Study Guide to Brave New World and Other Works by Aldous Huxley

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645420095
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for selected works by Aldous Huxley, James Tait Memorial Prize Winner for Fiction in 1939. Titles in this study guide include Brave New World, Point Counter Point, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, and Eyeless in Gaza. As a gifted critic with an unprecedented intelligence, Huxley’s science fiction vividly expresses the power and corruption of technology and politics in contemporary society. Moreover, Huxley’s lifelong concentration on the impacts of science and technology on life can be seen through his use of dystopian imagery and symbolism. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Huxley’s classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons they have stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&As The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO ALDOUS HUXLEY

PREFACE

Aldous Huxley’s writings express the disillusionment of the 1920s, the cynicism of the 1930s, and the questioning of the 1940s. Huxley was the product of the times, and his novels and essays are the expressions of his beliefs and concerns. Huxley’s first two important novels, Antic Hay (1923) and Point Counter Point (1928), like T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, express the despair and disillusionment of the period following World War I. By the time he wrote Brave New World (1932), he despaired of man’s ability to save himself from himself. But thinking that he had found a possible solution to the dilemma of man, Huxley became interested in the teachings of Eastern mystics. His novel After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939) is a vehicle for many of his ideas; his collection of essays The Perennial Philosophy (1946) is a kind of anthology and commentary drawn from the writings of the mystics. Alexander Henderson (Aldous Huxley, London, 1935) was probably right when he said, “Huxley is primarily a light philosophical essayist using the novel form to present the more superficial modes of contemporary thought and feeling.”

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Aldous Huxley was born on July 26, 1894, at Godalming, county of Surrey, England. His father was Leonard Huxley, a prominent literary man, and his grandfather was T. H. Huxley, a biologist who led the battle on behalf of the Darwinian evolutionary hypothesis. His mother was a niece of Matthew Arnold, the English poet, essayist, and critic. His family background seems to have prepared him for a variety of interests - everything from anthropology to zoology and from versification to mysticism. His brother Julian is a leading biologist, and Aldous at one time intended to follow a scientific career.

Having been educated at a preparatory school and at Eton, Huxley intended to become a doctor. But having contracted keratitis (an eye disease resulting in near blindness) he was forced to abandon this idea. He learned to read Braille; after two years he had recovered sufficiently so he could read with a magnifying glass. He then attended Balliol College, Oxford, studied English literature and philology, and took his degree in 1915.

It is interesting to note that Huxley considered the onset of eye trouble the most important single event in his life. This enforced isolation acted as a stimulant rather than a depressant - now more than he ever wanted to “see,” know, and understand everything. And he did not want to “see” only what was apparent, but also what was implied. The following comment of Huxley seems to summarize this point of view, “My ambition and pleasure are to understand, not to act.”

But it would be wrong to think that Huxley cut himself off from society in order to meditate and write. He and his wife (Maria Nys) traveled extensively and entertained frequently. They spent several years in Italy, had a cottage in France, visited India and Central America, and finally settled in California. He was at home with many of the leading authors and critics of his day - Siegfried Sassoon, Wyndham Lewis, the Sitwells, and Robert Graves. He worked with John Middleton Murry on the staff of the Athenaeum magazine, and his friendship with D. H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda has been widely publicized. Some of the tremendous influence that his studies, his travels, and his friendships had on his work will be alluded to later.

Huxley published several volumes of poetry between 1916 and 1920, when he published Limbo, a collection of stories. In 1921 appeared his first novel, Crome Yellow, which established his reputation. At the same time he was writing articles, reviews, and essays for many periodicals. From the beginning of his literary career we can see his interest in fact and fiction - in poetry and prose. This compulsion to communicate - this desire to express his ideas and convictions on a variety of subjects and in a variety of ways - manifested itself until his death in 1963.

HUXLEY AS ESSAYIST

Huxley was a far greater essayist than he was novelist. Because he wanted to “say something,” to make his ideas known, to influence others, his novels often suffer because they are too didactic. Whole sections of his novels could be published as essays since he often makes particular characters spokesmen for his ideas. It was only in the essay that he was free to say without embellishment what he thought and why he thought it. Many of the themes and ideas Huxley develops and expands in his novels were also expressed in his essays.

In his collection of essays Do What You Will (Doubleday, 1929), Huxley urges us to emulate the Greeks, to live a life which considers and accepts both the physical and spiritual elements of man, and to regard all manifestations of life as divine. At one point he says, “Man is multifarious, inconsistent, self-contradictory; the Greeks accepted the fact and lived multifariously, inconsistently, and contradictorily.” In his novel Point Counter Point, the most admirable character and the spokesman for Huxley’s ideas is Mark Rampion. In chapter nine, when speaking of the Greeks, he says, “They were civilized, they knew how to live harmoniously and completely, with their whole being…. We’re all barbarians.”

In another collection of essays, Ends and Means (Harper, 1937), he discusses the work of the Marquis de Sade, a French novelist and libertine: “de Sade’s philosophy was meaningless carried to its logical conclusion. Life was without significance…. Sensations and animal pleasures alone possessed reality and were alone worth living for.” In his novel After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, Huxley creates a character who lives by this philosophy and shows where this philosophy ultimately leads. The character, Jo Stoyte, wishes to find the secret of longevity so he will be able to continue his pursuit of the sensual life; when he discovers that the price of longevity is the loss of humanity, he indicates his willingness to revert to an animal state in order to retain the animal pleasures.

In another essay from the same collection Huxley discusses the change in values which resulted in the state achieving the highest value and significance to the detriment of the individual. “By the end of the twenties a reaction had begun to set in…. The universe as a whole still remained meaningless, but certain of its parts, such as the nation, the state, the class, the party, were endowed with significance and the highest value.” His concern with this transfer of value from the individual to the state resulted in his brilliant satire, Brave New World. In Huxley’s Utopia the individual exists for the state, not the state for the individual. A little further on he discusses the role science plays in our lives and questions the ultimate value of scientific advances. Since the theme of Brave New World is “the advancement of science as it affects human individuals,” we can immediately see Huxley’s concern with the use and misuse of science: “We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early success of science, but in a rather grisly morning after, when it has become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve the means for achieving unimportant or actually deteriorated ends.”

In another collection of essays, The Perennial Philosophy (Harper, 1945), Huxley is concerned with the meaning of existence - with the ultimate end of man. He says, “The last end of man, the ultimate reason for human existence, is unitive knowledge of the divine Ground [a spiritual Absolute - a God - without-form] - the knowledge that can come only to those who are prepared to `die to self’ and so make room, as it were, for God.” In his novel Eyeless in Gaza, Huxley recounts the spiritual pilgrimage of Anthony Beavis towards this end. As he meditates upon his life and his experience, Anthony suddenly understands the meaning and purpose of life, “And now at last it was clear, now by some kind of immediate experience he knew that the point was in the paradox, in the fact that unity was the beginning and unity was the end…. Unity with all being.” Again Huxley states the same belief and the same idea in a novel and in an essay.

We might also look to the essays for specific comments which will help us to better understand Huxley as a novelist. Two quotations from “Vulgarity in Literature” (in Music at Night, Doubleday, Doran, 1931) are especially important. “Literature is also philosophy, is also science.” A little further on he says, “I think it not only permissible, but necessary, that literature should take cognizance of physiology and should investigate the still obscure relations between the mind and its body.”

HUXLEY AS A NOVELIST

The four novels discussed at length in this study guide illustrate many of Huxley’s strengths and weaknesses as a novelist. The exuberance of his ideas, his use of wit and satire, the acuteness of his observations of mankind and its foibles, his juxtaposition of fact and fiction - these are his strengths. The shallowness of his characters, his overriding concern with teaching a lesson or pointing up a moral, the imposition at times of an overelaborate framework for the novel, the use of characters and situations which preclude “the illusion of reality” - these are his weaknesses. We can see certain of these strengths and weaknesses in each of the four novels.

Brave New World is Huxley’s most popular novel, though not necessarily his most important novel. The reader is “swept along” by Huxley’s vision of a Utopian future based on science and technology: he is dumbstruck by Huxley’s clever juxtaposition of fact (scientific data) and fiction (future life on earth). The novel is logically developed - Huxley “begins at the beginning” with a detailed account of life in the new World State. But before long we realize that Huxley is not content simply to present a satire of present a future life and let the reader draw his own moral from the story. Instead Huxley allows his preaching to obtrude upon the fantasy he has created, and his characters soon become important only as spokesmen for particular ideas and beliefs.

In Point Counter Point Huxley has created a fantastic array of characters, but none is fully developed; each represents a particular point of view the author wishes to satirize. But there is much wit and humor in the novel and a variety of plots and counterplots which maintain reader interest. The elaborate musical analogy which is woven through the novel is at times distracting but does illustrate Huxley’s considerable talent as a storyteller. And the two-angled view of life - the juxtaposition of the physical and the emotional, the esthetic and the scientific, etc. - contributes to the interest and the importance of the novel.

After Many a Summer Dies the Swan combines a highly sensational plot and outlandish characters in a wild and preposterous picture of the Hollywood scene. The caricatures of educators, starlets, doctors, and idealists provide some hilarious situations and some wry commentary on the temporary scene. But Huxley is not content to write a comedy - he creates Mr. Propter as a spokesman for his own ideas and beliefs. Unfortunately Propter is too good to be true, and his intrusions upon the scene tend to inhibit rather than enhance the value of the novel.

Eyeless in Gaza has been hailed not only as Huxley’s most significant novel but also as one of the most important novels of the 1930s. In this novel Huxley uses flashbacks to recount one man’s search for a meaning in life. The lack of a logical time sequence - the novel shifts backwards and forwards in time - is often distracting but is an attempt to show the unity of life and the unity and diversity of being. Huxley wished to show that an individual - his beliefs, ideas, and ideals - are the result of many influences. In this novel he recounts many of the influences that have molded Anthony Beavis. Perhaps this novel is most successful because it is in many ways a chronicle of Huxley’s own search for a meaning in life.

Although Huxley wrote some ten novels, the four briefly discussed here are representative of the strengths and weaknesses of all of them. It is a pity that Huxley was not more concerned with the writing of fiction and less concerned with the expression of personal opinion. Huxley “rigged” his plots and “produced” his characters in order to convey some idea or express some concern - to him plot and characters were valuable only as “purveyors of truth.”

THE NOVELS AS AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Because the novelist in some ways has to write about what he thinks, what he believes, and what he knows, every novel in some way may be considered autobiographical. Huxley is no exception. The people he knew, the places he visited, the books he read, the ideas he considered - all contributed to his development as a novelist, a skeptic, and a moralist, and often influenced what he wrote. Considering them in chronological order - Point Counter Point (1928), Brave New World (1932), Eyeless in Gaza (1936), After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939) - we can see some of the ways these novels reflect Huxley’s own life and beliefs.

Huxley was disillusioned by the decadence of society and disgusted by the behavior of his class. Point Counter Point is a sardonic portrayal of the futility of life - each of the characters (with one exception) fails to be a harmonious adult. The one exception is Mark Rampion, who is an idealized version of D. H. Lawrence. (Huxley was much impressed by Lawrence and his beliefs, and they were close friends.) Huxley admitted that in some ways he was Philip Quarles and that the Notebook entries expressed many of his own ideas. Most critics consider that in the novel Denis Burlap is an unflattering caricature of Huxley’s former editor, John Middleton Murry. Thus we see how circumstances, friends, and beliefs affected this work.

When he wrote Brave New World Huxley showed the extent to which his disillusionment with society and its values had influenced him. As noted in his preface to the New Harper edition, at the time the book was written he “toyed” with the idea that “human beings are given free will in order to choose between insanity on the one hand and lunacy on the other.” And we might well consider that John the Savage’s rejection of civilization in the World State paralleled D. H. Lawrence’s rejection of the civilization he knew. Also, many of the ideas presented during the discussion in the last chapter of this novel echo many of Huxley’s own views and concerns about the effect scientific advancement and technology would have on the individual.

Eyeless in Gaza is the picture of a man groping for a way of life that will bring meaning and purpose to his existence - in many ways it is a picture of Huxley and his change of attitude. In the novel Anthony Beavis changes from a self-indulgent, detached philosopher who sneers at life, to a humanistic pacifist who views life through the eyes of a l...