BRAVE NEW WORLD by ALDOUS HUXLEY
La
version en español puede encontrarla en Un mundo feliz https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Un_mundo_feliz
Barron's Notes by Anthony
Astrachan
CONTENTS
THE NOVEL
Brave New World is partly a
statement of ideas (expressed by characters with no more depth than
cartoon characters) and only partly a story with a plot.
The first three chapters present most of the important ideas
or themes of the novel. The Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning
explains that this Utopia breeds people to order. Where this people
comes from? They are artificially created.. after fertilizing a mother's eggs
to create babies that grow in bottles. They are not
born, but decanted. Everyone belongs to
one of five classes, from the Alphas, the most
intelligent, to the Epsilons, morons bred to do
the dirty jobs that nobody else wants to do. The lower
classes are multiplied by a budding process that can create up to 96
identical clones and produce over 15,000 brothers and sisters from a single
ovary.
All the babies are conditioned, physically and chemically in
the bottle, and psychologically after birth, to make them happy citizens
of the society with both a liking and an aptitude for the work they will do.
One psychological conditioning technique is hypnopaedia, or teaching people
while they sleep- not teaching facts or analysis, but planting suggestions that
will make people behave in certain ways. The Director also makes plain that sex
is a source of happiness, a game people play with anyone who pleases them.
The Controller, one of the ten men who run the world,
explains some of the more profound principles on which the Utopia is based.
One is that "history is bunk"; the society limits people's knowledge
of the past so they will not be able to compare the present with anything that
might make them want to change the present. Another principle is that people
should have no emotions, particularly no painful emotions; blind happiness is
necessary for stability. One of the things that guarantees happiness is a drug
called soma, which calms you down and gets you high but never gives you a
hangover. Another is the "feelies," movies that reach your sense of
touch as well as your sight and hearing.
After Huxley presents these themes in the first three
chapters, the story begins. Bernard Marx, an Alpha of the top class, is
on the verge of falling in love with Lenina Crowne, a woman who works in the
Embryo Room of the Hatchery. Lenina has been dating Henry Foster, a Hatchery
scientist; her friend Fanny nags her because she hasn't seen any other man for
four months. Lenina likes Bernard but doesn't fall in love with him. Falling in
love is a sin in this world in which one has sex with everyone else, and she is
a happy, conforming citizen of the Utopia.
Bernard is neither happy nor conforming. He's a bit odd; for
one thing, he's small for an Alpha, in a world where every member of the
same caste is alike. He likes to treasure his differences from his fellows, but
he lacks the courage to fight for his right to be an individual. In contrast is
his friend Helmholtz Watson, successful in sports, sex, and community
activities, but openly dissatisfied because instead of writing something
beautiful and powerful, his job is to turn out propaganda.
Bernard attends a
solidarity service of the Fordian religion, a parody of Christianity as
practiced in England in the 1920s. It culminates in a sexual orgy, but he
doesn't feel the true rapture experienced by the other 11 members of his group.
Bernard then takes
Lenina to visit a Savage Reservation in North America. While signing his permit
to go, the Director tells Bernard how he visited the same Reservation as a
young man, taking a young woman from London who disappeared and was presumed
dead. He then threatens Bernard with exile to Iceland because Bernard is a
nonconformist: he doesn't gobble up pleasure in his leisure time like an
infant.
At the Reservation, Bernard and Lenina meet John, a
handsome young Savage who, Bernard soon realizes, is the son of the Director.
Clearly, the woman the Director had taken to the Reservation long ago had
become pregnant as the result of an accident that the citizens of Utopia would
consider obscene. John has a fantasy picture of the Utopia from his mother's
tales and a knowledge of Shakespeare that he mistakes for a guide to reality.
Bernard gets permission from the Controller to bring John and
Linda, his mother, back to London. The Director had called a public
meeting to announce Bernard's exile, but by greeting the Director as lover and
father, respectively, Linda and John turn him into an obscene joke. Bernard
stays and becomes the center of attention of all London because he is, in
effect, John's guardian, and everybody wants to meet the Savage. Linda goes
into a permanent soma trance after her years of exile on the Reservation. John
is taken to see all the attractions of new world society and doesn't like them.
But he enjoys arguing with Helmholtz about them, and about Shakespeare.
Lenina has become popular because she is thought to be
sleeping with the Savage. Everyone envies her and wants to know what
it's like. But, in fact, while she wants to sleep with John, he refuses because
he, too, has fallen in love with her- and he has taken from Shakespeare the
old-fashioned idea that lovers should be pure. Not understanding this, she
finally comes to his apartment and takes her clothes off. He throws her out,
calling her a prostitute because he thinks she's immoral, even though he wants
her desperately.
John then learns that his
mother is dying. The hospital illustrates the
Utopia's approach to death, which includes trying to completely eliminate grief
and pain. When John goes to visit Linda he is devastated; his display of
grief frightens children being taught that death is a pleasant and natural
process. John grows so angry that he tries to bring the Utopia back to what he
considers sanity and morality by disrupting the daily distribution of soma to
lower-caste Delta workers. That leads to a riot; John, Bernard, and Helmholtz
are arrested.
The three then confront the Controller, who explains more of
the Utopia's principles. Their conversation reveals that the Utopia
achieves its happiness by giving up science, art, religion, and other things
that we prize in the real world. The Controller sends Bernard to Iceland, after
all, and Helmholtz to the Falkland Islands. He keeps John in England, but John
finds a place where he can lead a hermit's life, complete with suffering. His
solitude is invaded by Utopians who want to see him suffer, as though it were a
sideshow spectacle; when Lenina joins the mob, he kills himself.
THE CHARACTERS
Because this is a
Utopian novel of ideas, few of the characters are three-dimensional people who
come alive on the page. Most exist to voice ideas in words or to embody them in
their behavior. John, Bernard, Helmholtz, and the Controller express ideas
through real personalities, but you will enjoy most of the others more if you
see them as cartoon characters rather than as full portraits that may seem so
poorly drawn that they will disappoint you.
THE DIRECTOR OF HATCHERIES AND CONDITIONING
The Director opens the novel by explaining the reproductive
system of the brave new world, with genetically engineered babies growing in
bottles. He loves to throw "scientific data" at his listeners
so quickly that they can't understand them; he is a know-it-all impressed with
his own importance. In fact, he knows less and is less important than the
Controller, as you see when he is surprised that the Controller dares to talk
about two forbidden topics- history and biological parents.
The Director comes alive only when he confesses to Bernard Marx that as a young man he went to a
Savage Reservation, taking along a woman who disappeared there. She was
pregnant with his baby, as a result of what the Utopia considers an obscene
accident. The baby grows up to be John; his
return to London leads to the total humiliation of the Director.
The Director's name
is Thomas, but you learn this only because Linda, his onetime lover and John's
mother, keeps referring to him as Tomakin.
HENRY FOSTER
Henry is a scientist in the London Hatchery, an ideal
citizen of the world state: efficient and intelligent at work, filling his
leisure time with sports and casual sex. He is not an important character but
helps Huxley explain the workings of the Hatchery, show Lenina's passionless
sex life, and explore the gulf between Bernard and the "normal"
citizens of Utopia.
LENINA CROWNE
Lenina is young and pretty despite having lupus, an
illness that causes reddish-brown blotches to appear on her skin. She is, like
Henry Foster, a happy, shallow citizen, her one idiosyncrasy is the fact that
she sometimes spends more time than society approves dating one man
exclusively.
Like all well-conditioned citizens of the World State, Lenina
believes in having sex when she wants it. She can't understand that John
avoids sex with her because he loves her and does not want to do something that
he thinks- in his old-fashioned, part-Indian, part-Christian,
part-Shakespearean way- will dishonor her. She embodies the conflict he feels
between body and spirit, between love and lust.
Lenina is more a cartoon
character than a real person, but she triggers
John's emotional violence and provides the occasion for his suicide when
she comes to see him whip himself.
THE CONTROLLER, MUSTAPHA MOND
Mond is one of the ten people who control the World State.
He is good-natured and dedicated to his work, and extremely intelligent; he
understands people and ideas that are different, which most Utopians cannot do.
He has read such forbidden books as the works of Shakespeare and the Bible, and
knows history and philosophy. Indeed, he resembles the Oxford professors that
Huxley knew, and his discussion of happiness with
the Savage resembles a tutorial between an Oxford don and his most challenging
student.
Once a gifted
scientist, the Controller made a conscious choice as a young man to become one
of the rulers instead of a troublesome dissident. He is
one of the few Utopians who can choose, who has free will, and this makes him
more rounded and more attractive than most of the characters you'll meet
in the book. It also makes him concerned with morality, but he uses his moral force and his sanity for the immoral and
insane goals of the Utopia. You may decide that he
is the most dangerous person in Brave New World.
BERNARD MARX
A specialist in sleep-teaching,
Bernard does not fit the uniformity that usually characterizes all members of
the same caste. He is an Alpha of high intelligence and therefore a member of
the elite, but he is small and therefore regarded as
deformed. Other people speculate that too much alcohol was put into his bottle
when he was still an embryo. He dislikes sports and likes to be alone, two very unusual traits among
Utopians. When he first appears, he seems to dislike casual sex, another
departure from the norm. He is unhappy in a world where
everyone else is happy.
At first Bernard
seems to take pleasure in his differentness, to like being a nonconformist and
a rebel. Later, he reveals that his rebellion is less a
matter of belief than of his own failure to be accepted. When he returns
from the Savage Reservation with John, he is suddenly
popular with important people and successful
with women, and he loves it. Underneath, he has always wanted to be a
happy member of the ruling class. In the end, he is exiled to Iceland and
protests bitterly.
HELMHOLTZ WATSON
Helmholtz, like
Bernard, is different from the average Alpha-plus intellectual. A mental giant
who is also successful in sports and sex, he's
almost too good to be true. But he is a nonconformist who knows that the world
is capable of greater literature than the propaganda he writes so well- and
that he is capable of producing it. When John the Savage introduces him to
Shakespeare, Helmholtz only appreciates half of it; despite his genius, he's
still limited by his Utopian upbringing. He remains
willing to challenge society even if he can't change it, and accepts
exile to the bleak Falkland Islands in the hope that physical discomfort and
the company of other dissidents will stimulate his writing.
JOHN THE SAVAGE
John is the son of two members of Utopia, but has grown up on
a Savage Reservation. He is the only character who can really compare the two
different worlds, and it is through him that Huxley
shows that his Utopia is a bad one.
John's mother, Linda, became pregnant accidentally, a
very unusual event in the brave new world. While she was pregnant, she visited
a Savage Reservation, hurt herself in a fall, and got lost, missing her return
trip to London. The Indians of the Reservation saved
her life and she gave birth to John. The boy grew up absorbing three cultures: the Utopia he heard about from his
mother; the Indian culture in which he lived,
but which rejected him as an outsider; and the plays of
Shakespeare, which he read in a book that survived from pre-Utopian
days.
John, in short, is different
from the other Savages and from the Utopians. He is tall and handsome,
but much more of an alien in either world than Bernard is. John looks at both
worlds through the lenses of the religion he acquired on the Reservation- a
mixture of Christianity and American Indian beliefs- and the old-fashioned morality
he learned from reading Shakespeare. His beliefs contradict those of the brave
new world, as he shows in his struggle over sex with Lenina and his fight with
the system after his mother dies. Eventually, the conflict is too much for him
and he kills himself.
LINDA
Linda is John's
mother, a Beta minus who sleeps with the Director and becomes pregnant
accidentally, 20 years before the action of the book begins. She falls while
visiting a Savage Reservation, becomes unconscious, and remains lost until the
Director has to leave. She is then rescued by Indians, gives birth to John, and
lives for 20 years in the squalor of the Reservation,
where she grows old, sick, and fat without the medical care that keeps
people physically young in the Utopia. Behaving according to Utopian
principles, she sleeps with many of the Indians on the
Reservation and never understands why the women despise her or why the
community makes John an outcast. When she returns to London, she takes ever-increasing doses of soma and stays
perpetually high- until the drug kills her.
OTHER ELEMENTS
Setting plays a
particularly important role in Brave New World. Huxley's novel is a novel of Utopia, and a science-fiction
novel. In both kinds of books the portrayal of individual
characters tends to take a back seat to the portrayal of the society
they live in. In some ways, the brave new world itself
becomes the book's main character.
The story opens in
London some 600 years in the future- 632 A. F. (After Ford) in the calendar of
the era. Centuries before, civilization as we know it was
destroyed in the Nine Years' War. Out of the
ruins grew the World State, an all-powerful government headed by ten World
Controllers. Faith in Christ has been replaced by Faith in Ford, a mythologized version of Henry Ford, the auto pioneer who developed the mass production methods that have reached their zenith in the
World State. Almost all traces of the past have been erased, for, as
Henry Ford said, "History is bunk." Changing names show the changed
society. Charing Cross, the London railroad station, is now Charing T Rocket
Station: the cross has been supplanted by the T, from Henry Ford's Model T. Big
Ben is now Big Henry. Westminster Abbey, one of England's most hallowed
shrines, is now merely the site of a nightclub, the Westminster Abbey Cabaret.
The people of this world, born from test tubes and divided
into five castes, are docile and happy, kept occupied by elaborate games
like obstacle golf, entertainments like the "feelies," and sexual
promiscuity. Disease is nonexistent, old age and death
made as pleasant as possible so they can be ignored.
Some parts of the earth, however, are allowed to remain as they were before the World State came to power. With Bernard
and Lenina, you visit one of these Savage Reservations, the New Mexican home of
the Zuni Indians. It is a world away from civilized London: the Zunis are impoverished, dirty, ravaged by disease and old age,
and still cling to their ancient religion.
The settings in Brave New World, then, seem to offer only the
choice between civilized servitude and primitive ignorance and squalor. Are
these the only choices available? One other is mentioned, the islands of exile-
Iceland and the Falkland Islands- where
malcontents like Bernard Marx and Helmholtz Watson are sent. But Huxley does
not discuss these places in enough detail to let us know whether or not they
provide any kind of alternative to the grim life he has presented in the rest
of the book.
THEMES
This novel is about a Utopia, an ideal state- and bad ideal
state. It is therefore a novel about ideas, and its themes are as
important as its plot. They will be studied in depth in the chapter-by-chapter
discussion of the book. Most are expressed as fundamental principles of the Utopia, the brave new world. Some
come to light when one character, a Savage raised on an
Indian reservation, confronts that world. As you find the themes, try to
think not only about what they say about Huxley's Utopia, but also about
Huxley's real world- and your own.
1. COMMUNITY,
IDENTITY, STABILITY- vs INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM
Community, Identity, Stability is the motto of the World
State. It lists the Utopia's prime goals. Community
is in part a result of identity and stability. It is also achieved
through a religion that satirizes Christianity- a religion
that encourages people to reach solidarity through sexual orgy. And it
is achieved by organizing life so that a person is almost never alone.
Identity is in large part the result of genetic engineering.
Society is divided into five classes or castes, hereditary social groups. In the lower three classes,
people are cloned in order to produce up to 96 identical "twins."
Identity is also achieved by teaching everyone to conform, so that someone who
has or feels more than a minimum of individuality is made to feel different,
odd, almost an outcast.
Stability is the third of the three goals, but it is
the one the characters mention most often- the reason for designing society
this way. The desire for stability, for instance,
requires the production of large numbers of genetically identical
"individuals," because people who are
exactly the same are less likely to come into conflict. Stability
means minimizing conflict, risk, and change.
2. SCIENCE AS A
MEANS OF CONTROL
Brave New World is not only a Utopian book, it is also a
science-fiction novel. But it does not predict much about science in
general. Its theme is “how the advancement of science affects human as individuals,"
Huxley said in the Foreword he wrote
in 1946, 15 years after he wrote the book. He
did not focus on physical sciences like nuclear physics, though even in
1931 he knew that the production of nuclear energy (and weapons) was probable. He was more worried about dangers that appeared more obvious
at that time- the possible misuse of biology, physiology, and psychology to achieve community, identity, and stability.
Ironically, it becomes clear at the end of the book that the World State's complete control
over human activity destroys even the scientific progress that gained it
such control.
3. THE THREAT OF GENETIC ENGINEERING
Genetic engineering is a term that has come into use
in recent years as scientists have learned to manipulate
RNA and DNA, the proteins in every cell that
determine the basic inherited characteristics of life. Huxley didn't use
the phrase but he describes genetic engineering when
he explains how his new world breeds prescribed numbers of humans artificially
for specified qualities.
[[ The main difference between DNA and RNA is the
sugar present in the molecules. While the sugar present in a RNA
molecule is ribose, the sugar present in a molecule of DNA is
deoxyribose. Deoxyribose is the same as ribose, except that the former has one
more OH. More details at: https://www.saylor.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/BIO101-DNA-vs-RNA.pdf
Little more:
Two acides: ribose is found in RNA (ribonucleic acid) and deoxyribose in DNA. Deoxyribose refers to the fact that one of the hydroxyl (OH) groups is missing ... DNA is double
stranded (ds), meaning there are two of the above strands together. See DNA
Structure at www.colorado.edu/Outreach/BSI/k12activities/dnastructurestudent.html . A little bit more: Why is DNA stable but RNA is not? - Quora https://www.quora.com/Why-is-DNA-stable-but-RNA-is-not
Finally:
DNA Versus RNA at https://www.thoughtco.com/dna-versus-rna-608191 with a VIDEO: Watch Now: What Is DNA? OPEN https://www.thoughtco.com/dna-versus-rna-608191 ]]
…
4. THE MISUSE OF
PSYCHOLOGICAL CONDITIONING
Every human being in the new world is conditioned TO FIT
SOCIETY'S NEEDS- to like the work he will have to do. Human embryos
do not grow inside their mothers' wombs but in bottles. Biological or physiological conditioning consists of adding chemicals or
spinning the bottles to prepare the embryos for the levels of strength,
intelligence, and aptitude required for given jobs. After they are
"decanted" from the bottles, people are psychologically conditioned,
mainly by hypnopaedia or sleep-teaching. You
might say that at every stage the society brainwashes
its citizens.
5. THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS CARRIED TO AN EXTREME (hedonism? Or ..Search for pleasure?)
A society can achieve stability only when everyone is happy,
and the brave new world tries hard to ensure that every
person is happy. It does its best to eliminate
any painful emotion, which means every deep
feeling, every passion. It uses genetic engineering and conditioning
to ensure that everyone is happy with his or her work.
6. THE CHEAPENING OF SEXUAL PLEASURE (Is sex an innate basic instinct impossible to avoid?)
Sex is a primary source of happiness. The brave new world makes promiscuity a virtue: you can have
sex with any partner who wants you- and sooner or later every partner will want
you. (As a child, you learn in your sleep that "everyone
belongs to everyone else") In this Utopia, what we think of as true love for one person would
lead to neurotic (unstable) passions (strong desire) and the
establishment of family life, both of which would interfere with community and stability.
Nobody is
allowed to become pregnant because nobody is born,
only decanted from a bottle. Many females are born
sterile by design; those who are not are trained
by "Malthusian drill" to use contraceptives properly.
7. THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS THROUGH DRUGS
SOMA is a drug used by everyone in the brave new world.
It calms people and gets them high at the same time, but without hangovers or nasty
side effects. The rulers of the brave new world had put 2000 pharmacologists and
biochemists to work long before the action of the novel begins; in six years
they had perfected the drug. Huxley believed in the
possibility of a drug that would enable people to escape from themselves
and help them achieve the knowledge of God, (if get the status of god is call
megalomanic) but he made SOMA a parody and degradation
of that possibility.
8. THE THREAT OF MINDLESS CONSUMPTION AND MINDLESS DIVERSIONS
This society offers its members distractions that they must
enjoy in common- never alone- because solitude breeds instability.
Huxley mentions but never explains sports that use complex equipment whose
manufacture keeps the economy rolling- sports called Obstacle Golf and
Centrifugal Bumble-puppy. But the chief emblem of Brave
New World is the Feelies- movies that
feature not only sight and sound but also the sensation of touch, so
that when people watch a couple making love on a bearskin rug, they can feel
every hair of the bear on their own bodies.
9. THE DESTRUCTION OF THE FAMILY
The combination of genetic engineering, bottle-birth, and
sexual promiscuity means there is no monogamy, marriage, or family.
"Mother" and "father" are obscene words that may be
used scientifically on rare, carefully chosen occasions to label ancient sources of psychological problems.
10. THE DENIAL OF DEATH
The brave new world insists that death is a natural and not
unpleasant process. There is no old age or
visible senility. Children are conditioned at hospitals for the dying
and given sweets to eat when they hear of death occurring. This conditioning
does not- as it might- prepare people to cope with the death of a loved one or
with their own mortality. It eliminates the painful
emotions of grief and loss, and the spiritual
significance of death, which Huxley made increasingly important in his
later novels.
11. THE OPPRESSION OF INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES
Some characters
in Brave New World differ from the norm. Bernard is small for an Alpha and fond? of solitude; Helmholtz, though seemingly "every
centimetre an Alpha-Plus," knows he is too intelligent for the work he
performs; John the Savage, genetically a member
of the World State, has never been properly conditioned to become a citizen of
it. Even the Controller, Mustapha Mond, stands apart because of his leadership
abilities. Yet in each case these differences are
crushed: Bernard and Helmholtz are exiled; John commits suicide; and the
Mond stifles his own individuality in exchange for the power he wields as
Controller. What does this say about Huxley's Utopia?
[[ That it is not utopia? It is a dystopia A possitive nihilism, dirian otros ]]
12. WHAT DOES SUCH A SYSTEM COST?
This Utopia has a good side: there is no war or poverty, little
disease or social unrest. But Huxley keeps asking, what does society have to pay for these benefits? The price, he makes clear, is high.
The first clue is in the epigraph, the quotation at the front of the book.
It is in French, but written by a Russian, Nicolas Berdiaeff. It says, "Utopias appear to be much easier to realize than one formerly
believed. We currently face a question that would otherwise fill us with anguish:
How to avoid their becoming definitively real?"
By the time you hear the conversation between the Controller, one of
the men who runs the new world, and John, the Savage,
you've learned that citizens of this Utopia must give
up love, family, science, art, religion, and history. At the end of the
book, John commits suicide and you see that the
price of this brave new world is fatally high.
----
----
STYLE
Although Huxley's writing style makes him easy to read, his
complex ideas make readers think. Even if you're not familiar with his
vocabulary or philosophy, you can see that, as the critic Laurence Brander
says, "The prose was witty and ran clearly and nimbly."
Huxley's witty, clear, nimble prose is very much an
upper-class tradition. Brave New World- like all of Huxley's
novels- is a novel of ideas, which means that the characters
must have ideas and must be able to express them eloquently and
cleverly. This demands that the author have considerable knowledge. In
pre-World War II England such novels were more likely to have been written by
members of the upper class, simply because they had much greater access to good
education. Huxley, we remember, attended Eton and Oxford.
Huxley, like other
upper-class Englishmen, was familiar with history and literature. He expected
his readers to know the plays of Shakespeare, to recognize names like Malthus
and Marx, to be comfortable with a word like "predestination."
(Literally "predestine" means
only "to determine in advance," but it
is most importantly a word from Christian theology- describing, in one version,
the doctrine that God knows in advance everything that
will ever happen, and thereby decides who will be saved and who will be
damned.)
Although Huxley was very
serious about ideas, he never stopped seeing their humorous possibilities. His
biographer, Sybille Bedford, says that in 1946 he gave the commencement speech
at a progressive school in California, where he urged the students not to
imitate "the young man of that ancient limerick... who ....said
"Damn, It is borne in on me that I am a
A creature that moves
In predestinate grooves;
I'm not even a bus, I'm a tram!"
A creature that moves
In predestinate grooves;
I'm not even a bus, I'm a tram!"
To appreciate this
joke, you have to remember how a tram or trolley car moves on its tracks. It's
a reminder that you'll have much more fun with Brave New World and
get much more out of it if you don't let the language scare or bore you. Use
the glossary in this guide and your dictionary as tools. See how many of the
words you know. See if you can guess what some words mean from their spelling
and the context in which you find them. Look them up and see how close you are.
Look up the ones whose meaning you can't guess. If you put even a few of the
words you meet for the first time in Brave New World into your
vocabulary, you'll be winning a great game.
Games were an
important part of an upper-class English education in Huxley's day. Many elite
students developed a readiness to make jokes with words and ideas. You may find
some of Huxley's jokes funny, while you may think the humor has vanished from
others. But you'll have more fun with the book if you try to spot the humor.
You'll find big jokes like the Feelies, movies
that you can feel, as well as see and hear. You'll also find little jokes like
plays on words- as in calling the process for getting a baby out of its bottle
"decanting," a word ordinarily used only for fine wine. There is
humor in "orgy-porgy," a combination of religious ritual and group
sex, a parody of a child's nursery rhyme.
In Brave New
World Huxley plays many games with his
characters' names. He turns Our Lord into Our Ford, for Henry Ford, the
inventor of the modern assembly line and the cheap cars that embodied the
machine age for the average man. He names one of his main characters for Karl
Marx, the father of the ideas of Communism. His heroine is called Lenina, after
the man who led the Russian Revolution. Benito Hoover, a minor character, has
the first name of the dictator of fascist Italy and the last name of the President
of the United States who led the nation into the Great Depression, but he is
"notoriously good-natured." Look up any names you don't recognize.
POINT OF VIEW
Huxley's point of
view in Brave New World is third
person, omniscient (all-knowing). The narrator is not one of the
characters and therefore has the ability to tell us what is going on within any
of the characters' minds. This ability is particularly useful in showing us a
cross section of this strange society of the future. We're able to be with the
Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning in the Central London Conditioning and
Hatchery Centre, with Lenina Crowne at the Westminster Abbey Cabaret, with
Bernard Marx at the Fordson Community Singery. The technique reaches an extreme
in Chapter Three, when we hear a babble of unidentified voices- Lenina's, Fanny
Crowne's, Mustapha Mond's- that at first sound chaotic but soon give us a vivid
understanding of this brave new world.
FORM AND STRUCTURE
Brave New World fits
into a long tradition of books about Utopia, an ideal state where everything is done for the good of humanity
as a whole, and evils like war and poverty cannot exist.
The word
"Utopia" means "no place" in Greek. Sir Thomas More first
used it in 1516 as the title of a book about such an ideal state. But the idea
of a Utopia goes much further back. Many critics
consider Plato's Republic, written in the fourth century B.
C., a Utopian book.
"Utopia" came to have a second meaning soon after Sir Thomas
More used it- "an impractical scheme for
social improvement." The idea that Utopias
are silly and impractical helped make them a subject for satire, a kind of literature
that makes fun of something, exposing wickedness and foolishness through wit
and irony.
(Irony is the use of words to express an idea that is the direct
opposite of the stated meaning, or an outcome of events contrary to what
was expected.)
In this way two Utopian traditions developed in English
literature. One was optimistic and idealistic- like More's,
or Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), which foresaw a mildly socialist,
perfect state. H. G. Wells, an important English writer, believed in progress
through science and wrote both novels and nonfiction about social and
scientific changes that could produce a Utopia.
The second tradition was satiric, like Jonathan
Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726), in which both tiny
and gigantic residents of distant lands were used to satirize the England of Swift's day. Another
satiric Utopia was Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1872;
the title is an anagram of "nowhere"), which
made crime a disease to be cured and disease a crime to be punished.
In Brave New World, Huxley
clearly belongs in the satiric group. (Though toward the end of his
career he wrote a nonsatiric novel of a good Utopia, Island.) He told a
friend that he started to write Brave New World as
a satire on the works of H. G. Wells. Soon he increased his targets, making fun not only of science but also of religion,
using his idea of the future to attack the present. ojo
As in most works
about Utopia, Brave New World lacks the complexity of
characterization that marks other kinds of great novels. The people tend to
represent ideas the author likes or dislikes. Few are three-dimensional or true
to life; most resemble cartoon characters. As do many
writers of Utopian works, Huxley brings in an outsider (John the Savage) who
can see the flaws of the society that are invisible
to those who have grown up within it.
As Huxley worked on
his book, his satire darkened. The book became a serious warning that if we
use science as an instrument of power, we will
probably apply it to human beings in the wrong way, producing a horrible society. Brave New World belongs
firmly in the tradition of Utopian writing, but the
Utopia it portrays is a bleak one, indeed.
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