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Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Self:
Space and Time in the ‘Voyages extraordinaires’
William Butcher
For a couple of decades now, there has been huge interest in France in this writer, the bestselling author of all time, the most translated, and the only Frenchman to have achieved truly universal renown. But in Britain the real Verne is virtually unknown. It is this amazing disparity that my book tries to reduce.
It shows that the complexity of Verne’s themes and structures has been grossly underestimated in Britain, and that Verne’s works should be considered primarily as literature, albeit of a very readable nature. It tries therefore to establish the specifically literary devices used by this decidedly surprising writer. Although the book is a scholarly one, it never loses sight of the huge audience that Verne has maintained despite labouring under the misconception of being a writer for children and/or of science fiction.
The works of Jules Verne have undergone a major re-evaluation in France in recent years, based on a recognition of their sustained literary value and their unique influence on subsequent creative writers. In Britain, however, no full-length scholarly study of Verne had appeared before 1990.
It is this remarkable gap, where the bestselling writer of all time—and the only Frenchman to have achieved truly universal renown—is either unknown or travestied, that Dr Butcher brilliantly fills here. His detailed study of the themes and structures shows that they all lead ineluctably back to the author: that the self is at the centre of even the apparently most impersonal works.
William Butcher lectures in French Literature at the University of Buckingham. He was previously Senior Lecturer at the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, and has also taught in Malaysia and at Saint-Cyr, the INSEE and the ENS de Saint-Cloud. Dr Butcher has published extensively on French Literature and is co-author of Mississippi Madness: Canoeing the Mississippi-Missouri. He is currently preparing English editions of Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Backwards to Britain.
Malcolm Bowie: ‘Meticulous and original’
Ross Chambers: ‘Eloquent and powerful’
Edward J. Gallagher:
‘A paradigm through which to study Verne . . . Intriguing, provocative, stimulating . . . Any further study . . . will have to come to terms with [Butcher]’
The works of Jules Verne have undergone a major reevaluation in France in recent years, based on a recognition of their sustained literary value and their unique influence on subsequent creative writers. In Britain, however, no full-length scholarly study of Verne has ever appeared.
It is this remarkable gap, where the best-selling writer of all time — and the only Frenchman to have achieved truly universal renown — is either completely unknown or travestied, that Dr Butcher brilliantly fills here.
Another original feature is the full analysis of a recent discovery: Michel Verne’s posthumous, and often tongue-in-cheek, contribution to the Voyages extraordinaires, including the masterpiece ‘L’Eternel Adam’ (1910). Journey to the Centre of the Self argues that the very large number of journeys undertaken by the protagonists of both of the Vernes, whether under the seas, through the airs, or into space, represent a desire for transcendence. All the searches for the human, animal and mineral curiosities of the globe are also a search for lost time. One novel indeed, Voyage au centre de la Terre, employs an extended spatio-temporal metaphor to transport its heroes through the vertical layers of the past and into a primordial time-before-time, thus constituting a dramatic and convincing portrayal of travel in time.
Verne’s obsession with cannibalism — and corresponding currents of abnormal sexuality — has clear psychoanalytic roots; but this study looks at the precise structural consequences of the deviant acts and thus arrives at some remarkable conclusions.
Verne is also highly innovative in the stylistic area. Le Chancellor (1870, 1875) is the first novel in continuous prose to have been written in the present in French (and possibly in any Western European language); and L’Ile à hélice (1895), the first in the present and the third person. This discovery of Dr Butcher’s leads to an observation of genuinely experimental writing, for the present tense, with its ultimately destructive self-reference, perfectly expresses Verne’s self-consciousness, introspection and tendency to self-destruction.
The conclusion reunites these divergent spatio-temporal strands, in terms of such recurrent obsessions as inside-outside, self-others and plausibility-creativity. The most salient event of the nineteenth century is observed to be the closing of space represented by the closing of the age of exploration. What begins therefore as a journey of exploration becomes the journey into the past and finally ends up as a journey to the centre of the self. This ‘message’ is relayed, in subtly rewritten or pastiched form, in the posthumous works — and thus makes Jules-and-Michel very much more modern than has been realised.
Dr Butcher’s dense and wide-ranging study will revolutionise thinking about Verne in the English-speaking countries.
Prof Malcolm Bowie: ‘Original, impressive [. . .] and intelligent’
Prof Ross Chambers: ‘Eloquent and powerful’
Prof Edward J. Gallagher: ‘A paradigm through which to study Verne [. . .] intriguing, provocative, stimulating [. . .]. Any further study [. . .] will have to come to terms with [Journey to the centre of the Self]’
JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE SELF
Dr Butcher has also co-written Mississippi Madness
JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE SELF
TIME AND SPACE IN VERNE’S ‘VOYAGES EXTRAORDINAIRES’
William Butcher
© William Butcher
To the memory of my Father and Grandfather
CONTENTS
List of figures
Foreword by Ray Bradbury
Acknowledgements
Reference System
1 THE WARRIOR OF THE UNKNOWN
2 IN SEARCH OF LOST STRUCTURE
Lost Between Two Shores
The Strogoff Syndrome
Le Verbe et la Terre
Go Anywhere, Do Anything
Splitting the Difference
The Pleasure and the Pain
3 THE SHAPE’S THE THING
Plots and Intrigues
In and Out
Diversions or ‘Divertissements’
Putting it All Back Together Again
4 THE PAST IS A PLACE
Past Masters
Man and Less-than-Man
The New Country
Going Back
5 THE SHAPE OF THINGS GONE BY
Living in the Past
A Strange Dream
How to Travel in Time
6 STARTING AND STOPPING
Straight and Round
Return to Sender
Getting Things Going
Posthumous Cycles
Time Will Have a Stop?
7 ONE AND ALL
The Body Metaphoric
Violence and Sex
Friends and Relatives
The Terminal System
Knowledge and the Lone Individual
8 PAST REFLEXIONS
Past Present
Self-Conscious Narration
It Was Tomorrow
Will There Be a Reply?
Breaking Out
9 NOW OR NEVER
Things Going By
Supporting Role
Narration Impossible
Towards a New Novel
10 ‘SO UNLITERARY A WRITER AS VERNE’?
The Closing Down of History
Michel Meets Jules
Why Him?
Appendix A: The Time of the Novel
Appendix B: Michel Verne
Notes
Bibliography
Primary Works
Critical Studies
Index
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.
3.1 Graphs of Narrative Time v Fictional Time: Global Forms
(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’
3.2 The Beginnings
(a) Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours
(b) L’Ile mystérieuse
(c) Le Château des Carpathes
(d) Mistress Branican
3.3 The Endings
(a) De la Terre à la Lune
(b) Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours
(c) Le Château des Carpathes
(d) L’Ile à hélice
3.4 Synthesis
The General Structure of a Verne Novel
6.1 Cyclical Structures
(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
9.1 Variations in Tense with Nature of Transposition and Degree of Narratorial Intervention
App.1Ricardou’s Diagrams and an Alternative Presentation
(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
App.2The Two Presentations Compared
(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
Foreword
Ray Bradbury
William Butcher proves in this book that we are all, in one way or another, the children of Jules Verne. His name never stops. At Aerospace or NASA gatherings, Verne is the verb that moves us to Space.
He was born in the future we inhabit as our present. Once born he ricochetted back to the 19th century to dream our dreams and cause us to realise his possible improbabilities.
In one way or another Butcher shows us how Verne has structured our ideas and reared up the architectures of our lives even as Walt Disney, an equally improbable god, has blue-printed new cities from old ruins, and taught us how to run them, amidst doubts and derision.
Back in the early sixties when Verne was the unacknowledged ghost writer for President Kennedy, I described Verne along with his influence, Herman Melville, as the Ardent Blasphemers.
Melville struck God’s sun because it insulted him.
Verne very quietly suggested that the sun should not be struck, but plugged into, utilized, its energies borrowed to move and light the world.
Melville’s maniac Captain ran forth to kill a whale.
Nemo, with a more serene madness, said no, do not kill but build a whale. Run up a steel skeleton, skin it with iron, illuminate its interior and swim forth as Nautilus to be mistaken for and dubbed Moby Dick, in tribute to the American master.
Melville had a most sad ending. In a poem based on a terrible regret, a few years ago, I advised Herman, much too late, to ‘stay away from land, it’s not your stuff’.
Instead like an old god, its energies reversed, he made permanent landfall where gravity seized him. Instead of rejuvenation from contact with the earth, Melville was stake-driven down record straight and do some housekeeping in the rummage left behind by one-eyed screenwriters.
Butcher’s journey to, around, back and away from the pachyderm approaches the literary beast from as many directions as a well-meaning analyst can conjure. And if we do not in the end completely find the animal, that is good. For Verne turns out to be less creature and more unexplored territory. The metaphor of the elephant is insufficient. The fun and the mystery of Verne is the fact that after you have traversed great distances across his time, he always runs ahead. Like other novelist-explorers before and after him he could not resist going in a journey. And the journey itself is all. He acted out what I describe to my friends as the Aesthetic of Lostness.
He does not want to arrive any one place and truly know where he is. The effervescent boy-man in him longs always to be at odds, not to know where he came from, where arrived or where going.
We share that leaning into adventure.
If women want to stake their tents and stay, it is the man who is always grousing around the campfire because he knows only too well he is putting down roots and is discomfited by a knowledge of self as well as place.
He must be up and going, off and gone, long before dawn.
The wise woman drags after the absolute fool. It is man, not woman, who claims he climbs Everest ‘because it is there’. An insufficient reason, if I ever heard one.
A better one, that Verne implies is, we go there because we are nearer the stars, and if we reach the stars, one day, we will be immortal. I think this is all submerged in Verne. I risk criticism for bringing it out. What is the use of life if it isn’t immortal? The rage to live underlies everything Verne says and does. And to live at the top of one’s blood, heart, soul, and breath. Verne’s gift to us is the best: he makes us want to live forever. And we shall do so, one year, because he lifted our spirits in Le Géant in which he flew over France in a basket filled with liquid spirits, spiced chicken and, one hopes, an occasional female.
Which is why, of course, Verne is suspect among not all but many intellectuals. Life is too serious to be taken frivolously, they say. No, says Verne, life is too serious to be taken seriously. Life can be won with a good heart, high fevers and walked with tons instead of pounds of invisible flesh. He died not knowing his fame beyond century’s end, stamping and stamping and stamping the United States customs in.
Verne, contrarily, as Butcher proves in chapter after chapter, died in the midst of families. His own, with its lights and darks, but more important the world’s and all those young locomotive, diving-bell, cloud-staring men who would almost rather stoke engines in lieu of exasperated fiancées and wives.
Resultantly, he has never died. His family on his last day, was immense, and remains so.
We young romantics who once read Tarzan have found that Burroughs was for our boyhood jungle years and can not be revisited.
Verne, when we sit at his feet, remains our technological St. Nicholas, dispensing old gifts made freshly new on turning a page.
When I made a brief appearance on apostrophes the leading intellectual French television hour, 11 years ago, I found myself in a squabbling hen-yard of pontiffs mewing and muttering about Verne’s this, that, and t’other, with some homosexual innuendos tossed in to spoil the hour. In the midst of the exchange I advised everyone to be quiet.
‘Gentlemen’, I said, ‘you want to talk about the ants. I wish to talk about the Elephant’.
I went on to say what I have said early on in this preface. Without Verne there is a strong possibility we would never have romanced ourselves to the Moon. His immortal dust should be divided in separate and equal parts to be lodged in that first footprint on the Moon, and tossed to the winds that blow across that great Martian ravine that can hide our continental United States and swallow our imaginations.
It is only appropriate then that William Butcher comes at Jules Verne from just about every angle one can image. There are ants aplenty at his picnic. But in the main he skins and mounts the pachyderm without making it resemble the nine different kinds of animal described by those blind men of India.