A review by oskhen
Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley

5.0

Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley was the 4th novel of his that I've read. Time and time again I am astonished by the breadth of his writing, neither book resembling the other in more than superfluous ways. This time around, Point Counter Point reminds me more than anything of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray with its depiction of Victorian England and its profound Romanticism. If Wilde set out to exhibit morality through the contrast of the profoundly individual politics and aesthetic of Lord Henry (and of course, eventually, by Gray himself), Huxley does the same thing rather through an infinitely contrasting story. By this I mean that the story itself, with all its plots and characters, contain a never-ending opposition of views which serve to enlighten the properties being contrasted. The most glaring contrast is that of intellectualism as opposed to sensuality. As stated by The Guardian:

"Point Counter Point is a monstrous exposure of a society which confuses pleasure with happiness, sensation with sensibility, mood with opinion, opinion with conviction and self with God."

In addition to this, the actual minute details carry an unusual clarity. The first time this struck me was in an exposition of the noise found at a party.

"A jungle of innumerable trees and dangling creepers - it was in this form that parties always presented themselves to Walter Bidlake's imagination. A jungle of noise; and he was lost in the jungle, he was trying to clear a path for himself through its tangled luxuriance. The people were the roots of the trees and their voices were the stems and waving branches and festooned lianas - yes, and the parrots and the chattering monkeys as well. The trees reached up to the ceiling and from the ceiling they were bent back again, like mangroves, towards the floor . But in this particular room, Walter reflected, ... the growths of sound shooting up, uninterrupted, through the height of three floors, would have gathered enough momentum to break clean through the flimsy glass roof that separated them from the outer night. He pictured them going up and up, like the magic beanstalk of the Giant Killer, into the sky. Up and up, loaded with orchids and bright cockatoos, up through the perennial mist of London, into the clear moonlight beyond the smoke. He fancied them waving up there in the moonlight, the last thin aerial twigs of noise. But meanwhile down here, in the jungle ... Oh, loud, stupid, vulgar, fatuous."

The main running theme is as said the contrast between intellectualism and sensuality, and Huxley spares no punches on either. As for the sensual;

"Three lively terms and two still more lively vacs [of college] - discovering alcohol and poker and the difference between women in the flesh and women in the pubescent imagination. Such an apocalypse, the first real woman! And at the same time, such a revolting disappointment! So flat, in a way, after the super-heated fancy and the pornographic book.

Which is tribute to Art, said Philip. As I've so often pointed out. We're brought up to make love after high poetic models. We're brought up topsy-turvy. Art before life; Romeo and Juliet and filthy stories before marriage or its equivalents. Hence all young modern literature is disillusioned. Inevitably. In the good old days poets began by losing their virginity; and then, with a complete knowledge of the real thing and just where and how it was unpoetical, deliberately set to work to idealize and beautify it. We start with the poetical and proceed to the unpoetical. If boys and girls lost their virginities as early as they did in Shakespeare's day, there'd be a revival of the Elizabethan love lyric."

And, sparing no punches on the intellectual part of life either;

"The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred. Many intellectuals, of course, don't get far enough to reach the obvious again. They remain stuck in a pathetic belief in rationalism and the absolute supremacy of mental values and the entirely conscious will. You've got to go further than the nineteenth-century fellows, for example; as far at least as Protagoras and Pyrrho, before you get back to the obvious in which the non-intellectuals have always remained. And one must hasten to make it clear that these non-intellectuals aren't the modern canaille who read the picture papers and listen-in and jazz and are preoccupied with making money and having the awful modern 'good time'. No, no; one isn't paying a compliment to the hard-headed business man or the low-brow. For, in spite of their stupidity and tastelessness and vulgarity and infantility, they aren't the non-intellectuals I'm talking about. They take the main intellectualist axiom for granted - that there's an intrinsic superiority in mental, conscious, voluntary life over physical, intuitive, instinctive, emotional life. The whole of modern civilization is based on the idea that the specialized function which gives a man his place in society is more important than the whole man, or rather is the whole man, all the rest being irrelevant or even positively harmful and detestable. The obvious that the intellectual gets back to, if he goes far enough, isn't of course the same as the obvious of the non-intellectuals. For their obvious is life itself and his recovered obvious is only the idea of that life. Not many can put flesh and blood on the idea and turn it into reality. The intellectuals who don't have to return to the obvious, but have always believed in it and lived it, while at the same time leading the life of the spirit, are rarer still."

Huxley aims to strike a balance between these two, finding perfected achievement in the fine balancing of intellectual, mental, life and the sensuality and "flesh and blood" of animal-driven life. In the process, he rejects both as they're usually approached in life, while still embracing them as essentially necessarily for a genuinely human experience.

"But of course, there's nobody like the lover of abstraction for denouncing abstractions. He knows by experience how life-destroying they are. The ordinary man can afford to take them in his stride. He can afford to have wings too, so long as he also remembers that he's got feet. It's when people strain themselves to fly all the time that they go wrong. They're ambitious of being angels, but all they succeed in being is either cuckoos and geese on the one hand or else disgusting vultures and carrion crows on the other.

Your absolute God and absolute devil belong to the class of irrelevant non-human facts. The only things that concern us are the little relative gods and devils of history and geography, the little relative goods and evils of individual casuistry. Everything else is non-human and beside the point; and if you allow yourself to be influenced by non-human, absolute considerations, then you inevitably make either a fool of yourself, or a villain, or perhaps both.

Nobody's asking you to be anything but a man. A man, mind you. Not an angel or a devil. A man's a creature on a tight-rope, walking delicately, equilibrated, with mind and consciousness and spirit at one end of his balancing pole and body and instinct and all that's unconscious and earthly and mysterious at the other. Balanced. Which is damnably difficult. And the only absolute he can ever really know is the absolute of perfect balance. The absoluteness of perfect relativity. Which is a paradox and nonsense intellectually. But so is all real, genuine, living truth - just nonsense according to logic. And logic is just nonsense in the light of living truth. You can choose which you like, logic or life. It's a matter of taste. Some people prefer being dead."