Coupland uses new medium to discuss McLuhan message

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Marshall McLuhan

Marshall McLuhan

By Douglas Coupland

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Penguin, 251 pages, $26

MANY of the ironies of Marshall McLuhan and his work are aped by the ironies of this biography.

McLuhan was the rock star of media studies in the 1960s, embraced by students, academics and businesses, yet personally bookish, awkward and difficult.

He was unquestionably a singular genius, possessing a mind that was in no way inevitable, yet the very peculiar "wiring and plumbing" of that brain undid and killed him.

Similarly, Coupland's biography is consistently beautifully written, yet here and there jarring and off-putting. It is overtly about McLuhan but repeatedly and explicitly about Coupland.

It is conventionally chronological and serious yet unconventionally peppered with word games, unorthodox research, typographical experiments and general frolic.

A new edition to Penguin's series of short biographies, Extraordinary Canadians, the book makes no attempt to update nor replace the canonical biographies (by Philip Marchand in 1989 and W. Terrence Gordon in 1997 -- Coupland defers to both as "terrific" and pushes his reader to them for more details and footnotes).

Instead, it uses the framework of a typical biography (start with the grandparents and work up to the death of your subject before ruminating on his legacy) and recasts that both in form and content.

So, there are three chapters: the first covers genealogical background; 1911 birth in Edmonton; comfortable youth in Winnipeg (growing up on Gertrude Avenue in Fort Rouge, nestled between the rivers); the frustrating, deflating education at the University of Manitoba, followed by the welcome, liberating education at Cambridge; and his early teaching in the United States, up to his marriage to Corrine in 1939.

A second chapter delves more deeply into McLuhan's intellectual developments and meanderings as scholar and teacher, up to the cusp of the publication of The Gutenberg Galaxy in 1962.

A third chapter quickly covers his professional prime and apex and more thoroughly traces his personal and professional decline; his fade (to a pathetic six enrolled students in his final class in 1979, just before his final, terminal stroke); his death in 1980 and his subsequent resurrection.

But these chapters have computer-lingo titles (the second is, for example, called "... command ... shift") and are repeatedly interrupted by fun reproductions of online adverts for used McLuhan volumes.

More, Coupland tends toward anecdotes but the stories are less often about McLuhan and more often about our biographer and his oddly-similar life and work -- he even quotes his own recent novel extensively.

(EC series editor John Ralston Saul made an easy and obvious and good pick with Coupland for McLuhan.)

Even more, this book about an aggressively old-school well-read intellectual uses -- deliberately, openly and without apology -- Wikipedia, Google, YouTube and Twitter as sources (they literally appear not only in footnotes but in the has-to-be-read-to-be-believed acknowledgements at the end). This is in no way a weakness of the book: it is indicative of its self-image.

The biography has two overarching themes: one, there was this odd physiology to McLuhan's brain that propelled his rocket to fame but also hastened his earthly departure; two, his uncanny predictions were not happy ones for him despite their eventual cultural transcendence.

Yet McLuhan is ensconced in the pantheon of Canadians and his work remains hip and fresh. Emblematic of this is that the University of Winnipeg will this fall be hosting a major conference on McLuhan in a "PoMo" (postmodern) world. ("Facebook is so 2007!") and seemingly unpredictably.

He hardly needs the artifice of the upcoming 100th anniversary of his birth to regain relevance.

Laurence Broadhurst teaches in the department of religion and culture at the University of Winnipeg.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition April 24, 2010 H9