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]

Reactions to some Sherlock Holmes films I've seen recently.

Over the weekend I watched two film adaptations of Sherlock Holmes - one from 2009/10 and the other from 1993. 

The 2009 adaptation, it turns out, was produced by a studio called Asylum that only produces films straight to DVD that copy the most popular films in any given year.  The hope is that people browsing at a store might mistakenly buy a DVD with a similar title or cover art.  This particular film was trying to cash in on the Guy Ritchie adaptation starring Robert Downey Jr. 

Both films are simply titled Sherlock Holmes.  This consumer phenomenon is fascinating on its own, but what was interesting was just how different the look-alike film treated the supernatural.  There were dinosaurs and sea monsters, and they were REAL.  We never got an explanation for the dinosaurs; they were just wandering around London, attacking prostitutes and street urchins.  There was also the invention of Holmes' long lost recluse brother who decides to cure his paralysis with a robot body.  WHAT?!  This film was so over the top and so not in the tradition of Sherlock Holmes.  This is, I guess, where the line between the use of the supernatural I'm talking about and just pure B-movie horror or SF.

The other film, on the other hand, was in the exact opposite direction in terms of using the supernatural.  The plot reminded me of Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White because it relied heavily on the woman committed to a mental institution trope (can I call this a trope as long as I see it in more than one place?).  There are three "Ann Cathericks" in this narrative, establishing a serial pattern of crime.  (A nobleman keeps marrying women and disposing of them just to steal their fortunes and keep his estate alive.) 

how film might be involved

I was watching the 1933 film adaptation of The Invisible Man last night, and Danielle the other day had mentioned something about how film being born around this time might have influenced the way Victorians were thinking about reality and realism. I think I can parallel the "special effects" in the film with the crisis of seeing and knowing that the characters have in the narrative when confronted with the Invisible Man.

In the same way that the villagers in Wells' narrative cannot handle the fact that seeing does not correspond to knowing and being, spectators of James Whale's The Invisible Man (1933) experience a more pleasurable horror when thinking about the film's ability to represent reality. These spectators judge the extent to which special effects in a film can alter reality as it is represented on screen. When Jack Griffin removes his head bandages for the first time, for example, one might cast a discerning gaze on his "face" to see if there are any traces of filmic trickery or illusion. When he, while only wearing a white shirt, dances in the air, a spectator of the film might try to find the "strings" that hold up that shirt, that assure us that the shirt is just a shirt and does not have an invisible man inside. Alternatively, when a scene like this is well done and the "strings" are undetectable, the spectator derives pleasure from entertaining the possibility of an unconventional reality.

It is TECHNOLOGY that allows filmmakers in 1933 to extend the boundaries of reality.

I need to do research on how the special effects were done in the film and what technology existed in the 1933 film industry.