Gods in the House of Pain: Civilization and Savagery in Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

H.G. Wells’ early science fiction novels brim with invention but The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) is the most compelling read of the bunch, a dark masterpiece that takes a scalpel to the idea of the human and slowly tears it to shreds. I discussed in a post on Le Fanu’s “Green Tea” (1872) the operation of Darwin’s idea of evolution in horror fiction, and Wells takes Darwinian ideas relating to the kinship of man and beast even further and maximises their horrific implications in this novel.

The Island of Dr. Moreau is of the then popular genre of “found manuscript” stories (“Green Tea” is another such tale), and the manuscript that is found is the account by one Edward Prendick of his escape from the sinking of the Lady Vain in a dinghy, to be picked up and brought to an island where goings-on are of the strangest.

The real strangeness begins when Prendick comes to face to face with an inhabitant of the island:

He was, I could see, a misshapen man, short, broad, and clumsy, with a crooked back, a hairy neck, and a head sunk between his shoulders.

[…]

In some indefinable way the black face thus flashed upon me shocked me profoundly. It was a singularly deformed one. The facial part projected, forming something dimly suggestive of a muzzle, and the huge half-open mouth showed as big white teeth as I had ever seen in a human mouth.

Moreau, Chapter 3.

The hint of humanity in the apparently bestial is a theme of the book, disorienting the reader and prompting reflection on what makes humans human.

In the spectacularly dark and ahumanist apologia by the titular Dr. Moreau, he sees the gap as being far from insurmountable: “the great difference between man and monkey is in the larynx, he continued,—in the incapacity to frame delicately different sound-symbols by which thought could be sustained.” In his attempts to bridge that gap and become a god, Moreau tortures animals in his “House of Pain” with his unique surgeries, and feels no compunction for doing so: “it is just this question of pain that parts us. So long as visible or audible pain turns you sick; so long as your own pains drive you; so long as pain underlies your propositions about sin,—so long, I tell you, you are an animal, thinking a little less obscurely what an animal feels.” Moreau’s amorality is almost without precedent in literature, but may echo Wells’ reading of Nietzsche, even as it seems to pre-empt Freud: “Very much indeed of what we call moral education, he said, is such an artificial modification and perversion of instinct; pugnacity is trained into courageous self-sacrifice, and suppressed sexuality into religious emotion.” (Moreau, Chapter 14).

The darkness of the novel is defined not so much by Moreau’s attitudes and deeds as by the fact he often appears the sanest and most intelligent presence in the novel, and by the fact Prendick becomes haunted by the sense there is something human, after all, in the beings Moreau has created or recreated:

I cannot explain the fact,—but now, seeing the creature there in a perfectly animal attitude, with the light gleaming in its eyes and its imperfectly human face distorted with terror, I realised again the fact of its humanity. In another moment other of its pursuers would see it, and it would be overpowered and captured, to experience once more the horrible tortures of the enclosure. Abruptly I slipped out my revolver, aimed between its terror-struck eyes, and fired.

A strange persuasion came upon me, that, save for the grossness of the line, the grotesqueness of the forms, I had here before me the whole balance of human life in miniature, the whole interplay of instinct, reason, and fate in its simplest form.

Moreau, Chapter 16

This is the ultimate shock to Prendick’s sense of an ordered human existence in a benevolent universe:

I must confess that I lost faith in the sanity of the world when I saw it suffering the painful disorder of this island. A blind Fate, a vast pitiless mechanism, seemed to cut and shape the fabric of existence and I, Moreau (by his passion for research), Montgomery (by his passion for drink), the Beast People with their instincts and mental restrictions, were torn and crushed, ruthlessly, inevitably, amid the infinite complexity of its incessant wheels.

Moreau, Chapter 16

Though the Beast People appear at times more people than beasts, their lives and deaths are treated by Prendick – not to mention Moreau – with the utmost casualness. Prendick is sometimes disturbed by their humanity, but more often hates them violently. His questioning of the nature of humanity when he sees the Beast People has a perhaps even darker echo in an almost contemporaneous work, Heart of Darkness (1899) by Joseph Conrad. Marlow is never so disturbed in that work as when he acknowledges his kinship with those he calls savages:

They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you—you so remote from the night of first ages—could comprehend.

HoD, II

There are numerous points of similarity between HoD and Moreau. HoD is obviously about colonialism but is also a reflection on what it means to be human or bestial, civilized or savage; Moreau is obviously about the line between humanity and bestiality but is also a sort of reflection on the colonialist mentality. They are like two sides of the same coin. Take the very similar passages near the ends of both, when the protagonists return from their sojourns in hell, and find London itself has taken on a nightmarish complexion, its inhabitants not as unproblematically human as they seemed before:

When I lived in London the horror was well-nigh insupportable. I could not get away from men: their voices came through windows; locked doors were flimsy safeguards. I would go out into the streets to fight with my delusion, and prowling women would mew after me; furtive, craving men glance jealously at me; weary, pale workers go coughing by me with tired eyes and eager paces, like wounded deer dripping blood; old people, bent and dull, pass murmuring to themselves; and, all unheeding, a ragged tail of gibing children. 

Moreau, Chapter 22

I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretence, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend. I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces so full of stupid importance.

HoD, III

It is no accident. Conrad was an admirer of Wells and dedicated his novel The Secret Agent to him. He also called him “a very original writer with a very individualistic judgment in all things and an astonishing imagination” (Jocelyn Baines, Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography, Penguin, 1986, p.282). Wells seems on the whole less impressed by Conrad and described their relation as “a long, fairly friendly but always rather strained acquaintance” (op. cit., p. 284). Later, he took a few rather petty potshots at Conrad in the novel Boon (1915) and they became estranged.

Still, reflecting on the works together is intriguing. There is no doubt Conrad had read Wells’ book before writing HoD and to see Moreau as a forerunner of Kurtz is tempting: the white man in the jungle with ultimate power over the savage indigenous life, power that makes him mad, turns his genius into amorality and brings into question the nature of humanity. Both are megalomaniacal. Moreau insists he is following “the Maker of this world”; Kurtz goes further and explicitly identifies with godlike powers:

He began with the argument that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, ‘must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings—we approach them with the might of a deity,’ and so on, and so on.

HoD, II – square brackets as in original.

A nice indication that Kurtz and Moreau were, in a sense, the same character is that Marlon Brando famously played Kurtz in Apocalypse Now (1979) and, some years later, played Moreau in the much-maligned adaptation The Island of Dr. Moreau (1993). It is unsurprising a figure of Brandon’s stature seemed needed for these Übermenschen, even if his success was mixed in bringing them to life.

Brando as Kurtz in Apocalypse Now.

Conrad read Wells and perhaps the central scenario of Moreau was filtered through Conrad’s own memory of the Congo, allowing him a new manner of seeing the brutality and hubris of the colonising mission and resulting in the classic Heart of Darkness. At the denouement, though, Conrad’s Marlow embraces the lie. Wells never does that, and his work is perhaps the more uncompromising. I cannot deny it is my favourite of the two, a dissection as cold and merciless as anything Moreau got up to in his “House of Pain”.

Does History Progress? If so, to what?

¨Does history progress? If so, to what?¨ is the Question of the Month at Philosophy Now. My offering is among those printed in the December/January edition. It goes as follows:

The notion of historical progress was dealt a mortal blow in the nineteenth century by the discovery that the Sun must eventually burn itself out, destroying life on Earth in the process. H.G. Wells dramatized this end at the climax of 1895’s The Time Machine, when the weakening Sun renders the Earth too cold to support life.

Although the ramifications of Darwinism were generally undignified, it did at least suggest a sort of progress, from ape to man. The science of thermodynamics was altogether bleaker, and the idea of the dying Sun in particular exercised the late Victorian imagination greatly. Not only was individual death inevitable, but species death, too.

In the twenty-first century, we feel this notion less keenly than those who were first exposed to it, but it remains the ultimate stumbling block. While it is conceivable that humanity will last until the Sun makes life on Earth unsupportable, it’s unlikely to be in good enough shape to organise a sustainable civilization in another suitable corner of the universe. That is the end of our history, and it is for this that our progress must prepare us. Our intellectual progress is preparing us for this end. With the death of humanism, the tragedic nature of the death-of-the-Sun scenario evaporates.

Yuval Noah Harari tells us in Homo Deus (2015) that current scientific consensus is that individuals are, in fact, ‘dividuals’, that is, an assemblage of many different algorithms. The decisions of this assemblage are random, but not free. Who could weep for such an assemblage? But, in short, considering ourselves as assemblages of algorithms is intellectual progress, if it removes the existential horror that surrounds the fate of humanity.

The passage from Wells I alluded to but did not have space to quote comes from chapter 11 of The Time Machine (1895):

So I travelled, stopping ever and again, in great strides of a thousand years or more, drawn on by the mystery of the earth’s fate, watching with a strange fascination the sun grow larger and duller in the westward sky, and the life of the old earth ebb away. At last, more than thirty million years hence, the huge red-hot dome of the sun had come to obscure nearly a tenth part of the darkling heavens. Then I stopped once more, for the crawling multitude of crabs had disappeared, and the red beach, save for its livid green liverworts and lichens, seemed lifeless. And now it was flecked with white. A bitter cold assailed me. Rare white flakes ever and again came eddying down. To the north-eastward, the glare of snow lay under the starlight of the sable sky, and I could see an undulating crest of hillocks pinkish white. There were fringes of ice along the sea margin, with drifting masses farther out; but the main expanse of that salt ocean, all bloody under the eternal sunset, was still unfrozen.

From The Time Machine at Project Gutenberg.

W.H. Hodgson, who I have written about elsewhere, was heavily influenced by this chapter in The House on the Borderland (1908). The preoccupation with the death of the sun is characteristically late 19th century, and the existential despair it engenders has always been summed up for me by a passage from Joseph Conrad´s letters:

The fate of a humanity condemned ultimately to perish from cold is not worth troubling about. If you take it to heart it becomes an unendurable tragedy. If you believe in improvement you must weep, for the attained perfection must end in cold, darkness and silence.

Quoted in Cedric Watts, A Preface to Conrad (Longman, 1982), p. 87

Like Wells, Conrad pictured the death of life to come in coldness and silence, when the sun had burned out. This is not, current scientific consensus has it, how it will be, as the sun will get hotter before it gets colder:

“The predictions for what exactly will happen to Earth as the Sun brightens over the next billion years are pretty uncertain,” Scudder said. “But the general gist is that the increasing heat from the sun will cause more water to evaporate off the surface, and be held in the atmosphere instead. The water then acts as a greenhouse gas, which traps more incoming heat, which speeds up the evaporation.”

Before it ever even runs out of hydrogen, the sun’s high-energy light will bombard our atmosphere and “split apart the molecules and allow the water to escape as hydrogen and oxygen, eventually bleeding Earth dry of water,” Scudder said.

Ali Sundermier, ¨The sun will destroy Earth a lot sooner than you might think¨, Independent, 19 January 2018.

We have our own issues, and our own sources of apocalyptic despair, but we tend not to summon up quite the level of dread over the death of the sun that our predecessors had. However, William Thomson/Lord Kelvin´s theories on the matter are of enormous philosophical impact, at a stroke striking a critical blow against both religious teleology and whiggist notions of history. Given that this is what historical progress must lead to, the best way to progress may be by numbing the mind, anaesthetization and the Hararian notion that we are but assemblages of algorithms. Existential dread can wield little force in such an entity.

Idealism and Disgust in Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow (1921)

In Flann O´Brien’s comic masterwork At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), the narrator describes his book collection in his distinctively formal style:

Each of them was generally recognised as indispensable to all who aspire to the nature of contemporary literature and my small collection contained works ranging from those of Mr Joyce to the widely read books of Mr A. Huxley, the eminent English writer. (Paperview, 2005, p. 11)

At this time, a knowledge of Huxley’s works was indispensable, and he was both widely read and eminent.  Now, in literary circles he has aged less well than the other author mentioned by O’Brien, James Joyce.  Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) is still a significant contribution to the dystopian genre, but as an author he no longer has much recognition, and many of the works that made his name have fallen out of the selective tradition.

Among the semi-forgotten works is his first novel, Crome Yellow (1921), the Peacockian satire that made his name.  After reading it, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote: ¨I find Huxley, after Beerbohm, the wittiest man now writing in English¨ (Nicholas Murray, Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual, Kindle, loc 2644).  The title itself, Huxley wrote, is ¨pleasingly meaningless except in so far as the Peacockian house in which the scene is laid is called Crome” (Murray, loc 2580).

Crome Yellow is a light and witty book, and it is not difficult to see why it appealed to reviewers at the time.  Similarly, its lack of interaction with modernist techniques and its setting in an aristocratic class that was dying out (and that had already been extensively mined for literary material by preceding English authors) help explain why it now seems less relevant than work by Joyce or other contemporaries.

The book is focalized through Dennis Stone, a young man with poetic pretensions who is also desperate for romance, but clueless about it.  One of the primary themes that becomes apparent from the beginning, and that echoes through Huxley’s work, is an opposition between rationality on one side and emotion and sensuality on the other.  This is even prefigured in the character’s name: Stone.  Dennis does not feel the things that other people do, and does not understand the emotions of the other.  Even though he wants to connect, he also wants to avoid messy human interaction.  In his inability to feel normal emotions, he is a stone.

At the beginning of the book, Dennis is on a train journey:

They were snorting out of West Bowlby now. It was the next station, thank Heaven. Denis took his chattels off the rack and piled them neatly in the corner opposite his own. A futile proceeding. But one must have something to do. When he had finished, he sank back into his seat and closed his eyes. It was extremely hot.

Oh, this journey! It was two hours cut clean out of his life; two hours in which he might have done so much, so much—written the perfect poem, for example, or read the one illuminating book. Instead of which—his gorge rose at the smell of the dusty cushions against which he was leaning. (Chapter I)

Dennis’ first action is to close his eyes as he tries to avoid the people around him and close off the sensual world.  This is a typical Huxleian gesture.  Even then, he cannot help sensual disgust, his gorge rising at the smell of the dusty cushions.  This sensual disgust is a major factor in all of Huxley’s protagonists.  At times in later works such as Ape and Essence (1948), this disgust before all sensual existence and before humanity in general is indulged by Huxley to a level which is quite difficult to read and has a fevered quality.  In Crome Yellow, the writing does not quite reach that level, but the difficulty of living in a sensual world is apparent.

While retreating from sense in this opening passage, Dennis takes refuge in literature: pure enjoyment for him involves poetry and books.  In Chapter IV, Dennis diagnoses his own malady: “Life, facts, things were horribly complicated; ideas, even the most difficult of them, deceptively simple.  In the world of ideas everything was clear; in life all was obscure, embroiled.  Was it surprising that one was miserable, horribly unhappy?”  The entire book, then, follows Dennis’ attempts to reproduce the comfort he feels in the world of pure ideas in the much messier world of the senses.

Later in his career, Huxley came to be known for pronouncements about the state of the world and where it was heading.  In Crome Yellow, the greater world barely intrudes.  There is one passage which prefigures Huxley’s later preoccupations:

To-day we are no longer surprised at these things.  The Black and Tans harry Ireland, the Poles maltreat the Silesians, the bold Fascisti slaughter their poorer countrymen: we take it all for granted.  Since the war we wonder at nothing.  We have created a Caesarean environment and a host of little Caesars has sprung up. (Chapter XVI)

These are the words of Mr. Scogan, who Murray believes to be based on Bertrand Russell, though he also has a tinge of H.G. Wells.  Here, Scogan’s words seem sincere, but as with the novel as a whole, a touch of undermining satire is never far away.  Huxley is not concerned with providing socio-political analysis in Crome Yellow, but in documenting various forms of illogic and absurdity.  Each character is a little island of foibles and cranky notions and they cannot communicate with each other.

Huxley was a member of the war generation.  When he wrote Crome Yellow, the war was a recent memory.  He had spent it as a teacher, exempt from military duty because of his near-blindness.  One does not necessarily think of World War I when one reads the novel, but contemporaries did think of Huxley’s early satires as being “a direct outcome of the mood of dissatisfaction, even despair, by which honest thoughtful young people were seized as they saw the consequences of four years of slaughter”. (Frank Swinnerton, qtd. in Murray, loc. 2961)  From reading Huxley of various periods, I tend to think there was much of Huxley’s mood of despair and misanthropy that was personal to him and that remained in his outlook regardless of political circumstances but the acceptance his harsh outlook found was evidently related to the feelings amongst the war generation.

Even then, there were some who had misgivings.  Julia Huxley, the author’s sister-in-law, said: “One had the feeling that he was almost corrosive… There was something vindictive in those early books.” (Qtd. in Murray, loc. 2741)  Misanthropy runs deep in Crome Yellow.  In retrospect, Huxley’s views can be discerned dimly through Mr. Scogan’s Wellsian tour de force of political theorizing:

“Sanity!” said Mr. Scogan, suddenly breaking a long silence. “Sanity—that’s what’s wrong with me and that’s what will be wrong with you, my dear Denis, when you’re old enough to be sane or insane. In a sane world I should be a great man; as things are, in this curious establishment, I am nothing at all; to all intents and purposes I don’t exist. I am just Vox et praeterea nihil.”

Denis made no response; he was thinking of other things. “After all,” he said to himself—“after all, Gombauld is better looking than I, more entertaining, more confident; and, besides, he’s already somebody and I’m still only potential…”

“Everything that ever gets done in this world is done by madmen,” Mr. Scogan went on. Denis tried not to listen, but the tireless insistence of Mr. Scogan’s discourse gradually compelled his attention. “Men such as I am, such as you may possibly become, have never achieved anything. We’re too sane; we’re merely reasonable. We lack the human touch, the compelling enthusiastic mania. People are quite ready to listen to the philosophers for a little amusement, just as they would listen to a fiddler or a mountebank. But as to acting on the advice of the men of reason—never. Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman. For the madman appeals to what is fundamental, to passion and the instincts; the philosophers to what is superficial and supererogatory—reason.” (Chapter XXII)

Despair at the madness and unreason of humanity is very Huxleian, yet here the notion is deliberately undercut by Dennis’ trite reflections on romance.  The reader is left amused, intrigued and uncertain. 

Crome Yellow is a vortex of unsettling ideas in a traditional form and setting.  Huxley’s mind roams over many elements of human existence, probing for answers but unable to accept any he is given.  This precarious uncertainty gives it an energy and interest lacking in some of Huxley’s more decidedly theoretical works.  It was Huxley’s uncertainty, rather than his knowledge, that was his gift as a writer.

The Dawn of Algorithmic Man, or an Even Worse Death

Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus (2016) chronicles the (as he sees it) ongoing death of humanism, which Nuval sees as the “religion” that has dominated the world for 300 years. It is to be replaced by Dataism, the belief in the wisdom of algorithms, which are beginning already to know us better than we know ourselves, and which will soon be making decisions on all our behalves:

You may not agree with the idea that organisms are algorithms, and that giraffes, tomatoes and human beings are just different methods for processing data. But you should know that this is current scientific dogma, and it is changing our world beyond recognition. (429)

It is perhaps unnerving to contemplate the approaching death of human subjectivity in its familiar form. Yet I for one welcome our algorithmic overlords. This is because our subjective death at their hands will serve merely to spare us as a species from an even worse death in the long run. Ever since 19th century studies into the nature of deep time and of the universe, our inescapable doom has been present to the general consciousness. The Victorians knew, as their ancestors had not, that the sun was destined to die, and mankind along with it. This, in its novelty, was perhaps a starker reality to them than it is to us. Take, for example, Joseph Conrad’s reflection on the death of the sun, and its implications for ideologies of progress:

The fate of a humanity condemned ultimately to perish from cold is not worth troubling about. If you take it to heart it becomes an unendurable tragedy. If you believe in improvement you must weep, for the attained perfection must end in cold, darkness and silence.

Quoted in Cedric Watts, A Preface to Conrad (Longman, 1982), p. 87

Joseph Conrad: didn’t hold out much hope for humanity.

H.G. Wells, too, was preoccupied by this inevitability, and its implications for the belief in progress. In Men Like Gods (1923), for example, he writes:

[O]ur sun and planets are cooling, and there seems no hope of escape from the little world upon which we have arisen. We were born with it, and we must die with it. That robbed many of us of hope and energy: for why should we work for progress in a world that must freeze and die?

Why indeed? The death of the sun provides a more final and absolute denouement for the human race than even the impending climate catastrophe anticipated by scientific consensus. We don’t have the means to build a civilisation outside of the solar system, or even to get a single person out there. Human progress is ultimately futile. Let us leave it, then, to the algorithms. Long before the death of the sun, if Harari is correct, they will have taken over, probably reduced humanity to slaves, drones, our currently overdeveloped consciousnesses existing at subsistence level. At least, though, we are spared Conrad’s apocalyptical vision, which becomes one less thing to worry about.

It may not end in cold, darkness and silence as Conrad thought, but the death of the sun will be the obliteration of the Earth, and will be one which we will see coming long before it arrives. In this context, we should welcome the anaesthesia that will come with the dawn of algorithmic man. We can already feel the numbness taking over, as our bodies and minds adjust to lives as adjuncts to technology. The great anaesthetising is only beginning, and will take generations. Resistance is probably futile, but in any case misguided.

The Death of the Curate in Wells’ War of the Worlds and its 1953 Adaptation

Linda Hutcheon notes that when a narrative text is adapted, there is “almost always […] an accompanying shift in the political valence” (A Theory of Adaptation, 2006, p. 141). The story might be the same in its essentials, but in small narrative choices made, lines of dialogue , elements of character, etc., much food for reflection on differing ideological underpinnings, assumptions, morals, values, etc. is found. Where to locate this difference, then? In the author? The writer had a different intellectual and moral make-up to the director (assuming we can name the director as auteur). Or in the culture? Who writes a book, and an adaptation? An individual, or a culture? Considering many modern screen products, they appear to be written as much as anything by generic tropes. But are prevailing generic tropes themselves written by a culture? Surely they have a signifying purpose beyond mere cultural filler, which has enabled them to thrive in the meme pool? Perhaps the first point to be made before getting into these difficult questions is that a story doesn’t mean in the abstract. The narrative may remain the same between source and adaptation, but if the mode of narration changes, the narrative may mean, in an ideological sense, something quite different in both manifestations of the same story. If the story itself is not too saturated with evident ideological functions, just a few small changes can wholly shift the political valence. A few small crucial unargued assumptions may seem to convey a wholly different mode of considering the political.

An example, one that struck me recently: H.G. Wells’ classic sci-fi novel The War of the Worlds (1898) and its 1953 Hollywood adaptation. One ideologically loaded figure: the curate. Wells’ novel doesn’t give names to the characters. There’s the narrator (who never formally introduces himself) his brother, his wife, the curate, etc. Maybe it’s Wells deliberately depersonalizing humans just to hammer home his point about how insignificant we are, or would be to a hypothetical intellectually superior race. This is the point he makes in the book’s tremendous opening paragraphs, when he imagines a great race exterminating humanity, and then adds:

[B]efore we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit? (Bk. I, Ch. I)

The general reader doesn’t necessarily realize how harsh and cynical Wells is at times in his early sci-fi novels (especially The Island of Dr Moreau – the best of them in my opinion), but this passage sums up how determined he is to get people to question the notion and status of humanity. It’s a post-Darwinian, maybe post-Nietzschean outlook, and it’s not pretty.

It is predictable that given such a mood, curates are not going to be let off lightly, and Wells is unrelenting in his denigration of this character. The Curate is introduced as follows:

His face was a fair weakness, his chin retreated, and his hair lay in crisp, almost flaxen curls on his low forehead; his eyes were rather large, pale blue, and blankly staring. He spoke abruptly, looking vacantly away from me.

“What does it mean?” he said. “What do these things mean?”

I stared at him and made no answer.

He extended a thin white hand and spoke in almost a complaining tone.

“Why are these things permitted? What sins have we done? The morning service was over, I was walking through the roads to clear my brain for the afternoon, and then–fire, earthquake, death! As if it were Sodom and Gomorrah! All our work undone, all the work—- What are these Martians?”

“What are we?” I answered, clearing my throat. (Bk. I, Ch. 13)

Physical appearance is the first indice of character here: “His face was a fair weakness”; his eyes stared blankly. And then his tone of voice confirms it: it is, already, “almost a complaining tone”. As for the content of his speech: he can only regurgitate formulas from the Bible, with increasing hysteria as the book develops, demonstrating at every appearance an absolute inability to apply his intelligence to the situation, or even to face it in its empirical realities. Note, here, as well, that classically Wellsian response to the question “What are these Martians?” – “What are we?”. This is the question that resounds through his early science-fiction novels, less often in a tone of curiosity than in one of savage contempt.

The Curate does not improve on acquaintance and, ultimately, when he begins jabbering loudly and nonsensically about the Martians’ attack being a judgement from God, doing so when the Martians are just outside and thus endangering himself and the narrator, our narrator bashes him on the head with the butt of a meat-cleaver. It is unclear whether this stuns or kills him, but he is afterwards dragged away by the Martians, to die if he has not done so already. This chapter is actually called “The Death of the Curate”, but Wells seems to deliberately leave some ambiguity as to how that death came about.

But what is clear in this chapter is the contempt with which the Curate and “his vacant sham of God’s service” is viewed. In Brian Aldiss’ introduction to the book, he notes that “Wells’ curate is there to express the helplessness of organized religion when faced with the invaders” (Penguin, 2005, xviii). Not for Wells the old adage about no atheists in foxholes. Religion, he posits, is not of the least use in a foxhole, but rather a hindrance to clear thought.

So much for Wells. In the 1953 adaptation of the book, the figure of the Curate is retained, now called Pastor Dr Matthew Collins, according to IMDb. A pastor and a doctor. A man of science and a man of God. After the early establishing shots of Mars, Earth, and falling Martian rockets, Pastor Collins is present in the very first shot, and is centrally involved in the community reaction to the rockets. First, he is shown as the lone voice of community-mindedness among all the greedy businessmen who want to turn the smoking rocket into a tourist attraction. He engages in discussion of the Martians with the scientist, and later he tries to dissuade the military from shooting on the Martians without first trying to talk to them. When the military show no interest in this approach, the intrepid Pastor Matthew goes out alone to talk to the aliens.

Pastor Matthew and Sylvia, one of the film’s romantic leads.

Oddly enough, though his rationale is that no attempt has been made to communicate with the Martians, his attempts to speak to them on approach are limited to quoting the Bible: “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death”, etc, simultaneously holding up a Bible. They obliterate him, unsurprisingly.

Pastor Matthew comes to a similar end to Wells’ Curate, but that’s where the similarity ends. The Curate is whiny and utterly lacking in self-possession; Matthew is soft-spoken, intelligent, compassionate, and, obviously, brave. He is right at the centre of the communal effort to tackle the catastrophe. But to fully understand the religious undertones that emerge in the adaptation, one would have to take other elements beyond this character into account. Most of all, there is the climactic scene, which takes place in, of course, a church.

Wells’ story, then, proved very easily amenable to being turned to ideological purposes other than his own. Quite the reverse of his own, perhaps. This may well be because Wells’ curate is such an ideologically loaded character – he’s not essential to the plot, only to his own small section of it. He has no other characteristics beyond those that relate to the political valence of the movie. So it’s easy to change these elements without having any knock-on effect on the story as a whole. This is the irony of such a simply political approach to character. Had the Curate been a more complex character, and/or more integrated into the plot, it would have been difficult to change him without it jarring notably with other elements of the narrative. As it is, the story in the adaptation moves along quite smoothly, and the death of the Curate does not seem to be in any way out of keeping with it. A single story can, very easily with just a few simple moves, turned into an ideological opposite of itself.

H.G. Wells, In Search of Hot Water (1939)

I came across a copy of this book for a few euro in the second-hand section of Chapters bookshop in Dublin. A nice find: a first edition (paperback) from 1939 of a book I had never heard of by an author I admire. Looking the book up on WorldCat, it seems that it has only been republished once since 1939, and that was back in 1949. It made Hot Water more interesting to me to know that I was holding the first and almost only edition; and it surprised me that such a famous name as Wells could have a book that has been so long out of print. A good deal of the explanation is in the fact that Wells published a lot, and a great deal of his lesser work has been weeded out from the “selective tradition” (as Raymond Williams would say). And further, the essays that make up Hot Water are occasional, specifically about affairs of the times, and not for the ages. Most of them had appeared in newspapers in the months prior to the book’s November 1939 publication.

Wells’ In Search of Hot Water (1939), in the classic Penguin sleeve, scuffed edges and all.

The full title on the flyleaf is Travels of a Republican Radical in Search of Hot Water, but the front has only In Search of Hot Water. Note the clever double meaning in the title: firstly, Wells, a noted polemicist, is forever finding himself in metaphorical “Hot Water”, and each essay is written in expectation that he will find find himself there again; and, secondly, the traveller to the out-of-the-way places Wells visits in the course of these essays (e.g. Burma) is often, presumably, without the conveniences of Western living, such as physical “Hot Water”. The full title also sees Wells define himself politically, “A Republican Radical”.

These essays were written in 1938-39, when Wells was over seventy, and had been a prominent intellectual for almost 40 years. The time itself is significant, as it was just before the outbreak of World War II. This was a war which Wells, along with many others, saw coming, and it haunts the pages of Hot Water. There’s an essay in the book called “Prophecy of 1939”. Cultural prophecy was of course one of Wells’ long-standing specialities (witness Anticipations, A Modern Utopia and The Shape of Things to Come). However, he opens “Prophecy” with a characteristically blunt warning:

Let me be perfectly frank about what this Forecast amounts to. I know no more than you about what is coming. I have no magic crystal. All this sort of thing is guessing; an estimate of trends and possibilities. (17)

Disclaimer issued, he gets down to business. He predicts, accurately, that the greatest threat to the world order is coming from Germany. He postulates that “The German people are an orderly, vain, deeply sentimental and rather insensitive people” (18). Wells was rather fond of making huge generalizations about national character; which is odd, because he wanted nothing more than a single World State and constantly and effectively ridiculed provincialism and insularity among his compatriots. But his problem is not with the German people, but their leaders, “a triumvirate of lunatics”. He is loudly against Chamberlain’s appeasement policy:

[Hitler] and his chief friends ought to now be rendered harmless and put away as soon as possible. I appeal to his open record, his published speeches, his role in the present pogrom, to establish the fact that he and his two friends are suffering from delusions of grandeur and a contagious form of homicidal mania. (19)

The fence on which Chamberlain wishes to sit, in Wells’ metaphor, is becoming more and more a knife-edge. What is needed is…

 [A] Radical-minded union of the English-speaking states. Such a consolidation could say effectively “Stop the fighting”. It has to be said, arms in hand. Peace is not a foolish, faceless thing; it is not the retreating aspect of humanity. It is something more difficult than war, more exacting of human energy. (27)

It is typical of Wells to frame peace in such warlike terms, though perhaps in this case justified.

It was not his reflections on Chamberlain’s foreign policy which caused most upset. Rather, it was a fairly mild passing swipe at royalty in the essay which earned the author a rebuke in the pages of the Sunday Dispatch. Hot Water reprints said rebuke appended to “Prophecy”, further appending Wells’ own response – a response which, he wrote, “I have found impossible to reprint in any British or American periodical” (32). In this response he reiterates yet again his rejection of monarchism, preferring “the high republican and intensely English tradition of Cromwell, Milton, George Washington and so forth” (35). The invocation of Cromwell is interesting – undoubtedly Carlyle’s Great Man theory and the Carlylean construction of Cromwell was somewhere in the mix. “Prophecy” starts with a critique of Great Man politics in general and Hitler in particular, but the appeal to Cromwell shows Wells’ loyalties were never really to the democratic tradition, but to the tradition of rule of the best, the class identified as the Samurai in A Modern Utopia. His writings mix a scrupulous rationalism with a contempt for mediocrity and a love of conquest and good old Hero-worship, though not in the unequivocal Carlylean manner. Equivocality is part of Wells’ manner at all times, expressed in his humour, often at his own expense. In the descriptions of himself and his literary avatars (such as “the whitish plump man” at the beginning of A Modern Utopia), it is always clear that Wells finds himself a little ridiculous, both in his person and in the strength of his opinions – but still, he can’t help having very strong opinions.

Taken in isolation, some of Wells’ formulations of his opinions may be objectionable to contemporary sensibilities. Taken together, they show a writer who never stopped going over the problems of his society, who was never happy with formulae or with the received opinions of his time, and who always maintained a measure of open-mindedness, even if prone to excesses. Reading Wells remains bracing. There is an everyman quality to his indignant reactions to the stupidity and self-servingness of those in power, his deeply ingrained hatred of cant and hypocrisy; but it is allied to an intelligence and breadth of knowledge beyond most and an unerring dedication to ameliorating the muddle of worldly affairs, with the final end of bringing all of humanity together in one harmonious World State. His prose style is brisk and lively in this late book, he’s still hopeful and still spoiling for a fight. But now, almost seventy years after  his death, the Wellsian Utopia is as far away as ever, so perhaps he was an imperfect prophet, or perhaps the world hasn’t caught up with him yet.

Wells and Cultural Prophecy: “The Shape of Things to Come” (1933)

H.G. Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come (1933), isn’t really a novel, whatever the blurb of the recent Penguin edition (2005) might say. Its closest predecessor thematically may be a work of cultural prophecy such as Carlyle’s Past and Present (1843), but within a frame structure similar to, for example, Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833-34). What Wells calls it is “a history of the future”.

The main body of the text is from the files of one Dr Philip Raven, recently deceased. He presents it as based on his own dreams or visions of the future. The dreams don’t constitute an action-based narrative, but a very long and detailed historico-sociological textbook. Later, the editor (identified as HGW – Wells himself, or a version of him) whose comments frame Dr Raven’s writings, suggests they should be read as a “general thesis […] about the condition of things to come” (447).

The framework, then, is very similar to that of the thesis on “things in general” by Prof Diogenes Teufelsdrockh, as presented in Sartor. Both books are offering a thesis on the grandest and most important of subjects, but within a slightly fictionalized framework, which allows the authors to play with ideas and put forward ideas they do not quite wish to take full responsibility for. For Wells, this means he can provide for the regeneration/ rebirth of society through the instrument of a totalitarian Modern State, whose aim is “to rule not only the planet but the human will” (346), and who thus impose themselves by martial law and precisely 47,066 executions! (see page 358) But while this may appear draconian, in Wells’ scenario the end is seen to justify the means, because crime is ultimately abolished, as well as “hunger, fear and other primary stresses” (439). This is achieved through Discipline, Education, and the jettisoning of Democracy, Monarchy, Capitalism, Nationalism and Religion, the five great bugbears of 20th century society, as Wells saw it. There isn’t even any need for medical eugenics, just selective breeding (along with its corollary, selective sterilization) and right education, et viola:

[I]t is particularly evident in Bengal and Central China. There we find the direct descendants of shrill, unhappy, swarming, degenerate, undernourished, undereducated, underbred, and short-lived populations among the finest, handsomest, longest-lived and ablest of contemporary humanity. (430)

Things to Come demonstrates in one sense a very optimistic view of the human condition, a limitless faith in the powers of good education to eradicate “abberant motives” (413) and unite all the world as one race. But to reach that state, a couple of things have to happen: there’s the whole totalitarian bit, but even before that, to create the conditions for Wells’ Aristocracy of Talent to create their World State, the majority of the world’s population had to be wiped out by a Great Pestilence. This questionable deus ex machina is characterized as “not the disease but the harvest of a weakness already prepared” (226). It is Wells’ equivalent to the Carlylean schema of the phoenix death-birth of society in Sartor. As the early 19th century for Carlyle, the 1930s was the period for Wells in which society had become exhausted: caught in a stranglehold of old, worn-out beliefs, customs and institutions, unable to extricate itself, unable to work up the will to extricate itself, unable to appreciate the need to work up such a will. What was needed was the descent into chaos, in which shams could finally be burned up, and men could realize their true standing with regard to the nature of things. This was to be achieved through a workers’ revolution for Carlyle, for Wells it was pestilence.

The pestilence, though, is a big stumbling block for Things to Come as a prescriptive – and, if we want to call it a work of cultural prophecy, it has to be prescriptive. It’s a deus ex machina, a fictional device. Either Wells is suggesting that something of this kind should be arranged, or all the detail of his plan for a new society is worthless, because the conditions under which it can be implemented are, more or less, impossible. Yet it’s only really as cultural prophecy the book makes sense – it certainly isn’t a novel.

Nevertheless, there’s  a lot to appreciate about The Shape of Things to Come: there’s breadth of knowledge and depth of commitment, and a basically disinterested attempt to ameliorate the lot of mankind. Despite the impression that this post might have given, Wells’ approach is still fundamentally humane – his description of the horrors of WWI is powerful, for example. Yet in his impatience with his society, he went rather over the top, and his cultural prophecy, like Carlyle’s (which he had read as a teen/ 20-something), is based on an idealistic view of leadership. If he had been writing a few years later, maybe he could have taken Orwell’s Animal Farm (1944) into account. That book now seems a much more realistic account of how power is obtained and maintained. But Wells was no Orwellian, or indeed Foucauldian, and believed that power would fade when its job was done – and, who knows, maybe it will.

James Whale’s The Invisible Man (1933)

When I first encountered it, aged about 7 or 8, H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man inspired in me feelings which I would now, thanks to my later readings of Dr Freud, understand to belong to that realm of sensation called The Uncanny. It appeared in a children’s version, illustrated and much abridged, in my local newsagent, an establishment not given to stocking works of literature. I vowed to purchase and read this intriguing work, and soon did, but I don’t remember the actual reading of it so much as just seeing it before me in the shop, and being deeply discomfitted and fascinated by that illustration of a man-shaped suit of clothes and the glasses floating above them where the eyes should be, but there were no eyes, nor a face. I don’t even remember what particular reflections this notion of the invisible man provoked in me, just that I found it greatly fascinating.

The Invisible Man arrives in Iping.

The Invisible Man is a product of the Victorian era, first published in 1897. The 1933 Universal Studios adaptation is very much a product of that studio and of director James Whale, sharing quite a few features with, especially, Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein. Both foreground the notion of science being a danger to sanity and the human spirit. “He meddled in things men should leave alone”, says Kemp early in the film and Griffin (The Invisible Man) himself repeats the phrase much later on. Like Victor Frankenstein, too, Griffin is given a love interest (not in Wells), and again he seems to have been faced with a binary choice – marriage to Flora and domesticity, or devotion to the expansion of human knowledge. And like Victor F., he made what is coded in the film as the wrong choice.

The love interest aside, the film is a lot less interested in gaining sympathy for Griffin than Wells. Wells gave him a substantial back-story that’s omitted. The film’s Griffin is motivated by a megalomania and lust for power so excessive as to be parodic:

Don’t you see what it means? Power. Power to rule, to make the world grovel at my feet… Power! I said. Power to walk into the gold vaults of the nations, into the secrets of kings, into the holy of holies, etc.

Griffin is the evil and dangerous Other, and it is in the community response to his incursion that the film locates morality and fellow-feeling.

"Power! I said."

The film also locates considerable humour in the community response to Griffin, and in Griffin’s own Puckish pransterism. For, only minutes after expounding on his lust for power, Griffin is skipping down a country lane, appearing as a disembodied pair of trousers, singing “Here we go gathering nuts in May” for the purpose of alarming a middle-aged woman out walking. Such incongruities are characteristic of Whale’s movies and much in evidence in The Invisible Man.

The coming of the disembodied trousers

In the documentary on my DVD of the film, one of the contributors puts the popularity of The Invisible Man and its several sequels down to the fact that “it’s about nudity”. Because, of course, his clothes aren’t invisible, so to stay unseen he must remain naked. There may be something in this, though voyeurism must be at least an equally large component, if one wants to ponder the psychosexuality of invisibility. Of course, neither Wells nor Whale does ponder this. But in Whale, especially, Griffin’s motives are weak and, in fact, nonsensical. If one’s desire is world power and glory, invisibility is hardly the best course. Griffin’s plan is as follows:

I shall offer my secret to the world with all its terrible power. The nations of the world will bid for it, thousands, millions. The nation that wins my secret can sweep the world with invisible armies.

I’m not so sure of the efficacy of an invisible army. Rather than sweep the world, wouldn’t they be constantly falling over each other? And, of course, to remain invisible they’d have to be naked and unarmed, hardly an ideal state for an army. Admittedly, Griffin is clearly mad with his power-lust at this point, so maybe the stupidity of his idea is the point, but by making this somewhat absurd lust for worldly power central, the film is perhaps avoiding dealing with issues of nudity and voyeurism, though there are a couple of sly references to Griffin’s naked state. Could it be time for a modern update on this classic tale, one in which the perviness of the urge for invisibility is laid bare? Only time will tell.

Side-note: This shot comes in right after the studio logo.

It says:

Universal Picture.

NRA member US.

We do our part.

First time I’ve noticed this.