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
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" (
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
E.M.Forster in The Machine
Stops: "There came a day when over the whole world - in Sumatra, in
Vladimir Nabokov in
.......................................................................................................................................................................
*-
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
*** - 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"