Prophecies of Jules Verne

My coming-of-age experience in literature and science was when, in sixth grade, I read Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Vingt mille lieues sous les mers), in English of course. Soon I hope to read it in French. (I already notice that the French title was “under the seas,” not sea.)

Jules Verne is considered to be the father of science fiction. In addition, one biographer called Verne “the man who invented the future.” It would seem that Verne was ready to embrace a scientific and technological future for the human species. What a surprise it was, therefore, for me to read Verne’s Paris in the Twentieth Century (Paris au vingtième siècle), in which he created a nightmare future that was ruled by science and technology. As someone said, “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” This quote has been attributed to everyone from Niels Bohr to Yogi Berra. So far, no one has attributed it to Verne. But, at any rate, Verne got it wrong, though not completely.

Apparently the manuscript of this novel was found in 1994 in the proverbial locked drawer of a desk which Verne’s grandson had inherited. Verne’s publisher rejected the manuscript in 1863. And for good reason. It is a structurally flawed novel with two-dimensional characters. And it was overwhelmingly depressing. At least Twenty Thousand Leagues had an uplifting ending (see below), while this book (I will spoil it since you probably won’t read it) the protagonist falls into the snow and freezes to death.

Rather than to attempt a summary of it myself, I quote extensively from the Wikipedia summary, in bold italics below, but I add some of my own comments, not in italics.

Paris in the Twentieth Century (French: Paris au XX^e siècle) is a science fiction novel by Jules Verne. The book presents Paris in August 1960, 97 years in Verne's future, where society places value only on business and technology. Written in 1863 but first published 131 years later (1994), the novel follows a young man who struggles unsuccessfully to live in a technologically advanced, but culturally backwards world. Often referred to as Verne's "lost novel", the work paints a grim, dystopian view of a technological future civilization.

The novel's main character is 16-year-old Michel Dufrénoy, who graduates with a major in literature and the classics, but finds they have been forgotten in a futuristic world where only business and technology are valued. Michel, whose father was a musician, is a poet born too late. In fact, the opening of the novel was of Michel getting an award for writing Latin poetry. The science and technology professors of the big university scoffed at the arts and humanities, “spouting like a steam engine.”

Michel had been living with his respectable uncle, Monsieur Stanislas Boutardin, and his family. The day after graduation, Boutardin tells Michel that he is to start working at a banking company. Boutardin doubts Michel can do anything in the business world.

The rest of that day, Michel searches for literature by classic 19th century writers, such as Hugo and Balzac. Nothing but books about technology are available in bookstores. In fact, the bookstores did have books of poetry, but the poetry was all in praise of mathematics and technology, such as Harmonies Ėlectriques and Méditations sur l’Oxygène. One of the poems began, “Le charbon porte alors sa flamme incendiaire Dans les tubes ardents de l’énorme chaudière...” Yes, it is as bad in French as it sounds (“Horreur, s’écria Michel”).

Michel's last resort is the Imperial Library. The librarian turns out to be his long-hidden uncle, Monsieur Huguenin. Huguenin, still working in the arts, is considered a "disgrace" to the rest of the family, and so was barred from attending Michel's birthdays, graduations, and other family events, though he has followed Michel's life—from a distance. This is the first time they meet in person. Huguenin tells Michel that his father was “un musicien de grand talent, né pour un siècle meilleur,” a great musician born for a better century. In fact, he refers to our present age as “notre âge crapuleux,” which I thought meant “our crappy age” but crapuleux actually means totally motivated by money. Chapter 10 consists of a tour of Uncle Huguenin’s library crammed with non-scientific books that could be found nowhere else.

At his new job, Michel fails at each task with Casmodage and Co. Bank until he is assigned to The Ledger, where Michel dictates the accounts for bookkeeper Monsieur Quinsonnas. Quinsonnas, a kindred spirit of 30, writes the bookkeeping information on The Ledger. Quinsonnas tells Michel that this is a job he can do in order to eat, have an apartment, and support himself while he continues working on a mysterious musical project that will bring him fame and fortune. Michel's fear of not fitting in is resolved; he can be a reader and still work on his own writing after work. In fact, Quinsonnas’s apartment is almost completely filled by a giant piano.

The pair visit Uncle Huguenin and are joined by other visitors, Michel's former teacher Monsieur Richelot and Richelot's granddaughter, Mademoiselle Lucy. Quinsonnas and Michel both dream of being soldiers, but this is impossible, because warfare has become so scientific that there is really no need for soldiers anymore—only chemists and mechanics are able to work the killing machines. But this profession is denied to even them, because "the engines of war" have become so efficient that war is inconceivable and all countries are at a perpetual stalemate. Verne said that fighting lifted the spirit (Se battre élève l’âme) and seemed to mourn the end of war. Verne’s character also missed the old days when there were courtroom battles and convictions instead of just financial settlements out of court.

Before long, Michel and Lucy are in love. Michel discusses women with Quinsonnas, who sadly explains that there are no such things as women anymore; from mindless, repetitive factory work and careful attention to finance and science, most women have become cynical, ugly, neurotic career women. Verne depicts twentieth-century women as downright ugly: long, skinny, and dry. Their waists were flattened, their faces austere, their joints stiffened (La taille s’aplatit, le regard s’austérifia, les jointures s’ankylosèrent). Their noses stuck down below their lips (un nez dur et rigide s’abaissa sur des lèvres), and they were nothing but acute angles (de la ligne drote et des angles aigus). In fury, Quinsonnas spills ink on The Ledger, and he and Michel are fired on the spot; Quinsonnas leaves for Germany. Of course, the misogynous Quinsonnas blamed Eve for the fact that he lost his temper.

In a society without war, or musical and artistic progress, there is no news, so Michel can't even become a journalist. He ends up living in Quinsonnas' empty apartment while writing superb poetry, but lives in such poverty that he has to eat synthetic foods derived from coal. He eventually writes a book of poetry entitled Hopes which is rejected by every publisher in Paris.

Michel briefly has a job at the Great Drama Warehouse, where popular entertainment is churned out quickly and sloppily. Each play was required to have “soixante-quinze mille calembous” (75 thousand puns). Michel, who loved serious literature, quit this job, saying “plutôt mourir de faim,” better to starve to death.

As the year 1961 draws to a close, all of Europe enters a winter of unprecedented ferocity. All agriculture is compromised and food supplies are destroyed, resulting in mass famine. The temperature drops to thirty degrees below, and every river in Europe freezes solid. In despair, Michel spends his last bit of money on violets for Lucy, but finds that she has disappeared from her apartment, evicted when her grandfather lost his job as the university's last teacher of rhetoric. He is unable to locate her amongst the thousands of starving people in Paris. He spends the entire evening stumbling around Paris in a delirious state. Michel becomes convinced that he is being hunted by the Demon of Electricity, but no matter where he goes, he is unable to escape its presence. He wanders into a morgue, with “les cadavres rigides, verdâtres, et boursouflés, étendus sur les tables de marbre,” stiff, greenish, swollen corpses extended upon marble tables, but even here there is bright electrical illumination. As Michel wanders, he finds the tomb of Heloïse and Abélard fallen into ruin, the glorious past forgotten. Is this depressing or what?

In the climax of the story, the heartbroken Michel, bereft of friends and loved ones, wanders through the frozen, mechanized, electrical wonders of Paris. The subjective narrative becomes steadily more surreal as the dying artist, in a final paroxysm of despair, unconsciously circles an old cemetery and finally collapses comatose in the snow. You will never guess what his last word was. If you guessed “Lucy,” you are right. “Oh! Lucy, murmura-t-il, en tombant évanoui sur la neige.”

The book's description of the technology of 1960 was in some ways remarkably close to actual 1960s technology. The book described in detail advances such as cars powered by internal combustion engines ("gas-cabs") together with the necessary supporting infrastructure such as gas stations and paved asphalt roads, elevated and underground passenger train systems and high-speed trains powered by magnetism and compressed air, skyscrapers, electric lights that illuminate entire cities at night, fax machines ("picture-telegraphs"), elevators, primitive computers which can send messages to each other as part of a network somewhat resembling the Internet (described as sophisticated electrically powered mechanical calculators which can send information to each other across vast distances), the utilization of wind power, automated security systems, the electric chair, and remotely-controlled weapons systems, as well as weapons destructive enough to make war unthinkable.

The book also predicts the growth of suburbs and mass-produced higher education (the opening scene has Dufrénoy attending a mass graduation of 250,000 students), department stores, and massive hotels. Verne depicts a giant canal that connects Paris with the ocean, and gigantic ships big enough to be floating gardens. A version of feminism has also arisen in society, with women moving into the workplace and a rise in illegitimate births. It also makes accurate predictions of 20th-century music, predicting the rise of electronic music, and describes a musical instrument similar to a synthesizer, and the replacement of classical music performances with a recorded music industry. Verne’s example of the degeneration of modern music was none other than Richard Wagner projected into the next century. Verne said Wagner’s four-hour operas were not so much to taste as to swallow. His music, Verne thought, sounded like someone sitting on a keyboard. Ah, if Verne could only have imagined what twentieth-century music, with its dissonances, actually did sound like! Whether it was melodic and expressive like Stravinsky or like a gray mixture of dissonance as in Webern, it makes Wagner’s music seem very tame. In addition, [Verne] predicts that the entertainment industry would be dominated by lewd stage plays, often involving nudity and sexually explicit scenes. Verne’s example of this from the nineteenth century was Jacques Offenbach, whose female “jumpers” wore swimsuits “showing them as nature made them.” In another place, Verne writes “le flambeau de l’hymen ne sert plus comme autrefois à faire bouillir la marmite,” which I think means “the flame of the hymen does not serve, as in the old days, to make the stew boil.” I’m not sure what this means, but it can’t be good.

In some ways, the modern world is worse than Verne could have imagined, but in some ways it is better. The modern publisher, on the last page, told how many grams of carbon dioxide equivalent were produced by publishing each book. Verne did not imagine global warming; and he could not have imagined science helping us to prevent global warming.

How could a writer who loved science so much imagine that science would create a nightmare future? I can suggest an answer to this question. In Verne’s twentieth-century Paris, all of science was in the service of making money, whereas the science that M. Arronax viewed from Captain Nemo’s underwater drawing-room was a view of the wonders of the ocean. Twenty Thousand Leagues ends with (I quote from memory), “The writer of Ecclesiastes said, millennia ago, That which is far off and exceedingly deep, who can find it out? Of all men now living only two can answer in the affirmative: CAPTAIN NEMO AND MYSELF (his caps).” Science can liberate our minds to understand the world, or it can enslave us. To Verne, either future was possible. Unfortunately, the real twentieth and twenty-first centuries more closely resembles Captain Nemo’s acts of terrorism than his exploration of the sea.

The main message I get from Verne’s forgotten novel is that science and education are whatever we make them to be. They can be used to open our eyes to beauty or to enslave us to Mammon.