Essential McLuhan 190 In the visual theories of Ruskin as in the poetic theories of Walter Pater the passionate devotion to vivid detail goes with growing awareness that all the arts approach a condition of music; for in music all parts tend to be simultaneous in the sense that narrative progress in musical composition must constantly recapitulate and unify as much as a movie. Toward the end of the last century Theodore Lipps the psychologist was to demonstrate that the single clang of a bell contained all possible sonatas and musical forms. Anna Livia Plurabelle. As all kinds of information flowed from many quarters of the world in greater volume and at greater speed, so similar varieties of knowledge about the inner and outer life of man and society began to co-exist even in semi-literate minds. Biological metaphors of change and existence are necessary means of processing and unifying large bodies of data. Hippolyte Taine on one hand, Gustave Flaubert on the other, took up such biological concepts to revolutionize literary history and the novel. Taine undertook to explain the totality of literature in society as an organic and evolutionary process. His view of literature as an organic by-product of massive institutions and nationalisms lasted until recently as the basis for university study of vernacular literatures. The ordinary man finds a hero in Holmes and in his numerous descendants because the bureaucrat is always putting the finger on each of us in a way which makes us feel like Kafka characters—guilty but mystified. The Secretariat building at the U.N. is the biggest filing cabinet in the world. VERBI-VOCO-VISUAL 11 Highly literate people are those who have been read aloud to when young? The eye does not move evenly along the line save when retarded and guided by the ear? Ineluctable modality of the visible. There is an impression abroad that literary folk are fast readers. Wine tasters are not heavy drinkers. Literary people read slowly because they sample the complex dimensions and flavors of words and phrases. They strive for totality not lineality. They are well aware that the words on the page have to be decanted with the utmost skill. Those who imagine they read only for “content” are illusioned. As Bartlett showed in his classic Remembering, an act of attention to any situation is an act of rearranging all the members of that situation. Recall is also restructuring. Psychologists have shown that the eye does not apprehend while moving or while at rest. Rather there is a tremor while at rest which permits the encompassing of the object. The “reeling and writhing” of Lewis Carroll is close to the action of pre-typewriter reading and writing.