Of Modernism and Wells

Book Reviews Volume 32:4, 1989 Victorianism but also enabled an innovative fusion of these widely different approaches, which later was fully realised in Joyce's Dubliners. Claus Melchior Universität Bayreuth OF MODERNISM AND WELLS J. R. Hammond. H. G. Wells and the Modem Novel. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988. $35.00 J. R. HAMMOND ARGUES that Wells's reputation as a novelist has suffered from the critical perception of him as a realist rather than as a modernist in his fictional interests and techniques. Wells, Hammond contends, is a transitional figure who anticipates the modernists' management of narrative voice, structure, form, and point of view. Like the modernists, Wells emphasizes a sense of anxiety and isolation in a world gone awry. Consequently, as a reflection of the destabilization of the world, as Wells saw it particularly after World War I, his fiction evinces several types of dissonance: a frustration of the reader's expectations, a fracturing of fictional conventions (especially in the area of narrative framing), a dislocation of normal time sequences, a depiction of the world as insubstantial and ephemeral (as suggested by the coalescence of dream and reality), a reliance on equivocal and ambiguous endings, and a portrait of skeptical, confused , and self-divided protagonists. This line of approach strikes me as exactly the appropriate tack to take with Wells's fiction, and it is for this very reason that I wish Hammond's book made a more substantial contribution with fewer problems. Its first deficiency emerges in Hammond's proclivity to generalize without advancing supporting arguments. For instance, just what is his definition of a modernist novelist? Not only does he problematically associate Ã-talo Calvino (117, 200) and John Fowles (50) with this group, but when he does venture a statement about one or another feature of the modernists, he makes assertions that are questionable. He claims, for example, that a Wells novel "is characteristically modernist in its extensive use of metaphor and imagery" (89), a statement which amounts to a startling obliteration of hundreds of years of literature before Wells. Nor does it help when Hammond further defines Wells's modernist interest to include "themes of decay, disease and the coming of change" (89), which observation not only misrepresents a goodly number of the so-called 504 Book Reviews Volume 32:4, 1989 modernists, but again obliterates a long tradition of pre-Wellsian literature, particularly Romantic works. In fact, many of the themes and images Hammond categorizes as modernist have been featured in art for centuries and are particularly the mainstay of Romantic writings, which Wells knew and often revised in his fiction. Generalizations of other kinds abound as well. Is it correct, in the light of so much fin de siècle literature, to claim that an "emphasis on decline was unusual for a work [like The Time Machine] published at the climax of the Victorian age" (77)? Is it accurate, in the light of the epistemological problems so fundamental to Henry James's fiction, to declare that in contrast to Wells's writings, James's works "posit a conception of the universe in which man's stability and security are axiomatic" (37)? Is it sufficient merely to assert that "blue, in the language of symbolism," is "the colour of innocence" (137), especially if later we are told that "white is a familiar symbol of innocence and loss" (142). Does white routinely symbolize loss, or for that matter, does it always evidently "symbolise the feminine realm" (142)? Is it true, moreover, that "water is a symbol of the female side of the personality, the feminine unconscious" (167), and if so, where is the proof that Wells believed this association to be true? Another problem surfaces in the progression of Hammond's book. The first part sets out the thesis well enough, although contrary to Hammond's claim, it adds little to our understanding of the JamesWells controversy. The first part contains a good section on the nature of Wells's conclusions. In the second part, however, the case studies steadily dwindle in energy and insight as they proceed. By the end of the book Hammond's discussion degenerates into a virtual...