by Jules Verne
10 (p. 194) “I know the story... the pre-adamites of Scheuchzer”: Pausanias, a Greek scholar and writer from the second century A.D., tells the story of a man who claimed to have found the skeleton of the Greek hero Ajax; he described it as gigantic and said the kneecap was the size of a pentathlon discus, which would make it more than 7 inches wide. Asterius is a mythological giant whose tomb Pausanias claimed to have seen. Herodotus, a Greek historian from the fifth century B.C., reports the story of Orestes’ body being found by a Spartan who simply takes the word of a blacksmith for the authenticity of the remains. Polyphemus is a one-eyed giant who imprisons Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey; Trapani and Palermo are cities in Sicily. Felix Platter (1536-1614; spelled “Plater” in Verne’s text) was a Swiss doctor who identified bones found near Lucerne as those of a giant, but they were actually the remains of a mammoth. Jean de Chassanion (1531-1598) was a French clergyman and author of a book on giants in human history. Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) was a French naturalist who examined bones said to be those of Teutobochus, king of the Cimbrians, and found them to belong to the elephant relative deinotherium; the Cimbrians were a Germanic tribe. Peter Camper (1722-1789; spelled “Campet” in Verne’s text) was a Dutch anatomist best known for his work on anatomy and human races. In 1725 Johann Jakob Scheuchzer (1672-1733), a Swiss naturalist, claimed to have discovered the fossil remains of one of the victims of the biblical flood; in the nineteenth century, Georges Cuvier identified these fossils to be those of a giant salamander.
11 (p. 197) Hoffmann’s fantastic character who has lost his shadow: In the short story “The Wonderful Tale of Peter Schlemihl” (1814), by German Romantic author Adelbert von Chamisso (1781-1838), the protagonist sells his shadow. E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776-1822), another German writer of the period and friend of Chamisso’s, mentions the story in his own “Adventures of New Year’s Eve” ( 1815).
Inspired by Journey to the Center of the Earth
Science-Fiction
Oscar Wilde supposedly once remarked that H. G. Wells was a “scientific Jules Verne.” It is hard to determine which author Wilde wished to slight more, but it doesn’t really matter: Verne and Wells are the two progenitors of modern science fiction. Without these authors, science fantasy writing—a category that includes such notables as Kingsley Amis, Isaac Asimov, Anthony Burgess, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, Aldous Huxley, C. S. Lewis, George Orwell, Ray Bradbury, and J. R. R. Tolkien—would not exist as we know it today.
Herbert George Wells supported himself with teaching, textbook writing, and journalism until 1895, when he made his literary debut with The Time Machine, which was followed before the end of the century by The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds—books that established him as the first original voice in the realm of scientific fantasy since Verne. Where Verne dealt with scientific probabilities—for example, the Nautilus from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea serves as the forerunner to the modern submarine—time travel, interplanetary warfare, and invisibility and other fantasies are the subjects of Wells’s conceptual fiction.
Perhaps because of this fundamental difference in their artistic aims, Wells was famously loath to be compared to his literary ancestor. In a letter to J. L. Garvin, the editor of Outlook, Wells refused to attack Verne publicly, though he had openly denied having been influenced by the latter: “A good deal of injustice has been done the old man [Verne] in comparison with me. I don’t like the idea of muscling into the circle of attention about him with officious comments or opinions eulogy. I’ve let the time when I might have punished him decently go by.” Although the prolific Wells delved into social philosophy and criticism, history, utopian and comic novels, literary parodies, and even feminism, he was always best remembered for his auspicious beginnings as a science fiction writer.
The Underground Novel
Underground worlds have fascinated mankind for millennia—consider the Hades of the Greeks and the subterranean inferno of Dante—but Verne’s story is an important nineteenth-century manifestation. With Verne as a thematic predecessor, so-called Lost World and Lost Race novels took strong hold in the English-speaking world. In fact, Verne himself took inspiration from Journey to the Center of the Earth to write another underground tale, the little-known Les Indes Noires (1877), which chronicles a family living in a coal mine beneath the surface of Scotland. In English, the novel has been published under titles as various as Underground City, The Child of the Cavern, Strange Doings Underground, Black Diamonds, and the literal The Black Indies. The African adventure tales of British author H. Rider Haggard, including the treasure-hunt classic King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and the mystical She: A History of Adventure (1887), utilize the underground as a key setting and metaphor. Two of the best-selling fictions of their time, Haggard’s novels are still read today and also are known for helping inspire the Indiana Jones movie franchise of the 1980s. Lost World and Lost Race themes appear in works as wide-ranging as the science fiction of H. G. Wells, the anti-imperialism works of Joseph Conrad, the Professor Challenger novels by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Tarzan and Pellucidar series of Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Film
The first adaptation of Verne’s novel, Voyage au centre de la terre (1909; A Journey to the Middle of the Earth), was by Spanish director Segundo de Chomon; no copies are known to exist today. By the middle of the twentieth century, though, film audiences were quite familiar with Verne. The Czech Cesta do Praveku ( 1955; Journey to the Beginning of Time), directed by Karel Zeman, was inspired by Verne’s novel, though this story of traveling to past epochs is not really an adaptation. That came in 1959 with Journey to the Center of the Earth. James Mason plays Professor Oliver Lindenbrook and a frequently shirtless Pat Boone sings musical numbers in his role as Alec McEwen, Lindenbrook’s student. Arlene Dahl is the strongwilled Carla Goetaborg, a role created for the movie. Director Henry Liven portrays realistic-looking dinosaurs with footage of lizards blown up to monstrous proportions, and the magnificent settings include crystal gardens, forests of giant mushrooms, and footage of Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. Bernard Herrmann’s excellent score completes this classic. America also saw a wave of other Verne adaptations in the 1950s: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) and Around the World in 80 Days (1956) were popular hits, the latter winning an Academy Award for Best Picture.
An admirable Spanish adaptation, Viaje al centro de la Tierra, by director Georges Méliès (1976), appeared in the United States in 1978; it is sometimes known as Where Time Began and Fabulous Journey to the Center of the Earth. The creative opening sequence shows a pastiche of early, silent Verne films from prolific director Georges Méliès. Journey to the Center of the Earth (1989), featuring model-actress Kathy Ireland, takes little from Verne’s novel but the name; the same holds true for a 1993 television movie. A loosely adapted miniseries starring Treat Williams, Journey to the Center of the Earth (1999), moves the action to New Zealand and focuses on a dinosaur plot and a missing-person saga.
Director Gavin Scott’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (2005) depicts four young people who discover the original manuscript for Verne’s novel. When they find a map of Verne’s travels under the Earth’s surface, they realize that the author based the book on his real-life adventures and agree to go underground and follow Verne’s path. Part of this story rings true to actual events: Verne’s original manuscript for the novel, lost for decades, came to light in 1994.
Comments & Questions
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this endur
ing work.
Comments
JULES VERNE
My object has been to depict the earth, and not the earth alone, but the universe, for I have sometimes taken my readers away from the earth, in the novel. And I have tried at the same time to realize a very high ideal of beauty of style. It is said that there can’t be any style in a novel of adventure, but that isn’t true; though I admit that it is very much more difficult to write such a novel in a good literary form than the studies of character which are so in vogue to-day.
—as reported to R. H. Sherard and printed in McClure’s Magazine (January 1894)
THE NATION
The death of Jules Verne should strike with a sense of personal bereavement all boys who read and all men in whom the romantic imagination of boyhood has not yet perished. He was a prophet with honor in his own country, for he and the famous Cathedral of Amiens were the twin marvels of that provincial city. Their two pictures, in all sizes and styles, stare from hundreds of shop windows. But this tribute is only a faint echo of that which came to him from every corner of the globe. Wherever love of adventure, coupled with curiosity as to the mechanism of the universe, exists, there Jules Verne finds his disciples. ‘Around the World in Eighty Days,’ ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,’ ‘The Mysterious Island,’ ‘A Voyage to the Centre of the Earth,’ ‘From the Earth to the Moon’—here is a rollcall that should stir the pulses of graybeards, and almost summon back their irrevocable youth....
The books of Jules Verne are the ‘Arabian Nights’ elaborately fitted with all modern improvements. The genii and the sorcerers of a few centuries ago have their lineal descendants in the accomplished gentlemen who are sometimes described as “the wizards of science.” A submarine boat, a fast express, an automobile, a dirigible balloon, or a hollow shell shot at the moon, is a comfortable and highly plausible substitute for a travelling carpet or a roc. Given the problem of annihilating space and time, the unknown authors of the ‘Arabian Nights’ and Jules Verne both solve it according to formulas popular in their own day.
The charm of mystery is evident in the very title of Verne’s works. No lad of twelve can resist the challenge of ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,’ ‘Voyage to the Centre of the Earth,’ and ‘The Mysterious Island.’ Had the subject-matter belied the captions, many eager readers would still have pegged away, lured by the mere magic of the words stamped on the binding. But the stories are worthy of their delicious names....
On the scientific side of Verne’s writings one may easily lay undue stress. He is not the first to embed scientific knowledge in stories for boys, though he is uncommonly successful in sugar-coating the pill. The method of Abbott and his imitators is to let Rollo draw Uncle George into endless and often futile discussions of the wonders of earth and sky. There is too much talk and too little action. Verne, on the contrary—and he has had many followers, notably H. G. Wells—vitalizes the dead fact by employing it in some striking feat in mastery of man or nature.—March 30, 1905
CHARLES F HORNE
Jules Verne was the establisher of a new species of story-telling, that which interweaves the most stupendous wonders of science with the simplest facts of human life. Our own Edgar Allan Poe had pointed the way; and Verne was ever eager to acknowledge his indebtedness to the earlier master. But Poe died; and it was Verne who went on in book after book, fascinating his readers with cleverly devised mysteries, instructing and astonishing them with the new discoveries of science, inspiring them with the splendor of man’s destiny. When, as far back as 1872, his early works were “crowned” by the French Academy, its Perpetual Secretary, M. Patin, said in his official address, “The well-worn wonders of fairyland are here replaced by a new and more marvelous world, created from the most recent ideas of science.”
More noteworthy still is Verne’s position as the true, the astonishingly true, prophet of the discoveries and inventions that were to come. He was far more than the mere creator of that sort of scientific fairyland of which Secretary Patin spoke, and with which so many later writers, Wells, Haggard and Sir Conan Doyle, have since delighted us. He himself once keenly contrasted his own methods with those of Wells, the man he most admired among his many followers. Wells, he pointed out, looked centuries ahead and out of pure imagination embodied the unknowable that some day might perchance appear. “While I,” said Verne, “base my inventions on a groundwork of actual fact.”
—from his introduction to the Works of Jules Verne (1911)
GEORGE ORWELL
Like most writers, Jules Verne was one of those people to whom nothing ever happens.
—from the New Statesman (January 18, 1941 )
KINGSLEY AMIS
With Verne we reach the first great progenitor of modern science fiction. In its literary aspect his work is, of course, of poor quality, a feature certainly reproduced with great fidelity by most of his successors.
—from New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction ( 1960)
WILLIAM GOLDING
Verne’s verbal surface lacks the slickness of the professional; it is turgid and slack by turns. Only the brio of his enthusiasm carries us forward from one adventure to another.
—from The Hot Gates (1961)
JORGE LUIS BORGES
Before Wells resigned himself to the role of sociological spectator, he was an admirable storyteller, an heir to the concise style of Swift and Edgar Allan Poe; Verne was a pleasant and industrious journeyman. Verne wrote for adolescents; Wells, for all ages.
—as translated by Ruth L. C. Simms, from Other Inquisitions 1937 1952 ( 1964)
ISAAC ASIMOV
[Verne] gives careful detail, when detail is advisable, and makes omissions when it is safe. He carefully overcomes a known difficulty by reference to some authentic scientific hypothesis which, for the purposes of the story, turns out to be true. He uses currently impressive words and phrases at key points.
Done well enough, as Verne does, a story, however fantastic it may seem, becomes acceptable not only in its own time but also a century later when its science is as outmoded as Dante’s descriptions of the Inferno.—from his introduction to A Journey to the Center of the Earth (1966)
Questions
1. What is the appeal of fiction, movies, and paintings that depict events that could never occur or things that could never exist? Is it pure escapism? Or is there something more fulfilling about these fantasies? Do they somehow reflect on the world around us?
2. Think of the metaphoric implications of digging deeper and deeper until you come to a hidden world within the world, a world in which monsters roam. In part, is Verne’s story about what lies at the hidden center of the human mind? Or does it concern the monstrous at the heart of the day-to-day workings of human society?
3. In what ways is Journey to the Center of the Earth tied to its own time, and in what ways does it represent universal, timeless concerns?
4. How does Journey to the Center of the Earth compare to other works of science fiction? Is it as compelling as, say, Star Trek or Jurassic Park?
5. How does the novel foreground the contrast between animate beings and the inanimate world? How do Verne’s metaphors complicate or blur this opposition?
6. Are the characters intended as realistic figures, or are they symbolic representations of certain mindsets? How do their relations to one another affect the outcome of the story?
For Further Reading
Biographical Materials
Allotte de la Fuye, Marguerite. Jules Verne. Translated by Erik de Mauny. New York: Coward-McCann, 1956.
Jules-Verne, Jean. Jules Verne: A Biography. Translated by Roger Greaves. New York: Taplinger, 1976. Written by the author’s grandson.
Lottmann, Herbert R. Jules Verne: An Exploratory Biography. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.
Critical Materials
Barthes, Roland. “The Nautilus and the Drunken Boat.” In Mythologies, translated by Annette Lavers. New York: Noonday, 1972, pp. 65-67
.
Butcher, William. verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Self: Space and Time in the Voyages Extraordinaires. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990.
Chesneaux, Jean. The Political and Social Ideas of Jules Verne. Translated by Thomas Wikeley. London: Thames and Hudson, 1972.
Costello, Peter. Jules Verne: Inventor of Science Fiction. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1978.
Evans, Arthur B. Jules Verne Rediscovered: Didacticism and the Scientific Novel. New York: Greenwood, 1988.
Lynch, Lawrence W. Jules Verne. New York: Twayne Publishers,1992.
Macherey, Pierre. A Theory of Literary Production. Translated by Geoffrey Wall. London: Routledge, 1978, pp. 159-248.
Martin, Andrew. The Knowledge of Ignorance: From Genesis to Jules Verne. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Martin, Andrew. The Mask of the Prophet: The Extraordinary Fictions of Jules Verne. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Smyth, Edmund, ed. Jules Verne: Narratives of Modernity. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2000.
Materials in French
Bessière, Jean. Modernites de Jules Verne. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988.
Butor, Michel. Essais sur les modernes. Paris: Gallimard, 1960. Contains the important essay “Le point supreme et l‘âge d’or a travers quelques oeuvres de Jules Verne.”
