What. The bloody hell. Is this book? I thought that because it made a little cameo in A Single Man it would be good. That whole class lecture scene is incredibly intriguing. Amazing! But noooo. This book couldn't hold my attention for five minutes. I'd read twenty pages and be like... "What the hell is this?" Not because it was terribly difficult or anything--it just wasn't interesting or amazing. I mean, it pretty much was exactly about and representing what Isherwood had the students and George say (this may help). It was helpful to read A Single Man first, actually, despite the fact that it gave me far too high expectations... I mean, it was like a pseudo-sparknotes deal.
So. What the book is actually about--I trust you've peeked at the post linked above, so I need not explain what the title is referring to--though I think Huxley got his mythology confused. Endymion, if I remember my mythology, was a sheepherder who was given immortality--but he was eternally sleeping. This preserved his youth... On the other hand, there is another more unfortunate mortal who had won a goddess's affections. His loving goddess, unfortunately, forgot to ask Zeus to grant her beloved eternal youth along with his eternal life. So--the man lived forever, but withered and eventually turned into a cricket. There's a subplot--which becomes the main plot--involving a diary of a man who lived in the seventeen-hundreds. The 'mainest' character of the book is a millionaire named Stoyte. He is terrified of dying and has his personal physician working on the secret to immortality (apparently). So yes, the doctor has a man's journal--an earl's, actually--who basically feared the same thing. Noticing that the carps in the estate's pond are supposedly over one hundred years old, he decides to start eating the guts of the oldest carp to see what it will do for him. What it does for him, is make him very, very... hmm... Long lived and fertile. At the very end of the book, they find this man--he's holed up and locked away in a basement because he's devolved. (He also gave a bit of the mixture to a housekeeper who was ill, and she too is locked away with him.) So--like the cricket--he was given eternity but he withered on it--to something far more disgusting and pathetic than a cricket. He's filthy, only wearing a shirt--a group consisting of Stoyte, the doctor, and a young woman who I will get to later watch him, stunned, for a few minutes... In that time he and the woman chatter to each other like apes. The man has blemishes and sores on him from living in such poor conditions (which aren't entirely his fault, admittedly...) But what is repulsive is that he just pees. Right where he's sitting. Doesn't even get up, doesn't get up right away after he's sitting--and beyond being gross, it's disturbing. The woman is just kind of there (the ex-Earl slaps her once or twice), but the man still has habits that he did so often while coherent that he just kind of does them. He is wearing a ribbon and a medal, and he gets up and polishes them while humming a particular favourite tune of his--and every time he and his ex-housekeeper chatter at each other, their noises are described as on the verge of being understandable, echoes of coherence--and so on. So yes, he withered like the cricket, but in a far worse way.
And--I realize I've been spoiling the ends in the very beginning of these posts quite often as of late--but now I feel that I absolutely have to tell you Stoyte's reaction to this gruesome spectacle. Stoyte appears to be grossed out for a moment, but he can't seem to quite understand the situation: "Mr. Stoyte broke his silence. 'How long do you figure it would take before a person went like that?' he said in a slow hesitating voice. 'I mean, it wouldn't happen at once... there'd be a long time while a person... well, you know; while he wouldn't change any. And once you get over the first shock--well, they look like they were having a pretty good time. I mean in their own way, of course. Don't you think so...?' he insisted" (356). The doctor just laughs at how pathetic he is. Actually, the more I think about it, the more that this Doctor seems almost like a god figure of the novel... Beyond everyone's personal hangups and--he just seems a lot more intelligent and more powerful than everybody else. The doctor may even be seen as a devilish figure--he is holding out powerful temptations (he seduces the young woman who saw the devolved people, and makes her feel pleasure during sex, eek), and has the key to immortality in his palms--and he's messing with everybody with utter glee. He likes watching everybody floundering for nothing more than his own amusement.
So, the story starts out when a middleaged man named Jeremy goes to America to do some bookkeeping for Mr Stoyte. From here we meet the doctor, Obispo, Pete (O's assistant, who falls for Virginia), Virginia, Stoyte's mistress, Stoyte himself, and a few others.
My first note has to do with Jeremy--seven pages in he writes a letter to his mother, "Oscar Wilde's old friend, the witty and cultured Mrs. Pordage" (7). Of course I would mark that--as for the name, she is entirely fictional. I suppose that shouldn't be a surprise, but you never know.
I also want to mention that this is Jeremy's first time in the country--and he's in California first! He's hit with a barrage of neon marketing and superficiality, the likes of which he's never seen before. He's very overwhelmed, he starts trying out lingo and promising himself he'll try the things advertised, like certain types of burgers or milkshakes. It's overwhelming and strange, because he's never seen this sort of mass advertising and everything. It all seems as it is: absurd, alien, disgusting, rotten, pointless, a mockery--because it's being looked at by a foreigner (he is not necessarily seeing things as rotten or disgusting, but through his eyes, things look that way--like the neon-lit cemetery. He's in awe of it and I was disgusted)--it's essentially the same way Thompson and his Attorney see Las Vegas in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, except without the lizards and bats and overwhelming fear--but those few moments when Thompson is sober and disgusted, basically the same. And even when he's tripping, all the lights and signs and flashes and all overwhelm him and seem terrifying in their own right.
Stoyte has a terrible temper--his doctor has warned him that if he gets too riled, he's likely to give himself a second stroke. So: "'God is love,' he said again, and reflected that, if people would only stop being so exasperating, he would never have to lose his temper. 'God is love.' It was all their fault" (37). This cracked me up. I hope I don't need need to point out the humour... Do I?
The grossest thing I learned from the book was, unsurprisingly, explained by Obispo. He talks about theories of prolonging life, and untrue rumours--that sour milk will lengthen your life or what have you. One popular surgery in the days before the first World War it was apparently popular to have sections of your colon removed--that was thought to prolong health, I guess. Huxley is not making this up, I just looked it up. It killed 50% of people who tried it within two years, and even if it didn't, with a quarter of a colon you have to, um, "evacuate" as the doctor puts it, quite often. Yeah, so my point is, ew ew ew, gross gross gross, Jesus why, ew gross, vomitrocious.
As for George of A Single Man talking about what Huxley has cited as the "stupidest text in the Bible"--it is, to remind you, "They hated me without a cause". I guess this disturbs George's students, though Huxley in his own book basically says what George says, except in a more concise manner without examples and not as expansively (though I suppose concise would imply that?). And it's weird to think... A student raises the Holocaust in response to George's agreement with Huxley on this being the stupidest scripture. This book was written in 1939--when the very first Jews were being taken into ghettos and camps.
"For what hope, he asked himself, what faintest glimmer of hope is there for a man who really believes that 'they hated me without a cause' and that he had no part in his own disasters? Obviously, no hope whatever... In some measure they are directly or indirectly responsible. Directly, by the commission of stupid or malicious acts. Indirectly, by the omission to be as intelligent and compassionate as they might be" (107).
Later Huxley adds that the most sensible text of the Bible is "'God is not mocked; as a man sows, so shall he reap'" (256). I agree--and if the God bit makes you uncomfortable, add 'fate' or 'destiny'--or even cutting it out altogether works.
"'As a man sows, so shall he reap. God is not mocked. Not mocked,' he repeated. 'but people simply refuse to believe it. They go on thinking they can cock a snook at the nature of things and get away with it. I've sometimes thought of writing a little treatise, like a cook-book. "One Hundred Ways of Mocking God," I'd call it. And I'd take a hundred examples from history and contemporary life, illustrating what happens when people undertake to do things without paying regard to the nature of reality. And the book would be divided into sections, such as "Mocking God in Agriculture", "Mocking God in Politics", "Mocking God in Education", "Mocking God in Philosophy", "Mocking God in Economics". It would be an instructive little book. But a bit depressing,' Mr. Propter added" (282-283). "'Cock a snook'"?
"'Bad art can't do so much harm as ill-considered political action'" (172). Originally I marked this because again, Huxley mentioned Oscar Wilde, but then I realized that there was a good point--he's playing off of Wilde's "art for art's sake". Even if the art you make is mediocre, it's not as bad as a terrible political move--et cetera.
So far as i know, the earl whose diary is found and read is not based on any real earl. Again, I guess that probably goes without saying, but that's not the point--the point is that the earl 'wrote' a pretty bit of poetry and I was just checking if it was thieved... Anyways, the results, other than one passage, are pretty bad--"'If only the rest were silence!'" (213). Hehe.
The doctor, although he plays as a sort of God character, he is a smug fool too--he's just stupid in different ways--he's one of the sort who would have caused Brave New World. The doctor vaguely mentions several authors--the one he says specifically is Shelley--that he could have fixed, thanks to his modern medicines and therapies. Because many great pieces of art and literature are created out of suffering, I believe what he (Huxley, not the doctor) is essentially saying is that modern amenities can basically end art--beauty--and so on. Which again is exactly what is illustrated in Brave New World. There's a scene where Jonathan asks the man who suppresses all old literature and art if he has any use for old things, and the man says no, and then Jonathan asks even if they are beautiful, and the man says "'Particularly when they're beautiful'". (No source, but I promise that that is the exact line.)
My last note that directly corresponds to a page is the quote attached to the spiel about the silliest/most important quotes from the Bible. My last comment is again on the earl and his immortality secret: raw carp guts. It doesn't specify if it's just one dose or several that keeps up youth indefinitely (which bothers me greatly, the housekeeper lady is recorded to have taken it once when she was ill, but no other records of her taking it are there... Which doesn't really make sense...)
My second note is that a popular Roman condiment/dish was fermented fish paste--the exact recipe for making this... thing is unknown, though apparently historians have sought after the dish for quite some time. My point is that Romans, judging from statues, aged really, really well. And it's been proven that having a diet that's high in fish is about as healthy as you can get--well, it was at one point. Now that all fish are supposedly up to their gills in mercury... So, Huxley has something! We've found the key to immortality! HAHAHAHA--no, that's stupid. The reason why Huxley chose carp is because they live so incredibly long. But yeah, a diet with fish as a staple bis very healthy, but probably won't lengthen your life to two hundred years/turn you into an ape person. That is all, good night.
MLA Citation Information: Huxley, Aldous. After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. Ivan R Dee, Inc: Chicago, 1993.
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