All the world’s life is concentrated in me, and my heart is the only one that beats in this depopulated world. There are no more seasons; climates are no more; the heat of the globe continually increases and neutralizes that of the radiant star. Vegetation grows excessively. I glide like a shade amongst arborescent ferns, treading with unsteady feet the iridescent clay and the multicolored sand; I lean against the trunks of immense conifers; I lie in the shade of sphenophylla, asterophylla, and lycopods, a hundred feet tall.

Centuries pass by like days! I move back through the series of terrestrial transformations. Plants disappear; granite rocks lose their purity; solids give way to liquids under the impact of increasing heat; water covers the surface of the globe; it boils, evaporates; steam envelops the earth, which gradually dissolves into a gaseous mass, white-hot, as large and radiant as the sun!

In the midst of this nebula, fourteen hundred thousand times more voluminous than this globe that it will one day become, I am carried into planetary spaces! My body subtilizes, sublimates itself in its turn and, like an imponderable atom, mingles with these immense vapors that follow their flaming orbits through infinite space.

What a dream! Where is it carrying me? My feverish hand sketches the strange details out on paper! I have forgotten everything, the professor, the guide, and the raft! A hallucination possesses my spirit (pp. 162-163).

It is, of course, noteworthy that this journey to the beginnings of the cosmos fictionalizes, in reverse time sequence, some of the chief scientific findings of Verne’s era—the discovery of the enormous age of the Earth and Darwin’s theory of evolution, which was published in 1859, just five years prior to Journey to the Center of the Earth. It is also remarkable that Axel, in the throes of a properly scientific hallucination, loses the analytical distance that usually characterizes scientific work, and gradually shifts from normal scientific observation with a telescope to a visual imagination of nonexistent natural objects. He then places himself physically among these objects (leaning against the trunks of imaginary trees) and finally feels his body merge with the elementary forces of the cosmos in a climactic moment of transcendence. That such visionary states clearly cannot be sustained for long (Axel almost falls off the expedition’s raft because of his hallucination!) does not diminish their importance for science as Verne represents it. Otto Lidenbrock, a man who pulls the leaves of plant seedlings to speed along their growth, is clearly incapable of the kind of surrender to nature that is spelled out in his nephew’s vision, and this capability, in the novel, is an indispensable ingredient for a truly inspired and innovative scientific perspective.

The enormous lyrical power of Axel’s vision arises not only from what it tells us about Verne’s understanding of science and its relationship to the natural world. It is also gripping because it forms part of what is clearly the initiation voyage of a young man who has still to learn how to occupy his position in the social and scientific realms. The vision occurs after Axel has already suffered two near-death experiences—he almost dies from thirst, and he gets lost and spends agonizing hours alone in complete darkness and despair. Axel’s vision includes two very different bodily experiences: first, a concentration of all the biological life forces of the world in his body and the beating of his heart, then a complete dissolution of his body in its merger with the inanimate physical forces of the universe. Both, clearly, form part of an initiatory process during which the descent into the realm of death gradually metamorphoses into a physical, social, and perhaps spiritual rebirth.

The journey upward to the mouth of the volcanic crater that delivers the Lidenbrock expedition back to the world above ground amid an eruption of liquid rock is portrayed as a metaphorical rebirth that will in the end enable Axel to return home and marry the woman he has desired from the beginning of the novel. The superbly intelligent but stubborn and narrow-minded Lidenbrock, with his iron determination and implacable leadership, and the Icelandic guide Hans, with his loyalty, courage, and stoic acceptance of hardships and deprivations, serve as two different models of masculinity in relation to which Axel has to define his own identity—without, of course, merely becoming a replica of either.

What makes Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth such a complex, fascinating, and influential work of literature, then, is its distinctive combination of the most advanced science of its day with more speculative approaches to knowledge and literary figures and plots that have had a long tradition and far-reaching influence in the Western tradition. This combination is characteristic of many of Verne’s works. He developed this hallmark brand of narrative after studying law and spending his early years as an unsuccessful playwright—a dramatic legacy that is still obvious in the extended, skillfully handled dialogues between Lidenbrock and his nephew in Journey to the Center of the Earth. Verne is remembered principally as one of the two nineteenth-century fathers of the science-fiction genre, along with the British author H. G. Wells—even though we should keep in mind that the term “science fiction” did not exist in Verne’s and Wells’s day. The term was coined in the 1920s, in the United States. The kind of novel Verne and Wells wrote in Europe in the late nineteenth century would have been called “scientific romance.”

Yet, in many ways, Verne’s novels are quite unlike the genre that evolved out of his work in the twentieth century. While much twentieth-century science fiction focuses on the exploration of outer space, Verne wrote only two novels that take his characters away from the Earth, on trips to the moon. With few exceptions, the plots of his novels are set in the present or recent past rather than in the future—Journey is set in the resolutely contemporary year of 1863. (One of the exceptions to this rule is Paris in the Twentieth Century, a text that was long lost but then rediscovered in the 1980s and finally published in 1994). And while many Verne novels explore human interaction with technology and machines, not all of them do, and some are more focused on scientific knowledge itself rather than on the technological apparatus that dominates so much science fiction after him. The kind of technology that appears in Verne’s novels, at any rate, is generally based on that of his own day, with little or no projection into the future.

But Verne’s novels do create alternative worlds, some of them entirely imaginary even though they are set in remote parts of our own very real planet, and his protagonists explore them with some of the tools of modern science and technology. For a nineteenth-century reader, Verne’s narratives would have had clear affinities with other romances of adventure, as well as with certain kinds of travel writing—they may have seemed only a step or two beyond the strange tales of faraway lands and different cultures that colonial officers, explorers, traders, and adventurers brought back to Europe. Modern literary scholars often associate Verne’s writings with those of other novelists who combined adventure stories with issues of science and technology, such as Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and H. G. Wells. Verne himself gave his novels the general title Voyages extraordinaires: Les mondes connus et inconnus (Extraordinary Journeys: Known and Unknown Worlds). In an age of colonial expansion and geographical exploration all over the world, the blank spaces on Europeans’ maps of the globe were shrinking fast.