A “Bland” New World and its Discontents
In this chapter, my argument is divided into two parts. The first part focuses on Huxley’s dystopia Brave New World as essentially an “anti-existential” world where there exists no possibility for individual growth. Under the total dominance of the government, the citizens of the new world live in complete “fallen-ness,” with no right of self-definition. In the second part, my concern will be on how through his portrayal of several rebellious characters in this novel, Huxley criticizes the new world’s inhumanity, with its stranglehold of the quest for love, beauty and truth, and on how he suggests to the reader the ideal of the individual authentic life through the characters’ rebellion and their revival of humanity.
After reading Brave New World, the reader may ask himself or herself the question: “Is this really the ideal world that humans can have or just a nightmare from which one may desperately try to wake up?” Probably most of the readers will consider the later is truer to his or her response to the novel. Thus, the title of the book, taken from Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, seems to be profoundly ironical.
Commenting on the title of the novel, Jhan Hochman remarks that this dystopia strikes the reader as neither brave nor new. In fact, the society in the dystopia is so controlled and safe that there is really no need nor opportunity for bravery. And as for being “new,” its “unrelenting drives toward management and development” and
“its obsessions with predicable order and consumption” only remind the reader of our society ever since the Industrial Revolution (65). Coupling horror with irony, Brave new world is thus actually “a stinging critique of twentieth-century industrial society”
(64-5). Indeed, in the novel, by his choice of character names, Huxley very wittily suggests his criticism of both the socialist Left and the capitalist Right in the modern
industrial world. Both of the two economic schools, as we have noted in the first chapter, reduce man to “an abstract fragment.” Commenting on the significance of Huxley’s naming of his characters, Rafeeq O. McGiveron observes that one level of Huxley’s irony, that of incompatibilities, occurs when his World State invokes the names of leftist “such as Marx, Engels, Trotsky, and Bakunin” as well as the names of prominent historical supporters of capitalism such as “the deified Ford, Benito Mussolini, Diesel, Rothschild, Hoover, and ‘the important industrialist-politician’
Alfred Mond” (27). Besides, what seems rather ironical is that forgoing the best aspects of both the capitalist Right and socialist Left, Huxley’s World State has taken the worst: “from the former the subordination of the individual to the supremacy of the collective State and from the latter the reduction of the individual to compulsive consumer” (27). Thus, it is clear that in the novel Huxley means to satirize both the socialist reduction of the individual to merely a “unit” or a nameless “number” in the social organism such as we find in Zamiatin’s We and the capitalist treatment of man as nothing but a “hedonistic” consumer. As pointed out by Krishan Kumar, “for Huxley, Socialism and Marxism, as the latest variants of scientific rationalism, differed from other varieties only in their greater arrogance and fanaticism, a judgment the Russian revolution and the new Soviet State had done nothing to shake”
(243). Besides, “he naturally had no greater faith in right-wing dictators or large capitalists, who are rebuffed in Benito Hoover and Primo Mellon, the last also doubling for capitalists along with Morgana Rothschild” (Kumar 243). In his article
“Aldous Huxley’s Americanization of the Brave New World Typescript,” Jerome Meckier sees Huxley as satirizing the American way of life. He asserts that “few explicit references to our Ford or America can be found in the 27 pages of the Brave New World typescript” and “this suggests that the first chapter of the novel was completed before Huxley fused Henry Ford’s America with H. G. Wells’s worldwide
utopia as his novel’s target” (3). And Fordism, as Kumar maintains, “was the principle of the modern world tout court” and “for Huxley, Fordism was the latest and most destructive of the rationalizing impulse in western civilization that had begun with Plato” (244-246). In explicating Fordism, Kumar asserts:
Fordism is a compound of the scientific management of men linked to the fullest mechanization of tasks. It carries to a logical end the basic impulse of industrialism, to reduce the human being to the status of an appendage of the machine and to empty his work of all skill and significance. It employs modern science and technology to mass produce, cheaply and efficiently, standardized items--whether of material or non-material culture. It is equally applicable to works of art and literature as to motor cars or the
production of food. (244)
In his brief visit to America in 1926, Huxley got an unforgettable impression that
“the new civilization was in the making” but he saw no hope “that had inspired earlier visitors” (Kumar 246). He visited Los Angeles, ‘the great Joy City of the West,’ ‘the City of Dreadful Joy.’ And there he saw “a world totally given over to hedonism, a world where the movies, jazz, cocktails, automobiles and having a Good Time had become equated with life itself” (Kumar 246). And he witnessed also “the fatigue and boredom that was the other side of the ‘Good Time’ and the deadness that lay at its center” (Kumar 246).
It is against this background that Huxley wrote the novel Brave New World. To Huxley, “practically the whole of modern western development has been a steady descent into nightmare” (Kumar 242). As Kumar maintains, “the most characteristic and vaunted achievements of the West--the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century and the industrial revolution of the nineteenth-- have been the building blocks of the sterile graveyard of twentieth–century civilization” (242-3).
In the novel, the reader can see that to safeguard social stability and assure the regular economic working of the new World State, some scientific means of conditioning humanity are taken advantage of by the arbitrary totalitarian government.
By such conditioning methods as hypnopaedia and genetic control, humanity suffers such a great sacrifice that the sense of individuality disappears from the individual.
Man no longer feels the need for self-realization and loses completely the desire to look for a transcendent God. Under the totalitarian rule of the world state,
“No-one,” as John Atkins asserts, “was allowed to consider the purpose of existence--nor would any properly conditioned person think of doing so” (36).
Religion, history, science and art, which offer humans means for transcendence, knowledge and self-understanding, are thus either on the decline or completely out of place. Richard H. Beckham points out that after perusing the early chapters of the novel, the sensitive reader gets the impression that one of its recurrent themes is reduction, which actually involves “those attributes of life which make us most human” (68). To make all existence subservient to the state, the reductions insure such basic institutions of human civilization as religion and art to be “sapped of their vital force” (68). In fact, all that remains for the individual is the satisfaction of shallow pleasures. The pursuit of happiness has indeed become the sole aim of living. And just as John Atkins asserts, once there was a loss of faith in happiness as the “Sovereign Good,” society would be shaken to its very foundations (36). Under such a condition, humans can never have the possibility of spiritual growth. Indeed, as John Attarian asserts, “Without struggle, without a demanding moral call to self-transcendence, without pain and ecstasy, all vivid interior life disappears” (337).
Reading the novel, the reader will probably get the chilling impression that he or she enters a modern wasteland, in which there exist no characters with a rich inner life.
Actually, in the novel, except for John the Savage and others like Helmholtz Watson,
Linda, Lenina Crowne, and Bernard Marx, we do not find many characters that deserve our sympathy. It seems that some characters like the Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons are merely twisted shadows of humans or soulless puppets. Commenting on the characterization of the novel, Peter Edgerly Firchow maintains that Brave New World is “not a novel of character but a relatively short satirical tale, a ‘fable,’ much like Voltaire’s Candide” (70). And “one hardly demands fully developed and
‘round’ characters of Candide, nor should one of Brave New World” (70).
Commenting on the nature of the world in the novel which determines its inhabitants’
depth of character, he further asserts that the very nature of the new world state in fact precludes the existence of fully developed characters. As he contends, since
“character, after all, is shaped by suffering, and the new world state has abolished suffering in favor of a continuous, soma-stupefied, infantile happiness,” it is plain that
“in such an environment it is difficult to have characters who grow and develop and are alive” (70). Thus, it is the very existence of sufferings which cause the characters to grow spiritually. In a world where sufferings are gotten rid of by artificial means, humans can only be reduced to lifeless robots. As John Attarian maintains, “a corollary theme of Brave New World is that suffering and mortification are the price of transcendence, of fulfillment, of anything worthwhile, and that when life is purged of all occasion for paying this price, attaining these things become impossible” (337). In Brave New World, few characters are allowed to be confronted with sufferings. In fact, their sufferings are either self-inflicted or caused by accidents. With their sufferings, their character begins to grow, even to the extent of being consciously or unconsciously deviant from the social norms of the new world. Yet they are actually the characters that evoke the readers’ sympathy. In their act of rebellion, they impress us as being human. Commenting on the rebellion in Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, Jenni Calder maintains that both
Huxley and Orwell “use rebellion as a means both of exposing the society they describe and of generating characters that have an interest beyond the individualistic and with whom the reader can feel some kinds of identification” and that both of them “were concerned to demonstrate the dangers of the destruction of individualism, and set out to describe what the absence of individualism could really mean” (17).
Thus, in the novel, it is through their rebellion that Huxley suggests his criticism of the dystopian world and allows the readers to consider what it means to lead a life of authenticity, a life where the individual existence has its own significance.
In the first two chapters of the novel, we see the Director of Hatchery and Conditioning leading a group of students for an introduction of both the process by which lives are “created” and how the children are “educated” in the new world.
From his introduction, the reader can see clearly the new world’s “biological foundation” and also “the psychological super-structure erected on that foundation”
(Schmerl 38). Hearing the Director’s explanations, the reader receives the repulsive impression that the new world totalitarian regime has absolutely no respect for life itself or for the individual as the sole authority in determining his or her own life orientation. Like products produced from a factory, lives of the lower class people are created on an assembly line. And their future place in the new world society has already been determined:
Standard men and women; in uniform batches. The whole of a small factory staffed with the products of a single bokanovskified egg.
‘Ninety-six identical twins working ninety-six identical machines!’ The voice was almost tremulous with enthusiasm. ‘You really know where you are. …. ‘If we could bokanovskify indefinitely the whole problem would be solved.’
Solved by standard Gammas, unvarying Deltas, uniform Epsilons. (4-5)
From the above quotation, we can see that the Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons are created to serve the industrial or economic needs of the new world state. Created through the Bokanovsky process, they have lost their own individual identity. Their sole purpose for being is just to operate the machine or to work under extreme conditions:
‘Heat conditioning,’ said Mr. Foster.
Hot tunnels alternated with cool tunnels. Coolness was wedded to discomfort in the form of hard X-rays. By the time they were decanted the embryos had a horror of cold. They were predestined to emigrate to the tropics, to be miners and acetate silk spinners and steel workers. Later on their minds would be made to endorse the judgment of their bodies. ‘We condition them to thrive on heat,’ concluded Mr. Forster. ‘Our colleagues upstairs will teach them to love it’
‘And that,’ put in the Director sententiously, ‘that is the secret of happiness and virtue--liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that:
making people like their un-escapable social destiny.’ (12)
By operating the machine and working under extreme conditions, the bokanovskified twins seem to become part of the machine itself. In fact, as demanded by their “un-escapable social destiny,” they are conceived to function like machine or at least to have its efficiency. In the process of their making, they are actually dehumanized:
‘But in Epsilons,’ said Mr. Foster very justly, ‘we don’t need human intelligence.’
Didn’t need and didn’t get it. But though the Epsilon mind was mature at ten, the Epsilon body was not fit to work till eighteen. Long years of superfluous and wasted immaturity. If the physical development could be
speeded up till it was as quick, say, as a cow’s, what an enormous saving to the community! (11)
From the above quotation, the reader can see that except for serving as a working machine, the Epsilons have no other reason for being. And not only is this the case with the Epsilons but the Gammas, and Deltas are created from the same motive.
Thus, their dignity as human being seems to be deliberately and outrageously disregarded. The new world regime actually cares nothing about their inborn human rights. But what is the case with the Alphas and Betas? Working in managerial and executive positions, they are apparently more privileged than the other classes. But these privileges are limited to the requirements of their work. And for the efficient execution of their work, they in fact need better intelligence and therefore receive different conditioning. For example, as the Controller says, Alphas are ‘separate and unrelated individuals of good heredity and conditioned so as to be capable (within limits) of making a free choice and assuming responsibilities” (182). And if they happen to abuse their freedom, they will be severely chastised and punished--even to suffer the consequence of exile from the new world. In the novel, for instance, Bernard Marx is reproved and threatened with exile by the Director of Hatchery and Conditioning because of his “not-to-be-tolerated” unorthodoxy: “Alphas are so conditioned that they do not have to be infantile in their emotional behavior. But that is all the more reason for their making a special effort to conform. It is their duty to be infantile, even against their inclination. And so, Mr. Marx, I give you fair warning”
(80-81). Thus, if there is any purpose for their existence, it can be no other than the efficient governance of the other classes. In a word, the new world seems to be designed according to the principle of an efficient working machine, with each caste of citizens playing their allotted role. It is just as Jenni Calder puts it: “the Deltas and Epsilons are necessary, not only to provide a section of the population that will
contentedly perform the necessary menial tasks, but to balance the Alphas. Without Alphas, Epsilons would be meaningless, and vice versa” (33). In the new world, as Almeda King asserts, man is only “a cog in the intricate machinery of mass production” (50). Or as Hermann Hesse maintains, in the novel, “with perspicuity and irony a completely mechanized world is depicted, in which the human beings themselves have long since ceased to be human but are only ‘standardized’ machines”
(2). In “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger sees that “the essence of modern technology lies in Enframing” (23) and that “Enframing does not simply endanger man in his relationship to himself and to everything that is” (27). In other words, technology “arranges the world into an aggregate of raw materials or resources, both natural resources and human resources” (Foltz 102). By this “enframing,”
nature can only be treated as “the chief storehouse of the standing energy reserve”
(Heidegger 21). In Brave New World, this “enframing” of modern technology comes to regulate human relationships and dehumanize humanity. Under this “enframing,”
the citizens are dehumanized, being treated as “human resources” and classified into different social classes according to their social function.
As citizen in the new world, they have absolutely no right to choose their own identity, to define themselves. In Existentialism and Humanism, Sartre sees man’s existence as prior to his essence. He states that “man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world and defines himself afterwards” (4). That is, to Sartre, man is free in the sense that with no God-ordained nature to condition his actions, he can therefore act freely to create himself. But in the absolute freedom of his choice of actions, he actually defines himself and takes the full responsibility for his being. In Brave New World, however, the case with the new world citizens seems to be exactly the opposite. Indeed, to them, man’s essence is prior to his existence. And the sole aim of their existence is simply to fulfill their un-escapable
state-ordained “social destiny”. In Existentialism and Humanism, Sartre states:
When we think of God as the creator, we are thinking of him, most of the time, as a supernal artisan….Thus, the conception of man in the mind of God is comparable to that of the paper-knife in the mind of the artisan: God makes man according to a procedure and a conception, exactly as the artisan manufactures a paperknife, following a definition and formula. Thus, each individual man is the realization of a certain conception which dwells in the divine understanding. (3)
In Brave New World, the totalitarian government actually takes the place of God.
For each caste of citizens in the new world is made according to a preconceived conception. And to consolidate the hierarchical social system and keep the wheel of
For each caste of citizens in the new world is made according to a preconceived conception. And to consolidate the hierarchical social system and keep the wheel of