The Virtual Marshall McLuhan by Donald F. Theall (review)

humanities 525 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 acquainted with the artists for a number of years, states from the outset that he is neither an art historian nor a critic, and that the book is intended simply as biography. Even so, it is so laden with trivialities and diversions that fail to advance the narrative that the reader is left with no sense of the place that Leonard and Reva Brooks occupy in the history of Canadian visual culture, which would seem to be the reason for telling their particular story. The tone is chatty and anecdotal, often reading like a radio script. Sources are cited, but they are often inadequately footnoted by academic standards (this is a fair criticism, considering that the publisher is an academic press), and the uncritical use of press reviews renders them of little historical use. Husband and wife receive unequal treatment; whereas Leonard is lionized, his affairs and juvenile antics celebrated, Reva is treated much less sympathetically, the traumas of her early adulthood skimmed over, and much of her behaviour explained by her inability to bear children. Some unsympathetic comments from acquaintances, like Earle Birney or Miriam Waddington, were perhaps better left out of print. The author does reveal how Reva sacrificed a potentially brilliant career (she turned down an apprenticeship with Edward Weston, and received international recognition for her Mexican portraits of women and children) in favour of supporting that of her husband. While one may question her judgment, it was her choice. There is no attempt to evaluate or contextualize Leonard=s art. An indiscriminate use of information gathered through personal interviews subjects the reader to pettiness and personal animosities that simply detract from what should have been the larger goal. That goal should not have been to expose personal frailties and foibles by probing into the most personal corners of their lives, or to attribute to them undeserved importance, but to evaluate their contribution in realistic and historicizing terms B which, I conclude, has not been accomplished. (CHRISTINE BOYANOSKI) Donald F. Theall. The Virtual Marshall McLuhan McGill-Queen=s University Press. xiv, 306. $44.95 This is important reading for anyone interested in McLuhan=s ideas as they emerged from and interacted with both broader and narrower currents of his modern and tendentially postmodern worlds. The book weaves personal memoir together with literary aesthetics, cybernetics, and poststructuralist theory, and might strike the reader as a mixture of heterogeneous purposes. One should not be put off by this impression, however, for apart from the occasional stylistic grotesquerie resulting from a mixing of such languages and their tones, the project of a historicizing criticism which deliberately and perhaps radically integrates autobiographical , social historical, and theoretical knowledges here produces a re- 526 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 markable archaeology of McLuhan and the antinomies of a modern poetic sensibility. Donald F. Theall reasserts a view, developed by himself and others, of McLuhan as poet, satirist, and trickster, as opposed to theorist and academic , whose work is best understood as an art form trading in >affects= and >percepts= as opposed to >concepts.= But Theall emphasizes the double edge, for McLuhan, of this aestheticization of the work of criticism. On the one hand is the liberating implication of the artist as hero, the cultural producer as cultural revolutionary; on the other is the conservative recontainment of the artist as media image and artwork as commodity. Theall sees McLuhan, correctly I think, as both archetype and cliché: both a powerful outsider and critic of the new, chaotically cyborgian and schizophrenically dissociated world, and this world=s pre-eminent insider and symbolic symptom, an aggressive martyr to the market-driven production of cliché. There are several ways Theall develops this kind of tension, all of which should inspire lively debate. One is to see McLuhan biographically as >schizoid= (the echo of Deleuze and Guattari is intentional), fusing an ultraconservative Catholicism and a transgressive Nietzscheanism. The reader is presented with a detailed and thoughtful account of McLuhan=s religious investments (institutional and occult), which is later linked to McLuhan=s conservative or >cynical...