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Aldous Huxley’s Generic Shift to Fantasy - A Study of After Many A Summer Dies the Swan and Ape and Essence

Shahnawaz Muntazir, M.Phil.

Look into the Divisions of the Modern World

Aldous Huxley as a writer set out to articulate the intellectual and moral conflict being fought in the collective soul of twentieth century. He used the novel form because he found it congenial to his purpose. D H Lawrence would express his reaction viscerally but failed “to look through a microscope”, as Huxley reminds us (Sybille 1974:199). James Joyce could not disentangle himself from the nets in which he felt caught, because he was not aware of the oases to be found in eastern meditative systems. E M Forster knew of passages to other cultures but preferred to regard Art as self sufficient rather than as catalytic. Virginia Woolf knew the agony of private torment but did not realize the healing energy that emerges from societal involvement. It was Aldous Huxley of all these twentieth century English writers who best reflected and coordinated the divisions of the modern world; he best expressed its Weltanschuung in its most universal sense (Birnbaum 1971:4).

Cynical Depiction of the World

In early years of his career as novelist, Aldous Huxley was interested in cynically depicting the Weltanschuung of his times. However Huxley was aware of his shortcomings as a novelist. In a letter to Jerome E Hare he admits that he “… is not congenitally a novelist and therefore is compelled to resort to the devices which the born novelist would never think of using” (Smith 1969:58). Huxley, therefore, from the very beginning of his career, experimented with the novel form and continued to the end of his career to cope up with his growing artistic needs. At the very outset he declared himself to be an “amused pyrrrhonic aesthete” and living up to that reputation adapted a dialectic style embodying an argument or discussion, with no requirement to reach the conclusion. For such dialectic discussion he adapted Peacockian model in which a group of people are assembled in a country house, having varying temperaments and attitudes and novel dramatizes the clash of these attitudes. Peacock’s novel attacked most cherished assumptions, such as, new theories in morals, politics, and poetry. He suggested in not less than seven novels that most of the new ideas were idiotic, a source for satire rather than wisdom. In Headlong Hall (1816), Night Mare Abbey (1818), Crochet Castle (1831), to name only three, Peacock mocked at such trends as Romantic Movement, the political pretensions, scientific, and philosophical ideas of his age.

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Shahnawaz Muntazir, M.Phil.
Kaich Razgir
Khan Sahab
Budgam 191111
Jammu &Kashmir
India

Assistant Professor English
Higher Education Department
Jammy and Kashmir
India
nineteen84@rediffmail.com

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