How to Choose a Novel

[Mark Kohut]

This is great...(you did not have to do all this)......
But Eliade is a Major Influence on our beloved author......

Benny Profane............


----- Original Message ----
From: David Payne <dpayne1912 at hotmail.com>
To: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>; pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2007 11:05:07 PM
Subject: RE: How to Choose a Novel

Mark Kohut (Tue, 11 Dec 2007 14:01:32 -0800) wrote:
 
> Anyone know what is on page 69 of The Gutenberg Galaxy?

 
You were probably just making silly, but good thinking: As it turns out, the author presents his thesis (in the edition I found), which seems more than coincidence. 
 
You can read page 69 on Google Books: http://books.google.com/books?id=y4C644zHCWgC&printsec=frontcover&dq=The+Gutenberg+Galaxy&sig=OpIaC5B7sVAh6q7gmPnHzbkZgGs#PPA69,M1
 
Here's a copy. Excuse my typos: I was unable to grab the text & I am reacting badly to a cat at teh moment ("there's a tear in my beer" ... or there would be if I had a beer). Note that this page starts with a long quote, which I've awkwardly attempted to note by the addition of ["...] to the beginning of the text. Also, there's some weird formatting, long lines and big BF text halfway through, that I hope will be readable in this here email:
 
[“…]cosmos, is recent discovery in the history of the human spirit. It does not devolve upon us to show by what historical processes and as the result of what changes in spiritual attitudes and behavior modern man has desacralized his world and assumed a profane existence. For our purpose it is enough to observe that desacralization pervades the entire experience of the nonreligious man of modern societies and that, in consequence, he finds it increasingly difficult to rediscover the existential dimensions of religious man in the archaic societies.[”] (p. 13)
 
Eliade is under a gross illusion in supposing that modern man “finds it increasingly difficult to rediscover the existential dimensions of religious man in the archaic societies.” Modern man, since the electro-magnetic discoveries of more than a century ago, is investing himself with all the dimensions of archaic man plus. The art an scholarship of the past century and more have become a monotonous crescendo of archaic primitivism. Eliade’s own work is an extreme popularization of such art and scholarship. But that is not to say that he is factually wrong. Certainly he is right in saying that “the wholly desacralized cosmos is a recent discovery in the history of the human spirit.” In fact, the discovery results from the phonetic alphabet and the acceptance of its consequences, especially since Gutenberg. But I question the quality of insight that causes a human voice to quaver and resonate with hebdomadal vehemence when citing the “history
 of the human spirit.”
 
The Gutenberg Galaxy is concerned to show why alphabetic man was disposed to desacralize his mode of being.
* The later section of this book will accept the role declined by Eliade when he says: “It does not devolve upon us to show by what historical processes … modern man has desacralized his world and assumed a profane existence.” To show by exactly what historical process this was done is the theme of The Gutenberg Galaxy. And having shown the process, we can at least make a conscious and responsible choice concerning whether we elect once more the tribal mode which has such attraction for Eliade:
 
[“] The abyss that divides the two modalities of experience—sacred and profane—will be apparent when we come to describe sacred space and the ritual building of the human habitation, or the varieties of the religious [”…]



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