The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Jules Verne · Vingt mille lieues sous les mers · a novel in two parts, serialised by Hetzel in the Magasin d’éducation et de récréation from March 1869 to June 1870 and published in two volumes, 1869 to 1870 · scored on Verne’s French, read from knowledge; no text in hand, French quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s own English beneath, and William Butcher’s translation (1998) for sense
Mode
The voyage novel made to carry the science of its day as its matter: the marvellous explained, every wonder given a cause and every station logged
Mythos
The descent to the underworld made literal in a machine; the man named No One, without country or law, sovereign under the sea; the vessel as ark, library, home and tomb
Phase
From the uproar of 1866 over a monster seen across the oceans, through the capture of Aronnax, Conseil and Ned Land and some ten months aboard the Nautilus, across the Pacific, the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic and the South Pole, to the ramming of a warship and the escape in the Maelstrom off Norway
Presentation
Prose narrative in the first person, Aronnax’s, retrospective, in two parts, with dated positions and depths given as in a log; long passages of exposition and classification
Register
A clear, quick, precise expository prose; learned comedy in the opening and in Conseil’s classifying; dialogue that lectures; the set pieces paced by danger
Scale
The ocean from surface to floor and from pole to pole; science and its machine; history, from drowned Atlantis to the galleons of Vigo and the Vengeur of 1794; the Cretan rising and the colonial seas; one captain’s war on the nations
Governing Proposition
A professor of the Paris Museum sets out to hunt a sea monster and is taken prisoner by it: the monster is a submarine, and its captain, Nemo, has renounced the land and its laws. The wager of the book is that the science of its day can be the matter of a voyage, that a machine explained and made plausible can carry a reader to the floor of every ocean, and that at the centre of the marvel can stand a man of real moral weight whose history is withheld, merciful to the oppressed and, at the end, an avenger.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The book opens in comedy: “L’année 1866 fut marquée par un événement bizarre”
“The year 1866 was marked by a strange event.” A monster has been sighted across the oceans, and the press and the learned world are in an uproar over the monster. Pierre Aronnax, a professor at the Paris Museum, sails on the American frigate Abraham Lincoln to hunt it. He takes his servant Conseil, who classifies everything and recognises nothing. Aboard is the Canadian harpooner Ned Land.
The hunt ends with the three of them thrown into the sea and taken aboard the monster. It is the submarine Nautilus, and its captain, Nemo, has broken with the land and lives by and under the sea. He will not let them go. For some ten months they are his prisoners and his guests while the vessel goes round the world under water. The narrator is the savant held captive in the thing he came to hunt, and the book is his retrospective log, its dates, positions and depths set down as in a ship’s record.
The unit here is the novel as Verne and Hetzel published it, the French text in two parts, serialised in Hetzel’s Magasin d’éducation et de récréation from March 1869 to June 1870 and issued in two volumes. The illustrations of the large edition of 1871, by Alphonse de Neuville and Édouard Riou, are context and not the work. L’Île mystérieuse of 1875, which gives Nemo a history and a death, is a later book; this one is scored with its captain unexplained, as it was published. The twenty thousand leagues of the title are distance travelled, not depth.
Movement II
The Nautilus is a world. It has a salon, a library, an organ, a collection of art, and a window on the sea, and its motto is “Mobilis in mobili”
“moving in the moving element.” From the salon the reader sees what Aronnax sees: the sea through glass, from a closed room, in electric light, at the pleasure of a host. The machine is explained at length, its electricity, its reservoirs, its plan, and the explaining is the book’s method: the impossible made concrete and then made verifiable by the log.
The Pacific gives the first stations. There is a hunt in the submarine forest of Crespo Island; the vessel grounds in Torres Strait, and the Papuans are repelled by an electrified rail; a crewman dies and is buried in a coral cemetery, the crew kneeling in their diving dress on the sea floor. Between the stations Conseil classifies, by family and by genus, and the lists run on. Their comedy is the servant who can name every kind and recognise none; their cost is that they run far past their work.
The voyage crosses the Indian Ocean. Off Ceylon, at the pearl fishery, Nemo saves a diver from a shark. The Nautilus goes up the Red Sea and passes under the isthmus by the “Arabian Tunnel” into the Mediterranean. The captain is merciful to the oppressed; he has also, as Aronnax learns by stages, a portrait of a woman and children, a hatred he does not explain, and a war he does not name.
Movement III
In Vigo Bay lie the galleons sunk with their treasure, and Nemo takes the gold. Aronnax infers that it goes to the Cretan rising: the captain who has renounced the land is still at work on it, on the side of the oppressed. The book never says more, and never gives the cause of his war. Nemo’s name is Latin for “no one”, the name Odysseus gives the Cyclops, and the man without a country, a name or a law is the book’s centre and its secret.
On a night walk the captain leads Aronnax over a submarine mountain, lit by a volcano under the sea, to the ruins of Atlantis. It is among the book’s highest scenes, and it shows the book’s way with its myths: the drowned city is visited, wondered at, and left. The descent is the old descent to the underworld made literal in a machine, and its stations, the cemetery, the drowned city, are placed along a route.
Many of the stations could go: the shooting party on Gueboroar, the dugong, the history of the galleons, much of the Red Sea. What cannot go is the captivity, which keeps the voyage tense; Nemo’s withholding, revealed by stages; and the darkening that the book prepares from the first, in the cemetery, the gold sent to Crete and the refusal to let the prisoners go.
Movement IV
The Nautilus goes south to the Pole, and Nemo plants there a black flag bearing a gold N. Then the vessel is entombed under the ice. The air fails; the men draw the last of it while the crew hack at the ice, and the Nautilus is driven onto it to break it. It is the book’s terror at its best, paced by the falling air, and it tests the bond of captor and captives.
In the Atlantic the vessel is attacked by the giant squid, and it passes through the Gulf Stream. Through the second part the captain darkens. The marvellous has been made rational at every turn, each wonder given a cause, and the order of the vessel is now seen as the order of a man who has turned from the world and keeps a war in it.
The South Pole, like Atlantis, is planted and left. The black flag is the image of the sovereign outlaw at his furthest reach, a man who claims for himself what no state has reached, and it is the image that outlived the book: the scientist outlaw in his machine became an archetype of the modern imagination.
Movement V
Nemo rams and sinks a warship. Aronnax watches through the window of the salon as the ship goes down with its men, and the book’s wonder turns to moral horror. Afterwards the captain weeps before the portrait of the woman and children, and among the last words Aronnax hears from him are “Dieu tout-puissant! assez! assez!”
“Almighty God! enough! enough!” The merciful man is an avenger, and his liberty is a sealed prison. The book sets this in view and does not say what made him so.
The three escape in the Maelstrom off Norway, an escape by catastrophe, the one point where cause is suspended; the book lets it stand as mystery, and Aronnax closes on the question of who has seen the depths. Here, at the end, the history Verne withheld would have joined the orders the book holds, the family, the nation, the war; without it they stand side by side.
The text has never been out of print, and the book has been read without a break since 1870, in every language. In English, for a century, it was read mostly in Mercier Lewis’s version of 1872, which cut much of it and garbled its science, and much of its presence since has been abridged, or carried by its films, Disney’s of 1954 above all. Wells answered it, Gernsback reprinted it, and the first nuclear submarine took its vessel’s name in 1954. It stands beside The Hobbit, at 8.0, as a voyage of wonder read by the young, below Frankenstein, at 8.7, the founding book of its lineage.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and the book is the most subtractable of its order. It is a voyage of stations, and many could go without loss to what it has to say: the hunt in the forest of Crespo Island, the shooting party on Gueboroar, the dugong, the history of the Vigo galleons, much of the Red Sea. The catalogues are the greater charge. The lists of fishes and molluscs by family and genus are in part the argument, the ocean as an inventory too large for its inventoriers and Conseil’s classifying blindness as comedy, and a first share of them is required; but they run far past their work, and an editor could take a tenth of the book in them unnoticed. What is required is real: the captivity, Nemo’s withholding revealed by stages, the ice, and the ending the ramming compels. The spine is necessary; the body is permitted. That is what holds the axis lowest of the twelve.
Score: 7.0 / 10
What the book brings into the open is first the sea itself as a world: a habitable, lit, populated space under the surface, opened to a reading public before anyone had seen it, with the science of 1869 stated as fact and much of it right. That is the disclosure of a place more than of a condition. The condition is in Nemo: a man who has renounced the land and its laws in the name of freedom and justice, merciful to the oppressed, the diver off Ceylon and the Cretans, and found at the end an avenger who kills a ship’s crew; a man whose sea is at once his liberty and his prison. A further disclosure is technology as sovereignty, the machine that frees its owner from every state. Held below 8 because the book sets Nemo’s condition in view and does not articulate it: his history is withheld by design, and the meaning is shown in his acts and not understood.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The book rises often, and some of its summits are high. The submarine forest; the burial in the coral cemetery, the crew kneeling in their diving dress on the sea floor; the night walk over the mountain to the ruins of Atlantis, lit by a submarine volcano; the South Pole and the black flag; the entombment under the ice, the book’s terror at its best, the men drawing the last of the air while the crew hack at the ice and the Nautilus is driven onto it to break it; the squid; the warship watched through the window as it sinks with its men; the Maelstrom. The summits are frequent and varied: wonder, grandeur, claustrophobic dread, moral horror. What holds the axis is that the sublime is often handed to the inventory, so that the rise is followed by a list, and the prose seldom matches its sights in the sentence. Height and frequency high; sustained elevation less.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Myth built more than summoned, and the myth outlived its making. Nemo’s name is Latin for “no one”, the name Odysseus gives the Cyclops; the man without a country, a name or a law, sovereign under the sea, at war with the nations, merciful and murderous, is load-bearing here, and he became an archetype of the modern imagination, the scientist outlaw in his machine. The Nautilus is built as ark, library, home and tomb, a salon of art and books carried under the sea. The descent is the old descent to the underworld, made literal: the cemetery, the drowned city, the ice as a sealed grave. The motto, “Mobilis in mobili”
“moving in the moving element”, fixes it. The charge is that much of the mythic matter is evoked as a station: Atlantis is visited and left, the Pole is planted and left. The figure and the vessel are built; the stations are evoked.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The turn is real. Verne made the voyage novel carry the science of its day as its matter, and made the machine, explained and plausible, the hero’s means and the book’s centre. But the scientific romance did not begin here: Poe, and Verne’s own Cinq semaines en ballon and Voyage au centre de la Terre, came first, and the departure from the adventure novel runs within a programme already set, Hetzel’s educational magazine and the series of Voyages extraordinaires already under way. The stake was in the figure of Nemo: a protagonist whose politics were radical, whose acts included the killing of a warship’s crew, and whose history the book refused to give, in a book for the young under a cautious publisher. The stake there was real; the form ran on a proven path, and that holds the axis below 8.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The form knows something. The narrator is a savant held prisoner in the thing he came to hunt, and the reader is placed with him at the window of the salon: the sea is seen through glass, from a closed room, in electric light, at the pleasure of a host who will not let him go. The log, with its dates and positions, makes the impossible verifiable; the captivity makes the encyclopedic voyage tense. Give the narration to Nemo, or to an omniscient voice, and the book loses its central knowledge, that the captain cannot be known from inside his own ship. Make the voyage voluntary and the ice and the ending lose their force. Held below 8 because the stations within the voyage are arranged more than formed: their order is the order of the itinerary, and most could be shuffled within an ocean without loss.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, and a longer and more serious return than its standing as a book for the young would suggest. Roland Barthes read the Nautilus in Mythologies as the dream of the enclosed and appropriated world, the cave and the interior; Raymond Roussel adored Verne; Michel Butor and Michel Serres wrote on him; later criticism has read Nemo for the politics of empire and of anticolonial revolt. What yields on return is Nemo and his vessel as a figure of withdrawal, sovereignty and possession, and the question the book will not settle, whether the captain is liberator or avenger. What does not yield is the body of the book: the catalogues and the lesser stations are exhausted on a first reading. The evidence of return is good; the depth is concentrated in a part of the text.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The field is the French novel of the 1860s and 1870s, and with it the adventure and scientific fiction of Europe and America. The intrinsic force is large: with Voyage au centre de la Terre and De la Terre à la Lune, this is the book that made fiction of scientific possibility a major form, and it is the strongest of them, the machine plausible, the voyage an instruction, and a protagonist of real moral weight at its centre. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: H. G. Wells’s scientific romances came after it and against it; Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories reprinted Verne, and the American genre of science fiction named him a founder; the name Nautilus passed to the first nuclear submarine, USS Nautilus, in 1954. Its reach on the literary novel proper is thinner, and that holds the axis short of the top.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over a century and a half. Form: the French text survives whole, as Verne and Hetzel published it, and has never been out of print; nothing is charged. Presence is of the widest kind: Verne is among the most translated authors of any language, this book among his two or three most read, and it has been read without a break since 1870, in schools and in every language. The charge is in the kind of presence: in English, for a century, much of it was in a cut and corrupt version; much is as a book for the young, abridged; and much is as a story known through its films, Disney’s of 1954 above all, more than through its pages. Fabric: the surface is fixed in part to the science of 1869, and has outlived it. Raised a tenth for the breadth of presence, held below the widest by its abridged life.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged on Verne’s French. The prose is clear, quick and precise; its exposition of the machine, the electricity, the reservoirs, the plan of the vessel, is a model of making the impossible concrete; and the opening, the press and the learned world in an uproar over the monster, is brisk comedy: “L’année 1866 fut marquée par un événement bizarre”
“The year 1866 was marked by a strange event” (Part One, chapter 1). The set pieces are well built, the ice above all, paced by the falling air. The charges are many: the catalogues given as lists; dialogue that is often exposition, Aronnax and Nemo lecturing each other; three companions drawn as types, the savant, the classifying servant, the choleric harpooner, who do not change; a plot driven by stations and the captain’s will more than by its people; scientific statements presented as fact that are not. Serviceable and in places fine; seldom load-bearing in the sentence.
Score: 7.6 / 10
One law governs: the marvellous made rational, every wonder explained by a cause, every station logged. Take the two most distant elements: Conseil’s comic taxonomy and the ramming of the warship, with Nemo after it weeping before the portrait of a woman and children, “Dieu tout-puissant! assez! assez!”
“Almighty God! enough! enough!”, among the last words Aronnax hears from him. They obey the same law: the order of the Nautilus is the order of a man who has turned from the world, and the darkening across Part Two is prepared from the first, in the coral cemetery, the gold for Crete and the refusal to let the prisoners go. The Maelstrom, an escape by catastrophe, is the one point where cause is suspended, and the book lets it stand as mystery. The range of tone is wide and the law holds; the range of kind, one setting and one method, is narrower than the higher marks require.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The book holds the natural order on a planetary scale, the ocean and its life from the surface to the floor and from pole to pole; science and its technology; history, in Atlantis, the galleons of Vigo, the drowned ships and the Vengeur of 1794; politics, in the Cretan rising, the colonial seas and Nemo’s war on the nations; and, in Nemo’s appeals to God at the end, the sacred. What it does not hold: the family is a portrait on a wall; labour is a silent crew; the state is an absent enemy; consciousness is Aronnax’s wonder and Nemo’s sealed grief. The orders are present and in part held together through Nemo, whose history, a family lost and a nation oppressed, would join them; but the book withholds that history, and the orders stand largely side by side.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.1: a text whole and never out of print, read without a break since 1870 in every language. Then Pressure on Tradition at 8.6, for the book that made fiction of scientific possibility a major form and was answered by Wells and taken up by the genre as its founder; The Archetypal Deep at 8.4, for Nemo and the Nautilus, the man named No One and the vessel that is ark, library, home and tomb, built and not summoned; and The Sublime at 8.2, for the coral cemetery, Atlantis by volcano light, the ice and the sinking of the warship.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.0: a voyage of stations, many of which could go, and catalogues of species that run far past their work, so that the spine is necessary and the body permitted. Next above it, three axes at 7.6: The Unconcealment, for a captain whose condition is set in view and left unarticulated; The Made, for lists, lecturing dialogue and companions drawn as types; and The Encompassed, for orders present but held side by side, since the history that would join them is withheld.
The Necessity Cap is unmet: The Inevitable at 7.0 falls five tenths short of the threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Inner Law at 7.9, The Living Form at 7.8, The Made at 7.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on three of its five axes: The Imperishable at 9.1 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.4, The Swerve at 7.9 and The Unconcealment at 7.6 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Inevitable, 7.0, the one axis below 7.5, with The Unconcealment and The Made the next lowest at 7.6; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. Two of the five summit conditions are met, the Coherence Floor and the Megethos Floor. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 8.0, from a sum of 95.5, at the foot of Tier IV and short of the 9.0 that the summit requires, and the Necessity Cap would close the summit to it at any aggregate.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Jules Verne’s Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, serialised by Hetzel in the Magasin d’éducation et de récréation from March 1869 to June 1870 and published in two volumes, 1869 to 1870; the illustrated large octavo, with drawings by Alphonse de Neuville and Édouard Riou, followed in 1871. The unit is the novel as Verne and Hetzel published it, the French text in two parts; the illustrations are context, not the work; L’Île mystérieuse (1875), which gives Nemo a history and a death, is a later book and is not part of the unit. Every axis is judged on Verne’s French. No text was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. French is quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s own English beneath, and cited by part where the part is known; everything else is paraphrased. The order of the voyage, its set pieces and its cast are known closely; the sentences are not known word for word and are not quoted. Translation · William Butcher’s translation (Oxford World’s Classics, 1998) was used for sense, as complete and close. Mercier Lewis’s English of 1872, which cut much of the book and garbled its science, is named as context only; its shortfall is not charged to the work. Neither is quoted. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the number of chapters in each part, the dates of the voyage, the length of the book in words, the share of the text given to classification, the title of Barthes’s essay, the issue and year in which Amazing Stories first reprinted Verne, the inspiration of later submarine pioneers and oceanographers, the publisher’s objection to an earlier conception of Nemo, and the particular errors of the book’s science.