Science and Technology: Present, Past and Future
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
4 LAURENCE DAVIES Science and technology: present, past and future I Despite the contemporary enthusiasm for sanitary reform, few Victorians wrote poems about drains. One exception was Kipling, who gave his poem the daringly unpromising title ‘Municipal’. The speaker is a district com- missioner who, when menaced by a stampeding elephant, took refuge in a blocked-up outfall wearing regulation ‘snowy garments’: You may hold with surface-drainage, and the sun-for-garbage cure, Till you’ve been a periwinkle shrinking coyly up a sewer. The experience has made him ‘believe in well-fl ushed culverts’ 1 and, as a result, the death-rate in his district has gone down. Kipling’s vision of empire extended to the infrastructure of railways, riverboats, bridges and sewage systems. In his prose and poetry, his fascination with technology and its consequences shows up in unexpected places, foreign, imperial and domestic. On his visit to Brazil in 1927, he sent rapturous dispatches to the ultra-conservative (and often xenophobic) Morning Post praising the moun- tain railways, the giant hydroelectric installations, and the laboratory where snakes and spiders were milked for their venom. 2 ‘“They” ’ heads towards the mystical and redemptive, but it starts by evoking the joys of motoring through rural England, and does not stint on technical details: ‘I was on the point of reversing and working my way back on the second speed.’ 3 The inner narrative of ‘The Man Who Would Be King’ goes into an archaic world beyond the North-West Frontier, but the frame-narration involves the precisely timed arrival of a long-distance train at a junction, the scanning of cables from Europe, and the management of a printing press. 4 In Kafi ristan, Peachey and Daniel depend on the persuasive force of rifl es, some of them outdated and nearly worn out, others brand new and fi t for conquest. In ‘The Bridge-Builders’ ( The Day’s Work ), another story of India, we are plunged straight into the milieu of civil engineering. Girders, trusses, hoists, revetments, piers and technical drawings fi gure largely, as do the challenges 52 99780521199728c04_p52-65.indd780521199728c04_p52-65.indd 5522 55/10/2011/10/2011 110:31:030:31:03 AMAM Science and technology of managing a heterogeneous workforce fi ve thousand strong. Like much else in Kipling’s work, it has a topical aspect; it fi rst appeared in 1893, six years after major bridges were completed across the Ganges, the Sutlej and the Jherum. It is also a dramatic story pitting human resourcefulness against natural forces, the tension rising as the Ganges fl oods. Yet for all its immediacy, Kipling achieves a narrative coup by setting this imperial drama in a context of aeons. The foreman doses the bridge’s designer with opium, bringing the latter a vision of Hindu avatars who debate the bridge, the foreigners, the fl ood, mutability and eternity. Whatever one takes from this story, which can stand interpretations by the dozen, its conjunctions of urgency and infi nite perspective frame technology with the divine and the divine with technology in a manner virtually unique to Kipling. By contrast, ‘Below the Mill Dam’ begins with what is ancient (at least by English standards), as the Spirit of the Mill sings ‘its nine hundred year old song’ whose words come from the district’s inventory in Domesday Book ( TD 369). The audience is mixed: a pair of millstones, the waters of fi ve watersheds and, most vocally, a witty and condescending Grey Cat given to quoting Browning, and an Old English Black Rat. It takes three whole pages for any hint of the present day to disturb the cosy atmosphere with the Black Rat’s mention of ‘a local ruffi an’ ( TD 371), Mangles the builder, who has replaced the old and picturesque pigstys with a cube of bricks and mortar. Other incomprehensible humans have been stringing wires around the mill and connecting them to strange glass bulbs. Punctuated with more snatches of Domesday Book and plenty of medieval gossip, the narrative gradually makes the Miller’s agenda clear. Some of the brooks have been rechannelled, the wheel’s axle has been reinforced, the wires run from a dynamo in the new brick shed. Exposing the dust and dirt of many centuries to its glare, the electricity is switched on, but even this is a halfway stage; a bank of four turbines will soon replace the mill wheel, and the Spirit is blithely willing to be reinvented: ‘Not like turbines? Me? My dear fellows, turbines are good for fi fteen hundred revolutions a minute – and with our power we can drive ’em at full speed. Why there’s nothing we couldn’t grind or saw or illuminate or heat with a set of turbines! That’s to say if all the Five Watersheds are agreeable.’ ( TD 392) All fi ve of them acclaim the plan, but the Cat invokes Pasht, Egyptian patron of the species, to witness her devotion to old gods and ways, and the Rat has been trapped, stuffed and mounted in an exhibition case as a specimen of a dwindling breed. Given Kipling’s enthusiasm for engineering, ‘Below the Mill Dam’ could be described as a load-bearing structure, able to carry a convergence of 53 99780521199728c04_p52-65.indd780521199728c04_p52-65.indd 5533 55/10/2011/10/2011 110:31:030:31:03 AMAM Laurence Davies critical forces. It is a forerunner of the Puck stories and set in the same ter- rain. Quite without the perception of technology as magic in ‘Cold Iron’ or priestcraft in ‘The Knife and the Naked Chalk’ , or science as sorcery in ‘Marklake Witches’ (all in Rewards and Fairies , 1910), it treats of change and resistance to change. The tone is lighter, the language wittier, more extravagant, arguably parodic. In some readings Kipling, a modernising Tory who admired the bustling Joseph Chamberlain , is mocking the aris- tocratic Conservative Arthur Balfour , whose languid wit and philosophical detachment matched those of the Cat.5 Yet this story also acknowledges the seductions of the past without making them into fetishes, or excuses for nostalgia, or reasons for inaction. Kipling’s sense of progress is expansive rather than purgative; as the story goes on, the Wheel’s recitations from Domesday Book start to include the latest developments, so that ‘where till now was a stye of three hogs, Mangles, a freeman, with four villeins and two carts of two thousand bricks, has a new small house of fi ve yards and a half, and one roof of iron and a fl oor of cement’ ( TD 381) . Neither cliophobic nor technophobic, this attitude to time (and place) is as markedly different from the frozen ruralism of such writers as the then Poet Laureate, Alfred Austin , 6 as it is from impatience or contempt for what has gone before. This attitude also suggests that Kipling, in a different mode of course, sometimes writes like a modern historian of science, intrigued by blind alleys and nar- row, crooked streets as much as well-lit boulevards, and conscious that even the most ‘primitive’ transition – say from stone to bronze – had its material basis in technology. Among other infl uential writers of his day, only Jules Verne and H. G. Wells pay so much attention to machinery. 7 Verne and Wells differed on the permissible degree of speculation in a ‘scientifi c romance’ or ‘extraor- dinary journey’, 8 but both of them, like Kipling, dwelled on the machines themselves and their implications for society. Kipling’s distinctiveness in this regard lies in his frequent resort to personifi cation, animism, anthropo- morphism – no single word covers the range of implications. In ‘.007’ ( The Day’s Work ), for example, we hear the conversations of locomotives stabled in a roundhouse – engines designed for express, rural and suburban pas- senger traffi c, for main-line and local freight, or for yard switching,9 most belonging to the company, some visiting from other lines, some equipped with the latest Westinghouse brakes and compound cylinders, others more old-fashioned; one, the .007 of the title, is brand new, and Homeless Kate is a stray boxcar. Each has a distinctive manner of speech. A few human beings speak as well; engines can hear the humans, but the humans are deaf to what the engines say. The two societies exist in parallel, dependent on each other but not always willing to recognise the fact. By the story’s end, .007 54 99780521199728c04_p52-65.indd780521199728c04_p52-65.indd 5544 55/10/2011/10/2011 110:31:040:31:04 AMAM Science and technology has made such a good showing that he is initiated into the Amalgamated Brotherhood of Locomotives, a society that clearly resembles the labour unions of the human world . 10 An even more remarkable case is another story in The Day’s Work , ‘The Ship That Found Herself ’, which features not only talking engines, such as a bilge pump, but talking components such as a garboard strake (a long plate just above the keel) and a bow anchor. There is a long history of regarding ships as having their own personalities; in our time, many people name their cars or their computers. Yet this tendency to ascribe human characteristics rarely extends to components, nor does the animism that perceives a spirit indwelling. II For many contemporary readers, Kipling is at his most seductive when he embraces more than one idea or mode. 11 The stories discussed so far manage to combine sharp observations of such unglamorous objects as gears and grease guns with what the susceptible might indeed call wonder, fantasy or magic, and the sceptical, narrative bravura.