← The Literary Life Podcast
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- [00:19]
A
This is not just another book chat podcast. Lifelong reader Cindy Rollins joins teachers Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks for an ongoing conversation about the science, skill and art of reading. Well, explore the lost intellectual tradition and discover how to fully enter into the great works of literature. Learn what books mean while delighting in the sheer joy of imagination. Each week we will rescue story from the ivory tower and bring it to your couch, your kitchen, and your commute. The Literary Life is for everyone because in the words of Stratford Caldecott, to be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality. Join us for an ever unfolding discussion of how stories will save the world. This is the Literary Life Podcast. Hello and welcome back to the Literary Life Podcast. I'm Angelina Stanford and I am here with the mysterious Mr. Savage.
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B
No, I don't think I could live very long in that world.
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A
But you quote Shakespeare all the time.
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B
That's true. And I like New Mexico. I like New Mexico, which is also very dear to Aldous Huxley. As we will see.
- [01:47]
A
As we will see. Well, we're. We're here. And we are here with our special guests, Ella Hornstrah, who has joined us again for this second episode in our series on Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Welcome back, Ella.
- [02:01]
C
Thank you for having me. Once again.
- [02:04]
A
Well, we are. We are the lucky ones because we have got some fantastic stuff to talk about today, and I'm eager to jump in. But before we do that, let's talk a little bit about what's going on at the House of Humane Letter. So last week we mentioned a few things we have got going on. Of course, my Edgar Allan Poe webinar is coming on, too. But I wanted to highlight for you guys a couple of other things. One is our annual Literary Life Conference this year we moved it. We heard you guys saying you didn't like it in April. April's too hectic, so we moved it all the way to January. And I wanted to highlight the conference this particular week because the theme of the conference is very apropos to the things we're talking about in Brave New World. So let me tell you guys what's going on with this. The title of the conference this year is the letter Killeth and the Spirit Quickeneth. Reading Like a Human. That's right, Reading Like a Human. And of course, you're going to recognize that the title is from a Bible verse. And this is the theme of the conference. And Atlee gave us a. Just a fantastic graphic of a person standing in a library. But Looking at a phone with just ones and zeros, as if you can just download all of this, which is very brave new world. And when I came up with the idea for the conference, I knew I did not hesitate. I immediately, I went from thinking of it to texting him. It was that fast. I knew there wasn't anybody better to be the keynote for this conference than Dr. Jason Baxter. And he has agreed. So he is going to be giving the keynote there. And this is going to be January 23rd through 30th, 2026. So we've got a new format, it's going to be longer, we're spacing the talks out a bit more. And we are also going to have a student panel this year, which I'm quite excited about. So let me tell you a little bit about what this theme is. Let me read to you the description I wrote. Our culture is obsessed with, quote, unquote, literacy. We track literacy statistics and data schools, hire literacy coaches and specialists. Literature class has been replaced by literacy class. But has this obsession resulted in greater understanding of the written word? Quite the opposite. All around us is the evidence that we are existing in an almost post literate age. The the popularity of AI tools to summarize reading into talking points for us is simply one small example of our inability to decipher the written word. We need machines to read for us because we can no longer read like humans. To understand how we got here, we have to cast our eyes to the other side of what C.S. lewis calls the great divide, the invisible curtain that separates us from the past. For the seeds of our current crisis were planted a long time ago and the path of renewal starts in the same place. Looking back before the machine age, we can learn to recover a more human way to read and therefore to live. So I'm pretty pumped about this topic. We're having some fantastic behind the scenes conversations about how our talks are all going to go together. So it's going to be keynote speaker, Dr. Jason Baxter, I will be talking, Mr. Banks will be talking, Dr. Ann Phillips will be giving a talk, and Ms. Jen Rogers will be giving a talk. And this year, as I said, we're also including a student panel because I started thinking, you know, what's more pragmatic than, you know, the capstone of why don't we just let the kids who have been trained to read like humans speak for themselves and tell us what it means to them to have learned to read like a human. And so we're going to be hearing from four different hhl students about what it has meant to them to learn to read and live like a human. So I'm pretty excited about that. So again, that is January 23rd through January 30th. And yes, as I look over, the panel names Ella. One of those should look familiar to you. It's your sister Olivia. So, yes, it is. That's right. You guys are gonna get to meet the third. The third. The mysterious silent partner in the. In the trio of Hornstra girls. So, yes, our student panel is going to be Elizabeth Uesterman, Olivia Hornstra, Rome Smith, and Oliver Garber. And I'm really looking forward to that. So again, guys, it's live or later. Go to HouseOfHumaneLetters.com click on the conference tab and you can find out all the information there and join us because I think it's really going to be one of the more important conferences we've ever done. And honestly, I put all this pressure on myself every year because, you know, I keep thinking, how am I going to top this? But then somehow, you know, something just, just happens. I don't want to get all mystical about it, but it's like the muse just visits me and tells me, you know, this is, this is what we should be doing. And I had been reading Augustine, and he is the inspiration for a great deal of this, of this talk because he had a lot to say about how one should read and what kind of reading brings life and what kind of reading brings a death. And that, of course, is what the title is. All right, enough of that. One more thing I want to draw your attention to because this is nothing short of a coup. Yes, we have Dr. Jason Baxter, which is. He's always a coup, who's going to be our keynote speaker. But we're also going to be doing something in the spring that seriously, just pinch me, pinch me, pinch me. You guys might remember that Dr. Michael Drought, a couple months ago did a webinar for us on the Vikings. Dr. Drought, if you don't know, is a. An extremely accomplished medievalist, Anglo Saxon, ish, Germanic philosopher, philologists, an expert in Norse mythology. He's got online lectures, he's got books on Audible, he's got a brand new book coming out published by Norton. Like, he's as big as you get in the world of academia. He's incredibly respected and a fantastic teacher and an entertaining speaker. Like, he got our students so fired up at that webinar that literally while he's talking, they're in the chat box begging for more. So I asked him if we could have more and he responded by sending me the syllabus of a class he teach as he teaches at his university. And I said yes. So guys, for a steal a steal, we are offering a college class for adults, for high school students. He's a very accessible teacher on Viking and Old Norse culture. This is going to be a 16 week class in the spring starting January 8th and going through the spring semest and. And this is a legit college class being offered to you for pennies when you consider how much a college education costs these days. But I will read to you the short description he wrote. All right, so here it goes. In the years 800 to 1066, the Vikings reshaped the history and politics of Europe, raiding, conquering, settling and trading in an area of influence that reached from Byzantium in the east to North America in the west, and from Iceland in the north to as far south as Spain in Italy. A thousand years later, the rediscovery of their literature spread throughout both elite and popular culture, inspiring generations of readers and creators. In this course we will study the history and the culture of the medieval Norsemen and their engagement with the rest of Europe from the Iron Age until the Norman Conquest. Oh, goodness. There's a lot of hard words for me to pronounce. In this next section, I'll do my best. We will read the ancient Eatic poems, Snorri Sturlison's prose wreath retelling of Norse myth, and some of the Icelandic sagas included in the greatest of them all. Is it nulls Saga? Did I say that right?
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B
I thought Neols, but probably were both wrong.
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A
We're probably both wrong. Take the class to find out how to really say that which is as rich, complex and sophisticated as any modern American or 19th century French or Russian novel. Tom Shippy's Laughing Shall I Die. The lives and death of the great Vikings will help to guide us through the full range of Old Norse culture. And we will see if new archaeological discoveries are computer assisted analysis policies can shed new light on old questions. Although Vikings never wore horned helmets, probably, or drank mead from the skulls of their enemies, too much spills out through the eye holes, or at least that's always been my experience. The reality of Old Norse history is often more extreme than the imaginations of late popularizers. And this remarkable culture's literary achievements are far greater than is often recognized. You get a sense of his humor there in the description. He's just so, so entertaining. So what you'll see is this course could actually count both a literature and a history credit for an elective. You're going to get a lot of good stuff here. This is going to meet on Thursdays. It's a night class, so from 7 to 8:30pm Eastern Time, again, live or later, everything's recorded. And I won't read you his whole plan of study here. We've got a lot of details on the website, but I can tell you that, yeah, we're going to be studying the Ettas and the sagas and a history book and all kinds of good stuff. This is going to be an absolutely fantastic class and I'm simply beside myself with excitement that we get to offer this. So again, HouseOfHumaneLetters.com, check out everything. If you're trying to find the conference, click on the conference tab. If you're looking for Michael Drought's webinar, I mean his class, well, you can also find his webinar there and his class. Click on teaching. Go down to mini classes and webinars. You can find his webinar there. You can sign up for his class. You can sign up for my PO class. What you could do is watch the Viking webinar and then just get a sense of who he is and then make your decision if you'd like to more. But he, he is absolutely fabulous. Mr. Banks, you really enjoy Michael Drop.
- [11:59]
B
I do, I do. I. You know, you mentioned the. The major medieval chronicler of so much of their past, Snorri Sturluson.
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A
Great name.
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B
I knew someone once who knew nothing about the history of medieval Scandinavia, but he was in a bookstore and he just saw this author's name on the back of it on the spine of a book, Snorri Sturluson. And he bought the book and he decided that it doesn't matter what the book is about, it has to be interesting because of this author's name. And he became kind of obsessed with, yeah, medieval Norway and things like that because of just this chance encounter.
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A
Oh, that's fantastic. That's fantastic. I'll try not to gush too much about Michael Drought. I really am such a fan girl of him. I discovered him a few years back and well, Mr. Banks and I.
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C
You.
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A
You were so kind to let you just go along with whatever my obsession of the moment is. But we were driving on vacation and I said, is it okay if I put these lectures on. And we started listening to Michael Drought and then you put your book. That was a huge moment. You closed your book and started Listening. Yeah.
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B
I was just going to politely ignore them, but I got pulled in. I got pulled in. He's a very good lecturer.
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A
He's a very good lecturer. And I.
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B
You can tell he has a lot of learning that he wears very lightly. And I'm. That is a really hard balance to strike. I know very few teachers, I think, who strike it successfully.
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A
That's right.
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B
He seems to.
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A
He's so accessible. He has so much love and so much knowledge. And so this isn't one of these, like, stuffy college professors. He's the real deal. In fact, I remember when I was listening to those lectures, I thought to myself, like, this would be my dream to get this guy right here to come and work with me. And so the fact that it all. It all came together as very exciting to me. So definitely check out Michael Drought. Okay, now that we have gotten through all of the things that keep the lights on at House of Humane Letters, namely students and tuition, now we can move on with our free class that we offer right here in the podcast on Brave New World. Let's start off with some commonplace quotes. Mr. Banks, how about you?
- [14:04]
B
Okay, so mine is taken from. Mine is taken from the great Gibbon. This is from Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Here he's describing the reign of antoninus in the 2nd century AD and he writes his reign is marked by the rare advantage of furnishing very few materials for history, which is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind. I'd like to think it's more than that. You know, our inventions and exaltations and ennobling ideas as well. But it is certainly a register of crimes and follies. Not exclusively, but it is that.
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A
It's a very cynical look.
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B
No, it is a very. No, it's a very pessimistic outlook. It's kind of interesting. That Gibbon, even though he's living in the midst of the Enlightenment era, which is in some ways kind of a smugly optimistic time, he had himself kind of a dismal philosophy of history, he.
- [15:02]
A
Would not have written Brave New World.
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B
No. No, I don't think so.
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A
All right, Ms. Ella, do you have a commonplace quote for us?
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C
I do. And my commonplace this week is actually from Aldous Huxley himself, from an essay he wrote on Edward Lear in his collection called on the Margin. And it does apply to what we will be talking about today. We won't be talking about Edward Lear, but we will be Talking about another nonsense author. So he says the existence of nonsense is the nearest approach to a proof of that improvable article of faith whose truth we must all assume or perish miserably. That life is worth living.
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A
Ah, I can already see how this is going to connect to Brave New World. That's right. Life is in fact worth living. Some of you, some of you listening who are struggling with this book might think, what? That's the message of Brave New World. Indeed it is, as we shall see and we hope today to unpack this a little bit more and maybe answer the question about why some of you guys might be struggling with this book.
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C
Unpack it, but also show some of the ways that it is hilarious.
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A
Yes, yes, yes, we'll get to that. All right, here's my not funny quote for my commonplace quote. So I recently picked up a book on the recommendation of our Patreon. So shout out to you guys. Our Patreon is very committed to. It has just a bazillion reading groups. I mean, everything, Augustine, Boethius, all this old stuff. But they also like to read new books as well. And, and yeah, again, go to the Patreon, check out like, you guys are amazing and I'm in awe of you all the time that you, you guys are just fearless with your reading groups. But I happen to notice that you guys were talking about Paul Kingsworth's new book, against the Machine, and it was on my radar a little bit, but you know, I have a very long to be read list, so I didn't pick it up. But noticing what you guys were saying on the Patreon about it and how you were saying this really fit with Brave New World. I went ahead and got it and I started it this week and thought, oh my goodness, this does have everything to do with Brave New World. In fact, he talks about Brave New World. He also talks about E.M. forster's short story the Machine Stops, which we did on this podcast. And you should definitely go check out that episode. That's a fantastic episode. So anyway, as soon as I started reading it, I thought, oh my goodness, they'll be commonplace quotes galore from this book. But I actually thought I would start with two quotes he gives in the epigraph. He starts his book with these two quotes, both of which I think will play into our discussion of Brave New World. Here's the first one. It's by Wendell Berry. It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as Creatures and people who wish to live as machines.
- [18:01]
B
Oh, yes, that seems very apropos of.
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A
What we're talking about. And it's followed up with somebody on the other end of the spectrum, Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction novelist, who said it may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him. Also appropriately discussed today.
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B
Didn't you tell me that Arthur C. Clarke once met C.S. lewis in a publisher and spent several argues, drinking and arguing with him?
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A
That wasn't me.
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B
Someone has. I've heard about this encounter. It's like I've never seen.
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C
I feel like I've heard the same thing.
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B
Oh, yeah, there's a story, so. And by the way, anyone who doesn't know Arthur C. Clarke is the author of 2001 A Space Odyssey.
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A
One of the major fixtures liked Arthur C. Clarke's writing.
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B
Yeah, I've heard that they got along as a person. And C.S. lewis, his take on their conversation was that this is a guy who's basically a decent human being who has all of these destructive and really evil ideals, ideas which he is enslaved to. Yeah. So they did not see eye to eye, but they had a lot of. It's kind of an instance of Lewis. Lewis said that it's really actually kind of a blessing to have someone like this in your life. Someone who has read all the books that you have and values the things that you do, but looks at them from a completely and even inimical sort of angle. And I think it was one of those meetings. We have so much in common, yet we're also somehow kind of enemies.
- [19:29]
A
One of them seems upside down, perhaps, which will fit into today's discussion. All right, before we jump into chapters four through seven, I want to go back to something we said last week when we were talking about Edith Wharton's influence on this book and that she was a big fan of this because. So Kelly Bond from last week, shout out to her had brought us that quote that I read someone else who was in the fellowship with Kelly Bond, Lee, Leah Tekken, who's also been featured on this podcast. So shout out to Leah. Leah had messaged me a couple months back when we were doing the Age of Innocence on the podcast. And it was really interesting because she was kind of obsessing over the fact that to her, the Age of Innocence felt like brave new world, that it was still kind of these two. These two worlds at war with each other, a new world and moving forward and trying to hold on to the old world, and that tension there so when she found out that Edith Wharton was a big fan of Brave New World, she felt very vindicated. And she found some more quotes from Edith Wharton about this book. So here's a quote from Edith Wharton in her letters. So she's writing to somebody, she says, I suppose you have read his Brave New World, which is a masterpiece of tragic indictment of our ghastly age of Fortyan culture. Get it at once if you haven't. He wrote to me that I had, quote, put the case already in twilight sleep. And I own I was much set up by his recognition of the fact. Then in another one, she went on to say that Brave New World was a masterpiece worthy of Swift.
- [21:11]
B
Oh, yeah. No, there's.
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C
It's.
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B
I think that Huxley is not as merciless a humorist as Swift was. But there's a lot of Swift here.
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A
Oh, there's a lot of stuff here. Yeah. And it's that same sort of that Swift innocence of humor. Again, I agree with you.
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B
Yeah. There's a kind of detached irony in both of their style of narration. Yeah. At the same time, maybe Swift seems to me a more complete pessimist than Huxley did. I guess I'm saying that not so much from Gulliver's Travels as some of his other writers, but.
- [21:46]
A
Yeah, no, I think that would be fair. And I think Swift gets a lot of the same misunderstandings that Huxley does. People don't catch sense of humor because it's so incredibly, people assume that there's.
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B
Kind of a prescriptive intent in some of their writings that isn't there.
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A
People make the mistake of thinking Gulliver is Jonathan Swift, which is not correct. Gulliver is one of the things that Swift is satirizing. And we'll talk about what's happening there with satire as we go through the book. But so I'm teaching Gulliver's Travels again right now. I teach it every year. And it just so happens that it is lining up with Brave New World. And there are so many moments in Swift that are clearly an influence on Brave New World. We talked last time about how Gulliver's Travels was George Orwell's favorite book. And you see so much influence of gulliver's travels on 1984, but it's all over Brave New World, too. So I was laughing because there's a section in book 3 of Gulliver's Travels where he goes to the Academy, which is Jonathan Swift, just Hughes spoof send up of the Royal Society of London and the kinds of experiments they're doing. And anyway, one of the experiments they're doing is trying to figure out how to educate people in their sleep. So, you know, hello, brave new world. But Swift, like, cranks it up to 11 always. And what. When they realize that educating while they're sleeping won't work, they try something else. So they write what they want the person to know on a little tablet, and then they eat it and then they go to sleep. And while they're asleep, their stomach digests it and it goes up to the brain and then they're gonna learn it.
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C
You mean it's like the Eat me cakes and Alice?
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A
Yes, yes, it's like the eat me cakes and Alice. And then, of course, the twist at the end of the chapter is they're actually all throwing it up because it doesn't work.
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C
But.
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A
And very, very Huxley.
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B
And the society we meet here in Huxley's book is this could be a society. If the. If the Houyhnonyms had existed in the 20th century, this is the world they would have created. Am I saying that right? The Quinonym. The horses.
- [23:43]
A
So Dr. Field said you had to say it like a neighing horse. So he taught us to say the win.
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B
Yeah, I don't think I could do that with a straight face. Sorry. I learned it as. I learned it as Hoyonyms. But I think Hoynonyms does sound more like a Winnie sort of.
- [24:01]
A
You know, I'm always going to be team doctor. Feels okay. Okay. He's the one who taught me about medieval cosmology and forever changed.
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B
I think you and I have like the. Some of the weirdest disagreements of any couple. I know.
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A
It's marital blizzard.
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B
I don't know how to pronounce or fewer necessarily. I think we have about the same number. Number as everyone else, I'm guessing. But yeah, it's over. Really weird and arcane things like.
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A
And, you know, you said that when we first got together. I remember you grinned at me really big and you said, you know, you said two things. I wonder what our first fight is going to be. And then I got upset that you even could. You even suggested that there would ever be a fight amongst us with our.
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B
I think that was the first fight, right?
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A
I think it was a fight. Yeah. Whether or not we would have a fight. I was upset that you thought we would have a fight.
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B
You thought we could, like, achieve complete intellectual oneness.
- [24:46]
A
That's correct.
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B
Which I thought was creepy. But.
- [24:49]
A
But then. But then you, you you followed it up by saying, no, no, hear me out. I think we're going to disagree on some very obscure literary thing. And that has turned out to be completely right. It's completely right. We. We get along so well. It's freakish. Okay, Ella, you've seen us. You know, we get along. We are of one mind. Like, if we walk into a store, we are drawn to the same chair, the same artwork, the same work. We have never had any disagreement on things like that. We are like, weirdly, one mind.
- [25:22]
B
But there are a number of common prejudices, certainly.
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A
Yeah, okay, but. But we will find the most hair splitting things about literature to disagree on, which is just. Yeah, it's. It's baffling.
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B
Yeah, yeah.
- [25:35]
A
So far we've been able to have.
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B
It any other way. I'm fine with it.
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A
Navigate it. We don't let the sun go down on our anger. See, we're like, you know, we're the poster children for biblical marriage right here.
- [25:47]
B
Like, if I came into, you know, we were sitting over a morning coffee and I were to say, you know, you have to hand it to Fr. Levis in this.
- [25:53]
A
That's it. I'd be like, you're sleeping with a dog tonight. Okay, I'd have to go buy a dog so you could sleep with it. That's how upset I'd be. All right, so we're going to jump in with a bunch of stuff here because this book is going to need a lot of context, I think, for understanding many of the layers of satire. We've got. I've got a two pages of lists here of things we're going to make sure we talk about today as we go through the chapter. But I want to start with something we teased you about last week. And Ella has been teasing it already with her references to nonsense literature and Alice. And that is perhaps the very unexpected connection between Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll and Aldous Huxley. And of course, I have to tell this as a story because this is how it unfolded. So you and your sister were at our house. I had given Addison a book on Lewis Carroll and we were sitting there looking at it. She was actually in the middle of her research for her Lewis Carroll webinar. So we're all just really talking about Alice in Wonderland together, because that's what it's like at hhl. Behind the scenes. We. We live this stuff. And so when somebody's researching for a webinar, we're like all into it and all learning and making connections, and it comes out in Every class I teach. But while we were all looking there, I think what happened first was, Mr. Banks, I think you said, did you guys know Aldous Huxley wrote the Alice in Wonderland screenplay for the Disney movie?
- [27:20]
B
He wrote a draft of it, I believe.
- [27:22]
A
Yeah, he wrote a draft of it.
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C
That they didn't want to use because it was too much like the Alice book, and they didn't think it would go well on screen.
- [27:30]
A
Also, he was a purist. I love him even more. Right. So that was, I think, the first time when we started chatting about that, which is classic you, Mr. Banks, that you always come in with, like, the most obscure little detail that gets us off and running. And that's what happened. You said that. And we all just looked at each other and said, wait, there's a connection between Aldous Huxley and Lewis Carroll. So I think we all started Googling like crazy, right? And finding out there was a huge connection. So much so, because Aldous Huxley's mother, which. Do you remember her name? Ella?
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C
Yeah. So we've mentioned that Huxley was a Huxley, but he was also an Arnold. His mother, Julia Arnold, was one of the children that Lewis Carroll photographed during his career who had a personal relationship with the Carrolls.
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A
Right. So, yeah. So Alice Huxley has a personal connection with Lewis Carroll through his mother and was a huge fan of Alice in Wonderland, which, of course, just blew our mind and got us all excited.
- [28:30]
B
So, you know what? I just thought of? This would be a great idea for a movie. It could be kind of a sequel. Do you remember saving Mr. Banks? The. Okay, how pl. Trevors and Disney work out how to. How they're going to make Mary Poppins. Okay. A similar movie, except it would be like firing Mr. Huxley. How Disney hires Huxley to write this script and then decides he doesn't want it and cans him and the script. But Disney meets Huxley. I think that could be, like, some interesting. Some interesting dialogue there. That's an interesting scenario.
- [29:02]
A
No, that would be.
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B
That's the kind of movie I would see. I would totally watch that.
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A
We both would see One Mind Biblical unity right here. We would go see that movie. Movie. So I think it was at that moment, Ella, where you looked at me and said, do you have a copy of Brave New World? I've never read it. And I gave you my copy. Yeah.
- [29:17]
C
This was one of those instances in my life I am always paying attention to when things I. I have, like, this weird habit of watching for things that show up in threes, and that was like, the third time someone had mentioned Brave New World or someone related to Brave New World in, like, the last two days to me. So I was like, well, this is the heavens. I guess I have to read it now. No.
- [29:37]
A
Yeah. And so you kind of disappeared, because it's not a very long book. You disappeared, and then you walked in and, like, your. I remember your face was like glowing like Moses coming down from Mount Sinai, right? You just. You're just like the heavens. And I said, I don't remember the.
- [29:50]
C
Glowing, but I do remember being excited.
- [29:51]
A
You were so excited. You walked in, you said, Brave New World is Alice in Wonderland. And that was one of the reasons we decided to do this podcast. So you might be scratching your head. How is Brave New World Alice in Wonderland? We are just introducing the idea right now, and as we go through the chapters, we're going to start showing you some of the Alice in Wonderland stuff. And this is going to be very, very important for understanding the ending of the book. People radically misunderstand, and part of it is they're not picking up on the Alice reference. And as we talked about in the Alice webinar, it used to be everybody knew the Alice book so well, and now we don't. And so we're missing the. The quite obvious Alice references which Huxley would have presumed that we all knew. So that's coming up. All right, something else I want to bring up. I want to add a little bit to what we were talking about, about the satire with Sigmund Freud. So I want to start off by talking about the traditional view of the soul, particularly the medieval and Elizabethan view of the soul. And we've talked about the tripartite soul. That is the soul that has three parts before on this podcast. We talked about it a lot in the Harry Potter episodes. I believe we've talked about it in some Shakespeare episodes. But let me explain this quickly. If. If I can, and I will say this. There's a very, very slight difference between the way Plato explains this and the way Aristotle explains this and the way that the medievals understood it. But because as we're going to find out in a few minutes, this. This book is also pulling a great deal from Shakespeare. I'm going to use the version of the tripartite soul that you see in Shakespeare, because that is going to be the one that Huxley is pulling from. And again, it's very, very small differences. But just in case I say something, you're like, that's not what Plato said. Well, I'm. I'M doing the medieval version. Okay, so this is the idea that you have three parts to the soul. You have the head, the chest and the belly. The head is reason, capital R. And as C. S. Lewis points out in the discarded image, we're not talking about the post Enlightenment view of reason, which would be logic or the pure intellect. We're talking about reason more in like divine wisdom, or as Heather Goodman said in her Coleridge webinar, it's participating in the mind of Christ.
- [32:21]
B
So which includes the reason. Yes, Reasoning faculties, but isn't limited to that, isn't co. Extensive with them.
- [32:28]
A
Right. So for example, it would include things like divine revelation, the authority of the Bible, church tradition, tradition, as it comes down through the elders. The book of nature would be something under reason, all of the things that teach you wisdom. So obviously your, your ability to think logically and have an intellectual mind and be a rational creature are all part of that. But as Lewis points out in the discarded image, post enlightenment, we reduce what reason is. So we don't understand what it means to live reasonably in the medieval concept or the Elizabethan concept because we've narrowed it. So these would, these would be all, all those things. The book of nature, the book of divine revelation, church tradition, the elders in your town, your parents, all of the things that teach us, that pass down wisdom to us. These are all of the things that are associated with the head and the chest. Here's the little tiny difference between the medievals and Plato and Aristotle, because Plato and Aristotle differed amongst themselves about this. But again, we're primarily interested in the ancients as they come through the medieval imagination. The chest is the will, and the will is essentially, well, it's the seat of affections. It's. But it's mostly a muscle. So if your reason, the thing that gives you wisdom, tells you what is the right thing to do, your will has to be strong enough to then do said right thing. Right? And this is what Lewis is getting at when he says in Abolition of Man that we are creating men without chests, right? That center part of us is weak. We don't have the right affections and we lack the strength of will to act on those. We, we, you know, we're hollow men, to use T.S. eliot's phrase. That's the will. The belly is not hard to figure out. That's the appetites, that's the passions, right? Cough, cough. That's brave new world, right? This is a society that is completely led by their passion, their desires, their appetites. So for the medieval the well ordered man is a man who is ruled by his head. And this shows up all over the literature. They had a bunch of different stock images to express this, which Ellen's going to explain in just a minute. But you're ruled by your reason. So there are two ways that you could become disordered, right? One would be I genuinely don't know the right thing to do do. The other would be I do know the right thing to do, but I lack the strength of will to do it. And Shakespeare actually likes to give us both different versions of that. King Lear or Hamlet. We could use Hamlet. Hamlet is a guy who doesn't know what the right thing to do is. Right. His whole entire play is, I don't know, should I kill him? Should I not kill him? What do I do? And Macbeth is somebody who well knows what the right thing to do is and lacks the strength of will to do it. So see, there's two different ways you can be disordered, both equally destructive. So the well ordered man has the reason at the top, a strong will and his bellies in, in check. And the appetites should not be considered as sins, but more as appetites and passions, which could be sinful depending on if they're properly ordered or disordered. So for example, let's say I, I, I'm angry. Or well, we'll take, I mean, we'll take something even clearer than that. That would fit with this book. I, I have lust, right? I'm feeling sexual desire that fits. Very brave new world. If I'm properly ordered that I bring that desire up before my reason and my reason asks, is this an appropriate thing to feel? Right. Which will be connected to who I'm feeling it toward. Oh, is it? I'm feeling it toward the person I'm married to. Then, you know, check, carry on. Oh, you're feeling it to your neighbor's husband. You know, red flag, stop. You know, do not proceed, do not pass go. That's how a properly ordered person is supposed to work. So you take that appetite, you put it under your reason. Your reason tells you whether or not this is something that you should act on. Then of course, if your will is nice and strong and your reason is saying this is not an appetite to act on, then my strong will will help me then to reject it. It. That is what it means to be properly ordered. Some of you might be thinking this sounds a whole lot like what Charlotte Mason teaches in her volume ourselves. Correct. Charlotte Mason is a good medieval. This is why she makes such a big deal in her books about training of the will of children. Because all the medievals. Dorothy Sayers talks about this in her lectures on Dante. That for the medieval. For. She says, for modern psychology, this is going to fit in good with Freud in a second. That for modern psychology, they perceive man's biggest struggle as well, I just live in a very scary, confusing world, and who knows what the right thing to do is. Right. And she says for the medieval, they thought our primary problem was not that we didn't know what the right thing to do was, but that we lacked the strength of our will to do those hard, right, right things. So very often in Shakespeare, what you'll see, if he wants to show somebody disordered, he will show that person being upside down, which means instead of being ruled by their head, the reason they are ruled by their belly. Maybe that. Maybe you're thinking, hey, that sounds like brave new world. This is a person standing on their head. This is someone upside down who is ruled by their belly. Now, Ella, you brought up a really interesting point to me that I want you to explain to our listeners, where you said Sigmund Freud's id, ego and superego, his reimagining of the. In. He wouldn't say soul, but the inner psychology of a human being is a parody of the medieval tripartite soul. Tell us about that.
- [38:28]
C
Yeah. So Freud created this schema, if you will, of. Of. Of a human being that's made up of the id, the ego, and the super ego. Technically, the super ego is between the ego and the id, and the ID is made up of primal instincts, desires, passions. I guess it would correspond to the passions in the medieval model. And it's. It is the dark, inaccessible part of the personality that it. That man is always governed by, but yet doesn't fully know. So kind of part of the role of modern psychology is to dig into that primal part of you. And the ego is a essence of self, meaning your understanding of yourself. I mean, hence the pronoun ego just means I. And it corresponds, he says, to the reason and the superego he defined as the internalization of cultural norms, meaning your realization of what is expected of you in your cultural context, what other people expect you to do, how you're meant to behave culturally, what rules you are supposed to follow, if you will. And I have a quote from one of his books on metapsychology, where he borrowed a medieval image without saying so one of these images that the medievals use to depict this tripartite soul and the relationship that the reason has to the passions is the image of the relationship between a rider and a horse. The passions is this, this animal that moves about it. It is powerful, but it can be in a symbiotic relationship with its writer, where the writer is, you know, in control, but the two are working as one. It's a well ordered relationship when things are not out of control. Right, okay. He says the ego represents what may be called reason and common sense. In contrast to the id, which contains the passions. It is like a man on horseback who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse, with the difference that the rider tries to do so with his own strength, while the ego uses borrowed forces, meaning the ego, the sense of self, uses the superego being, the cultural rules to beat down the poor suppressed ID into submission. So this is kind of the idea he has set up. And Brave New World is a world in which we have fully realized everything that the ID wants and we have given it what it wants. And you said you wanted to talk about the pleasure principle, which is important because the pleasure principle is what rules the id.
- [41:01]
A
That's right. So this is.
- [41:03]
B
Oh, go ahead, before we run away. You may have noticed this yourself, Ms. Ella, but that the image of the horse and rider, I would bet anything that he is adapting for his own purpose. Plato's use of the same image in the Phaedrus. I think it is.
- [41:19]
C
I think he is.
- [41:20]
A
And that image of the horse on his rider is all through medieval literature. So, for example, like in the Fairy Queen, when Spencer wants to show that the Red Cross knight is being ruled by his passions and not his head, he loses his helmet while he's riding the horse. Right. So it's literally a man on a horse and the horse is running away and he, the horse is riding the man, basically, instead of the man riding the horse, and he's lost his helmet, which means he's not ruled by reason. So these images are very, very consistent. So, yeah, so we said last time that Huxley is satirizing Freud's the pleasure principle by building a society entirely built on the pleasure principle, which means this is a society completely built on the belly. Right. And one of the challenges we have as readers is because that's a parody world, that's a satire world. He's like, oh, let's exaggerate this crazily and everybody will see how stupid this is. But we also live in a society completely devoted to the pleasure principle to.
- [42:22]
C
Define the pleasure principle too. That's just the understanding that I think he Defines it as the watchman over life. Like the main principle of human existence is that we seek pleasure and avoid pain. And the whole role of the ID is to seek pleasure and it shirks away from any kind of pain. And so in the brave new world, they've given themselves the resolution to the pleasure principle. They only have pleasure and they've avoided pain at all costs.
- [42:46]
A
Costs. Which is why as we will get to chapter seven, but I'll just throw this teaser out of there. Which is why Lenina cannot understand that John Savage wanted to suffer in that ritual. She's like, you mean you wanted to suffer? So the suffering, the pain versus pleasure thing, that is going to come through the story as well. And that's very Freud. So go ahead.
- [43:09]
C
Now as to why they're crossing themselves over their bellies.
- [43:13]
A
Well, that's what I was.
- [43:14]
C
Okay, that makes sense. But then also taking the top off the cross, we've already said if we're thinking of this vertical line of the cross being the vertical up into the spiritual, maybe in the horizontal being this horizontal plane around us, we're getting rid of the vertical. The other thing you're doing is getting rid of the head. Because we only care about the stomach. So we're getting rid of the top part of the cross. Which I think is also maybe a little bit, has a little bit to do with Alice when the Red Queen goes around saying off with their heads.
- [43:44]
A
That's right, because.
- [43:45]
C
And if you want to know more about off with their heads in the Alice books, that's the place for the Alice mini class and webinar. But that is what's going on there.
- [43:52]
A
Yes. And as your sister Addison said in that webinar, because she was also explaining this to me when I was bringing in the Alice in Wonderland stuff into my Harry Potter class. And I argued that Dolores Umbridge was the Red Queen. But you have to take that mini class to find out more about that. But Addison pointed out that the Red Queen is unrestrained passion.
- [44:12]
C
Passion, yes.
- [44:13]
A
That's what she represents. Right, so. So this is the off with her head. In other words, I'm ruled by my passions, I'm not ruled by my head. And that is what they have done to the cross.
- [44:22]
C
This is the world we. Where we have taken off everyone's heads.
- [44:25]
A
That's right, exactly. So. And that is why they're making the sign of the tea over their bellies.
- [44:30]
C
And they say again and again, you know, linen unfortunately took Soma and didn't have to think or so and so didn't have to really think through this issue. They don't have to. They don't have to give any thought to him.
- [44:39]
A
Exactly. So. So the T on the belly is in contrast to the sign of the cross, which is really over the whole body. Right. So you start with your head and you go all the way down, you know, head to chest.
- [44:50]
B
Yeah.
- [44:50]
A
And then. And then across. Right. So it encompasses the whole of you. And they're doing it in the belly. And if you start to look for the belly references in the book, they're all over the place. So in those scenes where we see parodying of communion and parody of a few other things that we'll get to here in chapters five and six, I. All I noticed was, I mean, the thrumming. They feel it in their belly. It's in. They feel it in their midriff. It was described that. That it was felt in their guts, in their bowels, over and over.
- [45:18]
C
It's the only place they feel anything.
- [45:20]
A
It's the only place they feel anything. That's right. So this is an entire belly centric world. And again, for Huxley, this was obviously crazy. And anybody could see that and see that it's crazy. We're the ones who don't see it's crazy because we live this every day. We live in a world that is completely run by the belly.
- [45:43]
B
And it's also one of the. I think it's not the least frightening aspect of this book that the most of the characters, not all, but most of the characters within it, have lost not just the will, but just the very means of articulating even a hypothetical criticism of the world they live in and of the principles they live by and the. And the, you know, or of the appetites that they feel and act on, which is the, you know, the only thing they can act on, really, because they don't have any kind of. Any kind of higher spiritual or intellectual ideals to guide them.
- [46:21]
C
I was noticing today that they are not today, this week, while reading that they don't even actually have any real maxims or cliches. They all speak in these, like, little bits of phrases that have been passed down in their sleep, but they never have any understanding of what they're saying.
- [46:36]
A
Right, right. Yeah, I was thinking about that too. The. The sleep exercises and the little, you know, propaganda phrases they spit out. That's the opposite of reason because it's like a body reflex and instinct. Right. It's like, not really.
- [46:50]
C
He makes a joke at one point comparing the hypnopedic Wisdom to like homespun wives tales type wisdom.
- [46:59]
A
Right, right. Just things that sort of unthinkingly come down.
- [47:03]
B
It's like a sort of cheaply. Like a cheaply hedonistic version of Hobby Lobby hangings or something like that. The sort of sentiments.
- [47:13]
A
It's like Lenina just keeps yelling live, laugh love every time they talk. Live, laugh love.
- [47:17]
C
Like if you were hooked up to a Hobby lobby ivy.
- [47:21]
A
Right, exactly. But you know, when you were explaining Freud, Freud takes this medieval idea of divine wisdom is what is ruling us. Divine wisdom is what tells us. Us how to behave.
- [47:34]
C
And he says it's a sense of self.
- [47:36]
A
That's right. A sense of self and also. But culturally conditioned responses. Right. Which of course causes all kinds of problems because now everything's morally relativistic and you don't have anything, you know, objective to appeal to if it's just the self and cultural conditions. But what Huxley does is satirize the cultural conditioning. Right. So they. They are all the perfect Freudian person. They've been socially conditioned a certain way and they are living according to the pleasure principle 1.
- [48:08]
B
Something I noticed about this book that I hadn't really thought of the first time I read it is that I think this society. No, I mean, no matter how many drugs you took, no matter how much conditioning you were subjected to, willingly or otherwise, it would always be kind of hell if you were an introvert. It's a society with so much of the fun is. Is group activity fun, whether in the form of an orgy or some kind of bad concert or some kind of obstacle golf. Some, yes, some very complicated and really wretched sounding sport. But yes, like any. Any person who has any kind of solitary instincts at all would be kind of a square peg in a round hole, I suppose. And that's a lot of people pretty.
- [48:53]
C
Sure solitary instincts are not allowed in the brave new world.
- [48:56]
B
Pretty much. That's. Yeah, They've sort of conditioned them out of them. Yeah, yeah.
- [49:00]
A
All right. So the next thing I want to talk about is the obvious parody of Christianity in these chapters. And we're going to look at those scenes and talk about what's going on. But first I want to better define parody. The other night we were talking with our fellows, our patrons and all fellows, Eve. And we were talking about what are some of the things that people have found difficult with this book? And I think some people worried that, hey, there's. There's obvious parody of Christianity in here. Does that mean that this is something bad? Is Huxley doing Something bad. So let me define these things for you or redefine these things for you. Parody in the literary sense is very different than what we think of as parody. Like, we think Saturday Night Live is a parody, but it's not. It's just kind of mocking impersonations of things, which is not actually what parody is in terms of a literary form. So I wanted to make some distinctions. Parody is not exactly the same thing as satire. Satire is when you are mocking something and you're mocking it very deliberately to say, this is stupid. We shouldn't behave this way. Like, you know, thinking like Jonathan Swift mocking the fact that in book three, to make a suit of clothes, they don't measure Gulliver, they just do the math. And then the cloth that don't fit. Right. So that's. That's mocking a certain abstract mathematics, and it is intending to make fun of it to say, this thing is bad. Okay, that's mocking. That's not what parody is. So when we say these chapters have some parody rituals, some parody Christian rituals, don't think we're saying Huxley is mocking Christianity. That's not what's going on. He's not satirizing Christianity. If he was satirizing Christianity, we would say he's mocking it. But a parody is not the same thing. It does not work the same way. And actually, I will quote Addison again from her. From her Alice in Wonderland, because I. I loved the way she explained parody. Parody is the intentional turning things upside down and for a very particular purpose. And she explained it this way, that there's a. There's a part in Dante and the Divine Comedy where Dante realizes that people are struggling because they can't look up and see God. They're just staring at their feet. And he realizes the only way to get them to stop staring at their feet and look up and see God is to turn them upside down. So now when they look down, they see up. And we're going to develop.
- [51:35]
C
It is like the reflection of a mountain in the water. And in the water, it's upside down. It's a mirror image of the mountain. Right. But if you were going up the mountain, the actual mountain, mountain, it would look like you were going down in the reflection. So to go down is actually to go up.
- [51:51]
A
Exactly, exactly. So we're going to talk about what this looks like as we go through this book, this turning things upside down. And when we get to the end, we're going to bring it all together about why he's turned it upside down. All I want to suggest for now is that you understand that when we say he's parodying Christianity, we are not saying he's satirizing it and we are not saying he's mocking it. A parody is the intentional turning of something upside down to show you that you are the one that is upside down. So that's. That's the opposite of how mockery and satire works. So we're just going to throw that out there so you're clear in your head again. As we go, it'll become clearer what we mean. And when we get to the end, we'll be able to. To bring it all together. So should we. Should we actually jump into these scenes?
- [52:40]
B
I think we ought to.
- [52:42]
A
I did want to say something that I forgot to say last time that fits in with the idea that we're getting Christianity parodied. So in those early chapters, when they go out into the garden and they see the children engaged in childhood erotic play, that's a parody of the Garden of Eden. Right. So they're in the garden, they're naked and unashamed.
- [53:04]
B
Except for the one boy who sees there's something horribly wrong with this.
- [53:07]
A
So they send him to the psychiatrist. Of course they do. But we, the reader, are supposed to immediately think, oh, no, this is not normal. This is weird. This is terrible. What's going on with these kids? We're supposed to think that. Right. So it's a. That's a parody of the Garden of Eden. It's the Garden of Eden upside down. And I was also thinking too, about this was in the first set of chapters. But it also becomes clear in the. The idea that they live in an eternal present. And we're going to develop that more when we get into these chapters. But they don't have a past, we find out they don't really have a future here either. They are not supposed to think, even in the recent past, they're going to be killed before they. They die, before they get too old. They live in an eternal present. And I was reading some Northrop fry that got me thinking about this, that that is actually a parody of sacred time. That's a. It's a parody of eternity, because eternity is a state of eternal present. So they. So this is another way, you see, they have tried to make heaven on earth.
- [54:05]
B
It also means that they experience life. These adult people, young adult people are experiencing life still kind of in the way that children do.
- [54:14]
A
Yeah.
- [54:14]
B
Because, I mean, when you're. When you're a child, or most. Most children, anyway, you don't really think too much about either the past or the future.
- [54:21]
A
That's true. And they actually talk about that. The infantile response.
- [54:24]
B
Oh yeah. I mean, and that's, that's entirely the intention that, I mean, you know, living for the next party, the next rush, obstacle golf game or whatever and.
- [54:34]
A
Obstacle golf sounds horrible to me.
- [54:36]
B
Yeah. It's interesting that it's a world. It's a world for all of its cast divisions. And you would think it would promote a lot of personal ambition and rivalrousness and selfishness in the way that we meet them in the professional world today. Perhaps. But it doesn't seem that there's a whole lot of that really, because no one really has any aspirations of any kind, mind.
- [55:00]
A
That's right. You don't even see like, you see in 1984, like kind of the petty bureaucracy, like, I want to get ahead in my job. There's no. But no one has any aspirations to be anything because they've all been programmed to be completely content where they are. So you don't see people like. Like you don't see Bernard trying to, you know, kind of leverage his way into a promotion?
- [55:20]
B
No, I mean, he's. He's uncomfortable in the world he lives in, but which we find out is a feature.
- [55:26]
A
We find out that's a feature.
- [55:27]
C
Yeah, that the Alpha plus people are programmed to ask questions. They don't have to comply. Which is all the more reason why they should.
- [55:37]
A
Right. All right, let's jump in with chapter four, shall we? And let's just say what we noticed in chapter four. So this is, this is more of Lenina and Bernard and Henry and talking about all these guys. One of the things that stood out to me was that this whole society on the pleasure principle, you know, they, they did all that talk about this is what makes people happy. No one's unhappy. But then you find out that. That they take Soma to keep from being unhappy. Right. So there's that description of Benito and that he's so naturally kind of good natured. People are like, I don't think he actually takes Soma. But this line was interesting to me. The malice and bad tempers from which other people had to take holidays days never afflicted him. So for all of their emphasis on pleasure is going to produce happiness, we see that it actually doesn't. And that's why they all rely on Soma. Do you want to talk about Soma now? Ella, do you want to wait until we get to the parody Eucharist scene?
- [56:39]
C
Let's wait briefly.
- [56:40]
A
Let's wait briefly. Okay. I also found so much of this stuff very, very funny. Like charring tea instead of charring Crop Cross Road. Right.
- [56:50]
C
I found it funny that Lenina is described as being like. She's very flirtatious. She's like, oh, how funny you are, and all these things. And he makes the point of saying it's. It's frank and unmalicious. She genuinely did think he was funny. Like, she is so programmed into this behavior that this is like, this is truly the way that she is. It's not an act of flirtation. It's not. Not anything like that. But it's very coy behavior.
- [57:14]
A
Yes. And all the time she says, I'm glad I'm not a Gamma, like.
- [57:17]
C
And then Bernardo, she's just spouting this hypnopedic wisdom.
- [57:20]
A
Thousand times between age 12 and 14.
- [57:23]
B
She heard this with offense intended to absolutely no one. It seems to me that Lenina is the kind of person who would have done very well in a sorority.
- [57:30]
A
I knew you were gonna say that.
- [57:32]
B
No, I've. Yeah, it's something I was reflecting on.
- [57:35]
A
Yes. No, it's true. She would have enjoyed being told what outfit to wear at parties to go to.
- [57:40]
C
Yeah, yeah, Bernard.
- [57:42]
A
Okay, so in chapter four, this is where we see Bernard really, really doesn't fit in. He doesn't get along with the other guys. He's awkward. But of course, in another chapter, we're going to find out that that's a feature, not a bug. So he's. He's upset with the way that she's being talked about as a piece of meat. Which, again, this would be. You know, you. When you're creating a world like this, you always put a character in there who can kind of see things the way we see. And that's Bernard here in these early chapters.
- [58:14]
C
Kind of.
- [58:15]
A
Kind, kind of. Right. I don't want to give away too much, but kind of. So that's our voice saying, I cannot believe the way these men are talking about her like she's a piece of meat. And I can't believe she thinks of herself. She also sees herself as a piece of meat. Right. That.
- [58:27]
B
That offends like, everyone kind of mutually objectifies each other, whether in sexual or other ways.
- [58:33]
A
And it keeps contrasting his feeling with the fact that she's acting normal. Right. Wretched, in a word, because she had beh. As any healthy and virtuous English girl ought to behave. And not in some other abnormal, extraordinary way. Even that kind of Language, normal, healthy, abnormal. That's Freudian. That's all Freudian.
- [58:53]
C
Yeah. When Lenina and Henry are flying over the. Over the city, he says they notice there are traveling crucibles being used to pour molten stone onto the roads. I think this is they. They are paving the streets with their own kind of gold. Gold. It's an interesting choice of word.
- [59:12]
A
So I was going to ask you if you thought there was alchemy in here, because I'm seeing alchemy and I figure if he's. If he's riffing off of Alice, then he's.
- [59:18]
C
Oh, I think this is the society where they really do think that they have turned their metal into gold.
- [59:23]
A
Yes, that's the point.
- [59:25]
C
They're paving their own heaven.
- [59:26]
A
Exactly. And then the. The explanation of the tower. Okay, so again, my pet theory that Brave New World and Murder must advertise is the same book. Book. They're in the Bureau of Propaganda by television. This is. We're talking about advertising here. This is it. Right. By feeling picture by synthetic voice and music, respectively. And then they go up the tower and it's the College of Emotional Engineering. I'm glad you laughed, Ella, because you told me the other day you said, I don't understand how people can't see this as a funny satire. Because that's ridiculous what he's saying.
- [59:56]
C
I was.
- [59:56]
A
I was.
- [59:57]
C
I was laughing out loud. This part and another part this week made me laugh out loud. I love this book, by the way. I think I'm obsessed with it. That's not too strong a word.
- [60:05]
A
Oh, yes.
- [60:06]
C
60 floors, the Bureau of Propaganda. And right as the cherry on top, Emotional Engineering.
- [60:16]
A
Okay, so we meet another guy. Helmholtz. Helmholtz. Helmholtz. I got. Well, that's not.
- [60:22]
B
Helmholtz. Watson.
- [60:24]
A
Helmholtz. Watson. And he also doesn't fit in. And so he and Bernard have become sort of. Sort of friends.
- [60:31]
C
Yeah. They both shared the knowledge that they were individual.
- [60:35]
A
Yes, yes.
- [60:37]
C
Bernard is a psychologist and Helmholtz is a professor of emotional engineering.
- [60:44]
A
And both of them. This was so interesting, Realize that they are not satisfied with things like just having a bunch of women or playing community sports.
- [60:54]
C
Yeah, they're both the definition of badly adjusted.
- [60:57]
A
That's right. That's right. Under the Freudian term, really. And at the bottom, he was interested in something else. Else. But in what? In what? That was the problem. So neither one of them can figure out exactly what's wrong with them or how to fix it. But Ella, you were the one who noted to me, I miss It. I confess, I miss it. You noted to me when they go up to the apartment to hang out and talk to each other, like exactly what they're doing there.
- [61:23]
C
They can't figure out what they really want. So they go and they lounge on these couches and play psychologists with one another.
- [61:29]
A
That's exactly.
- [61:30]
C
And try to discern what exactly their inner feelings are. And they make no progress. And Helmholtz is frustrated because Bernard keeps giving into these bursts of self pity. Right.
- [61:42]
A
It's so good. And I can't believe he's crying at the end.
- [61:45]
C
Like, if only you knew what I'd been through.
- [61:48]
A
Yeah. This is. This is the Freudian couch here. This is, you know, lie down and tell me about your mother. Except they don't have mothers.
- [61:55]
C
Did you know they preserved Freud's couch in a glass case?
- [61:59]
A
Really?
- [62:00]
C
Yeah. With an oriental carpet thrown over it and everything.
- [62:04]
B
Okay.
- [62:05]
A
Wow. Museum of horrors. Did you ever feel, he asked, 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. So they keep talking a lot about that, that we know we're missing something, but we don't know what. I find all of this very fascinating that the idea that human nature can still kind of break through.
- [62:36]
B
And it's interesting that while they're trying to diagnose this. These feelings they have, their minds automatically recur to metaphors that are mechanical in nature. The water that misses the turbines and all that kind of thing.
- [62:50]
A
Things. That's the only thing they have.
- [62:52]
B
It's the only frame of reference they really have that, you know, all of us are basically machines. And actually I, I think this is the. You have the. The COVID with.
- [63:04]
A
Right.
- [63:04]
B
The man, you know, he has legs and arms, but he's a set of wheels and. And pulleys. Other than that, he's.
- [63:10]
C
I think that's.
- [63:10]
B
I think that's a great cover design.
- [63:11]
A
That's why I picked the Wendle Berry quote. They're living as machines. You're absolutely right. Right. This paragraph is. Sounds like something from Murder Must Advertise. So remember the scene in Murder Must Advertise where they're talking about how advertising creates this need in you and then sells you the fulfillment of that need, but it's not really a need, and you're just sort of on this hamster wheel of advertising and what it produces. That's Helmholtz's job. And he feels like, I can't believe I'm using my words just for this. Isn't there some better use?
- [63:43]
C
Use?
- [63:43]
A
Yeah.
- [63:44]
C
And he says, words are so piercing. What is the point of words being piercing and having the ability to touch that paragraph?
- [63:50]
B
For me, certainly. Oh, as far as they go. Helmholtz shrugged his shoulders. But they go such a little way. They aren't important enough. Somehow I feel I could do something much more important. Yes, and more intense, more violent. But what. What is there more important to say? And how can one be violent about the sort of things one's expected to write about? Words can be like X rays. If you use them properly, they'll go through anything you read and you're pierced. That's one of the things I try to teach my students how to write piercingly. But what on earth's the good of being pierced by an article about a community sing or the latest improvement in scent organs? Besides, can you make words really piercing? You know, like the very hardest X rays? When you're writing about that sort of thing, can you say something about nothing? That's what it finally boils down to. I try and I try. I think. I think Helmholtz today would be the guy who designs apps. He designs the apps to be maximally addictive.
- [64:57]
A
And then that would be bad about it.
- [64:59]
B
And then feels bad about it.
- [65:00]
A
All right, so I found. I found what Natalia sent me and it's from Gaudy Night, which sayers wrote in 1935. So right. Right after this book, and it has a direct reference to Brave New World. So they're talking about the people and one of the characters says if one could only invent them like characters in books, it would be much more satisfactory to a well regulated mind. From this conversation naturally passed to biology, Mindelian Factors and Brave New World. It was cut short by the emergence of Harriet's former tutor from a crowd of old studies students, etc. Etc. So Harriet Vane is talking about Gaudy Night. I'm talking about Brave New World in Gaudy Night. So that. That made me pretty darn excited there. All right, chapter five. All right, this is where it starts to get very interesting with the parody stuff.
- [65:52]
C
I did not notice this myself. It was pointed out by somebody else that I was reading that chapter five actually starts out out and lays the same scene as Elegy written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray. Oh, the curfew tolls the knell of parting day. Except it's the sirens telling them to.
- [66:12]
A
Leave the golf course oh, that's fantastic.
- [66:15]
C
And the Beatles wheel and droning flight. Except it's helicopters.
- [66:20]
B
Oh my. Oh, that's really sharp. I did not pick up on that.
- [66:24]
A
I didn't either. That's really good. Good. So Henry and Lenina are, are flying. So again we see this idea of speed, speed, speed. And that's when they fly over that, those stacks. And we find out that you continue to be useful even in death.
- [66:42]
C
So again, Elena, I love that line that made my commonplace.
- [66:47]
A
Go ahead, Ella.
- [66:48]
C
Go ahead, Elena. Country churchyard versus the crematorium.
- [66:52]
A
Yes, yes, yes. Right. So there's no divine, there's no spiritual. You live your life, we find out later you live it to 60. Which I gotta tell you folks, when I read that at 19, that might have seemed old, but right now it does not. That does not seem old at all. But we have this focus on the crematorium and that they harvest the phosphorus from the. The bodies. Fine. To think how they can go on.
- [67:16]
B
Their methods for doing that.
- [67:18]
A
Yeah. Trying to think we can go on being socially useful even after we're dead.
- [67:23]
B
Did you ever see the old 70s movie Soylent Green with Charlton Heston?
- [67:27]
A
Violent Green is people.
- [67:30]
B
Yeah. If you were around in the 70s, that, that was what I thought of there. Yeah.
- [67:33]
A
Yeah.
- [67:34]
C
And then, and then linen says how weird that alphas and betas don't make more plants grow after they're.
- [67:41]
A
We should be better. Right. And then, no, we're all equal. We're all equal. So I started thinking, oh, in death.
- [67:47]
C
All men are equal still. They haven't escaped that.
- [67:49]
A
That's right. Death, the grand great equalizer. But I was thinking about how all of their names are from various dictators.
- [67:57]
B
And there was some intellectuals or scientists.
- [67:59]
A
There was something that Paul Kingsworth said in against the Machine that sort of made that click. And he said that the communist regimes and the fascist regimes were the first attempt at a sort of machine model of a society. And I thought, okay, that tracks with what's going on with Brave New World. Because this is a machine model, little kind of top down thing. But I also thought that when they pass over the crematorium and they get shot up, that that's a parody Ascent.
- [68:32]
C
Well, they're definitely feeling something.
- [68:36]
A
Your face is funny. They also can't see the sky because everything's lit up the sky.
- [68:43]
C
They don't have the heavens. They have propaganda. Right.
- [68:47]
A
That also hits very cool stories because.
- [68:50]
C
The darkness was depressing. Seeing the moon in the stars was depressing to them.
- [68:56]
A
Right.
- [68:56]
C
It made them feel small. But also Westminster Abbey is now a cabaret.
- [69:04]
A
Where you can go listen to the 16 saxophonists. That's hilarious to me.
- [69:09]
B
Did he catch the name, what was it? The name of the band? Go back a page or so.
- [69:14]
C
Alvin Stopes.
- [69:15]
B
Alvin Stopes, yeah. So the Stopes is a reference to Marie Stopes, who if she was a birth control activist in Great Britain and she was in this country, she would be the Margaret Sanger of Britain, basically.
- [69:29]
C
Yeah, I did catch that they were reading or singing Little Bottle of Mine instead of Little Mother of Mine.
- [69:36]
B
He actually does, I know like that some of them.
- [69:38]
C
Which is hilarious.
- [69:39]
B
A little bit uncomfortable laughing at, but he did a very good job at the. With the lyrics.
- [69:44]
A
Okay, so this is supposed to be funny, guys. And this is hilarious. The 16 saxophonist. That is hilarious. That's like 12 year old boy humor.
- [69:52]
C
That is also. Also it's, I think, important that the top note, the climactic note of the entire piece can't even be played by the saxophonists. It's by some kind of machine. He calls it the ether note.
- [70:07]
B
And the rhythm of the piece is designed to be kind of off putting. It's in like five, four time, which is an odd.
- [70:15]
C
You can't dance to that. I. Yeah.
- [70:18]
A
So they're just all like weirdly flailing.
- [70:21]
C
Yeah, it's like the weirdest rhythm ever.
- [70:23]
A
Well, it's anti harmony. Right. So.
- [70:25]
C
Yeah.
- [70:25]
A
Not this again. I had said something last week about we have a parody of the great chain of being. The. The medieval understanding of the universe is it is divinely ordered and harmonious. So we come together in the great dance. Or you know, as Shakespeare says in that passage in Troilus and Cressida, you know, while there's an order, we meet together. I'm paraphrasing, but the planets meet together to today dance. And if there's disorder, they meet together to fight. And so this is a parody of harmony, a community coming together to dance. Except they can't dance because the music is all.
- [70:58]
C
They're drugged so they don't care. True. It doesn't really matter. Yeah, but he says the. The final shattering note of the ether music blew the 16 merely human blowers out of existence.
- [71:11]
B
I like this also. They were inside here and now safely inside with the fine weather, the perennially blue sky. And when exhausted, the 16 had laid by their saxophones and the synthetic music apparatus was producing the very latest in slow Malthusian blues.
- [71:30]
C
But also they're still in the bottle.
- [71:33]
A
Because it's the bottle perennially blue sky. Right.
- [71:36]
C
They never were decanted. The whole world, the brave new world is the bottle.
- [71:41]
A
Oh, nice. I like that. So the perennially blue sky, because, you know, the. The night sky is depressing. We just want to stay in the.
- [71:48]
C
Day all the time, you know, though, if you were never born, then you've never been alive.
- [71:54]
A
That is very true. Oh, your face. This will come. Become more clear what she's getting at when we get a little further into the book here. I love. I love this line about what Soma does. It creates an impenetrable wall between the actual universe and their mind. So that's your idea. Right? They're living inside this little fake bubble.
- [72:12]
C
Yeah. So maybe we should explain Soma. It's. He's not using the Greek word. He did know Greek very well, obviously. He says in a note somewhere, though, he is intentionally not using the Greek form of the word, which means body. I mean, there might be some kind of double play going on there with the meaning, but he's actually using a Vedic word that literally means ambrosia or nectar of the gods.
- [72:35]
A
So it's the lotuses eaters.
- [72:36]
C
Yes. Well, my. I make. I think it is the lotus. We should be picturing the lotus eaters from the Odyssey. People on an island that don't live in reality.
- [72:44]
A
Right. Who can't get home because they. Yes, because they'd rather be drugged up.
- [72:47]
B
And Ella, could you explain for anyone who might be thrown into confusion by the word Vedic, what do you mean by that?
- [72:55]
C
From the Indian languages. Sanskrit.
- [72:57]
B
Yeah.
- [72:59]
C
He picked it up during his time traveling in South Asia. Asia in India.
- [73:03]
A
Right. So a lot of people, I noticed, and good for you guys, they looked up what Soma was, and I think they got kind of stuck on it was Greek for body. But that is not the first time I read that.
- [73:13]
B
That's what I thought it was. Yeah.
- [73:14]
A
So you're saying it's. He's actually using the Sanskrit word soma for ambrosia or nectar of the gods, which is. That's much better. So, yeah, the lotus eaters, they can't get home because they're. Yeah.
- [73:26]
C
Honestly, this. This time, reading it through, all I could think about was the lotus either. Peters, this is an odyssey, kind of.
- [73:32]
B
It reminds me also, there's a great passage in one of George Orwell's essays where he describes this. He says, once upon a time, not very long ago, while I was at a restaurant, I did something rather cruel. And he's sitting in this outdoor restaurant, he's just finished up his tea and Jam. And he said, there was a bit of jam left on my plate, and a wasp landed there and was licking up the jam. And he took his knife and he cut the wasp wasp's abdomen off. And I mean, you're like, wow, okay, that's kind of. This is getting kind of morbid. But he said that the. The head of the wasp, of course, did not die right away and continued to suck the jam even though it had no abdomen to digest it in. He said that seemed to me a perfect metaphor for the condition of modern man.
- [74:17]
A
Wow.
- [74:18]
B
That he detached from, you know, essential parts of himself were not integrated in any real way.
- [74:24]
A
Way.
- [74:24]
B
But we go on sucking the jam. Whatever.
- [74:27]
C
I mean, it is, though, that's. That's the Brave New World.
- [74:29]
B
Yeah.
- [74:30]
A
Not to make too much of the Odyssey thing, but as you. As you say, you see so much Odyssey in Brave New World. I think that totally tracks like, what the choice Odysseus is given. So Calypso says, you can stay here with me on this island, not go home, not see your wife and son, but you can become a God. So you can be young forever, you can live forever, and you can have all the pleasure you want. You can have sex with the goddess every night. Right. You can have all this pleasure and live forever. And he rejects it. And she says, you're rejecting this. You're gonna suffer. And he says, I. He would rather suffer and go home and have a real life than stay in this fake life with her. And so what I argue when I teach the Odyssey is that all of his temptations then are different versions of come and live in a bubble and don't go home like the lotus eaters.
- [75:14]
C
That's the great temptation of the lotus eaters.
- [75:17]
A
Right? Right. All right. I'm looking at the time and thinking, holy cow, we've been talking for 90 minutes. We better. And we barely into the chapter, so. So let's. Let's speed up here. Let's talk about the parody Eucharist. So obviously we have an upside down Eucharist image. They gather together in groups of 12. Think the 12 disciples. And the soma is the. Is the communion bread, and the cup of strawberry ice cream is the wine. And what I think we're seeing here is that even in a deliberately secular culture, there is still a need for public sacred rituals, for communal sacred rituals. Rituals. Right. And so this is the ridiculous one they find themselves in. And it parodies even that. They're supposed to have some sort of vision of a great being. And Bernard can't see it.
- [76:07]
B
And it's significant that all of their rituals still take the form of play, which is by definition to degrade a ritual, which is actually something that a lot of modern churches aren't as aware of as they should be be.
- [76:22]
A
Although that's good.
- [76:23]
B
Confounding inter.
- [76:24]
C
They're all waiting for the coming of the greater being. And there's, they. I think there's a parody of a couple different Bible verses throughout this.
- [76:33]
A
Oh, okay.
- [76:34]
C
I'm trying to think. There was 1 John 17 at one point. Oh yeah, that's at the end of the chapter. I'll find it.
- [76:46]
A
Okay. And of course they, they, they feel it in their bowels, so that's in the belly and the passions. So one thing I was thinking to myself, and I'm curious what y' all thought. Are we to understand as Bernard in his kind of everyman role is like, I don't feel it, but he's just gonna pretend that he does. Is everyone just pretending?
- [77:06]
B
I don't think so. I think a lot of people really do feel fulfilled in this moment.
- [77:10]
A
They do feel fulfilled as much as.
- [77:12]
B
They'Re able to feel fulfilled. Yes.
- [77:14]
A
All right, so they have some kind of, you know, eucharistic ecstasy which then leads into an orgy. You found it.
- [77:23]
C
Yeah. One of the people after the ceremony, Fifi, when she's talking to him, he Huxley describes her as being. She was full, she was made perfect. She was still more than merely herself, which is, I think John 17:23. I in them and thou and me, that they may be made perfect in one on.
- [77:46]
A
Yes. So this is all a parody of like the unity, like we're all members of the body of Christ. We're all one. It's a, it's a parody of that. And the orgy thing is also a parody of Christ is the bridegroom and we are the bride. And that consummates in a relationship.
- [78:01]
B
Lenina. I mean, when Lenina and Bernard are having their arguments, she brings up the fact that, you know, one of the great, one of the great strengths of this society is that it gives you a sense of belonging, that you feel like you're not just yourself, but you're bound up with other people. And he says, but don't you, don't you want to be an individual person at least at times? Don't you want to be only yourself at times and not bound up with all of these other pre programmed, you know, drugged out citizens?
- [78:30]
A
And you can see how that connects to communism because this is 1935. This is still before all the horrors of communism are really globally known. And what their big selling point was, you're not alone. You're part. I mean, this communism means communal, right? You're part of a community and we're all going to take care of it.
- [78:47]
B
I mean, even the central image of fascism, tubing the fosques, the bundle of rods with the axes, you know, its chief symbol is strength and unity. It's kind of interesting. I don't think Huxley, unlike Orwell's 1984. Orwell's 1984 is very much inspired by Soviet Russia under Stalin. I don't think this is especially aimed at any particular autocratic state. I don't think so, it seems. Because, I mean, I think one thing he notices is that any modern state, and it doesn't really matter if you're talking about a conventionally liberal or conservative or a more extreme communist or fascist or some autocratic society, all of them will usually claim, at least at times, to be organized on scientific basis.
- [79:31]
A
Principles. That's right.
- [79:33]
B
Modern government. It doesn't really matter, like which party's in power. The Republican candidate, the Democratic candidate, will always say, we're going to be scientifically competitive with this or that country, China, or whoever our antagonist du jour is.
- [79:47]
A
No, that's absolutely right. And before we leave, chapter five, though.
- [79:50]
C
In case we were wondering if this was still supposed to be funny.
- [79:54]
A
Okay, good.
- [79:55]
C
Morgana and her. I would say her eyebrows, but I guess it's her eyebrow now. Or like, haunting Bernard the Great. Two in one. I love the line where he says, I drink to the imminence of his coming. He repeated with a sincere attempt to feel that the coming was imminent, but the eyebrow continued to haunt him.
- [80:16]
A
I love what you told me earlier today.
- [80:18]
C
I mean, Morgana takes the name of a famous enchantress, Morgana Le Fay, from the Arthurian tales. She's still enchanting people. It's just with her eyebrow now.
- [80:27]
A
Yes, this is. This is the humor, folks. This is funny.
- [80:31]
C
I kind of. I was laughing out loud during this section because it reminded me of my relationship during my time living in Texas to all the self portraits of Frida Kahlo. Like, I can't. I can't stop.
- [80:42]
B
That was whom I pictured as. Well, you know.
- [80:44]
C
Yeah, no, I can't look away. I'm horrified, but yet I can't look away.
- [80:49]
A
All right, chapter six. This is the. The very short. I was going to say courtship. It's not really a courtship, it's a Forged of Lanina and Bernard. And she just thinks he's so weird because she's been programmed to have this distracting pleasure which obviously is going to culminate in the pleasures of the bedroom. And Bernard wants something else and she's completely perplexed. He wants to just go out and walk in nature and talk. He wants to connect. And she's like, but why? Why? What is there to do with the walking? We could be playing obstacle golf. What?
- [81:25]
C
He wants to take a walk in the Lake District.
- [81:28]
A
That's very romantic. That's a very romantic. I mean, that's Lizzie Bennet. And he doesn't want to take the. The soma. I'd rather be myself, he said, myself and nasty, not somebody else, however jolly. And she just keeps thinking you're weird. And I bet it's right that they accidentally put alcohol in your blood surrogate because you're not fully formed. Right? In other words, he's a birth defect. And he wants to look at the sky. And she's. It's horrible.
- [81:56]
B
Oh, I love that path. Can I read that?
- [81:58]
A
Yes, yes, yes.
- [81:59]
B
Right, so Lenina looking up at the sky. But it's horrible, said Lenina, shrinking back from the window. She was appalled by the rushing emptiness of the night, by the black foam flecked water heaving beneath them, by the pale face of the moon, so haggard and distracted among the hastening clouds. Let's turn on the radio, quick. She reached for the dialing knob on the dashboard and turned it at random.
- [82:26]
A
You know, what makes me think of is Lewis when he talks about. Actually, I don't think this is in the discarded image. I think this is in a different essay. But he talks about the thought experiment of going out and looking at the sky as a medieval versus.
- [82:38]
C
No, it is in the discarded image.
- [82:41]
A
And he goes out and he says, you know, a medieval woman would have seen the heavens, right, teeming with life and this divinely ordered universe. And that's what he's trying to get across in. Out of the Silent Planet, for example, when they get into space and it's not dark and lifeless, it's not a great, you know, vacuum, it's full of life and music, even the music of the spheres. And he says, but a modern man goes out and sees a vast nothingness. And he says that that has a horrible psychic effect on us, which makes us feel. Feel anxious and small and insignificant and scared. And actually Huxley, I think, really captures that well. And it's very interesting too, because in out of the silent planet, it's H.G. wells's view of space that Lewis is attacking or satirizing. And it's HG Wells in this book that Huxley is satirizing. So there's Lewis and Huxley, and again, they don't have a ton of stuff in common, but they have in common that they see what H.G. wells sees and says, no, this is not going to work like you think it is. Once you take the heavens away from us and leave us with this vast emptiness, it is scary and depressing. And that's why she wants distraction. She does not want to have to sit in that.
- [84:00]
B
Another thing, actually, I would be interested to know know if Lewis was directly influenced by this work at all. I would be interested. Yeah, I'm gonna have to comb through his letters to see if he refers to it.
- [84:10]
C
Anyway, I asked Jen this question, Jen Rogers, and she said that that Lewis admired Huxley. There was a lot of admiration. And he kind of later in life disagreed with him on some points. They probably met personally at some point, even though they weren't in very close contact with one another. And he did read and admire Break New World a lot.
- [84:32]
B
I mean, yeah, obviously religious views are very different, naturally. But the villains, I'm thinking in this book and the villains in that hideous strength are drawn from the same kind of bureaucratic, you know, highly technically accomplished, very educated class. Lewis describes him as conditioning through science.
- [84:53]
A
You're right.
- [84:53]
B
The kind of well educated men in white lab coats who do not need to raise their voices.
- [84:58]
A
Yeah.
- [85:00]
B
That it's the same class of villain, you could say.
- [85:04]
C
I think Huxley and Lewis would, at various times in their life have run in very much the same circles. Also, I wondered if Bernard is described as rambling on it. His ramblings are described as his mad bad talk. Is that a Byron reference?
- [85:22]
A
It is. Is bad. Bad and dangerous to know. Well, that was good. I missed that. They're also under the moon and.
- [85:32]
C
And it's. Yeah, his mad bad talk rambled on. I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strong.
- [85:39]
A
Well, if you connect that with the Lake District, then yeah, this is definitely a reference to the Romantics. You're right.
- [85:43]
C
He's in danger of becoming a romantic.
- [85:46]
A
That's exactly right. And this is. So they're having their argument here and she's like, how do you. How can you talk like this? And she's, she just keeps coming back with these propagandized, you know, cliches. These, these just instinctive responses which he knows are not real, but he says I want to be free, not enslaved by my conditioning. So he rightly perceives that this is a type of slavery, that they're actually not a free society, they're enslaved. 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 now nowadays, but wouldn't you like to be free to be happy in some other way, Lenina? And she just keeps saying, I don't know what you mean. Take, take me away here. So they don't connect. And she actually thinks about canceling the trip to the reservation, but she really.
- [86:33]
C
But then she doesn't want to go to. Is it Alaska that she doesn't want to go to again?
- [86:37]
A
North Pole with Bonito.
- [86:38]
C
Oh yeah, the North Pole.
- [86:40]
A
Because it's not a comfortable hotel over there.
- [86:42]
B
Nothing says romance like the North Pole with Bonito.
- [86:45]
C
Well, Benito Hoover, the inventor of the vacuum.
- [86:48]
A
Vacuum. Exactly. Eli Jinx. You're hearing that in stereo. Are literally saying this.
- [86:54]
B
Are we supposed to think of the vacuum or the president? Cuz the president when this book came out would have been Herbert Hoover.
- [86:58]
C
Oh, probably was the president. I, I only thought of vacuum.
- [87:03]
A
Me too. I went vacuum with all the machine stuff. And he says, I wish the evening had gone differently. And she's like, like, what do you mean? How could it possibly have ended differently? He said, I wish it had ended in something other than us going to bed. And she was astonished. Not at once. Not the first day. And then she just, you know, there you go, right? She's just confused. He began to talk a lot of incomprehensible and dangerous nonsense. Lenina did her best to stop the ears of her mind, which by the way, that's what Soma is, right? To stop the ears of your mind. We just don't want to think about or hear about anything that's going to make us uncomfortable. We're just gonna follow our bellies. And then he says, we're children, we're babies, we're infants, we're not adults. Because. Okay, so this is a very medieval thing because babies are ruled by their passions. If I'm hungry, I cry, right? If I want to be picked up, I cry. Their reason is not yet developed. But he's like, we're adults, we don't have to be ruled by our bellies. All right, part two. I loved that, that he signed the paper without any. Even a genial Ford speed. I thought that was hilarious. Instead of Godspeed. And this is where we see more that they're programmed to talk, to not talk about the past. They live in an eternal present. But why don't you summarize for us what's happening here? Because this is going to be an important plot point for chapter seven. What this guy blurts out The Director.
- [88:32]
C
Of Hatcheries or the dhc. What. What is he called? What's his full title? I forget. This director fellow, he at one time also went to the New Mexican reservation and seeing a slip asking for permission to go back there, has triggered this memory, which is bad because we shouldn't live in our memory. And he immediately feels shame after sharing this story. But he at one time went with this girl on. On a similar date to New Mexico. And the girl got lost there.
- [89:01]
A
And I did my best, but. Oh, well. Right. And the idea. This is very Freudening. Again, the idea that this is a repressed memory, but it comes out in.
- [89:11]
C
His dreams is that he still has nightmares, which is.
- [89:15]
A
That's right.
- [89:16]
C
Which I thought was actually interesting because instead of only hearing the hypnopedic messages in his sleep, he's actually seeing the memories of losing the scene person. So it's like. It's very unusual to have something different in one's head at night.
- [89:28]
A
I guess when we get to the next chapter here, we're going to talk about Shakespeare. But I think you'll be impressed with me that what I picked up on here is what separated him from the girl was a tempest.
- [89:38]
C
It was a tempest. It was a great storm.
- [89:43]
A
The great storm that separated them.
- [89:45]
C
And he hurt his leg and couldn't walk.
- [89:48]
A
And of course, he catches himself and sees that he's said way too much to Bernard. Now he's going to punish Bernard.
- [89:55]
C
I shared a bit of his personal history and history we don't agree with. So then, you know.
- [90:00]
A
But Bernard leaves feeling very excited that he was persecuted. And we also find out, though, that he likes the idea of suffering, but he doesn't want to actually suffer. Like he never imagines he's really going to be punished.
- [90:11]
B
He feels oddly drawn to danger.
- [90:14]
C
He wants to be a martyr, something. But he can't actually do it. Which also comes up later.
- [90:19]
A
That will also come up later. Yeah, he wants to be a martyr. And I mean, we're going to see it in chapter seven, actually. And then. But then he gives a ridiculously heroic account of it that Helmholtz doesn't believe for a second.
- [90:33]
C
Whereupon I simply told him to go to the bottomless past and marched out of the room.
- [90:40]
A
It was it was Bernard's equivalent of and you can take this job and shove it, right, like the big dramatic thing. All right, so part three of that chapter. He and Lenina are on their way to the reservation.
- [90:53]
C
They get caught in a tornado over Texas.
- [90:58]
A
Made him 40 seconds behind, like wizard.
- [91:01]
C
Of Oz kind of thing.
- [91:03]
A
But, you know, all the. Henry was also somebody who was very concerned about promptness in time. I think that's just part of the whole machine thing, right? Well, yeah, everything's on time, everything's scheduled. So they get there, and she's actually super impressed because it's such a fancy hotel with all the modern luxury.
- [91:24]
C
This is like a very minor thing. But I noticed they had boiling caffeine, not coffee. They just have taken the substance straight out of the coffee. And I was horrified by the way I did.
- [91:35]
A
You're a hot coffee snob.
- [91:36]
B
I discovered that in the town of San Cristobal, New Mexico, there is still operating today this very luxurious organic farm and bed and breakfast where Huxley himself stayed while he was visiting D.H. lawrence and his wife Frida in New Mexico back in the 20s.
- [91:55]
C
Huxley was very fond of New Mexico.
- [91:56]
B
Yeah, he himself, again, I think. I mean, Huxley is not John the Savage, but he is. I think there was a side of him that was drawn to, yeah, kind of lonely and secluded places away from. Away from the technocratic civilization of the modern world. There was. Yeah, I think he had that side to him.
- [92:16]
A
Okay, I want to take a look at this little section here. Part of Bernard's delusion about himself. Often in the past, he had wondered what it would be like to be subjected soma less, and with nothing but his own inward resources to rely on to some great trial, some pain, some persecution. He had longed for affliction. So again, we see this pain versus pleasure. And he has this life of all pleasure, but he finds himself actually craving pain, his imagined stoicism. All right, so chapter seven, and we'll look at this chapter a little bit differently.
- [92:53]
C
We should make one note briefly about the end. They. I think it's. We'll just keep this in the back of our heads. That is it in this chapter that he falls asleep and they go, no.
- [93:04]
A
It'S the next one. It's in chapter seven. At the beginning of chapter seven, they just.
- [93:08]
C
Yeah, okay, you're right, you're right. Okay.
- [93:11]
A
She gives him some soma to settle him down, but it's in chapter seven. Okay, so in chapter seven.
- [93:18]
C
No, it is at the end of chapter six. Yes, it is.
- [93:20]
A
Okay, go ahead.
- [93:21]
C
When they're going from the rest house where they're staying in Santa Fe out to the, the mesa to the reservation itself, he takes 4 grams of soma or something in the plane with Lenina and falls asleep. And he doesn't see any of the scenery because he's sleeping and only wakes up when they're actually there. And Lenina has already unloaded all the bags and everything. It's important to keep in mind.
- [93:45]
A
Okay, so I want to say two things before we jump into this chapter. One, you need to be able to immediately see we are in an upside down world. There's no need for anybody to say, I cannot believe Huxley's call calling Indian savages. Because he is making it as clear as he possibly can that Lanina and Bernard are the savages. And these people are actually.
- [94:07]
C
He's using the word savage just like he uses the word civilized counterparts to each other.
- [94:12]
A
That's right. And they're both flipped around. So what are they calling savages?
- [94:17]
C
They.
- [94:17]
A
They have monogamous relationships. Oh, savages. Oh, they have monogamous.
- [94:21]
C
They have a religion.
- [94:23]
A
They have a religion.
- [94:24]
B
Several religions.
- [94:25]
A
They have mothers who love their babies.
- [94:29]
B
I know, I love how he intersperses. All these things, you know, Christianity songs, you know, monogamy with lizards, snakes, Gila monsters. And, you know, and of course, it's almost like the lions and bears, they.
- [94:42]
C
Become ugly, they grow old. All the cardinal sins of the new.
- [94:44]
A
Fat, they become fat. And we're going to see in this chapter a counterpart to the Eucharist parody in the civilization to what's going on here. But the second thing I want to say is when we meet John, he opens his mouth and Shakespeare comes out. So, Ella, tell us a little bit about the role of Shakespeare in this book.
- [95:09]
C
So the title of the book is of course taken from the Tempest, A scene in the Tempest where Miranda is saying, oh, brave new world that has such people in it, when she sees new people for the first time that have come to her island where she lives with her father and her, her. Her father, Prospero the magician responds, well, it's new to you because you've never seen it before. That is where the title comes from.
- [95:32]
B
The.
- [95:32]
C
The story of the, of the Tempest is the story of a ship which encounters a tempest that might be magically summoned and wrecks on an island that turns out also similarly to be enchanted and is habited by a magician and his daughter. And there's a. There's a great story behind why he ended up there that is Resolved throughout the play.
- [95:54]
A
The.
- [95:55]
C
The scholar Harold Goddard makes the point that the Tempest is the successor in Shakespeare's body's body of plays to both Macbeth, Othello, and King Lear.
- [96:05]
A
And of course, the Shakespeare that comes out of John's mouth is Macbeth. Macbeth.
- [96:09]
C
Out, out, damned spotter. Do you see that damned spot?
- [96:12]
A
Well, and actually, he says two things. He says that well.
- [96:15]
C
And you keep talking, we'll get to there. He's incarnadine, right?
- [96:18]
A
Yes. Yeah. The season carnadine. So he said there's two Macbeth references. Yeah. All right. Anything else we want to say about that, though, before we look at 7? Let's just keep the Tempest in the back of our minds. And yes, we will keep adding to it, but that's why the mesa is like a ship. So this is. This is a shipwreck. This is. Bernard and Lanina are shipwrecked on this island because John and his mother are shipwrecked on this island.
- [96:42]
B
One other detail about the Tempest, I mean, it has its own savage character. It has does. Yes.
- [96:48]
A
Very good.
- [96:49]
C
Well, it's also a world where a savage character is made the servant of someone higher than him, and even the fairies are made captive. And I. I have a personal theory that all of Brave New World is just the Tempest. And this is. What if we decided to make our own ma. The world was our own magical island, and we thought we could engineer people to be our servants and control the supernatural elements and. And everything else.
- [97:13]
A
Very good. Very, very good. And so obviously, you know. So how do we know we're supposed to be thinking about this? Because Huxley titled it Brave New World. We're supposed to be thinking of the Tempest. That's going to become more clear, actually, in. In a bit. So they go down and they're hearing the rhythm of the Indians, and she actually kind of likes that part, but she feels it in the heart instead of the. Yes, okay, so that's very interesting. We've. Okay, that's where we find out that they don't age.
- [97:40]
C
They're also real instruments. And she almost tries to put her. Herself into. Into kind of a trance listening to them, and then they mess it up and change the rhythm, and it doesn't work because people start singing. So she can't zone out to the music.
- [97:54]
A
Exactly. All right, let's talk about the ritual, because it's the main part of chapter seven. Ella, why don't you explain to our listeners what is going on in this and how it's the counterpart to the earlier parody Eucharist. Scene.
- [98:08]
C
They are watching a scene that is a. A ritual humiliation of a scapegoat or a pharmacos and a fertility rite that's normally exercised during the new year, where all of the sins of the people, the sins of the year, the diseases of the past year, would be ritually, symbolically attached to this person that was chosen to be the scapegoat, to bear these sins of some kind and. And then would be ritually beaten or sent out of the city. And it symbolized that the sins and, and the griefs of the people were being sent away right when we're starting a new year fresh, something of that sort. And it is important because Christ, of course, is our scapegoat. He bore our sins, he's the Lamb of God. And they are connecting the two in this. Right. And I think the shedding of the blood, among other things, is of course a direct contrast to the orgy that we saw like two chapters earlier.
- [99:03]
A
And this would be the pain counterpart part to the pleasure principle.
- [99:08]
C
Well, we find out from the person we meet shortly that they all take Soma to avoid the shame that they might feel the next day after whatever they've done. They don't feel any shame. And the whole point of the pharmacos or the skateboard goat is to bear the shame of the people, to bear it away. But no one ever bears their shame away. They just hide from it by drugging themselves every day.
- [99:31]
A
Exactly, exactly, exactly. So that actually fits with our parody Garden of Eden scene. Right. No one's feeling shame and they want to stay in that Edenic state of never feeling shame, except they do because they're humans and so they take Soma to avoid it. So that's what's going on in this scene. That's, that's why we need to see this, because this is the counterpoint, the need for a scapegoat to put your shame on.
- [99:53]
B
If I may, this is the first time really that Bernard and Lenina have been exposed to nature where, where nature is not controlled superficially.
- [100:02]
A
And she did not.
- [100:03]
B
She does not.
- [100:04]
C
It's also. She runs out of her soma. So it's her first time watching this with no drugs.
- [100:10]
A
Yeah. And she doesn't. She.
- [100:11]
C
And she weirdly has the appropriate reaction to the ceremony. She grieves for the sense of people. She says make them stop. She has the appropriate reaction of someone watching a crucifixion, for instance.
- [100:23]
A
Right. And. And she's uncomfortable by the fact that she had a natural response because she doesn't even want to go through the ritual of suffering, which is, you know, watching a suffering, reenacting a suffering. She just wants to go back to Soma, where her mind doesn't even have to.
- [100:41]
C
Also, one of the signs that is raised up during the rite is an eagle. And on their way climbing up, they were kind of clipped by an eagle that flew right past them. And they actually, actually felt the wind, which is like, not something that ever happens to them in daily life because there are no animals in the machines, I guess.
- [101:00]
A
And it's in chapter seven that we see an interesting kind of morph and flip between Bernard and John. So Bernard has fancied himself what I really want us to suffer. I really want to be a martyr, right? But then the second he finds out from Helmholtz that he's actually going to get sent to Ireland, he's like, no, I do actually don't want to be a martyr. I didn't really think this was going to happen. Happen. And then you meet John, who said, I want to be this guy.
- [101:23]
C
And.
- [101:24]
A
And Lenina said, wait, you wanted to suffer? Yes. I could bleed more. I could. I could suffer. So this is somebody who really desires to be a martyr and to suffer.
- [101:33]
C
Also, Lennon is weeping during the ceremony, and Bernard's trying to be a know it all the whole time and impress her by acting like he's not affected at all.
- [101:42]
A
Interesting specimen. He says things like that, right? He's trying to be that guy. Guy. My husband grins. It's none of you and him at all. So then we meet. We meet the mother, Linda.
- [101:53]
C
Linda, the first person with an average name.
- [101:57]
A
That's right. That's right. And she names her son John. That's also a very yes name.
- [102:02]
C
She has a very everyman type of name, right?
- [102:04]
A
And so does he. John Doe. The conversation about the clothes was fabulous. Lists, right? Acetate versus wool. And she says, oh, this wool stuff, it just lasts forever and ever, and we're expected to mend it. So everything is being contrasted to the quote, unquote civilized world. But what's important is she calls this madness. It's like living with lunatics. Everything they do is mad. And then she says again, mad, I tell you, absolutely mad. And then she says, I think madness is contagious. And John has become mad, too. So she gets in trouble, of course, because she's sharing her body with everyone like she's been taught to in civilization.
- [102:46]
C
This is how we know it's an upside down world. Everything that she thinks is normal, that we Know is not normal. Is wrong in this. On this reservation.
- [102:54]
A
That's right. The reservation is right side up.
- [102:57]
C
We are the ones that know that it's wrong.
- [102:58]
A
That's right. And she. So she's the character anyway. But you. Oh, go ahead.
- [103:02]
B
I was gonna say it's. It's kind of humorously ironic that she's proverbially gone off the reservation by going onto a reservation.
- [103:10]
A
Yes, yes, yes. And, Ella, I know you have a couple of points about Alice to make with Linda.
- [103:17]
C
There is something very Alice like about Bernard in the fact that he falls asleep and he wakes up in this strange world of the reservation, where everything that is normal in the civilized world is abnormal in the savage world and.
- [103:33]
B
Where you're never sure how to behave, really.
- [103:34]
C
Yes. Things are upside down. And he is spending expending much effort trying to be the know it all that reasons his way through Wonderland. And it doesn't work. Which, of course, is Alice. The other thing, though, I think Linda, who has a very average name, as Alice does, is also an echo of Alice. She's the blonde girl that fell down, hit her head, and fell in a hole in the forest.
- [103:57]
A
Boom.
- [103:58]
C
On the savage reservations. And never left.
- [104:01]
A
Yes. Yes. And never left. That's. Yes. And that's why she's saying everybody's mad.
- [104:04]
C
Yes. We're. We're all mad here. As the Mad Hatter famously says.
- [104:09]
A
Yep. All right.
- [104:12]
C
But is madness the true sanity? That's the question.
- [104:14]
A
That's right.
- [104:16]
B
Move so fast. I feel bewildered and, you know, all discombobulated.
- [104:19]
A
Sorry.
- [104:19]
B
Like. Like I'm a character in the book or something.
- [104:21]
A
This is. This is how Ella and I talk all the time. We move at the speed of our thoughts, but you can slow us down. We can listen to it more than once. Months. I feel good about this. I. We covered a lot of ground and gave a lot of background, and we will build on this in the next episode. There will be more Alice, there will be more Tempest, and we'll see how necessarily more Tempest. Very much so. Next week, we will get together again right here, same Bat time, same Bat channel. And we will talk about chapters 8 through chapter 13, and look forward to your comments on this episode and see what you guys over in the Discord are up to, too. And in the Facebook group, don't forget HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to find out about the conference. My PO webinar, Dr. Drought's Class. We've got our Christmas sale coming up, and you're going to pick up the Alice in Wonderland stuff. Ella's Glamour of the Natural World. So much good stuff you're going to want to check out. Stick around to the end. Mr. Banks has a special poem picked out. And until next time, keep crafting your literary life because stories will save the world. Thank you for listening to the Literary Life Podcast brought to you by our loyal patreon sponsors. Visit HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to find Angelina and Thomas and to sign up for our newsletter with podcast schedules and more. And keep up with Cindy at morning time for moms.com join the conversation at our member only Patreon Forum or our Facebook discussion group. Visit patreon.com theliterarylife to find out how you can sponsor this podcast and get great bonus content. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review and check out our sister podcasts, the New Mason Jar and the well Read Poem. And now for a poem read by poet Thomas Bay.
- [106:16]
B
From Prayer Before Birth by Louis I am not yet born Console me I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me with strong drugs, dope me with wise lies, lure me on black racks, rack me in bloodbaths roll me, I am not yet born. Provide me with water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light in the back of my mind to guide me. I am not yet born. Forgive me for the sins that in me the world shall commit. My words when they speak to me, my thoughts when they think me, my treason engendered by traitors beyond me me my life when they murder by means of my hands, my death when they live me, I am not yet born. Rehearse me in the parts I must play and the cues I must when old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white waves call me to folly, and the desert calls me to doom, and the beggar refuses my gift and my children curse me. I am not yet born. O hear me. Let not the man who is beast, or who thinks he is God come near me.