Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/09100_Field_TCGG T865.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 973b | 16 lines

consciousness. He breaks open the closed system of classical
rhetoric at the same time that he cuts into the closed system
of newspaper somnambulism. Symbolism is a kind of witty jazz,
a consummation of Ruskin’s aspirations for the grotesque that
would have shocked him a good deal. But it proved to be the
only way out of “single vision and Newton’s sleep.”

     Blake had the insights but not the technical resources for
rendering his vision. Paradoxically, it was not through the book
but through the development of the mass press, especially the
telegraph press, that poets found the artistic keys to the world
of simultaneity, or of modern myth. It was in the format of the
daily press that Rimbaud and Mallarmé discovered the means of
rendering the interplay of all the functions of what Coleridge
called the “esemplastic” imagination. (5) For the popular press
offers no single vision, no point of view, but a mosaic of the