Beschreibung
This psychological reading of Huxley’s oeuvre as a whole traces Huxley’s
self-transformation in his books and aims to do justice to the artist and the
person who was Aldous Huxley. It is safe to regard as basic to his entire work
the unfolding of the conflict we find so clearly delineated in his early short
story “Farcical History of Richard Greenow” ( Limbo, 1920), with
Pearl Bellairs representing the emotional tradition that threatens the synthetic
philosopher. Huxley’s own story is plainly visible even in Limbo and
Crome Yellow (1921), but it is in Antic Hay (1923) that the
pattern of the future assumes a solid foundation. There we encounter in full
force the tensions that follow him throughout his life: on the one hand an
extreme of sensuality and on the other a longing for the “chaste pleasures,”
for a quiet and mystical worid completely different from that in which he
found himself. The question of the relations between body and mind as well
as the mystery of human consciousness haunt him to the very last, but after
his mid-life crisis, depicted in Eyeless in Gaza (1936), a strong faith
in the reality of a spiritual world is obvions. In the end he even manages to
reinstate the body in his scheme of things.
