By Douglas Coupland
Viking Canada, 2010
“Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.”
- Marshall McLuhan
Recognize that quotation? I didn’t think so. There’s a good likelihood that even acolytes won’t know it. There are galaxies surrounding Marshall McLuhan that the average person won’t know about. He was a clever wordsmith who came up with dozens of memorable aphorisms in his lifetime (including the ubiquitous “the medium is the message” and “the global village”). His biographer, Vancouver-based writer/artist Douglas Coupland, is also credited with coining a couple of iconic expressions, including “McJobs” and “Generation X” (from Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, 1991). So perhaps it’s appropriate that he be the author in this edition of the series on “Extraordinary Canadians.”
Let me lose the reviewers normal stance of impartiality – and admit I’m slightly star-struck by both. They are cultural rock stars, who provoke and challenge in their writing and public discourse on the topics of identity, culture, media, and technology. I admit, as a Gen X-er and child of the 70s and 80s that I know far more about Coupland. This book is playful and strays from strict biography, but Coupand admits as much, suggesting early on that there are thicker tomes that provide a better overview of the life of McLuhan. The book however is investigative and entertaining, and for those interested in the lives and thoughts of both men, it is well worth checking out.
McLuhan is heralded as a kind of early communications prophet, and is best known for expressions which were coined decades ago but find a particular prescient resonance in the age of globalization and the Internet. It is noteworthy to acknowledge that writer Wyndham Lewis, a contemporary, may have had an influence on Marshall and the “medium is the message” expression. In his America and Cosmic Man Lewis discussed the beginnings of mass communications shrinking the world in the early twentieth century, when he wrote, “…the earth has become one big village, with telephones laid on from one end to the other.” McLuhan was also obsessed with Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, which his son Eric says may contain a similar notion. Edgar Allen Poe’s short-story “A Descent into the Maelstrom” was highly influential and he drew on the ideas and writing of colleagues at U of T (including Harold Innis, of whom McLuhan wrote: ”I am pleased to think of my own book The Gutenberg Galaxy as a footnote to the observations of Innis on the subject of the psychic and social consequences, first of writing then of printing”).
Coupland’s approach to researching and writing the book says a lot about the age we live in now. Numerous factoids are sourced from websites. References come from modern day online resources including: AbeBooks, Amazon, Google, MapQuest, Wikipedia, Yahoo! and YouTube. This Internet-sourced padding contains some funny nuggets (online name generators produce hilarious results). On the serious side of the equation, this is a literary and intellectual match made in heaven; Coupland is clearly engaged with his subject and works hard to elaborate on a range of subjects, from McLuhan’s family life to the vast range of the icon’s quirks and ideas.
Two central aspects which are brought to light (and surprised me) are Marshall’s cautionary attitude toward technology and the media, and his sense of propriety and religious belief. Marshall was at once many disparate things. He was rebellious but conservative, boring but funny; in short, he was a complex individual. Marshall was an often aloof, socially awkward man who knew how to work a crowd and tap into the popular culture of the day. He was immensely quotable and loved to talk. TV transmissions captured his effervescent tongue and relayed that message to the mass. But this is where a myth became distorted. McLuhan feared where technology might lead us, and his speeches often warned society of the perils of the oncoming information age. Another surprising aspect Coupland discusses is McLuhan’s conversion to Christianity. Marshall became a devout Catholic in mid-life. It occurred while studying at Cambridge and over many phases of his career influenced his choice of teaching venues, including his eventual arrival at St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto.
Here’s an illuminating comment about McLuhan’s world view from an interview with Coupland: “He hated technology. He hated the twentieth century. He would be appalled by the twenty-first century. There was one brief little moment – I think it was around fifty-nine or sixty – when he thought things might work out, but no, no, no, his early evangelical roots primed him for a readiness to believe in apocalypse of some sort. Also, he was deeply religious. He just thought the earth was a stepping-stone to something eternal. ” (Link to source, “Canadian Interviews,” at end of review).
The book is not a comprehensive overview of his life, but a solid exploration of the academic trail that led McLuhan from Edmonton to the University of Manitoba, to Cambridge, and then to teaching stints in the American Midwest (University of Wisconsin, St. Louis), and finally the University of Toronto, where he spent the latter part of his career. His university days began with English Literature studies and then blossomed into serious analysis of communications and mass media. Coupland outlines the early years of Marshall’s life, where his mother had an enormous influence, and his adult family life with wife Corrine and their six children.
I think I learned a great deal from this easy-reading, entertaining book but I am left with a sense of sadness. For the great sense of humour Coupland imbues the writing with, there are amazingly touching moments too. When McLuhan was struck down with a stroke and left without that fabulously inventive and witty tongue, a light was snuffed which never returned. I have provided a link to the full excerpt on this calamitous last year of his life at the end of this review. Here is its conclusion:
“On Sept. 26, 1979, he suffered a catastrophic stroke in his office. Marshall’s stroke left him unable to read, write, or speak. He could understand conversations but couldn’t participate verbally. The arteries that had blessed him had also cursed him. And, as happens with stroke victims, some verbal function remained: he could still sing hymns, and he was left with one signature phrase he could use when trying to speak. In his case, it was “Oh boy!”
Oh, the irony for Marshall. Words—the sound of them, the shape of their letter forms, their intricate relationship to each other, a relationship rendered industrial and homogenized by the printing press—were suddenly nothing but sounds with meaning, prehistoric noises with no means of being recorded or passed forward.
Well-meaning friends and family tried to retrain Marshall to read, but the neural damage was structural and too great. Devices like flash cards and Speak & Spell toys were tried, but to no avail. What seemed to make him happiest was to have visitors and friends come to read to him.”
One summer day during the Contact photography festival I ventured to the old “coach house,” in a hidden corner at U of T, where McLuhan had worked in his last vital years. The site was a multimedia art installation for a couple of weeks. As I wandered around the small decrepit building and peered inside to view the ghostly projected images inside, I got a sense of remoteness and isolation. At one point, before McLuhan died, and shortly after one of his illnesses, his absence from these offices has precipitated the readying of his files for the trash (or so McLuhan had perceived it). In recent years, The Centre for Culture and Technology has seen years of decline and neglect and even the academic programs have sadly lost the “McLuhan” naming and branding, and now fall under the blander moniker “Coach House Institute.” It falls to series like “Extraordinary Canadians” and writers like Coupland to keep Mcluhan’s name and ideas alive. And a job well-done on that front.
Read “Inside McLuhan’s Head,” a short but highly moving book excerpt from Maclean’s Magazine
Quote from a lengthy interview with Douglas Coupland at Canadian Interviews
