-William Shakespeare, Sonnet 3
Aldous Huxley attributes Shakespeare to intelligence, as he makes a
severance between the emotive quality of Shakespeare and it's role as a
social mapping device. By presenting Shakespeare in this way, Huxley is
acknowledging not only Shakespeare's prolific and lasting qualities as a
writer and inventor of man, but also the monolithic significance of the
Western canon itself. However, in the same way humans have been mass
produced for the sake of stability in BRAVE NEW WORLD, so has
Shakespeare's writing; his work has been mass produced for the sake of
keeping intelligence foundationally anchored in the canon, and it is on
this issue that Huxley poses interesting ground on which to analyze the
canon, but also Shakespeare in particular. What emerges is a new image
of Shakespeare's work on an individual level, apart from the canon,
which is responsible for free thinking and a "Brave New World."
Out of the portrait of the Savage emerges a portrayal of intelligence:
it requires a perspective outside of society to manifest visions of how
that society should be. Such visions cannot manifest amidst the gears
and wiring of society itself, and this is why the Savage, who is the
only individual to have ever lived outside the system, is a significant
figure. Soma, one method of keeping the gears and wiring intact, is a
key agent in making sure that individuals do not stray from the
collective group, and is symbolic of a number of sedatives in actual
modern societies such as food addiction, laziness, gluttony, or
religion: "Christianity without tears- that's what soma is" (Huxley
238). Shakespeare, but more specifically, "intelligence," is
foregrounded in the novel as the contra force to falling into sedation;
it is the escape to soma addiction. Huxley gives the canon a holy power
when the Savage defends himself against Mustapha Mond's dogmatic
offensive, in defending the distribution of soma, by quoting Othello:
"But the tears are necessary. Don't you remember what Othello said?" (As
if Othello were a historical figure), "'If after every tempest came such
calms, may the winds blow till they have wakened death'" (238). In the
same way that Jesus Christ is spoken of as a person, so is Othello, thus
embodying Huxley's creation of a bold face-off between canonized
literature and religion itself.
But is Huxley really using the canon to symbolize intelligence and free
thinking, or does the fact that Shakespeare is a mass-produced figure in
literature only expand Huxley's vision of collective assimilation?
Theodor Adorno, in his essay, "Aldous Huxley and Utopia," states that,
"[Collectivized people] are cut off both from the mind, which Huxley
rather flatly equates with the products of traditional culture,
exemplified by Shakespeare, and from nature as landscape, an image of
creation unviolated by society" (Adorno 102). For these cloned people,
it is traditional culture (the canon) that has cloned them, according to
Adorno. But I think that it is too easy to make this claim; there are
too many implicit references in the novel for Huxley's use of
Shakespeare to be written off, because when they are drawn out and
juxtaposed with the explicit Shakespeare references in the text, we find
that Huxley has created a trove from which the assimilated can reclaim
their humanity. For example, Shakespeare's Sonnet #3 (which is summed up
by it's heroic couplet: "If thou live remembred not to be, die single
and thine image dies with thee.") is relevant in the novel to when
Bernard tries to invoke feelings of motherhood in Lenina:
"... what an intensity of feeling it must generate! I often think one
may have missed something in not having had a mother. And perhaps you've
missed something in not being a mother, Lenina. Imagine yourself sitting
there with a little baby of your own..." (Huxley 112).
When Lenina quickly brushes the idea away as if it is vile ("Bernard!
How could you!"), she makes Shakespeare's image grotesque, and Lenina
then appears to be less human than she really is. To Shakespeare, any
such woman that denies the idea of motherhood presented to her by an
able man is, "[an] unear'd womb [who disdains] the tillage [of
husbandry]." Lenina makes motherhood a disgusting thing; she is not so
"fair" that she is innocent to carnal pleasure (evident on page 44, when
she becomes bored with Henry and wants to have Bernard instead), and so
her rejection of motherhood is not out of a lack of experience, but is
rather a rejection of nature itself.
Another implicit reference in the novel is a parallel between Coriolanus
and Helmholtz. Coriolanus is a respected warrior and leader who is the
victim of his own pride, as his mother has him on a leash which he is
unable to escape. Helmholtz reveals great weakness despite his
super-human status as an Alpha, and his leash is his own intellectualism:
"Did you ever feel [...] as though you had something inside you that
was only waiting for you to give it a chance to come out? 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" (Huxley 69)?
Bernard chimes in, using a word that Huxley is known for having applied
to non-intellectualism: "emotion" (Birnbaum 46). Bernard responds, "You
mean all the emotions one might be feeling if things were different"
(Huxley 69)? While Helmholtz rejects that he might be caught in an
emotional conundrum, which would deplete his status as an intellectual
(God forbid), he responds in such a way as to navigate around the issue
of "emotion:"
"'Not quite. I'm thinking of a queer feeling I sometimes get, a
feeling that I've got something important to say and the power to say it
- only I don't know what it is, and I can't make any use of the power.
If there was some different way of writing... Or else something else to
write about...' He was silent..." (69).
What is presented here by Huxley is a man of great status and power, who
is at the same time the victim of his own minutia, which is nothing less
than to say his own psychotherapy. Huxley has recreated Coriolanus via
Shakespeare's preexisting archetype. Both Coriolanus and Helmholtz
exhibit the classic trope of the Achilles heel, suggesting that the
giants in society fall victim to what they should have greatest control
over: their own egos, rather than the masses.
Out of the emergence and accumulation of these implicit parallels (there
are more), the Savage is empowered to emerge as a richly developed
memento to a past world where free thinkers were the happiest. He is a
symbol for free speech, free press, and liberty of mind. While the other
characters are unknowingly living representations of Shakespeare's
creations, the Savage is the only one who can see this, and the only one
willing to make it known to them that their lives have already been
lived, that they exist in books, and that cultivating these books is
their only means of severing from the societal machine that has human
experience numb. Aldous Huxley thus separates Shakespeare from its stale
canonization, giving it new life. This allows the space to establish
that the "Brave New World" is the one where the individual takes the
risk of making a new one for himself and his fellow free thinkers, and
navigates with the already written works of free thinkers of past times.
____________________________________
-Adorno, Theodor. PRISMS. 1983.
- Birnbaum, Milton. ALDOUS HUXLEY: A QUEST FOR VALUES. Transaction
Publishers, 2006.
- Huxley, Aldous. BRAVE NEW WORLD. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1946.
No comments:
Post a Comment