アウラの消滅 : オルダス・ハクスリー『すばらしい新世界』

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The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that Brave New World powerfully expresses Aldous Huxley's grave anxieties that Walter Benjamin's idea of the "aura" for the quality of uniqueness pos-sessed by the individual will be obliterated by the reproductive process of standardized mass production. This paper first examines Huxley's radical vision of embryo culture, as portrayed in the opening section of the novel: Podsnap's Technique and Bokanovsky's Process. The former refers to the method of immensely accelerating the maturation of ova, ensuring the production of at least 150 within a two-year period. The latter utilizes X-rays to trigger the process of embryo budding, which produces up to 96 identical embryos. The combination of both technologies allows one ovary to yield an average of nearly four-teen thousand embryos in 150 batches of identical twins. In the Bottling Room, each bottled embryo is placed on a conveyor belt and manipulated both chemically and environmentally, until the fetuses are "decanted" on the 267th day. Secondly, this paper indicates the source of the scientific back-ground of Huxley's novel. An English physiologist-geneticist J. B.S. Haldane whose work is Daedalus, or Science and the Future may have exercised a direct influence on several important features of Huxley's future state. The very core of Daedalus is the potential effect of the practical applications of modern biology on human society. Ectogenesis, or gestation outside the body of a woman in an artificial womb, is one such biological invention. Here Haldane, under the disguise of a "rather stupid" Cambridge undergraduate of the 21st century, tells of the fantastic development of ectogenesis. He goes on to predict that the abolition of disease will make death a physiological event like sleep. It is evident that Haldane's image of ectogenesis is considered as a possible inspiration for Huxley's vision. Thirdly, special attention is paid to a most striking line in the opening passage of the novel: "Embryos are like photograph film." It means that the development of embryos bears a close parallel to the photographic development process in that each is best carried on under dim light. It is Susan Squire who can convince us of the link between the disappearance of the individual uniqueness produced by Huxley's audacious new inventions and the loss of the aura addressed in Benjamin's famous essay on the modern art. The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard is another important person who takes into consideration the connection between Benjamin's idea and a debased humanity resulting from human cloning. He points out the denaturing of the human body and calls into question the totalized notion of human being. "Technically and ideologically we are still a long way from bottled babies. But who knows what may not be happening?"-this is a passage from Huxley's foreword to Brave New World. Tojudge from the present situation of the reproductive revolution, it would be no exaggeration to say that we may be approaching the dystopian vision of the reproductive technology embodied so force-fully in Huxley's text.

アウラの消滅 : オルダス・ハクスリー『すばらしい新世界』

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