The Machine Stops: Part II

King Ælfrid and the Meaning of Masculinity

Part I of ‘The Machine Stops’ ended with Vashti blocking out the view of Greece from the airship window — ‘no ideas here’. And Part II opens with her warning Kuno that going to the surface ‘is not the kind of thing that spiritually minded people do’. Spirituality now means the Machine, as Kuno realises: she is ‘beginning to worship the Machine'.

But Vashti becomes angry: 'I worship nothing!' she cried. 'I am most advanced.’ Kuno has hit a nerve, making her defensive. This worsens when he tells her the news he wanted her to visit him in person to hear: he’s been to the surface. No, it can’t be possible — the Book says so! ‘Well,’ Kuno replies, ‘the Book's wrong, for I have been out on my feet.’

How? ‘Kuno was possessed of a certain physical strength.’ This makes him unusual:

‘These days it was a demerit to be muscular. Each infant was examined at birth, and all who promised undue strength were destroyed…In the dawn of the world our weakly must be exposed on Mount Taygetus, in its twilight our strong will suffer euthanasia, that the Machine may progress, that the Machine may progress, that the Machine may progress eternally.’

Mount Taygetus is a reference to Sparta — a warrior culture of combat and conquest. But Vashti doesn’t even know what a sword is. And there is no longer even any need to conquer nature. Leviathan is harnessed. ‘Man must be adapted to his surroundings, must he not?’ With too much comfort, you become ‘a swaddled lump of flesh’, as Vashti was described at the beginning of the story. No pressure, no diamond.

But this is not the only reason: killing the strong is necessary ‘that the Machine may progress’. This is because the strong represent the threat of independence. The Machine weaponises its worshippers’ weakness. It wants them to sacrifice their souls for comfort. Thus Kuno correctly complains,

‘We have lost a part of ourselves. I determined to recover it, and I began by walking up and down the platform of the railway outside my room. Up and down, until I was tired, and so did recapture the meaning of "Near" and “Far”…Man is the measure. That was my first lesson. Man's feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong.’

Imagine a Rocky training montage. As Kuno strengthens his body, he also strengthens his mind. Aristotle had his philosophy students train with the wrestlers. Man is neither angel nor animal but a rational animal — an embodied soul. And the body is the locus of ‘all that is lovable’.

This is a vision of incarnation, not Vashti’s vision of a disembodied dystopia where people have become too civilised to touch each other, where mothers refuse even to hug their own children.

Training his body for his journey to the surface, Kuno

‘seemed to hear the spirits of those dead workmen who had returned each evening to the starlight and to their wives, and all the generations who had lived in the open air called back to me, "You will do it yet, you are coming.”’

Note the emphasis on wives: in the Machine, there is no marriage. And although she thinks he is ‘absurd’, Vashti is moved because ‘Kuno had lately asked to be a father, and his request had been refused by the Committee. His was not a type that the Machine desired to hand on.’

But why? Because he won’t make a good slave. In ancient Greece, the slaves weren’t allowed to strength train. Strong bodies, strong minds.

After Kuno finds a crack in the wall of the Machine, he trains harder:

‘I had got back the sense of space and a man cannot rest then. I determined to get in at the hole and climb the shaft. And so I exercised my arms. Day after day I went through ridiculous movements, until my flesh ached, and I could hang by my hands and hold the pillow of my bed outstretched for many minutes.’

The pillow — so light, designed for comfort — has now, in Kuno’s rebellion against what this world expects of him, become a resistance training tool. You have to start somewhere. Freedom must be paid for with the flesh, and in training until his flesh ‘ached’ Kuno reconnects with his ancestors:

‘the spirits of the dead comforted me. I don't know what I mean by that. I just say what I felt. I felt, for the first time, that a protest had been lodged against corruption, and that even as the dead were comforting me, so I was comforting the unborn…Had I been strong, I would have torn off every garment I had, and gone out into the outer air unswaddled.’

Note the echo in ‘unswaddled’ of Vashti as the ‘swaddled lump of flesh’ at the start of the story. Kuno rejects infantilisation in the technological womb that threatens to become the tomb of his potential. His body links him to the past (the dead) and future (the unborn). It must be honoured.

Climbing up the ventilation shaft, he finds ‘a ladder, made of some primæval metal.’ From the Latin primaevus "early in life, youthful,” this captures how Kuno is revivified by his efforts.  He wonders whether ‘our ancestors ran up and down it a dozen times daily, in their building.’ And his hands bleed (there is no success without sacrifice) and the silence pierces his ‘ears like a sword’. He has a realisation: ‘The Machine hums! Did you know that? Its hum penetrates our blood, and may even guide our thoughts. Who knows! I was getting beyond its power.’ The soporific spell of the Machine is breaking. The sword echoes his vision of the stars — of the time when 'men carried swords about with them’.

Listening to his story, Vashti knows it is hopeless:

Tears gathered in his mother's eyes. She knew that he was fated. If he did not die today he would die tomorrow. There was not room for such a person in the world. And with her pity disgust mingled. She was ashamed at having borne such a son, she who had always been so respectable and so full of ideas. Was he really the little boy to whom she had taught the use of his stops and buttons, and to whom she had given his first lessons in the Book? The very hair that disfigured his lip showed that he was reverting to some savage type. On atavism the Machine can have no mercy.

In biology, atavism — Latin atavus "ancestor, forefather” — is the ‘reversion by influence of heredity to ancestral characteristics, resemblance of a given organism to some remote ancestor, return to an early or original type.’ Moustached Kuno, already unusually physically strong compared to the others, has accelerated this with his training. And masculinity isn’t welcome. Beckoned by ancestral voices in the darkness, he makes a final jump to catch the rungs of a ladder: ‘I hung tranced over the darkness and heard the hum of these workings as the last whisper in a dying dream.’

Not with a bang but a whimper, as T. S. Eliot said — that’s how the world ends.

But outside the Machine are the hills:

‘to me they were living and the turf that covered them was a skin, under which their muscles rippled, and I felt that those hills had called with incalculable force to men in the past, and that men had loved them. Now they sleep – perhaps for ever. They commune with humanity in dreams. Happy the man, happy the woman, who awakes the hills of Wessex. For though they sleep, they will never die.’

This is St. Augustine’s ‘great book: the very appearance of created things.’ And Kuno knows Wessex ‘was once an important state. Its kings held all the southern coast.’ It symbolises, then, the fighting spirit of preserving your heritage and handing it down to posterity. And so Kuno’s ‘voice rose passionately’:

‘Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralysed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it. The Machine develops – but not on our lines. The Machine proceeds – but not to our goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die. Oh, I have no remedy – or, at least, only one – to tell men again and again that I have seen the hills of Wessex as Ælfrid saw them when he overthrew the Danes.’

Why is seeing the hills of Wessex as Ælfrid saw them the only remedy? Because he represents fortitude — the willingness to commit to the good despite hardship. As Geoffrey Hill put it in his poem ‘Genesis’, ‘no bloodless myth will hold’. Freedom demands sacrifice. Man must suffer. The substitute technological womb they have created for perfect comfort has become their tomb. ‘It is we that are dying’.

Vashti’s nerves tingle ‘with his blasphemies’, yet despite herself she is curious to know more — a reminder that even the Machine’s devotees know they are made for more than it can offer. And so Kuno continues the story of his adventure, describing how after looking around on the surface he noticed that ‘the gap in the tunnel had been mended; the Mending Apparatus; the Mending Apparatus, was after me.’

Forster’s description of it echoes the snake in Eden:

Out of the shaft – it is too horrible. A worm, a long white worm, had crawled out of the shaft and was gliding over the moonlit grass…Oh, the whole dell was full of the things. They were searching it in all directions, they were denuding it, and the white snouts of others peeped out of the hole, ready if needed…Everything that could be moved they brought – brushwood, bundles of fern, everything, and down we all went intertwined into hell.

Like Vashti, it is white — the colour that, as Melville wrote in Moby-Dick, describing the albino whale, ‘strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood.’ It drags Kuno away from communing with nature and back down ‘into hell’, echoing the serpent’s role in Eden. ‘Denuding’, meaning stripping, underscores the conflict between technology and nature, and back in the Machine Kuno is ‘surrounded by artificial air, artificial light, artificial peace.’

Vashti, concerned, reminds Kuno that ‘the bones of those who were extruded after the Great Rebellion…were left where they perished for our edification. A few crawled away, but they perished, too – who can doubt it?’ The Machine used them to send a message: resistance is futile.

But Kuno does doubt it:

'Because I have seen them,' he exploded.

'Seen what?'

'Because I have seen her in the twilight – because she came to my help when I called – because she, too, was entangled by the worms, and, luckier than I, was killed by one of them piercing her throat.’

The throat is significant because it is about the voice, speech — the mark of man’s rationality, one of the two elements of the image of God in man: intellect and free will. The Machine, ultimately, is an attack on this.

But Vashti dismisses Kuno as ‘mad’. ‘The Machine Stops’ is also a retelling of Plato’s allegory of the cave:

Plato describes prisoners chained in a cave and unable to turn their heads. A fire burns behind them, and all they can see is the wall of the cave. Puppeteers walk on a parapet between the fire and prisoners. They hold up puppets that cast shadows on the wall of the cave. The prisoners think the shadows are real. When a prisoner escapes into the sunlight and tries to explain to the others, they think he is mad.

And in Part III we will explore one of the story’s most disturbing predictions: a generation that has ‘got beyond facts’.