Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1324024
10 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 3 JANUARY 2021 Raphael Vassallo OPINION Cowardly New World I imagine most people will im- mediately recognise the literary allusion in that headline. After all, Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World' – originally published in 1932 – is still regarded as a ma- jor classic of the dystopian gen- re; and I suspect its reputation is set to grow further still, in an age when Genetics – the futuristic technology that informed Hux- ley's darkest and most unsettling predictions – is increasingly be- coming more 'science' than 'fic- tion'… Ah, but how many people would also recognise Huxley's original title as being, in itself, another literary allusion (a quote from Shakespeare's 'The Tem- pest', to be more precise)? OK, the answer to that one is: probably, quite a few. But I have to admit that I wasn't one of them, when I first read that book in… ooh, more years ago than I care to remember. No, the Shakespearean reference went clean over my head: which al- so means that – no matter how much I felt I 'understood' Hux- ley's novel, at the time – a signif- icant chunk of its entire ironic thrust was actually lost on me altogether. To see why, you have to go back to Huxley's original source-ma- terial. The words themselves were uttered by Miranda – a 15-year-old girl who had been raised in exile on a remote is- land, with only her father Pros- pero (and a misshapen monster named Caliban) for company – upon seeing other human beings for the first time. "O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't!" To which the older, wiser Pros- pero (who, unlike his daughter, had past experience of both the wider world, and the people Miranda was actually talking about) ominously replies: ''Tis new to thee…' It is, admittedly, a subtle nu- ance: but an important one nonetheless. In the specific context of Shakespeare's play, the 'new world' that impresses Miranda so much had already been revealed as anything but 'brave': after all, the same people (some of them, anyway) she de- scribes as 'goodly' and 'beaute- ous', were actually the ones who had marooned both her father, and herself, on that tiny island to begin with… By the same token, recognising the literary allusion will also pre- pare the reader for exactly what to expect in 'Brave New World': only in Huxley's vision, it is not just a mistake made by a shel- tered, naïve little girl, who has no real reason to even know any better. No, it is humanity as a whole, that – having placed far too much naïve trust, in a science it understood far too little – ends up sleepwalking its way into such a dark, soulless and posi- tively nightmarish future… Ok, at this point you might be wondering why I'm even writing about two major world literary classics – from the early 17th and 20th centuries, respective- ly – in the first place. And yes, fair enough: this is, effectively, my last column of 2020… so why not do the traditional thing, and take a 'retrospective look at the year that has just ended' (or, even worse, a 'speculative look at the one that has just begun')? Well, part of the answer is that – to be brutally honest – it was bad enough having to actually live through the past 12 months: still less, having to revisit the ex- perience for an article. But another part is that… let me put it this way: one of the things that made 2020 such an awful year to live through (apart from COVID-19, and all the rest of it) was the realisation that hu- manity has, in fact, taken its first somnambulant steps into a dys- topian future this year… even if, at the time of writing, it seems to have more to do with Ray- mond Bradbury's 'Fahrenheit 451', than Huxley's 'Brave New World'. As it happens, the last arti- cle I read in 2020 was about an attempt – all too successful, I fear – to ban yet another literary classic from the school curricu- lum. And this time, the chopper fell on (of all unearthly things) Homer's 'The Odyssey': which was deemed too 'violent' and 'sexist' for young readers today. And granted: so far, this has only happened in one particu- lar school in Massachusetts, USA – and even then, only on the insistence of one particular schoolteacher (who even tweet- ed: "Very proud to say we got the Odyssey removed from the cur- riculum this year!")… …but I draw little consolation from that myself; if nothing else, because the same was once true about other literary classics such as Mark Twain's 'Huckleberry Finn': and – despite being the ar- chetypal 'anti-slavery novel', par excellence – it is now considered 'racist' enough to be banned in schools and universities across America. (As, for that matter, is Harper Lee's 'To Kill A Mock- ingbird': though it was written more than a century later…) Much more seriously, however: this latest act of censorship also seems to form part of a wider, more concerted effort to sup- press all literary works that "do not conform to modern norms of behaviour". As author Megan Cox Gurdon recently put it in the Wall Street Journal: "A sustained effort is under way to deny children ac- cess to literature. Under the slo- gan #DisruptTexts, critical-the- ory ideologues, schoolteachers and Twitter agitators are purg- ing and propagandizing against classic texts—everything from Homer to F. Scott Fitzgerald to Dr. Seuss…" And as elsewhere described: "the proponents [of #Disrupt- Texts] believe that any world literature that does not portray the norms that they hold today in terms of gender roles, vio- lence and racial equality must be banned in the interest of shaping a new generation that will not be allowed to come into contact with concepts that they consider repugnant – or even just outdat- ed…" Applied to Homer's 'The Od- yssey', such 'outdated' norms would include the fact that his long-suffering wife Penelope waited 20 years for her hus- band's return from a war over- seas… which is (let's face it) not exactly a very 'feminist' thing to do, by early 21st century stand- ards. But then again, 'The Odyssey' was not exactly written in a very 'feminist' age, either; and be- sides… last I looked, the whole point of studying ancient classics was not so much to emulate the actions or cultural attitudes that these works portray… but rath- er, to understand that – what- ever we ourselves think of such attitudes, from our comfortable position around 3,000 years lat- er – there once was a time when people did indeed feel (and act) that way; and that, for better or worse… those people were our predecessors, in the long, slow and occasionally painful march towards societal progress. And there is plenty of evidence John Malkovich and Iman in a movie adaptation of Conrad's Heart of Darkness