Journey to the Center of the Earth (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (4 page)

Jules Verne’s career, after his years as a minor playwright, took a decisive turn in the 1860s when the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel accepted his novel
Five Weeks in a Balloon
for publication, and made him into one of the regular contributors to the
Magasin d’ éducation et de recreation (Magazine for Education and Entertainment).
Over the subsequent four decades, many of Verne’s novels were first published in this magazine, in serial form. In fact,
Journey to the Center of the Earth
is unusual among Verne’s works in that it was published in book form rather than serially, in 1864, just before Hetzel’s magazine got off the ground. Because Hetzel’s magazine was designed to appeal to younger readers, Jules Verne’s writings are sometimes still considered to be adventure reading for youngsters rather than serious literature. Yet Verne’s enormous influence on writers inside and outside of science fiction, as well as the in-depth attention he has received even from literary critics of a decidedly high-theoretical bent—prominent names such as Roland Barthes, Pierre Macherey, and Michel Serres come to mind—prove that the colorful surface of adventure and exploration in his writing hides conceptual depths that only a more mature and careful reading will unearth.

Nineteenth-century translations that substantially rewrote and distorted the text of many of Verne’s novels and were reprinted again and again throughout the twentieth century have made it difficult for readers who cannot access the original to perceive the complexity of the author’s work. Neither have the film versions through which many contemporary readers first encounter Jules Verne contributed anything to a better understanding of his novels.
Journey to the Center of the Earth
has been made into motion pictures several times, including the well-known 1959 version directed by Henry Levin, which features James Mason and Pat Boone in the leading roles, and a 1999 made-for-television version directed by George Miller. Neither bears much resemblance to Jules Verne’s text, since both fundamentally alter the basic set of characters and the development of the plot. First-time readers of the novel are therefore likely to be surprised by the sophistication of its thought and language.

But even a more faithful film version would surely have difficulty capturing the novel’s fascination with spoken and written language. Perhaps most obviously, Verne loves to take scientific language and display its lyrical and dramatic potential. From the mineral specimens in Professor Lidenbrock’s study to the numerous prehistoric animals Axel imagines in the underground landscape, scientific vocabulary pervades the novel and yet is evoked with so much energy, excitement, and playfulness that it never smacks of pedantry and cold abstraction. When scientific pedantry is on display, as it sometimes is in the sparrings between Axel and his uncle about the physical, chemical, and climatic details on which the success of their mission hinges, it is always within a context of dramatic dialogue that makes it part of fast, precise, and often quite witty repartees that would no doubt play well on a stage. Verne’s abundant use of semicolons and exclamation marks in the novel, in addition, helps to convey the sense of breathless excitement that often grips his characters when they are on the trail of an important discovery or conclusion.

Speech and writing also play an important part in the plot of
Journey to the Center of the Earth.
Otto Lidenbrock regularly becomes a butt of his students’ jokes, because he stumbles over polysyllabic scientific terms in his lectures and then rains down a hail of swearwords on his audience, the very antithesis of rational, scientific discourse. In spite of this impediment, however, Lidenbrock is an accomplished polyglot who can converse in multiple languages, an arena from which his less multilingual nephew is excluded. Axel and Otto Lidenbrock’s tendency to speak often and at length, in turn, is contrasted throughout the novel with their guide Hans‘s—and, more generally, the Icelanders’—preference for monosyllabic utterances and extended silences. Each of these ways of handling language is explored in its relation to the kind of mastery of the physical world it enables.

Written texts similarly open up varying and intricate perspectives on the characters. Lidenbrock is a confirmed bibliophile, and the plot starts out from the purchase of an antiquarian book and the discovery of a manuscript note it contains. But in spite of his knowledge of books and languages, Lidenbrock cannot decipher the cryptogram, while his nephew, much less expert in both areas, discovers the key. Both Lidenbrock and his nephew keep extensive notebooks and diaries during their journey, and both of these seem to survive the journey. Axel alludes to the publications Lidenbrock has prepared on the basis of the scientific data he collected during his journey, and he gives us his account of some of the most dramatic moments in the form of a log he kept at the time. Yet how Axel could have written anything under the life-threatening circumstances he describes is mysterious, and how his or his uncle’s notes could have survived the final trip through erupting lava is more elusive still.

If the novel, otherwise meticulous in its attention to physical possibilities and impossibilities, does not provide an answer to such riddles, it is not because of carelessness on Verne’s part. In a narrative that is so intensely concerned with questions of origins—cosmological, geological, evolutionary, and anthropological—the riddle of the surviving notes points us to the novel’s own perhaps inexplicable origin at the intersection of empirical observation, scientific theorizing, philosophical speculation, and different kinds of storytelling. Complexities such as these underneath the surface of a gripping adventure tale make Verne’s
Journey to the Center of the Earth
a compelling read almost a century and a half after its first publication, and have turned the novel into one of the paradigmatic stories of the modern age.

Grateful acknowledgments are made to William Butcher and Daniel Compere, whose detailed work on Jules Verne’s novels in general and
Journey to the Center of the Earth
in particular was very helpful in preparing this edition. Heather Sullivan of Trinity University provided useful references on the history of geology in the nineteenth century.

 

 

Ursula K. Heise
is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. Her book
Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism
appeared from Cambridge University Press in 1997. She has published numerous articles on contemporary American and European literature in its relation to science, ecology and new media. She is currently completing a book manuscript entitled
World Wide Webs: Global Ecology and the Cultural Imagination.

This edition of
Journey to the Center of the Earth
is based on the translation of Frederick Amadeus Malleson, which appeared in 1877. Malleson’s translation is more faithful than an earlier one that had appeared in 1872, but it renders Verne’s brisk and variable prose in a distinctly Victorian English that makes the text sound more dated in the translation than it is in the original.

Malleson also took other liberties with the text: He added chapter headings that did not exist in the original text, added explanatory notes, condensed dialogue that he considered too lengthy, and, being a clergyman, added religious diction in some places and elided or amended phrases of Verne’s that seemed to imply what he considered to be slight disregard for Christian theology and scripture. Malleson’s translation has been comprehensively revised for the present edition so as to bring the English text back into closer correspondence with Verne’s original: The chapter titles have been eliminated, Verne’s dialogues and original wording have been restored in full, and the syntax and vocabulary of the English text have been updated to reflect Verne’s lively, engaged and often witty style as closely as possible.

—Ursula K. Heise

Temperatures in the novel are given in degrees Celsius, not Fahrenheit, as is customary in continental Europe.

Verne gives measures of length in units, such as leagues and fathoms, that were used in France in the eighteenth century, prior to the introduction of the metric system; those that appear frequently in the text include:

ON MAY 24, 1863, a Sunday, my uncle, Professor Lidenbrock, rushed back to his little house located at No. 19 Königstrasse, one of the most ancient streets in the old town of Hamburg.

Martha, the maid, must have believed that she was far behind schedule, for the dinner had only just begun to cook on the kitchen range.

“Well,” I said to myself, “if my uncle, the most impatient of men, is hungry, he will cry out in dismay.”

“Mr. Lidenbrock so soon!” the good Martha exclaimed in amazement, half opening the dining-room door.

“Yes, Martha; but very likely the dinner is not half cooked, for it’s not two yet. Saint Michael’s clock has only just struck half-past one.”

“Then why is Mr. Lidenbrock coming home so soon?”

“He’ll probably tell us himself.”

“Here he is; I’ll stay out of the way, Mr. Axel, while you argue with him.”

And the good Martha retreated to her culinary laboratory.

I was left alone. But arguing with the most irascible of professors was out of the question for someone of my somewhat undecided turn of mind. Just as I was cautiously retreating to my handsome room upstairs, the street door squeaked on its hinges. Large feet made the wooden staircase creak, and the master of the house rushed through the dining-room immediately to his study.

But during his swift passage, he had flung his hazel walking stick into a corner, his rough broad brim hat on the table, and these emphatic words at his nephew:

“Axel, follow me!”

I had scarcely had time to move when the professor already exclaimed in a tone of utter impatience:

“Well! You aren’t here yet?”

I rushed into my redoubtable master’s study.

Otto Lidenbrock had no mischief in him, I readily admit that; but unless he changes in unlikely ways, he will die a confirmed original.

He was professor at the Johanneum
^a
and taught a course on mineralogy, in the course of which he invariably broke into a rage once or twice each session. Not that he was at all concerned about having diligent students in his class, or about the degree of attention with which they listened to him, or the success they would eventually achieve; such details never bothered him. His teaching was “subjective,” as German philosophy calls it; it was meant for himself, not others. He was a learned egotist, a well of science whose pulleys creaked when you wanted to draw anything out of it: in a word, a miser.

There are quite a few professors of this sort in Germany.

Unfortunately, my uncle was not gifted with great skill of delivery, if not in private, then at least when he spoke in public, and this is a deplorable shortfall in a speaker. Indeed, during his lectures at the Johanneum, the professor often came to a complete standstill; he struggled with a reluctant word that did not want to pass his lips, one of those words that resist, expand and finally slip out in the quite unscientific form of an oath. Hence his intense rage.

Now in mineralogy there are many half-Greek and half-Latin terms that are hard to pronounce, rough words that would injure the lips of a poet. I don’t want to speak ill of this science. Far from it. But when one faces rhombohedral crystals, retinasphaltic resins, gehlenites, fassaites, molybdenites, tungstates of manganese, and titanite of zirconium, even the most skilled tongue may slip.

In the city, therefore, my uncle’s forgivable weakness was well-known, and it was exploited, and it was expected at the more dangerous moments, and he broke out in a rage, and there was laughter, which is not in good taste, not even for Germans. And if there was always a full audience at the Lidenbrock lectures, how many came regularly to be entertained by the professor’s wonderful fury!

Nevertheless, my uncle, I must emphasize, was a genuine scholar. Even though he sometimes broke his specimens by handling them too roughly, he combined the geologist’s genius with the mineralogist’s keen eye. Armed with his hammer, his steel pointer, his magnetic needles, his blowpipe, and his bottle of nitric acid, he was a very powerful man. By assessing the fracture, the appearance, the hardness, the fusibility, the sonorousness, the smell, and the taste of any mineral, he was able to classify it unhesitatingly among the six hundred substances known to science today.

The name of Lidenbrock was therefore mentioned with respect in colleges and learned societies. Humphry Davy, Humboldt, and Captains Franklin and Sabine never failed to call on him on their way through Hamburg. Becquerel, Ebelman, Brewster, Dumas, Milne-Edwards, Saint-Claire Deville
¹
consulted him about the most difficult problems in chemistry. This discipline was indebted to him for quite remarkable discoveries, and in 1853
A Treaty of Transcendental Crystallography
by Professor Otto Lidenbrock had appeared in Leipzig, a large folio with illustrations which, however, did not cover its expenses.

Add to all this that my uncle was curator of the museum of mineralogy established by Mr. Struve, the Russian ambassador, a valuable collection whose reputation is known throughout Europe.

This, then, was the person who called me with such impatience. Imagine a tall, slender man, of an iron constitution, and with a fair complexion which made him look a good ten years younger than his fifty. His large eyes moved incessantly behind his full-sized spectacles; his long, thin nose looked like a knife blade; mischievous tongues have even claimed that it was magnetic and attracted iron filings. Sheer calumny: it attracted nothing except snuff, but that, to be honest, in great quantities.