Around the World in 80 Days, by Jules Verne, translated by William Butcher (New York: Oxford University Press), 1995.
Heroes, as we know them from pulp and other popular fiction, comic books, action movies, and TV shows, do amazing things: rescue maidens, battle dragons and monsters and alien civilizations attempting to enslave Earth, find treasure, discover lost civilizations, and light out for the territories to explore unknown lands, seas, planets, or simply The Unknown.
One might argue that our sense of the hero, as we know it today, is a dilution or vulgarization of its original meaning. That marvel of Western civilization, The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971; 24th U.S. printing, 1985), informs us that hero has its origin in Latin or Greek, and in antiquity it was a name given to someone “of superhuman strength, courage, or ability, favored by the gods; at a later time regarded as intermediate between gods and men, and immortal.” (p. 1296)
What the hero looks like in Verne’s fiction may be said to be still another thing. His first published novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon, sets the parameters for the subsequent “Vernian hero” with the appearance of Samuel Ferguson: a stalwart scholar with a can-do, positivist attitude and great faith in scientific knowledge and technology to provide a solution to any problem and a way out of any difficulty. The Adventures of Captain Hatteras gives us Verne’s first monomaniacal hero -- with personality characteristics that feed into his later anti-heroes -- although Hatteras relies on the knowledge from previous Arctic voyages and advanced shipbuilding technology to help him reach his goal; and he is accompanied by a human encyclopedia, Doctor Clawbonny, who provides another Vernian type with his vast knowledge and McGyver-like ingenuity.
The scholarly hero -- Professor Lidenbrock in Journey to the Center of the Earth, Professor Arronax in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea -- serve a pedagogical role for readers of publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel’s Magasin d'éducation et de récréation, in issues of which Verne’s novels were serialized. These heroes’ travels -- underground, under water, through outer space, across the Arctic ice -- may be described as Verne’s adapting the literary quest for a new audience. The Holy Grail for Verne’s heroes may be their reaching a new destination that has never been reached or beheld, or gaining new knowledge that has been beyond the reach of man until Ferguson, Barbicane, Michel Ardan, or some other Vernian intrepid seeks it.
And then we come to Around the World in 80 Days.
The UnHeroic Hero
I came to this novel with as few notions about it as may be possible for a 21st Century reader: I haven’t seen any of the films based on the novel (I hear you gasping -- similar to the gasp I and some co-workers expressed when a colleague said she had never seen The Sound of Music; or when I heard the woman whom I would eventually marry said, “I’ve never seen The Princess Bride”), nor had I ever watched an episode of The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne, a syndicated TV show from 1999-2000. I haven’t even read The Other Log of Phileas Fogg. Perhaps I’m as close as you can get to a 19th Century reader encountering this novel for the first time.
So I was surprised to read 80 Days and to discover it is a self-satire of the Vernian type of journey. Calling it a self-satire may seem to belittle the work, but Around the World in 80 Days is no less remarkable than any of the other entries in Verne’s Extraordinary Journeys series. It offers as much reality as many of Verne’s other novels -- for instance, according to William Butcher’s introduction to his 1995 translation, the “American section borrows from A Floating City (1871), a semi-fictional account of the author’s 1867 visit to the United States.” (xiii) The description of the Reform Club is apparently based on a published account from which Verne borrowed.
Is Around the World Verne’s most famous novel? A bit of Googling turns up a number of references to Phileas Fogg. For example, I learned of something called Phileas Fogg snacks:
Likewise, there’s an amateur (but quite accomplished) travel writer who hosts a web site, the Phileas Fogg Gazette:
http://www.phileas-fogg.net/quid.html
Certainly Fogg has found his place in the popular imagination. But Fogg is nearly the opposite of the typical Vernian hero. He lacks the fire for exploration that ignites the fuse for many of the heroic journeys recorded in the Extraordinary Journeys. He is nearly a cipher. As described in the opening of Chapter 1, he is not involved with industry, law, government, finance, or any other associations of power or influence. Instead, his existence centers solely around his membership in the Reform Club; “ . . . nobody could claim ever to have seen him anywhere else. His only pastimes were reading the newspapers and playing whist.” (8-9) He is nearly a mechanical man in his punctuality and focus on his strictly regimented schedule: “what he did was always so mathematically the same.” (8) He offers no spontaneity, no enthusiasm, no human warmth or passion for -- apparently, anything in particular.
Likewise, his journey around the world is not a quest at all. He is not seeking new knowledge or attempting to reach a previously unreachable site. Instead, his plan to circle the globe is simply to follow the path that men have made, not to step into untrod territories. He doesn’t seek a treasure that is hidden; he seeks merely to prove that the possible is doable. In this way the satiric barb of his quest is a sort of spatial pun, for it (his quest) and his journey are essentially circular -- his goal is to end up where he starts. In proving he can perform his journey as described, he will -- if we may boil his proof down to a few words -- prove the trains run on time, and thus warm the gears and flywheels of his mechanical heart. So as a hero, it is less accurate to call Fogg intrepid and more descriptive to say he is confident in and reliant upon civilization’s technological advances. In satirizing modern man, Verne thus creates a hero of his time -- unHeroic, according to classical terminology, but willing to stake money on Mankind’s technological and mechanical excellence.
Chapter 12 provides a remarkable picture of this hero: As Fogg and his party trek through the Indian jungle on their way to the rail station in Allahabad, they encounter a procession of Brahmins with a woman, whom they plan to burn as a sacrifice. After the procession passes, Fogg asks his companions about saving the woman from her dire fate.
“Saving this woman, Mr. Fogg? exclaimed the Brigadier-General.
[Fogg said,] “I’m still twelve hours ahead [of schedule]. I can use them that way.”
“I say, you do have a heart!”
“Sometimes,” he replied. “When I have the time.” (p. 62)
Again, Fogg’s concerns for situations all are influenced by the mechanics of time. Heroics or ethics play no role in his responses. A characterization that makes his counterpart all the more striking to the reader as Verne develops his narrative.
The Heroic UnHero
Passepartout is Fogg’s French valet, who plays the Shakespearian clown to Fogg’s British automaton. He is comical, a buffoon, but loyal and stout hearted; he ineptly and inadvertently prevents Fogg’s apprehension by the British detective Fix, who -- using a circular logic that remains unlogical, but whose circularity reflects Fogg’s voyage -- believes Fogg is a thief on the lam. Passepartout is part Sancho Panza (from Don Quixote), part Pancho (sidekick to the Cisco Kid). His bumbling and his misadventures hardly mark him as a hero, but his loyalty and good-hearted ways mark him as heroic.
The sidekick, by convention, provides comic relief. Simply look at Gabby Hayes, Smiley Burnett, Andy Devine, and other famous sidekicks. But Verne bucks convention and expectations in Around the World by making the valet, and not the gentleman, more human, appealing, and heroic -- a character, to sum up, with whom the reader can identify.
In deed, it is Passepartout, acting spontaneously and generously, who is the hero in saving the Indian woman from the Brahmins. It is a feat seemingly right from the pages of Doc Savage or James Bond, involving disguise and misdirection. For his pains, the man who ends up with the girl at the novel’s closing is not the valet, but the gentleman who was willing to postpone his journey for the woman simply because he had the time.
Posted by ds at May 30, 2009 02:14 PM
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