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 papers, in fact McLuhan gave two.1
But although Brooks and McLuhan certainly got together at the MLA, they did not first meet then. Earlier that year, Brooks had edited a special Hopkins issue of The Kenyon Review and had included McLuhan’s ‘The Analogical Mirrors’ in it. Further, Brooks’ important step toward his 1947 Well Wrought Urn had been taken in The Sewanee Review even earlier in 1944 with his ‘History without Footnotes: An Account of Keats’ Urn‘. 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 The Sewanee Review, of what would be a total of nine essays and reviews, helping 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: Christianity, metaphysical poetry, Richards and Eliot, the fit of close reading and the tradition, the importance of valuation in criticism. When they first met sometime around the end of 1943 or the start of 1944, perhaps through Felix Giovanelli, they seem to have bonded immediately.
- 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: “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: “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 need to communicate. 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. ↩