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Bessenyei József CANON AND CANONICITY IN HUXLEY’S POINT COUNTER POINT ÁKOS I. FARKAS Ákos I. Farkas took his first degree, an MA in English and Hungarian, at Debrecen University, Hungary, after which he gained years of experience as an educator at various institutions of higher learning in his native Hungary and abroad, including Miskolc University. He is now an associate professor at the Department of English Studies at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, where he earned his PhD, and where he lectures on twentieth-century British literature. His publications include numer- ous essays on James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, Aldous Huxley, and others as well as the book Will’s Son and Jake’s Peer: Anthony Burgess’s Joycean Negotiations (Akadémiai Kiadó, 2002). He serves on the editorial board of The End of the World Newsletter, an electronic publication issued by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. He gave two talks in the ERF—both on Anthony Burgess—on 25 April 2005 and 3 December 2007. The paper printed here is related to his recent work: he is currently writing a book-length study of the proto-postmodern aspects of Aldous Huxley‘s fiction. CONTRA CANONEM ―There have been times,‖ speculated the British writer John Wain in 1972 about the not-so- brave new world of Aldous Huxley‘s presumable future, ―[…] when I wondered if he was going to disappear altogether‖ (qtd. in Watt 27). Half a lifetime later, one might all too easily turn the question around and ask where Wain himself has gone with the phenomenal reputation he once enjoyed. However, it would be both frivolous and beside the point here to belabor the reasons why Wain‘s epoch-making novel Hurry on Down (1953) was out of print for more than thirty years prior to its being recently reissued, as an anniversary ho- mage of sorts, by a quaint little publisher specializing in fifties and sixties British literary memorabilia, and what, in general, has become of the writer-critic who could so dismissive- ly speak of yesteryear‘s great. It would be of dubious taste and doubtful relevance to dwell on how John Wain, that forgotten hero of a forgotten culture war, has disappeared without a trace from the undergraduate reading lists of all major British, American, and continental universities. After all, if the longevity of a critic‘s reputation as a creative writer was the sole criterion of assessing the validity of his or her judgments, then a vast body of insightful observations would be wholly lost to posterity (who would in turn be obliged to take the worst critical fallacies of the opinionated great for gospel truth as has only too often been the case with all the embarrassingly misguided evaluations handed down in their time by D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, Vladimir Nabokov, and others of their stature). Worst of all for Huxley‘s tenaciously sympathetic readers, the senior Angry Young Man of old 116 Ákos I. Farkas may just have had a point to make in that flippantly irreverent observation of his about the future obscurity of the one he saw as standing for all his obnoxious elders.1 This is not to say that Wain‘s dismissive attitude to Huxley has been fully borne out by what has in fact happened to Huxley‘s posthumous reputation. No, unlike his self- assured detractor, Huxley has not disappeared at all. The major documents of his prolific career as an intriguing novelist, an exciting essayist, a rather indifferent poet, and an even more questionable dramatist are all readily and universally available in recent editions brought out by some of the most highly regarded Anglo-American publishing houses,2 who rightly count books bearing Huxley‘s name among their steadiest sellers. Also, even as the writer of Brave New World, The Doors of Perception, and Island retains a sizeable cult- following among successive generations of the Birkenstock-wearing youth, the more intel- lectually respectable attractions of the Huxley-phenomenon continue to generate a large body of very serious scholarly articles, dissertations, and monographic studies of consider- able academic interest. Surveying my own, far from exhaustive, bibliography, I have found that no less than fifteen book-length works of scholarly exegesis have been devoted to Hux- ley‘s work in this less than decade-long new millennium alone. It is more than remarkable that all this is happening thirty years or more after Bernard Bergonzi gave full academic endorsement to Wain‘s impressionistic dismissal when declaring, in 1973, that ―the writing of more books about Huxley […] would be a work of supererogation‖ (qtd. in Ferns 5). Duly acknowledging Bergonzi‘s well-earned academic prestige, one may perhaps add, without risk- ing charges of ad hominem argumentation, that the long list of contributors to the ever-growing corpus of Huxley-criticism includes such luminaries of international English studies as a David Bradshaw, a Chris Baldick, or a Harold Bloom. In spite of the impressive quantity and occasionally very high quality of recent Hux- ley criticism, it would be unwise to conclude that a comfortable and indisputable niche in the modern English literary canon has now been secured for the Huxley oeuvre. It is not only the notoriously dubious place to which terms such as ―modern,‖ ―English,‖ ―literature,‖ and, above all, ―canon‖ have been relegated in the now prevailing critical idiom that must recommend caution. Neither is it the formidable prestige of Huxley‘s earlier detractors—Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, André Gide, David Daiches, and Frank Kermode come to mind alongside those mentioned above—that shake whatever complacency the enthusiast might feel about the overwhelmingly favorable reception of Huxley‘s achievement. It seems just as superfluous to demonstrate the historical relativity of celebrity opinions as it would be futile to make yet another doomed attempt at resolving the involuted theoretical problems besetting the large issues of literariness, modernism, and canonicity. Rather than the imponderables of theory or the status of Huxley‘s noble enemies, it is his trustiest friends‘ predictable attitude that must 1 The writing of this essay, a piece meant to be included in my ―habilitation‖ dissertation, was greatly facilitated by research conducted as part of the umbrella project ―Cultural Memory‖ supported by the Hungarian government‘s ―OTKA‖ grant No. 71770 and coordinated by Professor Ágnes Péter. Special thanks are also due to my colleagues at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, and Miskolc University, North Hungary, for valuable suggestions made in various contexts, such as the Work in Progress Seminar sponsored by the Modern English and American Doctoral Programme of Eötvös Loránd University or the English Research Forum of Miskolc University run under the tutelage of Professor Péter Dávidházi and Dr. Attila Dósa, respectively. 2 E.g., Faber and Faber, HarperCollins, Norton, Penguin, and Vintage. Canon and Canonicity in Huxley‘s Point Counter Point 117 give one pause: the defensive position that even the most self-confident of Huxley‘s apologists almost instinctively occupy. The routine procedure followed by virtually all who find Huxley‘s work worthy of their best exegetical-evaluative efforts can be easily summarized. The strategy invariably in- volves the same opening gambit: a dutiful survey of such standard reservations made by Hux- ley‘s critical adversaries as those concerning his novels‘ ―bloodless characters,‖ ―meager plot- lines,‖ ―excessive philosophizing,‖ the writer‘s ―half-hearted and derivative experimentation,‖ his ―wordiness,‖ his ―didacticism,‖ etc. The evidence thus acknowledged of Huxley‘s not being a ―congenital novelist‖ is then followed by the equally unavoidable exercise in challenging and disproving whatever adverse criticism is deemed really important. This is then followed by a gesture of conciliatory dialectics, whereby the validity of all that is perceived as irrelevant to the agenda of the Huxley apologist is graciously acknowledged. Needless to say, the move concluding such exercises in critical validation is that of demonstrating how Huxley‘s entire oeuvre or—more frequently—a period, work, or group of works within that oeuvre displays qualities that outshine whatever regrettable weaknesses the writer‘s overall achievement may be seen to suffer from. Here are some typical examples of pre-emptive criticism coupled with apologetic vindication: Huxley, as we are often told, is not a true, instinctive artist of the Law- rence-type but a superbly intelligent satirist (see Meckier, Satire throughout). Also, while Hux- ley‘s experiments do not measure up to those of Joyce, et al., the comprehensive vision of his later fiction more than compensates for the absence of technical sophistication (see Ferns). Furthermore, Huxley, while fully conversant with the Joyce–Eliot tradition, really belongs to an alternative, continental canon of modernism: the one represented by Hermann Hesse and, mainly, Thomas Mann (see Firchow, Reluctant throughout).3 Finally, some of his critics com- mend Huxley‘s thirties-style social responsibility (Bradshaw and Baker throughout), or his role as a forerunner of the sixties counter-culture (Ferns), all of them downplaying the importance of his perceived shortcomings as a ―pure artist.‖ It could be objected here that the rhetorical pattern of most laudatory Huxley criti- cism outlined above does not look very different from strategies of vindicating the canonic status of practically any writer applied by virtually any critic. It is to be noted, though, that the difference is that with Huxley, the defensive maneuver—moves aimed at surveying, bracket- ing, and denying any unfavorable criticism—tends to consume far more intellectual energy than whatever critical resources are expended on any offensive operations in which Huxley‘s positive values are asserted. Put another way, Huxley‘s friends tend to concentrate on belittling the failures rather than upstaging the successes of their ―hero.‖ With Huxley‘s coevals or older contemporaries occupying a firmer position in the modernist canon, the ratio of timorous defense and unreserved laudation is usually inverted.
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