The current study attempts to explore the notion of the unpopular in relation to the two writers Wyndham Lewis and Marshall McLuhan. The notion of the unpopular is a defining factor for these two writers. Among the seminal writers and artists, there are those that have had double claim to glory and there are others who were either scorned or overlooked. There are writers who are barely talked about or written about, despite their significant contribution to modern knowledge.
Wyndham Lewis is one of the writers who may be acknowledged as one of the greatest and most talented prose writers and artists. However, Lewis’s passion for Pro-Hitler discourse positioned him as one of the most unpopular writers. There have been times when Lewis’s books have been out of print. However, there has been minor flurry of interest in Wyndham Lewis which balances the generation of neglect. Similarly, another writer who, despite the revelation of many of his theories, he has not received significant recognition which would be Marshall McLuhan Despite the significance of his ideas on the future of the media, the Canadian writer grew out of fame due to what might be described as lack of scientific basis for his propositions.
The Notion of the Unpopular for Wyndham Lewis and Marshall McLuhan
Among the seminal writers and artists, there are those that have had double claim to glory and there are others who were either scorned or overlooked., There are writers who are barely talked about or written about, despite their significant contribution to modern knowledge.
Wyndham Lewis is one of the writers who may be acknowledged as one of the greatest and most talented prose writers and artists. However, Lewis’s passion for Pro-Hitler discourse positioned him as one of the most unpopular writers. There have been times when Lewis’s books have been out of print. However, there has been minor flurry of interest in Wyndham Lewis which balances the generation of neglect. Similarly, another writer who, despite the revelation of many of his theories, he has not received significant recognition which would be Marshall McLuhan Despite the significance of his ideas on the future of the media, the Canadian writer grew out of fame due to what might be described as lack of scientific basis for his propositions.
The current study attempts to explore the notion of the unpopular in relation to these two writers namely, Lewis’s infatuation with Hitler, and people’s perception of McLuhan’s ideas of the future of media. The notion of the unpopular is a defining factor for these two writers.
WYNDHAM LEWIS
Born in 1882 on a boat off shores of Nova Scotia, Wyndham Lewis was raised by an English mother, and an eccentric American military officer. His father was notorious for deserting the family. Wyndham attended Slade and Rugby primary schools both of which forced him to leave. He then moved immensely infatuated with Hitler. He supported Hitler in every way, he wrote books and composed his work of art in favor of Hitler.
The notion of Wyndham supporting Hitler was one of his worst mistakes in his art and writing career; it greatly affected his reputation. He turned into a national hate figure and guaranteed that nobody would ever again perceive him as a thinker. Wyndham’s artistic history, in a pervasive manner, comprises super-sized mistake for a man of immense, noisy, and unbalanced presence. While some writers dropped clangers, Lewis dropped an entire carillon of bells.
Hitler – the book, as we speak, is lying in a case in the heart of the National Portrait Gallery’s spirited little survey of the Lewis’ portraiture. The book has an assortment of pithy swastikas on its cover, re-modeled at sharp. The book is about Hitler being “a man of peace,” and the Zionist scheme to take over the world, but a lot of Lewis’ work of literature comprises of the slavering of a crackpot. It must be reminded here that Lewis admired Hitler well before he came to power yet and has not of course started to plot to take over Europe. In this sense, Hitler falls within the paradigm of the unpopular because he was out of favor in Germany for some time as a political socialist and spent time in prison. Lewis was attracted to that vigorous part of Hitler’s political career when it was irrational and unpredictable to see his ascendancy into power. Lewis’ paintings, however, stand as the only recognizable achievements because his literary eccentrics were incontrovertibly the finest British portraitist of the 20th century. Lewis was so talented, wild and fearless that he could easily have been one of the greatest figures of the 20th century. However, his perkiness held him back.
In the case of Lewis’s politics, the process may have been regarded as straightforward because the situation was explicit and the details are well known and provocative. In early 1931, he wrote a series of articles in Tide and Time during which, following his brief visit to Berlin in November 1930, he purposed to understand the elements of the national socialist party in Germany, particularly the philosophy of Adolf Hitler – its leader. The book in which the articles were published called Hitler not only depicted Hitler as a man of peace but also dismissed the judenfrage as a racial red herring. The most debilitating thing was the fact that the book was followed by two “peace-pamphlets,” the ‘ left wings over Europe’ (1936), and ‘Count Your Dead: They are Alive!’ (1937). As if this was not enough, Lewis advanced his Hitlerism with an article in the first issue of the re-launched British Union Quarterly; this embossed Lewis’ reputation as a fascist, or as a fascist sympathizer. The broad focus and content of his political writings has narrowly been permitted to trouble this easy caricature, and the possibility that the nitty-gritty of his poor books might disclose something other than pro-Hitler sympathies is still unconceivable (Rosenfeld 69-70). Not only does the notion of the unpopular here unravel itself in terms of Lewis’ unpopularity but also through his adherence and admiration of a rising figure who is a proponent of socialism, which was unfavorable in Britain at that time.
John Carey, in his dismissive attitude towards Lewis in “The Intellectuals and the Masses” (1992), mocks him as the ‘Intellectuals’ intellectual;’ implying some level of cerebral rarefaction. When recording a case for juxtaposing Lewis with the egocentric anti-intellectual Hitler, Carey describes what he sees as Lewis’ trivial collection of ideas. If it was not pure academic discrepancy, it must have been polemical strategy: he dismissed Lewis as both an obtuse obsessive, and an erudite deceiver, Carey extends his portrait of Lewis as a “spiteful talentless fascist”. Given the long-term debilitation of Lewis’ public image, the conception of him as a prowling brutish advocate of the Right would merely surprise anybody, and Carey’s originality comprised of preparedness to write about Lewis in high profile studies, despite being a part of a broad attack on modernism (Carey 69).
The current paper may only be one of many attempts to illuminate the critical barrier that has been created around Lewis’s work due to his purported political toxicity. There have been suggestions that Lewis’ reputation may be less tarnished than it was a decade ago, however, it remains the same even fifty years after his death. Anyone who writes or speaks about Lewis with anything rather other than trivializing and righteous contempt may be challenged to substantiate their claims.
The only bad thing with biased readings of Lewis’ politics is that they tend to suggest both inevitability and a finality of his passage into fascist apologia. Carey, again, tends to be typical in this respect, specifically quoting from The Art of Being Ruled (1926), The Paleface (1929), and Time and Western Man (1927), describes Lewis as a replica of Hitler; a Nietzschean power-fetishist, a natural fascist whose misogyny, anti-Semitism, racism, and homophobia are naive. Today’s dominant prejudices persist, but they are subject to further deliberate scrutiny. Very few indictments against his work consider anything published after 1939, and the result would be to truncate his career with what may invariably be dismissed as the too-little-too late re-incarnation of The Hitler Cult (Rosenfeld 75). Hence, the notion of the unpopular which accompanied a great deal of scholarship about Lewis started to recede.
Even with the broad literature written in regard to Lewis’s support for Hitler, a lot of information may have been concealed from the pro-democratic Anglo Saxony: A league that worked, or the utopian globalization of America and Cosmic Man. Further information may be concealed in the distastefully ironic title of “The Jews: Are They Human?” This title may be regarded as an absolute plea for tolerance, a candid self-appraisal, and cultural sincerity which is truly ignored. Other works of Wyndham Lewis’ Hitlerism that might reveal the true complexity of his stance during the dishonest decade include ‘the doom of the youth’ (1932), ‘The Mysterious Mr. Bull,’ and ‘One-way Song’ (1933).
Most shocking, though, may be the lack of close, unrelenting attention towards the primary exhibits in the case against Lewis’s, Left Wings over Europe, Hitler, and Count Your Dead: They are Alive! John Carey reflects upon all the three books and makes a few quotes from them, but it is evident that he might have read them only sparsely.
Having declared that Hitler exhibited Lewis’s true ideological allegiance, he implies that there is no need for further scholarly investigation. Surely, a critique may not owe more a work than this. If Hitler, as painted by Carey, was the key to Lewis’ politics and a lethal doctrine which undermines the all his work as an artist and a writer, then it should be reconsidered when looking at someone who may be regarded by many as the father and a profound prophet of the modern electronic age – Marshall McLuhan (Rosenfeld 87) but who is also similarly unpopular.
MARSHALL MCLUHAN
A Canadian born in 1911, McLuhan got to be Christian in 1937 through the influence of G. K. Chesterton. He published one of his monumental works in 1964 – Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, this was one of the twelve books and hundreds of articles he had in his life. This book is comprised of subjects that would characterize the most of his career; the mission of understanding the effect of technology in relation to the popular culture, and how this would affect human beings and their relationship with one another in the communities. Being one of the people to sound the alarm, McLuhan gained the status of a cult hero, and a high priest in pop-culture; However, many of his ideas were unpopular and quite strange.
McLuhan’s thoughts, though voluminous, are frequently reduced to one-liners, and small sound bites, which add up to the more complicated content of his probing and vigorous examination of the future of media. With regard to the new position of man in the technological and media- controlled society, as quoted in Understanding the Media, he said:
“If the work of the city is translating and making a man a more suitable from than what the nomadic ancestors achieved, then might our current translation of the entire life into spiritual form of information not seem to make of the globe, and the humanity, a single consciousness?”
In statements like those, McLuhan both seems to announce the coming of the global village – a word he is renowned for coining, and forecasts the intensification of the world communities to the current expression. These ideas seemed quite unpopular in the sense that they were lacking general approval and the general public or audience found them quite out of the ordinary.
All this happened in the early 1960s – a time when the TV was still in infancy, and the computer was at least twenty years into its inception.
McLuhan seems to be announcing what may be referred to as the world of people who worship their own inventions like the high-speed computers and fax machines, and concedes to the blessings dressings and Coca-Cola as marks of divinity. It is an unconceivable fact that more and more people are watching television than go to church; something that to McLuhan seemed like a tell-tale sign of a shift to culture in history. This shift is undoubtedly imperceptible to most, and debilitating to all. Should anyone question McLuhan’s warning that “people become what they behold,” they should reflect upon the desire of majority of the teenagers to be like celebrities such as Michael Jordan, Britney Spears, or Chris Brown: desires that have culminated into cultures of plastic surgery and shooting to obtain make up.
For McLuhan, technology would be seen as an improvement of man. This would be evidenced by some of the statements such as “extension of a man, the chair is a specialized ablation of the posterior, a kind of absolute ablative of the backside, whereas the couch extended the integral being” (McLuhan 84). This means that technology would come to aid man in the various activities of the daily life. However, it seems a bit strange that McLuhan, the tutelary spirit of the information age, fails to predict the internet to the threshold of the significance known today, the way Lewis failed to predict the fallibility and aggressiveness of Hitler coming to power. Signs of this medium were still evident in his days. The prophetic insight is not completely absent considering McLuhan’s vision and contributions. Signs of this medium were still evident in his days. McLuhan seemed to have been busy pondering around the relative tendencies of furniture and the meaning of objects such as miniskirts and their relevance to the contemporary era. This is what actually coined McLuhan as the father of the pop-culture- ability to prefigure Hollywood.
McLuhan seems to have paid more attention to the old-school media through the television, the “extension of man,” things that the internet has proofed more sophisticated than.
What would be permissible by many people is the fact that we are living in a media driven age, and even if the dominant media may not be exactly what McLuhan predicted in the body of his highly influential work; everywhere in the literature of technology, McLuhan’s strange, controversial, and often misquoted ideas seem to be floating. Many of these ideas are founded in the expressionism on understanding the media, this mystified many readers on its publication in 1964, and however, it began to make more sense as the media consolidated, integrated vertically and horizontally, and turned out more dominant, particularly in the field of advertising.
In his early works, McLuhan may have focused more on the swift change in the five centuries from the development of the printing press and the movable type, especially the swift discoveries of the 20th century. In his later years, and partially as a response to his critics, McLuhan seems to have developed a scientific basis for his thoughts around the term tetrad. The tetrad allowed him to apply the four laws framed as questions to a wide spectrum of mankind’s accomplishments, and thereby discover a new tool for looking at the culture.
The first question addressed the extent of medium or technology. In the course of the case of the foot, it would be the car; in the case of the voice, it would be the phone. The second question seemed to address what seemed to become obsolete. In this sense, people might have answered that the phone would render the carrier pigeons and smoke signals useless. The third question might have been what will be retrieved? Again, one might say that the sense of the community would return through the diversification of the telephone service, whereas the sense of adventure would be retrieved using the car. The fourth question asked: what would technology reverse into if it became over-extended? A fully blown automobile culture yearns for the pedestrian lifestyle, whereas the over-extended phone culture engenders a need for solitude. With television, radio, and the internet, we have gained accessibility to any information in the world, however, we have lost our sense of community life, and we have been reduced into silent people. These are some of the common voices that may be heard by the people over McLuhan’s ideas of the future (Theall 2006).
After his death, the one-time celebrity would rapidly be forgotten by the masses that had once adored him. However, he gained a renewed interest in the 90s when the World Wide Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee and prevailed by the Netscape Navigator by Marc Andreessen. Soon, the net culture mainly centered on the free sharing of information and a status based on the intelligent use of this skill, rather than age, possessions, or social connections. This seemed to become the next mainstream culture. At the same time, fresh readers from William Gibson’s Neuromancer among other cyberpunk classics contemplated on the dark notion that the ‘net culture’ might corrupt the mainstream with its greedy infusions (ibid).
Soon, the works of Marshall McLuhan, the man who had prophesied absolution of the printed books, overtaken by TV and other electronic media, would come to be true. It must be noted here that most of these ideas were looked at with a great deal of skepticism and therefore the notion of the unpopular persists. In the Gutenberg Galaxy McLuhan viewed the print as the technology of individualism. In the War and Peace in the Global Village, he foresaw that the emergent technological network would re-model the world to become a global village, in which people would understand instantly, the impact of their actions and common knowledge on possible solutions. This utopian prediction was concurrent with the initial purpose behind the development of the web. It would be worth noting that Marshall knew little about the personal computer. Ironically, he had revealed little interest in the microchip computer developments that gave rise to Apple Computers and PC clones. Later, the global network of electric media would be so eroded that it earned tags such as “unholy impostor, a deliberate manifestation of the Antichrist.” Still, these voices would be raised before the wake of personal computers. Ultimately, it was McLuhan himself who imagined that technology “eventually fl ips into something entirely different” (Theall, 34). If this is true, what remains for the internet is yet to be seen. Nevertheless, a major challenge continues to bite in keeping desired information accessible as the quantity of information piles exponentially.
Conclusion
McLuhan’s gravestone still bears an inscription with a message reading, “The truth shall set you free,” in a font that may be described as “digital analogue.” What might be revealed among other things is the fact that by 1970’s, McLuhan had become a household name in a society obsessed with TV, and how it used to transform civilization. The scene also shows the fact that despite some of McLuhan’s concepts such as the global village, the medium is the message, and hot versus cool media had penetrated the discourse of the mainstream, McLuhan is still widely perceived as Maverick, if not a crackpot, for many of his contentious pronouncements about innovation; which in many cases seem to be a common place today and which is an extension of the notion of the unpopular.
Despite having been the pioneer of the only modernist cultural society indigenous, Lewis is seldom spoken of in the same vigor as his contemporaries. Lewis was talented in his writing and drawing; however, his individualistic attitude and liberalism shattered all that. His contradictory philosophy, fascism, and infatuation for Hitler were catalysts towards unpopularity. Lewis and McLuhan seem to have had one thing in common; despite their significant contributions in their respective discourses, they made single but detrimental mistakes that many may refer to them as wasted talents who could have transcended and exceeded what they have already achieved.
Works Cited
Carey, John. (2002) 2 Winky Dinks to Stargazer: Five Decades of Interactive Television . Greystone
Communications. Retrieved October 15, 2013. Web.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Routledge . 2006. Print.
Rosenfeld, Alvin H. The End of the Holocaust. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. Theall, Donald F. The Virtual Marshall McLuhan. Montreal: McGill-Queen's
University Press, 2001.
Frequently asked questions about "The Notion of the Unpopular for Wyndham Lewis and Marshall McLuhan"
What is the central theme of this text?
The central theme revolves around the concept of unpopularity as it pertains to the legacies of Wyndham Lewis and Marshall McLuhan. It explores how their controversial views and actions, particularly Lewis's support for Hitler and public perception of McLuhan's media theories, have impacted their recognition and reception.
Who was Wyndham Lewis and why is he considered unpopular?
Wyndham Lewis was a talented writer and artist, but his pro-Hitler stance significantly damaged his reputation. His political views led to his being perceived as a fascist sympathizer, causing his work to be overlooked or criticized.
What specific works of Wyndham Lewis contributed to his unpopularity?
The book "Hitler," where Lewis portrayed Hitler as a man of peace, and his two "peace-pamphlets," "Left Wings Over Europe" and "Count Your Dead: They Are Alive!" further solidified his unpopular image. An article in the British Union Quarterly also contributed to this perception.
How did John Carey portray Wyndham Lewis in "The Intellectuals and the Masses"?
John Carey criticizes Lewis, labeling him the "Intellectuals' intellectual" and a "spiteful talentless fascist." Carey's negative portrayal further contributes to the understanding of Lewis's unpopularity.
Who was Marshall McLuhan and why is he discussed in the context of unpopularity?
Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian writer known for his theories on media and technology's impact on society. Despite his significant contributions to understanding the future of media, his ideas were often perceived as strange or lacking scientific basis, leading to periods of waning fame.
What are some of McLuhan's key concepts mentioned in the text?
Key concepts include the "global village," the idea that "people become what they behold," and the notion of technology as an extension of man. The text also references his theory of the "tetrad."
Why were McLuhan's ideas considered unpopular?
McLuhan's ideas, particularly those concerning the transformative effects of television and other media, were seen as unusual and not generally accepted, especially in the early 1960s when the technologies were still in their infancy.
What is the significance of McLuhan's "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man"?
This book is considered one of McLuhan's most important works, exploring the effects of technology on popular culture and how it shapes human relationships and communities.
What is the tetrad that McLuhan developed?
The tetrad is a tool McLuhan developed to analyze the effects of technology by asking four questions: What does the medium enhance? What does it render obsolete? What does it retrieve from the past? What does the technology flip into when pushed to its limits?
How did the rise of the internet affect McLuhan's legacy?
The rise of the internet in the 1990s led to a renewed interest in McLuhan's work, as his predictions about the global village and the impact of electronic media seemed increasingly relevant. However, skepticism towards his ideas persisted.
What conclusions does the text draw about Lewis and McLuhan?
The text concludes that both Lewis and McLuhan made significant contributions but were hampered by controversial aspects of their careers - Lewis by his political views and McLuhan by the unconventional nature of his theories. These factors contributed to their relative unpopularity compared to their contemporaries.
What are the works cited in the text?
The text cites: John Carey's 2 Winky Dinks to Stargazer: Five Decades of Interactive Television, Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Alvin H. Rosenfeld's The End of the Holocaust, and Donald F. Theall's The Virtual Marshall McLuhan.
- Quote paper
- Khalid Easa (Author), 2017, Notion of the Unpopular for Wyndham Lewis and Marshall McLuhan, Munich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/509725
