Psychotropes: Models of Authorship, Psychopathology, and Molecular Politics in Aldous Huxley and Philip K. Dick

Modernism and Magic

"In That New World Which Is the Old": New ^orld/Old World Inversion In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World by Oliver Quimby Melton Dr. Beth Rosenberg, Examination Committee Chair Associate Professor of English University of Nevada, Las Vegas "'In That New World Which Is The Old': New World/Old World Inversion In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World" examines the inversion of the concepts Old World, specifically associated with England, and New World, specifically associated with America, in the novel Brave New World. After examining and denotatively defining the terms Old World and New World, this thesis argues that the New World/Old World inversion in Huxley's dystopian novel exists because of Anglo-American cultural and political events of the 1920s and early 1930s, namely, the United States' rise as a military, political, and cultural superpower following World War I and Great Britain's concurrent early imperial dissolution and declining political power. Specifically, I argue that the New

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"In that New World which is the Old": New World/Old World inversion in Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World"

Aldous Huxley and Alternative Spirituality

The main concern in this study is both the revelation of the intertextual relations and explanation of their functions in Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point.One of the significant assumptions in the intertextual theory is that a text is not a stable field of meaning, but something that the reader work on and interpret. Taking this as a point of departure, Point Counter Point has been attempted to be analyzed from the standpoint of intertextual associations through which it was constructed. Having an abundance of intertextual connections the novel itself offers numberless ways of deciphering it. Therefore this study has become one reliant on our common knowledge and aiming at putting forward both explicit and implicit relations embedded in the novel. This also means that there may be some other studies aiming at finding and analyzing the intertextual relations in the novel and dependent on the knowledge of the reader; therefore, this study is just one of the probable studies on the intertextual relations in Huxley’s novel. Throughout the study it has been observed that Huxley exploited a wide range of cultural phenomena revealing popular, social, literary, artistic and historical culture by means of quotation, citation, allusion and reference either reproducing or transforming the texts or discourses belonging to these fields. Along with the mentioned domains, the novel makes the utilization of scientific references and allusions. A large number of allusions and references to a large number of texts and fields require classification of them in different parts. The first part of the study deals with quotations from and allusions and references to literature, literary texts and figures. The second part puts forward the references and allusions to other cultural fields and phenomena in Point Counter Point. The investigation of scientific allusions and references in the novel will be the subject of the third part. This study also sheds light on the function of the intertextual relations embedded in the novel. At the end of the study, what we have concluded is that Huxley, being a highly-intellectualized author, constructed his novel via both intertextual resonances and implicit intertextual connections and thus contributed to the English novel through his experimental style. Besides, it has been thought that the novel in Huxley’s hands has become developed because he contributed to its modernist qualities through his literary experimentalism resulting in the novel being an intertext.

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Intertextual relations in aldous huxley's point counter point

Unlike modern British writers such as T. S. Eliot and Evelyn, Waugh, Aldous Huxley did not convert to a specific religious community indigenous to Western culture; however, his entire life embraced a consciousness-expanding search for ultimate reality revealed to him through the mystical qualities of color and light. Like Eliot and Waugh, Huxley found himself regarded by many critics as unfaithful to his earlier writing after his conversion to a spiritual faith. Huxley's friend Christopher Isherwood states that Huxley's developing beliefs were "widely represented as the selling-out of a once-brilliant intellect" (Clark 303), and Donald Watt concurs that "in the minds of a majority of critics Huxley was fixed as an entertaining recorder of the frenetic 1920s who later recoiled into an aesthetically suicidal mysticism" (AH 31).(1) More recent critics still tend to divide Huxley's canon into two halves in which Eyeless in Gaza (1936) is sometimes referred to as his "conversion" novel (Bowering 114, Watt AH 19). Although the assumption has been weakening, what many critics mistakenly took to be an abrupt change of direction and attitude in Huxley's writing actually represents a continuation of his search for theological idealism. The writer's steps on the pathway to spiritual reality can be charted -- from his first book of poetry in 1916 to his last novel in 1962 -- through his distinctive use of the imagery of color and light. By 1936 Huxley had already started his troubled spiritual journey from despair toward mystical union with the "pure light of the void." Despite elements of wishful thinking and open doubt in Huxley's life and work, his conscious commitment to the struggle to believe in the Divine Light can be traced as early as 1922 in his first novel, Crome Yellow. Confirmation of Huxley's intentional use of color is summarized in his "Natural History of Visions," a 1959 lecture posing the question, "Why are precious stones precious?" (Human 216). These brightly colored pebbles, says Huxley, are not beautifully harmonized like a work of art or a piece of music; they are single objects which the human mind responds to in an unaccountable way. He states that one reason for our interest can be found in the Phaedo where Socrates speaks about the ideal world of which our world is in a sense a rather bad copy. Socrates says: "In this other earth the colors are much purer and more brilliant than they are down here. The mountains and stones have a richer gloss, a livelier transparency and intensity of hue" (217). Plato writes not merely about a metaphysical idea but also about another inner world which has landscape and beautiful regions of memory, fantasy, imagination, dreams, and-most remote -- "the world of visions" (218). Huxley explains the importance of light and color in this world of visions: This experience of the pure light of the void is a visionary experience of what may be called the highest, the most mystical kind. On a rather lower level the lights seem to be broken up and become, so to speak, incorporated in different objects and persons and figures. It is as though this tremendous white light were somehow refracted through a prism and broken up into different coloured lights. In this lower form of vision we have the intensification of light in some way associated with the story-telling faculty, so that there are visions of great complexity and elaboration in which light plays a tremendous part, but it is not the pure white light of the great theophanies. (228-29) Huxley deduces, therefore, that precious stones are precious because they are objects in the external world -- along with fire, stained glass, fireworks, pageantry, theatrical spectacle, Christmas-tree lights, rainbows, and sunlight -- which most nearly resemble the things that people see in the visionary world (232-35). …

Sally A. Paulsell

Papers

Color and Light: Huxley's Pathway to Spiritual Reality