When the members of the Lidenbrock expedition encounter such long-extinct humans living in a prehistoric natural environment, they are confronted not just with a personal or social past, but with ecological and biological history. Geological layers, therefore, function in the novel as metaphors for both collective cultural and scientific memory, and traversing these layers implies traveling back in time.

As a precursor of such present-day imaginary encounters with prehistoric flora and fauna as Steven Spielberg’s film Jurassic Park, Verne’s Journey invites us to ask questions about how we remember, reconstruct, and invent the past and present of our biological surroundings. But while Jurassic Park, with its rampaging, man-eating dinosaurs, is ultimately intended as a warning about the excessive manipulation of nature by science and consumerism, the point in Journey to the Center of the Earth is quite different. Professor Lidenbrock and his nephew also encounter dangerous dinosaurs—but they end up battling each other, not the intruding humans, and in fact don’t even seem to notice them. Verne does not mean to show us a natural world pushed beyond its limits by humans and taking its revenge on them. Rather, he invites us to compare this visceral confrontation with a primeval natural world in the middle pages of the novel to the very different encounter with the natural that takes place at the beginning of the story, in the description of Professor Lidenbrock’s scientific lectures and his work on carefully classified mineralogical samples in his study.

Lab work and field work, abstract taxonomies and concrete perception, analytical distance and lived immersion, the attempt to master nature intellectually and the way in which nature always offers more marvelous panoramas than the human mind can grasp—these are the juxtapositions upon which the novel hinges. It doesn’t seem that Verne wants his readers to value one over the other. Verne has quite a bit of fun at Professor Lidenbrock’s expense, through narrator Axel’s bemused and sometimes sarcastic comments about his pedantry, but the more visceral encounter with nature would never have taken place were it not for Lidenbrock’s passion for abstruse old books and manuscripts, by means of which he discovers the passage into the interior of the globe. Journey to the Center of the Earth highlights both dimensions of the scientific enterprise, emphasizing their tensions but also their inevitable conjunction in the quest for more and better knowledge.

So the journey to the underworld, while it breathes new life into an ancient literary motif, also serves as a framework for reflection on the much more recent problems of a scientific approach to the natural world and its history. In addition, it contrasts this scientific perspective of relentless inquisitorial rigor, which is exemplified by Professor Lidenbrock, with the more emotional, irrational, and sometimes visionary dimensions that his nephew Axel represents in the narrative. While Axel is a devoted scientist in his own right, he initially cares nothing about his uncle’s expedition; his thoughts are more taken up with his love for Graüben than with the possible scientific benefits such a mission might bring. Younger, less experienced, and physically more frail than his uncle, Axel often reacts with dismay or despair to difficult situations that Lidenbrock and the Icelander Hans face with stolidity and optimism.

Yet it should be noted that it is Axel, not his uncle, who is able to solve the two intellectual puzzles that bookend the novel. At the beginning, Axel finds the key that breaks the code in Arne Saknussemm’s cryptogram, and at the end, Axel discovers why the compass stopped functioning properly during the underground voyage. Clearly, then, there are scientific insights that are foreclosed to Professor Lidenbrock, not because of any intellectual weakness but because of his social and emotional ineptitude—his impatience, his eruptive temper, his disregard for erotic relations. Arriving at scientific truths, the novel seems to signal, requires not only technical expertise, which Lidenbrock certainly possesses, but also the kind of emotional warmth and visionary talent at which his nephew excels. Axel discovers the solution to Saknussemm’s textual puzzle during a hallucinatory state of mind; and it is again during a hallucination that he has the most sweeping and most lyrical vision of time travel that the novel offers:

I take up the telescope and scan the ocean…. I gaze upward in the air. Why should not some of the birds restored by the immortal Cuvier again flap their wings in these heavy atmospheric layers? The fish would provide them with sufficient food. I survey the whole space, but the air is as uninhabited as the shore….

Wide awake, I dream. I think I see enormous chelonians on the surface of the water, antediluvian turtles that resemble floating islands. Across the dimly lit beach walk the huge mammals of the first ages of the world, the leptotherium found in the caverns of Brazil, the mericotherium from the icy regions of Siberia. Farther on, the pachydermatous lophiodon, a giant tapir, hides behind the rocks, ready to fight for its prey with the anoplotherium, a strange animal that resembles the rhinoceros, the horse, the hippopotamus and the camel, as if the Creator, in too much of a hurry in the first hours of the world, had combined several animals into one. The giant mastodon curls his trunk, and smashes rocks on the shore with his tusks, while the megatherium, resting on its enormous paws, digs through the soil, its roars echoing sonorously off the granite rocks. Higher up, the protopithecus—the first monkey that appeared on the globe—climbs up the steep summits. Higher yet, the pterodactyl with its winged hand glides on the dense air like a large bat. In the uppermost layers, finally, immense birds, more powerful than the cassowary and larger than the ostrich, spread their vast wings and are about to strike their heads against the granite vault.

All this fossil world is born again in my imagination. I travel back to the biblical age of the world, long before the advent of man, when the unfinished world was as yet insufficient to sustain him. My dream then goes back farther to the ages before the advent of living beings. The mammals disappear, then the birds, then the reptiles of the Secondary period, and finally the fish, the crustaceans, mollusks, and articulated beings. The zoophytes of the Transition period also return to nothingness.