The Mysterious Island. Jules Verne
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him without being seen.
Verne’s shipwreckees and castaways have an easy time of it compared with real-life stories. As Pencroff points out, the whole Mysterious Island is in fact self-consciously artificial, “created especially for people to be shipwrecked on, where … poor devils can always manage” (II, 9). The reason, of course, is again Captain Nemo, who is heavy-handedly falsifying everything from the backdrop. Nemo’s backstage meddling is indeed a direct citation from Robinson Crusoe, with the single line of footprints, the message in a bottle that floats by at just the right moment, and above all the chest containing every object conceivably useful to a Robinson—even a Polynesian dictionary. The captain may in fact be deliberately showing up the artifices used in the previous works. As an ironic re-reading of Robinson Crusoe, or rather of The Swiss Family Robinson’s reading of Robinson Crusoe, the novel simultaneously reinforces its own narration and undermines it. By referring so insistently to its fourth-level nature, as a text reading another text which is itself reading Defoe, himself perhaps based on real events, Verne’s novel is emphasizing its own fictional status. The logical consequence is that Nemo, the Nautilus, and the Island will have to disappear at the end.
Of course Verne anticipates some of the reader’s objections by putting the same objections in the characters’ mouths. The novel contains its own critical commentary, making it very modern; but such an idea will not stop readers from continuing to dig out the mysteries. Some slips must be blamed on the editor’s repeated changes, making complete coherence more difficult. But many of the implausibilities may even have been deliberate. Many seem to constitute a weary defiance to Hetzel’s interference, as if Verne’s heart was no longer in producing plausible solutions.
The inconsistencies are inseparable from our interpretation of the novel as a whole. As regards the closing chapters in particular, we need to reject as misconceived the Iowa episode and the implausible religious sentiments and hold on firm to Nemo’s dying “Independence!” However, such a position still leaves many important questions unanswered.
Is Smith (or Hetzel) correct to accuse Nemo of “fighting against necessary progress”? Is Nemo’s life really an “error” because it is solitary? Or does the amazing luck of sharing his remote desert island with the five settlers cancel the error? Was British colonialism in India negative? What should we do when confronted with forces we know to be wrong but irresistible? Should Christian values of forgiveness be replaced by more straightforward Old-Testament ideas? Is revenge sometimes a legitimate action, as it appears to be in both Twenty Thousand Leagues and MI?
The answers are complex, and my conclusion will skirt round many of them. As we have seen, the responses reside in the multiple intersections of the characters and the Island, the historical and geographical circumstances, the French literary canon and the long series of previous Robinsons, exploration and comfort, the new and the old, and the writer and the publisher.
The correspondence reveals that Verne put his heart and soul into his Robinsonades and that they represent for him the conceptual core of the Extraordinary Journeys. Yet the catastrophic fate of “UR” showed that for the publisher something was lacking, that the center could not hold. The key to the enigma may lie in what Verne calls “the search for the absolute.” The entire second half of his production suggests that Hetzel’s premonition was partly justified, for after MI any element of transcendence, any approach of the sacred has disappeared: “the thrill has gone.” While explanations of the discrepancy in terms of Verne’s life and historical circumstances must be relevant, the works themselves are where we must continue to look for answers.
Verne’s characters inhabit their space passionately. They seek the most economical and powerful modus operandi, as if carrying out a minimax factorial analysis to produce the unique best solution. But to what problem? The works previous to MI center on exploration towards a unique goal. The heroes are able to sustain a moving equilibrium en route by balancing precariously between the inside and the outside, the present and the past. They calmly eat sea-food before venturing into the midst of the raging depths or study man’s greatest works as preparation for confronting the secret of destiny in the ruins of Atlantis or the center of the earth. Once the goal is reached, however, what Verne invariably calls the climax subsides and the heroes limp bedraggedly back home. It is in the movement towards the unknown, in other words, that the Vernian novel finds its reason for existing.
MI lacks the geographical goal, but compensates by incorporating the unknown into its very heart. Left to their own devices the colonists would be unable to say why they are there, where the transcendence lies. But part of the absolute quest of MI is in the exploration of the Robinsonade and the nature of the Island, and it is these ongoing experiences that define the happiness of the settlers. The Island is a world away from the battles of the Civil War, and from the natives of the south Pacific; hanging over it, nevertheless, is the awareness that soon there will be no mysterious bolt-holes left. Lincoln represents then the limit of the series of transcendent points on the globe and of the marvelous vehicles to get to them: an unstable island not much bigger than the monstrous vessel that forms Propeller Island but still not completely explorable since concealing in its subconscious, uterine bowels a semi-mechanical, semi-divine monster. The revolutionary Secret of the Island complements the bourgeois habits of the settlers.
Verne knows his classics, and the influence of Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Stendhal, Balzac, and even Zola is visible on every page of MI. The paradox is that he has set himself an apparently sub-literary goal: to go one better than the series of preceding Robinsons, to sum them all up but especially show them up, to synthesize their experience into one mega-Robinsonade that will start from the bottom but go higher if not faster than anything that has gone before. In his naiveté Verne forgets that the Robinsonade is not a recognized French literary genre, and so destroys his lingering chance of joining the Académie française.
The other problem in his pursuit of transcendence is the publishing contract tying him to a single partner tighter than any marriage. Verne has, however, perfected a method over the previous novels: he will incorporate the problem into the solution, he will absorb the grit of the ideological, moralistic, or religious principles Hetzel dumps in, like a mollusk producing a pearl. Nemo has the settlers’ interests at heart but can not resist repeatedly writing himself into the story. He will not only absorb into himself the angst Verne feels at Hetzel’s constant suggestions, but also serve to undermine the too-perfect machine for living of the settlers.
Machine-based perfection carries within it the seeds of its own destruction, for if all goes too smoothly, there is no plot. Verne is not writing a mathematical monograph of brevity and elegance, but a serialized novel at about ten centimes a word, with nothing for the reprints, and so his characters must encounter repeated difficulties. If the ideal situation or machine emerges, someone must quickly insert a grain of sand; and Nemo and Hetzel provide enough to build a small island. Verne needs the editor’s ideas, if only as a punching-board to discover, by reaction, what he himself really feels. The solitude of the writer was never really practicable. Ultimately, then we can not separate the sum of Verne’s success from the parts of Hetzel’s suggestions.
Verne’s enduring popularity in America is built on the impressive quantities of real-world information he provides and on a naive reading of his works as adventure stories in the Anglo-Saxon mold. But this is a dangerous half-truth. Much of the information in MI is tedious or erroneous. It may be more useful to view the adventures as founded on an encyclopedic knowledge of the predecessors and on a systematic—European?—irony and distrust of any fixed system of meaning. Verne’s many implausibilities must be decoded as signs of the imperfectly absorbed foreign bodies, themselves incorporating the problems from the previous desert-island literature. The writer ignores his contractual obligation of producing a message encapsulated in both specific national-linguistic boundaries and the publishing conventions of the time. He follows his own literary muse in requiring a satisfying story to have its own internal logic. History has proved him right to have concentrated on the deeper meaning of his novels. The large numbers of subsequent works citing or even bodily recreating the Island26 show that the questions he asks in MI are still vitally alive in the third millennium.
The real