Content provided in partnership with
Images of a networked society: E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops."
Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1997 by Marcia Bundy Seabury
It is a commonplace that we are in the midst of a computer revolution that will change our society perhaps more radically than the Industrial Revolution, and likewise a commonplace that the literary imagination has often gone before us in envisioning not only the shape but the possible significance of such changes. A striking example is E. M. Forster's dystopian story "The Machine Stops" (1909), which deserves renewed attention as the computer age accelerates and as the breakup of the Soviet Union may make Orwell's world of totalitarian control and fear, 1984, seem less imminent than Forster's of satisfied individuals sitting, before their networked personal computers.
- Most Popular Articles in Arts
- Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
- Free-standing cardboard sculpture
- What makes a successful business person? Business people who are tops in ...
- Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your ...
- Tino Sehgal at the ICA
- More »
Forster scholars have frequently either ignored "The Machine Stops," Forster's only portrayal of a future world, or devoted only a couple sentences or paragraphs to it; through the 1970s many judged it a limited creation. Those treating it at greater length have typically focused on how it develops Forster's recurring humanist concerns about connection--of individuals with themselves, senses plus spirit, or individuals with each other and with the natural world--while some recent critics have looked at narrative technique. But some scholars, including those critical of the story, have also seen it as prophetic. And beginning with Mark Hillegas's The Future as Nightmare (1967), discussions of the story began to appear in another kind of forum: books and articles on science fiction and dystopian fiction. "The Machine Stops" has come to be hailed as influential, the earliest of the twentieth-century dystopias exploring attitudes toward science and technology.(1)
Even the more recent of such commentaries have focused on the story's portrayal of technology in general: for example, people do not have to work and have become soft since the machine works for them. These analyses either predate the widespread use of home computers or do not discuss them. Further, none devotes sustained attention to the religious issues so central to the story. By looking at intersections between religious thinking and computerization in "The Machine Stops," this essay can explore some key questions about the effects of computerization on our lives and values. The citizens in the world of "The Machine Stops" live in individual cells, empty except for a chair, a desk, and the controls of a machine. What happens to people's relationship to a power outside themselves, and to their relationships with each other, when their days are increasingly spent in relationship with a networked communication device? I will explore these issues through images and metaphors, assuming as does Robert Frost in his "Education by Metaphor: A Meditative Monologue" that humankind's most profound thinking is metaphorical.
First, Forster portrays an entirely indoor society, a society that looks only at the man-made. This condition began well before the citizens' underground life, as people had increasingly homogenized the earth: "What was the good of going to Pekin when it was just like Shrewsbury?" (10). Then the environment was somehow poisoned, made uninhabitable for all higher life forms, so that people had to move underground--all this written decades before nuclear fission, bomb shelters, and the Swiss's reputed ability to house their entire nation in shelters under their mountains.
Forster is of course not alone in imagining the future city as underground. H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895) places the workers, the Morlocks, underground, while the Eloi live above. Fritz Lang's movie Metropolis (1927), based on the novel by Thea von Harbou, shows an aboveground society of the well-to-do undergirded by workers in a hellish world of overwork and steam. In these cases, however, note that there is a clear division: an at least apparently good life above ground and a hell below. In "The Machine Stops," all inhabit an underground "good life" that is hell.
Moreover, the issue of class, so important in those other works and in Forster's own novels, is nonexistent here. People's cells, their technological appurtenances, will not increase in size or sophistication depending on their birth or accomplishments. Thus our attention is focused not on how this brave new world affects its various classes but on how it affects everyone. As Northrop Frye puts it, today we may have the "growing sense that the whole world is destined to the same social fate with no place to hide" (29). Whether corporation executive or auto mechanic, we all increasingly interact with our technology at work and at home.
In this enclosed world, "night and day, wind and storm, tide and earthquake, impeded man no longer. He had harnessed Leviathan" ("Machine" 10). People see not the forces of nature but rather only the machine and the walls of their man-made rooms. Forster's underground citizens can still travel above ground in airships; Forster published his story in the same year as the first airplane flight across the English Channel, foreseeing the age of widespread commercial flights. But the citizens' supposed exposure to the larger world is thus high-speed travel, with windows sealed. Gradually, any travel people do is with the shades pulled, so that they can concentrate better on their own affairs.
