The Mysterious Island. Jules Verne
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is the first out of three, perhaps because the others were never written. The plot of the second manuscript can be summarized as follows: on 25 March 1861, Americans Mr. and Mrs. Clifton, with their four children, Marc, Robert,6 Jack, and Belle, plus a dog called Fido, are heading home across the northern Pacific on board the Vankouver [sic]. However, some of the crew mutiny and take over the ship; and Mrs. Clifton and the children are put into a boat near an island. They are accompanied by Flip, a sailor from Picardy, who shows great affection, cheerfulness, ingenuity, and teaching skill, thus becoming “Uncle Robinson.” With Flip’s help the family discover a shelter and food, and start a fire with a single match. At a second stage, Harry Clifton, an engineer, escapes from the Vankouver and joins his family, although receiving less attention than Uncle Robinson. More ambitious ventures are carried out, like growing wheat and tobacco and exploring and measuring the island. An orang-utan is captured and a lake discovered containing a strange boiling, as well as a cock with a recently trimmed crest. Part I ends with the discovery of a lead bullet in a leveret. (Extracts from “UR” and further information appear on pp. xxxv–xxxviii.)
Even before its publication in 1991, “UR” aroused controversy as to its literary quality. As Christian Robin points out,7 its tone and style are unique in Verne’s works, undoubtedly because written for young people. It is also his only book to convincingly portray child psychology and a family without possessions succeeding on an island. The main reason Hetzel did not like it, Robin surmises (233), is that he disapproved of children in Verne’s works, perhaps because it was his own speciality as a writer. Philippe Burgaud finds the work pleasant and readable,8 for it is a highly polished, fluent work (it even has chapter heads for the initial chapters). Indeed Part I of MI, which is less gripping than Parts II and III, may be considered only slightly more interesting than “UR.” While Verne destroyed several manuscripts in 1886, his retention of both manuscripts of “UR” implies that he did not share his publisher’s negative view of it.
Nevertheless, Jean Guermonprez calls “UR” a “lemon” and Jean Jules-Verne, Olivier Dumas, and Jacques van Herp agree that it is unimaginative.9 “UR” certainly does not compare with the series of masterpieces Verne produced from 1863 to 1870, if only because “the Clifton family is too similar to the pedantic and edifying family” of Wyss.10
Verne proceeded to write the two surviving manuscripts of MI.11 While MI visibly derives from “UR,” it is also different in both style and content. Many phrases and even episodes are copied wholesale, but the characters are transformed, and instead of the four months of “UR,” Part I of MI covers seven months. In an interesting crossover, the margin of “UR” (“UR,” 54) contains a diagram showing the triangulation done in MI (I, 14),12 plus a first draft of the corresponding dialogue, including Cyrus Smith’s name (Robin, 237). In “UR” there is only one watch, but two are needed in MI for making the fire and for calculating the longitude. Episodes absent from “UR” include the mysterious saving of the engineer, the dog’s fight with the dugong, and the making of nitroglycerin. Contrariwise, the turning of the turtle and the acquisition of Jup are displaced from “UR” to Part II of MI. The huge amounts of science in MI are presumably a reaction to Hetzel’s acerbic remark on “UR”: “Where is the science in all that?” (Guermonprez, “Du Navet,” 6) Similarly the splendors of Granite House and its hydraulic lift may derive from his comment about the “banal grotto” (Robin, 243). Making bricks, iron, steel, and soap in record time may be due to his remarks on the Cliftons’ ineffectuality.
In about 1871, Verne had apparently received lots of letters from women across the globe, begging him to reveal the identity of Nemo, left a mystery at the end of Twenty Thousand Leagues; and he wrote: “They will have the key to the enigma, but not immediately like that! They will have to be patient for a while yet” (cited without reference by Guermonprez, “Du Navet,” 6). In other words, the somber captain was possibly not at this stage part of the Robinsonade. However, in Part I of MI and even in “UR” there is already a human presence. The question then arises whether it is Nemo responsible for the bullet in the leveret, the strange boiling, and the trimmed crest. After all, the boiling in MI will be his doing, and no one else can act under water. Although Verne’s letter of 2 February 1873 mentions Nemo for the first time, he often claimed never to have started a book without planning it out in detail. Since the main alternative, Ayrton, is still thousands of miles away in the southern hemisphere, the captain may have appeared in the missing Part III of “UR.”
In judging Hetzel’s reactions, we note with amazement that he was nearly as critical of MI as “UR.” Given the uninformed nature of most English-language criticism of MI to date, it is again important to quote substantial extracts from the exchanges between Verne and his mentor13 (retaining Hetzel’s poor style and punctuation):
[May? 1873] The framework [of Part I] is good … but your characters … do not have enough variation, except the engineer and Harbert. Cracrof [sic] can pass, but the reporter is a nullity who can not survive, and … it’s not worth paying for a Negro if you’re not going to enjoy him a bit more … One does not send mere commercial travelers on missions like the ones [the reporter] did, for a newspaper as important as his. We need men of steel in mind and body … When I think that your 4 fellows spend the whole volume without saying a word of the America they left in those conditions, of their past, of anything, I say to myself that you must be the most astonishing and the most indifferent of creatures to find the thing plausible. (199–200)
[21? September 1873] While writing this work, I am above all concerned to invent episodes and especially the climax which must be produced from start to finish. There are incidents in the 3rd volume which are prepared from the beginning of the first. (204–05)
[22? September 1873] Overall, the [second] volume is better than the 1st … But what is missing from this book as a whole is that your people do not seem very close to each other. Nor are they sufficiently distinct in their language or character. Good humor is too rare, your lively philosophy too often absent … The scientific material and the execution of the works they accomplish have made you leave their humanity, their moods, their sentiments and thoughts too much in the shadows. One doesn’t sufficiently wish to be with them. (205–06)
[23 September 1873] Everything you say about Ayrton’s savagery is for me without importance. All the mental specialists in the world won’t change a thing. I need a savage. I tell the public, here is my savage. And you think people will worry about knowing whether after 12 years of solitude, he has become that savage! No! What is important is that having been a savage he becomes a man again … Do not forget: the Robinson subject has been done twice.
Defoe, who took man alone, Wyss who took the family. / These were the two best subjects. I myself have to make do with a third which is neither one nor the other. / Several times already you have created doubt in my mind about this work. / And yet I have the conviction—and I speak to you as though it were by someone else—that it will not be inferior to the preceding ones, that, properly launched like them, it will succeed. I have the profound conviction that the reader’s curiosity will be stimulated, that the sum of the imagined things in this work is greater than in the others, and that what I call the climax develops, as it were, mathematically. (208)
[22 January 1874] On the whole [Part III] is excellent well-constructed well-planned well-balanced in its details, the capital weakness is the endless description of Harbert’s illness, it’s as