Journey Through the Impossible Read Free

travels to the center of the earth, to Atlantis, and to Altor-tal-
ents very useful in such circumstances! To help the heroes get to Altor,
Verne resurrected Impey Barbicane and J. T. Maston, president and
secretary, respectively, of the Gun Club in Baltimore, which launched
the bullet From the Earth to the Moon in 1865. However, the characters
never reached the Moon. Likewise, having set his foot on the North
Pole, Hatteras finds only emptiness, because the exact geographic pole
is in the center of a volcano. The journey to the Center of the Earth does
not fulfill its goal, and Nemo, Under the Sea, does not visit the deepest
abyss on the floor of the ocean. Verne's astronauts are confined to circle
the Moon on their voyage Around the Moon. The cannon paid for with
The Five Hundred Million of the Begum does not destroy France-Ville,
and the lovers don't see The Green Ray.49 At the end of his tour Around
the World in Eighty Days,50 Fogg does win his wager, but only by way of
another typically Vernian glitch. Michael Strogoff arrives too late at
Irkutsk, and The Star of the South51 is not a synthetic diamond. We see
Maston failing Topsy-Turvy,52 as does Robur the Conqueror,53 as do the
engineers of Propeller Island'54 and Orfanik's inventions for The Castle in
the Carpathians are all destroyed. In most of the novels, however
extraordinary the voyage, a reader might come to feel as if an angel with
a flaming sword had risen before the writer and called out to him, "No
farther! Ahead is the unknown, forbidden to humans-the realm of the
impossible." After "Master Zacharius," Verne almost stopped writing
fantasy and horror stories, a domain that would later occupy writers
such as H. G. Wells, H. P. Lovecraft, Ray Sloane, and many others.

    Nevertheless, to such a forbidden realm we are taken by the hero
of Journey Through the Impossible, by way of the madness inherited
from his father. The other characters created by Verne move through
the extraordinary world of scientific realities. George Hatteras wishes
to go beyond. "This is simply the extraordinary, not the impossible,"
he exclaims to himself. Verne does not reject characters previously
created in his novels; they are, moreover, incarnations of the goodeven Nemo, the rebellious anarchist, the pirate who destroys innocent
vessels. This play doesn't contradict previous works; rather, it is an
extension of them, setting forth the limits beyond which lie the
unknowable and the inaccessible. This flamboyant subject, paradoxically, is quite modern in its "fantasy" concepts, rather than futuristic
science fiction, even though the reader is distracted repeatedly by
breaks in the tone or tension of the action by the goings-on of two
comic characters-a Shakespearean effect that also influenced the
comic interludes of Neapolitan opera-bouffe. Constructed like a signpost at the border between the possible and the impossible, this play
is, more than any other of the novelist's manuscripts, required reading
for all of those, in ever-growing numbers, who study him. Verne's
works are now classics in world literature, and he is a subject so complex as to be understood only from a multi-disciplinary approach.
    Verne wrote two trilogies; the first includes The Children of Captain Grant, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, and Mysterious
Island; the second comprises From the Earth to the Moon, Around the
Moon, and Topsy-Turvy (also known as The Purchase of the North Pole).
Journey Through the Impossible is the only piece where so many characters from other works-including both trilogies-appear together.
The first half of Jules Verne's life and work culminates with journey
Through the Impossible, a mantle atop the two trilogies.
    In 1882 all plays were checked by a governmental office before a work
was produced; the manuscripts were manually copied by anonymous
civil servants and archived. In 1978 Francis Lacassin searched the
archives of the