Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (2 page)

In 1872 Verne settled in Amiens with his family. During the next several years he traveled extensively on his yachts, visiting such locales as North Africa, Gibraltar, Scotland, and Ireland. In 1886 Verne’s mentally ill nephew shot him in the leg, and the author was lame thereafter. This incident, as well as the tumultuous political climate in Europe, marked a change in Verne’s perspective on science, exploration, and industry. Although not as popular as his early novels, Verne’s later works are in many ways as prescient. Touching on such subjects as the ill effects of the oil industry, the negative influence of missionaries in the South Seas, and the extinction of animal species, they speak to concerns that remain urgent in our own time.

Verne continued writing actively throughout his life, despite failing health, the loss of family members, and financial troubles. At his death in 1905 his desk drawers contained the manuscripts of several new novels. Jules Verne is buried in the Madeleine Cemetery in Amiens.

The book you hold in your hands is considered by many Jules Verne readers to be his masterpiece. Serialized in a widely read French family magazine in 1869 and 1870 and published in two volumes in those same years, it was Verne’s seventh successful novel. As is true of much of his fiction, in
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
Verne capitalized on the spirit of the time, incorporating up-to-the-minute scientific data in a pulse-quickening adventure plot. Verne’s mission as a novelist, he wrote, was to “depict in novel format the entire Earth, the whole world, by imagining adventures unique to each country and by inventing characters indigenous to the habitats in which they live” (quoted in Evans,
Jules Verne Rediscovered: Didacticism and the Scientific Novel,
p. 30; see “For Further Reading”). By all accounts, he succeeded, originating a fictional genre, writing in a voice at once unique and universal, and for forty years feeding his devoted readers a steady diet of extraordinary fiction based on scientific fact.

France had never seen anything like Verne. His readers touted him as a genius, a soothsayer, a visionary. His fourth book,
From the Earth to the Moon,
was so popular it elicited requests from single French women wishing to accompany Verne to the lunar landscape in his new space-going vessel. “Parisians are certainly brave,” Verne wrote in a letter after publication of that book. “Some of them are determined by hook or crook to embark on my projectile” (quoted in Teeters,
Jules Verne: The Man Who Invented Tomorrow,
p. 62). His reputation grew, and his works were reportedly translated into more languages than Shakespeare’s plays. “Take a young English boy and put half of
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
in his hand, in translation; then give him the other half in French; and that boy will figure out a way to try to understand,” said British author and Verne enthusiast Rudyard Kipling (quoted in Lynch,
Jules Verne,
p. 112). Verne never let his readers down, publishing more than sixty novels and some twenty short stories, as well as a few dozen plays. Even one hundred years after his death, a new generation of Verne fans can see his plots through Disney’s lens. His enduring popularity is a testament to the human appetite for fantasies brought to life.

Among Verne’s mountain of novels collectively known as
Extraordinary Voyages, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
stands out. In it, Verne used techniques he perfected in his previous books. Near-death beneath the ice caps and strangulation in the tentacles of giant squids made his readers squirm in their armchairs, while observation windows and an encyclopedia-toting sidekick educated as they entertained. At times remarkably lyrical, at other times strictly scientific, Verne’s writing took readers places they had never gone before—indeed, to places few of them had even imagined. But unlike in his other novels, in
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
he did more than paint a realistic picture of an unreal voyage. The book is Verne’s masterpiece not for the wonders of the sea he describes, but for the realistic creation of a singular man. It’s Captain Nemo, to the maelstrom and to the end.

In his other books, Verne’s heroes are acted upon. The outside world intrudes on the voyage of discovery; it supplies the adventure and propels the books, and their narrators, onward. In
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,
Verne turns the drama inward by making Nemo the central figure and the propelling force. The book follows the adventures of Verne’s scientist-hero, Aronnax, and his two friends Ned Land, the harpooner, and Conseil, Aronnax’s manservant, during a period of captivity and scientific discovery in Captain Nemo’s submarine. It is through Nemo’s genius and his secret (and possibly malevolent) motives that the three captives find themselves on their voyage. Verne knew that, for the book to work, Nemo had to be almost larger than life. “It is important that this unknown character refrain from contact with other human beings, from whom he lives apart,” wrote Verne in a letter to his publisher. “He is no longer on
earth,
he manages without the earth” (quoted in Lottman,
Jules Verne: An Exploratory Biography,
p. 130). A natural leader living on a ship inhabited by a crew of ghostlike men, a noble scientist in search of the unknown, a child marveling at the bounty of the seas, a genius and a lunatic, Nemo is the most complex character Verne ever created. He destroys ships without conscience and yet cries over lost companions. He is genial, affable, and terrible all at once. Nemo is Verne’s work of genius, ranking alongside Melville’s Captain Ahab and London’s Sea Wolf as the most fearsome and complex man sailing the fictional seven seas.