Title Essays (2706 words) - Fiction, Literature, British Literature

Title: The End of Utopia: A Study of Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" RSPEAK_STOP Author(s): Peter Edgerly Firchow Publication Details: The End of Utopia: A Study of Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World,'. Bucknell University Press, 1984. Source: Contemporary Literary Criticism . Ed. James P. Draper and Jennifer Allison Brostrom . Vol. 79. Detroit: Gale, 1994. From Literature Resource Center . Document Type: Critical essay Bookmark: Bookmark this Document Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1994 Gale Research, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning RSPEAK_START do not remove FT/IMG Full Text: [( essay date 1984) An American educator and critic, Firchow is the author of Aldous Huxley: Satirist and Novelist (1972) and The End of Utopia: A Study of Aldous Huxley's " Brave New World ." One of the chief problems Huxley had with Brave New World , according to Donald Watt, was with the characters. On the evidence of the revisions, Watt concludes that Huxley seems first to have thought of making Bernard Marx the rebellious hero of the novel but then changed his mind and deliberately played him down into a kind of anti-hero. After rejecting the possibility of a heroic Bernard, Huxley next seems to have turned to the Savage as an alternative. According to Watt, there are in the typescript several indications, later revised or omitted, of the Savage's putting up or at least planning to put up violent resistance to the new world state, perhaps even of leading a kind of revolution against it. But in the process of rewriting the novel, Huxley also abandoned this idea in favor of having no hero at all, or of having only the vague adumbration of a hero in Helmholtz Watson. Watt's analysis of the revisions in Brave New World is very helpful and interesting; he shows convincingly, I think, that Huxley was unable to make up his mind until very late in the composition of the novel just what direction he wanted the story and the leading male characters to take. From this uncertainty, however, I do not think it necessary to leap to the further conclusion that Huxley had difficulty in creating these characters themselves. Huxley's supposedly inadequate ability to create living characters, the result of his not being a "congenital novelist," is a question that often arises in discussions of his fiction, and in connection with longer and more traditionally novelistic novels like Point Counter Point or Eyeless in Gaza (1936) appropriately so. But Brave New World is anything but a traditional novel in this sense. It is not a novel of character but a relatively short satirical tale, a "fable," much like Voltaire's Candide . One hardly demands fully developed and "round" characters of Candide , nor should one of Brave New World . This is all the more the case because the very nature of the new world state precludes the existence of fully developed characters. Juliets and Anna Kareninas , or Hamlets and Prince Vronskys , are by definition impossibilities in the new world state. To ask for them is to ask for a different world, the very world whose absence Huxley's novel so savagely laments. Character, after all, is shaped by suffering , and the new world state has abolished suffering in favor of a continuous, soma-stupefied, infantile "happiness." In such an environment it is difficult to have characters who grow and develop and are "alive." Despite all this, it is surprising and noteworthy how vivid and even varied Huxley's characters are. With all their uniformly standardized conditioning, Alphas and Betas turn out to be by no means alike: the ambitious "go-getter" Henry Foster is different from his easy-going friend Benito Hoover; the unconventional and more "pneumatic" Lenina Crowne from the moralistic and rather less pneumatic Fanny Crowne ; the resentful and ugly Bernard Marx from the handsome and intelligent Helmholtz Watson. Huxley, in fact, seems to work consistently and consciously in terms of contrastive/complementary pairs to suggest various possibilities of response to similar situations. So, too, Helmholtz and the Savage are another pair, as are the Savage and Mond , Mond and the DHC, Bernard and Henry Foster. The most fully developed instance of this pairing or doubling technique is the trip that Bernard and Lenina