Une ville flottante (review)

Jules Verne’s relatively neglected 1871 novel makes an ideal choice for a scholarly edition in electronic format. Une ville flottante describes an Atlantic crossing by an anonymous narrator on the Great Eastern from Liverpool to New York, followed by a visit to Niagara Falls. The narrative has three main strands: the description of the ship and of life on board this embodiment of nineteenth-century technological progress (Verne first saw the ship, then named Leviathan, in 1859, the year in which Hugo, in ‘Pleine mer’, evoked it as a destructive symbol of ‘l’ancien monde’); a melodramatic plot (a love triangle culminating in a duel resolved by a lightning strike); and vivid land- and seascapes involving water and light (‘cette magie des flots’ (p. 82)). These last form the most evocative part; Verne’s publisher P.-J. Hetzel expressed reservations about the dominance of the documentary side. Relatively brief compared with his other, better-known early novels, it is unusual in being based on recent personal experience (Verne had made the crossing with his brother Paul in 1867). Timothy Unwin’s Introduction dispels the myth that questions its authorship (William Butcher suggested that Une ville flottante was substantially composed by Paul), and situates it in the mainstream of Verne’s novels, bringing out the links with Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (during the composition of which Verne made his transatlantic journey), and its characteristic hybridity, juxtaposing fact and poetry, melodrama and reality. The narrator’s loquacious and pessimistic on-board acquaintance Dean Pitferge both varies the narratorial voice and also articulates, in face of the narrator’s faith in progress, a subversive alternative reading of the ‘huitième merveille du monde’ (p. 187), indicating already Verne’s sense, more explicit in later novels, of the limitations of technology. The annotation draws on Verne’s manuscript to give an extensive (albeit not exhaustive) range of variants, and (where legible) Hetzel’s marginal comments. (The digitized manuscript can be consulted on the website of the Bibliothèque municipale de Nantes: hawk-eyed readers can try to decipher those Unwin deems illegible.) Crucially, these enable an assessment of Verne’s attention to style, and a balanced appraisal of the contested role of Hetzel. The publisher’s comments show occasional hasty misreadings, but in general are constructive, judiciously toning down Verne’s more reckless asides about nationality or religion; Unwin argues that Hetzel’s remarks and Verne’s responses represent a dialogue rather than the ideological tensions that some have seen. The proliferating nautical terms are left unexplained — for Unwin these ‘mots magiques et impénétrables’ (p. 19) have a poetic effect — even where Verne’s spelling is outdated (‘rouffle’ for ‘rouf ’ (spar-deck)) or erroneous (‘blinck’ for [sea-]blink (p. 102)). Other references and allusions are helpfully annotated; ‘l’aimable Yorick’, author of a sermon (p. 90), is, however, more likely to refer to the parson of Tristram Shandy than to Shakespeare’s fool. Appendices give Verne’s record of his 1859 visit to Liverpool docks, initial plans for a documentary text on the Great Eastern, and relevant extracts from the Verne–Hetzel correspondence. Appropriately for an e-text, references are given with links to the relevant websites whenever possible.