SOURCE: Huntington, John. Chapter on The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells. In The Logic of Fantasy: H. G. Wells and Science Fiction, pp. 41-55. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

[In the following essay, Huntington perceives Wells's view of life in the future found in The Time Machine as a simplification of issues relevant at the time of the novella's publication.]

Wells's use of balanced opposition and symbolic mediation as a way of thinking finds its most perfect form in The Time Machine. If the novella imagines a future, it does so not as a forecast but as a way of contemplating the structures of our present civilization.¹ At one level The Time Machine presents a direct warning about the disastrous potential of class division. But at a deeper level it investigates large questions of difference and domination, and rather than settling the issues, it constructs unresolvable conflicts that return us to the central dilemmas that have characterized the evolutionary debate. …

The Time Traveller's insights into the benefits of civilization are paradoxical. In his first interpretation of the meaning and structure of the world of 802,701 he finds a complex pleasure in the union of idyllic ease and evolutionary decline:

To adorn themselves with flowers, to dance, to sing in the sunlight; so much was left of the artistic spirit, and no more. Even that would fade in the end into a contented inactivity. We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity, and, it seemed to me, that here was that hateful grindstone broken at last!

(p. 43)

If there is regret at lost keenness here, there is also joy at escaped hardship. By the end of the novella, when he realizes that the decline has not conferred quite the benefits he anticipated and that the structure of civilization has degenerated into a primitive horror in which the Morlocks, the slothlike descendents of the laboring class, slaughter and eat the Eloi, the species descended from the upper classes, he entertains a different set of conflicting emotions. Now he balances a sense of the ironic justice of this situation with an irrational sympathy for the humanoid Eloi:

Then I tried to preserve myself from the horror that was coming upon me, by regarding it as a rigorous punishment of human selfishness. Man had been content to live in ease and delight upon the labours of his fellow-man, had taken Necessity as his watchword and excuse, and in the fulness of time Necessity had come home to him. I even tried a Carlyle-like scorn of this wretched aristocracy-in-decay. But this attitude of mind was impossible. However great their intellectual degradation, the Eloi had kept too much of the human form not to claim my sympathy, and to make me perforce a sharer in their degradation and their Fear.

(p. 81)

If the moral view, which would find satisfaction in the Eloi enslavement, is not adequate to the situation, it nevertheless works against the sense of pity, which is also, in itself, inadequate. Such nodes of conflicting insights and feelings are the expressions of tensions developed by the brutal oppositions on which the whole novella is built.

We can isolate two large, separate realms of opposition which operate in The Time Machine. One, essentially spatial, consists of the conflict between the Eloi and the Morlocks. Though the Time Traveller first views the 802,701 world as free from opposition, the novella traces his discovery of the radical oppositions that actually define that world; what begins as a vision of benign decay and carefree pastoral ends up as a vision of entrapment wherein the economic divisions of the present have become biological and territorial. The other opposition is temporal; it entails the opposition between the civilization of 1895 and a set of increasingly less civilized, more purely natural worlds of the future. Of these, the world of the Eloi-Morlock conflict is of course the most important. Towards the end of the novella the Time Traveller moves further into the future; he sees darkness and cold advance on the earth until life is diminished to huge, sluggish crabs and then finally to a football-sized organism that hops fitfully on the tideless shore.²

Because the Time Traveller arrives in 802,701, not by a process of incremental progressions, but by a single leap, the structure of the novella poses a puzzle: what is the relation of the future to the present? The Time Traveller and the reader are engaged in the same activity: they try to understand the nature of the temporal contrast presented and then to discover connections. Like evolutionary biologists, they must first understand what distinguishes two species and then they must reconstruct the evolutionary sequence that links them; the difference between Eohippus and the modern horse is like that between the modern human and the Eloi or the Morlocks. Unlike the biologist, however, the Time Traveller and the reader are engaged in negotiating a pattern more complex than a simple genealogical sequence. We must figure out what bonds exist amidst the differences between the Time Traveller and his and our distant grandchildren. The mental act of reconstructing the evolutionary connection involves more than just taxonomic description; it is not simply a perceiving of a pure two-world system; it entails examining a whole series of ambiguous moral conflicts.

During the course of the novella, as the truth reveals itself and the meanings of the discovered oppositions change, one relation between the present and the future persists: the future is a reduction of the present.³ The future offers a simplification of issues that is much like that which occurs in conventional pastoral: economic and social complexities have disappeared, and the issues of the world are those determined by elementary human nature. But to compare The Time Machine to a pastoral is somewhat misleading; though both diminish the importance of civilized forms and conventions, in The Time Machine the main agent of change is a biological regression not found in the conventional pastoral. The inhabitants of the future have lost much of the erotic, intellectual, and moral energy that we generally associate with human beings and which it is the purpose of the usual pastoral to liberate. The society of the future is reduced to what in 1895 might be considered childish needs and pleasures, and it is under the terms of this radical diminution that the systems of spatial opposition work.

Such a reduction certainly simplifies social issues, but the first question it raises is how human or how bestial are these distant cousins of present-day humanity. The split between the Eloi and the Morlocks raises this question from opposite directions: the Eloi seem subhumans, the Morlocks superanimals. The Time Traveller certainly considers Weena the most human creature he finds in the future, but as he acknowledges, he tends to think of her as more human than she is.⁴ Her humanoid appearance tends to obscure how much she is a pet rather than a human companion. At the other extreme, the Morlocks, though they too are supposedly descended from present-day humanity, because they look like sloths, always seem bestial to the Time Traveller. For much of his time in 802,701 he does not realize their importance; he treats them first as “ghosts,” then as lower animals, then as servants to the Eloi. Even at the end when he comprehends their domination of the Eloi he never really conceives of them as human. Thus the novella sets up a symmetrical illusion: the Eloi, because of their appearance, seem more human than they are; the Morlocks, again because of appearance, seem less.

The Time Traveller's relation to the Eloi engages special problems because it involves, not simply identification, but affection across the abyss of species difference. Critics have found the Time Traveller's attention to his “little woman” disturbing and have treated the hints of repressed sexuality, of pedophilia, as a novelistic blunder.⁵ I would suggest, however, that the unease generated by this relationship is apt, for at issue is the whole puzzle of human relations to nonhumans. The Time Traveller himself is confused by Weena. He can treat her as an equal and contemplate massacring Morlocks when he loses her, but he also forgets her easily. The tension and the ambiguities of their relationship derive from the impossibility of defining either an identity or a clear difference. To render such a state Wells plays on the inherently ambiguous relationship between adults and children.

The puzzle of Weena's sexuality is reflected and reversed by the Time Traveller's relation to the Morlocks. When he first meets the Eloi he allows them to touch him: “I felt other soft little tentacles upon my back and shoulders. They wanted to make sure I was real. There was nothing in this at all alarming” (p. 30). Similar behavior by the Morlocks, however, leads the Time Traveller to an hysterical smashing of skulls. At first, the touch of the Morlocks is hardly distinguishable from that of the Eloi: it is as if “sea anemones were feeling over my face with their soft palps” (p. 57). But this same intimate approach becomes sinister as the Time Traveller becomes aware of the Morlocks' real intent, and he feels horror later, at night in the forest, when he becomes aware that “Soft little hands, too, were creeping over my coat and back, touching even my neck” (p. 93). The reasons for the different reactions to this intimate approach are obvious; what we need to observe, however, is the area of identity here. If the repressed sexuality of the relation with Weena leads to a passive and childish activity (weaving flowers, dancing to burning matches), the Morlocks' almost seductive aggression leads to an antipathy which generates violence and ingenious invention.⁶

The central mystery of Eloi and Morlock humanity and of the Time Traveller's relation to it is emblematized by the statue of the sphinx that the Time Traveller sees when he first arrives in 802,701. The symbol works at a number of levels. It stands for the paradox of a progress that is a regression: the future is represented by a monument that we associate with early civilization. Thus, the future is a return to the past, to the childhood, so to speak, of human society. The sphinx herself is also a poser of riddles: when Oedipus met her she asked him the riddle of man who appears in different forms. This connection is clearly in Wells's mind, for no sooner has the Time Traveller seen the statue than he begins speculating about the possibilities of the human form in this distant future. But it is in her own appearance that the sphinx raises the most perplexing puzzle, for she represents a literal combination of human and animal: woman and lion. We ask whether Weena is a woman or not, whether a Morlock is a beast or not; here in the sphinx we have a creature which is both. The sphinx marks the cut; it is a union of a crucial opposition and, like the flying man, points to the possibility of transcending the contradiction. This important mediating symbolism is repeated in a striking but diminished form by the statue of a Faun which the Time Traveller later discovers (p. 77), another literal mixture of human and animal.⁷

Just as the sphinx and the faun render visually the puzzle of the relation of human and beast and offer a union of the supposed dichotomy, they also denote the areas of human and animal activity that have been diminished by the decline into the future. The sphinx, the poser of riddles, is a figure of the very intellectual prowess that the childish creatures of the future lack. Similarly, the faun embodies the sexual energy that is noticeably absent. Thus, while the statues link the human and the animal, they do so ironically; they suggest a potential for accomplishment and for civilization of which the Eloi and the Morlocks are biologically incapable.

While such issues of the relation of present-day humanity to these future creatures pervade the novella, the opposition between the Eloi and the Morlocks themselves, of which the Time Traveller becomes increasingly aware as he learns more about the future's underworld, has an important social meaning. In the split between the two species we see a split intrinsic to technological civilization itself. This is no dark secret of the tale, of course:⁸ the Time Traveller's final interpretation of how the split developed refers directly back to the division of labor in contemporary England. But the values that initially caused the split persist in the far future, and, in ways that are not generally recognized, the two species represent and at the same time parody values that belong, not merely to British capitalist civilization, but to all technological cultures. Though the Morlocks are hairy, have an apelike posture, cannot bear light, and live in burrows of a sort, any simple equation of them with the lower animals won't do. They live amidst thudding machines, and their habitat is artificially ventilated. The passage down which the Time Traveller climbs to visit them has a ladder with iron rungs. Unlike the Eloi, the Morlocks function as a group; they are individually weak, but they cooperate. Thus, though their specific intellectual and emotional capacities remain largely unknown, symbolically they subsume one aspect of what we admire in civilization: organized technological mastery. And the Eloi with their trivial, careless aestheticism embody the alternative leisure aspect of civilization, the pure delight in beauty, gaity, play. They live for these and as much as possible avoid even thinking about necessity and pain. The Morlock-Eloi split may be the result of today's class divisions, but in its final form it expresses two high and apparently contradictory values of human civilization: mastery and aesthetic leisure.⁹

The landscape of the future becomes an extension of the contradictions represented in Eloi and Morlock. The surface of the countryside, while much hedged and walled, is devoid of meaningful divisions; the ruined castles of the Eloi hardly differentiate inside and outside; at one time the Time Traveller even gets lost because the field in which he has landed is indistinguishable from any other; only the presence of the statue of the sphinx defines it. But a radically different world exists beneath the Eloi pastoral, and so it is down that the Time Traveller must go to find an alternative. Up and down, therefore, become an important expression of the basic Eloi-Morlock opposition. The same opposition is expressed in the opposition between light and dark. The imbalance of the opposition is symbolized by the fact that the Morlocks can intrude on the Eloi above-ground preserve at night.

The cut between the two opposed realms is marked most concretely by the strange palace of green porcelain that the Time Traveller visits when seeking to recover his lost time machine. The building is made of material that reminds the Time Traveller of Chinese porcelain and has an oriental look to it; it seems a special version of the palaces the Eloi inhabit. But within this aestheticized exterior is a museum of technology, a “latter-day South Kensington.” It thus partakes of both the worlds of Eloi aesthetics and Morlock technology. But most importantly it blurs the line between up and down. As he walks along one of the galleries, the Time Traveller finds himself unexpectedly underground. He confesses he wasn't even aware of the slope. And then, as if to underline the importance of this transition, but also to offer a new way of treating it, the editor, a person who appears nowhere else in the novella, supplies a curious footnote: “It may be, of course, that the floor did not slope—but that the museum was built into the side of a hill” (p. 85). By translating the up-down division into a lateral one, the museum ingeniously mediates the division's absolute separation. That is not to say that it resolves the split: Weena is still afraid of the dark, and the Time Traveller retreats back to the light. But it is an important symbolic possibility in an otherwise destructive and rigid opposition.

Though a treasury of the present in the future, the museum of green porcelain also stands for the important mediating possibilities of modern technology in the face of the future's natural antithesis. The diminished intelligence of the creatures of the future prevents them from understanding or using the museum; only the Time Traveller is capable of realizing the museum's potential. The Time Traveller thus becomes the main mediator in the future system of static oppositions because by means of his human intelligence, passion, and morality he is able to bridge its dichotomies. He reconciles in himself the masterful and aesthetic aspects of culture that are at war in the future: at the end of the story he displays to his audience a flower, the token of Eloi aestheticism and affection, but he also vigorously demands a piece of meat, a token of Morlock carnivorousness. The future is a horror in part because the divisions that are for us in the present still capable of modification and correction have become a purely natural competition, a predatory antithesis that does not allow for exchange or change. The Time Traveller offers some hope because by using tools and by acting ethically he is able to break down the bounds of the otherwise rigid, hostile evolutionary categories.

It is his mastery of fire that gives the Time Traveller his most distinctive mediating power. That power is complex, however, and as in the cases of the other mediating images, involves contradiction and operates on a number of planes of meaning simultaneously. In The Time Machine fire defines civilized humanity. It is an image of both domestic security and war. It has an aesthetic function and a technological one. Finally, it is an emblem of the paradox of degenerative progress that dominates the whole novella.

The Time Traveller himself makes the link between fire and present-day humanity when he observes how rare fire is in nature:

I don't know if you have ever thought what a rare thing flame must be in the absence of man and in a temperate climate. The sun's heat is rarely strong enough to burn, even when it is focussed by dewdrops, as is sometimes the case in more tropical districts. Lightning may blast and blacken, but it rarely gives rise to wide-spread fire. Decaying vegetation may occasionally smoulder with the heat of its fermentation, but this rarely results in flame. In this decadence, too, the art of fire-making had been forgotten on the earth. The red tongues that went licking up my heap of wood were an altogether new and strange thing to Weena.

(p. 92)

Implicit in the absence of fire is the question we have looked at earlier of the actual “humanity” of either the Eloi or the Morlocks. In this formulation of the issue, fire is a symbol of human control over nature, a control that the future has lost. Such innocence has ambiguous value; earlier in the story, before the Time Traveller has realized that the Eloi are victims, he approves of such ignorance. It is night; he has lost his time machine; searching for it he blunders into the dilapidated hall of the Eloi and, after striking a match, demands his machine from them. Their confusion conveys two things to him: that “they had forgotten about matches” and that they had forgotten about fear (p. 46). The link between the two forgettings is casual but significant. To forget about matches is to lose as aspect of today's technology, to revert to a primitive state in which tools are unknown. But to forget fear, one would expect, is to live in a world of complete security, to have escaped the primitive natural situation in which fear is necessary for survival. Thus, while the forgetting of matches suggests regression, the forgetting of fear suggests progress. At this early stage in his acquaintance with the future the Time Traveller interprets both forgettings as the privileges of progress, as the evidence of a carefree pastoral idyll. Under these circumstances the paradox that progress has led to regression is not dismaying.

So long as he does not understand the real situation of the future the Time Traveller has no conception of the importance his mastery of fire has, and he uses his matches merely to entertain the Eloi, to make them dance and laugh. The irony of such trivialization is that it actually prevents knowledge, as is clear in the following passage:

I proceeded, as I have said, to question Weena about this Underworld, but here again I was disappointed. At first she would not understand my questions, and presently she refused to answer them. She shivered as though the topic was unendurable. And when I pressed her, perhaps a little harshly, she burst into tears. They were the only tears, except my own, I ever saw in that Golden Age. When I saw them I ceased abruptly to trouble about the Morlocks, and was only concerned in banishing these signs of her human inheritance from Weena's eyes. And very soon she was smiling and clapping her hands, while I solemnly burned a match.

(p. 66)

By using fire as a toy the Time Traveller diverts Weena from exhibiting “signs of her human inheritance.” His instinct to avert tears is understandable, but the completeness with which the concern for Weena's innocence overrides the concern with the facts about the Morlocks has signs of panic. The other time that the Time Traveller uses matches to entertain the Eloi is also after they have been “distressed” by his inquiries about the Morlocks (p. 61). In both cases the match is used for entertainment at the expense of further knowledge, to sustain a complacent happiness which is, in fact, an illusion.

Though he is capable of using matches to preserve an innocent decorum, the Time Traveller is not simply a Victorian gentleman intent on preventing children from learning or expressing the grim truth. The match may be a toy, but it is also an instrument for seeing. When he first looks for the time machine the Time Traveller uses a match. When he looks down one of the Morlock wells he uses a match. And when he enters the underworld he uses a match: “The view I had [of the Morlocks' cavern] was as much as one could see in the burning of a match” (p. 70). When two paragraphs later he chides himself for coming to the future ill-equipped, the Time Traveller emphasizes the importance of matches for his investigation: though he might prefer a “kodak,” the match, feeble as it is, is the single “tool” that he has brought. For the Time Traveller to be master of fire is for him to have an intellectual dominance, and the safety match becomes a symbol of that aspect of present-day technology.

Intellectual dominance leads to other kinds of dominance. The ambiguous potential of fire is most forcefully realized when the Time Traveller uses it, not for entertaining or seeing, but as a weapon. The match becomes an important defensive tool which allows the Time Traveller to move across the boundaries of this world. And after he visits the green porcelain palace and comes away with matches and camphor, the Time Traveller begins to use fire as a tool of aggression. With the intention of “amaz[ing] our friends,” he sets a pile of wood on fire. Now when Weena wants to dance and play with the light, the Time Traveller prevents her. A little later he is forced to start a second fire.

What is important for our understanding of the symbol is that the fires fail him in diametrically opposite ways. The second, beside which he goes to sleep, goes out and the Morlocks, unhindered by the fire, almost overcome him. But the first, forgotten and left behind, starts a forest fire which threatens to destroy even the Time Traveller himself. We have here an expression of the danger of dependence on the very technology that allows for mastery: it can either fail to perform even its elementary expectations, or it can go wild and overperform. In both cases the human is betrayed by his own technological sophistication. Fire, which up to this point has been a symbol of technology's ability to mediate, here develops its own destructive opposition between too much and too little. The puzzle that a dependence on technology presents is again rendered a little later in the novella when the Time Traveller, mounted on the time machine's saddle, confidently tries to light a match to drive off the assaulting Morlocks and discovers that he has safety matches that won't strike without the box.

Yet it is just at the moments when fire gets out of control that the Time Traveller performs his most radical mediations. When the fire goes out he is forced to lay about with his other tool, a makeshift club, and when he is overtaken by the forest fire he comes to feel pity for the Morlocks. In both cases, though in different ways, he bridges the distance between himself and these alien beings.

In the first instance what starts as an act of self-defence becomes more aggressive until the Time Traveller is enjoying destroying others:

It was indescribably horrible in the darkness to feel all these soft creatures heaped upon me. I felt as if I was in a monstrous spider's web. I was overpowered, and went down. I felt little teeth nipping at my neck. I rolled over, and as I did so my hand came against my iron lever. It gave me strength. I struggled up, shaking the human rats from me, and holding the bar short, I thrust where I judged their faces might be. I could feel the succulent giving of flesh and bone under my blows, and for a moment I was free.

(p. 95)

The striking word, “succulent,” in the last sentence conveys both the pleasure the Time Traveller gets from such battery and the strange similarity between such violent activity and Morlock cannibalism. The Time Traveller here reveals himself as like the Morlocks and quite unlike the passionless and passive Eloi.

A more direct acknowledgment of his union with the Morlocks occurs after the first fire overtakes them all and the Time Traveller stops clubbing the “human rats” and becomes a victim with them. “I followed in the Morlocks' path” (p. 96). In the face of the larger catastrophe of the forest fire, the discriminations and hostilities that have kept the Time Traveller and the Morlocks apart are abandoned, and the Time Traveller, “assured of their absolute helplessness and misery in the glare,” refrains from his aggressions. Even when the thought of the “awful fate” of Weena whom he has lost in the confusion moves him “to begin a massacre of the helpless abominations” about him, the Time Traveller “contains” himself.

The logical distinctions to be made at this point are complex. The Time Traveller is both identical with the Morlocks and separate from them. In the morning, exhausted, shoeless, with grass tied to his feet to protect them from the hot soil, he is only remotely the master scientist. He has been reduced to a bare forked thing and forced to acknowledge his bond in suffering with the other creatures of this world. But with the difference between himself and the Morlocks overwhelmed by their common fate as victims of the fire, the Time Traveller reasserts a distinction, not by exhibiting mastery of some sort over the others, but by restraining himself, by mastering his own brutal nature.

The Time Traveller's self-control has a complex symbolic function. It marks his difference from both Morlock and Eloi, since neither species seems capable of such conscious mastery of the self. It is his ability—a distinctly human ability—to bridge distinctions, to recognize an area of identity within a difference, that sets him apart from the other forms of life which will presumably remain locked in opposition. The Time Traveller is able to assert an ethical view in the face of the evolutionary competition that rules the future. He offers the promise of, if not resolving, at least comprehending the problems inherent in the conflict between evolution and ethics. In place of absolute antagonism between classes and between species, he acknowledges momentarily the bonds that extend across those divisions. Such an act of sympathizing with a different creature is an important gesture in Wells; we will explore it more fully in the next chapter. What interests us right now, however, is not the particular thematic issue, but its structural fitness: the act both acknowledges difference and momentarily bridges that difference. In this way it reflects the central pattern of The Time Machine itself: its art is to create emblems of difference and separation and then to meditate on the balances, the antitheses and the identities that are possible.

In saying that reconciling both sides of a conflict is the central act of The Time Machine, I do not mean to suggest that the novella is without explicit moral point. The Time Traveller's latest interpretation of the division between Eloi and Morlock foresees and fears the transformation of an economic social division into a biological one, of an ethical issue into an evolutionary one. Clearly, Wells's moral point here is to impress on an audience which tends to accept the economic divisions of civilization as “natural” the horror of what it would mean if that division were truly natural. More narrowly, one may perhaps legitimately examine the novella as a treatise on possible evolutionary directions and study it as a prediction of sorts. But in isolating such moral ideas in the novella, one needs to be aware of the danger of distorting the deepest mechanisms of Wells's imagination: he is not the sort of writer who hides an esoteric meaning which is available only to the painstaking exegete. The difficulty one has deriving a clear reading of the future from The Time Machine comes from the large, unresolved oppositions of the tale. Instead of trying to “settle” ambiguities, to find out the one true reading, we should focus on the specific and powerful contradictions the story sets up. To see contradiction clearly in all its appalling and irresolvable conflict, and then to try by whatever imaginative means possible to mediate that disjunction: that is the true and deep moral of The Time Machine.

In the last paragraphs of the novella Wells offers us an explicit instance of how to read this way, to accept both sides of a contradiction. The Time Traveller has disappeared on his second journey three years ago, and the narrator speculates about his fate.¹⁰ Wells here enforces ambiguity. And one understands why: any plot resolution would resolve the earlier tensions in such a way as to diminish the complexity of the whole vision. In this final stasis of opposition, not only does the frame distance us, as Robert Philmus has argued,¹¹ but the narrator proposes an attitude diametrically contrary to that of the Time Traveller. “I, for my own part,” the narrator confesses,

cannot think that these latter days of weak experiment, fragmentary theory, and mutual discord are indeed man's culminating time! I say, for my own part. He, I know—for the question had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine was made—thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end.

(p. 117)

Here again we see the two attitudes of promise and hubris implicit in the symbolism of the matches. And then the narrator tries to combine the two in a single stance: if the Time Traveller's vision of bleak decline is the true one, the narrator argues, “it remains for us to live as though it were not so.” He finally settles on an image that echoes the more hellish imagery of the novella itself and also alludes to the image of the feeble light shed by the match of science at the end of “The Rediscovery of the Unique”: “But to me the future is still black and blank—is a vast ignorance, lit at a few casual places by the memory of his story.”¹²

We see Wells here balancing pessimism and optimism. But the novella achieves an even more essential balance between a vision of change and a vision of no change. If we recall the two realms of opposition with which we began this essay, we can see that they themselves create an opposition. The horror of the split between the Eloi and the Morlocks lies in the fact that the divisions of modern civilization have not changed but have, by a process of speciation, become intrinsic in nature. But the other opposition, that between the present and the future, is a vision of change, of entropic decline. The first opposition implies that the essential injustice, the conflict of classes, will not change. On the other hand, the second opposition argues that in spite of all humans might do, things will change. The processes of entropy and evolution will continue, and any vision of humanity's place in the universe must take into account these large movements that are outside our control. This conflict between a vision of change and a vision of stasis undermines any simple thematic reading at the deepest level. Viewed as a prediction, the novella contradicts itself: the economic pessimism foresees a grim permanence; the cosmic pessimism sees an equally grim movement. And if the cosmic has the last word, that does not disqualify the economic: in terms of mere hundreds of thousands of years the cosmic process, by dividing the classes into species, merely confirms the continuity of the economic. Only on the scale of millions of years does the division of classes cease to be a controlling factor. So we face a problem as we try to derive a message from The Time Machine. But the problem is not a flaw: such unresolved, antithetical conflict is central to the way Wells's imagination works and gives his fiction a profundity, based on the ambiguities of human desire and experience, that is rare in thought about the future.

It may help us see exactly what Wells has achieved in The Time Machine if we briefly observe how George Pal in his film of The Time Machine (1960) avoids facing the very conflicts that define Wells's work. First of all, Pal erases the issue of evolution and ethics by making the Morlocks monsters and the Eloi simply badly educated humans. Though for a while the film allows us to think there may be a genetic problem, by the end the Eloi, who have spoken English from the beginning, show that they are human in every way: they become social; Weena, a starlet, falls in love; a male Eloi learns to fight; they use records (the talking rings); and in the end the Time Traveller (here H. George Wells) returns with books to repair the educational gap that has prevented the Eloi from succeeding. These people are not involved in any evolutionary or cosmic process; they are simply humans living in a “dark age.” And while the Eloi are beautiful humans who can be reindoctrinated, the Morlocks represent nothing but horror. More than simply a softening of Wells's pessimism has taken place here: the intellectual tensions of the conflicts, both between the present and the future and between the values represented by the Eloi and the Morlocks, have disappeared.

If Pal ignores the biological issue so central to Wells, he evades the economic issue as well. In place of Wells's vision of class difference developing into species difference, Pal gives us a vague history of the first part of our century as it is defined by its wars. We know that the wars went on and that the bombs got more destructive until finally the human race “split.” The conflict is not in capitalism itself, but in the opposition of capitalism and communism. The clear hint is that the Morlocks are, loosely, the Russians; the story of the Time Traveller's final return to revive Eloi culture is, thus, an allegory of the liberation of peoples oppressed by totalitarian communism. The sense of catastrophe, individual, social, racial, cosmic, that so darkens Wells's end, is entirely missing from Pal's. Like Nunez in Wells's “The Country of the Blind,” the film George seeks a society he can dominate, and this time there seems no chance of the kind of ironic development that keeps Nunez from ruling the country of the blind.

It is important that we understand how Pal has changed the very nature of the story's thought. Wells's myth develops systematically a set of logical oppositions as a way of making us confront contradictions latent in our society and begin to think anew about our civilization, but Pal's myth lacks a logical base; our values and our civilization, except that they have wars, are not questioned. The future need only be returned to the present for all to be well; it can be “cured” by discipline and books. Wells has created a static nightmare which has the virtue of forcing us to reconsider our own world; Pal, by envisioning a change, a restoration, has freed himself from that stasis but has also avoided thought about the need for change in the present or the future. He has robbed Wells's story of the essence of its conflict and replaced intellectual tension with melodramatic conventions that inspire unreflective affirmation.

Notes

1. The novella has often been casually lumped with other of Wells's more obviously prophetic novels. The Dover text is entitled, Three Prophetic Novels of H. G. Wells and includes along with The Time Machine, “A Story of the Days to Come” and When the Sleeper Wakes. The urge to see the novella as a serious exercise in extrapolation of the potentials of the human future persists. On the other hand, Robert Philmus, “The Logic of ‘Prophecy’ in The Time Machine,” in Bernard Bergonzi, ed., H. G. Wells: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976), pp. 56-68, despite his title, is not concerned with prediction. What he calls the “dimension of ‘prophecy’” (p. 65) is a narrative device common to much fiction.

2. The structure of this decline has been analysed by Darko Suvin in “The Time Machine versus Utopia as Structural Models for SF,” in Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, pp. 223-33.

3. The argument of this paragraph owes much to Fredric Jameson's seminal essay, “World Reduction in Le Guin: The Emergence of Utopian Narrative,” Science-Fiction Studies (1975), 2:221-30.

4. “She always seemed to me, I fancy, more human than she was, perhaps because her affection was so human.” The Time Machine, p. 82.

5. V. S. Pritchett's distaste for the “Faint squirms of idyllic petting” has found numerous sympathetic readers. See Pritchett's “The Scientific Romances,” The Living Novel, p. 125.

6. Even when he meets the Eloi, the Time Traveller's first thoughts are violent: “They looked so frail that I could fancy flinging the whole dozen of them about like nine-pins” (p. 30). The obvious but important difference between this “fancy” and his treatment of the Morlocks is that here he is able to resist acting on such fantasies.

7. Mark M. Hennelly, Jr., “The Time Machine: A Romance of ‘the Human Heart,’” Extrapolation (1979), 20:154-67, has observed the Sphinx and the faun as “unification of dual nature” (p. 163).

   The Sphinx may have been suggested to Wells by a passage in Huxley: “However shocking to the moral sense this eternal competition of man against man and of nation against nation may be; however revolting may be the accumulation of misery at the negative pole of society, in contrast with that of monstrous wealth at the positive pole; this state of things must abide, and grow continually worse, so long as Istar holds her way unchecked. It is the true riddle of the Sphinx; and every nation which does not solve it will sooner or later be devoured by the monster itself has generated.” “The Struggle for Existence in Human Society” (1888), in Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays, p. 212.

8. Bergonzi has sketched some basic oppositions: “The opposition of Eloi and Morlocks can be interpreted in terms of the late nineteenth-century class struggle, but it also reflects an opposition between aestheticism and utilitarianism, pastoralism and technology, contemplation and action, and ultimately, and least specifically, between beauty and ugliness, and light and darkness.” The Early H. G. Wells, p. 61. Contemplation hardly seems appropriate to describe the Eloi.

9. This is a recurrent opposition and puzzle in science fiction of this century. See my “From Man to Overmind: Arthur C. Clarke's Myth of Progress,” in Joseph D. Olander and Martin Greenberg, eds., Arthur C. Clarke (New York: Taplinger, 1977), pp. 211-22.

10. No hint is given by the Time Traveller of the destination of his second voyage into time. Philmus, perhaps influenced by George Pal's film of 1960 (discussed below), twice suggests he returns to 802,701 (“The Logic of ‘Prophecy’ in The Time Machine,” pp. 57, 67), but that seems doubtful. Such a return is certainly not one of the possibilities the narrator imagines in the “Epilogue.”

11. “The Logic of ‘Prophecy’ in The Time Machine,” p. 67.

12. See the last paragraph of “The Rediscovery of the Unique,” Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction, pp. 30-31, discussed in chapter 1 above.