English 3044 WWI and Brave New World (1932)

Growing Nationalism

• The growth of industrialism and secular nationalism in Europe created a dangerous balance of powers between newly wealthy Germany and Prussia and England and France.

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19^th-Century attitudes towards war

• War almost always enlarges the mind of a people and raises their character. – Alexis de Tocqueville
• When I tell you that war is the foundation of all the arts, I mean also that it is the foundation of all the high virtues and faculties of man – John Ruskin
• Its “horrors” are a cheap price to pay for rescue from… a world of clerks and teachers, of… industrialism unlimited, and feminism unabashed. No scorn, no hardness, no valor any more! Fie upon such a cattle yard of a planet! – William James
• How I long for the Great War! It will sweep Europe like a broom! – Hillaire Belloc

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Charge of the Light Brigade (Tennyson, 1854)

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon behind them

Volleyed and thundered;

Stormed at with shot and shell,

While horse and hero fell.

They that had fought so well

Came through the jaws of Death,

Back from the mouth of hell,

All that was left of them,

Left of six hundred.

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When can their glory fade?

O the wild charge they made!

All the world wondered.

Honour the charge they made!

Honour the Light Brigade,

Noble six hundred!

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War Becomes Deadly

• The First World War is caused by an assassination, but it is only the trigger for a European civil war caused by the buildup of professional standing armies and the growth of antagonistic alliances in Europe caused by nationalist sentiments. The war begins as a popular movement until its unprecedented level of destruction become felt. The Ottoman and Austrian empires collapse.

War Becomes Deadly

• Twentieth century war was mechanized with tanks, railroads, poison gas, machine guns, and toward the war’s end, airplanes. The bloody medieval Battle of Agincourt (1415) resulted in about 8,000 deaths. Compare this to the Battle of the Somme in 1916, which saw over one million casualties. In 1918 much of Europe was in ruins, and its younger generation of men depopulated. Europe suffered some 40 million deaths.

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Suicide in the Trenches (Sassoon, 1918)

• From my mother's sleep I fell into the State, �And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. �Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, �I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. �When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner (Randall Jarrell, 1945)

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I KNEW a simple soldier boy

Who grinned at life in empty joy,

Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,

And whistled early with the lark.

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In winter trenches, cowed and glum,

With crumps and lice and lack of rum,

He put a bullet through his brain.

No one spoke of him again.

. . . .

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye

Who cheer when soldier lads march by,

Sneak home and pray you'll never know

The hell where youth and laughter go.

The Modernist Death of Civilization

• Intellectual and cultural: Poets, thinkers, and leaders were shocked by the war and questioned Victorian and enlightenment ideas of progress. Some saw an end to the values of western civilization. What became known as the “Lost Generation” of poets and artists became centered in Paris where they responded to the destruction of the old Europe—these movements became tied to
• modernism, with sub-movements
• such as Dadaism (based on
• nonsense) and later existentialism
• and nihilism. T.S. Eliot, in The
• Waste Land, calls civilization
• “a heap of broken images.”

Consequences of war

• The decline of belief in unending progress: Science in the Victorian era had seen itself as a means to a better world, once freed from the old burdens of religion and superstition. War undermined much of the Victorian respect for scientists. Scientists were now often seen as “agents of death” for creating inventions that had nearly destroyed the world. The sinking of the Titanic in 1912 symbolized the failure of technological and scientific arrogance.

Consequences of war

• The rise of The United States. With European physical infrastructure ruined, its peoples depopulated and weakened by postwar diseases, and its values discredited, the USA began to become a world power and to overtake Europe. The Americans played a strong role in postwar talks and its economy and political influence hugely expanded through its participation in the war effort.

Consequences of war

• The early rise of globalization. Technological innovations in communications, such as telegraphs, telephones, movies, radio, and then early television broadcasts, allowed faster communication. The growth of cars and railroads and advanced shipbuilding allowed trade and travel to become easier. The love affair with “the great god CAR” led to the growth of early suburbs and highway systems.

The Roaring ‘20s in England

• Postwar prosperity and decadence
• Voting rights for women
• Changing social roles

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Great Depression, England 1930-39

• Communism. In Russia communist rebels established a totalitarian state, The Soviet Union, also managed by the repressive use of industrial technologies. Lenin and then Stalin crushed dissent such as churches and intellectual elites, building prison camps. As western democracies fell into economic depression in the 1930s, many saw the world in a bad state where European nations were falling into dictatorial rule.

• Fascism. Post-war Europe decided to punish Germany heavily for its instigation of the war. This helped push Germany into such ruin that Hitler and National Socialism gained credibility. Partly inspired by German Romanticism and nationalism, the pseudo-science of Darwinian evolution of the fittest race, and vague economic socialism, Hitler was an anti-Christian and anti-Jewish dictator who used the new tools of propaganda and technology to build a terror state.

Henry Ford endorsed the substitution of the engineer for the politician as “a very natural step forward.”

George Bernard Shaw called Hitler “a very remarkable, a very able man.”

Consequences of war

• The rise of factory production. Improvements in metallurgy and factory technology and the assembly-line system by Henry Ford allowed mass production of cheap cars. F.W. Taylor, whose schemes on rationalization, the scientific organization of labor, were the blueprint for Ford’s factories.

Assembly lines: Efficient or dehumanizing?

Huxley’s World in 1932

• English novelist Aldous Huxley saw a Europe under threat in 1932 from an angry Germany, a murderous Soviet Union, and a North America in economic depression. Although Huxley had trained as a scientist, he still saw some dignity and glory in man, and was worried by the growth of rationalized economic and political ideas
• which saw man as a tool in a machine.
• Thus in Brave New World people are
• ‘parts’ manufactured to fit into the
• machine of the World State, and
• indoctrinated to like it.

Aldous Huxley

• 1894-1963
• Suffered from poor vision in his adult life, ending his scientific aspirations
• Grandson of famous Victorian scientist and atheist Thomas Huxley
• Became interested in Buddhism and new age spirituality in New Mexico
• Died on the same day as JFK’s death while on an LSD trip

Characters – Do you sympathize with any of them?

• Bernard Marx

Lenina Crowne

John Savage

Linda

The Director (Thomas) – World Controller Mustapha Mond – Fanny – Henry Foster – Helmholtz Watson

Banned in Ireland in 1932, a Missouri town in 1980, an Alabama high school in 2000; and challenged in Oklahoma in 1988, California in 1993, Texas in 2003, and Indiana in 2008.

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Movie�adaptations�… are mostly�very bad…

Themes

Factory Production of People

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Is the book in a way the total triumph of capitalism? Even people can be produced to order on an assembly line as a product.

Themes

Caste System

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All people are designed to be happy with their situation. Is this so bad?

Themes

Ford as a Religion

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All religions have been abolished, but is there still a need people have for something more? The World State replaces the cross of Christ with “T” – referring to the Model T.

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The real Henry Ford: “While I am most flattered by my inclusion and portrayal, I am also dismayed and terrified of the potential truth that lays in the premise.”

Themes

Sexual Freedom and the Abolishment of the Family Unit

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Huxley wrote before birth control pills were invented.

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Is it possible to imagine a culture with no mothers, fathers, or families?

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If drugs are freely available, how could they be controlled?

Themes

Psychological Conditioning & Propaganda

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If a slave is happy, is he/she still a slave?

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But does it work? How can people still know that ‘mother’ and ‘Shakespeare’ are dirty words?

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Themes

No Philosophy or Art: It expresses useless history and emotions

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Is pain necessary for happiness?

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Oh wonder How many goodly creatures are there here!�How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,�That has such people in't!�The Tempest (V. i)

Themes

Comparison to 1984

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George Orwell’s 1984, written in 1948, depicts a dystopia modeled after Nazism and Soviet communism. Society is ruled by violent force and torture for the benefit of a powerful elite.

Themes

BNW versus 1984

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What does it mean that what we love will ruin us? Is it possible?

Themes

Satire or prediction?

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Huxley intended the novel to be humorous, but worried that some of it was coming true in later years.

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Huxley couldn’t have predicted a post-assembly line future with computers. Does that make his book less valuable?

Chapter 1

• A SQUAT grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State's motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY.

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• What do these lines suggest? What is their tone?

Chapter 1

• …the original egg was in a fair way to becoming anything from eight to ninety-six embryos– a prodigious improvement, you will agree, on nature. Identical twins–but not in piddling twos and threes as in the old viviparous days, when an egg would sometimes accidentally divide; actually by dozens, by scores at a time.
• But one of the students was fool enough to ask where the advantage lay.
• "My good boy!" The Director wheeled sharply round on him. "Can't you see? Can't you see?" He raised a hand; his expression was solemn. "Bokanovsky's Process is one of the major instruments of social stability!"
• Solved by standard Gammas, unvarying Deltas, uniform Epsilons. Millions of identical twins. The principle of mass production at last applied to biology

Chapter 1

• "The lower the caste," said Mr. Foster, "the shorter the oxygen." The first organ affected was the brain. After that the skeleton. At seventy per cent of normal oxygen you got dwarfs. At less than seventy eyeless monsters.
• "Who are no use at all," concluded Mr. Foster.
• "But in Epsilons," said Mr. Foster very justly, "we don't need human intelligence."
• Didn't need and didn't get it. But though the Epsilon mind was mature at ten, the Epsilon body was not fit to work till eighteen. Long years of superfluous and wasted immaturity. If the physical development could be speeded up till it was as quick, say, as a cow's, what an enormous saving to the Community!
• "Enormous!" murmured the students. Mr. Foster's enthusiasm was infectious.

Chapter 2

• Turned, the babies at once fell silent, then began to crawl towards those clusters of sleek colours, those shapes so gay and brilliant on the white pages. From the ranks of the crawling babies came little squeals of excitement, gurgles and twitterings of pleasure.
• The Director rubbed his hands. Then, "Watch carefully," he said. The Head Nurse, who was standing by a switchboard at the other end of the room, pressed down a little lever. There was a violent explosion. Shriller and ever shriller, a siren shrieked. Alarm bells maddeningly sounded.
• "Offer them the flowers and the books again."
• The nurses obeyed; but at the approach of the roses, at the mere sight the infants shrank away in horror, the volume of their howling suddenly increased.
• "They'll grow up with what the psychologists used to call an 'instinctive' hatred of books and flowers. Reflexes unalterably conditioned. They'll be safe from books and botany all their lives."

Chapter 3

• He let out the amazing truth. For a very long period before the time of Our Ford, and even for some generations afterwards, erotic play between children had been regarded as abnormal (there was a roar of laughter); and not only abnormal, actually immoral (no!): and had therefore been rigorously suppressed.
• A look of astonished incredulity appeared on the faces of his listeners. Poor little kids not allowed to amuse themselves? They could not believe it.
• "Nothing?"
• "In most cases, till they were over twenty years old."
• "Twenty years old?" echoed the students in a chorus of loud disbelief. "But what happened?" they asked. "What were the results?"
• "The results were terrible."

Chapter 3

• "You all remember," said the Controller, in his strong deep voice, "you all remember, I suppose, that beautiful and inspired saying of Our Ford's: History is bunk.
• He waved his hand; and it was as though, with an invisible feather wisk, he had brushed away a little dust, and the dust was Thebes and Babylon and Greece. Whisk. Whisk–and where was Odysseus, where was Job, where were Jupiter and Gotama and Jesus? Whisk–and those specks of antique dirt called Athens and Rome, Jerusalem and the Middle Kingdom–all were gone. Whisk–the place where Italy had been was empty. Whisk, the cathedrals; whisk, whisk, King Lear and the Thoughts of Pascal. Whisk, Passion; whisk, Requiem; whisk, Symphony; whisk …

Chapter 3

• Our Ford–or Our Freud, as, for some inscrutable reason, he chose to call himself whenever he spoke of psychological matters–Our Freud had been the first to reveal the appalling dangers of family life. The world was full of fathers–was therefore full of misery; full of mothers–therefore of every kind of perversion from sadism to chastity. No wonder these poor pre-moderns were mad and wicked and miserable. Their world didn't allow them to take things easily, didn't allow them to be sane, virtuous, happy. What with the prohibitions they were not conditioned to obey, what with the temptations and the lonely remorses, what with all the diseases… Everywhere exclusiveness, a narrow channelling of impulse and energy.
• "But every one belongs to every one else," he concluded, citing the hypnopædic proverb.
• The students nodded, emphatically agreeing with a statement which upwards of sixty-two thousand repetitions in the dark had made them accept, not merely as true, but as axiomatic, self-evident, utterly indisputable.

Chapter 3

• "Fortunate boys!" said the Controller. "No pains have been spared to make your lives emotionally easy–to preserve you, so far as that is possible, from having emotions at all."
• "Ford's in his flivver," murmured the D.H.C. "All's well with the world.“
• [A flivver is slang for an inexpensive car.]

Chapter 3

• "The Nine Years' War began in A.F. 141.”
• "The Nine Years' War, the great Economic Collapse. There was a choice between World Control and destruction. Between stability and …“
• "Every man, woman and child compelled to consume so much a year. In the interests of industry. The sole result … Conscientious objection on an enormous scale. Anything not to consume. Back to nature."
• "Eight hundred Simple Lifers were mowed down by machine guns at Golders Green. Then came the famous British Museum Massacre. Two thousand culture fans gassed with dichlorethyl sulphide.”
• "In the end," said Mustapha Mond, "the Controllers realized that force was no good. The slower but infinitely surer methods of ectogenesis, neo-Pavlovian conditioning and hypnopædia …"

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Chapter 3

• "Accompanied by a campaign against the Past; by the closing of museums, the blowing up of historical monuments (luckily most of them had already been destroyed during the Nine Years' War); by the suppression of all books published before A.F. 15O. And a man called Shakespeare. You've never heard of them of course.'‘
• "There was a thing called Christianity. All crosses had their tops cut and became T's. We have the World State now. And Ford's Day celebrations, and Community Sings, and Solidarity Services.“
• "Ford, how I hate them!" Bernard Marx was thinking.
• "There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol."
• "Like meat, like so much meat."

Chapter 3

• "Idiots, swine!" Bernard Marx was saying to himself, as he walked down the corridor to the lift.
• "Now–such is progress–the old men work, the old men have no time, no leisure from pleasure, not a moment to sit down and think–or if ever by some unlucky chance such a crevice of time should yawn, there is always soma, delicious soma…"
• "Go away, little girl," shouted the D.H.C. angrily. "Go away, little boy! Can't you see that his fordship's busy? Go and do your erotic play somewhere else."
• "Suffer little children," said the Controller.

Chapter 3

"Able," was the verdict of his superiors. "Perhaps, (and they would shake their heads, would significantly lower their voices) "a little too able."

A mental excess had produced in Helmholtz Watson effects very similar to those which, in Bernard Marx, were the result of a physical defect. Too little bone and brawn had isolated Bernard from his fellow men. That which had made Helmholtz so uncomfortably aware of being himself and all alone was too much ability. What the two men shared was the knowledge that they were individuals.

But whereas the physically defective Bernard had suffered all his life from the consciousness of being separate, it was only quite recently that, grown aware of his mental excess, Helmholtz Watson realized that sport, women, communal activities were only, so far as he was concerned, second bests. Really, and at the bottom, he was interested in something else. But in what? In what?

Chapter 5

"I'm glad I'm not an Epsilon," said Lenina, with conviction.

"And if you were an Epsilon," said Henry, "your conditioning would have made you no less thankful that you weren't a Beta or an Alpha."

As they flew over the crematorium, the plane shot upwards on the column of hot air rising from the chimneys, only to fall as suddenly when it passed.

"What a marvellous switchback!" Lenina laughed delightedly.

But Henry's tone was almost, for a moment, melancholy. "Do you know what that was?" he said. "It was some human being finally disappearing. Going up in a squirt of hot gas. It would be curious to know who it was…” He sighed. Then, in a resolutely cheerful voice, "Anyhow," he concluded, "there's one thing we can be certain of; whoever he may have been, he was happy."

"Yes, everybody's happy now," echoed Lenina. They had heard the words repeated a hundred and fifty times every night for twelve years.

Chapter 5

"Oh, he's coming!" screamed Clara Deterding. "Aie!" and it was as though she were having her throat cut.

Feeling that it was time for him to do something, Bernard also jumped up and shouted: "I hear him; He's coming."

But it wasn't true. He heard nothing and, for him, nobody was coming. Nobody–in spite of the music, in spite of the mounting excitement. But he waved his arms, he shouted with the best of them; and when the others began to jig and stamp and shuffle, he also jigged and shuffled.

Chapter 6

On their way back across the Channel, Bernard insisted on stopping his propeller and hovering within a hundred feet of the waves.

"Look," he commanded.

"But it's horrible," said Lenina, shrinking back from the window. She was appalled by the rushing emptiness of the night, by the black foam-flecked water heaving beneath them, by the pale face of the moon, so haggard and distracted among the hastening clouds. "Let's turn on the radio. Quick!"

She reached for the dialling knob on the dash-board and turned it at random.

"… skies are blue inside of you," sang sixteen tremoloing falsettos, "the weather's always …"

Chapter 6

“Bernard, you're saying the most awful things."

"Don't you wish you were free, Lenina?"

"I don't know what you mean. I am free. Free to have the most wonderful time. Everybody's happy nowadays."

He laughed, "Yes, 'Everybody's happy nowadays.' We begin giving the children that at five. But wouldn't you like to be free to be happy in some other way, Lenina? In your own way, for example; not in everybody else's way."

"I don't know what you mean," she repeated. Then, turning to him, "Oh, do let's go back, Bernard," she besought; "I do so hate it here."

Chapter 6

"Two hundred repetitions, twice a week from fourteen to sixteen and a half," was all his comment. The mad bad talk rambled on. "I want to know what passion is," she heard him saying. "I want to feel something strongly."

"When the individual feels, the community reels," Lenina pronounced.

"Well, why shouldn't it reel a bit?"

"Bernard!"

But Bernard remained unabashed.

"Adults intellectually and during working hours," he went on. "Infants where feeling and desire are concerned. It suddenly struck me the other day," continued Bernard, "that it might be possible to be an adult all the time."

"I don't understand." Lenina's tone was firm.

Chapter 6

"I had the same idea as you," the Director was saying. "Wanted to have a look at the savages. Got a permit for New Mexico and went there for my summer holiday. With the girl I was having at the moment. She was a Beta-Minus, and I think" (he shut his eyes), "I think she had yellow hair. Anyhow she was pneumatic, particularly pneumatic; I remember that. Well, we went there, and we looked at the savages, and we rode about on horses and all that. And then–it was almost the last day of my leave–then … well, she got lost.”

"You must have had a terrible shock," said Bernard, almost enviously.

At the sound of his voice the Director started into a guilty realization of where he was; shot a glance at Bernard, and averting his eyes, blushed darkly; looked at him again with sudden suspicion and, angrily, "Don't imagine," he said, "that I'd had any indecorous relation with the girl. Nothing emotional, nothing long-drawn. It was all perfectly healthy and normal."

Chapter 6

"… about sixty thousand Indians and half-breeds … absolute savages … our inspectors occasionally visit … otherwise, no communication whatever with the civilized world … still preserve their repulsive habits and customs … marriage, if you know what that is, my dear young lady; families … no conditioning … monstrous superstitions … Christianity and totemism and ancestor worship … extinct languages, such as Zuñi and Spanish and Athapascan … pumas, porcupines and other ferocious animals … infectious diseases … priests … venomous lizards …"

Chapter 7

Lenina was left to face the horrors of Malpais unaided. The spectacle of two young women giving breast to their babies made her blush and turn away her face. She had never seen anything so indecent in her life. And what made it worse was that, instead of tactfully ignoring it, Bernard proceeded to make open comments on this revoltingly viviparous scene.

"What a wonderfully intimate relationship," he said, deliberately outrageous. "And what an intensity of feeling it must generate! I often think one may have missed something in not having had a mother. And perhaps you've missed something in not being a mother, Lenina…"

"Bernard! How can you?" The passage of an old woman with ophthalmia and a disease of the skin distracted her from her indignation.

"Let's go away," she begged. "I don't like it."

Chapter 7

Linda covered her face with her hands and shuddered. "They're so hateful, the women here. Mad, mad and cruel. And of course they don't know anything about Malthusian Drill, or bottles, or decanting, or anything of that sort. So they're having children all the time–like dogs. It's too revolting. And to think that I … Oh, Ford, Ford, Ford! And yet John was a great comfort to me. I don't know what I should have done without him.

Chapter 8

One day (John calculated later that it must have been soon after his twelfth birthday) he came home and found a book that he had never seen before lying on the floor in the bedroom. It was a thick book and looked very old. He picked it up, looked at the title page: the book was called The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.

He opened the book at random.

Nay, but to live / In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed, / Stew'd in corruption, honeying and making love / Over the nasty sty …

The strange words rolled through his mind; rumbled, like talking thunder; like the drums at the summer dances, if the drums could have spoken; like the men singing the Corn Song, beautiful, beautiful, so that you cried.

Chapter 8

At the full moon, they would go down, boys, into the kiva and come out again, men. The boys were all afraid and at the same time impatient. He went with the others. Already the leading boys had begun to climb down. Suddenly, one of the men stepped forward, caught him by the arm, and pulled him out of the ranks. The the man struck him, pulled his hair. "Not for you, white-hair!" "Not for the son of the she-dog," said one of the other men. "Go, go, go!" There was a shower of stones. Bleeding, he ran away into the darkness.

He was all alone. Down in the valley, the coyotes were howling at the moon. The bruises hurt him, the cuts were still bleeding; but it was not for pain that he sobbed; it was because he was all alone, because he had been driven out, alone, into this skeleton world of rocks and moonlight. To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow …He had discovered Time and Death and God.

Chapter 8

"Alone, always alone," the young man was saying. The words awoke a plaintive echo in Bernard's mind. Alone, alone …

"So am I," he said, on a gush of confidingness. "Terribly alone."

"Are you?" John looked surprised. "I thought that in the Other Place … I mean, Linda always said that nobody was ever alone there."

Bernard blushed uncomfortably. "You see," he said, mumbling and with averted eyes, "I'm rather different from most people, I suppose.”

Chapter 10

"Ladies and gentlemen," the Director repeated once more, “This man," he pointed accusingly at Bernard, "this this Alpha-Plus to whom so much has been given, and from whom, in consequence, so much must be expected, has grossly betrayed the trust imposed in him. By his heretical views on sport and soma, by the scandalous unorthodoxy of his sex-life, he has proved himself an enemy of Society. In Iceland he will have small opportunity to lead others astray by his unfordly example."

"Tomakin!" She ran forward, threw her arms round his neck, hid her face on his chest. A howl of laughter went up irrepressibly. "You made me have a baby," she screamed above the uproar. There was a sudden and appalling hush; eyes floated uncomfortably, not knowing where to look.

He came in at once, fell on his knees in front of the Director, and said in a clear voice: "My father!“ The comically smutty word relieved what had become a quite intolerable tension. Laughter broke out, enormous, almost hysterical, as though it would never stop. My father–and it was the Director! My father! Oh Ford, oh Ford!

Chapter 11

Greedily Linda clamoured for ever larger, ever more frequent doses. Dr. Shaw at first demurred; then let her have what she wanted. She took as much as twenty grammes a day.

"Which will finish her off in a month or two," the doctor confided to Bernard. "One day the respiratory centre will be paralyzed. No more breathing. Finished. And a good thing too. If we could rejuvenate, of course it would be different. But we can't."

Surprisingly, as every one thought (for on soma-holiday Linda was most conveniently out of the way), John raised objections.

But I'm very glad," Dr. Shaw had concluded, "to have had this opportunity to see an example of senility in a human being. Thank you so much for calling me in." He shook Bernard warmly by the hand.

Chapter 11

"And I had six girls last week," he confided to Helmholtz Watson. "One on Monday, two on Tuesday, two more on Friday, and one on Saturday…"

Helmholtz listened to his boastings in a silence so gloomily disapproving that Bernard was offended.

"You're envious," he said.

Helmholtz shook his head. "I'm rather sad, that's all," he answered.

Bernard went off in a huff. Never, he told himself, never would he speak to Helmholtz again.

The days passed. Success went fizzily to Bernard's head, and in the process completely reconciled him (as any good intoxicant should do) to a world which, up till then, he had found very unsatisfactory.

Chapter 11

"Do they read Shakespeare?" asked the Savage as they walked, on their way to the Bio-chemical Laboratories, past the School Library.

"Certainly not," said the Head Mistress, blushing.

"Our library," said Dr. Gaffney, "contains only books of reference. If our young people need distraction, they can get it at the feelies. We don't encourage them to indulge in any solitary amusements."

Chapter 12

BERNARD had to shout through the locked door; the Savage would not open.

"But everybody's there, waiting for you."

"Let them wait," came back the muffled voice through the door.

Despairingly, "But what shall I do?" Bernard wailed.

"Go to hell!" bawled the exasperated voice from within.

In the end Bernard had to slink back, diminished, to his rooms and inform the impatient assembly that the Savage would not be appearing that evening. The news was received with indignation. The men were furious at having been tricked into behaving politely to this insignificant fellow with the unsavoury reputation and the heretical opinions.

Chapter 12

To this deflated Bernard the Savage showed himself unexpectedly sympathetic. "You're more like what you were at Malpais," he said. “You're like what you were then."

"Because I'm unhappy again; that's why."

"Well, I'd rather be unhappy than have the sort of false, lying happiness you were having here."

Chapter 12

To this deflated Bernard the Savage showed himself unexpectedly sympathetic. "You're more like what you were at Malpais," he said. “You're like what you were then."

"Because I'm unhappy again; that's why."

"Well, I'd rather be unhappy than have the sort of false, lying happiness you were having here."

Chapter 13

Zip, zip! Her answer was wordless. She stepped out of her bellbottomed trousers. "Darling. Darling! If only you'd said so before!" She held out her arms.

But instead of also saying "Darling!" and holding out his arms, the Savage retreated in terror, flapping his hands at her as though he were trying to scare away some intruding and dangerous animal.

"Put your arms round me," she commanded. "Hug me till you drug me, honey." She too had poetry at her command. "Kiss me till I'm in a coma, honey, snuggly …"

The Savage caught her by the wrists, tore her hands from his shoulders, thrust her roughly away at arm's length.

"Whore!" he shouted "Whore! Impudent strumpet!"

The Savage pushed her away with such force that she staggered and fell. "Go," he shouted, standing over her menacingly, "get out of my sight or I'll kill you."

Chapter 14

He felt the hot tears welling up behind his eyelids as he recalled the words and Linda's voice as she repeated them. And then the reading lessons: The tot is in the pot, the cat is on the mat. And long evenings by the fire or, in summertime, on the roof of the little house, when she told him those stories about the Other Place, outside the Reservation: that beautiful, beautiful Other Place, whose memory, as of a heaven, a paradise of goodness and loveliness, he still kept whole and intact, undefiled by contact with the reality of this real London, these actual civilized men and women.

Chapter 14

The Savage stood for a moment in frozen silence, then fell on his knees beside the bed and, covering his face with his hands, sobbed uncontrollably.

The nurse stood irresolute, looking now at the kneeling figure by the bed (the scandalous exhibition!). Should she speak to him? try to bring him back to a sense of decency? remind him of what fatal mischief he might do to these poor innocents? Undoing all their wholesome death-conditioning with this disgusting outcry–as though death were something terrible, as though any one mattered as much as all that! It might give them the most disastrous ideas about the subject, might upset them into reacting in the entirely wrong, the utterly anti-social way.

Chapter 15

"But do you like being slaves?" the Savage was saying as they entered the Hospital. His face was flushed, his eyes bright with ardour and indignation. "Do you like being babies?”

The insults bounced off their carapace of thick stupidity; they stared at him with a blank expression of dull and sullen resentment in their eyes.

"Don't you want to be free and men? Don't you even understand what manhood and freedom are?" “Don't you?" he repeated, but got no answer to his question. "Very well then," he went on grimly. "I'll teach you; I'll make you be free whether you want to or not." And pushing open a window, he began to throw the little pill-boxes of soma tablets in handfuls out into the area.

For a moment the khaki mob was silent, petrified, at the spectacle of this wanton sacrilege, with amazement and horror.

Chapter 16

"But why is Shakespeare prohibited?" asked the Savage.

"Because our world is not the same as Othello's world. You can't make flivvers without steel–and you can't make tragedies without social instability. The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get. They're well off; they're safe; they're never ill; they're not afraid of death; they're blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they're plagued with no mothers or fathers; they've got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they're so conditioned that they practically can't help behaving as they ought to behave. And if anything should go wrong, there's soma.”

Chapter 16

The Savage was silent for a little. "All the same," he insisted obstinately, "Othello's good, Othello's better than those feelies."

"Of course it is," the Controller agreed. "But that's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art."

The Savage shook his head. "It all seems to me quite horrible."

"Of course it does. Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand."

Chapter 16

“We could synthesize every morsel of food, if we wanted to. But we don't. We prefer to keep a third of the population on the land. For their own sakes–because it takes longer to get food out of the land than out of a factory. Besides, we have our stability to think of. We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability. That's another reason why we're so chary of applying new inventions. Every discovery in pure science is potentially subversive; even science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy. Yes, even science."

Chapter 16

"Send me to an island?" Bernard jumped up, ran across the room, and stood gesticulating in front of the Controller. "You can't send me. I haven't done anything. lt was the others.” He pointed accusingly to Helmholtz and the Savage. "Oh, please don't send me to Iceland. I promise I'll do what I ought to do. “

“One would think he was going to have his throat cut," said the Controller, as the door closed. "Whereas, if he had the smallest sense, he'd understand that his punishment is really a reward. He's being sent to an island. That's to say, he's being sent to a place where he'll meet the most interesting set of men and women to be found anywhere in the world. All the people who, for one reason or another, have got too individual to fit into community-life. All the people who've got independent ideas of their own. I almost envy you, Mr. Watson."

Helmholtz laughed.

Chapter 17

ART, SCIENCE–you seem to have paid a fairly high price for your happiness," said the Savage, when they were alone. "Anything else?"

"Well, religion, of course," replied the Controller. "There used to be something called God–before the Nine Years' War. But I was forgetting; you know all about God, I suppose.“

"If you allowed yourselves to think of God, you wouldn't allow yourselves to be degraded by pleasant vices. You'd have a reason for bearing things patiently, for doing things with courage. I've seen it with the Indians."

"l'm sure you have," said Mustapha Mond. "But then we aren't Indians. There isn't any need for a civilized man to bear anything that's seriously unpleasant.”

Chapter 17

"What you need," the Savage went on, "is something with tears for a change. Nothing costs enough here.“

We don't think so," said the Controller. "We prefer to do things comfortably."

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."

"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."

"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."

"Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have too little to eat; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind." There was a long silence.

"I claim them all," said the Savage at last.

Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. "You're welcome," he said

Chapter 18

He had almost finished whittling the stave into shape, when he realized with a start that he was singing-singing! Guiltily he blushed. After all, it was not to sing and enjoy himself that he had come here. It was to escape further contamination by the filth of civilized life.

The weather was breathlessly hot, there was thunder in the air. He haddug all the morning and was resting, stretched out along the floor. And suddenly the thought of Lenina was a real presence, naked and tangible, saying "Sweet!" and "Put your arms round me!"–in shoes and socks, perfumed. No, no, no, no! He sprang to his feet and, half naked as he was, ran out of the house. At the edge of the heath stood a clump of hoary juniper bushes. He flung himself against them, he embraced, not the smooth body of his desires, but an armful of green spikes.

Chapter 18

A humming overhead had become a roar; and suddenly he was in shadow, there was something between the sun and him. He looked up,startled, from his digging, from his thoughts; looked up in a dazzled bewilderment; looked up and saw, close above him, the swarm of hovering machines.

"Go away!" he shouted.

The ape had spoken; there was a burst of laughter and hand-clapping. "Good old Savage! Hurrah, hurrah!" And through the babel he heard cries of: "Whip, whip, the whip!"

Acting on the word's suggestion, he seized the bunch of knotted cords from its nail behind the door and shook it at his tormentors.

There was a yell of ironical applause.

Chapter 18

It was after midnight when the last of the helicopters took its flight.

Stupefied by soma, and exhausted by a long-drawn frenzy of sensuality, the Savage lay sleeping in the heather. The sun was already high when he awoke. He lay for a moment, blinking in owlish incomprehension at the light; then suddenly remembered–everything.

"Oh, my God, my God!" He covered his eyes with his hand.

…Slowly, very slowly, like two unhurried compass needles, the feet turned towards the right; north, north-east, east, south-east, south, south-south-west; then paused…