| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 外國語文學系專班 === 94 === Abstract
Revered as one of the most essential writers in the twenty century, Huxley successfully prophesizes a futuristic dystopia to his readers by his masterpiece, Brave New World, where human beings are dehumanized under a post-capitalized society due to “enlightened” high-technology. Through the lens of the Enlightenment, infallible technology serves as the essential catalyst that triggers the death of day-dreaming utopia and causes the birth of nightmarish dystopia. Man’s hubris to surpass God’s power enables Him to appear “man-forsaken.” Yet, the consequence of man playing God resembles the catastrophe of the Tower of Babel, allegorized in the Bible: man eventually receives a devastating blow from God just before accomplishing his goal. One cannot help asking, “When mankind holds the key to the secret of God’s creation, does it entail that God’s mystery is thus unveiled?” Numerous dystopian critics and novelists have gloomily forecasted the opening of this “Pandora’s box,” only this time, along with all the world’s evils, Hope escapes as well. This thesis aims to explore how the Self, a rendering of the progress-worshipping Enlightenment, represses the voice of the Other, and pushes itself to a genuine dystopia. In this satirical futuristic allegory, the very return of the Other demonstrates that the aggrandized novelty of the Self orients the Fordian Society toward “regression,” instead of toward “mature adulthood.” In other words, these “zombies” are happy in that they do not know and will never know how tragic their lives really are; their biggest sorrow resides in their impossible awareness of this sorrow.
This thesis uses a three-stage deconstructive approach to investigate the complication and subtlety of the dystopian Self-Other relation in Brave New World. Firstly, the Self triumphs to repress the Other. That is, in this section I will discuss the ways how the enlightened Fordian regime reins in its civilians’ hedonism with ubiquitous domination. The New Worldians are convinced that they live in a utopia, an earthly paradise, which mankind has dreamed of inhabiting for centuries. With the perfect help of technology, they assume that they have succeeded in escaping from all others. Secondly, the hierarchy between the Self and the Other will be reversed. The return of the repressed Other, in the form of the Indian Savage Reservation, enters the picture and through one of its members, John, we are able to gain this new perspective on the Fordian society. The dichotomy exposes the false happiness of the Fordian Society, which is sugarcoated by the totalitarian dystopian government. Finally, this binary-opposition relation will be deconstructed. Here, the interdependent relation between the two is elaborated upon, and the affirmative meaning by the challenge of the Other to the Self is demonstrated. With regard to the mysterious element (time), the boundaries between the fixed binary parallels in this book are blurred. This dystopian Self-Other relation issues a warning via the Self’s response to the singular demand of the Other. In a nutshell, the aim of this thesis is to show that what Brave New World offers us is an “affirmative nightmare” which will continue to haunt our logos-oriented progress and civilization in the 21st century.
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