Technocracy or Degeneration: H.G. Wells’ ‘The Island of Dr. Moreau’
Introduction
H.G. Wells’ 1896 novella, The Island of Dr. Moreau, is an intriguing examination of the quandaries which modern technological society has engendered.
The novella’s plot will be familiar to most readers: a stranded protagonist, Edward Prendick, is picked up by Dr. Moreau’s aide-de-camp, Montgomery; he is brought to the island, and soon discovers that the other denizens, distorted in face and rife with as much bodily and facial hair as the average Turkish woman, are not fully human; Moreau waxes lyrical about his vivisectionist project, which aims to turn animals into humans; Prendick witnesses the quasi-human social relations between these chimerical creatures, the apotheosis of which is known as ‘The Law’, a code which mediates their relations with each other and stymies their reversion to animalism; following Moreau’s contravention of The Law, the animals, mimicking their creator, transgress it; they rise up, slaughtering Moreau and Montgomery in the process; Prendick escapes the island.
Independent of the questions it’s in dialogue with, Wells’ Island is patchy as a standalone work. The ending leaves much to be desired; the dearth of thought that went into it is reminiscent of the eschewal of climatic endings, an unfortunate vogue in ‘70s Cinema - William Friedkin’s Exorcist, an otherwise outstanding flick dampened by a lack lustre finale, comes to mind.
Wells was cognisant of his shortcomings as a penman, attributing the unpolished nature of his corpus to an inner-compulsion to write and produce - he was by nature averse to second readings and assiduous editing (much like the editor of MEON Journal!), and one need not be a literary critic to find evidence of his haphazard approach in the finished product.
“It scarcely needs criticism to bring home to me that much of my work has been slovenly, haggard and irritated, most of it hurried and inadequately revised, and some of it as white and pasty in its texture as a starch-fed nun. I have to overwork, with all the penalties of overworking in loss of grace and finish, to get my work done.” - H.G. Wells
Wells must be commended, however, for his character-building: Prendick’s haughtiness and unwavering scepticism, Montgomery’s dipsomania which mutually re-enforces his melancholic ambience, the detached, calculating Moreau whose pretence to be a novo-Jehovah dominates every scene, and the plethora of bastardised beings betwixt rudimentary humanness and fleshly animality that populate the island.
The source text has been adapted thrice - in 1932, 1977, and 1996. Of the adaptations, I’ve watched the 1932 and 1996 films, as well as a documentary (the quality of which exceeds the aforesaid) about the production of the latter.
Adaptations
“No…this is all insane. I’m getting paid; you’re getting paid. None of the scripts make any sense, so why worry?….I didn’t read the script.” — Marlon Brando
The 1996 adaptation, directed at first by the eccentric filmmaker Richard Stanley (a descendent of Henry Morton Stanley) and, later, by John Frankenheimer after the aforementioned was paid a sizeable sum to never return to the set, is a memorable experience to say the least.
A crown jewel in the so-bad-it’s-good genre much beloved by redditors/guys with bad shaving habits who compulsively interrupt women, the 1996 film features a morbidly obese Marlon Brando whose indolence was so extreme that he, in lieu of learning off the allotted lines, directed his assistant to read them to him via an earpiece; the device malfunctioned, resulting in Brando emitting a series of police dispatches verbatim: “Two Abbo drongos going about '90mph on a magic didgeridoo-turned-fresh-whip fixed with new alloys courtesy of Ballyshite Motors”.
Other highlights include: Val Kilmer having the temerity to bully the director into re-writing the script; Brando using his clout to have the world’s smallest man hired, only for this diminutive lecher to grope female cast members; dressed in an extra’s costume, the ex-director, Richard Stanley, inconspicuously snuck back on the set, despite it being a violation of contract (a contract he was paid serious moolah to abide).
The 1932 film, hereafter ‘Island of Lost Souls’, is, sensu stricto, the superior adaptation. It features a stellar, albeit campy performance by the votary of rotundness himself, Charles Laughton, a conspicuous closet-case; Bela Lugosi is effaced, unfortunately, as the Sayer of the Law; Montgomery is wooden — the protagonist, played by Richard Arlen, would suffer the same fate if not for the air of subdued violence and authority which Arlen deftly imbues in his character.
Lota the Panther Woman is perhaps the most iconic personage on screen. Fittingly this black cat is played by black Irish (in the tradition of the Corrs sisters, not Doctor Ebun Joseph) beauty Kathleen B. Burke. The film skirted the Hays code, and thus features a scantily clad Burke prancing about in a manner marked by innuendo. Interestingly, despite dedicating much of his time to womanizing and coozehounding, H.G. Wells outwardly abhorred the erotic facets of this adaptation.
Laughton’s Moreau, equipped with a razor thin moustache designed for twirling, possesses an old-Hollywood sinisterness which fails to make up for his lack of depth. The original variant, in contrast, meditates on the morality and purpose of his project whilst in dialogue with Prendick.
The Philosophy of Dr. Moreau
“What is ape to man? A laughing stock or painful embarrassment. And man shall be that to overman: a laughing stock or painful embarrassment.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
As a retort to Prendick’s critique of vivisectionism on grounds of pain, Moreau adopts a macrocosmic perspective, allowing him to frame pain in the manner of haughty Rumanian Boyars - that is, as an all too human, all too petty, concern:
“Oh, but it is such a little thing! A mind truly opened to what science has to teach must see that it is a little thing. It may be that save in this little planet, this speck of cosmic dust, invisible long before the nearest star could be attained—it may be, I say, that nowhere else does this thing called pain occur. But the laws we feel our way towards—Why, even on this earth, even among living things, what pain is there?”
Shrewdly, Moreau identifies Prendick’s pleasure-plain moral paradigm as derivative of base animality and concomitantly materialistic. The latter is cardinal, for Moreau, whether one looks to adaptations in film or reception by literary critics, is mis-framed traditionally as an personification of 19th century English positivism.
To maintain this position is to ignore the following paragraph, wherein Moreau explicitly self identifies as religious, a believer in God, and a wanderer in search of the former’s universal ordinances:
“Then I am a religious man, Prendick, as every sane man must be. It may be, I fancy, that I have seen more of the ways of this world’s Maker than you,—for I have sought his laws, in my way, all my life, while you, I understand, have been collecting butterflies. And I tell you, pleasure and pain have nothing to do with heaven or hell. Pleasure and pain—bah! What is your theologian’s ecstasy but Mahomet’s houri in the dark? This store which men and women set on pleasure and pain, Prendick, is the mark of the beast upon them,—the mark of the beast from which they came! Pain, pain and pleasure, they are for us only so long as we wriggle in the dust.”
The means whereby one discerns God’s Law is dependent on the confessional tradition from which one approaches theology. For Catholics, informed by Aristotle by way of St. Thomas Aquinas, Natural Law and Revelation are both esteemed; some Protestant sects eschew the former in favour of the latter.
In lieu of both, Moreau proposes a novel, idiosyncratic approach: to understand God’s plan, his imperatives, his interdicts, et cetera, one ought to proceed inductively.
In considering his inductivism, Wells’ cognisance of biological degeneration must be kept in mind; a widespread concern shared by a variety of perspectives during the Victorian, Edwardian, and post-Edwardian era. For the upper crust, dysgenics was a bugbear by-product of urbanisation and industrialisation, the amelioration of which was hotly contested by the right and left alike.
Wells, who was never shy about his progressivism, outlined his eugenic vision in Anticipations, a work he later called “the keystone to the main arch of my work”. Therein, he describes the motely multiplicity in modern metropoles as:
“a multitude of contemptible and silly creatures, fear-driven and helpless and useless, unhappy or hatefully happy in the midst of squalid dishonour, feeble, ugly, inefficient, born of unrestrained lusts, and increasing and multiplying through sheer incontinence and stupidity.”
Whilst not explicitly stated in the book, it’s hardly gross conjecture to posit that the horizon of Moreau’s experimental vivisectionist project -— a religious endeavour to discern God’s Law, as demonstrated above — is not limited to merely the elevation of animals to man’s level.
If Moreau is able anthropomorphise animals, is he capable of raising men to the status of veritable demi-Gods?
A potential panacea arose for the men of the 19th century: science. The march of material progress, - signified by industrialisation and urbanisation - and the malady that followed therefrom, to wit the decline of biological stock, may be assuaged, they contended, via the scientific method. This lingers in our culture in the form of transhumanism, gene editing, and IVF.
It’s transparent that the decline of human stock in the 19th century, a view held by Wells, informed The Island of Dr. Moreau. It’s less obvious, but plausible, that Wells viewed scientific experimentation as the key to saving humanity from the aforesaid accursed symptom of modernisation.
The question remains: would Wells subscribe to Moreau’s metaphysical picture? Namely, that there is a God who intervenes insofar as universal laws, such as the laws of physics, are extant (absent their existence, the universe would be reduced to Heraclitan becoming), and that his laws are discernible via experimentation - a variety of induction. And among these laws, there is a law of organic, and thus human, elevation/degradation.
Well’s perspective is decidedly atheistic, and thus at odds with the vision expounded by Moreau - one cannot help but wonder whether Wells is speaking through Prendick when the latter lampoons Moreau as a sophist.
That said, atheism and the belief in universal laws (say, the laws of physics) often co-exist within the same worldview - I’ll bypass the question of whether this is incoherent. While Moreau and his fictional creation part ways regarding religion, their views would likely converge vis-à-vis the statement: it is possible for man to grasp the laws of life, including that of elevation and degeneration.
“The Law”
“Punishment is sharp and sure. Therefore learn the Law. Say the words.” — The Sayer of the Law, ‘The Island of Dr. Moreau’
The novel exemplifies divergent perspectives toward law.
Moreau possesses a transcendent and antipathetic attitude toward legality and morality, the codes of the petty, as evinced by his prolonged association with a runaway criminal, Montgomery, and contravention of stipulations prohibiting vivisection.
Contrastingly, for most of the novel, Moreau’s chimerical creations hold the inverse position: The Law is something to be abided by - its tenants and the penalty for transgressing them are recited in the form of nigh-religious incantations at the direction of the Sayer of the Law, a creation of Moreau distinguished by blindness.
The tenants?
“Not to go on all-fours; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
Not to suck up Drink; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
Not to eat Fish or Flesh; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
Not to claw the Bark of Trees; that is the Law. Are we not Men?
Not to chase other Men; that is the Law. Are we not Men?”
And the penalty for transgressing The Law?
“His is the House of Pain.
His is the Hand that makes.
His is the Hand that wounds.
His is the Hand that heals.”
The House of Pain refers to the building wherein they were violently vivisected by Moreau, the means by which they ascended to the status of quasi-human. This painful procedure indelibly marked them with a dualistic disposition toward their creator: concomitantly fearful and reverent.
The Law, it should be noted, is not the creation of Moreau. He implies this when he states:
“I take no interest in them. I fancy they follow in the lines the Kanaka missionary marked out, and have a kind of mockery of a rational life, poor beasts! There’s something they call the Law. Sing hymns about ‘all thine.’”
It can be reasonably inferred, then, that The Law auto-generated in the collective psychology of these beings due to the process of vivisection; their very being is stamped by it - by its pain and by the gift it granted them: the gift of questioning, even if only rudimentary.
Primitive religiosity is characterised by repetition of signifiers relating to a primal fact of religious import - generative anthropology, despite its counter-factuality, was on to something in its depiction of ur-religiosity. Much in the same way, Moreau’s creations, via incanting “The House of Pain”, recall into the consciousness of the participants the foundational “religious” act undergirding their being.
Their Death of God moment induces, at scale, the reversion to their animalistic state. Absent an axiom - for them, The Law - they ineluctably reverted to an existence informed by want, pleasure, pain, and necessity. All interdicts lose their prior value. There is a parable here for modern man - was Wells aware of this?
Conclusion: A Fleshless Future
“I wanted — it was the one thing I wanted — to find out the extreme limit of plasticity in a living shape.” — Dr. Moreau
Reception-wise, The Island of Dr. Moreau was traditionally viewed as a cautionary tale; a warning against the usurpation of God’s mantle by man - for how could a century that disputed theodicy be so naïve and hypocritical?
In writing this essay, I have endeavoured to treat this work from rarer vantage points. Still, it would be improper to forgo briefly addressing its Promethean quality.
As alluded to, the discoveries of Dr. Moreau bear implications for humanity and animals alike. From the ascent of animals via science, it follows as a corollary that the same means could be employed toward a different, albeit akin, end: the improvement of human stock.
Put differently, we are confronted with the malleability of mankind via science and technology. With transhumanism, gene editing, and AGI on the horizon, the importance of The Island of Dr Moreau has metastasised.
In our potentially post-human future, the traditional demarcation points, the markers by-which we distinguished man from beast and God, will be increasingly blurred. What was taken for granted - man’s biological reality, a constant fixture in our history as a species - will increasingly come under scrutiny. Occupancy of flesh-space might become optional, or perhaps even obsolete.
What is the meaning of flesh in the year 2100? This is a question we must all ask ourselves.
I leave the last word to Blaise Pascal:
“What a chimera then is man. What a novelty! What a monster... what a contradiction, what a prodigy” — Blaise Pascal