MARSHALL MCLUHAN SLUMPS through the doors of the midtown Toronto restaurant with an oddly rolling motion, like that of a shore-bound sailor, squinting into the half-light, testing his senses against the glum, plastic dining room. At fifty-nine, white-haired and full of honours, McLuhan has grown a little weary of watching the world through his famous rear-view mirror. His Delphic ideas, which once made him sound like a distant interplanetary intelligence, became the dominant cultural insights of twentieth-century life, so that even the girls who enhanced the mystery of their sexuality with tinted stockings and dark glasses were subconsciously responding to his message.
“I heard a story the other day,” McLuhan says as we begin a long, relaxed lunch, “about a Scot who comes on the scene of a motor crash. The injured are lying around, and poking one of the survivors in the stomach with his walking stick, he asks: ‘Has the insurance adjuster been here yet?’ Not yet, is the reply, prompting the Scotsman to ask, ‘Do you mind if I lie down beside you?’” The hour or two we spent together every month or so bristled with one-liners such as his imaginary quote from the Greek god Zeus, warning his fellow deity, “Narcissus, watch yourself! “
When I was a University of Toronto student in the fifties, McLuhan used to be pointed out on the campus as that kooky author of The Mechanical Bride, and in those days he always seemed painfully intense. Now there was a playful aura about him; he had turned himself into an intellectual minstrel, almost a court jester, coining apocryphal slogans for an apocalyptic age. As a fellow diner got up and paid for his meal, McLuhan winked at me. “Money is the poor man’s credit card,” he said, and seconds later told a story about a man who went on a date with Siamese twins: “The next day a friend wanted to know if he’d had a good time, and his answer was ‘Well, yes and no.’”
His humour was infectious, but Canadian critics had been inordinately harsh on McLuhan’s two most recent books, and I asked him why he stayed in Canada instead of moving permanently to the U.S., where several Ivy League universities offered amenable surroundings, amiable colleagues, large salaries and the respect of his peers. Even though he had had dozens of attractive offers—and did leave temporarily to occupy such prestige-encrusted posts as the Schweitzer Chair at New York’s Fordham University—he always came back. “It’s a nuisance having my books criticized. It’s like being caught with your fly open,” he admitted. “It confuses my students. But I don’t think I’ve ever had more than half a dozen students who read anything I’ve written anyway. They’re not interested in my stuff, and they know very well that if they use it anywhere in their essays, it’s going to be held against them. I warn them never to quote me. Some of my fellow academics are very hostile, but I sympathize with them. They’ve been asleep for five hundred years, and they don’t like anybody who comes along and stirs them up. Still, I experience a great deal of liberty here in Toronto that I wouldn’t get in the States, because I’m taken quite seriously there. The fact that Canadians don’t take me seriously at all is a huge advantage. It makes me a free man.”
The pop culture we’ve adopted from the U.S. discards its gurus with alarming haste, and McLuhan by this time was not being listened to quite as attentively as he once was. Yet his intuitive leaps, the quality of his probes into a dim future where not only facts, but also the very dimensions that contain them would be changing, remained as relevant as ever. “The new human occupation of the electronic age has become surveillance, CIA-style,” he decreed. “Espionage is now the total human activity—whether you call it audience rating, consumer surveys and so on. All men are now engaged as hunters of espionage. So women are completely free to take over the dominant role in our society. Women’s liberation represents demand for absolute mobility, not just physical and political freedom to change roles, jobs and attitudes, but total mobility. At the same time, Canadian politicians are faced with a serious dropout problem. They’re still talking, but fewer people are bothering to listen. The successor to politics will be propaganda, not in the sense of a message or ideology, but as the impact of the whole technology of the times. So politics will eventually be replaced by ‘imagery.’ Politicians will be only too happy to abdicate in favour of their images, because the image will be so much more powerful than they could ever be.”
That’s not your usual chatter over a plate of fettucine alfredo, grown cold and sticky. But McLuhan’s soliloquy turned more relevant when he zeroed in on his favourite politician, then in power. “Pierre Trudeau must be at least 40 percent Indian because nobody could penetrate his tribal mask,” he told me. “Pierre has no personal judgment, but he is always interpreting the whole process that he’s involved in. So that when he slides down a banister or hops off a camel, it’s not really a way of expressing what it feels like to be Trudeau—it’s trying to express what sort of a hell of a hang-up he’s in. He’ll do anything to snap the tension.”
“Marshall McLuhan and John Kenneth Galbraith are the two greatest modern Canadians the United States has produced,” British novelist Anthony Burgess once wryly observed. The influence of McLuhan’s intellectual pyrotechnics was best caught in a Financial Post article by Alexander Ross: “There was a time when every university in Germany had a free period at 11 in the morning, because that was when Hegel was lecturing in Berlin. McLuhan is that kind of man, in our very own midst. So be proud.”
Proud we should be, and it was Tom Wolfe, the tart-tongued New York journalist, who coquettishly inquired: “Suppose McLuhan is what he sounds like, the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein and Pavlov—what if he is right?”
To which Marshall McLuhan, with that tight John Wayne smile, which signalled his most telling sallies, replied: “I’d rather be wrong.”
—1971