| Eyeless
in Gaza |
| Aldous Huxley |
| Novel 1936 |
|
approx.
143,000 words,
409 pages
@ 350 words/page
|
First lines:
The snapshot had become almost as dim as memories. This young
woman who had stood in a garden at the turn of the century was
like a ghost at a cockcrow. His mother, Anthony Beavis recognized. |
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Favourite
lines:
The thing that had made life worth living all these months was
precisely the pain of his bereavement.
Life's so
ordinary that literature has to deal with the exceptional....
That's why the inhabitants of imaginative literature have always
been recruited from the pages of Who's Who.
"(Football
is) the greatest English contribution to civilization.... Much
more important than Parliamentary government, or steam engines, or
Newton's Principia. More important really than English poetry.
Poetry can never be a substitute for war and murder. Whereas games
can be. A complete and genuine substitute."
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Into the mystic
Why critics think Eyeless in Gaza is Huxley's greatest novel:
• It's very long.
• It's his most difficult novel, using a fractured timeline, so we
follow several narratives that occur during Anthony Beavis' life almost simultaneously and we have to piece
together the chronology and who the recurring characters are.
• It's supposed to be Huxley's most autobiographical novel, tracing his
own development from precocious, womanizing intellectual to mystic.
• It makes really big statements about life, reality, politics,
social progress, sex...everything.
Why I don't agree Eyeless in Gaza is Huxley's greatest novel:
• It's too long. We really don't need so much detail about
his youth, schoolboy intrigues and such, nor all the subplots concerning
characters we don't care about.
• It's too difficult. Does the time-switching really help
the reader get Huxley's ideas or does it hinder us? Well, it helps in
that at least several strands of narrative—for example, one ending in
1914 with the tragic end of Beavis's childhood friend Brian, and the
other involving Beavis and his friend Mark joining an insurrection in
Mexico in 1934—reach climaxes at about the same time for the reader.
This increases the impact of the stories. But couldn't this have been accomplished through revelations
and occasional flashbacks rather than by making the entire novel a
puzzle to sort out? I was constantly flipping back and
forth, trying to remember who the characters were (sometimes two
generations of them) and what relationships they held at the various
time periods.
• I don't mind the really big statements about life and the
universe. In fact, I like them in a novel. But the ideas in Eyeless
seem particularly outdated. Huxley's characters, as usual, are in the
thick of intellectual conflict over the great artistic and social
movements of the day. But they are largely dilettantes—affluent and
highly cultured folks who play at having an interest in the concerns of
the masses but always return to their sardonic homes above the fray.
Huxley, I'm sure, is sincere but it is hardly surprising his
protagonist comes to the conclusion (signalled from the beginning of Eyeless
and in the previous novel, Brave New World) that social progress is
not possible without personal salvation first. His resulting mysticism
and pacifism, or Buddhism, was the answer of a despairing intellectual
to the great social upheavals of the 1930s—economic collapse, social
revolutions and the threat of world war—but were soon made to seem
irrelevant in the light of the need to confront Fascism and the
Holocaust. Later in the counter-cultural 1960s his ideas regained
currency but, even then, his characters' struggles seemed somewhat
outdated.
Yet there are
elements of Eyeless in Gaza that hold up. Many of the episodes
among the characters are interesting and entertaining, showing the same
psychological insight and satirical humour Huxley displayed in Antic
Hay and Point Counter Point. The involving sections on
Anthony and Mark in Mexico near the end prove Huxley could have been a
straight-ahead storyteller.
And the theme of
bravery—Beavis's yielding to peer pressure in childhood and his moral
cowardice as an adult contrasting to his ultimately achieved courage in
defence of his pacifist convictions—is interesting and worthy. The
novel's title by the way comes from the Biblical story of Samson and
Delilah in which the strongman, despite being blinded and enslaved,
pulls down the Philistine temple when his hair grows back in.
— Eric
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