mandarine

After my recent diatribe against scientism, maybe this is the right moment to write a little something about Jules Verne, the archfather of scientism in literature. I used to love Jules Verne novels when I was a child, although the red cover of the hardback editions had always intimidated me. Then I had almost forgotten all I’d read until some years ago when I delved into ‘De la Terre à la Lune’ for a physics class I was giving: I ripped all space mechanics references from the book and made a very funny physics test out of them (providing that units were properly converted). The one question I remember best was an illustration of Michel Ardan’s head, where I had drawn a downward arrow with a legend ‘m.gamma’ representing the apparent weight of the head on the neck during the acceleration phase of the shell in the cannon. Students were expected to show that even with the hydraulic cushion below the cabin floor, there was no way Ardan & co. could come out alive from an acceleration of 21,000g (you can check for yourselves: the cannon is 900 feet long, the liberation velocity was and still is 11000 m/s), as the head would have appeared to weigh more than 30 tons, i.e. the weight of twenty midsize cars.

This gave me the opportunity to get reacquainted with Mr Verne, and also to discover that the critic in me had grown up a little in the meantime. Contrary to many children’s books which children love but which were not specifically written for children, I was more and more under the impression that Jules Verne was definitely targeting his writing at the young generations, often indulging in hasty opinions and facts he knew young readers could not verify (all the more so as Wikipedia was yet to be invented). I mean, for instance, the discussion about the parabola or the hyperbola in ‘Autour de la Lune’ is completely grotesque — everything we know today in terms of the space mechanics that is needed for travelling to the Moon was known at the time. Who would send astronauts to the Moon without even having computed a trajectory? (OK, they were long dead from the launch, but what if..). If it had been written before Newton’s or Lagrange’s time, I would have understood, but from Verne, this really looked like laziness. And the more I read, the more easy shortcuts I could spot, the more narrative ‘dei ex machina’ I found, and all that sort of things I would never contemplate if I was to claim the title of writer.

Very well then, but is it entertaining? Et bien, as sad and blasé as it may seem, the part I find entertaining is precisely the retrospective criticism, the rejoicing at how far we’ve grown, me since my early teens, and the world since the late XIXth century. Other than that, I am not sure.

How to escape from such a negative mood about Verne and start enjoying it again? I found the answer in LibriVox’s release of ‘Le Tour du Monde en Quatre-Vingt Jours’. Probably because I was now read the book to, I stopped being an inquisitive critic and went back to being an obedient listener, enjoying what happened just as it happened. Maybe part of the renewed interest came from the fact that the audiobook format was more adapted to the original format: the Verne book was published as a series in a journal, and the rhythm of the chapters is probably best felt when you do not try to read ten chapters in a single sitting. The quality of the recording by ezwa was excellent, and I found myself quite immersed in the story, somewhere between the XIXth century and pure fantasy, a world in which English gentlemen never smile, never flinch, never fear, in which ventriloquist puppets like Passepartout clumsily carry all the burden of voicing everybody’s emotions as well as all the comic resource, and in which Miss Aouda carries all the weight of Verne’s mainstream misogyny. I am sure ezwa’s tones and accents with emotions in the book did a lot for me: as the voice really sounded captivated by the story, it sort of relieved some of the effort I would have been unable to make for Verne.

Alas, towards the end of the story, I reverted to grumpy criticism: I was awaiting the moment when the party would sail across the 180th meridian and the date line. It was cheating, as I already knew the ending, but I had to find out how Verne had handled the narration to make sure the reader was not to suspect anything while Fogg, Passepartout, Aouda and Fix travelled across the United States and the Atlantic. Well, the fact is: he cheated. I was outraged.

Let me explain: the whole point of the book’s ending is that Fogg, travelling eastwards, has counted one more day than the number of days which have elapsed in London, and has overlooked the date line issue. Fogg knows that he must be back at the Reform Club in London before December 21st otherwise he loses his wager (and all his fortune, suits him right). Therefore, it is not his day count in his diary that matters, it is the current date. As soon as he is confronted to the real date in the United States, there is no possibility for him to overlook the date shift. Because he wanted Fogg to be unaware of the date issue and to believe he had arrived one day late in London, Verne had to make sure that from San Francisco on, the heroes would neither read nor hear the date or even the day of the week.

During the railroad trip, I can understand that Mr Fogg does not find clues of his mistake if there are trains every day. Let us admit that his distant mood minimizes the risk of interaction with fellow passengers. But when the train stops in New-York, this is what happens:

Enfin l’Hudson apparut, et, le 11 décembre, à onze heures un quart du soir, le train s’arrêtait dans la gare, sur la rive droite du fleuve, devant le « pier » même des steamers de la ligne Cunard.

Le China, à destination de Liverpool, était parti depuis quarante-cinq minutes !

At last the Hudson came into view; and, at a quarter-past eleven in the evening of the 11th, the train stopped in the station on the right bank of the river, before the very pier of the Cunard line.

The China, for Liverpool, had started three-quarters of an hour before!

Don’t you see? Because he still does not know the true date, Mr Fogg believes it is the 12th of December when in fact, it is only the 11th. It is clearly said a couple of paragraphs later that Mr Fogg has a very nifty guidebook “which gave him the daily movements of the trans-Atlantic steamers”. Therefore, the fact that Mr Fogg was sure of having missed it by less than an hour means that the China was scheduled to leave on the 12th: the next day. It would have been moored right before his eyes!

What if it was not already moored? Let’s read further:

The next day was the 12th of December [i.e. the day the China is scheduled, whereas Mr Fogg thought it was already the 13th].

Mr. Fogg left the hotel alone, [and] proceeded to the banks of the Hudson, and looked about among the vessels moored or anchored in the river, for any that were about to depart. Several had departure signals, and were preparing to put to sea at morning tide;

So if the China was due to leave on the evening of the 12th, it would have been moored at least with the morning tide. Fogg could not have missed it, and then he would have known his mistake, for we are made to believe that he is not stupid. Gotcha Mr Verne. Now there is no denying: you cheated and then trapped yourself. No wonder the reader is taken by surprise at the end of the book! How many million readers did you thus deceive! I’d have expected more rigor from someone who put science at the center of every book. Or was it only technology? I wonder…

Well, never mind.

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