Island: Aldous Huxley's 1962 Utopian Novel Island and Its Literary and Social Significance in Postwar American Society a Thesi
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ISLAND: ALDOUS HUXLEY’S 1962 UTOPIAN NOVEL ISLAND AND ITS LITERARY AND SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE IN POSTWAR AMERICAN SOCIETY A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY AT HAWAIʻI AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS IN AMERICAN STUDIES MAY 2020 By Kevin Martin Thesis Committee: Robert Perkinson, Chairperson Todd H. Sammons William Chapman Keywords: Aldous Huxley, Island, Postwar Literature DEDICATION To Susila MacPhail, Thank you for your kind words to Mr. Farnaby. Had it not been for your words, I might not have ever understood that the ultimate life pursuit is, “To achieve WIDER sympathies and DEEPER understandings.” And these understandings and sympathies are for everyone. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I want to thank Robert Perkinson, David Stannard, and Bill Chapman for helping me gain admission into the University of Hawaiʻi American Studies Masters of Arts program. If not for them, I have no idea where I would be right now or what I would be doing. I would also like to express my gratitude for Karen Kosasa and Brandy McDougall for challenging me academically and opening my eyes up to literature, ideas, and practices I would not have found otherwise. I would also like to sincerely thank Todd Sammons for supporting me during this thesis process and becoming a member of my committee. He is the only professor I know who understands my obsession for Island – without him, I would have been lost and hopeless. Most importantly, I would like to thank Rumi Yoshida for always being so helpful, kind, and charismatic. Years from now, I will look back on my experience as a student at the University of Hawaiʻi as the time when I learned a great deal about the world, but most importantly when I learned to love myself. 2 ABSTRACT In 1962, Aldous Huxley, one of the greatest authors of the 20th century, published a utopian novel titled Island. During his career, Huxley wrote eleven novels; Island was his final novel and the most important to Huxley personally. Island was not Huxley’s most famous or acclaimed book, but he and many others considered Island to be his most influential and far-reaching. Huxley spent his life traveling, studying the world, and looking for solutions that would liberate individuals from the tyranny of authoritarian control, discourage mass militarization, and halt the innovation of predatory technological developments. The intersectional of control, militarization, and industrialism left Huxley and many others disillusioned and pessimistic about the future of humanity. However, after a series of spiritual epiphanies, Huxley began to envision the possibility of the postwar period of 1954-1962 as a time where people could demand change and create a more equitable, inhabitable, and peaceful world instead of succumbing to the blight of modernity. At the time, it was a radical belief that the future of humanity could result in the betterment of the human race, as most of the popular literature of that era focused on destruction, suffering, and chaos. Most importantly, this particular utopian vision was unlike anything previously proposed, as it sought to integrate Eastern mysticism and Western science. This thesis argues that Island exemplifies the most salient social concerns from the postwar 1950s epoch in American society. By the 1950s, a growing resentment towards traditional American values became visible through various social movements such as the Beatnik Movement, the 1960s Anti-war Counterculture Movement, and the Human Potential Movement. I will examine three popular texts – Lord of the Flies by William Golding, On The Road by Jack Kerouac, and Silent Spring by Rachel Carson – to illustrate the difference between Island compared to other books of the time. Each one of those books became popular because they presented a searing critique of authoritarian control, colonial values, and mass industrialization, all of which Huxley provides a solution to in Island. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………………….. ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………………...… PREFACE……………………………………………………………………. 1: IMPORTANT LITERATURE 1954 - 1962……………………………………………………………. LORD OF THE FLIES (1954) BY WILLIAM GOLDING…………………………………………………….……. ON THE ROAD (1957) BY JACK KEROUAC………………………….……. SILENT SPRING (1962) BY RACHEL CARSON………………………………….…... 2. ISLAND – UTOPIA LOST..…….………………………….. PALA...…….………………………….. CHARACTERS………………………………………………………………... IMPORTANT THEMES…………………………………...….…………………… 3. CONCLUSION……………....……………………………………………………… ISLAND AND IT’S RELATIONSHIP TO SOCIAL MOVEMENTS…………………………………………………….…………………….………. BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………… 4 PREFACE During the three years I spent at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa as a graduate student, I was exposed to a variety of great literature. I was lucky enough to have amazing professors who challenged me to read a diverse set of materials that opened my eyes to ideas, experiences, and histories that I would have never found on my own. However, one of the most important books that I read during graduate school did not come from a professor or course syllabus. During my first summer as a graduate student, I was working full time as an intern in a construction engineering role for a general contractor on a project for the US Army in Hawaiʻi. After a long day of work, I decided to stop by my local bookstore in hopes of finding some nice fiction to ease my mind and relax. When I walked into the bookstore, in the center in the main display was a book titled How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence (2018). As soon as I read the title of the book, I knew I had to buy that book and read it as fast as possible. For many years, I had been struggling with debilitating Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), anxiety, and depression. At a young age, I had experienced a series of difficult events within my own family and community; and, like many other disenfranchised young men, I enlisted in the US Army as a Cavalry Scout. Fifteen months later, I arrived in Afghanistan on May 2, 2011 – the day Osama Bin Laden was killed. May marked the start of the fighting season, and the death of Osama Bin Laden only energized and emboldened Taliban fighters. Four months into my deployment, I was wounded in combat after my vehicle ran over two Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) in five days. Even so, the worst part of my time in the US Army was not combat or being wounded – it was the corrupt authoritarian control of the US Army. I had numerous abusive supervisors who managed to evade investigation, break the rules as they pleased, and weaponize their authority against anyone who dared to expose their malfeasance. I was fortunate enough to grow up in a town in Connecticut with a great public school system, and that experience told me that my best way out of the Army was through education. Consequently, the first day after I got back to America from Afghanistan, I went down to the education center on base and signed up for college courses. A few months later, after completing enough courses to qualify as a transfer student, I was accepted into Trinity College, a small selective liberal arts school in Connecticut, in 2013. As Trinity College is a selective liberal arts school, it is home to the wealthiest undergraduate population in the country: “In 2013, 26 percent of Trinity’s student body came from families with incomes in the top 1 percent. That was the single highest concentration of ultrarich students to be found at any college” (Tough “Admissions Want”). At the time, I thought that was fantastic – I had gone from the lowest rung on the socioeconomic ladder (The US Army) to the highest (a student at Trinity College). However, after about a year and a half at Trinity College, I began to realize that everything I had thought was true about achieving success in American society – money, power, and prestige – was all a façade. The elite liberal arts college that I had once believed would be a utopia turned out to be just as dystopic as my time in Afghanistan was. The social scene at Trinity College was entirely contingent upon one’s status, wealth, and vain pursuits. I met more people at Trinity College, suffering from extreme mental health problems such as depression, substance abuse, and anxiety than soldiers who had PTSD from war. This disillusionment left me perplexed, and I realized that what was making the students at Trinity College so miserable was the same things 2 they were striving for – status, wealth, and material possession. It became apparent to me that, if achieving financial prosperity was contingent upon mortgaging my sanity, just to improve a corporation’s bottom line, then what was the point in striving to be wealthy? This experience left me disillusioned and hopeless. I knew that as soon as I graduated from Trinity College, I was going to go as far away as possible to figure out the purpose of life. Similar to the protagonist in Island, William Farnaby, I too decided to “intentionally shipwreck” onto a small island in the South Pacific, except mine was named Oʻahu – not Pala. The change of scenery, unique culture, and beautiful landscape did make a difference in me initially; but it was not the change I so desperately needed. Regardless, the spiritual awakening that I needed would not begin until two years after I arrived, was accepted into graduate school, and read Michael Pollan’s book and subsequently Aldous Huxley’s masterpiece Island. There is a specific passage in How to Change Your Mind that reminded me of my favorite class ever – AMST 643 Critical Traditions with David Stannard. Pollan explained how, historically speaking, Timothy Leary is most commonly considered the face of the psychedelic movement. However, Pollan states, “Huxley was inspired to try psychedelics and write about the experience by a scientist who gave him mescaline in the explicit hope that a great writer’s descriptions and metaphors would help him and his colleagues make sense of an experience they were struggling to interpret.