One grey, windswept afternoon, many years ago, the headmaster of the village primary school rang the bell that brought the pupils into line for entry into the afternoon classes. The playground, he announced, was untidy and part of the class was to be detailed to collect the litter. Then, silently, almost dramatically, he walked down the line, like a sergeant major reviewing his troops; and as he proceeded, he tapped on the chest those individuals who were to collect the litter. The remainder were led inside, and within a few minutes the school exploded to their distant, joyful cries. Those left in the cold stood and listened, exchanging worried glances; gradually, the significance of the occasion began to dawn: those inside were the ones who had ‘passed’ the 11-plus whereas those outside were the ‘failures’. ‘Mi mam ’n dad’ll kill me’, blubbered one. (Inside the cheers continued.) ‘There goes mi brand new bike’, mused another. A few affected not to give a damn. But for all of them it was a long walk home through the streets that day …
And, so, it came to pass that I entered University at a slightly more advanced age than the average student, after a long, hard slog through the ‘tech’ and other institutions of further education. Statistically, I was only the second pupil in the history of my Secondary Modern school – in other words, one in hundreds, if not thousands – to have made it through to advanced education. And I bore the psychological scars to prove it: the Authorities did not take kindly to those ‘failures’ who refused to recognise their status. I arrived on the steps of Bristol University to study Spanish – the fact that it was Spanish and not, say, French or German was one more consequence of my irregular education. While I had read widely in the European literatures, I was, in fundamental respects, largely self-taught, with all the disadvantages that this implied, and this quickly began to manifest itself within a university context. Less expected were the advantages with which I was favoured. These included an incredible capacity for sustained and disciplined hard work. It was, I guess, the intellectual equivalent of the labour power of which working-class men boasted: ‘get a gleg o’that, lad’, my uncle would say, on inviting me to prod his firm, bulging biceps. My instinct, on finding myself at last in the academy, was to reapply this capacity mentally, and I did so, to telling effect.
I was further encouraged by the realisation that the upper- and middle-class students were burdened by their own disadvantages. Most of the former moved through the world ‘as if they owned it’, which, to all intents and purposes, some of them, or at least their fathers, did. One of the unforeseen and unfortunate side-effects of their proprietorial ‘ease’ was a fundamentally unquestioning attitude towards the world. The university was an extension of their social round, with all the privileges that this entailed, and which they had every reason to accept as it was. As for the students from grammar schools, university represented, in academic terms, a continuation of a familiar routine: the thrills came from escaping the reach of Authority, in its various guises, and from experimenting with adulthood. As in the case of the privately educated students, more than a few of them struck me as being intellectually quite mediocre. They had got where they had through every advantage that the grammar-school system could provide. In contrast, I found the academy to be a totally alien environment; and, compelled by the mere force of circumstance, I was determined to survive at any cost – to operate both in and upon the world.
As part of my upbringing, I had imbibed (from my father) what I would describe as a vaguely socialist culture and, understandably, in an attempt to find my bearings within the University, gravitated during the Freshers’ Weekend towards the political clubs. Of course, I knew all about the practical effects of capitalist exploitation on working-class families – my grandfather had been made to work on the roofs at British Rail during the worst of weathers, as a punishment for his union activity. That said, my political awareness could only be described as embryonic, indicative of which was the confusion aroused in me by the existence of two Marxist clubs, one communist and one Trotskyist. What was the difference? Which was I going to join? In the event I joined neither, put off by the ‘public school types’ who, I realised immediately, were not from my background and who, I further intuited, were not to be trusted.
Beyond my prejudices, other, deeper pressures were at work – as I would subsequently learn, my situation was decidedly ‘over-determined’ – pressures that disposed me to distance myself from Left-wing politics. The message had been remorselessly hammered home, not least of all by my family: I was ‘to get on and do well’, which involved, in effect, severing the ties that bound me to my working-class background. Facilitating this disengagement was the fact that, within their respective spheres, my parents had themselves managed to haul themselves up by their bootstraps – after starting out as a bricklayer, then an assistant at the local Co-op, my father became a primary school headmaster, whereas my mother, initially an usherette at the local cinema, would eventually run her own stall in the town’s Market Hall. We are, after all, talking about the 1950s and ’60s, in which this kind of social mobility became feasible, even commonplace within certain social strata.
When I eventually came to react against this background, the ensuing wider family turmoil would prove all-engulfing, but that, as they say, is another story and, in any case, from the time I entered university the most important constraints upon the development of my political awareness were to be found within the academy. Hispanic scholarship at the time was dominated by a singularly obscure brand of Catholic orthodoxy, organised around the study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish drama. Critical concerns centred accordingly on the difficulty of reconciling free-will with predestination, which for me constituted a mere academic exercise. Beyond this limited ambit, literary studies presupposed the student’s possession of an appropriate ‘sensibility’, to which my peers appeared to have immediate access. My solution, by way of neutralising their advantage, was to transfer the focus of my attention to the study of language, as currently promoted by Noam Chomsky, whose work enabled me, in some degree, to re-engage with politics and broader intellectual issues.
My problematic situation notwithstanding, I managed to impress my examiners to the extent that I was eventually awarded a First-Class Honours degree. It was the only one in the country in Hispanic Studies that year, and I was much lauded as a consequence, not least of all in the local press in my hometown, Derby. Quite soon I was appointed to a position as assistant lecturer in the University of Wales and found myself giving classes on medieval Spanish literature, even as I pressed on with my research into linguistics. Of course, I continued to read widely – I recall being deeply influenced by Auerbach’s Mimesis and Ernst Fischer’s The Necessity of Art: A Marxist Approach – but professionally speaking I was confined to national traditions of – in their different ways – a singularly restricted kind. In the case of Spain, we are talking of a culture that was still under the heel of a Franco dictatorship. Students of English literature of a certain age will find it amazing that during these years I failed to engage the work of such a figure as Raymond Williams. But that in itself is symptomatic of their own confinement within a British tradition that, while less inward-looking than its Spanish counterpart, was also ‘in contraflow’, to borrow a term from Perry Anderson. The first of my intellectual ‘breaks’ only came when, in the mid-70s, I happened to read Norman Brown’s Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (1968) and Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death (1973). Then came the arrival of ‘Theory’ and, quite suddenly, everything was up for grabs, which brought about a second break.
It would have been in the early 1980s when I was first made aware of the work of the Spanish Althusserian Marxist Juan Carlos Rodríguez, via a footnote reference to Teoría e historia de la producción ideológica (1974) in Historia social de la literatura española (1978), edited by Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, Julio Rodríguez Puértolas and Iris Zavala. By this stage, Thatcherism had gone onto the offensive and, by way of reaction, I had begun, professionally, to refresh and deepen my understanding of Marxism. Coincidentally, many of the latter’s petty-bourgeois adherents, including those who had run the relevant social clubs at university, were in the process of abandoning ship. Following up the lead, as one was accustomed to do, I ordered Rodríguez’s text by inter-library loan and was somewhat taken aback to receive a copy from the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid. (I was at the time lecturing in the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and our inter-library loans habitually arrived from Australia.)
I vividly recall perusing the introduction to the work, which, for security reasons, was restricted to use in the university library. First impressions were not encouraging: I could barely make any sense of what turned out to be a densely theoretical work. Was it a text, I wondered, that needed to be taken on board or could it be politely returned to the librarian? Gradually, I came to sense that the problem lay not with Rodríguez’s text but could be traced to my own deficient knowledge of Marxist theory and, more specifically, of Althusserian theory.
So, in the event, I decided to press on … and on … and on. In the midst, also mists, of my confusion, I was hooked on the idea of an ideological unconscious. The bourgeois notion that ‘we’ are free subjects in control of ‘our’ destiny had increasingly struck me as a sick joke, not least when embraced by those academic Marxists who projected their own enhanced sense of agency onto the working class. I had only ever been aware of the structural barriers placed in my path and the ways in which, defenceless and powerless, I had been manipulated and pushed around by educational authorities. When, finally, I was able to gain access to the university, it had been through the tradesman’s entrance, which, if nothing else, had given me a rather different ‘take’ on the ‘freedom of the individual’. In Rodríguez I discerned a voice in common, emanating from a Spanish culture that, located on the margins of bourgeois society, was critical of, since exterior to, this same freedom. Now, I was coming to realise that structural forces determined my fate unconsciously at the level of ideology. Later that evening, I informed my rather perplexed wife that I feared I might have to jettison all my prior research, to the extent, by way of emulating Rodríguez, of literally having to ‘throw it out of the window’ …
Of what precisely did my break consist? Viewed retrospectively, I would suggest that, during the process of perusing Teoría e historia, I had begun to realise the need to change terrain, theoretically speaking, from a subject/object or individual/society paradigm to a problematic based on the social formation articulated on the basis of a mode of production. From the agonic conflict between the individual and society, in the case of the paradigm, the former was always destined to emerge victorious. The further temptation was to proceed to spin a narrative that, very much along the lines of my own, tells of how a subject possessed of unusual willpower had been able to make a success of himself; or, alternatively, of how a whole culture had been able to slough off medieval darkness to embrace enlightenment. Of course, it could always be conceded that society ‘influences’ or even ‘conditions’ the individual. But, that said, ideological constraints would always favour the individual, in an ascending spiral that, at any level, always finds him or her located outside and, more importantly, prior to society. Again, with variations: this same individual might also raise him/herself above society, to view it from a transcendental vantage point. The effect was the same: the beautiful soul escapes the domain of material causality either into pre-history or into the realm of the supernatural/aesthetic; as indeed was the resultant epistemological paradox: existentially, I experience myself as a free subject, even while I know that, objectively, I am absolutely determined.
To locate oneself within the problematic based on the social formation was to realise that, to anticipate my conclusion, the understanding is no longer the act of an individual subject but of its structural conditions. Of course, one is never able to break entirely with ideology or, by the same token, with one’s personal obsessions, hang-ups, prejudices, chips-on-the-shoulder and so forth, particularly after having negotiated the deadly minefield that was/is the British academy. But, that said, one can at least undertake a transformative displacement, which begins to operate in reverse and to pose questions, until, eventually, having traversed the social formation, in all its contradictory, microscopic and macroscopic density, it may be possible to ‘find oneself’. But with a final proviso: the self that one finds may be barely recognisable and, for certain, will in no way resemble the beautiful soul that presides over the liberal narrative. There may be no subject of history but, emphatically, there are subjects in history …
Several years later I stepped off the plane in Granada to meet the author of Teoría e historia in person for the first time. Our friendship was to be long and always comradely, although sometimes turbulent – while essentially a timid man, Rodríguez had managed to survive in a hostile academic environment only by being uncompromising in the defence of his positions. And I argued from the same standpoint. Our association came to an end only with his death in 2016. My last trip to Granada was to pay my respects to his mortal remains in the cemetery overlooking the city, in the company of his wife, the acclaimed poet Ángeles Mora. The ensuing chapters in many respects chart the course of our intellectual relationship.