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Aldous Leonard Huxley (1894-1963)
Brave New World
First Perennial Classics ed. NY: Harper, 1998. ISBN: 0-06-092987-1.
[Orig. ed., Harper, 1932.]
The thesis revolves around a dual meaning of "A.F" - "After Ford" and "After Freud" - in the dating of Aldous Huxley's fictional society of 632 A.F. "After Ford" relates to Henry Ford's invention of the automobile in 1908, year one of the Brave New World's dating system. Huxley's fictional society employs genetic engineering in a Fordian-type factory featuring an assembly line of bottled humans, literally in-vitro from conception until "decanting." This industrial production of human beings determines the proportion of classes, a concern that reflects Huxley's interest in population control, an interest that incorporates fadish Malthusian belts into his fictional culture. Both eugenics and dysgenics produce a caste system of Alphas, Betas, Gammas, and Epsilons, respectively declining in intelligence and physiognomy. Deltas and Epsilons are content to do the menial work because of specialized conditioning, but Alphas and Betas, the leaders of this society, more intelligent and potentially capable of exercising discretion, are more unpredictable. John, the "Savage," born and raised in a New Mexico Pueblo society, the son of an Alpha father and Beta mother, becomes the focus of the "After Freud" branch of the thesis. The shift in setting, halfway into the book, to the Pueblo Reservation, a museum-like attraction for Alpha vacationers, also shifts the thematic focus to its Freudian aspects. As a child, the Savage resents his sexually promiscuous mother's relationship with a Pueblo man, Popé. The Pueblo women object to her similar relationship with their husbands, and whip her in her bed. Little John bites the hand of one of the furious women, and he experiences some of the whipping, as well. As a teenager, the Savage attempts to murder Popé, drunk in his mother's bed. By this means, John the Savage is characterized with an Oedipus complex. Lacking the behavior conditioning and hypnopaedia of his mother, Linda, but emotionally attached to her, the Savage returns with her to the Brave New World. In this society, "Mother" is an obscene word, and the family is obsolete. The Savage scandalizes this society by grieving over his mother's death and by refusing to indulge in soma, the drug which conditioned his mother to accept the Pueblo intoxicant, mescaline, and contributed to her death. Soma is a mind-altering drug, which supplements the behavior conditioning and hypnopaedia that has "brainwashed" the people from bottle - predecanting - through infancy and childhood. Huxley interjects this topic of drugs, an aspect of his own life that became part of his own death, under the influence of LSD. Huxley was influencial in the drug cult of California in the 1960s, and he was a leader at the conference in Sweden in 1963 that recommended drug-induced mysticism. Soma, like the "feelies" - films with physiological effects - produce numbing or cathartic effects. Promiscuous sexual activity and pseudo-religious ceremonies ending in orgies drain the aggressiveness that might otherwise endanger the social structure. The Savage illustrates the masochistic and sadistic effects of the Oedipal complex: he whips and murders Lenina, and he practices flagellation, which he learned in the Pueblo culture, supposedly a mixture of ancient Pueblo and Christian penitentes cultures. After a self-inflicted flagellation, the Savage succumbs to a soma-orgy event, then commits suicide by hanging. Huxley's last view of John the Savage is swinging clockwise, then counterclockwise at the end of a rope, hanging from a stairwell. His demise is the consequence of the Brave New World social system and his Freudian complexes.
Abbott, Faith. "What Would Surprise Aldous Huxley?" The Human Life Review 20.2 (Spring 1994): 65-77. Expanded Academic.
"The theme of Brave New World is not the advancement of science as it affects human individuals.... The only scientific advances to be specifically described are those involving the application to human beings of the results of future research in biology, physiology and psychology. It is only by means of the sciences of life that the quality of life can be radically changed." [Aldous Huxley, "Foreword," Brave New World (1946), quoted by Abbott]
"About the 'sexual promiscuity' in Brave New World ... Huxley says it doesn't seem so very distant because 'there are already certain American cities in which the number of divorces is equal to the number of marriages.' ... What would Huxley ... say about the Reproduction Revolution of the 1990s? Perhaps he'd say 'Oh, I've already written about that.' ... Gina Kolata ... says 'the new reproductive science is raising piercing challenges to long-standing concepts of parenthood, family and personal identity.' ... In what [Huxley] calls 'the fable of my imagination' not only are there no mothers; there are no fathers, siblings, or families.... Well, there was the one mother, from the Indian reservation, but 'to say one was a mother - that was past a joke; it was an obscenity.' ... Huxley died on November 22, 1963.... Another famed writer died on that day in 1963: C.S. Lewis, who - half a century ago - had warned against a scientific 'conquest of nature' that would turn its attention to conquering human nature. If we begin treating some classes of humanity as 'raw material' for the experiments of a scientific elite that has lost its moral focus, Lewis said, our final conquest could amount to 'the abolition of man.'"
Aeschliman, M.D. "Why Shakespeare Was Not a Relativist and Why It Matters Now." Journal of Education (Boston University) 180.3 (1998): 51-66.
"The extremes of sectarian fanaticism and Machiavellian relativism were both prominent in Shakespeare's day. It was an era of religious strife, incipient nationalism, growing monarchical absolutism, and also of 'liberated' Machiavellian cynicism and 'will to power' – no 'golden age' of moral certainty and equanimity. Somehow, the literary genius of Shakespeare not only avoided these extremes ... but implicitly or explicitly critiqued them all.... Shakespeare is a ... potent deterrent to aestheticism ... especially in a culture dominated by an antireligious animus.... In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley's increasingly relevant pornotopian satire, he depicted the works of Shakespeare as the last repository of humanity.... Today, with the ascendancy of Emersonian 'self-reliance' in the world of market capitalism and of Nietzschean relativism and post-moral 'deconstruction' in the world of the academy – of libertarianism and radicalism –the very plausibility of common human decency has been weakened.... For Shakespeare this world of 'self-reliant' relativism and antinomian 'enlightenment' was lethal.... As Aldous Huxley discerned, and showed in Brave New World, Shakespeare hated the world of liberated impulse for which Whitman would later evangelize."
Attarian, John. "Brave New World and the Flight from God (Aldous Huxley's Vision of Future Society)." Modern Age 38.4 (Fall 1996): 332-42.
"Aldous Huxley's Brave New World warns of a society moving towards a soulless utilitarian existence as man ignores the path of ... self-transcendence."
Back, Kurt W. "Aldous Huxley and the Mysticism of Science. [NY: St. Martin's, 1996.]" Isis 88.2 (June 1997): 367-68.
"Aldous Huxley ... was a grandson of Thomas Huxley and a great-nephew of Matthew Arnold.... Huxley was a pathbreaker in introducing mysticism as the link between science and religion.... Huxley ... experimented on himself, exploring different methods for inducing mystical trance.... He tended to accept three tenets: everyone, given the proper training, has the ability to induce mystical states.... Some rare people have an extraordinary gift for doing so; and mystical experiences are not purely subjective, but they represent a special sort of reality."
Begnoche, Suzanne R. "Aldous Huxley's Soviet Source Material: An Unpublished Letter." English Language Notes 34.3 (March 1997): 51-56.
"A letter from Aldous Huxley to leftist writer Simon Blumenfeld indicates the influence of the Ukrainian propaganda film Earth on Huxley's Brave New World. Huxley's depiction of the danger of unchecked technological innovations is also the major theme depicted in Earth, in which a tractor's introduction into a simple agrarian village brings death and social upheaval. For example, the Solidarity Service described in the novel is comparable to the tractor's arrival in the town. Huxley did not embrace Communism, but the Blumenfeld letter indicates a respect for the ideas put forth in the film."
Buchanan, Brad. "Oedipus in Dystopia: Freud and Lawrence in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Journal of Modern Literature 25.3-4 (Summer 2002) 75-90.
"My concern ... is ... to show how how this attitude manifests itself in Brave New World, in which Freudian ideas are plainly on display.... The most prominent of Freud's ideas ... is his notion of the 'Oedipus complex,' which, according to Freud, describes a male child's feelings of incestuous desire for his mother and parricidal aggression towards his father.... On 24 August 1931, shortly after finishing Brave New World, Huxley wrote a letter to his father in which he describes his new book as 'a comic, or at least satirical, novel about the Future ... and adumbrating the effects on thought and feeling of such quite possible biological inventions as the production of children in bottles (withe [the] consequent abolition of the family and all the Freudian "complexes" for which family relationships are responsible).' ... This opinion is shown even more clearly in Brave New World, in which the Oedipus complex is deemed such a dangerous and powerful force that it (along with the family structure that produces it) has been eliminated from civilized life, as far as possible. Children are no longer born to a set of parents but produced in an assembly-line process from fertilized eggs, which are then ... subjected to endless chemical alteration and conditioning. By controlling all aspects of a child's birth and upbringing and by keeping adults in a condition of infantile dependency on a large social body, Huxley's imaginary state has taken over the role of parent and robbed the child of his or Oedipal potentialities. Indeed, it could be argued that the active suppression of the Oedipus complex is the principal tool of social stability practiced in this future.... Freud himself is treated as a prophet in this pseudo-paradise; indeed, he is elevated to near-divinity, along with Henry Ford ...: 'Our Ford – or, Our Freud, as for some inscrutable reason, he chose to call himself whenever he spoke of psychological matters – Our Freud had been the first to reveal the appalling dangers of family life' (44). These dangers have to do ... with 'the prohibitions they were not conditioned to obey' and which force them to 'feel strongly' (47).... The Director of London's Central 'hatchery' supplements this already grim picture with the horrible thought of emotionally suffering parents who once clung desperately to their children: 'The world was full of fathers – was therefore full of misery; full of mothers – therefore of every kind of perversion from sadism to chastity' (44). He sums up the plight of past generations vividly: 'home was as squalid psychically as physically. Psychically, it was a rabbit hole, a midden, hot with the frictions of tightly packed life, reeking with emotion. What suffocating intimacies, what dangerous, insane, obscene relationships between the members of the family group! Maniacally, the mother brooded over her children ... [and] say, "My baby, my baby ... and oh, oh, at my breast, the little hands, the hunger, and that unspeakable, agonizing pleasure.... "Yes," said Mustapha Mond, nodding his head, "you may well shudder." (42-43) ... The mythical figure of Oedipus returns to Huxley's novel with a vengeance in the form of John ('the Savage'), a man who was born (in the traditional 'vivaparous' way) into an Indian tribe on a reservation in New Mexico. John's father is the Director of the London Hatchery, who leaves John to be raised by his mother, Linda, after he has impregnated her in the once-traditional but now unthinkable way. Like Oedipus, John grows up without knowing who his biological father is, but finally, with the help of his mother, he learns the truth. He also unintentionally ruins his father by embracing him publicly, kneeling before him, and addressing him as 'My father' – a scene that no doubt functions as Husley's satirical rendition of Oedipus' unwitting murder of his own biological fathe. Yet John is more of a Freudian case than a reincarnation of Oedipus.... He identifies strongly with Hamlet's rage oabout his mother's marriage to Claudius. He experiences some classically Freudian Oedipal jealousy of the native man who sleeps with his mother, spurring his anger with apt quotations from Hamlet: 'He hated Popé more and more. A man can smile and smile and be a villain' (156). Finally, as if to complete the Freudian cliché, John tries to kill Popé as he is 'drunk asleep' (158); he fails, but Popé is mildly impressed with his attempt and says laughingly but affectionately: 'Go, my brave Ahaiyuta' (159).... John remains obsessed with his mother. He remembers the intimate moments between him and Linda fondly, recalling 'those times when he sat on her knees and she put her arms about him and sang, over and over again, rocking him, rocking him to sleep' (244). Linda's own behavior towards John has contributed heavily to his fixation on her; she has been neglectful, sentimental, abusive, and affectionate by turns toward John. for instance, when John was little, she slapped him for calling her his 'mother' and then ... kissed him ... as if he were a suitable replacement for the lovers whom she has lost temporarily because of other women's jealousy. John never understands the nature of his feelings towards Linda, conflating his incestuous desores and violent impulses towards Popé with the trappings of heroism... The fact that such powerful attachments are not normal any longer in a world of obligatory contraception and institutionalized promiscuity simply reinforces John's sense of self-importance.... John finds it difficult to renounce his mother or sever their emotional connection ... since all of his erotic attachments seem charged with the unsatisfied desires of his childhood love for Linda.... We get a sense of how deeply John's libido has been repressed when he attends a 'feely' ... which features scenes of lovemaking between 'a gigantic negro and a golden-haired young brachycephalic Beta-Plus female' (200). No doubt prompted by memories of Linda and Popé, John is revolted by this interracial love story.... Long afterwards, John's desire for Lenina becomes inextricably linked to the mixture of sexual arousal and disgust that he feels while watching the feely: 'he felt her [Lenina's] lips soft against his own. so deliciously soft, so warm and electric that inevitably he found himself thinking of the embraces in Three Weeks in a Helicopter. Ooh! ooh! the stereoscopic blonde and aah! the more than real blackamoor. Horror, horror, horror ... he tried to disengage himself.' (229). John seems to identify with the possessive 'negro' ... just as he had once identified with Popé ... just as he comes to hate Popé for having sexual access to Linda. Like Linda, the heroine of the 'feely' is a blonde Beta who makes love to a man from a different, darker-skinned race. Lenina, who accompanies John to the 'feely,' is herself associated in John's mind with the 'brachycephalic blonde.' ... John finally commits suicide.... Othello is ... mentioned prominently in Brave New World, where its interracial sexual themes resurface in the pornographic 'feely' attended by John and Lenina.... The quasi-spiritual rituals of 'atonement' (94) in Brave New World rely heavily on imagery very close to Freud's...; one song which features these moments of group celebration is called a 'Solidarity Hymn' and contains the lines: 'Ford, we are twelve; oh, make us one,/ Like drops within the Social River' (95). Each participant drinks from a 'loving cup' of soma after reciting a pledge of self-effacement – 'I drink to my annihilation' (95) – in a ceremony that seems like a parody of Christian self-abnegation.... Huxley seems to have been using the 'Oedipus complex' not as a target for mockery in Brave New World, but as a weapon in his satirical attack on the mores of modern life and on its utopian fantasies."
Clute, John. "When the Wheel Stops. (Aldous Huxley's Writings)." New Statesman & Society 6.283 (Dec 17, 1993): 61-2.
"Toward the end of the 1950s, his creative energies thinned by age, ill health and too many years in southern Califonia, Aldous Huxley wrote a series of articles about the future for Newsday. In a tone of wearing candour, he outlined for his American audience the issues that seemed urgent at the time: overpopulation; the excessive organisation of society ... and revised these pieces into a book that he called Brave New World Revisited.... The terror at the heart of Brave New World is not the feelies, not babies in bottles, but fixity. The novel closes with the suicide of Mr. Savage, the only character capable of reflecting our human nostalgia for rounded human beings alive in a supple world. At the end, we can only see his feet: 'Slowly, very slowly, like two unhurried compass needles, the feet turned towards the right; north, north-east, east, south-east, south, south-southwest; then paused, and after a few seconds, turned as unhurriedly towards the left, south-southwest, south, southeast, east.'"
Dass, Ram. "Brave New World or Island – The World Must Decide."
"I'm at a party in the Hollywood Hills, ... and in the corner chatting ar Gerald Heard and Aldous Huxley, two giants of the intellect. I'm a young brash Turk fromHarvard, recently psychedelicized.... My relationship to Alsous is one of awe and deep respect.... What I've gotten from readings of some of Aldous' work is a very provocative experience, forcing me to the edge of my consciousness time and again.... aldous ... was a dispassionate person.... When I was at Harvard before I took psilocybin, I lived in a time where I was a scientist and science was the high priest of the society.... Then I took psilocybin and I realized I'd been had.... By the '30s and the '40s, Aldous obviously had changed. He was still seeing the dark shadow embracing the culture, but he ... as he got deeper into the deeper qualities of mind, he began to imagine the healthy marriage of intellect and nonconceptual awareness ... connection to the mystery behind form.... He was then an out-and-out mystic.... Do I think that the high lamas whom I have had the grace to know have siddhis or powers. The answer is yes, I think they have them.... When I came back from India, I was in a very high state. Light was pouring out of my head, and I was out of time.... I was hanging out with various forms of the divine, and I was doing my mantra.... Then came a very critical part of Aldous' model, which was the ritual of initiation in which these young people went through an ordeal of climbing a mountain, coming down a dangerous courting with death, a very risky, demanding situation, which pulled them out of themselves into the action, and then when they had been softened through this process they were brought into the open spaciousnes of the meditation space and they had the moksha medicine experience, in which the medicine allowed them to extricate themselves from the conceptual structure ... the silence out of which words arise, the formless out of which the form dances.... As part of that ritual of initiation, they were brought into the presence of Shiva, the Nataraj, the Dancing Shiva, and with their moksha-opened eyes they got a chance to taste through that process of the universe of creation and decay, of darkness and of light." [Ram Dass is a former faculty member of Harvard University as well as the traveling lecture partner of Timothy Leary during the heyday of the psychedelic movement of the '60s.]
Derbyshire, John. "What Happened to Huxley." The New Criterion 21.6 (Feb 2003).
"Huxley's ... paternal grandfather was Thomas Henry Huxley, the great victorian biologist, best remembered for his victory against Archbishop Wilberforce in the 1860 debate about evolution. Known as 'Darwin's bulldog,' T. H. Huxley advocated scientism – that is, the belief that there is no area of human experience or understanding into which science will not eventually advance, or which the scientific method will be unable to explain. He seems to have coined the word 'agnostic,' and used it to describe his own position on the mysteries of mind, spirit, and creation. Aldous's mother was a granddaughter of the great evangelical headmaster Dr. Thomas Arnold, ... father of the poet Matthew Arnold (who was, therefore, Aldous Huxley's great-uncle).... To what degree these antecedents ... shaped Aldous's own thinking is a matter of some interest, the more so since eugenics ... is a key topic in Huxley's best-remembered novel, Brave New World, published in 1932.... The high summer of Victorian scientific optimism in which Aldous's grandfather had basked was long gone by the Aldous reached intellectual maturity. So – thanks in part to Grandpa Huxley's efforts – was the social atmosphere in which serious intellectuals ... could base programs for social reform on evangelical Christianity.... Edwin Burtt's Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science was a favorite book. Huxley enthused about it in a 1925 letter to his father.... Burtt's interests, prefiguring Huxley's, later turned to Eastern religion: his 1955 anthology of Buddhist scriptures is still in print today. The frustration of Huxley's natural scientific bent also had at least one malign consequence: a much too uncritical attitude towards fringe and crank sciences, especially those that offered some hint of a connection to the world of the spirit.... J. W. Dunne's 'experiments with time,' which involved sifting through one's dreams for episodes of precognition, got Huxley's attention. so did dianetics, which was later incorporated into Scientology. Huxley and maria, his first wife, had three or four sessions with L. Ron Hubbard. The body-typing theories of William Sheldon, the academic psychologist who gave us the words 'endomorph,' 'mesomorph,' and 'ectomorph,' were another enthusiasm.... These words are scattered through Huxley's books.... Huxley classified himself as an extreme crebrotonic ectomorph: he stood six feet four - perhaps another point of affinity with Hubble, who was six feet five. Huxley is mainly remembered ... for having written Brave New World, one of the two great admonitory novels of the twentieth century. It used to be ... a common classroom exercise for high school seniors to read Huxley's novel together with Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and then to express and justify an opinion about which is a more probable future for the human race.... The unsettling thing about Huxley's imagined future is that is not easy for a modern reader to say what, exactly, is so bad about it.... We have settled happily into the infantile hedonism of Brave New World.... Huxley ... settled into the views that he held to for the rest of his life, and which led him to those well-known experiments with mind-altering drugs he conducted from 1953 onwards. (In the last hours of his death from cancer, huxley asked for, and got, injections of LSD. He died under the influence.... Huxley adoped a philosophical outlook based on mysticism, most especially on Hindu and Buddhist concepts. There exists a single universal consciousness, the 'Mind at Large,' of which individual selves are manifestations, extrusions into the world of space, time, and language.... Mind at Large, says Huxley ... 'has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system.' ... Connoisseurs of pseudoscience will spot the parallels with dianetics here, though Huxley had formed his ideas long before hubbard launched his own system on an unsuspecting world in the may 1950 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. The ethical problem raised by this outlook – the fact that the Mind at Large is impersonal and therefore ethically neutral – is dealt with in Ends and Means by traditional Vedantic and Buddhist arguments.... Huxley took lessons in Indian techniques of meditation from Swami Prabhavananda at the Vedanta Society in Hollywood.... Huxley was ... strongly averse to the notion of religion grounded in culture. He sought the universal, the common denominator of religious experience."
Firchow, Peter Edgerly. "Wells and Lawrence in Huxley's Brave New World." Journal of Modern Literature 5 (1976): 260-78.
"In Brave New World [Huxley] was, among other things, blasting [H.G.] Wells.... In at least one letter dating from the period during which he was working on the novel, Huxley openly avowed his aim to expose the 'horror of the Wellsian Utopia,' and some thirty years later he even named Wells's Men Like Gods (1923) as the inspiration for a parody which later 'got out of hand and turned into something quite different from what I intended.' Somewhere behind Our Ford and Our Freud, then lurks Our Wells.... Huxley identified Wells, as he wrote in a letter to T. S. Eliot, with 'Wellsian Progress,' with the doctrine that man can live by technology alone.... Ironically, the apple which Wells proffered modern man was a Huxleyan growth. Before becoming a novelist and a Fabian socialist, Wells had been a biologist, trained for a brief time by the great T. H. Huxley himself. Wells had imbibed natural selection at the fountainhead, but natural selection, as Darwin's bulldog knew, had at least left Nature in the place of the vanished divinity, whereas artificial selection, in the form now proposed by Wells, left only man.... What the grandfather had given, the grandson now hoped to take away.... Wells believed that he had been misrepresented by this 'disagreeable fantasy.' ... In The Time Machine (1895) ... he draws a remarkable portrait of man's eventual degeneration and extinction.... Wells warns against states which, no matter how ideal in other respects, prefer uniformity to individuality.... Huxley foresees the next generation's utopia being based on an intellectual caste system 'accompanied by a Machiavellian system of education as it is profitable for a society at large and the upper castes in particular that they should have.' ... To ensure stability, the ultimate control of a society must be vested in a very few hands, a condition which is true not merely of the stable Fordian state but also of the stable Pueblo Indian community.... Though it may have started out as a parody of Men Like Gods, Huxley is right in insisting that Brave New World ended up as something quite different....
It would be dangerous to assume that Wells was Huxley's only or even primary source of scientific information. In the immediate Huxley background ... were his brother Julian and various sometime friends such as J. B. S. Haldane, Bertrand Russell and J. W. N. Sullivan. And in any case, the technological details, whether Wellsian or no, are not what matter most.... In Point Counter Point there is a description of a painting by a character named Mark Rampion (based on D. H. Lawrence) which depicts the evolution of man. It begins with a miniscule monkey and passes, via various stages of primitive man, through Greece, Rome and the Renaissance, with the figures growing ever larger as they approximate the present. 'The crescendo continued uninterrupted through Watt and Stevenson, Faraday and Darwin, Bessemer and Edison, Rockefeller and Wanamaker to come to a contemporary consummation in the figures of Mr. H. G. Wells and Sir Alfred Mond.... Wells and Mond, growing larger and larger at every repetition, wound in a triumphant spiral clean off the paper, toward Utopian infinity.' ... The most obvious allusion here is to Wells's Outline of History (1920) which, as A. J. P. Taylor has remarked, tries heroically and fails dismally to trace an evolutionary moral 'progress' in the history of mankind.... Mond came from a distinguished scientific and financial family: his father had founded the highly successful Mond Nickel Company...; his brother, Sir Robert Ludwig Mond, was a distinguished chemist and administrator. Alfred Mond ... expanded his father's company into one of the largest and most powerful industrial enterprises in Britain and eventually fused it and other related concerns in 1926 into Imperial Chemical Industries, which, after Ford Motor Company, was probably the largest privately owned corporation in the world.... Just behind Mond and behind the whole technological world which he controls stands H. G. Wells, so behind the Savage and the New Mexican Pueblo stands D. H. Lawrence. When Huxley began work on Brave New World, he had never been to New Mexico.... His path passed near New Mexico a couple years later ... but he did not actually set foot in the place until 1937.... Why not Arizona instead ... or any other American state with a sizable Indian population? The real answer is Lawrence. By the time Huxley came to know him intimately, Lawrence had already, to be sure, closed the New Mexican chapter in his life, but he had by no means forgotten it.... Lawrence ... did not merely talk about New Mexico, he had also written of it.... The sketch that seems most immediately relevant to the Pueblo section of Brave New World is entitled 'The Hopi Snake Dance' and gives Lawrence's reaction to the most dramatic of all the Pueblo Indian dances.... Lawrence ... aggressively demands the 'debunking' of the Indian.... For a brief period, Lawrence even convinced himself that he was an integral part of New Mexico, living high up on his ranch, surrounded by his women and his cow, with the Indians just a few steps away.... Certainly, by the time Huxley was writing Brave New World, he was sure that Lawrence's primitive Utopia no longer cut any ice, or certainly no more than Wells's technological one.... 'With every advance of industrial civilization,' Huxley predicts, 'the savage past will be more and more appreciated, and the cult of D. H. Lawrence's Dark God may be expected to spread through an ever-widening circle of worshippers.' Now Lawrence is the fashionable cultist, no longer the prophet of a new religion. And now the connection is made explicit: Lawrence is the savage past.
The savage past or the Fordian future? That is the question whcih Brave New World poses....Huxley's Pueblo Indians, closely related as they are to Lawrence's, also have other ancestors. The fragmentary tales they tell derive ... not from Lawrence, but from Frank Cushing's Zuñi Folk Tales (1901), which seems also to be the source of many of Huxley's Indian names, including Mitsima and Waihusiva. Not to mention the Smithsonian reports.... It is important to note the Huxley transformed the Pueblo Indians, in one respect at least, almost as much as he did our own world. The Pueblo Indians – as the Smithsonian reports, among others, make clear – are anthropologically a separate entity from the Penitentes. According to Elsie Clewes Parsons' massive study of Pueblo Indian religion – not published in book form until 1939 but a considerable portion of which had already appeared as articles by the end of the twenties – the Penitentes are 'an organization [which] the Indians observe with interest as comparable to their own esoteric groups.' But there is no mingling of the two, certainly nothing like the fusion that exists in Brave New World. Huxley was, of course, aware of this fact and in his foreword described the religion of his Indians as 'half fertility cult and half Penitente ferocity.' The fertility cult is Indian, and as one might expect, the snake dance is part of that cult. How closely this feature of Pueblo Indian life was linked with Lawrence in Huxley's mind may be appreciated from H. K. Haeberlin's observation the 'the Great Serpent of the Pueblo is commonly known as the "plumed serpent."' So too with the sipapus, the openings in the floor of the kiva, which play an important part in Huxley's description of the snake dance. It is there that the deities of germination and fertility reside. And associated with these deities are also the wargods, 'Püükon and his less important [twin] brother. Püükon is obviously Huxley's Pookong, but in Brave New World his twin brother has been replaced by Christ, and along with Christ have also come the Penitentes.... Though the Indians do practice whipping, it is very mild indeed compared to the Penitentes. The Pueblo Indians would certainly never tolerate sadism of the kind which climaxes the snake dance in Brave New World.... No Pueblo Indian would go out alone into the desert and commit an act such as the Savage discribes. 'Once,' he tells Bernard Marx, 'I did something that none of the others did: I stood against a rock in the middle of the day, in summer with my arms out, like Jesus on the Cross.' (93) What is Huxley's point here? Why does he insist on combining an Indian fertility cult with a Christian penitential ritual? If it is merely to suggest that the forces of life are balanced by those of death – Huxley, one remembers, is often accused of Manicheanism – then he could have portrayed that balance with much less effort by means of the Aztecs of Old Mexico.... Lawrence, as Huxley knew, disliked Christianity and may have feared it.... Significantly, Christianity is the most important shared element of both the Fordian and the Pueblo societies.... The Solidarity Service which forms a counterpart to the Pueblo Snake Dance is an obvious parody of the mass. The loving-cup of strawberry ice-cream soma is based on the bread and wine of the holy communion. ('All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects' [36] is how Mustapha Mond defines soma.)... There is even an oblique reference to the Holy Spirit in the 'enormous negro dove' at the close of the service. Like the Snake Dance, the Solidarity Service also has an underlying sexual meaning.... When the drums begin to beat at the Reservation, Lenina's first thought is of the Solidarity Services. 'Orgy-porgy,' she whispered to herself. These drums beat out just the same rhythm' (75). Christianity is an essential element in both of the worlds Huxley depicts. but – and this is a crucial distinction – it is not the same Christianity. In the one instance, it is the Christianity which maintains that we inhabit a vale of tears and that we should mortify the flesh in this life in order to store up credit in the next; on the other, it is the Christianity which promises a paradise on earth. The one is Christianity in rags, with flagellation and retreats into the desert; the other Christianity in riches, with everybody 'happy' and the peace of the world insured by ten semi-apostolic World Controllers. 'Suffer little children,' Mustapha Mond admonishes the Dhc who has disturbed the little girls and boys at their erotic play. At the end of Brave New World, secular and fanatic Christianity meet and join. the Savage's flagellation of himself and Lenina, echoing the dance at the Pueblo, merges with the orgy-porgy dance of the visiting Fordians and culminates in a fertility-sterility rite in which the Savage finally yields his principles and himself. the only purification for that sin, he realizes on the following day, is death.... Pueblo is Pueblo, and Ford is Ford, and ne'er the twain shall meet, for if they do disaster ensues."
Heptonstall, Geoffrey. "The Intellectual Behind Brave New World." Contemporary Review 281.1640 (Sept 2002): 182-83.
Higdon, David Leon. "The Provocations of Lenina in Huxley's Brave New World. (How Aldous Huxley's Misogyny Affects Characterization)." International Fiction Review (Jan 2002): 78-83.
"As befits a Juvenalian satirist, indignantly, bitterly, misanthropically chastising his culture, Aldous Huxley often expresses outright disgust with the entire human species.... The misogyny, everywhere evident in Huxley's novels written before 1931, does become a serious narrative issue and a thematic problem in Brave New World (1932). A careful consideration of Lenina's attitudes, decisions, and actions shows that the overlay of misogyny careened Huxley into contradicting his ideas.... Why does Lenina Crowne frequently wear green? ... Lenina voices her dislike for the 'hideous colour khaki' (62) and, a few moments later, tells Henry 'my word ... I'm glad I'm not a Gamma' (63), as they watch 'the leaf-green Gamma girls' changing shifts.... Interestingly, Lenina is wearing a 'bottle green jacket' (60) at the time. Even earlier, the narrative voice had marked Lenina's jacket 'made of bottle green acetate cloth with green vicose fur at the cuffs and collar,' her 'green corduroy shorts,' her 'green-and-white jockey cap,' her 'bright green' shoes, all topped off by 'a silver-mounted green morocco-surrogate cartridge belt, bulging ... with the regulation supply of contraceptives' (50). Two things are basically wrong with these details if orthodoxy and consistency are to features of the World State and of Huxley's chosen satiric direction. First green clearly places lenina outside the color codes of the caste system, the only character, other than the outsider John, who is allowed this violation. Second, and more revealing, Lenina is not construed by Huxley as a rebel for wearing green even though her green wardrove clearly marks her as being unorthodox. Lenina is, after all, either an Alpha ... or a Beta and should be wearing gray or maroon. (10) ... After John the Savage enters the text, Lenina becomes but one more Huxleyian sexual predator.... Lenina becomes obsessed with achieving sexual victory.... When her 'zippicamiknicks' (197) drop to the floor in a later scene, John 'retreats in terror, flapping his hands at her as though he were trying to scare away some intruding and dangerous animal' (197-98). Near the end of the novel, the revenge becomes complete. A young woman – without question Lenina 'in green velveteen shorts, white shirt, and jockey cap' (264) – disembarks from a helicopter and approaches the abondoned lighthouse John has made his home. John begins to whip her, and we are to assume, I believe, that in the ensuing frenzy of the orgy he either whips her to deat or embraces her sexually and then kills her in disgust over his own actions.... (11) Huxley's text is riddled with many inconsistencies and indeterminancies. For instance, it is perfectly clear that a number of women donate their ovaries to the general good of society (3, 11-12), but do a certain number of men donate their testicles to the State? Do they make themselves 'eunuchs for Ford'? Answering these questions depends on how one construes the sex-hormone gum the man frequently chew (60) and how one explains the origins of 'the male gametes' (3) in the Hatchery. With no regular donation of sperm for the Hatchery's fertilization process (148), it would seem necessary that the Hatcheries maintain a supply of both ovaries and testicles."
Hoffmann, Albert. "LSD, My Problem Child – Meeting With Aldous Huxley."
"In the mid-1950s, two books by Aldous Huxley appeared, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, dealing with inebriated states produced by hallucinogenic drugs. The alterations of sensory perceptions and consciousness, which the author experienced in a self-experiment with mescaline, are skillfully described in these books. The mescaline experiment was a visionary experience for Huxley. He saw objects in a new light; they disclosed their inherent, deep, timeless existence.... Huxley saw the value of hallucinogenic drugs in that they give people who lack the gift of spontaneous visionary perception belonging to mystics, saints, and great artists, the potential to experience this extraordinary state of consciousness, and thereby to attain insight into the spiritual world.... For Huxley these drugs were keys capable of opening new doors of perception; chemical keys, in addition to other proven but laborious 'door openers' to the visionary world like meditation, isolation, and fasting, or like certain yoga practices.... I gained a deepened insight into my own LSD experiments. I was therefore delighted when I received a telephone call from Aldous Huxley in the laboratory one morning in August 1961.... Both Huxley and his wife, Laura Archerea Huxley, had also experimented with LSD and psilocybin.... He believed in the great importance of agents producing visionar experience in the modern phase of human evolution.... As we parted, Aldous Huxley gave me ... a tape recording of his lecture 'visionary Experience,' which he had delivered the week before at an international congress on applied psychology in Copenhagen.... In our conversation in Zurich, I had already learned from Aldous Huxley that he would again treat the problem of psychedelic drugs in his forthcoming novel. Now he sent me a copy of Island, inscribed 'To Dr. Albert Hofmann, the original discoverer of the moksha medicine, from Aldous Huxley.' ... Aldous Huxley and I were together often at the annual convention of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences (WAAS) in Stockholm during late summer 1963. His suggestions and contributions to discussions at the sessions of the academy ... had a great influence on the proceedings. WAAS had been established in order to allow the most competent specialists to consider world problems in a forum free of ideological and religious restrictions.... The 1963 meeting of WAAS had dealt with the population explosion.... A decade before birth control ... proposals for their solution were made to governments and responsible organizations.... Huxley considered psychedelic drugs to be one means to achieve education.... Aldous Huxley died on 22 November.... He had written on a sheet of paper: 'LSD - try it - intramuscular - 100 mmg.' Mrs. Huxley understood what was meant by this, and ignoring the misgivings of the attending physician, she gave him, with her own hand, the desored injection – she let him have the moksha medicine."
Kass, Leon R. "Aldous Huxley Brave New World (1932). First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life (March 2000)
_____. "Preventing a Brave New World." The Human Life Review 27.3 (Summer 2001): 14.
_____. "Human Cloning: Toward a Brave New World." Current 431 (March-April 2001): 9.
McKay, George. "'Time Back Way Back': 'Motivation' and Speculative Giction. (The Relationship Between Fictional and Current Society)." Critical Quarterly 34.1 (Spring 1992): 102-16.
"The duality present in some speculative fiction, with the future or other society compared to present society, can be described in terms of similarity and difference. The closer the equivalence between societies, the higher value of motivation the story contains. The degree of motivation which a transition from now to then can have depends on the emphasis placed on the actual transitionary period itself. Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World are used as examples."
McGiveron, Rafeeq O. "Huxley's Brave New World." The Explicator 57.1 (Fall 1998): 27-20.
Meckier, Jerome. "Aldous Huxley's Americanization of the Brave New World Typescript." Twentieth Century Literature 48.4 (Winter 2002): 427-61.
_____. "A Neglected Huxley 'Preface': His Earliest Synopsis of Brave New World." Twentieth Century Literature 25 (Spring 1979): 1-20.
_____. "Our Ford, Our Freud and the Behaviorist Conspiracy in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World." Thalia I (1978).
O'Neill. "We Have Seen the Future: A Poll of Moral Attitudes Shows that We Have Reached the Doorstep of Huxley's Horrible Brave New World." (Cover Story). Alberta Report 29.6 (March 18, 2002): 36-40.
Petzinger ... Frederick Turner, Bruce Ames, Ronald Bailey, Gregory Benford, Daniel B. Botkin, Lorenzo W. Milam, Daphne Patai, Eric W. Petzinger, Eric Rabkin, Ed Regis, Michael Ruse, Michael Schrage, Jacob Sullum, John Tierney. Reason 31.7 (Dec 1999): 20.
Scott, Whitney. "Brave New World." Booklist 95.9-10 (Jan 1, 1999): 901.
Sexton, James. English Language Notes 35.1 (Sept 1997): 35-38.
Varricchio, Mario. "Power of Images/Images of Power in Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four." Utopian Studies 10.1 (Wntr 1999): 98.
Varney, David. The Book That Shook. (Aldous Huxley's Brave New World)" Management Today (Dec 1999): 44 (Mag.Coll.: 101H4509).
_____. "Scientific Brutality: Aldous Huxley's Bleak Vision. (1932 Brave New World Predictions Evaluated)." The Economist (US) 346.8057 (Feb 28, 1998): 86.
_____. The Times Literary Supplement 4220 (February 17 1984): 160
Bloom, Harold, ed.. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations. Philadelphia: Chelsea, 2003. ISBN: 079-1070-492.
Jones, William M. "The Iago of Brave New World." [The Western Humanities Review 15.3 (1961)] 3-6.
Bowering, Peter. "Brave New World (1932)." [Aldous Huxley: A Study of the Major Novels (Bowering, 1968).] 7-20.
Watts, Harold H. "Brave New World." [Aldous Huxley (Twayne, 1969).] 21-32.
Meckier, Jerome. "Utopian Counterpoint and the Compensatory Dream." [Aldous Huxley: Satire and Structure (1969)] 33-60.
Woodcock, George. "Destructive Encounters." [] 61-78.
Thody, Philip. "Brave New World." [] 79-92.
Baker, Robert S. "Brave New World: Huxley's Dystopian Dilemma." [] 93-104.
Firchow, Peter Edgerly. "The End of Utopia: A Study of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World." [Bucknell UP, 1984] 105-114.
Kuehn, Robert E., ed. Aldous Huxley: A Collection of Critical
Essays. Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974. ISBN: 013-4485-149
(013-4485-068 pbk).
Hoffman, Frederick J. "Aldous Huxley and the Novel of Ideas." 8-17.
A Critical Symposium on Aldous Huxley, The London Magazine (1955). 18-32.
Waugh, Evelyn. "Youth at the Helm and Pleasure at the Prow: Antic Hay. 18-20.
Wilson, Angus. "The House Party Novels: Crome Yellow and Those Barren Leaves." 20-23.
Wyndam, Francis. "The Teacher Emerges: Point Counter Point, Eyeless in Gaza, Mortal Coils." 23-25.
Wain, John. "Tracts Against Materialism: After Many a Summer and Brave New World." 26-29.
Quennell, Peter. "Electrifying the Audience: Music at Night and Beyond the Mexique Bay." 29-32.
Marovitz, Sanford E. "Aldous Huxley's Intellectual Zoo." 33-45.
Birnbaum, Milton. "Aldous Huxley's Quest for Values: A Study in Religious Syncretism." 46-63.
Holms, Charles M. "The Early Poetry of Aldous Huxley." 64-80.
Meckier, Jerome. "The Counterpoint of Flight: Huxley's Early Novels." 81-96.
Firchow, Peter. "The Music of Humanity: Point Counter Point 97-118.
Bowering, Peter. "Eyeless in Gaza." 119-41.
Bentley, Joseph. "The Later Novels of Huxley." 142-53.
Watts, Harold H. "Huxley As Biographer: Grey Eminence and The Devils of Loudun." 154-66.
Watt, Donald J. "Vision and Symbol in Aldous Huxley's Island." 167-82.
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