“In the
last resort, what has left its mark on the development of thought must be the
history of the earth we live on and its relation to the sun.”
~Freud
At
the conclusion of the Time Traveller’s story in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, the internal narrator
attempts to describe his journey to incredibly late moments in the future of
the planet. Tentacled creatures inhabit
this world, although haplessly, “hopping fitfully about” (71). The planet sinks in near-darkness beneath a
dying sun, and everything appears drenched in a dull redness: the sun is only a
“red-hot bow in the sky,” the surrounding water “blood-red” (70-71). Everything appears near death or extinction
as the world smolders under a mostly ineffective star. Wells takes his readers to the limits of
observable time on earth; but he also takes us somewhere potentially even more
terrifying: the limits of narrative.
Early
in the text, the Time Traveller expresses the difficulty of describing the
sensations of time travel. After
agreeing to tell his story, he admits that he “‘cannot convey the peculiar
sensations of time travelling’” (16). He
continues the only way he can conceive to: by using figurative language: “‘They
are excessively unpleasant. There is a
feeling exactly like that one has upon a switchback – of a helpless headlong
motion! I felt the same horrible
anticipation, too, of an imminent smash’” (16).
Spatial terminology and sensations serve to illuminate what the Time
Traveller experiences as he hurtles into the future; in many ways, his
description registers the effect of passengers on the railway, as recorded by
Wolfgang Schivelbusch: “repeatedly, the train was described as a projectile […]
The traveler who sat inside that projectile ceased to be a traveler and became,
as noted in a popular metaphor of the century, a mere parcel” (53-54). Although never using the term “parcel,” the
Time Traveller insists upon the contingent materiality of his body during
transportation – a materiality that is rendered passive by the conditions of
time travel:
“I was, so to speak, attenuated – was slipping
like a vapour through the interstices of intervening substances! But to come to a stop involved the jamming of
myself, molecule by molecule, into whatever lay in my way: meant bringing my
atoms into such intimate contact with those of the obstacle that a profound
chemical reaction […] would result, and blow myself and my apparatus out of all
possible dimensions – into the Unknown.” (17)
Like the terrified passengers of
Schivelbusch’s railroad, the Time Traveller appeals to the danger and terror of
moving at a high velocity through space in order to express the traversal of
time.
The
spatiality of time travel, as described in Wells’s short novel, gives time a material quality. The time machine functions as an apparatus that
realizes time as a material substrate, something that can be traveled along;
and this materialization forces the reader to consider time as something
strange. Time becomes estranging, echoing the formula put
forth by SF critic Darko Suvin in his 1979 book Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, in which he describes science
fiction as “the literature of cognitive estrangement.” The Time Traveller’s appeal to spatial
imagery conveys the limitations of describing unfamiliar temporal motion. Our conscious perceptions do not permit the
capacity to describe temporal motion as anything but linear. Time and consciousness are bound to each
other: “‘There is no difference between
Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness
moves along it’” (4). The
intervention of the time machine – an apparatus that mediates the relationship
between concrete conscious bodies and (for lack of a better word) change – reifies material change into
Time, into something separate from consciousness. However, time is not only a narrative
category in Wells’s text; it is also a constitutive component of
narrative. The text introduces the
apparatus of the time machine only in part to investigate the hypothetical
prospect of time travel; more comprehensively, The Time Machine functions as a meditation on narrative itself.
The
radical dynamics of The Time Machine
emerge not from its science-fictional subject matter, but from its internalization
of formal paradox at the level of content.
In The Theory of the Novel,
Lukács argues for the fundamental function of time in the novel-form:
“Only in the novel, whose very matter is
seeking and failing to find the essence, is time posited together with the
form: time is the resistance of the organic – which possesses a mere semblance
of life – to the present meaning, the will of life to remain within its own
completely enclosed immanence […] we might almost say that the entire inner
action of the novel is nothing but a struggle against the power of time” (217).
Building upon Lukács’s argument, Fredric
Jameson brings his own narrative theory to bear on the genre of science
fiction: “the narrative ending is the mark of that boundary or limit beyond
which thought cannot go. The merit of SF is to dramatize this contradiction on
the level of plot itself, since the vision of future history cannot know any
punctual ending of this kind, at the same time that its novelistic expression
demands some such ending” (148).[1] The
Time Machine serves as an archetypal image of Jameson’s argument for
science fiction; beyond reveling in the paradoxes of time travel, Wells’s
fiction realizes these paradoxes in the form of novelistic discourse and
recreates them in its subject matter.
The
ramifications of time travel thus indicate the very formal limitations of narrative itself, and Wells’s text registers
these limits. The Time Traveller is not
the text’s primary narrator; he is an internal
one. The primary narrator remains vague
and unnamed, a member of the party to whom the Traveller reveals his
invention. This technique is known as embedded narrative, and it enjoys
company in the nineteenth century: famous examples include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, and Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness (to name a
few). Embedded narrative allows the
author to construct a frame within the novel itself, to impose limits within
the diegesis. Often such constructions
evoke a sense of skepticism in readers, and lead us to question the
authenticity of our narrator(s); however, in Wells’s story the embedded
narrative also allows the author to explore the ramifications and difficulties
of a narrative that, in its very subject matter, defies one of the constitutive
components of narrative.
Many
19th-century models of history pursue a teleological aim, deriving
primarily from Hegel’s philosophy of history.
Despite Marx’s “inversion” of Hegel, his project yet remains
teleological, and Marxist politics function importantly in The Time Machine, infiltrating many aspects of the narrative. Upon witnessing the idyllic lifestyle of the
Eloi, the Traveller gasps “Communism” (24), and understands his vision in 19th-century
political terms: “There were no signs of struggle, neither social nor economical
struggle. The shop, the advertisement,
traffic, all that commerce which constitutes the body of our world, was
gone. It was natural on that golden
evening that I should jump at the idea of a social paradise” (27). The Traveller alters his interpretation of
the future in later pages, but the influence of Marxism remains, and the
concept of historical progress entailing future improvement is clear in many of
his statements: “The whole world will be intelligent, educated, and
co-operating; things will move fast and fast towards the subjugation of Nature. In the end, wisely and carefully we shall
readjust the balance of animal and vegetable life to suit our human needs”
(26). The Traveller espouses progress
and development that will eventually arrive at benevolent mastery.
However,
Wells deflates this teleological tendency by undermining the narrative
process. As the Traveller moves further
into the future, he watches the planet and sun slowly die before disappearing
from the novel entirely. Furthermore,
not only does he encounter denotative problems in his recounting of the
adventure; but his telling fails. His
listeners do not believe him, except for our primary anonymous narrator, who
tells us that the Traveller “vanished three years ago. And, as everybody knows now, he has never
returned” (75). Wells embeds the
secondary narrative of the Time Traveller in the primary narrative of the text;
and this primary narrative recounts the Time Traveller’s ultimate failure: his
own disappearance. Time travel undermines
its own ability to pronounce arbitrary demarcations such as beginnings and ends; such boundaries rely on normative, linear conceptions of
time, which break down in the process of time travel. The Traveller himself can never effectively
communicate his story because it must fixate itself in the bonds of linear
narrative.[2]
The
only way for Wells to reconcile the paradox of his hero’s journey – the
unknowability or definition of his temporal odyssey – is for the hero to vanish
from narrative time entirely. The
primary narrator, despite his belief in the Time Traveller’s story, cannot know the extent of this story in any
linear sense. The materiality of the
time machine thrusts the Traveller out of linear time entirely, suggesting that
our normative approaches to time (i.e. understanding it linearly, or in a
narrative way) fall short of apprehending what “Time” really is. The Traveller drops out of narrative time. He exists (to invoke Bakhtin’s chronotope) in
“time-time”; that is, in the fissure between the content of the primary
narrative and its constitutive form (if not out of form entirely). The reified realm of Time itself, as materialized
by the time machine; the hero must literally slip, as he has already told us,
into the “interstices of intervening substances.”
These
interstices reveal to the Traveller (as far as we are allowed to see) a
startling glimpse not of teleological or directed history, but of contingent
moments. Beyond the ideology of linear
time, the world appears startling and strange, resulting in the terrifying
creatures discussed above. Here, Wells
challenges the linearity of Darwinian evolutionary motion, which claims that “as
natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal
and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection” (Origin II:305). Instead, in the conclusion of the Traveller’s
narrative (or, rather, what appears to us as a conclusion), we find gigantic
insects and monstrous tentacled things; not the hopeful prospects of “Excelsior”
biology (Wells “Zoological Retrogression”).
As Stephen Jay Gould has put it more recently, the “vaunted progress of
life is really random motion away from simple beginnings, not directed impetus
toward inherently advantageous complexity” (Life's Grandeur 173).
As we can see in the final scene of the Traveller’s journey, life
appears to be slinking back toward its simple beginnings.
The
narrative barrier that the Traveller thus encounters is the ultimate
destruction of cognition itself, since narrative requires a conscious
construction of points constellated together to form a cohesive (or
not-so-cohesive) whole. The paradoxical
breakdown of the narrative effect arrives with the appearance of a dying sun;
the heat death of the universe. We can
have some fun with this by looking briefly (and in conclusion) at Ray Brassier’s
Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and
Extinction:
Everything is dead already. Solar
death is catastrophic because it vitiates ontological temporality as configured
in terms of philosophical questioning’s constitutive horizontal relationship to
the future. But far from lying in wait
for us in the far distant future, on the other side of the terrestrial horizon,
the solar catastrophe needs to be grasped a something that has already happened; as the aboriginal trauma driving the history
of terrestrial life as an elaborately circuitous detour from stellar death. (233)
What Brassier is concerned with is the
possibility of thinking the death of thought.
Any attempt is circumscribed by life and thought, and thus immediately
negates itself; we can think of death conceptually, but we cannot occupy it,
cannot identify with it. The death of
thought, however – signified by heat death, solar death – cannot be grasped
conceptually, because not only is it yet circumscribed by life, but is yet
circumscribed by thought. The concept of the death-of-thought is
non-conceptual.
As
a non-concept, the thought drives toward its own demise. Narratively speaking, it must fall out of
itself; it encounters its own death. The
Traveller, narrating his tale in The Time
Machine (if he is indeed to continue travelling), must also narrate beyond
the borders of life and thought. As a
narrative concept, he becomes non-conceptual.
Wells’s intention for the Traveller’s disappearance likely finds its
source in the genre of the adventure tale, of which The Time Machine must be included as an example. Our best guess may be that the Traveller met
his demise in some battle in a distant time, or that he fell in love and chose
to remain with his bride. However, the
circumscription of the Traveller’s narrative within that of the primary
narrator forces us to consider the formal problems that Wells is dealing with.
As
a formal institution dealing with conceptual content, the novel relies on time
and cognition in order to present itself to readers. Even if the content is estranging or
unfamiliar, readers must have some basis of communication with the text. The
Time Machine presents its readers with a paradox: not that of time travel
per se, but that of a concept that removes the apparatus through which we can
conceptualize it. Approaching the
borders of thought in the decimation of the earth through solar death, Wells
constructs a narrative that un-narrates itself, or narrates itself out of
narration entirely. All that remains are
the two shriveled flowers, succumbed at last to the slow passage of the only
time available for narrative and cognitive representation.
