Images of a Networked Society: E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops."
1997; Volume: 34; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0039-3789
Autores Tópico(s)Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life
ResumoIt 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 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. Forster scholars have frequently either ignored 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. 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 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 Machine Stops live in individual cells, empty except for a chair, a desk, and the controls of a machine. 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 of going to Pekin when it was just like Shrewsbury? (10). Then the environment was somehow poisoned, made uninhabitable for all higher 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 above ground and a hell below. In 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. …
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