A distance de voix: essai sur les "machines à parler"
About: This article is published in Substance.The article was published on 1996-01-01. It has received 2 citations till now.
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TL;DR: Verne does not like shepherds, a group that clearly annoys him and gets under his skin this article, and he immediately proceeds to criticize the leading names in the bucolic genre, accusing them of idealism and of a lack of realism, something George Sand had done before him in her preface to François le Champi.
Abstract: Are there any shepherds left in America? I suppose you have replaced them with computers or robots. Its less expensive and cleaner. Jules Verne would have liked to live in your countryhe was generous with his invectives against the race of sheepherders in his novel Le Château des Carpathes (1892). You know the book, and Im sure you recall a passage that I personally find very striking. At first, the tone is rather flattering: If we approach a shepherd on his idealistic side, he might easily be imagined a dreamy, contemplative being: he converses with the planets, he consults the stars, he reads the skies (9). The next sentence undoes this portrait. The shepherd is not like that, Jules Verne adds, he is less than that, and one must set the record straight: In reality he is generally a stupid ignorant brute (9). In the style of hitting the enemy where it hurts, it would be hard to do better. Jules Verne does not like shepherds, a group that clearly annoys him and gets under his skin. He immediately proceeds to criticize the leading names in the bucolic genre, accusing them of idealism and of a lack of realism, something George Sand had done before him in her preface to François le Champi (1864).1 But this makes his remarks no less violent. One must add, of course, that the majority of shepherds were illiterate at the end of the nineteenth century. They did not therefore constitute for the author of the Voyages extraordinaires what we would call today a reading public
But lets not linger on this point. Things hardly get better when we meet the shepherd Frik on the same page. He is not a particularly pleasant individualin fact, and I choose my words carefully, he is nothing short of monstrous. In describing this character, Jules Verne repeats Victor Hugos sentence parodying Virgil in the title of a chapter of Notre-Dame de Paris: Immanis pecoris custos immanior ipse, of a monstrous flock a herder even more monstrous. This is an allusion to the famous verse of the fifth eclogue: Formosi pectoris custos formosior ipse, of a handsome flock a shepherd
2 citations
2 citations