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[Recycled] Kuriles/Courland/Tartary: the Machine stops
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Jansy Mello: There was no love lost between E.M. Forster and Nabokov.
From a Book & Writers site I learned that "It took six years before Nabokov finished Lolita, a literary bomb. The English writer Graham Greene cited it among the best books of 1955. Edmund Wilson, Evelyn Waugh, and E.M. Forster did not share his view" and, from Herbert Gold's question, concerning E.M.Forster's opinion about characters dictating the course of his novels, we know what Nabokov replied:that "My knowledge of Mr. Forster's works is limited to one novel, which I dislike; and anyway, it was not he who fathered that trite little whimsy about characters getting out of hand; it is as old as the quills, although of course one sympathizes with his people if they try to wriggle out of that trip to India or wherever he takes them. My characters are galley slaves."*
It was, therefore, amusing when a line of Forster's Sci-Fi short-story, related to Terra, led me once again to Nabokov, this time to the habitated crust of Anti Terra and Tartary. Brian Boyd's annotations** link Tartary, also, to an underground hell - and this is where, in Forster's story, Terra's future inhabitants live and let themselves be controlled by "The Machine.". Instead of two planets (Earth and Venus)***, in Forster, there are two earthly regions: an ideologically dead upper crust and a magnificent deeply-hollowed inner-ground serving as an unconscious substitute for Hell. In Ada, Van Veen wants to do away with space (he is an "epicure of duration"). In The Machine Stops space is conquered and it disappears from human experience.. In this novel Forster seems to share Nabokov's views about the wonders and horrors of "direct experience" in relation to people and/or the external world in general.
Ironically, it's been Forster's story that heralds the time when, if not characters, it's a Machine that which may take over to dictate human's destinies and to tyrannically annul differences between people, landscapes, politics to link them in a "seraphic" and uniform world wide web. Suvarchala Narayanan**** recognizes "in this story, the same idea touted by Joseph Weizenbaum, the creator of the Eliza, a software program that simulated people. On witnessing the emotional reactions to the program and the ability of people to bond with them and treat them as human or even more than human, he cautioned against the 'easy embracing of a fabricated world' (Nicholas Carr, Eliza's World)."
And...there's also the incipient Google and Facebook phenomenon to consider.
Here are the lines that led me into my inquiry. These are quite insufficient if merely a shared word, "Kurland" (Courland), is considered.
I had already read this short-story before, without being struck by their geographic designation.This time, it was the rythm of the sentence, the arbitrary joining of disparate place names (Sumatra in Wessex, cities in Courland and in Brazil...) what attuned me to everything else with Faragod's blessing. . .
E.M.Forster in The Machine Stops: "There came a day when over the whole world - in Sumatra, in Wessex, in the innumerable cities of Courland and Brazil - the beds, when summoned by their tired owners, failed to appear. It may seem a ludicrous matter, but from it we may date the collapse of humanity... mankind was not yet sufficiently adaptable to do without sleeping." #
Vladimir Nabokov in ADA: "Of course, today, after great anti-L years of reactionary delusion have gone by (more or less!) and our sleek little machines, Faragod bless them, hum again after a fashion... Ved' ('it is, isn't it') sidesplitting to imagine that 'Russia,' instead of being a quaint synonym of Estoty, the American province extending from the Arctic...to the United States proper, was on Terra the name of a country, transferred ...to the opposite hemisphere where it sprawled over all of today's Tartary, from Kurland to the Kuriles! ...It was owing, among other things, to this 'scientifically ungraspable' concourse of divergences that minds bien rangés...rejected Terra as a fad or a fantom..."
.......................................................................................................................................................................
*- In a past VN-L posting I wondered about what novel by E M Forster had Nabokov read: ".Sexually charged bathing scenes were not uncommon in England during the early days of the twentieth century and there's one particular scene in "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight" in which a passing reference to this bucolic practice could have been made, with more irony than eroticism. In this scene Sebastian seems as surprised as the ladies pictured by E M Forster in his novel "A Room with a View.," when they accidentaly saw a naked trio - that included a wet frolicsome priest, a Mr. Beebe. Another similar scene surfaces a few years later in D H Lawrence's "The White Peacock" (1911). The naiad that turns into a long-haired naked priest in connection to Sebastian's "last dark love," if related to Forster's and Lawrence's homoerotic scenes, may be quite a revelation! (should V. [in RLSK] stop to chercher la femme ?).
** - Brian Boyd, Annotations. Ada Online Part One ch. 3
18.02-03: Tartary was the name applied...after the thirteenth-century Tatar invasion...At the time Ada was written, there was a Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic within the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, between Moscow and the Urals. "Tartary" also alludes by way of the tyranny and the torture in the Soviet Union, to Tartarus, the infernal regions (cf. "Tartary, an independent inferno," 20.03) of Greek mythology [...] 18.03: Kurland: also spelt Courland, a region of West and South Latvia between the Baltic Sea and the river Dvina; 18.03: Kuriles: the Kurile Islands, between Japan and Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula. 'From Kurland to the Kuriles' does indeed cover the extent of the Soviet Union from west to east."
*** - Brian Boyd, ADA annotations (theme:Terra) "Venus and Earth, because of their similarity in size, mass and density, were, at the time Nabokov began writing Ada, widely regarded as sister planets, or as Ada has it, "sibling" planets (231.03 and n.). Because of the brightness of its cloud cover, Venus appears mirror-bright from Earth, and could be supposed, behind the mystery of the clouds, to be a kind of mirror-image of our planet, as Antiterra may be of Terra (see 7.27-28 and n.)
**** - Suvarchala Narayanan, September 20, 2010 : Response to E.M. Forster's 'The Machine Stops'
This short story, penned in 1909 is nothing short of prophetic in some ways. It's central thrust about the role of machines in our lives, our extreme dependence on them and the consequent dangers is not new... I see in this story, the same idea touted by Joseph Weizenbaum, the creator of the Eliza, a software program that simulated people. On witnessing the emotional reactions to the program and the ability of people to bond with them and treat them as human or even more than human, he cautioned against the 'easy embracing of a fabricated world' (Nicholas Carr, Eliza's World). The problem, as evinced by E.M Forster's story is two fold; on one hand is the human being's predilection for anthropomorphic behaviour, and this behaviour extends to computers as well. The story takes this one step further where the machine is elevated beyond humans to the position of God. ... The machine's influence shapes not only society's structures but the more intimate structures of the self. Under the sway of the ubiquitous, "indispensable" computer, we begin to take on its characteristics, to see the world, and ourselves, in the computer's (and its programmers') terms. We become ever further removed from the "direct experience" of nature, from the signals sent by our senses, and ever more encased in the self-contained world delineated and mediated by technology." this is exactly how Forster represents this phenomena in his story. The individual repulsion towards other beings and the extreme identification with the world of 'buttons and stops' can be dismissed as creative exaggeration until one observes our own sources of identification today. The almost compulsive need to check our email and facebook feeds, the experience of an inexplicable void in the absence of access to them points to a subtle transformation of these programs from mere functions to emotionally vested entities.The second point, also made by Weizenbaum is the peculiar characteristic of the computer in that it "becomes an indispensable component of any structure once it is so thoroughly integrated with the structure, so enmeshed in various vital substructures, that it can no longer be factored out without fatally impairing the whole structure. That is virtually a tautology". The evidence of this line of thought can be seen in the recent financial crisis. A complex networked structure, that began as a clever idea and as means to efficiency and scalability, until one lost control of the multitude of interweaving threads and were reduced to subservience to the behemoth. The most telling part of Forster's story for me was the idea that the design influences behaviour. While there were no rules that prevented co-mingling and socialising in Forster's Machine world, the design of the system that 'brought things to people' enabled the isolation of people and the redundancy of face to face interaction and physical intimacy. This very point is echoed by Jaron Lanier and his book, You are not a Gadget, where he says 'how small changes in the details of digital design can have profound unforeseen effects on the experiences of the humans who are playing with it. The slightest change in something as trivial as the ease of the use of a button can sometimes completely alter behaviour patterns' He affirms that it is impossible to work with information technology without also engaging in social engineering' Forster's story hold more relevance today than possibly in any time before as we increase our dependency on technology and look to it to fulfill many different roles in our lives, including some human ones such as connection. While we marvel at the narrowing of the gap between the real and virtual, it will hopefully become second nature to those of us who are designing the future of human experience to use as our motif Forster's epigraph to his 1910 book Howard's End - "Only Connect." Filed under E.M.Forster Comm.Lab commlab themachinestops reading
# "The Machine Stops is available on line (free copies).
A few excerpts on "direct experience"," and the "imponderable bloom" lost through the Machine's comforts, practicity and endless scholarly authority:
"And yet-she was frightened of the tunnel: she had not seen it since her last child was born...Vashti was seized with the terrors of direct experience. She shrank back into the room, and the wall closed up again [ ] Advanced thinkers, like Vashti, had always held it foolish to visit the surface of the earth...what was the good of going out for mere curiosity...? The habit was vulgar and perhaps faintly improper: it was unproductive of ideas, and had no connection with the habits that really mattered... Those who still wanted to know what the earth was like had after all only to listen to some gramophone, or to look into some cinematophote. And even the lecturers acquiesced when they found that a lecture on the sea was none the less stimulating when compiled out of other lectures that had already been delivered on the same subject. "Beware of first- hand ideas!" exclaimed one of the most advanced of them. "First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by live and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element - direct observation. ..And in time ...there will come a generation that had got beyond facts, beyond impressions, a generation absolutely colourless, a generation seraphically free "
......
"The imponderable bloom, declared by a discredited philosophy to be the actual essence of intercourse, was rightly ignored by the Machine, just as the imponderable bloom of the grape was ignored by the manufacturers of artificial fruit. Something "good enough" had long since been accepted by our race.."
......
Kuno to Vashti: "The truth is," he continued, "that I want to see these stars again. They are curious stars. I want to see them not from the air-ship, but from the surface of the earth, as our ancestors did, thousands of years ago. I want to visit the surface of the earth." ..."You know that we have lost the sense of space. We say "space is annihilated", but we have annihilated not space, but the sense thereof. 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"
.
.
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From a Book & Writers site I learned that "It took six years before Nabokov finished Lolita, a literary bomb. The English writer Graham Greene cited it among the best books of 1955. Edmund Wilson, Evelyn Waugh, and E.M. Forster did not share his view" and, from Herbert Gold's question, concerning E.M.Forster's opinion about characters dictating the course of his novels, we know what Nabokov replied:that "My knowledge of Mr. Forster's works is limited to one novel, which I dislike; and anyway, it was not he who fathered that trite little whimsy about characters getting out of hand; it is as old as the quills, although of course one sympathizes with his people if they try to wriggle out of that trip to India or wherever he takes them. My characters are galley slaves."*
It was, therefore, amusing when a line of Forster's Sci-Fi short-story, related to Terra, led me once again to Nabokov, this time to the habitated crust of Anti Terra and Tartary. Brian Boyd's annotations** link Tartary, also, to an underground hell - and this is where, in Forster's story, Terra's future inhabitants live and let themselves be controlled by "The Machine.". Instead of two planets (Earth and Venus)***, in Forster, there are two earthly regions: an ideologically dead upper crust and a magnificent deeply-hollowed inner-ground serving as an unconscious substitute for Hell. In Ada, Van Veen wants to do away with space (he is an "epicure of duration"). In The Machine Stops space is conquered and it disappears from human experience.. In this novel Forster seems to share Nabokov's views about the wonders and horrors of "direct experience" in relation to people and/or the external world in general.
Ironically, it's been Forster's story that heralds the time when, if not characters, it's a Machine that which may take over to dictate human's destinies and to tyrannically annul differences between people, landscapes, politics to link them in a "seraphic" and uniform world wide web. Suvarchala Narayanan**** recognizes "in this story, the same idea touted by Joseph Weizenbaum, the creator of the Eliza, a software program that simulated people. On witnessing the emotional reactions to the program and the ability of people to bond with them and treat them as human or even more than human, he cautioned against the 'easy embracing of a fabricated world' (Nicholas Carr, Eliza's World)."
And...there's also the incipient Google and Facebook phenomenon to consider.
Here are the lines that led me into my inquiry. These are quite insufficient if merely a shared word, "Kurland" (Courland), is considered.
I had already read this short-story before, without being struck by their geographic designation.This time, it was the rythm of the sentence, the arbitrary joining of disparate place names (Sumatra in Wessex, cities in Courland and in Brazil...) what attuned me to everything else with Faragod's blessing. . .
E.M.Forster in The Machine Stops: "There came a day when over the whole world - in Sumatra, in Wessex, in the innumerable cities of Courland and Brazil - the beds, when summoned by their tired owners, failed to appear. It may seem a ludicrous matter, but from it we may date the collapse of humanity... mankind was not yet sufficiently adaptable to do without sleeping." #
Vladimir Nabokov in ADA: "Of course, today, after great anti-L years of reactionary delusion have gone by (more or less!) and our sleek little machines, Faragod bless them, hum again after a fashion... Ved' ('it is, isn't it') sidesplitting to imagine that 'Russia,' instead of being a quaint synonym of Estoty, the American province extending from the Arctic...to the United States proper, was on Terra the name of a country, transferred ...to the opposite hemisphere where it sprawled over all of today's Tartary, from Kurland to the Kuriles! ...It was owing, among other things, to this 'scientifically ungraspable' concourse of divergences that minds bien rangés...rejected Terra as a fad or a fantom..."
.......................................................................................................................................................................
*- In a past VN-L posting I wondered about what novel by E M Forster had Nabokov read: ".Sexually charged bathing scenes were not uncommon in England during the early days of the twentieth century and there's one particular scene in "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight" in which a passing reference to this bucolic practice could have been made, with more irony than eroticism. In this scene Sebastian seems as surprised as the ladies pictured by E M Forster in his novel "A Room with a View.," when they accidentaly saw a naked trio - that included a wet frolicsome priest, a Mr. Beebe. Another similar scene surfaces a few years later in D H Lawrence's "The White Peacock" (1911). The naiad that turns into a long-haired naked priest in connection to Sebastian's "last dark love," if related to Forster's and Lawrence's homoerotic scenes, may be quite a revelation! (should V. [in RLSK] stop to chercher la femme ?).
** - Brian Boyd, Annotations. Ada Online Part One ch. 3
18.02-03: Tartary was the name applied...after the thirteenth-century Tatar invasion...At the time Ada was written, there was a Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic within the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, between Moscow and the Urals. "Tartary" also alludes by way of the tyranny and the torture in the Soviet Union, to Tartarus, the infernal regions (cf. "Tartary, an independent inferno," 20.03) of Greek mythology [...] 18.03: Kurland: also spelt Courland, a region of West and South Latvia between the Baltic Sea and the river Dvina; 18.03: Kuriles: the Kurile Islands, between Japan and Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula. 'From Kurland to the Kuriles' does indeed cover the extent of the Soviet Union from west to east."
*** - Brian Boyd, ADA annotations (theme:Terra) "Venus and Earth, because of their similarity in size, mass and density, were, at the time Nabokov began writing Ada, widely regarded as sister planets, or as Ada has it, "sibling" planets (231.03 and n.). Because of the brightness of its cloud cover, Venus appears mirror-bright from Earth, and could be supposed, behind the mystery of the clouds, to be a kind of mirror-image of our planet, as Antiterra may be of Terra (see 7.27-28 and n.)
**** - Suvarchala Narayanan, September 20, 2010 : Response to E.M. Forster's 'The Machine Stops'
This short story, penned in 1909 is nothing short of prophetic in some ways. It's central thrust about the role of machines in our lives, our extreme dependence on them and the consequent dangers is not new... I see in this story, the same idea touted by Joseph Weizenbaum, the creator of the Eliza, a software program that simulated people. On witnessing the emotional reactions to the program and the ability of people to bond with them and treat them as human or even more than human, he cautioned against the 'easy embracing of a fabricated world' (Nicholas Carr, Eliza's World). The problem, as evinced by E.M Forster's story is two fold; on one hand is the human being's predilection for anthropomorphic behaviour, and this behaviour extends to computers as well. The story takes this one step further where the machine is elevated beyond humans to the position of God. ... The machine's influence shapes not only society's structures but the more intimate structures of the self. Under the sway of the ubiquitous, "indispensable" computer, we begin to take on its characteristics, to see the world, and ourselves, in the computer's (and its programmers') terms. We become ever further removed from the "direct experience" of nature, from the signals sent by our senses, and ever more encased in the self-contained world delineated and mediated by technology." this is exactly how Forster represents this phenomena in his story. The individual repulsion towards other beings and the extreme identification with the world of 'buttons and stops' can be dismissed as creative exaggeration until one observes our own sources of identification today. The almost compulsive need to check our email and facebook feeds, the experience of an inexplicable void in the absence of access to them points to a subtle transformation of these programs from mere functions to emotionally vested entities.The second point, also made by Weizenbaum is the peculiar characteristic of the computer in that it "becomes an indispensable component of any structure once it is so thoroughly integrated with the structure, so enmeshed in various vital substructures, that it can no longer be factored out without fatally impairing the whole structure. That is virtually a tautology". The evidence of this line of thought can be seen in the recent financial crisis. A complex networked structure, that began as a clever idea and as means to efficiency and scalability, until one lost control of the multitude of interweaving threads and were reduced to subservience to the behemoth. The most telling part of Forster's story for me was the idea that the design influences behaviour. While there were no rules that prevented co-mingling and socialising in Forster's Machine world, the design of the system that 'brought things to people' enabled the isolation of people and the redundancy of face to face interaction and physical intimacy. This very point is echoed by Jaron Lanier and his book, You are not a Gadget, where he says 'how small changes in the details of digital design can have profound unforeseen effects on the experiences of the humans who are playing with it. The slightest change in something as trivial as the ease of the use of a button can sometimes completely alter behaviour patterns' He affirms that it is impossible to work with information technology without also engaging in social engineering' Forster's story hold more relevance today than possibly in any time before as we increase our dependency on technology and look to it to fulfill many different roles in our lives, including some human ones such as connection. While we marvel at the narrowing of the gap between the real and virtual, it will hopefully become second nature to those of us who are designing the future of human experience to use as our motif Forster's epigraph to his 1910 book Howard's End - "Only Connect." Filed under E.M.Forster Comm.Lab commlab themachinestops reading
# "The Machine Stops is available on line (free copies).
A few excerpts on "direct experience"," and the "imponderable bloom" lost through the Machine's comforts, practicity and endless scholarly authority:
"And yet-she was frightened of the tunnel: she had not seen it since her last child was born...Vashti was seized with the terrors of direct experience. She shrank back into the room, and the wall closed up again [ ] Advanced thinkers, like Vashti, had always held it foolish to visit the surface of the earth...what was the good of going out for mere curiosity...? The habit was vulgar and perhaps faintly improper: it was unproductive of ideas, and had no connection with the habits that really mattered... Those who still wanted to know what the earth was like had after all only to listen to some gramophone, or to look into some cinematophote. And even the lecturers acquiesced when they found that a lecture on the sea was none the less stimulating when compiled out of other lectures that had already been delivered on the same subject. "Beware of first- hand ideas!" exclaimed one of the most advanced of them. "First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by live and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element - direct observation. ..And in time ...there will come a generation that had got beyond facts, beyond impressions, a generation absolutely colourless, a generation seraphically free "
......
"The imponderable bloom, declared by a discredited philosophy to be the actual essence of intercourse, was rightly ignored by the Machine, just as the imponderable bloom of the grape was ignored by the manufacturers of artificial fruit. Something "good enough" had long since been accepted by our race.."
......
Kuno to Vashti: "The truth is," he continued, "that I want to see these stars again. They are curious stars. I want to see them not from the air-ship, but from the surface of the earth, as our ancestors did, thousands of years ago. I want to visit the surface of the earth." ..."You know that we have lost the sense of space. We say "space is annihilated", but we have annihilated not space, but the sense thereof. 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"
.
.
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/