H.G. Wells. The Time Machine/The War Of the Worlds. Del Ray Books, 1986.
Virginia Woolf
once said that, unlike H.G. Wells, she wanted to write books about
the human soul. She probably did not spend much time reading Wells.
This paperback edition contains both The Time Machine and
The War Of the Worlds. Wells
may not have plunged as deeply into the depths of the human psyche as
Woolf did but it is obvious that the human soul plays a part in these
two classic short novels that he wrote at the end of the nineteenth
century. Certainly the soul of his era is deeply embedded in these
stories too.
The Time
Machine is short and simple. A
nameless narrator and protagonist, simple called the Time Traveler,
builds a time machine and travels to the future. At first he
encounters an Elysian utopia inhabited by a race of munchkin-like
people called the Eloi. They live simple, happy lives without work
and eat nothing but fruit. Their language consists of two-word
sentences, having nothing but nouns and verbs in their vocabulary.
Gender differences are non-existent and they lack intellect and
curiosity. They live without conflict but ultimately are little more
than happy-go-lucky idiots,
This
utopia turns out to be not so great. The other side of it comes out
when the Time Traveler discovers the Morlocks creeping around at
night. Nocturnal and chthonic,
they live in underground tunnels, operate machinery, and eat meat.
The plot takes a dark turn when the narrator discovers what the
relationship between the Eloi and the Morlocks truly is. (This theme
later gets taken up in The War Of the Worlds).
The
story is a precise, albeit an overly simplified, encapsulation of
modernist ideas. The Eloi and the Morlocks are descendants of humans
that evolved into two separate species, exemplifying Darwin’s
theory of evolution and environmental adaptation. The Eloi were once
the capitalists and aristocrats that owned all the property and the
Morlocks were the laborers who did all the work that made the Eloi
rich. After living so long in distinct environments, they split into
two races. This evolutionary outline explains Marx’s theory of
class conflict as well (H.G.
Wells was a socialist, by the way) with
the Eloi representing the bourgeoisie and the Morlocks the
proletariat. Freud’s structure of the psyche easily fits in here
with the Morlocks being the id, the Eloi being the superego, and the
Time Traveler the ego that mediates between the two. There
is a bit of Nietzsche also
since the easy life of the capitalists caused the Eloi to degenerate
into a race of physical and intellectual weaklings while the
Morlocks learned how to control and dominate them. The colonialist
mentality can be seen as well in the way a reckless adventure travels
to an exotic locale and condescendingly classifies the groups he
meets as either happy simpletons who sing and dance all day but have
a strong aversion to work on the one hand and violent, gruesome
savages on the other hand.
The War Of
the Worlds tells the story of
Martians who invade the countryside on the outskirts of London. The
philosopher narrator escapes to relative safety and barely survives
while watching the Martians destroy everything he knows. By pairing
advanced technology with alien invaders, Wells comments on how
foreign and potentially destructive technology can be to human
society. Prophetically, the Martians use devices that anticipate
things that would later be invented. Robots, flying machines, and
chemical warfare play roles in the story. The Martians also fight
with heat rays that work suspiciously like lasers.
But
The Time Machine is
not just simply a story of evil invaders fighting good people; the
narrator enters a poignant world of solitude and alienation as he
flees from the violence of the aliens who
introduce him into the psychological era of modern anxiety,
existential dread,
and the atomization of human communities that was so new at the turn
of the 20th
century. After surviving a Martian attack, the first person he
encounters is a minister from the church who quickly loses his faith,
degenerates into insanity, and becomes a burden to the narrator who
is trying to survive. Symbolically, Wells shows how the Christian
church has ceased to serve a useful purpose in modern society.
Next,
he meets up with a soldier who
is akin to Nietzsche’s ubermensch. He
has realized that the Martians plan on farming humans for food like
industrial cattle and pigs, hence
the stupidity and passivity of the masses;
he plans to build an underground civilization that will one day rise
up and conquer the Martians. The passage provides backstory to the
origins of the Eloi and Morlocks in The Time Machine and
ties the two stories together.
Stylistically,
neither novella is strong. Wells tends to have long paragraphs of
explanation that interfere with the flow of narrative events; like
chunks of sinew and cartilage in your beef stew, they do not break
down or digest easily and feel out of place. He also writes in overly
descriptive sentences that drag on longer than they need to. The
narrative shifts in The War Of the World seem
a bit clunky too; passages about crowd panics and stampedes are
narratively taken over by the philosopher’s
brother and the transitions do
not work so well. The crowd scenes in London are actually the most
poorly described sections of these stories. H.G. Wells was far ahead
of his time in terms of ideas but the Victorian literary idiom did
not suit his writing needs so nicely.
One
underlying message is clear. Modern humans should not take their
civilization for granted. The human place at the top of the food
chain is not guaranteed, Great Britain’s status as the dominant
nation could end, and our advances as a species could very well sow
the seeds of our destruction. The Eloi, Morlocks, and Martians are
merely inverted forms of the best and worst aspects that humanity has
to offer.
Virginia
Woolf committed suicide. H.G. Wells not only lived to be 80, with
diabetes no less but sparked an entire genre of literature as well.
He did not write the first science-fiction stories but he gave that
style a boost that inspired a multitude of other writers and artists.
If that has nothing to do with the human soul than
maybe we are lost as a species after all.
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