Prosthetics and Proxemics - Note No. 4
In a pre-Gutenburg Galaxy article, "James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial," McLuhan does nod towards Hegel. He likens a passage from Finnegans Wake to a gloss "in the style of Hegel's dialectic of the historic process". He quotes Joyce as writing: "From cenogenetic dichotomy through diagnostic conciliance to dynastic continuity." The style may be part Hegelian but it is fully Joycean satire. McLuhan misses any ironic intent for in his reading "Joyce uses the pun as a way of seeing the paradoxical exuberance of being through language." The Interior Landscape: The Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan 1943-1962, ed. by Eugene McNamara, (New York/Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1969), 46.