Monthly Archives: December 2021

St Kevin’s tub

I obey laws I have not chosen. (Joyce to Jacques Mercanton on FW)1

Danis Rose’s edition of Finn’s Hotel is controversial regarding the question of whether Joyce ever had the notion of building its ‘little epics’ into a self-standing work. But there is no question that these notes from 1923, after Ulysses and before the Wake (as Rose says), are critical for an understanding of the transition between the two.

The third of its epyllia concerns Kevin, the patron saint of Dublin, who founded a monastery in Glendalough, ‘the valley of two lakes’, in the seventh century. The name ‘Kevin’ goes back to Cóemgein, ‘the handsomely born’, that is to say, ‘the appropriately born’, that is to say ‘the reborn’, ‘the regenerated’. The crossing of the two in the valley, whether of lakes or births or generations, is the matter at stake and questions arise as to how this occurs and what relation it has to what is before it and what is around it.

Joyce’s retaling (formulated in free verse, alone among the episodes)2 situates these questions as concerning a ‘tub’ — namely Ireland or here-comes-everybody’s head3 — and its relation to a prior surrounding ‘ocean’:

A Tale of a Tub

KEVIN BORN on the island of Ireland in the Irish ocean

having been granted privilege of a portable altar cum bath goes to Lough Glendalough between rivers

where pious Kevin lives alone on an isle in the lake

on which isle, a plot perimetered with three watercourses, is a pond

in which is an islet whereon holy Kevin builds a beehivehut the floor of which most holy Kevin excavates to a depth of one foot

which done venerable Kevin goes to the lakeside and fills time after time the tub with water which time after time most venerable Kevin empties into the cavity of his hut thereof creating a pool

having done which blessed Kevin half fills the tub once with water which tub then most blessed Kevin sets in the centre of the pool

after which saint Kevin girds up his frock to his loins and seats himself, blessed saint Kevin, in his circumferential hiptubbath

where, doctor solitarius, he meditates with ardour the sacrament of baptism or the regeneration [gein] of man by water.

The ninth episode in the Finn’s Hotel series of eleven epiclets is ‘Here Comes Everybody‘ — “concerning the genesis of Harold or Humphrey“, and his ancestry, or not, from “the Earwickers“:

Discarding once for all those theories from older sources which would link him back with such pivotal ancestors as the Glues, the Gravys and the Earwickers of Sidham in the Hundred of Manhood or proclaim him a descendant of vikings…4

The episode would explicate his origins instead, or at least first of all, as going back to Eden and to:

the grand old gardener [who] was saving daylight one sabbath afternoon in prefall paradise peace by following his plough for rootles in the rere garden of ye olde marine hotel when royalty was announced…

The tendency of these notes to Finnegans Wake is clear and the central question would appear to concern the roots — and also the rootles(sness) — of genesis.

The crux of the matter has to do with the subjective genitive at stake here. Roots and rootles(sness) belong first of all to genesis, not to us.5 Just so, water is re-generative for Kevin exactly and only because it is not his! He needs to retrieve it — in his tub.6

McLuhan put the matter in negative mode — that is, in terms of our cul-de-sac or “opaque prison” — in ‘Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press’ in 1954:

For that school of thought for which the external world is an opaque prison, art can never be regarded as a source of knowledge but only as a moral discipline and a study of endurance. The artist is not a reader of radiant signatures on materia signata but the signer of a forged check on our hopes and sympathies.

It had earlier appeared in positive mode in ‘Mr. Eliot’s Historical Decorum’ in 1949 where the “reader of radiant signatures” has the calling to re-turn to “source” and

To read not in the book of the self but in the book of the existent and subsistent world…

Our home in an “existent and subsistent world” is original. Once fallen away from that birth-right, it may not be re-won by reading further into “the book of the self” (an absorption that leads nowhere but deeper and deeper into the “opaque prison”), but only (only!) through a re-version to origin. From there, and only from there, is a “re-generation” to be experienced along with St Kevin, in reception of its amniotic embrace and power. This is a gift — actually the gift above all other gifts — enabling a “radiant” relation to an “existent and subsistent world”.

  1. Jaques Mercanton, ‘The Hours of James Joyce, in Portraits of the Artist in Exile (ed Willard Potts), pp 209-221. Cited at Peter Crisp’s fine FW blog along with the Joyce to Hoffmeister quotation in note 4 below. ↩
  2. The spacing of the verses points to the spacing at stake in the tale between plural waters and plural tubs and plural births. ↩
  3. One of the further questions raised by the episode is whether the riot of our tubshead’s consciousness/unconsciousness sits in us and/or we in it. ↩
  4. And yet, as both a particular individual and as ‘everybody’, Harold/Humphrey — Haromphrey — proves to be an Earwicker after all. (Joyce to Adolf Hoffmeister: “Everyone is anyone and every instant is any instant.”) When asked by the “sailor king” (in this ninth episode of Finn’s Hotel), what he was up to, “honest blunt Haromphreyld answered in no uncertain tones (…) Naw, magersty, aw war jist a cotchin on thon bluggy earwugs. Our sailor king, remarked (…) we have for trusty bailiwick a turnpiker who is by turns a pikebailer no less than an earwicker!” Now bailiwick and pikebailer (bailiff) are collective designations, earwicker as ‘earwuger’ or ‘earwigger’, a very particular one — like Haromphrey’s dialect. In fact, Haromphrey is “a turnpiker who is by turns” the collective figure “no less than” the particular one. (Joyce to Arthur Power: “I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.”) “Comes the question: are these the facts as recorded in both or either of the collateral andrewpomurphyc narratives? We shall perhaps not so soon see. The great fact remains that after that historic date all holographs so far exhumed initialled by Haromphrey bear the sigla H.C.E. and, while he was only and long and always good duke Umphrey for the hungerlean spalpeens of Lucalizod and Chimbers to his cronies, it was equally certainly a pleasant turn of the populace which gave him as sense of those normative letters the nickname Here Comes Everybody.” All human beings, like “Haromphreyld”, but each one differently, are de-rey-ld and de-railed and the question is whether the cost of this ‘de-fall-t’ can be de-phreyld — where defray goes back to broken (‘to pay for damages caused by breakage’) and/or to peace (among the fragments). ↩
  5. At the same time, however, the rootlessness ‘of genesis’ is also an objective genitive since rootlessness is not later than genesis or subsequent to it: rootlessness is what genesis ‘is’. ↩
  6. These notes would seem to show Joyce as situating his narratives in an ontological context characterized by the cul-de-sac of modernity defined by Nietzsche and repeatedly depicted by Joyce’s friend and compatriot, Samuel Beckett. The central question is how far our tales obscure and/or reveal the real. (Persse O’Reilley, one concretion of HCE, refers on to perce-oreille, French for earwig. Both Persse/perce (as per se) and O’Reilley/oreille refer on to the real.) This question, in turn, has always reverted to the further one of origins. What journey have we already started ‘off on‘ and what other journeys might be possible for us and how does one go between journeys? The sun and moon appear to be impelled by just these questions when they rise and fall and rise and fall again and again in some regenerative relation to the surrounding ocean — a pattern that Kevin, as Cóemgein and the patron saint of doublin’, would re-trieve and re-establish. ↩

Poetic vs Rhetorical Exegesis 2: a question of ontology

Bacon upon occasion used both [Ciceronian and Senecan] styles and so does Mr. Eliot. Quarrels between Senecans and Ciceronians are inevitably the result of the triumph of specialized temperament over general intelligence. (From Eliot to Seneca, 1953)

‘Poetic and Rhetorical Exegesis’ is a critical statement of McLuhan’s position in 1944 and of his future orientation as seen from there. One of its aims was to coordinate that position with his PhD thesis on Nashe and the history of the trivium which had just been approved late in 1943.

Just as Korzybski offers us a correlation of knowledge by an extension of the modes of grammar (and in this respect belongs to an ancient tradition headed by Cratylus and carried on by Pliny, Philo-Judaeus, Origen, St. Bonaventura, and the later alchemists), so Mr. Richards, whose Meaning of Meaning is a treatise of speculative grammar of curiously scholastic stamp, offers us a method for interpreting and manipulating our lives by an extension of the devices of rhetoric. In this respect Mr. Richards is a true nominalist son of Ockham, Agricola, and Ramus; (…) Mr. Richards’ rediscovery of the functional rhetorical relationships in speech and prose was timely, indeed, after three centuries of Cartesian contempt for metaphor and rhetoric in all its modes [as an extension of the modes of dialectic]. (Poetic vs Rhetorical Exegesis)

In this paragraph from his 1944 essay McLuhan offers a summary of his thesis. It sets out its three trivial arts and names, as the thesis had attempted to detail, their ‘extensions’ in historical figures and traditions. The great question, actually questions, precipitated by it may be seen in his observation that each of these arts represents a self-standing “correlation of knowledge” or “a method for interpreting and manipulating our lives”.1 

Ten years before at the University of Manitoba McLuhan had encountered a similar situation in Rupert Lodge’s “comparative method“. There, too, there were three “method[s] for interpreting and manipulating our lives” and a kind of meta-method of critical comparison that would study them and their application (or “extension”) in the history of philosophy. Some of the questions implicated in Lodge’s work were:

  • was the ‘comparative method’ one of the three methods defining all of philosophy or was it a fourth method (somehow both within and without that ‘all’)?
  • if it were a fourth method, what was its status relative to the other three and how could that status be specified and justified?
  • if a fourth method could be specified and justified, how could it be communicated and put to general use in philosophy and beyond?2

These questions arising from Lodge’s work also applied to McLuhan’s studies of the trivium. His attraction to Eliot and Leavis in literary criticism was that they pointed to ways (he sensed) in which these questions might be addressed.

The first sentence of ‘Poetic vs Rhetorical Exegesis’ introduces the need to undertake “a critical journey to the full act of plenary critical judgment”. The paper then frequently sets out how such a journey may not be made. In this vein McLuhan writes in regard to Richards and Empson as rhetoricians, what he might equally well have said of Cratylus and Pliny as grammarians or Descartes and his followers as dialecticians:

It may seem simply absurd to say that neither Richards nor Empson [nor Cratylus nor Pliny nor Descartes] is a fully equipped critic.3 That, however, is not to say (…) that the [meta-]critic [equipped with an “overall view” of the three trivial modes] can dispense with their techniques. The fallacy consists in supposing that [any one of] their excellent devices for observing and describing (…) is a technique of evaluation.4

To be able to re-cognize a “dramatic structure” (that is, a dynamic plural structure) which is yet “self-contained” (that is, which is unified in its plurality) is the proper exercise of such “a technique of evaluation“.5 This is a “technique” does not arise on its own but somehow comes back from a prior structure that is before it (‘before’ especially in time): hence the need for “re-trieval” and “re-cognition”.6 In effect, this technique is just Lodge’s “comparative method” which arises from insight into the threefold play of the forms before it — but now under-stood not as a methodological technique but as an ontological response.

Over and over again McLuhan insists that there is no way that rhetoric (and by implication also not grammar or dialectic) can — “within the limits of their method” — be ‘extended’ in such a way as to reach reality and truth, “what (…) actually is“.7 Extension is always bound to the past, what McLuhan will later call ‘the rear-view mirror’. But what “what (…) actually is” stands on its own and instead of being generated out of some past is — as the beginning(s) — what must responsively be understood as already generating all past, present and future.8

A speaker or a writer of [rhetorical] prose has an intention related to an audience of some sort, but a poet’s intention is entirely absorbed in the nature of the thing he is making. The thing made [the poem]9 will stand in relation to an audience but this, while important, is only per accidens. (…) Thus rhetoric is essentially an affair of external (…) relations, while a poem has external relations only accidentally. (…) A poem (…) may contain any number of rhetorical and political components needing exegesis, and yet be wholly poetic — that is, be entirely organized with reference to a dramatic structure or movement which is self-contained. A rhetorical work is for the sake of producing action. A poetic work is an action produced for the sake of contemplation. This is an irreducible functional distinction between rhetoric and poetic10 which it is the business of the critic to manifest point by point in judging [any]  particular work.  This brings us to the crucial point. Faced with a work full of rhetorical and, therefore, political and psychological complexity, the rhetorician-psychologist can perform prodigies of ingenious and helpful exegesis but cannot possibly, within the limits of his method, determine whether the work IS a poem or not.

Again:

The utmost extension and refinement of the methods for observing speaker-audience relations brings one no nearer the problem of deciding whether a particular work IS a poem, and if so, whether it IS a significant or an insignificant one.

It is not (…) possible to arrive at a critical evaluation of a poem (…) from the point of view of rhetorical exegesis, as one can see in the work of Richards and Empson. Basically a rhetorical exegesis is concerned with indicating the “strategy” employed by a writer in bringing to bear the available means of persuasion. One can go on indefinitely describing the situation from which the strategy emerges, elaborating whole psychological and political treatises without ever reaching the point of critical evaluation.

Later, of course, McLuhan will articulate this point as the difference between lineality and simultaneity, between the literary and the electric. There is no linear way to simultaneity since lineality is exactly what simultaneity is not — and also, and chiefly, because simultaneity, as such, must already be in effect in order to be what it is.

There is a play of times here — hence McLuhan’s later appeal to Aristotle and Thomas:

The basis of all paradox, Christian and secular, is to be found in the sixth book of the Physics of Aristotle, to which Aquinas refers in his Summa Theologica I.II.q 113.a.7, ad quintum. The question for Aquinas is whether justification by faith occurs instantly or gradually. Aquinas says it occurs instantly because — ­here he appeals to Aristotle’s Physics  — “the whole preceding time during which anything moves towards its form, it is under the opposite form.” (From Cliché to Archetype, 1970)

Turning from the negative way (“the opposite form”) to the positive response may be seen in the following citations. But careful note must always be made of the basic difference between a “fusion” that is first of all ours and that receives its objectivity through us — versus one that is first of all ‘before’ us and whose prior objectivity it is that elicits our subjective response to it. McLuhan is pointing to this difference with his vocabulary of “contemplation”, “moral perception” and “critical evaluation”.

  • “it is (…) the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts.” (McLuhan citing Eliot’s 1919 ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’)
  • Richards and Empson offer no clues whatever for approaching evaluation of this sort (…) which would help to determine whether the components (…) are merely an aggregate (…) or whether they are genuinely fused in a unifying vision which makes of them a dramatic integrity.
  • In The Philosophy of Literary Form Mr. [Kenneth] Burke (…) appears for a moment to emerge as a [genuine] critic of poetry: “We should watch for the dramatic alignment: what IS vs what“.11
  • [The matter at stake is always] the dramatic unity, if any.
  • the quality or precise degree of intensity among diverse components (…) is the index to the (…) quality
  • the rhetorical exegetist (…) has no available technique for directing attention to one of the most essential facts which the critic (…) must be able to focus at all times. Naturally, this elusive trait resides in the inevitable dramatic character12
  • The reader as spectator or contemplator is compelled to “a precise complex response.” However, this compulsion is dictated not by any rhetorical persuasiveness or strategy but simply [Thomas’ “instantly”] by the exigencies of a dynamic dramatic moment
  • [a rebound is made from] the way in which the fusion of the elements occurred
  •  A poem in itself functions dramatically, not strategically or persuasively. It is for contemplation, and functions for the spectator or reader as a means of extending and refining moral perception or dramatic awareness

Put in Lodge’s terms, the great question is whether the components at stake (in his case, the three “channels” of philosophy) are beheld in their irreducible plurality (“diverse components”) but also in their unity (“fusion”) within the comparative method. Outside that unity, there is only one-sidedness; inside it, absent fundamental distinction, there is only a formless merging. The point of the method is to avoid, at once, both one-sidedness and merger.

Such a meth-od13 or medium as the middle road is the message.

So with McLuhan. The three trivial arts must be seen in their plurality and in their unity. Absent unity, there is inevitable one-sidedness. Absent plurality, there is formless merger. Here he is a decade later in his 1955 ‘Nihilism Exposed’…

On one-sidedness or “whim”:

These [gnostic] views flooded into Europe in the fifteenth century. They underlie all the mechanic-materialisms from Descartes to John Dewey, since it is the merest whim whether these views are used to structure a Berkleyan idealism or a Darwinian mechanism.14 

On formless merger or “illusion”:

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 is all that there ever was in the illusion of human existence. Let us rejoin the One!”

 

  1. ‘Poetic vs Rhetorical Exegesis’. All citations in this post, unless otherwise identified, are from this essay. Preliminary note may be made here that if each of the trivial arts represents “a method for interpreting and manipulating our lives”, it would seem that everybody must be exercising such a method all the time and therefore must be exercising one of the trivial arts (or, perhaps, some combination of them) — unconsciously, of course. So one way of putting the problematic of the essay is to pose the question: how get to where one already is? The epigraph to Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo: Wie man wird, was man ist — How one becomes what one is. — For ‘everybody must be exercising such a method all the time’: “The artist no longer suggests that art is something that you can take or leave, that it’s for some people and not for other people: the artist insists on his absolute relevance. I’m sure this note was never heard in the Renaissance, or at any time before now. The concept of relevance is a twentieth-century concept.” (Communications and the Word of God, 1959) ↩
  2. One of the many seminal notions McLuhan took from Lodge was the practical applicability of critical philosophy. Lodge published books on ethics, on logic, and on art, but also The Philosophy of Education (1937), The Philosophy of Business (1945) and Applied Philosophy (1951). ↩
  3. By “fully equipped” McLuhan means that such thinkers represent “a method for interpreting and manipulating our lives” (like everybody) and that they articulate it (as few do). They are representative in multiple senses (especially in the sense that they re-present a prior form). The questions for each of them, however, are: 1) how “fully” do they actually represent the fulness of life? Are they one-sided abstractions or multi-sided dramas? 2) how able are they to articulate real and true value? In sum: how far do they actually provide full access to reality? ↩
  4. By “a technique of evaluation”, McLuhan means the ability to discern true or real worth. So where Lodge criticized one-sidedness from a methodological perspective, McLuhan did so from an ontological one. Then the critical question became: how do reality and truth belong together with plurality? That is, might Lodge’s comparative method, as a variety of perspectivism, instead of revealing true reality, cut us off from ‘it’ as described above all by Nietzsche? Or, if this were not the case, how was perspectivism compatible or even essential to ontology? ↩
  5. Although McLuhan does not describe his essay as a prolegomena to ontology, this is what this specification of “a technique of evaluation” amounts to. For by “evaluation” McLuhan means anything but a relative one. He means one that would be true and real. ↩
  6. For discussion of the peculiar circularity implicated here see Poetic vs Rhetorical Exegesis 1. For the complications of time, see McLuhan’s times in particular and the Time and Times posts in general. For “re-trieval”, note the etymological connection with ‘trouver’ — ‘refinding’, ‘recovering’, ‘re-establishing’. ↩
  7. Leavis in Revaluation. ↩
  8. This is the metaphysical ground for McLuhan’s later statements regarding the already present of the future. ↩
  9. Throughout this passage McLuhan uses ‘poem’ as meaning ‘something real and true’, ‘something self-standing’. ↩
  10. The title of McLuhan’s paper, ‘Poetic vs Rhetorical Exegesis’, derives, of course, from this “irreducible functional distinction” between these two types of exegesis. ↩
  11. “What” is the content of some view or opinion. As such, it begs the question of the propriety of that view or opinion. That is, it begs the question of its reality and truth. ↩
  12. McLuhan is writing throughout of “the critic of poetry” and of “the inevitable dramatic character of poems” (subjective genitives!) . But his point has to do with criticism in general, not only of poems, so “the inevitable dramatic character” characterizes a poem, or  anything at all, which really and truly IS. ↩
  13. Meth-od is from Greek ‘odos, way. ↩
  14. “A Berkleyan idealism or a Darwinian mechanism” = Lodge’s idealism or realism. McLuhan’s point about the “merest whim” between them was made by Lodge as follows: “Both realism and idealism are one-sided. Experience has been split up into two aspects, and then the whole has been interpreted exclusively in terms of one of its aspects. It is all nature, or all mind.” Since the two are isomorphic in this way, their difference turns on “merest whim”. For the passage from Lodge, see The Comparative Method of Rupert Lodge. ↩

Poetic vs Rhetorical Exegesis 1

In McLuhan’s 1944 essay ‘Poetic vs Rhetorical Exegesis: The Case for Leavis against Richards and Empson’1, an involuted set of ideas may be seen which dominated McLuhan’s intellectual life from start to finish — not in a straight line, of course, but as a kind of complex formula persisting through maelstroms and flips.

  • The loss of tradition has left the world rudderless and it is the resulting general confusion that is responsible for our international, social and intra-individual wars.
  • The loss of tradition has resulted first of all from a loss of acuity among what should be our intellectual elite (but in the event we have only the blind leading the blind). This situation can be put right if, and only if, intellectual acuity is regained.
  • Intellectual acuity can be regained because the fundamental dynamic underlying tradition is the two-way fit between right thinking and reality, between acuity and truth, between logos and Logos.2
  • The demand made on acuity (a demand resulting from its nature, on the one hand — acuity demands acuity about acuity3 — and from the extent of our problems, on the other) is to come back from reality, truth and Logos to right thinking, acuity and logos.4 
  • Once this backwards flip to the beginning(s) is realized it must be articulated for “for general recognition and experience”.5

There are two great riddles to these ideas which McLuhan had to solve. First, how does thinking work towards where it must come back from? Second, how does acuity as it ‘sharpens’ itself become more “general” and exoteric rather than more specialized and esoteric? The answer to both riddles is: communication. But it would be 15 years after 1944, when McLuhan was almost 50, before the second became clear to him. And the first continued to elude him (despite his insight into the “gap” and “discontinuity” and the “flip” and “resonance”) just as it has forever eluded everyone else as well.

The journey to/from the beginning(s) is the way, the only way, out of the cul-de-sac in which the world today — the global village with nukes — finds itself. Or loses itself.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning.
(Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, Four Quartets)6

All these ideas and problems may be seen —  articulated, half-articulated. and awaiting articulation — in two passages from the 1944 ‘Poetic vs Rhetorical Exegesis’:

The entire effort of Mr. Leavis has been to realize (…) insight in such a way as to make it available for general recognition and experience among intelligent readers.7 It represents not only a major critical effort but the extension and refinement of sensibility as the very8 mode of critical activity and of discriminatory reading and response.

Leavis (…) without any chance of popular recognition [has been] engaged in executing the program which Mr Eliot (…) indicated but relinquished.9 Just how well he succeeded the reader [McLuhan himself, of course] who has worked for six years with Revaluation is best able to say.

In the wake of Eliot and Leavis, McLuhan took it upon himself “to realize (…) insight” in its “very mode” and to do so in “such a way as to make it available for general recognition and experience”.  Fifteen years later later he would come to see that this was the path the physical sciences had taken and that the “very mode” of insight needed to instigate science in a similar way in the humanities and social was focus on the medium.

  1. Sewanee Review, 52:2, 1944. ↩
  2. McLuhan in ‘James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial’ (1953): “There was a ‘nominalist’ school in antiquity but the main tradition was via the Stoics or analogists for whom speech was a specific level of communication in the divine Logos which distinguished men from brutes.” ↩
  3. Leavis in Revaluation: “It is salutary then, to remind ourselves (…) that (it is in) Keats’s poetry, the poetry he actually wrote (…) in its qualities, in what it actually is, (that there) must reside the chief grounds for a high estimate of his potentialities. So stated, the last proposition would seem to be axiomatic. Yet there is a common tendency to shirk literary criticism; to prefer, where creative genius is in question, some freer and looser approach, as if relevance were an easy matter, and by evading the chief relevant discipline one could attain to delicacy and inwardness.” ↩
  4. The circularity at stake here may be seen in the first sentence of McLuhan’s paper which broaches the need to undertake “a critical journey to the full act of plenary critical judgment”. How “journey” towards what must already be in place? How be “critical” on the way to the “critical”? McLuhan’s last sentence confirms the difficulty by specifying that “the arduous stage of the journey (namely, its beginning) remains to be accomplished”! ↩
  5. McLuhan continues the last sentence of the paper: “the arduous stage of the journey (…) remains to be accomplished before winning an overall view, which is plenary critical judgment”. ↩
  6. ‘Little Gidding’, the last of Four Quartets appeared in 1942. These lines would, then, have been an important aspect of McLuhan’s observation in his essay: “How profoundly Mr. Eliot has since interpreted this dramatic vision of history the reader of Four Quartets need not be told.” ↩
  7. The notion of an intellectual elite of “intelligent readers” that would reinstitute tradition was central to McLuhan from, roughly, 1930 to 1950. Around 1950 he came to see this as a literary idea (along with “discriminatory reading”, “contemplation”, “refinement”, etc) that was imploding in the electric age. But how, then, could tradition be survive and revive? Was it simply gone? Understanding media was his answer to this question, one which came to crystallize for him only around 1960. ↩
  8. “The very mode”, along with many other constructions in McLuhan’s essay implicates ontology — ie, access to, and articulation of, reality. See the etymology of ‘very‘ and ‘‘Poetic vs Rhetorical Exegesis’: a question of ontology. ↩
  9. McLuhan sharply differentiates in his essay between Eliot’s early criticism and his later criticism and between his later criticism and his poetry: “He (Eliot) has ceased to function as a critic (…) (but) since his poetry has in no way suffered from this fact, it can be dismissed as a matter of little consequence.” ↩