Monday, 6 March 2017

The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896)

Names are human. Animals do without then, but we humans like to name ourselves and the world around us; and, moreover, we like to string together elaborate webs and skeins of names into—for instance—novels. Wells's beast-men novel The Island of Doctor Moreau appeared in the middle of his early burst of amazing creativity that also, as we have been seeing, produced The Time Machine (in which humans devolve into bestial forms) and 1898's The War of the Worlds (in which bestial aliens smash civilisation). Something was on his mind: a Darwinian something—Wells, of course, had studied under Darwin's disciple, T H Huxley. Before Darwin humans had believed themselves unique, god-formed, fundamentally different to animals. Darwin said: not so. Humans are merely animals mutated by evolution. The Island of Doctor Moreau is the first great novel of that revolution in thought. And what a novel: concise, readable and superbly memorable, thought-provoking and dream-haunting. A stone-cold  masterpiece.


Less than halfway through his story the narrator suddenly exclaims: ‘“Moreau! ...I know that name.”’ Fameux Moreau, it seems. And critics have made much of the naming in this novel. Moreau in French means ‘brown-skinned, like a Moor’, and whilst the Moreau Wells portrays is exaggeratedly White, with a long white beard (a parody God-the-Father) he is also the novel’s locus for its anxieties about race, miscegenation and pollution—very much part of the cultural context of imperial Britain in the 1890s. Other critics have suggested that the first syllable of Moreau’s name hints at mors, morte, death; just as the second (eau of course means water) points to his islander isolation, or perhaps the fluidity with which he treats flesh, or conceivably the blasphemous ‘baptism’ he performs upon his animals.



The Island of Doctor Moreau is a novel whose symbolic meanings are so richly layered that, as with this discussion of naming, it is easy to get carried away. Margaret Atwood once wrote a brief introduction to the novel in which she offered, in quick succession, ten different readings: Moreau as evolutionary thought experiment, as 1890s imperial adventure yarn, as scientific romance, as a rewriting of The Tempest, or the Bible or Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner and so on. There’s fun to be had in such ludic hermeneutics, although I can’t help wondering if such prodigality of interpretation rather misses the point of Wells’ novel. Because, actually, The Island of Doctor Moreau is simple. Its brute clarity is the ground for its enduring appeal. It is simple because animals are simple, relatively speaking. We keep pets, and some people prefer pets to people, because pets give us crucial things—companionship, loyalty, love—without all the complications entailed by adult human relationships. The simplicity of animals is not an innocence, of course. It would be more than naïve of us to think so; it would be a category error. Yet simplicity is a central part of the way the beast signifies to humanity. This last qualification is important: simplicity, like complexity, is a human, not a bestial, conception. It means nothing to animals themselves except in the context of their relationship to humanity.


Freud mapped this territory expertly in his Civilisation and its Discontents (1930), but Wells got their first. The Island of Doctor Moreau understands completely that violence is simple where civilisation (negotiation, compromise, repression) is complicated. Moreau holds his beast men in check with a Law that is a nominalisation of Pain, his medium for creating them: a simple, if precarious, strategy. The trace of the novel is the disintegration or degeneration of this imposed structure.





1 comment:


    Significantly -- at least, it is a part of the book that i remember, without having reread it recently -- Moreau demonstrates that he knows how to stab himself (in a special place on his leg where there are purportedly no nerve endings) without causing pain. He is self-exempt, in a horrible way, from the same pain that he causes to his creations. This can have a fairly simple meaning (sadists don't cause the same pain to themselves that they cause to others), but also it's a religious burlesque of the way in which the Christian God causes pain to every created being but suffers no pain itself, so much so that Christ had to appear to remedy this lack.