A Marxist Critique of Brave New World

I'm in the middle of writing this paper on Brave New World using Marxist criticism for English. Firstly, Marxist criticism is a bit dull, but it really was my best option, considering that the other two available for the assignment were feminist and new historicist criticism. I was taking a mental stroll and three interesting thoughts occurred to me in the following succession.

I really like Brave New World, but quite honestly, it is not a particularly good book, and I'm not convinced of its literary merit. Huxley throws a lot of interesting insights into the work, but he does so (as in the rest of his novels) in an extremely didactic fashion that is not conducive to meaningful analysis at all. There is very little beneath the hood, so to speak. There is, however, a great deal above it, but it is primarily in the form of philosophical arguments between characters about the meaning of events that take place in the book. In effect, Huxley leaves nothing up to the reader to figure out. It makes it extraordinarily difficult to write a paper on, and I don't think it makes for an impressive work of fiction. It's more like a very good essay that has been fictionalized. There is little figurative depth, except perhaps at the very end. Sadly the end has little significance from a Marxist perspective.

After thinking through this, I checked myself slightly because I thought of an incisive idea/thesis. The novel portrays a society that is obsessed with happiness over all else. This sounds suspiciously similar to the manner in which our Western society is obsessed with liberty, often to the exclusion of other values. Hence one could make an extremely interesting (although probably not water-tight) argument that Huxley uses happiness in Brave New World to satirize freedom in present-day society. Clearly this was the furthest thing from Huxley's actual intention, but I think that there is a great deal of support for it and that it would yield lots of interesting analysis and perspectives on our current values and how they can be paradoxical. The main barrier to making this convincing is that happiness is far more extreme in Brave New World than it is in the present-day. Regardless, it is a heck of a lot more compelling than writing about the implications of social class differences and interactions.

This leads me to my final observation which is the idiocy of these literary "lenses" that are used in literary criticism. The main lesson that I gained from this assignment is that using these literary lenses is utterly worthless because it forces the reader to come into the book with a preconceived bias about the meaning. The reader thus shifts slightly away from truth-seeking argumentation to a more ideological style of analysis. Instead of looking for some true implication of the book, the reader only looks for evidence to support the pre-chosen topic of inquiry. Maybe this is no worse than my argument above that has nothing to do with Huxley's true intentions. As long as the argument is defensible, I suppose that it shouldn't matter. There just seems to be something aesthetically wrong with critical lenses. The best way I can describe it is by comparing it to general equilibrium and partial equilibrium models in economics. The critical lense seems like a partial equilibrium approach when a general equilibrium model would be more suited to the job. In other words, I think we should just all surrender all of this nonsense and become new critics. Although according to my English teacher, that would be nothing short of "insanity."