At the Speed of Light There is Only Illumination: A Reappraisal of Marshall McLuhan

McLuhan as Medium

McLuhan as Medium TOM DILWORTH B, >Y 1964, WHEN MARSHALL MCLUHAN WAS already an international culture star, I was an undergraduate at the college in the University of Toronto where he taught English literature. He was pointed out to me as he strode across campus, tall, lanky, in what looked like an orange suit. Various people who knew him remarked that he was colour blind, but he was not—he wassimply unconcerned with matters sartorial. He took vast strides, his long legs pushing slightly to the outside, as if he were trying to cover asmuch ground aspossible in all directions, even as he moved steadily and rapidly, straight ahead. In 1966, another professor at the college asked him to speak to her students in a class on Renaissance literature. When she asked the students what the purpose was of some aspect of Spenser's style, he impatiently cut her off,saying, "To involve the reader, of course," then put his hands to his head and rushed out of the room. It was the first any of us knew of the painful headaches that, we later learned, were caused by a brain tumour. The next year, he was away at Fordham, where he occupied the Albert Schweitzer Chair, which wasfunded by a $100,000 New York State Fellowship. Of that, $40,000 went to McLuhan, the rest toward salaries for two colleagues, a secretary, and an assistant.1 Fordham had to supply the full amount because the State of New York would not give money to a 18 Catholic institution. In late November, McLuhan spent sixteen hours on an operating table having the tumour removed. The followingyear, 1968, he returned to Toronto and to hiscollege, St Michael's. I was in his class in modern poetry with about twenty­five other students, including Philip Marchand, who later wrote his biography. During our first meeting, on September 23, McLuhan sat on a table swinging his legs and talking about "poetry concrete" and how buildings are poetry but only when under construction or in ruins—incompletion imaginatively engages the viewer. In the same way, he said, poetry, espe­ cially modern poetry, has to be finished by the reader­as­co­creator. People come to advertisements, he said, only for experience.That is an inadequate reason for reading a poem. Youdo experienceart, a poem, before starting to criticize it as art, but which is primary, experience or art? Does the experience depend on the artiness? It's the chicken and the egg. He wisecracked, "Chickens were eggs' idea for getting more eggs." He spent much of that class speaking about the then fashionable concept of "camp" in relation to art. Advertising is an art form intended not to be noticed but to create a new point of view. Only owners of advertised objects actually read the ads, for comfort, and then the ads become camp. Camp is an antidote to good art, which is upsettingbecause it concerns the present. "The moment of truth is a blast in the face. Unqualified or unfiltered, the present would kill," he said. We would all be Lot's wives, turned to stone. So we all head away from the present. Poetry causes us to turn back and see it a bit. The music of Bob Dylan is "a feeble, half­baked form of art, but it gives you a new dimension. It reaches out and gets hold of you, or forces you to get hold of it, to reach out. I can sing Bob Dylan incantation off the page of any book or newspaper." Poetry casts us out of the near past, out of comfortable self­image, into the real present; it is shocking, causes loss of identity. The poems on this course belong in a museum, he said. The course is a museum. All art over fifty years old is camp and comforting. With Eliot, the "present" is industrial­ ization and mechanization—aspects that are camp, he implied, to us in a post­industrial, electric age. People like to read old poetry partly because it offers no threat and therefore reassures, like an old record at which people clap in recognition. Camp is not so much an escape, however, as a safe way to look at the present without getting shattered. Camp must have continu­ ity with the present but be far enough awayto be quaint: wide lapels, cuffs, 19 mini­dresses as in the...