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| (Both titles: Reaktion Books/University of Chicago Press.) |
“This was the attraction of the abyss over which one is leaning, that of a life lived at white heat. It was a deliberate abdication of day to day struggles, the removal of the difficulties of existence.”
--J .K. Huysmans
“We live together, we act on and react to one another but always we are by ourselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”
--Aldous Huxley
As T.A. Brown pointed out in the article “The Technology That Actually Runs The World” last December in The Atlantic Monthly, the most dominant algorithms aren’t necessarily the ones choosing what songs Spotify serves up to you supposedly based on your personal tastes, but rather the ones that control everything you see, hear or read by controlling
all the art the even gets made before it’s made, as a result of prevailing consumer taste mechanisms that it can interpret more efficiently than the most canny culture critics ever could. The article suggested that these algorithms dictate everything, from which books are published and what art gets seen, in a revolutionary paradigm shift that has become entrenched in the arts and media. The essential premise was that in 2024 culture became boring and stale due to these thuggish algorithms’ calling the shots on what gets first produced, and then gets praised. The idea is that Big Tech has flattened culture into a facsimile of its former self, and that algorithmic recommendation engines have created what amounts to a lack of all forward momentum. But long before computers ever existed, except in the minds of visionary science fiction authors such as Yevgeny Zamyatin (author of the mindblowing 1922 novel WE) and Aldous Huxley (author of the book Zamyatin inspired, Brave New World in 1931), concerns were already beginning to float to the surface of our consciousness. Or at least to the consciousness of a few heroic prescients.
In a 1923 essay, “The End of Pleasures,” Huxley asserted that the ease of cultural production, being driven by middle-class desire for entertainment in the arts, was the reason most books, films, music and art were not at all satisfying: “These effortless pleasures, these ready-made distractions that are the same for everyone over the face of the whole Western world, are surely a worse menace to our civilization than ever the Germans were.” Sounds ominous because it was, even over half a century before the advent of electronic media, and now is, since our communal experience of the online world, all the more. So it sets a mind to searching, perhaps as a kind of respite, for modes of thinking and making that, still analog in nature, provide an alternative to the electric morass facing us, just as Zamyatin predicted it would, in a world dictated almost entirely by the binary codes of ones and zeros. And while ruminating on all this melancholia, I have found myself more and more actively scouring the analog world of thinkers before the era of our current dilemma. Fortunately I have found some solace in vacations I have taken in the realm of a book series called Critical Lives, published by Reaktion Books and distributed by the University of Chicago Press. The titles in this series, each authored by a writer with some special access to the subjects and themes being examined, present these thinkers in the enlivening form of a combined biography and critical profile which explores the life of the thinker and relates it to their major works.
Recently I was swept away by one such Critical Lives title by Bartholomew Ryan on the life and work of the idiosyncratic Fernando Pessoa, author of The Book of Disquiet, and now I’ve encountered two more titles that, in some shared and inevitably synchronistic manner, also offer some welcome breathing room for an overused cranium. Immersing oneself in the worlds of the French novelist/essayist J.K. Huysmans (1848-1907) and the British novelist/essayist Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) is like finding yourself on a quiet beach adjacent to an ocean of warm ideas wafting to and fro in the waves of their splendid works, all of which reflect one profound distinguishing feature: they both wanted to escape from the real world. The world of their fellows displeased them both immensely, for slightly different reasons but in keeping with a mutual desire for transcendence, by any means necessary. Huysmans’ incredibly rebellious edifice of audacity Au Rebours (Against Nature) appeared out of nowhere in 1884, and Huxley’s breathtaking depiction in The Doors of Perception of his experiments with his own consciousness appeared in 1953, but both are rejections of the hidden despotism of an everyday normalcy which threatens to stifle our full potential as angelic beings. If that sounds a tad outlandish that’s because it was and it still is. I can still recall the mesmerizing surge of recognition that overcame me as a teenager when I first picked up both books and left our quotidian world far, far behind.
But that rejection of the illusory everyday world, along with its presumptive limitations, was already well in full swing for me during my teenage years, and it was not Doors so much, or Against Nature, that turned the trick for me. They may only have solidified something in the germinal process of forming an attitude. Even more telling was my encounter with another Huysmans semi-Satanic tome, La Bas (Down There) from 1891, and in the case of Huxley, so many of his exquisitely crafted earlier novels starting with Crome Yellow, Antic Hay, Point Counterpoint, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, and then his last utopian gem, Island from 1962. But what these books all did was amalgamate what I might as well call a vibe, one which these two Critical Lives studies, of Huysmans by Ruth Antosh and of Huxley by Jake Poller, explore vividly. A vibe perhaps best characterized as, "stop the world I want to get off." Both of these writers, the elder a true misanthropic pessimist and the younger an astute diagnostician of humanity’s self-inflicted follies, fervently desired a sustainable cessation of our delusions, Huysmans via a vertiginous plunge into the sheer solipsism of his effete Des Esseintes character, and Huxley via his private exploration of the new dimensions available to him through his collaborative experiments with Dr. Humphrey Osmond and what they eventually decided to call the "psychedelic," which he also wrote about so poetically in his short but incisive book Heaven and Hell in 1956.
One wonders what algorithms of taste have rendered Huysmans a slightly fringe dwelling eccentric while other mechanisms have elevated Huxley to a place in a global literary canon. I’m not sure how or when Antosh entered Huysmans’ rarefied magnetic field but her skills as both a biographer and a critic have enabled her to provide us access to his somewhat specialized menu of reverie. She probes his origins in great depth, looking for the answers to how he has managed to intrigue readers with “his often ironic insights into the minds and souls of his protagonists. While not so well-known as his one-time mentor Émile Zola or his lifelong idol Charles Baudelaire, via the recent publication of his complete novels in the Bibliothèque by Éditions Gallimard he has now entered the literary canon, joining the likes of Voltaire and Proust.” This event would have come as quite a surprise to the retiring and reclusive dreamer Huysmans, who, Antosh points out, was under no illusions about his place in the world of letters, especially given the eccentric character of his principal character in Against Nature:
Huysmans had been certain that his strange book would be an utter failure, quickly forgotten by the few who bothered to read it. But when Au Rebours was published in May 1884 the opposite proved to be true. His novel shocked and intrigued its readers. It focused on a single, solitary protagonist, Des Esseintes, a profoundly neurotic nobleman who isolates himself in a country mansion decorated with hallucinatory paintings. His book is virtually plotless: the only action takes place in the protagonist’s head.
Much like his follow-up novel En Rade (Stranded), in 1887, one greatly prized by the audacious Dadaists due to its aimlessly charming reveries of a rogue mentality.
It is with a considerable tenderness that Antosh, Professor Emerita of French at the State University of New York, and author of Reality and Illusion in the Novels of JK Huysmans, evokes the literary edges of her bio-mission, as when she expresses it like this:
It is with a considerable tenderness that Antosh, Professor Emerita of French at the State University of New York, and author of Reality and Illusion in the Novels of JK Huysmans, evokes the literary edges of her bio-mission, as when she expresses it like this:
It is fitting to review Huysmans’ life along with his work, since the two are intertwined. Trapped in a tedious, ill-paying civil service job for decades, beset by bouts of neuralgia, anxiety and indigestion, he yearned to flee from reality, or at least to isolate himself in a safe haven. The solitude he sought proved difficult to find, especially after he achieved notoriety at the age of 36 with the publication of Au Rebours. From that time on he was in the public eye, a celebrity, pursued by journalists and enthusiastic fans, selected for high honours, and receiving two awards from the Legion d’Honneur.
Imagine his shock at being recognized so popularly for the very weirdness he so carefully cultivated in prose. But that very amorphous and discontinuous narrative flow, chronicling the anti-romantic discontents of a person who hates nature due to its “monotony,” is precisely what may have captured the attention and interest of recent postmodern authors and critics, despite the paradoxical fact that its elliptical style arrived even in advance of historical modernism per se (roughly 1845, in the pen of Baudelaire). In other words, it was, and still is, avant of the avant-garde.
An equally prescient author seeking release from reality, Aldous Huxley (and his family dynasty of pathfinders) and his writings are sure to be much more familiar territory for most readers. He sought not escape but liberation from the fetters of the everyday contemporary world, which he successfully excoriated in a steady stream of brilliant satirical works from the 1920’s to the 1960’s. And Poller’s Critical Lives/Aldous Huxley has made a significant contribution to contextualizing the life/work of one of the most highly acclaimed 20th-century literary provocateurs. He provides many fresh insights into some of the less well-known aspects of Huxley’s lengthy sojourn at the forefront of philosophical speculation embodied in both his crystal-clear fiction and scholarly but easily accessible essays. Poller charts the various phases of Huxley’s endeavours to achieve liberation from delusion, “from the early satirist who depicted the glamorous despair of the post-war generation, to the committed pacifist of the 1930’s, the spiritual seeker of the 1940’s, the psychedelic sage of the 1950’s—who affirmed the spiritual potential of mescaline and LSD—to the new age 1960’s ecological prophet of his final novel Island.” Poller, who teaches English Literature at Queen Mary University, London, and is also the author of Aldous Huxley and Alternative Spirituality, is an ideal guide for the perplexed in this domain. And Poller situates the often extremely uncomfortable Huxley decisively well in establishing what made him so intent on liberating himself beyond the limits of the corporeal.
Seldom has there been a more assertive affinity between two writers so stylistically divergent as these two. Not that Poller himself suggests anything of the sort (after all, who would be nutty enough to posit a subterranean symmetry between Huysmans and Huxley?), but his foundational bio material on Huxley provides an ample entrée into how Huxley shared a desperate desire with Huysmans, to be free of the constraints he found placed upon him, both by the ritzy society into which he was born and by the fragile body he was forced to inhabit. Poller sets forth that subject and theme right at the outset in his introduction:
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| (Tresse and Stock.) (Harper and Collins.) |
An equally prescient author seeking release from reality, Aldous Huxley (and his family dynasty of pathfinders) and his writings are sure to be much more familiar territory for most readers. He sought not escape but liberation from the fetters of the everyday contemporary world, which he successfully excoriated in a steady stream of brilliant satirical works from the 1920’s to the 1960’s. And Poller’s Critical Lives/Aldous Huxley has made a significant contribution to contextualizing the life/work of one of the most highly acclaimed 20th-century literary provocateurs. He provides many fresh insights into some of the less well-known aspects of Huxley’s lengthy sojourn at the forefront of philosophical speculation embodied in both his crystal-clear fiction and scholarly but easily accessible essays. Poller charts the various phases of Huxley’s endeavours to achieve liberation from delusion, “from the early satirist who depicted the glamorous despair of the post-war generation, to the committed pacifist of the 1930’s, the spiritual seeker of the 1940’s, the psychedelic sage of the 1950’s—who affirmed the spiritual potential of mescaline and LSD—to the new age 1960’s ecological prophet of his final novel Island.” Poller, who teaches English Literature at Queen Mary University, London, and is also the author of Aldous Huxley and Alternative Spirituality, is an ideal guide for the perplexed in this domain. And Poller situates the often extremely uncomfortable Huxley decisively well in establishing what made him so intent on liberating himself beyond the limits of the corporeal.
Seldom has there been a more assertive affinity between two writers so stylistically divergent as these two. Not that Poller himself suggests anything of the sort (after all, who would be nutty enough to posit a subterranean symmetry between Huysmans and Huxley?), but his foundational bio material on Huxley provides an ample entrée into how Huxley shared a desperate desire with Huysmans, to be free of the constraints he found placed upon him, both by the ritzy society into which he was born and by the fragile body he was forced to inhabit. Poller sets forth that subject and theme right at the outset in his introduction:
The work of Aldous Huxley is haunted by the notion of ‘island universes.’ He asserts that humans long to get out of themselves, to pass beyond the limits of that tiny island universe within which every individual finds himself confined. At one level, Huxley’s longing for transcendence can be traced back to his own body, the inflammation of his cornea permanently impairing his eyesight, plagued by respiratory complaints, beset by influenza, bursitis and pneumonia, dogged by eczema, hives and odema. In addition, throughout his work, Huxley acutely chronicled the frustrations, confusion and humour that arise from most social interactions.
This suggests that for Huxley society itself, as he lampooned it so caustically in Crome Yellow, 1921, was merely a larger-scale elaboration of the individual constraints of being in a body in the first place. One of his characters, clearly a stand-in for the author, even wondered if anyone anywhere ever really established actual contact with others. “We are all parallel straight lines” was how the future 60’s demigod once characterized our mutual cultural dilemma.
Eyeless in Gaza, his brilliant 1936 novel, coincided with a deep embrace of mysticism through his friendship with the trippy Gerald Heard, with everything after that seeming to form a head brew of spirituality and satire bubbling below the surface of virtually all his thinking and writing. And his return to societal, political and spiritual issues in Brave New World Re-Visited, in 1958 contains some of his most prescient and nearly prophetic insights into where we seemed to have been heading, and indeed, even where we have now, in our time, seemingly fully arrived. Indeed, his thinking almost always feels like a profoundly clairvoyant artist gazing into a crystal ball, staring directly at us in fact, as per his exceptional notions of the cheapening of our consciousness itself under the weight of modern technology. Poller documents Huxley’s struggles with being Huxley admirably, at times making it feel that he somehow suffered from a kind of PTSD from being born into intellectual royalty, having to cope with the shadow of patriarch Thomas Huxley, a famed zoologist aligned with Darwin, his grandson Julian, an evolutionary biologist and first director of UNESCO, and the Nobel Laureate physicist Andrew Huxley, in addition to a flock of similarly prestigious figures excelling in science, medicine, arts and literature, as well as occupying senior positions in the public service of Britain.
And most notably, perhaps, as ably profiled by Poller, we have the gifted literary giant Aldous, a legally blind visionary who, in addition to skewering the follies and foibles of modern life, also took it upon himself, apparently, to atone for his lofty position of privilege by sending urgent messages into the postmodern future for all of us to unwittingly stumble upon. Some of his warnings are downright spooky in both the humanist gravity of his concerns and the timely clarity of his insights. Such as this one:
Eyeless in Gaza, his brilliant 1936 novel, coincided with a deep embrace of mysticism through his friendship with the trippy Gerald Heard, with everything after that seeming to form a head brew of spirituality and satire bubbling below the surface of virtually all his thinking and writing. And his return to societal, political and spiritual issues in Brave New World Re-Visited, in 1958 contains some of his most prescient and nearly prophetic insights into where we seemed to have been heading, and indeed, even where we have now, in our time, seemingly fully arrived. Indeed, his thinking almost always feels like a profoundly clairvoyant artist gazing into a crystal ball, staring directly at us in fact, as per his exceptional notions of the cheapening of our consciousness itself under the weight of modern technology. Poller documents Huxley’s struggles with being Huxley admirably, at times making it feel that he somehow suffered from a kind of PTSD from being born into intellectual royalty, having to cope with the shadow of patriarch Thomas Huxley, a famed zoologist aligned with Darwin, his grandson Julian, an evolutionary biologist and first director of UNESCO, and the Nobel Laureate physicist Andrew Huxley, in addition to a flock of similarly prestigious figures excelling in science, medicine, arts and literature, as well as occupying senior positions in the public service of Britain.
And most notably, perhaps, as ably profiled by Poller, we have the gifted literary giant Aldous, a legally blind visionary who, in addition to skewering the follies and foibles of modern life, also took it upon himself, apparently, to atone for his lofty position of privilege by sending urgent messages into the postmodern future for all of us to unwittingly stumble upon. Some of his warnings are downright spooky in both the humanist gravity of his concerns and the timely clarity of his insights. Such as this one:
Of all the various poisons which modern civilization, by a process of auto-intoxication, brews quietly up within its own bowels, few, it seems to me, are more deadly than the horrors of modern pleasures which arise from the fact that every kind of organized distraction tends to become progressively more and more imbecile. Countless audiences soak passively in the tepid bath of nonsense. Self-poisoned in this fashion, civilization looks as though it might easily decline into a kind of premature senility. If nothing but the grossest stimulants of an ever-increasing violence and crudity can move it, the democracy of the future will likely sicken of a chronic and mortal boredom, just as ancient Rome did.
Feels like maybe that was written yesterday? Huxley wrote it in 1923. One gets the feeling that his exotic soulmate Huysmans would have been proud, and they may even have enjoyed hanging out together, drinking a glass of angst on the rocks, and discussing what was wrong with the world.
– Donald Brackett is a Vancouver-based popular culture journalist and curator who writes about music, art and films. He has been the Executive Director of both the Professional Art Dealers Association of Canada and The Ontario Association of Art Galleries. He is the author of the recent book Back to Black: Amy Winehouse’s Only Masterpiece (Backbeat Books, 2016). In addition to numerous essays, articles and radio broadcasts, he is also the author of two books on creative collaboration in pop music: Fleetwood Mac: 40 Years of Creative Chaos, 2007, and Dark Mirror: The Pathology of the Singer-Songwriter, 2008, as well as the biographies Long Slow Train: The Soul Music of Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings, 2018, and Tumult!: The Incredible Life and Music of Tina Turner, 2020, and a book on the life and art of the enigmatic Yoko Ono, Yoko Ono: An Artful Life, released in April 2022. His latest work is a book on family relative Charles Brackett's films made with his partner Billy Wilder, Double Solitaire: The Films of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, published in January 2024.
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