Martin Amis’s 2010 novel The Pregnant Widow is about the sexual revolution of the late 1960s, which he compares to a poetic turn of the late 1660s:
In the seventeenth century, it is said, there was a dissociation of sensibility. The poets could no longer think and feel at the same time. Shakespeare could do it, the Metaphysicals could do it; they could write brainily about feeling and sex. But it went. The poets could no longer naturally think and feel at the same time.
All we are saying is that something analogous happened while the children of the Golden Age were becoming men and women. Feeling was already separated from thought. And then feeling was separated from sex.1
The main character is Keith,
And he didn’t always see things clearly. He got it completely wrong, for instance, about what everyone was calling free love – as a succession of horrified hippies could quietly attest. He thought it meant what it said; but it wasn’t love that was on offer[.]2
It was sex. So love was dissociated from sex, hence the inclusion in the novel of the (in my opinion never very funny) real-life Amis et al. game of taking titles and replacing ‘love’ with ‘hysterical sex’, which Christopher Hitchens also describes in Hitch-22, published in the same year: ‘“Hysterical Sex Is a Many-Splendored Thing,” […] “Hysterical Sex in a Cold Climate,” […] “Free Hysterical Sex,”’ etc.3 The well-known etymology of ‘hysterical’ (from ancient Greek, ‘suffering in the womb’), would not be worth mentioning except that sex in turn, the novel says, was dissociated from reproduction. Gloria Beautyman, with whom Keith becomes obsessed, ‘went at it as if the sexual act, in all human history, had never even been suspected of leading to childbirth’.4 Sex – ‘Normal reproductive intercourse’5 – was cut off from those things between which it had previously been sandwiched, love and children.
One of Amis’s epigraphs, and his title, is from the Russian writer Alexander Herzen:
The death of the contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul. Yet what is frightening is that the departing world leaves behind it not an heir, but a pregnant widow. Between the death of the one and the birth of the other, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass.
The more well-known formulation is Gramsci’s: ‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’ The point is that Keith and Gloria experienced the sexual revolution when it had ‘diffused its seminal energies in expansion, without pausing to secure its base’.6
So, was the sexual revolution a good thing? The problem with this question is that to answer it one would have to say whether the widow is still pregnantly interregnal – overdue, perhaps – or that the new world has been ‘born’ and can be critiqued, just like the old was. In 2010 Amis seems to have been saying that the revolution, which after all he called a ‘Golden Age’ and Wikipedia states is also known as the ‘sexual liberation’, was in principle a good thing but wasn’t done right or hadn’t finished; through, for example, a character called Silvia: ‘In her view, the first and possibly the only clause in the manifesto should have read as follows […] Fifty-fifty. All the boring shite with the house and the kids.’7 One counterview, familiar to denizens of Substackistan, is Louise Perry’s 2022 book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. However, this essay is not primarily concerned with defending or critiquing said revolution, but rather with exploring the connections between it and another area in which we encounter the dissociation of sex and love, even pleasure, and reproduction itself – dystopian fiction. I will argue that in both its Orwellian and Huxleyan forms this feature is not incidental. It might even be defining.
Both Amis and Louise Perry refer to the much-mythologised ‘May Events’ of 1968. In fact, both quote ‘The famous’ – and utopian – ‘slogan of the May 1968 student protests in Paris, “Il est interdit d’interdire!” (It is forbidden to forbid)’, Perry noting that its sentiment ‘has become remarkably mainstream in the decades since’.8 If it is forbidden to forbid sex, then there can be no prerequisites. But 1968 was also the year in which another and opposite slogan of sorts came in: The future is dystopian. Until then, the adjective had been applied to works of fiction, such as Nineteen Eighty-Four, but the 11 July issue of New Scientist contains a sentiment which has also become remarkably mainstream in the decades since: ‘It is […] pleasant […] to read some hope for our future, although […] I fear that our real future is more likely to be dystopian.’
To summarise, there was a revolution in the main thing we do (sex), which dissociated it from the highest value in which we believe (love); and, at the very same time, the idea of dystopia, a defining feature of which is precisely this dissociation, jumped the fiction–reality barrier. When any two things are dissociated a unity becomes a dualism, and I believe there is a relationship, as explored by Orwell and the rest, between this and dystopia, ‘A society (or state of society) in which conditions are extremely bad’.9
First, the Orwellian school, Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Handmaid’s Tale, in which sex is dissociated from love and – as if that weren’t enough – pleasure, so there is not even the consolation of being able to go-at-it the pain away like Gloria Beautyman.
1. The Orwellian School: Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)
Orwell covers most of what needs to be said about sex in the state of Oceania in a single paragraph:
The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and women from forming loyalties which it might not be able to control. Its real, undeclared purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act. Not love so much as eroticism was the enemy, inside marriage as well as outside it. All marriages between Party members had to be approved by a committee appointed for the purpose, and – though the principle was never clearly stated – permission was always refused if the couple concerned gave the impression of being physically attracted to one another. The only recognised purpose of marriage was to beget children for the service of the Party. Sexual intercourse was to be looked on as a slightly disgusting minor operation, like having an enema. This again was never put into plain words, but in an indirect way it was rubbed into every Party member from childhood onwards. There were even organisations such as the Junior Anti-Sex League which advocated complete celibacy for both sexes. All children were to be begotten by artificial insemination (artsem, it was called in Newspeak) and brought up in public institutions.10
A certain amount of passion is channelled into the Two Minutes Hate – ‘it was impossible to avoid joining in’11 – and for the Proles there are the productions of Pornosec. But Winston Smith finds his accomplice, his fellow rebel for the cause of sex, in Julia, who hides in plain sight as a fanatical puritan:
She was a bold-looking girl, of about twenty-seven, with thick dark hair, a freckled face and swift, athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her hips. Winston had disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was because of the atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes and general clean-mindedness which she managed to carry about with her. He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy. But this particular girl gave him the impression of being more dangerous than most. Once when they passed in the corridor she had given him a quick sidelong glance which seemed to pierce right into him and for a moment had filled him with black terror.12
Eye contact is central in Nineteen Eighty-Four and here establishes, electrically, that Julia is dangerous, because, whatever the Party’s wishes, her suppression of the erotic is highly erotic (rather like Gloria’s incredibly modest swimsuits in The Pregnant Widow). It is not long before she sends Winston the note that initiates their affair. ‘I love you’, it says.13 But I’m not sure this bleak novel contains anything recognisable as love not connected to submission and power – recall the way its famous final sentence crowns the victory, won by fear, of the Ministry of Love.14 No, what Julia loves is sex. Adores it, in fact, as she tells Winston during their tryst in the country, and has done it with scores of Party members. It is this, her body count, that does most to turn Winston on, and in some ways the sex scene that follows is a sort of premonition of the sexual revolution and the idea of the personal as political:
‘Listen. The more men you’ve had, the more I love you. […] I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don’t want any virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones. […] You like doing this? I don’t mean simply me: I mean the thing in itself?’
‘I adore it.’
That was above all what he wanted to hear. Not merely the love of one person, but the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire: that was the force that would tear the Party to pieces. […] In the old days, he thought, a man looked at a girl’s body and saw that it was desirable, and that was the end of the story. But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.15
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopia in the Orwellian mode, but takes one idea – ‘The only recognised purpose of marriage was to beget children for the service of the Party’ – and makes it central. Because of a fertility crisis, the only recognised purpose of the entire state – the Republic of Gilead – is to beget children, hence the protagonist Offred’s role as Handmaid, which she glosses with the synecdoche, ‘We are two-legged wombs’.16
Perhaps because it is widely read in schools, there is a desire that the Tale be a highly relevant commentary on our own times, explaining developments such as the repeal of Roe v. Wade.17 Leaving aside how Yankified this is, the modern West is the product of the sexual revolution, not the Gileadean! I highly recommend an interview Atwood gave to Studs Terkel in 1986, in which she discusses her inspirations at length:
So women’s place is in the home in this regime. No exceptions. You can’t even have women on television saying women’s place is in the home. They’re not allowed publicly in any way, and that’s, by the way, much the way it is in a country like Iran these days.
One thing the world of The Handmaid’s Tale undoubtedly has in common with ours of unforbidden free-market sexuality is what I am arguing characterises dystopian fiction as such, namely the dissociation of sex and love. As with Orwell’s Two Minutes Hate, citizens of Gilead are required to join in with certain communal set pieces, and, like Winston, Offred finds it impossible not to join in with the ‘bloodlust’.18 But, meanwhile, sex takes a prescribed form intended to make lust impossible. Even if you haven’t read the Tale, you might have heard of the ‘Ceremony’, a ménage à trois of sorts involving Offred, the Commander, and his infertile wife, the third wheel whom Offred, with cruel irony, calls Serena Joy:
I lie on my back, fully clothed except for the healthy white cotton underdrawers. What I could see, if I were to open my eyes, would be the large white canopy of Serena Joy’s outsized colonial-style four-poster bed, suspended like a sagging cloud above us, a cloud sprigged with tiny drops of silver rain, which, if you looked at them closely, would turn out to be four-petalled flowers. […] Above me, towards the head of the bed, Serena Joy is arranged, outspread. Her legs are apart, I lie between them, my head on her stomach, her pubic bone under the base of my skull, her thighs on either side of me. She too is fully clothed.
My arms are raised; she holds my hands, each of mine in each of hers. This is supposed to signify that we are one flesh, one being. What it really means is that she is in control, of the process and thus of the product. If any. The rings of her left hand cut into my fingers. It may or may not be revenge.
My red skirt is hitched up to my waist, though no higher. Below it the Commander is fucking. What he is fucking is the lower part of my body. I do not say making love, because this is not what he’s doing. Copulating too would be inaccurate, because it would imply two people and only one is involved. Nor does rape cover it: nothing is going on here that I haven’t signed up for. There wasn’t a lot of choice but there was some, and this is what I chose.
Therefore I lie still and picture the unseen canopy over my head. I remember Queen Victoria’s advice to her daughter. Close your eyes and think of England.19
Interesting here, the emphasis on Offred’s closed eyes, because, as in Nineteen Eighty-Four, eye contact in the Tale is the route to eroticism. The regime knows that love, as Shakespeare says in The Merchant of Venice, ‘is engendered in the eyes, [and] / With gazing fed’ (III. ii. 69–70), so it forbids Handmaids from making eye contact with men in the outside world – they wear ‘wings’, a wrap-around bonnet ‘to keep us from seeing, but also from being seen’.20 However, the danger created by this prohibition is the grit that makes the pearl. In Chapter 4, Offred and another Handmaid are stopped to have their passes checked by a couple of the policemen known as Guardians:
In returning my pass, the one with the peach-coloured moustache bends his head to try to get a look at my face. I raise my head a little, to help him, and he sees my eyes and I see his, and he blushes. […] He is the one who turns away.
It’s an event, a small defiance of rule, so small as to be undetectable, but such moments are the rewards I hold out for myself, like the candy I hoarded, as a child, at the back of a drawer. Such moments are possibilities, tiny peepholes.
What if I were to come at night, when he’s on duty alone – though he would never be allowed such solitude – and permit him beyond my white wings? What if I were to peel off my red shroud and show myself to him, to them, by the uncertain light of the lanterns? […] As we walk away I know they’re watching, these two men who aren’t yet permitted to touch women. They touch with their eyes instead and I move my hips a little, feeling the full red skirt sway around me. […] I enjoy the power; power of a dog bone, passive but there. I hope they get hard at the sight of us and have to rub themselves against the painted barriers, surreptitiously.21
If you are wondering why Gilead doesn’t employ ‘artsem’, Atwood addressed this when answering a reader’s question on Twitter in 2018: ‘they are [biblical] literalists and don’t believe in ivf’. In fact, there’s nothing technologically futuristic about the Tale (the ‘Compu-’ coinages are half-hearted). Offred is ‘merely a usable body’, but usable for sexual reproduction, not as the source of some other type of commodity.22 The novel is social fiction, rather than science fiction, one of the things that distinguishes it from the Huxleyan mode of dystopia.
2. The Huxleyan School: Never Let Me Go (2005) and Brave New World (1932)
Whereas in the two Orwellian novels people have sex to reproduce but don’t enjoy it, in the Huxleyan ones they have sex for pleasure but not to reproduce. Huxley said that the theme of his Brave New World is ‘the advancement of science as it affects human individuals’, and I suspect this is why in recent years people have tended to follow Neil Postman in finding it more pertinent to our time than Nineteen Eighty-Four.23 At the ‘end of history’, with the great ideological clash of the twentieth century having fallen away, we’re left with human nature and our ability to invent ways of being that tie it in knots, often in pursuit of being happier or at least more efficient and rational. Brave New World, as Jenny Stringer et al. point out, is as much ‘anti-utopian satire’ as dystopia, ‘originally conceived as a parody of H. G. Wells’s Men like Gods’:
[I]t describes a scientifically determined future where history and the family have been abolished, and Henry Ford is the deity. Reproduction takes place in bottles by ‘Bokanovsky’s Process’ [a kind of cloning]; humans are graded from Alphas to Epsilons, subjected to neo-Pavlovian conditioning, and take their places in a utilitarian World State manipulated by Controllers.24
The World State possesses much better tech than Orwell’s shabby, Sovietised post-war London. It has a ‘Designed by Apple in California’ feel, unlike those telescreens, which one senses might go on the blink any time, if only Winston could tell when.
Brave New World initiated what I am calling the Huxleyan school, but for reasons that I hope will become clear I will start with another example, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, whose characters are part of a utopian experiment of sorts and whose end-of-history setting is ‘England, late 1990s’.
The narrator is Kathy H., and she and her friends are infertile clones, bred in order to be organ ‘donors’ (they don’t actually have a choice). They are, as it were, the Epsilons of their society, though just as human – all too human – as non-clones. From the time they are in their twenties, they can expect a series of operations to harvest their organs, which weakens and eventually kills them. This is known as ‘completing’, and usually occurs by the time they are in their early thirties. Their short lives comprise two halves, one relatively innocent and one involving sex, but having in common the attempt to prove a personhood that might permit the avoidance of their fate.
Most clones grow up in ‘deplorable conditions’, but as children Kathy and her friend-cum-soulmate Tommy attend Hailsham, a progressive boarding school and, as such, utopian enclave within the broader dystopian reality.25 Describing the school, Kathy naively capitalises phrases like ‘Art Room’ and ‘North Playing Field’, over-reifying the ways of the institution, as elite schools tend to, and contributing to its mystique as microcosm.26 What makes Hailsham unusual is that it gives the clones a humane education, as one of the teachers, Miss Emily, later explains, after the school has been shut down:
You see, we were able to give you something, something which even now no one will ever take from you, and we were able to do that principally by sheltering you. Hailsham would not have been Hailsham if we hadn’t. Very well, sometimes that meant we kept things from you, lied to you. Yes, in many ways we fooled you. I suppose you could even call it that. But we sheltered you during those years, and we gave you your childhoods.27
This is an example of Ishiguro’s subtle art – you might spot others in what follows. He describes the way things are in his dystopian fiction, and then you re-read it and he’s just describing life.
The Hailsham approach is typified by the way the students are encouraged to create art for a mysterious ‘Gallery’. Miss Emily again:
We selected the best of it and put on special exhibitions. In the late seventies, at the height of our influence, we were organising large events all around the country. There’d be cabinet ministers, bishops, all sorts of famous people coming to attend. There were speeches, large funds pledged. “There, look!” we could say. “Look at this art! How dare you claim these children are anything less than fully human?”28
Through Tommy’s wishful thinking – he and Kathy would love each other forever, if only they could – the Gallery gets mixed up with a myth about so-called ‘deferrals’, whereby Hailsham students could get their first donation delayed so long as they ‘qualified’. While at the ‘Cottages’ – the converted farm they’re moved to, aged sixteen – Tommy convinces himself and Kathy that to qualify for deferral clones have to be in love, and that the art was intended to test this. Miss Emily, he claims, at a certain point let it slip:
She told Roy that things like pictures, poetry, all that kind of stuff, she said they revealed what you were like inside. She said they revealed your soul.’ […]
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘I remember. So what are you getting at?’
‘What I think,’ said Tommy slowly, ‘is this. Suppose it’s true, what the veterans are saying. Suppose some special arrangement has been made for Hailsham students. Suppose two people say they’re truly in love, and they want extra time to be together. Then you see, Kath, there has to be a way to judge if they’re really telling the truth. That they aren’t just saying they’re in love, just to defer their donations. You see how difficult it could be to decide? Or a couple might really believe they’re in love, but it’s just a sex thing. Or just a crush. You see what I mean, Kath? It’ll be really hard to judge, and it’s probably impossible to get it right every time. But the point is, whoever decides, Madame or whoever it is, they need something to go on.’29
Being ‘in love’ is dissociated from sex, and in a way that resembles the sexual revolution more closely than the Orwellian scenario, reducing the latter to ‘just a sex thing’ – ‘the old in-out in-out’, to quote A Clockwork Orange, another superb dystopian novel. I said above that the clones experience a period of innocence at Hailsham, but it’s a short one, because sex education begins when they are thirteen; and, because they’re infertile – ‘we couldn’t have babies’30 – they are encouraged to treat it casually. By the time they are sixteen, Kathy says, ‘sex had got like “being creative” had been a few years earlier. It felt like if you hadn’t done it yet, you ought to, and quickly.’31 Miss Emily injects a bit of Louise Perry into the sex lectures, warning the students that ‘sex affects emotions in ways you’d never expect’,32 and so this awareness of there being a relationship between feeling and sex exists alongside a post-sexual revolution casualness:
I started to think I wouldn’t mind having sex with a boy. Not just to see what it was like, but also because it occurred to me I needed to get familiar with sex, and it would be just as well to practise first with a boy I didn’t care about too much. Then later on, if I was with someone special, I’d have more chance of doing everything right.33
Someone special with whom she was ‘truly in love’. Later, she and Tommy do start having sex, in case ‘we did find ourselves going for a deferral’.34 But of course true love is not dissociated from sex – it is its context – and so Kathy and Tommy are never able to graduate from a fairly naive idea of what love is: ‘if you were a boy and a girl, and you were in love with each other, really, properly in love, and if you could show it, then the people who run Hailsham, they sorted it out for you.’35
To make art, to be in love – these define the purview of human being, which in Christian and broadly deontological ethics it is forbidden to use as the means to an end. But as with all dystopias, the world of Never Let Me Go operates on the split-and-save ethic of utilitarianism. The clones are infertile. Sex is consequence-free, can be had for pleasure alone where no love is, and therefore cannot prove the clones’ humanity, even if their lives are at stake. Sex is dissociated from love and not therefore evidence of it. How would you plead personhood if love were inadmissible? This is the clones’ Kafkan kismet. And, in any case, deferrals aren’t actually a thing, which eventually Kathy and Tommy are forced to realise, hence what Mark Currie refers to as ‘the novel’s dark, even despairing, moral tone’.36 From a semi-utopian boarding school, to free sex, to despair. As Kathy says in Chapter 16, something of a turning point, ‘I remember a huge tiredness coming over me, a kind of lethargy in the face of the tangled mess before me.’37 Again, is this simply Ishiguro describing the burden of ensouledness?
Love is the desire to say ‘Never let me go and I’ll never let you go’, and the novel is about the conquering by death of that eponymous sentiment. Madame, who founded Hailsham with Miss Emily, knows this when she happens to see the young Kathy holding an imaginary baby to her breast and swaying along to a song with the refrain ‘Oh baby, baby, never let me go’:
She was out in the corridor, standing very still, her head angled to one side to give her a view of what I was doing inside. And the odd thing was she was crying. It might even have been one of her sobs that had come through the song to jerk me out of my dream.
When I think about this now, it seems to me, even if she wasn’t a guardian, she was the adult, and she should have said or done something, even if it was just to tell me off. Then I’d have known how to behave. But she just went on standing out there, sobbing and sobbing[.]38
Years later, when Tommy is nearing completion and Kathy is his carer, he says to her,
I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it’s just too much. The current’s too strong. They’ve got to let go, drift apart.39
We want to believe, to quote Philip Larkin, that ‘What will survive of us is love’, but this appears to be difficult when it is dissociated from the subject of his other most famous poem. Martin Amis opens The Pregnant Widow like this:
Sexual intercourse began In 1963 (Which was rather late for me) – Between the end of the Chatterley ban And the Beatles’ first LP.Philip Larkin, ‘Annus Mirabilis’ (formerly ‘History’), Cover Magazine, February 1968
But now it was the summer of 1970, and sexual intercourse was well advanced.40
The final dystopian novel I will discuss was written the longest ago, and yet is the most far-sighted about the advances of sexual intercourse, which – in Brave New World – was ‘invented’ not in 1963 but in the year of our Ford 150, c. 2058 in old money.
I’ve saved Brave New World to the end because in many ways it is the most futuristic and conceptually cleanest of the dystopias. The state is not one among many, like Atwood’s Gilead, because there is a single World State. ‘Artsem’ is not an aspiration, like in Nineteen Eighty-Four, but the only method of reproduction, full stop. Not that we necessarily want to hand it to Huxley, who, unlike Orwell, was with the intellectuals rather than the masses, and has more than a smack of Bloomsbury, but to have written Brave New World in 1931 is remarkable. In 2007 Atwood herself wrote a new introduction, calling it
either a perfect-world utopia or its nasty opposite, a dystopia, depending on your point of view: its inhabitants are beautiful, secure, and free from diseases and worries, though in a way we like to think we would find unacceptable.41
Given that the sexual revolution was utopian, it makes sense that the aptest critique of it be anti-utopian. One of Huxley’s points, Atwood goes on to say, is that ‘in a world in which everything is available, nothing has any meaning.’42 Self-professed Romantic Harold Bloom agrees with this, calling the novel ‘a vision of […] a world without authentic belief and spiritual values.’43
In The Handmaid’s Tale the authoritarian Aunt Lydia makes reference to Isaiah Berlin’s ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’: ‘There is more than one kind of freedom […] Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it.’44 In the time before Gilead, when Offred was growing up – the time of the sexual revolution – people had freedom to: ‘It is forbidden to forbid’. But Aunt Lydia’s Louise Perry-like point is that women didn’t necessarily have freedom from the risks entailed by a hyper-liberal attitude to sex. The ingenious exaggeration of Huxley’s vision is that citizens of the World State have freedom from risk, hunger, etc., and freedom to do what they like, including sexually, but they have been engineered not to want to engage, or even be capable of engaging, in any problematic activities such as love- and reproduction-associated sex. It is one of Huxley’s strokes of genius to make ‘mother’ the worst profanity – an M-word, if you will. Offred and Winston are oppressed, and feel that they are oppressed. The clones in Never Let Me Go create art that proves their personhood, and yet are denied that personhood. In Brave New World, all this kind of thing has been rationalised away. Making a similar point to Wittgenstein’s that even if a lion could talk we could not understand him, the World Controller explains that even if the people read a Shakespearean tragedy, they could not understand it:
[Y]ou can’t make tragedies without social instability. The world’s stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get. They’re well off; they’re safe; they’re never ill; they’re not afraid of death; they’re blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they’re plagued with no mothers or fathers; they’ve got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they’re so conditioned that they practically can’t help behaving as they ought to behave. And if anything should go wrong, there’s soma [‘a narcotic drug which produces euphoria and hallucination, distributed by the state in order to promote content and social harmony’ (OED)] […] that’s the price we have to pay for stability. You’ve got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We’ve sacrificed the high art. We have the feelies and the scent organ instead.45
A nineteenth-century history of ideas might be seen as a great battle between Romantics and utilitarians, with a figure like J. S. Mill attempting to split the difference – ‘It is better to be […] Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied’ – and George Eliot making humanistic religion out of high art. Huxley, born in 1894, presents us with the categorical victory of the utilitarians: far better to be a fool satisfied than a human being in pursuit of the association of love, sex, pleasure, and reproduction, and therefore perpetually dissatisfied. No ideology, no mess, just pleasure. Epsilons are not tortured by unrequited love or thwarted creativity; they are bred to be incapable of either. Brave New World depicted ‘The Rise of the Meritocracy’ almost thirty years before Michael Young published his book of that name. If I can paraphrase Neil Postman’s famous comparison, what Orwell feared were those who would ban normal reproductive intercourse based on love. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban normal reproductive intercourse based on love, for there would be no one who wanted to engage in it. Which leaves sex undertaken for pleasure only, in the depiction of which Brave New World’s prophetic qualities are ageing like fine soma.
Disturbingly, the World State sexualises children from a much younger age than Hailsham, encouraging them in ‘rudimentary sexual game[s]’.46 Remember that sexual revolution is a many-splendoured thing, encompassing age-of-consent reform as well as Wilhelm Reich’s orgone accumulator. But moving swiftly on, sex in Brave New World is, in a word, to employ an Amisism coined by Keith in The Pregnant Widow, ‘pornoid’.47 ‘Everyone belongs to everyone else’.48 The greatest compliment that can be paid to a woman is to call her ‘pneumatic’, meaning large-bosomed, a humorous sense of the word Huxley must have got from the short story writer O. Henry, or perhaps from T. S. Eliot (‘Uncorseted, her friendly bust / Gives promise of pneumatic bliss’). Keith complains about an earlier girlfriend that she always seemed to have her pants on: ‘I kept telling her, It’s 1968, for Christ’s sake. I kept bending her ear about the sexual revolution.’ But by the time of the novel’s setting sex is well advanced and women wear ‘cool pants’. ‘The cool thing about cool pants is you know they’re coming off.’49 Cool pants or, as Huxley calls them, ‘zippicamiknicks’.50 Sex in the World State is just as Keith says it will be: ‘In the future […] sex will be play […] A play of surfaces and sensations.’51 And, at the heart of Huxley’s pornoid state is the equivalent of Orwell’s Two Minutes Hate, except it is perhaps even more difficult to avoid joining in. I am speaking of the Solidarity Service and its irresistible chant of ‘orgy-porgy’:
Round they went, a circular procession of dancers, each with hands on the hips of the dancer preceding, round and round, shouting in unison, stamping to the rhythm of the music with their feet, beating it, beating it out with hands on the buttocks in front; twelve pairs of hands beating as one; as one, twelve buttocks slabbily resounding. Twelve as one, twelve as one. ‘I hear him, I hear him coming.’ The music quickened; faster beat the feet, faster, faster fell the rhythmic hands. And all at once a great synthetic bass boomed out the words which announced the approaching atonement and final consummation of solidarity […] ‘Orgy-porgy,’ it sang, while the tom-toms continued to beat their feverish tattoo:52
Orgy-porgy, Ford and fun, Kiss the girls and make them One. Boys at one with girls at peace; Orgy-porgy gives release.
All of which is to say that among the four dystopian novels discussed, Huxley gives us the uncanniest premonition of the sexual revolution, forty years before the fact. Not sex qua political act, but sex qua sex, dissociated from love and reproduction, but also lacking, at least in Brave New World, any hint of eroticism. This is certainly the case in the pilot episode (as far as I got) of the porny 2020 TV adaptation – being kind, the orgy scene might have been cleverly intentionally unerotic. The erotic being inversely proportional to an emphasis on pleasure alone – I’m not sure this even is a paradox. In his wonderful memoir I Put a Spell on You John Burnside associates the erotic with peril.53 Perhaps the erotic even requires an awareness of death, reproduction’s other. In Nineteen Eighty-Four there is a gritty dust in the mechanism of existence; Huxley’s Brave New World is fully-lubed-up luxury communism.
Hobbes famously described the life of man in the state of nature as ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’. We are in no such state, but if we fear that the future is dystopian, it appears we have a choice. Solitary and long are givens, but what else does life have in store? The Orwellian – poor and nasty, but with the consolation of brutish sex – or the Huxleyan: rich, nice, and pornoid.
Premature Ejaculation, or, an Abrupt Conclusion
Amis doesn’t mention him, but the dubious theory of a seventeenth-century dissociation of sensibility belongs to T. S. Eliot (‘Uncorseted, her friendly bust’); dubious partly because of his characteristic blind spot when it comes to Romanticism, which, as Frank Kermode rightly points out, has as one of its ideals the very ‘sensuous apprehension of thought’ that Eliot claims disappeared after Donne.54 Leaving Eliot, what I have tried to argue is that dystopianism is a dualism with a remarkable amount in common with its seeming opposite, the forbidless world of sexual liberation. It seems that whether everything is forbidden or ‘do what thou wilt’ is the whole of the law, love and sex drift apart. Perhaps authoritarianism and hyper-liberalism both preclude anything genuinely voluntary, sex-in-love being paradigmatically that.
The antidote, if there is one, to dualist dystopia has to be a monist utopia. That is, one that does not dissect or dissociate a unity like love and sex, and thereby destine itself to tend towards dystopia. Not Wellsian sci-fi or free love, but the original utopian thinking, good old-fashioned Romanticism, wonderfully evoked by M. H. Abrams:
Prominent in Wordsworth […] is his version of the great commonplace of the age: unity with himself and his world is the primal and normative state of man, of which the sign is a fullness of shared life and the condition of joy; analytic thought divides the mind from nature and object from object, and this division, if absolute, kills the object it severs and threatens with spiritual death the mind from which it has been severed.55
Wordsworth’s masterwork ‘The Recluse’ ‘was […] to have been no less than the catalyst for the regaining of paradise.’56
Romantics may be solitary, but they can at least imagine sex-in-love, relationship, and wholeness. We are all internalised, but some of us are looking at the quest-romance.
Martin Amis, The Pregnant Widow (London: Jonathan Cape, 2010), p. 309.
Amis, pp. 25–26.
Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir (London: Atlantic, 2010), p. 265.
Amis, p. 379.
Amis, p. 444.
Amis p. 232.
Amis, p. 232.
Louis Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution (Cambridge: Polity, 2022), p. 47; Amis, p. 16. This point has been made by Roger Scruton: ‘In this postmodern world there is no such thing as adverse judgement – unless it be judgement of the adverse judge’ (Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left [London: Bloomsbury, 2015], p. 237).
OED.
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Penguin, 2013), pp. 75–76.
Orwell, p. 17.
Orwell, pp. 12–13.
Orwell, p. 124.
I do not think this is the case, for example, in Gary Shteyngart’s 2010 dystopian novel Super Sad True Love Story. I liked the book a lot but did not find the ‘dystopian’ element so chilling, because the beleaguered protagonists do actually love each other.
Orwell, pp. 144–45.
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (London: Vintage, 1996), p. 142.
P. D. James’s The Children of Men (1992), set in ‘the multiracial boarding house we call Britain’, is closer to the mark.
Atwood, p. 287.
Atwood, pp. 100–101.
Atwood, p. 14.
Atwood, pp. 27–28.
Atwood, p. 168.
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (London: Vintage, 2007), p. xliv.
Jenny Stringer, ed., The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature in English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 86.
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (London: Faber, 2005), p. 255.
Ishiguro, pp. 5, 7.
Ishiguro, pp. 262–63.
Ishiguro, p. 256.
Ishiguro, p. 173.
Ishiguro, p. 94.
Ishiguro, pp. 95–96.
Ishiguro, p. 82.
Ishiguro, p. 96.
Ishiguro, p. 234.
Ishiguro, p. 151.
Mark Currie, ‘Controlling Time: Never Let Me Go’, in Kazuo Ishiguro: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, ed. by Sean Matthews and Sebastian Groes (London: Continuum, 2009), p. 91.
Ishiguro, p. 193.
Ishiguro, p. 71.
Ishiguro, p. 277.
Amis, p. 7.
Huxley, pp. ix–x.
Huxley, p. xiv.
Harold Bloom, ed., Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (Broomall, PA: Chelsea House, 2004), p. 8.
Atwood, p. 30.
Huxley, pp. 193–94.
Huxley, p. 26.
Amis, p. 310.
Huxley, p. 40.
Amis, p. 137.
Huxley, p. 124.
Amis, p. 340.
Huxley, pp. 72–73.
John Burnside, I Put a Spell on You (London: Vintage, 2015), p. 25.
Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (London: Routledge, 1957), p. 165.
M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), p. 278.
Duncan Wu, Wordsworth: An Inner Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), p. 110.
Just read the essay. I will have to think about some of the implications. Thank you for writing this.