Humankind imposes its internal self upon the external world. In turn, the external world becomes that which humans use as a source of meaning, purpose, and identity. J.G. Ballard’s “The Terminal Beach” and E.M Forster’s “The Machine Stops” illustrate attempts at reconciling inner-space and outer-space. Inner-space pertains to the human mind and spirit, while outer-space concerns itself with humankind’s natural and unnatural environments as well as the physical body. In addition, both stories maintain that the scientific process contaminates humanity and renders a reversal of man to a fetal existence and ultimately non-existence.

In “The Terminal Beach” Traven’s preoccupation with inner-space stems from human rejection of primitive uses of myth and religion that reconcile inner-man and his surroundings. Traven’s nihilistic self is superimposed onto the setting and the architecture of destruction surrounding him. Traven recognizes that “primitive man… assimilate[s] events in the external world to his own psyche,” but modern man imposes events within his psyche upon the external world. In essence, scientific thought as symbolized by the hydrogen bomb has made man part god while at the same time canceling out the possibility of god. As Robert Platzner states, the ontological distinctions between being and nonbeing become meaningless in the shadow of the bomb (212). This nullification is perfected when Traven kills the fly that dared to give purpose to the dead body of Yasuda. Traven abandons the world for the island and retreats further and further into the blocks that symbolize a monstrous man-made womb. Eventually, Traven dismisses even the familiarity of the concrete womb and succumbs to self-annihilation by rejecting time, the physical world and purpose.

Likewise, the underground race in “The Machine Stops” rejects the physical world and purpose. Vashti and Kuno are steeped in the rejection of myth and religion for science’s sake until the machine begins to fail. The underground race is said to have “defeated the sun” by making it spiritually insignificant, forcing science underground and dividing people of myth and religion from people of science. By denying the natural world, Vashti and Kuno’s race are left with no original ideas and only the skeletal remains of experience and family structure. Individuals are busied by being alone — withdrawn to the inner-space of the machine. The machine can be seen as a physical manifestation of social structures bent to function under scientific processes that strip humanity from the people. The machine civilizes the race by coddling the citizens underground until the body and mind are weak and fetal-like, incompatible with the natural world. The civilized people within “The Machine Stops” suffer annihilation by creating a system that isolates their race from variables found in the natural world or the wild societies of the surface. It is by denying humankind as the “measure” by which the race interacts with their surroundings that Kuno and his kind lose purpose and identity.

Like Traven, Kuno is on a quest to assimilate the external, or natural world, and his psyche; the journey seems hopeful, but neither Traven nor Kuno can be born again. Kuno can neither have children nor be born free from the machine due to his race’s self-inflicted devolution in the machine. Kuno’s escape through the mechanical birth canal of the “vomitories” symbolizes science’s perversion upon man’s existence in the natural world (185). Similarly, Traven’s family is dead, and he sees the outer realms of the blocks as an abandoned nursery of death and destruction: “husks of the abandoned wombs that had given birth to this herd of megaliths” (926). Traven’s mind represents the conception of destruction that stems from the minds of modern men. Both Traven’s and Kuno’s race cease to have significance in their natural worlds because of dissolution between the inner mind and the external environments with science being the wedge between the two.

Work Cited

• Platzner, Robert L. “The Metamorphic Vision of J. G. Ballard.” Essays in Literature 10.2 (Fall 1983): 209-217. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Daniel G. Marowski and Roger Matuz. Vol. 36. Detroit: Gale Research, 1986. Literature Resource Center. Web. 16 Nov. 2011.

e.m. forster, fall 2011, j.g. ballard, nature, science