SYNTHETIC MYTHS IN ALDOUS HUXLEY'S BRAVE NEW WORLD A NOTE Myths are no longer exclusively sacred stones contaimng an absolute truth which commands belief no matter how much it violates one’s sense of the real But whereas modern myths may not be true in a religious sense, they do present certain timeless verities, and make important statements about human affairs They are the truisms of our culture, and can be restated indefinitely Myths of this type are generated in the face of a conflict experienced subconsciously as a binary opposition The function of the myth 1s to mediate this opposition by making a relevant statement about it, transformmg an unbearable conflict into a bearable one ' It 1s necessary to distinguish between analytic and synthetic myths? The analytic myth makes a statement about an opposition, and describes the con- flict and the opposition which it mediates Thus, analytic myth exists synchrom- cally in the form of fictional or relational narrative The synthetic myth 1s the mediator divorced from the opposition which generated it, 1 an incontrover- tible statement Thus, ‘everyone belongs to everyone else’, (BNW, pp 42, 45. 47 100, 105, 162) 1s a synthetic myth mediating a hidden emotional conflict inherent 1n a society where it 1s evident that nobody belongs to anybody or anything ° + Claude Levi-Strauss ‘The Structural Study of Myth’, Journal of American Folklore LXXVIIL no 270 (1955), rpt in The Structuralists From Marx to Lev-Strauss, ed Richard T and Fernande M DeGeorge (Garden City, NY Doubleday 1972), pp 169-95, see especially p 188 ? @rvad Andersen et al, Tegneserier En Ekspansionshistorie (Kongerslev, Denmark GMT 1974), pp 104-25 contains a detailed and useful discussion of sacred (transempiric) versus modern (popular) myth, as well as the distinction between the analytic and the synthetic myth These concepts anse out of a closely argued redefimtion of Levi-Strauss’ transformational theory of myth and lead to a restructured theory of mythic taxonomies > Aldous Huxley, Brave New World A Novel (1932, Harmondsworth Penguin Books 1955, rpt 1972) Hereafter cited as BNW Cnitiasm of BNW often centers on its anti-utopian aspects, and its relationship towards the utopian/dystopian tradition, especially Yevgeny Zamyatin (We 1924) and H_G Wells J O Bauley, Pilgrums Through Space and Tome Trends and Patterns in Scientific and Utopian Fiction (1947, rpt Westport, Conn Greenwood Press 1972), pp 155-6 sees BNW as an anti-utopian satire, while Mark R Hillegas in The Future as Nightmare H G Wells and the Anti-Utopians (1967, rpt Carbondale Southern 111 University Press 1974), calls BNW an ‘admonttory satire’, (p 82) and an ‘anti-utopia’, (p 110) but 1s mostly concerned with its anti-Wellsian aspects (pp 113, 157, 158) David Ketterer, New Worlds For Old The Ap- ocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction and American Literature (New York Doubleday 1974) ‘emphasizes the dystopian aspect (pp 100, 125) Frederick W Conner, ‘Attention’! Aldous Huxley's Epistemological Route to Salvation’, Sewanee Review, LXXXI (1973), 282-308, 1s not specifically concerned with BNW, but rather with Huxley’s development as thinker and essayist However, be docs make a pomt which 1s important for an understanding of BNW’s philoso- phical context, namely that one of Huxley’s central preoccupations was with expenence versus abstraction, subjectivism versus objectivity, he indicates that these ‘puzzles of epistemology’. (p 302) show Huxley ‘a way to salvation’ (p 302) 506One problem in a discussion of synthetic myth 1s due to the fact that the actual process of mediation 1s obscured at best, one can hope to reconstruct the process, and present a speculative explanation of 1t The synthetic myth often grows out of an onginal analytic myth during a period of numerous repetitions, the mediator can disengage itself from its analytic context and acquire a formulaic, proverb-like status Behind the jingle ‘When the individual feels, the community reels’, (BNW, p 80) one must assume an analytic mythic narrative which explains why this 1s so And as a matter of fact, Mustapha Mond, ‘Resident Controller for Western Europe’, provides us with one version of the myth, split up i a larger context, (:bid pp 38-54) and states ‘No civilization without social stability No social stability without indrvidual sta- bility’ (:bid p 44) This ‘explanation’ 1s naturally reserved for Alphas, the most intelligent caste, and 1s in most cases unnecessary even for them The synthetic myth 1s typically geared for reiteration, and does not provide intellectual, but only moral knowledge In BNW, the individual 1s hypnopaedically conditioned and given a moral education which ‘ought never, in any circumstances, to be rational’ (BNW, p 32) The end result is that the synthetic myths become powerful ideological tools, and ‘axiomatic, self-evident, utterly indisputable’ (:bid p 42)* Its important to note that an ideology, in this case an ideology of happiness, can exploit synthetic myths to maintain its own interests, and to conceal the internal conflicts which arise between the interests of society and those of the individual In BNW, the synthetic myths can be divided into five groups jingles, rewnt- ten nursery rhymes, rewntten proverbs, new proverbs and pseudostatements All are types of discourse designed for parroting, 1e meamingless rhythmic repetition, and so in keeping with the infantile emotionalism of society in 632 Affter] Flord] The pngles, eg ‘Ending 1s better than mending’, (BNW, pp 49, 50, 51) or ‘a gramme 1s better than a damn’, (bid pp 53, 78, 96, 154) are tailored for easy remembrance, and are only marginally different from advertis- ing slogans in our society * Jingles and slogans age quickly and are replaced by new ones, the point is made in BNW where it 1s mentioned that Helmholtz Watson ‘had the happiest knack for slogans and hypnopaedic rhymes’, (:bid p 61) suggesting that in fact, his yob 1s to write endless reams of advertising copy The nursery rhymes, e g ‘Orgy-porgy’, (BNW, pp 73, 74, 146, 200) or ‘A, B, C, Vitamin D’, (:bid pp 110, 159, 160-61) stress the social infantilism, and serve a satimc purpose for the perceptive reader The rewritten proverbs, e g ‘Ford helps those who help themselves’, (ibid p 168) or ‘What man has jomned, nature is powerless to put asunder’, (ibid p 29) are satirical im the same manner, stressing the mindlessness lurking beneath the seemingly meaningful “ In this they are remmiscent of the moralitas of the medieval beast fable, and mn a wider sense the moral of the farry tale ‘Eg ‘Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should’, ‘The nght one, the bnght one Martim’, “Things go better with Coke’ Once a slogan has been associated with a product, 1t tends to become even shorter Martin's slogan has been reduced to ‘the right one’ “Martin” and ‘the ght one’ become synthetic myths which disguise the processes of their mediation Any specific ‘oppositions which might be mediated by consuming eg Marti: have disappeared 507surface of contemporary sayings, even when they are part of Chnstian ntual, as in the latter example While these are almost verbatim transcriptions, changed by substituting a few words, and therefore immediately recognizable, Huxley has also generated new synthetic myths in the form of proverbs, e g ‘One cubic centimetre [of soma] cures ten gloomy sentuuments’, (ibid pp 53, 57, 72) or ‘Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology’ (:bid p 53) Finally, there are pseudostatements, e g “What a hideous colour khakt 1s’, (ibid p 58) or ‘progress zs lovely’, (bid p 85) which are somewhat different As with the jingles and proverbs, a statement is either true or false, 1€ it 1s possible to establish the conditions under which truth or falsity can be determmed When there are no such conditions, the statement becomes meaningless as statement, that 1s to say, a pseudostatement ‘I'm glad I'm not a Gamma’, (:bid p 59) ‘Everybody's happy now’, (ibid pp 67 79, 105) or ‘Everyone works for everyone else’, (ibid pp 66, 78) are neither true nor false within the fictional universe Void of any semantic or logical content, they are meaningless while serving a psychological purpose as consohi- dators of happiness and security, however vacuous These synthetic myths are important for the way in which the fictional um- verse im BNW 1s experienced by the reader They are an organic part of the brave new society, as 1s seen in the deft, almost subliminal manner in which the contemporary pseudostatement ‘every man for himself’ 1s rewntten as “everyone belongs to everyone else’, and ‘Everyone works for everyone else’ A satirical contrast 1s established, for not only do people not belong to anybody or anything, they also work for nothing but the senseless perpetuation of society, ending their lives as one and a half kilos of reclaimed phosphorus (ibid p 66) In this sense, ‘Everyone works for everyone else’, and ‘everyone belongs to everyone else’, mean ‘every man for himself’ within the redefined social context As Bernard Marx discovers, the individual 1s unalterably alone in spite of his being surrounded with other individuals almost twenty-four hours a day However, the point 1s that the synthetic myths in BNW are directed, so as not Just to cast an ironical sidehght on the ways in which we ourselves use this type of discourse The horror of Huxley’s literalminded Brave New World 1s that 1t ives its synthetic myths Although we are not yet doing this ourselves, in this ‘admonitory satire’ Huxley is subtly indicating a potential danger, and giving fair warning ® Brave New World may have been written by an ‘amused, Pyr- rhonic aesthete’, (BNW, p 8) as Huxley himself pointed out in his 1946 intro- duction, but it 1s also an affirmation of Huxley's statement that ‘Truth repeated 1s no longer truth, 1t becomes truth again only when it has been realized by the speaker as an immediate experience’ 7 As John Savage, Helmholtz Watson, and Bernard Marx discover, this 1s the central human predicament Copenhagen PETER M LARSEN © Hillegas, The Future as Nightmare, p 82 Sce above, n 3 7 Huxley as quoted by Conner, p 283 See above, n 3 508Copyright © 2002 EBSCO Publishing