442
THOMAS R. EDWARDS
The cast of McLuhan's mind, with its provincial cheekiness to the
official culture it seeks to capture and its yearning for older, authoritarian
models of belief, thus has much in common with those reactionary
rebels - Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Wyndham Lewis - he so often invokes as
intellectual patrons:
Years ago, before I wrote the
Bride,
I had a moralistic approach
to all environmental facts. I abominated machinery, cities, every–
thing except the most Rousseauistic. Gradually, I became aware of
how useless this was and I discovered that artists of the twentieth–
century had a different approach and I adopted it.
It's his pleasantly old-fashioned idea of himself as artist, no doubt, that
makes necessary his "metaphysical" style, the lapses of mere grammar
and logic, the addiction to cute, gymnastic analogies, the discontent with
clarity and consistency of topic. He finds his justification in such things
as Cubism, Heisenbergian indeterminacy,
Finnegans Wake,
Toynbee, and
these slightly dated excitements may seem a little out of phase with the
evidence rather perfunctorily adduced from Burroughs, Jack Paar, the
Beatles,
New Yorker
cartoons or Op Art. Though he tries to keep up,
he remains oddly out of it, involved with what's happening only inso–
far as it confirms what was predicted by the happenings of his own
youth, forty years back. He admits he loathes
watching
TV, and nothing
he says about (for example) Pop Music or the new film reflects much
personal pleasure. His idea of fun - not one I can afford to ridicule–
is surely sitting down with a good book, preferably not brand-new.
Thus I think it an error to accuse him of wanting to embrace the
modem world in all its hideous charm. Rather I see him as a Secret
Square, a grim figure something like Stephen Dedalus at Bella Cohen's,
ill at ease with the scene except as it confirms his worst expectations
and punishes his lingering nostalgia for older and seemlier ways. The
trouble isn't that McLuhan exults in the electric environment but that,
in his determination to make it
really
new, he conjures up a monstrosity
he can take no pleasure in at all.
If
he opens doors to chaos, as Jonathan
Miller worries, he seems no readier than anyone else his age to live with
chaos comfortably. He
hopes
that the global village may be the mystical
body, but the Baptist keeps stirring around inside:
Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: bound–
less, directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world
of emotion, by primordial intuition, by terror. Speech is a social
chart of this bog.
(The Medium is the Massage,
p. 48)
This is the vision of
Finnegans Wake,
but without joyce's unquenchable
delight in the power of bog-life to rejuvenate the linguistic imagination.
