Is John the Savage Jesus?

I just finished Brave New World, and I gotta admit, I didn't think it could give a more cynical view of society, couldn't see how more twisted it could get, but these last couple of chapters totally blew the rest of it out of the water. I was impressed, really impressed, by just how crazy that perfectly content, completely boring society managed to get. John the Savage's ending didn't surprise me a whole lot though, honestly you could kind of see it coming, there was no way he was ever going to be able to escape civilization. I was interested in thinking about what his death might have represented though, especially in the context of the final "orgy-porgy" that took place.

I wouldn't proclaim myself an archetypal critic by any means, but I've studied archetypes in literature a little bit before and I think it's an incredibly interesting concept. Archetypes are basically categories of characters, each of them serve a specific function in the context of the text, and undergo the same sorts of transformations or journeys that have been found in many types of literature across cultures and history. This commonality is often used to make an argument for the existence of a collective unconscious, suggesting that these characters and what they go through represent something fundamental about the human experience, that we have these innate aspirations and history that we are born with, that get projected into the stories we tell. I don't know if I think that's all true necessarily, but I think it can be pretty cool to look for these different archetypes in novels.

So looking back on Brave New World, especially after that final chapter, the first archetype that popped out to me was the sacrificial archetype, which John seemed like he might fit. There are two kinds of sacrificial archetypes, at least that I know of, the sacrificial redeemer, and the scapegoat. The sacrificial redeemer comes bearing some knowledge, with the intention of enlightening a society (or even just a group of characters) with this knowledge, but in order to truly redeem the society, must die (or sacrifice something else major besides life) for their beliefs. This figure is similar to Jesus in the biblical story. The scapegoat, however, is a character that gets singled out and blamed for something negative about society, often unjustly, and is eventually killed to remove this negative aspect of society.

Here's an artistic representation of John on the mesa that
I really liked: "John ''The Savage'" by Rachel Davey

From when we first meet John, the things we find out about him and the way he is described make him out to maybe be a prophetic character of sorts. He describes the realization he had when he spent the night alone on the mesa, thinking about how easy it would be for him to kill himself but deciding not to: "He had discovered Time and Death and God" (Huxley 127). When John travels to London, his intention isn't necessarily to "save" them - at first he's excited to see this "brave new world" with people as perfectly beautiful as Lenina in it. After Lenina throws herself sexually at John, and after the children at the Hospital for the Dying show such disrespect (as John sees it) when Linda dies, the evils of the civilized world become increasingly unacceptable to him. It is finally at the soma distribution scene that we first see John become motivated to try to make a change in the society: "Linda had died; others should live in freedom and the world be made beautiful. A reparation, a duty. And suddenly it was luminously clear to the Savage what he must do..." (191). John tries, though in vain, to reveal to the masses how enslaved they are to soma, how it is being used to control their lives, but their conditioning is so deeply ingrained that John has catastrophic results with "those he had come to save" (192).

John still holds fast to his view of morality however, and we see this put to the test in his discussion about God with Mustapha Mond. While Mond is arguing the necessity of sacrificing the individual for the sake of society, of the need to abolish strong emotions to endue stability, John sticks to his justification of his beliefs (though these beliefs were fed to him by Shakespeare): "it is natural to belief in God" (211), "If you allowed yourselves to think of God, you wouldn't allow yourselves to be degraded by pleasant vices" (212), "God's the reason for everything noble and fine and heroic" (213), "tears are necessary" (213", and ultimately, "But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin" (215). Essentially what John is arguing for is the right to be fully human, the view that, in his eyes, the freedom to be an individual is more important than the stability of society.

But John gets banished. Granted, he wants to be banished, but regardless, he fails to save civilization. Instead he eats it (whatever that means, I'm still not clear about that part). At the lighthouse, we start to see signs that John is going to be a sacrificial character or sorts. In attempt to purify himself, he holds his arms out "as though he were on a Cross", in a sort of "voluntary crucifixion" (218). He is trying to get himself back grounded to his original purpose, to remember Linda and what her death represented, "to escape further contamination by the filth of civilized life" (221). Yet he can't escape civilized life - the reporters swarm, his every action is recorded and broadcasted by cameras wiring the surroundings - civilization is quite literally infesting his life, and eventually he kills himself in order to free himself. John gave the ultimate sacrifice in order to stay true to his beliefs.

But the nature of John's death and its function in the novel makes his character deviate from the sacrificial redeemer archetype. It isn't made totally clear, because the novel ends with his death, what impact his death had - does it allow society to realize their flaws and save themselves from the evils John saw in them, or does his death allow society to overcome the last negative obstacle in achieving stability? The latter is more probable, but we never do find out. However, the "orgy of atonement" (230) as it is referred to when the hordes that came to see the Savage all start whipping themselves, could provide an argument for redemption. It is suggested that perhaps the crowds were ready to be saved through John's means: "Drawn by the fascination of the horror and pain and, from within, impelled by that habit of cooperation, that desire for unanimity and atonement"(230). And, they do ultimately experience true pain and suffering (presumably), which is a large part of what John was arguing for. But then all that we are told about the outcome of this mass atonement is that it was all over the papers the next day - we don't know how, or if even, this event changes society, so you can't ever really tell whether John was successful in saving civilization with his ideals as a sacrificial redeemer, or if he was a scapegoat and the the removal of his ideals from civilization is what saved it. But I think this intentionally left unclear. John isn't portrayed as a true prophet, all of his ideas are just Shakespeare quotes, and as Mustapha says, "One believes in things because one has been conditioned to believe them" (211). In the end we are not left with a clear idea of what is right and what is wrong, who the good guys and bad guys are, instead the greater idea that we are left with is that morality is subjective.

So this kind of shows the limitations of archetypal criticism - they don't always hold true. It would be interesting to see how modern and post-modern literature adheres to archetypes, if they're even still prominent. But I do still like to believe in the idea of a collective unconscious, as that could be one of our biggest tools to keep our society from going down the path we saw in Brave New World.