Finished "Point Counter Point," which travels far beyond convenient categories like the "Novel of ideas." It's difficult to fathom Huxley's intention with this novel. Published in 1928, it owes much to that jaded, post-war view that seized the consciousness of the literary elite in this period. Huxley admits to the upper tier of society, and he presents an intellectual dramatis personae each of whom stands for some specific world view. for example, Quarles (partly a self-portrait) represents the cerebrotonic, socially disengaged thinker who operates on the principles of Pyrrhonism; Rampion (modelled on D.H. Lawrence) personifies the élan vital of the educated noble savage; Spandrell ( model unknown) is Baudelairean spleen updated for 1920s London; Lucy Tantamount (real life equivalent Nancy Cunard) is the over-sexed flapper, but with sociological curiosity towards the men she attracts. As the title suggests, characters and ideas are set in opposition to each other with interesting, and sometimes startling results. Spandrell metamorphoses into the dark other of Rampion by committing murder, ( hitting Webley, the Oswald Moseley fascist, on the head) almost as a kind of aesthetic exercise; his suicide is portrayed as a kind of Beethovian striving for the infinite. What makes the novel distinct from the novels of the beau monde, say Anthony Powell, is the lavish inclusion of scientific concepts and terms which Powell, Waugh and co would steer well clear of. In his early career Huxley espoused the mixing of science and literature, much against the Modernists like Bloomsbury who equated it with technical progress, mass society and the "violence" of democracy.
To his credit Huxley rejected this view of the intellectuals and the masses, though his turn towards mysticism encouraged him to distance himself from social democracy. His psychedelic quietism in California has been seen as a flight from the troubles of the modern world, though maybe that is too unfair. The mysticism isn't too pronounced in this novel, not yet; but there are fascinating clusters of concepts which give the impression of living in the realm of ideas rather than real life. Quarles is pure intellect in the world, and even his wife is hyperintelliigent, enough to distinguish her husband's cardinal defect. Huxley learnt about visual art too, from Roger Fry and there are painters in his fiction. Here, we meet John Bidlake, who is supposed to be based on Augustus John; old and devitalised, Bidlake succumbs to cancer of the pylorus, but paints one final canvas before his demise. From the description of Bidlake's art, it sounds like it was in the mould of Rubens and Renoir. Rampion is an artist too; perhaps the modernist foil to Bidlake, though his themes and style recall the Victorian materialism of Darwin rather the geometrical abstractions of Cubism. All in all this is the kind of novel one reads if one wants intellectual over-stimulation- but that could stand for much of Huxley's fiction which is the product of " ubiquitous intelligence", to steal a description of his alter-ego- Quarles.
I’ve written on art in Huxley’s novels before.
Comments