Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- A Note of Thanks
- The Guest List
- Introduction: A Welcome from the Host
- 1 ‘The dinner was indeed quiet’: Domestic Parties in the Work of Joseph Conrad
- 2 Prufrock, Party-Goer: Tongue-Tied at Tea
- 3 Party Joyce: From the ‘Dead’ to When We ‘Wake’
- 4 ‘Looking at the party with you’: Pivotal Moments in Katherine Mansfield's Party Stories
- 5 Virginia Woolf's Idea of a Party
- 6 Proustian Peristalsis: Parties Before, During and After
- 7 ‘Ezra through the open door’: The Parties of Natalie Barney, Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach as Lesbian Modernist Cultural Production
- 8 ‘Indeed everybody did come’: Parties, Publicity and Intimacy in Gertrude Stein's Plays
- 9 The Interracial Party of Modernist Primitivism and the Black ‘After-Party’
- 10 The Party In Extremis in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love
- 11 Bohemian Retrospects: Ford Madox Ford, Post-War Memory and the Cabaret Theatre Club
- 12 ‘Pleasure too often repeated’: Aldous Huxley's Modernity
- Index
12 - ‘Pleasure too often repeated’: Aldous Huxley's Modernity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- A Note of Thanks
- The Guest List
- Introduction: A Welcome from the Host
- 1 ‘The dinner was indeed quiet’: Domestic Parties in the Work of Joseph Conrad
- 2 Prufrock, Party-Goer: Tongue-Tied at Tea
- 3 Party Joyce: From the ‘Dead’ to When We ‘Wake’
- 4 ‘Looking at the party with you’: Pivotal Moments in Katherine Mansfield's Party Stories
- 5 Virginia Woolf's Idea of a Party
- 6 Proustian Peristalsis: Parties Before, During and After
- 7 ‘Ezra through the open door’: The Parties of Natalie Barney, Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach as Lesbian Modernist Cultural Production
- 8 ‘Indeed everybody did come’: Parties, Publicity and Intimacy in Gertrude Stein's Plays
- 9 The Interracial Party of Modernist Primitivism and the Black ‘After-Party’
- 10 The Party In Extremis in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love
- 11 Bohemian Retrospects: Ford Madox Ford, Post-War Memory and the Cabaret Theatre Club
- 12 ‘Pleasure too often repeated’: Aldous Huxley's Modernity
- Index
Summary
In an essay published in 1923, Aldous Huxley suggested that ‘of all the various poisons which modern civilization, by a process of autointoxication, brews quietly up within its own bowels, few are more deadly […] than that curious and appalling thing that is technically known as “pleasure”.’ By ‘pleasure’, Huxley here clearly meant something other than simple enjoyment. His use of inverted commas around the word and his description of pleasure as ‘curious and appalling’ signal a profound and significant unease, which I will argue can be fully understood only when considered in relation to Huxley's sense of the corruption of ‘pleasure’ by the forces of modernity as he perceived them in the early 1920s.
Huxley goes on to argue in this same essay that pleasure has become something other than the ‘real thing’, has become ‘organized distraction’, and to bemoan the emergence of ‘vast organizations that provide us with ready-made distractions’. Pleasure thus appears to have become for Huxley not simply negative, but something other than itself (not real), and an experience that is both inauthentic and slightly sinister (‘organized’ and ‘ready-made’). Huxley's profound suspicion about the nature of pleasure in the modern world means that an analysis of the structural and thematic role of the party in his fiction offers a particularly rich opportunity for a reconsideration of the broader arguments within his novels about the defining characteristics of modernity.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Modernist Party , pp. 210 - 227Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013