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The Virtual Marshall McLuhan

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Biographies and accounts of the famous possess a certain fascination. Sometimes even flashes of illumination. But most are based on second-hand knowledge of authors attracted to the famous after attainment of fame. This is often too late because fame has a way of creating a type of trickster mythology obscuring its subject.

A rare few biographies are written by those who had close friendships with the famous before the hazy mythology of fame enveloped their subject. Here are the famous before they were "hijacked" and packaged by icon-making PR handlers, before their entrance onto world stages or tabloid pages. Reading these accounts is somewhat like watching scratchy old home movies that peek into the shadowy early years before later lives were illuminated by the bright flashes of the paparazzi cameras. These stories are often the most interesting, the most enlightening, the most instructive, and too, the most paradoxical and ambiguous.

These thoughts come to mind in reading the brilliant and fascinating book The Virtual Marshall McLuhan by Donald Theall professor emeritus, former president of Trent University and author of The Medium Is the Rear View Mirror. In the thick mythological haze which particularly surrounds the McLuhan legend, it is indeed a rare and insightful friendship.

With this in mind, Theall's book is still a funny hybrid genre not easy to place in traditional categories. Andrew Potter, a reporter for the Canadian National Post says it well in his March 24, 2001 review of the book "Rescuing McLuhan." Potter writes Theall's book "is not a biography of McLuhan, nor is it an application or elaboration of his views. It is perhaps best understood as an exercise in retrieval, an attempt to rescue McLuhan from McLuhanism and McLuhanites, from those who would portray him as the patron saint of the new corporate technotopia as well as from those...who would read him as an early voice in the wilderness, warning of civilization's demise."

* * *

In the summer of 1950, Donald Theall arrived at the University of Toronto as a graduate student. The director of Graduate Studies of the English Department attempted to warn Theall against doing a doctoral degree with an avant-garde, unorthodox professor at the University named Marshall McLuhan.

But Theall was not persuaded and decided to stay in Toronto to study under the iconoclastic professor rather than return to Yale. Theall writes "I felt that between the historically oriented University of Toronto Department of English and the avant-garde McLuhan I was obtaining a badly needed awareness of the study of literature in its historical context as well as within a new, broadly interdisciplinary context."

McLuhan embedded his teaching in literary history but also in the history of grammar, logic, rhetoric, and early theories of education. It was a history of inter-relationships between literature, the arts, and the everyday culture. Certainly a rare combination at the time and one that threatened the rather insular perspective of the English Department at the University of Toronto. When he arrived, McLuhan was the only lay member of the English Department, which primarily consisted of a handful of priests and three nuns.

The Marshall McLuhan that Donald Theall and his new bride Joan met in 1950 was a "charming, good looking, witty, fun-loving, highly intelligent devotee to the world of letters and traditional arts." More significant for what has come to be, notes Theall, McLuhan was a technophobe who often despised technology. In 1950 he did not own an automobile or a vacuum cleaner. And he did not type but used pen and ink and stored his notes in small boxes that had originally contained Laura Secord chocolates.

Toronto in the 50s personified McLuhan's technophobia. It was a boring, forgotten city of three-quarters of a million people. Theall calls it an "overgrown village" adding it was a "somewhat idyllic...still semi-colonial, marginally contemporary city...a sedate, stuffy city where on Sundays the major department store drew curtains across its windows, stores did not sell cigarettes, and people could not have wine or other alcoholic beverages with a restaurant meal ... There was no television; the only radio network, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)...was government owned."

Another close friend and collaborator of McLuhan in Toronto of the 50s was Edmund "Ted" Carpenter. In his short enlightening McLuhan memoir "That Not-So-Silent Sea" in the Appendix of Theall's book, Edmund Carpenter remembers Toronto as a "depressing" place, "not a joyous place at all." It had a meanness which was visible everywhere - in its architecture, its food. McLuhan once described it to Carpenter as the "cringing, flunkey spirit of Canadian culture" and "its servant quarter snobbishness." Leopold Infeld, one of Carpenter's friends, suggested it was "perhaps the finest city in which to die, especially on Sunday afternoon when the transition between life and death would be continuous, painless and scarcely noticeable."

* * *

Theall's book is a master memoir of a time and a person that no other McLuhan biographer can come close to. It is not an easy book and those interested in reading a McLuhan for Dummies are advised to steer clear of this book. But this book is the real thing. I wrote a 6,000 word review of the book which was scheduled for publication in a publication that went out of business. I would be happy to send this review to anyone if they simply write me at jfraim@symbolism.org. Judge for yourself about Donald Theall's book. For myself, it is a masterpiece from the apprentice of the master.

Come on now, the title of the earlier review tells it all, except that Donald Theall isn't the one involved in the academic infighting.

It is also factually incorrect, since the entire sweep of McLuhan's work is more than amply covered in Theall's excellent biography.

As McLuhan's first PhD student Theall (along with McLuhan's first "partner" Ted Carpenter) presents a careful and nuanced perspective on the life and influences of McLuhan -- a rarity in a world where McLuhan has been used for everything short of selling pipe tobacco.

Let those who were outside McLuhan's life fight over him, Theall (and Carpenter) are clearly insiders and they give us the sharpest insight yet into the life of this towering intellect.

Biographies and accounts of the famous possess a certain fascination. Sometimes even flashes of illumination. But most are based on second-hand knowledge of authors attracted to the famous after attainment of fame. This is often too late because fame has a way of creating a type of trickster mythology obscuring its subject.

A rare few biographies are written by those who had close friendships with the famous before the hazy mythology of fame enveloped their subject. Here are the famous before they were "hijacked" and packaged by icon-making PR handlers, before their entrance onto world stages or tabloid pages. Reading these accounts is somewhat like watching scratchy old home movies that peek into the shadowy early years before later lives were illuminated by the bright flashes of the paparazzi cameras. These stories are often the most interesting, the most enlightening, the most instructive, and too, the most paradoxical and ambiguous.

These thoughts come to mind in reading the brilliant and fascinating book The Virtual Marshall McLuhan by Donald Theall professor emeritus, former president of Trent University and author of The Medium Is the Rear View Mirror. In the thick mythological haze which particularly surrounds the McLuhan legend, it is indeed a rare and insightful friendship.

With this in mind, Theall's book is still a funny hybrid genre not easy to place in traditional categories. Andrew Potter, a reporter for the Canadian National Post says it well in his March 24, 2001 review of the book "Rescuing McLuhan." Potter writes Theall's book "is not a biography of McLuhan, nor is it an application or elaboration of his views. It is perhaps best understood as an exercise in retrieval, an attempt to rescue McLuhan from McLuhanism and McLuhanites, from those who would portray him as the patron saint of the new corporate technotopia as well as from those...who would read him as an early voice in the wilderness, warning of civilization's demise."

* * *

In the summer of 1950, Donald Theall arrived at the University of Toronto as a graduate student. The director of Graduate Studies of the English Department attempted to warn Theall against doing a doctoral degree with an avant-garde, unorthodox professor at the University named Marshall McLuhan.

But Theall was not persuaded and decided to stay in Toronto to study under the iconoclastic professor rather than return to Yale. Theall writes "I felt that between the historically oriented University of Toronto Department of English and the avant-garde McLuhan I was obtaining a badly needed awareness of the study of literature in its historical context as well as within a new, broadly interdisciplinary context."

McLuhan embedded his teaching in literary history but also in the history of grammar, logic, rhetoric, and early theories of education. It was a history of inter-relationships between literature, the arts, and the everyday culture. Certainly a rare combination at the time and one that threatened the rather insular perspective of the English Department at the University of Toronto. When he arrived, McLuhan was the only lay member of the English Department, which primarily consisted of a handful of priests and three nuns.

The Marshall McLuhan that Donald Theall and his new bride Joan met in 1950 was a "charming, good looking, witty, fun-loving, highly intelligent devotee to the world of letters and traditional arts." More significant for what has come to be, notes Theall, McLuhan was a technophobe who often despised technology. In 1950 he did not own an automobile or a vacuum cleaner. And he did not type but used pen and ink and stored his notes in small boxes that had originally contained Laura Secord chocolates.

Toronto in the 50s personified McLuhan's technophobia. It was a boring, forgotten city of three-quarters of a million people. Theall calls it an "overgrown village" adding it was a "somewhat idyllic...still semi-colonial, marginally contemporary city...a sedate, stuffy city where on Sundays the major department store drew curtains across its windows, stores did not sell cigarettes, and people could not have wine or other alcoholic beverages with a restaurant meal ... There was no television; the only radio network, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)...was government owned."

Another close friend and collaborator of McLuhan in Toronto of the 50s was Edmund "Ted" Carpenter. In his short enlightening McLuhan memoir "That Not-So-Silent Sea" in the Appendix of Theall's book, Edmund Carpenter remembers Toronto as a "depressing" place, "not a joyous place at all." It had a meanness which was visible everywhere - in its architecture, its food. McLuhan once described it to Carpenter as the "cringing, flunkey spirit of Canadian culture" and "its servant quarter snobbishness." Leopold Infeld, one of Carpenter's friends, suggested it was "perhaps the finest city in which to die, especially on Sunday afternoon when the transition between life and death would be continuous, painless and scarcely noticeable."

* * *

Theall's book is a master memoir of a time and a person that no other McLuhan biographer can come close to. It is not an easy book and those interested in reading a McLuhan for Dummies are advised to steer clear of this book. But this book is the real thing... Judge for yourself about Donald Theall's book. For myself, it is a masterpiece from the apprentice of the master.

A Review
The Virtual Marshall McLuhan, Donald F. Theall
McGill-Queens University Press, 305 pp.
(with a historical appendix by Edmund Carpenter)

Everything about Marshall McLuhan is paradoxical. He knew this about himself and made much of it as an attention-getting strategy even to the point of appearing to be a trickster, an artist of sorts. Like a Dadaist or Surrealist, who were antagonistic toward middle class society in the avant garde Bohemian tradition of épater-le-bourgeois common to anyone wanting to gain broad attention, McLuhan `twitched the burghers' of establishment values far and wide almost globally. McLuhan noticed first and best how electric process was changing society and individuals.
I know of no one who understands McLuhan's electric and eclectic vision better than Donald Theall. As McLuhan's first and most important Ph.D. student and close associate from 1950-54, Theall was let in on the complex developments that produced the Explorations Group, the Ford Foundation study that led to Understanding Media, and the establishment of Toronto's Centre for Culture and Technology in the early sixties. Theall was privy to the developing relations between Harold Innis, Tom Easterbrook, Edmund Carpenter, Dorothy Lee and the rest of this historically significant association.
A true understanding of the coherence of McLuhan's vision is extremely rare. Theall brilliantly explains McLuhan's , unseemly, popularity with his understanding of the early virtualizing role of the intellectual in the electronic age:

Speaking about some remarks of the classical eighteenth-century father of capitalist economics, Adam Smith, ... McLuhan argues: "in this passage Smith does seem to sense that the new role of the intellectual is to tap the collective consciousness of `the vast multitudes that labour.' That is to say, the intellectual is no longer to direct individual perception and judgment but to explore and to communicate the massive unconscious of collective man. The intellectual is merely cast in the role of a primitive seer, vates or hero incongruously peddling his discoveries in a commercial market. (Theall. 208)

This is an example of the deep understanding that only Theall can bring to McLuhan's work. After McLuhan has described himself, to Ezra Pound, as "an intellectual thug,"

and gives his reason for being satirical and disinterested in society: "Everyman of goodwill is the enemy of society." (McLuhan, 1962, 269) This seems a deeply conservative view of one's fellow citizens - original sin as politics.
Theall sees McLuhan as a new kind of artist, who produces what Theall calls the "essai concrete," a poetic prose that captures the multiplexed meanings of the electric worldview. McLuhan , like Joyce is constantly punning - a strategy for multiplying meanings.. He was never definite or linear like a list of either/or oppositions (even though he was maddeningly dichotomous in some of his statements), so much as dedicated to a both/and approach to events - medium and message together.
Theall, is one of the few who know the deep scholarly background to McLuhan's critique of contemporary culture and he is incisive in his understanding of McLuhan's profound ambivalence in the face of traditional intellectual categories. McLuhan seems neither moralizing conservative nor countercultural guru. Being partly both, he transcended both in his electric odyssey, and toys with post-modernism by becoming beyond himself a virtual icon.
Theall, and very few others, perceives the darker side of McLuhan, his arcane knowledge which derives from his Cambridge Ph.D. studies in the hermetic tradition of the early grammarians - characters from Cicero to Blake through Cornelius Agrippa and Joachim de Floris. The Hermetic implications of the dissertation on Nashe show an earlier interest in such ideas.
In short, I know of no one better able to comment credibly on the multi-faceted genius of McLuhan: the artist, the satirist, the exploring pioneer of the electric world in all its complex diversity and amazing revelations.
Anyone who worked closely with Marshall McLuhan took their intellectual lumps. He was capable of great kindness and generosity but stood adamantly]
against any meddling with his work unless powerful new perceptions were presented to
him. Without mentioning Yeats and his famous reluctance to explain his poems because
("it tends to limit their suggestibility") McLuhan's position is deftly handled by Theall

who worked very closely with the master. "My canvasses are surrealist, and to call them theories is to miss my satirical intent altogether. As you will find in my literary essays, I can write the ordinary kind of prose any time I choose to do so." (Theall, 67)
The quite deliberate difficulties in McLuhan's writing are rooted in his taste for paradox and rhetorical play. The artful ambiguities that arise from this approach Theall is better than anyone to convey. He produces a brilliant insight: "The power of ambiguity to imply more than can be said and the power of juxtaposing items without comment to intensify observation are two strategies McLuhan had learned from Pound, Eliot and F.R. Leavis. (Theall., 68)
Some of Theall's best observations deal with McLuhan's proclivity for an allusive and aphoristic prose style that goes way back and is rooted in classical literature.
His knowledge of the obscurity of surrealism, modernist symbolisme, and high modernist post-symbolism ... reinforced and radicalized lessons he had learned earlier from Francis Bacon's observations about the advantages of a deliberately obscure, parabolic style - what Bacon called crypsis... . (Theall., 68)

The Virtual McLuhan has both scope and depth of understanding from perhaps the one scholar whose knowledge of McLuhan's genius is based on his own and his intimate almost filial relationship with the great men. The chapter "Gnosticism, Hermeticism and Modernism" is a first in bringing the darker McLuhan into fine focus. Fitted out in the robes of precursor it is possible to see McLuhan as Theall presents him as anticipating cyberspace, postmodernism and the Internet. His prescience is well marked and displayed by Donald Theall in this excellent, sine qua non, treatment of McLuhan the man and the multiplex and dynamic ideas which remain alive and are extended beyond the original in Theall's hands.

A Review
The Virtual Marshall McLuhan, Donald F. Theall
McGill-Queens University Press, 305 pp.
(with a historical appendix by Edmund Carpenter)

Everything about Marshall McLuhan is paradoxical. He knew this about himself and made much of it as an attention-getting strategy even to the point of appearing to be a trickster, an artist of sorts. Like a Dadaist or Surrealist, who were antagonistic toward middle class society in the avant garde Bohemian tradition of épater-le-bourgeois, McLuhan `twitched the burghers' of establishment values far and wide almost globally. McLuhan noticed first and best how electric process was changing society and individuals.
I know of no one who understands McLuhan's electric and eclectic vision better than Donald Theall. As McLuhan's first and most important Ph.D. student and close associate from 1950-54, Theall was let in on the complex developments that produced the Explorations Group, the Ford Foundation study that led to Understanding Media, and the establishment of the Centre for Culture and Technology at St.Michael's college in the early sixties. Theall was privy to the developing relations between Harold Innis, Tom Easterbrook, Edmund Carpenter, Dorothy Lee and the rest of this historically significant association.
Many commentators flirt with the ambiguities of McLuhan's vision but a true understanding of the coherence of this vision is extremely rare. Theall brilliantly links McLuhan's , at the time rather unseemly, popularity with his understanding of the very early virtualizing role of the intellectual in the electronic age:

Speaking about some remarks of the classical eighteenth-century father of capitalist economics, Adam Smith, ... McLuhan argues: "in this passage Smith does seem to sense that the new role of the intellectual is to tap the collective consciousness of `the vast multitudes that labour.' That is to say, the intellectual is no longer to direct individual perception and judgment but to explore and to communicate the massive unconscious of collective man. The intellectual is merely cast in the role of a primitive seer, vates or hero incongruously peddling his discoveries in a commercial market. (Theall. 208)

This is an example of the deep understanding that only Theall can bring to McLuhan's work. After McLuhan has described himself, to Ezra Pound, as "an intellectual thug," the prophetic huckster gives his reason for being satiric and disinterested in society: "Everyman of goodwill is the enemy of society." (McLuhan, 1962, 269) This is a deeply conservative view of one's fellow citizens - original sin as politics.
Theall sees McLuhan as a new kind of artist, a sort of poet who produces what Theall calls the "essai concrete," a poetic prose that captures the multiplexed meanings of the electric worldview. McLuhan follows Joyce in his unrelenting punning ambiguities - a strategy for multiplying meanings. There is never anything linear, logical or definite in the "probes" that Dr. McLuhan injects into situations. But it is never a matter of listing either/or oppositions (even though he was maddeningly dichotomous in some of his statements), so much as learning how to follow a both/and approach to events that most interests McLuhan in his Joycean and satiric posture.
Theall, being one of the few people knowledgeable of the deep background of scholarship behind McLuhan's contemporary façade, is incisive in his understanding of McLuhan's profound ambivalence in the face of traditional intellectual categories. McLuhan is neither fish nor fowl, neither moralizing conservative nor countercultural guru. Being partly both, he transcended both in his electric odyssey, and planted the first oar in the side of post-modernism by becoming himself another virtual self.
What is almost always missed except by a very few and Theall foremost, is the perception of the darker side of McLuhan, his arcane knowledge which derives from his Cambridge Ph.D. studies in the hermetic tradition of the early grammarians - characters from Cicero to Blake through Cornelius Agrippa and Joachim de Floris. The Hermetic implications of the dissertation on Nashe show an earlier interest in such ideas.
In short, I know of no one better able to comment credibly on the multi-faceted genius of McLuhan: the artist, the satirist, the exploring pioneer of the electric world in all its complex diversity and amazing revelations.
Anyone who worked closely with Marshall McLuhan took their intellectual lumps. He was capable of great kindness and generosity but stood adamantly against any meddling with his work unless powerful new perceptions were presented to
him. Without mentioning Yeats and his famous reluctance to explain his poems because ("it tends to limit their suggestibility") McLuhan's position is deftly handled by Theall who worked very closely with the master. "My canvasses are surrealist, and to call them theories is to miss my satirical intent altogether. As you will find in my literary essays, I can write the ordinary kind of prose any time I choose to do so." (Theall, 67)
The quite deliberate difficulties in McLuhan's writing are rooted in his taste for paradox and rhetorical play. The artful ambiguities that arise from this approach Theall is better than anyone to convey. He produces a brilliant insight: "The power of ambiguity to imply more than can be said and the power of juxtaposing items without comment to intensify observation are two strategies McLuhan had learned from Pound, Eliot and F.R. Leavis. (Theall., 68)
Some of Theall's best observations deal with McLuhan's proclivity for an allusive and aphoristic prose style that goes way back and is rooted in classical literature. His knowledge of the obscurity of surrealism, modernist symbolisme, and high modernist post-symbolism ... reinforced and radicalized lessons he had learned earlier from Francis Bacon's observations about the advantages of a deliberately obscure, parabolic style - what Bacon called crypsis... . (Theall., 68)

The Virtual McLuhan has both scope and depth of understanding from perhaps the one scholar whose knowledge of McLuhan's genius is based on his own and his intimate almost filial relationship with the great men. The chapter "Gnosticism, Hermeticism and Modernism" is a first in bringing the darker McLuhan into fine focus. Fitted out in the robes of precursor it is possible to see McLuhan as Theall presents him as anticipating cyberspace, postmodernism and the Internet. His prescience is well marked and displayed by Donald Theall in this excellent, sine qua non, treatment of McLuhan the man and the multiplex and dynamic ideas which remain alive and are extended beyond the original in Theall's hands.