Expressions of vitalism run throughout the fiction of
H. G. Wells, although the writer himself did not acknowledge the concept as
central to his thinking. Instead vitalism emerges, in the voices of various
characters, as a tentative thesis to explain life, or an expression of
culminating purpose that Wells considered poetic mysticism rather than
scientific truth. In this article I examine several instances of vitalist
thought in Wells’s work, and attempt to decipher from the critical reception of
those works why these ideas remain largely undetected. Specifically, I contend
that readers confined within the discourse of Man versus Animal have difficulty
apprehending statements about Life itself, and that Wells cleverly satirizes
the “othering” of animal or potential superhuman, to demonstrate the common
man’s inability to understand Life within a larger framework. I use four texts
— The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Food of the Gods (1904), Things to Come (1935) and Star-Begotten (1937) — to demonstrate a
vitalist undercurrent in the writings of this most scientific of all fiction
writers.
Critics have found a wealth of influence, and a welter of themes, crowded into Wells’s 1896 novel, The Island of Dr. Moreau. Like the best fiction, it is multivalent. It can be read both as an attack on the arrogance of scientism, and as a satire on religion. The text is also rich in allusion to previous literature, from Shakespeare through Kipling. Dr. Moreau is an outcast from Britain who establishes, on a Pacific island, a plantation-laboratory where he vivisects animals and transforms them into a semblance of human shape. Seen from the vantage of Prendick, a shipwrecked sailor — conveniently, like Wells, a former student of T. H. Huxley — Moreau’s island is a living hell of semi-human brutes who shamble about, chanting litanies to Moreau as their creator, and threatening those who would revert to beastly behavior with another visit to the “House of Pain.” Surgery without anesthesia is a key ingredient of Moreau’s science as well as the penal threat behind the Law.
As a biological science fiction work, The Island of Dr. Moreau is in a direct line with Mary Shelley’s 1817 Frankenstein. But where Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein creates a living being from dead tissue, a problematic vessel without soul or progenitor, Moreau’s creatures are animals already endowed with an animal nature. Wells was versed in science and its post-Darwin debates over the workings of heredity and evolution. The discovery of DNA was a half-century away, and it was by no means clear how genes worked or whether acquired traits could be passed along. As Moreau manufactures human forms from animals, he tests thereby whether or not the nature of man is entirely the result of his physical form. Given human speech organs, will not an animal speak? Given binocular vision and five fingers, will not an animal make and use tools? Moreau’s repeated failures are voiced very clearly in vitalist terms:
[T]here is something in everything I do that defeats me. . . . The human shape I can get now, almost with ease, so that it is lithe and graceful, or thick and strong; but often there is trouble with the hands and claws — painful things that I dare not shape too freely. But it is in the subtle grafting and re-shaping one must needs do to the brain that my trouble lies. The intelligence is often oddly low, with unaccountable blank ends, unexpected gaps. And least satisfactory of all is something that I cannot touch, somewhere — I cannot determine where — in the seat of the emotions. Cravings, instincts, desires that harm humanity, a strange hidden reservoir to burst suddenly and inundate the whole being of the creature with anger, hate or fear. . . . First one animal trait, then another, creeps to the surface and stares out at me. . . . But I will conquer yet. Each time I dip a living creature into the bath of burning pain, I say, This time I will burn out all the animal, this time I will make a rational creature of my own. ... And they revert. As soon as my hand is taken from them the beast begins to creep back, begins to assert itself again. (146-147)
Wells, with a placidity almost as alarming as that of
the fictional Moreau, writes in an 1895 science essay about the potential of
reshaping life forms and even eliminating instincts through surgery and
hypnosis:
It often seems to be tacitly assumed that a living thing is at the utmost nothing more than the complete realization of its birth possibilities, and so heredity becomes confused with theological predestination. . . . We overlook only too often the fact that a living being may also be regarded as raw material, as something plastic, something that may be shaped and altered ... a whole developed far beyond its apparent possibilities . . . that the thread of live might be preserved unimpaired while shape and mental superstructure were so extensively recast as even to justify our regarding the result as a new variety of being. (Wells, Plasticity, 221-222).
Leon Plover claims that, “Incredible as it may seem,”
the novel and Wells’s accompanying journalism, “set in motion the ongoing
controversy over heredity versus environment by his being the first biologist
... to discriminate nature and nurture” (Wells, Moreau 1896, 2-3)
Wells expresses two opposing vitalist ideas in these
two texts. One is the mere “thread of life,” the classical élan vital, in this case a tabula
rasa that can survive the complete reshaping of the living being. The other
is the “reassertion of the Beast,” which implies that a living form has a
blueprint capable of rebuilding and reasserting itself over matter. Set free
after Moreau’s death and the collapse of the Law, his 60-odd creations reacquire
both the psychological and physical
traits of animals. Foucault, studying the work of Bichat, formulates an
underlying concept applicable here: “Life is not the form of the organism, but
the organism is the visible form of life in its resistance to that which does
not live and which opposes it” (Foucault, 154).
As long as we interpret Moreau’s “failure” in terms of Man versus Animal, then we miss the underlying outcome: that the vital principle triumphs. The animal’s “nature” is its proper blueprint, its vitality. Its self-assertion is life imposing itself upon matter. The converse idea is that a human being, if “animalized” and “dehumanized” through hypnosis or conditioning, would reassert its own “beast,” an outcome that would be regarded as a success. It is all a matter of viewpoint. We must cast aside value judgment about “man” versus “beast” and see at play here the concept that each form of life has its unique organizational plan. The following value-laden description of the plight of man-beasts typifies the critics’ response:
They are not beasts, governed only by instinct, nor are they human, governed by the voice of reason. They are neither one thing nor the other, which is what makes them at once so pathetic and so dangerous . . . Dr. Moreau leaves behind him not a thriving and hopeful community, but a kingdom of beasts once again run wild. (Kagarlitski 54)
This line of reasoning obscures the more vitalistic
concept that it is the business of
animals to “run wild.” The depiction of man as “governed by the voice of
reason” denies any commonality of human with animal, with man only as a
Cartesian thing-that-thinks.
Other critical responses to The Island of Dr. Moreau focus on Moreau as bad scientist, his lack of ethics an alarming precursor of the medical atrocities to come in later decades at the hands of the Nazis, and of a scientific nonchalance generally about inflicting pain or seeking nonjustifiable ends. This is one of many ways of looking at the text, but it is questionable to what extent Wells himself doubted the ethics of experimental science in 1896. The “Plasticity” essay Wells published as science writing occupies Moreau’s ethical space.
Taking Moreau as a practitioner of science without
regard to his ethics, the question at hand is whether Moreau’s theory is a
vitalist one. A cogent analysis of Wells’s shifting attitude toward
evolutionary theory in the years 1895-96 by John Glendening identifies Wells’s
ambivalence towards vitalism as a key aspect in the depiction of Moreau.
Glendening identifies the acquired-trait theory of Lamarck, still a contending
theory in the early 1890s, as essentially a vitalist doctrine, “the idea that
the desire to evolve is innate, expressing itself through the purposeful
acquiring and development of new characteristics” (579).
As Wells was writing his novel, he underwent a radical change of belief. Glendening says that Wells was not a vitalist, but that he, in common with writers Samuel Butler and George Bernard Shaw, “sought in Lamarck’s theories sanction for the idea of human progress . . . and for the primacy of intelligence in evolution. What particularly attracted Wells to Lamarckianism was its suggestion that evolution might occur rapidly, since an organism’s successful adaptational efforts could be immediately expressed and elaborated upon in the next generation” (597).
After reading the scientific work of August Weissman, Wells felt compelled to change his mind in favor of pure Darwinian selection, and published an essay on this in mid-1895, while still working on writing The Island of Dr. Moreau (Glendening 580). This problematizes the reading of Dr. Moreau’s failures and the reason for them. Wells inserted an admission that his manufactured beast-men cannot reproduce their kind: “There was no evidence of the inheritance of the acquired human characteristics” (Wells, Moreau, 151). Examination of Wells’s manuscript establishes this as a late revision to the book (Philmus xvii). This admission, however, is voiced by Moreau’s drunken assistant Montgomery. Moreau himself remains Lamarckian through and through.
Darwinian selection dictates that acquired traits cannot be inherited, but there is nothing in Darwinian theory per se to account for the failure of Moreau’s adaptations to “take” on the individual specimens. The indefinable “something I cannot touch, somewhere — I cannot determine where” (146) is still the essence of what makes the animal nature and animal physical features grow back. Moreau’s defeat is Life’s triumph. It is only because we perceive the animal as the “other” that we can regard the triumph of its essence a defeat. Moreau clings to his theory, though, saying he sees something promising in his specimens: “Yet they’re odd. Complex, like everything else alive. There is a kind of upward striving in them” (147).
Most critics have paid justifiable attention to the novel’s literary influences, including Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (for the shipwreck section of the novel only), Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and especially Kipling’s The Jungle Book. The lattermost work was published just two years before Wells’s novel. The “Sayer of the Law” on Moreau’s island chants verses that parody Kipling’s “Law of the Jungle,” but they are also savage parodies of the Ten Commandments and the Christian catechism
Not to go on all-Fours: that is the Law. Are we not Men? . . . Not to eat Flesh nor Fish; that is the Law. Are we not Men? . . . Not to chase other Men; that is the Law. Are we not Men? . . .His is the House of Pain. His is the Hand that makes. (Wells, Moreau 1896, 117-118)
Wells’s book — and the memorable film made from it in
1932, Island of Lost Souls, banned
from theaters in Britain despite a British cast (Lammes 73) — have elicited
criticism overlaying racial and colonial content onto the man-animal dichotomy.
Prendick employs both the words “Negroid type” and “Hebrew type” to describe
several of the beast men, and although this is common terminology in the 1890s,
it opens the door to symbolize Moreau as colonizer, plantation owner, torturer
and slave master. Timothy Christensen examines the racism inherent in the
evolution of the island’s Law, and how Moreau, through the enactment of the
chants of the beast men, attains “the status of the Lacanian big Other,” (382)
a surrogate god. This risks misreading, however, since Moreau claims the
man-beasts invented the Law on their own.
(Wells, Moreau 1896, 147).
Colonialism also rears its head. Sybil Lammes, writing about the film, and Charles Laughton’s sadistic portrayal of Moreau, sees “a mixture between a cold-blooded scientist and a colonialist. His white tropical uniform, his British accent and his priest-like demeanour during the submission ritual all point in the latter direction” (71). These interpretations are instructive, but Wells, like his contemporary Kipling, had a keen sense of the arrogance of colonialism and its costs, and it is perilous to conflate the character’s voice with the author’s. (Philmus locates a number of places where Wells edited out phrases that might be taken as racial slurs (xxii).) These narrowly focused critical glances, productive as they are to theorists, cloud the larger issues about evolution and vitalism the novel raises.
The critical urge to overwrite the duality of Man/Animal
with White/Non-White or Colonizer/Colonized, retains a discourse that makes it
difficult to understand the vitalist principle. The “othering” of the animal
against the human implies some way in which animal and human do not belong to
the same set, just as “othering” a group of people as “non-white” creates the
opportunity to push the “other” class outside the larger conceptual set called
“human.” Human and animal are not antonyms. The most potent mythic symbol of
the endurance and commonality of life is the Ark. Can one imagine mankind
moving out to the stars and leaving the other animals behind? Not surprisingly,
the interplanetary or interstellar Ark is a staple of science fiction. Wells
would take the development of ecology, a term he himself was using before 1900,
as evidence of a larger human evolutionary force at work, a force that includes
awareness of all life.
In 1935, Wells published a half-novel, half film script, Things to Come, the result of his collaboration with film director Alexander Korda, whose eponymous film is one of the great classics of the genre. The story, set in the future, projects a nuclear war in 1966 and an age of barbarism and warlords, after which a world organization of scientists and engineers, “Wings Over the World,” cleans up and sets everything aright in a utopia of rational socialism. Not quite aright, though, since a group of disgruntled artists and aesthetes opposes the first rocket flight to the moon and organizes a mob that attempts to destroy the launch pad. In a final peroration, Wells’s hero, John Cabal, speaks of scientific progress and exploration as a life imperative:
“Listen, Theotocopulos! If I wished to give way to you, I could not. It is not we who war against the order of things, but you. Either life goes forward or it goes back. That is the law of life” (139) . . .
An observatory at a high point above Everytown. A telescopic mirror of the night sky showing the cylinder as a very small speck against a starry background. Cabal and Passworthy stand before this mirror.
Cabal: “There! There they go! That faint gleam of light.” Pause.
Passworthy: “I feel — what we have done is — monstrous.”
Cabal: “What they have done is magnificent.”
Passworthy: “Will they return?”
Cabal: “Yes. And go again. And again —until the landing can be made and the moon is conquered. This is only a beginning.”
Passworthy: “And if they don’t return — my son, and your daughter? What of that, Cabal?”
Cabal (with a catch in his voice but resolute): “Then presently — others will go.”
Passworthy: “My God! Is there never to be an age of happiness? Is there never to be rest?”
Cabal: “Rest enough for the individual man. Too much of it and too soon, and we call it death. But for MAN no rest and no ending. He must go on — conquest beyond conquest. This little planet and its winds and ways, and all the laws of mind and matter that restrain him. Then the planets about him, and at last out across immensity to the stars. And when he has conquered all the deeps of space and all the mysteries of time — still he will be beginning.
Passworthy: “But we are such little creatures. Poor humanity. So fragile, — so weak.”
Cabal: “Little animals, eh?”
Passworthy: “Little animals.”
Cabal: “If we are no more than animals — we must snatch at our little scraps of happiness and live and suffer and pass, mattering no more — than all the other animals do — or have done.” (He points out at the stars). “It is that — or this? All the universe — or nothingness. . . . Which shall it be, Passworthy?”
The two men fade out against the starry background until only the stars remain.The musical finale becomes dominant. Cabal’s voice is heard repeating through the music:“Which shall it be, Passworthy? Which shall it be?” (141-142)
In an entertainment medium not known for philosophical
depth, Things to Come and its
purposeful manifesto stand out. Wells, long associated with socialism, makes a
surprisingly anti-Utopian stance here. Utopias are normally thought of as
places of rest and balance and equity, while Cabal depicts a Nietzschean future
for man with a cosmic destiny, a belief that only struggle matters, and that
the cost is worth it. Cabal permits his own daughter to be hurled into space as
ultimate proof of what life must risk. There is no mistaking Cabal’s belief that
this process is an imperative, not a choice.
It is easy to pass over a speech like this, stirring as it is, as mere rhetoric. We are suspicious of rhetoric when it exhorts us for the hidden gain of the speaker. To be exhorted to greatness is another thing altogether. Wells makes here a fundamental claim about human nature, and, hence, about life, that would resonate through science fiction for decades. Colin Wilson, heavily influenced by Whitehead, expands this idea:
What are we doing here? And what are we supposed to do now we are here? . . .[W]e are driven by some powerful compulsion. The stakes are obviously higher than we think. The obvious explanation is that we are a colonizing expedition, and that our purpose is colonize the realm of matter. According to the view life — or spirit — is attempting to establish a bridgehead in matter, just as man might attempt to establish a way-station on the moon. (Wilson, Beyond Occult 349)
This sense of
seeing life as an adventure, from the outside in, is the transcendental
perspective that made Nietzsche suggest that we are being lived through:
the development of a higher body that emerges into our sensibility. The organic is rising to yet higher levels. Our lust for knowledge of nature is a means through which the body desires to perfect itself. . . . In the long run, it is not a question of man at all: he is to be overcome. (Nietzsche, Will to Power, III.676)
In Things to Come, Wells offers a kind of
science-driven higher consciousness, a rigorous mysticism, only mystical
because it leaps to an assumption of purpose. Turning again to Wilson, in his
synthesis of Whitehead and Husserl:
Western man has become so accustomed to the idea of his passivity and insignificance that it is difficult to imagine what sort of creature he would be if phenomenology could uncover his intentional evolutionary structure and make it part of his consciousness. (Wilson, Beyond Outsider, 158)
Again and again, Wells sees humankind living at a level
far below its potential because of small thinking. He finds a way to allegorize
this idea in The Food of the Gods, in
which a new super-nutrient leads to the rise of a generation of giants. These
giants, who do not suffer from
smallness of intellect, are promptly declared enemies of the small people, and
the book ends in struggle and conflict.
The Food of the Gods contains two
fascinating stretches of vitalist thought. In one scene, the creator of the
food and another character discuss the real possibility that the giants will
win, will induce everyone’s children to consume the food, resulting in the end
of their kind:
“I have not thought of it before. I have been busy, and the years have passed. But here I see. It is a new generation, Cossar, and new emotions and new needs. All this, Cossar—
Cossar saw now his dim gesture to the things about them.
“All this is Youth.”
Cossar made no answer, and his irregular footfalls went striding on.
“It isn’t our youth, Cossar. They are taking things over. They are beginning upon their own emotions, their own experiences, their own way. We have made a new world, and it isn’t ours. This great place —”
“I planned it,” said Cossar, his face close. “But now?”
“Ah! I have given it to my sons.”
Redwood could feel the loose wave of the arm that he could not see.
“That is it. We are over — or almost over.” . . .
“Of course we are out of it, we two old men,” said Cossar, with his familiar note of sudden anger. “Of course we are. Obviously. Each man for his own time. And now — it’s their time beginning. That’s all right. Excavator’s gang. We do our job and go. See? That is what Death is for. We work out all our little brains and all our little emotions, and then this lot begins afresh. Fresh and fresh! Perfectly simple. What’s the trouble?”
He paused to guide Redwood to some steps. “Yes,” said Redwood, “but one feels —” He left his sentence incomplete.
“That is what Death is for.” He heard Cossar insisting below him. “How else could the thing be done? That is what Death is for.” (317-318)
This is about more than one generation passing the
burden of civilization to another. This is one human species poised at
extinction as another comes to take its place. Only from a vitalist
perspective, taking organic life as a whole as its subject, can one arrive at
such a point of view, not as a tragedy but as an imperative.
Wells notes that the novel “begins in a cheerful
burlesque and ends in poetic symbolism” (Wells, Autobiography, 211). When Redwood’s son, the leader of the giants,
speaks on their behalf, Wells gives him a speech that could not be further from
the narrow outlook of the politician, or of the scientist huddled over his
microscope:
“It is not that we would oust the little people from the world,” he said, “in order that we, who are no more than one step upwards from their littleness, may hold their world for ever. It is the step we fight for and not ourselves. . . . We are here, Brothers, to what end? To serve the spirit and the purpose that has been breathed into our lives. We fight not for ourselves-for we are but the momentary hands and eyes of the Life of the World. . . . Through us and through the little folk the Spirit looks and learns. . . . This earth is no resting place — this earth is no playing place, else indeed we might put our throats to the little people’s knife, having no greater right to live than they. And they in their turn might yield to the ants and vermin. We fight not for ourselves but for growth, growth that goes on for ever. To-morrow, whether we live or die, growth will conquer through us. That is the law of the spirit for ever more. . . . To grow out of these cracks and crannies, out of these shadows and darknesses, into greatness and the light! Greater,” he said, speaking with slow deliberation, “greater, my Brothers! And then — still greater. To grow and again — to grow. To grow at last into the fellowship and understanding of God. Growing. . . Till the earth is no more than a footstool. Till the spirit shall have driven fear into nothingness, and spread.” He swung his arm heavenwards —“There”
His voice ceased. The white glare of one of the searchlights wheeled about, and for a moment fell upon him, standing out gigantic with hand upraised against the sky. (327-328)
Serialized in Pearson’s
Magazine in London, and in The
Cosmopolitan Magazine in New York in 1903, The Food of the Gods appeared in book form in 1904 in simultaneous
English, French and Italian editions (Raknem 59). It was a popular success.
Novels of this sort were not confined to the genre ghettos we know today, so
this text was read by general audiences. Some readers were entertained by
Wells’s fancy about giants, especially the amusing episodes early in the book
when giant chickens, wasps and rats run amok. Other readers insisted, then and
now, that the book was entirely allegorical. David C. Smith, in his 1986
biography of Wells, outlines the book as political allegory, citing the
fictional Tory politician Catherham who leads the opposition to the Food, and
Wells’s savage satire of small-minded citizens fearful for their money and
property. This leads him to conclude that the book is about “the symbolic Food,
which we can take to be socialism, and which will triumph, even though under
attack from the Catherhams of the time; eventually it will transform the world
of pygmies into a world of giants, the home of the blessed” (71). Wells, for
his part, complained, “No one saw the significance of it” (Autobiography 358).
The work may pass muster as a Swiftean political satire and a polemic, but the final speech of young Redwood shares the same expansive sense of life as Cabal’s final speech in Things to Come. It is several orders of magnitude larger than what the plot calls for: three-score 40-foot-tall teenagers at war with the British government in 1904 do not need to talk about conquering space and using the earth as a footstool. This Nietzschean restlessness, this Faustian refusal to even admit the possibility of satisfaction, is a complete refutation of Utopian ideals: the average man’s idea of a Utopia is a place where nothing much happens. Wells urges the species to become supermen, not to create a theme park for the proletariat.
Frank McConnell argues that the bumbling, comical
inventors of the Food, whose misadventures release the giant rats and wasps,
are meant to satirize the Utopian social planners Wells knew among the circle of Fabian Socialists (167). This arc
from comical to earnest McConnell views as a shift in Wells’ opinions while
working on the book (just as he had shifted stance on evolution during the
writing of The Island of Dr. Moreau).
The speech about the little men making way for the giants is part of that
shift, and the final speech shows that men:
once they begin to take stock of themselves and their true position in the universe, once they began to think both realistically and energetically about the business of living, they can indeed become the fathers of gods, the founders of a humanity that might resist even the universal principles of entropy and extinction. (168)
Wells counterpoises the inevitabilities of genetics
against individuality — the potential for parentage and the accident of
mutation to create unique individuals. In his magnum non-fiction work, The Outline of History, Wells prefaces a
presentation of straight Darwinian selection with this proviso:
This growth and dying and reproduction of living things leads to some very wonderful consequences. The young which a living thing produces are, either directly or after some intermediate stages and changes (such us the change of a caterpillar into a butterfly), like the parent living thing. But they are never exactly like it or like each other. There is always a slight difference, which we speak of as individuality A thousand butterflies this year may produce very many more next year and these latter will look to us almost exactly like their predecessors, but each one will have just that slight difference. It is hard for us to see individuality in butterflies, because we do not observe them very closely, but it is easy for us to see it in men. All the men and women in the world now are descended from the men and women of A.D. 1800, but not one of us now is exactly the same as one of that vanished generation. And what is true of men and butterflies is true of every sort of living thing (Wells, Outline, 15).
McConnell sees the anti-Utopian message of The
Food of the Gods as “a fable about the literally gigantic future of
humanity expressing . . . his belief that fierce individualism, if redirected
and creatively channeled, could be the salvation rather than the bane of the
race” (164). The catch in The Food of the
Gods is that the young giants were educated and trained by their scientist
fathers in a kind of super-Montessori nursery built for their needs. New, large
thoughts are always engendered from the large thoughts of past genius, and they
are reproduced, not in the collective, but in the individual mind. Wells came
to be regarded as a romantic and a misfit among his fellow socialists, and his
insistence on the primacy of the individual is at the heart of his continuing
appeal to readers.
What has happened to Wells’s thinking in the years between Moreau and Cabal and young Redwood? Wells’ abandonment of Lamarckianism in mid-1895 was a shock to his optimistic belief that humankind would progress and improve with a modicum of tending. Wells’s later work becomes more didactic, and his confident statements about a human future are put in the mouths of supermen-leader figures like John Cabal. Biology by itself could not be trusted, and just as the young giants had to be “educated” in a specially-designed nursery, mankind can only evolve as a species through education, which means cultural continuity. Wells struggles over whether this education applies to everyone, or whether it is sufficient for certain superior types to receive it. Robert Philmus addresses this shift in Wells’s thought:
[T]he human species ceased being exclusively a product of Darwinian Nature in the Neolithic Period, at which point human development became primarily a matter of ‘artificial evolution’ and Homo sapiens ‘the highly plastic creature of tradition, suggestion, and reasoned thought.’ This is not to say that human nature has essentially altered since the Stone Age; indeed out species retains, in Wells’s view, ‘a type of animal more obstinately unchangeable than any other’ and is therefore in danger of extinction. Against that eventuality stands ‘the artificial factor’ with ‘Education’ as the instrument of its ‘careful and systematic manufacture’ and hence as the one ‘possible salvation’ from what otherwise lies in store for ‘the culminating ape. (xvii, interior quotes from Wells, Human Evolution).
This brings us to the 1937 Star-Begotten, a curiously relaxed novel written at a truly
dangerous time, when Wells and many others were issuing books, articles and
pamphlets denouncing the spread of Fascist terror. This novel returns to
Lamarckian vitalism and deals with the sudden emergence of a new mental type in
the human species. Although cast as a series of unproven speculations among a
group of thinkers and scientists, the idea that a new biological type is
emerging occurs to observers simultaneously all over the world, and the book’s
protagonists labor over whether they are right, and if so, who should be told
and what should be done about it. The narrator, Davis, is an expectant father,
and his concern is that his child may be one of the “coming people,” superior
in intellect but not quite human.
Because of its publication date, it is tempting to read
this book mostly as allegory, and as satire. It plays upon racial fears — in
this case fear of the unborn as the “other” — and satirizes the Nazi obsession
with race. Nothing would be more offensive to true Aryans that the random
arrival, all over the planet, of genius mutations superior to them.
At first, Wells’s narrator, Davis, suspects the change may be a spontaneous product of life itself, evolution accelerating its own pace: “[W]hen a species comes to a difficult phase in its struggle for existence . . . there is an increased disposition to vary” (72). This harks back to Lamarck, or to the neo-Lamarckian thought always at the fringe of the laboratory. Neo-Lamarckian thought also appears in Bergson, who writes: “[T]he spontaneity of life is manifested by a continual creation of new forms” (96) . . . “an original impetus of life . . . the fundamental cause of variations, at least of those that are regularly passed on, the accumulate and create new species” (97-98).
Wells drops this vitalistic notion quickly, however, in favor of personifying the change and blaming “Martians.” This “othering” of evolutionary life force is extremely intriguing. Wells centers on mutation caused by cosmic rays — a fact accepted by science — and adds a paranoid level: what if we are being “manipulated” by Martians using directed cosmic rays to speed up human mutation? (72) Wells speculates, in the absence of any evidence whatever for the existence of Martians, that “Martians have been firing away with increasing accuracy and effectiveness at our chromosomes — perhaps for long ages” (76).
The agency of Martians enables Wells to dodge, once again, the vitalist idea. Wells also takes this opportunity to lampoon the human desire to de-humanize the “other.” Instead of imagining Martians as advanced human types, Wells steals from the interplanetary xenophobia he himself helped create with his 1898 War of the Worlds. He parodies the popular assumption that the non-human, or even the superhuman, has to be monstrous. Recalling his own fictional Martians, he has his protagonist Davis imagine the genetic manipulator of mankind as: “[S]omething hunched together, like an octopus, tentacular, saturated with evil poisons, oozing unpleasant juices, a gigantic leather bladder of hate” or “[T]urnip heads, bladder-of-lard crania, short-sighted eyes, horrible little faces, long detestable hands, unathletic and possibly crippled bodies” (110-111). This depiction of the biological other is a hilarious compendium of pulp-magazine cover art, what mid-century art directors called BEMs (bug-eyed monsters).
Davis fears that his unborn son will inherit some of these non-human characteristics as a result of gene manipulation. This entire novel can be considered as an extension of the scientists’ dialogue near the end of The Food of the Gods, when they consider their own possible extinction.
Using highly-charged political terms, Wells euphemizes the biological cataclysm as “the Martian intervention” (135) and dubs the super-babies as Homo sideralis (152) or star-begotten., and also terms them “the coming people” (177). Much of this does have the air of looking over one’s shoulder at Nazi racial propaganda and eugenics literature, and reminds us that England and Germany had been collaborators in medical and psychiatric research and treatment regimens for decades. The Star of Bethlehem, the swastika and the Soviet Red Star are all symbols of solar- or stellar-endowed power.
The complete lack of evidence in the story is startling. Davis, the protagonist, even after meeting others who share his theory, knows little more than before, only that others share his suspicions. It is all “pure-guess fantasy. . . .A new sort of mind is coming into the world, with a new, simpler, clearer, and more powerful way of thinking” (155) He does go so far as to assert, so far as such a thing could be asserted in 1937, “Certain genes making up the human mentality, we agree, have been altered in this new type” (160).
Wells characterizes his mutations as already occupying places in the world, as engineers, scientists, inventors. Although they are an elite, “they are hardly aware of themselves” (156). Having no identity, they have no politics, no voice for their kind. He looks forward to a cleansing of philosophy and literature which will follow the advent of the “coming people.” He welcomes an end to the infantile, self-obsessed psychologizing of the modern era: “[W]e have had our minds washed out by a real drenching of psycho-analysis” (163).
In his autobiography, Wells self-identifies with the “delocalized man” who “with wide interests and a wider range of movements, found himself virtually disenfranchised,” the lament of the prophet ignored (Wells, Autobiography, 210). The author confesses that The Food of the Gods was a fantasy in which intellectuals, for once, simply could not be stopped. Star-Begotten continues that fantasy of the superior type finally taking over. The novel’s latter pages contain some speculation about the Utopian future the “coming people” might create, reminiscent of Things to Come.
Unfortunately, Star-Begotten fizzles out. Davis’s son is born, and appears quite normal. Davis decides to abandon his efforts to expose the Martian conspiracy, and burns his notes — not because he was wrong, but due to a sudden revelation: “A great light seemed to irradiate and in a moment to tranquilize the troubled ocean of his disordered mind . . . He too was star-born.” (215) . . . “He too was one of these invaders and strangers and innovators to our fantastic planet, who were crowding into life and making it over anew!” (217)
This denouement can be read comically — as the passing fantasy of an expectant father — or it can be taken literally as a science-fiction story in which the “coming people” are indeed among us. On a conceptual level, this whimsical piece of wish-fulfillment at the brink of World War II flirts with vitalism and demonstrates its continuing utility for Wells.
What kind of vitalist is Wells? Canguilhem, in
“Knowledge and the Living,” discusses vitalism as an underlying imperative, and
I believe this approaches Wells’s vantage:
[A]n imperative rather than a method and more of an ethical system, perhaps, than a theory. . . . A scientist who feels filial, sympathetic sentiments toward nature will not regard natural phenomena as strange and alien; rather he will find in them life, soul and meaning. Such a man is basically a vitalist” (288).
Vitalism, then, as a kind of overarching tautological
or ontological principle, need not be scientifically true to be useful. As an
imperative, even fictional, it serves as Moreau’s nemesis, Cabal’s credo, and
young Redwood’s hope. I doubt that Wells could have lived past seventy as he
did, still holding to the possibility of a human future after two World Wars,
without a form of that imperative in his own spirit.
Works Cited
- Canguilhem, Georges. “Knowledge and the Living.” A Vital Rationalist: Selected Writings from Georges Canguilhem. Ed. Françoise Delaporte. New York: Zone, 2000. 287-319.
- Christensen, Timothy. “‘The ‘Bestial Mark’ of Race in The Island of Dr. Moreau.” Criticism 46.4 (2004): 575-95.
- Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Vintage, 2004.
- Glendening, John. “‘Green Confusion’: Evolution and Entanglement in H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau.” Victorian Literature and Culture (2002): 571-97.
- Kagarlitski, J. The Life and Thought of H. G. Wells. Trans. Moura Budberg. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1966.
- McConnell, Frank. The Science Fiction of H.G. Wells. Science-Fiction Writers. Ed. Robert Scholes. New York: Oxford UP, 1981.
- Nietzsche, Friedric. The Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J.Hollingdale. New York: Vintage, 1967.
- Philmus, Robert M. “Introducing Moreau.” H. G. Wells: The Island of Dr. Moreau, a Variorum Text. Athens, GA: U of Georgia, 1993. xi-xlviii.
- Raknem, Ingvald. H. G. Wells and His Critics. London: Allen & Unwin, 1962.
- Renzi, Thomas C. H .G. Wells: Six Scientific Romances Adapted for Film. Metuchen NJ: Scarecrow, 1992.
- Simmes, Sybille. “So Far, So Close: Island of Lost Souls as a Laboratory of Life.” Screen Consciousness: Cinema, Mind and World. Ed. Robert Pepperell, and Michael Punt. Consciousness: Literature & the Arts. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006.
- Smith, David C. H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal, a Biography. New Haven: Yale, 1986.
- Wells, H. G. Experiment in Autobiography. New York: Macmillan, 1934.
- ---. . The Food of the Gods: And How It Came to Earth. New York: Scribner’s, 1904.
- ---. “Human Evolution as an Artificial Process.” 1896. H. G. Wells: The Island of Dr. Moreau, a Variorum Text. Ed. Robert M. Philmus. Athens, GA: U of Georgia, 1993. 188-96.
- ---. The Island of Doctor Moreau: A Critical Text of the 1896 London First Edition, with an Introduction and Appendices. 1896. The Annotated H. G. Wells. Ed. Leon Stover. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1996.
- ---. “The Limits of Individual Plasticity.” The Island of Dr. Moreau: A Critical Text of the 1896 London First Edition. Ed. Leon Stover. Jefferson NC: McFarland, 1996.
- ---. The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind. 1920. Vol. 1. 2 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1926.
- ---. Star-Begotten: A Biological Fantasy. New York: Viking, 1937.
- ---. Things to Come. London: Cresset, 1935.
- Wilson, Colin. Beyond the Occult. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1988.
- ---. Beyond the Outsider. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965.
