This is the fairly chewy looking Aldous Huxley novel to which I referred a couple of weeks ago. I took another shot at it, and while I'd say chewy remains as good a description as ever, I got through it and even enjoyed it for the most part. Again we have a variation on previous Huxley novels such as Crome Yellow and Antic Hay amounting to a non-linear essay on the state of the world communicated through the dialogue of a large and thus occasionally confusing cast. However, this one is distinguished by at least a few of those characters being based on persons either of Huxley's acquaintance or otherwise of cultural significance around the turn of the century - notably D.H. Lawrence, Augustus John, Baudelaire, and John Hargrave, advocate of the Social Credit movement which, although Utopian and authoritarian was vocally opposed to Fascism and later fought the BUF in the streets - which I mention mainly because Huxley's Everard Webley is often wrongly identified as having been based on Oswald Mosely.
Huxley appears in Point Counterpoint as Philip Quarle, himself a writer, and so the book approaches the fourth wall without quite breaking through in the form of notes and letters written by Philip Quarle referring to his own novel in progress:
The musicalisation of fiction. Not in the symbolist way, by subordinating sense to sound (Pleuvent les bleus baisers des astres taciturnes. Mere glossolalia) But on a large scale, in the construction. Meditate on Beethoven. The changes of moods, the abrupt transitions. (Majesty alternating with a joke, for example, in the first movement of the B flat major Quartet. Comedy suddenly hinting at prodigious and tragic solemnities in the scherzo of the C sharp minor Quartet.) More interesting still, the modulations, not merely from one key to another, but from mood to mood. A theme is stated, then developed, pushed out of shape, imperceptibly deformed, until, though still recognizably the same, it has become quite different. In sets of variations the process is carried a step further. Those incredible Diabelli variations, for example. The whole range of thought and feeling, yet all in organic relation to a ridiculous little waltz tune. Get this into a novel. How? The abrupt transitions are easy enough. All you need is a sufficiency of characters and parallel, contrapuntal plots. While Jones is murdering a wife, Smith is wheeling the perambulator in the park. You alternate the themes. More interesting, the modulations and variations are also more difficult. A novelist modulates by reduplicating situations and characters. He shows several people falling in love, or dying, or praying in different ways—dissimilars solving the same problem. Or, vice versa, similar people confronted with dissimilar problems.
Of course, on the surface of it this means we have four-hundred pages of people talking about stuff, with the stuff being the point of the novel and that which is communicated with the most vigour. It could have gone tits up but Huxley was always exceptionally good at this sort of thing, delivering complex arguments and observations, even those built up on layers of nuance with pinpoint, near scientific accuracy - as distinct from Lawrence's more impressionist, intuitive approach to narratives of equivalent purpose.
Point Counterpoint is about the modern world, as it was in 1928, and about where we were going wrong, and where we continue to go wrong. It's about notions of progress in the wake of Darwin and the industrial revolution, and the infusion of such ideas into the realms of art, literature, politics, religion, and society; and, as usual, the Hux was right about fucking everything, here demonstrated through the mouthpiece of his impressively faithful D.H. Lawrence stand-in
'Our truth, the relevant human truth, is something you discover by living—living completely, with the whole man. The results of your amusements, Philip, all these famous theories about the cosmos and their practical applications—they've got nothing whatever to do with the only truth that matters. And the non-human truth isn't merely irrelevant; it's dangerous. It distracts people's attention from the important human truth. It makes them falsify their experience in order that lived reality may fit in with abstract theory.'
If it's chewy - which it is - then Point Counterpoint is justifiably chewy, its subject being that old chestnut everything ever, and it isn't difficult to see why some regard it as Huxley's greatest. I feel I should probably go into greater detail but it would be easier if you just read the thing.
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