Reconsidering Brave New World over 80 years after it was published, it now seems hard to believe that its singularly resourceful author felt while he was writing it that he had ‘hardly enough imagination’ (AHL 348) to do justice to its subject matter. Time would prove Aldous Huxley wrong. Brave New World has long been deemed one of the most inventive, enjoyable, multifaceted, and satirically impudent futurological fictions written during the twentieth century. It is a book readers and writers across the world have loved, abhorred, questioned, and imitated, goaded as much by its unforgettable anticipations as by its inevitable blind spots and inconsistencies. Brave New World fully deserves the praise of such figures as J.G. Ballard, who in 1998 judged it ‘a masterpiece of a novel’ that is ‘uncannily accurate in its prediction of the society we are now becoming: soma, feelies, test-tube babies.’ 1 And the remarkable prescience that Ballard identifies is only one aspect of the book’s enduring appeal. While Huxley’s prognostic ability continues to astonish new generations of readers, the book also rewards attentive querying of those predictions it makes which now seem strange, and of the problems it does not manage or even attempt to resolve. In short, Brave New World is a profoundly unsettled text. It appears ambivalent—sometimes even confused or confusing—in its attitudes towards power, freedom, and the nature of community. On the one hand it warns against despotism and on the other celebrates intelligent ruling elites. Readers are never quite sure whether it is a satirical swipe at the socio-economic, philosophical, and scientific wrongs, as Huxley saw them, of the 1920s and 1930s, or if it is a fairly candid broadcast of its author’s illiberal prejudices. Such contradictions have given the book a life beyond its historical moment. It continues to anger and energize its readers to this day.
To be sure, few readers would deny that the book reflects its author’s dismay about technological utopianism, hyper-industrialization, scientific progress, cultural decline, and the increasingly tyrannized subject positions available to human beings in the modern world. But in Brave New World Huxley queries, rather than simplistically plugs, his own ideological investments. Numerous scholars have shown that although strong correspondences exist between the opinions Huxley voiced in his non-fictional essays of the 1920s and 1930s and those put forth (explicitly or implicitly) in Brave New World, there is no simplistic ‘message’ to be extracted from the book, as Joseph Conrad would have it, like a nut from its shell. 2 A good example is the book’s attitude towards eugenics. Like many thinkers of his time, Huxley wrestled with this problem throughout the 1920s and 1930s, frequently articulating opinions about human life and human rights at a time when, to quote Bradshaw, ‘[m]any progressives envisaged eugenics as a humanitarian means of fast-forwarding to a better world’ (HH xv). Hence Robert S. Baker’s fair (if guarded) remark that while Huxley never adopted H.G. Wells’s ‘progressivist faith in science and technology, he did […] briefly entertain some notions that admittedly raise difficult and salient questions about his own tentative complicity in some of the darker aspects of social engineering.’ 3 Readers hoping unproblematically to place Brave New World on either side of the debate—as a straightforward attack upon or endorsement of eugenic principles—have a difficult task ahead of them, not least because when Huxley was writing the book he was still grappling with the elementary anxieties upon which the debate itself was founded. What makes the task more difficult still is our own historical distance from Huxley. As Aaron Matz reminds us in his essay on Huxley and reproduction in this volume, the Holocaust forever changed the ethical and political implications of eugenic thinking, making the pre-Second World War liberal enthusiasm for such bio-engineering appear today disconcerting if not downright outrageous. Such is only one of the many interpretive challenges Brave New World puts before its twenty-first-century readers.
Thus if any consensus emerges from the essays assembled in this volume, it is, as Patrick Parrinder suggests in the opening chapter, that the contradictions of Huxley’s novel are its greatest strength. It is probably wise to recognize that the novel may irritate some readers with an air of moralizing (what Parrinder calls its ‘didacticism’). Despite his quarrels with H.G. Wells, Huxley follows the older writer in unapologetically using fiction as a vehicle for intellectual argument. Yet the discursive or essayistic side of Huxley should not lead us to mischaracterize Brave New World as flatly propagandistic or monological. Time and again, the essays in this collection reveal to us a perplexing fictional text that appears multi-sided, contradictory, or dialectical. For Nathan Waddell, the book’s openly satirical attack on a technocratic state exists in an unresolved tension with a more subtle insistence on the role of experts and elites in managing modern problems of social and economic organization. For Laura Frost, the sexual traditionalism of Brave New World is undermined by a prurient excitement taken in the representation of perpetually youthful, hypersexual bodies—a representation that locates the novel surprisingly near to the sensationalistic mass-cultural entertainments it purports to condemn. For Keith Leslie Johnson, the fantasy of complete human mastery over nature paradoxically reveals that human existence, in the novel’s final analysis, is nothing but nature. Other contributors find similarly productive tensions in Brave New World’s representations of education, islands, competition, the management of human populations, and of course the nature and desirability of utopia itself. It is because of the value of such confusions and ambiguities that Jonathan Greenberg urges readers not to look past anachronistic details of the imagined future (whether card catalogs and telephone books or attitudes on race and gender) for the very reason that these anachronisms tether Huxley’s novel to its own ‘context’ and show us overlooked contradictions in the design of Huxley’s imaginary future society.
In subtitling this book ‘Contexts and Legacies’ we mean to signal that these tensions and paradoxes become most visible when we situate Brave New World in a multiplicity of contexts and trace from it a plurality of legacies—many of which have been understudied. Two important, overlapping trajectories to recognize up front are the location of the text in Huxley’s oeuvre and its placement in relation to the works of his contemporaries. The Orwellian ‘context’ is important here, providing an enduring critical heritage in which Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) are celebrated, rightly, as two of the twentieth century’s most perceptive and persuasive investigations of state power and individual dissent. Yet the foregrounding of Orwell with regard to Huxley can disguise other narrative relationships which are no less important and in some cases more interesting. Comparisons between Huxley and the writings of Wells, for instance, let us mark out the influence of a predecessor for whom Huxley had a shifting respect but whose formative stimulus upon Brave New World is undeniable. As several commentators have noted, Huxley’s World Controllers share many qualities with the Samurai class outlined by Wells in A Modern Utopia (1905), the ruling elite whose ‘widely sustained activities […] had shaped and established the World State’ (MU 176) that Wells’s book examines in such detail (see also HH 31–43). And behind Wells stands the entire late-Victorian boom of utopian fiction, through which nineteenth-century utilitarianism and technologism, with their faith in science and progress, were articulated (and sometimes subjected to critique). 4 Likewise, tracing links between Brave New World and its forerunners in Huxley’s own body of work—not only but perhaps especially in his essays of the 1920s and early 1930s, and in his ‘discussion novel’ Crome Yellow (1921), where the Wellsian Mr Scogan discourses on the shape of a future ‘Rational State’—helps us to view Brave New World less as a one-hit wonder in his career and more as a palimpsestic recapitulation of issues that had concerned him throughout his adult life. Huxley’s essays (cited liberally by many of this volume’s contributors) reveal the persistence and depth of his intellectual concerns, while Crome Yellow, with its over-earnest poet-protagonist Denis Stone, reminds us that Huxley learned early in his career the value of satirizing his own satiric observer—a technique he would use in Brave New World to complicate readers’ assessments of Bernard Marx and John the Savage.
Prioritizing these particular contexts, however, means downplaying or ignoring others. It is therefore worth insisting here that ‘contexts’ and ‘legacies’ are always contingent, and that the terms cast light on and define each other. ‘[B]eginnings’, writes Edward Said, ‘have to be made for each project in such a way as to enable what follows from them’, and the same truth applies to contexts: the choices we make in selecting the contexts in which we situate a work will determine how we view its legacies. 5 And while such a claim may be true to a degree of all literary texts, the future setting and utopian themes of Brave New World explicitly foreground the relationship of contexts and legacies—the interplay of pasts, presents, and futures. No one asks whether the world that Virginia Woolf creates in To the Lighthouse (1927) has come true; everyone asks this of the reality Huxley constructs in Brave New World. That is to say, the comprehensive fictional imagination of a planetary future charges the reader to consider how contemporary developments, even seemingly evanescent fads, may unfold over decades or centuries. At the same time, fantasies of our individual or collective futures—shot through with comic exaggeration or fanciful adornment—can disclose to us our own self-image and our own present in ways that may be unavailable to a more sober or restrained realism.
Certainly the critical heritage of the novel affirms that the selection of different contexts has enabled different generations of readers to interpret the text and its legacies in contrasting ways. For instance, Adorno summarized an enduring tradition of reading Brave New World as a critique of consumerism and standardization when he wrote about its ‘perception of the universal similarity of everything mass-produced, things as well as human beings’, and about Huxley’s conviction that under the conditions of capitalism men and women are relentlessly worn down until they become ‘deindividualized products of the corporations’ absolute power’ (AHU 98). But although the theoretician Adorno is typically invoked to explain (indeed to critique) Huxley the novelist, Huxley’s impact on Adorno and his colleagues was arguably stronger and more direct than is generally acknowledged. In June Deery’s words, ‘[b]efore the Frankfurt School decamped and brought their distrust of mass culture to America in the mid-1930s, Huxley was railing about the central nexus of media/entertainment, consumerism, and social conformity’. 6 Laura Frost’s essay in this book reminds us that Adorno—along with Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Bertolt Brecht—took part in a 1942 seminar on Huxley held at the Institute on Social Research in Los Angeles, and that Brave New World proved highly provocative to an entire cluster of mid-century ‘Freudo-Marxist’ thinkers. These thinkers, in other words, constitute not only a context for reading Huxley but also a legacy emerging from his work. There remains much to be explored about Huxley’s relation to one of the twentieth century’s most significant bodies of social analysis, and while several contributors here sign on to Adorno’s criticism of Huxley as insufficiently materialist, Andrzej Gąsiorek’s chapter mounts a fierce defence of the novel against what he sees as Adorno’s ideological over-reaching.
Probably the only theme in Brave New World criticism more prominent than the phenomenon of standardization that occupied both Huxley and his Frankfurt School associates has been that of utopia and totalitarianism. (U...