The Time Machine - H.G. Wells
It seems that I read this book in a different way to everyone else on the Fin-de-Siecle module I study as part of my MA. Everyone else seems to have taken it from the historical perspective, where as I apparently looked at it much more from a position of symbolism and allegory. Such is the life of the literature student.
As a novel(la) I found myself fairly indifferent to the text - it is easy to read unlike some of its contemporaries, the language is simple and the plot simple enough and it didn’t take me long to plough my way through it. I can’t say that science fiction has ever been my genre of choice and after finishing it, I did find myself depressedly sighing that I miss reading books that I want to read for myself. But there were some interesting snippets that I picked up by looking at the symbolism of the text that didn’t come up in the discussion today.
As aforementioned, I studied this text with the Fin-de-Siecle period in mind. One of the key things from this period was the advent of Darwinism. The Origin of the Species was published in 1860-something (I think) and upon its arrival into society, where it was widely received across the spectrum of the population, bang went religion. Or perhaps that’s too much of a generalisation. Religion didn’t completely disappear, but suddenly a whole load of things were thrown into doubt; if we evolved, then IS there a God who put us all here? What kind of God would let creatures evolve to no longer need eyes? If we can Evolve, then surely we can also DEvolve? And what of that? Wouldn’t degeneracy be terrifying? How do we avoid it?
It was like the religiously devout population were suddenly balancing on the edge of a precipice attached to a bungee cord- the security of their faith standing behind them, but this strange new world that turned everything they took for granted on its head far away on the ground below, looking quite exciting but absolutely horrific at the same time. Society was being asked to take an enormous plunge into the unknown while their anchor was further and further away, hidden more and more carefully by those naughty scientists. And something along this line comes through in The Time Machine.
When the Time Traveller goes into the future, until it disappears, he never ventures too far from his time machine, as though it is a sort of anchor to security. As long as he is close to it, he knows he can return to his time whenever he wants to. When it disappears, he panics. His anchor has been taken away and hidden from him, much the same as Darwinism took religion and hid it from society in the 1860s. The Time Traveller immediately suspects that his machine has been hidden inside a statue of a large Sphinx-like creature, which I thought could be representative of some religious deity, like an idol. Thus, the secure anchor has been hidden inside religion. Is H.G. Wells here trying to persuade the panicking, increasingly atheist and doubting audience that if they look back into religion, they can find all the answers they need to the new material that at first seemed to defy their faith? Is he predicting a retaliatory uprising in religious commitment? I would need to look into this in much more detail, but I think that reading The Time Machine as an allegorical discussion of religion in light of scientific development could make for an interesting essay if properly founded and sourced with secondary material. If not, then this is merely moderately interesting speculation.
Either way, it’s out there in a sort of coherent way now.
Wells, H.G. [1895] The Time Machine (2005) London: Penguin Classics
