Images of a networked society: E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops."

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1997 by Marcia Bundy Seabury

This wording highlights a variation that Forster rings on the Frankenstein motif. Frankenstein rejects his creature, who turns out not to be what he expected, his act in the moment being followed by a nervous breakdown. But with his man-made, mechanical environment, man gets what he wanted. And he does not suddenly abdicate responsibility; he enjoys the results of his inventiveness. As Forster puts it, "quietly and complacently, it [mankind] was sinking into decadence" (30).

A significant part of this slide is the citizens' developing reliance on the machine. Isaac Asimov suggests that "man has always been at the mercy of forces beyond his control--consider economic and sociological forces, whims of climate, and the disasters of war. Machine control is just a different kind of control, and a superior kind since man himself designs it" (Asimov et al. 251). But Forster sees a problematic displacing of the religious impulse that results from this shift. Supposedly having mastered their environment, having banished, as Vashti says, "all the fear and the superstition" (17), Forster's citizens of the machine inadvertently find themselves once again in an environment where they are not masters of the universe. It is disconcerting, in the new man-made machine world as well as in the old, to feel our lives are controlled by forces beyond ourselves. We look to whatever guide we can find to the world we must inhabit. Thus Forster's citizens turn their backs on one kind of religious belief only to embrace, at first unwittingly, another. Vashti's son Kuno tells her accurately, "You are beginning to worship the machine" (17). Forster's citizens look to "the Book"--the computer manual. The Book of the Machine is grounded in realities beyond people's comprehension and inspires reverence. People get a sense of security from it and actually begin to pray to it (7-8, 33). Indeed, as the society progresses, religion is explicitly reestablished--a religion of the machine.(3)

Forster himself had lost faith, and commented that "Faith ... is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible" ("What I Believe" 67). But in "The Machine Stops" he does not leave us with the simple view that any religion is a stiffening agent, and thus that the characters have escaped from one set of beliefs only to embrace another equally constricting. While he objected to religious dogmatism, Forster was deeply interested in the great questions that religions have asked, as witnessed in such works as A Passage to India. In "The Machine Stops," he clearly portrays a sense of loss, man's having confined his sights to the manmade and then transferred his worship to the machine. Instead of the music of the spheres, we now hear only a different eternal hum--the hum of the Machine (8). When Kuno's mother tells him to throw himself on the mercy of the machine, he replies, "I prefer the mercy of God!" (25). Forster consistently conveys sympathy with Kuno's yearnings for mystery, for meaning.