Acum vreo şapte sau opt ani, când am citit pe nerăsuflate Punct Contrapunct şi am trecut-o repede în galeria personală a cărţilor de aur, m-am regăsit în (sau mai bine zis, am aspirat umil să mă asemăn cu) personajul Philip Quarles: un romancier deşirat, osos, cu un simţ al umorului cel puţin discret (ca să fiu gentilă) şi care se lăfăia într-un intelectualism asumat, trecând totul prin filtrul nemilos al creierului dumisale genial.

Iată şi pasajul pe care l-am copiat atunci conştiincios şi caligrafic în caiet:


O, da. Philip Quarles eram (sau aş fi vrut foarte tare să fiu) chiar eu! Mintea nesăţioasă, firea schimbătoare şi (deductibil din continuarea pasajului de mai sus) spiritul liber, dar chinuit şi blocat de această libertate însăşi! Nu mai exista niciun dubiu. (continuarea cronicii: http://bookaholic.ro/punct-contrapunc...)

Huxley is quite the literary enigma. He is the progenitor of a style of expression that is thoroughly unique and exhaustive in its presentation of the matter at hand and this itself prevents any form of imitation by other lesser competent literary mortals. Yet the only deterrent to Huxley is perhaps Huxley himself. Over indulgence is undeniably his most persistent arch nemesis and it befuddles the authors best efforts in quite a lot of his creations and is well demonstrated here in PCP. The notion is arguable indeed but one cannot quite construct a 400+ novel merely out of a compulsion to isolate and vivisect certain episodic and grudgingly personal philosophies. A short story would have sufficed for this yet Huxley pompously persuades you with a brilliantly structured opening sequence and then abandons you in a confounding melodrama of rambling psychologies and distasteful diversions. This was not expected of the same author whose keenness of perception edited his philosophic and metaphysical outings with such unrelenting effectiveness in the laudable Brave New World and the morbid Ape and Essence. Social criticism is thus an aphrodisiac which Huxley cannot quite forego and yet he is seduced into excesses such as PCP and the drab Those Barren Leaves from which he just cannot liberate himself. No doubt, I am still in awe of the manner in which Huxley struggles passionately against his Achilles Heel and describes the music of Bach, how he deconstructs Romanticisim through Rampion, how he he enamors with an unflinchingly accurate portrayal of dissipating love...and yet I just couldnt proceed beyond page 201. A case of Huxley being slayed by his own ambitions.

Esse livro me despertou tantas emoções... É sobre aristocracia, cheio de ironia, críticas, reflexões e diálogos muito, muito bons! Ele aborda a vida de vários personagens e a histórias de todos eles se entrelaçam aos poucos; a medida que ele ia se aprofundando em cada um dos personagens, consegui encontrar pontos em comum com quase todos eles, são pessoas muito reais com qualidades e muitas falhas em suas personalidades. Cada um defendendo uma ideia, um ponto de vista diferente, sendo o contraponto do outro. O livro é incrível porém a maioria dos personagens masculinos realmente me irritaram um pouco, seus comportamentos e pensamentos...
Uma variedade de temas envolvidos como inveja, vaidade, traições além das discussões políticas, capitalismo, fascismo, comunismo...
E a escrita do Huxley é genial, amei demais ❤

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Along with with Brave New World (written a few years later), Point Counter Point is Huxley's most concentrated attack on the scientific attitude and its effect on modern culture.

n   n    When it was published in 1928, Point Counter Point no doubt shocked its readers with frank depictions of infidelity, sexuality, and the highbrow high jinks of Aldous Huxley's arty characters. What's truly remarkable, however, is how his novel continues to shock today. True, we may hardly lift an eyebrow at poor Marjorie Carling leaving her husband to live in sin with--and get pregnant by--her lover Walter Bidlake. And the sexual exploits of Lady Edward Tantamount or her daughter, Lucy, seem quite in keeping with the behavior expected of such exalted persons by readers inured to the exploits of the British Royals. If the varieties of sexual experience on display in Huxley's novel seem tame by current standards, his clear-eyed dissection of the motives behind them are thrillingly fresh--and his commentaries on everything from politics to ecology sometimes chillingly prescient. n   n  

"Huxley fills his novel with a multitude of characters, from the obscenely wealthy Tantamounts to the priapic painter John Bidlake, his children Walter and Elinor, and their respective mates, Marjorie Carling and Philip Quarles. There is also the venomous Maurice Spandrell, the revolutionary Illidge, the unctuous Burlap, and the happily married (a rarity in this novel) Mark and Mary Rampion, who are the book's moral center--theirs is the one relationship that combines reason and passion in proper measure. They are purportedly in part based on well-known figures of the time such as D.H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield. Love, loss, infidelity, and murder are the subjects under discussion as Huxley juxtaposes one point of view against its opposite, and mixes in a healthy dollop of science, politics, religion, and art, as well. Point Counter Point is an intelligent novel about the intellectual world, and one that bears up gracefully under the test of time." --Alix Wilber

n

ტყუილად რომ არ არის ჰაქსლი ჩემთვის ყველაზე საყვარელი მწერალი, ამ წიგნმაც დამიმტკიცა. ალბათ ლიტერატურის ნებისმიერი მოყვარულისთვის ერთერთი გამორჩეული წიგნი უნდა იყოს. როგორ შეუძლია ამ ადამიანს თან ასე ღრმად ისაუბროს ფილოსოფიურ თემებზე და ასეთი მძაფრი ემოციებიც განგაცდევინოს.

Es tan pedante, pomposo y pesado que dan ganas de robar un Delorean, viajar al pasado, luego viajar a Londres, esperar a Aldous Huxley en la puerta de su casa y darle un paliza de órdago. Conseguir que recobre la visión después de una buena hostieja a rodabrazo. Tan horrendo es que hace que el Brave New World parezca un accidente. Hasta antes de leerlo, no sabía que se podían escribir diálogos tan petulantes en un libro y encima hacerlo tal que así, completamente en serio, sin ironía de ninguna clase.

A lo mejor es que hay estar empapado en mescalina para encontrarle la gracia al puñetero libro, no sé. O a lo mejor es que el traductor es un criminal profesional.

I gotta be honest, even with 'Brave New World' I appreciated Aldous Huxley's ideas more so than his execution. But in 'Point Counter Point', neither the ideas nor the execution captivated me, on the contrary.

This is a classic case of people who visit each other's places and chat. Characters who are represented by their words rather than their actions. Behaviour that doesn't reflect the dialogue. Telling not showing.

Apart from this, I feel like 'Point Counter Point' has aged very badly, specifically on the philosophical discussions that rely on grouping together men and women and going on and on about their differences. The characters are of the belief that women are melodramatic, that they expect spectacular declarations of love, that they need emotion alongside a physical relationship. Studies have shown time and time again that there is no evidence that women would be more emotional or sensitive, and this is a key reason that has led to gender discrimination. Naturally, this is not a theme that I would find interesting or worthwhile and it just pissed me off.

Similarly, I was also pissed off by several characters insisting that their significant other tell them they love them, even though nothing in their interactions demonstrate affection or attraction. The importance that is attributed to this one word beyond their action is astonishing and beyond frustrating. It again echoes the sentiment of telling over showing, which seems to be pervasive throughout.

Lastly, I think the fact that we are following an entire group of people only adds to the lack of substance. There isn't enough to distinguish them, and we don't get to know any of them well enough to care what they're going through.

I still have some Aldous Huxley books on my to read list, and I might get around to then... eventually.

Una de las mejores novelas que he podido leer. Si bien es difícil resumirla, Contrapunto se basa en diferentes historias, múltiples voces polifónicas que tienen una realidad en común: la Inglaterra de principios del siglo XX. Cada personaje tiene un concepto bajo el cual rige su vida (en ese sentido, todos estos serían "monstruos", como bien dice Huxley, pues no hay nadie que viva así en la vida real). Se está ante el positivista científico, el hedonista, el erudito burgués, el proletario venido a burgués, el aristócrata hipócrita y deleznable, entre otros.

La entrada a este momento histórico preciso se da sobre la base de la pérdida del "mundo" anterior, de ese periodo histórico en el que los aristócratas vivían con elegancia y solvencia. Estos, ahora se perciben como seres en decadencia: burgueses con una moral deleznable, apresados bajo las "apariencias" y "encantos" que perduran en una sociedad desencantada.

Sin duda alguna, esta novela vale cada palabra escrita (y leída, por supuesto). Sólo queda dedicarle un buen tiempo.

Tal como lo refiere la crítica literaria, es la obra de Huxley narrativa y estilísticamente mejor lograda. Muy entretenida. Penetra en la naturaleza humana en sus distintas capas.

This is probably the best fiction that Huxley had written to date. While Chrome Yellow was relatively pointless, Antic hay, too verbose & Those Barren leaves only beginning to show maturity, Point Counter Point is the fruits of a novelist who has reached his full potential & given the world something entirely new & special. As the name of the book suggests, the story is constructed as a piece of music with intertwining melodic lines which are related to each other, but unique, displaying different viewpoints from many different angles as carried by its almost caricatured characters. Huxley seems to take every liberty & even includes a cameo of himself (humbly, not especially flattering). It seems every character is used to display a particular flaw, with a central character the single point of balance & sanity, although I even found him flawed in his impossible, unforgiving & scathing idealism. Was it Huxley’s underlying point to give the hero of the story, the free artist, a wealthy wife as a patron & talent to support himself happily & without social bonds? Could he have been so self righteous had these supports been removed? I’m not sure. Maybe that was Huxley’s point, that every man is carved from his circumstance.
One question I have. Is it only me who took Lucy as Walters unknown half sister? The love Child of Johns? “Lucy, My Child!”. This was a masterpiece of fiction at every level. The conversations were realistically personal & thought provoking. I had myself wincing on many occasions at the self-identification of many of the characters. If anything this book points out that we are all basically a microcosm of everybody else to a greater or lesser extent. There is good reason why this is listed among the top 100 books of all time. It really is a quite a work of art.

I found this novel very well written. Every time I read a book I look for memorable quotes to pick out, and Point Counter Point scored well above average. But at the high level the book still failed for me. Huxley was trying to write a 'novel of ideas,' but I found this was executed at the expense of a plot. Most of the characters are mere caricatures--people like Willy Weaver and Charles Quarles--who are themselves entertaining parodies, but who don't give the novel any meat. And then the official characters don't much pick up the slack. Take Walter Bidlake, who opens the book stuck in his declining affair with Marjorie Carling. He was interesting at the start, and I found his courtship of Lucy Tantamount engaging, but after that their affair simply leaves off and they do nothing but exchange a few letters in the last 200 pages. Walter's story has no ending, but his is actually the most developed of them all. Other than that, the only really engaging piece of storytelling was that of Mark Rampion's courtship of his wife, but that was a standalone episode.

So, without much plot, what do the characters spend their time doing? Mostly ranting. About how industrialized society is destroying our souls; how wealth and leisure make us frivolous and lazy; how the supercilious intellectual life is merely a crutch for people who can't deal with their fellow man, etc. While Huxley makes some good points, he doesn't counterbalance his criticisms with recommendations; and his characters are mostly examples of what not to do, so his theories end up pointing to nothing.

And a lot of the book's arguments seemed manufactured and phony to me. This phoniness reached surreal heights in the last scene where Rampion listens to Beethoven's A Convalescent's Holy Song of Thanksgiving. I've heard it many times, and it's a great piece of music; but Rampion uses it as a launching point to say, "Why did [Beethoven] make castration and bodilessness his ideal? What's his music? Just a hymn in praise of eunuchism. Very beautiful, I admit. But couldn't he have chosen something more human than castration to sing about." (p. 429) Rampion says to Beethoven, "What is your music?" and I say to Rampion, "What is your *deal*?" He isn't just over-analyzing the music: he's inventing completely artificial things to put on top of that music to over-analyze. Even the things he appears to enjoy he can only use as fodder for some blanket condemnation.

The novel wore even thinner for me when I discovered that it was a roman à clef filled with people Huxley knew personally. I thought Lucy Tantamount was a great character, but the dignity of her as a literary construction lost some of its gilt when I realized that Huxley was merely demonizing a woman he had had his own bad affair with. Though I was surprised to find that Mark Rampion was supposed to be a depiction of D.H. Lawrence.

Speaking of whom, in the end Point Counter Point reminded me of a quote from Lawrence's own Lady Chatterley's Lover. In it, Constance Chatterley is talking about her husband, Clifford, who is a young 'intellectual' writer, but:

"Where the intellect came in, Connie did not quite see. Clifford was really clever at that slightly humorous analysis of people and motives which leaves everything in bits at the end. But it was rather like puppies tearing the sofa cushions to bits; except that it was not young and playful, but curiously old, and rather obstinately conceited. It was weird and it was nothing ... a wonderful display of nothingness. At the same time a display. A display! a display! a display!"
(p. 53)

That is exactly how I feel about Point Counter Point: slightly humorous, but leaves everything in bits at the end, and comes off as a conceited display of nothingness.

Though, on reflection, I realized that Lady Chatterley's Lover was making a lot of the same core points as this book. In Chatterley, Constance begins having affairs because her husband was made crippled and impotent in the war; and Clifford tries to make up for his physical incapacity by devoting himself entirely to the intellectual life of a writer. But, as Clifford becomes more abstract and artificial, Constance and Oliver Mellors (the eponymous lover) move closer to nature and sensuality. And, while the lovers achieve happiness, the writer--for all of his success--only becomes frustrated and infantile. This seems like the same condemnation that Huxley was going for.

Perhaps Lawrence was criticizing those who symbolically cripple themselves to work purely in the intellectual domain, because they only produce inferior works because of it. That was why he approached Lady Chatterley with the objective of simply telling a good story with well developed characters--the plain, non-intellectual book--, and yet he was still able to convey the points he wanted. But with Point Counter Point Huxley was trying the opposite: to throw out the plot and story entirely so that he could just focus on writing his 'novel of ideas.' But by discarding the mobility and moment of a story, it seems that Huxley--like Clifford Chatterley--was crippling himself. And, as such, between the two books I enjoyed Lady Chatterley's Lover much more.

En esta novela Huxley desarrolla varios personajes. No hay uno principal y otros secundarios, son todos iguales en su peso. Mírenlos de cerca: Philip es el intelecto, Walter Bidlake es la carne, lo corpóreo, Rampion es la naturaleza, lo auténtico, Spandrell es un "demonio". Son personajes planos, homogéneos. Cada uno parece un componente de algo grande, todos ellos son partes de ese personaje colectivo que nos presenta el autor - de la sociedad británica. Huxley los choca, los hace discutir, intercambiar opiniones, expresar ideas, tesis (de ahí viene el título "Point counter point").

La novela fue publicada en el año 1928, tres años después del libro de Gide "Los monederos falsos". Huxley utiliza la misma herramienta que antes había empleado su colega - el metatexto, novela dentro de novela. PCP es el diario de Philip. Muy minuciosamente el describe el proceso de la creación, las causas, los métodos. Es una literatura egocéntrica, está enfocada en si misma, se interesa solo en si misma. Por que Huxley lo hace? Es una manera de revisar su trabajo, de verlo con otros ojos, de chequear las construcciones. Por esta razón la novela se lee muy fácil, no hay ningún "entre líneas", está todo explicado.

Otro punto sobresaltante del libro es su lado satírico. Con frecuencia los escritores usan los prototipos para sus personajes pero por lo general los disimulan, Huxley lo hace abiertamente para que los lectores reconozcan a las personalidades de su novela, la tarea que no era difícil para un contemporario de los años 20 en Britania, obviamente tomando en cuenta que se trata de los integrantes del circulo literario-editorial. Yo voy a mencionar solamente dos nombres, los otros Uds los encontraran fácilmente en cualquier artículo sobre la novela. Bajo del nombre de Philip Quarles el autor se representa a si mismo y el personaje de Mark Rampion se basa en D. H. Lawrence, autor de "Sons and Lovers", a quien Huxley tenía mucho aprecio. Los que no tenían tanta suerte aparecieron en el relato tratados por el autor con toda ironía y hasta sarcasmo. Parece que burlarse de sus enemigos desde las páginas del libro era un evento común.

La década de los 20 es el tiempo de muchos cambios en la literatura. Los escritores experimentan, emplean nuevas técnicas. La literatura no es un arte multidimensional, es lineal. Para empezar con otra escena el autor tiene que terminar con el episodio anterior. Rompen esta estructura utilizando texto fragmentado. Huxley trabaja con esta herramienta constantemente.

«Se expone un tema: luego se desarrolla, se cambia, se deforma imperceptiblemente hasta que, aunque permaneciendo reconociblemente el mismo, se ha hecho totalmente diferente. En las series de variaciones, el procedimiento se lleva un paso más allá. Por ejemplo, esas increíbles variaciones de Diabelli. Toda la extensión del pensamiento y de la emoción, y, no obstante, en relación orgánica con un ligero y ridículo aire de vals. Poner esto en una novela. ¿Cómo? Las transiciones bruscas no presentan ninguna dificultad. Todo lo que se necesita es un número suficiente de personajes y de intrigas paralelas, argumentos de contrapunto. Mientras Jones asesina a su esposa, Smith empuja el cochecillo de niño en el parque. Se alternan los temas. Más interesantes, las modulaciones y variaciones son también más difíciles. El novelista modula reduplicando las situaciones y los personajes. Muestra varios personajes enamorados, o muriendo, o rezando, de modos diferentes: disimilitudes que resuelven el mismo problema. O, viceversa, personajes símiles confrontados con problemas disímiles. De esta suerte se puede modular de modo que se presenten todos los aspectos del tema, se pueden escribir modulaciones en cualquier número de modos diferentes.»

"Mientras Jones asesina a su esposa, Smith empuja el cochecillo de niño en el parque." - aquí esta la clave. El texto fragmentado en este libro es la herramienta de la sátira.

Otro detalle interesante. Huxley elimina las conexiones externas entre las escenas y hace trabajar sus relaciones internas. Cada escena es una idea, una tesis, la próxima escena seria la respuesta a esta tesis pero lo curioso es que las escenas tienen diferentes interpretaciones, entonces ¿cuál de todas sigue Huxley? :) Si tengo que esquematizar la estructura, quedaría así: Escena № 1 (la tesis № 1) -> Escena № 2 (respuesta a la tesis № 1). No puedo no hacer la comparación con Faulkner. El esquema de "Luz de agosto" sería así: Escena № 1 (cronológicamente № 28 por decirlo así) -> Escena № 5 (cronológicamente № 15). Escenas 2, 3 y 4 no existen en el libro, el lector tiene que escribirlas en su imaginación. Además, los fragmentos están mezclados en el tiempo. Por eso la lectura de Faulkner es más complicada y más excitante. Volviendo con Huxley, las ideas representadas en PCP están para analizarlas. Son verdaderamente pequeñas joyitas que uno quiere apreciar una y otra vez. Mi libro quedó todo subrayado y con mis comentarios pegados en los márgenes. Se puede tratarlas con los amigos (ó no amigos), yo ya lo hice y fue divertido.

Concluyendo, PCP es una novela fascinante por su técnica y contenido intelectual. La recomiendo a todos.