"The Time Traveller": Wells makes a person into a hypothesis
In the opening of The Time Machine, Wells makes a scientific claim feel bodily and social before the machine ever appears: a name becomes a test case, and a dinner table becomes a laboratory.
The passage
H. G. Wells, The Time Machine: An Invention (1895), Chapter I, "Introduction," opening passage. The text is available in the Project Gutenberg edition.
The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us. His grey eyes shone and twinkled, and his usually pale face was flushed and animated. The fire burnt brightly, and the soft radiance of the incandescent lights in the lilies of silver caught the bubbles that flashed and passed in our glasses. Our chairs, being his patents, embraced and caressed us rather than submitted to be sat upon, and there was that luxurious after-dinner atmosphere, when thought runs gracefully free of the trammels of precision. And he put it to us in this way—marking the points with a lean forefinger—as we sat and lazily admired his earnestness over this new paradox (as we thought it) and his fecundity.“You must follow me carefully. I shall have to controvert one or two ideas that are almost universally accepted. The geometry, for instance, they taught you at school is founded on a misconception.”“Is not that rather a large thing to expect us to begin upon?” said Filby, an argumentative person with red hair.“I do not mean to ask you to accept anything without reasonable ground for it. You will soon admit as much as I need from you. You know of course that a mathematical line, a line of thickness nil, has no real existence. They taught you that? Neither has a mathematical plane. These things are mere abstractions.”
A small gloss
- recondite: difficult to understand because it belongs to a specialized or obscure field. The word gives the subject intellectual prestige before Wells has explained it.
- trammels: restraints or impediments. The dinner guests feel temporarily released from the exactness that scientific argument normally demands.
- fecundity: intellectual fertility or productive inventiveness. Here it describes the Traveller's abundance of ideas, with a faint suggestion that he may be producing more than the room can test.
Close read: a person made into a hypothesis
Wells opens with periphrasis, replacing a proper name with a functional label: “The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him).” The parentheses make the naming visible. The narrator does not simply call him the Time Traveller; he records the decision to do so, as though preparing a specimen for examination. The next sentence repeats the label as the grammatical subject, turning a person into a case study before the time machine has even appeared. Yet the surrounding prose keeps resisting that abstraction. The Traveller has grey eyes and a flushed face; his chairs “embraced and caressed” the guests; the fire and silver lights make the argument shimmer inside a sensuous dinner scene. The passage therefore performs its own problem: a theory must begin as an abstraction, but it can persuade only when it acquires a body, a setting, and a voice. The narrator's “us” makes the reader another witness at the table, invited to watch an extraordinary claim pass from label to experience.
A question to carry
What useful label do you use for another person, or for yourself, and what does that label leave out?
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