"Wells and the Novel"

by J. R. Hammond
from H.G. Wells Under Revision.  Edited by Patrick Parrinder and Christopher Rolfe.  London: Associated University Presses, 1990.

While discussing Wells' status as a novelist, J.R. Hammond touches briefly on the fact that Wells might make moves in his fiction that engage what he calls "the nineteenth-century realist tradition."  While he does not mention The Time Machine or The Invisible Man in this particular section, he does describe such a move as making the reader "continually aware of a blurring of the distinction between the fiction one is reading and the world beyond the text" (Hammond 76).

He goes on to cite a passage from an early "realistic" novel by Wells called The Wheels of Chance, but the statement can apply to his more fantastic work, such as The Time Machine and The Invisible Man as well.  He says, "This reminder that what the reader has before him is a novel destroys the illusion of reality: an illusion that the author is at pains to erode at several points in the story" (Hammond 76).  There are similar reminders throughout The Time Machine, and, contrary to Hammond's claim, such reminders don't actually destroy the illusion of reality; they merely cause the reader to pause and question how reality might be represented in a novel.  How are representations determined to be real or unreal?  How do representations reflect or change the real?

This reference to novel writing or storytelling as fact or fiction within a novel is, course, not a new or innovative narrative technique by Wells.  In fact, it is one that has been in existence and actually, for many scholars, defines the birth of the novel in the eighteenth century.  The hyperbolic insistence on truth that actually emphasizes the fictionality of a novel such as Moll Flanders even more is one that is unique to the novel as a form or genre. 

Yesterday's reading.

Haynes, Roslynn D.  From Faust to Strangelove: Representations of the Scientist in Western Literature.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

Haynes breaks down the latter half of the nineteenth century into three pieces - realist novels of the 50s and 60s, adventure novels of the 80s, and the fin de siecle novels of the 90s. Her argument basically identifies historical shifts in how scientists were represented on two poles, positive and negative.  In the romantic period they were romanticized, in the realist novels after that they were bleakly represented, in adventure novels after that they were idealistic heroes, and then towards the turn of the century they were scrutinized once again. H.G. Wells appears as a significant portion of this last chapter as an author who, along with Stevenson, portrays scientists as villains or morally compromised. 

Haynes chooses to give "the scientist as adventurer" a separate chapter from characters created by Wells and Stevenson.  The Time Traveller is certainly an adventurer, and despite having his hopes for humanity dashed upon seeing the future, he still starts out as an idealist.  

Haynes has a very reductive and anachronistic conception of realism, as she actually makes the argument that since so few authors practiced science, they could not identify with a scientist's "concerns, motivation, and language" (Haynes 108) and therefore could not realistically represent scientists in literature.  Haynes goes on to say that unfortunately "most novelists were quite ignorant of what scientists did or said when they were not present at social gatherings or giving public lectures" (Haynes 108).

Haynes does, however, compare realism to scientific materialism, albeit briefly.  The only definition of realism provided, however, is one sentence in a footnote, saying that "As Zola argued in his Roman Experimental (Paris 1880) realism is essentially concerned with the study of man's relation to the material world, that is, with his physical, social, and psychological interactions rather than with an idealist, transcendental or allegorical picture" (Haynes 341).

Other important factoids that can go into my introduction of the scientist figure:
-Within the scientific community, biology and astronomy became favored over chemistry and physics.  So even though the scientist as a learned profession would have come into its own and gained legitimacy by the 1890s (a legitimacy it did not enjoy a few decades before), the scientist figures studied here still might be seen as radical or on the fringes of the field, with Griffin being a chemist and the Time Traveller being a physicist.  
- The term scientist was first coined by William Whewell in a review he wrote for the Quarterly Review in 1834, but the budding profession, despite becoming more legitimate halfway through the century, would continue to be considered derogatory or ill-favored (much like the contemporary use of dentists as inferior to medical doctors) because practicing science for money was considered tacky or of lower class. 
-Science was not recognized by institutions, governmental or educational, but rather developed as a popular form, via scientific societies and public lectures sponsored by them. 

The Science Fiction of H.G. Wells

by Frank McConnell
New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.

"His "realistic" novels of this period, in other words, should be read along with his more explicitly scientific romances, since they explore many of the same themes with only a slight change of tone" (McConnell 35).

Two things learned from a mediocre HG Wells biography.

From H.G. Wells by Brian Murray
New York: Continuum, 1990.

1.) I actually found the letter Joseph Conrad wrote in which he calls Wells the "realist of the fantastic" (other sources had previously only mentioned the letter).  Conrad, in response to reading The War of the Worlds, writes,
"I suppose you'll have the common decency to believe me when I tell you I am always powerfully impressed by your work.  Impressed is THE word, O Realist of the Fantastic! whether you like it or not.  And if you want to know what impresses me it is to see how you contrive to give over humanity to the clutches of the Impossible and yet manage to keep it down (or up) to its humanity, to its flesh, blood, sorrow, folly.  THAT is the achievement.  In this little book you do it with an appalling completeness." (Murray 39)

Murray cites this as being from Parrinder's H.G. Wells: The Critical Heritage, p. 60.

2.) Critics of The Time Machine criticized the novel for its holes in logic.  Mostly trying to disprove time travel as a possibility, as if Wells were presenting a real scientific theory rather than offering a mere fictional adventure.

"The book impressed several reviewers with the power of its descriptions and the vitality of its prose; but one, Israel Zangwill, himself a novelist, pointed out that the tale does present lapses in logic that some readers have always found hard to ignore.  As Zangwill observes, it never occurs to Wells's "Time Traveller" that he will have to repeat "these painful experiences of his, else his vision of the future will have falsified itself - though how the long dispersed dust is to be vivified again does not appear."  Moreover, writes Zangwill, had the Time Traveller "travelled backwards, he would have reproduced a Past which, insofar as his own appearance in it with his newly invented machine was concerned, would have been ex hypothesi unveracious."  For of course had he "recurred to his own earlier life, he would have had to exist in two forms simultaneously, of varying ages."  These "absurdities," writes Zangwill, "illustrate the absurdity of any attempt to grapple with the notion of Time"' they prove too that "there is no getting into the Future, except by waiting." (Murray 37)

A Trip to the Moon

A Trip to the Moon

This film is considered one of the first science fiction films ever made.  It also showcases how film technology being born at the turn of the century made it so that the fantastic could be presented as realist.

A word on Victorian scientists for the introduction.

The scientist figure is the perfect vehicle for this kind of realist experiment.  As Jack Meadows claims in The Victorian Scientist, "History textbooks will tell you that the origins of modern science are to be found in the seventeenth century.  In terms of the basic ideas, this is quite true.  But, for the building of the modern scientific community, the nineteenth century is the key period.  ...that was when scientists became professionals with a significant role in society" (Meadows 1).  Scientists occupied a new and not entirely accepted profession.  Meadows goes on in his first chapter to trace the early educational lives of many of the century's most notable scientists, and shows how many of them were practicing science as hobbies because the classical education in the liberal arts was more valued than chemistry, for example, which was often called "useless" by public school teachers.

Some statements about realism for my introduction

In many works specifically tackling realism, it may be difficult to actually maintain a grasp on the term itself.  Some critics might off-handedly refer to realism and assume a reader's working knowledge of it that exactly coincides with his or hers [examples??].  A reader's confusion of criticism derives mostly from the fact that there are, in the history of literary criticisms and critics, competing definitions of realism.  Harry E. Shaw in Narrating Reality: Scott, Austen, and Eliot, does a particularly good job of exploring what realism meant to a handful of major critics, from canonized relics such as Barthes and Lukacs to contemporary critics such as Colin MacCabe and Lennard Davis.  Levine, upon whom I rely heavily, also gets a brief mention in realism's critical history, but only to the point of being named as against the naivete traditionally associated with realism.  At the end of his introduction, he says, "My categorization of these critiques of realism suggests a fundamental question: How could any mode of representation attract such utterly divergent views, not simply about its merits, but about its fundamental character?" (Shaw 30). 

Another important point Shaw takes the time to make is that throughout the history of realism's criticism, VALUE has continually associated with its definition.  Shaw's intent in arguing this may be to take himself out of the very debate about which he writes, but that seems impossible.  A defense of realism still permeates his writing, very much in the way I have tried to defend popular fiction here.  break the cycle!

This project does not wish to establish "the" definition of realism, to argue for one version over another, but rather to explore

Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot

By Harry E. Shaw
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999.

"In the last twenty years or so, anything approaching dialogue has been largely absent in discussions of realism.  Despite some promising recent developments, the realist novel has taken a beating.  David Lodge captures the central impetus of this attack on realism when he suggests that "Post-structuralist criticism, especially that which derives from teh work of Roland Barthes, has identified the 'classic realist text' as an instrument of ideology, a genre founded on bad faith, on the pretense that bourgeois culture is 'natural,' using the dominance of the authorial voice over all the other discourses in the text to limit meaning in the interests of control, repression, and privilege."  Lodge himself takes a more generous view.  Yet he inadvertently reveals how deeply what has become of the standard critique of realism has taken root when, a few sentences later, he suggests that "part of the problem is that realism is a literary effect that works by disguising its own conventionality"  (Shaw 8).  [He goes on to say that you can't assume that just because a novel isn't being meta-fictional that it is trying to disguise its conventionality or something else.]

Interesting....Shaw gets as defensive about realism and the realist novel as I and other critics do about popular fiction not considered realist.  He makes a point to argue that in high culture realism gets a bad rap; writers don't want their work to be considered realist.  This might be something to acknowledge in my writing.  I should say that instead of defending one or the other, because clearly that isn't even concrete (who the underdog in literary criticism is ambiguous or debatable), why not throw out the binary all together? 

"What has become the standard case against realism rests on objections that may be grouped under two heads.  Realist representation is said to be naively transparent and malignantly totalistic.  On the one hand, realism supposedly promises its reader a "direct' mirroring of reality, one that provides "literal transcriptions of reality, forms in which, as it were, reality writes itself."  On the other hand, realism supposedly attempts to make the world of the bourgeoisie seem "natural" and "full," thereby giving its vision of reality a peremptory power over our imaginations" (Shaw 9).  [the quote here is footnoted as Tony Bennett, Formalism and Marxism (London: Methuen, 1979, 24).