Marshall McLuhan. The Medium and Messenger. A Biography by Philip Marchand (review)

116 LETIERS IN CANADA 1990 Philip Marchand. Marshall McLuhan. The Medium and Messenger. A Biography Random House 1989. xiii, 322. $24·95; $16.95 paper Few people have had so stimulating an effect as Marshall McLuhan on so many diverse minds, including those who disagreed with him or believed they did. (Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy) Gilson was primarily interested in what Aquinas ... or any of the other historical figures he wrote about had actually said; McLuhan was interested in them for what ideas they might spark in his own head. (Philip Marchand, Marshall McLuhan) Marchand's biography, rather than the subject of his book, is under review here. My remarks on the latter are therefore merely supplemental to my account of the former. In knowledge about and love of his subject, in thoroughness of research, in his ability to place McLuhan's career in the context of his local setting, Marchand's work excels. One cannot in conscience demand more of a biography than this. The writer is hampered by the nature of his subject's career from writing a more interesting book. Marchand is dealing with an academic rather than a mover of the great world or someone in whose obscure life can be sensed the grinding way of greater gears. He deals with a most unusual academic, to be sure, but one whose chiefinterest lies in the nature of his ideas and society's response to them.His account of the man's personality, while accurate, presents largely a catalogue of eccentricities, incomplete projects, and wrong 'turnings, rather than a pattern either of desire and achievement or of yearning tragically frustrated. Thus while many who knew McLuhan will grin in recognition of a familiar story, the cause the anecdotes serve - for example, that of illuminating the politics of the University of Toronto during the post-Second World War era - will interest only those present at such a place and time. Since the man's ideas, their sources and implications, can be studied in greater detail elsewhere, a reader may question what it is that Marchand's treatment adds to these previous treatments. To this I would answer that what emerges from Marchand's work is a portrait of a figure whose career resembles that of a medieval wandering friar and preacher. Blest with a gift for restating the ideas of his time in a manner giving them an aphoristic, apocalyptic cast, the itinerant emerges from the disturbances he provokes among his clerical audiences to the attention of the great. His figures suit them, and their rewards him, until the courtiersand their masters tire of his fancies. His old companions have long since turned their attention elsewhere , leaving little more than hostility and jealousy to fuel their interest in him. He returns to the old conventual life to be relegated to a petty corner, stifled amid his chosen entourage of hangers-on in minor orders. HUMANITIES 117 The friar's conceits enter the commonplace books; his personality haunts the enclave he once exasperated and delighted. His old students remember him with fondness and wonder. One of them writes this account, rekindling his memory in a community he never quite joined, but never entirely abandoned. Thanks be for his life, and for this evocation of it. (DENNIS DUFFY) Linda Hutcheon. The Politics of Postmodernism New Accents Series. Routledge. x, 195. $54.00; $13.95 paper Under general editor Terence Hawkes, New Accents has brought forth a remarkable series of books on theory. Most of them make accessible the arguments of abstruse theorists; a few present their authors' own positions and situate these within the broader discourse. Linda Hutcheon's latest book belongs to the latter group. One might call it 'a' politics rather than 'the' politics of postmodernism, because Hutcheon's stance is recognizably her own, and differs from the varied, mostly neo-Marxist, philosophical and politicalagendas represented in thecollectionsedited by Andrew Ross, Jonathan Arac, and Hal Foster. What she gives us is an admirably coherent, usable definition - something of a rarity among the theorists of this field. Her illustrative examples draw primarily on literature and photography, but also on film, painting, and architecture. Although her own Poetics of...