"The Machine Stops"
by St. Clair Carr,
literary editor, NEW IMPROVED HEAD
As dedicated readers know, NEW IMPROVED HEAD's literature department is, unlike mainstream literary publications, interested in literature that is more than a few weeks old. Not for us a slavish devotion to the promotion of the latest aspiring bestseller (okay, if their publishers would send us review copies maybe we could get just a bit servile, but if ifs and ands were pots and pans, eh?). No, our province is the entire vast corpus of literature, or at least of English literature, or at least of literature written in modern English. Anyway, the literary department is also devoted to democracy, which is why it asked a couple of our other experts to reply to its review of a prescient short story. Links to their reviews are provided after the copyright notice at the end of this review.These articles have been sensitively revised to reflect developments since they were originally published in 1999.
Lately I've been telling people that E. M. Forster predicted the development of society and technology with startling accuracy in his story "The Machine Stops," which was published way back in 1928 in the collection The Eternal Moment. Forster in fact might have done better as a prophet than as a writer of fiction – neither I nor anyone else in the literary department has any great admiration for the rest of Forster's work, and it's not because we didn't like his looks.
Some of us even find Howard's End repellent. First of all, its attitude to the working classes is simply arrogant. For example, there's his account of a woodcutter working in a cemetery:
The young woodcutter...descended, his thoughts dwelling no longer on death, but on love, for he was mating.The woodcutter then steals a flower from a funeral bouquet and in the next paragraph regrets that he didn't steal them all. Then there's the uppity Leonard Bast, ill-born and consequently impertinent aspirant after culture:He knew that he was poor, and would admit it; he would have died [and he does] sooner than confess any inferiority to the rich. This may be splendid of him. But he was inferior to most rich people, there is not the least doubt of it. He was not as courteous as the average rich man, nor as intelligent, nor as healthy, nor as lovable.And for good measure his name is an anagram of LONE BASTARD (which also describes his legacy to the heroine's sister). An opinion, though, is forming in the literary department that these attitudes towards the lower classes may have been defensive. Our reading about the life of J. R. Ackerley, who was Forster's closest friend, has led us to entertain the idea that both Forster and Ackerley may have expressed this arrogance to conceal their own longings for romance with working class men. Or not, of course. Forster's ideas are still silly and repellent.There are other reasons to hate Howard's End, the chief being the high concentration of platitudinous piffle contained therein, mainly to do with its motto of "Only connect":
Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him in the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the grey, sober against the fire. Happy the man who sees from either aspect the glory of those outspread wings. The roads of his soul lie clear, and he and his friends shall find easy going.What was buddy on, eh? And what in the name of all that's holy does it mean to connect our monkish nature with our bestial? Well, the psychiatrically oriented could talk about this idea as a paradigm of upper class male homosexuality in the early twentieth century, the monkish existence relieved by periodic frenzies of sensuality and so on. We here in the literary department, though, say that it's rubbish.We also have a grievance about A Room with a View, but since Forster didn't have a high opinion of the book either we'll let it pass. Anyay, it's about time we discussed that amazingly prescient story, isn't it? So, I realized that I've been going around praising this story even though no one in the department has read the thing in years. In fact, I couldn't remember much about the story except that everyone lived in a big machine and it stopped. So I re-read it.
The leading-edge Ontario baby boomers among you will remember "The Machine Stops" from that book which plays a central role in the cultural heritage of leading-edge Ontario baby boomers: Man [sic] and his [sic] World, a standard high school short story collection of the 1960s. Some of us believe that much disrespect for authority was engendered by forcing young people to read C. S. Lewis's "Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe," which was one of the selections in the book, but that's only a theory and again it's a digression.
Anyway, "The Machine Stops" is an account of events in the lives of a woman named Vashti and of her son Kuno some time after 1928 (the exact period is not specified), when society has become one huge machine. These events are simple: Kuno wants to escape The Machine, and Vashti disowns him. Some years later Kuno tells Vashti The Machine is stopping; The Machine stops. These events are important mainly as ways of presenting Forster's predictions of how electronic society would develop.
Several of his predictions are indeed startling. For example, Forster envisioned a world in which people spend their lives in an activity very much like surfing the web, and in which the process of cocooning has been carried to its logical conclusion – everyone lives in an individual underground cell shaped like a cell of a honeycomb.
The technology which connects people and takes care of their needs has become known as The Machine, and a religion of The Machine is developing. While our current uncritical mania for ever newer technology is not a religion, or at least not yet, Forster can certainly be allowed some room for overstatement, so it's fair to say he anticipated the reverential attitude towards electronic technology, and especially of the internet.
Perhaps most perceptively, Forster understood that electronic technology would reduce the need for action. The people in his predicted world spend their lives in pursuit of ideas, or what they consider to be ideas, and the pursuit takes place almost entirely within their cells. The Machine has developed (or to use their term, evolved) to a point where society's needs can be taken care of without human labour, or so people are led to believe. The human race has been selectively bred to remove traits which would make a sedentary life unbearable.
These days the craze for fitness is certainly due in part to the increasing sedentariness of life. Vashti's life of getting ideas from radio broadcasts is remarkably similar to the modern "lifestyle" of sitting in front of the television and acquiring the attitudes that powerful commercial interests think it appropriate for you to have.
One question that arises in the back of the reader's mind is that of just how the world of The Machine is governed. Vashti and other clean-thinking devotees of The Machine think of it as a beneficent organism which evolves (as many people today think of the internet). However, committees, apparently unelected, are responsible for dealing with The Machine, for assigning living quarters, for assigning people to procreate, and so on. It is more likely that The Machine is in fact governed undemocratically, either as a one-party state or by an association of self-appointed organizations. In other words, society may be in the state towards which contemporary society seems to have been evolving for the last twenty years or so. The people's ignorance of how they are governed is of course strikingly similar to the contemporary citizen's ignorance.
Finally, everyone lives underground because the air is now toxic. Much like the air here in Toronto, which is by no means the most polluted city in the world.
As for mistaken predictions, Forster predicted, like many others, the end of human labour and was wrong. However, so far his biggest error has been in foreseeing an era of uniformity. In his story the world has become the same everywhere. In fact, though, electronic technology seems, as others predicted, to have produced an age of diversity.
Mechanical technology requires that everyone be alike, but electronic technology can easily accommodate differences between people. For example, the internet and intranets have mushroomed in part because they allow sharing of data without requiring common data management software. Forster does allow for some diversity, but for the most part the world he foresaw was uniform.
Of course, Forster may prove to be right in the end. One of the most powerful forces at work today is standardization, or the elimination of regional differences when they conflict with the needs of technology and commerce. Europe now has one currency, for example, and no one has tariffs.
Forster may also prove right in the short term. His story ends with the machine stopping, infrastructure collapsing, and everyone dying. Remind you of the fears expressed durting our recent blackout?
As literature (thought we'd never get to it, eh?) "The Machine Stops" has serious flaws. In particular, Kuno and Vashti are symbols rather than characters. However, the story is well worth reading as an analysis of modern technology.
This review has touched on only the broader issues raised by Forster, but many of the smaller details are important, too. For example, Vashti's life sounds much like life in the 1990s: "She exchanged ideas with her innumerable friends and believed she was growing more spiritual." The trends Forster foresaw are important, and the ones he's been wrong about so far may yet turn up.
The literary department is happy to announce that it is satisfied that its opinion of this story, although confirmable by few actual memories of its details, was close to being right. Our claim that Forster predicted the future with amazing accuracy was overblown (for example, he predicted people would travel in airships), but he does have more to say about technology than most contemporary experts on it.
"The Machine Stops" © John FitzGerald, 1999, 2004
For Roland Barphe's review click here
For S. Cosburn Mortimer's review click here
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