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Eric McLuhan

Joyce and McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan was not at all reticent about the debt he owed to James Joyce, and frequently uttered and published such statements as this: "Nobody could pretend serious interest in my work who is not completely familiar with all of the works of James Joyce and the French symbolists." He intended such statements to be taken quite literally: and truly, a full appreciation of McLuhan's work is impossible without the sort of perceptual training that such familiarity instils. Needless to say, that is not ' an attractive proposition, particularly to those from fields other than literature who resent the imputation that the training afforded by their own studies is in any measure inadequate. Consequently, such statements have come to be regarded as nothing more than provocative hyperbole. McLuhan, however, like Joyce, demanded the highest scholarship and erudition of those who would take him seriously or who would attempt to share his vision. He once remarked to me, as I know he did to many others, that his work on media and culture was, in the main, "applied Joyce." In that case, it might be fair to say that no-one can claim a serious appreciation of Joyce's work without a complete familiarity with the full spectrum of McLuhan's work. Joyce himself claimed to be "the greatest engineer who ever lived." Unquestionably, he is the towering figure in twentieth-century language and letters; McLuhan occupies much the same position vis-à-vis the study of communication in this century, having done for that field what Joyce did for expression in prose. Yet he is the only scholar to maintain that he has taken up where Joyce left off and pressed on to explore new areas of experience and understanding. Neither McLuhan nor Joyce worked in isolation from the main stream of our intellectual tradition; rather, each was quite aware of that tradition in all of its complexity and quite conscious of his role in it.

It has been fashionable in recent years to downplay or denigrate, privately and publicly, Marshall McLuhan's knowledge and use of Joyce's work and his insights, a trend that does no-one credit. After Work in Progress and Finnegans Wake, Joyce himself was widely regarded as a lunatic. But twenty or thirty years after Joyce's death, just when he was beginning to be regarded as academically safe, a good many of the literati would wince and gnash their teeth whenever McLuhan cited Joyce or used his work to illuminate (or obscure) a point about contemporary culture. It was as if they felt that some crass and unworthy popularizer were poaching on their private preserve. Even today, one finds condescending slights. I hope that my own study of Joyce and Menippism [Note: University of Toronto Press, late 1996 or early 1997] will, in some measure, illuminate a few of the many insights that McLuhan derived from Joyce and the Wake, and afford some glimmering of why he insisted that his work on technology and culture owed Joyce a great debt.

On the day that it appeared in American bookstores, Marshall McLuhan and Bernard J. Muller-Thym bought copies of Finnegans Wake an excite yrepairedtoalocalbarinSt.Louistoexaminethem.Bothmen, of course, knew what to expect, having followed with consuming interest the samples published in transition magazine under the title, Work in Progress. True to the-even by then-accepted practice, they began reading it aloud to each other. Imagine them on that warm, sunny afternoon, declaiming slightly, as the atmosphere in a friendly neighbourhood bar might encourage one to do. They had not been long at it when one of the other patrons, who had been drinking there somewhat longer than, they, wandered over and interrupted them and asked to see the page. They willingly showed it to him. He took a long, long, silent look. Then he handed the book back solemnly, slurred "I've had enough," and left the place. Some say he never returned.

Marshall McLuhan was a modem grammarian; that is, he was concerned with reading and interpreting not only literary texts but also what traditional grammarians call the "book of nature," the world about him. He consequently maintained a keen interest in writers and poets of all periods and their methods of observation of men and affairs, as his writings demonstrate. In this regard, although he did his doctoral work on Nashe and the Elizabethans (he wrote it, as he remarks at the outset, "from the point of view of grammar"), he frequently consulted Finnegans Wake in particular and Joyce in general, not just for ideas but also for sharpening and training. Such is one of the great traditional uses of the arts. He was the first (and for many years the only one) to offer courses in "the moderns" -Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Lewis, Yeats-at the University of Toronto, having recently completed his studies at Cambridge where Eliot and Richards and Empson were all the rage. He had drunk to the lees the excitement afforded by those intellects and their discoveries, and was not backward in conveying it to his students.

Today, over fifty years after Joyce's death, is there any reason to suppose his work has contemporary relevance? As its impact on readers and literature is undiminished it clearly is as vital and relevant to understanding and perceptual training as when it appeared. That is not to claim that Joyce was "ahead of his time" or any such empty banality; rather, it testifies to his precision and workmanship. For example, Richard Lanham had this to say in The Electronic Word about the effect of the personal computer on the teaching of literature. He might easily have been discussing Finnegans Wake.

Conventional literary study is pretty much stood on its car by a changeable, interactive, and nonlinear text that has no final beginnings, middles, andendings, no unchanging dominant tonalities, and no non-negotiable rules about verbal excess and expressive self-consciousness .... If the reader can adjust the writing by becoming the writer, and to any extent desired, a great deal of the current controversy about the role of the reader can be conveniently shelved. There is as much connection between reader and writer, or as little, as you want to dial in. Is every critic a creator and vice-versa? Is textual order a product of our rage for it, more than of the text itselp We can shelve that debate too: contrive whatever mixture you want. Is there a neutral language of conceptual expression or is all expression radically metaphorical? If we cannot settle this controversy finally, we can at least point now to a very broad spectrum of expressivity that includes not only words but also images and sounds, a spectrum controlled by a general theory of expressivity (which is what a theory of prose must become). This spectrum runs from least to most metaphorical, and you can locate yourself wherever you want. An identical spectrum exists for the reader as for the text. Mix and match as you like, anywhere along either one. (Page 129)

Let me offer three snapshots, taken about a dozen years apart, to display the character and the progression of Marshall McLuhan's interest in Joyce and his work. The first, which illustrates his awareness of Joyce's complex relation to the fullness of our intellectual tradition, comes from an article written barely a decade after Finnegans Wake appeared:

In the Wake, Shem the penman is, Eke Moses, an "outlex." The seer cannot be arhetor. He does not speak foreffect, butthat we may know. He is also an outlet, a shaman, a scapegoat. And the artist, in order that he may perform his katharsis-purgative function, must mime all things. (The katharsis-purgative role of the Herculean culture-hero dominates the nightworld of the Wake where the hero sets Alpheus, the river of speech and collective consciousness, to the task of cleansing the Augean stables of thought and feeling.) As mime, the artist cannot be the prudent and decorous Ulysses, but appears as a sham. As sham and mime, he undertakes not the ethical quest but the quest of the great fool. He mustbecome all things in order to reveal all. And to be all he must empty himself. Strictly within the bounds of classical decorum Joyce saw that, unlike the orator, the artist cannot properly speak with his own voice. The ultimate artist can have no style of his own but must be an "outlex" through which the multiple aspects of reality can utter themselves. 'Mat the artist should intrude his personal idiom between thing and reader is literally impertinence. Decorum permits the artist as a young man (The Portrait) to speak with his master's voice-the voice of Pater, his father in art. (Joyce like Chesterton delighted in the multivalent wit of nature and reality so that, no matter how far-fetched his analogues and paradoxes, they are never concocted nor forced. They not only bear but require intent scrutiny.)

Whereas the ethical world of Ulysses is presented in terms of well-defined human types the more metaphysical world of the wake speaks and moves before us with the gestures of being itself. It is a nightworld and, literally, as Joyce reiterates, is "abcedminded." Letters ("every letter is a godsend"), the frozen, formalized festures of remote ages of collective experience, move before us in solemn morrice. They are the representatives of age-old adequation of mind and things, enacting the drama of the endless adjustment of the interior acts and dispositions of the mind to the outer world. Tne drama of cognition itself. For it is in the drama of cognition, the stages of apprehension, that Joyce found the archetypeof poetic imitation. He seems to havebeen the first to see thatthe dance of being, the nature imitated by the arts, has its primary analogue in the activity of the exterior and interior senses. Joyce was aware that this doctrine (that sensation is imitation because the exterior forms are already in a new matter) is implicit in Aquinas. He made it explicit in Stephen Hero and the Portrait, and founded his entire poetic activity on these analogical proportions of the senses.

Delivery

The doctrine of decorum, the foundation of classical rhetoric, is a profoundly analogical doctrine, so that to discuss it as itoperates in Joyce is tobe atthecenter of his communication network. In Ulysses, each character is discriminated by his speech and gestures, and the whole work stands midway between narrative and drama. But the Wake is primarily dramatic and the techniques proper to this form are taken from the [fifth division] of rhetoric, "pronuntiatio" or action and delivery. This division of rhetoric was acrux of communication theory in former times, being the crossroads of rhetoric, psychology, and other disciplines. St. Thomas discusses the issue, forexample (S.T. I, 57,4,ad 3), apropos of the modes of communication between men and angels:

Since, therefore, the angelsknow corporeal things and their dispositions, they can thereby know what is passing in the appetite or in the imaginative apprehension of brute animals, and even of man, in so far as man's sensitive appetite sometimes acts under the influence of some bodily impression....

The analogical relation between exterior posture and gesture and the interior movements and dispositions of the mind is the irreducible basis of drama. In the Wake this appears everywhere. So that any attempt to reduce its action, at any point, to terms of univocal statement, results in radical distortion. Joyce's insistence on the "abcedminded" nature of his drama can be illustrated from his attitude to the alphabet throughout. He was familiar with the entire range of modem archaeological and anthropological study of pre-alphabetic syllabaries and hieroglyphics, including the traditional kabbalistic lore. To this knowledge he added the Thomistic insights into the relation of these things with mental operations. So that the polarity between H.C.E. and A.L.P. involves, for one thing, the relation between the agent and the possible intellect. H.C.E. is mountain, male and active. A.L.P. is river, female and passive. But ALP equals mountain and historically "H" is interfused with "A," and "A" is both ox-face and plough first of arts and letters; so that, dramatically, the roles of HCE and ALP are often interchangeable. Punning on "Dublin," he constantly invites us to regard his drama as the story of "doublendsjoined." Irremediably analogical, Joyce's work moves as naturally on the metaphysical as on the naturalistic plane. -From "James Joyce: Trivial and quadrivial," pp. 83-85.

If the above portrays Joyce as the Doctus grammaticus, the next snapshot shows McLuhan probing Joyce's attention to media of communication. It appears in The Gutenberg Galaxy, under the heading, Only afraction of the history of literacy has been typographic (pp. 74-5):

From the fifth century B.C. to the fifteenth century A.D. the book was a scribal product. Only one-third of, the history of the book in the Western world has been typographic. It is not incongruous, there fore, to say as G.A.Brett does in Psychology Ancient and Modem (pp. 36-7):

The idea that knowledge is essentially book leaming seems to be a very modem view, probably derived from the mediaeval distinctions between clerk and layman, with additional emphasis provided by the literary character of the rather fantastic humanism of the sixteenth century. The original and natural idea of knowledge is that of "cunning" or the possession of wits. Odysseus is the original type of thinker, a man of many ideas who could overcome the Cyclops and achieve a significant triumph of mind over matter. Knowledge is thus a capacity for overcoming the difficulties of life and achieving success in the world.

Brett here specifies the natural dichotomy which the book brings into any society, in addition to the split within the individual of that society. The work of James Joyce exhibits a complex clairvoyance in these matters. His Leopold Bloom of Ulysses, a man of many ideas and many devices, is a free-lance ad salesman. Joyce saw the parallels, on one hand, between the modem frontier of the verbal and pictorial and, on the other, between the Homeric world poised between the old sacral culture and the new profane or literate sensibility. Bloom, the newly detribalized Jew, is presented in modem Dublin, a slightly detribalized Irish world. Such a frontier is the modem world of the advertisement, congenial, therefore, to the transitional culture of Bloom. In the seventeenth or Ithaca episode of Ulysses we read: "What were habitually his final meditations? Of some one sole unique advertisement to cause passers to stop in wonder, a poster novelty, with all extraneous accretions excluded, reduced to its simplest and most efficient terms not exceeding the span of casual vision and congruous with the velocity of modem life." In The Books at the Wake, James S. Atherton points out (pp. 67-8):

Amongst other things finnegans Wake is a history of writing. We begin with writing on'A bone, a pebble, a ramskin ... leave them to terracookin the muttheringpot; and Gutenmorg with his cromagnom charter, tintingfats and great prime must once for omniboss stepp rubrickredd out of the wordpress' (20.5). The 'muttheringpot' is an allusion to Alchemy, but there is some other significance connected with writing, for the next time the word appears it is again in a context concerning improvement in systems of communication. The passage is: 'All the airish signics of her dipandump helpabit from an Father Hogam till the Mutther Masons,..' (223.3). "Dipandump helpabit' combine the deaf and dumb alphabet's signs in the air@r airish signs-with the ups and downs of the ordinary ABC and the more pronounced ups and downs of Irish Ogham writing. The Mason, following this, must be the man of that name who invented steel pen nibs. But all I can suggest for 'mutther' is the muttering of Freemasons which does not fit the context, although they, of course, also make signs in the air.

"Guttenmorg with his cromagnom charter" expounds by mythic gloss the fact that writing meant the emergence of the caveman or sacral man from the audile world of simultaneous resonance into the profane world of daylight. The reference tothe masons is to the world of the bricklayer as a type of speech itself. On the second page of the Wake, Joyce is making a mosaic, an Achilles shield, as it were, of all the themes of modes of human speech and communication: "Bygmeister Finnegan, of the Stuttering Hand, freemen's maurer, lived in the broadest way immarginable in his rushlit toofarback for messuages before joshuan judges had given us numbers..." Joyce is in the Wake, making his own Altimira cave drawings of the entire history of the human mind, in terms of its basic gestures and postures during all phases of human culture and technology. As his title indicates, he saw that the wake of human progress can disappear again into the night of sacral or auditory man. The Finn cycle of tribal institutions can return in the electric age, but if again, then let's make it a wake or awake or both. Joyce could see no advantage in our remaining locked up in each cultural cycle as in a trance or dream. He discovered the means of living simultaneously in all cultural modes while quite conscious. The means he cites for such self-awareness and correction of cultural bias is his "collideorscope." This term indicates the interplay in colloidal mixture of all components of human technology as they extend our senses and shifttheirratios in the social kaleidoscope of cultural clash: "deor," savage, the oral and sacral; "scope," the visual or profane and civilized.

The third snapshot is from the book, War and Peace in the Global Village: an inventory of some of the current spastic situations that could be eliminated by more feed forward, which was written about fifteen years after The Gutenberg Galaxy. The entire book should be examined here, but the introduction will have to serve. It begins with this paean to Joyce's prescience and his omnipresence in the text:

The frequent marginal quotes from finnegans Wake serve a varietyof functions. James Joyce's book is about the electrical retribalization of the West and the West's effect on the East:

The West shall shakethe Eastawake .... while ye have the night for mom...

Joyce's title refers directly to the Orientalization of the West by electric technology and to the meeting of East and West. The Wake has many meanings, among them the simple fact that in recoursing all of the human pasts our age has the distinction of doing it in increasing wakefulness. Joyce was probably the only man ever to discover that all social changes are the effect of new technologies (self-amputations of our own being) on the order of our sensory lives. It is the shift in this order, altering the image that we make of ourselves and our world, that guarantees that every major technical innovation will so disturb our sensory lives that wars necessarily result as misbegotten efforts to recover the old images. There are ten thunders in the Wake. Each is a cryptogram or codified explanation of the thundering and reverberating consequences of the major technological changes in all human history. When a tribal man hears thunder, he says, "What did he say that time?", as automatically as we say "Gesundheit." Joyce was not only the greatest behavioural engineer whoever lived, he was one of the funniest men, rearranging the most commonplace items to produce hilarity and insight: "where the hand of man never set foot." (pp.4-5)

War and Peace in the Global Village is festooned with marginalia taken from Finnegans Wake, by way of letting Joyce comment in person on the text from the sidelines. We had already found Joyce tinkering with the idea of global village in two remarks in the Wake: "the urb, it orbs" and "urban and orbal": both echo the title of the Pope's annual Easter message to the city of Rome and to the world, Urbi et Orbi. Tne Introduction also includes (pp. 46-8) a brief r6sum6 of the themes (explored in detail in the book on Joyce and Menippism) in the ten hundred-letter-word "thunders" of the Wake.

It was, in fact, about 1965 or 1966, a couple of years before the writing of War and Peace in the Global Village, when my father and I first tackled the ten thunders. We had been reading the Wake off and on together for a year or two, for sheer enjoyment and delight in playing with language, and as a way to whet our wits.

We had developed the habit, that summer, of sitting in the back yard at our house on Wells Hill Avenue in Toronto, and reading aloud together each day "a page" of the Wake. The "page" often extended to five or six, and our beginning point was usually chosen at random. That is, we never set out to read systematically from one end of the book to the other. "A page" may not seem like a lot, but a page of the Wake is not like an ordinary page. It demands the closest attention with all senses operating at once, or as many as one can muster. And with two minds alert for nuance and reference, even a couple of lines can occupy ten or twenty minutes of intense work, what with probing back and forth in the text and making links with other passages in the book and entering marginal references. (Once in a rare while we would read a whole chapter over the course of a few days, such as the first chapter, because it is so dense-it contains two thundersand so tightly woven, or that devoted to HCE, or to ALP.) The Wake is not, like anovel, to be read all at one go, butto be sampled and sipped and relished in bits. And used.

Of course, now and then we would stumble across a thunder, and wonder what in blazes Joyce was doing there. Eventually, our curiosity piqued, we wrote to ask a friend, Ivan Kramoris at the Buffalo Lockwood Memorial Library, to send us page-references to all ten thunders. He did, a few days later. After we received his reply, we spent the next several days reading the thunders and puzzling over them. First we puzzled over the obvious, that the thunders were different, that they made different sounds. We noticed that they were generally associated with episodes in the book or set-pieces. Then we noticed that, like the rest of Wake-ese, they burgeoned with other words than appeared on the surface-and suddenly the dam burst. Perhaps it was the "episode" of Belinda and The Letter(both letter of the alphabet, the letters symbolizing repeatability and reproduction), perhaps it was that of Kersse and the multiplicity of radio references, or perhaps it was the Charge of the Light Brigade at the screen of the television tube-whatever; we made the basic identifications in the thunder we were working on in a matter of a few hours, by following our habit of relating the present word to the larger context of the page and the episode. I remember that day, thirty years ago now, as a long one heady with excitement. We couldn't bring ourselves to stop until we had "cracked the code" of three or four of the thunders and the time for dinner was long past. Over the next few days, we sorted out the rest. Several years later, those identifications appeared, vastly abbreviated, as three pages in War and Peace in the Global Village. It took months of concentrated effort to begin to winkle out the thousands of words in the thunders; now, several of them have yielded thirty or more pages of words, each word denoting or alluding to a theme in the episode or an associated technology. Prior to our discovery of the thunders and their significance, Marshall McLuhan looked up to Joyce as a writer and artist of encyclopedic wisdom and eloquence unparalleled in our time, as the first two "snapshots," above, declare. After, he recognized in Joyce the prescient explorer, one who used patterns of linguistic energy to discern the patterns of culture and society and technology. Joyce was the perfect doctus grammaticus, expert in writing and reading both the written book and the book of nature, and in using each to interpret the other. (He pointed out that he had written Finnegans Wake "after the style of television.")

A final note: Marshall McLuhan used Joyce as acolleague. Whenever he made a discovery about technology and culture, he would open thewake and read for a bit, and there, sure enough, he would find that Joyce had already been over the ground years earlier. Joyce followed the lines of force in the language and read and recorded what was registered there about the convolutions and disturbances of human experience and perception. Often, too, he would find a pregnant allusion or turn of phrase in the Wake that would set off a chain reaction of associations about the matter under discussion. He did not merely use Joyce to confirm an insight; he did that to whatever extent the text allows (some readers, less expert or more conservative, have charged that he used the text as an ink-blot into which to project his own fancies.) But he also used Joyce as the stimulus for fresh awareness of the present moment. In the same vein, Joyce recommended using Vico "for all he was worth." Even today, Joyce gladly performs the same service for anyone willing to rise (or, as some would aver, sink) to his level of play. It is a commonplace that all great art has the same invigorative and illuminative power; in particular, that power is a defining characteristic of "low and motley" Menippean satire.