Aldous
Huxley: Brave New World.
London:Chatto & Windus; New York: Doubleday, 1932, and subsequent
reprints.
Readers of dystopic fiction are familiar with the mechanics of the genre: exposition of the totalitarian social system, development of the protagonists who are potential skeptics, dissidents, and rebels, and the culminating triumph or tragedy, usually the latter, wherein the presumed rebellion fails, usually quietly.
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) is one of the more standard representatives of the genre, with wide influence in fields beyond fiction and literature.
Dystopic fiction extends classical tragedy, and Huxley makes open reference to the classics throughout the novel. Dystopic fiction is the story of all societies, empires, and arrangements of power and authority, and Huxley grasps this truism in the tenor of his times: the instable 1930s in the West, increasingly seized by economic depression, social unrest, political instability, the decline of culture and the rise of science, technology, and authoritarian politics. But Huxley is subtle in taking the premises of authoritarian control in his fictional World State as a future given, as axiomatic, a system assuming a scientific and nearly-religious dogmatism in its mechanics. The World State motto is "Community, Identity, Stability." There is no need to lie, as in George Orwell's 1984 where "War is Peace," etc.
Among World Society characteristics are consumption, efficiency
(inspired by Henry Ford, whose name Ford has replaced God as a
euphemism), mind control with drugs ("they used to take morphia and
cocaine"), eugenics abolishing procreation (viviparous " birthing and
childrearing) and producing classes of intelligence from Alphas to
mentally and physically low caste Deltas, Gammas, and Epsilons. All
classes are handled with drugs, but one character seems to allude to
Winston Churchill when he says of savages that they have
"enough experience of gas bombs to know that they mustn't play any
tricks."). Some is universality dispensed. Of soma, the characters say:
"Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly
hallucinant ..."
"All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects
... "
"Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without
so much as a headache or a mythology."
"One cubic centimetre cures ten gloomy sentiments," said the Assistant
Predestinator citing a piece of homely hypnopaedic wisdom.
"A gramme is better than a damn."
Huxley's ironic humor includes his character's names: Bernard Marx (the dissident), Helmholtz Watson (another dissident), Henry Foster, George Edzel, Benito Hoover, Lenina Crowne (every man's favorite young woman), and titles like Assistant Director of Predestination, in charge of the biochemists designing new fetuses in test-tubes. Dissenter Bernard, always glum and skeptical, is said to have had too much alcohol in his blood surrogate while in the test tube.
Is there allowance for personal solitude in a society wherein all traces of individuality and creativity are abolished? For the restless and critically-minded Bernard himself admits that too much reflection on his situation produces "the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism." Helmholtz, who teaches a form of journalism, shows Bernard a poem that he had presented to a class and for which he was reported to authorities. Bernard remarks that, of course, it was dangerous to reveal such nostalgic reflections, for his students have had "at least a quarter of a million warnings against solitude," referring to "sleep-teaching," the subliminal messages programmed for all citizens to listen to during sleep.
But the momentum toward crisis increases after Bernard has brought
to London a young man from an Indian pueblo in New Mexico who is
completely ignorant of World Society but who was brought up on Zuni
ritual, Christian religion, and a stray book of Shakespeare. There is
mutual learning between the dissidents and John, whom the authorities
call the "Savage," the latter reluctantly tolerated because he is the
bastard son of a now-disgraced Director -- hence the disfavor building
against the trouble-making Bernard. But they are finally ushered before
the Western World Controller, Mustapha Mond,who is especially curious
about the backward John and engages him in conversation. John naively
espouses old virtues and values, which Mond understands from "old
pornographic books" like the Bible. John wonders aloud how people can
think for themselves without time for reflection.
"But people never are alone now," said Mustapha Mond. "We make them hate solitude; and we arrange their lives so that it's almost impossible for them ever to have it."
The denouement is inevitable. In the end, the two dissidents are exiled, but John escapes the city for an old unkempt lighthouse.
But it was not alone the distance that had attracted the Savage to his lighthouse; the near was as seductive as the far. The woods, the open stretches of heather and yellow gorse, the clumps of Scotch firs, the shining ponds with their overhanging birch trees, their water lilies, their beds of rushes -- these were beautiful and, to an eye accustomed to the aridities of the American desert, astonishing. And then the solitude! Whole days passed during which he never saw a human being.
Not expectedly, the story ends tragically.
CONCLUSION
While Huxley's plot setting in the future eliminates much
flexibility with characters, leaving the story with some necessary
contrivances, the entire concept is well worth the prominent place of
Brave New World in the
repertoire of not only dystopic fiction but any
speculation about the character of the future and the fragility of
solitude.
¶