Tim Unwin
166
provide good, wholesome instruction to the young at a time when science had become fashionable. What is less often noticed about this
famous preface, though, is that Hetzel explicitly claims the stylistic
high ground for his protégé. He points out that Verne has founded a new
form of novel in which science, knowledge and discovery have fully entered into the purview of literature: “L’art pour l’art ne suffit plus à notre
époque,” he writes, “et [...] l’heure est venue où la science a sa place
faite dans le domaine de la littérature”. Crucially, he insists that this
combination of science and of fiction has opened up an entirely new territory, which Jules Verne is able to exploit with true originality:
Le mérite de M. Jules Verne, c’est d’avoir le premier et en maître, mis le pied sur
cette terre nouvelle, c’est d’avoir mérité qu’un illustre savant, parlant des livres que
nous publions, en ait pu dire sans flatterie: “Ces romans qui vous amuseront comme
les meilleurs d’Alexandre Dumas, vous instruiront comme les livres de François
Arago.”
Now Hetzel’s promotional brief here is obvious, and it might be unwise to read it entirely without scepticism. However, what his remarks
suggest is that Jules Verne’s approach creates a new hybrid genre,
bringing together discourses that until then might have been considered quite separate. In this sense, Hetzel’s preface can also be considered a key transitional moment in the nineteenth century, the moment
at which the novel as a genre is seen and recognized to be breaking
free of its attachment to a certain traditional notion of style. Hybridity
– with its refusal to submit to notions of order, regularity, balance or
harmony that are the classical tradition of rhetoric – is an aspect of
Verne’s work that has been most fully and most eloquently explored
by Daniel Compère, who in Jules Verne écrivain points to the polyphonic nature of the Vernian text, constructed out of multiple voices
and discourses which fuse together in a rich, challenging but intensely
original mixture. Compère argues strongly that, for all their patchwork
quality, and indeed largely because of it, Verne’s texts nonetheless retain the mark of an individual voice.
15 So while, as I suggested earlier,
Verne may not build into his texts an explicit reflection on the fabrication of text or an overt claim to be pushing the novel as a genre in new
___________________________
15 “Là est sans doute le paradoxe de ce texte fortement intertextuel: la présence des
propos des autres donne au texte vernien une richesse, une puissance bien plus grande
qu’à celui qui n’est composé que d’une voix isolée” (Daniel Compère, Jules Verne
écrivain (Geneva: Droz, 1991), p. 87).
166
provide good, wholesome instruction to the young at a time when science had become fashionable. What is less often noticed about this
famous preface, though, is that Hetzel explicitly claims the stylistic
high ground for his protégé. He points out that Verne has founded a new
form of novel in which science, knowledge and discovery have fully entered into the purview of literature: “L’art pour l’art ne suffit plus à notre
époque,” he writes, “et [...] l’heure est venue où la science a sa place
faite dans le domaine de la littérature”. Crucially, he insists that this
combination of science and of fiction has opened up an entirely new territory, which Jules Verne is able to exploit with true originality:
Le mérite de M. Jules Verne, c’est d’avoir le premier et en maître, mis le pied sur
cette terre nouvelle, c’est d’avoir mérité qu’un illustre savant, parlant des livres que
nous publions, en ait pu dire sans flatterie: “Ces romans qui vous amuseront comme
les meilleurs d’Alexandre Dumas, vous instruiront comme les livres de François
Arago.”
Now Hetzel’s promotional brief here is obvious, and it might be unwise to read it entirely without scepticism. However, what his remarks
suggest is that Jules Verne’s approach creates a new hybrid genre,
bringing together discourses that until then might have been considered quite separate. In this sense, Hetzel’s preface can also be considered a key transitional moment in the nineteenth century, the moment
at which the novel as a genre is seen and recognized to be breaking
free of its attachment to a certain traditional notion of style. Hybridity
– with its refusal to submit to notions of order, regularity, balance or
harmony that are the classical tradition of rhetoric – is an aspect of
Verne’s work that has been most fully and most eloquently explored
by Daniel Compère, who in Jules Verne écrivain points to the polyphonic nature of the Vernian text, constructed out of multiple voices
and discourses which fuse together in a rich, challenging but intensely
original mixture. Compère argues strongly that, for all their patchwork
quality, and indeed largely because of it, Verne’s texts nonetheless retain the mark of an individual voice.
15 So while, as I suggested earlier,
Verne may not build into his texts an explicit reflection on the fabrication of text or an overt claim to be pushing the novel as a genre in new
___________________________
15 “Là est sans doute le paradoxe de ce texte fortement intertextuel: la présence des
propos des autres donne au texte vernien une richesse, une puissance bien plus grande
qu’à celui qui n’est composé que d’une voix isolée” (Daniel Compère, Jules Verne
écrivain (Geneva: Droz, 1991), p. 87).