{"id":10722,"date":"2011-02-01T13:49:10","date_gmt":"2011-02-01T18:49:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=10722"},"modified":"2011-02-01T17:48:34","modified_gmt":"2011-02-01T22:48:34","slug":"douglas-coupland-on-marshall-mcluhan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/02\/01\/douglas-coupland-on-marshall-mcluhan\/","title":{"rendered":"Douglas Coupland on Marshall McLuhan"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980).<\/p><\/div>\n

Douglas Coupland is the author of <\/em>Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!<\/a>, a pithy biography of the Canadian professor and communication theorist. McLuhan, who was born in 1911, is perhaps best known for coining the phrase \u201cthe medium is the message\u201d and for anticipating the Internet decades before its arrival. Earlier this month, Coupland answered a few questions about his work as a biographer and what drew him to McLuhan. <\/em><\/p>\n

You used an unconventional form for your biography of Marshall McLuhan such as MapQuest, an autism assessment test, use of Wikipedia as a source. <\/strong><\/p>\n

I did.<\/p>\n

Was this innovative method a deliberate reference to McLuhan\u2019s own idiosyncrasies? Or is it the reflection of a personal quirk?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Since starting the project I\u2019ve felt like an unwitting manifestation of McLuhan\u2019s beliefs about the effects of media: born 1961, TV child, Photoshop user, and so on. Having said that, I think I started the book at the crisis point in the history of biographies, and it\u2019s a happy coincidence it happened to be Marshall. <\/p>\n

Crisis point?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Twofold. First, if I want to know about Marshall or anyone, I can YouTube them, hear their voice, see them in action, read capsule biographies and dissertations on them\u2014you name it. You can get a subjective and highly factual dossier on most anyone in the public realm almost instantly. It\u2019s why publishers don\u2019t worry about author photos any more; people just google a person and get on with things. Second, we\u2019ve obviously entered the age of near total medicalization of personality. To write a biography of anyone, let alone someone so neuroconnectively fascinating as Marshall, seems like a gross abnegation of duty to truth. The biography has begun to morph into the pathography. Note: Marshall McLuhan\u2019s left cerebral cortex was vascularized in a way only ever before seen in mammals in cats. He wasn\u2019t just different; he was very different.<\/p>\n

\"\"One critic has claimed that the freedoms you took with the linearity of traditional narrative were done more in a spirit of subversion than of literary innovation. Please defend.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Has that critic written a biography lately? I suppose one could take disparate chunks of information and stick them into a narrative through-line as in a pre-2000 biography, but with Marshall it felt like a nostalgic conceit. The fact that information comes from places like Wikipedia, YouTube, and Amazon seems to be a part of the overall message of a 2011 biography. Seamless concealment of sources seemed, in this instance, like an attempt to get away with something.<\/p>\n

What attracted you to McLuhan as a subject?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Actually, nothing. A friend doing a series of biographies of Canadians writing about Canadians asked me to do it. I accepted and bailed three times before finally getting down to it.<\/p>\n

Did you see him as a prophet of the revolution in global communications?<\/strong><\/p>\n

No. Like most people, I only knew his three clich\u00e9s: Medium equals message<\/a>, global village<\/a>, and the scene from Annie Hall<\/a><\/em>. I\u2019ve found that most people truly would like to know more about the man, but it\u2019s almost impossible to do. His language is a universe unto itself and is astonishingly dense and hard to navigate. He died the year I started art school [1980], and his stock was at an all time low. His name never came up. <\/p>\n

Why did you believe he was still relevant?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well, I didn\u2019t. I had to figure that out myself. It took months of reading and rereading his stuff to realize that in Marshall we had a classically trained scholar realizing that there\u2019s this thing coming down the pipe\u2014the Internet\u2014yet because he didn\u2019t understand the ultimate interface, he was frustrated in his inability to describe it clearly. I think that\u2019s what people really respond to in Marshall: the almost vibrating sense of being in on one of the biggest prognostications of all time, yet having news of its arrival coming from this fuddy-duddy guy in 1950s Toronto. How on earth did that happen?<\/p>\n

What do you think of the reference to Woody Allen\u2019s Annie Hall<\/em> in the title? <\/strong><\/p>\n

The press person at Atlas suggested it to me as a title and it was a eureka moment. The title is a wonderful welcome mat for people to try to enter his house.<\/p>\n

\"McLuhan,Isn\u2019t Allen, by way of McLuhan\u2019s cameo in the film, making a comment on the way complex ideas are simplified for public consumption?<\/strong><\/p>\n

G. K. Chesterton, a Marshall favorite, said that the simplification of anything is always sensational. I think he was right, and I think that\u2019s what Mr. Allen was addressing.<\/p>\n

McLuhan said that the work of the artist is to find patterns.<\/strong><\/p>\n

He did. He also saw pattern recognition as a survival technique for staying sane in a universe of constant information bombardment.<\/p>\n

Is there a pattern in his own work?<\/strong><\/p>\n

A few things come to mind: he preferred to collaborate than to write solo; he tended to say the same thing over and over again, albeit phrased differently; and he liked to say sensational things to provoke responses from his readers. The two preexisting biographies of him that I used doing research are dense in their margins with exclamation marks, swear words, and most importantly, ideas triggered by his way of thinking. Few writers can do that to people so consistently.<\/p>\n

Was your own departure from fiction a rewarding experience? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Writing the book was a boot camp for understanding our new era. I lucked out in getting the chance to do it.<\/p>\n

Do McLuhan\u2019s ideas seem archaic now?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Oddly, no. A few of the pop culture material he references, like Blondie and Dagwood cartoons, feel a bit old, but the writing remains utterly fresh.<\/p>\n

Then what is it like to actually read McLuhan in the twenty-first century? How does it sound to the contemporary ear\u2014and mind?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It consistently addresses the human soul (Marshall\u2019s work is deeply pastoral in that way) while, at the same time, in tone it comes across sounding like an alien entity hovering over planet Earth filing mission reports back to his own galaxy.<\/p>\n

Was part of McLuhan\u2019s attraction as a subject the fact that he\u2019s a Canadian countryman of yours? <\/strong> <\/p>\n

No, and I feel like a bad citizen for being so clueless about the man at the start. One further thing about my engagement with this book is that there\u2019s an amazing ancestral, genetic and migratory overlap between his family and mine. That was an obvious carrot on a stick. I obtained a buccal DNA swap from his son, Eric, and took one from myself and did a comparison, which confirmed close DNA connection. But let me also add, those genetic testing companies are scams. They lure you in with the promise of data richness, and then they endlessly try to upsell you with the promises of upgraded Y DNA haplogrouping information and\u2014just beware. I think that in the future, DNA tests, when possible, are to become an inevitable dimension of any biography. It\u2019s happened. We\u2019re there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Douglas Coupland is the author of Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!, a pithy biography of the Canadian professor and communication theorist. McLuhan, who was born in 1911, is perhaps best known for coining the phrase \u201cthe medium is the message\u201d and for anticipating the Internet decades before its arrival. Earlier this month, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":113,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[1780,199,1432,1781,1078,1045,331,1779,1778,1782],"class_list":["post-10722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-annie-hall","tag-biography","tag-canada","tag-canadian","tag-douglas-coupland","tag-google","tag-internet","tag-james-atlas","tag-marshall-mcluhan","tag-youtube"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nDouglas Coupland on Marshall McLuhan by James Atlas<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"February 1, 2011 \u2013 Douglas Coupland is the author of Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!, a pithy biography of the Canadian professor and communication theorist.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" 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