The Time Machine.6: The Other Inside

“And because we are still such barbarians, any trust in the laws of human nature seem to us a dangerous and unethical naturalism. Why is this? Because under the barbarian's thin veneer of culture the wild beast lurks in readiness, amply justifying his fear. 

But the beast is not tamed by locking it up in a cage. There is no morality without freedom. When the barbarian lets loose the beast within him, that is not freedom but bondage. Barbarism must first be vanquished before freedom can be won. This happens, in principle, when the basic root and driving force of morality are felt by the individual as constituents of his own nature and not as external restrictions. How else is man to attain this realization but through the conflict of opposites?"
C.G. Jung

The Traveller tried to remain objective, to continue being the scientific detective of what he called with increasing irony the “Golden Age” of the future.

Why should he care about the fate of the Eloi? That they were “mere fatted cattle, which the ant-like Morlocks preserved and preyed upon...” He tried to think of the entire situation as only “a rigorous punishment of human selfishness.”

But now the Traveller realizes he is not studying this phenomenon from a distance—he is part of it. Because he is living on the surface, the Morlocks evidently consider him one of the Eloi—enough, in any event, to make him meat in their eyes. He has become what the Eloi are to the Morlocks: the beasts who are not us, the prey, the Others. And now the Morlocks have become to him what they are to the Eloi: the ones to be feared, the enemy, the Others.

The Traveller takes Weena to the Palace of Green Porcelain, which turns out to be the remains of a museum. Nearly all the exhibits have decayed and he learns nothing about how this future came to be. But he does find a box of matches in a hermetically sealed container, and an old machine that he dismembers to extract a metal rod that he might use to pry open the bronze door hiding his time machine—or use as a weapon against the Morlocks.

Wells portrays the Morlocks as capable of planning;
this comic book illustration is suitable for children

Now comes the most violent episode of the novel. The Traveller and Weena find themselves in the woods between the Palace and their safe shelter. He lights a small fire to slow the Morlocks down but becomes disoriented as he and Weena flee through the woods. He makes a campfire to spend the rest of the night but falls asleep, and awakes to find the campfire has gone out, and Morlocks are closing in.

He fights for his life with his weapon but is being overwhelmed, when the darkness is suddenly suffused with a dull luminous glow, and the Morlocks begin running away. Then he hears the crackling and smells the burning—"it was my first fire come after me"-- an inferno raging through the forest. The Morlocks scatter, blinded and terrified.

An even more exaggerated Morlock
monster and an even more sexualized
Weena.  This story is a particular origin
of this now familiar imagery.

But when the Traveller turns to find Weena, she is gone. The Morlocks have captured her. For hours he searches for her but in vain, and at first light he is stumbling back into the Eloi's encampment, exhausted and disheartened.

In addition to the violence, in this episode the Traveller expresses the most varied, volatile and violent emotions. He starts out tired and irritable, but afraid of what will happen if he and Weena sleep. In a fever, he rushes forward. When the Morlocks first appear he brandishes fire with aggressive glee. He pushes on grimly, feeling the Morlock's pursuit. In driving them off he loses his sense of direction, and lost in the dark woods he feels panic.

In fighting the swarming Morlocks by striking and killing them with his iron lever, he feels a "strange exultation." When they stop attacking him, he feels hope that they are afraid. He is amazed by the forest fire, distressed by the loss of Weena, and at daybreak, even though he survived, he is feeling wretched and terribly lonely.

The Traveller has been portrayed as a man who thinks scientifically, but he is now swamped by emotions. According to the prevailing view, feelings aren’t supposed to determine the workings of science any more than feelings affect the gears of machines. But although science provides the powerful appearance of objectivity, it can also hide the emotions, drives, and hidden agendas of scientists, as well as its own unacknowledged assumptions and prejudices. In that, scientists are the same as everyone else.

This denial of emotion’s existence is the tragic flaw, the hubris of science and scientists. Thomas Kuhn in his now celebrated theory of paradigm shifts has shown how scientific theories develop when and how they do partly due to the human foibles of human scientists and the pressures and prejudices of the surrounding society, and not just in immediate response to brilliant insights and careful research, in the stately, automatic and emotionless accumulation of knowledge.

Science can be manipulated, and the appearance of science can provide false justification for unacknowledged emotions and complex psychological reactions, as well as simply providing hypocritical cover for self-interest. All of this occurred in the late 19th century, with what historian Peter Gay calls "alibis for aggression" and "the cultivation of hatred."

Some of it would prolong the awful carnage of World War I with jingoistic and pseudo-racial patriotism, often justified by misinterpretations of Darwin. Some would flower in the evils of World War II and the European Holocaust, and some would haunt more recent times, in the long nuclear fear of the Cold War.

Just as science can fool itself unknowingly, people can fool themselves unconsciously. In the second half of the 1890s, a Vienna physician named Sigmund Freud was beginning to discuss his theories on how humans fool themselves. He began a systematic exploration of a known but significantly unmapped territory called the unconscious. So fraught with terrors and wonders was this world within every human, that many denied its existence.

Freud 1895

Freud proposed various mechanisms, such as repression, resistance and transference, to explain observations from his psychoanalytic practice with disturbed and mentally ill patients, and the analysis of his own dreams. In the same year The Time Machine was published, he wrote a paper describing the common stratagem he called projection.

People who are not really being attacked or overtly threatened nevertheless may ascribe terrible motives or sinister qualities to those they fear, with or without rational justification. Freud suggested that they are projecting their own aggressiveness and whatever else they accuse their enemy of, onto the face of that other group, class, race, gender or person. "That other" doesn't even have to be a true adversary, just someone else who can in some way be defined as different: the Other.

We project the ugliness inside ourselves we cannot face, onto the face of the Other. It helps a great deal if we don't know much about this Other, if the face is relatively blank. Then everything horrible we can imagine becomes the face of the Other that we see.

When even in Wells time, actual European travelers came back with stories of newly discovered animals or previously unknown peoples, they often drew pictures of them. They are usually quite inaccurate in very obvious ways. They seem to be exaggerated versions, or combinations of well-known imagery of demons or angels, for instance.

But it's more than a case of seeing what we think we see. Projection is one strategy for denying to ourselves what we actually feel, or even what we really do. And in a further convolution, it can reflect envy for those who we believe do have or can express the quality we vilify in the Other. It can be a product of insecurity, which is rampant in times of change, and possibly even more pronounced when an aggressive war of all against all is supposedly the natural state of affairs.

We are willing captives of the unconscious when we do not accept that we are complex beings, and that the most powerful as well as the most terrifying form of knowledge is the knowledge of ourselves.

We can be captives of our projections even when we are facing an enemy that really is bent on our destruction, as the Traveller was really attacked by the Morlocks. But the difference is when the Traveller takes responsibility for his own behavior, and does not project its cause only outward to the enemy.

The spirit of the scene, though the Traveller is depicted
as younger (and less clothed) than the novel 

At the height of the violence in The Time Machine, the Traveller is pulled down to the ground in the dark woods and covered by Morlocks. "I felt little teeth nipping at my neck." But in the midst of this horror his hand finds the iron lever he had dropped. He renews his struggle to stand, "shaking the human rats from me," and strikes with his iron. "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."

It is that word "succulent" that critic John Huntington singles out because it "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…"

Though the Traveller is obviously fighting in self-defense, this observation rings true, and seems to be intentional on Wells' part since he includes three notable mentions of the Traveller’s taste for meat-eating: when the Traveller first sees the bloody meat in the Morlocks's lair (and before he knows its origin) he approves that they at least are meat-eaters, and then when he returns to his own time and home, before he tells his story, he calls for and devours some mutton: "What a treat it is to stick a fork into meat again!" (Although this occurs after his journey, we read it at the beginning of the novel.) He refers to this delight again after telling his story.

A taste for flesh is not the only similarity. The attacking Morlocks have evoked reactions and emotions in him—aggressive energy, a "strange exultation" in battle, and a physical pleasure in smashing and killing, which we assume are qualities the Morlocks are more likely to embody than the Eloi.

Does this make the Traveller the same as the Morlocks? Presumably there is some genetic similarity, as the Traveller is a genetic forebearer. (The genetic differences between humans and other animals, particularly apes, were later found to be quite small, which would confirm Darwin and further scandalize his 19th century opponents.) The difference may not be so much in physicality as in behavior, and choices of behavior made according to perception and values.

As artists and storytellers knew long before Freud, what we project on others is often an image based on values in conflict within ourselves. The Eloi and the Morlocks are the Others in each other’s eyes, as they are in ours. In fictional terms, they are archetypes—the angels and the devils—but archetypes functioning as projections of the emotions of Wells’ time.

The Eloi are the working man’s cliché of the artist: weak, simpering, useless; children dancing around in dresses and eating fruit. But more than just ribald sneering at tutus, they are, for example, the projection of all the contempt and envy generations of working and lower middle class parents have heaped upon their artistically inclined children.

Similarly the Morlocks are the muted sorrow and real fear that the rich and middle class have for the gross, clumsy, violent, dirty, proudly mindless but physically strong underclass hordes. But they may also be the projection of all the contempt and envy generations of elite parents have heaped upon their children who feel compassion for the downtrodden, who react with shame and anger at the injustice and separation they see, who don't value money and power and social position over a sense of common humanity, or who even value fair play and a physical life over abstract hypocrisies.

Wells' own background comes into play. He grew up with the real fear of falling down the precipice of poverty and illness. He had a few encounters with industrial workers and how they lived, and he reportedly reacted with repulsion and anxiety. At the same time, he could empathize with the downtrodden. He had grown up poor and deprived, with a low iron ceiling on his hopes.

Early and often, Wells had expressed his anger and contempt for the upper class that limited what he as a child was permitted to learn and achieve because he happened to be born into a lower middle class family. He saw through the pretentiousness of the elite, and the hypocrisy of their piously held—and now pseudo-scientific—views, that conveniently allowed them to feel angelically justified in piling up wealth and power at the expense of everyone else, and especially of anyone who got in their way.

But he also admired the graceful spaciousness of Up Park (the estate where his mother was housekeeper), the educated elite of science, the arts and world affairs, and those among the rich who championed the advancement of knowledge and the dissemination of learning.

Wells' attitudes towards the Haves and the Have-nots of his time, the things he feared or disapproved of, and the things he admired and longed for, are represented in how he structures this story, and the characterizations of the Eloi and Morlocks. Projecting onto the page, projecting the story in the air or on the screen, is part of what artists do. Those images can then be examined, worked with, thought about, by both storyteller and audience.

What feelings do they evoke, what thoughts do they inspire? Free from too close an identification, free from personal criticism or exposure or betrayal, free from sin, we find more freedom in considering fictional characters and situations than in our own lives. Distance lends enchantment; the story is a playground of the soul.

And sometimes the more distant, the clearer we can see the outlines of action, character and meaning. This becomes one of the key discoveries about this kind of fiction, in which aspects of a present time are projected in time or space, to a distant time or a faraway planet, onto faces of beings no one has seen except in that story.

But projection in the real world has real consequences. One purpose of understanding projection is to cut down on the damage that projection and other unconscious stratagems motivate, channel or indirectly cause. We can do this by become aware of what's going on inside us, and by applying tools for understanding at least enough of what's going on inside us so we can question our motives, and when appropriate, change our behavior.

The Traveller for example might understand that for many thousands of years, humans have been omnivores—meat-eating is part of our evolutionary heritage. Cannibalism is so repulsive that it might have some sort of biological component. But in any case, the lines drawn by nature or culture have become part of our values that guide our behavior.

Similarly, the exultation the Traveller feels in battle is a response that has likely helped the human species survive when attacked by predators, or to make the body keener for the difficulties and dangers of the hunt.

On the other hand, while the Traveller’s exultant smashing of the Morlocks may be an organic human response, such pleasure in violence can also result in murder, rape and aggressive war-making which has become an agent of mass death. It may fuel less obvious aggressions, such as those against the natural world, which can endanger the existence of all life on earth.

Some (including a few in Wells’ time) have advocated dampening or eradicating these aggressive tendencies with drugs or genetic manipulation. But the result could well be the Eloi.

The Traveller has qualities of both Morlock and Eloi. From either’s perspective, he contains the Other. That’s the essence of his humanity. He is the living synthesis, and his strength and intelligence are derived from that union. He is both angel and devil, and the difference is in how he sees things, and how he behaves.

It also suggests Wells’ ultimate solution to the human conundrum of natural selection, and the key to human evolution.

...To be continued.  For earlier posts in this series, click on the "Soul of the Future" label below.