Aldous Huxley warned us against a Third Atomic World War


When Aldous Huxley publish your novel A happy world in February 1932, the work consecrates him as one of the intellectual references of the 20th century. Sixteen years later, in August 1948, he writes another dystopian novel, monkey and essence. The book goes on sale in the middle of the Iron Curtain, with the world divided into two irreconcilable great geopolitical blocs – the Soviet Union and the governments of the West – and facing the possibility of a Third World War waged with nuclear weapons.

post apocalyptic scenario

Huxley’s absolute mistrust of the drift of mid-twentieth-century ideals, nationalism, and scientific progress leads him, with well-founded fear, to take a step further. The author does not wait for a nuclear holocaust to be unleashed, but he goes directly to envision and predict the post-apocalyptic scenario that happens to him. Against all odds, the result, the kingdom of Belial in southern California in the year 2108, does not cause the strong repercussion that it had caused in the reader. the scientifically sweetened civilization of the World State.

From its publication to the present day, one of the issues that continues to create the greatest expectation among critics is to find an explanation for the kind of literary limbo in which the work falls. Not even Huxley’s commitment to a new narrative style, where the argument is built from the cinematographic language itself, was enough to be treated as a subject of study from a purely semiotic perspective.

The reason seems obvious: the strong literary impact of A happy world and the temporal proximity of 1984 from George Orwell allocate and condemn monkey and essence to become one of the great “forgotten classics” of our contemporary era.

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Portrait of Aldous Huxley, 1947.
Wikimedia Commons

In our days, the threat of a Third World War carried out by atomic bombs, with a Putin who keeps the world population in check, once again makes “nuclear terror” one of the causes of greatest concern in our Western society. Therefore, it is opportune to rescue the visionary message that Huxley offers humanity in 1948 with monkey and essence: There is the possibility that an unexpected war waged with nuclear weapons destroys civilization as we understand it and ends up reducing us to a kind of human-beast and unable to rebuild humanity.

Bearing in mind the importance that religious and political fundamentalism acquire in the pseudo-civilization represented in the novel, the reader is now faced with an unbeatable opportunity to read and reinterpret this serious warning about our most immediate future.

In fiction, the human being is urged to choose between one of these two scenarios in the novel:

  • As they say in the book: “Speak of peace to end the war, or speak of independent democracy.”

  • Or allow ourselves to be degraded as humans to the point of becoming simple half-done beasts guided by the darkest version of politics, regardless of ideologies.

reception in spanish

In monkey and essence, a dejected social model adopts the state formula: “Fear of institutions, demonstrably fatal, for which, in our suicidal loyalty, we are willing to kill and die.” To our luck and misfortune, his visionary message is today more relevant than ever.

If in the early fifties the warning of the novel was overshadowed by the indefatigable and bloody gaze of Orwell’s Big Brother and by the Great State of A happy worldtoday finds an almost exact reproduction precisely in the monstrous world order that Russia intends to impose at any cost.

The timid impact of monkey and essence in the Anglo-Saxon literary panorama it could have delayed its edition in Spanish. This, fortunately, did not happen, thanks to Huxley’s unconditional follower and friend, the Argentine writer and editor Victoria Ocampo. She was the one who promoted the first edition of monkey and essence in Spanish in 1951, just two years after the English edition. The translation then was carried out by the Catalan writer and translator, exiled in Argentina, Cesar August Jordana (1893-1958).

Cover of the latest Spanish edition of monkey and essencefrom Editorial Cátedra.
Editorial Chair

The latest edition of monkey and essencewhose editing and translation I have taken care of, is offered by the publishing house Cátedra in 2017and includes an exhaustive preliminary study of the work, with abundant textual notes and a translation that reinterprets the voices, the hypnopedic messages and the registers of the original English text in its adaptation to Spanish.

Aldous Huxley, with this allegorical moral fable of our time, reminds us that «Thanks to words we have been able to overcome the beasts; and thanks to words, we have often put ourselves on the level of demons.”

we hope that monkey and essence never jump from fiction to reality and continue to be that necessary and timely reading that invites us to a serene reflection to learn to recognize, and thus stop, “with words” and not with war, the demons that prowl through nature human.

Let us stay with the reflection that the author of another great dystopia, clockwork orange, Anthony Burgess, be done in his day on monkey and essence:

“Novels like ‘Mono y essence’ seem, now more than ever, products of their time (Post-Hiroshima), quite anachronistic. But this is Huxlian, intelligent, brutal, thoughtful, original, and the plot line of it captivates our minds… It is a nauseating vision of a more than possible future… Nuclear man has reverted to the ape”.

Jesus Isaiah Gomez LopezEnglish philology, University of Almeria

This article was originally published on The Conversation. read the original.



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