In 1923, the London literary scene saw the appearance of two innovative works. In April, the play R.U.R.; or, Rossum's Universal Robots by the Czech dramatist Karel Čapek was presented at St. Martin's Theater; in May Heinemann brought out E. V. Odle's comic novel The Clockwork Man. Odle's entertaining book is now all but forgotten whereas Čapek's three-act drama is still in print. Thanks to it, the term “robot” entered the English language, and such humanoids were immediately hailed as icons of modernity.1 When in 1930 the centenary of the railway was celebrated, Liverpool's Lime Street station was surmounted, not by a locomotive engine, but by “a robot figure symbolizing the Age of Machinery.”2 The centerpiece of the 1932 Radio Exhibition at Olympia was a robot of chromium-plated steel called “Alpha,” which, it was claimed, could read a newspaper and tell the time.3 In the interwar period, a host of commentators wrestled with the challenges posed by such “mechanical slaves.” Why such a fascination? The most obvious answer is that the robot represented the displacement of humans by machines. In what follows, a sense will be given of the extent to which those worried about the coming of a mechanized society batten on the robot. But the main thrust of this chapter is that fears of mechanized men were driven by more than concerns about technology. In looking closely at the cultural context of the (p.58) interwar years, one finds that such discussions were heavily colored by eugenics. It took little imagination for those alarmed by reports of the fertility decline of the middle classes to see the robot as representing both the docile worker on which modern industry increasingly depended and the unthinking drone whose uncontrolled reproduction posed a serious threat to social stability.
Let's begin with the play.4 R.U.R. takes place in a factory on an island sometime in the future. We are told that old Rossum discovered a way to create living matter, something like protoplasm in a test tube, and vainly tried to make actual men. His nephew young Rossum, an engineer, restricts himself to producing simple working machines—which boast no ornaments and have no needs—the Robots.5 Put together like motorcars, their livers and brains made up of paste, their nerves and veins spun, these beings are produced biochemically. They are not electrically or mechanically driven. The handful of men who oversee their production is joined in act 1 by a naive young woman, Helena Glory, who expresses her horror at the cruel exploitation of the robots. The men scoff at her notion of liberating them and explain to her that robots feel no pain, have no soul or desires. Moreover, being produced by the thousands, they will soon do all the world's work. In the resulting utopian leisure society, humans will finally be able to perfect themselves. Hovering in the background, however, are both the specters of overproduction and the robots' inexplicable restlessness, manifested by the gnashing of teeth and their cramping up.
Act 2 takes place five years later. Helena, who has married the factory manager Domaine, hears that in Europe, robots, used for destructive military purposes, have suddenly revolted against their human masters.6 In France, the insurgents issue a “manifesto” calling for all the robots of the world to rise. A world revolution ensues, which the robots, enjoying a numerical advantage over humans, easily win and then turn their murderous attentions to Rossum's factory. But as the robots are sterile, have a life span of only twenty years, and do not possess the secret of their manufacture, the managers believe that they still have a vital bargaining chip. They are accordingly horrified to hear that Helena has destroyed the formula. They also learn too late that the cause of the revolt is that Dr. Gall, the factory physiologist, gave the latest generation of robots the ability to feel pain. In making them more like people, he gave them the rudiments of a soul.
In the last act, thousands of robots lay siege to the factory. All the humans are killed save for a craftsman whom the robots almost consider one of them, as he works with his hands. They desperately ask him how they might reproduce. Though he cannot help them, he is surprised to discover a male and a female robot who demonstrate their love for each other. The play ends with him sending this new Adam and Eve out into world.7
No comments:
Post a Comment