How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions. Francis Wheen

he were swiftly quarantined. In the words of the anti-structuralist don Christopher Ricks, ‘It is our job to teach and uphold the canon of English literature.’ Ricks’s colleague Ian Jack added that ‘one does want to keep the attention of students focused on the great writers’. On the other side of the barricades, Dr Tony Tanner described the treatment of MacCabe as ‘the most unjust thing I have ever seen in academic life’ and resigned from the faculty’s degree committee in protest. Raymond Williams, the grand old man of Marxist criticism, was voted off the appointments board for defending MacCabe. So, more surprisingly, was Professor Frank Kermode; though not a structuralist or semiologist himself, he argued that the university ought to accommodate a plurality of critical styles and techniques.

      Having succeeded in forcing out Colin MacCabe, the Cambridge conservatives continued to guard the gates against foreign barbarians for many years. (As a young lecturer observed, ‘Cambridge is an island in some ways, cut off from the rest of the country. When I ran into a colleague in London once, he said: “Fancy seeing you in England.”’) At a degree-awarding ceremony in March 1992, three of them shocked the hundreds of proud parents assembled in Senate House by standing up and shouting ‘non placet’ – thus imposing a temporary veto on the proposal to give an honorary doctorate to Jacques Derrida, the sixty-two-year-old doyen of deconstructionism. But although Cambridge may have won the odd battle, it was the continental theorists who won the war. When Derrida came to speak in Oxford a few weeks before the Cantabrigian yell of ‘non placet’, he drew an audience of 1,800 – as against the 400 who turned up at the Oxford Union that month to hear the Hollywood star Warren Beatty. The success of the theorists’ long march through the institutions can also be gauged by Colin MacCabe’s career: immediately after his eviction from Cambridge a full-blown professorship was created for him at Strathclyde University; three years later he was appointed head of production at the British Film Institute and, for good measure, professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.