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.