Lucky Jim and class warfare

Like most British literature, Lucky Jim is a witty, incisive sendup of Britain’s rigid class structure. If ever there is to exist a society truly devoid of socio-economic class bias, it ought to exist in Great Britain, what with all the egg their class system has been getting on its metaphorical face from the time of Chaucer to the present.

The protagonist, Jim Dixon, is faced with the unpleasant task of having to accept constant humiliation in order to ingratiate himself with the head of the history department, who at the end of the semester will cast an important vote in the department’s decision to hire Jim on a permanent basis. Jim thoroughly hates his job as lecturer on medieval history, but he has no other plans and his bank account is thoroughly teetering on the brink of disaster, so he unwillingly participates in a great variety of activities designed to endear himself to Professor Welch.

One of my favorite moments comes early in the story, when Jim is introduced to Welch’s son Bertram at a dinner party at Welch’s house. Betram thoroughly believes himself to be a great artist, despite a great deal of contradictory evidence (think a 1950s version of Tobias Fünke). Bertram is in the middle of a monologue on the importance of wealthy people to society in their role as patrons of the arts, guardians of a higher culture, etc. Jim interrupts him with the simple question: “If one man’s got ten buns and another’s got two, and a bun has to be given up by one of them, surely you take from the man with ten buns.” Bertram, evidently not used to being contradicted, begins fuming and nearly assaults Jim on the spot. Jim, for his part, continues loudly spouting a mixture of confused laborite and socialist slogans, predicting a quick downfall of the upper class of which Bertram is a proud moment.

Part of the irony behind this is that Jim himself is a petty bourgeois, by no means a radical in any sense of the term. He only assaults Bertram’s worldview as a means to frustrating Bertram himself, as indeed their rivalry is the chief subject of the remainder of the book. This brings out a principle which I strive to live out in my everyday life. Anytime someone states a strongly held political opinion, particularly one as heinously senseless and self-serving as Bertram’s, you must strongly attack it, regardless of your own personal sympathies or antipathies towards such a view. It is true that this behavior does little more than irritate people with deeply held political opinions. Nevertheless, if I can look back on my day and say that all I have accomplished was to frustrate someone who holds an essentially political principle more dearly than he holds any other principle—some other moral principle which might serve to give him some ironic distance between his political opinions and distinguish between an attack on his ideas and an attack on his person—then I count it a day well spent.