Living with Monsters

A Study of the Art of Characterization in Aldous Huxley's Novels

Indrani Deb

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000578539
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria inglesa

Aldous Huxley is one of the most well-known modernist intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century, excelling in novels, essays, philosophical tracts, and poems. His novels are special in that they use a unique form – the novel of ideas – with which to satirize human nature and the pride regarding human achievement. Few readers of English literature are not acquainted with books like Point Counter Point, Eyeless in Gaza, and Brave New World (novels dealt with in detail). A proper study of Huxley's characterization in his novels opens up a veritable treasure-house of history, philosophy, psychology, and incisive satire. "Characterology", as the art of projecting different kinds of characters is called, is an ancient art, which either aimed at representing the entire universe in a single individual, or the same in a variegated form through various individuals. Huxley uses the latter kind in his representation of character, and as such, a study of the characters of his novels opens up a general interpretation of the universe as a whole.

1Character-building in Huxley’s Novels

DOI: 10.4324/9781003276388-1

Characters, according to M.H. Abrams, are “the persons presented in a dramatic or narrative work, who are interpreted by the reader as being endowed with moral, dispositional, and emotional qualities that are expressed in what they say – the dialogue – and by what they do – the action”.¹ Characters can be real or imaginary; human, animal, or supernatural; but above all, they must be “consistent” – that is, they must not suddenly act in a way which is implausible or counter to the temperament which has already been logically ascertained in them by the writer.

E.M. Forster’s definition for character-types has become the most popular because of its simplicity. A “flat” character, he says, is two-dimensional, always predictable, is built around “a single idea or quality”, and does not adapt to succeeding happenings or actions in the novel. A “round” character, on the other hand, is complex, subtle, and being more like a real-life person, is capable of changing with circumstance, and of surprising the reader with some unpredictable actions or thoughts –

We may divide characters into flat and round.

Flat characters were called ‘humours’ in the seventeenth century, and are sometimes called ‘types’, and sometimes caricatures. In their purest form, they are constructed round a single idea or quality; when there is more than one factor in them, we get the beginning of the curve towards the round.²

And Forster also reminds us of the great advantages of flat characters –

One great advantage of flat characters is that they are easily recognized whenever they come in…

A second advantage is that they are easily remembered by the reader afterwards. They remain in his mind as unalterable for the reason that they were not changed by circumstances; they moved through circumstances, which gives them in retrospect a comforting quality….³

Of round characters he says –

The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises, it is flat. If it does not convince, it is flat pretending to be round. It has the incalculability of life about it….⁴

This terminology will be used broadly used in the succeeding pages in connection with the characters of Huxley, not because it is the best definition, but because it is the most convenient. What Forster omits mentioning, however, is that the “round” character has originated from the Rennaissance concept of the “microcosm”, – the “little Universe” – who represents the world in miniature, and all the workings of God. Francis Bacon agrees with the ancient concept that “man was microcosmus, an abstract or model of the world”.⁵ Sir Walter Raleigh said that “in the little frame of man’s body there is a representation of the Universal; and (by allusion) a kind of participation of all the parts there, therefore was man called Microcosmos, or the little World”.⁶

The “flat” or “type” character also has ancient roots in the old literary genre called “the Character”, and which too became popular in the early seventeenth century. The “Characters” of Theophrastus of Lesbos (371–287 B.C.) had been translated in 1592 by Casaubon, and this prototypal work had several imitations during the Rennaissance, in the pamphlets of Nashe, Greene, and Nicholas Breton, and in some contributions of Webster, Dekker, and Donne to Sir Thomas Overbury’s compilation, Characters (1614). A true descendent of Theophrastus is John Earle, who published Microcosmographie in 1628 – a gallery of type portraits, generally believed to be the best of its time. Three categories of “type” characters are followed in such character-sketches – a) an ordinary type with a single mood or quality – such as the angry man, the jealous man, or the conceited man; b) a social type – as a typical clerk, a gambler, or a lawyer; and c) a place or scene, such as a tavern or a college.⁷

“Characterology”, as the art of projecting different kinds of characters is called, is therefore an ancient art, which either aimed at representing the entire universe in a single individual, or the same in a variegated form through various individuals. It is only in modern times that qualitative differentiation is made between the former and the latter kinds, the former being regarded as a superior form of character representation to the latter.

The novel of ideas is a form that essentially uses the character-type most often found in the genre called “Characters”. Barring a few exceptions, the characters we find here are necessarily “flat” to suit the different modes of discourse represented by each person. From Thomas Love Peacock in the early nineteenth century, through Thomas Mann, to Aldous Huxley in the twentieth, the picture is more or less the same – a small world which encompasses several different characters representing variegated points of view, adding up to a total picture of a flawed social set-up. In such a condition a group of “round” characters would never fit, for different ideas must be shared and inter-related in a black-and-white succession to form an integrated pattern.

“Flat” and “type” characters are often used as synonymous, even by Forster, though there is a subtle difference between them. All flat characters are not types, even though all type characters are invariably flat. Prospero in The Tempest for instance, is flat, because he is projected from a single angle, and does not adapt to the actions around him – rather, he makes the actions happen. He, however, cannot be called a “type” in any of the senses listed earlier. In the same way, Cordelia in Lear is flat, and not a type. The characters in the novel of ideas, however, tend to be social and moral types, aiming to project a social picture, which is criticized and held up for comment. Type characters are especially used for two reasons – comic and satiric. Dickens, for instance, used them for a comic effect, highlighting a particular flaw – a crooked nose, or a dry cough. Huxley uses them for satire, hardly ever for comedy alone. Amusement and wit are always involved; never a hearty laugh. His aim, as he declares, is to illustrate the “philosophy of meaninglessness” reigning in modern urban society, and in doing so, to find a way out of it.

On this philosophy of meaninglessness, this is Huxley himself in Ends and Means –

Does the world as a whole possess the value and meaning that we constantly attribute to certain parts of it (such as human beings and their works); and, if so, what is the nature of that value and meaning? This is a question which, a few years ago, I should not even have posed. For, like so many of my contemporaries, I took it for granted that there was no meaning. This was partly due to the fact that I shared the common belief that the scientific picture of an abstraction from reality was a true picture of reality as a whole; partly also to other non-intellectual reasons. I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption.⁸

As the worthy grandson of T.H. Huxley, it is indeed remarkable that Aldous Huxley should take on himself the task of warning mankind of the tremendous influence of the philosophy of meaninglessness in a world which was being increasingly steered by scientific principles. But the years after the First World War constituted a period very different from the comparatively less complex period of the late nineteenth century. The tremendous upheaval of the Great War had turned all social and moral values topsy-turvy, and more so in England, because there the beginning of the twentieth century had witnessed an age of development in all fields – social, economic, and artistic.

Towards the last years of the Victorian era, the society had been undergoing a general reaction to traditional, orthodox, and restrictive values, and with the growing popularity of Marxism, and with revolutionary theories in the sphere of Physics and Biology, the roots of this kind of social temperament were severely shaken. Political changes throughout the world introduced a new sphere of interest to the youth, and just as the mainstay of the Victorian regime had been religion, it was politics now.

There was, moreover, a shift in the political balance, for the lower middle class was rising, and the working classes were not as they were before – thanks to the Third Reform Act of 1884, the County Councils Act of the same year, the rise of the grammar schools after 1902, and along with them, a development of universal education. Even though the predominant class structure was strongly authoritarian, there were signs that the upper classes were no longer quite what they had been. We find Henry James referring to the “clumsy, conventional, materialized, vulgarized, brutalized life of London”, where the state of the English upper classes was “in many ways very much the same rotten and collapsible one of the French aristocracy”.

A general demand for “change” was in the air, and along with the unprecedented influence of Marxism, which brought in a new sense of “community”, there was a call from several quarters for old customs to be replaced. The sudden crash of high hopes, the economic depression, and the realization of the infinite cruelty and beastliness of which human kind is capable – a realization which the Great War brought in – acted as a contrast to the complacency of the previous era. Everything in the world revolved around Einstein’s theory of relativity, and science became totally opposed to morality and religion. Darwin and Thomas Huxley had already loosened the foundations of religion, once and for all breaking to pieces the concept of the immortal soul and the superiority of man. Morality now was brought under the axe, for apart from implying traditional values, it could not be of much consequence in a world in which nothing was worthy, serious, meaningful, or long-lived. Those who had the means indulged in a life of meaningless pleasure, and their children did likewise. The divorce rate soared, love lost its meaning, and human relationships began to be calculated in economic terms. For those who did not have the means, however, life went on as it had done for ages.

It is thus to the middle and upper middle classes that Huxley chose to restrict himself, for it is here that the philosophy of meaninglessness had the most takers. Huxley himself describes their life thus –

Good times are chronic nowadays. There is dancing every afternoon, a continuous performance at all the picture-palaces, a radio concert on tap, like gas or water, at any hour of the day or night. The fine point of seldom pleasure is duly blunted…It is only among more or less completely rustic populations, lacking the means and the opportunity to indulge in the modern chronic Good Time, that the surviving feasts preserve something of their ancient glory. Me, personally, the unflagging pleasures of contemporary cities leave me most lugubriously unamused. The prevailing boredom – for oh, how desperately bored, in spite of their grim determination to have a Good Time, the majority of pleasure-seekers really are! – the hopeless weariness infects me!⁹

The people of these social classes had exactly the intellectual capability he required to expound the dialectics of the ideal with which he wished to comment on the times; they had exactly the right kind of understanding he later required to discover a new road to knowledge and peace – the Perennial Religion. Their intellectuality, moreover, made them lead just the kind of one-sided lives that he needed in order to exemplify the “split” personalities that modern society created: wholeness of character was rare in such a society because the people, for the greater part, led the life of the body, with no time for the mind or spirit. If the person was a scientist or a writer, his life, again, was that of the intellect, with a conscious neglect of even the body –

In the case of scientists and philosophers this ineptitude outside their line of business isn’t surprising….Indeed, it is almost inevitable. For it’s obvious that excessive development of the purely mental functions lends to atrophy of all the rest.¹⁰

Huxley’s characters are primarily people of their times, rooted in the second and third decades of the twentieth century, and inextricably related to the environment in which they were born. A Mrs. Aldwinkle with her fear of old age (Those Barren Leaves) or a Lucy Tantamount with her infinite fear of boredom (Point Counter Point) or Coleman and his negativism (Antic Hay) are people easily to be seen in the upper echelons of society in the twenties. The circle may be a limited one, but the barrenness of th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Character-building in Huxley's Novels
• 2 Point Counter Point
• 3 Eyeless in Gaza
• 4 The Futuristic Novels: “Brave New World”, “Ape and Essence”, “Island”
• 5 Huxley's World View and His Characters
• Bibliography
• Index