The History Man
The History Man (1975) is a campus novel by the British
author Malcolm Bradbury set in 1972 in the fictional seaside town of Watermouth in the South of England. Watermouth
bears some resemblance to Brighton. For example, there is a frequent and fast
train service to London.
Howard
Kirk is a lecturer in sociology at the local university. The Kirks are trendy
leftist people, but living together for many years and the advance of middle
age have left unfavourable
traces in their relationship. It is Barbara Kirk who notices this change,
whereas Howard is as enthusiastic and self-assured as always. Officially, the
Kirks oppose traditional gender roles just as fiercely as the exploitation of
humans by other humans. Nevertheless practices have crept into their lives
which do not live up to such high standards: Howard writes books, while Barbara
— stranded with much of the housework and two little children — would like to
but never gets round to doing it. Any female student who comes to live with,
rather than work for, them is ruthlessly made to baby-sit and perform domestic
chores.
What
we learn about the Kirks' past does not set them apart from most young
working-class intellectuals who grew up in the post-war 1950s when there was
growing hope of improved economic and educational opportunity. When Howard and
Barbara meet in their third year at the University of Leeds, Howard is still a
virgin. They are both religious and working class, and during their student
years cannot afford more than the bare necessities of life. A few years after
their graduation, in the summer of 1963, the "old Kirks", already a
married couple living in a small bedsit, metamorphose into the "new
Kirks" when one day, while Howard is at the university where he has a job
as a lecturer, Barbara has spontaneous casual sex with an Egyptian student.
This fling triggers a whole series of events: When he has got over his initial
shock, Howard begins to associate with all kinds of radical people. The Kirks
make lots of new friends; they smoke pot at parties; Barbara develops a new
interest in health food and astrology; Howard grows a beard; and they both
start having "small affairs". When Barbara gets pregnant, Howard,
rather than cancelling his class, takes all his students to the clinic to watch
his wife giving birth. Finally, in 1967, he is appointed lecturer at Watermouth, and right from the start he is intent on radicalising that bourgeois town, especially the
newly-founded university.
The
novel chronicles a few months — one term, to be precise — in the lives of
Howard and Barbara Kirk. Howard's zero tolerance concerning non-Marxist,
especially conservative, thinking makes him persecute one of the male
participants of his seminar who, apart from wearing a university blazer and a
tie which make him look like a student out of the 1950s, just insists on being
allowed to present his paper in the traditional, formal way, without being
interrupted and without having to answer questions before he has finished his
train of thought. In front of the others Howard calls him a "heavy, anal
type" and what he has prepared for class "an anal, repressed
paper", without considering his own apparent hypocrisy any further. In the
end he succeeds in having the student, a "historical irrelevance",
expelled from the university.
Whereas
Howard selects his many sexual partners from among the people who work at the
university — students as well as faculty members; on Saturday mornings, Barbara
Kirk regularly goes on "shopping trips" to London, which usually turn
into "wicked weekends". What is more, the Kirks consider the parties
they throw in their house a success if at least some of their guests have sex
in the many rooms they provide for that. At one point in the novel Howard's
indiscriminate promiscuity gets him into trouble when he is told that he might
be fired for "gross moral turpitude" (defined by a female student of
his as "raping large numbers of nuns"), but he shrugs off this
accusation as being based on "a very vague concept, especially these
days".
A number of supporting characters round off the
vivid picture of the permissive society of the early 1970s. For example, there is Henry
Beamish, one of Howard's work colleagues whose childless middle-class marriage
to Myra has been largely unhappy. There is Dr. Macintosh, a sociologist from
Howard's department who, despite his pregnant wife, can be convinced by Howard
that shagging one of his students during the end-of-term party is the right
thing to do. Also, there is Flora Beniform, a social
psychologist with rather unconventional research methods — she sleeps with men
in whom she is professionally interested, to elicit information from them.
At
the end of the novel Howard and Barbara are still together, and all their
friends admire their stable yet "advanced" marriage. Howard has even
further metamorphosed into "the radical hero" who is "generating
the onward march of mind, the onward process of history. According to his
philosophy, things, especially those he likes, are bound to happen: This is
called "historical inevitability". The trajectory of the Kirks' life
together ends when Barbara commits suicide during a party.
Lodge, David (1992) "Staying on the
Surface," pp. 117-120 in his The Art of Fiction. Penguin.
The History Man was filmed by the BBC as a four-part mini-series in 1980. It starred Antony Sher as Howard Kirk, and Geraldine James as his wife Barbara. Exteriors for the series
were shot at the University of
Lancaster. It had long
been rumoured that the events of the book were based
in part on activities at the University of Lancaster, although the University
Of Sussex has also been cited as a possible basis.
At
the end there is a caption stating that in the 1979 General Election Howard Kirk voted Conservative.
Published in
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This
page was last modified on 14 September 2008, at 17:33
Wikipedia® is a
registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_Man
Other interesting summaries: [Next] [1] [2] [3]
Página creada y actualizada por grupo "mmm".
Para cualquier cambio, sugerencia,etc. contactar con: bargasca@uv.es
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Bárbara Gasquet Carrera
Universitat de València Press
Creada: 06/110/2008
Última Actualización: 06/11/2008