Mark Rampion
A painter and writer from a poor country family who tells everyone what is wrong with the modern world. Drawn from D. H. Lawrence.
He wants people to live as whole human beings, body and mind together, instead of as specialists in one part of themselves.
The book
Point Counter Point
Aldous Huxley
At a glance
- D. H. Lawrence · 1885–1930 · Huxley's close friend in the late 1920s. The critic Keith Cushman calls the Rampions unmistakable portraits of Lawrence and his wife Frieda.
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeRampion is the book's voice of health. He believes modern people have starved their bodies and instincts in favour of the mind, and he says so at every chance. He is also the only character with a happy marriage. Huxley gives him a whole chapter of back story, which no other character gets.
How Mark Rampion Is Portrayed
- His first wordsChapter VIII opens with Rampion complaining about the horrible, unwholesome tameness of the modern world. Mary laughs from the depths of her lungs.
- The trespasserIn Chapter IX a thin, pale young man with a country accent walks up to Mary and her brother in their father's park above a coal town. He tells them he is trespassing. Mary laughs, lets him stay, and later marries him.
- The house in ChelseaIn Chapter XVI Burlap visits the Rampions in Chelsea. Their house is one large studio with three or four little rooms tacked on.
- Ten yearsIn Chapter XXVI Philip's notebook finds Rampion gloomy. He gives the present order ten years before an appalling, bloody collapse.
- A table of pervertsIn Chapter XXXIV at Sbisa's he tells the others that the world is an asylum of perverts. He calls himself one too, a pedagogue pervert, and goes home ashamed of how much he has talked.
- Against BeethovenIn Chapter XXXVII Spandrell plays him the slow movement of Beethoven's A minor quartet as proof of God. Rampion finds it beautiful but calls it the art of a man who has lost his body.
Mark Rampion quotes
The world's an asylum of perverts.
It's the art of a man who's lost his body.
Rampion and Mary are in Spandrell's flat when the Freemen shoot Spandrell at the door. They run out and find him dying, while the music still plays in the next room.
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