The Mysterious Island. Jules Verne

       INTRODUCTION

      At a time when Jules Verne is making a comeback in the United States as a mainstream literary figure, one of his most brilliant and famous novels remains unavailable in English. Although half a dozen works carrying the title “The Mysterious Island” are in print, all follow W. H. G. Kingston’s 1875 translation, which omits sections of the novel and ideologically skews other passages.¹

      The real Mysterious Island is nearly 200,000 words long. For Sidney Kravitz, this first-ever complete translation has been a long labor of love, resulting in a highly accurate text which captures every nuance and will be the reference text in English.

      L’Ile mystérieuse (MI—1874–75) needs little presentation. In 1865 during the American Civil War, a violent storm sweeps a balloon carrying a group of Unionists to an island in the Pacific. After satisfying basic necessities, Cyrus Smith the engineer, Spilett the reporter, Pencroff the sailor, Harbert the adolescent, and Neb the Black find a single match and grain of wheat, and proceed to rebuild most of modern civilization. They construct a boat and rescue Ayrton from the neighboring island of Tabor, abandoned there as a punishment in Verne’s Captain Grant’s Children (1865) and now in an animal state. However, a series of puzzling incidents leads the settlers to believe they are not alone on the Mysterious Island, including a lead bullet and a washed-up chest. At the end of the novel, they discover that Captain Nemo from Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas (1869) has been helping them all along. Nemo reveals his true name to be Prince Dakkar, then dies, and is entombed in his Nautilus. Following a volcanic eruption, the Island disintegrates, leaving just a small rock, from which the settlers are rescued.

      Astoundingly, no scholarly edition has ever been produced of this rich and influential work in either French or English. Yet studying the real-world references and the inceptions of Verne’s other works has thrown up some amazing results in recent years. For what Roland Barthes once called “an almost perfect novel,”² two distinct manuscripts have survived, together with two earlier drafts, published in 1991 under the title L’Oncle Robinson (“Uncle Robinson”). This annotated edition, then, studies MI in terms of its literary themes but especially its origins, including the four manuscripts and the correspondence between Verne and his publisher, Hetzel, published only in 1999.³

      Verne’s imagination is fired by unique events. The dark continent, the poles, the interior of the earth, the dark side of the moon, the bottom of the ocean were unexplored when he began writing. Their two- or three-dimensional spaces were not only virgin, but were defined by a height, depth, or distance out or in. In each case a central point then represented a maximum exoticism, an ultima Thule. The first dozen novels in Verne’s series of Extraordinary Journeys exultantly explore these limits; these are the ones which sold the best and remain