by Jules Verne
The Correspondence
It is worth at this stage re-examining the nationality question in a chronological perspective, but now following the correspondence from the period when Hetzel started reading the contentious second volume.
As we have seen, Nemo’s national origin is central, since it seems to be linked to his violent interactions with the ships he meets. The published book, however, leaves the reader rather confused because, while distributing clues about the involvement of different nations, it does not explain the reason for the final attack by the warship and for Nemo’s riposte.
Before publication, the two nationalities in question underwent repeated revisions, invariably instigated by the publisher. Around 1866 Verne seems to have wanted Nemo, without discernible nationality, to be opposed to all nations, to all men — an idea he calls the ‘best’.14 The second position has caused barrels of ink to flow. In the letters to Hetzel, the novelist repeatedly asserts his clear preference for the captain to have been a Polish patriot who opposes the Russians, and whose wife is murdered, daughters raped, and country wiped off the map. However, the publisher effectively vetoed the idea — for fear of offending the Russian government and losing the corresponding market.
In a third, relatively brief stage, the captain is called ‘Juan Nemo’ and his home base is explicitly in the Canary Islands. Some of his characteristics, such as his proud demeanour, do seem to conform to Spanish stereotypes.
In the final stage, which lasts over the extensive period of the revision of the second manuscript and the preparation of proofs, Hetzel subjects Verne’s novel to a barrage of suggestions and instructions. For the seven months from March 1869, in particular, when the novel had already started coming out, Hetzel rejected the closing chapters. He claimed that the captain’s attacks were intolerably violent and morally unacceptable — and he refused passages that implied a particular nationality for the warship that attacks Nemo.
Verne tries first to circumvent the problem, using gentle persuasion:
If Nemo had been a Pole whose wife died under the scourge and children perished in Siberia, and . . . had found himself faced with a Russian ship . . . everybody would admit his revenge . . . [8 May 1869]
Less good, there was the battle of the outlaw against those who had made him an outlaw, a Pole against Russia. That was forthright. We rejected it for purely commercial reasons.
But if it’s now just a battle by Nemo against a chimerical enemy as mysterious as him, it’s not a duel between two individuals any more.15 It singularly diminishes the whole thing. (15 May 1869)
In the face of Hetzel’s insistence, Verne details why the proposed changes are unacceptable. His words convey the depth of Hetzel’s misunderstanding of the captain and the whole book, the scope of the changes, the extent of his indignation, and the strength of his logic:
I can see full well that you’re picturing a very different fellow from mine . . . all I need to do is to justify the captain’s terrible action in terms of the provocation he undergoes. Nemo doesn’t run after ships to sink them, he responds to attacks. Nowhere, whatever your letter says, have I made him a man who kills for killing’s sake. He has a generous nature and his feelings are sometimes brought into play in the environment he moves in. His hatred of humanity is sufficiently explained by what he has suffered, both he and his family.
I refuse to write the letter for you concerning Captain Nemo; if I cannot explain his hatred, either I will stay silent about the reason for the hero’s hatred and life, his nationality, etc. or, if necessary, I will change the ending. [11? June 1869]
Reading the correspondence, of which the above is only a small selection, one must side with the author, ‘tortured’, as he says, by Hetzel’s blind obstinacy. The publisher falls into the elementary trap of judging the captain’s violent actions without looking at the reasons behind them. The quick-fix changes, made for basely ‘commercial reasons’, do seem wrongheaded.
In the end, however, Verne is forced to take on board most of the alien ideas. He does manage to subvert some of them, so subtly as to have taken in most readers, and indeed critics. But the final effect on Nemo ‘s agenda and the meaning of the novel is to make both less convincing. The captain is not allowed to be explicitly French, or Polish, or any nationality at all. His rebellion cannot strike openly at any governmental authority, only all the great powers, with a mishmash of evasive hints at Confederate, Russian, British, French, Italian, and even Turkish ships. It is a sad result for Verne’s greatest hero.
Verne may have had the last word, though. As we saw above, an inescapable identification of the warship that Nemo sinks, even in the published version, remains that it is French, by construction and by flag.
Conclusion
Twenty Thousand Leagues, which forms such an important part of the modern imagination, cannot be fully understood without assessing the original ideas from which it grew (or retreated?). It is to be hoped that the extensive manuscript material which has recently come to light, a small part of which has been presented here, can be made available to English-speaking readers.
It is clear that a significant part of the modifications introduced by Hetzel are to be regretted. The first conception is sometimes superior, in personal, political, even literary and philosophical vision. Admittedly, the style and the surface features of the manuscripts are very far from being uniformly better than in the following versions.
At best, the changes, on occasion making the text repetitive, ambiguous, or deceptive, are ingeniously reintegrated into the complex conceptual core of the novel. At worst, they are introduced without reference to the surrounding text, the change of tone and perspective betraying their alien origin.
Knowing the harrowing cuts made in the other novels, with the additional evidence of the correspondence, and aware as we now are of the extensive unpublished text, we can no longer accept the known version of 20T as either representing Verne’s real wishes or the work that is necessarily the most coherent or the most accurate.
But it is not clear what Verne would have done without Hetzel’s changes. Trying to produce an edition of the novel to restore the author’s intentions would be difficult, if only because of the knock-on effects of putting the deleted passages back in and because of the palimpsest effect, wherein each new draft melds into the previous one, like layers of paint.
However, even if we did not wish to remove the ‘Hetzelized’ version from the bookshops, nothing would prevent the parallel publication of Journey under the Waters as a work in its own right. Less famous novels are available in competing versions. Why not for the only French author of truly global renown?
1 A letter written by Verne’s son, Michel, to Prince Roland Bonaparte in 1906 says that the manuscripts being sent to him ‘seem’ to include a third version of Part Two, although no trace of this has been found. C.-N. Martin states that Verne gave another manuscript to the Comte de Paris in 1878, but this has never been confirmed. In addition, to facilitate Hetzel’s revision work, a Mme Lachaise recopied the second volume of Verne’s fair copy [8 June 1869].
2 As noted above, Destombes’s study of 1975 (see Select Bibliography), which is excellent, examines only short sections of the manuscripts and the transcriptions contain a few mistakes.
3 Additional information about the manuscripts of 20T can be found in my Jules Verne inédit.
4 References to the manuscripts appear in this form (volume 1, chapter 22, page 56, following Verne’s chapter and page numbering); in the Explanatory Notes, such references are generally omitted.
5 I would like to thank the French National Library for its kind permission to publish extracts from documents in its possession.
6 The innocuous title ‘The Coral World’ in the summary seems to correspond to ‘The Coral Cemetery’, which describes the underwater burial.
7 The others are: between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, ‘only 80 centim. of difference. Dict. 2.407’; for information about the
Mediterranean, ‘dict. 2 407’; about the Atlantic, ‘dict. 2 406’; about the Sargasso Sea, ‘which gave Columbus idea for the new world. dict. 2 406’; and citing the water temperature in degrees, ‘4.17. Dict. 2 406’.
8 In addition, Renard shares with Verne such ideas as underwater fishing, byssus clothing, Conseil’s submarine, and Fulton’s Nautilus.
9 Zurcher and Margollé also contains such familiar elements as currents, the Maelstrom, the sounding of great depths, aquariums, atolls, Atlantis, and various species of fish. Verne wrote to his editor: ‘the identical chapters of the books of MM. Renard and Margollé are the history of the submarine cable [and] the history of submarine boats’ (30 April [1868]).
10 MS1 marks this scene as ‘a few miles from low landmasses which had to be those of Holland, scarcely shaded through the warm vapours of the horizon’ (II 22).
11 These sentences, together with those in the next two extracts, are struck through.
12 This description constitutes another of those copied from Gratiolet, as shown by the entry in the margin, ‘hatred. Grat. 369’.
13 His question may seem ingenuous, but such ships could conceivably have been sold by France to other navies during his eight-month stay on the Nautilus.
14 15 May 1869. It is true that, in an earlier letter [29 April 1869], Verne says that the Polish Nemo was the ‘first idea’.
15 It is not clear who the second ‘individual’ could be, but presumably from a country with an authoritarian leader; Napoleon III is one possibility.
Appendix 2
Sources
Amongst the notable literary sources for Twenty Thousand Leagues are the Bible, Victor Hugo, Walter Scott, Moby-Dick,1 and three works by Poe.
As we saw in Appendix 1, Verne himself cites four sources, chapter and verse, in the margin of the first manuscript, although his borrowing is more extensive than these acknowledged instances: Gratiolet, Renard, Vorepierre and Marcoux, and Zurcher and Margollé (see Select Bibliography).
The idea of situating a work underwater was by no means original. Among the titles on submarines published before 1870 were: Captain Mérobert (pseudonym of Clément-Jules Briois), Voyage au fond de la mer (1845); Léon Sonrel, Le Fond de la mer (1868); Henri de La Blanchère, Voyage au fond de la mer (1868); and Aristide Roger, Les Aventures extraordinaires du savant Trinitus.2
Another book by Zurcher and Margollé, Histoire de la navigation (Hetzel, 1867) was also a source for Verne, who cites it in a letter [27 October 1867].3 The first attested occurrence of the phrase ‘twenty thousand leagues’ occurs in this book (p. 328), concerning Cook’s circumnavigation of 1772–5; and so may have contributed to Hetzel and Verne’s final choice of title.
The other non-fiction Verne consulted must have included: Louis Figuier, Articulés, poissons, reptiles et zoophytes, mollusques (n. d.) and Henri de La Blanchère, La Pêche et les poissons (1868).
Amongst the sources listed in the Select Bibliography, Frédol, The World of the Sea, shares a great deal of botanical and zoological vocabulary with Verne. The novelist acknowledges a debt to Jules Michelet’s The Sea, once in the published book (I 7), but twice more in the manuscripts. He borrows extensively from The Physical Geography of the Sea, by the oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury,4 especially as regards the ocean currents. He also obtained much information from The Mysteries of the Ocean by Arthur Mangin.5 However, although citing Maury and Mangin in the novel, Verne does not acknowledge Transoceanic Steam Navigation, by engineer Eugène Flachat (1802–73), a work consulted for many of the details on ships and marine companies at the beginning of the novel. Zoophytes and molluscs by Louis Figuier seems to provide information about the seabed, some of the names of fish, and at least twenty technical terms. Bernard-Germain Lacépède, Natural History of Fish (1793–1803), provides a large proportion of the fish names.6
Figuier, Flachat, Lacépède, Mangin, Michelet, and Zurcher and Margollé could be found in Verne’s library in pre-1870 editions. In Nemo’s library, the only documentary sources admitted to are the popularizers Agassiz, Maury, and Michelet (the latter ranked amongst the non-scientists).
Submarine Navigation
Verne’s ideas on submarines were not original. Many manned vessels had dived before 1868. (Details appeared in the 1998 World’s Classics edition, pp. 382–4). Even Nautile and Nautilus were used as names for diving-bells and submarines, as Verne himself pointed out in a letter to his editor (13 November 1894). The novelist had already set the opening chapter of Captain Hatteras on a (conventional) ship moored in Liverpool docks and called the Nautilus.
As early as 1861 Verne himself had created a submersible that prefigures the Nautilus in some ways. The climax of his short story ‘San Carlos’ involves customs boats pursuing a vessel which is completely watertight thanks to a ‘spacious’ internal metal hull; it carries a whole world of clothing, ‘hams, butter, fine wines, oil, tobacco, madder, soap, and metals’. The boat is kept submerged at a constant depth by means of ‘forward and rear sections filled with air’. When finally surrounded by his pursuers, the eponymous hero and his companions simply ‘open a valve in the bottom, and so escape by sinking to a depth of ten fathoms’. Additional similarities to 20T are the Spanish hero, his outlaw condition, and his predilection for duty-free cigars and volcanoes.
An article under Jules Verne’s name, entitled ‘Future of the Submarine’, appeared in Popular Mechanics in June 1904. It says ‘I am not in any way the inventor of submarine navigation, and reference will show that many years . . . before . . . the Italians were at work upon submarine war vessels, and other nations were busied with them too’.
1 20T contains a considerable density of biblical reference, including: Leviathan, Edom, the unicorn, the ‘archangel of hatred’, the ‘days’ of Genesis being ‘eras’, Jonah (Jonah 1: 17), the ‘draught of the fishes’ (Luke 5: 9), the ark (Genesis 6–7), the crossing of the Red Sea (Exodus 14: 21–31), the ‘fiery furnace’ (Daniel 3: 6), ‘they have ears and do not hear’ (Mark 8: 18), the ‘fire which did not burn’ (‘the bush burned with fire, and the bush [was] not consumed’, Exodus 3: 2), and the final ‘hast thou walked in the search of the depth?’ Moby-Dick; or, the Whale (1850) by Herman Melville presents Captain Ahab’s obsession for vengeance on the whale that took off his leg, culminating in his death and the sinking of his ship. A substantial extract from the novel was published in translation in Émile Forgues, Gens de Bohème (Hetzel, 1862), pp. 211–65; the novel was (partially) translated into French only in 1941, and Verne could not read English. In his 1962 article, Ray Bradbury finds important parallels between Moby-Dick and 20T; certainly, they share a considerable number of ideas, although mostly not in Forgues, meaning no transmission route has been demonstrated. We find in Melville: Ecclesiastes, Leviathan, Seneca, Cleopatra, Dampier, Darwin, Maury, Agassiz, Albermarle, the Maelstrom, the Battle of Actium, the sea of milk, cannibalism, the Argo, the narwhal as a ‘sea-unicorn’, various shells, the rewarding of the first sailor to sight the monster, the deliberate drawing down on to the ship of an electrical storm, ‘the great kraken of Bishop Pontoppodan [sic]’; a giant squid with ‘innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to catch at any hapless object within reach’; and ‘Aristotle; Pliny . . . Linnaeus . . . Lacépède . . . Cuvier [and] John Hunter’ —all ideas which appear in Verne’s volume, together with many of Melville’s localities. Ahab’s vessel goes down in the trench off eastern Japan — where Verne’s emerges. Both endings feature revenge and a whirlpool which swallows up the vessel, a short epilogue citing the Book of Job, and a closing reference to the sea, respectively ‘five’ and ‘six thousand years ago’.
2 Published in Le Petit Journal (May 1867 to January 1868); Roger was the pseudonym of Jules Rengade. There are a number of similarities with 20T: a journal is written on board and the Éclair, an electric submarine with portholes, goes around the world. The story also contains: a tunnel, a submarine fo
rest and volcano, divers, the Antarctic and Sargasso seas, a narwhal, sperm whales, a combat with sea monsters, asphyxiation, and the final sinking of the submarine on rocks. In a letter published on 1 November 1867, while admitting the ‘analogy of subject between the two books’, Verne claimed to have ‘momentarily abandoned’ the drafting of his own book: by this misleading claim, at a stage when composition had probably not begun, he must have been seeking to prevent suspicion of unfair borrowing.
3 Mention should also be made of Élie Margollé, Les Phénomènes de la mer (Dubuisson, 1862), as a possible minor source.
4 A selection of information shared with Maury includes: the references to Wilkes, Ehrenberg, Humboldt, Faraday, King, Fitzroy, Franklin, Parker, Denham, Dumont d’Urville, and Ross; ‘ooze’, the expansion undergone by freezing water, the proof of the Northwest Passage by finding whales impaled with stamped harpoons, the inability of right whales to pass the warm waters of the equator, British miles, burials at sea, messages-in-bottles, sounding techniques, and the transatlantic cable over the ‘telegraphic plateau’; life on the seabed, the calm and the pressure in the deeps, jellyfish as nettles, the sea of milk, luminescence, salinity, animalculae, and the nautilus shell; the idea of driftwood from the Mississippi (not tree-trunks from the Missouri, as Verne implausibly claims), the difference in level between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, the Sargasso Sea, the Gulf Stream, the Black Stream, the large Antarctic landmass needed to produce the icebergs, and many of the localities.
5 Mangin published regularly in Le Magasin pittoresque and Le Musée des familles. Nearly all the information about the dugong (II 5) is taken from him, including the vocabulary of ‘sirenian’, ‘siren’, and ‘half women, half fish’, as well as the statistics and the comparison of its flesh with beef and veal. Many other paragraphs in 20T are derived from Mangin, including perhaps those about sea monsters. Even Aronnax’s title, The Mysteries of the Ocean Deeps, may show its influence.
