Brave New World

1 Aldous Huxley sBrave New WorldBloom s GUIDESCURRENTLY AVAILABLE1984 All the Pretty HorsesBelovedBrave New WorldCry, the Beloved CountryDeath of a SalesmanHamletThe Handmaid s TaleThe House on Mango StreetI Know Why the Caged Bird SingsThe Scarlet LetterTo Kill a MockingbirdAldous Huxley sBraveNew WorldEdited & with an Introduction by Harold BloomBloom s GUIDES 2004 by Chelsea House Publishers, a subsidiary of Haights 2004 by Harold rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the and bound in the United States of Printing1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataApplied ForISBN: 0-7910-7566-4 Chelsea House Publishers1974 Sproul Road, Suite 400 Broomall, PA editor: Aislinn GoodmanCover design by Takeshi TakahashiLayout by EJB Publishing ServicesContentsIntroduction7 Biographical Sketch 9 The Story Behind the Story12 List of Characters16 Summary and Analysis19 Critical Views 70 Peter Bowering on Huxley s Use of Soma70 Jerome Meckier on Huxley s Ironic Utopia72 Laurence Brander on the Mass Community 75 Peter Firchow on Satirical versus Futuristic Readings79 Ira Grushow on Brave New Worldand The Tempest82 Peter M.

2 Larsen on Huxley s Use of Synthetic Myths 85 Robert S. Baker on the Evolution of Huxley s Philosophy89 Rafeeq O. McGiveron on the Literary and Political Allusions behind Huxley s Choice of Names92 Guinevera A. Nance on the Limits of the Heroic 95 Malinda Snow on Huxley s Use of Thomas Gray s Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard 97 Works by Aldous Huxley101 Annotated Bibliography104 Contributors108 Acknowledgments110 Index1127 IntroductionHAROLD BLOOMIn his Foreword to a 1946 edition of Brave New World (1931),Aldous Huxley expressed a certain regret that he had writtenthe book when he was an amused, skeptical aesthete rather thanthe transcendental visionary he had since become. Fifteen yearshad brought about a World in which there were onlynationalistic radicals of the right and nationalistic radicals ofthe left, and Huxley surveyed a Europe in ruins after thecompletion of the Second World War.

3 Huxley himself hadfound refuge in what he always was to call the PerennialPhilosophy, the religion that is the conscious and intelligentpursuit of man s Final End, the unitive knowledge of theimmanent Tao or Logos, the transcendent godhead orBrahman. As he sadly remarked, he had given his protagonist,the Savage, only two alternatives: to go on living in the BraveNew World whose God is Ford (Henry), or to retreat to aprimitive Indian village, more human in some ways, but just aslunatic in others. The poor Savage whips himself into thespiritual frenzy that culminates with his hanging Huxley s literary remorse, it seems to me just as wellthat the book does not end with the Savage saving himselfthrough a mystical contemplation that murmurs That areThou to the Ground of All half-century after Huxley s Foreword, Brave New Worldis at once a bit threadbare, considered strictly as a novel, andmore relevant than ever in the era of genetic engineering,virtual reality, and the computer hypertext.

4 Cyberpunk sciencefiction has nothing to match Huxley s outrageous inventions,and his sexual prophecies have been largely fulfilled. Whetherthe Third Wave of a Gingrichian future will differ much fromHuxley s Brave New Worldseems dubious to me. A newtechnology founded almost entirely upon information ratherthan production, at least for the elite, allies Mustapha Mondand Newt Gingrich, whose orphanages doubtless can be geared8to the bringing up of Huxley s Bokanovsky groups. EvenHuxley s intimation that marriage licenses will be sold like doglicenses, good for a period of twelve months, was beingseriously considered in California not so long ago. It is truethat Huxley expected (and feared) too much from the peaceful uses of atomic energy, but that is one of his fewfailures in secular prophecy. The God of the ChristianCoalition may not exactly be Our Ford, but he certainly is theGod whose worship assures the World without end of Brave New Worldfor the first time in severaldecades, I find myself most beguiled by the Savage s passion forShakespeare, who provides the novel with much more than itstitle.

5 Huxley, with his own passion for Shakespeare, would nothave conceded that Shakespeare could have provided theSavage with an alternative to a choice between an insane utopiaand a barbaric lunacy. Doubtless, no one ever has been saved byreading Shakespeare, or by watching him performed, butShakespeare, more than any other writer, offers a possiblewisdom, as well as an education in irony and the powers oflanguage. Huxley wanted his Savage to be a victim orscapegoat, quite possibly for reasons that Huxley himself neverunderstood. Brave New World , like Huxley s earlier and betternovels Antic Hayand Point Counter Point, is still a vision of T. s Waste Land, of a World without authentic belief andspiritual values. The author of Heaven and Helland theanthologist of The Perennial Philosophyis latent in Brave NewWorld, whose Savage dies in order to help persuade Huxleyhimself that he needs a reconciliation with the mystical Groundof All SketchAldous Leonard Huxley was born on July 6, 1894, inGodalming in Surrey, England.

6 He came from a family ofdistinguished scientists and writers: his grandfather wasThomas Henry Huxley, the great proponent of evolution, andhis brother was Julian Sorrell Huxley, who became a leadingbiologist. Aldous attended the Hillside School in Godalmingand then entered Eton in 1908, but he was forced to leave in1910 when he developed a serious eye disease that left himtemporarily blind. In 1913 he partially regained his sight andentered Balliol College, 1915 Huxley became associated with a circle ofwriters and intellectuals who gathered at Lady OttolineMorell s home, Garsington Manor House, near Oxford; herehe met T. S. Eliot, Bertrand Russell, Osbert Sitwell, and otherfigures. After working briefly in the War Office, Huxleygraduated from Balliol in 1918 and the next year beganteaching at Eton. He was, however, not a success there anddecided to become a journalist.

7 Moving to London with hiswife Maria Nys, a Belgian refugee whom he had met atGarsington and married in 1919, Huxley wrote articles andreviews for the Athenaeumunder the pseudonym s first two volumes were collections of poetry, but itwas his early novels Crome Yellow(1921), Antic Hay(1923), andThose Barren Leaves(1925) that brought him to prominence. By1925 he had also published three volumes of short stories andtwo volumes of essays. In 1923 Huxley and his wife and sonmoved to Europe, where they traveled widely in France, Spain,and Italy. A journey around the World in 1925 26 led to thetravel book Jesting Pilate(1926), just as a later trip to CentralAmerica produced Beyond the Mexique Bay(1934). Point CounterPoint(1928) was hailed as a landmark in its incorporation ofmusical devices into the novel form. Huxley developed afriendship with D.

8 H. Lawrence, and from 1926 until Lawrence sdeath in 1930 Huxley spent much time looking after him duringhis illness with tuberculosis; in 1932 he edited Lawrence s 1930 Huxley purchased a small house in Sanary, insouthern France. It was here that he wrote one of his mostcelebrated volumes, Brave New World (1932), a negative utopiaor dystopia that depicted a nightmarish vision of the future inwhich science and technology are used to suppress became increasingly concerned about the state ofcivilization as Europe lurched toward war in the later 1930s: heopenly espoused pacifism and (in part through the influence ofhis friend Gerald Heard) grew increasingly interested inmysticism and Eastern philosophy. These tendencies wereaugmented when he moved to southern California in Heard and Christopher Isherwood, Huxley formed theVedanta Society of Southern California, and his philosophy wasembodied in such volumes as The Perennial Philosophy(1945)and Heaven and Hell(1956).

9 During World War II Huxley worked as a scenarist inHollywood, writing the screenplays for such notable films asPride and Prejudice(1941) and Jane Eyre(1944). This experienceled directly to Huxley s second futuristic novel, Ape and Essence(1948), a misanthropic portrait of a post-holocaust societywritten in the form of a California Huxley associated with Buddhist and Hindugroups, and in the 1950s he experimented with hallucinogenicdrugs such as LSD and mescalin, which he wrote about in TheDoors of Perception(1954). Brave New World Revisited(1958), abrief treatise that discusses some of the implications of hisearlier novel, continues to be very pessimistic about the futuresociety, particularly in the matters of overpopulation and thethreat of totalitarianism. But in Island(1962) the manuscriptof which Huxley managed to save when a brush fire destroyedhis home and many of his papers in 1961 he presents apositive utopia in which spirituality is developed in conjunctionwith in life Huxley received many honors, including anaward from the American Academy of Letters in 1959 andelection as a Companion of Literature of the British RoyalSociety of Literature in 1962.

10 His wife died in 1955, and the11next year he married Laura Archera, a concert violinist. AldousHuxley died of cancer of the tongue on November 22, 1963,the same day as John F. Kennedy and C. S. Story Behind the StoryAldous Huxley s decision to merge science with literatureseems an obvious choice when one considers his heritage. Bornin 1894 in Surrey, England, Huxley s father, Leonard Huxley,was editor of Cornhillmagazine, a literary journal thatpublished authors such as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy,Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning. His mother,Julia Arnold, was the niece of the poet Matthew Arnold, andher sister, Mary Humphrey Ward, was a popular novelist in herown right. Huxley s grandfather was the famous biologist T. , Charles Darwin s disciple and prot g . As it was proper for the son of two such distinguishedintellectual families, Huxley attended Eton with the hopes offollowing in the footsteps of his grandfather and elder brotherJulian by becoming a doctor and scientist.