Brave New World: Discussion II

Chapters 4-6: Orgasms, Obstacle Golf, and the ocean

Initial thoughts

In chapters 1-3 we saw how the machine was built. In these chapters we get a better look into the characters existing within it, especially Bernard and Lenina, and their respective struggles. Let’s get into it.

Chapter 4 - Part 1

• Lenina tells Bernard she’s willing to go to New Mexico with him: “I’d simply love to come with you for a week in July. That is, if you still want to have me.” Bernard is uncomfortable with the casualness of it all. Lenina wonders why he’s acting like he made a joke—”asked him who his mother was, or something like that.” We’ve traced this inversion of sexual norms in the society—how what is “dirty” has been flipped on its head. It’s central to understanding how the World State operates (58)

• “He looked up into the sky and round the blue horizon and finally down into Lenina’s face. Isn’t it beautiful!” His voice trembled a little.” Some smooth writing here. Bernard’s admiring the sky, but also Lenina’s face. He’s moved by both. Through this Lenina is connected with nature, but what does that mean?

• “Simply perfect for Obstacle Golf.” This is the World State’s theory of control in action, playing out exactly how they planned. Lenina is incapable of viewing nature and the outside world as anything other than an outlet for games—distractions that don’t allow its players to admire the mountains or the smell of the trees. Its purpose is for them to spend but also to be distracted—to not be moved (59)

• Lenina’s view of nature parallels that of her own body and sexuality. She can’t comprehend it as something deeper or more meaningful, a vessel for human connection and intimacy

• On their way to Obstacle Golf, Lenina and Henry fly over central London: “Forests of Centrifugal Bumple-puppy towers gleamed between the trees.” Have to make the Top Golf connection here. It’s even more apt than the NFL one. It looks like an airport. It has an elaborate apparatus that tracks every single ball. Heaters blasting during the winter so you can even play in the cold. Overpriced drinks, undersized nachos (actually). It’s the capitalism-induced evolution of much the much chiller OG golf, which could itself be argued as an apparatus, a bastardization of the natural world in its own way. But the point about Top Golf is that it seems like an awful lot of money, effort, and energy just to do something you could do at a driving range. But a driving range isn’t $100+ an outing (62-63)

Part 2

• “Those who meant well behaved in the same way as those who meant badly.” Bernard thinks about Benito Hoover. Is it a commentary on how this world has inverted good behavior and bad, so it’s impossible to truly know? Or is more about how pleasure has replaced morality as the driving force? (63)

• Bernard doesn’t feel the excitement he expected from Lenina’s acceptance—he’s put off by her going off with Henry right after, thinking the day perfect for Obstacle Golf, talking about private affairs publicly— “behaving as any healthy and virtuous English girl ought to behave…” It’s the nerd trying to change the party girl—a tale as old as time—except this party girl has been conditioned to party (64)

• We get a big dive into Bernard’s physique and psyche. He’s eight centimetres short of the standard Alpha height. He feels humiliated that he looks eye level at a Delta instead of down—this is key

• Bernard self-consciousness about of his physical defects increases his sense of being alien and alone—emotions we also witnessed in Billy Pilgrim. Billy’s status as a prisoner of war and witness to the bombing of Dresden alienated him from the American myths and propaganda surrounding war, just as Bernard’s physical deficiency removes him from milieu of the upper caste in which so many other Alphas exist unquestioningly. It’s the key to any good story that seeks to critique myths and power structures—a person who is a part of the system but somehow separated from it

• We’re given more insight into the propaganda apparatus of the world state in the Bureaux and the College Emotional Engineering. The basement contains the three great London newspapers. The Hourly Radio is an upper-caste sheet. The Gamma Gazette is for Gammas, and then there’s The Delta Mirror, “exclusively of one syllable.” Lmao

  • It’s telling though, that these three “great” papers are housed in a government building, stratified by class. It calls to mind Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, dictating that moving forward the only topics its Op-Ed page would cover would be “in defense of personal liberties and free markets” and that viewpoints “opposing those pillars would be left to other publishers.” Newspapers are supposed to be pillars of truth, forums for public discourse and sources of information that inform a democracy. If The Hourly Radio is for the upper-caste, and the Gamma Gazette is for the Gammas, then who is The Washington Post for? What is its purpose?

• Helmholtz Watson — able, Alpha, a stark and intentional contrast to Bernard in every way, but also alien in his own way, afflicted by a “mental excess” has isolated him just as a physical defect has isolated Bernard. A counterpart to Bernard whose mental acuity separates him from his peers, and thus the system

• Watson is a professor at the College of Emotional Engineering (Department of Writing). Watson is an Emotional Engineer who writes for The Hourly Radio, composes feely scenarios, and has a knack for slogans. Calling writing emotional engineering is thought-provoking, for sure. I mean writing is emotional engineering. Huxley is trying to engineer emotions in us—I’m trying to engineer emotions in you. But writing is also a source of thought, questioning, and knowledge. To reduce it to only its emotional impact is to reduce its power, to wield it as a tool of repression instead of liberation

• “What the two men shared was knowledge that they were individuals.” This is the whole theme right here, guys. It’s kind of annoying that he is straight-up just telling us. We can examine everything we’ve looked at so far through this lens. It even gives us an answer to the question we posed at the beginning when discussing the epigraph: what is lost, in pursuit of utopia? Individuality and identity are two of the answers. Yet Bernard, Helmholtz, and even Lenina, in her own smaller, scandalous way, demonstrate that the World State cannot eradicate this truth completely (67)

• As far as Helmholtz is concerned, “sport, women, communal activities were only…second bests.” Like Bernard, Helmholtz wants something more

• “Some sort of extra power that you aren’t using—you know, like all the water that goes down the falls instead of through the turbines.” It’s fascinating Helmholtz uses this example here. He’s depicted as at odds with the World State and his occupation—yet all the same slips into the language of consumption that denies natural beauty any innate worth (69)

• “It’s not enough for the phrases to be good; what you make with them ought to be good too.” Helmholtz recognizes the power of written words to sedate, but he wants to inspire. Yet he doesn’t understand how he can write piercingly about a world sapped with meaning (69-70)

• “Can you say something about nothing?” — Poo-too-weet. It’s a different flavor of nihilism: you can’t say something intelligent about a massacre, and you can’t say something intelligent about nothing, either. Or can you?

• Helmholtz wishes Bernard would show pride. He does care about Bernard. Good chance this all ends with Bernard showing pride, somehow (71)

Chapter 5 - Part 1

• Lower Caste barracks vs. proper houses for Alphas and Betas at the the golf club, separated by a wall—a clear, visual metaphor for class stratification. Language of barracks vs. houses delineates the two groups: one as a single unit, the other as individuals (73)

• “The approaches to the monorail station were black with the ant-like pullulation of lower-caste activity” — further development of the lower castes as part of a larger, productive organism, stripped of individuality, existing to benefit only colony and queen (73)

• The Slough Crematorium has four tall chimneys, each “flood-lighted and tipped with crimson danger signals. It was a landmark.” Now that’s symbolism if I’ve ever seen it. What do we think it means?

• Phosphorous recovery from dead bodies—the natural outcome of the commodification of bodies that drives the World State’s consumption, chilling in its illustration of the human body itself as a resource

• Lenina turns her eyes away from the Crematorium. She’s disturbed that “Alphas and Betas won’t make any more plants grow than those nasty little Gammas and Deltas down there.” This is her witnessing the undeniable: we’re all human beings, we all bleed red, we all emit phosphorous when cremated. Lenina turns her eyes away because it is proof that the class system is manufactured, alongside her own happiness and sense of identity and superiority

• Everyone works for everyone else…even Epsilons are useful.” — Community

• “And if you were an Epsilon, your conditioning would have made you no less thankful that you weren’t a Beta or an Alpha.” It reeks of the fatalism witnessed in Slaughterhouse-Five, that this is how the world structured (in the case of the World State, deliberately so). There must be a class of poor, there must be children who fight in the wars, there must be the many who live less full lives to the benefit of the few (74)

• The World State, however, has done away with the emotions that make these injustices problematic: “I suppose Epsilons don’t really mind being Epsilons,” Lenina says. But if they don’t mind being Epsilons, if they don’t strive for something better, are they even human?

• “Do you know what that switchback was? It would be curious to know who it was—a man or a woman, an Alpha or an Epsilon…” I thought Henry was a douchebag but he’s a dash sentimental here—recognizing the individuality lost at the altar of consumption. It seems that even in perfectly content Alphas like Henry there exists a humanity that cannot be fully repressed (75)

• But he finds solace in knowing whoever it was, was happy. But were these people happy or simply sedated?

• With that, they continue on with their night, popping soma like a THC gummy and hitting the town. The night is “moonless and starry; but of this on the whole depressing fact Lenina and Henry were fortunately unaware.” The natural world here is again a casualty—the cool clear night ruined by electric sky-signs. But the night sky is also framed as something not desirable to begin with. This is The Great American Book Club, so I have to make the connection to Times Square. The number one landmark in the most famous and populous American city, its electric advertisements inundating the teeming tourists with the same message so essential to the Brave New World: look at anything but the sky. Sephora, Shake Shack, the latest Marvel flick. Be dissatisfied, be distracted, and spend.

  • It’s not just the big screens. It’s the little screens, too, that package these cultural landmarks into bite-sized clips, to be consumed like french fries: an insufferable dancing weather man busting a move alongside Deadpool, a man-on-the-street segment asking a tourist how he got rich or “What’s your body count?” Clips send across the globe only to end up on a high schooler’s phone as he scrolls and scrolls and scrolls on the bus ride to school, not once looking up at the sky

• Henry and Lenina’s time spent at the Colour Organ sounds a lot like a Disney ride, perhaps Epcot’s Soarin’ or the Animal Kingdom’s Avatar ride. These rides are exhilarating, stunning, and stimulating to the senses—but also entirely synthetic

• In the World State, spectacle has replaced introspection

• Skies are blue inside of you — twisting of nature into pleasure: why think when you could simply feel good? (76)

• Bottled — restricted, constrained, not free—experience filtered through soma (77)

Part 2

1. The Solidarity Service tells us that this will be about the enforcement of community. “Twelve of them ready to be made one, waiting to come together, to be fused, to lose their twelve separate identities into a larger being.” Definitely some weird, religious ritual. Another practice aimed at the repression of individuality through a false, forced community, a manufactured one, with the help of drugs

2. “I drink to my annihilation.” The denial of the self with drugs. Also, that line goes incredibly hard (81)

3. They sing together, as they forge into one. We saw singing in both The Grapes of Wrath and Slaughterhouse-Five. The residents of Hooverville sang and so did the British prisoners, and that was actual solidarity: a source of strength for the community, a way to form bonds, a form of protest. Singing is a deeply human act. Just the act of doing it or even just singing at a concert alongside strangers carries meaning. And that’s what the World State exploits, forcing its civilians to sing away their sense of self, turning human nature against itself

4. I drink to the imminence of His Coming - Ford as Jesus. This is an obvious symbol we’ve already noted

5. “The feet of the Greater Being are on the stairs.” The ritual turns into a hallucination where everybody can here the Greater Being approaching except, of course, Bernard

6. For I am you and you are I —further erasure of individualism this time in a religious context (82)

7. One of the participants in the ritual, Clare, screams that she can hear the Greater Being coming “and it was she was having her throat cut” - A comment on the death of her status as an individual, most likely. It’s about her giving away her agency, finding comfort in collective hallucination. It’s also just a straight up critique of religion, not as salvation but as murder and death (84)

8. Bernard hears nothing, but he goes along with it. Which means it’s possible the others were going along with it, too. Could they all be faking it?

9. This mirrors the experience of Lenina and Henry at the cabaret in its rising of expectation building to a climax. That seems to be the MO of the World State, good vibes, expectation, and collective orgasm

10. Then they all start dancing and it’s fucking creepy but yet again there is that inversion: taking an act of community, of humanity, and turning it on humanity itself, deceiving into it believing in its own subjugation

11. Orgy-porgy - Again, creepy. Nursery rhyme —> World State mantra

12. “She looked at Bernard with an expression of rapture in which there was no trace of agitation or excitement—for to be excited is still to be unsatisfied. Hers was the calm ecstasy of achieved consummation…a rich and living peace” (85) Just another way the World State is maintaining control, through rituals such as these. We leave church feeling unburdened, replenished, at peace with ourselves, more convinced of our own salvation and the salvation of others and thus less inclined to question the injustice in the world

13. Love this line describing Bernard’s separateness at the end of it all: “He had emerged from that crimson twilight into the common electric glare with a self-consciousness intensified to the pitch of agony.” (86)

Chapter 6 - Part 1

• That Lenina considers visiting both New Mexico and the North Pole (which she has already been to) demonstrates the effectiveness of the World State’s mandate for “consuming transport”

• She laments that the North Pole hotel rooms didn’t have televisions, scent organs, or enough pickle ball Escalator-Squash courts. No mention of polar bears or the Northern Lights, of course. Travel as a means to see beautiful places and explore new cultures is threatening to the World State—it can only be another form of pleasure, distraction, and consumption (87)

• “For what was there that one could do in private?” This is another reversal of expectations, the natural extension of the World State’s idea of community, the mantra that “everybody belongs to everybody.” Its motive isn’t just sexual in nature but aimed at the elimination of private life altogether—because privacy is where dangerous thoughts take root (88)

• To go off on this idea of privacy a little more. These sports and games are so essential in the World State because they keep the people occupied, as we know. To keep us doing things with others, to never be alone with our thoughts. That mission is carried out with games and spectacle. Yet Huxley didn’t envision an even better way to keep the people occupied, unquestioning—he didn’t envision the cell phone, social media, or the algorithm, and this apparatus is just as potent as the World State’s in the way in which is eviscerates privacy. The World State’s answer to privacy is to engineer it into meaninglessness—Silicon Valley’s strategy is to corrupt it—not just by collecting a person’s data, but by reaching out to him when he is lonely, with a simple push notification that says you don’t have to be alone, you don’t have to think those thoughts, you can just scroll, or you can be part of a community that understands, all from the comfort of your own bed

• Privacy encourages individualism and discourages groupthink

• Bernard expresses his desire to be alone with Lenina. She tells him “we shall be alone all night” — That’s another casualty of the regime, the death of intimacy, which is connected to privacy (89)

• On the way back across the English Channel, Bernard decides to hover his helicopter above the waves. It’s a slick move, but Lenina is appalled. “Let’s turn on the radio. Quick!” That same refrain plays through the radio: Skies are blue, inside of you. In this moment it’s especially relevant. The skies are somewhat scary, somewhat beautiful— but Lenina can’t confront that either. She’d rather seek comfort in the pleasures of the flesh

• Bernard tries to tell Lenina how looking at the sea makes him want to be more than just a cell in the social body. Lenina goes back to Community — where everyone works for everyone else

• “Don’t you wish you were free, Lenina?” “I don’t know what you mean. I am free. Free to have the most wonderful time. Everybody’s happy nowadays.”

• Happiness in your own way, not in everybody else’s way —> Bernard appeals to agency, struggle, fulfillment

• He appeals to intimacy, too, telling Lenina he thought they would be more “together here—with nothing but the sea and moon. More together than in that crowd, or even in any rooms. Don’t you understand that?” Bernard craves the intimacy of sharing moments with just a single other person in the world (89)

• “I don’t understand anything,” she said with decision, determined to preserve her incomprehension intact.” Lenina is depicted here not as conditioned but as making a choice. It suggests she can understand what Bernard is saying, she does understand the potency of the sea and its solitude, but she’s still compelled to make the easier choice. Understanding means confronting the impending storm and the crematorium stacks—understanding means accepting beauty but also accepting suffering. Her worldview is convenient and protective—she’s not going to give it up that easily

• In fact, when challenged, Lenina ultimately turns to attempted seduction as a way out. Bernard flies back into the sky, begins laughing, and then begins fondling Lenina. Has he given up on changing her perspective?

• So I’ve been wondering what pneumatic means this whole time…apparently it just means thicc? (93)

• Bernard is even mad that Lenina lets him hit after the first date. Even that is a hynoaedic lesson: “Never put off till to-morrow the fun you can have today.” He wants tension, passion, to which Lenina responds, “When the individual feels, the community reels.” Stability.

• Bernard spells it out. The “adults” are only adults in the workplace, and “infants where feeling and desire are concerned.” Infantilization as a way to deny one’s humanity (94)

Part 2

• When Bernard goes to get his permit signed, the Director reflects on a visit he made to the reservation when he was Bernard’s age. Bernard is taken aback by the Director’s reminiscing—talking about the past is frowned upon and the Director knows it. It shows that even a man as important as the Director still has human impulses (95)

• The director’s account of his trip to the reservation is heartbreaking. He was with a girl, and she got lost in one of the mountains, and he injured his knee trying to find her in the storm, but they never did. And he had no soma for the whole ordeal. It’s a horrific story, an account of true suffering, both mental and physical, for both the Director and his girl, whose fate remains unknown. It’s the exact type of scenario the people of the World State are taught to avoid

• That the Director’s girl was lost to the mountains, to the thunderstorm, to nature, is intentional, too. Nature is unpredictable and therefore dangerous (97)

• More inversion — the Director tells Bernard he knows of his strange behavior and that even Alphas don’t have to behave “infantile”, he expects that they will. He threatens Bernard with a transfer to Iceland if he violates the standard

• Bernard leaves the meeting empowered: “the thought of persecution left him undismayed, was tonic rather than depressing. He felt strong enough to overcome affliction, strong enough to face even Iceland.” What is the reason for Bernard’s invigoration? Was it the Director’s story, the hint that many men (at least Alphas) crave the same connection and intimacy, and are willing to suffer because of it? Was it the prospect of actually facing adversity? Or is it the fact that he thinks Iceland is an empty threat? (98)

Part 3

• Finally, Bernard and Lenina take the trip. The hotel they stay at in Santa Fe is a marked contrast from the one at the North Pole, complete with “liquid air, television, vibro-vacuum massage, radio…eight different kinds of scent laid on in every bedroom.” It’s the Ford Seasons, a palace of stimulation and sport (sorry) (100)

• Grand Canyon as a hydroelectric station is appalling — more evidence of how this society does not think in terms of beauty but only in terms of power-generation (101)

• “Those who are born in the Reservation are destined to die there.” Is that not also true of those born in the World State?

• The “savages” of the Reservation have marriage, families, superstitions. They also face true danger and suffering: “Pumas…infectious diseases…priests…venomous diseases.” (103) Hmmm.

• At this key moment Bernard learns from Helmholtz that he actually his being send to Iceland. Now actually faced with hardship, his courage vanishes. “Of that imagined stoicism, that theoretical courage, not a trace was left.” (104)

• Lenina comforts him with soma, which he takes. She says, “Was and will make me ill. I take a gramme and only am.” The erasure of the past, and the elimination of purpose, in the name of stability.

• At the top of page 105 is an assertion of nature as they cross the frontier that separated “civilization from savagery.” There are deserts and forests and “violet depths of canyons”….marked by a fence: “the geometric symbol of triumphant human purpose.” The human purpose being to control men, to subjugate men, to put them in prisons, to defile their nature and to defile nature itself

• The animals fried on the electric fence testify to this derangement—the backwardness of it all (105)

• The savages were bombed and that’s why they stay in line. But why are the savages repressed by the World State with bombs instead of soma, genetic engineering, sleep-teaching and Centrifugal Bumple-puppy? What makes them so special

  The first three chapters showed us exactly how the World State exercises its control, while these few chapters have shown us that its mechanisms might not be quite as airtight as we were led to believe. Bernard, Helmholtz, Henry, Lenina, and even the Director—all of them exhibit humanity in this chapter in spite of their class and conditioning. I have a feeling this visit to the Savage reservation is going to blow this whole thing open.

  Let’s keep reading. Our next discussion will be for chapters 7-10 and will be posted Monday, 4/27.

  See you then.