by Jules Verne
Dieudonné of Gozo: (d. 1353), a Provençal squire, a knight of Rhodes (1346–53), or member, more precisely Grand Master, of the Order of the Hospitallers of St John of Jerusalem; it was in about 1342 that he is reputed to have delivered Rhodes from a dragon.
21 the Argus: Argus was a giant with a hundred eyes, allowing him to keep watch while asleep, hence a watchful person.
due to be exhibited at the 1867 Universal Exposition: from 1 April to 3 November, on the Champ-de-Mars, with 52,000 exhibits and several million visitors. Aronnax is speaking in July 1867, when the Universal Exposition had already opened. Verne went to it, probably in June, and may have seen such important inspirations as: the Rouquayrol–Denayrouze diving apparatus, which won a gold medal for its innovative accessories, including a portable air tank; clothing made from byssus; and a giant aquarium with 800 fish, which gave visitors the impression of strolling on the seabed. He could also have seen Samuel Hallett’s American submarine Nautilus (1857), with its riveted sheet-metal and magnifying panes; and section and complete models of Siméon Bourgeois and Charles-Marie Brun’s Plongeur, an 80-HP submarine tested in Rochefort in 1863 and relaunched in 1867. It measured a slender 6 × 42 metres, weighed 410 tons, had a flat deck, a recessed lifeboat, a spur, inclined planes, and observation windows, and used compressed air for breathing and to expel the water from its ballast tanks.
Ned Land: he has an English surname common in Nova Scotia, and an English first name; he is Québécois, celebrates Christmas like a Protestant (I 19), and is simultaneously ‘Anglo-Saxon’ (I 7), ‘half-French’ (I 11), and ‘American’ (I 9). He served in the United States Navy; he swears in both languages, but his culture is largely French, as his ancestors seem to be.
Rabelais: François (c.1494–1553), author of Gargantua (1532) and Pantagruel (1534), present in Nemo’s library.
22 Homer: writer (late 8th century bc), included in Nemo’s library, author of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
three weeks after our departure: in fact closer to four weeks.
whose depths are still hidden from human eyes: the present tense implies that even at the end of the story, no one will have seen the depths.
23 incredible . . . such fantasies: Verne is ironic at the expense of his own Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864, 1867).
23 resist the pressure: it is now known that certain primitive organisms live in the deepest parts of the ocean.
25 unwittingly echoing a celebrated riposte of Arago’s: François Arago (1786–1853), astronomer, physicist, and politician. The answer ‘Maybe because it isn’t true’ is attributed to Plutarch in his Astronomie populaire (vol. 3 (1856), book 15, ch. 24, p. 510), on the subject of links between the moon and mental perturbations.
On 30 June: they were off Patagonia on 30 July. This ‘30 June’ and the following ‘3 July’ and ‘6 July’ should be in about the second week of August.
26 the Monroe: the name is perhaps taken from the James Monroe, an Antarctic exploration vessel of the 1820s.
28 in a state of permanent erythrism: erythrism is the ‘abnormal sensitivity of an organ to stimulation’!
29 three more days, like Columbus before him: Christopher (1451–1506), the first to cross the Atlantic in the modern era; his request was made on 10 October 1492, two days before sighting land.
36 that unfortunate 6 November: in fact the 5th; this date marks the end of a four-month pursuit.
37 Two enormous columns of water: why does the submarine eject them? The tanks are normally emptied by ‘injection’ into the surrounding water (II 16); although the propeller sends water to a great height (II 1), this is unlikely to be as ‘two . . . columns’; is the object trying to imitate a whale?
An Unknown Species of Whale: the title in the second manuscript is the ironic ‘A Whale Made of Galvanized Metal’.
Byron or Poe, who are masters: the present tense is unusual (some editions have ‘were’). George Gordon Byron (1788–1824), militant Hellenist and Romantic author of the poems Childe Harold (1812–18), The Corsair (1814), and Don Juan (1819); he swam the Hellespont (now the Dardanelles) in 1810. The American Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49) claimed to have swum from Richmond to Warwick in 1823, although the current was four kilometres an hour.
40 in the bellies of whales: ‘Jonah was in the belly of the whale three days and three nights’ ( Jonah 1: 17).
42 ‘The boat hasn’t moved?’: if Conseil and Aronnax fell into the sea at the same spot as Land, and have been swimming for three hours, why do they finish up in the same place?
nearly a metre out of the water: if its height is eight metres and a tenth of its cylindrical form emerges (by volume, I 13), the Nautilus would come out of the water about twice as much—unless carrying a heavy cargo or ballast. In any case, the waves generated by the prow would cover the platform.
43 Mobilis in Mobili: in Latin ‘Mobilis’ means ‘nimble, mobile, lively; shifting, varying, changeable; inconstant, or fickle’; ‘Mobilis in mobili’ can be translated as ‘Mobile in the mobile element’ or ‘Changing within change’. Given that ‘Mobili’ is here a substantivized adjective, both ‘Mobile’ and ‘Mobili’ may be considered correct. However, it was clearly intended to amend all instances of ‘Mobile’, the original form in the proofs and some of the early editions, although this was only partially successful in the 1871 edition, for the monogram itself continued to read ‘Mobile’.
44 New Caledonians . . . cannibals: allusion to the eating of French people shipwrecked there in 1850.
Maybe they can hear us: the captain does seem to be able to read Aronnax and Ned’s minds, and his entrances do have uncanny timing. In the closing chapters Aronnax remarks: ‘Ned and Conseil avoided speaking to me for fear of giving themselves away.’ Is there a secret listening device on board?
45 Diderot: Denis (1713–84), novelist, philosopher, main contributor and editor of the Encyclopédie (1751–72), and author of Letter on the Deaf and Mute (1751), which contains the words, ‘the language of gestures is metaphorical’ (I, p. 356), a phrase borrowed by Gratiolet (see note on this same page): ‘Notice incidentally how much the language of gestures is metaphorical’ (p. 41).
prosopopoeia, metonymy, and hypallage: classical figures of speech. In prosopopoeia, an imaginary or absent person is represented as speaking or acting; in metonymy, an idea replaces a related one, as in ‘bottle’ for ‘strong drink’; in hypallage, the relation between two words is reversed, as in ‘her beauty’s face’.
A pupil of Gratiolet or Engel would have read his physiognomy like a book: Dr Pierre-Louis Gratiolet (1815–65), anatomist, naturalist, and author of De la physiognomie et des mouvements d’expression (1865), a work referenced twice in the margin of the first manuscript of 20T. Probably the author Johann Jacob Engel (1741–1802).
46 his hands . . . palmistry: pseudo-science, associated with Stanislas d’Arpentigny (1791–1861), author of La Chirognomie (1843) and La Science de la main (c.1854), who presented Verne to Dumas fils in 1849; Dumas became his faithful friend and literary collaborator, and introduced him in turn to his father. Of d’Arpentigny’s seven categories, the most sought after was the ‘psychic hand’, qualified in Verne’s play, Eleven-Day Siege (1854–60) as ‘Which must marvellously serve the conceptions of a superior intelligence’ (Act II, scene 8).
nearly a quarter of the horizon: surely a slip; in the second manuscript, Verne explains that his eyes, following Gratiolet (p. 16), ‘opened almost at the ends of the transversal diameter of his head, the parallelism of the scalar axes being partly destroyed and the man being largely able to see at an oblique angle, and thus take in half of the horizon at the same time’. Nemo does not have a beard, and indeed MS2 describes him as clean-shaven; however, the illustrations in the Hetzel editions show him with a full beard and moustache.
46 how he penetrated your very soul! How he could pierce the liquid depths: as if anticipating Freudian ideas of the subconscious, Verne is equating seeing into the deeps of the mind
and the sea.
47 invoked habeas corpus: the legal language in these two paragraphs reflects Verne’s training as a barrister. ‘Natural law’ ( jus gentium), ancestor of human rights, meant the minimum rights granted to foreigners; habeas corpus (1679) proscribes arbitrary detention.
Faraday: Michael (1791–1867), physicist and chemist; inventor of the law and the cage that bear his name.
Fleming: we will never find out whether Conseil hails from French Flanders or from Belgium.
48 Cicero: Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 bc), politician, orator, and author.
49 He brought us clothing: Aronnax omits that he and Conseil have been virtually naked since their swim.
Mobile in the mobile element: the source is probably Flachat: ‘An engineer had taken for coat-of-arms a rock beaten by the waves with this motto: immobilis in mobile; another more observant engineer chose a light skiff yielding to the agitation of the waves, with this motto: mobilis in mobile’ (vol. 1, p. 117). The first engineer quoted by Flachat is Henri Sébastien Dupuy de Bordes (1702–76), whose coat-of-arms represents a rock, with a naked siren on it, and whose motto reads ‘immobilis in mobili’. The expressions ‘immobilis in mobile/mobili’ and ‘mobilis in mobili’ date back at least to the seventeenth century; the less correct form ‘Mobilis in mobile’, on the other hand, is hardly attested before Flachat.
50 a natural reaction . . . wrestled with death: misleading remark, like the one about the steward’s deafness. Later Nemo occasionally drugs his passengers: in the present case, to be able to respond unobserved, albeit with some delay, to the American ship’s aggression?
55 ‘Calmez-vous . . . veuillez m’écouter!’: ‘Calm down, Master Land, and you, Dr Aronnax, kindly listen to me!’
57 Was it unintentionally that Master Ned Land here struck me with his harpoon?: the captain’s use of ‘me’ (some editions have ‘it’) shows his passionate identification with the vessel—and his antipathy for Ned.
58 in the same way as Oedipus must have looked at the Sphinx: the winged Sphinx proposed a riddle to travellers, killing them if they answered incorrectly; but when Oedipus solved the riddle, the Sphinx killed herself instead.
natural pity: concept visible in Rousseau and Buffon.
59 But no promise binds us to the master of this ship: the captain’s ‘condition’ is that of ‘passive obedience’ in being ‘confine[d] . . . to cabins’, which Aronnax accepts on behalf of the three men. The ‘question’ concerning the ‘choice between life and death’ seems to be simply whether they accept to live in the submarine, rather than go back overboard; to which, as Aronnax says, ‘no reply is possible’ (or indeed given). In sum a promise has been made (‘passive obedience’), but not a promise to stay. Nemo later says: ‘I want you to observe one of the engagements which bind you to me.’ But he is mistakenly using a plural; he has them locked up in the same cell as before, not in their cabins; and he seems to be abusing the ambiguity of Aronnax (at least) being ‘bound’ to the captain: bound by his promise or unable to leave? The explanation of the three discrepancies is to be found in MS2: ‘ “You are therefore my guests, I do not say my prisoners . . . I will impose only three conditions . . . their sole aim is to safeguard the mystery of my existence. | . . . “First, you will never seek to know who I used to be, nor who I am, what I used to do nor what I am doing, why I chose to live in these conditions nor why I still live in them. As for the events which take place on my ship and which you will witness, I leave them to your appreciation and do not ask you to keep them secret. You will be able to repeat what you have seen, heard, or understood, if ever you return to your fellows . . . Secondly,” he continued, “you will never try to leave my ship without my authorization . . . I alone will judge the circumstances in which we will come to separate . . . you will patiently wait for the time to be ripe to take up again that unbearable yoke of the land that men call freedom. Do you accept?” | “We accept,” I replied . . . this second condition explicitly made us prisoners on our parole.’
At this stage, Nemo imposes two extra conditions on his ‘guests’: secrecy and not attempting to return to their ‘fellows’ (as if the submariners were no longer ‘terrestrials’), in return for which he holds out the possibility of releasing them one day. These ideas will exercise Aronnax’s mind over the coming months, with frequent echoes of Nemo’s deleted speech (e.g. ‘We are not even prisoners on our parole’). Some of Aronnax’s musings about Nemo, and even the terrible anguish he feels on leaving, may make more sense after reading the manuscript passage.
60 I will merely be Captain Nemo for you: in much of MS1 I, the commandant is ‘Captain x’, and he is often called ‘the stranger’ or ‘the unknown man’; he is ‘Juan Nemo’ in I 16, and thereafter ‘Captain Nemo’ or baldly ‘Nemo’. ‘Juan Nemo’ would make ‘Nemo’ a surname (cf. Conseil’s ‘Mr Nemo’). ‘Nemo’ on its own has the advantage of concealing any nationality, and may be an allusion to many sources. First, Nemo, ‘no one’, is the name Ulysses takes on meeting Polyphemus the Cyclops, in the Odyssey in Latin. This alias allows the use of the ambiguity in ‘Nemo/No one is killing me’ to mislead him.
Nemo is, secondly, the assumed name of the dead opium addict at the beginning of Dickens’s Bleak House (1853). The form also occurs in ‘Nemo me impune lacessit’ (‘No one assails me with impunity’), the emblem of the Scots Guards and of Scotland, surely seen by Verne on his formative visit; it is quoted in Poe’s ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ (1846).
The illustration of Nemo, described by Verne as ‘the most energetic imaginable’, is based on Colonel Jean-Baptiste Charras (1810–65), a former junior war minister, a friend of Hetzel’s, and author of Histoire de la Campagne de 1815: Waterloo (1857). He was banished from France from 1852 until his death.
60 the Nautilus: its form, nauti- plus a masculine ending, combines scientific and mythological resonances, and is Latin and so non-localized. A nautilus (< Latin < Greek ‘sailor’) is a cephalopod mollusc of the genus Nautilus, especially the N. pompilius found in the Indian and Pacific oceans. It has a spiral, mother-of-pearl-lined shell with air-filled chambers that regulate ascent and descent, plus grasping tentacles surrounding a sharp beak. The symbolism is in the self-sufficiency and security of the shell and the dual mode of locomotion—paddling and sailing.
61 Neptune’s old shepherd: Neptune was the Roman god of the sea, corresponding to Poseidon for the Greeks; his shepherd was Proteus, a minor god and herdsman of the flocks of the sea, with the power to take on many shapes.
62 Your pen will be made from whalebone, your ink from the liquid secreted by a cuttlefish or squid: Aronnax has not indicated any plan to write on board. However, he starts a diary a few days later (I 15); this basic form will give rise to the rewriting of his published book on the submarine depths (II 6), and hence to the ‘real book of the sea’ (II 18), somewhere between documentary and autobiography. a cuttlefish or squid: the vocabulary of ‘byssus . . . aplesias . . . sea-wrack . . . cuttlefish or squid’ is visible in La Mer (1861) by Jules Michelet, as is the mistaken idea of sperm whales attacking baleen whales (II 12). In his preface to the Livre de poche 20T, Chelebourg says the same source also provides: coral as ‘the real point where life dimly rises from a sleep of stone, without yet cutting itself off from that rude starting-point’; whale sightings proving the existence of the Northwest and Northeast Passages; some of the details of Atlantis; the sea of milk, the Black River, the open sea at the South Pole, animalculae, madrepores as makers of worlds, ‘blood flower’ coral, and submarine forests; the Mediterranean as ‘one of the globe’s most invigorating climates’; the harpooner as bold hero confronting monstrous whales on a fragile skiff; the (incorrect) idea of the killer squid; giant crustaceans wearing armour; volcanoes as more active in the early geological periods (II 2, I 4, III 4, II 3, II 5, II 4, II 4, IV 2, III 1, III 1, II 10).
a living infinity, as one of your poets has put it: MS2 reads, ‘as your illustrious Michelet said’.
&nbs
p; 63 It was a library: MS1: ‘It was a library and smoking-room.’ The plan of the Nautilus is as follows: air tank (length 7.5 metres), Aronnax’s room (2.5 m), Nemo’s room (5 m), these two presumably slightly raised so as to fit into the conical end, salon (10 m), library (5 m), dining room (5 m); Conseil and Ned’s room (2 m), kitchen (3 m), bathroom (including no doubt the toilet), stairwell, storerooms, cloakroom, and the room the wounded man is put in (dimensions unknown), cell (6 m), crew room (5 m); perhaps a separate electricity room, and finally the engine room (20 m for the last two together). Although the ‘service’ rooms in the centre-rear of the submarine must be on either side of the central corridor, and therefore not cumulative, the specified interior dimensions alone give a total of 71 m (compared with 70 m as the total length of the vessel, I 11). There is also an upper level, of which we know very little.
64 free use of them: MS1 adds: ‘for the whole time that circumstances force me to keep you in this prison’.
Homer . . . Sand: writers. Xenophon: (430?–355? bc), historian, philosopher, and author of the Anabasis, which contains the quotation ‘The sea! The sea!’ (IV, ch. 7), central to Verne’s ‘Edom’ (1910). Victor Hugo: (1802–85), poet, dramatist, and author of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831), Les Misérables (1862), and The Toilers of the Sea (1866—so not in the ship’s library); lived in exile (1852–70). Hugo is the author, with Poe, Scott, and Dumas, who perhaps most influenced the young Verne. Michelet: Jules (1798–1874), Romantic historian, associate of Hetzel, opponent of Napoleon III, and author of Histoire de la France (1833–67) and La Mer (1861). Mme Sand: George, pseudonym of Amandine-Aurore-Lucie Dupin Dudevant (1804–76), novelist and playwright; on 25 July 1865 she wrote to Verne: ‘I hope that you will soon take us into the depths of the sea and that you will have your characters travel in those divers’ machines which your scientific knowledge and imagination will permit themselves to improve’, a probable inspiration for 20T that Verne recorded in an interview with Brisson in 1897. Despite the phrase, ‘everything that humanity has produced of greatest beauty in history, poetry, the novel’, Hugo and Sand are the only nineteenth-century novelists or poets mentioned in 20T: both figured amongst Hetzel’s best-sellers; and Michelet also had regular contacts with the publisher. Verne’s lists are instead scientists, painters, and musicians.
