Encounters with the Other: the Feud of Identities Monica SPIRIDON Key-words: European literature, modern travel writing, Myself/ the Other 1. The Myth of the Wild Man revisited It is common knowledge that standard European identity has always been flaked by the image of the Other both as a barbaric figure opposed to the Western man and as an obstacle to a free cross-cultural communication. One of the basic principles of Western culture and a major landmark of European identity has been the equation civilized versus wild. In the process by which Western identity was constituted, the opposition civilized versus barbarian as well as the Figure of the Barbarian played an important role. Consequently, the myth of the barbarian is tightly bound up with the exposition of the basic mythical components of Western identity (Bartra 1994: 146). Traveling has the advantage of creating images of the Other, of analyzing otherness and of making it easier to accept and also of finding surprising ways of coping with it (Moura 1998). In the real and imaginary travel journals that I am pointing to in the following pages, the intertwining of modern travel writings with major questions concerning Western culture is very highlighting: Voyages de l’autre côté; Le livre des fuites; Le Chercheur d’Or, Voyage à Rodrigues (Le Clézio); India, The Library of the Maharajah (Mircea Eliade) and Traveling with Quixote (Thomas Mann). Despite different starting points they end up by questioning the status of the equation civilized versus barbarian, trying to redefine the two notions and to invalidate the stereotypes floating around them. Turning the tables on those who suggest that the primitive peoples, discovered and colonized by European explorers gave birth to the myth, we have to accept the hypothesis that, in fact, the already existing myth of the wild man helped shape European reactions to real people. In this way, the wild man underpins the notion of civilization on which much of Western identity has been based (Bartra 1994: 147, 148). The very idea of a contrast between a wild natural state and a civilized cultural configuration is part of an ensemble of myths sustaining the identity of the civilized West and emphasizing the otherness, the difference. Yet, one need to merely cast an eye on the myth of the wild man to realize that we are dealing with an imaginary form existing only on a mythological level (Duer 1986). Eliade usually sets the epithet “barbarian” between inverted commas when he is referring to India or to Indians. It is his way of showing that he is using it as a quotation from the typical European discourse (the discourse of the white man who „Philologica Jassyensia”, An VI, Nr. 2 (12), 2010, p. 245–254