Demolishing Humanity through Pleasure and Pain: Reading Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984 Side by Side

Reimundus Raymond Fatubun(1*),

(1) Universitas Cenderawasih
(*) Corresponding Author

Abstract


Oligarchical collectivism that supports totalitarianism silences freedom of speech, privacy, assembly, etc. both personal and communal through horrific pain or plentiful pleasure.  Authors write literary works to remind readers of this situation through novels, poems, plays, political essays, and or satire. In today's life, it seems these two ways of totalitarianism are being practiced in life singly or combined in different parts of the world. This can be seen in a number of countries where the government does this both in disguise and addressed to a certain group of members of society such as in Nigeria and in real terms such as in Nicaragua. This is also done in total for a country such as Ukraine by Russia. Two of those great anti-utopia literary works are novels that raise the issue of restrained freedom of life in Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's 1984. These two anti-utopian novels raise the issue of the freedom of life that is confined but in different ways. Using Marxist psychoanalytic criticism, this paper discusses this issue seen in both novels by the two authors.  The focus is on how both authors show totalitarianism being practiced both personally, and in the society found in these novels – how they are treated to follow rules that confine personal and societal freedom in totalitarianism.


Keywords


Brave New World; humanity; pain; pleasure;1984

Full Text:

PDF

References


A, Albloly & D, Nour. (2019). The Political Symbolism in George Orwell Writings: With Reference to “Animal Farm” and “Nineteen Eighty-Four”. The International Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities Invention, 6(9), pp. 5642-5648. DOI: 10.18535/ijsshi/v6i9.03.

Antonijevic, Pavle. (2021). Analiza Orvelovih Pogleda na Ideje Socijalizma u životinjskoj Farmi i 1984. Lipar, 22(74), pp. 67-85. DOI: 10.46793/lipar74.067a.

Atwood, Margaret. (1985). The Handmaid's Tale. San Diego: Harcourt.

Barry, Peter. (1995). Beginning Theory. New York: St. Martin’s Press, Inc.

Bradbury, Ray. (1953). Fahrenheit 451. New York: Ballatine Books.

Darwin, Charles. (1860). On the Origin of Species. (Fifth Thousand [2nd] ed.). London: John Murray.

Diken, Bülent. (2011). Huxley's Brave new world - and ours. Journal for Cultural Research,15(2), pp. 153-172. DOI: 10.1080/14797585.2011.574056.

Fatubun, Reimundus Raymond. (2022). Humans and Humanity at a Crossroads, Reading Huxley’s Brave New World in Light of Harari’s Homo Deus: a Brief History of Tomorrow. Linguistics and Culture Review, 6(1),pp. 110-126. DOI: 10.21744/lingcure.v6n1.1999.

Fatubun, Reimundus Raymond. (2022). The Contemporary Significance of Orwell’s Animal Farm in Indonesia’s Contemporary Political Situation. International Journal of Special Education, 37(3), pp. 3041-3055.

G, Diglin. (2014). Living the Orwellian nightmare: New media and digital dystopia. E-Learning and Digital Media, 11(6), pp. 608-618. DOI: 10.2304/elea.2014.11.6.608.

Harari, Yuval Noah. (2015). Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. London: Harvill Secker.

Holstein, Michael E. (1987). Beginning Literary Criticism. Florida: Robert E. Kreiger Publishing Company.

Huxley, Aldous. (1932). Brave New World. London: Chatto and Windus.

J, Rodden. (2020). The Orwellian “Amerika” of Donald J. Trump? Society, 57, pp. 260–264 DOI: 10.1007/s12115-020-00476-5.

J, Todd. (2019). A Utopian Mirror: Reflections from the Future of Childhood and Education in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Island. Springer, pp. 135-153. DOI: 10.1007/978-981-13-6210-1_8.

Law, Stephen. (2013). The Great Philosophers. London: Quercus

Linett, Maren. (2019). “No Country for Old Men”: Huxley’s Brave New World and the Value of Old Age. Journal of Medical Humanities, 40(3). DOI: 10.1007/s10912-017-9469-x.

M, Al-Subaihi; H, Ismail. (2020). Orwell’S 1984 and the concept of Powerlessness. International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences, 5(1), pp. 289-297. DOI: 10.22161/ijels.51.48.

Merriam Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature. (1995). Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, Incoporated.

Miles, Matthew B; Huberman, A. Michael.

(1994). Qualitative data analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Miles, Matthew B; Huberman, A. Michael, & Saldana, Johnny. (2014). Qualitative Data

Analysis. London: SAGE Publications, Inc.

Morner, Kathleen and Rausch, Ralph. (1991). NTC’s Dictionary of Literary Terms. Lincolnwood: National Textbook Company.

Orwel, George. (1949). 1984. London: Harvill Secker.

P, Zimbardo. (2019). How Orwell's 1984 Has Influenced Rev. Jim Jones to Dominate and Then Destroy His Followers: With Extensions to Current Political Leaders. Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, 26(1), pp. 4–8. Doi.org/10.1037/pac0000428.

Rowsell, Jennifer; Morrell, Ernest; E. Alvermann, Donna. (2017). Confronting the Digital Divide: Debunking Brave New World Discourses. Reading Teacher, 71(2), pp. 157- 165. DOI: 10.1002/trtr.1603.

Selden, Raman. (1985). A Reader Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory. Lancaster: Harvester Press.

Shadurski, Maxim. (2021). From science to literature: The limits of aldous huxley’s interdiscursive utopia. World Literature Studies, 13(4), pp. 83-93. DOI: 10.31577/WLS.2021.13.4.7.

Wilczynnski, Josef. 1984. An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Marxism, Socialism, Communism. London: The Macmillan Press Ltd.

Zamyatin, Yevgeny. (1924). We. New York: E. P. Dutton.

Websites

https://orwell.fandom.com/wiki/Emmanuel_Goldstein

Retrieved 9 October 2022.

https://www.ipl.org/essay/Joseph-Stalin-In-George-Orwells-1984-

Retrieved 9 October 2022.

https://www.bing.com/search?q=is+big+brother+in+Orwell%27s+1984

Retrieved 9 October 2022.

Sanchez, Anna. https://sites.google.com/site/annasanchezallusion/a-brave-new-world

Retrieved 9 October 2022.

https://www.liquisearch.com/emmanuel_goldstein/leon_trotsky

Retrieved 9 October 2022.

https://www.coursehero.com/lit/Brave-New-World/the-historical-significance

Retrieved 9 October 2022.

https://sites.google.com/site/annasanchezallusion/a-brave-new-world

Retrieved 9 October 2022.




DOI: https://doi.org/10.24071/joll.v23i1.5335

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Journal of Language and Literature (JOLL) is published by  Prodi Sastra Inggris, Fakultas Sastra, Universitas Sanata Dharma.

JOLL is indexed in:

       


This journal is is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License 

View My Stats