‘You Are Too Slow’: Time in Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days

Abstract

Like all of Jules Verne’s most popular works, the so-called ‘Voyages Extraordinaires’, Around the World in 80 Days (1872) is about a journey. The journey-based narrative is the ‘master story of Western civilization’,1 and the ‘home-away-home’2 pattern structures stories and folktales wherever there is a culture of travel. The plot of each of Verne’s novels may be described thus: ‘the traveler and the reader leave the known for the unknown and return finally to the known and familiar world, reintegrating themselves with the familiar which they have only temporarily left behind’.3 In the majority of cases, the physical journey frames a metaphorical journey whereby a character moves from ignorance towards experience, and from isolation and low status towards community and recognition. In such instances, the journey is shown to have a profound social, emotional and spiritual impact on the traveller who returns a better and wiser person. This is not the case with Around the World in 80 Days. Although Phileas Fogg, the novel’s imperturbable protagonist, has found the lovely Aouda, he feels that he has nothing to offer her in return for her hand in marriage as his journey has all but ruined him: After travelling at a steady pace during this long journey, after overcoming a thousand obstacles, braving a thousand dangers and finding the time to do some good on the way, to fail at his port of arrival in such violent circumstances, which he could not have foreseen and was powerless to combat, was a terrible thing.