Jules Verne’s Transylvania: Cartographic Omissions
175
changed for centuries, we may detect an allegorical critique of modernity’s displacement of Ancien Régime traditions. If Frik, the almost
savage shepherd, could be a “descendant dégénéré” of his noble
Dacian ancestry, the river by which his sheep are grazing is nevertheless still so pure that the narrator easily imagines it “couler à travers
les meandres du roman de l’Astrée”.
14 Verne’s reference to the dolmens and menhirs of Carnac may also allude nostalgically to the same
idea of a land that still preserves the purity of an archaic, long-gone
France. At the same time, for many Romanian readers, such descriptions of a world unchanged for centuries were not necessarily seen as
a critique. In the nineteenth century, many nationalist discourses focused on the continuity of the Romanians in Moldavia, Walachia and
Transylvania, an idea that was often based on the preservation of unadulterated Dacian traditions and costumes by the peasants of the
three territories.
The Transylvania of Le Château des Carpathes thus differs
not only from other foreign lands derogatorily depicted in Verne’s
novels, but also from many images of Eastern Europe described by
other authors around that time and in which Romanian readers refused
to recognize themselves. As Larry Wolff argues in his Inventing Eastern Europe, since the eighteenth century, most of the descriptions of
anything east of Austria abounded with grotesque, quasi-fantastic imagery meant to underscore the difference with the “civilized world” of
Western Europe, and to prove that “Eastern Europe was a realm of
fantastic adventures with savage beasts, whose wildness [could be]
triumphantly tamed in a parable of conquest and civilization”.
15 That
was the case of Walachia and Moldavia which, even in the nineteenth
century, continued to inspire images of a fictional Oriental world invented by eighteenth-century literati.
Because of the persistence of the idea of an exotic Eastern
Europe in the nineteenth century, many journals of Western travellers
simply included the two Romanian principalities – Walachia and
Moldavia – in the Ottoman Empire, and sometimes continued this
“Orientalization” even after Romania’s Independence War. In 1878, a
Romanian diplomat underscored this anachronistic view: “Jusqu’ici,
l’Angleterre ne s’est intéressée à la Roumanie que sous le point de vue
___________________________
14 Verne, Château, p. 8.
15 Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the
Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 101.
175
changed for centuries, we may detect an allegorical critique of modernity’s displacement of Ancien Régime traditions. If Frik, the almost
savage shepherd, could be a “descendant dégénéré” of his noble
Dacian ancestry, the river by which his sheep are grazing is nevertheless still so pure that the narrator easily imagines it “couler à travers
les meandres du roman de l’Astrée”.
14 Verne’s reference to the dolmens and menhirs of Carnac may also allude nostalgically to the same
idea of a land that still preserves the purity of an archaic, long-gone
France. At the same time, for many Romanian readers, such descriptions of a world unchanged for centuries were not necessarily seen as
a critique. In the nineteenth century, many nationalist discourses focused on the continuity of the Romanians in Moldavia, Walachia and
Transylvania, an idea that was often based on the preservation of unadulterated Dacian traditions and costumes by the peasants of the
three territories.
The Transylvania of Le Château des Carpathes thus differs
not only from other foreign lands derogatorily depicted in Verne’s
novels, but also from many images of Eastern Europe described by
other authors around that time and in which Romanian readers refused
to recognize themselves. As Larry Wolff argues in his Inventing Eastern Europe, since the eighteenth century, most of the descriptions of
anything east of Austria abounded with grotesque, quasi-fantastic imagery meant to underscore the difference with the “civilized world” of
Western Europe, and to prove that “Eastern Europe was a realm of
fantastic adventures with savage beasts, whose wildness [could be]
triumphantly tamed in a parable of conquest and civilization”.
15 That
was the case of Walachia and Moldavia which, even in the nineteenth
century, continued to inspire images of a fictional Oriental world invented by eighteenth-century literati.
Because of the persistence of the idea of an exotic Eastern
Europe in the nineteenth century, many journals of Western travellers
simply included the two Romanian principalities – Walachia and
Moldavia – in the Ottoman Empire, and sometimes continued this
“Orientalization” even after Romania’s Independence War. In 1878, a
Romanian diplomat underscored this anachronistic view: “Jusqu’ici,
l’Angleterre ne s’est intéressée à la Roumanie que sous le point de vue
___________________________
14 Verne, Château, p. 8.
15 Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the
Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 101.