Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free Page B

travel books dealing with the natural history of each region of France.
    But the most disturbing aspect of this writer-publisher relationship was hinted at in Hetzel’s own mission statement. “We have created a Magazine wherein everything is tailored to different age groups and nothing displeasing to anyone,” Hetzel wrote (Evans, p. 24). The articles and stories in this magazine were to be “fundamentally wholesome and good” (Evans, p. 24), and Hetzel worked closely with Verne to ensure that his stories met these criteria. It was a recipe for censorship. Hetzel struck many of Verne’s references to God, as well as any mention of sex or sensuality. For instance, in the original manuscript of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, the paintings in Captain Nemo’s library included a “half-clothed woman” (Evans, p. 29) and a courtesan. These were changed to a Leonardo da Vinci virgin and a portrait by Titian, respectively.
    At other times Hetzel attacked his star author. “Where’s the science?” Hetzel wrote when Verne presented him with a manuscript of what would become The Mysterious Island. “They [the characters] are too dumb! ... 82 pages of text and not a single invention that a cretin couldn’t figure out! ... It’s a collection of totally listless beings; not a one of them is alert, lively, witty.... Drop all these guys and start again, from scratch” (Evans, p. 27).
    Verne, eager to keep his name at the top of Hetzel’s literary roster, compromised himself to please his editor. After Hetzel presented Verne with a laundry list of edits on his manuscript of The Adventures of Captain Hatteras, Verne responded in a letter, “I promise you that I will take them into account, for all your observations are correct.... I have not yet achieved total mastery over myself.... Have you ever found me to be recalcitrant when it came to making cuts or rearrangements? Didn’t I follow your advice in Five Weeks in a Balloon by eliminating Joe’s long narrative, and without pain?” (Evans, p. 27).
    These influences—Hetzel’s pedantic morality along with the proven formula of Verne’s previous successes—gave rise to the Jules Verne Novel, a mold from which most of his works were cast. In later years especially, his formula sometimes became wooden; his plots hung like cloaks on the frames of his familiar characters. Whether a tale of adventures under the sea, scientific discoveries circling the moon, or a race against time around the earth, nearly all of Verne’s novels track the adventures of a scientist-turned-hero, from Phileas Fogg to Professor Aronnax. The scientist-hero is aided by a worthy servant, and this pair is complemented by a “common man,” a figure like Ned Land in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. There is usually a library or a museum somewhere in the story—as in Nemo’s paintings, books, and display shelves—as well as an obsessive desire to take bearings and locations, as in Aronnax’s consultation of the naval charts for longitude and latitude or a group of people clambering up a mountain in The Mysterious Island to read the land. In addition, Verne’s adventures nearly always take place in microcosmic societies: on a ship, in a balloon, in a submarine, on a space projectile, on an island, on the ice. The scientist-hero always returns to his departure point—for Aronnax in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea it is to dry land—to publish the discoveries made during the course of his trip. This recurring structure provided Verne a ready-made narrative arc that proved useful. Not only did it excuse the sometimes endless categorizing of scientific knowledge—“ I end here this catalogue, which is somewhat dry, perhaps, but very exact, with a series of bony fish that I observed,” Aronnax writes (p. 260)—it also lent credence to the claims made in the course of the tale. By couching his findings in a book that serves the greater good of science, it is as if the fictional