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PARTISAN REVIEW
that revolution and how the new world came into being. But here in
Gissing that space has become hell, a prison, a madhouse, and a dystopian
panopticon (as well as a factory for writing), all at the same time.
The fog grew thicker; she looked up at the windows beneath the
dome and saw that they were a dusky yellow. Then her eye discerned
an official wallcing along the upper gallery, and in pursuance of her
grotesque humour, her mocking misery, she likened him
to
a black,
lost soul, doomed
to
wander in an eternity of vain research along end–
less shelves. Or again, the readers who sat here at these radiating lines
of desks, what were they but hapless flies caught in a huge web, its
nucleus the great circle of the Catalogue? Darker, darker. From the
towering wall of volumes seemed to emanate visible motes, intensifY–
ing the obscurity; in a moment the book-lined circumference of the
room would be but a featureless prison-limit.
It is not the end of the world, or of capitalism, or of history, but it cer–
tainly is the end of some kind of human possibility, and this work too is
written from the bifurcated consciousness of a great phase of cultural and
social history corning to an unexpected climax which at the same time
marks its immanent obliteration or decline.
The third and last representative from the end of the last century that
I should like summarily to refer to is H.G. Wells's
The Time Machine (1895).
The claim this text makes upon our immediate interest attaches in part to
the circumstance that it contains an apparent utopia that only momentari–
ly conceals a deep dystopian reality. As the Time Traveller reviews fast
forward on his temporal bicycle to the year 802,701, he is also forecasting
backward, or retrogressing, as the sequence of numbers in the specified date
at once suggests. The world he finds himself in is Marxian and anti–
Marxian at the same time, as it is equally Darwinian and post-Darwinian
as well. The society of the delicate, refined, and apparently aristocratic Eloi
is more or less communistic; it is also Darwinian in the sense that in it the
human species has been biologically modified. Correlatively, the other
species of the future, the Morlocks who live underground and tend
machines, is composed of the evolutionary descendants of the nineteenth–
century industrial working classes. But in a connected series of reversals,
we learn that the Eloi are also fin de siecle aesthetes and biological deca–
dents if not degenerates, and that the subterranean Morlocks breed, serve,
herd, tend, and care for the Eloi because what were once the reigning
social classes have become the domesticated animals which are the chief
item in the diet of the former proletarians. Both sides have been dealt rot–
ten hands by history and evolution, and when the Time Traveller cycles
