Christopher Bray

A man with an agenda

By encouraging his students to follow what already interested them, he did nothing to broaden their education

issue 10 June 2017

What’s this? An autobiography by Stuart Hall? Wasn’t he one of the guys who put the Eng. Lit. departments out to grass by arguing that it was senseless to talk about fictional characters as if they were real people when the truth was that real people were fictional constructs? Indeed he was; but don’t go thinking that just because Hall embarked, shortly before his death in 2014, on writing his life story, that he’d given up on the decentred subject. As he remarks early on in Familiar Stranger, despite our need to grasp our inner being, ‘we’ll never be ourselves’.

It’s a nice line. It’s also a rare moment of clarity in a memoir that can be as cloudy and windy as a Turner sea study. Unlike many of his epigones, Hall is never exactly obfuscatory. But nor is he often exact. Admittedly, he was gravely ill when the book was conceived (it began life as a dialogue between him and his former student Bill Schwartz, who subsequently edited it into something like a traditional autobiographical narrative).

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