McLuhan and Frye

B.W. Powe’s Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye is a sassy book about two of Canada’s greatest intellectuals, McLuhan the orator and rhetorician and popular guru, Frye the media-shy theorist of literary archetypes. Powe deals with their relationship as colleagues at the University of Toronto, as well as describing their direct and indirect disagreements. 

A couple of quotations capture the flavor of their interaction. After quoting Frye’s definition of archetype, McLuhan accuses him of indulging in “textbook cliche,” since Frye “is insisting that the archetypal experience is a pleasing form of somnambulism” (121). Frye’s theory, he write elsewhere, is “most un-Jungian in suggesting that archetypes are human artifacts produced by much repetition – in other words, a form of cliche.” This poses the problem of “whether Oedipus Rex or Tom Jones would have the same effect on an audience in the South Sea Islands as in Toronto” (123).

Frye thought McLuhan’s attention to the medium rather than message was misguided: “The McLuhan cult, or more accurately the McLuhan rumour, is the latest of the illusions of progress: it tells us that a number of new media are about to bring in a new form of civilization all by themselves, merely by existing. Because of this we should not, staring at a television set, wonder if we are wasting our time and develop guilt feelings accordingly; we should feel that we are evolving a new mode of apprehension. What is important about the television set is not the quality of what it exudes, which is only content, but the fact that it is there.” He charged that McLuhan laid himself open to such a characterization by casting his insights “into a deterministic form.” Determinism might offer plausible explanations but it is ultimately an “oversimplified form of rhetoric” (131).

Powe finds common themes too, particularly in the twin themes of his subtitle – apocalypse and alchemy. Both, further, “converge in their desire to articulate potent harmonies of meaning,” which both find through application of “the four levels of exegesis,” the old medieval quadriga (28-29). McLuhan employed the fourfold in his PhD dissertation on the trivium, and they come in Frye’s major critical work, Anatomy of Criticism and The Great Code. For both, they are tied in with apocalypse: “The four levels of re-creative meaning and textual extension are a form of natural visionary experience which can be applied in any situation. . . . Apocalyptic action becomes an act of concentrated will, energy, intuition, and imagination together” (29).