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.

Categorizing Humanity's Future

As The Time Machine emphasizes, the Time Traveller’s experience of his temporal destination is shaped by his understanding of the present. When time travellers are displaced from their own eras, they often must reframe the world by fitting it within their own conceptions of society. By imposing his “current” social/philosophical theories into the unfamiliar world, the Time Traveller simultaneously recognizes historical continuity and defines the new era through its differences from the current one. These observations probably seem intuitive and obvious, but reading and watching The Time Machine and The Terminator uses these themes to raise important questions about the way we think of the present.

One prime example of subjecting the future world to a contemporary world view occurs when Wells’s time traveller analyzes 802701 A.D. through a socialist lens. Even as he finds information that contradicts his theories, the time traveller refuses to consider that his observations can’t be explained through socialism’s theories or prophecies. Interestingly, just as George Orwell and Aldous Huxley and Ayn Rand crafted worlds that emphasize the evils of socialism, H.G. Wells shows a future where capitalism continues to widen the rift between social classes, and the “have-nots” are ultimately both crafty and resourceless enough feed off of the lazy “haves”; this is supposed to show us the dangers of not overthrowing the oppressors.

The Time Traveller also assumes that the Eloi and Morlocks descended from humans. He seems preoccupied by categorizing their behaviors as “human” or “inhuman.” One of his initial fears before he meets the Eloi is that “the race had lost its manliness, and had developed into something inhuman, unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly powerful?” (20). As he observes the Eloi and Morlocks, readers gain insight into what he considers “human” qualities - humans have language and they read and write , but the Eloi don’t. Weena seems “more human than she was, perhaps because her affection was so human” (51). He continues to cast himself as human, and the Eloi and Morlocks as inhuman, even justifying his own “inhuman” actions (“Very inhuman, you may think, to want to go killing one’s own descendants! But it was impossible, somehow, to feel any humanity in the things.” (54)) The 1960 movie version casts cannibalism as “the lowest form of human life.” It seems that humanity is often defined by what is less human or inhuman - it constitutes itself by stigmatizing its "Other" and its "inferiors." The movie version makes these divides even more clear - the time traveller only identifies with the (Aryan) Eloi, pushing them to rebel against their captors. The movie erases the only marginally-sympathetic aspect of the Morlocks - that they were the “have-nots” who were forced to hunt their captors; instead, the Morlocks always bred and controlled the Eloi like cattle.

Watching/reading about the Time Traveller’s way of organizing the future world prompted me to think about our current ways of labeling and categorizing the present and the past. When we impose a philosophical theory (ie. as Engels imposed Marxism on the distant history of humanity in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884)) upon “known” facts, are we forcing those details into an anachronistic labeling, one that will always be inadequate? Also, how many other things do we define through biased characteristics? (I’m sure that quite a few cultures do not have a high literacy rate or produce many formal written works, and it doesn’t make sense to deem them “inhuman” or “less human”). Also, I wonder what a time travel narrative that is entirely isolated from current political/theoretical agendas might look like (and I don’t think that’s entirely possible.) Finally, the movie definitely pointed to these questions much more at the end: should the time traveller intervene and reshape the world specifically through his 1890s knowledge of what humanity should be? That already looks odd to me - there’s already an entirely new world of theory that has surfaced in the last century, and it’s clear that the Time Traveller might have a severely narrow world view. Both The Terminator and The Time Machine raise questions about the ethics surrounding time travel, but they do not directly engage them.

The Time Machine: Colonialism and the Necessity of War

While reading and watching The Time Machine, two themes leapt out at me more than any others. First of all, as alluded to in previous posts, the colonialist themes were surprisingly explicit—as Kai points out in his post, The Time Machine is most definitely a product of its… well, times. In the book, the Time Traveler claims of his first interactions with the Eloi that he “felt like a schoolmaster amidst children” (45), and upon his first exploration he seats himself upon a throne-like chair from which he can survey the entire land (47). Similarly, he repeatedly describes his idea of a paradise as one in which nature has been wholly subjugated. In the 1960 movie adaptation, the parallels between historical British colonialism and The Time Traveler’s attitude toward the Eloi, particularly Weena, are acknowledged quite clearly. In the intimate glow of the campfire, he tells her, “I’m sorry I was angry with your people; I had no right to be. No more than if I had visited the island of Bali in my own time…we’ve had our dark ages before, and this is just another one of them. All it needs is for someone to show you the way out.” History isn’t my strength, but it seems to me that the interaction between Weena and the Time Traveler illustrates the most ignorantly optimistic of colonialist fantasies—the colonized people as ignorant and childish, but receptive, beautiful, and worshipfully adoring. Before the arrival of the Time Traveler, the Eloi do not even possess fire, the ultimate key to human progress according to the legend of Prometheus.

(This telling conversation with Weena begins at about 6:10)

The second theme I’d like to discuss is most clearly illustrated in the film, so I’ll focus on that medium in my discussion. From the beginning, George the Time Traveler’s motivation for building his time machine seems driven not only by intellectual curiosity, but by a desire to escape the entire concept of war. His initial travels land him in WWI, WWII, and a surprise nuclear holocaust in 1966, and he increasingly despairs of mankind as a whole as he tries to race forward to a time when war is but a distant memory.

He finds it, and finds it lacking. I’m not saying that George’s actions against the Morlocks were unjustified, but there’s something bitingly ironic about the fact that his main contribution to the world of the Eloi is exactly what he was trying to escape: aggression and war. For all his desire to find a peaceful paradise, he essentially seeks to recreate his own world, which, despite the fact that he sought to escape it, he still thinks of as the height of progress. Is this a story, then, of a man coming to terms with the justification for violence? Is the film, with its (compared to the book) exaggerated emphasis on the prevalence of war and George’s colonialist attitude, meant as a criticism of the potential hypocrisy of that mindset? Despite the parallels between the detonation of the bomb in 1966 and the fiery death of the Morlocks, the morality of George/The Time Traveler’s near-genocide is not explicitly addressed in either the book or the film, but that sort of thematic juxtaposition cannot be accidental.

** Page numbers come from my edition of The Time Traveler, which probably won’t match up with any of yours. ISBN: 0-449-30043-9