ALDOUS HUXLEY (1894-1963)

Aldous Huxley

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Cet article est extrait de l'ouvrage Larousse « Dictionnaire mondial des littératures ».

Écrivain anglais (Godalming, Surrey, 1894 – Hollywood 1963).

Pratiquement aveugle, il doit interrompre ses études de médecine. L'imagisme le tente (la Défaite de la jeunesse, 1918 ; Leda, 1920), mais ses poèmes souffrent de transparence. Ses premiers romans, Jaune de Crome (1921), Contrepoint (1928), Musique nocturne (1931), dépeignent une intelligentsia britannique troublée par le premier conflit mondial. Dans le Meilleur des mondes (1932), dont l'action se situe en l'an 2500, un État dont la devise est « Communauté, Identité, Stabilité » assure la reproduction sélective de ses citoyens dans des éprouvettes. Les valeurs et les désirs sont remplacés par des pilules, les sentiments sont indécents et seuls les derniers « sauvages » ont lu Shakespeare. Cette contre-utopie brillante et prophétique, signale, derrière la montée de la barbarie, le danger d'une civilisation technicienne parfaitement huilée dont le pouvoir sera psychobiologique. À la Seconde Guerre mondiale Huxley répond par une étude sur le pouvoir (l'Éminence grise, 1941) et sur la possession (les Diables de Loudun, 1952). Il plonge ensuite dans le tourbillon dont naîtra la sous-culture hippie (Île, 1962 ; The Politics of Ecology, 1963 ; Moksha, 1976).

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Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

enc.Britannica

Aldous Huxley was a grandson of the prominent biologist Thomas Henry Huxley and was the third child of the biographer and man of letters Leonard Huxley; his brothers included physiologist Andrew Fielding Huxley and biologist Julian Huxley. He was educated at Eton, during which time he became partially blind because of keratitis. He retained enough eyesight to read with difficulty, and he graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1916. He published his first book in 1916 and worked on the periodical Athenaeum from 1919 to 1921. Thereafter he devoted himself largely to his own writing and spent much of his time in Italy until the late 1930s, when he settled in California.

Huxley established himself as a major author with his first two published novels, Crome Yellow (1921) and Antic Hay (1923); these are witty and malicious satires on the pretensions of the English literary and intellectual coteries of his day. Those Barren Leaves (1925) and Point Counter Point (1928) are works in a similar vein.

Brave New World (1932) marked a turning point in Huxley’s career: like his earlier work, it is a fundamentally satiric novel, but it also vividly expresses Huxley’s distrust of 20th-century trends in both politics and technology. The novel presents a nightmarish vision of a future society in which psychological conditioning forms the basis for a scientifically determined and immutable caste system that, in turn, obliterates the individual and grants all control to the World State. The novel Eyeless in Gaza (1936) continues to shoot barbs at the emptiness and aimlessness experienced in contemporary society, but it also shows Huxley’s growing interest in Hindu philosophy and mysticism as a viable alternative. (Many of his subsequent works reflect this preoccupation, notably The Perennial Philosophy [1946].) In the novel After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939), published soon after he moved to California, Huxley turned his attention to American culture.

Huxley’s most important later works are The Devils of Loudun (1952), a detailed psychological study of a historical incident in which a group of 17th-century French nuns were allegedly the victims of demonic possession, and The Doors of Perception (1954), a book about Huxley’s experiences with the hallucinogenic drug mescaline. His last novel, Island (1962), is a utopian vision of a Pacific Ocean society.

The author’s lifelong preoccupation with the negative and positive impacts of science and technology on 20th-century life, expressed most forcefully in Brave New World but also in one of his last essays, written for Encyclopædia Britannica’s 1963 volume of The Great Ideas Today, about the conquest of space, make him one of the representative writers and intellectuals of that century.

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Romane

Galben crom (1921)

Fân antic (1923)

Frunze uscate (1925)

Punct. Contrapunct (1928)

Minunata lume nouă (1932)

Orb în Gaza (1936)

După multe veri (1939)

Timpul are un sfârșit (1944)

Maimuță și esență (1948)

Geniul și zeița (1955)

Reintoarcere în minunata lume nouă(1958)

Insula (1962)

Povestiri

Limbo (1920)

Surasul Giocondei(1924)

Două sau trei grații și alte povestiri(1926)

Lumânări stinse (1930)

Muzică nocturnă (1931)

Două sau trei Grații|Grace

Micul mexican

Mâinile lui Iacob, o fabulă (sfârșitul deceniului al treilea al secolului XX)

Poezie

Roata de foc (1916)

Iona (1917)

Înfrângerea tinereții (1918)

Leda (1920)

Arabia Infelix (1929)

Cicadele si celelalte poeme (1931)

Literatură de călătorie

Pe drum (1925)

Bufonul lui Pilat (1926)

Dincolo de golful Mexic (1934)

Eseuri

Fă ceea ce vrei (1929)

Măslinul (1936)

Scopuri și mijloace(1937)

Arta de a vedea (1942)

Mâine, mâine, mâine (1952)

Porțile percepției (1954)

Rai și iad (1956)

Brava lume nouă revizitată (1958)

Literatură și știință (1963)

Filozofie

Scopuri și mijloace (1937)

Filozofia perenă (1944)

Biografii

Eminența gri (1941)

Diavolii din Lodun (1952)

Literatură pentru copii

Ciorile din Pearblossom (1967)

Colecții

Text și pretext (1933)

Antologia prozei scurte (1957)

Moksha: scrieri despre experiențe psihedelice și vizionare (1977)

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Operele sale în ordinea cronologică a scrierii lor

The Burning Wheel, 1916;

The Defeat of Youth, 1918;

Limbo, 1920;

Crome Yellow, 1921;

Antic Hay, 1923;

On the Margin, 1923;

Along the Road, 1925;

Those Barren Leaves, 1925;

Jesting Pilate, 1926;

Essays New and Old, 1926;

Proper Studies, 1927;

Point Counter Point, 1928;

Do What You Will, 1929;

Holy Face, and Other Essays, 1929;

Brief Candles, 1930;

The World of Light, 1931;

Music at Night, 1931;

The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, 1932 (ed.);

Brave New World, 1932;

Beyond the Mexique Bay, 1934;

Eyeless in Gaza, 1936;

The Olive Tree, and Other Essays, 1936;

Stories, Essays, and Poems, 1937;

Ends and Means, 1937;

An Encyclopaedia of Pacifism, 1937 (ed.);

After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, 1938;

Time Must Have a Stop, 1944;

The Perennial Philosophy, 1946 (ed.);

Ape and Essence, 1948;

The Perennial Philosophy, 1948;

Gioconda Smile, 1948;

Themes and Variations, 1950;

The Devils of Loudon, 1952;

The Doors of Perceprion, 1954;

Adonis and the Alphabet, 1956;

Collected Short Stories, 1957;

The World of Aldous Huxley, 1957;

Brave New World Revisited, 1958;

Collected Essays, 1959;

On Art and Artist, 1960;

Selected Essays, 1961;

The Island, 1962;

Literature and Science, 1963;

Letters of Aldous Huxley, 1969;

The Collected Works of Aldous Huxley, 1970;

Huxley and God, 1992;

Hearst Essays, 1994;

Between the Wars, 1994;

The Hidden Huxley, 1994.

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Bibl. preluata din art:https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldous_Huxley