FROM SCIENCE TO LITERATURE: THE LIMITS OF ALDOUS HUXLEY’S INTERDISCURSIVE UTOPIA

Abstract

Abstract: The idea of the interdiscursive construction of literature leads back to
peter l. Berger and Thomas luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise
in the Sociology of Knowledge (1966). Famously, this study proposes to treat “social
reality” as the sum total of the “common-sense world” of intersubjective everyday life
and multiple provinces of subjective experience and objectivized knowledge (Berger
– luckmann 1991, 28–29, 34). in an attempt to conjoin the otherwise disparate “social
distribution of knowledge” with intersubjectivity, Berger and luckmann develop the
concept of “symbolic universes” (60, 110). They designate the latter as specialist fields
of knowledge, language, and meaning that at once transcend and affect everyday life,
as well as defining intersubjective relations. in the light of this theory, literature
acquires the significant role of a mediator between the intersubjective experience of
everyday life, on the one hand, and the symbolic universes of science, religion, politics,
philosophy, and economy, on the other. as an interdiscursive construction, literature
becomes capable of integrating social reality. aldous Huxley’ s writing career
exemplifies the interdiscursive construction of literature. This enterprise amounts to
an articulation of utopia, an ever-receding horizon where literature integrates social
reality by creating a common ground between scientific and literary discourses. as
early as the “Subject-matter of poetry”, an essay collected in On the Margin (1923),
Huxley premises his utopia on the allegedly profound receptivity of literature in
general, and poetry in particular, to the most recent scientific agenda. He observes:
There would be real novelty in the new poetry if it had [...] taken to itself any of
the new ideas and astonishing facts with which the new science has endowed the
modern world. There would be real novelty in it if it had worked out a satisfactory
artistic method for dealing with abstractions. it has not (1928, 33).