In a letter to Harry Skornia from the last week of February, 1959, McLuhan described
“Break-through in class today. Talking about Baudelaire’s famous line1
Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère! —
his address to his readers — point is that it is voice through reader to poet not voice of poet to reader. This reversal borne out in all subsequent poetry — same as TV image reversal of light through, not on. Takes whole stress off private, personal role of reader and poet alike. Both now come to share a common creative action.
Can explain all this in detail. But you can see my point here about the ease with which the student of the most popular forms can be given either casual or intense introduction to highest art forms of his time. e.g. all poets since Rimbaud have used telegraph-press form of juxtaposed items — no linkages, just mosaic of proportions. Again a form of light through, not private editorial perspective of light on items.”McLuhan would repeat the point for the rest of his career, endlessly. It was part of the armamentum he employed teaching modern art: allow communication to come to you, don’t force you on it; look for figure and ground — and allow these to flip into the reverse configuration; imagine the images as shots in a movie and ask why they have the place they do; consider the composition as a newspaper page; see what happens when a text is read backwards or a picture seen upside down; ask what the artist is trying to elicit from the audience in general and you in particular; pull out the connections! These were techniques he had picked up in learning to read himself and Mallarmé and the French moderns had been critical in this process.
https://mcluhansnewsciences.com/mcluhan/2020/04/marshall-harry-and-baudelaire/
The French symbolist poets responded immediately and intuitively to the ground introduced by the telegraph by retrieving pre-alphabetic forms of discontinuous resonance and mimesis. Baudelaire announced the rediscovery of audience as mimetic ground for [his]3 work: his reader puts on and wears the art as a means of correcting not his concepts but rather his perception. The reader is a mask-wearer (‘Hypocrite’), the poem the mask: ‘Hypocrite lecteur, – mon semblable, – mon frère!’
Laws of Media, 48
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Bonus Beats :
Beats and Pieces :
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