But Verne the scientific Victorian was bothered by Poe’s incomplete trust in science and his general lack of concern for plausibility. In spite of the note at the end of “Hans Pfaall,” it was clear to Verne that Poe didn’t really care a great deal about plausibility. In his essay on Poe, Verne specifically criticized “Hans Pfaall” for its abandonment of scientific principle in the matter of that thin atmosphere extending from the Earth to the Moon that permits the balloon to make its passage.
Verne wrote: “The most elementary laws of physics and mechanics are boldly transgressed. This has always seemed astonishing to me as coming from Poe, who, by a few inventions, could have made his story more plausible.”56 That was where Poe could be improved upon.
All of the early extraordinary voyages might be described as Jules Verne’s attempt to write Edgar Allan Poe more plausibly. At the outset of the series, an alternative description of Verne’s stories was offered by his publisher: Voyages dans les mondes connus et inconnus. Journeys to worlds known and unknown. By enlisting the protective power of science and placing all his trust in it, Verne aimed to go into the unknown in confidence where Poe had gone doubtfully and pulled up short.
This may have been Verne’s aim, but it was one that he was only able to carry out in part. He was able to set off into the unknown bravely enough, even to enter the region of novelty and wonder that Poe evoked but avoided. But Verne wasn’t able to remain very long in the heady atmosphere of the World Beyond the Hill.
Just as in his first story of 1851, “A Balloon Journey,” Verne’s wild Romantic heart and his sober Victorian head still remained in conflict. Again and again in his early stories, Verne would wrap himself in super-science and launch himself into the unknown. All would go well enough for a time, but at last, in each case, the mystery would become too much for him, the threat of transcendence too overwhelming. Verne’s nerve would break and he would retreat to the safety of the Village.
Verne was a Nineteenth Century man. He identified with the powers of science and technology and the changes in life they had brought. Science-beyond-science, so alien and dangerous to Mary Shelley and her fellow Romantics, was a form of transcendence Verne could face without fear. He’d grown up with it. It seemed almost natural to him.
In Verne’s stories, transcendent power was presented as familiar and plausible. It was identified with contemporary scientific knowledge and practice. Its mysterious effects were limited to the powering of super-scientific means of travel and exploration, vehicles and devices similar to actual inventions of the day but in advance of them, like the balloon Victoria in Five Weeks in a Balloon. This domesticated science-beyond-science was one of Jules Verne’s two major contributions to the development of SF.
The other and greater was his penetration into unknown places in the World Beyond the Hill, one of them at least an undeniably transcendent realm. This was difficult for Verne. Domesticating science-beyond-science was a plausible and rational thing to do. But to leap with this science-beyond-science into the World Beyond the Hill was not rational. In the World Beyond the Hill, far beyond the reach of Village society and law, untamed undomesticated mystery is to be found. For Verne, this was almost as frightening and unbearable a prospect as it had been for Poe.
To Poe, the unknown region of novelty and wonder wore the aspect of Death. It was guarded by awesome spectral figures. It was filled with dark and hideous mysteries.
For Verne, the World Beyond the Hill was not quite as deadly as it was for Poe. For Verne, the unknown World Beyond the Hill was identified with sex and irrationality. He pictured it again and again as the Abyss, alluring and dangerous, a yawning chasm gaping wide into which rationality dare not take a header. To his great credit, however, once or twice Verne took the plunge.
Verne’s formula of imaginary science, travel and Edgar Allan Poe, and his yearnings and limitations, can all be seen displayed in his second extraordinary voyage. The Adventures of Captain Hatteras was serialized in 1864, initiating Hetzel’s new juvenile magazine, the Magasin d’éducation et de récréation, of which Verne had been made a co-editor.
In The Adventures of Captain Hatteras the aim of travel is the North Pole. Like the goal in Five Weeks in a Balloon, this was a unique spot on the Earth that contemporary explorers strained to reach, a place with mystical overtones. The Poles were still a great unknown in the Nineteenth Century. As in Poe’s A. Gordon Pym or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, they might be treated as a region of novelty and wonder.
We may remember that at the end of Frankenstein the creature intends to make his way to the North Pole and there immolate himself. Even more interestingly, at the outset of Frankenstein the polar explorer who receives Victor Frankenstein’s story and the last confessions of his creature writes in anticipation to his sister:
“I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight. . . . There snow and frost are banished; and sailing over a calm sea, we may be wafted to a land surpassing in wonders and beauty every region hitherto discovered on the habitable globe.”57
But if a transcendent land with the familiar wonders of the old spirit realm does not reveal itself to this explorer at the Pole, he expects that he may at the least discover there a wonder of a new kind—the secret of the compass. That is, if not old-fashioned transcendence, then science-beyond-science.
For his part, Edgar Allan Poe was fascinated by the theory of one John Cleves Symmes that great holes exist at the Poles which lead to another world at the interior of the Earth. Poe suggested this theory a number of times in his stories without ever quite daring to propound it directly. We may remember the great chasm at the South Pole at the conclusion of A. Gordon Pym. Beyond this, in Poe’s very first story, “MS. Found in a Bottle” (1833), there is a gigantic whirlpool at the South Pole which swallows the narrator’s ship. And in “Hans Pfaall,” as the balloon rises above the North Pole toward the Moon, a sharply defined circular depression is seen in the ice “whose dusky hue, varying in intensity, was, at all times, darker than any other spot upon the visible hemisphere, and occasionally deepened into the most absolute blackness.”58
Verne’s party to the North Pole in Captain Hatteras consists of an American arctic explorer, a ship’s doctor, two sailors, and their leader, the Romantic English multimillionaire, Captain Hatteras, who is bent on being the first man to set foot on the North Pole. This central character is the impediment to Verne’s success. Although Verne cites many scientific facts as his party suffers through great realistic arctic hardships, his main character is not devoted to science. Rather, Captain Hatteras is a madman with an obsession akin to the mania of the stowaway in “A Balloon Journey.”
Just as Poe’s Pym had found those strange open waters that were previously expected by Mary Shelley’s captain in the vicinity of the Pole, so do Verne’s explorers, who launch a small sloop they have brought with them by dogsled. Verne, no less than Poe, was fascinated by the Symmes Hole theory. His man of fact, the ship’s doctor, observes: “In recent times it has even been suggested that there are great chasms at the Poles; it is through these that there emerges the light which forms the Aurora, and you can get down through them into the interior of the earth.”59
However, here, as in subsequent Verne novels, the high Romantic expectations of his characters outstrip the actualities they are permitted to discover. This possibility of a Symmes hole is too wild and dangerous a mystery for Verne to contend with. Instead, like Poe, he shies away from it, and makes a non-transcendent substitution. In the middle of the eerie northern sea, Verne’s party comes upon a small island. On this island is a flaming volcano. It is the volcano that is the location of the North Pole.
Captain Hatteras the Romantic will not be kept from his goal. Like his predecessor in “A Balloon Journey,” he is drawn to the fire. He rushes up to the lip of the volcano and is about to throw himself into the abyss when the American p
ulls him back to safety. Hatteras faints. When he returns to consciousness, he is hopelessly insane.
And so the story concludes, as an old-fashioned Romantic cliché. This is certainly no improvement on Poe.
Hatteras the Romantic destabilizes Verne’s story. With him running things, Verne is unbalanced from the beginning. No more than he will land on the sun will Verne enter a Symmes Hole or leap into a living volcano and then imagine what comes next. And certainly not with a madman like Hatteras at the center of his story.
In his next novel, the third extraordinary voyage, however, Verne took the substance of Captain Hatteras and recast it. Journey to the Centre of the Earth, also first published in 1864, is the most imaginative SF story that Jules Verne ever wrote. In this story, in the course of pursuing fact down a rabbit hole into the earth, almost without realizing it, Verne’s travelers penetrate into what is undeniably the World Beyond the Hill.
One vital recasting that Verne made in Journey to the Centre of the Earth was to make the leader of his expedition a dedicated man of science rather than a Romantic. Professor Lidenbrock the German geologist may have his little obsessions and rigidities, but he is no egocentric madman. Verne can trust his stability as he could not trust the unscientific judgment of Captain Hatteras. The Romantic in Journey to the Centre of the Earth is the narrator, Professor Lidenbrock’s ineffectual nephew Axel, who is much given to fainting.
Once again, there is a volcano, but this time an extinct one located in the wastes of Iceland rather than at the emotionally charged North Pole. The story begins when Professor Lidenbrock and Axel discover and decipher a coded message from a heretical Sixteenth Century Icelandic alchemist which has fallen out of an old manuscript.
The message reads: “Descend into the crater of Sneffells Yokul, over which the shadow of Scartaris falls before the kalends of July, bold traveller, and you will reach the centre of the earth. I have done this. Arne Saknussemm.”60
The dispassionate man of reason and fact, Professor Lidenbrock, has no doubt at all about what he will do. He and Axel are off to Iceland instantly, and down they go into Sneffells Yokul. This volcanic mount has two peaks and a crater containing three chimneys, the middle one of which is a hundred feet in diameter and leads into the unknown. In a passing moment that is a defused replay of the climax of Captain Hatteras, as they start downward Axel the Romantic is overcome by an attack of vertigo on the edge of the abyss and must be pulled back to safety.
Professor Lidenbrock, Axel and an Icelandic guide named Hans descend into the darkness armed with two of the recently invented Ruhmkorff coils, arc lamps which provide them with electric light. Like Verne’s steerable balloon Victoria, this was a transformation of contemporary science into super-science. With less than a wave of the hand from Verne, clumsy experimental lights are altered into reliable and efficient devices capable of continuing to work for as long as the party remains underground.
And it is no mere afternoon outing they are bound upon. The party spends weeks hiking through underground caverns where successive strata of perfectly preserved fossils serve to dramatize the latest ideas about prehistory, and to give us a clue that we have left the Village and entered the World Beyond the Hill.
What the party has found is not a Symmes Hole leading directly to an interior world with its own suns. In fact, they are nowhere near the center of the Earth, the destination promised in the book’s title. More plausibly, Verne says that they are in caverns eighty-eight miles below the surface of the Earth. Yet this is enough. We may not be in a Symmes Hole. We may never reach the center of the Earth. But this maze of underground caves and passages does lead to a transcendent realm, a place of inexhaustible mystery.
Native transcendence first appears when Axel becomes lost in the dark and breaks his arc light. In the attempt to rejoin his companions, he knocks himself unconscious. He awakens on the shores of a mysterious underground ocean. Everywhere there is light:
It was not the light of the sun with its dazzling shafts of brilliance and the splendours of its rays; nor was it the pale vague glow of the moon, which is just a cold reflection. No, the power of this light, its tremulous diffusion, its clear bright whiteness, its coolness, and its superiority as a source of illumination to moonlight, clearly indicated an electrical origin. It was like an aurora borealis, a continuous cosmic phenomenon, filling a cavern big enough to contain an ocean.61
Imaginative Axel, dumbfounded by the immensity of this cavern with its mysterious illumination, wonders briefly if Symmes’s theory of an interior world with its own suns might not be true. But even if it isn’t—which we never find out, since the possibility of a Symmes Hole is thereafter dropped uninvestigated—these wonders in themselves are enough to tell us and Axel where we are. As Axel puts it:
I gazed at these marvels in silence, unable to find words to express my feelings. I felt as if I were on some distant planet, Uranus or Neptune, witnessing phenomena quite foreign to my “terrestrial” nature. New words were required for new sensations, and my imagination failed to supply them. I gazed, I thought, I admired, with a stupefaction not unmixed with fear.62
It is clear to Axel, at least, in his stupefaction and fear, that they are in an alien realm, even if he cannot articulate his perception. After this recognition by Axel, in the previously desolate underground region they have entered prehistoric living things begin to spring into existence, fossils taking on life. The travelers encounter ancient plants—tree-ferns and gigantic mushrooms. Then they build themselves a raft and set sail on the underground ocean, where extinct fishes and saurians swim.
As they travel this immense ocean, as great in extent as the Mediterranean, Axel falls into a “prehistoric daydream”63 which may be the most imaginative passage that Verne ever wrote. Back through time Axel passes, witnessing the earlier stages of life. The dream climaxes:
The whole of this fossil world came to life again in my imagination. I went back to the scriptural periods of creation, long before the birth of man, when the unfinished world was not yet ready for him. Then my dream took me even farther back into the ages before the appearance of living creatures. The mammals disappeared, then the birds, then the reptiles of the Secondary Period, and finally the fishes, crustaceans, molluscs, and articulated creatures. The zoophytes of the transitional period returned to nothingness in their turn. The whole of life was concentrated in me, and my heart was the only one beating in that depopulated world.
Centuries passed by like days. I went back through the long series of terrestrial changes. The plants disappeared; the granite rocks softened; solid matter turned to liquid under the action of intense heat; water covered the surface of the globe, boiling and volatilizing; steam enveloped the earth, which gradually turned into a gaseous mass, white-hot, as big and bright as the sun.
In the centre of this nebula, which was fourteen hundred thousand times as large as the globe it would one day form, I was carried through infinite space. My body was volatilized in its turn and mingled like an imponderable atom with these vast vapours tracing their flaming orbits through infinity.64
Heavy stuff! Axel wakes from this vision of imaginative possibility—this “brief hallucination”65 as he calls it—by nearly throwing himself off the raft into the ocean under the dream’s influence, and being pulled back to safety from the infinite sea by Hans the Icelander.
Thus far the perception of transcendence has been limited to Axel. Where he discerns marvels, the unflappable Professor Lidenbrock sees only confirmations of the theories of science. When Axel cries, “That’s wonderful!”66 the professor overrules him with, “No, it’s perfectly natural.”67 It is only by the constant maintenance of this double vision that Verne is able to penetrate so deeply into the World Beyond the Hill without losing his head.
This is not to last, however. On the farther shore of the underground ocean, the party comes across a vast plain entirely covered with heaps of fossil bones. Among these, they find a perfectly preserved human skull, an
d then the mummified fossil of an ancient man. When they travel a little further, they encounter a Tertiary Period forest and a living herd of mastodons ripping away tree branches and eating them.
Here the unresolved conflict between Axel’s dreams and intimations of mystery and Lidenbrock’s plausible scientific explanations comes to a head. Axel is the first to come to the realization that dream and fact are one. He thinks:
“So that dream in which I had had a vision of the prehistoric world, of the Tertiary and Quaternary Periods, was finally coming true. And there we were, alone in the bowels of the earth, at the mercy of its fierce inhabitants!”68
But Professor Lidenbrock is not yet convinced. In spite of Axel’s protests, he wishes to have a closer look. Then, however, they see the shepherd of these mastodons. It is a shaggy human figure over twelve feet tall—twice the size of the fossil man they have found.
This is more than heavy stuff—it is freaky. In 1864, the existence of earlier forms of man, differing from present humankind, had not yet been conclusively demonstrated. To meet a prehistoric man, a giant, in this underground region is a strangeness that not even a Professor Lidenbrock can reduce to lecture-room rationality.
Axel flees in terror. And he pulls his uncle along behind him, “who for the first time in his life allowed himself to be persuaded.”69
The moment of integrated vision ends. From the safe vantage of retrospection, Axel-the-narrator interjects a denial of what we have just seen:
Now that I can think about it unemotionally, now that I am quite calm, now that months have gone by since that strange, extraordinary encounter, what am I to think, what am I to believe? Was it a man we saw? No, that is impossible! Our senses were deceived, our eyes did not see what we thought they saw. No human being could exist in that subterranean world; no generation of men could live in those deep caverns of the globe, caring nothing about the inhabitants of the surface and having no communication with them. The very idea is insane! . . . It must have been a monkey, however improbable that may seem. The idea that a man, a living man, and with him a whole generation, should be buried down there in the bowels of the earth is unacceptable.70
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