War of the Worlds, the impossible encounter

Meeting and proper meeting

In classical language, encounter is understood in two different ways. There's the randomness of the encounter, which, as a prelude to the unfolding of a fictional world, manifests itself at the edge or across the narrative road. The encounter then constitutes the nodal point of the narrative, at the crossroads of the prestiges of the imagination and the arbitrariness of the narrative on the one hand, and the structural necessities of composition, redundancy and narrative loops on the other. Every scene in a novel thus obeys the double constraint of the encounter : chance of the encounter, it disrupts the narrative, halts it, distracts it  necessity of the encounter, it structures the narrative, the frame, the rhythm.

To this first, structural, use of the encounter, we must add a second, illustrated by this second spring of language : to encounter justly, to encounter well, is to guess, to find the truth, to access one's hidden knowledge, to unmask what lies hidden behind the visible spectacle of things. Encounter then presupposes not a hazard, but an investigation, not a road, nor more generally the geometry of a visible, measurable, describable, detailable space, but the paradoxical space of an entrenched knowledge, the space of invisibility of an essential enigma, through which the subject confronts himself, measures himself against his intelligence, defies his own inner darkness, turns the nonsense of what offers itself to his gaze into a revelation that his insight undoes.

This meta-level of the just encounter thus constitutes a knowledge, and a space of invisibility : this space belongs neither to the stage, nor to the theatrical spectacle  it is not tableau  it resists the eye that seeks to measure it, the discourse that strives to characterize it. It offers itself to us as a smooth enigma, as a mute compactness, as a challenge to the narrative institution  to encounter it well is to restore the signifying asperities of place, to tie to these asperities the chains of a discourse of explanation, and thereby restore the scenic visibility of events.

So, as much as the level of the encounter, the structural level of its scenic visibility, deploys a theatrical device, articulated to the narratological game of storytelling, so much the meta-level of the just encounter evades this visibility and manifests an entirely different device, which encompasses the first : it's the device of the narrative itself, in which the stage participates only as a possible stage, as an anecdote whose fictional substratum is not a story, but a world, is not a visible place, but an invisible and enigmatic knowledge.

The articulation of these two levels of encounter (structural and fictional) runs through the entire history of representation. But it takes on different forms in each era, and takes on new semiological and ideological stakes. Here, we focus on the new articulation that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, with the invention of cinema in Lyon by the Lumière brothers, but only finds its characterized form in the most recent productions of cinematic fiction.

The meeting of worlds : the birth of science fiction

G. H. Wells's War of the Worlds, published in London in 1898, is a textbook case for this study : it gave birth to a genre, science fiction, and thus served as a model for an entire fictional production that deployed its potentialities. The 1952 Hollywood adaptation, based on a screenplay by Barré Lyndon, was directed by Byron Haskin and produced by Georges Pal with very limited means. /// Steven Spielberg's 2005 re-creation, which on the surface marks a scrupulous return to Wells's story, transvestite and watered down in 1952, but in reality brilliantly hijacks its expectations.

However, despite these detour, in these three representations of the same fiction, the encounter is indeed the central and critical issue of the narrative, which deconstructs it by identifying the modernity of the world with the impossibility of the encounter. Through this impossibility, the narrative device is taken in reverse, revealing its hidden springs.

The practice of film adaptation cannot be identified with that of translation, even if unfaithful : one does not pass from one language into another  cinema is not a language, but a medium. Adapting a novel for the cinema, like painting a scene from a story, is a creation in its own right. What the novel provides the filmmaker, then, is not a text, but a world  it's not words, a style, a language, but images, places, figures  in a word, all the somewhat disjointed elements of a visual Meccano to which the filmmaker, through his script, his editing, will confer a narrative framework, a grammar, a syntax. We thus arrive at the paradox that, when a novel is transferred to the screen, the novel provides the visual material, and the filmmaker textualizes it.

I. The fiction of the encounter

This paradox reveals an essential dimension of fiction: fiction functions as a world, meaning that it is neither linear, progressive nor articulated outside itself. Global, insular, total, fiction imposes itself atemporally as an exclusive, enveloping universe.

Insignificance of men

The effectiveness of Wells' fiction lies in its perfect realization of this program. The encounter of the Martian invaders (who in Spielberg become more distant aliens) with terrestrial humanity is not part of the story of a voyage, nor the history of a civilization, nor the epic of a conquest  even less of a resistance. There is no Iliad, no Grand Narrative. Brutal and blind, this encounter is very quickly identified with the disaster of humanity.

" - It's not a war, says the gunner. It's never been a war, any more than there is a war between men and ants. " (II, 7, 535¹.)

The gunner's remark to the narrator, as London is deserted and humanity appears in disarray, reveals a disproportion. Similarly, while land weapons were still giving voice :

" Did they realize that our millions of individuals were organized, disciplined, united for the same work ? Or did they interpret these bursts of flame, the sudden flights of our shells, the steady investment of their camp, as we might interpret, in a hive of disturbed bees, a furious and unanimous assault ? " (I, 15, 477.)

There is no encounter because the Martians don't see us. Our organization, our logic is insignificant to them. Compared to them, we hold no commensurable knowledge likely to arouse curiosity or insight. There is, in us, nothing to encounter.

" Thus, in the same methodical way that men employ to smoke a wasps' nest, the Martians covered the whole country, towards London, with this strange suffocating vapor. " (I, 15, 480.)

Ants, bees or wasps, mankind is not an object of encounter. Punctiform, indifferent, indistinct, humanity doesn't know the tragic story of a catastrophe, a disaster and an end  it discovers with astonishment its total lack of interest. No object, no encounter  no encounter, no story. Wells' fiction is that of an impossible encounter, constituting a real challenge for the construction of a narrative.

Martian invisibility

If Martians don't see us, don't consider us, our relationship with them reciprocally reveals the same impossibilities. This is the starting point of the story : " while men absorbed themselves in their occupations² ", they did not imagine, before " the arrival of the Martians ", that " human things (this world) were observed in the most penetrating and attentive way " (I, 1, 409). Men do not see that they are seen ; and they are not seen as men, but as a world, i.e. a habitable and, as it were, unoccupied territory. Even when they arrive on Earth, Martians remain invisible because they are indescribable, and thus constitute a spectacle-limit :

" And invisible to me, because it was so small and so far away, advancing more rapidly and steadily across the unimaginable distance, nearer by the minute by so many thousands of kilometers, came the Thing they sent us (came the Thing) " (I, 1, 412). 
" However, the strangest of all things that, from infinite spaces, came to earth, must have fallen while I sat there, visible if I had only looked up as it passed. " (I, 2, 415.) 
" The Thing itself lay, almost entirely buried in the sand among the scattered fragments of the fir trees " (ibid.). 
" [Ogilvy] went down into the hole, very close to the mass, to see the Thing more closely. [...] All at once, after a sudden leap of his mind, he connected the Thing with the explosion he had observed on the surface of Mars. " (I, 2, 416.)

" It was at that moment absolutely clear in my mind that the Thing had come from the planet Mars. " (I, 3, 419.)

Ogilvy has met his match. But no sooner is the Thing identified with this projectile object from the planet Mars than the invisibility of its interior opens up :

" Something in the cylinder was unscrewing the top ! " (I, 2, 416.)
" And there's something inside. " (I, 2, 417.) 
" My mind wandered at its whim around the possibilities of a manuscript locked inside and the difficulties its translation would raise, or of coins, models or various representations it would contain and so on. " (I, 3, 419.)

We're faced with a hollow cylinder from elsewhere, and we don't know what's inside : the fictional creation of a space of invisibility provides the possibility of a narrative hook  finding clues there, the pieces, the fragments of a story, the possibility of an adventure. But this is an illusion. Like the crime scene in the first detective novels written at the same time, the Thing delivers nothing to see, and the search for clues is always disappointed. The space of invisibility encloses brutality and death, beyond signs. It resists its own theatricalization:

" What a misfortune that they make themselves so unapproachable says [the neighbor of the /// narrator]. It is curious to know how one lives on another planet : one could learn something from it. " (I, 9, 435.)

And the narrator insists :

" The Martians let nothing of themselves be seen. " (P. 437.)

Basically, the fiction imagined by Wells boils down to this : Martians occupy the earth without there ever being an encounter. This occupation is inexorable, necessary, not circumstantial : it is not a matter of narrative ; it is a constitutive fact of our world, of the fictional world assumed by Wells.

Fiction as the presupposition of narrative : Burton and Kepler

To establish this idea, Wells in fact prefaces his narrative with a quotation from Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy :

" But who shall dwell in these Worlds, if they be inhabited ?... Are we or they Lords of the World ?... And how are all things made for man ? " (S 2, 2, 3, Air rectified)
But who would move into these worlds, if they're uninhabited ?... Who, of them or us, are the Lords of the World ?... And why would all things be made for man ?

Burton expands on (and off-centers) a passage from Kepler's Songe:

" Quid igitur inquies, si sint in caelo plures globi, similes nostræ telluris, an cum illis certabimus, quis meliorem mundi plagam teneat ? " (ed. 1635, fol. 29.)
What will you say, then, if there are several planets in the sky, similar to our earth ; shall we engage in combat against them, to know who should occupy the best region of the world ?

In a way, the whole novel is simply the development, the metalepsis of its exergue and the humanist decentering it contains, as if Kepler and Burton were giving the logical formula to which Wells' fictional world can be summed up. This formula pre-exists the novel, just as the novel pre-exists its cinematic adaptations : logical or visual, fiction is not what representation manufactures, produces, but on the contrary it constitutes its prerequisite, and provides its conditions of possibility.

Indubitably, the stability, the logical consistency of this prerequisite poses a problem : on close inspection, Wells' world, Burton's meditation and Kepler's Dream are in no way equivalent. On the contrary, each responds to the other. Kepler does not speak for himself, but dialogues with a fictitious interlocutor to demonstrate that, among the infinite possibility of habitable worlds, we are ultimately housed in the best of places, closest to the sun. Instead, Burton adopts, against Kepler, his virtual contradicter's skepticism of this Catholic anthropocentrism. The formula But who shall dwell in these Worlds paraphrases the style of Isaiah's prophecy, And the Wolf shall dwell with the lamb (Isaiah, 11, 6), whose counterpoint it takes. For Wells, likewise, the earthly lamb and the Martian wolf cannot cohabit, or even meet.

Presenting the exergue as by Kepler quoted by Burton, whereas it is by Burton criticizing Kepler, constitutes a first amalgam ; but above all, if Burton and Kepler envisage a comparison of worlds, Wells starts from the idea of their incommensurability, and therefore the impossibility of their meeting : the title of his book, The War of the Worlds, preserves the memory of this fictional prerequisite that the narrative has modified, and even in some ways turned against itself : any /// history tends to demonstrate that between incommensurable worlds, war is not possible. Wells' fiction consists in the deconstruction of the Keplerian certamen. It is accomplished not in negation, but in the dissemination, diffraction, pulverization of itself : no War, but a multitude of encounters, or more exactly of disordered shocks, unforeseen backlashes  no plurality of worlds, but the brutal projection of our world turning against us.

II. Structure of the encounter

Something in the work therefore turns against the logical and visual data, against the imaginary mechanics, the fictional world that motivated it. This return is dialogic : the narrative enters into dialogue with the fiction that conditions it  through this dialogue, it builds its autonomy and unfolds itself as its own imaginary structure.

The vector of the reversal of fiction, considered as a pre-existing world, into the structure of the narrative, introducing a dialogical game with its conditions of possibility, is imagination. Wells, then Haskin, then Spielberg, all imagine the same (or virtually the same) fictional world in different ways. This is not simply a subjective difference between personalized artistic universes. We might as well say it straight out: in this sense, the imagination of our creators is poor; from thesis novels to commercial cinema, there's hardly any room for original imaginative fantasy. If things are imagined differently, it's primarily because they have to be made to coincide with different structures of representation, themselves conditioned both by the technical revolution in means and by ideological demands as to the content of representation.

The Lumière brothers' model : retro-projection

When Wells wrote The War of the Worlds, in 1898, the Lumière brothers had just invented cinema in Lyon (1895). We won't dwell here on the actual device of cinematic projection, but rather on the content of these first short films that toured the world, L'Arrivée d'un train à la Ciotat, La ville de Lyon, Une sortie d'usine à Lyon, L'Arroseur arrosé, La Mer.

The train, the streetcar, the double-decker bus, the cyclist come towards us, projecting out to meet us. The waves of the sea rush towards us. The shot is fixed, with few camera movements: the whole effect is one of reversed projection, which seems to jeopardize our position as spectators. Rushing towards us, the object explodes the fourth wall of the theatrical spectacle  it pulverizes the scenic screen.

This pulverization is immediately and very materially visible : female workers burst from the factory gates, passengers emerge en masse from the train, the station platform is populated by bustling men, the streetcar tracks are crossed by motley vehicles, snowballs explode around the cyclist, the gardener's water jet squirts. The surface of the representation is no longer focused : movement brings to the image the scattering, circulation, dissemination of objects. In Le Repas de bébé, the mother drinking her coffee does not converge her gaze on the child being fed by her father, as would an equivalent scene by Greuze, for example Le Paralytique. Absorbed or distracted, attentive and inattentive, she unravels the scene, carrying it away in the frenzied rhythm of modern life.

Although Wells doesn't mention cinema at any point in The War of the Worlds, we find exactly this device of representation. It's not rockets or spaceships that bring the Martians to Earth, but projectiles fired from an " immense cannon, /// huge hole dug in their planet " (I, 1, 411) :

" ... no one in the world thought of this fatal projectile. That same night, there was another burst of gas on the surface of the distant planet. I saw it just as the chronometer marked midnight : a reddish flash around the edges, a very slight projection of the outlines. " (I, 1, 413³.)

The projectile thus first appears as a faint diffraction of light at the back of the fixed field of the telescope pointed at Mars to accomplish its projection towards us and materialize as a Thing inhabited by the overactive swarm of Martians placed inside. As in the Lumière brothers' short films, the projection is reversed, endangering the spectator-subject; the projected Thing is not inscribed in the fixed frame of a scene, but scatters and constitutes the space of the representation itself, of its swarming. Here, it's not so much a question of the Martians' incessant bustle as of Wells' representation of men  non-spectators, they see nothing, they miss the spectacle to go about their business, to swarm like bees, wasps, ants.

Second characteristic of the model : saturation

We understand the fascinating effect that these projections of vehicles and figures could produce, in the Lumière brothers' short films, on the viewer confronted for the first time with moving images. On the other hand, the insistence on the swarming of crowds and the saturation of space by human activity is less obvious. The figures gradually come to occupy the fixed space cut out by the camera lens: they imprint themselves on this surface, which for the eye is apparently stable and immobile, in the same way that dark spots gradually imprint themselves on paper during photographic printing. The film thus mimics the process of indexical image-making.

The saturation of objects recurs obsessively in The War of the Worlds. From the very first page, men are compared to " transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water " (I, 1, 409). But the description of the countryside ravaged by the Martians proceeds from the same principle of luminous saturation :

" Between these three main centers of light, the houses, the train and the burnt-out country towards Chobham, stretched the irregular spaces of dark countryside interrupted here and there by intervals of fields smoking and burning faintly  it was a very strange sight, this black expanse, cut by flames, which recalled more than anything else the furnaces of glassworks in the night. " (I, 11, 446.)

Space becomes discontinuous. On its surface emerge races : on one side, centers of light, on the other, black traces and zones of shadow.

The narrator then crosses deserted zones, marked by the scattering of abandoned objects :

" Yet, from place to place, some object had been lucky enough to escape - here a white signal on the railway track, there, the tip of a bright, cool greenhouse amid the rubble. " (II, 11, 450.)

and further :

" here and there, objects that people had dropped - a clock, a slipper, a silver spoon and poor precious things like that " (I, 12, 451).

Parallel to this, on the roads of exodus, the narrator encounters convoys overloaded with objects :

" They overloaded a handcart with dirty bundles and wretched furniture " (II, 12, 453).

A man seeks to carry away " more than a score of pots containing orchids " (II, 12, 454). A peasant couple /// " had piled ", on " a small hut door ", " all they could find of domestic objects " (II, 12, 455). Another man is carrying a sack of gold sovereigns, which gets torn apart, the coins scattering in the crush of the road (II, 16, 490)  the man will die crushed by a car while trying to recover his treasure. All that remains of him is a " dusty object, blackish and immobile, crushed and crushed under the wheels " (II, 16, 491).

The scattering of figures and objects is linked to a panoramic, de-subjectivized vision of things. Wells opens his book from the point of view of Mars : this world was beeing watched. During the debacle, he dreams of an airship to embrace the tiny swarming of " scattered multitudes " (1, 17, 494) on the run :

" If on that June morning, someone had been in a balloon above London, in the middle of the blazing sky, all the roads that go north and east, and where the infinite tangles of streets end, would have seemed dotted with black by the innumerable fugitives. " (I, 17, 492.)

At sea, it's the same scattering of boats fleeing to France, " a dense multitude of boats trafficking with the people of the shore and extending as far as Maldon " (I, 17, 495) ; " The fleet of fugitives was scattering towards the northeast " (I, 17, 499).

The generalized dissemination of objects visually deconstructs the encounter  the encounter presupposes, semiologically, the differential play of line  the encounter draws the contours of a demarcation  it theatricalizes an abolishing frontier. The encounter is a matter of pen and drawing. To this differential line, this semiotic cut, the photographic indexical surface opposes the deliberately indistinguishable multitude of points in which every line, every difference dissolves into indecisive polarities, hesitant circulations, mobile encumbrances and precarious overloads.The mass of the crowd, the paths of the debacle, the aerial view, then replace the singularity of face-to-face, the limits of the stage and the security of the ambushed gaze.

The Heat Ray

But it wasn't enough for Wells to imagine the invasion and debacle  he also had to imagine the means of Martian superiority : Wells endows the invaders with two highly significant weapons, the Heat Ray and the Black smoke. The Heat Ray appears very early in the story, as a response to the embassy of the three boldly curious to the first cylinder :

" Suddenly, there was a sudden jet of light (a flash of light), and a luminous grayish smoke emerged from the hole in three distinct puffs, which, one after the other, rose to lose themselves in the still air.
This smoke - it would perhaps be more accurate to say this flame - was so brilliant that the sky, deep blue above our heads, and the moor, dark and misty with its clumps of pine on the Chertsey side, seemed to darken abruptly as these puffs rose, and to remain darker after their disappearance. " (I, 5, 425.)

The Heat Ray is described as a kind of flame-thrower, with a jet, jerky puffs. But Wells insists on the flash of light : flash of light, their faces flashed (the faces of the three adventurers were illuminated), as if some invisible jet... flashed into white flame  ; a... blinding flash of light   I saw the flashes of trees and hedges... suddenly set alight; the flashing bushes it touched; dumbfounded and dazzled by the flashes of light. /// light).

The French translation dissolves the implacable imaginary logic of these flashes of light.It was in 1850 that the photographic flash was invented, its intense light produced by the combustion of magnesium wire and accompanied, like what Wells describes from his Heat Ray, by abundant white smoke. The invention was perfected in 1887 by Adolf Mieetke and Johannes Gaedicke's flash powder.

But at the same time, a German, Wilhelm Röntgen, discovered X-rays, X-Rays, whose light is capable of penetrating opaque bodies and making bones appear : his article " Sur une nouvelle sorte de rayonnement " published in Würzburg in December 1895 toured Europe.

The Heat Ray imaginatively combines the illumination of the flash, its brutal light projection and the disseminating effect of the X-ray. We find the double movement of the cinematographic model.

The Black Smoke

But Wells doesn't over-exploit the fictional possibilities of the Heat Ray. He dwells much longer on the Black Smoke. The invention of poison gas was not yet a reality, but it was on the agenda, as evidenced by the Declaration of The Hague in 1899, in which the signatories prohibited the use of projectiles emitting asphyxiating or noxious gases. When, in 1915, the Germans, circumventing the declaration they had signed, used these gases in the trenches, they diffused them by means of chlorine cylinders. But it was these cylinders that Wells imagined as Martian projectiles.

But Black Smoke also refers to the pollution mists that perpetually bathed the city of London at the time.

The tripods

Wells' third invention, the tripods built by Martians weighted down by Earth's gravity to move with ease and speed, installed in invulnerable hulls. The tripods, as Alfred Mac Adam has shown, echo the English vogue for the bicycle, which Wells, ugly and puny, had just managed to tame...

All these imaginary elements - the projectile cylinders, the Burning Ray, the Black Smoke, the tripods - did not belong to the pre-existing data of fiction. We have attempted to show that they in turn define a structural logic of the narrative, ordered semiologically according to a (retro-)projection/dissemination polarity that articulates the fictional impossibility of the encounter with the mediological and ideological data of Wells's world.

This structural logic enters into a dialogical play with the fictional world from which it springs, transforming it dialectically : the battle of the worlds, the decentering of humanity in the universe persist as a prestigious fictional framework, as a reverential reference to the humanist cultural tradition, but no longer constitute the essential data of the fiction. The Fiery Ray, a mere accessory in Wells's story, will become the horrifying heart of fiction in the cinema. Worlds are no longer important, and neither is man's position. It is in relation to himself that man becomes off-center, far more than in relation to other creatures. Wells initiates this transformation by suggesting that Martians are merely humans more advanced in evolution, and therefore closer to the end :

" We humans, with our cycles and road skates, with Lilienthal flying machines, with our sticks and guns, are still only at the beginning of the evolution at the end of which the Martians have reached. In reality, they have turned into mere brains, putting on various bodies according to their different needs, in the same way as we put on our various costumes and take a bicycle for a hurried errand or an umbrella if it's raining. " (II, 2, 514.)

We find here the imaginary structure of inverted projection : the Martians, these super-evolved men, project themselves onto /// us, their origin, and disseminate themselves in the overactive multiplicity of their technological garments. There is no longer anybut a single world, projected onto itself, crushed in its own encounter.

III. The encounter along the way : narrative restoration

The narrative loop

However, if the macrostructure of the encounter collapses in on itself in The War of the Worlds, it re-emerges at the discursive base of the narrative, at the nodal points of the narrative hooks. On their way to escape, the protagonists have a series of encounters that punctuate the narrative: the narrator's meeting with the artilleryman (I, 11, 447), then with the vicar (whom he kills; I, 13, 462), then again with the artilleryman; the narrator's brother's meeting with the two ladies in the carriage, whom he saves from the brigands in the great picaresque tradition. All these adventures are themselves embedded in the circular trajectory of the narrator, who sets off from his home in Woking with his wife, leaves her in Leatherhead (I, 10, 440) to find her again in Woking at the end of the narrative (II, 9, 556), so that on a narrative level the novel boils down to a marital separation and reunion, the last sentence of which coldly gives the substratum :

" And the strangest thing of all, ecore, is to think, as I hold her hand in mine again, that I have counted my wife and she has counted me among the dead. " (II, 10, 559.)

Or this narrative circle, which circumscribes the most eccentric encounters, is in no way exported in the two film adaptations of 1952 and 2005. In Haskin's case, the heroes are a young couple who form in the face of events and seal themselves in the aftermath of tragedy, according to the imposed framework of post-war American comedy. Dr. Clayton Forester marries the vicar's daughter, who dies a banally pathetic death that bears no relation to the miserable farce Wells had intended for him.

The 1952 narrative is nonetheless an encounter, with an identical function of closing the narrative. In Spielberg's film, Ray, the divorced father (named after the department he's trying to escape from), has to babysit his two rebellious children for a weekend. In fictional terms, this weekend is both the time of the alien invasion and, in narrative terms, the time of the separation between the children and their mother, who must be reunited at the end of the adventure. The principle is still that of a narrative circle that completes and circumscribes the fictional explosion. But the stakes of the encounter have changed once again: neither a marital separation, nor an amorous encounter, this time the story bears the anguish of broken families, identified with an exra-terrestrial cataclysm.

While formally, on a narrative level, the encounter always operates the same loop, the narrative loop is itself constrained and informed by the ideological structures of the story, which condition its content.

Fictional autonomy

The three versions of The War of the Worlds that we have set in series with their humanist origins (Kepler and Burton) enable us to distinguish three levels in the narrative device implemented each time in a different way, albeit on a common fictional basis.

The level of fiction is the most stable level of the device, since fiction pre-exists the text and provides it with its constitutive data. Fiction is considered here in contrast to narration, i.e. not as the unfolding of the story being told, but as the world in which this story is inscribed. The world logically pre-exists the story, which is why fiction structurally pre-exists narration. The fictional world seems to provide the atemporal, mythical data of the narrative : in La Guerre des mondes, this world is partially identified with the other world, of the Martians, with the " more ancient worlds " (I, 1, 409) that observe us. This world of fiction cannot meet the real world: it is immeasurable to it.

The narrative is a device of representation. It is not directly engaged with the real, but it mimes this engagement by means of a fictional artifact : this is why every representational device is self-reflexive, i.e. it both gives a representation (it tells a story, unveils a world) and it represents this representation (it shows the way, the means of this representation). In a sense, every representational device is a meta-dispositive.

This self-reflexivity doesn't manifest itself as a generic rule, doesn't impose itself as an instruction manual  rather, it exerts pressure on the narrative, whose content it inflects, informs. The form of the narrative device tends to be reflected in the content of the fiction  this is how The War of the Worlds, given a priori as the story of an encounter between two worlds, turns in Wells into a demonstration of the impossibility of any encounter whatsoever between incommensurable worlds. What this signifies from the point of view of representation is not only the old incommensurability of the real (humanity) and its representation (Martians, metaphors for humanity), but above all the overwhelming superiority of fiction, its cold hegemonic autonomy, which succeeds the classical insularity of fictional worlds, entrenched but mappable, susceptible to description.

This hegemonic autonomy, this incommensurability, manifests itself in the presence of the Thing, an overwhelming presence outside language, a space of invisibility inaccessible to the gaze. The Thing is a hole in representation, a depression in reality through which fiction manifests itself. The development of the Red Grass brought to Earth by the Martians represents this depression  the Red Grass does not substitute one ecosystem for another  it proliferates only to die  its luxuriance, a new expression of the dissemination that structures the space of representation, soon turns into decay :

" Eventually, the Red Grass succumbed almost as quickly as it had grown. Soon a kind of infectious disease, believed to be due to the action of certain bacteria, took hold of these vegetations. [...] The Red Grass fell into putrefaction like something already dead. The stems turned white, withered and became very brittle. At the slightest touch, they broke and the waters, which had favored and stimulated their development, carried their last vestiges to the sea. " (II, 6, 528.)

The plant invasion is succeeded by the crumbling : this widespread dissemination is not so much the result of a fictional imaginary as of a new organization, or rather occupation, of the space of representation, which is no longer Euclidean/geometrical. Space is marked indicially, and discontinuously, on the technical model of photographic revelation, on the quantum model of the particle jet, on the political model of mass society.

Structure of the narrative

Fiction is an anterior world, atemporal, always already there  separate from reality, detached from history in progress and the socio-political contingencies of the moment, it is nevertheless indirectly, but profoundly conditioned by them : Wells's Black Smoke of the Martians figures the smog of the English industrial revolution ; Haskin's film begins with archive footage of the Second World War and implements (unnecessarily, of course) the atomic bomb against the Martians  Spielberg opens hostilities with a general failure of car ignition, whose integrated circuits can't withstand the magnetic storms provoked by the aliens.

It is clear, however, that these elements of the narrative belong neither to the fictional world proper (they are already events, contingencies, an unfolding of facts), nor to the narrative circuit that traverses this world (the narrator reunites with his wife, the /// doctor marries the girl, the father brings his children back to their mother). They constitute an intermediate level, which already describes a world, but is still a matter of event contingency.

Historicized, ideologized, they form the structural articulation of the narrative device. The structural level can be recognized by its polar organization : it defines a semiotics of narrative, or as it were a skeleton. Wells's Black Smoke of the Martians is opposed by the pollution of humans, which it mirrors; Haskin's dematerializing ray of flying saucers is opposed by the nuclear fire of the American army, which, in another way, it represents even in its ineffectiveness; Spielberg's cannibalistic ingestion of humans by tripods is opposed by the abject consumption of food by Ray and his children, but here too, this one represents that one. Through these polarities, the story draws on the very structure of the society it intends to represent: this structure is fictionalized (constituting a world) and narrativized (unfolding a story). The articulation of these three levels constitutes the narrative device.

Notes