Their names are Phileas Fogg and Jean Passepartout, protagonists of Jules Verne’s “Around the World in Eighty Days.” I last sort of read the book in grade school, when I cheated my way through a report with the Classics Illustrated version. But coronavirus lockdown makes strange bedfellows, so now I’m reacquainting myself.
As the name indicates, the novel follows Fogg’s attempt to circumnavigate the globe in an amount of time that would have been fast to readers in the nineteenth century and appears glacial to readers in the twenty-first.
A quick Google search — hey, it’s the Internet, so it can’t be wrong — indicates a similar trip around the Earth in 2020 would take 45.5 hours, plus time to refuel the plane.
Santa, of course, does it all in one night. But I digress.
Fogg, the epitome of stiff-upper-lip British privilege, spends a large part of the voyage, whether by boat, train or elephant, playing whist, a card game I don’t even pretend to understand, and ignoring the cities and countries he visits.
By contrast, his loyal French manservant, Passepartout, is much more enamored by people and cultures along the way, and is hence more relatable. A classic fish out of water, he mistakenly sets foot in a forbidden temple in Bombay and passes out in an opium den in Hong Kong. (I’m not sure this last part was included in the Classics Illustrated version.)
One scene near the end of the novel speaks eloquently to our current pandemic.
Fogg and Passepartout are traveling across the Rockies by rail when the train stops. One of those challenges that happens exclusively in adventure stories is about to occur: The suspension bridge ahead is too rickety to cross.
The only option is to walk 15 miles around the river, estimated to take six hours, and catch a replacement train on the other side of the tracks. Passengers will be delayed, and Fogg and Passepartout will miss their 80-day deadline, but it’s the safest, most prudent course.
Then the engineer, described by Verne as “a true Yankee,” offers an alternative. They can cross the bridge anyway, safety and prudence be damned, trusting in the train’s speed to carry them through.
Passepartout tries to offer a sensible compromise, but nobody wants to hear it. Indeed, before he can explain his idea, he is shouted down, accused of cowardice. The decision to cross quickly is made.
This is as apt a metaphor for today’s coronavirus situation as one could imagine. We Americans are all on a train, chugging toward a rickety old suspension bridge, which represents a patchwork system of local and state reopening plans, an uneven and ineffective federal response, the politicization of masks, the desire to get back to our restaurants, department stores, schools and sports so strong that we ignore science and expert opinion.
Below the bridge, mounting infection rates, prolonged economic distress when businesses must again be shuttered, and more death.
On the other side, “normalcy.” Our orderly, scheduled lives.
Other countries, many of which have weathered the virus and its fallout more readily than we, are demonstrating how a more unified approach is safer and more effective. They’re shaking their heads — and closing their borders. Like Passepartout, they are finding our “proposed experiment a little too American.”
And for a growing number of states, the recovery train is careening off the tracks, either because the locomotive —emphasis on the “loco” — is going too fast, because the plan is too weak to support it, or both.
As for the scene in the novel?
Well, the engineer’s plan works, even though it would make a better metaphor if it didn’t.
The conductor backs up the train for almost a mile and then barrels toward the bridge, hitting it at 100 mph. “The train leaped, so to speak, from one bank to the other, and the engineer could not stop it until it had gone five miles beyond the station,” writes Verne.
But no sooner does the train cross than the bridge collapses.
Passepartout’s plan, by the way, was to have the passengers disembark, cross the bridge on foot, and then send the train across.
It’s the equivalent of a slow, careful reopening of America, based on the best recommendations of epidemiologists and other health officials, not the fantasies of business leaders and campaigning officials.
Yet nobody wants to hear Passepartout’s plan, and few Americans, it seems, want to hear people — “sheeple,” as we are disparagingly called — begging for more caution, more testing and, at the very least, masks in public.
Instead, it’s full steam ahead in the battle with a virus that has also gone around the world in about 80 days.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
Santa, of course, does it all in one night. But I digress.
Fogg, the epitome of stiff-upper-lip British privilege, spends a large part of the voyage, whether by boat, train or elephant, playing whist, a card game I don’t even pretend to understand, and ignoring the cities and countries he visits.
By contrast, his loyal French manservant, Passepartout, is much more enamored by people and cultures along the way, and is hence more relatable. A classic fish out of water, he mistakenly sets foot in a forbidden temple in Bombay and passes out in an opium den in Hong Kong. (I’m not sure this last part was included in the Classics Illustrated version.)
One scene near the end of the novel speaks eloquently to our current pandemic.
Fogg and Passepartout are traveling across the Rockies by rail when the train stops. One of those challenges that happens exclusively in adventure stories is about to occur: The suspension bridge ahead is too rickety to cross.
The only option is to walk 15 miles around the river, estimated to take six hours, and catch a replacement train on the other side of the tracks. Passengers will be delayed, and Fogg and Passepartout will miss their 80-day deadline, but it’s the safest, most prudent course.
Then the engineer, described by Verne as “a true Yankee,” offers an alternative. They can cross the bridge anyway, safety and prudence be damned, trusting in the train’s speed to carry them through.
Passepartout tries to offer a sensible compromise, but nobody wants to hear it. Indeed, before he can explain his idea, he is shouted down, accused of cowardice. The decision to cross quickly is made.
This is as apt a metaphor for today’s coronavirus situation as one could imagine. We Americans are all on a train, chugging toward a rickety old suspension bridge, which represents a patchwork system of local and state reopening plans, an uneven and ineffective federal response, the politicization of masks, the desire to get back to our restaurants, department stores, schools and sports so strong that we ignore science and expert opinion.
Below the bridge, mounting infection rates, prolonged economic distress when businesses must again be shuttered, and more death.
On the other side, “normalcy.” Our orderly, scheduled lives.
Other countries, many of which have weathered the virus and its fallout more readily than we, are demonstrating how a more unified approach is safer and more effective. They’re shaking their heads — and closing their borders. Like Passepartout, they are finding our “proposed experiment a little too American.”
And for a growing number of states, the recovery train is careening off the tracks, either because the locomotive —emphasis on the “loco” — is going too fast, because the plan is too weak to support it, or both.
As for the scene in the novel?
Well, the engineer’s plan works, even though it would make a better metaphor if it didn’t.
The conductor backs up the train for almost a mile and then barrels toward the bridge, hitting it at 100 mph. “The train leaped, so to speak, from one bank to the other, and the engineer could not stop it until it had gone five miles beyond the station,” writes Verne.
But no sooner does the train cross than the bridge collapses.
Passepartout’s plan, by the way, was to have the passengers disembark, cross the bridge on foot, and then send the train across.
It’s the equivalent of a slow, careful reopening of America, based on the best recommendations of epidemiologists and other health officials, not the fantasies of business leaders and campaigning officials.
Yet nobody wants to hear Passepartout’s plan, and few Americans, it seems, want to hear people — “sheeple,” as we are disparagingly called — begging for more caution, more testing and, at the very least, masks in public.
Instead, it’s full steam ahead in the battle with a virus that has also gone around the world in about 80 days.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
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