Whereas Huxley’s other novels are largely forgotten today by the general public, and his later visits to the themes of Brave New World are those of a crank whose imaginative gifts have deserted him, in writing his greatest work he seems to have been in the grip of an idea larger than himself. Yet it may not be necessary to confirm any precise authorial intention on Huxley’s part to imitate Plato. His biographer Murray mentions no such connection in Huxley’s mind either nor does his earlier biographer Sybille Bedford. Nor do his Complete Essays (published 2000 – 2002) shed light on this.
In neither the “Foreword” added to the 1946 edition nor his lengthy 1958 essay Brave New World Revisited, which is published together with the novel in some editions, does he indicate any consciousness of a parallel. Whether Huxley saw the similarities himself is far from clear. A more penetrating view was taken by Rebecca West, who in a 1932 review of the book in the Daily Telegraph called it “the most serious religious work written for some years,” and remarked that in one pivotal scene Huxley had “rewritten in terms of our age the chapter called ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ in The Brothers Karamazov.” (West’s comparison was discussed at length in these pages in Caitrin Nicol’s essay “ Brave New World at 75,” Spring 2007.)īut an even more telling comparison can be made - that Brave New World is a modern counterpart to the “city in speech” built by Socrates and his young interlocutors in Plato’s Republic. Though Huxley clearly intended his 1932 book as a dystopia, Murray reports that the novel was “popular with American college students in the 1950s” for its portents of sexual liberation, and that the contemporary French novelist Michel Houellebecq, in the words of one of his characters, treats Brave New World as “exactly the sort of world we’re trying to create, the world we want to live in.” Murray himself, whose strong suit is Huxley’s personal life rather than his literary production, plays up the respects in which the novel is a “critique of modern consumerism.” To be sure, there are the planned obsolescence of consumer goods, the conditioned desire for empty recreations, and the replacement of God with the shade of Henry Ford. Huxley’s latest biographer, Nicholas Murray, explains that when Orwell sent Huxley an early copy of 1984, Huxley wrote back to say “that he had enjoyed it but believed his book was better prophecy,” with its portrait of a gentler but more effective totalitarianism than Orwell’s “boot smashing down on the face.”
This is a judgment that would not have surprised its author. With the Cold War now long over, and with that era’s public preoccupation with space, military technology, and the physical sciences redirected toward the biological and behavioral sciences and their potential to reshape human beings and society, Huxley’s dark tale has seemed “relevant” again. Orwell’s book, published in 1949, seemed to many readers the more apt dystopia for understanding the challenge of totalitarianism, since it could be said to capture the essential character of the regimes on the other side of the Iron Curtain. For much of the Cold War, George Orwell’s novel 1984 eclipsed Aldous Huxley’s earlier work Brave New World.
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