When the Whales and Seals Are Gone: Verne, Toussenel, and the Brave New Ocean

According to a wide array of twentieth- and twenty-first-century commentators upon marine conservation, the novelist Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869–70) inaugurates a modern disposition toward apprehending ecology and extinction at sea. This chapter considers the novel’s central, and in some telling respects contradictory, fascination with marine mammals, and with prospects of their becoming extinct. I focus especially on a memorably odd—and oddly influential—episode where Verne’s narrator Pierre Aronnax anticipates a future when overhunting has precipitated the disappearance of whales and seals, creatures formed by God to keep the surface of the ocean clean. I argue that to read Verne’s novel for its whales is to recognize the mingled novelistic powers of scenes of cetacean destruction and prophecies of marine impurity, infectiousness, and collapse. I also examine the source of Aronnax’s worry, which Verne openly identifies as the French naturalist Alphonse Toussenel’s L’esprit des bêtes (1846, 1853–5). When he is remembered today, Toussenel is recalled primarily as a virulent antisemite. This problematic connection has escaped mention in conservation-oriented citations of the novel, and even of the episode in question. I ponder what it entails for practices of reading Verne as a presciently ecological writer. Ultimately, I contemplate how we ought to understand a work like Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea as simultaneously a discrete literary text and an artefact of extra-literary citation—and how to locate the place of the literary amidst the epistemological and communicative projects of marine science.