Encounters with the "White Sphinx": Poe's Influence on Some Early Works of H. G. Wells

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE "WHITE SPHINX": POE'S INFLUENCE ON SOME EARLY WORKS OF H. G. WELLS By Catherine Rainwater (University of Texas at Austin) In his early "Popularising Science" (1894), H. G. Wells acknowledges Edgar Allan Poe as one of his literary precursors. Wells believes that "the fundamental principles of · construction that underlie such stories as Poe's 'Murders in the Rue Morgue,' or Conan Doyle's 'Sherlock Holmes' series, are precisely those that should guide a scientific writer." Despite this and later such acknowledgments, the subject of Poe's influence on Wells has received almost no critical attention . This lack of scholarship is especially curious since, according to David Y. Hughes and Robert M. Philmus, Wells considers Poe's "fundemental principles of construction" to underlie several of his own science-fiction works. Throughout Wells's lengthy career, his indebtedness to this American author becomes increasingly apparent; numerous direct and indirect allusions to Poe and to his works occur within Wells's novels, early and late. Any argument about the influence of one writer upon another must acknowledge the problems inherent in such a task. In its unqualified usage the word "influence " recalls late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century biographical and impressionistic modes of criticism, which Wellek and Warren in 1942 termed some of the "least interesting" owing to their speculative and inconclusive nature. However,,.in recent decades a more sophisticated notion of literary influence has emerged. Critics such as Harold Bloom and J. Hillis Miller have explored the precise relationship between a single text and the other texts to which it alludes. Miller discusses how one literary work can take another Into itself and how an "encapsulated" text informs the fiction which surrounds it. According to Miller, a work which alludes to another both alters and is altered by the incorporated text. This essay will explore how Poe's material informs Wells's fiction. Some of Wells's early works containing significant echoes of Poe's fiction— especially "Ms. Found in a Bottle" (1833), "Ligeia" (1838), "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839), "A Descent into the Maelstrom" (1841), and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) —include a short story, "The Red Room" (1896), three scientific romances, The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), and The First Men in the Moon (1901), and a social novel, Tono-Bungay (1908). These early works of Wells suggest Poe's influence in three general areas: Wells develops symbolic settings and spatial metaphors suggesting psychological terrain; he questions conventional notions about objective reality and individual identity through the use of spatially disoriented or otherwise unreliable narrators;' and finally, he ponders the role of language in creating, sustaining, and sometimes even destroying human reality and identity. Perhaps the image of the "white sphinx" in The Time Machine most paradigmatically suggests Poe's influence on Wells's early works. This strange icon recalls the "white god" at the end of Poe's Pym and, like the "white god," implies much about the complex relationship between the human mind and phenomena. 35 During the years between 1895 and 1901, Wells appears most affected by Poe's technique of creating settings and situations that obscure the boundaries between phenomenal reality and human imaginative states. As he blurs usual distinctions between phenomena and his characters' imaginings, Wells emulates Poe in exposing as simplistic the conventional philosophical attitude which considers the human mind as affected by, but not profoundly affecting, the world outside. Both authors insist upon the highly important function of the mind in making and sustaining the external world humans assume they merely inhabit. Poe and Wells show that when the mind ceases to operate in its usual modes, the face of the external world can change, often irrevocably. Owing to the effects of dreams, drugs, art, intense emotions, encounters with extraterrestrials, or exotic adventures in strange environments, Poe's and Wells's characters often find themselves unable to sustain any notions about the external world that conform to their expectations and assumptions. Indeed, characters sometimes discover the complex interdependence between mental activity and so-called objective reality; like Prendlck in Moreau, they might also discover that sobriety or the return to...