@estão-lendo
Descobri hoje isso, a introdução que Ursula K. Le Guin escreveu para uma edição nova e ilustrada de Admirável Mundo Novo:
Huxley’s Bad Trip
An introduction to the Folio Society edition of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, 2013.
When Brave New World came out in 1931 it wasn’t called science fiction, because the term was scarcely used then; and it has seldom been called science fiction since, because such a description might be taken as implying that it has no literary value. Now that the critics are at last giving up such generic prejudice, we can call the book what it obviously is: a dazzling work of early science fiction.
Aldous Huxley intended his novel to be a warning about the future, but it did more: it lived into the future itself, remaining immensely influential in literature for decades after its publication. Its success in providing a model of “futuristic” writing for lesser writers may indeed make it seem, to a postmillennial reader, rather over-explanatory and predictable. What was new and daringly original to readers in 1931 has become cliché. Fiction and film have made us more or less familiar with vast laboratories, fetuses ripening in bottles, programmed children, ever-nubile women, hordes of indistinguishable clones, the vision of a materialistic paradise where nothing is lacking except imagination, spontaneity, and freedom. Occasionally we even catch glimpses on the daily TV news of the programmed, uniformed children, the smiling clones exercising in unison.
Both in reality and in fiction, the rational utopia and the rational dystopia modeled on it run much to the same pattern. And they are quite small places, with remarkably little variety. Huxley was brilliant in his paradoxical depiction of a perfect heaven which is a perfect hell; but neither heaven nor hell, conceived rationally, conceived politically, can offer much to the imagination. Only the poets, a Dante or a Milton, can find the grandeur of heaven and hell, infusing them with passion.
Does Brave New World ever surpass its rational, dystopic limits and hint at that greater poetic vision? I am not sure it does, not sure it doesn’t.
The cautionary novel does what many people assume all science fiction does: it predicts the future. However much they may exaggerate dramatically or satirically, predictive writers extrapolate immediately from fact. And, believing that they know what’s going to happen in the future, for good or for evil, they want the reader to believe it too. A great deal of science fiction, however, has nothing to do with the future, but is a playful or serious thought experiment, such as H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds or Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles. Thought experimenters use fiction to recombine aspects of reality into forms not meant to be taken literally, only to open the mind to possibility. They don’t deal with belief at all.
This distinction enforced itself on me when I realised that Huxley himself appears to have believed quite literally in his prediction.
In 1921, early in the Soviet social experiment, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s great dystopic novel We drew a powerful picture of an over-rationalised society under total governmental control. Far earlier than that, in 1909, E. M. Forster had written the amazing visionary story “The Machine Stops,” which Huxley surely knew. Brave New World, then, had worthy ancestors in a specific tradition of anti-totalitarian dystopias. And by 1931, when most of Asia and much of Europe was being run by or taken over by dictatorships, it was perfectly realistic to see totalitarian government as the most immediate and appalling threat to any kind of freedom.
But in 1949, Huxley was still speaking of his novel not only as a cautionary tale, but as describing nascent reality. He wrote to George Orwell when Nineteen Eighty-Four was published, generously praising it as “fine and profoundly important,” but adding, in defense of his own vision against Orwell’s subtler yet more brutal dystopia, “Within the next generation I believe that the world’s leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience.”
Evidently he still believed that “hypnopaedia,” the essential technique of the mental programming of the citizens of the World State, was a proven, effective method, only waiting to be used. Psychological theories of the time, such as B. F. Skinner’s “operant conditioning,” could be taken to support this belief, and most of the experiments disproving the effectiveness of “sleep-learning” were yet to come. On the other hand, no experiment had ever been accepted as proving it. Hypnopaedia was to Huxley not so much a fictional invention or scientific hypothesis as an article of faith.
Why did he invest so much in a shaky theory and call it science? What was his fundamental attitude to science?
His grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, “Darwin’s bulldog,” and his brothers Andrew and Julian were all biologists of extraordinary distinction and humanity. Thomas Henry Huxley invented the word “agnostic” to name, and so create, an open space for the spirit equivalent to the open space for the mind offered by science. Ideally, the scientist, while always seeking to know and to know more, forgoes any claim to final knowledge. A sound hypothesis supported and modified by endless testing (such as Harvey’s theory of the circulation of the blood, or Darwin’s theory of evolution) is as far as science goes towards certainty. Scientists don’t deal in belief.
Aldous Huxley of course knew this. He also knew that few scientists attain the ideal openness of mind of agnosticism, and that many of them talk as if they alone know anything worth knowing. Here in the real world the smug conviction of incontestable rightness displayed by the technicians of the World State is at least as common in laboratories as it is in seminaries.
Huxley’s novels were mostly cynical, but the hideous scientism of his dystopia reveals something fiercer than cynicism. To some temperaments the open mind, the acceptance of final uncertainty, is not only insufficient but frightening and hateful. He knew enough science to make the inventions of his novel plausible, but whatever made him dislike and distrust it, the role he gives scientific technology in his novel is domineeering and sinister. It appears that, seeing science as heartless, emotionless rationalism, he thought that the pursuit of science could never attain true meaning or do true good, but was inevitably at the service of evil. The scion of a great humanistic scientific tradition portrayed science as the enemy of humanity.
And the young author of cold, scathing satires of British intellectual and social mores became in middle age a member of the mystical Vedanta Society of Los Angeles and a guru of the drug movement that was gathering strength when he died in 1963, his suffering eased by a hundred-milligram dose of LSD.
California is what you make of it, and what it makes of you. Brave New World was written in the Old World, a long time before the Summer of Love. Yet rereading it now, I was impressed by the importance in it of soma, the wonder drug on which everybody in the World State, and the World State itself, is dependent. It’s partly a plot gimmick, to be sure, but surely also significant of the author’s preoccupations. Soma enhances all pleasures, sex above all, of course. It never causes bad trips, but induces bliss, invariably—even eternally, if you keep taking it. If it has any adverse effects on health they aren’t mentioned. Whether it’s addictive is a moot point. If you had unlimited access to a drug that would give you a perfect high for hours or days at a time, at any time, without doing you any bodily harm, and with the enthusiastic approval of your entire society, would you be likely to abstain from it?
You’re not allowed to. You must consume your daily dose of soma because it’s what holds everything together in happy inertia. Consumption is the basis of the World State, the state of delusion.
And in this, Huxley’s science fiction was undeniably and radically visionary, leaping decades beyond the society of his day into the post-millennial world of obligatory consumerism and instant gratification.
Here, too, he introduces an element of the book that greatly augments its emotional, vital power. Into the delusional world where everybody is made and kept perfectly, vapidly happy, he brings a character who isn’t.
Bernard Marx, dwarfed, meanspirited, and frustrated, at first seems to be this misfit or rebel, but turns out to be only the lead-up to him. The stranger to bliss, the tragic outsider, is John. He is called the Savage, but might more accurately be called the Puritan. Despite the miseries of his childhood among the “primitives” outside the World State, John has seen enough actual love and happiness to be sure that a chemical can deliver only imitations of them, that there are no shortcuts to the experience of the real. Trapped in the hell he thought would be heaven, he tries to opt out of delusion, to regain reality, to abstain from the drug that maintains the World State.
The word soma is Greek for “body.” Today we see it mostly in the word psychosomatic, but Huxley could assume that a great many of his readers had enough classical education to recognise it directly.
A Puritan is one who abjures the body and the pleasures of the body to save his soul. To what extent is Brave New World a study of body-hating, world-renouncing, self-castigating mysticism, concealed within a novel about politics and power?
The Savage has a long conversation, the most conventionally utopic passage of the novel, with the local World Controller, whose splendidly villainous name is Mustapha Mond. It’s hard not to see the Controller as a conscious competitor with the Grand Inquisitor of Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. “There used to be something called God,” he begins airily, “before the Nine Years’ War.” The Savage knows a good deal about God, having grown up in a violent stew of Catholicism and Native religions, and can hold up his end of the conversation. In their discussion of the nature of God, he asks, “How does he manifest himself now?” and Mustapha Mond replies, “Well, he manifests himself as an absence.” They go on to argue about human spiritual need, John insisting that we need God to guarantee the value of virtue and self-denial, the Controller brushing aside such notions as “symptoms of political inefficiency.” “You can’t have a lasting civilization without plenty of pleasant vices,” he says, and, triumphantly, “You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears—that’s what soma is.”
John’s final refutation of a tearless existence, his claim to have God, poetry, danger, freedom, goodness, and sin, his declaration of his right to be unhappy, are the high point of the novel; but a high point that can only be followed by a fall. The poor Savage will indeed find his unhappiness.
And thus he is the only character in the novel likely to remain in the reader’s mind as a person rather than an allegorical figure or intellectual construct. When I came to reread the book, I had forgotten Mustapha Mond and Bernard Marx and the pneumatic Lenina. I was glad to rediscover them. But I had remembered the Savage for fifty years.
Huxley’s later experiments with drug-taking seem almost a search for real-life soma, religion in a bottle. Did he think that mescaline and LSD and the other psychedelic drugs he consumed and endorsed falsified his perceptions and endangered his soul, or that they were a high road to enlightenment, shortcuts to a greater truth? Perhaps he thought both. The Savage and the Controller were, after all, both creations of his own mind, where their conflict might, perhaps must, continue unresolved.
Written with the aplomb of his class and culture, yet with a searing urgency; concealing obscure or unexamined motivations behind a fireworks of invention; showing pleasure as inevitably disgusting and degrading and freedom as mindless license, yet offering no escape from the sordid world where these are the only options, Brave New World is a troubled, troubling book, a masterpiece of the Age of Anxiety, a vivid record of the anguish of the twentieth century. It may also be a valid and very early warning of the risk of keeping civilisation on the course Aldous Huxley saw it beginning to follow more than eighty years ago.
