Journey to the Center of Two Questions

Given that one of my goals in this third decade of planned reading is to bring back some of the boyhood wonder and excitement of reading classic adventure stories, after rereading Journey to the Center of the Earth for the first time since about 1972, I have to say, “Mission Accomplished!” Of course, the experience isn’t the same this time; I approach this book this second time with almost fifty extra years of experience and understanding. But, wow! Did I have fun! The obsessed professor! The runes! The thrilling sensation of hearing and reading at desperate moments the adventurous name of Arne Saknussemm! Glorious!

Now let me bog down my notes with two annoying grown-up observations my sexagenarian mind can’t help making. First, I couldn’t help laughing at the supposedly seminal science-fiction author alternately praising and flouting science. Axel, in his narration, keeps the reader abreast of the latest scientific information about the structure of the earth, geological eons, and evolutionary strata. But then the plot he unfolds contradicts all of it. For instance, the most prominent indications of prehistoric life the group discovers are actual, living prehistoric beings, whose ancestors at some time long, long ago slid with their habitat down a hundred miles of a gaping chasm, only to survive and breed underground for millions of years without any evolutionary change whatsoever: the adventurers note that they match exactly the skeletons of supposedly extinct species they have seen in museums.

Geology? Oh, sure, the explorers pass through various types of rock that “prove” the latest theories of the formation of the earth. But this all happens in the first fifty miles or so of descent; the next few hundred miles take them through more and more identical tunnels of extinct volcanic action, all of which is assigned to a small molten core that occupies only the very center of the center of the earth. They mention the scientific belief that temperature will increase as they descend and then find that it really doesn’t – until, that is, they find themselves at last in an active volcanic zone. It seems actual science stands in the way of a journey to the center of the earth, so Verne, in order to make good on the promise of his title, has to reject it. The good professor who leads the expedition tries to preserve some kind of scientific authority by saying that Sir Humphrey Davy has an opinion about the inner parts of the earth different from that of all other scientists. But a lone opinion can’t make the premise of the book scientific. An unsupported opinion can’t make science scientific. Some might point to the contradiction as a flaw, as a cheat. I just enjoyed watching the precarious balancing act as Verne showed off both his passion for science and his utterly unscientific yet captivating imagination.

My second annoying observation is related to the first. The editor of the version I read offered occasional notes indicating passages in which she saw Verne’s scientific observations indicating a break with Christian doctrine and sometimes outright disdain for it. I don’t know anything about Verne’s religious views. I can only say that people – Jules Verne belonging to that distinguished society – fall into many more subtle positions regarding the relationship of faith and science than the two the editor seems to recognize. Verne sometimes speaks of the “antediluvian era.” Was he joking in referring to the biblical flood? Was he throwing a comforting blanket to his theologically more conservative readers? Or was the author (or his first-person narrator, Axel, actually) trying to reconcile the accounts of the first few chapters of Genesis with the expanded timeframe of recent geological science? These and twenty more variants were all views held by actual people at the time, and they all represent possible understandings of Axel’s (and possibly Verne’s) view, especially since Axel never says, “And so our journey to the center of the earth has disproved the book of Genesis.”

In any case, since Verne gleefully used his plot to throw out all the science he so carefully alludes to, how could his science possibly throw out any given theology?