Huxley’s Brave New World: Essays Huxley’s Brave New World: Essays edited by DAVID GARRETT IZZO and KIM KIRKPATRICK McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Jefferson, North Carolina, and London McFarland has also published the following works: W. H. Auden Encyclopedia (2004), Christopher Isherwood Encyclopedia (2005), and The Writings of Richard Stern: The Education of an Intellectual Everyman (2002), by David Garrett Izzo. Henry James Against the Aesthetic Movement: Essays on the Middle and Late Fiction (2006), edited by David Garrett Izzo and Daniel T. O’Hara. Stephen Vincent Benét: Essays on His Life and Work (2003), edited by David Garrett Izzo and Lincoln Konkle. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Huxley’s Brave new world : essays / edited by David Garrett Izzo and Kim Kirkpatrick. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-¡3 978-0-7864-3683-5 softcover : 50# alkaline paper ¡. Huxley, Aldous, ¡894–¡963. Brave new world. 2. Huxley, Aldous, ¡894–¡963—Political and social views. 3. Huxley, Aldous, ¡894–¡963—Philosophy. 4. Dystopias in literature. I. Izzo, David Garrett. II. Kirkpatrick, Kim, ¡962– PR60¡5.U9B675 2008 823'.9¡2—dc22 20080¡3463 British Library cataloguing data are available ©2008 David Garrett Izzo. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover illustration ©2008 Shutterstock Manufactured in the United States of America McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Box 6¡¡, Je›erson, North Carolina 28640 www.mcfarlandpub.com Carol A. Corrody, spirit-catcher, Laura Archera Huxley, for This Timeless Moment, and Aldous Huxley for his inspiration in art and life —D.G.I. For the funny little man—K.K. Contents Introduction (DAVID GARRETT IZZO)1 The Nonconformers Pause and Say: “There’s Gotta Be Something More” (COLEMAN CARROLL MYRON)11 Political Repression and Sexual Freedom in Brave New World and ¡984 (GAVIN MILLER)17 Oedipus Against Freud: Humanism and the Problem of Desire in Brave New World (BRADLEY W. BUCHANAN)26 Some Kind of Brave New World: Humans, Society and Nature in the Dystopian Interpretations of Huxley and Orwell (ANGELO ARCIERO)46 “Laboring for a Brave New World: Our Ford and the Epsilons” (SCOTT PELLER)62 Words Have to Mean Something More: Folkloric Reading in Brave New World (SEAN A. WITTERS)73 Brave New World and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (JOHN COUGHLIN)88 “O brave new world that has no poets in it”: Shakespeare and Scientific Utopia in Brave New World (PAUL SMETHURST)96 The Birth of Tragedy and the Dionysian Principle in Brave New World (KIM KIRKPATRICK)107 To Reflect, to Sit Down: The Hinzutretende and Huxleyan Characters in Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s Philosophy (ANGELA HOLZER)117 Brave New World as Prototypical Musicalized Fiction (THEO GARNEAU)132 Deconstructing the Savage Reservation in Brave New World (KATHERINE TOY MILLER)145 vii viii Contents The Eternal Now of Brave New World: Huxley, Joseph Campbell, and The Perennial Philosophy (ROBERT COMBS)161 “Everyone Belongs to Everyone Else”: The Influence of Brave New World on Cinema (JAMES FISHER)172 About the Contributors 183 Index 187 Introduction DAVID GARRETT IZZO Brave New World (¡932) is perhaps the most influential novel of the twen- tieth century if one sees its impact as not exclusively literary. Huxley’s inten- tions were social, political, economic, psychological, scientific, philosophical, and then literary. Many of the ideas in this “novel of ideas” came from his volu- minous essays written in the ten years prior to its publication. The influence is wide and deep. For example, admirers of the philosophy of Horkheimer and Adorno, particularly their essay “The Culture Industry,” are actually influenced by Huxley, whom Horkheimer and Adorno read. There is an academic Aldous Huxley Society with a home base in Muenster, Germany, that appreciates his impact on our world and spreads the gospel of Huxley through a book-length Huxley Annual and a conference every year so that he will not be forgotten. His friend and fellow philosopher Gerald Heard called Huxley “The Poignant Prophet” (¡0¡), and he was certainly a godfather of the New Age. With all of his accomplishments, perhaps the most enduring was how endearing he was to those who knew him and adored his wit, his kindness, and, finally, his pro- found humanity, which is behind his writing of Brave New World. Huxley was the man in British literature in the ¡920s, much more so than Eliot was, although Eliot’s reputation has fared better since then. Huxley’s influence was enormous, directly and indirectly. In the U.K. and U.S., under- graduates made sure to read him in the ¡920s. When Christopher Isherwood was a student at Cambridge, his mid–¡920s Mortmere story, “Prefatory Epis- tle to my Godson on the Study of History,” has a Mr. Starn proclaim, sound- ing Huxleyesque, that “man is the sole and supreme irrelevance. He is without method, without order, without proportion. His childish passions, enthusi- asms, and beliefs are unsightly protuberances in the surface of the Universal Curve.” (¡7¡). Starn also warns his godson to be skeptical of the New Testa- ment, saying: “I refer to this exploded forgery with all due reference to Profes- sor Pillard, who has, by the Historical Method, clearly proved that it is the work of Mr. Aldous Huxley” (¡7¡ footnote). The cult of Aldous Huxley was afoot as he dared to write down what other artists and intellectuals would have loved to have said, particularly regarding class pretension and snobbishness. Indeed, his subject matter itself was inno- vative—and widely imitated. Isherwood’s first two novels in ¡928 and ¡932 are Huxleyesque attacks on the bourgeois middle and upper classes—or, as Isher- 1 2 Introduction wood called them, “the Others.” Later, in Isherwood and Auden’s ¡935 satirical play, The Dog Beneath the Skin, it is clear from the following lines that they had read Huxley’s Brave New World: “No family love. Sons would inform against their fathers, cheer- fully send them to the execution cellars. No romance. Even the peasant must beget that standard child under laboratory conditions. Motherhood would be by license. Truth and Beauty would be pro- scribed as dangerously obstructive. No books, no art, no music” (¡67). Huxley in the ¡920s and ¡930s was a marked man by “the Others” who considered him the most cyn- Aldous Huxley circa ¡960 (Library of Con- ical of the postwar cynics. gress, Prints and Photographs Division, Huxley’s novels of ideas are NYWT&S Collection, [LC-USZ62-¡¡9¡53]). always about moral dilemmas that need to be sorted out. In the ¡920s his characters wallow in the philosophy of meaninglessness with sarcasm as their defense veiling a prevalent despair. The characters secretly—or openly—seek a vehicle that can give meaning to a world that has realized that science, technology, and industry are not the answers. Huxley’s protagonists evolve as either upward seekers of the perennial philos- ophy of mysticism, or they devolve into an even greater disa›ected nihilism. Brave New World was a warning of a future 600 years hence that is already here. The title comes from Shakespeare: O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in’t! The Tempest How influential is Huxley’s Brave New World? The title, while from The Tempest, is recognized today as being from Huxley’s novel—these three words are a catchphrase for any person or idea that is cutting edge and may have a possible positive/negative duality. If one Googles “brave new world” (as of ¡¡ May 2006) there are 953,000 hits and the majority are not about Huxley’s novel. Examples: “The Brave New World of Customer Centricity,” “Mental Health Review, Brave New World,” “Iraq embraces a brave new world of democracy,” Introduction (IZZO)3 “Brave New World Astrology Alive!,” “The Brave New World of E-Showbiz,” “Computer Intelligence: A Brave New World,” “Politics in a Brave New World,” “Koreans Discover Brave New World of Blog,” “Brave New World Surf Shop.” No other twentieth-century novel title on this planet has become such a ubiq- uitous term. The meaning of the phrase as Huxley intended is now both ubiq- uitous and threatening. Huxley’s world is already upon us. Huxley himself recognized it long before the year 2000, first in his introduction to the ¡946 edition of Brave New World, and then in book-length form for ¡958’s nonfiction reevaluation Brave New World Revisited. This novel, the precursor for the modern genre of science fiction,is still telling the future; the threats it depicts are now more reality than fantasy. “[B]rave new man will be cursed to acquire precisely what he wished for only to discover—painfully and too late—that what he wished for is not exactly what he wanted. Or, Huxley implies … he may be so dehumanized that he will not even recognize that in aspiring to be perfect he is no longer even human” (Kass, 52). In Huxley’s Brave New World the duality of reason and passion is explic- itly out of balance. There is no emotional passion whatsoever. The world is run by Mustapha Mond. “John the Savage” enters this world and almost turns it upside down. To follow, the two square o›. Mond: “The world’s stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get. They’re well o›; they’re safe; they’re never ill; they’re not afraid of death; they’re blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they’re plagued with no moth- ers 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.