ABSTRACT
Marshall McLuhan claimed his ideas came from Wyndham Lewis, but criticised Lewis for his ambitions for art as a total new environment. He claimed Lewis was a Gnostic Manichee. His annotations to Lewis’s books, his remarks in correspondence and his review(s) of Hugh Kenner’s book on Lewis show his reading was mistaken, however. McLuhan’s model of communication denied meaning or the aesthetic and led him to the same ‘nihilism’ he wrongly attributed to Lewis.
