Coupland's McLuhan

'Marshall McLuhan' by Douglas Coupland. With an introduction by John Ralston Saul. Extraordinary Canadians Series. Penguin Canada. Toronto 2009.249pp.


    In l967 the face of Marshall McLuhan the University of Toronto English professor seemed to be everywhere. The Manotoban-born McLuhan, now father of five children and 57 ytears old, had his face platered on the cover of 'Newsweek', was a guest on one t.v. show after another, sat in on numerous seminars, and flew off to faraway conferences on the future, pocketting sometimes $5,000 a pop. [To-day that would be about $35,000].
     His books 'The Gutenberg Galaxy' and 'Understanding Media' were darn hard to read. But many people bought them and scoured their pages to find out why groups like gays, hippies, anti-war protestors, black power advocates and Quebec separatists had suddenly appeared on the scene.
     And McLuhan's phrases like 'The medium is the message; and 'Global village' turned up in many conversations.
    Ten years later, say 1978, McLuhan seemed to have vanished. He died in l980, after a stroke had rendered this great if overbearing conversationalist nearly speechless.
    Douglas Coupland is on of Canada's fine novelists whose novels have definittely been influenced by television. In this biography of McLuhan, he sets out the main points of McLuhan's life and theories.
   Non-literate societies or tribal societies lived in what McLuhan called 'acoustic space'. Phonetic spech or words wiped out or chipped away at  acoustic space. Then according to McLuhan, along came the printing press which helped produce the Industrial Revolution, the middle class, nationlism and capitalism In short the 19th centiry was the heyday of mechanical man.
     But with the rise of the telegraph came electronic media, which McLuhan saw as extensions of the human nervous system.
     "The punchline - and what made Marshall a star," writes Coupland, "was that TV, as well as future technologies would possesss the ability to retribalize man back to his oral and tribal roots."
    So McLuhan or 'Marshall' as Coupland and others call him, was a grand theorist some of whose predictions came true. Other of his insights didn't. But Coupland is fair tio McLuhan.
     Coupland stresses the great influence that McLuhan's motherr Elsie had on him. This obviously led Marshall to stress how what he thought was the emasculating influence of women in modern North America. McLuhan was politically incorrect on many issues.
   Coupland also points out how conservative McLuhan was. Marshall hung out with writer and attist Wyndham Lewis whose l930's book 'Hitler' praised the Nazi dictator. Another pal of Marshall's was Ezra Pound, the great American poet. Pound issued pro-fascist and anti-American rants right in the middle of world war two, while based in fascist Italy.
   Coupland is also funny and creative. He brings back the eraly 1960's in a way that no one elese could.
     Last, he shows that mcLuhan was not an easy m,an to get on with. "He was tangenital and self-contradictory," Coupland says of McLuhan, "and could really piss people off." Many of his fellow Uof T English professors hated McLuhan.
      The McLuhan era ended in any case in l967 or 1968. mcLuhan underwent brain surgery in late l967 for a massive brain tumour. He recovered but never completely. Also the high hopes of the 1960's, which McLuhan had never really shared, fell victim to assasinations, violence, and the endless Vietnam War.
      By l973 or so, McLuhan was a non-person in the media. Yet the rise of the personal computer and the world-wide Web has again raised his profile from the dead. Coupland has written a witty , interesting book on one of Canada's oustandind Canadians. And John Ralston saul, should be thanked for overseeing  the series of books on extraordinary Canadians. McLuhan was dedfinitely  an extraordinary person.