by Robert Guffey “Electricity comes from other planets.” – Lou
Reed, 1968 McLuhan’s main influence was Joyce, and it is the
contention of this essay that Joyce’s main imperative with
Finnegans Wake was to approximate the hyperlink effect of the
Internet in visual space fifty years before the Internet was
even invented. Before Marshall McLuhan became “the High Priest
of Popcult and the Metaphysician of the Media,” as Playboy
christened him in 1969, he was first and foremost a critic
immersed in the world of letters and the traditional arts. He
wrote numerous articles examining the fiction and poetry of such
writers as G.K. Chesterton, William Faulkner, James Joyce, Edgar
Allan Poe, and Ezra Pound. In 1969, after his transformation
into a “media guru,” McGraw-Hill published a collection of his
early literary criticism under the title The Interior Landscape.
Prima facie, one finds little in these essays that hint at the
freewheeling, satirical media analysis to come. It is indeed
there, however, lurking just ben