International Journal of Literature and Arts 2016; 4(3): 38-43 http://www.sciencepublishinggroup.com/j/ijla doi: 10.11648/j.ijla.20160403.13 ISSN: 2331-0553 (Print); ISSN: 2331-057X (Online)
The Civilization of Aldous Huxley’s Brave World Saffeen Nueman Arif Department of English, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Koya University, Kurdistan Region, Iraq
Email address: saffeen.numan@koyauniversity.org
To cite this article: Saffeen Nueman Arif. The Civilization of Aldous Huxley’s Brave World. International Journal of Literature and Arts. Vol. 4, No. 3, 2016, pp. 38-43. doi: 10.11648/j.ijla.20160403.13 Received: April 3, 2016; Accepted: May 13, 2016; Published: May 26, 2016
Abstract: The paper aims at exploring Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), precisely, his criticism of the civilized rules by which the World State citizens must abide. Those rules are, characteristically, at odds with the normal human ways of life that the writer textually describes as "savage." The paper intends to examine the two concepts of civilization and savageness as far as Huxley's utopian "brave" world is concerned. Moreover, it tries to underscore, by means of juxtaposing the discussion of the two worlds representing each of the two concepts throughout the second and the third sections of the paper, the irony underlying their new inverted meanings.
Keywords: Civilization, Oppression, Rights, Individual, Ideal, Savage
1. Introduction The issues that the twentieth-century British writer Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) addressed in his novel Brave New World (1932) seemed urgent during the post-World War era, “when governments sought scientific and technological progress at all costs”. [1] Huxley seemed to witness with dismay the sweeping victory of the matter over the spirit, which came as a result of what the eighteenth-century rationalists believed to be the prevalence of Reason. The twentieth-century French writer Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) criticizes the modern Western civilization for having cut its links with the sacred and the numinous. He believes that the triumph of rationalism has led Westerners to neglect the spiritual in favour of the intellectual, "with the result that culture is impoverished and theatre reduced to mere talk." [2] On writing his novel, Huxley must have in mind the image of Europe left in ruins after the First World War, a world that was torn between nationalistic radicalisms on the left and on the right. Therefore, the book came out to be of a transcendental, visionary outlook though the author insisted that his novel was not a prophetic, but a cautionary one. [3] Huxley’s alarming perspective of the future of mankind was obviously nourished by the fact that: Huxley composed Brave New World in 1931, when Europe and America were still reeling— economically, politically, and socially—from World War I. Massive industrialization,
coupled with severe economic depression and the rise of fascism, were the backdrop for the novel. [4] The vast and rapid scientific advancements perceived against a social background during the second half of the twentieth century - particularly in the field of biology - made Huxley’s prophecies about the future seem more real than mere fantasy. [5] In keeping with his view of life as fastidious and vulgar, Huxley’s satire, whose main targets are aesthetics, politics, morals, and spiritualism, turns him, for the most part, into a “superb debunker”. [6] Huxley's novel might have been inspired by H. G. Wells’s prophetically optimistic book Men Like Gods (1923). In a 1962 letter, Huxley explained how the facile optimism of Men Like Gods greatly annoyed him. Having the impetus to compose a parody of Wells in 1931, he began writing a novel satirizing the notion of a scientific utopia, a satire that was published the following year and became his most widely read narrative. [7] Unlike Wells’s novel, however, Huxley’s tale evokes a frightening vision of the future of a society governed by highly developed reproductive technology, biological engineering and sleep-learning. [8] Huxley appears to be extremely concerned about a hygienic, serialized future. Where “everything is mechanical, planned, bottled, dehumanized, and frightful … the result is a picture from which one recoils with loathing". [9] Whereas a