Realization, like Magic and Engendering, are typical of HERMES since their intertexts are classics, here Upanishads, Dhammapada and Bhagavad Gita, the first philosophical, the second moral, the third poetic. Such variety matches another variety, monistic Indic optimism finding its counterpart in emergent Texas; Buddhist moralism, in Massachusetts; bhakti, in California. Realization, a fundamental Hindu concept, is transmogrified to manifest itself as a Whitmanesque fecundity under control, a fervent yet disciplined self-fulfillment. MM surveys America, its highways, byways, towns and cities, its mores and manners, its heroic brio so broadly and breathtakingly that one reader has renamed the larger enterprise Sentence of the Grass. Instead I am reminded of Democracy in America, a precedent for Whitman that is still prescient. Like Toqueville, Morrison exercises a double point of view, redoubled by his own French “education.” In classical terms his Quixotic triple itinerary, with its Odyssean outward voyages and returns, reminds me more of Herodotus than of Homer, for here it is the author himself who is constantly in motion, his technique that of the “motion picture.” The variety of race, culture and scenery suggests the Hiranyagarbha, or golden cornucopia of Hindu myth. Like WW, MM conned well the Indian masters before his day of setting out.
Full text of Realization,I Realization,II Realization,III
Manjushree S. Kumar, "Hermes and the Modernist/Postmodernist Interface"
D. Gnanasekaran, pages from “The Intertextuality of Body and Soul”