Describing a Circumference: Jules Verne’s Guidebook for the Modern World

Abstract

Returning to Seville in 1522, Antonio Pigafetta published the account of the world’s first successful circumnavigation. He inaugurated a tradition that links the journey with its written record. By the nineteenth century, such accounts served fewer practical purposes, and yet there was a surge in publications about the newly accessible trip. In Around the World in Eighty Days, Jules Verne incorporated these real stories from the period while inspiring many others. It is at once an outlier—in so far as it is fiction—and at the very center of this travel writing tradition. Drawing on the work of Verne scholars, in this chapter I analyze some of the novel’s overlooked complexities and formal innovations. In a proto-modernist maneuver, for example, Verne embeds a range of documents: journals, timetables, and newspapers. He integrates features of the emerging guidebook—the Baedeker’s and Bradshaw’s—into the novel form, and so encourages his readers to fuse and confuse those genres. As the characters themselves read, write, and travel, Verne slyly inspires his readers to take on those other two related roles, that is, to set out on and to write about their own journeys.

In one of his lectures, Vladimir Nabokov muses that literary works have different trajectories, that they move in different directions. “Don Quixote is one of those books,” he remarks, “that are, perhaps, more important in eccentric diffusion than in their own intrinsic value.”¹ Nabokov stresses how Don Quixote , despite its significant intrinsic merits, inspires so many readers—and even non-readers—beyond the books’ pages and into the world itself. Through translation, adaptation, and looser reference, the errant knight and Sancho Panza accompany the adventurous reader on imaginative journeys beyond the specific details of the two-volume novel. Don Quixote is certainly a monument in Spanish literature and world literature, but its characters and scenarios often turn up elsewhere, in paintings and sculptures, in video games and comic books, and as the name of a Japanese retail chain with a penguin mascot.² Something inside this book inspires people to do things outside of it—though still in the book’s name.

“Don Quixote is one of those books.” Nabokov implies that there are others, works that are better known beyond their own reading. George Orwell—himself much adapted and misused—said that one knows Charles Dickens’s novels without reading them, because Dickens is in “a tradition that moves outside the realm of literature.”³ Jules Verne’s Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingt jours is another of these eccentric works that moves outside literature’s realm. Around the World in Eighty Days is best known in its diffusions, and it happens to share a number of qualities with Dickens and especially with Don Quixote : it is constructed episodically, allowing for easy modification and adaptation; it features capricious travel, allowing for tangential journeys; and it is literary but not unduly serious about it.⁴ Given its easy adaptability, Around the World in Eighty Days’s intrinsic values are often overlooked, and Verne’s brand of extraliterary diffusion takes readers and non-readers far from the source text, that is, all the way around the world.

Verne is among the world’s most republished and translated authors, yet his novels are better known for their outsides than the insides. His characters, plots, and inventions are widely and wildly repurposed in global culture. The title of Around the World in Eighty Days itself has become easy shorthand for describing other global phenomena. In a bookshop one can choose one’s own adventure, to go Around the World in 80 Cigars, in 80 Pints, or in 80 Purees. Timothy Unwin characterizes Verne’s popularity: “Jules Verne is not only a household name, but is recognized as an essential icon of travel,” and yet he “is more than ever misrepresented, misread and misunderstood.”⁵ Another Verne critic, Andrew Martin, observes that “everyone already knows Verne, even without reading, much less studying him.”⁶ Martin laments one crucial restriction that comes with Verne’s being common knowledge: he “is allowed to be almost anything—except, that is, a writer.”⁷ Verne is prevented from being a writer, though his writings do not completely disappear from view. Even avid non-readers cite their sources, acknowledging Verne as an allusion or guide.

Later in this book, I trace the eccentric diffusions, the remarkable stories that radiate outward from Around the World in Eighty Days. In this chapter, however, I first allow Verne to be a writer. I analyze what is inside this book that propels so many readers and non-readers outward, on irreverent journeys. In Around the World in Eighty Days, Verne provides a guide to the modern world that seems unbound by its pages, one that craftily leads the reader on digressive forays. In “Writing Reading,” Roland Barthes articulates how sometimes the most compelling literature makes us stop reading it. This rare work startles our forward progress and inspires us to pursue related thoughts instead, to “read while looking up.” Barthes asks his reader if they have experienced this:

Has it never happened, as you were reading a book, that you kept stopping as you read, not because you weren’t interested, but because you were: because of a flow of ideas, stimuli, associations? In a word, haven’t you ever happened to read while looking up from your book?⁸

Around the World in Eighty Days, like other forms of travel reading, invites its readers to look up and set it aside; to consult a map or a periodical instead; or to gaze out the window at the world passing by. Verne embeds all kinds of other documents within this novel—telegrams and flyers, and newspapers and guidebooks—to remind us of the distracted forms of reading that take place as we travel. With their composite constructions, Verne’s novels showcase the modern world’s textuality, and they accordingly provide instructions on how to read, write, and move through it. Around the World in Eighty Days shows how reading and writing can encompass the world and carry the reader back home.

In the novel’s opening scenes, characters and readers alike are presented with a newspaper story concerning the feasibility of an eighty-day trip. This article outlines the novel to come, and the suggested itinerary becomes a script to perform or a challenge to be met. The Morning Chronicle’s equation—the world as eighty days—sets up this adventure as a quantitative bet managed from London. Verne immediately raises the stakes, and eighty days becomes the subject of side wagers and speculation on the London stock exchange. The narrator conveys these developments through a series of newspaper digests, naming an additional seven periodical accounts to supplement Phileas Fogg’s own reading. This overwhelming amount of information is delivered out of context, and this is the moment in media history, shaped by the telegraph, that ushered in what Lewis Mumford and Neil Postman call a “world of broken time and broken attention.”⁹ Verne relies on the telegraph too, assembling these various, disconnected sources and inviting the reader to negotiate them, to fill in the gaps, to consult other sources—that is, to read while looking up.

While the London scenes are shaped by newspaper reading, Verne’s characters rely on other kinds of print when traveling. In a single overnight bag—the extent of Fogg and Passepartout’s luggage—they carry Bradshaw’s Continental Railway, Steam Transit and General Guide. Verne introduces a real guidebook into the fictional world, allowing the guidebook’s form and content to influence the surrounding novel. Guidebooks had their origins in the 1840s but “achieved widespread prominence in England in the 1860s and 1870s.”¹⁰ These books were part of a new era of personal travel, and Verne—unlike some of his now more canonical peers—saw their potential for and as literary discourse. Some of Verne’s Voyages extraordinaires go far beyond any contemporary guidebook’s offerings; his characters venture to the North and South Poles, the sea floor, and to and around the moon. But Around the World in Eighty Days is different: the route these characters follow is established, the sites themselves offering little novelty or sense of discovery to readers. Verne shifts his attention from the undiscovered to the logistical, and his characters make a reconnaissance trip of the nineteenth century’s transport and communication networks. The Bradshaw they carry along helps recast Around the World in Eighty Days itself as a largely unprecedented logistical novel and effectively a guidebook in its own right.

Verne’s novels are populated with documents of all kinds, and these various texts link the author, the characters, and the reader in the same work. Fogg and Passepartout are known by how they travel as well as by what they read and write. Their tour of the world becomes legible for the reader through the documents they read and produce. Fogg sequesters himself in his cabin to write a record, should it be “useful to those wishing to attempt a journey around the world.”¹¹ Passepartout has their passports stamped, relying on this modern, interactive form of writing to record their progress. In their combined reading and writing, these characters join the reiterative circumnavigation tradition, both in and out of fiction. Just as travelers read the guidance of their predecessors, they also leave behind their own impressions for others. Verne’s novel is not only a “tale” but a “formula,” as Cara Murray puts it, a set of practical, repeatable instructions.¹² Faced with Fogg and Passepartout’s intertwined practices of reading, writing, and traveling, the reader realizes that reading Around the World in Eighty Days might not be enough—they may need to head out and to leave their own records in the wake.

A Newspaper, a Wager, and a Chronotope

Around the World in Eighty Days is quickly set in motion with “a hiring and a crime.”¹³ Within the first few chapters, there also is a big wager and a hasty departure. After this concatenation of events, the characters are propelled on an unprecedentedly fast journey. Amidst these initial incidents, however, Verne’s novel also includes a more patient scene, of Phileas Fogg reading the day’s newspapers. The author himself was an avid reader of periodicals, and in an 1895 interview, he claimed to hold twenty subscriptions.¹⁴ In another interview, he described the routine in his study:

I come here every day after lunch and immediately set to work to read through fifteen different papers, always the same fifteen … Then I read the reviews … I also read and re-read, for I am a most careful reader, the collection known as ‘Le Tour du Monde,’ which is a series of stories of travel.¹⁵

The writer of Le Tour du monde reads ‘Le Tour du Monde’ every day. It was that publication, according to Volker Dehs, that first published the speculative itinerary that spurs this novel into action.¹⁶ In Around the World in Eighty Days, the principal character thumbs through the same kind of papers from which Verne gathered the story’s idea. From this early scene—in which the reader reads about a character reading—the novel underscores its layered textual practices. Around the World in Eighty Days accentuates its sources, its own production and dissemination, and its awareness of being read in and around the world.

October 2, 1872 is an unusual day for Phileas Fogg. His quotidian habits are disrupted, his daily paper-reading deferred. Prior to the novel’s start Fogg fired his manservant for a minor sin of imprecision, regarding the temperature of shaving water. On this morning, he hires Jean Passepartout as the replacement and his soon-to-be travel companion. As a condition of employment, Passepartout synchronizes his watch to Fogg’s, and Fogg resumes his routine. He leaves No. 7 Savile Row and walks, with cartoonish precision, 1151 steps to the Reform Club in Pall Mall. Verne no doubt read about this gentlemen’s club in one of his newspapers, and he situates the novel’s pedestrian beginnings in a literary framework. Fogg’s house belonged to the Irish playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and the Reform Club counts—or will come to count—among its members William Makepeace Thackeray, H. G. Wells, and Henry James. Among several likely sources for Phileas Fogg’s naming is Anthony Trollope’s character Phineas Finn, himself a Reform Club member.¹⁷ Verne’s writing is dense with these literary allusions, if one spares the time to notice.

In the early pages Fogg is defined principally by where he lives and what he reads; other biographical details remain obscure even to the narrator. Fogg “might not have been a Londoner … His name had never rung out in a barristers’ chamber … He was not engaged in industry, business, commerce, or agriculture.”¹⁸ Fogg is defined by what he is not, just as his journey will be described it terms of what he fails to see. In Bombay, for instance, Fogg “did not think of visiting any of Bombay’s wonders: not the Town Hall, the magnificent library, the forts, docks, cotton markets, bazaars, mosques, synagogues, Armenian churches, or the splendid pagoda of Malabar Hill.”¹⁹ Fogg’s travels are characterized by the unseen, as well as by what he does not even think to see. Timothy Unwin argues that Fogg’s story is thus told as a “negative image,” that “The telling of the story is also the telling of the non-story, the profiling of what is absent and of what would ideally be required to complete it.”²⁰ The onus for completion, for developing the negative and thus observing the passing world, falls to the reader. The noted absences serve as a clever readerly invitation, and the “barrage of negatives” tricks the reader into seeing things in Fogg’s stead.²¹ Along the lines of the famous linguistic example of “don’t think of an elephant,” a reader inevitably thinks of a Bombay bazaar, a mosque, and indeed the elephant that Fogg buys in Allahabad.²²

Once settled at this club with literary bona fides, Fogg peruses the day’s papers. This novel revels in steam-powered speed, but it opens with a deliberate description of reading. Fogg is handed an uncut copy of The Times at 12:47, which he deftly “managed to unfold and cut with a proficiency indicating great experience of that exacting operation.”²³ Three hours later, he moves on to the Standard. The day proceeds slowly, even laboriously, with the reader effectively flipping pages along with the main character. After the Standard and well into the afternoon, Fogg picks up the Morning Chronicle—or maybe it was the Daily Telegraph. Across the novel’s manuscripts the masthead of this third paper switches, indicating the papers’ shuffling in the Reform Club, in Verne’s study, and in his memory. The Voyages extraordinaires were marketed by Verne’s editor for their timeliness, for arriving “at just the right time,” but the Morning Chronicle is anachronistic, having ceased publication ten years earlier.²⁴ Verne’s reading and writing practices are out of sync, predicting how the characters’ own reading and writing will mislead them about their own place—and time—in the world.

In this day’s Morning Chronicle there is a chart tabulating how long it should take for one to go around the world (Fig. 2.1). With the recent completion of the Suez Canal and railways across North America and British India, the world had become more efficiently girdled. The paper therefore predicts that one could make it full circle in eighty days. Verne reproduces the chart in the novel, and it is the first of several excerpted documents. Verne inserts news clippings, telegrams, and fliers for circus shows, alongside his own characters’ diary entries and private notes. If novelistic discourse is composed of heterogeneous voices and registers, as Mikhail Bakhtin would later characterize it, Verne makes that assemblage unusually apparent in the late nineteenth century.

Fig. 2.1

From the serial publication of Verne’s Le Tour du Monde in Le Temps, November 7, 1872. (gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque nationale de France)

Verne’s sourcing is sloppy and sly, leaving it to readers to assess the credibility of the documentary evidence. When describing the mytho-geography of India, for instance, Verne is clear to acknowledge his debt to the Ramayana.²⁵ On the same page, when introducing the character Aouda, Verne incorporates a two-hundred-word description attributed to “the poet-king, Yusuf’Adil,” a very specific but dubious fifteenth-century source.²⁶ Verne’s deliberate crediting of this source—whether it is embellished, misattributed, or obscure—effectively pokes fun at all the real sources that he copies but fails to mention. A number of passages in Around the World in Eighty Days are cribbed without attribution, and Verne had legal troubles regarding plagiarism at several points in his career.²⁷

The Morning Chronicle timetable is contested within the book as the characters debate the trip’s feasibility. The timetable is effectively an embedded table of contents, one that proves at least as useful as Verne’s actual table of contents. Verne often was playful with chapter titles, as Andrew Martin shows. Tribulations of a Chinaman in China (1879), for example, ends with “A chapter the reader himself might have written, so predictable is its ending.”²⁸ In Les Sphinx des glaces (1897), Verne compares the rate of narrative time to pages turned, “Eleven years in a few pages.”²⁹ The Morning Chronicle’s chart portends that same conversion, of passing time to page numbers. The inserted document indicates—via a discursive exchange rate—how long characters might spend in each place. Unlike a conventional table, however, this chart seems to be spoken in the Reform Club. A character named Sullivan shares with the others, “This is the calculation,” and without a closed quotation mark the table appears.³⁰ The characters seem to hear the columns and rows of the figure, and the reader joins in tallying the relationship between places and days. This chart is an early indication of the novel’s logistical structure, its distinctive sense of linked time and space.

Reading the Morning Chronicle, the characters get ahead of themselves: it will be three days from Bombay to Calcutta and precisely twenty-two between Yokohama and San Francisco. Uncertainties of travel are rounded up or down to comforting, if implausible, whole numbers, without fraction or remainder. Robert Rushing traces a pattern of “zero-sum” accounting across the novel, proposing its generic alignment with detective fiction, where nothing remains amiss.³¹ The other club members are incredulous at the itinerary, but Fogg trusts a combination of the London papers, imperial infrastructure, and his own ingenuity. He assures his friends that he can make the journey and he stakes his fortune on it. The others believe that contingencies will disrupt the neat calculations, but Fogg is adamant: “The unforeseen does not exist.”³² The novel’s more interesting events contradict Fogg’s statement, but their effects are all overcome by money, as Jane Suzanne Carroll stresses in her analysis.³³ In the opening pages, over a game of cards, Fogg remarkably transforms the world into an itinerary, a personal wager, and a kind of financial ledger. Global space is henceforth known through time—as space-time—and the novel’s plot is the playful demonstration of this equation.

Verne’s much-adapted title offers a handy conceit for scaling the world to a given number. Eighty remains the default, as in recent books such as Around the World in 80 Dishes, 80 Cocktails, or 80 Trains. His title coins and comments on the novel’s spatiotemporal structure, and Around the World in Eighty Days makes an almost too obvious self-declaration of its own chronotope (meaning “time-space”). Bakhtin describes how in the novel time “thickens, takes on flesh,” while “space becomes charged and responsive to time.”³⁴ Of the several chronotopes Bakhtin discusses—such as “threshold time” and “castle time”—Verne’s novel most closely aligns with “Greek adventure-time,” as Cara Murray notes.³⁵ It certainly has some of those key features: the quest, imperturbability of character, and predictably unpredictable events happening “suddenly” or “at that moment.”³⁶ And yet, Around the World in Eighty Days agitates against the neatness of that classification. Verne’s circumnavigation stakes out a global space-time just emerging in this historical moment.

Concluding his essay, Bakhtin insists that chronotopes are historically contingent and that authors themselves rarely have insight into their own works. A writer, Bakhtin reflects, looks at the world “from his own unresolved and still evolving contemporaneity.”³⁷ Verne’s novel documents a process underway, serving as a “supremely sensitive register of historical change and as a source for understanding.”³⁸ In The Triumph of Human Empire, Rosalind Williams brings together Verne, William Morris, and Robert Louis Stevenson as the documentarians of “the overarching historical event of our time,” the “end of the geographical unknown.”³⁹ Around the World in Eighty Days depicts the era’s technological developments and imperial expansions that contribute to this historical event. It basically advertises the new steamships and railways; it is a caricature of a British gentleman with a French sidekick saving an Indian widow; and it relies on the reckless burning of ships, bridges, and oil lamps for the purpose of traveling from Point A to Point A. This overt content, however, is tangled up with the novel’s unresolved contemporaneity, expressed in its construction and through its assumptions about the modern world, namely: that the world, or at least one imperial course through it, is personally traversable; that time and space are contingent and defined by relative motion; and finally, that characters’ worldviews are shaped by what, when, and how they read.

Verne updates the adventure chronotope to a not-yet-articulated modernity. Romance is residual in this mechanistic era, while a modernist uncertainty plays against the grandfather clocks that keep steady time in London. In one of his short mythologies, Roland Barthes discerns a chronotopic structure across the Verne oeuvre. He notes how the novelist establishes and undercuts a formal rigidity with chance, with a sense of play. According to Barthes, Verne’s characters “pledge space by means of time, constantly to unite these two categories, to stake them on a single throw of the dice.”⁴⁰ Verne characters seek to define their own spatiotemporal bearings in a moving world, and yet Barthes highlights that last variable: the gambler’s wager. With the trope of the dice throw, Verne joins French contemporaries such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Charles Baudelaire in marveling at the rituals of simulated novelty within modern routine: the thrill of the gamble, the challenge of the odds, the anticipation of a coup. Modern narrative is poised in that moment—and in that place—when the dice crash and collide, before their surfaces settle into view. The rules of the game seem familiar and comforting—like narrative conventions—but new results hang in the balance.

After staking his fortune on this wager, Fogg plays a few more hands of whist, the lower-stakes card game he will play on trains and steamers while not seeing the world. Fogg and Passepartout set out from Charing Cross Station, passing through Sydenham on the boat-train to Brindisi. Ostensibly they pass the Crystal Palace, to which Verne made his own pilgrimage a few years earlier. But that monument to “the final ambitions of modernity” is another conspicuous absence in the novel, invoked only by the town’s name.⁴¹ It is another implied negative image for the reader to develop and another entry in Verne’s “resumé of the nineteenth-century archive.”⁴² At Sydenham, the third-person narrator parts ways with the characters who proceed unaccompanied to Suez. This narrator lingers in London for another chapter, to show how the story will be amplified in the periodical press. He digests the coverage of Fogg’s gambit and reports on the betting odds. As the characters cross Europe, the narrator—sharing the habits of author and character alike—consults five newspapers as well as the Illustrated London News and the Proceedings of the Geographic Society. Peter Sinnema observes that Fogg’s own commitment to the London papers “is one of the clearest signs of his social ascetism,” and yet the same papers turn this introvert into a celebrity.⁴³ Private practices become public discourse in the dailies. The newspapers become one of several mediating devices in Verne’s fiction, between the private and public, the local and the global.

Fogg’s bet ripples outwards from the gentlemen’s club into the public sphere. It circulates around London and then around the world to wherever the reader might find herself. Fogg is “registered like a racehorse, in a sort of ‘studbook;’” later he is “listed on the stock exchange.”⁴⁴ His voyage sparks vicarious journeys for armchair travelers and speculators. These internal readers encourage external readers to buy in, to get in on the so-called action. These Londoners put their fortunes down, and the odds of Fogg’s success plummet from 5-to-1 to 200-to-1. Fogg becomes a hot topic, a traded commodity, and a proper character within the same newspapers he is accustomed to reading. With the advent of “Letters to the Editor” sections in nineteenth-century papers, Walter Benjamin reckons that the line between the readers of the news and its writers became less meaningful.⁴⁵ Benjamin may have added that these reader-writers could also become the main characters of the news. Verne ends the public wager chapter with a telegram from Suez to Scotland Yard—that is, in the reverse direction from the journey underway. It requests a warrant for Fogg’s arrest for a robbery he did not commit. The stakes of the journey are raised again, with another moving document.

The Imperial Guidebook and the Logistical Novel

The Voyages extraordinaires are an attempt to map the whole world. Verne is convinced, Unwin writes, that the world is “a vast narrative mediated through many different discourses, and that it remains to be explored, retold, rewritten, re-read, remapped.”⁴⁶ Verne, that is, commits exploration to print. Andrew Martin marvels at the sheer variety of documents in these novels, “manuscripts of all kinds, whole and intact or fragmentary and nibbled by sharks, in obscure runic scripts or bafflingly enciphered.”⁴⁷ Confronted with the eccentric archive, Verne’s characters join their author and the reader in navigating the texts and, by extension, the world. In Twenty Thousand Leagues, the reader gathers exposition through a letter, a speech, and newspaper reports, before a writer-character takes over the storytelling. Journey to the Centre of the Earth starts in a library, and the journey is sparked by a fragment inside a rare book, a clue left by another reader. And in Mathias Sandorf, a “conspiratorial signal plucked from the leg of a flagging carrier pigeon” sets the events in motion.⁴⁸ Everything is read in Verne, and everyone reads. Plots are then spurred by how characters read differently. “Verne’s ubiquitous readers are not neutral figures in the text,” Martin suggests, and their differing interpretations propel the novels’ conflicts.⁴⁹ These internal readers also model this work for those outside the book.

If Verne’s fiction is unusual for its many scenes of reading, it is even more distinctive for how the characters so regularly write their own versions of events. Verne’s characters are “actively engaged in the business,” and their output includes “memoirs, scholarly or scientific reports, diaries and journals, logbooks and so on.”⁵⁰ In the course of Around the World in Eighty Days, the characters consult newspapers, a guidebook, and flyers; more loosely, they seek out and interpret maps and charts, and they read the shifting faces of clocks and pocket watches. They contribute their own impressions in private journals, through dispatched telegrams, and in one of modernity’s newest forms of travel writing, the passport. Of these many internal texts, the guidebook has the most consistent and curious effects on Around the World in Eighty Days; it is the one book the characters carry with them for the duration. Given this baggage, the novel can even be understood as “a fusion between novel of empire and tourist guide,” according to Sinnema.⁵¹

Hastily leaving London, Fogg instructs Passepartout to pack an overnight bag with the following: two shirts and three pairs of stockings, twenty thousand pounds, and a copy of Bradshaw’s Continental Railway, Steam Transit and General Guide . Fogg and Passepartout presage a generation of travelers who pride themselves on light packing. As Emily Ridge shows in her study, travelers claimed a new personal modernity through packing lightly, benefitting from the corresponding ease of movement.⁵² Fogg selects a single book for the trip, a six-hundred-page testament to systematized tourism. Yet, the Bradshaw has limited utility for this itinerary. The “continental” in its title refers to Europe, and Verne omits his characters’ continental travel, including their passage by his own scene of writing in Amiens. After Fogg appeared on London’s stock exchange, the narrator transports the reader ahead of the travelers to the Suez quayside, to wait alongside that warrant-writing detective.⁵³ The continental guide is thus another named absence, the area it describes another negative image the reader is asked to develop. Verne’s novel supplements the book it contains.

Like Fogg’s luggage, the Bradshaw is a telling accessory for both its form (as a new kind of publication) and its contents (for the world it describes). As guidebooks became popular in the second half of the nineteenth century, one’s choice of a guidebook—or even the choice to carry one—revealed something about character. As Suzanne Hobson has argued, the guidebook was a meaningful prop, a kind of “badge” that signaled to others whether one was a tourist or a traveler, along with other, often class-based, assumptions that come with such distinctions.⁵⁴ The publisher and the language of a guidebook conveyed information about the traveler’s ostensible culture of origin. Verne fashions Fogg as a dedicated Briton, and his character prefers the Bradshaw over the popular Baedeker. Despite having been in the English language and market since the 1840s, the latter still had traces of German origins. Jonathan Grossman suggests Fogg’s choice is more simply a preference for the quantitative over the qualitative; the Bradshaw prides itself on its more detailed timetables.⁵⁵

Guidebooks in the nineteenth century were updated and reissued quickly, as the world they described changed at an even faster rate. Travelers were explicitly asked to write to publishers with suggested amendments for further editions. This gesture, which persists in the genre in the digital age, indicates how these books were collaboratively written by traveling readers and how the books aspired to stay up to date with their object, while inevitably falling short. In the late 1860s the Bradshaw was published monthly, its primary objective—given the preponderance of its copy—to consolidate the latest routes and timetables. Most of its pages were clean and orderly charts, a meticulous “list of times and city names.”⁵⁶ Aside from that primary format, however, the volumes also included “an epitomized description of each country,” information on the health benefits of travel, and detailed packing instructions.⁵⁷ Meeting the needs of an expanding market, publishers broadened their offerings with new regions and more specialized guides. In 1866, for example, the Bradshaw advertised a French phrasebook and their Invalid’s Companion to the Continent.

Across the Bradshaw sections, the format, voice, and even the fonts are eclectic. In an essay on modernism and the guidebook, Jesse Schotter stresses how the stylistic boundaries across the timetables, advertisements, and descriptions were in flux in these rapidly produced, read, and revised editions. These guides’ textual qualities migrated across sections within the book, and then between the books on the news rack. Alasdair Pettinger describes how “many of the formal devices characteristic of the guidebook are often used in travel narratives too”; from there, they migrated to novels about travel as well.⁵⁸ Novelists of course sold stories for serialization, and features of the periodical press seeped into literary fiction. But Verne’s outright naming and integration of periodicals makes a more self-aware statement about the discursive bricolage in the Voyages. He pursued a more heterogeneous discourse with encyclopedic ambitions, qualities associated with later literary generations. While some modernists explicitly dismissed associations with Baedekers and Bradshaws—Virginia Woolf is Schotter’s main example—guidebooks had already permeated modern culture, high and low.

Verne embraced guidebooks beyond 1872. The characters in Un capitaine de quinze ans (1878), P’tit-Bonhomme (1893), and Claudius Bombarnac (1892) all carry or consult guidebooks on their journeys.⁵⁹ In Twenty Thousand Leagues, Captain Nemo reads Professor Aronnax’s guide to the ocean depths, and the professor is later discovered reading his own book.⁶⁰ Verne includes other adjacent forms—maps, tables, and schedules—archiving the geographical knowledge of the day. These inclusions make Verne a stylistic outlier among his literary peers, who tended to keep lower forms of print unrealistically out of view in their realist portraits of social life. Unwin cites Verne’s imbrication of print culture among the many features of literary interest in the Voyages, the “intertextuality, intergeneric borrowing, self-consciousness, encyclopaedism, authorship and discourse construction.”⁶¹ These qualities gesture to the modernist novel yet to come, and yet from another angle they anchor Verne precisely in his own time, his work a “sensitive register” of that epoch in transition. His novels were prominent, porous, and portable, and they offered readers, writers, and travelers an interactive guide to the changing world around them.

This interplay between internal works, the work, and the world tells another story here, about the European imperial episteme and the period’s geopolitics. All of this paperwork contributes to the mapping of empire. The subtitle for Verne’s Voyages extraordinaires is Mondes connus et inconnus (“known and unknown worlds”), and the plots generally transform the latter into the former. This subtitle first implies that there are multiple worlds, and it places two types side-by-side with a semblance of neutrality. That “and,” however, is the site of conflict, the kind that narrative thrives on, but it also marks real, extratextual conflict. The “and” contains and sometimes conceals colonial desire and anxiety; it captures the conquest and exploitation that serve as the backdrop for, or sometimes the manifest events of, Europe’s adventure stories. This political and aesthetic cluster of relations is what Victor Segalen set out to study in his Essay on Exoticism, and what Chris Bongie theorizes in his 1991 Exotic Memories. Bongie reads Verne and his contemporaries to witness how the exotic mediates the known and unknown, the here and elsewhere, the past, present, and future. The exotic holds a promise of contact and mastery, but “it can never keep its promise.”⁶² This always-incomplete conversion structures Verne’s novels and, more broadly, the milieu.

Verne’s books are excursions, exercises, and experiments in discovery. The extraordinary journeys properly begin, Ross Chambers writes, with the characters arriving at the border: “It is only in the colonized part of the world that the journey acquires that additional element of interest that makes it worth narrating.”⁶³ Asked about his first novel Five Weeks in a Balloon, Verne aligned the unknown with what is worth telling: “I chose Africa as the scene of action, for the simple reason that less was, and is, known about that continent than any other.”⁶⁴ Verne is exemplary but certainly not isolated in this approach. The figure of the map, and especially a blank map, finds many iterations in the period’s European literature. Baudelaire wrote of the “child in love with maps and prints / Finds the world equal to his vast appetite.”⁶⁵ Joseph Conrad’s Marlow links colonial exploitation to a child’s fascination with the “many blank spaces of the earth.”⁶⁶ Even and especially for children—potential explorers, colonialists-in-training—a map’s blankness is another negative image. It is an invitation and justification for a combination of adventurous storytelling, imaginative worldmaking, and potential conquest. The unknown becomes an obsession, even a form of madness, for Verne’s characters. In Twenty Thousand Leagues the relatively level-headed narrator announces his personal stakes in remaining imprisoned on the Nautilus: “I would like to finish seeing what no man has yet seen, even if I have to pay for this insatiable need with my life!”⁶⁷

This discovery structure is chronotopic, expressed in intertwined spatial and temporal manifestations. On a map, territories are distinct based on relationships in space, but they are implicitly sequenced, marked by their relative status of discovery or development. Peter Sloterdijk suggests that after the first circumnavigation, geographical unknowns attained a new temporal character: the “famous white spots on maps marked as terrae incognitae acted as points that would have to be made known in future.”⁶⁸ The unknown is another name for the future-known, and this European project became an anxious race. More peculiarly, it was understood as a retrospective injunction from a projected future. In 1893, the British Foreign Minister Lord Rosebery mused: “It is said our Empire is already large enough … We have to consider not what we want now, but what we shall want in the future.”⁶⁹ Three decades earlier, Verne’s characters had pioneered the language for that future-minded orientation, “we must moreover consider what has to happen as having already happened, and see only the present in the future.”⁷⁰ In the imperial episteme, cartographic features are not static descriptions of a physical world but harbingers, instructions.

Verne’s Voyages are a near-epitomic demonstration of this nineteenth-century mindset, as Bongie and Williams both show. And yet Around the World in Eighty Days does not offer the standard conversion. Despite being one of the best remembered novels in this series, Le Tour du monde is an anomaly. Fogg and Passepartout proceed through the heart of an empire long since mapped, a world “already codified, fully converted to cartography.”⁷¹ For this reason, Sloterdijk characterizes Verne’s novel as the terminus, rather than a milestone, in the history of exploration.⁷² For him, the circumnavigation project is exhausted. The end of exploration came earlier, and the new leisure travel offered meagre pleasure and even less purpose. Joris-Karl Huysmans’s character Jean des Esseintes from Á Rebours (1884) would later become the spokesperson for this idea, the “end of travel.” As Verne’s characters continued to explore new frontiers, urban sophisticates like des Esseintes were content to have ersatz experiences of foreign lands, cultivating the jaded belief that there was nothing worth traveling outward to see.

Phileas Fogg seeks something other than novel sights and experiences with his journey. His incuriosity is actually akin to des Esseintes’s, but he still travels, in pursuit of something else. In Around the World in Eighty Days Verne and Fogg value a different kind of unknown than the one Sloterdijk describes. The territory may have been mapped, the white spaces given provisional names, but the routes between places were not yet properly paced, timetabled, and linked. The proliferating trajectories of the global networks had not yet been connected, and these logistical segments are Fogg’s proper frontier. The Bradshaws of the period came in British, Continental, and Indian editions, but there was yet to be a compelling and useful guide for the whole world. It arrived in serial form in 1872 and in 1873 in the guise of a novel.

Logistics had become the latest frontier of geographical knowledge. The term “logistics,” in the sense of coordination, came into English from French in the late 1870s. Around the World in Eighty Days, itself moving from French to English (and beyond), can be understood as a pioneering logistical novel, as Jonathan Grossman shows in his reading. It is not merely the documentation of logistics—it is a novel, after all—and the story models how the logistical world is experienced by the characters. The narrative performs quantitative calculations and qualitative explorations, and it dramatizes the tension between those ways of knowing. Most works that purport to depict the whole world gather a representative sample of notable sites and present them as disconnected exhibits, as if in a museum. Around the World in Eighty Days more prominently gives form and duration to the journey itself, to the real links occluded by a timetable’s conventional dashes, as in “San Francisco – New York.”⁷³ It documents the usually taken-for-granted in-betweens, what Caitlin Vandertop calls the “infrastructural unconscious” in her study of modernist travel writing.⁷⁴ These intervals and stopovers are overlooked in our smoother glosses on the global but in Verne are given form and texture. His narrative, by definition, still includes gaps but it confers to the reader the perspective—and even the sensation—of being in the network, being part of a “networked community.”⁷⁵

This more immanent worldview agitates against some of the principal, more abstract ways of thinking about literature and the world, whether through the classical conceit of Archimedean ground, the “view from nowhere,” or with “the powers of distance.”⁷⁶ What Verne proposes instead is surprisingly simple: that circumnavigation re-situates the human in the world. He shows that a given body can stand at any line of longitude and, like the characters, proceed in one direction and eventually return to where they began. Around the World in Eighty Days re-scales the modern world to the body of the traveler, the writer, and the reader. In modernist studies, there have been recent efforts to value a situated, corporeal perspective—which, of course, we each inhabit—but our bookish and metaphysical habits are tenacious. Michelle Clayton draws attention back to the body in “Modernism’s Moving Bodies,” and Harris Feinsod recently devised a “navigational” method that focuses on moving through the modern. He finds his key critical expression “Periplum” within the field, in Ezra Pound’s Cantos: “Periplum, not as the land looks on a map / but as sea bord seen by men sailing.”⁷⁷ “Periplum” is a Pound neologism, from the Greek for “around” and “voyage.” The world can be met at eye-level, that is, when one is on a voyage around it.

For anyone embarking on such a journey, Around the World in Eighty Days is helpful: as an idea, a guidebook, and a light diversion. It is brought along on trips more often than those works better known for what Nabokov considers intrinsic literary values. Joyce Chaplin notes how circumnavigators often read about others’ trips while on the trip, and she started her history by reading Verne at sea.⁷⁸ Nonetheless, many travelers do not ultimately read the book, even if they carry it with them. They rely instead on eccentric mythologies; in Barthes’s sense, they “read while looking up.” The novel itself, in any of its many editions or translations, could be mere weight like the Bradshaw in Fogg’s overnight bag. If the traveler does look inside the pages, however, she will feel welcome, in this world or that. She will find practical instructions on how to read and write the world, and how to extend this eccentric tradition.

Fiction’s Fulfillment and the Footpath Around the World

In the novel’s course, Fogg and Passepartout test out the global transportation system, a network newly accessible for enterprising individuals. On this reconnaissance tour, Fogg is a caricatured champion of the quantitative, his own written ledger a generic relative of the tables in the Bradshaw and the Morning Chronicle.⁷⁹ The supporting characters, ambivalent or bemused by Fogg, offer a range of qualitative contrasts to his calculations and figures. Pierre Macherey claims that there is “neither psychology nor character” in Verne, that the author explores very little interiority.⁸⁰ His characters instead are distinguished by their actions, their outward-turned behaviors, by what they do and say—as all characters are—and also by what they read and write. Primed by that early newspaper scene, readers of Around the World in Eighty Days keep reading with the characters, following their proverbial footsteps.

Interviewing Verne in 1895, Marie Belloc inspected her subject’s bookshelves. She wrote that a man’s books reveal his character.⁸¹ Verne concurs with this commonplace, shaping his characters in terms of their reading: Fogg prefers his Bradshaw, the London papers, and his own ledger; Passepartout’s reading is more eclectic, his watch, his stamped passport, and a circus flyer; the detective Fix single-mindedly reads and writes bureaucratic telegrams through the British Empire. Keeping with the novel’s negative-image construction, Fogg also is known for what he neglects to read. The Bradshaw is of limited use, and Fogg’s preference for the British press is a blind spot and part of his eventual redemption. Arriving in Hong Kong, Passepartout catches on to the monotony of the British Empire: this port city was “Bombay, Calcutta, or Singapore all over again … There is a trail of British towns right round the world.”⁸² For Fogg, this similarity is Hong Kong’s principal charm. Anticipating that they are heading for Japan and the U.S.—outside British domains for the first time since Brindisi—Fogg “engrossed himself all evening in The Times and the Illustrated London News,” both of which, the reader recalls, were covering his own trip.⁸³ His parochial reading habits contribute to Fogg’s signature insularity. As Sinnema writes, “newspapers spare the intensely reserved Englishman from any genuine encounter with otherness.”⁸⁴ Halfway around the world, the character escapes into the papers, in search of news of home and perhaps of himself.

This avid reader stops looking at newspapers entirely when outside the British Empire. When Fogg arrives in North America, he prefers his other Reform Club pastime of whist. He does not glance at mastheads or headlines in San Francisco or New York, nor in the smaller towns in between—not even in the periodicals circulating on the train itself. In the nineteenth century, railway reading was popular, with literature published in special travel editions. Around the World in Eighty Days, for example, appeared in a newsprint “Railroad Edition” in the U.S. in 1876. This broadsheet was meant to be read along the very rails on which Fogg rode, but in 1872 he read nothing but playing cards and his opponents’ faces. Fogg’s not-reading in America is essential for the confusion of dates which allows him to believe he lost—but to actually win—the bet back home. As Butcher and Chambers both point out, if Fogg had read the papers after crossing the Pacific he would have noticed that he was reading one day in the future.⁸⁵ From December 3 onward—or December 2 depending on whom you ask—Fogg’s scrupulous logbook and local mastheads disagree on the date. When the characters first land in San Francisco, Verne coyly concludes that chapter with a single-sentence paragraph, “Mr Fogg had neither gained nor lost a single day.”⁸⁶ Verne provides this update on their overall progress at the moment when a single day had disappeared.⁸⁷ This isolated line becomes one of several preemptive nods to the novel’s eventual sleight-of-hand.

Passepartout’s reading of his watch is another such clue, making the novel’s ending seem at once surprising and obvious for first-time readers. Passepartout stubbornly believes in a single time and he refuses to change his watch as he travels, despite having calibrated his watch to Fogg’s in the opening scene.⁸⁸ He then unwittingly charts their longitudinal progress by reading the relative error of his watch. To change the time—as other characters advise him to do—would disrupt his own way of situating himself. He is teased, but Passepartout functions as that truth-telling fool, with his device’s errancy (or its accuracy) tracking their passage through the world’s as yet unsystematized time zones.⁸⁹ The eighteenth-century invention of the marine chronometer made it possible to determine longitude at sea; the narrator, incidentally, compares Fogg to this particular instrument. But it is Passepartout who in effect compares local time with London time chronometrically. Next to Fogg, Passepartout better balances the traveler’s “double sphere of reference,” orienting himself to home while attentive to local differences.⁹⁰

Passepartout’s twelve-hour watch briefly realigns with his situated time when he crosses the anti-meridian, what now is known as the International Date Line. If he had been wearing an Italian twenty-four-hour watch—the kind with which Verne specifically outfits characters in Twenty Thousand Leagues—there would be no confusion with this simulated return to London time. Passepartout expresses momentary vindication on the Pacific: “That rascal who told me lots of nonsense about meridians, the sun, and the moon … I was sure that one fine day the sun would decide to synchronize with my watch.”⁹¹ In the moment, the joke seems to be on Passepartout, but it ends up landing on the other characters and the reader; eyes trained on the hour, they neglect to consider the day. Verne plants these references to time’s shifting inscriptions on mastheads and watch faces, like a mystery novelist plants clues, to make the surprising ending appear to have been hiding in plain sight.⁹²

While their reading leads them astray, Fogg and Passepartout’s forms of writing certify their travel accomplishment to the potentially skeptical back home. These documents become entries in the longer travel writing tradition, offering guidance for future travelers inside and outside the fiction. Their respective writing methods are introduced on their arrival in Suez. The Suez chapter is called: “Which Shows Once More the Uselessness of Passports as a Means of Control.” Verne uses chapter titles as “a clear pastiche of the eighteenth century convention,” Unwin writes, and as “an opportunity to comment ironically on the processes of narrative.”⁹³ The passport is introduced as what it is not—a means of control—and it serves instead as a personal record, a souvenir, and a form of verifiable documentation. Passports would not be standardized until after the First World War, and their enforcement was erratic.⁹⁴ On her 1889 around-the-world trip, for example, the American Nellie Bly proudly lied about her age for the document she obtained when already in London.⁹⁵ In the historical moment a passport was inessential, but Fogg reckons it will authenticate his course; he wants it stamped “to prove that I have passed through Suez.”⁹⁶ The passport is a form of collaborative writing for which one must leave home, and Fogg sees it as corroboration for his personal ledger.

While Passepartout seeks out the stamps, his employer does not disembark. According to the narrator, this is a Briton’s custom, to “have their servants do their sightseeing for them.”⁹⁷ Fogg sequesters himself to write his account of the trip, and here briefly joins the likes of Nemo, Aronnax, and Lidenbrock as Verne’s author-characters. Fogg’s account is predictably mechanical. While most nineteenth-century circumnavigators reflect on what they observe at sea and on shore, Fogg translates his experience into bare sums and figures. His notebook, excerpted by Verne, is a list of departures and arrivals in Paris, Turin, and Brindisi. This retrospective, second-hand text is the only record of the trip’s otherwise omitted European segments. Fogg recognizes the possible utility of his written work for readers and future travelers, beyond verification at the Reform Club: “it might be useful to those wishing to attempt a journey around the world in the same conditions.”⁹⁸ He explicitly joins the long list of circumnavigators in “seeing themselves as part of a tradition,” as co-authors of an ongoing story.⁹⁹

Verne wrote about both real and imagined circumnavigations and blurred the distinctions. In the 1870s, he was publishing his multivolume history of exploration, Découverte de la terre. In this work he cited his characters’ real predecessors, the likes of Magellan, Drake, and Bougainville.¹⁰⁰ In his 1892 Claudius Bombarnac, Verne would fold the real-life circumnavigators Bly and Elizabeth Bisland (the first two to beat Fogg’s record) back into his latest fiction. In short, Verne creatively exploited the overlap and the mutual citationality of fiction and the so-called real world. In A Theory of Literary Production, Macherey links the Verne oeuvre to Leibniz’s “Palace of the Fates,” a storehouse of compossible worlds. In Verne’s Voyages then, “The real is the fulfillment of a fiction”—and, implicitly, vice versa.¹⁰¹ Unwin documents the novelist’s practical methods to this end, how Verne worked from carefully coded research notecards in a “circular process.”¹⁰² That is, he noted actual events, reorganized them, added a gloss of imagination, and sent the new stories out to be realized once more. It made for a “a new kind of narrative,” Macherey writes, in which “the literary work immediately becomes reality.”¹⁰³ Fogg’s circular journey is itself a tracing of real precedents as well as the invitation for others to follow. The Bradshaw and the journal (one real and one fictional, as far as the distinction holds) in Fogg’s luggage are material manifestation of the more abstract transactions Macherey describes. Verne’s fiction fables the connections between the read, the lived, and the written, and the reader is initiated into those circuits.

Fogg thinks that his example “might be useful to those wishing to attempt a journey around the world,” and Macherey identifies this prospective use as the deep structure in Verne’s oeuvre, linking predecessors and successors, characters and readers. Verne’s fictions adhere to “a very simple model: a journey in the footsteps of the other.”¹⁰⁴ As this novel’s dispersive legacy bears witness, these particular characters’ footsteps have inspired many writers and travelers. “Think of the way a footpath,” the performance theorist Rebecca Schneider writes, “is both composed of footprints (traces of past event) and also an index to the future with the sedimented (or, perhaps more properly, eroded) suggestion: ‘walk this way.’”¹⁰⁵ In five hundred years of circumnavigation, Verne’s fiction has made the strongest impressions in the footpath. It is a nearly definitive record of the trip and the most-often consulted script for travelers. The novel may seem dated, a quaint nineteenth-century adventure, but it also keeps whispering: “walk this way.”

Circumnavigation and stories about circumnavigation were already popular in 1872, and they would become even more so in the decades to follow. In his study of the global nineteenth century, Jürgen Osterhammel describes network-thinking as one of the major developments of the age. He lists out the itinerary that Verne’s characters follow as handy shorthand for how the whole world was linked by new technologies. Osterhammel focuses on the physical infrastructure and expresses passing skepticism about the network’s actual use by travelers: “But who undertook this journey, aside from the gentleman Phileas Fogg,” George Francis Train, and Nellie Bly?¹⁰⁶ Osterhammel underestimates the trip’s popularity. Circumnavigators of the period easily numbered in the thousands, and among those eclectic, circular journeys—subsequently conducted in silence, on bicycles, in the air, and underwater—Jules Verne was and is the most powerful inspiration.¹⁰⁷ Around the World in Eighty Days remains the talismanic guidebook—its characters the patron saints—for around-the-world readers, writers, and travelers.

A Matter of Perspective: Jules Verne Writes on the Globe

In the early 2000s, the American writer Seth Stevenson quit his day job to embark on a circular journey along this well-trod path. He was aware of being a latecomer and reflected on one of his more recent predecessors. In the 1980s, a reporter for Condé Nast Traveler wrote a piece titled “Around the World in 80 Hours,” to show readers the ease of air travel. Consigned to three-plus days of airports and airplanes, that jetsetter experienced, according to Stevenson, “All the hassles of travel with almost none of the rewards.”¹⁰⁸ Stevenson and his wife decided to take their time instead, in the throwback fashion of Phileas Fogg and others. Stevenson remained “grounded” (the title of his eventual book) by restricting himself to forms of transport available in 1872. He emulated Verne’s characters in their travel methods, in his reading en route (he reads about circumnavigators), and finally by writing his own impressions for future travelers.

In the final pages of Grounded, Stevenson hazards a conclusion about what it is like to travel around the world. He describes an uncanny feeling that is present, if underdeveloped, in Verne’s book. Having finished the circuit, Stevenson reflects on the trip’s corporeal toll, the accumulated fatigue that comes with many awkward berths and unfamiliar meals. Traveling on the surface “forces you to feel, deep in your bones, the distance you’ve covered.”¹⁰⁹ The body carries this accumulation; it is an archive of sensation. Stevenson meditates on an ordinary globe when he is back home, and he conveys this uncanny feeling: “You will run your finger along the curve of the sphere and think: I know what this distance feels like. What this ocean looks like. What it means to trace the surface of the earth.”¹¹⁰ In shifting between “you” and “I,” Stevenson extends an invitation to his own reader to take his place on the journey.

Verne also “traces the surface” in Around the World in Eighty Days. Among the disciplines, Verne maintained that “Geography is my passion and my study”; geography combines the Greek for “earth” and the Latin for “writing.”¹¹¹ Verne wrote on the earth’s surface and at sea, while going above and below each in his fictions. Michel de Certeau sites the sea, rather than Paris or Amiens, as Verne’s iconic scene of writing. Aboard his boat, Verne wrote on a makeshift desk—aspiring for Nemo’s proper library—and he used the proceeds from his books to buy a bigger boat, that is, a bigger workspace. When Verne wrote of the voyages of the past, de Certeau muses, “he simultaneously wrote upon the immense page of the sea.”¹¹² Circumnavigators traverse a “stage the size of the world,” as Joyce Chaplin reflects, and Verne’s novels present a print corollary, the world stage doubling as an impressionable page.¹¹³

On land, railroads were the primary means for nineteenth-century earth-writing, for man’s quest “to girdle the globe and write his signature upon it.”¹¹⁴ Jean Chesneaux believes that Verne took up Ange Guépin’s 1854 call to “write man’s achievements on the face of the earth,” in a manner similar to Proust answering Bergson’s “invitation” to write the mind’s impressions.¹¹⁵ For the philosopher Guépin, modern industry was “writing on the face of the world,” and Verne imaginatively worked out the details for that transcription. Through his writer-characters, he calibrated and assigned the task to individuals. It is this “you” or “I” who rides the train across continents, you or I whose finger traces a course on a globe. In the words of Verne enthusiast Georges Perec, the earth itself “is a form of writing, a geography of which we had forgotten that we ourselves are the authors.”¹¹⁶ Verne adapts this collective global writing project to the novel form with a simple but profound trick of scale. Making both characters and readers participate in geography—in earth-writing—is one of Verne’s chief achievements in Around the World in Eighty Days. He makes the extraordinary journey around the world seem so personal and possible. It happens to you or me when we consider a globe or look up from a book.

Verne’s plots dramatize and document the zeitgeist, what his editor called “the marvels of the universe where destiny is unfolding.”¹¹⁷ His characters provide on-location commentary about these destined marvels; they lend them a language. When riding the railroad through India, Phileas Fogg befriends a Sir Francis Cromarty. Cromarty is keen to pass the time by relaying his knowledge of the Raj to a fellow Briton. But Fogg prefers not to engage; he sits impassively, asking his companion nothing. Through the narrator, Verne indirectly registers the other characters’ bemusement with Fogg’s lack of curiosity: “He wasn’t travelling, he was describing [décrivait] a circumference. He constituted a heavy body moving in orbit around the terrestrial globe.”¹¹⁸ Fogg’s behavior, that is, is inscribed in the text as description, as a kind of writing. Décrire’s similarity to écrire in the French makes this earth-writing even more pronounced. Fogg’s disinterest in talking or reading about the world may be attributed to the fact that he was too busy writing it, with his own body, on a planetary scale.