McLuhan, McKusick, and McGann

In 1964 The Medium is the Massage burst onto the literary scene, catapulting its primary author, Marshall McLuhan, to rock star status (along with a $100,000 per year professorship at Fordham University and a cameo role in Woody A). The last word in the title was supposed to be  m-e-s-s-a-g-e, but the printer mistakenly inserted an a for an e. The error turned out to be a blessing because, among other things, the misspelled word punned mass and age. McLuhan rejoiced in being able to claim that his picture book was intended for the masses through the ages. (His publisher must have thought so too, because they omitted the year of publication.) The theme of the book is that the medium is the m-e-s-s-a-g-e. In other words, over time form is more transformative than content. Thus the invention of the Western phonetic alphabet privileged the linear continuum as the organizing principle of our perceptions, which had a greater long term impact than the content that it communicated. Although this idea is old hat to those of you who were reared on post-structuralism (not me), it was novel (and confusing) to us children of the Age of Aquarius. Today many of the literati trace the antecedent of post-structuralism to McLuhan’s book. But, as I learned this week, there are some who trace its roots 150 years further back, to Coleridge. In the James McKusick (assigned) article, he shows—or tries to show—how the “The Ancient Mariner’s” linguistic form enhances its content. The Jerome McGann (unassigned) article follows the McLuhan paradigm precisely in that he shows how the poem’s structure delivers a radically different message from its ecological theme.

McKusick, who prefers the 1798 version of the poem over its successors, believes that the original “enhances the poem’s ecological themes through its conservation of lexical diversity” ((7). The diversity is represented  by its melding of three linguistic forms: lexicon of traditional ballads, diction of Chaucer and Spenser, and seafaring terminology. Aside from the expressive poetic effects of this archaic language, McKusick sees value in the “discrete historical periods and social strata” (emphasis mine) from which this language is drawn. Supposedly these “polyglossic and diachronic features” give the Mariner an aura of geographic and historical transcendence. But I do not see how this quality “enhances” the poem’s ecological themes. Perhaps if McKusick had provided an example or two of which language belongs to which age, I would have had a clearer idea, but he does not do this. That’s the difficulty of dealing with discrete historical periods; they are hard to locate.

Professor Garrett suggested that I read  the McGann article, “The Meaning of the Ancient Mariner,” in conjunction with my class presentation on the poem. At first I was taken aback by its 37-page length; then, on reading in the first paragraph that McGann intends to explains the “meaning behind the meanings of the “Rime,” I hit the floor. But as it turned out McGann eases the reader into his argument, beginning with an informative critical history of the poem’s text. One of the things he shows is how the successive changes Coleridge made to the poem coincided with the evolvement of religious and philosophical thinking. By 1817, when he added the gloss, Coleridge was committed to a historical view of the Scriptures known as the Higher Critical approach, which viewed these ancient writings as a “living and processive” organism. So determining biblical truth meant not just consuming the written text but also god’s word expressed through commentary, gloss, and the interpretation of theologians at different points in history. Although this approach served to restore authority to the church, it also comported with Romantic aesthetics. Thus Coleridge applied this hermeneutical system not only to the bible but to ecology, history, and literature.

The significance of the 1817 version of the poem resides in its four layers of (fictive) development: the original, raw tale of a mariner; the subsequent ballad narrative; the editorial gloss supposedly added during publication; Coleridge’s hermeneutical theory imprinted on the finished product. Although Coleridge’s readers would have recognized the period difference in the language of the ballad and that of the gloss as spanning from before the Age of Discovery to the 17th or 18th centuries. What’s more, the discerning reader would notice that the factual differences between the gloss and the narrative, which testifies to the documents evolution of time. Of course, contemporary readers may not be privy to the significance of this multifaceted structure, but this only underscores the importance of having informed professors in the classroom. It seems to me that $100,000, in inflation adjusted dollars, is a fair salary.