The Window of Desire: Captain Nemo, Nautilus and a Modern Utopian Project The Window of Desire:...

The Window of Desire: Captain Nemo, Nautilus and a Modern Utopian Project.

“-You like the sea, Captain?-Yes, I love it! The sea is everything. It covers seven-tenths of the terres-trial globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert where man is never alone, for he feels life stirring on all sides. The sea is only the vehicle of a supernatural and prodigious existence. It is noth-ing but love and motion; it is the living in!nite…”

In Jules Verne's novel, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Vingt Mille Lieues Sous Les Mers

-1870-) , we are introduced to a microcosmical representation of an ambitious literary project.

It is a novel where architecture plays a central role in the enterprise of containment and ac-

quisition of knowledge. Architecture and machines are indispensable for Verne's ambitious

goal: to encompass the totality human knowledge in his collection of adventure novels, enti-

tled Voyages Extraordinaires.

1. Voyages, Crafts and Science.

Jules Gabriel Verne (1828-1905) di"erentiated himself from the other literary projects of the

nineteenth century in a very particular fashion. He showed an incisive interest in everything

that mankind was able to produce and study. Science, technology and crafts magazines

abounded in his studio.

While other writers such as Balzac or Dumas focused on exhausting and covering all possible

manifestations of society by clustering them in detailed temporal archetypes, characters that

incarnated a series of personalities within French cities in a particular moment in history,

Verne was more interested in human production, craftsmanship and science. It is not as if

Balzac or Dumas could (or would) have done it otherwise, their project demanded such kind

of clustering in order to be a complete and coherent one; their intentions were headed to-

wards something di"erent, a mapping (and perhaps a satire) of the human condition. Verne,

The Window of Desire: Captain Nemo, Nautilus and a Modern Utopian Project. Jorge Rivera G.

1

on the other hand, had a di"erent project of totalization: “to exhaust all possible nouns”1 . He

wrote Voyages then, with the intention of including every single object (mineral, vegetal, and

creature) that nature had to o"er, avoiding any kind of synthetic grouping or naming that

would leave small particles out, but making a detailed inclusion of everything. Andrew Martin

explains it in The Knowledge of Ignorance as an act where Verne renounces to “the pro!le of

localized pseudo-totalities, mere monads, in favour of the undiminished, inclusive description

of the physical universe”2.

Pierre-Jules Hetzel, Verne’s editor, describes his plan in the Advertissement of the Voyages ex-

traordinaires, which was to:

“recapitulate all the knowledge, geographical, geological, physical, and astro-nomical amassed by modern science, and to rewrite, in the attractive and pictur-esque form which is his own, the history of the universe.”3

This project of total inclusion, was spread along the seventy one novels that embodied the

Voyages Extraordinaires collection. These novels contain, as their title implies, adventure nar-

ratives covering the entire globe and beyond. Verne made sure to include and cover each one

of the four elements of the planet in their di"erent material states: a journey through !re and

earth in Voyage au centre de la terre, the skies in his !rst novel Cinq Semaines en Ballon (1863) or

the famous Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (1873); the seas in Vingt Mille Lieues sous les

mers (1870) , L'Ile mystérieuse (1874) or Voyages et aventures du Capitaine Hatteras (1866). Every

element and every surface of the earth was then to be discovered (for science of course, to

discover is to possess), measured and framed within a unitary discourse of narrative and lan-


2

1 Andrew Martin, The Knowledge of Ignorance (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1985) p.132

2 ibid p.132

3 ibid p.133

guage. Even if Verne was not a believer in the bene!ts of human and scienti!c progress (he

was actually quite pessimistic about them), he did believe in the possibility of achieving this

complete mapping and classi!cation of the world.

Each one of his novels speak in some way of similar subjects, or share common elements

within themselves that can allow us to read Verne’s interests and set of shared symbols that

created a uni!ed mythology that is cross-referenced between every story.

One of the main points of encounter between all his texts, is the idea of cyclical movement. A

journey with a linear trajectory but that commonly returns to the point of departure (thus al-

lowing the raconteur of the story to tell of the wonders, adventures and misadventures lived).

The geometry of Verne’s narrative is both a circle and a line, a linear story (intersected by

transversal fragments of plot and taxonomical lists), that comes to a close at the same place as

it started, be it a trip to the moon where the travelers are placed within a hollow cannon bul-

let and !red towards the moon, #ying around it and coming back; or the more obvious Le Tour

du monde en quatre-vingts jours,

where the circumnavigation is

part of the wager placed by the

story’s hero Phileas Fogg.

High praise of current scienti!c

research and development is

one of the loudest concepts

within his texts. While not all of

his stories utilize science as a

main device for the narrative to

unfold, the moments within the


3

fig 1. Map of the trajectory followed by the Nautilus in Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mers. Cartography and geography predominate in Verne’s adventures. Verne himself charted most maps for each one of his nov-els.

novels where Verne does show his very personal interest and research in di"erent !elds of

knowledge (most of which developed vastly during the 18th and 19th century) the result is

quite poignant. Among the di"erent disciplines of science, Verne seems to have some favour-

ite ones that keep showing up in his adventures. Cartography and geography, for example,

take a position of alliance, and work together to help man take possession of the entire

planet. Naming, tracing and locating oneself is always an important, if not solemn, event

within his stories. A passage where Nemo and his crew reach the southern pole takes a whole

chapter, culminating with a precise positioning of their location and pinpointing of the geo-

graphic southern pole by an intricate process of measurements and triangulation. Physics and

chemistry !nd themselves some space within the lines of the Nautilus too, as they are used to

explain in detail the functions of the complex mechanisms that allow the submarine to be

powered and sunk into the depths of the ocean. And its by the manipulation and understand-

ing of di"erent laws of physics and hydraulics that Captain Nemo manages to escape the

dangers of an enclosing glacier in the southern pole.

Another common point among Verne’s stories is the importance of the occupation of its he-

roes. For Verne, to make is to be, and every character's personality is delimited by their craft

and occupation4 . Each one of the stories in Voyages is normally narrated through the eyes

and voice of one of his characters, most of time incarnated by a scientist, that possess the dual

ability of having a vast and precise knowledge of his !eld, as well as a capacity for prose that

can turn any kind of objective description into a poetic narration of facts. Each one of his main

scientists take on the role of submitting the journey to a taxonomical analysis, they observe

with care everything around them, taking notes and measurements. Verne then, utilizes for

this a wide array of literary formats: the journal, the news note, the list, the travel log, to tell us


4

4 ibid p. 151

what his characters are witnessing and living in

their adventures.

Finally, Verne utilizes current technological ad-

vances and actual scienti!c facts, to construct the

imaginary vessels that allow the protagonists to

ful!ll the journey that has been set upon them.

Each vessel is designed and constructed using cur-

rent technology, not a science !ction-like imaginary

one, which makes Verne’s novels bear a weight of

factual truth intertwined within the fantastic stories

that are being told. All along the stories, Verne util-

izes contemporary technological developments

and speaks highly of them. Contrary to popular belief,

Verne did not make prophetic inventions nor had he the intention of doing so. All the tech-

nology and scienti!c research that is shown in the novels is based in factual elements that he

researched before writing, there is in his writings a profound respect for the laws of nature.

For example, in his !rst interview Verne was asked about the similarities between H.G Wells

writing and his own work, Verne answered that there was no comparison between their work.

“In his own novels, he says, there is no invention because he makes use of the known laws of

physics. Wells, on the other hand, goes to Mars in an airship constructed of a metal which de-

!es the laws of gravity”. 5


5

5 Timothy Unwin, Jules Verne Journeys in Writing,(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005) pg. 9

fig 2. Illustration of of the Vernian vessel used in De la Terre à la Lune by Henri de Montaut.

But Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is the novel where one can !nd a clear, microcos-

mical representation of the Vernian project in all its glory. It is also one of the novels from the

body of his work where the capacity of architecture to ful!ll this project is illustrated.

Twenty Leagues Under the Sea tells the story of Dr. Pierre Aronnax, Conseil and a french-

canadian harpooner named Ned Land. These three men are hired by the United States gov-

ernment to initiate a hunt for an alleged sea monster that is causing all kinds of havoc in the

ocean. After several months in the hunt and with the sailors about to give up, their ship gets

attacked by the supposed monster and in the ensuing collision, Aronnax, Conseil and Land

are thrown over board, only to awake on the surface of a metallic monster. The creature that

everyone thought to be a gigantic narwal happens to be a Submarine, The Nautilus, and Cap-

tain Nemo rules it with an imperative voice. Nemo allows the three heroes to live and stay on

board under the condition of never again leaving the ship, and since the Captain has read Dr.

Aronnax book about his research on submarine life, he uses the opportunity to take them on

a trip around the globe, to show them the wonders below the surface of the oceans and put

into discussion several points dealt within the Doctor’s book. Nemo shows his guests,

throughout the novel, a remarkable interest in science, and an outstanding knowledge of the

secrets of the submarine and supramarine worlds. As said before, this novel could represent

the whole Vernian project, the circumnavigation (encirclement) of the globe in search for ac-

quisition of the complete knowledge of the world, with the aid of science, technology and

adventure.

2.Circles and Knowledge.

The !rst attempts to present a plausible project to make all knowledge accessible to men in a

single work was presented in the 18th century by Diderot and D’Alembert in their Encyclope-

dia, a project that, as its name refers to, would encircle all the knowledge produced by man-


6

kind. It is Verne who incorporates this intention within the lines of his novels. Verne and Did-

erot bear numerous similitudes in the intentions and interests within their projects. Verne had

a particular interest in the capacity and beauty of human craft, its tools and the manipulation

of technology as instruments that could help science and human knowledge broaden and

become every day more and more complete, as did Diderot. The encyclopedia, as Martin ex-

plains, aims to “accomplish a goedesic journey around the sphere of knowledge: it is a textual

circle[…] But, in the diverse forms of the grand (global) tour, it also underlies the teleology of

the Voyages. Thus circumnavigation is the encyclopedic manoeouvre par excellence...Truth for

Verne is a circle” 6

The didactic tone of his novels shows an interest in transmitting not only current scienti!c

breakthroughs, but also explaining how these breakthroughs are achieved and how it is that

every machine, contraption and research functions within the plot. As Jean Chesneaux ex-

plains: “the didactic nature of the Voyages Extraordinaires as a whole, derives also from the

care with which Verne sought to retrace in detail the history of man’s acquisition of scienti!c

knowledge, instead of just presenting it as it was known at the time”7 . In the chapters entitled

“The Nautilus” , “All by electricity” and “Some !gures” in Twenty Thousand Leagues, the narra-

tor, Monsieur Aronnax describes a series of conversations with captain Nemo about the con-

struction, distribution, materials and internal functioning of the Nautilus. Like this one ex-

plaining the way electricity is generated within the submarine:

“First I shall tell you that in the depths of the sea there exist zinc, iron, silver, and gold mines whose exploitation would certainly be practicable. But I have bor-rowed nothing from this earthly metals, for I wished to !nd the means of produc-ing my electricity only in the sea itself […] You know the composition of seawater. In a thousand grams are found ninety six and a half percent of water, and about


7

6 Andrew Martin, The Knowledge of Ignorance (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1985) p.143

7 Jean Chesneaux, The Political and Social Ideas of Jules Verne. trans. Thomas Wikeley ( London: Thames and Hudson, 1972) p.30

two and two-thirds percent of chloride of sodium […]mixed with mercury it forms an amalgam which takes the place in bunsen batteries[…] I shall tell you besides that the sodium batteries must be considered the most powerful”8

The three characters imprisoned inside the Nautilus, are also literary vehicles through which

Verne portrays his didactic and scienti!c interests. Each of this characters represent a fraction

of this spirit of communication:

1. Aronnax, the naturalist (the narrator of the story), who studies the submarine

world through the windows in Nemo’s studio; he provides long taxonomic

lists of species that are normally valued against the French market and their

practical purposes for society. He is the one that is commonly engaged in a

dialog with Nemo, who devotes himself to teach Aronnax everything he has

learned about the secrets of the ocean and its submarine world.

2. Conseil, his servant, the classi!er, who sees every underwater species with a

purely scienti!c eye – naming and classifying it all he is the taxonomist par

excellence. Verne does not worry about the development of his character,

but Conseil is himself a vessel for the sciences of taxonomy and ichthyology.

3. Ned Land, the canadian whale hunter, who sees the underworld as a vast

source for food , resources and a !eld of a never-ending hunt. He is a typical

character in Verne’s novels, the predator that represents the colonialist coun-

try, ever hungry and ever consuming everything in his way. Nature is en-

framed as a source of food and game.

Captain Nemo is one of the few attempts of Verne to develop a character within his texts.

Through Nemo, he manages to maintain an aura of mystery and some sort of psychological

drive behind the character - one cannont simply con!ne him to being a representation of

good or evil. Nemo is an utopian, a monomaniac who built Nautilus as an tool for absolute


8

8 Jules Verne, (The complete) Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, trans. Emmanuel J. Mickel (Bloomington & Indianapolis; Indiana University Press 1991) p. 178-179

knowledge. It holds within it every necessary

thing for human survival and scienti!c develop-

ment, allowing Nemo to isolate himself from the

rest of civilization. This self-concealment is part of

his utopian project. Within the interior of the

submarine, all the inhabitants followed a strict set

of rules, subscribed themselves to a lifetime of

brotherhood, and a life of study and communal

work. The world is to be seen through the win-

dows of the Nautilus and controlled through the

hands of its crew. They travel the seas mapping,

measuring, enlisting and registering all the con-

tents of the ocean, islands and continents. This is

Nemo’s utopian dream of a new social order.

3. Nemo and Utopia.

The term Utopia was coined in the 16th century by Tomas More, who before the publication in

1516 of the De Optimo Reipublicae Statu deque Nova Insula Utopia Libellus Vere Aureus, had ref-

ered to this place as “Nusquama” or “nowhere”, later to be changed to “Utopia” when he “com-

bined the Greek ou, used to express a general negative and transliterated into the latin u, with

the Greek topos, place or region, to build Utopia”. But it wasn’t until the sixteenth and seven-

teenth centuries that the descriptive or narrative works that imitated the ideas behind Utopia

were called utopias, more or less as a literary form. Utopia then became charged with a series

of meanings that have been accumulating through the passing of time: “a literary genre, a


9

fig 3. Captain Nemo on top of the Nautilus. Engraving by Alphonse de Neuville

constitution for a perfectly restructured polity, a state of mind, the religious or scienti!c foun-

dations of a universal republic”9

In the introduction to Utopian Thought in the Western World, Frank E. Manuel enlists the com-

mon elements to be found in an utopian narrative where “the principal elements are: a ship-

wreck or a chance landing on the shores of what turns out to be an ideal commonwealth, a

return to Europe, and a report what has been remarked”10 . If Twenty Thousand Leagues

would be looked at within this terms, one might say as well that the novel is some form of a

draft for an utopian project, where Nemo is the brain behind its conception and Annorax, Ned

Land and Conseil are, of course, the narrators that through of their journals have told the

story of how they have been led into the submarine world and learned all about the social,

economic and scienti!c vision of its proud and mysterious captain.

In 17th century monk Tomasso Campanella’s City of The Sun, we are introduced to an utopia

where the accumulation of human knowledge, science and learning through displacement

are a de!ning part of the project. “Campanella presented a city under a single ruler called

Sole, or the Meta!sico, who incorporated in himself all power, all knowledge, and all

love...Under his direction were as many o$cials as there were scienze, though its not quite

clear from their titles precisely what areas of knowledge they covered. There was an As-

trologo, a Cosmografo, a Geometra, a Loico, a Rettorico, a Grammatico, a Medico, a Fisico, a

Politico and a Morale….” 11 About the way that Scienti!c knowledge was accumulated, repre-

sented and transmitted: “Scienti!c knowledge was translated into pictures painted on both

sides of all seven concentric walls of the circular city and on a globe beneath the cuopola of


10

9 Frank Manuel, Utopian Thought in The Western World ( Harvard: Harvard Press, 1979) pg. 2

10 ibid p. 4

11 ibid p. 271

the central temple, where the sphera with its constellations was drawn in the traditional

manner.”12 and the City, being formed with seven concentric rings of walls, became a total

book of knowledge. The illustrations engraved in the walls were explained by little or no

words at all, since Campanella believed in visual communication as a superior means to tell

something. Each ring of walls allowed the knowledge to be subdivided and displayed in cor-

rect order, starting with the depiction and symbolic representation of all the stars and planets,

and continuing to the lower creatures of the sea and scienti!c inventions and breakthroughs

all over the known world. Since the language was mainly based in pictorial representation,

children learned all about the universe while playing on the streets of the city, even before

they turned ten years old they would have been exposed to and understood most of it.13

As one can see, Nemo’s project is not far from the intentions of a 17th century utopia, where

the whole project of self isolation and creation of a new order functions as a way for Verne to

write a political remark on the situation of the colonist-spirited world he lives in. Nemo is

driven by both his scienti!c interests and his hatred towards tyranny found in the world.

(Nemo has Hindu origins -son of a Rajah- and has been displaced and pushed into his oceanic

adventure by the hatred towards the English conquest of India)14 . But his utopia speaks of

something else, not only the search for vengeance, but a new beginning, where brotherhood

among men, science and craftsmanship rule and drive their lives. Nemo dreams of the day

mankind lives underwater in peaceful harmony:


11

12 ibid p. 272

13 ibid p. 272-273

14 For a full biography of Captain Nemo refer to Part 3, Ch. XVI in Jules Verne, The Mysterious Island (New York, NY: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1958)

“ ’Also’ he added, ‘that is where true existence lies; I can imagine the construction of nautical

towns, clusters of submarine houses, which, like the Nautilus, would ascend every morning to

breathe at the surface of the water -free towns, independent cities!…’ .” 15

Nature, the great interlocutor in Verne’s novels, is

not regarded as a threat to the human race. As

Chesneaux puts it, “Verne does not think of nature

as having a real existence apart from man and be-

ing hostile to him”16 . Contrary to many other

novels that see natural forces such as the ocean,

volcanoes and storms as a source for fear and

challenge, Verne !nds an opportunity to put sci-

ence at equal force with nature. The universe and

the natural world o"er no challenge but are

sources of resources and power. In many of the

novels, nature puts in jeopardy, in some way or

another, the journey that the characters have set

upon, be it storms or giant squids, there is a

struggle where science, technology and man’s

bravery manage to outcome at the end. But nature, as mentioned before, not only o"ers chal-

lenge to man’s technological prowess, but o"ers also an in!nite !eld of resources to be

cropped out of it, be it taxonomical resources, as Aronnax and Conseil !nd within the vast

submarine world; or food resources, that Ned Land is never to shy to demonstrate his capacity


12

15 Jules Verne, (The complete) Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, trans. Emmanuel J. Mickel (Bloomington & Indianapolis; Indiana University Press 1991) p. 223

16Jean Chesneaux, The Political and Social Ideas of Jules Verne. trans. Thomas Wikeley ( London: Thames and Hudson, 1972) p.33

fig 4. Captain Nemo and Dr. Aronnax on top of the Nautilus after a long battle against polar ice. A struggle and victory over nature is depicted in this particular scene.Engraving by Alphonse de Neuville

to consume ( he knows only two species of !sh: edible and non edible); or Nemo’s more bal-

anced perspective, where the submarine world o"ers him an in!nite array of resources to

keep in track his underwater utopia, as well as a source for knowledge, awe and understand-

ing of the natural universe.

4. The Studio and the Window.

The Nautilus, Nemo’s studio and its windows represent in Vingt mille lieues the architectural

mediators between man and nature. They perform as parts of a machine, as normative ob-

jects to understand and witness the wonders of the natural world. Architecture within the

novel allows the crew to observe, measure and classify, to grow, crop, hunt, process, research,

list and conceal. Further, samples of the outer world, registries, maps and diaries are pro-

duced, which become part of the studio, the captain’s personal encyclopedic collection and


13

fig 5. Nemo’s studio. Comprised of two chambers, the library and the drawing room. This represent the heart of the Nautilus and of Nemo’s effort to map and understand the entire world.

integral part of the ship’s architecture. In the studio, the tension between the enclosed world

and the vast openness of the ocean is revealed. It contains a library of 12,000 volumes, that

will never grow due to Nemo’s rupture with human history and production on the very mo-

ment he immersed himself with the submarine “Twelve thousand [Volumes], Monsieur Aron-

nax. These are the only links which attach me to the earth. But I had !nished with the world

on the day when my Nautilus plunged for the !rst time beneath the waters. That day I bought

my last volumes, my last pamphlets, my last papers, and I wish to think that from that time

men no longer think or write.” ; a museum-like display of natural wonders, all rightly classi!ed

and named; art from all over the world, scienti!c tools, maps and many other wonders. An ar-

chitectural device of total knowledge.

The constitution of the studio, comprised of a library and a drawing room are described in the

following excerpts. Narrated by Dr. Aronnax, who is invited by the captain to take a tour

around inside the submarine:

“Captain Nemo rose. I followed him. A double door at the back of the dining room opened , and i entered a room equal in dimensions to that which I had just left.

It was a library. High pieces of furniture, made of black violet ebony inlaid with brass, supported upon their wide shelves a great number of books, uniformly bound. The shelves followed the shape of the room and terminated at the lower part in huge divans, covered with brown leather, which were curved to a"ord the greatest comfort. Light, movable desks, made to slide in and out at will, allowed one to place one’s book down while reading. In the center stood a large table, covered with pamphlets, among which were some newspapers already old. The electric light #ooded this harmonious ensemble; […] Among these works I noticed masterpieces of the ancients and moderns, all the !nest works that mankind has produced in history, poetry, the novel, and science, from Homer to Victor Hugo, from Xenophon to Michelet, from Rabelais to Madame Sand. But works of science particularly held an important place in the library. Books on mechanics, ballistics, hydrography, meteorology, geology, geography, etc. held a place there no less im-portant than works of natural history.”


14

Right after, the Captain takes Aronnax into a contiguous room, a larger one described as

Nemo as a drawing room where he keeps all his treasures and samples from the human and

natural world:

“At the moment Captain Nemo opened a door which stood opposite to that by which I had entered the library, and I passed into an immense drawing room splendidly lighted.

It was a vast four-sided room, ten meters long, six wide, and !ve high. A luminous ceiling, decorated with light arabesques, shed a soft, clear light over all the marvels accumulated in this museum. For it was a museum, into which an in-telligent and liberal hand had gathered all the treasures of nature and art, with the artistic confusion which distinguishes a painter’s studio. Thirty paintings of mas-ters, uniformly framed, separated by bright drapery […] Formerly I loved to collect these beautiful works created by the hand of man...These are my last remem-brances of that world which is dead to me. In my eyes, your modern artists are al-ready old; they have two or three thousand years of existence; I confound them in my own mind. Masters have no age.”

The machines, instruments and other devices used by all the characters in their adventures,

are meticulously described by Verne with a remarkable precision. But if Verne has a particular

interest in explaining with didactic clarity and uses accurate scienti!c laws to provide his sto-

ries with a weight of realism, his machines’ descriptions always reach a point of obscurity in

the way that they perform the tasks they’re designed for. Every instrument ingeniously cre-

ated for the plot is a machine of wonder, a device that reveals enough to draw our attention

and produce awe in novel characters and us readers. Even if Nemo explains in detail the

chemical reactions and instruments utilized for the obtention of electricity, it is never fully ex-

plained in detail the way that the machines produce (and why) such enormous amounts of

electricity and how is it that the Nautilus utilizes this power as a locomotive force so e$-

ciently. Some of the electric devices in Nemo’s chamber are described in their function but the

how is never revealed. Verne makes sure that some of the details remain obscure, this ma-

chines are not exactly science !ction visions of the future but machines imagined as sources

of wonder, as in Francesco di Giorgio Martini’s machines, Verne is more concerned here with


15


16

fig 7. Captain Nemo’s Window. Engraving by Alphonse de Neuville

the phenomenological impact that this machines have within the plot and the readers than

the actual scienti!c precision of the machines that he presents. Machines and architectural

devices thus, carry the dialectic function of being indispensable for man’s rule over nature

within the plot, provide the idea of acquisition of knowledge, but also produce wonder

through their incompleteness and the halo of magic surrounding them.

Roland Barthes suggests in his essay “The Nautilus and the Drunken boat” the possibility of un-

derstanding Verne’s idea of a !nite and measurable world through the architectural and liter-

ary !gure used in some of his novels, the space of meditation, of self-seclusion, collection and

containment. He describes this !gure as the place where “the man-child re-invents the world,

!lls it, closes it, shuts himself up in it, and crowns this encyclopaedic e"ort with the bourgeois

posture of appropriation”17 . The Studio of Captain Nemo, comprised by both the library and

the drawing room is this space of isolation in the novel. It is the space where the dream of to-

tal inclusion is realized, where man can make real the idea of appropriation of the world

through collecting and stacking up its pieces in the walls and shelves. Nautilus is the space of

quietude, “Where could one !nd greater solitude or silence, Professor?”18 , the space where

this man-child is able to describe the world in his journals, texts and catalogues. It is the space

where things are named, and by naming them they are provided with mythological status

within Verne’s universe. It is Michel Foucault’s tabula, a table “that enables thought to operate

upon the entities of our world, to put them in order, to divide them into classes, to group

them according to names that designate their similarities and their di"erences - the table

upon which, since the beginning of time, language has intersected space.”19 This static space


17

17 Roland Barthes, Mythologies. trans. Annette Lavers (New York, NY: Hill and Wang 1972) p.65

18 Jules Verne, (The complete) Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, trans. Emmanuel J. Mickel (Bloomington & Indianapolis; Indiana University Press 1991) p.164

19 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things. (New York, NY: Routeledge Classics 2006) p. XIX

receives and holds the results of all the interactions and negotiations of Nemo with the exte-

rior, with nature. It allows the other characters to study, list and map in quiet, motionless soli-

tude, accompanied only by the glow of the electrical bulbs and the hypnotic blur of the stu-

dio’s window.

But as Thomas A. Sebeok and Harriet Margolis point out in their essay on Semiotics of the

Window, for this static quietude to be truly e"ective, it is necessary to place this space into

confrontation with its opposite. Movement is needed: adventure and the desire for it. The

Window, or porthole in captain Nemo’s drawing room (and the quadruple one in the subma-

rine’s bridge) then, provide the possibility of this dialectic between enclosement (static) and

openness (movement). As Sebeok puts it: “The dialectic movement, which constantly impels

man’s encapsulated habitat to beget departures out into the in!nite, requires channels, por-

tals, or other loopholes through which such passage (of sound, of sight, of objects) is possible

from the inside to the outside to the inside, between order and chaos - in short […] to assure

a ‘genuine poetics of exploration’ (Barthes 1973: 66)”20.

The window in the studio is the loophole that the Nautilus, Nemo, and its inhabitants require

to ful!ll the appropriation of the world, to close the circular geometry traced in the beginning

of the adventure. The opening provides Nemo with a channel to project his desire, the scien-

ti!c mapping of everything, Science and knowledge obtained, the window ful!lls its function

and as in the Adamic myth, to obtain knowledge is also to obtain carnal understanding and

the feeling of desire. Captain Nemo’s window is perhaps, a threshold to Eros.


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20 Thomas A. Sebeok and Harriet Margolis, “Captain Nemo’s Porthole: Semiotics of Windows in Sherlock Holmes” Poetics Today Vol. 3, No. 1, Types of the Novel Semiotics of Social Discourse. (Winter, 1982), p. 113-114.

Bibliography:

•Roland Barthes, Mythologies. trans. Annette Lavers (New York, NY: Hill and Wang 1972)

•Jean Chesneaux, The Political and So-cial Ideas of Jules Verne. trans. Thomas Wikeley ( London: Thames and Hudson, 1972)••Tommaso Campanella, The City of the Sun: A Poetical Dialogue. trans. Daniel J. Donno (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press 1981)

•Michel Foucault, The Order of Things. (New York, NY: Routeledge Classics 2006)

•Thomas More, Utopia (1516)

•Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in The Western World ( Harvard: Harvard Press, 1979) ••Thomas A. Sebeok and Harriet Mar-golis, “Captain Nemo’s Porthole: Semi-otics of Windows in Sherlock Holmes” Poetics Today Vol. 3, No. 1, Types of the Novel Semiotics of Social Discourse.

(Winter, 1982), pp. 110-139. •• Michel Serres, “Jules Verne's Strange Journeys”,Yale French Studies, No. 52, Graphesis: Per-

spectives in Literature and Philosophy. (1975), pp. 174-188.

• Timothy Unwin, Jules Verne Journeys in Writing,(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005)

• Jules Verne, (The complete) Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, trans. Emmanuel J. Mickel (Bloomington & Indianapolis; Indiana University Press 1991)

• Jules Verne, The Mysterious Island (New York, NY: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1958) Jules Verne, The Mysterious Island (1874)


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