Dear Pound,
My epistolary socks have sagged lately. You know, going through [Ford Madox] Ford, and trying to read all that he says I must, has given me quite a feeling of inadequacy and irrelevance. That will pass by the time I have finished the next 200 volumes. But the sense of only now reading things I should have known all along has sapped me. And to write to yourself, who have for forty-five years taken for granted all this learning, perception and art, well it seemed sheer impertinence. (Marshall McLuhan, letter to Ezra Pound, Sunday, 7 Nov. 1948)
Ford Madox Ford was as a guardian divinity of ‘Belles Lettres,’ one of those writers who contribute to the spiritual well-being of all those who are in love with creative writing, modernist scholars or aficionados of literature alike. This declaration stems not so much from the refined pleasure I have always derived from reading his proto-modernist works; instead, it is based on Ford’s incessant and strenuous defence of the social and political values of both literature and the arts. By defending the role of all arts – and of literature in primis – inside a growing consumerist society, Ford seems to give hope to all the existing Don Quixotes who are devoted to ‘Belles Lettres’ for either professional or passionate reasons.
When cultural trends lead us to question the real meaning and impact of what we do today as literary critics or as ‘artsy aficionados’ acting in a world in which progress, as well as success and welfare, are clearly associated with other departments of life, Ford’s visionary statements contribute plenty of good reasons to go on. Statements such as ‘Only from the arts can any safety for the future of the state be found’1 and ‘The public of today has to go to the imaginative writer for its knowledge of life, for its civilisation’2 comfort us. Ford reassures (and even worries) us by repeating as a constant leitmotiv all through his writing that literature stands as ‘the only civilising agency that is at work today as in other dark ages’ because you cannot have ‘a business community of any honesty unless you have a literature to set and maintain a high standard.’3 No matter if these hyperbolic and absolute assertions, these emotive utterances, are perceived by the majority of people as mere illusions. And it matters even less if some mathematicians find these utterances to be false; to us – who accept the fact that ‘in the poetic approach … logic comes in, if at all, in subordination, as servant to our emotional response’4 – they resonate as true.
Literature matters, and literature is a very serious business.
Still.
Certainly, literature mattered to Marshall McLuhan, professor of English, who always linked his media analysis and his own probing of the evolving mass society to his literary studies. Yes: media studies, as per McLuhan, have solid literary roots.
To date, critics have neglected the role played by Ford Madox Ford in shaping the way in which Marshall McLuhan employed the arts and literature as analogical mirrors casting light on ongoing cultural, technological, and social processes. This neglect is nothing new: for many decades, Ford was a little-known writer, especially in comparison to the popularity achieved by other modernist writers. For some time, Ford was considered as a writers’ writer whose literary tenets, unknown to the public, influenced the development of later poetics. His works and the role he played at the turn of the previous century as a proto-modernist writer helped trigger the debate on literature and the necessity to open the form to new societal realities. But his contributions went unnoticed until the last decades of the twentieth century, when the studies of Malcolm Bradbury, Frank MacShane, Sondra J. Stang, and especially Max Saunders brought him back to the foreground.5
Today, we know and appreciate Ford’s impressionist tenets, conceived to render his time in the spirit of his time, turning the writer into a new type of social historian different from Zola’s naturalist writer and poles apart from Wilde’s poetical principles.6 Ford’s project was to renew English letters and realign them with the good literature of the time, which, in his own view, was coming from France as a counterbalance to Zola, namely, the imaginative literature of Flaubert, Maupassant, and the symbolist poets. To pursue his dream of an international Republic of Letters, Ford edited two literary reviews (The English Review, in London from December 1908 to February 1910, and the transatlantic review, in Paris throughout 1924). As Douglas Goldring recalled, they ‘were to perform a glorious and much needed service to English letters, by setting up and maintaining a standard of literary values, of real writing … They were, above all, to start a Movement and to found in the French sense, a school.’7 And, in order to start such a Movement, Ford fought late-Victorian Intelligentsia – ‘The quite natural tendency of Intelligentsia is to make of literature as unconsumable a thing as may be, so that … they may cement their authority over an unlettered world.’8 He scouted for talented among new young writers, would-be internationally renowned masters of literature, including D.H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, W.H. Hudson, Wyndham Lewis, Jean Rhys, and Ernest Hemingway. In the promo that he wrote and circulated at the end of 1923 to launch his forthcoming transatlantic review, Ford wrote of the dual goal he pursued as an editor:
The major one, the purely literary, conducing to the minor, the disinterestedly social. The first is that of widening the field in which the younger writers of the day can find publication, the second that of introducing into international politics a note more genial than that which almost universally prevails. The first conduces to the second in that the best ambassadors, the only non secret diplomatists between nations are the books and the arts of nations.9
In spite of Ford’s commitment and his persistent generosity towards younger writers, most of his young protégés revolted against Ford over time, often denouncing his excessive paternalism, as well as his ambiguous take towards tradition.10 Ford never embraced the most extreme avant-garde credos against the past and – in contrast with most radical modernist isms – he based his poetics on a constant dialogue among literary and artistic traditions. This is an attitude which can be easily compared to both Eliot’s and Pound’s later idea of a best tradition to be preserved as inscribed in ‘the sacred wood’ (Ford’s International Republic) of Letters. There was one ‘protégé,’ Ezra Pound, who always acknowledged his debt towards Ford Madox Ford’s teaching and always defended Ford’s role as a writer and a thinker.11 It is through Ezra Pound that the young Marshall McLuhan encountered Ford Madox Ford’s works and ideas.
In 1948, McLuhan wrote in a letter to Pound, ‘Can you or Mrs. Pound tell me why T.S. Eliot carefully suppresses all references to Ford or his writing? There must be some explanation. My interest in the matter is not at the gossip level. It seems to me to be necessary for an understanding of 20th century letters.’12 In the letter, McLuhan emphasizes Ford’s learning and quotes Goldring’s book South Lodge: Reminiscences of Violet Hunt, Ford Madox Ford and the English Review Circle. Even though Goldring’s book is quoted as a homage to Pound himself (as its author praises the influence of Pound on ‘the birth of the later Yeats’),13 it is important to realize that McLuhan had already read it at the time. This is one of the few testimonies of Ford’s role as an editor and a writer written almost in real time (in 1942, three years after Ford had passed away), a role which provided McLuhan with the opportunity to learn about his vision of the writer as a new type of scientific observer. As a scientific (not a naturalist) observer, the new writer must investigate his own time and render it with no party bias (in this way, Ford’s ideal writer is also a social historian). Literature is the key to such a rendering, especially the type of literature that Ford named imaginative as opposed to the merely factual, as well as to the merely fictive.14 What Ford envisaged (already in his 1909–10 editorials) is a new idea of ‘realism,’ as in Flaubert and Maupassant, mirroring a new type of writer:
It will be observed that this elevates the novelist of this school to the rank of a scientific observer. His business is to lay before the readers the results not of his moral theories, not of his socially constructed ideas, not even of his generous impulses, nor even of his imagination, but simply the results of his observation of life.15
Similarly:
The more modern novelists – or, at any rate, those of the school to which Mr Ford Madox Ford belongs – write with two purposes: they try to produce work according to the canons that they have derived from light vouchsafed them. Within those limits they try to render – not to write about their times without parti pris.16
Both these statements could be used as grounds for McLuhan’s later pun on his role as a scholar in communication: ‘I’m not an explainer, I’m an explorer’: the task of any scientific observer is in fact that of showing the community in action, not judging it.
As we shall see, direct references to Ford’s work are not easily found in McLuhan’s writings. Yet starting from Ezra Pound’s fundamental mediation, it is possible to assert that the Canadian scholar was well aware of Ford’s literary impressionism; and it is possible to speculate about Ford’s impact on McLuhan’s approach to literature and the role it could play as a probe to explore societal matrixes. In his memoirs, essays, and critical writings, Ford teaches us that literature is, in fact, quite a serious business and not just another form to entertain, amuse, or even manipulate people. Literature is the perfect figure to understand the complexity of the ground from which it emanates. Even though he was criticized for historical inaccuracies,17 Ford’s idea of the novelist as a scientific observer whose task is not to judge society, but instead to signal the ongoing cultural, political, and societal processes, anticipates McLuhan’s call to face societal change. Also, by developing a series of rhetorical strategies based on a carefully conceived progression d’effet, Ford writes, not to pontificate to his readers, but to encourage their participation in the process of understanding. His goal is to awaken a blurring critical attitude (which McLuhan will later define as the Narcissus narcosis, the collective hypnosis that his probes intended to challenge).
In Ford’s view, imaginative readers must make themselves grasp the juxtaposition of situations that the author develops in his novels. The reader has to become an active producer of knowledge through a renewed act of reading, and by grasping hidden implications; thereby is her or his awakening encouraged. Ford used to repeat, ‘Nothing was more true than the words of Flaubert, when he said that, if France had read his Education Sentimentale, it would have been spared the horrors of the Franco-Prussian War.’18 The clue here is to understand how to read, something which, in turn, mirrors a new way of writing, a new form. Certainly, Ford elaborated his form, not to accommodate his readers to his own views, but to induce their active response and, by so doing, to start a process leading to epiphanies.
Hence, to appreciate the impact of Ford on McLuhan’s writing is not simply a pedantic academic exercise. On the contrary, it becomes a useful link for further understanding and clarifying the literary origins of McLuhan’s media and communication studies, both in terms of the operative project (to explore and investigate his own times) and the form through which it is enacted (that is, the ‘mosaic,’ built to provoke and not to comfort his readers). It is a way to retrieve the role played by the humanities not only in relation to the process of understanding the ways in which our high-tech society developed; it is also a way to assert the importance of tracing a constant fil rouge connecting literature to the world, text to context, figure to ground.
Paraphrasing McLuhan on Eliot, we might ask: why does Marshall McLuhan suppress any reference to Ford or his writing? Is it an intentional or an unconscious omission? In fact, Ford’s name is missing from the long list of writers, artists, and thinkers whose quotes are continually found in McLuhan’s most popular works. However, I have found two exceptions: a brief reference in an essay entitled ‘Coleridge as Artist,’ in which Ford’s novels are associated – en passant – with those of Henry James and Joseph Conrad for their ‘confessional and digressive’ element; and the recalling of Ford’s reading of Sinclair Lewis’s Babbit as ‘the American Madame Bovary.’19
It is only in McLuhan’s letters to Pound and to his friend Felix Giovanelli, that is, in his private conversations, that we find open references to Ford. And yet, for Ford’s alert readers, this lack of direct references in McLuhan’s major books is somehow compensated for by the constant presence of several ‘indirect’ references: McLuhan’s pages resound with expressions which echo in the scholar’s ear and form a sort of Fordian progression d’effet. For instance, when in Understanding Media we read the comment ‘Flaubert, the French novelist of the nineteenth century, felt that the Franco Prussian War could have been avoided if people had heeded his Sentimental Education,’ we cannot but juxtapose both this quote and its allusive use to Ford’s original note.20 It is not a matter of plagiarism, since that very quote has certainly been repeated by many other critics and writers. Yet, the persistent impression is that McLuhan has appropriated Ford’s lesson, his ideas on art and literature, his language and technique, in such a strong and lasting way that it has become almost an unconscious platform pervading his own language, and technique, as well as his modus operandi as a media explorer.
After what McLuhan himself confessed in his preface to his The Interior Landscape, I do not think that it is too much to state that the process of elaboration of Ford’s theories into his own writings derives from McLuhan’s direct investigation of Ford’s works, and from his study of other modernist writers who knew Ford and who adopted and further developed his original impressionist tenets, namely, first and foremost Pound. It is a process which is never acknowledged overtly, but which tends to emerge sometimes in unexpected ways, and which is translated as ‘little’ epiphanies. For instance, Father Lawrence Dewan, who was one of McLuhan’s assistants in the 1950s, recalls the importance that McLuhan gave to the search for le mot juste– the right word. He uses an expression that McLuhan himself used and which reflects one of Ford’s most famous impressionist tenets (in turned based on his study of Flaubert’s new style as carried on during his collaboration with Joseph Conrad). The expression was used by Ford to emphasize the important role played by form in the creation of content. It is another (ante litteram) way to say that ‘the medium is the message’: to select and to juxtapose words is a conscious act that the writer performs to cast a form capable of driving the reader towards impromptu epiphanies, irrespective of the plot or content.21 Ford’s most famous novel, The Good Soldier, embodies the major technical devices which Ford elaborated to make us see, hear, and feel: the juxtaposition of situations; progression d’effet; time shift, and, of course, the perennial search for the right word, le mot juste.
Omissions and indirect testimonies cannot be considered as factual evidence for the purpose of this book. For this reason, it is safer to investigate the few direct references to Ford Madox Ford which we can find in McLuhan’s letters. To conclude this chapter, I will also suggest a reading of Ford’s historical romance – The Fifth Queen – in the light of McLuhan’s investigation of old and new media. The intention is to show that McLuhan’s appraisal of Ford was based as well on the clear understanding that, in his novels, the English writer had grasped the implications of various environmental changes triggered by new technologies, be it in the late Renaissance (as in The Fifth Queen), or in Edwardian society (as in The Good Soldier). McLuhan sees these two historical moments as conducive to the passage from the oral to the mechanical age and from the mechanical age to the electric age, respectively.
It is important to stress that McLuhan read Ford through Ezra Pound’s critical mediations. In June 1946, together with Hugh Kenner, McLuhan visited Ezra Pound at St Elisabeth’s Hospital for the Criminally Insane. In the course of an encounter which ‘fired McLuhan intellectually,’22 Pound introduced his two young visitors to Ford’s work. Later, in August, McLuhan writes to Pound informing him of his reading ‘for the first time’ of Ford’s Some Do Not, A Man Could Stand Up, Last Post, and The Good Soldier, recently released by Penguin Books. In his letter, McLuhan comments that ‘these books repay the reading certainly, and I’ll get them read by others.’23 A few weeks later, McLuhan writes about Ford to his friend Felix Giovanelli in a letter which is crucial to our understanding of McLuhan’s immediate and deep grasp of Ford’s poetic and rhetorical strategies:
Let me say that you will get much pleasure and enlightenment from Ford Madox Ford’s Return to Yesterday. Light on Pound, Lewis, et al. … Ford deals with res non verba. His anecdotes always point to social, political, economic aesthetic axes and dynamics within a situation. His March of Literature (1939) is the best book on comparative lit. I’ve ever come across.24
And again, a few days later in another letter to Giovanelli, he continues:
Ford and Pound talked and talked about everything from 1908–1922 when Pound went to Italy. They agreed on everything except Cicero and Mommsen … Ford’s memoirs are not mere chat. The chat is a series of epiphanies of carefully considered social and literary structures and their inter penetration.25
These brief passages show that McLuhan had clearly understood three major aspects of Ford’s poetics, three aspects which later will pervade his own as well. The first, Ford Madox Ford deals with res (things – that is, facts and actuality – with clear reference to a concrete use of language, which implies a careful process of selection of le mot juste) and not with verba (here to be understood as abstractions or redundant and soft words); that is, Ford uses language in a new way, conveying to language a natural and concrete quality, as other modernist poetics will later do (i.e., Pound’s imagism).26 The second, Ford considers literature and storytelling not as a mere divertissement, nor as a preaching strategy, but as an active component of his observation of his own time (‘His anecdotes always point to social, political, economic aesthetic axes and dynamics within a situation’). The third, Ford adopts a comparative and broad approach (he talks ‘about everything,’ he is not a specialist but a generalist) to develop his observations, thus turning literature into a tool to approach various aspects of an ever growing complex society.
Thus, as a young man passionate about literature and as a professor of English, McLuhan anticipated what most modernist critics fully acknowledged only some decades later. As a matter of fact, in his letters to Giovanelli, he implicitly traces some crucial tenets of Ford’s literary impressionism which later critics will define as the will to render and not to narrate. The intention is to embrace at once social, political, economic, and aesthetic phenomena through a renewed approach to literature; to develop a renewed form of storytelling based on anecdotes that appear simple and naïve at first glance, but that are, instead, carefully conceived; and not to moralize but to show one’s own times in the terms of one’s own existence. In addition, McLuhan points out the important role which Ford played as a proto-modernist writer (as mentioned before, Ford was a renowned ‘talent scout,’ helping several would-be famous writers to get published). The reference to the intense and continuous dialogue which took place between Ford and Pound during 1908–22 is not only a fact, but also stands in McLuhan’s letter as an appropriate metaphor to epitomize the handover of artistic principles between two authors who, even though belonging to different cultural backgrounds and eras, nevertheless shared a similar approach to literature at a time of social and cultural change. Consistently, through his conversations and correspondence with Ezra Pound, McLuhan further developed his ideas on the role of a man of letters inside a growing consumerist and technological society – that is, his declared goal to detect and explore change.
If we compare the poetics of these three men of letters – Ford, Pound, and McLuhan – it is easy to realize that they all have a similar understanding of the role of the artist in society. Ford Madox Ford considers the imaginative writer as a new type of scientific observer – a modernist social historian – who, in the true spirit of the time, wants to help his readers acquire and preserve an independent train of thought and to not succumb to accepted ideas. Ezra Pound, a former young protégé of Ford, presents the artist as the antenna of the race monitoring and alerting readers to the ongoing change;27 and McLuhan, who read Ford through Pound and who well understood Pound’s prose, presents the artist as the individual of integral awareness, in ‘any field, scientific and humanistic,’ who perceives the implications of ‘new knowledge in his time.’ In each of these cases, the artist is seen as the dynamic counter-environment to the spreading of the Narcissus narcosis.
Ford, Pound, and McLuhan consider literature as a heuristic experience preserving free thinking at a time of rapid cultural change. According to McLuhan, this was even more pertinent when he started his own media investigations in the early 1940s, when new technologies of communications were reconfiguring the interplay between individuals and their own environment at an accelerated pace. Times of action and times of reaction speeded up, and the space for reflection, for processing, for rational thinking was inevitably being reduced. McLuhan responded by applying the ‘method of art analysis to the critical evaluation of society,’ a strategy, as we shall see when discussing Lewis’s influence on McLuhan, aimed at arresting the information overload in order to create a counter-force to change. It is a way to promote aesthetic and societal awareness also among non-artists:
It’s always been the artist who perceives the alterations in man caused by a new medium, who recognises that the future is the present, and uses his work to prepare the ground for it … But the ability to perceive media-induced extensions of man, once the province of the artist, is now being expanded as the new environment of electric information makes possible a new degree of perception and critical awareness by non artists.28
As a non-artist, McLuhan approaches the new reality by borrowing the artist’s strategies, and considering the new man-made environment as a unique ‘artefact’ for which all previous strategies of analysis are obsolete. Through his books, and through his new form of writing, McLuhan pursued his explorations while testing out new epistemological tenets.
A similar strategy of exploration had already been advanced by Ford Madox Ford, not only through the development of his ‘impressionist’ new form, but also through editorship of his literary reviews, The English Review and the transatlantic review. In his editorials, Ford denounces the increasing dominance of what he calls accepted ideas. He sees these as a side effect of the new era of mass communications that is characterizing the passage from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, when new technological developments changed the way news was distributed, and started the process which we now define as ‘information overload’:
For it was the struggle with the Boers that made the fortune of the more frivolous Press … It should be remembered that the South African War was the first vital struggle that this nation [England] has been engaged in since the telegraphic Press was really organised. Before that time, though this tendency was gradually dying, the public was accustomed to accept with equanimity news that was a day or two old – to accept it with equanimity and to ponder over it for some small length of time. But nowadays, even in more remote country districts, the Englishman is overwhelmed every morning with a white spray of facts - facts more or less new, more or less important, more or less voracious.
The overload of information induced by the telegraphic press, and later by the wireless radio, is presented by Ford as a constant, continuous, and even voracious flow of data which blurs categories and classifications, and contributes to a superficial approach to both facts and the analysis of facts. For instance, in his editorials for The English Review, later collected in a volume bearing the revealing title of The Critical Attitude, Ford encourages his readers to rebel against what he calls ‘the half-penny Press,’ to resist all brainwashing, and to regain a true critical attitude or free will. He laments that ‘the days of most rapid travelling are the days of most frequent misunderstandings between the races of mankind,’ mostly because ‘accepted ideas’ – spread through new processes of communication – are replacing individual and original thinking:
The fact is that what humanity desires passionately and almost before other things is a creed. It craves for accepted ideas; it longs more for a mind at rest … The tendency of the great public is more and more to leave all public matters in the hands of a comparatively few specialists.29
In his first volume – The Mechanical Bride – McLuhan follows a similar analysis and writes to counter the accepted ideas and the numbing processes induced by the Reader’s Digest mentality, or by the Book of the Hour.
As previously discussed, in his later volumes McLuhan will never repeat such a clear-cut criticism of cultural phenomena. He will no longer explain what he sees; rather, he will only render his explorations with no party bias. As he pointed out: ‘I try to avoid value judgements … I neither approve nor disapprove. I merely try to understand … I’m an observer in these matters, not a participant … My personal point of view is irrelevant.’30 It is an attitude which Ford himself had already encouraged when acting not as an opinion-maker but as an impressionist writer:
… the only thing of value is the concrete fact; the concrete fact is only of value as an ‘illustration’ of a state of mind, a characteristic in an individual. The fact should be stated first. The ‘moral’ may or may not be drawn in so many words. Theoretically it ought not to be, because the first duty of an artist is not to comment and precisely, not to moralise.31
In this way, there begins to appear a network of correspondences between two intellectuals who belonged to different cultural settings and to different professions: Ford Madox Ford, an imaginative writer seeking suggestions and not dictates,32 who observed the passage from an old to a new world order and who tried to render it through his fictional works, as well as his literary criticism, with the goal of preserving and encouraging a critical attitude in his readers; and Marshall McLuhan, a professor of English and a literary scholar sharing the same goal, becoming an explorer of new media-induced environments and dynamics, acting on the basis of his humanistic training, and creating a new way to approach actuality. As a writer, Ford Madox Ford denounced the malaise of his time in an allegorical way, through his fictional and anecdotic storytelling, enlightening what lies behind the opalescent surface of things; whereas McLuhan used fiction, anecdotes, and the storytelling of Ford and other writers as his own life-long subtext, as analogical mirrors to speculate on the world in progress and to develop a new strategy that rendered not only what he saw, but also the very process of observation in which he engaged. Even though Ford and McLuhan experimented with different genres and areas of study, they both were engaged intellectuals trying to read ‘the language of the outer world and relate it to the inner world,’33 and they were both innovators in their own field, as they developed a new form to render and mould their operative project. Their own new forms became not just a way to embellish their observations, but an important part of their cognitive process.
The poetics of both Ford and McLuhan originate from their desire to be witnesses of complex cultural ages, which were also ages of passage from one societal matrix to a new one, characterized by an expansion in technologies of communication. During the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, Ford witnessed the phenomenon of a new journalism parallel to the establishment of a new transnational mass society. A few decades later, McLuhan witnessed another crucial moment leading to the consolidation of that same mass society, since the post–Second Word War years were those in which mass media triumphed and become the powerful leading factor in all sociological, anthropological, and cultural changes. Looking at the same phenomenon from two different but contingent moments in history (Ford died in 1939, just as McLuhan started his career as a university professor), Ford and McLuhan become witnesses to the shrinking of the world on a vast scale, as well as to a standardized approach to actuality (increasingly mediated through new media and a new media infrastructure).
The global village which McLuhan theorizes was already intuited by Ford Madox Ford, who presented his version of it in the volume A History of Our Own Time as follows:
Be that as it may, it is, premising that we peoples whose shores nearly enclose an inland sea are already all one people – it is with that as its chose donnée that this book will set out … We are, that is to say, at one in every thing save the barrier that we still maintain at our frontiers; and those barriers are purely artificial and, by all logic, absurd. An exposé of how we all now resemble one another – of the present day standardisation of the Western World – I do not need here to make. Anyone can make it for himself … It is sufficient here to point out that, with the enormous increase of means of communication, not merely by locomotion but with ear and eye, and with the establishment in all our relationships of nearly standardised and practically secularised system of universal primary instruction, the minds of us all are being very truth standardised; and with a very little more attention to education in modern languages there is no reason why a native of Levallois-Perret should not feel as at home in Hoboken as in the other suburb of his birth … So that we are all, whether as a nation or individuals, much of a muchness whether in blood or civilisation. And we are all made up of about the same matter and our civilisations are all of much the same blend … But the material point to observe is that these purely artificial and pseudo-scientific, pseudo-historic dividings up of humanity are nowadays as absurd as were the custom-barriers that small Germany potentates used to set up at every few miles of main road through Low Germany. And they grow more absurd everyday.34
It is unlikely that McLuhan ever read Ford’s statement because even though his manuscript originates approximately in 1930, it was not published until 1988 (and was in the Cornell University Library since 1973). Yet, his reference to a cultural assimilation which overcomes geographical borders still preserved by the various nation-states, his discussion on the fundamental role played by ‘increase of means of communication’ understood as achieved ‘not merely by locomotion but with ear and eye, and the inevitability of the process of standardization of the Western world: these are all concepts which also form the basis of McLuhan’s idea of the global village. ‘After three thousand years of explosion by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding … As electrically contracted, the globe is no more than a village.’35 And again: ‘The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.’36 Other considerations reflecting those stated by Ford concerning the adoption of a ‘nearly standardised and practically secularised system of universal primary instruction’ also emerge out of McLuhan’s production. In particular, as I will expand on later, in his essay ‘An Ancient Quarrel in Modern America,’37 McLuhan traces the various phases which have led to the passage, in the modern age, from a cultural and educational tradition based on the ancient idea of encyclopedic learning to a hyper-specialized one, based on the separation between heart and mind. The ensuing dissociation of sensibility was still perceived in the contemporary age to be to the detriment of wit and a critical attitude. A similar comment is to be found in Ford’s The March of Literature – a volume McLuhan read and praised – when he discusses the decadence of institutions such as Balliol College at Oxford, now dedicated to preserving a distorted idea of education based on notions of training and no longer on learning.38
Finally, it is important to further stress that the poetics of Ford and McLuhan may be compared not only in terms of their underpinning operative project (to awaken their readers/audience and provoke critical thinking), but also in terms of their interest in developing a new form to embed and actualize that very project. It is a form clearly synthesized by McLuhan when he affirms that ‘Ford deals with res non verba.’
At the start of the twentieth century, Ford was among the first to write about the impotence of Victorian rhetorical canons to fully convey the complexity of his changing times. Together with Joseph Conrad, he worked out new tenets renewing the approach to language and cross-breading other artistic domains, especially music and painting. In their novels, the two writers developed and experimented with new techniques whose names immediately convey their interest for discontinuous and non-linear structures: time shift, juxtaposition of situations. In particular, Ford’s search for the right word opened up the printed line through the retrieval of the heuristic power of words. In his works, words become polysemic containers of complex experiences. When reading Ford’s fiction, a reader is engaged in a progression of effect which leads to the final epiphany only if all juxtapositions and all verbal suggestions are carefully assembled in the reader’s mind. His storytelling unfolds as if he were talking to us. He moves back and forth, and is often uncertain and full of doubts, unreliable even, as his prose is continually interrupted, as if he were following an associative train of thoughts, as in oral communication.
McLuhan later developed a similar strategy. As he pointed out, Ford’s sentences are not mere chat and his anecdotes are small epiphanies of ‘carefully considered social and literary structures and their inter-penetration.’ As we saw earlier, for McLuhan words are also more than a series of letters; they are ‘complex system of metaphors and symbols’ through which ‘the entire world can be evoked and retrieved at any instant.’ For him, too, the world cannot be narrated but must be rendered to his readers in a direct way. McLuhan’s mosaic, just like Ford’s new form – his impressionist novels – is a complex and broken form of writing based on the juxtaposition of verbal probes acting just like Ford’s impressions, juxtaposed in order to involve the reader in a progression of effects leading to epiphanies, to knowledge and understanding. Both Ford’s and McLuhan’s forms of writing develop, not through distance or linear rendering, but in medias res and through a direct mimesis, because the world cannot be narrated: the world – and our own experience of it – IS.
It still surprises me that the works of Marshall McLuhan have never before been linked to those of Ford Madox Ford, at least not in a systematic way as they should have. I did try, in fact, to suggest that connection about ten years ago at a Ford Madox Ford conference in Münster, Westfalen, Germany. On that occasion, I approached Ford’s historical romance The Fifth Queen (1906–8) in the light of McLuhan’s media theories; I still remember the perplexed glance among my colleagues in literary studies. It was both an odd and a funny experience. A decade later, after the blooming of new interdisciplinary studies, I think it is worth retrieving that approach to show how the interplay of media and literature can in fact enlighten the cultural grey or hybrid zones, that is, the interfacing passage from one form of society to the next. I will therefore now elaborate on that essay, which was nevertheless published by the benevolent organizers of the symposium in a volume dedicated to Ford Madox Ford’s ‘individual talent.’39
Ford’s trilogy can in fact be read as a literary work that supports one of McLuhan’s fundamental assertions, namely, that each new medium, each new technology, participates in a series of chain reactions which, unavoidably, have a deep impact on the environment, as well as on the interplay between that environment and the individuals who inhabit it. Ford’s The Fifth Queen, which tells the story of Katharine Howard, King Henry VIII’s fifth wife, can be approached as a peculiar analogical mirror which facilitates an in-depth investigation of that historical period. No doubt, the first half of the sixteenth century was a critical moment in the history of England, as well as of the Western world. As a matter of fact, that historical period is commonly taken as a decisive passage from the late Middle Ages to the newly forming Renaissance society, that is, to modernity.
McLuhan considers this passage as the crucial one for the final establishment of what he calls the literate society, the book age, or the Gutenberg Galaxy. It is important to recall here that according to McLuhan, the interplay of a new technology with other societal agents ends in a modified environment and triggers a series of side effects which are not immediately perceived by the individuals. Only over time does it become possible to focus the complex set of cultural dynamics following the impact of a new medium. As we saw earlier, McLuhan called this a backward process of understanding. Hence, as in a rear-view mirror, The Fifth Queen helps the reader to focus the implications related to the passage from the Middle Ages (the old environment) to Renaissance society (the new environment).
McLuhan considers a new technology as an agent participating in a complex series of anthropological changes whose subliminal fluxes and re-fluxes (to borrow from Ford himself) are registered by the arts through time. The Fifth Queen seems to have been written precisely to enlighten our grasp of the making of the Gutenberg Age; it is tempting to imagine that McLuhan might, in fact, have employed it to better focus his own understanding, even though there is no published evidence of such a use. The printing press, invented by Gutenberg in the fifteenth century, was the new emerging technology whose effects were becoming more visible at the time of Henry VIII, in England, a century later. McLuhan writes in The Gutenberg Galaxy, and in Understanding Media, that the invention of the printing press speeds up the consolidation of the so-called literate society, thereby giving men ‘an eye for an ear.’ In the Western world, this process had started following the invention of the phonetic alphabet, itself a technology which had contributed to turn the ancient tribal society first into a chirographic society, a sort of hybrid society in which orality and literacy coexisted, and then into a typographic society. From a psycho-social perceptive view, the invention of the phonetic alphabet started to unbalance a previously harmonic and multi-sensorial perception of the environment, and slowly favoured the eye over all other senses. In the fifteenth century, the invention of the printing press contributed to the consolidation of this process. The new medium of the printing press clearly marked a new age, McLuhan’s so-called mechanical age. It contributed to the transformation of the integral man of the oral society into Gutenberg’s fragmented, literary man. As McLuhan writes: ‘It would appear that to see one mother’s tongue dignified with the precise technology of print released a new vision of unity and power … The sentiment of spatial and territorial nationalism that accompanies literacy is also reinforced by the printing press, which provides not only the sentiment, but also the centralised bureaucratic instruments of uniform control over wide territories.’40
As a result, the concepts of nationalism, state, individualism, order, and hierarchy became even stronger, and the ancient harmony emanating from communal values gave way, in time, to Machiavelli and his bold theories: ‘… Machiavelli stands at the gate of the Modern age, divorcing technique from social purpose.’41 The new technology, the printing press, seems to bring a new idea of space itself: space can now be divided, ordered, and dominated by a new logic built upon the opposition of centre and margins. Also, the idea of privacy is born, and men start to divide outer from inner space. As we saw earlier, in the visual arts, this change was underlined by the development of the technique of perspective, that is, a new way of observing and rendering the landscape: everything is positioned according to a pre-set vanishing point which facilitates giving each object its proper order. The concepts of uniformity, order, and repeatability which accompany the printing press characterize the modern or mechanical age, which is also well known for being the age of specialists. It is important to point out that the specialist mentality, which marks this period, complements the fragmentation of the ancient encyclopedic learning. This process continued in subsequent centuries, leading to what Ford termed the ‘standardised and practically secularised system of universal primary instruction,’ a definition which, as said, would have pleased Marshall McLuhan.
What McLuhan and media studies teach us, Ford renders in his trilogy. He succeeds in grasping the essence of that historical moment, which McLuhan theorized about five decades later. More precisely, Ford uses his literary craft to enlighten the passage from an Old to a New order. This is so evident that, in order to render its true spirit, he does not hesitate to twist history, and change historical facts and evidence, as has been suggested.42 Therefore, we refer to Ford’s trilogy as a historical romance, aware that Ford’s idea of realism, shaped by his literary impressionism, is much more elusive than traditionally understood. It is not an accident that The Fifth Queen is dedicated to Joseph Conrad, the author with whom Ford strenuously discussed new techniques to apply to a new form for the novel.
In the trilogy, Ford uses characterization as a narrative device to convey all the hidden tensions which underlie the passage from the Old to the New order. Each of the three main characters represents one of the major attitudes towards change at the time. Katharine Howard, the Catholic, is the tenacious and truthful defender of the Old Faith; Cromwell, Lord Privy Seal, is the ferocious champion of the New Order, promoting new alliances with the German and Lutheran princes; whereas King Henry is presented as a man still contemplating a choice. The king embraces all the doubts and uncertainties linked to that historical moment. Ford presents Henry VIII as constantly oscillating from one pole to the other, as he is attracted, in turn, by Cromwell’s self-assurance and Katharine’s innocence. As the King’s daughter, Lady Mary, a Catholic, tells Katharine, the King is made out of doubts. Katharine herself, who for a while tried to resist this reality and thought she could lead the King, and England, back to the Old Faith, ends by defining him as ‘a weathercock that I should never blow … to a firm quarter.’43
As Ford suggests, the fight between Katharine and Cromwell is much more complex than would appear at first glance. This struggle is slowly revealed not only through the repeated conversations between them, but also through a series of entangled sub-plots which wittily provide a carefully conceived progression d’effet, culminating in the final epiphany. The religious quarrel opposing Katharine and Cromwell is, in fact, concealing the fight between two different philosophical and theological traditions. This fight dates back a few centuries, but during the Renaissance period, it became a crucial one, as it is subtly linked to the making of modern society itself. I am referring here to the well-known quarrel opposing the grammarians, the defenders of the Old Learning and the dialecticians, the champions of the New Order. The grammarians were the defenders of the ancient paideia, the encyclopedic and humanistic tradition which, in the Middle Ages, was preserved through the practice of the translatio studii, consolidated by Augustine and the Fathers of the Church, and commonly referred to as Patristic. The dialecticians, on the other hand, stood for the new principles of the Scholastic as expressed in the Middle Ages by the famous School of Paris. In Renaissance England, this quarrel had among its famous protagonists Thomas Nashe, a grammarian, and Gabriel Harvey, a dialectician. It is their quarrel which McLuhan discusses in his PhD dissertation, as well as in several parts of The Gutenberg Galaxy.
Katharine, who is ‘well read in the learned tongue,’ can quote from the works of the classical authors, knows the philosophical works of the Fathers of the Church, and tells Cromwell that she supports ‘the Old Faith in the Old Way.’44 She shares the Patristic method, which preserves the world as a harmonious continuum, as a net of analogies which one must investigate through allegorical exegesis. By contrast, Cromwell is the champion of the ‘print-made split between head and heart,’ that is, of the ‘trauma which affects Europe from Machiavelli till the present.’45 Also, Cromwell is presented as a ‘setter up of walls,’46 a definition which immediately renders the new idea of space fragmentation that McLuhan associates with the Gutenberg Age, and that led to a new perception of both outer and inner space. Ford underlines this fragmentation through a peculiar setting of dark rooms lost inside huge palaces where people spy through doors ajar. These delimited spaces are mostly perceived through a reduced, narrowed visual perspective, either through a fissure or a hole. The very act of spying can, in turn, be read as a subtle metaphor of the passage leading from an open society to an increasingly closed one – an individualistic society built upon the idea of nationalism and progressing to a new logic which reconfigures space according to the ideas of the relations of the centre to the margin. By contrast, Katharine is often represented as standing in the open air, seated on a balcony, walking in a garden; even the Royal Palace, after Cromwell’s death and Katharine’s marriage to the King, seems to be brought to a new life.
In his trilogy, Ford seems implicitly to have caught another important element of the making of the new modern society, something which also constitutes a central tenet of McLuhan’s ideas, namely, that the printing press accelerated the passage from the ear to the eye, unbalancing a previously harmonic way of perceiving one’s environment. According to McLuhan, the sensory balance which characterizes the oral tribe and is preserved in the Middle Ages, even though the spread of a literate culture is starting to undo it, is finally overcome by the invention of the printing press. That technology accelerates a passage in progress: acoustic space is turned into visual space, and Renaissance society is progressively turned into a visual society, a society where the eye becomes the alpha and omega of all perception. Thus the split between head and heart that Cicero foresaw, and that McLuhan underlines in his works, is finally accomplished. In turn, Ford seems to have also grasped this in his way. It is evident that the word eye recurs often on almost every page of his trilogy. The colour, the attitude, the movement of eyes are all elements Ford uses in order to present his characters – elements that, in most cases, replace a more traditional and detailed description of the characters themselves. It is from the eyes that most words are spoken: ‘Show me your eyes,’47 the King asks Katharine when they first meet, and Cromwell walks beside Katharine ‘with his eyes on her face’;48 Gardiner’s eyes are ‘agate-blue … sombre, threatening, suspicious’;49 Magister Udal alerts Katharine to Cromwell, presenting him as ‘Circumspectatrix cum oculis emisitiis!’ … ‘A spie with eyes that peer about and stick out’;50 ‘My eyes are your Highness,’51 Lady Mary says sarcastically to the King, her father; Cromwell’s eyes are ‘sagacious,’ the King’s eyes can be ‘crafty,’ and Katharine’s can be ‘cold,’ depending on the moment and the situation. The same can be said of all characters, including the so-called minor ones, from Hal Poins to Katharine’s maids of chamber and servants. In this way, Ford continually presents his characters through a single physical detail, a single component of the human body, namely, the eye. Through this metonymical use of language, he seems to underline the making of what McLuhan would later define as Gutenberg’s fragmented and visual man.
The beginning of the trilogy could be easily defined as a true masterpiece of literary strategy as, in a few pages, Ford manages to convey the true essence of his book. Wittily, he chooses to open the trilogy with a peculiar setting: a print-shop. It is in the print-shop that the reader is introduced to many apparently minor characters who, however, will later play key roles in the unravelling of the plot. Not surprisingly, John Badge, the printer, representing the New Order, calls Lord Cromwell ‘God’s engine,’ and is immediately opposed by his father, who instead defends the Old Order and sees Cromwell simply as ‘a brewer’s drunken son.’ This opposition of father and son dramatically reinforces the idea of a passage towards a new form of society in which ancient and noble values give way to new, individualistic, and mechanical ones. At the printer’s shop, arriving at the same time, is Magister Udal, ‘the Lady Mary’s pedagogue,’ who had also taught the learned tongue to Katharine Howard before her arrival at court – a man who, ‘Being of the Old Faith,’ hates ‘those Lutherans – or those men of the New Learning – that it pleased his master [Lord Cromwell] to employ.’52
From the very beginning, then, Ford relates belonging to one or the other of the religious parties with a clearly identifiable cultural and exegetical tradition. In fact, the New Learning mentioned by Magister Udal inevitably points the reader to the quarrel between grammarians and dialecticians, which also bears social and political implications. To learn that Magister Udal, despite being well-read in the encyclopedic tradition, and being Lady Mary’s Catholic’s pedagogue, is also a Cromwell’s man (‘his master’) should make the reader a bit suspicious. This circumspection is reinforced by the fact that the printer, whom Ford presents as an ‘artificer’ and whose art is opposed to the ‘Magister’s learning,’ sharply names the Magister a ‘Latin mouth-mincer.’ It is a witty image which Ford uses to emphasize how the Latin spoken by Magister Udal is a ‘learned’ tongue, a refined form of Latin that, as proved by Walter J. Ong in his Orality and Literacy, became institutionalized precisely when the vulgar tongues started to consolidate during the passage from the Middle Ages to the modern age.
A newly codified version of Latin, submitted to written rules and paradigms, is a language that, despite being the learned tongue spoken by the new man of learning, is less and less associated with an ancient idea of knowledge, and more and more connected with a new idea of power. In the Renaissance period, in fact, Latin is the language of international bureaucracy, the language used to write treaties, to establish connections, to execute secret plots. It is a language that is no longer simply related to knowledge, but to the very idea of power itself. It is Cicely Rocheford, one of Katharine’s maids, who clearly enlightens the reader. Answering Katharine, who still defends the old values and believes in ancient traditions and rules, Cicely underlines how learning nowadays is a mere instrument, a tool men use to reach individual purposes, and repeats hotly: ‘This is no place for virtues learned from learned books. This is an ill world where only evil men flourish.’53 Inevitably, Magister Udal will, in the end, serve Cromwell first, and the King later. His task is that of translating their letters into the ‘learned tongue,’ that is, translating letters which are of political relevance and, once delivered, could change the history of England. Such is the case of the letter of submission that King Henry VIII, urged by his fifth Queen, plans to write to the Pope in Rome, a letter which is written and rewritten many times but never sent. Somehow the Magister himself, despite his learning, embodies the final strengthening of the new, individualistic, and literate Gutenberg society. No wonder he is despised by Lady Mary the Catholic, who, unlike him¸ is firm in her faith.
In the print-shop the reader also meets the Poins siblings, Hal and Margot, who, once they arrive at court, will, in turn, repeat the opposition between Old and New order, as Hal will serve Cromwell, and Margot, Katharine. In the print-shop, you hear the names of ‘Sieur Machiavelli’ and Lord Cromwell; of Lord Edmund Howard and Thomas Culpepper, respectively father and cousin of Katharine; and also, the name of Anne of Cleves, the fourth wife of King Henry VIII, who has just arrived in England from Germany. The new marriage has been arranged by the Lord Privy Seal, who showed the King an unfaithful portrait of the Queen, resulting in Henry’s disappointment with her true aspect and habits. Ford seems here to underline, emblematically, the paradox of following a blind trust in the eye, and to signal the relevant risks; if people look at things rather than through them, they will lose the integral perception of the things and situations themselves. On the contrary, it is through the speech she delivers during an elaborate masque at court, that Katharine conquers the King’s attention and love: the opposition of visual (love and commitment through a portrait) versus acoustic (love and commitment through words) again reinforces the forthcoming split between head and heart. Letters from Germany always arrive at the print-shop, and Germany is the very place where the Lutheran protest began. Finally, the print-shop is located beside Cromwell’s palace, separated by a wall which Cromwell has forcibly erected encroaching on the Badges’ garden. Again, the setting up of walls returns the reader to that logic of centre and margins which characterizes the making of the modern state.
As previously suggested, the barriers which Cromwell imposes do in the end affect both inner and outer space, and therefore mirror the new idea of privacy. Lord Cromwell is the Lord Privy Seal, a title that, in itself, well encapsulates this new idea. Opposite to this attitude, Ford depicts Katharine’s sociability and lively entourage, which makes the reader associate her with a communal idea of society. This is a form of society that Cromwell’s politics is slowly destroying, although it seems to be temporarily restored after his death:
In the shadow of the high walls, and some in the moonlight, the serving-men held their parliament … And some said it was marvellous that there they could sit or stand and talk of such things – for a year or so ago all the Court was spies, so that the haymen mistrusted them that forked down the straw, and the meat-servers them with the wine. But now each man could talk as he would, and it made greatly for fellowship when a man could sit against a wall, unbutton in the warm nights, and say what he listed.54
But this is only the final act of a dying order, as Ford suggests through a subtle presentation of the hidden tensions among servants themselves; it is too late to halt a change which has already permeated the social strata.
To show the final accomplishment of this change to his readers, towards the end of his trilogy, Ford returns to the same print-shop, using the same setting to render the way Katharine Howard, the Fifth Queen, is undone by the conspirators of the New Order. Ford shows his readers a new and linear situation where there is no more outstanding opposition but only well-established biases. The younger printer can now dominate all the space: ‘His old father was by that time dead … so that the house-place was clear. And of all old furnishing none remained. There were presses all round the wall, and lockers for men to sit upon.’55 And new men like Lascelles, who acts according to Cromwell’s (or ‘Sieur Machiavelli’s’) logic, firmly seated in the print-shop of John Badge the Younger, will finally defeat Katharine and the Old Order she stands for.
Marshall McLuhan wrote that in the process leading from orality to literacy, ‘the rich interplay of all the senses that characterised the tribal society is sacrificed.’56 Similarly, Katharine, who stands for the Old Order, must be defeated and sacrificed. She understands the inevitability of what comes through change, and Ford conveys all her understanding in a last, dramatic monologue which can be taken as the testament of a dying age:
And so, now I am cast for death, and I’m very glad of it. For, if I had not so ensured and made it fated, I might later have wavered … I came to you [the King] for that you might give this realm again to God. Now I see you will not – for not ever will you do it if it must abate you a jot of your sovereignty, and you never will do it without that abatement. So it is in vain that I have sinned … for this world is no place for me who am mazed by too much reading in old books … So now I go!57
Katharine is brought to death, and, with her, both the Old Order and the Old Learning die too. The new individualistic society is finally born, and the Middle Ages give way to modernity, something which will completely reconfigure man’s outer and inner space. The Western World will soon move towards what William Blake defined as ‘the single vision and Newton’s sleep,’ a new reality whose effects various men of letters, and various conscious craftsmen and artists, tried to probe and counterbalance through their works. As McLuhan understood, Ford’s chat ‘is a series of epiphanies of carefully considered social and literary structures and their inter-penetration,’ because ‘it’s always been the artist who perceived the alteration in man caused by a new medium.’58 In the rear-view mirror offered by Ford’s The Fifth Queen, we can learn something about the complex implications pertaining to the newly fermenting Gutenberg Age, and better understand the real ground upon which a new technology finally becomes set.
See? Literature matters! It is a function inseparable from communal existence: it makes us see, hear, and feel. It keeps us awake. Now, go and get a copy of Ford’s The Fifth Queen. Read it, then think: ‘Does the interiorization of media such as “letters” alter the ratio among our senses and change mental processes?’59