Brave New World - Aldous Huxley [4]
Of course, Huxley himself still had one foot in the nineteenth century: he could not have dreamed his upside-down morality unless he himself also found it threatening. At the time he was writing Brave New World, he was still in shock from a visit to the United States, where he was particularly frightened by mass consumerism and its group mentality and its vulgarities.
I use the word 'dreamed' advisedly, because Brave New World – gulped down whole – achieves an effect not unlike a controlled hallucination. All is surface; there is no depth. As you might expect from an author with impaired eyesight, the visual sense predominates: colours are intense, light and darkness vividly described. Sound is next in importance, especially during group ceremonies and orgies, and the viewing of 'Feelies' – movies in which you feel the sensations of those onscreen, 'The Gorillas' Wedding' and 'Sperm Whale's Love-Life' being sample titles. Scents are third – perfume wafts everywhere, and is dabbed here and there; one of the most poignant encounters between John the Savage and the lovely Lenina is the one in which he buries his worshipping face in her divinely scented undergarments while she herself is innocently sleeping, zonked out on a strong dose of soma, partly because she can't stand the awful real-life smells of the 'reservation' where the new world has not been implemented.
Many Utopias and dystopias emphasize food (delicious or awful; or, in the case of Swift's Houyhnhnms, oats), but in Brave New World the menus are not presented. Lenina and her lay-of-the-month, Henry, eat 'an excellent meal', but we aren't told what it is. (Beef would be my guess, in view of the huge barns full of cows that provide the external secretions.) Despite the dollops of sex-on-demand, the bodies in Brave New World are oddly disembodied, which serves to underscore one of Huxley's points: in a world in which everything is available, nothing has any meaning.
Meaning has in fact been eliminated, as far as possible. All books except works of technology have been banned – pace Ray Bradbury's 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451; museum-goers have been slaughtered, pace Henry Ford's 'History is bunk.' As for God, he is present 'as an absence; as though he weren't there at all' – except, of course, for the deeply religious John the Savage, who has been raised on a Zuni 'reservation' off-limits to normal Brave New Worlders. There, archaic life carries on, replete with 'meaning' of the most intense kinds. John is the only character in the book who has a real body, but he knows it through pain, not through pleasure. 'Nothing costs enough here,' he says of the perfumed new world where he's been brought as an 'experiment'.
The 'comfort' offered by Mustapha Mond – one of the ten 'Controllers' of this world and a direct descendant of Plato's Guardians – is not enough for John. He wants the old world back – dirt, diseases, free will, fear, anguish, blood, sweat, tears, and all. He believes he has a soul, and like many an early twentieth-century literary possessor of such a thing – such as the missionary in Somerset Maugham's 1921 story, 'Miss Thompson', who hangs himself after sinning with a prostitute – John is made to pay the price for this belief.
In the foreword to Brave New World written in 1946, after the horrors of the Second World War and Hitler's Final Solution, Huxley criticizes himself for having provided only two choices in his