Overview
“Joyce, Aquinas and the Poetic Process” is a work of literary criticism by Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980), the Canadian scholar best known in later life as a theorist of media and communication. Before McLuhan became a public figure associated with phrases such as “the medium is the message” and “the global village,” he was a professionally trained literary critic and English professor, and much of his early and mid-career writing consisted of close, learned essays on poetry, rhetoric, and the modern literary tradition. This piece belongs to that side of his output: it treats the aesthetic theory that the modernist writer James Joyce drew from the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, and it uses that theory to illuminate how a poem or literary artwork does its work upon the reader.
The pairing announced in the title is characteristic of McLuhan’s intellectual habits. Two of his most enduring lifelong preoccupations were the scholastic and rhetorical inheritance of the Middle Ages, and the achievement of James Joyce, whom he regarded as the supreme modern artist. Bringing Aquinas and Joyce together in the context of “the poetic process” is therefore not an eccentric juxtaposition but a distillation of concerns that run through McLuhan’s whole career.
McLuhan’s intellectual context
Marshall McLuhan trained in English literature at the University of Manitoba and then at Cambridge, where he was exposed to the practical criticism and close-reading methods associated with figures such as I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis, and to the broader currents of literary modernism. His doctoral work concerned the classical trivium—the medieval arts of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic—and the place of these arts in Renaissance letters. This grounding in the verbal arts of antiquity and the Middle Ages shaped everything he later wrote, including his media theory, which he consistently understood as an extension of the study of language, rhetoric, and perception rather than as a departure from it.
Equally important is McLuhan’s Catholicism. He converted to the Roman Catholic Church in the late 1930s, and his conversion was bound up with his reading of scholastic philosophy and of Catholic literary and intellectual figures. For a convert of McLuhan’s cast of mind, Thomas Aquinas was not merely a historical author but a living authority on the nature of being, cognition, and beauty. Thomistic aesthetics—the idea that beauty involves qualities the Latin tradition named integritas, consonantia, and claritas (commonly rendered wholeness or integrity, proportion or harmony, and radiance or clarity)—provided McLuhan with a philosophical vocabulary for talking about art that he could set against, and combine with, the modern critical methods he had absorbed at Cambridge.
Joyce occupied a special position at the meeting point of these interests. Joyce had been educated by the Jesuits and was steeped in scholastic categories, which he adapted, transformed, and turned to secular artistic ends. In Joyce’s fiction, the young artist figure articulates an aesthetic theory explicitly derived from Aquinas, translating the scholastic account of beauty into a program for modern art. For McLuhan, who admired Joyce above nearly all other moderns and who returned to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake throughout his life, Joyce was thus the ideal case study in how the medieval verbal and philosophical inheritance could be carried forward into the twentieth century.
Subject and argument
The central subject of “Joyce, Aquinas and the Poetic Process” is the relationship between Thomistic ideas about beauty and cognition and the actual working of the poetic or literary artwork. McLuhan’s characteristic concern is not with abstract definitions of beauty in isolation, but with process—with what happens in the act of perception and apprehension when a work of art is encountered. The Joycean notion of the epiphany, the sudden showing-forth of the “whatness” or essence of a thing, and the Thomistic account of how the mind grasps the form and radiance of an object, give McLuhan a way of describing the moment in which an artwork discloses itself to the mind.
This emphasis is entirely typical of McLuhan. Throughout his criticism he was less interested in the content or “meaning” of a work considered as a message to be decoded than in the way a work is structured so as to act upon and reorganize the perceptions of the audience. The Aquinas–Joyce line of thought, with its attention to apprehension, radiance, and the grasping of form, gave him a philosophically respectable pedigree for the view that art operates by shaping the process of perception. In this sense the essay looks forward to the later McLuhan, who would famously analyze media and technologies as extensions of the human sensorium that reorganize the ratio of the senses. The interest in the “poetic process”—in how a work acts rather than merely what it says—is continuous with his mature preoccupation with effects rather than contents.
Place in McLuhan’s body of work
This piece belongs to McLuhan’s substantial body of literary-critical writing, which is sometimes overshadowed by his later fame as a media theorist but which formed the foundation of everything he did. Across these writings he ranged over the metaphysical poets, the Symbolist tradition, nineteenth-century poetry, the rhetorical tradition, and the great modernists—Eliot, Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and above all Joyce. His engagement with Joyce was lifelong and profound; Joyce’s language, his encyclopedic play with the whole heritage of Western culture, and his treatment of the word as a sensory and cognitive event were central to McLuhan’s own thinking, and Joyce is a recurring presence even in McLuhan’s media books.
Reading Joyce through Aquinas, and Aquinas through Joyce, McLuhan exemplifies the way he refused to keep medieval and modern, sacred and secular, philosophical and artistic categories in separate compartments. The willingness to move fluidly between scholastic philosophy and avant-garde literature, and to treat the ancient arts of language as directly relevant to contemporary art and perception, is one of the most distinctive features of his mind. For readers interested in the intellectual roots of McLuhan’s later work, writings such as this one are valuable because they show the literary, rhetorical, and theological sources from which his ideas about perception, media, and form ultimately grew.
Significance
The significance of “Joyce, Aquinas and the Poetic Process” lies chiefly in what it reveals about the formation of McLuhan’s thought and about the continuity between his literary criticism and his media theory. It documents his conviction that questions about art are fundamentally questions about perception and cognition, and it shows how deeply the Catholic and scholastic tradition, especially Aquinas, informed his understanding of how art works upon the mind. As part of the record of one of the twentieth century’s most influential and unconventional thinkers, it belongs to the tradition of Thomistic and modernist aesthetic criticism, and it stands as one instance of the sustained dialogue with Joyce that runs through the whole of McLuhan’s career.
