Beast in Competition] (1910).
Like Samuel Berthoud, Rengade was a qualified physician—he always signed his plays “Dr. J. Rengade”—but, unlike Berthoud, he does not seem ever to have practiced medicine after finishing his qualificatory stints as an intern in two Parisian hospitals. Instead, he preferred to follow Parville’s example in launching a career as one of the first generation of scientific journalists; he launched a popular periodical of his own in 1867, La Santé, journal de vulgarisation médicale et scientific [Health, a magazine of medical and scientific popularization], although it ceased publication a year later. Given that he was a full time professional writer, and that his two exercises in fictional popularization sold so well, it is perhaps surprising that he did not do more in that vein, but it is possible that he simply realized that he could not compete with Verne, and conceded defeat in that particular arena. If the idea of writing Voyage sous les flots and Les Monstres invisibles had, in fact, been Brunet’s rather than Rengade’s, it is also possible that Rengade regarded them as mere hackwork, perhaps not entirely unworthy of one Molière’s heirs, but nevertheless an occasion for dabbling rather than the adoption of a vocation.
Juxtaposed with Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, Voyages sous les flots is certainly a crude affair, especially seen from a contemporary viewpoint, from which its treatment of the natives of Polynesia exhibits all the most unacceptable features of crude racism, but that probably did not work entirely to its disadvantage in terms of appealing to its intended audience. Indeed, its crudity makes it all the clearer as a demonstration of how little was known about the undersea world in 1867. We are so familiar nowadays with the results of sophisticated underwater camera-work that we all know what the world of the sea-bed looks like, in terms of its décor and population, and we also know how difficult it is to see anything at all down there in all but the clearest and calmest of waters, and what vast spaces there are between the surface of the oceans and their abyssal depths. In 1867, however, even the most advanced diving-bells could not go down very far and had not brought back very much in the way of eye-witness accounts, and although the catches of fishermen and other dredgers of the sea-bed had brought back vast numbers of samples of underwater organisms, it was by no means easy to perform the imaginative gymnastics required to envision those specimens in their natural state.
Modern readers know full well that the sea-bed is not brightly illuminated by vast hosts of phosphorescent organisms, that the notion of the weed-choked Sargasso Sea popular in the nineteenth century was more myth than reality, that narwhals do not engage in titanic battles with whales, and that the notion of dangling a trapeze underneath a fast-moving submarine to serve as a viewing platform for men in canvas suits breathing air from the interior of the submarine through long rubber tubes is monumentally silly. The fact that such narrative devices did not seem entirely ridiculous to Rengade and his contemporary readers, however, serves to remind us that the reason that no one prior to 1867 had dared to write a novel about an underwater voyage is that no one had any but the slightest idea of what such a voyage might reveal.
The project was just as difficult, in its own way, as constructing a plausible account of a journey to Mars, whose surface was at least visible to astronomical observation—albeit, as it turned out, somewhat unreliably. Verne’s and Rengade’s novels were, quite literally, imaginative leaps in the dark, taking their authors and readers into a world in which large-scale imaginative constructions had to be based on woefully inadequate informational foundations. If Rengade went spectacularly awry, he did not do so to a much greater extent than Verne, and the latter writer’s enormous literary achievement was more a matter of glossing over his inadequacy of his resources than any spectacular anticipatory success. If Verne did not reproduce all of Rengade’s errors in chronicling the exploits of Captain Nemo, that was partly because he had already made many of them before, in Les Enfants du capitaine Grant, serialized in the Magasin d’Éducation et de Récréation in 1865-67, from which Rengade seems to have borrowed considerable inspiration in shaping his plot—which is, in essence, a brutal abridgement of Verne’s, in which the submarine functions as a means of curtailment as well as a vehicle of revelation. (The novel in question was translated into English in three separately-titled volumes, but is best-known nowadays as In Search of the Castaways, under which title the story was filmed by Walt Disney’s company.)
Both Verne and Rengade deserve credit for taking on the task that they did; it really was a bold attempt to explore the unknown by means of the imagination. The lack of success they enjoyed in terms of accurate prediction of what future underwater exploration would actually reveal is somewhat beside the point; no one can know today what will only be discovered tomorrow. The real issue at stake is whether such journeys are worth undertaking, regardless of the scant chance of predictive success. Verne surely demonstrated that they are, and that entitled him to become the figurehead of an entire genre, which not only collated such attempts but also enabled them to achieve a measure of collective progress. Contrary to what René Pont-Jest thought, it is actually healthy for writers to take inspiration from one another, borrowing one another’s ideas in order to extract further mileage from them and exhibit the true breadth of their potential. Mere copying is fruitless, but development is anything but, and although much of the material contained in Voyage sous les flots is mere and somewhat inept copying, the narrative does have developmental ambitions, and Brunet and Rengade were correct in their belief that there really was additional mileage to be obtained from jumping on to the Hetzel-Verne bandwagon, in terms of seeing how far it could go, and in what directions.
It is difficult to judge the particular influence of Voyage sous les flots, which was bound to be eclipsed by its own model and by its accidental parallels with the serial novel Verne was writing alongside it, but it probably did serve as a significant exemplar to the other writers who soon began to flock to the Vernian banner, including Alphonse Brown, whose own career as a dedicated Vernian was launched in 1875 with La Conquête de l’air (1875; tr. as The Conquest of the Air), and Albert Robida, whose parodic Vernian fantasy Voyages trés extraordinaire de Saturnin Farandoul (1879; tr. as The Adventures of Saturnin Farandoul) surely has Voyage sous les flots in mind in one of the key incidents in the first of its five parts, in which the characters witness an undersea battle that results in one of them being carried away and temporarily lost.
Seen from the viewpoint of 1889, let alone from 2013, Voyage sous les flots is a historical curiosity, a strange specimen dredged up from the literary deeps, but, just as Louis Figuier was right in thinking that it was worth reprinting then, it is still worth translating now, precisely because it is such a revealing historical illustration. It was, in essence, the first Vernian novel written by someone other than Verne; the novel that demonstrated that the track, once beaten, was well worth treading repeatedly, and that there were potential rewards to be gained from a genre of voyages extraordinaires as well as a single series by a single author.
Seen as an adventure story, Voyage sous les flots is a cardinal example of what would later be considered to be “pulp fiction”—but that too is illuminating, given that there was not yet any such thing in 1867, which was prior to the advent of the cheap wood-pulp paper that made it possible to produce printed text at a price poor people could afford, thus encouraging the mass-production of fiction aimed at the uneducated and semi-literate. The fact that the novel seems so stereotyped and obsolete now, in its method as well as its content, is partly due to the fact that it was one of the models that helped to create the relevant stereotypes, and to pioneer the melodramatic fashions that were subsequently to become standardized in popular globetrotting action-adventure fiction. It is undoubtedly a bad book, but it is bad in interesting ways, and although it is not a great book, as some bad books are, it is nevertheless a narrative that has virtues, not only in addition to its badness but at their very heart. It is not entirely surprising that it was popular when it was first published in the 1860s, or that it posted a useful signpost for other writers, which Louis Figuier still thought important when he attempted to define, circumscribe and promote the genre of roman scientifique two decades later.
This translation was made from the copy of the second Brunet edition reproduced electronically in the Bibliothèque Nationale’s gallica website.
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