Originality and the literary writer

Towards the end of Flaubert's unfinished Bouvard et Pécuchet the two clerks, having run the gamut of knowledge and signally failed to stamp their imprint on any field of human endeavour, return to their erstwhile occupation. As copyists once more, they will mechanically transfer in their own hand what they find in the writings of others. Precisely what the clerks are to copy out has remained a matter of scholarly argument, but one thing is clear: that their decision is something of a defeat, even an act of desperation. It represents a final quest for certainty – however small – in a world in which the proliferation of texts makes absolute knowledge impossible and originality unthinkable. Everything has already been said, everything already written. There remain only two options: to repeat, and to accumulate. Like the parrot in that other famous Flaubertian text, Un coeur simple, the two clerks will endlessly echo the sayings of others, hoping that in this act of appropriation and transmission they will find some credible voice of their own.

The problem of the already spoken or the already written, central to the preoccupations of so many key figures in the nineteenth century, is also at the heart of Verne's undertaking. What is ‘originality’? At what point does writing become rewriting? If every text is by definition an intertext, when does it cease to resonate with the sound of an individual author's voice, and turn into the mere echo of what is heard through and beyond it? Can there be such a thing as individuality or uniqueness in a century in which, as Musset famously put it in a somewhat different context in his narrative poem Rolla, ‘Je suis venu trop tard dans un monde trop vieux’ [‘I came too late into a world too old’]? Is the author's recognition that he or she must follow in the footsteps of others enough to guarantee freedom and detachment from them? Is there some way in which the knowledge of sameness, the awareness that the beaten path is the only route, can be exploited? This last question comes to have added significance in the case of Verne, where the subject of journeys into unknown places is also the central metaphor of the writer's own approach.