East and West in Aldous Huxley’s Travel Writings
East and West in Aldous Huxley’s Travel Writings

Summary/Abstract: Writing has always been, inter alia, an effective means of manipulation or, at least, of forming opinions. Travel writing is one form of writing by means of which authors relate their impressions about places and people they visited, about societies and cultures they encountered; some of them, if not all, also create certain images and strong opinions in the minds of the readers about the things they read of, all the more so if the readers have never had the chance to visit the places themselves. We are all, therefore, subject to influence, we are the product of what we read and, generally, of the things and ways we are taught. The present article will try to explore Aldous Huxley’s travel writing in order to understand how much of it is fiction, and how much are the writer’s real subjective impressions and opinions, on the one hand; and, on the other hand, the fiction part will be scrutinized in order to identify clichés, i.e. ’the rhetorical figures one keeps encountering in [...] descriptions of the ‘’mysterious East’’, as well as the stereotypes about the African (or Indian or Irish or Jamaican or Chinese) mind’, as Edward Said (1994: xi) so rightfully puts it. At the same time, one is to be aware of the fact that, even if Huxley’s travel writing is, to some extent, subject to such stereotyped thinking, he nevertheless alters to some degree both this typical thinking and the reality itself through his subjective perceptions (which continuously modified themselves all along his life and career) - a reason why his travel writing is congenially different from one stage to another.

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