Modern Dystopian Fiction and Political Thought

Narratives of World Politics

Adam Stock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317326922
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

Over the past few years, 'dystopia' has become a word with increasing cultural currency. This volume argues that we live in dystopian times, and more specifically that a genre of fiction called "dystopia" has, above others, achieved symbolic cultural value in representing fears and anxieties about the future. As such, dystopian fictions do not merely mirror what is happening in the world: in becoming such a ready referent for discussions about such varied topics as governance, popular culture, security, structural discrimination, environmental disasters and beyond, the narrative conventions and generic tropes of dystopian fiction affect the ways in which we grapple with contemporary political problems, economic anxieties and social fears.

The volume addresses the development of the narrative methods and generic conventions of dystopian fiction as a mode of socio-political critique across the first half of the twentieth century. It examines how a series of texts from an age of political extremes contributed to political discourse and rhetoric both in its contemporary setting and in the terms in which we increasingly cast our cultural anxieties. Focusing on interactions between temporality, spatiality and narrative, the analysis unpicks how the dystopian interacts with social and political events, debates and ideas, Stock evaluates modern dystopian fiction as a historically responsive mode of political literature. He argues that amid the terrors and upheavals of the first half of the twentieth century, dystopian fiction provided a unique space for writers to engage with historical and contemporary political thought in a mode that had popular cultural appeal.

Combining literary analysis informed by critical theory and the history of political thought with archival-based historical research, this volume works to shed new light on the intersection of popular culture and world politics. It will be of interest to students and scholars in literary studies, cultural and intellectual history, politics and international relations.

1 “Troubles began quietly”

Tensions of emergence in E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops”

Introduction

The apparently straightforward plot and superficial didactic message of E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” (1909) masks a series of remarkable contradictions and ambiguities, which forestall interpretation. Even the title exudes uncertainty: figuratively “machine” is a metonym for any efficient system or organisation, while in the more literal sense it is (usually) something with a moving mechanism. The nature of the titular Machine becomes more uncertain, however, when considered in conjunction with the word “stops”. Like a church organ, a “machine” may have mechanical “stops” which allow certain parts to move when needed, but then again the entire device may – as part of its function or not – arrest in its movement completely. For example, a moving truck should ordinarily stop when the brake pedal is pressed. Failure to stop could signal a (potentially catastrophic) mechanical fault. On the other hand, if the cam belt snaps the truck will likewise judder to a halt. While the titular Machine does break down irrevocably in the narrative, Forster’s title does little to definitively foreshadow anything, and instead forestalls interpretation.

This interpretive difficulty suggests Forster’s choice of narrative form (the dystopian short story) might hide more complex and provocative political content than at first appears. I contend that here such content cuts to the quick of fin-de-siècle cultural anxieties bound up with empire and masculinity by positing a queer futurity in challenge to then dominant positions. To make this case, this chapter begins by considering the question of literary periodisation as one that brings together aesthetic concerns with political issues – a question with resonances for the whole genre. Consideration of literary context reveals how Forster’s narrative strategy deals critically with fears of racial degeneration, derived from social Darwinism, which formed part of a perceived crisis in the physical condition of working-class Edwardian British men. Further historical contextualisation can then tease apart the text’s fragmentation and aporia to reveal more radical insights. Here I turn to the queer theory of José Esteban Muñoz alongside the work of Forster’s contemporary Edward Carpenter in order to read the story as an intervention in international political debates surrounding the Dreyfus Affair in France and the Eulenburg Scandal in Germany. These cases were of tremendous symbolic importance in the lead up to the First World War. In this context Forster valorises the othered “cosmopolitan” identities of Jewish and queer figures against the European imperialist order, constructing a queer futurity to counter the hegemonic model of masculinity of his age.

Arrested development

The resistance of the title to immediate comprehension has both political and aesthetic (narrative) consequences. The reader is induced to participate in an act of narrative world building from the very first sentence through direct address: “Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape like the cell of a bee” (Forster 1954, 109). As several critics have noted, this apiary imagery is overtly political.¹ But no sooner has the narrator demanded the reader engage in building a narrative world with an explicitly political form than the change of tense at the conclusion of the opening paragraph from present to past signals an end to the mapping out of the political space of a “cell” as part of a framing narrative. From here on information will be strategically withheld until such time as it serves a specific purpose.

The story traces the relationship of Vashti and her adult son as he begins to resist the passive, isolated life which the Machine provides and eventually ventures out of his part of the global subterranean hive to explore the Earth’s surface, widely thought to be uninhabitable. The Machine captures him and he is threatened with expulsion (and hence death). But in the third section of the story Kuno calls his mother across the world to tell her – rather more clearly than the title indicates – that “the Machine is stopping, I know it, I know the signs” (emphasis added). Faced with the world-destroying concept of mechanical failure, her immediate response is to “burst into a peal of laughter” as she finds the notion “absurd” (Forster 1954, 139). The Machine orders her existence, and is the means by and through which she apprehends and even perceives the world. The reader, aware already that Kuno’s contact comes in the context of “troubles” which “began quietly, long before she was conscious of them” (138), understands what the failures in the Machine’s function represent even as Vashti continues to plead ignorance, but only because we have just been told what “the signs” represent by Kuno. In Tom Moylan’s words, “the narrator formally signifies the existence of a reality outside the parameters of both the Machine society and the surface enclave of the Homeless” (2000, 159). The narrative voice opens up a gap between the information available to the reader and that known to the characters themselves, and importantly alerts the reader to the gap. This gap is sustained until the close of the narrator’s “meditation”, when Kuno and Vashti are reunited just in time to see the final, total breakdown of the Machine when an airship crash causes the entire underground network they are in to collapse inward.

In some ways, then, the reader is directed toward a specific interpretation; but, as with the tensions in the title, at other moments the text implements a strategy which Richard Widdicombe (1990, 93) has labelled “aporia”, or the “obstruction of meaning” and “impossibility of textual resolution”. Widdicombe notes that the story’s “didactic message, founded on Protagoras’s adage ‘Man is the measure [of all things]’, warns against succumbing to ‘the terrors of direct experience’ and the seductiveness of ‘tenth-hand’ ideas, warns against mediation of all kinds, but does so through a text marked by superfluous mediation” (1990, 95). The arresting of the interpretative process in what Ralph Pordzik (2010, 56) terms Forster’s “textual machine” through “a deliberate act of concealment” opens the text to multiple readings, for example as queer (Pordzik 2010), Hegelian (March-Russell 2005), liberal post-Darwinian (Jonsson 2012) or as propounding anti-scientism (Walker 2007). It is this very openness that makes it so difficult to pin down, not least because like some of the 1930s dystopian allegories examined later in this book, the text exceeds allegorical readings.

Periodising the Machine: Georgians, Edwardians, Victorians

“The Machine Stops” is similarly resistant to easy periodisation. However, I argue that this literary question offers a way in to political issues which are otherwise obscured by the text’s aporia. In a 1924 essay Virginia Woolf arranged “Edwardians and Georgians into two camps; Mr Wells, Mr Bennett, and Mr Galsworthy I will call Edwardians; Mr Forster, Mr Lawrence, Mr Strachey, Mr Joyce, and Mr Eliot I will call the Georgians”. Quoting this passage, David Bradshaw goes on to state that “while shoehorning [Forster] into the canon of high modernism alongside Eliot and Joyce now seems more than a touch audacious, his various affinities with the writings of Lawrence, Strachey, and Woolf are obvious enough” (Bradshaw 2007, 5). Elsewhere in the same volume, Dominic Head argues that “the preoccupation with the fantastic suggests that Forster has affinities with Kipling as a short story writer, rather than with the technically more innovative modernists, such as Joyce, Mansfield, and Woolf” (Head 2007, 78). The differences between “high modernist” groupings here serve to show the instability of the modernist canon and definitions of the avant-garde, and point to Forster’s fluctuations on aesthetic questions. David Medalie (2002, 1) correspondingly terms Forster’s work “reluctant modernism”. Some important characteristics associated with modernist literary writing can indeed be found in the story. For example, free indirect speech is used in novel ways, the narrative is concerned with time and memory, and, with the “re-establishment of religion” (in which the Machine is “worshipped as divine”), Forster (1954, 136–37) satirises religious urges. Yet at the same time, it is also very much an Edwardian story that looks backwards toward nineteenth-century naturalism and Head (2007, 87) accurately observes that the tale has “the quality of parable” about it, placing it of an age with novels like G. K. Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904).

In other ways, Forster’s story seems to be a relic from a bygone age due to some important thematic concerns usually associated with the late Victorian era. In part, this is because as Forster claimed in his 1947 preface to his Collected Short Stories, “The Machine Stops is a reaction to one of the earlier heavens of H. G. Wells” (1954, 6). This, I suggest, is only partly the truth of the matter: one can perceive the influence of some of Wells’s early “scientific romances” in the text as easily as works like A Modern Utopia (1905), and the reaction of Forster is by no means entirely negative. In Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), for instance, future humanity evolves into two races – the child-like, effeminate surface-dwelling “Eloi” (descendants of the late Victorian bourgeoisie) and the animal, predatory “Morlocks” (descendants of the working class) who live underground. In “the Machine Stops” there likewise appear to be two populations (although they may not be separate species). Firstly, there are the inhabitants of the Machine, represented by Vashti (but not Kuno), who is depicted as “a swaddled lump of flesh – a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus” (Forster 1954, 109).² The second group is alluded to only briefly. Kuno tells Vashti that the last thing he sees when he visits the surface of the Earth before a “horrible… long white worm” connected to the Machine (133) captures him and drags him below ground is a woman: “she came to my help when I called… she too, was entangled by the worms, and, luckier than I, was killed by one of them piercing her throat” (134). In combining a hellish image of a return to the womb (the worm as umbilical cord) with an image of sexualised death (the worm penetrating and killing the woman), the Machine acts as a sort of psychotic parental figure who keeps Kuno from meeting his potential mate. “The Machine Stops” is hence a neurotic tale, torn between naturalism and modernism. It mediates between dominant cultural and political neuroses of Georgian, Edwardian, and late Victorian eras through engagement with Darwinism.

Degeneration fears

In The Time Machine, Wells’ splitting of humanity into two separate species is explicitly grounded in the biopolitics of the fin-de-siècle when the Time Traveller states: “even now, does not an East-end worker live in such artificial conditions as practically to be cut off from the natural surface of the earth?” (Wells 2005c, 48) The fact that in terms of both physical appearance and temperament Kuno sits somewhere between the surface and underground groups is likewise important in the political and scientific context of degeneration fears.

These fears played on cultural understandings of evolutionism for which, since the 1870s, “Darwinism” had become a catchall name: as Peter Bowler has stressed, before the twentieth century “the term did not denote a commitment to the Darwinian theory of natural selection” (2003, 179). The theory of natural selection as described by Darwin is nature’s trial and error approach to population variation. By favouring at the population level useful variations (i.e. those that help life forms to best adapt to their environment and reproduce), natural selection “does not positively produce anything. It only eliminates, or tends to eliminate, whatever is not competitive” (Flew 1984, 25). In strictly Darwinian terms, this means nature has no telos and humankind does not represent an end point. In the late nineteenth century however, this element of Darwinism was misused or misrepresented in two important ways: firstly, attempts were made to apply Darwinian theories of population change on the evolutionary timescale to both socio-economic groups and individuals, and secondly attempts were made to preserve humankind’s privileged position at the summit of all creation (and thereby the need for a benevolent Creator). The first type of misuse helped to justify reading imperialism (in the context of the “scramble for Africa”) as well as class structures in biopolitical terms, while the second type gave credence to an argument that individuals who enjoyed social and economic success were morally superior. If the most prosperous were identified as the “fittest” and best adapted for survival, then the most vulnerable – especially those reliant upon charity – represented a dangerous social “residuum” (to use investigative journalist Henry Mayhew’s 1840s term). Dorothy Porter (1991, 160) stresses that the idea of the poor being a “race apart” is pre-Victorian (and hence pre-Darwinian) in origin but nevertheless, “by the close of the century, this supposed ‘race apart’ had been given formal and prominent status within the new discourses of degeneration and eugenics.” What the social Darwinism of the fin-de-siècle did was to suggest that “the so-called ‘race apart’ might be but the tip of the iceberg of degenerates, a vast horde of the unfit dragging the nation down into inevitable biological decline and final extinction”. This was brought sharply into focus in the aftermath of the failure of the British to recruit sufficient physically fit volunteers during the Boer War.³

While the turn of the twentieth century saw the founding of the eugenics movement by Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, the story world of Forster’s tale turns eugenics on its head as in “it was a demerit to be muscular. Each infant was examined at birth and all who promised undue strength were destroyed” (1954, 124). Jonsson (2012) reads Forster as a true Darwinian who understood the biological subtleties in play, but the exposure of healthy infants surely makes a satirical point here: Forster’s story world has successfully “solved” the problems of both the social “residuum” and European competition in empire expansion. The physical strength formerly required for labour and violence is now therefore a demerit. This is not Darwinian selection, which operates on evolutionary timescales over many millennia (as Wells depicts in The Time Machine), but rather the logical consequence of following social Darwinism, which promises to rid society of an exploited class on which the creation of wealth is dependent. To appreciate the force and subtlety of Forster’s political critique requires engagement with Wells’s novel as a central intertext.

Queer futurity

Kuno, who rebels first by undertaking a regime of exercise to increase his strength, provides a characteristically ambiguous critique of this social Darwinian entropy. He is a creature out of time and place, and notwithstanding Forster’s own homosexuality it is precisely because Kuno so ill-suits the society into which he is born – both temporally and spatially – that queer theory seems an obvious means of approaching the construction of his character. As José Esteban Muñoz (2009, 1) puts it, “queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world”. Kuno represents Forster’s attempt to reach beyond what Muñoz terms “romances of the negative” (ibid.), and he does so in a Lefebvrean fashion, by reaching back toward a romantic past in order to create his utopian dreams for a different way of life (see Coleman (2015, 21)).

Pordzik makes a persuasive case that a major source for this romantic queer futurity in Forster’s story is the work of Edward Carpenter. A radically utopian thinker and devotee of Walt Whitman, Carpenter mixed in anarchist and socialist circles but is best known for his essays advocating the legalisation and acceptance of gay love as a question of both politics and morality: in Homogenic Love (written 1894, but first published in revised form in the larger Love’s Coming of Age (1908)) he produced, as his biographer Sheila Rowbotham notes, “the first British statement by a homosexual man, linking emancipation to social transformation” (Rowbotham 2009, 189–90)). Forster was certainly aware of Carpenter’s work by the time he wrote “The Machine Stops”.⁴ I argue that Forster’s story echoes Carpenter’s refutation of the “contemporary panic about a supposed ‘degeneration’ mysteriously emanating from a miasma of urban slum-dwellers, criminals, decadent artists, mystics and homosexuals, insisting that the nervous troubles of many homogenic men arose from their social predicament rather than from their sexual inclination” (Rowbotham 2009, 191).

Using an ironic mode in which the social mores advocated by conservative commentators were followed to their terrible logical conclusion, Kuno becomes a vehicle for advocating a different path of social evolution: literature becomes a means for saying what cannot be said openly in public political debate without breaking social mores. As Pordzik states, Forster’s “intriguingly evasive narrative style” hereby reveals meaning “through an act of concealment” (2010, 54, 56). In his critique of social Darwinism, the turn to Carpenter represents not a turn away from Darwinism, but rather a queering of biological theory at its interstice with politics. In his 1908 essay collection The Intermediate Sex, Carpenter lays out a theory that “might best be called nonheterosexual evolutionary democracy. Drawing on a Darwinian model of sexual selection, the tract posits ‘Urnings’ – a term for homosexuals Carpenter derived from the works of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs – as signs of social evolution” (Bredbeck 1997, 32). The influence of Carpenter is particularly noticeable in Forster’s posthumously published Maurice (2005 [1971]), written after the two met in 1913. Gregory Bredbeck argues that Edward Carpenter, in common with Forster’s eponymous character Maurice, “fetishize[d] the homosexual, positing him not as the debased other, but as the valorized other” (1997, 34). Such “bifurcation” is likewise apparent in “The Machine Stops” where Carpenter’s conception of homosexuals as socially evolved “teachers of the future” on matters of love can be seen in the presentation of Kuno (Pordzik 2010, 62).

T...