POINT COUNTER POINT

Aldous Huxley POINT COUNTER POINT This brilliant and satirical work is probably the most popular novel of one of England’s leading present day novelists. POINT COUNTER POINT is the story of a novelist, Philip Quarles, who works out his novel as Huxley’s novel progresses. It is thus a novel within a novel, its focus shifting from one set of characters to another. Life sparkles more or less meaninglessly, but beneath the surface a central current moves. The effect that is produced is the effect of counterpoint. In his thoughtful and illuminating Introduction, Professor Watts interprets Huxley’s unusual technique and its meaning : “...Our passage from one section to another, from one person to another, sufficiently underlines Huxley’s point. As he sees it, we do not live in an integrated society. Instead, we live in one that can be called morally atomistic–one in which persons are no more related to each other than the self-contained atoms which, in Lucretius’ description, fall through space, colliding and rebounding, but never establishing with each other a binding relation, a real community of being. We see a good example of this moral atomism in the Bidlake household. There is Mrs. Bidlake with her Ruskhinesque estheticism, puttering with her flowers, incurious about the behavior of others; Miss Fulkes, the governess, earnestly ‘educating’ the Quarles child —and reading cheap romances on the sly; John Bidlake, the great painter and the great rake, come home to die; not to mention Philip Quarles and his wife Elinor, bound in unrewarding marriage. All exist ‘under one roof’ and create the effect of circus, of menagerie, that the reader first senses during the soiree of Tantamount House.” Harold H. Watts, Professor of English at Purdue University, was a well known writer whose critical essays and fiction had appeared in many literary journals.

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