Brave New World

Hallucinogenic Drugs, Virtual Sex, Alienated People. Brave New World is a futuristic novel traced by Aldous Huxley, considered one of the greatest prophetic writers of the 20th century. Aldous, who wrote about the effect of LSD and acids, brought from his experimental sessions ideas that were at the very least intriguing, so much so that some renowned scientists then chose him for research into the effect of hallucinogens on humans.
In Brave New World, Aldous describes a perfect society, possibly located in Europe, dominated by a single ruler, where the state distributed a drug called SOMA to the citizens. All had a very calm life, without stress, which helped discipline all inhabitants. In addition to this collective doping strategy, the state provided cinemas where the audience connected to the sensory terminals. It accompanied the films, directly knowing sensations, taste, and smell from the screen. The sex is divided into two parts, one for pleasure and another for prosecution. The latter depended on state authorization. The first was free since there was no sensual coition, i.e., no direct contact between people, which eliminated the carnal intercourse of relationships, connecting to individual terminals, conveying the sensations of sex through the mind and not of the sensual body.
Several children were born in a test tube, adapting them to future situations and raising those working in the basement from a fetus in a dark room. Others who would be soldiers were taught by electroshocks not to appreciate nature, flowers, and wild animals.
Beyond context, the fascination of this literature is that Aldous described all this writing around 1913, when the world was still preparing for the first great world war, trench warfare, without any technology. No one dared to think, much less talk about test-tube children, and sensory terminals were unimaginable; humanity had barely gotten used to the telephone. There was no television; cinema was recently released by the genius Chaplin, still in black and white and mute.
In the book, Aldous mentions a region that would protect from the state's power, where wholly savage people lived, preserving customs of food, sex, and freedom unrelated to the present stage. This charming place, described by Huxley in that fiction written in the moments of his hallucination, was Brazil, with its forests and people.

Brave New World says as much about Aldous Huxley as it does about our modern world.

Maybe more.
***

When he wrote it, Huxley was in the process of losing his inner child. Darling of the Jet Set, he was the literary version of their current idol, Cole Porter.

And in the end, the sophisticated public’s jaundiced taste for quick, fun and outré reads made him disposable - to us all.

And worst of all, to his own deep, dreaming subconscious!

Shy, lanky, shortsighted polymath Huxley was born to a family of Eminent Victorians, and was given ample leisure time to read any book he could get his hands on - which was them all.

They would call him a nerd nowadays.

But his reading and shyness disassociated him from the rough-and-tumble world. He had no fixed anchor.

Like so many of us, he had lost his centre of gravity, or had never had one.

But entre-deux-guerres Europe loved him, and adopted him as one of its own. The darling of the Smart Young Things - as the Catholic Waugh tartly put it - he was witty, caustic and irreverent.

He could do no wrong - except in the eyes of social activists, on one side, and believers on the other.

So it was at the midpoint of his career that he took up his pen against the future in Brave New World. If he couldn’t be serious, he could nevertheless shock.

Problem is, he half-loved his own Utopia. And in later life he moved to the U.S.A. and became an early advocate of the Southern California Lifestyle with its casual gurus and myriad conveniences.

When his beloved wife Maria died of cancer, disconsolate and without moorings, he turned to her much younger caregiver for love - a quality conspicuous by the rarity of its occurrence in his hyper-intellectual heart.

They were married at a no-frills marriage boutique in Nevada. They explored Eastern religions through Vedanta, then a current fad. They attended séances and summoned the ghost of his late wife. But all was not well.

His doctor told him some disturbing news: he was going blind. Losing his sight would be losing his most precious pleasure: reading. So his doctor advised him to frequently rest his eyes, by closing them and then applying light pressure from his palms, gently circling them in a counterclockwise motion.

He was very much a faddish man without roots, and much akin in his casual though refined nature to the citizens of the Brave New World. He Needed to read and write. He was a sensual man who needed his pleasures.

But with the approach of the sixties, he received another grim diagnosis. Cancer of the mouth. He started to compare notes with his friend Stravinsky about their planned abstinence from cigarettes:

The weeds that killed him in the end.
***

Carl Jung used to say that our Shadow will visit us in our dreams if we ignore it in our daily lives...

Huxley bought into the mainstream Freudian POV that the asceticism of the great mystics was mere dumb sexual repression (witness his Late anti-Christian rant entitled The Devils of Loudon - now made newly available on Kindle).

And late in life, close to the time of his own death, Huxley dreamt he was floating in a vast orb containing a marvellous city.

But outside the bubble, brutish crowds were howling with derisive laughter at him - yes, him - the untouchable visionary who penned the great Brave New World!

It’s like that late photo of him at his misunderstood California friend Stravinsky’s recording sessions for his own new severely serial and segmented short compositions.

Huxley marvelled at the capacious mind of the composer of the Sacre, but his small-souled trivial brain had no clue of the older man’s unimpeachable moral integrity.

A wannabe mystic, he was a no-show at the starting gate of Heaven because he could never focus his thoughts long enough to shore up enough justifications for a undying Faith.

He awoke from that dream in a panic.

Poor, dear lost soul that he was, there were times when even Soma wouldn't help...

And in his quest for new utopias, he had left the rough and tumble Faith of ordinary poor workaday, believing sods out of his equation.

For his advanced calculations noisily and brusquely precluded the one and only possible healing panacea for his soul - the Simplicity of the Holy Spirit.

For that’s ALL he had ever needed, had he understood Stravinsky and the common folk well.

about 120 pages, the story becomes very boring, since it is mostly the feelings of the protagonists. However, this attempt to identify me emotionally with the characters did not touch, since it is quite bizarre.
So I felt more like having a classical drama in a modern world in front of me.

Fazit:
quite weak translation into German,
grammar partly catastrophic, so sentences lose their meaning.

În comparaţie cu "O mie nouă sute optzeci şi patru", îmi permit să numesc "Minunata lume nouă" O DISTOPIE ROZ.
GENIALĂ PRIN CARACTERUL EI TRAGIC! Sigur, e mult mai cunoscut romanul "O mie nouă sute optzeci şi patru", scris în 1949 de George Orwell, dar "Minunata lume nouă", scrisă în 1932, prezintă utopia negativă a viitorului, dacă nu mult mai sumbru, cel puţin mult mai realist.
Se ştie foarte bine că Huxley era un mare consumator de droguri, fapt ce a facilitat scrierea acestei cărţi (acţiune care, pentru "un om obişnuit", este prin excelenţă imposibilă) al cărei subiect se rupe total de realitatea din jurul noastru.
Opera nu are un protagonist anume, deşi apare la un moment dat un "Sălbatic" care se diferenţiază de oamenii din "minunata lume nouă" (cât de satiric este titlul...). Din punct de vedere sociologic, ea este plină de antagonişti (dacă se poate folosi pluralul, căci aceşti antagonişti, deşi mulţi, sunt identici la nivel "intelectual"), căci autorul prezintă lumea (de azi) în viitor, o lume care, din pricina excesivei evoluţii ştiinţifice, i-a transformat pe oameni în roboţi (în totalitate, căzând scenariul orwellian cu "Big Brother" sau o mâna de oameni superiori care conduc lumea mai mult sau mai puţin din umbră), în fiinţe autoprogramate genetic şi condiţionate.
Subiectul romanului condamnă conceptul de "rasă" (dar nu şi cel de clasă socială) şi condamnă evoluţia ştiinţifică, ceea ce conferă scrierii un caracter apolitic. Sigur, narează un sistem filosofic (şi chiar bine structurat), în care prezintă posteritatea cu o viziune nouă asupra religiei, ştiinţei, stagnării, condiţionării, stabilităţii ori fericirii, iar toate acestea, puse în oglindă cu lumea contemporană (deci la aproape 100 de ani după ce Huxley a scris romanul), reflectă exact ceea ce nu trebuie, şi anume: faptul că societatea se îndreaptă exact spre punctul de care ne vorbeşte autorul.
M-a frapat scrierea în sine, dar m-a frapat foc (la superlativ absolut), o caracteristică a oamenilor viitorului: condiţionarea! Anumiţi oameni (le spun aşa, deşi se înţelege că erau roboţi biologici), condiţionaţi genetic şi ei, produc (deci nu "zămislesc") alţi oameni în eprubete. În mod chimic, ei îi pot face pe aceşti oameni intelectuali, agricultori, valeţi etc. ( o să revin asupra claselor sociale), asta fiind, pentru dânşii, ceva absolut normal.
Un alt aspect: ceea ce numim noi astăzi "adulter"! Adulterul, în carte, este o virtute. În roman nu există căsătorie. Nu există nici măcar concubinaj. Folosirea cuvântului "mama" ori "copil" (dat fiind că oamenii sunt produşi în eprubete) era interzisă cu desăvârşire. Fiecare bărbat/femeie îşi schimbă partenerul când şi cum vrea. Sentimentele sunt, de asemenea, considerate un delict (iar pentru potolirea lor oamenii erau "vaccinaţi"). Nu există Dumnezeu, există doar Marele Ford (autorul îl pune la geneza "lumii noi" pe Henry Ford, responsabil de evoluţia excesivă a ştiinţei). Nu există istorie decât "de la Ford până acum".
Indivizii, deşi produşi în laborator, sunt dispuşi în clase sociale (există cinci clase: Alfa, Beta, Gama, Delta şi Epsilon, în ordine descrescătoare ca autoritate). La un moment dat se face o remarcă monumentală conform căreia, ca o societate să existe, este absolută nevoie de clase sociale. Adică, noi ştim bine că până şi în comunism sunt clase sociale. :)
Există doar vagi insule de umanitate, considerate "Rezervaţii Naturale", unde oamenii (aşa cum îi ştim noi în 2015) joacă rolul de obiecte de studiu.
Întâmplarea face ca un reprezentant al oamenilor clasici (cei din "rezervaţia Naturală") să ajungă întâmplător în "lumea civilizată". Abia acum se poate vorbi vag de un personaj principal şi, odată cu apariţia lui pe scenă, de o adevărată dialectica asupra caracterului dăunător al acestui sistem social.

1. E foarte curios să citeşti ceea ce scriau oamenii din vremea Marelui Ford despre progresul ştiinţei. După cât se pare, ei îşi închipuiau că această ar putea fi lăsată să meargă înainte la nesfârşit, indiferent de toate celelalte lucruri. Cunoaşterea era binele cel mai înalt, adevărul constituia valoarea supremă; tot restul era secundar şi subordonat lor. Dar, într-adevăr, încă de pe atunci ideile începeau să se schimbe. Însuşi Marele Ford a făcut foarte mult pentru a deplasa accentul de la adevăr şi frumuseţe către confort şi fericire. Schimbarea era cerută de producţia de masă. Fericirea universală face să se învârtească mereu roţile; adevărul şi frumuseţea n-o pot face.

2. Fărâmă dintr-o dialectica dintre "Sălbatic" şi unul dintre guvernatorii lumii:
-Dar dacă ştiţi despre Dumnezeu, de ce nu le spuneţi şi lor? întreba indignat sălbaticul? De ce nu le daţi cărţile acestea despre Dumnezeu?
-Din acelaşi motiv pentru care nu le dăm nici Othello: sunt vechi; sunt despre Dumnezeul de acum nu ştiu câte veacuri. Nu despre Dumnezeul de acum.
-Dar Dumnezeu nu se schimbă.
-Oamnii, însă, da.
*Nu cred că am remarcat altundeva ceva mai brusc spus despre sensul religiei (şi decăderea ei)*

3. Sălbaticul: "Da, aşa faceţi cu toate. Scăpaţi de toate neplăcerile, în loc să învăţaţi să le faceţi faţă."

4. Sălbaticul: -Eu unul nu vreau confort. Îl vreau pe Dumnezeu, vreau poezie, vreau primejdie adevărată, vreau libertate, vreau bunătate. Vreau păcatul.
-Da fapt, dumneata pretinzi dreptul de a fi nefericit, spuse Mustafa Mond.
-Mă rog, fie şi asta! îl sfida sălbaticul. Cer dreptul la nefericire.

5. "... stabilitatea nu e nici pe departe atât de spectaculoasă că instabilitatea."


Aşadar, romanul este şocant prin virtutea pe care o propagă. Eu unul îl recomand din toată inima tuturor. Sunt perfect conştient că recenzia curentă nu cuprinde nici 1% din esenţă cărţii, însă mie mi-a plăcut foarte mullt (şi, credeţi-mă, sunt un om foarte pretenţios în materie).
Totuşi, nici măcar nu mă aşteptăm la aşa ceva. Pur şi simplu un om, fie el cât de cult ori educat, nu poate avea o imaginaţie atât de bogată (darămite să o transpună la maşina de scris?). Magia lui Huxley -sau păcatul lui?!- a stat în consumul de halucinogene.
*Se înţelege că "Sălbaticul", într-o lume programată genetic, se sinucide*

P.S. Rog să-mi fie scuzată multitudinea de paranteze, care cu puţină trudă literară s-ar fi putut transforma în construcţii incidente, însă această recenzie a fost scrisă în febra terminării romanului.

Andrei Tamaş,
26 noiembrie 2015

3.5 stars

*

”You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.”

*

Satire works best when it is timely and, unfortunately, this is still timely. It’s also witty and funny in that sad kind of way. As a novel, it doesn’t work as well as it might’ve, especially during the stretch when a World Controller reads lengthy passages from banned books to the Shakespeare-spouting ‘savage’. Huxley could’ve gotten his point across without that; in fact, we’d already gotten it. The way he uses quotes from Shakespeare for the savage’s responses is brilliant. The prescient ending is, also unfortunately, all too real: it could easily happen; looked at in a certain way, it already has.

*

I was intrigued by Huxley’s use of the word pneumatic to describe several things, from women to an armchair to, most puzzlingly, a man’s shoes.

*بدون خطر لو رفتن داستان

دنیای قشنگ نو، قرار بود اواخر سال جاری میلادی خونده بشه، که یک روز بصورت تصادفی، تصمیم گرفتم یکی دو صفحه اولش رو بخونم. این تصمیم همانا و در همون پاراگراف اول جذبش شدن همانا! :))
بعد از اینکه شروع به خوندنش کردم، دائم در ذهنم، در حال مقایسه کردنش با 1984 بودم، که به جرات میگم بیشتر از چیزی که فکرش رو می‌کردم با هم تفاوت داشتن.

اگر بخوام به زبان ساده، و خیلی کوتاه توضیح بدم، اینطور میگم که، تصور کنید حکومت حاکم بر دنیای 1984 بر سر قدرت باقی مونده، و حالا همون حکومت، در مثلا 500 سال آینده داره حکمرانی می‌کنه!
تفاوت‌های زیادی بین حکومت‌ها و دنیاهای این دو کتاب هست.
مثلا دنیای 1984 دنیای زور و خشم و دیکته بود، اما دنیای قشنگ نو، دنیای بی‌خیالی بود، دنیای پوچی بود، دنیایی بود که حکومت برای پیشبرد اهدافش توسط مردم، نیازی به زور نداشت و همه چیز از بدو تولد شرطی سازی شده بود!
در 1984 انسان‌ها زاده می‌شدند و به زورِ حکومت، به خدمت گرفته می‌شدند، اما در دنیای قشنگ نو، زاده شدن معنایی نداشت و کلمات پدر و مادر، جزو بدترین کلمات بود که مردم حتی با شنیدنش هم احساس نارضایتی می‌کردند! چرا که در دنیای قشنگ نو، انسان‌ها زاده نمی‌شدند و حکومت با کمک تکنولوژی، انسان‌ها رو تولید می‌کرد!

بیشتر از این چیزی از دنیای کتاب لو نمی‌دم، هرچند که این کتاب، به شدت وسیع و بزرگه، که نه سواد من برای نقد کردنش کافیه و نه حوصله شما برای خوندنش!

تنها توصیه‌ای که می‌تونم بهتون بکنم، اینه که اول کتاب 1984 رو بخونید، بعد تصور کنید که قرن‌ها از اون دنیا گذشته و بعد با این تصور، کتاب دنیای قشنگ نو رو شروع کنید.

من به این کتاب، پنج ستاره کامل نمی‌دم، چرا که هنوز معتقدم 1984 یک سر و گردن از دنیای قشنگ نو بالاتره! این کتاب چهار ستاره براش کافیه!
خوندن این کتاب رو شدیدا به همه توصیه می‌کنم. این کتاب رو بخونید، بخونید، بخونید...

I think I read it wrong.
Because my first thought upon finishing this was this:
Where the hell do I sign up for this Brave New World?
Basically, this society is missing religion, shame, sin, misery, fear, disease, and classic books.



Now, that's not to say life is perfect in this utopia.
Nobody gets married and has kids anymore. I know, a lot of you are thinking that isn't quite the downside that the book thinks it is. No more monogamy? Gasp. Whatever would we do?



The new people are grown in test tubes. There are the dumb ones who do the menial shit, the average ones who do the office stuff, and the smarter ones who run the show. After being conditioned genetically, everyone is raised in state-run lab/home/school facilities, brainwashed in their sleep, and given a teeny bit of shock therapy in the toddler years to ensure that folks are content with their lot in life.



Can you imagine if people were actually set up to be in charge by nothing more than a coincidence of birth?
Gosh. That's some crazy sci-fi caste shenanigans right there.



So what we have here is job security, free drugs that don't have side effects and make you feel good, non-judgemental sex, no conflict, no health issues till you die, and no barky religious folks knocking on your door at 9 am on a Saturday.
And what are you missing out on, pray tell? Shakespeare.
I've read his stuff, and I can say without a doubt that I could skip it and make do with a Micheal Bay movie. Fair warning, no one has ever accused me of being someone they aspire to emulate.



Even the evil overlord in charge of it all wasn't that bad of a dude. When these guys met him and confronted him with their doubts as to how well they actually enjoyed their place in society, he just sent them to an island full of like-minded individuals so they could do what they wanted without disrupting the flow of things. He was kind of like, yeah, this isn't for everyone and sent them off with a wave of his chill hand.



For the entire book, I kept waiting for the Soylent Green is People moment, but it never really came. To me, that world did not appear worse than ours in any significant way. The only weird thing was that being a mother or father was shameful and no one was monogamous. That's not exactly the most horrifying thing I've ever heard happening in a dystopian novel.

  

Especially if the other option is to be like John, who flogged himself every time he got a boner over cute little Lenina. On a related note, the part where he kept yelling n  STRUMPET! STRUMPET! STRUUUUMPET!n had me laughing until the tears rolled down my face. I kept waiting for some sort of redemption arc for this savage wherein he stopped being a complete asshat, but that also didn't happen. He was creepy as fuck right up till the end.
And what an ending it was.
So John has had enough of polite society and runs out to some deserted little strip of land. Once there, he prays to some weird mash-up of Christian and Native American gods, flogs himself daily, and tries his darndest to make his life as hard and unbearable as he can. Because suffering for no reason whatsoever is what makes life good?
Bottom line, he's so batshit that tourists start showing up at his doorstep to watch him act the fool. But it's not till Lenina gets there and tries to embrace him that he loses his damn mind. He tries to attack her with his nasty little flogger and when he doesn't succeed, he just starts beating the fuck out of himself. And if that wasn't weird enough, he AND all the tourists end up getting turned on by his self-flagellation and have a massive orgy.
John wakes up after his night of debauchery, can't deal with having busted a nut, and hangs himself.
The end.
If you drew random scenarios out of a hat and put them down on paper in no particular order, you seriously could not have come up with a more bananas conclusion to this book.



I'm still not sure what the moral of the story is here. Now, admittedly, I like the sound of the drugs and sex and fun holidays. I will say I think it was a bit of overkill to taze babies.
Then again, sacrifices must be made for the greater good.



I'm kidding! Don't zap toddlers, you idiot.
Ok. At the end of the day, I didn't really care for this book. I personally thought it was sort of boring. Not much happened plotwise and I never really felt invested in any of the characters. It seemed (to me) a bit of a daffy book that had a lot of fuckwit ideas of what would happen if we ignore the strict moral codes about sex found in most religions.
I know this is a beloved novel and I don't think you're stupid if you enjoyed it. Different strokes for different folks and all that.

Michael York was the narrator of the audiobook I listened to, and I thought he did a fantastic job.

„Прекрасният нов свят“ е много хубава и смислена антиутопия! Хъксли майсторски е описал едно привидно перфектно и щастливо футуристично общество, което обаче има огромни недостатъци за всеки мислещ човек и всъщност представлява зловещ вариант на консуматорско общество...



„Връщане към културата. Да, точно към културата. Човек не може да консумира много, ако си седи мирничко и си чете книжки.“