The New Criterion

Jules Verne
The Golden Volcano.
University of Nebraska Press, 362 pages, $15.95

I once had a professor who believed that the impressive titular number of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea referred to oceanic depth, rather than distance traveled. “That’s where the anglerfish lives,” he’d say, like the good Monsieur Verne had invented a species to join the ranks of the strange ichthyoid and quadruped creations that got him branded as the father of science fiction.

The Jules Verne of The Golden Volcano—his novel of the Klondike gold rush, now published for the first time in English—is different. He’s the writer, in warm wraps and bearskin cloak, behind this posthumous novel that dates from the first few years of the twentieth century, when our man would dash around his rooms from one desk to another, at work on five or six novels at a time.

The popularly loved Verne had already forecasted the future, imagined technologies that we’d eventually go on to realize, sent his characters to the moon and back, tossed off one scientific in-joke after another, and made his march on literary Dreamland—that realm of the romantic and the fanciful where the Verne-inspired Little Nemo would later repair for his slumbers, and a few nightmares, with lambent denizens serving as everyday scenery.

So what about M. Verne the reluctant prospector then, the man with firsthand knowledge of glitter and pyrite and fortunes found and lost, who wandered the Klondike in 1899, conducting his researches? This was the fellow who hated gold and what it did to men so much that he wrote this novel—practically vomited it forth, you might say, given that the hacking and retching of purging, in sundry forms, is a key motif throughout the work. This isn’t the Verne of sea-demons and rocket ships; it’s more like Verne doing his best Frank Norris imitation, but with a little more sententiousness, and some caustic and hilarious asides, most coming from the co-lead character Summy Skim (a guy whose normal, frothy manner is well-strained throughout the novel, as befits his pun-based name). No use looking for any sci-fi, preternatural argot. There isn’t any. Verne had tired of the yoke, even if he refused to dash it to the ground:

my intention for the novels that are still left for me to do is to spice them up as much as possible by using every means provided by my imagination in the rather restricted milieu in which I am condemned to operate.

Conan Doyle talked this way sometimes about Holmes, but he was referring to what was almost too much public love for a character, despite his other successes. For Verne, “condemned to operate” is a phrase that we can read as “Why are my literary talents slanted towards writing about doctors, inventors, explorers? Cursed empiricism!” The Golden Volcano is a departure, then, even if it’s still something of a scientific novel. It deals in exactitude: maps, engineering principles, the frank and unavoidable traits and behaviors of animals, climate, and men. After Verne’s death, his son Michel had a go at the manuscript, softening it up, replacing Verne’s slag and detritus with prettified hokum: like a dual-wedding at the end. Not so scientific—which is to say, realistic. For Verne, the intractability of science was a barometer to illustrate just how deeply avarice and caprice will get you.

The plot is basically a succession of road trips. Ben Raddle, an engineer, and his cousin Summy Skim, a farmer-hunter, learn that their wayward uncle has died and left them a gold claim in western Canada. They make the journey there from their home in Montreal with a plan to sell the property and return, but instead end up working the claim until it’s flooded over. A dying prospector tells the cousins of a sort of Xanadu, a volcano inside the Arctic Circle jammed with nuggets, and away we go, with Skim serving as Verne’s stand-in, the teetotaler at the bacchanalia. He’s also as drolly metaphysical a character as you’ll find in early twentieth-century naturalistic fiction. Apprised of the cold by a pushy thermometer salesman—it is, after all, the Klondike—an attempt is made to counteract nature with surrealistic logic: he’ll take the device that only registers minus sixty centigrade, rather than minus ninety.

As the science is made more explicit and the environment exacts its pounds of flesh, metaphors and parables deepen. Verne’s Klondike is hell without the flames and bright hues (a visual conception that also informs Frank Hurley’s South, shot on expedition in 1914 with Shackleton, or William Bradford’s polarscapes). Ships have their insides crushed in the grip of ice, fissures split the ground, toxic vapors escape from their holds deep in the earth. Unless you’re a naturalist, there’s nothing here for decent men—just the chase. Verne loves the idea that the chase doesn’t pay, even when it pays—like when a miner finds himself a vein that meets his needs. Desire is satiated, with no real human sustenance to speak of. Sick of waiting for their volcano to erupt and dispense its riches, Raddle conceives a plan to divert a nearby stream into a hole blown into the rock at the base of the structure, thereby triggering an explosion. Thus manipulated, the volcano sends its contents heavenwards, only to have the treasure land in the nearby ocean.