The process of sorting through the cache of old papers I discovered recently is a fascinating one, in several respects. Who was the man who wrote these things? Some of it is deeply familiar, but other parts of it surprisingly strange. Back in the ‘seventies, for example, I projected a book on the work of the science-fiction writer John Wyndham. I had had a long-standing interest in his stories, but I formed a project to use them as the focus for a study in the sociology of literature. I couldn’t resist the temptation today to sit down and read the fifty pages of my preliminary proposal. The experience was interesting for several reasons.
The first of these is the fact that the elements that might be more properly regarded as literary criticism come across to me now as better developed than the more obviously sociological parts. I am prepared to bet that the former would still stand up today (with some adaptation, of course) but the sociology comes across as rather tentative.
Some elements of it do still have the ring of contemporary relevance. Two things in particular come to mind. My central thesis was that Wyndham needed to be read in relation to the history and situation of British liberalism. (I was interested to locate Wyndham in relation to H.G. Wells, Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell.) I am sure that it is true that the liberal tradition in this country is still in a mess forty years later.
The second point that made my ears prick up had to do with education. It emerged in my discussion of Wyndham’s story The Trouble with Lichen. The lichen in question had the remarkable property of extending considerably human longevity, and whether the consequences of this would be beneficial or not provides the focus of the book’s development. One of the characters, defending the benefits of the exploitation of their discovery, argues as follows. “Or think of education. The sort of smattering that’s been good enough to tide most of us over fifty years isn’t going to give us a full life for two hundred years or more.”
We may not be facing today the prospect of a life of two centuries duration, but human longevity has extended appreciably during the fifty years since Wyndham wrote. There has been a great deal of criticism in Britain in recent years of the state of the educational system, and if one takes one view of it (which I in fact share) then the adequacy of the experience of most children to meet their life-needs has been deteriorating rather than improving. The “performance” of the system has been measured in terms of extremely narrow criteria of preparation for work instead of for life. I suspect that Britain is not alone in suffering from this kind of distortion of education.
Working steadily through this “intellectual archaeology’, I’m interested in the facts that might have encouraged or discouraged my projects. In this case I think that the story is curious. I moved from the School of Social Sciences at Bradford in 1973-4, into the humanities area. One of the reasons I moved out was the fact that I had been hoping to develop my interests in the sociology of art and literature, but the teaching in this area was given to somebody else, and I was asked to cover other areas. Sadly, my hopes of greater encouragement for my interests in literature, in the humanities area, were dimmed I’m much the same way. As it turned out I found myself working much more closely with the philosophers. It has been said that life is what happens to you when you are planning something else, and it does seem to have been true in my case.
I wonder what else will be turned up by my archaeological digging.