Are we there yet? Devilish chronotopes in Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas

Abstract

This essay examines how the unique Oceanic temporality of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas reflects broader changes in the hermeneutics of Oceanic time in the late 19th century. By unraveling time-discipline in the context of Paul Glennie & Nigel Thrift, I argue that Oceanic stasis reveals the mechanisms through which its practices proliferate. I demonstrate, by looking across several of the novel’s key episodes and its characterisation, that Verne sought to reflect three distinct concerns about multiple time-disciplines of the late 19th century in his writing. These were the proliferation of time-sense, the temporal asymmetry of capitalism, and the intellectual subjugation of Oceanic spaces. Indeed, by contextualising this in a period of profound technological change, I will analyse how Verne demonstrates these themes amid the weakening temporal stasis of the Ocean.