[Mb-civic] McLuhan, Frye and the falling towers tributes for both ....

[Harold Sifton]

McLuhan, Frye and the falling towersTributes for both men continue to pop up
Why both men, so often disdained by academics, 

still resonate in a post-9/11 world
Apr. 30, 2006. 01:00 AM
PHILIP MARCHAND
TORONTO STAR


Decades after their death, Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye still haunt academia, despite every attempt to exorcize them. 

These two University of Toronto English professors were regarded with skepticism by their colleagues even at the height of their fame in the 1960s. McLuhan, the student of communications who coined phrases such as "the global village" and "the medium is the message," was often considered to be a bit of a clown, with his disregard for scholarly norms and his fondness for puns, jokes and outrageous one-liners. 

Frye, on the other hand, was almost too academic. He turned his encyclopedic knowledge of literature, including the Bible, into a system of thought that fellow English professors nervously regarded as an imposing cathedral of the mind. They weren't sure they wanted to spend time amid the incense and the organ music. 

Slowly but surely, McLuhan's star is rising. He's still not very respectable academically, but those wanting to understand the new technologies, from the iPod to the Internet, are going back to read what the master had to say about television and computers and the process of technological change in general. 

Frye also continues to influence writers and critics, but he is a distinct minority taste in an age when literary studies are heavily influenced by radical politics and the philosophy of deconstruction — twin wrecking balls sworn to destroy any literary cathedral in sight. 

Acting on one of the most unusual invitations I've ever received, I was recently a judge in a debate held by the students of B.W. Powe's class in McLuhan and Frye at York University. It was a McLuhan versus Frye smackdown. 

In life, both men were indeed rivals. It wasn't just a case of professional jealousy, although there was a bit of that. 

Each thought the other was on the wrong track. Frye had no use for McLuhan's tendency to view media and technology as art forms. 

McLuhan, on the other hand, thought Frye was using literature as a religious quest, a bridge to a timeless, visionary realm, opposed to reality as we ordinarily experience it. 

This was, in fact, true, and McLuhan, a serious Catholic, wasn't happy about it. 

I thought it was a brave idea for Powe, a novelist and critic who has written brilliantly about both Frye and McLuhan in his books A Climate Charged and The Solitary Outlaw, to stage such a debate. For one thing, both Frye and McLuhan are, to say the least, challenging. I wish I understood Frye better than I do. But the class of undergraduates, evenly divided into McLuhanites and Frygians for the event, rose to the occasion. 

What to make of 9/11, for example? The McLuhan adherents viewed the attacks on the World Trade Center as attacks on an image, a contemporary form of warfare. (McLuhan once predicted — years before Reagan — that the image of a politician would be far more powerful than the politician himself.) 

For the Frye adherents, on the other hand, the burning skyscrapers were properly understood as an embodiment of a literary archetype, a recurrence of the Tower of Babel in the Old Testament, or Saruman's tower in The Lord of the Rings, or the "Falling towers" in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. As one student referred to the event, "It did take place, but it is also the kind of thing that always takes place." 

"Frye wants us to find the mythical meaning" of events, the pro-Frye students maintained, by way of "accessing to a spiritual realm." In this realm, metaphors such as the archetype of the falling tower are more real than the World Trade Center. 

The pro-McLuhan students, on the other hand, emphasized the "tools of investigation," such as the creation of artistic anti-environments, satire, and so on, that McLuhan handed on. "Frye leads us, and McLuhan trains us," one of them said, which was a good summary. 

At the end of the debate, I disappointed everybody by not pronouncing a winner. But both sides were equally serious, well prepared, articulate and understanding of their subject. It was wonderful to see. 

The irony is that both Frye and McLuhan are still regarded with deep suspicion by many of the faculty of York. The same is true in English and Communication Studies departments across North America. The voice of the two Canadian prophets must struggle to be heard. 

But they are being heard. Tributes to the career of both Frye and McLuhan keep popping up. Last week, the Northrop Frye International Literary Festival was held in Frye's home town of Moncton, N.B. Panel discussions ("Is there a future for poetry?"), readings, writing workshops and even a play entitled Northrop Frye High were presented in such venues as the Moncton city hall and the Moncton public library. 

As for McLuhan, Gingko Press, a California-based publisher that has re-issued many of McLuhan's works, has just published his 1943 Cambridge University doctoral dissertation. 

The title of the thesis, "The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time," sounds suitably academic and specialized. Nashe was an Elizabethan poet, playwright and pamphleteer, read today only by students of the period. Yet McLuhan's interest in Nashe led to his discovery of the classical trivium — the ancient educational program consisting of grammar, rhetoric and dialectic. 

Researching the history of this trivium, McLuhan realized that the entire cultural history of the West could be understood as the struggle between the three sciences for supremacy. Those trained in dialectic (logic), for example, have little use for those influenced by rhetoric, the science of eloquence. The fact that literary departments are now dominated by dialecticians, who go by the name of literary theorists, explains why so much critical prose now is deliberately unfriendly to readers. 

McLuhan's dissertation was his first great work, the key to the understanding of his subsequent career. Gingko Press, which has published the book in a handsome edition under the title of The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time, edited by McLuhan scholar W. Terrence Gordon, deserves a good deal of praise for making the work generally available for the first time
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