Deconstructing the Time Machine (La déconstruction de la machine du temps)

Author(s): Veronica Hollinger

Source: Science Fiction Studies , Jul., 1987, Vol. 14, No. 2, Critical Approaches to Science
Fiction: Retrospects & Prospects (Jul., 1987), pp. 201-221
Published by: SF-TH Inc

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4239816

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 DECONSTRUCTING THE TIME MACHINE 201

Veronica Hollinger

Deconstructing the Time Machine'

Time is, of all modes of existence, most obsequious to the imagination....

Samuel Johnson

The idea of time travel has for many years exercised the ingenuity not only of
SF writers, but of scientists and philosophers as well; neither the equations of
quantum physics nor the rules of logic have managed definitively to prove or
to disprove the possibility that this most paradoxical of SF concepts may
some day be realized.' The purpose of this present essay is to examine some
aspects of time travel within the framework of Derridean deconstruction,
since, as I hope to demonstrate, the time-travel story always achieves a
deconstruction of certain received ideas about the nature and structure of
time. It may be that deconstructive activity of some kind is characteristic of
all SF, in which case this present application of post-structuralist critical
theory may serve to suggest new approaches to other SF motifs. The final
two sections of this essay focus in detail upon H.G. Wells's The Time
Machine (1895), the novella which first applied technology to time travel and
which remains the most influential time-travel story ever written.
Anticipating post-structuralist strategies by a good many years, The Time
Machine accomplishes its own ironic deconstruction of Victorian scientific
positivism, couched in the very language of the system which it sets out to
undermine. And this, as I will discuss below, is the very essence of the
deconstructive enterprise.

1. Time travel is a sign without a referent, a linguistic construction

originating in the metaphorical spatialization of temporality. As Mark Rose
observes, "the visualization of time as a line generated the idea of time
travel" (p. 108). To write about time travel, therefore, is necessarily to have
performed a kind of reading, to have interpreted time in order to structure it
as the "space" through which a traveller can undertake a journey. As lin-
guistic construction, time travel is never "true," but its very status as pure
sign gives rise to one of its most valuable functions within the SF genre: the
time-travel story provides literary metaphors of our ideas about the nature of
time; it is a means of working out the logical (and the not-so-logical)
implications of our interpretations of this most nebulous aspect of human
experience.
As in all SF, the relationship in time-travel stories between narrative
event and empirical reality can be characterized as either analogical or
extrapolative. The analogical tendency is exhibited, for example, in James

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202 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 14 (1987)

Tiptree, Jr's "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" (1976), in which time travel
is used both to literalize Tiptree's critique of contemporary sexual chau-
vinism and to demystify the signifying coerciveness of concepts such as
"feminine" and "masculine." Her fictional future is relatively discontinuous
with contemporary reality. At the other end of the spectrum, a novel like
Gregory Benford's Timescape (1980) emphasizes the interrelationships
among present, past, and future in very direct ways, concerned as it is with
the short-term effects of recent ecological carelessness. No matter what the
reigning tendency of a particular story, however, time travel is itself always
metaphorical, the result of a "false" condensation of time with space.3 The
Time Machine, for example, offers itself as a prophetic warning of the
decline of the human race and this "devolution" is the apparently direct result
of the class divisiveness of Wells's contemporary social situation.
Nevertheless, the "scientific" rationale for the temporal journey which mak
possible this warning is developed solely through spatial metaphors. The
Time Traveller's central contention is that "there is no difference between
Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness
moves along it" (TTM 1:5).
It is indicative of the changes that have occurred in scientific and philo-
sophical "discursive formations" (to borrow a term from Michel Foucault)
that SF no longer defines itself solely as an extrapolative genre. This is due in
large part to the comprehensive realization that reality is constituted by
language; that the language from within which we speak constantly mediates
between the self and experiehce of reality. Ferdinand de Saussure's insight
into the arbitrary nature of the bond between sign and referent, his conclu-
sion that "every means of expression used in society is based, in principle, on
collective behaviour or-what amounts to the same thing-on convention"
(p. 68), indicates both the contingency and indeterminacy of these linguistic
mediations. We are led to the unavoidable conclusion that experience of
reality is always already interpretation, since "without language, thought is a
vague, uncharted nebula [a happily fortuitous SF metaphor]. There are no
pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language"
(Saussure: 112). Like other literary metaphors, a time-travel story is a
metaphor once removed, a metaphor of a metaphor which may or may not
have any direct relationship with objective reality, since that reality is
screened from direct apprehension by the very language through which we
speak of it. Language speaks of time in spatial metaphors and produces the
concept of travel in time.4
Rose suggests that the metaphorical tendency in contemporary SF far
outweighs its predictive intent. In his initial distinction between fantasy and
SF, he discusses analogy and extrapolation in the following terms:

it may be useful...to conceive the opposition between fantasy and science fic-
tion in terms of Roman Jakobson's distinction between metaphor and
metonymy as poles of literary behavior. The changed worlds of fantasy are
presented as literary substitutions for reality; they are related to the empir-
ical world paradigmatically or metaphorically....The changed worlds of sci-
ence fiction, however, are presented as logical extensions of reality; they are

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 DECONSTRUCTING THE TIME MACHINE 203

related to the empirical world syntagmatically or metonymically. This is

what is meant when science fiction is called an extrapolative form. (Rose:
2l-22)-

Recognizing that "both principles are at work in science fiction as in all dis-
course" (p. 22), Rose nevertheless notes a shift in emphasis from metonymy
to metaphor in more recent SF, which has resulted in "a radical
reinterpretation of the genre" (p. 16). We may conclude from this that tim
travel is not the anomaly it might at first appear to be, since its overtly
metaphorical function is now the rule of the genre, rather than the exception.
Darko Suvin (pp. 222-42) has suggested The Time Machine as a "structural
model" for SF; in the present context, it offers itself as a linguistic paradigm
as well.7
Suvin has defined SF as a genre "whose main formal device is an imagi-
native framework alternative to the author's empirical environment" (p. 8).
From this perspective, time travel is "a means of reality displacement" (p. 71)
similar to space travel, in that it functions to introduce the reader into the
alternative framework of the SF text as an "extension and exaggeration of
some facet of our experience into [sic] another setting" (Lindsay: 126).
Extending beyond such generic displacement, however, time travel also
achieves a displacement specific to itself, and this is its subversion of certain
traditional approaches to the question of time. This holds true whether the
stories in which it appears offer themselves to the reader as metaphorical
commentaries, as exercises in extrapolation, or as blends of both.
It will be useful at this point (for critical theory can be as much a force
for defamiliarization as SF itself)8 to continue this discussion of the partic-
ular nature and function of time travel from within the context of Derridean
deconstruction. Jacques Derrida's (anti)philosophical strategies are so named
because they recognize the impossibility of effecting any complete or perma-
nent breakdown of the conventionalized modes of thought from within which
we interpret human reality. Derrida cautions that

it is not a question of 'rejecting' these notions; they are necessary, and, at

least at present, nothing is conceivable for us without them. It is a question at
first of demonstrating the systematic and historical solidarity of the concepts
and gestures of thought that one often believes to be innocently separated.
(OG, pp. 13-14)

Both SF and post-structuralist theory in general are involved in the

processes of defamiliarization: SF achieves a "cognitive estrangement"9
through its displacement of the social/political/cultural present, while
deconstruction seeks to expose the conventional nature of the "gestures of
thought" of the Western metaphysical tradition. Thus both call attention to
the historical contingency of their subject matter. "I On the other hand, both
SF and deconstruction must speak from within the contexts which they seek
to defamiliarize: there is no getting outside of the discourses of consensus
reality. Derrida is at his most succinct here: "il n'y a pas de hors-texte" (OG,
p. 158). There is no vantage point outside the boundaries of the observable,
no privileged observer, no completely innocent reading of "reality."

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204 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 14 (1987)

2. Time travel is always potentially deconstructive, effecting as it does a

displacement of the human "here and now" upon which we tend to base our
interpretations of reality. Its immediate fascination for writers, as for
scientists and logicians, is the fact that time-travel stories are always
constructed around and within paradox, "the contradiction that at each dif-
ferent moment we occupy a different moment from the one which we are
then occupying-that five minutes from now, for example, [we] may be a
hundred years from now" (Williams: 105). The time traveller experiences
diachrony (succession) as synchrony (simultaneity), but the effect is not
simply a reversal of these two perspectives, because the time-travel story
does not abandon the notion of historical change, which tends to result when
synchrony is privileged over diachrony. The result is rather a paradoxical
movement in which the narrative synchronicity of temporal events highlights
rather than hides differences in times. The instantaneous displacement of the
time traveller from one moment to another creates an immediate juxtaposi-
tion of differences which our habitual sense of the successivity of events
renders less discontinuous and jarring than it in fact is.
At the heart of the time-travel motif is the "scandal" of temporal par-
adox. The Grandfather Paradox is the best-known version of this peril of
backward time travel. Larry Niven develops it as follows:

At the age of eighty your grandfather invents a time machine. You hate the
old man, so you steal the machine and take it sixty years back into the past
and kill him. How can they suspect you?
But you've killed him before he can meet your grandmother. Thus you
were never born. He didn't get a chance to build the time machine either.
But then you can't have killed him. Thus he may still sire your father, who
may sire you. Later there will be a time machine...
You and the machine both do and do not exist. (Niven: 11 1)"

As Niven concludes, "with the Grandfather Paradox operating, the

effect, coming before the cause, may cause the cause never to come into
effect, with results that are not even self-consistent" (p. 113). This variation
of the time-travel story leads the reader to "the point at which thought
encounters an aporia-or self-engendered paradox beyond which it cannot
press" (Norris: 49).
The structure of the time-loop story creates another version of temporal
paradox. Readers who try to unravel the threads of Robert A. Heinlein's "All
You Zombies-" (1959) will find themselves ensnared in the same time-loop
which traps its protagonist: through time travel and sex change, he is his own
mother and father; trapped in a process of endless supplementation, he must
repeatedly travel into the past to (re)create himself.
Heinlein's brilliant exercise in solipsism is a virtual dramatization of
Derrida's (non)concept of the supplement, which he develops in his
deconstruction of the nature/culture opposition. As Derrida demonstrates,
the concept of the supplement contains two differing significations. At its
most obvious, it is a surplus, an addition to full presence: "it cumulates and
accumulates presence" (OG, p. 144). Thus, for example, culture supplements
nature, and writing supplements speech. Traditionally, nature and speech are

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 DECONSTRUCTING THE TIME MACHINE 205

privileged over culture and writing, which are considered to be supplemen-

tary constructs. In addition, however (as its own "supplementary" implica-
tion), the supplement compensates for a lack of full presence and comes to
replace that which it supplements: "it intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-
place-of " (OG, p. 145: emphasis in original). '3
In demonstrating the impossibility of arriving at the origin of the "entity"
(his protagonist Jane), Heinlein dramatizes the always already supplemented
nature of that entity. At which point did Jane enjoy a pure un(re)created state
if s/he is caught in the deterministic strands of an endless time-loop? "All
You Zombies-" is the fictional analogue of the Derridean contention that
"the apparent addition/substitution of the supplement actually constitutes the
seemingly unsupplemented entity" (Leitch: 172; emphasis in original).
Heinlein's Jane is always already supplemented by his/her trips into the past
to repeat the act of (re)creation: "the indifferent process of supplementarity
has always already infiltrated presence" (OG, p. 163; emphasis in original). 14
Heinlein's story is arguably the masterpiece of its type, but the disturbing
play of supplementarity is inherent in any time-loop situation, from Robert
Silverberg's hard-bitten "Absolutely Inflexible" (1956) to the parodic "Sev-
enth Voyage" of Stanislaw Lem's Star Diaries (1964).

3. As I suggested earlier, to write about time travel is always already to

have performed a reading; that is, it requires that the writer has first
interpreted time in order to structure it as space. Since scientific discourse is
one of the frameworks within which all SF is written, the revolution which
overturned the Newtonian scientific paradigm has necessarily had an effect
upon how time-travel stories read time. This scientific revolution accounts
for a major shift in the development of the motif, since interpretation of time
is a crucial differentium between the Newtonian and Einsteinian world-
views. '5 As James Ziegler explains:

To Newton time was a constant, to be measured in the same way that mass,
density, and volume are measured. To Einstein time is relative in the same
way that mass, density, and volume are relative. Since mass, density, and
volume change as their velocities change, time also changes-hence the pop-
ular term fourth dimension. (p. 74)

If the reading of time takes place within the paradigm of Classical Physics,
temporal structure will tend to be linear, homogeneous, and consecutive; on
the other hand, relative time is nothing if not a "post-structure," tending
towards heterogeneity and indeterminacy. Or, to invoke an analogous set of
metaphors developed by Roland Barthes, Newtonian time is read as Work
(asuvre), Einsteinian time as Text (texte). 16
Before exploring this analogy, however, it is necessary to review the
implications of the several sets of binary oppositions that have appeared in
my own text. I have already made use of Rose's Jakobsonian distinction
between metonymy and metaphor, and two more polarities have just been
introduced: the opposition between the Newtonian and Einsteinian scientific
paradigms and Barthes' opposition of the Work to the Text. While each of
these is a functional opposition in this present analysis, it should not be

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206 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 14(1987)

supposed that they are in any fundamental sense truly antithetical. Indeed,
the configuration of binary oppositions, as the principal structural convention
of our mental operations, is the prime target of Derridean deconstruction. 17
Derrida's deconstruction of the "proper" discourse of philosophy (in his
essay "White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy"), as it
demonstrates the metaphorical nature of all language, leads inevitably to the
conclusion that, so far from standing in opposition to metaphor, metonymy
may in fact be defined as a special case of metaphor. Nor does Relativity
Theory consider Newtonian science in opposition to itself: "Relativity does
not...contradict classical physics. It simply regards the old concepts as
limiting cases that apply solely to the familiar experiences of [human
beings]" (Barnett: 58).
Hence, if my contention that time may be read as either Work or Text is
to hold up, it is necessary to "supplement" Barthes' argument, to recognize
that all literary productions are texts (or intertexts, for that matter-a more
radically heterogeneous view of literary discourse). The Work, best
exemplified in the world-view of the 19th-century realist novel, is a limiting
case of Text, one more consonant with "the familiar experiences" of human
reality, which we tend to interpret in linear, causal patterns, as logical
structures. It is diffcerance which defines and which "invites us to undo the
need for balanced equations, to see if each term in an opposition is not after
all an accomplice of the other" (Spivak: lix). In place of presence, of center,
of secure ground upon which to base our knowledge of reality, Derrida offers
the "play" of differance as the (non)principle of reality. Difftrance, a
Derridean neologism which conflates the effects of both deferral and differ-
ence, is the gap between signifier and signified, between sign and referent,
between our interpretations of the world and the world "in itself."'8
Barthes makes the distinction between Work and Text in "From Work to
Text," a product of his later, post-structuralist, career. Recognizing that the
idea of the Work arises from within the same epistemological matrix (or
episteme) as does Classical Physics, he writes of it as "a traditional notion
that has long been and still is thought of in what might be called Newtonian
fashion" (p. 74). The implication here, of course, is that the Text is to be
aligned with Einsteinian "fashion." Derrida has also recognized the post-
structuralist affinities of relativistic science. In his seminal essay "Play,
Structure and Sign in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," he observes that
"the Einsteinian constant is not a constant, is not a center. It is the very con-
cept of variability-it is, finally, the concept of the game" (p. 267). Relativity
becomes identified with free play and differance, the (non)principles of the
"post-structure."
Time-travel stories influenced by Newtonian fashions rely heavily upon
an interpretation of time-as-Work, which limits the free play of both narrative
event and structure: the Newtonian universe is "a closed system operating by
fixed rules that [can] be discovered by reason based on observation"
(Ziegler: 70). Newton's idealist physics defined time as absolute: in Book
One of his Principia Mathematica (1687), he writes that "absolute, true and
mathematical time, of itself and from its own nature, flows equably without
relation to anything external" (quoted in Thayer, p. 17). Absolute Time

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 DECONSTRUCTING THE TIME MACHINE 207

(functioning like a kind of metaphysical Greenwich Mean Time) joins the

company of transcendental signifieds, the centers which determine the fixed
nature of metaphysical structures. By the 19th century, the concept of
Absolute Time had given way to a belief in Natural Law as the organizing
principle which secured and determined the nature and structure of time.
In many ways, The Time Machine appears to be an exemplary demon-
stration of time as Newtonian Work. Wells's Traveller journeys through one
dimension of a rational universe which is itself a fixed structure, a totality
whose "truth" is, at least potentially, accessible to scientific discovery. The
Victorian scientist is presented as an intelligent and competent reader of time
future, the quintessential privileged observer, the subject who enjoys a van-
tage point hundreds of thousands of years removed from the object of his
study.9
Because time is a linear and homogeneous Work, the Time Traveller
moves along a fixed time-line into a future which is the direct and apparently
inevitable result of his present (time read as classic realist novel). His ability
to return to this present (as opposed to any other "present") is never in
question. As he gazed at the stars of the far future (he tells his listeners), he
"thought of their unfathomable distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their
movements from the unknown past into the unknown future" (1.79). This
"inevitable drift" of the stars is both a fact of Wells's narrative universe and a
resolutely spatial metaphor for the fixed structure of time.
Inevitability is a keynote of time-as-Work. The "devolution" which Wells
saw threatening the society of his own day is figured first in bio-sociological
decline and then repeated in the entropic decay of the Solar System (scientif-
ically determined according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics).20 At
the level of narrative event, the logic of Wells's reading seems to require the
final disappearance of the Traveller himself from the text.2' The most
powerful event in The Time Machine is a dramatically visual depiction of this
vast determination: the Traveller at the terminal beach, a helpless and
horrified spectator at the end of the world. Wells's epilogue seems to suggest
that time future is as fixed as time past: "If that is so, it remains for us to live
as though it were not so" (12:117). Nothing to be done. Interpreted within the
framework of the Newtonian world-view, the Narrator's rather enigmatic
conclusion invites this fatalistic reading.
When time is read as Work, SF tends to function metonymically-that is,
as extrapolation-since temporal structure is comprised of a rational and
successive series of cause-and-effect events. Temporal free play is usually
limited to forward movement in time; the "scandal" of temporal paradox is
quite firmly excluded from the game. This may be the reason that most early
time-travel stories limit themselves to trips into the future. Examples would
include the optimistic anticipation of Edward Bellamy's best-selling utopia,
Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888), and the "death-watch" anxieties of
John W. Campbell's twin stories "Twilight" (1934) and "Night" (1935), which
together offer Campbell's own version of the triumph of entropy. These
future journeys provide some protection against the dangers (to narrative
event and/or to the discourse of the text) of temporal paradox. One of the
earliest stories to admit the potential for temporal paradox, Mark Twain's A

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208 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 14 (1987)

Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), dissolves finally into a

metaphysical negation of reality, conveniently erasing temporal structure
altogether. In place of the majestic drift of the stars in The Time Machine,
Hank Morgan in A Connecticut Yankee refers to his life as "this pathetic drift
between the eternities" (18:161).

4. When the Einsteinian scientific paradigm displaces the Newtonian, SF

is invited to explore what we might call the infinite free play of temporal
structure, the play of time-as-Text, heterogeneous, indeterminate, and
uncentered, completely at odds with the notion of fixed structure. Considered
in this context, Derrida's explication of the concept of centered structure
implicates Classical Physics in the game of Western metaphysics:

The concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of a freeplay based

on a fundamental ground, a freeplay which is constituted upon a funda-
mental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which is itself beyond the
reach of the freeplay. With this certitude anxiety can be mastered, for anx-
iety is invariably the result of a certain mode of being implicated in the
game, of being caught by the game, of being as it were from the very begin-
ning at stake in the game. ("Play, Sign and Structure," p. 248)

Derrida's (anti)philosophy is clearly a product of the same episteme which

produced the Principle of Indeterminacy. This holds, in part, that "the very
act of observing alters the object being observed" (Heisenberg: 24). The sci-
entist as well as the philosopher is implicated in the game. We may also see
in the Principle of Complementarity, by which contemporary physics
recognizes both the wave and particle properties of light, a recognition of the
fundamental differance in the nature of reality.
Relativity offers a new (non)definition of both space and time:

space and time are forms of intuition, which can be no more divorced from
consciousness than can our concepts of color, shape, or size. Space has no
objective reality except as an order or arrangement of the objects we
perceive in it, and time has no independence apart from the order of events
by which we perceive it. (Barnett: 19)

Scientific discourse admits its own status as metaphor. Time has no reality
outside of our interpretations and it invites a potentially vast variety of
possible "readings." Time is read as Work in a reality defined by discourse
that upholds the traditional hierarchical opposition between science and fic-
tion, in which science is the privileged term. In post-structuralist
epistemology, of which Relativity Theory is one expression, this opposition
has been subverted. Science, no longer privileged, has become subsumed
under fiction as a particular system of discourse, and this has greatly
expanded the possibilities for SF's explorations of the nature and structure of
time.
Jorge Luis Borges has left us one of the most memorable figurations of
this new awareness of time in his story "The Garden of Forking Paths"
(1944), which concerns a book which is also a labyrinth, a remarkable image
of time-as-Text. Borges writes that the author of this book

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 DECONSTRUCTING THE TIME MACHINE 209

did not think of time as absolute and uniform. He believed in an infinite

series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging,
converging parallel times. This web of time-the strands of which approach
one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the
centuries-embraces every possibility. (p. 156)23

Borges's radical postmodern philosophy is echoed in less extreme form in

many SF stories which function within the Einsteinian paradigm. The fixed
time-line of The Time Machine loses its privileged status in the face of the
heterogeneity of times of the relative universe. Such offshoots of the time-
travel story as alternate and parallel world stories, which frequently include
the ideas of multiple time-tracks and branching time-lines, are extensions of
this reading of time-as-Text. James Blish's Jack of Eagles (1952), for
example, is an early novel which suggests the possibility of a split in the
time-line. Larry Niven explores some of the darker implications of a universe
of universes created by endlessly branching time-lines in his story "All the
Myriad Ways" (1968). Alternate times and multiple time-tracks shape stories
such as Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (1962), in which
Germany and Japan have won World War II. Norman Spinrad's The Iron
Dream (1972), which is "really" Adolph Hitler's 1953 award-winning novel,
The Lord of the Swastika, also fits into this category. In many of these sto-
ries, scientific relativity finds its analogue in a serious exploration of cultural
relativity.
Time-as-Text invites us not only to read it, but to participate in writing it
as well, to admit our active role in the creation of the structure, our com-
plicity in the game: "the Text requires an attempt to abolish (or at least to
lessen) the distance between writing and reading, not by intensifying the
reader's projection into the Work, but by linking the two together in a single
unifying process" (Barthes: 79). Because Wells's Time Traveller reads the
future as logical and determined extrapolation of his present, he confirms the
inevitability of devolution and apocalypse, a confirmation which severely
limits the freedom of the human subject to shape events in time. Relativity
has contributed to the restoration of this freedom in many SF stories. Marge
Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), for example, posits at least two
opposing futures which are potential in the present, and one of these, a
feminist utopia, uses time travel in an effort (whose outcome is left open) to
ensure its actualization. Benford's Timescape (1980) assumes an even greater
freedom to write time: the doomed world of 1998 successfully uses time
travel to warn the world of 1962 of its impending ruin; the result is a split in
the time-line, as the world of 1962 veers towards its new future, while the
"old" future continues to decline. Writing time in this instance includes
(re)writing the past.
Even when a time-travel story inscribes itself within the Newtonian
paradigm (as many still continue to do), it is (at least, from a "postmodern"
perspective) always already deconstructive of any mechanical reading of the
universe. The Time Machine can once again provide the model for this partic-
ular textual activity. We have already seen, for example, some of the effects
of Wells's reading of time-as-Work: the determinate nature of time, the line-

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210 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 14 (1987)

arity of temporal structure, and the apparently extrapolative tendency which

develops from this view of time. But by the very fact that this is a time-travel
story, narrative activity disruptive of specific aspects of the 19th-century pos-
itivist world-view is already at play within the text.
In the first place, in order to postulate time travel as one of the givens of
his narrative universe, Wells had to separate the subjective time of his
Traveller from the objective time by which his temporal perceptions are sup-
posedly determined. Private time breaks free of public time. This situation is
analogous to Derrida's subversion of the languelparole (language as system!
language as individual speech-act) hierarchy erected by Saussurean struc-
tural linguistics. This deconstruction of the opposition between public and
private time also anticipates Relativity Theory, which, in Stephen Kern's
delightful image, has "filled the universe with clocks each telling a different
correct time" (p. 19). Kern identifies the collusion between the normative
and the coercive, between "the authority of uniform public time" and
"centralized public authority" (p. 16) which is implicit in the idea of a public
time. Now there is no more privileged Time, only an infinite number of indi-
vidual times which together constitute the illusion of an absolute and uni-
versal Time.
As a consequence of this subversion of public time, the concept of "now"
becomes displaced from its privileged point on the time-line: this is the char-
acteristic gesture of displacement particular to the language of time travel.
"Now" is no longer "'here" but "there." There is no longer a privileged "now"
of any empirical force. Within the discourse of the time-travel story, "now"
becomes shifting and unstable, indicative of any point in the past, present, or
future inhabited by the subjective present of the time traveller.24 Language
recognizes temporal subjectivity; it is always limited to private time. No
words exist to fix the absolute present, the Now, while narrating the time
traveller's experiences in the past or future relative to that absolute present.
Wells's Narrator demonstrates this linguistic peculiarity as he speculates on
the Time Traveller's "present" whereabouts: "He may even now-if I may
use the phrase-be wandering on some plesiosaurus-haunted Oolitic coral
reef, or beside the lonely saline lakes of the Triassic Age" (12:117).
As as point of reference, the time traveller acts as both the functional
(not absolute) center of the temporal structure and as a floating signifier
released from any fixed relationship to that structure. Time-travel stories,
then, are never "really" versions but are always subversions of traditional
temporal structure; their absolute rejection of an absolute Present works to
negate the very concept of temporal Presence, "temporal presence as
point...of the now or of the moment" (OG, p. 12).

5. In an important early essay, "The Rediscovery of the Unique" (1891),

Wells demonstrates his anticipation of several key Derridean concepts. The
focus of the essay is the "rediscovery" of difference: "All being is unique, or,
nothing is strictly like anything else. It implies...that we only arrive at the idea
of similar beings by an unconscious or deliberate disregard of an infinity of
small differences" (Philmus & Hughes: 23; Wells's emphasis). Even more
significant is Wells's conclusion:

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 DECONSTRUCTING THE TIME MACHINE 211

[The "human delusion" of sameness] has grown with the g

and is, we are quite prepared to concede, a necessary featur
may here remark, parenthetically, that we make no proposal to supersede
ordinary thinking by a new method....This...is outside the scope of the present
paper, and altogether premature. (ibid., pp. 25-26)

According to Derrida, the present moment is no more conducive to new

methods of thinking than was the late 19th century:

the movements of deconstruction do not destroy structures from the outside.

They are not possible and effective, nor can they take accurate aim, except
by inhabiting those structures. Inhabiting them in a certain way. (OG, p. 24;
emphasis in original)

Wells's answer to this dilemma, that there is no ground upon which to base
any attack upon conventionalized systems of thought outside of those systems
themselves, proves to be the same as Derrida's. Just as Derridean
deconstruction is a profoundly ironic enterprise, one which, in the words of
Paul de Man, "splits the subject into an empirical self that exists in a state of
inauthenticity and a self that exists only in the form of a language that asserts
the knowledge of its inauthenticity" (p. 197), so The Time Machine is a pro-
foundly ironic text. It simultaneously inhabits the world of Classical Physics
and ironizes that world-view. We have already seen how the classical defini-
tion of time is crucial to the logic of the narrative events and to the Time
Traveller's interpretations of these events. It will therefore be worthwhile to
examine in more detail the cumulative effects of Wells's ironization of the
Newtonian paradigm on the "meaning" of his novella.
An implicit confession of disloyalty to the classical world-view is
embedded in the very title of this "exemplary" Newtonian production. While
"the time machine" refers to the invention by which the Victorian scientist
moves into the far future, Wells's title invites at least two more readings.
Mark Rose points out that the machine of the title is also "the relentless
turning of history,...a diabolic mechanism whose workings lead to death"
(p. 101). Time is the machine which will eventually crush the life out of the
very universe. A third reading reminds us, self-reflexively, that the time
machine is the story itself, which creates the time of its particular narrative
universe. Although Wellsian time travel is a direct literalization of linguistic
metaphor-diachrony treated as synchrony-his story-as-time-machine
works its own considerable deconstruction upon the time machine of
Classical Physics.
Robert M. Philmus and David Y. Hughes have discussed in some detail
the subversion of the Newtonian world-view which takes place on the level of
narrative event in The Time Machine. They link this to the rising influence of
evolutionary theory in the latter half of the 19th century:

The newly posited entanglement of species in the destiny of one another

reopened the question of 'humanity's' relation to (the rest of) nature and to
the universe at large in part because it rendered the concept of isolation
(itself a spatial concept) anachronistic, if not obsolete. (p. 3)

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212 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 14 (1987)

Wells's repudiation of "the anthropocentric fallacy" (Philmus & Hughes: 8)

is demonstrated both in the disappearance of the human race from the
universe of the far future and in the disappearance of the Time Traveller him-
self from the universe of the story.26 What is of interest within the terms of
this present discussion is that there is a parallel attack against such a centrist
perspective in the text's ironically compromised sense of commitment to the
ideal of logocentrism as well, an ideal framed by the same episteme from
within which the intellectual conventions of scientific positivism were
developed. The very discourse of Wells's text subverts the notion of full
presence through its ironic treatment of this traditional metaphysical con-
cept. This can most clearly be seen in the development of the "frame story"
within which the events of The Time Machine occur. There is a constant ten-
sion between the logocentric idealism of Wells's Narrator and the events
which he reports at second hand.
Vincent Leitch explains that

the logocentric system always assigns the origin of truth to the logos-to the
spoken word, or to the Word of God. Moreover, the being of the entity is
always determined as presence: the 'object' of science and metaphysics is
characteristically the 'present entity.' In these circumstances, the full
presence of the voice is valued over the mute signs of writing....Writing
represents a fall from full speech. (p. 25)

It is this hegemony of Speech over Writing that Derrida criticizes in

Saussure; Wells's Narrator is a supporter of the same metaphysics of
presence and would undoubtedly agree with Saussure (p. 30) that "writing
obscures language; it is not a guise for language but a disguise." The "truth"
of the Traveller's story is apodictically proven through his own account of it,
a convention used in the 19th century to support the fictional truths of texts as
disparate as Jane Eyre (1848), David Copperfield (1850), and Dracula (1897)
(although, as a compendium of written reports, Dracula is already
contaminated by a fall from immediate presence).
Wells's Narrator is so extremely conscious of the truth-value of the
present voice that he enters the following disclaimer for his own second-hand
account:

In writing it down I feel with only too much keenness the inadequacy of pen
and ink-and, above all, my own inadequacy-to express [the] quality [of
the original narration]. You read, I will suppose, attentively enough; but you
cannot know the speaker's white, sincere face...nor hear the intonation of his
voice. (2:21-22; my emphasis)

Derrida reminds us that writing in the logocentric system is always the sign
of a double absence: "the absence of the signatory, to say nothing of the
absence of the referent" (OG, p. 40). The Time Machine calls particular
attention to these absences, since the only I/eye-witness disappears from the
text. Committed as Wells's novella apparently is to the tradition in which
Presence supports the truth of narrative event, it nevertheless informs us at
the end that "the Time Traveller vanished three years ago. And, as everybody
knows now, he has never returned" (12:117). This last-minute supplementary

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 DECONSTRUCTING THE TIME MACHINE 213

information changes the very essence of the narrative: the presence of the
Time Traveller has, in fact, always already been an absence. This is further
underlined by a strange and seemingly irrelevant occurrence which takes
place during the Time Traveller's exploration of the Palace of Green
Porcelain. He recounts that, "yielding to an irresistible impulse, I wrote my
name upon the nose of a steatite monster from South America that
particularly took my fancy" (8:89). The unnamed Traveller has at last named
himself, but that name exists on a monument from the past buried in a
museum in the future-never in the present. Presence is always already past
or to come: it is never immediate. If, as Derrida defines it, "a written signa-
ture implies the actual or empirical non-presence of the signer" ("Signature
Event Context," p. 194), then Wells's text here reinforces the absence at its
core, since not only the "signer" but his very signature is lost in time.

6. Parallelling this subversion of logocentrism in Wells's text is the

displacement of the human subject from the center to the periphery of natura
structure, and, finally, to a point outside the picture altogether. This
movement is analogous to the reversal of the evolutionary process which the
Traveller discovers to be the fate of humanity. If we view the time from
which the Traveller embarks as one in which humanity is the center and
meaning of the natural world, then the world of 802,701 is one in which the
Eloi and the Morlocks are less central and more marginal-that is, less
"human" and more "natural"-than before; in the distant future at the end of
the world, humanity is no longer even a peripheral presence but a complete
absence. In this extreme displacement of the subject, only the object, the
world of nature, remains. The "object" has overwhelmed the "subject" in a
deconstructive reversal of the traditional scientific conviction of the power of
the Cartesian res cognans over the res extensa. The Time Machine, to borrow
the words of Paul de Man, is an ironic treatment of "the purely instrumental,
reified character of [our] relationship to nature." It demonstrates that "Nature
can at all times treat [us] as if [we] were a thing and remind [us] of [our] facti-
tiousness, whereas [we are] quite powerless to convert even the smallest
particle of nature into something human" (p. 196). Under these
circumstances, the gestures of "observation" and "reason" become sadly
diminished and ineffectual. Humanity as transcendental signified, the ground
of the Time Traveller's explorations into the future, has been removed as part
of the narrative equation; and any "meaning" based on such a ground has
vanished with it.
This is supported by the ironic role played by the figure of the White
Sphinx in the text. The various references to the Oedipus myth in The Time
Machine (noted in Ketterer: 340-41, and Huntington: 44-45) are focussed
upon this inscrutably "colossal figure" with its "unpleasant suggestion of dis-
ease" (1TM 3:27); the answer to its ancient riddle is also the answer which
correctly interprets the world of 802,701. Only now the riddle of the Sphinx
might more suitably be: "What is missing from this picture?" In each case,
the answer is the same: "Man"; but while the original question bespeaks
presence, the revision in The Time Machine points to absence. The discourse
of Wells's text is also constituted by absence, so that the Time Traveller is a

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214 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 14 (1987)

correlative on the textual level of the absence repeated on the level of narra-
tive event.27 The end result of the Time Traveller's readings of the future is
absence, just as his absence is the final note in our reading of The Time
Machine.
In his early writings, Wells explored both absolutist and psychologistic
approaches in his discussions of the nature of time, oscillating between
concepts of cosmic determinism and human free will in his earlier versions
of The Time Machine. Philmus and Hughes (pp. 47-56) demonstrate the bal-
ance achieved in the final version between Wells's idea of "the universe
rigid"28 and the theory that time is a subjective phenomenon, stressing Wells's
ultimate adherence to a principle of complementarity in what has become the
definitive edition of the text. In like manner, John Huntington emphasizes
that "the coexistence of opposites is a fundamental element in all of Wells's
early fiction," and cites the juxtaposition of the world of 802,701 against the
present world of The Time Machine as one example of what he terms "this
two world structure" (p. 21). He goes on to argue that "by a series of fairly
simple transformations a number of other oppositions in Wells's early fiction
derive from this...structure" (p. 22), such as "the moral opposition" (p. 33)
represented by the scientist and the anarchist of "The Stolen Bacillus" (1895).
What is of interest here is Huntington's contention that the typical Wellsian
opposition, that between nature and culture, is an ironic one, maintaining as
it does "a constant and balanced reciprocity[;]...the one cannot exist without
the other" (p. 22). The two world(view)s which are woven together
throughout both narrative events and textual discourse in The Time Machine
function in a manner similar to Huntington's "two world structure." As he
concludes, "in such a structure neither world in itself holds our interest; what
is important is the two of them together and the linked oppositions they estab
lish" (ibid.). (We might observe here once again that oppositions as
oppositions tend to exist "in the eye of the beholder"; as a rule, they are
effects produced by difference rather than fundamental antitheses.)
The end result of the presence of these complementary world-views is a
play between narrative metonymy (The Time Machine as extrapolative work)
and textual metaphor (The Time Machine as figurative text), which is as
integral to its structure as is the play between present and future. There is an
implicit insistence upon this in the Time Traveller's invitation to his listeners
(which is also a self-reflexive moment of textual duplicity):

Take it as a lie-or a prophecy. Say I dreamed it in the workshop. Consider I

have been speculating upon the destinies of our race until I have hatched this
fiction. Treat my assertion of its truth as a mere stroke of art to enhance its
interest. And taking it as a story, what do you think of it? (12:112)

The Time Machine is essentially an exercise in aporia, an oscillation between

the desire for presence and the awareness of absence, between the objectivity
of extrapolation and the subjectivity of metaphor, between-one is tempted
to add, given its historical moment-the 19th century and the 20th century.
The Narrator's acknowledgment of human ineffectuality in the face of a
determined future-his "If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it
were not so" (12:117)-begins to take on additional resonance at this point, in

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 DECONSTRUCTING THE TIME MACHINE 215

view of the complementary existence of both world-views in the text.

Balanced against the deterministic universe of the Newtonian paradigm is the
refutation of that very paradigm. If the future is not, after all, a fixed and
determined one, then perhaps the refusal on the part of humanity to read time
as though it were inevitable might avert the devolution to which the Traveller
bears witness. 29
Certainly The Time Machine is about "making a difference"; its narrative
defamiliarizes apparently natural class-structures by taking them to their bio-
sociological extremes; its discourse achieves at least a partial displacement of
the logocentric system through a comparable act of deconstruction. Like the
(anti)philosophy of deconstruction, it both admits the ineluctability of our
metaphysical structures and effects a defamiliarization of those structures. It
acknowledges its inevitable inscription within the logocentric system of
Classical Physics at the same time as it inhabits that system "in a certain
way," with an ironic skepticism which questions some of its own fundamental
narrative commitments.
In 1933, in his "Preface to the Scientific Romances," Wells referred to
The Time Machine as an "assault on human self-satisfaction" (p. v). The stra-
tegic position occupied by The Time Machine accomplishes much more than
simply an overt attack upon 19th-century moral complacency, however; in its
deconstruction of some fundamental aspects of traditional logocentric dis-
course, it looks forward to the projects of much contemporary critical theory.
It attempts at once to displace a smug humanity from its privileged position
at the center of creation and to remind us of our ineluctable ties to the natural
world. And what, after all, is the aim of post-structuralist theory if not a
continuation, in another form, of that same "assault on human
self-satisfaction"?

NOTES

1. This essay was in part made possible through a grant from the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
2. See, for example, Larry Dwyer's essay, "Time Travel and Changing the
Past," for a discussion of the implications of the Einstein-Maxwell equations and Kurt
Godel's solutions to the field equations of general relativity "which permit closed
timelike lines to exist in spacetime" (p. 344). Dwyer's is only one of many
philosophical attempts to justify at least the logical possibility of time travel. Other
challenging discussions include David Lewis's "The Paradoxes of Time Travel" and
Paul Horwich's "On Some Alleged Paradoxes of Time Travel."
3. Donald Davidson points out that "most metaphors are false" (p. 39). For his
discussion of this aspect of metaphor, see "What Metaphors Mean," pp. 39-41.
4. Time travel is the result of a kind of linguistic extrapolation, then, even as it
functions as literary metaphor. I am indebted to David Ketterer for this observation.
5. Rose is applying the distinctions between metaphor and metonymy drawn by
Jakobson in his "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbance."
See especially, Jakobson, pp. 76-82.
6. The most overtly "metonymical" trend in SF today is probably cyberpunk,
which may be one of the reasons that it stands out as a "movement." The sensibility of

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216 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 14 (1987)

a novel like William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), for instance, is firmly rooted in
technological extrapolation, although it is by no means devoid of metaphorical
content. Cyberpunk seems to be an SF current flowing against the contemporary tide.
7. In his recent essay, "Futurological Congress as Metageneric Text," Robert
M. Philmus has discussed several aspects of generic self-reflexivity in The Time
Machine, demonstrating its value as a model in this context as well. The
heterogeneity of meaning of Wells's title, to which I refer below, is also a key factor
in Philmus's analysis. See especially pp. 313-15.
8. Terry Eagleton writes, for example, that "the genuinely theoretical'question
is always violently estranging, a perhaps impossible attempt to raise to self-
reflexivity the very enabling conditions of a range of routinized practices..." (p. 89).
9. Suvin's definition of the genre, which is the most useful yet devised, reads in
full: "SF is...a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the
presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal
device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical
environment" (pp. 7-8).
10. Carl Freedman has made a similar point about the conjunction of SF and
critical theory, which I will quote at length, because of its importance:

It is...a matter of the shared perspectives between SF and critical theory, of the
dialectical standpoint of the SF tendency, with its insistence upon historical
mutability, material reducibility, and, at least implicitly, Utopian possibility. In a
sense, SF is of all genres the one most devoted to historical specificity: for the
SF world is not only one different in time or place from our own, but one whose
chief interest is precisely the difference that such difference makes, and, in
addition, one whose difference is nonetheless contained within a cognitive
continuum with the actual....(p. 186-87)

11. This is never posed as a "Father Paradox." It is as if the SF community is

evading the Oedipal aspects implicit in its favorite model of temporal paradox.
12. Even a narrative line as uncomplicated as that of The Terminator (1984)
creates the potential for endless repetition which the viewer must tacitly ignore in
order to collaborate in the closure of the film.
13. The sign, for example, "is always the supplement of the thing itself" (OG, p.
145), at the same time as it stands in for the full presence which it both defers and
differs from. The aim of Derrida's argument is to deny the notion of origin, of the
unsupplemented entity. Nature is a construct of culture; speech of a larger writing
(hence Derrida's grammatological undertaking); "the thing in itself" of the sign used
to "replace" it. For a useful summary of Derrida's theories of the supplement, see
Leitch, pp. 169-78.
14. As Leitch explains, the always already "works to insert the supplement into
any seemingly simple or pure metaphysical conceptualization" (p. 171).
15. My initial thinking about the effects of Relativity on the development of the
time-travel motif was generated by Andrew Gordon's excellent essay, "Silverberg's
Time Machine." Gordon discusses, for example, the disparity of subject and form in
many time-travel stories: "the problem is that time-travel stories have been trying to
deal with twentieth-century conceptions of time in narrative forms borrowed from
the 19th-century" (p. 348). These narrative forms, of course, were developed to
explain the reality created by nineteenth-century scientific metaphors.
16. Since availing myself of Barthes' distinction between oeuvre and texte, I
have come across another instance of the same application to quite different
circumstances. This suggests to me that the Barthian treatment of oeuvre and texte is
a flexible notion with potential for a wide range of applications. See Patrice Pavis's
discussion of oeuvre and texte (pp. 2-12).

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 DECONSTRUCTING THE TIME MACHINE 217

17. In "Signature Event Context," Derrida draws attention to the political

character of such oppositions:

an opposition of metaphysical concepts...is never a confrontation of two terms,

but a hierarchy and the order of a subordination. Deconstruction cannot be
restricted or immediately pass to a neutralization: it must...put into practice a
reversal of the classical opposition and a general displacement of the system. It
is on that condition alone that deconstruction will provide the means of
intervening in the field of oppositions it criticizes and that is also a field of non-
discursive forces. (p. 195; emphasis in original).

18. In her Preface to Of Grammatology, Gyatri Spivak neatly exemplifies the

dual effects of differance in her discussion of the nature of the sign: "Such is the
strange 'being' of the sign: half of it is always 'not there' [the signified, which is
constantly deferred] and the other half always 'not that' [the signifier, which is always
different from that which it signifies]" (p. xvii).
19. As Spivak points out, however, "the description of the object is as
contaminated by the patterns of the subject's desire as is the subject constituted by
that never-fulfilled desire" (p. lix).
20. In his "Preface" to the 1931 Random House edition, Wells draws attention to
his application of the Second Law of Thermodynamics in The Time Machine (pp.
ix-x).
21. See Philmus's discussion of this point in his "The Time Machine: or, the
Fourth Dimension as Prophecy" (pp. 534-35).
22. British physicist Michael Shallis writes: "the world exists for us only in the
form we clothe it. Our descriptions or explanations define our world. Our technology
manifests our explanations" (p. 197).
23. Borges demonstrates a more pragmatic approach to the subject, however, in
his ironic "A New Refutation of Time." After developing arguments which seem to
deny the objective reality of time, he nevertheless concludes that "denying temporal
succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent
desperations and secret consolations....Time is the substance I am made of....The
world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges" (p. 222). Borges thus
neatly sums up the apparent impossibility of reconciling contemporary scientific
descriptions of "reality" with our human experience of it.
24. The separation of private from public time, or as Hilary Putnam phrases it,
"the relativistic notion of proper time" (p. 669), has been recognized as the only route
logic can take to defend the philosophical possibilities of time travel. See, for
example, Putnam's essay, "It Ain't Necessarily So" and David Lewis's "The
Paradoxes of Time Travel."
25. Even this "obvious" reading suggests the play of differance: Philmus and
Hughes (p. 48) draw attention to the fact that Wells's "invention" includes not only
the machine itself, but "the notion of travelling through time" and, even more
importantly, "its rationale."
26. The formal irony of The Time Machine has elsewhere been identified by
Bernard Bergonzi, for example, in his "The Time Machine: An Ironic Myth," and by
Hughes in his "H.G. Wells: Ironic Romancer."
27. 1 am here distinguishing between two aspects of The Time Machine as
narrative fiction, based upon Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan's structuralist distinctions
(pp. 3-4). The first is that aspect of "written discourse," or "text," through which "all
the items of the narrative content are filtered"; in the case of The Time Machine, the
text is permeated by the absence of the Time Traveller, necessitating a secondary
Narrator and a second-hand "translation." The second aspect is that of the "story,"
"the narrated events" of the fiction, which in the present instance include the final

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218 SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 14 (1987)

disappearance of humanity from the world as well as the "actual"

the Traveller himself.
28. Although the original version of Wells's essay entitled "The U
has been lost, he includes what might be considered an "abstract" of t
the first book version of The Time Machine, published in the United
Holt. This "abstract" probably gives a much truer idea of the origina
does the reconstruction undertaken by Wells nearly 40 years after th
Experiment in Autobiography (see Philmus & Hughes, pp. 4-5, 51-53)
29. I am indebted to David Y. Hughes for this reminder of poss
readings of the Narrator's conclusion.

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RESUME

Veronica Hollinger. La deconstruction de la machine du temps.-Les me'thodes

analytiques de deconstruction de Jacques Derrida offrent une charpente efficace pa
laquelle on peut examiner certains aspects du motif du voyage dans le temps. La
science-fiction et la deconstruction s'occupent du processus de la defamiliarisation,
l'un par le deplacement du pre'sent sociallpolitiquelculturel, I'autre par ses efforts en
vue de demasquer la nature conventionnelle des .<gestes a penser>> de la tradition
m'taphysique occidentale. De plus, un vovage dans le temps opere toujours une
deconstruction de certaines ide'es classiques concernant la nature et la structure du
temps.
En premier lieu, il est toujours ne'cessaire de 4ire>> le temps avant d'ecrire une
histoire de voyage dans le temps: en tenant compte d'un groupe de metaphores
suggerees par Roland Barthes, on peut conclure que les histoires qui illustrent la
definition classique de Newton ont tendance d lire le temps comme . texte>>. Dans ce
paradigme, la structure du temps est lineaire, homogene et consecutive alors que le
temps einsteinien est une expression de la ..post-structure>>, inde'termine'e,
he'terogene et decentree. Ainsi on peut identifier la relativite' avec le jeu libre et avec
la differance qui sont les (non)principes de la *post-structure>> de Derrida.
A premiere vue, La Machine a explorer le temps de H.G. Wells parait lire le
temps comme .<wuvre>> classique. Cette nouvelle est structuree autour d'une lecture
extrapolative du temps futur et parait soutenir que les pouvoirs de la science peuvent
decouvrir tous les secrets du monde naturel. Cependant, parce qu'il s'agit d'une
histoire d'une voyage dans le temps, ce texte fait une de'construction de l'ide'e d'un
temps absolu en de'pla'ant l'idee du <<maintenant>> de son lieu fixe sur l'axe temporel
tout en renversant la position privilegiee du temps public sur le temps prive. De plus,
le texte de Wells poursuit sa propre deconstruction du point de vue classique. Dans
son essai, .<La redecouverte de l'unique>>, Wells anticipe plusieurs concepts
importants de Derrida, en particulier l'idee qu'il faille renverser les structures
metaphysiques de l'inte'rieur. Ceci est realise par La machine a explorer le temps,
qui, par conse'quence, est un texte ironique. Le renversement des valeurs
scientifiques du l9eme siecle qu'il poursuit au niveau de recit trouve un complement
au niveau du discours par la deconstruction de la metaphvsique de la presence. Le
resultat est un jeu entre la metonvmie du recit (le texte lu comme wuvre
extrapolative) et la metaphore du texte (le texte lu comme wuvre figurative) et ce jeu
fait partie integrante de la structure au meme titre que celui entre la pre'sent et le
futur. (VH)

Abstract.-Both SF and deconstruction are involved in the processes of

defamiliarization, the former through its displacement of the sociallpoliticallcultural
present, the latter through its attempts to expose the conventional nature of the

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 DECONSTRUCTING THE TIME MACHINE 221

"gestures of thought" of the Western metaphysical tradition. In a

itself always achieves a deconstruction of certain classical notions
and structure of time.
It is first necessary to "read" time before writing a time-travel
terms of a set of metaphors suggested by Roland Barthes, one can conclude that
stories which support the classical Newtonian definition tend to read time as "work"
("euvre"), while stories which explore the Einsteinian paradigm of physical reality
tend to read time as "text" ( "texte"). Within the classical paradigm, time is linear,
homogeneous, and uncentered. Relativity may thus be identified with free play and
differance, the (non)principles of the Derridean "post-structure. "
At first glance, H.G. Wells's The Time Machine appears to be an exemplary
reading of time as classic "work." Wells's novella is structured around an
extrapolative reading of time future, and seems to support the conviction that the
powers of science will ultimately uncover the secrets of the natural world. Howeve
because it is a time-travel story, The Time Machine necessarily deconstructs an
notion of absolute time, displacing the concept of "now" from its fixed point on th
time-line, and subverting the privileged position of public over private time. In
addition, Wells's text undertakes its own particular deconstruction of the classical
world-view. In his early essay, "The Rediscovery of the Unique," Wells demonstrates
his anticipation of several key Derridean concepts, in particular the conviction that
metaphysical structures must be underminedfrom the inside. This, in effect, is what
is achieved in The Time Machine, which, as a consequence, is a profoundly ironic
text. The subversion of 19th-century scientific values which it undertakes on the level
of narrative event is complemented on the level of textual discourse by its
deconstruction of the metaphvsics of presence. The end result is a play between
narrative metonymy (The Time Machine as extrapolative work) and textual metaphor
(The Time Machine as figurative text), which is as integral to its structure as is the
play between present andfuture. (VH)

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