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Conradian reminders in Aldous Huxley's Island: will Farnaby's Moksha-medicine experience and "the essential horror".(Critical Essay)

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From: Studies in the Novel
Date: 20030322
Author:Meckier, Jerome

Island is the only utopian novel to climax with a drug-taking. Will Farnaby's ingestion of the moksha-medicine, closely modeled upon Huxley's experiments with mescaline and LSD, (1) fills chapter fifteen. Although Susila MacPhail, Will's guru, considers him ready for an expansion of consciousness, the jaded journalist is no prodigy. Most Palanese first sample "the reality revealer" (I 136) as part of a religious ceremony to mark their coming of age. Nevertheless, Will has progressed. (2) He entered Pala by subterfuge as a sort of"secret agent" (I 111) for the West's oil companies; ...

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