This reading is the one that makes the novel a dilemma rather than a warning

The argument

A second argument for this reading turns on what kind of book it makes the novel. Proponents observe that the rival interpretations all produce warnings: about what technology may be used for, about where an economy of appetite leads, about what an unchecked authority will do. Warnings have a settled structure, in which the danger is on one side and the reader on the other, and the appropriate response is to resist. Proponents argue that this structure fits the novel badly, because it leaves no account of the book's difficulty. The difficulty they point to is that the novel's society is not easy to argue against on its own terms. It has removed a great deal that human beings have always found unbearable, and it has done so successfully. To object to it is to insist that something matters more than the absence of suffering, and the novel does not make that insistence easy; it requires the reader to name what is worth being unhappy for. On this reading the book is not asking whether such a world should be resisted but what the grounds for resisting it are, which is a question a warning does not raise. Proponents conclude that only the happiness-and-truth reading gives the novel this shape. Under it the two sides of the exchange are both real: the contentment is genuine and the loss is genuine, and no reckoning cancels the other out. That, they argue, is why the book has outlasted the specific anxieties it was written among, and why reading it as a warning makes it smaller than it is.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics answer that the dilemma is manufactured by granting the novel's premise. The contentment on offer is not happiness in any sense a reader would accept on reflection, and once that is said the supposed difficulty dissolves and the book is a warning after all. A second objection is that warnings are not as simple as the argument assumes, since a warning about concentrated power also requires the reader to say what is worth defending and at what cost. Others argue that preferring the reading which makes a novel most philosophically interesting is a literary preference rather than an interpretation, and that the book's own satirical attention points at a social order rather than at an abstract exchange.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] The novel's contentment is not happiness in a sense most readers would endorse on reflection, so arguing against that society requires far less than the premise claims. [Rejecting P3] Warnings also pose dilemmas, since any warning about concentrated power requires the reader to say what is worth defending and at what price, and the contrast therefore fails. [Rejecting C] Choosing the reading that makes a novel most philosophically interesting is a preference about literature rather than a finding about this book.