Jules Verne and the Discovery of the Natural World
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poetic intervention of creative geniuses such as Cuvier – and thus
stakes out his own position as an artist whose task is akin to that of the
palaeontologist, reconstructing the spectacle of totality from the discovery of fragments. In Cuvier’s creative interrogation of distant geological eras, Balzac finds his cue as the secretary of his own
contemporary society, and he articulates an aesthetic of accumulation
and totalization. And here is the link with Flaubert, since nature is for
Flaubert too the intuition of totality. Nature, in Flaubert’s experience,
may need no reconstruction as it does for Balzac or, beyond him, Cuvier, but it is precisely in this wholeness and abundance that the writer
finds his own way forward. If Flaubert does not explicitly outline an
aesthetic approach in the passage quoted, the discovery of the natural
world is clearly enhanced by the process of writing itself. Flaubert
turns a raw mystical experience (if indeed such a thing ever took
place) into a quintessentially written one. And, as in the case of Balzac, but for very different reasons, the writing of that vision of nature
progressively gathers momentum and speed. Words multiply and acquire an intensity that puts the primary emphasis on their rhythmic
and phonetic rather than their referential status, until it seems that language itself becomes the real locus, and perhaps the real focus, of the
experience referred to. Nature, we might conclude, must be viewed
and enhanced through language in order to be fully seen, appreciated
and understood. Much more than the point at which a mystical experience is retrospectively re-enacted, writing is the basis of such an experience.
So, in these works that mark an early stage of each of the two
novelists’ development, an aesthetic credo is at some level being set
out. The discovery of the natural world, or the representation of that
discovery, implies a view of writing as an act of creation, completion
and totalization. The puzzling fragmentedness or the abundant diffusion of nature is transformed through the act of writing into a vision of
coherence, wholeness and, most strongly in Flaubert’s case, harmony.
Now, much has of course been said and written about disruptions and
discontinuities of meaning in both Balzac and Flaubert – notwithstanding the fact that each of them appears to predicate his approach
on notions of unity and order – and it is not my intention here to go
back to such discussions. If I have chosen, however, to draw attention
to what I shall call their “poetic recuperation” of nature, it is because
at the outset it offers us a major point of contrast with Jules Verne
159
poetic intervention of creative geniuses such as Cuvier – and thus
stakes out his own position as an artist whose task is akin to that of the
palaeontologist, reconstructing the spectacle of totality from the discovery of fragments. In Cuvier’s creative interrogation of distant geological eras, Balzac finds his cue as the secretary of his own
contemporary society, and he articulates an aesthetic of accumulation
and totalization. And here is the link with Flaubert, since nature is for
Flaubert too the intuition of totality. Nature, in Flaubert’s experience,
may need no reconstruction as it does for Balzac or, beyond him, Cuvier, but it is precisely in this wholeness and abundance that the writer
finds his own way forward. If Flaubert does not explicitly outline an
aesthetic approach in the passage quoted, the discovery of the natural
world is clearly enhanced by the process of writing itself. Flaubert
turns a raw mystical experience (if indeed such a thing ever took
place) into a quintessentially written one. And, as in the case of Balzac, but for very different reasons, the writing of that vision of nature
progressively gathers momentum and speed. Words multiply and acquire an intensity that puts the primary emphasis on their rhythmic
and phonetic rather than their referential status, until it seems that language itself becomes the real locus, and perhaps the real focus, of the
experience referred to. Nature, we might conclude, must be viewed
and enhanced through language in order to be fully seen, appreciated
and understood. Much more than the point at which a mystical experience is retrospectively re-enacted, writing is the basis of such an experience.
So, in these works that mark an early stage of each of the two
novelists’ development, an aesthetic credo is at some level being set
out. The discovery of the natural world, or the representation of that
discovery, implies a view of writing as an act of creation, completion
and totalization. The puzzling fragmentedness or the abundant diffusion of nature is transformed through the act of writing into a vision of
coherence, wholeness and, most strongly in Flaubert’s case, harmony.
Now, much has of course been said and written about disruptions and
discontinuities of meaning in both Balzac and Flaubert – notwithstanding the fact that each of them appears to predicate his approach
on notions of unity and order – and it is not my intention here to go
back to such discussions. If I have chosen, however, to draw attention
to what I shall call their “poetic recuperation” of nature, it is because
at the outset it offers us a major point of contrast with Jules Verne