In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [77]
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 1932 utopia/dystopia—an “insane life in Utopia” or “the life of a primitive in an Indian village, more human in some respects, but in others hardly less queer and abnormal.” (He does, in fact, provide a third sort of life—that of the intellectual community of misfits on Iceland—but poor John the Savage isn’t allowed to go there, and he wouldn’t have liked it anyway, as there are no public flagellations available.) The Huxley of 1946 comes up with another sort of utopia, one in which “sanity” is possible. By this, Huxley means a kind of “High Utilitarianism” dedicated to a “conscious and rational” pursuit of man’s “Final End,” which is a kind of union with the immanent “Tao or Logos, the transcendent Godhead or Brahmin.” No wonder Huxley subsequently got heavily into the mescaline and wrote The Doors of Perception, thus inspiring a generation of 1960s hopheads and musicians to seek God in altered brain chemistry. His interest in soma, it appears, didn’t spring out of nowhere.
Meanwhile, those of us still tottering along on the earthly plane—and thus still able to read books—are left with Brave New World. How does it stand up, seventy-five years later? And how close have we come, in real life, to the society of vapid consumers, idle pleasure-seekers, inner-space trippers, and programmed conformists that it presents?
The answer to the first question, for me, is that it stands up very well. It’s still as vibrant, fresh,