For my summer reading book, I chose the novel A Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. Like so many others, I enjoy works of dystopian fiction, such as the enormously popular novel by George Orwell of the same genre. However, Huxley’s novel greatly deviates from 1984: his artistic vision creates a world with a peaceful dystopian society that is focused on a perfect society created by genetic engineering and the absence of individuality. Huxley created many pertinent and powerful points conveyed throughout his novel, and thus his novel strongly embodied the iceberg effect—meaning there was much more message that had to be discovered and dug from the text itself, i.e. 8/9 of the novel’s “meat” was submerged beneath the text. However, what really propelled this book to the next level was how he presented his “meat—” by delivering it to the reader on his golden platter of great storytelling.
The most impressive aspect of Huxley’s writing is the offspring of his creative vision. Huxley births this very innovative society with his writing structure, his symbolic allusions, and through the reader’s introduction to the world itself. By introducing the novel in a hatchery center, combined with the carefully placed speech given by the director of the facility, he invokes the reader through a symbolic “birth” into his world:
I shall begin at the beginning, said the [Director,] and the more zealous students recorded his intention in their notebooks: Begin at the beginning. "These," he waved his hand, "are the incubators." And opening an insulated door he showed them racks upon racks of numbered test-tubes. "The week's supply of ova. Kept," he explained, "at blood heat; whereas the male gametes," and here he opened another door, "they have to be kept at thirty-five instead of thirty-seven. Full blood heat sterilizes." Rams wrapped in theremogene beget no lambs.
Still leaning against the incubators he gave them, while the pencils scurried illegibly across the pages, a brief description of the modern fertilizing process; spoke first, of course, of its surgical introduction–"the operation undergone voluntarily for the good of Society (Huxley 3).
Furthermore, Huxley created a world filled with his own historical terminology, events, and figures that break up the time continuum into a more realistic novel. For example, he dubbed “Bokanovsky's Process” and created a “past” to his future of man; however, his most powerful device is his incorporation of the great industrialist, Henry Ford, into the novel. Huxley replaces A.D. with A.F. (after Ford) and “oh, my God” with “oh, my Ford;” by this, he inserts Ford in the place of God. In Huxley’s created world, rather than the teaching of God—the meek will inherit the earth, human flaw and weakness, individuality, and mental well being—the notion of “Ford” reflects his world’s industrialized survival of the fittest—where society is streamlined to avoid flaws and to live a comfortable, social, existence. Huxley’s invocation of Ford sets the framework of his dystopia from the top, thus, he allows his characters to the fill the bottom of his artistic society.
The next aspect that should be noted about Huxley’s storytelling is his characters; he cleverly creates characters who are totally unique to one another and who represent different themes and aspects of the society he creates. (That’s all for this rough draft: more to come soon!)
