‘You’ll have to learn to concentrate’. This from one of my investment banking colleagues on learning of my academic plans. I was mildly offended: what had I been doing for the last decades, if not concentrating on my work as a banker? But the remark stayed with me, and proved prescient. What I’d been concentrating on as a banker was how to avoid concentrating on any single subject – keeping a dozen balls in the air at once is the skill required. What I would now need as a returning postgraduate student would be the ability to spend months unpeeling a single onion.
The onion itself, it has to be said, was recognisable. What I had been doing as a banker had a lot to do with narrative. My job was, essentially, to polish, publish, promote (and occasionally create) the stories of the companies my clients wanted me to sell for them, or alternatively to go out and find a target which conformed to a previously written narrative. In bankers’ language this is called ‘M&A’ – mergers and acquisitions – acting as auction-master for companies being sold or as search agent for purchases. The core skill required is neither economic nor financial. It is an understanding of how a good narrative can, quite literally, create value.
Rather to my surprise, I discovered that my undergraduate education in the humanities – French and Russian at Oxford in the early 1970s – fitted me for the financial sector just as much as for my original goal of the UK diplomatic service, who were probably rather relieved that my shaky diplomatic skills went elsewhere. With hindsight I joined the financial world, in 1975, at precisely the time when an industry which had come to see itself as the financial establishment decided that it had products which needed aggressive marketing. We have all seen the consequences of that in subsequent decades.
Even more to my surprise, I discovered that my business experience as a banker fitted me just as well for life as a postgrad. After almost forty years as a banker it was time to move on. It had taken me well over a decade to find myself working as a banker as hard as I had studied as an undergraduate, and I found I enjoyed the intellectual intensity of the challenge. And I’d always enjoyed reading novels. So returning to a university environment seemed like an attractive way of combining a return to literature with a more purposive framework.
Oxford, of course, was determined to make the process as difficult as possible. The application process simply assumes that anyone applying for the entry level humanities postgrad courses must be a recent graduate with a stack of freshly written essays on the shelf which could be produced at the drop of a hat, along with suitable academic references, as proof of suitability. Evident success in an intellectually demanding career, along with references from clients and employers, was entirely beside the point. This is where you really need to persevere. It took two entire years to prepare my admissions dossier – reading myself back into novels last touched forty years earlier, bridging a forty year gap in the evolution of critical thought, writing new essays, finding long-retired undergraduate tutors for references and, most importantly, making personal contacts with senior faculty members to convince them my application was not frivolous.
But two years later there I was, starting a two year MPhil course in French and Russian at Wolfson in September 2010 at the age of 58. I’d chosen Wolfson because I felt I might have a slightly better chance of fitting into a graduate college than an undergraduate one. That didn’t happen at the graduate level, since there were no mature students of anything approaching my age or background, but I found an enthusiastic welcome within parts of the Modern Languages faculty, who seemed genuinely curious about my background and supportive of my work, and at senior levels within the college hierarchy where my experience proved useful on the finance and investment sides. A successful MPhil led to a DPhil, begun in 2014 and finished in 2016, and to an active link with Wolfson which continues today.
The real buzz, though, came from the intellectual journey. Even before my arrival in Oxford my two supervisors took a keen interest in my financial background and started to draw parallels between the worlds of finance and literature. So seeing narrative as an object of commercial transaction came naturally. Banks ‘pitched’ their stories to clients. Companies produced prospectuses – in essence their own life-writings – to sell themselves to investors. Often there was little or no opportunity to investigate the ‘reality’ behind the narrative – you bought or sold the story, just as online buyers today buy the narrative of a product before they ever see it in the flesh. And understanding how stories could be manipulated to alter value, or unpicked to expose the limits of credibility, suddenly becomes a core competence not of the novelist but of the financier. The path from credibility to credit is short.
So when we started to discuss the idea of a doctorate on some of my favourite authors – Balzac, Dostoevsky and Zola – it seemed natural to see their narratives, too, as objects of transaction. After all, were they not competing for readers in the rapidly commercialising world of the nineteenth century? Were they not themselves writing for money, and for publishers whose motives were even more commercial? Were they not writing in the pages of commercial newspapers and periodicals, surrounded by journalism, often in a serial format which forced them to become part of the publisher’s sales strategy? It seemed evident to me that their literary enterprise had a distinctly economic dimension.
Oddly, few scholars seemed to agree. Treating works of art as commercial products had courted controversy since the origins of fiction itself. Repeated attempts at establishing ‘economic criticism’ as an academic discipline had failed. So I found myself in poorly mapped territory, armed with a surprisingly useful new weapon – a career-long understanding of commerce and transaction. Few academics have the opportunity to acquire these skills, and fewer still have used them in the service of literary criticism. I discovered that the perspective I brought was seen as genuinely new and, if argued carefully enough to dispel fears that this was reducing great literature to the status of a commodity, capable of producing new readings even of canonical and much studied works.
My forthcoming book, Selling the Story, to be published by Harvard University Press in July 2019, is the result of my thesis. It addresses the issue of how the business of literature influences its very composition. Authors participate in a marketplace in which the reader is the target of a literary ‘sell’. Using as my favourite authors as examples, Selling the Story shows how major works reflect their authors’ differing ‘point of sale’ perspectives on reader response and the market for literature. Previous approaches to economic criticism have largely ignored the clues offered by the narrative itself as to the author’s commercial objectives. Selling the Story offers a new approach which shows how the economic conditions of a text’s production help to determine the nature of that text, and that these conditions are reflexively present within the text itself.
The simple fact that I am still actively involved in the academic world, through the book, through articles, through conferences is testament enough to the intellectual engagement my return to Oxford has brought me. The experience has introduced me to new friends, many of whom are as surprised to be hobnobbing with a former banker as I am to be in the company of scholars. The university itself has not yet quite got to grips with the notion of students as mature as me, and in consequence is losing out on an entire generation of potential supporters. But I have found a new perspective on life, an intellectual bone with many hours of chewing left, and a host of new friends.