So the journey to the underworld, while it breathes new life into an ancient literary motif, also serves as a framework for reflection on the much more recent problems of a scientific approach to the natural world and its history. In addition, it contrasts this scientific perspective of relentless inquisitorial rigor, which is exemplified by Professor Lidenbrock, with the more emotional, irrational, and sometimes visionary dimensions that his nephew Axel represents in the narrative. While Axel is a devoted scientist in his own right, he initially cares nothing about his uncle’s expedition; his thoughts are more taken up with his love for Graüben than with the possible scientific benefits such a mission might bring. Younger, less experienced, and physically more frail than his uncle, Axel often reacts with dismay or despair to difficult situations that Lidenbrock and the Icelander Hans face with stolidity and optimism.
Yet it should be noted that it is Axel, not his uncle, who is able to solve the two intellectual puzzles that bookend the novel. At the beginning, Axel finds the key that breaks the code in Arne Saknussemm’s cryptogram, and at the end, Axel discovers why the compass stopped functioning properly during the underground voyage. Clearly, then, there are scientific insights that are foreclosed to Professor Lidenbrock, not because of any intellectual weakness but because of his social and emotional ineptitude—his impatience, his eruptive temper, his disregard for erotic relations. Arriving at scientific truths, the novel seems to signal, requires not only technical expertise, which Lidenbrock certainly possesses, but also the kind of emotional warmth and visionary talent at which his nephew excels. Axel discovers the solution to Saknussemm’s textual puzzle during a hallucinatory state of mind; and it is again during a hallucination that he has the most sweeping and most lyrical vision of time travel that the novel offers:
I take up the telescope and scan the ocean.... I gaze upward in the air. Why should not some of the birds restored by the immortal Cuvier again flap their wings in these heavy atmospheric layers? The fish would provide them with sufficient food. I survey the whole space, but the air is as uninhabited as the shore....
Wide awake, I dream. I think I see enormous chelonians on the surface of the water, antediluvian turtles that resemble floating islands. Across the dimly lit beach walk the huge mammals of the first ages of the world, the leptotherium found in the caverns of Brazil, the mericotherium from the icy regions of Siberia. Farther on, the pachydermatous lophiodon, a giant tapir, hides behind the rocks, ready to fight for its prey with the anoplotherium, a strange animal that resembles the rhinoceros, the horse, the hippopotamus and the camel, as if the Creator, in too much of a hurry in the first hours of the world, had combined several animals into one. The giant mastodon curls his trunk, and smashes rocks on the shore with his tusks, while the megatherium, resting on its enormous paws, digs through the soil, its roars echoing sonorously off the granite rocks. Higher up, the protopithecus—the first monkey that appeared on the globe—climbs up the steep summits. Higher yet, the pterodactyl with its winged hand glides on the dense air like a large bat. In the uppermost layers, finally, immense birds, more powerful than the cassowary and larger than the ostrich, spread their vast wings and are about to strike their heads against the granite vault.
All this fossil world is born again in my imagination. I travel back to the biblical age of the world, long before the advent of man, when the unfinished world was as yet insufficient to sustain him. My dream then goes back farther to the ages before the advent of living beings. The mammals disappear, then the birds, then the reptiles of the Secondary period, and finally the fish, the crustaceans, mollusks, and articulated beings. The zoophytes of the Transition period also return to nothingness. All the world’s life is concentrated in me, and my heart is the only one that beats in this depopulated world. There are no more seasons; climates are no more; the heat of the globe continually increases and neutralizes that of the radiant star. Vegetation grows excessively. I glide like a shade amongst arborescent ferns, treading with unsteady feet the iridescent clay and the multicolored sand; I lean against the trunks of immense conifers; I lie in the shade of sphenophylla, asterophylla, and lycopods, a hundred feet tall.
Centuries pass by like days! I move back through the series of terrestrial transformations. Plants disappear; granite rocks lose their purity; solids give way to liquids under the impact of increasing heat; water covers the surface of the globe; it boils, evaporates; steam envelops the earth, which gradually dissolves into a gaseous mass, white-hot, as large and radiant as the sun!
In the midst of this nebula, fourteen hundred thousand times more voluminous than this globe that it will one day become, I am carried into planetary spaces! My body subtilizes, sublimates itself in its turn and, like an imponderable atom, mingles with these immense vapors that follow their flaming orbits through infinite space.
What a dream! Where is it carrying me? My feverish hand sketches the strange details out on paper! I have forgotten everything, the professor, the guide, and the raft! A hallucination possesses my spirit (pp. 162-163).
It is, of course, noteworthy that this journey to the beginnings of the cosmos fictionalizes, in reverse time sequence, some of the chief scientific findings of Verne’s era—the discovery of the enormous age of the Earth and Darwin’s theory of evolution, which was published in 1859, just five years prior to Journey to the Center of the Earth. It is also remarkable that Axel, in the throes of a properly scientific hallucination, loses the analytical distance that usually characterizes scientific work, and gradually shifts from normal scientific observation with a telescope to a visual imagination of nonexistent natural objects. He then places himself physically among these objects (leaning against the trunks of imaginary trees) and finally feels his body merge with the elementary forces of the cosmos in a climactic moment of transcendence. That such visionary states clearly cannot be sustained for long (Axel almost falls off the expedition’s raft because of his hallucination!) does not diminish their importance for science as Verne represents it. Otto Lidenbrock, a man who pulls the leaves of plant seedlings to speed along their growth, is clearly incapable of the kind of surrender to nature that is spelled out in his nephew’s vision, and this capability, in the novel, is an indispensable ingredient for a truly inspired and innovative scientific perspective.
The enormous lyrical power of Axel’s vision arises not only from what it tells us about Verne’s understanding of science and its relationship to the natural world. It is also gripping because it forms part of what is clearly the initiation voyage of a young man who has still to learn how to occupy his position in the social and scientific realms. The vision occurs after Axel has already suffered two near-death experiences—he almost dies from thirst, and he gets lost and spends agonizing hours alone in complete darkness and despair. Axel’s vision includes two very different bodily experiences: first, a concentration of all the biological life forces of the world in his body and the beating of his heart, then a complete dissolution of his body in its merger with the inanimate physical forces of the universe. Both, clearly, form part of an initiatory process during which the descent into the realm of death gradually metamorphoses into a physical, social, and perhaps spiritual rebirth.
The journey upward to the mouth of the volcanic crater that delivers the Lidenbrock expedition back to the world above ground amid an eruption of liquid rock is portrayed as a metaphorical rebirth that will in the end enable Axel to return home and marry the woman he has desired from the beginning of the novel. The superbly intelligent but stubborn and narrow-minded Lidenbrock, with his iron determination and implacable leadership, and the Icelandic guide Hans, with his loyalty, courage, and stoic acceptance of hardships and deprivations, serve as two different models of masculinity in relation to which Axel has to define his own identity—without, of course, merely becoming a replica of either.
What makes Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth such a complex, fascinating, and influential work of literature, then, is its distinctive c
ombination of the most advanced science of its day with more speculative approaches to knowledge and literary figures and plots that have had a long tradition and far-reaching influence in the Western tradition. This combination is characteristic of many of Verne’s works. He developed this hallmark brand of narrative after studying law and spending his early years as an unsuccessful playwright—a dramatic legacy that is still obvious in the extended, skillfully handled dialogues between Lidenbrock and his nephew in Journey to the Center of the Earth. Verne is remembered principally as one of the two nineteenth-century fathers of the science-fiction genre, along with the British author H. G. Wells—even though we should keep in mind that the term “science fiction” did not exist in Verne’s and Wells’s day. The term was coined in the 1920s, in the United States. The kind of novel Verne and Wells wrote in Europe in the late nineteenth century would have been called “scientific romance.”
Yet, in many ways, Verne’s novels are quite unlike the genre that evolved out of his work in the twentieth century. While much twentieth-century science fiction focuses on the exploration of outer space, Verne wrote only two novels that take his characters away from the Earth, on trips to the moon. With few exceptions, the plots of his novels are set in the present or recent past rather than in the future—Journey is set in the resolutely contemporary year of 1863. (One of the exceptions to this rule is Paris in the Twentieth Century, a text that was long lost but then rediscovered in the 1980s and finally published in 1994). And while many Verne novels explore human interaction with technology and machines, not all of them do, and some are more focused on scientific knowledge itself rather than on the technological apparatus that dominates so much science fiction after him. The kind of technology that appears in Verne’s novels, at any rate, is generally based on that of his own day, with little or no projection into the future.
But Verne’s novels do create alternative worlds, some of them entirely imaginary even though they are set in remote parts of our own very real planet, and his protagonists explore them with some of the tools of modern science and technology. For a nineteenth-century reader, Verne’s narratives would have had clear affinities with other romances of adventure, as well as with certain kinds of travel writing—they may have seemed only a step or two beyond the strange tales of faraway lands and different cultures that colonial officers, explorers, traders, and adventurers brought back to Europe. Modern literary scholars often associate Verne’s writings with those of other novelists who combined adventure stories with issues of science and technology, such as Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and H. G. Wells. Verne himself gave his novels the general title Voyages extraordinaires: Les mondes connus et inconnus (Extraordinary Journeys: Known and Unknown Worlds). In an age of colonial expansion and geographical exploration all over the world, the blank spaces on Europeans’ maps of the globe were shrinking fast. Verne’s novels look forward to a time when exotic countries will be too familiar to warrant further exploration, and turn instead to other unknown realms and other kinds of exploratory journey in the air, under water, inside the Earth, or in outer space. Verne’s distinctive combination of extant methods and tools of exploration and imaginary realms and landscapes exerted a shaping influence on the emergent genre of the scientific romance and, later, of science fiction.
Jules Verne’s career, after his years as a minor playwright, took a decisive turn in the 1860s when the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel accepted his novel Five Weeks in a Balloon for publication, and made him into one of the regular contributors to the Magasin d’ éducation et de recreation (Magazine for Education and Entertainment). Over the subsequent four decades, many of Verne’s novels were first published in this magazine, in serial form. In fact, Journey to the Center of the Earth is unusual among Verne’s works in that it was published in book form rather than serially, in 1864, just before Hetzel’s magazine got off the ground. Because Hetzel’s magazine was designed to appeal to younger readers, Jules Verne’s writings are sometimes still considered to be adventure reading for youngsters rather than serious literature. Yet Verne’s enormous influence on writers inside and outside of science fiction, as well as the in-depth attention he has received even from literary critics of a decidedly high-theoretical bent—prominent names such as Roland Barthes, Pierre Macherey, and Michel Serres come to mind—prove that the colorful surface of adventure and exploration in his writing hides conceptual depths that only a more mature and careful reading will unearth.
Nineteenth-century translations that substantially rewrote and distorted the text of many of Verne’s novels and were reprinted again and again throughout the twentieth century have made it difficult for readers who cannot access the original to perceive the complexity of the author’s work. Neither have the film versions through which many contemporary readers first encounter Jules Verne contributed anything to a better understanding of his novels. Journey to the Center of the Earth has been made into motion pictures several times, including the well-known 1959 version directed by Henry Levin, which features James Mason and Pat Boone in the leading roles, and a 1999 made-for-television version directed by George Miller. Neither bears much resemblance to Jules Verne’s text, since both fundamentally alter the basic set of characters and the development of the plot. First-time readers of the novel are therefore likely to be surprised by the sophistication of its thought and language.
But even a more faithful film version would surely have difficulty capturing the novel’s fascination with spoken and written language. Perhaps most obviously, Verne loves to take scientific language and display its lyrical and dramatic potential. From the mineral specimens in Professor Lidenbrock’s study to the numerous prehistoric animals Axel imagines in the underground landscape, scientific vocabulary pervades the novel and yet is evoked with so much energy, excitement, and playfulness that it never smacks of pedantry and cold abstraction. When scientific pedantry is on display, as it sometimes is in the sparrings between Axel and his uncle about the physical, chemical, and climatic details on which the success of their mission hinges, it is always within a context of dramatic dialogue that makes it part of fast, precise, and often quite witty repartees that would no doubt play well on a stage. Verne’s abundant use of semicolons and exclamation marks in the novel, in addition, helps to convey the sense of breathless excitement that often grips his characters when they are on the trail of an important discovery or conclusion.
Speech and writing also play an important part in the plot of Journey to the Center of the Earth. Otto Lidenbrock regularly becomes a butt of his students’ jokes, because he stumbles over polysyllabic scientific terms in his lectures and then rains down a hail of swearwords on his audience, the very antithesis of rational, scientific discourse. In spite of this impediment, however, Lidenbrock is an accomplished polyglot who can converse in multiple languages, an arena from which his less multilingual nephew is excluded. Axel and Otto Lidenbrock’s tendency to speak often and at length, in turn, is contrasted throughout the novel with their guide Hans‘s—and, more generally, the Icelanders’—preference for monosyllabic utterances and extended silences. Each of these ways of handling language is explored in its relation to the kind of mastery of the physical world it enables.
Written texts similarly open up varying and intricate perspectives on the characters. Lidenbrock is a confirmed bibliophile, and the plot starts out from the purchase of an antiquarian book and the discovery of a manuscript note it contains. But in spite of his knowledge of books and languages, Lidenbrock cannot decipher the cryptogram, while his nephew, much less expert in both areas, discovers the key. Both Lidenbrock and his nephew keep extensive notebooks and diaries during their journey, and both of these seem to survive the journey. Axel alludes to the publications Lidenbrock has prepared on the basis of the scientific data he collected during his journey, and he gives us his account of some of the most dramatic moments in the form of a log he kept at the time. Yet how Axel could have written anything under the life-threatening circumst
ances he describes is mysterious, and how his or his uncle’s notes could have survived the final trip through erupting lava is more elusive still.
If the novel, otherwise meticulous in its attention to physical possibilities and impossibilities, does not provide an answer to such riddles, it is not because of carelessness on Verne’s part. In a narrative that is so intensely concerned with questions of origins—cosmological, geological, evolutionary, and anthropological—the riddle of the surviving notes points us to the novel’s own perhaps inexplicable origin at the intersection of empirical observation, scientific theorizing, philosophical speculation, and different kinds of storytelling. Complexities such as these underneath the surface of a gripping adventure tale make Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth a compelling read almost a century and a half after its first publication, and have turned the novel into one of the paradigmatic stories of the modern age.
Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgments are made to William Butcher and Daniel Compere, whose detailed work on Jules Verne’s novels in general and Journey to the Center of the Earth in particular was very helpful in preparing this edition. Heather Sullivan of Trinity University provided useful references on the history of geology in the nineteenth century.
Ursula K. Heise is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. Her book Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism appeared from Cambridge University Press in 1997. She has published numerous articles on contemporary American and European literature in its relation to science, ecology and new media. She is currently completing a book manuscript entitled World Wide Webs: Global Ecology and the Cultural Imagination.