CP Snow and the Struggle of Modernity

Hugh Oliver is Editor-in-Chief, OISE Press.

As academic books go, this one is more readable than most, for despite
interspersing his prose with the customary “parameters” and
“problematics,” the author is unusually lucid, and by linking his
own concepts to what is essentially a biographical critique of the late
C.P. Snow, he provides a human dimension of general interest.

According to the author, “While alienation and the disenfranchised
individual are among the keywords of our period, we intuitively remind
ourselves that to seek out totality or a comprehensive
self-identification that is balanced between our private and public
experiences may, in fact, be the only ‘heroism’ left to us in the
late twentieth century.” This was the kind of problem with which Snow
grappled in his fiction, particularly in his 11-novel sequence Strangers
and Brothers, and in his famous (and often misinterpreted) 1959 Rede
Lecture, The Two Cultures, in which he explored the gulf between science
and (in broadest terms) the arts. To this task Snow brought the
experience of a promising graduate research scientist (he was a Fellow
of Christ’s College, Cambridge) and a highly placed official in the
post-World War II bureaucracy; perhaps just as important, he brought his
feelings of alienation as someone of lower-middle-class origins who rose
to high places (ultimately becoming Lord Snow of Leicester) in the
British establishment.

Although Snow is currently passing through a phase of obscurity, which
tends to follow the death of writers not quite in the top rank, he
addressed many of the difficulties that currently besiege us.
Furthermore, the author’s analysis of Snow’s limitations (wisdom in
hindsight) is just as enlightening as Snow’s perceptions in our
understanding of the struggle for modernity.