To Hate Shepherds: Letter to an American Friend about a Jules Verne Story (or Why Technological Objects Sometimes Complicate Our Lives)

Are there any shepherds left in America? I suppose you have replaced them with computers or robots. It's less expensive and cleaner. Jules Verne would have liked to live in your country—he was generous with his invectives against the race of sheepherders in his novel Le Château des Carpathes (1892). You know the book, and I'm sure you recall a passage that I personally find very striking. At first, the tone is rather flattering: "If we approach a shepherd on his idealistic side, he might easily be imagined a dreamy, contemplative being: he converses with the planets, he consults the stars, he reads the skies" (9). The next sentence undoes this portrait. The shepherd is not like that, Jules Verne adds, he is less than that, and one must set the record straight: "In reality he is generally a stupid ignorant brute" (9). In the style of hitting the enemy where it hurts, it would be hard to do better. Jules Verne does not like shepherds, a group that clearly annoys him and gets under his skin. He immediately proceeds to criticize the leading names in the bucolic genre, accusing them of idealism and of a lack of realism, something George Sand had done before him in her preface to François le Champi (1864).¹ But this makes his remarks no less violent. One must add, of course, that the majority of shepherds were illiterate at the end of the nineteenth century. They did not therefore constitute for the author of the Voyages extraordinaires what we would call today a reading public... But let's not linger on this point.

Things hardly get better when we meet the shepherd Frik on the same page. He is not a particularly pleasant individual—in fact, and I choose my words carefully, he is nothing short of monstrous. In describing this character, Jules Verne repeats Victor Hugo's sentence parodying Virgil in the title of a chapter of Notre-Dame de Paris: "Immanis pecoris custos immanior ipse," "of a monstrous flock a herder even more monstrous." This is an allusion to the famous verse of the fifth eclogue: "Formosi pectoris custos formosior ipse," "of a handsome flock a shepherd even more handsome."² Frik, then, is the Quasimodo of shepherds, the Frankenstein of this bucolic region. As Verne puts it: "The immanum pecus were browsing, then, under the care of the said Frik, immanior ipse" (7). We can paraphrase in less erudite language: lovers of idyllic and industrious country scenes, please abstain—this book is not for you.

What is more striking still, given the context, is that the shepherd Frik, who has never set foot in a school, presented to us by Verne as a sort of anthropopitheticus dressed as a shepherd, is also a character who is respected—even feared—in his village. Those who know Frik, writes the author of Le Château des Carpathes, consider him to be "a sorcerer, one who could call up fantastic apparitions" (10). The shepherd, in other words, is a magician, a shaman.

You could object, of course, that we do not necessarily have to take seriously what the villagers say and that this could simply be the effect of rumors. But the text ultimately demonstrates that the gossipmongers are right. And we thus discover that Frik is a surprisingly and profoundly contradictory character, who succeeds in being both a perfect imbecile and an ancestor of Harry Potter... This contradiction interests me, and I want to pursue it.

The shepherd's task is to watch over his flock. He thus needs, among other things, a good pair of eyes. The shepherd Frik might well not correspond to the Virgilian idyllic image of the custos formosus, but from the point of view of vision, he is perfectly within the norm. Frik, writes Jules Verne, is "doué d'une grande puissance de vision," "endowed with great power of vision" (9). Curiously, while his vision might be excellent, it...