The Kip Brothers. Jules Verne
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and that of the Rorique/Degrave brothers on whom his own fictional protagonists were based? Could it be that Verne, unable or unwilling to “sweep aside a good many beliefs that he had always regarded as inviolable,” purposefully embedded in the text of The Kip Brothers certain clues that reflected his change of heart about the Dreyfus Affair as he was preparing the final version of the manuscript in 1901?
Such is the premise of Christian Porcq in a seminal two-part article on Verne’s The Kip Brothers published in the Bulletin de la Société Jules Verne in the winter of 1993–94.52 In a provocative analysis that ranges from the factual to the far-fetched, Porcq argues that Verne—a lover of riddles, puzzles, and cryptograms—hid in his text a host of references to the Dreyfus Affair. Some are lexical: repetitions of certain words such as “affair” and “proofs” (legal as well as photographic—where Dreyfus is a kind of “negative” for the Kip brothers) or phonological anagrams in the fictional characters’ names (like KAR[L]KIP which could conceivably be an inverted PIKAR, that is, Picquart, the name of the French officer who investigated Dreyfus’s case). Some are chronological: the fact that Karl Kip is thirty-five years old when he was arrested (the same age as Alfred Dreyfus at the time of his arrest) or that the three successive court trials portrayed in The Kip Brothers (that of Flig Balt in January 1886, that of the Kip brothers in February 1886, and the Kip brothers’ retrial in August 1887) parallel the timing of the court trials in the Dreyfus Affair a dozen years later (that of Esterhazy in January 1898, that of Zola in February 1898, and Dreyfus’s retrial in August 1899). And some clues can even be found in one of the novel’s illustrations: the portrait of Mr. Hawkins in chapter four bears an uncanny likeness to Edgar Demange, Dreyfus’s defense attorney. According to Porcq, despite Verne’s overt anti-Dreyfus views during the late 1890s, the author nevertheless secretly patterned much of his story on the legal tribulations of the French officer. Porcq’s reading of this novel is fascinating but, ultimately, not entirely convincing. Verne’s anti-Dreyfus views toward the end of his life seem as strong as before he published The Kip Brothers.
Finally, another source for The Kip Brothers was Verne’s own first-hand experience with the sea and the nautical life. As Jean-Paul Faivre has observed, The Kip Brothers is one of Verne’s most “oceanic” novels.53 And the Pacific Ocean is used as the fictional locale for many of Verne’s Voyages extraordinaires (The Children of Captain Grant, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas, The Chancellor, A Captain of Fifteen, and The Stories of Jean-Marie Cabidoulin, among others) as well as in some of the author’s very first short stories.54 From the earliest days of his youth exploring the docks of the seaport city of Nantes, Verne had a consuming passion for the sea. His grandson writes: “Undoubtedly, it was in Nantes that Verne’s love for the sea made its first mark on him, a real love that many years later led him to remark: ‘I cannot see a ship leaving port … but my whole being goes with her.’”55 Verne owned three yachts during his lifetime: the first, a nine-ton built-to-order vessel launched in 1868 and baptized the Saint-Michel I, in which he sailed out of the port of Le Crotoy (and aboard which he wrote much of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas); the second was the Saint-Michel II, bought in 1876, which he owned for less than a year; and the last, purchased in 1877, was the Saint-Michel III, a luxurious steam and sail yacht with a crew of ten, in which Verne sailed to various ports of call throughout the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the North Sea until early 1886. When Verne was writing about ships and the sea, he knew the subject well.56
Verne’s nautical expertise is often reflected in the pages of The Kip Brothers. For example, consider the following passage when Karl Kip takes command of the brig James Cook during a ferocious storm at sea: “The storm, although extraordinarily fierce, was less dangerous, since it now attacked the ship by the bow, and no longer by the stern. The crew managed to set up, not without great difficulty, a heavy-weather jib, capable of resisting the wind’s blasts. Under its storm jib and its small topsail whose reef Karl Kip had unfurled, both of which were trimmed tightly, the brig held close to shore, while seaman Burnes, an excellent helmsman, imperturbably maintained the James Cook on its proper course.” While penning this particular scene, the author was no doubt recalling some of his own early maritime adventures aboard the Saint-Michel. As Verne’s grandson Jean Jules-Verne describes it in his biography, “There can be no doubt that the thoughts of his mariner heroes were his own. … Hence, the importance of the Saint-Michel in his life and works cannot be overstated. Even though he visited few of the faraway places frequented by his heroes, he was a sailor, well versed in sailing and broken to [familiar with] the dangers of the treacherous seas between Boulogne and Bordeaux.”57
NATIONALITIES, REVOLUTIONS, AND BROTHERHOOD
Another interesting aspect of The Kip Brothers—and one that distinguishes it from most other novels in Verne’s Voyages extraordinaires—concerns how certain nationalities are portrayed. The novel’s plot unfolds in Tasmania and New Zealand, former British colonies, and in the Bismarck Archipelago, which belonged to Germany. Most of the main fictional characters are therefore Anglo-Saxons and Germans, with the two heroes of the novel, the Kip brothers, being Dutch. This particular configuration in his cast of characters is a very unusual one for Verne, for two reasons. First, the majority of the protagonists in Verne’s works tend to be British, American, or French.58 The only French and American characters appearing in The Kip Brothers are secondary and clearly minor: the captain and sailors of the French ship Assomption, who announce the wreck of the Wilhelmina to the passengers and crew of the James Cook, and the unsavory American seamen Bryce recruited in the Three Magpies tavern at the beginning of the novel. Second, Verne depicts the British and Germans in this novel in a very sympathetic light. The Kips’ tireless advocate and friend Mr. Hawkins; the governor of Tasmania, Sir Edward Carrigan; and even the warden of the Port Arthur penitentiary, Captain Skirtle, are shown to be fine and honorable British gentlemen.59 And Mr. and Mrs. Zieger of New Mecklenburg as well as Mr. Hamburg of Kerawara exemplify the best of German warmth and hospitality as they welcome the captain of the James Cook and the Kip brothers into their homes during the ship’s layovers in the Bismarck Archipelago.
These approving portrayals contrast sharply with Verne’s more cynical representation of these same nationalities in several of his other later works. Note, for example, the many diatribes against the British in the pages of such novels as The Mysterious Island (their conquest and domination of India), Hector Servadac (their jingoistic “Gibraltar” mentality), Lit’l Fellow (their terrible treatment of orphans), and especially in his 1895 Propeller Island (the greedy English imperialists of “perfidious Albion” are “cursed down to their children and grand-children, until its detestable name is wiped from the memory of the world!” And Verne’s depiction of Germans follows a very similar trajectory. During the decade immediately after the Franco-Prussian war, Verne’s first truly evil scientist emerged in the person of the racist megalomaniac Herr Schultze of The Begum’s Millions. Other anti-Germanisms punctuated many of Verne’s subsequent novels, such as A Drama in Livonia (in which Germans brutally oppress the Slavs) or in Claudius Bombarnac (in which the contentious and crude Baron Weissschnitzerdörfer personifies most Germanophobic stereotypes of the fin de siècle). As Verne scholar Jean Chesneaux has explained, however, it is important to understand that Verne’s
hostility towards England hardly ever stems from simple national chauvinism; it is politically motivated. England is castigated as the oppressor of the Scottish, Irish, and French Canadian nationalists, or for being a great colonial Power. Verne’s Anglophobia is directed towards a country regarded as typical of certain negative political tendencies, much more than towards an ‘enemy’ nation. …
In the same way, Verne’s Germanophobia, with the exception of one or two casual and ridiculous characters, is invariably linked with political criticism. … Even in this case [The Begum’s Millions], symptomatic of the extreme vengeful chauvinism widespread in France in the 1880s, the ‘eternal German’ Schultze is indistinguishable from Schultze the armament industry magnate, the master of a gigantic totalitarian and, so to speak, proto-Hitlerian complex, a scientist who uses his knowledge in the service of destruction.60
Although there exists no iron-clad correlation between an author’s personal politics and those expressed in his fiction, it is nevertheless interesting that Verne’s