The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (8 page)

In the France of 1863,
Five Weeks in a Balloon
was exactly the right book at the right moment. The use of domesticated science-beyond-science to influence the present-day world was something new in fiction. Verne’s story was an imagination, to be sure, but so spare and in command of fact was it, so confident and plausible in presentation, that it almost might be tomorrow’s headline.

And it was. Not only was the construction and launching of Nadar’s actual balloon widely discussed in the press in 1863, but, in a masterpiece of timing, just after
Five Weeks in a Balloon
was published, John Speke emerged again from the jungle to say that he had found the source of the Nile in Lake Victoria the previous July—just one month after Verne’s fictional balloon was supposed to have made its passage. To use imaginary science to steal a march on the contemporary explorers of Africa, and be proven correct—how audacious!
Five Weeks in a Balloon
was a great popular success, not just with those boys born since mid-century who were its intended audience, but with adults as well.

Here, at last, was the literary career that Verne had always desired. He bade farewell to his friends at the stock exchange—according to one of them, in these words:

I am leaving you. I have had an idea, the sort of idea that, according to Girardin, ought to come to every man once a day, but has come to me only once in my life, the sort of idea that should make a man’s fortune. I have just written a novel in a new form, one that is entirely my own. If it succeeds, I shall have stumbled upon a gold mine. In that case, I shall go on writing and writing without pause, while the rest of you will go on buying shares the day before they drop, and selling them the day before they rise. I am leaving the Bourse. Good evening, my friends.
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What was this once-in-a-lifetime idea that had descended upon Verne and kissed him on the brow so tenderly? Lacking direct testimony from Verne of the kind that we have had from our earlier writers, it is difficult to say how he might have phrased his intentions in 1863—or how he did actually phrase them. Verne had such an intense sense of personal privacy that in 1898, seven years before he died, he burned his early unpublished manuscripts, his letters and private papers. His thinking is veiled from us.

However, one bit of evidence about his idea is to be found in the public phrase that Verne chose to characterize this new novel form of his—
voyages extraordinaires
. Extraordinary voyages. This is the outwardness, the common frame within which sixty-five books by Verne would be made. In this concept is Verne’s abiding love of geography and imaginary travel.

As for the content of his voyages, that was foretold by Verne in that long-ago letter to his parents in which he spoke of science “performing miracles and thrusting into the unknown.” Verne had faith in science. Science—performing miracles and thrusting into the unknown—was Verne’s chosen guide and companion on his extraordinary voyages.

Whatever conscious thoughts of geography and science Verne may have had in mind, however, there is another element in Verne’s formula for the extraordinary voyage that cannot be overlooked. It may be the most important: Edgar Allan Poe. In the same way that Mary Shelley’s original intent in conceiving Frankenstein was no more than to write a ghost story
right,
at its most essential and immediate, Verne’s gold mine of an idea might well have been as simple as this—to write Edgar Poe
right.

Verne the late Romantic admired Poe deeply. He liked Poe’s cryptograms, puzzles and strange facts. He was fascinated by Poe’s fevered characters. He loved Poe’s occasional use of scientific materials, and his sense of mystery, his ability to dislocate vision.

But Verne the scientific Victorian was bothered by Poe’s incomplete trust in science and his general lack of concern for plausibility. In spite of the note at the end of “Hans Pfaall,” it was clear to Verne that Poe didn’t really care a great deal about plausibility. In his essay on Poe, Verne specifically criticized “Hans Pfaall” for its abandonment of scientific principle in the matter of that thin atmosphere extending from the Earth to the Moon that permits the balloon to make its passage.

Verne wrote: “The most elementary laws of physics and mechanics are boldly transgressed. This has always seemed astonishing to me as coming from Poe, who, by a few inventions, could have made his story more plausible.”
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That was where Poe could be improved upon.

All of the early extraordinary voyages might be described as Jules Verne’s attempt to write Edgar Allan Poe more plausibly. At the outset of the series, an alternative description of Verne’s stories was offered by his publisher:
Voyages dans les mondes connus et inconnus.
Journeys to worlds known and unknown. By enlisting the protective power of science and placing all his trust in it, Verne aimed to go into the unknown in confidence where Poe had gone doubtfully and pulled up short.

This may have been Verne’s aim, but it was one that he was only able to carry out in part. He was able to set off into the unknown bravely enough, even to enter the region of novelty and wonder that Poe evoked but avoided. But Verne wasn’t able to remain very long in the heady atmosphere of the World Beyond the Hill.

Just as in his first story of 1851, “A Balloon Journey,” Verne’s wild Romantic heart and his sober Victorian head still remained in conflict. Again and again in his early stories, Verne would wrap himself in super-science and launch himself into the unknown. All would go well enough for a time, but at last, in each case, the mystery would become too much for him, the threat of transcendence too overwhelming. Verne’s nerve would break and he would retreat to the safety of the Village.

Verne was a Nineteenth Century man. He identified with the powers of science and technology and the changes in life they had brought. Science-beyond-science, so alien and dangerous to Mary Shelley and her fellow Romantics, was a form of transcendence Verne could face without fear. He’d grown up with it. It seemed almost natural to him.

In Verne’s stories, transcendent power was presented as familiar and plausible. It was identified with contemporary scientific knowledge and practice. Its mysterious effects were limited to the powering of super-scientific means of travel and exploration, vehicles and devices similar to actual inventions of the day but in advance of them, like the balloon
Victoria
in
Five Weeks in a Balloon.
This domesticated science-beyond-science was one of Jules Verne’s two major contributions to the development of SF.

The other and greater was his penetration into unknown places in the World Beyond the Hill, one of them at least an undeniably transcendent realm. This was difficult for Verne. Domesticating science-beyond-science was a plausible and rational thing to do. But to leap with this science-beyond-science into the World Beyond the Hill was not rational. In the World Beyond the Hill, far beyond the reach of Village society and law, untamed undomesticated mystery is to be found. For Verne, this was almost as frightening and unbearable a prospect as it had been for Poe.

To Poe, the unknown region of novelty and wonder wore the aspect of Death. It was guarded by awesome spectral figures. It was filled with dark and hideous mysteries.

For Verne, the World Beyond the Hill was not quite as deadly as it was for Poe. For Verne, the unknown World Beyond the Hill was identified with sex and irrationality. He pictured it again and again as the Abyss, alluring and dangerous, a yawning chasm gaping wide into which rationality dare not take a header. To his great credit, however, once or twice Verne took the plunge.

Verne’s formula of imaginary science, travel and Edgar Allan Poe, and his yearnings and limitations, can all be seen displayed in his second extraordinary voyage.
The Adventures of Captain Hatteras
was serialized in 1864, initiating Hetzel’s new juvenile magazine, the
Magasin d’éducation et de récréation,
of which Verne had been made a co-editor.

In
The Adventures of Captain Hatteras
the aim of travel is the North Pole. Like the goal in
Five Weeks in a Balloon,
this was a unique spot on the Earth that contemporary explorers strained to reach, a place with mystical overtones. The Poles were still a great unknown in the Nineteenth Century. As in Poe’s
A. Gordon Pym
or Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein,
they might be treated as a region of novelty and wonder.

We may remember that at the end of
Frankenstein
the creature intends to make his way to the North Pole and there immolate himself. Even more interestingly, at the outset of
Frankenstein
the polar explorer who receives Victor Frankenstein’s story and the last confessions of his creature writes in anticipation to his sister:

“I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight. . . . There snow and frost are banished; and sailing over a calm sea, we may be wafted to a land surpassing in wonders and beauty every region hitherto discovered on the habitable globe.”
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But if a transcendent land with the familiar wonders of the old spirit realm does not reveal itself to this explorer at the Pole, he expects that he may at the least discover there a wonder of a new kind—the secret of the compass. That is, if not old-fashioned transcendence, then science-beyond-science.

For his part, Edgar Allan Poe was fascinated by the theory of one John Cleves Symmes that great holes exist at the Poles which lead to another world at the interior of the Earth. Poe suggested this theory a number of times in his stories without ever quite daring to propound it directly. We may remember the great chasm at the South Pole at the conclusion of
A. Gordon Pym.
Beyond this, in Poe’s very first story, “MS. Found in a Bottle” (1833), there is a gigantic whirlpool at the South Pole which swallows the narrator’s ship. And in “Hans Pfaall,” as the balloon rises above the North Pole toward the Moon, a sharply defined circular depression is seen in the ice “whose dusky hue, varying in intensity, was, at all times, darker than any other spot upon the visible hemisphere, and occasionally deepened into the most absolute blackness.”
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Verne’s party to the North Pole in
Captain Hatteras
consists of an American arctic explorer, a ship’s doctor, two sailors, and their leader, the Romantic English multimillionaire, Captain Hatteras, who is bent on being the first man to set foot on the North Pole. This central character is the impediment to Verne’s success. Although Verne cites many scientific facts as his party suffers through great realistic arctic hardships, his main character is not devoted to science. Rather, Captain Hatteras is a madman with an obsession akin to the mania of the stowaway in “A Balloon Journey.”

Just as Poe’s Pym had found those strange open waters that were previously expected by Mary Shelley’s captain in the vicinity of the Pole, so do Verne’s explorers, who launch a small sloop they have brought with them by dogsled. Verne, no less than Poe, was fascinated by the Symmes Hole theory. His man of fact, the ship’s doctor, observes: “In recent times it has even been suggested that there are great chasms at the Poles; it is through these that there emerges the light which forms the Aurora, and you can get down through them into the interior of the earth.”
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However, here, as in subsequent Verne novels, the high Romantic expectations of his characters outstrip the actualities they are permitted to discover. This possibility of a Symmes hole is too wild and dangerous a mystery for Verne to contend with. Instead, like Poe, he shies away from it, and makes a non-transcendent substitution. In the middle of the eerie northern sea, Verne’s party comes upon a small island. On this island is a flaming volcano. It is the volcano that is the location of the North Pole.

Captain Hatteras the Romantic will not be kept from his goal. Like his predecessor in “A Balloon Journey,” he is drawn to the fire. He rushes up to the lip of the volcano and is about to throw himself into the abyss when the American pulls him back to safety. Hatteras faints. When he returns to consciousness, he is hopelessly insane.

And so the story concludes, as an old-fashioned Romantic cliché. This is certainly no improvement on Poe.

Hatteras the Romantic destabilizes Verne’s story. With him running things, Verne is unbalanced from the beginning. No more than he will land on the sun will Verne enter a Symmes Hole or leap into a living volcano and then imagine what comes next. And certainly not with a madman like Hatteras at the center of his story.

In his next novel, the third extraordinary voyage, however, Verne took the substance of
Captain Hatteras
and recast it.
Journey to the Centre of the Earth,
also first published in 1864, is the most imaginative SF story that Jules Verne ever wrote. In this story, in the course of pursuing fact down a rabbit hole into the earth, almost without realizing it, Verne’s travelers penetrate into what is undeniably the World Beyond the Hill.

One vital recasting that Verne made in
Journey to the Centre of the Earth
was to make the leader of his expedition a dedicated man of science rather than a Romantic. Professor Lidenbrock the German geologist may have his little obsessions and rigidities, but he is no egocentric madman. Verne can trust his stability as he could not trust the unscientific judgment of Captain Hatteras. The Romantic in
Journey to the Centre of the Earth
is the narrator, Professor Lidenbrock’s ineffectual nephew Axel, who is much given to fainting.

Once again, there is a volcano, but this time an extinct one located in the wastes of Iceland rather than at the emotionally charged North Pole. The story begins when Professor Lidenbrock and Axel discover and decipher a coded message from a heretical Sixteenth Century Icelandic alchemist which has fallen out of an old manuscript.

The message reads: “Descend into the crater of Sneffells Yokul, over which the shadow of Scartaris falls before the kalends of July, bold traveller, and you will reach the centre of the earth. I have done this. Arne Saknussemm.”
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