Andrew's Wiki
Crome Yellow

Themes

• Education
  • Makes you narrow-minded
  • Kills creativity
  • Makes experience second-hand
• History
  • Comforting alternative to Real Living
  • Distance makes “life” bearable
• Unknowability of people
  • People are opaque
  • Discovery of Jenny’s red notebook of caricatures: shows that people can know the worst of other people, but for Denis it is merely the knowledge that other people have living lives, not a real access to meaningful human as preliminary to contact or experience
  • To even try to get to know people is tiresome (Henry)
  • People are in “parallel straight lines” 18: so I guess the only human contact seems to be critique
• Stalemate
  • The plot is a stalemate: real contact with maternal Mary disables desired contact with Anne; no real change occurs b/c Denis goes right back to his weak lack of action and decision; coming and going of people to and from Crome doesn’t materially change the atmosphere or Denis’ mood
  • Critique is difficult b/c Huxley critiques both sides of the extreme: Denis’ Romantic/Symbolist/Decadent warblings are nearly as stupid and vacuous as the boorish Mr. Barbecue-Smith’s empty platitudes; laughs at the prudery of the Bodihams yet also at Mary’s self-conscious, dutiful Freudian flashlight into her unconscious
• Body/mind
  • The whole book shows people putting mind over body: Priscilla turning back from her passion of gambling to the occult world of the astral body and hysterically claiming that she’s still happy; Denis’ wordplay masking his experience and covering up what he would rather say (“I need you”), mooning about in his bittersweet contemplation; Mary’s intellectualizing of her sexual desire by making it a rational conquest of “repression”
• Anticlimax: this is the dominant stylistic pattern
  • 5 no one is home so Denis can’t surprise anyone, 10 Priscilla’s commentary on her occult conversion ends in talking about the locals bathing co-ed in their pool, 7/15 Denis never gets to tell his amusing stories abut London; 25 the beauty of the farm ends up in an image of the pig having 14 piglets who are greedy (forcing out the runt) and only about gross animal pleasure (the sire being poked at by Denis’ stick) so we see cruelty not pastoral vision of wonder in the farm, 60 history of Crome’s architecture is really about the marvel of privies (and Henry Wimbush’s reflection on the sad transience of human glory is thus made absurd b/c who would care about toilets? nostalgia thus stupid), 68 Mary can’t get Gombauld to have sex with her, 70 Henry’s real contribution in his History of Crome which is indeed finished is some history about the three-pronged fork, 71 the family is placid and unadventurous (unlike say Golden Bowl family) and makes listeners yawn and the sire of the family home was a runt himself (himself too small), 103 Denis can’t pick up the injured Anne and take her heroically back to civilization, 103-4 Denis is surprised that everyone in the parlor is still doing the same thing even though his life had appeared to have taken a momentous turn (cf Musee des Beaux Arts), Sir Ferdinando dies trying to celebrate Napoleon’s defeat 112, Mary and Denis talk past each other when they lament impossibility of knowing or relating to people 151
  • Why? Plot won’t get you a story: we have a plot beginning at the very end of the book: Mary’s plot to get Denis out of his predicament; but it ironically turns out to END the book, to END his experience. Another way Huxley refuses to let “reaction” be the solution to anything.
• Desire
  • Always frustrated: Denis notes that he has to have a scientific or philosophic justification for pleasure (women, drinking, dancing), knows that he gets everything mediated 22 but his preaching about people who know the world intellectually is quite hypocritical: “You have a bad habit of quoting,” Anne tells him
  • Mary messes it up by trying to seduce Gombauld to get rid of her repression and then getting mixed up in a romantic affair with the womanizing Ivor
• Occult
  • Priscilla: we see that it’s just an escape from her gambling mania, and it can’t mask her unhappiness even though she pretends to be happy now
• Art
  • Denis rejects the notion that art is a way to bypass chaos and get to the eternal 22: he realizes that’s just an excuse for something he WANTS to do
  • Carminative: Denis’ lovely word that he creates a mythology about but turns out to be anti-spasmodic (anti-flatulence) medicine, not something about the warm fuzzy glow of art or pleasure or wine
    • But even his story, telling Scogan about it, is long-winded and more about his love affair with his illusion rather than any new truth that he found when he learned the truth
  • Anne’s story about the painter in Paris who has given up on the third dimension and is about to reject the second: ridicules some artists but not all art because Gombauld himself is creating an alternative to the Cubism he left behind (although it is just a pastiche of the past: of Romantic psychologism, of classicist trompe l’oeil)
    • It’s all potential, not here yet
  • This book is an example of modernism pausing on the threshold of new art but really only making a devastating critique of popular or dominant trends in current or recently past art
  • This is the book Scogan said Denis would write (the Kunstlerroman about the sensitive young boy who isn’t too good at sports but turns out writing a wonderful novel by the end) with all of the plot points and crises (of love, of art, of philosophy) but all end in ANTICLIMAXES
    • It could be an anti-example in my history of books about the transformative power of leisure spaces: where Huxley even puts the pincers on this tradition
  • Meanwhile, Scogan (who believes that you cannot be happy if you are sympathetic) uses for a pretext a shelf of fake books in the library to explain that the perfect Modern Novel (its forerunner, the fake Tales of Knockespotch) is not in existence yet, like Excalibur, waiting for the right artist to take it off the fake shelf: fabulous, extraordinary, adventure yet with lots of erudition and intelligence
    • People like Denis are still writing silly novels about people in Chelsea or Bloomsbury being polite to one another in middle-class homes
    • He says the the masterpieces of the past just convince you that you can’t find meaning in history after all
  • Mr. Barbecue-Smith’s books like Pipe-lines to the Infinite are empty platitudes that he writes by turning off his conscious thoughts, by voluntarily shutting off all conscious powers and writing volubly: thousands of words per hour
• History
  • Henry Wimbush is our historian, our antiquarian, but for what reason? it turns out because he hates interacting with people and would rather read about a party two hundred years ago than attend one today; our nostalgia, our mourning for the past, is thus made impossible, for this man laments the passing away of a time when privies were heroic!
• Change
  • You can’t really change
  • Scogan on holidays: they are for you to try to escape yourself, but you never can (cf his own past trying to get into religion or aesthetics which fail b/c he’s devoid of emotion)
  • The only “Complete Transformation” is the towering orange wig Priscilla wears
• Fascism
  • The ever-critical Scogan spouts out the stuff that will make Brave New World: babies in bottles, rating humanity according to “grades” that determine your occupation in life and will have no place for people like Denis (he’s not enthusiastic enough, rational enough, or blind enough)
  • Wants to make all of the irrational “Men of Faith” servants of a rational intellectual order
  • We’re not supposed to admire Scogan: he “chuckled maliciously” (141) and is “taking revenge” on the people who can actually feel
  • Scogan’s art is the same way: he likes “Cubismus” (a Germanization that therefore allies Cubism with philosophizing) b/c it is akin to cold rationalization and far from the Nature that he says is too complex and incomprehensible, so he doesn’t like it
    • Philosophy and religion are “but spiritual Tubes” (the London transport!) that carve a narrow tunnel through the incomprehensible: RATHER THAN opening up the incomprehensible

WE ONLY GET CRITIQUE HERE. THERE ARE NO SOLUTIONS, ONLY WARNINGS, ESPECIALLY WARNINGS ABOUT CRITIQUE.
And yet, Huxley knows you have to provide more than critique, for the warning is Scogan, who gives nothing but critique and is rather a Fascist.
HUXLEY IS STUCK FAST HERE.

• Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow
  • The house: see my notes about how a house is diff from other types of leisure space
  • A hilarious book, but hilarious in the sense that it cuts everything down, just like Eysteinnson and Calinescu say modernism has to do: to keep turning on itself to avoid the contradiction of becoming an autonomous or novel “tradition”
    • Cruel, killing everything: its evisceration of Ottoline Morrell as a hostess (just trying to fill the emptiness of her life since she could no longer gamble, turning to spirituality to fill that void: rather than what you’d normally hear, where the loss of religion would lead to vices like gambling); the parody of history to kill the aura around the old house (a history of midgets, women who pretend to eat daintily so idealistic but really pig out in the back room), of course art (not only critiques the writer of bland inspiration, but also our hero Denis the budding writer as having a silly sentimental style), etc
    • Education makes you narrow and kills your creativity; history is used to keep present life at a comfortable distance
    • Never really contact people: his romance for Anne of course will fall apart; Discovery of Jenny�s red notebook of caricatures: shows that people can know the worst of other people, but for Denis it is merely the knowledge that other people have living lives, not a real access to meaningful human as preliminary to contact or experience; People are in �parallel straight lines� 18: so I guess the only human contact seems to be critique
  • It’s a stalemate: The plot is a stalemate: real contact with maternal Mary disables desired contact with Anne; no real change occurs b/c Denis goes right back to his weak lack of action and decision; coming and going of people to and from Crome doesn�t materially change the atmosphere or Denis� mood
    • Mary tries to intellectualize her sex instinct and colonize her own repressions
    • Critique is difficult b/c Huxley critiques both sides of the extreme: Denis� Romantic/Symbolist/Decadent warblings are nearly as stupid and vacuous as the boorish Mr. Barbecue-Smith�s empty platitudes; laughs at the prudery of the Bodihams yet also at Mary�s self-conscious, dutiful Freudian flashlight into her unconscious
    • Even critique is made uncomfortable, impossible, temporary
  • Plot is a series of anti-climaxes
    • 5 no one is home so Denis can�t surprise anyone
    • 10 Priscilla�s commentary on her occult conversion ends in talking about the locals bathing co-ed in their pool,
    • 7/15 Denis never gets to tell his amusing stories abut London
    • 25 the beauty of the farm ends up in an image of the pig having 14 piglets who are greedy (forcing out the runt) and only about gross animal pleasure (the sire being poked at by Denis� stick) so we see cruelty not pastoral vision of wonder in the farm
    • 60 history of Crome�s architecture is really about the marvel of privies (and Henry Wimbush�s reflection on the sad transience of human glory is thus made absurd b/c who would care about toilets? nostalgia thus stupid)
    • 68 Mary can�t get Gombauld to have sex with her
    • 70 Henry�s real contribution in his History of Crome which is indeed finished is some history about the three-pronged fork
    • 71 the family is placid and unadventurous (unlike say Golden Bowl family) and makes listeners yawn and the sire of the family home was a runt himself (himself too small)
    • 103 Denis can�t pick up the injured Anne and take her heroically back to civilization
    • 103-4 Denis is surprised that everyone in the parlor is still doing the same thing even though his life had appeared to have taken a momentous turn (cf Musee des Beaux Arts)
    • Sir Ferdinando dies trying to celebrate Napoleon�s defeat 112
    • Mary and Denis talk past each other when they lament impossibility of knowing or relating to people 151
      • WHY? Plot won�t get you a story: we have a plot beginning at the very end of the book: Mary�s plot to get Denis out of his predicament; but it ironically turns out to END the book, to END his experience. Another way Huxley refuses to let �reaction� be the solution to anything.
  • Even Dennis tries to intellectualize his pleasures, such as Denis rejects the notion that art is a way to bypass chaos and get to the eternal 22: he realizes that�s just an excuse for something he WANTS to do
    • Carminative: Denis� lovely word that he creates a mythology about but turns out to be anti-spasmodic (anti-flatulence) medicine, not something about the warm fuzzy glow of art or pleasure or wine
  • Is there possibility? Yes: Anne�s story about the painter in Paris who has given up on the third dimension and is about to reject the second: ridicules some artists but not all art because Gombauld himself is creating an alternative to the Cubism he left behind (although it is just a pastiche of the past: of Romantic psychologism, of classicist trompe l�oeil)
    • but he can only do it if Mary won’t bother him, if Anne won’t bother him (that is if people will stop enact their own fantasies on him b/c he is the convenient artist)
    • Meanwhile, Scogan (who believes that you cannot be happy if you are sympathetic) uses for a pretext a shelf of fake books in the library to explain that the perfect Modern Novel (its forerunner, the fake Tales of Knockespotch) is not in existence yet, like Excalibur, waiting for the right artist to take it off the fake shelf: fabulous, extraordinary, adventure yet with lots of erudition and intelligence
• People like Denis are still writing silly novels about people in Chelsea or Bloomsbury being polite to one another in middle-class homes
  • This book is an example of modernism pausing on the threshold of new art but really only making a devastating critique of popular or dominant trends in current or recently past art
  • This is the book Scogan said Denis would write (the Kunstlerroman about the sensitive young boy who isn�t too good at sports but turns out writing a wonderful novel by the end) with all of the plot points and crises (of love, of art, of philosophy) but all end in ANTICLIMAXES
  • Where does it come in for leisure space?
    • It could be an anti-example in my history of books about the transformative power of leisure spaces: where Huxley even puts the pincers on this tradition
  • Hilarious: Mr. Barbecue-Smith�s books like Pipe-lines to the Infinite are empty platitudes that he writes by turning off his conscious thoughts, by voluntarily shutting off all conscious powers and writing volubly: thousands of words per hour
    • Harry Wimbush only uses history to avoid socializing with people who are visiting!
  • Scogan on holidays: they are for you to try to escape yourself, but you never can (cf his own past trying to get into religion or aesthetics which fail b/c he�s devoid of emotion)
    • Yet are they really impossible? I’d say no. Huxley leaves a little opportunity: he did have a flash of rapport with Mary, and the art is getting better.
    • To some extent, the leisure space is ridiculed as a place for transformation: of sex, of history, of quiet spaces, of real relations with people, of a mixing of different “types” of people, of getting in touch with nature
      • Compare to Cold Comfort Farm, where Gibbons ridicules the popular neo-pastoral novels inspired by Hardy, where Flora goes and uses her scientific rationality and her commodities to go fix the backwards folks: the attitude of a certain strain of modernism is anti-utopian
      • No wonder he will write Brave New World in a few years
    • But we could read this book as doing the negation that Eysteinnson and Calinescu say is necessary for the art to stay coherent; where Berman says that it’s all about creative destruction
      • This hardly helps Ottoline Morrell’s memory, but the book is here, and he did visit her and make use of her resources.