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I have been stewing for the better part of a week (with no time to compose a proper response) about the essay on immortality by Stephen Cave in the August 28 NY Times. His hypothesis that immortality would remove the impetus for creativity and exploration is faintly ridiculous...I can respect those of my betters who say they write in hopes of literary immortality, and there is certainly enough evidence for the validity of the wish. (The fact that I immediately remember Kenneth Rexroth's riposte to Horace, "babies / Are more durable from monuments," illustrates the validity of the wish—in a poem that very prettily denies the validity of the desire for lasting fame while confirming it...at least for those few folks who know the Collected Longer Poems). But I maintain that the motives for literary creation are multiple: Leaving aside the wish to make money (a largely futile one for most writers), some or indeed many write in order to change the lives of those few who are meant to read them; not to change them in salvific ways or anything, just to leave the reader's consciousness in a usefully different place, from which they may find a new way or a new belief on their own. René Daumal was one such, and his novels continue to be read by subsequent generations even though at least one of them is so directed to his contemporaries that it requires annotation to be fully comprehensible.
Then there are the researchers who know that their magnum opus is likely to be superseded within a generation...I am sure that Mircea Eliade would have taken the offer of immortality if it had meant he could rethink the entirety of the unfinished History of Religious Ideas. (For one thing, the offer would itself have been a significant datum for the never-written final volume of the magnum opus in question.) It clearly distressed him to be forced to farm out the chapters of the substitute version of the concluding Volume Four to two teams of his former doctoral students. (I've written before about the further irony that while the German version was published, the completely different compilation of essays overseen by Ioan Culianu disappeared without a trace after being submitted to the publisher, in the wake of Culianu's murder and the controversy over the exact shape of Eliade's anti-royal-dictatorship politics back when he was organizing multidisciplinary seminars and hobnobbing with anticolonial Indian nationalists in his youth. (Trust me, you don't want to know. Intellectuals should be given a pass for every stupid opinion they hold up to age sixty or so. I have quoted before Eliade's response in 1962 to Joe Kitagawa's outburst about Castro: "Which [university] faculty is he on?")
Eliade pretty well knew he was summarizing a state of research that would change, even as he used the data to buttress his own view of religious creativity—a view which his star student Ioan Culianu was in the process of undercutting with neurological data and structural analysis. (I like to hope that just as Paul Tillich started rethinking his whole theology of culture in the light of the global history of religions, an Eliade gifted with this-worldly immortality would have been ready to discard his morphology of religious ideas and start over from a new methodological perspective, especially as espoused by someone who shared his fondness for Renaissance Hermetism.)
But I like to think he would never have disavowed his fantasy fiction, from The Forbidden Forest to Youth Without Youth—which of course is about a man who is granted a renewed lifespan that permits him, as a mutant, to use his combination of fresh vigor and paranormal abilities to confirm the various linguistic hypotheses he had been exploring. The parallels with Eliade's own situation of encountering his limits are too obvious to ignore; it's also obvious why Francis Ford Coppola felt compelled to make a movie from the novella.
Jeff Kripal presumably noted the mutant theme when he read the novella (presumably he did read it at some point). Eliade's Romanian protagonist is a very different kind of superhero from the comic book characters he discusses in terms of the American Super-Story, but similar thematic details find their way into various plot lines in pop-culture superhero tales that do not aspire to the level of graphic novels: enough of them for Kripal to trace the very American genealogy of the ideas, in his forthcoming Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal. I can't decide whether it will help or hurt sales and scholarly discussion of this latest installment of his in-depth (but eminently readable) exploration of cultural history that superhero comics have been so much in the news lately: mostly in terms of whether the genre has reached its termination in hard-copy format (which would put comic books in the same dustbin of history previously reserved for painting, sculpture, and market capitalism...all of which seem to mutate endlessly rather than meet their deaths).
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*[And that's the end of the essay, though not, of course, the end of the story. I had pondered whether to segue into the question of variant beliefs on our subsequent knowledge or lack of same that form a fascinating chapter in the history of religions, not to mention in David Eagleman's fantasia on forty types of afterlife (the collection of tales called Sum that Philip Pullman likes so much) and decided it would be a digression too far. Better to stick to the cultural meme of indefinitely extended earthly existence. I believe I have said quite enough about Eagleman until his next book, on neuroplasticity, is published.)
Then there are the researchers who know that their magnum opus is likely to be superseded within a generation...I am sure that Mircea Eliade would have taken the offer of immortality if it had meant he could rethink the entirety of the unfinished History of Religious Ideas. (For one thing, the offer would itself have been a significant datum for the never-written final volume of the magnum opus in question.) It clearly distressed him to be forced to farm out the chapters of the substitute version of the concluding Volume Four to two teams of his former doctoral students. (I've written before about the further irony that while the German version was published, the completely different compilation of essays overseen by Ioan Culianu disappeared without a trace after being submitted to the publisher, in the wake of Culianu's murder and the controversy over the exact shape of Eliade's anti-royal-dictatorship politics back when he was organizing multidisciplinary seminars and hobnobbing with anticolonial Indian nationalists in his youth. (Trust me, you don't want to know. Intellectuals should be given a pass for every stupid opinion they hold up to age sixty or so. I have quoted before Eliade's response in 1962 to Joe Kitagawa's outburst about Castro: "Which [university] faculty is he on?")
Eliade pretty well knew he was summarizing a state of research that would change, even as he used the data to buttress his own view of religious creativity—a view which his star student Ioan Culianu was in the process of undercutting with neurological data and structural analysis. (I like to hope that just as Paul Tillich started rethinking his whole theology of culture in the light of the global history of religions, an Eliade gifted with this-worldly immortality would have been ready to discard his morphology of religious ideas and start over from a new methodological perspective, especially as espoused by someone who shared his fondness for Renaissance Hermetism.)
But I like to think he would never have disavowed his fantasy fiction, from The Forbidden Forest to Youth Without Youth—which of course is about a man who is granted a renewed lifespan that permits him, as a mutant, to use his combination of fresh vigor and paranormal abilities to confirm the various linguistic hypotheses he had been exploring. The parallels with Eliade's own situation of encountering his limits are too obvious to ignore; it's also obvious why Francis Ford Coppola felt compelled to make a movie from the novella.
Jeff Kripal presumably noted the mutant theme when he read the novella (presumably he did read it at some point). Eliade's Romanian protagonist is a very different kind of superhero from the comic book characters he discusses in terms of the American Super-Story, but similar thematic details find their way into various plot lines in pop-culture superhero tales that do not aspire to the level of graphic novels: enough of them for Kripal to trace the very American genealogy of the ideas, in his forthcoming Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal. I can't decide whether it will help or hurt sales and scholarly discussion of this latest installment of his in-depth (but eminently readable) exploration of cultural history that superhero comics have been so much in the news lately: mostly in terms of whether the genre has reached its termination in hard-copy format (which would put comic books in the same dustbin of history previously reserved for painting, sculpture, and market capitalism...all of which seem to mutate endlessly rather than meet their deaths).
--------------
*[And that's the end of the essay, though not, of course, the end of the story. I had pondered whether to segue into the question of variant beliefs on our subsequent knowledge or lack of same that form a fascinating chapter in the history of religions, not to mention in David Eagleman's fantasia on forty types of afterlife (the collection of tales called Sum that Philip Pullman likes so much) and decided it would be a digression too far. Better to stick to the cultural meme of indefinitely extended earthly existence. I believe I have said quite enough about Eagleman until his next book, on neuroplasticity, is published.)
