(Axel alludes to Symmes in chapter XXIX, mistakenly identifying him as English rather than American.) Such theories influenced not only Verne, but also other writers and were sporadically revived until the early twentieth century. Edgar Allan Poe’s “Manuscript Found in a Bottle” and Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s At the Earth’s Core and Pellucidar are other examples. Yet by the time Verne published Journey to the Center of the Earth in 1864, hollow-Earth theories, while not entirely disproved, were not a central topic of debate among leading scientists.

Verne, famous for his extensive and meticulous note taking, was surely not unaware of this fact; what led him to use the idea of a hollow Earth as the foundation for his novel was no doubt the way in which the notion allowed him to tie scientific exploration into some of the oldest and most significant motifs of the Western literary tradition. On the surface, the plot of Journey to the Center of the Earth seems relatively straightforward: Lidenbrock and his nephew by sheer coincidence discover an ancient cryptogram that points to the bottom of an Icelandic volcano as the entryway to a passage that will eventually lead to the Earth’s core. Axel prefers the safety of life above ground and is reluctant to leave his fiancee, the professor’s goddaughter Graüben, but Lidenbrock becomes obsessed with the idea of retracing the steps of his illustrious predecessor, the sixteenth-century Icelandic scholar Arne Saknussemm, […] to the center of the Earth. Lidenbrock, Axel, and their Icelandic guide Hans penetrate deep beneath the Earth’s crust, where they discover an alternative world of plants, animals, and even human beings that have long gone extinct on the surface, and return to ground level through another volcano. Although this plot may at first appear to be quite linear, it derives much of its narrative force from the way in which it invokes some of the founding stories of Western culture: the quest narrative, the descent to the underworld, and the initiatory voyage.

Professor Otto Lidenbrock is without any doubt a prime example of a hero on a quest so urgent that no one and nothing can stop it. His obstinacy in reaching the center of the Earth in spite of seemingly insurmountable obstacles puts him in the company of other literary figures whom we remember principally because of their overriding obsession with a single project: Jules Verne’s own Captain Nemo from Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea and Phileas Fogg from Around the World in Eighty Days provide the most obvious parallels, but one is also reminded of Captain Ahab, the protagonist of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. While these may well be more complex characters, Lidenbrock shares with them their stubborn single-mindedness, their iron determination, and the reckless imposition of their will on others who have no desire to take part in the pursuit but are dragged along regardless. Even seen through Axel’s reluctant eyes, however, Uncle Lidenbrock remains likable: His personal foibles, which Axel dwells on with a mix of gentle malice and affection, make him a more human figure than Nemo or Ahab, and the novel leaves us in no doubt that Lidenbrock is genuinely attached to his nephew and his ward Graüben—though his concern for them will never in the end deter him from his quest for knowledge.

While there is no doubt something cliched about this portrait of the fierce scientist with the warm heart under his crust of social brusqueness, it is Lidenbrock’s enthusiasm and determination in the pursuit of science that gives the novel much of its propulsive energy (as literary critics have pointed out, his temper is compared to volcanic eruptions and electric discharges long before his expedition actually encounters these phenomena in their literal shape). Yet it is curious that Lidenbrock’s scientific obsession is not presented as a quest for genuine innovation and original discovery, but rather as the repetition of a project that was already executed by someone else centuries earlier. The discovery of sixteenth-century scholar Arne Saknussemm’s manuscript certainly strikes a familiar note, as ancient books or maps and lost manuscripts written in secret codes play a crucial role in many nineteenth- and twentieth-century adventure romances. But here, the discovery turns the journey into the realm of the unknown into a simultaneous quest for the traces left by the historic predecessor; the search for the new combines with an attempt to reconnect with the past. These two time vectors in Lidenbrock’s voyage point to two quite different conceptions of history: on one hand, the idea of progress and its association with the increase of scientific knowledge, and on the other hand, the idea of a heroic past in which great men accomplished tasks that are difficult to repeat for ordinary individuals of the modern age. The ultimate outcome of Lidenbrock’s quest should be seen in light of this tension between different perspectives on the relationship of modern society to its past and future.

But whatever the philosophical implications of the professor’s expedition into the unknown may be, the reader’s attraction to following the journey lies above all in the abundance of physical detail that Verne provides. Whether the expedition’s goal is reached or not soon seems less important than the marvelous details that unfold before the travelers’ eyes. As the famous science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov has shrewdly noted, the scientific implausibility of humans penetrating deep into the Earth’s mantle despite increasing heat and pressure is compensated by Verne’s emphasis on precise details. From the meticulous attention paid to the tools and instruments the expedition requires to the narrator’s lovingly detailed descriptions of the physical features of each geological layer they encounter, Verne’s writing bewitches the reader with its insistence on the wonders of sheer materiality. He writes of the ingenuity of Ruhmkorff lamps with as much devotion as he describes the colored striations of marble in underground tunnels and the festive scintillations of light falling on thousands of bits of crystal and quartz embedded in walls and vaults of rock. Of course, this intense physical presence of nature is not always inviting for the characters: Steep vertical slopes, regions without a drop of water, heat, fierce storms, and darkness so absolute as to be almost palpable endanger the travelers, just as the primeval magnificence of the subterranean landscapes delights them. But whether it is splendid or menacing, the physicality of the environment in Verne’s novel holds the reader spellbound.

At the same time, Verne associates the materiality of the Earth with symbolic and metaphoric dimensions that may be quite familiar to the reader. Some of the most influential texts of the Western cultural tradition, from Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid to Dante’s Divine Comedy, prominently feature the protagonist’s descent into the underworld, the realm of the dead, as an important part of his social and spiritual development. Usually, the point of this voyage to the underworld is to confront deceased individuals whom he used to know: parents, lovers, friends, or public figures from his own era, whose manner of death and afterlife are significant for his own course of life and contribute to a deeper understanding of his past and present. In Journey to the Center of the Earth, this confrontation with death and desolation starts long before the protagonists descend into the crater of the Snaefells volcano; fully a third of the novel is taken up with the description of their journey toward and across Iceland. This part of the trip takes the expedition through a magnificently portrayed wasteland of cold, solitude, and poverty where plants, animals, and humans are barely able to survive and shadowy lepers scurry away at the travelers’ approach. The impoverished Icelanders, portrayed as almost congenitally prone to silence and stolid acceptance of extreme adversity, sometimes seem to form part of an all-encompassing landscape of rock, ice, and steam more than of human society as we usually conceive it. All of these elements already suggest that the protagonists have entered a netherworld that will confront them with the bare essentials of their own existence.

Once the travelers start descending below the surface of the Earth and move outside the boundaries of human society, their exploration turns into a temporal as much as a geographical journey. They discover a prehistoric world of gigantically sized plants and mushrooms, a realm not only of fossils and bones but also of living, breathing, and battling dinosaurs and other animals long extinct on the planet’s surface. In large segments of two chapters (XXXVIII and XXXIX) that were not part of the novel when it was published in 1864, they even encounter predecessors of the human species itself. Verne added them in 1867 as a direct fictional transplantation of discoveries about Stone Age humans that the French archaeologist Jacques Boucher de Perthes made in the 1830s and 1840s, but which were only generally accepted in the late 1850s and early 1860s. They were the basis for his claim, revolutionary at the time, that not only fauna and flora but human beings themselves have a history that counts in the hundreds of thousands of years.