5. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Year Published: 1932

Pages: 311

First Sentence: A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories.

Rating: 3/3 (read it!)

Review:

The first time I read Brave New World I was in my grade 12 year of high school, and I read it because I didn't understand Ragtime* well enough to write an essay about it. Brave New World, being an sf novel, was much more my speed.

I've been very curious to find out what I'd think of Brave New World the second time around. I remembered the beginning section with the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning giving a group of students a tour through what is essentially a factory for building humans. I remembered John, the natural man. I vaguely remembered what becomes of him at the end of the book. But there was a lot that I managed to forget. 

 My plot summaries don't usually extend beyond the one third mark of the book but I'm going to have to go a little further this time.  As I mentioned, the book begins by introducing us to its society via a really well-executed info dump. We learn that human reproduction has been industrialized and that citizens are carefully produced throughout the process of gestation and childhood to be hedonistic cogs in a great machine. This is achieved using a combination of physical interventions in the bottles that now perform the office of a womb, as well as various kinds of conditioning. The notion of a "mother" is vulgar. The result is a society that is rigidly controlled and stratified into different castes. The Alphas at the top are the most intelligent and have jobs that require this intelligence, while Epsilons are deliberately disabled in the bottle and taught to love horrible work conditions in deadly environments. Neither Alphas nor Epsilons nor anyone in between should ever think about their lot in life, either, though, so everyone is pumped full of mindless entertainment and a drug called soma. They're also encouraged to maximize their consumption of all kinds.

In this world we're introduced to two main characters at first. Lenina Crowne is a young woman who works at the hatchery. It's never stated in the book which caste she's a part of, but we do learn how "pneumatic" she is, and she's desired by every man in the novel. She's nearly the ideal citizen—someone who just wants fun and novelty, to feel good all the time and to take some to feel even better or to quiet any doubts. On the other hand is Bernard Marx. He's a member of the Alpha caste but he also has short man syndrome which makes him grumpy. He dislikes the shallowness of his culture. He likes Lenina as much as anyone, though, and invites her to go to the Savage Reservation, a place somewhere in America that has been deemed basically worthless and therefore has been cordoned off for "savages" to live in (in other words, people that live outside of the global system).

While visiting the Savage Reservation, Lenina and Bernard stumble upon the existence of a man named John and his mother Linda. Linda was formerly one of them, and became lost while visiting the reservation. Prior to that at some point, she had also become pregnant, something which shouldn't have been possible if she was properly doing her "Malthusian drill." Anyway, John has grown up listening to Linda's stories of the paradise she came from and also reading the complete works of Shakespeare.

(In other words, yes, this is a Star Trek episode where the Enterprise forgot to show up.)

Lenina and Bernard bring John and Linda back to "civilization" with them and the narrative shifts to focus mostly on John's encounter with utopia.

So this book is pretty excellent. The addition of the new main character a little more than a third of the way through does wreak havoc on the pacing, but the book really zips by even with that considered. I'm probably one of only a dozen or so people currently living who has actually read two books by Aldous Huxley, and the prose in this one is jaunty and light with a touch of humour that really belies the darkness of the subject matter, as compared with Point Counter Point, which was often a chore to read.

Brave New World has come up a lot over the last decade because it's really evocative of our current entertainment environment of all distraction, all the time. That is absolutely true. But I think there are other aspects to it that are also really interesting that don't get discussed as much.

One is the mass production of human beings. I don't know if Brave New World is the origin of the concept of rows upon rows of fetuses in jars but if it's not the first it must be one of the earliest examples. One aspect of this that I didn't mention earlier is that they literally are mass-producing people by forcing fertilized eggs to "bud" and creating many identical twins (often 96 or even more). This in combination with the indoctrination process really blurs the line of individuality in this world. It also forces the reader to consider the individuality of the people who currently, in our actual world, fill the positions that are occupied by the lower castes in the Brave New World.

The other thing that doesn't get examined enough is the concept of the necessity of human suffering. Brave New World isn't the only work of art where this concept shows up. On its surface, I agree with it. All my experiences, both the joyful and the painful, h ave made me who I am. But I've also grown up privileged, healthy, and well off. There are many people who have suffered to death on this planet. There is suffering beyond understanding or expression in this real world. For many years, people have been encouraged to turn to God to cope with this, but in a world without God, where is the incentive to say that this level of suffering is necessary? I'm getting a bit carried away here, but I think this is an idea that deserves very careful and critical consideration.

Brave New World and 1984 are often discussed together so I'll briefly do that as well. Brave New World is the more engaging read. Both books use language to flesh out their worlds: 1984 has Newspeak, Brave New World has dumb, infantile names for everything (zippycamiknicks and feelies to name a couple). On a character drama level I think 1984 is better, though. As far as prescience goes, they're equal. Both have things to say about the world of the times when they were published, and about the modern world, but we shouldn't get carried away saying that either one has come to pass.

* The date that Ragtime review was posted is in September 2010. I was six years out of high school at the time and predicted that I'd be reviewing Brave New World in five years. You can do the math to see how long it's actually been.

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Primroses and landscapes, he pointed out, have one grave defect: they are gratuitous. A love of nature keeps no factories busy. It was decided to abolish the love of nature, at any rate among the lower classes; to abolish the love of nature, but not the tendency to consume transport. For of course it was essential that they should keep on going to the country, even though they hated it. The problem was to find an economically sounder reason for consuming transport than a mere affection for primroses and landscapes. It was duly found.

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Our Ford—or Our Freud, as, for some inscrutable reason, he chose to call himself whenever he spoke of psychological matters—Our Freud had been the first to reveal the appalling dangers of family life.

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Success went fizzily to Bernard's head, and in the process completely reconciled him (as any good intoxicant should do) to a world which, up till then, he had found very unsatisfactory.

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The Savage was silent for a little. 'All the same,' he insisted obstinately, 'Othello's good, Othello's better than those feelies.' 

     'Of course it is,' the Controller agreed. 'But that's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art. We have the feelies and the scent organ instead.'

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Talking About Music

Occasionally I actually do benefit somewhat from my broader survey of the Western canon via The List.

Which is to say that there is a joke in Point Counter Point that I'm certain is a reference to Zuleika Dobson, and if not for this project, I never would've caught it.

How am I certain?

Well, because Aldous Huxley name drops Max Beerbohm in his novel.

It comes up a couple of times in Zuleika Dobson. Here is the first:

And Zuleika returned his gaze with a smile not less gay. She was not sure what he was playing. But she assumed that it was for her, and that the music had some reference to his impending death. She was one of the people who say "I don't know anything about music really, but I know what I like."

That's really just set up for the second:

He asked: "To what am I indebted for this visit?"
     "Ah, say that again!" she murmured. "Your voice is music."
     He repeated his question.
     "Music!" she said dreamily; and such is the force of habit that "I don't," she added, "know anything about music, really. But I know what I like."

And here's the one from Point Counter Point, which is much wordier, I'm afraid, and not as funny:

"I hesitated," Lady Edward went on in the same significantly intimate tone, "between Handel's Water Music and the B minor Suite with Pongileoni. Then I remembered you and decided on the Bach." Her eyes took in the signs of embarrassment on the General's ruddy face.
     "That was very kind of you," he protested. "Not that I can pretend to understand much about music. But I know what I like, I know what I like." The phrase seemed to give him confidence. He cleared his throat and started again. "What I always say is..."

Point/Counterpoint

;)

44. Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley

Year Published: 1928
Pages: 432
First Sentence: "You won't be late?"
Rating: 2/3 (meh)

Review:

Aldous Huxley is most famous nowadays for his novel Brave New World, which I read in high school and will be rereading in several years because it's #5 on The List. Certainly dystopia is having a moment right now and for the past decade or so, but the novel at hand, Point Counter Point, is less popular for a few other reasons.

Point Counter Point is concerned with human passions versus reason and the intellect. To illustrate this, Huxley throws situational dice featuring an enormous cast of characters in 1920s London, some of whom are based on real people who were running around at the time. Walter Bidlake is dealing with his boring, silly mistress Marjorie and also pursuing a woman named Lucy Tantamount. Philip and Elinor Quarles are generally trying to navigate the fact that their marriage is in trouble because Philip struggles to express his feelings. Lucy's father's lab assistant, Illidge, is bitter about how everyone he interacts with is rich. There really isn't an overarching plot, just this overarching question of what happens when passion is pitted against reason.

The lack of plot and surfeit of theme are not insurmountable issues. The way the beginning of the book is structured, I thought that the perspective would jump from one character to another without stopping throughout, but eventually we return to Walter and Marjorie and then things settle down in terms of character introductions. There are a few too many characters to keep track of, although they at least all are distinct personalities within the narrative. It's just hard to keep track of all of the Burlaps, Bidlakes, and Webleys (I had to look up that last name since I couldn't remember it at all and thought it also started with a B). And although they're well-drawn, all of the characters are basically mouthpieces for different ideas. There's even a fantastic meta bit in which Philip Quarles writes in his notebook about a novel he wants to write featuring musicality and variations on a theme. He writes:

Those incredible Diabelli variations, for example. The whole range of thought and feeling, yet all in organic relation to a ridiculous little waltz tune. Get this into a novel. How? The abrupt transitions are easy enough. All you need is a sufficiency of characters and parallel, contrapuntal plots. While Jones is murdering a wife, Smith is wheeling the perambulator in the park. You alternate the themes. More interesting, the modulations and variations are also more difficult. He shows several people falling in love, or dying, or praying in different ways—dissimilars solving the same problem. Or, vice versa, similar people confronted with dissimilar problems. In this way you can modulate through all the aspects of your theme, you can write variations in any number of different moods. Another way: The novelist can assume the god-like create privilege and simply elect to consider the events of the story in their various aspects—emotional, scientific, economic, religious, metaphysical, etc. He will modulate from one to the other—as, from the aesthetic to the physico-chemical aspect of things, from the religious to the physiological or financial. But perhaps this is a too tyrannical imposition of the author's will. Some people would think so.

And then after a break:

Put a novelist into the novel. He justifies aesthetic generalizations, which may be interesting—at least to me. He also justifies experiment. Specimens of his work may illustrate other possible or impossible ways of telling a story. And if you have him telling parts of the same story as you are, you can make a variation on the theme. But why draw the line at one novelist inside your novel? Why not a second inside his? And a third inside the novel of the second? And so on to infinity, like those advertisements of Quaker Oats where there's a Quaker holding a box of oats, on which is a picture of another Quaker holding another box of oats, on which etc., etc. At about the tenth remove you might have a novelist telling your story in algebraic symbols or in terms of variations in blood pressure, pulse, secretion of ductless glands, and reaction times.

The novel is saved from being a boring set of dialogues like Walden Two by a few factors: Huxley is a much better writer than Skinner, the characters are all distinct people in distinct situations, and finally Huxley's mind-boggling prescience. The book is more quotable than anything else I've read in a long time, except maybe Julius Caesar. I don't know enough about the 1920s London lit scene to have picked up on who any of the characters were modelled after besides being convinced that Philip Quarles is Huxley's portrait of himself (and not a very flattering one). My favourite part of the book was the chapter featuring the courtship of the characters Mark and Mary Rampion, a poor man who married a rich girl and eventually made a living through art. I was surprised to find out that Mark Rampion is apparently modelled after D. H. Lawrence. Maybe I shouldn't be quite so surprised, though, since I at least appreciated the concept of The Rainbow, if not its execution.

Would you believe that I'm struggling with a rating yet again? I almost regret the conclusion I drew when reviewing Light in August about not adding a 2.5 rating. Books tend to end up getting 2/3 ratings when I find them a chore to read, but just because something's hard doesn't mean it's not worthwhile for other reasons. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I hope that ultimately you'll decide to read some of these books not solely based on my ratings, but on my reviews as well. In this case, yep, Point Counter Point was a chore and I never really wanted to pick it back up again. It's dense for obvious reasons, and I can't enthusiastically recommend it to just anyone, but I think there's a lot of interesting stuff in this novel that would reward a close reading by an interested party.

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Polly's voice dropped again to a stage whisper. She liked to make everything sound exciting—as exciting as she felt everything to be. She was only twenty.

- - - - -

"...Because... yes, because I really like hating and being bored."
He liked it. The rain fell and fell; the mushrooms sprouted in his very heart and he deliberately cultivated them. He could have gone to see his friends; but he preferred to be bored and alone.

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Her stockings were the colour of sunburnt flesh. Brought up in an epoch when ladies apparently rolled along on wheels, Mr. Quarles was peculiarly susceptible to calves, found modern fashions a treat, and could never quite get over the belief that the young women who adopted them had deliberately made themselves indecent for his benefit and because they wanted him to become their lover.

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But the very possession of a body is a cynical comment on the soul and all its ways. It is a piece of cynicism, however, which the soul must accept, whether it likes it or no. Elinor duly went to bed at eleven and came down to meals—if only that she might have strength to endure yet more unhappiness. To suffer was the only thing she could do; she wanted to suffer as much and intensely as she could.

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