Jules Verne - WikiHQ

Jules Gabriel Verne ( , ; 8 February 1828 – 24 March 1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright.

His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages extraordinaires,

To secure his services for the planned magazine, to be called the Magasin d'Éducation et de Récréation (Magazine of Education and Recreation), Hetzel also drew up a long-term contract in which Verne would give him three volumes of text per year, each of which Hetzel would buy outright for a flat fee. Verne, finding both a steady salary and a sure outlet for writing at last, accepted immediately. For the rest of his lifetime, most of his novels would be serialized in Hetzel's Magasin before their appearance in book form, beginning with his second novel for Hetzel, The Adventures of Captain Hatteras (1864–65).

thumb|Sketch by Verne of the Saint-Michel

In 1867, Verne bought a small boat, the Saint-Michel, which he successively replaced with the Saint-Michel II and the Saint-Michel III as his financial situation improved. On board the Saint-Michel III, he sailed around Europe. After his first novel, most of his stories were first serialised in the Magazine d'Éducation et de Récréation, a Hetzel biweekly publication, before being published in book form. His brother Paul contributed to 40th French climbing of the Mont-Blanc and a collection of short stories – Doctor Ox – in 1874. Verne became wealthy and famous.

Meanwhile, Michel Verne married an actress against his father's wishes, had two children by an underage mistress and buried himself in debts. The relationship between father and son improved as Michel grew older.

Later years

thumb|left|upright|Jules Verne and Madame Verne

Though raised as a Catholic, Verne gravitated towards deism.

Some scholars believe his novels reflect a deist philosophy, as they often involve the notion of God or divine providence but rarely mention the concept of Christ.

On 9 March 1886, as Verne returned home, his twenty-six-year-old nephew, Gaston, shot at him twice with a pistol. The first bullet missed, but the second one entered Verne's left leg, giving him a permanent limp that could not be overcome. This incident was not publicised in the media, but Gaston spent the rest of his life in a mental asylum.

After the deaths of both his mother and Hetzel (who died in 1886), Jules Verne began publishing darker works. In 1888 he entered politics and was elected town councillor of Amiens, where he championed several improvements during the fifteen years he served in office.

Verne was made a knight of France's Legion of Honour on 9 April 1870, and subsequently promoted in Legion of Honour rank to Officer on 19 July 1892.

Death and posthumous publications

On 24 March 1905, while ill with chronic diabetes and complications from a stroke which paralyzed his right side, Verne died at his home in Amiens, 44 Boulevard Longueville (now Boulevard Jules-Verne). His son, Michel Verne, oversaw the publication of the novels Invasion of the Sea and The Lighthouse at the End of the World after Jules's death. The Voyages extraordinaires series continued for several years afterwards at the same rate of two volumes a year. It was later discovered that Michel Verne had made extensive changes in these stories, a language that his father had been very interested in. In 1989, Verne's great-grandson discovered his ancestor's as-yet-unpublished novel Paris in the Twentieth Century, which was subsequently published in 1994.

Works

thumb|upright|An 1889 Hetzel poster advertising Verne's works

thumb|Verne novels, [[The Carpathian Castle, The Danube Pilot, Claudius Bombarnac, and Kéraban the Inflexible, on a miniature sheet of Romanian postage stamps (2005)]]

Verne's largest body of work is the Voyages extraordinaires series, which includes all of his novels except for the two rejected manuscripts Paris in the Twentieth Century and Backwards to Britain (published posthumously in 1994 and 1989, respectively) and for projects left unfinished at his death (many of which would be posthumously adapted or rewritten for publication by his son Michel). Verne also wrote many plays, poems, song texts, operetta libretti, and short stories, as well as a variety of essays and miscellaneous non-fiction.

<!-- Additional subsections could be added, such as "Themes". The "Themes" subsection can include the following entry among others:

Antiwar sentiments: Throughout his life, Verne consistently lampooned and criticized war and the military life.

The French Wikipedia quotes Chapter XX of Five Weeks in a Balloon to illustrate the point.-->

Literary reception

After his debut under Hetzel, Verne was enthusiastically received in France by writers and scientists alike, with George Sand and Théophile Gautier among his earliest admirers. Several notable contemporary figures, from the geographer Vivien de Saint-Martin to the critic Jules Claretie, spoke highly of Verne and his works in critical and biographical notes.

However, Verne's growing popularity among readers and playgoers (due especially to the highly successful stage version of Around the World in Eighty Days) led to a gradual change in his literary reputation. As the novels and stage productions continued to sell, many contemporary critics felt that Verne's status as a commercially popular author meant he could only be seen as a mere genre-based storyteller, rather than a serious author worthy of academic study.

This denial of formal literary status took various forms, including dismissive criticism by such writers as Émile Zola and the lack of Verne's nomination for membership in the Académie Française, and was recognized by Verne himself, who said in a late interview: "The great regret of my life is that I have never taken any place in French literature." To Verne, who considered himself "a man of letters and an artist, living in the pursuit of the ideal", this critical dismissal on the basis of literary ideology could only be seen as the ultimate snub.

This bifurcation of Verne as a popular genre writer but a critical persona non grata continued after his death, with early biographies (including one by Verne's own niece, Marguerite Allotte de la Fuÿe) focusing on error-filled and embroidered hagiography of Verne as a popular figure rather than on Verne's actual working methods or his output. Meanwhile, sales of Verne's novels in their original unabridged versions dropped markedly even in Verne's home country, with abridged versions aimed directly at children taking their place.

However, the decades after Verne's death also saw the rise in France of the "Jules Verne cult", a steadily growing group of scholars and young writers who took Verne's works seriously as literature and willingly noted his influence on their own pioneering works. Some of the cult founded the Société Jules Verne, the first academic society for Verne scholars; many others became highly respected avant garde and surrealist literary figures in their own right. Their praise and analyses, emphasizing Verne's stylistic innovations and enduring literary themes, proved highly influential for literary studies to come.

In the 1960s and 1970s, thanks in large part to a sustained wave of serious literary study from well-known French scholars and writers, Verne's reputation skyrocketed in France. Roland Barthes' seminal essay Nautilus et Bateau Ivre (The Nautilus and the Drunken Boat) was influential in its exegesis of the Voyages extraordinares as a purely literary text, while book-length studies by such figures as Marcel Moré and Jean Chesneaux considered Verne from a multitude of thematic vantage points.

French literary journals devoted entire issues to Verne and his work, with essays by such imposing literary figures as Michel Butor, Georges Borgeaud, Marcel Brion, Pierre Versins, Michel Foucault, René Barjavel, Marcel Lecomte, Francis Lacassin, and Michel Serres; meanwhile, Verne's entire published opus returned to print, with unabridged and illustrated editions of his works printed by Livre de Poche and Éditions Rencontre. The wave reached its climax in Verne's sesquicentennial year 1978, when he was made the subject of an academic colloquium at the Centre culturel international de Cerisy-la-Salle, and Journey to the Center of the Earth was accepted for the French university system's agrégation reading list. Since these events, Verne has been consistently recognized in Europe as a legitimate member of the French literary canon, with academic studies and new publications steadily continuing.

Verne's reputation in English-speaking countries has been considerably slower in changing. Throughout the 20th century, most anglophone scholars dismissed Verne as a genre writer for children and a naïve proponent of science and technology (despite strong evidence to the contrary on both counts), thus finding him more interesting as a technological prophet or as a subject of comparison to English-language writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and H. G. Wells than as a topic of literary study in his own right. This narrow view of Verne has undoubtedly been influenced by the poor-quality English translations and very loosely adapted Hollywood film versions through which most American and British readers have discovered Verne. However, since the mid-1980s a considerable number of serious English-language studies and translations have appeared, suggesting that a rehabilitation of Verne's anglophone reputation may currently be underway.

These early English-language translations have been widely criticized for their extensive textual omissions, errors, and alterations, and are not considered adequate representations of Verne's actual novels. In an essay for The Guardian, British writer Adam Roberts commented: <blockquote>I'd always liked reading Jules Verne and I've read most of his novels; but it wasn't until recently that I really understood I hadn't been reading Jules Verne at all ... It's a bizarre situation for a world-famous writer to be in. Indeed, I can't think of a major writer who has been so poorly served by translation.

A primary issue at the heart of the dispute is the question of whether Verne's works count as science fiction to begin with. Maurice Renard claimed that Verne "never wrote a single sentence of scientific-marvelous". Verne himself argued repeatedly in interviews that his novels were not meant to be read as scientific, saying "I have invented nothing". His own goal was rather to "depict the earth [and] at the same time to realize a very high ideal of beauty of style", as he pointed out in an example:

Closely related to Verne's science-fiction reputation is the often-repeated claim that he is a "prophet" of scientific progress, and that many of his novels involve elements of technology that were fantastic for his day but later became commonplace. These claims have a long history, especially in America, but the modern scholarly consensus is that such claims of prophecy are heavily exaggerated. In a 1961 article critical of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas scientific accuracy, Theodore L. Thomas speculated that Verne's storytelling skill and readers' faulty memories of a book they read as children caused people to "remember things from it that are not there. The impression that the novel contains valid scientific prediction seems to grow as the years roll by". As with science fiction, Verne himself flatly denied that he was a futuristic prophet, saying that any connection between scientific developments and his work was "mere coincidence" and attributing his indisputable scientific accuracy to his extensive research: "even before I began writing stories, I always took numerous notes out of every book, newspaper, magazine, or scientific report that I came across."

Legacy

thumb|Monument to Verne in [[Redondela, Spain]]

Verne's novels have had a wide influence on both literary and scientific works; writers known to have been influenced by Verne include Marcel Aymé, Roland Barthes, René Barjavel, Michel Butor, Blaise Cendrars, Paul Claudel, Jean Cocteau, Julio Cortázar, François Mauriac, Rick Riordan, Raymond Roussel, Claude Roy, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and Jean-Paul Sartre, while scientists and explorers who acknowledged Verne's inspiration have included Richard E. Byrd, Yuri Gagarin, Simon Lake, Hubert Lyautey, Guglielmo Marconi, Fridtjof Nansen, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Wernher von Braun, and Jack Parsons. Verne is credited with helping inspire the steampunk genre, a literary and social movement that glamorizes science fiction based on 19th-century technology.

Ray Bradbury summarized Verne's influence on literature and the science world: "We are all, in one way or another, the children of Jules Verne."

The highest trim level of the French luxury vehicle manufacturer DS's cars, is named the Jules Verne Edition, to honour the figure as an integral part of French cultural heritage and history.

Verne has also been mentioned during human missions to the Moon ; during the return flight of the Apollo 11 crew in 1969 and at splashdown of the Artemis II, the first crewed flight beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972. During their return journey from the Moon, the crew of Apollo 11 made reference to Jules Verne's book during a TV broadcast on 23 July, 1969. The mission's commander, astronaut Neil Armstrong, said, "A hundred years ago, Jules Verne wrote a book about a voyage to the Moon. His spaceship, Columbia , took off from Florida and landed in the Pacific Ocean after completing a trip to the Moon. It seems appropriate to us to share with you some of the reflections of the crew as the modern-day Columbia completes its rendezvous with the planet Earth and the same Pacific Ocean tomorrow."

In 2026, upon the splashdown return of Artemis II from the historic lunar flyby around the Moon back to Earth and the first test flight of

Orion (spacecraft) with crew members; NASA Public Affairs Officer and commentator Rob Navias (also known as the 'Voice of NASA')

made reference to Verne, stating "Splashdown confirmed at 7:07 pm Central Time, 5:07 pm Pacific Time, from the pages of Jules Verne to a modern day mission to the moon, a new chapter of the exploration of our celestial neighbour is complete". This was during the official live broadcast of the landing shown by NASA on YouTube.

Notes

Footnotes

References

General sources

; statistics on Index Translationum database (1979–present, updates processed upon receipt from UNESCO members states)

External links

Zvi Har'El's Jules Verne Collection, an extensive resource from the early 2000s
The Jules Verne Collecting Resource with sources, images, and ephemera
The North American Jules Verne Society
Maps from Verne's books

Online editions

Jules Verne's works with concordances and frequency list