he’s one giant step closer to keeping the vow he made.
Undaunted by what others think of his not-so-proper credentials, already well-practised in the art of dismissing those who ridicule him as proof of nothing but their own ridiculosities, McLuhan tears into his studies with all the ferocity of a wanderer in the desert dying of starvation and thirst suddenly realizing the oasis into which he’s stumbled is anything but a mirage.
It most certainly is not a mirage. Nor are McLuhan’s years at Cambridge a disappointment. Anything but. The experience opens his eyes, ears, and mind to near-limitless possibilities, confirming for him his feeling that, if he is indeed going to make his mark on this rapidly changing world, there is no better way to go about doing so than by immersing himself in the stimulating intellectual culture so abundantly available in this refuge from the wild and crazy world beyond its borders. Look no further than the fact that Elsie has left Herbert, has taken Red to go off and make her way in Toronto’s theatre world and – almost unbelievably the pair’s now living in a roominghouse on Selby Street, in the very heart of Cabbagetown, in the city’s working-class neighbourhood. Go figure, eh?
Happily, at Cambridge, McLuhan flourishes. The world-renowned university is credited with reinventing and revitalizing literary criticism through its pioneering efforts to bring it into the twentieth century (from the morass of the nineteenth century’s high romanticism and peculiar standards). Lionel Elvin, McLuhan’s tutor, comments that when the twenty-three-year-old consults with him, he finds him willing, open, amiable, intense, and earnest; he’s not, however, earnest in any plodding nor sycophantic sense of that word; in fact, he still has a playful light in his eye; and, of necessity, he still continues to hold himself and his ideas in healthy esteem.
Naturally, McLuhan begins to take his health more seriously; in order to achieve his goals at Cambridge, he’d logically reasoned, he’ll need to stay in tip-top mental and physical shape; thus, when he learns the Trinity Hall boat club’s training new crewmen, he goes along to the trials and secures a place as oarsman with one of the crews.
McLuhan considers it an honour to wear his team’s heavy white Trinity Hall sweater; and, when he bulks up to 151 pounds or 68 kg, he notes with satisfaction his training diet – lots of fish and meat (preferably mutton or beef steak), veggies, eggs, toast, and fruit, all topped off with a pint of beer – is working its magic.
During his second year, McLuhan relocates to rooms at Trinity Hall; once settled, he surveys his pleasing domain and thinks, How lovely this all is, how fortunate I am. Truly, this is happiness. My love of life has never been greater. And, although the rower’s team is never the fastest, it does sufficiently well in one race – placing fifth – that its members are rewarded with the oars they’d only been allowed to borrow until that achievement. It means a great deal to McLuhan, evidenced in the fact his Cambridge oar is always given pride of place in every office he occupies throughout his life.
In 1910, Cambridge had created the King Edward VII Professorship of English Literature, a position towards which the greatest literary theorists of the new century had naturally gravitated; thus, fortuitously, McLuhan’s greatest mentors, the ones who most affected his own course in life – not to mention his approaches to literature, culture, technology, and theory – are, among others, Professors I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis, now universally recognized as two of the granddaddies of what came to be called the New Criticism.
Extremely influential as a school of formal investigation into literature, New Criticism’s principles rest upon the belief the author of a given work is not as important as that authors creation. The creation exists independent of the author who created it; it exists for its own sake; and, it contains its own logic and justification which have nothing to do with its creator’s life, intent, history, or biography. A New Critic doesn’t snoop into the details of the private life of the author, in other words, a New Critic examines the author’s creation and aids readers in their appreciation of the work’s form, technique, and effects (based upon the belief that all worthy and valuable Western literature is part of a great tradition rooted in ancient Greece). New Criticism emphasizes formal considerations alongside techniques that achieve their desired effects upon readers. Context and relationship within a given work of art are as important as form and content; additionally, the New Critic endorses this tradition of excellence, the so-called Western Canon, and points out ways a given work of art supports and reinforces the valuable in literature (worthy of study for edification or enlightenment) based upon the principles clearly on display in the great works of the Western Canon.
New Criticism provides the key and unlocks the door to McLuhan’s imagination, flooding his parched mind with everything he knows he intuitively believes before he hears it from the mouths (and reads it in the works) of his greatest teachers. Their lectures – as well as their ground-breaking investigations and publications in the interconnected fields of the philosophies of rhetoric, literature, culture, and technology – profoundly shape McLuhan’s lifelong scholastic attitudes, writerly approaches to style, and deeply held technocultural convictions.
Of these, none influences McLuhan more than Practical Criticism, a book in which Richards “exposes” the inadequacy of the Academy’s outmoded approaches to “studying” literature in the twentieth century or Culture and Environment, perhaps the single most important Leavis volume McLuhan reads and certainly, as time reveals, the work most responsible for one of the young disciple’s important breakthroughs. He discovers the ways in which the tools and analytic methods of the literary critic might bear fruit in other areas of investigation in the social sphere, in such unlikely stuff as advertisements, magazines, pamphlets, radio, newspapers, and the cinema.
The intermingling and wide-reaching approach Leavis recommends, a kind of cooperation between the worlds of science and literature, galvanizes McLuhan. Here, in all its glorious precision and exquisite simplicity, is the basis, the scaffolding, and the confirmation for the volume McLuhan dreams of writing, the one he’d imagined back on Gertrude Avenue, the Great Book that would reveal and illuminate the set of immutable laws of creation he’s more and more convinced exist.
Thus, when Leavis suggests, in Culture and Environment, that the principles and practices of the New Criticism’s emphasis on technical and formal investigation might similarly be employed when training in awareness of the social environment is required, McLuhan wholeheartedly embraces the notion, completely understanding its implications in terms of studying the forms, techniques, ways, means, and methods of the modern world (most easily observed in the new electric-electronic media increasingly making their presence felt in all areas of life).
Richards had similarly concerned himself with practicalities when he had conducted several literary experiments during his years as a professor. In the ones he describes at greatest length in Practical Criticism, he explains he presented numerous series of unsigned poems by unidentified authors to his students so they might critique them to assess their value and various merits. Richards had included both brilliant poems written by the art’s greatest practitioners as well as banal poems penned by nobodies.
The students reviled the established writers’ works and, far too frequently, waxed poetic on the virtues of the no-count entries. According to Richards, such gross misreadings demonstrated that an entirely new approach to literature was required. It was no longer enough, in the present world, to read, memorize, and regurgitate the received wisdom on the vague truth and beauty of what makes a poem (and poet) great. High-minded ideals and grand themes are well and good; but, the best way to approach a poem is through each of its words in relation to every other word
