Reading this book, I
had the sense of someone successfully making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.
Stefan Collini is a conscientious researcher, who gets deep into the archives;
a very alert and astute reader, able to pick up the significance of a
parenthetic concession or an adverbial emphasis; and a fluent writer. He also
constructs and sustains an interesting thesis which has wider implications than
the local ones with which he is primarily concerned.
At the same time, I
often felt that the authors and books selected for analysis scarcely merit the very careful attention given to them. At times, something of what may
be his exasperation shows through in asides which reveal a very nice, dry sense
of humour. But his even-handedness does not allow him to go much further than
that.
As universities began
to develop imperial ambitions in the late nineteenth century, new
professionalised subject departments put the squeeze on older forms of (often
amateur) writing. In the new academic history, there was soon to be no place
for the kind of general overview which cheerfully assumed both a general theory
and a short set of moral, political or religious values to sustain narratives
which offered readers a ready-made sense of how they (and, usually, their own country)
had got to be where they now were. In England - and Collini is writing only
about England - a main victim of university
professionalisation was what, as a sixth
former in the 1960s, I learnt to call The
Whig Interpretation of History.
But there were still
readers who wanted those general overviews and Collini’s principal thesis is
that, in England, some part of the demand was met by the work
of a group of writers and academics (nearly all with strong links to Cambridge
University) whose official concern was with the teaching of English Literature,
itself a new university subject, and officially focussed on its internal
history and on text-focussed criticism. But, perhaps because less secure in its
identity than academic history, university English Literature found room for
historical and critical works which were stuffed with both general theory and
moralising lessons.
The general theory was most often pessimist, a story of cultural
decline (T S Eliot, the Leavises) or, at least, fragmentation (maybe
good-enough shorthand for Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams) - combined with
ideas about how the situation might be reversed, redeemed, or at least made
tolerable to the sensitive. The proposed remedies seem to indicate some weakness
in the original nostalgic diagnosis: the Church of England, hill-walking,
cycling, adult education. I had assumed there were flirtations with fascism among those Collini discusses,
but he does not mention any. It would have been good to have had a disclaimer.
Collini does not at any
point mention Imperialism, even though the period he covers (roughly from 1918
to the 1960s) embraces both the peak moments of British Imperialism in the 1920s and
1930s and its precipitous decline after 1945. I infer not a failure on his part but a likelihood that, for his authors, the Empire was a bit like
your income or your sex life; it was something there but not talked about, as
if you didn’t have one or any. You just drank the tea, sweetened with the sugar. In terms of his main thesis, that his authors all gravitated to nostalgia about the past, not thinking about Empire may have helped leave the nostalgia untroubled.
In retrospect, though
they were reasonably well informed about history, the group of critics with
whom Collini is concerned had no access to an adequate analytical understanding
of language (pace Empson). That did
not really become available until the work of Wittgenstein, J L Austin, H P
Grice - and from another source, Mikhail Bakhtin - enabled the kind of work
then accomplished by writers like Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson. The main achievement has been to create clear and useable distinctions between sentence and utterance, sentence
meaning and utterance meaning, semantics and pragmatics. This has allowed a recasting of traditional rhetoric (which never distinguished sentence and utterance) and a more sophisticated account of the field of author - narrator - implied reader - actual reader relations.
“Continental” semiology and semiotics as
practised by Roland Barthes in the 1950s got underway in no better an
analytical position than the Cambridge
critics, with Barthes professing to stare at images on the page much as the
Cambridge critics professed to attend to words on the page. Both could only do
it because of a great deal of only half-formed theory.
The general interest of
Collini’s very readable book lies in its connection to the broader topic of
changes in the hierarchy and distribution of writing genres brought about by
twentieth century university expansion, an expansion which proceeded at an exponential rate. One result was a fairly long period when it
seemed that the job of the non-science academic was to write unreadable and
unread books, many to be published at astronomic prices by specialised publishing houses. At the same time, anything readable and read
was regarded as inferior. But in the last couple of decades a clear
movement has arisen to create “cross-over” books which can both function as core
texts in serious university courses and appeal to a wider readership. Some of
the American university presses have played an important part in this movement,
though inhibited by increasingly censorious university environments.
