In picking up on my earlier post on the ‘foreign flâneur’ in Mexico and the discussion of Sybille Bedford, my attention now turns to Aldous Huxley. Recent controversy has been rightly raised due to the bulldozing of a 2,300 year-old Mayan pyramid in Belize at the Nohul complex, close to the border with Mexico (pictured). As reported in the Guardian, Francisco Estrada-Belli, a Professor in Archaeology at Boston University, has stated that ‘I don’t think I am exaggerating if I say that every day a Maya mound is being destroyed for construction in one of the countries where the Maya lived’, including Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico. It is a landscape that Huxley surveyed himself in Beyond the Mexique Bay [1934], chillingly commenting on the choice betweens pyramids or progress, the latter defined in the modern form of personal liberty. He even surmised that ‘there are enough bricks in the Cholula pyramid [Mexico] to cover an area twice as large as the Place de la Concorde to a depth to twice the height of the Louvre’. To paraphrase Paco Ignacio Taibo II, it seems that Aldous Huxley should have avoided writing on Mexico and carried on with those dystopian novels he wrote so well.
Travelling across Mexico and Central America in the 1930s one cannot be struck by anything other than the frank bluntness of Aldous Huxley’s prose. Sybille Bedford visited Mexico in the 1950s and was quite brutal in her views on Oaxaca, for example. However, the author with whom she became friends and authorised biographer, Aldous Huxley, is nothing but emblematic of colonial arrogance and Eurocentric civilisational supremacy.
Huxley dismisses the tropics as melancholic and hopeless and thus completely resigned to hopelessness. Mayan architecture is set aside as ‘abstractly inorganic’ meaning ‘an affair of pyramids, of flat walls divided up into rectangular panels, of wide and regular flights of steps, it is an abandonment of man’s [sic] most distinctively human, his most anti-natural imaginings’. In Antigua his conclusion is that ‘I will not pretend that it contains any great masterpiece of architecture: that would be absurd’.
More worrying still is his cultural essentialism (and racism) in counterpoising traditional ‘isolated and homogenous communities’, the indigenous Mayans, that are ‘classless and unspecialised’, with the more diverse heterogeneous societies of Europe, composed of a greater number of more complex classes and disposed to wider contact with other societies. Huxley’s acceptance that Melanesians seem to be ‘more sensitive to pain than we are’ and that ‘Bushmen, Australian Black-fellows, and perhaps some races of Negroes’ are perhaps ‘a little less bright’ than Europeans is extremely uncomfortable reading. The colonial undertow of ‘The White Man’s Burden’ comes through:
The development of an undeveloped land will ultimately (we hope) be of good to all the inhabitants . . . Every colonial power has found itself obliged to systematise the efforts of its subjects by compulsion. Naked or in disguise, as slavery or in some less brutal form, forced labour has everywhere been employed in the development of wild countries. And it is exceedingly difficult to see how they could have been developed without it.
Key here, perhaps, to assessing Aldous Huxley’s social function as an intellectual is to insert him in a wider milieu as one more member of a broader tradition recognised as the ‘Tory Anarchist’ — this is a form of dissident, taking cultural and moral opposition to many features of the modern world, but maintaining respect for specific English class sentiments, such as individual liberty, and including them within a fading imperialist arrogance linked to Britain’s decline in world order.
The contradictions of these themes are apparent in at least two aspects of Beyond the Mexique Bay that directly link to Aldous Huxley’s better known work, Brave New World [1932]. First, there is Huxley’s grappling with the problem of developmental catch-up and how best to understand the condition of uneven development. Second, there is his conceptualisation of time and the processes of spatialising time throughout history.
In visiting Miahuatlán in Mexico, south of Oaxaca City, Huxley surmises that industrial European towns in Lancashire, or the Ruhr, are intensely and positively appalling whereas their Mexican equivalents are negatively appalling. With an intertextual reference to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94, Huxley states:
A Black Country town is a fearful sin of commission; Miahuatlán and its kind are sins of omission . . . “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds”; the Black Country is more horrible than Miahuatlán . . . The lily, whose festering fills the industrial areas of every continent with so fearful a stench, is the disinterested love of truth. For the disinterested love of truth leads to pure science; and the application of pure science to commercial ends is industry; and when (as generally happens) the ends are silly or downright harmful and the modes of application iniquitous, then, nightmarishly proliferating, appear the Pittsburghs and Birminghams, the Osakas and Calcuttas of this unhappy world.
This leads to an extended set of reflections on the ‘backwardness’ of places such as Miahuatlán in contrast to the ‘advanced’ alternatives of places such as Middlesborough and how to reconcile the ‘primitive’ with the ‘civilised’. If these are the only two choices — Miahuatlán or Middlesborough — Huxley ponders, then suicide might as well be committed. One alternative that might exist is the blending of Mexico with North America. This is something that flips out of Brave New World, given the division between the ‘Savage Reservation’ and the village of Malpaís [badland], on one hand, and the ‘utopia’ of the Western European zone centred in London headed by Mustapha Mond in the year A.F. 632 (After Ford), on the other hand. As Huxley critically comments in a later foreword to Brave New World [1946], ‘the Savage is offered only two alternatives, an insane life in Utopia, or the life of a primitive in an Indian village’.
In grappling with these contradictions of uneven development and their reconciliation, Huxley ponders ‘How much of what is good in North American civilisation can Mexico import and still remain Mexico?’ The problems of cultural essentialism resurface. Increased hygiene and education will bring rapid population growth, urbanism, and the demand for fleets of the new Ford motor car in Mexico. And ‘the Fords will carry an invisible cargo of new ideas, of alien, urban ways of thought and feeling’. Also on display is a neo-Malthusian anxiety about overpopulation, something also articulated strongly in Brave New World Revisited [1958], which in underdeveloped regions is deemed to be threatening the ‘well being of individuals’ elsewhere in the modern world, generating economic insecurity and social unrest.
When visiting the Mayan ruins of Copán in Honduras, the narrative is not that much gentler. Huxley imparts an interest here in the airplane transforming the local mode of life and conceptions of time and space.
Mules, porters, mud-tracks through the jungle . . . Then, from one day to another, people were hurtling through space in trimotored air liners. A long, laborious epoch of history was suppressed, and without transition men passed from a Neolithic technique of transportation to the most advanced twentieth-century practice.
Time is therefore transformed into space but Huxley does pose the significant and beguiling question: ‘How shall time be spatialised?’
Spatialisations can take various forms and the Mayan focus on calendar time, time as an obsession, and the intellectual mastery and transformation of time, is one of the artistic techniques highlighted by Huxley and how there is a parcelling up of the continuous flux of life. Music, poetry, and dance are also noted as methods for spatialising time, which establishes patterns and reveals different identities in the transmutation of time into space. Time, then, has been spatialised to its extreme limit but the current of time, history, is still flowing.
Yet, how does the spatial and temporal come together towards the end of Beyond the Mexique Bay? The travelogue closes with reflections on Mexico City with Huxley once more clumsily grappling with the spatial conditions of uneven development. ‘In spite of the proximity of the United States’, he states, ‘in spite of Fords and Frigidaires and Palmolive, Mexican culture still remains predominantly French’. The trappings of Eurocentrism remain. While admitting that he has never been so bad-tempered as during his time in Mexico City, Huxley then concludes:
I never saw so many thin, sickly, and deformed people as in the poorer quarters of the metropolis; never such filth and raggedness, such signs of hopeless poverty. As an argument against our present economic system, Mexico City is unanswerable.
Finally, the unevenness of development is grasped in terms of multiplicity and conceptualised, in part, as a condition of spaces in interaction and combination rather than separateness. But that point of arrival comes all too late and at great cost.