Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizatio

by David Standish

  In 1855, thanks to his growing reputation as a translator of Poe and an art critic, his poetry began to be published. He had great hopes for the 1857 collection of Les fleurs du mal, but instead it brought scandal and heartbreak. A scathing review by Le Figaro was followed by a trial that found thirteen of the one hundred poems an affront to public morality, heretical, obscene. Six were banned, a suppression not lifted until 1949.

  The effects of syphilis increasingly showed themselves. He said he felt “the wind of the wing of imbecility” blowing over him. In 1864 he went to Belgium in hopes of persuading a publisher to bring out his complete works, staying there until 1866, when he suffered attacks of paralysis and aphasia. He spent his last year in a nursing home in Paris and died on August 31, 1867, at the age of forty-six, in his mother’s arms.

  Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867). (Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource NY Musee d’Orsay, Paris, France)

  Poor Baudelaire seems the unlikeliest possible vessel to carry the light of inspiration that would lead to the first best-selling novel about the hollow earth, from Poe to Jules Verne. Compared to tortured visionary Baudelaire, Verne was the picture of bourgeois normalcy. But he read Baudelaire’s translations of Poe in various journals and newspapers (Verne knew almost no English), and they touched something in him. It was, however, something different from the deep solemn chord Poe had sounded in Baudelaire’s heart. Verne responded chiefly to the cleverness, ratiocination, and up-to-date scientific trappings Poe wrapped his strange stories in. Both Poe’s influence and their great differences are glaringly obvious in Verne’s 1897 The Sphinx of the Ice Fields—his sequel to Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. That he was still thinking about Poe and his chopped-off novel this late in his life (Verne was sixty-seven when it was published) says a lot about how Poe remained with him. But he draws a lame “ending” completely lacking in the grand spiritual mystery Poe’s final paragraphs suggest. Pym’s body is found pasted to a loadstone mountain looming at the South Pole; Verne doesn’t follow him down the cosmic drain clearly waiting in Poe’s original. This is emblematic of a practical materialism very much in the regular daylight world, far from the spooky subterranean cosmos inhabited by Poe.

  Verne was just a normal guy whose life gave little hint of the fantastic voyages that he would find within and that would make him the originator of the modern science fiction novel. He was born in 1828 in Nantes, France, then a fading entrepôt thirty-five miles up the Loire River estuary, 240 miles southeast of Paris. His father, Pierre, had a modestly successful law practice, and the family lived in one of the better neighborhoods, in a house overlooking a quay. Verne grew up watching ships coming and going from all over the world. As the firstborn son he was expected to follow his father’s profession. In 1848, his studies took him to Paris, but apolitical young Jules did not join the revolutionary riffraff in the streets. Instead he found himself entranced with the theater. He started hanging out with the artsy bohemian set, actors and writers, becoming friends with Alexandre Dumas fils, four years his senior and already famous thanks to his novel La dame aux camélias, recently published when they met. They began collaborating on musical confections for the theater, the first of which, Broken Straws, went up in June 1850, produced in a venue newly and conveniently opened by Dumas père. The play had a decent run, but Verne’s expenses while working on it equaled what money he got.

  He spent the 1850s in a long struggling apprenticeship, inching crablike toward the new fictional form he would create. Hoping to generate some extra income, in 1851 he wrote the first of many pieces for Musée des familles, a magazine devoted to articles and fiction with an educational underpinning. These pieces needed to be solidly researched—even the fiction—and entertainingly didactic, both qualities he would bring to his novels. His theatrical work continued. For two years he became the secretary—unpaid—to the Théâtre Lyrique’s director, which put him in the thick of things. But despite years of trying and occasional small successes, his theatrical writing never developed into much. He did gain a sense of shaping discrete scenes that carried over into the novels, and presumably his skill at writing dialog was honed as well. By 1856 he had given up the pretext that he would ever become a lawyer. He had also snagged a potential wife, Honorine, a young widow with two small children and an attractive dowry. He tried to persuade his father to pay 50,000 francs to buy him a share in a stock brokerage in Paris, where Jules would invest for his father and his father’s friends, make everybody rich, and still have plenty of time for his writing. His father wasn’t buying. In the end his father-in-law made a place for him in a brokerage office he was opening in Paris. Jules and Honorine were married on January 10, 1857.

  In the meantime, he continued to write pieces for Musée des familles, gaining considerable facility in conducting detailed research—scientific, geographical, historical—taking meticulous notes and then synthesizing the information, threading it into an agreeably entertaining article or story. Whether he was aware of it or not, these pieces were moving him closer to becoming the “real” Jules Verne. He also made a friend who would be a great influence. Jacques Arago was an explorer, travel writer, artist, playwright, and theatrical impresario. Nearly forty years Verne’s senior, Arago had traveled to the world’s remotest parts and then written and illustrated books about his adventures. Blind and in his sixties when Verne met him, Arago embodied the been-there, done-it-all, know-everything character who would play the lead in so many of Verne’s novels. He also had theories about writing that Verne listened to. “He argued that travel books,” writes Herbert R. Lottman in his 1996 Jules Verne, “when the explorer avoided pedantry, were second only to memoirs as the most interesting of all books, with a minimum of description and a maximum of pithy dialogue.”

  In 1862 Verne began assembling the pieces of his long apprenticeship into the first of his Voyages extraordinaires series: Five Weeks in a Balloon. Its sources were disparate and spread over many years, not the least of which were two stories by Edgar Allan Poe, “The Balloon Hoax” and “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfall.” What came to be known as “The Balloon Hoax” had first been presented as fact, appearing as an extra edition of the New York Sun on April 13, 1844, under the headline

  ASTOUNDING

  NEWS!

  BY EXPRESS VIA NORFOLK!

  THE

  ATLANTIC CROSSED

  IN

  THREE DAYS!

  This account of a wayward balloon (named Victoria, just like Verne’s) blown off course across the Atlantic during an attempted flight across the English Channel to France exactly mimicked the journalistic style of the time and was widely accepted as fact, for a day or two anyway. “Hans Pfall,” while more fantastic—Hans constructs a balloon that takes him to the moon—also tries to present itself as an account of actual events.32 Verne’s Five Weeks in a Balloon achieves the same verisimilitude in recounting a balloon trip by three Englishmen across Africa, starting from Zanzibar and ending up in sub-Saharan Senegal. Just as Poe had played off the excitement surrounding the Wilkes expedition in Arthur Gordon Pym, Verne in Five Weeks was responding to the current fascination with Africa. Like the poles, it was a great unknown. Even as the novel was published in January 1863, John Speke was on his way home from having reached the long-sought-after source of the Nile in July 1862. He and Sir Richard Burton had made much-publicized African expeditions a few years earlier. Verne’s novel, essentially an adventure-filled, low-flying travelogue, caught this buzz, overlaying a concurrent fascination with the possibilities of aviation, and was an immediate hit.

  Part of its success was due to Verne’s publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel. Verne dropped off the manuscript for him and returned two weeks later to a rejection—of sorts. Hetzel told him he had the makings of a great storyteller but needed to make some revisions. Verne knocked them off quickly, and they were in business. Hetzel was both sympathetic and helpful in working with him as a close adviser on his stories, offering encourag
ement and suggestions Verne almost always followed. Their collaboration lasted many years. In spring 1864 Hetzel began publishing Magazin d’education et de récréation, a bimonthly illustrated magazine for a younger audience, another publication that aimed to entertain while edifying. From the first issue it began serializing novel after novel by Verne before they appeared in book form, which was usually at year’s end, just in time for the New Year’s gift-giving then popular in France.

  Verne’s first serialized novel turned to another mysterious place—the North Pole. His longest effort to date, it was subsequently published as two separate volumes: The English at the North Pole and The Desert of Ice, which were then combined under the title The Adventures of Captain Hatteras. During the 1840s and 1850s the world was captivated by the disappearance of legendary polar explorer Sir John Franklin; expedition after expedition was mounted to find out what had happened to him, and each one produced a fresh crop of polar narratives. Like Poe before him, Verne absorbed all such literature he could find, relying especially on Sir John Ross’s Second Voyage in Search of a North-West Passage (1835), when Ross’s nephew, James Clark Ross, discovered the magnetic pole. In Verne’s story, Captain Hatteras veers from his search for the Northwest Passage toward the pole, driven to be the first to plant the British flag on it. This showed a characteristic instinct for timely prediction on Verne’s part. From this time on the arctic focus shifted from pursuing the Northwest Passage to standing on the North Pole. In Verne’s novel we naturally find that old standby, the open polar sea, but he adds a fresh twist by explaining it through the presence of volcanoes—one of which sits atop the pole. Verne never buys into Symmes’ Holes, but in The Desert of Ice he does have Dr. Clawbonny observe:

  In recent times it has even been suggested that there are great chasms at the Poles; it is through these that there emerges the light which forms the Aurora, and you can get down to them to the interior of the earth.

  So he knew about Symmes and his holes, but in A Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) he found another way for his characters to get down there, courtesy of Athansius Kircher.

  There were two French precursors to Verne’s novel that he would have known. Le voyage au centre de la terre (1821) was written by Jacques Collin de Plancy, author of several books on vampires, ghosts, the living dead, that sort of thing. Clearly de Plancy’s novel owes a great deal to Symmes and eighteenth-century novels by Holberg and Casanova, which Verne’s doesn’t. The characters embark on a voyage to Spitzbergen, where on winter’s approach they nearly starve, but at the end of the first volume they find the chute au centre de la terre and head down into it. There they run into little people, sauvages du petit globe, and we’re off into a litany of their habits, customs, religion, government, and so on. In volume 3, they visit a series of countries with varying peculiarities, emerging from the opening at the South Pole and heading home. It is a considerably more old-fashioned take on the hollow earth than Verne provides.

  The other predecessor was by Alexandre Dumas père, a strange concoction called Isaac Laquédem, whose main character was the Wandering Jew, which Dumas had conceived on an epic eighteen-volume scale but never completed. It has never been translated into English. The first parts appeared in 1852-1853. As Arthur B. Evans describes it in Science-Fiction Studies ( July 1996), “In Isaac Laquédem, the hero Laquédem is guided to the center of the earth by Tyane, a scientist and disciple of Pythagoras. During the long subterranean descent, the former is obliged (much like Verne’s young Axel) to ‘build up an entire arsenal of Science’ by examining the geological history of the planet as shown in the successive strata of rock through which they pass.”

  But Verne’s scheme doesn’t owe a lot to either novel.

  There are only three main characters: gruff but lovable Professor Lidenbrock; his orphaned nephew, Axel; and strong, stolid Hans, their Icelandic guide, who says about twenty words in the whole novel. The Professor has found an ancient manuscript written in old Icelandic that contains a coded parchment that says, “Descend into the crater of Yocul of Sneffels … audacious traveler, and you will reach the center of the earth. I did it. ARNE SAKNUSSEMM.” They travel to Iceland, gather supplies (including a few handy Verne inventions, such as an electric-powered gaslight and “a voltaic battery on the newest principle”), and hire Hans, an eider hunter, as their guide. Proceeding to Mount Sneffels, they find the right opening and head down into it. After a torturous descent, they finally arrive in the vault of the inner world—more than a third of the way into the novel. There they encounter a prehistoric realm that seems a succession of tableaux vivant of all the earth’s geological periods. They have a variety of adventures, including being blown across the Central Sea on a raft they construct, witnessing an epic battle between two huge prehistoric sea monsters, and encountering a giant tending a herd of mastodons, before trying to head for home. They find Arne’s rusty dagger and a stone-carved message amounting to “This way out.” A massive boulder blocks the passage, so they blow it up, using fifty pounds of gunpowder they somehow still have with them. It blows a hole in this layer of the inner earth, and suddenly they’re back on the raft, riding a torrent as the Central Sea rushes down the hole. Luckily, they’re thrown into a passage that proves to be a volcano’s chimney, so it’s then up up and away, riding an erupting lava flow that pops them, alive and intact, onto a Mediterranean landscape—the island of Stromboli, near Sicily.

  Title page from the 1874 American deluxe edition of A Journey to the Center of the Earth showing two examples of the fifty-two engravings by Edouard Riou (1838-1900) appearing throughout the volume. (Courtesy of Sumner & Stillman, Booksellers)

  Verne uses the framework of an adventure into a world below to instruct his readers about geological science—which, along with Africa and the North Pole, was also a hot topic at the time. The novel might have as easily been called A Journey to the Center of Geology. Verne revised the 1867 edition, adding three new chapters, all of them introducing incidents—and creatures—drawn from recent advances in paleontology. Dinosaurs and pterodactyls and ape men had captured the popular imagination, and Verne was opportunely tapping into it.

  Geology as a true science was barely seventy-five years old when Verne was writing his novel. The revolution had begun with James Hutton (1726–1797), a Scotsman whose ideas of “deep time” and “uniformitarianism” in the late eighteenth century had amounted to thinking the unthinkable. According to the Bible the world was less than 6,000 years old and had been created by God in six days. Hutton (and Sir Charles Lyell after him) argued that time beyond measure had gone into the making of the earth as we found it, that no miraculous acts of creation were needed to account for the way it is, and that processes observable today would do the trick. Against this uniformitarianism stood the “catastrophists,” who believed changes in the earth occurred through a series of catastrophes—such as The Flood. They continued to have strong proponents well into the nineteenth century. Hutton also believed (correctly) that interior heat was the principle behind major geological processes, a theory that came to be called “Plutonist”—as distinguished from the more popular ideas of the “Neptunists,” led by German geologist Abraham Warner (1749–1817), who conceived of the earth much as Burnet had in the late seventeenth century, as a watery sphere with a crust gradually forming as it cooled, with rocks precipitating out of the liquid, and major landscape features caused by disruptions in this unstable crust.

  Two other related concepts also played a part in mid-nineteenth-century geological controversies: progressivism and directionalism. Progressivism meant what it suggests, that there is an observable progress in the geologic record, an upward march of creatures from lower to higher, culminating with man at the pinnacle. This was both in keeping with the spirit of the times—all sorts of progressive social measures were afoot—as well as being in harmony with religious ideas of a Divine Plan. Progressivism found metaphysical purpose in geological events. Directionalism was a scientifi
c expression of the biblical idea, going back to the work of Burnet and others, that the earth is in a state of decline from an earlier perfection; it held that the major geologic processes were weakening over time, an attenuation caused by the continued cooling of the earth. Both these ideas were embraced by the catastrophists but dismissed by Lyell and his uniformitarian followers, Darwin among them.

  Understanding of geology was proceeding by leaps, but even in the 1860s when Verne was writing, deep disagreements continued regarding basic ideas, with neptunists, plutonists, catastrophists, uniformitarians, nonevolutionists, evolutionists, scriptural geologists, and atheists all slugging it out. So where did Verne fit into all of this?