Ong published a perceptive review of McLuhan's experimental book in the Jesuit-sponsored semi-popular magazine America, volume 107, number 24 (September 15, 1962): pages 743, 747.
Subsequently, Ong included McLuhan's experimental book in his lengthy scholarly article "Recent Studies in the English Renaissance" in the journal Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, volume 4 (1964): pages 163-194. In it, Ong's discussion of literature in print culture 1.0 as well as literary scholarship that is worth quoting at length and pondering:
"Marshall McLuhan's remarkable work, The Gutenberg Galaxy, aptly styled an 'anti-book' by one reviewer, opens other sweeping perspectives as it moves in its announced 'mosaic' fashion through a great many ages. Its axis, however, is the Renaissance, for, as its subtitle indicates, it is concerned with 'the making of typographic man.' English Renaissance figures commanding special attention include St. Thomas More, Sir Francis Bacon, Marlowe, Nashe (McLuhan finished his own doctoral dissertation on Nashe at Cambridge University at the outbreak of World War II), and Shakespeare. Working out from this axis, Professor McLuhan treats the most widespread cultural phenomena in terms of phonetic or alphabetic literacy, tracing detribalization of man and the reconstitution of the collective unconscious through the successive shift in the media of communication. The successively dominant media -- oral [oral culture 1.0], chirographic, typographic [print culture 1.0, including eventually literary modernism], and now electronic [oral culture 2.0] -- are related to another as galaxy to galaxy; when a galaxy moves into the scene, the organization of the one or ones earlier in possession is permanently modified [as oral culture 2.0 was modifying print culture 1.0 in the 1960s, resulting subsequently in print culture 2.0 emerging]. Professor McLuhan's discussion engages a great many matters, including the history of ideas, philosophy, theology, Americanology, sociology, psychology, literary history, literary interpretation, and much else. The effect of his discussion is not merely to illuminate such 'fields' but to call up for inspection the premises and historical conditions which have brought our attention to the foci which such terms register. The effect of The Gutenberg Galaxy on literature is drastic: like some few other works today, it forces one to think about the very nature of literature as literature, that is, about the nature of written expression which have exclusively occupied man for all but the tiniest fraction of his history. The assumption that in teaching literature one is teaching something coeval with the human race is simply false, although it is true that literature has some relationship (which we do not as yet very well understand) to primary oral performance (which should not be thought of as 'oral literature' any more than a horse should be thought of as an automobile without wheel).
"I venture to close this account [Ong continues] of recent Renaissance studies with The Gutenberg Galaxy because the new perspectives which it opens regarding the relationship of literature to the whole of human culture are badly needed. Literary scholarship, necessarily involved in more and more detail, as this year's harvest of English Renaissance material alone makes clear, must of course justify this involvement by continued return to the literary works themselves on which the detail bears. But this return is not enough. If scholarship cannot rest on a limitless sequence of details, neither can it rest on a limitless sequence of great aesthetic moments. It [literary scholarship] calls for some kind of over-all wisdom, if not as a prerequisite at least as outcome.
"'Wisdom is reflective,' [Ong continues] and the state of affairs today intensifies reflection in two ways, among others. First, there is more to reflect on, immeasurably more than earlier ages have known, because of the unprecedented accumulation of information and scholarship to which we are heir and which we are augmenting at always accelerating speeds. Secondly, there is an awareness of the historical dimension of the accumulation. Because we know what we do of the history of literature and scholarship, we not only savor the knowledge which we have but we also sense the trajectory along which we are moving. We thus need an account not only of literature in a static sense, but also of literature in its patterned, evolutionary movements [such as Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg's account in their book The Nature of Narrative (Oxford University Press, 1966)]: Where has it been and where is it going? We need a similar account of scholarship: Where has it been and where is it going? The development of scholarship is influenced by the development of literature, but does not parallel it: there has always been contemporary literature, but no previous culture has been so deeply involved with its own contemporary literature on reflective, scholarly grounds as is our own. Under these circumstances, we need more efforts like The Gutenberg Galaxy, enabling us to see both literature and the study of literature, together with a great many other things, in terms of the total venture of mankind" (pages 193-194).
Ong's own body of scholarly work further enable us to see humankind's total venture.
In a discussion note in his 1967 encyclopedia article about the written transmission of literature, Ong acknowledges that McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy is flawed in certain ways: Ong says there, "McLuhan gives a racy survey, indifferent to some scholarly detail, but uniquely valuable in suggesting the sweep and depth of the cultural and psychological changes entailed in the passage from illiteracy to print and beyond." So Ong does not throw out the baby with the bath water.
Nevertheless, conventional literary critics such as Frank Kermode contributed to the tsunami of a backlash among conventional academics against McLuhan's books The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964). Kermode was the editor of the Modern Masters book series in which Jonathan Miller published his book Marshall McLuhan (1971). The backlash against McLuhan parallels the anti-60s backlash of conservatives, mentioned above.
Nevertheless, after McLuhan's death in 1980, Ong published a ringing tribute to McLuhan for being thought-provoking in an informed way: "McLuhan as Teacher: The Future is a Thing of the Past" in the Journal of Communication, volume 31, number 3 (Summer 1981): pages 129-135.
For further reading about Ong and McLuhan, see the revised and expanded edition of my book-length study of Ong's thought, Walter Ong's Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication (New York: Hampton Press, 2015), and my lengthy introduction to the 600-page anthology titled An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry, edited by me and Paul A. Soukup (Hampton Press, 2002).
In addition, drawing on McLuhan's thought, Beatrice Bruteau (1930-2014; Ph.D. in philosophy, 1969, Fordham University [a Jesuit university]) distinguishes the paleo-feminine era in the human psyche and the new feminine era. In effect, she sees the paleo-feminine era in the human psyche as manifesting in oral culture 1.0, and the new feminine era in the human psyche in Western culture as manifesting in oral culture 2.0. However, in my estimate, the new feminine era in the human psyche in Western culture manifested in the Romantic Movement, but it is further manifesting in our contemporary oral culture 2.0 in Western culture. Bruteau also incorporates McLuhan's thought, in a different way, in her book The Psychic Grid: How We Create the World We Know (Wheaton, IL; and London: Theosophical Publishing House, 1979). Your guess is as good as mine as to why Bruteau was able to use McLuhan's thought creatively, when so many stodgy academics reacted to his thought with hostility.
Bruteau's article "Neo-Feminism and the Next Revolution of Consciousness" appears in the journal Cross Currents, volume 27 (1977): pages 170-182.
What Bruteau refers to as neo-feminism in the psyche helps explain the intensity of conservatives' anti-60s fervor directed at Hillary Rodham Clinton. Her political journey in the 1960s and 1970s and subsequently represents one woman's inner struggle with the neo-feminism emerging in her psyche, as it is also emerging in the psyches of other women and men in our contemporary Western culture as a result of our cultural conditioning by communications media that accentuate sound -- oral culture 2.0.
Even so, Bottum's "The Novel as Protestant Art" suggests that at least one conservative American Catholic has now gained enough distance to move in the revolutionary direction that Ong and McLuhan moved in in their publications about print culture 1.0. As a thought experiment, we may wonder what would happen if Bottum and other conservative American Catholics today were to grasp the import of Ong's and McLuhan's publications about print culture 1.0. Would they become as creative as Bruteau became?
Similarly, we may wonder more broadly about American conservatives. No doubt their anti-60s rhetoric expresses hostility. But if they were to grasp the import of Ong's and McLuhan's publications about print culture 1.0 and oral culture 2.0, would they perhaps temper their anti-60s fervor?
But what about progressives and liberals? If they were to grasp the import of Ong's and McLuhan's publications about print culture 1.0, would they be as creative as Bruteau in expressing oral culture and consciousness 2.0?
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