Identity & Literature: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea & The Recluse Utopia

“You know what I’d love? Just leave all this. Get out to some cabin in the mountains and live there. Simple days. Easy life.”

We’ve all been there. Granted, my survival in this scenario would depend on an army of drones who bring me groceries, furniture, and can fix plumbing. But even with these constraints, it sounds like a beautiful dream. You know why? Because sometimes, society stinks. People are jerks. People do dumb and insane things which I, as a member of society, have to account for and live with the consequences of. Why can’t I just scrap the whole thing and start over? What if there was a way for me to opt out? The reason we don’t, of course, is that it’s never actually that simple.

This reclusive utopia is the dream Jules Verne toys with in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Captain Nemo, a figure shrouded in mystery, has access to nearly infinite resources and a brilliant mind. He used all this to construct the Nautilus, a submarine that he and roughly twenty other crew members have made their permanent home. It has every conceivable luxury of its age, including a grand piano, a library the size of your community’s, its own chef, sleeping quarters, and floor-to-ceiling viewing windows. It’s the eccentric billionaire’s dream.

My biggest complaint with the realism is not the engineering (what do I know?) but that Verne asks us to believe there could be twenty men so completely disaffected with society that they prefer a life of permanent hermitage under the water, yet they work together in seamless and affectionate camaraderie. If you have ever known someone seriously considering withdrawal to an enormous track of land in the wilderness, this is not the sort of person you’re choosing to work with on a committee.

This is the difficulty with all such recluse or techno-libertarian utopias. It’s not only The Lord of the Flies phenomenon (people left to themselves degenerate into savagery), it’s the nature of the people who would desire such a life so strongly that they would be willing to leave everything else behind.

It’s one thing to say, “I’ve had it with all this nonsense,” then pack your bags and go live off the land in Wyoming. A number of people do so and do just fine. If you’re Thoreau, you do so for two years, then write your most famous book about the experience. It’s quite another thing to say, “I’m done with all these people,” and then go live in close quarters with a whole bunch of other people who just said the same thing.

Church planters can attest to this. It can sound amazing to start a church from the ground up—to cast a new vision, to build momentum with everyone aligned from the beginning, to reach the lost. You have an opportunity to start fresh—to focus on what church should be about—loving Jesus and people, without all the baggage. But many of the people most interested in coming to a church plant are those most disaffected with…church. Some of their wounds may be genuine, but many times the reason why this person or family has been so continually frustrated by church has more to do with them than the church. Often their dissatisfaction has to do with what a church is by its very nature.

Verne is not naïve about this. As the book progresses, he begins hinting at the sort of pitfalls you can expect in such a utopia. At the beginning, the narrator feels much sympathy for Captain Nemo. The Captain’s clearly a wounded and wronged man. They share scholarly interests. But a dark side emerges. Nemo does still periodically engage with society. The narrator witnesses something he wasn’t intended to see—Nemo’s ruthless destruction of a ship that was carrying the wrong flag. He sees faces of innocent men, women, and children sink past the Nautilus windows, drowned as the casualties of an act of vigilante vengeance.

This is the sort of hubris you can expect in the recluse utopia. People who would opt into such a venture see all the ills of the world within society, and none within themselves. They stand above society, disgusted by its cruelty and injustice. If only they could form their own…

The Bible paints a grim picture of the time period of Israel’s kings. Many of the kings worshiped false gods, oppressed their people, and hurt the nation through pride and foolishness. But in the time period before, when “everyone did what was right in his own eyes,” it was actually worse (Judges 21:25). We need King Jesus. But while we wait for that heavenly kingdom, we should be grateful for whatever semblance of human justice that God grants us. You are unlikely to do better on your own.

*PS I cannot in good conscience recommend 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea as it has one of the most dissatisfying endings I have ever encountered.

Interested in the intersection of identity & literature? Check out Huckleberry Finn & The Lies of Loyalty