You, Not Something Like You

In 1909—well over a century ago now—the English novelist E. M. Forster wrote a short story entitled The Machine Stops, an underground dystopia, a denatured and artificial environment whose inhabitants (can we call them persons any longer?) “mustn’t say anything against the Machine.”

One young person does, however, and when over videoconference he asks his mother to meet with him and hear his doubts, she is impatient and ununderstanding: “’I want you to come and see me.’ Vashti watched his face in the blue plate. ‘But I can see you!’ she exclaimed. ‘What more do you want?’ ‘I want to see you not through the Machine,’ said Kuno.” Our screens today were apparently conceived as plates a century ago.

The mother’s son continues his plea, and the manner in which Forster lays out the boy’s remonstrances can help us as we study more ways to enrich the composition of our paragraphs. Form follows content, and the overarching theme of this section in the story is opposition: fideistic devotion to the Machine and its artificial world versus a critical doubt about its omniscience and omnipresence. In this passage the son, Kuno, makes his protest in a series of sentences which are each constructed and connected to enforce his opposition:

“You talk as if a god had made the Machine,” cried the other. “I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is why I want you to come. Come and stop with me. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind.”

The term antithesis is sometimes used more precisely to mean direct opposition rather than a general, or indirect, contrast. The boy denounces his mother’s faith with the classical antithesis between god and man. His first two sentences are straightforward indicatives: you say this and I say that. But with the third sentence, Forster begins to represent his character’s objections in some tightly crafted rhetorical constructions. The first of the two clauses announces the opposing term of men, and the second, imperative clause is abutted to the first not with an expected semicolon, but rather with a comma. Schoolteachers will not like that. We regularly expect a semicolon to replace an omitted conjunction (here and). Forster’s comma, however, preserves the impatience of the son’s retort and leaves the clarifying logic for the next sentence. Great men, but men at once concedes the distinction of the inventors and limits it within the domain of the human. The pinch we feel in reading that fragment is due to its terse ellipsis: there is no verb.

That same adversative conjunction but continues to build opposition between the first and second clauses in each of the following three sentences. Something else, though, begins with the eighth and ninth. Notice that the first of this pair concludes with the word come, and the next sentence begins with that same word: That is why I want you to come. Come and stop with me. Repetition always emphasizes. This technique of directly repeating a word (or phrase) one after the other is a rhetorical device called anadiplosis. The expensive derivation of that classical Greek term simply means to double up again. And we see it happen yet again with the pronoun me between the last two sentences of the passage (though necessarily displaced a step by the verb pay): Come and stop with me. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind. Repetition emphasizes a meaning, close repetition secures it.

What disturbs the mother in Forster’s story is her son’s actual life, and that is the “more” he wants from the direct presence of his mother, face to face with her bodily in the same space and time. It is precisely what she does not have time for, and her son hopes that his terse oppositions between you and something like you will make his point and pierce her ersatz heart. The Machine may replicate a presence, but its replication is an appearance, sophisticated in its semblance but absent of the actual and real. The Machine and its acolytes, then and now, do not possess a presence—that exactly through which we humans respond to poetry and prose, music and drama. They reproduce, but do not engender, what, ironically, this now distant mother once indeed did. Earlier in the story, the son told his mother that he had tried to call before, but that she was “always busy or isolated.” “I have,” he tells her, “something particular to say.” Something particular, something human and of its own, something not machinable.

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