The Missing Father and the Theme of Alienation in H. G. Wells's Tono-Bungay

243 THE MISSING FATHER AND THE THEME OF ALIENATION IN H. G. WELLS'S TONO-BUNGAY By Max A. Webb (Louisiana State University) 1 2 After the recent articles of David Lodge, Kenneth B. Newell, and William J. Scheick,3 no one can doubt that Wells makes highly skillful use of imagery in Tono-Bungay. But a novel is something more then a conscious use of the language of fiction. The reader also recognizes its pattern of meaning by comparing it to other, similarly but not identically organized structures of expectation and fulfillment. In part at least, even that most amorphous and independent of literary forms, the novel, communicates by a series of highly recognizable signs and symbols inherited from earlier works, hints of significance which may be almost unnoticeable to. readers unfamiliar with the particular convention. Wells imaginatively employs such a pattern in the figure of the missing father in Tono Bungay. Despite the extended discussion the book has recently received, no one has yet mentioned one of its most startling oddities - that the narrator, George Ponderevo, continually and insistently calls his narrative, i.e., Tono-Bungay itself, a novel and not a history or autobiography. Presumably, earlier critics have regarded Ponderevo's choice of words as a slip on the part of the book's real author. But the choice is deliberate: Wells consciously places Tono-Bungay in a context of similar "autobiographical" novels , a context that he no sooner insists on than he declares he will significantly modify. Ponderevo writes: "I've reached the criticising, novel-writing age, and here I am writing mine - my one novel - without having any of the discipline to refrain and omit that I suppose the regular novel-writer acquires. ... I must sprawl and flounder, comment and theorise, if I am to get the thing out I have in mind."5 Lodge ably describes this disclaimer as "a case of artlessness concealing art" 8nd goes on to show that the "organizing principle" lies precisely in the "web of description and commentary," the narrator 's language which engulfs and replaces narrative events. But the continuation of the passage suggests a slightly different emphasis . Ponderevo adds that "it isn't a constructed tale I have to tell, but unmanageable realities" (8). One of the major ways in which Tono-Bungay frustrates expectations created by earlier tales lies in Welis's treatment of the figure of the absent father. From the days of Tom Jones and Roderick Random, foundlings have stalked English fiction, in search of fathers and fortunes, generating plots as a by-product of their quests. Because their parentage is unknown, such heroes stand outside of the fixed, relatively static class divisions that restrict other characters. As a result they can traverse the entire range of social life, as Tom Jones does, among other things, on his journey to London and back, and as Pip does in Great Expectations. If the "foundling novel" and its 244 near kin have a common plot, it is in the movement of someone relatively outside of society toward inclusion in a fixed position in English life. So pervasive is this pattern, one often connected with the search for one's father or origins, that Hillis Miller sees it as central to understanding the novels of Charles Dickens (clearly the major influence on the Wells of Tono-Bungay) and on the form of Victorian literature generally." Broadly considered, Tono-Bungay continues the line of "foundling" novels. Though George Ponderevo's mother, a maid at Bladesover, is known and has a precisely fixed social position, her son is an orphan of sorts: his father is "missing." He had run away from his wife before George's "distincter memories" (25) had begun. But George does find a foster-father in the person of his uncle Ned Ponderevo. Much of the book records that his life is fundamentally intertwined and defined with reference to his uncle's. As George writes, "I want to trace my social trajectory (and my uncle 's) as the main line of my story" (6). But, in two significant ways, Wells alters the literary conventions of the "foundling" novel to convey a sense of the "unmanageable realities...