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The Two Future Worlds of Aldous Huxley

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Rudolf B. Schmerl
Rudolf B. Schmerl*
Affiliation:
The University of Michigan Office of Research Administration, Ann Arbor
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Extract

Aldous huxley's Brave New World is generally recognized as one of the two most widely discussed English fantasies of this century. The other, of course, is Orwell's 1984. The two books seem to present the two plausible alternative directions totalitarianism may take, and for several years after the publication of Orwell's book in 1949 it was common to evaluate the one against the other. 1949 was also the year of publication of Huxley's Ape and Essence, an exploration of still other possibilities of the future. It may be profitable to sidestep the question of the credibility of Huxley's fantasies as projections—which is not, fundamentally, a literary question—and to examine them first in relation to some of the techniques employed in their construction, and secondly as satires of the real worlds they reflect.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 77 , Issue 3 , June 1962 , pp. 328 - 334
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1962

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References

Note 1 in page 328 With space, of course, there is the problem of traveling through it; that is, the fantasist has some obligation to account for whatever magical machine transports his characters to Mars and back again. An acute distinction between skilled and clumsy ways of doing this is made by Fletcher Pratt in his essay, “A Critique of Science Fiction,” in Reginald Bretnor (ed.), Modern Science Fiction (New York: Coward McCann, 1953), pp. 74–90.

Note 2 in page 328 See Alexander Henderson, Aldous Huxley (London: Chatto and Windus, 1935).

Note 3 in page 328 Richard Gerber, Utopian Fantasy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1955), p. 125.

Note 4 in page 328 Brave New World (Garden City: Doubleday, Doran & Co., Inc., 1932), p. 3.

Note 5 in page 329 Once, later, Huxley interrupts to glance ahead, introducing an irrelevancy purely for the fun of it: Lenina forgets to give an embryo its sleeping sickness injection, and “twenty-two years, eight months, and four days from that moment, a promising young Alpha-Minus administrator at Mwanza-Mwanza was to die of trypanosomiasis—the first case for over half a century. Sighing, Lenina went on with her work” (p. 223).

Note 6 in page 330 Ape and Essence (London: Chatto and Windus, 1951), p. 37.

Note 7 in page 330 See George Woodcock, “Utopias in Negative,” Sewanee Review, lxiv (1956), 81–97.

Note 8 in page 330 John Atkins outlines most of Huxley's pertinent remarks made in this period in his Aldous Huxley ((London: John Calder, 1956), pp. 212–216. Particularly interesting is a comment in Proper Studies (London: Chatto and Windus, 1927), not mentioned by Atkins; using the same reference to Erasmus Darwin and “Miss Anna Seward, the Swan of Lichfield” as does Mr. Scogan, Huxley again mentions the possibility of successfully manufacturing babies in bottles in the future (Proper Studies, p. 278).

Note 9 in page 332 New York: Bantam Books, 1955.