Sukob između fetišizma i naučnog racionalizma i rasno pitanje u ranim pripovetkama H. Dž. Velsa: „Priča iz kamenog doba”, „Džimi Goglz — bog”, „Leteći čovek”

Abstract

This paper analyzes three early stories by H. G. Wells: “A Story of the Stone Age”, “Jimmy Goggles the God”, and “The Flying Man”. The basic arguments of the paper are, firstly, that the three stories contain a conflict between two different worldviews – namely, fetishism (as being characteristic, in a synchronic sense, of tribally organized non-Europeans, and, in a diachronic sense, of the prehistoric ancestors of all modern-day nations) and scientific rationalism (as being characteristic solely of contemporary Europeans) – and, secondly, that the stories “Jimmy Goggles the God” and “The Flying Man” also implicitly contain Wells’s specific stance on the race issue. It is concluded that, with regard to the former question, the author presents the European, scientific and rationalistic worldview as triumphant, whereas in relation to the latter question, he presents himself as particularly tolerant and humane to the dark-skinned non-European races. Since the prevailing sociological and anthropological concepts of the nineteenth century were based on bourgeois, emphatically racist, unilinear sociocultural evolutionism, in the aforementioned stories Wells presents himself as a selective, critical mind that takes only the acceptance of global technologization and the enlightenment of non-European races, but rejects the affirmation of the racially based hierarchization of the world utopia from unilinear evolutionism. In interpreting these works, we do not solely rely on the texts of the analyzed stories, but also use intertextual relations between these stories and Wells’s later utopian and reformist opus.