"after, beautiful one- those gruesomely bloodless crocodile's gums and palate. The musicalization of fiction. Not in the symbolist way, by subordinating sense to sound...but on a larger scale, in the construction."
Aldous Huxley,1928, Point Counter Point, US: Dalkey Archive Press, 2001
I am very drawn to the address of the interlocutor of 1920s English fiction. Gide in the 1890s was a master at this (Fruits of the Earth).
The intimacy and distance, yet unlike now on facebook and other surveilled sites, this was in the imagination of the author.
Were authors then anticipating and prefiguring this connection that is now? The connection with "friends" on facebook that one has never met and never will? Let alone the ever-present eyes of the 'surveillance machinery" the 'secret police' that accompany us everywhere we go online?
Was this what they anticipated?
I think not.
The words are addressed to the writer's inner self, to a muse, a projected addressee who is of the author's own self.
And yet it is this which I can relate to. Not the intimidating public realm of contemporary surveillance society.
RS
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