More on Brave New World

While re-reading Brave New World, I found a lot with regard to the Hamlet quotes, but I also noticed a lot of other stuff that I'd neglected the other times I'd read the book.

I'd never noticed how appropriate Mr. Foster's name is.  In the book, children aren't really born; rather, they're "decanted."  As such, they don't really have parents, so Mr. Foster, in working in the Hatchery, is sort of like a foster parent.

Around the same time that Mr. Foster is introduced in the book (chapter one), social predestination is mentioned.  While the caste element of this predestination is encountered throughout the book, I think this early section is the only time that other physical conditioning is mentioned (at least at any length):

On Rack 10 rows of next generation's chemical workers were being trained in the toleration of lead, caustic soda, tar, chlorine.  The first batch of two hundred and fifty embryonic rocket-plane engineers was just passing the eleven hundred metre mark on Rack 3.  A special mechanism kept their containers in constant rotation.  "To improve their sense of balance," Mr. Foster explained, "Doing repairs on the outside of a rocket in mid-air is a ticklish job,  We slacken off the circulation when they're right way up, so that they're half starved, and double the flow of surrogate when they're upside down.  They learn to associate topsy-turvydom with well-being; in fact, they're only truly happy when they're standing in their heads."

About a page earlier, heat conditioning is also mentioned, for those "predestined to emigrate to the tropics."  As the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning explains, "All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny."

Reading the book this time, I realized more fully how disastrous this is.  Not only is it messing around with biology and free will with (at best) questionable ethics, but it also totally disregards the possibility of new job positions or old jobs' becoming obsolete.  If a new position requiring specific skills is spontaneously created, there won't be anyone with those skills, and there will be a period of about two decades before a group can be decanted and conditioned to qualify for that position.  And if rockets are no longer being built, what are those two hundred and fifty rocket-plane engineers - already endowed with those specific skills and only those specific skills - going to do?  In the one case, there's a deficit (or maybe even an impediment), and in the other, there's a surplus.  Either would significantly affect the technological progress that's so important in the book.

I also noticed to a new degree how much religion has been eradicated.  As the Director explains in chapter three, "All crosses had their tops cut and became T's," but this is also seen just in the word cross itself.  Instead of Charing Cross Station, there's Charing-T Tower, which encapsulates not only the book's view of technological progress (what was a station has become a tower) but also this eradication of religion and some specific religious elements.  Yet - interestingly - as an adjective (a synonym for angry), cross still exists.  In chapter four, Lenina says, "Henry gets cross if I keep him waiting."

There's also a fair amount about delayed gratification that I hadn't noticed before.  In chapter six, Bernard says, "I didn't want it to end with our going to bed... not at once, not the first day," and he says he wants "to try the effect of arresting my impulses."  When John is introduced, he's shown to "arrest his impulses" without even thinking about it.  In chapter seven when he sees Lenina, he "was so much overcome that he had to turn away and pretend to be looking very hard at something on the other side of the square."  When John sees Lenina sleeping in the rest-house in the reservation, he even denounces his impulses:

He found himself reflecting that he had only to take hold of the zipper at her neck and give one long, strong pull... He shut his eyes, he shook his head.  ...  Detestable thought!  He was ashamed of himself.

Bernard seems helpless to "arrest his impulses," but John has no problem in doing so, not even daring to look at Lenina.

Finally, I understood to a better degree John's inhabiting the lighthouse in the last chapter of the book.  Not only is he trying to give himself some direction ("Oh, forgive me!  Oh, make me pure!  Oh, help me to be good!"), but he also wants to be an example to the rest of society.  It's not explicitly mentioned in the book, but he does think "vindictively" that throwing away the enhanced food he's purchased will "teach them."  In a way, the purer life that he endeavors to lead will be a beacon for everyone else, so it's fitting that he lives in a lighthouse.

Hamlet in Brave New World

I recently re-read Brave New World.  At the same time, I was also re-reading Hamlet (and I still am), so I discovered some connections between the two, specifically in how Huxley uses the original context of the Hamlet quotes to add some more depth to his characters.

This post contains spoilers for both Hamlet and Brave New World.

In Chapter 8 in the midst of John's history in the reservation, he acquires The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, which - in a way - give him the language to express his thoughts.  At the same time, it's explained how he hates Popé, one of the Indians on the reservation with whom his mother Linda spends a lot of time.  It's kind of hard to tell whether Shakespeare helps John in articulating his hate for Popé, or whether John starts hating Popé because of what he reads in Shakespeare and how similar it is to his own situation.  In any case, his hating Popé is accompanied with two Shakespeare quotes:

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

And, when John's thoughts turn to murdering Popé:

When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage
Or in the incestuous pleasure of his bed

Both of these are from Hamlet.  The first ("Nay, but to live...") is in Act III, Scene IV (lines 103-106), when Hamlet talks to Gertrude about her marrying Claudius so soon after King Hamlet's death, and the second ("When he is drunk asleep...) is at the very end of Act III, Scene III (lines 92-93), when Hamlet resists killing Claudius because Claudius is praying (and Hamlet thinks that killing him in the midst of prayer will send him to Heaven, which Hamlet wants to avoid), so he thinks of better opportunities to kill him.

The characters in Brave New World sort of match up to the rôles in Hamlet.  John is Hamlet.  His mother Linda is Gertrude.  Popé is Claudius.  But the rôle of King Hamlet could be fulfilled by either Thomas (the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning), who is John's biological father, or - more broadly - the "civilized" society of England itself.  (I think the broader application is more useful.)  In both works, the son tries to kill his mother's new partner, and because Hamlet does this at the behest of the Ghost of King Hamlet, the parallels suggest that, in trying to kill Popé, John aligns himself with his father figure - England, including its "civilized" values of conformity and possibly even its caste system.  In the reservation, John and Linda stick out, and through John's attempts to complete the Indians' rituals, it's obvious that he's trying to fit in.  Before he sees England firsthand, he thinks it will provide him with that sense of belonging.

The parallels beyond that get sort of confusing, and they might even break down after that scene.  Like Hamlet, John dies at the end, but where Hamlet is (at least relatively) successful in avenging his father by killing Claudius, John turns away from his father figure - the society that bred him.  He doesn't have the strength to reform - or even resist - the "civilized" England and hangs himself.  At the end of the book, when he's discovered dead, his feet "turned towards the right: north, north-east, east, south-east, south-south-west; then paused, and, after a few seconds, turned as unhurriedly back towards the left.  South-south-west, south, south-east, east...."  This is similar to Hamlet's "I am but mad north-north-west.  When the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw" (II.ii.388-389), but I'm not sure of the depth of the resemblance.  I don't think I can make a very strong case for the southerly direction that John's feet point for most of the description and their connection with Hamlet's ability to "know a hawk from a handsaw" (i.e. that John was the only sane person in a land of crazy people), but at the very least, John's feet's directions - combined with that Hamlet quote - illustrate the conflict within him - whether he would adopt the ways of "civilization" or renounce them.  It could also represent the split nature of his being - his parents were from the "civilized" society yet he was raised as a "savage" in the reservation.

I think there's also a lot to be said between the two works about what's natural and what's artificial.  The conditioning in Brave New World seems to have some precedent with the differentiation of "seems" and "is" in Hamlet, but I'd have to re-read both again in order to pay attention to those specific points.  Additionally, in the same way that John can be cast as Hamlet, I think he bears some resemblance to Miranda from The Tempest (beyond just their shared excitement about a "brave new world"), but I think it's been two years since I last read The Tempest, so in order to support that claim I'd have to reacquaint myself with that too.  Reading Brave New World this time, I was paying attention mostly to the characters' connections to Hamlet.

Alliteration in The Return of the King

While re-reading The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, I found multiple instances where Tolkien's writing style emulates that of Anglo-Saxon poems.  Most of my knowledge of Anglo-Saxon poems comes from the introduction to my edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  The version I have is in the Oxford World's Classics series, translated by Keith Harrison with an introduction by Helen Cooper.  In the introduction Cooper notes the frequent alliteration in the poem: "the defining feature of the poems of the movement [the "Alliterative Revival" of the 14th century] is the repetition of key sounds within each line, rather than a rhyme or a strictly regular metrical pattern."  Additionally, the introduction to one of my editions of Beowulf mentions this alliteration.  The translator - Burton Raffel - notes that he "felt it advisable, even obligatory, to alliterate much more freely, occasionally as the Old English alliterates," and in the afterword Roberta Frank notes that the lines are "linked by alliteration."  While Beowulf is older than Sir Gawain the Green Knight, through that particular stylistic element they're connected (based on Cooper's comments on the "Alliterative Revival," it seems as if the alliteration in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight might be reviving that of poems like Beowulf).  The themes (of knights and battles) are similar too.  Tolkien studied - and, if I'm not mistaken, even taught - Anglo-Saxon literature (I recently got his translation of Beowulf), so I'm pretty sure that he would have been familiar with this particular feature and it's not surprising that he includes it in The Lord of the Rings.

This posts contains spoilers for The Return of the King.

The first instance I found of this alliteration is at the end of Chapter 3 (The Muster of Rohan).  Before the knights of Rohan go to aid Gondor, they sing a song about Théoden:

From dark Dunharrow in the dim morning
with thane and captain rode Thengel's son:
to Edoras he came, the ancient halls
of the Mark-wardens mist-enshrouded;
golden timbers were in gloom mantled.
Farewell he bade to his free people,
hearth and high-seat, and the hallowed places,
where long he had feasted ere the light faded.
Forth rode the king, fear behind him,
fate before him.  Fealty kept he;
oaths he had taken, all fulfilled them.
Forth rode Théoden.  Five nights and days
east and onward rode the Eorlingas
through Folde and Fenmarch and the Firienwood,
six thousand spears to Sunlending,
Mundburg the mighty under Mindolluin,
Sea-kings' city in the South-kingdom
foe-beleaguered, fire-encircled.
Doom drove them on.  Darkness took them,
horse and horseman; hoofbeats afar
sank into silence: so the songs tell us.

Once they arrive and the battle begins (at the end of Chapter 5, the title of which [The Ride of the Rohirrim] is alliterative in itself), there's an-other alliterative cheer:

Arise, arise, Riders of Théoden!
Fell deeds awake: fire and slaughter!
spear shall be shaken, shield be splintered,
a sword-day, a red day, ere the sun rises!
Ride now, ride now! Ride to Gondor!

But, interestingly, that alliterative element also makes its way into Tolkien's prose here:

With that he [Théoden] seized a great horn from Guthláf, his banner-bearer, and he blew such a blast upon it that it burst asunder.  And straightway all the horns in the host were lifted up in music, and the blowing of the horns of Rohan in that hour was like a storm upon the plain and a thunder in the mountains.

... 

Suddenly the king cried to Snowmane and the horse sprang away.  Behind him his banner blew in the wind.  ...  Éomer rode there, the white horsetail on his helm floating in his speed, and the front of the first éored roared like a breaker foaming to the shore.  ...  Fey he [Théoden] seemed, or the battle-fury of his fathers ran like new fire in his veins.  ...  His golden shield was uncovered, and lo! it shone like an image of the Sun, and the grass flamed into green about the white feet of his steed.  ...  The hosts of Mordor wailed, and terror took them,  ...  And then all the host of Rohan burst into song, and they sang as they slew, for the joy of battle was on them, and the sound of their singing that was fair and terrible came even to the City.

When Éomer takes up the kingship in Chapter 6 (The Battle of the Pelennor Fields), he continues the alliterative verses:

Out of doubt, out of dark to the day's rising
I came singing in the sun, sword unsheathing.
To hope's end I rode and to heart's breaking:
Now for wrath, now for ruin and a red nightfall!

And the alliteration is present in the song that recounts the battle:

We heard of the horns in the hills ringing,
the swords shining in the South-kingdom.
Steeds went striding to the Stoningland
as wind in the morning.  War was kindled.
There Théoden fell, Thengling mighty,
to his golden halls and green pastures
in the Northern fields never returning,
high lord of the host.  Harding and Guthláf,
Dúnhere and Déorwine, doughty Grimbold,
Herefara and Herubrand, Horn and Fastred,
fought and fell there in a far country:
in the Mounds of Mundburg under mould they lie
with their league-fellows, lords of Gondor.
Neither Hirluin the Fair to the hills by the sea,
nor Forlong the old to the flowering vales
ever, to Arnach, to his own country
returned in triumph; nor the tall bowmen,
Derufin and Duilin, to their dark waters,
meres of Morthond under mountain-shadows.
Death in the morning and at day's ending
lords took and lowly.  Long now they sleep
under grass in Gondor by the Great River.
Grey now as tears, gleaming silver,
red then it rolled, roaring water:
foam dyed with blood flamed at sunset:
as beacons mountains burned at evening;
red fell the dew in Rammas Echor.

And finally, there's the song sung at Théoden's funeral (in Chapter 6 [Many Partings] of Book Six), which is similar to what Éomer says when he rides into battle:

Out of doubt, out of dark, to the day's rising
he rode singing in the sun, sword unsheathing.
Hope he rekindled, and in hope ended;
over death, over dread, over doom lifted
out of loss, out of life, unto long glory.

I started paying attention to all of the alliteration of the characters from Rohan only while reading The Return of the King, so I might have missed a lot in The Two Towers and even in the beginning of The Return of the King.  However, I still think there's enough alliteration present to connect Rohan to those Anglo-Saxon poems.

There are some other elements in The Lord of the Rings that I feel have precedents in Beowulf (for instance, Meduseld seems to be Tolkien's version of Herot), but I'm going to have to re-read both in order to find specific descriptions of each to compare.