Counterpoint of life

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The novel Counterpoint of Life (in the English original Point Counter Point ) was by Aldous Huxley in the publishing house Chatto and Windus Ltd. First published in London in 1928.

In a literary way, Huxley depicts the social conditions in England at the end of the 1920s. Using the musical principle, counterpoint , different characters are depicted in parallel and in relation to one another, and their developments are discussed. Some of these protagonists are verifiably identifiable with personalities from Huxley's circle of acquaintances and the character in the novel by Philip Quarles is depicted as a critical self-portrait of the author. Huxley represents various ideas and views with the persons shown and explains them starting from the 22nd chapter with explanations from Philip Quarles' booklet : “A novel of ideas. The character of each figure must be indicated as far as possible by the ideas of which it is the mouthpiece. "

Main character novel plot

John Bidlake is an aged, former painter who draws on his celebrity (painting) from better days and continues to be the talk of the town with his scandalous love affairs. His persistent ailment leads to a diagnosis: terminal cancer.

Walter Bidlake , John's son, a feeble young journalist who lives with a married woman named Marjorie Carling, who is expecting a child from him. In the course of the plot he becomes the plaything and lover of Lucy Tantamount , daughter from a wealthy family, who appears independent and sexually aggressive.

Philip Quarles , writer, married to the daughter John Bidlakes Elinor, who gradually falls in love with the fascist "Freemannenführer" Everard Webley during the course of the plot , but who is later murdered. Webley's opponent Illidge Babbage advocates the ideas of the " wealthy haters " and feels marginalized by the leading social upper class, but is not the "communist" described by the figure of the work-shy cynic Maurice Spandrell (Chapter 12). Spandrell and Illigde murder Everard Webley and only achieve that his fascist movement is strengthened in social perception, while Elinor sees the death of their son from meningitis as a 'just' punishment of fate because of their susceptibility to Everad Webley's seductive skills.

The journalist Denis Burlap , described as a “mixture (...) of a cinema villain and Saint Anthony of Padua by a baroque painter, of a misplaying Lothario and an ecstatic prayer brother (...)." (Chapter 5), is the biting one Caricature of the publisher and writer John Middleton Murry (according to the afterword by Reinhard Lehmann in the edition shown below).

With the figure of the scientist Edward Tantamount , Huxley parodies the physiologist John Scott Haldane , with whose family Huxley lived for a while.

German translation

Counterpoint of life translated from English by Herberth E. Herlitschka and published in 1930 by Insel-Verlag Anton Kippenberg, Leipzig on 645 pages.

review

In addition to his other works, Counterpoint of Life is also counted among the modern classics of English literature. This work is compared with time must end . Hans-Dieter Gelfert ranks the novel next to Chrome Yellow ( Chrome-Gelb , 1921), Antic Hay ( Narrenreigen , 1923) "also among the most important cultural and time-critical novels of the years after the First World War ". At the time of its publication, the novel was received extremely positively in the German-speaking area. In 1930 Franz Blei highlighted the following works as "the four great novels" in the literary section of the Berlin magazine Neue Revue : Robert Musil's Man without Qualities , Hermann Broch's Die Schlafwandler , John Cowper Powys ' Wolf Solent and, of course, counterpoint of life . Despite a number of restrictions, Hermann Broch himself had great respect for the work of his fellow writer .

, The nesting of individual stories in total offense for a veritable matryoshka principle can Huxley Quarrel even with the popular UK Quaker Oats associate , those packs of oatmeal that make it the inevitable porridge making: "But why draw the line at one novelist inside your novel? Why not a second inside his? And a third inside the novel of the second? And so on to infinity, like those advertisments of Quakter Oats where there's a Quaker holding a box of oats, on which is a pictur of another Quaker holding another box of oats, on which etc. etc “.

The “self-thematization of the novel” by the novelist in the story was particularly emphasized, since it “brought up the problem of passivity and the relationship to norms”.

reception

Political allusions

Interpretations saw parallels to Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists in the literary figure Everard Webley . At the time the novel was written, however, Mosley was still part of the Labor Party , of which he remained a member until 1931. The BUF was only founded in 1932. So Huxley must have used another source of inspiration from the environment of the then active British Fascists . Even in the early 1980s, it was still accepted as a fact in English manuals. In the new edition of Point Counter Point from 1996, Mosley's son, Nicolas Mosley , as an author and politician, discussed these interpretive approaches in the foreword of the novel.

filming

The novel was adapted from the BBC in 1968 by Simon Raven starring Lyndon Brook ( Philip Quarles ) and Tristram Jellinek ( Walter Bidlake ) as a five-part miniseries . Four years later, the Public Broadcasting Service broadcast it again.

literature

  • Philippe Birgy: Point Counterpoint: Le Journal de Philip Quarles et la théorie du modernisme en littérature. In: Etudes Britannique Contemporaines, 11 (June 1997), pp. 37-45.
  • Carla Roes: The Counterpoint of Satire: Art and Criticism in Aldous Huxley's Early Novels . Phil. Dissertation, Jena 1997.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht : Terminology of musical composition . Steiner, Stuttgart 1995, p. 86.
  2. ↑ Bill Bryson : A Brief History of Almost Everything , Goldmann-Verlag, 2005, ISBN 3-442-46071-9 , Chapter 16, Page 307
  3. ↑ Hans-Dieter Gelfert: Small history of the English literature . Beck, Munich 2005, p. 314.
  4. ^ Theo Schumacher: Aldous Huxley: with self-testimonies and picture documents . Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg, 1987, p. 43.
  5. ↑ Birgit Nübel : Robert Musil: Essayism as self-reflection of modernity . de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2003, p. 380.
  6. ↑ January Aler, Jattie Enklaar (ed.): Hermann Broch, 1886-1986 . Rodopi, Amsterdam 1987, p. 7.
  7. ↑ Eckart Goebel, Martin von Koppenfels: Die Endlichkeit der Literatur . Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2002, p. 93.
  8. ↑ Cf. Jochen Vogt: Aspects of narrative prose: an introduction to narrative technique and romance theory . Fink, Paderborn 2008, p. 243.
  9. ↑ Aldous Huxley: Point Count Poin . Normal, Ill. 1996, p. 294.
  10. ↑ Valentin Mandelkow: The trial of the 'ennui' in French literature and literary criticism . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1999, p. 312.
  11. ↑ Cf. Christoph Bode: Intellectualism and alienation: the image of the intellectual in Aldous Huxley's early novels . Bouvier Verlag H. Grundmann, Bonn 1979.
  12. ↑ Harry Blamires: A Guide to twentieth century literature in English . Methuen, London 1983, p. 127.
  13. ^ Aldous Huxley: Point counter point . Dalkey Archive Press, Normal, Ill. 1996.