Passages from the Reviews of Marshall McLuhan’s Books: The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly #2 The Gutenberg Galaxy

15Feb22

The original cover, 1962

The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962) 

Assembled by Robert Sparrow-Downes

 The Good:

“The present work, like much of McLuhan’s utterance, is prophetic in the classical sense of this term. It is the result of a live realization of a truth that at least partially transcends immediate powers of utterance and that, as uttered, will affect hearers diversely. Those whose antennae are as sensitive as McLuhan’s will be overjoyed at this high degree of articulateness about a vast range of mysteriously linked cultural phenomena. Others, completely dominated by the habits of thought incident to the typographical society that McLuhan is standing off from and evaluating, will either be unable to make head or tail of what he is saying or will reject it with some show of hostility.”
– Walter Ong. Review of The Gutenberg Galaxy. America, 15 Sept. 1962. Reprinted in An Ong Reader, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup, Hampton Press, 2002, p. 308.

“If the human community is to retain meaningful possession of the knowledge it is accumulating, breakthroughs to syntheses of a new order are absolutely essential. McLuhan aids one such breakthrough into a new interiority. . . .”
– Walter Ong. Review of The Gutenberg Galaxy. America, 15 Sept. 1962. Reprinted in An Ong Reader, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup, Hampton Press, 2002, p. 308.

“For McLuhan’s now global reputation as a communications authority credits him with the power to see as few do, to hear a new language and to walk confidently in the strange and frightening world of the electronic age.”
– Kay Kritzwiser. “The McLuhan Galaxy.” The Globe & Mail, 4 Jan. 1964, p. 8.

“This book does rather remind me though of the way a William Blake prophecy is written. There too, in Jerusalem, there is no linear story. The reader has to forget his ‘one thing after another’ approach and instead get his head around and under the symbols, symbols which are meant to be felt all at once. All at once corresponds to ‘unified sensibility.’”
– James Reaney. “Change and the Invention of Printing.” ETC: A Review of General Semantics, vol. 21, no. 4, Dec. 1964, p. 501.

“Part of McLuhan’s stance as a maverick can thus be traced to his decision not to write another book in the conventional format. Therefore, in Gutenberg Galaxy, his farewell to literary criticism, an attempt is made to banish linearity and sequentiality in style and idea from the pages of the book medium . . . . The material is organized only by occasional newspaper-like paragraph headings. In this and other ways, McLuhan attempts to infuse his enormous erudition with some of the flair of journalism and the meter of poetry; the result is striking, but it will not be easily accessible to the average reader.”
– David L. Fagen. Review of The Gutenberg Galaxy, Understanding Media, and The Medium is the Massage. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, vol. 8, no. 1, Jan. 1968, p. 83.

“The whole theory is worked out in detail, with a wealth of quotations from primary and secondary authorities. Even those who are immune or antipathetic to McLuhanism may find a great deal of fascinating and out-of-the-way information in the pages of The Gutenberg Galaxy.”
– Neil Compton. “The Paradox of Marshall McLuhan.” New American Review, vol. 2, Jan. 1968. Reprinted in McLuhan: Pro & Con, edited by Raymond Rosenthal, Pelican, 1969, p. 114.

“Yet most people who have read Galaxy are unable to dismiss it. After every objection has been made, the book still contains a wealth of fascinating and novel material about the culture of the past twenty-five hundred years.”
– Neil Compton. “The Paradox of Marshall McLuhan.” New American Review, vol. 2, Jan. 1968. Reprinted in McLuhan: Pro & Con, edited by Raymond Rosenthal, Pelican, 1969, p. 117.

“The way in which McLuhan relates and connects ideas from a wide range of sources and people in this book is amazing. It is, of all his writing, perhaps the best example of how his mind works.”
– Charles Weingartner. “Marshall McLuhan and What He’s Been Doin’.” ETC: A Review of General Semantics, vol. 34, no. 2, June 1977, p. 229.

The Bad:

“. . . . for all its claims, his book is essentially backward in its vision and method.”
– Alvarez. “Evils of Literacy.” New Statesman, 21 Dec. 1962, p. 902.

“The book, however, cannot be trusted, as more than stimulation. The over-simplified view of types of society and character gets facts wrong . . . . The contrast between oral and typographic communication is carried to ludicrous extremes, as a vehicle of cultural criticism and historical explanation. It can no more stand against an adequate view of human history than any other single-minded exegesis known to us.”
– Dell Hymes. Review of The Gutenberg Galaxy. American Anthropologist, vol. 65, no. 2, Apr. 1963, p. 479.

“Underneath it all McLuhan plays the history-of-ideas game, and plays it, I am afraid, none too well . . . . Furthermore, McLuhan does not have the encyclopedic learning with which to back up his generalizations . . . . Indeed, this is McLuhan’s worst failing: the wholesale reinterpretation of texts to prove his preconceived argument.”
– John Simon. “Pilgrim of the Audile-Tactile.” Acid Test, 1963. Reprinted in McLuhan: Pro & Con, edited by Raymond Rosenthal, Pelican, 1969, p. 97.

“The point of difficulty is then almost too simply seen: not only that the substance of the book is embedded in print, but that the normal reaction to it—given our present fields and procedures of advanced learning—will be in print also. Paradoxically, if the book works it to some extent annihilates itself.”
– Raymond Williams. “A Structure of Insights.” University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 3, Apr. 1964, p. 338.

“….one must confess an increasing incomprehension of McLuhan’s work… Some supporters of McLuhan defend his unique approach by describing him as ‘prophetic.’ He is the intellectual frontiersman who blazes a trail for less sure-footed mortals who will then make a roadbed broad and level enough to carry the freight of civilization’s institutions. The trouble with this defense of McLuhan is that he blazes away at every tree in the forest . . . .”
– Patrick D. Hazard. Review of The Gutenberg Galaxy. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 356, Nov. 1964, p. 219.

“A mosaic is a way of suggesting, but the only way to ‘reveal’ is still by empirical means, and this implies an appeal to evidence whether the mosaic method is used or not. The mosaic method has no magical value, and only McLuhan’s followers will be impressed with his usual reply that the objection is based on a stuffy, visual, linear concept of cause and effect. He cannot dazzle us into believing that empirical method is merely a fallacy of print-culture.”
– Arthur Efron. “Making Peace with the Mechanical Bride.” Paunch, vol. 22, Jan. 1965.

The Ugly:

“One cannot escape the feeling that the book is a deeply felt attempt to intellectualize the obvious.”
– Dan M. Davin. Review of The Gutenberg Galaxy. The Globe and Mail, July 1962. Reprinted in McLuhan Hot & Cool, edited by Gerald Emanuel Stearn, Signet, 1969, p. 187.

“I had always suspected that Finnegans Wake was less a work for the future than the last manic rattling of the bones of scholasticism. The way McLuhan draws it continually from his magician’s hat makes me certain.”
– Alvarez. “Evils of Literacy.” New Statesman, 21 Dec. 1962, p. 902.

“McLuhan claims that if we can understand the nature of this revolution, we can avoid being its victims. Perhaps, then, it would be more accurate to describe him not as the apologist, but as the dupe of the new technologies.”
– John Simon. “Pilgrim of the Audile-Tactile.” Acid Test, 1963. Reprinted in McLuhan: Pro & Con, edited by Raymond Rosenthal, Pelican, 1969, p. 97.

“Since there are no pictures in The Gutenberg Galaxy, and since McLuhan is an outrageously false historian, this is a maddening book.”
– Christopher Ricks. “McLuhanism.” The Listener, 28 Sept. 1967. Reprinted in McLuhan: Pro & Con, edited by Raymond Rosenthal, Pelican, 1969, p. 101.

The latest edition from the University of Toronto Press, first issued in 2011

Filed under: 1960s, Commentary, journalism, Media Coverage, Quotations, Reviews, university   |  Closed