ORGANS

It is likely that McLuhan's concept of 'extension' was partly inspired by James Joyce. McLuhan first read Ulysses in 1936-1937, while working as a Graduate Assistant at Wisconsin University (L 92). Joyce presents the chapters of Ulysses each as an analogy of an organ of the human body: one chapter represents the heart, another the brain, another the lungs, another the genitals, the eye, the ear, the nerves, and so on, as revealed in Joyce's chart of the book (Gilbert, 1930: 40). McLuhan wrote in 1952: 'The shape of Ulysses is that of the city presented as the organic landscape of the human body. The shape of [Finnegans Wake] is the same, save that the landscape of the human mind and body is presented more intimately and under a much greater diversity of forms ...' (IL 158) Refracted through Joyce, the city functions as an organizing body (or sensus communis) for the manifold 'extensions' of man, a concept further pursued by McLuhan from the early 1950's in discussions with Jacqueline Tyrwhitt. McLuhan acknowledges Joyce in an article of 1967, writing that 'Joyce ... calls the extensions of man, whether in weaponry or clothing, the "extinsions of man". For every extension not only colors and enlarges our lives but also extinguishes a part of us.' (McLuhan in Matson & Montagu, 1967: 39)