In Other Worlds

by Margaret Atwood

  In other respects, the despotism I describe is the same as all real ones and most imagined ones. It has a small, powerful group at the top that controls—or tries to control—everyone else, and it gets the lion’s share of available goodies. The pigs in Animal Farm get the milk and the apples, the elite of The Handmaid’s Tale get the fertile women. The force that opposes the tyranny in my book is one in which Orwell himself—despite his belief in the need for political organization to combat oppression—always put great store: ordinary human decency, of the kind he praised in his essay on Charles Dickens. The biblical expression of this quality is probably in the verse “Insofar as you do it unto the least of these, you do it unto me.” Tyrants and the powerful believe, with Lenin, that you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs and that the end justifies the means. Orwell, when push came to shove, would have believed—on the contrary—that the means define the end. He wrote as if he sided with John Donne, who said, “Every man’s death diminishes me.” And so say—I would hope—all of us.

  At the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, there’s a section that owes much to Nineteen Eighty-Four. It’s the account of a symposium held several hundred years in the future, in which the repressive government described in the novel is now merely a subject for academic analysis. The parallels with Orwell’s essay on Newspeak should be evident.

  Orwell has been an inspiration to generations of writers in another important respect—his insistence on the clear and exact use of language. “Prose like a windowpane,” he said, opting for plainsong rather than ornament. Euphemisms and skewed terminology should not obscure the truth. “Acceptable mega-deaths” rather than “millions of rotting corpses,” but hey, it’s not us who’re dead; “untidiness” instead of “massive destruction”—this is the beginning of Newspeak. Fancy verbiage is what confuses Boxer the horse and underpins the chantings of the sheep. To insist on what is, in the face of ideological spin, popular consensus, and official denial: Orwell knew this takes honesty, and a lot of guts. The position of odd man out is always an uneasy one, but the moment we look around and find that there are no longer any odd men among our public voices is the moment of most danger—because that’s when we’ll be in lockstep, ready for the Three Minutes’ Hate.

  The twentieth century could be seen as a race between two versions of man-made Hell—the jackbooted state totalitarianism of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and the hedonistic ersatz paradise of Brave New World, where absolutely everything is a consumer good and human beings are engineered to be happy. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it seemed for a time that Brave New World had won—from henceforth, state control would be minimal, and all we’d have to do was go shopping and smile a lot, and wallow in pleasures, popping a pill or two when depression set in.

  But with the notorious 9/11 World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks in 2001, all that changed. Now it appears we face the prospect of two contradictory dystopias at once—open markets, closed minds—because state surveillance is back again with a vengeance. The torturer’s dreaded Room 101 has been with us for millennia. The dungeons of Rome, the Inquisition, the Star Chamber, the Bastille, the proceedings of General Pinochet and of the junta in Argentina—all have depended on secrecy and on the abuse of power. Lots of countries have had their versions of it—their ways of silencing troublesome dissent. Democracies have traditionally defined themselves by, among other things, openness and the rule of law. But now it seems that we in the West are tacitly legitimizing the methods of the darker human past, upgraded technologically and sanctified to our own uses, of course. For the sake of freedom, freedom must be renounced. To move us toward the improved world—the utopia we’re promised—dystopia must first hold sway. It’s a concept worthy of doublethink. It’s also, in its ordering of events, strangely Marxist. First the dictatorship of the proletariat, in which lots of heads must roll; then the pie-in-the-sky classless society, which oddly enough never materializes. Instead we just get pigs with whips.

  What would George Orwell have to say about it? I often ask myself.

  Quite a lot.

  Ten Ways of Looking at

  The Island of Doctor Moreau

  by H. G. Wells

  H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau is one of those books that, once read, is rarely forgotten. Jorge Luis Borges called it an “atrocious miracle” and made large claims for it. Speaking of Wells’s early tales—The Island of Doctor Moreau among them—he said, “I think they will be incorporated, like the fables of Theseus or Ahasuerus, into the general memory of the species and even transcend the fame of their creator or the extinction of the language in which they were written.”

  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 schoolmaster
ing. 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 needs they also supply. The upper classes, in other words, have become a bevy of upper-class twitterers and have lost the ability to fend for themselves, and the working classes have become vicious and cannibalistic.

  Wells was neither an Eloi nor a Morlock. He must have felt he represented a third way, a rational being who had climbed up the ladder through ability alone, without partaking of the foolishness and impracticality of the social strata above his nor of the brutish crudeness of those below.

  But what about Prendick, the narrator of The Island of Doctor Moreau? He’s been pootling idly about the world, for his own diversion we assume, when he’s shipwrecked. The ship is called the Lady Vain, surely a comment on the snooty aristocracy. Prendick himself is a “private gentleman” who doesn’t have to work for a living, and though he—like Wells—has studied with Huxley, he has done so not out of necessity but out of dilettantish boredom—“as a relief from the dullness of [his] comfortable independence.” Prendick, though not quite as helpless as a full-fledged Eloi, is well on the path to becoming one. Thus his hysteria, his lassitude, his moping, his ineffectual attempts at fair play, and his lack of common sense—he can’t figure out how to make a raft because he’s never done “any carpentry or suchlike work” in his life, and when he does manage to patch something together, he’s situated it too far from the sea and it falls apart when he’s dragging it. Although Prendick is not a complete waste of time—if he were, he wouldn’t be able to hold our attention while he tells his story—he’s nonetheless in the same general league as the weak-chinned curate in the later The War of the Worlds, that helpless and drivelling “spoiled child of life.”

  His name—Prendick—is suggestive of “thick” coupled with “prig,” this last a thing he is explicitly called. To those versed in legal lore, it could suggest prender, a term for something you are empowered to take without it having been offered. But it more nearly suggests prentice, a word that would have been floating close to the top of Wells’s semiconsciousness, due to his own stint as an apprentice. Now it’s the upper class’s turn at apprenticeship! Time for one of them to undergo a little degradation and learn a thing or two. But what?

  2. SIGNS OF THE TIMES

  The Island of Doctor Moreau not only comes midway in Wells’s most fertile period of fantastic inventiveness, it also comes during such a period in English literary history. Adventure romance had taken off with Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island in 1882, and H. Rider Haggard had done him one better with She in 1887. This latter coupled straight adventure—shipwreck, tramps through dangerous swamps and nasty shrubbery, encounters with bloody-minded savages, fun in steep ravines and dim grottos—with a big dollop of weirdness carried over from earlier Gothic traditions, done up this time in a package labelled “Not Supernatural.” The excessive powers of She are ascribed not to a close encounter with a vampire or god but to a dip in a revolving pillar of fire, no more supernatural than lightning. She gets her powers from Nature.

  It’s from this blend—the grotesque and the “natural”—that Wells took his cue. An adventure story that would once have featured battles with fantastic monsters—dragons, gorgons, hydras—keeps the exotic scenery, but the monsters have been produced by the very agency that was seen by many in late Victorian England as the bright, new, shiny salvation of humankind: science.

  The other blend that proved so irresistible to readers was one that was developed much earlier, and to singular advantage, by Jonathan Swift: a plain, forthright style in the service of incredible events. Poe, that master of the uncanny, piles on the adjectives to create “atmosphere”; Wells, on the other hand, follows R. L. Stevenson and anticipates Hemingway in his terse, almost journalistic approach, usually the hallmark of the ultra-realists. The War of the Worlds shows Wells employing this combination to best effect—we think we’re reading a series of news reports and eyewitness accounts—but he’s already honing it in The Island of Doctor Moreau. A tale told so matter-of-factly and with such an eye to solid detail surely cannot be—we feel—either an invention or a hallucination.

  3. SCIENTIFIC

  Wells is acknowledged to be one of the foremost inventors in the genre we now know as “science fiction.” As Robert Silverberg has said, “Every time-travel tale written since The Time Machine is fundamentally indebted to Wells.… In this theme, as in most of science fiction’s great themes, Wells was there first.”

  Science fiction as a term was unknown to Wells; it did not make its appearance until the 1930s, in America, during the golden age of bug-eyed monsters and girls in brass brassieres. Wells himself referred to his science-oriented fictions as “scientific romances”—a term that did not originate with him but with a lesser-known writer called Charles Howard Hinton.

  There are several interpretations of the term science. If it implies the known and the possible, then Wells’s scientific romances are by no means scientific; he paid little attention to those boundaries. The “science” part of these tales is embedded instead in a worldview that derived from Wells’s study of Darwinian principles under Huxley and has to do with the grand study that engrossed him throughout his career: the nature of man. This, too, may account for his veering between extreme utopianism (if man is the result of evolution, not of Divine creation, surely he can evolve yet further?) and the deepest pessimism (if man came from the animals and is akin to them, rather than to the angels, surely he might slide back the way he came?). The Island of Doctor Moreau belongs to the debit side of the Wellsian account book.

  Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man were a profound shock to the Victorian system. Gone was the God who spoke the world into being in seven days and made man out of clay; in his place stood millions of years of evolutionary change and a family tree that included primates. Gone, too, was the kindly Wordsworthian version of Mother Nature that had presided over the first years of the century; in her place was Tennyson’s “Nature, red in tooth and claw/ With ravine.” The devouring femme fatale that became so iconic in the 1880s and 1890s owes a lot to Darwin. So does the imagery and cosmogony of The Island of Doctor Moreau.

  4. ROMANCE

  So much for the “scientific” in “scientific romance.” What about the “romance”?

  In both “scientific romance” and “science fiction,” the scientific element is merely an adjective; the nouns are “romance” and “fiction.” In respect to Wells, “romance” is more helpful than “fiction.”

  “Romance,” in today’s general usage, is what happens on Valentine’s Day. As a literary term it has slipped in rank somewhat—being now applied to such things as Harlequin Romances—but it was otherwise understood in the nineteenth century when it was used in opposition to the term novel. The novel dealt with known social life, but a romance could deal with the long ago and the far away. It also allowed much more latitude in terms of plot. In a romance, event follows exciting event at breakneck pace. As a rule, this has caused the romance to be viewed by the high literati—those bent more on instruction than on delight—as escapist and vulgar, a judgment that goes back at least two thousand years.

  In The Secular Scripture, Northrop Frye provides an exhaustive analysis of the structure and elements of the romance as a form. Typically a romance begins with a break in ordinary consciousness, often—traditionally—signalled by a shipwreck, frequently linked with a kidnapping by pirates. Exotic climes are a feature, especially exotic desert islands; so are strange creatures.

  In the sinister portions of a romance, the protagonist is often imprisoned or trapped, or lost in a labyrinth or maze, or in a forest that serves the same purpose. Boundaries between the norma
l levels of life dissolve: vegetable becomes animal, animal becomes quasi-human, human descends to animal. If the lead character is female, an attempt will be made on her virtue, which she manages miraculously to preserve. A rescue, however improbable, restores the protagonist to his or her previous life and reunites him or her with loved ones. Pericles, Prince of Tyre is a romance. It’s got everything but talking dogs.

  The Island of Doctor Moreau is also a romance, though a dark one. Consider the shipwreck. Consider the break in the protagonist’s consciousness—the multiple breaks, in fact. Consider the pirates, here supplied by the vile captain and crew of the Ipecacuanha. Consider the name Ipecacuanha, signifying an emetic and purgative: the break in consciousness is going to have a nastily physical side to it, of a possibly medicinal kind. Consider the fluid boundaries between animal and human. Consider the island.

  5. THE ENCHANTED ISLAND

  The name given to the island by Wells is Noble’s Island, a patent irony as well as another poke at the class system. Say it quickly and slur a little, and it’s no blessed island.

  This island has many literary antecedents and several descendants. Foremost among the latter is William Golding’s island in Lord of the Flies—a book that owes something to The Island of Doctor Moreau, as well as to those adventure books Coral Island and The Swiss Family Robinson, and of course to the great original shipwreck-on-an-island classic, Robinson Crusoe. Moreau could be thought of as one in a long line of island-castaway books.