The will is never free—it is always attached to an object, a purpose. It is simply the engine in the car—it can't steer. — Joyce Cary

The children's television series Shining Time Station recently moved from PBS to Fox Family. Since the model trains that star in it are essentially toys already, the show should be at home in commercial television, where entertainment and advertising can blend without all the hand-wringing. The American version of this British-based TV show is probably best known for its one-time narrator, Ringo Starr, who played a pocket-sized conductor always popping out of the woodwork to deliver homilies and tell stories of Cheeky, Fussy little Thomas the Tank Engine. As Ringo spoke, gay-visaged little steam engines charged to and fro through sets of obsessively delightful detail. (Ringo was later replaced by George Carlin, by the way—and the spectacle of the seven-dirty-words-man hamming it up on a PBS kids' show tells us all we need to know about our age and more.) But this essay isn't about the TV show. Like so many TV series for kids, Shining Time Station is based on books—in this case the "Railway Stories," a series written by the Reverend W. Awdry over some 30-odd years beginning in 1946. When my son was three, we received Thomas the Tank Engine: the Complete Collection as a gift. In reading the book, I discovered what the television show with its consumable animation effaced: that the apparently moralistic Thomas stories replace the ostensibly Christian values of their Anglican author with the utilitarian and, ultimately, alienating imperatives of production. In the end, the engines of the Railway Stories are animated solely by the Capitalist Spirit, without even the Grace of the Protestant Ethic to offer them solace.

Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Whatever is happening?

The Railway Stories take place on the fictional Island of Sodor, which lies between Wales and the Isle of Man on the map in our copy of the collected edition. Sodor, which for a small island is unusually rich in transportation resources, is a place where engines are possessed of consciousness and, despite all their desires and faults, try their best to live, not good, but useful lives. Most of the stories have the same essential plot: Engine wants something (a new paint job, a new funnel, a new set of coaches to pull), Engine is unhappy for not getting it, Engine treats his Coaches or Trucks roughly to act out his frustration; said Trucks or Coaches then "pay him out" by bumping or pushing him ("On! On! On! On!" they shout, with all the brio of pepper-sprayed protesters at a meeting of the WTO) over a cliff, or across a washed-out bridge, or down a long hill into a railyard full of idled trains. Engines derail, crack up, lose their funnels, or slide into holes with dreadful regularity in the Railway Stories, and the point is clear as can be: know your place, and don't get above yourself. Pull your coaches and trucks cheerfully, do what you're told, never complain, never desire anything that the Fat Controller---Sodor's excuse for a philosopher-king---doesn't desire for you. This is how one attains the ultimate aim of Thomas and the other engines of Sodor, becoming a Really Useful Engine.

Engines don't have much agency in pursuit of their goal. Trapped in bodies of iron, dependent on engineers to regulate them, firemen to burn their fuel, and brakemen to stop them, the condition of the engines is essentially that of infants, as described by Descartes in his Principles of Philosophy (LXXI):

In our infancy our mind was so tightly bound to the body as not to be open to any experiences (cogitationibus) except mere feelings of what affected the body [...] Later on, since the bodily mechanism is naturally so constituted as to be capable of various movements by its own power, its random wrigglings this way and that, as it followed after something beneficial or shrank from something unbeneficial, led the mind to be conjoined to it to observe the external existence of what the body thus followed or shrank from [...]

Descartes' theory is disturbing, because it implies that the mind cannot free itself without a free body. Without freedom of the body, which makes purposive experimental action possible, inadequate ideas formed on the basis of intuition alone cannot be corrected. So Engines, which are capable of little more than some "random wrigglings" in their iron skins, aren't as human as Awdry would have us believe. But they're still less limited than trucks—those rail cars that carry coal and wood and widgets—the true lumpenproles of Thomas's world are. Here's how trucks are described in the 1946 story, "Thomas and the Trucks":

Now, trucks are silly and noisy. They talk a lot and don't attend to what they are doing. They don't listen to their Engine, and when he stops they bump into each other screaming. "Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Whatever is happening?" And, I'm sorry to say, they play tricks on an engine who is not used to them.

The result of such tricks, invariably, is a smash-up; the trucks are splintered and broken by their own foolishness.

Of course, the engines can be foolish, too. Being a Really Useful Engine is a condition which consists of never screwing up and cheerfully and efficiently doing what one is told. The engines often fail to meet this standard, of course, and the punishment can be horrible. Take "The Sad Story of Henry," for instance. Henry (another engine) enters a tunnel one day as rain begins to fall. Not wanting to spoil his new paint job in the downpour, he chooses to stop in the tunnel and wait for clear weather. But that won't do—the Fat Controller tells him he must continue on. Even the passengers get out and yell at him, but he won't budge.

So they gave it up. They told Henry, "We shall leave you there for always and always and always." They took up the old rails, built a wall in front of him, and cut a new tunnel. Now Henry can't get out, and he watches the trains rushing through the new tunnel. He is very sad because no one will ever see his lovely green paint with red stripes again. But I think he deserved it, don't you?

Awdry constructs an education for his engines that is the opposite of the ideal Rousseau offers in Emile. Rousseau contends that "[a]s long as children find resistance only in things and never in wills, they will become neither rebellious nor irascible and will preserve their health better. [emphasis added]" The network of main lines and branches the Fat Controller lords over, by contrast, places his engines in a Hobbesian State of Nature—rust-red in bumper and boiler—in which they are forever contending with one another's wills. The Fat Controller keeps them in line by giving them enough track, so to speak, to crash themselves. Engines are not born free, and the chains that bind them are forged from their very nature. They never learn to resent the constitution of authority itself; they're too busy nursing the desires and resentments born of their own thwarted needs. Rousseau portrays well the result of such an education of the will:

[A]fter having made him learn this and that—that is, after having burdened his memory either with words he cannot understand or with things that are good for nothing to him—this facticious being is put in the hands of a preceptor [a Fat Controller?], who completes the development of the artificial seeds that he finds already all formed and teaches him everything, except to know himself, except to take advantage of himself, except to know how to live and make himself happy. Finally when this child, slave and tyrant, full of science and bereft of sense, frail in body and soul alike, is cast out into the world, showing there his ineptitude, his pride, and all his vices, he becomes the basis for deploring human misery and perversity.

However cruel and repulsive we may find Rousseau's vision of education, its aim, ultimately, is emancipatory. Rousseau seeks to avoid for Emile the fate suffered by the creature described above—a fate decreed not by human nature or the sin of Adam, but by the mistaken ideas of those who raised him. He wants to raise a person whose "desire to affirm" never outstrips his "capacity to prove"; a person who is capable of making discoveries about himself and his world, a person whose own self-sufficiency inclines him to value others (which is the essential formula of Rousseau's notion of moral responsibility). One of the chief problems with the educational scheme outlined in Emile is its absurd singularity. If Emile does emerge from the process free from the will to cruelty and vice, he's incapable of producing another Emile—for the tutor, in Rousseau's scheme, must be oppressively cruel and deceitful in order to succeed.

But Awdry's engines cannot aspire to such a degree of moral responsibility. If, like Rousseau's creature, they are products of a human discipline clumsily applied, they are at the same time fundamentally flawed. These morality tales, these machine-age fables, tell children that to know oneself is impossible, that one must depend on the constant correction of authoritative others. And what's the reward for this? For the engines, from whom Awdry's Anglican imagination seems to withhold the prospect of a disembodied life everlasting, there is no clear and transcendent Good to anticipate. There is no moral responsibility to which they can aspire, no emancipation for which they need await. The engine is to force down "his ineptitude, his pride, and all his vices" in the service of utility, to subordinate himself to an efficient production cycle from whose products he is inescapably alienated. The Island of Sodor is a kind of neutertopia, in which engines aspire not so much to happiness as to a tolerable level of labor free from injury.

The Death of Godred

Of course, it's a bit muddled in Awdry's world, since here it's things—trucks, coaches, and engines—that have the wills, though without the agency to use them. And it's on this level—the metaphysical—that the stories of Thomas get really weird, and really frightening for children to contemplate.

The engines' faces, for example, are fixed on their fronts; they can't regard themselves at full length. In one story, some engines tease their colleague Edward by telling him his wheels are black (which would be bad). When Edward complains to the Fat Controller, he seems to experience an identity crisis: "[...] last night they said I had black wheels. I haven't, have I, Sir?" he asks anxiously. "No, Edward, you have nice blue ones," replies the Fat Controller. The engines, it seems, can't even know themselves in the most fundamental ways. How can they help it, then, if they're sometimes Cheeky and Fussy? They know—for they're told constantly, by the Fat Controller, their drivers, and countless passengers—that their freedom is limited. It's the classic high church freedom of the will—ever failing, ever needful of corrections in course, always perfectible but never perfect, never sufficient—transposed into an amoral universe: Never Really Useful.

This imperfection stands between being Really Useful and Fussy, and the punishment for fussiness can be extreme. By way of warning, Culdee the mountain engine (who has two faces, by the way, one in front and another behind—talk about issues of identity!) tells a newcomer a cautionary tale about Godred, an engine who was "named after a king. [...] Perhaps that went to his smokebox and made him conceited. He'd never keep a Good Look-out," the consequences of which, of course, involve a crash. When Godred, disabled by his accident, is hoisted onto a truck and delivered home, his Manager pronounces his fate, as recounted by Culdee:

"'We've no money to mend you,' said our Manager, 'so you'll go to the back of the Shed!'

"As time went on, poor Godred got smaller and smaller till nothing was left."

"Wha ... what happened?" asked Duncan [the newcomer] anxiously.

"It's not nice to talk about," said Culdee. [...] "Our drivers used Godred's parts to mend us," [he] answered mournfully.

At the end of this story, the author tells us that Culdee had made up this tale. But in the engines' world such things can happen, and surely they do. The engines' condition presents children with questions of identity, body, and mind that are classical in outline: if you take Thomas and replace his funnel, and then his wheels, and then his firebox, and so on with his boiler and his bumpers and so on... at what point does he cease to be a Cheeky, Fussy Little Engine and become—well, another engine altogether? Do the engines feel pain? Time and again in the stories they voice discomfort, when something gets stuck in a funnel, say, or a pipe breaks somewhere inside. What would Godred have gone through had he been slowly disassembled and his parts transplanted into other engines? These are questions children ask when they read these stories, and the author's fuzziness about their answers only leaves kids feeling cheated. (The engines, it must be said, never question their world and its grinding hierarchies. Thomas, for instance, in one story has a conversation with a tractor plowing a field, and pokes fun at the tractor's caterpillar treads. The tractor replies that with his treads he can go anywhere, that he isn't confined to rails. "I like my rails," Thomas replies sulkily.)

It's not that the engines act like children; it's the idea of children—of what children are, and what's to be done about them—that most depresses me. I suppose it shouldn't be too surprising that we set out to murder the conscience quite early, in the books we read to our children. We might find solace in the knowledge that liberating readings of these things are possible, and not just for parents versed in the rhetoric of critical outrage. For children are predisposed to read liberation into the stories of Thomas the Tank Engine; they do so naturally, without prompting. My own five year-old son has worried at length about the fate of these engines; he has learned to question the treatment they mete out to trucks, and the infallibility of the Fat Controller. More tellingly, perhaps, he doesn't recreate the stories of these engines when he plays with his own toy trains. He prefers the pure kinetic joy of moving wheels and widgets around on tracks to the cramped and damaging moral world of the Island of Sodor. And who doesn't? This, incidentally, is the level at which the television show works so well. On TV, the engines are toys, as are the people who run them----in fact, the little figurines that represent the Fat Controller, engineers, and passengers are themselves immobile, which lends the engines an air of relative freedom they manifestly lack in the books. This is a case where the standard nostrums are reverse: the TV show is better—and better for kids—than the books.

I wouldn't want to make the same claims Rousseau makes for his Emile, but I do try to sneak some notion of justice into our reading of Thomas' stories. But I wonder: am I (relatively) alone in this? Sometimes I think so. In their easy effacement of any moral order—revolutionary, reactionary, or otherwise—by a grinding and joyless Utility and the relentless liturgy of the Bottom Line, the Thomas stories are hardly unique. This summer will see the American release of a new feature-length film, starring Peter Fonda and (in the role in which Ringo and George Carlin have had their turns) Alec Baldwin. Will they manage to read justice into tales of the Island of Sodor? Since no one has yet found a way to make justice sell toy trains and lunch boxes and "educational" CD-ROMs, I'm not holding my breath.