Monthly Archives: September 2026

Ransom’s good advice

Thanks to his friend Cleanth Brooks, who was the guest editor for that issue, McLuhan published ‘The ‘Analogical Mirrors’ in The Kenyon Review in 1944. The general editor of the review was the poet, John Crowe Ransom, who took an interest in McLuhan work, but not an uncritical one. In fact, his advice proved prescient for McLuhan’s development over the crucial 1945-1960 period (his age roughly 35 to 50).

Ransom’s interest had undoubtedly been spurred by Brooks who was attempting to find outlets for McLuhan’s work. But his interest seems to have been genuine enough quite aside from Brooks’ prompting:

I don’t think you should stay on the sidelines. I admire the authority and the excellent writing in your paper. (Ransom to McLuhan, 25 September 1943, in Gordon 135)1

We haven’t had anything of yours for a long time and I hope it won’t be much longer before we can see something. I talked with Cleanth Brooks a short while ago; he is an admirer of yours, and told me of some smart things you had talked [about] with him” (Ransom to McLuhan, 12 January 1946, in Gordon 386n49)

Ransom’s criticism of McLuhan’s reliance on Leavis’ moralism as a trumping response to the irony and ambiguity of Richards and Empson would come to be shared by McLuhan himself:

Ransom
I can’t quite feel that Leavis is the answer to Richards and Empson; the best answer; the perfect complement. I believe we need re-examinations of the aesthetic problem more radical than that. (Ransom to McLuhan, 25 September 1943. in Gordon 380n5)

McLuhan
For many years, until I wrote my first book2, The Mechanical Bride, I adopted an extremely moralistic approach (…) But gradually I perceived how sterile and useless this attitude was, and I began to realize that the greatest artists of the 20th Century — Yeats, Pound, Joyce, Eliot — had discovered a totally different approach (…) I ceased being a moralist and became a student.

Ransom’s letter was written in reaction to McLuhan’s paper, ‘Poetic vs Rhetorical Exegesis: The Case for Leavis against Richards and Empson’, which McLuhan had submitted to Kenyon Review for consideration.3 And, indeed, the turn from Leavis to Yeats, Pound, Joyce and Eliot would be crucial for McLuhan’s development toward media science. Instead of attempting to disable irony and ambiguity through strident moralisms (which he continued until sometime in the middle 1940s),4 McLuhan would come to see how to utilize them for investigation and analysis.5 This would occasion McLuhan’s characteristic turn from claim to discipline, from message to medium.

His ‘media’ would be exactly ‘types of ambiguity’ — as the title of Empson’s 1930 The Seven Types of Ambiguity ran — but these would be structural types, not Empson’s categorial ones. Here again Ransom was prescient:

I wish you didn’t rely on ambiguous terms like dialectic, rhetoric, and grammar. (Ransom to McLuhan, 31 Aug 1947, in Gordon 386n49)

With the trivial arts of dialectic, rhetoric and grammar, McLuhan already had the crucial matter of the irreducible plurality of ontologies: “the essential opposition between the arts of the trivium” (Classical Trivium, 42). This entailed, as he said in the same place, that “in studying the history of dialectics and rhetoric, as indeed, of grammar, it is unavoidable that one adopts the point of view of one of these arts” (Classical Trivium, 41). This was unavoidable since one could not be without an ontology, on the one hand, but, on the other, once one had one, it necessarily excluded, at least at the level of element, the others.

This introduced an even more basic ambiguity than Ransom contemplated. Words were first of all ambiguous, not because not enough care had been taken in their definition and use, but because they always already implicated an ontological foundation that was radically undecided because plural. This was what Yeats, Pound, Joyce and Eliot had discovered: ambiguities in expression are not the province of fine art or of morality or of any such specialized area, but go down into the roots of the being at stake, human being.

The arts were subservient to these roots, not vice versa:

Yeats, Pound, Joyce, Eliot had discovered a totally different approach, based on the identity of the processes of cognition and creation.6 I realized that artistic creation is the playback of ordinary experience 

All the acts of humans beginning with language use and ordinary experience were mediated by the ontological possibilities before them. The questions he began to face starting in the late 1940s were: how to understand this insight himself and how to communicate it to others?

 

  1. Correspondence of Ransom with McLuhan from the McLuhan papers in the Ottawa Archive is cited in Terrence Gordon’s Escape into Understanding. The excerpts above are all as given by Gordon. ↩
  2. Starting in 1946, so around 3 years after Ransom’s Leavis letter to him. ↩
  3. Brooks would shortly later get ‘Poetic vs Rhetorical Exegesis’ published in the Sewanee Review through its new editor and Brooks’ good friend, Allen Tate. ↩
  4. McLuhan noted in his Nashe thesis: “The war between these (trivial) camps is basically the opposition between dialectics and rhetoric to control the modes of literary composition”. So he clearly recognized the motivations of other people’s values, just not, or not yet, his own. He would later say that he had been “blinded” at that time (‘Sight, Sound, and the Fury’, 1954). ↩
  5. Harold Innis was very important for this turn, of course, but he was hardly alone. Brooks and Ransom, for two, played important roles as described here in regard to Ransom. ↩
  6. For “the identity of the processes of cognition and creation”, see Ordinary apprehension is poetic, where the 1951 dating of the earliest citations is noteworthy. ↩

Reality in Brooks’ 1944 Urn essay

What Brooks and McLuhan found when they met sometime in 1942 or 1943 was a common concern with reality and the conviction that the relation to it implicated more than one human faculty. Cleanth Brooks published ‘History without Footnotes: An Account of Keats’ Urn‘ in the first issue of the Sewanee Review (LII:1) in 1944. Throughout, registered as a kind of drumbeat, his concern was with the real and its structure and our apprehension of these.  

the question of real importance [twice repeated on its second page] 90

But is it really a question of truth? 91

the poet provides a sort of realistic basis 94

We are really dealing with an ambiguity here 95

Keats is perfectly aware that the frozen moment of loveliness is more dynamic than is the fluid world of reality only because it is frozen. 96

And the poet, by pretending to take the town as real — so real that he can imagine the effect of its silent streets upon the stranger who chances to come into it — has suggested in the most powerful way that he can its essential reality for him — and for us. 98

not myth as a pretty but irrelevant make-believe, an idle fancy, but myth as a valid perception into reality. 100

insure our dealing with the problem of truth at the level on which it is really relevant to literature 101

 

Brooks and McLuhan at the 1941 MLA?

The 1941 meeting of the MLA was held in Indianapolis at the traditional time at the end of the year. Cleanth Brooks is listed in the proceedings. McLuhan is not listed, but Indianapolis is the closest major city to St Louis. It is likely that he would have driven or taken the train over to the event, presumably with SLU colleagues.

It is not known if McLuhan made the trip or, if he made it, if he met Brooks there. But at some point in 1942 or 1943 (years in which the MLA did not hold its annual meeting) the two did meet and established a kind of working association that saw Brooks help McLuhan publish his ‘Edgar Poe’s Tradition’ paper early in 1944. And then his ‘Analogical Mirrors’ paper a few months later in a Kenyon Review issue edited by Brooks.

Of course there are other possibilities. McLuhan could have written Brooks about his 1938 anthology, Understanding Poetry.1 Or about his 1939 Modern Poetry and the Tradition. It is easy to imagine both as course books in McLuhan’s poetry classes. But if he did, this correspondence has not not survived.2 Or Brooks could have lectured during this time at one of the universities in St Louis. But until decisive evidence emerges, that end of year 1941 MLA conference provides the most ‘likely location for the start of a friendship that lasted the rest of McLuhan’s life.3

 

  1. Coauthored with Robert Penn Warren. ↩
  2. The great many letters we have between the two begin in early 1945. ↩
  3. Brooks, born in 1906, was 5 years older than McLuhan, but died 14 years later than him in 1994. In 1941, McLuhan was 30 and Brooks 35. ↩

Marchand on McLuhan and the University of Chicago

Phillip Marchand’s Marshall McLuhan: the medium and the messenger describes McLuhan’s interaction in 1946 with the University of Chicago and specifically with its then president, Robert Hutchins.1 But Marchand was apparently not aware of the background to that meeting: the recommendation of McLuhan to Chicago by Sigfried Giedion in 1943 and McLuhan’s attempts to interest Hutchins In Wyndham Lewis at that time. Nor does he mention McLuhan’s published writings concerning the University of Chicago: his 1940 review of Adler and his 1946 essay (originally a 1944 lecture), ‘An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America’. But Marchand did interview Cleanth Brooks about the 1946 interaction with Hutchins and Brooks’ account, although not always factual, is noteworthy.

McLuhan dreamed of various projects. One of the more exciting resulted when Cleanth Brooks asked him to visit the University of Chicago, where Brooks had just spent six months as a guest professor. Brooks had left that university disappointed in its rigorously “logical” approach to literary criticism. Robert Hutchins, then president of the university and ally of Mortimer Adler in the Great Books approach to education, had asked Brooks, whose reputation as a literary critic was then rising steadily, to speak to him personally about what might need to be changed. Brooks agreed on condition that McLuhan accompany him. Brooks had been enormously impressed by McLuhan’s Cambridge thesis and its historical review of the trivium. That account, he felt, had a direct bearing on what was wrong with the University of Chicago.
In June 1946 McLuhan went to Chicago with Brooks and argued the case for change. Basically he told Hutchins that if he wanted to produce graduates who were capable of “learned eloquence” instead of mere technical expertise — as Hutchins had told the world he was going to do — then he would have to do something about his deans, who were all complete dialecticians, strangers to rhetoric and grammar. “Marshall spoke brilliantly”, Brooks recalls. “He put into what seemed to be very cogent, lucid English, in concise form, what I was thinking in inchoate form after six months of teaching there. He who had never set foot on that campus before had it all beautifully diagrammed.” (90)

Was Brooks not aware of the earlier exchanges between Hutchins and McLuhan? Why did he think Hutchins would agree to meet with an unknown academic from an obscure Catholic college in rural Canada? In fact, Marchand’s interview with Brooks must have taken place more than 40 years after the events in question at a time when Brooks was more than 80 years old himself. He simply did not have a firm grip on the facts of the matter anymore and doubtless had no particular care to.

Marchand’s description of McLuhan’s 1947 proposal to Hutchins following their 1946 meeting is particularly uninformed:

McLuhan returned from Chicago with more than his usual share of optimism, sat down, and wrote a 10,000-word brief expanding on what he had said at the meeting. Ernest Sirluck, a colleague at the University of Toronto who saw that brief, was amused many years later to note that it “was an enormous piece of special pleading, the most blatant preaching for a call.” McLuhan, in a not so subtle fashion, urged Hutchins to hire him and a few friends to take over his program in the humanities. As McLuhan wrote to one of those old friends from St. Louis, Felix Giovanelli, Hutchins was being offered a plan to revamp his university that would allow McLuhan, Brooks, Muller-Thym, Giovanelli, and others to form a cadre of New Critics and like-minded metaphysicians on his campus. The “circle of fine intellects” McLuhan had been dreaming of since his undergraduate days in Manitoba would be given an institutional power base and institutional prestige. 

Here again events were being recalled from a remove of more than 40 years. Sirluck was a friend of McLuhan (they edited a Chicago University Press series together) and was a fellow ‘Winnipigeon’. But he had doubtless given little thought in the interim to the matter and no longer had much recall of it. The proposal was less than 3000 words, had no mention of the supposed ‘cadre’ and was not necessarily aimed at the University of Chicago.

Marchand’s conclusion to the story is not mistaken, except for the fact that McLuhan’s essay — ‘The Failure at Chicago‘ — was written in anticipation of his meeting with Hutchins and not in reaction to it.

Hutchins ultimately resisted his proposal — he was planning to leave the university shortly anyway and had no intention of overhauling it before he departed. McLuhan was left to take revenge by writing an essay, never published, denouncing the University of Chicago’s instruction in literature. In that essay, McLuhan cited, with devastating effect, some examples of multiple-choice questions on Hamlet and Tom Jones from University of Chicago exams. These examples, he claimed, were symptoms of the university’s “naive rationalism”, the kind of rationalism that reduced literature to categories and concepts instead of training students to sharpen their perceptions of literature through the analysis of the effects sought by writers. The argument in this essay, like that of his oral presentation to Hutchins, was a variant of a theme McLuhan had pursued since his Cambridge thesis. According to this theme, the rational, or dialectical, mind must be controlled2 by the other two disciplines of the trivium: by rhetoric, which emphasized the relationship between the author and his audience, and by grammatica, which emphasized verbal analysis.3 (91)

 

  1. Page references in this post to Marchand are to the 1989 Random House edition. ↩
  2. ‘Controlled’ is too strong a word here. ‘Correlated with’ would be more accurate. ↩
  3. McLuhan set all this out in specific reference to Hutchins in his ‘Ancient Quarrel in Modern America’ essay which appeared in January 1946, 5 months before the meeting with Hutchins. Did he bring an offprint to the meeting for the president? ↩

Brooks and McLuhan at the 1944 MLA

The 1944 MLA Meeting in NYC, Dec 27-29, was the first general meeting of the association since 1941. Both Cleanth Brooks and McLuhan attended and both gave papers1, in fact McLuhan gave two (presumably because his Bacon paper had been accepted for the cancelled 1942 MLA meeting).

Brooks and McLuhan certainly got together at the MLA, but they did not first meet there. Earlier that year, Brooks had edited a special Hopkins issue of The Kenyon Review and had included McLuhan’s ‘The Analogical Mirrors’ in it. Even earlier in 1944, Brooks took an important step toward his 1947 Well Wrought Urn with his ‘History without Footnotes: An Account of Keats’ Urn‘ which appeared in the Sewanee Review. And here again Brooks had helped McLuhan to place his ‘Edgar Poe’s Tradition’ in that same issue. This was McLuhan’s first appearance in Sewanee Review, of what would be a total of nine essays and reviews, benefiting him both professionally and financially: Sewanee was one of the few journals which paid for contributions.

Brooks and McLuhan had a number of shared interests and passions: especially their common practice of criticism that self-consciously bordered on philosophy and theology. Whenever it was they first met, sometime in 1942 or 1943 it seems, they appear to have bonded immediately.

 

  1. As listed in the conference proceedings, Brooks gave a paper on ‘The Relationship of Research and Criticism’ (p1336). The first of McLuhan’s papers was ‘Medieval Grammar as the Basis of Bacon’s Novum Organum’. Abstract (from the proceedings): “The art of grammar in Greek and Roman times was, in its etymological and analogical functions, inseparable from physics, cosmogony, and the interpretation of phenomena, or the book of nature. Philo of Alexandria adapted the art, with its four levels of interpretation, to scriptural exegesis. Patristic theology took over his methods, and the encyclopedic tradition in education which it implied. Until the time of Abelard grammatical theology and science were supreme. Its temporary eclipse did not effect a breach in continuity. St. Bonaventure was its greatest exponent. Erasmus was the key figure for his contemporaries because he restored grammatical theology while struggling against decadent dialectical theology. Bacon’s significance is best understood in this tradition and against this background. His conception of the problem of interpreting nature is primarily, though not finally, grammatical.” (1324-1325) His second paper was ‘Baroque vs the Dissociation of Sensibility’. Abstract (again from the proceedings): “What modern critics call the ‘dissociation of sensibility’, the separation of thought and feeling, of words and ideas, was fostered by the two major scholastic traditions of Ramus and Descartes, of Calvinism and mathematical physics. Baroque art, on the other hand, was directly and consciously the result of the Renaissance revival of patristic theology (with its classical program) and was militantly arrayed against dialectical or scholastic theology. Encyclopedic patristic learning provided the techniques and motifs of baroque sensibility and language. Significantly, Baudelaire and the symbolists revived patristic rhetoric in opposition to the “clear and distinct” language of the Cartesian epoch. In T. S. Eliot, too, this reorganization of sensibility involves the revival of the baroque by patristic art of Andrewes, Donne, and their contemporaries.” (1338)
    It is noteworthy that ‘sensibility’ appears in McLuhan before he came to apply it to the senses. Similarly, ‘medium’ and ‘media’ appear before their application to particular sources of information like books and movies. In both cases the motivation of a turn to identifiable particulars must have been the compulsive need to communicate the priority of metaphor (‘need’ both of McLuhan and of the world). Vastly more people are familiar with the senses than with sensibility, just as they are with media they use as opposed to hypothetical media that use them. But while McLuhan’s motivation may be understandable, together with the frustration prompting it, it may be wondered if he didn’t betray in this way the very heart of his enterprise. ↩

Lodge: Plato’s Theory of Ethics

In 1928 Rupert Lodge published Plato’s Theory of Ethics in the International Library of Psychology, Philosophy, and Scientific Method, edited by C.K. Ogden. Included with Lodge in the Library were such leading edge figures at the time as G.E. Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein, C.G. Jung, I.A. Richards, Alfred Adler, C.S. Peirce, T.E. Hulme, E.A. Burtt, Bruno Malinowski, Bertrand Russell. and Jean Piaget. Rich company!1

The title page of Plato’s Theory of Ethics introduces him as ‘Professor of Logic and History of Philosophy in the University of Manitoba, and Visiting Lecturer in Philosophy at Harvard University’. Lodge held his visiting lectureship at Harvard in that same year of 1928 in which Plato’s Theory of Ethics was published. He had been at Harvard in 1926 at the sixth international congress of philosophy in his capacity as the president that year of the western division of the APA. He presented a paper at the congress, ‘On a recent hypothesis concerning the Platonic Socrates‘, on am all-star panel with W.D. Ross (representing John Burnet, who was ill), Léon Robin, and Paul Shorey. Presumably Lodge’s invitation to Harvard in 1928 resulted from a good impression made by him there in 1926.

Two years years after the publication of Lodge’s book in Ogden’s ‘International Library’, McLuhan would take the year-long Introduction to Philosophy course at the University of Manitoba which was taught by Lodge in the first semester (classical philosophy, concentrating on Plato) and Henry Wright in the second (modern philosophy and psychology).2

Wright’s course included his latest book, The Moral Standards of Democracy from 1925, perhaps as a set text, perhaps as a background reference. In any case, McLuhan owned the book and studied it carefully. It is preserved, ‘heavily annotated’, in his working library at the University of Toronto.3

Lodge’s course must have included his latest book in some way as well, although Plato’s Theory of Ethics is not found in McLuhan’s library at UT. Perhaps he never found an inexpensive used copy, as he did with Wright’s Moral Standards.4 But because McLuhan’s relation with Lodge was much closer than with Wright, there can be little doubt that he read, and presumably repeatedly read, Lodge’s book. For McLuhan must have quickly realized how exceptional it was, and how potentially important to him personally it was, that a scholar of Lodge’s caliber and international reputation was teaching in Winnipeg.5

For further on Plato’s Theory of Ethics, see Lodge on Plato’s ‘mean’. It seems plain that Plato’s ‘mean’, as articulated by Lodge, is what was to become McLuhan’s ‘medium’ in its important, but little referenced, senses of ‘mediating middle’ and ‘due proportion’.

 

  1. Three more books on Plato by Lodge appeared in the same famous series: Plato’s Theory of Education (1947), Plato’s Theory of Art (1953) and The Philosophy of Plato (1956). ↩
  2. See Lodge and Wright and Henry Wright on Winnipeg in 1920. ↩
  3. See Henry Wilkes Wright and Henry Wilkes Wright 2. ↩
  4. Wright’s title, The Moral Standards of Democracy, should be compared to the title and subtitle of Lodge’s book: Plato’s Theory of Ethics — The Moral Criterion and the Highest Good. The compatibility of Lodge and Wright in co-teaching the entrance course to all subsequent philosophy and psychology courses at UM may be seen in the duplication of ‘moral’ in the titles of their books. ↩
  5. See W.O. Mitchell on Rupert Lodge for Mitchell’s assessment of Lodge and for the life-changing influence of Lodge on him. ↩

Lodge on Plato’s ‘mean’

Plato’s Theory of Ethics by McLuhan’s mentor at the University of Manitoba, Rupert Lodge, must have been read by him, closely, in the early 1930s. There can be little doubt that what must have been largely background meditation on Plato’s ‘mean’, as set out by Lodge in that book, is what eventuated in McLuhan’s ‘medium’ 25 years in the future.

Here are passages in page order from Plato’s Theory of Ethics on the ‘mean’:

Disease, then, is viewed by Plato as an upsetting of the balance, a disturbance of the mean or due proportion which holds the body together. 23

The body is (…) a whole, a single organism to the life of which each element contributes its part. It is held together by the “limit”, “mean”, or principle of proportion, with a unity resembling that of a musical composition. 23-34

The most that we can safely infer from Plato’s hints and metaphors is that excellence of memory is analogous to excellence of bodily condition generally, and depends upon the proper organization of the physiological factors concerned — i.e. upon the presence of order, law, and the “mean’’ and upon the absence of excess… 36

not only too little (…) but also too much is an evil, and (…) as is obvious in the case of eating and drinking (…) the mean state, something between the two extremes represents what is best 388-389

The avoidance of excess in any direction, and the seeking of the middle pathway as a guide through life is formulated by tragedian and historian long before Plato taught the doctrine of the “limit” and Aristotle the doctrine of the ‘‘mean” as expressing the secret essence of all excellence. To the Hellenic mind, this saying formulated that characteristic of sophrosyne which we call ‘‘moderation in all things” and temperance thus easily took on some of the attributes of a supreme good. 412

In many contexts (…) the ‘‘mean” and the “limit,” are highly praised as principles which make art and conduct valuable, and in a few contexts they are definitely stated to be the highest good. This is, of course, especially true in the Philebus, but the Laws are full of such contexts, and they are found scattered up and down all the later Dialogues, including the Republic. In order to obtain a concrete idea of what is to be understood by this term, we shall therefore deal with the whole field investigated in these later Dialogues, and shall inquire what is meant by “the mean” in the world studied by natural science, in medical science and art, in the art of music, and in human conduct. From such an investigation we should be able to discover the general sense of the term, and in particular to discover why it is identified with the highest good. 442

the mind applies its own fundamental principle of the “limit” or ‘‘mean” to an otherwise unlimited and chaotic “extension” and “motion”.1 The principles and details of the theoretical universe thus constructed derive their whole significance from the principle of the “mean”. 442

What occurs in the absence of the mean? (…) The various elements refuse to combine, and fight with one another. 444

absence of the mean is synonymous with disintegration, chaos, not-being, while the presence of the mean signifies proportion, law, order, control, and reason. 445

both artist and philosopher are guided throughout by the principle of the mean. It is this principle which [in music] introduces unity, law, and order into the individual notes, the individual scales, the individual rhythms, and the composition as a whole (…) In what follows [from this this in theory], the artist does not need to understand; but it is fully [to be] apprehended by the philosopher. It is because the principle of the mean [in music and all art] is also the principle of order (…) in the actual cosmos 453

The “idea” [= metaphor, manifestation] represents the application of the principle of the mean or limit to a specific field of experience,2 so that to observe the mean is to follow the principle of the idea (…) that (…) has (…) a metaphysical basis (…) formed upon the objective principle of ultimate reality. 454

when it is stated that “the mean” is the highest good, what is meant is that the principle of the idea is the source of all idealization, of all elevation of fact to value, in a word, that the principle of the mean is identical with the principle of the (…) idea of good  455

 

  1. Lodge adopts a simplistic and utterly misleading pseudo-Kantianism here, as if the world existed as a kind of chaos before the mind applied its formations to it. ↩
  2. See the previous note. It is not as if any “specific field of experience” could exist absent “the application of the principle of the mean or limit” within it. As Lodge himself insists, “the principle of the mean is (…) the principle of order (…) in the actual cosmos”, it is “the objective principle of ultimate reality”. ↩