The Victorian novelist and poet, subject of McLuhan's 1933 University of Manitoba MA thesis. He surfaces here as the buried source of one of McLuhan's most compressed late phrases — "all compact." Cameron shows that the hundred-page thesis quotes a single Meredith passage — on passing "the clashing rocks" of asceticism and sensuality, "all compact of human destiny" — five times, so that when McLuhan later wrote "the bomb is the university all compact" he was quoting himself across thirty years. New to it — start with dialogue 47.
Across the dialogues
Enters as the buried source of "all compact" — the Victorian novelist McLuhan quoted five times in his 1933 MA thesis and, decades on, was quoting himself from when he called the bomb "the university all compact"
The thesis's obsessive core — in a work "only 100 pages long," McLuhan returns to a single Meredith passage five times, the repetition that marks it as the seed he would carry for decades.
"He quotes one passage from Meredith five times in that short work."
What the Meredith passage says — the attempt to pass "the clashing rocks" between asceticism and sensuality, which Bob names Scylla and Charybdis, "all compact of human destiny."
"asceticism on the one hand and sensuality on the other."
The payoff Cameron draws — "the bomb is the university all compact" is not a fresh coinage but McLuhan quoting his own 1933 thesis, thirty years of thought folded into two words.
"McLuhan is quoting himself from 30 years earlier when he uses the phrase all compact."
Connections
The subject of McLuhan's 1933 MA thesis; the buried source of the phrase "all compact."