Ape and Essence
First British edition, 1949
Ape and Essence (1948) is Aldous Huxley's second dystopian novel, written sixteen years after Brave New World in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and the atomic bomb. Framed as a rejected Hollywood screenplay discovered on its way to the incinerator, it imagines Southern California in 2108, more than a century after nuclear and biological warfare destroyed most of civilization. A New Zealand expedition lands in the ruins of Los Angeles, where botanist Dr. Alfred Poole is captured by a primitive society ruled by a priesthood devoted to Belial. Radiation has left much of the population genetically damaged, while the survivors have transformed the consequences of the old world's destruction into a religion of human depravity, complete with rigid sexual controls, ritual punishment, and the annual killing of deformed children. Darker and more savage than Brave New World, the novel turns Huxley's earlier concern with the misuse of science toward the possibility of humanity using its intelligence to engineer its own destruction. The British first edition followed the American edition by one year.
Hardcover. First British Edition, First Printing. Octavo, blue-gray cloth binding titled in gilt over a blue panel on spine. London: Chatto & Windus, 1949. Burgess, Ninety-Nine Novels. #11211.
Fine in fine price-clipped dust jacket.
Hardcover. First British Edition, First Printing. Octavo, blue-gray cloth binding titled in gilt over a blue panel on spine. London: Chatto & Windus, 1949. Burgess, Ninety-Nine Novels. #11211.
Fine in fine price-clipped dust jacket.
Additional Details
Ape and Essence opens on the day of Gandhi's assassination, when two Hollywood writers rescue an unwanted screenplay from a truck carrying rejected scripts to an incinerator. Its dead author, William Tallis, has written a vision of the future in the form of a film treatment, and Huxley spends the rest of the novel reproducing it. The screenplay begins with a strange and deliberately disorienting series of scenes. Well-dressed baboons fill a movie theater, while the nineteenth-century scientist Michael Faraday, whose discoveries helped lay the foundations of modern electrical technology, is led about on a leash. Later, opposing armies each have their own Albert Einstein similarly chained at the feet of their military leaders. Science, nationalism, sex, advertising, religion, and warfare are mixed together in a grotesque satire of modern civilization. The imagery also introduces the idea behind the novel's title. Humanity has acquired extraordinary powers through reason and science, but Huxley questions whether it has developed the wisdom to control them. The "ape" remains beneath the civilized exterior, now equipped with increasingly powerful tools for pursuing its appetites for sex, power, possession, and violence.
After this strange and highly symbolic opening, the screenplay develops into a more conventional post-apocalyptic story. In 2108 an expedition from New Zealand, spared from the destruction because it was too remote to be worth attacking, arrives in California. Dr. Alfred Poole, a timid botanist, becomes separated from the expedition and is captured by the survivors living among the ruins of Los Angeles. Their society is dominated by the Church of Belial, whose Arch-Vicar presides over a crude theocracy built partly from the physical and psychological wreckage left by the nuclear war.
The dystopia is particularly vicious because its religion provides supernatural explanations for disasters humanity inflicted upon itself. Radiation has produced widespread genetic mutations, but the survivors attribute the resulting deformities to Belial and conduct an annual "Purification of the Race," killing malformed infants and punishing their mothers. Sexual desire is likewise treated as evidence of Belial's power. Radiation-induced mutation has reduced sexuality to a short annual mating season, while anyone experiencing desire outside that period is branded a "Hot" and subjected to persecution. Women wear patches marked "NO," the priesthood regulates reproduction, and Church and State work together to transform biological catastrophe into a permanent system of guilt and control.
Yet Huxley's target is larger than this future religion. The Arch-Vicar's theology is an obscene parody, but his account of the civilization that destroyed itself often sounds disturbingly close to Huxley's own diagnosis. Nationalism, political ideology, organized religion, and scientific progress have combined not to overcome humanity's destructive impulses but to magnify them. The old world possessed unprecedented knowledge without the wisdom required to determine how that knowledge should be used. In one of the novel's recurring inversions, science itself is not the enemy. The problem is that intelligence supplies ever more powerful tools to desires and collective passions that remain essentially primitive. As Tallis puts it near the beginning, "Ends are ape-chosen; only the means are man's."
Poole's relationship with the young woman Loola gradually gives the screenplay a more traditional narrative center and offers an alternative to both his own sexually repressed upbringing and the Belialists' institutionalized hatred of desire. Their eventual flight from Los Angeles is therefore more than an escape from a brutal theocracy. It represents a small rejection of the systems, abstractions, and inherited fears that Huxley sees repeatedly overwhelming individual human beings. The screenplay closes with Poole and Loola traveling north toward communities outside Belialist control, pausing beside the desert grave of William Tallis himself.
Written in the first years of the atomic age, Ape and Essence is considerably harsher than Brave New World. The earlier novel imagines a civilization made stable through conditioning, consumption, pleasure, and the sacrifice of individuality. Here civilization has already failed. Huxley instead asks how a species capable of Faraday, Einstein, art, philosophy, and scientific discovery can repeatedly put those achievements in the service of nationalism, violence, domination, and destructive appetite. The screenplay's opening can be disorienting, overloaded with surreal imagery, literary references, verse, and abrupt cinematic montage, but the novel becomes increasingly accessible as Poole's story takes over. Beneath its deliberate grotesquerie is one of Huxley's bleakest arguments: greater intelligence does not necessarily make humanity less animal. It may simply make the animal more powerful.
After this strange and highly symbolic opening, the screenplay develops into a more conventional post-apocalyptic story. In 2108 an expedition from New Zealand, spared from the destruction because it was too remote to be worth attacking, arrives in California. Dr. Alfred Poole, a timid botanist, becomes separated from the expedition and is captured by the survivors living among the ruins of Los Angeles. Their society is dominated by the Church of Belial, whose Arch-Vicar presides over a crude theocracy built partly from the physical and psychological wreckage left by the nuclear war.
The dystopia is particularly vicious because its religion provides supernatural explanations for disasters humanity inflicted upon itself. Radiation has produced widespread genetic mutations, but the survivors attribute the resulting deformities to Belial and conduct an annual "Purification of the Race," killing malformed infants and punishing their mothers. Sexual desire is likewise treated as evidence of Belial's power. Radiation-induced mutation has reduced sexuality to a short annual mating season, while anyone experiencing desire outside that period is branded a "Hot" and subjected to persecution. Women wear patches marked "NO," the priesthood regulates reproduction, and Church and State work together to transform biological catastrophe into a permanent system of guilt and control.
Yet Huxley's target is larger than this future religion. The Arch-Vicar's theology is an obscene parody, but his account of the civilization that destroyed itself often sounds disturbingly close to Huxley's own diagnosis. Nationalism, political ideology, organized religion, and scientific progress have combined not to overcome humanity's destructive impulses but to magnify them. The old world possessed unprecedented knowledge without the wisdom required to determine how that knowledge should be used. In one of the novel's recurring inversions, science itself is not the enemy. The problem is that intelligence supplies ever more powerful tools to desires and collective passions that remain essentially primitive. As Tallis puts it near the beginning, "Ends are ape-chosen; only the means are man's."
Poole's relationship with the young woman Loola gradually gives the screenplay a more traditional narrative center and offers an alternative to both his own sexually repressed upbringing and the Belialists' institutionalized hatred of desire. Their eventual flight from Los Angeles is therefore more than an escape from a brutal theocracy. It represents a small rejection of the systems, abstractions, and inherited fears that Huxley sees repeatedly overwhelming individual human beings. The screenplay closes with Poole and Loola traveling north toward communities outside Belialist control, pausing beside the desert grave of William Tallis himself.
Written in the first years of the atomic age, Ape and Essence is considerably harsher than Brave New World. The earlier novel imagines a civilization made stable through conditioning, consumption, pleasure, and the sacrifice of individuality. Here civilization has already failed. Huxley instead asks how a species capable of Faraday, Einstein, art, philosophy, and scientific discovery can repeatedly put those achievements in the service of nationalism, violence, domination, and destructive appetite. The screenplay's opening can be disorienting, overloaded with surreal imagery, literary references, verse, and abrupt cinematic montage, but the novel becomes increasingly accessible as Poole's story takes over. Beneath its deliberate grotesquerie is one of Huxley's bleakest arguments: greater intelligence does not necessarily make humanity less animal. It may simply make the animal more powerful.
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