ALDOUS HUXLEY : Beyond
a Clever Young Man
| Universitat de València Press |
ALDOUS HUXLEY : Beyond
a Clever Young Man
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A few number of writers have got to be commented by the "average reader" for a long time , and this is the case of this author. According to Doriann MacDermott [1] there are four things that offer us a good idea of him . First of all , his intellectual capacity. Secondly , the themes he wrote about and his ability to hurl his texts into future. Finally, his interest to comunicate his ideas to this "average reader" by using a clear and easy prose. So ,at this point we could ask , What was Huxley ?. A poet , a novelist , a philosopher , an essayist , a historian , or a reporter ?.
A good answer would be all and none. But if we say that he was a clever writer that, depending on the text, was able to write about everything ( Art, biology, psychology, politics, etc...) by using this or that technique and without losing a particular capacity to communicate his deeper ideas in a particular way , we´ll give a possible answer to this question. The best example is his literary production. !!!
About his intellectual capacity, we can say that Huxley was born with this inborn quality. Doriann MacDermott said that " he was born in a too little favourable period for his talent and the XVIII century , with men as Swift, Fielding ,or Voltaire , would have provide him an more appropiated environment according to his versatil condition " . Due to his familiar environment , this author saw the world differently than the average men [2]. According to Matthew , when talking about this environment, we can find that :
" This environment provided Huxley a heritage and upbringing effect on his work. Gerald Heard, a longtime friend, said that Huxley's ancestry "brought down on him a weight of intellectual authority and a momentum of moral obligations." Huxley's own experiences made him stand apart from the class into which he was born. Even as a small child he was considered different, showing an alertness, an intelligence, what his brother called a superiority. "But , to talk about his backgrounds would be to repeat what other authors have said better than me before. If we want that the Literary Criticism become in a very "objective science" we have to change our objects under investigation. And this is what this paper pretends. If we want you to read this author , we have to provide you with new ideas to investigate. For this goal, this draft has been based on the rest of the ideas about Huxley. So, the question we are going to answer is : How did he reach the top in both the Non-Academic and the Academic Circles ?
On the other hand , If you are interested in knowing much more about this author I´ll recommend you to visit : THE SOMA WEB PAGE
HIS TIMES, HIS READERS, AND HIS WORKS.
As MacDermott said his capacity to mix themes and to hurl them into future by using a clear and easy prose, has provided him to be updated with the "REAL" world. She said that [3]:
" For the young people in the 1920s , Huxley was the big lasher of the British Bourgeoisie and their habits , the spokesperson of a desillusionated after-war generation. In the 1930s , he was the prophet of the Brave New World , and he predicted the catastrophe which came. For those who reach the adult age in the fearsome 1940s , those years of the most uncontrolled barbarism in our History , Huxley offered new spiritual values ; and more recently, in the last years of his life , he gave a clear expression to some fellings , very simmilar with those which conducted to a new generation in the 1960s to revolt them against a society feverely devoted to arms , racial hates , consumism , and a suicidal unworried for ecological harmony."So , you have to keep in mind that this author was changing ,and adapting himself, to the time and the world he had to live in . His way of writing had to have something special to cause such a big effect in several generations. According to Martínez López [4] in his article about English UTOPIA we find that :
" There must be something about dreams and about time that seems to , or indeed does, turn the apparently impossible -or, at least , part of what was once thought of as impossible -into being. Furthermore, there is a branch of Literature -call it ´genre´, ´subgenre´, ´literary form´, ´style´... - that specifically deals with the products of imagination , which tell us of wonderful or terrible things that existed once , somewhere, and of no less wonderful or terrible things that must yet come."Here we have the key to explain this effect on different periods and in different social contexts that make a writer so worth. Keeping his style , he was evaluating both his well-known themes and his surronding reality. His big encyclopaedic imagination to evaluate could even anticipate future events. In that sense , Martinez said that " Humankind has always lived in two very different worlds at the same time; it is the counciousness and the capacity for rationalizing this double dimension of existence that varies from time to time , from age to age ... "[5] .That is what Huxley did , to write about these "affecting humanbeing themes" and he proyected them into the future , both fictionally or really . This is , for example , the case of his NOVEL Brave New World and his ESSAY Brave New World Revisited . The first one deals with a fictional reality and it has an artistic value. In the second one , he was using those products of imagination to talks about the real problem that the "World" had. He didn´t talk about probabilities , instead of that he talked about possibilities and, obviously, it has a more philosopical value that distinguish this text from the other one. We have talk about these examples, because in a way they explaine those two worlds of this author.
His products were directly influenced by non-British writers such a Stendhal, Flaubert ,and Anatole France. In his direct context , he recovered T. Love Peacock´s style by copying the "entertainments" of this author[6] : The menippean satire. In that sense , we can say that one of his more direct objectives when he wrote was to entertain his readers.
He wrote Brave New World with the idea of satirizing H.G.Wells´ A Modern Utopia which follows a very well developed type of literature in England . As Martinez said " Think about Thomas More´s Utopia, Francis Bacon´s The New Atlantis , Jonathan Swift´s Gulliver´s Travels , William Morris´ News from Nowhere , etc ... all of theme great titles of Western Literature."[7]
We could say that Huxley, in a way , became in one of the masters in this type of Literature because his text became, too, in one of the master pieces of this Century. But before evaluating him, you should have read , at least , Plato´s Republic and Thomas More Utopia to see its dimension.
As a conclusion of this part of the draft , we are going to give you two ideas that will show you How he reach to connect with the readers in all those periods : the first one , it´s a quote of this author. The second one , it´s the connection in between the theme we have been talking about; we think that you will find the special sensibility this author had.
If you are interested in MORE QUOTES ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
" We,men,live on the one hand, in what we could call , in its broadest sense , " The physical world" , a material existence full of narrow limitations which we cannot escape without terminating our life, as we conveive it while alive; on the other hand, we live in a perhaps much more interesting environment , in a world of dreams , of ideas , of affections , of beliefs , of happiness , of sadness , of unlimited hopes and expectations...which are all real , as real as the food , clothes and air and all the solid matter we live on."So the only way he found to do it, the best he knew , was by communicating his world through his Literature , or as he would say by crossing THE DOORS OF THE PERCEPTION. Therefore , if you want to know how the world goes you should taste this "Not-dangerous drug" that is Huxley´s Literature to appreciate it.
In that sense , a few number of writers would write things like this in their forewords :[9] "In the meantime, however , it seems worth while at least to mention the most serious defect in the story , which is this..." Obvioulsy , if Huxley talks about his own mistakes , the Literary Critic has a very difficult job, and both aspects are very important if you want to talk about him.
MacDermott said when talking about Huxley and the Literary Criticism that :
" In the Literary Criticism , Huxley was judged by the"EXPERTS" of his time and declared guilty of several penalties. In general , his Contemporary British Criticism talks about him in a coldness way. It was due , on one hand , to his irritating erudition , and on the other hand to the fact that he was a very difficult to classify author. His protean condition was disconcerting. For the critic disposed to shut away in a clearly defined Literary Gender the easiest was to consider him mainly as a novelist , and to lash him for not have given way to the stablished standard for this class of Literature."As you can see, one of the main problems , when trying to classify Huxley in the common literary terminology , is that without having study him in a deeper way , we won´t have a good definition for him. This means that , at the same time, he could be considered one, two or more things depending on your point of view and the type of production you are studing. Maybe , he is a good novelist and a bad poet,or maybe he is a good essayist and a bad novelist. So, we need to find objectives ways to evaluate him as a whole and to use different concepts to search on him.
In that sense, he was considered guilty by his critics , because as Graham Bradshaw said [10] :
" A number of novelist writing in the decade where either reacting against ,or remained relatively untouched by , modernist experimentation. Indeed , it is misleading to think of the "reaction against modernism " as something which characterizes the 1930s , and seeing literary history as a succession of -isms or anti-isms is always distortingly lumpish (to recall the historian Jack Hexter´s nice distinction between "lumpers" and "splitters"). None the less , we might notice , in a broad but vary fashion , how various novelists in the 1920s as well as the 1930s were more inclined to treat the world as "given" , without that intense concern with the problematics of representation which underlines the major modernist innovations. So , we can consider Huxley as a alternative toHuxley followed his own standard of judgement to understand the literary form, so we shouldn´t considered him as a modernist , because he, himself, didn´t do it. But when we talk in general about our subject (English Narrative), we have a fault we should check out. We need to compare in order to evaluate, and in this case Huxley (or whoever) could make us feel lost because we compare him with his contemporary authors. Obviously, we follow the tendencies that the literary history ,or critics, has followed for a long time. We are in a hurry to include him in an "after modernism movement", but we should think that we have a controversy we have to correct. Literary History is based on texts , but texts are based on Human perceptions or experiences, and in that sense, the Movement in which we could include him maybe will arrive later or took place a long time ago.
" MODERNISM "."
In other words, and following a more critical point of view ,as David Daiches did[11],we find that :
" The novelists of the inter-war period had also explored another very modern problem: The relation between knowledge and the value. He said that the brilliant early novels of Aldous Huxley written in the 1920´s explored with selflacerating mockery the ways in which a scientific understanding of causation seemed to have destroyed all possibility of believe in ethical and other norms. If no man is a hero to his valet , it is also true that no man can be a hero to his psycho-analyst; knowledge of psychological process seems to destroy the possibilities of heroism. Further , if modern technological development succeeds in creating a world in which every individual will be so perfectly adapted to his environment that no moral effort will ever be felt,then the possibilities of moral effort will dissapear and with them the traditional moral virtues and the traditional ways of judging personality.This theme , wittily explored in Brave New World , is part of the larger theme of the possibilities of heroism in the modern world that has been steadily growing in importance in English Fiction."As you have seen , there are several aspects you can compare to build up a proper Narrative Criticism. We prefer those ideas that deal with more universal categories than that restrictive one which obligate us to stop time in a way (The inter-war period), because the second one can be included in the first one.The relation in between knowledge and the value, or the heroism are human experiences that can be analised in an objective or descriptive way, whereas the time has created more controversy because we don´t still have a very well defined concept of it, because we have two of them the known-time or the product of a human perception and the unknown one , which is more difficult to perceive.
We don´t want you to consider this ideas as rules to follow , but when we talk about Literature we have to be the most attentive reader in order to provide a good critic for future readers of any author. Showing them the " Human aspects that all texts containe " we will provide them with the best critic.
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Last Updated : 05/06/99