Biopower

Biopower lies at the intersection between power and the processes of life. It is a technique of power that seeks to simultaneously control the biological life of individuals and the entire population. While the individual body is rendered docile and machine-like, the population’s biological processes, such as birthrate and mortality, become subject to regulation by forces that wield power. A variety of interventions may be used to achieve this regulation, such as health campaigns.⁵ Understanding biopower in relation to governance gives rise to terms such as ‘biopolitics,’ which describes a political structure responsible for the administration of life and populations: ‘to ensure, sustain, and multiply life, to put this life in order.’⁶ Biopower revolves around changing the instruments of power and while it might be utilised to augment life, this is done in such an engineered and regulated manner that it essentially removes the human dimension and unpredictability of life.⁷ The established notion of power for Foucault centred on the ‘sovereign,’ with sovereign power ‘the right of a ruler to seize things, time, bodies, ultimately the life of subjects.’⁸ Eventually, biopower replaced sovereign power but this did not mean that wars were no longer fought; instead, the state waged battles in the name of society itself, as wars ‘are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter.’⁹ Jon Simons observes that in Foucault’s conception of biopower, resistance is the most effective means of practising freedom.¹⁰ Thompson further argues that the model Foucault favoured is individual resistance against governance, and such resistance potentially equates to increased autonomy and self-formation.¹¹ Freedom achieved to any degree is best obtained at the individual level.

Biopower is a demonstrably powerful yet dangerous means of controlling society, undermining the potential for citizens, and characters within novels, to live autonomously.¹² In Brave New World, an ambiguous form of engineered ‘contentment’ is evident in the World State’s biopower where individuals feel they have free choice, but their agency exists only within preconditioned boundaries. O’Nolan’s critique of the law in his writing reflects its ‘ambiguous status’ and his view that ‘the state is local.’¹³ John Conlan argues that local government is biopolitical rather than parochial; he posits that the aloofness with which O’Nolan conducted his employment as a civil servant reflected his derision for state biopolitical power and describes O’Nolan as ‘a critic of Irish justice and a theorist of biopolitical concerns.’¹⁴

Biopolitical concepts can be applied to a reading of Brave New World and At Swim-Two-Birds in terms of sociological analysis. Brave New World operates on the level of macrosociology in its inclusion of the large-scale political and social structure of the World State.¹⁵ At the macro-level, characters’ agency and autonomy are generally reduced and the focus is on society en masse. At Swim-Two-Birds differs in that it operates on a microsociological level, where the focus is on interactions between individuals and groups in terms of the plot and its range of characters.¹⁶ Agency has more potential in this context and meaning is produced through characters’ relations and exchanges. Characters’ autonomy increases when governing forces are distracted or resting. Conversations tend to be more meaningful in a microsociological context and this is evident in At Swim-Two-Birds, although they are complicated by the multiple plots, characters, and authors.

Foucauldian Readings of O’Nolan and Huxley

Huxley and O’Nolan examine surveillance, control, manipulation, and dehumanisation, which has led scholars to draw on Foucault and biopower to interpret their work. Maebh Long applies Foucault and biopolitics to disempowerment and exposure to death in An Béal Bocht, writing that the political dimension of the living body is of importance and that ‘the modern era is the period of the biopolitical’ (original emphasis), where ‘biopolitics transforms the political body into a biological body, and an obsessive focus on the body […] becomes a point of control.’¹⁷ Paul Fagan describes Foucault’s ‘truthful confession’ as a means of ‘individualisation by power’¹⁸ in relation to O’Nolan’s short story ‘Two in One,’ but he explains that it goes beyond ‘self-exposure of a guilty inner self to the authority of the reader,’ and instead shows how the narrator’s ‘self comes not to be, or, perhaps, how it unbecomes.’¹⁹ Authority’s use of confession to wield power over a character is evident in the farcical trial scene in At Swim-Two-Birds, where each witness’s evidence brings about further statements of confession from Trellis that are then used against him. As Fagan reminds us, biopolitics also implicates the reader, who is impacted by ‘the atmosphere [that] is vibrant, affective, and trans-corporeal: it literally gets under our skins and transforms us materially and psychologically in ways that we may endeavour to describe in words, but which we experience first through bodily attunement.’²⁰ The atmosphere of At Swim-Two-Birds engages the reader in a sense of discomfort, empathy, and potential collusion with the characters as they scheme to overthrow their oppressor.

Todd A. Comer focuses on the political postcolonial Irish context of At Swim-Two-Birds and issues of power and agency. He writes that ‘Irish identity is constructed and controlled via a god-like architecture of temporal and discursive surveillance’ in the novel and argues for ‘an agency that does not simply place the subaltern in a new tower, but […] that displaces the panoptical structure.’²¹ Comer further contends that At Swim-Two-Birds is an indictment of ‘soft’ colonial oppression or ideological control through England’s books and publishing houses and also refers to Foucault and his plague-stricken town in Discipline and Punish to support this claim: ‘Each individual is fixed in his place. And, if he moves, he does so at the risk of his life, contagion or punishment.’²²

Radvan Markus discusses the cultural context of O’Nolan’s pessimistic view in his work and aligns it with Foucault’s theory of discourse which ‘dissolves the link between utterances and the traditional human subject’²³ and replaces it with the ‘modalities of enunciation.’²⁴ Markus highlights that for Foucault, language is oppressive and inescapable: it is essentially a prison. This is visible in O’Nolan and Huxley, where in At Swim-Two-Birds, characters such as the student narrator, Trellis, and Orlick are trapped in the roles assigned to them by the author’s language, and in Brave New World, much of the language spoken by the characters is embedded in them by the World State and hypnopaedia lessons. They are trapped in a prison of received language heightened by the state’s discouragement of solitude. The novel ‘anticipates the Foucauldian paradigm of resistance, subversion and containment, ending in eliminating the forces that pose a challenge to the ideology of the world state.’²⁵ The use of disembodied, engineered, and emotionless language ensures that citizens can be managed and controlled. The treatment of language in both novels links to the discussion of power applied to sleep and food. Language in both novels is received by characters, in that it is generated in At Swim-Two-Birds by multiple authors, and through the rhyming language of hypnopaedia in Brave New World. The simplified language is beguiling and memorable because it rhymes and functions similarly to the slogans and messages used in television advertising, political campaigns, and propaganda.²⁶

Feeding into the concepts of biopower and macrosociology is the ‘total institution,’²⁷ a term which refers to a space where all aspects of life are managed according to strict rules and round-the-clock surveillance, with a significant impact on biological processes such as sleeping and eating. Institutions such as prisons or psychiatric hospitals are examples of spaces where lines between public and private no longer exist and social interaction is strictly regulated. Brave New World depicts the World State as a total institution where citizen’s lives are controlled through eugenics, social engineering, and brainwashing. Individuality is eroded and people are dehumanised. They accept this situation because they have been conditioned through sleep indoctrination to think that they are happy, as the Director of Hatcheries states: ‘the secret of happiness and virtue – liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny.’²⁸ Acceptance of the total institution is achieved by teaching citizens to ‘like’ the experience. Regulated and ‘docile bodies’ emerge through self-disciplinary processes, as evidenced in the World State citizens, but while they might make up the majority, ‘where there is power, there is resistance.’²⁹ Such is the case in Brave New World, where Bernard Marx questions his situation, as do Helmholtz and Watson, all of whom have been decanted and socialized in the New World State. As a human-born outsider to this society, John the Savage logically challenges the engineered Fordian world he encounters, but resistance from within – that of the World State citizens themselves – is more noteworthy.

In At Swim-Two-Birds the total institution is conceptualised in the character of Dermot Trellis, a metaphorical panopticon who acts as a single guard, or watchtower, in his bedroom, tyrannically managing his characters’ every move to meet his needs. The description of Trellis’s eyes as ‘sentries from their red watchtowers’ that collect ‘intelligence’ is in line with Foucault: ‘Inspection functions ceaselessly. The gaze is alert everywhere.’³⁰ The idea of the writer as a watchtower shows surveillance is central and activated through this character/author. Jessie Burnette observes that At Swim-Two-Birds was published two years after the passing of the 1937 Factories Act in the United Kingdom and notes that ‘the concerns raised by Trellis’s characters about poor working conditions suggest that the connection between overwork and fatigue was likely socially salient within Ireland at the time of the novel’s publication.’³¹ Foucault mentions the ‘workshop’ in reference to the rise of biopower, as this factory space is an area ‘where bodies can be managed and controlled.’³² Factories, like Henry Ford’s, which the novel satirises, are structured so workers are visible at all times and can be communicated with via a central system.³³ For example: ‘in the four thousand rooms of the Centre the four thousand electric clocks simultaneously struck four. Discarnate voices called from the trumpet mouths. “Main Day-shift off duty. Second Day-shift take over”’ (BNW, 46). The World State is inspired by the writings of its deity, Ford, who ‘attempted to make production predictable, and in management, to ensure certainty through surveillance […] Fordism was felt to have put everyone in little boxes, just the same.’³⁴ This level of control is designed to reduce workers to dehumanised elements of a larger manufacturing machine.

Sleep

Biopolitics extends into the governing of sleep in societal institutions. Its impact can be seen in Huxley and O’Nolan, where sleep is not restorative in either context but is instead largely used as a site to control, discipline, and punish. Sleep is connected with surveillance and manipulation from the powers that be. Simon Williams sees ‘sleep as a vital commodity to be converted into other forms of capital.’³⁵ Williams is concerned with Foucault’s ideas concerning the production of ‘at risk’ selves and the dominance of the self-regulated body and positions sleep ‘at the intersection of material-corporeal questions concerning the regulation and governance of bodies.’³⁶

Williams argues that three levels of sleep analysis exist at the individual, social/interactional, and societal/institutional levels. Sleep is performed as an individual. Yet people might sleep socially, sharing a bed/room with a partner or sibling, or having a sleepover with friends as children, and we also have a shared sense of ‘bedtime’ on a societal level. Sleep’s direct association with power can be seen in its governance: the total institution, such as the prison or mental asylum, controls the sleep of inmates/residents. Sleep is also a social convention; the psychologist Barry Schwartz argues that ‘the coordination within a collectivity of the timing of sleep is one of the most important senses in which it is institutional […] the idea of “bedtime” is one adhered to by all of society’; social protocols govern what is and is not acceptable beyond a reasonable hour, including phone calls and visiting someone’s house, except in cases of emergency.³⁷

In Brave New World, the total institution of the World State controls every aspect of sleep from birth and infancy for its citizens and children are as ‘busy as everyone else, though they do not know it, listening unconsciously to hypnopaedic lessons in hygiene and sociability’ (BNW, 158). Everything that is heard during sleep as ‘a whisper under every pillow’ is centrally managed according to tried and tested doctrines through sleep-teaching.³⁸ Thus the rules of society are imparted during sleeping hours and collectively absorbed. When a citizen’s behaviour is contrary to sleep-teaching, others quickly remind them of this fact. For example, when Bernard upbraids Helmholtz for questioning the system through the rhymes that he creates, he emphasises solitude as a threat to the social dimension of sleep: ‘It’s flatly against all their sleep-teaching. Remember, they’ve had at least a quarter of a million warnings against solitude.’³⁹

A two-way connection exists between sleep and social processes, ranging from our basic perceptions in this area to more complicated social interactions.⁴⁰ The quality of our sleep is informed by our daily interactions and social relationships are influenced by how well we sleep. Williams equates sufficient sleep with good citizenship and acting in the public interest. Drowsiness is synonymous with drunkenness. The ‘disciplining’ of sleep is aligned with the ‘service of broader moral […] patriotic goals and values, both past and present,’ emphasising the importance of individual self-discipline and awareness.⁴¹ Sleep discipline also connects with the concept of ‘sleep hygiene’: behavioural and environmental conditions for individuals to promote healthy sleep, such as an early bedtime and consistent waking time.⁴²

In this context, people are accountable for their sleep and society considers responsible individual behaviour as self-governance for the public good in a way which is often linked with the discipline of productivity and the moral scorn of laziness or idleness. The student narrator in At Swim-Two-Birds hears his uncle argue against this ‘vice’: ‘Idleness darkens the understanding; idleness weakens the will; idleness leaves you a very good mark for the sinful schemes of the gentleman down below. […] Idleness you might say is the father and the mother of the other vices’ (ASTB, 213). John demonstrates a strong belief in this idea of rest as a vice at the Reservation, where he forces himself to resist repose and to undergo sleep deprivation alongside flagellation as a means of purifying himself (BNW, 147).

Idleness has been examined alongside ‘Irish time’ in At Swim-Two-Birds. Dobbins argues that ‘Irish time’ shows that ‘Ireland inhabits a unique temporality distinct from that of the industrialized center of empire, and any effort toward the construction of a new national culture and society must proceed from that fact.’⁴³ He identifies an ‘alternative Irish modernity’ and At Swim-Two-Birds as ‘a text that operates according to a temporality distinct from the teleology of linear progress identified with modernization.’⁴⁴ As he explains,

the temporality of At Swim-Two-Birds approximates what MacCabe calls Irish time […] Where MacCabe’s understanding of Irish time was grounded in preindustrial forms of work, the temporality of At Swim-Two-Birds emerges out of an ongoing commitment to avoid work as much as possible. Drawing liberally on a wide range of sources from the archaic to the contemporary […] [t]he heterogeneous temporality of O’Brien’s novel indicates an alternative to the progressive temporality of modernization just as idleness signals an alternative to work.⁴⁵

Burnette has conducted the most substantive research on sleep and rest in At Swim-Two-Birds to date. She examines fatigue in the novel, where she explores it ‘as deviant, burdensome, and indicative of emasculating weakness.’⁴⁶ Burnette considers O’Nolan’s novel against a wider trend of emphasising fatigue and tiredness within modernist literature due to society’s preference for productivity: ‘the growing presence of bodies tired from the effects of overwork, rapid social progress, illness and post-war malaise posed a threat both to society and ideas of the able-bodied self.’⁴⁷ Furthermore, the structure of the novel itself is connected with fatigue and sleep; it is intended to test and tire the reader. As Burnette observes the complicated structure has an exhausting effect on the reader and its complexity connects the reader’s experience with that of ‘a waking dream,’ where the strangeness of the narrative is better suited to a dream state.⁴⁸

The experience and use of sleep in both novels is extreme. Sleep is not experienced as restful and restorative, but instead becomes a site of power struggles, manipulation, abuse, and torture. Sleep is used as a means of escape for the oppressed and as punishment against the oppressor. It is also a channel for authoritarian control and behavioural conditioning. It is an ideal time for those in power to control others en masse. Burnette outlines the connection between ‘sleep, fatigue and punishment’ and highlights both the ‘perilous’ nature of going to sleep and sleep as punishment in fairy tales such as ‘Snow White’ and ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ showing how it can be a time of trickery while the oppressor sleeps, as in ‘Jack and the Beanstalk.’⁴⁹

In Huxley’s Brave New World, sleep as a time of reduced consciousness is identified as the prime opportunity for ‘hypnopaedia’ (sleep teaching), social conditioning, and brainwashing, and its use is concentrated on babies and children to ensure that they follow the overall societal plan. In O’Nolan’s At Swim-Two-Birds, sleep is seen conversely as unproductive or dead time as its potential has not been harnessed; O’Nolan portrays excessive sleeping as grotesque in the novel.⁵⁰ Yet he does not suggest that excessive sleep necessarily causes deviance, rather, as Burnette puts it: ‘In At Swim-Two-Birds, there are not bad characters who happen to spend “excessive” time in bed, so much as bad characters whose badness is fundamentally entangled with their time spent in bed.’⁵¹ Trellis, for instance, spends twenty years in bed.

In Brave New World sleep is subject to control and manipulation from citizens’ earliest moments as babies. Besides being a means of indoctrinating the population in the rules and regulations of society from the cradle onwards, sleep can also be a time for lack of control where the oppressed can take advantage of others while those in power sleep. For example, sleep is used as suppression in At Swim-Two-Birds, first by Dermot Trellis when he tries to keep his characters under lock and key in the Red Swan Hotel, and later by his characters themselves when they realise they can lock up their tyrannical master Trellis. Sleep is used as oppression by those in control and is often welcomed by those in the World State society, such as when they undertake a drug-induced soma holiday, where characters use drugs to escape reality and sleep for one or more days. These examples show that sleep is at once utilised as power (biopower) but can equally be a time of lack of power (disempowerment), which depends either on the approach of the state and its citizens or on the behaviour of the narrators and their characters. John Savage’s outsider attitude to sleep, with his attempts to exercise self-control through sleep deprivation, fasting, and flagellation, stands in stark contrast to the World State’s use of sleep.

Rhymes and repetition are used to convince and control through hypnopaedic statements that promote the principles of the World State. John’s mother Linda sang him lullabies from the World State, referred to as the ‘Other Place,’ and he remembers many of them fondly: ‘A, B, C, vitamin D: The fat’s in the liver, the cod’s in the sea,’ ‘Bye Baby Banting, soon you’ll need decanting,’ and ‘Streptocock-Gee to Banbury T’ (BNW, 209). These are simple, child-like rhymes that are embedded in characters’ psyches for life. When Lenina is frustrated with Bernard Marx and his melancholic mood, she says that ‘One cubic centimetre cures ten gloomy sentiments’ (BNW, 99) and ‘when the individual feels, the community reels’ (BNW, 103). These are two of many hypnopaedic statements, which are all simple and repetitive, making it easy to condition people to believe them as truth. In Brave New World Revisited, the narrator states:

Most of the things that can be done with and to a person in a hypnotic trance can be done with and to a person in light sleep. Verbal suggestions can be passed […] if these suggestions are well conceived and frequently repeated […] new patterns of feeling can be installed and old ones modified, posthypnotic comments can be given, slogans, formulas and trigger words deeply ingrained in the memory (BNW, 373).

Sleep teaching is never intellectual as this is considered dangerous, instead it is moral, simplistic, and rhyming, for conditioning thought, behaviour, oneself and others. The Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning declares that hypnopaedia is ‘the greatest moralising and socialising force of all time’ (BNW, 42).

James Sexton notes that the drive towards rationalisation is at the root of the homogenised society modelled on Fordism in Brave New World. He cites the definition of rationalisation as coined at the World Economic Conference in Geneva in 1927, which includes the passage that Huxley used as the epigraph to Brave New World: ‘the judicious and constant application of […] rationalisation is calculated to secure […] to the community greater stability and a higher standard of life’ (my emphasis).⁵² Within that last sentence are two of the three words that constitute the World State’s Motto: Community, Identity, Stability (BNW, 17). Each of these values is impressed on World State citizens negatively. Community in the World State is built through assigned state-controlled groups and a caste system; collective identity is imposed on these groups through sleep teaching, and stability is achieved as people behave according to the state-designed system.

In At Swim-Two-Birds the productivity of sleep is more complex. The bedroom is seen as the creative centre where the student and Trellis write their narratives, but neither is described positively in this bedroom space. Furthermore, and in contrast, Trellis’s characters Shanahan and Furriskey take advantage of the time when they have drugged Trellis so they can productively follow self-directed narratives as he sleeps. Ultimately it is the sleeper Trellis who is punished by his own characters in a nightmarish trial and this can be viewed as a moral lesson for the oppressor who exploits his workers. In Brave New World, sleep is a productive space for the World State where the government annihilates any capacity for independent thought in its citizens’ unconscious state. This is a fact of life for inhabitants of the World State as they know no other reality and simply embrace and regurgitate the statements they absorb. Sleep is the site of programming and the citizens are puppets at the mercy of the puppet masters, communicating according to state ventriloquism, using received words.

Biopower’s extensive impact can reach the reader through the very structure of At Swim-Two-Birds. Sleep is disconnected from any restful and restorative potential in O’Brien’s novel and instead it is allied with idleness and aversion to work or connected to characters’ negative traits. While Huxley and O’Nolan explore sleep as control in different ways, both focus on sleep’s entanglement with biopower and disempowerment. Within both novels, sleep can be harnessed as oppression or suppression, as a means of control and conditioning or, conversely, as escape and rebellion.

Food

Both novels begin and end with allusions to food or drink. The opening sentence of At Swim-Two-Birds refers to bread: ‘Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes’ chewing’ (ASTB, 1). The first page of Brave New World contains a reference to butter, ‘streak after luscious streak’ (BNW, 17). Both novels mention food or drink at the end. At Swim-Two-Birds closes with tea: ‘Well-known, alas, is the case of the poor German who was very fond of three and made each aspect of his life a thing of triads. He went home one evening and drank three cups of tea with three lumps of sugar in each cup’ (ASTB, 228). This framing underlines the importance of food and drink within the texts while also highlighting their unconventional treatment.

The most imaginative portrayal of food in At Swim-Two-Birds occurs at a point when the narrative is at its most fantastical, in the account of the journey of the Pooka and party; a tale within a tale that demonstrates rich, bountiful food gifts:

At approximately twenty past four p.m. they arrived at the Red Swan Hotel […] and deftly stacked the papered wallsteads with the colourful wealth of their offerings and fine gifts – their golden sheaves of ripened barley, firkins of curdy cheese, berries and acorns and crimson yams, melons and marrows and mellowed mast, variholed sponges of crisp-edged honey and oaten breads, earthenware jars of whey-thick sack and porcelain pots of lathery lager, sorrels and short-bread and coarse-grained cake, cucumbers cold and downy straw-laced cradles of elderberry wine poured out in sea-green egg-cups and urn-shaped tubs of molasses crushed and crucible with the lush brown-heavy scum of pulped mellifluous mushrooms, an exhaustive harvesting of the teeming earth, by God (ASTB, 141).

Adding to the fantastical tone are the colours and alliteration: ‘melons and marrows and mellowed mast’ and ‘mellifluous mushrooms.’ This description is at odds with that of the mundane food world of the student narrator, which is largely limited to bread, bacon, alcohol, and tea. The language used to describe the food foraged in nature is visually-rich, varied and appealing. It points to myth, folktales, and cultural heritage and stands in stark contrast to the simple fare available to the student narrator. Food is therefore part of O’Nolan’s means of structuring and demarcating worlds within his novel.

This also demonstrates the transformative dimension of food, where it can mute characterisation or accentuate it. Characters in Brave New World eat and drink collectively but the synthetic foodstuffs are secondary to leisure activities such as magnetic golf or group solidarity sessions and eating sheds no light on individual personality. In O’Nolan, the mealtime interactions of the student narrator and his uncle in At Swim-Two-Birds are used to describe characters’ attributes. For example, the uncle ‘speared a portion of cooked rasher against a crust on the prongs of his fork and poised the whole at the opening of his mouth in a token of continued interrogation’ and ‘put the point of his fork into the interior of his mouth and withdrew it again, chewing in a coarse manner’ (ASTB, 2). Brillat-Savarin writes ‘tell me what you eat, and I’ll tell you who you are,’⁵³ which is a biopolitical means of viewing society, and here the student’s perception of his uncle’s identity is tied to how he eats inferior-quality bacon. The fact that he is eating bacon could be connected with O’Nolan’s use of the pig elsewhere in his writing, particularly as Maebh Long has observed in An Béal Bocht, where the pig is used to represent Ireland as backward in terms of language, behaviour, and habits.⁵⁴ Through describing the uncle in such unflattering terms in this first scene, O’Nolan highlights what and how the uncle eats, with this image of negative transformation remaining with the reader throughout the novel. The transformative dimension of food can be connected to the concept of metamorphosis in literature as discussed by Foucault, which reflects evolving structures of knowledge and power.

Bacon (rashers) is the most commonly mentioned food after bread in At Swim-Two-Birds. The student narrator’s friend Shanahan mentions bacon when they are at the pub socialising to highlight that alcohol can be a good substitute for food: ‘When food is scarce and your larder bare/And no rashers grease your pan/When hunger grows as your meals are rare – A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN’ (ASTB, 75). Bacon has been used positively in other narratives to capture the joy of eating real versus engineered food. For instance, at the end of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the protagonist Guy Montag eats bacon at a campfire with a group of exiled intellectuals: ‘The bacon began to flutter and dance in the pan and the sputter of it filled the morning air with its aroma.’⁵⁵ Cooking and eating bacon is the focal point of the group coming together and sharing their exile and the experience emphasises commensality. A further signifier of eating together is bread, which Rose Williamson discusses in detail, including the concept of bread as literal earnings, daily bread, and as a metonym for all food. She shows that bread has a cross cultural reach: ‘[b]read’s role as a staple food has paradoxically made it both sacred and banal […] it is holy, and yet humble.’⁵⁶ When he complains about the economic state of the nation in At Swim-Two-Birds, the Good Fairy mentions bread first: ‘[t]hey have the country crippled with their strikes. Look at the price of bread. Sixpence halfpenny for a two-pound loaf […] And look at bacon. One and ninepence if you please’ (ASTB, 122). The ubiquity, quality, and price of bread at a given time provides an insight into society; the timeless dimension of bread and its breadth of representation denotes community, economics, hardship, and survival.

There is some overlap in the two novels of specific foods, such as milk and honey, although these occur less frequently in Brave New World. There are four instances of ‘milk’: the ‘smell of sour-milk’ and Mustapha Mond’s disgusted description of how a mother tended her child and sang to it ‘Till at last my baby sleeps, my baby sleeps with a bubble of white milk at the corner of his mouth. My little baby sleeps’ (BNW, 50). The provision of milk is mentioned twice, first at the beginning of chapter 5 – ‘From the grounds of the Internal and External Secretion Trust came the lowing of those thousands of cattle which provided, with their hormones and their milk, the raw materials for the great factory at Farnham Royal’ – and finally in relation to Lenina trying to seduce John the Savage – ‘For those milk paps that through the window bars bore at men’s eyes’ (BNW, 83, 201). There are seven instances of ‘honey,’ and as in At Swim-Two-Birds, ‘honey’ is often used in Brave New World descriptively or as a term of endearment sung in seduction, but never in relation to food: ‘hug me till you drug me, honey […] Hug me, honey, snuggly bunny’ (BNW, 130). The same song was played in the hospital while John’s mother Linda lay in bed, where it occurs in ‘sunshine lay like warm honey’ (BNW, 51). Milk and honey are referenced figuratively and metaphorically in At Swim-Two-Birds, ‘like the wispy suds of milk when it is boiling over on a hob’ – an unlikely description of the effect of light on a game of cards – and ‘they saw Sweeny in the branches and then they talked their honeywords, beseeching him that he should be trustful’ (ASTB, 93). ‘Honey’ is used repeatedly as an adjective in ‘honey-talk/-tongued/-glutted/-yellow,’ and the ‘honeyed discourse of sweet Irish’ (ASTB, 24).

It is noteworthy that O’Nolan and Huxley tend to use milk and honey descriptively in their narratives because the pairing is weighted symbolically and metaphorically. The ‘land of milk and honey’ is a biblical idiom from Exodus and represents a fertile place of nourishment, spiritual life, and prosperity. It also appears in Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Squarings xlv,’ where souls are reunited in an ‘arcadian land of milk and honey.’⁵⁷ Its predominant metaphorical use in O’Nolan and Huxley underlines the lack of opportunity for citizens of the World State and Trellis’s characters to achieve either bodily nourishment or spiritual potential. This ironically references the biblical meaning where boundless flowing of milk and honey does not exist in either novel. Instead the texts allude to food scarcity and limitation as a biopolitical constraint or means of control.

Food is a form of power that highlights the social dynamic of power relations in that ‘those who regulate its production, distribution and consumption can control others.’⁵⁸ Controlling human ingestion is acutely evident in Brave New World, where alongside the production of synthetic food, the drug soma is rationed and distributed to workers as a daily incentive to ensure they remain docile and compliant under state-control. It has been noted that food in dystopian fiction is often an emblem of authority and dominance.⁵⁹ Food functions as a symbol of power in Brave New World too, where the state permits the population to eat only synthetic meat and drink. One manifestation of biopower is in the ‘biological processes tied to food production and consumption.’⁶⁰ Biopolitics is the wider governance and guidance on food around dietary guidelines and farming regulation. It is the hierarchy that controls food structures. Everything in the World State is fabricated and engineered, from the food to the people themselves. In At Swim-Two-Birds, the biopolitical food landscape is informed by the limited foods available as well as food scarcity, price, and references to inferior quality.

Sociologically, food is relational and the preparation and sharing of a meal ‘is an age-old way of making friends and allies.’⁶¹ The sociology of food revolves around representations and meanings with food seen as an important ‘factor in determining how we see ourselves and others.’⁶² But this dimension is restricted in the context of biopolitics, which is dominated by ‘surveillance, control, and regulation in the food system.’⁶³ How can citizens be effectively controlled if they are enriching their everyday lives and relationships through the symbolic and sensory material of food? In this context, the cultural dimension of food is necessarily diminished to ensure efficacy of control as Brave New World illustrates.

Food centres on practices that shape shared and individual identity. Meals inform daily life, creating rhythm and moments of pause. However, the position of meals as a means of organising time is complicated in these novels: there are far more pervasive forms of social structuration and control at play in Brave New World, and there are multiple temporalities, narrative strands, and character layers in At Swim-Two-Birds, where it seems no one is running to the same schedule. Food’s traditional structuring dimension is only evident in the mealtime interactions between the student and his uncle. Food, drink, and mind/mood-altering drugs feature in the writings of Huxley and O’Nolan to differentiate between contexts such as the Reservation and the World State, the Uncle’s home, and foraged foods in nature. In Brave New World, the everyday presence of the drug ‘soma’ overshadows, and almost silences, citizens’ experience of food and eating, as soma is used to sedate and control the population. Engineered, futuristic-sounding food is widely distributed: ‘pan-glandular biscuits, vitaminized beef-surrogate’ (BNW, 254) and ‘caffeine solutions’ (BNW, 212). The name of each item has a recognisable food aspect and an ultra-processed dimension. The protagonist John Savage, rejecting this fare, seeks to return to nature by buying seeds and flour and planning to hunt rabbits and water-fowl.

Huxley and O’Nolan repeatedly disrupt the structuring and temporal dimensions of food to undermine its social and relational potential. Both novels eschew the rhythm of daily food events and this creates a dislocated food landscape of unlikely elements, where characters are left without meaningful sustenance and social opportunities.

Governmentality, Control, and Resistance

In both novels food varies significantly across contexts. Food is natural in the New Mexico Reservation in Brave New World yet engineered and artificial in the World State. Likewise, food is largely limited to bread, sandwiches, tea, bacon, and alcohol in the Dublin of At Swim-Two-Birds, but a remarkable array of foods is talked about, sourced, and foraged in nature in the novel.

In Brave New World food is unpredictable in its natural state and therefore difficult to control and govern. Natural foods are connected with the past, history, and memory. Engineered, synthetic foods are promoted as progressive: the food of the future. Generally food is absent in the novel, stemming from the World State’s forms of control that interrupt the ways that meals structure life for most citizens. Consequently there is little sense of commensality and food’s relational dimension. There are only two instances of the word ‘food’ that refer to edible food, and both are voiced by Mustapha Mond when he is promoting engineered food: ‘we could synthesize every morsel of food if we wanted to. But we don’t. We prefer to keep a third of the population on the land. For their own sakes – because it takes longer to get food out of the land than out of a factory’ (BNW, 232). In the same way that intellectual activity and cultural pursuits are discouraged as they provoke sensory and sentimental responses, so too foodstuffs are sanitised, engineered, and of limited variety as they are designed to promote conformity.

There is a third instance of the word ‘food,’ but not an edible type. Instead it references Lenina’s youthful appearance ‘an angel in bottle-green viscose, lustrous with youth and skin food, plump, benevolently smiling’ (BNW, 149). This description denotes John Savage’s impression of Lenina, and the ‘skin food’ portrayal sees Huxley anticipate the economic leviathan of the skincare industry. ‘Bottle-green,’ ‘skin food,’ and ‘plump’ all simultaneously point to the sensory and food-adjacent dimension of skincare, where colours, scents, and effects are borrowed from food and the natural world yet engineered to fill, boost, and plump. Lenina is living proof of the potential of engineered eugenics and a specimen who is fastidious in maintaining her hair and skin while curating her appearance to maximise its appeal. The inedible dimension of this third instance of food highlights Lenina’s role as a signifier of consumerism, eugenics, and the engineered World State.

The food listed in the book consists of vitamin A paté, carotene sandwiches, ‘pan-glandular biscuits, vitaminized beef-surrogate,’ and raspberry soma sundaes (as previously referenced), while babies consume ‘pasteurised external secretions’ (BNW, 254). The only unprocessed and unmodified food is that eaten on the New Mexico Reservation and that John plans to cultivate at the end of the book when he goes into exile in the abandoned lighthouse. Foods referenced on the Reservation include tortillas and sweet corn. Tortillas are mentioned twice, once when John is telling Bernard of his memory of his mother and Popé (‘They had eaten a lot of tortillas and sweet corn’) and later when it is remarked that ‘there was nothing to eat except cold tortillas’ (BNW, 137). Corn is mentioned most (eight instances), for example, in the Corn Song the men sing at the Reservation, ‘a pinch of corn meal lay white in his palm,’ and the Corn Dances (BNW, 145). Within the Reservation, living off the land is embedded in daily life. The foods eaten are very limited and simple, yet the corn crop is mentioned in relation to the meal in his hand, the sweet corn harvested, and the songs and dances around the reaping. Huxley demonstrates how dangerous one simple crop can be in terms of bringing people together in tending, harvesting, and sharing their produce. It becomes the essence of sociality and commensality, yet it is challenging to govern and control.

John’s intention to live off the land at the end of the book is controversial in the context of independence versus social participation. His planned self-sufficiency negates some of the potential for state control. He buys pots and pans, 24 packets of seeds, and 10 kilos of wheat flour. He hopes to survive through growing food in his garden and hunting. By the end of the novel, however, he himself becomes a figure of curiosity to the World State citizens and they come out to view him, offering him engineered food once again to his intense frustration: ‘Have a few magnesium-salted almonds! They’re really very good you know, and the magnesium salts will help keep you young’ (BNW, 263). Their gesture relates back to the idea of community self-policing that arises from biopower as the community itself tries to bring John back into conformity through this offering of food. The incident represents the underlying clash between community and the outsider that is underlined throughout the novel.

Conclusion

In Huxley and O’Nolan’s work the fundamentals of life are ambiguous, turned upside down, and divested of potential. Sleep is made restless and stripped of its comfort and restorative dimension; it is either managed or controlled, or serves as a time for characters to stage a trade union-style rebellion. Food is likewise stripped of its cultural richness, relational dimension, and commensality; it is limited to bread and bacon or to engineered surrogates. The pleasure of sleep and food is replaced by governmentality and control. The limitations of biopower imposed on sleep and food determine the landscape of the novels as sites of control and resistance. Sleep and food are treated imaginatively in the novels and their regulation and control permeates the societies in each context. Foucault’s theories have previously been employed to an extent in reading aspects of O’Nolan’s work in relation to biopower, authorship, and language, but this essay has furthered this scholarship in a first reading of biopower in At Swim-Two-Birds alongside Brave New World. The biopower within these novels, I would argue, is, as Fagan has observed of O’Nolan’s work, ‘trans-corporeal and affective.’⁶⁴ Both writers affect us bodily, as they get ‘under the skin’ and demand that the reader take notice of what is happening in these societies and to the characters. While biopower permeates these works of fiction, it is in its bodily form that it reaches out and grabs us, the readers, by the throat and asks if we are awake.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.