Jules Verne and the Discovery of the Natural World
169
les mers in which Aronnax’s observation of the flora and fauna, the
patterns, colours, sumptuous effects of light and infinite variety of the
ocean depths inspire an ecstatic – if not mystical – response in the
first-person narrator. Nature itself becomes a source of almost infinite
poetry, both because of its sheer abundance, and because of the intrinsic beauty of the spectacle it offers. When Aronnax, in diving gear,
accompanies Nemo on a walk on the ocean bed, we have just such a
passage:
Il était alors dix heures du matin. Les rayons du soleil frappaient la surface des flots
sous un angle assez oblique, et au contact de leur lumière décomposée par la
réfraction comme à travers un prisme, fleurs, rochers, plantules, coquillages,
polypes, se nuançaient sur leurs bords des sept couleurs du spectre solaire. C’était
une merveille, une fête des yeux, que cet enchevêtrement de tons colorés, une
véritable kaléidoscopie de vert, de jaune, d’orange, de violet, d’indigo, de bleu, en
un mot, toute la palette d’un coloriste enragé!
19
The reference in the final words here to the “coloriste” makes explicit
Verne’s wish to convey the spectacle as art, and there is an element of
deliberate transposition, here as elsewhere, of natural scene into textual artefact. And while such passages in Verne may not herald an
overarching or explicit artistic credo, as they appear to do in the early
Flaubert, we may nonetheless sense that they are crucial both to his art
and to his vision of the natural world, indeed that they play a fundamental role in eliciting a nuanced and complex response from the
reader. Crucially, though, even in these passages that evoke the spectacle of nature in such effusive, essentially poetic terms, there is a gesture in the direction of a more scientific, specialist vocabulary
(“plantules, coquillages, polypes”). This is the kind of passage in
Verne that so inspired writers like Perec, who once wrote: “Quand,
dans Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, Jules Verne énumère sur quatre
pages tous les noms de poissons, j’ai le sentiment de lire un poème”.
20
Despite and indeed because of the differences between
Verne’s style and the apparently more “poetic”, more “canonical” approach of writers like Balzac and Flaubert, we find in the Voyages extraordinaires a new form of discourse, or new discourses, for the
novel. Such discourses owe almost everything to the discoveries of
travellers, explorers and scientists in his own century and to the new
___________________________
19 Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, p. 173.
20 Georges Perec, “J’ai fait imploser le roman”, Galerie des arts, 184 (1978), 73.
169
les mers in which Aronnax’s observation of the flora and fauna, the
patterns, colours, sumptuous effects of light and infinite variety of the
ocean depths inspire an ecstatic – if not mystical – response in the
first-person narrator. Nature itself becomes a source of almost infinite
poetry, both because of its sheer abundance, and because of the intrinsic beauty of the spectacle it offers. When Aronnax, in diving gear,
accompanies Nemo on a walk on the ocean bed, we have just such a
passage:
Il était alors dix heures du matin. Les rayons du soleil frappaient la surface des flots
sous un angle assez oblique, et au contact de leur lumière décomposée par la
réfraction comme à travers un prisme, fleurs, rochers, plantules, coquillages,
polypes, se nuançaient sur leurs bords des sept couleurs du spectre solaire. C’était
une merveille, une fête des yeux, que cet enchevêtrement de tons colorés, une
véritable kaléidoscopie de vert, de jaune, d’orange, de violet, d’indigo, de bleu, en
un mot, toute la palette d’un coloriste enragé!
19
The reference in the final words here to the “coloriste” makes explicit
Verne’s wish to convey the spectacle as art, and there is an element of
deliberate transposition, here as elsewhere, of natural scene into textual artefact. And while such passages in Verne may not herald an
overarching or explicit artistic credo, as they appear to do in the early
Flaubert, we may nonetheless sense that they are crucial both to his art
and to his vision of the natural world, indeed that they play a fundamental role in eliciting a nuanced and complex response from the
reader. Crucially, though, even in these passages that evoke the spectacle of nature in such effusive, essentially poetic terms, there is a gesture in the direction of a more scientific, specialist vocabulary
(“plantules, coquillages, polypes”). This is the kind of passage in
Verne that so inspired writers like Perec, who once wrote: “Quand,
dans Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, Jules Verne énumère sur quatre
pages tous les noms de poissons, j’ai le sentiment de lire un poème”.
20
Despite and indeed because of the differences between
Verne’s style and the apparently more “poetic”, more “canonical” approach of writers like Balzac and Flaubert, we find in the Voyages extraordinaires a new form of discourse, or new discourses, for the
novel. Such discourses owe almost everything to the discoveries of
travellers, explorers and scientists in his own century and to the new
___________________________
19 Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, p. 173.
20 Georges Perec, “J’ai fait imploser le roman”, Galerie des arts, 184 (1978), 73.