Terry Eagleton's Brave New World

Terry Eagleton’s quote compares the nature by which we structure our society with the way in which novelists create entire worlds within their works. When he writes “the only rules which are binding are those which we invent for ourselves,” he means that the codes we live by are defined by the values and ideologies that we subscribe to. For much of the United States’ history, for example, African Americans were legally segregated from the rest of society. Why? Because the ideology of the ruling class dictated that African Americans were inferior to Caucasians. There is no natural law that mandates this separation, but it was put in place nonetheless. This is as a result of the decades upon decades of bigoted values held by the majority of
the United States populace. These values shaped the structure of society for nearly two hundred years, and other values shape the structure of novels in a similar fashion. The principles and goals of the author shape the ways in which they structure their works.
Brave New World, for instance, is a novel crafted with the purpose of critiquing a world Huxley found troubling. He took issue with what he saw as expanding control of the state in the lives of its citizens, and in response wrote a novel in which this control or manipulation was taken to the extreme. The rapid technological improvement of the era concerned him, and so the society of Brave New World was designed to exemplify the dangers of allowing technology to control our lives. He viewed a world in which people all too often pull the wool over their own eyes, blinding themselves to the reality of their situation, so the people in his creation would take soma in order to convince themselves of their own happiness. In much the same way as groups of people have used their beliefs to build the structures of their societies, the civilization that Huxley created in Brave New World is shaped by his personal system of beliefs, albeit in a way which directly contradicts them, in order to convey his messages to his audience. This is not a phenomenon unique to Huxley’s Brave New World, indeed it is present in many, if not all, novels. The England portrayed in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was created in the same way. In the moral code of her time, for someone such as Lydia Bennet to run off with a man like Wickham and not get married would result in becoming a social pariah. This lead Austen to
write about this type of situation, since it would create a compelling and dramatic plot element in a society with the values of 1813 England. The second half of Eagleton’s quote is centered upon the way in which this building of fictional worlds based on real world values results in a narrative that is more realistic than it otherwise would be. While some of the values held by an author may be formed independently, the vast majority are likely to be influenced in some manner by the society in which they live. This means that the majority of the members of such a society are likely the hold similar ideological tenants. Even if their systems of belief are not utterly identical to that of the novelist, they will, at the very least, have been exposed to ideas of a similar vein. As a result, the novel’s audience is more likely to be able to relate to the views espoused in the text. Brave New World’s message warning against an overreaching government resonates with its readers because they fear the government assuming control of their lives just as Huxley did in the 1930s. As a result, Huxley’s vision of a dystopian future seems all too plausible, galvanizing the readership into action to prevent it. This, of course, was Huxley’s entire goal: to prevent this sort of future. There is no better way to accomplish this by writing from a base of relatable ideology.