More free writing for Chapter 2 (HG Wells)

While reading Thomsa C. Renzi's H.G. Wells: Six Scientific Romances Adapted for Film, I remembered that a large part of what I want to talk about with The Time Machine is the narrative structure and self-reflexive references to narrative itself.

Possible Chapter Outline:
-Time Machine's historical context (theories of the fourth dimension at the time)
-close reading of fourth dimension as a demonstration of limited human perception --connect to realism
-apply the same thing to The Invisible Man
-talk about the narrative structure of each novel and how it relates to realism - narrative time travel or narrative as time traveling!
-talk about film adaptations? (this will more likely be spread throughout the chapter)


TEXT TO GO DIRECTLY INTO CHAPTER:
When comparing the 1960 film adaptation to Wells' text, Renzi points out that while Wells employs a "frame narrator" director George Pal chooses to represent the narrative frame with a character, David Filby.  He says, "The Frame Narrator and Frame Character serve at least two purposes.  Their outside viewpoint carries a degree of objectivity and gives credibility to the inventor's Inset Narrative.  Second, they ground the story in a reality with which the audience can identify before and after experiencing the wondrous trip in the Time Machine" (Renzi 19).  Renzi ascribes this similarity in narrative frame between film and novel to the fact that both narratives need to contain the fantastical portion of the narrative - time travel.  The idea of a narrative frame "grounding the story in reality" implies that the the story itself is unreal, assuming an antithetical relationship between the two narrative discourses.  I would argue that one could also see the narrative frame as a mechanism for naturalizing time travel.  If the reader or spectator is already "grounded in reality" as Renzi says, then that sets up the time travel in the narrative as a logical part of that reality. 

Renzi also goes on to say that the return to reality provided by the narrative frame renders the realism of the time travel moot because, "the value of the dream experience is not whether it was real, but that it left an indelible impression."  This, I think, shortchanges the intellectual significance of the narrative frame and overlooks the time machine as a product of scientific experimentation.  In some ways it actually agrees with the aforementioned argument that the narrative frame naturalizes or real-izes the time travel narrative embedded within in that the reader, according to Renzi, doesn't seem to pay much attention to real and unreal on account of the narrative frame, but I would actually argue that Wells, in creating this narrative frame, hopes for readers to focus their attention on issues of realism, just not in terms of the real/supernatural binary. 

Having one time line embedded into another links the actual scientific theory behind time travel and narrative as a representation of time and space.  We begin in the Time Traveller's parlor room, explaining the theory behind the time machine, but then, instead of chronologically following the Time Traveller on his journey, the narrative remains in the Time Traveller's home, with his friends and colleagues, in order to receive him and then hear about his journey to the time of the Eloi after the fact.

The actual narrative of the Time Traveller's journey, then, is, not unlike Conrad's Heart of Darkness, written only a few years later in 1898, painstakingly told in quotations by the Time Traveller and not by the third person narrator.  Of both novels one must ask why have a narrator at all if the majority of the story is going to be told as dialogue from another non-narrator character?  For Conrad's work, many critics have argued that it is to emphasize the fact that narratives are inherently unreliable, of history or histories as always subjective and subject to the narrator's ideological, social, and political moorings. 

[Probably should bring in some Bakhtin here - both heteroglossia from "Discourse in the Novel" and narrative time from Chronotope essay.]

Even the Time Traveller himself, when the narrative frame comes to a close, remains unsure, for a brief moment, as to whether or not his story is real or was merely a dream.  He explicitly tells his colleagues that he does not expect them to believe him -  "I know...that all this will be absolutely incredible to you.  To me the one incredible thing is that I am here to-night in this old familiar room looking into your friendly faces and telling you these strange adventures" (Wells).  One, instead of assuming that the Time Traveller's admission of uncertainty is a way of labeling the middle portion of the narrative as fantastical, might think of the attention drawn to uncertainty as a way of showing that there is no way to discern to what extent any narrative told by any narrator might correlate to "reality."  All narratives are always already both dreamlike and real at once.

"I shared a cab with the Editor.  He thought the tale a 'gaudy lie.' For my own part I was unable to come to a conclusion.  The story was so fantastic and incredible, the telling so credible and sober." --> THIS IS VICTORIAN REALISM!  The telling may be "credible and sober," but that does not exclude "fantastic and incredible" content.

[ADD PARAGRAPHS FROM OLD PROSPECTUS DRAFT, PRE-SHORTENING]

Some freewriting, a part of chapter 2 (HG Wells).

In addition to the Time Traveller's theory of time as the fourth dimension, there is, of course, the much more well known or recognized portion of the novel - the dystopian prediction for the future of human civilization.  As a scientific theory of H.G. Wells himself, how does the representation of man's future as a place where cultural and industrial "progress," as the humans in the Time Traveler's time perceive it, is in fact self-destructive, also operate as a realist project or experiment?

Like Darwin's theory of natural selection, the dystopia depicted in The Time Machine is a functional scientific theory that similarly implies projections for the future.  As either an application of Darwin's theories (resembling the atavism that will be discussed in Chapter 3) -- if humans evolve to select for certain traits, they may in fact end up like Morlocks and the Eloi.  Then again, Wells' proposed future may be a refutation of Darwin's theories, because the traits that have been selected for are obviously the weakest or least desirable - for the Eloi it's an ineffective delicacy, and for the Morlock's it's a hyper-aggressive and "savage" industry.  Alexei and Cory Panshin, in "The Reinvention of the Future" write, "The Eloi, the children of the idle rich, have grown soft and stupid.  The descendants of the proletariat, the monstrous Morlocks, have retained some bestial vigor."  These two civilizations serve as a cautionary tale that co-opts an existing scientific theory like natural selection for the sake of thinking the unthinkable, the inconceivable.

The Time Traveller even mentions Darwin by name, when he says that those unfamiliar theories like those of "the younger Darwin" don't realize that the sun will get hotter over time, thus accounting for the hotter weather that the Eloi experience.  This passing reference to Darwin positions him as a scientist who would back up the Time Traveller in his assessment of the future, as his theory of evolution, extended and adapted for the Time Traveller's purposes, actually means that Darwin's theory would implicitly have to be in agreement with his. 

The Panshins go on to say that "It is the Time Traveller's final theory that he is present at the sad conclusion of the brief dream of the human intellect, one part of man degenerated into feeble prettiness, the other into bestiality.  But he concedes that even his theory may be wrong.  The ultimate effect of all this theorizing is to leave us uncertain of anything.  We do not know what happened.  We cannot know.  The eight hundred thousand years between now and then is a great mystery."

[GO BACK AND FIND ACTUAL QUOTES FROM THE NOVEL TO COMPLEMENT PANSHINS]

How is this scientific theory that predicts human civilization's future a realist experiment?  Active speculation, according to Caroline Levine, was a key tenet of realism.  The only problem is there's no way to test the Time Traveller's  -- we only have his narrative, his eye-witness account, to rely upon.  Or rather, there would be no way to test Wells' speculation, but his staging of the Time Traveller's narrative is the next best thing.

Prospectus: Chapter Descriptions: Chapter 2 - Draft 1 Complete

Chapter 2: Epistemological Crises in H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man (1897)

Only two years later, Wells writes another narrative featuring an epistemological crises caused by the limitations of human perception in The Invisible Man.  Griffin, who refers to himself as an “experimental investigator,” tests the limits of reality when he renders himself invisible in a chemical experiment; this experiment not only allegorically represents the realist project, but the very existence of Griffin as an invisible man confounds the characters around him because he exists and yet they cannot see him. He is not represented in any tangible way. Thus, the epistemological crisis H.G. Wells stages here speaks directly to the realist experiment enacted by other authors.  This second chapter will explore, in a similar manner to the last, how both the premise of the narrative and the way that premise plays out challenges the assumption that seeing is knowing, that observation produces an accurate representation of reality. 

Most of the novel features Griffin bitterly battling ignorant villagers who want to arrest him, and the reason the peasants Griffin loathes so much are unenlightened is because they cannot bring themselves to mistrust or question their senses.  They come up with all sorts of more rational explanations for his “appearance” – that he is in a disguise, that he is racially “black,” that he has some sort of skin disease that makes him marbled black and white, that he was in a horrible accident and needs to cover his body in bandages, etc. - as opposed to questioning their ability to “see” and subsequently acknowledging that it is within the realm of possibility that Griffin is invisible.  His invisibility – the fact that they cannot see him – would mean that he is not there, so they must rationalize his strange appearance, which in fact is a lack of appearance, in some other way.

When Griffin reveals himself, they experience the uncanny sensation of “the strangest thing in the world” when they hear a voice coming out of an “empty space,” when in fact the space is not empty, but occupied by Griffin’s body.  The act of seeing in this case is unreliable because even though no one can actually see Griffin, this does not mean that he is not there, does not mean that they cannot know him.  Victorian writer Walter Pater, from whom both Levines draw many of their ideas about realism in Victorian literature, claims that seeing guarantees nothing – it does not equate knowing, but in fact displaces knowledge or obscures it.  The peasants of The Invisible Man fail to understand that even though they see an empty space, that space is not necessarily empty, and this perfectly proves Pater’s point.

On the other hand, The Invisible Man also supports John Ruskin’s more traditionally cited realist notion that imagination is a faulty sense of sight, and that a representation that looks to be an accurate representation – unideal and unimaginative – is realist and therefore preferable.  The peasants plotting against Griffin use only their imaginations and not their powers of reason and observation to reproduce Griffin to each other verbally.  The narrator says, for instance, “Elaborated in the imagination of Mr. Gould, the probationary assistant in the National School, this theory took the form that the stranger was an Anarchist in disguise, preparing explosives.”  This use of imagination to inaccurately represent someone makes Mr. Gould and the other townspeople fools; the peasant readings of Griffin will strike readers as laughable, therefore locating them in a realist role, scoffing at the anti-realists.  And this positioning of the reader as a participant (or a better participant than Mr. Gould) within a realist project occurs despite the narrative, in its premise, being a supernatural and uncanny tale.  That is, the reader knows that invisible men aren’t possible outside of the novel, but he or she still stands as superior to the townspeople who, in relying on their overactive imaginations, do not know how to properly enact realism.