Brave New World

An English writer and one of themost prominent members of thefamous Huxley family, he is bestknown for his novels includinghis masterpiece Brave New World(1932), a dystopian novel as vibranttoday as then. By the end of hislife he was considered a leaderof modern thought as well as anintellectual of the highest rank.

8. ALDOUS HUXLEY 1894: born into a well-to-do upper-middle class family, at 17he suffered an attack of keratitis punctata which left himtotally blind for over 18 months. He learned Braille but byusing special glasses (and with the partialrecovery of one eye) he was able to read again. 1913-15: having turned from medicine toliterature at Oxford University, he receivedhis B.A. in English and published his first collection of poetry. 1921: his first novel, Crome Yellow, a witty criticism of societywon him widespread recognition and in the following eightyears he published a dozen books.He formed a close friendship with D.H. Lawrence(1885 – 1930), an English writer who shared Huxley’svision of the dehumanising effects of modernity andindustrialisation: they travelled in Italy and France.

8. ALDOUS HUXLEY• 1930s: he moved from Italy (near Florence) to France wherehe wrote Brave New World (1932), a dark vision ofa highly technological society of the future.• 1937: he moved to California with the guru figureGerald Heard (1889-1971) who introduced himto Vedanta, meditation and vegetarianism.He published an influential study of consciousness expansionthrough mescaline (a psychedelic alkaloid found in the Peyotecactus in Mexico, for ex.), The Doors Of Perception (1954) – hebecame a guru among Californian hippies and started using LSD.• 1958: Brave New World Revisited appearedfollowed by Island (1962), a utopian novel.• 1963 (22 nd November): he died in Los Angeleson the same day in which J. F. Kennedy was assassinated.

Brave New World• The novel opens in London in theyear AD 2540 (in the book 632 A.F.,After Ford): the majority of the population is unified underThe World State, an eternally peaceful, stable, globalsociety in which goods and resources are plentiful (becausethe population is kept limited to no more than two billionpeople) and everyone is happy.• Natural reproduction has been done away with and childrenare “decanted” and raised in Hatcheriesand Conditioning Centres, where they aredivided into five castes (from Alphas toEpsilons) designed to fulfill predeterminedpositions within the social and economicstrata of the World State.

Brave New World (1932)• Indoctrination starts at birth through “hypnopædia”,i.e. recorded voices repeating slogans during sleepwhich teach people• to value constant material consumption (since“spending is better than mending”);• to make use of soma, a hallucinogenthat takes users on hangover-free“holidays”, releasing them from theneed of transcendence and solitude;• to consider sex a social activity (since“everyone belongs to everyone else”).Words like “marriage”, “natural birth”, “parenthood”, “pregnancy”are too obscene to be mentioned in casual conversation!

Brave New World• Spending time alone is considered an outrageous waste oftime and money; moreover wanting to be an individual ishorrifying so free time is spent enjoying the company ofone’s caste members and doing activities together.• People typically die at age 60 having maintained good healthand youthfulness their whole life: death isn’t feared and,since no one has family, they have no ties to mourn.• But in The World State there is still anarea, located somewhere in New Mexico,where people live in the “old way”: it isknown as The Savage Reservation andthe contact between the inhabitants ofthe two worlds will bring about tragicconsequences…

Contemporary issues.• Although the novel is set in the future, it contains issues ofthe early (as well as the late!) 20 th century: the IndustrialRevolution had transformed the world.• In 1908 Henry Ford’s first Model T rolled off his assemblyline, built on the principles of• mass production,• homogeneity,• predictability,• consumption of disposableconsumer goods.• Banned, challenged and misundertood at various times, thisscience fiction novel expresses, above all, the fear of losingindividual identity in the fast-paced world of the future.

Orwell vs Huxley (2)Orwell feared that the truth would be concealedfrom us.Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in asea of irrelevance.Orwell feared we would become a captive culture.Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.In “1984” people are controlled by inflicting pain.In “Brave New World” they are controlled byinflicting pleasure.Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us.Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.