Brave New World: The Choice I Wish I’d Made

1. Brave New World: The Choice I Wish I’d Made Feraco Myth to Science Fiction 23 April 2012

2. 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!

3. 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.

4. 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).

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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 .

9. 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 soma-fueled 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.

10. 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?

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. 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-the-butler-esque narrator. Again, without giving too much away, the Savage’s character arc is the reason the book exists…so it’s worth monitoring.

14. The second chapter opens in the Neo-Pavlovian 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 name-checking, and it can be downright bizarre at times; while some of them are frying-pan-over-the-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.

15. 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.

16. 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.”

17. 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.

18. 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?

19. 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.”

20. 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.

21. 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).

22. 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.

23. 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.

24. “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?

25. 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?

26. 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 well-being. The embryo is hungry; day in, day out, the blood-surrogate 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!