Brave New World vs. Island: Who Gets to Be Right?

Part of: The Deep Reader

This essay discusses both novels in full, including their endings.

Mustapha Mond knows why Shakespeare is worth reading. That makes him a disturbing man to find in charge of a society which has banned the plays. In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, the World Controller defends that ban with a connoisseur's appreciation of what has been lost. We can reject his decision and still feel the force of the person defending it.

Thirty years separate Brave New World (1932) from Island (1962). In the earlier novel, social stability depends on conditioning people to accept their assigned lives; in the later one, the island society of Pala tries to educate desire and attention toward a less destructive happiness. Both place a dissatisfied outsider among people ready to explain how their world works. Both ask what a society should do with suffering.

In Brave New World, opposed convictions retain their force after the debate ends. Parts of Island secure assent more readily by discrediting an objection through the person who makes it. We can foresee which teaching will prevail while the conversation still has pages to run. This helps explain an unevenness in the later book which its ideals alone cannot account for. Its finest scenes occur when the people who know how to live need something beyond their knowledge.

A conviction shared between voices

Before Mond debates anyone, Huxley has already made his explanations compete with other voices. Chapter III of Brave New World cuts between the Controller's account of social order and the conversations through which that order is maintained. Lenina's friend Fanny worries about her prolonged attachment to Henry Foster. The objection is perfectly respectable by their society's standards: sexual exclusiveness threatens the circulation of pleasure on which everyone has been trained to depend.

Intercut with the Controller's lecture, Fanny's advice carries the World State's creed into the intimacies of friendship. Lenina needs no policeman at the door. Someone who cares about her is already correcting her conduct. What the lecture describes as liberation from old restrictions acquires restrictions of its own in the changing room.

Huxley also cuts to Bernard, who resents the men's casual treatment of Lenina as an available body. The men's contempt deserves his anger, even as his own longing and humiliation compromise his judgment. Through the chapter's counterpoint—the intercutting of distinct conversations—Huxley divides our sympathy. A genuine objection can belong to someone whose motives are mixed; an oppressive rule can be passed on through affection.

In the late debate, Mond defends his society with an admission of loss. John, the outsider raised beyond the World State, appeals to Shakespeare against an existence organized around easy satisfactions. Mond readily grants Shakespeare's superiority to the entertainments his state provides, while maintaining that the passions and disturbances which sustain such art would threaten the society he governs. John's argument cannot be settled by proving that Shakespeare is good. They disagree about whether that good is worth the suffering which accompanies it.

Mond forces John to be specific about that price. When John demands the freedom to suffer, the Controller names some of what the demand includes: illness, poverty, fear, bodily decay. After a long silence, John answers, “I claim them all.” Mond replies, “You're welcome.” The courtesy preserves the disagreement. Neither has persuaded the other to revise what he is prepared to sacrifice.

The same Controller can exile people and refuse John's request to leave with his friends, making his intellectual candor all the more unsettling. Nor does John's alternative offer a safe refuge. At the lighthouse, his attempts at purification become self-punishment; the visitors turn his suffering into entertainment, and he attacks the young woman who approaches him, apparently Lenina. John finally kills himself. A reader who sides with him against Mond must also face what his ideal does to him and to another person.

The objection and the objector

The mushroom conversation in Chapter Nine of Island begins by making one of its participants ridiculous. Murugan, Pala's future ruler, has been absorbed in a Sears Roebuck catalog. He admires the motor vehicles and consumer abundance which the island's economy has failed to provide. When his teachers approach, he substitutes Elementary Ecology for the catalog. Before anyone has answered him, we have seen a schoolboy concealing his appetite behind the appearance of study.

His hostility to the island's sexual freedom and its moksha-medicine follows the same comic treatment. Murugan sounds like his mother, the Rani; his indignation is described as a performance incongruous with his youth. Dr. Robert can therefore diagnose the objection as an inherited verbal reflex. The young man has learned a disapproving name for the drug and refuses the experience which might correct him. Beside the pupil's furtiveness, the teachers' ease and good humor already recommend their judgment.

The freedom Murugan covets as a consumer sits awkwardly with his horror of other people's pleasures. Huxley invites us to prejudge his objection through this inconsistency. The claim that the experience is illusory comes burdened with vanity, prudery and secondhand certainty. The conversation acquires the satisfaction of watching an immature person corrected, at some cost to our interest in what might remain unanswered.

Will Farnaby, the visiting journalist through whose experience we encounter Pala, briefly changes the terms. He points out that an experience can be real inside someone's head and still tell us nothing about an external reality. This is an objection to the inference, independent of Murugan's character. Robert accepts it. The teachers acknowledge the limits of their knowledge, and the discussion includes people for whom the drug has little or no effect. It would be unfair to describe the whole exchange as a sermon incapable of hearing doubt.

After comparing competing accounts of the brain's relation to consciousness, Robert shifts the discussion from metaphysical proof to the value of the experience. Mozart's G-minor Quintet can enrich us even if it does not establish the existence of God. He recalls sharing the drug with his terminally ill wife, Lakshmi: they experienced a loving communion during an illness it could not cure.

A claim about what an experience reveals has given way to a claim about what it can do for someone. The second may be compelling even if the first remains uncertain. Robert's account of love under the pressure of death gives the discussion a seriousness Murugan's denunciations lack. To return to Will's unanswered question now risks sounding callous toward a dying woman. The testimony establishes the value the experience had for these people; it cannot, by itself, settle whether those altered perceptions disclose anything beyond the mind.

The conversation gradually favors the invitation to try the teaching. Will's question has been admitted, but the compassionate teacher, the diminished opponent and the promised experience all point him toward acceptance. The result can feel unduly convenient even to a reader sympathetic to Pala. Compassion lends the invitation a persuasive force that the metaphysical argument has not earned.

Mond's arguments are hardly brief, and a willing reader can find Robert's ideas absorbing. Once the likely destination of a conversation is clear, however, each further explanation must complicate the expected answer or risk simply repeating the invitation to agree. Some of Island's instruction feels slow because we can anticipate its answer so much earlier than we can accept it.

When the teaching has to listen

At Lakshmi's deathbed, the woman whose experience helped recommend Pala's teaching can interrupt the account. Susila, her daughter-in-law, speaks to her about the spiritual light from which they have come and to which they will return. But the lamp beside the bed is glaring. Susila covers its shade with the red silk handkerchief she has been wearing around her neck.

That small adjustment changes the authority of the scene. We have been asked to consider a teaching about perception; now someone has to notice what is hurting the person who is supposed to perceive. Whatever the spiritual language means to us, the glare demands a practical response. Susila's attention is credible because Lakshmi can redirect it. The teacher has to hear a need which her explanation does not anticipate.

The bedside conversation is also interrupted by Will's memories of his Aunt Mary's agonized death. Huxley has not abandoned the counterpoint of Brave New World. He places present speech beside remembered speech, contrasting Lakshmi's moments of serenity with Aunt Mary's terror. Yet the recollection brings back Aunt Mary's affection, humor and shared life with Will. Her suffering hurts him because of the woman he loved and admired. She cannot be reduced to an unsuccessful doctrine.

Chihiro Kato reads Island as a novel of education, in which the movement between Will's present experience and his memories helps produce his development. For Will, learning how to face death entails revisiting the death of someone he loved; he cannot discard that history as he might discard an opinion.

Even so, the contrast between the two deaths favors Pala heavily. Aunt Mary's terror and Lakshmi's moments of peace can seem to furnish the desired conclusion for us. Then Lakshmi identifies a failure within the very teaching her serenity seems to vindicate. Her sense of light disappeared, she says, when she began explaining that her pain did not really belong to her. Susila approves what she was saying. Lakshmi answers, “I know—but I was saying it.”

The dying woman catches an explanation obstructing the experience it describes. Her irreverence briefly unsettles the authority of all the good words around her, including her own. Lakshmi's pain, impatience and humor interrupt the demonstration, giving her a part in the conversation which no approving pupil could supply.

The scene continues through pain, waiting and the effort to speak, until Robert reaches the bedside after failures of communication and transport have delayed him. For Lakshmi, an account of consciousness cannot take her husband's place. The teaching can be judged by what it enables those beside her to do in the time she has left.

The teacher needs her pupil

Near the end of Island, Susila needs help of her own. She has been guiding Will, but her grief for her dead husband returns. Her knowledge of attention does not exempt her from needing another person's attention. Will helps her come back to the present, and she acknowledges the reversal: “And now it's you who have to teach your teacher.”

The armed invasion of Pala tests that mutual dependence under immediate threat. Will's altered perception unfolds as the political world around him collapses; the novel insists that his experience remains real to him amid the violence. We need not treat the island's defeat as proof that its teaching was false. Armies can destroy a community without settling its arguments. Equally, the beauty of Will's experience cannot answer the questions of power and vulnerability which the invasion leaves behind.

As the violence closes in, Susila trembles and Will holds her. He can now offer the steadiness he earlier needed from her. Neither person can promise safety, though their education in attention has made this small assistance possible.

Brave New World sustains the more unsettled contest. Its defender of social peace knows what he has destroyed; its rebel's demand for a fuller life becomes entangled with cruelty toward himself and another. At times, Island assigns its speakers their credibility so early that their objections serve chiefly as invitations to instruct them. The weakness is most apparent in Robert's appeal to consolation, where the emotional satisfaction of the answer can obscure the unanswered question about truth.

The later novel also contains a better form of persuasion than the correction of Murugan. Its bedside exchanges require the teaching to listen, adjust and accept help. Here Pala's ideas earn our attention through the needs they answer and the limits their practitioners must live with. Susila has taught Will something he can give back to her; her need for it keeps their exchange unfinished. Island is most compelling when the people entrusted with its answers still have something to learn from one another.

For a closer look at what speakers need from one another, continue with how to read Dostoevsky’s dialogues.

Sources and Further Reading

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (Chatto & Windus, 1932), Chapters III and XVI–XVIII. Primary text.

Aldous Huxley, Island (1962), Chapters Nine, Fourteen and Fifteen. Primary text, Chatto & Windus 1975 printing.

Chihiro Kato, “Aldous Huxley’s View of Ecology: The Arts of Fiction in Island”, Eibeibunka 50 (2020), 49–69.