(Re) Finding (Captain) Nemo

 

Painted by Patrick Griffin

As is sometimes the case, I found myself out of things to read. I located a few Barnes & Nobles classics around the house and picked up Mysterious Island by Jules Verne. But I also had 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. How much did I actually remember of that book, I wondered? After all, Mysterious Island is a direct sequel. So I decided to re-read Leagues, instead. Because once I started thinking about it, I realized I couldn’t have been older than ten when I first read it. This is not a book for ten-year-olds.  I doubt I absorbed much of it, at the time.

It was also of interest to me as I have long since written an homage of sorts, Hurricane Regina, as an intersection between Verne, Clive Cussler, and Robert Heinlein. His classic was the most murky in my mind as I did so, and I was curious as to what similarities existed beyond the most obvious.

I’m glad I re-read it. I had my first ‘duh’ moment before I had finished with the biography included before the actual story. He wrote it in French! This seems wildly obvious, but I had never considered that until just a few weeks ago. This affects nothing, and everything. How odd that such a basic fact can evade knowledge. Consequently, I realized I had a lot to learn.

Never underestimate the value of a, now maligned in some circles, classical education. Mr. Verne piles on scads of oceanography, geography, history, engineering, Greek and Roman mythology, marine biology, and so much more, to the point of near exhaustion, at times, that you cannot help but walk away from this novel more informed than you were before you read it.  I don’t know many college graduates in this day and age with his breadth of knowledge.

Granted, it’s a bit heavy-handed, at times. The descriptions of marine life by genus and species sometimes feels like cataloging. This is often counterbalanced by very poetic prose. It’s a curious mix. Of course, this is all in perfect harmony with the lead character, himself both a scholar and enthusiast. His conveyance of location, direction, time, speed of travel, and depth is similarly detailed in its ultra-realism, and contributes greatly to the overall immersion you receive. Although Verne’s travels abroad were all above sea level, Leagues gives the impression that he himself had indeed spent a considerable amount of time exploring the ocean’s depths in person.

Verne also manages to establish himself as an early proponent of ecology. Numerous passages exist lamenting overfishing and the despoiling of the ocean ecosystems by man. At the same time, the crew of the Nautilus gleefully kill and eat almost every creature they encounter in abundance. It’s a convergence of theory and practice that I’m not sure he was aware of as he wrote it. Teary paragraphs decrying the destruction of ocean life are met with scenes of hauling in great nets of wildlife to stock their seemingly infinitely accommodating larders. Not even birds and quadrupeds are safe from their lust for dietary variety. Of course, their hauls are but a drop in literal oceans, in terms of scale.

His characterizations are not the most fleshed out personalities in literature, to be sure. Robert Louis Stevenson basically called them all Mary Sues. For the most part, they seem to exhibit bravery and apprehension, and little else. They do tend to have slightly more depth than I am giving them credit for, but not by much. This is simply not that sort of literature. The protagonist is primarily wonderous, his sidekick servile and loyal, their Canadian compatriot angry and dissatisfied.

Captain Nemo himself proves to be the most enigmatic of the characters, driven by events that are merely alluded to, and is alternatingly gruff, expansive, mysterious, and vindictive. He is a true anarchist, albeit not of the most principled sort. Sometimes motivated by self-preservation, he’s also at times suicidal. He’s also a bit of a pirate, although the riches he plunders are the possessions of others only in theory. I get the impression that he was perhaps the inspiration for Ayn Rand’s character Ragnar Danneskjold.  Nemo is easily the most complex character, taking center stage while at the same time remaining in the background for much of the novel. Nowhere is the dichotomy of his nature more apparent than in the scene whereby this champion of the ocean slaughters a huge pod of sperm whales because he thinks they’re assholes.

In terms of pacing and suspense, Verne is spot on. He manages to convey the feeling of being confined and losing your sense of time quite well, and also shows how if affects the characters involved. There are numerous events that break up the monotony, compelling you forward with genuine concern for the outcome of each.

As an early work of speculative science fiction, Verne is amazingly on the mark. There are very few things he got wrong in any real sense. The workings of the sub are complex but almost entirely accurate. His understanding of the value of electricity is impressive. It doesn’t matter that his view of battery storage was unworkable when he wrote the novel, in terms of size and output. They did become feasible. He speaks of the possibility of a land mass in Antarctica, which was at the time only a theory, although actually planting a flag at the exact location of the pole would have been unworkable in terms of geography without a lengthy and perilous trek on foot. Most fascinatingly, he talks about the few existing undersea telegraph cables connecting the U.S. to Europe, able to transmit information with a delay of .32 seconds.

Even as a study of etymology, this novel has value, with words that have changed meaning or spelling over time, primarily with things like ingulfed/engulfed, and to-day/to-tomorrow.  As scholar Victoria Blake, who wrote the forward of this edition notes, it is not without error. The relative density of steel to water is off by a degree of magnitude. She attributes this to a likely translation issue, but as a researcher/literary historian, I would expect her to clear this matter up fully. Most distressingly, the very last page refers to “Captain Nero”, and I’m pretty sure that is not intentional. Come on, B & N. Do better.

Another extremely interesting detail I leaned when reading this again for the first time, the word squid is never used, except as a footnote included by Blake. The Nautilus and crew are in fact attacked by what is called a giant cuttlefish.

If I may be so bold and pretentious as to level an actual criticism at this work, it would be the ending. I haven’t read such a slapped-together deus ex machina device since Tom Sawyer wanders into the end of Huckleberry Finn. There is great peril as the protagonists seek to make their escape, gripping suspense, and then boom… it’s over. They’re safe. Mr. Aronnax himself, the principal character, doesn’t know what happened, or how. I realize writing an epic novel like this one is a labor, and I can definitely relate to wanting to wrap something up when you are near the end. But surely a work of this scope merits more than a half-page conclusion. Verne’s editors, instead of making him remove crucial pieces of Nemo’s backstory, should have demanded a more fleshed-out ending.

So, how does my own oceanic novel relate to this classic tale?

I won’t even pretend it’s in the same, erm, league, of course. I made no attempt at hard science. My own mysterious captain and his impossible sub are definitely tributes. Both are driven by unknown motivations.  The crews of the two subs are similar in that mine are clones, and Nemo’s are almost entirely without personality or dialogue. And there are giant squid in both. And that’s basically it. It’s an homage of sorts, but I’d like to think the story itself is my own. Without the groundbreaking work of Mr. Jules Verne, it is unlikely that my own novella would even exist.

Onward to The Mysterious Island I go…

Verne's Cartographies

Preview the audiobook of Hurricane Regina, read by Kenneth Lee.