SENA KAYASÜ (ARCH/IV)
sena.kayasu@ug.bilkent.edu.tr

Eschatology:

the study of the end of things and the ultimate destiny of mankind. Even though knowledge of the term is rare, the practice is quite common.

By looking at endings, we can figure out how things begin. We can see how they should begin, or how they could have ended better. Isn’t this true for a relationship, a job, the reign of a government, a war or a natural occurence, such as global temperature change? We all look at endings.

The literary (therefore also cinematic) genre that, more than any other, relates to eschatology is science fiction. One of its most fundamental examples is “The Time Machine,” written by H. G. Wells in 1895. The story is now proverbial: a man invents a time machine and travels to the end of the world. There, he finds that humans have evolved into two species, called the Eloi and the Morlocks.

The Eloi are small, elegant, childlike adults who live above ground. They eat nothing but fruit, they do nothing but play and sleep. They are infantile in their innocence, which approaches indolence. But they live in fear of the Morlocks, who dwell underground, and come out when the Eloi are sleeping to feed on them. There are no other creatures on Earth. Humanity has become both the bottom and the top of the food chain.

The novella has quite a social message about the Morlocks. These night-dwellers, who operate the machinery and infrastructure that keep the Eloi alive, have taken over. Instead of the more “aristocratic” Eloi managing and exploiting the Morlocks, we have them cowering in a huddle every night in order not to be the one who gets eaten. The Eloi are devoid of the power to take care not only of the Morlocks, but of themselves as well.

To a degree, the Eloi remind me of the Crawleys in Downton Abbey, a television series that I’ve finally gotten around to watching. Despite not knowing anyone who followed the show closely enough to excitedly try to convince me of its quality, I had been hearing nothing but compliments and wanted to check it out.

What I found was a show about the end of an era in the United Kingdom, beginning in 1912. The power of the aristocracy is fading and the Crawleys—our protagonists and the “keepers” of the eponymous dwelling—are trying to somehow hold onto it. They are good people caught in the crossfire of, well, life. The show is the story of their attempt to survive. It is also eschatological in that it looks at the end of an actual, historical era.

The scenery, costumes and cinematic values are all creditable. It’s obvious that there are many good minds working behind the series. It is very well-structured: since a very specific part of British history is being traced, our fiction is closely tied to real events. Even the seasons are constructed around the chrolonology of the era. For example, the first season begins with the sinking of the Titanic and ends with the beginning of World War I. In order to make the events relevant, the Crawleys are always given a stake in whatever is going on.

This, of course, makes them much more realistic and much less feeble than the Eloi. At the beginning of the series we see the Earl of Grantham and his family as a bunch of people who must be taken care of by a houseful of staff, unaware of or at least unconcerned about the brewing social change that will endanger their entire way of life. As the plot progresses, however, we see how they adapt to survive. They reawaken in themselves the “benevolent paternalism” that defines their class, and remind the people in their county that they are needed as patrons. After decades of stagnation, they bring together the funds and resources required to implement the changes that the county needs to adapt to the new times after the war. They build new houses and bring in new farming equipment. When necessary, they switch to new products, as seen when they bring in pigs to breed as an additional source of income.

“The Time Traveller” is an argument that wit and strength are the result of the response to danger. Thanks to the Morlocks, the Eloi face no danger and have no needs. Hence, they lose the the spirit, intelligence and physical fitness that characterizes humankind. Downton Abbey shows us the other side of coin, where, instead of rolling over, the privileged get back in the fight and begin anew. Lord and Lady Grantham make mistakes, as do all the other characters on the show (as superficial as they may be), but they are not drunks, idiots or adulterers. If they carry with them any of the traditional character deficiencies usually attributed to the aristocracy, they drop them pretty quickly. They change.

(An exception to this is probably Mary Crawley’s vanity, which I could well have done without, but oh well, she’s only human.)

Change for the sake of change may be just as bad as tradition for the sake of tradition. For this reason, eschatology is still a popular and relevant practice. By looking at how things may end, science fiction writers remind us what to keep alive, when to start anew, and how to do one or the other. “Downton Abbey” does the same. There was a reason why the rural British aristocracy began and a reason why it ended. There’s a reason why everything has an ending: to give way to something new (but not too new).