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Aldous Huxley and the “Brave New World” of Architectural Modernism

Ashley Maher

in Reconstructing Modernism: British Literature, Modern Architecture, and the State

Using Aldous Huxley’s prolific body of architectural criticism, this chapter argues that Huxley evaluated political concepts—individualism, liberalism, uniformity—through analyzing the creations and ... More

Using Aldous Huxley’s prolific body of architectural criticism, this chapter argues that Huxley evaluated political concepts—individualism, liberalism, uniformity—through analyzing the creations and rhetoric of the modern movement. While his brother Julian sponsored modernist animal housing at the Regent’s Park and Whipsnade Zoos as part of his efforts to imagine a more egalitarian Britain, Aldous reconfigured the structuring role of the household in the novel. His foundational dystopian narrative, Brave New World, merges fiction and criticism, as Huxley stages debates between literary advocates and a World Controller. What emerges is a politics of medium, whereby literature serves as a vehicle for liberalism. Against the uniformity and “over-organization” of architectural modernism, Huxley demonstrates the capaciousness and flexibility of the novel as a genre.Less

The Coterie as Commodity: Huxley, Lawrence, Rhys, and the Business of Revenge

Sean Latham

in The Art of Scandal: Modernism, Libel Law, and the Roman à Clef

The continuing expansion of the mass media in the 20th century, and particularly the emergence of mass-mediated celebrity culture, meant that an ever-growing audience imagined they had access to even ... More

The continuing expansion of the mass media in the 20th century, and particularly the emergence of mass-mediated celebrity culture, meant that an ever-growing audience imagined they had access to even the most exclusive circles. Uniquely positioned to exploit this fraught tension between the public and the private, the roman à clef became an increasingly popular genre, catering to a market hungry for scandal and snobbery. This chapter focuses narrowly on two such coteries, one in England and the other in Paris. The first organized itself around the imposing figure of Lady Ottoline Morrell, who, despite her generosity, was frequently satirized in romans à clef by D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, and others. Far from simpleminded acts of revenge, these works deliberately exploit the genre in order to escape the hermetic aestheticism of highbrow modernism and thus reap the considerable rewards of the wider literary marketplace. In expatriate Paris, Jean Rhys deployed the roman à clef in similarly strategic ways, using the masochistic protagonist in Quartet to attack Ford Madox Ford’s misogynistic bohemianism. Poised at the boundary between public and private, the roman à clef thrives at the intersection between gender, genre, modernism, and celebrity.Less

The Huxleyan Conundrum: Brave New World as Anti-Utopia

Gregory Claeys

in Dystopia: A Natural History

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) remains one of the most popular dystopian texts, second only to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in defining the emerging genre of dystopia. The work is usually ... More

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) remains one of the most popular dystopian texts, second only to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in defining the emerging genre of dystopia. The work is usually read as a satire on eugenics. But it addresses a wide variety of themes so successfully as to remain fascinating to later modern readers. This chapter contextualizes the work, and illustrates the degree to which it should be read as, in part, an anti-Bolshevik novel. The development of Huxley’s ideas after this, up to his utopia, Island (1962), is also assessed in terms of a series of efforts to confront the themes of his greatest work.Less

Out of Time: Aldous Huxley and the Extinction of the Novel

Jonathan Foltz

in The Novel after Film: Modernism and the Decline of Autonomy

This chapter tracks film’s role in rewriting the possibilities of novelistic irony. It focuses on the work of Aldous Huxley, the period’s most well-known satirist, who relocated to Hollywood in the ... More

This chapter tracks film’s role in rewriting the possibilities of novelistic irony. It focuses on the work of Aldous Huxley, the period’s most well-known satirist, who relocated to Hollywood in the 1930s for a disastrous career as a screenwriter. As Huxley reflected in a number of key essays on the medium, the cinema achieves automatically what writers often labor to express. It is a medium, he says, in which “miracles are easily performed”—a medium in which miracles are no longer miracles, beauty no longer beautiful. Yet Huxley was a writer perversely willing to draw upon that unbeautiful energy, writing the majority of his late dystopian novel, Ape and Essence (1948), in the hybrid form of a screenplay. In offering a novelistic burlesque of modernity’s most abject art, Huxley casts doubt on the ability of art in general to comprehend the culture of which it is a part.Less

The Antipodes of the Mind

Christopher Partridge

in High Culture: Drugs, Mysticism, and the Pursuit of Transcendence in the Modern World

In 1956, in a letter to Aldous Huxley, the British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond coined the term “psychedelic.” This chapter provides an analysis of the events that led up to Huxley’s psychedelic ... More

In 1956, in a letter to Aldous Huxley, the British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond coined the term “psychedelic.” This chapter provides an analysis of the events that led up to Huxley’s psychedelic epiphany under the influence of mescaline, including Albert Hofmann’s discovery of LSD and subsequent psychedelic research. Particular attention is given to Huxley’s interpretation of the psychedelic state. This is important because Huxley was a catalytic figure at an important moment in the postwar Western world and his ideas had a formative influence on the culture of the 1960s. There is also analysis of R. C. Zaehner’s strident critique of Huxley’s thesis.Less

Anachrony, Neoteny and the ‘Education of an Amphibian’ in Eyeless in Gaza

Daniel Aureliano Newman

in Modernist Life Histories: Biological Theory and The Experimental Bildungsroman

This chapter examines the only Bildungsroman written by Aldous Huxley, one of foremost modernist advocates of Bildung, and one of its most intimately linked with contemporary biology. Reviewers and ... More

This chapter examines the only Bildungsroman written by Aldous Huxley, one of foremost modernist advocates of Bildung, and one of its most intimately linked with contemporary biology. Reviewers and critics have long struggled to make sense of the disorienting and seemingly unmotivated use of anachrony in Eyeless in Gaza, which I attribute to Huxley’s careful study of biological studies by his brother Julian (among others) on the embryology, endocrinology, and evolutionary biology of frogs and salamanders. Central to Huxley’s search for full, harmonious development is the phenomenon of neoteny (the retention of juvenile characteristics into sexual maturity); once interpreted as a pathological failure of development, neoteny was by the 1920s heralded as the biological key to human evolutionary and social success.Less

‘Pleasure too often repeated’:1 Aldous Huxley’s Modernity

Morag Shiach

in The Modernist Party

In ‘“Pleasure too often repeated”: Aldous Huxley’s Modernity’, Morag Shiach focuses on three kinds of Huxleyan repetition: quotation, circulating sexual energies and social rituals. Huxley’s ... More

In ‘“Pleasure too often repeated”: Aldous Huxley’s Modernity’, Morag Shiach focuses on three kinds of Huxleyan repetition: quotation, circulating sexual energies and social rituals. Huxley’s ‘accumulating drops of allusion and quotation’ represent not only a literary style but also ‘the characteristic universe’ of his fictional parties, ‘where meaning emerges from the cumulative drops of fragmented conversation and quotation rather than presenting itself as continuous or coherent’. Serial sexual encounters at parties, together with the taking of narcotics, figure ‘paralysis and obsessive return’, while the ‘repetitions and rituals’ of ‘enforced sociability’ occasion psychic damage. Linking these symptoms in Crome Yellow (1921), Point Counter Point (1928) and Brave New World (1932) to Huxley’s vision of modernity, Shiach explores how Huxley’s textual strategies mimic party behaviours.Less

Huxley’s Feelies: Engineered Pleasure in Brave New World

Laura Frost

in The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents

This chapter examines the intricate balance of pleasure and unpleasure in Aldous Huxley's novel, Brave New World. In particular, it considers the dense composite of references around the “feelies” in ... More

This chapter examines the intricate balance of pleasure and unpleasure in Aldous Huxley's novel, Brave New World. In particular, it considers the dense composite of references around the “feelies” in Brave New World, from a popular women's romance novel to William Shakespeare to race cinema and nature documentaries. It looks at Huxley's vision of futurity, or, as he called it, a “negative utopia,” that is paradoxically organized around pleasure. Just as D. H. Lawrence's work registers the attraction of the material he claims to reject, the engineered pleasures in Brave New World, including the feelies, exert a frivolous, sleazy magnetism that often contradicts the novel's argument against careless hedonism. The totalitarian culture that is meant to be repellent is secured by a wide variety of vernacular pleasures that are, from a readerly perspective, paradoxically engaging. The chapter explains how this irony is extended in Huxley's subsequent adaptation of Brave New World to a musical comedy.Less

The Entertainment Empire: Britain's Hollywood between the Wars

Genevieve Abravanel

in Americanizing Britain: The Rise of Modernism in the Age of the Entertainment Empire

In the period shortly after the First World War, the vast majority of films viewed in Britain and its Empire came from America. This worrisome state of affairs led some British politicians, cultural ... More

In the period shortly after the First World War, the vast majority of films viewed in Britain and its Empire came from America. This worrisome state of affairs led some British politicians, cultural critics, and writers to assert in all seriousness that Hollywood film had the potential to undermine the British Empire. This chapter introduces the concept of the “entertainment empire” in order to explain how some in Britain perceived American entertainment as a new kind of imperialism, one based less on colonial occupation and more on the marketing of mass-reproduced leisure. The chapter further considers how a group of modernist film critics including H.D., Bryher, and Kenneth Macpherson recast the aesthetic philosophy of their pioneering journal, Close Up, in reaction to the new sounds of Hollywood.Less

Coda: Brave New World

David Ayers

in Modernism, Internationalism and the Russian Revolution

The conclusion briefly reflects on the myopia that the Russian Revolution itself generated, and suggests that in British literature it was Aldous Huxley, just a few years after the period considered ... More

The conclusion briefly reflects on the myopia that the Russian Revolution itself generated, and suggests that in British literature it was Aldous Huxley, just a few years after the period considered in this study, who was the first to take a distance from events and from the particularities of the Revolution and the League to ask what a future, world state might look like.Less

Conclusion: ‘On the very brink of utterance’: Aldous Huxley, Mark Gertler and Transfigured Things

Claudia Tobin

in Modernism and Still Life: Artists, Writers, Dancers

Conclusion: ‘On the very brink of utterance’: Aldous Huxley, Mark Gertler, and Transfigured Things Modernism and Still Life concludes by examining the writings of Aldous Huxley in his analysis of ... More

Conclusion: ‘On the very brink of utterance’: Aldous Huxley, Mark Gertler, and Transfigured Things Modernism and Still Life concludes by examining the writings of Aldous Huxley in his analysis of still life painters from Mark Gertler to Cézanne. Reading Huxley’s early art criticism in the light of his later meditation on visionary experience, The Doors of Perception (1954), returns this inquiry to a series of concerns about the ethics of the contemplative versus the active, the animate and the inanimate, which were first raised in the Introduction in Lawrence’s writing on Cézanne.Less

Huxley and Isherwood: The California Years

Peter Edgerly Firchow

in The American Isherwood

This chapter focuses on Christopher Isherwood’s collaboration with Aldous Huxley on a number of literary projects in California during the 1950s and early 1960s. It considers how the Huxley–Isherwood ... More

This chapter focuses on Christopher Isherwood’s collaboration with Aldous Huxley on a number of literary projects in California during the 1950s and early 1960s. It considers how the Huxley–Isherwood friendship allowed the two writers to explore their common interests in Eastern religion, film writing, and the Southern California landscape. Working on scripts for plays and films was something Isherwood was good at and already had a fair amount of experience doing, not only for a lot less money a few years earlier with Berthold Viertel in London, but even more notably with his close friend W. H. Auden. He undertook several collaborated scripts with Huxley, including Jacob’s Hands—the only one ever to be published. Unfortunately, their collaborations did not lead to financial or artistic success.Less

Introducing LSD, 1953–1956

Stephen Siff

in Acid Hype: American News Media and the Psychedelic Experience

This chapter studies the dramatic appearance of LSD on the news agenda in reports on scientific studies using drugs to simulate madness, and the concurrent discussion of mystical, mind-expanding drug ... More

This chapter studies the dramatic appearance of LSD on the news agenda in reports on scientific studies using drugs to simulate madness, and the concurrent discussion of mystical, mind-expanding drug use sparked by the publication of Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception. In addressing these topics, journalists introduced American audiences to new drugs and to the use of drugs to create mental states considered to have significant scholarly and academic importance. Scholarly interest gave journalists license to describe drug states that previously had been considered inappropriate for public view. Reports in mainstream media outlets were followed quickly by even more sensational coverage in more marginal publications.Less

Authorship and Adaptation

Darren Arnold

in The Devils

This chapter examines Ken Russell's The Devils (1973) in terms of authorship and adaptation. The Devils is often viewed, quite understandably, as being pure Ken Russell, but the influence of the two ... More

This chapter examines Ken Russell's The Devils (1973) in terms of authorship and adaptation. The Devils is often viewed, quite understandably, as being pure Ken Russell, but the influence of the two acknowledged sources on his screenplay should not be overlooked. A common view is that much of the historical information in the film was gleaned from Aldous Huxley's 1952 book The Devils of Loudun, and the dialogue was influenced by (or lifted from) John Whiting's 1961 play The Devils. Both of the film's credited sources allow for interesting correlations with Russell's film, but what is often passed over is that Whiting's play was based on Huxley's book—therefore the film is based on both a book and a play that was based on that same book, meaning Russell adapts Huxley both directly and indirectly. With this in mind, a straightforward bifurcation of The Devils' screenplay is not really possible.Less

Virginia Woolf and Aldous Huxley in Good Housekeeping Magazine

Saskia McCracken

in The Modern Short Story and Magazine Culture, 1880-1950

In 1931, Virginia Woolf was commissioned to write a series of six articles for Good Housekeeping, a middlebrow women’s magazine, which have typically been read by critics as five essays and a short ... More

In 1931, Virginia Woolf was commissioned to write a series of six articles for Good Housekeeping, a middlebrow women’s magazine, which have typically been read by critics as five essays and a short story. Woolf’s series takes her readers on a tour of the sites of commerce and power in London, from the Thames docks and shops of Oxford Street, to ‘Great Men’s Houses,’ abbeys, cathedrals, and the House of Commons, ending with a ‘Portrait’ of a fictitious Londoner. This chapter has three aims. First, it suggests that Woolf’s Good Housekeeping publications can be read not simply as five essays and a short story, but, considering Woolf’s ethics of the short story, as a series of short stories or, as the magazine editors introduced them, word pictures and scenes. Secondly, this chapter argues that Woolf’s Good Housekeeping series responds to, and resists the Stalinist politics of, Aldous Huxley’s series of four highbrow essays on England, published in Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine. Finally, this chapter analyses a critically neglected short story by Ambrose O’Neill, ‘The Astounding History of Albert Orange’ (February 1932), published in Good Housekeeping, which features both Woolf and Huxley as characters, and which critiques, satirises, and destabilises the boundaries of highbrow literary culture. Thus, the focus turns from highbrow writers’ short stories to a story about highbrow writing, all published in the supposedly middlebrow Good Housekeeping, demonstrating the rich complexity of the magazine, its varied politics, and its generically hybrid publications.Less

The Politics of Value

Nathan Waddell

in Moonlighting: Beethoven and Literary Modernism

This chapter discusses the music of Beethoven’s so-called ‘late’ period and its representation in the work of Aldous Huxley, among others. Beethoven’s music may or may not embody values over which ... More

This chapter discusses the music of Beethoven’s so-called ‘late’ period and its representation in the work of Aldous Huxley, among others. Beethoven’s music may or may not embody values over which the politics of authoritarianism arguably can never fully or finally triumph, but it is hard to see what that music can do, practically speaking, when faced with the violent realities of authoritarianism ‘on the ground’: vitriol, fists, weapons, bombs, and tanks. Huxley managed to bring these emphases into a distinctive dialogue with the idea of Beethovenian conventionality. This chapter considers how his most modernist novel, Point Counter Point (1928), affirms the value of Beethoven’s late music; questions the terms of the inter-war musicological consensus which did so much to put that music on a high-cultural pedestal; and uses the implied background of the Beethoven centenary celebrations to dispute the redemptive power of Beethovenolatry in an age of authoritarian entrenchment.Less

Girlfriends, Boyfriends, and Bright Young Things

Jane Marcus

Jean Mills (ed.)

in Nancy Cunard: Perfect Stranger

The chapter explores Cunard’s circle of bohemian friends as it gives an analysis of women’s independence and the identification of that independence with lesbian sexuality. The chapter also examines ... More

The chapter explores Cunard’s circle of bohemian friends as it gives an analysis of women’s independence and the identification of that independence with lesbian sexuality. The chapter also examines Cunard’s relationship to Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley, and Louis Aragon, rereading Huxley’s fictional portrayal of Cunard as femme fatale and his engagement with English primitivism. Cunard’s contributions to Vogue and avant-garde aesthetics and leftist politics are also investigated.Less