1

Williams

RESPONSE TO THE NOVEL: BRAVE NEW WORLD

Response to the Novel:

Brave New World

Dan Williams

Reynolds High School

AP Composition and Literature

12 May 2016

Abstract

An explanation of one’s experience with the Novel, Brave New World. The paper moves from an introduction to the novel and its selection, to basic elements of literature, writer’s style, and finally to a personal reaction to the novel.

Section I: Introduction to the Novel

I read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley in high school and absolutely loved it. I remember it fundamentally changing the way I viewed experience. The quote “Happiness is never grand” has always stuck with me as something of a mantra to repeat when I am faced with adversity. I have read nothing else by Huxley and chose to revisit this book with the intention of becoming refreshed and to determine if I could use it for class.

Section II: Basic elements of literature

The novel is set in AF 632. With a little history and some math, the reader can place this time at around the year 2550 AD. This time period seems quite plausible; it is more than enough time, based on our current trajectory to develop the technologies employed in Huxley’s narrative; engineers and scientists would likely tell us that most of what Huxley envisions is already possible. The novel’s only geographic settings are London and the American Southwest. More important than these two locations are the buildings and objects that Huxley shows us in order to emphasize the great changes the world has undergone. Placing the novel in London, New Mexico, and his mention of Big Henry [for Big Ben] instead of creating new names, remind us that this world was once ours and that ours could very possibly become theirs.

John, the savage, supplies the voice the reader can most closely identify with. He is simultaneously upset by the discrimination and injustice he experiences in the savage reservation and appalled by the too-easy living of the World State. His position is the one we are encouraged to adopt. He represents beauty and romance. His incompatibility with the two worlds he experiences establishes theme and provides us with our moral; there must be a balance of justice and adversity in our lives.

Bernard Marx has few redeemable qualities. He is shallow and weak. His only moments of bold action are followed hard by self-doubt and regret. He immediately second guesses his defiance of the director when asking for leave to the reservation, he cannot commit to help John and Helmholtz in their skirmish with the Deltas, and he clearly uses John for person vengeance and social gain. Most importantly, Bernard reverses his position on promiscuity and the recreational use of women once he has easier access to the pleasures that his social position should have guaranteed but his stature denied. Bernard is important because he does bring all of the others together. He also shows us some unflattering hallmarks of human nature.

There are perhaps no lapses in the character of Helmholtz Watson. Watson is unique in his introspection and desire to achieve something more than the easy, downhill life his intellect and physic allow him. Watson, from the absolute barest of materials has become a romantic. He embraces the opportunity to spend his exile on an island with a “thoroughly bad climate” indicating his wish to endure some struggle. He is a constant, understanding, and loyal friend to both Bernard and John.

Mustapha Mond delivers the rational, balanced argument for the world state to John, Helmholtz, and Bernard in the philosophical climax of the novel. Mond is endearing in his clear appreciation of the past, but he prefers the safety of the future. With his unique capacity to understand our past and his present, he is able to weigh the two against each other to determine through the application of Mill’s Principal of Utility to choose control. Mond serves as a foil for John. Mond is a pragmatic realist while John is a romantic; the two placed in contrast provide the book’s most thought provoking exchange.

In a futuristic society that has removed all sources of contention and developed an inescapable caste system relying on biological predetermination, we see what is given up and gained in achieving universal contentment and safety. Most notably, promiscuity is required and family units are dissolved to prevent any extremes of emotion or a preference for certain individuals. When these measures fail to keep individuals contented, a wonder drug without side effects is used to eradicate any dissatisfaction. A few exceptional individuals become discontented with the blasé effect of endless ease and comfort. Discontented Bernard Marx feels like an outsider due to his below-par looks and resents the accepted use of women as sexual playthings. Helmholtz Watson, because of his exceptional intelligence and incredible good looks feels that life is hollow, too easy. Lenina Crown feels a socially disapproved desire to date only one man.

These three, through a few odd twists of fate end up befriending an individual from a savage reservation, a place where people live primitively, within a fence probably for psychological study or for genetic diversity. This savage shows them how very different their lives are from his and suggests some things they are missing. The savage becomes a celebrated novelty in the World State, but John finds the antiseptic new world repulsive. He reacts violently after a distressing personal loss and, along with Helmholtz and Bernard, is arrested.

The three enter a discussion with the World controller through which the reader is made to weigh the value of life as we live it now versus the way of life in the World State. Helmholtz and Bernard are sent to live on islands with others who are dissatisfied with the World State, but the savage remains in London.

The savage, unable to cope with the World State’s reality commits suicide.

The World State is able to eradicate disease, war, poverty, and stresses of any kind, and people are provided with endless simple pleasures and amusement. The cost for these advances though is love, passion, strength of feeling, and emotional depth. Ultimately the reader is made to see that even a safe and pleasure-filled world is not as satisfying and moving as a life with adversity can be. This idea is best illustrated in a quote from Mustapha Mond:

And being contented has has none of the glamor of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.” (199)

Another good line to compliment this same idea is seen when Mustapha Mond considers the virtues of a paper submitted to him by an unnamed “scientist.” Considering and stating the paper’s point, he worries about its effect:

It was the sort of idea that might easily decondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes – make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge. Which was, the Controller reflected, quite possibly true. (162)

Section III: Writer’s Style:

Huxley often implies a great deal with very little, leaving statements hang with page breaks so the reader is allowed to consider the line. “The golden T lay shining on Lenina’s bosom. Sportively, the Arch-Community-Songster caught hold of it, sportively he pulled, pulled. ‘I think,” said Lenina suddenly, breaking the long silence, ‘I’d better take a couple grammes of soma” (163). Here Lenina finds herself doing what she is conditioned to do, about to go to bed with a prestigious man. Her conditioning in the moment though is failing her as she has become infatuated and perhaps fallen in love with John. Her going to bed with this other man feels hollow and deeply wrong to her, but she lacks the language and knowledge to act on or articulate, even to herself, her feelings. In the passage, Huxley implies the great weight and sadness of the moment when she thinks to take some soma; the only thing she knows how to do when faced with her waxing emotions.

Perhaps the most comical passage in the novel occurs as and just after John throws the Deltas’ soma out the window of the Park Lane Hospital for the Dying. Picturing the mounting anger in the twins and then John and Helmholtz fighting off their attackers always seems comical. Funnier still is Bernard’s wavering on whether to help his friends or not. His indecision is very telling of his character, relatable, and pathetically humorous. The scene’s culmination in blubbering and hugging with the “Voice of Good Feeling” calming everyone down is all quite ridiculous to imagine.

We are amused at Bernards’s expense many other times throughout the novel. Even though he seems at first to be our hero- later he loses this role - Bernard provides most of the comic relief. We laugh at his worrying about leaving a tap running in a hotel room and his ill-founded-fear of being sent to an island. Huxley relies on passing situational humor for his lighter moments. Consider Lenina making a mistake at work, distracted by thoughts of John:

She sighed profoundly as she refilled her syringe. “John,” she murmured to herself, “John…” Then, “My Ford,” she wondered, “have I given this one its sleeping sickness injection, or haven’t I?” She simply couldn’t remember. In the end, she decided not to run the risk of letting it have a second dose, and moved down the line to the next bottle… Twenty-two years, eight months, and four days from that moment, a promising young Alpha-Minus administrator at Mwanza-Mwanza was to die of trypanosomiasis – the first case for over half a century. (171)

Section IV: Response to the Novel

Brave New World can be lumped in with other dystopian or anti-utopian novels like 1984, Fahrenheit 451, The Giver, and a host of lesser quality young adult reads like, The Hunger Games, Divergent, and The Fifth Wave. For literary prestige, Brave New World is most appropriately compared to 1984. 1984’s future is gritty and dark where-as The World State is pleasant and glittering; none would choose to live in Orwell’s future or identify anything good in it whatsoever. After Mond’s argument for the World State’s way of life, many less romantic individuals may be ready to head to that easy-going future. Huxley’s vision, while spiritually bleak, is optimistic in its view of man’s benevolence, ingenuity, and rational thought. The World State is created to keep everyone as safe and happy as possible, and brilliant technology is developed and employed to achieve this end. All decisions are made through application of the principal of utility. Oceana, and the other powers in 1984, however keep their power through fear, lies, delusion, propaganda, and violence for strictly self-serving reasons. Both Orwell and Huxley use their narratives to couch weighty political and social philosophy. The characters and plot seem almost secondary to the authors’ desire to educate and warn readers of frightening possibilities. Orwell subjects his audience to reading, through Winston, the Brotherhood’s treatise on Oceana’s governing philosophy; many students lose interest in this section; Huxley, however, uses an exciting and plot-relevant conversation between Mustapha Mond, John, and a frightened Bernard to lay bare the arguments for the World State and a world like ours.

I think the novel will be a fantastic one to read with juniors and seniors in Pre AP and AP English classes. The text is risqué enough, with its orgies and rampant drug use, to capture student interest. All of the inappropriate content though is shown to steer us toward the parent-approved conclusion that promiscuity is not all that it is cracked up to be. More importantly, Huxley insists that we should be happy “to suffer the slings and arrows.” High school students need to know that as far as experience and gratification go, the journey is the thing – they should enjoy an occasional struggle, savor doses of bitter-sweet, and relish in a challenge; things do not need to work out just the way we planned. Having said all of that, it is a shame that John commits suicide; not a solution to be recommended to students…

Huxley offers no shortage of spring-boards for class writing or discussion

  • “Why is it that Bernard desires solitude? What do we gain from solitude?”
  • Why does Lenina fear the ocean? Why does Bernard wish to hover there?
  • How many of you would trade your life for one in the World State if you would not know what you were giving up? Does not knowing this life change your mind?
  • What would you be willing to give up for safety and contentment?
  • Explain why you parents would approve of your reading about sex and drugs as Huxley presents them to you.

Huxley says a great deal through covert statements that require time to unpack and digest. I love this sort of writing for the discussion that it fosters in a classroom. Consider the following passage:

It was a trio for hyper-violin, super cello, and oboe surrogate… against this instrumental background, a much more than human voice began to warble; now throaty, now from the head, now from hollow as a flute, now charged with yearning harmonics, it effortlessly passed from Gaspard’s Forsters’s low record on the very frontiers of musical tone to a trilled bat-note high above the highest C to which (in 1770, at the ducal opera of Parma, and to the astonishment of Mozart) Lucrezia Ajugaria, alone of all the singers in history, once piercingly gave utterance. (154)

Many students will read this quote as a simple side-note to explain just how high the note is. On closer inspection though, Huxley’s chosen detail carries a great deal of weight, and houses one of the author’s main points: if something is easy, it doesn’t matter. Students may also be asked why Huxley names the synthetic instruments as he does.

The novel is every bit as good as I remember it. For the teenage me, the moral was mind-blowing and fresh. I wonder though, how much detail, how many subtle points I missed when I read it then – points like the one I mentioned above regarding Huxley’s description of the synthetic music. As a more seasoned reader, I can better considered Huxley’s style and judge its quality. I am excited to share this novel with students and hope it can leave some of the same valuable impressions on them as it did me.

References

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World: and Brave New World Revisited. New York: Harper Perennial, 2004. Print