"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.