Huxley and the rest of humanity
- Periodista:
- Gustavo Javier Encina
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If someone – a visiting Martian, say – wanted to gain a real understanding of the twentieth century, the best advice would be to read three great novels that expose the political dread at the very heart of that era. Namely, George Orwell’s 1984, Franz Kafka’s The Trial and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
Of these three anti-utopias, the first two are the most immediately horrifying – but Huxley’s is arguably the cleverest. Orwell incandescently portrayed the brutality of totalitarianism, and Kafka emphasized the destructiveness of a totalitarianism that additionally is inscrutable and arbitrary. We have seen regimes of those kinds; and we have seen some of the worst of them eventually fall. Huxley instead imagined a system in which people remain in lengthy bondage not through fear but by being kept in a state of lying, stupid contentment.
On the fiftieth anniversary of his death, Huxley is being criticized – anew – for not being truly democratic either. His vision is allegedly showing its age, on account of his essential elitism. Maybe so. But his deepest insight is anything but stale: the dystopia he created retains a special insidiousness. It is particularly hard to shake off a tyranny if its artifically blissful victims don’t even perceive it as such. This doesn’t only apply to politics; it’s found under theocratic worldviews too.
His elitism is something that Huxley was perfectly aware of, and very uncomfortable about. The character patterned on himself in his wonderful novel Point Counter Point loves humanity but cannot stand the common man’s very commonness. The publication of Cuentos selectos gives us an opportunity to look at this matter in the context of Huxley’s short stories. If a common thread can be found through the tales in this collection, it is Huxley’s lifelong worries of intellectual haughtiness, insensitivity, snobbery, holier than thouness, poseurism of all kinds (he himself was not an intellectual poseur; he really did know everything, and his thinking was suppleness itself). One particular form of insensitivity that he hated, we find, is that which smothers the emotional needs of children.
This reflection can be made: by definition, a person isn’t responsible for the character traits that he comes hard-wired with. But he is responsible for what he does about them once he becomes aware of them. In this regard, Huxley found a way to try to counteract any innate superciliousness: he constantly wrote against it, to keep himself and others alert to that type of danger.
And he wrote so observantly and well. Here he describes a very self-consciously idealistic man, who (in a retranslation into English) demonstrates “spirituality and disinteresteness” by always sporting shorts, a beard and a knapsack on his back: “Even on Bond Street... Herbert looked as if he were about to climb Mont Blanc. The knapsack is a badge of spirituality.”
It can be mentioned that half the stories unfold in Italy. An Italy of a very specific date. It is festooned with Fascist officials whom resident Britons either consider just another colourful ingredient of the landscape, or positively admire. This part is indeed a time tunnel.