Modernism and disciplinary history: On H. G. Wells and T. S. Eliot

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2004 by Lisa Fluet

For all their hard- and soft-boiled differences, Dashiell Hammett and H.G. Wells do share a crucial, underexamined creative interest in the novelistic depiction of world-weary, underpaid men who represent both emergent forms of lower-level white collar work and the professional face of state power. In "The Contemporary Novel," a 1911 lecture to the Times Book Club, Wells offers one approach to understanding the responsibilities of the novel as a "social mediator" addressed to the challenges posed by "the increasing complexity of our state":

     On every hand we are creating officials, and compared with only a
     few years ago the private life in a dozen fresh directions comes
     into contact with officialdom. But we still do practically nothing
     to work out the interesting challenges that occur in this sort of
     man and that, when you withdraw him as it were from the common
     crowd of humanity, put his mind if not his body into uniform and
     endow him with powers and functions and rules. (149)

Wells's contemporary novel, it seems, owes something to the unlovely, often unsympathetic figure of the bureaucratic functionary--that is, to an individual not unlike Sam Spade, endowed with professional responsibilities for facilitating the relationship between private citizen and the powers, functions, and compensations of the state. Wells identifies "the distinctive value of the novel among written works of art" in terms of "characterization"--and most hard-boiled novelists would probably agree with him. For Wells, however, the British novel so far has only come up with Mr. Bumble as the "supreme and devastating study" of all that is wrong with the low-level functionary as character:

     That one figure lit up and still lights the whole problem of Poor
     Law administration for the English reading community. It was a
     translation of well-meant regulations and pseudo-scientific
     conceptions of social order into blundering, arrogant, ill-bred
     flesh and blood.... You may make your regulations as you please,
     said Dickens in effect; this is one sample of the stuff that will
     carry them out. (150)

While we should question Wells's critical estimation of Dickens's contribution to our understanding of the bureaucratic character solely in terms of Mr. Bumble, he nevertheless articulates rather strange goals for the modern novel here. That modern novelists should devote at least some of their characterizing energies to producing better-rounded Mr. Bumbles--thereby "creating an intelligent controlling criticism of officials, and ... assisting conscientious officials to an effective self-examination" (150)--seems an overly specialized goal, on a par with the obtuse understanding of specialized function associated with Bumbledom.

And yet "the great problem of officialism made flesh" (151) becomes, for Wells, a problem not only of characterization but also one of novelistic form. In this essay the arguments for more humane, sympathetic depictions of low-level bureaucrats as characters frequently slide into arguments for transforming the contemporary novel into the ideal, most socially sympathetic realization of bureaucratic function. If Mr. Bumble and his kind frequently fail in the role of "social mediator" between state and citizen, the novel should step in and, by rendering more nuanced depictions of governmentality, explore the form's capacity to educate readers in feelings unavailable to them in their real-life encounters with "officialdom":