Jules Verne and the Discovery of the Natural World
165
ously referred to through their texts, often cited directly and referred
to by their author, one of the most striking consequences of Jules
Verne’s work is the sheer quantity of text that has been recycled from
other sources. As his travellers enter into new and different regions of
the globe, Verne openly interpolates the accounts of historians, explorers, scientists and others, thus making of his fiction an amalgam
and a hybrid of other people’s accounts, and indeed offering a kind of
“manual of manuals” within the fictionalized framework. The Voyages extraordinaires give us the whole world, but they also appear to
give us the whole of knowledge about the world. Verne’s travellers
are often seen to venture into new terrains with book or manual in
hand, or alternatively with remembered texts in their mind (for many
of them have prodigious powers of recall). Authors and explorers are
cited in abundance and often at random, nowhere more typically than
in Verne’s first major bestseller, Cinq semaines en ballon, where the
hero, Dr Samuel Fergusson, patches together long tracts of textbooks
and manuals as he speaks about the tribes, customs and history of the
places that the balloonists visit. Crucially, there is no attempt to conceal these textual sources or to integrate them seamlessly into the new
text. Even where authors are not named, the changes of style, tone and
vocabulary provide sometimes as bumpy a ride for the reader as that
journey in the balloon for Verne’s travellers.
Given that part of Verne’s approach involves the creation of a
textual patchwork, it is not surprising that accusations of plagiarism
surfaced regularly during his lifetime, and many such cases have been
documented by his biographers. And his legacy too has often been
overshadowed by references to the derivative nature of his writing.
Sartre, in an amusing passage from Les Mots in which he comments
on his own early uses of the Vernian principle of digression, tells how
at key moments in the narrative he learned to incorporate encyclopaedia entries in order to pad out his stories.
14 That this derivative approach might be viewed in a positive light – as a daringly creative
remapping not only of the world and of current knowledge but also of
the novel and its discourses – is an argument that I should like to pursue more fully in the rest of this chapter.
Hetzel, we noted, was keen to promote the knowledge agenda
in his early preface to Hatteras, insisting that Verne’s novels would
___________________________
14 Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Mots (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), pp. 118-19.
165
ously referred to through their texts, often cited directly and referred
to by their author, one of the most striking consequences of Jules
Verne’s work is the sheer quantity of text that has been recycled from
other sources. As his travellers enter into new and different regions of
the globe, Verne openly interpolates the accounts of historians, explorers, scientists and others, thus making of his fiction an amalgam
and a hybrid of other people’s accounts, and indeed offering a kind of
“manual of manuals” within the fictionalized framework. The Voyages extraordinaires give us the whole world, but they also appear to
give us the whole of knowledge about the world. Verne’s travellers
are often seen to venture into new terrains with book or manual in
hand, or alternatively with remembered texts in their mind (for many
of them have prodigious powers of recall). Authors and explorers are
cited in abundance and often at random, nowhere more typically than
in Verne’s first major bestseller, Cinq semaines en ballon, where the
hero, Dr Samuel Fergusson, patches together long tracts of textbooks
and manuals as he speaks about the tribes, customs and history of the
places that the balloonists visit. Crucially, there is no attempt to conceal these textual sources or to integrate them seamlessly into the new
text. Even where authors are not named, the changes of style, tone and
vocabulary provide sometimes as bumpy a ride for the reader as that
journey in the balloon for Verne’s travellers.
Given that part of Verne’s approach involves the creation of a
textual patchwork, it is not surprising that accusations of plagiarism
surfaced regularly during his lifetime, and many such cases have been
documented by his biographers. And his legacy too has often been
overshadowed by references to the derivative nature of his writing.
Sartre, in an amusing passage from Les Mots in which he comments
on his own early uses of the Vernian principle of digression, tells how
at key moments in the narrative he learned to incorporate encyclopaedia entries in order to pad out his stories.
14 That this derivative approach might be viewed in a positive light – as a daringly creative
remapping not only of the world and of current knowledge but also of
the novel and its discourses – is an argument that I should like to pursue more fully in the rest of this chapter.
Hetzel, we noted, was keen to promote the knowledge agenda
in his early preface to Hatteras, insisting that Verne’s novels would
___________________________
14 Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Mots (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), pp. 118-19.