The Adventures of Saturnin Farandoul

by Albert Robida

  written and illustrated by

  Albert Robida

  translated, annotated and introduced by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  Introduction

  Voyages très extraordinaires de Saturnin Farandoul dans les 5 ou 6 parties du monde et dans tous les pays connus et même inconnus de M. Jules Verne [The Very Extraordinary Voyages of Saturnin Farandoul in the World’s five or six Continents, and in all the Countries known—and even unknown—to Monsieur Jules Verne], here translated as The Adventures of Saturnin Farandoul, initially appeared as a feuilleton serial in 1879. Each installment consisted of an eight-page pamphlet, of which there were 100 in all. The pamphlets were rebound and reissued in 1880 as an 800 page paperbound book, with the modification that the full-page color illustrations that had served as covers in the part-work, which were blank on the rear, were stripped of text repeating the title and mostly relocated within the text. A contents section was also added as a supplement. The novel was never reprinted again thereafter, although a silent movie version of part of the text was made in Italy in 1914 by Marcel Perez. The text of the paperbound book is currently available as an electronic document on the Bibliothèque Nationale’s gallica.com website (although the colored illustrations are reproduced in monochrome), and it is from that version that this translation has been taken.

  Robida had already built up a considerable reputation as an illustrator and caricaturist before embarking on the serial, but this was his first novel, and it represented a very ambitious undertaking. Its format and magnitude must have been planned in advance, and Robida must therefore have blithely undertaken to produce a 200,000-word text, organized into five equal sections, each of which would be further divided into ten chapters, without any significant experience of writing long fiction. He probably intended each chapter to consist of two pamphlets, but some actually ran to three, thus requiring others to be restricted to one (a regularity obscured in the pagination of the paperback version because of the relocation of the color plates). Each pamphlet had to fill up the available space more-or-less exactly, meaning that its text had to be tailored to fit the space available once the illustrations had been set in place—a task that inevitably provided a stern challenge to the writer’s organizational skills, and probably required a good deal of editing.

  This kind of pamphlet part-work was more common in England than in France during the 19th century, and English writers of so-called “penny dreadfuls” had worked out a system of fitting episodes of text exactly to eight-page units. Almost invariably, the writers “wrote short” and then padded the text to fit the required space, routinely feeding extra lines to the typesetter in the printer’s workshop. Such extra lines were often exclamatory items of dialogue, which filled space without adding any significant content—it was writers of penny dreadfuls who first adopted the now-standard convention of making every item of dialogue a separate paragraph, partly in order that an “Oh!” or a “What!” would use up an entire line. The evidence of Robida’s text, by contrast, strongly suggests that he routinely “wrote long” and then reduced his text to fit, or allowed his editor/printer to chop it; there are numerous places in the narrative where text appears to be missing or the narrative becomes brutally terse, but relatively few where unnecessary items of dialogue seem to have been inserted.

  The standard method of producing feuilleton serials in France was for the writer to dictate the text to an amanuensis, who was often entrusted with stretching it or condensing it to produce the correct wordage. Saturnin Farandoul exhibits numerous symptoms of that system of production and was almost certainly generated in that way. Although such serials routinely repeated information for the benefit of readers who made a belated start, and often used repetition as a form of padding, habitual dictators of text also used repetition as a means of stalling production while they tried to figure out what ought to happen next, and the pattern of repetition in Robida’s text is strongly suggestive of that kind of hesitation. On the whole, though, given that Robida was a novice, the text is remarkably free of such procrastinations, and is more often so hectic in its pace that it gives the impression of an author overflowing with ideas. It is not until mid-way through part five that the flow becomes seriously abated by any apparent weariness, and it is quite remarkable that a relatively unpracticed author should have been able to maintain the fecundity of his imagination over such a long narrative distance.

  Such modern critical description as there is of Saturnin Farandoul tends to describe it as a “parody” or “spoof” of the works of Jules Verne, which were extremely popular in France at the time. Verne certainly provided the principal inspiration for Robida’s book, whose original title clearly represents it as a derivative work, and there are certainly elements of parody in the way Robida chose to adapt and redeploy his Vernian materials, but the nature of Robida’s response to and extrapolations of Vernian materials is much more complicated than mere caricature. In order to understand and evaluate Robida’s novel more accurately, it is necessary to consider in some detail exactly what Jules Verne had accomplished in the preceding decade and a half, and analyze Robida’s reaction to that achievement in some detail.

  Verne’s career as a novelist began when the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel persuaded him—he was then an aspiring Romantic dramatist attempting to fund his artistic endeavors by hack journalism—to set aside a proposed series of articles on the popular hobby of ballooning in favor a novel that would embed the projected technical and lyrical descriptions of contemporary aeronautics within a robust adventure story. The result was Cinq semaines en ballon (1863; tr. as Five Weeks in a Balloon), in which a balloon borne by the prevailing winds is used to cross Central Africa from west to east. The nature of its origin ensured that it became a rather didactic work, full of detail about recent African exploration as well as contemporary aeronautical technology, which aimed for a higher degree of verisimilitude in its narrative than was typical of adventure stories set in remote regions of the globe.

  Verne followed that first novel with an exceedingly gloomy account of Paris au XXème siècle, lamenting the likelihood that the march of technology would produce a purely utilitarian society with no room for Art, but Hetzel rejected it—advising him never to publish it lest it damage his reputation irreparably—and told him to concentrate instead on celebrating the advancement of technology as an invaluable aid and adjunct to adventurous exploration. The novel remained unpublished until the manuscript was rediscovered, quite by chance, in the 1990s. Instead Verne produced Voyage au centre de la Terre (1864; tr. as Journey to the Center of the Earth), which followed Hetzel’s prospectus faithfully—although Hetzel probably considered it a little too imaginatively extravagant and might well have asked that Verne exercise more restraint in future.

  In 1864 Hetzel founded a new “family magazine”—intended to appeal to both adults and children—after a pattern that he had used before but had had to terminate when subjected to political exile by Napoléon III on account of his Republican views: Le Magasin d'Education et de Récréation. Enthusiastic about the potential of Verne’s didactically-inclined and technologically-sophisticated adventure fiction to serve the magazine’s compound brief, he offered the author a commission to write the equivalent of three volumes a year—approximately 250,000 words—for serialization in the magazine and subsequent book publication. Verne—not unnaturally, given his previous struggles—was glad to accept, and set out to extrapolate the works he had already published into long series collectively entitled Voyages extraordinaires. The series constitutes an explicit celebration of the glorious culmination of an age of heroic exploration a
nd the consequential advent of a new age of universal tourism. The first of these new serials was Les Aventures de Capitaine Hatteras (1864; tr. as The English at the North Pole), which described the attainment of one of the few remaining points on the Earth’s surface that humans had not yet reached.

  Verne maintained a conscientious restraint in De la Terre à la Lune (1865; tr. as From the Earth to the Moon), which described the building of a huge gun for the purpose of firing a manned missile into space, but the much longer Les Enfants du Capitaine Grant (1867-68; tr. as In Search of the Castaways) was more characteristic of the subsequent voyages extraordinaires. It describes a long rescue mission undertaken in response to a message found in a bottle thrown into the sea by a castaway, which takes its protagonists to South America, Australia and New Zealand, involving them in various mishaps en route. Although Verne’s earlier novels had made some use of the narrative currency established by the enormously popular prototype of the modern adventure story, Daniel Defoe’s Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), Les Enfants du Capitaine Grant was set very solidly in the flourishing tradition of 19th century “Robinsonades,” taking up the educational aspirations of the first half of J. R. Wyss’s Der Schweitzerische Robinson (1812-27; tr. as The Swiss Family Robinson) but ingeniously adding a relentlessly dynamic element to a usually static formula.

  The most successful of the early serials that Verne wrote for Hetzel was the classic Vingt mille lieues sous les mers (1870: tr. as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea), which introduced the enigmatic Captain Nemo and his ultra-sophisticated submarine Nautilus. It seems probable that Verne made Nemo a shadowy figure primarily in order to hide his plot away as an episode of “secret history,” but the mysteriousness of the character created a precedent at least as important as his vessel, and he acquired a quasi-legendary status that required further elaboration. That elaboration was eventually provided in the course of a long and contentedly-static Robinsonade, L’Ile mystérieuse (1874-75; tr. as The Mysterious Island). In the meantime, Verne produced Aventures de trois russes et de trois anglais dans l'Afrique australe (1872; tr. as The Adventures of Three Russians and Three Englishmen in South Africa and Measuring a Meridian), and the North America-set Le Pays des fourrures (1873; tr. as The Fur Country) and another exceedingly popular work, whose central character, Phileas Fogg, and his determination to set a new record for round-the-world travel both went on to acquire a quasi-legendary status: Le Tour du monde en 80 jours (1873; tr. as Around the World in 80 Days).

  Verne followed up L’Ile mystérieuse with a much grimmer and more melodramatic account of the aftermath of a shipwreck, Le “Chancellor” (1875; tr. as The Survivors of the Chancellor) and an account of a journey across the Russian wilderness in Michel Strogoff, Moscou-Irkoutsk (1876; tr. as Michael Strogoff, Courier of the Czar) before he allowed his taste for extravagance to get the upper hand again,. He had already written a sequel to De la Terre à la Lune, entitled Autour de la Lune (1870; tr. as Around the Moon), but his characters, unable to leave their spacefaring cannonball, had been limited to the role of narrowly-imprisoned passive observers; in Hector Servadac (1877; tr. as Off on a Comet), he attempted to get over that difficulty, at least to the extent of giving his spacefarers a little more space to roam, by improvising a highly improbable comet-strike that carries a segment of the Earth’s surface away into space. Although Verne published a few other volumes before the serialization of Saturnin Farandoul began, the named titles included all those that had a direct influence on Robida, and which he plundered to a greater or lesser degree.

  In each of the five parts of his own worldwide adventures, Saturnin Farandoul meets one of Jules Verne’s characters: Captain Nemo in part one, Phileas Fogg in part two, Hector Servadac in part three, Michel Strogoff in part four and Captain Hatteras in part five. Such borrowing might have landed him in difficulties with regard to intellectual property rights, but Verne raised no objection, apparently finding the homage rather amusing, although he cannot have approved of the manner in which Robida developed and altered some of the characters. Captain Nemo is, in fact, the only one whose manifestation in Saturnin Farandoul is approximately faithful to Verne’s model; he plays the same supportive role with respect to Farandoul as he does to the castaways of L’Ile mystérieuse, albeit in a more violent manner. All four of the other characters, who play broadly heroic if slightly mentally-unbalanced roles in Verne’s originals, become Farandoul’s enemies, routinely undermining his projects and threatening him, actively or by neglect, with death. Despite the inherent absurdity of the situations in which they become involved, this transfiguration of Verne’s characters is more than mere parodic or caricaturish exaggeration, amounting to a more sinister kind of role-reversal.

  The use that Robida makes of Verne’s characters is all the more surprising when one considers that Robida was a sincere admirer of Verne’s work, who loved his books. After publishing Saturnin Farandoul, he persuaded Verne to contribute to one of the humorous periodicals he found, and wrote a glowing tribute to Verne’s work to accompany the contribution. There is certainly a celebratory aspect to Saturnin Farandoul as well as a satirical one, but that serves to throw its contrasts and darker aspects into even sharper relief. Had Robida not recognized that Verne was a great writer, whose work had begun a significant new era in adventure fiction, changing that genre irredeemably, he would surely never have bothered to write Saturnin Farandoul—but nor, in all probability, would he have bothered if he had not had a simultaneous sense of the cost involved in that irredeemable transformation, and a sharp regret for the loss that Vernian verisimilitude entailed.

  The tradition of traveler’s tales goes back to antiquity, and the subgenre had a reputation for unreliability from the very beginning. It was always taken for granted that travelers, like fishermen, were innately prone to exaggeration—that they would always strive to make their narratives more melodramatic than the actual events warranted, and represent their own actions in a more heroic light. Imaginary travelers’ tales, usually narrated in the first person or allegedly based on first-person accounts, thus became a natural vehicle for narrations that required inherent exaggeration, such as satires and calculatedly nonsensical comedies. Robida would have been familiar with the highlights of a pan-European satirical tradition stretching from Lucian of Samosata’s True History (c. 160 A.D.) to such Renaissance works as The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (c. 1360)—which was almost certainly written in French, although most of the surviving manuscripts are in English—and the adventures of Sinbad, as subsequently integrated into the Arabian Nights, transfiguratively extrapolated into such Enlightenment classics as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and The Adventures of Baron Münchausen (1785, in a version by Rudolph Eric Raspe; subsequently expanded and continued by others). He might well have had access to the 36-volume anthology of Voyages Imaginaires, Songes, Visions et Romans Cabalistiques published in 1786-89 by Charles Garnier, which commenced with Robinson Crusoe and included many of the most fanciful items in the French satirical tradition of imaginary voyages.

  Robida clearly loved that satirical tradition, for its humor and its extravagance—new editions of its classics provided some of his best opportunities as a illustrator—and his love of it clearly put him in two minds when he encountered the further transfiguration of voyages extraordinaires achieved by Verne. Verne’s sophistication of the traveler’s tale, under the stern restraining hand of P.-J. Hetzel, was clearly an advancement of sort, reflective of the technological progress it celebrated, but it also delivered a potentially mortal blow to the unfettered imaginary extravagance of previous traveler’s tales. The principal reason why Saturnin Farandoul continually meets Vernian characters in the remotest regions of the world is that Robida was all-too-conscious of the fact that, from 1878 onwards, nobody would be able to write a story of the hypothetical exploration of any earthly setting without being uncomfortably conscious of the fact that Jules Verne had not only got there ahead of him, but had
conclusively de-mystified the territory in question.

  The Vernian characters borrowed by Robida become Saturnin Farandoul’s enemies because there is a sense in which they are the implicit enemies of all future adventurers who desire to find something unprecedentedly rich and strange in the places they visit, and a sense in which they will give the lie to all future tellers of munificently absurd tall tales. Saturnin Farandoul is not of their ilk; he belongs wholeheartedly to an earlier and incipiently-obsolete tradition. He is the kind of traveler who routinely falls into grotesque adventures and routinely extricates himself from them by equally grotesque means. He is more a Sinbad than a Robinson Crusoe, and far more of a Münchausen than a Phileas Fogg, an Henri Servadac or a Captain Hatteras—all of whom pose a threat not only to his person but to his whole raison d’être.

  One of the principal means by which Verne cultivates verisimilitude in his voyages extraordinaires is, of course, the use of third person narrative. Of all his major works, only one—Voyage au centre de la Terre—uses a first person narrator, although Le “Chancellor” is presented in the form of a journal, and the objective narrative voices he employs in his other novels make every effort to cultivate the rhetoric of reliability. It is significant that Robida, too, tells the tale of Saturnin Farandoul’s adventures in the third person. His narrative voice is considerably more intrusive than Verne’s, but that is because it serves a commentary function, continually making observations about the kind of modern world that Farandoul is now cursed to inhabit and to which he is, crucially and essentially, quite ill-fitted. Farandoul’s world is not entirely Vernian yet, but it is in the process of becoming Vernian, inexorably and irredeemably, and when it has completed its transition, it will be even more hostile to the likes of Saturnin Farandoul and his trusty crew of comic mariners. The narrative voice is polite enough not to labor this point overmuch, mainly allowing it to emerge naturally from the narrative by demonstration, but its eventual conclusion is quite explicit and leaves no room for doubt.