Thomas R. Edwards
THE SOFT MACHINE
Though it's hard to believe that people really read or talk
much about Marshall McLuhan these days, he and his critics keep elect–
ing him man of the decade. Frank Kermode remarked in
1963
that
"in a truly literate society
[The Gutenberg Galaxy]
would start a long
debate," but no one has waited for so improbable a millennium;
McLuhan goes on writing new books and republishing old ones, but
it hardly matters, since the debate about him now seems to have become
self-generating. In
McLuhan: Hot
&
Cool,
an intriguing new olio of
things by and about the master, we are assured of his importance by
ad men, hip Jesuits, Susan Sontag and various Canadians, assured of
his folly by Dwight Macdonald, George P. Elliott, Christopher Ricks and
other Urizenic tyrants of typographical law, assured of his mixed value
by judicious Centrists like Harold Rosenberg, Jonathan MiIler and
George Steiner.1 But no one, least of all McLuhan himself, doubts that
he has to be dealt with somehow. What is his fatal fascination? How
has a mind that is by any known test slipshod and derivative, a style
that so relentlessly cultivates the tasteless and the banal, occupied so
much critical space? How can a man who solemnly assures uS that "the
word parody means a road that goes alongside another road" be trusted
with any harder science than Greek etymologies?
It is I think best to assume that
what
McLuhan says is the least im–
portant thing about him. McLuhanism is not a message but a medium,
a rendering of the uneasy excitement about contemporary culture that
grips thoughtful people of a certain age. To my knowledge none of the
contributors to
Hot
&
Cool
is under thirty, and for the people who are
1 Marshall McLuhan:
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic
Man
(paperback), University of Toronto Press, 1966. $2.25;
The Mechanical
Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man
(paperback), Beacon Press, 1967. $2.95.
Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore:
The Medium is the Massage: An In–
ventory of Effects,
Random House, 1967. $10.00;
Keep
in
Touch,
McGraw-Hill,
1968. $5.95. Marshall McLuhan and Parker Harley:
Throu'gh the Vanishing
Point,
Harper and Row, 1968. $6.95.
McLuhan: Hot and Cool,
ed. G. E. Stearn,
Dial Press, 1967. $4.95.
