The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [365]
Marx is permitted to bring the Savage and his mother out of this `inferior realm' back to the `above the line' world in London, where John is horrified by everything he sees as being a hideous stultification of human nature. He sees its inhabitants as having been reduced to no more than sleep-walking zombies. At this point, so much clearer is the Savage's perception of how limited the `ruling consciousness' of this society has become, that he takes over from Bernard Marx as the story's real hero. Finally, in the equivalent of job's confrontation with God, he and Marx are summoned for an interview with the immensely powerful Mustapha Mond, one of the World Controllers of the universal totalitarian state.
This seemingly benevolent, quasi-god-like figure explains in a fatherly way how he too had once been tempted to rebel against the new world order and to think for himself. He and the Savage even swap quotations from Shakespeare. But the World Controller has now come to appreciate the deeper and wider truth that the highest good for mankind is a completely stable, orderly society in which everyone unthinkingly and happily conforms to the collective stereotype. There can be no place in such a society for family life, great art or any deeper human feelings, because these are individualistic, disruptive and dangerous. The perfect unity of the new world order must at all costs be preserved.2
This is why Mond rules that Marx must be sent overseas to one of the remote islands reserved as prison camps for such dissidents. The story's real hero, the Savage, is meanwhile allowed to leave London, to live in a lonely spot in the empty and abandoned countryside of Surrey. Here he becomes a tourist attraction, besieged by hordes of journalists, film cameras and coach parties, peering at him like some bizarre wild animal, Soon he can take no more of this brave new world and hangs himself.
Full `dark version': Nineteen Eighty-Four
At least in Huxley's version neither Marx nor the Savage end up being crushed into willing submission to the totalitarian power. For the full dark inversion of the Job story we must go to the novel written by George Orwell shortly before his death in 1950. Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948) projects into a nearer future a picture of the rundown, bomb-damaged post-World War Two London in which Orwell lived but now ruled by a totalitarian regime far blacker than Huxley's, based more than anything on what was then the contemporary Communist regime of Stalin's Soviet Union.
As in Huxley's version, London is dominated by a handful of huge skyscrapers. But these, inspired by those of Stalin's Moscow, are the ministries through which the `Party' imposes its ruthless will on the cowed citizens. Orwell's `brave new world' is the nightmare counterpart to that of which Huxley's pleasure-dominated `Utopia' had been the dream version. No one in Orwell's world is happy. Spied on by the state through telescreens in every room, people are desperately short of food, perpetually fearful for their lives, and under relentless pressure night and day to conform like zombies to the model of citizenship imposed on them by the Party. They must join in collective hate of its enemies, and demonstrate unceasing collective love for the figure of the Party's remote, mysterious Stalin-like leader `Big Brother: In contrast to Huxley's state, family life is still permitted, but only so that children can be encouraged by the state to spy on their parents. Sex is allowed