Brave New World:
A Glass Can Only Spill What
It Contains
Feraco
Myth to Science Fiction + SDAIE
31 March 2015
Our first meeting with Linda in Chapter Seven is
fairly disturbing, if only because Huxley describes
and portrays her as grotesquely as possible.
She’s all bloated flesh and bad smells, stinking
of the crude alcohol and drugs that she’s used in
futile attempts to replicate a soma holiday.
This is the grotesquerie of Mother; no wonder
it’s an obscenity where Lenina hails from!
Linda points out that she simply didn’t need the
skills she needed for the real world when all that
was required of her in the World State was so much
simpler – not so much instinctual as conditioned,
but automatic all the same.
Birth, parenting, motherhood – it all seems
impossible when you’ve never been taught to do
any of it.
“There’s so much one doesn’t know; it wasn’t
my business to know. I mean, when a child asks you
how a helicopter works or who made the world –
well, what are you to answer if you’re a Beta and
have always worked in the Fertilizing Room? What
are you to answer?”
This (obliquely) points to something about
Huxley that’s important, but that we haven’t
discussed yet.
One of his odder fascinations concerned
eugenics – the idea of advancing the human race
through selective reproductive habits that
increased the prevalence of desirable traits and
eliminated undesirable ones.
This meant that one needed to make sure that
the High had more offspring while the Low
reproduced less frequently in order to increase,
say, the human race’s average intelligence level.
The eugenics movement is not one of the
twentieth century’s finer achievements.
While the British Eugenics Society claimed
Brave New World was about their movement,
Huxley actually keeps it fairly toned down; if
anything, it’s easy to interpret Brave New World
as an angry broadside against eugenicist
pursuits.
Huxley’s fixation on the idea that humans
could be “controlled for traits,” however, did
make its way into the book.
He was convinced that authors such
as H.G. Wells, whose utopian visions
rested in part on the idea that the High
could be convinced to alternate
between High and Low work, were
hopelessly misguided, that they did not
understand the human heart as he did.
In his mind, a superior individual
could not move from fertilizing a field
one day to composing an opera for the
next three before returning for half a
week to the fields; he simply wouldn’t
tolerate work that was so clearly
beneath his traits and talents.
Huxley’s attitudes towards humanity
made it impossible for him to believe in
Utopia.
We diverged from the discussion
about Linda because we needed to point
out a problem with Huxley’s attitude, a
problem that expresses itself exquisitely
through Linda herself.
Basically, if the High cannot bother
itself with Low work, it will quickly
adopt a position of learned
helplessness. (This is all well and good
when the World State actively promotes
learned helplessness.)
Linda’s narrow skill-set is
appropriate in a society that shuns
challenge, versatility, and hardship
while prizing specialization, efficiency,
and ease.
Unfortunately, her lack of skill leaves
her completely helpless when cut off
from the society she knew.
When you do this, your ignorance
leaves you dependent on your “lessers.”
For example, I probably had a longer
and richer academic career than my
mechanic…but I can’t fix my own car,
and I undoubtedly feel less confident in
the mechanic’s presence than he feels
in mine, at least when it comes to
talking about automotive matters.
This is the value of living with risk; if
you’re ever in a situation with
uncontrolled variables (i.e., anywhere
outside the World State), you need to be
versatile, and problems force you to
acquire those skills.
The World State, believing it’s solved
just about every problem that once
plagued mankind, sees no reason to
develop coping skills in its populace; a
soma holiday is easier.
Yet while John’s mother may not have
coping skills, John is not like his mother,
and not simply because it’s clear he’s
had to fend for himself for some time.
He’s the product of so many
conflicted mythologies and belief
systems; the Savage Reservation isn’t
just a non-World State society, but a
schizoid fusion of different ones.
To be honest, John’s coping skills
aren’t the best either…but at least he’s
trying!
Chapter Eight fleshes out John’s history,
and it’s a complex one, full of pain, hardship,
and longing, perfunctorily punctuated by
small triumphs and fleeting moments of joy.
Huxley tells it in a dreamlike way, hopping
from moment to moment in order to build up
the backstory.
We see his difficult relationship with
Linda, who doesn’t let him call her Mother
(for obvious reasons).
Linda is a creature from a different world,
and her refusal to assimilate and adapt to
this one separates her from her son.
John doesn’t really understand how to
relate to her because his natural feelings
differ from her conditioning.
Linda’s Beta-like behavior –
entertaining married men, heavily
abusing drugs – make her an outcast in
the world of the Reservation, which
makes John a marked target for abuse;
his only means of coping with the
others’ cruelty is to take pride in his
ability to read, even though his reading
is largely limited to a World State
textbook.
(Even here, John retreats into
knowledge and study, rather than join
his mother in narcotic distraction.)
For a while, his only happiness lies in
the moments when Linda shares stories
about the “Other Place.”
Then he stumbles upon The Complete
Works of William Shakespeare, and his
world’s transformed.
Just as Helmholtz mentioned earlier,
John has been searching for something
without knowing precisely what he’s
looking for; this is why he feels a primal
excitement after creating things out of
clay.
When he reads Shakespeare, he’s
pierced.
He finally has language to describe
his feelings, language that Linda could
never teach him; after all, she’s
emotionally illiterate.
Shakespeare’s words are old, ornate,
overly patterned and self-consciously
beautiful; in other words, they’re perfect
for John, who ends up living out
Shakespearean themes and events on a
regular basis.
His attack on Popé, for example,
explicitly recalls Hamlet – reacting to a
violation of a child/parent bond without
really understanding why he feels what
he does (and Linda, again, couldn’t tell
him).
His longing for Kiakimé, on the other
hand, recalls Romeo and Juliet:
It is finished. Old Mitsima’s words
repeated themselves in his mind.
Finished, finished…In silence and from
a long way off, but violently, desperately,
hopelessly, he had loved Kiakimé. And
now it was finished. He was sixteen.
John decides to go back to the
World State with Bernard, Lenina,
and Linda partly because he’s tired
of feeling so terribly alone.
His choice comes directly after
he tells of his near-suicide, as well
as the time he tried to see what
crucifixion felt like.
Clearly, he’s searching for
meaning, and he’s not finding it on
the Savage Reservation; he’s
actually excited to see the World
State.
The young man drew a deep breath.
“To think it should be coming true –
what I’ve dreamt of all my life. Do you
remember what Miranda says?”
“Who’s Miranda?”
But the young man had evidently not
heard the question.“O wonder!” he was
saying; and his eyes shone, his face was
brightly flushed.“How many goodly
creatures are there here! How
beauteous mankind is!”The flush
suddenly deepened; he was thinking of
Lenina, of an angel in bottle-green
viscose, lustrous with youth and skin
food, plump, benevolently smiling. His
voice faltered.“O brave new world,” he
began, then – suddenly interrupted
himself; the blood had left his cheeks;
he was as pale as paper.
“Are you married to her?” he asked.
“Am I what?”
“Married.You know – for ever. They say ‘for
ever’ in the Indian words; it can’t be broken.”
“Ford, no!” Bernard couldn’t help laughing.
John also laughed, but for another reason –
laughed for pure joy.
“O brave new world,” he repeated.“O brave
new world that has such people in it. Let’s start
at once.”
“You have a most peculiar way of talking
sometimes,” said Bernard, staring at the young
man in perplexed astonishment.“And, anyhow,
hadn’t you better wait ‘til you actually see the
new world?”
-----
“The greater a man’s talents, the
greater his power to lead astray. It is
better that one should suffer than that
many should be corrupted. Consider the
matter dispassionately, Mr. Foster, and
you will see that no offence is so heinous
as unorthodoxy of behaviour. Murder
kills only the individual – and, after all,
what is an individual?”With a sweeping
gesture he indicated the rows of
microscopes, the test-tubes, the
incubators.“We can make a new one
with the greatest ease – as many as we
like. Unorthodoxy threatens more than
the life of a mere individual; it strikes at
Society itself.Yes, at Society itself,” he
repeated.
Thus the Director casts himself as the White
Knight of Society, proudly defending its
community / identity / stability from the insidious
influence of individualistic anarchy.
He prepares to greet Bernard upon the
latter’s return from the Savage Reservation, not
simply to punish him but to humiliate him by
publicly excoriating and banishing him.
Having anticipated this, Bernard deflects his
enemy’s thrust expertly; when the DHC
mockingly asks him if he has any reply to the
charges leveled against him, Bernard seizes the
opening by presenting Linda, in all her naturallyaging grotesquerie.
Linda’s desperate pleas for “Tomakin” to
acknowledge her quickly morph into angry
“obscenity” – she declares that he made her have
a baby.
There’s really no equivalent for what she’s
said in English, at least nothing I could repeat
without being fired on the spot; if it’s not the
worst thing one can say in the World State, it’s
pretty close.
The horror is compounded once John enters
the room, greeting the DHC as “My father!”
Huxley points out that “father” isn’t nearly
as obscene as “mother” – not due to any
lingering misogyny (well, any more than
already seeps through a society where the
male-centric definition of pleasure reigns
supreme), but to the father’s “relative remove”
from the actual birthing process.
That combination – Mother! Father!
Exclusive lover! – serves to thoroughly and
irreversibly devastate the DHC’s reputation; the
irony’s pretty blunt, mainly because Bernard is
able to turn the tables so effectively.
And as spermatozoa-filled test tube after
test tube spills and shatters on the floor, the
laughter in the room reaching a fever pitch, the
Director turns and flees the grotesque, horrible
scene, never to return.
John proceeds to gain some measure of
infamy. He is a Savage with vague connections
to the State, a curiosity, something that should
not exist.
Linda, of course, isn’t nearly as compelling;
her son may have charmingly stupid ideas (in
their view, obviously), but she’s just disgusting,
a fallen creature who should have known
better.
I’ve mentioned that the community
(IDENTITY STABILITY) is pretty vicious towards
anything that deviates from orthodoxy; the
inability to handle difference, the unexpected,
or a change in routine forms a running motif in
the book.
It’s more obvious at this stage, what with
the DHC’s spectacularly-backfiring “exile
plan” and with Linda’s shunning.
But it’s reversible, as demonstrated by
Bernard’s newfound “popularity” thanks to his
association with the newly-famous Savage.
John isn’t just a curiosity. Even at this
early stage of his involvement, we get hints
about his ultimate destiny – the “selfcrucifixion” to atone for his wrongs in
Chapter 8, or his yearning for Lenina (and
subsequent disgust with his weakness) in
Chapter 9.
He’s perpetually willing to punish
himself for what he perceives as “base,
ignoble” behavior, which is why he finds
kindred spirits in the Penitentes.
He’s flawed – he can’t see what we can,
he falls for a woman he shouldn’t – but he’s
profoundly human all at once, the rare
individual in this story.
He’s motivated by needs that surpass his
base desires, and his emotions and values –
honor, wonder, etc. – are more complex
than his counterparts’.
Unsurprisingly, he’s either nonplussed,
confused, or actively repulsed by what he
sees; a glimpse of Bokanovskified Deltas at
work leaves him vomiting.
“O brave new world, that has such
people in it…”
Linda, on the other hand, is not, and she
drowns herself in soma, seeking an escape
from real life, a continuous holiday.
Her son is the only one who cares about
what becomes of her; the rest are perfectly
content to pacify her with drugs until she
dies within a month or two (which, as a
middle-aged woman, she’d have no
biological reason to do…except, as a deeply
dysfunctional castoff, she has little left to
enjoy).
John also contrasts strongly with Bernard,
whom nobody actually likes.
He craves all the benefits and signifiers of
influence anyway (costing him Helmholtz’s, and
our, respect in the process), trying to steal affection
and physical gratification from those who
previously ignored him.
Yet he still finds himself drawn to criticizing the
very social order he enjoys.
There’s that old saying: “Pride goeth before the
fall.”
Bernard is all too proud and none too wise, and
while the Director’s arrogance cost him everything,
his adversary’s equally vulnerable.
John, on the other hand, perpetually believes
himself to be unworthy of Lenina…so he refuses to
let himself be with her, which vexes her to no end.
When she takes him – or, rather, gets him to take
her – to the feelies, she wants him to be thrilled and
to seek pleasure in her.
But he’s repulsed and repelled by them, and
turns away from what he sees – and, in turn, from
her…