• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 569 0

Huxley produced at the same time as his novel, and his retrospective accounts of why he wrote it and what it means, can either be attended to in unison or left to speak for themselves. But whatever interpretation the reader favours, it seems more than likely that the composition of Brave New World proved so problematic for Huxley between April and August 1931 because he was unsure in his own mind whether he was writing a satire, a prophecy or a blueprint. When a journalist asked him in 1935 whether his ultimate sympathies were with 'the savage's aspirations or with the ideal of conditioned stability', Huxley is reported to have replied, 'With neither, but I believe some mean between the two is both desirable and possible and must be our objective.' Significantly, a letter which Huxley wrote to his father in late August 1931 announcing the completion of a 'comic, or at least satirical, novel about the Future' concluded with him declaring that he felt 'more and more certain that unless the rest of the world adopts something on the lines of the Five Year Plan, it will break down'. In his 1946 Foreword to Brave New World Huxley makes no reference to the appeal which planning and eugenics held for him at the time he wrote the novel. Hitler and the 'Final Solution' had made all such ideas unthinkable and by then Huxley had long since forsaken them. Instead, the Foreword and Brave New World Revisted (1958) emphasise the novel's prophetic awareness of the 'nightmarish' future which the hegemony of Soviet Communism seemed to portend.

One of the great strengths of Brave New World is that it is hard to dissect, it resists categorical interpretation. For instance in an article published in May 1931, D.H. Lawrence described how New Mexico changed him 'for ever' by liberating him from the 'great era of material and mechanical development'. Huxley's Savage Reservation appears to owe much to this essay, The Plumed Serpent (1926), and Mornings in Mexico (1927). In these works Lawrence continually draws a distinction between the aboriginal Americans, who had held on to the 'animistic' soul of man, and the democratic citizens of the Ford-infested United States. Brave New World seems to employ the same distinction, and Huxley even uses one of Lawrence's favourite words, 'obsidian', to describe the wrinkled face of a Pueblo Indian. Lawrence died in 1930, and Huxley brought out an edition of the letters of his friend and fellow novelist in 1932. In preparing it, Huxley would have come across further vivid evidence of what New Mexico meant for Lawrence. In part, Brave New World certainly can be construed as another tribute to Lawrence, but, as with so many aspects of the novel, the situation is not quite as uncomplicated as it seems. Huxley was not, in fact, sympathetic to Lawrence's 'regressive' celebration of primitive cultures, and when the Savage flings himself against 'a clump of hoary juniper bushes' in the last chapter of the novel, the incident seems more a send-up of Birkin's naked gambol in the prickly undergrowth in Women in Love than a moment of allusive homage to Lawrence. Similarly, as a 'very stout blonde', Linda bears more than a passing resemblance to Frieda Lawrence, who spent the rest of her life in New Mexico after her husband's death, and with whom Huxley had grown distinctly irritated while assembling Lawrence's letters.

Those who would read the Savage Reservation as the human, warts-and-all antithesis of the inhuman World State, must also recognise that John and Linda's ostracism amidst the racial prejudice of Malpais ('They disliked me for my complexion,' John tells Bernard and Lenina when they first meet at the ritual flagellation in Chapter VII. 'It's always been like that.') is far more intolerable than the predicament of Bernard Marx and Helmholtz Watson in the World State. Unorthodox behaviour is punished more brutally in New Mexico than in London, and are the totemism and mescal of Malpais any more than the crude counterparts of the World State's Fordism and soma} Conversely, the sanitised elysium of A.F. 632 is