A PRELIMINARY GENEALOGY
Jonas van de Poel
Student no. 10439005
Program in Literary Studies: English Literature and Culture Department of Literary Studies and Linguistics
Thesis supervisor: dr. Rudolph Glitz
Submitted on 29 Jun. 2016 in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts in the Faculty of Humanities University of Amsterdam
Table of Contents
Introduction 3
Purpose 4
Chapter outline -
Chapter 1: High Velocity (Near) Collision – An Outline 6
1.1 Velocity -
1.2 (Near) Collision 7
1.3 Subjective Experience 9
1.4 Paralysis Versus Stasis 11
1.5 Otherworldliness 13
Chapter 2.1: Nucleus – De Quincey’s Glorious Mail-Coach 15
2.1.1 Introduction -
2.1.2 Accident 17
2.1.3 Aftermath 19
2.1.4 Explication 21
Chapter 2.2: Nucleus – H. G. Wells’s Traveling Time Machine 24
2.2.1 Introduction -
2.2.2 Time Travel 25
2.2.3 Explication 28
Chapter 3.1: Inversion – Charles Dickens’s Haunted Signalman 31
3.1.1 Introduction -
3.1.2 Narrative -
3.1.3 Explication 34
Chapter 3.2: Inversion – Thomas Hardy’s Blighted Tess 37
3.2.1 Introduction - 3.2.2 Accident 38 3.2.3 Explication 41 Conclusion 44 Discussion 46 Works Cited 49
Introduction
Technological progress in the nineteenth century carried mankind’s experience of locomotion to dazzling new heights. Where before, riding horses, skating on ice, sailing the winds, or the simple act of running were the utmost one could achieve with regards to attaining high speeds, the advent of the Industrial Age provided a wide range of new possibilities. The invention of the steam engine, especially, enabled new developments in the relation between man and motion. So how did these developments alter this relation? How is this altered relation reflected in nineteenth century literature? And what are the philosophical, psychological and conceptual foundations for this relation? These are some of the questions that led to this research project’s germination.
Alongside these questions regarding motion and mankind, this research project focuses on the concept of recurring literary devices, or tropes. Russian Formalist, structuralist, and literary scholar, Boris Tomashevsky, stated that a work of literature, “as a whole has a theme,” that “its individual parts also have themes,” and that general interest in a theme “is determined by the historical conditions prevailing when the work appears” (63-65). From this it follows that the historical conditions of nineteenth century technological progress and its effects on the experience of locomotion provided fertile grounds for the popularization of a theme that centralizes mankind’s relation to motion. This study focuses on a specific literary device, a unique trope originating within this nineteenth century thematic interest. By positing the existence of such a trope, locating its inception, deconstructing its constituent aspects, and providing examples from literature in which these aspects recombine to form alternative manifestations, this study falls within the framework of structuralist literary criticism. Indeed, this research project owes fealty to a structuralist approach to literary criticism, confirming the possibility that its methodologies are still useful today.
The trope itself is based, mainly, on the ideas of high velocity and a near collision, and will henceforth be referred to as the high velocity near collision trope. Far from being a simple, unambiguous, transparent literary device, such as, for instance, the ‘damsel in distress’, the ‘superfluous man’, or the ‘Byronic hero’, the high velocity near collision trope can best be perceived as a network of relations between certain abstract concepts. Although recognizable as a unitary figure in some examples in literature, it is not necessarily the aim of this study to expose a solitary, unitary rendition of the trope. Instead, exposing the internal relation of its constituent aspects is this study’s main priority. Where the Formalist approach would be “the so-called ‘laying bare’ of a device,” this study goes one step further, and disassembles the device, in order to expose the circuitry at its core (Tomashevsky 84).
Nonetheless, a distinction is made between examples that conform to the core aspects of the trope’s outline more directly, that exist within its nucleus, so to speak, and those that hover at its periphery, and exhibit an inversion of its outlined trajectory. This distinction does not point towards a linear, historical chronology: those examples more explicitly related to the trope’s core outline do not necessarily occur earlier in time, as if manifestations of the trope slowly drifted away from its original inception.
By comparing and contrasting several different examples of the high velocity near collision trope, this research project also takes a comparative, perhaps even philological approach to tropological studies. Additionally, by postulating its initial inception, its origin, this approach might erroneously be taken to present a complete genealogy of the high velocity near collision trope. However, the scale of this project does not allow for the pretense of this genealogy being either representational or complete. Instead, the term preliminary genealogy seems more applicable, implying a generative open-endedness that paves the way for future studies.
Purpose
The main aim of this research project is to provide a side-by-side identification of several occurrences of the high velocity near collision trope, followed by explications of the relevant constitutive conceptual facets, in order to establish their interrelatedness. To do so means to describe the high velocity near collision trope in its most abstract, skeletal outline, first, and to then superimpose this outline on relevant passages from the primary objects of study. Hopefully, this will provide a convincing argument for the trope’s existence, and help its contours come into sharper focus. In addition, this study might also open up the possibility for further, more complete research into the trope, its different manifestations, and its genealogical development.
Chapter outline
The first chapter of this study will focus on providing the abstract, skeletal outline of the high velocity near collision trope. It breaks the trope down into its constitutive aspects, and attempts to describe and contextualize these aspects in detail. The first of these aspects is that of high velocity, and revolves around ideas of speed, vehicular motion and control, maneuverability, immobilization and anticipation. The second aspect is that of (near) collision, and is contextualized by discussions of momentum, decision-making, ethics, determinism, free will and trauma. The trope’s third constitutive aspect is the concept of subjective experience, and dovetails ideas of (self-)consciousness, agency, creativity, and imagination. The trope’s fourth aspect revolves around the concepts of paralysis and stasis,
oppositional to motion, which are complemented by discussions of retrospection, time dilation, and the fragility of equilibria. The trope’s fifth and final aspect is that of otherworldliness, a concept contextualized by a discussion of several motifs it connotes, as well as by its connection to ‘what-if’ scenarios, alternate histories, and virtual realities.
The second chapter of this study is comprised of those examples from literature that exist within the nucleus of the high velocity near collision trope. The first of these is Thomas De Quincey’s autobiographical essay “The English Mail-Coach, or the Glory of Motion” (1849). This example is simultaneously the trope’s proposed point of inception, and, as such, represents its core aspects most faithfully, directly, and elaborately. The second of the trope’s nuclear examples is H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895). This early science fiction story revolves around the concept of time travel and provides another relatively straightforward rendition of the high velocity near collision trope, albeit grounded on fictional science and technology. The fact of the impossibility of time travel provides an interesting opportunity to elucidate the trope’s philosophical, psychological and conceptual interrelations as significant regardless of logic, realism and actual technology. Perhaps it is worthwhile, in this context, to mention Coleridge’s statement that it is sufficient for the author to “transfer from [his] inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth,” in order to generate, in the reader, a “willing suspension of disbelief” (169). In light of this statement, the physical impossibility of time travel does not detract from the possibility for the reader to identify with the universal, psychological aspects of the high velocity near collision trope.
The third chapter of this study deals with those examples from literature in which the high velocity near collision trope is altered significantly, to the point of inversion. The first of these is Charles Dickens’s “The Signalman” (1866). In the discussion of this example, the argument is made that, because this story revolves around a train-related accident, where direct experience of high velocity is impossible for all but the train driver, the high velocity near collision trope is necessarily inverted. The chapter’s second example is taken from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891). The relevant passage from this countryside tragedy is eerily reminiscent of the trope’s originating moment in De Quincey’s “The English Mail-Coach”, to the point where one might suspect this earlier essay to be of direct influence upon Hardy’s novel. The trope’s inversion, here, is near perfect, a mirrored reflection that only serves to fortify the idea of the trope’s existence. Before we go into detail, however, the trope’s constitutive elements and basic outline need to be specified.
Chapter 1: High Velocity (Near) Collision – An Outline 1.1 Velocity
The dream of velocity is like being caught between the desire to glide in beautiful speed, and the paralysing possibility of the accident. There’s something erotic and monstrous about velocity.
Pedro Gómez-Egaña, Interview by Heather Jones
As its name suggests, the literary trope around which this research project revolves is predicated, first and foremost, on the phenomenon of high velocity. Velocity, as a concept, is not entirely synonymous with the concept of speed, the latter lacking the additional and nuancing distinction of definitive direction. This is to say that the term velocity does not merely indicate the rate at which a given object moves through time and space, but complements this indication with a vectorial character, imbuing speed with a linear quality, and bestowing upon it a sense of presumed guidance or control.
More so than speed, we associate velocity with vehicular movement. The linearity of cart wheel and train track suggest a consistent progression, as opposed to the potentially meandering course of, say, the afternoon ramble. Especially relevant to our proposed trope is velocity’s aforementioned sense of guidance or control, which presupposes a certain degree of initial force and/or agency. The Wordsworthian wanderer exploring the Lake District’s leas and fells can certainly be said to be his trek’s prime agent and director, but when considering the train’s conductor, the ship’s helmsman, or the coach’s stage driver, the control of velocity takes on a rather more indirect character. As noted by contemporary Colombian visual artist Gómez-Egaña, “the thing with vehicles is that they not only make us go fast, but in doing so, they also immobilise us” (“Interview”). Seeing as there is a trade-off between velocity and maneuverability, especially in cases of vehicular velocity, where guidance and control are exercised indirectly, the higher the velocity, the more stifling and immobilizing the experience.
Conversely, vehicular developments facilitating ever-increasing speeds accommodate an increase in social mobility and economic expansion, effectively scaling down the social world, as well as multiplying its communicative potential. This paradoxical dichotomy between restriction and liberation, mobility and immobility, operates at the center of the modern technological subject, and can be said to be a by-product of industrialization. Industrialization enabled mass production of steel C spring suspension and consequently the popularization of travel by carriage.1 Industrialization brought about the revolutionary development of steam engine and train travel. Both these developments revolutionized the
1
way travelers in the nineteenth century experienced velocity. Essential to the literary trope at hand is the effect these newly arisen experiences of velocity exerted on the traveling subject. Central to these experiences are a sense of immobilization and a loss of control, contrasted with an increase in potential social mobility and economic expansion.
In 1902, H. G. Wells suggested that “[t]he nineteenth century, when it takes its place with the other centuries in the chronological charts of the future, will, if it needs a symbol, almost certainly have as that symbol a steam engine running upon a railway” (Anticipations 4). However, Ralph Harrington notes that “from the point of view of the modern historian . . . as a symbol of the nineteenth century a steam engine running off [emphasis in the original] a railway and dragging its train to destruction behind it might serve equally well” (31). The rewards of social progress and economic expansion accommodated by the increase in velocity made possible by the forces industrialization were, naturally, accompanied by commensurate risks. A synthesis of high velocity, immobilization, and loss of control, ad absurdum, culminates in a literally unstoppable force, and, according to the classical irresistible force paradox, an unstoppable force begs the anticipation of an immovable object. Quintessential to experiencing increasingly high velocities, then, is an imminent threat of collision, a sense of impending doom.
1.2 (Near) Collision
As its velocity increases, the moving object also gains momentum, a notion that takes into consideration the object’s mass. The greater its momentum, the more catastrophic the consequences of a potential collision. Hence, traveling at high speeds involves an anticipatory state of great fear, as well as considerable excitement – Aldous Huxley, reflecting on the experience of driving an automobile in 1931, stated: “Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure” (263). However, it is not solely the anticipation of collision that is relevant to the literary trope we are discussing; what is equally important is what happens during the event, or encounter, itself.
For, in the case of imminent collision, the moving subject traveling at high velocity is confronted with the choice between circumvention and a potentially fatal accident. Either the subject remains inactive, and risks potentially fatal consequences for itself, its vehicle, and possible fellow travelers, or the subject attempts to change course. This choice between death and destruction or survival and circumvention is problematized, as previously mentioned, by the immobilization and loss of control that high velocity connotes. An additional consequence relates to the infamous ethical ‘trolley problem’ – first proposed by Philippa Foot in 1967 – which involves the hypothetical situation where the choice of circumvention,
by means of pulling a lever, wreaks a different net amount of destruction than the choice of inaction.2 The aggregate of these circumstances entails that the subject, confronted with an impending collision, is forced to make a high-stake, split-second decision. In case of failure, the subject is consigned to oblivion. More thought-provoking, however, are the ramifications of a successful avoidance of collision. But before we look at those ramifications, let us examine, in a short digression, the consequences and connotations of evoking the idea of the accident.
The term accident raises questions of determinism, fortune, fate and free will. It implies an unfortunate mishap, unforeseen and unintentional, but with damaging consequences. In case of a deterministic, or even predeterministic, fatalist worldview, an accident might be an unforeseen event, but nonetheless one that was inevitably bound to happen, due to its specific physical circumstances. Etymologically, the word fortune is derived from the Latin ‘fortuna’, which could be used to refer to good fortune as well as misfortune, or destiny in general, and which also signified the Roman goddess Fortuna herself. Ultimately, then, the moment the subject chooses to exert its free will in order to save itself from oblivion, the moment of near collision, represents the symbolical battle between the philosophical concepts of determinism and free will, a battle between divine fortune and human nature. This rather paradoxical, mind-boggling, and perennial discussion about free will, fate, and human nature looms over the high velocity near collision trope. However, let us return to the situation of the subject’s avoidance – predetermined or not – of collision and death.
The aftermath of the crisis of near collision can best be described from within the framework of trauma studies and, from a more neuroscientific perspective, the idea of the death experience. This is especially beneficial because imagining the survival of a near-death experience as mainly characterized by elation and relief would mean to engage in an erroneous over-simplification. When discussing near-death experiences, most neurological studies focus chiefly on states of consciousness consequential to, for instance, cardiac arrest, during which “the boundary between consciousness and unconsciousness is often indistinct and a person may enter a borderland and be far more aware than is appreciated by others” (Nelson 111). Although such a state of consciousness does not necessarily follow as a result of a near collision, it nonetheless provides us, as context, with a convenient insight into
2
See Foot, Philippa, p. 3 for a full description of the philosophical conundrum, in which a lever allows the subject to change the course of a trolley barreling down a track.
neurological reactions to the threat of the dissolution of self, and the effects this threat has on one’s consciousness.
Jill L. Matus explains the recent years’ rising interest in trauma theory, across several disciplines – including literary studies – as a response to “a century that has seen cataclysmic and catastrophic activities of many kinds,” logically leading to “a concern with aftermath – events and their representation and reconstruction” (414). Matus raises questions about “the effect on consciousness and memory of events and experiences . . . so overwhelming and unassimilable that the ordinary processes of registration and representation [are] suspended or superseded” (415). Where high velocity and a near collision are concerned, deeming the experience overwhelming and perceiving the surviving subject as potentially traumatized can be considered, then, entirely legitimate. Furthermore, trauma theory’s concern with the representation and reconstruction of events is especially pertinent to literature, even more so Victorian literary realism, which, by its very nature, deals with the representation and reconstruction of reality.
For now, as regards the high velocity near collision trope, it suffices to examine near collisions as the traumatic events that precede a subject’s reflection on it, and as events in which the threat of the self’s dissolution obfuscates the boundary between consciousness and unconsciousness. Additionally, near collisions evoke questions of determinism, free will, and the ethics of high-stake decisions with potentially fatal consequences. So far, our model has been taking the presence of the subject for granted. Its two main aspects of high velocity and (near) collision do not, however, inherently imply such a subjectivity, which brings us to a discussion of the third aspect of the literary trope.
1.3 Subjective Experience
In the hypothetical situation where an irresistible force meets an immovable object, also sometimes referred to as the shield and spear paradox, if both force and object are inanimate, the resulting collision is a fairly simple test of strength that leads to destruction of either two objects – hence the paradox. More complex, and more relevant to this study, is the situation in which either force or object is granted consciousness, subjectivity, and, as a result, agency: the ability to act or intervene in order to produce a particular effect. Absence of consciousness and agency entails a complete absence of decision-making; indeed, acts and decisions can be said to be the very forces that shape subjectivity.
When consciousness is hypothetically reduced to a bare minimum, as is the case with lower animals, decision-making becomes essentially spontaneous, survival-driven, and instinctive. Were we to climb up the ranks of organismal consciousness, we might imagine a
situation such as the one that led to the idiomatic expression of looking like ‘a deer caught in the headlights’. This phrase describes a state of heightened awareness of one’s own inability to act, complete with visual connotations of wide opened eyes, and a stunned, mixed expression of fear, confusion, surprise and panic. These thought experiments relating to the interaction between consciousness, agency, and a situation of high velocity and near collision seem to suggest a trade-off between consciousness and awareness on the hand, and agency on the other. Where consciousness is logically prerequisite to agency, an excess of consciousness seems to be detrimental to it.
Peter Hühn, in an article on the complexities of Romantic poets’ self-consciousness, argues that one of English Romantic poetry’s “constitutive and motivating features” is “an unprecedented degree of self-consciousness,” a habit of mind “of which the poets themselves are acutely and inescapably aware and from which they suffer consciously and painfully, experiencing depression, emotional sterility and artistic paralysis” (230). Artistic creation is, of course, also a form of agency, of acting and intervening in the world, by means of the artistic product. The English Romantics, especially, considered unselfconscious, spontaneous, artistic creation to be the pinnacle of the poet’s genius, something regarding which self-conscious subjectivity presented a complicating and detrimental factor.
Similarly consigned to paralysis, but less specifically related to acts of creativity, is the example of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s fictional protagonist in Notes from the Underground (1864). This protagonist argues that “inertia” is the “direct result” of “the normal fundamental laws of over-acute consciousness,” which render one “not only unable to change,” but, in fact, cause one to do “absolutely nothing” (74). Although these consciousness-related examples make no mention of high velocity explicitly, the commonplace idiom of a ‘train of thought’ provides a connection between the notion of stifling (self-)consciousness and high velocity’s immobilizing effects. The fanciful metaphor of one’s train of thought hurtling down imaginary tracks, when described in I. A. Richards’ terms of a metaphor’s “tenor” and “vehicle,” elucidates this connection (96). The cognitive process of relentlessly continuous association of mental states or conceptual entities comprises the tenor of this metaphor, whilst its vehicle is the image of the train, with not only its linked carriages, but also its high velocity and unmaneuverable, vectorial character. When this train of thought, this over-acute (self-) consciousness, is hyper-active, goes into overdrive, so to speak, its stifling and immobilizing effects on agency become more easily visualizable.
A final facet of the aspects of subjectivity and subjective experience relevant to the high velocity near collision literary trope is that of the faculty of imagination. Coleridge’s
deconstruction of the cognitive faculties of fancy and imagination leads him to distinguish hierarchically between fancy, a secondary, and a primary imagination. In his philosophical, literary critical, and loosely autobiographical Biographia Literaria (1817), the Romantic philosopher-poet argues that the primary imagination is “the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and functions as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM” (167). According to Hühn, the Romantics solved the aforementioned problem of “consciousness or of sterility or paralysis through self-reflection” by means of a “backgrounding of the creator’s subjectivity” (235). It is through reducing subjectivity to its core condition, the linguistic representation of the bare state of being, that the Romantic poet is able to tap into the eternal act of creation, something repeated time and again in, for instance, the Keatsian notion of the “camelion Poet” who “has no Identity,” or the comparison of the poet to the Aeolian harp (973).
When we consider that, in a situation of high velocity and near collision, making a split-second decision with high ethical and survival-related stakes requires a suppression of consciousness, it becomes clear that such a suppression can result in a state of mind that enables a mobilized and heightened operation of the faculty of the Coleridgean imagination, just as well. However, before we explore the ramifications of this relation in further detail, let us take a closer look at the specific moment of paralysis and/or stasis that is consequential to the subject’s confrontation with a near collision, and which precedes a potential act of divergence.
1.4 Paralysis Versus Stasis
By now, the high velocity near collision situation’s paralyzing and stifling effects have been delineated sufficiently. This paralysis is especially prominent in case the traveling subject is acutely self-conscious. The term stasis, which connotes a less subjective state of motion in time than paralysis does, enables us to approach the same situation from a different angle, allowing us to focus on its temporal aspects. For, a situation of stasis, defined as a period of inactivity or equilibrium, indicates a balance, a fragile suspension of motion. Edgar McDowell Shawen, in a discussion of the Nabokovian “micro-motif” of “motion vs. stasis,” frames the latter term as an “arrested motion in a sort of stop-action – stasis where motion is expected and will probably reassert itself” (379). Regarding a situation of high velocity and near collision, it is not, of course, actual, physical stasis that occurs. Instead, the subject’s temporal experience, or, more accurately, temporal judgment, renders the situation one of apparent stasis. The life- and, by extension, self-threatening confrontation cannot possibly be
controlled through a sudden reduction of actual velocity, hence the mind turns inward, inverses the equation, and time itself seems to slow down, as if experienced frame by frame.
Although the theory of special relativity shows that time dilation does, in fact, alter the perception of time when an observer approaches the speed of light, the negligibly minute effects of this process do not account for the stop-action experience described here. Similarly, a recent neurobiological study shows that, although “[o]bservers commonly report that time seems to have moved in slow motion during a life-threatening event . . . time-slowing is a function of recollection, not perception: a richer encoding of memory may cause a salient event to appear, retrospectively, as though it lasted longer” (Stetson, Fiesta, and Eagleman). It suffices to conclude that, although temporal judgments are subject to distortions, the representation of stasis in our literary trope is just that: representational and grounded on, if anything, the act of recollecting a traumatic, life- and self-threatening event.
However, let us return to the motion-stasis-paralysis trichotomy. Where sterile, uncreative paralysis in the face of a near collision inevitably results in the ultimate finality of death, the tension embodied in a situation of fragile, apparent stasis, with its inherent anticipation of future motion, indicates a more open-ended potentiality. An aspect of the representation of this potentiality relevant to our trope is that of shaking and trembling. The immobilized subject, traveling at high velocity and experiencing a moment of apparent – at least retrospectively – stasis, at the apex of suspended motion, anticipating a collision, is often represented, or contextualized by the representation of, a tension so extreme a shake or tremble occurs. This representation symbolizes a pent-up force of momentum seeking an escape from impending collision, resulting in a quivering, oscillatory, fragile state of equilibrium.3
This anticipatory state of extreme emotional, mental, and physical stress has several repercussions. First of all, in case of the subject’s survival, psychosomatic reactions to situations similar to the traumatic event can be expected. Similar reactions can occur when the subject recollects and recounts said event, i.e. mentally relives the memory of it. Equally significant is the effect of this extreme stress characterizing pre-collision stasis on the subject’s faculty of imagination. The momentary paralyzed subject, with its suppressed consciousness, traveling at high velocity, in a state of shaking, trembling, stasis, lacks the ability to mediate the effects of a mobilized, heightened operation of the faculty of the imagination. In case of survival, this imagination, liberated as well as buttressed by a sense of
3
In what follows, it will be shown that this pent-up force often manifests itself in a vertical movement, perpendicular to the horizontal vector of high velocity travel.
elation and relief, expands outward into the realm of the final aspect of our literary trope: the phantasmagoria of otherworldliness.
1.5 Otherworldliness
Otherworldliness is simultaneously the trope’s most elusive, as well as most intriguing aspect, and is as mercurial as its name suggests. After the traveling subject’s mind’s vectorial force of high velocity reaches its apex and is transmuted into a singular point from which all possible divergences are equidistant, immobilization makes way for creative potential. The aftermath of the traumatic near collision is characterized by an inversion of the trajectory leading up to it: velocity grinds down to a halt, and active reflection on what has just happened will expectedly take its place – this, or, in case of full pre-collision paralysis and the concomitant failure to act, the ultimate finality, death. The subject has, physically, diverged from impending doom, whilst its mind, less burdened by physicality, in the aftermath of near collision, diverges and expands into each and every possible direction.
The moment of reflection, then, breeds unbridled, imaginative, other worlds and otherworldly scenarios. The concept of otherworldliness connotes a variety of things. In absence of a clear and unambiguous definition of otherworldliness, it will be conducive to this research project’s accuracy and clarity to provide a list of some of its recurring connotations, described as its motifs. Among these, first and foremost is otherworldliness’s motif of death and the afterlife. This includes further sub-motifs such as those of spirit, soul, and ghost, Heaven and Hell, God and Satan, rapture and apocalypse. Moving away from the purely religious, but maintaining the mystical, transcendental, as well as often revelational nature of otherworldliness, one might consider the realms of dreamscape and memory. These conceptual realms connote motifs that deal with the prophetic and the mythological, the oracular and the legendary. Even further down the spectrum of religiosity, yet as interrelated to both death and afterlife, as to dreamscape and memory, lies the realm of psychoactive substances and the psychedelic experience. This conceptual realm connotes the motif of the drug-induced journey to the otherworldly, replete with hallucinatory visions, and suits the idea of mind expansion quite literally.
A more literal interpretation of the term otherworldliness, when approached from the concept of the ‘what-if’ or alternate history scenario, provides us with a further insight into how this aspect of the trope might take shape. An immediate reaction to having survived a potentially fatal near collision would most probably occur to the subject in question in the form of the imagined scenario of that other world in which the fatality would have been unavoidable. As such, the concept of the alternate history scenario touches upon the issue of
determinism, presupposing that alternate histories are determined to unfold the way they do. Simultaneously, this more literal interpretation of otherworldliness ties into the literary trope of the parallel universe, favored by science fiction and fantasy writers.
Additionally, contemporary readers might imagine otherworldliness to be manifested in some form of virtual reality. Indeed, many contemporary science fiction writers apply the technological development of virtual reality to their narratives, in order to relate this sense of otherworldliness. However, since the main focus of this study is on the nineteenth century origins of the literary trope of high velocity near collision, this facet of otherworldliness is of minor significance. For now, it is sufficient to state that the general concept of otherworldliness, in any of its multifarious manifestations, is an essential aspect of the trope.
Before we turn to the several examples in literature that provide the foundational body of evidence for the trope we are discussing, let us take a short moment to summarize its main characteristics. In short, any work of literature that combines the aspects of high velocity and near collision with a subjective experience of paralysis, stasis, and otherworldliness consequential to the subject’s expanding mind and heightened operation of the faculty of the imagination, conforms to the general outline of the high velocity near collision trope. This does not go to say that all examples provided correspond neatly to these postulated characteristics. Indeed, deviations and alterations do occur, although these will hopefully only serve to strengthen the argument that all of the trope’s separate characteristics are interconnected, and can be rearranged to form different constellations, different manifestations of the same intertwined concepts. In what follows, nineteenth century examples of the trope will be analyzed, according to how well they correspond to its most essential components, starting with its hypothesized point of inception: Thomas De Quincey’s 1849 essay, “The English Mail-Coach, or the Glory of Motion”.
Chapter 2.1: Nucleus – De Quincey’s Glorious Mail-Coach 2.1.1 Introduction
In this chapter, a short contextualization of Romantic author Thomas De Quincey (1785 – 1859) and his work will be provided, followed by a summary and explication of the relevant aspects of the text in which the high velocity near collision trope originates, De Quincey’s “The English Mail-Coach, or the Glory of Motion”. This latter part functions as an introduction to the extrapolation of the trope’s outline from examples from literature, and will hopefully ease the reader into this research project’s modus operandi, its theoretical train of thought.
Thomas De Quincey was an English Romantic essayist, editor and translator, most famous for his autobiographical Confessions of an English Opium-Eater; Being an Extract from the Life of a Scholar (1821). During his life, he became personally acquainted with other major Romanticists such as Charles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth. The Confessions deals with the author’s laudanum (a tincture of alcohol and opium) addiction, and can be said to embody a milestone in, or even the origin of, the tradition of addiction literature, prefiguring works such as Charles Baudelaire’s Les Paradis Artificiels (1860) and William S. Burroughs’ Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict (1953). De Quincey’s confessions are also part of a tradition of – self-evidently – confession literature, harkening back to works such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions (1782), and, ultimately, Saint Augustine’s Confessions (397~400). According to George C. Carpenter, “[a]s a stylist, De Quincey marked a new ideal in English; that of impassioned prose, as he himself expresses it,– prose which deliberately exalts its subject-matter, as the opera does its” (4559). This impassioned prose is lyrical, flowery, grandiloquent and extremely digression-prone, and helped establish De Quincey as the most famous of Romantic prosaists. “The English Mail-Coach, or the Glory of Motion” is, in a way, an unofficial sequel to the Confessions, and presents a “thrilling, moonlit vision of disaster” (Holmes 84). Like the Confessions, this essay is largely autobiographical and conforms to the author’s style of impassioned prose.
In “The English Mail-Coach”, De Quincey champions Mr. Palmer’s invention of the standardized mail-coach, and the unprecedented velocities this new invention could attain (191). In 1849, railway travel had already surpassed coach travel as the dominant means of transportation. However, as Slusser notes: “Though De Quincey locates his first-person instant of narration in the Tennysonian present of 1849, he sets his story or action in the time of Wordsworth – the period of the Napoleonic campaigns and English victories at Talavera,
Salamanca, Trafalgar.” By doing so, De Quincey is able to frame these mail-coaches as “technological marvels,” appearing “in perspective as powerful organs of increasingly [emphasis in the original] rapid dissemination of news – news of English victories that will shape the course of the future” (112-113). Focusing on the period of the Napoleonic wars also helps De Quincey to render the mail-coach a symbol of national unity, and, because of this, many critics have used the essay as a means to discuss issues of English nationalism, imperialism, and war.4
Another essential aspect of the author’s choice to present an ode to the mail-coach is that he considers it to be superior to the train. De Quincey laments the dominance of train travel over coach travel, stating that, “on the new systems of travelling, iron tubes and boilers have disconnected man’s heart from the ministers of his locomotion,” bemoaning that “[t]he galvanic cycle is broken up for ever,” and that “henceforwards” travel is merely a “culinary process” (203). This lament represents a typically Romantic elevation of the animate over the inanimate, the prioritizing of the natural over the cultural.
The essay is divided into four sections, “The English Mail-Coach, or the Glory of Motion”, “Going Down with Victory”, “The Vision of Sudden Death” and “Dream Fugue; On the Above Theme of Sudden Death”. The first two sections deal, predominantly, with the connection between the technologically superior mail-coach and the dissemination of the news of victory in war, albeit accompanied by many an interjection, digression, and various – sometimes seemingly quite unrelated – anecdotes. One of these anecdotes, for instance, deals with the author’s flirtatious interactions with a mail coachman’s granddaughter, Fanny of the Bath road. The essay’s overarching narrative, however, revolves around the author traveling from London to Manchester on one of these mail-coaches, bearing news of victory, and intends to be a factual, autobiographical account of this journey.
At the outset of its third section, “The Vision of Sudden Death”, in which focus starts to shift towards this journey to Manchester, the author-cum-narrator opens with a discussion of the concept of sudden death. This passage seems to tie in to the previous section’s ending, in which De Quincey relates to a mother, upon inquiry, that her son’s regiment fought valiantly, refraining from telling her only one in four of its soldiers survived (217-218). The discussion of sudden death amounts to the author’s attempt to reconcile a positive pagan and negative Christian view of the concept. The pagan emperor Caesar considered that death best,
4 E.g. Hopkins, Robert. “De Quincey on War and the Pastoral Design of The English Mail-Coach,” Tomothy
Ziegenhagen. “War Addiction in Thomas De Quincey’s The English Mail-Coach,” and Andrew Franta, “Publication and Mediation in ‘The English Mail-Coach’.”
which is “most sudden,” whilst the English Litany “places such a death in the very van of horrors” (De Quincey 219). This philosophical discussion is used to introduce the essay’s central event: the mail-coach’s high velocity near collision with a young couple in an oncoming carriage. This is where the origin of our trope comes into sharper focus.
2.1.2 Accident
During the final leg of his journey, the author boards the coach’s box, and takes “a small quantity of laudanum.” However, “[i]n the taking of laudanum there was nothing extraordinary.” He notes that the coachman “was a monster in point of size, and that he had but one eye,” and refers to him as “Cyclops the whip-bearer.” They set off on their journey, during the first stage of which the author “found out that Cyclops was mortal: he was liable to the shocking affliction of sleep” (De Quincey 225-227). Over-exhausted, the coachman falls in and out of sleep, until at some stage, the author notices that the sleeping one-eyed coachman has lost control of the horses, which start to gather speed:
Ten years’ experience had made my eye learned in the valuing of motion; and I saw that we were now running thirteen miles an hour. I pretend to no presence of mind. On the contrary, my fear is, that I am miserably and shamefully deficient in that quality as regards action. The palsy of doubt and distraction hangs like some guilty weight of dark unfathomed remembrances upon my energies, when the signal is flying for action. But, on the other hand, this accursed gift I have, as regards thought, that in the first step towards the possibility of misfortune, I see its total evolution: in the radix, I see too certainly and too instantly its entire expansion; in the first syllable of the dreadful sentence, I read already the last [emphases in the original]. (De Quincey 230)
What we have here is a situation in which the traveling subject, experiencing high velocity, in a position of immobility, is seemingly unable to act – a fact aided by the physically immobilizing effects of opium. This subject is already anticipating impending misfortune, as if the mind is preparing itself for all possible outcomes regarding a physical encounter.
At this point, the mail-coach starts to drift into the wrong side of the road. The author mentions that he hears the “far-off sound of a wheel”: “A whisper it was – a whisper from, perhaps, four miles off – secretly announcing a ruin that, being foreseen, was not the less inevitable” (231). He concludes that it is impossible to wrest the reins free from between the legs of the Cyclops, due to the author’s position at the back of the mail-coach, expressing:
“[F]ortunately, before I had lost much time in the attempt, our frantic horses swept round an angle of the road, which opened upon us the stage where the collision must be accomplished, the parties that seem summoned to the trial.” The avenue they enter upon looks like a “cathedral aisle,” at the further end of which approaches a “reedy gig, in which were seated a young man, and, by his side, a young lady” (232). All the aspects of the initial phase of our literary trope (high velocity, impending collision, subjective experience, a situation of paralysis that needs to be broken in order to avoid death) are now in place.
In this moment, the author – a renowned Grecian – derives inspiration from Homer’s Iliad, in which Achilles’s divinely inspired cry is described as “loud” or “terrible" several times (Milligan 295-296). To avert the impending collision, he exerts agency by using his voice: “I shouted – and the young man heard me not. A second time I shouted – and now he heard me, for now he raised his head” (232). Having brought the situation to the young man’s attention, the author ponders the bifurcated, dilemmatic nature of the choice at hand, corresponding neatly to the high-stake, split-second decision described in the previous chapter:
[A]h! what a sublime thing does courage seem, when some fearful crisis on the great deeps of life carries a man, as if running before a hurricane, up to the giddy crest of some mountainous wave, from which, accordingly as he chooses his course, he descries two courses, and a voice says to him audibly – ‘This way lies hope; take the other way and mourn for ever!’ (233)
Because of the author’s warning cry, the young man is able to pivot the gig, placing it at a right angle to the oncoming mail-coach, which barrels down the road and hits the little gig’s rear wheel. After this barely evaded collision, the author “rose in horror, to look upon the ruins [they] might have caused” (235). From his perspective, the young man seems to be frozen in horror:
But the lady–! Oh heavens! will that spectacle ever depart from my dreams, as she rose and sank upon her seat, sank and rose, threw up her arms wildly to heaven, clutched at some visionary object in the air, fainting, praying, raving, despairing! . . . From the silence and deep peace of this saintly summer . . . suddenly as from the ground yawning at her feet, leaped upon her, with the flashing of cataracts, Death the
crownèd phantom, with all the equipage of his terrors, and the tiger roar of his voice. (235-236)
A fatal collision has been avoided, but the author’s consideration of a young girl confronted with a vision of sudden death has not, as the mail-coach and the author reach a turn in the road that “carried the scene out of [his] eyes in an instant, and swept it into [his] dreams for ever” (236). Like in the case of a near-death experience, the blurring of the boundary between consciousness (the scene itself) and unconsciousness (the world of dreams) takes place in the aftermath of the near collision. These are the final thoughts of “The Vision of Sudden Death”, which brings us to the essay’s fourth and final section, as well as the final aspect of the high velocity near collision trope: the otherworldliness of “Dream Fugue, on the Above Theme of Sudden Death”.
2.1.3 Aftermath
The grand finale of De Quincey’s essay is marked by a distinct genre shift from analytical, erudite – albeit ‘impassioned’ – prose, to a literary composition of prose-poetry that mirrors that of the fugue, a contrapuntal musical composition in which one or more themes are repeated by successive voices. The prelude to this fugue is “The Vision of Sudden Death”, and all themes in “Dream Fugue” are taken from the preceding three sections. According to Brown Jr., “the greatest problem confronting De Quincey was that of suggesting the simultaneous voices of the fugue,” something easily done in a musical composition, but “impossible in literature.” De Quincey’s solution, however, “helps to emphasize the transmuting power of dreams.” He takes as his subject a “group of ideas: speed, urgency, and a girl in danger of sudden death,” ideas which “remain constant, while the varying settings and details perform the function of the shifting contrapuntal accompaniment” (345). This phantasmagorical dream sequence, divided into an introduction and six numbered parts, takes the reader through different temporal and spatial settings, on an apocalyptic and symbolic coach ride through the subconscious world of the author’s dreams. Here, it might be worthwhile to mention once more Hühn’s theory on Romantic creativity and the suppression of self-consciousness. The “Dream Fugue” can be seen as the act of creation that results directly from the state of suppressed consciousness necessary to act instinctively during a moment of near collision.
At this stage, it might also be helpful to quickly readdress Coleridge’s deconstruction of the faculties of fancy and imagination. Where his definition of the primary imagination has been mentioned in relation to reduced subjectivity, here, his remarks on the secondary
imagination prove useful, too. According to Coleridge, the secondary imagination is “an echo” of the primary, “differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate” (Biographia 167). The aftermath of the accident takes the shape of an artistic representation of the imaginative mind’s recollection of the traumatic event, in “an attempt to develop in contrapuntal fashion . . . elements that seem to exist in irreconcilable opposition” (Slusser 117). These irreconcilably opposed elements, according to Slusser, are the young woman’s sinking and rising vertical movements, in contrast with the mail-coach’s horizontal vectorial direction, i.e. “a formation of vertical impediments to the horizontal rush of change,” which “are not things of permanent stone, but compounds of stasis and movement waiting to be unlocked, statues to be brought to life in subsequent moments of time” (118). In the dream-fugue sequence, then, we encounter the echo of the primary imagination recreating dissolved and diffused elements from a traumatic experience of high velocity and near collision. The dream-fugue is “a fantasy . . . which, as the product of experience of sudden death . . . allows the forces of velocity and material transformation to circulate freely inside an expanded realm no longer a mere mind-theater” (Slusser 118). A short summary of the dream sequence should provide an adequate argument for this mercurial process of the imagination.
As mentioned, the narrative of the dream-fugue is based on the vision of a young girl confronted with a vision of sudden death. The narrator pursues, in several settings, a fleeing girl, attempting to warn her of perils that lie ahead, viewing her from behind, as in the aftermath of the accident that inspired the dream-fugue. In one section, the girl sinks into quicksand, leaving nothing behind but her arm, which turns to marble. In the next, suddenly, the reader is transported to the battlefields of distant kingdoms, bringing news of victory in a laurelled car. After two hours, this car reaches a “mighty minster,” and “at a flying gallop,” the equipage enters “the grand aisle of the cathedral” (De Quincey 240). Thundering down this aisle they behold “a female infant that rode in a carriage as frail as flowers,” as the narrator exclaims: “Oh baby . . . shalt thou be the ransom for Waterloo? Must we, that carry tidings of great joy to every people, be messengers of ruin to thee?” As the narrator rises in horror to this thought, so does rise a “Dying Trumpeter” (242). In the fugue’s final section, the author’s equipage, still pursuing the female infant, now grown up, through the “infinite cathedral,” is suddenly being pursued itself by “the quick and the dead that sang together to God, together that sang to the generations of man,” under the accompaniment of the Dying Trumpeter, who enters the tumult of the cathedral’s choir and anti-choir (244). The host of humanity, dead and living, “[l]ike armies that ride in pursuit,” envelops the narrator and his
carriage and, together, they ascend the skies, “rendering thanks to God in the highest . . . rendering thanks to thee, young girl! whom having overshadowed with his ineffable passion of Death – suddenly did God relent.” As if in synchrony with the rising ascension of the contrapuntal musical composition of the fugue, De Quincey’s final sentence reads:
A thousand times, amongst the phantoms of sleep, has he shown thee to me, standing before the golden dawn, and ready to enter its gates – with the dreadful Word going before thee – with the armies of the grave behind thee; shown thee to me, sinking, rising, fluttering, fainting, but then suddenly reconciled, adoring: a thousand times has he followed thee in the worlds of sleep – through storms; through desert seas; through the darkness of quicksands; through fugues and the persecution of fugues; through dreams, and the dreadful resurrections that are in dreams – only that at the last, with one motion of his victorious arm, he might record and emblazon the endless resurrections of his love! (245)
As the conclusion to the phantasmagorical, otherworldly dreamscape of the dream-fugue, this climactic sentence embodies the subject’s representation and recollection of the singular point of split-second decision at the apex of the moment of high velocity and near collision. The entirety of the “Dream Fugue” can be seen as the creative product resulting from experiencing and averting sudden death, whilst traveling at high velocity. So let us deconstruct how the trajectory of the high velocity near collision literary trope brings us to this point of conclusion.
2.1.4 Explication
The author-cum-narrator, as subject, travels on top of a mail-coach, unprecedented in its velocity at the time the narrative is set. This high velocity, which increases at the moment the coachman falls asleep and loses direct control of his horses, is already the cause of an overall decrease in maneuverability and increase in immobilization. The immobilizing nature of velocity is added to by the physically stifling effects of the laudanum imbibed by the subject. Having reached a turn in the road, the prospect of collision comes into full view. The subject realizes the situation is one of potential fatality, and its imagination starts anticipating the horrifying future outcome.
Regarding subjective experience, there are, of course, several perspectives to consider: that of De Quincey, the young man, the young woman, and the coachman. Of these four, the coachman is most obviously paralyzed, albeit by sleep, and not the experience of
impending collision. Although De Quincey is hindered physically, by the effects of laudanum, and by his position at the back of the mail-coach, he is nonetheless able to exert his agency, and use his voice to do the only thing he can to avert disaster: utter a warning cry, inspired by divine forces, like that of Achilles, “aided by Pallas” (De Quincey 232). If the mail-coach symbolizes an irresistible force, this is the moment the young couple is able to prove whether or not they are doomed to the role of immovable object, frozen in horror in the face of sudden death. It should be noted that the description of the moment leading up to the young man’s decision to act is conspicuously reminiscent of what a literary description of a cinematic stop-motion sequence might look like.5 This corresponds neatly to the fact that the experience of a life-threatening event, retrospectively, seems to have occurred in slow-motion.
In the aftermath of the near collision, the author observes the young man to have retreated into self-reflective paralysis, frozen by horror, while the young lady’s vertical gesticulation, perpendicular to the mail-coach’s horizontal velocity, represents the release of trembling, pent-up momentum characteristic of pre-collision stasis. The shift to the essay’s final section is one from description to creation, from analysis to poiesis, from realism to dreamscape, inspired by the heightened operation of the faculty of imagination consequential to the suppression of mind necessitated by the need to act instinctively.
In Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, De Quincey states that “it is certain that some merely physical agencies can and do assist the faculty of dreaming almost preternaturally,” amongst which “beyond all the others” is “opium, which indeed seems to possess a specific power in that direction; not merely for exalting the colours of dream-scenery, but for deepening its shadows; and, above all, for strengthening the sense of its fearful realities [emphases in the original]” (91). The phantasmagorical otherworldliness of the dream-fugue, exalted, deepened, and strengthened by the its author’s opium addiction, revolves around the motif of the drug-induced journey, that of death and the afterlife, as well as that of dreamscape and memory, and addresses issues of trauma, revelation, and apocalypse. This apocalyptic, eschatological aspect is most distinct in the fugue’s final scene, in which the moment of high velocity and near collision, in a retrospective dream world, becomes symbolic for humanity being saved by the grace of God’s divine love. In a sense, this also sheds light on the author’s perspective on fate and determinism. The dream-fugue’s
5 “For seven seconds . . . the stranger settled his countenance steadfastly upon us . . . For five seconds more he
sate immovably . . . For five he sate with eyes upraised . . . Then suddenly he rose; stood upright [etc.]” (De Quincey 233-234).
argument seems to lean towards a predeterministic view of fate, in which, ultimately, it was God’s decision to spare the young lady ‘with one motion of his victorious arm’.
By now, it should become clear that the high velocity near collision trope, even at the point of its origin, does not correspond to a simple, chronological reproduction of its separate constituents, but rather that these intermesh to form an intricate constellation of influence. “The English Mail-Coach” is the first literary text to clearly and elaborately address all of the tropes constituents, representing one specific expression of their interrelation. However, as will be shown by the following example from nineteenth century literature, H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, there are alternative representations that nonetheless depend on the same basic outline.
Chapter 2.2: Nucleus – H. G. Wells’s Traveling Time Machine 2.2.1 Introduction
Four-time Nobel Prize in Literature nominee Herbert George Wells (1866 – 1946) was a prolific English writer, most known for his work within the science fiction genre. His most famous science fiction novels include The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898), the first of which will be the object of study regarding the high velocity near collision trope. Although the popularization of the time machine trope in literature is often attributed to The Time Machine, whether or not it offered the first literary manifestation of time travel is debatable. Wells’s 1888 short story, The Chronic Argonauts, for instance, although less popular than The Time Machine, also employs the idea of the use of a machine to travel through time. Relevant to this study, however, is the fact that, in The Time Machine, the idea of vehicular velocity is inextricably linked to the fantasy of time travel. In what follows, a short summary of the novel’s narrative will be provided, after which the elements of the novel’s vehicular time travel corresponding to our trope will be explicated.
The Time Machine is a framed narrative, the outer frame of which is set in Surrey, in Victorian England, and conveyed by an unnamed narrator. This narrator frequents weekly, gentlemanly salon meetings at the house of the story’s protagonist, who is simply referred to as the Time Traveller. The visitors at these gatherings include learned members from the upper echelons of society, such as a Provincial Mayor, a Psychologist, a Journalist, and a Medical Man, alongside some other guests. At the outset of the story, the Time Traveller exhibits and demonstrates the workings of a miniature model of an invention he has been working on, the Time Machine. None of the guests quite believe the machine to be real, suspecting the demonstration to be a cheap trick. Before the night ends, the Time Traveller shows them the unfinished, actual, large-scale Time Machine, after which his guests leave, to return in one week’s time.
A week later, the guests encounter the Time Traveller “in an amazing plight,” his coat “dusty and dirty,” his hair “disordered” and his face “ghastly pale” (TM 12). He tells his guests he has used the Time Machine to travel to the future, and the subsequent retelling of his travels introduces the inner frame of the novel’s narrative. According to the Time Traveller, he has visited the year AD 802,701, in which the human race has evolved into two distinct species, the frugivorous, “elfin Eloi, a race of ditsy Arcadians” and the subterranean, carnivorous, “pale, apelike creatures,” called the Morlocks (Anderson 34). The Traveller later infers these two distinct races to be an extension of the growing gap between decadent
aristocrats and the working class. This has led scholars to interpret The Time Machine as a novel that “openly explores questions of English class structure, the future of production, and that pet theory of the Victorians, social Darwinism” (Anderson 35).
As regards the rest of the plot: the Morlocks steal the Time Machine, the Time Traveller discovers more about this future world in the process of retrieving it, and, when he finally manages to do so, escapes in the midst of a scuffle, traveling further into the future. Wells uses this second journey to transport his protagonist roughly 30 million years into the future, where the sun is slowly extinguishing, and the human race has deteriorated into some sort of primordial, tentacled, football-like organisms, representative of a cyclical, Darwinian eschatology. The Traveller returns home, arriving on the evening of the day he left, and relates the fantastical travel narrative to his incredulous, skeptical guests. The unnamed narrator of the narrative’s outer frame returns to the Traveller’s house the next day, only to witness him leaving on his machine, on another journey through time, from which “as everybody knows now, he has never returned” (TM 75). Relevant to the discussion of the trope of high velocity and near collision are the descriptions of the actual moments of vehicular time travel.
2.2.2 Time Travel
Of the passages that include descriptions of time travel – there are several stops on the way to ~30 million AD, and there is the journey back to the present, of course – the initial one is the most elaborate, and also the most interesting, in the sense that, at this moment, the Traveller has yet to master control over his invention. There is actually a moment of time travel prefiguring this initial journey, where the Time Traveller takes his machine for a miniature, foreshadowing test drive: “I took the starting lever in one hand and the stopping in the other, pressed the first, and almost immediately the second. I seemed to reel; I felt a nightmare sensation of falling; and, looking round, I saw the laboratory exactly as before” (TM 15). This short burst of momentary high velocity is represented, temporally, by a five-and-a-half-hour journey into the future.
The idea of equating the experience of high velocity to the nightmare sensation of falling, however, is a noteworthy association applicable to our discussion. Gravity provides mankind with easy access to attaining high velocities, albeit vertically, and shares a common trait with horizontal velocity, namely the anticipation of collision, inevitable in the case of a fall. This conflation of vertical, downward velocity with horizontal, forward velocity sheds some light on the abstract psychological processes underlying our trope. Slusser picks up on this conflation between horizontal and vertical velocity, as well, noting that, “Wells’s Time
Traveler accelerates to vertiginous speeds, giving the reader the experience of doing so” (115). However, this foreshadowing preface to the protagonist’s journey to AD 802,701 is not the main point of discussion.
After his test drive, the Traveller draws a breath, grips the starting lever, and goes off “with a thud.” He presses the lever “over to its extreme position,” signaling the initiation of extreme acceleration. Since the Time Traveller is not actually moving through space, but rather through the fourth dimension of time, extremely high velocity is represented temporally: “To-morrow night came black, then day again, night again, day again, faster and faster still. An eddying murmur filled my ears, and a strange, dumb confusedness descended on my mind.” The Time Traveller expresses time traveling to be “excessively unpleasant”: “There is a feeling exactly like that one has upon a switchback – of helpless headlong motion! I felt the same horrible anticipation, too, of an imminent smash. As I put on pace, night followed day like the flapping of a black wing.” (TM 16). In general, this scene is characterized by the traveling subject’s consciousness being predominantly unfocused and confused, reflecting the way time traveling renders the surrounding landscape and the sky homogenous, vague, and blurry. Eventually, the “unpleasant sensations of the start” fade, merging “into a kind hysterical exhilaration,” and “with a kind of madness growing upon [him],” the Time Traveller flings himself “into futurity,” wondering about the possible developments of humanity that might appear were he “to look nearly into the dim elusive world that raced and fluctuated before [his] eyes” (TM 17).
Caroline Hovanec draws on this passage as an example for The Time Machine’s “kinship with Aestheticism and related forms of early modernity,” arguing that Wells, here, refigures “the apparent solidity of matter as a series of ephemeral, ghostly sense impressions” (463). She states that “the novel’s aestheticism emerges from a critique of empiricism, or the idea that sensory perceptions can reliably produce scientific knowledge,” and argues that one of the issues addressed in the novel, facilitated by its framed narrative, is the question of whether the Time Traveller’s story is an objective record or a subjective fantasy (461). Underlining this argumentation is the idea that “[p]sychological states also play a role in perception, affecting the body in multiple ways,” and that “[f]ear, especially, affects the Time Traveller’s sensory experiences” (468). She even goes as far as to propose that the Time Traveller is suffering from “[m]ale hysteria,” which became “a familiar diagnosis in the late nineteenth century . . . often triggered by railway accidents and other shocks of modern life” (469). This reading of The Time Machine and its protagonist’s psyche addresses the aforementioned questions regarding traumatic events and their retrospective representation,
