Journey to the Center of the Earth (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (3 page)

Once the travelers start descending below the surface of the Earth and move outside the boundaries of human society, their exploration turns into a temporal as much as a geographical journey. They discover a prehistoric world of gigantically sized plants and mushrooms, a realm not only of fossils and bones but also of living, breathing, and battling dinosaurs and other animals long extinct on the planet’s surface. In large segments of two chapters (XXXVIII and XXXIX) that were not part of the novel when it was published in 1864, they even encounter predecessors of the human species itself. Verne added them in 1867 as a direct fictional transplantation of discoveries about Stone Age humans that the French archaeologist Jacques Boucher de Perthes made in the 1830s and 1840s, but which were only generally accepted in the late 1850s and early 1860s. They were the basis for his claim, revolutionary at the time, that not only fauna and flora but human beings themselves have a history that counts in the hundreds of thousands of years. When the members of the Lidenbrock expedition encounter such long-extinct humans living in a prehistoric natural environment, they are confronted not just with a personal or social past, but with ecological and biological history. Geological layers, therefore, function in the novel as metaphors for both collective cultural and scientific memory, and traversing these layers implies traveling back in time.

As a precursor of such present-day imaginary encounters with prehistoric flora and fauna as Steven Spielberg’s film
Jurassic Park,
Verne’s
Journey
invites us to ask questions about how we remember, reconstruct, and invent the past and present of our biological surroundings. But while
Jurassic Park,
with its rampaging, man-eating dinosaurs, is ultimately intended as a warning about the excessive manipulation of nature by science and consumerism, the point in
Journey to the Center of the Earth
is quite different. Professor Lidenbrock and his nephew also encounter dangerous dinosaurs—but they end up battling each other, not the intruding humans, and in fact don’t even seem to notice them. Verne does not mean to show us a natural world pushed beyond its limits by humans and taking its revenge on them. Rather, he invites us to compare this visceral confrontation with a primeval natural world in the middle pages of the novel to the very different encounter with the natural that takes place at the beginning of the story, in the description of Professor Lidenbrock’s scientific lectures and his work on carefully classified mineralogical samples in his study.

Lab work and field work, abstract taxonomies and concrete perception, analytical distance and lived immersion, the attempt to master nature intellectually and the way in which nature always offers more marvelous panoramas than the human mind can grasp—these are the juxtapositions upon which the novel hinges. It doesn’t seem that Verne wants his readers to value one over the other. Verne has quite a bit of fun at Professor Lidenbrock’s expense, through narrator Axel’s bemused and sometimes sarcastic comments about his pedantry, but the more visceral encounter with nature would never have taken place were it not for Lidenbrock’s passion for abstruse old books and manuscripts, by means of which he discovers the passage into the interior of the globe.
Journey to the Center of the Earth
highlights both dimensions of the scientific enterprise, emphasizing their tensions but also their inevitable conjunction in the quest for more and better knowledge.

So the journey to the underworld, while it breathes new life into an ancient literary motif, also serves as a framework for reflection on the much more recent problems of a scientific approach to the natural world and its history. In addition, it contrasts this scientific perspective of relentless inquisitorial rigor, which is exemplified by Professor Lidenbrock, with the more emotional, irrational, and sometimes visionary dimensions that his nephew Axel represents in the narrative. While Axel is a devoted scientist in his own right, he initially cares nothing about his uncle’s expedition; his thoughts are more taken up with his love for Graüben than with the possible scientific benefits such a mission might bring. Younger, less experienced, and physically more frail than his uncle, Axel often reacts with dismay or despair to difficult situations that Lidenbrock and the Icelander Hans face with stolidity and optimism.

Yet it should be noted that it is Axel, not his uncle, who is able to solve the two intellectual puzzles that bookend the novel. At the beginning, Axel finds the key that breaks the code in Arne Saknussemm’s cryptogram, and at the end, Axel discovers why the compass stopped functioning properly during the underground voyage. Clearly, then, there are scientific insights that are foreclosed to Professor Lidenbrock, not because of any intellectual weakness but because of his social and emotional ineptitude—his impatience, his eruptive temper, his disregard for erotic relations. Arriving at scientific truths, the novel seems to signal, requires not only technical expertise, which Lidenbrock certainly possesses, but also the kind of emotional warmth and visionary talent at which his nephew excels. Axel discovers the solution to Saknussemm’s textual puzzle during a hallucinatory state of mind; and it is again during a hallucination that he has the most sweeping and most lyrical vision of time travel that the novel offers:

It is, of course, noteworthy that this journey to the beginnings of the cosmos fictionalizes, in reverse time sequence, some of the chief scientific findings of Verne’s era—the discovery of the enormous age of the Earth and Darwin’s theory of evolution, which was published in 1859, just five years prior to
Journey to the Center of the Earth.
It is also remarkable that Axel, in the throes of a properly scientific hallucination, loses the analytical distance that usually characterizes scientific work, and gradually shifts from normal scientific observation with a telescope to a visual imagination of nonexistent natural objects. He then places himself physically among these objects (leaning against the trunks of imaginary trees) and finally feels his body merge with the elementary forces of the cosmos in a climactic moment of transcendence. That such visionary states clearly cannot be sustained for long (Axel almost falls off the expedition’s raft because of his hallucination!) does not diminish their importance for science as Verne represents it. Otto Lidenbrock, a man who pulls the leaves of plant seedlings to speed along their growth, is clearly incapable of the kind of surrender to nature that is spelled out in his nephew’s vision, and this capability, in the novel, is an indispensable ingredient for a truly inspired and innovative scientific perspective.

The enormous lyrical power of Axel’s vision arises not only from what it tells us about Verne’s understanding of science and its relationship to the natural world. It is also gripping because it forms part of what is clearly the initiation voyage of a young man who has still to learn how to occupy his position in the social and scientific realms. The vision occurs after Axel has already suffered two near-death experiences—he almost dies from thirst, and he gets lost and spends agonizing hours alone in complete darkness and despair. Axel’s vision includes two very different bodily experiences: first, a concentration of all the biological life forces of the world in his body and the beating of his heart, then a complete dissolution of his body in its merger with the inanimate physical forces of the universe. Both, clearly, form part of an initiatory process during which the descent into the realm of death gradually metamorphoses into a physical, social, and perhaps spiritual rebirth.

The journey upward to the mouth of the volcanic crater that delivers the Lidenbrock expedition back to the world above ground amid an eruption of liquid rock is portrayed as a metaphorical rebirth that will in the end enable Axel to return home and marry the woman he has desired from the beginning of the novel. The superbly intelligent but stubborn and narrow-minded Lidenbrock, with his iron determination and implacable leadership, and the Icelandic guide Hans, with his loyalty, courage, and stoic acceptance of hardships and deprivations, serve as two different models of masculinity in relation to which Axel has to define his own identity—without, of course, merely becoming a replica of either.

What makes Verne’s
Journey to the Center of the Earth
such a complex, fascinating, and influential work of literature, then, is its distinctive combination of the most advanced science of its day with more speculative approaches to knowledge and literary figures and plots that have had a long tradition and far-reaching influence in the Western tradition. This combination is characteristic of many of Verne’s works. He developed this hallmark brand of narrative after studying law and spending his early years as an unsuccessful playwright—a dramatic legacy that is still obvious in the extended, skillfully handled dialogues between Lidenbrock and his nephew in
Journey to the Center of the Earth.
Verne is remembered principally as one of the two nineteenth-century fathers of the science-fiction genre, along with the British author H. G. Wells—even though we should keep in mind that the term “science fiction” did not exist in Verne’s and Wells’s day. The term was coined in the 1920s, in the United States. The kind of novel Verne and Wells wrote in Europe in the late nineteenth century would have been called “scientific romance.”

Yet, in many ways, Verne’s novels are quite unlike the genre that evolved out of his work in the twentieth century. While much twentieth-century science fiction focuses on the exploration of outer space, Verne wrote only two novels that take his characters away from the Earth, on trips to the moon. With few exceptions, the plots of his novels are set in the present or recent past rather than in the future—
Journey
is set in the resolutely contemporary year of 1863. (One of the exceptions to this rule is
Paris in the Twentieth Century,
a text that was long lost but then rediscovered in the 1980s and finally published in 1994). And while many Verne novels explore human interaction with technology and machines, not all of them do, and some are more focused on scientific knowledge itself rather than on the technological apparatus that dominates so much science fiction after him. The kind of technology that appears in Verne’s novels, at any rate, is generally based on that of his own day, with little or no projection into the future.

But Verne’s novels do create alternative worlds, some of them entirely imaginary even though they are set in remote parts of our own very real planet, and his protagonists explore them with some of the tools of modern science and technology. For a nineteenth-century reader, Verne’s narratives would have had clear affinities with other romances of adventure, as well as with certain kinds of travel writing—they may have seemed only a step or two beyond the strange tales of faraway lands and different cultures that colonial officers, explorers, traders, and adventurers brought back to Europe. Modern literary scholars often associate Verne’s writings with those of other novelists who combined adventure stories with issues of science and technology, such as Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and H. G. Wells. Verne himself gave his novels the general title
Voyages extraordinaires: Les mondes connus et inconnus (Extraordinary Journeys: Known and Unknown Worlds).
In an age of colonial expansion and geographical exploration all over the world, the blank spaces on Europeans’ maps of the globe were shrinking fast. Verne’s novels look forward to a time when exotic countries will be too familiar to warrant further exploration, and turn instead to other unknown realms and other kinds of exploratory journey in the air, under water, inside the Earth, or in outer space. Verne’s distinctive combination of extant methods and tools of exploration and imaginary realms and landscapes exerted a shaping influence on the emergent genre of the scientific romance and, later, of science fiction.