Time Machine and The Invisible Man (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (2 page)

The Time Machine
(1895) and
The Invisible Man
(1897) are now more than a century old. Yet they endure as literary texts, radio plays, and movies, because they appeal directly to two of our deepest desires: immortality and omnipotence. The time machine would allow us to escape death and gain knowledge of the fate of the earth, while invisibility would enable us to go and come as we please, under the noses of friends and enemies. At the same time, both fictions show us the dangers of fulfilled wishes: The Time Traveller discovers the future of humanity is not bright but hideously dark, while the Invisible Man drowns in the madness brought about by his own experimentation.

Of course, what Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) wanted to express in these fantasies and what generations of readers have made of them are two radically different things. Erroneously labeled “science fiction,” and tricked out in their film versions with all kinds of fanciful devices with flashing lights and ominous buzzers Wells never mentions, they are really tales that enact the author’s theories and speculations about human society, human nature, and natural history in allegorical fashion. That is, the “science” in Wells’s fictions is nothing more than stage machinery. But, ironically, it is the machinery that has come to dominate our collective imagination.

There is nothing unique in this. Think of
Gulliver’s Travels
(whose long-forgotten original title is
Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World),
a book that Wells read as a boy and reread throughout his life. In 1726 Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) satirized English political parties, religious quarrels, theories of world government, and science, but his work was so grounded in eighteenth-century British culture that today’s readers need extensive preparation to fathom it. The story of Lemuel Gulliver’s visits to lands populated by giants or intelligent horses has, however, become a staple of children’s literature. The same applies to
Robinson Crusoe
(1719), by Daniel Defoe (1660-1731). Only scholars see the relationship between Crusoe’s shipwreck and Defoe’s ideas on the fate of the middle classes during the Restoration, when Charles II returned to England in 1660. Defoe’s message and all his political intentions have been lost, but his story endures as a wonderful demonstration of self-reliance. In the literature of the United States, we have the example of Herman Melville (1819-1891) and his
Moby Dick
(1851): Most readers learn about the ambiguous struggle between good and evil embedded in the work long after they’ve read a novel about nineteenth-century whaling and the strange characters engaged in that dangerous work.

Much the same has taken place with Wells’s
Time Machine
and
The Invisible Man.
Wells cloaked his ideas about the future of society and the role of science in the world so well that readers simply do not see those issues and instead read his short novels as examples of a kind of fiction based on the simplest of propositions: “What if it were possible to travel through time by means of a machine?” or “What if it were possible to make oneself invisible?” In a world—one we share with Wells despite the fact that more than a hundred years separates the moment he published these two works from our own age—when scientists seem to make discoveries every day, it requires no great leap of imagination, no “willing suspension of disbelief,” to accept the basic premise of each text.

This is what differentiates Wells from Jules Verne (1828-1905), author of
Voyage to the Center of the Earth
(1864) and
Around the World in Eighty Days
(1873). Wells, in a 1934 preface to a collection of his early fictions comments on why they are not comparable to Verne’s writings:

Wells links himself to a tradition, but at the same time he misleads the reader. It is true, as he says in the same preface, that “The invention is nothing in itself,” by which he means that the applied science of Verne is of no interest in his kind of tale. It is also the reason why rediscoveries of Verne, especially films, are always set in the past: His projections became fact very quickly. By the same token, this explains why Wells’s inventions and their ramifications will always be modern.

This choice of fantasy over plausible scientific projection is also what separates Wells’s kind of fantasy from writing that depends on magic or the supernatural to shock the reader: There are no werewolves or vampires in these novels, and Wells does not break the laws of nature, except in the instance of the basic proposition animating each fiction—time travel or invisibility. This swerves Wells away from authors of the “Gothic” tradition, like Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, or Charles Maturin, whose primary intention is to arouse the reader’s fear. That same intention appears in Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
(1897), published in the same year as
The Invisible Man,
though, ironically, vampires have come over the years to have their own symbolic values, from being metaphors about sexuality to being symbols of the way capitalists drink the lifeblood of the proletariat.

If we wonder about Wells’s immediate antecedents, we would probably have to begin, following his lead, with Mary Shelley (1797-1851).
Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus
(1818), despite the myriad films based on it, really presents the problems of creation—artistic or scientific—disconnected from traditional notions of morality or religion: creation for the sake of creation or creation for the sake of ego, an idea quite relevant both to the Time Traveller, whose mysterious machine resembles nothing more than a Victorian motorcycle (if such a thing is imaginable) with no visible mechanism, and to the Invisible Man, who labors to make himself invisible only to satisfy his own selfish needs.

The affinities between Mary Shelley’s protagonist, Frankenstein, whose means for infusing life in a pieced-together body Shelley leaves as vague as the time machine in terms of technique, and Griffin, Wells’s invisible protagonist, are clear: Each isolates himself from society to pursue a scientific goal that can only be understood as a triumph of will. Frankenstein has no real altruistic purpose in creating his monster; he only wants to copy God—like the titan Prometheus in Mary Shelley’s subtitle, who fashions man out of clay—by creating a creature who will adore him as its creator. Griffin at first simply wants to see if he can do in fact what he thinks he can do in theory. Only after he becomes invisible does he become a terrorist who threatens the established order of society.

It is that part of Griffin’s story that most concerns Wells, himself unhappy with the status quo and desirous of bringing about changes in society. What Wells hoped would one day come into existence was a socialist state organized along the lines of a factory, but a factory in which labor and management were a single body. He radically opposed the Marxist idea that current society was based on the opposition between an owning class of capitalists and a working class of proletarians. In fact,
The Time Machine
is a voyage to a future in which the Marxist concept has become fact and society has evolved into two classes of beings: subterraneans who feed and clothe surface dwellers who spend their lives singing, playing, and making love. The horror of this relationship is that the laborers, the apelike Morlocks, use the pretty but brainless Eloi as food.

Wells was certain that Marxist class struggle would produce a working class that was perfectly organized but concerned only with promoting its own interests. Once a kind of harmonious balance was struck between capitalists and proletarians—once the workers got all they wanted and could somehow manage to tolerate the existence of an idle class of owners—both classes would slowly degenerate into subhumans because their intelligence would no longer be challenged.

Wells clearly had Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel
Looking Backward
(1888) in mind as he wrote and rewrote
The Time Machine,
which began in 1888 as a series of sketches called
The Chronic Argonauts.
In his romance, Bellamy (1850-1898) has his hero fall asleep in 1887 and wake up in the year 2000. State ownership has replaced capitalism, and all citizens work for the state. The transformation of society also brings about the transformation of the people, with the result that morality and culture reach new heights. H. G. Wells was simply not convinced that a communism offering a work-free utopia was the best thing for humanity. In fact, his own puritanical work ethic taught him that such a scheme would result in a society of drones living in a mediocre world kept barely functioning by a well-organized but self-interested working class—Marx’s proletariat. Without a spur to force humanity into making new discoveries and expanding its physical or mental frontiers, Wells felt, we would be content with whatever satisfied our basic needs, but nothing more.

The Time Machine,
then, stands as a pessimistic response to the optimism animating nineteenth-century thought and locates Wells squarely in his historical context. Three thinkers—Hegel, Marx, and Darwin—define the optimistic mind-set of the nineteenth century, itself a logical response to the great strides being made by technology and to the lessons if not the realities of the two great revolutions of the late-eighteenth century, that of the United States in 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770—1831) established the predominant concept of how history was thought to be shaped in the nineteenth century. His idea that there is a discernible pattern in history, one in which more and more people enjoy freedom, reflects the European movement away from autocratic, monarchic government to constitutional monarchies in which ordinary citizens are given at least a limited voice in their own governance. Hegel looks back to a past when there is only one free person in society, the autocrat who holds all power, and forward to a time when freedom is shared by many.

How this takes place, Hegel says, is through conflict, the other idea he establishes as a fact of historical thought in the nineteenth century. Hegel’s notion of conflict does not reflect a chaos in which myriad forces strike out at one another but a clash of opposed ideas that crystallize at a certain moment in history, ideas embodied in individuals, parties, and nations. Out of conflict arises a new order, one that combines or synthesizes principles found in both of the opposing forces.

Karl Marx (1818—1883) translated Hegel’s principles into a concrete projection about the future. Observing that technology has acquired a history of its own, that its development is independent of ideology or past history, Marx announced a new era. The nineteenth century, Marx says, is the age of industrialization, in which entrepreneurs and capitalists use industrial technology to organize production for profit. The result of that organization, which, according to Marx, had taken place with astonishing speed, is the creation of a two-class society: those who own the means of production (the capitalist owners of industry) and those who work in their factories (the proletariat). These classes are fundamentally opposed to each other, and their clash will inevitably result in the annihilation of the capitalist class and the triumph of the proletariat, who will seize the means of production and use it for their own benefit. This victory will see the birth of a new world order in which industry and most property will be owned by a state whose only reason for existing will be the well-being of its citizens, a state that will eventually wither away.

Charles Darwin (1809—1882) revolutionized nineteenth-century science with his theory of evolution. Darwin’s idea, that organisms, man included, change over time from one state or condition to another, challenged the theological view that human beings were created by God in His image. Darwin’s principle—that, for example, modern horses began in small animals like
eohippus
and, over millennia, evolved into
equus
—declares that evolution is the success of those animals that best meet the challenges of their environment through transmission to successive generations of genetic variations favoring survival—a concept he termed “natural selection.” This theory becomes a lens through which scientists tried to understand the history of the natural world.

It also produced the false corollary “survival of the fittest,” used by those, following Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), who sought to apply Darwin’s ideas to human society—so-called “social darwinists”—to show that there are superior and inferior human types. This perversion of Darwinian thought influenced the views of H. G. Wells on society and shows that he was as much a product of his age as he was a shaper of it. That is, Wells, fascinated by technology and science (his intellectual training was almost totally scientific), gathered into himself the progressive, evolutionary theories that dominated the nineteenth century but transfused them with yet another nineteenth-century idea: entropy.

Loosely stated, entropy describes a tendency in dynamic systems to lose energy and degrade. We might think of a car battery as an example: When new, the battery is able to start the automobile and keep its lights burning. Over time, the chemical reaction that produces the electricity in the battery weakens until finally the battery is dead. Speculative thinkers—notably, in the case of Wells, his teacher, Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895)—applied this idea to nature and humanity. Where Darwin’s ideas of human evolution seemed to open a path leading humanity to an almost angelic state, this theory suggests we are susceptible to decay and decline, an idea Wells puts into practice in his first novel,
The Time Machine,
in which the Time Traveller discovers humanity some eight hundred thousand years in the future to have degenerated into little more than animals.