SOURCE: Hume, Kathryn. “Eat or Be Eaten: H. G. Wells's The Time Machine.” Philological Quarterly 69, no. 2 (spring 1990): 233-51.

[In the following essay, Hume investigates the function of oral fantasies and imagery in The Time Machine.]

“It is very remarkable that this is so extensively overlooked,” says the Time Traveller, speaking of time as the fourth dimension.¹ Similarly remarkable is the way we have overlooked the comprehensive functions of oral fantasies in The Time Machine. They play a fourth dimension to the other three of entropy, devolution, and utopian satire. They ramify, by regular transformations, into those other three; into the social and economic worlds of consumption and exploitation; and into the realm of gender anxieties. They transform the ideological commonplaces from which the text constructs its reality. They create a network of emotional tensions that subliminally unites the three time frames: Victorian England, the Realm of the Sphinx, and the Terminal Beach. At the same time, this nexus of related images undercuts and fragments the logical, scientific arguments being carried out on the surface of the tale.

The Time Machine is the first of Wells's scientific romances to achieve canonical status.² In their eagerness to elevate and assimilate this text, however, critics have lost awareness that some of its parts are not explained by their normal critical strategies. One such feature to disappear from critical discourse is the failure of any coherent social message to emerge from the world of the Eloi and Morlocks. Another partly repressed feature is the disparity between the Time Traveller's violent emotions and the experiences that evoke them.³ A third feature lost to view is the dubious logic that binds the two futuristic scenarios.

I would like to approach the text with both the oral image complex and these elided mysteries in mind. What emerges will not fill the gaps in the narrative logic; the text resists such treatment, for reasons that will be shown. Rather, I wish to explore the hidden dynamics of emotion and logic. Since the semes attached to eating, consumption, and engulfment point in so many directions, I shall start instead with the public ideologies of power, size and gender. Then we can explore their symbolic manifestations as fantasies of being eaten or engulfed; as equations involving body size, intelligence, and physical energy; and as gender attributes projected on the world. Once sensitized to these concerns, we can examine the two future scenarios and their relationship to the Victorian frame. By exploring the interplay of ideology with its symbolic distortions, we will better sense what the text represses, and why despite (or even because of) this hidden material, the book has such disturbing power.

IDEOLOGICAL ASSUMPTIONS

Ideology, used here in Roland Barthes' sense, means the unexamined assumptions as to what is natural and inevitable and hence unchangeable. One realizes these “inevitabilities” to be historical and contingent most readily by comparing cultures, for within a culture, the ideological is taken to be “real.”

The part of the general ideology relevant here consists of a nexus of values that include power, body size, and gender. Separating the values even to this extent is artificial; they intertwine tightly, and in turn link to other values such as dominance, exploitation, race, physical height, and bodily strength. They also merge with political and social and military power. The form taken by this family of assumptions in England made the British Empire possible.

Let us assume you are a nineteenth-century Briton—white, male, and a member of the politically powerful classes. You are also nominally Christian and equipped with the latest weaponry. You could expect to march into any country not blessed with most of these characteristics and expropriate what you wanted, be it raw material, cheap labor, land, or valuables. Such power gives the ability to exploit and consume. The so-called inferior races had no choice, since their technology was insufficient to resist British force. The Traveller's outlook is very much that of the nineteenth-century Briton among the aliens. His strength, technological know-how, and culture elevate him in his own mind. He scribbles his name on a statue, much as other nineteenth-century Britons carved theirs on Roman and Greek temples. To the empire builders, killing Africans or Indians was not “really” murder; they were Other and hence less than truly human. While the Traveller controls his impulse to massacre Morlocks (and is even praised for his restraint by one critic),⁴ he smashes at their skulls in a way he would never dream of doing in Oxford Street. He is outraged (as well as frightened) when his trespassing machine is impounded. In the “kangaroo” and “centipede” episode found in the New Review serialization of the novel, his immediate impulse is to hit one of the kangaroo-like creatures on the skull with a rock. When examination of the body suggests that it is of human descent, he feels only a flash of “disagreeable apprehension,” evidently directed toward this proof of Man's degeneration, not at his own murderous action. His regret at leaving the body (possibly just unconscious) to the monstrous “centipede” appears to be regret at the loss of a scientific specimen, not guilt at leaving this “grey animal … or grey man” to be devoured.⁵ He protects himself from any acknowledgment of this self-centeredness by viewing his urges as scientific, but ultimately he sees himself as having the right to whatever he wants, and cherishes himself for being the only “real” human and therefore the only creature with rights.

Part of this superiority stems from physical size, the second element in the ideology and one closely linked to power. Size generally permits a man to feel superior to women, and a British man to feel superior to members of shorter races. In English, size is a metaphor used to indicate that which is valuable, good, desirable. “Great,” “high,” and “large” are normally positive markers.⁶

In the two paragraphs that encompass the narrator's first language lesson and his response to it, we find the word “little” used eight times. Attached in his mind to the littleness of the Eloi is their “chatter,” their tiring easily, their being “indolent” and “easily fatigued,” and their “lack of interest” (p. 35). Littleness and its associated debilities are so grotesquely prominent that one cannot help note this obsession with the inferiority attaching to bodies of small size. What the narrator thinks will shape and limit what he hears and sees. When he first hears the Eloi (p. 29), they look and sound like “men” running. Later, his senses register “children”: “I heard cries of terror and their little feet running” (p. 46).

The ideological inferiority of littleness is reinforced for readers by the Traveller's reactions to artifacts of the prior civilization. He admires and wonders at the “ruinous splendor” consisting of “a great heap of granite, bound together by masses of aluminium, a vast labyrinth of precipitous walls” (p. 36). He cannot describe such a building without expressing this admiration for sheer size: the buildings are “splendid,” “colossal,” “tall,” “big,” “magnificent,” “vast,” “great,” and “huge.” He never wonders whether the size was functional and if so, how. Nor does he speculate on whether it was achieved through slave labor, as were the colossal monuments of antiquity which it resembles, with its “suggestions of old Phoenician decorations” (p. 33). He simply extends automatic admiration to such remains because of their impressive size.

The third element in the common ideology, besides power and size, is gender. Power and size support the superior status of maleness. Wells extends this prejudice to the point of defining humanity as male. Early in his narrative, the Time Traveller recounts his fear that “the race had lost its manliness” (p. 28). No sooner does he identify the Eloi as shorter than himself than they become “creatures” and are quickly feminized with such terms as “graceful,” “frail,” “hectic beauty,” “Dresden china type of prettiness.” All later descriptions use codes normally applied to women or children: mouths small and bright red, eyes large and mild, a language that sounds sweet and liquid and cooing and melodious. Ultimately, he equates loss of manliness with loss of humanity.

To sum up the ideological assumptions: the text shows as natural and inevitable the interconnection of power, size and male gender. Wells was to prove capable of challenging the politics of power in later scientific romances. He questions the might-makes-right outlook of Empire in his reference to the Tasmanians in The War of the Worlds (1898), and in Dr. Moreau's parodic imposition of The Law on inferior beings (1896). Callousness towards non-British sentients is rebuked by Cavor, who is shocked by Bedford's slaughter of Selenites in The First Men in the Moon (1901). However, though power may be somewhat negotiable to Wells, size and maleness remain positively marked throughout the scientific romances. In The Food of the Gods (1904), size automatically conveys nobility of purpose, and this idealized race of giants consists so exclusively of men that it will have trouble propagating.

If this text merely echoed the ideology of its times, The Time Machine (1895) would be drab and predictable. The symbolic enlargements and distortions of these values are what create the images and tensions that make it interesting, so let us turn to them.

SYMBOLIC TRANSFORMATIONS OF IDEOLOGY

Power belongs to the same family of values as “exploitation” and “consumption.” These terms from the political and economic spheres take on added resonances when they emerge as oral fantasies about eating and being eaten. As Patrick A. McCarthy points out, cannibalism lies at the heart of this darkness, or so at least the Traveller asseverates.⁷ Actually, the evidence for cannibalism is far from complete, as David Lake observes, and the narrator may be jumping to totally unwarranted conclusions. However the notion of humans as fatted kine for a technologically superior group will reappear in The War of the Worlds, so it evidently held some fascination for Wells. The latter book certainly makes the connection between eating people and economic exploitation,⁸ a parallel made famous by Swift's “Modest Proposal.”

The putative cuisine of the Morlocks is only the most obvious of the oral fantasies. “Eat or be eaten” is a way of characterizing some social systems, but in Wells's futures, the words are literally applicable, and the text regales us with variations upon the theme of eating. The Time Traveller fears that the Morlocks will feed upon him as well as on Eloi. In the extra time-frame of the New Review version, the centipede appears to be hungry. The crabs make clear their intentions to consume the Traveller. The Sphinx traditionally devoured those who could not guess her riddle; the Traveller's entering her pedestal constitutes but a slight displacement of entering her maw. The Victorian frame features a prominent display of after-dinner satisfactions (including drinks, cigars, and feminized chairs that embrace and support the men) and a meal at which the Traveller urgently gobbles his food. Oral fantasies also take the forms of engulfment: one can be overwhelmed, drowned, swallowed by darkness, or rendered unconscious. Both in the narrator's dreams and in his physical adventures, we find several such threats of dissolution.

Norman Holland observes that “the single most common fantasy-structure in literature is phallic assertiveness balanced against oral engulfment,”⁹ exactly the pattern of The Time Machine. Typical of the phallic stage anxieties is the exploration of dark, dangerous, and congested places. Time travel and other magic forms of travel are common omnipotence fantasies at this stage of development. So is the pre-oedipal polarization of agents into threatening and non-threatening, and the focus on a single figure. Opposing this phallic quest are oral anxieties. One such wave of anxiety oozes forth as the engulfing embraces of night (e.g., “dreaming … that I was drowned, and that sea-anemones were feeling over my face with their soft palps”—p. 57). Another such anxiety grips the narrator when he faces the yawning underworld; indeed, upon escaping from below, he collapses in a dead faint. The threat of being eaten, and the enfolding gloom of the Terminal Beach are two others.

The protagonist faces engulfment of body and mind. When he returns to his own time, he responds with typical defenses against oral anxieties; he eats something (“Save me some of that mutton. I'm starving for a bit of meat”—p. 18), and he tells his tale. Holland observes that “a common defense against oral fusion and merger is putting something out of the mouth … usually speech” (p. 37).

This fantasy content forecloses many options for plot development. Within the economy of oral anxieties, the subject eats or is eaten; there is no third way. When the Time Traveller finds himself on the Terminal Beach, where nothing appears edible or consumable or exploitable, he cannot assert his status as eater. Evidently, he subliminally accepts power relationships in terms of this binary fantasy, and thus dooms himself to being devoured through sheer default of cultural imagination. His technological magic may permit him to withdraw physically, but psychically, he is more defeated than triumphant at the end. Like his strategic withdrawal from the underworld, his departure is a rout. We note that although he returns home, he does not long remain. He is swallowed up by past or future.¹⁰

The commonplace assumptions in this text about bodily size undergo equivalent amplifications and distortions that affect the plot. We find elaborate equations between bodily size, intelligence, and bodily energy. Some of these simply reflect the science of the day. Researchers were establishing averages for sizes and weights of male and female brains, and followed many dead-end theories as they tried to prove what they were looking for: superiority of men over women and of whites over darker races. Furthermore, many scientists were convinced that the First Law of Thermodynamics, conservation of energy, applied to mental “energy” as well as physical.

Food was taken in, energy (including thought) emerged, and the energy was “an exact equivalent of the amount of food assumed and assimilated.” In Hardaker's crudely quantitative universe bigger was definitely better, and men were bigger.¹¹

If the human race dwindles in size, so will its brain size, so will intelligence, and so will physical energy. Thus much is good science of the day. The text moves from science to symbolism, however, in linking the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics and implying that energy loss in the universe will directly diminish the mental and physical energy of humanity. Although Wells does not state this explicitly, he apparently accepted it. The loss of culture and security would otherwise have reversed the devolutionary decline as the descendants of humans had once more to struggle for existence. This reason for species degeneration remains implicit, but it clearly follows the fantastic elaboration of ideology and science.

The explicit reason given for degeneration is Darwinian. The Traveller decides that strength and size must have declined because they were no longer needed for survival: “Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security, that restless energy, that with us is strength, would become weakness. … And in a state of physical balance and security, power, intellectual as well as physical, would be out of place” (p. 42). Such a safe society dismays him. He relishes swashbuckling physical action, and is loath to consider a world that would exclude it. Indeed the Morlocks provide him with a welcome excuse to exercise powers not wanted in London. “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). “Succulent” is highly suggestive, relating as it does to the realm of the edible.

The equivalence of body, mind, and energy determines major features of the futuristic scenarios. We find something like medieval planes of correspondence. As the cosmos runs down, men will lose energy individually—a linkage no more logical than the Fisher-King's thigh wound causing sterility to fall upon the crops of his realm. Given this as a textual assumption about reality, however, we can see that clever, efficient and adaptive beings are impossible, although a setting like the Terminal Beach would call forth precisely such a humanity in the hands of other writers.

Gender, the third ideological element, undergoes a different kind of symbolic transformation. The traditional semes of “masculine” and “feminine”—whether culturally derived or natural—are widely familiar and even transcend cultural boundaries. Semes of the masculine include such constellated values as culture, light, the Sun, law, reason, consciousness, the right hand, land, and rulership. The feminine merges with chaos, darkness, the Moon, intuition, feeling, the left hand, water, and the unconscious.¹² The dialogue between them in some cultures involves balance; in the West, however, we find masculine consciousness fighting off or being overwhelmed by the feminine powers associated with unconsciousness. Thus the eat-consume-overwhelm nexus also enters the story as an attribute of gender.

Much of what troubles us in the realm of the Sphinx derives its power from the text's manipulation of these values. The grotesque is frequently formed from the mingling of characteristics from two “naturally” separate sets, man and beast, for instance. Despite cultural changes since the turn of the century, the traditional assumptions about gender are well enough ingrained in us by reading, if nothing else, to give the story's grotesques most of their original power. Wells attaches but also denies “feminine” and “masculine” attributes to both Eloi and Morlocks. The resulting contradictions prevent us from resolving the tensions roused by these grotesques into the kinds of reality that we are culturally conditioned to find comfortable.

The Eloi at first appear to be the only race, and then the superior of the two. Their life consists of a pastoral idyll, sunlight, and apparent rulership. Thanks to happiness, beauty, absence of poverty, and uninterrupted leisure, their life better fits our notion of Haves than Havenots. However, closer inspection shows them to be small, lacking in reason, deficient in strength, passively fearful, ineffectual, and ultimately just not “masculine” enough to be plausible patriarchal rulers, the standard against which they are implicitly held. In the National Observer version the Eloi have personal flying machines, but Wells ultimately deprived them of anything so technical. For all that they are feminized, however, they lack positive identity with the feminine, so we cannot reconcile them to our sense of the real by means of that pattern.

The Morlocks, by virtue of living in the dark and underground, seem first of all sinister, but secondarily are marked with symbolism of the unconscious and hence the feminine. Their access to the innards of the Sphinx reinforces the latter. Confusing our judgment, however, is their possible control of the machines, a power linked in Western eyes with the masculine rather than the feminine. Likewise, their apparently predatory aggression, their hunting parties (if such they be) fit “masculine” patterns. However, they seem deficient in strength and size to the Traveller, and their inability to tolerate light makes them obviously vulnerable in ways not befitting a “master” race. When comparing the two races, we find that both have traits associated with ruling and exploiting. The Eloi apparently live off the labor of the Morlocks while the latter apparently live off the flesh of the former. However, both are “feminized” in ways that render them less than masterful. These ambiguities in the cultural symbol system cannot be resolved. The traits associated with each race remain in uneasy tension, and contribute to the difficulty that critics have had in putting labels to the two races.

Power, size, and gender; oral fantasies, the laws of thermodynamics as applied to bodies and thought, and the grotesque: this peculiar mixture propels the story and gives it much of its intensity, its disturbing power. However, these concepts are not entirely consistent and harmonious. The conflicts they generate undermine the narrative logic and thereby dissolve the coherence of the ideas Wells was exploring. As we move to the future scenarios, we will note the gaps in the logic.

IN THE RIDDLING REALM OF THE SPHINX

Almost any way we approach this addled utopia, we find irreducible ambiguity. Does The Time Machine seriously concern a possible—albeit distant—future, or is futurity only a metaphoric disguise for the present? Darko Suvin focuses on the biological elements of the story, so he views the futurity as substantial and important. Others who focus on entropy or time travel likewise assume the significance of the futurity.¹³ After all, without a real time lapse, anatomical evolution would be impossible. Alternately, the “future” settings may be read as versions of Wells's present. “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.”¹⁴ Social warnings of danger 800,000 years away will inevitably fail to grip. Hence, the reality of time in this text—Wells's cherished fourth dimensional time—depends upon whether readers are focusing on biological or social systems.

Even if the critic ruthlessly simplifies to one or the other, interpretations go fuzzy at the edges or lead to contradiction. The biological reading appears at first to be straightforward. Wells asks, “what if progress is not inevitable and devolution can happen as well as evolution?” The Traveller decides that the Eloi degenerate because they no longer need to fight for survival—an interesting argument to present to the increasingly non-physical Victorian society. The need for serious, bodily rivalry makes utopia a dangerous goal, and social restraint unhealthy. Wells thus raises a genuine problem, but does not develop it.

The social reading is yet more disturbing in its inability to satisfy the expectation of coherence. Oppressing the working class is dangerous as well as inhumane, and if we continue along such lines, the Haves will fall prey to the Havenots. At first glance, this seems like an unexceptionable social warning about mistreating the Workers. Somewhat unexpectedly, Wells treats the situation not as a revolution devoutly to be desired, but as a nightmarish terror. He evidently could not work up much sense of identification with the exploited. Hence the dilemma: not improving conditions leads to nightmare, but improving them in the direction of equality gets us back to utopia and its degeneration. If one accepts the biological message—physical competition—one must ignore the social message; if one accepts the social—improved conditions—one must ignore the biological. Wells offers us no way to accept both.

Since these two approaches lead to contradiction, one might try to escape the ambiguity by generalizing the referents of Eloi and Morlocks. Then one can read this as a parable about human nature,¹⁵ or opt for Bergonzi's approach, and see the struggle between Eloi and Morlocks as polysemous. They are Pre-Raphaelite aesthetes and proletarians, and their struggle variously resonates with “aestheticism and utilitarianism, pastoralism and technology, contemplation and action, and ultimately … beauty and ugliness, and light and darkness” (Bergonzi, p. 305). If you are content, with Bergonzi, to call the tale “myth” and agree that meaning in myth is always multiple, you have one solution to the problem of interpretation. Otherwise, you must accept that the Eloi and Morlocks do not form coherent portraits. Their unstable identities—e.g., Morlocks as underclass or rulers—seem better likened to the duck/rabbit optical illusion, which has two embedded forms but which we are compelled to see as only one at a given time. The Eloi are an upper class in terms of pleasant material living conditions and freedom from toil, but they are an exploited class if they are being kept as cattle. The same double-identity obscures any explanation of the Morlocks. I have argued elsewhere that another possibility is that the two represent a dual assessment of the middle class alone: on the surface, we find an idealized and ineffectual claim to sweetness and light and vague aestheticism, but the vicious, exploitive side of bourgeois power, which preys upon the helpless, is hidden (Hume, pp. 286-87). We can (and will) make many other such equations because each reader's assumptions will activate different voices within the text. Resolution, though, is unlikely. The two races have been rendered permanently ambiguous through their clashing qualities.

They also resist interpretation because of the disparity between the Traveller's emotions and what he actually experiences. The Morlocks are only guilty of touching him and of trying to keep him from leaving them. They use no weapons, and they attempt to capture rather than kill him. They may be interested in studying him or in trying to establish communication. After all, as Lake points out, the Morlocks apparently visit the museum out of curiosity. The Traveller is as ready to jump to dire conclusions as Bedford is in The First Men in the Moon. What pushes him to such extremes of fear and loathing may be his deep uneasiness over code violations. The grotesque mixing of masculine and feminine and of human and animal seem to produce in him much the sort of panic and hostility as that felt by some people towards transvestites and physical freaks.

Even the Sphinx plays her part in such confusions. “The State” and its powers are conventionally symbolized by the masculine, the father, the lawgiver. Wells's symbols for government are patriarchal in other romances, and his heroes either rebel against this oedipal oppressor or make their way into patriarchal power and identify with it. Dr. Moreau is such a threatening father, indeed a not-very-displaced castrating father. Almost all the clashes over authority in The Food of the Gods are put in terms of fathers and sons. The Invisible Man's hatred for established authority causes him to act in a way that literally kills his father. The Martians allow the protagonist to project his dissatisfactions with the social system onto an enemy, and with the defeat of the enemy, take up a patriarchal role and uphold the status quo.

The Sphinx, though, is female, the spawn of chaos.¹⁶ She looms over the landscape, evidently the symbol of a ruling power, present or past, but also a grotesque yoking of beast and woman. (The other ornaments in her realm—a griffin and a faun—are also hybrids.) Bram Dijkstra has explored the Sphinx in late nineteenth-century art. He sees her renditions there as embodying tensions between the sexes that reflect male fears of

a struggle between woman's atavistic hunger for blood—which she regarded as the vital fluid of man's seminal energies and hence the source of that material strength she craved—and man's need to conserve the nourishment that would allow his brain to evolve. Woman was a perverse instrument of the vampire of reversion, and by giving in to her draining embrace, men thought, they must needs bleed to death.

(Dijkstra, p. 332)

In the art of this era, then, we find the same configuration of man being consumed, that consumption being carried out in such a way as to diminish not only his manly strength but also his intelligence. Oral fantasies here merge with the peculiarly end-of-the-century way of construing conservation of energy in physical and mental terms. Wells's world ruled by the Sphinx is indeed one bled of its masculinity and mental power, a world of reversion.

Wells's susceptibility to such oral anxieties is underlined by another gap in the logic. The oral fears emerge in a curiously skewed form. Haves normally exploit, “eat,” or consume Havenots in a capitalist system; that is how the image usually enters socio-economic discourse. In The Time Machine, however, the cannibalistic urges are instead projected onto the Havenots. One finds a similar reversed logic in the martial fiction of America and England in the period of 1870 to the 1920s. Those white, Anglo-American populations who were spreading empire and invading the Philippines or carrying out wars in India and Africa entertained themselves with invasion tales in which they themselves were the victims. The War of the Worlds is just such an invasion tale, probably the greatest to emerge out of this literary type in England. Wells likens Martian treatment of Britons to British treatment of Tasmanians. America battened on fictions about the Black Menace, the Yellow Menace, the Red Menace, not to mention fears that England, Canada, or Mexico would invade America. Throughout the same period, America was stripping Native Americans of land and lynching Blacks, and sending armies to the Philippines and Haiti.¹⁷ Whether Wells is using this trick of mind to characterize his protagonist, or whether Wells himself is denying political guilt and replacing it with self-justifying political fears simply is not clear. The application of the cannibalistic fantasy to the exploited group remains a notable gap in the logical fabric of the whole.

What are we to make of this adventure in the realm of the Sphinx, then? A rather mixed message, at best. Utopias by most definitions eliminate competition. This proves a dangerous ideal, because so safe an environment would encourage bodily weakness, and then degeneration of mind and feminization. In other words, beware Socialism! However, the paradise of capitalists is a world in which the Great Unwashed lives underground, its misery unseen and ignored. This too leads to degeneration, as we see, because it also abolishes real struggle. Without the chance or need to compete—literally to destroy or exploit or “consume”—man devolves, according to Wells's ideology. The importance of competition comes out when we realize its relevance to power, size, and masculine behavior patterns, and its status as guarantor of intelligence. This competitive violence appears to be the most consistently upheld value in the first adventure, but even such struggle is undermined by the arguments in the second adventure, the excursion to the Terminal Beach. There entropy, by means of the planes of correspondences, cancels the energizing effect of struggling for existence.

THE TERMINAL BEACH: A JOURNEY TO THE INTERIOR

“Journey to the interior” nicely condenses what happens here. The Time Machine as a totality consists of a trip to the interior of some unknown land, as found in She, Henderson the Rain King, Heart of Darkness, and The Lost Steps. The foray from 800,000 to thirty million years into the future is an embedded journey to the interior, a mise en abîme repetition. Call the Terminal Beach a mindscape reached by being eaten. The Traveller enters the Sphinx much as Jonah or Lucian enter their respective whales.¹⁸ Entropy may supply the logic that links the two scenarios, but the emotional unity derives from oral fantasies.

The Terminal Beach actually consists of two scenes and several fractional visions. The crab-infested litoral comes first, then the world in which life lingers in the form of a black, flapping, tentacled “football.” The eclipse and snowflakes both belong to the second scene, increasing its inhospitability. However, both form a continuum of desolation and an invitation to despair.

That the Traveller's responses need not be quite so bleak becomes clear if we contrast Wells's handling this situation with what might be called the Germinal Beach in Arthur C. Clarke's 2010. There, new life is discovered, but the physical conditions are much the same as in Wells, and Clarke clearly had both of Wells's beaches in mind. Clarke's setting consists of ice and water, where Wells has water, pebbles, and ice. Clarke's tragic snowflakes result from the ruptured space ship. Clarke offers a huge, slow-moving, semi-vegetative creature. Both authors suggest the frailty of life through flickering, flapping, flopping, intermittent movement. In The Time Machine, day and night “flap” as the Traveller zooms into the future; the black creature on the strand flops, a screaming butterfly flutters, crab mouths flicker, the sea surface ripples. The larval stages of Clarke's life-form remind the speaker of flowers and then butterflies, and then flop about like stranded fish. Wells eclipses the sun to squeeze the last drop of symbolic value out of the light and darkness; Clarke has his observer break their artificial light so that the phototropic life-form will return to the sea. The Time Traveller sees “a curved pale line like a vast new moon” (p. 107) and as the eclipse passes off, notes “a red-hot bow in the sky” (p. 109); Clarke's Dr. Chang notes that “Jupiter was a huge, thin crescent” (p. 81),¹⁹ and a few pages after this scene, another character stares at a picture of Earth as a thin crescent looming above the Lunar horizon.

Even in the most distant future, the Time Traveller can breathe the atmosphere and can escape any immediate danger by pulling a lever, yet he despairs. Clarke's Chinese astronaut will die as soon as his oxygen runs out, yet he remains scientifically alert and basically excited and pleased, although the level of life visible in each scene is roughly the same: non-human, non-intelligent, and probably scarce. Clearly the two authors perceive the landscapes from different vantages. To Clarke, Europa is the key to hegemony of the outer planets, the source of “the most valuable substance in the Universe” (p. 66). With Europa's water and cold fusion, settlers would enjoy virtually unlimited power for themselves plus fuel for their spaceships. By contrast, the Time Traveller sees nothing worth colonizing in either scene, nothing to exploit or utilize, nothing to consume. Wells and Clarke are at one in valuing worlds for what we can exploit.

Again, Wells disturbs his Traveller by violating his codes for normal reality. Instead of finding light and dark, he finds all liminal and borderline colors and values: palpitating greyness, steady twilight (p. 104), a sun that glows dully, and a beach on which there are no waves, only an oily swell. An eclipse is suitably liminal as well, a state that produces neither true day nor true night. In addition to being in a permanently transitional phase, his world is also liminal with regards to land and water. The ocean has approached over the millennia; what was high land in Victorian London and 800,000 years later is about to be overwhelmed by the advancing ocean. Light and land, often mindscape equivalents to mind and body, are threatened by the encroaching, engulfing forces of darkness and water. Insofar as sea and darkness have symbolic associations with the unconscious and the feminine, this threat repeats both the gender and oral anxieties seen in the earlier adventure.

One's first instinct upon reading the Terminal Beach chapter is to interpret it solely as a funereal rhapsody on entropy, as a look at the inevitable death of the sun and the ramifications of this eventuality for mankind. George H. Darwin provided Wells with ideas about tidal friction and slowed rotation. The Book of Revelation contributes water-turned-blood. These simple transformations, plus the narrator's depression at what he finds, make the bleakness and hopelessness seem natural and inevitable. I would argue that to some degree they are actually cultural and ideological.

One has only to look at The War of the Worlds or even The First Men in the Moon to see very different fictional responses to apparently dead-end situations. The protagonists in those stories, or various lesser characters, face new situations with the same sort of scientific curiosity and engagement shown by Clarke's Dr. Chang. They are not foolish optimists, but a bleak and threatening situation is cause for intellectual stimulation, for forming and confirming theories, for taking pride in observing new phenomena, for striving against the environment. The Time Traveller, though, seemingly suffers an entropic loss of his own energy as he observes that life in general has lost the struggle. The point of failure, however, actually came where Wells's thermodynamic fantasy overcame his Darwinian science. When the social system eventually disintegrated, the descendents of Eloi and Morlocks should have improved through survival of the fittest. His assumptions about mind, energy, and body, though, render his fictional creations helpless long before the final scenes. That helplessness was dictated by a fantastic distortion of the laws of thermodynamics, not by the laws themselves, so here again, we find the amplifications and elaborations of basic ideologies affecting plot. Mankind disappears because of one such fantasy; the Traveller's panic takes its form from another.

In superficial regards, The Time Machine is obviously enough a social satire to justify our expecting a reasonably coherent warning. The doubled identities of both Eloi and Morlocks turns them into the literary equivalent of an optical illusion. Coherence can no more emerge from them than from Escher's drawing of water flowing downhill in a circle. Scientifically, The Time Machine explores entropic decline, but refuses to give us ingenious humanity striving ever more ferociously to put off the inevitable. Humanity has already degenerated irreversibly through the exercise of what is generally considered its higher impulses. Even that would be a warning, but Wells undercuts it with his thermodynamic fantasies, which would bring about similar degeneration in any case through the links he posits among body and mind and energy. Thus do some of the rather fierce undercurrents in this romance break up its arguments, leaving them as stimulating fragments rather than logical structures. The powerful emotions both expressed by the Traveller and generated in readers are tribute to the sub-surface currents, especially the oral-stage anxieties. The torment they represent is most clearly seen in the blind, defensive, totally illogical projection of savagery and cannibalism upon the group most apparently exploited. Like the imperialistic nations fantasizing their own humiliation at the hands of invaders, Wells's Traveller, and possibly Wells himself, are projecting behavior upon others in ways that suggest considerable repressed social guilt.

The return of the repressed is important to the dynamics of this tale. I will finish my arguments with one further variant on that theme. When the Time Traveller seeks the ruler of the pastoral realm, he seeks an Absent Father, and finds instead the Sphinx, avatar of threatening femininity. Within the classical Greek world view, “man” is the proud answer to the Sphinx's riddle, and man as Oedipus vanquishes the feminine and chaotic forces from Western civilization. In The Time Machine, “man” is no longer as proud an answer, and man has no power to prevent the lapse from order towards entropy. One might even argue that this time-travelling Oedipus is to some degree the criminal responsible for the status quo, for the ideologies he embodies have limited his culture's vision and rendered alternatives invisible. The Greeks and their civilization based on patriarchal structures banished the Sphinx. Here, she returns, and she succeeds in swallowing humanity after all.

Notes

1. The Atlantic edition of The Works of H. G. Wells, 1 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1924): 4-5.

2. Bernard Bergonzi rendered The Time Machine orthodox by bestowing upon it two charismatic labels: “ironic” and “myth.” See “The Time Machine: An Ironic Myth,” Critical Quarterly 2 (1960): 293-305.

3. See David J. Lake, “Wells's Time Traveller: An Unreliable Narrator?” Extrapolation 22, no. 2 (1981): 117-26.

4. John Huntington sees this mastery of his actions as index to the protagonist's superiority over both Eloi and Morlocks, since they lack such self-control. See The Logic of Fantasy: H. G. Wells and Science Fiction (Columbia U. Press, 1982), p. 51.

5. For details of this and many other variants, including a previously unpublished draft of an excursion into the past, see The Definitive Time Machine: A Critical Edition of H. G. Wells's Scientific Romance, with introduction and notes by Harry M. Geduld (Indiana U. Press, 1987), quotations from p. 179.

6. In her utopian novel, The Dispossessed, Ursula Le Guin calls our attention to this unthinking esteem for height by replacing commendatory terms based on size with those based on centrality.

7. See McCarthy's “Heart of Darkness and the Early Novels of H. G. Wells: Evolution, Anarchy, Entropy,” Journal of Modern Literature 13, no. 1 (1986): 37-60.

8. See Kathryn Hume, “The Hidden Dynamics of The War of the Worlds,” PQ 62 (1983): 279-92; Wells developed the connection more forcefully in the serialized version.

9. Norman N. Holland, The Dynamics of Literary Response (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), p. 43.

10. For an argument in favor of the Traveller's being a traditional monomyth hero, and hence triumphant, see Robert J. Begiebing, “The Mythic Hero in H. G. Wells's The Time Machine,” Essays in Literature, 11 (1984): 201-10. Wells's many escape endings are analyzed by Robert P. Weeks in “Disentanglement as a Theme in H. G. Wells's Fiction,” originally published in Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters 39 (1954), reprinted in H. G. Wells: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Bernard Bergonzi (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1976), pp. 25-31. Interestingly, Wells considered another kind of ending, at least in response to editorial pressures. In the version of this story serialized in The National Observer, the story ends with the Traveller referring to hearing his child crying upstairs because frightened by the dark. This ad hoc family man, however, may result from hasty termination of the serial. Henley, as editor, liked Wells's work while his replacement, Vincent, did not. See Geduld for such variants.

11. For the nineteenth-century science behind all the assumptions about body size and energy, see Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Harvard U. Press, 1989), p. 105.

12. In other words, Yin, Yang, and Jung. These symbolic clusters of values are discussed and illustrated throughout both the following Jungian studies by Erich Neumann: The Origins and History of Consciousness, Bollingen Series 42 (Princeton U. Press, 1970) and The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, Bollingen Series 47 (Princeton U. Press, 1972).

13. Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (Yale U. Press, 1979), chapter 10. For an analysis of time travel, see Veronica Hollinger, “Deconstructing the Time Machine,” Science-Fiction Studies 14 (1987): 201-21.

14. Huntington, p. 41. Others focusing on social issues include Patrick Parrinder, “News from Nowhere, The Time Machine and the Break-Up of Classical Realism,” Science-Fiction Studies 3, no. 3 (1976): 265-74, and Wayne C. Connely, “H. G. Well's [sic] The Time Machine: It's [sic] Neglected Mythos,” Riverside Quarterly 5, no. 3 (1972): 178-91.

15. Stephen Gill sees the Morlocks as “the bestial nature of human beings.” Hennelly sees it about the failure to reconcile the contraries in the human heart, and Lake explores it as a protest against death. See Gill, Scientific Romances of H. G. Wells: A Critical Study (Cornwall, Ontario: Vesta Publications, 1975), p. 38, and Mark M. Hennelly, Jr., “The Time Machine: A Romance of ‘The Human Heart,’” Extrapolation 20, no. 2 (1979): 154-67; and David J. Lake, “The White Sphinx and the Whitened Lemur: Images of Death in The Time Machine,” Science-Fiction Studies 6, no. 1 (1979): 77-84.

16. See Frank Scafella, “The White Sphinx and The Time Machine,” Science-Fiction Studies 8, no. 3 (1981): 255-65, p. 259. Bram Dijkstra explores the fin de siècle fascination with sphinxes in art in Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (Oxford U. Press, 1986), pp. 325-32.

17. For an analysis of the British version of such invasion jitters, see Cecil Degrotte Eby, The Road to Armageddon: The Martial Spirit in English Popular Literature, 1870-1914 (Duke U. Press, 1987). For the American version, see H. Bruce Franklin, War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination (Oxford U. Press, 1988).

18. Two mindscapes similarly reached in a physical interior are Harlan Ellison's “Adrift Just Off the Islets of Langerhans: Latitude 38° 54’ N, Longitude 77° 00’ 13” W,” and Norman Spinrad's “Carcinoma Angels.” In the latter, the protagonist psychically descends into his own body to kill cancer cells. He “finally found himself knee-deep in the sea of his digestive juices lapping against the walls of the dank, moist cave that was his stomach. And scuttling towards him on chitinous legs, a monstrous black crab with blood-red eyes, gross, squat, primeval.” The Wellsian intertext enriches the cancer/crab wordplay. “Carcinoma Angels” is found in Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison (London: Victor Gollancz, 1987), 513-21, quotation, p. 521.

19. The “Germinal Beach” occurs on pp. 77-82 of Arthur C. Clarke, 2010 (London: Granada, 1983).