Connecting with E.M. Forster
As my jetliner rears back, I look up from E.M. Forster's
Howards End to gaze at the concrete sprawl of airport
momentarily filling my window. The rows of parked airplanes and
automobiles make a fitting backdrop: In the period when Forster
wrote Howards End, 1908 to 1910, he was already decrying the
filthy, cluttered underside of life in the motorized age. Although he
was not alone in despising the stink of gasoline and the frantic
pace of vehicles, Forster had an unusual grasp of how
technological advance promised to change social
interaction—often for the worse.
Forster also had an uncanny ability to predict exactly how
technology would develop. At the century's beginning the
telephone was new and the computer not even invented, yet
Forster anticipated their modern evolution, perhaps most
explicitly with his short story "The Machine Stops." Today the
Internet and its related technologies are as ubiquitous as the
automobile, within easy reach even as I fly five miles up. They
raise all sorts of questions about relationships, community, and
sexuality—the very same questions that Forster was
contemplating in these two works.
For those who have never read Howards End (or missed Emma
Thompson in the 1992 film version), it is a book about human
connection. Margaret Schlegel—the older of the two cultivated,
well-to-do sisters central to the story—becomes impassioned
over the phrase "Only connect!" which carries two meanings.
One is a call to unite the opposing elements within each
person—what Margaret calls the beast and the monk, the prose
and the passion—while the other is a call to put the greatest
energy into personal relations. "Only connect!" is the book's
epigraph, and whenever Forster speaks as narrator he
emphasizes the value of personal relationships.
But Forster also realizes that the quality of personal connection
depends on the .quantity—often inversely. "The more people one
knows the easier it becomes to replace them," Margaret sighs.
"It's one of the curses of London." Too many connections, in
other words, devalues each one in a kind of emotional inflation.
For the Schlegel sisters, this is the constant danger of frenetic city
life; for the characters of "The Machine Stops," it is the inevitable
by-product of remote communication technology.
Written in 1909 partly as a rejoinder to H.G. Wells's glorification
of science, "The Machine Stops" is set in the far future, when
mankind has come to depend on a worldwide Machine for food
and housing, communications and medical care. In return,
humanity has abandoned the earth's surface for a life of isolation
and immobility. Each person occupies a subterranean hexagonal
cell where all bodily needs are met and where faith in the
Machine is the chief spiritual prop. People rarely leave their
rooms or meet face-to-face; instead they interact through a global
web that is part of the Machine. Each cell contains a glowing blue
"optic plate" and telephone apparatus, which carry image and
sound among individuals and groups.
The story centers around Vashti, who believes in the Machine,
and her grown son Kuno, who has serious doubts. Vashti, writes
Forster, "knew several thousand people; in certain directions
human intercourse had advanced enormously." Although clumsy
public gatherings no longer occur, Vashti lectures about her
specialty, "Music During the Australian Period," over the web,
and her audience responds in the same way. Later she eats, talks
to friends, and bathes, all within her room. She finally falls asleep
there, but not before she kisses the new Bible, the Book of the
Machine.
Kuno, in contrast, once made his way illegally to the surface,
where he saw distant hills, grass and ferns, the sun and the night
sky. The Machine dragged him back to its buried world, but he
understands the difference between pseudo-experience and
reality. "I see something like you in this plate," he tells his mother,
"but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this
telephone, but I do not hear you." Vashti also senses the lack.
Gazing at her son's image in the plate, she thinks he looks sad but
is unsure ". . . for the Machine did not transmit nuances of
expression. It only gave a general idea . . . that was good enough
for all practical purposes. . . ."
The drama in the story comes as the Machine inexplicably begins
to decay, at first producing minor quirks. The symphonies Vashti
plays through the Machine develop strange sounds that become
worse each time she summons the music. That troubles her, but
she comes to accept the noise as part of the composition. A
friend's meditations are interrupted by a slight jarring sound, but
the friend cannot decide whether that exists in her cell or in her
head. More serious problems ensue with food, air, and
illumination, but Vashti—like almost everybody else—clings to
the conviction that the Machine will repair itself.
When the Machine's demise is nearly complete, Vashti's faith fails
with it in a way that recalls Margaret Schlegel's speech about
large numbers of people. For all the thousands Vashti "knows,"
she dies nearly alone in a mob of panicked strangers, frantically
clawing upwards to the Earth's surface as the Machine finally
stops. Her sole redemption comes from a moment of true human
contact: She encounters Kuno to talk, touch, and kiss "not
through the Machine" just before they perish with the rest of the
masses. Forster leaves us amid that final failure of the race to
"Only connect," sustained solely by the promise that the few who
survive on the surface will rebuild, without the Machine.
Long after Forster imagined this dire scene, the technology of
connectivity is here. The details differ slightly: Instead of sound
and moving images, we exchange written messages and pictures
over the Internet, which links computers globally through
fiber-optic telephone lines. (I use "Internet" here as a generic term
for the major computer webs—the Internet itself and its World
Wide Web, and the commercial nets connected to it, such as
America Online. These, by the way, can also carry real-time sight
and sound, which will surely grow in use.) But the logic of
network connectivity, whether one-to-one or one-to-many,
remains unchanged, and so does the loss of personal dimensions.
The images in Forster's world move and speak, but do not
convey facial nuances. Except for the limited use of still images,
our electronic messages omit physical attributes. Forster's
imaginary system, and our real one, offer unprecedented breadth
of connection—there are an estimated 10 to 30 million Internet
users worldwide—but do not allow people to touch, or to read
each other directly.
On the Internet, Forster's implied questions still beg for answers.
Open a magazine or newspaper, and you're likely to find an
article asking a simple question: Does the Internet break down
isolation, or merely provide pale simulations of friendship and
love that drive out the real things? At one extreme, a recent
newspaper story announces "On-Line addiction: wire junkies are
multiplying as more people withdraw into their private worlds,"
and describes Internet users who are "ensnared in a net of fiber
optic lines . . . and loneliness." But some users tell a different
story. Mary Furlong, the founder of a group called SeniorNet,
says: "I see a lot of loneliness in the senior population and lack of
mobility. . . . Going on-line allows you to be intellectually mobile
and be socially mobile"—exactly what the optic plates of
Forster's world offer its confined inhabitants. There are even
indications that the lack of physical presence can be
advantageous. A London-based group finds the Internet to be a
"nonprejudicial medium," especially valuable for children with
conditions like cerebral palsy that affect speech.
In Forster's story, the rise of the Machine came from a belief in
progress, which had "come to mean the progress of the
Machine." Today, the relentless march of constantly updated
computers and infrastructure sweeps us along to use the new
technology because it is there, even when it conflicts with existing
ways of life. A case in point is occurring in Italy, where a real
estate consortium has spent more than $2 million for an entire
village, Colletta di Castelbianco, founded in the thirteenth or
fourteenth century and long since abandoned. The developers will
turn its medieval walls and arches into a "telematic" village,
creating apartments outfitted with the latest communications
equipment including high-speed access to the Internet. The idea is
that businessmen can operate on a global scale while enjoying the
beauties of the rugged Ligurian region. Even the village cafes will
be linked to the Internet, with facilities for video conferencing.
In a nation that values its cappuccino accompanied by
enthusiastic conversation, the project evokes mixed reviews.
Paolo Ceccarelli, an architect who studies the impact of
computers, believes the Italian way of life is unlikely to bring forth
many devoted Internet afficionados. He is depressed by the
disconnection he sees in the Internet village. Echoing Forster's
themes, he contemplates businessmen "parking their BMWs . . .
climbing the stairs to their hermetically-sealed apartments and
plugging in their portables in unison, all blissfully unaware of each
other's presence."
It's true that even in Forster's vision, traces of emotion and
relationship elude the grip of the Machine. "Human passions still
blundered up and down," Forster wrote, and it is clear that Vashti
and Kuno share a mother-son link, although Kuno has been
raised in a public nursery. Sexual love, however, has changed
radically. Sitting passive and isolated, people no longer touch
each other, and their physical attractiveness has diminished.
Vashti is described as a "swaddled lump of flesh . . . five feet
high, with a face as white as a fungus." The Machine controls
procreation, sending citizens traveling for the specific purpose of
propagating the race. In this world where people do not kiss,
where sex happens on assignment, Kuno rails that the Machine
"has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a
carnal act."
Human passions still blunder around the Internet, too, where
people have fallen in love and gone on to form complete
relationships or marry. But in an outcome that Forster did not
consider, the Internet also adds the more or less artificial
experiences of cybersex to the sexual repertoire. Sex over the
'net means incomplete involvement in different degrees, from
exchanges among mutually responsive participants to the solitary
viewing of pornography. Remote sex has its undeniable impact,
and in a world dealing with the disease of AIDS, it may stand in
for unsafe actual sex. But can it stand in emotionally for genuine
sexual love? Responding to this concern, participants at a recent
Vatican conference on "Computers and Feelings" declared that
cybersex is "the end of love. It is empty loneliness." That
judgment is based on a recognition that human experience is
diminished as it is filtered through electronic channels.
Forster went further. Fearing that more technology meant less
humanity, he utterly rejected the technical achievements of his
time. In 1908, after hearing of the first successful airplane flight
over a kilometer-long circuit, he wrote in his journal, ". . . if I live
to be old, I shall see the sky as pestilential as the roads. . . .
Science . . . is enslaving [man] to machines. . . . Such a soul as
mine will be crushed out." But we have come to learn that instead
of producing a monolithically "bad" or "good" effect, a rich
technology usually generates a balance sheet of benefits and
costs—many of them unpredictable, because people use
technology in unexpected ways. Thomas Mann once said, "A
great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a great truth." A
significant technology also embraces opposites; if some of its
applications constrain human potential, others enhance it.
The Internet, in fact, helps people find kindred spirits. Forster did
not foresee this development, but his story hints at it, for Vashti
could either talk to a friend through the Machine or address an
audience. Now many Internet users coalesce into groups that
share concerns and emotional affinities. People with unusual
beliefs or lifestyles, with secrets they dare not tell family and
friends, seek each other out in thousands of news groups, list
servers, and chat rooms. These cater to a variety of interests,
problems, and ways of life, including a range of strong political
views; divorce, grief, and loneliness; and a spectrum of sexuality,
from heterosexual to homosexual, lesbian, and bisexual
orientations, with variations. Within these groups, the private and
the hidden can be revealed and validated, anonymously if desired.
Forster himself grappled with the partial secret of his
homosexuality, which colored his life and his writing. His
biographer, P. N. Furbank, concludes that Forster knew he was
homosexual by the age of 21. But while a gay lifestyle was then
acceptable in some quarters, Forster did not feel he could openly
declare his sexuality, or act on it freely. The tension remained until
he tried to release it in a way that would reaffirm him as a writer.
After the success of Howards End in 1910, he feared his
creativity had dried up. Yet in 1913, the idea for a novel about
homosexual love came to him in a moment of revelation. That
seemed to show a way out of his barren time, and he wrote
Maurice enthusiastically and at great speed. When it was done in
1914, however, Forster saw that it could not appear "until my
death or England's," and it remained unpublished until after he
died.
It is only a speculation, but a revealing one, to imagine how
Forster would have fared with access to a like-minded group on
a net, where he could have expressed what he had to suppress in
the real world. After all, as a student at Cambridge he had been
elected to the exclusive intellectual society called the "Apostles,"
where, among other topics, homosexuality was discussed in a
spirit of free and rational inquiry, providing a sense of liberation
that Forster later came to value greatly. On-line access would
have created the opportunity to circulate Maurice to a larger but
still select group that would accept its theme—a form of
publication that would have brought even greater fulfillment.
Yet time on-line would have been ill used for Forster the writer.
Aimless chat is the insidious seduction of the Internet; it can
replace inward contemplation and real experience. In the decade
after Maurice, Forster looked both inward and outward. His
internal life became more unified as he came to terms with his
self-doubts, and his sexuality. His external life developed as he
worked for the Red Cross in Alexandria during the war, returned
to England, and left again for his second visit to India. He
deepened old relationships, and formed new ones, in all three
places. All this must have been necessary, in ways hardly
discernible at the time, before Forster could break free of his
unproductive period to complete A Passage to India in 1924—a
ripening that came only through the slow refining of life-as-lived
into understanding.
Forster probably would have sensed this—just as he understood
technology's potential to both isolate and overwhelm the
individual. In the world of the Machine, each person could call or
be called through his blue plate; but each could also touch an
isolation switch to stop all interchange. While it is not always so
simple, we can make individual choices about how and when to
use technology. And in allowing his future humans their privacy
between bouts of communication, Forster drew a fine metaphor
for both aspects of "Only connect!": the joining of beast with
monk carried out in the mind's solitude, the essential reaching out
to others that breaks isolation—and the combination of the two,
through the internal distillation of felt experience.
Sidney Perkowitz
Copyright © 1999 by The American Prospect,
Inc. Preferred Citation: Sidney Perkowitz,
"Connecting with E.M. Forster," The American
Prospect no. 26, May-June 1996. This article
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