The year Orinoco appeared in French, 1898, was the year procolonialist Anglo-American publishers decided to end their twenty-five-year tradition of promptly offering Verne’s latest work in English. The translation would have appeared between the time the United States took Cuba and Puerto Rico and the time Rudyard Kipling urged Americans to crush Filipino patriots as America’s part in taking up the “white man’s burden”—when an American general thought it would be necessary to kill half the Filipino rebels in order to “civilize” the other half. At the same time, the major powers were all rushing to plunder big chunks of Africa and Asia. Suppression of an anticolonialist writer was ideologically well timed.
Yet when you go from this introduction to the text of Orinoco itself, you will be properly perplexed. In the very opening chapter, Verne drops an unpleasant remark about “Negro blood.” Throughout, he disparages many Indians and “half-breeds,” using the word “savages” all too recklessly. He fails now and then to think of the Indians’ side of the story: they cannot forget that for centuries they have been invaded and enslaved by the white man.
But there are background circumstances that become relevant here. All his life Verne waxed hot and cold about the idea of progress. Scholars used to think that he was optimistic on that subject mainly at the beginning of his career and grew more pessimistic as his life wore on. But the recent discovery of the manuscript of Paris in the XXth Century (written in 1863 but not published until 1994) makes it clear that Verne had been deeply ambivalent about “progress” from the very start. The pessimism of Paris caused his publisher to reject it; not until Verne was famous could he once again reveal that side of himself.
“Progress,” colonialism, and “race” stand in a reliable relationship to each other in Verne’s moods. When he felt confident about “progress,” he saw it as the work of civilization, which in his day meant the advances of the white race. Any race opposing the spread of civilization (like the Sioux in Around the World in Eighty Days) was unfortunately standing in the way of the white race’s “manifest destiny.” But whenever Verne doubted “progress,” his tolerance of so-called anti-progress forces flourished. Verne himself usually opposes “colonialism,” which is what “spreading civilization” tends to be all about. And whenever he examines a nonwhite close up—as when he portrays Gomo in Orinoco—his basic human sympathy dominates all other considerations. Gomo is not nonwhite—he is a fellow person, an equal.
We must consider too the climate created by Darwin. Although Verne was not an out-and-out Darwinist, he, like most nineteenth-century intellectuals, was aware that history involves evolution. The prevailing idea—even among many social scientists—was that the white race was the first to reach the top rung on the evolutionary ladder. Other races were still evolving, presumably up the same ladder. Well into the twentieth century it was customary for prominent international leaders such as Herbert Hoover to speak of “the lower races.” Missionaries—of whom we meet a few in Orinoco—saw it as their duty to help these people hasten their climb up the ladder. But the imperialists’ purpose often overrode the clergy’s.
One other important idea: Verne seemed compelled to give voice—in his more than sixty books—to virtually every point of view, from anarchism and anti-Semitism to fascism and socialism. And here it’s urgent to take an honest look at literary history. We simply must admit that, from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Dickens, our greatest writers imbibed such biases as anti-Semitism and male supremacy as part of their normal religious upbringing, their everyday hearsay. As late as 1940, one of our leading poets, W. H. Auden, an Oxford graduate, told me that it was impossible to escape such taint even in the great British universities. (Admirers of the 1981 film Chariots of Fire will understand the subtleties in what Auden meant.) It’s a sobering realization that Jules Verne (1828–1905) and Charles Dickens (1812–1870), when compared to most of their contemporaries, prove to be quite broadminded.
So which of Verne’s conflicting attitudes toward colonialism represents his own deepest feelings? For Jean Chesneaux, author of the authoritative work on the subject,8 for Taves, and for me, Verne’s dominant tone, the stronger underlying emotion, the full power of Verne’s Id, connote anti-imperialism.
From the viewpoint of his publishers in English-speaking lands, Verne’s lapses into colonialist and racist attitudes did not outweigh his frequent condemnations of imperialism. So they first bowdlerized Verne’s books and then discontinued them. After all, there were hordes of writers taking a 100 percent procolonialist stance, glorifying the major powers for taking up “the … burden.” There was no need to continue publishing a writer who had mixed feelings about progress, civilization, and imperialism. And, at the risk of committing “presentism,” we will examine the ramifications of Verne’s conflict more thoroughly in the notes.
Verne usually juxtaposes Romanticist imagination against Positivist logic. As Evans has demonstrated in his Jules Verne Rediscovered (1988), this proves to be one of Verne’s best ways of achieving narrative tension.9 In The Mighty Orinoco he also uses an additional version of this approach: he juxtaposes the Quest for the Father against the experience of androgyny. The first is patriarchal in nature, the second egalitarian. Both are archetypal in their appeal. Verne launches the Father Quest early in his story and unveils the androgyny question midway through. Both themes involve the use of disguise; add surprises about the real identity of a character or two, and we have an example of perfect plotting.
In the Quest for the Father, Verne immerses us in a mainstream theme in Western literature at least as old as Homer (eighth century B.C.E.?). Ever since Telemachus set out to find his king-father Odysseus in The Odyssey, writers frequently remind us that in patriarchal society the male parent symbolizes the center of organization and authority, a source of meaning, purpose, and identity, a landmark of continuity. As the Freudians see it, one cannot achieve one’s own full development until one comes to terms with one’s father. As Jung expands the concept, that means exploring one’s legacy from both the male and female sides (a point that also becomes pertinent in our story).
The Vernian Quest, though, need not be for one’s biological father, as it is in Orinoco and in The Children of Captain Grant (1868). It can be an unconscious search for a “perfect father,” a father figure stronger or more influential than the biological father. In Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, Professor Aronnax’s irrational attraction to Captain Nemo has been seen as fulfilling such a deep psychological need. And Conseil’s blind dependence on the professor is an extreme example. (It illustrates, too, Verne’s use of counterpoint, a technique prominent also in Orinoco.) French psychoanalytic critics have viewed Verne’s portrayals of father-seeking characters, as in Orinoco, as reflecting his own search for and reliance on his own “perfect father,” his publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel. And indeed, Verne paints the father found in Orinoco as a perfectly idealized patriarch.
It’s possible that Verne chose the problem of the Father Quest because it provides a beautiful parallel to his main scientific theme: the hunt for the source of the mighty Orinoco. This scientific search gives Verne his chance to introduce this work with a comic scene, with slapstick characters; comedy is often his way of educating his reader painlessly about a question in science. But this theme, too, has its serious psychological aspects. Going upstream is a symbolic way of going back in one’s own life, learning about its many tributaries, its continuous variations within one central, domineering, inexorable flow. In this larger sense, several of the characters are heading toward the discovery of their own nature. And readers are unconsciously but gratefully associating to their own sources and flow.
Symbolic too is the fact that the upstream struggle leads us to a utopia that not only, as suggested earlier, seems based on the de las Casas approach, but also matches other classic utopian efforts. The Orinoco utopia, like Plato’s, thrives under a philosopher-king and, like Sir Thomas More’s, is created by an outsider. One might not want to live in this particular
