What do you say about a guy who wrote two novels a year for 40 years?
He Is Nemo
It’s a paradox that with fame and popularity often comes profound misunderstanding. The more people who know of you, the more your private identity can get lost behind the public perception. This certainly is true in the case of Jules Verne. He’s one of the most popular authors in the history of the world: the United Nations Index lists him in the Top Five of the most translated authors of all time, below Agatha Christie and Walt Disney and above such luminaries as Shakespeare and V.I. Lenin. But the man himself remains an enigma shrouded in mystery. Like his famous creation, Captain Nemo (which is, of course, Latin for nobody), Verne is both more and less than a mere man; he is a vessel for the imaginations of others, an idea as much as a reality.
The Two Vernes
Verne’s life and work betray a man with a dual nature: a romantic dreamer on the one hand and on the other a technician, fascinated with the technological and the industrial, particularly as it applied to travel. Born in 1828 in the French seafaring town of Nantes, Verne grew up writing poems and verse plays in the swashbuckling, romantic style of his hero Victor Hugo, who dominated the French imagination in a way difficult to fathom in our era of fragmented mainstream culture; indeed, Verne once told a reporter he could recite the entirety of Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame from memory. Young Jules and his brother Paul were young adventurers, exploring the banks of the Loire River and the rim of the Atlantic Ocean. The watery theme dogged the Vernes: Paul would become a career officer in the French navy, and Jules eventually owned three yachts.
But Jules also had a technocratic, wonkish side balancing out his more radical, adventurous streak. As a high school student, Verne focused on geography before moving onto literature; he studied law at the University of Paris while trying to make it as a young playwright; and he supported his family by working as a stockbroker while he shopped his manuscripts to publishers. His books—voyages of discovery and self-discovery—were frequently accompanied by detailed, expository cartographic and scientific sketches that Verne drew himself. They are epic journeys, filled with exciting incident, but he assembled them with the skill and care of a machinist and they move forward with the relentless internal consistency of clockwork. “I have still as much pleasure,” Verne said in an 1894 interview, “in watching the steam-engine of a fine locomotive at work as I have in contemplating a picture by Raphael or Correggio.”
Verne was a man of opposites. Indeed, though he sailed around the coasts of Europe in his yachts, Verne was possessed of a sickly constitution and was given to fits of hypochondria. This prophet of the modern spent the last 20 years of his life in domestic seclusion in the ancient medieval city of Amiens.
The First International Bestseller
Verne, a prolific craftsman if there ever was one, wrote 54 volumes of “Extraordinary Voyages” between 1863 and 1904. Like the works of his favorite author, Dickens, these ran first as serials in local French magazines before they were published as stand-alone novels. And thanks to the ever-shrinking late-19th-century world, Verne became popularly famous across the world during his own lifetime. This was a novel development for a writer: Shakespeare had to wait nearly a century before the first translations of his work popped up in German; and though 18th-century author-intellectuals such as Voltaire and Goethe were read in noble courts, the bulk of the population had no idea who they were. But in this, the first Golden Age of the newspaper and mass-produced periodical, Verne’s books could be found in markets on either side of the Atlantic and Pacific. He attained a fame during his lifetime that his critically lauded contemporaries did not enjoy.
Homeric Myths for a Technological Age
Verne witnessed a tumultuous century, in which the Industrial Revolution allowed entire continents to be crisscrossed by railroad and entire oceans by steamship. Later in his life, telephone lines, automobiles, and flying machines made daily existence seem much as it would a hundred years later. As an old Europe of monarchies, rituals, and romantic beliefs receded into the background, a new era of science and technological-industrial progress rose to take its place. Verne, who began his career in imitation of Romantic writers such as Hugo and, later, Alexandre Dumas père (he was good friends with Dumas’ son, Alexandre, author of Camille), matured into a romantic writer for a post-romantic age, supplying a new breed of mythical heroes for a distinctly technological and scientific modern present. Captain Nemo, for instance, is named for an episode in Homer’s Odyssey—when asked to give his name by the grotesque giant Polyphemus, Odysseus replies “no one”—and most of Verne’s central characters can be read as Odyssean figures, setting sail through fantastic landscapes and unknown territories in order to return home.
Yet Verne was at pains to pair his romantic dreamers with complementary, scientific minds, avatars of modernity. In Around the World in 80 Days, the servant Passepartout is an endlessly distractable romantic spirit, reminiscent of Sancho Panza from Cervantes’ Don Quixote, whereas Phileas Fogg is a new kind of character: a man of scientific order and routine, his life ruled by the rituals brought to the British Empire through the Industrial Revolution—newspapers, schedules, and maps. This contrast of opposing forces is a characteristic trait in Verne’s life and work. The equilibrium between mind and spirit, which the character of Phileas Fogg discovers in Around the World, also constitutes the popular audience’s persistent fascination with Verne’s works.
He Wrote Travel Books, Not Science Fiction
Verne’s fascination with the scientific and the modern has earned him the posthumous title of the “father of science fiction,” but that term has become so laden with expectations in the latter half of this century that the description occludes more than it illuminates. It’s more accurate to describe him as a writer working within (and expanding) the conventions of the travel narrative, in a world undergoing the shocks of the steam-powered and electrical revolutions. All of Verne’s stories revolve around a central voyage, and he fills them with scenes of precisely rendered local color, fleshed out with detail to captivate the mind’s eye. No matter how fantastical the location, the reader’s thrills derive at least in part from the extraordinary verisimilitude of the tales, the sensation that in this optimistic era when technological innovation made anything seem possible, you could go there.
Around the World in 80 Days, written in 1872 at the midpoint of Verne’s career, offers a glimpse of the writer at his most crowd-pleasing and contemporary. Two recent breakthroughs in engineering—the construction of the Suez Canal in 1868 and the erection of the American transcontinental railroad in 1869— made the kind of speedy travel depicted in the book possible for the first time. Indeed, according to legend, Verne seized on the inspiration for the book after reading a travel advertisement in a local French newspaper. Part of the tale’s simple and immense charm is its appeal as a travel story—the document of a voyage that, while fantastical, was also eminently possible.
A Generation that Redefined Popular Fiction
In 1864, Verne published an appreciative review of Poe’s short stories (published in France beginning in the 1860s as Histoires Extraordinaires, they are a conspicuous influence on Verne’s own Voyages Extraordinaires). It was one of those rare moments when readers could identify a metaphoric torch being passed from one generation to the next. Over the next 40 years, Verne would combine Poe’s penchant for hyper-technical scientific description with a sense of swashbuckling adventure akin to Dumas (Three Musketeers) and Hugo (Les Misèrables). These he merged with his own fascination for travel to create a new kind of fiction.
It’s doubtful that Verne set out to create an entire genre, just as it’s doubtful that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, writing at the same time, meant to establish the detective novel, or H. G. Wells a rival strand of science fiction. Each of these authors in turn owed a great deal to the unheralded genius of Edgar Allan Poe; but many whom we now regard as the progenitors of so-called “genre fiction”—Verne (or Wells) and sci-fi, Conan Doyle and the detective novel, Poe and horror, Sir Walter Scott and medieval fantasy—were simply working craftsmen who made an evolutionary impact by synthesizing bits and pieces of literary tradition to suit a modern audience.
His Adaptors Have All but Erased Him
Images of Verne’s works—Phileas Fogg setting out to traverse the globe in 80 days; Nemo plunging 20,000 leagues under the sea in his fantastic machine, The Nautilus; journeys to the center of the earth and from the earth to the moon—reside in our collective cultural unconscious. And yet most of us have only a faint notion of his books, encountering his stories instead in pop-cultural adaptations. These adaptations often treat Verne as tabula rasa for their own obsessions, mining his Victorian epoch for metaphoric inspiration.
For instance, the spate of Verne adaptations from the Walt Disney company in the late 1950s and early ’60s embody the enthusiasms of an Atomic Age America, in which landing on the moon seemed like an ever-more plausible reality. The 1956 film version of Around the World in 80 Days forever chained the tale to the image of the now-famous hot-air balloon—imported from one of Verne’s other books. In 1946, Orson Welles adapted Around the World as a musical radio-play, accompanied by a swinging, cosmopolitan score from Cole Porter. Verne’s stories have become standards, interpreted from one generation to the next to yield up new meanings, just as Laura Eason and Lookingglass Theatre have done in this 21st-century version.