Welcome to the third installment of Logos! I’m creating this series to fundraise for my upcoming trip to Boston, to aid the fight for our collective freedom at LibrePlanet 2023. Many thanks go out to Duncan, Leon, Gia, and Dmitriy. With their help, I’ve got a place to stay for the trip. More on that later. Last week, I promised you an installment on Embodiment. Well, 3000 words later, I’m not there yet! You’ll have to forgive my following the flow of how, it seems, the story here must proceed.

Part Three: Prufrock

In the last instalment of LOGOS, we considered Wyndham Lewis’ merger of the Time School with the approach of the Space School. Lewis, like the anthropologists from which so much of his work derived, immersed himself in society without becoming part of it. All the better to use society unapologetically and unflinchingly as substance for his art. In his book The Mechanical Bride, McLuhan found several analogates of the Lewis type in fiction.

In order of historical occurrence, McLuhan’s story starts with Lord Byron as the “residue” of aristocracy, abhorring the commercialism of industrial culture and the reduction of human life to mechanism. Here McLuhan first delineates the mind body split. Byron, McLuhan says, is the exemplar of “a whole tribe of early nineteenth century ‘Hamlets.’”

To Be

In a criticism of ‘Hamlet,’ T.S. Eliot had identified the play’s primary weakness as Hamlet having far too much existential angst and emotion than anything that Shakespeare managed to put into the story so-as to justify it. This weakness, said Eliot, was overlooked not only because few critics would ever dare say a word against Hamlet, but because nearly all literary criticism of Hamlet the play never discussed the play—critics of Hamlet were nearly always engrossed singularly with dissecting and analyzing Hamlet the character.

By this reading, Hamlet is a character too large for his own story.

Here we can begin to see a familiar, human face of that otherwise all-too-abstractly naméd conception “mind-body split.”

Byron was the exemplar of the nineteenth century Hamlet, “the bewildered man of exasperated nerves and confused sensibility affecting to be blighted by an excess of thought and experience,” as McLuhan puts it in his class notes from the ‘40s. And “excess of experience,” here meaning a young person affecting to be tired, weary of life—having seen it all. Old souls, resigned to know their naive years, perhaps their best years, are over—and that nothing changes for them onward, except maintenance in the face of gradual decline, nostalgia, and perhaps the endless Manichean struggle against one’s timeless enemies.

He continues there, as he would have for his students:

“The habit of rumination… is the result of a separation of thought and feeling. These men think and feel by turns, as it were. They conceptualize their emotions and emotionalize their conceptions. This has been called the disintegration of that unified sensibility which one finds in… [Andrew] Marvell, [Alexander] Pope, and Austen…. Jane Austen’s thoughts are never found in separation from a delicately organized mode of perception and feeling, and her feelings are everywhere irradiated by thought.”

The “bewildered” soul of “exasperated nerves” “affecting to be blighted by an excess of though and experience,” takes many forms, all of them sharing, though, in this thinking and feeling by turns.

This unstable mode of alternating feeling and thinking is described by T.S. Eliot in the essay wherein he originates the phrase “dissociation of sensibilities.” Eliot writes there that, after the Metaphysical poets of the 16th century, later generations of poems seemed to have been written out of hind-sight. Poets after the metaphysicals was inspired by l’esprit de l’escalier—staircase wit—as in someone embarrassed, at a loss for words, leaving a party, going down the stairs, and half-way down thinking to themselves “Oh! That’s what I should have said! Why didn’t I say that?” They just dream of running back up the stairs or finding a time machine to go say or do what they need to undo their own shame.

In contrast the “old soul” just described, this victim of perpetual social frustration hasn’t even a front to put up.

That’s the sort of character Prufrock is, in Eliot’s famed poem ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock.’ written 1910 and published in 1914. Prufrock is so fraught with self-destructive, pitiable over-analysis, that the one single line of the poem most people remember, I’ve found, is “Do I dare to eat a peach?” Dude’s nerves are so fried from worry that eating a peach could somehow bite him in the ass. It echoes a question asked earlier in the poem, “Do I dare/Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time/For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.”

Prufrock carries, in perpetuity, the worry of someone who has no idea what will result from their next action, and who only has felt pain and humiliation from every groping tentative step forward in life. Someone who’s experiences teach neither their mind nor their body, any coherent or consistent form of being in this world.

But they’re full to the brim of memories and stories and experiences of their experience of such a state. Their memories overwhelm, but do not fit together, in either continuity or by any common measure of intensity. The memories and stories and errant bits of advice which might guide their thoughts and actions are discordant, contradictory, out of relative scale, of uncertain relevance, or non-existent in a self-aware way.

And, as the lines “Do I dare/Disturb the universe?” suggest, it’s not just one’s own risks on the line, but risks one’s potential actions impose onto others or, more improbably, the whole world.

Ideally, we saw, McLuhan thought that the ideal integration of self, body and mind, thought and feeling, was last exhibited as a matter of inhereted cultural tradition in the prose of Jane Austen—the way she penetrated and portrayed and animated all her characters and their interrelations.

Not until Modernism, his curriculum goes, did English again learn to appreciate the Metaphysical poets, and begin writing works where thought and feeling were unified.

It’s worth contrasting Austen’s writing with those of Wyndham Lewis. The great novels of both evince proof of some unity of perception, a simultaneity of thinking and feeling. Lewis, while being an astute observer of character, was no Jane Austen. To me, Austen’s characters feel like a part of her own world—Lewis’ characters are always either himself, or are part of another world he merely has to exist in. Other modernists go even deeper into such feelings of alienation—the technical state, not to mention two world-wars and the societal awareness of knowledge of espionage and spying, leads many to paranoia. Thinking and feeling in unison isn’t exactly a pleasure in our new world of covert electric intrigue. Andrew Gaedtke’s book Modernism and the Machinery of Madness is excellent on this topic, and features a whole section on Wyndham Lewis to boot.

The unbearable pathos of Hamlet is not a stable posture to hold against an entire culture, post printing-press, Newton, Machiavelli, contract law, and industrialism-at-large. The stable constitution is closed off, detached. Few could become Jane Austen, who, as an aristocrat, had Logos owing her training and study in the culture which society was eating-away from the bottom up.

One radical form of being was, then, that of the detachment of Lewis. McLuhan came to recognize that character in the sleuth.

The Sleuth

So here’s how early McLuhan, McLuhan the English Professor, is laying out the situation: any sense of human-scale perception and proportion in art which might be inherited by tradition ended with the last generation of aristocrats still tutored in the then-dying tradition of classical culture. With the Enlightenment, rationalism and industry and commerce and all the rest became constitutive of the world and its culture. What remained for us, then, is sleuthing.

McLuhan had already spent a great deal of time researching the techniques of the French Symbolist poets, owing largely to their great influence on the English Modernists. The French Symbolists, starting with Baudelaire, had in prior turn been greatly influenced by an English author—an American. Namely, Edgar Allen Poe.

Poe, McLuhan points out again and again throughout his writings, had invented the modern detective, the Sleuth, with his character Dupin. Poe was quite candid in revealing his method, which was that of beginning with the desired effect of his art, and then working backwards to find the precise circumstances and causes to bring that effect about. And this is how a mystery story is written—the author must know how it ends, who did it, before beginning to write the opening.

The sleuth’s faculty of perception here is key. Artists must become like the ideal detectives of fiction: dispassionate and ruling nothing out as irrelevant. The notion of “high art” as in the Time school here is irrelevant: there is nothing beneath the artist for inspection and use. The macabre or the lowly or the disgusting is worthy of contemplation and understanding within its scheme.

Here, then, we can again compare the difference between, to use them somewhat arbitrarily as exemplars, Jane Austen and Wyndham Lewis. Austen was writing from within a long tradition, albeit one finally dying out. Lewis was examining with the eyes of a sleuth, detecting the world anew by clues, with perception honed for the purpose in a world that granted you no easy means ways or means of knowing or sensing the greater whole—the whole of yourself or of the world.

Between Austen and Lewis, remember, lay both Darwin and Einstein. Also, as McLuhan’s later career was built on establishing, the telegraph, the daily press, and the radio—mass media. What a world for the artist, as sleuth, to poke their nose into!

The Angelic

One of McLuhan’s guiding lights regarding the nature of art during the ‘40s was Jacques Maritain, a Catholic scholar who, McLuhan was proud to point out, had broken out into the mainstream of popular culture as a public intellectual in a way that few other Catholics had. Maritain had studied under Henri Bergson in Paris, but converted to Catholicism upon his first encounter with Thomas Aquinas. One facet of Maritain’s appreciation of post-enlightenment European culture was an “Angelism” which snuck into being with Descartes.

This “angelism” is another formulation of what Eliot, separate and apart, had called the dissociation of sensibility, and what we here are calling the mind-body split. In all cases, there is a particular perception of reality, culture, the world, time and space which leaves one’s embodied situation in the here-and-now behind.

Regarding the Modernist poets, especially Baudelaire and Mallarmé, Maritain identified and explained their method as having gone beyond the functions of poetry as a crafting of words. In fact the modernists, in Maritain’s telling, had developed an unprecedented method of inspiration which involved the cultivation of “self-awareness” on behalf of poetry within themselves, to the supplanting of their own egos or identities.

Maritain points to Baudelaire, the first of the Symbolist poets, creatively translating a Poe essay:

It is the instinct for beauty “which makes us consider the world and its pageants as a glimpse of, a correspondence with, Heaven… It is at once by poetry and through poetry; by music and through music, that the soul divines what splendors shine behind the tomb; and when an exquisite poem brings tears to the eyes, such tears are not the sign of an excess of joy, they are rather a witness to an irritated melancholy, an exigency of nerves, a nature exiled in the imperfect which would possess immediately, on this very earth, a paradise revealed.”

Baudelaire was undoubtedly influenced by Swedenborg, a London-based 18th century mystic, who quite explicitly fleshed out this obvious Time-school conceit.

Maritain cites Rimbaud, another Symbolist:

“The poet makes himself by a long, tremendous, and coldly reasoned dissipation of all the senses. All the forms of love, of suffering, of madness, he seeks within himself, and he drains from them all their poisons in order to preserve only the quintessences. Ineffable torture… Let him burst to death in the spasms of things unnamed and unheard of; there will be other horrible practitioners too: they will rise on the very horizons where he goes down!”

Maritain also quotes Mallarmé:

“This is to make you know I am now impersonal, not Stéphane you knew–but the ability of the Spiritual Universe to see and develop itself, through what was me. “

Here we witness aspects of total self obliteration characterized by the Space School. Maybe now we can begin to appreciate McLuhan’s reproval in a July 31st, 1974 letter,

“Remember, I have the only communication theory of transformation—all the other theories are theories of transporation [of information] only… Nobody could pretend serious interest in my work who was not completely familiar with all of the works of James Joyce and the French Symbolists.” A subsequent letter to the same correspondent continues, “He seems to have the usual anti-McLuhan animus that characterizes the schools of communication. That is, they are all information-theory people, as people…”

McLuhan’s study of poetry—a style of analysis which, as far as I can tell, cannot be learned in university literary-studies classrooms anywhere today—lead him to a theory of “transformation” in opposition to the “information-theory” schools which teach communication as the “transportation” of a message. The Shannon Weaver model. And the ground of McLuhan’s turned out to be—it should be no surprise by now (although it was certainly a surprise to him)— religious. So let’s continue with Maritain.

In Maritain’s large, complex, Aristotelian view of modernism—which I can scarcely do more than indicate to here—, artists in the 19th century had cultivated an unprecedented, radical self-effacement which surrendered themselves to becoming vessels by which the larger universe was dispassionately channelled. It’s an “angelism” of the sort which possessed Descartes, only with a mind of its own—the spirit of poetry, of impersonal creativity becoming aware of itself. It’s like that old science-fiction trope, of the person who encounters some alien force and becomes a vessel to some higher force. Often one dangerous to former, still human companions.

While many concepts, “frameworks,” words, myths, or examples may rush to your mind to capture this notion, let’s hold off on that for now, and continue to examine the notions in their genesis, as expressed in language and art as they were being discussed in the period we’re looking at. Like poetry itself, I feel its important not to rush to shoe-horn conclusions or foist well-known labels and boxes on-top of the complexities of new stories while they are still being told. Sleuths who rush to the end of their mystery before their investigations are thoroughly completed tend to be the dupes, not the Dupins.

Renowned Art Critic Harold Rosenberg, later of New Yorker Magazine, wrote a response to Maritain in The Partisan Review, challenging Maritain’s framing of the larger history. Rosenberg suspects Maritain is twisting history out of allegiance to the Church. Rosenberg points to the muses and cults of Ancient Greece as precedents to Modernism, which is not as unprecedented as Maritain claims. Rosenberg does not, however, doubt Maritain’s primary premise. On the contrary, Rosenberg puts on airs of taunting and provocation, like Vincent Price or Alfred Hitchcock, in confirming Maritain’s fears about the power of the method.

Every poet truly modern has increased the capacity of the human spirit to live and realize itself in its time. When Maritain recalls against modernism its individual causalities, he tempts us to draw an awesome contrast: on the one side, the handful of pioneers of the “dark night” who left indestructible blazes for those who follow; and on the other, the thousands who “deranged their senses” and “drained every poison” in the caves and deserts of the Dark Ages but without the intention of or the technique of gathering and handing on what each had gained….

Modern poetry has no frontiers which it is forbidden to cross. It is serious about all former miracles, including that of Grace; since Grace too is a human condition and can therefore be understood and perhaps ultimately be produced at will. The direction of poetry has been set up by a faith peculiar to this age: that man will become the center of powers which, were he to sense them within him today, would cause him to tremble before his own greatness, as Rimbaud trembled before the aspect of his seer.

As is recounted again and again by Modernists and McLuhan alike, the ultimate effect of such a perception is that everything in the world, even in its most mundane facets, becomes endlessly engrossing and interesting—if only from the endless analogies which the contemplative mind can draw from a things likeness. Not to say, again, that it’s all pleasant. A re-reading of Plato’s allegory of the Cave: a translation of the original, not a summary, would be instructive on this point.

At the very least, nobody or nothing could ever, in this state, be boring. We might look here for one explanation of McLuhan’s voracious appetite for books on so many a varied subject, high and low. It is, a James Joyce called it, Encyclopedic.

We’ll have more next week, but for now, let’s consider Logos as the capacity to keep up with this impersonal spirit of poetic perception, and consider Prufrock as something of a burn-out, in the style which Maritain and Rosenberg are arguing over.

This series will continue! At the same time, my time is best now focused on finishing and finessing my presentation for the Free Software Foundation’s LibrePlanet 2023 Convection in Boston, Massachusetts, which is convening on the 18th and 19th of March. I am attending thanks to the gracious sponsorship of viewers like you, and could still use the help! Please consider contributing at my PayPal, or through some other means by reaching out to me.