Diametric Dystopias (Brave New World - Aldous Huxley)

Member Name: amygdala

Product:	Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
Date:	14/02/01 (132 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Intelligent and highly inventive.

Disadvantages: Badly disguised didacticism.

I can’t remember when I first read Brave New World, but I’m fairly certain it was before I was in my teens. And I’m absolutely certain that I loved it, though I didn’t realize at the time that I loved it for what, from the author’s point of view, were all the wrong reasons. To me, the brave new world of Brave New World was exactly that: brave, and brave because it was new, that is, scientific. Life-long good health, hypnopaedically guaranteed satisfaction with one’s lot in life, abundant guilt-free sex with a never-ending stream of partners, new forms of art stimulating and satiating all the senses, and a perfectly safe, perfectly legal pleasure-drug to fill in any remaining cracks in one’s cup of happiness.

If that was what lay ahead of us, I couldn’t wait and I couldn’t understand the plea for the right to be unhappy – to suffer dissatisfaction, disappointment, disease, and pain – made by one of the characters towards the end. I understand it better now, but I don’t think I’m much more in sympathy with it. The brave new world of Brave New World still looks pretty brave to me and the only thing I would truly find fault with now is its intellectual stagnation. As in Nineteen Eighty-Four, science is utterly subordinated to state policy, but where in Nineteen Eighty-Four state policy is to enslave and imprison, in Brave New World state policy is to enthral and entertain.

And as prophecies, Brave New World might seem to be batting with a much better average. Soma, the harmless pleasure-drug named after the ambrosia of Hindu myth, is very reminiscent of Prozac, and the hedonistic consumption of the Brave-New-Worlders – no new sport is approved unless it is at least as complicated and dependant on technology as existing ones – is only slightly less reminiscent of our hedonistic consumption.

Though that second prophecy wasn’t so much prophetic as sati
rical: like Nineteen Eighty-Four, which caricatured the greyness and conformity of 1940s and ’50s Britain and the BBC, Brave New World caricatured the hedonistic consumerism of the 1930s, when the rich were as in love with technology and the pursuit of pleasure as we are now. Both books meant to create dystopias, but I think only Orwell’s truly succeeded in doing so. The vision presented by Orwell is that of a boot stamping on a human face, for ever. The vision presented by Huxley is that of perfume being poured on a human face, for ever. I know which face I’d rather were mine, though as an educated member of the middle class, I probably don’t have to worry: Huxley’s is the future my class is heading towards. Orwell’s is the future the working class is heading towards.

But the future, as usual, is already America’s present. Science is simultaneously expanding the freedom – which means, of course, the freedom to consume – of one group while destroying the freedom of another. Huge numbers of American men, mostly black and uneducated, are being shut away in prison for mostly trivial crimes connected with drugs. The technologies of surveillance and control are growing more sophisticated and powerful by the month and it seems likely that the diametric dystopias presented to us by Orwell and Huxley will arrive simultaneously in the United Kingdom as they have already arrived in the United States.

But as novels, Nineteen Eighty-Four is far superior to Brave New World, which suffers from the faults of other Huxley fictions: that is, plot and character serve as excuses, and often transparent ones, for Huxley to present his political and psychological ideas. What I loved as a boy I often laugh at as an adult, because Christopher Sykes’ acerbic aside on Huxley in his biography of Evelyn Waugh is right: you CAN hear the scene-shifters bawling instructions at each other.

And that's as true
here as it is in, for example, Huxley’s After Many A Summer: the characters are ciphers and his plot – the visit to the Indian Reservation, for example – often highly contrived. Intelligence and erudition don’t guarantee a good novel and certainly didn’t here, and although I’ll always have affectionate memories of Brave New World from my boyhood, I can’t take it seriously any more. If that is our future, I don’t mind, so long as true science finds some way to survive in it and so long as it includes all of us, not just an élite.

Summary: