Utopianism, Modernism, and Literature in the Twentieth Century

A. Reeve-Tucker, N. Waddell, A. Reeve-Tucker, N. Waddell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349347636, 9780230358935
• eBook ISBN: 9781137336620
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Utopianism, Modernism, and Literature in the Twentieth Century considers the links between utopianism and modernism in two ways: as an under-theorized nexus of aesthetic and political interactions; and as a sphere of confluences that challenges accepted critical models of modernist and twentieth-century literary history. An international group of scholars considers works by E. M. Forster, Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, Naomi Mitchison, Katharine Burdekin, Rex Warner, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Thomas Pynchon, Elizabeth Bowen, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Ernst Bloch. In doing so, this volume's contributors prompt new reflections on key aspects of utopianism in experimental twentieth-century literature and non-fictional writing; deepen literary-historical understandings of modernism's socio-political implications; and bear out the on-going relevance of modernism's explorations of utopian thought. Utopianism, Modernism, and Literature in the Twentieth Century will appeal to anyone with an interest in how deeply and how differently modernist writers, as well as writers influenced by or resistant to modernist styles, engaged with issues of utopianism, perfectibility, and social betterment.

1

The Point of It

Douglas Mao

This chapter is centrally concerned with two stories by E. M. Forster. One, ‘The Machine Stops’, has long been considered a classic of dystopian fiction. For George Kateb in Utopia and Its Enemies (1963), Forster’s story, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924) taken together give vent to ‘almost every fear that utopian ends arouse’ (Kateb, 1963, p. 20); Tom Moylan draws the title of his 2000 study of dystopias, Scraps of the Untainted Sky, from the last phrase of Forster’s tale. ‘The Point of It’, published two years later, has not been discussed in relation to problems of utopia, but I will be arguing here that it offers key insights into the suite of values animating ‘The Machine Stops’ and, by extension, a number of anxieties informing an important strain of anti-utopian thinking. I will go on to suggest that another line of modernist writing furnishes an effective riposte to such anxieties, and that this riposte requires us to reconsider some prevailing assumptions about the relations between quotidian existence under capitalism and utopian imagining.

First published in 1909 and subsequently included in Forster’s second collection of short fiction, The Eternal Moment and Other Stories (1928), ‘The Machine Stops’ centres on a woman named Vashti, who, like the other inhabitants of the future Forster conjures, lives in a single room in a vast honeycomb beneath the surface of the earth. Like her fellows, Vashti rarely leaves that room, since within it all needs are met at the touch of a button. An encompassing entity known as ‘the Machine’ provides food, drink, light, ventilation, and entertainment; a button somehow ‘produce[s] literature’ (Forster, 1909, p. 94); one may hear whatever music one desires at any time; and there is no need to go visiting other people physically, since one’s thousands of friends communicate with one through ‘speaking-tubes’ (p. 94) and ‘blue optic plate[s]’ (p. 116). One can even listen to a friend give a lecture, which appears a common pastime. Indeed lectures about art – such as Vashti’s own lecture on ‘Music during the Australian period’ (p. 91) – are often preferred to the thing itself. Near the beginning of the story, Vashti turns off the ‘isolation-switch’ that had briefly blocked most inputs to her room, at which

all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Had she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one’s own ideas? Would she make an engagement to visit the public nurseries at an early date? – say this day month.

To most of these questions she replied with irritation – a growing quality in that accelerated age. (p. 94)

No other work of fiction anticipates quite so uncannily the ceaseless visitation by others, through networks extending into one’s domestic space, that defines existence in the age of e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, and Skype.

The first crisis of the tale is brought on by the conversation Vashti had isolated herself in order to hold, an exchange with her son Kuno via optic plate. Kuno, we learn, had been a little odd even in the days of his infancy at the public nurseries (a venue at which, as the preceding quotation suggests, people do sometimes meet – though it seems unlikely that this happens often, since Vashti has not seen a ‘fellow creature […] face to face for months’ [p. 98] or entered the tunnel that leads from her room to a public conveyance ‘since her last child was born’ [p. 97]). Whatever the rationale for the public nurseries, lasting parental-filial bonding is not encouraged: ‘the book of the Machine’, the single printed object in Vashti’s room, states that parents’ duties ‘cease at the moment of birth’, and, though Vashti fondly remembers teaching Kuno the basic life skill of using ‘stops and buttons’ (p. 108), the Machine at some point ‘assigned him a room on the other side of the earth’, under what had once been England (p. 97). Vashti’s room is beneath Sumatra.

In the initial conversation, Kuno tells Vashti that he wishes to walk upon the surface of the earth, which Vashti finds shocking and ‘contrary to the spirit of the age’ (p. 94), and that he wants her to visit him in person. Vashti resists this request for some days and through several exchanges, but eventually – for ‘she must brave the journey if he desired it’ (p. 97) – she undertakes the two-day trip to the other side of the world by airship. On her arrival, Kuno tells her that he walked on the surface even without receiving an ‘Egression-permit’ (p. 104), having found a way out through a railway tunnel, and that he saw ‘the hills of Wessex as Aelfrid saw them when he overthrew the Danes’ (p. 110) before the Machine dragged him back to the world below. Dismayed by this account, Vashti warns Kuno that his fate will be ‘Homelessness’ (p. 112) or expulsion to the surface, which means death, because the ‘surface of the earth supports life no longer’ (p. 113). Kuno retorts that he saw a woman living above ground, which Vashti thinks mad. She returns by airship to her own distant room.

There is another act to this drama. Some years later, the Machine goes into decline. Services are provided less and less reliably; the Mending Apparatus proves unable to mend itself; complaints to the Central Committee of the Machine go unanswered; and when at last the Machine succumbs to ‘disintegration […] accompanied by horrible cracks and rumbling’ (p. 121), people run screaming from their rooms, to die either by electrocution on the live rails of the transportation system or from such catastrophes as the crash of an airship through the subterranean galleries. Vashti and Kuno meet their ends in the latter fashion, but before they do, they enjoy a reunion. Instead of being exiled to the surface, Kuno had shortly before been relocated ‘to a room not far from her own’ (p. 117), so that he is able to find his mother in the chaos. And in the last moments of their lives, they touch, their contact accompanied by an epiphany:

They wept for humanity, those two, not for themselves. They could not bear that this should be the end. Ere silence was completed their hearts were opened, and they knew what had been important on the earth. Man, […] the noblest of all creatures visible, […] was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven. Century after century had he toiled, and here was his reward. Truly the garment had seemed heavenly at first, […] [a]nd heavenly it had been so long as […] man could shed it at will and live by the essence that is his soul, and the essence, equally divine, that is his body. The sin against the body – it was for that they wept in chief; the centuries of wrong against the muscles and the nerves, and those five portals by which we can alone apprehend – glozing it over with talk of evolution, until the body was white pap, the home of ideas as colourless, last sloshy stirrings of a spirit that had grasped the stars. (pp. 122–3)

The sadness of the ending is mitigated not only by the contact between parent and child but also by Kuno’s revelation that he has ‘seen’, ‘spoken to’, and ‘loved’ (p. 123) people hiding among the mist and ferns until the civilization of the Machine should end. To Vashti’s bitter prediction that ‘some fool will start the Machine again, tomorrow’, Kuno responds confidently: ‘Never […]. Humanity has learnt its lesson’ (p. 123).

‘The Machine Stops’ thus delineates quite plainly a number of the ‘fear[s] that utopian ends arouse’. One is that, by giving itself over to the care of machines, humanity diminishes rather than enhances its chances of survival, since machines break down. Other fears pertain to the moral and experiential deprivations humanity would suffer not under the collapse of a regime like the Machine’s but under its persistence, among which losses of intimacy and of corporeal joy figure especially prominently. In Vashti’s world, one may have thousands of friends (Facebook avant la lettre, again), but relationships between people seem to lack the intensity and immediacy that pertain between the individual and the Machine. Prior to the denouement, we witness only one expression of exuberant feeling on her part – when, ‘half ashamed, half joyful’, she murmurs ‘O Machine! O Machine!’ and kisses the book of the Machine in a ‘delirium of acquiescence’ (pp. 95–6). Meanwhile, the pleasures of bodily exercise are eradicated. Freed from physical toil, the denizens of this future assume that progress tends towards absolute liberation from the body, thereby losing both a source of pleasure and an irreplaceable dimension of human experience.

The loss of intimacy and the loss of bodily delight can in turn be understood as aspects of a more general modern tendency that Forster finds worrisome, a rage for mediation crystallizing most prominently in Vashti and her friends’ explicit mistrust of the firsthand. In the world of the Machine, the only things that matter, at least to advanced thinkers such as Vashti, are ideas; any moments deemed unproductive of ideas (views of the Himalayas, the Caucasus, and Greece from the airship, for example) are dismissed as a waste of time, and even ideas can appear threatening if insufficiently removed from immediate experience. One of the most admired lecturers in the world of the Machine is applauded warmly when he advises: ‘Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element – direct observation’ (p. 114). This counsel accords perfectly with the ‘terrors of direct experience’ (p. 97) that afflict Vashti more than once during her airship journey.

Forster’s other fictions of the period are scarcely less earnest in decrying attenuations of intimacy and bodily enjoyment, and like ‘The Machine Stops’ they associate these impoverishments with the drift towards mediation that attains an extreme in Vashti’s world. Most contain at least one character whose failure to connect with others or discomfort with the body is coupled with a mistrust of spontaneity or an unhappy relationship to the natural world, from the uptight narrator and the pretentious artist Leyland in ‘The Story of a Panic’ (1904), to the witty but horrible Mrs Failing of The Longest Journey (1907), to the hay-fever-prone Wilcoxes of Howards End (1910). These negative models are then contrasted with more vital and sympathetic figures such as Gennaro and Eustace, touched by the madness of Pan in ‘The Story of a Panic’, the outdoors-loving Stephen Wonham in The Longest Journey, and the Schlegel sisters, who by the close of Howards End have chosen an old house and a meadow in Hertfordshire over the round of discussion groups and play-going that had absorbed them in London.

The fiction in which Forster most emphatically asserts the importance of intimacy and of relish of the body, however, is surely ‘The Point of It’, first published in 1911, or two years after ‘The Machine Stops’. Forster seems to have recognized an affinity between the tales, placing them next to each other in The Eternal Moment and Other Stories, and indeed the two have many elements in common, from such local details as the deployment of Orion as a figure for heroic aspiration (about which more below), to a governing concern with what matters in life. Where ‘The Machine Stops’ delivers its judgement on the latter question by depicting a massively organized future society that deadens the soul, however, ‘The Point of It’ presents, first, a poorly lived life in this world and, second, a glimpse of an ideal mode of existence perhaps available only in heaven.

The beginning of ‘The Point of It’ finds two youths, Micky and Harold, in a boat in a channel. The latter is rowing in order to recover his strength after an illness; swept up in the euphoria of physical exertion and the prospect of helping his friend recover, Micky urges Harold to row ever harder – until Harold collapses. Horrified, Micky stammers, ‘you oughtn’t to – I oughtn’t to have let you. I – I don’t see the point of it,’ to which Harold, with his last breath, replies, ‘Don’t you? […] Well, you will some day’ (Forster, 1911, p. 126). Twenty-two at the time of the incident (and told by the doctor in the case that he considers Micky responsible), Micky ‘expect[s] never to be happy again’ (p. 126). But he does recover in time and goes on to lead a life of notably liberal virtue, working hard in the British Museum and raising three children with his wife, Janet, whose sternness of personality complements his own mildness. We learn that where ‘Micky believed in love, Janet believed in truth’ (p. 127), and indeed ‘toleration and sympathy’ increasingly become the ‘cardinal points of his nature’: in good liberal fashion, he allows that others’ faults are beyond their own choosing and grows ‘sweeter every day’ (p. 128). In middle age, he publishes some successful, if not artistically distinguished, ruminations on the virtues of wisdom acquired over a long life (‘Experience, he taught, is the only humanizer’ [p. 129]); reaching his fifties, he gives ‘up all outdoor sports’ and grows opposed to ‘late hours, violent exercise’, and ‘muddling about in open boats’ (p. 129). Janet dies when Micky is 60, but he lives more than a decade longer, until a freak accident sends him to the hospital – where, overhearing conversations in which his son Adam derides him as ‘played out […] for the last thirty years’ (p. 132) and in which Adam’s son then describes Adam as ‘pretty well played out’ (p. 133), he absorbs at last the truth that youth will never respect the wisdom of age. He dies soon after, but the story does not end there.

After death, Micky finds himself buried in the sands of a Dantean hell, where he soon recognizes that his situation is eternity’s verdict on the mildness that had characterized his life. In the desert plain ‘lay the sentimentalists, the conciliators, the peace-makers, the humanists’, while Janet suffers the torments of the ‘mountains of stone’ hard by: ‘with his wife were the reformers and ascetics and all sword-like souls. […] Micky now saw what the bustle of life conceals: that the years are bound either to liquefy a man or to stiffen him, and that Love and Truth hold each the seeds of our decay’ (p. 136). The story does not end even here, however. Sometime after, what seems to be the voice of Youth itself cleaves the darkness, bidding come to it ‘all who remember. Come out of your eternity into mine. […] [H]e who desires me is I’ (p. 139). Micky does desire, and after a second death finds himself able to walk to the infernal stream dividing those who grew old from those who died young. He stumbles into a boat, and though he cannot see who is at the oars, he hears a voice saying ‘The point of it’ and beholds, at the end of the story as he had at the beginning, the windows of a farmhouse on the farther bank, catching the light of the setting sun. Micky’s accession to some version of the crucial moment preceding Harold’s death is thus also a return to embodiment, albeit on the terms of the afterlife. Clearly answering the narrator’s earlier assertion that ‘[n]either in heaven nor hell is there place for athletics and aimless good temper’ (p. 127), the ending suggests that the true heaven is precisely where athletics and aimless good temper prevail.

‘The Point of It’ presents a strange compound of severity and generosity, to say the least. On the one hand, it courts dismissal in the terms Vashti applies to one of Kuno’s assertions – ‘the nonsense of a youthful man’ (p. 97) – by so strenuously repudiating the kind of life to which many well-intentioned people aspired in Forster’s day as in our own. Breathtaking in its sweep, Micky’s discovery that ‘the years are bound either to liquefy a man or to stiffen him, and that Love and Truth […] hold each the seeds of our decay’ (p. 136) intimates not merely that people should try to hold on to youthful openness but that the only acceptable way to live is to die young. Apart from this immense derogation, on the other hand, the story’s moral stance is mainly conveyed in prescriptions of authenticity unlikely to have troubled the most inflexible Edwardian vicar. Like many of Forster’s early works (viewed uncharitably), in other words, ‘The Point of It’ seems to position itself as a rebuke to the complacencies of the educated British middle class while sorting very well with those complacencies. And because its take on what matters in life veers between the anodyne and the intransigent, it seems to offer little in the way of guidance on how actually to live, let alone of serious social commentary. I want to suggest, however, that Forster’s repudiations in ‘The Point of It’ bear further scrutiny because they illuminate some of the fundamental investments of ‘The Machine Stops’ – and, by extension, of a strain of anti-utopianism exemplified (and in literary history partly launched) by the earlier story.

We might begin with another of the illuminations to which Micky is treated as he lies buried in the sands of hell:

one of the sins here punished was appreciation; he was suffering for all the praise that he had given to the bad and mediocre upon earth; when he had praised out of idleness, or to please people, or to encourage people; for all the praise that had not been winged with passion. (p. 134)

Micky’s failing seems to have less to do with untruthfulness than with a want of deep feeling that finally precludes intimacy. Where he had once (rowing with Harold) been so swept up in a shared excitement that he scarcely thought how his passion might hurt the other person, he later imposes a kind of distance between himself and others in part out of a reluctance to injure. (In the aforementioned denigration of his father, Micky’s son Adam notably indicts the ‘sloppy civilization’ engendered by people ‘afraid of originality, afraid of work, afraid of hurting one another’s feelings’ [p. 132].) This is no minor fault, of course: in the surprising universe of Forster’s story, Micky’s idle praise earns a contrapasso as dramatic and brutal as those meted out to Dante’s sinners. Indeed one might say that ‘The Point of It’ completes the elliptical epigraph of Howards End with a frightening conditional imperative: ‘Only connect … or suffer the torments of hell.’

This harshness of judgement is matched, in its way, by the finale of ‘The Machine Stops’, where the ‘sin against the body’ committed by Vashti and her fellows invites a destruction not unworthy of the God of the Old Testament. Indeed it is not hard to recognize an allegory of Micky’s way of living, or a literalization of its terms, in Vashti’s situation. Where Micky’s very indulgence of others sets them at a distance, Vashti keeps to her single room and, until the end of the story, joins with most of her kind in finding the touch of other people abhorrent – as when, during the airship journey, she turns too abruptly and the attendant

behaved barbarically – she put out her hand to steady her.

‘How dare you!’ exclaimed the passenger. ‘You forget yourself!’

The woman was confused, and apologised for not having let her fall. People never touched one another. The custom had become obsolete, owing to the Machine. (Forster, 1909, p. 101)

Satirically exaggerating limits on bodily proximity that some would have regarded as especially pronounced in English conceptions of good form, Forster represents the world of the Machine as one in which all contact carries an air of impropriety – as does nearly all physical exertion. When Vashti enters Kuno’s room, she does not ‘shake him by the hand’, because she is ‘too well-bred’ to do so; she is also ‘shocked […] beyond measure’ (p. 104) by Kuno’s question about why it would be wrong for him to find his own way to the earth’s surface, and has apparently admonished him, on another occasion: ‘It is not the proper thing, it is not mechanical, it is not decent to walk along a railway tunnel’ (p. 106). Even visiting the surface with the proper permits eventually earns her censure: ‘The habit was vulgar and perhaps faintly improper: it was unproductive of ideas, and had no connection with the habits that really mattered’ (p. 114).

‘The Machine Stops’ and ‘The Point of It’ are far from the only Forsterian fictions in which good manners raise unhappy bars to intimacy; virtually all of the stories and novels include transactions in which propriety and communion are at odds. More surprising than the ubiquity of the theme, however, is Forster’s repeated implication that if the object of politeness is to diminish the shock, violence, and pain of human intercourse, the presence of true intimacy will be signalled, precisely, by an eruption of shock, violence, or pain. ‘The Point of It’ is especially striking in this regard, since it turns on a contrast between Micky’s failures of connection in later life and what heaven seems to regard as his great moment of success, when in uninhibited rapture he helped bring about his friend’s demise. Intimacy and violence are also linked in the finale of ‘The Machine Stops’, however, for if Kuno’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes On Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 The Point of It
• 2 A Likely Impossibility: The Good Soldier, the Modernist Novel, and Quasi-Familial Transcendence
• 3 Providing Ridicule: Wyndham Lewis and Satire in the ‘Postwar-to-end-war World’
• 4 Naomi Mitchison: Fantasy and Intermodern Utopia
• 5 Lesbian Modernism and Utopia: Sexology and the Invert in Katharine Burdekin’s Fiction
• 6 Syncretic Utopia, Transnational Provincialism: Rex Warner’s The Wild Goose Chase
• 7 The Role of Mathematics in Modernist Utopia: Imaginary Numbers in Zamyatin’s We and Pynchon’s Against the Day
• 8 The Two Hotels of Elizabeth Bowen: Utopian Leisure in the Age of Mechanized Hospitality
• 9 ‘Seeing beneath the formlessness’: James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Restorative Urbanism
• 10 Uncovering the ‘gold-bearing rubble’: Ernst Bloch’s Literary Criticism
• Bibliography
• Index