If it is the case, as Milan Kundera once stated, that ‘every novelist's work contains an implicit vision of the history of the novel, an idea of what the novel is’, there can be no more exemplary illustration of that truth than the work of Gustave Flaubert. Supremely preoccupied with style and with the refinement of techniques handed down by previous generations, Flaubert heralds a new era of self-consciousness in the novel. As he hones his texts through many drafts in the solitude of the family home at Croisset, near Rouen, he pursues his reflection on literatures ancient and modern on a daily basis, wresting his own fictions from a truly vast programme of reading. At the same time, he scrutinises the complexities of narrative with a new intensity, and contemplates his own place within the literary tradition. Prose, he writes to his mistress Louise Colet on 24 April 1852, is the modern form of writing par excellence, replacing the ancient and established literary form, poetry: ‘Prose was born yesterday … All the combinations of poetry have been tried out, but as for prose, far from it.’ Flaubert's sense of his own mission and modernity as a writer is manifest throughout his exceptionally readable correspondence. ‘Before Flaubert’, writes the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, ‘novelists sensed intuitively that form played a key role in the success or failure of their stories … But only after Flaubert does this spontaneous, diffuse and intuitive idea become rational knowledge, theory, artistic consciousness.’

Jules Verne and the stage

‘Mais, dira-t-on, cela finit comme un vaudeville… Eh bien, qu'est ce récit, sinon un vaudeville sans couplets, et avec le dénouement obligatoire du mariage à l'instant où le rideau baisse?’ (CD, p. 211) [‘But, you will say, it all finishes like a vaudeville. Well, what is this story if not a vaudeville without verse, and the obligatory ending with a marriage as the curtain falls?’] Thus reads the final, self-reflexive line of Clovis Dardentor. Not only does it make absolutely explicit the link between the style of the vaudeville and the plot of the narrative just completed, it also uses the comparison itself as a means of closure. Young love and family interests, marriage, wealth and inheritance, conflict occasioned by the presence of an unwelcome suitor – these are the ingredients not only of Clovis Dardentor, but of many of Verne's novels, and they return us directly to the apprenticeship years of the 1850s when he learned the craft of the vaudeville through his involvement in the Parisian stage. As secretary of the Théâtre Lyrique from 1852 until the death of its director Jules Seveste in 1854, Verne met and fraternised with many of the best-known dramatists and actors of the day, and wrote numerous plays himself. He also made important contacts with influential critics and journalists, notably Théophile Gautier and Emile de Girardin. One of the most significant friendships he formed during this period was with Alexandre Dumas fils, who collaborated with him on two plays and also introduced Verne to his father, who was director of the Théâtre Historique. In 1894 Verne reminisced:

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.

Of all the generalisations about Jules Verne, one of the most tenacious and potentially restrictive is the assertion that he is the ‘father of science fiction’. Now, while it is legitimate and proper to see Verne's scientific narratives as having initiated a new type of literature, the term ‘science fiction’ usually connotes a futuristic, anticipatory style of writing, speculative in scope and content, which extends reality into imaginary worlds that might or might not be possible. Moreover, science fiction is often considered to be an American genre, and Verne's association with it risks making it easier to forget that he was in reality a French author. The received wisdom about Jules Verne is that, since he foresaw the innovations of modern technology and was in some sense ‘ahead of his time’ (whatever such a phrase might be construed to mean), he naturally finds his niche alongside the great science fiction writers of the twentieth century. However, this is a case of Verne being damaged by those very readers who admire him, for this well-intentioned process of repackaging all too easily overlooks his very significant formal, stylistic and narrative innovations, his experiments with multiple ironic voices, his wit, his ludic self-consciousness, and his sophisticated uses and manipulations of nineteenth-century scientific and positivist discourses. In fact, as I shall stress in the course of this study, Jules Verne's novels are based extensively on documented fact rather than on speculation about the future, and his deeply complex use of sources is a major part of his interest as a writer. Moreover, it has often been observed by critics that Verne seems more preoccupied with the past than he is with the future, and that many of his stories are allegorical quests for lost origins. This is nowhere more explicit than, for example, in Voyage au centre de la terre, which turns out not to be a departure to a brave new future at all, but rather a return to prehistory, as the travellers go downwards through the earth's crust and backwards in time to the evidence of ever earlier stages of the evolutionary process. No science fiction here, it seems – though there is science, and there is fiction.

The conquest of nature

In Cinq semaines en ballon, the novel that launches the Voyages extraordinaires in 1863, Jules Verne narrates the westward flight across Africa of his scientist-hero Dr Samuel Fergusson in search of the sources of the Nile. Fergusson is accompanied by a manservant called Joe, and by his friend Dick Kennedy. As is the case in so many of Verne's novels, we are confronted with two characters who are exact but inseparable opposites, for as the narrator tells us, ‘l'amitié ne saurait exister entre deux êtres parfaitement identiques’ (5S, p. 14) [‘friendship cannot exist between two perfectly identical beings’]. Where Fergusson is calm, measured and objective, Kennedy is volatile, eccentric and excitable. Fergusson is a man of the air, Kennedy a man of the earth. But the biggest difference between the two is in their attitude towards the environment. While Fergusson has an encyclopaedic knowledge that is the constant mark of his respect for the natural world, Kennedy is a plunderer who wilfully vandalises the terrain he passes through. Shooting almost everything in sight, he eats what he can and happily abandons what is not needed. The concepts of conservation and recycling have no place in his ideological arsenal. As for his arsenal of weapons, detailed early in the novel, we are assured that it is sufficient to cause destruction and havoc among whatever species of animals he will come across. When they fly low over Lake Chad, Kennedy sees the chance of adding a hippopotamus to his already substantial list of trophies. Fergusson attempts to call him to order: ‘il me semble que, sans parler du menu gibier, tu as déjà une antilope, un éléphant et deux lions sur la conscience’ [‘it seems to me that, without mentioning the small game, you already have an antelope, an elephant and two lions on your conscience’]. To this reasoned intervention – not without its echoes of Rabelais's famous ‘sans compter les femmes et petits enfants’ [‘without mentioning the women and little children’] – Kennedy retorts, showing that conscience is the least of his concerns: ‘Qu'est-ce que cela pour un chasseur africain qui voit passer tous les animaux de la création au bout de son fusil?’

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).

A writer of pot-boilers, adventure stories, cheap melodramas, children's literature. An author of educational textbooks dressed up as fiction. A copycat who plagiarised from the popular scientific and geographical publications of his day. A literary thief who took the ideas and sometimes the entire plots of his novels from the works of his contemporaries. A marginal figure in French literary history, a compulsive scribbler who wrote badly, carelessly, and far too swiftly for his own good. A novelist without any sense of style, whose rambling prose was driven by the desire for commercial success and the need to keep the pages rolling off the press. A storyteller whose inspiration was so defective that he ended up re-using his own texts.

The man who foretold the future of the world, who predicted an era of space exploration, electronic communications and global travel, and who understood the real impact that science would have on humankind and society. The novelist-engineer who assembled submarines, aircraft and other vehicles by looking ahead and understanding how technology would develop. The prophet who, through the combined power of imagination and intuition, ‘invented’ gadgets, devices and machines, and who accurately predicted the uses to which they would be put. The writer who stepped outside of his own century and visualised the world as it would be in our own time. The great Jules Verne, honorary world citizen and dreamer of scientific tomorrows, the writer translated into dozens of languages and adapted into every existing medium, still astonishing us with his ‘uncanny’ insights into the future.

There are endless clichés and generalisations about Jules Verne, many of them offering a simplified version of the truth, others misguided or just plain false. They come as much from his admirers as from his detractors. What nearly all of them have in common is that they overlook the self-conscious literary skills and compositional practices which went into the writing of the eighty or so titles in the Voyages extraordinaires, produced over a four-decade period between 1863 and 1905. Part of the reason for the frequency of these clichés is undoubtedly the fact that, as one of the most translated authors of all time, Verne has been subjected to all manner of distortions and inaccuracies (only in recent years have accurate scholarly translations and editions of his works started to become more widely available in English).

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.

At his death on 24 March 1905, Jules Verne had been a successful author for more than four decades. While the print-runs of his novels naturally waxed and waned – peaking with the sale of 108,000 copies of Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours in the 1870s, though suffering something of a decline in the final decade of his life – his commercial value was assured. But his obvious marketability was to increase exponentially in the course of the twentieth century. The Voyages extraordinaires would be exploited and adapted (notably in the early stages by Verne's own son Michel, who passed off his rewritten versions of the posthumous texts as ‘genuine’ Jules Verne novels), then transposed with huge success to other forms and media. With Georges Méliès's two short films Voyage dans la lune (1902) and Voyage à travers l'impossible (1904), and with Michel Verne's own later ventures into film-making, the enduring tradition of cinematic adaptations of Verne's works was established. Today, Jules Verne is not only a household name, but is recognised as an essential icon of travel, exploration and scientific progress. His place in Western culture is attested among other things by the massive number of events and exhibitions that were organised in France and across the world in 2005 to celebrate the centenary of this enduringly popular author.

However, such obvious appeal comes at a price. A hundred years down the line, Jules Verne is more than ever misrepresented, misread and misunderstood, especially in the popular imagination. Among the socalled ‘chattering classes’ today, the common image of Verne is of a futuristic author – a cliché which, as we saw earlier in this study, was damagingly reinforced in 1994 with the publication of Paris au XXe siècle. Much of what is stated about Verne is based on second-hand information, on recycled and adapted versions of his stories, on inaccurate translations, or on extravagant myths that have become common currency. Even brilliant and respected critics can regularly be found to slip up in their knowledge, and the sheer quantity of works in the corpus means that only the most specialised scholars are likely to have read the entire series of the Voyages extraordinaires.

Famously dubbed the 'novelist's novelist' by Henry James, Flaubert has preoccupied almost every generation of writers since the mid-nineteenth century. From the seclusion of a large family home on the banks of the Seine near Rouen, the so-called hermit of Croisset raises the art of prose narrative to new levels and reveals its modernity. As he stomps up and down the avenue of lime trees in his garden, sometimes in the company of his friend and mentor Louis Bouilhet, Flaubert bellows out the sentences of Madame Bovary, to the amazement or amusement of the folk in passing river craft. This is the legendary gueuloir, or 'yelling place', where the novelist puts his writing through the test of sound, rhythm and vocal fluidity, subjecting it to the final quality control. For, as he writes to his mistress Louise Colet on 24 April 1852, 'prose was born yesterday, that is what we must tell ourselves. Verse is the quintessential form of ancient literatures. All the combinations of poetry have been tried out. But as for prose, far from it' ['la prose est née d'hier, voil à ce qu'il faut se dire. Le vers est la forme par excellence des littératures anciennes. Toutes les combinaisons prosodiques ont été; faites, mais celles de la prose, tant s'en faut' (Cor. ii 79)]. And so, as he opens up new pathways in technical and formal experiment, Flaubert also heightens awareness of the complexities and the possibilities of the novelist's craft.