Monthly Archives: January 2024

McLuhan and Kenner (the plotline of Dublin’s Joyce)

moving self-consciously from the alone to the alone… 

Kenner’s phrase here (from the first page of chapter 7, Dublin’s Joyce, 95) speaks to his reading of Joyce, but through it, as with a palimpsest, may be read the action of “the permanent mind of Europe” (from the last page of chapter 6, Dublin’s Joyce, 94).

Earlier in Dublin’s Joyce Kenner had compared Joyce with Pope and recalled how that “mind of Europe” with “intellectual traditions running back through St. Augustine to Cicero and Homer” now “entered the (…) night-world”:1 

If we want an English analogue for Joyce, it is Pope; their orientations and procedures are surprisingly similar. Pope is conscious of intellectual traditions running back through St. Augustine to Cicero and Homer; and the universal darkness that he predicted at the end of the Dunciad fell exactly as he foretold; the mind of Europe entered the Romantic night-world. (Dublin’s Joyce, 23) 

Here is the passage in Pope from the end of the 1725 Dunciad:

She comes! she comes! the sable Throne behold
Of Night Primaeval, and of Chaos old!
Before her, Fancy’s gilded clouds decay,
And all its varying Rain-bows die away.
Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires,
The meteor drops, and in a flash expires.
As one by one, at dread Medea’s strain,
The sick’ning stars fade off th’ethereal plain;
As Argus’ eyes by Hermes’ wand opprest,
Clos’d one by one to everlasting rest;
Thus at her felt approach, and secret might,
Art after Art goes out, and all is Night.
See skulking Truth to her old Cavern fled,
While the Great Mother bids Britannia sleep,
And pours her Spirit o’er the Land and Deep.
She comes! she comes! The Gloom rolls on,
Mountains of Casuistry heap’d o’er her head!
Philosophy, that lean’d on Heav’n before,
Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more.
Physic of Metaphysic begs defence,
And Metaphysic calls for aid on Sense!
See Mystery to Mathematics fly!
In vain! they gaze, turn giddy, rave, and die.
Religion blushing veils her sacred fires,
And unawares Morality expires.
Nor public Flame, nor private, dares to shine;
Nor human Spark is left, nor Glimpse divine!
Lo! thy dread Empire, CHAOS! is restor’d;
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And Universal Darkness buries All.

McLuhan ended his unpublished Typhon in America,2 written at a time in the late 1940s when he and Kenner were in intense communication, with this passage. The last sentence of his typescript runs:

In this darkness we must learn to see.

Around 15 years later, he ended The Gutenberg Galaxy3 with this same passage from Pope but with a changed summary sentence:

This is the Night from which Joyce invites the Finnegans to wake.

Compare Kenner:

In Finnegans Wake (…) Joyce reversed for the western world that current that has flowed from Milton’s exile-myth4 into the romantic night-world.5 (Dublin’s Joyce, 90)

McLuhan’s revision in the Gutenberg Galaxy to reference Joyce and FW does indeed seem to have come about through the reconsideration he made of Joyce in the late 1940s together with Kenner.6 On the other leg he hand, Kenner’s reading of Joyce, as it came to be formulated over the decade leading to Dublin’s Joyce in 1955, owed to McLuhan this plotline of “the mind of Europe enter[ing] the (…) night-world”.7 The great question was, how to go from an isolated perspective — “moving self-consciously from the alone to the alone” (Dublin’s Joyce, 95) — to the common life of Dublin and doublin?8

This plotline goes back in “the permanent mind of Europe” at least to Plato, and arguably to Parmenides and Heraclitus. The central question is, again, how is thinking to break from captivity in “the alone to the alone” and instead join itself with the ‘common world’ (κόσμος κοινός)?

An abysmal circularity is implicated here, since joining is an act of ‘bringing together’ and cannot even be attempted unless the possibility of it is already at hand. But how to get to what is already at hand, especially when a start has long since been made elsewhere with what is equally but fundamentally differently also at hand? Having started with the ‘alone’, how start again with another possibility? Especially with another possibility that is hardly known or even utterly unknown?

A peculiar kind of backwards somersault through the dark is required — a Gestalt switch or paradigm shift in accord with which the action of mind is to be reordered from the start (at a time when it has already started, and been deeply ordered, elsewise).

In “the permanent mind of Europe” it was just such a break with linearity that Plato’s ‘dialectic’ aimed, if not to accomplish — for to accomplish would privilege a student’s chain of thought and the point was to break with that chain, certainly not to reinforce it. Instead, a new start was to be prompted through such a backward break — to ‘occasion’ it somehow.

Dublin’s Joyce traces one more attempt in the action of “the mind of Europe”, this time by Joyce, to relocate itself to where it already is.

τοῦ λόγου δὲ ἐόντος ξυνοῦ ζώουσιν οἱ πολλοί ὡς ἰδίαν ἔχοντες φρόνησιν
Heraclitus DK B29

Although logos is common to all, the many live as if they had a wisdom of their own.

Although the logos is shared, most men live as though their thinking were a private possession

τοῖς ἐγρηγορόσιν ἕνα καὶ κοινὸν κόσμον εἶναι τῶν δὲ κοιμωμένων ἕκαστον εἰς ἴδιον ἀποστρέφεσθαι
Heraclitus DK B89

The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own.

The waking have one world in common; sleepers have each a private world of his own.

 

  1. Kenner writes of “the Romantic night-world”. But this threatens to place in an historic era what is a “permanent” possibility. Or did Kenner consider “the Romantic” a “permanent” possibility which the Romantic age may have particularly realized, though not exclusively? ↩
  2. See Typhon/Minotaur/Dionysus parallels. ↩
  3. The Gutenberg Galaxy book, as opposed to ‘The Gutenberg Galaxy’ main section of the book, has a kind of appendix, ‘The Galaxy Reconfigured’. But that McLuhan considered ‘Pope’s Dunciad’ (pages 255-263 of GG) to be the chief conclusion of The Gutenberg Galaxy follows from the inclusion of this section of GG in The Interior Landscape in 1969. ↩
  4. Kenner’s phrase “Milton’s exile-myth” recalls his quotation a few pages before from William Empson’s Some Versions of Pastoral: “Milton uses (the myth) to give every action a nightmare importance, to hold every instant before the searchlight of the conscious will. It is a terrific fancy, the Western temper at its height; the insane disproportion of the act to its effects implies a vast zest for heroic action.” Kenner comments: “Joyce chose to construct his drama (around) beings inadequate to the Miltonic holding of every instant before the searchlight of the conscious will. He chose that image because it was the inadequacy of that formulation to mankind that he sought to display”. (Dublin’s Joyce, 88-89) ↩
  5. With “the romantic night-world” Kenner is referring to Pope’s Dunciad. As cited above from Dublin’s Joyce, 23: ” the universal darkness that (Pope) predicted at the end of the Dunciad fell exactly as he foretold; the mind of Europe entered the romantic night-world.” ↩
  6. This is not to say that that revision itself came from Kenner! Although Dublin’s Joyce appeared in 1955, seven years before the 1962 Gutenberg Galaxy, the latter had been under construction since at least 1952. It is entirely possible, therefore, that the impetus here came from McLuhan and not from Kenner. ↩
  7. Dublin’s Joyce does not have only a single plotline. Kenner’s own plotline follows Joyce through two “cycles” of the Aristotelian lyric-epic-drama progression: Chamber Music, Dubliners, Exiles; Portrait, Ulysses, FW. Against this, McLuhan had became fascinated with the epyllion or “little epic” form after encountering it in the work of Eric Havelock in the mid 1940s. (For discussion see The Road to Xanadu.) This cut across Kenner’s progression of genres. In his 1960 ‘Tennyson and the Romantic Epic’ McLuhan referred succinctly to “the little epic fusion of lyric, epic, and dramatic”. Here was not only a further complicating genre, but also a whole different notion of time. (For detailed exposition see McLuhan’s Times.) ↩
  8. Doublin’ is the action of participation in the ‘common world’ (κόσμος κοινός). Using a phrase from Jacques Maritain, Kenner describes Dublin as “the world of generality” (Dublin’s Joyce, 88). ↩
  9. This is one of the two epigraphs from Heraclitus to Eliot’s Four Quartets. Kenner has recorded in regard to McLuhan and himself in the late 1940s: “the passion (…) with which we two (…) studied Eliot! We penciled notes on the yellow postwar paper of a Faber Four Quartets.” (1985 ‘Preface’ to the reprinting of Kenner’s The Poetry of Ezra Pound from 1951.) ↩

McLuhan and Kenner (Dublin’s Joyce, chap 6)

Kenner’s long chapter 6 treats Joyce’s Exiles…

Exiles frees Joyce from Ibsen (…) whose (…) pseudo-rigours of revolt had for some years compromised a portion of his spirit. The repudiation of the Norwegian (…) is explicit. (Dublin’s Joyce, 69)

Kenner’s Joyce thinks progressively against himself though his fiction:

The artist lives in two worlds, the world he understands and the world his characters understand (…) he defines the former by disdaining the latter… (Dublin’s Joyce, 75)

“Naturalism”, as Joyce saw instantly, is an essentially ambivalent convention. It parades an ironic obsession with what the characters see in order to express what they ignore. (Dublin’s Joyce, 76)

Joyce’s works are read by Kenner as stages of liberation from “worlds” that make equally for limited art and limited polity — limited polity at all levels from that of the soul to that of the city.1 In this way “worlds” are conceived as in “battle” with one another and growth in art or life amounts to turns or shifts in that battle. The thought goes back at least to Plato, but the imagery goes back to wars of the gods in mythology that was already ancient in Plato’s time and was frequently represented on the most important Greek temples like the Parthenon in Athens and the Altar of Zeus at Pergamon.  

The theme of Exiles is Richard’s agon2 (Dublin’s Joyce, 85)

[in Exiles] Robert Hand (…) proposes to Richard (…) “a battle of (…) souls (…) against all that is false in them and in the world”:
“All life is a conquest, the victory of human passion over the commandments of cowardice. Will you, Richard? Have you the courage? (…) The blinding instant of passion alone — passion, free, unashamed, irresistible — that is the only gate by which we can escape from the misery of what slaves call life.” (Dublin’s Joyce, 70)

Two matters are fused here which must be detached from one another and considered separately. There is the “agon“, the “battle of (…) souls (…) against all that is false in them and in the world”; and there is “the blinding instant of passion (…) that is the only gate by which we can escape”. Joyce’s language is precise. The “instant of passion alone” is “blinding” in multiple senses. It succeeds, so far as it succeeds, only because it is “blinding”. The claim is that it exactly thereby achieves the “conquest” and “victory” in the aforesaid “battle of (…) souls”. The “battle” is to be won by being put one-sidedly to rest by “escape” through “the only gate” of “the blinding instant of passion alone“.

But the notion that “blinding” can represent “victory” in the “battle of (…) souls” in this way is itself blinding. It does not see that this supposed resolution of the battle does not work in multiple respects — respects Kenner describes Joyce at work recognizing and rejecting in Exiles. And yet it remains very much with us as McLuhan unsuccessfully attempted to explain to Norman Mailer, a modern champion of this “only gate”.

Joyce always weighs the parody against the parody. (Dublin’s Joyce, 70)

That is, he insists that the battle actually be a battle. All “worlds” are to be retained for investigation and the resulting information they exhibit. No world is simply to be cancelled. Further, strictures applied against any one world must be applied against all, “parody against (…) parody”.

We must not be misled (…) into supposing that this [talk of “the sea, music and death”] is any less “faded green plush” than the armchairs of the (…) drawing-room. Ibsen imagined talk like this to be an absolute and a defiance of the drawing-room. Joyce exhibits them as continuous modes. (Dublin’s Joyce, 71)

“Continuous” here means that the “worlds” at stake must not be lifted somehow out of the “battle of (…) souls” through some or other “gate”. They must be left in contesting “agon” with each other. In this context, Joyce found cant as much in existential declaration as in drawing-room cocktail conversation. The test was always how open was any such “world” to the complex real.

Joyce the citizen-exile confronting the dual Dublin, the Dublin of “sordid and deceptive details” and that of civic intelligibility (…) had “all but decided to consider the two worlds as aliens to one another”. (Dublin’s Joyce, 72-73, citing Stephen Hero)3

The real consists ineluctably of multiple “worlds”, both collectively and individually, and the great question concerns the relations of these worlds. When they are conceived exclusively as “aliens to one another”, any resolution of their antagonism will necessarily be one-sided. Since there is no middle that could account for the orchestration of their plurality, a solution to their “battle” can lie only in their dissolution into some variety of supervening singularity.

Conversely, “in his best work, Ibsen achieved ‘the syllogism of art’, the mediation between the two worlds“. (Dublin’s Joyce, 75)

Kenner is very much alive to the differing ratios “between (…) worlds” and to their present or absent mediations accounting for those differences: 

A few weeks after his eighteenth birthday [Joyce] published in the Fortnightly Review (April 1, 1900) an account of [Ibsen’s] recently-issued When We Dead Awaken; the opening paean indicates how, in his4 mind, the stress came to fall: “Seldom, if at all, has he consented to join battle with his enemies. It would appear as if the storm of fierce debate rarely broke in upon his wonderful calm. The conflicting voices have not influenced his work in the very smallest degree.”5 (Dublin’s Joyce, 74)

The “battle” of “debate” between “conflicting voices” and differing “worlds” had been put to rest by Ibsen in a “wonderful calm”. This is achieved through a displacement of emphasis — how “the stress came to fall” — between voices and worlds. Ibsen’s solution, admired by the young Joyce, was to move “stress” from multiple “worlds as alien to one another” to “only” one singular world “alone”. The “battle” was to be stilled in a singularizing move Kenner designates as “the vehemence of uneasiness”. (Dublin’s Joyce, 75)

In his 6 March, 1901 letter to Ibsen Joyce was explicit:

“how your battles inspired me — not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead, how your willful resolution to wrest the secret from life gave me heart and how in your absolute indifference to public canons of art, friends, and shibboleths you walked in the light of your inward heroism.” (Dublin’s Joyce, 74)

There is an essential parallel between the agon of the individual soul and the artist’s ‘use of words’. Each requires (but seldom acknowledges) what Kenner treats as “the syllogism of art, the mediation between the two worlds” (Dublin’s Joyce, 75):

[In Exiles] Joyce chose to construct his drama of beings inadequate to the Miltonic holding of every instant before the searchlight of the conscious will. He chose that image because it was the inadequacy of that formulation to mankind that he sought to display, not just the inadequacy of mankind to the formulation. (…) The battle that Robert proposes to Richard is irrelevant to the context of their plight. It is not “a victory of human passion over (…) cowardice” that will solve their exile. It is not (…) cowardice that inhibits a repetition of the act of love. The conventional marriage into which Bertha and Richard are settling down is not a retreat but as much of a fulfilment as is allowed. As the family, so the City. The City is not a refuge from the demands of alert living but the context of meaningful life. (Dublin’s Joyce, 89-90)

Kenner closes his chapter on Exiles with a summary of his reading of Joyce’s progress through the play:

Hence Joyce drew off the rebellious heroics and cast them as a running sub-plot to his later works: first Richard Rowan, then Stephen Dedalus, then Shem the Penman; a metamorphosis of sham personae containing and controlling all the errors implicit in the relation between Dublin and its “liberated” victim. These figures, impurities from the chemical process to which the artist was submitting Dublin, prove to be of permanent interest, just as Dublin is; the emancipated victim is not only the nineteenth-century tragic hero, he [also] has affinities, through Prometheus and Oedipus, with the permanent mind of Europe. That is why Joyce directed so much labour to the purification of what he had taken from Ibsen. Ibsen was both a catalyst and a heresiarch: a warning. He understood as did no one else in his time the burden of the dead past and the wastefulness of any attempt to give it spurious life:6 his “I think we are sailing with a corpse in the cargo!” corresponds to Stephen Dedalus’ apprehension of the nightmare of history from which H. C. Earwicker strains to awake. But he had never known, and could not know amid the frontier vacuum of the fiords, the traditions of the European community of richly-nourished life; and the lonely starvation of his ideal of free personal affinity in no context save that of intermingling wills inspired Joyce with [both] a fascination that generated Exiles and a repulsion that found its objective correlative when Leopold Bloom, reversing Gabriel Conroy’s lust for snow,7 shuddered beneath “the apathy of the stars”, U 719/694. (Dublin’s Joyce, 93-94)

Bloom, “reversing Gabriel Conroy’s lust for snow”, is yet “continuous” (Dublin’s Joyce, 71) with him. The demand is thus set for a depiction of the City as “the mediation between the two worlds” (Dublin’s Joyce, 75), where a “battle of (…) souls” can play itself out in, or as, “the context of meaningful life”. (Dublin’s Joyce, 90)

Ibsen confused the impercipient inertia of much human conduct with the matrix of convention and artifice in which social and familial relationships are necessarily enacted. (Dublin’s Joyce, 72)

The guidance of a habitual communal order is not an evasion but a human necessity. (Dublin’s Joyce, 87)

 

  1. The central question at stake in these Dublin’s Joyce posts may be put: how far did Kenner’s account of Joyce’s liberation help to spark McLuhan’s liberation from “moralist” to “student”? Further clarification of this question depends upon an investigation of the stages undergone by Kenner’s Joyce book between its initiation in the mid 1940s to its eventual publication as Dublin’s Joyce in 1955. See note 1 to McLuhan and Kenner (Dublin’s Joyce, chap 1. ↩
  2. Kenner continues here concerning the other characters in Exiles: “Robert, Beatrice, and Bertha may be said to exist to explicate aspects of his (Richard’s agonistic) mode of being and phases of his plight”. ↩
  3. Stephen Hero has ‘detail’, not Kenner’s  ‘details’ and ‘one to another’, not Kenner’s ‘to one another’. ↩
  4. Whose mind is this? Ibsen’s? Joyce’s? Both? ↩
  5. In a note in regard to Joyce learning Norwegian to read Ibsen in the original, Kenner references Muriel Bradbrook’s Ibsen the Norwegian. (Dublin’s Joyce, 74n) Now Bradbrook was a friend and sometime advisor of McLuhan dating back to his undergraduate years in Cambridge a decade before Kenner and McLuhan met in 1946. This reference to Bradbrook would certainly have come from McLuhan. Similarly, Kenner’s thoughts on Sigfried Giedion’s Mechanization Takes Command (Dublin’s Joyce, 76) would have been prompted by McLuhan. Giedion and McLuhan had been acquainted and in correspondence since 1943. And McLuhan reviewed Mechanization Takes Command in 1949 in Hudson Review, where Kenner was also publishing at the time. ↩
  6. Kenner’s Joyce with its emphasis on an imperfect yet best-we-are-allowed sociality may have worked with Corinne McLuhan’s 1946 conversion to suggest the brittleness of McLuhan’s Catholicism to that point. Corinne’s conversion would certainly not have been so ‘theological’ as his own 10 years before. Whatever the complicated motivation, McLuhan’s ‘second conversion‘ from “moralist” to “student” took place in this 1946-1951 period. ↩
  7. This “lust for snow” from the last sentence of the chapter returns to its first sentence: “Gabriel Conroy (from ‘The Dead’ in Dubliners) yearned for the snows. Exiles — an austere ungarnished play — inspects that pseudo-liberation; its Richard Rowan is a Gabriel Conroy liberated by Ibsen.” Kenner seems to have in mind the transition from a pseudo-liberation in what is “yearned for” to its possession — however much dispossession might be implicated in that possession. And however much such a liberation turns out itself to be one more pseudo-liberation. Here is Kenner’s description of Ibsen’s ‘liberation’: “Ibsen unbound Prometheus by dismissing all human bonds as sentiment. The myth that contains his life-work was projected in a (1859) poem, ‘On the Vidda’ (…) In the poem a young man from the valley (…) is visited on holiday in the mountain uplands (the Vidda) by a strange hunter ‘with cold eyes like mountain lakes’ who induces him to stay (…) The youth takes to heart this lesson in detachment. (…) ‘Self-steeled he looks on at joy (in the valley) from above life’s snow-line. The Strange Hunter reappears and tells him he is now free’…” (Dublin’s Joyce, 78). ↩

Chaos and confusion in 1948

McLuhan wrote a short ‘Introduction’ — ‘Where Chesterton Comes In’ — to Hugh Kenner’s 1948 Paradox in Chesterton. It is an interesting document in many respects,1 not least in the context of McLuhan’s conversion from “moralist” to “student” over the course of his first 5 years at the University of Toronto (1946-1951).2 That McLuhan’s mind was in painful flux at the time3 can be seen in his fixation in the piece on “chaos” and “confusion”:

  • The specific contemporary relevance of Chesterton is this, that his metaphysical intuition of being was always in the service of the search for moral and political order in the current chaos. He was a Thomist by connaturality with being, not by study of St. Thomas. And unlike the neo-Thomists his unfailing sense of the relevance of the analogy of being directed his intellectual gaze not to the schoolmen but to the heart of the chaos of our time.
  • That is where Chesterton comes in. His unfailing sense of relevance and of the location of the heart of the contemporary chaos carried him at all times to attack the problem of morals and psychology. He was always in the practical order.4 It is important, therefore, that (…) the reader (…) feel Chesterton’s powerful intrusion into every kind of confused moral and psychological issue of our time.
  • It is time to abandon the literary and journalistic Chesterton (…) to see him as a master of analogical perception and argument who never failed to focus a high degree of moral wisdom on the most confused issues of our age.

It might seem that McLuhan was reacting to the immediate post-WW2 world which had seen the first use of atomic weapons and the accelerating “mechanization” of all aspects of life. He writes of “the current chaos”, “the chaos of our time” and the “confused issues of our age”. But he goes on to write of “the universal confusion” and, indeed, as his Introduction proceeds it emerges that all the times he considers were chaotic and confused as well:

  • St. Thomas was sustained by a great psychological and social order in an age of dialectical confusion.
  • Shakespeare wrote when this great symbolic and psychological synthesis [of the middle ages] was really destroyed.
  • What Descartes really did was to make explicit the fact which had been prepared by centuries of decadent scholastic rationalism: the fact that a complete divorce had been achieved between abstract intellectual and specifically psychological order.  Henceforth men would seek intellectually only for the kind of order they could readily achieve by rationalistic means: a mathematical and mechanistic order which precludes a human and psychological order. Ethics and politics were abandoned as much as metaphysics. But both society and philosophy were in a state of great confusion by the time this desperate strategy was adopted. Since the time of Descartes (…) moral, psychological, and political chaos has steadily developed, with its concurrent crop of fear and anger and hate.
  • that world of adult horror into which Baudelaire gazed with intense suffering and humility.

‘Universal confusion’ results from the constant exposure of the world to a foundational ‘untuning’ — a kind of underlying continental drift that always threatens individual and social order. As he was often to continue to do in his later work,5 McLuhan brings Shakespeare forward to witness his point:

The heavens themselves, the planets and this centre
Observe degree, priority and place,
Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,
Office and custom, in all line of order.6

Shakespeare’s rich passage is cited unbroken (though with some omissions) in McLuhan’s piece. But it will be separated into segments here to highlight the movement between its parts.

O, when degree is shak’d,
Which is the ladder of all high designs,
The enterprise is sick!

For:

How could communities,
(…)7
But by degree, stand in authentic place?

And then:

Take but degree away, untune that string
(…)8
Then everything includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself. (Troilus and Cressida, 1:3)

Against this background of chaos and universal confusion, McLuhan’s Introduction has two short sentences which look ahead to the course he will come to take for the rest of his life:

The artist offers us not a [conceptual] system but a world. An inner world is explored and developed and then projected as an object. 

‘World’ is used here in 2 different senses. There is a new world of experience which “the artist offers us” in an artwork. And there is the “inner world” — the ‘interior landscape’ as McLuhan will later say — through which that artwork is “developed and then projected”.

He was on his way to seeing, as a “student”, that no “moralist” position can hold out by dint of force against other positions held on the same basis.9 Indeed, the “chaos” of only forcibly held positions is the “universal confusion”. It followed, as he did not yet see clearly, that the only way to confront “moral, psychological, and political chaos” was through the collective scientific investigation of all experience without exception. And this, as he would shortly come to understand, by 1951 at the latest, was possible only through examination of just how that “inner world is explored and developed and then projected as an object” — not only in artistic production but in all cognition whatsoever. 

Here he is to 1951, on the other side of his ‘second conversion’ in ‘The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry’:

Helped by Rimbaud and Mallarmé, Joyce arrived quickly at the formula of the aesthetic moment and its attendant landscape as consisting in a retracing of the stages of ordinary apprehension. The poetic process he discovered and states in Stephen Hero is the experience of ordinary cognition, but it is that labyrinth reversed, retraced, and hence epiphanized. 

Every “object” in the artifactual order, whether of artistic production or “ordinary apprehension”, was to be treated as an “effect” — an “effect” of some “creative (…) reconstruction” carried out through exploration in the “inner world” or “interior landscape”. Again in ‘The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry’:

This secret [generative action both of art and of “ordinary apprehension”] consists in nothing less than a fusion of the learning and the creative processes…

All experience is momentary, it is generated moment by moment through a “learning” process (where the range of possibilities ‘before’ it are cognized) followed by a ‘creative’ process (where some one possibility is selected and “developed” out of that range). Compare in language use where moment by moment some particular word with some particular grammar is selected and uttered (outered) out of all the possible words and grammatical markers that might have been “developed”. In both cases, these processes are, of course, largely unconscious. And the time of these “processes” is not horizontal and chronological, it is vertical and synchronic.10 But in the potential consciousness of these unconscious processes is to be dis-covered, according to McLuhan, the possibility of a new science and, with it, the resulting possibility of exoteric orientation — one no longer esoteric via willful insistence.11

In the unpublished Typhon in America,12 dating from this same 1947-1948 period, having quoted Pope how “Universal Darkness buries All”,13 McLuhan concludes his manuscript with this admonition:

In this darkness we must learn to see.

Similarly in The Gutenberg Galaxy, 15 years later, having cited the same passage from Pope, he then immediately concludes:

This is the Night from which Joyce invites the Finnegans to wake.

Another decade later still, at the end of Take Today (297):

For the best part of a century, we have been programming human consciousness with retrievals and replays of the tribal unconscious. The complementary of this process would seem to be the natural program for the period ahead: programming the unconscious with the recently achieved forms of consciousness. This procedure would evoke a new form of consciousness.

In his Playboy Interview McLuhan spoke in the same way of the need “to grope toward a consciousness of the unconscious”. This “new form of consciousness” would serve, as he said in the same interview, for a “survival strategy”.

 

  1. Other contexts implicated in the document include McLuhan’s relations with Kenner and Fr Gerald Phelan and McLuhan’s Thomism. Of course all these different aspects are closely related with one another. ↩
  2. “For many years, until I wrote my first book, The Mechanical Bride (published in 1951, but largely written by 1948), I adopted an extremely moralistic approach (…) But gradually I perceived how sterile and useless this attitude was (…) I ceased being a moralist and became a student.” (Playboy interview, 1969) ↩
  3. McLuhan to Walter Ong, Jan 23, 1953, Letters, 234: “After 5 years of miserable health I am suddenly recovered and full of energy again.” ↩
  4. Indicating a continuity in McLuhan’s concerns, his first published paper from 1936, more than a decade before his Introduction to Kenner’s book, emphasized Chesterton’s commitment to “the practical order” in its title: ‘G.K. Chesterton: A Practical Mystic’. ↩
  5. See Through the vanishing point 2 – Shakespeare. ↩
  6. Omitted by McLuhan here:
    And therefore is the glorious planet Sol
    In noble eminence enthroned and sphered
    Amidst the other; whose medicinable eye
    Corrects the ill aspects of planets evil,
    And posts like the commandment of a king,
    Sans check to good and bad: but when the planets
    In evil mixture to disorder wander,
    What plagues and what portents, what mutiny,
    What raging of the sea, shaking of earth,
    Commotion in the winds, frights, changes, horrors,
    Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
    The unity and married calm of states
    Quite from their fixture! ↩
  7. McLuhan includes the following lines here:
    Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities,
    Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
    The primogenitive and due of birth,
    Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels. ↩
  8. Here McLuhan strangely omits the great lines from Shakespeare:
    And hark what discord follows! Each thing melts
    In mere oppugnancy.
    When he cited the same passage again in The Gutenberg Galaxy, these lines were retained and, indeed, emphasized. ↩
  9. See note 11 below. ↩
  10. See McLuhan’s times. ↩
  11. Here is Joyce in his 6 March, 1901, letter to Ibsen: “how your battles inspired me — not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead, how your wilful resolution to wrest the secret from life gave me heart” (Dublin’s Joyce, 74). Such “wilful resolution” is where both Joyce and McLuhan came from. (Kenner has ‘wilful’ in his citation of the letter, but other transcriptions have ‘willful’.) ↩
  12. See Typhon/Minotaur/Dionysus parallels. ↩
  13. McLuhan cites the same passage from Pope’s 1725 Dunciad in Typhon in America and in The Gutenberg Galaxy:
    She comes! she comes! the sable Throne behold
    Of Night Primaeval, and of Chaos old!
    Before her, Fancy’s gilded clouds decay,
    And all its varying Rain-bows die away.
    Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires,
    The meteor drops, and in a flash expires.
    As one by one, at dread Medea’s strain,
    The sick’ning stars fade off th’ethereal plain;
    As Argus’ eyes by Hermes’ wand opprest,
    Clos’d one by one to everlasting rest;
    Thus at her felt approach, and secret might,
    Art after Art goes out, and all is Night.
    See skulking Truth to her old Cavern fled,
    While the Great Mother bids Britannia sleep,
    And pours her Spirit o’er the Land and Deep.
    She comes! she comes! The Gloom rolls on,
    Mountains of Casuistry heap’d o’er her head!
    Philosophy, that lean’d on Heav’n before,
    Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more.
    Physic of Metaphysic begs defence,
    And Metaphysic calls for aid on Sense!
    See Mystery to Mathematics fly!
    In vain! they gaze, turn giddy, rave, and die.
    Religion blushing veils her sacred fires,
    And unawares Morality expires.
    Nor public Flame, nor private, dares to shine;
    Nor human Spark is left, nor Glimpse divine!
    Lo! thy dread Empire, CHAOS! is restor’d;
    Light dies before thy uncreating word:
    Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
    And Universal Darkness buries All. ↩

McLuhan and Kenner (Dublin’s Joyce, chap 5)

Kenner’s chapter 5 treats Dubliners and does so mostly through textual commentary.

The human cogs and levers of the story [‘Counterparts’] whirr and jerk as the rebuke administered by the employer passes through them and emerges at the other end as the flailing of a cane on the thighs of a small boy. (Dublin’s Joyce, 57)

In 1968 McLuhan wrote a review of Erich Fromm, The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology (Book World, November 10, 1968). It was titled, ‘Noble Purpose but to What End?’ But the original title of McLuhan’s review, perhaps rejected by Book World, seems to have been: ‘Ye Shall Be As Cogs’.

Its1 layers of meaning are numerous. It is the paralysis of the City, at one level; the rhythm of the Dubliners’ lives rises to no festivity and is sustained by no community; (…) It is the paralysis of the person, at another level, though it is seldom evident that these persons are so circumstanced that they might have chosen differently. But at the most important level it is metaphysical…

McLuhan reverted to “layers of meaning” over and over again his work — see Multi-levels of simultaneous presentation.

But at the most important level it is metaphysical: the Exiles are exiled from the garden, and the key to their plight, as Finnegans Wake brings forward, is the Fall. (…) As the Rev. Walter Ong has written (…) “the great fiction of the West: the self-possessed man in the self-possessed world, the fiction which seeks to erase all sense of plight, of confusing weakness, from man’s consciousness, and which above all will never admit such a sense as a principle of operation.”2 (…) It is precisely this fiction of self-containment that Joyce defines in successively more elaborate images, from Mr Duffy’s careful control over every detail of life through the tightly-bounded ethical world of Exiles and Stephen’s “All or not at all” to HCE’s solipsistic nightmare. What beats against all these people is the evidence of otherness3…. (Dublin’s Joyce, 59-60)

Shared insight into some such vision of the Fall may have been one of the commonalities that drew McLuhan and Kenner closely together for 5 Years or so after they met in 1946. In the 30 years remaining to McLuhan’s life, they would never be close again. McLuhan thought Kenner used many of his ideas without attribution and, worse, without entirely understanding them. This grated in multiple ways especially given Kenner’s increasing influence as a critic which rapidly outpaced McLuhan’s. But McLuhan’s deepest disappointment was surely that Kenner might have been that colleague through whom collective work on a ‘new science’ could have begun — but didn’t. And this was no question of academic reputation but one of the greatest possible practical significance:

Today with the revelation of the poetic process which is involved in ordinary cognition we stand on a very different threshold4 from that wherein Machiavelli stood. His was a door into negation and human weakness. Ours is the door to the positive powers of the human spirit in its natural creativity. This door opens on to psychic powers comparable to the physical powers made available via nuclear fission and fusion. Through this door men have seen a possible path to the totalitarian remaking of human nature. Machiavelli showed us the way to a new circle of the Inferno. Knowledge of the creative process in art, science, and cognition shows us the way either to the earthly paradise or to complete madness. It is to be either the top of Mount Purgatory or the abyss. (Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, 1954)

Walter Ong, SJ, was one of McLuhan’s students In the early 1940s at St Louis University and a good friend. Ong’s work and perhaps Ong himself would have been introduced to Kenner by McLuhan. Quoting Ong concerning self-possession as a “principle of operation” (McLuhan’s ‘technical means’ or ‘medium’) may be taken as a disguised acknowledgement of McLuhan’s contribution to Dublin’s Joyce beyond what Kenner openly avows:

Dr. H. M. McLuhan of the University of Toronto has permitted me free use of his unpublished History of the Trivium, on which my thirteenth chapter depends heavily, and afforded the continual stimulus of letters and conversation. (Dublin’s Joyce, vii)5

McLuhan and Ong (and others at SLU) would long have discussed the “fiction of self-containment” of human beings, indeed of being itself. This is the deep background to the subtitle of the 1964 Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. ‘The Extensions of Man’ is a dual genitive, but it is first of all an objective genitive. Humankind in all the myriad forms of its expression is the product or effect of media extensions beginning with language itself. Considered as a subjective genitive, in contrast, where extensions would belong to humans, ‘The Extensions of Man‘ define “the great fiction of the West: the self-possessed man in the self-possessed world” — the Fall itself. The unprecedented dangers of modernity derive from this confusion between genitives, which is equally a confused inversion between figure and ground. The figure of humankind arrogates itself to ground and consigns to figure and terrible use that very extension through which it is.

Kenner brings out the point through Joyce’s implied contrast of Dubliners at Mass with Dante’s vision in the last canto of the Com-media:

The gentlemen sat in the benches, having hitched their trousers slightly above their knees and laid their hats in security. They sat well back and gazed formally at the distant speck of red light which was suspended before the high altar. D219/195
O abbondante grazia, ond’ io presunsi
ficcar lo viso per la luce eterna
tanto che la veduta vi consunsi!6 (Dublin’s Joyce, 62)

Whereas “the gentlemen (…) gazed formally at the distant speck”, consuming it within the form of their gaze, hence its distance, Dante’s gaze is itself taken up by “la luce eterna” — “la forma universal”.

 

  1. Kenner seems to be referring to Joyce’s work in general here, but particularly to ‘A Painful Case’ in Dubliners. ↩
  2. Walter Ong, SJ, ‘Kafka’s Castle in the West’, Thought, September 1947, 439-460. ↩
  3. Kenner elaborates: “Man so constituted (…) cannot afford to give, since giving recognizes the fact of otherness, of a portion of being neither susceptible to his control nor violable to his gaze; this works out alike between man and man, and between man and God” (Dublin’s Joyce, 60). ↩
  4. The threshold is the same but the access it gives is to 2 fundamentally different ways. The Machiavelli way was one of fission. The other way of “the positive powers of the human spirit in its natural creativity”, one of fusion. ↩
  5. Some of this acknowledgement is repeated later in the book: “The documentation behind this exceedingly compressed account (of ‘The Trivium in Dublin’) was collected by Prof. H. M. McLuhan in his unpublished History of the Trivium, which he has generously placed at my disposal. (Dublin’s Joyce, 223n) McLuhan’s actual contribution to Kenner’s life (such as his job for 2 years at Assumption College taking McLuhan’s place, or his PhD work at Yale which McLuhan arranged through his close friend, Cleanth Brooks) and thought was much greater than this. And his potential contribution greater yet. ↩
  6. Dante’s vision is given by Kenner, but only (only!) implied by Joyce. ↩

McLuhan and Kenner (Dublin’s Joyce, chap 4)

Chapter 4 of Hugh Kenner’s Dublin’s Joyce is named ‘Dedalus Abolished’ and the whole first section of the book, chapters 1-7, is titled ‘Icarus’ after Daedalus’ son.1 McLuhan’s unpublished book-length typescript, Typhon in America, dating to 1947-1948, has this style of chapter headings from Bacon’s 1609 Wisdom of the Ancients, and its first two books (of three) have titles from the Daedalus-Minotaur cycle.2 There can be little question that Kenner took this manner of naming, not to say the topic itself, from McLuhan.

One of the epigraphs for Kenner’s chapter is from FW 344:

his face glows green, his hair greys white, his bleyes bcome broon to suite his cultic twalette (Dublin’s Joyce, 1955, 36)

McLuhan would later cite Joyce’s “cultic twalette” over and over again as a kind of Leitmotif for a Celtic style of Romantic ‘integrity’, Kenner’s “lyrical dream” (39).3 Kenner in the late 1940s was doubtless responsible for turning McLuhan to Joyce, or back to Joyce, at a time when he, McLuhan, was wrestling also with a whole series of other new interests: Harold Innis, Eric Havelock, the epyllion, Mallarmé, cybernetics, Giedion’s Mechanism Takes Command, Pound (again through, or at least with, Kenner), Eisenstein — and so on. By 1951, when he turned 40, he would emerge from this multiple confrontation a new man, a “student” rather than a “moralist”:4

For many years, until I wrote my first book, The Mechanical Bride [published in 1951, but largely written by 1948], I adopted an extremely moralistic approach (…) But gradually I perceived how sterile and useless this attitude was (…) I ceased being a moralist and became a student. (Playboy interview)

Compare, as broached below, the time of what Kenner calls Joyce’s “pain of depersonalization”, his “maturation” as “dissociation”.

After its epigraphs, Kenner’s chapter begins with a number of passages taken from Yeats’ The Tables of the Law from 1896.5 The first of these passages has:

I shall create a world where the whole lives of men shall be articulated and simplified as if seventy years were but one moment, or as if they were the leaping of a fish or the opening of a flower.6 (Dublin’s Joyce, 36)

This passage captures, and must indeed have helped to suggest, McLuhan’s notion of the momentary genesis of human experience as “articulated” artifact and effect. The idea is that every moment of human being (verbal, not nominal) is generated through a confrontation with the full range of the “potencies”7 of that being8 — a range which McLuhan found formulated in Yeats’ 1903 Emotion of Multitude as the background chorus in Greek tragedy “which called up famous sorrows, even all the gods and all heroes”. This is Saussure’s synchronic genesis of the diachronic expression of language, but applied to experience conceived as artifact (hence McLuhan’s interest in technology) and effect (ex-facere). Furthermore, these potencies are characterized as dynamic — ex — as captured in Yeats’ “leaping of a fish or the opening of a flower”.9 Thus conceived, “potencies” inherently ‘extend’ themselves such that experience comes from them (McLuhan’s “light through”) as the exfoliation of resulting effect, not (or at least not first of all) potencies through experience (McLuhan’s “light on”) as their purported occasion.

A further epigraph in Kenner’s chapter from Yeats’ Tables has the following:

Just as poets and painters and musicians labour at their works, building them with lawless and lawful things alike (…) these children of the Holy Spirit labour at their moments10 with eyes11 upon the shining [“light through”] substance on which Time12 has heaped the refuse of creation… (Dublin’s Joyce, 36)

Exactly as described by Yeats, McLuhan’s second conversion from “moralist” to “student” consisted in the realization that “lawful things” could not be isolated and protected from “lawless” ones through judgmental segregation in the style of F.R. Leavis.13 Hence, instead of the selected assertion of the “moralist”, the whole of the “refuse of creation” called for study by the “student”.14 Again:

For many years, until I wrote my first book, The Mechanical Bride, I adopted an extremely moralistic approach (…) But gradually I perceived how sterile and useless this attitude was (…) I ceased being a moralist and became a student. (Playboy interview)

On the one hand, this served to detach McLuhan from a strain of Catholicism that tends to gnosticism and that implicates a loss of divine power and providence through the apparently mistaken act of creation. On the other hand, as McLuhan may or may not have been aware,15 this amounted to a recovery of Hegel’s great point in the Preface to the 1807 Phenomenology:

Das Verschwindende16 ist vielmehr selbst als wesentlich zu betrachten, nicht in der Bestimmung eines Festen, das vom Wahren abgeschnitten, außer ihm, man weiß nicht wo, liegenzulassen sei, sowie auch das Wahre nicht als das auf der andern Seite ruhende, tote Positive. Die Erscheinung ist das Entstehen und Vergehen, das selbst nicht entsteht und vergeht, sondern an sich ist, und die Wirklichkeit und Bewegung des Lebens der Wahrheit ausmacht. Das Wahre ist so der bacchantische Taumel, an dem kein Glied nicht trunken ist… (Phänomenologie des Geistes, Vorrede, 1807)

The demand is to consider all experience as a ‘student”, not some selected supposedly standard experience as a “moralist”. And Kenner’s chapter goes on from this point to consider “multitude” in both Yeats and Joyce — without, however considering, or even broaching anywhere in his book, Yeats’ 1903 Emotion of Multitude.

“No man”, [Joyce] began, quoting the outcast Giordano Bruno, “can be a lover of the true or the good unless he abhors the multitude.” Abhorring the multitude, Yeats had done the finest Irish writing of Joyce’s time.17 (Dublin’s Joyce, 38)

But Kenner himself shows how Yeats, already five years before,18 far from simply “abhorring the multitude”, had offered a more complex slant:

Let the starry winds and the flame and the flood
Cover over and hide, for he has no part
With the lonely majestical multitude.
(To His Heart, Bidding It Have No Fear)

As Kenner justly comments:

it is the concluding couplet that turns the screw. Yeats’ “Lonely majestical multitude” manages to blunt lonely by multitude and turn flame, flood, and the winds of space from terrors to glories with majestical.  (Dublin’s Joyce, 41)

What Yeats had done, and what Joyce had yet to learn at that time when he was not yet twenty, was to expose the questionability of “multitude”. Such abysmal questions are forever implicated in it such as those raised in Kenner’s chapter 3 regarding “the first formal relationship among parts and whole”, P241/234 and “the first entelechy”, U425/413. For every individual is always already a part of a whole multitude, or a whole multitude of multitudes, and, beyond that, it is not clear just what multitude, or multitudes, should be acknowledged to embrace. In this way, a universal questionability descends on all things (“flame, flood, and the winds”) and it becomes uncertain how to start or who it is that might start:

It is a worthwhile guess that the writing-out of Stephen Hero was the crucially cathartic labour of [Joyce’s] life. The pain of depersonalization was undergone then once and for all. (Dublin’s Joyce, 44)

Kenner calls this period Joyce’s “time of maturation” and, in the same paragraph, “time of dissociation”. What he saw, it seems, even or especially in regard to his own “integrity”, was that a finitizing and hence pluralizing

snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling (…) faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. D288/256

the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling. D287/255

There was something prior and in-between to all that could ever be said, or ever be, definitively pluralizing and relativizing it. It was “general all over Ireland” and to “all the living and the dead”. In fact, “it was falling (…) faintly through the universe” as a whole as its “first entelechy” and “last end”. 

Die Erscheinung ist das Entstehen und Vergehen, das selbst nicht entsteht und vergeht, sondern an sich ist, und die Wirklichkeit und Bewegung des Lebens der Wahrheit ausmacht.  

Hence, as Kenner’s chapter concludes, “the infinite number of ways of saying anything” (44/45) and the implicated call for “the uncompromising craftsman” (44).

  1. Joyce’s spelling of ‘Dedalus’ intentionally varied from the accepted one in English of ‘Daedalus’. McLuhan saw ‘dead are us’ in this, tying Ulysses to the last story in Dubliners, ‘The Dead’. Similarly with Kenner: “In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce) excised the diphthong from the hero’s surname so that Dedalus chimed with ‘dead’.” (38) This seems more like a McLuhan idea than a Kenner one and therefore a further appearance of McLuhan in Kenner’s book. ↩
  2. For discussion, see Typhon/Minotaur/Dionysus parallels. ↩
  3. See McLuhan and Kenner (Dublin’s Joyce, chap 2), note 6, for further on ‘integrity’ in this context. ↩
  4. The general importance of this ‘second conversion’ in relation to Kenner’s work on Joyce is discussed in McLuhan and Kenner (Dublin’s Joyce, chap 1). ↩
  5. The Tables of the Law first appeared in issue 5:7 of The Savoy. In a typical McLuhan turn of phrase, ‘Tables of the Law’ became ‘fables of the law’: “the Mosaic fables of the law” (James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial’,1953). ↩
  6. The Tables of the Law. ↩
  7. “Potencies” is from McLuhan’s long 1951 letter to Harold Innis. Other terms used by McLuhan for these synchronic powers of formation include “archetype” and, all importantly, “medium”. The full range: Yeats’ “the whole lives of men”, “seventy years”. ↩
  8. “Potencies of that being” is a dual genitive, but is first or all a subjective genitive: the multifold forms of human being are the objectivized (thrown forth) effects of a process through which the spectrum of possibilities is, in Yeats’ terms, “articulated and simplified”. The German Auseinandersetzung captures the required abysmal action of confrontation and sorting that is (ids!) at stake here. Regarding ‘ids’, in a letter to Archie Malloch from February 24, 1950, McLuhan writes: “Somewhere a vice is calling.  Once you begin reading F Wake you get into this mood e.g. Flying Sorcerers and a muddle of clearness etc. (…) Very finny (submarine).” ↩
  9. Further on dynamism in McLuhan: The representative ferment. ↩
  10. “Labour at their moments”! The momentary genesis of human experience is broached above. ↩
  11. Whose eyes are these from whose observations our experience and its eyes derive as artifacts and effects? ↩
  12. Time is both vertical and horizontal here. The vertical time of the “shining substance” of the potencies underlies what is “heaped” upon them through their inherent up-thrust, “lawless and lawful things alike”, “the refuse of creation”. ↩
  13. Such dualistic cleavage as between the lawless and lawful McLuhan would come to see as typical of the Gutenberg galaxy (as described in his 1962 book of that name). ↩
  14. McLuhan would later often cite Yeats’ “foul rag and bone shop of the heart” in this context. ↩
  15. McLuhan’s two early mentors at the University of Manitoba, Henry Wright and Rupert Lodge, were ‘Hegelian’ enough that both were contributors to John Watson’s 50-year anniversary volume, Philosophical Essays Presented to John Watson. And McLuhan’s longtime colleague at St Michael’s College, University of Toronto, Etienne Gilson, was decisively influenced by Hegel in his readings of Augustine and Thomas. In McLuhan’s 1943 PhD thesis, Gilson is the single most referenced source. ↩
  16. ‘Das Verschwindende’ names the inability of any finite order to establish itself in itself (an sich), the inevitability of any finite order to ‘disappear’. And this is particularly true, of course, of any order or claim that is demonstrably false. The great question posed by Hegel is therefore how to conceive of what is fleeting and even false as essential. A clue to the answer may be seen in chemistry where any and all physical materials and reactions are subject to elementary or ‘essential’ analysis. Compare Joyce in Stephen Hero: “The artist who could disentangle the subtle soul of the image from its mesh of defining circumstances most exactly and re-embody it in artistic circumstances chosen as the most exact for its new office, he was the supreme artist.” S78/65. (Dublin’s Joyce, 49) ↩
  17. The Joyce citation is from The Day of the Rabblement (1901). ↩
  18. Five years before: in the 1896 To His Heart, Bidding It Have No Fear. ↩

McLuhan and Kenner (Dublin’s Joyce, chap 3)

their aqueous emotional element the humming denizens took for granted, (…) as men take air for granted.1 (Dublin’s Joyce, 27-28)

He made a careful distinction between lilting gestures of embellishment and the rhythms which imitate those discernible in the subject, S184/163, “the first formal relationship among parts and whole”, P241/234, “the first entelechy”, U425/413 2 (Dublin’s Joyce, 29)

Whether in fact or in artifact,3 a thing exists first as a set of relations, then [second] when matter joins proportion, or words join rhythm, as a set of articulate [cognate with ‘artifact’] relations.4 (Dublin’s Joyce, 29)

Controlled rhythms afford a continuous matrix to contain what drops through the sieve of discursive denotations.5 Hence it is always with rhythms, arranged relationships, that artistic imitation begins. Like Flaubert, Joyce always conceives the prose paragraph as a rhythmic unit; it is the component of “absolute rhythm” that explains why so much of Finnegans Wake communicates, when read aloud, before being understood. (Dublin’s Joyce, 29)

A metaphoric perception (“Votre âme est un paysage choisi . . .” [Verlaine]) is raised to intelligibility (Joyce’s term was “epiphanized”) by articulation of images whose relevance the poet does not need to justify. (Dublin’s Joyce, 30)

In the emergence of the “meaning” (…) we may discern the “luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure” of which Joyce makes Stephen speak: “the instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure.6 P250/242 (Dublin’s Joyce, 30)

Verlaine discovered, or rediscovered, how to make a mode of passion emerge illuminated without employing the images as mere steps in an argument, and with an action, a progression d’effet, that parallels the movement of the mind penetrating — not playing checkers with — the données.7 (Dublin’s Joyce, 30) 

Here is the programme of “double-writing”: the received expression used “a little ironically”.8 (Dublin’s Joyce, 34)

the poem (…) is the first example (…) of the double-writing that is characteristically Joyce’s. To turn “Love in ancient plenilune” into the dream of a “sweet sentimentalist” with (…) poised equivocalness of feeling…  (Dublin’s Joyce, 35)

 

  1. ‘The humming denizens’ are the Dubliners constantly at their singing. The first words of this chapter are: “Joyce’s Dublin submerged itself in song”. (Augustine: ‘once sung, twice said’.) As was already to be found in the presocratics, the ontological background, on the basis of which all things first of all are, may be thought of as primordial ‘water’ or primordial ‘air’. It is what is always already there enabling both factual things and our artifactual hold on things. ↩
  2. The question, as always, concerns the reality of finite things and the reality of their relation to non-finite things — along with the question of how such matters are to be thought, articulated and communicated. ↩
  3. “Whether in fact or in artifact”: fact is the subject matter of ‘old science’, arti-fact the subject matter of ‘new science’. ↩
  4. “A thing exists first as a set of relations” — this is what Kenner indicated with “the intelligible order (of things) with which (mind) copulates”. “Then when matter joins proportion or words join rhythm, as a set of articulate relations” — this is Kenner’s “intellected order”. (Citations are from Dublin’s Joyce, 19-20.) McLuhan, 17 years later, in Take Today (3): “the ‘meaning of meaning’ is relationship”. ↩
  5. “What drops through the sieve of discursive denotations” is the gap or medium between them. It works to hold them in being only when it itself is held in being by a prior gap or medium in the ground of things. ↩
  6. Italics added. The “instant” of “arrest” in poetry became very important for McLuhan around 1950 (see “Arrest in time” in McLuhan) and then became the central difference for him between fact and artifact. What characterizes every artifact was the ‘technical means’ or medium of the structural construction displayed in it moment to moment to moment — like frames in film. Hence ‘understanding media’ was the key to a specification of such moments and therefore of all ‘artifacts’ — just as an understanding of the elements was the key to the specification and investigation of physical materials as ‘facts’. ↩
  7. Progression d’effet — compare McLuhan to Skornia: “Media are ‘ideas’ in action” (June 5, 1959). ↩
  8. Double-writing is an artifact considering artifacts; a gapped technique considering gapped techniques “a little ironically”. ↩

McLuhan and Kenner (Dublin’s Joyce, chap 2)

Continuing a reading of Hugh Kenner’s Dublin’s Joyce as background to McLuhan’s second conversion from “moralist” to “student”:

“Coition”, as Joyce is exploiting it in these pages, is the basic Aristotelian and Aquinatian metaphor for the intercourse between the mind and things. It was a classroom commonplace of his Jesuit schooling that the phantasm gathered by the senses fertilizes the active intellect,1 and a concept is generated and flung in affirmation out into existence. The word “conception” unites biology and epistemology. We start with sensory beguilements, whether in begetting or in cognizing; we end with an articulated concept, a begotten Logos, word; an affirmation that this or that exists: is, is irreducibly there, ineluctable. Things are before we know them, that is the first condition; they doubly are after they are known, that is the second. The mind is nourished and impregnated by things, the mind affirms the existence of things, the mind by thousands of successive acts of conception generates an intellected order (…) in (…) analogy [with] the intelligible order [of things] with which it copulates.2 (…) The verb “to be” is a copula in every sense. (…) Words flourish in the soil of known things. (Dublin’s Joyce, 1955, 19-20)

The abstraction and circumlocution of the language derives from the fact that not a mind in the [Dublin][ assemblage is in contact with any but a sort of spectral colloquial reality. Their meeting-ground is the idée reçue.3 (Dublin’s Joyce, 1955, 21)

If we want an English analogue for Joyce, it is Pope; their orientations and procedures are surprisingly similar. Pope is conscious of intellectual traditions running back through St. Augustine to Cicero and Homer; and the universal darkness that he predicted at the end of the Dunciad fell exactly as he foretold; the mind of Europe entered the Romantic night-world.4 (Dublin’s Joyce, 1955, 23)

“under sleep, where all the waters meet”: Stephen’s two fathers during song for an instant one.5 (Dublin’s Joyce, 1955, 25)

Since nostalgia is the sole comprehensive emotion now, integrity beckons to death.6 (Dublin’s Joyce, 1955, 25)

  1. A memorial volume for John Watson‘s 50th anniversary at Queen’s was published in 1923, Philosophical Essays Presented to John Watson. Two of its 13 contributors were McLuhan’s early mentors at the University of Manitoba, Henry Wright and Rupert Lodge. Another contributor to the volume was Henry Carr (1880-1963), then the superior of St Michael’s College, later the founding president of the Institute of Medieval Studies there in 1929, and the person most responsible for bringing Etienne Gilson to Canada and the Institute. McLuhan was, of course, to teach at St Michael’s for 35 years starting two decades later in 1946 and Hugh Kenner would be a student there for his MA, finishing in 1946. The two would be brought together by Fr Gerald Phelan who was the outgoing President of what was now the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies. Carr’s contribution to the Watson memorial volume was titled ‘The Function of the Phantasm in St Thomas Aquinas’. A great many lines crossed at this juncture — Thomas, Aristotle and Joyce, then Watson (Hegel), Wright, Lodge (Plato) and Carr, along with McLuhan and Kenner. It was a key nodal point in Canadian intellectual history — one that could not possibly be less researched than it is. ↩
  2. Italics added. Kenner has “the mind by thousands of successive acts of conception generates an intellected order in more or less exact analogy of the intelligible order with which it copulates”. As usual with writing that does not quite come off, Kenner is trying to say too much here. “Analogy of the intelligible order” (rather than ‘with’ or ‘to’ the intelligible order) wants to make the additional (admittedly highly important) point that “the intelligible order” supplies not only the ground and model for our “intellected order”, but also the possibility of correlation (however imperfect) between the two. ↩
  3. Both ‘their meeting-ground’ and ‘the idée reçue‘ are ambiguous. On the one hand, they lack real “contact with (…) reality”; on the other hand, they are “a distortion, but a distortion of something real” (11). The very existence of such a “meeting-ground” (a good definition of language) and ‘idée reçue‘ (ditto) is marvelous and thought-provoking. ↩
  4. McLuhan ended his unpublished Typhon in America from the late 1940s (probably 1947-1948)  — just as he would conclude the major portion of the Gutenberg Galaxy more than a decade later — with the same extended quotation from Pope’s 1725 Dunciad:
    She comes! she comes! the sable Throne behold
    Of Night Primaeval, and of Chaos old!
    Before her, Fancy’s gilded clouds decay,
    And all its varying Rain-bows die away.
    Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires,
    The meteor drops, and in a flash expires.
    As one by one, at dread Medea’s strain,
    The sick’ning stars fade off th’ethereal plain;
    As Argus’ eyes by Hermes’ wand opprest,
    Clos’d one by one to everlasting rest;
    Thus at her felt approach, and secret might,
    Art after Art goes out, and all is Night.
    See skulking Truth to her old Cavern fled,
    While the Great Mother bids Britannia sleep,
    And pours her Spirit o’er the Land and Deep.
    She comes! she comes! The Gloom rolls on,
    Mountains of Casuistry heap’d o’er her head!
    Philosophy, that lean’d on Heav’n before,
    Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more.
    Physic of Metaphysic begs defence,
    And Metaphysic calls for aid on Sense!
    See Mystery to Mathematics fly!
    In vain! they gaze, turn giddy, rave, and die.
    Religion blushing veils her sacred fires,
    And unawares Morality expires.
    Nor public Flame, nor private, dares to shine;
    Nor human Spark is left, nor Glimpse divine!
    Lo! thy dread Empire, CHAOS! is restor’d;
    Light dies before thy uncreating word:
    Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
    And Universal Darkness buries All.
    The Gutenberg Galaxy then immediately concludes: “This is the Night from which Joyce invites the Finnegans to wake.” Typhon in America, 15 years before The Gutenberg Galaxy, at a time when McLuhan and Kenner were in intense communication, similarly: “In this darkness we must learn to see.”
    McLuhan often complained that Kenner was loose with his credits for points which he, McLuhan, had shared with him in unpublished work and in conversation and letters. The Dunciad passage may be a major exhibit in this general case. ↩
  5. The feminine matrix of the unconscious harbors all the masculine (extending, re-presenting) forms of possible experience. It might be said that this is the one subject of all icons, with their gold background, and the theotokos who re-presents that background, serving to bring forth mostly male divinities, angels and saints. The great question at stake in this topic is the lost relation between between finite insight and universal truth and how, or if, this might be regained. ↩
  6. Modern ontologies have been unable to preserve “the gap where the action is” which alone can valorize and protect plurality at any level — ontological, international, social, familial, individual. Integrity has seemed possible only by a collapse into One. A complex integrity has proved inconceivable.
    In the same year that Dublin’s Joyce was published, 1955, McLuhan reviewed Kenner’s 1954 book, Wyndham Lewis. ‘Integrity’ is said by McLuhan to be at the heart of Lewis’ work: “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-Platonic angelism to the point where the human dimension is obliterated by (the dominance of) sensuality at one end of the spectrum, and by (the dominance of) sheer abstraction at the other. (…) 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.” (Nihilism Exposed) ↩

McLuhan and Kenner (Dublin’s Joyce, chap 1)

Joyce (…) focussed (…) on what was actually there, and strove so to set it down that it would reveal itself as what it was, in its double nature: a distortion, but a distortion of something real. (Dublin’s Joyce, 1955, 11)

“Distortion, but (…) distortion of something real” is what McLuhan opposed to ‘matching’ as ‘making’. This complex doublin’ — “distortion of something real” — is the great question at stake in all of Joyce’s tales of the ‘Dubliners’. But did Kenner get this fundamental insight from McLuhan, or McLuhan from Kenner, or both from Father Gerald Phelan — or does none of these alternatives fit the case?

McLuhan was already familiar with what he called Kenner’s ‘book on Joyce’ in 1947. This book was then rewritten multiple times until it appeared almost a decade later as Dublin’s Joyce in 1955. One of its manifestations in the meantime was James Joyce: Critique in Progress, Kenner’s 1950 Yale PhD thesis.1 At some point, the various stages of this book need to be collected2 (so far as they still exist), their progressive innovations specified, and these compared to McLuhan’s ongoing contemporaneous work with its innovations. Importantly, the years of the book’s metamorphoses overlapped with McLuhan’s ‘second conversion’ from “moralist” to “student”.3 It is this conversion that the world desperately needs to understand if it is ever to wake from its suicidal woke.4

Further commonalities between the 2 (McLuhan and Kenner) — or 3 (with Phelan):

So the usual criterion of style, that it disappear like glass before the reality of the subject, doesn’t apply to [Joyce’s] pages.5 (Dublin’s Joyce, 1955, 12)

Paul Valery tells us how “a literary langue mandarine is derived from popular speech, from which it takes the words, figures, and ‘turns’ most suitable for the effects the artist seeks”…6  (Dublin’s Joyce, 1955, 13)

educed order from Babel7 (Dublin’s Joyce, 1955, 14)

“It was revealed to me that those things are good which yet are corrupted which neither if they were supremely good nor unless they were good could be corrupted.” U140/132 (Dublin’s Joyce, 1955, 15)

the faded eloquence (…) illustrates the decorums of the whole book, an articulation of the city of the dead.8 (Dublin’s Joyce, 1955, 16)

He started always from the material nearest to hand. He was interested in bad operas because they contained all the dramatic components listed by Aristotle, still held in some sort of classical balance…  (Dublin’s Joyce, 1955, 16)

He was interested in advertising and journalism because they both were and were not aligned with classical rhetoric. He was interested in Leopold Bloom because nothing was in that philosopher’s intellect that had not first been in his senses, though not exactly as St. Thomas stipulated. (Dublin’s Joyce, 1955, 17)

“Methought as I was dropping asleep somepart in nonland of where’s please (and it was when you and they were we)”9 FW 403 (Dublin’s Joyce, 1955, 17)

we are not for a moment tempted to suppose that we ought to be seeing a subject through a style; what is on the page is quite frankly the subject. The subject is “style” and what style implies.10 (Dublin’s Joyce, 1955, 17)

 

  1. From Kenner’s ‘Acknowledgements’: “Earlier versions of parts of this book have appeared in James Joyce : Two Decades of Criticism (Vanguard Press, 1948), Hudson Review, Kenyon Review, Sewanee Review, Essays in Criticism, Shenandoah, and English Institute Essays 1952 (Columbia University Press); I am grateful to the editors concerned for permission to reprint. An early draft of the entire book was written in 1950 as a Yale doctoral thesis, under the guidance of Cleanth Brooks. Though the work has been completely rewritten since then, the effect of his patient counsel has not been obliterated.” (Dublin’s Joyce, 1955, viii) ↩
  2. Eg: ‘The Portrait in Perspective’, Kenyon Review, 10:3, 1948 (reprinted in James Joyce : Two Decades of Criticism, 1948); ‘A Communication’, Hudson Review, 3:1, 1950; James Joyce: Critique in Progress, 1950 Yale PhD thesis; ‘Joyce and Ibsen’s Naturalism’, Sewanee Review, 59:1,1951; ‘Joyce’s Ulysses: Homer and Hamlet’, Essays in Criticism, 2:1, 1952; ‘Pound on Joyce’, Shenandoah 3:3, 1952; ‘Joyce’s Exiles‘, Hudson Review, 5:3, 1952; ‘The Trivium in Dublin’, English Institute Essays 1952; ‘Joyce’s Anti-Selves’, Shenandoah, 4:1,1953. ↩
  3. Playboy interview: “For many years, until I wrote my first book, The Mechanical Bride, I adopted an extremely moralistic approach (…) But gradually I perceived how sterile and useless this attitude was (…) I ceased being a moralist and became a student.” ↩
  4. The required conversion is not at all to be understood as something peculiar to McLuhan. As Kenner was well aware, something like such a conversion is the topic of Joyce’s whole oeuvre. In happier and less dangerous ages, it was thought to be the mark of maturity as undergone by most people most of the time in ‘growing up’. The present situation of the world is exactly that children, ages 30 to 90, have their hands on the levers of terrible power. ↩
  5. On ‘style’, see the last passage below from p17 and its note 9. ↩
  6. Typical of McLuhan, he took “the effects the artist seeks” not as ‘effects’ in the audience the artist addresses with her works, not as audience reactions to those works, but as those works themselves, the artist’s productions as ef-fects (ex-facere) in multiple senses (what is made, what is outered, what is secondary to something(s) prior). Taking all human expressions as effects in this way is the key move to McLuhan’s ‘new science’ — just as it was the key move in the genesis of chemistry to begin taking all physical materials — facts — as effects of underlying elements. For arti-facts those underlying elements are media. ↩
  7. The wonderful un-gnostic insight that ‘in order’ to exist at all, Babel, even as the revolt against God, even as linguistic and social chaos, could not be without order (as little as any event in the physical universe can be without order). ↩
  8. Compare McLuhan, ‘T.S. Eliot’s  Historical Decorum’, Renascence II:1, 1949. ↩
  9. The “nonland of (…) when you and they were we” is McLuhan’s ‘unconscious’ out of whose  “potencies” (Innis letter from 3/14/51) all human experience in its myriad forms is born as “effect”. ↩
  10. Kenner’s ‘style’ = McLuhan’s ‘effect’. ↩