Time Travel in Wells' Universe

The Time Traveller reconfigures time as “only a kind of Space” (5), and attempts to remove the constraints we assume of linearity and present-ness. In his assessment of time as the fourth dimension (4), the Time Traveller shows an amazing prescience; in his attempts to move through time as easily as one moves through space, he is ultimately thwarted. By this, I am not referring to the motion of the machine, which, if his story is to be believed, works just as intended and reveals the dying sun at the end of the world. Instead, I refer to the form of the book, and of the many books and movies in which time travel is represented.

The Time Traveller notes that “There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it” (4). This is not as trivial a problem as he attempts to make it into. Sure, if we accept the Traveller’s claim that “our mental existences…are immaterial and have no dimensions” (6), then moving through time is easy. But we are still limited by our consciousnesses, even as we are not limited by the time on the clock. The way we understand the movement of our consciousnesses from birth to death relies on our understanding of time: otherwise, we might pull a Benjamin Button, or simply live forever. Though he “hope[s] that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time-Dimension, or even turn about and travel the other way” (6), this only refers to the material, dimensional body. The Traveller’s idea of consciousness as the thing which passes through life “with a uniform velocity” (6) ends up dominating, simply because of the form of the novel.

The Time Traveller recounts a story to his guests, a story of his experiences. This story spans four hours (4 o’clock until after 7:30 p.m.), “eight days” (16), or over thirty million years (84), depending on how the reader interprets time. For the audience of his tale, the story materializes in the few hours before dinner. For the Traveller, the story lasts eight turns of the earth. From the point of view of a distant, long-lived observer (since Einstein did show us that there is no such thing as absolute time after all), the story spans millions of years. The only way to reconcile these is from the point of view of the narrator, as the narrator becomes the referential consciousness by which the reader sets their watch. Here, the fact that the frame narrator is not the Time Traveller keeps the passage of time conventional, where an hour is an hour and the events in the future have not/will not happen(ed). The experience of time travel is just a story, told with a beginning, a middle, and an end, as well as a clear progression of events. The Time Traveller uses regular temporal language in his story, speaking of the events in the future as though they were in the past. The experience of reading this book proceeds linearly, tracing a single conscious path through time.

A rough diagram of the Time Traveller's travels. The bottom blue line represents the time of the frame narrative, while the middle green line represents the time of the Eloi and the Morlocks, and the top red line represents the time of the bleeding sun. The purple path represents the Traveller's path through time as one continuous conscious experience (interrupted by sleep). By convention (whose convention?), time moves from left to right. These distinct worldlines make very little sense except as a useful figure.

This is a problem faced by many works that seek to depict time travel. What exactly is time travel, if you are the same person you were a second ago, if the “you” you meet in the future is not actually you but seems to be another distinct person entirely? How can we read time travel if we read linearly? (Or watch, or play, or hear.) We must return to the Traveller’s idea of an immaterial, dimensionless mental construct of identity, one that, regardless of surroundings, continues on its merry way.

The title of this post is an homage to Gott's book, Time Travel in Einstein's Universe.
Also, euurgh formatting issues this time.

A future like ours

Don Marquis put forth the deprivation argument as reasoned opposition to the ethicality of abortion. Roughly, he argues that it is wrong to kill an unconscious embryo because it has a future that is valuable, a “future like ours.” Destroying the potential of that future (the embryo) is equivalent to killing the later-stage conscious being involved in it. Though this argument is ultimately very problematic, it speaks interestingly to the way in which we interact with the future to determine not only present worth, but also, as H.G. Wells addresses in The Time Machine and Marquis hits on in his statement, how we define ourselves, and our descendants, as beings over time, both within the span of a single lifetime and over history.

For the Time Traveler, the issue is inverted. He is presented with two peoples – the Eloi and the Morlocks – representing the bifurcated evolutionary path taken by divergent social categories which, for Wells, are a logical consequence of the physical division of populations based on economic class. Among these, he must choose that which is the rightful son of Man, which represents the future that is ours.

The world of the 8,000^th century constitutes far more than a kind of recasting of Wells’ capitalist present in socialist terms (though it is indeed that). He has not produced a sympathetic laboring class which dotes faithfully on its ineffectual aristocratic charge. Rather, the conditions of labor have changed them into something altogether inhuman; unsympathetic even when the alternative is a kind of dumb petulant baby. The physical division, of decadent aristocracy increasingly buying up the Earth’s surface, while the laborer acclimates to the terms of his labor, eventuates a genetic bifurcation as the absence of class mobility and increasing cultural differences rarefy interbreeding among what become two species.

We find that the Time Traveler’s sympathies are with the dumb, child-like Eloi, while he describes the Morlocks consistently as nauseating, spidery and smelly. His actions reflect the adoption of a perspective from which only one descendant has any moral status as human. The Time Traveler saves Weena from drowning and days later begins smashing in the heads of the Morlocks, to which he is less sympathetic, but which he knows to be just as human, in a way, as the Eloi. His response to the Eloi is one of benign annoyance; for the Morlocks he has only contempt and anger.

What is ultimately at stake is which race we are going to claim as human. Wells’ future, unlike others which cast either “good” against “evil” (as are men and machines in The Terminator), is populated by human derivatives which are the decaying representations of a class system which, for Wells, discourages precisely those features (curiosity, intelligence, capacity for innovation and technology, compassion, etc.) which it, presently, purports to value above all else as human.

The Time Traveler chooses. He prefers to ally himself with the Eloi. He claims the future that is most like his as one of men turned fleshy and unthinking, but with some remnant of the aesthetic, and maybe the laughter. Perhaps it is the return of fear that he recognizes in them. He does not find his future in a brutish laboring class which has resorted to cannibalism.

The curiosity of this task of choosing is underscored by the book’s final line: “…even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.” “Gratitude” and “mutual tenderness” are not typically among the qualities which we (now or in Wells’ time), in a rational/empiricist age, list as quintessentially human. When confronted with the question of what qualities of man will survive into the future, we are forced to reevaluate what it means to be “like us,” or to have a future like ours. This obviously calls into question the futility of our own striving for knowledge/advancement, as the final chapters of the book address, while the Earth drifts into its eternal night. More importantly, though, it forces us to ask what it is about our fellow man that we find sufficiently like us for him to have moral status in our own lives, and, further, which criteria future man (or past man) must meet to warrant our present consideration. Would we make sacrifices for a future race which has fallen into decadence and decay, and which has forgotten us?

Interestingly, the first thing the Time Traveler does on his return is fill himself with mutton – finding inner carnivore unsated by the fruit diet of the Eloi. The polarized diets of the Eloi and Morlocks are symbolic of the degeneration that each race represents, an indication that it is the specialization, division, and pigeonholing of man that unravels him into separate beings which can, by present man, be either accepted and nurtured, or discarded. The reality, we find, is that the Time Traveler is related to both, though he readily discards one as insufficiently like himself and thus a kind of extra that can be killed off without moral repercussion.

Here at the End of All Things: Hope and Fear in The Time Machine

The two versions of The Time Machine that we looked at this week present very different perspectives on the same dark future: the movie version is ultimately based on optimism, while the original novels seems to present a fatalistic pessimism.

At first glance, the movie version of The Time Machine may appear to present a bleak outlook. Instead of exploring for the sake of exploration, as the Time Traveller does in H.G. Well's novel, the movie's George explicitly leaves turn-of-the-century England in an attempt to escape what he considers to be the growing corruption and violence in the people around him. However, he then stops his time machine in 1917 during WWI, and in 1940, in the middle of the Blitz. His third stop in 1966, just before a nuclear bombing attack hits the city, both reflects the fears of the imminent outbreak of war experienced by the film-makers and audiences in 1960, and seems to confirm to George the inevitability of war in humanity's future. The wars can only escalate, never cease, and indeed the film decides to make the separation of the Eloi and Morlocks an explicit result of the devastation caused by centuries of war that left the planet's surface almost unusable. Yet although the this chain of events may seem bleak at best, the film ends on a hopeful note, with the Morlocks destroyed, and the Eloi rediscovering their desire to fight and protect (and so, the film implies, to live). The film therefore presents the possibility of renewal, of recovery after even the most horrific of wars. Even if the human race almost destroys itself, there will eventually always be at least one rebel fighting for life.

However, this ultimately optimistic presentation of the future is a complete reversal of the original novel, which accepts, rather than fights, the idea that "all things must end." Since H.G. Wells wrote The Time Machine during the Fin de Siecle period, it is not surprising that it contains both an initial great hope for the continued progress and spendour of the (European) human race, but also a confirmation of the anxiety that this greatness will all fade to nothing. Therefore, not only does the time traveller fail to resolve (or even attempt to resolve) the problems of the Eloi or the terror created by the Morlocks, but he travels beyond even this, to the very end of the earth. As he watches "the life of the old world ebb away" (106) and comes to a silent, black world, he becomes overwhelmed with terror: "A horror of this great darkness came on me" (108). It is as though the Time Traveller is faced with the reality of the world, one that is not saved by the Eloi but ruled by the Morlocks, in darkness and shadow and despair. Ultimately, no matter how hard anyone resists, everything will become empty and dark.

Perhaps this difference is linked to the immediacy and clarity of the problems which caused anxiety and fear in writers in 1895 and 1960. During the Cold War, people lived under a constant fear of nuclear war, and so are perhaps in greater need of a resolution to the problems of war, however distant that resolution might be. The 1960s version of The Time Machine therefore offers the hope that, however dark things might get, and no matter how much the world changes, humanity will eventually be able to fight back and rebuild. The evil aspects of war (represented by the Morlocks) will eventually be eradicated, and the more positive aspects, like self-defense and fighting for what is right, will always remain lurking, to create a civilization that will fight on. The original novel, meanwhile, explores more general anxieties about the long-term consequences of the structure of society itself, industrialization, and the way that the growth and successes of the 19th century must eventually fade. With this "all shall fade" attitude, the novel explores cannot offer any hope for the future, cannot touch on the possibility of growth or renewal among the Eloi's, because even this would only be temporary compared to the "great darkness" that must eventually come. The fears of 1960 are resolved by a concrete, definite end-of-the-world scenario, which can then hint at the possibility of life recovering and continuing on - a known fear needing a clear sense of possible survival. The vague unsettling feeling of the fin de siecle, however, cannot be resolved or made concrete, beyond the idea that an indefinite, speculative "something" caused humanity to change and divide. It is not the fear that each individual, that society, will be ended by a nuclear war, but that one has reached the sunset on the great 19th century, and that everything, no matter how great, must eventually end.

Stranger in a Stranger Land... or Maybe Just a Displaced Human

The first thing that struck me about H. G. Wells' The Time Machine was its juxtaposition of the known and unknown. The story opens with a prim and proper dinner party, shifts to the Time Traveler's escapades in the year 802,701, then returns to the contemporary time of Victorian London. While the changes over the 800,000+ years between eras were obvious and described in detail in the novel, what fascinated me was H. G. Wells own daring in discussing the topic of true human variation. Most Science Fiction novels stick to the known or understandable future, better known as some variation of the utopian mixed with the Orwellian Earth populated by (with the exception of new fashions) rather normal humans. Wells pushed the envelope on the possibilities of the future populated by two "degenerate" branches of Homo Sapiens, the Eloi and the Morlocks. Most notably though, this future is not really a future at all but rather a status quo ad infinitum bereft of culture, curiosity, or compassion.

A version of the Time Machine

My inspiration for this post actually came from the 1960 film version of The Time Machine. As the film closes, David Philby runs back to the Time Traveler's laboratory only to find the scientist disappearing into Time. He concludes that the Time Traveler is returning to the future and has probably brought something of Victorian England back with him as a teaching aid. Searching his friend's study, Philby realizes that the only items the Time Traveller took were a trio of books from his library. This of course begs the question: "which books?" Were they books of knowledge such as an encyclopedia, of culture such as the Bible, or of art such as a collection of drawings? If put in this position, what would you take?

The scene in question is from about 0:30 to 1:32

I think it is the hallmark of good literature, especially for Science Fiction (a genre otherwise saturated with thriller novels), if the book's plot makes you consider your own views and actions. While I understand that only the movie specifically deals with this situation, the book does touch upon the basis of humanity and the Time Traveller's understandable exasperation with the apparent lack of it amongst the Eloi. Unlike other colonization metaphors in Science Fiction, the future described by Wells is fascinating in that the Eloi and Morlocks both lack culture, innovation, society, or even basic curiosity. Thus we return the theme of the known versus the unknown. Ironically in this case, the sword cuts both ways since just as we as contemporary humans fail to understand utopian anarchy, the Eloi have not concept of creativity, government, society, etc... Both parties are repulsed by the modus operandi of the other as the Eloi fear the occasional aggressiveness and frequent daring of the human while the Time Traveller in turn becomes increasing frustrated with the Eloi's lack of reaction or interest in him or his plight.

If this is only a small fraction of our knowledge and history,

what would you take with you to start a civilization?

There is of course, a second question here: if the Eloi and Murlocks live in harmony (as warped as predatory mutualism is), do you upset it by introducing a new set of beliefs? While only the film directly introduces the Time Traveller as a teacher, the novel still touches upon his effect on the Eloi. Weena obviously becomes quite attached to him and consequently appears to have regained some elements of her lost 'humanity' such as curiosity, compassion, and ability to overcome fear. Nonetheless, should the Time Traveller force a change in the name of his own beliefs, if those "benefitting" from his actions fail to acknowledge that fact or accept his teachings? Of course there is a clear parallel with A Rose for Ecclesiastes and other colonization-themed Sci Fi tales, but the very lack of culture amongst the Eloi makes The Time Machine a special case. Interfering with an existing culture is one thing, but crafting one from scratch is a completely different story. In the end, the question is: how do you and can you teach "humanness"?