F.
“Henry James’ style was transformed in the 90’s by his new habit of dictation. The alchemy of the media between themselves and upon their audiences is a totally unexplored subject. But why should it be doubted that radio and TV will transform prose and verse styles? Or how could anybody, in view of the history of such transformations, wish that they would cease to affect language and expression? The difference between the artist and the organization man in these matters would seem to be that the artist senses at once the creative possibilities in new media even when they are alien to his own medium, whereas the bureaucrat of arts and letters moans and bristles whenever his museum of exhibits is threatened by invasion or desertion. The artist is the historian of the future because he uses the unnoticed possibilities of the present.
G.
“Wyndham Lewis is perhaps the first creative writer to have taken over the new media EN BLOC as modes of artistic and social control. (Joyce and Eliot have done so on a smaller scale.) In APES OF GOD, Pierpont’s ‘broadcasting’ is central to the esthetic effect of that work. In THE CHILDERMASS, movie dissolve and montage are the very mode of presentation of scene and character. The effect of daily technological and social change in society at large is encoded in the Marx-brother sequences between the characters Pullman and Satters:…”
H.
“… The high point of THE CHILDERMASS occurs when the Bailiff assumes the costume of a Limerick playboy and canters and steins his way through several pages of mock Finneganese. These antics he refers to as his own press lord operations: ‘… having explained to you the principle of my prattle, I hope you understood it. Nexpleece!’
I.
“In MONSTRE GAI and MALIGN FIESTA, which make up THE HUMAN AGE, the Bailiff resumes his protean Press Lord role, but in the loftier and more austere dimensions of Third City he appears as a shabby public relations gent. He’s a WASHINGTON CONFIDENTIAL sort. Lewis now refers to the Magnetic City as ’Third City’ and makes it explicit that this particular level of the Dantesque comedy is the BBC’s Third Program:
‘All are vegetarians, perforce. There is no meat to be had. But unless you are inveterately carnivorous, you will soon forget that…. No, there is no meat, no women, no alcohol, no telephones…. There is a good deal of homosexuality. And, as I have said, the air is like champagne! You are in a degenerate, chaotic outpost of Heaven. The ostensible ruler, the Padishah, is a supernatural being of great charm, but devoid of the slightest trace of gumption…. There is no man in the city who has been here beyond the Tudors…. The entire show is one great farce. It is far sillier even than life on earth – for at least that was centred upon the mechanical purpose of perpetuating the species. Someone or something seemed crazily set upon that happening. There is no ENTETEMENT of that kind here. Provided with money by the State, they exist in suspended animation, sexless, vegetarian, and dry, permanently about forty-six. If you can see any sense in it, I can’t.’
J.
“It is, however, after leaving Third City for Matapolis that Lewis provides his most subtle and extensive correlations between Hell and the technology of our new media. With the help of modern scientific medicine he (Lewis-ed.) re-edits and refurnishes the various levels of Dante’s Inferno in a startling way. The Devils appear as film stars perturbed by the ease with which their supernatural dimensions are mimicked by modern publicity devices. It’s this power of the new media which fosters a new humanist movement in Hell. The Devil, Pullman sees as:
‘Now arranging for the contamination of the angel nature – for the destruction of something which had endured since the beginning of time. He was going to mix it up with the pettiness and corruption of mankind. He had built for it, in Angeltown, a sort of comic Hollywood. Now he was forcing upon it woman – with all her sexishness, her nursery-mind, her vulgarity.’”
– Marshall McLuhan, “Third Program in the Human Age”, VERBI-VOCO-VISUAL EXPLORATIONS, 1967 (first published in 1957, EXPLORATIONS: STUDIES IN CULTURE AND COMMUNICATIONS, Number 8, October, 1957), Part Two, pp.16-8
8.
LEFT WINGS OVER EUROPE: or, How to Make a War About Nothing, 1936
“But, you will say, these men are actuated by motives as far apart as the poles; in spite of the fact that they arrive, in this particular matter, at an identical conclusion. One goes pacifist to make the world safe for imperialist war; another IS pacifist; and yet a third is pacifist for the occasion, at the dictate of party-strategy. That, of course is true. Nevertheless, there is something else at work, effecting this startling separation into camps, of ill-assorted partisans. There is more significance in this alignment than is accounted for by the factors suggested above. And there are other issues upon which much the same agreement would be found to subsist, among men wearing contradictory labels.
“We think of the world as POLITICALLY divided, more to-day even than formerly that is our way of dividing it. The political world is ostensibly divided into various parties. But human society is far more fundamentally divided into those who are political animals and those who are NOT political animals: into party-men and non-party-men. That is a far more fundamental division. The world is not all ‘party’. It is, rather, composed of one type which is purely party-man, and of another type which possesses something that is non-partisan. The latter may be a party-man, too. But he is a person AS WELL. That is the difference.
“If you MUST choose a party for me – and I have no objection if that will make you more comfortable – please bear in mind this still more fundamental division, to which I have drawn your attention above.”, pp.20-1
“At present the whole world is about to split, and, I am afraid, to contend, for a very long time, upon a very great issue indeed. It is a far greater issue than that of party. This is obscurely recognized by the generality; the ‘march of progress’, the immense development of the technique of science, the breakdown of the present ‘capitalist’ system (for plainly half the world cannot remain out-of-work FOR EVER) – everything seems to indicate some great turning-point in life upon this planet.
“The real nature of the issue is very little understood. It goes under a variety of confusing names. But it has to do, perhaps first and foremost, with two capital conceptions of man and his destiny.
“The sort of society for which one set of men are heading, whether they know it or not, is a mechanical, standardized society of robots conveniently mesmerized by slogans – worn down, all over the earth, into a monotonous consistency, until we are all as like as two peas. And the sort of society for which another set of men are heading is the opposite – one in which there is diversity and individual initiative. The former is the outcome of an almost mad predilection for the abstract and the theoretic. The latter is the outcome of a sane and rational appetite for the concrete and the real.
“Now the word coined by Mr. Litvinov (a man typically endowed with the abstract mentality of his race), a word which has had a great vogue, namely INDIVISIBILITY, is the master-key to all this complex situation. ‘Peace is indivisible’, says that gentleman: and war, of course, the same. And of course, if it comes to that, everything else would be INDIVISIBLE, too. All that would remain to be decided is WHO SHOULD CONTROL this ONE AND INDIVISIBLE human society – raceless, classless, nationless, and even individual-less.
“If you will pursue that word ‘indivisibility’, wherever it may lead you: if you weigh all its implications, if you consider what, in practice, it must ultimately mean, in the shaping of human society, you have the clue to the present situation in the world.”, pp.21-23
“In consequence, this enthusiastic and strong-minded extremist would forcibly rescue it, and put it upon the right road – the road that it SHOULD, according to him, have taken (when, confused, probably by the new complexities of the industrial revolution, it mistook its route).
“He would not, for his part, smash up the White tradition as would the men of the militant ‘left’. He regards that tradition as being upon an altogether higher plane than the primitivism of the ‘brave new world’ of the Soviets, whose saurian spinal cord is the MATERIALIST DIALECTIC of Marx. He would reincarnate the dynamic impulses of individual initiative and adventure, deriving from a higher center than the impersonal automatisms of reptile life, exemplified by that retrograde ‘dialectic’ – impulses which were productive of all the great arts and sciences of the West, but which have been watered down, or suppressed, in the quantitative levelment of the mechanical age; and which have been betrayed by the professional politicians of the western parliamentary democracies.
“These politicians, as he sees the matter, stand for the great capitalist interests – which interests, instinctively, or deliberately, seek, hand in hand with the Soviets, to TRUSTIFY all human society.”, pp.35-6
“The whole-hogging adherence of the British Government to the COLLECTIVIST ideology of Geneva means that the British Empire, as it appears upon the world-map to-day, is already a thing of the past. Potentially, it has passed into the COLLECTIVIST melting-pot of world-planning or corporate internationalism. (For, be it observed, no corporate state would be so corporative, nor any totalitarian state so thoroughly totalitarian, as the super-state envisaged at Geneva – a United States of the World, in short, controlled by a highly centralized internationalist executive.”, p.57
“One might almost suppose that the law of DIVIDE AND RULE is already at work, with us – in preparation for the COLLECTIVIST world-rule that is being hatched at Geneva.
“But, as we decentralize, and fall apart into independent fragments; and as we abandon our ’sovereign’ rights to the new ‘reign of law’, projected by the powerful internationalist caucus at Geneva, we observe, with mixed feelings, OTHER states doing, as I have said, the opposite. At this we grow very angry indeed, and our ministers and plenipotentiaries never cease to admonish and threaten those contrairy states: or, alternatively, they implore them to reconsider this wicked INDIVIDUALIST behaviour, and to come inside the COLLECTIVIST fold and cease to be so obstinately ’sovereign’. A rather farcical, but extremely dangerous, situation, you must, I think, agree!”, pp.58-9
“The Press, indeed, IS democracy, as we know it to-day, one might almost assert. And, of course, when democracy ceases to be the accepted political system in a modern state, it is the constitution of the newspaper press, more than anything else, that suffers a change….
“… Whereas, in a democracy, ’Scarcely any of those who read what the paper tells them know who has written what they read, or what sources of information he possesses, or what intellectual weight. The voice seems to issue from a sort of superman, and has a hypnotic power of compelling assent.’ (Ed. – Lord Bryce quoted on p.96)
“There you have the essence of the matter. The power of a visible ’superman’ – the modern ‘dictator’ – is as nothing to the power of this INVISIBLE superman.
“And such is the magic of this verbal hypnosis, what is more, that the reader ultimately comes to believe that he is himself responsible for all these opinions he finds domiciled in his consciousness. – This is what we term PUBLIC OPINION. And we are – in a democracy – very proud of this indeed. ‘Public opinion’ is a thing to which we attach a superstitious value….
“… So the hypnotized automaton of democracy, THROUGH NOT KNOWING THAT HE IS NOT FREE, is, if anything, in greater danger than the plain servant of the state (SERVANT – not ‘gentleman-help’ and co-partner, or any democratic make-believe of that sort). And he is in a less dignified position for he is a perpetual dupe, enslaved by WORDS. ‘We rule people by words!’ When he said that, Disraeli was describing a typical democracy.”, pp.96-8
“Because ‘democracy’ is, here and there, still a reality; and because ’the freedom of the Press’ is still, even to-day, more than a mere parrot-cry to delude the ignorant voter; nevertheless the tendency on all hands is to close the ranks, and to achieve a uniform surface of mechanical unanimity, which, ultimately, is in no way different from the unanimity of the ‘controlled’ Press of a communist or fascist state.”, p.102
“So it would be quite useless for our fellow-democrats – those who govern for us and in our name – to address us as follows: ‘You are passing over into a new epoch – indeed you are already there! The world has become a small place. It is absurd of you… if you only knew it… to go on thinking of yourself as “an Englishman”. Indeed, to go on thinking of yourself as “a White Man” is completely out of date, as also very arrogant and unchristian. We are all brothers! After all, Christ said so. And now we are all going to BE so, at long last! Hallelujah! In the future no distinction will be drawn between you and the coolie. This difference in standard of life between you and the African or Asiatic is all wrong. We shall all be coolies together! And though as a mere human being I might be disposed… I admit it!… to see you got the best cut off the joint, merely because you came from “the old country” and spoke the same language as myself; yet, AS A STATESMAN, I have to banish all those feelings, you do understand that? As a true member of the world-brotherhood at Geneva, I have to say to myself that you are of no more consequence, and no less, than an Andaman Islander. And as to the British Empire being BRITISH… well, we are not living in the days of Wolfe or Clive! There are the Germans, for instance, beginning to ask to have their colonies returned to them. THEIR colonies! How about the Blacks who inhabit the place, to whom we used in the old days to refer to as “natives”? Because the Germans seized portions of Africa before the War, that does not mean that those lands BELONG to them, any more than our colonies belong to us. Why shouldn’t the Basuto colonize Westphalia for a change! Between ourselves, I wish he would!’
“It is along these lines, I take it, that our leading parliamentarians are thinking to-day. I am quite sure that they believe that they are ‘acting for the best’. By way of their religious training – and through all that liberal sentiment they inherit from the early nineteenth century – they have been insensibly led into these theoretic regions….”, pp.143-5
“Then the new role of the Press. A Press barrage in 1936 is a very different thing to what it was at the time, say, of the Balkan Wars. Political publicity changes as rapidly as the technique of aviation. And this publicity factor has transformed diplomacy. In place of its dear old traditional ‘inscrutable’ face, we have now a sort of frightful mask, compounded of crooked homeliness, of equivocal ‘openness’, and of sanctimonious exhibitionism. Oh, for the good old days of Mr. Maugham’s ‘impenetrable’, aristocratic, wooden, ambassadors – monocled, polyglot, and aloof!
“Well, MURDER MUST ADVERTISE! So must diplomacy, it seems, or so diplomacy has come to think. And very extraordinary are some of the results.”, p.152
“The simplification that I offer here of a complex political situation is of a bold and unusual pattern. But not too bold, I think: whereas nothing could be too UNUSUAL to meet the case. For the educated public to be in possession of ‘a key’, a simplification, of some sort, is highly desirable. So far they have been without one, except for what they have been told by the Press, from day to day, and from week to week. And the Press, whatever other functions it may perform, does not SIMPLIFY.”, p.156
“This is a social revolution, rather than a war. Ultimately that is what it will look like to the historian. Even to-day it looks like that to the politicians of the ‘left’. The common front in France and the socialists in England regard it as the beginning of a world revolution.”, p.164
“But freedom, in that strenuous, disciplined, understanding of the word indicated above, is not merely a passive affair. It is not even exemplified in the violent resistance of the French Democracy to imposition and interference. It is an active thing. It does not want to be interfered with. It even imposes upon itself, at times, iron restrictions. A truly democratic state might even GO DRY. But it would go dry with its eyes open. It would not be TRICKED into teetotalism, like the American people, or be fooled into it by the gradual erecting of an artificial outcropping of snags and obstacles, such as the prohibitive price established for whiskey, or the progressive diminishing of the number of licences granted.
“As in any democracy grown tyrannous and arbitrary, the SAFETY VALVE has been worked overtime in England since the Armistice: the policy of keeping social life upon a modified war-footing was ably abetted by a lot of blowing off steam – in grumbling, and critical, observations in the Press. Just as the gigantic post-war taxation was successfully put over by FLATTERY – by telling the British public that it was a particularly stout fellow of a public, who could ’stand up to taxation’ (whereas the gutless Frenchman COULD NOT ‘stand up to taxation’) so the programme of drastic curtailment of liberty was put over by appeals to ‘the Englishman’s sense of humour’.
“Whenever anyone refers in a flattering and insinuating manner to his ‘sense of humour’, the Englishman should immediately, without further parley, knock him down.
“Now one of the most usual grumbles heard in the Press was that ‘Lord-lumme – talk about VERBOTEN! Talk about PRUSSIANISM! Having beaten the Boche in war, aren’t we now imitating all the worst vices of Prussian state-interference?
“But, really, there is, first and last, a great deal of misunderstanding about being free! And since we are being asked, because we are so free, to go and do battle with other nations until they agree to be as free as we are, I am tempted to turn to the modern Prussian, and try to dispel ONE illusion, at least, which may save us all from a world-war. I am tempted (‘greatly daring’) to point out how absurdly DEMOCRATIC the fellow is! Whether we like him or not, in the matter of that disciplined, strenuous, freedom I have been talking about, he takes a bit of beating. I am not expressing any opinion as to what is going on in Germany at present (to express a favourable opinion would be more than my place was worth: to express an unfavourable opinion would appear to be soliciting popularity, by too easy and well-worn a high-road); but it is an undeniable fact that DEMOCRACY is being practised in Germany at present, with surprising success.
“It was a purely parliamentary democracy that voted in – as nearly by democratic vote as it is humanly possible to get – and has periodically confirmed in power, the great patriot who is now the ‘Dictator’ of the German Democracy.”, pp.296-8
