The Virtual Marshall McLuhan

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

In this book, Donald Theall aims to “re-conceptualize Marshall McLuhan
within the values he himself espoused and to present him as the complex,
contradictory and conflicted person he was.” Theall has undertaken to
do so partly because of meeting others interested in reassessing McLuhan
and his ideas; partly because of his own perception that McLuhan’s
recent “canonization” has blurred the central focus of McLuhan’s
work; partly to respond to perceived attacks on his earlier publication
about McLuhan; and partly because of his reading of an essay by Edmund
Carpenter (included as an appendix) which triggered his realization that
his close working relationship and personal friendship with McLuhan from
1950 to 1965 would allow him “to put into perspective those aspects of
McLuhan’s history and biography which had not come to light” during
the more than 20 years since the media guru’s death.

To supplement his direct knowledge and personal experience, Theall
applies scholarly research and academic analyses to McLuhan’s
publications, to the publications of others about McLuhan and his
influence, and to the tracking of the sources in art, literature,
religion, culture, philosophy, and other branches of knowledge that
inspired McLuhan and that he adroitly usurped for his own purposes.
Theall amply illustrates that, as Edmund Carpenter states,
“McLuhan’s genius lay in perceiving, not creating.” As additional
support for this contention, Theall devotes several chapters to
McLuhan’s roles as a poet and trickster, as a prepostmodernist and
forerunner of French critical theory, as a satirist, and as a
techno-prophet. As well, he examines in detail McLuhan’s
correspondence as “probes, percepts and affects”; describes his
views about the cults of gnosticism, hermeticism, and modernism; and
provides extensive explication of James Joyce’s influence on
McLuhan’s thought processes and literary style. As a major thrust of
his reassessment of McLuhan, Theall proposes that as perceptive and
intuitive as McLuhan was, it was the overriding influence of Thomas
Wolfe’s essay, “What If He’s Right,” and the consequent hype
engendered by the San Francisco advertising agency, Freeman, Masden and
Gossage, that ironically brought McLuhan to national prominence.

Theall’s extended treatise will interest scholars and academics
wanting to continue the debate of the extent and value of McLuhan’s
influence. General readers will find Carpenter’s essay more succinct
and easier to read and follow.