Volume 10, Number 5 · March 14, 1968
Free Fall
By Frank Kermode
The Presence of the Word
by Walter J. Ong S.J.
Yale, 360 pp., $6.95
Now that the other eminent Catholic-electronic prophet, Marshall McLuhan, seems to have gone into orbit with his fantasy-probes, we shall all no doubt need to attend more closely to Fr. Ong, who says so many of the same things but appears to say them more judiciously. He is a good typographical man—encyclopaedic, repetitive, and committed to the past, not only as scholar but as theologian. He makes an occasional bow to his cool colleague, whose account of the new oral culture he echoes, but he appears to be of the opinion that if you have a theory you should be willing to defend it and produce evidence; he too says very extraordinary things but assumes that he has to vouch for them, and allow you to agree or disagree. I don't know what McLuhan would say about the more theological formulations of Ong, but in so far as he spells out the argument about the periodic modification of the sensory apparatus from oral to visual etc., it seems clear that any critique of Ong is substantially one of McLuhan also, a momentous consequence that will be in everybody's mind as he toils through these pages.
Review, 3536 words
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