If you make a landing on Huxley’s utopian fiction

Island

expecting an idyll of warm sand and happiness, you discover that it offers instead an uncomfortable terrain of narratorial grit: “ ‘Psycho-physical means to a transcendental end,’ said Vijaya, raising his voice above the grinding screech of the low gear into which he had just shifted …” (

Island

, Ch. 9, p.149). The preoccupations of the book are indeed “psycho-physical”. This is not a fiction about blissful existence. The book has a “transcendental end”: it invents a whole society organised to keep at bay what its central character refers to as “E.H.”, the “Essential Horror” of existence. Throughout this novel of ideas, voices like Vijaya’s are very much raised in disquisition – to the extent that when…

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Citation: Booth, Roy. "Island". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 08 August 2019 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=4416, accessed 28 March 2024.]

4416 Island 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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