Aldous Huxley Brave New World: A task sheet (Á.
Farkas)
I. THE OPENING
A SQUAT grey building of only thirty-four storeys. Over the main entrance the
words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE,
and, in a shield, the World State’s motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY,
STABILITY.
The enormous room on the ground floor faced towards the north. Cold
for all the summer beyond the panes, for all the tropical heat of the room itself, a
harsh thin light glared through the windows, hungrily seeking some draped lay
figure, some pallid shape of academic goose-flesh, but finding only the glass and
nickel and bleakly shining porcelain of a laboratory. Wintriness responded to
wintriness. The overalls of the workers were white, their hands gloved with a pale
corpse-coloured rubber. The light was frozen, dead, a ghost. Only from the yellow
barrels of the microscopes did it borrow a certain rich and living substance, lying
along the polished tubes like butter, streak after luscious streak in long recession
down the work tables.
“And this,” said the Director opening the door, “is the Fertilizing
Room.”
Bent over their instruments, three hundred Fertilizers were plunged, as
the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning entered the room, in the scarcely
breathing silence, the absent-minded, soliloquizing hum or whistle, of absorbed
concentration. A troop of newly arrived students, very young, pink and callow,
followed nervously, rather abjectly, at the Director’s heels. Each of them carried a
notebook, in which, whenever the great man spoke, he desperately scribbled.
Straight from the horse’s mouth. It was a rare privilege. The D. H. C. for Central
London always made a point of personally conducting his new students round the
various departments.
“Just to give you a general idea,” he would explain to them.
Questions:
1. What is the effect of the very first sentence? What is strange about its grammar?
What explains that sort of syntax? The sentence contains a contradiction in terms
(an oxymoron). Can you find it? What tone of voice does this line establish?
2. What seemingly contradictory fields of human activity are brought together by the
name of the institution described and the motto over its main entrance?
3. What is the main factual information given in the second paragraph about the
interior described? Is this information directly stated? Why/not? Can you find
instances of personification in the paragraph? What is the function of that
rhetorical figure here?
4. There is a paradox suggested in the closing sentence of paragraph two. What are
its contradictory terms? What is the effect intended?
5. The appearance of a group of students in the scientific institution supervised by
the director is a variation of an age-old convention of utopian and fantasy fiction.
What is that convention?
6. There are two examples of low colloquial style in this bit of scientific discourse.
Can you find them? What is their effect?
II. AUTHORIAL INTENTIONS: A SECOND LOOK
In his “Foreword” to a 1946 edition of Brave New World Huxley criticizes his own earlier
self for having at least partially failed in his tasks as a writer when he first composed his
anti-utopian novel. Read the passage below and then answer the questions on the issue:
[…] it seems worth while at least to mention the most serious defect of the story,
which is this. The Savage is offered two alternatives, an insane life in Utopia or
the life of the primitive in an Indian village, a life more human in some respects,
but in others hardly les queer and abnormal. At the time the book was written this
idea that human beings are given free will in order to chose between insanity on
the one hand and lunacy on the other, was one that I found amusing and regarded
as quite possibly true. […] Today I have no wish to demonstrate that sanity is
impossible. On the contrary, though I remain no les sadly certain than in the past
that sanity is a rather rare phenomenon, I am convinced that it can be achieved
and would like to see more of it. […] If I were to rewrite the book, I would offer
the savage a third alternative. Between the utopian and the primitive horns of his
dilemma would lie the possibility of sanity – a possibility already actualized, to
some extent, in a community of exiles and refugees from the Brave New World,
living within the borders of the Reservation.
Questions:
1. Insanity and lunacy being near synonyms, it is suggested here that there is an
essential similarity relating the apparently opposed poles of the Indian
reservation of Malpais and the glittering utopia of the World Controllers. What
can that similarity be – if there is indeed such a similarity?
2. Is Huxley justified in his retrospective criticism of his own earlier work for having
failed to offer a viable third option by outlining a “sane” eutopia? Is it the job of
a dystopian satirist to undertake the task of a social engineer? Is he or she only
required to suggest, by implication, where the “way out” may lie?