Five Weeks in a Balloon. Jules Verne
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full of unknown realms: both polar regions, South America, Canada, Mongolia, Siberia, Australia, the ocean depths, to say nothing of the moon and outer space. Right then the giant continent of Africa was making news: Burton and Speke had returned from it quarreling about the Nile’s source, and in 1860 Speke had gone back “to prove that he was right.” (Hazel Mary Martell, 30)
It was at this time too that African exploration was shifting into shameless colonialism, all Europe getting into the act. The continent’s own people “were no match for the modern weaponry of the Europeans,” as William Habeeb notes (30). “The French focused on North and West Africa, the British on southern and eastern Africa and Egypt, and the Portuguese on the southwestern and southeastern coasts.” Not to mention the Belgians in the Congo, the Dutch in South Africa, and the Germans in East Africa. Ultimately it all led to the infamous 1884 Berlin Conference, where these factions parceled out the whole landmass for themselves. Not a single African was invited, the conference “gave no consideration to [their] needs and desires,” and European rule persisted through much of the twentieth century (Habeeb, 30–31).
But as for Verne’s career, it was going nowhere. Whether penning play scripts, short fiction, or full-length nonfiction, nothing worked until at last the tumblers clicked into place and he found his own winning combination: science … exploration … showmanship.
In 1862 he wrote a novel about a high-tech balloon trip across Africa.
It was finally his moment. As Evans describes it, Barth, Burton, Speke, Grant, and others were “creating widespread public interest in their continuing exploits. There is no doubt that Verne, conscientious as he was about staying abreast of such developments, saw in these explorations not only the ideal ingredients for his first [scientific novel], but also the strong likelihood of its immediate commercial success” (1988, 20).
This time around he had read Poe beforehand. Peter Costello writes that Verne’s edition of Poe is dated 1862 and that he was critical of the American’s two ballooning stories (70). He elaborated on his concerns in an analysis published a few years later: in Edgar Allan Poe and His Works (1864), he faults these tales for “brazenly transgressing the most elementary laws of physics and mechanics.” As we’ll see, Verne was determined to offer something more believable.
In the summer of 1862 he pitched his new manuscript to Pierre-Jules Hetzel, called by the author’s grandson “one of the greatest publishers France has ever known” (Jules-Verne, 54). Hetzel’s author list included the big names of nineteenth-century French literature: Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, Émile Zola, George Sand, Baudelaire, Alexandre Dumas father and son. But the circumstances of his first meeting with Verne are hazy: it isn’t clear how the young writer got his foot in the door or what took place after he did. Both of Verne’s modern biographers bewail the lack of hard evidence, Lottman complaining that “there’s precious little documentation” (83), Butcher suspecting that the details in earlier biographies might be fabricated: “Since no document has ever emerged, it remains perfectly possible that the biographers invented the whole story” (147).
The exact shape of Verne’s new novel is also uncertain. Butcher even wonders if it was a novel (146–47), speculating that Verne offered the publisher a medley of nonfiction pieces about Africa and ballooning, Fergusson’s adventure being simply a fanciful change of pace. But Hetzel called for revisions, and the author turned them around within two weeks (Jules-Verne, 56), so they hardly could have entailed a sweeping structural overhaul. Besides, there weren’t any such medleys in Verne’s earlier output, just short fiction, a couple dozen play scripts, and a book-length travelogue based on his own traveling. He had never been to Africa, and only later did he undertake a multipart geographical overview—and that was in an emergency and at Hetzel’s behest.
More likely his text closely resembled what we know today as Five Weeks in a Balloon.4 The revisions were in the details, edits, and refinements that could be decently managed in a fortnight. But this too remains uncertain: aside from some scraps of chapters 30 and 36, the manuscript is lost (Volker Dehs, 20–27).
Storytelling Strategies
Even so, the novel is distinctive in its structure. Five Weeks uses two separate strategies that Verne would resort to in many later narratives, although not necessarily together as he does here.
He takes exactly the first quarter of the book (chapters 1–11) to set up his journey. Initially he catches our attention simply by acting mysterious: the opening situation is fuzzy and unclear—we’re curious to find out what in blazes is going on. In fact the yarn has an oddly disjointed, piecemeal exposition: chapter 1 hints at a daring expedition by the scientist Fergusson but gives few details—we know little more than what we can glean from the book’s title page, namely that ballooning and Africa are involved. Then chapter 2 adds that Fergusson will fly east to west across the continent’s midriff … after this, chapter 3 raises the notorious problem of how to steer a balloon … chapter 4 reveals that the trip aims to bridge two recent expeditions … and that’s the rhythm. Later chapters keep adding dribs and drabs, culminating in chapter 10’s by-the-numbers description of its innovative answer to the steering question. Verne has, in short, taken ten chapters to fit all the pieces into the puzzle, and we’re finally ready for liftoff in chapter 11. To repeat: the engine that has pulled us along is our itch to find out
“What’s Going On?”
The remaining three-quarters of the novel have a different drive mechanism—they set measurable goals for the balloonists, goals that tease us with a new question: “Will They Make It?” Fergusson’s first hope is to travel all the way to Senegal on Africa’s west coast … his second is to link up the two earlier expeditions—Heinrich Barth’s to the west in the vicinity of Timbuktu, Burton and Speke’s to the east in the vicinity of the Nile’s undiscovered source.
In those days England held a near monopoly on African exploration, and modern readers may not realize that the German Barth was in the pay of the British: “Barth was a Prussian, but he traveled under the British flag, wrote English for preference, and called himself Henry rather than Heinrich” (Felipe Fernández-Armesto, 344). This isn’t as outlandish as it sounds, since Queen Victoria’s mother and husband were both German-born; Anglo-Teuton relations could hardly have been closer. But the point is: Verne’s hero Fergusson is working to connect the discoveries of two English teams.
A tangent to this objective is a third one that Fergusson tackles fairly early on: solving the age-old riddle of the Nile’s source. As chapters 5 and 11 imply, the fictional Fergusson is in a race with an actual explorer, John Henning Speke. In 1860 the latter had gone back to Africa to settle this issue, which automatically means there are other true-life individuals in the race: Verne and Hetzel are hustling to write and publish the novel before it turns into old news. As Verne scholar Andrew Martin insists, “The main reason for speed in the preparation and execution of the expedition is that it is in danger of being overtaken by events” (36).
The danger didn’t materialize, but in any case both of these storytelling strategies turn up in Verne’s later fiction. If we’re more familiar with the second (Will They Make It?), it’s because his top sellers tend to advertise their objectives right in the title: Around the World in Eighty Days (1872), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), From the Earth to the Moon. In