The Time Machine.5: Humans Divided

“...go, Teachers of content and honest pride, into the mine, the mill, the forge, the squalid depths of deepest ignorance, and uttermost abyss of man’s neglect, and say can any hopeful plant spring up in air so foul that it extinguishes the soul’s bright torch as fast as it is kindled!”
Charles Dickens
Martin Chuzzlewit

The Traveller resists the idea of following the Morlocks to their underground lair, yet if he is to recover the time machine, he knows he must. He senses and begins to share the Eloi’s fear of the dark, and notices his own unreasoning dread of the Morlock’s “pallid bodies...They were “the half-bleached color of the worms” he has seen in the zoological museum.

But with a frightened Weena watching, he climbs down the ladder of one of the wells and enters the underground darkness, equipped with only his last few matches. He sees machinery and some meat on a table, but he cannot communicate with the Morlocks. They quietly attack him, and he barely escapes.

Back on the sunny surface, he considers his emotions, and reconsiders the order of this future world. His third hypothesis adjusts the relationship of the two species descended from the human race he knew in his own time.

“The Upper-world people might have once been the favored aristocracy, and the Morlocks their mechanical servants, but that had long since passed away. The two species that had resulted from the evolution of man were sliding downwards...”

The Eloi “had decayed to a mere beautiful futility.” They had the surface to themselves because the Morlocks could no longer stand the light. “And the Morlocks made their garments” and maintained them “perhaps through the survival of an old habit of service.”

The Traveller takes Weena on an expedition towards a distant structure he calls the Palace of Green Porcelain. But the day wanes before they can return, and they stop for the night on an isolated hill near an expanse of endless woods. It is then that the Traveller's fourth and final hypothesis comes to him unbidden, as he is looking at the stars and thinking gentle cosmic thoughts.

In his brief foray underground he had seen a table of red meat, noted with scientific objectivity that the Morlocks were meat-eaters, and wondered where the meat could come from, for he had seen no animals. Now in the still silence of night he realizes "what the meat I had seen might be. Yet it was too horrible! I looked at little Weena sleeping beside me, her face white and starlike under the stars, and forthwith dismissed the thought."

But with the assurance of dawn he stands up and faces what he now knows to be true. The Eloi are the Morlocks’ lunchmeat. The Morlocks keep them like cattle. And he has his fourth hypothesis, no longer obscured by philosophies or anything less than the biological truth: humanity has divided into predator and prey.

But now the Traveller realizes he is not studying this phenomenon from a distance—he is now part of it, and he must act. He is living on the surface with the Eloi, and the Morlocks evidently consider him one of them—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.

Though Wells' endows the Morlocks with some human emotion and at least one positive act (as the Traveller later finds, they have carefully cleaned and oiled his time machine), they are portrayed mostly as mechanically capable cannibals. Technically perhaps they aren't cannibals, because they are now a different species from the Eloi. But that of course is the point, and the horror of it: humanity has created its own predator, and made part of itself the prey.

The Time Machine has become a horror story. Humanity has divided into two separate and mutually dependent species, locked together in an ultimate inhuman symbiosis.

It is the final reflection of fears in the Traveller’s own time, where workers fear that the elites will keep them separate and enslaved, and drive them into the depths of despair, while elites fear the dark energy of the lower class and the "lower races" they exploit, so they tamp it down with the oppression of force and the shaming pretensions of science and culture.

The primal fears of the insecurely powerful are fulfilled in this future, as the apparently servile stalk them in the night, to devour them and all they have. Some of the Traveller’s contemporaries would see this future as just a reversal of predator and prey. They would assert that “predatory capitalism,” the rich preying on the poor describes the Traveller’s present.

Of course these fears remain, for the divisions are still with us, however reconfigured and sustained by new technologies and dogmas. And so the story continues to be haunting.

based on the 1960 film

Though the Eloi and Morlocks may be acting out of instinct at the time the Traveller visits them, they are the descendants of conscious humans who must have chosen to separate, and in a sense collaborated to divide. Perhaps violent conflict threatened to destroy them both. So the winners and losers of their common world divided into different environments that they each reinforced with their own creations, and then they each adapted to the environments they created and accepted.

Each species is separate, and both are incomplete. This is the key to Wells' portrayal of them, as simplified and unattractive opposites. Locked in the eternal dark and clanging of machine hell, the morbid, moronic Morlocks are the sketch of death. The Eloi, the cloying elite, are parodies of life and light. The Morlocks are pure evil, the Eloi pure innocence, but neither has the power of demons or angels, or gods of the future. They are satires of parts of humanity and segments of society. And in a sense those parts are interchangeable.

If the Morlocks are satirized Satans and the Eloi are travesties of angels, the two species define each other. Symbolically as well as symbiotically, without each other they don't exist. And this may be the most savage point Wells makes: the Eloi and Morlock devolved as separate species because humanity divided. On what basis they divided is a secondary point—it might be class, or race, religion or gender. It is all based finally on the dualism of the superior and inferior, of Us and Them.

Back in London the guests around the Time Traveller's baronial dinner table were right: it is a trick, a practical joke. The joke is that instead of showing how humans reflect in their cultures aspects of their biological evolution, in Wells' future, humanity has biologically evolved from its own cultural creations—and destruction.

But it's a very dark joke; no laughter interrupts. And the story is not over.

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