From New France to a "Millennial Mall":
Identity Paradigms in Istvan Anhalt's Operas

By Nadya Zimmerman

In 1932 Aldous Huxley published Brave New World, a book that was widely popular with the San Francisco counterculture of the late 1960s. A futuristic fantasy, the novel depicts a horrifying totalitarian world of twenty-four-hour surveillance, complete mechanization, test-tube babies, and enforced cultural conformity. Amid this narrative, Huxley offers advice on how to stop civilization’s progress toward such a potential apocalypse—“[do] anything not to consume, [go] Back to Nature.”1 Huxley’s narrative enforces a dialectical relationship between consumerism and symbolic freedom in order to guarantee the success of Brave New World’s thesis. The tangible prospect of a technology-driven, inhuman future can only be stopped by a retreat to the utopia offered by nature, and this retreat to nature can only be achieved by not consuming.