Marshall McLuhan and "Sir Patrick Spens"
Marshall McLuhan and "Sir Patrick Spens"
by Ronald J. Goba
The English Journal, Vol. 60, No. 1 (Jan., 1971), pp. 62-64
Marshall McLuhan and "Sir Patrick Spens"
Ronald J. Goba
Department of English
State College at Westfield
Westfield, Massachusetts
THE title of this essay is not meant to be cute, funny, or violent. On the contrary, the title is a deliberate attempt to underscore how relevant Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media thinking is to the high school English teacher confronted with the problem of teaching poetry, especially traditional poetry. "Sir Patrick Spens," a traditional Scottish poem, is a ballad. A ballad is a poem that tells a story. Marshall McLuhan's observations on "story-line" in an electronic age are apropos to how "Sir Patrick Spens" tells a story.
McLuhan tells the English teacher two things about the modern student that we must listen to. First, the "medium is the message." Even English teachers who will not accept this equation will at least, I think, accept the notion that the medium affects the message. After all, the story as novel and the "same" story as movie are not the same story. Second, electronic media have sharpened the student's perception of structure by deemphasizing the linear flow of information, by virtually eliminating the storyline and the plot. In Aspects of the Novel (A Harvest Book), E. M. Forster defines story as "a narrative of events arranged in time-sequence" and plot as "a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality" (p. 86). In a story, then, B follows A and C follows B because that's the way it happened. In a plot, B follows A because there is something that happens in A that causes B to happen. But, as McLuhan puts it, modern media do not characteristically or overtly communicate in this way. Easy Rider, The Strawberry Statement, and The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart, like a Bergman and Fellini movie or the typical "Then Came Bronson" TV show, are more casual than causal, more a recorded mixture of happenings than an "arranged" fit. Pop art, or its more "legitimate" counterpart, abstract art, has no explicit story-line. Walter Cronkite does not tell a sequential story of what happened in the world today but shows and tells a meticulously edited afghan of concrete events, many of which are narrated on but one broadcast. The New York Times does not report all the news that's fit to print, nor does it tell a continuous story of occurrences; instead, it blares headlines and bleats leaders and marches words in columns of prose that have small relationship to each other except that they may have occurred on the same day and appear on the same page or in the pages of the same newspaper. OR each of the examples cited, McLuhan argues that the absence of story- line enables the audience to focus upon the form or process or structure of experience and thereby to discover patterns and assign meanings to experience.
Perhaps it is farfetched to suggest, as McLuhan seems to, that, given modern media, we willingly seek to be so active and that, undistracted by someone else's '"story," we tend to create our own. But I think and feel McLuhan is exquisitely sane to argue that our perceptions are modified and conditioned by contemporary mediums and that, subsequently, our involvement with structure is now more direct and personal.
This news ought to be welcomed by English teachers, especially teachers of poetry, but I fear it is not. Maybe the challenge confounds us, but I doubt it. I think, instead, that McLuhan scares us into scepticism about the survival of the written word. I think McLuhan intimidates us to throw out the TV, to quarrel with the news, to picket the movies, to read old English lyrics by candlelight. And the pity is that McLuhan's observations about perception and structure and story-line are not unlike those admonitions of the literary critics and poets who insist that the paraphrase is not the poem or that the poem is what's missing in the translation or that there is no verbal substitute for the experience of the poem. The poem is the poem, not the "story" or meaning. Simply, we live in an age where howness is prior to whatness, that is, where structure determines meaning and where, finally, experience is all. And the process by which our age communicates itself to us is similar to the process by which poetry communicates. For example, let's look at how "Sir Patrick Spens" tells a "story," is an experience.
FOR me, "Sir Patrick Spens" is made up of five dramatic scenes. I have marked John Ciardi's modernization of the poem [1] accordingly.
I [The King sits in Dumferling town,
Drinking the blood-red wine:
"O where will I get good sailors
To sail this ship of mine?"
Up and spoke an old knight,
Sat at the King's right knee:
"Sir Patrick Spens is the best sailor
That sails upon the sea."
The King has written a broad letter,
And signed it with his hand,
And sent it to Sir Patrick Spens,
Was walking on the sand.]
II. [The first line that Sir Patrick read
A loud laugh laughed he:
The next line that Sir Patrick read,
A tear blinded his ee.
"O who is this has done this deed,
This ill deed done to me,
To send me out this time of the year
To sail upon the sea?
Make haste, make haste, my merry men all,
Our good ship sails at morn."
"O say not so, my master dear,
For I fear a deadly storm.
Late, late last night I saw the new moon
With the old moon in her arm,
And I fear, I fear, my master dear,
That we will come to harm."]
III. [Our Scots nobles were right loth
To wet their cork-heeled shoon;
But long ere all the play was played,
Their hats they swam aboon.]
IV. O long, long will their ladies sit
With their fans into their hand,
Before they see Sir Patrick Spens
Come sailing to the land.
O long, long will the ladies stand
With their gold combs in their hair,
Waiting for their own dear lords,
For they'll see them no mair.]
V [Half-o'er, half-o'er to Abadour
'Tis fifty fathoms deep,
And there lies good Sir Patrick Spens
With the Scots lords at his feet.]
Each scene, as marked, tells a "story," but there is no continuous, linear, sequential "story-line." The poem is episodic. The structure dominates. And the "story" of each scene and of the whole is discerned exclusively in the structure, in the howness, in the process itself. Taking the poem as an act of communication, the medium, the poem itself, not the "story," is the message.
EVEN a cursory look at the transitions will support this claim. For example, in Scene I the King, in his typical regal setting, questions where he can get a good sailor, learns of Sir Patrick Spens, and writes an official letter (we later learn) ordering him to take a trip. The transition between line 11 and line 12 is abrupt and typically poetic. Line 12 serves line 11 as its verb and serves Scene II as its physical locale. But the transition here, as throughout the poem, is not discursive. The details are vivid, but the "facts" are shown, not told. The King is seen and heard in his court, drinking blood-red wine, sending orders at ease. Sir Patrick Spens is seen and heard walking the beach, laughing derisively at the witless order, and dutifully obeying it. The contrast between the King and Sir Patrick is intense, precisely because it is perceived without verbal interference. It is drama, not narration. It is presentational, not discursive. And the irony is: by indirection, by the absence of "story-line," it is simply more direct. And the point is: as McLuhan puts it, this mode of communication is central to the electronic age. There are other comparable examples of such implicit explicitness in the poem.
To name a few: the "weather sign" image where the affectionateness ironically turns into disaster; the Scottish lords, reluctant to get their feet wet, drown; the ladies waiting with the golden combs wait in vain; the tragic consequences that result when obedience and loyalty distort knowledge. All these images and ironies and themes are, I think and feel, in the poem. And, as McLuhan says, I perceive them directly, precisely because there is very little, if any, overt "story-line." Simply, I see and feel them in the very structure of the poem. The poem is re-con-structured, in me.
The conclusion I am compelled to offer is that only English teachers who wish to interfere with the impact of a poem (a) would teach poems that so require their interference that they therefore have little affective value for the students, or (b) would teach poems as if Marshall McLuhan, and, to some degree-, Aristotle, and to a greater degree than Aristotle, Korzybski, had not offered them a more effective, efficient, and "natural" way.
Footnote:
1. John Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean? (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1959). Reprinted by permission