Fossilized Socialist, Soured Enthusiast

...When critics act like this, one wonders what hit them...

...Perhaps McLuhan has accomplished the greatest paradox of all, creating the possibility of truth by shocking us all with a gigantic system of lies...

...For a religion, even a pseudo-religion, to subsist, a whole world of thought and fact and analysis must be annulled...

...To begin at the lowest level, this is patently wrong since Orwell's terminology is now being used by so many American journalists to describe any antidemocratic, centralizing, aggrandizing effort on the part of our government...

...What makes it abrupt, laconic, is his use of pseudoscientific terminology?late generalization," "structure of feeling," "local example," "elements of the projection," and so on—as cotter pins to hold the argument together...

...Way back in 1960 he read Marshall Mc-Luhan and, he writes, "first began to look at print as a thing in itself...

...And yet I can rehabilitate no actual truth from what I read...

...So as an academic and detailed description of where McLuhan comes from, Miller's book is perfectly usable, but also perfectiy redundant in the light of all the excellent work that has been done by other critics...

...Instead we have this terse little essay, with all of its absurdities heaped upon its head like the ashes of some obscure act of penitence...

...They may be obtuse or off the point, but they are far from facile...

...Miller is a soured enthusiast...

...I start with Williams' style because it is the only thing evident about him...

...The hope for such books is that a vigorous mind will view a familiar important figure in letters in a fresh, revelatory light...

...The difference is that Williams has come to cozy rest, while Orwell continued to struggle...

...He maintains a cautious silence...

...and by this token he excludes himself from the small company of those seriously interested in accomplishing a democratization of the existing social, economic and political systems...

...In projecting an all too recognizable world Orwell confused us about its structures, its ideologies, and the possibilities of resisting it...

...Orwell, in the last period of his life, had thrown off the restraints imposed by his immediate milieu—the intellectual restraints above all—and tried to give imaginative form to his doubts about Socialism, following in the great tradition which holds that a full expression of doubt will eventually result in enlightenment and renewal...

...the rest is a wrecking job that leaves not a single one of McLuhan's categories standing—from "hot" and "cool" to "the medium is the message" and the "tribal village...

...And Williams' analysis wends its crooked way between these two blurred images of its subject, stumbling and groping, albeit with a notable effort at careful enunciation—to shift my metaphor from sight to speech—just like a drunk who must form his words with particular attention...

...Reviewed by Raymond Rosenthal Translator, Tommaso Landolfi's "Cancerqueen and Other Stories" THESE TWO short surveys are part of a series on famous modern writers edited by the well-known English critic, Frank Kermode...

...I consider it necessary, valuable, and, if it were still true of McLuhan, something that could only be said in his favor...

...In doing the job, Miller tracks McLuhan back to his beginnings?Catholic with a pronounced proclivity for an agrarian, aristocratic society set against the vulgar mess of the modern, technologically oriented industrial agglomerates...

...I have quoted all this because it is the only positive statement in the book...

...On the other hand, when confronted by Miller's buoyant acceptance of all of science in all its manifestations, I find myself in the strange position of coming to the rescue of the older, backward, reactionary McLuhan...

...Indeed, these are baubles of prose decoration that can be gained only through the middle-class channels he affects to despise...

...I began to see photographs not just as pictures of the world around but as peculiar objects existing in their own right, often usurping the reality that they supposedly represented...

...In Williams' case the answer is clear...

...The special idioms associated with radio became glaringly apparent...

...He reads Orwell's accounts of the grievous defeats of Socialism—especially in Spain—and rather than try to understand how it might be resurrected, his main concern is to deny that these were defeats and to blame such an interpretation on the intellectual misusers of the Orwellian tradition, as though the acknowledgement of fact were some nasty invention of the cold-war mentality...

...By limiting his inquiry to such early books as The Gutenberg Galaxy and The Mechanical Bride, he has overlooked and neglected the latest McLuhan, who converts at will his den-igratory descriptions into "probes" and assigns private meanings to his terminology in an endless effort to elude his critics and, perhaps, himself...

...Why he chose to tackle George Orwell is the greatest mystery...

...Furthermore, Williams doesn't realize that 1984 is eminently a Socialist book precisely because it deals so drastically with the failures of Socialism...

...Williams sees Orwell in a kind of cockeyed light—a confusing double vision, the way one's eyes refuse to focus after too much alcohol...

...There is also a commercial reason for these books: a large, ever growing, lazy public?mainly in the colleges—that wants to ingest its "famous" authors without too great an expense of the spirit...

...Jonathan Miller's booklet on Mc-Luhan is another matter entirely...

...perhaps his work as a television programmer hasn't sensitized him too much to this particular aspect of all media, including prose...

...It is no longer true that McLuhan opposes technology or that he opts for what Miller regards as a regressive social and political perspective...

...After this display one can see that Williams' Socialism must be coddled, protected from the icy blasts of reality, deprived of the advantages of analysis?in other words, it is a pseudoreligion which is perfectly mirrored in its pseudoscientific style...

...The Oxford Don seems to have stolen a march on the lover of the people...

...Certainly nothing in this book, beyond a few sweeping generalizations supported only by bravado, would seem to warrant his smugness...

...His Socialism crumbles into comforting rhetoric at the merest touch of a concrete historical problem...

...and as someone who has subsequently spent much time trying to devise and shape programs for television I am grateful for the way in which McLuhan has alerted me to the odd properties of the medium itself...

...Raymond Williams is of course the English "revolutionary" populist, yet his style, supposedly an emanation and esthetic equivalent of his world view, is curiously abrupt and peremptory...

...Williams is a fossil of Socialist thought, frozen at the moment—about 1936—when events challenged its verities and demanded a new, truly creative leap from its proponents...

...Williams sees this imaginative effort as divisive and excessively pessimistic...

...everything else is mysterious, at least to me...

...Miller may have become aware of the peculiar qualities of various media but he is strangely impervious to the dangers and monotonies of repetition...

...I became aware of the peculiar idioms associated with using the telephone...

...Orwell, it seems, is half revolutionary populist, like Williams, and half anti-Communist and cold-war apologist, like those intellectuals Williams so heartily contemns...

...That is why a book as grim and pessimistic as 1984 strikes Williams as offering comfort and aid to all those who want to desert the fight for Socialism and support the status quo: "By assigning all modern forms of repression and authoritarian control to a single political tendency [Communism], he not only misrepresented it but cut short the kind of analysis that would recognize these inhuman and destructive forces wherever they appeared, under whatever names and masked by whatever ideology...

...For some strange reason, considering how bright and clever Miller is in general, he does not seem to realize that most of his analysis has been rendered obsolete by his subject's subsequent books and behavior...

...Miller regards as "futile" the criticism of technology by Leavis, Chesterton and a host of others...

...One would imagine, given the political and literary inconsistencies, gaps and contradictions of Williams' position, that he would have fled Orwell like the plague itself...

...but what has he to say about the degradation of Socialist ideals in such countries as the Soviet Union...

...Be it said in advance, and in acknowledgement of Kermode's services, that whatever their shortcomings neither of these books truckles to that lazy public...

...In this respect Williams is very similar to his subject, who, as George Woodcock so intuitively grasped, used his Socialism as a private initiatory test, somewhat like a man willing to immolate himself to penetrate an esoteric mystery...

...When so many scientists and social critics are disturbed and skeptical about the workings of science in our world, where does Miller get his aplomb, his total unconcern with the problem...