Jules Verne has
long been identified as an exceedingly successful popular genre author, the
writer of entertaining and adventurous fast reads. To many his work, like that of Robert Lewis
Stevenson, is primarily appropriate for children. Even in his own time his immense sales led
some critics to suspect that his work lacked qualities required to gain
admission to Parnassus. A counter-tendency has emerged in our own time
in which ingenious contrarian critics find in Verne a writer who anticipated
surrealism and practiced postmodernism avant la lettre [1].
While the
revisionists seeking to elevate Verne’s status among writers can justly argue
that his reputation has suffered from a combination of hasty or incompetent
translations, abridgements, and countless editions designed to appeal to
children, he has always been a demonstrably popular author among both young and
old, not only in his sales but in his style as well. While Verne’s early work was applauded by littérateurs
such as George Sand and Théophile Gautier, his immense popularity overwhelmed
this initial critical receptivity.
Around the World in Eighty Days originally appeared in installments in Le Temps. While appearance in a popular journal itself indicates a mass audience, serial publication has not similarly impacted the critical reputation of other Victorian novelists such as Thackery, George Eliot, Dickens, and Trollope. When it came out in book form, Around the World in Eighty Days did prove an immediate bestseller and was soon translated into the major European languages (Verne is the very most translated of authors after Agatha Christie [2]). The author collaborated with Adolphe d'Ennery on a staged version which was a hit for decades. Verne’s fiction, his "romans de la science" [3] often based on technological innovation or scientific discoveries he had studied in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France [4], had an immense readership, but this very success in the marketplace led many critics to think him imperfectly literary.
Whether Verne
deserves a place on the pantheon of French greats is a matter of judgement, of
course, and the general notion that elite art, often indecipherable to hoi
polloi, deserves more praise than best-sellers is not as universally
accepted as it once was. The popular
character of his work is undeniable, proven as much by the formal
characteristics of the novel as by its sales.
Though he is often placed among the Realists, Around the World in
Eighty Days has significant unrealistic, even metafictional elements. Many think of him as the father of science
fiction, no small title in literary history, and the genre’s very name embodies
a contradiction, since science deals with observed reality and fiction with fantasies. Thus, “science fiction” is concerned with imaginative
possibilities that do not currently
exist yet are described as though they were factual.
Around the
World in Eighty Days is, like The Mysterious Island or Five Weeks
in a Balloon, more a tale of
adventure than science fiction, though it does take advantage of public
awareness and excitement about new feats of engineering in the years just
preceding the novel’s publication: the Suez Canal and the construction of rail
lines across the United States and India.
The popular interest in the practicality of a trip like Phileas Fogg’s
is indicated by the Thomas Cook travel agency marketing for the first time an
around the world tour (taking not eighty days but rather seven months) a short time
after the book had appeared. That the
theme retained its appeal is evident from Nelly Bly’s account of a seventy-two-day
circumnavigation on which she embarked in 1889 for the New York World.
Though the
greatest works can rely heavily on plot,
that element is virtually always foregrounded in popular works to the
disadvantage of psychology, description, and theme, and, indeed, Verne’s
characters are simple and transparent. While Fogg is somewhat enigmatic, he seems at the same time shallow. His reserve, quiet confidence, and conformity
to gentlemanly behavior do sketch a personality, but hardly a complex or profound
one. Other characters are no more
convincing. Not only does Passepartout
behave predictably; his very name (“Passport”) indicates that he is not to be
considered a person with a fully-developed psyche [5]. Finn and Aouda are simpler yet.
Readers’ interest
in the story is sustained by the wager, a rather artificial device, and then satisfied
by the twist at the end, when Fogg thinks he has failed to make the deadline
until he realizes the day had changed in the middle of the Pacific, today’s
International Date Line. Such a lapse,
of course, is not what one would expect of a man so often called methodical and
meticulous. Inevitably less satisfying
at second reading, suspense and a surprise in the denouement are characteristic
of genre stories, though used by some prominent writers such as de Maupassant
and O. Henry. The theme of a trip around
the globe could have been the occasion for a series of colorful vignettes and picturesque
delineations of landscape, but, since Fogg is said to have no interest in his
surroundings, only the most minimal descriptions are included [5]. This must have been a convenience for Verne as,
though his works spanned the globe, the author never traveled outside Europe [6].
The appearance of
Finn generates added interest by suggesting that Fogg, who seems a proper
gentleman, is in fact a bank robber, a suspicion that turns out to be
groundless. Finn is thus adventitious, a red herring of
the sort familiar from detective mysteries that imply a likely suspect only to
distract from the real culprit. This
uncertainty about Fogg’s character is another element that, effective upon an
initial reading, would lose its effect thereafter.
Though Around
the World in Eighty Days lacks the fantasy elements of Journey to the
Center of the Earth or From the Earth to the Moon several of the
chief episodes are contrived. The Indian
attack, though not altogether impossible, is surely designed to satisfy the
European audience with a taste of the Wild West [7]. The rescue of Aouda from death on her
husband’s funeral pyre is an important element in the story, itself most
improbable and rendered impossible by the identification of Aouda as a “Parsi,”
a sect that condemned the sacrifice of widows [8].
Verne conforms as
well to the expectation that popular
literature must be unadventurous in theme, accepting received ideas without
challenge. Thus the only female in the
story, Aouda, is entirely passive, the foreigners are often barbaric, and Fogg’s
“gentlemanliness” constitutes his virtue [9].
None of this will
matter, of course, to the casual reader seeking a few hours entertainment. The book is a pleasant read, well-suited to pass
the time in an airport or under a beach umbrella. Verne has a certain dash of his own to which
his enduring popularity is a convincing testament. He was (like Kurt Vonnegut more recently)
certainly galled by being relegated to a sub-literary category. It is little wonder that he felt mistreated
by characterizations like that of Zola who called him “un aimable
vulgarisateur” [10] reacting in interview with the complaint that, though
he considered himself "a man of letters and an artist, living in the
pursuit of the ideal," he felt that “the great regret of my life is that I
have never taken any place in French literature." [11]
The author’s
disappointment was a reaction to the habitual disparagement of popular genres by many savants;
in fact, Verne’s work admirably fulfils the conventions of first-class popular
fiction. In Journey to the Center of
the Earth M. Fridriksson sensibly observes, “We are of opinion that instead
of letting books grow moldy behind an iron grating, far from the vulgar gaze,
it is better to let them wear out by being read.” Rather than feeling chagrin at the reaction of
those who found his works wanting, the author might have gloried in their general
appeal. More than a hundred years later, despite the judgement of some literati, his novels seem far more likely to be worn out from use than to grow moldy from
being ignored.
1. A useful survey of
critical opinion, both positive and negative on Verne’s literary qualities is provided
by Arthur B. Evans in “Jules Verne and the French Literary Canon” (in Jules
Verne: Narratives of Modernity, edited by Edmund J. Smyth (2000). See also Marc Angenot, "Jules Verne and
French Literary Criticism," Science Fiction Studies I (Spring 1973).
2. "Statistics:
'Top 50' Author," Index Translationum, UNESCO Culture Sector, 2013.
3. Some critics have
thought his work should be called “scientific fiction” rather than “science
fiction” because of his use of scientific facts.
4. See Quentin R.
Skrabec. “Jules Verne’s Use of Victorian Scientific Models,” Journal of
Science Fiction and Philosophy, VIII (2025).
5. Even his own
country is barely described. In the
story of Fogg’s setting out; for instance, there is no mention of the calamity
of the recently concluded Franco-Prussian War.
6. Much of his
excitement about exotic realms was inspired by his friendship with Jacques
Arago, a writer, artist, and explorer who continued his world travels even
after becoming blind.
6. Phileas Fogg may
be a more subtle sprechende Name.
Fogg certainly conveys a sense of mystery. The Greek-derived Phileas, odd enough to draw
attention in either French or English, seems slyly ironic since he is described
as anything but a “lover” or “lovable.”
He does, of course ultimately make a match with Aouda, so the name
proves true in the end.
7. Buffalo Bill’s
Wild West show was highly popular in Europe after their first tour in
1887. This taste has not vanished. In the souvenir shops of International
terminal of JFK one will yet today find
considerable merchandise associated with cowboys and Indians.
8. Verne lays enough
emphasis on her “Parsi” identity that I suspect it may be to remove her, as a
sort of Persian closer to civilization than the Hindus who are perceived as
more barbaric
9. Contrast with
Flaubert’s ridicule of the bourgeoisie, most pointedly, perhaps, in Bouvard
et Péchuchet and in Le Dictionnaire des idées reçues.
11. Émile Zola in
“Adolphe d'Ennery,” Œuvres complètes, p. 271.
12. R.H. Sherard,
“Jules Verne at Home,” McClure’s Magazine, January 1894.
