Marshall McLuhan: Message Received

Douglas Coupland's new biography does an admirable job of navigating the tricky interrelationship between McLuhan’s life and work.

I was going to start this review by quoting Laurie Anderson saying that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” But then I started looking and realized that it could have actually been Martin Mull (probably) or Elvis Costello (maybe) who originally said it.

I was going to leap from there to talking about how Douglas Coupland’s new book, a sweet little biography of Marshall McLuhan, one in John Ralston Saul’s line of books about “extraordinary Canadians,” is an equally odd act – discussing the man of media using only one medium (and a hot one, at that).

But what’s perhaps more intriguing is that nobody’s sure about who originally said the architecture-music line. One of the things the web often seems to do is to make the original disappear, for all that Wikipedia tries to keep track of the world’s words. I would think that McLuhan wouldn’t be happy about the disappearance of the author, although Coupland might get a bang out of it.

And that is this biography’s greatest strength: the author holds a deep and clear affection and respect for McLuhan, no matter how outdated the man seems now.

Well, he may seem that way, but he isn’t. And this is something that Coupland’s adroit work addresses. Coupland believes McLuhan wasn’t just “Extraordinary,” as the Penguin Series has it, but was a genius.

If you’ve never read McLuhan, this is certainly an excellent place to start. It’s a solid combination of the man’s personal history and the history of his ideas. It skillfully threads its way through the potential disaster zone of the interrelationship between McLuhan’s life and work.

Rather than just laying out a few details about his subject and then moving on to the ideas, Coupland puts together a readable, holistic account of the kind McLuhan himself excelled at making. It becomes clear, for instance, why McLuhan’s strange and estranged family was so formative to not just his beliefs, but also his ambition.

We come to understand that there was a tremendous amount of chance involved in getting McLuhan to the University of Toronto where he would meet and be set alight by the ideas of Harold Innis, who is today more studied inside but ever more forgotten outside the academy than is McLuhan. Innis’s notions of the way Canadians formed a culture of communication organized around space and time (more of the latter for a culture like ours, focused on lightweight technologies that allow instantaneous communication), were central to McLuhan’s astonishing, staggering, often linguistically apoplectic utterances about the effects of technology on human beings.

Coupland is best when he puts the reader in specific cultural moments. Here his novelist’s talents come into play, as he poses McLuhan in the suffocating, hetero white guys only world of the late ’50s and early ’60s. Coupland’s prose snapshots of McLuhan in an airport, McLuhan in the lecture hall, McLuhan finally arrived in New York thanks to Tom Wolfe and a host of media corporations hoping to pick his unusual brain for details about how to make more bucks from advertising, are the work at its best.

Then there’s the dancing about architecture stuff that doesn’t quite click. There are pages of anagrams that are instantly tiresome, and two curious additions from Coupland’s upcoming novel. (Hey Douglas, get your novel out of McLuhan’s brain. I’m here for him, not you.) I suspect Coupland would have wanted to add documents as artifacts to his text: screenshots from ABEbooks or pieces of wordplay. But Penguin, or some other big bird, apparently sat on that.

On the other hand, there are Coupland’s insertions of himself as biographer into the text that are genuinely intriguing – notes about how McLuhan’s life helped Coupland understand his own, about physical trauma that befell both men and shaped the way they wrote (and still write).

The book is a good place to start reading about Marshall McLuhan and stop worrying about music, architecture, the web, and who said what first.