A man with an agenda

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). But Tony Judt was on his deathbed when he and Timothy Snyder embarked on the conversations that became Thinking the Twentieth Century, and there isn’t a sentence in that book that’s not pure crystal.

Hall, on the other hand, seems to have been able to think only in periphrastic boilerplate. ‘Identity is never singular but is multiply constructed across intersecting and antagonistic discourses, practices and positions.’ After two or three goes at such stuff you get the gist. But since the gist has been put rather better by others, including Auden, Browning and Emerson, you can’t help wondering whether the polysyllabic mash-up isn’t just the usual academic camouflage for paucity of thought. (Like the don who knows he drones on, Hall begins chapters by telling you what he’s already told you, before telling you what he’s about to tell you.)

Fortunately, the straight biographical bits of Familiar Stranger are more nourishing.