'Pleasure too often Repeated': Aldous Huxley's Modernity
Editors
McLoughlin, K
Pagination
210 - 227 (18)
Publisher
Publisher URL
ISBN-13
9780748647316
Location
Journal
The Modernist Party
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Aldous Huxley’s Modernity Morag Shiach In an essay published in 1923, Aldous Huxley suggested that ‘of all the various poisons which modern civilization, by a process of auto- intoxication, brews quietly up within its own bowels, few are more deadly [. . .] than that curious and appalling thing that is technically known as “pleasure”.’ By ‘pleasure’, Huxley here clearly meant something other than simple enjoyment. His use of inverted commas around the word and his description of pleasure as ‘curious and appalling’ signal a profound and significant unease, which I will argue can be fully understood only when considered in relation to Huxley’s sense of the corruption of ‘pleasure’ by the forces of modernity as he perceived them in the early 1920s. Huxley goes on to argue in this same essay that pleasure has become something other than the ‘real thing’, has become ‘organized distraction’, and to bemoan the emergence of ‘vast organizations that provide us with ready-made distractions’. Pleasure thus appears to have become for Huxley not simply negative, but something other than itself (not real), and an experience that is both inauthentic and slightly sinister (‘organ-ized’ and ‘ready-made’). Huxley’s profound suspicion about the nature of pleasure in the modern world means that an analysis of the structural and thematic role of the party in his fiction offers a particularly rich opportunity for a reconsideration of the broader arguments within his novels about the defining characteristics of modernity. These broader arguments, I will suggest, can themselves be more fully and productively understood only when put into dialogue with the literary and cultural project we have come to call ‘modernism’, represented (necessarily only partially) in this chapter through discussions of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and Sigmund Freud