We are planning to move house in the near future and naturally this implies a good deal of attention to sorting and disposing of old things we no longer need. I have been aware that I still have a stack of academic papers which I have kept since my retirement in 2001, and decided yesterday that I really should get to grips with the task of reducing this material. The first thing I came across was a draft of a book about the sci-fi writer John Wyndham. What a fascinating experience, encountering a former version of myself!
You might well ask what a former sociologist was doing writing about this subject. It was, actually, conceived of as an exercise in the sociology of literature. This branch of the discipline was just emerging at that time, particularly under the influence of writers such as Jean Duvignaud and Lucien Goldmann. An influential reader on the subject edited by Elizabeth and Tom Burns was published in 1973. Reading through my typescript I was quite impressed.* I had had a positive response from the editor of a journal, to which I expected to send a preliminary article. Why, then, was the project abandoned if it seemed to be so promising?
The short answer is that I was diverted by a combination of a sense of duty and the growth of a competing interests. As some readers will know, I made most of my career as a specialist in Yugoslav society and affairs. I had already visited the country quite a few times by then, and indeed published several articles on aspects of Yugoslav society and politics. The academic “home” through which these activities had been conducted was the Postgraduate School of Yugoslav Studies, headed since its creation by Fred Singleton, who was very well known in academia and beyond for his work there. Unfortunately at this time Fred was diagnosed with cancer and withdrew from academic life. The question arose as to whether his retirement was such a blow to the enterprise that it should be wound up. I was persuaded to take on Fred’s role in academic leadership, which I continued to hold until by own retirement in 2001. The burden of this obligation soon made it evident that I ought to restrict the range of my interests, spreading myself less thinly, if the job was to be done properly. John Wyndham was put on the shelf, in the hope that I would be able to take him up again at some point. That opportunity never came.
I was struck, reading through my script, by its resonance with a recurring theme in Wyndham’s stories. Wyndham explores the idea that our selves are not inviolable, and that at some point it is possible for different versions of the self to split from each other and follow quite different courses of development. The focus of the story is an occasion when the protagonist encounters another version of him or herself.
It turns out that this is not the stuff of science fiction. It has just happened to me!
*Not always in a positive way. The prevalence of gendered language was really quite striking to the contemporary reader!