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H.G. Wells's Revisi(tati)ons of The Time Machine Robert Philmus Concordia University He likes to be ... his own Alpha and Omega ... —Herman Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities1 H. G. WELLS'S IMPULSE to revise is extraordinary. From The Time Machine (1894-1895) through Love and Mr. Lewisham (1900), at least, he is almost as obsessive as Flaubert, except that Wells's revisions have to do with conception far more than with le mot juste. Perhaps, however, obsessive is a term which should be reserved to characterize a kindred, but also different, species of revisionary enterprise that Wells engages in. Especially in the years following the appearance of the Atlantic Edition (1924-1927), he revisits certain of his early "scientific romances" and reconceives them in the same way that he had all along been reconceiving works by various other writers.2 Returning, in effect, to his literary origins, he re-views those fictions almost as if someone else had written them, giving new form and new expression to their meaningful content, and this in a manner which realizes the aspiration of Melville's Pierre: he becomes his own Alpha and Omega. The Time Machine, in particular, offers itself as a case in point. Six years before proclaiming it to have been the book which "fairly launched" him as a writer,3 Wells revis(it)ed it in Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island (1928); and two years after identifying it, in other words, as his Alpha, he reconceived it again in The Croquet Player (1936). Each of those highlights aspects ofThe Time Machine's significance which might not be evident from a reading of that work by itself (in some measure because The Time Machine does not accord them the same emphasis). By way of getting to a demonstration of this matter, I begin with the published incarnations of The Time Machine proper and argue that the 427 ELT 41:4 1998 fiction as Heinemann printed it in the spring of 1895 already has inscribed within it a tendency towards the sort of revisionary project that I shall be trying to define—the project that essentially defines Wells as a writer. I The Time Machine is usually said to originate with The Chronic Argonauts. In fact, however, the resemblances between those two do not go much beyond the bare notion of time-travel and some verbal carryovers of its theoretical basis in the idea of a Universe Rigid.4 Otherwise , the story of Moses Nebogipfel that Wells abandoned after three installments in his Science Schools Journal—oriented, as it is, toward the past and centering, as it does, on an unnameable blood-crime—is a Gothic tale "written under the influence," Wells himself later remarked, "of [Nathaniel] Hawthorne," and especially the Hawthorne of The House of Seven Gables.5 The first serial version of The Time Machine so designated, though itself unforeseeable in The Chronic Argonauts, is still far from subsequent incarnations. The basic components of those are detectable, at least in retrospect, especially in the titles of the first three (of seven) installments of that National Observer serialization: "Time Travelling: Possibility or Paradox," "The Time Machine," and "A.D. 12.203."6 But these components are not clearly delineated in the National Observer. Instead, Wells at this point conceives of the fiction along the lines of the speculative science essays he was otherwise engaged in writing: the vision of the future serves to illustrate an opening generalization that runs counter to popular belief. Such a conception facilitates the logical nexus between present and future that The Time Machine from this incarnation on spells out; but on its own it is not adequate for giving form to any fiction much longer than "A Vision of the Past," say (for which, see EW 153-57). It should not be particularly surprising, then, that the Eloi remain anonymous and the Morlocks barely glimpsed, and even less so that the Time Traveller, returning directly from their world, "stopfs]" his narrative "abruptly" (EW 90) after giving the barest hint of what, a year later, will appear as "The Further Vision." On the other hand, in the mention of a "sunward movement" (EW 89...

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