; even the attempt has a certain
derisory quality. The hero is forced to oscillate
between structures, to enjoy freedom to differing
degrees and to rely on both chance and Providence.
Verne's totalising project can apparently never
reach a successful conclusion.


CHAPTER 3


THE SHAPE'S THE THING

Plots and Intrigues

The search for signs of significance in the contents of the
Voyages comes up, we have seen, against the obstacle of the
multidimensionality of the real world. But clearly the
novels do manage to recount journeys more or less
successfully. Starting instead from the finished form,
might it not be possible to seek an understanding of the
spatio-temporal issues? Such formal features as the
footnotes and illustrations may prove illuminating; and
there also exists a method for demonstrating the narrative
and fictional times of novels like Voyage au centre de la
Terre or Le Chancellor. In other words, by graphing the
internal time of the text (the time of the events) against
the 'time' or 'space' of the fiction (as measured by the
amount of text occupied), one can get a very good idea of
the overall plot. (See Appendix A for further details of
this method.) 

        As Genette has pointed out (pp. 225-7), it is a
characteristic of 'modern' fiction to make great play of
undermining the opposition between the narrator, whose role
is by definition within the fiction, and the author, the
real-life person who wrote the fiction. In this respect,
Jules Verne may qualify as a modern, for he often
identifies the two. 
        Thus in summarising 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue',
he writes 'un fruitier heurta POE d'une faon brusque'; his
narrator similarly remarks 'Arthur Pym - autrement dit
Edgar Poe'; and the first-person narrator especially is
sometimes represented in the illustrations as resembling
the author himself.1 Moreover, footnotes or maps are often
marked 'Note de l'auteur', 'J.V.' or 'Jules Verne', and
events are even occasionally reported from his private
life: 'l'auteur a eu le plaisir de (...) visiter (le
Telemark). Il l'a parcouru en kariol'; '1. Au 12 avril
1867, l'auteur se trouvait @ Buffalo, alors que l'Eri{
{tait pris (de glace) sur toute son {tendue. J.V.'.2
Sometimes indeed, the author's own previous works are
referred to: Capitaine Hatteras and Hector Servadac in Sans
dessus dessous (SDD vii 98; xviii 189; cf. PF 302), Les
Cinq cents millions in Robur-le-conqu{rant (RC 10), and
Vingt mille lieues in L'Ile myst{rieuse (IM 801). In this
last instance, we observe the remarkable instance of Smith
quoting the novel about Nemo to an amazed Nemo himself! The
tendency to refer to other works is completed by a striking
'blurb' within C{sar Cascabel (1890) which refers to the
existence of the ongoing series of novels: 'Tel est le
r{cit de ce voyage que l'on peut compter comme l'un des
plus surprenants des Voyages extraordinaires' (CC II xv
410).
         Although such instances are relatively isolated,
they do point to Verne's tendency to extreme naturalism and
one of the paradoxes it provokes. Elements of the real
world are depicted in the Voyages, but the Voyages are
published in the real world. The container and contained
alternate, creating a potentially infinite regress of
reality/fictionality. 
         Probably as a result, the narrator's temporal
stance is normally close to the author's. He employs
authorial omniscience, bringing in real-life events not
accessible to the figures within the fiction. Thus he
points out in L'Ile myst{rieuse that the American Civil War
has ended, which the characters will only learn a decade
and 800 pages later; he describes a real-life explorer as
following in the footsteps of the (fictional) trans-African
explorers; and he often slips in reports of historical,
geographical and scientific events that have happened even
after the end of the novel.3 In extreme cases, indeed, the
dates within the novel and the real dates of publication
get tangled up, in a variant on the fictionality/reality
alternation. Even the most tangible aspects of the Voyages
lead into complicated, self-referential systems.
         The diagrams may perhaps give us further
information about the narratorial-authorial role and the
spatio-temporal structures. It is interesting to examine
six of the works (Figure 1): 

         The main impression created by the first five
graphs is undoubtedly their similarity. Despite the
differences of scale, the two short stories and the three
novels all advance through the plot more or less without
extended anticipations, ellipses or flashbacks. The time of
the narration is very closely modelled on that of the
fiction. Serres's intuition about Le Chancellor, that it is 'un r{cit (...) tr}s unilin{aire' (p. 103), is thus
proved to be true. Verne's works are probably here typical
of the period. Although these diagrams have never been
applied to them, writers such as Balzac, Dickens and France
seem to have generally 'started at the beginning and
carried on to the end', with only relatively brief
deviations.
         What is possibly distinctive to Verne's works is
the very regularity of the graphs. The two short stories
are symmetrical almost by virtue of their simplicity, but
the three novels are also constructed from two very similar
parts. In each half, there is an initial passage where the
narration is slower (the graph is less steep), a passage at
an intermediate speed and a final acceleration. 
        The conditions of publication of the Voyages may be
relevant here: many of the works were published in two
separate volumes. But in addition, the variations in speed
correspond to important discontinuities in the plots. In
Voyage au centre de la Terre, the mid-point corresponds to
the transition from normal existence to the underground
cavern; in Mistress Branican, it divides the heroine's life
into passive and active phases, into waiting at home and
going out and searching for her lost husband; and in Le
Chancellor, it represents the transfer from the ship to the
raft, with the fluctuations corresponding not only to a
destruction of the ship's fabric by fire and by water, but
also to a destruction of the social fabric, by murder and
by cannibalism. Serres has already noted the symmetry
represented by the equilibrium states of the beginning and
end of Le Chancellor (pp. 105-06); and Jean-Pierre Picot
has observed that the social conventions also go from an
initial equilibrium via an anarchical state to a final
equilibrium.4 What has been shown here, then, is that the
equilibrium is not limited to the end-points of the novel,
but governs the novel as a whole, and that it constitutes
part of the structure and not just an aspect of the
internal themes.
         The one exception is 'L'Eternel Adam'. As Figure
1(f) shows, this posthumous tale is set in two equally
represented time-zones, one in the third millennium and the
other roughly 20,000 years later. Not only is it remarkable
then in being the only Voyage set outside the second
millennium, but it is also the only one to give equal
weight to the first and third persons and to the
presentation of two independent protagonists. This duality represents moreover an essential part of the story,
with the 'three-dimensional' perspective it affords being
one of the vehicles by which the tale proposes a cyclical
structure of history (see Chapter 4).
         This tale is thus radically and blatantly different
from the other Voyages: in construction, in conceptions of
time, and in the role of the individual. Even as far as the
form is concerned, Michel Verne asserts his independence
from his father.

In and Out

         The reader of the Voyages extraordinaires certainly
perceives the relentless advance of the plots, but he may
also have an impression of a great deal of activity at the
local level. There are two particular sections where
diversity in temporal structures is especially evident: the
beginnings and the endings. Let us accordingly take four of
the novels and plot the narrative and fictional times of
their opening pages (Figure 2). 
         
        Perhaps because of the bigger scale, there is here
considerably more complexity. But whereas L'Ile myst{rieuse
starts with a passage covering a great deal of fictional
time - a beginning in medias res - the other three works
begin with the initially static time of a descriptive pause
(in each case in the present tense). In all four, there
follow flashbacks, used for the past of each of the main
protagonists, the historical situation, and, in some cases,
the relevant scientific subject. Only then does the action
proper begin, coinciding with the definitive introduction
of the pass{ simple; in every case this is a distinct point
(marked . in the diagrams). Each novel examined therefore
exhibits a careful and appropriate structure. Balzac's
incipits have attracted a great deal of attention, in terms
of tenses and their slow build up to a point de d{part. But
on the evidence we have seen, they do not seem radically
different from Verne's.5
         If we examine the endings of four of the novels
(Figure 3), symmetrical observations can be made. The
action has a clear end-point as well - a dramatic 'Cut!'.
After this point, a variety of forms are visible, with
anticipations now more frequent than flashbacks. One
possible reason for this complexity is that, in some works,
the winding up is in effect done twice: in L'Ile @ h{lice
and Le Chteau des Carpathes, numerous characters drown, are buried alive or go mad (IH II xiv 315-16; ChC 234-36;
239-40), but are then brought back to life or sanity, and,
in many cases, married off. This is undoubtedly a sign of
the tension betweeen the natural tendencies in Verne's
imagination and the more optimistic and ideologically
conformist tendencies required of him by his editor and his
public. The endings are, then, sometimes less coherently
constructed than the openings - an observation that is
supported by a remark in the early play 'Monna Lisa (sic)':
'"Vous tes toujours, vous, l'homme qui s'occupe Du vernis
d'un tableau qui n'est pas commenc{!"' (p. 43). The later
novels seem more fragmented than the earlier ones - thus
confirming the overall tendency of the later works to
lesser 'lisibilit{'. More generally, the endings perform a
similar, but opposite, function to the beginnings. Instead
of serving to unite different threads of the story, they
'wind up' each of them. They close down the fiction - thus
laying the ground for the impatient author to start the
next one.
        
Diversions or 'Divertissements'

         Perhaps most typical of Verne's general style is
his treatment of what Genette calls the paratexte, that is
the novel not forming part of the main text. The titles,
illustrations, and footnotes of the Voyages are vital for
studying the conventions of fiction, for they are all
intermediate between the invented and real worlds. 
        No reader of Verne can help noticing the footnote,
a persistent feature which few other novelists employ.
Typical examples are: (explaining 'mark': '1. 2 francs 75
centimes environ Note de l'auteur.' or (explaining 'acide
azotique fumant': '1. Ainsi nomm{, parce que, au contact de
l'air humide, il r{pand d'{paisses fum{es blanchtres.'
(VCT 68; TL 117). It constitutes a voice that exists in all
parts of the cosmos and in all modes of narration.
Associated with the narratorial point of view, it proceeds
logically from the text, but is marked off typographically,
and is also temporally distinct. Of course, part of the
function of the footnote is to mimic scientific discourse.
But in practice, the present and pass{ compos{ of Verne's
footnotes contrast with the pass{ simple of the text,
unlike the situation in scientific writing; and thus the
main effect becomes instead the literary one of detachment.

        One of the notes in 'L'Eternel Adam' pushes this effect to
the limit. The civilisation of the distant future, it is
remarked, is familiar with planets not known to earlier
stages. The footnote comments: '(...) Il faut conclure
qu'au moment o| ce journal sera {crit, le syst}me solaire
comprendra plus de huit plan}tes et que l'homme en aura par
cons{quent d{couvert une ou plusieurs au-del@ de Neptune'
(EA 233). These unusual tenses can apparently only
represent the future of an authorial voice,6 and thus the
isolation of the note from the temporality of the main
narration is further emphasised. The posthumous example -
which seems to contain elements of pastiche - pinpoints the
essential features of all the Vernian notes: their
non-integration with the temporal flow of the text, their
self-consciousness and their apparent gratuitousness.
         The illustrations have a similarly ambiguous role.
In most respects, they form part of the Voyages
extraordinaires (for copyright purposes, for instance); and
for many readers, they are an inseparable part of the text
- possibly what is most likely to stay in the memory. But
they are not, of course, by Verne. Perhaps because of this
tension, there are a number of problems associated with
them. Many of them may of course be true of illustrated
fiction in general; but certain follow on from such
distinctively Vernian features as the enigma, the
hyper-realistic tendency, and the attempted depiction of
'future' machines.
         The first problem has to do with the position of
the illustrations. Not only are they often placed several
pages away from the corresponding text, but they are
virtually never mentioned in the text.7 One reason, of
course, is that, unlike the maps, the illustrations were
apparently conceived after the texts.8 But where the
illustration precedes the text, there is a danger of losing
the effect of surprise. In general, the loss of suspense is
minimal, for the illustrator plays the narrator's game
loyally, as Franois Raymond has pointed out.9 But the
enigma of the lamp-extinguishing Spirit of the Mine in Les
Indes noires, which is apparently meant to be solved only
at the end (IN 233-34), is in fact undermined by an earlier
illustration showing a bird (IN 95). Similarly, the heroes'
apparently supernaturally fast movements in Mathias
Sandorf, Face au drapeau, Robur-le-conqu{rant or Matre du
monde - movements carefully built up over several chapters
- are no longer mysteries if the reader notices the
submarines or aircraft in the title-page illustrations. It is as if suspense and mystery were for
Verne not matters of concealment of information, but of
ostensible concealment - Roland Barthes's 'jupe qui baille'
outclassing total nudity.
         A second problem concerns the depiction of elliptic
or possibly unreliable text. Sometimes the first-person
narrator is unconscious or otherwise prevented from
recounting his tale - in which case the very incompleteness
of captions like 'Etendu sur un divan' (20M 530, cf. VCT
260) serves only to emphasise his incapacity and to create
doubts in the reader's mind. In other cases, objective
reality is completely replaced in the text by the
imaginings of a character in an ecstatic state. Even so,
they are usually fully translated into pictorial form,
including, for instance, Ardan's ideas of free-flight in
space, playing pygmy to the inhabitants of the sun, or
observing the cattle capable of ploughing the giant furrows
on the moon's surface, Hatteras's dog-captain or a
Carpathian teacher's dragons and fairies (AL 106; 130; 179;
CH 73; ChC 27). Even dream passages with several periods of
time concertinaed together are faithfully transcribed in a
medley of juxtaposed images, as in a mother's idea of a day
in her son's life or Axel's vision of different stages of
prehistoric animal life (500 86; VCT 260). The search for
extreme realism thus often culminates in a complete
reversal: the irruption of the fantastic.
         The last two examples typify the general problem of
condensing an extended segment of text into a single
illustration. As Lessing pointed out,10 one of the ways in
which the pictorial form differs intrinsically from the
written one is that it is normally apprehended either in
its full two-dimensionality, without any predetermined
sequence of perception, or else in its gestalt. This
problem again seems to find particular solutions in the
Voyages. Sometimes, the discrepancy between text and
picture is avoided because one particular moment serves to
represent a static or repetitive scene ('Il risqua vingt
fois sa vie' (20M 437)). But when there is movement, this
solution tends to produce the unfortunate result of
immobility, suspending in mid-air such diverse objects as
horses, men, waves, sand and rocks, stopping the propellers
of the Albatros, or causing the moon projectile to burst
out of an observatory instead of crashing into it!11
Accordingly, what many characters are described as
observing in practice is often shown instead, namely
'traits continus, (...) un r{seau de lignes mouvantes ', 'raies {clatantes, (...) sillons de
feu trac{s par la vitesse' (VCT 337; 20M 361; cf. VCT 254,
20M 578, DO 103, IM 856).
         Two theories of instantaneity are in competition
here. On the one hand, a physics-based theory assumed that
time was infinitely divisible, and that the best way to
depict motion was not to depict it at all - despite the
fact that, given the rudimentary state of photography, it
was difficult to observe a 'stopped moving object', and
that the mathematics of the continuum were not fully
developed until 1875.12 On the other, the common-sense of
actual observation treated 'the present' as having a
certain psychological thickness, as containing blurred
movement. 
        But neither of Verne's solutions can totally hide
the intrinsically synchronic nature of the pictorial form
and its consequent dissonance from the text. As if to
compensate, his illustrations often employ a mise-en-abyme,
by emphasising, for instance, their own pictorial nature,
showing written forms, or photographers and painters at
work, or pictures-within-pictures (CG 461, VCT 142, etc.;
IM 563, 592, etc.; RV 101). Thus, as Nemo dies, the naked
female figure above him progressively lowers her head (IM
797, 809, 813, 820). Once again, Verne seems to solve the
problem by subdividing it into other problems.
         A last dissonance of the illustrations is their
greater explicitness, which means that they are more tied
to their epoch than the text is. Even without anachronisms
like a steamboat in pre-Reformation Geneva (frontispiece to
Le Docteur Ox), the illustrations, particularly those
showing 'futuristic' clothes or machines, tend to have a
sort of period charm for the modern reader: they remain
largely fixed in the era in which they were created,
whereas the text evolves and accumulates new meanings. More
generally, the illustrations are necessarily in a fixed
time and space, whereas the text is not, constituting yet
another dissonance.
         The notes and illustrations contrast then with the
rest of the text. The main text consists, formally, of a
single, advancing form; whereas the notes and illustrations
can adopt a more ludic attitude to time and space. For
Verne, opposing aspects of time and freedom are often
meshed together.
        

Putting it All Back Together Again
        
        As in most nineteenth-century 'impersonal' fiction,
an authorial figure occasionally openly intervenes in the
Voyages. But most of the time, the origin of the narration
is shrouded in mystery - even the minimal intervention of
a non-chronological order on events is absent.
         There are, however, three important exceptions. The
first one is so blatant as to seem deliberate (and it seems
surprising therefore that it has not provoked more critical
commentary). 'L'Eternel Adam''s double focalisation, its
narrative-within-a-narrative, necessarily draws attention
to both its own narration/authorship and its date of
writing. It is as if, having made the decision to write 'in
Jules Verne's manner', Michel is then tempted to
demonstrate the difference in as many ways as possible.
         The second exception is the openings and endings,
whose relative complexity is undoubtedly the sign of the
multiple, and symmetrical, connections necessary for
entering and leaving the fictional universe. The final one
is the footnotes and illustrations. Both escape the
one-dimensional structure of the main text to constitute a
sort of antechamber between the fictional and the real
worlds. Unlike the text, they are not directed towards some
external goal, such as making a pedagogical point or
setting up a clou - they are defined instead by their
temporal qualities of divertissement or diversion. The
paradoxical effect of Verne's tendency to hyper-naturalism
is to escape from some of the constraints of traditional
narration.
         The constituent parts of the Voyages
extraordinaires thus have varied temporal natures. Their
interrelations may nevertheless be explored by plotting
them all in a single, idealised graph, where the individual
features are slightly exaggerated. The beginning and ending
may be shown as branching structures; the notes and
illustrations, proceeding from the text but without further
interaction with it, may be depicted as bifurcations
leaving the structure; and the linearity of the main body
and its points of symmetry may be indicated as such (Figure
4).

        What we have established, then, is an overall
structure which summarises the formal temporality of
virtually every work in the series of the Voyages
extraordinaires. 
       But the reductionism of this diagram is clearly only
part of the story. Verne's imagination often exhibits
concrete and anti-theoretical tendencies. His strength may
be simultaneously in the temporal and spatial structures of
his novels, and in the manner in which he 'fills in' the
story, the way he accumulates temporal details until they
finish up by creating a universe. We are as likely to
remember the temporal foibles of a Zacharius, a Nemo or a
Robur as the time-scales in which they move. Verne's time
is as much a human and subjective one as it is a scientific
or objective one. The structures exist in the context of
much wider concerns.




CHAPTER 4


THE PAST IS A PLACE


Past Masters
         
In a remarkable number of cases in Verne's works,
time is considered in a topos which neatly counters
the form-contents opposition: in the opposite order
from that of its normal flow. Typical examples
include: the time-scale of the past relived, where
characters see their whole lives flashing by; the
one implied by the 'running out' of time, as in
traditional expressions like 'days being counted' or
'having only a few hours to live'; or the one
constituted by the countdown (which Verne may have
invented), as in the launching of the projectile in
Sans Dessus Dessous.1 
         In certain cases, the time-scale is linked
to a material object that is theoretically
measurable: the finite space of the unexplored
globe, or its more concise embodiment in the form of
a virgin river; declining numbers of natural
objects, such as whales, elephants, furs, or coal
deposits; or reducing amounts of commodities vital
for the hero's existence, such as air for balloons,
oxygen for breathing, fuel, or above all food.2 In
other cases, it is the time of the text itself which
is affected, as in the cryptogrammes that are solved
when it realised that they are simply written
backwards: '(...) terptsetuot' or (in dog-Latin)
'(...) tabiledmekmeretarcsilucoYsleffenSni' (MS 80;
VCT 25).
          If the exact nature of many of these
time-scales is difficult to identify, they do have
important shared characteristics: they are all in
some sense retrogressive and they are all defined
with relation to their culminating point. They not
only resemble therefore the first methods of
measuring time, such as candles, sandglasses and
waterclocks, but also contribute to the suspense of
the story and to fuelling the anxiety syndrome
manifest in many of the characters.
          The logical deductions in Verne's works
are based on a similar psychological and temporal
regression. Amongst the more curious instances one
can observe, slightly at random: the inference of
each stage of a ship's past from a pile of bones,
fragments of paper, an empty bottle, or a piece of
flotsam; the deduction of the inter-oceanic route of
a piece of floating mahogany merely from its
position in space; and the reading of five years in
the life of a group of men from a rusty knife and a
few other remnants.3 In each case, the paucity of
the evidence is matched only by the copiousness of
the conclusions. Verne's imagination often overtakes
his naturalistic caution.
          Amongst the characters using the
deductive method are many of the scientists, more or
less imitating Cuvier's famous reconstructions of
whole prehistoric animals from scraps of bone or
cartilage (VCT 259); but also various professional
detectives - a novelty in the nineteenth century,
and probably due to the influence of Poe.4 At least
eight different works in fact present positivistic
detectives using material signs to re-create a whole
series of events (TM, J, CF, FSN, FN, DL, PD, DJM).
          Un Drame en Livonie is representative of
this exploration of the past, with its murder behind
a locked door, the disappearance of the victim's
numbered banknotes, and the discovery of clues
including blood-stained ashes in the grate. After
various false trails, the blame eventually falls on
Prof. Dimitri Nicolef, for he had a plausible
motive, was in the inn at the time of the murder and
is caught with the banknotes in his possession. And
representative of the confidence of all the
investigators is the explanation of how it was
inferred, Sherlock Holmes-like, that a carriage was
used and that '" the lead horse is missing a nail in
its front right shoe"': '"Rien n'est plus simple.
(...) On avait (...) besoin d'un v{hicule (...).
J'ai donc cherch{ ce v{hicule et je l'ai trouv{
(...). Il a plu la nuit derni}re et (...) la terre
(...) a gard{ fid}lement les empreintes"' (PD ix
146-47).
          Both the miraculous geographical
deductions and the detectives' step-by-step
inferences thus take place in a drastically
simplified, almost closed, system. Not only are
uncertainty and ambiguity virtually absent from the
investigations but each event is above all
considered as caused by exactly one other event. The
essential feature is the presentation of a linear
chain of actions going back through time. But
because the sequence is linear, the events can then
neatly be summed up in the forward direction. The
floating mahogany's route is typical of the
perfection of the finished product:
         
'Il a {t{ charri{ vers l'oc{an Pacifique par quelque
rivi}re de l'isthme de Panama ou de Guatemala; de
l@, le courant l'a tran{ le long des ctes
d'Am{rique jusqu'au d{troit de Behring, (...) (par)
les mers polaires (...), (par) cette longue suite de
d{troits qui aboutit @ la mer de Baffin (...); il
est venu par le d{troit de Davis se faire prendre @
bord du Forward pour la plus grande joie du docteur
Clawbonny' (CH 53). 

         Because post hoc reasoning is used, with
all causes sufficient, all effects necessary, and
all mysteries explained, these instances avoid
arborescences of causality. A world is created with
no loss of information, no multiple causes and no
chance variations. Justice is a machine with
'engrenages' (PD xiv 226), where events may be
traversed indifferently from either end - it is a
world free of the vagaries of time, but without its
variety either. Verne's didactic intentions are
undoubtedly visible here, reinforced by the general
determinism of the era.
         An extension of post hoc linear reasoning
consists of analysing situations only after the
event. This important Vernian tendency consists of
explaining them, in other words, as if they had to
be so and, above all, as if they had always had to
be so. Archetypal in this respect is the complacent
philosophy of five of the characters: Michel Ardan
- '"Rien d'inutile n'existe en ce monde"' - Ben-Zouf
- '"C'est comme a, parce que c'est comme a! Si le
P}re Eternel l'a voulu, mon capitaine, faudra s'en
arranger tout de mme!"' - Palmyrin Rosette - '"Va
bene! All right! Parfait!!!"' - Am{d{e Florence -
'Quoiqu'il arrivt, il s'en applaudissait' - and
Z{phyrin Xirdal - '"Comme tout sert dans la vie!"'.5

         This facile sort of 'just-so' reasoning is
above all visible in the comments made on
'Providence'. The term is very often used as a
shortcut way of accepting events on (present)
face-value, and ignoring the possible events of the
past that may have led up to them.  
         A similar tendency exists for Nature's
works: '"La nature est logique en tout ce qu'elle
fait"', '"(elle) ne fait rien @ contresens"',
'"ayant le temps, (elle) {conomise l'effort"' (CH
331; 20M 40; IM 160). Each Natural object, and each
species and race, is presented as perfectly adapted
to its environment:
          
'C'est (l')instinct (des moustiques), cousine
Weldon', lui r{pondait-il en se grattant jusqu'au
sang, 'c'est leur instinct, et il ne faut pas leur
en vouloir!' (C15 463); 'les Arabes (...) ont reu
de la nature un merveilleux instinct pour
reconnatre leur route (dans le d{sert)' (5S 315);
combien la nature s'est montr{e sage en (...) ayant
donn{ (aux natifs du Kamtchatka) aussi peu que
possible de nez dans un pays o| les d{bris de
poissons, laiss{s en plein air, affectent si
d{sagr{ablement le nerf olfactif! (JMC ix 97). 

All efforts to change the world are therefore
useless:
            
'Nous sommes bien o| nous sommes, et (...) il est
inutile de courir ailleurs' (CH 592); '(tout
n'est-il pas pour le mieux,) puisque nous voil@ tous
les trois en bonne sant{? Par cons{quent, dans tout
cela, nous n'avons rien @ nous reprocher' (5S 306);
'il n'y a qu'@ suivre les {v{nements et on se tire
d'affaire! Le plus sr, voyez-vous, c'est (...)
d'accepter les choses comme elles se pr{sentent' (5S
309). (En un mot,) 'il faut (...) consid{rer ce qui
doit arriver comme arriv{ d{j@' (5S 20). 

         The main bodies of the works may well
present didactic and deterministic conceptions of
time but the d{nouements work in the opposite
direction. Thus, at the end of Un Drame en Livonie
it is revealed that the blood-stained ashes had been
thrown down the chimney (!) and that the real
culprit is the innkeeper. The logic of the hoofmarks
is correct as far as it goes, but its subsequent
identification of the culprit is erroneous, being
based on an unfortunate homonymy (PD v 153)... . In
virtually all the novels, the 'logical' conclusions,
established by the seemingly most rigorous methods,
prove in the end to be wrong or else irrelevant.
         L'Ile myst{rieuse, especially, consists of
a series of fortunate incidents which are apparently
due to mere chance or Providence, but which become
of increasing improbability, and eventually
culminate in the washing up of a trunk containing
objects that cater for the settlers' every need.
Just as in this case a hidden secular agency has
been at work since the beginning (Nemo), so
elsewhere things are not so simple as they might
seem: balloons are subject to both divine will and
the prevailing winds, but phrases also appear like
'le hasard, ce 'nom de guerre' ( ...) que prend
quelquefois la Providence', '"un hasard
providentiel"' or '"ultra -providentiel"', or
'Aide-toi, le ciel t'aidera'.7 Thus, although the
simplistic explanation in terms of Providence is not
entirely done away with, it is at the same time
treated with a certain irony, and very rarely
accepted as a total explanation for events. In many
of these cases indeed, Verne may be pastiching his
contemporaries or predecessors, Defoe first and
foremost. He is possibly objecting to the
manipulation of situations in defiance of
plausibility (and often scientific truths), and
implying that a novel which relies too much on
coincidence is a poor novel. 
         In fact, both the general and the specific
fatalistic arguments are usually placed in the
characters' mouths, are followed by exclamation
marks and are expressed in emphatic fashion. There
would seem to be reasonable grounds, therefore, for
detecting an expressly ironical intention.
Sometimes, indeed, the characters themselves provide
a bitingly explicit and sceptical commentary:
            
'Quant aux (...) mots (...) 'Va bene! - All right!
- Parfait!!!' ils ne signifient rien ...' ] 'Si ce
n'est (...) que l'auteur (...) trouve que tout est
pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes
impossibles' (HS 160); '(tout) cela me rappelle
l'histoire de ce grand admirateur de la Providence,
qui la louait du soin qu'elle avait eu de faire
passer les fleuves au milieu des grandes villes!'
(5S 316).

         The four reductionist tendencies often
converge therefore on a single issue - and the
reader who remained at this stage of analysis would
have totally missed the point. Verne is at least
partly tongue-in-cheek. In their various ways,
reasoning by post hoc or just-so methods or in terms
of Providence or Nature all rely too much on the
idea of necessity, and do not leave enough room for
chance or other unpredictable factors. By declaring
the present to be the best of all possible worlds -
or even the only possible world - they assimilate
the future to the past, they attribute too much
importance to teleology and they above all ignore
time as a medium in which major changes could be
possible. One can surmise that this tension between
determinism and free-will may be part of a
self-reflecting debate in the Voyages on the nature
of fiction - on the author's quasi-Providential
manipulations limiting the freedom of his
characters.8 The undeniable attractions of such
total determinism do not, however, compensate for
the absurdity it produces when confronted with the
unforeseen. In all four areas, inflexible behaviour
- like that of music-boxes which have to be broken
before they will stop (MZ 117) - is ultimately
judged inappropriate and ridiculous. Systematically
compressing the loose time and space of the real
world into a fictional straitjacket is contrary to
Verne's imagination.
          Knowledge of past time proves in the end
to be incomplete, the machinery of justice eminently
fallible and all the retrogressive chains of
deduction infinitely less uniform than had appeared.
         Verne is undoubtedly using ideas derived
from Voltaire's Pangloss to make fun of the
simplistic explanations of some of his
contemporaries. More specifically, he seems to be
questioning scientific theories that ignore the
hypothetico-deductive method, that enounce an
internally coherent explanation, but without taking
into consideration under what conditions it could be
refuted. Even more specifically, he may easily be
arguing against Lamarckian theory, with its
supposition of a link between correlation and
causation (as in the case of the Eskimos' noses) and
its consequent introduction of the idea of
intentionality into the Natural world. Verne is
proposing instead a relatively modern
counter-theory, whose axioms are simpler, being
without teleology or transcendence; but whose
specific explanations are more complicated, as they
must always take in consideration what could have
been as well as what is - where, in a word,
contingence is involved. Verne is thus close here to
one of the central arguments used by Darwin in On
the Origin of Species (1859, translated into French
in 1873), namely that animal species could easily
have been different from what they actually are.9 
          The Voyages seem to have set a trap for
the unwary. Appearances are rarely to be trusted;
the legal model of the world can only hope to
codify, not discover the truth. Time, above all,
must not be neglected. The events of the past cannot
be traversed and re-traversed without time taking
its revenge. Linearity is far from the whole truth.
Behind Verne's deadpan narration lurks an attack on
the positivistic assumptions of many of his
contemporaries - and of his readers in the twentieth
century.

Man and Less-than-Man

          One of the problems with the scientists'
and detectives' deductions was that they were
physically static. For Verne, this makes for bad
science and for bad fiction: space simply cannot be
ignored. A more appropriate structure might be one
where aspects of the historical or scientific past
could be presented in a suitable spatial form. More
precisely, if the world contained some sort of
representation of bygone events, many of the
problems of interest and significance would be
solved.
          Racial differences apparently satisfy
this condition for Verne, since, throughout the
Voyages, the different groups are presented as
varying in their degrees of modernity. Because they
seem to embody stages of the past, the way might be
open for exploring a significant ailleurs.
         Thus within the European group, certain
races are argued to possess cultural and spiritual
values inherited from the past - especially the
'Celts', a term that is sometimes used to include
the French or Qu{becois. The temporal aspect is
emphasised by conventional remarks describing the
customs of Quebec, for example, as identical to
'celles du XVIIe si}cle ( ...), '(d')une France du
vieux temps'' (FSN I iv 81). In a similar way, the
North American Indians are presented as sympathetic
but archaic. In contrast, the Germans, English and
Americans - collectively 'la race saxonne' (500 55)
- are described as dominant in technological and
geopolitical spheres and destined to triumph
increasingly in the future.10 At a cursory glance,
Verne's views would seem to be variously and
indiscriminately gleaned here from Gobineau,
Rousseau, Saint-Simon or others.
          But in the remaining cases, the logic
works the other way round and behaviour considered
typical of the past produces a forceful denigration.
The Jews, for instance, are subject to vituperation,
with one of them described as: 'Trafiquant de tout
et partout, il descendait en ligne droite de ce
Judas qui livra son matre pour trente deniers (...)
(etc.)' (MP iii 242; cf. MP passim, HS passim, ChC
passim). There is thus an incontrovertible streak of
anti-Semitism in Verne's works, which cannot be
explained away, as various commentators have
attempted to do, by appealing to events of Verne's
life. 
         The Spanish are also attacked, especially
in 'Un Drame au Mexique' (1851), 'Martin Paz'
(1852), Un Capitaine de quinze ans and Hector
Servadac, possibly on the basis of an underlying
comparison with the Blacks, for Spaniards in these
two novels are called 'Negoro' and 'Negrete' (C15
246; HS 198). The various Black races themselves,
above all, are the object of a special attention.
          On a first level, a patronising
benevolence is visible, as in comments like: '(...)
Ses traits CORRECTS le rapprochaient plus du blanc
que du n}gre' (MS 4). Especially revealing in this
respect are the opening chapters of L'Ile
myst{rieuse, which contain a number of generous
remarks, but at the same time reveal a strange
reversal of roles between Nab the Negro and Top the
Dog. Thus Nab swims in dog-like fashion and, to dry
himself, shakes himself vigorously (IM 33). Unable
to find Smith, he refuses to eat: '(Il) ne voulait
plus vivre', 'comme le chien qui ne peut quitter la
place o| est tomb{ son matre' (IM 56; 64). Whereas
Nab is often mute, Top manages to convey a message
and reply to questions, and saves Smith, washed up
on a beach, where Nab could not (IM 88; 85; 85; 90).
The double comparison is finally made explicit in
the phrase '(...) le d{vouement de Nab ( ...),
l'intelligence (de) Top' (IM 95) - and is reinforced
in a later novel with a comment describing a Black
servant as 'fais(ant) office de chien' (ER 200). In
the second part of L'Ile myst{rieuse as well, Nab is
compared to another creature with a monosyllabic
name, Jup the Orang-Utan - Jup is called, to give
only one example, Nab's 'superior' (IM 415). In sum,
even if many comments are meant to be spoken in
jest, and even if many are accompanied by liberal or
progressive sentiments, there is still an undeniable
tendency to assimilate Blacks to the animal kingdom
- and not even its highest echelons.
          This blatant racism is of course typical
of the period, and of the genre from Defoe onwards.
But at this first stage, it is not clear what the
temporal implications are: the Blacks, in Verne's
view, could represent a precise stage in the past
evolution of European man; or they could correspond
in a loose manner to some past stage; or else they
could be unlinked with the past of European man. The
search for an operative space-time relationship is
clearly not yet over.
          On a second level, the biological aspect
is made more explicit. One obsessional passage, for
instance, lists various possibilities of
'miscegenation' between Spanish, Indians and Blacks,
with names for each combination down to the fourth
generation; and it then assimilates certain human
beings to animals by evoking the offspring 'n{(s)
d'un coyote et d'une multresse (ou) (...) d'un
coyote et d'un Indienne' (DM iv 445). It is amazing
that this passage escaped censorship, from the
public censor but especially from Hetzel when it was
published in the Voyages extraordinaires - even
without a reference to White women in the same
context of union between animals and humans, which
appeared only in the first edition ('Les Premiers
navires de la Marine mexicaine' (1851), p. 70).
         Similarly, in many works, the idea of men
with tails or simian in other respects is evoked;
and in general, the various groups of natives are
often characterised as being as close to animals as
to men.check8 Australian Aborigines and Hottentots,
for instance, are described as having a facial angle
and an intelligence very close to that of
orang-utans (IM 382), and Mac Kackmale (sic) is
caricatured in terms of 'ses bras d{mesur{s, (...)
ses gestes d'anthropopith}que, le prognathisme
extraordinaire de sa mchoire' (GB iii 308). What
would seem to be in fact Verne's general position
appears in a passage in Capitaine Grant, again on
the Australian Aborigines: '(Ce n'est) pas sans
raison que M. de Rienzi proposa de classer ces
malheureux dans une race @ part qu'il nommait les
'pith{comorphes', c'est-@-dire hommes @ formes de
singes'; 'on ne pouvait nier (...) que cette race
toucht de pr}s @ l'animal' (CG 508; 510).      
         A third level - which does not entirely
confirm the tendency of the other two - consists of
the exploration of the transitional area between
human beings and animals, and occurs principally in
Le Village a{rien. This novel, published in 1901,
presents a missing-link tribe discovered in the
heart of Africa, governed by a mad European
anthropologist, and superior to the animals but less
developed than homo sapiens. The extension of the
racial hierarchy into the animal kingdom is
reinforced by a hierarchy of age, as in comments on
Blacks like: 'Puisque les deux (hommes blancs)
avaient adopt{ le JEUNE indig}ne, il {tait bien
permis @ celui-ci d'adopter un PETIT singe' (VA xi
118-19). In other words, the non-White races are
being compared to children - another prevalent
comparison in the nineteenth century, one which
imposed a temporal order on the races, and thus a
potential path for explorers. But the supposed
childishness of non-Whites still poses a fundamental
problem: are they juvenile because they are younger
- of recent development - or because they are older
- that is, they developed first?
          The question is not directly answered,
but there are instead many remarks tending to
diminish the distance between White and Black, as if
to 'make room' for the third group below them both.
Thus not only are the two heroes '"n{grifi{s"' and
'"africanis{s"' by the sun, but their Black
companion has 'le teint presque clair, la chevelure
blonde et non la laine cr{pue (...), le nez aquilin
et non {cras{, les l}vres fines et non lippues' (VA
i 8; v 60; i 12).
          When the inhabitants of the Treetop
Village are discovered - characteristically the
first to be seen is a baby - it does prove very
difficult to classify them. There are many
indications tending to set the Wagddis apart from
the animals, icluding their facial angle, shape of
nose and forehead, body hair, clothing, family
structure, smiles and tears, language, and
religion.9 On the other hand, this language is
described as being extremely primitive, as offering
'des parall{lismes frappants avec le babil enfantin'
(VA xiv 161); and their objects of worship are
similarly derisory, consisting as they do of the mad
Dr Johausen and his flat barrel-organ with its
missing notes. The narrator in fact explicitly
concludes that the creatures do not demonstrate a
clear moral or religious sense, a sine qua non of
the human condition (VA xiv 157). The Wagddis, then,
seem to be presented as being, like Java Man (VA
xiii 146), neither totally in the animal nor totally
in the human camp.10
          There are thus three levels of
association between human or humanoid beings and
animals; plus in fact a certain number of cases of
degeneration - Johausen himself or Ayrton castaway
on his desert island (VA xvii 193; IM 503). But real
evolutionary ideas are very seldom quoted with
approval. The Village a{rien is not a 'village
Aryan'. Conceptions of the origin of animal and
human species tend instead to be Biblical (20M 15,
VCT 261, etc.), and to involve the acquisition and
inheritance of at most superficial characteristics
(C15 398, B 319, etc.), in line with
pre-evolutionary ideas. Darwin's theory of evolution
is indeed explicitly rejected;11 as is Vogt's,
according to which 'l'orang(-outang) (...) serait
(...) l'anctre des N{gritos ; le chimpanz{, (...)
(celui) des n}gres; (...) (le) gorille, (...) (celui
de) l'homme blanc' (VA xiv 156) (although, of
course, the mere fact of mentioning it gives its
racist aspects some credence). Even when species are
shown as mutable, as in the fantaisie 'La Famille
Raton' (1891), where human beings become rats or
oysters following the 'laws of metempsychosis' (FR
2), the movement up and down the animal scale is not
continuous but follows discrete '{chelons' (FR 2).
Only in Voyage au centre de la Terre is the
possibility of human evolution alluded to, when it
is stated that the Giant Shepherd may be 'un PROTEE
de ces contr{es souterraines, un NOUVEAU FILS DE
NEPTUNE' (VCT 318). But this remarkable idea of a
parallel evolutionary branch - with all its
consequences of anti-Creationism and all its
science-fiction possibilities - was never to be
followed up. However one looks at them, then, Jules
Verne's works do not contain a coherent scientific
theory, but a set of heteroclite ideas designed to
fit the needs of the story rather than biological
science. In terms of the continuing search for a
spatio-temporal structure, the racial variations
certainly provide material for an exploration of the
past, but perhaps for religious reasons, cannot
provide a totally coherent context.

          'L'Eternel Adam' (1910), with its multi-
millennial plot and its presentation of different
stages of human, animal and vegetable life, provides
a very different perspective on the same problem. It
amplifies the evolutionary hints of the non-
posthumous works, but to such an extent as to, so to
speak, distort the signal. After a catastrophe
destroying virtually all land-based life, plants and
animals are described as re-emerging in a remarkable
scene of Lamarckian instant evolution, '(une)
transformation sur le vif': 'On voit d'anciens
animaux (...) marins (...) en train de devenir
terrestres. L'air est sillonn{ de poissons volants,
beaucoup plus oiseaux que poissons, leurs ailes
ayant d{mesur{ment grandi (...)' (EA 256; 256). 
         Michel's description builds on his
father's predilections for flying fish and dramatic
oddities of all sorts, but to produce a most un-
Julesian and implausible but poetic scene. As far as
man himself is concerned, however, the tale seems to
hesitate - as if Michel was not quite sure what his
father's views were, or how far he could go without
revealing his own role. Thus on one hand the
anonymous narrator comments 'We are no longer men'
(EA 259), and predicts: 'Il y aura d'autres adultes
et d'autres enfants, (...) toujours plus proches de
l'animal, toujours plus loin de leurs aeux
pensants' (EA 259). Similarly, twenty thousand years
afterwards, the deeper the archeological excavations
go, the smaller the human craniums discovered
become, indicating diminished mental capacity and
human qualities (EA 223), in line with the
contemporary view that the size of the brain was
all-important. On the other hand, the craniums of
the deepest strata are as big as craniums ever have
been (EA 223); and man does always seem to retain
certain characteristics, a vestige of language
especially: the names Hedom and Hiva, for instance,
go back to the anonymous narrator's civilisation and
even, as the title of the work clearly implies, to
the very origins of humanity (EA 226, 261-62). This
is perhaps why, despite his pessimistic prediction,
the anonymous narrator talks of future men (EA 259),
and why the Zartog insists on the 'abme
infranchissable' 'entre l'homme et les animaux' (EA
221; 221), concluding that the people are right to
consider themselves as having had exclusively human
ancestors (EA 262).12
          Michel's representations of evolution
would thus seem to have two facets. On the one hand,
in line with a general posthumous exaggeration of
the themes of all the Voyages extraordinaires, the
'densification' of animal evolutionary tendencies
may similarly represent Michel's privileged, but not
infallible, extrapolation of what he believed to be
his father's views on this subject. But at the same
time, 'L'Eternel Adam' attempts to remain close to
the limits of plausibility defined by the previous
works - hence undoubtedly the continuing
evolutionary immunity of the White man.
          If a certain number of Noble Savages
exist within the non-posthumous Voyages, most of the
non-White races seem instead to be somewhere between
representing a different group within humanity and
constituting a different species. There are
therefore more than sufficient grounds for accusing
Verne's works of a position that is insulting
towards the non-White races.16 But Verne's works do
not seem to conform to any single biological theory,
being rather a re-working of De Maillet, Mauperthuis
and others. Darwinian natural selection is notably
absent; and if the early works do exhibit an
adherence to Cuvier's creationism, based on Genesis,
the representation of a human missing link in Le
Village a{rien goes against Cuvier's theory. To
complicate matters further, the Lamarckian elements
of 'L'Eternel Adam' seem to be unrepresentative of
the Voyages as a whole. In the end, there remain
apparently only two constant factors: the White race
as an isolated and immovable phenomenon (even if
individuals are not immune to deleterious
influences); and 'the scale of animal life' (VCT
169) as defined by its intrinsic inferiority to this
'summit' of the scale of being (VCT 169).
          The views on evolution seem to form
instead part of the Vernian search for an
'elsewhere', an exoticism which will show up the
banality of nineteenth-century France, and which
will contribute to the 'recherche de l'absolu'. One
vital effect is that the variation of human species
enables the space of the globe to be covered with a
significance-bearing pattern. What is more, the
pattern is to a certain extent based in time, and is
thus an improvement on the detectives' and
scientists' narrowly spatial tramping-ground. But
the temporality remains ambiguous - its
'beginnings', especially, are still shrouded in
mist. 

Discovering the Past

          The inanimate vestiges discovered
throughout Les Mondes connus et inconnus are, on the
other hand, most definitely situated in time. They
thus help to give a strong sense of purpose - and
mystery - to the explorations.        Sometimes the
vestiges are purely imaginary: Hatteras is presented
with visions of icebergs which resemble '"la
chapelle d'Henri VII ou le palais du Parlement"';
the trans-African balloonists imagine 'd'immenses
animaux ant{diluviens p{trifi{s'; Axel and
Lidenbrock observe underground formations
reproducing 'les contre-nefs d'une cath{drale
gothique', 'les cintres surbaiss{s du style roman',
'(ou les) ouvrages des castors'; and Clawbonny,
finally, perceives a vast Romantic 'cimeti}re sans
arbres, triste, silencieux, infini, dans lequel
vingt g{n{rations du monde entier se fussent
couch{es @ l'aise pour le sommeil {ternel'.15(no note 14)
But in other cases, it is a real and detailed past
that is visible. Under the sea, for example, Aronnax
observes '(des) squelettes d'animaux des temps
fabuleux, (...) (des) arbres (...) min{ralis{s' (20M
423). The polar regions, especially, conserve
multiple vestiges of the past, including such
various organic items as food supplies, human
bodies, a rhinoceros, or a Siberian elephant, but
preserve even the landscape itself: the Antarctic
landmass 'est rest{e ce qu'{tait notre sph{rode
pendant la p{riode glaciaire'.16
          Whether mineralised or frozen, real or
imaginary, close or distant, the past is thus a
vital store of vivid images for Verne. Remoteness
from the present is in fact generally related to
distance from Europe - time is linked with space.
And since the space of the globe often in turn
determines the journey, Verne's characters and
narrators thereby have the potential basis for
structuring existence, for linking past time to the
time of the narration. The adventures have a
possible raison d'tre. With any luck, history will
be the story.
          But these links are at best episodic, and
cannot in practice sustain the narration for more
than one or two scenes. The project of using the
past for the story can only work if space contains
significant and sustained structures. It might
therefore seem that the use of the dimensions of
space as intermediary was redundant after all. Would
it not be easier, in other words, for the two
one-dimensional temporal scales to be directly
associated, for past time to govern present time,
for natural history simply to be recounted?
          This solution has a certain elegance, and
is in fact frequently adopted for the mise en sc}ne
of the geological past. In such cases, it is
naturally enough the temporal aspects of the globe's
history that are at the centre of the presentation,
although in two markedly different ways:
                    
Peut-tre (...) l'astre du jour n'{tait-il pas PRET
@ jouer son rle (...). Les 'climats' n'existaient
pas ENCORE (VCT 173); les eaux (...) se
pr{cipitaient en arrachant aux roches (...) de quoi
composer les schistes, les gr}s, les calcaires (IN
21); 'pas de trace de v{g{tation. L'acide
carbonique, vomi par le crat}re, n'AVAIT ENCORE EU
LE TEMPS (...) pour former, sous l'action de la
lumi}re, LES mati}res organis{es' (CH 599);
c'{taient partout d'{normes massifs d'arbres, sans
fleurs, sans fruits, d'un aspect monotone, qui
n'auraient pu suffire @ la nourriture d'aucun tre
vivant. La terre n'{tait pas PRETE ENCORE pour
l'apparition du r}gne animal (IN 19); la terre
INCOMPLETE ne pouvait suffire ENCORE (@ l'homme)
(VCT 261). 

Un jour, quelque graine (...) tomba (...). La
v{g{tation gagna peu @ peu (...). Les oiseaux
nich}rent dans les jeunes arbres. (...) La vie
animale se d{veloppa ; le premier singe apparu @ la
surface du globe (...) gravit les cimes ardues;
l'homme apparut (20M 202; VCT 261; 20M 202). 

The impression created by such quotations is of a
strange, didactic tone that is rare in
twentieth-century fiction. In the first five
quotations, absence, negativity, or monotony are
emphasised, reinforced by the continuous tenses. In
the last three, by contrast, purposeful organic life
is established, and the process is characterised by
its internal momentum, as indicated by the
progression of the pass{s simples (even though
explanations of cause are still scrupulously
avoided). In them, but also in certain longer
continuous passages (e.g. VCT 128-30), the past of
the globe is narrated in linear terms, as a coherent
sequence, with each stage described as a function of
the following ones. Teleology and anthropocentrism
combine, in sum, to produce a 'highly-narrativised'
past where content can finally govern form - a
history of the globe that starts with a long and
pregnant descriptive pause, but finishes up with a
strong 'story-line' and a satisfying climax.
          Despite the coherency of these instances,
the fictional recounting of mere scientific facts
can cause two particular problems. The whole
tradition of the novel - as Robbe-Grillet has
convincingly demonstrated - encourages readers to
expect a human presence, a specific point of view;
and yet this is by definition absent from most of
Verne's descriptions of remote and arid events. But
also - and as a consequence - the known-unknown
tension is lacking here. Because contingency is
ignored, because 'alternative futures(in-the-past)'
are neglected, the temporal thread is too
well-marked - there is no room for conflict or
suspense. Of course, the primary aim of the whole
exercise was to employ the security of perfectly
well-defined structures; but for narrative purposes,
it would clearly be better if some freedom was also
involved.
         It is possible that some of these problems
might be solved by considering the future of natural
'history' instead. Although the 'internal' temporal
structure is perhaps the same, the relation with the
observer and the 'beginnings' and 'ends' are very
different. Verne's narrator in fact takes great
delight in extrapolating geological events forward
far beyond the present era. The extrapolations are
facilitated by the similarity between the pass{
simple and future tense forms,17 and also because
many adverbs may be employed for both, even ones
like 'bientt' and 'dans un temps rapproch{' -
undoubtedly another example of Verne's deadpan
pedagogical humour. Straits will thus 'shortly'
close up again, islands join together, or new
continents form; life on the globe 'will' come to an
end, due to a complete cooling of the globe, a
near-total flood, or else an explosion.18 Support
for these predictions is drawn from a comparison
with other heavenly bodies: if certain planets, such
as Venus and Mercury, are still in the past - in the
immature, vegetation stage - the comet Gallia, dying
of cold, and the moon, already dead, are described
as being signs in the present revealing the future
of the Earth (IN 19; HS 414-15; 20M 386, IM 276).
Ultimately then, it is the predictable and didactic
aspect of future geological events that is
emphasised - and so more or less the same problems
as before are present.      
         The tendency for past and future time to
be accelerated and spatialised does present huge
advantages in dramatic impact and clarity. But it
still leads back to the conundrum: is the past
younger or older than the present? And then what
about the future? More generally, geological
'history' allows Verne to consider the
world-without-man, and thus to relativise the
importance of humanity - a vital stage in the
development of nineteenth-century thought; but it
still does not easily lead to the construction of a
sustained narrative. It is lacking in human interest
- it is merely expository or pedagogical. Rational-
scientific time is too uniform, spread too evenly to
produce a satisfying fictional effect.
         Such instances stand therefore in contrast
to the frozen or petrified vestiges of the past, for
these do constitute a dramatic time, in and of the
moment, defined by its brevity and changeability. In
short, the mise en sc}ne of time in the Voyages
normally involves the sacrifice of either
completeness or tangibility, of continuity or
extraordinary effect - and thus fails one or other
of the goals embodied in the title of Le Magasin
d'{ducation et de r{cr{ation. As so often, Verne's
attempt to encapsulate the totality of a given
problem in a nutshell seems to culminate in the
production of two antinomic conceptions. Where
exhaustiveness is emphasised, time loses its
significance and becomes a scientific and un-
novelistic scale: where intensiveness is
accentuated, time loses external referentiality and
tends to the hermeticness and incoherence of the
quasi-instantaneous.





          The topoi of this chapter may all be seen
as attempts to answer the question 'What is the
past, and how can one come to terms with it?' In
every case, the answer begins with the observation
of the link between form and content, time's
intimate dependence on space, and the consequent
necessity for the past to be discovered
progressively. For Verne, the exploration of the
past cannot exist independently of a physical
medium.   
         At a first stage, a single object or
location enables scientists, detectives, or others
to (re)construct a conceptual chain of events going
back into the past, or forwards into the future. In
either case, the movement, away from the present and
towards the unknown, satisfies two requirements of
the Voyages (and the genre in general). For the
characters, it represents an escape from the world
they are familiar with (although at the same time
fuelling their anxiety); and for the reader, it
produces a steadily increasing suspense. But
principally because of its conceptuality, this sort
of (re-)creation remains of limited scope. It does
not totally involve the characters, and nor does it
lead to the direct presentation of dramatic or
exotic features of the globe.
         The second stage, presenting the Earth as
a museum of anthropology and ethnology, does in
contrast imply contact with extraordinary features.
'L'{chelle des tres' (B 454) defines a hierarchy of
every living being in terms of both race and
species, whose be-all and end-all is the White man,
immune to the indignities of biological change.
Quite a long way down are the other human groups,
with the ones closest to the animals being on or
below the 'dernier degr{ de l'{chelle humaine' (CG
508). In other words, the human part of the scale is
both distributed over space and intrinsically
ordered. But it is not clear if the gaps below the
White man are bridgeable - whether by degeneration
from above or regeneration from below. Nor is it
clear to what extent the lower beings represent the
past of the White man. And finally, there is  a
hesitation as to the directionality of the scale:
primitives are also on the 'PREMIER degr{ de
l'{chelle humaine' (VA xvii 188) - the first one up
as well as the last one down. This ambiguity
contributes further to the confusion; and so, for
all these reasons, the space-time association cannot
yet be fully operative.     
         Man's doubt about his origin combines with
a frustration about his destination. His total
supremacy means that he has no worlds left to
conquer, and is therefore in a racial cul-de-sac as
well as the geographical one. The only way he can
compensate for the unfair advantage his forefathers
gained by being born into earlier eras is to attempt
to conquer remote domains. The only antidote to the
monotony of modern existence is to search, in the
last unexplored regions of the universe, for novel
creatures from the past, a counterbalancing
primordial superiority, an original noble state. The
past is the ultimate challenge for modern man.


CHAPTER 5

THE SHAPE OF THINGS GONE BY

Depuis la veille, la cr{ation avait fait un
progr}s {vident (VCT 169).

Living in the Past

        Le Pays des fourrures (1873) comes very
close to reconciling the twin goals of Le Magasin.
In this novel of travel through the Arctic, the
heroes venture onto a promontory in the north of
Canada, whose longitude and latitude then begin to
change! The 'promontory' is really an ice-island,
built up from 'gel{es successives' (PF 313), and
as the island moves into warmer currents, the
layers melt, starting of course with the lowest
ones. 
        In terms of Verne's search, this idea
would seem to represent a major breakthrough. By
means of the ice, past time has been materialised
and conserved in frozen form, with the year 1868
superimposed on 1867, 1867 on 1866, and so on. But
history can then also be re-activated in the
present, brought back to life, and at a rate many
times faster than the 'real' speed. An efficient
'accelerator' has been invented, fifty years
before Wells. A reconciliation between tediously
drawn-out scientific time and satisfyingly intense
literary time seems possible after all. The vital
differences here are that not only is (vertical)
space the 'container' of time, but also the
(horizontal) movements in space determine the
temperature of the water, the speed of melting,
and hence the rate of release of time. The perfect
space-time link at last?
        But there is a huge problem. The lowest
layers are also the oldest ones, and so the heroes
never in practice discover any layer except the
top one. The unfortunate result is that the device
lacks all progression and hence narrative
interest. The problem is perhaps to do with the
very transparence of the ice - it hides no
mystery, the story it recounts is empty, the
heroes are stranded in the derisory thinness of
the present. This device is ultimately a heroic
failure.
        But all is not lost. As so often in Verne,
the later novels, representing retreats from
earlier-held positions, may lead us back towards
more clear-cut successes. A structure already
exists with the required characteristics of
vertical space-time and total opaqueness. Axel and
Lidenbrock's visions were in inverse chronological
order: 'gothique', 'roman', 'castors' (VCT 161;
163; 163). More generally - and this, I would
claim, is the key to the remarkable success of
Voyage au centre de la Terre - the geological
layers they pass through are past time. The heroes
discover the layers stage by stage and in inverse
order. Even the names emphasise the linear
ordering: the quaternary era, the tertiary, the
secondary, and then the primary. 
        The problem of the journey in space and
time is thus brilliantly solved. The tangible
vestiges of past time may be discovered in
progressive and therefore satisfyingly dramatic
fashion.1 This work represents the culmination of
the search of the seventy-nine Voyages
extraordinaires - even though it was the second in
the series to be published.
        What distinguishes this device from the
discovery of the prehistoric remnants is that the
space involved is no longer two-dimensional.
Vertical space is the support, in accordance with
the linear obsession of Lidenbrock, '"l'homme des
verticales"' (VCT 196). And what makes it
different from Le Pays des fourrures is that this
one-dimensionality is put to active use, is at the
same time the reason and the place for the
journey. The discovery of the past is thus highly
structured, is both exhaustive and non-repetitive.
Because the characters are immersed in the very
substance of history, the dullness of mere
didactic recounting is avoided. Unlike 'L'Eternel
Adam', finally, where the conceptual exploration
of the past (the excavations) is separated from
the presentation of them (the document), Voyage au
centre de la Terre can successfully and coherently
integrate such oppositions as telling and showing,
knowledge and discovery, and science and
adventure.
        But the device goes further. Because the
association is complete, without residue, its
middle term (vertical space) tends to disappear,
and as the heroes descend, personal time and
geological time are often directly identified in
Verne's language. Days, in other words, are
equated with entire eras. If this goes some way to
explaining why the Creation took only six days,
its main consequence is that the heroes actually
live an accelerated version of past time.
Sometimes the experience is relatively static, as
shown by throw-away remarks like: 'Nous {tions en
pleine p{riode de transition, en pleine p{riode
silurienne (VCT 165); '"nous voici arriv{s @ cette
p{riode (...) (des) premi}res plantes et (des)
premiers animaux"' (VCT 166). But in other cases
verbal play is made on the identification between
the flows of geological and personal time,
particularly when their directions happen to
coincide: '"Nous sommes ENCORE @ l'{poque
primitive ; mais nous montons ! (...) A BIENTOT
(...) l'{poque de transition"' (VCT 347). Axel
takes such a perfect opportunity to, above all,
pose the conundrum of directionality and
improvement in time: while moving upwards and
forwards towards 'un ordre plus parfait' (VCT
169), he observes, whimsically and sacrilegiously:
'Depuis la veille, la cr{ation avait fait un
progr}s {vident' (VCT 169).
        Verne's treatment of the apparently simple
idea of the spatial descent thus contains a subtle
and sustained representation of time and space. In
particular, the dissonance is examined between the
Christian opinion that the Creation took only six
days and the scientific opinion that it took
thousands of years. Verne adds a major dissonance
of his own - that between scientific and personal
time - juxtaposes the two - in the same way as he
often opposes pairs of monsters - and hence, with
a certain amount of verbal brio, makes them cancel
each other out. Scientific time is evacuated, and
Verne presents the heroes as directly experiencing
the days of Biblical Creation - with all the
tongue-in-cheek that this implies. Further irony
is directed at the hackneyed expression of 'days
seeming like centuries'. Elsewhere (CG 500), Verne
says that metaphors are one of the most dangerous
things on Earth. His attempt here is to render the
overworked metaphor slightly less dangerous by
reversing the direction of the comparison and by
makking it absolutely literal.
        Another idea passed through the Vernian
mill is that of progression. The individual days
of the Creation culminated in the perfection of
the White man; but on the other hand, this end was
presumably inscribed in its beginning: an
omnipotent divinity does not make 'progress', at
worst It just switches attention from one task to
another. In other words, Verne here seems to be
pointing out the absurdity of anthropomorphising
the process of the Creation - and at the same time
posing the conundrum of the beginning of time,
whether in a Creationist view or otherwise.
        But Verne's imaginative play on space and
time is still far from finished - and indeed the
preceding may be considered just the build-up.
Once the heroes arrive at their underground
destination, the downwards and backwards linear
tendency is interrupted, for the world discovered
is fully three-dimensional. It thus serves to
summarise and synthesise the imaginary graveyards
of the other novels: 'On et dit un cimeti}re
immense, o| les g{n{rations de vingt si}cles
confondaient leur {ternelle poussi}re. De hautes
extumescences de d{bris s'ETAGEAIENT au loin.
Elles ondulaient jusqu'aux limites de l'horizon et
s'y perdaient dans une brume fondante. L@ (...)
s'accumulait TOUTE L'HISTOIRE DE LA VIE ANIMALE'
(VCT 303). 
        In these few brilliant lines are expressed
some of the most distinctive features of Verne's
vision of the world.
'S'{tager', in particular, would seem to be an
original use of scientific vocabulary in a novel:
not only is it a reaction to the diffuse Romantic
s{pulchres of the preceding tradition; but, by its
dimensional quality, it also contributes to the
fundamental metaphor of the Voyage au centre de la
Terre. Time is layered, made up of discrete
objects, in an echo of the geological strata; but
it is also then covered with what is
simultaneously a traditional representation of
time and that ultimate symbol of the continuity
and breakdown of matter, namely dust. Time is
'twenty centuries' deep, but the generations come
together in an 'eternal' synthesis. Time's
vertical components go off to the horizon but also
disappear there (the mist being the fluid
equivalent of the dust). The attempt of the
Realist hero to achieve a total vision is thereby
firmly put into place, put into perspective: the
physical relation between objects is perceived
from the subjective point of view of - through the
distorting prism of - the visionary individual.
Scientific space-time and its opposite, personal
time-space, are superimposed - with all 
the paradoxes this equation implies. A whole new
vision of the sensible universe has been proposed.
Axel perhaps does for the physical world what
Fabrice did for war.
        But there is also room (or time) in this
world for vegetable life, and the preparatory
chapters begin to pay off even further, for verbal
brilliance leads to yet more verbal brilliance:

(...) de grands palmiers, d'esp}ces aujourd'hui
disparues (...). Tout se confondait dans une
teinte uniforme, bruna^tre et comme pass{e. Les
feuilles {taient d{pourvues de leur verdeur, et
les fleurs elle-me^mes, si nombreuses @ cette
{poque (...) qui les vit nai^tre, alors sans
couleurs et sans parfum, semblaient faites d'un
paper d{color{ sous l'action de l'atmosph}re (VCT
316).

'Feuilles' 'bruntre(s)', 'papier d{color{':
Verne's world is a textual world, but one where
the logos has undergone the physical ravages of
time. The trees are similarly 'rong{s par le
temps' (VCT 317), and the general effect is 'as if
faded' (VCT 316) - or, to make the pun explicit,
'as if past'. Indeed, the world is not of
'aujourd'hui', but dates from a distant and
imprecise 'alors', is both diluvian and
antediluvian (VCT 317; 320). It contains fossil
fish; and the characters themselves are also
described as antediluvian or fossilised (VCT 257;
284; 202). This world is dead and gone; but at the
same time, since the heroes are actively
witnessing its existence, it is vividly present:
it undulates, and even contains flowers. It is, in
Verne's word, 'reborn' (VCT 318).
        Great play is being made specifically on
the interaction between present and past. Because
all this is happening now, things are living; but
because scientifically it is in the past, the
things in it - like those in Lidenbrock's dusty
'museum' - are old and visibly worn out. If one
dimension of space was enough to represent the
time of the descent, here there are two
dimensions, capable therefore of accumulating huge
amounts of different sorts of time, juxtaposing
great stretches of history and prehistory. Past
time is there to see.
        But Verne's demonstration is still not
finished. The Underworld is even more vividly
present than it seemed, for animal life is
represented in it. The fossil fish are in fact
fully alive, and Axel and Lidenbrock also
encounter living sea-monsters; and they even
discover a (dead) human body, one that is
'"incontestablement caucasique, (...) (de) race
blanche, jap{tique"' (VCT 312). Were it that of an
authentic inhabitant, reasons Lidenbrock, then
humanity could no longer be considered a latecomer
to the scene of the world, and evolutionary theory
would have to be completely revised (as it is
initially in 'Le Humbug' (1910), where a giant
fossil man is discovered). But after playing with
the possibility for a while, Lidenbrock
reluctantly admits that the quaternary era man is
out of his time - may even have arrived as a
scientist or a tourist (VCT 313)! Built into the
sense of wonder is already an ironic awareness of
the massification of travel.
        The Professor's honesty is rewarded, for
he and Axel do subsequently observe authentic
terrestrial specimens of the era: first a herd of
mastodons, and then a Giant Shepherd to go with
them, one who is menacingly alive, with a mane
like a lion's and a head like a buffalo's (VCT
320). The scope of Verne's invention shows him not
to be just a realist.
        The Shepherd's world is past and present:
it exploits the dead-living, space-time and old-
new paradoxes to the maximum. Because the
inhabitant, this time, is completely at home in
his environment, scientific theory is resoundingly
upset; but also and more importantly, the space-
time quest is brought to a climax. The ultimate
proof that Axel and Lideenbrock have finally got
somewhere is that they have discovered something
which is unexpected. The Shepherd's world is both
the culmination and the denial of the association
between past geological time, modern spatial
order, the time of narration, and the time lived
by the characters.
        As such it shares characteristics with
other climactic locations in the Voyages
extraordinaires which, even if they are not
prepared in exactly the same way, similarly
transgress the limits of realistic time and space.
Virtually every novel before 1875 in fact presents
scenes where some sort of transcendent element is
present.2 But most notable are those of the
underwater ruins of Atlantis in Vingt mille lieues
and the Arcadia at the North Pole in Capitaine
Hatteras, for both involve a time and space beyond
the well-ordered traces left in the modern world
by the march of history. The plurals of the
recurrent phrases '(les) temps ant{historiques',
'(les) temps fabuleux', '(les) premiers jours du
monde'3 are one revealing sign of this undermining
of traditional temporal succession. Another
indication is that, modern creatures being only
'des r{ductions affaiblies de leurs p}res des
premiers a^ges', primordial beings are invariably
'vastes', '"collossa(ux)"', 'construits sur des
gabarits gigantesques' (VCT 267; 20M 15; VCT 268;
20M 15, cf. 5). Perhaps surprisingly, their
general 'superiority' (20M 465) or 'perfection'
(VCT 259) of the earliest beings also includes
man. The Giant Shepherd is in fact over twelve
feet tall; Lucerne Man is nineteen feet; the
posthumous fossil man is over forty metres; and
the Atlanteans were not only gigantic, but lived
for well over a hundred years (VCT 319); 310; H
176; 20M 423). Even contacts between man and the
animals were better at this 'time': despite his
fearsome appearance, the  Shepherd peacefully
herds the mastodons; and 'the relations of the
first man with the first animals', still preserved
at the North Pole, are/were positively idyllic:
'Ces jolis animaux (...) couraient, bondissaient
et voltigeaient sans d{fiance (...); ils
s'offraient d'eux-me^me (aux) caresses (etc.)' (CH
498; 498). The oldest regions of the globe retain
elements of a paradise where men and animals are,
in Verne's recurrent paradox, still in their first
youth.
        Once again, an explanation for these
scenes could be found in the Biblical assertion
that species were created once and for all, with
only minor variations especially deteriorations
thereafter. But other explanations would seem to
be possible: the psychological one in terms of the
huge prestige of the father figure,4 transmitted
more and more to each successive ancestor; but
above all, the deep streak of pessimism permeating
even the earliest works.5 These attractive regions
only exist in extremely remote - and in any case
past - places, and thus serve to underline the
humdrumness of nineteenth-century France. The
world has gone downhill from the beginning. But
because Verne's characters attain such stature
from their modest starting point, their quest is
thereby all the more heroic.
        Verne's most exciting novels would seem to
be defined less by their precise historical
resonances than by their escape from the
contemporary social settings.

A Strange Dream

         In spite of the contrast between
scientific time and the youthful time of the
beginning of the world, the two do reach on one
occasion a synthesis, or rather an apotheosis, in
the form of a time going back to the very origin
of the universe. The mise en sc}ne is prepared by
a short but seminal passage in Capitaine Hatteras:

        Hatteras se prit @ rver. Sa pens{e rapide
erra sur toute son existence; il remonta le cours
de sa vie avec cette vitesse particuli}re aux
songes, qu'aucun savant n'a encore pu calculer; il
fit un retour sur ses jours {coul{s; il revit son
hivernage (...). Alors il retourna plus loin dans
le pass{; il rva de son navire (...). Son
imagination (..) plana plus haut encore (...);
puis, sa pens{e reprit un nouveau cours (...); il
se vit (...) d{ployant le pavillon du Royaume-Uni
(au Ple Nord) (CH 562-63). 

Beneath the standard language of the late-Romantic
dream is, I would claim, an opposition that is
particularly instructive. The dream's basic
structure depends on the space-time association
('remonta le cours', 'retourna plus loin dans le
pass{'), but above all contains two opposed modes
of considering time. The first, characterised as
'pens{e', is linked to the past, reproduces real
events and is exhaustive ('TOUTE son existence').
The second, a time of 'rve', 'songes' and
'imagination', is incalculable, is linked with
merely potential events in the future, and appears
under the sign of selectivity and liberty ('erra',
'plana plus haut').
         Both modes are nevertheless limited to
the time and space that Hatteras can easily
imagine. In contrast, the definitive visionary
experience, that of Voyage au centre de la Terre,
uses the same opposition to trace the entire
prehistory of the globe.
         Axel is day-dreaming - significantly on
a fathomless sea - and, after his vision of the
collection of the 'grands mammif}res des premiers
jours', starts to relive past time: he moves back
through the '{poques bibliques de la cr{ation,
bien avant la naissance de l'homme', sees first
the mammals disappear and then the birds,
reptiles, fish, crustaceans, molluscs, articulates
and zoophytes (VCT 259-61). Axel is now totally
alone: 'Toute la vie de la terre se r{sume en moi'
(VCT 261). He undergoes another acceleration:

        Les si}cles s'{coulent comme des jours! Je
remonte la s{rie des transformations terrestres.
Les plantes disparaissent; les roches granitiques
perdent leur puret{; l'{tat liquide va remplacer
l'{tat solide sous l'action d'une chaleur plus
intense; les eaux courent @ la surface du globe;
elles bouillonnent, elles se volatilisent; les
vapeurs enveloppent la terre, qui peu @ peu ne
forme plus qu'une masse gazeuse, port{e au rouge
blanc, grosse comme le soleil et brillante comme
lui! ] Au centre de cette n{buleuse, quatorze cent
mille fois plus consid{rable que ce globe qu'elle
va former un jour, je suis entran{ dans les
espaces plan{taires! Mon corps se subtilise, se
sublime @ son tour et se m{lange comme un atome
impond{rable @ ces immenses vapeurs qui tracent
dans l'infini leur orbite enflamm{e! (VCT 262) 

Verne's time-traveller probably goes faster and
farther than any of his predecessors - and perhaps
successors - in the history of literature.6 Part of
his art is the verve of the narration, his
involvement in the backwards movement through the
very substance of time. The motion is inscribed in
the language itself, with 'la s{rie des
transformations terrestres' not only transplanted
from a scientific context to a literary one, but
also considered in the opposite order from the
normal one. The same holds true of the phrases
'plus intense', 'L'{tat liquide VA remplacer
l'{tat solide', 'la terre (...) NE forme PLUS
qu'une masse gazeuse', 'courent' and above all
's'{coulent'. The progressively more vivid, linear
and irreversible temporal imagery of 'courir',
'couler', '{coul{' and 's'{couler' were of course
commonplace in nineteenth-century literature; but
only Verne applies the most expressive terms to
past time and the flow of a physical substance
representing past time. This movement does not
consist of a finite series of instantaneous
images, as might have been expected from a
pre-cinematographic era, but is continuous,
resembling a film run backwards. Each of the
stages of the Earth's history has apparently been
analysed, reversed and then put together again.
Verne succeeds the remarkable innovation - absent
in Wells, and rare even in modern fiction - of
showing time as flowing backwards.
         This vision starts from a pedagogical
premise - hence the anomalous 'forward'
temporality of '(...) ce globe qu'elle VA former
UN JOUR'; it improves on Hatteras's space-time
association ('Je REMONTE la SERIE'), perfecting
the identification between scientific and personal
time-scales; but it above all culminates as a
mystical liberation from the constraints of
conventional time, a blurring of the distinction
between the self and the world, a floating in a
time-before-all-time. Like the geological
exploration it completes, this vision reconciles
linear time and circular space. Axel not only
retraces the entirety of history, but is also
absorbed into the transcendent, amniotic origin.
         Principally in Voyage au centre de la
Terre, then, but also elsewhere, Verne takes a
number of contemporary lieux communs, totally
transforms them in the light of his own personal
vision, and produces what he himself accurately
calls 'rveries scientifico-fantaisistes' (VA v
62). 'Faire du nouveau avec l'ancien' was one of
the mottoes of Le Magasin; and a number of
commentators have similarly commented on Verne's
bricolage in other areas.7 Verne's peculiarly
anxious, sceptical attitude makes him mistrustful
of pure introspection, and insists that realism
and the physical world must remain the basis for
intersubjective communication. But at the same
time, a particularly sensorial force, a great
tension between the individual and the universe
pushes him towards the hyper-romantic, the
'recherche de l'absolu'. The result is the
physical explicitation of a simultaneously
inferiority/superiority complex, the annihilation
of the romantic-realist opposition, the
magnification of the atom and the reduction of the
cosmos, the poetry of space. The Vernian quest is
a quest for all or nothing.
The Space-Time Paradox, or How to Travel in Time
The conclusions of the present chapter follow
directly on from those of the last, for they take
the observation of time's intimate dependence on
the past further than the first two stages.
        The problem then was that science shows
man to be a modern phenomenon, who cannot
therefore be discovered in the distant past.
Verne's constant desire for verisimilitude means
that elaborate preparation is necessary before any
potentially implausible scenes can be presented.
First - and this is the third attempt at a total
space-time association - modern man must construct
a mise en sc}ne by means of continuous processes
in space and time. He must indulge first in the
pursuit of detached scientific analysis, the
retracing of ordered history, the carrying out of
conventional exploration. 
        But mere finiteness and persistence cannot
on their own afford access to an elsewhere and
'elsewhen': titanic men and animals can only be
reached if modern man accepts the risks of
participation and relinquishes the role of mere
observer. The fourth and ultimate stage can only
be achieved if the present impinges on the past.
Only then can the authentic origin emerge, ageless
monsters be called up from the deep, primeval
innocence be encountered, and undiluted cosmic
existence be experienced. The genuine living past
is impossibly 'distant' from modern eras, is
'below', 'before' or 'beyond' any real time. It
does not contain order, progression or cause and
effect; it is probably even unchanged by man's
participation - the participation which transforms
man himself. It is both the ultimate bourne of
past time and oneirically timeless.
         Verne's demonstration is so convincing
that it all but hides the basic donn{es, namely
that man can only participate in the past by means
of time-travel, and that time-travel is generally
considered to be a logical and physical
impossibility.8 Let us therefore search the mise en
sc}ne again to see how the trick is carried out.
         In the third stage, the equivalence
between the dimensions of space and the traces
left by past time was still strictly limited. The
witnessing of frozen or petrified vestiges,
normally isolated, but on occasion forming
complete panoramas, does give an inkling of
further possibilities. Some of the instances in
fact contain improbable sequences of remnants from
distinct eras, and the hero sometimes carelessly
destroys or removes pieces of the past. But no
physical law is broken, for an odour of death
permeates each of these scenes. Time is only
imperfectly spatialised, and its corridors are not
yet fixed enough for an active participation by
modern man.
         In Voyage au centre de la Terre, on the
other hand, only one dimension of space is
involved. The narration can therefore associate it
with both the historical-scientific and personal
time-scales, without residue in either case.
Because two temporal scales are associated to the
spatial one, they can be associated to each other.
It is this short-circuited identification between
the historical and personal time-scales that is
the precise cause of realistic space-time being
bypassed and hence initiates the paradox of
time-travel.
         Three additional illustrations may
provide an extra perspective on the problem. At
one stage in Hector Servadac the eccentric
scientist Palmyrin Rosette gives a striking gloss
on space and time: '"Supposons un tre dou{ d'une
puissance de vision infinie, et mettons-le (dans
l'espace) (...) @ une distance que la lumi}re
emploie dix-huit cents ans @ franchir, il
assistera @ cette grande sc}ne de la mort du
Christ (...), (aux) d{solations du d{luge
universel. Plus loin enfin (...), il verrait,
suivant la tradition biblique, Dieu cr{ant les
mondes"' (HS 423).9 The monn-bound Ardan, in one of
his zanier moments, goes even faster and farther
than Rosette: he claims that people will soon be
travelling to the planets as rapidly as they wish
and concludes that, as a result: '"'La distance
est un vain mot, la distance n'existe pas!'"' (TL
239). In the particular case of the lost White
man, lastly, accepting appearances, as Lidenbrock
was at first inclined to do, would mean
considering the body as that of an authentic
native. In other words, one would have to identify
together the quaternary era its physiology implies
and the primary era it is discovered in, to
equate, in other words, its personal and
historical characteristics. The ordering of time
implicit in modern science would thus no longer be
operative.
         The ideas of Rosette, Ardan and
Lidenbrock are certainly laconic and eccentric,
but they brilliantly summarise the argument behind
the transcendent scenes, and especially the
spatio-temporal underpinning of the route leading
to the Underworld. In all these cases, the
space-time association is taken to its most
literal limit. Because historical time is
identified with a spatial dimension, it loses its
dynamic characteristics, is 'detemporalised',
becomes a fixed scale. Because it is fixed - in
the form of Rosette's 'light-year-rays' or the
space-time geological strata - man can travel
through or along it. The (spatio-temporal)
'distance' separating Rosette from Christ and from
God, Ardan from the planets, or Lidenbrock and the
White man from the Giant Shepherd can be mapped
onto - conjugated with, substituted for - personal
time. It is this asymmetric equating of distance
and time that is necessary for unconstrained
travel, both 'up' and 'down' the time-scale - and
it is this that goes beyond what is normally
thought possible. 
        Once one has travelled to a given era,
however, a 'retemporalisation' is needed to begin
to live in it. Before normal-speed history and
biography can resume a joint course, a
'despatialisation' is required, followed by a
shaking of the temporal clock to set it going
again. In the case of backwards travel, the same
segment of time thus plays two contradictory and
successive roles: a medium to travel back through;
and thus a dur{e to be lived forwards in. This
duality is the weakest link in the logical chain,
and this is why Axel, Hatteras and Aronnax are all
ecstatic or unconscious on first arrival at their
destinations. It is this ultima thule of the
backwards motion, the unique point at which a U-
turn and a thousand-fold slowing down are
executed, that constitutes the highest degree of
initiation, the 'point suprme'. This is where
Rosette can imagine the Creation, Ardan visualise
life on the planets, and Lidenbrock take part in
the living past. Only for Axel's cosmic dream does
the handbrake-turn-cum-retemporalisation not take
place, because he is already dreaming, because he
never leaves the fixed space-time scale, because
the beginnings of time-space are themselves
timeless. In his ultimate voyage, he succeeds in
escaping the constraints of time and space
altogether.
                   An incidental effect of the
downward and backward exploration is to ironically
show up the nineteenth-century view of progress on
and up towards some undefined goal - that is,
progress as associated with the vertical dimension
of space. Verne stands this idea on its head.
        Such situations are, then, physically
impossible: if the inconsistent status of the
historical time-scale is the logical explanation
why, Lidenbrock's temptation also implies a
potential paradox that concretely shows up the
contradiction. In Lidenbrock's mind, since
quaternary man is a racial ancestor of modern
Europeans, his existence at the appropriate time
and place on the surface is necessary for them to
have been born. (A similar argument may possibly
apply to the Giant Shepherd.) But the discovery of
man in the Underworld would destroy this
possibility of his having had descendants on the
surface at the appropriate moment - it would
create a time-loop (to use a term much employed in
modern science-fiction). And consequently, the
scientist who claimed that quaternary man was an
authentic inhabitant of the primordial world would
create a contradiction, and thereby, if words
really were acts, himself cease to exist through
lack of recent ancestors... . Thus although Verne
does not at this stage make explicit the problems
of causal loops across time, he does set up the
precise conditions of the paradox. 
         At the same time, he takes every possible
precaution to fit in, wherever he possibly can,
with nineteenth-century science. Thus the problem
of encountering man in the distant past, in
particular, is acknowledged, and incorporated into
the presentation, in at least four different ways.
The space-time confusion just analysed is
fundamental (the mise en sc}ne is still in the
nineteenth century, and therefore humans can be
discovered). The dead body is not in its own
time-zone, and consequently no permanent damage is
done to scientific theory. Doubt is in fact
subsequently thrown onto the very existence of the
Giant Shepherd. And the final union between man
and the cosmos is rendered more acceptable because
Axel travels alone - and it is a one-off, without
precedent or successor.
         Despite all these precautions, Verne's
works do transgress the scientific norms. In
particular, they start by establishing what might
logically be thought the basic requirement of
time-travel, but which has virtually always been
neglected in science-fiction, namely a time to
travel in. Only after replacing the traditional
conceptions of space-time, by inventing the
successive stages of an operative and integrated
- and therefore un-Wellsian - time-machine, do
they push against the limit of verisimilitude. On
occasion, they cross it, allowing the travellers
to arrive, to go beyond mere voyeurism, to
participate in the past, and to be changed by it.
         The past is thus treated as another
ailleurs, time resembles space, and man travels in
them conjointly. Verne's works demonstrate an
awareness of the paradox of time-travel, the
impossibility of changing the past, of ignoring
the one-directional laws of causality. But they
manage nevertheless to subvert these constraints
in subterranean manner, replacing 'verism' by
verisimilitude. They replace the division proposed
by Newtonian physics between perfectly definable
space and perfectly definable time with an
awareness that time and space simply cannot be
perceived or measured independently. The essential
distinction is between the spatio-temporally near
and the remote, the here-and-now and the
there-and-then, the observer and the rest of the
universe. Egocentrism is an essential part of
understanding even the apparently most objective
features of the world. In this way, Verne also
proposes one of the surprising planks of the
General and the Special Theories of Relativity:
that observations of the physical universe are
linked in profound ways with the position of the
observer. In particular, time and space behave
very similarly, with pay-offs possible between
them, meaning that 'distance' must be defined in
simultaneously spatial and temporal terms, that it
is not a straight-line concept but only definable
in terms of concentric spheres. Of course Verne
did not produce a scientific theory; but his
sensitivity to the essential problems, I would
claim, allowed him to define the conditions for
one.    
        Faced with the apparently infinite and
immutable horizon of space-time, the Vernian hero
compensates for his own infinitesimal dimensions
by participating in accelerated versions of other
eras. The mapping between space and time leads to
a subversion of the traditional categories, a
'subtilisation' of scientific terminology and a
sublimation of the hero. It enables the virtually
non-personifiable to be personalised, the
tragically finite to be integrated with the
superbly infinite, and the self to encompass the
cosmos. Transcendence is occasionally possible after
all. 

CHAPTER 6


STARTING AND STOPPING
        
         
Lorsque quelque ami voulait (...) arrter (Ardan)
en lui pr{disant une catastrophe prochaine: 'La
fort n'est brl{e que par ses propres arbres',
r{pondait-il (TL 127).
        
Straight and Round

It was seen in Chapters 1 to 4 that time for Verne
is often conceived of in a simplified and
spatialised form. The physical forms involved are
frequently independent of the characters following
them, and leave little room for randomness,
subjectivity or ineffability. Time is pared down
and abstract, virtually devoid of entropy or
significance: safe from surprises, but robbed of
most of its essential defining qualities. It is a
clean machine. 
        Certainly Verne's works are not unique in
this respect - but because they have a strong
degree of structuring, they do avoid the pure
picaresque of much of the 'adventure' genre with
its tendency to aimlessness and lack of form. The
unity of the Voyages, we have constantly seen,
stems from their being novels of exploration and
about exploration, with the opposition
connu-inconnu constituting at least a minimal
structure for the whole of space and time.
         Many of the topoi observed may in fact
serve to spin out the reassuringly simplified
form. The sinuous line, the path where success
leads only to greater difficulties, or the calling
into doubt of predecessors' achievements can all
be considered strategies of suspense.1 They all
allay the dread of a final cul-de-sac or fiasco on
arriving in port. But what they cannot do is
totally mask the extravagance of the linear form.
Because it 'uses up' space so quickly, it will
have to cede all the sooner to some fundamentally
different structure.
         The clearest example is the straight line
on the surface of the globe, for it necessarily ends up by coming back
to the exact point it started from. This is a key
element in the plot of Le Tour du monde, but also
of Les Enfants du capitaine Grant: Voyage autour
du monde, Vingt mille lieues sous les mers,
Robur-le-conqu{rant, and many others.2 As so often
in Verne, the new leads back to the old, the
global runs counter to the local, and the explicit
effect conceals an implicit one. But the
flashbacks, anticipations, notes, and
illustrations also come to a stop, the
retrospective deductions invariably cease, and the
scientific-historical explorers, however far they
go, always end up by coming back to modern
existence. In sum, although the spatial structures
examined up to this point are all more or less
based on the linear form, an element of
'circularity' is seldom absent.
         Examination of the Voyages shows that in
fact the purely physical structures form merely
the tip of a much bigger iceberg of systems
defined, in one way or another, by some degree of
closure. Often the circular image is the vital
one; often it is simply some element of concavity
that serves to define the system; but in other
cases, the closure operates on a dynamic
principle. Verne explores systems that are closed,
static, and timeless; that, in them, space and
time do not continue indefinitely, cause and
effect interact, 'output' affects 'input', and
some sort of internal 'feedback' is involved. 
        It might seem that this concern with
systems and processes were unliterary and arid.
But one of the makor advance caused by
'structuralism' is the realisation that
'structure' is a vital component of all human
concerns, including the psychological and the
social. Three seminal studies, in particular, have
already shown this general connection, and will
therefore form an excellent underpinning to the
analysis of the next two chapters: Douglas R.
Hofstadter's analysis of logical and living
systems in terms of self-awareness and
'self-consciousness'; Franois Raymond's
demonstration of the frequent occurrence of
'auto-regulating' systems in the Voyages; and
Roland Barthes's description of Verne's ships as
characterised by 'l'enfermement (...), la clture
(...), le bonheur commun du fini (...), la
pl{nitude (...) encyclop{dique (...), (dans) un
espace connu et clos'.3 
         
Return to Sender

         The appendages of Verne's living entities possess
a remarkable tendency to 'introversion'. Mangrove
trees grow branches which take root as soon as
they touch the ground; characters cross their legs
or arms or thrust their hands into their pockets
with a surprising frequency; and one of them puts
his hand so far into 'le pavillon de son cor' that
it will not come out again.4 'Cor' or, three lines
later, 'corps'? The word-association is not
gratuitous, for a letter written by Verne to his
father reads:
        
(...) Un Anglais vint un jour (...) commander un
embl}me de la taciturnit{ la plus absolue; le
grand statuaire, apr}s avoir longtemps song{ aux
moyens d'exprimer le silence le plus complet,
imagina un homme qui aurait UN DOIGT DANS LA
BOUCHE ET UN AUTRE DANS LE DERRIERE; (...) c'{tait
(...) assez commode pour son mod}le, parce que,
quand il aurait {t{ fatigu{ d'avoir un doigt dans
la bouche, il aurait pu changer de main.5 

        Much of the humour derives of course from
the deadpan disparity between the artistic aims
and the down-to-earth, scatologically-tinged
methods; but it also comes, I would claim, from
the eccentric and introverted idea of the closing
off of a part of space.
         Introjection is in fact an obsessionally
recurrent feature throughout the Voyages
extraordinaires. It is visible in such
characteristic closed objects as the ships, the
vehicles, the caves, and the islands. It can be
observed in the constant dream of the characters
to be ensconsed in sea-shells, with its
accompanying vocabulary of security, independence,
and - paradoxically - liberty.6 It is also evident
in such varied 'introverted' forms as
lighting-coils, propellers, staircases, the jeu de
l'oie, watch-springs, or even cog-teeth '@ surface
{picyclo~ique'.7 But it is especially visible in
moving natural objects, since, in Jules Verne at
least, the sun tends to spiral inwards, and
whirlpools and whirlwinds always possess an
intrinsic and alluring centripetality, with their
'trou circulaire', 'gouffre (...)
engloutiss(ant)', 'su\oirs liquides', their
'puissance d'attraction', 'aspiration puissante',
'succion irr{sistible'.8
         The recurrent ideas, in sum, are
autonomy, introversion, and (en)closure. But these
are not limited to particular objects, for in Verne's works they very frequently exist as
an entity which functions as a closed unit but
without a fixed form. What will here be called the
cycle seems to have as principal function to
isolate a given system from the rest of the world.
Biology is often a pretext, but we may again
suspect that Verne's aims are usually elsewhere.
         The conventional cycle of
sea-water/water-
vapour/rain/river-water/sea-water, as a first
example, is remarkably self-contained,
self-sufficient, and self-regulating (the double
antecedents indicating a similar overloading):
'"Il se nourrit lui-mme avec les vapeurs qu'il
{met, dont il alimente les sources, qui lui
reviennent par les fleuves, ou qu'il reprend
directement par les pluies sorties de son sein"'
(RV 129; cf. 20M 334, CH 341-42, IN 178-79).
Again, icebergs are presented as starting their
existence in a quasi-timeless perfect equilibrium
near the North Pole, but the open sea slowly
undermines them and they turn upside down; this
stable equilibrium is once more gradually eroded
and destroyed; and so on, until the icebergs
disappear completely (HG 244; cf. CH 63).
         Similar cycles abound in Vernian man's
manipulation of nature, with in each case a
comparable twist of introjection. For instance,
the feathers shed by the female eider-bird to
prepare its nest are gathered by a 'hunter' each
year; the male eider-bird then sheds its feathers
but the hunter leaves them; 'le nid s'ach}ve donc;
la femelle pond ses oeufs (...) et, l'ann{e
suivante, la r{colte de l'{dredon recommence' (VCT
92). Again, for their vertical movements, many of
Verne's vessels imitate animals, especially seals,
which swallow stones to sink, and then regurgitate
them to come back up: the Nautilus, for instance,
uses taps and reservoirs; the Boynton
wet-suit-cum-autonomous-vessel (a typical Vernian
bricolage), its level of inflation; and the
various balloons use hydrogen and ballast with
great virtuosity.9 Indeed, the second half of Cinq
semaines en ballon is determined by the complex
system of cycles and sub-cycles comprised of
'real' ballast, structural parts jettisoned from
the balloon, gold and other material picked up and
abandoned again, or parts or wholes of the
passengers themselves. Verne was clearly a
structuralist before the letter.
         Not all the cycles last for ever;
sometimes, indeed, there is built-in obsolescence.
In one significantly eccentric case, the
deliberate sinking of a ship provides the first
stage of a harbour, which will then prevent other ships from sinking
(MP ii 234); in another, fifty-three years later,
the only way to stop boats being wrecked is to
make smoke signals - using wood taken from boats
that have already been wrecked (PBM 132). In yet
other cases, the entity in question uses feedback
to counteract environmental changes. Thus, '(un
missile) vole pour ainsi dire de ses propres ailes
@ travers l'espace' '(et) entretient lui-mme sa
vitesse et l'acc{l}re jusqu'@ l'arriv{e au but'
(FD 180; 179); and posthumous flying-machines
possess an ingenious system of quasi-organic
'reflexes' which enables them to overcome all
fluctuations and to remain stable in three
dimensions (MB II vii 340-41).
         What is common to all such cycles is that
they link cause and effect together much more than
is normal in Nature. But also, because there is in
each case an alternation cause-effect-cause-
effect, each cycle is made up of four poles.
Figure 5 is an attempt to present this idea in
geometric form.
         The interest of the cycles undoubtedly
comes from their tension between reductionism and
vitalism. In each case, a carefully-selected
physical reality is described in regular, rhythmic
terms that perhaps mimic the process itself; in
each case, a hyper-economical, 'ecological'
solution is sought; and in each case therefore,
the effect is that of a comically independent
system, where a simple mechanical-biological
perfection explains everything (or nothing) - but
in any case ironically shows up more elaborate
systems.
         But not all the cycles in Verne's works
are defined in terms of the full double symmetry,
for in some the four poles collapse to two. One of
the duels, for example, consists of two men
mutually hunting each other, becoming '@ la fois
chasseurs et gibier' (TC 271). Again, wintering
ships contain two closed cycles in parallel - the
inhalation and exhalation of the air, and the
evaporation/condensation of the water (CH 228-29).
Similarly bipolar is the eternal and universal
cycle that consists of the equivalence of matter
and energy (CM (1908) 127). 
        A still compacter system where the two
poles act so much against each other as to
virtually collapse into one may be observed in a
hyper-stable Flemish town where the entire
industrial production - barley-sugar and whipped
cream - is consumed locally; where even fire and
flood never accumulate enough momentum to become
dangerous; and where the typical inhabitant is so
inert, so '"d{cid({)" (...) "@ ne rien d{cider"', that his clothes, person, and even his marriage
hardly ever wear out. Other remarkable uni-polar
systems include: one where water is heated by the
apparently naive method of burning water; a
corresponding, posthumous, 'pile {lectrique
capable de se r{g{n{rer d'elle-mme par des
r{actions successives'; a system where insulation
proportional to the cold is provided by Nature, in
the form of extra ice and snow; one where damage
done by sea-water to the Transatlantic Cable
merely serves to strengthen the whole; and - on a
larger scale - the cycle of life on Earth: '"la
vie disparatra (...) du globe (...). Peut-tre,
alors, notre sph{ro~ide se reposera-t-il, se
refera-t-il dans la mort pour ressusciter un jour
dans des conditions sup{rieures!"'.10
         All the cycles seem to depend largely on
reciprocal reaction, rather than on mere action;
they are all more or less closed; and therefore
the possibilities for real change are severely
limited. An apparently huge benefit is obtained
from the introversion of the system for, given
that output is conditioned by input or even fully
determined by it, no mismatch can ever result. At
best, the cycles may result in perpetual motion.
At worst, cause and effect get tangled up and,
even if the lack of external influence means that
the frameworks will last 'probably for ever' (20M
585), all internal activity tends to damp down. 
        
        Verne may here be operating a reductio ad
absurdum on certain nineteenth-century id{es
re\ues like the searches for a human mid-term
between the artificial and the natural and for a
perpetual-motion machine. But in any case, the
result is structures which surprise because of
their extreme economy of means, and because the
reader suspects there is a flaw somewhere, but is
given too little information to find it. Verne's
imagination is defined by its re-invention of the
current scientific theories and by its humorous
exaggeration.
         As for the real usefulness of such
systems, the author is ambivalent. On one hand,
they are presented as the most economical and
efficient ones possible; but on the other, they
produce conservatism and complacency and are in
the end the enemy of passionate, human concerns.
Verne is both attracted to and repulsed by the
idea of ultimate order in the universe.
        

How to Get Things Going

         The cycle with no input of energy is thus
presented as being totally stable in the long run.
But in many cases, there is a hidden leakage of
energy which, after a deceptive 'calme plat' (TCC
248), will end up converting the cycle into an
open system of positive feedback. The equilibrium
lasts longest when equal and opposing forces are
involved: those engaged by the duellists, for
example, but also those of rivals like Fogg and
Proctor, Hatteras and Altamont, the Three Russians
and the Three Englishmen (A3) or bbordais and
tribordais (IH). Verne delights in delivering a
come-uppance to excessively obstinate or arrogant
individuals, by the satisfying means of
confronting them with other versions of
themselves. Sustained rivalry between machines is
also a dramatic feature in many novels: the
Albatros and the Go a head (sic) (RC), Arraje's
submarine and the Royal Navy one (FD); but also
between machines and natural forces: Fogg's train
and the bison, Nemo's submarine and the whales,
Robur's flying-machine and the birds or Maucler's
steam-elephant and the real elephants.
         The more endogamous the conflict, in
fact, the more equally balanced; and accordingly
it is when a single force is turned back on its
own origin that the situation becomes the most
stable in the short term - but the most unstable
in the long run. This applies to communities, for
the self-denying order of Verne's Utopian and
dystopian cities - centralised, compartmentalised,
and specialised - conceals a remarkable tendency
to explosion.11 But it is above all true for the
individual, since the self-censorship and mutism
of the characters invariably leads to violent
outbursts, self-control to 'disequilibrium' - a
behaviour that is all the more 'impatient',
'absolute', 'impetuous', 'fiery', 'volcanic' or
simply 'insane' for having been long-repressed.12
         Verne's underlying debate would again
seem to be the natural-artificial one. In nature,
monsters are automatically eliminated, presumably
by means of reproductive mechanisms or by meeting
their mirror-images. But man-made monsters - and
human ones - have no such mechanism. The only way
that they will be destroyed, Verne seems to say,
is by a reflection of their internal tension: by
their own images in the mirror. The often
impressive order of the artificial, the cold, the
unspontaneous and the insensitive is the very
means whereby reality is lost sight of: because these systems secrete
their own perfection, they lose touch with natural
input, which is however the only valid one, and in
the long term, the only halfway efficient one.
Order ultimately leads to chaos.
        In other situations, an untrammelled
positive feedback comes to exist. Virtually every
Voyage presents examples of what is often called
a snowball effect or geometric progression: the
multiplication of vegetable and animal life, fires
and explosions, entry into strongholds; the
increasing effect of gravity on ships being
launched, on spacecraft, on pyramids of acrobats,
on tottering buildings; or the accelerating
progress of monomania, of the drunkard's thirst,
of technological capacity or of fame and
fortune.13
         Once started, these processes fuel
themselves and will require therefore no external
assistance. What does remain mysterious is how
they begin. How, starting from scratch, can one
attack the strongholds, escape from the
gravitational equilibrium point between the Earth
and the moon or build up a financial empire?14 The
Mysterious Islanders repeatedly meet this vicious
circle: 'pas un instrument quelconque, pas un
ustensile', 'le premier marteau manquait @ ces
forgerons', 'ils ne poss{daient mme pas les
outils n{cessaires @ faire les outils': 'de rien,
il leur faudrait arriver @ tout' (IM 63; 201; 160;
63). Just one ear of wheat, it is said, would be
worth 400 billion, one match an entire shipload;
with sulphuric acid, saltpetre could be made, with
saltpetre, sulphuric acid; with bricks, an oven
could be produced, with an oven, bricks (IM 265;
59; 220-22; 161-62).
         By posing the problem of multiplication
in such dramatic, insistent and economically
humorous terms, Verne is not altogether falling
into a naive scientism. He would in fact seem to
be questioning such systems with their own
arguments, applying the reflection process to the
thrust of the argument itself: if multiplication
is as simple as Linn{ and other biologists had
claimed, then how does it stop, but above all, how
did it manage to start? The problem is the
transformation of inertia-bound systems into
accelerating systems endowed with a life of their
own: it is the insertion of the variable 'time'
into the physical world. 
         Verne's first four prose texts give us a
broader perspective on this problem of starting
processes off: they all explore the mystery of the
creation of modern techniques, ideas or
institutions, as Delabroy points out with great pertinence (pp.
2-106). Thus 'Un Drame dans les airs' describes
the hazards of the first ascents in balloons, 'Un
Drame au Mexique', those encountered in starting
off the Mexican Navy, and 'Martin Paz', those of
establishing the Peruvian Nation; and 'La Destin{e
de Jean Mor{nas' (published in 1910, but probably
written in the early 1850s and then revised by
Michel) shows the problems of inaugurating an
autonomous personal existence.        
        Amongst the solutions proposed, the most
frequent is the discovery that the means of
starting the process off were present after all,
that novelty 
had been somehow built into the system. Thus
strongholds are usually betrayed from within; the
settlers are fortunate enough to find a single ear
of wheat and a single match, and make maximum use
of other items that happen to be at hand, like
watch-lenses to make a fire and a sharpened metal
dog-collar as a knife; the Mexican Navy is just
part of the Spanish Navy rebaptised; and the
Peruvian Nation had 'always' existed
(potentially). Again, hardly any of the
balloonists in history can be said to have
invented anything, for they all simply copied
previous constructs (DA 189). 
         The diametrically opposite solution is
the arrival of the deus ex machina, the mysterious
opening up of the system to an external influence.
It is Dr Ox's presence in the Flemish town that
gets things going and makes fires and passions
burn brighter; and it is Nemo's hidden
interventions that are in fact the main cause of
the settlers' progress - to such an extent as to
destroy the whole validity of their self-contained
Utopian experiment.15
         Both 'solutions' - from the inside and
from the outside - seem to avoid the central
problem of novelty, by concentrating on the ends
to be achieved rather than the means towards it.
But the two are reconciled in a third category,
which adopts the interior-exterior dichotomy as
its very operational principle, by incorporating
the vicious circle wholesale into the process of
take-off. Thus the settlers' first coarse attempt
at a hammer serves to construct a 'real' hammer;
their oven-brick dilemma is solved by an 'enormous
brick oven which will cook itself'; and
speculators make their first million by inventing
fictional share-values, which then become totally
real (IM 201; 168; H 170). As Ardan cryptically
argues: '"La fort n'est brl{e que par ses
propres arbres"' (TL 227). Attempting to restore
the multiple logical steps his argument jumps over, we can identify a
situation where radically different agent and
action are, as it were, chain-stitched together -
 that is their input and output fused, producing
an infinite and instantaneous va-et-vient, an
infinitely quick computer alternating between
complementary states. A static, endogamous
situation may then come, by magic, to create its
own validity and generate its own autonomous
process of positive feedback. The fire burns
itself; and without material to burn, fire would
never start. The dichotomy is still there. Novelty
simply becomes.
        One particular work seems to take this
problem as its central theme. 'Matre Zacharius ou
L'Horloger qui avait perdu son me' (1854, 1874)
pinpoints the difficult transition from a
lethargic '"vague immense"' (MZ 146) to an
energetic, chronometrised, and frenetic society.
         Set in pre-Reformation Geneva, this short
story recounts Matre Zacharius's invention of
clockwork, his explanation of the human body in
terms of a mechanical comparison, the subsequent
breaking down of all but one of his clocks, and an
accompanying reduction in his own vitality. The
sole surviving clock is to be found in the
mountain lair of a clock-devil, and Zacharius
follows it there, but arrives only to experience
its destruction, and, with it, his own death.
         It is clear that Verne is once again a
long way from his reputation of the pure adventure
novel. He is undoubtedly influenced by Hoffmann
and the Gothic tale and, more generally, by ideas
drawn from the Enlightenment, such as the
conception of the universe as deterministically
defined from the creation onwards and the debate
between vitalism and reductionism.16 But Verne in
fact goes much further on the specific subject of
time and the problem of starting processes off. He
interprets even the most exalted spheres of
existence in terms that are resolutely secular,
and indeed explicitly temporal: religious practice
is equivalent to filling the day with
precisely-timed ritual, and love is defined, with
a sexual undertone, as being merely two hearts
that are '"isochrones"' (MZ 167, 168; 138). But
time itself s to be in turn defined in terms of
material phenomena. Thus the accuracy of each of
Zacharius's clocks is guaranteed by a
self-regulating pendulum, '"(qui retrouve) sa
force perdue par ce mouvement mme de l'horloge,
qu'il (est) charg{ de r{glementer"' (MZ 133). Force gives movement, and
movement force; the clocks - and Zacharius himself
- are 'logically' in perpetual motion (MZ 173).
Furthermore, this clock-time is meant to control
the sun (MZ 143), but the sun remains obstinately
irregular, and therefore clock-time is instead
adjusted to it (MZ 143). Clock-time and sun-time
also form therefore a hermetic couple.
        Zacharius's inspired method, in other
terms, consists of reproducing what already
exists, namely the mechanism of the human body (MZ
131, 134), itself a reflection, in Biblical terms,
of divine being - and the advice his apprentice
receives is to imitate his master's method, that
is to produce a third-degree copy (MZ 131-34)!
         The fault in the system, I would argue,
the one that causes Zacharius's downfall, is
consequently in its very conception. Just as the
description of the clocks is dangerously
overloaded, with '"qu'"' and '"il"', both again
referring to multiple antecedents, so the defining
ideas are themselves vicious circles, mixing cause
and effect, measurement and control, and
materialism and hypostatisation. Zacharius's
overblown attempt to establish perpetual movement
thus produces the fatal short-circuit.
Nevertheless, the immaterial idea of the invention
will in fact ultimately succeed, enthralling the
whole of society to time and hence forming the
very basis of modern civilisation (MZ 130).
                   In this work, then, modernity
stems from the idea of applying materialistic
reductionism, first to the most exalted spheres of
human existence, reducing them to their
being-in-time, and then in turn to time itself,
reducing it to mere mechanical movement. But the
conundrum of time is still thereby far from
solved. Ultimately, the attempt to account
explicitly for the phenomenon just throws up a
paradox: everything is time, but time is nothing
in itself. And modernity, above all, came from
both inside and outside. Both novelty and the
medium in which novelty might come about are
unanalysable.
                  Verne's delight in all such
systems is thus evident. But behind the
materialism of these varied examples, and
especially in 'Matre Zacharius' is a debate on
the ongoing nature of time. Does time merely mark
a constant revolution, in the old-fashioned sense
of a simple re-arrangement of what went before? Or
are revolutionary revolutions possible, with
accompanying thresholds, breakthroughs, and
take-offs? Biology and mechanics often serve as a
frame of reference for the question, but its main
thrust is the attempt to 'test' hypotheses concerning
history in quasi-scientific fashion. The
underlying problem is - variously - that of
knowing how the physical universe came into being,
as a moving, dynamic entity; how organic life,
with purposeful movement, began; how human life
emerged, with intelligence, responsibility,
self-consciousness, hammers and stock-markets; and
on a last level, perhaps, how the process of
literary creation happens. The whole debate is an
optimistic veneer on a pessimistic base: the
depressed suspicion is that nothing can ever work,
that all attempts to act are doomed; and therefore
the last thing to do before giving up is simply to
prove that suspicion. Verne attempts to reproduce
the essential events in all the incipits, and thus
to isolate the points of rupture - if they exist
at all. If any part of the procedure can be
identified, then at least some knowledge will have
been gained. One might even have learned to change
things.  
         But in fact Verne seems uncertain what
the answers should be, and soon introduces
elements that vitiate or rather half-vitiate the
experiment. The idea of authentic discovery is
undermined but without being totally destroyed. As
in the case of exploration, Jules Verne seems
determined to defuse the whole question by
inserting as many borderline cases as possible.
The oppositions discovered-non-discovered or
original-imitative are swamped by such other
dichotomies as theoretical-pratical,
physical-conceptual, natural-artificial,
inside-outside, divine-temporal, until in the end
they are completely submerged. The only positive
conclusions seem to be that although the
undeniably new is often merely the old tacked
together, large amounts of novelty often simply
cancel out - but that a mere fictive or fictional
object can on occasion create an objective
reality.
         Verne's response to whether real change
in time is possible is to sit on the fence.
Clearly, the real constructs in the world today
represent changes in the past; but, almost equally
clearly, present changes are almost impossible to
implement. The very question disappears into an
infinite regress. 
        

Posthumous Cycles: Whither History?

         This is where Michel steps in. He takes
the already involved line of division between new
and old, and, as it were, threads it through
itself again, but then pulls it all out to produce
a different conclusion.
        One of the first signs of the change is
that in 'his' works, the spirals invariably spiral
outwards (PD viii 124, CM 131, MB II x 387, etc.).
In addition, whereas the idea of the cyclical
death and rebirth of the Earth is apparently
unique in Jules Verne's works, after 1905
repeating structures are often mentioned in a
philosophical or social context. The language,
above all, is new: thus the description of the
equivalence of matter and energy in La Chasse au
m{t{ore (1908) begins 'la substance, {ternellement
d{truite, se recompose {ternellement', and man's
analysis of matter into elements is similarly
characterised as '{ternellement @ recommencer' (CM
127, 126). Le Pilote du Danube (1908) remarks on
the 'perp{tuel recommencement de l'{ternelle
bataille pour la vie' (PD iv 64). And Les
Naufrag{s du 'Jonathan' (1909), lastly, contains
the following comment: 'l'un apr}s l'autre, (ces
hommes) {taient repris par la terre, creuset (...)
qui, continuant LE CYCLE ETERNEL, referait de leur
substance d'autres tres, h{las! sans doute,
pareils @ eux' (NJ II xi 219). These differences
are sufficient themselves to demonstrate that a
new pen is at work, one perhaps influenced by
Nietzschean, turn-of-the-century conceptions of
constant transformation. But the change is here
mainly on the level of language, making explicit
ideas about cycles which, I would claim, were
already to be found in the non-posthumous works,
although embodied in the action rather than in
philosophical form. Michel certainly has no
monopoly on closed systems or pessimism.
         Another sign of change is that cyclical
repetition is occasionally used in the plot
itself: in 'La Destin{e de Jean Mor{nas' (1910),
for instance, twice a man is murdered while
writing, twice the murderer proves to be the
hero's brother, and twice the hero goes to prison
to save him, with the two series of events forming
a sort of stereoscopic counterpoint. But only in
'L'Eternel Adam' does the idea of the cycle become
a structural motif, in this way marking, I
believe, a radical discontinuity in the Voyages
extraordinaires.
         The short story starts off in the general
style and ideology Verne has traditionally been
associated with. The Zartog in the twenty-third
millennium pronounces a dithyramb to the benefits
of science; and the anonymous narrator in the
third millennium similarly praises man's 'glorious
destiny' (EA 234; 217). Both are here
progressivists, observing a positive feedback in
human affairs, an autonomous motor of history,
with inventions leading to further inventions (EA
218), driving man on and up (EA 262). As for the
question of knowing how it all started, the first,
the vital, step out of the bloody morass of
prehistory is analysed by both men as having
involved, paradoxically, an intensification of the
slaughter (EA 216). This belligerent pacifism
(also a feature of the earlier Voyages) thus
employs the vicious-circle method of starting off
the historical process: plus \a reste la mme
chose, plus \a change.
         But in fact, the idea of uninterrupted
progress is subsequently undermined. The Zartog
and the anonymous narrator will be forced to
change their minds, and will end up adopting a
more pessimistic view of human affairs. The
author, it is true, does warn us, in a footnote
signed 'M.J.V.' (Michel Jules Verne), of the
unusually 'pessimistic' conclusions of this tale
'of Jules Verne's' (EA 213).
        Both heroes start by observing that the
advance of civilisation creates its own
difficulties, in particular an overdeveloped
hubris, as embodied in the desire to give
'l'immortalit{ (@) des organismes anim{s' (EA
233). Because it overstretches its capacities and
encroaches on divine domains (a frequent Jules-
Vernian theme), civilisation produces the seeds of
its own destruction. Both men come therefore to
regard the ascending course of history as only
part of a repeating structure: what goes up must
come down. From the observed and repeated evidence
of the events of the third millennium, Atlantis,
and the Flood, they deduce that there have been
peaks and troughs every 20,000 years. They even
catch a glimpse, behind the decline and fall of
these three civilisations, of '"une infinit{
d'autres humanit{s"' (EA 234; 255). This leads
them to deduce that there is an irremediable
cyclicity in history, that like his descendant the
Wandering Jew, the Adam of the title is indeed
destined to travel eternally, and that anonymous
narrators and scientific panegyrists will
alternate for evermore. Even the illustrations
show the degeneration of the colony in
Old-Testament style and the Zartog in Classical
surroundings (EA 257; 213). The conclusion proposed then by both of them -
again using the posthumous language - is that man
must acknowledge the inescapable evidence of the
'vains efforts accumul{s dans l'infini du temps'
and 'l'{ternel recommencement des choses' (EA 263;
263): that he can do nothing but stoically endure.
         In 'Jules Verne ou le mouvement
perp{tuel' (p. 27),
F. Raymond has argued that such a periodic
structure 'abolishes' the problems of the
directionality of history and the origin and end
of man by substituting an infinite and universal
'oscillation', with a precise geometrical
underlay. In terms of the presentation of this
chapter, the 'course' of history, as presented by
Michel, could be fitted into the cyclical schema
so often used by Jules. Even the number of stages
would fit (fig. 30). 
        
        These desciptions have undeniable
advantages in synthesising the views expressed in
'L'Eternel Adam'. But to remain exclusively at
this level of analysis would, I believe, be
dangerous, for it would be close to falling into
the 'inductive trap', to assuming that because
something has been true n times, it will
necessarily be true the n+1th time. It is more or
less reductionist:18 it has the disadvantage - a
crippling one - of implying that, since history
has been regular in the past, it will necessarily
be so in the future; and it also falls, heavily,
into the trap of accepting what the text says, and
ignoring what it shows.
        Reexamining the content and the form
suggests that the elegant symmetry of 'L'Eternel
Adam' is in fact destroyed at - or rather by - its
very construction: the Zartog can only know about
the repetition of history because it has been
communicated to him. Science redeems itself here,
for not only did a motor-car carry the anonymous
narrator to safety, but it was an aluminium
container which protected the vital document -
apart, ironically, from the scientific part of its
message (EA 260). The nub of the story is thus, I
would claim, the communication of a pessimistic
message: a communication which itself provides
grounds for a certain guarded optimism.19
         Michel's footnote may contain therefore
a double trap: its ascription of authorship to
Jules, but above all its emphasis on the
'pessimism' of 'L'Eternel Adam'. The tale
certainly seems to argue that the historical cycle
- summum of all the previous cycles - exists, but
at the same time that it can always be subverted.
Indeed, self-knowledge for humanity may consist
precisely of this vital short-circuit administered
to the cycle; and, if so, written communication - with the help of
technology - is the means by which it is effected.
         'Michel's' short story is thus surprising
in many ways. With its temporal structure divided
between two protagonists separated by 20,000
years, it contains many-layered debates on such
diverse temporal subjects as the origins of human
civilisation, the nature of repetition, the
importance of literature, the role of science, and
the future of mankind. Of course, it could be
argued that the works analysed are not entirely
Michel's. But I would claim to have identified
sufficient distinctive features to demonstrate at
the very least a change of emphasis from 1905
onwards, even if remaining in the same wide
framework. It could also be argued that the
specificity of 'L'Eternel Adam' was linked with
the period in which it was written. Such an
argument contains an amount of good sense - and in
any case would be very difficult to refute - but
is less important, I believe, than the personal
circumstances of the publication of the work - the
debate between father and son, carried out in
paternal style but from a filial point of view.
'L'Eternel Adam', I would argue, draws much of its
force from simultaneously forming an integral part
of, and standing in ironic contrast to, the
Voyages extraordinaires. It is de but not par
Jules Verne. 

Time Stabilised or Time Accelerated?
        
        What is common to the topoi studied in
this chapter is that they all avoid the fuite en
avant/arri}re of the linear structures. They
substitute ones involving an element of 'mixing of
levels', ones which it is not too fanciful to
conceive of as corresponding to a certain
self-consciousness. Much of their importance
resides in particular in their attempt to simulate
human behaviour in terms of a finite number of
variables or stages.
         History, especially, is typical of this
treatment, for it is initially presented as
comprised of ultimately only two phases: an
archaic one where objects and ideas merely
'circulate', without opening up any new
perspectives; and a modern, dynamic one where
there is some sort of progression, with events
producing events indefinitely, and so on, up
towards some unseen goal.
         This stereotyped nineteenth-century view
of historical progress is taken by the Vernes as the starting-point of their
attempt to escape from the theoretical,
verbalistic ideas of most of their contemporaries.
They argue that such a twofold representation
necessarily depends on a satisfactory account of
the transition between the phases, or, at the very
least, a realistic reproduction of it.
         L'Ile myst{rieuse, in particular,
addresses this problem. In the first half, the
settlers do manage to recreate the dynamic from
the static; the second half, however, demonstrates
that the experiment was vitiated from the
beginning, both by the germs of civilisation that
they had brought with them and by Nemo's meddling.
But what if this was the only way to get things
going, if civilisation and contamination were
inseparable, if the germs could only come
simultaneously from oneself and from elsewhere?
         Such a hypothesis would seem to be
central to 'Ma^itre Zacharius'. The Jewish
clock-maker is a member of an 'archaic race', and
imitates the First Clock-Maker, but he operates in
the Mecca of innovative Protestantism. He copies
his own workings, in an effort to make sure that
his material self will survive; but merely hastens
his own end guarantees instead the survival of an
immaterial idea. And he tries to subject time to
being merely an imitation of celestial events - or
even of its own previous workings - but fails
miserably, and succeeds by mistake in completely
opening time up. Historical progression would seem
to be merely the result of multiple
misunderstandings - repeated interlocking and
superimposed counterfeits, which together, and
completely unintentionally, in fact comprise the
most original step conceivable. The whole process
of intentional change is to implement in the
present, and impossible to define for the past,
for the process itself rests on undefined
elements. In other words, any attempt to analyse
or even reproduce the massive vicious circle of
the starting off of historical progression - or
the difference between novelty and imitation - is
bound to fail. It simply breaks it up, like a
bubble in a test-tube, into the corresponding
number of smaller vicious circles. Man's past has
a mystery at its centre.
         Nor is it clear which of the two phases
is preferable, either in the case of history or in
the general case of novelty-imitation. The
well-ordered, self-contained cycles resist wearing
out - but the time they conserve is virtually
dead. Although pre-Reformation history was safe from surprises, it was boring.
The multiplying processes, on the other hand,
consist of an invigorating density of events - but
they are extravagant, and possibly out of control.
Although creativity requires a vital spark, sparks
can be dangerous. Oxygen intoxicates, says Verne,
but it is also etymologically, a 'generator of
bitterness'. Ideally, therefore, one should seek
a middle situation between immobilism and
freneticism, and between self-absorption and
self-dissipation. But the cusps in Verne's works
are invariably of infinitesimal thickness,
including that between the cycle and the
non-cycle. The moment of inauguration of all the
vicious circles - but especially of historical
innovation - is undetectable, and probably
undecidable, and so moderation proves virtually
impossible to achieve.
         Only in 'L'Eternel Adam' does the tension
between recurrent and non-recurrent situations
receive a certain resolution. In the process,
partial reconciliations are also found for such
typically Vernian oppositions as exploration and
knowledge, the Natural and the artificial, science
and literature, optimism and pessimism, and the
reductionist and the transcendental. While
undermining such varied dichotomies, the
posthumous tale incorporates self-knowledge into
its contribution to the joint problem of story and
history. Its modernity, in other words, resides in
its seeking for solutions to the problems of life
in the literary form itself. Its conclusion -
which has a certain validity for the whole of the
Voyages - is that the cycle can also spiral
outwards, that the future is irreductible, that
time itself evolves, and that humanity may be both
the working out of an initial design and
self-generative. The validity of the questions
posed in 1854 is resoundingly confirmed in 1910.


CHAPTER 7
ONE AND ALL
          
Et voil@ qu'il sentit au plus profond de son tre se
creuser comme un gouffre (...). Puis tout @ coup, on
le lchait, et il tombait ... dans son propre
estomac, c'est-@-dire dans le vide (MS 197). 

O| le cannibalisme est trait{ th{oriquement (CG
666).
         
The Body Metaphoric

The closed systems in the material world examined up
to this point are not the only ones in the Voyages.
Interaction between the individual and the
environment exhibits many of the same features; and
the closed human systems point in fact to even more
surprising conclusions concerning space and time.
         One of the most striking features of 
Verne's works is their degree of personalisation of
the physical world. Plutonic domains, for instance,
are described in a vocabulary normally reserved for
the human body, with Axel and Lidenbrock's
penetration into the Earth being typical of the
multiplication of sexually-charged terms: 'fente
(...) entrailles (...) masses mamelonn{es (...)
fluides (...) sein (...) flancs (...) chevelure
opulente' (VCT 129-30).
          Delabroy quotes this passage at great
length, and analyses it with perspicacity (pp.
410-11);1 but he does not seem to have noticed other
passages in both terrestrial and marine areas.
Particularly interesting are the description of the
volcano in Hector Servadac, the island at the North
Pole in Capitaine Hatteras, Axel and Lidenbrock's
exit from the Earth, and Aronnax's departure from
the submarine:
         
Boyaux (...) flanc (...) orifice (...) grondements
(...) transsudait (...) pores (...) bouche (...)
exutoire (HS 224-26). 

Vomissait (...) s'agiter (...) secousses r{it{r{es
(...) respiration (...) flancs (...) embouchure
bouillonnante (...) ondoyait (CH 575). 

Cette formidable {treinte (...) 'symptmes' (...)
'repouss{s, expuls{s, rejet{s, vomis, expector{s'
(...) le sein de la terre (...) 'l'orifice' (...)
'respirer' (...) volupt{ (...) agitation (...)
mouvement giratoire (...) ondula (...) ronflantes
(...) bouche (...) je roulais sur les flancs (...)
nous {tions (...) @ demi nus (...) splendide
irradiation (VCT 351-59). 

Extases (...) soupir (...) sanglots (...) (je)
p{n{trai (...) l'ouverture (...) l'orifice {vid{
(...) ce gouffre justement appel{ le 'Nombril de
l'Oc{an' (...), (o|) sont aspir{s non seulement les
navires et les baleines, mais aussi les ours blancs
des r{gions bor{ales (...;) les roches aigus du
fond, l@ o| les corps le plus durs se brisent, l@ o|
les troncs d'arbres s'usent et se font 'une fourrure
de poils' (20M 609-12). 

         With the benefit of modern eyes, we may
detect in these passages a blatant sexual
undercurrent with virtually a whole catalogue of
before-the-letter Freudian symbols and sensations.
We may even suspect that Verne is deliberately
laying it on a bit thick. But what is more
interesting is perhaps the admixing of other
metaphors: the idea of childbirth, in the last two
passages ('"repouss{s, expuls{s, rejet{s"',
'l'orifice {vid{', '"Nombril"'); but above all the
process of eating/drinking, as indicated notably by
the vocabulary of mouths, breasts, spitting,
vomiting, entrails, bowels and orifices. These
instances of an alimentary concern are in fact by no
means isolated - we have already seen ones like the
'gouffres engloutissants' and the ocean '"(qui) se
NOURRIT lui-me^me (...), (et) ALIMENTE les sources
(...) sorties de son SEIN"' (RV 129).2
          It is already clear, then, that Verne's
characters enjoy a relationship with their
environment that goes well beyond the merely
instrumental; and that his reputation as 'just' a
children's and/or adventure-story writer is far from
the whole truth.
          Further evidence is to be found in the
anthropomorphic passion hidden in many of the
material objects, but especially in the ships. At a
preliminary stage, their diverse constituent parts
- 'tte', 'flancs', 'hanche', 'membrure',
'oeuvres-mortes', 'oeuvres vives', '"ventre"',
'quille', 'talon', 'jointures' - variously
'tremble', 'vomit', 'suffer', 'are carried away',
'wounded' or 'assuaged'.3 The helmsman is the soul
of the boat, is welded to it, forms part of it: its
flesh is his flesh, and the destruction of a boat
amounts to murder.4
          Some of this is standard marine
vocabulary, of course; but, apart from the density
of reference, what is remarkable is the way in which
the metaphor is adapted, to emphasise the identity
between food and fuel. If the vessel is identical to
the man, then the man must be identical to the
vessel. Many Vernian characters boil with
impatience, as if there were fires within them (TL
227). Indeed, their level of activity - their
intensity in time - is governed by their 'stoves',
which require constant replenishment with coal or
wood (CH 230; 321; 319; cf. TM 176). And one
comments: '"S'il faut recevoir des boulets dans
notre carcasse, j'aime encore mieux les boulets du
Nord. Ca se dig}re mieux"' (FB ix 80).
          The sexual allusions are again
interesting. A woman is described as '"la charmante
cargaison que j'ai rapport{e"': '"elle me retourne
comme fait la mer d'un btiment en d{tresse. Je sens
que je sombre"' (FB x 88; vi 50). Despite the
existence of 'human safety valves', frustrated
fianc{s fascinatedly follow a boat's 'longs pistons
(...) qui se pr{cipitaient l'un vers l'autre, en
s'humectant @ chaque mouvement d'une goutte d'huile
lubrifiante' (CH 22; VF 72). One character even
exclaims of a boat, voluptuously and longingly:
'"Que n'en suis-je la machine! Comme je le
pousserais contre vents et mar{es, quand je devrais
{clater en arrivant au port!"' (BL v 48).
          As if the exploration of the separate
metaphor was not enough, food and sex are united by
a shared bodily need, one that is the key to a
strange series of events disrupting the peace and
quiet of the self-contained Flemish town. It all
comes to a head in an operetta performed with
exceptional force: 'Un feu inaccoutum{ d{vore (l'un
des interpr}tes). (...) Il est embras{ (...), le
public (...), enflamm{ (...)! Toutes les figures
sont rouges comme si un incendie et embras{ ces
corps @ l'int{rieur (...) (; il y a une)
surexcitation infernale'; '(le chef ressemble @)
quelque M{phistoph{l}s, battant la mesure avec un
tison ardent' (DO 58-59; 68). The reason for the
alimentary and sexual vigour, it is revealed at the
end, is an excess of oxygen in the atmosphere, which
makes the passions stronger and which controls all
human functions - even the soul (DO 108; cf. AL
101-19, CH 556, 20M 517-31). For Verne, then, man
and boat, food, fuel and sex are virtually
interchangeable.
          This general idea of a man-machine had of
course been common since the Enlightenment; and as
Meyerhoff points out (pp. 2-3), it enjoyed a
particular vogue throughout the nineteenth century,
being undoubtedly one of the key inspirations of
such figures as Darwin, Marx or Freud. Verne's aim
is similarly to demonstrate the material
underpinning of all aspects of human life: to show
the naivety, in robustly Rabelaisian or Flaubertian
manner, of the idealist view of abstract essences,
of disembodied sentiments or thoughts; to
demonstrate, in a word, the earthy pulsions of human
beings. The apparently scientistic naivety of
studying 'la machine humaine' (MV 97) will have
further surprising consequences in the areas of
morality and the identity of the self.
         
Cannibalisation and Cannibalism

          Despite the mechanical metaphor, various
commentators have pointed out that industrial
production is almost totally absent from Verne's
works; and this also applies to non-industrial
areas. Boats are sailed rather than constructed,
children adopted rather than conceived; and fortunes
spent rather than earned. Even the material employed
by the various 'machines' is apparently never
created, and very rarely acquired at all. The
systems exist almost without input.
          When we examine the fate of Verne's
ships, another striking trait emerges. Just as camel
excrement is not discarded, but used for fuel (55
314), so none of the ships' constituent material
ever seems to be abandoned. In a few cases, the
boats are simply burned, in a literal application of
the Classical metaphor (e.g. VCT 328, TL 226). But
in most cases, they have the singular destiny of
providing materials for the needs of another vessel:
they are cannibalised.
          Non-production and recycling are of
course closely complementary. But what is remarkable
is the degree to which these principles of economy
are taken, in the form of internal recycling of
material. The term 'autocannibalisation' would seem
appropriate for this process.
          Sometimes, the idea is episodic, as when
the vessel is chopped up, either to provide its own
heating or, even neater, to produce motive power by
'devouring' its own 'oeuvres-mortes' (HG 304; CH
255, CH passim, TM 304). But in Le Chancellor the
idea structures the whole novel. First, a fire
starts spontaneously in the hold and begins to burn
faster and faster (C 50-51; cf. C15 412, 414). The
only way to halt this multiplying process - what
Verne calls a '"combustion progressive"' (FD 179)
and Serres, a 'positive feed-back loop' (p. 114) -
 is to flood the vessel. Here again the process
threatens the whole ship, although the feedback is
now a negative one, that is each successive stage
counteracts the process, making it slow down. But
then the singularly unfortunate vessel begins
sinking, and has therefore to be taken apart, so
that a raft can be produced from the remains. Still
the passengers' problems are not over, for they have
nothing to eat and in desperation try to devour the
sails and wooden and leather parts of the raft.
          In other words, the structure of the
whole work is determined by the catastrophic
metamorphoses of the eponymous ship. Each of the
four stages follows rigorously on from the preceding
one; and in each stage the vessel is bodily reduced.
A quasi-mathematical materialism governs the
narration. The successive developments of the
autocannibalisation constitute a precise convergent
series. The material of the Chancellor is the
material of Le Chancellor.
          So much attention to the fate of the
vessel clearly points to some sort of deeper
symbolism, but it is not immediately apparent what
this could be. In fact, if we add on the man-machine
and food-fuel metaphor, we obtain an automatic and
striking result: instead of ships 'consuming' each
other, humans: instead of cannibalisation,
cannibalism! It is obvious that yet another Vernian
extended metaphor is at work here. This theme occurs
in at least thirty Voyages, often on the flimsiest
of pretexts. In order to determine the extent of the
equivalence, let us now examine the 'internal
economy' of the cannibalism in the Voyages.
          In Verne's works, anthropophagy is
considered relatively banal when carried out between
primitive tribes as a means to exact revenge or to
satisfy hunger (e.g. CG 669). It is when the idea
occurs among Europeans and between acquaintances
that it seems to take on interest and indeed a life
of its own.
          The theme is introduced in extremely
innocuous fashion. Sometimes, as in the traditional
metaphor, curiosity, ambition, anger, impatience,
jealousy or desire make the character 'devour' his
fellows or else these feelings 'devour' the
character himself.5 Often, the sentiments are
deflected from an external object back towards
source and internalised as humiliation, anxiety or
nervousness, and cause the gnawing or biting of
'bridles', fists, thumbs, nails, beards, lips, or a
general 'self-devouring'.6 In these examples the
body eats itself from without. But the body may
equally well be digested from within. Notable
examples include the scenes of oxygenation ('un feu
(...) @ l'int{rieur', etc. (DO 58-59)) but also the
introjective dream where a character falls into the
bottomless pit of his own stomach (MS 197-98).
          If we examine actions of eating in the
literal sense, we notice a corresponding progression
from external to internal object, whose complete
range is again to be found in the decidedly complex
Le Chancellor. The initial situation, anodyne once
more, is that Kazallon and his companions on the
empty raft are famished and wish to catch fish.
Using the fish caught as bait, they know that a
geometrically multiplying amount could be caught, if
only the vicious circle could be overcome, if only
the closed system could be opened up. The means to
do so are eventually realised to have been at hand
after all: first flesh taken from corpses, and then
flesh cut from living people - 'oeuvres mortes' and
'oeuvres vives' again! These relatively 'exogamous'
solutions do not work, however, and the starving
passengers are constantly about to perpetrate acts
of assault or murder on each other followed by full
and unmitigated cannibalism. In the event, this sort
of thing does not happen, in the published versions
at least. It very probably did in the manuscript,
particularly since it occurs in the two main sources
of the novel.7 But to compensate, three remarkable
variations on the theme occur instead.





          At one stage, the passengers draw lots to
determine who should be killed and eaten; an invalid
loses, and is about to serve as victim, when his
father intervenes and offers himself instead, or
rather his arms; and only a 'chance' incident
prevents the sacrifice being carried out. Earlier,
the Black cook had gone mad, presumably through lack
of culinary material to work on, and 


offered his own substance to his companions as a
substitute sustenance: '(...) sa rage se tourne
contre lui-mme. Il se d{chire de ses dents, de ses
ongles, nous jetant son sang @ la figure et criant:
] "Buvez! Buvez!"' (C 213). Kazallon, lastly,
undergoes the torture of thirst and finishes by
cutting his own vein and drinking from it: 'me voil@
me d{salt{rant @ cette source de ma vie! Ce sang
repasse en moi, il apaise un instant mes tourments
atroces; puis, il s'arrte, il n'a plus la force de
couler!' (C 221). The system starts by flowing
maximally before the short-circuit terminally short-
circuits itself. This act - which gains considerable
force because it is also a terrible temptation for
three other characters, namely Kennedy, Axel and
Shandon (5S 225; VCT 217; CH 35) - represents a
shocking but satisfying terminus to the
progressively more cannibalistic, violent and self-
centred activities. 
          A whole gamut of successively more
endogamous solutions has in this way been tried:
paracannibalism, then cryptocannibalism, then
necrocannibalism, and finally, after a flirtation
with the real thing,8 autocannibalism. The mere
mention of any of these individual acts would have
created scandalised havoc in any drawing-room of the
period, but Verne accumulates them in successively
more horrifying behaviour, integrating them at the
same time into a single sequence. Each successive
term is obtained from the preceding one by taking
the process one further stage along the path of
endogamy, bringing the process closer and closer to
home. The actions again constitute a convergent
series - and one which is 'taken to the limit'. The
final stage represents the most radical act, but at
the same time the most balanced one in physical
terms.
          A certain sexual undertone may perhaps be
detected in the progressively more morbid bodily
acts. This is indeed confirmed in various ways, and
ones which further illuminate the endogamy. 
         Elsewhere in the Voyages one can detect a
certain sexual/cannibalistic innuendo. Conseil says
to his master Aronnax: '"Vous, anthropophage! Mais
je ne serais plus en sret{ pr}s de vous, moi qui
partage votre cabine! Devrais-je donc me r{veiller
un jour @ demi-d{vor{?" ] "Ami Conseil, je vous aime
beaucoup, mais pas assez pour vous manger sans
n{cessit{"' (20M 227). But it is in fact also
possible to detect parallels with precise sexual
acts. First, that other crime of taking over the
body of another person, rape, is evoked a surprising
number of times in the Voyages extraordinaires. Thus
in addition to the traditional obsession for White
women to die rather than be separated from their
menfolk, texts as distant in time as 'Un Hivernage
dans les glaces' (1855) and La Mission Barsac (1919)
involve protracted and explicit scenes of full-
blooded attempted rape; Zacharius asks his daughter
to give her body to the clock-devil for his sake;
and the passage listing the various results of of
'miscegenation' also refers, obliquely but
unmistakably, to '"les belles go{lettes blanches que
plus d'un flibustier abordent par le travers!"'.9 It
is no coincidence that none of these works was
produced during the period of Hetzel p}re's
supervision: the 'go{lettes blanches' sentence was
indeed cut when the story was published in the
Voyages (as 'Un Drame au Mexique' (DM iv 445)). When
allowed to, sexual violence rears its head
surprisingly often in Verne.
          Similarly, just as Mor{ (ch. 3) has
detected a strong streak of homosexuality in the
Voyages, so autoerotic hints are also amazingly
transparent, given his audience and social context.
If in the vegetable realm sago-palms innocently
'croissent sans culture, se reproduisant (...) par
leurs (propres) rejetons et leurs (propres)
graines', the branches of certain African trees have
'feuilles (...) de six @ sept pouces, doubl{es d'une
{corce @ substance laiteuse, et dont la noix,
lorsque le fruit est mr, fait explosion en
projetant la semence de ses (...) compartiments'.10
In the same way, in the human realm, one can observe
descriptions like: 'Kin-Fo rvait d{j@ (...), et
(...) senti(t) une sorte de chatouillement @ sa main
droite. ] Instinctivement, ses doigts se referm}rent
et saisirent un corps cylindrique l{g}rement noueux,
de raisonnable grosseur, qu'ils avaient certainement
l'habitude de manier (...)'.11 A certain amount of
similar evidence is available in Verne's letters,
for Soriano has quoted '(des) aveux nafs
d'auto-{rotisme', for instance: '(mon propri{taire,
Jules Verne,) a perdu l'habitude de m'{largir en
fourrant ses doigts dans mes profondeurs (...).
Monsieur votre fils, Madame, (...) rel(}ve) sa
moustache en croc, il la caresse un peu trop (...)
mais (...) mes secr{tions ne sont pas trop
abondantes (etc.)'.12
         A first conclusion is that Verne here
seems to go beyond the normal bounds of stories for
young people - or even for adults. In the case of
the raft-bound cannibalism, he is undoubtedly
reflecting contemporary reality, for numerous cases
were reported in the press throughout the period.
But the number of times the anthropophagous and
sexual themes are repeated points at the same time
to psychological or social - even psychoanalytical
- concerns.
          It is here that the man-ship metaphor may
reinforce our understanding of both poles of the
problem. Undoubtedly one of the most remarkable
things about cannibalisation, cannibalism, and the
'perverse' forms of sexuality is their displacement
of the object of desire. Ships normally burn fuel,
and people normally eat food and often have sexual
relations. It is only when the object is one usually
considered more or less a subject that surprise is
generated. In other words, each of the three
processes seems to be perverse only in so far as it
limits its choice to a severely limited subset of
the universe for interaction, only if it defines the
'inside' and the 'outside' in a constricted way.
          When Nature's abundant external resources
are so wilfully excluded, it is the material of the
consumers themselves which is brought into play,
turning the system literally inside-out. But once
the 'consumption' has been made internal, the stage
is set for a closed cycle of recursive activity. In
theory at least, a fixed proportion of the system
will go in to be consumed, but emerge as turncoat
'consumer'; but a fixed proportion will also be used
up at each stage, thus closing it more - and
increasing the horror each time. Like Kazallon's
blood, the resources will start by reducing
relatively quickly, but will never completely be
exhausted. Like Zeno's arrow, they will never be
able to quite reach their final destination,
although they will be able, given enough time, to
get infinitely close.13 A decreasing vestige of
activity will always continue - an object cannot
ever completely absorb itself.
          Verne's structures are certainly
fascinating, but may seem rather abstract and
gratuitous. I would claim however that a certain
debate on social ethics is in fact present, and that
the successive graduations in the system may equally
well be construed as a highly significant moral
thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Cannibalisation,
cannibalism and sexuality are all so important for
Verne because of their grounding in the most
material reality, because the basic acts can destroy
others in the most physical sense. But a variation
is provided in each case by a directly opposed act:
instead of the use of a foreign body for one's own
purposes, one's own body is unrestrainedly offered
for the use of others. Zacharius's suggestion that
his daughter give her body for his sake is thus a
commentary on the egoism of the basic act; and so,
above all, is the behaviour of the invalid's father
and the frustrated cook. Verne is of course
reactivating the cannibalistic sub-text of the
Eucharism here, with its curious mix of self-
sacrifice and consumption of flesh and blood - as
elsewhere in Le Chancellor, he uses other Biblical
imagery, such as the twelve companions, the
crucifixion image of outstretched arms, and the
final baptism in fresh water. But more
fundamentally, he would seem to be pointing to the
hypocrisy of most of the social tabous, whether
Christian or not: if one should really do to others
as one would have them do to oneself, then why
should all forms of cannibalism and sexuality
produce such moral outrage? If in particular, the
basic act is always wrong (at least in fiction),
then why is the opposite act not sometimes right?
          Having posed the difference self-others
in such stark and paradoxical terms, Verne then
crowns his demonstration by moving the goalposts a
second time and converting the opposition into a
synthesis. If the basic act destroys the other, and
if the opposite act is also immoral, then why not
oppose the two monsters, why not abolish both
problems by combining the two into a single pole, by
identifying the subject and the object? The
autocannibalisation, autocannibalism and
autoeroticism that result should logically remove
any remaining moral objections. The activity here is
more or less self-cancelling - and thus represents
the ultimate compact cycle - but above all
constitutes the final ironic showing up of the
social tabous.
          The effect on time and space is also
undoubtedly surprising. Judged from the outside,
less and less substance is involved at each stage,
meaning a slowing down of time, as in the formal
cycles. But judged from the inside, the process gets
more and more self-contained, obsessional, and dense
in time. It is because gratification can be
virtually instantaneous that the time outside and
the time inside are divorced. The acts represent
both an absolute concentration and an absolute
dissipation of desire. Verne's pursuit of the
eternal leads him back towards the present and
finally into an ultimate short-circuited spasm, a
hyper-dense fragment of non-time. The infinite is
contained within the infinitesimal.
         

Kinship and Companionship

          We have thus seen that, far from being
sentimental or simplistic accounts of human
relationships, Verne's works contain complex and
unmitigated descriptions of physical interactions.
The reader of the Voyages can detect similar
tensions in the purely social aspects of human
relations; with, once again, the themes of
introversion, time and space being important issues.
          As far as the family is concerned, the
arborescence might have been thought to occur
frequently as a means of emphasising the continuity
of extended relationships over time, in accordance
with the traditional image of the family tree. In
fact, in the rare examples where the image is
employed, it is the dissipatory aspect of vertical
relationships that is emphasised: 'Depuis bien des
si}cles, les ramifications, sorties du tronc commun,
s'{taient {cart{es de la ligne du glorieux anctre';
'la famille s'{tait divis{e et perdue en de
nombreuses ramifications' (RV 19; MS 34). In
accordance with this loosening, the common literary
theme of 'transcendence of time by means of progeny'
also receives short shrift in Jules Verne's works.
It is treated either in extremely conventional terms
- 'Dans les enfants il reste toujours quelque chose
de la vie d'un p}re!' (MS 149) - or else in subtly
ironic ones: 'Le bourgmestre se maria (...) dans des
conditions excellentes ... pour l'heureux mortel qui
devait lui succ{der' (DO 107). Verne is mocking,
simultaneously and sardonically, the ideals of
progression, altruism and parenthood.
          Many of the Vernian relatives are for
this reason distant ones in distant parts - an
Indian Begum or one of the proverbial 'Uncles in
America' (500; Un Neveu d'Am{rique, p. 394). The
idea of inheritance is similarly affected. Wealth
will be transmitted to the most unlikely of
relatives (MS 229, etc.) - in Testament d'un
excentrique (1899), to the eccentric legator of the
title himself. There is in sum a tremendous gulf
between much of one's kin and oneself;
inter-generation relationships are stretched to the
point of disappearing.
          Relationships within a generation, on the
other hand, are very close in the Voyages. There is
a strong tendency for attraction to exist between
siblings or quasi-siblings - confirming the
importance of the availability of the object of
desire. Zacharius's apprentice and daughter, brought
up in the same household, marry each other; so do
the virtually identical twins M. R{-di}ze and Mlle
Mi-b{mol, Lidenbrock's adopted son and daughter, and
Michel Strogoff and his mother's 'daughter'; Jean
Mor{nas is in love with his sister-in-law (and
cousin, and therefore 'cousin-in-law'); and Ferney
is only very narrowly foiled in his posthumous
attempt to rape his half-sister.14
          There are also a large number of male
couples in the Voyages, whose dominant mode
similarly oscillates between the fraternal and the
marital. Sometimes they are constituted of 'deux
fr}res Siamois' - '"deux jumeaux ... mais pas du
mme ge ... ni de la mme m}re"' - and sometimes
they are in Servadac's situation: '"Alors, nous
voil@ mari{s, Ben-Zouf." ] "Ah! mon capitaine, (...)
il y a longtemps que nous le sommes!"' (MS 233; 205;
HS 464). Moreover, members of both heterosexual and
homosexual couples are normally not only without
offspring, but are also themselves orphans or even,
as in one indicative case, 'v{ritables produits
d'une g{n{ration spontan{e' (MS 195). 
          Both underlying tendencies, the
incestuous and the self-contained and
non-productive, are, lastly, combined in one
brilliant example. In the static Flemish town, the
'same' married couple has existed since 1340, as
Michel Serres points out.15 Whenever one Mme Van
Tricasse dies, a second one is chosen, '(une)
cousine' (DO 107), presumably the fruit of a
previous stage of the couple. The same incestuous
remarriage applies to the husband, with widowhood
and widowerhood thus following each other in strict
alternation, indefinitely and, as Verne says, 'sans
solution de continuit{' (DO 11). The problems of
choice and freedom have apparently been solved. The
branches of the family tree have here been absorbed
into the trunk - which they then split into further
self-searching and -seeking branches.
          As well as amusing himself, then, Verne
is expressing his views about marriage. Choice of
partner is often arbitrary and in any case
irrelevant. One plus one does not always make two.
The Van Tricasse couple(s) combine(s) maximal
endogamy with minimal production: they
simultaneously exclude the temporal flux and
triumphantly overcome it.
          More generally, a debate on the person is
going on. As a phenomenon which occurs in nature,
the twins and all the other close couples appeal to
the Verne of the early self-confident period
(whereas mirror imagery would seem more in evidence
in the later, self-conscious period, with its
emphasis on the allegorical and the 



artificial). The use of twins has of course been
common in stock situations in comic writing from
Shakespeare to Tintin, as a way of posing the
questions of identity and difference. In Verne's
case, however, there is in addition the general
biological context. Jacob (p. 91) points out that
Darwin, for instance, thought that the similarities
and variations represented by close relatives were
the basis of all classification. But in fact Verne
seems to re-route the scientific or even social
implications onto the specifically personal ones -
emphasising, in particular, the fragility of the
concept of the individual. Everyone is defined in
terms of others, but the others do not themselves
allow a precisae definition. Persoanlity also
implies an infinite regression.
         
         In the social group in general, there is
a similar tendency to closure, and, with it, again
a problem of excessive introversion. Numbers are
strictly limited, with a maximum of five or six full
members, and an average of about three -  as Vierne
says, 'la vie prot{g{e dans (...) une communaut{
privil{gi{e'.16 The desert-island or other totally
self-contained community is thus merely an extreme
expression of this tendency; and it is no
coincidence that the Mysterious Island has the form
of a 'pt{ropode monstrueux' or that Nemo's submarine
takes its name from the nautilus (IM 135; 20M
295-96), given the complete self-sufficiency of
these two forms of animal life.
          Within the group, altruistic acts are
again often attempted, with their generosity once
more being emphasised by their corporeal nature:
characters attempt to save their companions by such
eccentric means as throwing themselves out of
balloons, going to prison when innocent, or trying
not to use up oxygen for breathing (5S 270-71, IM
10; DJM 114, 142-43; 20M 527). But this recurrent
ninenteenth-century watchword, of 'being made happy
only by the happiness of others' (J 37, CH 544, FB
x 88, etc.), is shown up by an altruism which turns
out to be merely superficial. Thus the balloon
stowaway switches from offering to throw himself out
to attempting to throw the hero out instead;
Zacharius uses his previous 'generosity' to justify
his present egoism ('"Puisque je t'ai donn{ la vie,
rends la vie @ ton p}re!"'); and Ox's offer to
provide free lighting for the peaceful Flemish town
proves in the end to have been a mere cover for his
callous and dangerous experiment on human beings (DA
201, 213; MZ 172; DO 16, 108-09).
          Those who depend on the public for their
living are particularly conscious of the danger of
egoism/narcissism, of the fragility of their links
with the rest of the world. 'Entertainers' as varied
as acrobats, a dancing teacher, a Mormon preacher,
a journalist and a scientist end up 'performing'
without an audience; and Aronnax's book is read most
intently by Aronnax himself.17
          Clearly, a similar endogamy is present to
the one visible in the cannibalism and other
perverse processes; but, as we shall see, the
consequences are not always identical.
          One particularly revealing case of
professional introversion is to be found in
'Frritt-Flacc' (1884). This gothic tale features an
egoistical doctor who treats only those patients
rich enough to pay for his services. One dark night,
he is entreated to attend to someone in the next
village, but refuses to go until promised a large
sum of money. After travelling towards the village
for a while, however, he has a shock: without
changing direction, he has suddenly found himself
going back and re-entering his own house. He ends up
attempting to treat himself, or rather his own
double lying in bed, but he is too late, and finally
patient and doctor both die.
          This strange Hoffmannesque story is thus
not only another example of linearity becoming
circularity, but constitutes an original refutation
of the idea of time-travel. It makes explicit what
was hinted at in Voyage au centre de la Terre: the
argument that the whole idea of time-travel requires
a splitting of the person into two and is thus
riddled with contradiction. More specifically, goes
the argument, if time-travel is possible, then so is
meeting one's ancestor before, say, his marriage.
Then so is killing him; then so is preventing him
from having (had) any descendants; then so is
preventing his descendants travelling in time -
which is a blatant contradiction. In 'Frritt-Flacc',
this syllogism is taken to its concisest limit by
observing the particular case where one's 'ancestor'
is, egoistically, oneself. The doctor (accidentally)
kills himself 'in another temporal state', and thus
creates a simultaneously self-contradicting and
self-confirming spatio-temporal loop. (Did the
doctor travel and treat himself? How could he, if he
was dying? But how could he avoid doing so, if he
was dying?) The person that travels cannot kill the
one that stays at home, for he depends logically on
him; but, given that a contradiction exists in any
case, what better person from an aesthetic point of
view to kill the doctor than himself? 
          The potential paradox set up by the time-
travel of Voyage au centre de la Terre is thus
explored after all. The science-fiction of the
twentieth century here covers ground that had
already been explored by the Voyages
extraordinaires. 
         But the tale is especially a study in
solipsism. The doctor's division of the world,
separating those who can pay for his services from
those who cannot, is shown to fall down by virtue of
a set-theoretical formalisation of the Cretan Liar
Paradox. Since it would be absurd for the doctor to
pay himself for his own services, then, by his own
egoistical logic, given that he does not pay, he
cannot treat himself either. But he must treat
himself (since no-one else will) and he is therefore
obliged to split himself into the two personae -
payer and payee - with the fatal consequences.
Taking self-absorption to the limit thus results in
losing part of one's identity, in being literally
alienated from oneself - and ultimately disappearing
up one's own temporal vortex.
          In case it be objected that Verne's
example, being comprehensible, cannot be of any
profound philosophical value, it should be pointed
out that Bertrand Russell's destruction of the
logical coherency of set-theory as it was then
conceived consisted merely of considering this sort
of example. Russell examined 'The barber shaves all
those who do not shave themselves. Does he shave
himself?', the precise logical equivalent of 'The
set of all sets that do not contain themselves (what
about that set?)'. Following Russell's example, not
only contemporary set-theory, but also the
philosophical foundations of mathematics in general,
were found to be 'inconsistent', that is that not
all its propositions could ever be both true and
provable.18
         Verne's works, then, set up a variety of
closed social systems, and employ them to continue
the debate on the role of the individual and the
nature of logic. The smaller the system, the greater
the strain. When numbers go below three, dramatic
changes in behaviour result. And when the social
unit is reduced to one-and-a-fraction persons, the
logical foundation of arithmetic, geometry and
set-theory are undermined, egoism interferes with
its own principles, and even time and space change.
Closing all the exits produces unpredictable
results.
         
Knowledge and the Lone Individual

          The tendency to timeless and spaceless
egoism is especially visible in the individual who
cuts himself off from his fellows. He is variously
described as '(tout) en dedans', 'impassible,
imp{n{trable, insensible', 'taciturne, (...)
concentr{, (...) rejet{ en lui-mme', 'repli{ sur
lui-mme', 'aveugle pour tout ce qui l'entour(e)'.19

         His solipsism is above all apparent in his
speech acts. Thus he continues without transition
conversations interrupted hours before; he perorates
subjectively or '"@ blanc"'; he talks to himself,
often taking both sides of the conversation; he
cannot finish his sentences, which must be completed
by his twin; he systematically contradicts previous
assertions; or he speaks 'au pluriel, afin, sans
doute, de se donner la flatteuse illusion d'un
auditoire suspendu @ ses l}vres'.20 He ignores, in
other words, such conventions of dialogue as the
individuality of interlocutors, the beginning and
end of utterances, and the progression of topic.
What happens as a result is that the very mechanism
of communication is perturbed. Sometimes, the
individual's speech is blocked; and sometimes it
runs away with him instead. But on occasion both
somehow happen together in a remarkable pre-Freudian
'explosive stuttering', 'aposiopesis', 'paroles
pr{cipit{es', stumbling over or swallowing of
sentences, or ejaculations, 'non en longues phrases,
mais par petites interjections'.21
          Verne's perceptive observation of certain
psychological traits thus leads him to the heart of
the problem of social time. In the Vernian syndrome,
there is an element of 'angelism' which takes the
form of an attempt to fit too much activity into a
finite time or space. This would seem to be both a
reaction to and a direct cause of what is in many
ways its opposite, a profound pessimism. The
character is in a hurry because of his deep anxiety,
the anxiety that his audience may be snatched away
at any moment, as it has so often before. He is a
perfectionist because of repeated previous setbacks,
when his best was judged not good enough. As a
result, whereas in the cannibalistic and other
processes, less and less material was chasing itself
round and round, here the system tends to be blocked
by an excess of material. But, surprisingly, the
effect is often very similar: abrupt movements, an
alternation of fullness and emptiness, a space-time
that is both flying apart and crumpled up.
          Occasionally the theme of solitude is
evoked directly. A 'Chinaman's' natural preference
is declared to be isolation (ER 257), and some
characters are tempted by the idea of life alone on
a desert island, as a 'king without subjects' (5S
5). But those who actually experience such
conditions are in practice soon disenchanted. Smith
concludes '"Malheur @ qui est seul"', and Nemo
similarly declaims '"Je meurs d'avoir cru que l'on
pouvait vivre seul"' - although he does not say if
he would have done the same again (IM 513; 819; cf.
CG 327). 
         Only the posthumous characters do not
concur. The pilot of the Danube and the Zartog are
shown as actually preferring solitude; and the hero
of Les Naufrag{s du 'Jonathan', especially, can find
no permanent solution to the problems of society
other than the cloister (NJ III xv 442), a cell
consisting of a bare and rocky island: he decides to
'vivre, libre, seul, - @ jamais' (NJ III xv 444).
Once again, Michel's conclusions extrapolate those
of his father to the point of exaggeration.    

         The problems of lack of integration in the
time and space of society are particularly evident
in the case of the scientist. Mechanics, in
paricular, is very prominent in many of the Voyages,
with whole chapters devoted to it in at least five
different works (TL, AL, SDD, 500, HS). The
scientists often claim that science is infallible
(e.g. VCT 126), and mechanics in particular is
described as having the almost magical power of
predicting the future with perfect accuracy (e.g. PF
265, CM 178-79). But the practice is frequently
shown to be very different. A predicted total
eclipse is only partial, all the experts are wrong
about the path of the moon projectile, and the most
competent scientists cannot agree whether a certain
meteor will fall on Japan in June or Patagonia in
July. Science ultimately proves to be eminently
perfectible (VCT 48), merely serving "'@ savoir, la
plupart du temps, qu'on ne sait pas encore tout'"
(HS 494). Darko Suvin's contention, that "science
(...) was for Verne (...) the bright noonday
certainty of Newtonian physics", is therefore far
from the truth.22 
          An identical division may sometimes be
detected in the personality traits of Verne's
characters. There are a large number of rigid
characters, obsessed with rules and duty, defined 


in a word by their "mechanicalness". Thus
Zacharius's resemblance to a pendulum (MZ 113) is
shared by Lidenbrock, "(qui fait des) enjamb{es
math{matiques d'une demi-toise" (VCT 7), but also by
the scatologically-presented Nicholl, "'un
chronom}tre @ secondes, @ {chappement, avec huit
trous'" (AL 16). But it is Fogg who is subject most
often to mechanical and chronometric metaphors:
              
"Une v{ritable m{canique" (TM 14), ce qu'il faisait
{tait (...)  math{matiquement toujours la mme chose
(TM 4). Avec la pr{cision d'un automate (TM 311, cf.
321, 331), il ne voyageait pas, il d{crivait une
circonf{rence. C'{tait un corps grave, parcourant
une orbite autour du globe terrestre, suivant les
lois de la m{canique rationnelle (TM 71-72).
(C'{tait) un tre bien {quilibr{ dans toutes ses
parties, justement pond{r{, aussi parfait qu'un
chronom}tre (TM 10). 
         Because they sacrifice human values, these
men are often presented as being more efficient than
their fellows. But in practice, ponderous perfection
normally tends to defeat even its own object.
Zacharius is led to his death, Hatteras to madness,
and Nicholl and Fogg survive only by tempering their
severity, by adopting some of the flexibility of
their "luxuriant" companions.23 Whether as a
scientific theory or as a mode of behaviour, then,
the systematism of mechanics is its very weakness,
rendering it unadapted to the real world. Once again
Verne starts off with a relatively banal idea -
mechanics was a frequent metaphor over much of the
period 1850-80, the apogee of scientism. But in
fact, having put the conventional wisdoms of the day
into the mouths of his characters (and sometimes his
narrator), Verne thens to proceed systematically to
upset them. Ultimately, he argues, mechanics solves
very few problems - and time cannot be treated as a
mere physical constant.
         Thus, although Verne's conception of
science is that of an open system, the individual
savant is constantly threatened by the closure of
his personal world. In the 'worst' cases, he lives
virtually outside the space and time of normal human
activity. He omits to sign his letters -
'"Pouvait-on douter qu'elles ne fussent de moi?"' -
does not know how to read a railway timetable, and
forgets either days - '"Tiens! mon dner a pass{
vite"' - or whole decades (HS 329; VCT 65; 40; 49).
He attempts to subvert those time-pieces and other
instruments which do not read as he would have
wished, to hurry up the time of the natural world,
or to apply science to himself (e.g. RV 92; 20M 608,
JMC i 13). In the early works, his concomitant
ignorance of psychology, finance and politics leads
him into relatively harmless incidents and
accidents; but in the later ones, his parabolic,
hyperbolic, or elliptic behaviour causes him to
become the tool of unscrupulous villains and thus to
become a force for evil. His essential problem has
to do with his division between scientific knowledge
and human knowledge. He cuts himself off from
present reality,24 he denies his own subjectivity
and his own position in time, and even his science
is self-centred (e.g. HS 527, MZ 128, 158). The
result is an enclosure in the straitjacket of the
present which is itself adrift in a sort of
spaceless void.
          But even the scientist who lives in time,
'in touch' with others and aware of such problems,
is not thereby totally exonerated. The Vernian
savant is constantly subject to the dangers of
relying exclusively on the past or present and of
falling into plagiarism or self-observation,
especially when he is confronted with apparently
virgin lands. Thus territories that might have been
thought to be most clearly uninhabited - the North
Pole, the depths of the ocean, the interior of the
Earth or the dark side of the moon - often contain
convincing evidence of human activity, in the form
of ruins, footprints or voices (CH 536-38; 20M
420-24; VCT 209-11, 219; AL 244). Even less remote
and prestigious areas pose scientific problems in
determining what is really new. Where does the
solitary savage discovered on the desert island come
from (IM 503)? Is the giant human skeleton
authentic? What is the origin of the missing-link
creatures' culture? Are the logic, precision and
subtlety of the Australian Aborigines' language,
implying the possibility of a lost civilisation (B
457), further evidence of the superiority of the
first men? Is the Gaelic spoken by a girl discovered
in a disused mine a natural language, one spoken
without ever having been learnt (IN 152)?
          Some of the questions are never answered,
but in a majority of cases, apparently convincing
evidence of unsullied savages merely proves to be
due to a European presence: the ruins on the
ocean-floor, for instance, are those of Atlantis,
the mummy in the interior of the Earth is a White
man, the solitary savage is a castaway, the culture
of the missing-link creatures comes 


mainly from a resident German anthropologist, and
the skeleton is nothing but a modern fake. And where
there are no convenient natives to act as resonator
for the Europeans' contact with their own culture,
an extremely neat self-reflective device sometimes
substitutes: voices heard underground are actually
in the character's head; the lunar ruins exist only
in Ardan's imagination; and two different sets of
footprints in totally virgin territory are caused by
the explorers' coming full circle and following
tracks previously made by themselves (VCT 209-11; AL
244; CH 549, VCT 322)! Scoops are therefore much
rarer than it would at first seem, for explorers are
often simply investigating each other or, in the
worst cases, themselves. Once again originality and
a different future prove hard to find.
          Although scientific knowledge is often
presented as a powerful model for understanding the
world, the actual process of scientific/geographic
discovery is thus shown as fraught with tremendous
problems. Verne argues that the question of
authenticity cannot employ the logical categories
used in established laboratory science, but
necessarily points back to the subjectivity and
existence-in-time of the field scientist himself.
Only by resisting the tendency to the eccentric and
the inhuman can the scientist hope to retain both
his sanity and his scientific effectiveness. There
is no automatic test of originality, time cannot be
circumvented, and the only conclusion is largely
pessimistic and self-cancelling: the vicious circle
of authentic discovery depends on the need to
exercise systematic doubt, to transcend one's own
thought-processes, in short, to 'bootstrap' oneself
up onto a higher conceptual level.
          Verne ultimately argues against the
positivistic views characteristic of his epoch. His
scientists are individualists, who have apparently
no need of sustained contact with external reality,
but who remain in practice vitally dependent on such
a contact. Verne's vision of ongoing scientific
discovery is expressed in terms remarkably similar
to those of literary creation.
         
Individual and Society

          The situations examined in the present
chapter take on varied forms, but they all revolve
around a single concern - the relationship between 



the individual and the physical world.
          There is an initial identification
between Earth-mother and sexual/alimentary object,
furnace and ventre, piston and bas-ventre, the
ship's mechanics and the mechanics of sex. This
fruitful material imagery of course contributes to
the vivacity of Verne's descriptions of animate and
inanimate objects, and represents another example of
his desire to break down the established boundaries.
But it also has consequences for the role of the
person. The individual's part is passive, involving
mere stimulus-response reactions without the need
for initiative or foresight. The security of these
compact systems is paid for by the giving up of any
attempt to control events or to come to terms with
the future.
          Then, in a more active stage, the
endogamy is increased - the bodies burn or eat each
other, and interaction consists of egoistical but
positive activities like cannibalisation,
cannibalism or abnormal sex. There is next a
counter-variant based on pure altruism and reversing
the same activities. But in the last, self-reflexive
stage, the poles of the sexual and alimentary cycles
are superimposed onto each other: the appendage is
absorbed into its support, survival is fused with
self-destruction, discardable object with sacrosanct
subject, and the microcosm with the whole universe.
          Thus, although time and space are not the
explicit object of Verne's concerns, they do
constitute much of the prevailing force behind all
these closed systems: it is the finite amount of
resources and the absolute curtailment of the future
which are at the same time the reason for the
eccentric behaviour and its inevitable result. Fear
for the future and retreat into a narrow present are
inextricably linked in Verne's world.
          Social interaction follows an identical
sequence, an identical withering away of the state
of companionship. There is again a 'normal'
situation, consisting of the small group, which is
isolated but otherwise unexceptional. In contrast,
interaction in the second stage, that of the egosme
@ deux of the man-and-his-servant, man-and-his-wife
or man-and-his-double, is no longer between
autonomous entities but does involve more than a
single individual. The result is that time is all
the more distorted and unpredictable. The final
stage again consists of the singleton, engrossed in
a total solipsism that apparently excludes all
possibilty of change in the future, and who is again
prone to take his self-centred view as
representative of the whole world. Time will however
exact a spectacular revenge.
          Personal concerns are thus vital in the
Voyages. It is always possible of course to relate
such concerns to the life of the writer. But what is
more illuminating, and what previous commentators on
Verne's works seem to have missed, is the vital
importance of the self, the blending together of
passivity and activity, the central role of autism.
Much of the interest of the extreme situations
resides in their exploration of the psyche, in their
exposure of the hypocrisy and cruelty normally
hidden in the give-and-take of the social system,
their destruction of the pretence that morality
consists exclusively of consideration for others.
Why should necrocannibalism be frowned upon, why
should the sacrifice of one man to save twelve be
forbidden, and why should even the subject of
autocannibalism be tabou?
          Although Verne uses Biblical imagery, he
is careful to pose his interrogation in general
terms: can the conventional morality of the
nineteenth century be a practical basis for living?
The Voyages show up the contradictions inherent in
even loving one's neighbour as oneself.
          Another aspect of the individual is to be
found in the intersection of science's two main
functions - as a passive repository of knowledge,
and as an active mode of changing the real world.
Applied, i.e. geographical, science in Verne's works
consists of an attempt to put the claim to universal
and objective knowledge into pratice, and thus to go
one better than well-oiled but piecemeal Natural
systems. But the claim proves ill-founded, and the
attempt misguided. Often, the Vernian scientist's
assertions are merely subjective impressions dressed
up in impressive language, and his belief in his own
infallibility leads him into monumental errors. But
even when the scientist is sane and conscientious,
his restricted point of view can lead him into the
trap of believing that he has made authentic,
exogamous discoveries, when he is merely observing
a reflection of his own civilisation or of himself.
In every case, therefore, science and the scientist
have an inescapable Achilles heel. As would be
proved rigorously by Gdel in 1931, the most
rigorous reasoning system proves powerless when
applied to its own base. Closing a system produces
an essential epistemological incompleteness. The
only attitude is to accept that the scientific
method is vulnerable and that mistakes are the price
to be paid for knowledge in an open system. Verne
insists that the only important hypotheses are the
refutable ones, that, in contrast to Natural
systems, human-based systems always contain an
element of instability. 
          More generally, the example of the
scientists underlines the fundamental choice between
closed systems and systems where behaviour cannot be
circumscribed. Hyperfinite spaces in the Voyages
present advantages of predictability in the short
term and as such would seem to be a sign of a deep
insecurity, a desire to create a watertight
defensive shield against the rest of the world. But
what happens, of course, is that the germs of
anxiety are all the more effectively incubated. The
temporality that results is an obsessional cycle
which gets tighter and tighter, producing a
semblance of faster and faster activity. But at the
same time, there is less and less real substance to
flow, the semblance gets thinner and thinner, the
time-of-events more and more diluted - in external
terms at least. The result that the system tends to
is what Beckett calls the 'last moment' - the
(undefined) multiplication of an infinite intensity
by an infinitesimal amount of constructive activity:
an eternal terminal moment unstably suspended
between totalisation and annihilation. The closed
cycle finishes by being absorbed into its own
object.
          Verne's conclusion is that the temptation
of the perfect closed system should be resisted, for
there is always a blind spot situated between
observer and observation, actor and action. The man
within the scientist has to accept the extreme
contingency attached to the discovery of knowledge;
and the scientist in the man must accept personal
and temporal relativity, and participate in the
looser, partly self-regulating time of the social
system. Time must be left for what Fogg calls the
'frottements' (TM 100) engendered by human
intercourse, the repeated va-et-vient of real
communication. Verne argues that if human beings
distinguish themselves from the inorganic through
their capacity to reflect, and from the merely
organic through their capacity to self-reflect, they
must nevertheless ensure that their introspection is
not total. Only in this way can man transcend a
passive reaction and maintain an active and
long-term equilibrium with his material, social and
intellectual environment. Time and space are one of
man's essential concerns. 



CHAPTER 8 





Employait-il le crayon multicolore afin de mieux
varier ses rimes rebelles ? (HS 21)


Past Present   

Throughout the Voyages, there is a constant tension
between the outward exploration and the inward
search, between a relentless progressive movement
and a determined regressive one. It would perhaps be
normal if a similar tension could be found in the
'form' of the text, especially the tenses. The
apparently unified fictional time-flow implied by
the verbs may conceal more subjective modes of time.
In this way the highly-recurrent linguistic signs of
ther tense could perhaps in turn provide further
insight into 'the internal economy' of the text.
They may in particular prove one of the most
revealing indicators of certain introverted or
'self-reflexive' qualities in the time and space of
the collected works.
                   
         Studies of tense in fiction have not
concentrated a great deal on the functioning of
particular novels.1 As a result it is difficult to
know when - and how - certain features entered a
given language.    
         The research has shown, nevertheless, that
the traditional novel belongs, at any given point in
the text, to one or other of two general modes, and
that these modes strongly condition the events
recounted. The first, the more 'objective',
past-tense mode, consists in French essentially of
the pass{ simple and the past anterior, what
Weinrich calls 'temps narratifs' and Emile
Benveniste, 'temps de l'histoire'.2 The other, the
more 'subjective', present-tense mode, is made up of
the present, the pass{ compos{, the future, and
their derived forms, Weinrich's 'temps commentatifs'
and Benveniste's 'temps du discours'. The division
thus separates the pass{ simple from the pass{
compos{, with the former implying a temporality
removed from the 'present' (the origin of
narration), and the latter implying some sort of
'collusion' with it. The imperfect, pluperfect and
conditional, on the other hand, take on the value of
whichever of the two modes they are in contact with
(even if in practice this is much more often the
past-tense mode).
         Until some time in the nineteenth century,
the primary mode of every novel in continuous
narrative seems to have been the past-tense one, in
both French and Western European languages in
general.3 The main reasons seem to be of a temporal
nature. First, the juxtaposition of pass{s simples,
even without an adverb of time, somehow 'produces'
a temporal progression, in the sense that the verbs
are normally read as referring to successive moments
- and the pass{ simple is probably the only tense to
have this property.4 But secondly, and as far as the
absolute temporality is concerned, Kte Hamburger
has argued that the pass{ simple in a fictional
context does not necessarily refer to a specific
time-zone at all. It is not a past tense, but a
zero-tense, a neutral form, merely a highly
convenient way of narrating.5 Her thesis has,
understandably, provoked a great deal of
controversy. To the extent that verisimilitude is
operative, the fact that the pass{ simple in a
non-fictional context refers to a definite
time-sphere means that it will do so in a fictional
context as well. But on the other hand, in so far as
the 'suspension of disbelief' contributes to the
creation of a fictional world, Hamburger's thesis
may be considered to have considerable validity -
there is no direct connection between fiction and
fact. Without totally accepting either position,
then, Verne's examples may give us concrete
confirmation of one or other of the two positions.
         The tenses rarely operate in isolation, of
course - there are normally adverbs present, and in
fiction especially they often influence the mode. In
particular, the opposition pass{ compos{-pass{
simple is sometimes reproduced in the adverbs. The
best example is the series
'hier'-'aujourd'hui'-'demain' compared with 'la
veille'-'ce jour-l@'-'le lendemain'. The difference
between the two is perhaps at first hard to seize -
 as Bronzwaer points out (pp. 44-50), both series
refer to an identical semantic division
past-present-future. But in the first series the
period in question is implied to contain the
'present' (the period from which the narration is
taking place), and in the second, to be distinct
from it. n other words, 'aujourd'hui' is as direct
as one can get; but 'ce jour-l@' contains a
distancing effect.
         Accordingly, the first series - to which
may be added 'maintenant', 'actuellement', '@
pr{sent', 'en ce moment', 'ici', 'voici', 'ce
(...)-ci' - is normally used with the present-tense
mode; and the second, together with 'alors', '@ ce
moment', 'voil@', 'ce (...)-l@', with the past-tense
one. In practical terms, 'aujourd'hui, il travaille'
and 'ce jour-l@, il travailla(it)' may respectively
be considered normal combinations (the first one
occurring most frequently in direct speech, and the
second in conventional narration). The two series of
adverbs will consequently be referred to as
'present-context' and 'past-context' ones. (It
should however be pointed out that the vast majority
of adverbs, whether 'point' ones like 'puis', 'en
1870' or 'une fois', or durative or iterative ones,
like 'longtemps' 'or 'tous les jours', are neutral
in this respect.)
         If the adverbs and tenses always agreed,
the opposition would be of little interest. In fact,
it is possible for, say, present-context adverbs to
occur in the past-tense mode. The resulting
combination - 'aujourd'hui, il travaillait'6 - is
intuitively striking. It may perhaps at first sight
seem modern, psychological, slovenly, or perverse.
In fact, it has frequently been attested in the
'best' authors: it is encountered above all in the
free indirect style.7
         Such a juxtaposition undoubtedly becomes
all the more surprising when the adverb is one of
future meaning, as in 'DEMAIN, il travaillait'. This
occurrence is sometimes pronounced as incorrect by
native or other competent speakers of French. The
general combination is indeed referred to by John
Lyons as being a category of construction which is
self-evidently non-grammmatical.8 His affirmation is
understandable, for it seems in effect to be absent
from novels written before the middle of the
nineteenth century.9 Nevertheless it has been
unmistakably identified in subsequent ones. It
occurs only in narrative, and only in the free
indirect style; and it thus indicates that the
context in question is to be interpreted not only as
not part of the main narrative, but also as being a
subjective vision, and, above all, as being
fictional.10
         As such, its importance cannot be
overestimated: this combination is apparently the
only clear sign indicating that an utterance is 'not
strictly true' - or at least has a limited
truth-value. Of course, the opposition
fictional-'true' has been the object of much playful
undermining throughout the history of literature
(and film). Nevertheless, this 'demain, il
travaillait' combination - perhaps because it
affirms intentions only accessible to an omniscient
and therefore necessarily fictional narrator - has
remained a relatively reliable marker of
fictionality up to the present.

Self-Conscious Narration
         
In practice, the distinction between the past- and
present-tense modes is not always watertight. As far
as Verne is concerned, the pass{ compos{ is
occasionally seen accompanied only by the pass{
simple. At the ends of the novels, for example, we
read: 'Harry Grant DEVINT l'homme le plus populaire
de la vieille Cal{donie. Son fils Robert S'EST FAIT
marin comme lui' or '(...) cette derni}re travers{e
FUT heureuse et rapide (...). Ainsi S'EST TERMINEE
cette aventureuse et extraordinaire campagne qui
COUTA trop de victimes, h{las!'.11
         Such occurrences, indicating the
transition stage of the closing scenes, are perhaps
not exceptional in the French novel of the
nineteenth century.12 But in one particular case,
Verne may be carrying out an original experiment:
when his pass{s compos{s 'displace' the pass{s
simples over a complete passage. Previously, an
escape had already been recounted in the pass{
simple: 'Les douaniers continu}rent (...). Ce fut
peine perdue. ] D}s que le fugitif les crut
suffisamment {loign{s (...)' (DL 7). But then it is
narrated for a second time: 

Pendant la nuit (le h{ros) s'est jet{ @ travers les
glaons (...). Une ronde de douaniers (...) s'est
lanc{e sur ses traces, et (...) a fait feu sur lui.
(Il) n'a pas {t{ atteint et a pu se r{fugier dans
une hutte de pcheurs, o| il a pass{ la journ{e.
Puis, le soir venu, il s'est remis en marche, a d
fuir devant une bande de loups, n'a trouv{ d'abri
que dans le moulin d'o| un brave meunier a favoris{
son {vasion. Enfin, poursuivi par l'escouade du
brigadier Eck, (...) il a pu {chapper en se jetant
sur les gla\ons en d{rive de la Pernova. C'est
miracle (...) s'il n'a pas p{ri dans la d{bcle, et
s'il lui a {t{ possible de s{journer @ Pernau sans
y tre d{couvert (...) (DL (1904) 178, cf. FD 115).

         The use of the pass{ compos{ over more
than twenty verbs is undoubtedly a surprising
innovation; but once again the literature is lacking
in historical analyses of the question. Despite the
example of L'Etranger (1942), where the pass{
compos{ plays such an important role, one may
suspect that sustained sequences of this tense have
been - and remain - extremely rare, given the
impression of strain that they generate. In spoken
French, as Weinrich notes (pp. 302-06; cf. Fitch, p.
35), either large numbers of imperfects are also
used or, most frequently, presents, which normally
even outnumber the pass{ compos{. The tense used by
Camus's first-person character is, according to
Sartre, a major reason for the lack of continuity
between the sentences, and contributes therefore to
the reader's impression of incoherence and absurdity
in the individual actions; but B.T. Fitch argues
that the pass{ compos{ is virtually the only tense
that could have been used to construct the complex
but largely coherent overall relationship between
the character and the narrator.13 The two views are
not of course entirely incompatible.
         Verne's use of tense has perhaps similarly
divergent consequences. The hero's actions seem to
constitute less of an automatic linear progression
than a new achievement with each phrase, a new
defiance of what the reader already knows to be the
conclusion - his capture. At the same time, the
reader searches for the connection between the
narrator and the character implied by the pass{
compos{ (Imbs, p. 103). But since there is neither
an explicit narrative stance, nor an implied one (as
there is at the ends of the novels), nor even a 'je'
to create some sort of connection, there remains an
irreducible tension between what is being recounted
and the manner of recounting. 
         These brief experiments in the history of
literary forms, involving the introduction of the
pass{ compos{, are in fact particularly
characteristic of Verne's style elsewhere: in the
narrow sense of the presence/absence of his
narrator; but more generally, in the play on
naivety/sophistication and obviousness/deviousness
that permeates the whole of the Voyages. 
         In the general case, then, the literary
distancing produced by the pass{ simple, its
relegation of events to a (semi-real) past, is
subverted. The later Verne may thus here be compared
with Flaubert who, as Jonathan Culler says, 'leads
his readers to expect an intelligible history and
then fails at crucial moments to provide it' (The
Uses of Uncertainty (1974), p. 42). A subterranean
link is created between the narrator and events, and
the objective, well-ordered temporality customary in
the novel of the period hesitates. The events come
to seem slightly contingent, the narrative spotlight
to partially illuminate its own support.

It Was Tomorrow

              The other principal past tense, the
imperfect, has a standard function in narration:
that of mise en relief for the pass{ simple. Verne
demonstrates his command of most of the normal
varieties including the imparfait d'ouverture and
the imperfect used for future events, for example
'un ph{nom}ne allait {videmment se produire dans
lequel l'{lectricit{ JOUAIT son rle' (VCT 349, cf.
TM 129).14
         But in other cases in the Voyages a
succession of imparfaits pittoresques produces a
remarkable stylistic effect, contributing notably to
the build-up of suspense. Particularly vivid
examples include the scenes describing the pursuit
of a creeper through a dangerous section of jungle
in La Jangada, the slow crossing of a treacherous
marsh in Michel Strogoff, the perilous descent of an
underground river in Mathias Sandorf  or the
discovery of the lost ruins of Atlantis in Vingt
mille lieues (J 80-86; MSt 217-21; MS 131-32; 20M
412-20).
          But the imperfect is especially striking
when used in the presentation of Fogg's race against
time on his land-yacht across the frozen prairie,
and in the climax of Vingt mille lieues where the
prisoners finally succed in escaping from the
submarine:

Le traneau volait sur l'immense tapis de neige
(...); il passait quelques creeks (...). Les champs
et les cours d'eau disparaissaient sous une
blancheur uniforme. La plaine {tait absolument
d{serte (...), une grande le inhabit{e (...). De
temps en temps, on voyait passer comme un {clair
quelque arbre grima\ant, dont le blanc squelette se
tordait sous la brise. Parfois, des bandes d'oiseaux
sauvages s'enlevaient du mme vol. Parfois aussi,
quelques loups (...), maigres, affam{s (...),
luttaient de vitesse avec le traneau. Alors
Passepartout (...) se tenait prt @ faire feu (...).
Mais le traneau tenait bon, il ne tardait pas @
prendre de l'avance, et bientt toute la bande
hurlante restait en arri}re (...) (TM 285-86).  

Le Nautilus (...) d{crivait une spirale dont le
rayon diminuait de plus en plus. Ainsi que lui, le
canot, encore accroch{ @ son flanc, {tait emport{
avec une vitesse vertigineuse (...). Nous {tions
ballott{s affreusement. Le Nautilus se d{fendait
comme un tre humain. Ses muscles d'acier
craquaient. Parfois il se dressait, et nous avec
lui! (...) (Soudain,) un craquement se produisait.
Les {crous manquaient, et le canot, arrach{ de son
alv{ole, {tait lanc{ comme la pierre d'une fronde au
milieu du tourbillon (20M 611-12).  

         The first passage is a well-developed
example of Romantic imagery, with its desolation and
its play on the opposition dead-alive (the living
skeleton, the dying wolves); and the second, one of
'realist' imagery, with its familiar man-machine
comparison and phallic and childbirth symbolism. But
much of the power of both comes also from their
presentation of space and time. 
         In each case the protagonists' movements
are, or become, rectilinear, but in the first they
contrast with an empty space ('d{serte', 'blancheur
uniforme'), and in the second, with a circular,
introjective, one ('spirale', 'alv{ole'). Above all,
it is the imperfects that are vital in both,
creating two opposed but interacting
times-of-events. On one hand, succession and
progression are emphasised (imperfect + 'parfois',
'de temps en temps', 'alors'), in accordance with
what has undoubtedly become a general tendency in
the 'realist' and adventure novel. But on the other,
time seems to be hardly moving at all (the imperfect
on its own), giving the impression, as in the best
Romantic tradition, of being ethereal, non-spatial
or drugged.15 The effect of both passages, one of
great urgency in slow motion, comes therefore from
their union between a certain density of internal
events and an overall lack of progression. As in the
underground cavern and the hyperclosed spaces, Verne
manages to create a new mode of perceiving time.
         Some of the other imperfects benefit from
a similar loosening of temporal progression, but
linked now with an ambiguity in the narrator's
position. Thus apparently straightforward statements
of fact are made using this tense: 'le chaland {tait
compl}tement vide'; 'il n'y avait plus de doute: le
Dream venait de couler @ pic'; 'Duk aboyait aupr}s
d'un cadavre envelopp{ dans le pavillon
d'Angleterre'; '(Fogg) {tait bien et d^ument ruin{',
'il avait perdu'.16 Later events prove however that
the 'corpse' was not really dead, that Fogg was not
really ruined and so on. But such inconsistencies
are not in fact limited to isolated phrases:
sometimes they englobe whole scenes (although the
narrator rarely produces total non-truths). They
allow, for instance, Axel and Lidenbrock to cross
the underground sea only to arrive at the point they
started from, Passepartout to be in two places at
once, and the Boy-Captain to see giraffes in South
America when really he is watching ostriches in West
Africa (VCT 292, 298; TM 103; C15 238)!
         Clearly, something strange is going on
here. If total coherence is required, the reader is
obliged to accept the principle of 'deliberate'
self-contradiction by the narrator (perhaps in many
cases under pressure from his publisher and his
public to produce happy endings); or else to
consider the utterances as being in some sort of
free indirect style - even in instances where it is
very difficult to link them with any of the
characters at all. But in either case, they must be
considered as belonging essentially to an instance
of narration and therefore a time-zone that is not
fully part of the main narrative. 
          The adverbs also set certain utterances
apart from the main flow of the narrative. One can
sometimes observe the dissonances between the
adverbs and the tenses noted above: 'Les m{contents
ralli}rent bientt @ leur id{es le premier
ing{nieur, qui JUSQU'ICI restait esclave du devoir';
'le 24 mai DERNIER (...), le nabab avait {t{
pr{venu'.17 These combinations, which are perhaps
due once more to free indirect style, are certainly
unusual; but even more striking ones are
occasionally visible: 'la famille Cascabel
arriverait (...) en juillet de l'ann{e PROCHAINE';
'cette op{ration devait tre termin{e (...) le 15
octobre PROCHAIN'; 'ce fid}le et complaisant
satellite reviendrait APRES-DEMAIN'; 'D'ICI LA, tous
les pr{paratifs pouvaient tre enti}rement
termin{s'; 'c'{tait DEMAIN'.18
          What is distinctive about both categories
is that the verbs remain in the normal past-tense
narrative system, whereas the adverbs imply a
fictional immediacy, a time-zone that is meant to be
'really' present. When the present-context adverb is
one of future reference, producing an even more
marked contrast with the surrounding past-tense
mode, as in 'c'{tait demain', the dissonance between
verb and adverb becomes almost total. In such cases
the explanation in terms of the free indirect style
is certainly useful; but it is, I would argue,
insufficient to account for the radical reduction of
the temporal distance between narrator and
narrataire. It is as if the text had jumped out of
itself and into an open-ended future. For brief
moments, the text is self-sufficient. 
          As for the originality of the device, it
is not impossible that this often disembodied
flouting of the fictional time-sphere might owe part
of its introduction to Verne. Large numbers of
commentators have pointed out the use of the free
indirect style in Flaubert, especially Madame Bovary
(1857), but also in La Fontaine and La Chanson de
Roland (e.g. Stephen Ullmann, Language and Style
(1964), p. 134). But the peculiarly disembodied free
indirect style that Verne favours has rarely been
identified; and in particular this rupture of the
traditional time-flow does not seem yet to have been
identified in other writers of the nineteenth
century. Verne contains complexities in the most
surprising places. 

Will There Be a Reply?

         The tense where narrative and fictional
time come closest together, and which most combines
non-sequential and self-referential qualities, is
undoubtedly the present. This tense is also the one
that comes closest to our immediate experience. It
is a largely unmarked form, in the sense that it
often consists merely of the stem of the verb. Above
all, it is one that can stand on its own, without
other tenses or adverbial support.   
         In fiction, there are a number of
situations where the present tense is normal: where
the narrator or author intervenes; in direct style,
especially dialogue; in the historic present; and in
the descriptive present. Verne's works make full use
of these possibilities. But in certain cases, they
go far beyond the conventional categories.   
         A first area consists of 'visionary'
presents:

(...) Le cur{ (...) remettait ce navire entre les
mains de Dieu. ] O| va ce navire? Il suit la route
p{rilleuse sur laquelle se sont perdus tant de
naufrag{s! Il n'a pas de destination certaine! Il
doit s'attendre @ tous les p{rils et savoir les
braver sans h{sitation! Dieu seul sait o| il lui
sera donn{ d'aborder! Dieu le conduise! (HG 231; cf.
IM 60, VCT 339, 20M 398).

Ils moururent en hommes qui avaient fait le
sacrifice de leur vie pour leurs pays. (...) Ainsi
donc, trois mis{rables (...) n'avaient pas recul{
devant cette odieuse machination! ] Une telle
infamie ne sera-t-elle donc pas punie sur cette
terre (...)? Le comte Sandorf, le comte Zathmar,
Etienne Bathory (...), ne seront-ils pas veng{s? (MS
182; cf. VCT 332-33).

Nous sommes au lendemain (...). Un des canots est @
la trane ... Je pr{viens le m{tis ... Nous nous
glissons sans tre aper\us (...), et le courant nous
emporte ... ] Nous allons ainsi sur la mer toujours
libre ... Enfin notre canot s'arrte ... Une terre
est l@ ... Je crois apercevoir une sorte de sphinx
(...), le sphinx des glaces ... Je vais @ lui ... Je
l'interroge ... Il me livre les secrets de ces
myst{rieuses r{gions ... (SG 347).

Despite major differences, each passage seems to be
situated somewhere between a prophetic present and
a free direct style. Above all, each creates a
distinctive temporality within the general context
of past tenses, for each contains a present
time-zone together with an autonomous future. The
illusion is produced of non-determined events
(sometimes thoughts) being recounted as they
actually happen.
         Another area where narrative and fictional
time come together is in messages-in-bottles and
other documents within the Voyages. In such cases,
the communication emanates from a position of
terrible need, as indicated by both the laconicness
of the language and the fact that the communication
is often interrupted:       

'(...) continuellement en proie @ une cruelle
indigence, (les naufrag{s) ont jet{ ce document par
153[ de longitude et 37[11' de latitude. Venez @
leur secours, ou ils sont perdus' (CG 861); '(...)
ce 26 avril (...), nous sommes entran{s par les
courants vers les glaces! Dieu ait piti{ de nous!'
(HG 235); je vais prendre mes derni}res notes, et,
lorsque les marins fran\ais d{barqueront sur la
pointe, j'irai ... (FD 259); les derniers mots
relev{s sur son carnet furent ceux-ci: 'Un sudiste
me couche en joue et ...' (IM 16); '... nourriture
va me manquer ...' (SG 101); 'le Viken va sombrer!
...' (BL xii 106); 'Vivres vont manquer, et ...' ]
Le reste de la d{pche, d{chir{ par les coups de bec
des go{lands, n'{tait plus lisible (HS 259; cf. MV
471); (...) Quelqu'un trouvera-t-il jamais le d{pt
commis @ la terre? (...) C'est affaire @ la
destin{e. A Dieu, vat! ... (EA 260).
         
         The unfinished message is thus a
characteristic mark of Verne's narrative. It is an
economical means to add to the suspense, while
leaving the reader's imagination free to work. It
also draws attention to the writing itself. But in
a variant on this topos, which occurs in both Jules
and Michel, the idea is held up to ridicule.
Sometimes the ironic intention is indicated by an
overworked situation and a too-regular punctuation:
'Dans la main crisp{e du cadavre, on trouva, en
effet, un papier froiss{, sur lequel, avant
d'expirer, Alexandre Tisserand avait {crit ces mots:
"C'est mon neveu qui ... "' (DJM 113). But sometimes
it is the message itself that is devoid of meaning,
subverted by the use of too much technology. Thus
one message, in an aluminium box, is aimed directly
at the Rue de Rivoli from an airship; another
employs a box made of copper; Rosette sends hundreds
of virtually identical messages; and a bottle is
rescued from a shark's stomach using firearms (RC
138-44; VA viii 83; HS 329; JMC iv 43). The result
of these unsporting methods is that the airship
message produces no effect, the notebook in the
copper box turns out to be virtually blank, and the
hundreds of messages are said to 'mean nothing'.
And, whereas Grant's message had proceeded directly
to his children 11,000 miles away, the bottle
retrieved using firearms proves to be completely
empty. 
         Written pleas for help are thus numerous
in the Voyages. Undoubtedly the adventure genre
contains many similar instances, but in Verne's
case, the careful punctuation, the urgency of the
tone, and the fate of the final action - turned
towards the future but destined to remain unfinished
- should make us suspect that important concerns are
at work. It is as if the sincerity of the message
were linked to the risk of its not being received.
The knowledge that even if it does arrive, it will
be in a very different time and space, seems to free
the writer from his inhibitions. The more advanced
stages of technology, on the other hand, destroy the
risk and the protection - and with them either the
form or the substance of the message. 
         But the importance of the messages also
resides in their temporal characteristics. For once,
the narrator is fully a character, instead of being
merely a passive onlooker. Indeed, what he writes
will probably determine his destiny. But the very
intensity of the form means that it cannot be
sustained for long - the consequence of bringing the
narration right up to date is that it then has
nowhere to go. The messages thus constitute temporal
balancing acts, and ones with a tendency to
self-destruct. In the early works, they just come to
a halt; but in the later ones, the impulses are
turned inwards, and it is the contents that tend to
be destroyed instead. Only in the Michel-Vernian
'L'Eternel Adam' with its message across the
millennia is a certain synthesis found, undoubtedly
because the vital action here is the transmission of
the message itself, and not any contents it might
have - making the emptiness here almost a virtue. 
         Ultimately, then, the messages illustrate
all sorts of global themes. Their internal economy -
 and amazing economicalness - reflect back onto a
wider message. They may represent a mise en abyme of
the Voyages. 

         A similarly precarious convergence of
narrative and fictional time becomes visible at the
ends of some of the novels. The use of the pass{
compos{ and the recourse to anticipations we saw
earlier may be interpreted in this perspective as
being signs of the tensions inherent in making the
narration present its own demise. This is
undoubtedly a problem of all fiction, but seems to
become particularly explicit at the end of Vingt
mille lieues. Aronnax is in Norway, waiting for the
next ship back to France, and is reduced for a long
period to total inactivity, interrupted only by the
revision of his manuscript describing his previous
adventures. The present tense here, in other words,
constitutes the sign of a stagnation, a
self-consciousness and a self-referentiality that
are unusual in the adventure novel.
         But the ending of the very last Voyage,
L'Etonnante aventure de la mission Barsac (1919),
brings narrative and fictional time even closer
together. Throughout most of the novel, the
narration was in the third person, with only
occasional extracts from the (first-person)
newspaper articles sent back by one of the
protagonists called Am{d{e Florence. The final page,
however, reserves a surprise:
             
         Mais voici que (le narrateur) est parvenu
@ la fin de sa tche. Bon ou mauvais, amusant ou
ennuyeux, le livre est l@, maintenant. Sans
inconv{nients ni dangers, l'incognito peut tre
d{voil{, l'histoire peut tre proclam{e v{ritable,
et celui qui la r{digea, votre tr}s humble et
respectueux serviteur, peut la signer de son nom,
Am{d{e Florence, (...) avant d'{crire le grand mot,
le mot sublime, le roi des mots, le mot:
                        FIN

This passage would seem interesting in more than one
respect. As in much of the posthumous production,
the themes of authenticity and authorship are
alluded to - by his play on person, Michel may also
be implying that beneath the apparently impersonal
style of the Voyages, a more involved voice is
detectable - especially in the posthumous ones, his
own. But also, the unique temporal situation of the
closing of the sixty-eight-year cycle produces the
present-context adverbs like 'voici', 'l@' and
'maintenant'. The overall effect is embodied
especially in the build-up to the word 'FIN',
whereby Michel finishes his father's task, and in
some sense also finishes him off. It is thus both
conventional and ironical, narratorial and authorial
- it may constitute Michel Verne's having the last
word in his debate with his father.

Breaking Out

Despite certain departures from the norms, the
Voyages extraordinares do on the whole rely on the
traditional system of tenses. The pass{ simple
outnumbers all the other tenses put together. The
exceptions that we have seen are therefore all the
more interesting.
          First, the use of the pass{ compos{,
without other verbs from the present-tense system,
subtly distorts the traditional, largely linear
construct, by implying a narratorial presence. Where
there are successive verbs in this tense, the
sequentiality of events is particularly reduced,
distancing is much less, and the convention of
objective knowledge characteristic of prose fiction,
past and present, is seriously weakened. Verne here
substitutes an element of self-reference and an
allusion to a definite person, place and time. The
pass{s compos{s imply, but cannot create, a more
involved time of narration.
          Next, the extended imperfect affects
instead the progression of events. It prolongs the
duration of point-actions and reduces that of
extended actions. It establishing a dur{e which is
recursive, non-linear and disembodied.
           Thirdly, the constituent tense of
Verne's free indirect style neutralises much of the
progressive quality of the past tenses; but some of
its constituent adverbs construct in addition a
temporality which transgresses the norms of the
nineteenth-century novel. They thus go a long way
towards replacing the 'safe' narration of successive
past events by an open-ended present with a
remarkably undetermined future. 
          The visions, the messages and the
endings, finally, subvert the temporal situation.
Each topos starts with an account of the past which
leads up to the present. The abolition of the
temporal barrier between the fiction and the
narration adds urgency and cogency. But at this
vital moment - which is also sometimes the moment of
exhaustion of food or water - the topos is abruptly
interrupted, and the reader is left to his own
devices, as if in a sort of textual coitus
interruptus. Because the self-referentiality is so
developed, there is a danger of short-circuiting of
activity, of a paralysed self-contemplation. The
present-tense topoi should apparently be handled
with caution. 
         All four forms stand in opposition
therefore to the well-established conventions of the
objective narration of past events, carried out
within a largely linear temporality. Verne's works
contain an implicit critique of the continuity and
verisimilitude of the 'realist' novel. They secrete
a self-reflexiveness and a self-referentiality which
underline 'faults' in the conventional system. They
thus point the way to further experiments.




CHAPTER 9


NOW OR NEVER


'Pour {conomiser les notes, il n'a fourr{ dans sa
bote ni les ut ni les sol di}ses!' (...) 'C'est un
crime' (...). Cette abomination, les Wagddis n'en
ressentaient pas toute l'horreur!... Ils acceptaient
cette criminelle substitution d'un mode @
l'autre!... (VA xvi 183).

'Si @ chaque instant nous pouvons p{rir, @ chaque
instant aussi nous pouvons tre sauv{s' (VCT 341).

'Nous sommes condamn{s @ l'inaction, et il est des
circonstances o| il faut avoir le courage de ne rien
faire!' (C 50).

Things Going By?

As a result of the problems of using the
self-referential present in narrative passages, it
is difficult to imagine how extended passages in
this tense could ever exist. It would seem that the
text would soon necessarily fall over its own
bootlaces, grind to a paralysed halt.
         And yet three of the Voyages
extraordinaires are written virtually entirely in
this tense. The novels in question are Le Chancellor
(1875), L'Ile @ H{lice (1895) and Face au drapeau
(1896). Le Chancellor is apparently the very first
novel in continuous prose written in the present, in
French and perhaps in any Western European
language.1 What is more, L'Ile @ h{lice is
apparently the first - perhaps only - one written in
the third person and the present.2 Given the huge
importance of tense in the modern novel, this
moment, when the rigid form of the past tenses was
first abandoned, would seem to be vital for
understanding further developments. 
         But what is almost as surprising as the
phenomenon itself is the critical literature on it.
Serres reports his impression that Le Chancellor is
'un r{cit simple et naf, tr}s unilin{aire';
Delabroy declares that this novel is the opposite of
'l'habituelle {criture pleine de la narration, qui
est l'id{al-type de la bourgeoisie'; Musti}re
perceives it as being a transcription of an instance
of a largely non-temporal art, the painting Le
Radeau de la M{duse; and Roudaut describes
'L'Eternel Adam' as 'un r{cit dont le temps (time
rather than tense) se confond avec celui de la
narration'.3 Despite these remarkable near-misses,
not a single commentator appears even to mention the
use of the present in any of the three novels. And
yet this is clearly one of the most radical formal
innovations in Verne's works, and one which may
allow us a unique entry into his 'imaginary
universe', with its highly revealing obsessions.
         The phenomenon occurs not only in the
three novels (except for three chapters in Face au
drapeau (FD 1-65)), but also in fairly lengthy
sections of Voyage au centre de la Terre, Mistress
Branican, La Mission Barsac, 'L'Eternel Adam',
'Frritt-Flacc', 'La Famille Raton' and 'M. R{-di}ze
et Mlle Mi-b{mol'.4 In order to understand the
temporal structures implied by the present tense,
let us start by examining a typical selection of the
opening passages, for this is where the author has
to work hardest to establish the new usage:       

         Vendredi 14 aot.- Brise {gale du N.-O. Le
radeau marche avec rapidit{ et en ligne droite. La
cte reste @ trente lieues sous le vent. Rien @
l'horizon. L'intensit{ de la lumi}re ne varie pas.
(...) A midi Hans pr{pare un hame\on @ l'extr{mit{
d'une corde. Il l'amorce avec un petit morceau de
viande et le jette @ la mer. Pendant deux heures il
ne prend rien (...) (VCT 256-57).      

         - CHARLESTON.- 27 septembre 1869.- Nous
quittons le quai de la Batterie @ trois heures du
soir, @ la pleine mer. Le jusant nous porte
rapidement au large. Le capitaine Huntly a fait
{tablir les hautes et basses voiles, et la brise du
nord pousse le Chancellor @ travers la baie. Bientt
le fort Sumter est doubl{ (...) (C 1). 

          Frritt!... c'est le vent qui d{chane. ]
Flacc!... c'est la pluie qui tombe @ torrents. ]
Cette rafale mugissante courbe les arbres de la cte
volsinienne et va se briser contre le flanc des
montagnes de Crimma. Le long du littoral, de hautes
roches sont incessamment rong{es par les lames de
cette vaste mer de la M{galocride (...) (FF i 295).
         

Lorsqu'un voyage commence mal, il est rare qu'il
finisse bien. Tout au moins est-ce une opinion
qu'auraient le droit de soutenir quatre
instrumentistes, dont les instruments gisent sur le
sol. En effet, le coach dans lequel ils avaient d
prendre place @ la derni}re station du railroad
vient de verser brusquement contre le talus de la
route. ] 'Personne de bless{?', demande le premier,
qui s'est lentement redress{ sur ses jambes (...)
(IH I i 5).

           O| suis-je?... Que s'est-il pass{ depuis
cette agression soudaine, dont j'ai {t{ victime @
quelques pas du pavillon? (...) Mais je raisonne
dans la supposition que Thomas Roch a disparu avec
moi... Cela est-il?... Oui... cela doit tre... cela
est... Je ne puis h{siter @ cet {gard... Je ne suis
pas entre les mains de malfaiteurs qui n'auraient eu
que le projet de voler (...) (FD 66-67).

                                 Rosario, le 24 mai
2...
          Je date de cette fa\on le d{but de mon
r{cit, bien qu'en r{alit{ il ait {t{ r{dig{ @ une
autre date beaucoup plus r{cente et en des lieux
bien diff{rents. Mais, en pareille mati}re, l'ordre
est, @ mon sens, imp{rieusement n{cessaire, et c'est
pourquoi j'adopte la forme d'un 'journal', {crit au
jour le jour. ] C'est donc le 24 mai que commence le
r{cit des effroyables {v{nements que j'entends ici
rapporter pour l'enseignement de ceux qui viendront
apr}s moi, si toutefois l'humanit{ est encore en
droit de compter sur un avenir quelconque (...) (EA
230).  

         At first sight, these passages appear to
have little in common apart from the present tense
itself. Even this usage may not seem surprising:
like the visionary scenes examined in the last
chapter, some of the passages resemble diaries or
logbooks, some, lengthy historic presents, some,
'fantasy-presents', and some, narratorial presents.
In other words, each occurrence appears explicable
in terms of the previous tradition.
          But the reader who is confronted with
this tense, paragraph after paragraph, page after
page, chapter after chapter, normally feels a sense
of strangeness - as shown by the bemused reactions
of the four critics. The present tense is
homeopathic in small doses, but proves highly
unsettling in the long run. Indeed, reexamining each
of the explanations in the light of the extreme
persistence of the tense shows that they in fact
present a problem. 
         The first two extracts, for instance,
resemble a diary merely in having dated headings,
rather than in terms of their internal structures;5
and indeed the last one explicitly says that the
diary form is a mere pretence, artificially
superimposd on the narration. In the wider corpus,
direct or indirect apostrophes also undermine the
idea of a diary: 'que ceux qui me lisent
comprennent'; '(...) ainsi que le lecteur ne va pas
tarder @ l'apprendre'; 'vous comprenez bien que
(...)'; '(...) que l'on connat' (C 173; IH I i 6;
I xiv 153; FD 98, cf. 121, MB I iv 71, etc.). 
         Again, the idea of a historic present is
certainly a plausible one in the fourth passage, and
Roudaut (p. 192) has argued that the final passage
is also in the historic present. But I would claim
that the latter is in fact much closer to a
narratorial present; and that in any case the
historic present is defined by its contrast with
surrounding past tenses, with the result that a
prose work entirely in the historic present cannot
properly be said to exist.6 Ultimately, then, I
would maintain that the traditional explanations,
even taken together, are insufficient to explain the
recurrence of the phenomenon.
          If we examine the background material to
this corpus it also proves unhelpful: nowhere in the
Voyages does the existence of the present tense seem
to be hinted at - nor indeed in any extant part of
Verne's correspondence nor in any other document.7
          Let us therefore start again from first
principles. Is it not possible that the present
tense is used simply because the action is in
present time? Reexamining the opening passages in
this light shows that such an idea is by and large
highly plausible: in general, they can easily be
interpreted as 'instantaneous' narration - a sort of
running commentary without the commentary. 
         Nevertheless, there is one category of
verbs that does not fit into this analysis, namely
examples of the sort 'pendant deux heures il ne
prend rien' (VCT 257). Elsewhere in the extended
corpus, we can observe phrases like 'nous avons
classe tous les jours', 'plusieurs fois, je rends
visite @ l'ex-capitaine', 'une heure s'{coule' 'je
consacre quelques heures @ r{diger mon journal' (RM
54; C 50; FD 110; C 74). All these verbs, in other
words, are durative or iterative. The time of the
narration is more extended than the time of the
fiction, and so the two cannot be wholly
synchronous. 
         Indeed, in certain cases, the present
tense is used for events clearly finished before
being narrated: as historic presents within passages
otherwise in the pass{ compos{ (e.g. FD 115) but
especially in mixed sentences like '"Le cher
enfant!', MURMURE M. Letourneur (...)."Monsieur
Letourneur", AI-JE r{pondu, "(...)"' (C 11-12) or
'quoique je fusse un enfant pieux, je ne suis pas
recueilli, moi!' (RM 92, cf. 55). Awareness that the
present tense is sometimes past time may also
contribute to the analysis of sentences like 'quel
rve! (...) Ma main fi{vreuse en jette sur le papier
les {tranges d{tails' (VCT 267) or '(...) je
consigne le fait sur mon journal' (VCT 264). The
writing, it is clear, cannot be going on at the same
time as the speaking, or indeed as the writing
described.8 
          Whatever the reason, greater scepticism
would seem to be necessary: we have to ask whether
any of the verbs imply simultaneity between events
and narration. A further examination of the works
shows that the great majority of the present tenses
in fact contain very little indication as to their
temporal status. Once again, however, there are
exceptions. The rest of the opening passage from
Face au drapeau, in particular, stands out because
of its temporal immediacy, one where the form and
content seem especially well-integrated:
              
(...) Je ne me laisserai pas succomber (au
sommeil)... Il faut me ressaisir @ quelque chose du
dehors... A quoi?... Ni son ni lumi}re ne p{n}trent
dans cette bote de tle... Attendons!... Peut-tre,
si faible qu'il soit, un bruit arrivera-t-il @ mon
oreille?... (...) Enfin... ce n'est point une
illusion... Un l{ger roulis me berce... et me donne
la certitude que je ne suis point @ terre... bien
qu'il soit peu sensible, sans choc, sans @-coups...
C'est plutt une sorte de glissement @ la surface
des eaux... (...) Une nouvelle heure vient de
s'{couler (...). A pr{sent, je me sens envahir par
une sorte de torpeur... L'atmosph}re est vici{e...
La respiration me manque... Ma poitrine est comme
{cras{e d'un poids dont je ne puis me d{livrer... ]
Je veux r{sister... C'est impossible... J'ai d
m'{tendre dans un coin et me d{barasser d'une partie
de mes vtements, tant la temp{rature est {lev{e...
Mes paupi}res s'alourdissent, se ferment, et je
tombe dans une prostration, qui va me plonger en un
lourd et irr{sistible sommeil... ] Combien de temps
ai-je dormi?... Je l'ignore. Fait-il nuit, fait-il
jour?... Je ne saurais le dire (...) (FD 73-80). 

Similarly, in the rest of the corpus, a few passages
do give the impression of recounting events as they
happen. In the first of the three following
passages, Kazallon describes, respectively, the
sinking of the ship, the ending of a long and
desperate water-less period, and his decision to eat
human flesh; in the last one, the narrator describes
his own death several decades after the founding of
the last remaining human colony:
         
         Impossible de dire toutes les pens{es dont
mon esprit est travers{ en ce moment, ni de peindre
la rapide vision qui se fait en moi de ma vie toute
enti}re! Il me semble que toute mon existence se
concentre dans cette minute suprme qui va la
terminer! Je sens les planches du pont fl{chir sous
mes pieds. Je vois l'eau monter autour du navire,
comme si l'Oc{an se creusait sous lui! (C 109-10). 

         
         Nous sommes tous {tendus sur les voiles
(...). Je souffre horriblement. Dans l'{tat o| sont
mes l}vres, ma langue, mon gosier, pourrais-je
manger? (...) Il est onze heures du matin. Les
vapeurs (...) n'ont plus une apparence {lectrique
(...). Ce n'est plus, maintenant, qu'un brouillard
(...). Nous sommes couch{s @ la renverse, la bouche
ouverte. L'eau arrose ma figure, mes l}vres, et je
sens qu'elle glisse jusque dans ma gorge! Ah!
jouissance inexprimable! (...) Les muqueuses de mon
gosier se lubrifient @ ce contact. Je respire autant
que je bois cette eau vivifiante, qui p{n}tre
jusqu'au plus profond de mon tre! (C 198-99).  
         
         Ah! le mis{rable! ] Mais non! Hobbart a
sagement agi (...). Il ne faut pas que d'autres
viennent m'arracher cette proie (de chair humaine)!
(...) Il me la faut @ tout prix, je la veux, je
l'aurai! (...) Personne ne m'a vu. J'ai mang{! (C
205-06).  

         De tout (sic) ceux qui d{barqu}rent ici,
moi, l'un des plus vieux, je reste presque seul.
Mais la mort va me prendre, @ mon tour. Je la sens
monter de mes pieds glac{s @ mon coeur qui s'arrte
(...) (EA 260).  

What is striking about all these passages is their
dramatic quality, their air of sincerity, their
immediacy - their unusual presentness. More
analytically, it is possible to see that for once,
the focus of attention is not on external events:
introspection now governs the speed of narration, as
indicated by the density of first-person pronouns,
punctuation marks like the series of three dots, and
constructions like 'une nouvelle heure VIENT DE
s'{couler'. Transcribing these passages in the pass{
simple would produce a strange result: 'A pr{sent,
je me sentis envahir par une sorte de torpeur...
L'atmosph}re fut vici{e... (etc.)'. But it would
work for the imperfect: 'A pr{sent, je me sentais
(...) L'atmosph}re {tait (...)'. 
         A hypothesis then presents itself: given
their running commentary concerning the inner self
and their affinity with the continuous tenses, could
these passages not be the thoughts of the character?
In other words, could they not possibly be in some
sort of free style (or interior monologue or even
stream of consciousness)?9
          Once the question has been posed, the
obvious answer is yes - reading all the passages
quoted as examples of free (direct or indirect)
style is perfectly possible. But, because the tense
does not provide any information, as it does in the
context of past-tense narration, it would be less
easy to go further - by for instance saying where in
a given example the free style starts or stops.
          One way of attempting to formally verify
the hypothesis is to take the classifications
generally applied to the three voices of
conventional narration, and see what result
transposing them from the past into the present
gives. Figure 35 represents this attempt: 
                      
Variations in tense with nature of transposition and
degree of narratorial intervention10  











This table indicates, for both the past tense (top
line) and the present tense (bottom line) the degree
of transposition - that is the use of 'normal
narration', indirect style or direct style - and the
degree of narratorial intervention - that is the use
of free style (2nd col.) or simply ordinary style
(1st col.). It shows, notably, what would happen to
the threefold opposition normal narration-indirect
style-direct style if present-tense narration did
follow the same categories as conventional
narration. There would be no problem with the 'not
free' case, but the distinction provided by the
pass{ simple-imperfect-present would be lost in the
case of free style, for 'Je suis libre' would be
found in all three modes (as underlined in the
table). The same utterance could be free indirect
style, free direct style, or normal narration,
without one having any way of telling the
difference. Indeed, if it were observed in reality,
this threefold equivalence could conceivably be used
as a way of defining interior monologue in the
present. 
          But even on this assumption that the
traditional categories worked for the present tense,
the verbs would be powerless to help us identify the
three voices. If we wish to demonstrate their
existence, there remains only the possibility that
formal discrimination between the voices might be
produced by the past- and present-context adverbs,
as it was in the case of the past tenses (cf.
Chapter 8).
          In practice, one observes that many verbs
have no accompanying adverbs ('la respiration me
manque', 'je souffre horriblement', 'je reste
presque seul', etc.), and may thus still be either
normal narration, free indirect style or free direct
style. But on the other hand certain of the adverbs
do give a precise indication. In the four dramatic
passages, all five - '@ pr{sent', 'en ce moment',
'aujourd'hui', 'maintenant' and 'ici' - are clear
present-context ones. On the assumption that the
same implications work as for the past tenses, our
hypothesis is then verified, and the existence of
direct or indirect style confirmed. The dramatic
passages are to be interpreted as the thoughts of
the characters. Some of the present tenses do mean
present time, after all.
         It now remains to counter-check our
hypothesis by verifying the temporal adverbs in the
rest of the corpus. In certain cases, we may again
observe clearly present-context ones: 'c'est demain
(...) que nous serons arriv{s', 'en ce moment (...)
on marche @ l'ouest', 'aujourd'hui', 'jusqu'ici',
'hier'.11 But there are also a large number of
past-context adverbs: 'la brise est alors
compl}tement tomb{e', 'le lendemain, 21 octobre, la
situation est la mme', 'ce jour-l@ (...),
j'aper\ois', 'cette ann{e-l@ (...) les Etats-Unis
(...) sont dans l'entier {panouissement de leur
puissance industrielle', 'dans ce temps-l@', '@ ce
moment', 'la veille'.12 The present-context adverbs
occur normally in the most vivid scenes, the ones
where the main character has an important role, and
the ones where the events are lived from within -
the ones, in other words, where one might expect to
have access to the thoughts of the character. The
past-context adverbs, in contrast, are most in
evidence in less dramatic passages where there are
also durative or iterative ones - in those, in other
words, most similar to conventional narration. It
would seem reasonable to assume that these instances
are closest to being past time.
         Beneath the apparent simplicity of the
present tense, then, there is a considerable
complexity, one which it is worth summarising. We
have seen that the great mass of verbs contain
little indication as to their external temporality.
But a few of them, and many of the adverbs, do
provide precise information, even if it points in
two different directions. On one hand, a
non-synchronous aspect, or even a clearly posterior
narrative stance, combines with past-context adverbs
and a generally objective or neutral tone and
position. The cumulative effect is to destroy the
idea of simultaneity of action and narration, and to
produce a compressed temporality and a point of view
like those of the pass{ simple. Most of L'Ile @
h{lice, with its non-deictic third person,
approximates to this mode: the strange tone of this
novel may be that of a future 'une fois' - a
science-fiction effect on the level of the form. 
         On the other hand, the immediacy of many
of the verbs and adverbs in the corpus, together
with an unusual introspection, produces a time which
seems to be really present. In it there sometimes
appears to be an indetermination between the three
voices possible in fiction. Within this, however,
one can detect a more personal voice. An effect is
produced which moves between a sort of camera-eye
technique and a stream of consciousness, a bit like
Robbe-Grillet crossed with Virginia Woolf.
         The distribution of verb and adverb in the
Voyages thus makes ultimate sense. In addition to
establishing a new sub-genre - the novel written in
the present tense - Verne invents a multiply-defined
temporal system, a range of voices playing on the
oppositions between narrator and character,
posterior and simultaneous narration, and reporting
and participation. Verne's three works are not only
pre-Zola romans exp{rimentaux, but introduce new
conceptions of subjectivity and time into the novel.
Meredith's The Egoist (1879) and Dujardin's Les
Lauriers sont coup{s (1887)13 are not the only
advances in technique during this period.

Supporting Role

         The present occupies a surprising
proportion of the verbs: over four-fifths of tense
forms in the corpus. But an analysis of the other
tenses may also contribute to our understanding of
the experiments.
         As the passages quoted show, the next most
frequent form is the pass{ compos{. In the same way
as the pluperfect in conventional narration, it
serves to describe events previous to the main line,
even where free direct/indirect style seems to be at
work: 'Hobbart A sagement AGI (...). J'ai mang{ (de
la chair humaine)!' (C 205-06). But its time-sphere
is not always distinct from that of the present
tense. This applies in the cases of e^tre verbs like
'la mer EST ARRIVEE maintenant au tr{lingage' (C
128), but is also the essential feature of a unique
scene where the narrator of Le Chancellor applies
thought to his own moral behaviour. Having abruptly
replied to a young girl that stronger people die
quicker under starvation, and that this is a
consolation, he then switches from the present to
ask: 'Comment AI-JE pu r{pondre ainsi @ cette jeune
fille?'; he resolves to reform: 'j'ai promis (de
mieux agir)'; and he is later able to write: 'j'ai
r{sist{, et que ceux qui me lisent comprennent' (C
170; 170; 173). The pass{ compos{, not here
replaceable by any other tense, thus creates a rare
link between past action and present reflection.
Together with the 'reader's' present ('ceux qui me
lisent'), serves to create an impression of
sincerity: of the narrator's wish to gain a
salvation going beyond mere survival.
         The imperfect has a similar role of mise
en relief of past events, but for durative actions:
'Le second examine attentivement celui qui jusqu'ici
commandait @ bord' (C 48). But the fact that its
time-sphere does not overlap with that of the
present means that non-motivated imperfects are
occasionally visible: '(...) quand le Chancellor,
que le vent poussAIT alors rapidement, s'arrte
soudain'; 'j'aper\ois ce personnage alors qu'il
remontAIT (...)' (C 40; FD 145; cf. 103, MB II ii
256, etc.).14
         Undoubtedly more surprising in the context
of the extended present tense would be the pass{
simple, for the imperfect and pass{ compos{ seem to
cover most of the past between them. In fact, verbs
like 'demandai-je', 'm'{criai-je' and 'pensai-je' (C
111; VCT 257; FD 102, 179) are probably not pass{s
simples at all. They seem to be spelling variations
of the presents 'demand{-je', 'm'{cri{-je' and
'pens{-je'.15 Again, a few of the authentic pass{s
simples, like 'ces d{tails, je les appris' 'C'est
avec le pic (...) que furent port{s les premiers
coups' (FD 156; 191), are apparently due to
inattention by author, typographer or editor.16 As
such they demonstrate the habits of several
centuries of reading prose in the past tenses, and
the difficulties of conceiving novels that escape
from them. 
         On the other hand, virtually all the
'deliberate' pass{s simples are used for flashbacks
going further back than the beginning of the novels,
whether covering the past of the characters or
historical events 'J'obtins (...), je partis et
m'embarquai (...)' (FD 117; cf. 116, IH I i 8-9, I
v 49, I xi 115-18). When maintained over several
paragraphs without other tenses and with few adverbs
a strange tone is created: 'Pomar{ protesta, les
Anglais protest}rent. L'amiral Dupetit-Thouars
proclama la d{ch{ance de la reine en1843 et expulsa
le Pritchard, {v{nements qui provoqu}rent (...).
Pritchard re/cut une indemnit{ de vingt-cinq mille
francs, et l'amiral Bruat eut mission de mener ces
affaires @ bonne fin' (IH I xiii 148-49; cf. 148).
It may perhaps be best described as Voltairean in
its remoteness and irony or Flaubertian in its
flatness.17 It seems to gain part of its effect from
the contrast with the general context of the
present, but especially from the pass{ simple's
great sequentiality and inherent
'non-reflexiveness', the fact that it contains no
intrinsic coherence, no 'lateral' links to give
breadth to the narrative thread. Verne's experiment
produces a common purpose between tenses and
temporal structures, to a degree that many novelists
would envy.
         An isolated pass{ simple, on the other
hand, is occasionally used for dramatic emphasis:
'le roi redevint un homme'; '(les) hommes que nous
fmes - car nous ne sommes plus des hommes, en
v{rit{' (IH II iii 190-91; EA 259). Here, in
contrast, the effect comes from the sudden
introduction of a temporal 'thickness', the addition
of a longer-term perspective to the 'flatness' or
the 'thinness' of the present.
         In Le Chancellor, especially, all the
pass{s simples without exception are highly
significant, serving to help define the overall
structure of the novel. The events before the
fateful voyage are recounted in this tense: 'en
parcourant les quais de Charleston, je VIS le
Chancellor. Le Chancellor me PLUT, et je ne sais
quel instinct me POUSSA @ bord de ce navire (...).
Je me DECIDAI donc @ prendre passage sur le
Chancellor' (C 2). The transfer to the raft is also
emphasised by means of a resounding preterite: 'rien
ne reste plus de ce qui FUT le Chancellor' (C 130).
Once dry land is reached again, finally, it is
remarked that 'Robert Kurtis est et restera toujours
l'ami de ceux qui FURENT' 'les passagers du
Chancellor' (C 236; 236). All the pass{s simples in
this novel appear therefore structurally important.
They are symmetrically arranged, and act in
conjunction with the loud ostinato of the name of
the ship (and its virtual anagram, Charleston) to
emphasise the three pivotal points of the novel, the
beginning, the middle and the end. They create a
tight framework, defined in terms of normal
existence on dry land, within which the nightmarish
events on the ocean may unfold. The pass{s simples
may be the sign of an ordered terrestrial existence
in a definite time and place - and the present, its
abandonment.
         It is clear that, in our corpus, the three
past tenses operate by instituting a contrast with
the present, by simultaneously providing relief and
relief. Both the 'accidents' and the 'deliberate'
occurrences thus create a trompe l'oeil background
with which to foreground the main story. At the same
time, many of them may represent a temporary
regression to one of the largely unconscious
assumptions brought about by the long tradition of
narrative literature: that past events have to be
recounted in the past tenses.         
         Verne, in his obvious-discreet way, simply
ignores the convention. He thus confirms a version
of Hamburger's thesis, namely that tense and time
are not necessarily identical, that narration can
produce its own autonomous temporality. But the
boldness of this experiment should not be allowed to
pass unnoticed. Science fiction has sometimes made
play of the reduction of the dimensions of the world
from three to two. We saw earlier that Verne is
again a precursor on this 'content' level. But his
reduction of tense applies the same principle to the
form and the content - placing the characters on
occasion in a time-capsule of both present tense and
time from which escape is not obvious.
         The extraordinariness of Verne's journeys
is not always where it might seem.

Narration Impossible

         Further evidence of the difficulties
encountered in writing novels in the present may be
found in the role of the future. Here again, the
traditional novel seems to act as a kind of
anti-model for Verne.
         A naive view of his experiments might
represent the present-tense novels as being merely
past-tense ones without the past tenses (and with a
pinch of narrative subjectivity added). L'Enfant,
with its problems of coherency, is apparently
written in this spirit. Evidence against such a view
in Verne's case has already been accumulated; but
the future tenses - principally the forms va porter
and portera - will also prove illuminating in this
respect. 
         On the theoretical and formal level, the
equivalence between the two sorts of novel
apparently does not cause a problem, as there is a
correspondence between their respective tenses. The
present apparently takes on the functions of the
past; the past, the pluperfect; the future, the
conditional; and 'allait', those of 'va'.
         But the practice is sometimes different.
A minute, almost Borgesian, change in a past-tense
passage of Voyage au centre de la Terre points to
one problem: in the 1867 edition, 'J'allai donc
prendre (...)' (VCT 300) is substituted for
'J'allais donc prendre (...)'. The difference of a
single letter, unnoticeable in the phonology of many
parts of France, may seem unimportant. But 'J'allai'
describes a completed movement, whereas 'J'allais'
shows a gesture which is possibly going to be
interrupted. The first, in other words, is spatial,
and the second, spatio-temporal.
         In the present-tense narration the
distinction is not always maintained, as shown by
examples like: 'Ma main VA le saisir' (FD 245), 'je
VAIS m'{lancer' (FD 257).18 In such instances, the
spatial and temporal aspects are fused.
         One or other aspect may of course be lost.
The temporal one disappears in 'Les matelots VONT
chercher les pics' when the illustration shows the
sailors already working with the pick-axes (C 94)!
Sometimes, the ambiguity is undermined by an adverb,
or simply by the following events: 'A pr{sent, que
VA faire Robert Kurtis?' (C 72), 'Je VAIS faire feu.
Hans m'arrte d'un signe' (VCT 270), 'Je VAIS les
suivre ... ] Une main m'arrte' (C 110). In other
cases, the spatial aspect is excluded from the
beginning because the semantic level makes it clear
that the assertions are 'merely' predictions: '(...)
cette minute suprme qui va terminer (ma vie)' (C
110) or 'Nous allons sauter!' (VCT 290, repeated
word for word on C 56). 
         These last two examples are in fcat very
important. Such instances may perhaps of course be
interpreted as being in free indirect style; but
such an explanation does not totally remove the
problem. The future seems here contingently
ill-defined (as it is in conventional narration,
subject to the whims of the narrator) but also
essentially and irrevocably ill-defined,
undecidable. Taking these two utterances as
literally true would be equivalent to contemplating
a narrative on the point of disappearing. Because of
their very 'monosemy', these two pinpoint the
problem which the va form in general merely alludes
to, but which is at the heart of present-tense
narration: how can a future exist in a work of
fiction? On whose authority can pronouncements be
made about events yet to happen? 
         'Nous allons sauter!' is particularly
illuminating in this respect, for it is not in
quotation marks, and its concise and categorical
affirmation implies its own contradiction. (If it is
true, a) the story necessarily stops at that point,
and b) the communication of the affirmation to any
sort of narrataire becomes impossible.) More
precisely, we can say that this self-contradiction
is a sophisticated variant on the Cretan Liar
Paradox, on a specifically temporal plane. Instead
of simply saying 'I am lying', the character affirms
'I will have been lying': 'If I am telling the truth
at the moment, then it will have been the case that
I cannot have been telling the truth'. By means of
this convoluted self-denegation, doubt is ultimately
cast onto everything the first-person present-tense
narrator affirms. Verne exhibits a very modern and
complex self-questioning.
         In practice, of course, solutions are
often found to the potential paradoxes of the
open-ended future within the present-tense system.
First, occurrences of 'vais' and 'va' other than
those already quoted are rarely in the affirmative,
except for events that are predictable in the short
term, like the weather (VCT 282, etc.). Sometimes,
they are negative, interrogative or combined with
'si' (e.g. VCT 287) - the slight redundancy of this
last formulation indicating the tension provoked
even by hypotheses concerning the future. But most
often, other auxiliaries are used instead, like
vouloir, devoir or pouvoir: the subjectivity of
these verbs, and their emphasis on present
potentiality, means that they are interpreted more
as intentions than as affirmations, and therefore
the paradox is largely avoided. 
         Secondly, the context is often vital. Thus
if the isolated prediction '(...) nous sommes sur le
point de chavirer' (VCT 272) may undoubtedly be
taken at face-value, an iterative fatal prediction
is such a contradictory concept as to make the
reader automatically assume it is in the past, as
the full quotation shows: 'Vingt fois nous sommes
sur le point de chavirer'. Similarly, the phrases
'l'{tat liquide va remplacer (...)' and 'ce globe
que (la n{buleuse) va former' (VCT 262) may, if
taken in isolation, again seem to be authentic
pronouncements about the future. But in fact, as we
have seen, they form part of Axel's vision of past
time and thus, in addition to operating in
diametrically opposite directions, are both
ultimately bounded by posterior events.
          In this way all the occurrences of 'va'
extrapolate the tendency of the unfinished messages
and other terminal situations: they remove the
protection that consisted of the inverted commas or
the impending end-cover. They imply, even if only
some of them create, a revealing paradox: that of
the absorption of the narrator by his character, a
present-future that is open-ended, a fictional
time-span of an unpredictable nature.  
          The paradox is in fact taken a degree
further with the future tense itself. This form is
employed to make a number of even more categorical
predictions about events on the millionaire cruiser
with its resident orchestra or about the rescue of
Ratine from her life as an oyster:

         Les plus riches gentlemen, Walter
Tankerdon en tete, font merveille dans le sparties
de golf et de tennis. Lorsque le soleil SERA tomb{
perpendiculairement sous l'horizon, ne laissant
apr}s lui qu'un cr{puscule de quarante-cinq minutes,
les fus{es du feu d'artifice PRENDRONT leur vol @
travers l'espace, et une nuit sans lune PRETERA au
d{ploiement de ces magnificences. ] Dans la grande
salle du casino, le quatuor est baptis{ (...) (IH I
x 112).  

Somme toute, comme ils n'ont pas r{clam{ contre cet
enl}vement, il n'y a point eu {change de notes
(...). Quand il PLAIRA au quatuor de reparatre sur
le th{tre de ses succ}s, il SERA le bienvenu. ] On
comprend que les deux violons et l'alto ont impos{
silence (...) (IH I xii 131). 

Grce aux sentiments d'humanit{ que les Malais
AURONT su exploiter, sans {veiller aucun soup\on,
Standard Island RALLIERA les parages d'Erromango...
Elle MOUILLERA @ quelques encablures... Ils la
JETTERONT sur les roches... Elle s'y BRISERA... (IH
II ii 179, cf. II ii 178, I vi 222).

Le porte-monnaie du quatuor est bien garni, et, s'il
se vide @ Standard Island, quelques recettes @ San
Diego ne TARDERONT pas @ le remplir (IH I vi 64).  

Lorsque le banc SERA @ sec, ils IRONT chercher la
pr{cieuse hutre, qui renferme Ratine, et
l'EMPORTERONT (FR 13).  

         One's first reaction to these passages -
above all if read in their context of present tenses
- is surely surprise and incomprehension. Even with
the benefit of decades of narrative experimentation
behind us, it is difficult to see where the verbs in
the third person and future tense 'have come from',
especially given that there are no adverbs and that
the rest of the works is also in the third person.
One's surprise is undoubtedly further increased by
what they say, for it is destined to be essentially
untrue: the fireworks are not mentioned again, the
players do not go back, the Malays' attack fails,
the players do not make money at San Diego, and the
rescue of Ratine does not happen as described. The
utterances conceal, once again, a flagrant tendency
to self-contradiction.
         The problem of the open-ended future is
therefore posed here with particular acuity. What is
the point of these utterances? And who is
responsible for them? In the total absence of the
usual markers, it would be hazardous to interpret
them as an 'authorial' intervention. Nor can one
easily posit the transcription in free indirect
style of the thoughts of an individual or a group,
since, in the third case for instance, nobody has
any warning of the Malays' intention to attack, and
nowhere else in the novel is their point of view
adopted.
         A first conclusion, then, is that this use
of the future tense is a surprising departure from
the literary norms - even of the twentieth century.
And secondly, given that no other explanation works,
the only response seems to be to posit a sort of
free style, one that can only be the responsibility
of the narrator. The free style is again
indeterminate between direct and indirect - indeed
the distinction becomes meaningless here. But,
because of the tense used and the systematic
unreliability of the information given, this style
is necessarily distinct from the principal voice;
and must therefore be considered as forming a
'second narrative voice'. These future tenses, in
brief, constitute another radical innovation, and
one that coincides with the striking mode of
narration of L'Ile @ h{lice: its unique combination
of deictic tense and non-deictic person.
          Both the va form and the future thus
extrapolate the narrative problems caused by a
present tense which is sometimes a present time.
Often, it is true, the problems are eluded, for an
apparently true present/future is really guaranteed
by a narrator-in-the-shadows, and is consequently
firmly anchored in the past. But in other cases, the
problems of freedom in narration are squarely faced
up to; and the narration then tends to blend into
the fiction itself. Of course, explanations in terms
of authors' 'mistakes' cannot be totally excluded.
But in the particular case of Verne's futures, the
occurrences are sufficiently distinctive and
numerous to make us suspect that some sort of
aesthetic 'plan' is at work. Above all, they fit
into the wider context of the use of the present
tense, which can clearly not be a mere 'accident'.
         Verne's works are not only remarkable
experiments in the novel, but point the way to later
developments. Their systematic doubt, loosening of
structures, narrow social panorama, introversion and
self-consciousness are all aspects of anguished
modernity.

Towards a New Novel

           Le Chancellor, L'Ile @ h{lice and Face
au drapeau must be considered as startling
innovations in the form of the novel. But in
addition they pose the questions of time in
literature and the nature of narration; and they
also go some distance, I would claim, towards
answering them, towards creating a new system in
place of the old. The simple appearance of the
present tense in fact conceals the existence of two
modes, each with its own adverbial system: an
external one designed for the narration of
adventures and a personal one suitable for
introspection. What is more, transitions between the
two may be either gradual or sudden. If further
evidence were required of the care with which the
tense system is constructed, it is provided by the
pass{ simple framework. These work in very close
harmony with the symmetries we observed in the speed
of the narration and with the various stages of
cannibalism and cannibalisation. Form and content
here mutually reinforce each other.
          But the specific raison d'tre of the
experiments still remains largely mysterious. Even
in the most radical modern experiments, tenses are
essentially defined by their variety, by their
contrast with surrounding forms (Weinrich, ch. 4).
Why then are over four-fifths of Verne's verbs in a
single tense? The much-analysed pass{ compos{ of
L'Etranger, by way of comparison, makes up much less
than two-thirds of the verbs.19 Why is the present
used rather than some other tense? Why do the
experiments continue over some 800 pages or 25,000
verbs? Why do these novels employ this particular
device?
           The explanation in terms of the diary is
clearly incompatible with the parts of the corpus
that are not in dated sections - and even for the
dated sections, it does not begin to account for the
persistence of the present, nor for the dual
internal temporal structure. Again, it might be
thought that the tenses were linked to an unusual
distribution of past, present and future time-
spheres. Whereas conventional narration can draw on
two main tenses, two for future events, and one or
two for past events, the three works can draw on
only one main tense, two for future events and as
many as four or five for anterior events. This sort
of link could only be plausible, then, if the works
spent a great deal of time exploring the past in
great detail. But in reality, they hardly exploit
the opportunities for flashbacks at all, whether
personal or historical, or internal or external to
the time of the novels. Instead, the use of the
present tense causes the narration to virtually
"implode", posing the problem of the continuity of
the narrative act in fiction. On this level, the
tenses are positively counter-functional. 
         Is there anything then in the themes which
might explain the present tense? Comparison with the
rest of Verne's works - and with the 'adventure'
novel in general - does lead in fact to the
observation of a number of unusual characteristics.
The figure of Kazallon, anodyne first-person
narrator of Le Chancellor, is typical of the huge,
almost Meursault-like, distance between the main
character and the author. In none of the three
novels in fact is there a hero, in the sense of an
admirable character who remains at the centre of the
stage; in none is any particular aim being pursued
apart from the passive one of mere survival; and in
none do all the sympathetic characters finally
survive. In addition, all three works are set at
sea, out of sight of land; in all three, the main
protagonists are there against their will, as
unwilling passengers; and in all three, the future
is unknown, and will be determined by factors beyond
their control. 
         Intuitively, one can see that the present
tense is at least compatible with such
characteristics; that spatio-temporal emptiness,
lack of structure, negativity, pessimism,
indeterminism and reductionism might easily be all
linked together. But this would still not seem
enough on its own to justify the extent of the
experiments.
         We have seen that the three works
themselves contain no hint of acknowledgement of
their own formal eccentricity. But in the other
Voyages, a careful reading does occasionally throw
up a potentially relevant comment. In each case,
formal reductionism and the very stuff of artistic
activity are closely associated.      Thus when
faced with the problem of pursuing rhymes 'like
deserters in a battle', Hector Servadac attempts to
subject poetry to rigorous methods, using a colour-
code system 'afin de mieux varier les rimes
rebelles' (HS 21). Again, Scottish bagpipe music is
described as exclusively using 'les intervalles
d'une gamme majeure, @ laquelle manque la sensible'
(RV 48). The mad king-anthropologist, lastly, is
presented as having performed a similar subversion
on the musical scale of his barrel-organ: '"Pour
{conomiser les notes, il n'a fourr{ dans sa bote ni
les ut ni les sol di}ses!"' (VA xvi 183). The three-
way convergence is striking. Colours, rhyming
vowels, notes: in each case at least seven primary
values are possible, but in each case the range is
reduced to a more limited form of expression. And
nowhere is any further explanation provided. 
         It is here that the tenses come into play,
for there are again approximately seven basic values
and the range is again dramatically underemployed,
nay decimated, once more without justification
given. Even the dates involved would seem to confirm
a connection.20 My claim, then, is that after
carrying out his experiments, Verne cannot resist
alluding to them - but in characteristically
indirect fashion, by writing about colours, notes
and vowels rather than about tenses. For the pass{
simple, read G-sharp, and for the conditional, read
green o. 
         In this light, we can also understand the
(fictional) audience's reaction to 'cette
abomination, (...) cette criminelle substitution
d'un mode @ l'autre' (VA xvi 183). They did not even
notice. For untutored savages, read the French
reading public. This phrase is a scathing comment on
the real public's total blindness to the experiments
replacing most of the tenses - a comment itself
destined of course to remain totally misunderstood.
The nouveaux romanciers have been much less discreet
about their own formal innovations.
         The public's reaction did contain some
information, nevertheless: the low sales-figures of
the three novels21 may be taken as implying some sort
of link between the formal experiment and the
discontinuity in Verne's production that
Bellemin-Nol and Raymond noted (cf. my Chapter 1).
Such an idea is supported by observing that what
seems to 'break' in the Voyages is the temporal
coherence - the overall sense of significance - and
that the experiments explicitly provide the means of
expressing this in sustained and tangible form.
Consequently, I would argue that the break is more
pronounced and happens earlier than most critics
have recognised - that it is Le Chancellor which
inaugurates the later period, and in no uncertain
fashion. Cannibalism and unprecedented tenses are
both signs of a deep despair.
         Moreover, the spatio-temporal emptiness of
the three novels and their apparently perverse
omission of the past tenses may tie in with other
general features of the Voyages observed earlier.
Their negativity and reductionism, in particular,
stand in many respects in opposition to the dynamic
structures implied both by the line and arborescence
and by the pass{ simple. But they also share
characteristics with the various closed systems
analysed throughout this work: the refusal to use
external resources, most notably, and the bored
passivity that results. The ultimate effect of being
an unwilling passenger (or perhaps a narrator
without a subject) is very similar to that of the
solitary or starving individual: that of being
trapped in the present, in the situation of waiting,
of waiting for events that are not only
unpredictible but also beyond all control. 
         Here at last, then, is a precise link
between the forms of the three novels and their
contents. Waiting is the sign that there are no
adventures left; that, the past having been
foreclosed, the future is thereby also poisoned; and
that, as a result, the problems to come can no
longer displace those of the present, nor the
practical questions the existential ones. The
present tense throws the characters back on their
own devices. It is this same fundamental situation,
I would argue, that Beckett explores, from En
Attendant Godot (1952) onwards. Beckett exhibits the
same emphasis on waiting, the same obsession with
the closed physical space, the same curtailment of
the future, the same further reduction of the
already reduced space and the same refusal to
consider abstract metaphysics directly.22 Instead of
relying on delayed gratification - the perversely
roundabout route, the constantly retreating temporal
horizon - the characters of both writers are reduced
to a complete passivity - to hoping that their
sensory and metaphysical deprivations will go away,
and to writing, like Flaubert, about almost nothing.
Action and narration together give them enough
substance to exist, but only just. 
         Throughout the Voyages, indeed, there is
a similar tendency to exist in the anxious
expectation of catastrophe - 'la mort probable @
chaque minute, @ chaque seconde' (MS 127). Most of
the time, the characters under this sword of
Damocles attempt to adopt a pragmatic and phlegmatic
attitude. They argue that, '"si @ chaque instant
nous pouvons p{rir, @ chaque instant aussi nous
pouvons e^tre sauv{s"' (VCT 341); or else that their
very powerlessness frees their minds for other
matters: '"'Apr}s', c'est l'avenir, c'est ce que
Dieu voudra! Ne songeons qu'au pr{sent!"' (C 61; cf
46). But the situation cannot really be considered
symmetrical, for 'being saved', whether one takes it
in its moral or adventure-story meaning, amounts to
continuing to wait for the unpredictable future - to
being 'condemned to inaction' (C 50). And thinking
'only about the present' is even further from a
solution, being merely a conciser formulation of the
problem. '"Que sommes-nous venus faire ici?"'
Verne's characters ask in quiet desperation, '"mais
que faire?"' (RV 188; VCT 341). But the question is
answered at best by an unhelpful and passive '"ce
que nous faisons"'; and at worst either by a
nihilistic '"il faut (...) ne rien faire"' or by a
suicidal '"plus rien @ faire"'.23 Both 'nothing to
do' and 'nothing to be done': a situation both empty
and desperate. The only response proposed to the
problem of anguished solipsism is to indulge in yet
more anguished solipsism. And this is in the early,
supposedly more optimistic, works!
         Negativity and materialism have robbed the
characters of all normal occupations, and it is in
this metaphysical dead-end that the regressive
activities find one of their principal raisons
d'tre. The only occupation at the disposal of the
characters is to squeeze the maximum out of the
resources remaining in the system. After the
successive stages have been passed through, however
- after internal resources have also been exhausted
- the '"que faire?"' question only comes back with
greater force than ever. The despair of Verne's
characters is then all the more complete for being
concentrated into the pathetically restrained limits
of the present.
         The tenses used in Le Chancellor, L'Ile @
h{lice and Face au drapeau would thus seem to be
merely one manifestation - but one that is
'overdetermined' - of the reductionist and self-
annihilating tendencies visible throughout Verne's
works. The avoidance of the normal mode of narration
and the resultant temporal stagnation barely visible
in Vingt mille lieues and La Mission Barsac in fact
underlie all the Voyages extraordinaires. Beneath
the enthusiastic pursuit of the adventure genre,
there is often the opposite genre trying to get out
- and it succeeds over at least three novels. The
present tense stands for the renunciation of three
connected facilit{s: the optimistic fuite en avant,
the extravagant use of external material and
narrative resources and the retreat into the past or
future. It substitutes instead a hopeless waiting,
an existential void: closed tenses and closed social
systems are ultimately in tight correlation.
         The rupture in Verne's production points
to one of the important problematics of the
collected works. The break of the structure is the
result of going to the end of the cul-de-sac implied
by certain versions of the naturalistic mode of
time: '(the) slow, imperceptible pining away, the
silent wearing out of life.'25 At the same time,
Verne seems to be taking part in - even anticipating
on - the general tendency of the last quarter of the
nineteenth century to turn the novel inwards and to
question the very genre itself.26
         In so doing, he points up the
arbitrariness of Weinrich's and Benveniste's names
for the groups of tenses. Although temps narratifs,
temps de l'histoire, temps commentatifs, temps du
discours are in general accurately named, the effect
of Verne's radical subversion is to make the
'commentative tenses' into un-commentative
'narrative' ones, to produce a 'discourse' which
does not discourse at all but instead tells a story.

         Fran\ois Rivi}re's disappointed
conclusion, that Verne's writing is here equivalent
to an 'absence d'intrigue',27 must therefore be
replaced by a recognition of novelty on a deeper
level. The temporal and spatial minimalism of the
marine setting represents an escape from the
structural looseness of much of the picaresque and
adventure genres. But it and the materialistic
reductionism are merely the donn{es of Verne's
fiction. From them, the novels create a multi-level
interrogation of the process of narration, a
universe where the form refers insistently to its
own origin, a spiral of significance that points
ineluctably to its own inner void. Verne's use of
the present tense, with its concomitant distortion
of the past and future, is not merely a formal
device, but represents an attempt to refashion the
genre of the novel. His search for a way of
expressing the mood of three voyages leads him to a
rejection of the ordered temporality of the
nineteenth-century novel, and to the creation of an
'external interior monologue', a personal but
disciplined vision, an ongoing dur{e, closer to
man's real experience of the tangible world.
         This emphasis on present time anticipates
a major concern of many modern works. Verne's
strength is not to have predicted the science of the
twentieth century, but to have laid the ground for
some of its most remarkable literary developments. 
   




CHAPTER 10

'SO UNLITERARY A WRITER AS VERNE'?


The Closing Down of History

Our journey through the Vernian universe has above all led
us to discover a bewildering richness of material, and one
where the difficulties of searching for order are compounded
by two distinctive traits. First, Verne's works seem to
consist almost exclusively of 'one-offs', of presentations
of the non-reproducible peculiarities of the natural or human
worlds, of  unique cases straddling the traditional
classifications. Each Voyage is apparently so constructed as
to blur numerous distinctions: those separating God and man,
man and beast, beast and machine; space and time, inside and
outside, open and closed; novelty and repetition, self and
others, or activity and passivity. The texts are at first
sight nothing but stresses and strains.
        Comprehension is seemingly further hindered by the
other distinctive trait, the differences between the earlier
and later works. If most of the Voyages up to L'Ile
myst{rieuse (1875) offer relatively structured forms and
themes, those published after this date are characterised by
a regression from earlier positions and an increase in
explicit irony and pessimism. Must one therefore consider
them, like Bellemin-Nol, as 'fiascos'? To answer this
question, the criteria involved must be made clearer.
        If an explicit philosophical or ideological 'message'
is being sought, then the later works do imply a certain
failure. Verne undermines more and more of the conventional
wisdoms of the sixty-eight years when 'he' was writing. As
Raymond points out, the self-conscious works of the later
period air obsessions that had previously only been visible
in outline, lay bare their own textual machinery, and so
afford certainly fewer positive conclusions but perhaps as
much understanding of the Voyages as a whole.
        Using the complementarity of the two periods to
search for order is therefore the most suitable way of
approaching the Vernian cosmos. The heroes started with the
challenge of coming to terms with an open horizon. To be able
to travel, their aim was to make some sort of connection
between their own isolated 'point-being' and the whole of
two- or three-dimensional space. They wished to find a
structure that was continuous but would also be able, by its
planarity, to accommodate a geometrically increasing area of
space. To a certain extent, these conditions are satisfied
in the arborescence, for it can be considered to 'start from'
a single point, but to finish by filling the length and
breadth of the available space. But the projects are still
far from being completed, because the destination remains
evacuated: without a fixed end, the fuite en avant of the
branching structure is equivalent to an avoidance of the
issue. The mere covering of space, the later works belatedly
seem to conclude, cannot hope to produce significance,
cannot, a fortiori, lead to the sacred. It merely dissipates
energy.
        The structure standing in opposition, the linear path
that ignores the vagaries of space and heads directly towards
a predetermined goal, is also a frequent figure in the
Vernian cartography. But it often involves the opposite
problem, tending as it does to lead too quickly to the
destination. If he wishes to use this form, therefore,
Vernian man must temper his desire to arrive in an unexplored
region by employing artificial means, by thinking about the
joys of travelling. Self-restraint is part of gratification. 
        Novel destinations cannot however be invented
indefinitely in an age where the speed of travel is rapidly
shrinking space. The age of exploration will soon have to be
considered closed - and going too often to the ends of the
Earth means coming all the more abruptly to the end of the
world. The days of the Voyages are numbered from the
beginning. (Verne is not of course the only writer to
contemplate this ending of history - but he seems to have
been the first (and the last?) to make it the aim of his
collected works.) Once the universe has been totally
discovered and described - if only in fiction - the series
of Les Mondes connus et inconnus will be bereft of its
constituent tension. The heroes and the author are obliged
from the beginning to eke out what is left of their peau de
chagrin, but at the same time to indulge in bursts of
hyperactivity when others look like getting there first; and this double activity
is overshadowed by the total passivity that will result when
there is nothing left at all. The dog in the manger is
guarding a stable-door that is ineluctably closing. Verne
reacts to the acceleration of history by trying,
alternatively, to slow it down and to speed it up even more.
        The tensions between closure and openness and
activity and passivity - and between the earlier and later
works - are thus not only psychological but historical. For
Verne, the unique c{sure is between a world where field
exploration is still possible, where anything may yet be
found, and a globe without even the theoretical possibility
of change, one limited to the dreary rehearsal of Les Mondes
connus.
        If we accept this hypothesis of the future as being
ultimately a dead-end for all the Vernian travellers, it
helps us understand why the real and cognitive ventures
nearly always finish by trying other time-zones. But even the
explorations carried out in the recent past, by means of
logical deductions or scientific or historical mises en
sc}ne, contain little mystery, and hence few chances of
approaching the sacred. By default, the remote past appears
to be the only issue open to the nineteenth century, the only
area where Nature can resist man's mechanical progress, the
only 'place', paradoxically, where the journey is not spoilt
by knowledge of journey's end. It is the only domain, in
other words, where real and significant change is still
possible. The consequence - which undoubtedly chimes in again
with Verne's psychology - is that the search for the
mysteries of past time receives exceptional attention in the
Voyages extraordinaires. But only in one book, Voyage au
centre de la Terre, do all three components slot perfectly
into place: the spatio-temporal relationship - one-to-one and
exhaustive; the direction - backwards; and the range - all
the time that has ever been. The time-travel of this novel
represents an impulse of the whole sixty-eight-year cycle.
From the scientific point of view, nevertheless, the long
backwards and downwards path through the animal, vegetable,
and mineral vestiges is overshadowed by its 'starting'-point
- the White man. But the journey also culminates in the
resurgence - 'l@-bas' - of something resembling modern man.
The end is thus in the beginning. Time-travel seems to be
both the only novel experience possible and the ultimate
symbol of the finiteness of existence and the closing-down
of history. It opens up new worlds - to visit rather than to conquer -
 but it also involves an unhealthy entanglement of past and
present - one containing an inherent tendency to implode. 
        Because even the spatio-temporal world proves in the
end to be bounded, each attempt to go beyond it merely serves
to emphasise the circularity: all roads lead back home.
Verne's heroes are sooner or later forced back into the
present, and into the smaller, self-contained spaces that
constitute both the ultima Thule and the denial of the travel
drive. The illustrations, with their tendency to the
instantaneous, may possibly reflect this spatio-temporal
frustration; but the major sign is undoubtedly the self-
reflection, self-absorption, and self-destruction which
feature so prominently throughout the Voyages.
        The tendencies occur in the most varied of 'systems',
but exhibit vital shared morphological characteristics. The
fundamental claim of this study, then, is that the processes
of Verne's ships, social groups, and tenses exhibit deep
structural parallels, and ones that imply a common disruption
of time and space. In each, a preliminary step consists of
the refusal to use the external resources normally considered
essential to the activity in question. The refusal is never
justified or explained, but we can note that the act of
choosing is generally very difficult for the characters, and
that this refusal obviates much of the need for choice. Then,
after the vital first step, the rest of the process follows
on.
        Two degrees of closure may be distinguished. The
first one involves the self-contained group or alimentary
system; it undermines the linear time of events and reduces
the distance between action and reaction. The high degree of
selectivity in the construction of the system permits
exhaustive treatment within it. This exhaustiveness will
nevertheless lead to the exhaustion of resources, and
necessarily culminates, therefore, in a bored passivity. 
        The final stage of endogamy occurs when the
selectivity becomes exclusivity, when the self-other division
is transferred from the social or ship's body to the self-
contained individual and when the past tenses are ousted by
the self-conscious present. The narrator now tends to lose
all autonomy, and external perspectiveness and resources to
be completely absent. The fuite en avant is turned in on
itself, it is a fuite en dedans. Narrator and character end
up hopelessly tangled together. Caught up on the horns of a temporal version of the Cretan Liar
Paradox, they can consider the future only in the light of
assertions which are either true or communicable but can
never be both together. The resonance now combines only too
perfectly with the chamber; the systems of autocannibalism,
autoeroticism, and 'autoreference' are both the most
naturally accessible ones and the most dangerously and
artificially isolated ones. Their constituent acts are
atemporal ones on a high-wire apparently held up only by the
flow of time and surface tension. They are the last positive,
self-assertive acts, and the final negative, self-
annihilating ones. They make up systems that are both open
and closed, free and constrained, and timeless and centred
on time. They are in perpetual motion but also permanently
self-destructing. 

        
Michel Meets Jules

Verne's works contain original and sophisticated systems; and
they do this starting from a realistic, even pedagogical,
perspective. One of the consequences is that conventions of
realism, at least as Verne interprets them, sometimes lead
to conclusions that fall outside the canon. But another
consequence is on our perceptions of the Voyages: Verne's
reputation as an 'impersonal' writer would seem to be very
much weakened. Even if conventional psychology plays little
part in the works, much of their unity comes from this subtle
and systematic working-out of the situation of the person in
the functioning of the universe. What begins as a journey of
exploration becomes a journey into the past and ends as a
journey to the centre of the self.
        Additional evidence for such a claim can be seen in
two central figures of the Voyages. The writer in Jules
Verne's works is one of the rare figures to be able to go
everywhere and evaluate all modes of life and thought. But
in practice, at least as first-person narrator, he invariably
deals with contingent matters: his subject is always very
much of this world and his rewards, if any, basely material.
Put otherwise, the essential problem of writing for Vernian
man is in the need for scrupulousness. Writing leaves little
time for action; and if it is not to be pure confabulation,
it must adhere closely to reality, but must avoid interfering with it, must avoid crossing the
frontier between the cognitive and the real worlds. The
writer can thus never be a full actor, but must always remain
involved. The tension between doing and observing can be seen
throughout the Voyages.
        The Vernian scientist possesses the same
conscientiousness, but taken to a higher pitch - Aronnax and
Clawbonny are also writers, but ones trapped in a narrow
specialisation. As a result, their attempted total
objectivity - their separation of narrative knowing and
active being - merely leads them back all the more quickly
and brutally to the ineradicable position of the individual.
The hidden role of the person - and his desire - is central
to an understanding of science in the Voyages.
        The writer and the scientist are both defined by
their ontological incompleteness and their more or less
repressed subjectivity. Above all, they both have an
ambiguous relationship with time and space, which permeate
all the concerns of the Voyages, but remain almost impossible
to isolate. Even at the end of our analysis, time and space
in the Voyages, considered separately, remain largely
mysterious entities. Neither is material nor immaterial,
neither, divinely-appointed nor created by man, and neither
is detectable as a scientific object nor constructable as a
literary subject. For Verne the positivist, the frustrating
lack of physical data tends to lead time and space to be
ignored; but for Verne the novelist-craftsman, they simply
cannot be circumvented. Instead, the problem is transferred,
subsumed into such typically nineteenth-century concerns as
the relationship with other times and places, the nature of
identity and difference, or the functioning of feedback
systems. Time and space in the Voyages remain a loose bundle
of conceptions and perceptions, defined above all in terms
of each other. Although rarely imperceptible, they stay
consistently and implacably unanalysable.
        As a result, the long and tortuous search in Jules
Verne's works for meaning in and over space and time never
reaches a final destination, frustrated as it is by a
blockage at the very beginning. The only reliable definition
of even such everyday conceptions as inside or outside or
physical and mental is a circular one where each is defined
as the opposite of the other - as Verne puts it, 'stomach and
brain' constitute the man (AL 119). In the Voyages,
hierarchical or top-down theories cannot hope to be sustained, because of the unpredictable
effect of natural oddities. Global views tie their authors
completely in knots, but partial ones throw up more problems
then they solve. Reflection alone is useless, and action
heedless. In this way, the Voyages extraordinaires seem to
present themselves as a heroic and exemplary failure: they
prove that even the most visionary survey of Nature's
outstanding features cannot put the world back together
again. This general scepticism is undoubtedly a reaction to -
 and comment on - the overweening philosophical and social
ideas of the time. Verne puts another nail into the remaining
encyclopaedic aims of the Age of Reason; and contributes
massively to what was to become the new uncertainty.
        Ultimately, then, Jules Verne argues that all
watertight, mechanical, or self-absorbed systems must be
avoided, that the only total system is the whole universe,
and that man's sole choice is in relativity. The Voyages seem
to conclude that man defines himself by contact with his
environment and by informed introspection. He must be neither
too involved nor too detached.
        Or at least, he must in the unrevised version. Michel
Verne's resuscitation of the Voyages in extremis subtly
alters the balance of the whole. The posthumous works are
perhaps less Vernian than hyper-Vernian, in constant danger
of being so imitative as to seem tongue-in-cheek, of becoming
'post-Vernian'. 
        The fifty pages of 'L'Eternal Adam', in particular,
put the ideas of fifty years through a prism. They use the
form to argue against the 'message', to apply scepticism to
the very principle of scepticism; and to conclude that the
scientist and the writer may together yet circumvent the
evasiveness of time and the meaningless of existence. In the
posthumous creed, appearances are particularly deceptive.
Cycles are not necessarily eternal, for individual
intelligence and collective wisdom, and faith in a future
progress and knowledge of a better past are not now
antagonistic opposites. Michel Verne's work faces up to the
disasters man provokes by excessive pride in advanced
technology; but does not allow itself to become hypnotised
by them.
        Such is the synthetic force of the tale, indeed, that
it acts in many ways as a conclusion for the whole
contradictory series of the Voyages extraordinaires. (For
this reason, but also for Michel's limpid and lucid
contribution to the collected works, it is my view that they
should have both names on the cover. The corollary is that Michel Verne ought also to have
full status as a writer in encyclopaedias, histories of
literature and so on.) Bringing to a close one of the final
volumes, 'L'Eternel Adam' shifts the 'neither-nor' towards
a potential 'both-and'. It proclaims that man's essential
task is to attempt to come to terms with time and space by
both reflection and action. The central debate of the Voyages
- that between objectivity and subjectivity - is here partly
resolved. Man's proper role is in a courageous and lucid
search for theoretical and practical knowledge of himself and
the cosmos (EA 236): 

La v{ritable sup{riorit{ de l'homme, ce n'est pas de dominer,
de vaincre la nature; c'est, pour le penseur, de la
comprendre, de faire tenir l'univers immense dans le
microcosme de son cerveau; c'est, pour l'hommme d'action, de
garder une me sereine devant la r{volte de la mati}re, c'est
de lui dire: 'Me d{truire, soit! m'{mouvoir, jamais!...'.  

Why Him

Why, in the light of their subtlety and richness, have the
Voyages extraordinaires suffered from such a reputation for
naivety and poverty, and from at best an admittance into a
sub-literary genre? Why, even now, do postgraduate students
so often encounter such blind incomprehension?
         Mere popularity often of course has little to do
with literary merit. Nevertheless, any creative writer who
has been the most widely translated writer in the world, who
has sold as many copies as Marx or Mao and who, unlike all
other 'popular' writers has been read so extensively over
more than a century would seem to deserve a minimum of
serious consideration.1
        It is true that Jules Verne's works vary in interest,
epecially towards the end of his life. Even in the richest
works, Verne occasionally indulges in longueurs - and often
makes factual mistakes of the most elementary sort. More
generally, such features as a patronising tone, a tendency
to conservatism and certain limits of the genre sometimes
reduce 'the pleasure of the text'.
        But much of the responsibility, I would argue, must
in fact be laid at the door of some of the commentators
themselves. Neglect of the creative aspects of the Voyages has led, for
example, to trivialisations like Erich von Dniken's
'Spirit-Telephone Conversation with Jules Verne' or C.-N.
Martin's 'Jules Verne = 1/2 de Fenimore Cooper, 1/4 d'Edgar
Poe + 1/4 d'Hoffmann' or even to characterisations like
George Orwell's 'so unliterary a writer as Verne'!2
        But it is also certain critics' misunderstanding of
the nature of science-fiction and indeed of science and of
literature that seems to have led them astray. Thus Verne
himself, comparing his own works with those of H. G. Wells,
claimed '"I make use of physics. He invents"'; Wells throws
the comparison back, arguing that Verne avoids the fantastic
and that 'his works dealt almost always with actual
possibilities of invention and discovery'; Suvin presents
Verne as a strict Newtonian, dismissing him with an
unsupported remark about his 'liberal interest in the
mechanics of locomotion within a SAFELY HOMOGENEOUS SPACE'.3
Francis Lacassin, lastly, extrapolates the ideas of these
three, making a long list of science-fiction concepts
supposedly absent from the Voyages: 'Equation espace-temps;
univers parall}les; voyage dans le temps et sa cons{quence
extrme, le paradoxe temporel; promotion du r}gne animal ou
v{g{tal  (..., d')esp}ces animales (...); d{finition d'une
nouvelle cosmogonie; mutants; robots; monstres; humanodes'.4
        In assessing these ideas, one can begin by agreeing
that Verne's works are characterised by many
positivistic-inspired positions that exclude certain aspects
of the extraordinary. Verne's horror of the 'danger' of the
unsubstantiated metaphor generates many of the works.
Plausibility and realism often haunt the Voyages. But I would
argue that the critics fatally weaken their case by an
extremely unfortunate choice of terms. Indeed, it is my claim
that, on each point, the opposite assertion is nearer the
truth. Verne's works, I believe, on occasion use physics in
order to invent - more effectively than in the magic potions,
black boxes and mechanical justifications of many of his
predecessors and successors; the side-effects include lucid
analyses of science and its effects on humanity, and
intelligent guesses as to which of the 'possibilities'
(everything is possible) were actually probabilities; and
Verne's space, with its temporal force and its inside-outside
duality, is anything on earth but 'safely homogeneous'. His
scientific invention in fact meets most of Lacassin's requirements - whose list comes therefore close
to providing a brilliant summary of the Voyages! 
        The incomprehension of the four critics may have a
common cause. It may easily have been provoked by mistaking
the verisimilitude of the Voyages for 'verism', and
science-in-fiction for science, almost as if Verne were meant
to be a scientist, and his works, papers in Nature. The
invention of the Voyages occurs in reality on both the
literal and the literary levels. The new machine-gadgets are
subject to metaphors, puns, ambiguities and shifts in
language before being allowed to vehicle new conceptions of
space-time, alternative worlds, monsters or subhumans.
Science is judged for its coherence, originality and truth
- as values in and of fiction. 'At worst' Verne employs
science towards his own ends, sidesteps it, or ignores it
completely. 'At best' the Voyages are science-fiction -
'rveries scientifico-fantaisistes' - for in them, narration
governs Nature, experiments are non-reproducible, and the
mathematical creates the mythical. In Verne's universe, the
comic, the cosmic and the cosmetic are literally contained
the one in the other.
        A few of the commentators on Verne must therefore be
held partly responsible for contributing to his grossly
inappropriate reputation - despite the excellent work in
recent years of Vierne, Delabroy, Raymond, Comp}re, A. Martin
and others. One of the reasons why so few English-language
critics have taken part in this trend until now may have
something to do with the dismal quality of most of the
original translations - often still the ones used today. Not
only are whole chapters missing from the English versions,
but they contain such nonsensical phrases as 'with a lentil,
he lighted a fire', 'the disagreeable territory of Nebraska'
(the Badlands), 'the Passage of the North Sea' (North-West
Passage), or using explosives to 'jump over' obstacles.5 I am
suggesting, in other words, that even university reading -
or lack of it - in the Anglo-Saxon countries has all too
often been affected by the popular reputation of Verne,
itself the product of the truncated and often nonsensical
English texts. My own personal experience has often revealed
the depths of misunderstanding this writer suffers from -
even from those that, by their profession, should know
better.
        But even in his country of origin, the myth dies
hard. A further explanatory, if again extraneous, factor may
be found in the half-truth of Verne as a writer for children
- although La Fontaine, Defoe, Swift, Alain-Fournier and Saint-Exup{ry have
survived a similar accusation. Stage adaptations and film
versions, often bearing little resemblance to the novels,
have also drawn attention away from the specifically literary
qualities. Another reason may possibly be Verne's very
position as a unique best-seller for well over a century: as
Serres ironically quips, Verne is read but not studied -
which makes him the opposite of a great man.6
        Certain other features of the works themselves may
also have further contributed to misapprehensions. Their
length - approximately 8 million words - is certainly an
obstacle to complete knowledge and appreciation; but does not
seem to have detracted from respect for what is possibly the
only comparably encyclopaedic attempt, La Com{die humaine.
Verne's image may have something to do instead with the
distance between his surface and 'deep' levels, the
all-encompassing nature of his irony, which has often taken
in the superficial reader. Reinforced by his genre, his
audience and his publisher's censorship, Verne's discretion
tends towards literal self-effacement. His networks of
obsessions present symptoms but avoid the sore points
themselves. Personal and social concerns are camouflaged,
desire functions in terms of an elsewhere, and truths are
skirted round rather than baldly enounced. As a result,
Verne's major contribution to the form of the novel has never
even been noticed; and possibly just as surprising, his claim
to be adhering to the principles of physics when writing an
untrammelled tale of time-travel has also passed totally
unchallenged.
        The texts themselves therefore require a great deal
of further unprejudiced analysis. Verne can only be evaluated
at his just worth if the examples of Tolstoy, Turgenev and
Tournier7 are followed: if detailed attention is paid to the
literary aspects of the Voyages themselves, rather than to
incidental matters in or around them.
        The first task of future research is thus to continue
to dispel the mythical Verne. But a great deal of work also
remains to be done before we can possess the depth of
accurate knowledge that exists for contemporaries like
Baudelaire, Flaubert or Proust/Gide?. Fuller investigations
are still needed of themes like cannibalism and sexuality,
reading and writing, and of such formal elements as the use
of person, the 'diary' structures, the dialogue and the use
of rhythm. Examining possible influences by Verne on twentieth-century writers like Camus, Sartre and
above all Tournier could throw up some surprising
conclusions. Annotated editions of the richest works would
seem basic necessities. So would systematic literary
evaluation of Michel Verne's contribution, especially novels
like L'Agence Thompson and La Mission Barsac; including, for
instance, the internal theme of authorship and the father-son
relationship.
        Only if such studies are added to the growing number
of serious ones in recent years can Verne's peculiarly
down-to-earth and sensorial universe be properly understood.
Only then can we gain a full comprehension of the poetry of
his gleaming machines and Romantic desolations and
dissolutions; of his acute sensitivity and sensibility, his
kinaesthetic, almost neurasthenic, awareness. Verne shows man
as caught between salvation and desire, the beaten track and
the unexplored horizon, the contentment of closure and the
voluptuousness of open space. In his best works, phlegm is
inseparable from passion and the word from the spirit.
Verne's prophetic literal-mindedness topples over into poetic
ecstasy, and effects a subtle but far-reaching shift in our
ways of seeing and feeling the world.     