Journey Through the Impossible (2 page)
Read Journey Through the Impossible Online
Authors: Jules Verne,Edward Baxter
Scene 4: The End of a World
138
Appendices: 1882: Two Reviews of Journey Through the Impossible
145
Arnold Mortier: Evenings in Paris in 1882 (November 25)
147
The New York Times "A Jules Verne Piece" (December 19)
155
Notes
161
ith the publication of Journey Through the Impossible a dream
comes true. The North American Jules Verne Society
(NAJVS) presents to the English-speaking world this heretofore
unpublished play. This edition is the result of a collaboration between
several members of the NAJVS and their friends. Edward Baxter
translated the text from the original French and it is his translation we
publish here. Two other translators independently rendered the play
into English: Cecile Molla Leyonmark and Frank Morlock. Cecile's
translation was published in Extraordinary Voyages, the NAJVS
newsletter. Frank is a professional translator of Dumas' plays and he
enjoys translating Verne's plays. His Dumas translations are available
at www. roguepublishing.com/.
Edward Baxter has already translated several of Verne's works,'
and we hope he will for many years continue to help "rescue" these works, so that Verne will be recognized in America, finally, as a writer
and stylist. Our thanks go also to the board of directors of the NAJVS,
chaired by Dennis Kytasaari until June 2002, and to the members of
the Translations Committee: Walter James Miller, Brian Taves, and
Roger Leyonmark. The elegant illustrations created by Roger Leyonmark and which adorn the cover, the frontispiece, and serve to open
each act of the present play, help the reader travel to the center of the
earth, through oceans, and to the planet Altor.
We are also grateful to Anna Jean Mayhew, a professional editor
and one of the newest members of NAJVS, for her careful attention
to this introduction and to the notes throughout the play.
Three prominent members of the French Societe Jules Verne
helped us tremendously with first-hand information: Robert Pourvoyeur, the world specialist of Offenbach and of Verne's plays; the late
Francois Raymond (d. 1993), who edited the French edition of the
play; and Volker Dehs, whose curiosity and tenacity make him the
"Vernian detective." Steven L. Mitchell, our editor at Prometheus
Books, brings this unknown and unexpected Verne play to life in
America.
ourney Through the Impossible (Voyage a travers l'impossible) is
for many readers an unexpected and surprising work by the
French novelist Jules Verne (1828-1905). First, the piece is a play and
not a novel. Second, when staged in Paris in 1882, the play included
"special effects," as they are called today. Third, Verne took characters from his former novels and short stories (like Captain Nemo of
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea' and Michel Ardan of From the
Earth to the Moon), resurrecting them for great adventures in Journey
Through the Impossible. Fourth, the play was written in the middle of
Verne's life, between his optimistic and pessimistic periods. Fifth, of
all Verne's work, this is the one most oriented toward science fiction;
the play includes travel to the interior of the earth, under the oceans,
and into outer space. Sixth, for almost a century the piece was lost to
Vernian scholars. Seventh, the play was never translated and the pub lisher of the original French edition overlooked a scene. The omitted
scene is included in this first complete edition of Journey Through the
Impossible.
Verne, known in the United States as "the father of science fiction," wrote mainly geographic and scientific adventure novels
between 1862 and 1905.3 These works were published in Paris by
Pierre-Jules Hetzel,4 his lifelong publisher. In his novels, only on
exceptional occasions does Verne step out of what is possible, what
can be scientifically explained; for the most part he stays in the real
world. For example, Verne's The Sphinx of the Ice 5 and H. P. Lovecraft's
At the Mountains of Madness,6 are both sequels to the unfinished
Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym7 by Edgar Allen Poe. However,
Verne explains rationally the supernatural apparition that comes out
of the fog in the last pages of Poe's book. Lovecraft does not unveil
the mystery, and even enhances it.
Silence surrounded a work whose title suggested a fundamental
departure from all his other work, and whose goal was to go beyond
the limits of the Extraordinary Voyages.' In 1904, when interviewed by
the British journalist Gordonjones,9 Verne said, "But these results are
merely the natural outcome of the scientific trend of modern thought,
and as such have doubtless been predicted by scores of others besides
myself. Their coming was inevitable, whether anticipated or not, and
the most that I can claim is to have looked perhaps a little farther into
the future than the majority of my critics." And yet here is Voyage
Through the Impossible, a play in three acts, written with d'Ennery10
and performed over two decades earlier; the play is in complete contradiction to the above affirmation!
Before becoming well known in 1863 upon publication of Five
Weeks in a Balloon,11 Verne wrote numerous plays (most are not yet
translated into English), and many of his novels are structured like
plays, using the "coup de theatre" to refresh the reader's attention.
Three novels Around the World in Eighty Days,12 Michael Strogoff,13
and The Children of Captain Grant14 (also known as In Search of the Cast-
aways)-were rewritten as plays and published as a book in 1881 by
Hetzel under the title The Journeys on Stage.15 They were performed
for several years in Paris and their huge success made Verne wealthy. The plays became grand spectacles, due to the genius of d'Ennery, who
brought to the stage an elephant, water fountains, and Indians chasing
a train. Without movies and television, the people of Paris went to the
theatre, and the name piece a grand spectacle (extravaganza) is reserved
for plays of the second half of the nineteenth century with huge, colorful, animated sets. The success of these plays was such that some
were brought to America in the 1870s and 1880s by the brothers
Bolossy and Imre Kiralfy.ib D'Ennery helped make journey Through
the Impossible into a piece a grand spectacle-a guarantee of success.
journey Through the Impossible played for the first time in Paris, at the
Theatre de la Porte Saint-Martin on November 25, 1882. The play
was performed 97 times (43 in 1882 and 54 in 1883), which compares
well with the 113 performances of The Children of Captain Grant.
By 1882, Jules Verne was a world-renowned writer, thanks to a
new genre, the scientific novel. His plays, a goldmine for theatre
directors around the world, dramatized some of his novels, fulfilling
for him a dream of his youth-to be appreciated as a playwright. In
fact, young Verne, from the time of his law studies, dreamt of nothing
but the theater. He was introduced into the social circles of Alexandre
Dumas pere,17 and managed to have an act performed at the Theatre
Historique18 in 1850: The Broken Straws.19 He loved music, mainly
opera, and in 1853 he became secretary of the Theatre Lyrique,20
where the most famous French operas of the nineteenth century were
created under the signature of Hector Berlioz,21 Charles-Francois
Gounod,22 Georges Bizet,23 Adolphe-Charles Adam,24 and others.
Before finding his way to the publisher Hetzel and embarking on his
monumental work, Extraordinary Voyages, Verne had written several
plays, and even after starting his adventure novels, he continued to
produce dramas.
But a profound change in the public's taste made Verne seek a new
approach. The festive atmosphere of the Second Empire was brutally
wiped away by the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, by the defeat of
France, and by the bloody reprisals following the Paris Commune. In
the field of theater, these events transformed theater-goers, who no
longer wanted sarcastic opera-bouffe'25 loaded with verve and presupposing a wide culture among spectators who understood a world of fairies and genies. Rather, the Parisian public sought consolation and
relief from a grim reality by fleeing into the world of dreams. That
meant a return to a simpler form of the old opera-comique,26 a fantasy.