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wingedbeastI'm thankful to Huxley for one thing about Chapter 8. In this chapter we get a few quick glimpses of John's life in the Pueblo. It looks at the culture that is a mishmash of various cultures and one with a lack of what we, today or in Huxley's time, would consider advanced technology. It would have been very easy for Huxley to present us with the "Simpler Time" narrative.
You know how the trope goes. The "Simpler Time" wherein people were better to each other, more neighborly. They might not have had all our gadgets, but they really cared about each other and they would never...
Except... here... no.
Let's take the treatment of Linda first off. It's important to keep in mind that Linda, first becoming a member of Pueblo society, was a child.
Physically, she was an adult and, as Fordly society says it, a pneumatic one at that. I would guess her to be somewhere in her mid-to-late twenties, similar to Lenina's age in her visit. But, the society she grew up in kept her from developing into what we would consider an adult mindset.
Fordly society actively discourages you from learning about the broader world outside your own position in it. Fordly society takes pains to make sure that you suffer as little, in the way of delayed satisfaction, as is possible. It shelters you from pain and teaches you to, with little exception, think in short term.
In short, it tries to keep you a teenager. That means that the best way to describe Linda in terms of our frame of reference would be that Linda is a teen who got pregnant, got abandoned by everybody she knew, and had to tough it out to make a living in conditions she was never prepared for.
By this point in John's quick flashbacks, we'd seen that Linda already had a hard time adjusting to Pueblo life. She'd broken something because she didn't know how to weave. And, at this point, the reasoning was that she was having sex with their husbands. So, for their society and their monogamous ways, I get the high emotions.
However, we're talking about whipping a woman in front of her child... a woman that these women know to have come from another culture and to be in need of a great deal of help adjusting. And, there's no indication that they make much of an effort at all. Then, they whipped a child for trying to stop them from whipping his own mother.
There's no indication, one way or another, on whether or not those three women suffered any consequences at all for this. John did, because what happens immediately after that is that Linda smacks him some. The proximate cause was that he, in hugging her, touched her shoulder. The ultimate cause is, well... she's now the subject of both abandonment and abuse, as well as internalized abuse as she couldn't imagine going back to Fordly society now that she'd given birth, now that she was (as perverse as this is to say) a mother.
Other instances of abuse involve John being, just as other boys his age are leaving to go on a rite of passage, yanked out of line because of his blond hair and that the Pueblo, in general, doesn't like his mom. According to him, he went down to do the ritual on his own.
It's not all horrible for him. He has moments. Linda, for all her troubles, does seem to really love him. She teaches him to read, does her best to condition him like she thinks is best for him. And, in one of the quick flashbacks, someone did take time out to teach him how to make clay pots and promised (with no indication that he didn't follow through) to teach him how to make a bow the next winter.
And, of course, there's Shakespear.
I don't know what to make of John's relationship with Shakespeare. Because, there's a lot of it that's...
Here's the thing about Shakespeare. He wrote a lot of good plays. If you enjoy the Bard's work, that's great, you're in good company. But, Shakespeare gets a lot of worship that I don't think is good for appreciation of his work.
Shakespeare was a playwright, not a bookwright. His plays aren't meant to be read. They're meant to be played and/or viewed. They're meant to be understood within a context. John's the only child in the Pueblo to know how to read, so he can't be watching the plays. I don't know that he's doing any acting. I do know that he's not been taught much of the context.
What I'm saying is that I doubt he can really understand as much of the plays as Huxley would seem to have us think he understands.
Still, it does something for him. It gives him the language to express, if only internally, many of the emotions he's dealing with. On top of being a teenager, which is enough to fill one with enough passions to torture yourself on its own, but also with the frequent abuse and, as may be unintended by Huxley, the internalized self-hatred that he got from the Pueblo people.
It also gives him, again internally, a place of respite. As far as this chapter can tell us, he has very little of that. One maybe-kindly adult who taught him to make clay pots (and possibly taught him to make bows), his mother's talk of the civilized world, and Shakespear.
In the previous part to this decon, Carstonio noted some confusion about the Linda-John relationship.
Much of John's character needs to be explained with the Doylist lens. Huxley did not either understand, think through, consider important compared to what he wanted to do with John, or any combination of the above. Huxley wanted John to be a counterpart to Bernard and Helmholtz. I don't think we can really understand John without understanding that bit of authorial intent.
That said, I can come up with something of a Watsonian explanation for John in this. His happy moments are few, in the Pueblo. His respite comes from his vague understanding of civilization as some kind of virtue, from his appreciation of Shakespeare, and from his identification with his own intellect. He's internalized some of their values (particularly the value of pain as valuable/redemptive) but he's also identified himself apart from them, because he had no other choice.
Much like Bernard, fitting in just wasn't an option for John, so he crafted an identity around being different in this way.
You know how the trope goes. The "Simpler Time" wherein people were better to each other, more neighborly. They might not have had all our gadgets, but they really cared about each other and they would never...
Except... here... no.
Let's take the treatment of Linda first off. It's important to keep in mind that Linda, first becoming a member of Pueblo society, was a child.
Physically, she was an adult and, as Fordly society says it, a pneumatic one at that. I would guess her to be somewhere in her mid-to-late twenties, similar to Lenina's age in her visit. But, the society she grew up in kept her from developing into what we would consider an adult mindset.
Fordly society actively discourages you from learning about the broader world outside your own position in it. Fordly society takes pains to make sure that you suffer as little, in the way of delayed satisfaction, as is possible. It shelters you from pain and teaches you to, with little exception, think in short term.
In short, it tries to keep you a teenager. That means that the best way to describe Linda in terms of our frame of reference would be that Linda is a teen who got pregnant, got abandoned by everybody she knew, and had to tough it out to make a living in conditions she was never prepared for.
One afternoon, when he had been playing with the other children-it was cold, he remembered, and there was snow on the mountains-he came back to the house and heard angry voices in the bedroom. They were women's voices, and they said words he didn't understand; but he knew they were dreadful words. Then suddenly, crash! something was upset; he heard people moving about quickly, and there was another crash and then a noise like hitting a mule, only not so bony; then Linda screamed. "Oh, don't, don't don't!" she said. He ran in. There were three women in dark blankets. Linda was on the bed. One of the women was holding her writs. Another was lying across her legs, so that she couldn't kick. The third was hitting her with a whip. Once, twice, three times; and each time Linda screamed. Crying, he tugged at the fringe of the woman's blanket. "Please, please." With her free hand she held him away. The whip came down again, and again Linda screamed. He caught hold of the woman's enormous brown hand between his own and bit it with all his might. She cried out, wrenched her hand free, and gave him a push that he fell down. While he was lying on the ground, she hit him three times with the whip.
By this point in John's quick flashbacks, we'd seen that Linda already had a hard time adjusting to Pueblo life. She'd broken something because she didn't know how to weave. And, at this point, the reasoning was that she was having sex with their husbands. So, for their society and their monogamous ways, I get the high emotions.
However, we're talking about whipping a woman in front of her child... a woman that these women know to have come from another culture and to be in need of a great deal of help adjusting. And, there's no indication that they make much of an effort at all. Then, they whipped a child for trying to stop them from whipping his own mother.
There's no indication, one way or another, on whether or not those three women suffered any consequences at all for this. John did, because what happens immediately after that is that Linda smacks him some. The proximate cause was that he, in hugging her, touched her shoulder. The ultimate cause is, well... she's now the subject of both abandonment and abuse, as well as internalized abuse as she couldn't imagine going back to Fordly society now that she'd given birth, now that she was (as perverse as this is to say) a mother.
Other instances of abuse involve John being, just as other boys his age are leaving to go on a rite of passage, yanked out of line because of his blond hair and that the Pueblo, in general, doesn't like his mom. According to him, he went down to do the ritual on his own.
It's not all horrible for him. He has moments. Linda, for all her troubles, does seem to really love him. She teaches him to read, does her best to condition him like she thinks is best for him. And, in one of the quick flashbacks, someone did take time out to teach him how to make clay pots and promised (with no indication that he didn't follow through) to teach him how to make a bow the next winter.
And, of course, there's Shakespear.
I don't know what to make of John's relationship with Shakespeare. Because, there's a lot of it that's...
Here's the thing about Shakespeare. He wrote a lot of good plays. If you enjoy the Bard's work, that's great, you're in good company. But, Shakespeare gets a lot of worship that I don't think is good for appreciation of his work.
Shakespeare was a playwright, not a bookwright. His plays aren't meant to be read. They're meant to be played and/or viewed. They're meant to be understood within a context. John's the only child in the Pueblo to know how to read, so he can't be watching the plays. I don't know that he's doing any acting. I do know that he's not been taught much of the context.
What I'm saying is that I doubt he can really understand as much of the plays as Huxley would seem to have us think he understands.
Still, it does something for him. It gives him the language to express, if only internally, many of the emotions he's dealing with. On top of being a teenager, which is enough to fill one with enough passions to torture yourself on its own, but also with the frequent abuse and, as may be unintended by Huxley, the internalized self-hatred that he got from the Pueblo people.
It also gives him, again internally, a place of respite. As far as this chapter can tell us, he has very little of that. One maybe-kindly adult who taught him to make clay pots (and possibly taught him to make bows), his mother's talk of the civilized world, and Shakespear.
In the previous part to this decon, Carstonio noted some confusion about the Linda-John relationship.
The Linda-John relationship is confusing. She resembles real-life parents with addictions, but he doesn't quite fit the personality of someone who grew up in a dysfunctional household. And John's experience is not that of a second-generation immigrant influenced by two worlds - the Fordian world and its ideology are merely a faraway dream for him. Instead, he functions to a large extent as a doppelganger for Bernard, as if Huxley could describe the contrasting World State and Reservation cultures only from the perspectives of characters who don't fit in.
Much of John's character needs to be explained with the Doylist lens. Huxley did not either understand, think through, consider important compared to what he wanted to do with John, or any combination of the above. Huxley wanted John to be a counterpart to Bernard and Helmholtz. I don't think we can really understand John without understanding that bit of authorial intent.
That said, I can come up with something of a Watsonian explanation for John in this. His happy moments are few, in the Pueblo. His respite comes from his vague understanding of civilization as some kind of virtue, from his appreciation of Shakespeare, and from his identification with his own intellect. He's internalized some of their values (particularly the value of pain as valuable/redemptive) but he's also identified himself apart from them, because he had no other choice.
Much like Bernard, fitting in just wasn't an option for John, so he crafted an identity around being different in this way.
no subject
Date: 2017-11-06 11:46 pm (UTC)No question that Shakespeare should be viewed or acted instead of read. Among other things, good actors can bring out shadings in the characters that may not be obvious from the bare text. I want to see schools introduce Shakespeare by relying much more on films and trips to live productions.
Rereading the scene where the Pueblo women attack Linda and John, I'm tempted to interpret their anger in what in our world would be called anticolonialist terms. I imagine the Pueblo society feeling resentful of the Fordian one that keeps it in poverty, and seeing Linda sleeping with the women's husbands as the ultimate indignity. Probably not in Doylist terms since Huxley didn't seem to question colonialism.
no subject
Date: 2017-11-06 11:56 pm (UTC)I suppose simply being separate and having better wealth and technology is bad enough. But, Fordly society apparently feels it their right to, every so often, go through and examine them like they're animals in a cage.
So, with Linda the effectively abandoned and John her son, they have a target for their anger.
It doesn't justify their treatment of her. She's not as much a victim as they (she, after all, had access to healthcare that they lack, as well as a certainty of being able to eat), but she is a victim of Fordly society. I have to imagine some compassion would have gone as long a way as the abuse.
Shakespeare quotations
Date: 2017-11-07 04:09 am (UTC)—Steve Morrison
How does John know?
Date: 2017-11-07 06:55 am (UTC)Clive D.W. Feather
Re: How does John know?
Date: 2017-11-07 01:15 pm (UTC)He understands the anger and hatred from Hamlet to his uncle. But, he doesn't understand the dynamics so much. I don't think his society has anything like that hereditary rule that would apply.
Romeo and Juliet, in order to get the tragic romance element, one needs to understand loving and being denied by rule (and John was once sixteen in a culture that didn't condition him against such strong emotions). But, the complex matters of power structures? The warning that Romeo and Juliet gives to parents? Probably not.
But, yeah, I think Huxley didn't quite get how context-dependent Shakespeare can be.
Re: How does John know?
Date: 2017-11-07 03:06 pm (UTC)Re: How does John know?
Date: 2017-11-07 03:40 pm (UTC)It's also a note of how much Huxley wasn't aware of his own conditioning.
Oh, and a note on "beauty", there's a heavy influence of familiarity involved. Show someone a picture repeatedly and, when asked to choose the more aesthetically pleasing between that picture and a similar picture (similar theme, color palate, etc.), they'll more often choose the more familiar. So, a lot of the beauty of Shakespeare's work (and, indeed, much of the beauty of the biblical stories) can be seen as a function of repetition.
Now, while Shakespeare is good at his craft, it's just an element of how ephemeral beauty, as a concept, is.