Jules Verne: Journeys in Writing (review)

Timothy Unwin's aim is to rescue the Voyages extraordinaires from the distorting effect of Verne's cultural legacy and from clichés and oversimplifications, be they dismissive (Verne the writer of pot-boilers) or laudatory (Verne the prophet). Sidestepping issues that have preoccupied some recent critics, notably the interventions of his publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel and of Michel Verne, and briskly dispatching psychoanalytical speculation, he tackles 'the Vernian corpus' (p. 42) as text: double entendres can be read as 'signs of repressed homosexuality' (p. 108), but more importantly they are things done with words. For Unwin, Verne is an author rooted in the nineteenth century both ideologically and as a writer, but one consciously pushing back the frontiers of fiction. The six chapters explore different but overlapping aspects of the textuality of the novels: the creation of a new literature, incorporating technology and non 'literary' language in a hybrid, patchwork text (Chapter 1); writing as paradoxically both the imposition of order and wild proliferation, and travel, both in space and time, as a pursuit that leads back to the point of departure and the already said (Chapter 2); the role of texts as triggers of plots (notes, ciphers), and plots as producers of texts (memoirs, lectures) (Chapter 3); the lasting effect of Verne's theatrical apprenticeship on the novels, whose ludic dimension and theatrical devices (disguise/revelation, conventional resolution, set types) contribute to the undermining of narrative realism (the 'theatrical' here in fact refers back to a particular range of works: romantic comedy, melodrama, Molière) (Chapter 4). Chapter 5 further explores this self-consciousness, from verbal pointers to the artificiality of the story we are reading to features that undermine the convention of character. Chapter 6 tackles the awkward question of originality in Verne given his often highly visible use of pre-existing texts; Unwin argues that his originality lies in combining different styles, scientific and literary, in a 'patchwork' that gives 'resonance and depth' (p. 182). This argument is not unproblematic: Unwin concedes that to say that all visible incorporation of 'foreign bodies' (p. 185) is 'modern' and 'experimental' smacks of special pleading: while it can lead to polyphony, it can equally stall momentum or be close to plagiarism. Indeed: if Verne's aim is not to 'create a seamlessly "fictional" fiction', but to puncture self-consciously the conventions he is writing in (p. 198), any incompetence can be excused: where some critics see stereotyped characters, Unwin sees the subversion of the 'illusion' of character. However, in addition to the justification from ludic and self-conscious modernity, Unwin, acknowledging Verne's unevenness and weaknesses, also responds to Verne in terms of more straightforward, albeit less explicit, criteria, praising him for careful construction (in ingenious readings of Le Sphinx des glaces and of echoes of Wordsworth and Hugo in Le Rayon vert): key evaluative terms are 'brio and gusto' (p. 147), 'narrative verve' (p. 187), the 'dizzying, hallucinatory, surreal' quality (p. 187) found in his recycling of terminology. This wide-ranging study constitutes a lucid, balanced and engaging defence of Verne.