Wyndham Lewis' 1954 novel, a fictionalized record of the conversations he and McLuhan held after meeting in 1943 — its debate over the "superhuman" the seed Bob says McLuhan later rebuilt as the super angel. Bob reaches for it in dialogue 39 to supply the background of that detour.
Across the dialogues
Enters as the textual source behind the super-angel detour — the Lewis novel whose "superhuman" McLuhan is said to have upgraded, read here for its two thinly fictionalized discussants
In Lewis' novel the McLuhan-based discussant is Professor Ian McKenzie, set opposite Rene Harding (based on Lewis) — the frame in which the "superhuman" is argued out.
"Rene Harding, who's based on Wyndham Lewis, is interacting at the university with Professor Ian McKenzie, who's based on Marshall McLuhan."
Bob reads the novel's conceptual core as "the superhuman" — the Nietzschean, Hitlerian superman debated by Harding and McKenzie — the germ McLuhan later refined into the super angel.
"The superhuman is the conceptual content of self-condemned."
Its fictional professor doubled by a real one — Bob's own Ian McKenzie in Dartmouth turns the novel from a source into a coincidence he reads as the synchronicity of language
The novel acquires a second McKenzie outside it, which is what lets Bob read his own history as repeating the book's structure rather than merely citing it.
"Ian McKenzie is a person in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia."
The proportion Bob draws from the coincidence, casting himself in Lewis's position — the giver of the insight rather than its inheritor.
"so me to Ian McKenzie is Wyndham Lewis to Professor McKenzie, or McLuhan."
Cameron narrows the novel's role before it can carry too much — it stages a theme Lewis already had, so it dates the McLuhan conversations without originating the idea.
"I'm just trying to bring out the point that the superhuman in Lewis is not a new theme in"
Connections
Lewis' 1954 novel, based on his 1940s encounter with McLuhan.
the character Professor Ian McKenzie is based on McLuhan.