"Producers and consumers".

McLuhan, H. Marshall

James Joyce by Richard Ellmann. New Yorq[sic]. Oxford University Press. $12.50.

It is quite possible that this is the first book on Joyce since Professor Levin's that will prove seriously misleading to the young Joyce student. Levin's book was small and early. Professor Ellmann's book is large and late. Both books are based on a deep misunderstanding of Joyce with regard to "naturalism" and "symbolism." This very misunderstanding has also been the reason for their ready acceptance by the literary establishment, for it was the occasion of no small rejoicing on the part of the mandarins to hear that all that Joyce was really up to was a continuation of already familiar patterns. Levin reported that Joyce was a naturalist in the French tradition. Ellmann reports that Joyce's symbolist world is only the old quest for self-expression. In the same way Frye in criticism has permitted a reversion to older methods of literary classification while seeming to be involved in a new enterprise. (Frye in effect runs around the new criticism, back to a method allied to the old Germanic philology, avoiding exegesis of verbal effects at all costs.) Levin, by classifying Joyce as "naturalism," was saying that Joyce had merely piled the old novel documentation higher and deeper. The perspectives were larger and the pictorial spaces provided by the enlarged perspectives were filled in with meticulous industry. The fact that neither Flaubert nor Joyce use any perspective at all was lost on Levin. Flaubert like Cezanne had rediscovered the two-dimensional, pre-perspective form. The mass of "naturalistic detail" in Flaubert and Joyce is not arranged in perspective or from any "point of view." It is arranged by juxtapositions of themes to effect ratios among forms. The result is not light on but light through. This is what is meant by "inscape" versus landscape in Hopkins and by "epiphany" in Joyce. It is the technique of a Seurat and Rouault. The audience is not a camera eye as in movie form, but the screen as in television. It was Andre Girard of NBC, long associate of Rouault, who pointed out to me that it was his work with Rouault which enabled him to recognize the novel artistic power of the television medium. Because just as Rouault painted his pictures as if they were glass windows (light through), so the television image is a form of illumination from within. The television image is also a mosaic of luminous points. And like painting since Cezanne it is twodimensional, endowing the retinal impression with tactile values.

The new dimensions of art since Cezanne are lost on Ellmann. He is a man with a point of view. Joyce eludes him. A very notable example of this inability to come to grips with Joyce occurs at the very outset of his large book: "Stephen Dedalus said the family was a net which he would fly past, but James Joyce chose rather to entangle himself and his works in it. It seemed he had flown by the net of his father's family only to catch himself in one of his own." Not to have noticed the new dimension of art, and to have understood that Joyce said that he would fly by means of the nets of family, nationalism and religion--this is indeed to have a point of view, one that flies right past the target. And this point of view includes a resentment toward the boobytraps of modern art and literature. For the nonviewpoint work of art involves the beholder not as consumer but as producer. "My producers," we hear in the Wake, "are they not my consumers?" The conventional literary man is consumer-oriented and dislikes the role of the co-creator. He expects a completed package of speltout message. The profound differences which Ellmann experiences with the art of Joyce not only to impel him to force Joyce's two-dimensional and multi-leveled composition into a three-dimensional perspective of self-expression, they inspire him to present exactly such a person as could be responsible for such an opaque and unpleasant kind of art. Boswell's London Journals, by comparison with this biography ("beogrefright" as the form is called in the Wake) presents a rational, urbane and tolerable human being. Joyce emerges here as detestable and imbecilic. Ellmann's point of view excludes that producer-orientation which enabled Joyce's friends and associates to give only due regard to his personal modes at the same time that they were aware of his productive enterprises. Ellmann does not fail to mention Joyce's activities as a writer. He has gathered new biographical materials and added them to the existing mass of reports. He tracks through Joyce's life chronologically in the literal, naturalistic tradition. That is why his book will be used by the young and by the harried theme and thesis writers. And there is one advantage the young will discover in using this work, namely that Ellmann's naive misconceptions are so accessible and startling that the young readers will have the pleasure of flat disagreement with a senior teacher.

It would also be misleading to conclude this notice without thanks to Ellmann for the item: "'Do you believe in the Scienza Nuova?' asked Kristensen. 'I don't believe in any science,' Joyce answered, 'but my imagination grows when I read Vico as it doesn't when I read Freud or Jung.'" Joyce found Freud and Jung naive and mechanical.

H.M. McLuhan

University of Toronto

"PRODUCERS AND CONSUMERS" (10)

(10) Renascence 13.4 (1961): 217-219.