Book~"Journey To The Center Of The Earth" By:J.Verne Treasury of Illus.Classics

Description: Journey to the Center of the EarthBy: Jules VerneOne of the oldest themes in storytelling deals with a trip to theunderworld—a plot of such universal appeal that it has even beengiven a name: katabasis literature, from the Greek wordsignifying descent. Readers are most familiar with the classicEuropean examples—Odysseus, Orpheus,Aeneas, the Inferno of Dante. But thesubject can be found universally. In mybook on Healing Songs, I describe howdozens of versions of the Orpheus mythhave been documented among NativeAmerican tribes. Similar accounts canbe found in Australia, Asia, Siberia—indeed, virtually everywhere and any-where stories have been told. Give credit to Jules Verne for taking thisancient plot and finding a completely newbasis for it—namely the scientific journeyinto the underworld. Some things stay the same here: thedangers of the trip, the tests and adventures along the way, andthe risk of never returning. But a whole new positivistatmosphere is present, for the first time, in Verne’s narrative. Inhis Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), the protagonistsare not suppliants or in thrall to the powers of the depths, but aimto comprehend and categorize, to cast light on the darknesswithin—in short, to stake out the previously unknown regions andbring them into conceptual frameworks of the terrestrial worldabove. Verne was still a fledgling author when he tackled this subject. Hehad published his first adventure novel the previous year, FiveWeeks in a Balloon, a work that received favorable reviews, butdid not sell enough to allow Verne to quite his day job. That novelhad been initially rejected by a number of publishers who hadfound it “too scientific,” yet it was not a true science fiction workby any measure. Even Verne later admitted that his primaryconcern was not the technology: “I wrote Five Weeks in aBalloon, not as a story about ballooning, but as a story aboutAfrica. I was always greatly interested in geography and travel.” He followed this up with another travel novel, The Adventures ofCaptain Hatteras, which deals with an arctic expedition. ThenVerne, trying to top these exciting travelogues, concocts the ideaof trip to a place where no one has gone before. Travel literaturenow morphs into conceptual fiction. Professor Otto Lidenbrock, a Hamburg geologist has found an oldmanuscript in runic script with a coded message hidden in itspages. By deciphering its text, he learns of an access point to theinterior of the planet in a volcanic crater in Iceland. Dragging hisreluctant nephew Axel along, and picking up a taciturn guide onthe way, our Professor embarks on a journey to the center of theearth. Verne was forced to adopt a science fiction approach here, butthe science is dicey at best. A real journey to the center of theearth would result in a quick death for the travelers. Thetemperature at the core is estimated to be 7,000 degreesFahrenheit, a little bit cooler than the surface temperate of theSun (9,000 degrees Fahrenheit), but still requiring a strongly-worded travel advisory warning. Most experts in Verne’s dayswould have asserted the impossibility of his story’s premise, andthough the novelist tries to dance around this issue, he neverreally offers a credible explanation. “I believe and will alwaysbelieve in core heat,” his narrator remarks in the final pages of thebook; “but I admit that certain as yet ill-defined circumstancescan modify this law under the impact of natural phenomena.” But Verne’s genius lay in precisely this—forcing his story beyondthe limitations of conventional realism, and embracing theimaginative possibilities of story-telling. In the course of thisnovel, he brings prehistoric creatures back to life, inventsunderground oceans and summons up strange sources ofatmospheric light in the dark recesses of the earth. He even hints,in a passage later added to the book, at the existence of hugehuman-type creatures living below ground. The result is adifferent breed of adventure story, one premised on theideologies of a technological age, but not restricted by itslimitations.Now don’t assume that Verne completely discards the sciencehere In truth, he shows his devotion to it most clearly in thetangents and discursions of his novel. Some of these stray farfrom the story at hand. Our author takes time to discuss thesource of eider down (“In the first days of summer, the female, akind of pretty duck…”), the nature of geological formations (“It isknown that basalt is a brownish rock of igneous origin…”), theconstruction of early experiments in electric lighting (“ARuhmkorff device consists of a Bunsen battery operated bymeans of potassium dichromate…”), and a host of other matterswith no direct bearing on the unfolding adventure. But Verne’saudience saw him as more than a storyteller. He also delightedthem as a bold speculative thinker and close observer of thenatural world, and this attitude figures on almost every page ofJourney to the Center of the Earth. Verne established the formula for his greatest successes here. From this point on, his most successful books will retain his earlyinterest in travel literature, but never allow a slavish devotion torealism to cramp his style. A patina of science is usuallyapparent, but when forced to make a choice between plausiblenarratives and imaginatively charged scenarios, he wisely opts forthe latter. This recipe proved to have staying power, not just forVerne himself, but for the world of fiction in general. Incombining the fanciful perspective of the fabulist with thecuriosity of the technologist and experimental researcher, hecreated nothing short of a new tone for the novel, one that stillresonates with readers and inspires other authors more than acentury after his death.

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End Time: 2024-09-17T17:13:56.000Z

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