Back to the Classics 2021 #9

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2021.

A classic with an animal in the title. I like reading Aldous Huxley because he’s smart and funny, though Elizabeth Bowen called him "a stupid person's idea of a clever person."  I’ve read not only the dystopia everybody reads Brave New World but also a travel book  Jesting Pilate, a late career novelette  The Genius and the Goddess, the science fiction-like After Many a Summer, and a history The Devils of Loudon. This novel on review here I can’t recommend except to readers really into dystopias. Or Aldous Huxley.

Ape and Essence - Aldous Huxley

Written after WWII, this short novel is dated in its cultural touchstones – everybody has to google Lady Hamilton nowadays - but with our recent rise of fascism and its attendant big lie, it feels disconcertingly current.

Huxley's style begins engagingly satirical, reminiscent of his novels written after the Great War such as Antic Hay, Those Barren Leaves, and Time Must Have a Stop.  Set in Hollywood in 1948, Hollywood writer and director Bob Briggs and the nameless narrator accidentally find the rejected treatment for a film, Ape and Essence, by a misanthrope named William Tallis.

Briggs saves the script from the incinerator and eternal oblivion. Briggs and the narrator go to the address on the treatment to interview William Tallis. They discover from his landlady that he passed away six months before. However, his work survives.

The second part presents the treatment, commented on by the narrator. It describes a dystopia even darker and more scalding than that shown in Brave New World.

In the year 2108, New Zealand and Equatorial Africa survive as the only populated regions after the nuclear exchanges of World War III have devastated the rest of the planet. Due to the mutations induced by radioactivity, natural selection has made it possible for non-human primates to evolve a higher level of consciousness and cognition. Inevitably, they rule over the human race which has been reduced to slavery.

Amidst the ruins of Los Angeles, there is a remnant of a community that the radiation has transformed into mutant akuma (demons, devils) who worship the triumph of Evil. They live in terror of an ongoing purge by the so-called "healthy" which very much recalls the archetype of an Aryan superman. Dissent and individuality are seen as illnesses, with torture as the preferred therapy to treat people who think differently.

With savage clarity, didactic Huxley presents an alarming future - a horrifying vision where the regime's media and educational systems force the population into a cult, convincing them that the current lifestyle the best of all possible worlds. It’s a vision that revolts normal people. It’s a 4chan fevered dream, for stunted chuds who think a real good bead on things is to be had on FB, for yahoo insurrectionists who pant watching Hitler documentaries.