Jules Verne’s works are considered groundbreaking pioneers in science fiction, as well as a limit a-quo of social utopia. At first, his work seems simple and straightforward, often evaluated based on its accuracy in technological prophecy, as well as the scientific accuracy of Verne’s illusory scientific proficiency.
The present day, with its literary critics and scholars, has deemed the “scientific” matter of Verne’s great body of work irrelevant, and is instead focused on Verne’s imaginative talents, narrative techniques, world view, and the formulaic way in which Verne wrote that turned out to be so wildly popular. Verne’s inventions, as the father of science fiction, such as lunar trips, submarine ships and live fossils, have been demonstrated to be less than original by previous utopian romances. Verne’s writing techniques themselves are gaining prominence over his so-called “originality”.
Locations from Verne’s narrative side are comparable with recurrent images in surrealism, including the subterranean world, the city seen as a Gothic-style caste, the voyage to the abyss, the land of plenty, the undeciphered message, and more.
Verne’s legendary formula, when his works are seen as more than scientific fun, follows the lines of the main characters discovering something secret and/or doing something very daring, preliminary purification of said characters, perilous travel, ordeal, attaining the point suprême, death and transfiguration of some sort. Pure fantasy is rejected, because there is always a rationalist explanation behind Verne’s writing. Everything about Verne’s plots is impossible, extravagant, unbelievable, impulsive. Like the hero and explorer Ferguson in Five Weeks in a Balloon, Verne “explores text, works his way through it, covers known textual terrain and rewrites it in order to follow and itinerary through to a new place and break new ground. Narrative…is both about the exploration of previous narrative, and the plotting of new ‘journeys’ in terms of an earlier one. Physical space and narrative momentum and conceived along precisely the same lines, and follow the same model”, according to writer Timothy A. Unwin. Verne’s formulaic writing proved not only very entertaining but very profitable in regards to the masses.
Unwin also defends Verne’s literary status against skeptics. Acknowledging that the writings of Verne’s sizeable body of work include lapses of taste and style, moments of excess, moments of facileness, grammatical issues, formulaic writing, weak characterization, repetition, lazy plot construction and even poor writing, Unwin also compares Verne to Balzac and Proust, saying that for any writer who produces a large amount of material, “variability of result is an occupational hazard.”
Travel was an integral concept in Verne’s writing; his detailed descriptions are one of his hallmarks. For Verne, travel is text and text is travel. Verne has been derided as armchair travel, but in fact, the writing is a journey in itself that can stand its own; Verne’s writing involves twists, turns, and more in terms of textual negotiation. “Text is the fundamental precondition” of all Verne’s journeys, states Unwin. Unwin also states that Verne’s works reveal rather than conceal their sources, display their debt to the theatre, refer to literary origins and stress their artificiality and conventionality in supremely self-concious work. Verne was concerned with the issue of writing itself.
Verne’s didacticism meant that a message, similar to a “moral of the story” was impressed upon the reader. Recurring themes in his work, besides a scientific façade, include man’s domination over nature, teamwork and religion. According to Chesneaux, “comprehensive political analysis of man’s relation to nature” takes precedence over scientific interest in Verne’s world. Verne’s narratives are full of themes tending towards socialism, phalansterism, anarchism no reproaches from the educators of his time. Even so, it is not difficult to find in them a network of themes and theses tending toward socialism, phalansterism, isolationism or even anarchism. Verne read scientific journals carefully, besides being influenced by and even referencing in his novels utopian socialists like Fourier, Saint-Simon, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bakunin, and German and English romanticists. Michel Serres argues that Verne “collected and hid under the sediments of picturesque exoticism and up-to-date science, almost the whole European tradition of mythology, esotericism, initiatory rites, and mysticism.” The Voyages Extraordinaires are quintessentially a work about a changing world and the new possibilities—social, scientific, or political—opened up by progress. Others have argues that Verne is fixated on the past and the archaic, and that his novels should be read as texts that celebrate mythical innocence or a return to the primitive, as opposed to being obsessed with the future. It is apparent, however, that in the end, the father of science ficion’s “works mark a turn not only in the history of utopian and technologico-adventurous SF [science fiction] but also from the 19th to 20th century”, as according to social theorist, historian of ideas and literary critic Marc Angenot. The existence of a strong link between Verne’s fiction and the political and social events of his age has been recognized – Verne’s work deals with and is a transposition of many major historical conflicts of the world, including Indian revolts, Greek independence, -isms, and the American Civil War. Verne recreated history via science as as a way of telling which might have been. According to Marc Angenot, “His works are not anticipations, but rather “uchronias.” Progress, linked to technological advancement, modifies the course of real events and projects a new order at a different level.”
Verne’s novels appealed in many ways. Instead of simply being about scientific pedagogy and technical advancement, the concept of the vision of a new world, ordered by technical meritocracy also had its fans. The social tensions marking the transition from old regime to new are marked clearly in Verne’s characters, competing and cooperating with each other in different ways within a new social hierarchy. Besides scientific prophecy, masculinity is also heavily featured as a central theme, as can be seen in many of Verne’s novels with a central cast team of men who like each other, complement each other, work well with each other and come to depend on each other. Verne’s writing is filled with references to masculine power, as well as the male’s (scientist, researcher, explorer, survivor, etc.) often problematic relationships to nature and to other men.
Some believe that Verne actually wrote scientific fiction, with writing full of didacticism, as opposed to science fiction, which is fiction utilizing science for fictional purposes, and that his work only really transformed into the latter after Hollywood picked it up and converted it, removing the technical details and figures in favor of the imaginative, mythic elements of Verne’s writing.
Verne’s novels, aside from scientific pedagogy, also sought to shape the imaginations of young men, imprinting upon them that knowledge is power and that they should fill certain social roles in a new social order that asserted the West’s technology over the rest of the world. Much of Verne’s work is a fusion of duty and adventure, with the author as ethnologist pointing out the supremacy of white men in every aspect.
All in all, Verne, who can be forgiven due to the time period in which he lived, is, by today’s standards, an extremely racist writer. His writing was also pretty sexist, in the comparatively rare instances that main female characters were featured. Apparently, characters like Captain Nemo, with his infallible scientific prowess, mathematical skills, and hardened exterior all symbolized the power of the symbolic phallus.
The maternal womb is also present in Verne’s writing, via the multiple symbols of enclosure, including the atmosphere of helpless isolation surrounding the protagonists of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, as well as the inability of the colonists to leave the Mysterious Island for some years.
Much of the western religious (as in Christian) aspect featured in Verne’s work was not initiated by Verne at all (this does not just apply to religious aspects) but actually the doing of Verne’s editor and publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, who, besides being heavily involved in the editing and creative process, also acted as a censor and conformed Verne’s work to certain standards. For example, Hetzel famously changed Captain Nemo’s famous last words from “Freedom” to “God and country”.
Vernes works, which were masterpieces of scientific romances, fictional works with plots hingeing on some extrapolation, or untried application, of contemporary science, or used some unresolved scientific (including geography, as can be seen in Five Weeks in a Balloon; in fact, some of Verne’s novels really are mainly geographical novels) as a hook on which to hang an adventure story, are generally agreed to have gone down in quality, popularity and recognition after the mid-1870s, becoming formulaic pot-boilers in a vast field of imitators, as well as becoming darker.
While dubbed as the father of modern-day science fiction, Verne did have his influences. For example, he hobnobbed with the likes of Victor Hugo. One of Verne’s favorite books was The Swiss Family Robinson. The lesser-known book widely considered to be Verne’s masterpiece, The Mysterious Island, reflects much of this The Swiss Family Robinson. In both books, an energetic, capable group is marooned on a remote island, which is soon transformed into a form of paradise.
Verne’s castaways have an especially short list of items still with them after the marooning: the clothes on their backs, a match, two watches, a metal dog’s collar, and a grain of wheat. However, according to John Derbyshire, “They are Americans, though, and this was the beginning of the era—it ended with the Apollo program—when the U.S.A. was seen by foreigners, certainly by Verne, as the can-do nation, populated by ruggedly self-reliant types who could turn their hands to any practical task. The personification of this national stereotype is Cyrus Smith, leader of the castaways, “an engineer and a scientist of the first rank,” and also “courage personified,” who “had been in all the battles of the Civil War.” Compare this with the 1987 book Hatchet, wherein the main character obtains a plane-full of survival supplies; he is rescued hours after this find.
Verne’s fantastical writing often borders on, or reaches into, the impossible. Besides the numerous examples and descriptions of imagined technologies/applications that simply do not work in the physics/science of the real world (indeed, Journey to the Center of the Earth has not aged well at all, and the long-distance hot air balloon as described in Five Weeks in a Balloon won’t actually work in the real world), sometimes everything could happen in a perfect world, but the world is not perfect and the situation is just too perfect. For example, in The Mysterious Island, the originally desperate castaways have a forge, a brickworks, a pottery kiln, and a glassworks running in a matter of days. To remove a rock barrier, nitroglcerin is manufactured. A hydraulic elevator is actually installed, as well as cannons, part of a comprehensive, well-developed island defense system.
The castaways are a diverse group. It is a little too perfect of a group – every member possesses some invaluable, extraordinary talent, and each member of the group, with these talents, combines with the others to form powerful, high-performing whole. Cyrus Smith is a genius of an engineer, Bonadventure Pencroff is a capable and skilled sailor, and his protégé Herbert Brown is only 15 years old yet is a walking encyclopedia of biology, botany and zoology. The pet dog, Top, and resident orangutan, Master Joop, adopted from the native jungle, are uncannily tough, intelligent, loyal and capable. With all these skills and resources, the tight-knit group basically never finds itself without – indeed, even tobacco is cultivated and obtained for addicted Pencroff. Conflicts between group members are virtually nonexistent as friendships grow stronger and characters experience personal growth, happening only between the “colonists” and designated “bad guys”, such as a horde of higher primates, or a ship full of convicts, for example, unlike in Lord of the Flies, wherein internal disputes, politics and fighting destroy the group, as well as their civilization, while it is never clear who is what side – instead, complex social relationships blur the lines between good and bad, in a world that is not as simple like the ones of Verne’s. (It is also worth noting that while Lord of the Flies included fatal consequences for main characters, in Verne’s books, characters in positive lights rarely die (at all) violent deaths, instead dying of old age or something similar.)
These relationships, as well as other relationships in Verne’s books, such as the ones in Journey to the Center of the Earth, Five Weeks in a Balloon, and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, are undeveloped, simple and bare, lacking any realistic social dimension or genuine depth and interaction. This is all very implausible, and the exploding of the island in a volcanic eruption, as well as the group’s miraculous survival (save Master Joop, who is killed when the ground opens up under him and he falls into down the crack), hasn’t even been addressed yet, nor the legendary Captain Nemo’s godlike assistance that permeates the text, or his revealing at the end. Indeed, the deus ex machina plot device is utilized in Verne’s work on numerous occasions as a way of carrying the story forward and saving the protagonists from some situation, again in an implausible fashion very convenient both for the writer, Jules Verne, and the story’s heroes.
Although social relationships in Verne’s writing may be simplistic, cookie-cutter in their pleasantness and lack depth and realism, his characters are nonetheless flamboyantly original, weird and interesting. Around the World in 80 Days’ Phineas Fogg is crazy for routine, exactness and punctuality. And both Ayrton and Captain Nemo (both featured in two books, including The Mysterious Island) redeem themselves despite their controversial and complicated pasts. Professor Otto Lidenbrock (Journey to the Center of the Earth), in his drive to decode an ancient scrap of paper covered in mysterious runic characters, decides to lock everyone in the house, including himself, without food, until he knows the secret of the code. His reluctant, practical nephew, Axel, who has accidentally deciphered the text, and knows his uncle’s eccentricity and impatient whims, goes for two days without food with the distraught maid before hunger makes him finally crack, and he tells his uncle what the code is saying. The food issue that he himself caused, Lidenbrock doesn’t even notice as he works, his entire being focused on the matter at hand.
Verne loved cryptology. Coded, cryptic, or incomplete messages appeared in many of his works as a plot device, the deciphering process and code itself both meticulously explained and described in Verne’s signature detail.
