In the 1980s, as an undergraduate at the University of Bologna specializing in modernist studies, I had no idea of the existence of a volume called The Interior Landscape: The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan. Originally published in 1969, that volume had in fact been translated into my first language, Italian, in 1983 but had not made it into university curricula, with perhaps a very few exceptions. McLuhan was renowned worldwide as the media guru, or the media oracle, but certainly not as a professor of English literature; in addition, in the 1980s his star was no longer shining as it had during the two previous decades, no matter if his aperçus had by then entered our international jargon. When I finally managed to read McLuhan’s literary criticism, I had already entered a PhD program, and I was almost ten years older; by the middle 1990s, modernist studies were something different from what I had been taught originally; new scholars had opened the field up to new interdisciplinary perspectives and had, so to speak, broken the vessels of previous interpretations. Comparing McLuhan’s early investigations of modernism with those of later critics reveals that the Canadian thinker anticipated lines of interpretation which only blossomed in the last decade of the previous century, that is, almost three decades after McLuhan’s book was published. To have read The Interior Landscape at an earlier stage in my educational career would have helped me better understand literature not only as a subject but also as a function, because in that book McLuhan turns the modernist literary masterpieces into cognitive tools to better understand new environmental processes. He does so through a careful analysis of their fragmented forms, as well as of their unusual and refined use of language. The investigation of language and the playful creation of neologisms capable of translating the societal dynamic processes are what McLuhan mostly admired in Joyce and in the other modernists. Etymology plays a major role in McLuhan’s media explorations; it stands at the core of his own laws of media. And etymology plays a major role as well in conveying a renewed energy to McLuhan’s mosaic, combining the right words (les mots justs, to borrow from Ford Madox Ford and Gustave Flaubert) in a fragmented structure whose goal is to make us see, to make us hear, and, above all, to make us feel (to borrow from Joseph Conrad): in other words, to make us experience and better understand our environment. Below the surface of McLuhan’s modernist mask lies a conscious craftsman who deliberately chose to explore actuality through language and who played with words to elaborate a probing form to awaken his audiences.
By casting modernism in the light of broader cultural and theoretical approaches, McLuhan anticipated future trends of modernist studies. In the early 1990s, Marjorie Perloff commented on the dichotomic lines of research dominating that area of studies at a time when McLuhan was already developing a different strategy of observation:
Surely no literary term has raised more controversy and misunderstanding than the modest little word modernism … Once the site of all that was radical, exciting, and above all new … by the early 1970s modernism found itself under attack as a retrograde, elitist movement – at best the final phase of the great Romantic revolution and, at worst, the aestheticist reaction formation to an alienated social life that had close links to fascism …1
To investigate the way in which modernist studies have evolved would offer an interesting perspective on how our attitude and approach to literary criticism have also evolved; it would contribute as well to tracing the changing mentalities of the different decades of the twentieth century. Some critics have tried, in fact, to do this. In 1992, Kevin J.H. Dettmar offered one of the first attempts to historicize modernist studies, suggesting three possible stages: the first, ‘characterised by outrage,’ sees a strong reaction against most modernist productions in real time; the second, until the late 1960s / early 1970s, characterized by ‘an institutionally approved way of reading the Modernists,’ aims at controlling the manner in which modernist texts should be read, therefore ‘domesticating’ them; and the third, characterized by the attempt ‘to rediscover just what it was that once seemed so new in the Modernists,’ is the one that Dettmar calls ‘postmodern criticism,’ still to be fully written at the time, but already defined as eclectic and oriented towards the acceptance of open and not absolute interpretative paradigms.2 Today we know that such a third phase has led to different and even opposing interpretations of modernism and modernist art, often – and not surprisingly so – depending on the critics’ politics, agendas, and backgrounds. For sure, in the 1960s, McLuhan was ahead of his time when writing about Joyce, Pound, Lewis, and other modernist masters; not following the domesticated line of interpretation, he pioneered new interdisciplinary approaches.
Generally speaking, recent approaches to modernism have in common the idea that modernist writers were not looking at actuality from unreachable ivory towers but were instead fully inhabiting their own time; they were not academics, but as practitioners of their crafts, they were explorers of different cultural and artistic situations. Critics now agree that their aesthetics are, in fact, deeply imbued with the spirit of their time, as well as with its dynamics. They were not developed simply to seclude (or protect) artists from their society; on the contrary, they were elaborated as a response to the cultural and political phantasmagorias of those very realities.
Modernist art – and especially art produced in the first two decades of the twentieth century – was originally understood as art for art’s sake, or as art defending a privileged status quo, consciously detached from the then forming mass society, the result of an elitist rebellion performed by either snobbish or hungry young men and women living in an ideal intellectual limbo. It is true that most modernist poetics – and for sure those discussed in relation to McLuhan’s poetic – still appear to be detached from the mass of new readers, being too arcane to reach a broader audience, especially in their final renderings. It is also true that many modernist writers wrote against the most materialist aspects of mass society, often understood as a society trivializing a certain idea of art. As Pound wrote in his Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: ‘The age demanded an image / Of its accelerated grimace / … The “age demanded” chiefly a mould in plaster / Made with no loss of time.’3 And yet, it is also undeniable that those very poetics derived from that society and were deeply influenced by its new environmental, technological, and cultural dynamics.
I think it is more appropriate to define modernist poetics as elitist in their rendering, but not in their underpinning strategies (and perhaps not even in their broader goal, as they meant to awaken society). Those strategies were based, in fact, on a renewed approach, even to the most popular cultural forms of their time. Inevitably, if we continue to read modernist art and narrative only through ideology, then we might decide that those provocative experiments and achievements were not only elitist but also conservative; however, this is an approach which, though it has some points, risks blinding us to other, more articulated perspectives.4
Philip Marchand was among the first to point out that Marshall McLuhan’s approach to modernism was, in fact, an original one which anticipated later discussions. In particular, Marchand recalls the role that modernist poetics played in helping McLuhan to start to understand the importance of sensorial perception in the rendering of one’s own time:
These writers and teachers also gave McLuhan the first hints of what later became a key element of his ideas: the notion that human perception varied greatly according to which senses were predominant in the perceiver. The poets of interest to McLuhan, for example, emphasised the role of sound in their poetry … More significant was Eliot’s well-known advocacy of the ‘auditory imagination.’5
Marchand points out not only the intellectual legacy, but also the solid humanist roots of modernist research. He recalls that McLuhan approached the modernist masters as new grammarians because his twentieth-century time sensibility was also based on the return of grammar. If the Middle Ages emphasized dialectic, the Renaissance encouraged a return to grammar and rhetoric, which were then banished again in the seventeenth century following Descartes’s méditations; in the twentieth century, the works of modernist writers and the New Criticism encouraged a return of grammar. Grammar was the world of integral awareness, the world of perceptive synaesthesia which centuries of literacy had, so to speak, put on hold and which new media were now retrieving: from the ear to the eye, from the eye to the ear.6 It is in fact in The Interior Landscape that McLuhan clearly acknowledges the deep impact that modernist writers had on his study of media; they taught him how to mediate the sensorial implications of new technologies through new forms apt for detecting and revealing the new spirit of their time. By so doing, he suggested a fascinating approach to modernism which, unfortunately, is still neglected.
In many essays collected in The Interior Landscape, McLuhan points out the close links existing between the modernist experiments and the new technological and cultural environment of the time. In these essays, he combines his activity as a literary critic with his intellectual explorations of new media. He points out how the modernists bore witness not only to the making of a new age, but also to the long-term effects of that process on the collective and individual psyche. These essays continue the explorations of media we found in McLuhan’s other books, and they give clear and even more explicit acknowledgment of the role played by the modernist masters in the development of his own rhetorical devices and poetics as a media explorer. My point is that McLuhan employed a modernist strategy from the very beginning. With this premise, I consider The Mechanical Bride as McLuhan’s most modernist work, while his later books establish his most original mosaic. The Mechanical Bride brings together formal experimentation, the cross-hybridization of high and popular art forms, and the denunciation of all those hidden agencies which were redesigning culture, power, and, therefore, society by taking advantage of a numbed and accommodating audience. What he denounces in his preface is, in fact, comparable to T.S. Eliot’s denunciation of a waste land now dominated by young carbuncular individuals ‘on whom assurance sits as a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire,’ or to Pound’s vision of his society as one where ‘Caliban casts out Ariel’ and a ‘tawdry cheapness / shall reign throughout our days.’ In his later books, McLuhan dismisses such an overt judgment of a consumerist society, thereby choosing to refuse to act on the basis of an intellectual bias, something which most modernist poetics have often been accused of. After The Mechanical Bride, McLuhan moved from the particular to the general (that is, to the universal) and, as a modernist, shifted from the vision of John Dos Passos to that of James Joyce.
The works of the American Dos Passos and the Irish Joyce are in fact compared in The Interior Landscape, where McLuhan juxtaposes the universality of the latter to the political (therefore historically contextualized) commitment of the former. Although McLuhan acknowledges Dos Passos’s merits and relevance as a writer, he sees his works as undermined by the writer’s explicit ideological agenda, something which situates those works inside a specific time and place. In the essay comparing the works of these two modernist writers, McLuhan recalls how they both bring light to the status of modern man inhabiting the new metropolis, now turned into a robot-like individual by the joint action of industrial organization and mass communication; but he points out that it is Joyce who offers a universal, rather than a partial or biased, vision of the new condition. Joyce’s Dublin stands as a mythical place, and his Ulysses is a character epitomizing a universal quest; Dos Passos’s New York, instead, stands as an actual place, and his fragmented characters are trapped into a too clearly defined situation, so much so that their experiences are doomed to become obsolete.7 This essay should be a must among students of modernism; it should be listed in all syllabuses as a mandatory reading; the whole book should, in fact, be a classic on modernism. In particular, the Dos Passos–Joyce essay would help to exemplify a delicate and controversial issue pertaining to that field of study, that is, the uncanny relationship between ‘objectivity’ and ‘subjectivity.’ What McLuhan praises against Dos Passos’s ideological rendering is, in fact, Joyce’s rhetorical strategy. Joyce’s form translates personal temperament into universal epiphanies. He is a master of etymology and knows how to turn his subjective observations of life into an objective rendering; Dos Passos turns the objective renderings derived from avant-garde art into a prose which brings to the forefront his subjective approach. If Dos Passos is interested in ‘American know-how’ and registers ‘a personal reaction to society,’ Joyce’s storytelling is translated through what Eliot defined as a ‘mythical method’; it is a narrative fully inscribed into a solid tradition, which makes Joyce’s work representative of a universal human condition. His epiphanies bring to light fragments of truth intelligible to us, in spite of time and space and notwithstanding the complex textual architecture. In The Mechanical Bride, McLuhan starts as Dos Passos and evolves towards Joyce: in spite of a clear-cut introduction which offers a key for interpreting the following chapters as a reaction to a world shaped by advertising agencies, McLuhan does not write to merely ‘query ideas.’ He says so openly, warning his readers.8 While discussing the folklore of industrial man through a vivisection of American consumerism, McLuhan aims to explore a more universal landscape because he wants to offer his readers ‘a grip’ for ‘taking hold of it.’ He does not want to fix a point of view on a situation; he wants to encourage a mobile point of view on evolving processes.
The ideas of subjectivity (of perception) and objectivity (of rendering) are therefore crucial for many modernist aesthetics, as the latter aim at rendering a reality which can no longer be understood only in Romantic terms. T.E. Hulme’s philosophy praising the dry hardness of classicism, his idea of a geometrical art opposing all Romantic vital and soft art, offered a theoretical construct to many of the so-called modernist impersonal poetics.9 Inevitably, these poetics are based on a conceptual paradox: they aim to convey the universality of all experiences, while knowing full well that it is almost an impossible task and that they can only succeed in part. Hence, while the new poets and writers are asked to investigate language and tradition, they are forced to select among their experiences only moments of being, impressions, objective correlatives, and epiphanies capable of conveying truth and reality through approximations. Just like Heisenberg’s modern physicists, they acknowledge the incompleteness or indeterminacy of their quest, while pursuing it. And just like the new scientists, they realize that such incompleteness is a consequence of the fact that all observations are, in fact, relative, as they cannot fully transcend the subjective element. What the German physicist wrote when discussing the rendering of scientific experiments, also works well for a discussion of many modernist experiments:
… the transition from the ‘possible’ to the ‘actual’ takes place during the act of observation. If we want to describe what happens in an atomic event, we have to realize that the word ‘happens’ can apply only to the observation, not to the state of affairs between two observations … This again emphasizes a subjective element in the description of atomic events, since the measuring device has been constructed by the observer, and we have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.10
Here, Heisenberg imposes the idea of subjectivity over something which is supposed to be totally objective, that is, scientific observation. The modernist writers and poets often portray themselves as new scientific observers, in turn vivisecting their own society through their impersonal poetics. They question the absolute Romantic ideal vision of humanity and the centrality of the author: they do not trust the poet as the sole medium; and they look for models to provide a parallel capable of conveying a shared universality (Joyce and myth, Pound and epic). As suggested, the new poetry is no longer conceived simply as a mechanism but instead as an organism, each of its parts affecting and somehow containing the whole. Most new aesthetics are often expressed through metaphors pertaining to both the world of hard sciences (Eliot’s vision of the poet as a catalyser; Pound’s metaphor of ‘the rose in the still dust,’ referring to the rose pattern formed in iron filings by a magnetic field of forces) and to other cultural traditions, mostly deriving from oral-based societies (Pound’s ideogrammatic method; the idea of primitivism underpinning several artistic and literary formal explorations). Most metaphors translating modernist poetics acknowledge at once the attempt to foster objectivity in observation and the paradox of the subject being part of all such processes: life therefore is perceived as an impression, or as a luminous halo, or as a semi-transparent envelop through which we are challenged to look. Even more, objectivity itself is based precisely on the acknowledgment of the ways the subject might interfere, change, or condition the act of observation. What complicates the analysis even further is the fact that most modernist poetics were not always born from a writer’s neutral approach to society, but were, in fact, inscribed inside a more entangled participation in the historical and political events of the time (for instance, Pound’s Guide to Kulchur, written at the time of Pound’s flirtation with the Italian fascist regime, is ambiguously presented as a series of notes for a totalitarian treatise).
Subjectivity and objectivity are also components of McLuhan’s media investigations, especially as far as their rendering is concerned. As the discussion of McLuhan as a media guru has shown, he borrowed the idea of a marriage between poetry, the arts, and sciences as a basic tenet for his own media explorations and understanding. He always maintained that he had no point of view on the situations he was investigating, and always underlined his detachment as an explorer (the modernists would have spoken of ‘aloofness’). He often repeated that his was a mobile point of view because this is what the act of probing literally implies. Finding himself inside the new media maelstrom, McLuhan was still assessing the action of the vortex, which he was seeking to understand: ‘If you have a point of view, it means that you have already mastered the situation. You are not with the situation, you have already abstracted it, and angled it.’11 He was sharing his explorations with his own readers and was also coopting them in the process of discovery by adopting and adapting modernist inclusive poetics. In his volumes on media, he constantly refers to modernist techniques when he needs to discuss the depth-involving newness of the time: already in The Gutenberg Galaxy, the experiments with language of Gertrude Stein, e.e. cummings, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot are mentioned as ‘carefully devised strategies to get the passive visual reader into a participant, oral action.’12
By blurring inner and outer realities, the modernist experiments rendered on the printed page the depth-involving newness both of the electric environment and of its probing; that is, they aimed to render at once both the observed object and the act of observing. It was experimental writing conceived at exactly the same time that new experimental fields in the sciences, for instance, in medicine, were conceived; arts, literature, and the hard sciences were therefore developing new models to assess their subjects at a time of change. Such an isomorphism could only signify a major change in the time sensibility, as McLuhan notices in The Gutenberg Galaxy: ‘It was notably Claude Bernard’s approach to experimental medicine in the later nineteenth century that reconquered the heterogeneous dimensions of the milieu interieur at exactly the same time that Rimbaud and Baudelaire shifted poetry to the paysage interieur.’13 Between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, inner and outer landscapes blurred and visual limits had to be renegotiated through new approaches to both domains. In 1908, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti spoke of the electric or wireless imagination to exemplify the change of time sensibility; a few years later, Guglielmo Marconi’s experiments with wireless communication had a strong impact far beyond the technology itself: they led to the creation of the first wireless commodity, the radio. Not only did radio lead to break-through developments of other media, but it also enhanced imagination and holistic visions: demand for content transcended the technology itself, and people started to perceive themselves as immaterial beings, simultaneously inhabiting different ages and lands, their lives being mythical and real at the same time.
In the 1930s, while at Cambridge, McLuhan learned more about the shift from Victorian to modernist mentality. In particular, he began to appreciate the complexity of the modernist research, which he perceived, in fact, as a struggle to develop a form capable of preserving the integrity of the process of observation. Being themselves inside the whirlpool, literary and artistic experiments were questioning the whirl. Modernist writers took to translating movement and uncertainties through their hallucinatory and fragmented renderings of their sporadic epiphanies. It was thus inevitable that modernist narratives or poetry did not comfort the reader, did not confirm traditional values, did not encourage accepted ideas, and did not progress in linear and reassuring ways. On the contrary, they deconstructed all commonplaces to show ‘the community in action.’ They unveiled and rendered the chaos, the disorder, the aporias, which inevitably accompanied change and shocked readers. Through their work, they provoked, attacked, and, by so doing, stimulated critical thinking.
Just as in a cubistic canvas, the vanishing point in modernist narratives is outside the work. Readers are challenged and engaged as co-authors; novels and poems mirror processes of change, and all are related to coeval uncertainties. They do not offer solutions, nor do they foretell what such changes will produce; they are narratives conceived in medias res – in the middle of things – returning a dynamic, not a static, portrait of the time. The reassuring omniscient narrator no longer exists. Writers now bear witness to a change in progress by playing with their narrations, and with their readers, by constantly challenging them. Technically speaking, modernist works are strongly participatory, as they are based on the same mobile point of view which McLuhan adopted for his own explorations; as readers, we, too, have to adopt it, as our way to share both the probing and the discoveries. It is also our way of participating in the process and experiencing the function of the work of art. As revealed by Joseph Conrad in his famous Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus, the goal of the new modernist narrative is ‘to make you see, to make you hear, and above all to make you feel.’ That turns reading into a cognitive process that is not based on the acceptance of the author’s vision, his or her point of view; instead, it encourages our active participation as readers, as we cannot but adjust and respond to an uncanny mobile formal structure if we want to make it resound. As readers, it is our own ‘moment of being.’ We are elevated to the authorial level of co-explorers and co-producers of meaning. It is this idea that McLuhan not only adopted but also tried to popularize through his public appearances and through his books: his modernist mask embeds that idea into his mosaic.
As suggested by Conrad, the vision to which modernist writers aspire does not coincide with the mere visual spectrum; instead, it is a complex one which is connected to a global dimension capable of overcoming all representational traditions based on a spatial abstraction, on a dissociated sensibility which only relies on sight. It is a non-Euclidean vision; it is both tribal and oral, oriental and inclusive, and can be obtained through a renewed syntax which retrieves multi-sensorial modes of perception or, as Marchand recalls, Eliot’s ‘auditory imagination.’ ‘Write for the ears,’ ‘The words you will see are not the words you will hear,’ and ‘Read me with your ears’ are the primary instructions that modernist writers offered to their readers, suggesting a different approach not only to their works, but also to their times. Experiencing modernist art means, therefore, experiencing change and being on the alert.
McLuhan adopted the modernist idea of art as warning signal. It is, in fact, the central idea that leads us to conceive literature not as a subject but as a function. His experiments with form, which shape his own operative project, stand in the wake of experimental writers who had put on the world of electric media, cross-pollinating the civilization of the eye (Western world) and the civilization of the ear (Eastern world), reconfiguring the world in the image of a tribal village. Their work translated the new cultural situation through acoustic forms, which also retrieve previous oral traditions pertaining to older forms of society now given a new vitality. It was the awakening of the tribal hero, Finn, that Joyce set out to turn into an emblematic myth of our universal history. The retrieval of an ancient science such as etymology – fully inscribed in the realm of grammar – pervades several modernist poetics, and provides the background for the actual process of understanding; words become not just verba (words) but also res (things); they connect past and present traditions and acquire new meanings when applied to actuality. As Eric and Marshall McLuhan wrote in Laws of Media: ‘The need of poet, musician, and artist for ever-new means of probing and exploring experience sends them back again and again to the rag-and-bone shop of abandoned cliché.’14 It is in the hands of the new modernist grammarians that the cliché returns to its archetype.
McLuhan the modernist loved to play with language, with genres, with codes, that is, with various forms of communication. Language is in fact what contains change through literary tradition; through language you shore your ruins, as Eliot wrote in The Waste Land. Modernism started with a renewed approach to language, with the will to break the linearity of the literary productions of the time. Proto-modernist writers such as Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford opposed naturalism through their literary impressionism. As recalled by Ford in his memoir Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (1924), Conrad could spend hours if not days discussing how to render a certain feeling, a certain experience, and certain impressions. Certainly, as a Pole who spoke English as his third language, you could assume that his interest was motivated by the fact that he was learning a new language; it was much more than that. Conrad, as well as Ford and many others, was experimenting with language while searching for a new form to make us feel through his word. Conrad and Ford continued the work of Flaubert, of the Russian masters, of Henry James; through their experiments, they engaged a dialogue that bridged different literary traditions in the pursuit of new knowledge. McLuhan knew their works almost by heart. It is through those works that he started to probe his own times: they helped him to adjust to his own world, to move from subject to function.
The modernist mask therefore shows us McLuhan investigating language in the wake of both symbolist poets and proto-modernist and modernist writers. He, too, acknowledged the important role played by the French poètes maudits, and was fascinated by their breaking of linearity, which he saw as a consequence of their interest in new forms of communication. Titles like ‘Joyce, Mallarmé and the Press’ and ‘Wyndham Lewis: His Theory of Art and Communication’ prove the immediate connection between the professor of English and the media scholar. By reading those writers, McLuhan understood how, in the twentieth century, form was not just a frame to contain words but a fundamental component of the narrative process. Modernist writers taught McLuhan that writing could no longer be representational because new discoveries in many different domains (physics, medicine, communications, social sciences, etc.) were challenging both traditional knowledge and traditional canons. Victorian narratives were obsolesced and had to be replaced by experimental forms, more elusive and in progress. But the modernists also taught McLuhan that such elusiveness was counterbalanced by the solidity of language rediscovered through the study of etymology. Words were no longer perceived as abstractions but as containers of multiple meanings, constantly reassembled and hybridized with other semiological codes, from music to painting, from theatre to cinema.15 You find words and sounds on Picasso’s canvases, music on Joyce’s pages, cinematic close-ups in Fitzgerald’s descriptions: Modernist productions are no longer ‘mono-sensorial,’ but ‘multi-sensorial’ – that is, multi-media – renderings.
McLuhan himself considers words as ‘complex systems of metaphors and symbols’ through which ‘the entire world can be evoked and retrieved at any instant.’16 It is precisely this intrinsic power of words that the new modernist poetics are evoking. Inevitably, the writer, as well as the artist, is no longer portrayed as an inspired and gifted individual, but instead as a conscious craftsman. As a craftsman, the new writer must know how to mould language and must always be aware of his tools (rhetoric, grammar, etymology) in order to control their effects. McLuhan was a good apprentice and learned the tricks of the trade from Ezra Pound – il miglior fabbro, ‘the better craftsman,’ as per Eliot’s dedication in The Waste Land – from T.S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, and all those craftsmen that he encountered through them.
As with other modernist writers, McLuhan no longer wanted to narrate reality; he, too, wanted to render it; he, too, wanted ‘to show the community in action,’ to convey action itself (both inner and outer) in all its dynamism. His probing of old and new media is disseminated the same way other modernist writers had successfully done it; their comments are the constant leitmotif of his media storytelling. In his Laws of Media, he still recalls the English imagist school of Pound and Aldington, and praises its attention to ‘the exact word’; he describes Pound and Eliot as ‘the Cicero and Quintilian of our time’ for their incessant work upon language, and for their ‘modern artistic enterprise [of] the ancient modes of rhetoric and grammar.’17 The search for the exact word, his search for a new form, is therefore inscribed inside the humanistic traditions which McLuhan the modernist never ceased to explore.
Yes, it would have made a huge difference to me if I had met McLuhan when I first discovered modernism; I would have approached those refined poems and novels not only as solid cross-roads of different cultural and literary traditions, but also as experiments throwing light on new media processes and their related societal dynamics. As I mentioned earlier, McLuhan literally put the modernists on, so much so that I think his books on media are based on those experiments. As a media theorist, McLuhan did not only limit his interest to modernist ‘messages’ (most writers did, in fact, discuss media and new forms of communication, as well as the then forming mass society); instead, he used their language, their formal discoveries, and their artistic achievements as ceaseless acts with which to engage actuality and its related cultural processes.
For McLuhan, to study modernist poetics was, indeed, a way to take part in the process of understanding the type of societal and technological change whose long-term effects he was experiencing, as an individual and as a professor. In his introduction to the Italian edition of The Interior Landscape, critic Amleto Lorenzini has well captured the essence of McLuhan’s modernist lesson:
McLuhan tells us that literary criticism should not be academic, but should learn from Pound; it should be clearly polemical, brave enough to tell what must be told. That’s why, McLuhan also tells us, academics have ignored Pound’s criticism or, whenever they acknowledged it, they were against it: Pound’s criticism, capable to illuminate two masters like Yeats and Eliot, constitutes, in fact, the ground of his Cantos – which is the greatest poem of our century, still the most misinterpreted one.
McLuhan applies the lesson he learnt from the great masters of literature to the study of mass media; not to the messages they convey, but to their language, to their process in order to codify their functioning and to avoid becoming their slave.18
Through modernism, McLuhan developed an approach to media aimed at understanding the hidden ground of patterns underpinning each medium, but also the confluence of different media inside a society where technological progress was racing fast-forward. He aimed to unveil media languages and processes, thereby contributing to the stimulation of people’s awareness (to prevent them from becoming cultural ‘slaves’). The medium is the message, and literature is our warning signal, helping us to detect the grammar of a change in the environment. This was, in fact, what McLuhan proved was possible.