Recent scholarship has examined the many ways modernist writers were drawn to the ideas of the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century. Most of this attention, however, has been paid to how these ideas filtered into the content of modernist works, while relatively little has concerned the ways debates over eugenics may have shaped their style and form. Taking up two of Aldous Huxley’s mid-career novels, After Many a Summer (1939) and Ape and Essence (1948), this essay considers how they are informed by ideas about degeneration and decay, forwarded by eugenicists such as Max Nordau and Cesare Lombroso. In exploring how Huxley’s thought developed beyond his fascination with aesthetic disjunction, this essay examines how these novels enacted satirical attacks on prevailing aesthetic tendencies toward fragmentation, even as the only way Huxley the author could find to attack the specter of degeneration feared by Huxley the social critic was by means of the very degenerative aesethetics he wanted to set himself against.
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