In a 1905 letter to Robert Trevelyan, the author E.M. Forster wrote: “What I want, I think, is the sentimental, but the sentimental reached by no easy beaten track.” The story he published only two years later, however, appears to be void of any sentimentality.

The Machine Stops (1909) tells the story of an underground world in which parents' duties “cease at the moment of birth.” People live in separate rooms, similar to those of a beehive, but can connect to others at the click of a button. In fact, buttons are the gateway to just about anything:

There were buttons and switches everywhere - buttons to call for food for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced literature. And there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. (E.M. Forster)

It doesn’t take long for a reader of the third millennium to see parallels between the world created in the mind of Forster and the virtual world of the internet and social media platforms we have created and live through now. While the narrator’s observation that Vashti, one of the main characters, “knew several thousand people, (since,) in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously” might have seemed strange and possibly even inconceivable to Forster’s readers as the story was first published, current readers will find it even more strange and inconceivable that someone at the start of the previous century could have predicted a manner of connecting that allows for such a quantity of connections to other people. This brings us to Forster’s other dictum, popularized perhaps most of all by the contemporary author Zadie Smith, namely: “Only connect”. In The Machine Stops this phrase takes on a more specific meaning.

The Machine Stops is a story with a classic three-part structure that is carried by only two characters: Vashti and her son Kuno, although perhaps a third character is “The Machine”. While Vashti can be seen as the protagonist, since the reader encounters the story mainly through her experiences, Kuno, “suffering” from curiosity, can be seen as the “hero” of the story. How that is so, is something for the reader to discover, as some spoilers are better left undisclosed. What can be said is that the connection between Kuno and Vashti might provide the belief in the human race that this world needs so desperately.  

In order to shape the setting for his story, Forster uses some of the sights and sounds so familiar to the industrial age: the constant humming of activity and the lack of silence. Silence, however, might need to be understood in a different sense, literally and figuratively, than that of the auditory. Vashti feels she is wasting time when she needs to wait 15 seconds for a face-call from her son, and five minutes are deemed long enough to have a good conversation. Such an incessant pace makes quiet of mind that allows for deep thought and engagement an impossibility, which is something his current readers, who are almost constantly subject to the demands of phatic communion, might recognize well. Forster’s observations regarding the manner in which the senses function in this world actually give the reader the impression that they have all become blunt, perhaps numb, since those who connect through the “plates” of the Machine can see but not see, as “the Machine did not transmit nuances of expression.” And so when Vashti gives a lecture on music, her audience “heard her, fairly well, and saw her, fairly well,” but the reader of Forster’s story might very well believe only careful attention to the development of our senses can develop a belief in good taste.

So why did a writer who is known for his novels’ satirical and witty take on English society and manners, with a focus on characters from the middle-class, who are aspiring to be upper-class, decide to write this science-fiction story in which people appear to live a perfect life until they realize that maybe they do not? Perhaps some of the inauthentic connections he explores in those novels are not that different from the connections presented in The Machine Stops. An uncritical, slavish following of rules, norms and habits can never lead to a free mind. Coupled up with the technical developments that Forster witnessed at the time, such as aeroplanes, cars and motion-pictures, and the notion that he feared that such an increase in our pace of life and an increasing reliance on technology might make us lose some of our humanity is not that far-fetched. Because, as he phrased it, “The four characteristics of humanism are curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.”

References

Forster, E. M. (1909) The Machine Stops. New York: Halmos,

Kirsch, A. (2010). The Prose and the Passion.

Moffat. W. (2010). A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Quote by E.M. Forster, retrieved from: Goodreads.

Rich, F. (2005). Zadie Smith's Culture Warriors.

Varis, P. & Blommaert, J. (2014). Conviviality and collectives on social media: Virality, memes and new social structures.