Jules Verne and the Discovery of the Natural World
161
the words themselves seems to disappear, as in this list, one among
many other possible examples of this distinctively Vernian process:
Pendant deux heures toute une armée aquatique fit escorte au Nautilus. Au milieu de
leurs jeux, de leurs bonds, tandis qu’ils rivalisaient de beauté, d’éclat et de vitesse, je
distinguai le labre vert, le mulle barberin, marqué d’une double raie noire, le gobie
éléotre, à caudale arrondie, blanc de couleur et tacheté de violet sur le dos, le
scombre japonais, admirable maquereau de ces mers, au corps bleu et à la tête
argentée, de brillants azurors dont le nom seul emporte toute description, des spares
rayés, aux nageoires variées de bleu et de jaune, des spares fascés, relevés d’une
bande noire sur leur caudale, des spares zonéphores élégamment corsetés dans leurs
six ceintures, des aulostones, véritables bouches en flûte ou bécasses de mer, dont
quelques échantillons atteignaient une longueur d’un mètre, des salamandres du
Japon, des murènes échidnées, longs serpents de six pieds, aux yeux vifs et petits, et
à la vaste bouche hérissée de dents, etc.
5
The conclusion of the list with “etc.”, a frequent device in the
Voyages extraordinaires, reinforces the notion that, in an unbounded
linguistic and/or natural world, the writer must arbitrarily halt his descriptions. There is no necessary stopping point, for there is nothing
that divides, segments or arrests the continuum. It is easy to see, from
such lists, why translators of Verne have such immense difficulty: it is
like translating the encyclopaedia or the dictionary, and often the work
involves retracing Verne’s own steps back into the reference works,
only to find that the terminology is still missing or indeed that Verne
himself may have invented a likely name.
6 In such passages, Verne
celebrates the nineteenth century’s invention of new languages and
terminologies, but he often seems to do so in a conspicuous vacuum of
significance. And while Verne’s lists have sometimes been judged to
have a poetic, incantatory force – a point I shall be returning to – their
only obvious function as discourse is the endeavour to reference every
variety of every species. This mirrors the functioning of his writing
more generally, in its attempt to map out the totality of the globe itself
– its seas, mountains, jungles, rivers, ice caps – in words. It seems that
the writer must simply get out there and attempt to cover everything in
text, literally throwing words at everything, following and inventory___________________________
5 Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, p. 153. References to Jules Verne’s novels are to the
fifty-volume Les Œuvres de Jules Verne (Lausanne: Rencontre, 1966-71).
6 See for example the remarks by William Butcher, “Note on the Text and Translation”, in Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, “World’s Classics”, 1998), pp. xxxvii-xxxviii.
161
the words themselves seems to disappear, as in this list, one among
many other possible examples of this distinctively Vernian process:
Pendant deux heures toute une armée aquatique fit escorte au Nautilus. Au milieu de
leurs jeux, de leurs bonds, tandis qu’ils rivalisaient de beauté, d’éclat et de vitesse, je
distinguai le labre vert, le mulle barberin, marqué d’une double raie noire, le gobie
éléotre, à caudale arrondie, blanc de couleur et tacheté de violet sur le dos, le
scombre japonais, admirable maquereau de ces mers, au corps bleu et à la tête
argentée, de brillants azurors dont le nom seul emporte toute description, des spares
rayés, aux nageoires variées de bleu et de jaune, des spares fascés, relevés d’une
bande noire sur leur caudale, des spares zonéphores élégamment corsetés dans leurs
six ceintures, des aulostones, véritables bouches en flûte ou bécasses de mer, dont
quelques échantillons atteignaient une longueur d’un mètre, des salamandres du
Japon, des murènes échidnées, longs serpents de six pieds, aux yeux vifs et petits, et
à la vaste bouche hérissée de dents, etc.
5
The conclusion of the list with “etc.”, a frequent device in the
Voyages extraordinaires, reinforces the notion that, in an unbounded
linguistic and/or natural world, the writer must arbitrarily halt his descriptions. There is no necessary stopping point, for there is nothing
that divides, segments or arrests the continuum. It is easy to see, from
such lists, why translators of Verne have such immense difficulty: it is
like translating the encyclopaedia or the dictionary, and often the work
involves retracing Verne’s own steps back into the reference works,
only to find that the terminology is still missing or indeed that Verne
himself may have invented a likely name.
6 In such passages, Verne
celebrates the nineteenth century’s invention of new languages and
terminologies, but he often seems to do so in a conspicuous vacuum of
significance. And while Verne’s lists have sometimes been judged to
have a poetic, incantatory force – a point I shall be returning to – their
only obvious function as discourse is the endeavour to reference every
variety of every species. This mirrors the functioning of his writing
more generally, in its attempt to map out the totality of the globe itself
– its seas, mountains, jungles, rivers, ice caps – in words. It seems that
the writer must simply get out there and attempt to cover everything in
text, literally throwing words at everything, following and inventory___________________________
5 Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, p. 153. References to Jules Verne’s novels are to the
fifty-volume Les Œuvres de Jules Verne (Lausanne: Rencontre, 1966-71).
6 See for example the remarks by William Butcher, “Note on the Text and Translation”, in Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, “World’s Classics”, 1998), pp. xxxvii-xxxviii.