The Sixties

The Sixties are a personal measure of missed possibility for Roland Michell, not a period he experienced as a participant. He remembers them as a ferment of brightness, travel, and youth, then sets that imagined expansiveness against his own precarious life and Fergus Wolff’s actual involvement in the era’s revolutions. The contrast helps explain why Roland thinks of himself as a latecomer, always arriving after the moment has passed.

Roland’s Retrospective View

Roland believes he arrived too late for the Sixties, whose energy had vanished by the time he could have taken part. He pictures the decade as a blissful dawn before a blank day: a period of movement and possibility, seen from the distance of someone who missed it. This is less a record of his own experience than a narrative he uses to measure the narrowness of the present.

His childhood makes that distance concrete. During the psychedelic years he was a schoolboy in a depressed Lancashire cotton town, untouched by the noise of Liverpool and the turmoil of London. His father was a minor County Council official; his mother, a disappointed English graduate, drove his education with forceful ambition. She had him moved from metalwork to Latin and from Civic Studies to French, and paid a mathematics tutor from the money he earned on a paper round. The classical education he gained came through hurried schooling, with gaps left by redundant teachers and chaotic classrooms.

Education and the Present

Roland did what was expected of him: four A grades at A level, a First, and a PhD. In 1986, aged twenty-nine, he was nevertheless essentially unemployed. He scraped by through part-time tutoring, menial work for James Blackadder’s Ash Factory, and restaurant dishwashing. The promise he attaches to the Sixties sharpens the irony: he imagines that, had he been older, he might have advanced rapidly and involuntarily, whereas in his actual time he sees himself as a failure and feels vaguely responsible for it.

His doctorate, completed at Prince Albert College in 1985 under Blackadder’s supervision, concerned the presentation of historical evidence in the poems of Randolph Henry Ash. That scholarly path also places him inside the institutional world of Ash research, but it does not give him secure employment or a settled sense of achievement. Roland tends to think of himself through the relations among Blackadder, Mortimer Cropper, and Ash—or through his relationship with Val—rather than as an independent professional with a clear future.

Fergus Wolff as a Contrast

Roland encounters Fergus Wolff in the British Museum, between the legs of Egyptian statues, as both men head for coffee. Fergus is presented as a child of the Sixties who temporarily dropped out, chose freedom and the Parisian revolutions, and studied at the feet of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault before returning to Prince Albert College. His career gives visible form to the route Roland imagines he missed: departure, intellectual adventure, and return with cultural prestige.

The contrast is not a simple opposition between failure and success. Fergus’s dazzling appearance and voracious smile leave others with a vague suspicion that he might be dangerous, while Roland likes him because Fergus seems to like him. Fergus is writing a deconstructive study of Balzac’s Chef-d’Oeuvre Inconnu, and describes the challenge of analyzing a book about a painting that proves to be a chaotic mass of brushstrokes. Their encounter links the decade’s intellectual afterlife to Roland’s present academic world, even as Roland’s question about Christabel LaMotte redirects their conversation toward the investigation that will occupy him.

Significance

The Sixties function in Roland’s account of himself as a counterfactual: an era whose imagined freedom makes his own stalled circumstances feel like evidence that he arrived too late. Yet the decade is not wholly absent from the present. Fergus carries its history into the university, and Roland’s meeting with him occurs amid the institutions and scholarship that now structure Roland’s life. The period therefore marks both a lost personal horizon and a continuing cultural presence against which Roland measures his uncertain place.