This is hardly topical or timely. Nevertheless:
A while back (maybe 4 years?) I read Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza, and I must confess to having been bored out of my mind. My boredom did not arise out of a lack of appreciation for Huxley or from a lack of familiarity with his ideas/philosophy, as I voraciously devoured Chrome Yellow, Ape and Essence, Time Must Have a Stop, Brave New World, and Island. I simply found the story and the writing style lackluster. That being said, I’d like to look at a couple elements of the book that I consider worthy of discussion.
Part of the problem I had with the book might have been that the main character’s name is Anthony Beavis. The 6th-grader in me couldn’t stop wondering when Butthead would show up. The remainder of the problem is that, although the book contains moments of truly deep philosophical contemplation, it’s bogged down with passages like this:
The carriage rattled away down the drive; and for a hundred yards or more Anthony ran beside it, shouting “Good-bye” and waving his handkerchief with a vehemence that Mr. Beavis took as the sign of a correspondingly immense regret to see him go. In fact, however, it was just a manifestation of overflowing energy and high spirits. Circumstances had filled him, body and mind, with the deep joy of being happily alive. This joy required physical expression, and his father’s departure gave him an excuse for running and waving his arms. Mr. Beavis was extremely touched. But if only, he went on sadly to think, if only there were some way of canalizing this love, and his own for the boy, so that it might irrigate the aridities of their daily intercourse!
Apparent out-of-context pederasty aside, the third-person omniscient perspective becomes a weapon against the reader in Huxley’s hands. What was intended to be interesting (the incongruence between two characters’ perceptions of the same situation) turns into a hammer of boredom–nay, the very wet noodle of my own apathy towards the story! Huxley’s characterizations always tend towards the thoughtful rather than the active, but in this case it’s just too much. At least in Brave New World we had the “savage” and the objectionable Beta-Plus love interest, Lenina. In Eyeless, we get an upper-middle class boy and his quest for meaning through a few tacked-on events (a suicide, a trip to South America, some sex). You get the feeling that it’s all an excuse for Huxley to rant about things he didn’t get a chance to cover in his essays.
But some of those essay-like segments can be interesting. Take this passage between Anthony Beavis (:muffle:) and Mark Staithes, someone who used to bully him. Anthony begins:
“… Drama begins where there’s freedom of choice. And freedom of choice begins when social or psychological conditions are exceptional. That’s why the inhabitants of imaginative literature have always been recruited fromt he pages of Who’s Who.”
“But do you really think that people with money or power are free?”
“Freer than the poor, at any rate. Less completely conditioned by matter and other people’s wills.”
Mark shook his head. “You don’t know my father,” he said. “Or my disgusting brothers.”
…
He described the Staithes who was now a Knight Commander of St. Michael and St. George and a Permanent Under-Secretary. Pleased as Punch with it all, and serenely conscious of his own extraordinary merits, adoring himself for being such a great man.
“As though there were any real difficulty in getting where he ’s got! Anything in the least creditable about that kind of piddling little conquest!” Mark made a flayed grimace of contemptuous disgust. “He thinks he’s a marvel.”
[Mark goes on to describe his brothers--bullying people in India, and another working in the stock exchange who prided himself as an amorist.]
“And you call them free,” Mark concluded. “But how can a social climber be free? He’s tied to his ladder.”
“But social ladders,” Anthony objected, “become broader as they rise. At the bottom, you can only just get your foot onto them. At the top the rungs are twenty yards across.”
“Well, perhaps it’s a wider perch than the bank clerk’s,” Mark admitted. “But not wide enough for me. And not high enough; above all, not clean enough.”
These parts of the book are interesting simply because they make us think about our own aspirations, and what might motivate them. Would we, as Mark’s family has, complacently allow ourselves to be carried forward on a wave of wealth, contacts, and nepotism because it is pleasurable? (Later, Mark calls this type of freedom the ‘license to be a pig.’) Is it objectionable to use the resources that are available to you? More importantly, and the question driving this debate, is the problem of free will. How can we identify and extricate ourselves from social determinism long enough to consider ourselves truly free? Is true freedom even possible while living within a social system and availing ourselves of its resources? The United States of America would like us to think so, but freedom cannot be granted by society–a society can merely remove restrictions, and a lack of restriction is not sufficient to consider oneself free.
Food for thought. As with any discussion of philosophy, we must end it with:
“Oh well.”
