The modicum is the messuage

PERSONAL COLUMN ANTHONY BURGESS

I make no apology for that title, especially as Professor McLuhan will, if he goes on as he is going on, be forced to use it himself sooner or later. A messuage- is legally defined as -a house with outbuildings and garden. Professor McLuhan has created a very commodious messuage, productive of a most satisfactory rent, with a modicum of raw material. Good luck to him.

There are various approaches to Professor McLuhan and, during the recent McLuhan season marked by the publication and re- issue of four of his books, most of them have been tried. I diffidently suggest a new one. McLuhan started his academic career as' an engineering student at the University of Manitoba, but then changed. to English. This is an interesting example of the influence of a hot medium, linear alphabetical arrangement leading McLuhan ineluctably from Engi to Engl. He went to Cambridge, where he came under the influence of I. A. Richards and, one presumes, must have at least been touched by the terrible magic of F. R. Leavis and Scrutiny. In 1939 he wrote a thesis on Thomas Nashe, an Elizabethan notable for highly auditory prose and an appeal to the entire sensorium. It may or may not be' relevant to add that in 1937 he was converted to Catholicism and was thus enabled to leave teleological matters in hands other than his own. No need to speculate about the purpose of life: from now on the epistemological would be enough. _ - The important thing, though, is the Cam- bridge aesthetic. Scrutiny taught that, in an acceptable work of literature, it- was: not pos- sible to separate content from form. You couldn't' talk about the meaning of a poem: to explain it in terms of a prose paraphrase was not merely heretical but destructive of a highly wrought artefaet. In' a work of art the form is the content, the medium is the message. But message implies intellectionthe reading eye of the mind. And so, through a pun; that. Thomas Nashe would have approved, suggest through massage the laying on of pum- melling hands, the -beneficent attack on the skin and the nerve-endings. It was all there in Eliot, a Scrutiny darling, who complained about the dissociation of sensibility in the (hot medium) Romantics and not only taught but demonstrated the need for modern pOets to submit to the massage of (the 'twenties man's mechanical bride) the internal combustion engine.

McLuhan's gimmick has been to push an aesthetic doctrine to the limit. Nobody denies that a piece of music represents the condition to which all works of art must tend—a con- dition of unparaphrasability, a total identifica- tion of form and content. Painting and sculp- ture became non-representational; literature became symbolist or surrealist: they were try- ing to be like music. But what makes one art different from another is, of course, the medium. The painter loves squelchy pigment, the sculptor loves intractable stone. The old baroque way was to ignore the character of the medium, so that stone became ridiculously Plastic, losing its stoniness, and orchestral in- struments were made to behave like each other and like the human voice..The medium must be' allowed to have its own way: the artist resists its tyranny at his peril.

But' McLuhan is concerned with society more than art (though art, being something that just 'happens,' has no hieratic status in social pat- terns). Applying the Cambridge aesthetic to all the communication media, he is led to dis- tort it in a very interesting way. He deliberately refuses to distinguish between a medium as the determinant of an art-form and a medium as a transmissive device. I watch, on television, a film of a man reading a poem. Now obviously there are separables here—three media of com- munication concentrically set about the thing thafis being communicated. But, to McLuhan, 'there are really four things of the same order. A medium has to have a content, but the con- - tent is alWays itself a medium. Nor is any medium transparent: it modifies our percep- tion of the• medium which is the content. Thus, an old film seen on a Tv late late show is a different experience, and hence a different art- - form, from the original performance in a cinema.

McLuhan is absolved from the need to get to the core of a communication-process by his deliberate identification of the artistic 'message' with the purely informative or didactic one. Ends are not hiS-concern; indeed, they may not really exist. It seems to' me that his doc- trines have pragressed from (as in Understand- ing Media) an insistence on our accepting the importance of knowing what the massage is doing to us, to -an elevation of the massage- machine to the rank of- demiurge. His adora- tion of the Beatles (always, to me, an index of intellectual unsoundness) is based presum- ably' on their having become priests of elec- .. ironies. That they have to refuse a million dollars for a live concert in the United States (their new electronic medium being unable to accommodate the protoelectronie one) must be, to McLuhan, a sign of ultimate grace.

But he is very good and suggestive when he tells us of, say, the influence of the typewriter on the art, not just the craft, of authorship. Henry James became a new kind of writer when he began to dictate to a stenographer. The vers libre and typographical tropes of e. e. cummings owe, thinks McLuhan, every- thing to the machine (how much more this applies to the admirable work of Don Marquis). I myself, humbler but still an author,

know that my prose, such as it is, has been determined by a lifelong devotion to the type- writer: coming to the end of a line, unwilling to split a word with a hyphen, I will often use a shorter word than the one I intended. This is utter slavery to the machine. And McLuhan is 'right to insist on the worthiness of such com- mercial media as the advertisement. A special

edition of an American magazine, compressed

for airmail transmission by the elimination of advertisements, was promptly rejected by its GI recipients: it was the advertisements that they primarily wanted. They wanted them, says McLuhan, because advertisements are always by far the best devised feature of a periodicaL (True, and because of the urgency of their aim, which. McLuhan does not mention—to sell goods.) McLuhan is at his most Cambridge when he preaches the repressive and limiting force of our western visual culture and our failure to maintain the richer auditory and syn- aesthetic traditions of tribal societies. Alpha- betic writing he calls a 'hot' medium: it is explicit and authoritative and it doesn't in- vite participation: it imposes a linear way of looking at the universe; it attacks one sense only. Ideograms and syllabaries he regards as functioning quite differently. Thus, the ideo- gram of Chinese writing does not impose meaning with the explicit brutality of a quasi- phonetic script: it is 'cool,' the meaning is suspended airily between you and it. All 'this strikes me as a lot of nonsense. To read Chinese and a western language involves much the same process of instant recognition: we take in a word whole, as a Chinese takes in an ideogram. To present the traditional East-West difference in terms of irreconcilable modes' of writing will not do. Islam is as alphabetic as Christendom, and Islam's history went, for cen- turies, in an opposed direction to that of the West. It is ideas, not scripts, that change cul- tures. Ultimately, all scripts function in the same way. We do not take in the word not as a collocation of three sounds; the Chinese do

not take in pu (which means not) as a graphic

representation of a little plant prevented from growing (a metaphor of notness): the semantic signal flashes in a split second. And yet on the factitious notion of radical differences of func- tion McLuhan erects a whole historiography.

Perhaps he is right—though I'm not at all sure—when he says that the West is being dragged by the new electronic media out of the Gutenberg or Caxton age. Children, he says,

brought up on the cool medium of television (a

medium which invites participation) find diffi- culty even in the visual adjustment required when reading is forced on them. The straight- line chronology symbolised by a book belongs to the pre-Einsteinian era. Television is a norm we have to accept, not an upstart deviant that hypnotises the young. There is nothing sacro- sanct about a medium that hasn't changed since the fifteenth century, despite the halo that all books, however bad, borrow from the good one. But in refusing to accept that ideas are stronger than media, that the influence of media is (appropriately : I'm thinking of my type- writer prose again) marginal, McLuhan is per-

haps guilty of a heresy worse than the aesthetic one that thought the message was all. I say 'perhaps': I'm not sure. That McLuhan should shake our minds up and make us powerfully aware of the pressure of media 'is probably enough. But he wants more than that