Jules Verne, la science et l'espace : travail de la rêverie (review)

Christian Chelbourg's earlier study, Jules Verne: l'œil le ventre — Une poétique du sujet (see FS, LV [2001], 261-2), explored why Verne wrote the Voyages extraordinaires; his new work explores how Verne's imagination treats space and science (both as knowledge and as technology), through a series of six representative texts, weighing in each the different proportions of science, poetic imagination and pedagogy, guided by the assumption that at the heart of the creative process lies rêverie which enables the writer to elaborate his world, freed from constraints imposed by reason. In Voyage au centre de la terre, the narrative of the stages of the travellers' descent (which is also an account of biological ancestry) is seen as tracing a progressive shift from didacticism to a poetic embroidery on scientific discourses (geology and palaeontology); careful comparison of Verne's position with those of other scientists tackling the fossil record (Cuvier, Darwin and Quatrefages) enables Chelebourg to bring out Verne's caution with respect to contending theories about human origins (siding with Quatrefages against Darwin, a stance reinforced in Le Village aérien). In the mining novel Les Indes noires, with its focus on industrialization, Nell's education shows Verne's concept of 'pédagogie romanesque' and the privileged roles in this of travel, culture (especially literary) and poetic imagination. The space journey of Hector Servadac, an improbable blend of scientific didacticism and 'merveilleux poétique' (p. 72), provides Verne's most polarized combination of 'féerie burlesque' and scientific didacticism. Maître du monde, with Robur (both Flying Dutchman and megalomanic inventor) conquering three elements with L'Épouvante, the summa of Verne's machines, but vanquished by the fourth, fire, provides the most extreme example of man alienated by technology. Finally Chelebourg explores the pessimistic implications of 'Monsieur Ré-dièze et Mademoiselle Mi-bémol', a fairy-tale/nightmare of children enslaved by technology, read as an allegory of the dangerous use that not only the scientist but also the novelist can make of their powers. If Timothy Unwin's study ( Jules Verne: Journeys in Writing (see FS, 00 [0000], 00-00)[aq1] stressed the modernity and self-consciousness of Verne's hybrid texts, Chelebourg brings out Verne's Romantic affinities, his links to the Gothic novel and to melodrama. Although he too stresses the importance of the textual and verbal in Verne, his playfulness and humour, Chelebourg's approach is more traditional, with frequent nods to Bachelard and close readings that trace networks of allusion (notably to myth), verbal echoes and patterns of imagery. This is frequently illuminating, notably in the reading of Les Indes noires ('un conte de fées repeint aux couleurs du réalisme ouvrier', p. 37) and 'Monsieur Ré-dièze' ('détournement de mineurs', p. 121), but sometimes seems forced (allusions to Plato's myth of Er in Hector Servadac), unhelpful (echoes of family names in Hector Servadac reveal 'fantasmes homosexuels', a symbolic castration of the father and an indentification with the mother) or over-ingenious (arithmetical juggling in 'Monsieur Ré-dièze' produces from the site of a village [page 47 in a geography text] a reference to the date of publication of Le Docteur Ox).