We saw earlier how Jules Verne repeatedly and ostentatiously recycles written documents in his work. Text, in all its forms, proliferates and multiplies through the pages of the Voyages extraordinaires, like that self-perpetuating swarm of locusts in Aventures de trois Russes et de trois Anglais dans l'Afrique australe, whose sheer number ‘défiait toutes [les] causes de destruction’ (A3, p. 143) [‘defied all attempts to destroy them’]. Placing his citational mode of narrative on open display, Verne reinforces the point that no text can ever stand alone, that every script depends for its existence on innumerable others which nourish it and which may in their turn consume it. Within this context of flamboyant textuality, we saw also that Verne refers frequently and specifically to literature as a field of endeavour and a body of work, by way of situating his own writing clearly within it and reinforcing his claim to be a literary figure. In this process of high-lighting the literary credentials of the Voyages extraordinaires, the use of the theatre occupies a particular place, for it emphasises the extravagant playfulness and the self-conscious, contrived artificiality of narrative. The Voyages extraordinaires are anything but a mere objective, realistic account of travel and technology in the nineteenth century (though it is certainly possible to read them on that level as well); rather, they are an intensely self-conscious experiment with the very tools of the writer's craft, narrative and language, which they place on almost permanent display.

The present chapter will focus on the self-consciousness of Verne's approach to writing. More than drawing our attention specifically to the corpus that writing produces, or even to its relationship to other texts, self-consciousness is the act of gazing inwards, the glimpse we get behind the scenes into the processes and the creation of narrative, the awareness of what narratologists call ‘the narrative situation’. It is the moment or the state in which the writer appears to stand back from his or her own act of composition, even as that composition is unfolding, and to exploit the creative possibilities of his or her own detachment.