Happiness

Jeffrey R. Di Leo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032015200
• eBook ISBN: 9781000529487
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book introduces the reader to the ways in which happiness has been explored in philosophy and literature for thousands of years, in order to understand the newest theoretical approaches to happiness.

Jeffrey R. Di Leo draws on its long and rich history as a window into our present obsession with happiness. Each of the four chapters of this book provides a substantially different literary-theoretical account of how and why literature matters with respect to considerations of happiness. From the neoliberal happiness industry and the psychoanalytic rejection of happiness to aesthetic hedonism and revolutionary happiness, literature viewed from the perspective of happiness becomes a story about what is and is not the goal of life.

The multidisciplinary approach of this book will appeal to a variety of readers from literary studies, critical theory, philosophy and psychology and anyone with an interest in happiness and theories of emotion.

1The brave new world of well-beingHappiness as a commodity from Huxley and Alain to Pharrell and Oprah

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178941-2

What would you call a world where ‘People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get’ (Huxley 2006: 220)? A world where ‘if anything should go wrong’, there’s a surefire way to make us to forget about it? In 1932, amidst the rise of Fascism in Western Europe and a world shaken by massive economic depression, a 40-year-old British novelist addressed this question with a power and prophecy that almost a century later reads like a guidebook to selling happiness in the new millennium.

The author was the prolific Aldous Huxley, who, in addition to novels, wrote poetry, plays, short stories, essays, criticism, and philosophy. The novel, Brave New World, is one that is on a short list of socially prophetic twentieth-century fiction along with George Orwell’s 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. In fact, when Orwell published Nineteen Eighty-Four, he had his publisher send Huxley a copy. Huxley found it a ‘profoundly important’ (Huxley 1969: 604) book, writing to Orwell:

Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving [sic] their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World. The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency.

(Huxley 1969: 605)

Nineteen Eighty-Four warns about the terrors of totalitarian government and has become a handbook of modern political abuse. Terms like Big Brother, Newspeak, Doublethink, Thoughtcrime, and the Thought Police from Nineteen Eighty-Four are regularly associated with real-life situations where totalitarian-trending police states abuse their power. Today, for example, when our privacy is invaded through government or corporate technological surveillance, Orwell’s ‘Big Brother’ is often cited to indicate its abuse of political power. Moreover, popular culture has done an ample job in reinforcing and reminding us of the political nightmare depicted in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

A few years after its publication, there were two television movie adaptations of the novel. In the United States, CBS adapted Nineteen Eighty-Four for television in 1953 (Orwell 1953), and in the United Kingdom, BBC adapted it for television in 1954 (Orwell 1954). A few years later, allegedly with ‘secret’ funding from the United States government (in specific, the Central Intelligence Agency [Morris 2012]), a British film version was made and released in the United Kingdom and the United States (Orwell 1956). Later, it was again brought to the big screen in a 1984 film adaptation (Orwell 1984) with a best-selling soundtrack done by the Eurythmics (Eurythmics 1984), which was followed up with a 2005 operatic version (Maazel 2005) and a 2013 play adaptation (Orwell 2013) with extreme torture scenes that elicited fainting and vomiting among audiences (Lee 2017). Also, it would be remiss not to mention eponymous albums by Yusef Lateef (Lateef 1965), Van Halen (Van Halen 1984), and Rick Wakeman (Wakeman 1981), among others, and eponymous singles by Spirit (Spirit 1969), David Bowie (Bowie 1974a), and Oingo Boingo (Oingo Boingo 1983), and more, all taking their musical inspiration from Orwell’s novel. And finally, speaking of Bowie, he originally intended his entire 1974 album Diamond Dogs (Bowie 1974b), which includes the aforementioned eponymous single, to be a rock musical based on Nineteen Eighty-Four.

But, if Huxley is right, and the totalitarian nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four ‘is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which [he] imagined in Brave New World’, then what might this world look like as represented by the other arts? Curiously, unlike Orwell’s novel, Huxley’s dystopia of happiness is far less the subject of the popular imagination. While there was a radio broadcast of it for the CBS Radio Workshop in 1956 that was narrated by Huxley, there were no accompanying film productions in the United States or the United Kingdom until 1980. Since 2008, however, the BBC has annually broadcast a ten-part reading of Brave New World (Huxley 2008) and, in 2016, aired a dramatic production of the novel (Huxley 2016). There was also a staged dramatic adaptation of it, but again, only fairly recently—in 2015 (Huxley 2015). To date, there is no cinematic film adaptation of Brave New World, and only two television movie versions—one in 1980 (Huxley 1980) and one in 1998 (Huxley 1998). The director Ridley Scott and the actor Leonardo DiCaprio were said to be developing it as a theatrical film, but to date, the project is on hold. Says Scott of the project,

I don’t know what to do with Brave New World. It’s tough. I think Brave New World in a funny kind of way was good in nineteen thirty-eight, because it had a very interesting revolutionary idea. Don’t forget it came shortly before or after George Orwell, roughly the same time. When you re-analyse it, maybe it should stay as a book.

(Weintraub 2012)

This ‘revolutionary idea’ that Scott says should stay as literature is Huxley’s critique of happiness in Brave New World.

Nonetheless, in spite of the relative scarcity of adaptations of Brave New World, the difficulty of creatively envisioning it in the other arts might not be about the limits of artistic representation. Rather, it may be one about the limits of a critique of happiness in any art. While Westerners can easily imagine the evils of a government or industry that invades our privacy in the pursuit of total political power, it is much more difficult to depict the ‘horrors’ of a government which seeks to make everyone maximally happy. The latter is particularly true in the West where the pursuit of happiness is completely ingrained in and celebrated by our culture—if not also, in our way of living. Huxley’s Brave New World builds a government upon the premise that one of the absolute goods of society is the pursuit of happiness. The artistic challenge here is to get an audience to believe that governmental control in support of maximising social and personal happiness can ever be a bad thing. That is to say, to get an audience to see that not getting what you want is ever preferable to getting everything that you want. While Huxley’s novel is built upon the premise that a society solely dedicated to the maximization of happiness could only be an object of critique and horror, the Western world today finds much of what is fictionalized here to be acceptable.

In Brave New World, people are happy. They always get what they want—not just what they need. It is a stable world where everyone is safe and well off. Moreover,

they’re not afraid of death; they’re blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they’re plagued with no mothers or fathers; they’ve got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they’re so conditioned that they practically can’t help behaving as they ought to behave.

(Huxley 2006: 220)

And, if anything should go wrong, there is a governmentally distributed drug that cures their unhappiness. Huxley calls it ‘soma’. In short, this is what Huxley believed awaits us after Orwell’s totalitarian state: happiness.

Still, the price of happiness is extreme in Huxley’s novel. The novel itself questions whether the benefits of complete happiness in modern civilised society are worth its costs. Moreover, in Huxley’s novel, happiness has become a commodity. In turn, one of the prophecies of Brave New World is that in the future—a future after the totalitarian state—happiness will be bought and sold. This chapter will look at both the practice of selling happiness in philosophy, popular music, and psychology, and weigh them against the warnings of Huxley in Brave New World about the social and political consequences of commodifying happiness. In the end, what Huxley intended as a social and political satire about the future of happiness in our world has almost become the cookbook for its current status in society. Moreover, because of its iconic literary reputation, Brave New World is a good fictional focal point for some of the new theoretical approaches to happiness. But before there was soma, there was a widely read French philosopher who offered daily drug-free cures for unhappiness. Let’s turn to him next.

One must vow

‘It is not difficult to be unhappy or discontented’, wrote the philosopher Émile Chartier. ‘All you have to do is sit down, like a prince waiting to be amused’, he continues. ‘This attitude of lying in wait and weighing happiness as if it were a commodity casts the gray shadow of boredom over everything’ (Alain 1989: 247).

Chartier was a French philosopher who died in 1951 at the age of 83. He spent his entire professional career teaching philosophy in secondary schools. Though his star has dimmed over the years, while he was alive, he was the philosopher of French radicalism. He was also considered by the French in his day as the most important philosopher since France’s national philosopher, René Descartes. Chartier’s pupils included Raymond Aron, Simone de Beauvoir, Georges Canguilhem, André Maurois, Maurice Schuman, and Simone Weil (Plottel 2006: 379). He has been called the greatest teacher of their generation (Hellman 1982: 8).

‘The key to [Chartier’s] teaching’, writes John Hellman, ‘was his determination to instill critical habits of mind in his students’ (Hellman 1982: 8). ‘He believed’, continues Hellman, ‘that students did not truly “acquire” ideas until they had digested them and re-expressed them in their own words’. Rather than in-class exams, he thus preferred to assign ‘“topos”, or take-home essay examinations, to his students which forced them to formulate their own (not “correct”) answers to knotty questions’ (Hellman 1982: 8).

To be sure, Chartier’s pedagogical prowess was as legendary as some of his pupils. Still, the work of his closest contemporary, Henri Bergson, is much more highly regarded today than that of Chartier. Part of the reason is the ephemeral nature of the majority of his writing. That is, while Chartier published numerous books on philosophical topics, he was best known in France through the thousands of articles he published in various daily newspapers. Beginning in 1903, he started to publish these philosophical articles under the pseudonym ‘Alain’, a name he took from the fifteenth-century Norman poet, Alain Chartier.

At first, Alain’s articles were longer weekly columns, and then in 1906, they became daily short articles. The shorter articles were published as a daily column entitled Propos d’un Normand. From 1906 until the start of the Great War in 1914, Alain wrote a two-page article every evening. Then, after the war—which he fought in as a soldier even though he was exempt from service and could have served as an officer—he resumed the practice of writing propos. All said and done, Alain produced nearly 5,000 of these little articles.

Turning philosophy into literature or journalism can be difficult for philosophers. Writing for a philosophical audience is very different than writing for a literary or general one. Certain assumptions that are made when writing for a philosophical audience cannot be made for a general audience. As such, the list of philosophers of note who successfully wrote for a general audience is a short one. Alain, to be sure, is on this list, if not heads it.¹

Alain was able to bridge this gap through the technique he used to write his little articles. Every evening he would sit down with two sheets of paper in front of him. He then started to write his propos knowing that its last line would be at the bottom of the second page. He also committed himself to making no corrections, erasures, or changes. This allowed him to meet his publication deadline (all pieces were published the next day) and write only that which was directly relevant to the topic of the propos. The result was thousands of 50–60 line aphoristic compositions.

In 1928, 93 of Alain’s propos dealing with the theme of happiness (bonheur) were published as Propos sur le bonheur, which became a best-selling book. The lines above are from the penultimate propos in this collection entitled ‘The Obligation to be Happy’. It is dated March 16, 1923, and was entitled as to leave no doubt as to his position on happiness. It was a position steeped in practical wisdom tempered with an endless bounty of cheerfulness and cheeky irony. Alain encouraged people to not complain or burden others with their problems. Rather, even when they are confronted w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• New Literary Theory: Series Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The brave new world of well-being: happiness as a commodity from Huxley and Alain to Pharrell and Oprah
• 2 Happiness, no thanks!: psychoanalysis, philosophy, and the critique of happiness from Freud to Žižek
• 3 The happiness of the text: morality, writing, and the pursuit of pleasure from Gide to Barthes
• 4 Real happiness is revolutionary: Badiou, antiphilosophy, and the metaphysics of happiness from Spinoza and Pascal to Mallarmé and Beckett
• Bibliography
• Index