At this point we need to pause, leave behind McLuhan’s activities in the classroom, and retrace this terrain from another vantage in such a way as to lay a foundation for the following chapters.
McLuhan’s first “great labour” was conducted with one eye on the past, and the other on the figures he regarded as the brightest
138 McLuhan, “It Will Probably End the Motor Car,” Cinema Canada 30 (August 1976), 37.
139 McLuhan, and Robert K. Logan, “The Microcosmic Library,” MS., 5 in “The Future of the Library, An Old Figure on a New Ground.” This work is an unpublished book completed in 1979.
constellation in all English letters:140 James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound,
and Wyndham Lewis. The concluding note of McLuhan’s “Nashe” even suggests that James Joyce may have functioned as a palimpsest through which he apprehended and grappled with both the patristic legacy and Elizabethan satire:
In applying some basic facts concerning the trivium and the patristic motivations of the translatio studii to Thomas Nashe, we have seen that supposedly nonexistent vistas and sanctions are the primary features of his work. What is true of Nashe is equally true of his contemporaries. One is, therefore, faced with the fact that while much excellent and indispensable work has been done on the Elizabethan period, we have scarcely begun to see its
intellectual and literary life in an Elizabethan light. Many facts contributed to make it an age of rhetoric, and even of conflicting rhetorics; but we have long persisted in viewing it in the light of the violent reaction against what Huxley called “the pestilent cosmetic of rhetoric.” It required, perhaps, the advent of such a successful devotee of the second sophistic as James Joyce, to prepare the ground for a scholarly understanding of Elizabethan literature.141
Despite the significance McLuhan affords Joyce, it is, however, with Wyndham Lewis that we need to start.
As with all the Men of 1914, McLuhan’s commentary on Lewis, runs the entire course of his career.142 It is however, a fragmentary affair.
This may be indicative of the fact that McLuhan’s understanding of Lewis never fully stabilized. Alternately, it could be argued that McLuhan preserves something of Lewis’s own ambivalence that stems
140 McLuhan, “From Laforgue to Dante,” MS., 2.
141 The Classical Trivium, 252–53. Further evidence for the claim that Joyce is
McLuhan’s primary palimpsest can be seen in a letter to Felix Giovanelli (c.1946–1949). Here, McLuhan indicates that, today, Cicero’s De Oratore “gets its principle
meaning….from Joyce’s Ulysses,” (McLuhan to Felix Giovanelli, n.d.).
142 The following material that contends with McLuhan’s relationship to and reading of Lewis departs from the loose chronological scheme I am using.
both from his dual place as painter and writer,143 and his practise of
leveraging several personalities as part of his artistic/survival strategy.144
Ambivalence aside, McLuhan was certain of Lewis’s significance: Wyndham Lewis’s The Art of Being Ruled … is probably the most radical political document since Machiavelli’s Prince. But whereas Machiavelli was concerned with the use of society as raw material for the arts of power, Lewis reverses the perspective and tries to discern the human shape once more in a vast technological landscape which has been ordered on Machiavellian lines.145
As previously mentioned, McLuhan saw Lewis as “perhaps the first creative writer to have taken over the new media en bloc as modes of artistic and social control.” Like Joyce and Eliot, yet in a way distinct from them, Lewis made the press, radio, movie, and television modes of his vision and made them instruments of his art.146 Joyce and Eliot,
McLuhan regarded as also having done so, but on a smaller scale.147
For McLuhan, Lewis’s value, like that of T. S. Eliot, was not only in terms of his artistry, it was also theological.148 But unlike his appraisal
143 “When Lewis opts for eye values and rationality and civilization, he was at the same time creating and sponsoring, graphically and verbally, art forms that are audile-tactile,” (McLuhan to Sheila Watson, 17 February 1971).
144 Writing to Kenner in 1949 McLuhan takes special care to note how, in Count Your Dead and America, I Presume, Lewis tried on the persona of the big, extrovert, dumb- ox, British clubman, and how, via the mask of the oaf with the elephant gun, Lewis was able to “bang away at other game,” (McLuhan to Hugh Kenner, 3 May 1949).
145 McLuhan to Harold A. Innis, 14 March 1951. 146 McLuhan, “Lewis’s Prose Style,” MS., 5.
147 McLuhan, “Third Program in the Human Age,” Explorations 8 (1967): 17. 148 McLuhan held that Eliot, following years of Pounds masterly tuition, successfully married Paul and Apollo, theology and art. In an interview for CBC’s “Critically Speaking Program,” McLuhan outlines how Eliot’s The Wasteland is concerned primarily with the condition of man existentially when deprived of faith: “Eliot restored the use of ancient myth for modern poetry in that poem as a means of revealing life lived according to two contrasting kinds of love and two kinds of death,” (McLuhan, “T. S. Eliot,” Canadian
of Eliot, Lewis stands as the only one of the Men of 1914 of whom McLuhan asserts that theology is absolutely necessary for a full understanding. Lewis’s theory of art and communication, McLuhan noted, is a traditional one. The artist-hero or genius is a god intoxicated man. Lewis’s triadic view of spirit, intellect, and sense is the neo-
Platonist and Buddhist view of the opacity of intellectual knowledge and illusory character of the human self. Art is, therefore, spiritual and capable of impregnating the world with reality.149 Further, McLuhan
claims, Lewis, like Eliot, Yeats, and Pound, assumes the Pythagorean and neo-platonic doctrine of the spirit and imagination as a divine or
superhuman power. As McLuhan notes writing to Wilfred Watson, several years later:
Talk about blind spots in regions of maximal impact! Looking at
The Diabolical Principle just now I read loud and clear that art must be totally environmental. It must be the content of nothing
whatever. Ergo, the VORTEX = the totally environmental .… Lewis wants nothing less for Art than the power to create total environments for Life and Death. There must be no art as content of some other set of skills or interest.…I find it a bit staggering to
confront Lewis as a man who really wanted to be Pontifex maximus
of a magical priesthood. I suppose Yeats, Joyce and Pound had similar aspirations. Their priesthood was to create new worlds of perception. They were to be world engineers who shaped the totality of human awareness. Their pigments and materials were not to be paint or words but all the resources of the age. Such were the Pharaohs. They made of the world a perception Lab .… The mode of great Art. The environment as ultimate artefact.150
Lewis, however, McLuhan held, rejected the way of connatural gnosis and emotion favoured by Bergson, Eliot, and Theosophy, in which
Forum 44 (February 1965): 243–244. Transcript of a talk given on CBC’s “Critically Speaking Program,” 10 January 1965).
149 McLuhan, “Nihilism Exposed,” review of Wyndham Lewis, by Hugh Kenner, Renascence 7, no. 2 (Winter 1955): 97.
emotion is used as the principal window on the soul. Rather, “there is in Lewis a Manichean abjuration of delectation.” 151 Lewis, says McLuhan, is
a mystic or visionary of the comic, moving towards the pole of intelligibility instead of that of feeling:152
Lewis makes great and grim comedy of the horror of spirit shackled to the dying animal or human body. His own point of view in comedy is expressed as opposite to Bergson's when he says that laughter results from the spectacle of things (that is, persons) trying to behave as though they were alive. Bergson found the key to laughter in persons behaving as though they were things. Bergson had not the courage of his own philosophical position.153
It is precisely Lewis’s Gnosticism and his consequent “un-worldliness” that makes Lewis “so intense … and evaluation so fearless,”154 and for
McLuhan, so valuable. Unlike Joyce, who expressed ambivalence in regard to both Gnosticism and Catholicism, McLuhan finds that Lewis has value and importance in the technological age because of his courage to push his Gnosticism to the extreme:
It just happens that in the new age of technology when all human arrangements from the cradle to the grave have taken on the hasty extravaganza aspect of a Hollywood set, the nihilist philosophies of neo-Platonism and gnosticism have come into their own. Existence is an empty machine, a cheap art work, they have always said. The soul is a shabby mechanism, the body a
monstrous one. The spirit or artist says to body and soul, a plague on both your prisons. And now in the twentieth century when nature has been abolished by art and engineering, when government has become entertainment and entertainment has become the art of government, now the gnostic and neo-Platonist and Buddhist can gloat: “I told you so! This gimcrack mechanism
151 McLuhan, “Wyndham Lewis: His Theory of Art and Communication,” MS.,12–13. 152 Ibid.
153 McLuhan, “Nihilism Exposed,” review of Wyndham Lewis, by Hugh Kenner, Renascence 7, no. 2 (Winter 1955): 98.
is all that there ever was in the illusion of human existence. Let us rejoin the One.”155
And it is precisely the courage of Lewis in pushing the Cartesian and Plotinian angelism to the logical point of the extinction of humanism and personality that gives his work such importance in the new age of technology. For, on the plane of applied science we have fashioned a Plotinian world-culture which implements the non-human and superhuman doctrines of neo-PIatonic angelism to the point where the human dimension is obliterated by
sensuality at one end of the spectrum, and by sheer abstraction at the other.156
McLuhan states that the situation was so obvious to Lewis in the 1920s that he devoted the next two decades to warning us and explaining the anti-human nihilism emanating from modern philosophy and physics, and everyday activities in commerce and social engineering.157
Wyndham Lewis also served McLuhan as a palimpsest on the
themes and method of Julien Benda.158 Given that McLuhan only makes
less than a handful of passing references to Benda, I will defer to McLuhan’s former student, Vincent Sherry, to help elucidate Benda’s significance.159 Sherry presents Benda as a significant figure in a pan-
European dialogue;who extended and built upon an older
enlightenment tradition of empirical inquiry into the relationship of human physiology, particularly the faculties of perception and cognition,
155 Ibid. 156 Ibid., 98.
157 Ibid. “Electrically, mans struggles are with principalities and powers, and Lewis presents the struggle more vividly that any other writer of the 20th century,” (McLuhan, “The Lewis Vortex: Art and Politics as Masks of Power,” MS., 6).
158 McLuhan to Larry Henderson, 20 October 1975. In a similar way, Ezra Pound serves McLuhan as palimpsest on the themes and methods of Benda’s contemporary, Rémy de Gourmont. This matter, however, must await further elucidation.
159 If not immediately apparent, then the significance of Benda for McLuhan’s emerging oeuvre should become readily apparent in the following chapter.
on the political meaning of aesthetic experience.160 Benda’s problematic,
as Sherry presents it, was the situation in France in and around 1780 wherein music had entered into an easy alliance with the proto- revolutionary doctrine of mesmerism. In face of the situation, Sherry argues that Benda expanded his analysis of style, and the objective analysis of social meaning of sense impressions, into disquisitions on the social function of art. His starting point in these matters is the fabric of sentient and perceptual life, which he took as the sole locus from which political and philosophical concepts could be adduced. Benda’s
systematic “(quasi-) scientific” analysis of the human senses, particularly the physiology of eye and ear, provided Benda with what Sherry calls a “pseudo-scientific language” that enabled him to construct a distinctly aesthetic understanding of social phenomena. In the main, however, Sherry asserts that Benda’s aesthetic critique of mass society proceeds from a physiology of hearing. His disquisitions on music examine music’s pathology, physiologically and psychologically, and identify its alarming social ramifications. Benda, Sherry asserts, heard an internal, essential connection, between musical sensation and populist
collectivism:
Music reaches the vital core of the listener, they proposed, and joins all members of the audience in a spurious but formidable unity. The fellow feeling induced in this way represents a form of mob bonding. The excitable mass emerges as the political image – the direct result – of this provocative melding through sound.161
160 Sherry argues that the “pan-European dialogue” includes figures such as: Henri Bergson, Georges Sorel, Gustave LeBon, Wilhelm Worringer, Theodore Lipps, the Italian Futurists, and José Ortega y Gasset. Sherry asserts that while these figures did not all agree they were engaged in a single consistent enterprise: “Their inquiry into aesthetics verged ever on social statement,” (Sherry, , 4).
161 Sherry, 4. The group solidarity can thus be seen as prefiguring the democratic solidarity that would topple the “ancient regime” in 1789.
The ear is thus shown up by Benda as the intellectual weak point in the body politic, the soft spot through which people can be collectivized and manipulated for the purposes of total war. Consequently, Sherry argues that Benda turned his efforts to retuning the musical myth of social hierarchy to the more severe measures of the eye. In contrast to the merging of the “democratic ear,” Benda held that the aristocratic eye divides. Separating the viewer from the object of sight, the eye achieves the distinctions on which clear conceptual intelligence relies. The eye thus provides Benda with the emblem and instrument of a ruling intellectual elite.162 Similarly, Wyndham Lewis, McLuhan would argue,
spent his whole life simply saying Western man is an eye man:
If he abandons the primacy of the eye in structuring his experience he is finished. Lewis spent his whole life in a magnificent rebuttal of the ear men of his time – and got nowhere because he was not a moralist. He didn’t know how to rally that great backlog of
Protestant moral fury to support his hypothesis.163