Reading Modernism, After Hugh Kenner (1923-2003): Hugh Kenner's Pound of Flesh

There is a figure concealed behind the curtains of Hugh Kenner's high modernism, or perhaps Hugh Modernism, that no matter how qualified of late has ineluctably become our own. The wizard manqué hovers over the modernist critical edifice that is Kenner's enviable legacy, hiding in plain sight. This secret sharer holds an unexpected skeleton key to Kenner's modernist project, its gates glimmering before us like the illusory Emerald City. In Oz, the wizard's powers, while demystified as magic, are in essence the same techniques responsible for the magical effects of the film we watch spellbound. A similar Moebius strip effectively loops Kenner's construction of literary modernism's Radiant City with the seemingly humble machinations of the man in the projection booth. The largely unacknowledged animating spirit behind Kenner's modernism is Marshall McLuhan, the technical ghost in the modernist machine.

This probe implies no diminution of Kenner's indubitable originality. It does matter, though, that McLuhan's early work provides the template for the variant of modernism that thanks to Kenner we know best. The negative dialectics of McLuhan's modern materialism trace their crop circles across the landscape of Kenner's modernity. There are farms within farms within farms in high modernism's cultural geography, no matter how cosmopolitan its surfaces, and on this imaginary farm Ezra Pound, in the judgment of McLuhan and then Kenner, rules the roost. The Moebius strip on whose planar surface high modernism was produced met in its impossible suture with McLuhan's theory of modernity at the embodied edge called "Ezra Pound." If the patient lying etherized on the table was modernity, Pound's material poetry transfused the sleeper, allowing the unconscious patient to awaken. A foreshortened history of how the early McLuhan peaks in Kenner's prime reveals an arc that ends for both in Pound, the double arc or double rainbow responsible for giving Pound's name to modernist making, making Pound the arbiter of The Pound Era, and its epistemological pot of gold.

McLuhan came out of Canada's agricultural soil, his cultural origins quite similar to the passionate socialist agrarianism Thomas Frank lauds in the pre-Republican Kansas of yore, a state we are not in anymore. McLuhan read English at Cambridge with I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis, but a no less profound mentor was G. K. Chesterton; Kenner's first book was Paradox in Chesterton, introduced by McLuhan. McLuhan likened Chesterton's style to a cathedral's stained glass window, "a mosaic of brilliantly clear and simple hues through which, and not upon which, a transfiguring light streams."¹ The alembic of Cambridge was powerful for McLuhan's thought, but the mediated encounter with the American South he experienced as a professor in St. Louis, Missouri, a former slave state culturally identified with the defeated Confederacy, proves decisive. No longer populist per se, but still true to his agricultural roots and resistant to the colonial metropole, McLuhan finds in the New Agrarians quixotically reconstructing the historical South a fitting template for his cultural critique, one with farmland at its heart.

Giving Enlightenment rationalism a wide berth in its European form, the Sophist tradition's dedication to the originary powers of speech blooms for him anew in the antebellum South, and finds its ideal mouthpiece in Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson is like Pound, McLuhan will write in a late essay, one who puts a trenchant, practical American spin on Europe's effete rationalism, like the plough Jefferson designed, which McLuhan compares to Pound's technical poetics in the Cantos. Both are poetic machines, inventions not attributable, McLuhan argues, to Europe.

In the rationalist North, a literary hero, Edgar Allan Poe, arises from the fallen condition of print and mass culture who can navigate these shoals because he is originally Southern. By McLuhan's lights, Poe descends into the savage forces of print culture, modernity, and the North to seize their power for other, sophistic ends. Poe's medium—writing that mimics modern media forms to channel those energies into a wake-up call for...