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Point Counter Point
by Aldous Huxley
I give this book two stars but not because I consider it mediocre. It's just an average of two extremes: some moments superb and some moments catastrophically bad. Particularly if you're a feminist, or have any investment in a non-rapey world.
THE GOOD:
Huxley pays attention to class. A person's position of power or disenfranchisement is shown as the foundation for the most intimate of thoughts (you can only believe certain things when you have a guaranteed weekly income). It is latent in any physical object (a house is described not just architecturally but historically, through political economy: meaning you trace the rounds of theft and disenfranchisement behind the splendour of the rich). I began the book with excitement, thinking somebody had combined the delicate social psychology of Henry James -- which bathes a reader’s brain in the jubilation of being a social primate, capable of reading thoughts into actions and faces that in turn can read your own -- somebody had joined this with a subject matter that actually mattered. James is all the petty interplay of the frivolously rich; Huxley promises to delve straight to all the big questions.
Most of the action of the novel is gathering to talk (until the very end, where Huxley throws in several astonishing events). Sometimes the conversations are marvellous, like the rousing argument between a right-wing paramilitary leader and an upper-class scientist about phosphorus.
THE BAD: At other times it's all impossible to believe. In an actual life, when very intelligent people get together, no one ever is allowed to monologue for an entire chapter, with only occasional three-word questions here and there to keep the good lecturer going. It feels too obvious that Huxley had written an essay and wanted to push it in there somewhere. As Huxley himself writes in the book: "people who can reel off neatly formulated notions aren’t quite real; they’re slightly monstrous. Living with monsters becomes rather tiresome in the long run." So does reading about them.
And of course you'll get uneasy about the gimmick of a novelist writing a novel about a novelist writing a novel about a novelist writing a novel . . . "And so on to infinity, like those advertisements of Quaker Oats where there's a Quaker holding a box of oats, on which is a picture of another Quaker holding another box of oats, on which etc., etc." Very cool idea . . . for an oat package.
THE TERRIBLE: RAPEY! ALERT!
I mentioned Henry James earlier, who could do one thing Huxley can't: write of a woman who thinks. In PCP, women can be funny, shrewd, wicked or good, but they cannot be thinkers.
There’s more, and there’s worse: Rape is real, and a legitimate subject for literature. A crucial subject for literature, even. But while I live in the world with soaring sexual abuse rates, I’m not about to have any patience with an author -- particularly a male author -- who presents rape as a great way to win your girl.
It's all throughout the book, but the real rapey-charmer is the paramilitary strike-breaker, Webley, who writes this gem of a letter to the lady he fancies:
I warn you: one of these days I’ll try the good old methods. I’ll do a slight Rape of the Sabines and then where will your ineffable, remote superiority be? How I hate you really for compelling me to love you so much! It’s such a damnable injustice -- getting so much passion and longing out of me and giving nothing in return. And you not here to receive the punishment you deserve! I have to take a vicarious revenge on the ruffians who disturb my meetings [. . . at which point he describes beating up some commies . . .] it was really you I was fighting. If it hadn’t been for you I wouldn’t have been half so savage. [. . .] The next fight will be against the real enemy -- against you. So be careful, my dear. I’ll try to stop short of black eyes; but in the heat of the moment one never knows.
Whew, what a charmer! So MANLY! Nothing says I love you like a “slight rape” threat!
The female characters appear to be into this bruise-your-face 'uncontrollable passion.' It feels like I'm reading an Ayn Rand novel.
When rape isn't happening or being threatened, misogyny can be more versatile. Philip, the character stand-in for Huxley himself, gets irritated that a woman he thinks is hot wants to actually talk to him. He thinks: "A woman who uses the shapeliness of her breasts to compel you to admire her mind -- [. . .] trying in private life, very trying indeed." You heard right -- she's just using her boobs to make a man listen to her ideas. Very bad manners.
When he pushes for sex, and she is clear she doesn't want his "pouncing and clawing," Philip leaves her with this lecture: "if you were really and consistently civilized, you'd take steps to make yourself less desirable. Desirability's barbarous. It's as savage as pouncing and clawing. You ought to look like George Eliot. Good-bye."
She sexually assaulted me first . . . by not making herself ugly enough for me to not want sex.
If Huxley had been interested in doing some of the same insightful analysis of gender that he does with class, this could be one of the best books, even if it couldn't escape the inevitable problems of a "novel of ideas." But he fails spectacularly.
THE GOOD:
Huxley pays attention to class. A person's position of power or disenfranchisement is shown as the foundation for the most intimate of thoughts (you can only believe certain things when you have a guaranteed weekly income). It is latent in any physical object (a house is described not just architecturally but historically, through political economy: meaning you trace the rounds of theft and disenfranchisement behind the splendour of the rich). I began the book with excitement, thinking somebody had combined the delicate social psychology of Henry James -- which bathes a reader’s brain in the jubilation of being a social primate, capable of reading thoughts into actions and faces that in turn can read your own -- somebody had joined this with a subject matter that actually mattered. James is all the petty interplay of the frivolously rich; Huxley promises to delve straight to all the big questions.
Most of the action of the novel is gathering to talk (until the very end, where Huxley throws in several astonishing events). Sometimes the conversations are marvellous, like the rousing argument between a right-wing paramilitary leader and an upper-class scientist about phosphorus.
THE BAD: At other times it's all impossible to believe. In an actual life, when very intelligent people get together, no one ever is allowed to monologue for an entire chapter, with only occasional three-word questions here and there to keep the good lecturer going. It feels too obvious that Huxley had written an essay and wanted to push it in there somewhere. As Huxley himself writes in the book: "people who can reel off neatly formulated notions aren’t quite real; they’re slightly monstrous. Living with monsters becomes rather tiresome in the long run." So does reading about them.
And of course you'll get uneasy about the gimmick of a novelist writing a novel about a novelist writing a novel about a novelist writing a novel . . . "And so on to infinity, like those advertisements of Quaker Oats where there's a Quaker holding a box of oats, on which is a picture of another Quaker holding another box of oats, on which etc., etc." Very cool idea . . . for an oat package.
THE TERRIBLE: RAPEY! ALERT!
I mentioned Henry James earlier, who could do one thing Huxley can't: write of a woman who thinks. In PCP, women can be funny, shrewd, wicked or good, but they cannot be thinkers.
There’s more, and there’s worse: Rape is real, and a legitimate subject for literature. A crucial subject for literature, even. But while I live in the world with soaring sexual abuse rates, I’m not about to have any patience with an author -- particularly a male author -- who presents rape as a great way to win your girl.
It's all throughout the book, but the real rapey-charmer is the paramilitary strike-breaker, Webley, who writes this gem of a letter to the lady he fancies:
I warn you: one of these days I’ll try the good old methods. I’ll do a slight Rape of the Sabines and then where will your ineffable, remote superiority be? How I hate you really for compelling me to love you so much! It’s such a damnable injustice -- getting so much passion and longing out of me and giving nothing in return. And you not here to receive the punishment you deserve! I have to take a vicarious revenge on the ruffians who disturb my meetings [. . . at which point he describes beating up some commies . . .] it was really you I was fighting. If it hadn’t been for you I wouldn’t have been half so savage. [. . .] The next fight will be against the real enemy -- against you. So be careful, my dear. I’ll try to stop short of black eyes; but in the heat of the moment one never knows.
Whew, what a charmer! So MANLY! Nothing says I love you like a “slight rape” threat!
The female characters appear to be into this bruise-your-face 'uncontrollable passion.' It feels like I'm reading an Ayn Rand novel.
When rape isn't happening or being threatened, misogyny can be more versatile. Philip, the character stand-in for Huxley himself, gets irritated that a woman he thinks is hot wants to actually talk to him. He thinks: "A woman who uses the shapeliness of her breasts to compel you to admire her mind -- [. . .] trying in private life, very trying indeed." You heard right -- she's just using her boobs to make a man listen to her ideas. Very bad manners.
When he pushes for sex, and she is clear she doesn't want his "pouncing and clawing," Philip leaves her with this lecture: "if you were really and consistently civilized, you'd take steps to make yourself less desirable. Desirability's barbarous. It's as savage as pouncing and clawing. You ought to look like George Eliot. Good-bye."
She sexually assaulted me first . . . by not making herself ugly enough for me to not want sex.
If Huxley had been interested in doing some of the same insightful analysis of gender that he does with class, this could be one of the best books, even if it couldn't escape the inevitable problems of a "novel of ideas." But he fails spectacularly.