Around the World in Eighty Days occupies a key position in Jules Verne's series of Extraordinary Journeys. By I872 his heroes have penetrated the heart of Africa, conquered the Pole, urgently plumbed the ocean's and Earth's depths, and even headed breezily for the moon. Now they have only one task left: that of summing up the whole travelling business, encompassing the entire globe in one last extravagant fling. Under its gay abandon, then, Around the World is streaked with the melancholy of transitoriness. Henceforth, there can be no virgin territory and no deflowering heroes-just glorified tourists.
Verne's reputation as a novelist is still under attack. What may appear at first sight as uncraftedness in Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas, or From the Earth to the Moon has been taken as almost childish naivety by generations of readers. In Britain and America especially, the 'translations' have generally been atrocious, further fuelling the myth of Jules Verne as an unnovelist and often unperson. But his simple style conceals in reality considerable complexity and sophistication.
Nor is Verne's reputation for optimistic anticipation at all justified. Around the World in Eighty Days contains not a glimmer of science fiction; and very few of the other works contain any radically new technology. Even the early works display self-doubting and nihilistic tendencies; in the intermediate period, there appear opposing views on the characters' motives, the events reported, and even the narration itself; and these will eventually grow into mordant and distant pastiches that will attack the previous novels and undermine the series' whole being.
The transitional novel Around the World appears therefore all the more important. It has always been a favourite in the 11 Introduction English-speaking world, perhaps because of the nationality of the central figure. But its joyous tone and surface positivism are in reality subverted by a tendency for any authority to be mocked and for parts of the story to prove extremely unreliable. The work is also significant in its use of new conceptions of psychology.
Any explicit philosophizing is, however, abhorrent to Verne's pragmatic mind. There exists a distinctive Vernian metaphysic: the absence of metaphysics. Some critics have attempted to establish a coherent ideology or other theoretical construct from their readings of Verne's works. But these studies have generally been one-sided, for they have usually neglected the form for the content--consequently missing Verne's irony and ambivalence. Other commentators have claimed that real events do not impinge on the works, that the author only feels happy thousands of miles from reality, lost in some unmarked icefield or underwater labyrinth. The truth lies in fact somewhere in between: the amount of contemporary reference and implicit ideology in Around the World, especially, is quite staggering. But the real-world referents are merely an entry into the Vernian scheme of things. His abiding interest is man's position in the cosmos-making him one of the last of the universal humanists.
Again, Verne's technique is often amazing. The very idea that narrative devices might exist in the Extraordinary Journeys Into the Known and Unknown Worlds would initially meet with incomprehension and disbelief in many people. But their appeal to the most varied of audiences becomes more explicable when the texts are studied carefully. They are the product of a long and arduous literary apprenticeship, together with a visionary inspiration and an unparalleled amount of perspiration. Verne's works are full of pioneers and inventors who are ignored or misunderstood—perhaps standard fare. But his own technique involves radical innovations which themselves remained undiscovered for more than a century.
He omits, for instance, to use the two main past tenses over an entire novel (The Chancellor, I873). Not only does this alter its structure and perspective—especially since there is Introduction only one present tense in French—but it even affects the free indirect style, for the present tense alone cannot indicate whether or not it is operating. It also transforms the tonality of the composition, like Nemo's eery effects using just the black keys. In the face of the loud silence from his readers that ensued, Verne then writes of a community that is so tone-deaf as not to have realized that its official music-maker has deleted two notes from the harmonic scale. Deafening silence again. He then publishes a second novel omitting the past tenses (Propeller Island, l 89 5), but written in the third person this time-an achievement again apparently unique in any European language. And still nobody commented. In sum, any view of Verne as the epitome of non-technique is based on ignorance of the texts themselves.