The science and travel writer Jules Verne, who died a century ago, avoided using phones in cars and rarely traveled the world
Tamara Traubman
The bullet launched to the moon, from an illustrated edition from 1872 of Jules Verne's book (right) "From the Earth to the Moon" (1865)
On March 24, it will be 100 years since the death of Jules Verne. In France and around the world, his fans will hold ceremonies in which they will highlight his legacy. The attitude towards his writings and towards himself went through many incarnations. Vern was classified as a writer for adults, then as a writer for children - mostly boys. The literary establishment of his time considered him a talented storyteller, but refused to recognize him as a "real" writer. Verne won this recognition only after his death. He wrote about a hundred books, sometimes two books a year. Readers in the second half of the 20th century favored him. He was said to be a scientific prophet, a genius, "the father of science fiction", "chief and foremost of the mythmakers of the machine age".
In recent weeks, European newspapers, especially those of France, are full of articles trying to find out who the "real Jules Verne" was. Was the author of "20 thousand miles under water" a scientific prophet? Did he really invent the technologies presented in his books or did he copy them from other sources? Was the author of "Five Weeks in a Hot Air Balloon" and "Around the World in Eighty Days" a spirited humanist or a provincial racist, who contributed to the establishment of European imperialism? And maybe all the answers are correct?
Verne's books are a song of praise for technology and progress. He presented science as exciting and heroic. Cultural scholars say that he contributed a lot to the mindset of technological optimism, to blind faith in science and to the veneration of the future - mindsets that developed in the 19th century and are also dominant in today's society. But did Vern really believe that?
At a conference on Warren held this month at the Sde Boker seminary in the Negev, David Lloyd, director of the ICT center at the seminary, said that Warren was actually a technological pessimist. According to him, the "real Verne" was probably the one revealed in his book "Paris in the Twentieth Century", which was first published only about ten years ago and in which a dark and gloomy reality is described. Why didn't he publish books like these during his lifetime? Lloyd and others say that his publisher, Pierre-Jules Etzel, had a decisive influence on his books. He intervened in the contents, determined a happy ending for the stories. "He stopped Vern," Lloyd said. Pessimistic books were rejected as "unsuitable".
"In his books, Verne is a poet of machines, of the rational and the physical," writes publicist John Lichfield in the British newspaper "Independent". "But his personal life was woven of riddles and paradoxes." Verne the modernist refused to use telephones and cars that were in their infancy at the time. Vern the globalist doesn't much explore the world with his feet. Verne, the socialist representative in the municipality of Amiens, once wrote to a friend that he hoped the socialist revolutionaries would be "shot like dogs". The cosmopolitan Verne was a racist, like most of his contemporaries.
"The book 'Five Weeks in a Hot Air Balloon' is full of descriptions of the Africans, emphasizing and highlighting their strangeness and wildness," says Dr. Yoram Bar-Gal, a geographer and historian from the University of Haifa, descriptions that would of course not make it to print today.
Verne lived in a France that was full of colonialist fervor. As part of this trend, geographers and land explorers set out to map the "unknown territories" in the world. "Government publications provided an extensive platform for describing the journeys in the remote areas, alongside 'development' programs and research in them," says Bar-Gal. According to Edward Said, the thinker and author of the book "Orientalism", Jules Verne was also recruited for these needs, who not only encouraged the colonial movement in his books, but also participated in French plans for the management and exploitation of the colonies.
But Vern is more complex than that, says Bar-Gal. He also criticizes imperialism, of course within the limits of the uninspiring belief that dominated his time in the supremacy of the white man. In "Five Weeks in a Hot Air Balloon" Vern asks with surprising insight for his time: "Is there really a need to discover the sources of the Nile? Will this really be an action that will promote the happiness of the human race? Will the African peoples be happier when they finally get to taste the taste of European culture?"
Verne, the scientific visionary, understood little of science. But he had a fertile imagination and an inexhaustible ability to absorb facts. He voraciously read books, scientific journals and newspapers. That's where he got ideas from. It may be petty, but it is interesting to know that even before the publication of the book "20 thousand miles under water", plans of the diving equipment used by Captain Nemo and the other heroes in the book were published in one of the scientific journals of the 19th century. Verne didn't invent the idea of the submarine either; Various models of submarines were built already in the 18th century.
Vern the private person was also a confusing and complex figure. "He was not the kind, cheerful humanist and optimistic scientist that emerges from his books," writes Lichfield. "He was a grumpy man, who led a mysterious second life and worked hard to cover his tracks and confuse biographers. Why did he have two houses in Amiens? Why did he burn all his private documents? Why did his nephew, Gaston, shoot him in the leg in 1886?"
"Roja Moody (a French researcher who recently published the book "La Face Cachee" - "The Hidden Face" - about Jules Verne, 54) guesses that Verne had a second wife and another family," Lichfield adds and writes, "Is his nephew Gaston , who was imprisoned for 20 years in a mental hospital after his attack on Uncle Jules, was actually his biological son? His publisher, Pierre-Jules Etzel, marketed Verne as a family man and author of educational books for young boys. Actually Vern was a terrible husband and a bad father. There are no women in his stories worth remembering. Some of the books, like 'XNUMX thousand miles under water', are like women-free zones."
So what was the secret of Verne's magic? Why are hundreds of thousands of fans around the world still following his books a hundred years after his death? Jean-Paul Daquis, director of the Jules Verne International Center in Amiens, who also authored several books about him, says: "Verne was the first modern mythmaker. He is the first writer who tried to tell the story of what happens after God is removed from office, what happens when man begins to shape his world, what happens when man shrinks the globe and recreates the concepts on which he has existed for thousands of years. He was the first to create poetry from questions that still concern us today, about the relationship between technology and humanity."
