Sinthomosexuality and the Fantasy of Travel in The Time Machine

Abstract

Sinthomosexuality and the Fantasy of Travel in The Time Machine Dan Abitz H.G. Wells begins the preface to Seven Famous Novels (1934) by drawing a distinct line between his "fantastic stories" and the pioneering science fiction of Jules Verne. "As a matter of fact," reflects Wells on the comparison, "there is no literary resemblance between the anticipatory inventions of the great Frenchman and these fantasies" (vii). Wells reiterates, "They are all fantasies; they do not aim to project a serious possibility; they aim indeed only at the same amount of conviction as one gets in a good gripping dream" (vii). Though they may be fantasies, they are also "appeals for human sympathy quite as much as any 'sympathetic' novel" (vii). For Wells, the fantastic element of any of his novels is a "magic trick," an "impossible hypothesis" in need of domestication, a smokescreen "used only to throw up and intensify our natural reactions of wonder fear or perplexity," in order that the vastly more important "interest of looking at human feelings and human ways" from a new angle can indeed elicit a touch of "human sympathy" from his readers (viii). Time travel is the "impossible hypothesis" at the center of Wells' first major piece of fiction The Time Machine (1895). Though Wells regards The Time Machine as "a little bit stiff about the fourth dimension," he still believes it to be "quite as philosophical and polemical and critical of life and so forth" as his later, more mature work (vii, ix). The "rigid four-dimensional space time framework" bandied about by Wells and his school chums occurred to the young author as a magic trick to be used for "a glimpse of the future that ran counter to the placid assumption of that time that Evolution was a pro-human force making things better and better for mankind" (ix). In that way, The Time Machine, like The War of the Worlds (1898), was an "assault on human self-satisfaction" (ix).1 Though this seems to run counter to the sympathy at the heart of his fantastic stories, implicit to his depiction is Wells' desire to look from new angles at "human feelings and human ways." In particular, The Time Machine critiques the placid assumptions of the fin-de-siècle in order to unveil myopic and vain Victorian presumptions about human progress and planetary dominance. Philosophical, polemical, critical of life, and running counter to placid assumptions about the future—much the same could be said about Lee Edelman's No Future (2004). Edelman's own reflection on No Future in "Learning Nothing: Bad Education" (2017) [End Page 135] sounds not dissimilar from Wells' thoughts on The Time Machine: "No Future argued that social relations that imagine an end to their structural antagonism in a tomorrow perpetually deferred invoke the future as guarantee of meaning's realization (124). Here, the "placid assumption" in question is not that Darwinian Evolution will continue to provide an ever-better future for mankind but that the future will inevitably bring about the realization of the Symbolic's promised meaning. The Symbolic's perpetually deferred promise of totalization takes, in effect, a linear view of social, evolutionary, moral, political, and technological progress that happens for the benefit of humanity. Edelman is not concerned with Darwinian Evolution per se, but he certainly takes aim, as did Wells, at those futural fantasies that work to reaffirm and reproduce dominant ideological formations. Both Wells and Edelman critique futures that they view as nothing more than reproductions of inherently conservative social fantasies. Wells and Edelman make these critiques through their own fantasies about futurity (or the lack thereof). While Wells uses time travel as the fantastic element to produce an increasingly inhuman future for his novel's protagonist to explore, Edelman's sinthomosexual is a theoretical-fantastical figure that he uses to explore the impossibility of breaking with our increasingly inhumane present. More specifically, Wells' Time Traveler is, like Ebenezer Scrooge and Silas Marner in No Future, the Victorian sinthomosexual; he is the figure that Edelman fantasizes "would assert itself instead against futurity, against its propagation, insofar as it would designate an impasse in the passage...