A classic dystopian novel, BNW is fundamentally a satire. I found the humour rather obvious and heavy-handed but a lady at my Eastbourne Central U3A group has convinced me that the book’s much funnier than I had seen: she quoted in particular the scene from the first page when the Director, described as having “a long chin and big, rather prominent teeth, just covered, when he was not talking, by his full, floridly curved lips” is talking to students who take down his words “straight from the horse’s mouth”. That’s funny. But he says it twice, so it still isn’t very subtle.
Perhaps the best bit of the book is the irony in which Huxley proposes a dystopia in which everyone is happy. Babies are hatched, genetically manipulated and brainwashed into five castes, the clever alphas and the sub-human epsilons who do the donkey work, but are quite content. Everyone belongs to everyone else and everywhere there is guilt-free promiscuous sex. There is no disease. There is no ageing. People work, play, and take soma, the wonder drug that just keeps them happy with no ill effects. The missing ingredient, for John the Savage, and for Helmholtz, is the opportunity for artistic freedom. At the climax of the philosophical debate, dissatisfied because “nothing costs enough here”, John claims this right. The World Controller responds: “you're claiming the right to be unhappy ... Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.” (Ch 17) And John says ‘yes’.
I think that is the kind of response that an Eton-educated, privileged member of the intellectual elite might make; I’m not sure that a member of the underclass would be so sure.
It isn’t really a novel. The only character who has internal conflicts is Bernard, who is a brilliant portrait of a weak, vacillating man who wants to have his cake and wants to eat it too, just like the rest of us. The ‘hero’ John the Savage faces conflicts too, but they are between what he wants and what the world will allow him to do; he scarcely has a recognisable character arc and certainly the book does not conform to the classic pattern of a tragedy. This is much more a ‘novel of ideas’, which is to say that it is fundamentally a fictionalised work of philosophy, like A Socratic dialogue, or like Candide.
So the message is to the forefront and the message is a critique of society and a warning that, if the trends the author perceives are to continue, then the consequences will be unpleasant. So first it is important to consider the context in which the novel was written.
The contexts
Sexual promiscuity
The 1920s, which followed the slaughter of the First World War, which destabilised the old social order, was widely seen as a time of sexual promiscuity.
Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa was published in 1928 and suggested the Samoan sexual mores were considerably more relaxed, especially in its toleration of adolescent promiscuity, than in Europe of the time. This book was a best-seller and was a key anthropological text for many years. Is it not ironic that the sexual promiscuity of the civilized world BNW is derived from the sexual promiscuity observed by ‘savages’ on an island?
Marie Stopes published Married Love, a best-selling book advocating, among other things, birth control, in 1918. She was accused of being a ‘Neo-Malthusian’ by a male doctor who opposed birth control and fought a controversial libel case against him in 1923, losing in the House of Lords in 1924.
One of the key tensions in the book is the mismatch between Lenina and John. As Margaret Atwood says: the love affair between the Savage and Lenina is doomed because she wants sex for fun and he wants love and a real relationship.
The title of the work is from lines spoken by Miranda in the Tempest when, having been brought up on an island where the only two males are her father and Caliban, an ogre, she first sees eligible men and falls in love at first sight with the male beauty of Ferdinand. John’s understanding of love is shaped by Shakespeare: when he sneaks into Lenina’s bedroom and watches her sleeping, he quotes Troilus talking about his adoration of Cressida and Romeo speaking about Juliet. (Ch 9) After watching a porn ‘feely’ film starring a black man (as the villain, natch) he remembers Othello. But why should Shakespeare’s view of romantic love (which was in his day the rebellious response to the orthodoxy of arranged matches as evidenced in many of the plots, in particular R&J) be the paradigm?
Huxley also wrote Ape and Essence (taking this title from a line in Measure for Measure, a play largely about sexual morality) about a post-nuclear-holocaust society in which sex has been harnessed entirely for the service of breeding; there are still orgies in the five weeks of the annual breeding season (males who can’t control themselves at other times are castrated).
Bolshevism
Upper class Britain in the 1920s was terrified of Bolshevism. The Russian Revolution was in 1917 and had been followed by British forces invading Russia to try to foment a counter-revolution. The General Strike took place in 1926 when upperclass volunteers conspired to defeat the workers. The names derived from the socialist revolutionaries (Bernard Marx, Lenine Crowne) and BNW emphasis on ‘stability’ may reflect these fears.
Aldous Huxley was, of course, an Old Etonian (as was George Orwell, Huxley returned to Eton to teach for a year and Orwell was in Huxley’s French class) and this is a book (like 1984) in which an upper-class intelligent ‘alpha’ male writes about a world created for upper-class intelligent ‘alpha’ males (at least, in 1984, Winston Smith observes the ‘proles’ and even envies their ‘freedom’). In 1984, a book by the ‘Trotsky’ character (Goldberg?) states that a revolution is an opportunity for the middle class to replace the ruling class in the name of the working class; that the working class never gain power but only ever change their masters. BNW is just such a book.
Are there any books from this period written by lower class people about lower class people? Walter Greenwood published Love on the Dole in 1933 (BNW was written in 1931 and published in 1932, 1984 was famously written in 1948).
Economics
At the other end of the spectrum, the end of the 1920s and the start of the 1930s saw the Wall Street Crash and the beginnings of the Great Depression. Having initially spoken the Brave New World line in praise of the beauty of Lenina, John the Savage later uses it ironically two more times, and both times he is triggered by the sight of the clones. The book itself starts with the assembly line production of humans. They are created and conditioned to fit the assembly-line systems of production, a system invented (in 1913) by Henry Ford who also invented the Model-T Ford car, giving the book its religious focus:
One of the key features of the BNW society is also the insistence that everyone keeps on consuming (no-one mends clothes anymore). Capitalism needs continual growth in order to survive: “old clothes are beastly,' continued the untiring whisper. 'We always throw away old clothes. Ending is better than mending” (Ch 3)
Eugenics
Huxley is living in an age when eugenics was seriously being considered, and not just by Hitler, and when it was seriously believed that genetic racial differences justified social stratification. Eugenics was a word coined by Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, in 1883; he believed that the British upper class owed its position to superior genes. TH Huxley, Darwin’s ‘bulldog’, was grandfather of Aldous. A Eugenics Institute at UCL was first led by Galton and, following his retirement in 1907, by statistician Karl Pearson who believed in creating ‘a homogeneous white race, whose fertility shall markedly dominate that of the black’ and in discouraging reproduction among ‘the unthrifty … the mentally defective’ and ‘the criminal, the tramp and the congenital pauper’, insisting that the right to live did not confer the right to reproduce.
Marie Stopes was in favour of eugenics, warning against a "vast and ever increasing stock of degenerate, feeble-minded and unbalanced who ... populate most rapidly and tend proportionately to increase and ... are like the parasite upon the healthy tree sapping its vitality.”
In the USA, in 1906 Kellog founded an institute to promote eugenics in the US: various states promoted forcible sterilisation of those deemed unfit, such as lunatics, and even forced euthanaisa (one mental institution put TB germs into the milk the patients drank, reasoning that those genetically immune would survive; the death rate was 30 to 40%.
These were mainstream scientific views and are scientifically justified in the sense that if it is possible through selective breeding to create animals that are better in specific ways (eg racehorses that are faster, sheep that are woollier etc) then it should also be possible for humans though it may be morally indefensible. In BNW Huxley points out the possibility of using Eugenics to make assembly-line production even more efficient.
Relativity
The golf in BNW is played on a Riemann surface. Riemann was a mathematician who developed non-Euclidean geometry in 1854, in effect extending geometry from flat to curved surfaces. This became important following Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity in 1915 which showed that space-time has curvature imposed upon it by mass. One presumes that this is what made Riemann’s work known to Huxley.
What aspects make us aware that Huxley is dealing with a dystopia?
The epigraph at the start of the novel is in French and quotes Nicolas Berdiaeff, (Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev who was exiled from Soviet Russia in 1922): “Les utopies apparaissent comme bien plus réalisables qu’on ne le croyait autrefois. Et nous nous trouvons actuellement devant une question bien autrement angoissante: Comment éviter leur réalisation définitive? … Les utopies sont réalisables. La vie marche vers les utopies. Et peut-être un siècle nouveau commence-t-il, un siècle où les intellectuels et la classe cultivèe rêveront aux moyens d’éviter les utopies et de retourner à une société non utopique, moins “parfaite” et plus libre.” which can be translated as “Utopias appear to be much more achievable than previously thought. And we currently find ourselves faced with a much more agonizing question: How to avoid their definitive realization? … Utopias are achievable. Life marches towards utopias. And perhaps a new century is beginning, a century in which intellectuals and the educated class will dream of ways to avoid utopias and return to a non-utopian, less ‘perfect’ and freer society.”
The Outsider
Both Bernard (through nature, or at least the error while he was being developed) and John the Savage (through nurture) are outsiders. They have both been rejected by the societies in which they have grown up.
“The mockery made him feel an outsider; and feeling an outsider he behaved like one, which increased the prejudice against him and intensified the contempt and hostility aroused by his physical defects. Which in turn increased his sense of being alien and alone.” (Ch 4)
Our Ford
Apart from the obvious word play (the use of the phrase ‘Our Ford’ as opposed to the Christian ‘Our Lord’, the description of Mustapha Mond, the “Resident Controller for Western Europe, one of the Ten World Controllers”, as “his fordship”), there are the religious Ts (crosses with their top cut off, representing, presumably, the ‘model-T- Ford car) and the confusion between Ford and Freud as “for some inscrutable reason” [and that’s irony!] Ford is said to have called himself “whenever he spoke of psychological matters”
‘Brave New World’
The title of the book is taken from The Tempest. They are quoted by John on three occasions ( chap 8, Chap11 and Chap 15). What are the differences in interpretation?
Chapter 8: The Savage, John, is hoping to go to the BNW. He has also fallen in love at first sight with Lenina. So he is using Miranda’s words in a hopeful, optimistic sense. Miranda, bedfazzled by the beautiful young men among the shipwrecked crew, says: ‘Oh wonder! /How many goodly creatures are there here! /How beauteous mankind is! Oh brave new world, /That has such people in’t.’ to which her father Propsero retorts ‘’Tis new to thee’. He, of course, knows that these creatures are from the old world, and that they are his enemies. He knows the wickednesses of the old world. Both Miranda and John are naive innocents.
Chapter 11: Bernard takes John to a factory where all the workers have been bred for the precise task required (including left-handers where left-handedness is needed) and John repeats: ‘Oh brave new world, /That has such people in it’: This time it is in a clearly ironic context because, almost immediately, “the Savage had suddenly broken away from his companions and was violently retching, behind a clump of laurels, as though the solid earth had been a helicopter in an air pocket.”
Chapter 15. Immediately following his mother’s death, John again encounters a horde of clones. “Like maggots they had swarmed defilingly over the mystery of Linda's death. Maggots again, but larger, full grown, they now crawled across his grief and his repentance. ... 'How many goodly creatures are there here!' The singing words mocked him derisively. 'How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world...' ... 'O brave new world, O brave new world...' In his mind the singing words seemed to change their tone. They had mocked him through his misery and remorse, mocked him with how hideous a note of cynical derision! Fiendishly laughing, they had insisted on the low squalor, the nauseous ugliness of the nightmare. Now, suddenly, they trumpeted a call to arms. 'O brave new world!' Miranda was proclaiming the possibility of loveliness, the possibility of transforming even the nightmare into something fine and noble. 'O brave new world!' It was a challenge, a command.” He now sees the phrase as a challenge and throws all the soma being handed to the clones out of the window, provoking a riot.
The debate
The main theme of the novel is summarised in the debate between Mustafa Mond and John.What are their opposing points of view and do you have any sympathy for Mond’ s ideas?
The preliminary arguments are given in the conversation between MM and John and Bernard and Helmholtz in Chapter 16:
“People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get. They're well off; they're safe; they're never ill; they're not afraid of death; they're blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; ... they're so conditioned that they practically can't help behaving as they ought to behave.” (Ch 16)
“stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt.” (Ch 16)
“An Alpha-decanted, Alpha-conditioned man would go mad if he had to do Epsilon Semi-Moron work--go mad, or start smashing things up. Alphas can be completely socialized--but only on condition that you make them do Alpha work. Only an Epsilon can be expected to make Epsilon sacrifices, for the good reason that for him they aren't sacrifices; they're the line of least resistance. His conditioning has laid down rails along which he's got to run. He can't help himself; he's foredoomed. Even after decanting, he's still inside a bottle--an invisible bottle of infantile and embryonic fixations. Each one of us, of course,' the Controller meditatively continued, 'goes through life inside a bottle. But if we happen to be Alphas, our bottles are, relatively speaking, enormous. We should suffer acutely if we were confined in a narrower space. You cannot pour upper-caste champagne-surrogate into lower-caste bottles” (Ch 16)
“The optimum population,' said Mustapha Mond, 'is modelled on the iceberg--eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.” (Ch 16)
The workers don’t find their work awful. “On the contrary, they like it. It's light, it's childishly simple. No strain on the mind or the muscles. Seven and a half hours of mild, unexhausting labour, and then the soma ration and games and unrestricted copulation and the feelies. What more can they ask for? True,' he added, 'they might ask for shorter hours. And of course we could give them shorter hours. Technically, it would be perfectly simple to reduce all lower-caste working hours to three or four a day. But would they be any the happier for that? No, they wouldn't.” (Ch 16) Of course, no-one actually asks the epsilons. This argument seems dangerously like the one I heard made in favour of people in Gambia being contented with the squalor of their lives because they didn’t know any different.
The key requirement of a government is stability: “We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability. That's another reason why we're so chary of applying new inventions. Every discovery in pure science is potentially subversive; even science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy.” (Ch 16)
But MM admits that the fundamental reason is that capitalism depends upon consumption: “Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the emphasis from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness. Mass production demanded the shift. Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't.” (Ch 16)
“The gods are just. No doubt. But their code of law is dictated, in the last resort, by the people who organize society; Providence takes its cue from men.” (Ch 17)
“industrial civilization is only possible when there's no self-denial. Self-indulgence up to the very limits imposed by hygiene and economics. Otherwise the wheels stop turning.” (Ch 17)
“'civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic.” (Ch 17)
Common themes for dystopian novels
1984 by George Orwell: The little man against a Big authoritarian society. The complacency of the rulers who assume that everything is for the best in this the best of all possible worlds. The rebellion of the individual against the collective.
Ape & Essence by Aldous Huxley: set in a post-nuclear apocalypse world and presciently preaching against environmental catastrophe, A&E portrays a world in which gamma rays have made all but a despised minority 'on heat' only for a five week window every year; those males who are permanently randy are castrated. The Belial-worshipping society is communist-authoritarian and babies born with more than the usual number of disabilities (thanks to gamma rays) are killed as infants just before the next round of copulation. The religion is devil-worship on the grounds that the devil is in all of us as clearly evidenced by the way mankind repeatedly self-destructs. The themes of an authoritarian society (in this case a hierocracy) and the manipulation of the sex-drive are reminiscent of BNW. There is also a message that individuality must be crushed: "If a machine is fool-proof, it must also be skill-proof, talent-proof, inspiration-proof. Your money back if the product should be faulty and twice your money back if you can find in it the smallest trace of genius or individuality." The title comes from another Shakespeare play, Measure for Measure: “But man, proud man, /Drest in a little brief authority, /Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d; /His glassy essence, like an angry ape, /Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven, /As make the angels weep.” M4M, of course, is about the hypocrisy of the lords of society punishing inappropriate sex (and the fascinating concept of the Duke who, like God, set up the imperfect world, departs to see what happens, and returns at the end to condemn.
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Book of Dave by Will Self
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall
The Kids of God by Dave Appleby: a rather imperfect authoritarian society where control and domination is fragile and crumbling.
Are all dystopias necessarily totalitarian? Most modern dystopias written in the western world, or influenced by western mores, seem to assume that freedom, at least artistic freedom, is good, control is bad. And yet the alternative is anarchy.
The only anarchic dystopia that I can think of is that in Dhalgren by Samuel R Delaney.
The third alternative?
AH in his 1946 foreword to BNW says that he should have offered the Savage a third alternative “the possibility of sanity ... in a community of exiles and refugees from the Brave New World, living within the borders of the Reservation. In this community, economics would be decentralist and Henry-Georgian, politics Kropotkinesque and co-operative.”
According to wikipedia: Henry George was a theorist whose best-selling and hugely influential book ‘Progress and Poverty’ showed how technological and social progress could exacerbate poverty. For example, if public services are improved, land and natural resources become more valuable. Those who own these resources therefore seek higher returns. Speculation drives up the price of land faster than wealth can be produced and therefore the wealth left over to pay for wages is reduced. This results in businesses at the margin failing, resulting in a depression causing unemployment. His solution was to tax everything freely supplied by nature but held as private property; he believed this would be sufficient to make other taxes unnecessary and provide limitless investment in public services as well as a basic income.
Kropotkin was a Russian anarchist who believed that the hallmark of a successful society (as observed in animals and pre-industrial societies) was mutuality and co-operation as opposed to the competition advocated by social Darwinists. He therefore proposed an economic system based on mutual exchange and voluntary cooperation.
Quotations
- “That is the secret of happiness and virtue--liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.' (Ch 1: spoken by the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning)
- “Wintriness responded to wintriness. The overalls of the workers were white, their hands gloved with a pale corpse-coloured rubber. The light was frozen, dead, a ghost. Only from the yellow barrels of the microscopes did it borrow a certain rich and living substance, lying along the polished tubes like butter, streak after luscious streak in long recession down the work-tables.” (Ch 1)
- “Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green ... and Delta Children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides, they wear black, which is such a beastly colour. I'm so glad I'm a Beta.” (Ch 2)
- “Home, home--a few small rooms, stiflingly over-inhabited by a man, by a periodically teeming woman, by a rabble of boys and girls of all ages. No air, no space; an understerilized prison; darkness, disease, and smells. ... And home was as squalid psychically as physically. Psychically, it was a rabbit hole, a midden, hot with the frictions of tightly packed life, reeking with emotion. What suffocating intimacies, what dangerous, insane, obscene relationships between the members of the family group! Maniacally, the mother brooded over her children (her children)... brooded over them like a cat over its kittens; but a cat that could talk, a cat that could say, 'My baby, my baby,' over and over again. 'My baby, and oh, oh, at my breast, the little hands, the hunger, and that unspeakable agonizing pleasure! Till at last my baby sleeps, my baby sleeps with a bubble of white milk at the corner of his mouth. My little baby sleeps...' ... Our Ford--or Our Freud, as, for some inscrutable reason, he chose to call himself whenever he spoke of psychological matters--Our Freud had been the first to reveal the appalling dangers of family life. The world was full of fathers--was therefore full of misery; full of mothers--therefore of every kind of perversion from sadism to chastity; full of brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts--full of madness and suicide.” (Ch 3)
- “every one belongs to every one else” (Ch 3)
- “Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can't consume much if you sit still and read books.” (Ch 3)
- “Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly--they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced.” (Ch 4)
- “The sexophones wailed like melodious cats under the moon, moaned in the alto and tenor registers as though the little death were upon them.” (Ch 5) Presumably the ‘little death’ is a translation of the French phrase ‘petite mort’ which is used as a euphemism for orgasm.
- “Murder kills only the individual ... Unorthodoxy ... it strikes at Society itself.” (Ch 10)
- “That young man will come to a bad end,' they said, prophesying the more confidently in that they themselves would in due course personally see to it that the end was bad.” (Ch 11)
- “a savage reservation is a place which, owing to unfavourable climatic or geological conditions, or poverty of natural resources, has not been worth the expense of civilizing.” (Ch 11)
- “Once you began admitting explanations in terms of purpose--well, you didn't know what the result might be.” (Ch 12)
- “It was the sort of idea that might easily de-condition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes--make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge. Which was, the Controller reflected, quite possibly true. But not, in the present circumstance, admissible.” (Ch 12)
- “as I make the laws here, I can also break them” (Ch 16)
- “you can't make tragedies without social instability” (Ch 16)
- “a philosopher [is] ... a man who dreams of fewer things than there are in heaven and earth.” (Ch 17)
- “At Malpais he had suffered because they had shut him out from the communal activities of the pueblo, in civilized London he was suffering because he could never escape from those communal activities, never be quietly alone.” (Ch 17)
- “You can't play Electro-magnetic Golf according to the rules of Centrifugal Bumble-puppy.” (Ch 17)
Reread April 2022
