Jules Verne: Major literary author, second most-translated, ranking between Agatha Christie and William Shakespeare

“Jules Verne (1828-1905) is generally considered a major literary author in France and most of Europe, where he has had a wide influence on the literary avant-garde and on surrealism. His reputation is markedly different in Anglophone regions, where he has often been labeled a writer of genre fiction or children’s books, largely because of the highly abridged and altered translations in which his novels are often reprinted. Verne has been the second most-translated author in the world since 1979, ranking between Agatha Christie and William Shakespeare” (1).

“Another trait was his changeability…It is not as if we could appeal to the works, since severe contradictions have tripped up all those seeking coherent philosophies in Verne’s works. Socialists have often found Verne to be left-leaning; nationalists, pro-French; Americans, naïve, optimistic, and science oriented; Canadians, confused as to identity; Swiss, stay-at-home; and British, unintellectual and insular. Only the wisest of scholars have concluded on an essential inconclusiveness in the works…mainly because the views expressed are so inconsistent as to cause total confusion” (2, pp. 240-241).

“Most interviewers agreed on his paradoxical combinations…In fact he hated to talk about his own persona—‘the story of my life would not be interesting’—and writing formed his only reality: ‘If I don’t work I feel I’m not living’ ” (2, p. 286).

“The remarkable images of Around the World in Eighty Days…all combine with an explicit and repeated indication that the characters’ rational minds are not in control. Verne thus produces an inventive account of human nature, involving split personality, repressed memories, neurotic behaviour, illicit impulses, sexual obsessions, and many of the concepts that would later be formalized by the psychologists…

“Or as Verne wrote in 1882, ‘There are two beings inside us: me and the other’ ” (3, pp. xxix-xxx).

1. Wikipedia. “Jules Verne.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_Verne

2. William Butcher. Jules Verne: The Definitive Biography. Foreword by Arthur C. Clarke. New York, Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006.

3. Jules Verne. Around the World in Eighty Days [1873]. Trans. William Butcher (1995). Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008.