A
Journey to the Center of the Earth
Jules Verne (1864)
I
don’t think I’ll be blowing any minds by saying that our world is hostile to
adventure and individuality. It’s a square universe, where the one rule is
square up or die. There’s no end to the pressures of conformity, the orders to
stay put, to never leave the city, and constantly buy things. Even if one day
the doors to adventure were thrown open neither myself nor any of my
slug-countrymen would have a clue what to do. Conformity is drilled into us.
All the maps are filled in, the species named and classified, and after several
successful trips to the moon our leaders have decided that was good enough for
them. The one institution that Americans believe can provide the adventure they
crave is the military, which of course means that to a broad swath of America
adventure involves shooting poor people, throwing hand grenades at poor people,
launching guided missiles at poor people, spraying poor people with napalm,
humiliating poor people, raping poor people, torturing poor people, desecrating
cultural treasures, getting bad religious tattoos, starting barfights, beating
people up for being different, and leaving a horde of crippled, mutilated
orphans and widows wherever they go and then laughing about it. Rather than
striking off towards the horizon adventure in our War Culture--where you are
not a Real Man unless you have killed--involves thrill-killing one’s way across
the third world.
A Journey to the Center of the Earth is
a very old-fashioned sort of story: the adventure tale. I don’t know if anyone
writes these sorts of things any more. The big money in Young Adult literature
these days is stuff like Harry Potter
and other sorts of proto-fascist indoctrination, right? Though I suspect it was
probably always like that, I can’t imagine that a tale of brave adventure would
much appeal to today’s youth, who need explosions and fascist GI Joe
protagonists to identify with. The protagonists in Journey are a university professor and his cowardly nephew!
Sergeant Ace, with his trusty revolver and hard-on for justice, is nowhere to
be found.
Basically
the plot is that a German professor, when browsing through an ancient copy of
the Icelandic eddas, finds a note
with a cryptic, indecipherable message. After the cowardly nephew decodes it
the two discover that it is a message from a long dead Icelandic alchemist, who
claimed to have descended to the center of the Earth from the mouth of a
dormant volcano. The professor decides to follow in his footsteps and the two
of them travel to Iceland. There they hire a stoic guide and descend into the
Earth’s interior. The writing about Iceland is very nice. The trip beneath the
crust takes months. They discover a huge underground ocean and the
still-breathing members of species thought long extinct. They even discover
some gigantic humanoid troglodyte. Eventually they are spit out upon the slopes
of Mt. Stromboli, in Italy, and return to Germany, where the coward marries his
cousin.
I
expected a lot out of A Journey to the
Center of the Earth but sadly it was not the book I wanted it to be. I
wanted it to be about big ideas, about man’s struggles in understanding an
incomprehensible universe, about the strength of the human spirit, but, sadly,
it was not nearly so deep. Pardon the pun. The book, instead, was a pretty
straightforward adventure story, which was disappointing. It wasn’t bad,
really, it just didn’t affect me very much. Maybe if I had read it when I was a
child then this review would be different. Additionally, time has not been kind
to this story. Science has marched on. Verne tried to ground his stories in
realistic science but the theories of 1864 sound ludicrous today. I know it’s
not Jules Verne’s fault, but I found much of the book difficult to take seriously.
It’s hard to resist comparing Verne to the much superior H.G. Wells. They’re
basically at the opposite ends of the spectrum: Verne tried to make his stories
seem plausible but the plausibility doesn’t hold up, and Wells forgoes
scientific grounding and instead tackles big social issues and his books still
seem timely and relevant.
Also,
the characters are poor scientists. They are superstitious, irrational, and
prone to sloppy thinking. That really irked me.
The
one thing that I would say really stands out as a plus is the narrator’s voice,
that of the cowardly nephew. He’s skeptical, unadventurous and sarcastic. He
doesn’t want to go off on any adventure, he just wants to read his books and
bang his cousin. I think we can all relate.
I
gather that this book, at least the edition I read, was horrifically mutilated
by the original translator, and that significant portions were omitted or
rewritten. Even the names were changed. In the original the Professor is named
Von Lidenbrock, in my copy he’s Hardwigg. The original nephew is named Axel,
but I knew him as Harry. Very strange. Unfortunately I’m not interested in
searching out a more accurate edition and anyway, if a book is poorly
translated how the hell am I going to know?
Each
month I pay five hundred American dollars to rent a miniscule room out in the
suburbs. When I moved in my roommates were a nerd, a guy in the Navy, an
alcoholic divorcee and a pair of juggalos, engaged to be married. They’re all
gone now and new people have moved in. Each has been depressing in their own
way but the most depressing, by far, has been a mother and son duo. The mother
is an abject failure as a parent, and her child is a sullen, dead-eyed cretin.
While his mother smokes marijuana and listens to Van Halen the boy frequently
stays up at night playing a video game involving a tremendous amount of gun violence.
I’ve decided that his game of choice is a fictional game called Bulletfucker 8. It’s the eighth game in
the Bulletfucker series, which
debuted on the NES in 1989. In the game you play a footsoldier from any number
of factions vying to control the world, and the conflicts take place in
real-world battlefield locations, such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan, Syria,
Indonesia, Vietnam, a preschool, the ruins of a state college, the jungle, a
library. The death animations are highly detailed and all the guns are true to
life. And when you rack up fifty headshots, your sniper rifle grows titties!
The world we’re headed towards: a nation of deadened slug people, legs
amputated from diabetes, lost in brightly colored fictions, ruled by a powerful
military elite.
I
don’t know if there are any more adventure stories left. Star Trek has been lobotomized, and they’re going to remake 2001, except now all the characters are
musclebound marines, and nothing’s going to stop them from blowing up Jupiter.
Sometimes I feel like we’ve forgotten about all the most interesting parts of
ourselves, and we only know that we can punch things or set them on fire. I
wish there were more stories like A
Journey to the Center of the Earth, that were optimistic, about discovery
and achievement, and I wish that they would live up to my expectations. That’s
not a huge request.
This
has been the most boring, stupidest of these book blog entries that I’ve yet
written. Sorry about that. It’s just that I didn’t have a tremendous amount to
say regarding A Journey to the Center of
the Earth. Yeah, I read it. That’s about all I can think of. Now I’m
re-reading The Savage Detectives. Spending
time with an old friend.
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