Brave New World:
The Choice I Wish I’d Made
Feraco
Myth to Science Fiction
12 April 2013
Brave New World takes a while to get going;
Huxley spends several chapters simply
explaining the new realities of the world to us.
Most of the first three chapters are spent
taking the audience along for an educational
field trip.
Nothing really starts happening until the
fourth chapter, and even then we aren’t
introduced to all of our important characters.
While it may frustrate readers who crave
more immediate action, there are some
benefits to the deliberate approach, the main
one being that we see the plot and characters
in the context of Huxley’s universe once it
finally kicks into gear (rather than imagining
them inhabiting ours).
Without that context, some of the actions we
see – let along some of the dialogue we read –
would seem incomprehensible!
The novel’s willingness to make dramatic
changes to its narrative structure, its plot, and
its characters help distinguish it from most
dystopian literature, but it also helps reinforce
Huxley’s ideas (much like Orwell’s reinforced
his).
For example, we start in the Hatchery, move
out into the city (much as the characters do),
take an extended detour to the Savage
Reservation, and finally return “home” to
civilization.
We’re in the Hatchery because we, like the
soon-to-be-decanted infants, need to receive
the minimum amount of information we need
to serve our purpose (in this case, to be
perceptive readers, not fret-sawyers).
Once we get an idea about what life in the
World State is really like, we move out into the
city, which allows us to both meet new
characters and flesh out ones we already know
using the information we’ve been given.
When we get out to the Savage Reservation,
everything breaks down for our characters,
and the narrative “breaks down” as well; some
of the middle chapters have all of the narrative
momentum of a tidepool, although I’d strongly
argue this is intentional.
Finally, when we do return to society and
the book begins taking some bewildering
turns, we feel just as overwhelmed as the
Savage might, and the conflicts that arise
merely stem from that ancient tension
between man and the progress he makes.
In those four stages, we mirror a human life:
early development, adolescence, middle age,
and the second half of life (when we’re forced
to grapple with the things we’ve avoided, and
when people come and go – sometimes
permanently – with surprising frequency).
The characters we see now are important –
Huxley, like Orwell, doesn’t spend a lot of time
on people who aren’t essential to his plot or
symbolic framework.
Out of the figures we meet in the early
going, only Benito Hoover and Henry Foster end
up seeming pretty unimportant, and even
they're useful for showing readers how
“normal” people now function; Orwell does
something similar by showing us Syme and the
Parsons clan fairly early in his narrative.
The DHC, Lenina Crowne, Bernard Marx,
Helmholtz Watson, and especially Mustapha
Mond each play crucial roles from here on out,
and their functions end up linking with one
another as Huxley spins the web wider.
Note, however, that the most important
figure, the Savage (alternately known as John),
isn't introduced for many chapters.
Each main character – the DHC, Lenina,
Bernard, Helmholtz, Linda, Mond, and the
Savage – serve as shorthand for one of the
book’s major ideas or themes.
The DHC obviously stands for man’s new
pursuit of the book’s Big Three – Community,
Identity, and Stability.
He also stands for the fallibility of such a
pursuit, with the narrative eventually laying
him low in scandal (fathering a naturally-born
son!!) after presenting him as a seemingly
perfect citizen.
Other “perfect” citizens include Henry and
Benito, each of whom represents different
aspects of the dominant culture.
Benito represents its false cheerfulness,
whereas Henry is as much a “perfect
gentleman” as his boss.
Both men hop between partners easily,
consume soma, participate in the sanctioned
entertainment activities, etc.
You’ll notice the book, much like
1984, is light on significant female
characters.
Lenina Crowne is our main one, but
she’s a confusing character.
For a healthy portion of the book,
we’re not sure whether we’re supposed
to like her or laugh at her.
It’s not until we get out to the
Reservation that her characteristics are
thrown into sharper relief, for she’s
more contradictory than she seems at
first.
Lenina isn’t a perfect representation of the type
of girl this society prizes; her attraction to Bernard
Marx proves she’s a little bit different, and her
“bizarre” refusal to take other partners in addition
to Henry Foster seems to indicate that she’s
capable of feeling (although, as we’ll discover, it’s
more indicative of the character’s resistance to
change and conflict).
She’s actually pretty emotionally crippled, and
the Savage Reservation brings out the worst in her.
In fact, her interactions with John throughout
the book help throw his “human” characteristics
into sharper relief.
Lenina is, in many ways, a child in a world of
children, and even though she sometimes clashes
with those who would keep infantilizing her, she
also fights those who would ask more of her .
Linda represents the utter emptiness of
man’s “civilized” pursuit of happiness, even
more so than Lenina.
Whereas Bernard is more of an outcast,
Linda’s an exile – we’re very much reminded of
the idea of the Fall here, and she seems to view
the World State as her Eden.
While she’s out on the Reservation, she
rejects every chance she has to live an actual
life even when life can’t be resisted (as when
she gives natural birth to the Savage).
All she wants to do is return back to what
the Savage dubs a brave new world; she
ignores the actual new world in front of her as
best she can, drowning herself in different
substances to try to get a hint of what somafueled living used to feel like.
Once she returns to society, it’s not
surprising that she has trouble re-assimilating
– it’s a pretty unnatural culture – and her
ultimate surrender seems both sad and, for
lack of a better word, gross.
Helmholtz and Bernard serve as foils for one
another, although it’s not as apparent until you
advance far into the book.
Bernard, for example, seems at first like he’s
going to serve as our moral compass.
His disgust with his society’s shallow
excesses mirrors our own, and we can’t help but
notice that he’s the only one who seems
miserable here.
He, like Helmholtz, seems to see the world and
World State for what they are, and wants
something more than he can get here; readers
would be forgiven for believing they’d stumbled
upon Winston Smith’s spiritual forefather.
Unfortunately, Bernard’s a fake protagonist;
the right things might make him cranky, but that
doesn’t make him a strong personality.
When Bernard faces real challenge, or when
his circumstances shift, will he be any more
ready than Linda or Lenina…or will he cave and
change?
We eventually ask the same question of
Helmholtz, whom we’re a bit removed from at
first.
He’s more of an intellectual than most
members of the World State, and that makes
him seem a little detached.
It doesn’t help that he’s good at everything
he tries; those types of characters usually
aren’t relatable.
He ends up being a useful character,
however; his desire for something more (as
well as his perceptivity regarding his world)
mirrors Bernard’s, and his desire to write in
particular helps emphasize Huxley’s views on
the purposes of art and expression as our
society evolves.
When we ask the same question of
Helmholtz that we asked of Bernard, we find
it’s not a question: we know he can greet a
challenge.
Finally, we get to the Savage and Mond,
whose conversations closer to the end of the
book make up the bulk of Brave New World’s
most significant chapters.
It’s easy to draw parallels between those
chapters and the extended dialogues between
Winston and O’Brien in 1984, but they aren’t
direct analogues; Mond’s not really a bad guy.
We’ll eventually discover his “choice,” and
while we may not necessarily agree with it, we
can understand it; it’s much more difficult for
readers to understand why someone as
intelligent as O’Brien would choose to serve
the Party instead of tearing it down.
We can’t really say anything else about
Mond without jumping ahead of ourselves
(and giving much of the book away for those of
you frantically trying to finish), so I’ll just say
he’s important, and that the hints about him in
the beginning (rumors that he possesses
banned books, for example) are as well.
The Savage is the “soul” of the book, along
with Mond (one can also argue for Helmholtz
and Bernard’s inclusion here), and he’s our real
protagonist.
His creation and upbringing smack of
neglect and contradiction, but we see much of
ourselves in his hunger for the old world and his
desire to feel like he belongs somewhere.
Of course, Huxley implies that the same desire
to belong leads to the formation of societies like
the World State when unchecked; John isn’t
immune from the darker themes of the book just
because he’s our protagonist.
Still, John yearns for genuine human emotion,
and he seems like a relic of the past.
As a man without worlds, John’s the perfect
figure to give us an outsider’s perspective on the
World State – even more so than our Alfred-thebutler-esque narrator.
Again, without giving too much away, the
Savage’s character arc is the reason the book
exists…so it’s worth monitoring.
The second chapter opens in the NeoPavlovian Conditioning Rooms, which give us
our first glimpse at real infants (as well as
what we do to them).
You’ll notice that Huxley does a lot of namechecking, and it can be downright bizarre at
times; while some of them are frying-pan-overthe-head obvious, I still haven’t figured out
why he’s given some of the characters the
names he’s given them.
Still, it’s worth tracking in many cases (as in
Ford’s and Pavlov’s) because the symbolic
implications are so clear.
With Pavlov, for example, we know him best
through his experiments with the dogs; having
children conditioned in “neo-Pavlovian”
centers allows Huxley to subtly reinforce the
“we’re pretty dehumanized at this point” idea.
The language we get in this chapter is also
pretty bizarre – a mix of hyper-inflated vocabulary
and baby-talk.
This isn’t supposed to highlight the difference
between the infants and those controlling them; if
anything, it implies that there isn’t much
separating the two.
The scene where the babies are essentially
tortured is chilling, and the Director’s casual
statement that this experience will be repeated two
hundred times for each infant is even more so.
However, this is clearly how the World State gets
around the Myron Rolle problem; any Deltas whose
mental capabilities weren’t sufficiently damaged
during the fetal manipulation stages in the
Hatchery no longer have any interest in using such
excess capacity.
The line “What man has joined, nature is
powerless to put asunder” is disturbing, but it’s a
great “mission statement” for this society; it even
has relevance for our own times.
After all, we, too, are trying to beat nature – our
progress doesn’t aim at moving us back towards
the animal kingdom.
We move from explicit scenes of
conditioning to examining the larger
implications of such actions.
The Director mentions that sports and
activities are now intentionally
overcomplicated – requiring a lot of
equipment and so on – in order to encourage
consumption, and that people are indeed
conditioned to over-consume in such a
fashion.
To what end? Well, to keep factories open –
artificial consumption to justify artificial
production (real shades of 1984 and its
permanent war here).
We also get a quick mention of the horrors
of old reproductive methods – and when Huxley
refers to as “the smut that was really science,”
it’s an indictment of our tendency to ignore the
intellectually inconvenient – as well as an
offhanded remark that “most historical facts
are unpleasant.”
Both threads are picked up by
Mustapha Mond in the third
chapter, who fleshes them out to a
much greater degree.
The Controller shows us a
society that took Ford’s “history is
bunk” motto so seriously that it
actively tries not to learn from it
(again, shades of 1984).
He also paints a fairly miserable
picture of old family life, which
recalls the way the Capitalists were
portrayed by the Party in Orwell’s
text.
Jumping back into the second chapter, the
Director reviews the history of hypnopædia,
also known as sleep-teaching.
Its initial failure lay in trying to teach
knowledge to people who slept; the scene with
Tommy being unable to use the facts he’d
“memorized” gave me troubling flashbacks of
trying to learn trigonometry!
Hypnopædia’s eventual “triumphs” lay in
what the DHC calls “moral education”; each
class’s ideology is ingrained through rigorous
and regular repetition over the course of the
human developmental cycle, and those class
divisions become self-reinforcing by virtue of
being unconscious.
This raises some interesting, albeit
disturbing, questions about education and
child-rearing: would our society be more
stable, for example, if morality were no longer
a virtue – if it were no longer a choice?
And if you could choose to learn something
in your sleep…would you?
There’s no rational thought involved
in the philosophies of this new age; each
person’s “own beliefs” merely consist of
thoroughly internalized and
regurgitated jargon.
To the members of the World State,
there’s no benefit to forming your own
moral systems – that invites chaos!
(Community, identity, stability…)
If you’re not creating or testing your
own morals – if you’re merely following
their dictates, or the dictates of what’s
been taught to you – you don’t need to
be conscious of what you’re doing as
long as you’re doing it
“Moral education…ought never, in
any circumstances, to be rational.”
But wordless conditioning is crude and
wholesale; cannot bring home the finer
distinctions, cannot inculcate the more complex
courses of behaviour. For that there must be words,
but words without reason. In brief, hypnopædia.
“The greatest moralizing and socializing force
of all time.”
The students took it down in their little books.
Straight from the horse’s mouth…
Not so much like drops of water, though water, it
is true, can wear holes in the hardest granite;
rather, drops of liquid sealing-wax, drops that
adhere, encrust, incorporate themselves with what
they fall on, till finally the rock is all one scarlet
blob.
“‘Til at last the child’s mind is these
suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the
child’s mind. And not the child’s mind only. The
adult’s mind too – all his life long. The mind that
judges and desires and decides – made up of these
suggestions. But all these suggestions are our
suggestions!”The Director almost shouted in his
triumph.
The third chapter’s stylistic shift is a
bit drastic for some; Huxley ends up
juggling three scenes at once, cutting
between them in the style of a film
director constructing a montage (as in
the ending to The Fountain).
Some of the timing of the cuts
seems/is arbitrary; in other cases, the
timing is worth noticing (so keep your
eye on when and how Huxley makes
those jumps).
Out of the three scenes, one features
Mustapha Mond in an expository role –
giving us one last dose of World State
history – while the other two feature
supporting characters (Bernard / Henry /
Benito and Lenina / Fanny).
When considering those three, Mond’s
scene is the most important, but Lenina’s is
the easiest to follow; we tend to drop
Bernard’s for long periods of time, which
mirrors his overall rejection.
Each of the three features a different
sort of wry commentary on the nature of
man’s existence in the brave new world –
the “feelies” representing the seemingly
insatiable desire for man to immerse
himself in his own entertainment (3D
movies!), the conversation between the
women revealing the scandalous nature of
monogamy (as well as the need for every
personality to conform to a set ideal), and
the lecture from Mond explaining why we’d
abandoned some of the things we treasure
most dearly.
Mond’s lecture links with Lenina’s
conversation in a couple of ways, the
most important of which is human
exclusivity.
As Mond puts it, families, monogamy,
the entire concept of romance – all
served as devices to cripple rather than
elevate us.
“Everywhere exclusiveness, a narrow
channeling of impulse and energy.”
In the next passage, he illustrates
why that channeling could be so
detrimental to human happiness.
“Think of water under pressure in a pipe.”
They thought of it.“I pierce it once,” said the
Controller.“What a jet!”
He pierced it twenty times. There were
twenty piddling little fountains…
Mother, monogamy, romance. High spurts
the fountain; fierce and foamy the wild jet. The
urge has but a single outlet. My love, my baby.
No wonder these poor pre-moderns were mad
and wicked and miserable. Their world didn't
allow them to take things easily, didn't allow
them to be sane, virtuous, happy. What with
mothers and lovers, what with the prohibitions
they were not conditioned to obey, what with
the temptations and the lonely remorses, what
with all the diseases and the endless isolating
pain, what with the uncertainties and the
poverty – they were forced to feel strongly. And
feeling strongly (and strongly, what was more,
in solitude, in hopelessly individual isolation),
how could they be stable?
Obviously, human relationships are
difficult.
They’re messy, often confusing, and
depend on willing trade-offs and
sacrifices.
We value those things, partly because
we’ve been conditioned by our culture
to accept them as wonderful (in much
the same way the citizens of the World
State have been conditioned to reject
such things as madness).
Is there value in maintaining a
relationship if you get benefits without
it?
Is there a point to avoidable
hardship?
Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling,
the flood is passion, the flood is even madness: it
depends on the force of the current, the height and
strength of the barrier. The unchecked stream flows
smoothly down its appointed channels into a calm wellbeing. The embryo is hungry; day in, day out, the bloodsurrogate pump unceasingly turns its eight hundred
revolutions a minute. The decanted infant howls; at once
a nurse appears with a bottle of external secretion.
Feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and
its consummation. Shorten that interval, break down all
those old unnecessary barriers.
“Fortunate boys!” said the Controller.“No pains have
been spared to make your lives emotionally easy –to
preserve you, so far as that is possible, from having
emotions at all.”
Is this a blessing…or a curse?
That remains one of the book’s central
questions…and it certainly won’t be answered so early!