The Canadian novelist and Lewis scholar to whom McLuhan wrote, in the mid-1960s, that what Lewis called "eye" he had been describing as tactile rather than visual. Bob uses the letter as a dating device: her 1965 doctorate on Lewis is what McLuhan was thinking about when the insight arrived, which fixes the tactile eye at 1965 — until Cameron reads out a 1959–60 passage saying the same thing, and the letter becomes evidence of a discovery McLuhan had already made and not announced. New to it — start with dialogue 70.
Across the dialogues
Enters as the addressee who dates the tactile-eye insight — the recipient whose letter lets Bob fix a year, and against whom Cameron's earlier 1959–60 passage then reads as a secret precedent
The letter's content, and the correction it performs on Lewis — the space/time antinomy Lewis built his career on rests on a sense he had misidentified.
"And McLuhan says, I just realized that what he called eye, he thought it was visual. But he was actually describing the eye as tactile. The tactile eye."
Watson's thesis is what Bob uses to date the insight, which is what makes Cameron's earlier passage a problem rather than a corroboration.
"thinking about Sheila Watson's PhD on Lewis. That happened in 65."
The letter is demoted from discovery to disclosure — McLuhan announcing to a correspondent something he had put in writing years earlier without flagging it.
"he tells Sheila he discovers about Lewis in 1965 or so, but no, he discovered it eight years before secretly."
Connections
The mid-1960s letter in which McLuhan reports realizing that what Lewis called "eye" was tactile, not visual.
Her 1965 PhD on Lewis is what Bob says McLuhan was thinking about when the tactile-eye insight arrived.