At the Speed of Light There is Only Illumination: A Reappraisal of Marshall McLuhan

Retracing the Labyrinth of Modernism: McLuhan and the Aesthetic Moment

Retracing the Labyrinth of Modernism: McLuhan andthe Aesthetic Moment DOMINIC MANGANIELLO IVlARSHALL MCLUHAN SOUNDS A KEYNOTE of his literary criticism with a description of modern art as a process of recovery by retracing. Landmark works such as Ulysses and The Waste Land move simultaneously forward and backward in a timeless present, he argues, providing the reader with a discontinuous or cubist perspective from which to view various stages of aesthetic apprehension. This modernist method of composition in reverse was made possible by the shift in focus from exterior to interior landscape, apaysage interieur, that occurred after Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Stephane Mallarme. The period spanning the early eighteenth to the late nineteenth century, which marked the transition from English landscape poetry to French symbolism, is pivotal to McLuhans genealogy of modernism—but so is the return to the Middle Ages of the romantics and pre­Raphaelites. The fresh impetus for the latter two literary movements also inspired the modernists to rediscover the importance of Dante Alighieris epiphanic meeting with Beatrice. McLuhan, however, makes a "radical distinction" between the approach to the "Beatrician moment" taken by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and W. B. Yeats, on the one hand, and by James Joyce and T. S. Eliot, on the other. The former aimed to prolong the moment as a wayof achieving intensity, whereas the latter split the moment into numerous little pieces before reconfiguringit and thereby illuminating its attendant 86 landscape. For the former, the moment represented the culmination of aesthetic experience, whereas for the latter, it became a catalyst for the unfolding of the creative process. The pre­Raphaelites never imagined the power of "aesthetic fission" that would enable the modernists to retrace what McLuhan calls "the labyrinth of human cognition."1 In what follows, I explore the aesthetic and epistemological implica­ tions arising from McLuhans conjunction of landscape and labyrinth— his favorite tropes—by relating them to Mallarme s concept of "le demon de 1'analogie." McLuhan bases a crucial aspect of his theory, moreover, on Charles Williams s The Figure of Beatrice, a book that Eliot commissioned and Faber published in 1943. That Williams privileges the ethical and theological dimensions of the Beatrician moment calls for, I suggest, an even more radical distinction to be made between the poetics of Joyce and Eliot than McLuhan's account of modernism allows. McLuhan considers Joyce the consummate painter of mental land­ scapes, a modern master at rendering an inclusiveconsciousness by means of multiple perspectives. The famous ouverture to A Portrait of theArtistas a Young Man aptly illustrates this "radically democratic aesthetic."2 In the first two pages of the novel, Joyce superimposes several layers of otherwise disparate material in a single instant of perception: "The entireexperience of the race, the ground plan of all his unwritten work, and the most individual features of Stephen Dedalus's expanding awareness."3 The fairy­ tale opening, moreover, places the hero from his infancy in the traditional labyrinth and confronts him with a minotaur metamorphosed into "a moocow coming down along the road."4 This archetypal encounter, ac­ cording to McLuhan, represents "any movement of appetite" within the maze, whether it be "concupiscence, pride, imprecision, or vagueness," that threatens to devour beauty and impede the growth of the artist.5 Armed with the aesthetic cunning of his mythical namesake, Stephen stems the tide of desire by "epiphanizing" the many symbolic labyrinths he traverses. McLuhan credits Joyce especially, but Eliot and Williams too, with recasting Dante's doke stil nuovo in the modern form of the epiphany. These twentieth­century writers drew inspiration from the way the great medieval poet had vivisected the "prismatically arranged landscapes" of the Vita Nuova and the Commedia and then reconstructed them in a series of "Beatrician" or "sacramental" moments.6 McLuhan assumes that Joyce, 87 like Eliot and Williams, dedicates himself to "epiphanizing the signatures of things" because he believes that "all art is the shadow of the Incarna­ tion."7 Although the Irish novelist adopts the same vocabulary of spiritual renovation as that used by his English contemporaries, he invests it with alternative meaning. Stephen defines "epiphany," for example, as a "sud­ den spiritual manifestation,"8 a showing forth or illumination, but does not refer to a mystical or typical conversion experience captured in the following verse McLuhan quotes from the Psalms (4:7): "The light of thy countenance is signed upon us, O Lord...