by Jules Verne
Nemo thus remains an enigmatic figure — we do not even know who he eats with. His chosen crew reflect him in being anonymous, mute, repressed. Only at the end do we discover that these blank, interchangeable ciphers actively support Nemo’s campaign. But it is still not clear why many different nationalities are apparently represented on board.
In sum, we know very little about Nemo. In an interview in 1903 Verne described him as ‘a misanthropist’, and, in a letter in 1894, as ‘confining himself in his [Nautilus]’; but this does not get us much further. What determines his route? Why has he not visited either Pole before? Does he try to influence his depiction in Aronnax’s ongoing book?
Like the number of Lady Macbeth’s children, questions as to Nemo’s nature and the meaning of the novel are virtually unanswerable, because of the narrator’s very presence on board. As with a married couple, Aronnax and Nemo’s behaviour cannot be separated out: each action is modified by those of the other half, each variable in the interactive equation is fed back in, each conclusion seems undermined by its complementary opposite. Narrator and narratee are in symbiosis. Nemo-as-seen-by-Aronnax cannot be broken down.
Many of the enigmas of course serve to displace the author’s unanswered questions on to the characters. What seems probable is that Verne himself feels torn between the captain and his guest. He identifies with Aronnax in his logical and systematic aspects, but with Nemo in his imagination, energy, and freedom. Equally probable is that the clash of personalities reflects the slightly incestuous relationship between Verne and Hetzel. The intense but secretive writing activities on board the submarine ultimately result in an overabundance of manuscripts, proofs, and letters flying forth between the two. Hetzel’s blue pencil may be connected with Aronnax’s literalness and ‘realism’, but his exile in Belgium may correspond to Nemo’s political idealism.
The Question of Nationalities
Like Phileas Fogg, who flies over France without a single mention, the submarine crosses the Mediterranean without giving it a single glimpse. Then in another flash we are transported past Verne’s beloved northern France. The only indication, itself ambiguous, is: ‘we were passing near the mouth of the English Channel’ (II 22). But even this short remark is unusual, because Verne never depicts France or its surroundings in his novels published with Hetzel.5
Admittedly, Aronnax climbs aboard the Abraham Lincoln with the thought of heading to his native country; Nemo goes so far as to mention ‘the ten billion francs of France’s debts’ (I 13); the Marquesas and the Gambier group are described as French, although Aronnax hardly sees them. Certainly metropolitan France is mentioned several times in the novel, but as a distant past or an impossible dream.
This absence is linked to another, that of the nationality of Nemo and his crew, the secret key to his campaign and his exile from inhabited lands. In the novel many clues are strewn, which however point in every direction.6
The exception is the climax. In the published version of II 20, the Nautilus passes Land’s End to port. It eventually locates the Vengeur and Nemo declaims the glory of the scuttled ship’s cause. In the waters west of Nantes, a ‘great warship with a ram: an armour-plated double-decker’ (II 21) attacks the Nautilus for no apparent reason, which lures it eastwards. Nemo intones ‘I am the law, I am the justice! . . . I am the oppressed, and they are the oppressor!’ — then sends his submarine clean through the vessel. As a horrified Aronnax watches the sailors’ death-throes, the chapter closes.
The doctor belatedly raises the question of the warship’s nationality. The position of the sinking seems significant; the captain himself attributes the ship to ‘an accursed nation’ (II 21), appearing amazed that the doctor does not realize which one. Indeed, the only warships in the world to comply with this description are of French construction and nationality, with an instantly recognizable shape.
If the attackers are French, what nationality would Nemo be? At the end of the 1860s, the Franco-British wars are a distant memory. Perhaps the obvious opponents of Napoleon III’s Empire are Frenchmen, among them famous personalities, like Hugo, Hetzel, or Verne himself. In sum, the closing chapters indirectly imply the same nationality for the captain.
Nemo claims to know French, English, German, and Latin, in that order; his declamatory soliloquies are in the language of Racine. His books, fiction or otherwise, as well as his musical taste and his quotations and allusions, are predominantly French. He studied in France, among other places. He emphasizes the existence of the Paris meridian; the crew member lifted aloft by the giant squid cries spontaneously in French. The captain seems to be especially interested in the French navy at the Battle of Vigo Bay; his sympathy for the Vengeur is evident; the submarine’s route seems to be designed to culminate in the Channel.
In sum, Verne’s intention in the published version of the book could be twofold. On the one hand, according to its description, the frigate is French, as is perhaps Nemo himself.
But, on the other hand, by scattering contradictory clues throughout the novel, Verne tries to avoid any clear identification of nationality and thus create a stateless, or universal, captain, like his name and his ship. His life is devoted to the last areas without a master, perhaps without God, in any case without a flag — except his own.
Conclusion
Exile, intertextuality, atemporality. The ‘unknown man’ yearns for both the future and the past, but stands outside his own period. The captain’s technology is well in advance of its time, enabling him to discover a new continent or two. His social vision seems futuristic, his causes espouse the tide of history. He is anti-slavery, internationalist, individualist, rationalist, against entrenched privilege and intellectual sloth. But if he is so much of a modern, why does a whiff of nostalgia still hang about him, an air of things we shall not see again? Part of the answer may lie in the all-embracing nature of his talents, but also in his unwillingness to use social means to effect change, his reluctance to get involved. Even at the time, his mysterious cause could be seen to be a losing battle, his way of life a dead end.
But part of the answer may also lie in our own ahistorical perspective, our post-everything-ness. We no longer believe that an individual can change the world, or even defy humanity for long. The Nautilus would have been reverse-engineered or turned into a tourist attraction. Nemo is a prisoner of his era. He has a Quixotic and classical soul, but we feel we have got past all that. We believe we have absorbed the Byronic and ’68 rebellions: we are all post-revolutionaries now, at least in stylistic externals.
Nemo’s principled refusal to set foot on the inhabited continents exemplifies the Extraordinary Journeys. The series can only prosper by visiting virgin territories; but the quicker they are deflowered, the sooner the subject will be exhausted. Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas occupies the fatal point of no return: the dark continent and the North Pole have already been done, snapshots taken of the dark side of the moon. The ocean deeps and the South Pole form the ultima Thule of a certain mode of being and writing. The Nautilus can only be the end of the line.
Nemo is the last outlaw. He is in a geographico-historical cul-de-sac, and the absolutism of his fight cannot be permanent. He is suspended between George Stephenson and R. L. Stevenson, born too late or too early, post-Romantic but pre-modern. The captain’s oceanic freedom is a mortgage on things to come. Technologically-inspired rebellion forms a rapidly shrinking option for meridionals in the 1870s, but Nemo’s passion for music and the sea are surely destined to be eternal.
1 On a cumulative basis since 1850; Unesco’s Index Translationum lists the number of new translations appearing worldwide each year.
2 The correspondence cited — in abbreviated form — follows Olivier Dumas, Piero Gondolo della Riva, and Volker Dehs, eds, Correspondance inédite de Jules Verne et de Pierre-Jules Hetzel, 1863–1886, vol. 1 (Geneva: Slatkine, 1999); the dates they attribute are sometimes subject to caution.
3 Another irritatio
n was that, after Verne had finished the book, Hetzel casually suggested adding a new volume to increase its length by half, rather like a butcher measuring out sausage. To achieve this, he wrote on 25 April 1869, episodes could easily be added, such as the escape, capture, and reconciliation of one of the guests, an episode involving John Brown (the abolitionist murdered in 1859), or a scene where Nemo could save a few Chinese boys from Chinese pirates and keep one on the Nautilus, thus ‘cheering things up on board’! Fortunately, the ideas were not implemented.
4 Arthur B. Evans, Jules Verne Rediscovered: Didacticism and the Scientific Novel (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 75.
5 Among the rare exceptions is chapter 2 of The Begum’s Fortune (1879), whose original manuscript was not by Verne.
6 In The Mysterious Island (1874), Verne, under great pressure from Hetzel, claims that the captain has been Indian all along, but the idea simply does not make sense at this stage.
Note on the Text and Translation
For this edition the translation has been systematically revised. The Introduction, Note on the Text and Translation, and many of the Explanatory Notes in the original 1998 edition have largely been retained; but the Chronology, Select Bibliography, and Appendices have been updated or replaced.
The Three Main Editions
Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas first appeared in fortnightly instalments in the Magasin d’éducation et de récréation (MÉR) from 20 March 1869 to 20 June 1870, with the subtitle ‘Submarine Tour of the World’ (‘Tour du monde sous-marin’). Its structure seems to reflect its initial publication; however, Verne complained that the novel was ‘fragmented’ by the serialization, which often changed length. What is more, Hetzel used the pretext of the juvenile audience of the MÉR to impose changes to the text.1
The MÉR publication of 1869 had a dedication on the first page, which was never reprinted. Although signed ‘Jules Verne’, it is rather patronizing, and Hetzel may have contributed to it.
The first volume of the first book edition, 18mo without illustrations, was placed on sale on 28 October 1869, but the second one only on 13 June 1870. The large octavo edition, with 111 illustrations by Riou and de Neuville, appeared on 16 November 1871.
Astonishingly, there has never been an attempt to explicitly identify and publish the canonical Hetzel edition, in the sense of the text most revised by the author (and astonishingly, this is probably not in fact the celebrated octavo edition, the basis for all modern publications).2 Again, there has been no systematic initiative to identify mistakes in the various editions, often in the spelling, but occasionally touching on the syntax.
The Present Translation
The text here normally adheres to the Presses Pocket one (1991), which generally follows the 1871 edition.3 This translation is an entirely original one, benefiting from the most recent scholarship on Verne and closely following the French text.
There are perhaps 2,000 rare words and proper names in the French edition, but more than 100 are incorrect. The policy here is to amend clear spelling mistakes in real-world names and dictionary words, plus simple arithmetic mistakes — in other words, changes that can easily be made within a single word or number — often noting such changes. However, substantive information will not be amended, even when clearly erroneous, although generally identified in the notes.
Verne often Gallicizes proper names and words. Thus he (or his editor) writes ‘the Castillan’ for ‘the Castilian’, ‘the Albermale’ for ‘the Albermarle’, ‘oaze’ for ‘ooze’, or ‘ice-blinck’ for ‘ice-blink’. Even some of the French terms he uses have not been located, such as ‘déponté’ (‘with its cover off’); others seem to be erroneous, such as ‘crécelles’ (‘screechings’) for ‘crécerelles’ (‘kestrels’).
Geographical Information
Verne is not always consistent, using for example ‘Bourbon’ and ‘Réunion’ for the same island. In many cases obsolete names have been replaced here.4
A number of Verne’s names are erroneous, like ‘Liarrov’ for ‘Lyakhov’, ‘Hadramant’ for ‘Hadramaut’, ‘Paramatta’ for ‘Parramatta’, ‘Kittan’ for ‘Kiltan’, or ‘Arfalxs’ for ‘Arfak’. This is confirmed by variant spellings (both ‘Tikipia’ and ‘Tikopia’) and what must be total misreadings, such as ‘Captain Bell on the Minerve’ for ‘Captain Bellingshausen on the Mirny’.
Despite emphasizing the political importance of the difference between the Paris and Greenwich meridians (I 14), Verne often uses one or the other indiscriminately. In any case many of the coordinates quoted are approximate or simply wrong, such as those for Fiji and Vanuatu (I 19). Other information is occasionally as unreliable. Thus a direction cannot be ‘east-north-easterly’ and then still ‘north-north-east’ (I 14–15); the ‘476-fathom-high Mount Kapogo’ (I 19) reaches at most 810 metres; ‘Mannar Island, whose rounded shape loomed to the south’ (II 3) should probably read ‘the north’; ‘the eastern point of the Gulf of Carpentaria’ (I 23) should read ‘western’; and the crater above Nemo’s home port is described as ‘500 or 600 metres high’ but then ‘not . . . more than 800 feet’ (II 10).
Verne says ‘The British foot is only 30.40 cm long’ (I 1), but this seems to be a slip for 30.48. In any case, he uses both French and British feet and miles. (Perhaps as a result, the depth required to increase underwater pressure by 1 atmosphere is quoted as both ‘30 feet’ and ‘32’.) He uses leagues ‘of four kilometres’ (II 7) — French land ones (whereas an English league is three miles, or 4.8 kilometres). No adjustment has been made here to measures, since otherwise the title would become something like Sixteen Thousand Six Hundred and Sixty-Seven Leagues under the Seas!
Marine Terminology
Verne often uses the vague term of ‘poulpe’, corresponding to the obsolete English ‘poulp’ or ‘polyp’ and including both squid and octopus. However, the contextual information indicates that he is probably thinking of squid. One exception is when he says that ‘Bouyer’s squid’ has eight, rather than ten, tentacles: a perhaps understandable slip, for the animal was not even recognized by scientists at the time.
The long lists of names of marine life in Twenty Thousand Leagues (20T ) are a translator’s nightmare. The lists are occasionally mixed up without regard for habitat; many of the names quoted are Latin ones, but Gallicized to some degree. They also contain some spelling mistakes.5 Spelling occasionally even varies within the same passage, with both ‘hyales’ and ‘hyalles’ (‘hyales’), ‘pirapèdes’ and ‘pyrapèdes’ (‘pirapedas’), and ‘coryphèmes’ and ‘coriphènes’ (‘coryphènes’ or ‘dolphinfish’). In other cases, Verne writes just half the binomial name, for instance ‘parus’ (‘Pomacanthus paru’ or ‘French angelfish’). Sometimes hyphenated names are not really compound: Verne often conjuncts a French version with a learned or foreign variant of the same name, or attaches adjectives like ‘American-’ simply to mean ‘found in America’.
Implausibilities
The text of 20T contains a number of implausibilities, where the translator and editor has to be especially careful not to further obscure the situation. A select list of textual mysteries might include the following. Why are the Scotia’s passengers having ‘lunch’ at 4.17 p.m.? How do you ‘push’ someone along when he is floating ‘motionless on his back, with arms folded and legs extended’? How do people stay dry on a platform only three feet above the sea? How is Aronnax able to describe his own facial expressions? How does the Nautilus manage to remain motionless in the depths using just its inclined planes and the thrust of its propeller? Why does lightning strike fish, and not the much larger metal submarine? What happens to the fragile displays in the salon when the submarine lists dramatically or collides with objects? How are pitching and rolling avoided? Why do Nemo’s apartments take up so much space, when his twenty crew members have a living space of 5 by 2 metres? How can the disappearance of footprints in the sand be caused by water pressure? Can a boat that two men are able to remove c
arry ten people or ship ‘one or two tons’ of water? How does ‘an unbearable sulphurous smell’ reach 60 feet down? If Nemo loves the sea so much, why does he avoid contact with sea water?
Gagneux also poses a number of pertinent questions. How does the sun shine brightly at 100 metres depth, and how does it produce a rainbow underwater? How does Aronnax hear rain 300 metres down? How does Nemo extract sodium from salt water, which requires a temperature of 3,000° C? How does a compass work inside a metal hull? How does an 8-metre wide cylinder resist a pressure of 1,600 atmospheres? How do you reverse a submarine at 20 knots through a narrow ice-tunnel? Where does the Nautilus find the power required to do 50 knots? Does the 16,000-metre rise in four minutes not equal more than 120 knots? What about the bends? What happens to the inclined planes when the submarine goes clean through the ship? And finally, where are the toilets?
1 In the MÉR of 5 September 1867 it was falsely announced that ‘M. Jules Verne is putting the more or less final touches to a book which will be the most extraordinary of all, a Journey under the Waters. Six months spent beside the sea, in total retreat, have been necessary for the conscientious and dramatic writer to collect together the materials for this curious book.’
2 The occurrences of typographic symbols [ in the second manuscript, to indicate the ends of successive typesetters’ work, invariably correspond to the ends of lines in the octavo edition, which shows that the first proofs were also in the octavo format. The MÉR and 18mo editions, although published first, must therefore have been produced from the descendants of these proofs — and as a result are often more intensively corrected.
