Scholars unearth the prehistory of a genre
Nearly a century after his death, Jules Verne still has readers -- but not much of a literary reputation. Critical theorists such as Roland Barthes and Pierre Machery have analyzed Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and other “fantastic voyages” by the novelist, and children have acted them out, with even greater seriousness, in their backyards. But Verne never gets listed among the great authors of his era. The didactic quality that makes him appealing to junior scientists -- the way his action-packed adventures are periodically interrupted by lectures on geology, astronomy, and the fundamental principles of engineering -- has seemingly condemned him to a minor place in cultural history.
Or has it? Next month, the Modern Library and Wesleyan University Press will each publish new translations of The Mysterious Island (1874). Verne’s saga of Civil War-era Americans who rebuild civilization on an uncharted desert island seems tailor-made for an audience drawn to Survivor and Cast Away. But the coincidence may point to a literary revival that extends beyond Verne himself. “In a period of accelerated change, people may be looking back, at a subconscious level, to stories about inventions that were a lot less complicated,” says Arthur B. Evans, an editor of the journal Science Fiction Studies who is a professor of French at DePauw University. “Verne’s portrayal of technology is always on a human scale. His machines are also aesthetic objects. They are artistically rendered, in a way that electronic circuits usually aren’t.”
The appeal of such retro-futuristic visions, for literary scholars and ordinary readers alike, has inspired two recent series published by academic presses. Since its inception in 1998, the “Bison Frontiers of the Imagination” series, from the University of Nebraska Press, has reissued 19 English-language science-fiction novels that originally appeared between the Victorian age and the “pulp” era of mass-market paperbacks and magazines during the early 20th century. Wesleyan’s edition of The Mysterious Island is one of two books kicking off its new “Wesleyan Early Classics of Science Fiction Series,” which will publish annotated editions of works from the genre’s prehistory, as well as critical and historical studies. The other, Verne’s Invasion of the Sea (1904), has never before appeared in English, while The Mysterious Island is best-known in a Victorian translation of dubious competence.
The Pulps and the Profs
While seeming to overlap, the two series embody very distinct outlooks on what “early science fiction” means, and who will be reading it. Gary Dunham, the editor in chief at Nebraska, grew up reading the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs, who, besides creating Tarzan, King of the Jungle, also wrote fiction describing the civilizations on other planets. Those novels, Mr. Dunham says, inspired his own, earlier career as an anthropologist. “Rather than being designed mainly for classroom use, I want [the Bison series] to remind readers of the existence of these wonderful works of the imagination. Our editions tap into the emotional heart of the books.”
Most volumes in the Bison series contain introductions or afterwords by contemporary writers, like Ben Bova, who are well-known to science-fiction fans, rather than commentary by scholars of the genre. However, the recent edition of Burroughs’s Pirates of Venus, first published in 1932, does include a useful philological tool: a glossary of Amtorian, the language spoken on that planet. (With its references to both the Communist Party and the Ku Klux Klan, the novel awaits some New Historicist worthy of its challenges.)
“We were nervous when we started this series,” Mr. Dunham recalls, “but we tapped into a demand among readers, including people professionally involved in the genre. Members of the Science Fiction Writers of America have long been upset with the major [publishing] houses for letting classic novels go out of print.” He notes that many of the reprints have sold 3,000 copies within their first year of publication -- not enough to keep a commercial house interested, but more than respectable for a university press.
In contrast with the populist and market-driven Bison series, Wesleyan’s new series reflects an unapologetically academic interest in the genre’s past. Each volume will be edited by a prominent scholar in the field, who will write a long critical introduction to the work, says Mr. Evans, general editor for the series.
Editions will include the original artwork from illustrated works. The series will publish four volumes a year over the next four years.
Where Mr. Dunham’s reprint series for Nebraska includes work from the “pulp” era, Mr. Evans defines the contours of early science fiction differently. Titles forthcoming in the Wesleyan series were first published between the middle of the 18th century and the first two decades of the 20th. After about 1920, he says, the genre “split into two different traditions according to how it was marketed -- on the one hand, a juvenile mass-market’ tradition, and on the other, a higher-brow literary’ tradition.” (Edgar Rice Burroughs would belong to the former tradition, while William Burroughs, whose postmodernist fiction also includes aliens from Venus, would belong to the latter.) The Wesleyan series will focus on the prehistory of the genre, before that split.
Time Travel
The archaeological work yields some surprises. Next fall, the series will publish Jean-Baptiste François Xavier Cousin de Grainville’s long-forgotten The Last Man, a novel of postapocalyptic desolation that first appeared in 1804. The editor and translator, I.F. Clarke, is well known among historians of science fiction for his work on The Battle of Dorking -- a sort of Victorian-era Tom Clancy novel that generated worldwide discussion about the possible effects of technology on warfare following its publication in 1871.
End-of-the-world stories became a staple of sci-fi films during the cold war. But as Mr. Clarke’s introduction points out, speculation about the collapse of civilization preoccupied many European intellectuals during the late 18th century. Following the appearance of The Last Man, writers produced a sizable body of fiction wiping out humanity through famine, pestilence, and natural disaster. Mary Shelley (better known for her first novel, Frankenstein) published a work also called The Last Man in 1826. But by that time, the public’s appetite for global catastrophe had been sated, at least for a while.
Even more obscure, perhaps, is The Centenarian, a tale of scientifically induced immortality that Honoré de Balzac wrote under a pseudonym in 1822. Just as the 18th-century French chemist Antoine Lavoisier had isolated the atmospheric substance (oxygen) that feeds a flame, so Balzac’s immortal scientist has discovered the “fluid” necessary to human life. “It is never reprinted in scholarly editions of Balzac’s work,” says George Slusser, a professor of comparative literature at the University of California at Riverside. “I discovered a copy of the original while on a Fulbright in France during the mid-1970s. I banged out a translation in about a month, which is about as long as Balzac spent writing it.”
He has retranslated and annotated the novel with his wife, Danièle Chatelain Slusser, who is an associate professor of French, also at Riverside. The Wesleyan series will publish their scholarly edition of the novel in spring 2003. Curious though it is to think of the master of social realism penning a tale of Gothic biochemistry, the Slussers find that The Centenarian anticipates crucial themes of power, knowledge, and secrecy found in Balzac’s novel series The Human Comedy.
Back to the Future
The genre’s prehistory is an alternative universe that remains largely unexplored by academics. At the University of California at Riverside, Mr. Slusser directs the Eaton Collection, which holds 80,000 volumes of science fiction and fantasy in 14 languages, some dating as early as 1638. The first steps have been taken with one classic work in the genre: Earlier this year, Mr. Slusser coedited H.G. Wells’s Perennial Time Machine (University of Georgia Press), which included 15 papers out of the 100 delivered at a centenary conference on Wells’s novel, held in London in 1995.
Scholars of science fiction seem driven by an enthusiasm not that different from that of the genre’s fans. The recent history of The Mysterious Island is an example. The Wesleyan edition is based on a translation by Sidney Kravitz, a retired mechanical engineer who has had what he calls “a lifetime love affair” with Verne’s work. In 1992, after 14 years of work, he self-published his own translation of the novel in a limited edition. It caught the attention of Mr. Evans, who, in 1999, gave a paper at the Modern Language Association meeting on the damaging circumstances under which most English readers encounter Verne. Victorian translators would cut passages, such as denunciations of British imperialism, that offended their sensibilities. And when ideology was not the problem, incoherence sometimes took command. In one translation, a character manages to light a fire with ... a lentil. (In French, “lentille” also means “lens.”)
The new edition from Wesleyan -- with Mr. Kravitz’s translation retooled and annotated by Mr. Evans and William Butcher, a senior lecturer in English at the Hong Kong Institute of Education -- is the first unexpurgated version in English. Or rather, one of two such “firsts,” given the Modern Library’s new edition, translated by Jordan Stump, an associate professor of French at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.
“I have to admit it was a guilty pleasure,” says Mr. Stump, who has won acclaim for his translations of 20th-century French fiction. “Verne has this all-seeing, all-knowing language. There’s something terribly fascinating about it. In Verne, if you know enough, especially about technology, then you can master the world. That is such a comforting myth.”
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