The Mysterious Island. Jules Verne

ensuring his lesson sinks in … you put your foot in your soul when you hoped that your process of scientific popularization could apply to medicine, like better-known subjects … In this episode there are also attempts at sensibility which do not work. There are good sentiments, and you tried them thinking of me perhaps … but we should not be doing reverence … The end of Nemo with the removal of a few unhappy efforts in the same vein will remain very fine but it is important that Nemo not die before knowing what might happen to the Island … Your destruction of the Island is a masterpiece. / The whole preparation of Nemo’s death and the escape as well, and only details need to be amended. But you have to add a last chapter, a chapter conclusion [sic] of 3 pages. / In your fatigue and after all your effort you dump everybody in America like dirty washing, first of all it’s not appropriate and next it makes the interest fall flat on its face or its arse as you will … You will reduce the value of the pearl, you will say that it might be worth millions but you will put it in the middle of 8 or 10 millions of diamonds, jewels, etc. / You will send the pearl to Lady Glenarvan my good fellow and with the diamonds our settlers back in America will make themselves another Lincoln Island on dry land. / They will found a little State wherever you want, in 4 pages you will say that very well you will show them without embellishment, you will show them to us united like the fingers of a glove in a peacetime America and in a colony that is already prosperous with kids and all the trimmings: church schoolhouse a monument to Nemo Glenarvan and Robert Grant. / They must be darlings and your public must say that you are one too. (229–31)

      [18 September 1874] It’s completely agreed for the ending of MI. I’ll stick their island back on dry land in America for them. (259)

      [29 September 1874] … a confidence that Nemo should share with Cyrus on his own, about the possibility of upheaval of the island, perhaps soon … That explains why Nemo did not die alone. He had some advice of capital importance to give them. / The question of the chest would be insufficient to explain why he wished to interrupt his solitary existence, for he could very easily have put the chest in their hands or under their table … Incidentally for the conclusion. Jup and the dog must be saved. (261–62)

      Despite Verne’s valiant resistance, both manuscripts of MI underwent a harrowing series of cuts, additions, and changes. Some of the alterations are presented on pp. xxxviii–xlii; here it can be noted that the meaning of the conclusion is totally changed. In the published version, but not in the manuscripts, we read of a deathbed remorse by Nemo and a pompous and presumptuous assessment by Smith of his life as an “error.” In the book, Nemo gives the settlers Hetzel’s jewelry, whereas in the manuscript they get the giant pearl he had so carefully nurtured in Twenty Thousand Leagues. In Verne’s original idea, the destruction of the Island is the end of the novel; in the “Hetzelized” version, the settlers have to start again in Iowa. The captain’s dying words, the absurd “God and my country!” were brutally, criminally, imposed by Hetzel. The manuscript read simply “Independence!”

      Our exploration of the origins of “UR” and MI has, in sum, thrown up several major problems with accepting the work as published. Because the Nemo of the third part is not what Verne wanted him to be, this falsifies his destiny and hence that of the settlers, and in turn the whole meaning of the novel.

      Understanding the links between MI and Twenty Thousand Leagues is in turn rendered difficult. One problem is simply consistency. In MI the “true” origin of Nemo and all his crew is revealed to be Indian—although at least one of them had been French in the earlier masterpiece. His victims were, it seems, British; and so on. The Nemo of MI in fact bears little resemblance to the earlier Nemo; even the most basic facts do not tally, such as his age and the dates, which are all wildly off. The captain of MI claims that he sank the warship “in a narrow, shallow bay … I had to pass, and I … passed” (III, 16). However, the claim is wrong, for in the 1870 novel the sinking takes place several hundred miles from land (III, 23). The only merit in the claim is its identity with an implausible suggestion that Hetzel made in the correspondence—and which the earlier Verne indignantly rejected. But the rot goes deeper, for even the Nemo of Twenty Thousand Leagues was adulterated, since Verne had already conducted a running battle over two or three manuscripts and a score of anguished letters, where he demonstrates, point by logical point, that Hetzel is insisting on radical changes while not understanding the most basic aspects of Nemo’s behavior.

      The links between the two novels, as encapsulated in Nemo and the Nautilus, are therefore of little help in understanding the gloomy captain, and may indeed create misconceptions. MI is disappointing if judged purely as a sequel, for it contradicts and undermines the previous work, with its heroic defiance of human society and its magical exploration of the ocean depths. However, as an independent work, MI remains a resounding success. It is probably best to ignore the links between the two novels.

      On top of the ambivalence and irony invading Verne’s work in the 1870s, then, we must add our own skepticism as to every sentiment and deed in MI, especially the pious or noble ones. Behind each episode and phrase lurk a line of darker copies, like Macbeth’s ghosts, running through the correspondence with Hetzel and the four manuscripts but even into Twenty Thousand Leagues and its manuscripts and correspondence.

      A naive reading is no longer possible.

      Verne’s degree of identification with his seven characters varies. Guermonprez lucidly analyzes the settlers: “Instead of the usual trio of men, representing intelligence, courage, and fidelity, he spreads these qualities over five men.” (“Notes,” 18) Four of them are in the force of age and all are energetic, in the Anglo-American mold. In contrast with the Scottish Ayrton and their European predecessors in the genre, the Americans are omnipotent and fearless.

      The novel seems in some ways an English-language one from the beginning, as indicated by its English place-names and its emphasis on practical reality. In his approximately twenty-three novels partly or entirely situated in the US, Verne often gives a positive image. America is for him a nation of engineers, mechanics, balloons, telegraphs, and railways, one where science is discussed and nothing is feared. The novelist is systematically anti-slavery, from a humanitarian consideration since he royally ignores economic arguments. However, he also writes devastating criticisms of over-engineering and destruction of nature. One of Verne’s major criticisms of the US in his later years, for instance in Propeller Island (1895), is the power of money. The other is the lack of culture, as in “In the Year 2889” (1889), whose critical passages were apparently censored when published in New York, and in “Humbug: The American Way of Life,” which remained unpublished in English until 1991.¹⁴

      Nevertheless, as Guermonprez indicates (“Notes,” 29), the settlers’ characters and daily habits are not always well-defined or plausible. They rarely talk of their origins from different parts of New England, or even the reasons for the Civil War. They have no petty jealousies or nicknames; they rarely smile or laugh; and they almost never go for a swim in their Pacific paradise. We know little of their washing or toilet arrangements, perhaps because twenty-five to thirty gallons per day (I, 19) does not allow such refinements. But their waste water must go down the well—up which Nemo comes to eavesdrop. Although the bedrooms are not heated, the settlers’ health is perfect: not a sniffle, despite the humid environment caused by the shaft.

      Within the group, Smith is invariably seen in a good light, with his polyvalence and his Unionist officer’s cap, in the illustrations if not in the text. Michel Tournier says of him that “engineer” is a superb word, “combining both genius and ingenuity” (Le Vent paraclet, 214). He is forty-five, Verne’s own age in 1873, and represents values of sociability and practicality. While he indulges in the pleasure of enclosure in the womb-like cave, it must still have a window. He is above all an over-achiever. As Kravitz points out (private correspondence), the list of his scientific and engineering accomplishments is endless: a fire made with watch lenses; a knife made from Top’s collar; bricks, then a kiln, then clay pots, jars, and cups; determining the coordinates of the Island; calculating the height of the granite wall; making bellows from seal skins, then steel; sulphuric acid, nitric acid, and nitroglycerin; tallow candles; baskets and maple sugar; a bridge over the Mercy; pyroxyle; glass panes; a large boat; a mill