the past” (II, 11).25 Other problems must be due to poor copy-editing. “Ten thousand francs” (I, 1) should logically be Unionist or Confederate currency. Prisoners of war were not usually “left at liberty” (I, 2—as shown also in the illustration). Smith is recorded as being “in all the battles of the Civil War” but simultaneously and implausibly “entrusted … with the management of the railroads” (I, 2). Given that the distance from Richmond to the Mysterious Island is about 6,850 miles and that the balloonists travel for 91 hours, their average speed is a remarkable 75 mph. It is strange that Harbert does not accompany Spilett and Neb in their search for Smith when he is feared dead, and does not even look very actively himself (I, 4). It is surprising that the settlers do not celebrate Christmas (the reason presumably being that France did not either). Verne refers to “the winter of 1866–67” (II, 11), but in the southern hemisphere it should simply be “the winter of 1866.” The narrator mentions “Flotsam Point” in Part I (I, 21), although the colonists only give it this name later (II, 2). When Smith first explores the shaft he takes “a revolver” (II, 11), but its origin is mysterious since no such weapon is listed in the contents of the chest (II, 2). The narrator refers in 1866 to “the thirty-seven stars representing the thirty-seven states of the Union” (II, 11), whereas the thirty-seventh star was added only in 1867. Throughout the book, the settlers work incredibly quickly: only five days to unload the Speedy, transport four huge cannons a considerable distance, recover the chains and anchors, and remove the copper plating from the hull; a few months to construct the first vessel, 110 feet long; and a matter of days to build a hydraulic lift. It also seems implausible that the six settlers and the dog are unharmed by the explosion of the Island; that they manage to save the chest and provisions when the Island is crumbling beneath their feet; and even that the Duncan arrives just as they are dying.
More seriously, the central theme of the novel, Nemo’s actions, seems highly suspect, for many of the final explanations (III, 16) of “The Secret of the Island” do not make sense. Although only Smith’s footprints are found outside the excavation (I, 10), Nemo is meant to have rescued him from the water and taken him there. When “Top [is] thrown … by some unknown force … ten feet above the surface of the lake” (I, 16), huge power must have been used to catapult him without being seen.
Verne’s shipwreckees and castaways have an easy time of it compared with real-life stories. As Pencroff points out, the whole Mysterious Island is in fact self-consciously artificial, “created especially for people to be shipwrecked on, where … poor devils can always manage” (II, 9). The reason, of course, is again Captain Nemo, who is heavy-handedly falsifying everything from the backdrop. Nemo’s backstage meddling is indeed a direct citation from Robinson Crusoe, with the single line of footprints, the message in a bottle that floats by at just the right moment, and above all the chest containing every object conceivably useful to a Robinson—even a Polynesian dictionary. The captain may in fact be deliberately showing up the artifices used in the previous works. As an ironic re-reading of Robinson Crusoe, or rather of The Swiss Family Robinson’s reading of Robinson Crusoe, the novel simultaneously reinforces its own narration and undermines it. By referring so insistently to its fourth-level nature, as a text reading another text which is itself reading Defoe, himself perhaps based on real events, Verne’s novel is emphasizing its own fictional status. The logical consequence is that Nemo, the Nautilus, and the Island will have to disappear at the end.
Of course Verne anticipates some of the reader’s objections by putting the same objections in the characters’ mouths. The novel contains its own critical commentary, making it very modern; but such an idea will not stop readers from continuing to dig out the mysteries. Some slips must be blamed on the editor’s repeated changes, making complete coherence more difficult. But many of the implausibilities may even have been deliberate. Many seem to constitute a weary defiance to Hetzel’s interference, as if Verne’s heart was no longer in producing plausible solutions.
The inconsistencies are inseparable from our interpretation of the novel as a whole. As regards the closing chapters in particular, we need to reject as misconceived the Iowa episode and the implausible religious sentiments and hold on firm to Nemo’s dying “Independence!” However, such a position still leaves many important questions unanswered.
Is Smith (or Hetzel) correct to accuse Nemo of “fighting against necessary progress”? Is Nemo’s life really an “error” because it is solitary? Or does the amazing luck of sharing his remote desert island with the five settlers cancel the error? Was British colonialism in India negative? What should we do when confronted with forces we know to be wrong but irresistible? Should Christian values of forgiveness be replaced by more straightforward Old-Testament ideas? Is revenge sometimes a legitimate action, as it appears to be in both Twenty Thousand Leagues and MI?
The answers are complex, and my conclusion will skirt round many of them. As we have seen, the responses reside in the multiple intersections of the characters and the Island, the historical and geographical circumstances, the French literary canon and the long series of previous Robinsons, exploration and comfort, the new and the old, and the writer and the publisher.
The correspondence reveals that Verne put his heart and soul into his Robinsonades and that they represent for him the conceptual core of the Extraordinary Journeys. Yet the catastrophic fate of “UR” showed that for the publisher something was lacking, that the center could not hold. The key to the enigma may lie in what Verne calls “the search for the absolute.” The entire second half of his production suggests that Hetzel’s premonition was partly justified, for after MI any element of transcendence, any approach of the sacred has disappeared: “the thrill has gone.” While explanations of the discrepancy in terms of Verne’s life and historical circumstances must be relevant, the works themselves are where we must continue to look for answers.
Verne’s characters inhabit their space passionately. They seek the most economical and powerful modus operandi, as if carrying out a minimax factorial analysis to produce the unique best solution. But to what problem? The works previous to MI center on exploration towards a unique goal. The heroes are able to sustain a moving equilibrium en route by balancing precariously between the inside and the outside, the present and the past. They calmly eat sea-food before venturing into the midst of the raging depths or study man’s greatest works as preparation for confronting the secret of destiny in the ruins of Atlantis or the center of the earth. Once the goal is reached, however, what Verne invariably calls the climax subsides and the heroes limp bedraggedly back home. It is in the movement towards the unknown, in other words, that the Vernian novel finds its reason for existing.
MI lacks the geographical goal, but compensates by incorporating the unknown into its very heart. Left to their own devices the colonists would be unable to say why they are there, where the transcendence lies. But part of the absolute quest of MI is in the exploration of the Robinsonade and the nature of the Island, and it is these ongoing experiences that define the happiness of the settlers. The Island is a world away from the battles of the Civil War, and from the natives of the south Pacific; hanging over it, nevertheless, is the awareness that soon there will be no mysterious bolt-holes left. Lincoln represents then the limit of the series of transcendent points on the globe and of the marvelous vehicles to get to them: an unstable island not much bigger than the monstrous vessel that forms Propeller Island but still not completely explorable since concealing in its subconscious, uterine bowels a semi-mechanical, semi-divine monster. The revolutionary Secret of the Island complements the bourgeois habits of the settlers.
Verne knows his classics, and the influence of Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Stendhal, Balzac, and even Zola is visible on every page of MI. The paradox is that he has set himself an apparently sub-literary goal: to go one better than the series of preceding Robinsons, to sum them all up but especially show them up, to synthesize their experience into one mega-Robinsonade that will start from the bottom but go higher if not faster than anything that has gone before. In his naiveté
