Jules Verne and the Discovery of the Natural World
167
directions, there is in his approach an astonishing daring that in his
own time is matched only by the later Flaubert with Bouvard et Pécuchet. That text, like Verne’s Voyages extraordinaires, builds its own
voices specifically through the uses and abuses of other texts that it
displays, distorts or appropriates, and it too experiments with plurality
rather than unity. It is premised on a fracturing principle that is radically different from that of early Flaubertian texts like Novembre.
Running the constant risk of disappearing under the burden of other
texts – that is part of its ironic and potentially self-destructive point –
Bouvard et Pécuchet navigates a complex and treacherous path between them, extending novelistic discourses into every domain of human knowledge, and conversely allowing every domain of human
knowledge to invade and perhaps to undermine the traditional terrains
of novelistic rhetoric. Here, I would suggest, we find a striking similarity with Jules Verne who, for all the obvious popularity of his approach as an educational novelist targeting a mainly youthful
readership, puts new languages and new terminologies on display in a
fictional context, thus questioning and problematizing the very form
of the novel. Add to this the highly self-conscious manipulations
throughout the Voyages extraordinaires of literary devices and conventions (in particular, Verne’s frequent experiments with the robinsonnade), the theatricality, the word-play, the narrativization of
reading and writing themselves within Verne’s plots, and a very different picture of his approach and contribution to the novel begins to
build up.
George Orwell, echoing a long and dismissive tradition, once
regretted that Verne should have been “so unliterary a writer”, though
he noted with some incomprehension that Verne appeared nonetheless
to have the standard credentials and background of a nineteenthcentury novelist.
16 The point we might make in response, with only
minimal risk of paradox, is that Verne is literary precisely because he
is so apparently unliterary, because he pushes the novel outwards towards those many other discourses that his century’s scientists and
explorers had produced. Yet it is also important to stress that this is
not done at the cost or to the exclusion of those discourses which are
more traditionally associated with the novel. There are from time to
___________________________
16 George Orwell, “Two Glimpses of the Moon”, The New Statesman (18 January
1941), reprinted in The Jules Verne Companion (London: Souvenir Press, 1978), pp.
17-19.
167
directions, there is in his approach an astonishing daring that in his
own time is matched only by the later Flaubert with Bouvard et Pécuchet. That text, like Verne’s Voyages extraordinaires, builds its own
voices specifically through the uses and abuses of other texts that it
displays, distorts or appropriates, and it too experiments with plurality
rather than unity. It is premised on a fracturing principle that is radically different from that of early Flaubertian texts like Novembre.
Running the constant risk of disappearing under the burden of other
texts – that is part of its ironic and potentially self-destructive point –
Bouvard et Pécuchet navigates a complex and treacherous path between them, extending novelistic discourses into every domain of human knowledge, and conversely allowing every domain of human
knowledge to invade and perhaps to undermine the traditional terrains
of novelistic rhetoric. Here, I would suggest, we find a striking similarity with Jules Verne who, for all the obvious popularity of his approach as an educational novelist targeting a mainly youthful
readership, puts new languages and new terminologies on display in a
fictional context, thus questioning and problematizing the very form
of the novel. Add to this the highly self-conscious manipulations
throughout the Voyages extraordinaires of literary devices and conventions (in particular, Verne’s frequent experiments with the robinsonnade), the theatricality, the word-play, the narrativization of
reading and writing themselves within Verne’s plots, and a very different picture of his approach and contribution to the novel begins to
build up.
George Orwell, echoing a long and dismissive tradition, once
regretted that Verne should have been “so unliterary a writer”, though
he noted with some incomprehension that Verne appeared nonetheless
to have the standard credentials and background of a nineteenthcentury novelist.
16 The point we might make in response, with only
minimal risk of paradox, is that Verne is literary precisely because he
is so apparently unliterary, because he pushes the novel outwards towards those many other discourses that his century’s scientists and
explorers had produced. Yet it is also important to stress that this is
not done at the cost or to the exclusion of those discourses which are
more traditionally associated with the novel. There are from time to
___________________________
16 George Orwell, “Two Glimpses of the Moon”, The New Statesman (18 January
1941), reprinted in The Jules Verne Companion (London: Souvenir Press, 1978), pp.
17-19.