William Firebrace - Memo for Nemo

William Firebrace

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England

1. Professor Aronnax first meets Captain Nemo, Nautilus; 2. Mariana Trench; 3. Point Nemo, Pacific Pole of Inaccessibility; 4. Sealab III; 5. Sealab II; 6. Conshelf III; 7. Chernomor and Iktiandr; 8. Conshelf I; 9. Underwater photographs by Louis Boutan, Banyuls-sur-Mer; 10. FRNS-3; 11. Photosphere, Bathyscaphe, Sealab I; 12. Wreck of Titanic; 13. Voyage of the USS Nautilus under the North Pole; 14. Murmansk, start of Herbert Sellners bathysphere voyage, 1947; 15. Maelstrom, sinking of Nautilus, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

T hree hundred miles west of Japan, at a depth of 60m, Captain Nemo sinks languidly into the curves of a couch in his library. The commander of the Nautilus submarine in Jules Vernes novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea expounds at length to his fellow traveller, Professor Aronnax, on his book collection and the wonders of the undersea. He lights a cigarillo of nicotine-flavoured algae and sips a planktonic aperitif. Aronnax listens and occasionally takes notes. Together they turn the pages of a book of natural history, commenting on the images of sea creatures and the descriptions of the oceans.

Nemo believes in inhabiting the undersea in style. The library, with its 12,000 volumes, is one of three grand spaces inside the Nautilus, together with the dining room and salon. On its shelves are contemporary novels and collections of poetry, and also many books on sciencemeteorology, geography and natural history, specialising of course in the ocean. The books are in various languages, for the captain is multilingual, and since he has sworn never again to set foot on terra firma they are, he says, the only ties now connecting me to the land. Nemos great library is therefore a memory of the written culture of the land and also the first collection of knowledge of the undersea encompassing both fact and fiction. For the voyage under the ocean is determined as much by invention as discovery, and at times there seems to be little difference between the two.

In a submarine, where space is limited and excess weight to be avoided, dedicating an entire room to a library is a wonderful piece of vanity, and a statement by Verne on what is most important. Today, all of these books, along with films and sounds of the undersea, could be contained on a laptop and regularly updated, but the library of the Nautilus needs to be physical and fixed in size. It requires its own particular room because the knowledge it holds must be prominently displayed as a visible sign of the great learning of the captain and, through him, of his creator Jules Verne. Until the unexpected arrival of Professor Aronnax, accompanied by his assistant Conseil and the adventurer-harpoonist Ned Land, the books have made up a gentlemans private collection to be read by Nemo alone. This must be the only proposal for a library moving under the sea, assembled for the delight of one person.

Nemo stands up and reaches for another volume off the shelves. He reads aloud:

The land is silent and the sea speaks. The ocean is a voice. It speaks to distant galaxies, responds to their movements in its grave and solemn language. It speaks to the earth, to the shore, with a moving tone, in harmony with their echoes; plaintive, menacing by turns, it growls or sighs. It speaks to humanity above all.

A certain silence then descends in the library as these words are absorbed. The ocean as a voice? Aquatic beings as words? The narrative of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is continually interrupted by passages like this, references usually taken from Nemos extensive library. It is as though Vernes novel were constructed out of the libraryvia some circular process, a novel containing a library in some way then produces the novel.

Yet the library of the Nautilus cannot offer much information about the nature of the undersea because knowledge on the subject was limited at the time the novel was written. No one had ever been down very deep or had much desire to do so. Imagination filled in the empty spaces. This was certainly the case with the French historian Jules Michelets part-scientific, part-ecstatic La mer (1861), the book from which Nemo was quoting. The title of the book itself plays on the assonance of la mer and la mre to offer the sea as an infinitely fruitful mother, speaking through the beings it brings forth. Other similar volumes from the time include Victor Hugos mournful The Toilers of the Sea (1866), which ponders the philosophy of the oceans and features a vision of a giant cephalopod in a sea cave. The Physical Geography of the Sea (1855), by Matthew Fontaine Maury, provided the first description of the circulation of the ocean with elegant hand-drawn maps of currents that look like wisps of hair. Somewhere on Nemos shelves must also have been Herman Melvilles hunt for a legendary whale of considerable size and destructive ability, Moby Dick