If Aenglish Were a Language (Part 6)

you cannot fight the peace of the universe

If in Between the Acts the narration conspires with characterization through the paradoxical dialectics of the vacillations in the tone, primarily resulting from the inexplicable emergence of the nearly sublime out of the pedestrian, in Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point (1928), the effect is manifested as a result of an interplay in question, only in a kind of reverse. Specifically, unlike the space provided in Woolf’s novel so the narrative can breathe, engaging the reader in an akin sort of activity, Huxley’s narrator is almost omnipresent. Each page, every single sentence, syntagm, phrase, morpheme, phoneme is loaded with narrating voices. All is noise in this novel of his. And yet, as the story is unfolding, it turns out that not all is as noisy as it seems. In addition, it, at least, is not all that noisy all the time. Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point:”’Why should triviality be so fascinating? Or is there something else besides the triviality that draws one?’” (126).

What’s wondrous about the narrative technique in question is, again, a strange interaction between the narration and characterization. In the unwrapping of the storyline, it becomes apparent that the impression of the overcrowded narrative comes from the role each character has in that what comprises the novel. How those voices constitute the narration is also the way the storytelling shift occurs in the most astonishing of manners. Namely, not only do they participate in weaving the narrative tissue, but the way they are constructed is, at the same time, how the story is told. They, in a word, manage to take over the narrative. One might be prone to claim that it is, consequently, a weakness of the storyline, but few things can be more erroneous than such a statement, given the layered structure of storytelling at large, as well as this one in particular.

First, the seeming weakness could stem from the confusion of the notions such as individuality and individualism, unity and uniformity, crowd and community, noise / sound / music. Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point: “Each is always alone and separate and individual. ‘I am I,’ asserts the violin; ‘the world revolves around me.’ ‘Round me,’ calls the cello. ‘Round me,’ the flute insists. And all are equally right and equally wrong; and none of them will listen to the others” (23). Then, one realizes that how the characters inhabit the world of Huxley’s novel is the way of making the omniscient narrative voice humble itself in front of the individual vernaculars of the novel-dwellers.

The characters’ taking over the narration is a silent rebellion. Quite noisy at that, one might say. So noisy at times that, being preoccupied with duties of higher priority and greater significance, one seems not to be able to hear it. Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point: “Diminished and in fragments, the B minor Suite came floating up from the great hall to the ears of the two men in the laboratory. They were too busy to realize that they were hearing it” (30).  The intricacy and appeal of Huxley’s panoramic social portrayal of the birth of the new world between two wars lies predominantly in the whatness of the story. From it, of course, is borne the howness of the peculiarity with which alternating cycles of noise and silence are being remixed.

If in Between the Acts the characters speak of fragments, see the world as a broken mirror image, talk in fragments, feel like ones, Point Counter Point presents to the readership the characters that can be perceived either as rudimentary, atavistic, minimalist, reduced, or a combination of some of the features fused to epitomize the clime of the world plagued by new values. In the onset of an economic dictatorship, not unlike the system of values propagated nowadays as a dominant cultural paradigm, these were more often than not defined in monetary terms.

Coupled with it, possibly in a mutually conditioned relationship, is a desperate pursuit of amusement. Not unlike the exhaustion by superficial, forced forms of entertainment known to the dwellers of modern day culture, the world portrayed in Huxley’s novel is similarly hollow amid the plethora of ecstatic and euphoric battlefields against boredom. Sites of fun. Dens of intoxication. Streets covered with evaporations, saturated with torpor, conjuring disenchantment as the sun rises and swipes the magic of the night (Point Counter Point 148).

When the night climaxes in its decay that sees its early hours with first appearance of dusk, noise of the sweaty, crowded amusement joints dissolve in the vapor of boredom. One can only hear sad music of a failed attempt to conquer and shape the totality of experience according to one’s perception of how changes in the world and the notions such as individuality and communality inform one another. The world has become a timespace offering to the inhabitants to emphasize certain aspects of experience, while disregarding the others. The speed at and with which societal relations are being redescribed echoes the progress with which linguistic descriptions proliferate. It also reverberates with the dynamics of the self-disintegration of bewilderment.

In the long aftermath of the Enlightenment, modern babylon offers myriad ways to reaffirm the significance of rationality. Or, so babylonian tower would want one to believe. Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point: “The intellect’s been exalted as the spiritual upper classes; the spiritual lower classes rebel’” (128). In a time of fluctuating, discursively conditioned categories, one wonders how to articulate the rebellious classes in question. The body for sure is part of the vocabulary. So might be the heart. But, how to understand such an elusive constituent of the communication channel is an enigma in its own right. In Virginia Woolf’s novel, it is now childless (Between the Acts 100-1), now broke (Between the Acts 113), then dry (Between the Acts 119), and again melting (Between the Acts 130). It is motherly (”for a mother must ask, if daughters she has” Between the Acts 169). Above all, it is human (Between the Acts 176).

To imagine how such unlikely interlocutors negotiate a hierarchy within discursive games is not an easy task. How they position themselves within a broader context of power relations is perhaps most suggestively presented in the debate over the issues of burning importance for the protagonists of Huxley’s novel: “’The only result of your progress,’ he said, ‘will be that in a few generations there will be a real revolution—a natural, cosmic revolution. You’re upsetting the equilibrium. And in the end, nature will restore it’” (Point Counter Point 58).

The advent of science enlightened the world with a blessing that humans gradually started to misinterpret and assumed the meaning of words that to a high extent confused them. Not only did the new paradigm create a sense of omnipotence that some individuals wholeheartedly accepted, but it also introduced a vocabulary of culture that enabled a proliferation of vocabularies and discursively conditioned realities calling for reconfiguring. Neither stigmatizing the paradigm per se nor divinizing it, one is rather prone to question how it reflected in the realm where social relations were becoming increasingly dependent on and, indeed, subjugated to the idea of progress not galvanizing, but rather weakening the flourishing of human potentials. Huxley observes an instance of such a perplexing situation:“They’re telling him that the laws of nature are useful conventions of strictly human manufacture and that space and time and mass themselves, the whole universe of Newton and his successors, are simply our own invention” (Point Counter Point 153).

The world became a mosaiclike image describable from diverse points of view. Each description seemed to be equally valid and not lacking in competitiveness with others. Such an arena, featuring numberless candidates for the privileged discourse, mirrored the overarching sentiment of commodity culture. And yet, none seemed to be sufficient to provide a comprehensible picture of how the world spoke. Trying to decipher the versatility of the complexity in question, humans tended to adopt what appeared to be the lexicon of correspondence between their own and the ways the world was. Huxley portrays a segment of an attempt to grasp kaleidoscopic cultural realities in the vocabulary they were trying to impose on one:

’Because the essence of the new way of looking is multiplicity. Multiplicity of eyes and multiplicity of aspects seen. For instance, one person interprets events in terms of bishops; another in terms of the price of flannel camisoles; another, like that young lady from Gulmerg,’ he nodded after the retreating group, ‘thinks of it in terms of good times. And then there’s the biologist, the chemist, the physicist, the historian. Each sees, professionally, a different aspect of the event, a different layer of reality. What I want to do is to look with all those eyes at once […]’. (Point Counter Point 192)

Not that there was no solid basis for thinking of an individual in terms of multitudinousness, but the way it was perceived proved as somewhat misleading. Its trickster character can be said to, in a way, have tricked itself into believing in the imposition of multiplicity as the dominant expressive mode in which valid statements can be uttered, revealing the vocabulary of the world, matching the ways in which humans could navigate their ways through it. And yet, within a bewildering cacophony, Huxley’s character seeks:“Where was the self to which he could be loyal?” (Point Counter Point 194).

For some, it was a specific intellectual capacity that occupied the centrality of the endeavor:

The essential character of the self consisted precisely in that liquid and undeformable ubiquity; in that capacity to espouse all contours and yet remain unfixed in any form; to take, and with an equal facility efface, impressions. To such moulds as his spirit might from time to time occupy, to such hard and burning obstacles as it might flow round, submerge, and, itself cold, penetrate to the fiery heart of, no permanent loyalty was owing. The moulds were emptied as easily as they had been filled, the obstacles were passed by. But the essential liquidness that flowed where it would, the cool indifferent flux of intellectual curiosity—that persisted and to that his loyalty was due.  (Point Counter Point 194)

For others, it might be religion. There were those who chose to divest themselves from loyalty as such. But, then, they found themselves inexplicably trapped within the liberty, i.e., the characteristic they ascribe to such a state:

But always, whatever he might do, he knew quite well in the secret depths of his being that he wasn’t a Catholic, or a strenuous liver, or a mystic, or a noble savage. And though he sometimes nostalgically wished he were one or other of these beings, or all of them at once, he was always secretly glad to be none of them and at liberty, even though his liberty was in a strange paradoxical way a handicap and a confinement to his spirit” (Point Counter Point 195).

Instead, some opted for other choices: “She felt as though she were melting into that green and golden tranquility, sinking and being absorbed into it, dissolving out of separateness into union: stillness flowed into stillness, the silence without became one with the silence within her” (Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point 355).

Just as uncritical reading of social relations based on dominance-ridden polyphony can conjure a dissolution of clear distinctions between sameness & difference, unity and uniformity, individuality and individualism--to name a few—so can a belief in progress without a critical distance from its aspect in which radical utilitarianism paradoxically converges with self-referentiality may  entail a misinterpretation of advanced technologies in the service of creativity. Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (2011):

At first glance, armies of refrigerators and dishwashers sending messages back and forth to servers might not have much bearing on literature, but when viewed through the lens of information management and uncreative writing--remember that those miles and miles of code are actually alphanumeric language, the identical material Shakespeare used--these machines are only steps away from being programmed for literary production, writing a type of literature readable only by other bots. And, as a result of networking with each other, their feedback mechanism will create an ever-evolving, sophisticated literary discourse, one that will not only be invisible to human eyes but bypass human altogether. (225)