[In the following essay, Cody judges the influence of The Time Machine on William Faulkner's 1950 Nobel Prize speech.]

          We finish thus; and all our wretched race
Shall finish with its cycle, and give place
To other beings, with their own time-doom;
Infinite eons ere our kind began;
Infinite eons after the last man
Has joined the mammoth in earth's tomb and womb.

—James Thomson, “The City of Dreadful Night” (1874)

Why should we bear with an hour of torture, a moment of pain,
If every man die for ever, if all his griefs are in vain,
And the homeless planet at length will be wheel'd thro' the silence of space,
Motherless evermore of an ever-vanishing race,
When the worm shall have writhed its last, and its last brother-worm will have fled
From the dead fossil skull that is left in the rocks of an earth that is dead?. …
Have I crazed myself over their horrible infidel writings? O yes,
For these are the new dark ages, you see, of the popular press,
When the bat comes out of his cave, and the owls are whooping at noon,
And Doubt is lord of this dunghill and crows to the sun and the moon,
Till the Sun and the Moon of our science are both of them turn'd into blood
And Hope will have broken her heart, running after a shadow of good. …

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Despair: A Dramatic Monologue” (1881)

One must err to grow and the writer feels no remorse for this youthful effort. Indeed he hugs his vanity very pleasantly at times when his dear old Time Machine crops up once more in essays and speeches, still a practical and convenient way to retrospect or prophecy.

—H. G. Wells, Preface (1931) to The Time Machine (1895)

In his 1950 Nobel Prize speech, William Faulkner contemplates the ultimate fate of mankind in a nuclear age and considers the role that the writer might play in helping to determine that fate. In one of the most famous passages he would ever write, he suggests that the young writer of his day, although living in the debilitating shadow of “a general and universal fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it,” must “teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed—love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.”¹ “Until he relearns these things,” Faulkner insists, “he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail” (p. 4).² Although the Nobel Speech is addressed to “the young man or woman writing today” and although it concerns itself with “our tragedy today” (“There are no longer questions of the spirit,” Faulkner writes, “… There is only the question: when will I be blown up?”), it has as one of its central themes the crucial importance of remembering or re-learning the “old universal truths” which mankind is in danger of forgetting. Faulkner insists that man is immortal not merely because he will “endure,” but because he is possessed of a soul, “a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance” which will permit him, in the end, to “prevail,” and he makes the point too that “the poet's voice” is one of the “props” or “pillars” that will help man to do so: “The poet's, the writer's duty,” he informs us, “is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past” (p. 4).³

The Speech, then, is emphatic in its defence of the “old verities and truths of the heart.” Whether Faulkner's life's work is in fact “uplifting” in this sense—whether he really did believe, that is, that his own work signified an affirmative belief—is a complex question that is not easily resolved. In the Speech, however, Faulkner contrasts his own efforts on behalf of mankind with the work of other writers who have failed in their duty because they have written as though they “stood among and watched the end of man.” He does not identify such writers by name, but that oddly detailed reference to a “last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening” gives us some sense of what he had in mind—for although it has been plausibly suggested that in the Speech as a whole he disparages the pessimistic view of man's future that had been expressed by Joseph Conrad in his essay “Henry James: An Appreciation,” the very specificity of that apocalyptic reference makes it clear that Faulkner is in fact recalling the climacteric scene in H. G. Wells's The Time Machine: An Invention (1895).⁴

We do not know when Faulkner first encountered Wells's “scientific romance”—which purports, of course, to be the narrative of a traveller who has quite literally “stood among and watched the end of man”—but we do know that his personal library at Rowan Oak contained a copy of a special limited edition published in 1931, with a preface by the elderly Wells and remarkable “designs” in color by W. A. Dwiggins.⁵ In the penultimate chapter of The Time Machine, the Time Traveller moves forward into the distant future, watching as the earth's rotation upon its axis gradually slows, the planet eventually coming to rest “with one face to the sun, even as in our own time the moon faces the earth” (77). As he begins to slow his motion through time, “the dim outlines of a desolate beach” gradually become visible, and when he comes to rest he finds himself in a world very different from the one he has left behind:

The sky was no longer blue. North-eastward it was inky black, and out of the blackness shone brightly and steadily the pale white stars. Overhead it was a deep Indian red and starless, and south-eastward it grew brighter to a glowing scarlet where, cut by the horizon, lay the huge hull of the sun, red and motionless. The rocks about me were of a harsh reddish colour. … [T]he machine was standing on a sloping beach. The sea stretched away to the south-west, to rise into a sharp bright horizon against the wan sky. There were no breakers and no waves, for not a breath of wind was stirring.

(p. 77)

It was on this desolate beach, clearly, with its tideless sea brooding beneath a red and dying sun, that Faulkner first stumbled over his “last worthless rock.” It is not a pleasant place, and the Time Traveller—appalled by the “abominable desolation,” but “drawn on by the mystery of the earth's fate”—decides to venture still further into the future. When he halts once more, “more than thirty million years hence,” he finds himself upon the same stretch of beach, now lying cold and apparently lifeless in a dying world in which “the huge red-hot dome of the sun had come to obscure nearly a tenth part of the darkling heavens.” Here, troubled by “a certain indefinable apprehension,” he watches as “an inner planet passing very near to the earth” gradually eclipses the sun. […] As the eclipse becomes total, the silence, cold, and darkness grow overwhelming, but one final epiphany awaits him:

A horror of this great darkness came on me. The cold, that smote to my marrow, and the pain I felt in breathing, overcame me. I shivered, and a deadly nausea seized me. Then like a red-hot bow in the sky appeared the edge of the sun. … As I stood sick and confused I saw again the moving thing upon the shoal—there was no mistake now that it was a moving thing—against the red water of the sea. It was a round thing, the size of a football perhaps, or, it may be, bigger, and tentacles trailed down from it; it seemed black against the weltering blood-red water, and it was hopping fitfully about. Then I felt that I was fainting. But a terrible dread of lying helpless in that remote and awful twilight sustained me while I clambered upon the saddle.

(p. 80)

In much of the horror literature produced in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, characters experience symptoms such as nausea, sickness, and confusion after an encounter with the “uncanny”—Freud's “unheimlich”—or with what we have more recently come to refer to as the “abject.” In her Powers of Horror (1982), Julia Kristeva defines “abjection” as that which “disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.”⁶ Such encounters appear so frequently in the horror literature of the fin de siècle that they might almost be called a defining characteristic of the genre, just as the literature itself was a symptom of the intense anxiety which existed in the culture that engendered it. In Kipling's “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes” (1885), for example, the protagonist, caught up in his Imperialist nightmare, compares his “inexplicable terror” to “the overpowering nausea of the Channel passage—only my agony was of the spirit and infinitely more terrible.”⁷ We might also recall the “horror and revolting nausea” experienced by the doctor who witnesses the ghastly demise of Helen Vaughn in Arthur Machen's “The Great God Pan” (1890); the “horror” and “loathing” with which Basil Hallward views the infamous portrait in Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891); and the “horrible feeling of nausea” that overcomes Jonathan Harker when he meets the Count in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897): in all such descriptions, the response is triggered by the realization that an ontological border (between the normal and the abnormal, the safe and the unsafe) has been violated.⁸ In this sense, the Time Traveller's nausea is due not merely to the cold and the thin atmosphere which he encounters in the future, but also to his realization—not as mere theory or hypothesis, but as fact—that mankind has no place there. Faulkner's young writers, attempting to create in a time when not the century, but the world itself seemed about to come to an end, were similarly distressed—and so, if the speech is any indication, was Faulkner himself.

To appreciate the relevance of Faulkner's reference to The Time Machine, then, we must be cognizant, as Faulkner himself obviously was, of the various implications of that final moment of horror, which is given particular emphasis in Wells's narrative not merely because the encounter itself marks the culmination of the Time Traveller's adventuring (the round object the size of a football is the last sight he sees before he flees back to the relative safety of the late-nineteenth century) and not merely because it provides us with a glimpse of the end of life on earth. In his preface to the 1931 edition of The Time Machine, the elderly Wells noted that although his romance “seems a very undergraduate performance to its now mature writer, as he looks it over once more,” it nevertheless “goes as far as his philosophy about human evolution went in those days” (p. ix). During the Victorian period as a whole, of course, and during the fin de siècle in particular, the prevailing “philosophy about human evolution” underwent a remarkable transformation. For many years, many more or less eminent Victorians, equating technological advances with moral ones, had attempted to reconcile the moral values of Christianity with what was (ostensibly, at least) morally neutral Darwinian thought: their tendency, inevitably, was to distort the latter so that in various ways it could be made to reinforce belief in human “Progress,” both spiritual and material. By 1895, however, the great age of Victorian optimism was already over, and in this sense The Time Machine reflects an ongoing ideological crisis within late-Victorian culture itself, as the heirs of Darwin asserted the primacy (and the purity) of their own vision, which was much less overtly anthropocentric. It is only a slight exaggeration to suggest, as two recent critics have done, that by 1895 “the conventional pieties of romantic Christianity seemed on the verge of being finally destroyed by the overwhelming evidence for Darwinian materialism.”⁹

The groundwork for such destruction, however, had been laid much earlier. In 1834, for example, William Whewell had noted in his Bridgewater Treatise on Astronomy and General Physics Considered with Reference to Natural Theology that all planets orbiting the sun were gradually losing velocity because of the resistance offered by an “ethereal medium”:

It may be millions of millions of years before the earth's retardation may perceptibly affect the apparent motion of the sun; but still the day will come (if the same Providence which formed the system, should permit it to continue so long) when this cause will entirely change the length of our year and the course of our seasons, and finally stop the earth's motion round the sun altogether. The smallness of the resistance, however small we choose to suppose it, does not allow us to escape this certainty.¹⁰

By 1852, seven years before the first publication of Darwin's The Origin of Species, Lord Kelvin and others had already formulated the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and Kelvin himself had stated that “Within a finite period of time past, the earth must have been, and within a finite period to come, the earth must again be, unfit for the habitation of man as at present constituted.”¹¹ In his The Conservation of Energy (1873), Balfour Stewart would note that “We are led to look to an end in which the whole universe will be one equally heated inert mass, and from which everything like life or motion or beauty will have utterly gone away.”¹² In his Degeneration (1893), the eccentric Max Nordau would suggest that even the “degenerate” art and music and literature of the day betokened doom: “The old Northern faith contained the fearsome doctrine of the Dusk of the Gods. In our days there have arisen in more highly-developed minds vague qualms of a Dusk of the Nations in which all suns and all stars are gradually waning and mankind with all its institutions and creations is perishing in the midst of a dying world.”¹³ Many of the most prominent scientists of the period agreed that in the long term at least, the prospects for continued human existence were grim; this view is also reflected in such dark and anxiety-ridden poems as James Thomson's “The City of Dreadful Night” (1874) and the elderly Tennyson's “Despair: A Dramatic Monologue” (1881).

The same premise, of course, shaped The Time Machine. Looking back in 1931 on the weltanschauung that had prevailed during his youth, Wells would note that “the geologists and astronomers of that time told us dreadful lies about the ‘inevitable’ freezing up of the world—and of life and mankind with it. There was no escape, it seemed. The whole game of life would be over in a million years or less. They impressed this upon us with the full weight of their authority …” (ix-x). That Darwin himself eventually accepted this pessimistic vision of the future of mankind, and that he too found the idea profoundly disturbing, is made clear in one of his letters to J. D. Hooker, dating from Feb. 9, 1865:

I quite agree how humiliating the slow progress of man is, but everyone has his own pet horror, and this slow progress or even personal annihilation sinks in my mind into insignificance compared with the idea or rather I presume certainty of the sun some day cooling and we all freezing. To think of the progress of millions of years, with every continent swarming with good and enlightened men, all ending in this, and with probably no fresh start until this our planetary system has been again converted into red-hot gas. Sic transit gloria mundi, with a vengeance. …¹⁴

The same point would later recur in William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), although James inverted the central metaphor:

The lustre of the present hour is always borrowed from the background of possibilities it goes with. Let our common experiences be enveloped in an eternal moral order; let our suffering have an immortal significance; let Heaven smile upon the earth, and deities pay their visits; let faith and hope be the atmosphere which man breathes in;—and his days pass by with zest; they stir with prospects, they thrill with remoter values. Place round them on the contrary the curdling cold and gloom and absence of all permanent meaning which for pure naturalism and the popular scientific evolutionism of our time are all that is visible ultimately, and the thrill stops short, or turns rather to an anxious trembling.

For naturalism, fed on recent cosmological speculations, mankind is in a position similar to that of a set of people living on a frozen lake, surrounded by cliffs over which there is no escape, yet knowing that little by little the ice is melting, and the inevitable day drawing near when the last film of it will disappear, and to be drowned ignominiously will be the human creature's portion. The merrier the skating, the warmer and more sparkling the sun by day, and the ruddier the bonfires at night, the more poignant the sadness with which one must take in the meaning of the total situation.¹⁵

Wells's “imaginative romance,” then, is a dramatization of the views of those “geologists and astronomers” who were proponents of “popular scientific evolutionism” and of their counterparts in physics, biology, and even philosophy. As a literary fantasy, The Time Machine owes a great deal to works by Swift, Poe, Stevenson, Twain, and Kipling; as a modern myth, it echoes ancient legends concerning the Twilight of the Gods; but as a presumably scientific Jeremiad, it is most obviously and specifically indebted to the thought of Thomas Henry Huxley, the great rationalist and defender of Darwin whose lectures on Biology and Zoology had greatly impressed Wells during his first year (1884) as a student at the Normal School of Science.¹⁶ In his influential essay “Evolution and Ethics” (first presented as a Romanes lecture, in 1893), Huxley acknowledged that to the popular mind, “evolution” meant “progressive development,” but he emphasized that “every theory of evolution must be consistent not merely with progressive development, but with indefinite persistence in the same condition and with retrogressive modification.”¹⁷ It was Huxley's definition of the latter term as “progress from a condition of relative complexity to one of relative uniformity” that provided Wells with the “central idea” for the work that would eventually become The Time Machine. “The theory of evolution,” Huxley wrote, “encourages no millennial anticipations. If, for millions of years, our globe has taken the upward road, yet, some time, the summit will be reached and the downward route will be commenced. The most daring imagination will hardly venture upon the suggestion that the power and intelligence of man can ever arrest the procession of the great year” (p. 85). Fascinated by the concept of “degeneration following security,” Wells would vividly describe its ultimate consequences in the penultimate chapter of The Time Machine, in which the “round thing” encountered on the dying beach is, in fact, the last representative of degenerate “man”—man as he would appear after thirty million years of inexorable “progress” on a “downward route” dictated by laws of physics and thermodynamics.

It is this denial of the possibility that man might somehow “prevail,” then, that Faulkner condemns in a Speech which implicitly contrasts the uplifting “old verities and truths of the heart” with the deeply pessimistic premise underlying Wells's late-Victorian nightmare. In this sense, Faulkner's Speech, always viewed as a classic affirmation of the values of humanism, is also a profoundly conservative work in which he adopts the traditional stance of the Biblical prophet—or of the Victorian sage. Ignoring his own prolonged flirtation with literary Decadence and with the implicitly nihilistic attitudes of the Lost Generation, Faulkner condemns Wells because in writing The Time Machine he had contributed to rather than helped to alleviate the potentially overwhelming anxieties that would eventually begin to cripple modern literature. Hence Faulkner's invocation of implicitly Victorian virtues in the Speech itself, and hence the relevance of the fact that in the midst of an attempt to “uplift the hearts” of the young writers who lived in the shadow of a possible nuclear holocaust, he would invoke—as epitomizing a decadent and enervating sense of imminent and inevitable doom—a work written fifty-five years earlier (and two years before Faulkner himself had been born) in the midst of another period of cultural malaise.¹⁸ Even in this sense, however, his choice of The Time Machine as a text to react against was singularly apt, for as Wells informs us, the Time Traveller “thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end” (p. 86). In declining to accept “the end of man,” then, Faulkner is rejecting the very premise that haunts the conclusion of The Time Machine—the assumption that life itself has no ultimate or transcendent meaning.

The connection between Faulkner's Nobel Prize Speech and Wells's work does not end there, however, for in declining to accept the end of man, Faulkner was also echoing or recapitulating a memorable conversation that Wells had had in 1906 with Theodore Roosevelt, then President of the United States. Roosevelt, of course, was a staunch advocate of American expansionism—his best-known literary work, The Winning of the West, being in effect, as David Wrobel has noted, “a study of American imperialism and its march across the continental mainland.”¹⁹ Many years afterwards, in his Experiment in Autobiography (1934), Wells recalled the conversation and brooded over its implications:

It is a curious thing that as I talked with President Roosevelt in the garden of the White House there came back to me quite forcibly that undertone of doubt that has haunted me throughout this journey. After all, does this magnificent appearance of beginnings, which is America, convey any clear and certain promise of permanence and fulfilment whatever? … Is America a giant childhood or a gigantic futility, a mere latest phase of that long succession of experiments which has been and may be for interminable years—may be, indeed, altogether until the end—man's social history?

I can't now recall how our discursive talk settled towards this, but it is clear to me that I struck upon a familiar vein of thought in the President's mind. He hadn't, he said, an effectual disproof of a pessimistic interpretation of the future. If one chose to say America must presently lose the impetus of her ascent, that she and all mankind must culminate and pass, he could not conclusively deny that possibility. Only he chose to live as if this were not so.

That remained in his mind. Presently he reverted to it. He made a sort of apology for his life, against the doubts and scepticisms that, I fear, must be in the background of the thoughts of every modern man who is intellectually alive. He mentioned my Time Machine. … He became gesticulatory, and his straining voice a note higher in denying the pessimism of that book as a credible interpretation of destiny. With one of those sudden movements of his he knelt forward in a garden-chair—we were standing, before our parting, beneath the colonnade—and addressed me very earnestly over the back, clutching it and then thrusting out his familiar gesture, a hand first partly open and then closed.

“Suppose, after all,” he said slowly, “that should prove to be right, and it all ends in your butterflies and morlocks. That doesn't matter now. The effort's real. It's worth going on with. It's worth it. It's worth it—even so.” …

I can see him now and hear his unmusical voice saying, “The effort—the effort's worth it,” and see the gesture of his clenched hand and the—how can I describe it?—the friendly peering snarl of his face, like a man with the sun in his eyes. He sticks in my mind at that, as a very symbol of the creative will in man, in its limitations, its doubtful adequacy, its valiant persistence, amidst perplexities and confusions. He kneels out, assertive, against his setting—and his setting is the White House, with a background of all America.²⁰

In his Speech, then, Faulkner—himself speaking, as it were, “with a background of all America”—is also rehearsing the role played by Roosevelt when, acknowledging the possibility that it might all end in “butterflies and morlocks,” proclaims that he nevertheless “chose to live as if this were not so.” Both Roosevelt and Faulkner reject Wells's premise that America itself is a “gigantic futility,” just as both refuse to accept the inevitability of “the end of man.” Perhaps they do so because to do otherwise would be to admit that their own struggles and sacrifices, their own “anguish and travail”—Faulkner's as an artist, Roosevelt's as a “reformer”—had been in vain. Speaking as a writer, speaking to writers, and for writers, Faulkner also speaks—as sage and prophet—to all mankind, refusing to accept the Time Traveller's testimony that the writer's struggle to uplift the human heart is a pointless one. By implication, he offers himself as a writer who has both uplifted hearts and insisted that human existence is meaningful; in this crucial sense, the Nobel Speech is also an attempt on his part both to find meaning in his own existence and to define a philosophical perspective from which that existence can be judged. His ringing affirmation of humanist values upon the occasion of his receipt of the most prestigious of literary awards, then, may have been at least in part an attempt to respond to or forestall criticism of his own work; criticism grounded on the premise that his own work was not “uplifting.” In the Speech, he undertakes both to enhance his status and reputation as an American man of letters and to influence or even to re-define the context within which his audience would receive and react to his own “life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit,” and in a dramatic sense he uses the Speech to position himself as the very incarnation of what Wells, speaking of Roosevelt, had called the “very symbol of the creative will in man, in its limitations, its doubtful adequacy, its valiant persistence, amidst perplexities and confusions.” The general outlines of this effort are readily visible in the portions of the Speech in which he proclaims the continuing importance of certain traditional values in a world which has come to neglect them. Faulkner does so, perhaps, because he feared that without that faith in the meaningfulness of his own life's work he would himself be consumed by the same “general and universal” fear of which he speaks so eloquently in the Nobel Speech and elsewhere—the fear that had preoccupied H. G. Wells as it had preoccupied Shakespeare: the old fear that all our yesterdays have but lighted fools the way to dusty death.

Notes

1. William Faulkner, “Speech of Acceptance upon the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature, delivered in Stockholm on the tenth of December, nineteen hundred fifty,” in The Faulkner Reader (Random House, 1954), pp. 3-4. All citations from the Nobel Speech refer to this edition.

2. The reference to “the last worthless rock” is, of course, accompanied by a reference to “the last ding-dong of doom,” otherwise the world's death-knell—a Faulknerian variation on the traditional Crack of Doom that is to herald the Day of Judgment. It is tempting to read this phrase as a deliberate echo or redaction of Shakespeare's reference to “the last syllable of recorded time” in the great nihilistic speech from Macbeth that had already provided Faulkner with the title for The Sound and the Fury. In this sense, the thrust of the Nobel Speech would also refute Macbeth's conclusion that life—the “walking shadow,” the “poor player”—will “strut and fret his hour upon the stage” and then “be heard no more.” What Faulkner meant by the word “prevail” is an interesting question in itself. One wonders whether he meant more than is implicit in the ambiguous vision, set forth four years afterwards in A Fable, of man's progress through the Universe as a sort of interplanetary Mad Hatter's Tea Party: “Oh, yes, he will survive it because he has that in him which will endure even beyond the last ultimate worthless tideless rock freezing slowly in the last red and heatless sunset, because already the next star in the blue immensity of space will be already clamorous with the uproar of his debarkation, his puny and inexhaustible voice still talking, still planning; and there too after the last ding dong of doom has rung and died there will be one sound more: his voice, planning still to build something higher and faster than ever before, yet it too inherent with the same old primordial fault since it too in the end will fail to eradicate him from the earth.” [William Faulkner, A Fable (New York, 1954), p. 354.]

3. Joseph Blotner and several other critics have remarked the fact that three years later, in the preface to The Faulkner Reader, Faulkner would repeat that the writer's purpose was “to uplift man's heart,” even though the source of this “hope and desire” may be “completely selfish, completely personal.” [William Faulkner, The Faulkner Reader (Random House, 1954), p. x.] On this occasion he suggested that he remembered encountering the phrase as a boy in the preface to an unidentified book by the Polish novel Laureate Henryk Sienkiewicz. (Several commentators have noted that the book was Pan Michael, the third volume of a lengthy historical romance typical in its way of the nineteenth-century revival of interest in the medieval cult of chivalry). In fact, the passage appears at the end of the book, not in the preface, but this reference too suggests a connection between Faulkner's speech and his sense of the importance of the values of the past. His hortatory invocation of the “old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed—love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice” as the proper study of “the young man or woman writing today” has a characteristically Victorian ring: we might, for example, compare it with the sentiment expressed by the young John Buchan, when in 1896 he reminded his reader that “The old noble commonplaces of love and faith and duty are always with us, since they are needful for the making of any true man or woman.” [John Buchan, “Prefatory,” in Scholar-Gypsies (Bodley Head, 1896).]

4. In 1967 Eric Solomon suggested that Faulkner owed “much of the rhetoric and many of the key ideas” in the speech to Conrad's essay on James, first published in the North American Review in 1905 and later reprinted in Conrad's Notes on Life and Letters. Conrad refers to the last day as a moment when some last artist “will formulate, strange as it may appear, some hope now to us utterly inconceivable.” Solomon notes that Conrad and Faulkner employ “remarkable similar phrases and attitudes that reflect their essentially hopeful views of man's chances in a doom-ridden world.” Christof Wegelin, writing in 1974, agreed that “the final paragraph of Faulkner's speech owed its rhetoric and its key ideas to Conrad,” but concluded that “there is nothing in Conrad to match Faulkner's optimism” and went on to suggest that “while Faulkner expressed an essentially hopeful view, Conrad was at best dubious about man's end.” Conrad suggests that “When the last aqueduct shall have crumbled to pieces, the last airship fallen to the ground, the last blade of grass have died upon a dying earth,” a man “gifted with a power of expression and courageous enough to interpret the ultimate experience of mankind in terms of his temperament, in terms of art” will be “moved to speak on the eve of that day without tomorrow—whether in austere exhortation or in a phrase of sardonic comment, who can guess?” Hence, presumably, Faulkner's sardonic glimpse of post-Doomsday man and his “puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.” This stands in stark contrasts, obviously, to the Time Traveller's vision of the overwhelming silence that reigns at the end of things. See Eric Solomon, “Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, and the Nobel Prize Speech,” Notes and Queries (New Series XIV, 1967), pp. 247-48, and Christof Wegelin, “‘Endure’ and ‘Prevail’: Faulkner's Modification of Conrad,” Notes and Queries (New Series XXI, 1974), pp. 375-76. For the relevant passage in Conrad's essay, see his Notes on Life and Literature (Doubleday, Page & Company, 1924), pp. 13-14. It may be worth noting that Conrad (a longtime friend who would in 1907 dedicate The Secret Agent to Wells, was himself indebted to The Time Machine both in the essay on Henry James and in such crucial works as Heart of Darkness. In any case the pages of Faulkner's copy of Notes on Life and Literature remained uncut, and we might also note that in describing his “last evening” Conrad refers only to the “feeble glow of the sun,” and to the “last flicker of light on a black sky”: his evening is neither “tideless” nor “red,” and there is no reference to any rock, “worthless” or otherwise.

5. H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (Random House, 1931). All citations from The Time Machine refer to this edition. See Joseph Blotner's William Faulkner's Library—A Catalogue (University Press of Virginia, 1964), p. 75.

6. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 4.

7. Rudyard Kipling, The Portable Kipling, ed. Irving Howe (Viking, 1982), p. 14.

8. For relevant citations and insightful commentary see Susan J. Navarette's “The Physiology of Fear: Decadent Style and the Fin de Siècle Literature of Horror” (Doctoral Dissertation, Department of English, The University of Michigan, 1989), pp. 53-54. I am also indebted to Professor Navarette for bringing the relevant passage in Max Nordau's Degeneration to my attention.

9. See Samuel L. Hynes and Frank D. McConnell, “The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds: Parable and Possibility in H. G. Wells,” in H. G. Wells, The Time Machine; The War of the Worlds: A Critical Edition, edited by Frank D. McConnell (Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 345.

10. William Whewell, Astronomy and General Physics Considered with Reference to Natural Theology (William Pickering, 1834), pp. 199-200.

11. Lord Kelvin, quoted in Sir William Thomson's Mathematical and Physical Papers, 5 Volumes (Cambridge University Press, 1882-1911), I: p. 514.

12. Balfour Stewart, The Conservation of Energy (H. S. King, 1873), p. 153.

13. Max Nordau, Degeneration (1893), (D. Appleton and Company, 1895), p. 2.

14. Charles Darwin, More Letters of Charles Darwin, 2 Vols. ed. Francis Darwin (D. Appleton and Company, 1903), vol. I, pp. 260-261.

15. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), (Penguin Books, 1982), p. 141.

16. For information on this relationship, and for an interesting commentary on the genesis of the various versions of The Time Machine, see Harry M. Geduld's introduction to The Definitive Time Machine: A Critical Edition of H. G. Wells's Scientific Romance (Indiana University Press, 1987).

17. Thomas H. Huxley, “Evolution and Ethics,” in Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays (AMS Press, 1970), p. 85. We might note in passing that Huxley begins his lecture with a summary of the plot of “Jack and the Bean-Stalk” and that it would appear that Wells also appropriated the basic structure of this fairy tale for The Time Machine.

18. Wells in middle age was guardedly optimistic about man's future, but by the time of his death in 1946 he had—as such works as The Fate of Man (1939) and Mind at the End of its Tether (1946) reveal—become increasingly bleak and pessimistic. As he wrote in The Fate of Man (Longmans, Green, & Co., 1939):

    There is no reason whatever to believe that the order of nature has any greater bias in favor of man than it had in favor of the icthyosaur or the pterodactyl. In spite of all my disposition to a brave looking optimism, I perceive that now the universe is bored with him, in [sic] turning a hard face to him, and I see him being carried less less and less intelligently and more and more rapidly, suffering as every ill-adapted creature must suffer in gross and detail, along the stream of fate to degradation, suffering, and death. … Adapt or perish, that is and always has been the implacable law of life for all its children. Either the human imagination and the human will to live, rises to the plain necessity of our case and a renascent Homo Sapiens stuggles on to a new, a harder, and a happier world dominion, or he blunders down the slopes of failure through a series of unhappy phases, in the wake of all the monster reptiles and beasts that have flourished and lorded it on the earth before him, to his ultimate extinction.

    (pp. 247-48)

    It is difficult to determine how familiar Faulkner was with Wells's later works, although Blotner also notes that Faulkner kept a copy of The Outline of History (1923) in the bookcase in his bedroom at Rowan Oak.

19. David M. Wrobel, The End of American Exceptionalism (University Press of Kansas, 1993), p. 66.

20. H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography (The Macmillan Company, 1934), pp. 648-649.