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Aldous Leonard Huxley |
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Tall, witty, charismatic, conspicuously handsome, a polymath, Aldous Huxley was an intellectual lighthouse for over forty years. He wrote poetry; drama; screenplays; journalism; biography; social, scientific, and intellectual history; he was a distinguished essayist, but above all else, he was a novelist. Judged early by critics and by a large popular audience as an original lamp of modern fiction, Huxley's work is now best understood as a mirror that creatively distorts and reshapes two lines of the narrative tradition. The dominant mode since Gustave Flaubert and Henry James has been the novel of selection, the novel that strives toward unity of effects, balance of parts, and realistic probability of story and its narration. Huxley's accomplishment does not lie in this line. Instead, his achievement has two sources: one in what Mikhail Bakhtin has called the "carnivalesque novel" and the other in what Sheldon Sacks has deemed the "apologue."
According to Bakhtin, carnivalesque narratives, which include Petronius's Satyricon, François Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel (1534), and Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote (1615), emphasize inclusion rather than selection.
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