Jules Verne's writing is, as we have seen, firmly grounded in the ideologies and concerns of his own century. But, whether it focuses on hunting and the environment, or on the quest for total coverage of the globe, or on notions of progress and the future – those three key areas highlighted in the last chapter – his writing consistently unveils the complexities and the ambiguities of its own nineteenth-century framework and, crucially, re-enacts these in its textual practices. Writing mirrors the environment in its proliferation and profusion, yet mimics the attempt to contain and control it; writing re-stages the contradictions of the century's encyclopaedic ambitions, by aiming for totality yet recognising its fragmentedness; and, in its representation of the future, writing deconstructs the nineteenth century's notions of temporality and progress. While Verne ostensibly subscribes to the first principle of realism – that the world can be represented objectively through words – it rapidly becomes apparent that his writing is itself the symbolic locus of the struggles and conflicts that it purports to describe. Ostensibly a window on the world, writing also turns back on itself and problematises its procedures, even as it grapples with the great themes and subjects of its century.

Not least among the paradoxes facing the reader of Verne is the recognition that this writer, who uses so much scientific and factual information as the basis of his fiction, believes perhaps less than any other so-called realist novelist in the objective validity of his verbal representations. The novel, negotiating and recycling the ‘text’ of reality, is an extravagantly textual construct that puts its own verbality, sometimes its own verbosity, on display. Language itself may never be more than a representation or an image, a copy, a paltry fiction, even a distortion in the Vernian world. However, the existence of what lies beyond language, or is incapable of being linguistically defined, has no place either for the novelist or for his characters, as Michel Ardan makes clear when challenged about the difficulties of covering the distance between the earth and the moon. ‘La distance est un vain mot, la distance n'existe pas!’ he exclaims (TL, p. 169).