By Brian Taves
[Editor’s note: The following essay was written by Library of Congress researcher and Verne scholar Brian Taves as an introduction to The Ice Sphinx, published by Wildside Press as An Antarctic Mystery Or, the Sphinx of the Ice Fields: A Sequel to Edgar Allan Poe's the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym in 2005. The Wildside edition is a reprint of the 1899 English translation by Mrs. Cashel Hoey published in Philadelphia by J.B. Lippincott Co. Many thanks to Brian for sharing this piece. You'll find a link to the Wildside edition at the Links section after this article.]
During his twilight years, the French author Jules Verne (1828-1905) wrote two original sequels to books that had fired his own youthful imagination, but which he felt to be incomplete: Johann Wyss's Swiss Family Robinson and Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Arthur Gordon Pym (1845) was only one of many Poe stories that Verne admired; no other single author had more impact on his writing.
Verne acknowledged this debt in his only major piece of literary criticism, a detailed 1864 article entitled "Edgard [sic] Poe and His Work." Poe (1809-1849) was just emerging on the French literary scene in translation as Verne was writing his first plays and short stories. Verne was familiar with a broad range of Poe's works, the well-remembered stories as well as many that are obscure today. What is to be admired in Poe, Verne wrote, "are the novelties of his situations, the discussion of little-known facts, the observations of the unhealthy faculties of Mankind, the choice of subject-matter, the ever-strange personality of his characters, their nervous, sickly temperaments, their ways of expressing themselves by bizarre interjections. And yet, among all these improbabilities, exists at times a verisimilitude that grips the credulity of the reader."
What chiefly interested Verne was not the American's imaginative thrust, but his handling of scientific questions. Verne examined Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter," displaying the deductive powers of Auguste Dupin, the detective who presaged Sherlock Holmes. Verne was fascinated by the narrative use of Dupin's ratiocinative processes, which he found echoed in the decipherment of the cryptogram in "The Gold Bug." In that story Verne saw a new narrative pattern in Poe's emphasis, not on the treasure, but the logical, analytical process that leads to its discovery. Similarly, Verne noted that Poe's "Three Sundays in a Week" capitalizes on the potential change in time resulting from crossing what became known as the International Date Line. Verne would adapt the idea himself in Around the World in 80 Days (1873).
Verne also seems to have known of Poe's life, for it appears to have contributed to the characterization of the disillusioned, struggling poet, Michel Dufrénoy, in Verne's Paris in the Twentieth Century, written at the same time as his essay on Poe. Dufrénoy meets a macabre peroration not unlike Poe's own mysterious end, when he wandered for several days, lost, before his death. In the novel, starving in the winter's cold, Dufrénoy semiconsciously walks in circles around an old cemetery. There, in a surreal fashion, he sees the modern tool of criminal execution, the electric chair, and freezes to death.
However, such characters are rare in Verne's oeuvre. Although he uses eccentrics and villains, and larger-than-life figures, they are realistic men and women of intelligence who are seldom susceptible to hallucinatory conditions. Only in a few stories of his own did Verne utilize the mystical and supernatural; "Frritt-Flacc" (1884) used the theme of the double that was the basis of Poe's "William Wilson." "A Drama in the Air" (1851), often hailed as Verne's most "Poe-like" story, was actually written before the American's works had appeared in France, and so cannot have been indicative of his influence.
Verne was intrigued by the idea of the lunar journey in Poe's "The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaall," but criticized it for not having provided a convincing mode of transport. "The most elementary laws of physics and mechanics are carelessly transgressed. This has always surprised me, for Poe could have rendered his narrative far more plausible by the use of a few inventions," Verne noted. Having just completed his comparatively realistic Five Weeks in a Balloon, Verne faulted the obvious contradiction in the explanation of Pfaall's journey: as Poe's balloon ascends into the ether, Pfaall is still able to breathe. Verne speculated that "another [person] more inspired -- if not more audacious," will undertake to carry on the trip -- a goal he was probably already planning with From the Earth to the Moon, published a year later. Yet Verne adapted the idea of a balloon approaching space in Hector Servadac (1877), in which refuge in an airborne gondola becomes the means to survive a comet grazing the Earth.
Nowhere are the similarities and differences clearer than in Verne's sequel to Arthur Gordon Pym, entitled The Ice Sphinx, published in 1897, over three decades after his article on Poe. Like Poe's characters, Verne had a near-obsession with the Polar regions, initially the North but later shifting to the South Pole as well. The frozen wastelands of the Arctic are the setting for A Winter Amid the Ice, Journeys and Adventures of Captain Hatteras, and The Fur Country. Like The Ice Sphinx, A Winter Amid the Ice recounts the trials of a search party who set out to find a missing sailor but in turn are themselves stranded. The Antarctic had been the locale for other Vernian incidents; in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas and Robur the Conqueror, respectively, Captain Nemo lands at the South Pole, while the Albatross flies over it.
Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym was in a sense incomplete, ending with Pym rushing toward a giant, shrouded white figure. As Verne commented, since Pym is the narrator of the published volume, he must have returned to America, but the climax has been left unexplained. While using Poe's plot, Verne departs from its tone. His structure is similar to his own Journey to the Center of the Earth, itself ostensibly a return journey following the fragmentary evidence of a previous traveler.
As some of Poe's characters try to rescue Pym, their explorations discover the natural sources of the strange apparitions he encountered, and Verne draws his denouement of the magnetic mountain from the 'Arabian Nights,' translated into French at the beginning of the 18th century. In retelling, expanding, and concluding Poe's nightmarish saga, Verne fundamentally transforms it. He provides a rational basis for all that Pym saw, shifting the generic context into Vernian science fiction. (Another direction was taken in the other best-known sequel to Arthur Gordon Pym, H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness [1931].)
Verne believed the literary road Poe had followed led to a dead end, so he lifted the scientific qualities he admired, and deleted the fantasy and horror. Expanding on the form Poe had used, Verne blazed a fundamentally different path, one he regarded as more literary and true to life. These distinctions are vividly evident in the differences between Arthur Gordon Pym and The Ice Sphinx. Despite the influence, the directions and contributions Verne made to literature are entirely original, beyond what Poe attempted or foresaw.
copyright Brian Taves
LINKS:
You may purchase Wildside Press’ edition of An Antarctic Mystery Or, the Sphinx of the Ice Fields at Amazon.com by clicking here.
A recent book by Brian Taves also of interest to Pulp Rack patrons is Talbot Mundy, Philosopher of Adventure: A Critical Biography. You’ll find it at Amazon.com by clicking here.
Certainly The Jules Verne Encyclopedia, also by Brian, is of interest to Verne completists. Click here to learn more at Amazon.com.
Learn more about Jules Verne and his connection to Edgar Poe by reading some other essays at The Pulp Rack. Click here.
Posted by ds at June 16, 2007 04:25 PM
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