Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Free Page A

heroes are acted upon. The outside world intrudes on the voyage of discovery; it supplies the adventure and propels the books, and their narrators, onward. In Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Verne turns the drama inward by making Nemo the central figure and the propelling force. The book follows the adventures of Verne’s scientist-hero, Aronnax, and his two friends Ned Land, the harpooner, and Conseil, Aronnax’s manservant, during a period of captivity and scientific discovery in Captain Nemo’s submarine. It is through Nemo’s genius and his secret (and possibly malevolent) motives that the three captives find themselves on their voyage. Verne knew that, for the book to work, Nemo had to be almost larger than life. “It is important that this unknown character refrain from contact with other human beings, from whom he lives apart,” wrote Verne in a letter to his publisher. “He is no longer on earth, he manages without the earth” (quoted in Lottman, Jules Verne: An Exploratory Biography, p. 130). A natural leader living on a ship inhabited by a crew of ghostlike men, a noble scientist in search of the unknown, a child marveling at the bounty of the seas, a genius and a lunatic, Nemo is the most complex character Verne ever created. He destroys ships without conscience and yet cries over lost companions. He is genial, affable, and terrible all at once. Nemo is Verne’s work of genius, ranking alongside Melville’s Captain Ahab and London’s Sea Wolf as the most fearsome and complex man sailing the fictional seven seas.
    But what combination of luck and craft brought Verne to Nemo, or Nemo to Verne? For a writer whose pen traveled more than sixty times over continents and through atmospheres, how did Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea come to be Verne’s masterpiece? And how did Verne—part bourgeois, part bohemian—become the grandfather of scientific fiction, the creator of a new genre in the world of letters, and the master of extraordinary voyages?
     
    Jules Verne was born on February 8, 1828, in Nantes, France, a prosperous commercial port still thriving at the tail end of the French maritime boom and the African slave trade. He grew up watching three-masted schooners glide into the harbor and studying the workings of steel-making machines that fed the maritime industry. His father was a successful provincial lawyer and a devout Catholic, his mother a gifted lyricist with the temperament of a poet. As a child, he read James Fenimore Cooper, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, and Victor Hugo. He also read Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Johann Wyss’s The Swiss Family Robinson, survival tales that captured his imagination. “It is man set out on his own, solitary man, the one who one day finds the imprint of a bare foot on the soil,” Verne wrote in his incomplete memoir. “It is a family: father, mother, and children, with their diverse talents. How many years did I spend on their island! How eagerly I became wrapped up in their discoveries! How much I envied their fate” (quoted in Lynch, p. 20).
    Verne was the first of five children. His closest brother, Paul, would go on to become a naval officer. But in an age when fathers more or less controlled the fate of their first-born sons, Verne would not be allowed to indulge his fantasies of traveling on the open seas. After a spotty academic history in primary and secondary school—“studious children invariably turn into half-witting grownups,” he wrote (quoted in Schoell, Remarkable Journeys: The Story of Jules Verne, p. 13)—Verne followed his father’s plan and enrolled at law school in Paris. He studied the first year in Nantes, then moved to the capital in the winter of 1848 to be closer to his classes.
    “I came to Paris as a student just about the time when the grisett [prostitute] and all that she meant was disappearing from the French Quarter,” Verne wrote in his memoir (quoted in Lottman, p. 20). He also arrived on a