Ape and Essence
First edition, 1948
Ape and Essence (1948) is Huxley's darkest dystopian work and his most unusual, written in the immediate aftermath of Hiroshima as a savage indictment of what humanity had demonstrated itself capable of becoming. The book takes the form of a discovered screenplay, a device that allows Huxley to frame his post-apocalyptic vision as something already written and discarded, a story too bleak to be produced. Set in a irradiated Southern California centuries after a third world war, it depicts a society that has inverted Christian theology, worshipping Belial as its deity and organizing its rituals around institutionalized cruelty, sexual repression, and the sacrifice of deformed infants born from radiation. Less widely read than Brave New World, it is arguably the more unsparing of the two. This American first edition precedes the British Chatto & Windus edition by one year.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth binding with decorated spine. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948. Burgess, Ninety-Nine Novels. #10210.
Near fine in dust jacket with some nicking a couple short tears.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth binding with decorated spine. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948. Burgess, Ninety-Nine Novels. #10210.
Near fine in dust jacket with some nicking a couple short tears.
Additional Details
Ape and Essence opens not in the post-apocalyptic future but on the Mahatma Gandhi's assassination day in Hollywood, where a film industry writer named Bob Briggs discovers a discarded screenplay on the studio lot. The screenplay, by one William Tallis, has been rejected and is being carted to the incinerator. Briggs retrieves it, and what follows is the text of Tallis's script, a vision of the world as it might be two centuries after nuclear war has destroyed most of civilization.
The structure is deliberate and significant. By framing the dystopia as a rejected screenplay, Huxley situates the horror not in the future but in the present. This is a story that exists already, written by a man who retreated to the Mojave desert and died there, and which the film industry has found unprofitable. The device also allows Huxley to use the visual grammar of film, narrator intrusions, stage directions, close-up and long-shot notations, as a satirical instrument. The screenplay form distances and aestheticizes what is being described, which only makes it more disturbing.
The screenplay itself follows a New Zealand botanical expedition that lands in the ruins of Los Angeles. The expedition's central figure, Dr. Alfred Poole, is a botanist whose mother has stunted him emotionally, a detail that serves as a small private joke on Huxley's part about the relationship between civilization's cultivated exterior and its arrested interior life. What the expedition finds is a society organized around the worship of Belial, the Lord of Flies, whose clergy, the Arch-Vicar prominent among them, rule through a theology that inverts Christianity systematically. Where Christian doctrine holds that evil entered the world through human sin, the religion of this future California holds that Belial is in fact the master of the material world and that the catastrophe humanity brought upon itself through nuclear war was simply the proof of it.
The society's sexual arrangements are particularly grotesque. Physical desire is officially condemned as a manifestation of Belial's power over the corrupted body, and normal sexual contact is forbidden except during two weeks following the annual Belial Day festival, during which it becomes not merely permitted but mandatory in a ritualized orgy. Women who give birth to radiation-deformed infants are publicly shaved, whipped, and subjected to purification ceremonies. Deformed infants are sacrificed. The inquisitorial apparatus that enforces these customs is described with a specificity that makes it recognizable as a satirical distillation of real mid-century institutions.
The book's opening sequence, before the screenplay proper begins, features the striking image of Einstein on a leash, crouching behind uniformed baboons representing the opposing armies of two nuclear powers, while the instruments of biological warfare are labeled with brand-sounding names. The image states the book's thesis plainly: scientific genius has become the servant of tribal violence, and reason has been harnessed to irrational ends. The book's title comes from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, in which Angelo, contemplating his own capacity for evil, says "but man, proud man, dressed in a little brief authority... plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven as make the angels weep." The ape is what survives when the angel is stripped away.
Poole eventually falls into the society's hands, is enslaved, and finds an unlikely connection with a young woman named Loola, whose instinct for ordinary human feeling has survived the surrounding barbarism. Their tentative relationship, and the possibility it suggests of some small, personal resistance to systemic degradation, provides the novel's only note that is not entirely bleak.
Ape and Essence is less frequently discussed than Brave New World, partly because of its unconventional form and partly because its anger is less restrained. But it is in some ways more honest about what Huxley feared, not the managed pleasures of the World State, but the raw brutality that emerges when those management systems fail. Published three years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it has the quality of a work written in genuine revulsion.
The structure is deliberate and significant. By framing the dystopia as a rejected screenplay, Huxley situates the horror not in the future but in the present. This is a story that exists already, written by a man who retreated to the Mojave desert and died there, and which the film industry has found unprofitable. The device also allows Huxley to use the visual grammar of film, narrator intrusions, stage directions, close-up and long-shot notations, as a satirical instrument. The screenplay form distances and aestheticizes what is being described, which only makes it more disturbing.
The screenplay itself follows a New Zealand botanical expedition that lands in the ruins of Los Angeles. The expedition's central figure, Dr. Alfred Poole, is a botanist whose mother has stunted him emotionally, a detail that serves as a small private joke on Huxley's part about the relationship between civilization's cultivated exterior and its arrested interior life. What the expedition finds is a society organized around the worship of Belial, the Lord of Flies, whose clergy, the Arch-Vicar prominent among them, rule through a theology that inverts Christianity systematically. Where Christian doctrine holds that evil entered the world through human sin, the religion of this future California holds that Belial is in fact the master of the material world and that the catastrophe humanity brought upon itself through nuclear war was simply the proof of it.
The society's sexual arrangements are particularly grotesque. Physical desire is officially condemned as a manifestation of Belial's power over the corrupted body, and normal sexual contact is forbidden except during two weeks following the annual Belial Day festival, during which it becomes not merely permitted but mandatory in a ritualized orgy. Women who give birth to radiation-deformed infants are publicly shaved, whipped, and subjected to purification ceremonies. Deformed infants are sacrificed. The inquisitorial apparatus that enforces these customs is described with a specificity that makes it recognizable as a satirical distillation of real mid-century institutions.
The book's opening sequence, before the screenplay proper begins, features the striking image of Einstein on a leash, crouching behind uniformed baboons representing the opposing armies of two nuclear powers, while the instruments of biological warfare are labeled with brand-sounding names. The image states the book's thesis plainly: scientific genius has become the servant of tribal violence, and reason has been harnessed to irrational ends. The book's title comes from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, in which Angelo, contemplating his own capacity for evil, says "but man, proud man, dressed in a little brief authority... plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven as make the angels weep." The ape is what survives when the angel is stripped away.
Poole eventually falls into the society's hands, is enslaved, and finds an unlikely connection with a young woman named Loola, whose instinct for ordinary human feeling has survived the surrounding barbarism. Their tentative relationship, and the possibility it suggests of some small, personal resistance to systemic degradation, provides the novel's only note that is not entirely bleak.
Ape and Essence is less frequently discussed than Brave New World, partly because of its unconventional form and partly because its anger is less restrained. But it is in some ways more honest about what Huxley feared, not the managed pleasures of the World State, but the raw brutality that emerges when those management systems fail. Published three years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it has the quality of a work written in genuine revulsion.
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