In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [61]
This has proved true, if film may be considered a language unto itself. The Island of Doctor Moreau has inspired three films—two of them quite bad—and doubtless few who saw them remembered that it was Wells who authored the book. The story has taken on a life of its own, and, like the offspring of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, has acquired attributes and meanings not present in the original. Moreau himself, in his filmic incarnations, has drifted toward the type of the Mad Scientist, or the Peculiar Genetic Engineer, or the Tyrant-in-Training, bent on taking over the world; whereas Wells’s Moreau is certainly not mad, is a mere vivisectionist, and has no ambitions to take over anything whatsoever.
Borges’s use of the word fable is suggestive, for—despite the realistically rendered details of its surface—the book is certainly not a novel, if by that we mean a prose narrative dealing with observable social life. “Fable” points to a certain folkloric quality that lurks in the pattern of this curious work, as animal faces may lurk in the fronds and flowers of an Aubrey Beardsley design. The term may also indicate a lie—something fabulous or invented, as opposed to that which demonstrably exists—and employed this way it is quite apt, as no man ever did or ever will turn animals into human beings by cutting them up and sewing them together again. In its commonest sense, a fable is a tale—like those of Aesop—meant to convey some useful lesson. But what is that useful lesson? It is certainly not spelled out by Wells.
“Work that endures is always capable of an infinite and plastic ambiguity; it is all things for all men,” says Borges, “… and it must be ambiguous in an evanescent and modest way, almost in spite of the author; he must appear to be ignorant of all symbolism. Wells displayed that lucid innocence in his first fantastic exercises, which are to me the most admirable part of his admirable work.” Borges carefully did not say that Wells employed no symbolism: only that he appeared to be ignorant of doing so.
Here follows what I hope will be an equally modest attempt to probe beneath the appearance, to examine the infinite and plastic ambiguity, to touch on the symbolism that Wells may or may not have employed deliberately, and to try to discover what the useful lesson—if there is one—might be.
TEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT
THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU
1. ELOIS AND MORLOCKS
The Island of Doctor Moreau was published in 1896, when H. G. Wells was only thirty years old. It followed The Time Machine, which had appeared the year before, and was to be followed two years later by The War of the Worlds, this being the book that established Wells as a force to be reckoned with at a mere thirty-two years of age.
To some of literature’s more gentlemanly practitioners—those, for instance, who had inherited money and didn’t have to make it by scribbling—Wells must have seemed like a puffed-up little counter-jumper, and a challenging one at that, because he was bright. He’d come up the hard way. In the stratified English social world of the time, he was neither working class nor top crust. His father was an unsuccessful tradesman; he himself apprenticed with a draper for two years before wending his way, via school-teaching and a scholarship, to the Normal School of Science. Here he studied under Darwin’s famous apologist, Thomas Henry Huxley. He graduated with a first-class degree, but he’d been seriously injured by one of the students while teaching, an event that put him off schoolmastering. It was after this that he turned to writing.
The Time Traveller in The Time Machine—written just before The Island of Doctor Moreau—finds that human beings in the future have split into two distinct races. The Eloi are as pretty as butterflies but useless; the grim and ugly Morlocks live underground, make everything, and come out at night to devour the Eloi, whose