BIBLIOGRAPHY
An offer of free audiobooks of Jules Verne (February 8, 1828 – March 24, 1905) classics was a chance to revisit the wild and wondrous worlds described by Verne in his Voyages Extraordinaires series which includes the big three — Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1872). Twenty Thousand Leagues… further occasioned reading The Mysterious Island (1975) where the captivating backstory of the fascinating Captain Nemo is revealed.
Verne had left Nemo’s identity purposely vague after clashing with his publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel. Verne had initially conceived of Nemo as a Polish scientist who goes on a roaring rampage of revenge against the Russians who killed his family during the January Uprising. Hetzel did not want to lose out on sales of the Russian translations (ever the commercial publisher) and tried to get Verne to change Nemo’s enemies to slave traders and thus make him a regular hero.
Verne chose the middle path of keeping Nemo’s origins vague even though there are some clues as to his nationality in Twenty Thousand Leagues… He helps an Indian pearl diver from a shark attack and is fiercely anti-imperialistic. With the castaways of The Mysterious Island, we learn of Nemo’s history.
A Prince of Bundelkund known as Prince Dakkar in his earlier life, he lived like many Indian princes of the time, receiving a western education and being a man of letters, well-versed in arts and sciences. Marriage to a princess and the birth of two children should have been the prince’s happily ever after moment but that was not to be. Throwing himself wholeheartedly into the First War of Independence in 1857, Prince Dakkar loses his family and after the war is lost, quits terra firma completely. He takes to the oceans in his futuristic submarine, Nautilus, which he designed and built.
In Captain Nemo, we have the perfect superhero—brave, intelligent and strong, who lives life on his own terms and we have a French writer to thank for it. Even though in all the gazillion adaptations of Twenty Thousand Leagues… white actors including Michael Caine (1997) and Patrick Stewart (Mysterious Island, 2005) have played Nemo, Naseeruddin Shah did play him in the diesel-punk adaptation of Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill’s comic book, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003). While Shah did not have nice things to say about his LXG experience, it would be beyond nice to watch an Indian Nemo, being the master of his realm, bringing succour to beleaguered westerners all the while calmly battling giant squids.
Giant monsters of the deep and dinosaurs roaming free in a lost world in the centre of the earth has been the introduction to Verne for most of us. By dismissing Verne as a mere writer of genre fiction, one is falling into the hideous pit of classifying popular fiction as not being high literature.
Once his books and plays (he wrote quite a few and his stage adaptation of Around the World in Eighty Days was exceedingly successful) became popular, he was snubbed by the literati. His reputation was salvaged in the 1970s and 1980s by respected authors including semiotician Roland Barthes with his essay, on The Nautilus and the Drunken Boat, and Ray Bradbury who commented, “We are all, in one way or another, the children of Jules Verne.” There were also Jules Verne cultists including Brendan Fraser’s character in the 2008 movie, Journey to the Center of the Earth. Though Verne insisted he did not invent anything, he was responsible for the creation of what he called "Roman de la Science" ("novel of science"), which tells tales of fantastic adventure buttressed by well-researched facts. Indeed, the castaways’ efforts in The Mysterious Island to make Lincoln Island habitable with whatever they can find make for fascinating reading. This goes to show that there is no harm or shame in being popular. Like the best detective fiction uses crime to study character,—from Oedipus to Hamlet so too does science fiction address the concerns of the time. For instance, critics have looked at the thrilling battle with the giant squid as emblematic of the downtrodden struggling against their oppressors. Serious literature or unbridled fun, either way Jules Verne provides succour and cephalopods in equal measure.
