Marshall McLuhan

	The Medieval Environment:  Yesterday or Today?(1974)

I want to explore a theme concerning a new inter-relationship of past and 
present.  If Carlyle in his Past and Present (1843) looked nostalgically 
to the medieval world as a paradigm for his own age, we can reverse that 
outlook today.  The electric age, by virtue of its simultaneity, has 
created a universal "acoustic" environment.  Having left the Middle Ages 
by the visual route, we are returning to full medieval awareness by the 
acoustic route.  I shall explain the contrasting forms of the visual and 
the acoustic further on in this essay, but the implications of electric 
simultaneity for the Western world are much more fully explored in Take 
Today:  The Executive as Dropout.  Even sensory psychologists still cling 
to the after-image of "space" as a visual form that is continuous, 
connected, homogeneous and static.  In fact, such continuous or visual 
space "ended" in 1900 with quantum mechanics and Max Planck.  In the same 
year Freud's Interpretation of Dreams plunged from the rational, visual 
world into the mythic simultaneities of the unconscious.  This essay, 
like the rest of my work, is an exploration of effects and formal 
causes.  I am not making any value judgements, nor endorsing any of the 
developments which I observe and report.

Tony Schwartz in The Responsive Chord also does a formal analysis of TV, 
explaining many of its effects:

		In watching television, our eyes function like our ears.  
They never see a picture, just as our ears never hear a word.  The eye 
receives a few dots of light during each successive millisecond, and 
sends these impulses to the brain.....  Watching television, the eye is 
for the first time functioning like the ear.  Film began the process of 
fracturing visual images into bits of information for the eye to receive 
and the brain to reassemble, but television completed the transition.  
For this reason, it is more accurate to say that television is an 
auditory-based medium.  Watching TV, the brain utilizes the eye in the 
same way it has always used the ear.  With television, the patterning of 
auditory and visual stimuli is identical.

Radio had in the 20's many of the effects which have been enormously 
strengthened by TV.  Radio had already created a simultaneous environment 
of information and, when hitched to film, had created a very powerful 
transforming medium which  restored to the plane of daily life many of 
the tribal features of pre-literate man.  Today the return of the 
"wandering" scholars in full international motley has not failed to get 
some notice from the medieval scholarly world.  "Motley" was the costume 
adopted by the clown to express his alienation from the establishment to 
which he was "attached".  The costume adopted widely and spontaneously by 
the young people of the TV generation, has appeared in many countries, 
combining a conscious arrangement of hair and clothing which avoids the 
category of "dress"; for costume is not so much "dressing up" for people, 
as "putting on" the public.  the small demi-mask worn by the participants 
in a masquerade is a "put on" of the group.  The wearer drops his private 
identity in order to assume a corporate identity.   To wear such a mask 
is to submerge oneself, as it were, in the vortex of festive celebration, 
and this is done by abandoning the specialism of private dress in order 
to enjoy the stepped-up group power and energy of a special corporate mood.

The wearer of motley, by that token, asserts a degree of alienation from 
the establishment that confers on him the licence of the "chartered 
libertine", such as is strongly marked in the hippie costumes that are 
currently being dimmed down.  The need to recognize the "structures" of 
masks or costume relates to the possibility of making social forms 
intelligible over and above their accidental "content".  The difference 
between dress and costume is very great, the one private, the other 
corporate, and each has widely different functions which relate to the 
entire structure of their social "put on".  Today the vestiges of 
traditional costume and corporate power and dignity, occur mainly in 
academic and judiciary functions, whereas the reign of private dress has 
been taken as the norm during the century past.  The mention of motley, 
however, reminds us that there was for many centuries a decorum in dress 
and costume as much as in speech and levels of rhetorical style.  The 
structuralism upon which these distinctions was based was not visual but 
acoustic, and the same process of levelling of rhetorical styles and 
exegetical levels of interpretation of scripture.  Those means were, of 
course, the advent of technologies which stepped up visual stress to new 
levels of intensity, just as today the advent of powerful new acoustic 
structures in the environment have disposed human perception towards an 
easy understanding and acceptance of complex non- visual structures once 
more.

Huizinga in The Waning of the Middle Ages opens with the memorable 
account of the colors and sounds of the medieval environment:

		...Executions and and other public acts of justice, 
hawking, marriages and funerals, were all announced by cries and 
processions, songs and music.  The lover wore the colours of his lady; 
companions the emblem of their confraternity; parties and servants the 
badges or blazon of their lords.  Between town and country, too, the 
contrast was very marked.  A medieval town did not lose itself in 
extensive suburbs of factories and villas; girded by its walls, it stood 
forth as a compact whole, bristling with innumerable turrets.

In marked contrast to the visual measurement of time by segments and 
fragments, from nine to five, in Mr. Eliot's "time kept" city, the 
dominant mode of time in the Middle Ages was acoustic:

		One sound rose ceaselessly above the noises of busy life 
and lifted all things unto a sphere of order and serenity:  the sound of 
bells.  the bells were in daily life like good spirits, which by their 
familiar voices, now called upon the citizens to mourn and now to 
rejoice, now warned them of danger, now exhorted them to piety.  They 
were known by their names: big Jacqueline, or the bell Roland.  Every one 
knew the difference in meaning of the various ways of ringing.

However continuous the ringing of the bells, people would seem not to 
have become blunted to the effect of their sound.

		Throughout the famous judicial duel between two citizens 
of Valenciennes, in 1455, the big bell, "which is hideous to hear," says 
Chastellain, never stopped ringing.  What intoxication the pealing of the 
bells of all the churches, and of all the monasteries of Paris, must have 
produced, sounding from morning till evening, and even during the night, 
when a peace was concluded or a pope elected.

If the acoustic principle is inclusive and participant, the visual 
principle is exclusive and detached.  Another way of putting it is to say 
that whereas the visual principle is analytic and mechanistic and 
logical, the auditory principle is quite contrary.  Mr. Eliot has made 
this feature memorable in his definition of "The Auditory Imagination":

		What I call the "auditory imagination" is the feeling for 
syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of 
thought and feeling, invigorating every word:  sinking to the most 
primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something 
back, seeking the beginning and the end.  It works though meanings, 
certainly, or not without meanings in the ordinary sense, and fuses the 
old and obliterated, and the trite, the current, and the new and the 
surprising, the most ancient and the most civilized mentality.

This auditory principle characterizes all of Eliot's work, even as it 
does that of Yeats and Joyce and Pound.  Eliot makes this structural fact 
a central motif of Four Quartets which opens with the lines:

			Time present and time past
			Are both perhaps present in time future,
			And time future contained in time past.

The last section of the same poem begins:

			What we call the beginning is often the end
			And to make an end is to make a beginning,
			The end is where we start from.

The redemption of time occurs at the conclusion, with space and place and 
the opportunity:

			. . .for history is a pattern
			Of timeless moments.  So while the light fails
			On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel
			History is now and England.

The fact that in all structures of a simultaneous or acoustic character 
"effects" always precede "causes" is merely to say that the ground comes 
before figure, so that when any new figure arises, the comment has always 
been "The time is ripe".  This, of course, is a matter that affects 
"prophesy", which is essentially predicting what has already taken place 
in the present.  As Wyndham Lewis put it:  "The artist is always engaged 
in writing a detailed history of the future because he alone is able to 
live in the present".

I am proceeding in this vein because I wish to remind us that wherever 
men have been sensitive to the simultaneity of acoustic structures, they 
have also manifested most of the outlook which is now characteristic of 
the electric age.  Early in the electric time when the telegraph had 
brought the instantaneous dimension into ordinary awareness (there was 
commercial telegraph by 1830), Edgar Allan Poe developed the theme that 
the only way to make a work of art is to start with the effect and then 
to look around for the means of achieving that effect.  Poe's separation 
of the poem from the poetic process occurred simultaneously with Boole's 
separation of the mathematical process from mathematical quantities.  Poe 
invented both the symbolist poem and the detective story by the basic 
step of removing the connections among the parts, introducing instead of 
visual connections the principle of the resonant interval, which permits 
the participation of the reader in the making process, much as 
syncopation in jazz became the means of involving the mass audience.

I think it is easy to illustrate all the principles assumed in the 
process of implementing electric technology as basic to all the arts and 
sciences of the Middle Ages, whether we consider Gothic architecture, 
multi-level exegesis, rhetorical decorum, or political hierarchies.  We 
shall look at some of these shortly, but let me first remind you of that 
nostalgic backward look which Shakespeare used so many times in his 
plays; presuming the basic priority of auditory structure:

				O! when degree is shak'd
			Which is the ladder to all high designs,
			The enterprise is sick.  How could communities,
			Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods  in cities,
			Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
			The primogenitive and due of birth,
			Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,
			But by degree, stand in authentic place?
			Take but degree away, untune that string.
			And, hark! what discord follows:  each thing meets
			In mere oppugnancy:

			O! what a noble mind is here o'er- thrown:
			The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword;
			The expectancy and rose of the fair state,
			The glass of fashion and the mould of form,
			The observ'd of all observers, quite, quite down!
			And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,
			That suck'd the honey of his music vows,
			Now see that noble and most sovereign reason,
			Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh;

To an Elizabethan audience in 1600 or so, the figure of Hamlet would have 
appeared as an archetypal retrieval from the past.  He has none of the 
new egotism or individualism of Marlowe's or Ben Johnson's worlds, and 
his "musical" politics belong to the age when time was measured by bells 
rather than by visual clock face.  The world of the bell is inclusive 
rather than exclusive, as John Donne reminded his contemporaries:

		No man is an island, intire of it selfe; every man is a 
peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by 
the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well 
as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death 
diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never 
send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee . . .

Having indicated that there are two great principles of organization 
present in Western culture, the acoustic and the visual, and that these 
principles have enlarged and reversed themselves at various time in the 
past 2500 years of Western development, it might be well to notice a 
little more closely where and how the visual principle was established.  
I am suggesting this is the easier to do because we have now moved far 
into the simultaneous age of electric information, whose dominant 
principle is acoustic and auditory.  Since we have the power to hear from 
all directions at once, it happens that when information becomes 
environmental and omnidirectional, it too, assumes an acoustic form, 
which radically shapes patterns of perception.  Just as surely as the 
structure of visually dominated perception is not omnidirectional but 
strongly favours a private point of view, with fixed position, vanishing 
point and perspective.  Visual space, unlike acoustic space, is 
continuous, connected and static, whereas all the species of all the 
other senses are discontinuous, non-homogeneous and dynamic.  As to which 
of these powers, the visual or the acoustic is the more remarkable, the 
verdict must go to the visual, if only because of its rarity and uniqueness.

Before the rise of phonetic literacy in fifth century Athens, all of 
mankind had lived only in an acoustic mode of awareness, the mode of 
awareness to which we, in the electric age, have returned after the 2500 
year disgression into phonetic literacy and visual culture.  Structural 
linguists, following the lead of Ferdinand de Saussaure, have divided the 
approaches of their studies into diachronic and synchronic modes.  The 
diachronic approach is chronological or development or sequential, and is 
familiar to most students of Western history and language and 
institutions.  The synchronic approach on the other hand, regards each 
moment or each facet of any situation as inclusive of the full range of 
the matters studied.  Another way of putting it is to say that the 
diachronic approach adopts a visual point of view, while the synchronic 
method prefers the simultaneity of the acoustic method.  If the 
diachronic offers a point of view and continuous, rational exposition, 
the synchronic tends toward insight and instant awareness of totalities.  
The visual faculty of itself offers a world of continuity and homogeneity 
and stasis, whereas the acoustic world, since we hear from all directions 
at once, offers a world that is discontinuous and multi-locational in 
which effects come before causes and instant awareness takes precedence 
over connected demonstration.  Another way of putting it is to say that 
the diachronic procedure is that of literate and highly visual societies 
in which the visual faculty has become, in large measure, abstracted from 
the other senses.  This state of affairs is only possible in societies 
long accustomed to the phonetic alphabet, and the reasons for this 
development appear in Eric Havelock's Preface to Plato and also in his 
Prologue to Greek Literacy.  On the other hand, Latin Entralog in his 
Theraphy of the Word in Classical Antiquity has shown the preliterate and 
magical uses of language in the Greek world before writing.

In synchronic terms, that is, in terms of the effects exercised 
simultaneously on whole situations, it needs be said that the unique 
properties of our phonetic alphabet include its phonemic rather than 
morphemic character.  This phonemic alphabet was obviously the result of 
much cultural change, and was itself an achievement of extreme 
abstraction and specialism.  So far as I know, it is only this phonemic 
alphabet of "meaningless bits" that has the effect of "fissioning," in 
its turn, the visual faculty from the acoustic and proprioceptive areas 
of the sensorium.  Only societies accustomed to the use of this abstract 
form can enter the exclusively visual world of Euclidean space.  Many 
great cultures have existed, and still exist, which have never entered 
the visual world of Euclidean space with its rationalistic qualities of 
continuity connection, homogeneity and stasis.  The entire area of what 
we now call the "Third World", is constituted by cultures which have 
never undergone the sensory abstraction and effects of the phonetic 
alphabet of the Western world.  What is called the "First World" is the 
Western 19th century with its extreme uses and applications of the 
phonetic alphabet in all areas of social action.  What we call the 
"Second World" is Russia, with its powerful oral tradition and culture of 
residual medievalism, and Byzantine bureaucracy.

The problems of incorporating the "First World" of 19th century 
industrialism into the "Second World" of Russian Communism were greatly 
complicated by bringing the very high level literate culture of the 19th 
century West into interface with the "medieval" culture of Russia, 
preindustrial and semi-literate.  Ireland also resisted Western 
industrialism with the resources of its oral tradition which are 
incompatible with the extreme specialism of mass production and 
quantitative goals.  The difficulties of relating the "First World" to 
the "Second World" are insignificant compared to the problem of bringing 
the "First World" to the "Third World".  A preview of this problem 
occurred in Japan in the 16th century when Christianity was first 
introduced.  In the translator's preface to Silence by Shusaku Endo the 
impossibility for finding any foothold for Hellenistic Christianity in 
the Japanese culture is the theme of his novel, which has evoked much 
interest in Japan:

		. . .Japan because it is so stubbornly Western.  'Father, 
you were not defeated by me,' says the victorious Inoue.  'You were 
defeated by this swamp of Japan.'  It is precisely the swamp of Japan 
that cannot absorb the type of Christianity that has been propagated in 
these islands.

When interviewed, Endo said:

		. . .I was struck once again with the grandeur of the 
Catholic Faith.  This problem of the reconciliation of my Catholicism 
with my Japanese blood . . .has taught me one thing:  that is, that the 
Japanese must absorb Christianity without the support of a Christian 
tradition or history or legacy or sensibility.  Even this attempt is the 
occasion of much resistance and anguish and pain, still it is impossible 
to counter by closing one's eyes to the difficulties.  No doubt this is 
the peculiar cross that God has given to the Japanese.  In short, the 
tree of Hellenized Christianity cannot simply be pulled out of Europe and 
planted in the swamp of a Japan that has a completely different cultural 
tradition.  If such a thing is done, the fresh young sapling will wither 
and die.

		Yet this does not mean that the Christian cause is 
doomed.  For Christianity has an infinite capacity for adaptation; and 
somewhere within the great symphony of Catholicism is a strain that fits 
the Japanese tradition and touches the Japanese heart.  A different 
strain this from that evoked by the cultures of Greece and Rome, a strain 
perhaps so intimately blended with the whole that its gentle note has 
never yet been heard by the Christian ear.  But it is there, and it must 
be found.

The reason for dwelling on this matter is that Japan is a portion of the 
"Third World" which has seemingly triumphed in its takeover of Western 
industrial technology.  The Japanese have also made a sort of quantum 
leap from tribal feudalism into what may well become recognized as the 
"Fourth World" of electronic acoustic culture.  The Japanese seem to have 
been able to bypass 19th century specialism and to have plunged instantly 
into the new "software" world of electronic information.  Far greater 
than the problem of bringing the 19th century to the "Third World" is the 
problem of survival for the "First World" in its encounter with the 
"Fourth World" of the new electronic services.

It is at this point that I want to introduce the major paradox of our 
time, namely, that the Third World is the one that is most compatible 
with the latest electronic technology and environmental services.  It is 
this backward, undeveloped world that is most avant garde, culturally, 
today.  For the electronic world offers a universal environment of 
simultaneous information that, in synchronic or structural terms, is 
structurally acoustic.  The properties of the acoustic are antithetic to 
the visual world, with its single point of view, for the synchronic or 
acoustic is multi- locational.  The acoustic is, as it were, a sphere 
whose centre is everywhere and whose margin is nowhere.  Experientially, 
it offers no footholds and no points of view, but only total involvement, 
such as music affords.

As the Catholic Church today encounters the "Fourth World" of electronic 
information, it displays all the characteristic behaviour of Hellenistic 
culture floundering in the Oriental "swamp," so that to say "East is East 
and West is West, and never the twain shall meet" is to say that the 
culture of the eye and the ear, of the outer-directioned rational man, on 
one hand, and the inner-directed intuitive man, on the other hand, are 
antithetic and incompatible.  The other possibility, of course, is that 
they may be made complementary by a process of confrontation and 
understanding; a time when such a process of using both the visual and 
the acoustic, the rational and the intuitive, in some sort of 
equilibrium, however shifting, such is the time we have learned to call 
the "Medieval Period".

In our electric time, when all happenings have an increasingly resonant 
and simultaneous character, we begin to feel a co-natural sympathy with, 
and understanding of, the medieval period, as well as a sense of identity 
with primitive or preliterate societies for whom visually measured time 
was unknown and for whom the environmental sense of ecological 
equilibrium was a primary consideration in their imagination of order.

My theme for the medievalist of today is that the electronic world has 
restored the habit of simultaneous awareness which is a primary character 
of acoustic or synchronic culture.  T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets provides a 
complete guide to structural or synchronic perception of the world.  He 
had anticipated this awareness in Tradition and the Individual Talent:

		. . .the historical sense involves a perception, not only 
of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense 
compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, 
but with a feeling that the whole of literature of Europe from Homer and 
within the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous 
existence and composes a simultaneous order.  This historical sense, 
which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the 
timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer 
traditional.  And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely 
conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.

Yet today, the structural or simultaneous and inclusive perception of 
situations, whether verbal or institutional, which the 19th century found 
so difficult to attain, has once again become as natural and easy as it 
was for practitioners of multi- levelled exegesis in the Middle Ages.  
Robert H. Hollander, in approaching Allegory and Dante's Commedia 
(Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1969) uses the work of Henri de 
Lubac, Exgse mdivale, les quatre sens de l'criture (4 volumes, Paris, 
1959-1964).

The four-level exegesis is no longer a formidable opacity to the scholars 
of the electronic age, since they too have recaptured the simultaneous or 
acoustic approach to the book.  In his European Literature and the Latin 
Middle Ages, Ernst Robert Curtius devotes chapter 16 to "The Book as 
Symbol" or "trope":

		It is a favorite cliche of the popular view of history 
that the Renaissance shook off the dust of yellowed parchments and began 
instead to read in the book of nature or the world.  But this metaphor 
itself derives from the Latin Middle Ages.  We saw that Alan speaks of 
the "book of experience".

The Book of Nature and the Book of Creatures is what Francis Bacon 
undertook to read in his advancement of learning and Novum Organum.  Far 
from being a "modern", Bacon was an "ancient" in the tradition of 
Patristic exegesis,  in his approach to nature and science.  Whereas it 
may be quite natural for us today to retrieve for ourselves the 
multi-levelled acoustic and synchronic character of medieval culture, it 
is equally useful to observe the process by which the Gutenberg 
technology alienated the Renaissance time from the acoustic multiplicity 
in favour of the single level visual approach.  This is the theme of 
Walter J. Ong in Ramus:  Method, and the Decay of Dialogue.  The very 
great intensification of visual order which was introduced with printing 
naturally took its toll of the prior centuries of mixed visual and 
auditory culture by the route of simplification and utilitarian 
implementation:

		RAMUS:  After my regular three and a half years of 
philosophy, mostly the Organon of Aristotle's logical works, terminating 
with the conferring of my master's degree, I began to consider how I 
should put the logical arts to use.

Ong explains:

		More plainly, Ramus proposes here to apply to eruditio - 
that is, to the material of history, antiquity, rhetoric, oratory, and 
poetry -the rules of logic and thus in effect to cut short the reign of 
scholasticism.

The law of implementation requires that the new thing be done with the 
old method, and Ramus quite simply reduced the humanists to logical and 
dialectical form.  It is very much what happens today when computers are 
programmed by fragmenting the ground of multi-levelled situations into 
homogenized "yes/no" bits.

Whether one is dealing with Gratian's Concordia Discordantium Canonum, or 
Abelard's Sic et Non, or the Thomistic "question", one is in the presence 
of multi- locational views just as surely as the Renaissance moved toward 
the discovery of perspective and single locations.  Erwin Panofsky sees 
the same pattern in Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism:

		What applies to prose and poetry applies no less 
emphatically to the arts.  Modern Gestalt psychology, in contrast to the 
doctrine of the nineteenth century and very much in harmony with that of 
the thirteenth, "refuses to reserve the capacity of synthesis to the 
higher faculties of the human mind" and stresses "the formative powers of 
the sensory processes".  Perception itself is now credited - and I quote 
- with a kind of "intelligence" that "organizes the sensory materials 
under the pattern of simple, 'good' Gestalten" in an "effort of the 
organism to assimilate stimuli to its own organization"; all of which is 
the modern way of expressing precisely what Thomas Aquinas meant when he 
wrote:  "the senses delight in things duly proportional as in something 
akin to them; for, the sense, too, is a kind of reason as is every 
cognitive power". . .

The multi-locational character of a medieval space which relates as much 
to the many levels of verbal meaning as to the many points of view in a 
scholastic article or a Gothic cathedral, is true also of medieval 
furniture.  It is in Mechanization Takes Command that Siegfried Giedion 
explained how medieval architectural space was structurally unique.  
Nothing was more multi-locational about the Middle Ages than its 
furniture which had to be taken with the traveller:

		And yet there was a medieval comfort.  But it must be 
sought in another dimension, for it cannot be measured on the material 
scale.  The satisfaction and delight that were medieval comfort have 
their source in the configuration of space.  Comfort is the atmosphere 
with which man surrounds himself and in which he lives.  Like the 
medieval Kingdom of God, it is something that eludes the grasp of hands.  
Medieval comfort is the comfort of space.

		A medieval room seems finished even when it contains no 
furniture.  It is never bare.  Whether a cathedral, a refectory, or a 
burgher chamber, it lives in its proportions, its materials, its form.  
This sense for the dignity of space did not end with the Middle Ages.  It 
lasted until nineteenth-century industrialism blurred the feelings.  Yet 
no later age so emphatically renounced bodily comfort.  The ascetic ways 
of monasticism invisibly shaped the period to its own image.

D. W. Robertson's A Preface to Chaucer is like Giedion in its discovery 
of the "non-visual" character of medieval space, narrative, and 
characterization:

		It may be that the "restlessness" so often ascribed to 
the Gothic style is due in part to our modern tendency to think of 
architecture in terms of "moulded space".  If we picture to ourselves the 
predicament of the tourist with a camera who wishes to obtain in a 
photograph a general view of a Gothic interior, this point may be made 
clearer.  Impressed by the beauty of the nave with its aisles, the 
transepts, the radiating chapels, and the span of the vaults, he seeks a 
convenient location to set up his camera.  But there is no position from 
which all of these things may be seen.  To see a Gothic interior 
spatially, it is necessary to move, and, not only to move, but to turn 
one's head.  If our tourist, baffled by the manner in which the piers 
interfere with his efforts to obtain a diagonal view, compromises by 
taking up a position at the center of the west end of the nave, his 
picture will not include a very impressive view of the vaults.

This multi-locationalism of audile, tactile and resonant space he finds 
pervasive in the characters of Chaucer also:

		Although Chaucer's characters frequently convey a strong 
impression of verisimilitude, they are not essentially realistic, and 
there would have been little point in giving them elaborate realistic 
settings in which to move.  In the dream visions, the settings are 
clearly iconographic in technique, although some of them may show, like 
the painted chamber with its stained-glass windows in The Book of the 
Duchess, a certain resemblance to locations actually observed.  The 
framework of The Canterbury Tales exhibits a typical Gothic disregard for 
spatial coherence.  The tales are told as though a large group of people 
riding down a fairly narrow road could hear a story told by one of them.  
Beyond a few references to place-names no details of the scene are given.

What Robertson sees as "a typical disregard for spatial coherence" 
represents his effort to reduce the acoustic to conventional forms for 
the purposes of exposition and intelligibility.  the rediscovery of 
acoustic space in the arts is in full bloom with the symbolists in the 
mid 19th century, but by the time of Yeats it is well established.  Yeats 
had spent his later years in trying to eliminate visual characteristics 
from his verse:

		I have spent my life in clearing out of poetry every 
phrase written for the eye, and bringing all back to syntax that is for 
the ear alone ...  "Write for the ear", I thought, so that you may be 
instantly understood as when actor or folk singer stands before an 
audience.  I would have poetry turn its back upon all that modish 
curiosity, psychology.

The implications of this new preference for the acoustic can be seen more 
structurally in Yeats' comment on the "Emotion of Multitude".  It is in 
this essay that he indicates discontinuity as the very principle of 
acoustic involvement:

		I have been thinking a good deal about plays lately, and 
I have been wondering why I dislike the clear and logical construction 
which seems necessary if one is to succeed on the modern stage.  It came 
into my head the other day that this construction, which all the world 
has learnt from France, has everything of high literature except the 
emotion of multitude.  the Greek drama has got the emotion of multitude 
from its chorus, which called up famous sorrows, even all the gods and 
all heroes, to witness, as it were, some well- ordered fable, some action 
separated but for this from all but itself.  The French play delights in 
the well- ordered fable, but by leaving out the chorus it has created an 
art where poetry and imagination, always the children of far-off 
multitudinous things, must of necessity grow less important than the mere 
will.  This is why, I said to myself, French dramatic poetry is so often 
rhetorical, for what is rhetoric but the will trying to do the work of 
the imagination?  The Shakespearian drama gets the emotion of multitude 
out of the sub-plot which copies the main plot, much as a shadow upon the 
wall copies one's body in the firelight.  We think of King Lear less as 
the history of one man and his sorrows than as the history of a whole 
evil time.  Lear's shadow is in Gloucester, who also has ungrateful 
children, and the mind goes on imagining other shadows, shadow beyond 
shadow, till it has pictured the world.  In Hamlet, one hardly notices, 
so subtly is the web woven, that the murderer of Hamlet's father and the 
sorrow of Hamlet are shadowed in the lives of Fortinbras and Ophelia and 
Laertes, whose fathers, too, have been killed.  It is so in all the 
plays, or in all but all, and very commonly the sub-plot is the main plan 
working itself out in more ordinary men and women, and so doubly calling 
up before us the image of multitude.  Ibsen and Maeterlinck have, on the 
other hand, created a new form, for they get multitude from the wild duck 
in the attic, or from the crown at the bottom of the fountain, vague 
symbols that set the mind wandering from idea to idea, emotion to 
emotion.  Indeed all the great masters have understood that there cannot 
be great art without the little limited life of the fable, which is 
always the better the simpler it is, and the rich, far- wandering, 
many-imaged life of the half-seen world beyond it.  There are some who 
understand that the simple unmysterious things living as in a clear moon 
light are of the nature of the sun, and that vague, many-imaged things 
have in them the strength of the moon.  Did now the Egyptian carve it on 
emerald that all living things have the sun for father and the moon for 
mother, and has it not been said that a man of genius takes the most 
after his mother?

The structural or symchronic approach which is so congenial to the new 
acoustic or electronic time, may well have had its low point in the 
heyday of 19th century industrialism.  It was, however, in the age of 
rationalism that the revolt against mere visual order began.  The Gothic 
revival in the 18th century was part of the then avant garde passion for 
the picturesque, and William Blake found an audile-tactile freedom in the 
"bounding line" of Gothic, but only repression in the austerities of 
visual classicism.  Almost parallel with the advance of visual technology 
in applied science and industry, there occurred the complementary 
romantic revolt into the acoustic order of intuition and involvement.

Locke and Hume had pushed visual order all the way to determinism, which 
must happen when visual sequence is confused with causality.  
Acoustically, causes and effects are "simultaneous" or, in the practical 
order, effects really precede causes.  That is to say, the ground must be 
prepared before the figure appears, it is natural to say "the time was 
ripe".  Lewis Carroll, a non-Euclidean geometer, worked on both sides of 
the looking glass simultaneously, and Samuel Butler, the biologist, 
explained apropos "the chicken and the egg" that "the chicken was the 
egg's idea for getting more eggs".  When Kant said that Hume had 
"awakened me from dogmatic slumber", he made the leap from the external 
visual world into the inner noumenal and acoustic world, into which Hegel 
followed him.  Aquinas had explained this paradoxical reversal of form 
somewhat earlier, when he noted that during the preceding time, when 
anything is moving to a new form, it appears under the opposite form:

		Et ideo in toto tempore praecedenti, quo aliquid movetur 
ad unam formam, subest formae oppositae;

							S.T., I-II, 113, 
7, ad. 5.

Things reverse form when pushed to limits of their potential.  The flip 
from visual to acoustic order, from rational connectedness to intuitive 
insight, came on the heels of the Gothic revival and seemed to prelude 
the advent of the electronic age of quantum mechanics and discontinuous 
matter and space.  What had been the pre- Raphaelite dream of 
multi-sensuous involvement in art and work and vocation was a Romantic 
figure against an industrial ground of fragmented work and lives.  In the 
electric age the receding hardware of the 19th century industrial age is 
now only a figure against our new "medieval" ground of multi-sensuous 
awareness.

Equally useful for approaching the great visual revolution which came to 
the Greeks, is the work of Eric A. Havelock.  Havelock contrasted the 
corporate mimesis involved in the performance of the Greek epics and 
drama with the individualist analysis that came with the innovation of 
the phonetic alphabet.

One way of looking at the emergence of the separate individual from the 
tribal matrix of oral society is to point to the unique character of the 
phonetic alphabet.  As Havelock shows:

		The Greek alphabet, when it took over the Phoenician 
signs, made the crucial decision of restricting the function of most of 
them to the symbolisation of non- sounds.  The syllables actually 
pronounced in any language were broken down and dissolved into abstract 
components.  These, so far as they were what we call consonants, were 
objects of intelligence, not units of actual speech.  At a stroke, by 
this analysis, the Greeks provided a table of elements of linguistic 
sound not only manageable because of its economy but, for the first time 
in the history of homo sapiens, also accurate.

The idea of uniformity and universality is latent in the visual faculty 
alone, for visual space is uniform, connected and static, whereas all 
other spaces are discontinuous and dynamic.  If the Greeks were moving 
from an acoustic to a visual order in the fifth century B.C., the 
twentieth century is witnessing the reverse process which is apparent in 
the new salience and relevance of the medieval forms

Listening:Journal of Religion and Culture. Vol 9 nos.1&2 1974, pages 9-27