Brave New World - Aldous Huxley [6]
Each of the World State's ten zones is run by a Resident World Controller. 'His fordship' Mustapha Mond, the Controller of the Western European zone centred on London, heads a hierarchical, factory-like concern, with a mass of Epsilon-Minus Semi-Morons bred for menial labour at the base and with castes of increasing ability ranked above them. Immediately below Mond are a caste of Alpha-Plus intellectuals. Bernard Marx and Helmholtz Watson are members of this elite, but both have developed subversive tendencies, taking delight in such deviant pleasures as being alone and abstaining from sex. They know only too well that it is 'their duty to be infantile', and that 'when the individual feels, the community reels' and both are fated to be exiled on one of the islands which serve as asylums for Alpha-Plus misfits.
The only other human beings permitted to exist beyond the pale of World State are the inhabitants of the various Savage Reservations. Segregated by electrified fences from the Fordian hell which surrounds them, the savages still get married, make love, give birth and die as of old. It is while visiting the Reservation in New Mexico that Bernard Marx meets a savage named John, whom he brings back to London. John is at first enraptured by the new world which surrounds him and is lionised by fashionable London, but he soon becomes disillusioned by the World State, and it is from John's perspective that the full, totalitarian horror of A.F. 632 is affirmed.
Brave New World has long been installed, along with Zamyatin's We (1920-21), Koestler's Darkness at Noon (1940) and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), as one of the principal dystopian or anti-utopian novels of the twentieth century. Its title is now a pervasive media catch phrase, automatically invoked in connection with any development viewed as ultra-modern, ineffably zany or involving a potential threat to human liberty. When Huxley wrote the novel, however, he had other things on his mind besides the 'nightmarish' future, and a knowledge of the precise circumstances of its conception and composition can help us to explain the ambivalence which so many readers have sensed in Brave New World.
Writing to his brother Julian in August 1918, Aldous Huxley predicted that one of the most deplorable consequences of the First World War would be 'the inevitable acceleration of American world domination'. Many other intellectuals felt the same, and the 1920s witnessed a revival of the vogue for condemning America epitomised in the previous century by Fanny Trollope's Domestic Manners of the Americans, Dickens's contemptuous American Notes and Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. This resurgent concern with the grotesquerie of America helps us to understand why Huxley was almost thrilled to find the United States every bit as vulgar and as freakish as he had anticipated when he first visited the country in 1926. The final section of Jesting Pilate, published later that year, contains a gleeful execration of the gimcrack movies, blank-faced 'pneumatic' flappers, 'barbarous' jazz and unrelenting pep which Huxley had encountered in Los Angeles ('the City of Dreadful Joy') and which made him so gloomy about the prospects for European civilisation. 'I wish you had seen California,' he wrote at the time to another recent visitor to America. 'Materially, the nearest approach to Utopia yet seen on our planet.' Huxley reiterated his doleful prophecy that 'the future of America is the future of the world' on a number of occasions in the 1920s, and it is clear that the World State, with its huge skyscrapers, dollar economy, cult of youth, 'feelies' (tactile descendants of Hollywood's talkies), sex-hormone chewing-gum, ubiquitous zippers (identified by