The Terror of History at the Time of its Death – A Contribution to the Critique of The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury

Abstract

According to most critics, The History Man is the best work of Malcolm Bradbury, the celebrated 20th-century English novelist. Composed as an academic or campus novel, it does not differ at first glance from the academic novels his fellow contemporaries wrote. The dominant realism and the highly effective parody made it very popular among the readers of the time. Later readings, however, drew attention to the fact that the novel, in many aspects, exceeds the boundaries of the genre it belongs to. Composed in the period when postmodernism in literature was beginning to take its turn, the novel conveys the sentiment caused by the so-called end of history, mainly on account of the author’s tendency to express his anxiety regarding the downfall of his liberal views. All the events in the novel before 1968 are reported in the past tense, whereas everything that happens after the period is spoken of in the present. Designating 1968 as a kind of crossroads in time, Bradbury implies that this outstanding time point represents the spiritual peak reached by his ideals before their downfall. The paradox of the whole situation lies in the fact that the ideals in question are endangered by the main character, a hard-line Marxist, a representative of the abstract notion of history, ironically clad in the vestiges of the Marxist thought on history. By creating his own “historical” plots and by reversing the “flow of history” for his own benefit, he denigrates all academic values. A genuinely Machiavellian type, he works against students, his fellow professors, as well as against the University of Watermouth itself. Ostensibly respectful of liberal values, he is constantly engaged in a kind of verbal duel with the people who could hinder his aspirations. His favourite weapons in the duels are the statements that, in Jean-Francois Lyotard’s classification of agonal games, figure as denotative, performative, prescriptive and technical. The majority of the statements, especially those containing the names of Marx, Hegel and other philosophers, subvert, in a minimalist manner, the so-called grand narratives dealing with the Absolute, which is the genuinely postmodern feature of Bradbury’s work. The three analysed agonistic situations, revealing the total destructiveness of the triumphant main character, assume the ironic contours of deep ideological conflicts. The paper also deals with some controversies regarding the presence of some postmodern traits in Bradbury’s novel (Widdowson). At the same time, the attention is drawn to the critics such as James Acheson and Robert A. Morace, who contributed significantly to clarifying some of the novel’s crucial aporias. On the other hand, some parts of the author’s prose strategy, identifying him as a postmodernist, are correlated with the postulates of Francis Fukuyama, Francois Baudrillard, and Frederic Jameson. The fact that the qualities of The History Man make it superior to all other Bradbury’s campus novels leads us to believe that the novel will continue to challenge the imagination of both critics and audiences.