Tim Unwin
156
eral novels. The four elements – earth, air, fire and water (or its solid
equivalent, ice) – associated with different aspects of the globe, mark
out the parameters of the Voyages extraordinaires, and give them a
mythical scope that has produced a rich and continuous strand of
scholarship over recent decades.
1
In the following pages, my focus will be not only on Verne’s
discourses about nature, but also – and crucially – on the nature of his
discourses. How is nature understood and mediated in the Voyages extraordinaires? What language and idioms does the writer have at his
disposal? How do the discoveries of recent explorers affect the writing
of novels? And how might Verne’s writing of nature be said to differ
from that of some of his contemporaries or near-contemporaries?
While I shall duly stress Verne’s expansive and cumulative manner of
writing, I should also insist at the outset on the pedagogical remit of
his fiction, which sets out specifically to educate the young not only
by initiating them into the scientific and technological developments
of the time, but also by giving them an overview of the nineteenthcentury global village through long encyclopaedic interpolations.
However, my central point is that, for all the knowledge that his stories relay and exploit, Verne is essentially a self-conscious writer who
uses the century’s new-found understanding of the natural world as a
means to experiment with the language of fiction itself. Scientific and
other discourses collide and collude throughout his work, in a manner
that specifically draws attention to their textual status. And journeys,
with their apparently linear progression interrupted by digressions or
obstacles, provide not only the structure and metaphor, but also the
very text of his narratives since they are so clearly negotiated in and
through documents of all kinds – diaries, logbooks, guidebooks,
manuals, dictionaries, encyclopaedias, newspapers and so on. In this
sense, Verne emerges not just as a great scientific popularizer and a
pedagogue, but as an experimental writer “pushing back the frontiers”
___________________________
1 This strand of scholarship was apparent as early as 1949 in a groundbreaking article
by Michel Butor, “Le Point suprême et l’âge d’or à travers quelques œuvres de Jules
Verne”, in Répertoire I (Paris: Minuit, 1960 [1949]), pp. 130-62. More recently it has
been exploited most notably by Simone Vierne in Jules Verne. Mythe et modernité
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989). A productive application of this approach to a single text, Les Indes noires, can be seen in David Meakin, “Future Past:
Myth, Inversion and Regression in Verne’s Underground Utopia”, in E. J. Smyth
(ed.), Jules Verne: Narratives of Modernity (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press,
2000), pp. 94-108.
156
eral novels. The four elements – earth, air, fire and water (or its solid
equivalent, ice) – associated with different aspects of the globe, mark
out the parameters of the Voyages extraordinaires, and give them a
mythical scope that has produced a rich and continuous strand of
scholarship over recent decades.
1
In the following pages, my focus will be not only on Verne’s
discourses about nature, but also – and crucially – on the nature of his
discourses. How is nature understood and mediated in the Voyages extraordinaires? What language and idioms does the writer have at his
disposal? How do the discoveries of recent explorers affect the writing
of novels? And how might Verne’s writing of nature be said to differ
from that of some of his contemporaries or near-contemporaries?
While I shall duly stress Verne’s expansive and cumulative manner of
writing, I should also insist at the outset on the pedagogical remit of
his fiction, which sets out specifically to educate the young not only
by initiating them into the scientific and technological developments
of the time, but also by giving them an overview of the nineteenthcentury global village through long encyclopaedic interpolations.
However, my central point is that, for all the knowledge that his stories relay and exploit, Verne is essentially a self-conscious writer who
uses the century’s new-found understanding of the natural world as a
means to experiment with the language of fiction itself. Scientific and
other discourses collide and collude throughout his work, in a manner
that specifically draws attention to their textual status. And journeys,
with their apparently linear progression interrupted by digressions or
obstacles, provide not only the structure and metaphor, but also the
very text of his narratives since they are so clearly negotiated in and
through documents of all kinds – diaries, logbooks, guidebooks,
manuals, dictionaries, encyclopaedias, newspapers and so on. In this
sense, Verne emerges not just as a great scientific popularizer and a
pedagogue, but as an experimental writer “pushing back the frontiers”
___________________________
1 This strand of scholarship was apparent as early as 1949 in a groundbreaking article
by Michel Butor, “Le Point suprême et l’âge d’or à travers quelques œuvres de Jules
Verne”, in Répertoire I (Paris: Minuit, 1960 [1949]), pp. 130-62. More recently it has
been exploited most notably by Simone Vierne in Jules Verne. Mythe et modernité
(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989). A productive application of this approach to a single text, Les Indes noires, can be seen in David Meakin, “Future Past:
Myth, Inversion and Regression in Verne’s Underground Utopia”, in E. J. Smyth
(ed.), Jules Verne: Narratives of Modernity (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press,
2000), pp. 94-108.