MCLUHAN
443
Maybe McLuhan is trying to scare Dwight Macdonald here, but I
suspect that a mind so quick to associate emotion with darkness and
terror is already scared itself and needs some company.
In
short, I
believe him both when he seems to welcome the new environment and
when he protests that he doesn't welcome it in the least.
He's at his worst when he plays the sage, pronouncing organized
conceptual plenitude upon a world that would otherwise be unbearable
in its randomness, a Virgil in search of other Dantes than just himself.
But
if
we would locate our infernal regions elsewhere, in just that con–
sciousness of personal and collective failure he so insistently excludes
from his scheme, we might do well, in dismissing his pretensions, not to
dismiss the phenomena he calls to our attention. He himself, in his
literary presence, is a modern phenomenon, and a particularly pleasant
one. He's not a serious man - indeed it's one of his virtues that in some
moods he would take this as a compliment, as I mean it to be. Rather
he's a modern type of the Enthusiast, the man who (like some Swiftian
Projector) has found the right "approach" at last and wants very badly
to share his great secret with the world. He loves the sound of words
like
absolutely, totally, perfect, exact, entire, complete,
as well as ones
like
Fantastic, amazing, tremendous;
and we all know that voice and
have felt inner dismay as it approaches across the noisy room, grips our
elbow and solves the universe before our eyes.
If
the solutions change
from moment to moment, that is only because the problems do too, and
there are possibilities of delight as well as dismay in the spectacle of
perpetual mental motion and an amiable indifference to one's own
comic value. It would be miraculous if a "surround" as fragmented,
discontinuous, irrational as he says ours is
could
be adequately expli–
cated by a mind so infatuated with historical patterns and universal
correspondences, and so innocently committed to instrumental solutions.
But the McLuhan style, with its suprarational agility, its hunger to
know just enough about everything to escape ever having to shut up,
its saving power to forget what it just said, does in a funny way convey
the feel of experience nowadays and demonstrate some of the skills it
takes to keep going.
Indignation or horror is not the best response to McLuhan. He
once dismissed hostile critics by observing that "many people would
rather be villains than nitwits," and one suspects that he quite enjoys
the lurid roles he's so often cast in; but his own literary presence is
hardly that menacing. He would be at home in a Dickens novel or a
play of Shaw's, and there you would never mistake him for a
villain.
