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Sunday, February 11, 2007
Begum
I taught myself enough French to pass my graduate translation exam by reading Jules Verne novels. The only one I read without an English crib by my side was Les Cinq Cents Millions De La Bégum. And, oddly, I somehow read the whole thing under the misapprehension that Begums are males. It turns out they are always female. And it is odd that I would learn this by reading about the case of a male Begum.
It isn’t so surprising that I would have been confused about this because the Begum in the novel is a MacGuffin and who cares what sorts of genitals a MacGuffin has? Also, reading the novel last night in English for the first time - thanks, Scott McLemee - the part where we hear about the Begum’s fortune is narrated by a silly English laywer who is talking funny. No doubt I got impatient with the French and just skipped ahead to the part about the Big Gun, like any responsible philosophy graduate student.
I’ve written about the novel before because it has the distinction of being the one novel about the Oregon Experience untainted by experience of Oregon. The Begum’s fortune is divided between the good French doctor Sarrasin, who comes to America to build France-Ville, a model of hygienic science; and the evil German Schulze, who builds Stahlstadt, an industrial hell boasting a giant gun to blast France-Ville off the map:
The place and time have now changed. For five years the Begum’s inheritance has been in the hands of her two heirs. The scene has now shifted to the United States, in southern Oregon, ten leagues from the Pacific shore. This region, which is still unmapped for the most part, forms a kind of American Switzerland. Its northern border divides these two neighboring powers but remains poorly defined.
Yes, 20 years after being granted statehood, Oregon was still unmapped and the sort of place where European powers could set up heavily militarized colonies. Why not?
Comments
Rajneeshpuram had a bioweapons lab. And that was in the 1980s.
Oddly, I have a story about that, Wade. I went to South Eugene High School, in Oregon, and in German class I had to read German magazines and such. And I remember reading and giving a report on a “Stern” or “Spiegel” article about the Rajneeshees, and it was all about how this could happen because it was in the Wild West and the the law hadn’t fully been established, etc. It was rather amusing.
There’s also an odd error in the new English translation edition I’ve got: Jules Verne gives the latitude and longitude of France-Ville. It’s exactly where Brandon, Oregon is today. Oddly, the editors have a footnote indicating that Verne made a mistake and located it 20 miles into the Pacific Ocean. So far as I can tell, he did not.
If I had anything new to add I would. Instead I’m reduced to quoting the following, from my Palgrave book, where the novel is read in terms, inter alia, of a dialectic of ‘mobility’ and ‘stasis’ that informs Verne’s whole output. Or so I argue.
This novel, published only a few years after France’s humiliating defeat at the hands of the German army in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, has been read by several critics as a crude piece of wish-fulfilment. Andrew Martin suggests that ‘Verne obliquely recapitulates and rewrites German defeat of France … making France the victor this time round and reinscribing the irrevocable facts of history in a more congenial form’ (Martin 60-1). Certainly the libel on ‘German-ness’ implicit in the text seems egregious. But the book works much more vividly as a commentary upon utopian tradition than it does as an example of recent-historical denial. As political commentary the very binary of ‘good city’ and ‘bad city’ seems abstract and removed from reality, located as it is in a thinly realised American location (we never learn what the US Federal authorities make of these two communities forging their respective armies, and Stahlstadt’s weaponry of mass destruction, on US soil). But as utopian meta-text the book is full of penetrating insight into the relationship between different versions of utopian idealism: the pastoral and the authoritarian. That Verne emblematises the mediation between these two cities in terms of a gigantic cannon constellates destruction, militarism, a degree of optimism (after all this is a cannon that could, in Verne’s cosmos, carry men to the moon) plus, of course, a familiar technological giganticism. In the event Schultz does fire his cannon, but he has—as is so often the case with Verne’s scientists—mistaken his calculations: with a muzzle-velocity of ‘dix mille metres à la second’ the shell not only overshoots France-ville, but overshoots the horizon, putting it into orbit and providing the earth with ‘un second satellite’ (Verne, Cinq Cents Mille, 183). Schultz, enraged by this failure, plans a general assault on France-ville, intending to destroy it utterly, to turn it into ‘une Pompéi moderne’ such that it would be ‘l’effroi et l’étonnement du monde entier’ (Verne, Cinq Cents Mille, 230). But before he can send this order he is himself killed, frozen by the explosion of one of his poisonous shells. At the very end this icon of rapid mobility becomes the medium for another representation of absolute stasis.
Probably “Sarrasin” is a mistake for “Sarasohn”. That guy at the Oregonian did seem fishy to me.
Some French exiles set up a utopian colony near Klamath Falls sometime before WWII. Perhaps they were influenced by the novel. I used to know a woman who was born in that colony, and from what she said it was a very sad story, which as I recall began with a bad land buy, to which was added a lot of small-town bigotry.
The utopian communities on the East Coast started earlier, of course. The town where I live had one from 1842-1846 (which makes it unusually long lived for those of its time), the Northampton Association of Education and Industry. It was noteable for being one of the few that included black people, including Sojourner Truth. It was economics that did them in, according to “The Communitarian Moment: The Radical Challenge of the Northampton Association”, by Christopher Clark (a good read, by the way)—all sorts of businesses were going under, they were undercapitalized, and they had had the bad judgement to try to set up making silk, which no one in New England managed.
One of their members bought the others out when they decided to go their ways, and ironically became a kind of industrial baron of the town, complete with philanthropic good works, including a continuation of their educational experiments in the form of the first U.S. kindergarden. Sort of a pocket history of socialism.
Amana kitchen appliances were originally built by non-Luddite religious Utopians. Likewise Oneida silverware.