This article needs additional citations for verification .(December 2014) |
Point Counter Point is a novel by Aldous Huxley, first published in 1928. [1] It is Huxley's longest novel, and was notably more complex and serious than his earlier fiction. [1]
In 1998, [2] the Modern Library ranked Point Counter Point 44th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. [3]
The novel entered the public domain in the United States in 2024. [4]
The novel's title is a reference to the flow of arguments in a debate, [3] and a series of these exchanges tell the story. [5] Instead of a single central plot, there are a number of interlinked story lines and recurring themes (as in musical "counterpoint"). [6] As a roman à clef , [7] many of the characters are based on real people, most of whom Huxley knew personally, such as D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Nancy Cunard, and John Middleton Murry, and Huxley is depicted as the novel's novelist, Philip Quarles. [8] Huxley described the structure of Point Counter Point within the novel itself, in a stream of consciousness musing of Quarles:
The musicalization of fiction. Not in the symbolist way, by subordinating sense to sound. . . . But on a large scale, in the construction. Meditate on Beethoven. The changes of moods, the abrupt transitions . . . 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. . . . Get this into a novel. How? The abrupt transitions are easy enough. All you need is a sufficiency of characters and parallel, contrapuntal plots. . . . You alternate the theme. 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. In this way you can modulate through all the aspects of your theme, you can write variations in any number of different moods. Another way: The novelist can assume the god-like creative privilege and simply elect to consider the events in the story in their various aspects -- emotional, scientific, religious, metaphysical, etc. He will modulate from one to the other -- as, from the aesthetic to the physico-chemical aspect of things, from the religious to the physiological or financial. . . . Put a novelist in the novel. He justifies aesthetic generalizations, which may be interesting -- at least to me. He also justifies experiment. Specimens of his work may illustrate other possible or impossible ways of telling a story." [9]
Some of the main characters are:
Comparisons have been made between the character Everard Webley with his Brotherhood of British Freemen and Oswald Mosley with the British Union of Fascists. However, when Huxley wrote Point Counter Point, Mosley was still a prominent member of the Labour Party and would remain so until 1931. The BUF was not founded until 1932. A number of other fascist groups preceded Mosley, the most prominent being the British Fascists, and possibly one of those may have been Huxley's inspiration. In the 1996 reprint of Point Counter Point, Mosley's son Nicholas discusses the connection in a new introduction to the novel. [12] David Bradshaw has argued that the most likely source for Webley is John Hargrave, the founder of The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift. [13]
Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and philosopher. His bibliography spans nearly 50 books, including novels and non-fiction works, as well as essays, narratives, and poems.
The Doors of Perception is an autobiographical book written by Aldous Huxley. Published in 1954, it elaborates on his psychedelic experience under the influence of mescaline in May 1953. Huxley recalls the insights he experienced, ranging from the "purely aesthetic" to "sacramental vision", and reflects on their philosophical and psychological implications. In 1956, he published Heaven and Hell, another essay which elaborates these reflections further. The two works have since often been published together as one book; the title of both comes from William Blake's 1793 book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
Brave New World is a dystopian novel by English author Aldous Huxley, written in 1931 and published in 1932. Largely set in a futuristic World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society which is challenged by the story's protagonist. Huxley followed this book with a reassessment in essay form, Brave New World Revisited (1958), and with his final novel, Island (1962), the utopian counterpart. This novel is often compared as an inversion counterpart to George Orwell's 1984 (1949).
Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood was an Anglo-American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, autobiographer, and diarist. His best-known works include Goodbye to Berlin (1939), a semi-autobiographical novel which inspired the musical Cabaret (1966); A Single Man (1964), adapted as a film by Tom Ford in 2009; and Christopher and His Kind (1976), a memoir which "carried him into the heart of the Gay Liberation movement".
The British Union of Fascists (BUF) was a British fascist political party formed in 1932 by Oswald Mosley. Mosley changed its name to the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists in 1936 and, in 1937, to the British Union. In 1939, following the start of the Second World War, the party was proscribed by the British government and in 1940 it was disbanded.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1894.
The Genius and the Goddess (1955) is a novel by Aldous Huxley. It is the fictional account of John Rivers, a student physicist in the 1920s who was hired out of college as a laboratory assistant to Henry Maartens.
Walter Ellis Mosley is an American novelist, most widely recognized for his crime fiction. He has written a series of best-selling historical mysteries featuring the hard-boiled detective Easy Rawlins, a black private investigator living in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, California; they are perhaps his most popular works. In 2020, Mosley received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, making him the first Black man to receive the honor.
The String Quartet No. 15 in A minor, Op. 132, by Ludwig van Beethoven, was written in 1825, given its public premiere on November 6 of that year by the Schuppanzigh Quartet and was dedicated to Count Nikolai Galitzin, as were Opp. 127 and 130. The number traditionally assigned to it is based on the order of its publication; it is actually the thirteenth quartet in order of composition.
The Perennial Philosophy is a comparative study of mysticism by the British writer and novelist Aldous Huxley. Its title derives from the theological tradition of perennial philosophy.
Dying Inside is a science fiction novel by American writer Robert Silverberg. It was nominated for the Nebula Award in 1972, and both the Hugo and Locus Awards in 1973.
Everard is a given name and surname which is the anglicised version of the old Germanic name Eberhard. Notable people with the name include:
Literature and Science, published in September 1963, was Aldous Huxley's last book - he died two months after it was published. In it, he strives to harmonize the scientific and artistic realms. He argues that language is what divides the two realms and makes communication between them difficult. He analyzes the ways in which scientists and fiction writers use language differently to achieve their desired effects. Although he concedes that many differences in language use are inevitable, he urges both camps to seek mutual understanding and appreciation. He directs his argument primarily to fiction writers: "Whether we like it or not,” he tells them, “ours is the Age of Science."
Stephen Hudson is a pseudonym of the British novelist and translator Sydney Schiff, whose work was published in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. With a substantial income from his commercially successful family, Schiff was a patron of the arts, with friendships in the musical, artistic and literary circles of England and France.
Los Hermanos de la Fraternidad Piadosa de Nuestro Padre Jesús Nazareno, also known as Los Penitentes, Los Hermanos, the Brotherhood of our Father Jesus of Nazareth and the Penitente Brotherhood, is a lay confraternity of Spanish-American Catholic men active in Northern and Central New Mexico and southern Colorado. They maintain religious meeting buildings, which are not formal churches, called moradas.
John William Navin Sullivan (1886–1937) was an English popular science writer and literary journalist, and the author of a study of Beethoven. He wrote some of the earliest non-technical accounts of Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, and was known personally to many important writers in London in the 1920s, including Aldous Huxley, John Middleton Murry, Wyndham Lewis, Aleister Crowley and T. S. Eliot.
Science, Liberty and Peace is an essay written by Aldous Huxley, published in 1946. The essay debates a wide range of subjects reflecting Huxley's views towards the direction of society at that time. He puts forward a number of predictions, many of which resonate far beyond the time when it was written. A consistent theme throughout the essay is Huxley's preference towards a decentralised society.
Peter Edgerly Firchow was an American literary scholar and educator. He wrote extensively on the relationship between British and German literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and he was a leading scholar of the British writer Aldous Huxley. He served as a faculty member in the University of Minnesota English Department from 1967 to 2008 and as director of the university's Comparative Literature program from 1972 to 1978.
Philosophy of psychedelics is the philosophical investigation of the psychedelic experience. While psychedelic, entheogenic or hallucinogenic substances have been used by many traditional cultures throughout history mostly for religious purposes, recorded philosophical speculation and analysis of these substances, their phenomenological effects and the relevance of these altered states of consciousness to philosophical questions is a relatively late phenomenon in the history of philosophy. Traditional cultures who use psychedelic substances such as the Amazonian and Indigenous Mexican peoples hold that ingesting medicinal plants such as Ayahuasca and Peyote allows one to commune with the beings of the spirit world.
The following bibliography of Aldous Huxley provides a chronological list of the published works of English writer Aldous Huxley (1894–1963). It includes his fiction and non-fiction, both published during his lifetime and posthumously.