UTOPIA ON THE ROCKS
Griffin, C. W. Jr.
Utopia on the Rocks Island, by Aldous Huxley. Harper 8c Brothers. 355 pp. $5. Reviewed by C. W. Griffin, Jr. Having portrayed the insipid horrors of an insane Utopia enslaved to Science in Brave...
...Potential troublemakers in Pala are identified by physiological type and the proper treatment administered, depending on whether they are Peter Pans (future Hitlers) or Muscle Men (future Stalins...
...On the personal level, the Palanese strive for heightened consciousness in all kinds of experience—sensual, mystical, aesthetic, and intellectual...
...Having portrayed the insipid horrors of an insane Utopia enslaved to Science in Brave New World, Aldous Huxley has created, 31 years later, a genuine Utopia in Island...
...What other current writer would dare as much...
...Won over by these splendid people and freed from his psychological burdens, Farnaby renounces his role in the conspiracy to betray Pala...
...The managers of Brave Nexv World genetically designed their subjects to fit their machines and trained them to love their servitude...
...Pala's decentralized, stable social institutions also deflect hard-driving extraverts from their naturally domineering ambitions...
...Throughout most of the book, the decadent Farnaby, who personifies the spiritual afflictions of the West, acts as a straight man for the happy, rational, healthy Palanese...
...He is not content to illuminate the details in a few dark caverns...
...From the dialogues between Farnaby and his hosts, we learn how to build Utopia...
...the penitent, admiring Farnaby acts too much like Gulliver among the Houyhnhnms...
...Creating Utopias is no easy task, and Huxley's Pala is a tremendous improvement on the totalitarian community of Plato's Republic or the dismal society of Swift's passionless Houyhnhnms...
...Will Farnaby, a British journalist employed for his talents at intrigue by a power-hungry oilman, is shipwrecked in Pala, whose oil reserves have attracted the covetous eyes of the outside world...
...The young raja, a neurotic delinquent ruined by his puritanical mother and his Western upbringing, only hastens the inevitable by selling out to a neighboring dictator...
...A man of immense learning, Aldous Huxley springs from the vanishing tradition of writers like Shaw and Wells...
...Through yoga techniques, they raise the act of making love, and even the act of dying, to the level of high art...
...Its mood is sometimes saturnine...
...But the tiny paradise, leading a precarious existence in the ocean of greed, power, envy, and stupidity surrounding it, is doomed anyhow...
...it lacks the wit and irony that makes Butler's Erewhon such delightful reading...
...the people of Pala, an island paradise in the South Pacific, keep Science under control...
...But despite these literary failings, Island deserves a wide audience for its thoroughgoing diagnosis of our civilization's sickness and its prescription for survival and freedom...
...As literature this book has defects...
...hard physical labor and mountain climbing generally tame the Muscle Men...
...He learns that their Utopia was founded in the mid-Nineteenth Century, when a Scotch doctor moved in to become the ruling raja's personal physician...
...Education entails training in "receptivity" to complement intellectual instruction...
...The Palanese are a little too perfect, smug, and self-assured to be lovable...
...he tries to light up the whole landscape...
...These two—the Western humanist and the Mahayana Buddhist— built the ideal society, isolating it from the demoralizing influence of Western missionaries and traders...
...Biochemistry straightens out the Peter Pans...
...Blending Eastern spiritual insights with Western science and technology, the Palanese create a society in which progress means advancement in human fulfillment and happiness rather than accumulation of wealth, power, and gadgets...
Vol. 26 • July 1962 • No. 7
