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06465_Field_TCUM T30.txt
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1996-04-10
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of course, has for the West long meant “uniform and
continuous and sequential.” In other words, we have confused
reason with literacy, and rationalism with a single technology.
Thus in the electric age man seems to the conventional West to
become irrational. In Forster’s novel the moment of truth and
dislocation from the typographic trance of the West comes in
the Marabar Caves. Adela Quested’s reasoning powers cannot
cope with the total inclusive field of resonance that is India.
After the Caves: “Life went on as usual, but had no
consequences, that is to say, sounds did not echo nor thought
develop. Everything seemed cut off at its root and therefore
infected with illusion.”
A Passage to India (the phrase is from Whitman, who saw
America headed Eastward) is a parable of Western man in the
electric age, and is only incidentally related to Europe or the