Jules Verne's life, literary themes, and enduring influence

Verne

BIOGRAPHY

WORKS

STYLE

CRITICS

Few major figures in Western literature seem to both capture the imagination and defy mainstream analysis as much as Jules Verne. Nonetheless, his ever-present specter looms ominously over modern science, science fiction, children's fiction, film, and even philosophy. It seems almost that every new form of artistic expression in some way relates to the late nineteenth century foresights he put forward. In many ways, his applicability to the modern world is due to the fact that he was ahead of his time. Although many authors of his age were experimenting with new forms of literary expression by partially abandoning the romantic tradition, few did so by turning to science. Yet, this is precisely what society was doing at the dawn of the industrial age: turning to science.

Verne managed to relate, through his grasp of basic scientific principles, stories that could previously only have been explained with magic, gods, deities, or mythical heroes. He brought ancient mythology to the modern age. Yet, Verne accomplished this by making his characters, for the most part, ordinary members of this modern age; ordinary people became the stuff of legends through Verne's use of science fiction.

Personally, Verne repeatedly exhibits an inner attraction to the notion of escape and exploration. He is powerfully enamored with the idea that something new, wonderful, and exciting is just beyond his and his characters' grasp. Whether this escape takes place on a ship, in a balloon, or in a capsule, the theme remains constant throughout Verne's writing.

The result of these unique characteristics is that Jules Verne has remained one of the most read, interpreted, and talked about writers for over a century.

CHAPTER 1: BIOGRAPHY

Jules Verne was born in Nantes on February 8, 1828. The locale was abundant in merchants, ship owners, and maritime suppliers. His parents were Pierre Verne, a lawyer, and his wife, Sophie Allotte de la Fuye. His father was known as a strict conservative, and despite his repeated attempts to convince Jules to enter the legal profession, his son never quite lived up to his father's hopes in that capacity.

In 1829 Jules' brother Paul was born. He eventually became a sailor. Throughout Paul's life, he remained very close to his bother; they very routinely traveled together and he occasionally served as Jules' consultant. Jules was less close with his three sisters, however, who were all born a number of years after Paul.

In 1833, Jules began schooling at a day school operated by Mme Sambin. The woman was reportedly rather eccentric; having lost her husband at sea several years earlier and was yet continually anticipating his immediate return. By 1837, however, he was enrolled in a Catholic school. Yet within only a year he transferred to different schools on two different occasions; first to a seminary school and then to the Lycee Royal. During the summer of 1839, Jules demonstrated some of his inner drive to see far off places and experience the extraordinary. He decided to run away from his family's vacation home so that he could sign on as a cabin boy on a departing ship. It was a large, three-master which was headed for the Indies. Verne later recalls his childhood dreams of sailing: "In my imagination, I climbed among their shroud sails, I slid up to their topsails, I perched on top of their masts. So strong was my desire to cross that delicate little gangplank which connected them to the pier and to set foot on the bridge. but, because of my youthful timidity, I didn't dare." However, his journey did not last long; his father caught up with him the very next day just forty-four kilometers away. Jules later recalled that he was paddled so hard that he promised his father that he would never leave again, except in his dreams. So, it should not be particularly surprising that the vast majority of Verne's works feature the sea prominently.

Jules eventually earned his bacalaureat from Lycee Royal by the time he was eighteen years old. Verne left Nantes for Paris in 1847 after a long infatuation with one of his cousins proved to be fruitless when she married another man. At the urging of his father, Jules began to study law. Legal studies proved to be quite difficult for Verne and the impoverished state of he and his housemate seemed to further detract from his propensity for law. In a letter to his father, Verne writes, "The examiners are unbelievably hard. The fail such a high number of candidates that it is frightening." Nevertheless, Verne continued struggling through his studies, though at the same time, he began to write librettos for operettas, and a handful of short stories. He kept this aspect of his life hidden from his father, who deeply wanted him to succeed as a lawyer.

Verne eventually earned a license to practice law, but his true passion remained literature. Although several letters to his father clearly display Verne's obsession with literature, he never explicitly tells his father of his extracurricular activities. However, his father eventually discovered the truth about his writing and immediately withdrew his financial support. For a time, Verne supported himself as a stock broker, which he proved to be moderately skilled at. Also, "During this period, he met the authors Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo, who offered him some advice on his writing." Verne also met Honorine de Viane Morel while he was in Paris and married the widow, taking her two daughters under his support in 1857. Although Verne found himself to be exceptionally busy as a husband, father, and stock broker, this did not deter him from continuing to pursue his passion -- writing: "He rose every morning at five or six o'clock, hastily downed coffee, and read and wrote until it was time to make an appearance at the Eggly firm at ten o'clock."

Verne and Honorine had one son together, Michael, who was initially a source of pride for the father, but later became somewhat troublesome. To some extent, it would seem Michael took after Jules in his yearning to travel. In 1878 Michael was apprenticed on a ship that traveled to India. Upon his return however, he married a local actress, despite his father's objections, and promptly left her only a few years later. Michael ran off with a young music student, as Jules was left to support his abandoned wife until a discrete divorce could be arranged. As his father began to age, however, Michael eventually settled down and served as his secretary until the author's death.

In the years after his marriage, Verne decided to move his family away from Paris, once he gained some success as a writer. He also took a trip to the United States where he was inspired by Niagara Falls and the wilderness to write a Floating City a few years later in 1871. In 1870, however, Verne first published Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, which became an instant success. Verne was even awarded the Legion of Honor by emperor Napoleon III, in one of his final official acts prior to the state's capitulation to Prussia. Despite this success, 1871 was a difficult time in Verne's life -- and indeed for all of France. The Prussians negotiated a treaty that greatly penalized France in terms of lands and money, and made life difficult for many of its citizens. Hetzel, his close friend and publisher was forced to flee the country to Monte Carlo, which made putting the final touches on his work particularly difficult. Furthermore, Verne's father finally succumbed to death at the end of the year.

Yet despite these difficulties, Verne managed to experience his greatest amount of success during this period. In 1872, there was such a demand for his writing, that he decided to publish a number of his shorter works; those that had only appeared in periodicals early on in his career. This period also witnessed the publication of one of his most well-known works, Around the World in Eighty Days. 1872 also saw the return of his brother, Paul, from his commission as an officer in the French navy; Jules soon enlisted him as his close advisor in matters of oceanography and sailing.

The latter portion of his career is marked with decidedly more dark literature. A bizarre incident also occurred in 1886, when his twenty-five-year-old nephew, Gaston, shot him in the leg with a rifle. Verne never fully recovered from the injury and Gaston spend the rest of his life in an asylum. One year later, one of the key individuals responsible for Verne's success, Hetzel, died; and so did his beloved mother. At this time, Verne employed Hetzel's son as his editor and publisher, but the quality of the work proved to be noticeably diminished. In 1888, Verne was elected town councilor of Amiens, where he held his seat for fifteen years and oversaw a handful of town improvements. Still, in 1905, Verne eventually died from complications due to diabetes in his home at Amiens. His son, Michael, oversaw the final stages of publication, after his death, of Verne's last written story the Lighthouse at the End of the World.

CHAPTER 3: STYLE of WRITING

There is very little debate among the literary community about who the father of science fiction is: Jules Verne. It should not be wholly surprising that it took writers in the Western tradition so long to arrive at such a genre of fiction; after all, the dozens of centuries that passed since the birth of Western literature with Homer, to the dawn of the nineteenth century saw relatively little by way of scientific advancement. The nineteenth century saw change of a manner and magnitude never before experienced in world history. Technological, governmental, and ideological transformations made the nineteenth century span the gap between the modern world and the ancient world: "At the start of the century, life was not so very different from Roman times -- although a Roman would have been very shocked by the state of the roads and the filthy towns. But by the end of the century life was not so very different from the world we know today." By this interpretation of events, the middle ages in Europe had taken well over a millennium to finally match the living conditions and way of life enjoyed by the Romans; however, the next hundred years would be a period of unprecedented change and social upheaval. Largely, these changes were associated, in some way, with the industrial revolution, which reorganized the economy, the city, travel, the government, and warfare. New ways of life demanded new ways of interpreting the world. This was a time of accelerating change, and literature reflected this change by inventing a new genre of storytelling: science fiction.

This is important in conceptualizing the style of Verne's writing, because although the plot lines and characters in his tales may be at least somewhat conventional, the revolutionary aspect of his approach to literature was precisely where he placed the importance of science in the modern world. For the first time in the history of Western writing, an author situated the theories of science at the core of his artistic expression. Accordingly, it should be noted that Verne's pervasive themes of escape and exploration seem to be applicable to the age out of which his writings emerge: "Verne's most exciting novels would seem to be defined less by their precise historical resonances than by their escape from the contemporary social setting." In other words, his stories take the ordinary into the extraordinary, with scientific theory as the ignition. So for the first time in history, a mythical story was able to be conveyed in a modern, empirical, and seemingly tangible manner.

Still, the specific language that Verne uses is still steeped within the late romantic tradition. He is very capable of evoking emotion through his writing: "The strange history of this region passed through the Doctor's mind as he leaned on the rail and followed with his eyes the long wake left by the brig. Thoughts of its daring navigators crowded into his memory, and he fancied he could perceive, below the frozen crests of the icebergs, the pale ghosts of those who would return no more." Essentially, though Verne is undoubtedly committed to empirical mechanisms of explanation and storytelling, he also owes a debt to the romantic movement from which he borrows.

Romanticism first found its philosophical footing in the eighteenth century; it drew its understanding of nature and beauty from the writings of Immanuel Kant, who expressed his notion that art was autonomous. Just as comprehending the beauty of a tree fails to depend upon any auxiliary information about the physical properties of trees, beauty itself was perceived to be independent of everything but itself. Kant was convinced that the autonomy of the human soul permitted such internal recognitions of external beauty. For this reason, Kant was not as interested in the physical creations of art, as he was in the impressions that art could leave upon the intellect; he called this reflective judgment. Consequently, romanticists emphasized the importance of feeling, emotion, and the aesthetic over that of abstract rationality.

Verne clearly makes use of from this tradition in his style, but puts his own decisive stamp upon the dying convention. He was strongly influenced by Defoe, Scott, Poe and Stendhal; who each adopted a version of the romantic to their own writing. Yet of all these authors, Verne seems to possess a closer affinity to Poe in his literary style. Ultimately, this is because both authors attempt to do something that was never attempted before: bring an old approach to literature into a more modern context. Whereas Poe attempted to bring the gothic into the romantic, Verne attempted to bring the romantic into the scientific. The motivating theme within Poe's gothic tales is one that is not altogether gothic: he makes the horror psychological. By doing this, Poe manages to skirt the problem that realism presented for many of his contemporaries. This is an ingenious technique, and Verne uses an analogous one to make the fantastical believable. Verne revered Poe for his ability to make horror real by providing a modern, psychological perspective; accordingly, Verne was able to make the mythical real, by providing it with a modern, scientific perspective.

Still, it cannot be ignored that uses a style that emphasizes realism. If his tales lacked any scientific fiction, then they would be far more similar to the romantic tales of Defoe. Precisely what Verne managed to accomplish was fitting an established and ancient literary style into a format that would once again appeal to people on a very elemental level. Just as Poe was able to portray the unbelievable through psychology, Verne was able to do it through an appropriate understanding of scientific advancements.

CHAPTER 4: CRITICS' INTERPRETATIONS

Critical interpretations of Verne have varied wildly since the time of his writings to the present, and also across language barriers. For much of his career, Verne was renowned for his capacity to make the implausible seem plausible though his power of storytelling and explanation. His prose was admired and the power of his imagination championed. In more recent years, increased importance has been placed upon the accuracy of many of his predictions, with a decreased regard for his general writing skill. In this respect, Verne has also been well renowned, but less as a literary figure and more as a visionary.

Additionally, his reception among English audiences has always been decidedly lukewarm. Some of this, initially, had to do with the poor quality of the translations of his works into English. Yet some of it also had to do with Verne's critical appraisals of English culture and politics within his texts. In fact, the earliest English translators actually omitted portions of Verne's writing because it mocked England or Englishmen: "While several of Verne's English translations have been shortened by the wholesale removal of chapters, by far the most common method of abridgment is by paraphrase -- where a lengthy portion of Verne's narrative is replaced by a short summary." Ultimately, there has also been a general position held by many English-speaking critics that Verne is fundamentally a children's author: "Jules Verne has always been considered a children's writer in the English-speaking countries."

Furthermore, as aforementioned, the way in which Verne's work seems to straddle several literary genres at once -- while inventing one of its own -- has added to much of the confusion, among critics, about precisely how to categorize him: "Jules Verne called what he wrote voyages extraordinaires, and H.G. Wells called it scientific romance." At the same time as he is a monumental figure in the history of Western literature, few agree upon the particular methods he used, the messages he intended to send, or even whether his writing was entirely his own or significantly that of Hetzel. Nevertheless, all of his critics tend to agree upon three major premises: first, that he was the original founder of modern science fiction; second, that his inferences into the future have, to some extent, stood the test of time; and third, that him and his works are worthy of detailed study and investigation.

The literary critics who have focused primarily upon Verne's particular technique have, perhaps, been rewarded the most with insight into just what sort of an artist he was. By ignoring the obvious importance of Verne in the genre of science fiction, and by ignoring his powers of insight into the mechanisms of late nineteenth century science, many critics have arrived at somewhat unique conclusions about Verne's literary body as a whole. Of course, even this perspective has changed over time: "Before World War II Verne was generally considered a paraliterary phenomenon, and his admirers, gathered around the 'fanzine' Bulletin de la Societe Jules Verne (1935-1938), saw themselves as a small group of passionate amateurs. But already in the mid-20s the surrealists had drawn attention to the place Verne deserves among the great imaginative writers." The surrealists believed that attainment of a dreamlike state could bring one to a sense of epiphany, and that Verne's science romance was an ideal expression of this general philosophical and artistic point-of-view. It should be apparent, these critics argued, that Verne was more than just a visionary, he was an imaginative artist of the highest possible order; he created truth and reality where there had been none before. This, to them, made Verne a predecessor of their tradition, and not just of the amorphous genre known as science fiction.

Although there is significant debate over where to posthumously place Verne within literary traditions, he clearly warrants discussion due to his lasting importance to both literature and to modern culture: "Though they are now historical, instead of contemporary, fiction and though much of their technical background, though based in the accepted beliefs of the time, has now been superseded, Verne's stores have by no means lost either their value or their appeal." This fact definitively says something about the quality of work Verne produced in his lifetime, as well as something about the essential characteristics of storytelling. Verne's early fascination with the sea is indicative of the innate human desire to explore the unexplored, and to discover what is beyond the extent of our vision. By remaining true to this essential spirit, Verne generated dozens of stories that evoke the same emotions in readers to this day. Ultimately, this is why he is still critically examined a century after his death, and found to continually fit into newly formed literary traditions.

CONCLUSION

Overall, Verne's science fiction, or his scientific romance, has remained current because of both his basic understanding of science and because of his adherence to the basic tenets of mythology. In the world of mythology, geography, climate, and the external forces of the universe tend to play the major role in determining specifically what kind of forces act upon any particular characters involved in the tale. This should not be surprising considering the functional role of mythology: to explain the otherwise unexplainable. Mountains, rivers, seas, and forests are just as mysterious and incomprehensible as the stars and the planets in many respects. In this light, it was Verne's reorientation of the ways in which we come to know these mystical features of the universe that allowed him to tell romantic-style stories.

The apparent battles between the sea and the shore, the mountain and the snow, and the earth and the sky have all lent themselves to mythological explanations for millennia; accordingly, these explanations tend to mirror their physical surroundings and build heroic characters out of their magnificence. Fundamentally, mythology is aimed at portraying the natural world in terms that are more readily comprehended by ordinary people than direct means are capable of. The fact that the sea, the moon, volcanoes, and the far expanses of the earth stand prominently among ancient myths should be anticipated because they can be used as the conduit through which the fantastical is depicted. Jules Verne capitalized upon the fact that natural human psychology tends to make us wonder and daydream about these places, and upon the fact that ancient myths explaining their ways lacked any real meaning in the late nineteenth century. The new alternative was science, so Verne's new mythology became science fiction.