Jules Verne's Metaphor of the Iron Cage

Abstract

Max Weber's concept of the iron cage has become a byword in the scholarly world since the publication in 1930 of Talcott Parsons’ translation of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. What is less well-known is that Jules Verne had earlier used the iron cage metaphor in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869) to reveal the paradoxes of modernity. Roland Barthes criticized Verne's vision of modernity as bourgeois and positivistic, pointing out his narrow-minded enthusiasm for futuristic technology. In this essay, I argue that Verne's originality lies precisely in his equivocal attitude towards modernity with its high technology. Verne, I suggest, does not reject technological modernity, but by dissecting it he reveals its propelling forces, high demands and price. He shows that the Enlightenment's Rule of Reason is, in the end, governed by the ancient passions of fear, bitterness and the thirst for revenge. It is this combination that makes the human condition tragic. Verne's Homeric imagination creates an epic hero—Captain Nemo—who personifies the remarkable alliance of modern science and ancient heroism.

Notes

1. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (1930; London: Routledge, 1992), 203; first published in German in 1904. Recent translators, like Stephen Kalberg and Peter Baehr and Gordon Wells, have translated the Stahlhartes Gehäuse as, respectively, “steel-hard casing” ([Oxford: Blackwell, 2001], 123), or “shell as hard as steel” ([London: Penguin, 2002], 121).

2. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress (1678), ed. Roger Sharrock (London: Penguin, 1987), 32, 33. The entire dialogue between Bunyan's Christian and Man goes as follows:

• Christian. Well, but what art thou now?

• Man. I am now a man of despair, and am shut up in it, as in this iron cage. I cannot get out, O now I cannot.

• Christian. But how cames thou in this condition?

• Man. I left off to watch, and be sober; I laid the reins upon the neck of my lusts; I sinned against the light of the world, and the goodness of God: I have grieved the Spirit, and he is gone; I tempted the Devil, and he is come to me; I have provoked God to anger, and he has left me; I have so hardened my heart, that I cannot repent. (32–33)

3. George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2000), 25.

4. Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), trans. Walter James Miller (Manchester: World International Publishing, 1990), 52; hereafter page references are cited in the text.

5. Roland Barthes, “Nautilus et Bateau Ivre,” in Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957), 80–81.

6. Jean Demerliac points at Verne's “mauvais sauvages,” namely, the tribes, particularly the cannibalistic ones, which, in his books, are not represented as exotic but as vile. Jean Demerliac, L’Odyssée Jules Verne. Avec Michel Serres et Jean-Yves Tadié (Paris: Albin Michel, 2005), 41.

7. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. T. E. Lawrence (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1992), bk. ix, 98. On the meaning of Nemo as ‘no-body’, derived from the Greek oudeis, see Michel Serres, “Jules Verne's Strange Journeys,” Yale French Studies 52 (1975): 180–81. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, claim that Odysseus personifies oudeis and that the word has a double meaning: hero and namelessness.

8. William Butcher emphasizes that Nemo is without nationality and that it was Verne's deliberate intention to make his hero without any identifiable nationality. See William Butcher, “Les Episodes Fantômes de ‘Vingt Mille Lieues’,” Europe 909–10 (2005): 124. Arthur Evans informs us that Verne had “originally cast [Nemo] to be a Pole seeking vengeance for the massacre of his family and countrymen by the army of the Russian czar.” See Arthur B. Evans, “Jules Verne: Exploring the Limits,” Australian Journal of French Studies 62.3 (2005): 267. Michel Serres, on the other hand, argues that Nemo does have a nationality. Serres argues that Nemo is a Hindu prince, whose “original nation is India” and who fights for the independence of India. See Michel Serres, Jules Verne: La Science et l’Homme Contemporain, Conversations avec Jean-Paul Dekiss (Paris: Le Pommier, 2003), 37.

9. Arthur Evans points at the specific significance of the library, arguing that “this imaginary library aboard the Nautilus represents a rich locus of Verne's actual source material—a kind of Bibliothèque Nationale, if you will, devoted to the world's recognized masterpieces of science and literature.” Arthur B. Evans, “Literary Intertexts in Jules Verne's Voyages Extraordinaires,” Science-Fiction Studies 23.2 (1996): 186.

10. In “Jules Verne's Strange Journeys” Michel Serres suggests that, in Verne's novel, the sea, as described by Nemo and by Aronnax, becomes a geographical classification and catalogue of species. In “Les Episodes Fantômes de ‘Vingt Mille Lieues’,” Butcher stresses that Verne is primarily fascinated by the complexities of nature (128).

11. Warren Westcott and Everett Spell note Verne's accurate descriptions of the mechanisms of the Nautilus. See Warren B. Westcott and J. Everett Spell, “Tearing Down the Wall: Literature and Science,” The English Journal 89.2 (1999): 72.

12. Jean-Yves Tadié states that Jules Verne has done for geography what his friend Alexandre Dumas has done for history. See Jean-Yves Tadié, Le Roman d’Aventures (Paris: Presses, Universitaires de France, 1996), 69. For Serres, Verne has done for science what Frédérique Chopin has done for art. See Serres, Jules Verne: La Science et l’Homme Contemporain, 105.

13. Daniel Donaldson and Olaf Kuhlke point out that in Verne's vision, the extraordinary journeys are made possible through the mastery of nature. Verne stresses that, through the mastery of nature, the world has become smaller, since in 1870, one could now go around the world ten times more quickly than in the eighteenth century. The Suez Canal is an important mastery, because, as Verne remarks, it shortened the trip from England to India by at least a half. See Daniel P. Donaldson and Olaf Kuhlke “Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days: Helping Teach the National Geography Standards,” Journal of Geography 108 (2009): 39–46.

14. Michel Serres repeatedly stresses that Verne cannot be classified as a futuristic writer. The submarine, for instance, had already been invented before 1869. See the interview with Michel Serres in Demerliac, L’Odyssée Jules Verne, 49.

15. Alain Buisine holds that the Nautilus is not so much a safe haven as the electric machine that “realizes the dream of transmission without loss, fast and simple, but controlled, monitored, of forces.” See Alain Buisine, “Machines et Energétique,” La Revue des Lettres Modernes: Histoire des Idées et des Littératures (1980): 28.

16. Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923).

17. Verne scholars have recognized the relationship between epic heroism and liberation in Verne's novels. Timothy Unwin, for instance, stresses that “Nemo, among many other characters in Verne's work, is famously the champion of an oppressed group.” Timothy Unwin, “Jules Verne: Negotiating Change in the Nineteenth Century,” Science Fiction Studies 32.1 (2005): 6.

18. Serres emphasizes the terrorist character of Nemo's existence: “Nemo is the figure that stands in between the heroes of Corneille and the contemporary terrorist.” See Serres, Jules Verne: La Science et l’Homme Contemporain, 92.

19. Evans suggests that in Verne's writings such liberation has a divine character, whereby providence “almost always comes to the aid of the Vernian explorer during moments of crisis.” See Arthur B. Evans, “Jules Verne: Exploring the Limits,” Australian Journal of French Studies 62.3 (2005): 270.

20. Barthes, “Nautilus et Bateau Ivre,” 80–81.

21. George Slusser, “Why They Kill Jules Verne: SF and Cartesian Culture,” Science-Fiction Studies 32.1 (2005): 60.

22. Slusser, “Why They Kill Jules Verne,” 55.

23. Serres, “Jules Verne's Strange Journeys,” 175, 180; Serres, Jules Verne: La Science et l’Homme Contemporain, 162. Similarly, Warren Westcott and Everett Spell claim that Verne seeks “to show what wonders human ingenuity can create, though it also sometimes leads him into tedious catalogs of scientific observations.” See Westcott and Spell, “Tearing Down the Wall,” 72.

24. Serres, Jules Verne: La Science et l’Homme Contemporain, 23; Buisine, “Machines et Energétique,” 28–29; Demerliac, L’Odyssée Jules Verne, 153; Buisine, “Machines et Energétique,” 30; Arthur B. Evans, “The Vehicular Utopias of Jules Verne,” in Transformations of Utopia: Changing Views of the Perfect Society, ed. George Slusser, Paul Alkan, Roger Gaillard, and Danièle Chatelain (New York: AMS Press, 1999), 99–108.

25. Jean-Yves Tadié observes that in Verne's novels there is “a profound political reflection,” which can be typified as politically conservative and, as Verne would later show himself, antidreyfusard. See the interview with Jean-Yves Tadié in Demerliac, L’Odyssée Jules Verne, 125, 135.

26. Buisine, “Machines et Energétique,” 50.

27. Serres, Jules Verne: La Science et l’Homme Contemporain, 86. Serres stresses that, for Verne, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Bible, the Aeneid, the works of Dante, “constitute the common culture” of the European legacy; and he emphasizes that in Verne's age, the cultured European often knew many passages from Homer or Virgil by heart. Serres, Jules Verne: La Science et l’Homme Contemporain, 132.

28. Serres, “Jules Verne's Strange Journeys,” 177. Evans provides an alternative account, suggesting that Verne must be placed in the context of nineteenth-century literature, along those adventure writers whom he admired so much, such as James Fenimore Cooper, Walter Scott, Edgar Allan Poe, and Daniel Defoe. See Evans, “Literary Intertexts in Jules Verne's Voyages Extraordinaires.”

29. Simone Vierne, Jules Verne: Mythe et Modernité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989). See also Unwin, “Jules Verne: Negotiating Change in the Nineteenth Century,” 7.

30. Unwin, “Jules Verne: Negotiating Change in the Nineteenth Century,” 9.

31. Ibid.

32. Westcott and Spell, “Tearing Down the Wall,” 72.

33. Ibid.