The title of Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza (1936) derives from Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671), in which the blind Samson is described as: “Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill with slaves”. The novel has traditionally been seen as a watershed in Huxley’s career, demarcating the work of the “amused, Pyrrhonic aesthete” (as Huxley would later describe his younger self), who sardonically depicted the moral anomie of the post-war generation in novels such as Antic Hay (1923) and Point Counter Point (1928), from the work of the quasi-mystical pacifist, who sacrificed his artistic standards in order to promote what he would subsequently term the Perennial Philosophy (the common mystical core of the …
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Citation: Poller, Jake. "Eyeless in Gaza". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 14 October 2008 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=5226, accessed 25 November 2024.]
