Overview of Sci-Fi short Story, "The Machine Stops"

"The Machine Stops"
Source: TheMachineStopsFilm.wordpress.com

In this futuristic short story by E.M. Forster, humanity no longer resides on the surface of the Earth, but far below. The air above is unable to sustain life (or so everyone is led to believe). Human action, need, and desire are guided by the Machine: a super computer that caters to a person’s every wish. Need a hot bath? There’s a button for that. Need to give a lecture about Australian music? There’s a button for that.

Sameness is like a disease that has spread across civilization. Every room in every part of the underground Earth looks the same, everyone speaks the same language and feels the same sort of god-like worship for the Machine. The goal of the people is to eventually ‘be free from the taint of personality; live colorlessly’. Living underground requires certain characteristics, so those babies that are born with athletic traits are euthanized, as an athletic person would never be content with a life of solitary confinement. When people want to visit, they do so via cinamotrophes (3-D images of each other, like video chat). To see someone physically over a great distance, people travel by air-ships. The thought of touching one another or seeing daylight is abhorrent.

Vashti is a conformist, of the highest degree. However, her son, Kuno, has discovered that humanity has lost touch with each other, and with Nature. He visits the surface (without permission from the machine), and supposedly encounters others. Vashti is embarrassed that her son would go against the Machine, and both of them know that his actions will mean his eviction from his room underground (meaning, he will be forced to live above-ground, which will kill him).

Kuno does not care that he will be Homeless. He is passionate about what he experienced on the surface: “"Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives in the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It was robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralyzed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it.”

After Kuno’s unscheduled visit to the Earth’s surface is made known to others, above-ground visits are made illegal. Another change is the re-instatement of religion (before it was thought to be perverse to be spiritual in any capacity). The religion that forms is based around the love of the Machine, and its all powerful knowledge and applications.

Themes in this story are plentiful. To begin with, man has lost touch with being an individual. The idea of conformity is one of comfort and pleasure. To be different is dangerous and unheard of. Another theme is man’s acquiescence to technology and the risks and rewards behind that. Technology in the story serves man’s every need so that the people begin to pray to it, considering it a divine being (though they acknowledge time and time again that it is a man-made structure). Is it right to worship something simply because it provides for you, even if it is clothing you, feeding you, keeping you safe? Do those conditions create the need for a spiritual connection?

There is an theme in the story that really resonated with me, and that is man’s ignorance to the past. People perpetuate traditions, habits, and cultural norms without knowing why (often without caring why. The narrator states “Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.”

Once the Machine stops, society breaks almost instantly. People are used to being taken care of, and they do not know how to exist without the thrum of the Machine, and all that it provides for them. As humans equally dependant on technology, I wonder how quietly (or loudly) we would fade after our Machines stopped. 

The Times They Are a Changin'

The 20th century changed the world of poetry. Major world events boded on the mind of many a writer, reflecting in their work. Diaspora in the British Empire, the two World Wars, and cultural and societal events was behind the poetic change that took place in the early 1900's.

Claude McKay's "If We Must Die" is a poem that depicts the racial issues he experienced as a Jamaican born citizen living in white neighborhoods. His prose is as full of eloquence as any Romantic or Victorian writer, but the issue he is writing about is something either of those writers could not relate to: being persecuted or even killed because of skin color. "If we must die, O let us nobly die/ So that our precious blood may not be shed/ In vain; then even the monsters we defy/ Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!" (Greenblatt et al, 2006). When reading his poem from an objective stance, one could assume he is describing a bloody battle in any war during any time period. His ultimate message of the poem could be achieving honor, even in death.

Seamus Henley writes about a blacksmith, ever present and non-changing though the world is changing around him: "He leans out the jamb, recalls a clatter/ Of hoofs where traffic is flashing in rows/ then grunts and goes in, with a slam and a flick/ To beat iron out, to work the bellows," (Greenblatt et al, 2006). Though the job of the blacksmith has not differed for decades upon decades, the world has, bringing with it industry and technology.

The world that these poets saw was very different from the world of the Romantics and Victorians. Things in the world of the Romantics and Victorians were easier in a way, more black and white. While the world of the 20th century writer became muddled with grey, full of detail and chaos.

References:

Greenblatt, et al. [Eds]. (2006). The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic

Period Through the Twentieth Century [vol. 2] (8th ed.). New York,

NY: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Tradition

Tradition. It is a word that has many different meanings, as plenty of words tend to do. For writers, it means repetition, boredom. To T.S. Eliot and other poets of his era, tradition meant a certain quality of writing. Specifically, tradition came into play when comparing modern poets with Romantics and Victorians. Romantics and Victorians influenced writers for generations to come.

The writing styles of the Romantics and Victorians have their differences and their points of agreement. While the Romantic writer fancied nature and created poems with ethereal backdrops, the Victorian writer had a more modern standpoint and wrote more realistically about nature and issues that interested them. This is not to say that either of the the writers had more imagination than the other, but they merely used it in ways that suited them. Poets of the 20th century seemed to have taken both of these styles and merged them, to create poems that are full of modern sentiment, but romantically spoken.

English writer T.E. Hulme would have disagreed because he was a man who longed for writers to lose their "romantic view[s] which drag in the infinite," (Greenblatt et al, 2006). He believed that Romantic poems were always "moaning or whining about something or other [...and true romance and...] beauty may be a small, dry thing," (Greenblatt et al, 2006). Many of T.S. Eliot's works echo this sentiment, such as "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". In this poem, Eliot writes of the mundane but presents it in such light that it takes on a life of it's own: "Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets/ the muttering retreats/ of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels/ and sawdust restaurants with oyster shells" (Greenblatt et al, 2006).

Eliot's view of traditionalism stemmed from his respect for Hulme and his base of literary history. He believed that in order to be a great writer, one had to study about literature. By learning different styles and reading about different stories, a writer would know better about how to develop their own style; "This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity," (Greenblatt et al, 2006)".

References:

Greenblatt, et al. [Eds]. (2006). The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period Through the Twentieth Century [vol. 2] (8th ed.). New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.