How to Read Dystopian Literature: Brave New World & Nineteen Eighty-Four (Double Bill Introduction)
'Oh wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! Oh brave new world, that has such people in it.'
It’s time to begin our dystopian double bill, which will take us through two modern nightmare visions of the future. We're beginning with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and then reading George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four back-to-back.
Our reading will teach us about totalitarianism, modernism, history, political oppression, the dangers of technological advance, how dystopias spring from utopian ideals, how these visions of the future are often critiques of the present, pleasure vs pain as methods of control, and much more.
Today we’re discussing how best to break into this fascinating genre and how to bring ourselves fully to these iconic dystopian visions.
Video Timestamps:
0:00 George Orwell’s dystopian vision
1:00 Aldous Huxley’s tyranny of pleasure
2:00 Brave New World vs Nineteen Eighty-Four
3:00 whose dystopia are we living in today?
4:30 how to read dystopian literature
5:30 dystopian book club lecture series
6:30 development from utopian literature
8:00 reviewing Sir Thomas More’s Utopia
10:00 what does Utopia mean?
11:00 analysing More’s utopian society
12:30 the society in Plato’s republic
14:00 one man’s heaven is another’s hell
15:00 what does Dystopia mean?
16:00 reviewing Marx’s Communist Manifesto
17:00 an evaluation of Marxist ideology
19:00 history of society as class struggle
20:00 dystopian as descendent of the gothic
21:30 what is the value of dystopian literature?
22:30 the two fuels for dystopian literature
23:30 totalitarianism vs scientific advance
24:00 from Victorianism to Modernism
25:00 Jerome K. Jerome’s New Utopia
26:00 the influence of H. G. Wells
27:30 development of science fiction
28:30 nightmare of the twentieth century
30:30 reviewing Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We
31:30 Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism
32:30 Zamyatin’s influence on dystopian genre
35:30 reviewing Huxley’s Brave New World
36:30 are we living in Huxley’s dystopia?
37:30 the dystopia of Huxley’s World State
38:30 worship of hedonism and consumerism
39:30 circular vs linear views of history
40:30 mass production vs individuality
42:00 the anxiety of the machine age
43:00 eugenics in the modern age
44:00 conditioning in behavioural psychology
46:00 caste system in Brave New World
48:00 Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale
49:00 Murray Constantine’s Swastika Night
51:30 Huxley’s critique of social hierarchy
52:30 placated and sedated by pleasure
53:30 what if we were happy all the time?
55:00 the characters of Brave New World
56:00 Savage Reservation in Huxley’s novel
57:00 allusion to Shakespeare’s The Tempest
58:30 the character of John the Savage
59:30 Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
1:00:00 Prometheus and the Fall of Mankind
1:02:00 why is Shakespeare banned in dystopia?
1:04:00 ‘the price we have to pay for stability’
1:05:30 David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest
1:06:30 Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451
1:07:30 does Brave New World terrify you?
1:09:00 would you really want a perfect life?
1:10:00 ‘I don’t want comfort. I want freedom.’
1:11:00 reviewing Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four
1:13:00 George Orwell’s deathbed novel
1:14:00 ‘the clocks were striking thirteen’
1:14:00 read George Orwell’s novel as 1948
1:15:00 when is Orwell’s dystopia set?
1:16:00 commentary on postwar Britain
1:17:00 nightmare of the First World War
1:19:30 Hitler’s Nazi Germany and WWII
1:22:00 George Orwell’s Animal Farm
1:23:00 Orwell in the Spanish Civil War
1:24:30 George Orwell’s political thoughts
1:25:30 socialism in postwar Britain
1:27:30 deprivation in the wake of WWII
1:29:00 Cold War and nuclear anxiety
1:31:00 Airstrip One in Orwell’s Oceania
1:32:00 political satire on enemies vs allies
1:33:00 disastrous subtext in Orwell’s novel
1:34:00 Big Brother’s totalitarian state
1:35:00 ‘abolished, annihilated, vaporised’
1:36:00 two minutes of hate as struggle sessions
1:37:00 Hannah Arendt on totalitarian markers
1:38:00 ‘who controls the past controls the future’
1:39:00 ‘Freedom is slavery. War is peace.’
1:39:30 Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four
1:41:00 ideological absolutism in tyrannies
1:42:00 ‘two plus two equals five’
1:43:00 nightmare of Stalin’s Soviet Union
1:44:00 Orwell on censorship of writing
1:45:30 banning speech is banning thought
1:46:30 reading and writing is thinking
1:47:30 reading is deep emotional connection
1:48:30 freedom of speech as ultimate liberty
1:50:30 principles of Newspeak in 1984
1:53:00 George Orwell on doublethink
1:55:00 why thoughtcrime is death
1:56:00 Huxley’s review of Orwell’s dystopia
1:57:00 dystopian book club lecture series
1:58:00 your thoughts on these dystopias?
Resources:
Editions: There are many wonderful editions of Brave New World to choose from. I'm working from Vintage edition, a paperback perfect for marginalia. The introduction by Margaret Atwood is excellent. If you want a great hardback, the Everyman's Library edition is superb as always and has a marvellous introduction from the perceptive John Sutherland. For Orwell's dystopian nightmare, I value the Penguin paperback edition, which has a great afterward by Thomas Pynchon. Everyman's Library also have a great hardback edition, which has a great introduction by Julian Symons.
Meet the Author: As we're diving into Brave New World first, you might like to spend some time getting to know his thoughts on the craft of writing. The Paris Review has a fascinating interview with Aldous Huxley here, which was conducted thirty years after the publication of his extraordinarily influential dystopian novel. We're very fortunate to have access to several television interviews of the great writer too. His warning in this BBC interview from 1961 is as true today as it was then: 'Man is being subjected to his own inventions. He's now the victim of his own technology.' If you want more interviews, you might enjoy this one and this one too.
Audiobook: There is a phenomenal reading of Huxley's prophetic novel available here. Michael York does an excellent job with the narration. You may also enjoy this short radio dramatisation, which stars the great writer himself. CBS Radio Workshop was a series of radio dramatisations of imaginative literature that ran in the mid-fifties and they chose Brave New World to kick it off. For a more recent dramatisation, BBC Radio Four did a superb job with this exciting radio production starring Anton Lesser.
Debate: Two great writers and speakers battled it out onstage to determine whose dystopia is closest to the world we are living in today here. Will Self argued for Huxley's dystopia, whilst Adam Gopnik argued for Orwell's nightmare vision. The talk is chaired by Jonathan Freedland and there are some wonderful live dramatic readings of the works. The debate took place almost a decade ago, but is no less thought-provoking today. The talk is great to listen to either as an appetiser before reading or as desert at the end of your reading.
Screen Adaptations: There have been several adaptations of Brave New World, but none have managed to fully capture the depth of Huxley's dystopian vision. Here is the trailer for the nine-episode series from 2020 and Peacock/NBC, which is a very loose adaptation that came under critical fire for diverging too significantly from the original novel. You've also got this charmingly dated television film adaptation from 1980 and there is also an adaptation from 1998. I'd personally recommend reading the book first, thinking about how you would produce an adaptation, and then checking one out. You'd probably enjoy the film Equilibrium more than those adaptations. We'll make more dystopian film recommendations as we read through together.
Dystopian TV: Why not treat yourself to a few episodes of Charlie Brooker's profoundly dystopian television series Black Mirror? When you're not reading, give yourself a little screening of this masterpiece of television. I recommend starting with the episodes 'Nose Dive' and 'Fifteen Million Merits.' If you find yourself wanting to binge the series, then here are some more options: 'Be Right Back', 'Playtest', and 'The Entire History of You.' Think about how Huxley and Orwell's dystopian visions sublimely intertwine. How far off from our current reality is this really? Here is the series creator in interview talking about living in a dystopia. I agree with him when he says, 'You can psychologically profile someone based on what their favourite episode of Black Mirror is.'
Additional Reading: We mentioned a lot of different works and writers over the course of the discussion. Several of the most illuminating and complementary works are very slim, quite digestible, and make for a rewarding optional extra reading. I would recommend picking up one that intrigues you the most as this moment in time and dipping in here and there when you have the chance. If you're interested in checking out the most iconic work of utopian literature, then Sir Thomas More's Utopia would be for you. If you're interested in political philosophy, you could check out The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. If you want to see the work of dystopian literature that would influence so many works in the genre, including the works of Huxley and Orwell, then check out Yevgeny Zamyatin's We. If you find the genre's critique of totalitarianism to be fascinating, you might find George Orwell's Animal Farm, the satirical beast fable he wrote prior to his dystopian novel, an interesting one to check out. If you found the Neil Postman quote interesting, then you may like Amusing Ourselves to Death. If the allusion in the title of Huxley's book intrigues you, then some time spent Shakespeare's The Tempest is always going to be rewarding.
Reading Assignment:
Our next discussion will cover the first eight chapters of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and will be out this coming weekend. This takes us through the first one hundred and twenty pages of the story depending on which edition you're working from.
So, start making your way into the first novel in our dystopian double-bill, thinking about the vision of the world that Huxley gives us, meeting the characters, and noting down any themes, ideas, or passages that personally resonate with you.
Questions for You:
1) What is your current relationship with Aldous Huxley and George Orwell? Is this your first reading or a rereading of these works?
2) What themes from your wider reading would you like to pull into your dystopian experience?
3) What is the most terrifying idea at the heart of dystopian literature?
4) What are you hoping to get out of your reading of Huxley and Orwell?
Happy reading, everybody!