The Beast Re-Asserts Itself - Vitalism in the Science Fiction of H. G. Wells (original) (raw)

Expressions of vitalism run throughout the fiction of H. G. Wells, although the writer himself did not acknowledge the concept as central to his thinking. Instead vitalism emerges, in the voices of various characters, as a tentative thesis to explain life, or an expression of culminating purpose that Wells considered poetic mysticism rather than scientific truth. In this article I examine several instances of vitalist thought in Wells’s work, and attempt to decipher from the critical reception of those works why these ideas remain largely undetected. Specifically, I contend that readers confined within the discourse of Man versus Animal have difficulty apprehending statements about Life itself, and that Wells cleverly satirizes the “othering” of animal or potential superhuman, to demonstrate the common man’s inability to understand Life within a larger framework. I use four texts — The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Food of the Gods (1904), Things to Come (1935) and Star-Begotten (1937) — to demonstrate a vitalist undercurrent in the writings of this most scientific of all fiction writers.

The Human Species and the Good Gripping Dreams of H.G. Wells

2013

H.G. Wells was one of the first literary authors to depict human beings from an explicitly Darwinian perspective. The enduring appeal of his fiction testifies to his artistic intuition and imaginative understanding of evolution. However, Wells drew a sharp line between nature and culture, trusting culture to work against nature toward his ideal social state. From a modern evolutionary perspective, that split gave him an inadequate view of two important parts of human nature: imaginative culture and dispositions toward cooperative group behavior. In this article, I put Wells back on the Darwinian ground from which literary scholars have detached him. Taking The Time Machine and The Island of Dr. Moreau as examples, I use historical, biographical sources and modern evolutionary science to explain the psychological functions, imaginative effect and ambiguous canonical status of Wells’s early fiction.

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“Are we not Men?”: Reading the Human-Animal Interface in Science Fiction through John Berger’s “Why Look at Animals?”

New Horizons in English Studies, 2020

The so-called animal turn in literature has fostered the evolution of animal studies, a discipline aimed at interrogating the ontological, ethical, and metaphysical implications of animal depictions. Animal studies deals with representation and agency in literature, and its insights have fundamental implications for understanding the conception and progression of human-animal interactions. Considering questions raised by animal studies in the context of literary depictions of animals in science fiction, this article threads John Berger’s characterization of the present as a time of radical marginalization of animals in his essay “Why Look at Animals?” through two highly influential science fiction texts: H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Applying Berger’s reasoning to these two novels raises issues of personhood, criteria for ontological demarcation, and the dynamics of power, providing an opportunity to clarify, mod...

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The Beast Within: H.G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau and Human Evolution in the mid-1890s

Geological Journal, Volume 50, pp 383-397, 2015

H.G. Wells’ novels, The Time Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau, were both concerned with the evolutionary destiny of mankind and what it meant to be human, both important areas of discussion for Victorian natural science in the 1890s. In this essay, I set these two works in their broader scientific context and explore some of the then contemporary influences on them drawn from the emerging disciplines of archaeology and anthropology. Wells was a student of T.H. Huxley whose influence on his own emerging views on human evolution is clear. While most scientists and the lay-public accepted the reality of evolution by the 1890s, and the natural origins of the human species, fear of the implications of our ‘primitive’ heritage pervaded popular and scientific works. Wells bridged that gap with an uncompromising outlook delivered to the public as scientific truth delivered through short stories, novels and scientific journalism

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"Animality and Human Nature": Review of Mark Payne, The Animal Part, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010; Anat Pick, Creaturely Poetics, New York: Columbia University Press, 2011; Susan McHugh, Animal Stories, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011

The Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature 10.1 , 2012

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Biologists also do literature: Derrida, Heidegger and the danger of scientism

Derrida Today, 2021

In his recently published seminar Life Death (1975-76), Derrida engages in a close reading of Heidegger's refutation of the biologistic interpretation of Nietzsche. Derrida explains that, building on his interpretation of Nietzsche as the peak of metaphysics, Heidegger wishes to rescue the latter's metaphysical discourse from its biologizing character. In this article, I argue that Derrida's reading centres on the ontological regionalism undergirding Heidegger's refutation. To develop this argument, I test the following three hypotheses. First, I show that the later exploration offered in Life Death draws on the schematic reading of Heidegger's question of being provided in Of Grammatology (1967). Second, I explain that, for Derrida, through his refutation of Nietzsche's supposed biologism, Heidegger reaffirms ontological regionalism in order to secure the whole interpretative system that interweaves together his reading of Nietzsche and Western metaphysics and his thinking of being. Finally, I highlight Derrida's emphasis on the relentlessness of Heidegger's denunciation of biologism. I demonstrate that, for Derrida, this can be explained as biology, which has been a discourse on life and nature since its beginnings, touches on the blind spot of regionalism.

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