THE HISTORY MAN
When someone as
sophisticated as Malcolm Bradbury points out, with a laugh 'that some of my
best friends are.... ', an irony is clearly intended and recognised.
His statement that 'some of my best friends are sociologists' is
no more than plain truth. The irony, of course, is that many commentators
believe his fictional sociologist Howard Kirk - particularly as incarnated with
fearsome priapic charisma by Anthony Sher in the memorable television adaptation of Bradbury's
The History Man - enabled the fearful battering the subject took in the 1980s.
A quarter of a century on from creating Kirk - the History Man
was first published in 1975 - Bradbury, 66, now retired as Professor of
American Studies at the University of East Anglia, isn't going to apologise for the character who made him famous far beyond
the boundaries of academia. Sher's drawing of himself
as Kirk is proudly displayed in the front room of Bradbury's Norwich house.
Like any professional wordsmith, he is pleased that his phrase 'History Man'
has entered into the vernacular: "It was a good title", he says. But
he emphasises that Kirk was never intended as an
attack on sociology: "Far from it. Writing the History Man was in fact
part of a continuing preoccupation, of a love affair with the subject that I
have felt for my whole life."
The enthusiasm goes back to the roots of his academic career,
as a student at Leicester University. "Sociology was strong there with
people like Elias and Neustadt around". As a
postgraduate and young academic in the 1950s and early 1960s, the subject was a
big influence. "I read a lot of sociology. It was an era of very powerful
big books, particularly from Americans like David Reisman,
Wright Mills and Talcott Parsons. A lot of things that
were happening - the rise of affluent society, the growth of suburbia, mass
culture and the new social types Reisman described as
'other-directed man' - and these major works seemed to fit them together very
elegantly." Working at Birmingham during the period when Richard Hoggart was driving the Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies, reinforced this preference. "When we started American Studies at
UEA in 1965, the three core sub-jects were
literature, history and sociology."
This
reflected sociology's primacy among the social sciences. "It was
particularly strong in the new universities, a sensitising
subject that linked other disciplines, so that courses such as art and
sociology and literature and sociology were common. It was perceived as the
great issue subject, providing a map of learning and a means of understanding
the contemporary world."
Bradbury
was among the interdisciplinarians. His book The
Social Context of Modern English Literature was published in a social science
series in 1972, the year in which The History Man is set. But by then sociology
was in difficulties. "It divided in different directions. Some saw it as a
detached, value-free subject while others saw it as a form of activist
radicalism". Bradbury, an enthusiast for the large-scale broadbrush sociologists like Durkheim and Weber, was always
dubious about the activist model. "I've got no objection to politics. But
as a university teacher you have to be concerned with where your work fits into
the map of learning." If the claims made for sociology in its fashionable
years were exaggerated, so too were allegations of its demise under
Thatcherism. "Sociology never disappeared. What has happened to it is that
it has become one of the team of social sciences, rather than dominating the
others." He admits to reading less sociology than he once did, but points
out that since retiring from UEA he no longer has as a professional necessity
to keep up with latest literature.
So
where would Howard Kirk, now in his early 60s, be now? Bradbury says. "It
is a good party game. The version I like sees him as vice-chancellor of a
former polytechnic, still interested in cultural, media and gender studies. He
had a Thatcherite phase in the 1980s because, as a
good opportunist he reads trends, perceives the political flow and goes with
it. He's a Blairite now, of course". Kirk's
villainy lay not in his being a sociologist, or his ideology - Bradbury says
that his trope of 'a little Freud, a little Marx and a little social history'
as a means of understanding the world is not invalid - but his opportunism.
"There always has been a connection between politics and cultural forms.
People like Kirk strive to keep up with cultural fashion and they base their
politics on making sure that they are always in the right place."
The
dedicated follower of fashion moved on from sociology not long after the
publication of The History Man. So where are the turn-of-Millennium
thirty-something equivalents of Howard Kirk to be found? "I think they are
most likely to be found in genetics, the science of consciousness, brain
science and so on - although these require greater medical and biological
awareness than Kirk had."
Published by Huw Richards
Page Last Updated: September,
21st 2007, 11:47:19
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