Comments & Questions

Comments & Questions

In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.

Comments

JULES VERNE

My object has been to depict the earth, and not the earth alone, but the universe, for I have sometimes taken my readers away from the earth, in the novel. And I have tried at the same time to realize a very high ideal of beauty of style. It is said that there can’t be any style in a novel of adventure, but that isn’t true; though I admit that it is very much more difficult to write such a novel in a good literary form than the studies of character which are so in vogue to-day.

—as reported to R. H. Sherard and printed in McClure’s Magazine (January 1894)

THE NATION

The death of Jules Verne should strike with a sense of personal bereavement all boys who read and all men in whom the romantic imagination of boyhood has not yet perished. He was a prophet with honor in his own country, for he and the famous Cathedral of Amiens were the twin marvels of that provincial city. Their two pictures, in all sizes and styles, stare from hundreds of shop windows. But this tribute is only a faint echo of that which came to him from every corner of the globe. Wherever love of adventure, coupled with curiosity as to the mechanism of the universe, exists, there Jules Verne finds his disciples. ‘Around the World in Eighty Days,’ ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,’ ‘The Mysterious Island,’ ‘A Voyage to the Centre of the Earth,’ ‘From the Earth to the Moon’—here is a rollcall that should stir the pulses of graybeards, and almost summon back their irrevocable youth....

The books of Jules Verne are the ‘Arabian Nights’ elaborately fitted with all modern improvements. The genii and the sorcerers of a few centuries ago have their lineal descendants in the accomplished gentlemen who are sometimes described as “the wizards of science.” A submarine boat, a fast express, an automobile, a dirigible balloon, or a hollow shell shot at the moon, is a comfortable and highly plausible substitute for a travelling carpet or a roc. Given the problem of annihilating space and time, the unknown authors of the ‘Arabian Nights’ and Jules Verne both solve it according to formulas popular in their own day.

The charm of mystery is evident in the very title of Verne’s works. No lad of twelve can resist the challenge of ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,’ ‘Voyage to the Centre of the Earth,’ and ‘The Mysterious Island.’ Had the subject-matter belied the captions, many eager readers would still have pegged away, lured by the mere magic of the words stamped on the binding. But the stories are worthy of their delicious names....

On the scientific side of Verne’s writings one may easily lay undue stress. He is not the first to embed scientific knowledge in stories for boys, though he is uncommonly successful in sugar-coating the pill. The method of Abbott and his imitators is to let Rollo draw Uncle George into endless and often futile discussions of the wonders of earth and sky. There is too much talk and too little action. Verne, on the contrary—and he has had many followers, notably H. G. Wells—vitalizes the dead fact by employing it in some striking feat in mastery of man or nature.—March 30, 1905

CHARLES F HORNE

Jules Verne was the establisher of a new species of storytelling, that which interweaves the most stupendous wonders of science with the simplest facts of human life. Our own Edgar Allan Poe had pointed the way; and Verne was ever eager to acknowledge his indebtedness to the earlier master. But Poe died; and it was Verne who went on in book after book, fascinating his readers with cleverly devised mysteries, instructing and astonishing them with the new discoveries of science, inspiring them with the splendor of man’s destiny. When, as far back as 1872, his early works were “crowned” by the French Academy, its Perpetual Secretary, M. Patin, said in his official address, “The well-worn wonders of fairyland are here replaced by a new and more marvelous world, created from the most recent ideas of science.”

More noteworthy still is Verne’s position as the true, the astonishingly true, prophet of the discoveries and inventions that were to come. He was far more than the mere creator of that sort of scientific fairyland of which Secretary Patin spoke, and with which so many later writers, Wells, Haggard and Sir Conan Doyle, have since delighted us. He himself once keenly contrasted his own methods with those of Wells, the man he most admired among his many followers. Wells, he pointed out, looked centuries ahead and out of pure imagination embodied the unknowable that some day might perchance appear. “While I,” said Verne, “base my inventions on a groundwork of actual fact.”

—from his introduction to the Works of Jules Verne (1911)

GEORGE ORWELL

Like most writers, Jules Verne was one of those people to whom nothing ever happens.

—from the New Statesman (January 18, 1941 )

KINGSLEY AMIS

With Verne we reach the first great progenitor of modern science fiction. In its literary aspect his work is, of course, of poor quality, a feature certainly reproduced with great fidelity by most of his successors.

—from New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction ( 1960)

WILLIAM GOLDING

Verne’s verbal surface lacks the slickness of the professional; it is turgid and slack by turns. Only the brio of his enthusiasm carries us forward from one adventure to another.

—from The Hot Gates (1961)

JORGE LUIS BORGES

Before Wells resigned himself to the role of sociological spectator, he was an admirable storyteller, an heir to the concise style of Swift and Edgar Allan Poe; Verne was a pleasant and industrious journeyman. Verne wrote for adolescents; Wells, for all ages.

—as translated by Ruth L. C. Simms, from Other Inquisitions 1937 1952 ( 1964)

ISAAC ASIMOV

[Verne] gives careful detail, when detail is advisable, and makes omissions when it is safe. He carefully overcomes a known difficulty by reference to some authentic scientific hypothesis which, for the purposes of the story, turns out to be true. He uses currently impressive words and phrases at key points.

Done well enough, as Verne does, a story, however fantastic it may seem, becomes acceptable not only in its own time but also a century later when its science is as outmoded as Dante’s descriptions of the Inferno.—from his introduction to A Journey to the Center of the Earth (1966)

Questions

1. What is the appeal of fiction, movies, and paintings that depict events that could never occur or things that could never exist? Is it pure escapism? Or is there something more fulfilling about these fantasies? Do they somehow reflect on the world around us?2. Think of the metaphoric implications of digging deeper and deeper until you come to a hidden world within the world, a world in which monsters roam. In part, is Verne’s story about what lies at the hidden center of the human mind? Or does it concern the monstrous at the heart of the day-to-day workings of human society?3. In what ways is Journey to the Center of the Earth tied to its own time, and in what ways does it represent universal, timeless concerns?4. How does Journey to the Center of the Earth compare to other works of science fiction? Is it as compelling as, say, Star Trek or Jurassic Park?5. How does the novel foreground the contrast between animate beings and the inanimate world? How do Verne’s metaphors complicate or blur this opposition?6. Are the characters intended as realistic figures, or are they symbolic representations of certain mindsets? How do their relations to one another affect the outcome of the story?