by St. Clair Carr,
literary editor, NEW IMPROVED HEAD
We've been promising for some time to post more of the reviews which were on the old site, and here at last is one of them. Not one word has been changed! Which explains the dated references in the first paragraph. The two books mentioned are three years older now. As are we all, if we've been lucky.An important new book has just been published about Marshall McLuhan, patron saint of this site and its companion, so of course NEW IMPROVED HEAD is going to review a twelve-year-old book about him instead. I have been reading this ancient book as part of the literary department's relentless quest to discover the purpose of biography.The department's most ambitious examination of this topic reached the conclusion that the function of biography could only be to entertain, but we remain open to arguments for the possibility that it has other functions. The National Post recently published a well-judged review by Robert Fulford of a work of literary biography, and Mr. Fulford's e-mail address appeared at the bottom of his column. I sent Mr. Fulford an e-mail asking him to recommend some exemplary works of literary biography, and he obligingly did.
One of the books Mr. Fulford recommended was Philip Marchand's Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger (Random House, 1989, 320 pp.; a revised edition was published in 1998 by MIT Press), and I chose to read it first. Mr. Marchand's book is certainly exemplary. He is evenhanded and honest, and, unlike some other biographers – I won't mention names, but I was thinking of the biographers of a certain man who loved his dog – he assesses the validity of assertions that people make about his subject.
Although Mr. Marchand is clearly one of McLuhan's admirers, he does not gloss over McLuhan's shortcomings. He also commendably refrains from making moral judgments about these shortcomings, or about McLuhan's virtues. His concern is not with the putative state of McLuhan's immortal soul but with the observed facts of McLuhan's life and how they relate to his ideas.
The book is organized around McLuhan's development of his theories, not only because they are the most important thing about McLuhan but also because he apparently wasn't much interested in anything else. He neglected his family, he neglected his students, he neglected pretty well everything but having fun with his ideas and impressing other people with them.
Mr. Marchand makes an exemplary effort to show how the events of McLuhan's life explain his thought. In the end, though, the chief influences on his thought turn out to be other academics, and an intellectual history would probably have explained his ideas as effectively as a complete biography.
For example, Mr. Marchand's revelation that McLuhan believed he was directly inspired by the Blessed Virgin Mary does not help me understand his ideas (nor, I should mention, does Mr. Marchand claim that it does). Mr. Marchand commendably refrains from the pop psychologizing which would contrive relationships between McLuhan's non-academic life and his ideas, even though lesser biographers could probably not have refrained from extensive speculation about his relationship with his parents.
Mr. Marchand also refrains from performing a McLuhanesque analysis of McLuhan, but he gives you the information with which to make one. Viewed as a medium of communication, McLuhan's message consisted of books, laughter, annoyance, and sensation. He wrote books, he loved to tell jokes, he annoyed his colleagues and many of his students, and he caused sensations. However, as Marchand observes, McLuhan's Centre for Culture and Technology produced little research and no graduates. His thought has no official place in the academy.
McLuhn also vanished quickly from the public mind. Perhaps one of the reasons for that is a change in the way in which we think about thinking. In McLuhan's day, many people thought that thinking was fun (this phenomenon is discussed in another article on this site). As Mr. Marchand makes clear, McLuhan really had fun thinking. He said outrageous things just to get people thinking, and he thought that most people were dull, complacent, and bored because they were not thinking clearly about the world.
These days, of course, thought is what you use to decide how to invest your retirement money. Thinking has become dead solemn, and eccentrics like McLuhan who refuse to be solemn just don't fit with the spirit of the times.
I started off by describing Mr. Marchand's book as exemplary. That is, it is honest, straightforward, and obviously the work of an accomplished critic. However, it is just these characteristics which confirm the literary department's doubts about biography.
Mr. Marchand is analytical, and his evaluation of the significance of the events in McLuhan's life is judicious. Because it is judicious, we quickly realize that most of the events of McLuhan's life tell us nothing useful about him. In the end most of the facts of his life are nothing more than data; they are not information. Mr. Marchand does give us useful information about McLuhan's life, but as I have noted the conventions of biography require him to include accounts of many events which are not informative.
Perhaps the most informative aspect of Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger is a non-biographical one: the contrast it offers between a disciplined critical mind – Mr. Marchand's – and an undisciplined one – McLuhan's. McLuhan had brilliant ideas, but he did not have the discipline to build a body of work adequate to perpetuate his thought after his death. He did not have the discipline to write a book as internally consistent and focussed as Mr. Marchand's. More people have disciplined critical minds than have brilliant ideas about the media, but for the brilliant ideas to be exploited to the full some discipline is necessary.
I do not want to leave the impression that Mr. Marchand has somehow failed. Marshall McLuhan got a good biographer. However, one of the messages of Mr. Marchand's biographical medium is a good understanding of the limitations of the form. Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger is well worth reading, but one of the reasons it is well worth reading is that the display of Mr. Marchand's critical ability makes up for the inevitable disappointment of biography.
Did McLuhan Have a Life? © John FitzGerald, 2000
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