As it apeared at Academia.Edu

Introductory essay for the Special Centennial issue of RENASCENCE magazine, which I guest edited in 2011. This is the only journal where McLuhan was on the editorial board, and to which he contributed around 40 essays/reviews/speeches in the 1950s/60s. This is where he spoke to a Catholic audience about the literary “modernists” he was closely associated with — Joyce, Eliot, Lewis and Pound et al — and is work which has been largely ignored by subsequent McLuhan scholarship.

We become what we behold.

We shape our tools and then our tools shape us (Marshall McLuhan)

MARSHALL McLuhan was a hopeful man born into an age of conflict. He was born Herbert Marshall McLuhan on July 21, 1911, (died 1980) in Edmonton, Alberta, on the distant prairie-edge of a decaying British Empire. He was to become one of the most profound Catholic intellectuals of the modern era. Among his mentors were Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, Etienne Gilson, F. R. Leavis, I. A. Richards, Frederick Wilhelmsen, Edgar Allen Poe, and Wyndham Lewis. Despite many published accounts of his life, an intellectual biography of McLuhan has not yet been written. In 2011, the centenary of his birth, hundreds of articles were penned and speeches given in his honor, while scholarship about his life and research into the implications of his insights has only just begun. At the height of his fame in the late 1960s, a bikini-clad Goldie Hawn giggled “Marshall McLuhan, what are ya doin’?” from the joke-wall on television’s Laugh-In. Later, after the fame had faded in the 1970s, he upstaged Woody Allen in Annie Hall, satirizing himself with, “You mean my whole fallacy is wrong!” McLuhan’s profession was English literature, and he contributed 36 articles and reviews to Renascence between 1949 and 1963, gave speeches at the journal’s Spring Symposium, and served on its editorial board from 1954 to 1962. John Pick, the founding editor of Renascence, was McLuhan’s godfather when he converted to Catholicism at the age of 25 in 1937, and the journal was where McLuhan spoke to a Catholic audience.

HIS TIMES: McLuhan’s understanding of the world began to take form in the late 1920s. The English-speaking intellectual world of the early twentieth century was a very lively one, with many authors writing essays and commentary in magazines and newspapers. McLuhan even penned some articles for his college newspaper, the University of Manitoba’s The Manitoban, between 1930 and 1934. Out of the hundreds who tried to make a living as what might be called “public intellectuals” in this time, there are a handful who stand out as the most successful, appearing constantly in multiple venues, writing essays,books, poetry, and plays, as well as giving public speeches and holding debates with each other. Of these, there are four who were so widely read that they became virtual household names — the pair of George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells was commonly contrasted with the pair of Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton. As befits their prodigious talents as writers and larger-than-life personas, there was a significant audience who gravitated to the Fabian-tinged opinions of Shaw and Wells, while many others gravitated to the Christian-framed opinions of Belloc and Chesterton — two critics who were such close friends and so often together that they were dubbed “Chesterbelloc”by Shaw (Belloc, Agree). McLuhan joined the Chesterbelloc camp while still an undergraduate in Winnipeg and pursued his interest in these authors with considerable excitement when he arrived at Cambridge University pursuing a Ph.D. in late 1934. He bought their books and read their essays. He traveled to London to hear Chesterton speak and even joined their “political” movement, the Distributist League (Belloc,Servile). In 1936, at the age of 25, McLuhan’s first published article was titled “G. K. Chesterton: A Practical Mystic” (Dalhousie Review). Hilaire Belloc was the senior of the two — born in France in 1870, he became a naturalized British subject in 1902, having lived in England since he was two, where he remained until his death in 1953. Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born in 1874 and lived in England until his death in 1936. Belloc was a lifelong Catholic, while Chesterton converted from Anglicanism in 1922. Belloc wrote upwards of 150 books, including more than 30 on English and French history, as well as many volumes of fiction and satire, while Chesterton wrote around 80 books, hundreds of poems, about 200 short stories, as many as 4,000 essays, and several plays. According to Marshall’s son Eric McLuhan, his father read “nearly all” of what both authors wrote, a feat likely unmatched by McLuhan with any other writers (E. McLuhan, Email). As prolific social and literary critics, historians, novelists, theologians, debaters, poets, satirists, magazine publishers, and political activists, Belloc and Chesterton provided a rich and far-reaching context for the young McLuhan, who regularly sent copies of G. K. Weekly home to his family from Cambridge. These were, in many ways, McLuhan’s most vital and earliest teachers. Belloc, who today is much less well known than Chesterton, is a particularly important influence with whom McLuhan scholars must wrestle. McLuhan got both his knack for satire (Belloc, Allah) and an early appreciation for the social impact of technologies (Belloc, Road ) from him.

Belloc was arguably the more combative as well as controversial of the two — imparting some of the qualities that McLuhan would later describe about himself as an “intellectual thug” in a letter to Ezra Pound ( Letters 227). Belloc forcefully disagreed with accepted English history (Crisis). He regarded the loss of Britain, which had once been a part of Roman culture, from Catholic Europe to be the defining event in the fracturing of Christendom, about which he famously said, “The Faith is Europe and Europe is the Faith” ( Europe viii). From this account, McLuhan got his understanding that being born an Anglophone placed him in the middle of a colossal historic conflict. (1) Belloc saw the sequence from the looting of Catholic monasteries under Henry VIII to the manipulation of Elizabeth by the Cecils —through the seventeenth century English Revolution and regicide to the ultimate destruction of the monarchy and its replacement by an anti-Catholic aristocracy — as nothing less than the decline and the breakdown of civilization (Shorter ). He is perhaps the only author to have detailed this sordid account in the English language, putting him sharply at odds with the story of steady progress and English beneficence typically portrayed in “Whig” history. (2) In a 1931 essay titled, “The Counterattack Through History,” Belloc declares:

“I say that we must approach our historical task in a spirit of hostility to our opponents. We must look with suspicion upon every statement; still more upon the main tendencies in writing which we instinctively feel to be opposed to Catholic truth, even where they do not overtly attack that truth. We must not begin by accepting the bulk of official stuff and then see where we can pick holes in it to the advantage of religion. We must start out with a general suspicion of the whole cargo. (101)”

As every schoolboy debater knows, “logic” requires agreement about premises. McLuhan’s lifelong effort to get “behind” logic, through his championing of analogy, formal cause, and grammar, is, at its root, an attempt to discover valid premises. McLuhan, as Belloc’s student, did not accept the “official” premises. History was a moral battle ground for Belloc, as it was for McLuhan. In his 1928 book How the Reformation Happened , Belloc writes:

“But the last factor, the hatred of the Faith, though it was numerically by far the smallest, was much the most intense, and was in the nature of a leaven which could rapidly infect all society, once it was given play. We must remember that this hatred has always been present. That it is present today most Catholics and all converts know well, though the world outside (the world that writes our official history) does not appreciate the presence of this hatred until it is excited by opposition. Such hatred is natural and inevitable. All energy polarizes, and the Catholic Church is the most powerful source of energy on earth. It provokes an opposite pole. Further, the Church is an issue everywhere with man as he is, restricting him always, and, at sometime or other in nearly every man’s life, violently at issue with pride, ambition, or desire. Over and above, and more powerful still as a provocative, is the Church’s claim to absolute authority and universal moral dominion.” (36)

HIS LEARNING: Like his mentor Hilaire Belloc, McLuhan was a deep student of history. As chaotic as the twentieth century appeared to many, he was convinced that human affairs have their causes and that these causes can — indeed, must — be understood. While he became famous for phrases like “the global village” and “the medium is the message,” the term that McLuhan repeatedly emphasized as his popularity took off in the late 1960s was “pattern recognition.” (3)  He took this phrase from his association with IBM, which provided early funds for The Centre for the Study of Culture and Technology, McLuhan’s base-of-operations at the University of Toronto from 1963 until his death in 1980. Most likely, the term originates in early efforts to develop machine-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) and was deliberately re-purposed by McLuhan. Pattern recognition is not the same as intelligence and isn’t something that is part of today’s typical personality inventories. It is the ability to perceive what is “really” happening and does not often appear in conventional accounts of the world. It is the domain of accomplished artists and, McLuhan believed, would become more widespread as the effects of“electric media” became dominant in the culture, replacing the “tunnel-vision” engendered by printed media. (4) Later, McLuhan shifted from AI to the metaphors of Gestalt psychology (figure and ground) and brain research (right brain, left brain) to try to explain this elusive capability. Throughout, he insisted that it was fundamentally a matter of “percepts” and not “concepts,” by which he meant that trying to systematically categorize, diagram, and logically construct a view of the world inevitably obscures the underlying pattern — blocking pattern recognition ( Essential ii). His concerted efforts against “logic” won him many opponents, indeed in much of academia he was (and still is) considered to be at best an eccentric and at worst a fraud. (5) McLuhan had already begun to stake his claim on the myriad ways of thinking that go “behind” logic which wereonce prevalent in Western culture in his student years at the University of Manitoba and then at Cambridge University. McLuhan’s Ph.D. thesis is an unprecedented historic account of human learning. He completed “The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of his Time” by sending chapters via multiple mail-ships to avoid being lost to U-boats at sea. Until it was finally publishedin 2006, few had read this work. Indeed, to this day, many who think of themselves as “students” of McLuhan still have not. McLuhan perceived long-term patterns that he believed were essential to the understanding of our own lives. Most important of these patterns was the Incarnation of Christ, around which human history revolves. The patterns of Greek and Hebrew culture, already deeply embedded into the patterns of Roman culture, was the world into which Christ was born. They became the patterns of Christian culture, reaching a “zenith” in the High Middle Ages, from which humanity has retreated during the past many centuries. McLuhan was a hopeful man and a strong believer in “rebirth,” and he made it clear from the introduction to “The Classical Trivium” that he believed multiple “renaissances” were to be expected.(6) The fifteenth-century Great Renaissance, which was the “times” of the life of Thomas Nashe mentioned in his thesis subtitle, was only going to be one of many renaissances. Indeed, it could be fairly said that McLuhan was a leading renaissances (plural) scholar. The long retreat from the patterns of Christian culture beginning around the sixteenth century is the topic of McLuhan’s first popular work, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962). In it he describes “Typographic Man” as one who was seduced by the visual “bias” of the printed page. Later, he jokingly referred to those who retained this bias in the face of new cultural patterns that had already shifted to an “acoustic” bias as “Print-OrientedBastards” (Take Today 288). McLuhan was certainly no opponent of books. His office was essentially a private library with a lamp and a comfortable reading chair. Surrounded by 5,000+ volumes, many of which he annotated in the margins, McLuhan was a voracious reader. (7) In addition to Latin and Greek, it appears he read mostly in English, although he made it a point to read the Bible in as many languages as he could. He wasn’t against reading; he was against the visual bias that came with the printing press. He was against the inability to recognize the developing patterns that were caused by print. And, through his incessant “probes,” non-stop reading and voluminous correspondence, he was looking for others who understood what causes the world we all live in. Causality was a very important topic for McLuhan. From a young age, he was convinced that human affairs have their causes and that the“official” versions of history aren’t the most truthful ones. (8) Even beforehe “officially” converted to Catholicism, McLuhan became a Thomist by adopting a medieval sensibility. St. Thomas Aquinas was, of course, the medieval theologian who “tamed” Aristotle. In Thomas’s times and, indeed, throughout the times described in The Classical Trivium, from antiquity through the Renaissance, causality had multiple meanings. “Cause” wasn’t a univocal term but rather equivocal. Aristotle had famously described these meanings — his four causes: formal, material, efficient, and final — and no one had added or subtracted from this list for 2,000 years. That, in itself, is an important pattern. Coincident with the cultural invasion of the printing press, however, this pattern began to change. As McLuhan might recount it, the linear first-this-then-that “perspective” delivered on the printed page tipped our sensory balance in favor of efficient cause — which eventually, as printing became the dominant medium in the culture, became the only cause-and-effect known by most people. This is the same visual perspective that appears in the sight-lines infinitely converging on the horizon that appear in Renaissance paintings. This is also the personal perspective that encouraged people to write their own books, to express their personal “point-of-view.”McLuhan did not believe that efficient cause-and-effect told the whole story or that it exhausted the multiple meanings of causality. Based on the contributions of the many people who had accepted Aristotle’s four causes as the necessary framework of their experience and understanding for so many centuries, McLuhan was convinced that something extremely valuable had been lost with the triumph of the “Gutenberg Galaxy” and the“discarding” of the other causes. In many ways, we had lost the ability to recognize the patterns all around us by focusing on the efficient and the straight-forward. We had become “straight-line” ignorant. As McLuhan wrote to his mother, Elsie McLuhan, an accomplished elocutionist and significant figure in his life, in 1935: “You may know athing by its fruits if you are silly enough or ignorant enough to wait that long” ( Letters 72). He is saying that there is something about “a thing” that can be known without waiting for the “fruits” to appear. Waiting forcause-and-effect to play out, says McLuhan, is for those who are “silly”and “ignorant.” In other words, there is a way to “know” that is superior to everyday and commonplace cause-and-effect observation. Perhaps this is his first expression of the importance of pattern recognition. McLuhan had just turned 24 and was beginning his second year at Cambridge. Later, he would identify this effects-before-causes and outside-of-time approach to pattern recognition as “formal causality” and devote his life to demonstrating why it is this sense of “cause” that is most important for understanding the patterns of our own lives ( Media and Formal Cause). McLuhan’s own discoveries went through many stages and his contributions to Renascence reflect his growing recognition in the 1950s about what Wyndham Lewis had termed the “freemasonry of the arts” and the need to discuss these matters publicly. In his 1953 correspondence with Eric Voegelin, precipitated by Voegelin’s 1951 “Truth and Representation” Walgreen Lectures at the University of Chicago (which were published asThe New Science of Politics in 1952), McLuhan notes, “But a person feels like an awful sucker to have spent 20 years of study on an ‘art’ which turns out to be somebody else’s ritual” (underlining original, Letter to Voegelin). Voegelin had skillfully expanded the study of “gnosticism” from anearly-Christian-era specialty to a broad critique of modern society in New Science and his subsequent 1958 Munich lecture, “Science, Politics and Gnosticism.” Like McLuhan, Voegelin was ready for public controversy, including the front-page German newspaper editorial which accused Voegelin of “irrationalism” for characterizing “Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger as Gnostics” (qtd. in Modernity Without Restraint 3). McLuhan would have agreed with Voegelin. In his correspondence with Voegelin, McLuhan continued, “Such being the state of Catholic culture on this continent, it has never even occurred to me to seek a hearing among my fellow Catholics except in the class room. But in the past year or so I have changed my ideas on this matter.” McLuhan’s extensive contributions to Renascence were the out come of this new mindset.

HIS PLACE: In 1959, C. P. Snow published his famous essay “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.” Snow, who had been a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and a key official organizing scientific personnel for the British in World War II, made a compact argument and attracted considerable debate. He argued that since the “Scientific Revolution,” Western culture had divided into two “cultures”— artists and scientists. He further argued that this division was damaging to “progress” and that something had to be done about it. He proposed that since poets couldn’t be trusted with society, the solution would be to teach poetry to physicists, who would then embody all that was needed for the proper management of society and its culture.

In making this argument, Snow singled out Wyndham Lewis, one of McLuhan’s mentors, as the prime example of the “unreliability” of artists. Among those who took issue with Snow was F. R. Leavis, one of McLuhan’s teachers at Cambridge, who published his Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow in 1962. The book’s jacket opens with:

“England’s foremost literary critic sees the widespread acceptance of Snow’s view of the two cultures — humanist and scientist — as the mark of a new “publicity-oriented culture” imposed by a pretentious and ignorant elite on an uncritical public.”

Snow’s obviously self-serving dichotomy was a crude example of the conflict that McLuhan had drawn in his Cambridge Ph.D. thesis between “grammarians” (who included the “humanists” such as Francis Bacon et al) and “dialecticians” (who included the “scientists” such as René Descartes et al). McLuhan, however, did not portray this as a newly emerged conflict — either in the twentieth or the sixteenth centuries —but rather as one that has persisted since antiquity. In fact, McLuhan further identified this “ancient quarrel” as a perennial battle between the “ancients” and the “moderni” ( Interior Landscape 214). McLuhan’s place in the learning of his times was as an “artist,” a “humanist,” a “grammarian,” and an “ancient” — and McLuhan’s place was squarely on the losing side, based on Snow’s formulation. Snow was not the first, or last, to make a plea for the cultural dominance of “scientists” over “artists.” This argument dates, at least, to the times of McLuhan’s own intellectual formation in the early twentieth century. H. G. Wells madea similar argument in his 1905 A Modern Utopia, where, based on the dangers associated with new technologies, society would need to be segregated and the “scientist-priests,” whom he termed the “New Samurai,”would need to be placed in charge. Wells was the more combative of the Shaw and Wells duo who fought for the Anglophone audience against Chesterton and Belloc in the 1920-30s. Wells’s “anti-humanist” (or using McLuhan’s terms “dialectician”or “moderni”) argument persisted throughout his career, with highlights including his 1928 manifesto The Open Conspiracy and his 1934 novel The Shape of Things to Come (which was made into a movie in 1936,simply called Things to Come), as well as his 1938 World Brain and scores of other books and essays. It also provides the underlying premise for his 1921 The Outline of History, against which Belloc wrote his 1926 A Companion to Mr. Wells’s Outline of History.

Wells had some wealthy supporters, among them Imperial Chemical Industries head Sir Alfred Mond, who backed a short-lived Wellsian journal called The Realist  in the late 1920s. Mond reappears as the “World-Controller of Western Europe” Mustapha Mond in Aldous Huxley’s 1932 Brave New World , which was written as a satire on Wells and his schemes of world dominance.

This back-and-forth presumably stems from the fact that Wells had been a “godfather” to both Aldous and his brother Julian Huxley, a role he was given by T. H. Huxley, “Darwin’s Bulldog,” who was Wells’s mentor and the boys’ grandfather. However,the animosity between Wells and Aldous Huxley was so severe that Wells once suggested Aldous and his colleague Gerald Heard would make “perfect material for display dissection in a museum of psychic surgery” (Phoenix 50).

In contrast, Julian Huxley became Wells’s most important protégé. Together they penned the 1929 The Science of Life. Julian Huxley went on to become the founding Director General of UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) at its first General Conference in 1946. UNESCO traces its mandate to a 1921 League of Nations resolution and the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (CICI), which was formed in 1922, in which Wells had been involved. UNESCO is perhaps the most important surviving embodimentof Wells’s The Open Conspiracy  manifesto.

Julian Huxley also became a primary sponsor of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, helping him to publish his views which his Jesuit Order had forbidden him to print. Like Wells, Huxley was vehemently anti-Catholic. Today, some, like Tom Wolfe, persist in incorrectly identifying McLuhan with Chardin ( Hooking Up73), placing McLuhan on the wrong side of the enduring “ancient” vs. “moderni” conflict. Some even incorrectly identify McLuhan with the “complex systems” movement, which grew outof Snow’s “physics for poets” and related “Third Culture” efforts, which,in turn, grew out of the earlier collaboration between Wells and Huxley (Logan).

McLuhan was on the other side of that conflict too. Wells’s conspiracy schemes for global social-control of a “WorldState” by the “scientist-priests” also appeared in other venues. Atomic weapons were developed under the critical tutelage of Leo Szilard, a Hungarian physicist. Szilard, who had headed the “education” wing of the ill-fated Bela Kunled 1919 Budapest Commune, emigrated first to Germany, where he studied with Einstein and Max Planck in Berlin, and then to England where he is credited with inventing the nuclear chain reaction. In turn, Szilard credited Wells with his inspiration, based on Wells’s 1914 The World Set Free, a novel in which war was made impossible as a result of nuclear weapons developed by what Wells called the “sun snarers,” based on Wells’s attendance at lectures given by Baron Rutherford in London (Grandy).

Szilard later went on to pen the letter which was sent to Franklin D.Roosevelt, over the signature of Albert Einstein, which established the Manhattan Project. Famously, Szilard, nicknamed “Leo the Lizard,” was denied a security clearance, presumably based on his public commitment to the global sharing of nuclear technology. For Szilard, as it had been for Wells, the purpose of “the bomb” was to guarantee what became known as “mutually assured destruction” (MAD) and thus the end of global warfare, which was one of the three foundational principles of Wells’s “open conspiracy. ” Szilard, along with Einstein, Bertrand Russell, and others, went on to form a global group of scientists which became known as the “Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs,” after the Pugwash, NovaScotia, estate where it first met in 1957. The Pugwash founding director, Joseph Rotblat, and the Conferences won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995. The core of the initial membership were British, American, and Soviet nuclear physicists and the transcripts of these private conferences have never been made public. Again, the inspiration came from Wells, who in The Shape of Things to Come had imagined such a convention of leading scientists, which he termed “Wings Over the World,” to take place in the 1950s (in Basra, Iraq). The fact that Snow would promote the idea of scientists learning poetry and then taking command of global culture and society in his 1959 “Two Cultures” essay was no accident. It was a theme that had been richly developed in the 1920-30s by Wells and then implemented by Wells’s protégés Julian Huxley (UNESCO) and Leo Szilard (Pugwash) in the 1950s. It was so widely noted at that time that outgoing U.S. President Dwight D.Eisenhower pointed to it in his famous Farewell Address on January 17,1961, long remembered for his coinage of the term the “military-industrial complex,” in which he also said:

“Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge cost involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every blackboard there are now hundreds of electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is everpresent — and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger (15) that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

What Eisenhower was speaking of, implicitly indicting those involved in Pugwash et al, was the danger of conceding power to what McLuhan referred to as the “moderni” who had been in relentless conflict with the“ancients” since the earliest history. McLuhan’s own “times,” as he matured in the 1920-30s, highlighted this conflict in the contest for the English-speaking audience between Belloc/Chesterton and Wells/Shaw. McLuhan’s own “learning,” as reflected in his Cambridge Ph.D. thesis and his conversion to Catholicism,was built around this conflict, in which McLuhan declared himself to be a “grammarian” who was opposed to the dominance of the “dialecticians.” McLuhan’s “place,” as he became a pop-culture icon in the 1960s and again today, as the world celebrates the 100th anniversary of his birth on that distant Canadian prairie, was as a combatant on behalf of humanity inthe age-old conflict between mankind and our own inventions.

Notes

1) The degree to which the English (and, therefore, the English-speaking elites) have considered themselves to be in conflict with Catholics has been highlighted by recent changes in the 1701 Settlement Act which, for the first time in more than 300 years, would allow a British Monarch to marry a Catholic but did not change the ban against allowing a Catholic prince (or princess) to actually become the Sovereign.

2) Belloc wrote more than 30 books on English and French history, largely devoted to correcting what he believed were the mistakes of the “Whig” history which dominatesthe field.

3) Pattern recognition first appears in McLuhan’s work in the second introduction to his 1964 Understanding Media and then shows up continually in his subsequent interviewsand essays, where it is often counter-posed to “data classification.”

4) McLuhan sharply contrasted “print media” with “electric media” beginning in the 1950s. His first popular book, The Gutenberg Galaxy, focuses on the effects of print and his second, Understanding Media, brings the reader up-to-date about the effects of “electricity“. The most successful of his books, The Medium is the Massage, which was produced by Jerome Agel, then takes these insights and presents them in a “swinging 60s” collage-styled format.

5) McLuhan’s detractors were (and are) legion, typically bemoaning his failure to come up with a “theory” and flummoxed by his apparently flippant, “If you don’t like that idea, I’ve got many more” sort of comments. Historian Paul Johnson went so far as to call McLuhan an “enemy of society” for his presumed “pseudo-science” because, along with Freud and Marx, they would “continually reformulate their theories to avoid creeping refutation” (149-150). One suspects that being called an “enemy” by Johnson might have even been a compliment for McLuhan, recalling that one of his mentors, Wyndham Lewis, founded a journal called The Enemy, which was published between 1927-29.

6) In the introduction to McLuhan’s monumental Ph.D thesis The Classical Trivium, he refers to at least four renaissances: the Carolingian (“of grammar”), the twelfth century (“dialectics achieving complete ascendancy in all places save Italy”), the Grand Renaissance (“the reassertion of the claims of grammar against the goths and huns of learning at Paris”), and the “modern Renaissance.” Eric McLuhan’s essay in this volume, “On Renaissances,” significantly expands on these brief comments.

7) Parts of McLuhan’s “working library” have recently been cataloged by his grandson, Andrew McLuhan, whose blog Inscriptorium is a valuable resource for McLuhan scholars, publishing many of the marginal notes McLuhan wrote to himself inside thesevolumes. 

8) One of these notes-to-himself was written on the back pages of Thomas Carlyle’s French Revolution: A History in early 1932, when McLuhan was only 20. It begins, “I have to-day heard Prof. Fieldhouse on the subject of the Revolution and his remarks, (to be found in no existing text) seem to me to be worth noting down: 1st the French were not an oppressed people . . .” To be found at  professor-fieldhouses-revolution.

Works Cited

Belloc, Hilaire. A Companion to Mr. Wells’s Outline of History. London: Sheed and Ward,1926.

—. “The Counterattack Through History.” Essays of a Catholic Layman in England . NewYork: The Macmillan Company, 1931.

—.The Crisis of Civilization. New York: Fordham UP, 1937.

—. Do We Agree? A debate between G. K. Chesterton and Bernard Shaw with Hilaire Belloc in the Chair . London: Cecil Palmer, 1928.

—. Europe and the Faith. New York: The Paulist Press, 1920.

—. How the Reformation Happened . London: Peter Smith, 1928.

—.The Mercy of Allah. London: Chatto and Windus, 1922.

—.The Road . Manchester: The British Reinforced Concrete Engineering Co. Ltd., 1923.

—.The Servile State. London: T. N. Foulis, 1913.

—. A Shorter History of England . New York: The Macmillan Company, 1934.

Church, Archibald and Gerald Heard, eds.The Realist: A Journal of Scientific Humanism.London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd. 1.1 (1929).

Eisenhower, Dwight D. “Farewell Address.” 17 January 1961.

Grandy, David. Leo Szilard: Science as a Mode of Being. Lanham, MD: UP of America,1996.

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World . London: Chatto & Windus Ltd., 1932.

Johnson, Paul. Enemies of Society. New York: Atheneum, 1977.

Leavis, F. R.Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow. London: Chatto & WindusLtd, 1962.

Logan, Robert K. “McLuhan Misunderstood: Setting the Record Straight.”Lecture, 2 March 2011. <>

McLuhan, Eric. Email to the author. May 2011.

McLuhan, Herbert Marshall.The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2006.

—. Essential McLuhan. Ed. Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone. New York: Basic Books,1995.

—.The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: U of Toronto P,1962.

—.The Interior Landscape: The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan 1943-1962. Ed.Eugene McNamara. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1969.

—. Letter to Eric Voegelin. Eric Voegelin collection at the Hoover Institution. Stanford University.

—. Letters of Marshall McLuhan. Ed. Corrine McLuhan, Matie Molinaro, and WilliamToye. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

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Este artigo é apresentado como uma contrapartida de “O caso dos africanos e da galinha” exposto no tablet 64 de “A Galaxia de Gutenberg” de McLuhan

Cheikh BÈYE

Université Gaston Berger Saint-Louis, Sénégal, Langues, Litteratures et Civilisations du Monde Anglophone, Graduate Student

Traduzido do paper original The Question of Orality

Introdução 

O desenvolvimento da literatura africana contemporânea coincidiu com o nascimento da literatura oral. Esta última interessou um grande número de estudiosos no campo da literatura. Seu aparecimento faz muitos pensadores questionarem se isso pode ser considerado literatura ou não. O que aumenta esse desvirtuamento da oralidade é que alguns a consideram explicitamente um fenômeno africano. Escritores como Ngugi wa Thiong’o e Chinua Achebe, entre outros, fizeram uso da oralidade como estratégia para autenticar suas criações artísticas e perpetuar seus valores culturais por suas características flexíveis. Nessa lógica, os romances africanos de Eileen Julian e a questão da oralidade propõem uma análise detalhada, introduzindo a noção do romance e da oralidade como núcleos da literatura oral africana. Lidando com o trabalho de Julian, este trabalho será dividido em três partes principais. A primeira será dedicada ao estudo da oralidade na literatura escrita africana, a segunda parte será o uso de fábulas, fantásticas e suspense em Devil on the Cross e a terceira será dedicada à questão da autoridade na mesma romance.

Análise de Cambridge

Resumo de Stanford

JSTOR Analise

BOOKTopia

I-ORALIDADE NA LITERATURA ESCRITA AFRICANA

1 – Forma narrativa e uso da linguagem em romances africanos

Os romances africanos há muito são vistos como uma literatura que favorece a particularidade cultural e reencarnam sua autenticidade. A natureza oral desses tipos de romances é destacada por Julian como uma questão de formas narrativas e uso da linguagem. Assim, esse gênero tende cada vez mais à adaptação de princípios ocidentais que não sejam sua estrutura narrativa. Na literatura oral, avalia-se que a multiplicidade ou diversidade de vozes é comum em muitas produções literárias africanas. Esta autora, ao descrever esses parâmetros, apóia-se no Devil on the Cross de Nguni, que ela considera um discurso de classe no âmbito social em relação ao gênero oral e aos usos da linguagem oral.

Ao lado do escrutínio de Julian, a distinção existente entre as formas orais e a língua tradicional é por um lado apresentada. Para ela, o estilo narrativo é de alguma maneira oposto ao modo da linguagem. Portanto, o estilo narrativo é atribuído exclusivamente à questão do discurso colonial. Os romances africanos, especialmente Ngugi e Achebe, entre outros, refletem implicitamente o período colonial e as cicatrizes que ele deixou sobre as sociedades africanas através das vozes dos personagens. Este último ajuda a conhecer o método pelo qual as formas orais são usadas na criação de memórias populares ou na noção de historicismo. Essas vozes podem ser executadas por diferentes personagens para o público com diferentes abordagens estilísticas. Embora exista uma diversidade de vozes e expressões idiomáticas, as formas narrativas estão sempre separadas do tipo de uso da linguagem. Eileen apóia baseando-se na discussão de Bakhtin sobre “o diálogo e os gêneros baixos”, saudando ou atraindo nossa atenção para que:

“Usos tão diferentes das formas narrativas encontradas na tradição oral sugerem que as lições da narrativa têm menos a ver com o modo da linguagem – oral ou escrita – do que com o gênero, e do que com quem fala e com quem uma narrativa é falada” (Eileen 143)

Nesse comprimento de onda, a composição dos personagens de memórias ou histórias típicas da África pós-colonial é importante em relação às formas estruturais narrativas dos romances africanos. Explica em outras palavras que as formas orais são centradas apenas no discurso colonial, concentrando-se nos tipos de histórias que os personagens ou mesmo os contadores de histórias relatam.

Por outro lado, a questão da linguagem é explicada por sua flexibilidade e dinamismo. Nesta seção, considerando o uso da linguagem, Eileen Julian considera de interesse as diferentes maneiras pelas quais a linguagem oral pode ser entendida e improvisada em artefatos literários. Por esse motivo, ela leva o Devil on the Cross de Ngugi e as Things Fall Apart  e Arrow of God. Para ela, a linguagem dessas narrativas é ensinar às gerações mais jovens a história de seus ancestrais e o tempo colonial. Este ensino ou transmissão pode ser realizado através de algum tipo de dialeto, frase e provérbio. Da mesma forma, ela o critica porque eles misturam o inglês com algumas de suas línguas nativas que ela julga imitativas ou miméticas. Para trazer isso à tona Julian considera que:

“Todos esses três romances são miméticos, documentando conscientemente a vida das sociedades nigerianas e quenianas em suas muitas facetas, incluindo a linguagem. No entanto, estes, como os li, são profundamente diferentes, embora sejam textos em inglês, superficialmente semelhantes no uso de provérbios e no entrelaçamento de ritmos e turnos de frases de duas línguas (inglês e igbo, inglês e kikuyu). (Eileen 143).

A exploração de Julian do seu trabalho African novels and the question of orality sublinha que os escritores africanos fizeram empréstimos de línguas estrangeiras para reforçar e transmitir suas identidades e realidades culturais de seus povos. Nesse caso, seu artefato literário pode ser visto como mimético ou como cópia do mundo ocidental. Para ela, a literatura oral africana é uma mera “metissagem” (de raça mista), concentrando-se na análise de Homi Bhabha sobre antigas colônias.

O uso de palavras Ibo e estilo de linguagem é uma faceta fundamental da Cultura Igbo . Da mesma forma, Devil of the Cross, de Ngugi, é considerado uma maneira de incluir a  Cultura Queniana e em muitas das histórias de seus romances. Além disso, Ngugi vai além ao explicar o dinamismo da linguagem, incluindo os conceitos de “classe e gênero”. Seguindo seus passos, o passado ou os modos de vida pós-coloniais, considerando pessoas ricas, pobres e questões de gênero, pode ser elucidado pelo uso da linguagem. Por meio de justificativa, Eileen nos informa que:

A linguagem é considerada, neste ponto, dinâmica ou vigorosa no exame de uma sociedade colonial. Em Devil on the Cross, de acordo com a perspectiva de Julian, Ngugi mostrou nesta narrativa dois personagens, principalmente de Wangaari e Mwireri wa Mukiraai. Wangaari como personagem feminina representa a “questão de gênero” que fala apenas Kikuyu e um pouco de Pidgin English, enquanto Mwireri está acostumado a falar inglês. Ele faz parte do proletariado educado. Principalmente, o uso da linguagem destaca a sociedade diferenciada por meio da linguagem, determinada por classe e gênero.

2-Representação contrastante da oralidade entre Ngugi e Achebe

Independentemente das formas de representação da oralidade em relação ao uso da linguagem para incorporar seus códigos culturais e narrativos para revelar sua área colonial, Ngugi e Achebe apresentam algumas diferenças aparentes. Eles não se apóiam apenas em seus códigos narrativos culturais, nem nas entidades históricas e sociais que os impelem à direita, mas na maneira pela qual a linguagem oral é transmitida ao público e ao leitor lambda. Em Devil on the Cross, em particular, a história escrita deve ser lida em voz alta para o público, especialmente para quem estuda literatura oral. Nesta narrativa direta ao público, as vozes dos artistas determinarão os destinatários e a mensagem global transmitida ao longo da história.

O que torna a especificidade da oralidade nos artefatos literários de Ngugi é a evocação essencial do cânon “dizendo e ouvindo “. É nesse mesmo comprimento de onda que Eileen afirma que:

“Oralidade aqui significa a linguagem e tradição em que essa narrativa é articulada, o meio no qual o público de Ngugi ouvirá essa história” (Eileen 145).

Sobre esse assunto, apesar de existirem todos os itens que agrupam todas as substâncias do teatro, como vozes, pausas, provérbios, repetições, enigmas, músicas e assim por diante, Eileen Julian afirma que Devil on the Cross não mostra de maneira alguma uma oralidade pura, porque o uso desses itens mencionados não é referencial. Portanto, as vozes dos artistas não são confiáveis como tais.

Posteriormente, a oralidade nos romances de Achebe, por exemplo, em Things Fall Apart é apenas uma representação da matriz ou do meio cultural. É daqui que a única semelhança aparece entre Ngugi e Achebe em suas obras literárias. In Things Fall Apart, a oralidade é representada como um sinal ou um símbolo. O escrutínio de Eileen Julian mostra que ele não pode ser lido para o mundo exterior por causa de suas pesadas características ou códigos culturais. Para destacar, esta autora relata que:

“A oralidade em Things Fall Apart  é um símbolo cultural, representado, envolto no romance, sob um invólucro de vidro, por assim dizer. Esse enquadramento, de fato, caracteriza a cultura como um todo. […] Em Ngugi, onde a oralidade é similarmente uma manifestação de uma matriz cultural específica, não pode ser interpretada como uma curiosidade, preparada para os olhos do espectador externo, pois participa em determinar a forma real da narrativa. No primeiro caso, o Igbo é replicado pela narrativa; no segundo, a narrativa é elaborada no idioma daqueles que pretendem ser seus principais ouvintes, em seus códigos comuns. Achebe representa uma tradição de fala, Ngugi tenta conceber (escrever) dentro ”(Eileen 145).”

Nessa lógica, as diferenças que o autor extrai dessas narrativas são que, em Devil On The Cross, a história pode ser lida em voz alta para o público, porque responde à noção de “contar e ouvir” e que na maioria das vezes os ouvintes preferencialmente devem ser educados. Pelo contrário, considerando Things Fall Apart, de Achebe, o enredo não pode ser lido para o público por causa dos códigos culturais e da matriz cultural que precisam ser revisados e ter um histórico da comunidade que ele descreve.

II- O uso da fábula, do fantástico e do suspense

Eileen Julian começa a segunda parte de seu livro lembrando a afirmação de Ngugi de que nenhum exagero literário pode superar a atrocidade do neocolonialismo. O fato é que Devil on the Cross pode ser considerado um exagero, pois apresenta um grupo de ladrões internacionais que se reúnem e discutem seus planos de roubar riquezas africanas de muitas maneiras diferentes. Mas Ngugi considera seu romance uma parábola. Definida como “um conto que ensina uma lição moral ou espiritual” (Merriam-Webster) Portanto, Devil é um meio para Ngugi contar a seus leitores uma lição sobre “ganância econômica e política” (Julian 147). Para atingir esse objetivo e dar mais estética, eficácia o romance como uma fábula e acrescentar beleza ao romance, Ngugi faz uso de dois elementos fundamentais: o fantástico e o suspense.

1– O fantástico em Devil on the Cross

Os primeiros elementos fantásticos usados ​​em Devil on the Cross são visões e sonhos. A primeira coisa que Julian destaca é o começo do romance, quando o jogador de Gicaandi conta a história de Wariinga, a pedido de sua mãe. De fato, o jogador de Gicaandi não quer contar a história a princípio. Ele explica: “E então a mãe de Wariinga veio até mim quando o amanhecer estava chegando e, em lágrimas, ela me implorou: Gicaandi Player, conte a história da criança que eu tanto amava. […] No começo eu hesitei. ” (Ngugi 7) Essa é a primeira ocorrência de elementos fantásticos no romance; porque assim que ele se recusa, ele é tomado por visões. Ele diz: “durante sete dias jejuei, nem comi nem bebi, porque meu coração estava muito perturbado por aquelas vozes suplicantes”. (Citado em Julian, 147). As vozes pedem que ele conte a história. Julian compara os sonhos e visões dele aos heróis bíblicos e míticos, como Abraão, que foi visitado por visões (Deus), que pede que ele sacrifique seu filho. Ele também pode se comparar ao profeta muçulmano Maomé, que recebeu uma mensagem de Deus pedindo que ele aprendesse, porque ele deveria espalhar a mensagem de Deus por todo o mundo.

Aqui, o jogador Gicaandi é retratado como um profeta que precisa contar uma história para o mundo inteiro. Essa impressão é confirmada quando ele diz: “Ouvi uma voz, como um grande trovão, me advertindo: quem lhe disse que a profecia é só sua, para guardar para si”. (Citado em Julian 147) As vozes mostram suas visões da história a ser contada; ele recebeu a revelação das vozes. A história que ele deve contar funciona como uma parábola; como Jesus Cristo, o jogador Gicaandi reúne pessoas para contar uma história que lhes ensinará uma lição. Como Julian afirma: “essa cena de revelação sinaliza tanto a natureza simbólica da história que se segue, seu parentesco com alegoria e fábula, e sua autoridade moral” (Julian 147).

Further, Julian contends that “the preponderance of visions and dreams contributes likewise to the continual, sustained confusion about the frontiers of the real and the imagined” (Julian 148) She recalls the passage during which Gatuiria sees imagines the thieves in the cave turning into monsters. The fact is that narrator never says whether he really sees it or just imagines it. This creates a feeling of confusion in the mind of the reader who cannot identify the frontier imagination/reality. Julian’s next point is the use of metaphor and the grotesqueness of the body; indeed, many characters in the novel are portrayed as monster and ogres. This metaphor is used to talk about those leaders who are greedy for power. For many of them they are obese and have big bellies. As an illustration, in Wangaari’s nightmare, after the devil has been crucified by the masses and that his acolytes came and lift him from the cross, we are given his description: “ The devil had two mouths, one on his forehead and one on the back of his head. His belly is sagged as, if it were about to give birth to all the devil of the world. His skin was red as that of a pig” (Ngugi13). The same description is given to his acolytes as he fastened their bellies as a reward. Gitutu is said to have“ a belly that protruded so far that it would have touched the ground had it not been supported by the braces that held up his trousers” (Qtd in Julian 148). In Julian’s opinion, the grotesqueness of the body‟s in a means for Ngugi to undermine authority. Indeed, Ndikita‟s desireof have two male sexual organs and his unwillingness that his wife has also to female sexual organs signals his need that women witness his masculine power.

Julian continua afirmando que Devil é cheio de sonhos e visões. Ela argumenta: “Wariinga, por exemplo, é avisada do discurso de Kimeendeeri wa Kanyuanjii na caverna. Ela prevê o assassinato de Mwireriwa Mukiraai. Ela vê a morte e ressurreição do diabo ”(Julian 157). Como ela diz, a presença dessa visão pode ter dois objetivos. De fato, Ngugi vive na sociedade Kikuyu, na qual elementos e adivinhações sobrenaturais fazem parte da tradição e da vida cotidiana. E Ngugi escreveu Devilin Kikuyu porque achava que o povo Kikuyu deveria ser sua audiência principal. A implementação dessas visões e sonhos seria uma maneira de comunicá-las e direcioná-las. A segunda função seria “reforçar o significado especial da história do jogador Gicaandi” (Julian 148). Como mencionado acima, a história funciona como uma parábola e o objetivo de uma parábola é ensinar uma lição. É comum dizer que os bandidos acabam mal e Mwireri é um dos ladrões e afirma que a exploração da África e dos africanos deve ser feita pelos nativos. Além disso, Julian afirma que “a preponderância de visões e sonhos contribui igualmente para a confusão contínua e sustentada sobre as fronteiras do real e do imaginário” (Julian 148). Ela lembra a passagem durante a qual Gatuiria vê os ladrões na caverna se transformando em monstros. O fato é que o narrador nunca diz se ele realmente vê ou apenas imagina. Isso cria um sentimento de confusão na mente do leitor que não consegue identificar a fronteira entre imaginação / realidade. O próximo ponto de Julian é o uso da metáfora e o grotesco do corpo; de fato, muitos personagens do romance são retratados como monstros e ogros. Essa metáfora é usada para falar sobre os líderes que são gananciosos pelo poder. Para muitos deles, eles são obesos e têm grandes barrigas. Como ilustração, no pesadelo de Wangaari, depois que o diabo foi crucificado pelas massas e que seus acólitos vieram e o levantaram da cruz, recebemos sua descrição: “O diabo tinha duas bocas, uma na testa e outra na atrás da cabeça dele. Sua barriga está afundada como se estivesse prestes a dar à luz todo o diabo do mundo. Sua pele era vermelha como a de um porco ”(Ngugi13). A mesma descrição é dada aos seus acólitos quando ele cingiu as barrigas como recompensa. Diz-se que Gitutu tem “uma barriga que se projetava tão longe que tocaria o chão se não tivesse sido apoiada pelos suspensorios que sustentavam suas calças” (Citado em Julian 148). Na opinião de Julian, o grotesco do corpo é um meio para Ngugi minar a autoridade. De fato, o desejo de Ndikita de ter dois órgãos sexuais masculinos e sua falta de vontade de sua esposa em relação aos órgãos sexuais femininos sinalizam sua necessidade de que as mulheres testemunhem seu poder masculino.

2-Suspense no diabo na cruz

Suspense é definido como: “um sentimento ou estado de nervosismo ou excitação causado por imaginar o que acontecerá” (Merriam-Webster). O suspense é criado deixando algumas informações cruciais desconhecidas, para que o leitor se pergunte o que acontecerá a seguir e como isso acontecerá. Para Julian, a primeira instância de suspense no romance ocorre com a história do jogador de Gicaandi. De fato, quando ele finalmente aceita contar a história de Wariinga, ele faz uma prolepse e pula para o final da história. Então ele decide começar do inicio. Julian argumenta que, no início da história, testemunhamos “o mistério do destino e da identidade” (Julian 150). A questão é que logo no início o leitor é apresentado a alguns personagens que compartilham uma viagem de Matatu (microônibus) para Nairóbi. O problema é que o leitor não sabe quem eles são. Portanto, muitas questões surgem: quem são elas? O que eles estão realmente fazendo no Matatu? É por acaso que eles compartilham o Matatu com Wariinga? As respostas para essas perguntas só podem ser encontradas através da leitura da próxima parte do romance.

O outro elemento que constitui suspense no romance é certamente a identidade do Rich Oldman. De fato, o leitor sabe que Wariinga teve um caso com um velho rico que a traiu, mas sua identidade é desconhecida. Enquanto isso, Wariinga encontrou um homem Gatuiria no ônibus (Matatu) e eles planejam se casar. É quando ele quer apresentá-la aos pais que se descobre que o pai de Gatuiria e o velho rico são a mesma pessoa. O suspense de sua identidade foi mantido para criar esse efeito de surpresa. E então surge uma pergunta: o que Wariinga fará? Como ela vai reagir? Ela se casará com Gatuiria? A resposta é finalmente dada quando ela atira no Velho Rico e o mata.

Julian contends that “Ngugi has a predilection for teleogenic ending” (Julian 151). It is worth mentioning that teleogenic plot is the ordering of action and information that implies the transformation of past events by subsequent one” (Herzberger 68). As Julian this is exactly what happen in the novel; Wariinga is given another chance to repair her errors. Indeed, as Julian claims it: “the revelation of the Rich Old Man‟s identity radically reorganizes relationships and power” (Julian 151). The point is that Wariinga kills him to restore the order of power before he makes her make the same mistakes again. Wariinga grows as a heroine who is now responsible for herself. Unlike the Wariinga of the beginning, she now can handle her problems herself.

Julian afirma que “Ngugi tem uma predileção pelo final teleogênico” (Julian 151). Vale ressaltar que o enredo teleogênico é a ordem de ação e informação que implica a transformação de eventos passados por eventos subseqüentes ”(Herzberger 68). Como Julian, é exatamente isso que acontece no romance; Wariinga tem outra chance de reparar seus erros. De fato, como Julian afirma: “a revelação da identidade do homem rico reorganiza radicalmente as relações e o poder” (Julian 151). O ponto é que Wariinga o mata para restaurar a ordem do poder antes que ele a faça cometer os mesmos erros novamente. Wariinga cresce como uma heroína que agora é responsável por si mesma. Ao contrário dos Wariinga do começo, agora ela mesma pode lidar com seus problemas.

III- A questão da autoridade no Devil on The Cross

A primeira coisa que Julian enfatiza aqui é a primeira passagem do romance em que o jogador de Gicaandi é convidado a contar a história de Wariinga. De fato, o narrador pergunta quem ele é. Julian presume que isso seja uma referência ao próprio Ngugi. A função de um griot como a voz de toda a comunidade na maioria das vzes é contar histórias que ensinam. Portanto, a única maneira de um griot falhar em sua missão é permanecer em silêncio. Depois, “o silêncio é uma traição” (Julian 152) e a história deve ser contada mesmo que algumas pessoas não gostem. Consequentemente, o griot aqui questiona a autoridade. Ele é grato às pessoas e à comunidade, mas não aos nobres. Além disso, a autoridade da comunidade é a autoridade das tradições orais. Aqui a tradição oral é usada para dois fins diferentes: “progressivo e repressivo” (Julian 152). Alguns a usam para mentir e alterar verdades. Julian dá o exemplo de Nditika, que usa provérbios e tradições orais para convencer sua esposa. Mas alguns outros usam tradições orais e linguagem para “chegar ao conhecimento” (Julian 153)

Conclusão

Eileen Julian, ao analisar Romances Africanos e a Questão da Oralidade, afirma que esse tipo de narrativa é o alimento bruto da “metissagem” (mistura de raças). Isso explica em outras palavras que todos os romances africanos são fenômenos coloniais escritos com a linguagem do colonizador. Depois, ela mostra como Ngugi e Achebe leram a questão da linguagem. Ngugi considera a linguagem como dinâmica; é a única ferramenta capaz de transmitir fielmente os reais padrões culturais de sua comunidade, incorporando os costumes e o estilo de vida de sua própria nação. Da mesma forma, esta autora enfatiza um contraste de oralidade entre esses dois romancistas africanos. Para ela, Achebe representa um discurso de tradições, enquanto Ngugi tenta concebê-lo através de seus escritos.

Julian continua lidando com o uso de fábulas, o fantástico e suspense em Devil on The Cross. De fato, ao longo do romance, visões e sonhos estão presentes. A primeira instância é no início, durante a qual o jogador de Gicaandi é tomado por visões que o exortam a contar a história de Wariinga. O uso do suspense reside nas muitas perguntas que surgem na mente dos leitores sobre os passageiros do ônibus Matatu e a identidade do homem rico.

This paper is presented as a counterpart of “The Case of the Africans and the chicken” exposed on tablet 64 of McLuhan’s “The Gutenberg Galaxy“

Cheikh BÈYE

Université Gaston Berger Saint-Louis, Sénégal, Langues, Litteratures et Civilisations du Monde Anglophone, Graduate Student

Introduction 

The development of contemporary African literature has coincided with the birth of oral literature. This latter has interested a huge number of scholars in the field of literature. It’s coming out urges many thinkers in questioning whether it can be considered as literature or not. What increases this misrepresentation of orality is that some consider it as being explicitly an African phenomenon. Writers such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Chinua Achebe, among others made a use of orality as a strategy to authenticate their artistic creations and perpetuate their cultural values via its flexible characteristics. In this logic, Eileen Julian’s African novels and the question of orality proposes a detailed analysis by putting forward the notion of the novel and of orality as cores of African oral literature. Dealing with Julian’s work, it will be divided into three main portions. The first one will be devoted to the study of the orality in the African written literature, the second part will be the use of fable, fantastic and suspense in Devil on the Cross and the third one is devoted to the question of authority in the same novel.

See the Cambridge review

Stanford Summary

JSTOR Review

BOOKTopia

I-ORALITY IN AFRICAN WRITEN LITERATURE

1-Narrative form and language use in African Novels

African novels have long been viewed as a literature that favors cultural particularity, and re incarnates its authenticity. The oral nature of these types of novels is highlighted by Julian to be a question of narrative forms and language use. Thus, this genre tends more and more towards the adaptation of western principles other than their narrative structure. In oral literature it’s assessed that the multiplicity or diversity of voices are mostly common in many of African literary productions. This author in depicting these parameters leans on Nguni’s Devil on the Cross which he considers as a discourse of the class in social range with regard to oral genre and the uses of oral language.

Alongside Julian’s scrutiny the distinction existing between the oral forms and the traditional language is put forward on the one hand. For her the narrative style is in some way opposed to the mode of language. Therefore, narrative style is exclusively attributed to the issue of colonial discourse. African novels especially of Ngugi and Achebe among others reflect implicitly the colonial period and the scars it left over African societies via the voices of characters. The latter helps to know the method in which oral forms are used in the creation of popular memories or the notion of historicism. Those voices can be carried out by different characters to the audience with different stylistic approaches. Even though there is a diversity of voices and idioms, the narrative forms are always detached from the type of language use. Eileen supports basing on Bakhtin’s discussion of “both dialogism and low genres ” by hailing or attracting our attention that

“such different uses of narrative forms found in the oral tradition suggest that the lessons of narrative have less to do with the mode of language – oral or written – than with genre, than with who speaks and to whom a narrative is spoken” (Eileen 143).

In this wavelength the characters’ composition of typical memories or histories of post-colonial Africa matters regarding the narrative structural forms of African novels. It explains in other words that the oral forms are only centered to colonial discourse by focusing on the kinds of stories that characters or even storytellers relate.

On the other hand, the issue of language is explained via its flexibility and dynamism. In this section considering the language use, Eileen Julian deems of interest the different ways in which oral language can be understood and improvised in literary artifacts. For this reason she takes Ngugi’s  Devil on the Cross and Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. For her the language in these narratives is to teach to the younger generations the history of their ancestors and the colonial time. This teaching or transmission can be done via some kind of dialects, phrases and proverbs. In this same way she criticizes it because they mixed English with some oftheir native languages that she judges as imitative or mimetic. For bringing to the fore Julian considers that

“All these three novels are mimetic, consciously documenting the life of Nigerian and Kenyan societies in their many facets, including language. Yet these, as I read them, are profoundly different, although as English-language texts, they are superficially similar in their use of proverbs and their interweaving of rhythms and turns of phrases of two languages (English and Igbo, English and Kikuyu). (Eileen 143).”

Julian’s exploration of the piece African novels and the question of orality underlines that African writers have made the borrowing of foreign languages in order to reinforce and transmit their identities and cultural realities of their folks. In this case their literary artifact can be however viewed as mimetic or the copy of the western world. For her, African oral literature is a mere “metissage” (of mixed race) by focusing on Homi Bhabha’s analysis on former colonies.

The use of Ibo words and language style is a fundamental facet of Igbo culture. Similarly in Ngugi’s  Devil on the Cross is regarded as a way to include Kenyan culture and in many of the story lines of his novels. Furthermore, Ngugi goes further in explaining the dynamism of language by including the concepts of “class and gender”. Treading on his footsteps, the past or the post-colonial ways of living considering wealthy, poor people and gender issues can be elucidated by the use of language. By means of justification, Eileen lets us know that:

“Ngugi depicts language not surprisingly, as dynamic, differentiated, determined by one’s “class and gender; it is one of several registers of wealth and class, levels of power in current society can be surmised by the foreign languages one knows and particularly by once attitude towards them” (Julian 144).”

Language is considered at this point to be dynamic or forceful in scrutinizing a colonial society. In Devil on the Cross in accordance with Julian’s perspective Ngugi has shown in this narrative two characters mainly of Wangaari and Mwireri wa Mukiraai. Wangaari as a female character represents the “gender issue” who speaks only Kikuyu and a little bit Pidgin English whereas Mwireri is accustomed with English speaking. He is part of the educated proletariat. Principally, the use of language puts in the limelight the differentiated society via language which is determined by class and gender.

2-Contrasting representation of orality between Ngugi and Achebe

Independently from ways of the representation of orality regarding the use of language to embody their cultural and narrative codes to reveal their colonial area, Ngugi and Achebe have some apparent differences. The latter do not only lay on their cultural narrative codes either to their historical and social entities which urge them to right but to the way in which the oral language is conveyed to the audience and to a lambda reader. In Devil on the Cross in particular, the written story is to be read aloud for the public especially one who are schooled in oral literature. In this direct telling to the public, the voices of the performers will determine the addressees and the global message conveyed throughout the storyline.

What makes the specificity of orality in Ngugi’s literary artifacts is the essential evocation of the canon “telling and listening”. It’s in this same wavelength that Eileen states that :

“Orality here means the language and tradition in which this narrative is articulated, the medium in which Ngugi’s audience will hear this story” (Eileen 145).

About this subject, even though there are all the items gathering all theater substances such as voices, pause, proverbs, repetitions,riddles, songs and so on, Eileen Julian contends that Devil on the Cross does not at all show a neat orality because the use of those mentioned items are not referential. Therefore, the voicesof the performers are not reliable as such.

Subsequently, orality in Achebe’s novels for instance in Things Fall Apart is just a representation of cultural matrix or medium. It is from here that the only similarity appears between Ngugi and Achebe in their literary works. In Things Fall Apart orality is represented as a sign or a symbol. Eileen Julian’s scrutiny shows that it cannot be read for the outside world because of its heavy cultural features or cultural codes. To bring to the fore, this author relates that:

“Orality in Things Fall Apart is a cultural symbol, represented, encased within the novel, under glass as it were. Such framing, in fact, characterizes the culture as a whole […] In Ngugi, where orality is similarly a manifestation of a particular cultural matrix, cannot be read as a curio, prepared for the eye of the outside viewer, for it participates in determining the actual shape of the narrative. In the first instance Igbo is replicated by the narrative, in the second, the narrative is elaborated in the idiom of those who are meant to be its primary listeners, in their common codes. Achebe represents a tradition of speech, Ngugi tries to conceive (write) within”(Eileen 145).”

In this logic, the differences that the author draws out from these narratives are that in Devil On The Cross, the story can be read out loud for the audience because it responses to the notion of “telling and listening” and that most of the time the preferred listeners should a schooled one. On the contrary considering Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, the storyline cannot be read for the public because of the cultural codes and cultural matrix that need to be revisited and have acertain background of that community he describes.

II- The use of fable, the fantastic, and suspense

Eileen Julian begins the second part of her book by recalling Ngugi’s assertion that no literary exaggeration can beat atrocity of neocolonialism. The fact is that Devil on the Cross can be considered to be an exaggeration as it presents a group of international thieves who gather and discuss their plans to steal African riches in many different ways. But Ngugi considers his novel as a parable. The latter is defined as“a short story that teaches a moral or spiritual lesson.” (Merriam-Webster) Therefore Devil is a means for Ngugi to tell his readers a lesson about “economic and political greed” (Julian 147). To achieve this aim and give more aesthetics, effectiveness of Devil as a fable and beauty to the novel, Ngugi makes uses of two fundamental elements: the fantastic and suspense.

1- The fantastic in Devil on the Cross

The first fantastic elements used in Devil on the Cross are visions and dreams. The first thing Julian stresses out is the beginning of the novel when the Gicaandi Player tells the story of Wariinga under her mother‟s request. Indeed, the Gicaandi player does not want at first to tell the story. He explains: “And then Wariinga‟s mother came to me when dawn was breaking, and in tears she beseeched me: Gicaandi Player, tell the story of the child I loved so dearly. […] At firstI hesitated.” (Ngugi 7) This is the first occurrence of fantastic elements in the novel; because as soon as he refuses, he is taken by visions. He says: “for seven days I fasted, neither eating nor drinking, for my heart was sorely troubled by those pleading voices.” (Qtd in Julian 147). The voices ask him to tell the story. Julian compares his to biblical and mythical heroes such are Abraham who was visited by visions (God) who asks him to sacrifice his son. He might also becompared to the Muslim prophet Mohamed who received a message from God asking he is to learn because he is to spread the message of God throughout the world.

Here the Gicaandi Player is then portrayed as a prophet who has to tell a story to the whole world. This impression is confirmed when he says:“I heard a voice, like a great clap of thunder, admonishing me: who has told you that prophecy is yours alone, to keep to yourself.” (Qtd in Julian 147) The voices show his visions of the story to be told; he has received the revelation from the voices. The story he is to tell then functions as a parable; like Jesus Christ the Gicaandi Player gathers people to tell them story that will teach them lesson. As Julian claims it: “this scene of revelation signals both the symbolic nature of the ensuing story, its kinship to allegory and fable, and its moral authority” (Julian 147).

Julian proceeds stating that Devil is full of dreams and visions. She argues:“Wariinga, for example is forewarned of Kimeendeeri wa Kanyuanjii’s speech in the cave. She foresees Mwireriwa Mukiraai‟s murder. She sees the devil’s death and resurrection” (Julian 157). As she says, the presence of this vision may have two objectives. Indeed, Ngugi lives in the Kikuyu society in which supernatural elements and divination are part of tradition and everyday life. And Ngugi wrote Devilin Kikuyu because he felt that the Kikuyu people should be his primary audience. Then implementing these visions and dreams would be a way to render that and target them. The second function would be“to reinforce the special significance of the Gicaandi Player’s tale” (Julian 148). As mentioned above, the story functions as a parable and a parable’s aim is to teach lesson. Commonly it is said the baddies end up badly and Mwireri is one of member of the thieves and claims that exploitation of Africa and Africans should be done by the indigenes. Further, Julian contends that “the preponderance of visions and dreams contributes likewise to the continual, sustained confusion about the frontiers of the real and the imagined” (Julian 148) She recalls the passage during which Gatuiria sees imagines the thieves in the cave turning into monsters. The fact is that narrator never says whether he really sees it or just imagines it. This creates a feeling of confusion in the mind of the reader who cannot identify the frontier imagination/reality. Julian’s next point is the use of metaphor and the grotesqueness of the body; indeed, many characters in the novel are portrayed as monster and ogres. This metaphor is used to talk about those leaders who are greedy for power. For many of them they are obese and have big bellies. As an illustration, in Wangaari’s nightmare, after the devil has been crucified by the masses and that his acolytes came and lift him from the cross, we are given his description: “ The devil had two mouths, one on his forehead and one on the back of his head. His belly is sagged as, if it were about to give birth to all the devil of the world. His skin was red as that of a pig” (Ngugi13). The same description is given to his acolytes as he fastened their bellies as a reward. Gitutu is said to have“ a belly that protruded so far that it would have touched the ground had it not been supported by the braces that held up his trousers” (Qtd in Julian 148). In Julian’s opinion, the grotesqueness of the body‟s in a means for Ngugi to undermine authority. Indeed, Ndikita‟s desireof have two male sexual organs and his unwillingness that his wife has also to female sexual organs signals his need that women witness his masculine power.

2-Suspense in Devil on The Cross

Suspense is defined as: “a feeling or state of nervousness or excitement caused by wondering what will happen” (Merriam-Webster). Suspense is created by letting certain crucial information unknown so that the reader keeps wondering what is to happen next and how it willend up. To Julian, the first instance of suspense in the novel occurs with the story of the Gicaandi Player. Indeed, when he finally accepts to tell Wariinga’s story, he makes a prolepsis and jumps to the end of the story. Then he decides to start from the beginning. Julian argues that in the beginning of the story we witness “the mystery of fate and identity” (Julian 150). The point is that right at the beginning the reader is introduced to some characters that happen to share a Matatu (minibus) heading for Nairobi. The problem is that the reader does not know who they are. Therefore, many questions arise: who are they? What are they really doing in the Matatu? Is it by chance that they share the Matatu with Wariinga? The answers to these questions can only be found through the reading of the next part of the novel.

The other element that constitutes suspense in the novel is surely the identity of the Rich Oldman. Indeed, the reader knows that Wariinga had an affair with a Rich Old man who betrayed her but his identity is unknown. In the meantime, Wariinga has met a man Gatuiria in the (Matatu) bus and they plan to marry. It is when he wants to introduce her to his parents that it is discovered that Gatuiria‟s father and the Rich old man are the same person. The suspense of his identity was maintained to create this effect of surprise. And then some question arises: what will Wariinga do? How is she going to react? Will he marry Gatuiria? The answer is finally given when she shoots at the Richold man and kills him.

Julian contends that “Ngugi has a predilection for teleogenic ending” (Julian 151). It is worth mentioning that teleogenic plot is the ordering of action and information that implies the transformation of past events by subsequent one” (Herzberger 68). As Julian this is exactly what happen in the novel; Wariinga is given another chance to repair her errors. Indeed, as Julian claims it: “the revelation of the Rich Old Man‟s identity radically reorganizes relationships and power” (Julian 151). The point is that Wariinga kills him to restore the order of power before he makes her make the same mistakes again. Wariinga grows as a heroine who is now responsible for herself. Unlike the Wariinga of the beginning, she now can handle her problems herself.

III- The question of authority in Devil on The Cross

The first thing Julian stresses here is the first passage of the novel in which the Gicaandi Player is asked to tell the story of Wariinga. Indeed, the narrator asks who he is. Julian presumes that this is a reference to Ngugi himself. The function of a griot as the voice of the whole community is most of the time to tell stories that teach. Therefore, the only way for a griot to fail his mission is to remain silent. Then “silence is betrayal” (Julian 152) and the story is to be told even if some people do not like it. Consequently, the griot here questions authority. He is indebted to the people and the community but not to nobles. Besides, the authority of the community is the authority of oral traditions. Here oral tradition is used to two different ends: “progressive and repressive” (Julian 152). Some use it to lie and alter truths. Julian gives the example of Nditika who uses proverbs and oral traditions to convince her wife. But some others use oral traditions and language to “arrive at knowledge” (Julian 153)

Conclusion

Eileen Julian in analyzing African Novels and the Question of Orality contends that these kinds of narratives are the crude food of “metissage” (mixed races). This explains in other words that all African novels are colonial phenomenon written with the colonizer’s language. Then she shows how Ngugi and Achebe read the question of language. Ngugi considers language as dynamic; it is then the only tool that is able to transmit faithfully the real cultural standards of his community while embodying his own nation’s customs and lifestyle. By the same token, this author stresses a contrasted of orality between these two African novelists. For her Achebe represents a speech of traditions whereas Ngugi tries to conceive it through his writings.

Julian continues dealing with the use of fable, fantastic and suspense in Devil on The Cross. Indeed, all along the novel, visions and dreams are present. The first instance is in the beginning during which the Gicaandi player is seized by visions that urge him to tell Wariinga’s story. The use of suspense resides in the many questions that arise in the mind of the readers about the passengers of the Matatu bus and the identity of the Rich Old man.

Although eventually the use of papers, articles, dissertation, books, etc. will occur, this job is none of them. I call it blog/site for the lack of some more appropriate name, having in mind the purpose of it. Loosely it is a kind of book/dissertation in the format of the Future, as it has been cogitated by many and in our case by McLuhan and, perhaps, in a very long shot, James Joyce. (it comes to my mind “HCE“) Using McLuhan’s jargon, this is what would it be like a task performed by the Global Village with the technological extensions “electricity” made available, examining in their own terms Gutenberg and McLuhan. On top of that, in between the lines, an examination of oral and written cultures, specially when supported by print, how they intermingle with “electricity” and the possibility of happening the same revolution which occurred when Gutenberg introduced his invention. 

Although as the reader will notice I used the Moebius as a metaphor for what it seems to me a vicious circle which is much more due to the Gutenberg legacy limitations and not the the prowess of the authors. I would risk, perhaps dare, that mostly there are the following aspirations from those who sit down and try to put the pieces of this riddle together and make a clear picture of it:

First, is to cogitate McLuhan in his own terms;  

Second, find the perfect or complete relation of McLuhan and James Joyce before anything else (this specially under literature);

Third, and I quote from Digital Humanism: The Processed World of Marshall McLuhan, by Arthur Kroker:

Marshall McLuhan was never the technotopian that contemporary technophiles like to portray. To read McLuhan is to discover a thinker who had a decidedly ambivalent perspective on technoculture. Thus, while McLuhan might be the patron saint of technotopians, his imagination is also the memory that should haunt them. As a way of understanding McLuhan anew, CTHEORY is publishing this account of McLuhan’s ambivalent relationship to technology. Titled “Digital Humanism: The Processed World of Marshall McLuhan,” this excerpt is from Arthur Kroker’s Technology and the Canadian Mind: Innis/McLuhan/Grant.

And then jump to his communication theory and how he saw “electricity” was changing it. “Electricity” initially was Television, but it ended up being all modern technologies the computer made available, i.e., Internet, IPhone, Ipads,Personal Computers, etc.  

Well, I contend that Joyce (and Innis incidentally) were not important for the development of McLuhan’s ideas about communication, specially midia. Joyce could have influenced him about his style of writing and how he saw himself inserted in literature on what we could maybe call his poetics. Innis could jump on board as an example with his staples and communication under a general “one fits all” theory which McLuhan developed. The second contention I have is that McLuhans use of Poe’s Maelstron as a metaphor of what is hapening with the introduction of “electricity” overshadowed most everything else that can be extracted from his ideas. Poe’s Maelstron is tricky, but understandable and anyway a good figure, but the impact of “electricity” in modern affairs, is quite something else. And McLuhan’s ideas, to say a kind word, are obscure and specially without context which could make them understandable.

Perhaps we could use the words of John Main, former Abbot of the Benedictine Priory of Montreal, at the opening of one of his conferences by saying that “The impersonal theory, however correct, seems to me to be always floating in the stratosphere. In order for you to come down to earth you need a personal context and then it will be not only correct but true,

I wish I succeeded in the structuring my job translating the above as “Which exactly were the terms McLuhan was referring to?” ” What was, is and possibly will be the the context where all that takes place?”

If you go to the Index, any article will be either about some term McLuhan was set upon or discussion of context.

Since the Literature terms are extremely well served, I decide to explore the technological terms aspects, even when discussing contexts at the time Gutenberg invented the printed press or when discussing oral and written cultures, point of view, Global Village, The Medium is the Message, etc.

Veja em Português

This documentary is difficult to appraise. The context and the framing of it can be fairly perceived in the excellent review of Shaun Huston of March 6th, 2007.

You can buy the DVD and you’ll get the bonus of:

• Interactive Tetrads – Exploring technology via McLuhan’s Laws of Media
• “The Descent into the Maelstrom” – Bonus short animated film of Edgar Allan Poe’s story
• Exclusive interviews with Corinne McLuhan, Eric McLuhan, Neil Postman, Lewis Lapham, Edmund Carpenter, Gerald O’ Grady, Phillip Marchand, Frank Zingrone and Patricia Bruckmann
• More than an hour of vintage McLuhan audio clips
• Gallery featuring photographs of McLuhan and some of his aphorisms
• Original music soundtrack composed by Kurt Swinghammer
• Hundreds of pages of printable text, including a McLuhan dossier, director’s notes and original shooting script
• Study guide for McLuhan’s Wake

Sounds great but the film is disappointing as you can see in the review above. Perhaps its worst problem is the sluggishness and the excessive use of Poe’s Descend into the Maelstrom metaphor.

The best part unfortunately is not about McLuhan’s ideas, communication, midia, etc. It is about the end of his life, when he suffered a stroke and became mute and was unable to communicate. It is particularly touching his friend and colleague Ted Carpenter’s description of McLuhan’s reaction when he realized he couldn’t speak. He screamed and shouted and, ashamed, recomposed himself in silent despair. On top of that, the University closing of his center and trashing everything contained in it, is a very sad event that reveals that deep inside the only true vortex that really takes humanity down to its dark bottom is evil.  

Anyway the film itself is available at the You Tube under McLuhan’s Wake and definitely it is worth seeing.