The following piece on The Time Machine by H.G. Wells is really a sequel to my original article on The Time Machine published here in May. This article deals with the actual book directly and explores further, in some depth, the main themes running through this iconic work. Nearly 125 years after the novella was published, the works of analysis and interpretation are still being composed and published, and I see no sign of this diminishing. So here is my small though (I hope) thought-provoking contribution.
After a brief discussion with an assemblage of bourgeois characters about the fourth dimension and the mathematics of time we find ourselves transported with the Time Traveler into the future and crash-land in a verdant park landscape in the year 802,701 AD. The Time Traveler is not named by the author for reasons I shall discuss later. As he climbs down from his machine, towering above him, anachronistically, is the White Sphinx. This is at the very opening of the narrative and must be seen as highly significant.
Moreover, when the Time Traveler is in the presence of the Sphinx throughout the book his psychic state changes from awe through dread and despair to a final resolve to overcome his anxiety through reason alone, much like Oedipus in his encounter with the Greek monster. First, he meets the Sphinx, and solves her riddle: ‘What is that which in the morning goes upon four feet; upon two feet in the afternoon; and in the evening upon three?’ It’s a very famous story, and a very famous riddle, although that very fame should give us pause: Oedipus’s answer is ‘man’, who crawls on all fours in his infancy, strides on two legs in his maturity, and walks with a stick in his dotage.
It is the trajectory as much as the actual answer here that is relevant to Wells sphinxian novella: the passage from our collective infancy, through maturity, and into the decay of the species: Eloi and Morlocks, rabbits and crabs, into something even less definite and so to terminal nothingness. It means that The Time Machine can be read as a variation of Oedipus’s encounter with the Sphinx on the road to Thebes as it is imagined by Sophocles in his tragedy. However, the answer to the riddle that Wells provides us with is not ‘man’ but ‘mankind’. Remember that Wells did not name his hero and the idea that he could stand for ‘everyman’ is highly plausible and does fit well with the riddle being set by Wells.
The Time Traveler wanders through the vestiges and remnants of once great civilizations and we are witnesses to the rise and fall of human society that ends in the complete devolution of man into a beast that consumes its own kind. Homo sapiens have slowly, like a child progressed forward, then developed at its maturity into a great world civilization but finally has succumbed to rottenness and decay through the unremitting Laws of Evolution and Natural Selection.
The first beings he meets near this sinister colossus are the Eloi. Wells took their name from the Archaic Greek which meant vain, worthless or useless. They live in a neo-Hellenic communist paradise somewhat reminiscent of the Arcadia created by William Morris in his utopian novel News from Nowhere (1890). Everything is provided for and they have no lack of food, clothing or shelter yet they are obviously unable to provide these items for themselves which is very perplexing to our Time Traveler until he meets the Morlocks. There is no doubt as to how much the TT loathes these bestial creatures as the description excoriates them. When the TT finally discovers that the Morlocks are cannibals and that they are preying upon the defenceless Eloi, his anger and hatred overflows
To reach this stage of devolution Wells has applied Darwinian theory (or neo-Darwinianism) to the Marxian dialectical materialism of industrial proletariat and its antithesis the bourgeoisie. Conventional critical response has been to read the Victorian aristocracy as the Eloi and the Moorlocks as the proletariat or underclass, with The Time Machine being a Swiftian satire on the class relations of fin-de-siècle Britain, its inherently violent nature and the interminable works of utopian fiction now being produced. This, at first glance, Utopian community is nothing but a future dystopian stage in the devolution of the human race into prey and predator. No society, Wells is warning, can escape the brutish aspects of human nature defined by classical bourgeois rationalists such as Machiavelli and Hobbes.
The mirage of William Morris’s mellow and beautiful Arcadianism is not tenable once we see the whole society together. Without biology or politics entering into the narrative any type of Utopia arrived at will be nothing but pure fantasy. But this only raises more issues for Wells and his attempts later in his life to create a Modern-day Utopia. What political system is best suited to provide the framework for a 20th century Utopia? And how much social and biological engineering of the human race (eugenics) will be needed to establish a peaceful and sustainable outcome given the Darwinian nature of the evolutionary process?
However, this seemingly straightforward viewpoint and classification has been literally turned upside down and reinterpreted in recent years to fit better with a more modern Marxist analysis. So, the nature of class relations in 19th Century to a socialist like Wells was that the rich exploit the poor by expropriating their labour and enriching themselves only. The poor are immiserated and left to work themselves to death without any safety net or welfare provision. The situation in 802,701 is that the passive and powerless Eloi are preyed upon by the technologically superior and more powerful Moorlocks. They own the means of production and use this industrial base to provide everything for the Eloi. In return the Eloi provide the Moorlocks with every part of their being, literally. They are consumed by the Moorlocks and the process continues ad infinitum and will only end when the universe stops through entropy at Terminal Beach.
There is nothing to stop this process as the Eloi’s are in the throes of false consciousness which is suggested by the Time Traveler believing himself to be in a Utopian paradise until he starts asking some very simple questions. The answers to which reveal the true horror of this world. Automation, we presume, having done away with the need to exploit the proletariat for their labour, what remains is to literalize the predatory nature of all class exploitation by literally devouring the underclass. It is the ultimate in class warfare.
That readers tend to agree with the Time Traveler, and think of the Eloi as the aristocrats, has to do with two features of the way Wells styles them: they are freed from the need to work; and they are beautiful. But on the former count there’s nothing stopping us reading this as a commentary upon the exigencies of full machinic automation: a near-future society in which all physical needs are supplied by technology.
However, that society may well be closer than we think and the Eloi and Moorlock dichotomy envisaged by Wells may now, today, present us with a worrying third interpretation. We are all gradually becoming like the Eloi: reliant for everything upon the machine and becoming unable to function without it. And if that machine should also become aware? Will humanity become batteries for The Matrix? Will the machines devour us?!
Even such a monstrous creature as the Sphinx does not eat her own but consumes human flesh. The Morlocks have become the living embodiment of the Sphinx and they have set our Time Traveler his very own riddle which he must solve to escape the fate of the Eloi. He will be successful to a point, but he must change his mask to attain his freedom. The TT’s adventures are undoubtedly reminiscent of the emergence, establishment and predicament of the scientist in the modern world.
As Dr. Victor Frankenstein was once named ‘The Modern Prometheus’ by his literary creator, Mary Shelley, so too can our TT, who has literally become a deus ex machina who has brought the original Promethean gift of fire and its modern iteration, technology, once again to the human race. The Promethean identification is sealed in the Palace of Green Porcelain episode, when he steals a matchbox from the museum of earlier humanity, whose huge architectural remnants might be those of the Titans.
However, our Prometheus will not pass the fire deliberately on, but can only this time use it for defense against the hunting Morlocks, in a vain attempt to save Weena, the tiny Eloi he has fallen in love with. The fire he has started, quickly becomes unstoppable and his love perishes (we are led to believe) in the resulting conflagration. The Time Traveler cannot control the fire much like Victor Frankenstein cannot control his fire once it is unleashed. Is this not the very essence of the Promethean myth?
At least he can take some comfort that Weena was not eaten by those living Sphinxes, but his own safety and the recovery of his machine is now paramount. The answer to the riddle set for him by the Moorlocks is that the machine has itself already been devoured by the very physical manifestation of the God they worship and the last towering reminder of human civilisation-the White Sphinx. His machine lies within the ‘belly of the beast’ and he will need to combine both Oedipus and Prometheus to escape his fate.
Our Time Traveler will combine both the answer given by Oedipus in the original story told by Sophocles ‘man’ with the modern iteration of Prometheus first suggested by Mary Shelley ‘science’ to realise himself as ‘the man of science’ and to finally reveal the story of The Time Machine as an allegory of the nature of knowledge (and scientific knowledge in particular) and another warning to the modern-day Prometheans.
Marc Barham
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