Read in a Vintage edition, with forewords by Margaret
Atwood and David Bradshaw
Set 600
years in the future, Huxley’s “Brave New World” is run by a benevolent
scientific despotism. Science has eliminated most diseases and the ageing
process, but has also been used to socially engineer society. Many aspects of
our present society are inverted, so drug taking is encouraged, as is
promiscuity, books (other than instruction manuals) are forbidden or unknown,
and, in a convincing piece of cod-science, parenthood has also been eliminated –
children are instead grown in factories, and engineered to fill their
pre-designated station in life.
If Huxley
had left it there, this would have made an interesting short piece of science fiction,
a gentle satire on the way science could lead society. People are relatively
happy with their lot in life, and society can even allow dissent, albeit dissent
that is quickly isolated and neutered (rather than completely extinguished). There
is a certain prurience in the portrayal of sexual liberation in life After
Ford, (AF), but titillation in science fiction is nothing new.
However, at
this point Huxley introduces a character, Bernard Marx, who is presented as an
outsider, one who can see beyond the drug induced façade to the rottenness of
society, the emptiness of people’s lives. During a visit to a reservation, Marx
“discovers” a savage, John, living among a surviving population of unmodernised
indigenous people in Mexico. John has read Shakespeare, and sees the world much
as Miranda may have done when first discovering she is not alone on her island.
“Oh, wonder!How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in ’t!”
John has been
treated as an outsider all his life by the Indians he grew up with, but his reaction to the new
world he finds himself in is anything but positive. He is repelled by the
absence of romantic love, his perspectives having been distorted by his reading
of Romeo and Juliet and the like. He finds the new world disgusting, and despite
a long and didactic conversation with the Controller, Mustapha Mond, remains
unconvinced about the merits of this new world:
“All right then,"
said the savage defiantly, I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."
"Not to mention
the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and
cancer; the right to have too little to eat, the right to be lousy; the right
to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to
catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every
kind."
There was a long
silence.
"I claim them
all," said the Savage at last.”
When John’s
desperate attempts to retreat from society fail, he kills himself in the novel’s
final scene. Meanwhile Bernard does not emerge as the hero we originally expect
him to be – he uses his notoriety as “discoverer” of the noble savage to sleep
with a variety of important women, despite his previous objection to people
being treated like pieces of meat, and offers no help to John as he struggles
in his new environment.
While a more
optimistic view of the future than the later “1984”, “Brave New World” is still
bleak. Several of the characters are given the names of well known Communists –
Marx, Lenina, Trotsky – suggesting that this world is a socialist experiment,
where the attempt to nationalise parenthood and use science to eliminate
difference, has failed.
Brave New
World is a novel of ideas, where none of the characters are convincing or particularly
interesting, and where few of the ideas are fully developed or followed
through. The ending is predictable, unconvincing and melodramatic. It really
only works as a companion piece to the infinitely darker “1984”. In “1984” the
vision of the future is of a boot continually smashing into a face – in “Brave
New World” the future is “seven and a half hours of mild, unexhausting labour, and
then the soma ration and games and unrestricted copulation and the feelies.”
(197)
No comments:
Post a Comment