Douglas Coupland

Understanding Marshall

When initially approached to write the biography of media theorist Marshall McLuhan for the Extraordinary Canadians series, Douglas Coupland immediately resisted the invitation. The series editor, John Ralston Saul, made the pitch in 2005 when the two authors met for the first time at a literature festival in Australia. “He was just very persistent,” Coupland recalls. “Putting me with Marshall was all his call, and God knows I balked at it at first. After I said I’d do it, I sort of bailed, and finally it just came to the point of ‘okay, just do it’. Fortunately I broke my leg and was stuck in bed. I got wireless installed, so it was ‘well, might as well get started.’”

Coupland is the renowned author of thirteen novels, including his landmark debut Generation X and most recently Generation A. It is fortunate that John Ralston Saul pushed him to write this portrait of McLuhan. He admirably stretches the traditional boundaries of written biography, infusing the text with several thought-provoking touches. At the outset of the opening chapter, which is titled ‘… return’, the reader finds six pages of anagrams, dozens of short phrases created by rearranging the letters in the name ‘Marshall McLuhan’. Making the grade are ‘alarm small hunch’, ‘calm rash man hull’, and ‘clam hall man rush’. Next McLuhan is quoted directly: ‘The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers’. Coupland follows this up by providing a lengthy list of monikers produced by entering the name ‘Marshall McLuhan’ into various internet name generators. It is surprising to learn that McLuhan’s online-generated pimp name is ‘Slick Tight’. Better yet, his drag name comes out as ‘Vanilla Thunderstorm’. His online-generated Goth name is ‘Lord Fragrant Desiccated Corpse’. For readers accustomed to the straight line of conventional biographies, these are intriguing revelations!

Throughout the book, Coupland riffs on the arbitrariness facilitated by the internet and the unusual identities and categories that the online world produces. This playfulness reflects how McLuhan recognized the mass disruption of linear communications, and how he managed to identify new patterns in the process.

Coupland reins in the early randomness of the biography by offering on page ten an extended statement from vintage 1962 McLuhan: “The next medium, whatever it is – it may be the extension of consciousness – will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form. A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organization, retrieve the individual’s encyclopedic function and flip it into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.” Having sounded this bell, Coupland steers readers successfully through the story of how McLuhan rose to international prominence in the nineteen sixties as ‘the oracle of the electric age’.

Born in Edmonton in 1911, McLuhan grew up mostly in Winnipeg, attending the University of Manitoba before moving to England to study at Cambridge. He bounced from post to post in the academic world before arriving in 1946 to teach at St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto. As a professor and researcher, the prairie boy emphasized the idea that media were worthy of study in and of themselves, and that each medium brought about new laws and effects.

His first book, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, was published in 1951. Only a few hundred copies were sold initially. “As with most of Marshall’s books,” Coupland writes, “he employed a mosaic text format that allowed the reader to dip in and out of the book at whim, as though looking at a website.” Inhabiting the media world of the early fifties, McLuhan looked around and found mostly insincerity and exaggeration. He critiqued nearly everything. Coupland sums up the impact of the book in the following way: “Nearly six decades after the book’s publication, everybody in Western society is a critic, and everybody has theories about TV, film, and advertising. What makes The Mechanical Bride magic is that McLuhan was arguably the first person on earth to be a metacritic.”

In the middle years of the nineteen sixties, McLuhan reached the apex of his fame. In 1962 he released The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. The critical success of the book prompted the decision makers at the University of Toronto to take a bold step. Aware that McLuhan was onto something, they allowed their rising star to establish the Centre for Culture and Technology. The primary purpose of the facility was to investigate the psychic and social consequences of all technologies. The founding of the Centre in 1963 proved to be well timed. McLuhan hit the mainstream in a big way in 1964 with his seminal work, Understanding Media. The first chapter of that book is called ‘the medium is the message’, widely regarded as one of the most famous aphorisms of the twentieth century. McLuhan had made the shift from examining the content of media to stressing the significance of how that content is formed. “For the ‘message’ of any medium or technology,” he wrote, “is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.”

In the following interview, Douglas Coupland highlights some of the important points that he explores in the biography. He stresses how Marshall was influenced enormously by his forceful mother, Elsie. This occurred in terms of both nature (they shared a similar brain condition) and nurture (she encouraged his interest in literature through fierce debate). Coupland measures how McLuhan was impacted by the work of Harold Innis, the celebrated political economist and communications theorist. There is also the matter of the relationship between McLuhan and Pierre Trudeau, which Coupland refers to as a ‘two-way man-crush’. Interestingly he identifies in their association a shared feeling of satisfaction based on the fact that both were Catholics who had achieved great success in a society that, up until that time, had been openly fearful of the influence of Catholicism on public affairs.

The conversation concludes with Coupland briefly contemplating the similarities and differences between himself and McLuhan. Both authors coined phrases that attracted massive media attention, and as a result both men have left permanent marks on Western culture. According to Coupland, the major difference is that one of them really wanted the fame that he got, and the other one did not.

CI: In the Extraordinary Canadians biography series, there has obviously been an emphasis put on intriguing pairings of author and subject. How did it happen that you were selected to write the McLuhan biography?

DC: Oh, you would have to ask John that! I met John for the first time when we were both just coincidentally down at the Melbourne Writers Festival, the literature festival in Australia. He first broached the subject there, so that’s how long he had the series in mind. I sort of looked down and said, ‘John, you can’t be serious, man. Nothing in my background would prepare me for doing a biography.’

He was just very persistent. Putting me with Marshall was all his call, and God knows I balked at it at first. After I said I’d do it, I sort of bailed, and finally it just came to the point of ‘okay, just do it’. Fortunately I broke my leg and was stuck in bed. I got wireless installed, so it was ‘well, might as well get started.’

CI: Throughout the book you make the occasional reference to a certain discomfort that you feel with the concept of writing biographies, given that people are able to assemble their own biographies now by jumping link-to-link online. Near the end of the book you write two meditations. In the first one you suggest that ‘writing a biography feels cruel’; in the second one, you state that ‘writing a biography is divine’. As you went through the process and got to the end, did it feel cruel or more divine?

DC: Well, I think it felt more divine. I think to have met him in person – you can see him on YouTube – from everything certainly that I’ve read about him, and people that I’ve spoken to about him, I think he was extraordinarily opaque. He had his public façade, and I don’t think that ever once let up. Obviously that would be different for family members. It was hard to empathize with someone with that much armour around him. Once I began to examine his personality through a medical lens, I was actually able to empathize that way. That was the entry point. Once you see him as brilliant but also as a prisoner of his pathologies, it became very comfortable-feeling to write the book.

Then, you know, you also get very used to being around someone, even if they’re dead, and there is the cruelty – that this is not the last word on Marshall, or on anyone else. Who am I to make that call? I think that the good thing is, before I even put a word down, I went through the three seminal works of his, The Gutenberg Galaxy – and obviously you’ve read that, right?

CI: Yeah …

DC: Okay, and lord only knows how dense that book is! I could only go through three or four pages at a time maybe. I circled things, and wrote ‘what a jerk’ or ‘this is great’ – you can just tell by the marginalia I wrote that I was really deeply engrossed in it. It did change the way I viewed the world.

We were talking about divinity or cruelty here. The fact that his books were so affecting to me made me want to evangelize for them. You know how McLuhanists can be. They’re very evangelical. So it went from him being opaque, to some degree of empathy, to me really wanting to put forth who he was to the world and turn more people onto his work.

It’s not like the universe is crying out for a biography of Marshall McLuhan, or Norman Bethune or whatever, but if you have to do it – and I had to do it – you have to take people through sixty thousand words, seventy, whatever thousand words it is. You have to get them through it, and this is someone they maybe don’t even know about but they would like to know about. From a written standpoint, you have to use all the tricks in the book to get someone through. ‘Tricks’ is the wrong word. You have to use everything at your disposal to get people through sixty, sixty-five, seventy thousand words. And it was the fact that, once I locked onto his ideas, I really, really thought he was terrific. …

CI: One of the things that you did to bring people into his world is that you focussed quite a bit in the first half of the book on his relationship with his mother, Elsie. From what you wrote, and what I’ve read elsewhere, she was a tough lady, a tough wife and mother, and she worked as a teacher, and then as an elocutionist and performance artist. I thought it was interesting that you emphasized that relationship so much. How would you characterize the full extent of her impact on her son?

DC: Oh boy. Well, I think you have to realize that they both had pretty much the same brain condition. … They were both genetically predisposed to being able to absorb huge amounts of text, and not just be able to absorb them and remember them, but also relay them with intonational passion. They weren’t necessarily that close. It was only when, I think it was in grade three or four – it’s in the book somewhere – when he started reading literature, and Elsie realized ‘wow, he’s got the same thing as me’, that they became very, very close. They became elocution buddies. I think temperamentally Marshall had some things in common with his grandfathers, who were both garrulous and autodidacts.

I think she found with Marshall someone that she could spar with as well. His father was just one of nature’s nice guys – ‘oh Elsie, just let it rest’ – and this incensed her, I’m sure. She had a huge nature and nurture influence on Marshall.

CI: You chart nicely the growing realization in McLuhan, in the nineteen forties and fifties, that media should be studied, and the importance of the effects of different media. The first Canadian really to do this and think it through – and you mention this – was Harold Innis, particularly with his thoughts on how each different medium of communication tends to have a bias toward either time or space, and how technological forms matter more than content. There has always been this little debate on how much McLuhan was influenced by Innis. What were your thoughts about Innis as you did your research?

DC: Oh, I think it’s such a shame that he died when he did, in fifty-two. Can you imagine? Marshall liked collaborating on things. He didn’t like doing things on his own. The two of them would have been such collaborators. It just kills me that he died when he did. I think what I came away with in terms of Innis, and also that magic moment in the fifties in Toronto, is that you did have all these machines and these devices, which suddenly ‘blink’, and it would be the end of the universe. … Canada has no real agenda to yoke to these machines. In the States they have their own Cold War agenda; China, Europe, they all have their special agendas. Canada had no agenda. It was just all these very freethinking people with all these new machines saying ‘well, what are these all about?’ – without having to worry about getting their funding renewed if they didn’t tow a certain political line or what-have-you. That is what I think was remarkable.

Innis certainly paved the way. He catalyzed a lot of thoughts, not just in Marshall but in others as well. So I do think he was seminal. …

CI: Several times in the book you mention how McLuhan had to deal repeatedly with an incorrect response to his work, specifically the belief that many people held, and still hold, the belief that he actually liked the new mass media world that he was describing. You mention that he did not ascribe any moral or value dimensions to his thought, and that he was mainly charting the impact of the new technologies on individuals.

DC: 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. For him, the world was just this thing, you know, you’re on this plane for seventy-something years – you might as well analyze it. He lived in eternity, not the future. He pretty much despaired for the human race.

Did he judge the world? No, he was very careful not to judge the world. That’s actually kind of nice. He didn’t like it, but he wasn’t an information-age David Suzuki. He didn’t pass value judgments, and I think that made him accessible to a lot of people. Also, he loved just crashing ideas together, like in a particle accelerator, just to see what would happen when they collided. Sometimes those collisions were quite provocative or inflammatory. People would hear him say things, and they would go ‘oh my God, he believes that!’ And no, he was just throwing ideas together to see what happened. The thing about the McLuhan universe is that it really has its own rules and logic, and vocabulary and diction, and unless you’ve actually studied him and taken the time to really absorb it, it can be a very alienating way of looking at the world. I had a great advantage over Phillip Marchand in that, between Phillip’s biography and mine, we had the internet. A lot of the stuff that Marshall had been talking about that sounded crazy or whatever, and it had nothing in the real world to bond to, suddenly ‘ding’, you can see the actual enactment of his ideas.

The other thing too is that people were really frustrated because there was no real way to exploit his work for political or financial benefit. He taught some stuff that was pretty confusing or hopeless for the audiences. He was just working with a very different time-scale, one that works in centuries, and that’s another reason that people had trouble – and continue to have trouble – with him.

CI: The idea of the political application of his work, or the lack thereof, is an interesting area to question. Late in the book you mention briefly the relationship between Pierre Trudeau and Marshall McLuhan, describing it as a ‘two-way man-crush’, which I found amusing. You state that McLuhan hoped his discoveries into the effects of media might be politically useful for Trudeau, but really his thought had no immediate political application. Rather his thought was profoundly political when read with a view to the long-term. How would you describe the long-term political dimensions and implications of his thought? Is that really what ultimately made him disconnected from people, that they could not find an immediate use to it?

DC: Well, two things: vis-à-vis Trudeau - and I wish I had put it in there but it only arrived at me later - they were both hardcore Catholics who had made it in a society that, up until then, really rejected Catholicism in North America. Being Catholic was a very, very difficult thing to do – to succeed. I think that was what they had in common in one sense: ‘wow, we’ve made it in a Catholic-hostile continent’.

In terms of his ideas, a theme that surfaces over and over is fragmentation and dissolution, and the atomization of individuals, which goes on at the same time as we have retribalization. When you look at the world right now, certainly in the western laptop-using world, we have an incredible sense of atomization and dislocation through this sensation of being particulate as opposed to being part of a whole, yet you also have things like fundamentalist religions on the rise because they’re using the intrinsic nature of linked technologies to bring people together. At the same time, when you look at Iran, it was this strange little technology called Twitter of all things, which was able to bring some sanity to what was a crazy situation. I’m not going to make think-tank type pronouncements here, but I think that you have to, as a politician, appeal not just to people as individuals but sort of hyper-individuated individuals, people who are feeling very, very isolated and not connected to a whole. I mean, those crazy Tea Party people down in the United States – they’re a very clear manifestation of that. They get together and they don’t even know what they stand for or against. All they know is that they just don’t feel a part of anything. It’s a very McLuhanistic state of being to be in. How that plays out, I’m as curious as anyone else!

The thing that we do know about the future is that – I think it’s in there somewhere – Bill Gates and all his best friends, all the richest and smartest people on the planet, they work at it for years and they completely miss Google, they miss social networking, they miss everything! It’s interesting. If you look at what’s happening, and if you look at it from a McLuhan standpoint, it makes sense. There’s a pattern to it. It doesn’t seem irrational, or it doesn’t seem illogical. You can see where it’s actually coming from. I think that’s the real value of his work right now.

CI: Early in the book you mention a certain feeling of similarity between yourself and McLuhan. You mention that you were placed into a ‘McLuhan-ish situation’ when elements of your book Generation X ended up inspiring, as you put it, ‘an unsightly media frenzy’, similar to how McLuhan’s work got taken apart by the media in the sixties. When you were writing the biography, did that experience help you to sympathize with him and what he went through?

DC: Well, a little bit, but not really. What happened with me, I ended up being in a situation where I got something that a lot of people want, but it’s not something that I actually wanted or sought out to get. It was just sort of ‘okay, fine’. Whereas with Marshall, he worked within academia, and he really wanted what he got, the fame and the notoriety. Also, I was thirty when things happened for me. He was fifty. He was old. He had kids. He had a mortgage. He had bills. I don’t think that he got to have as much fun with it, and also because he wanted it so much. It’s the old Warholian maxim that you should only get things when you don’t want them, or after you’ve stopped wanting them, because if you get something you want, it just sort of blows up in your face. I think that would be the number one difference: whether or not we wanted what we got.

Date of Interview: 04/23/2010
Location: On the phone from Vancouver, B.C.
Link: www.coupland.com