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

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2004 by Lisa Fluet

If Wells's understanding of the state in "The Contemporary Novel" sounds rather vague, this could reflect the fact that the anticipations of the welfare state with which Wells's utopian writings (such as A Modern Utopia, The Shape of Things to Come, and The New Machiavelli) have been associated do not necessarily have England's territorial borders in mind. In The Rise of Professional Society, Harold Perkin emphasizes the ways in which Wells's utopias anticipate post-World War II government in England, but he does so partly in order to connect Wells with visions of the welfare state emerging from Fabianism (a movement that Wells later repudiated) and partly to narrate a story of the welfare state's rise as concurrent with the solidification of professional qualifying associations in nineteenth-century Britain and its fall with the onset of Thatcherism in the late twentieth century. His account therefore implicates Wells in a uniquely British story about the beneficial aspects of professionalized society and governmentality. But Wells's conception of the welfare state's domain was primarily a global one, posing the more difficult project of a social welfare world run by global bureaucrats. (2)

The strong impulse toward autobiographical revelation in Wells, most obvious in his 1934 work Experiment in Autobiography and more generally in the "transparent" reappearances of his own story in many of his novels and other writings, suggests that--in addition to setting himself the task of characterizing "rounded" global bureaucrats less prone to Bumbledom in his utopias--Wells delegated to autobiography the task of imagining a citizen "character" to whom the peaceful, humane, governmental compensations of a world state could be addressed: the Oliver Twist, in a sense, who might actually benefit from "mediated" Bumbledom. For all his well-intentioned plans for beneficent, peaceful government over global masses, Wells exhibits a frequently noted ambivalence toward the actual presence of anonymous mass humanity in his utopian and dystopian science fiction. He seems unaware of the irony in, for example, actively campaigning for what became, after his death, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights while he indulges in fictional representations of vast human rights abuses, of masses displaced and left to die or vanquished by authoritarian avatars of technological rationalism, as in A Modern Utopia and The War of the Worlds. The only recipient of the beneficial aspects of global governmentality that Wells is capable of imagining is a world citizen and avid social philosopher who looks very much like himself. The right to articulate his autobiography as a kind of bildungsroman of progress from obscure origins to international fame thus shares in what Franco Moretti has termed the bildungsroman's generic capacity to make us aware of its protagonists as "people endowed with rights" (205). (3) The early twentieth-century Wellsian bildungsroman (Tono-Bungay, Kipps, the novelistic Experiment in Autobiography) thus can be viewed as the generic complement to the hard-boiled forms I discussed earlier: Hammett's characterization of a modern state functionary involved in professional dealings with the aftereffects of human rights abuses (that is, murders) balances against Wells's education novels and the implicit rights of his central protagonists.