It was back in June 2017 when I wrote a piece on that fictional and archetypal figure Captain Nemo. The Nemo Syndrome I bring this subject up simply because I decided to have a relaxing evening watching the 1954 Walt Disney film Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. I would love to go up to Amiens and find a living Jules Verne to ask him what he really intended as he manufactured Nemo’s personality. Unfortunately, that is not so and we can only rely on literary experts and critics. The film removes the extensive descriptions of sea life and scientific data from the nineteenth-century novel, and maybe some aspects of Nemo are unjustly portrayed.

What are we going to imagine of the succession of scenes where Nemo clandestinely takes Aronnax to an island where Imperial slave drivers are using their slaves to mine minerals to load onto ships and make into explosives for weapons of war? A highly convincing James Mason put on the face of the terrifying fanatic as his character prepared to ram those ships as they left the island on the tide. Is this not the fanaticism of a terrorist who flies a plane into the World Trade Center or Hitler whipping up the crowds to back his intentions to invade England in 1940? At the same time, Nemo shows his culture and scientific knowledge and devotion to the world under the sea.

We need to ask the question differently, not about an imaginary character but about its author. Jules Verne was born in Nantes in 1828, and was a product of his time. This was the France of restoration of some kind of Monarchy and a revival of Christianity through monasteries and popular devotions. At the same time, there was news of great scientific discoveries and explorations of men like Charles Darwin. Ordinary people become more interested in politics and individual rights than ever before. Verne was a socialist (one who believes in communal ownership of property and a strong central government), but this was a pre-Marxist notion. He espoused the ideas of the French philosopher Henri Saint-Simon (1720–1825) and put great faith in the Industrial Revolution. As Marxism corroded the political status quo in Europe and the United States, Jules Verne remained a supporter of aristocracy. All that being said, I could not imagine that Verne was ignorant of the Romantic movement, Lord Byron in particular, and Nietzsche with his theme of the Ubermensch.

Both Twenty Thousand Leagues and the Mysterious Island portrayed as Nemo as an “anti-hero”, a mysterious and secretive figure. His origins were exotic, the son of an Indian Raja with fantastic wealth and education in European culture. He embodied Verne’s devotion to science and technology, to human progress. Like Leonardo da Vinci, he devised a submarine that far pre-dated the first practical mechanically-powered submersible vessels. This article gives a fascinating history of the submarine. Verne’s dream came true but shortly before this machine de guerre. Ironically, as surface vessels would be used for transporting freight, pleasure and fishing, the submarine had but one purpose – destroying ships and killing. Nemo’s machine would do so by ramming the ship and often cause damage to itself. Real submarines in the opening years of the twentieth century would carry torpedoes and missiles to do the destructive work in their place.

How ironic that a man motivated by hatred for the British Empire that had taken him and his family into slavery would use this terrifying machine! As I first saw this film in the late 1960’s in our local cinema, the ideas flooded into my mind of rejection of mainstream civilisation, authority, seemingly senseless convention and conformity. Two keywords also fired my childish imagination: independence and the secret. Nemo’s secret was the volcanic island of Volcania where he built the Nautilus and presumably found the inexhaustible fuel (nuclear?) to power its engines. Here was an exciting way out of the humdrum of family and school life, but could I identify with that hatred and fanaticism? I could not, and the conflict remained in me. My personality simply did not fit this archetype.

These festering ideas motivated me to leave home at the age of twelve with a carrier bag of supplies and steal a boat from its anchorage in Arnside. My parents must have been aware of my variations of behaviour, glossed over by independence and secret. I was caught in the bathroom taking my secret bag from behind the washbasin. My mother was very angry but my father took a more rational position. What is going on? My father analysed the contents of the bag, mainly food and tools with some fishing tackle. The next day, in the early months of 1971, we went to Arnside by car – not a single boat in sight. In any case, as I have learned since then, no small boat owner leaves all the rigging, rudder and engine. He might do if the boat is anchored or lying on Morecambe Bay quicksand. It was all followed by a long drive and a father-to-son talk. I thank my father to this day for his rational and emphatic approach, for his imagination in looking for activities that would pull me out of my darkness and moroseness.

There was this literary creation of the French Jules Verne. I became attracted to France far beyond our family holidays going back to 1966 (Beg Meil in Brittany where I anchored a month ago with my little group), and I ended up living in this country. In those last years of the 1960’s and the first of the 1970’s, I came across the notions of Romanticism. As I have already expressed, Romanticism is essentially an epistemological reaction against the extreme devotion to human reason by wanting to emphasise the imagination and subjectivity. There were aspects that become quite morose, especially in the minds of Byron and his guests at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland, Percy and Mary Shelley. Many of those thoughts influenced Nietzsche in Germany as he condemned Christianity for its “softness” and unwillingness to confer virtue on the strong. After all virtue comes from virtus meaning strength and the word vir meaning a man. What place do compassion and empathy for the weak occupy? There is something enthralling but also very unhealthy about the Byronic Hero.

The poem Prometheus was  published in 1816. It portrays a figure from Greek mythology known for stealing fire from the gods to help humanity. Prometheus claims the values of resisting tyranny and self-sacrifice. Was that not Churchill’s Britain in 1940 like Greece facing Turkey in Byron’s time? Strength comes out of suffering, and this dimension is exactly that of Christ. We live in a time of vacillation between pandering to the weak and people of diverse cultures coming to our countries in large numbers, and preserving our own. Byron’s Prometheus is the solitary, suffering, defiant hero is meant to empower readers, reminding them that revolutions begin with individuals who dare to imagine the future differently. He is the Ubermensch of Nietzsche, of whom Hitler made but a caricature. Death is turned into victory. This is the poem Prometheus in question:

Titan! to whose immortal eyes
The sufferings of mortality,
Seen in their sad reality,
Were not as things that gods despise;
What was thy pity’s recompense?
A silent suffering, and intense;
The rock, the vulture, and the chain,
All that the proud can feel of pain,
The agony they do not show,
The suffocating sense of woe,
Which speaks but in its loneliness,
And then is jealous lest the sky
Should have a listener, nor will sigh
Until its voice is echoless.

Titan! to thee the strife was given
Between the suffering and the will,
Which torture where they cannot kill;
And the inexorable Heaven,
And the deaf tyranny of Fate,
The ruling principle of Hate,
Which for its pleasure doth create
The things it may annihilate,
Refus’d thee even the boon to die:
The wretched gift Eternity
Was thine—and thou hast borne it well.
All that the Thunderer wrung from thee
Was but the menace which flung back
On him the torments of thy rack;
The fate thou didst so well foresee,
But would not to appease him tell;
And in thy Silence was his Sentence,
And in his Soul a vain repentance,
And evil dread so ill dissembled,
That in his hand the lightnings trembled.

Thy Godlike crime was to be kind,
To render with thy precepts less
The sum of human wretchedness,
And strengthen Man with his own mind;
But baffled as thou wert from high,
Still in thy patient energy,
In the endurance, and repulse
Of thine impenetrable Spirit,
Which Earth and Heaven could not convulse,
A mighty lesson we inherit:
Thou art a symbol and a sign
To Mortals of their fate and force;
Like thee, Man is in part divine,
A troubled stream from a pure source;
And Man in portions can foresee
His own funereal destiny;
His wretchedness, and his resistance,
And his sad unallied existence:
To which his Spirit may oppose
Itself—and equal to all woes,
And a firm will, and a deep sense,
Which even in torture can descry
Its own concenter’d recompense,
Triumphant where it dares defy,
And making Death a Victory.

There is also the monumental drama-poem Prometheus Unbound which inspired Vaughan Williams for his Antarctic Symphony, with its paean to human heroism and stoicism in the face of adversity.

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.

Modern psychology will make a double-edged sword of the Byronic Hero, generally a Cluster B personality profile between the sociopath and the narcissist. I noticed much to admire about Verne’s Nemo, but the arrogance, hatred and fanaticism repelled me – and still do. He and others like him will be ruthless, arrogant, sexually appealing, melancholic, unable to overcome suffering, manipulative, angry, self-destructive. They can descend into the depths of depravity and evil like so many of the Nazi war criminals who were judged and executed after World War II. Not all Byronic types would go so far, but this is the dark and dangerous side of Romanticism.

1971 was a turning point in my life, between the naïve and superficial understandings of the Byronic Nemo’s emotions and my excitement faced with an Atlantic storm on the pier of Viana do Castello in Portugal (and my mother coming to ensure my safety!). In the autumn of that year, I went to my first boarding school founded on Quaker ideas and experienced new and not very successful notions of education.

As my marriage failed and I asked myself what my own problems were before those of my ex, I discovered the explosive conflict between Asperger’s autism and what I could only conclude was narcissistic personality disorder. Are they perhaps variations of the same thing, since psychology is not a very empirical field of science? I needed elements of an explanation of my mind going back to the encounter with Nemo to my present life dominated by reality and common sense. Jung was very much based on a theory of archetypes and symbols, a notion of Gnosticism and liturgical Christianity alike. As the years passed, I shed the secretiveness of Captain Nemo as I was highly sensitive to this archetype when I encountered it with certain Catholic priests looking for their narcissistic supply. We have to keep some things secret, but not make a cult out of it. Independence, on the other hand, was something I kept. The American Transcendentalist Emerson called it Self-Reliance. Individualism can be good only so far, and it becomes unacceptable beyond certain limits. Everything in moderation!

Verne’s Nemo repelled me when I read (and heard):

“Professor…I am not what you call a civilized man! I have done with society entirely, for reasons which I alone have the right of appreciating. I do not, therefore, obey its laws, and I desire you never to allude to them before me again!”

Yet he sunk ships that came from the society he rejected! What if he had simply been someone who wanted to share an eccentric life at sea with his friends and not cause harm or take revenge against anyone? He could still build a ship or a submarine and devote his life to technology, science and culture. I spend little bits of my life going out in my boat, but I don’t set out to do evil. Nikolai Berdyaev made distinctions between civilisation and culture. All the same, we have a social contract, a duty to respect others and do good whenever possible. Other people can be more mysterious than the bottom of the sea, but we are their “other people”. Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets. (Matthew 7,12) – the golden rule of both Christianity and Judaism. We find here the limits of anarchism!

My experience as a humble coastal sailor has taught me that our response can only be humility and modesty faced with the Leviathan of the sea. I was particularly impressed by the jagged black rocks on the coast of the peninsular of Quiberon, any one of which could have instantly sunk me. There is really nothing romantic about sailing. It is common sense and the decision to stay in port when the conditions are too dangerous! What is awe-inspiring are the things far from the boat, of planetary dimensions.

There is no sense in rage and fury as Nemo ranted like Shakespeare’s King Lear:

Strike, mad vessel! Shower your useless shot! And then, you will not escape the spur of the Nautilus. But it is not here that you shall perish! I would not have your ruins mingle with those of the Avenger!…I am the law, and I am the judge! I am the oppressed, and there is the oppressor! Through him I have lost all that I loved, cherished, and venerated—country, wife, children, father, and mother. I saw all perish! All that I hate is there! Say no more!”

What unhappiness that can be healed by turning to Christ! “He who seeks revenge digs two graves” is attributed to Confucius. The vengeful Prometheus will do himself more harm than his intended victim. The final condition of such a man is empty and hollow, that of the psychopath or narcissist who meets his karma. I rejected Nemo as an archetype long ago, and my own eccentricty followed other lines – above all by respecting God’s and my country’s laws and doing to others as I would have them do to me – even if they don’t always. We can’t always have justice in this life! This is the drama of modern politicians and the so-called oppression narrative.

Verne rehabilitated his character to some extent in his later novel Mysterious Island. The submarine and its crew were sunk, but somehow he survived and found some element of redemption. I thank Verne for his humanity by extending hope for the dying Nemo. Professor Aronnax also refrained from judging him as a criminal or a terrorist, but saw an element of altruism standing in opposition to his hatred and refusal to forgive.

There is a consequence in modern life that I can surmise, that of the complete chaos of politics between Marxist critical theory to the rage of those who see their lives being eroded by corrupt politicians and their policies. It is perhaps my interior pilgrimage that I have been spared from the brainwashing and the ideologies. My scepticism made me doubt other people’s truths and encouraged me to search – even if the finding would take such a long time.

Some of us need a different way of life, every one of which carries its risks and perils. I have rejected city life. One marriage was enough for me, not only because of the indissolubility of Christian sacramental marriage (if mine was) but because the experience caused so much psychological and spiritual damage. Most of my life is one of solitude but I appreciate the company of people with at least some common interests. The issue of priestly ministry is a difficult one. I am not interested in integralist politics or seeking to impose some kind of authority like the Pope or the Bible or even the Church Fathers. I believe in the idea that beauty will save the world as expressed by Dostoevsky. I first found God through music, even through Nemo’s Phantom of the Opera-style caricature of playing the organ in his submarine. I came to prefer something more gentle and harmonious as I began organ lessons a year after my tumultuous 1971.

It might seem so selfish to go on at such length about my own feelings and experience instead of “church planting”. I am incapable of charming and influencing people. Ste Thérèse de l’Enfant-Jésus said Je veux passer mon ciel à faire du bien sur la terre. One of my sailing friends damaged his rudder, and I was able to repair it with epoxy resin glue and stainless steel screws. It was a simple enough job for me but it meant a lot to him! Our little rally of September was summed up:

Thanks to:

Frédéric for organising and for catching and cooking the fish

Bob and Mike for coming so far and Mike for buying us all dinner in Benodet

Miles for the map and the limericks

Anthony for gluing and screwing Salvo’s damaged rudder

Îles des Glénans for letting us off harbour dues because we were “too small”

Mark for introducing Patrick to Navionics

Cidrerie Kerné for the Cider

The dolphins for playing with us

I find this more of a life for a priest than many things I have seen in my life. It won’t make people who will go to church, read the Bible and say their prayers, but it might bring about a little more good being done in this chaotic and sad world.