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Most people in the twentieth century are no enemies to technology and machines; the concept of progress has come to mean for them sudden improvements in our gadgets. Inevitably, they virtually idolize the latest battery-run screwdrivers and self-cleaning ovens, CD players and VCRs, computers and golf carts, security systems and automated tellers. In short, technology is not in the least unsavory, as were topics like cannibalism and excrement.
Yet, we are just a bit uncomfortable about our robots, motors, and utensils. Every one of us has at times fantasized about (and paranoically dreaded) some incredible instrument panel of an awful contrivance going awry, possibly flooding us with radiation, blackouts, dioxin, synthetic chromosomes, and artificial disease. What can we do if all our engines run amok? What happens when our equipment becomes smarter than we are? Such thoughts are not untenable: we do at times indulge in such technophobian fancies. The satirist, as usual, steps forward blythely to agitate us and upset our balance. James Thurber informs us of one such victim of the machine. He tells
about a housewife who bought a combination ironing board and card table. . . . The husband, coming home to find the devilish contraption in the parlor, was appalled.
“What’s that thing?” he demanded. His wife explained that it was a card table, but that if you pressed a button underneath, it would become an ironing board. Whereupon she pushed the button and the table leaped a foot into the air, extended itself and became an ironing board. . . . the thing finally became so finely sensitized that it would change back and forth if you merely touched it—you didn’t have to push the button. The husband stuck it in the attic (after it had leaped up and struck him a couple of times while he was playing euchre), and on windy nights it could be heard flopping and banging around, changing from a card table to an ironing board and back.1
Nonetheless, yet another viewpoint exists on this subject as well: many of us are apt to be smug or complacent about industrialization. We are inclined to think too grandly of ourselves and of our material achievements. Once again, the satirist will step in to humble us; he will create mock science fictions and ruptured utopias, showing us how, in the future, mechanisms will have fully dehumanized us and letting us know that subsequent generations will become the slaves and victims of metallic and mathematical monsters. However the satirist might treat mechanization, you may rest assured that he will be disquieting.
By the close of the nineteenth century, the realities of industrialization had been fully developed and accepted (however much the romantics resisted it). Nonetheless, with the advent of our present century, a new phase in the struggle fully emerged: the fictive concept that not only had the machine triumphed but it had also “taken over,” become victorious, vanquished mankind, fully prevailed. Utopias turned “sour,” and fictions like We, 1984, and Brave New World suggested that the antiutopia or dystopia was the true vision of our immediate future.2
Much of this dis-ease about machinery and technology, what Stanislaw Lem calls the “techno-revolution,” has remained, in the popular arts, benign.3 Amusingly, on television the computer panel in “Star Trek” and the robot in “Lost in Space” stand out as the most sane and intelligent figures on these programs; and the interest in the Bionic Man and the Bionic Woman, in Robocop, indicates that the public is still very willing indeed to take its superheroes with a substantial dose of automated mechanization and replacement parts. Yet the prognosis does not remain wholly optimistic.
Arthur Asa Berger conjectures that “high” culture is far more suspicious of monstrosity and industrialized invention than are the propagators of popular arts: “The dominant thrust of high literature has been a revulsion against science and the machine. Novelists and poets generally see science and technology as a threat to humanity and recoil against it almost in panic. Thus most contemporary utopian novels are dystopies which see societies of the future as totalitarian and antihuman.” On the other hand, Berger argues, comic book writers look toward “nature” and repeatedly represent the hero’s conquest of technological monsters.4
Berger is not entirely correct. Two of the most noticeable developments among comic book heroes of late are their genesis and appearance. In the past, major heroes were normal human beings (Batman), or given added vigor by human means (Captain America) or by Merlin-type gods (Captain Marvel), or else they brought their supernatural powers with them to planet earth (Superman). More recently new heroes have been created by accident, by exposure to gamma rays, by unholy laboratory experiments. These beginnings imply that heroes are made rather than born. In addition, the most striking feature about recent “heroes” is their rank unsavoriness, their sheer ugliness. No longer does one encounter the handsome swain swathed in colored silks, tights, and scarfs, but rather the raw, hideous mechanisms of a debauched and polluted society—Iron Man (with his plug-in battery-recharged heart), distorted Plastic Man and Mr. Fantastic, the volatile Human Torch, unnatural Spider Man, and the chief grotesque crime fighters (who appear little better than monsters themselves) the Hulk and the rock-creature the Thing. In two decades, we have come a long way from neatness and sobriety, cleanliness and decorum in the comics. Manufactured gallants are distinctly threatening to get out of hand.
Motion pictures, too, present a mixed reaction. One of the first short reels by Lumiere played humorously with mechanization. The Sausage-Machine (1897) depicted dogs being fed on a conveyer belt into a contraption that issued continuous links of sausage at its nether end. Since that time, much of cinema has merely continued to toy with the theme of the rampant machine. Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), Guinness’s Man in the White Suit (1951), and Tati’s Mon Oncle (1956–57) merely suggest the absurdities of industrial living—white-line arrows and flashing-light directives, cannibalistic cogwheels, belching and burping engines that seek to consume everyday civilized life. Of darker aspect are pictures like Otto Rippert’s Homunculus (1916), Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926), René Clair’s A Nous la Liberté (1932), Wilcox’s Forbidden Plant (1956), or Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966), which represent a hypermechanized era interchangeable with the criminal, or worse. Recent science fiction features (not to mention Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey [1968]) often favor the outright apocalyptic, in which man brings his world rushing and tumbling to an end.5
Despite the powerful portrayal of mechanized dehumanization in some of these films, much in the cinema is sober and tame, too many directors “preferring to approach scientific subjects with a mixture of straight-faced solemnity and plodding worthiness,” demonstrating “the characteristic American ambiguity about technology.”6 “The cinema, a machine itself, enabled the machine to acquire tremendous powers and to develop its possibilities in advance of scientific fact. On the screen, the machine loses its impersonal, inhuman, and mathematical nature and becomes a poetic object.7 Nevertheless, the powerful films by men like Lang, Clair, Chaplin, and Kubrick do constitute forceful indictment of automated and mechanical society and dramatize a reaction against technology that is increasingly prevalent in our century’s literature.
To be sure, a large cause of this reaction against science and its instruments results from the growing sense, at the outset of the present century, that the idea of progress, Newtonian classical mechanics, Hegelian idealism, Comtean positivism, all had wavered, toppled, or fallen. Furthermore, romanticism’s suspicion of any mechanism that impeded or inhibited the pastoral, individualist, unique, and spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings accorded all too few accolades to the newly developing sciences. Finally, science and technology were undermined by modernism itself. For in the seventeenth century the bifurcations of self and other, of God’s words and God’s works, have led to modernity’s schizophrenia and the “divided self.”
This “modern” spirit is quite well described by Matthew Arnold. Modern man, Arnold reports, lacks all the virtues of ancient Greece; he has lost calm, cheer, steady objectivity. In their stead is nervous mental insecurity: “the Dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced; modern problems have presented themselves; we hear already the doubts, we witness the discouragement, of Hamlet or of Faust.” Arnold appears, prophetically, to have been right. Wylie Sypher speaks of “the loss of self” in the modern period, when man becomes virtually a faceless “functionary,” and Lionel Trilling discusses “the radical, subversive energy of the modern period.”8 Hans Meyerhoff also addresses modernism’s bald “pessimism”:
Pessimism is not only the title of one of Spengler’s essays but a general attitude or orientation pervading the twentieth century.
It is much easier for us to appreciate the negative reaction to this faith in progress which, pricked by Voltaire’s Mephistophelian ridicule of Leibniz’ faith in the best of all possible worlds, and assaulted by various forms of pessimism in the nineteenth century (Schopenhauer, Tennyson, Hardy, etc.), has steadily declined ever since, until the prevailing intellectual attitude of our own age makes such a faith appear, at best, naive; at worst, a dangerous illusion.9
Beyond pessimism, Tony Tanner detects, in recent American novels, a strain of paranoia: “Narrative lines are full of hidden persuaders, hidden dimensions, plots, secret organizations, evil systems, all kinds of conspiracies against spontaneity of consciousness, even cosmic take-over. The possible nightmare of being totally controlled by unseen agencies and powers is never far away in contemporary American fiction.”10
In such a literary climate, it is small wonder that scientific inventions have been all but universally greeted in literature with uneasiness, distrust, even terrific chagrin. Arnold’s words of 1853 are almost repeated in William Barrett’s analysis of 1972: “Contrary to the confidence in our powers of technology and information, the prevailing image of man we find in modern art is one of impotence, uncertainty, and self-doubt.”11
Before we survey the immediate scene of intimidating science in modern fiction, however, let us briefly examine one early romantic exemplar of the modern theme. The concept of “forbidden knowledge” has been with us for several thousand years, and of course, Adam and Eve are the primal instances of such fatal “curiosity.”12 Moreover, such a concept is normally conjoined with the idea of an unearthly or godlike hubris or aspiration: we associate the stories of Prometheus, the Tower of Babel, medieval alchemy, and, to be sure, Dr. Faustus with this recurrent tragic pattern. But only in modern times do we encounter such a “Prometheus” inventing a machine—a human machine that willfully causes the inventor’s own destruction. Such a story is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a gothic tale that has been of perennial interest since its publication in 1818.
Dr. Frankenstein virtually embodies Arnold’s “modern”: lacking utterly in classic calm, cheerfulness, and objectivity and beset by discouragement and doubt. He disavows the monster from the moment of its inception, and he can never bring himself to accept it, to mollify it, or to destroy it. Instead, he tumbles in an incessant fever of vacillation and uncertainty. Invevitably, of course, his creation—increasingly assuming the characteristics of Milton’s Satan—tortures him, pursues him, does him to death.
This romantic fiction becomes the paradigm of all subsequent literature concerning the machine. For since the Industrial Revolution we have had a stormy and ambivalent affair with technology. We rely upon it, we are devoted to it; it becomes the backbone of our leisure and our modern state. Yet we falter before this creation; we doubt, and ultimately we despair. Thus we surround the machine with demonic fictions. Just as God created a man who falls and subsequently produces a philosophy of the death of God, so, in modern fiction, has man created the machine. And the machine ultimately engenders the death of man. Ironically, it is a fitting “tragedy,” and a romantic one; for it is performed in an atmosphere of apocalypse, nightmare, and cataclysm, a new Wagnerian Gotterdammerung, the crashing and falling of worlds.
Our own century naturally continues the exposé and the assault of the machine. Our writers are primarily distrustful of the Victorian mindset that all too readily honored railroads, textile mills, child labor, expositions, coal towns, mass production, soot, smog, and smoke. In Decline and Fall, Evelyn Waugh presents a lunatic mechanic, Professor Silenus, who is “remodeling” what had once been an elegant English country house.
“The problem of architecture as I see it,” he told a journalist who had come to report on the progress of his surprising creation of furro concrete and aluminum, “is the problem of all art—the elimination of the human element from the consideration of form. The only perfect building must be the factory, because that is built to house machines, not men. I do not think it is possible for domestic architecture to be beautiful, but I am doing my best. All ill comes from man,” . . . he said gloomily. . . . “Man is never happy except when he becomes a channel for the distribution of mechanical forces.”13
It is precisely the possibility that man might well become mechanized, dehumanized—an automaton—that causes so many modern writers to manhandle our machines.
E.M. Forster’s story “The Machine Stops” (1916) dramatizes a society living in isolation and dependent upon the universal machine to feed, clothe and bed it down; the machine’s exhaustion and demise signal the collapse of this future civilization. Karel Čapek’s important play R.U.R. (1921) introduces the “robot” and indicates that machinery will overtake and eventually destroy present civilization altogether. Likewise highly influential is Kafka’s symbolic story “In the Penal Colony” (“In der Strafkolonie,” 1919), in which an electronic torture device of the utmost sophistication punishes and destroys human life at agonizing leisure. Of similar symbolic intent is Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine (1923), in which the dead in limbo practice upon the business machines that have replaced them, and Eugene O’Neill’s Dynamo (1928), in which men become the fanatic worshipers of electricity and its automated, thunder-making machines.
In the thirties and forties, a brief period of comic interlude appears (before the bomb). E.B. White introduces his computer that needs a drink in “The Hour of Letdown,” James Thurber creates Walter Mitty with his inevitable visions of machines going “pocketa-pocketa-pocketa,” and Donald Barthelme imagines an inflation of a gaseous balloon that almost totally covers the sky above New York City.14 Similarly, Harold Pinter conceives “Trouble in the Works” (1955), wherein workers “take a turn against” their machines’ products; they have come to mistrust “hemi unival spherical rod ends,” “speed taper shank spiral flute reamers,” “nippled connectors,” “male elbow adapters,” and similar suggestive (and aggressive) products. Recent mechanized employees, in sum, have become hostile to manufactured (and humanized) bawdy equipment. In the manner of Robbe-Grillet, Robert Coover, as in “The Elevator,” contrives variable scenarios of constantly alternating, rising and falling fictions.15 Reality here becomes the primordial dancer—and inflamer—of mechanistic potentialities.
Yet increasingly in the latter portion of this century, the picture becomes more grim. For we encounter death on a grand scale—orchestrated by deportations, chemical and atomic warfare, concentration camps, and carefully engineered genocide. Hence the image of the machine’s primal governance of human life becomes still more serious, more prevalent, more ferocious in recent letters. One need only think of George P. Elliott’s “The NRACP” (1966). Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1952) rehearses once again the machine-oriented society that might not work but that is nonetheless irreplaceable. Two major recent novels—Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy (1966) and Pynchon’s Gravity Rainbow (1973)—possess symbolic visions of mechanistic accomplishment and success (one portraying a world governed by a WESCAC computer, the other by the mechanic determinism of the V-2 rocket’s mysterious trajectories). Recent ratiocinative science fictions by the Polish author Stanislaw Lem, however, go one step further. Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (1971) ultimately shows American spies as the victims and slaves of an incredibly mysterious and treacherous Pentagon computer and spy center buried beneath the Rocky Mountains.
Perhaps most insidious have been the flurry of fictions hastening to pronounce the destruction of the entire world. Such creations are apocalyptic in the older, extirpatory sense of the word.16 They fully expose a “power of blackness” that witnesses a cataclysm: simple extinction without the slightest opportunity for rebirth or regeneration. Such a fiction is Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957), that observes the death of the entire planet from cobalt-bomb radiation. Such is Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove (1963), that almost gleefully posits the onset of the first—and last—nuclear war. And such is Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s Cat’s Cradle (1963), wherein the latest scientific invention, like Medusa’s head, deep-freezes the planet’s population into statuary.
If anything can be more forbidding than the demolition of the world, it might well be the development of an upside-down Darwinism. Arthur Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), for example, suggests that a superior civilization of the future created such advanced computers that the inventors no longer found any need for their own bodies, allowing their spirit and intellect to pass into the machines. At this point, one supposes, we have returned to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—for the machine becomes the superior intellect that must infallibly prevail. Increasingly and more insidiously in our century, then, writers represent the machine as taking over our lives. That which interferes with our lives becomes more and more the symbol of the exacerbated, the encroaching, and the celebrated.17
Nevertheless, I do not wish to give the impression that the machine is to be despised. After all, much of the material I have been tracing here is satiric, and satire succeeds by shocking us—precisely because it “speaks for the Devil.” Reverting to Arnold’s concept of modern man’s self-doubts, William Barrett praises our era’s scientific productivity and invention:
This doubt has even shaken our confidence in progress, which was once an unquestionable article of faith. A few decades ago the distrust of technology was an avant-garde position. Today that distrust has become so widespread that it has become banal. One hesitates to add to it, and in fact one feels pushed toward defending technology. It is, after all, the most adventurous, creative, and original part of our culture. There can hardly be any more striking symptom of loss of heart than when a civilization begins to doubt what it does best.18
What Barrett urges is largely true—and yet I am not at all fully convinced that mankind merely “doubts” or debunks what it creates, “what it does best.” For modern man is convinced—and I would even say proud—of the vast scientific revolutions and technological innovations of recent times. He is doubtful, rather, about his own mind and heart.
In Cannibals and Christians, Norman Mailer reprints his little “treatment” of the end of the world. Ecologically, this future earth is in trouble. Our great American president talks the world into believing—and into democratically voting for—the detonation of the entire planet, so that the president (with ninety-nine other great and creative men of foresight) might, in a solitary rocket ship, be propelled out of the solar system to find a “new world” to build, to populate, to aspire in, and to expand upon. And yet, it is never clear (the caustic Mailer would never have it so) whether this wondrous leader is really such a gullible Mosaic galactic colonist or whether he is the maniacal solipsist and fanatic dupe of the most fantastic ego-trip of them all. The question, although distinctly put, is never properly answered in Norman Mailer’s tale. Modern man, then, is not so entirely fearful of his apparatus and his equipment as might at first appear, but he is positively livid with fear and trembling about the ambiguities, perplexities, and delusions of the all-too-human inventors of machines. To underscore my point, let us listen to Mailer describe the finale of his story—and of the world.
“Forgive me, all of you,” says the President.
“May I be an honest man and not first deluded physician to the Devil.” Then he presses the button.
The earth detonates into the dark spaces. A flame leaps across the solar system. A scream of anguish, jubilation, desperation, terror, ecstasy, vaults across the heavens. The tortured heart of the earth has finally found its voice. We have a glimpse of the spaceship, a silver minnow of light, streaming into the oceans of mystery, and the darkness beyond.19