Literary Criticism: What are “chemically pure” and “chemically impure” in literature?

Aldous Huxley’s Tragedy and the Whole Truth is a very important text in literary criticism as he has created a new window for the readers with this piece of writing. An idea has existed from the ancient time that tragedy or tragic drama is the best form of literature. So, we always consider Sophocles' Oedipus or Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Macbeth as some of the best pieces of literature and it is also thought that people’s emotions can be best revealed through tragedy. Huxley refers to this kind of idea or thought as chemically pure. That means, many people consider non-tragedies as of low quality. However, Huxley, through his essays, tries to imply that what is chemically impure can represent whole truth.

First of all, we need to know what chemically pure means. By introducing this term, Huxley does not intend to relate it with chemistry. Rather, he stresses on portraying the best thoughts, best feelings of human minds in literature. We can see that tragedy dramas are of very serious mood and incorporate serious dialogues or interactions among the characters, thoughts and feelings of very serious nature. We can also feel the seriousness in the presentation of the drama and as a result, small, irrelevant matters are not given much importance. This seriousness in presentation and the high standard is what Huxley calls chemically pure.

On the other hand, by saying chemically impure, Huxley denotes the representation of every detail of a story or set of stories, though not of so serious mood as of tragedy. In his regard, Huxley takes an example from the novel Tom Jones by Henry Fielding where the female protagonist, Sophia Western, falls on the ground while attempting to ride on a Western horse. The incident creates some humors and the way Fielding describes the incident is also very humorous. In tragic dramas, we cannot see a scene like this because it is chemically impure.

A lot of debates and arguments were going on about truth. Truth is obviously portrayed in tragedy and to establish the truth is one of the objectives of tragedy. In Macbeth, we can see that greed brings destruction and in Oedipus, we can see that arrogance causes downfall. Establishing this kind of higher truth is the objective of most of the tragedies. So, chemically pure literature is viewed by many with sheer importance and there are many who do not want to see chemically impure literature as of high standard. However, Huxley is against this idea and he thinks that higher truth is undoubtedly established in tragedy, but literature being chemically pure could also represent whole truth and it definitely has some importance. Huxley has taken the idea of whole truth with great importance and talked about the term in a recurring manner throughout the essay. Huxley wants to say that whole truth, by no means, diminish the standard of literature. Rather, whole truth could help increase the standard of literature.

Huxley attempts to answer whether chemically impure literature represents whole truth by introducing the example of heroine’s falling down from horseback, an incident taken from Tom Jones by Fielding, which sets up a humorous scene. We may find this humorous incident in our everyday lives and portraying every detail of this kind of incidents from our daily lives is actually whole truth. Huxley thinks that in literature, chemically pure is not a problem in establishing whole truth. So, Huxley opines that chemically impure literature can and must represent the whole truth.

Huxley also says that we have reached an age where the importance and popularity of whole truth is increasing and to establish whole truth, we need chemically impure elements. If we look at our daily lives, we can realize that our lives are full of all kinds of incidents.  Here, as we find sorrow, pain, despair, we also find delight, joy and happiness. We also find comic elements in life as well. So, in the current-day literature, we can see more emphasis given on illustrating the whole truth and it has a connection with the growing importance of novel. Novel is long in size and it is easier to represent whole truth in novel. So, this is the age of chemically impure literature. At last, I would like to say that there is no alternative of chemically impure elements for displaying whole truth in literature.