12. What does such a system cost?

This Utopia has a good side: there is no war or poverty, little

disease or social unrest. But Huxley keeps asking, what does society

have to pay for these benefits? The price, he makes clear, is high.

The first clue is in the epigraph, the quotation at the front of the

book. It is in French, but written by a Russian, Nicolas Berdiaeff. It

says, "Utopias appear to be much easier to realize than one formerly

believed. We currently face a question that would otherwise fill us

with anguish: How to avoid their becoming definitively real?"

By the time you hear the conversation between the Controller, one of

the men who runs the new world, and John, the Savage, you've learned

that citizens of this Utopia must give up love, family, science,

art, religion, and history. At the end of the book, John commits

suicide and you see that the price of this brave new world is

fatally high.

STYLE

STYLE (HBRASTYL)

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Although Huxley's writing style makes him easy to read, his

complex ideas make readers think. Even if you're not familiar with his

vocabulary or philosophy, you can see that, as the critic Laurence

Brander says, "The prose was witty and ran clearly and nimbly."

Huxley's witty, clear, nimble prose is very much an upper-class

tradition. Brave New World- like all of Huxley's novels- is a novel of

ideas, which means that the characters must have ideas and must be

able to express them eloquently and cleverly. This demands that the

author have considerable knowledge. In pre-World War II England such

novels were more likely to have been written by members of the upper

class, simply because they had much greater access to good

education. Huxley, we remember, attended Eton and Oxford.

Huxley, like other upper-class Englishmen, was familiar with history

and literature. He expected his readers to know the plays of

Shakespeare, to recognize names like Malthus and Marx, to be

comfortable with a word like "predestination." (Literally "predestine"

means only "to determine in advance," but it is most importantly a

word from Christian theology- describing, in one version, the doctrine

that God knows in advance everything that will ever happen, and

thereby decides who will be saved and who will be damned.)

Although Huxley was very serious about ideas, he never stopped

seeing their humorous possibilities. His biographer, Sybille

Bedford, says that in 1946 he gave the commencement speech at a

progressive school in California, where he urged the students not to

imitate "the young man of that ancient limerick... who

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....said "Damn,

It is borne in on me that I am

A creature that moves

In predestinate grooves;

I'm not even a bus, I'm a tram!"

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To appreciate this joke, you have to remember how a tram or

trolley car moves on its tracks. It's a reminder that you'll have much

more fun with Brave New World and get much more out of it if you don't

let the language scare or bore you. Use the glossary in this guide and

your dictionary as tools. See how many of the words you know. See if

you can guess what some words mean from their spelling and the context

in which you find them. Look them up and see how close you are. Look

up the ones whose meaning you can't guess. If you put even a few of

the words you meet for the first time in Brave New World into your

vocabulary, you'll be winning a great game.

Games were an important part of an upper-class English education

in Huxley's day. Many elite students developed a readiness to make

jokes with words and ideas. You may find some of Huxley's jokes funny,

while you may think the humor has vanished from others. But you'll

have more fun with the book if you try to spot the humor. You'll

find big jokes like the Feelies, movies that you can feel, as well

as see and hear. You'll also find little jokes like plays on words- as

in calling the process for getting a baby out of its bottle

"decanting," a word ordinarily used only for fine wine. There is humor

in "orgy-porgy," a combination of religious ritual and group sex, a

parody of a child's nursery rhyme.

In Brave New World Huxley plays many games with his characters'

names. He turns Our Lord into Our Ford, for Henry Ford, the inventor

of the modern assembly line and the cheap cars that embodied the

machine age for the average man. He names one of his main characters

for Karl Marx, the father of the ideas of Communism. His heroine is

called Lenina, after the man who led the Russian Revolution. Benito

Hoover, a minor character, has the first name of the dictator of

fascist Italy and the last name of the President of the United

States who led the nation into the Great Depression, but he is

"notoriously good-natured." Look up any names you don't recognize.

VIEW

POINT OF VIEW (HBRAVIEW)

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Huxley's point of view in Brave New World is third person,

omniscient (all-knowing). The narrator is not one of the characters

and therefore has the ability to tell us what is going on within any

of the characters' minds. This ability is particularly useful in

showing us a cross section of this strange society of the future.

We're able to be with the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning in

the Central London Conditioning and Hatchery Centre, with Lenina

Crowne at the Westminster Abbey Cabaret, with Bernard Marx at the

Fordson Community Singery. The technique reaches an extreme in Chapter

Three, when we hear a babble of unidentified voices- Lenina's, Fanny

Crowne's, Mustapha Mond's- that at first sound chaotic but soon give

us a vivid understanding of this brave new world.

FORM

FORM AND STRUCTURE (HBRAFORM)

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Brave New World fits into a long tradition of books about Utopia, an