Donald Watt’s Critical Essay on Aldous Huxley: The Manuscript revisions of Brave New World
By Ripley Beaver
Donald Watt reviewed the overall attributes of Huxley’s characters in “A Brave New World” and compared said attributes based on the evolution of the characters’ actions did in the various revisions of Huxley’s transcripts. He determined the various transcripts to be counter to popular opinion, i.e. going against the archetypal behavior of the main characters, such as John and Bernard. Apparently, Huxley was worried about his writing and of the idea that his characters would be predictable. As evidenced by Watt, the change in Bernard from having an inferiority complex to having a sense of guilt around Helmholtz shows a dynamic character; having simply one character trait might have led to situations where it would be easy to predict how a character would have acted. Also, there is an entire sequence that was edited out by Huxley in which Mond and John met and discussed John’s horror at the human decanting facilities(Meckier 73-87); Huxley opted for a more general debate to showcase his well-rounded characters.
Watt also examines the change in the use of Huxley’s linguistic revisions, exchanging “common” phrases in turn for more etymologically stimulating words and phrases. Huxley’s earlier revisions versus his older versions show differences in wording such as switching “hatched” with “decanted” and “coffee” becoming “boiling caffeine solution”. Huxley is displayed as enhancing the story by adding the futuristic parallels of everyday objects. Huxley’s apparent new phrase is the revamping of “When a man feels, the state reels” to the phrase “When the individual feels, the community reels”, indicating how he was predicting a stronger sense of the community versus the individual, instead of a juxtaposition of the two. Anyway, Huxley was of the belief that the future would be innovated (and ties to the past cut) to the point that even common phrases would vary by degrees over the course of centuries. This was viewed by Watt as a minor way that Huxley was writing about in his “‘comic, or at least satirical novel’” that the future would choose to cut away its ties of the past society/civilization(Meckier 73-87).
Meckier, Jerome, ed. Critical Essays on Aldous Huxley. New York City: Simon & Schuster Macmillan, 1996. 73-87. Print.