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ENGLISH LITERATURE AND THE POLITICS OF WORKING—
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REVOLUTION OF THE [9508
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KEVIN G. ASMAN

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ENGLISH LITERATURE AND THE POLITICS OF WORKING-CLASS IDENTITY:
FROM MODERNISM TO THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION OF THE 19508

BY

Kevin G. Asman

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of English

2001

ABSTRACT

ENGLISH LITERATURE AND THE POLITICS OF WORKING-CLASS IDENTITY:
FROM MODERNISM TO THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION OF THE 19508

by
Kevin G. Asman

By studying the complex utopian longings of literature, one
can understand the actual social contradictions that texts
attempt to resolve imaginatively, and in turn, can discern the
contradictions that structure the limits of real experience.
Reality does not emerge in the text as a one to one
correspondence with the sequence of events expressed in the
narrative. However, all texts are realist in that they are tied
to the real social contradictions of the historical moment in
which they were written. The competing utopian longings of
working-class and bourgeois literature yield insight into the
real conflicts that defined British society in the twentieth-
century. In particular, it is evident that English literary
Modernism is a reactionary entrenchment against the socialist and
working-class forays into culture that had been increasing since
the latter decades of the nineteenth-century. The Modernist
moment in England is more expansive than is commonly supposed.
Its reactionary entrenchment continued uncontested into the
19503, when it faced its first real challenge from authors and
critics of working-class background. During this moment of
cultural revolution, working-class writers challenged Modernist
assumptions about working-class subjectivity, and working—class
academics gave the working-class a scholarly legitimacy that the

Modernists had sought to deny it.

Copyright by
Kevin G. Asman
2001

For Mary, Sydney, and Desdemona
and
In memory of Duster-

we miss you

iv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This dissertation would not exist except for the generous
financial support of Michigan State University and especially its
English Department, whose timely funding allowed me to do much of
the research needed to complete my study. It is also necessary
for me to acknowledge the critics of working-class literature who
came before me. Without their ground~breaking work, none of this
would have been possible. Many colleagues and comrades also
assisted me unknowingly with conversations that always kept me
questioning my own certainties. Of special note are my friends
Jeff Lent and Jason LaFay, two true intellectuals. I need to
thank my mentors, Professors Victor N. Paananen and Katherine
Fishburn. In your different ways, you nurtured me and kept me
honest. Most people never even have one mentor. I am fortunate
enough to have had two. Yet, I am most fortunate to have you as
friends. Of course, I am deeply indebted to my wife Mary, who
never stopped believing in me and whose companionship sustains

me.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE: THE MARXIST LACUNA 1

CHAPTER TWO: THE REDEMPTION OF REALISM 31

CHAPTER THREE: THE LONG REACTION 65

CHAPTER FOUR: THE ABORTED REVOLUTION 110

CHAPTER FIVE: LEGITIMATING MOMENTS 157

CHAPTER SIX: PARTY POLITICS AND COLLUSIVE RESISTANCE 175
CONCLUSION 226

NOTES 232

WORKS CITED 242

vi

CHAPTER ONE: THE MARXIST LACUNA

At Brighton in May 1940 Virginia Woolf read her essay “The
Leaning Tower” before the Workers’ Educational Association. She
said to the assembled workers, “Take away all that the English
working class has given to literature and that literature would
scarcely suffer; take away all that the educated class has
given, and English literature would scarcely exist” (Woolf,
“Leaning” 137). If what Virginia Woolf identifies as “English”
Literature does not, at least in part, represent the
multiplicity of “English” society and, in particular, does not
reflect the views and conceptions of the working—class majority
in that society, then one might argue that it is problematic to
call it “English” literature at all. To do so is to suggest
that an elite minority of “educated” writers have been
responsible for the creation of a literary canon that is somehow
quintessentially representative of the values of an entire
society in which most people, by Woolf’s standards, would
qualify as uneducated because they have not been to public
schools and universities. Woolf’s characterization of “English”
literature says more about her ideological assumptions than it
does about her knowledge of the English working—class and its
contributions to literature.

Quinten Bell notes in his biography of Woolf that “she felt
so little love for the proletariat that she wanted to abolish it
and in abolishing it to abolish the class society” (Bell 2:

220). Though her desire to abolish capitalism is laudable, her

reasoning is suspect. She derives her “lack of love” for
working—class people from a conviction that they are
incorrigibly obtuse. In January of 1905, Woolf accepted a
teaching position at Morley College, a night school in the
Waterloo Road for working men and women, what Bell calls her
“social inferiors” (Bell 1: 105). In a report on her teaching
experiences at Morley that was edited and transcribed by Bell
for his biography's appendix, Woolf says that she delivered
eight lectures “ . . . to people who [had] absolutely no power
of receiving them. . .” (Bell 1: 204). This characteristic
disrespect for working—class intellectual capabilities underlies
her assumption that working-class people have contributed
nothing to “English” literature. As Woolf suggests, much of the
English working—class majority has been silent, and critics need
to interrogate the material circumstances which have prevented
the working—class from contributing proportionately to “English”
literature. However, this working-class has not been entirely
silent. Working—class people have been producing the types of
works that literary critics often define as literature, although
it is rare for working-class writing to be associated with the
term. Scholars of all theoretical positions also need to
reflect on the practices and assumptions that have kept
working—class writers from receiving acknowledgment for their
efforts, that have kept them, in other words, from being
identified as part of “English” literary culture by most of

academia.

The British Marxist critic Carole Snee says Woolf’s

assertion that the working-class has produced almost nothing
literary (or should it be Literary?) is “the one about our
literary history which will gain almost unanimous support from
critics, irrespective of their ideological position” (165).
Snee even contends that “there is an implicit general agreement
between Marxists and other critics as to which authors and works
are ‘great’, and therefore worthy of study” (165). She
correctly notes that “literature” is not a “neutral body of
imaginative writing,” but rather an ideologically constructed,
and therefore politically invested, corpus of texts (Snee 166).
English literature has historically been the literature of what
Woolf calls the educated, and what I would call the bourgeois,
class because it has historically been the prerogative of this
class to define English literature. While much effort has been
exerted by racial and ethnic minorities and women toward
challenging the ideological assumptions underlying the creation
(and recreation) of the English literary canon, the one group
which has not figured substantively in the academic debate over
the redefinition and expansion of that canon is the
working-class. There have been studies of working-class
literature that have contributed significant insights and have
aided in the recovery of lost and co-opted texts, and since the
19503, working—class literature and history has had an academic
legitimacy thanks to the efforts of scholars like Raymond
Williams, Richard Hoggart, and E. P. Thompson. Nonetheless, in
the years since Woolf’s address to the Workers' Educational

Association, most of the British critical establishment,

including its more radical elements, has paid little attention
to English and other forms of British working—class literature.
The American critical community has virtually ignored it.
Though not all, most Marxist critics have constructed complex
theories of capitalist culture from which working—class people
are absent as discursive agents.

To ignore the discursive output of working-class people is
to work within long established traditions of Marxian analysis
and is to accept, without interrogation, Marx's declarations
about the state of working-class consciousness. Marx’s
discussion of alienation is foremost a characterization of
working—class intellectuality and its stagnation under
capitalism. He argues in The Manifesto that “owing to extensive
use of machinery and the division of labour, the work of the
proletarians has lost all individual character, and
consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an
appendage of the machine . . .” (479). The worker must exist
according to the sale of his labor power, which becomes a
commodity that he exchanges in order to obtain the means of
subsistence, and “it is a bit of luck for him if he can find a
buyer” (Marx, Economic 65). His capacity to work, then, becomes
something outside himself and is actually turned against him as
the means of his oppression. To understand the tragedy of this
commodification, one must consider Marx’s theory of “species
being.” As he argues in The Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts of 1844, “Man therefore also forms things in

accordance with the laws of beauty. . . . This production is his

active species life” (114). Humans create, and that they create
the means of their subsistence in highly organized ways
separates them from all other natural entities. The ongoing
process of creation and human interaction is what Marxists
identify as history. Through history, according to Marx, human
beings have evolved so that they find pleasure and meaning in
the act of creating beautiful things.

The tragedy of working—class existence for Marx is that the
vast majority of the population cannot create in accordance with
the laws of beauty. They are alienated from this defining
element of their species and are, therefore, alienated from
themselves. The lives they lead are less than human. Marx
speaks forcefully about this degradation, and my point is not to
refute his claims about alienation. His insights into the
exploitative mechanisms of capitalism are profound, and he is
worthy of the homage that people bestow upon him by using his
ideas. Nonetheless, Marx’s assessment of the working—class is
one from which they are intellectually absent because he
presumes that they do not have intellects worth exploring. He
says in the Manuscripts that, under capitalism, “man (the
worker) only feels himself freely active in his animal
functions--eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his
dwelling and in dressing—up, etc.; and in his human functions he
no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal” (Marx,
Economic 111). Yet, Marx provides no evidence to support his
generalization as to how a working-class individual might “feel”

about the effects of capitalistic social relations, and nowhere

in his major writings does he acknowledge that working-class
people are capable of speaking for themselves about their own
feelings. He is, as a non-worker, speaking for and about
others, which can be dangerous if the “other” is silenced in the
process. Linda Alcoff’s cautions us that social “. . . location
is epistemologically salient, [and] certain privileged locations
are discursively dangerous. In particular, the practice of a
privileged person speaking for or on behalf of less privileged
persons . . . [can result] in increasing or reinforcing the
oppression of the group spoken for” (Alcoff 7). Marx is not
individually responsible for perpetuating working-class
oppression. This oppression is the direct result of extensive
social mechanisms over which Marx had no control, and a better
foundational study of how those mechanisms function has yet to
be written. Nonetheless, one can argue that Marx fetishizes the
working—class as the idealized embodiment of all that is wrong
with capitalism and presents working-class people as homogenous.
Despite his sympathies and life long commitment to working—class
liberation, Marx establishes an interpretation of the working-
class as intellectually bankrupt and does so from a position of
almost unquestionable authority. So discursively privileged is
Marx that generations of Marxists have not felt compelled to ask
whether his representations were accurate, whether the
individual proletarian, that human appendage to the machine, had
really become the “mentally and physically dehumanized being”
with which Marx links him in the tropological discourse of the

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (121). In short, most

Marxists have not felt compelled to listen to working—class
voices because they have presumed that Marx was accurate in
speaking for them. Therefore, if Marx did not help to
perpetuate working-class oppression, one can make a convincing
case that he at least helped to perpetuate working-class
silence.

Even sophisticated Marxist literary critics such as
Frederic Jameson develop their studies of capitalist cultures on
terrains from which the working-class is generally absent in
intellectual terms. In a thoughtful study of late capitalism,
“Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Jameson compellingly
observes that one must “read high and mass culture as
objectively related and dialectically interdependent phenomena,
as twin and inseparable forms of the fission of aesthetic
production under late capitalism” (“Reification” 134). This
dialectical approach to modes of literary expression that are
generally regarded as anathema is a considerable advancement
over many approaches to high and mass culture in that it
challenges both the exclusivity of high art and the still
prevailing assumptions about the obtuseness of mass culture.
Jameson correctly argues that both emerge from the same cultural
milieu of ever-increasing commodification and must, therefore,
be considered dialectally as interrelated aspects of late
capitalism and not as hierarchically ordered forms of expression
in which high art reflects a moral imperative to negate mass
culture. In these terms, he is challenging the very valuation

that emerged with Modernism, especially as it was articulated by

those such as F. R. Leavis and T. S. Eliot. For all that this
is a valuable contribution, Jameson’s tacit assumption is that
one can adequately understand late capitalism and in particular
reification as its defining element by studying exclusively
literatures that emerge either directly from the bourgeoisie or
from bourgeois controlled institutions that exist, in his
terminology, for purposes of ideological “manipulation and
containment,” terms that he seems to borrow from Marcuse’s One;
Dimensional Man (“Utopia and Reification” 144).1 Nowhere does
he suggest that reification can be best understood by examining
the living discourse of the exploited, whose lives represent the
most complex manifestation of capitalistic modes of reification.

To his credit, Jameson does mention that there are modes of
“authentic cultural production” over which the hegemonic class
does not exert total control. He concludes that “the only
authentic cultural production today has seemed to be that which
can draw on the collective experience of marginal pockets of the
social life of the world system: black literature and blues,
British working-class rock, women's literature, [and] gay
literature . . . “ (140). Using ideas from Guy Debord's The
Societv of the Spectacle, and perhaps from Walter Benjamin’s
“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” as well,
Jameson contends that most art has attained commodity status,
disconnected from the particular historical situation in which
it was created (“Reification” 131). Authentic art, including

“British working-class rock,” has evaded this commodification,

but Jameson's study of late capitalism does not include a

rigorous consideration of this “authentic cultural production”
which has “not yet been fully penetrated by the market and by
the commodity system” (“Reification” 140). How this literature
has managed to avoid total penetration by the commodity system
is never explained. Neither does Jameson argue for the value of
such literature in a world where “mass culture” so effectively
works to manipulate and contain the sentiments of “marginalized”
peoples, who would otherwise be engaged in totally “authentic”
modes of expression. In fact, when Jameson wants to understand
something of the nature of these people, he attempts to do so
not through a study of their “authentic” cultural expression but
rather through a “close reading” of mass produced texts. In an
undeveloped argument that anticipates the more fully considered
positions of Michael Denning’s book Mechanic Accents, Jameson
intimates that “. . . [one must] grasp mass culture not as empty
distraction or ‘mere' false consciousness, but rather as
transformational work on social and political anxieties and
fantasies which must then have some effective presence in the
mass cultural text in order subsequently to be ‘managed' or
repressed” (“Reification” 141). In Jameson's system, one can
understand something of the anxieties of the oppressed by
performing a sort of archeology on those mass produced texts
that speak to those anxieties and attempt to manipulate or
contain them.

Although Jameson's method might yield important evidence
about the assumptions of those who control the production of

mass culture, the ability of these texts to say anything about

the complex and real anxieties of those who are subject to
strategies of containment is highly suspect if the mass produced
texts are studied in isolation, which is what Jameson does.
Making such assessments is problematic without a direct
consideration of texts that contain the “authentic” expressions
of those anxieties. Jameson does not consider “authentic”
texts, and one can only assume that he finds the texts that
contain these “authentic” expressions inadequate to the task of
revealing the anxieties of “marginalized” peoples, who as it
happens, constitute a majority in late capitalism. Within
Jameson’s system, it is reasonable, for instance, to say that
one can understand the anxieties of women by studying in
isolation cosmetic advertisements that play on those anxieties.
Though such a study might produce valuable insights about the
strategies of containment practiced on women’s behavior, it
could not do justice to the ontological depth of women’s
anxieties, certainly not to the degree that a consideration of
writing produced by women could. Despite his acknowledgment
that “marginalized” people have voices, Jameson sees no
particular need to include their cultural production in his
analysis of late capitalism, even though he is describing the
mechanisms through which capitalistic institutions work to
control and shape (manipulate and contain) their voices. They
have no intellectual presence in his formulations, and one can
only wonder how his assumptions about containment, which also
circulate in The Political Unconscious, might differ if they

were informed by a consideration of texts that are produced by

10

those who are in a social position to contain nothing and who
are, at least in part if never absolutely as Lukacs reminds us,
shaped by the containment strategies of others. Instead, texts
from people on the “margins” of society are given the
surprisingly simplistic categorization of “authentic,” as if
they are the organic creations of collective spirits which have,
somehow, avoided the pitfalls of capitalism. They do not get
the rigorous analysis that Jameson usually reserves for
Modernist texts that are supposed to be the products of
individual authors. To be clear, I am objecting to Jameson’s
analysis of high and mass culture only to the degree that he
virtually ignores other modes of cultural production that are
also distinctive aspects of the late capitalist epoch in which
we live. Nonetheless, much of what he argues in this essay and
subsequently in the Political Unconscious will inform my study
of working-class literature, which starts with the declaration
that working-class texts deserve the same analytical scrutiny as
all other texts that have emerged within capitalism.

Jameson fetishizes the working-class and other marginalized
groups because he sees them, categorically, as the idealized
other, as organic formations that signify the negation of
reification rather than its most complex embodiment. Yet, he is
merely continuing a pervasive tradition of Marxism, one which
has its origins in the writings of Marx and finds its expression
in virtually every school of Marxist thought. It is a tradition
that sees in the working-class a potential for the liberation of

all (i.e., the potential for something authentic in a world of

11

decontextualized commodities). At the same time, this tradition
disregards the complexity and diversity of the working-class
intellect. Even the radical anti-humanist Louis Althusser, for
instance, relies on a characterization of working-class
consciousness in his often quoted theories of ideology. In his
landmark essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,”
Althusser’s concern is that Marx under—theorized the
relationship between the base and superstrucuture by not
adequately explaining the dialectical relationship of the two.
Althusser never challenges that basic Marxist assumption “that
it is the base which in the last instance determines the whole
edifice,” but he does want to move beyond the limitations
inherent in the spatial metaphor of base/superstructure
(“Ideology” 135-36). He concludes that “. . . the reproduction
of labour power takes place essentially outside the firm”
(“Ideology” 130). According to his system, though it is true
that a superstructure of state and social institutions is
created from the labor process (which is how I translate
“firm”), it is also true that these institutions, Ideological
State Apparatuses, recreate the dominate relations of production
and do so through the discursive dissemination of politically
invested systems of thought, what he calls ideology. Ideologies
exist to maintain the status quo, but unlike those who work
within the humanist traditions of classical Marxism, Althusser
challenges the belief that ideology is a type of false
consciousness or mere illusion because this view implies that

the false can be negated simply by a correction of

12

consciousness, that is, by learning what is real and what is
not. To maintain the argument about false consciousness is, by
Althusser's standards, to ignore the epistemological depths to
which ideology reaches. He argues that “there is no practice
except by and in an ideology” (Althusser, “Ideology” 170). The
subject is hailed, or interpellated, by ISA’s, and the
ideologies that these ISA’s disseminate constitute the
subjectivity of the individual thus hailed. Our very identities
are constructed by the ideologies which call out to us. They
are not false because they constitute our reality, even if they
exist to disguise the real nature of the circumstances in which
we live.

The problem that remains for Althusser is how one goes
about changing an ideology from a position that has been
constructed within that ideology. The unsatisfactory way in
which Althusser answers this question has largely been
disregarded by the post-structuralist theorists who have co-
opted his ideas and accorded him the status of primogenitor of
their tradition. Chris Weedon argues that Althusserianism marks
“a crucial break with humanist conceptions of the individual”
because it does not presuppose that the individual has a
coherent and fixed essence, a position which many post-
structuralists attribute to humanist modes of Marxist thought
(32). It is in language, according to Weedon, that “our sense
of ourselves” is constructed; the self is “an effect of
ideology” (32). Logically, there is no way to move beyond

ideology to change a world, the reality of which, even in

13

Althusser’s terms, is hidden by the very ideology which
constitutes our individual subjectivities. Post—structuralists
believe that we cannot know reality objectively and that we can
only perceive it subjectively through an ideological filter.
They tend to miss that, even if his theories are not clearly
developed or explained, Althusser does allow for the possibility
that the epistemological hold of ideology can be broken. It is
not even stretching the matter to say that he is counting on it.
Althusser admired Marx because he had gone through an
“epistemological rupture” which freed him from the limitations
of the German ideology. He says in For Marx, that Marx’s
“retreat from ideology towards reality came to coincide with the
discovery of a radically new reality of which Marx and Engels
could find no echo in the writings of ‘German philosophy’” (£9;
Marx 81). He adds, “In France, Marx discovered the organized
working class, in England, Engels discovered developed
capitalism and a class struggle obeying its own laws and
ignoring philosophy and philosophers” (For Marx 81). Marx and
Engels encountered realities that the traditions of German
philosophy could not explain or disguise. The observation of
behavior beyond the boundaries of their culture, in turn, gave
them the tools “to break” with the prevailing epistemology. The
German ideology could not disguise the reality of France and
England. Seeing that reality, Marx and Engels found a way
outside of the ideology that had been interpellating them. This
epistemological break allowed them to construct a science,

historical materialism, that also expressed a “new practice of

14

philosophy” grounded in real history, not ideology (Althusser,
“Lenin before Hegel” 107). Ideologies might present themselves
as totalizing, but they can never disguise reality in its
totality, an implied position for Althusser but one that he
shares with Georg Lukacs and Raymond Williams.

Althusser also allows for the possibility that ideologies
can be subverted from the inside by some aspect of consciousness
that, somehow, and he is vague as to how, avoids the pressures

of being hailed. He argues:

It is because bourgeois and petty bourgeois intellectuals
have a bourgeois (or petty-bourgeois) ‘class instinct’,
whereas proletarians have a proletarian class instinct.
The former, blinded by bourgeois ideology which does
everything it can to cover up class exploitation, cannot
see capitalist exploitation. The latter, on the contrary,
despite the terrible weight of bourgeois and petty-
bourgeois ideology they carry, cannot fail to see this
exploitation, since it constitutes their daily life
(“Preface to Capita ” 100).
At some level of the proletarian consciousness there will be
perceptions, what he calls instincts, that evade the tremendous
pressures of bourgeois ideology and allow the proletariat to see
the reality of human relations under capitalism. Like most
other Marxists, Althusser pins his hope for the liberation of
society on the consciousness of the proletariat, but he never
feels compelled to address that consciousness directly in his
study of ideology. Instead, like Jameson, he looks for
manifestations of proletarian “instincts” in the writings of
those who are not of that class. He says, for instance, that
“Lenin adopted a proletarian class viewpoint,” and Althusser

makes this claim after just having said that this would be

impossible for someone of Lenin’s class based alignment

15

(Althusser, “Lenin before Hegel” 107). Lenin did not, after
all, directly live the exploitation that leads to the necessary
perseverance of proletarian instincts, and Althusser never
explores what made his epistemological break with bourgeois
ideology possible. Nor does he explain which of Lenin’s
viewpoints were specifically proletarian except to say that
historical materialism itself is the manifestation of the
proletarian viewpoint (Althusser, “Preface to Captial” 100).

The relationship between Marxism and proletarian consciousness
is one that I will explore in more detail later, but suffice it
to say for now that Althusser’s equation of proletarian instinct
and Marxism is altogether unsatisfying and based on a wishful
thinking that is generally associated with the most
reprehensible moments of Stalinism. Bertel Ollmann notes that
Marxists are, too often, guilty of making the leap from the
belief that working-class consciousness is the effect of
capitalistic modes of alienation to the view that Marxism is
itself working-class consciousness without interrogating the
contradictions between these two positions (7). Althusser’s
theories of revolution rely almost exclusively on a conception
of working-class consciousness, and yet, like so many other
Marxists, he does not turn to actual working-class discourse for
an understanding of what that consciousness might be able to
express instinctually. He claims, instead, that the working—
class intellect finds its best representation in the writings of
Lenin, a petty bourgeois intellectual who did not share his

faith in working-class instincts and who did not equate his own

16

writing with working—class consciousness. In What is to be
Done? Lenin argues that revolution must be brought to the
proletariat from without by bourgeois and petty bourgeois
intellectuals who, working within the discipline of a party, can
see beyond the immediate demands that proletarians are likely to
make in a revolutionary scenario (82). In the end, like
Jameson, Althusser presents an analysis of capitalism from which
its most significant creation, the proletariat, is absent except
as an idealized other capable of expressing something
instinctual or authentic despite the crushing weight of
capitalist ideology. Althusser both simplifies the working—
class and, by default, presents it as simplistic.

At a foundational level, Marxism is predicated on the
assumption that working—class consciousness has the most
revolutionary potential. Yet, Althusser never adequately
explained how this consciousness progresses from a state of
animalistic or machine-like dehumanization with which it is
often associated in Marxist literature, even though an
instinctual manifestation of proletarian awareness is so central
to his thinking. Ironically, because Althusser and he are
diametrically opposed as anti—humanist and humanist within the
traditions of Marxist thought, Georg Lukacs did theorize this
progression in History and Class Consciousness (1923), forty to
fifty years before Althusser presented his theories. In his
1967 Preface, Lukacs declares that he had two major objectives
in writing this text. The first is to “chart the correct and

authentic class consciousness of the proletariat, distinguishing

l7

it from ‘public opinion surveys’ (a term not yet in currency)
and to confer upon it an indisputably practical objectivity”
(Lukacs, History xviii). Lukacs sets out to retrieve from
bourgeois theories of sociology and psychoanalysis the notion of
consciousness, which is central to the early works of Marx,
those that most reflect an Hegelian influence. In the above
passage, the word “practical” is key because Lukacs is
responding to the bourgeois ossification of consciousness. It
exists objectively, but consciousness is never static and should
not be treated as such. If we can for a moment discuss the
opinions that circulate widely within a given group, these
opinions are in no way adequately representative of a class that
is continually changing as history progresses. Within Lukacs’s
system, there are no fixed ideas that are representative of the
consciousness of a particular class. When Lukacs refers to the
class consciousness of the working-class, he is not referring to
a world view, static or otherwise. As he says, “Thus only when
the theoretical primacy of the ‘facts’ has been broken, only
when every phenomenon is recognised to be a process, will it be
understood that what we are wont to call ‘facts’ consists of
processes” (History 184). In his effort to break the
“theoretical primacy of facts” that predominates in bourgeois
thought and that distinguishes it from historical materialism,
Lukacs sought to reinvigorate Marxism (his second major
objective) by bringing back to it the Hegelian notion of the
process, which he felt had been lost from the theories of all

but the very best Marxists. We talk about the working-class as

18

a fixed entity. However, Lukacs reminds us that we need to
consider the working-class as a living process, even if our use
of the term working-class for “terminological convenience” makes
it appear static (Fuss 34).2 A theory must be accompanied, in
other words, by an application of its ideas to the real world,
which evolves. Lukécs calls this marriage of theory and
application “praxis” (History 126). Only by re-emphasizing the
notion of process, according to Lukacs, can Marxism overcome its
“rigidity dialectically and take on the quality of [a theory of
history in a state of] Becoming" (History 203). In his study
Walter Benjamin, Terry Eagleton wrongly suggests that the
Hegelianism of Lukacs entails a return to Hegelian idealism,
which is based on the Kantian concept of the monad, the human
subject as an independent and ahistorical essence. He
categorically rejects Lukacs as a result of this perceived
backsliding into liberal humanism (Eagelton, Walter Benjamin 83—
84). It appears that Eagleton uncharacteristically ignores the
deeper implications of Lukacs's arguments. Lukacs’s professed
Hegelianism is a “nee-Hegelianism.” If he sees value in
recovering the notion of process from Hegel and bringing it to a
Marxism which has left it behind, this does not then imply that
he also brings with him the Hegelian conception of the subject
as it is articulated by Hegel. Lukacs’s theory is centered on
the subject. He is a humanist, as was Marx. It does not, thus,
follow that he is a liberal humanist. His subject is not trying

to achieve an awareness of and unity with a platonic (fixed and

eternal) essence from which it has been separated. For Lukacs,

19

the subject is striving for an historically necessary “class
consciousness.”

Class consciousness does not entail what the term seems to
imply logically. Often, critics, especially practitioners of
American neo-Marxism, use it to refer to the collective
consciousness or the shared views and conceptions of a given
class. This use of the term is endorsed by some prominent
Marxists, notably the sociologist Erik Olin Wright (Class Counts
384). For Lukacs, the term class consciousness is not, however,
synonymous with this abstract notion of a consistent and
pervasive world view. In History and Class Consciousness,
“class consciousness implies a class-conditioned unconsciousness
of ones [sic] own socio-historical and economic conditions.

Everything hinges on the extent to which [the members of a
given class] can become conscious of the actions needed to
obtain and organise power” (52-53). Like Hegel and, for that
matter, Louis Althusser, Lukacs emphasizes “awareness.” Whereas
Hegel is looking for the awareness of a liberal humanist
essence, Lukacs suggests that what is needed by those who are
oppressed is a conscious awareness of the nature of their
oppression. Again like Althusser, he argues that the potential
for this awareness arises out the very experience of
exploitation that defines working-class existence. The
oppressed have a “class conditioned unconsciousness” of their
own oppression that manages to exist despite the degradation
that reification entails. Lukacs’s thinking follows closely the

ideas of Marx, with the exception that he gives a more complete

20

account as to how revolution will occur. For Lukacs, the very
experience of proletarian existence is dehumanizing as well, but
this process of dehumanization is also planting the seeds of its
own destruction. Reification might degrade the intellect, but
it does not do so to the extent that this intellect becomes
completely devoid of analytical capabilities. Awareness of
oppression, an awareness that develops within the intellect of
the working—class, is not only possible within Lukacs’s system,
it is imminent. When the individual proletarian sees the nature
of his reification, it will enable him to see its pervasiveness
under capitalism. The worker will then be able to see
capitalism as a “totality,” understanding how it functions on a
macrocosmic scale. This awareness will ultimately lead to the
demise of capitalism (Lukacs, History 29).

Even though its outcome is desirable, Lukacs’s “objective”
study of proletarian consciousness is problematic because it is
one which ignores proletarian consciousness as it objectively
exists. Lukacs does not ossify working-class consciousness. He
presents a theory of that consciousness as a process, albeit an
abstract one that never touches upon an actual discursive
manifestation. He does, unfortunately, see proletarian
consciousness as homogeneous. Though his very argument
recognizes its evolutionary character, Lukacs still fetishizes
that consciousness as the ideal other. The importance he places
on conscious intellectual awareness implies a recognition of
working-class intellectual capability, but he offers a

teleological theory of working—class thought that does not take

21

the practical step of subjecting that thought to direct
scrutiny. In these terms, Lukacs’s own study falls short of
achieving the praxis that he called for in others. He centers
his theory of capitalist development on the evolution of the
working-class mind, but the working class intellect exists in
his texts only as an absent presence, something that is
described with a definitive authority but that also never makes
an appearance. Like Jameson, he constructs a theory of
reification that ignores the voices of those whose lives, and
therefore, consciousnesses constitute reification’s most complex
manifestation. Like Marx, he is still speaking for others in a
way that perpetuates working-class silence.

In addition to those who ignore it, there are those
Marxists who adamantly refuse to acknowledge that working—class
culture has any value whatsoever. In fact, they are often
hostile to the idea that a meaningful working-class culture
exists, even if they do concede that isolated moments of
creativity occur. In Literature and Revolution, for instance,
Leon Trotsky does not disavow the existence of working-class
authors, nor is he blind to the reality that, on occasion,
working-class authors have overcome the enormous obstacles
placed in their paths by the hegemonic forces of bourgeois
society that work to deny them discursive agency. In these
terms, he goes one step beyond the Marxist theorists discussed
thus far. Trotsky even applauds those “talented and gifted"
workers who have managed to produce poetry because they are

laying the foundations of revolution by breaking out of the

22

strictures and limitations that have been imposed on their class
(200—01). He does argue, however, that these texts, which he
sees as isolated historical phenomena, do not constitute a
“literature” because “the work of the proletarian poets lacks an
organic quality, which is produced only by a profound
interaction between art and the development of culture in
general” (Trotsky 200). He contends further that this “organic
quality” (a phrase which he never adequately defines) can only
come about with the emergence of a proletarian culture. His
understanding of “culture” needs explication because he is not
using the term in the sense that contemporary leftists engaged
in cultural studies do. He does not see culture as the site of
conflict, class or otherwise. His use of the term is much more
Arnoldian. Matthew Arnold writes in Culture and Anarchy,
perhaps the most important expression of British bourgeois
literary politics, Culture “consists in becoming something
rather than having something, in an inward condition of mind”
(Arnold 477). For Arnold, Culture is monolithic, something to
be defended. Having the capacity to produce what looks like art
does not mean that one contributes to the development of Culture
unless one possesses the proper sensibilities, usually by virtue
of birth. Trotsky does not regress into this essentialism, but
like, Arnold he also sees Culture as coherent and monolithic,
accessible only to the dominant few, though through political
conquest and not right of birth. He says, “One cannot turn the
concept of culture into the small change of individual daily

living and determine the success of a class culture by the

23

proletarian passports of individual inventors or poets. Culture
is the organic sum of knowledge and capacity which characterizes
the entire society, or at least its ruling class” (Trotsky 199—
200). A proletarian culture, and thus a proletarian literature,
can exist only when the proletariat has become something, when
it has seized for itself control of the means of the production
and distribution of knowledge within a given society. A culture
for Trotsky is, thus, a unified body of knowledge that conveys
the views and conceptions of a dominant class that has
successfully absorbed the culture of previously dominant
classes. There is an intellectual complexity to the dominant
class that allows it to organize the whole of society in its
interests. Until the working-class reaches this stage in its
development, the literary works produced by members of that
class must necessarily be regarded as a degraded aspect of
bourgeois dominated culture. Works by “talented and gifted”
working—class writers are the by—product of social relations
that have been organized under capitalism and must, therefore,
reflect the objective reality of bourgeois hegemony, rather than
the complexity and specificity of the working-class mind.
Trotsky sees the eventual domination (the term he uses is
dictatorship) of the proletariat as the inevitable result of the
class conflict, but he does he not see the existence of a
proletarian culture as inevitable as well. He proclaims
repeatedly in Literature and Revolution that “it is
fundamentally incorrect to contrast bourgeois culture and

bourgeois art with proletarian culture and proletarian art”

24

(Trotsky 14). His argument is grounded in the traditions of
Marxism, which in this case, does not make it sound. He
concludes that, as a necessary condition of its hegemony, the
bourgeoisie, through its century and a half of predominance, had
absorbed and appropriated older forms of culture and had, in
turn, created its own culture, the sole purpose of which was to
reinforce its dominance. Even when it comes to power, the
proletariat will be unable to duplicate this process of cultural
hegemony because, whereas bourgeois culture exists for the
ongoing maintenance of bourgeois domination in class based
society, the dictatorship of the proletariat will exist only in
the brief interlude between the demise of capitalism and the
emergence of socialism. Proletarian literature will never exist
“because the proletarian regime is temporary and transient. The
historic significance and the moral grandeur of the proletarian
revolution consist in the fact that it is laying the foundation
of a culture which is above classes and will be the first
culture that is truly human” (Trotsky 14). The proletariat, he
contends, must still master and absorb Pushkin if it hopes to
develop the “organic” quality which defines culture. In his
view there simply will not be time for this absorption to occur.
During the short transitional period of its dictatorship, the
proletariat must necessarily concern itself with building the
institutions of socialism (Trotsky 130). When these
institutions come into existence, the proletariat will cease to
exist. The proletarians engaged in the struggle for their own

liberation from the alienating effects of capitalism will

25

eliminate their existence as proletarians, a view shared by
every thinker discussed thus far. Trotsky sums up his argument
by saying that the culture which follows bourgeois culture will
“be, happily! Socialist and not ‘proletarian’” (201).

Although he grounds his argument in a logic shared by many
Marxists, Trotsky gets it wrong because he does not allow the
working-class an appropriate degree of agency. He sees the
working-class as the out-come of bourgeois social relations and
thus as a part of bourgeois culture rather than as a class whose
interests are antithetical to those of the bourgeoisie. They
are antithetical, even if the very existence of the working-
class depends on its inability to recognize this antagonism.

The proletariat is, as Georg Lukacs reminds us, a specific
economic articulation of the bourgeois epoch, one of its “pure”
and defining classes (Lukacs, History 59). The working—class is
not, however, (merely) a specific articulation of the
bourgeoisie. If the proletariat does not have interests that
are antithetical to the interest of the bourgeoisie and if they
are incapable of expressing those interests, even in a literary
capacity, then there would be no need for the existence of a
bourgeois culture. The entire process of hegemony that Gramsci
defines so thoroughly would be meaningless if the existence of
what Raymond Williams calls a “counter-hegemony” were not
possible (Williams, Marxism 118-19). The bourgeoisie would not
need to work toward the “spontaneous consent” of the proletariat
to its own oppression if the latter were incapable of inscribing

its own interests and concerns, both resistant and collusive,

26

into a discourse that forms the basis of a counter—hegemonic
working-class culture (Gramsci 12). For too long, critics have
confused the ongoing attempt to suppress working-class discourse
with its actual suppression and have, in turn, accepted at face
value claims, such as those by Virginia Woolf, that working—
class texts and, by extension, working-class cultures do not
exist. In short, working-class culture, art, and literature do
exist. If one hopes, as most Marxists suggest they do, to
understand the interest and concerns of the majority class in
society, a class which the mechanisms of the bourgeois state
work so hard to manipulate and contain, then one must also
understand where these concerns and interests are being
expressed in their complexity.

More disturbing than the neglect of committed Marxists is
the lack of working-class advocacy within academia for the
curricular inclusion of working-class literature. In Britain,
working-class culture has had an academic legitimacy of sorts
since the fifties, but that there is a long way to go even there
is suggested by the dearth of criticism on working~class
literature over the last forty years. The cumulative number of
critical studies on working-class literature does not compare to
the quantity of material that scholars of Virginia Woolf produce
annually. There are multiple and complex reasons for why
working-class people who enter academia, unlike people from
other “marginalized” groups, have not been struggling for the
academic legitimation of their own art. The most significant

reason is that working-class consciousness, as depicted by the

27

hegemonic ideologies of western capitalism, has come to
symbolize a negation of intellectuality. By silencing working
people, influential Marxists such as those I discuss have by
default been responsible for propagating this negative valuation
of working people, even if their motives were different from
those of the capitalists and their desires for working—class
liberation were sincere.

In their book the Politics and Poetics Transgression, Peter
Stallybrass and Allon White contend that the ideological
devaluation of the working-class intellect has its historical
roots in the political and economic ascendancy of bourgeois
industrialists and their subsequent need to legitimate their
control of cultural and material production. Stallybrass and
White suggest that this urgent need gave rise to the mind/body
split which underlies western liberal humanism and, therefore,
bourgeois philosophical and political thought. They describe
how the ideological distinction between embodiment and
rationality was the result of a deliberate bourgeois political
strategy to develop a discursive system which it could use to
distinguish itself bodily and intellectually from the working—
class. They argue that “the creation of a sublimated public
body without smells, without coarse laughter, without organs[,
or uncontrollable openings,] separate from . . . the
[‘grotesque’ proletarian body of the] market square, alehouse,
and street . . . was the great Labour of bourgeois culture”
(Stallybrass and White 93-94). The bourgeoisie claimed for

themselves a particular type of embodiment, one which

28

Stallybrass and White describe as “classical” because it is best
exemplified by the ideals of classical sculpture: “The classical
statue has no openings or orifices whereas the grotesque
emphasize[s] the gaping mouth, the protuberant belly and
buttocks, the feet and the genitals . . .” (Stallybrass and
White 22). As part of this ideological agenda, the bourgeoisie,
in turn, projected onto the proletariat all undisciplined bodily
expression, and the laboring classes became associated with the
grotesque in the artifacts of bourgeois culture (Stallybrass and
White 201). Most significantly, Stallybrass and White further
suggest that, the bourgeois identification with the classical
had real political consequences because “. . . the classical
body was far more than an aesthetic model. It structured, from
the inside as it were, the characteristically ‘high’ discourses
of philosophy, statecraft, theology and law, as well as
literature as they emerged from the Renaissance” (Stallybrass
and White 22). The end result was that “these protocols of the
classical body came to mark out the identity of progressive
rationalism itself" (Stallybrass and White 22). Within the
context of this ideology, the bourgeoisie have claimed for
themselves the realms of reason and intellect and denied the
working—classes any such associations.

Thus, working-class people who have entered academia have
done so generally on the condition that they divest themselves
of a socially acquired identity which the hegemonic group has
deemed intellectually worthless. Such a divestment is never in

itself possible and attempts to do so usually result in a sort

29

of self loathing which can become debilitating. Joanna Kadi
argues as much in an autobiographical account of her struggles,
as a working-class woman, to find acceptance in an academic
world that pro forma dismisses those aspects of working-class
culture in which she finds pleasure. She says that “beginning
and continuing through my twenties and early thirties, middle—
class and upper-middle—class people let me know, in no uncertain
terms, that my feelings for country music were suspect and
shameful” (Kadi 94). For her, these signals “reinforced
internalized self—hatred and community hatred” to the point that
she “stopped listening to country music,” a mode of expression
which she defines as authentically working-class because it
communicates, to use Jameson’s terminology, the anxieties of
working-class people (Kadi 94-95). The devaluation of working-
class culture, a devaluation which, as I argued above, is
implicit in the writings of many Marxists, had the effect of
silencing a scholar who saw philosophical complexity in working—
class modes of expression. Like most working-class people, Kadi
was coerced into perpetuating an ideological perspective of the
dominant class that, as Stallybrass and White note, denies
working-class people and working-class cultural artefacts
intellectual legitimacy. Through no fault of her own, she
colluded in her own oppression by conceding to the devaluation
of her own culture. As her book Thigkigg_§la§§ indicates so
forcefully, she has since refused to be an accomplice in this

process.

30

CHAPTER TWO: THE REDEMPTION OF REALISM

To their credit, some Marxists have been calling for the
academic legitimacy of working—class literature, but few critics
have approached this issue with the rigorous inquiry common to
Marxist thought. Through an application of an eclectic Marxism,
one which draws on the best of many schools but is not
insensitive to conflicts, I propose to resolve the major issue
facing those who are proponents of working-class literature. I
applaud their advocacy and join them in their insistence that
working—class people have the right, ability, and perhaps even
the responsibility, to speak out about their own culture. Few
have attempted, however, to define what working-class people and
those committed to working-class liberation should be
advocating. In its broadest sense, the purpose of what follows
is to provide a Marxist definition of working—class literature
that foregrounds working-class experience.

Too many critics use the term “working—class literature”
without identifying its parameters because, apparently, they are
unwilling to approach the theoretical complexities of class.
Unlike those who deal with gender or race, critics who wish to
discuss issues of class have not been accorded the tenuous
luxury of relying on the grosser biological features of an
author to understand what Raymond Williams calls “alignment”
(Marxism 199). While this has caused many to question the
validity of class as a methodology for categorizing human

experience, it has also meant that those concerned with class

31

have never been able to rely for long on what appears natural,
such as physical appearance. In the long run, this works to the
advantage of theorists genuinely interested in class because
their adversaries have urged them continually to re—evaluate the
commonalities that have led them to classify people in expansive
groups. Those commonalities change as history changes. The
working-class is, as Lukacs argues, in a “continual state of
becoming.” Many who interrogate class have not approached it
with the critical rigor necessary to understand how those
commonalities change. People are “aligned,” and the
commonalities that determine the nature of that alignment exist.
In saying so, I am merely expressing what most accept tacitly.
Even if they appear to be elusive, the commonalities that we
rely on to identify class alignment are as real, if not more so,
than those that are taken for granted by theorists who concern
themselves solely with issues of gender or race.

In defining alignment, Williams claims that people exist in
particular historical situations, and that they have achieved
politically situated views and conceptions because of specific
historic, and in Marxist terms, class relations (Marxism 199).
Anthony Appiah notes that the grosser physical features that we
commonly use to identify differences in race and gender signify
very little actual difference in biology and are altogether
unreliable as signifiers of the social relations which people
have experienced, except in the most general and abstract terms
(31). If class is to be a meaningful categorization of human

experience, then it must be informed by actual human relations

32

to the continually evolving organization of a society’s material
and ideological production. To argue otherwise, is to dismiss
that central tenet of Marxism which distinguishes it from
bourgeois philosophy. A Marxism which is not continually re-
evaluating itself in terms of the material forces that drive
human experience ceases to be Marxism. As Paulo Freire says,
“The radical, committed to human liberation, does not become the
prisoner of a ‘circle of certainty’ within which reality is also
imprisoned. On the contrary, the more radical the person is,
the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it
better, he or she can transform it” (21). To enter into reality
in Marxist terms is to concern oneself, on some level, with the
organization of the labor process in a given society. While
many so—called Marxists would call such a claim the crassest
sort of economism, they often continue to use class as a means
of identifying certain types of human experience.1 They reduce
the concept of class to a meaningless abstraction, one which is
unquestioned because it is presumed to be commonsensically
logical. The primary importance attributed to the economic as
an identifying determinant distinguishes class from other
methodologies. Nonetheless, the economic cannot be separated
from the ideological forces that work to perpetuate it. The
relationship between the two is, as Althusser claims,
dialectical. Adorno is correct to remind us that “a dialectical
theory which is uninterested in culture as a mere epiphenomenon,
aids pseudo—culture to run rampant and collaborates in the

reproduction of the evil” (“Cultural Criticism” 28). The

33

converse is also true. A theory that professes the economic to
be unknowable because of the ideological opacity of culture is
not in the least bit dialectical.

Class is a methodological signifier of how real people live
and express real lives. Marx says in The German Ideology, “As
individuals express their life, so they are. What they are,
therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they
produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals
thus depends on the material conditions determining their
production” (43). The most significant, and certainly the most
contested, claim of classical Marxism involves the primacy of
the labor process as a formative determinant of consciousness
and class alignment. As Marx argues in The Manifesto, “Our
epoch, the epoch of the Bourgeoisie . . . has simplified the
class antagonisms: Society as a whole is more and more splitting
up into two great camps, into two great classes directly facing
each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat” (Marx and Engels,
Manifesto 480). A widely held misconception about Marx, even
among many Marxists, is that he acknowledges the existence of
only two classes. He does not, but he does claim that, with the
continuing predominance of the bourgeoisie, other classes are
being absorbed into and eradicated by a system in which most
people belong to either the bourgeoisie or proletariat, two
classes dialectically opposed in their relationships to the
labor process. It might seem pedestrian to point this out, and
I risk being redundant. Regardless, many self-professed

Marxists would benefit from being reminded of the note that

34

Engels appended to the 1888 English edition of The Manifesto:
“By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern Capitalists, owners
of the means of social production and employers of wage—labour,
by proletariat, the class of modern wage-labourers who, having
no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling
their labour—power in order to live” (473). A working-class
individual necessarily obtains, or is dependent on someone who
obtains for them, the means of their subsistence through the
sale of their labor power.

Class alignment is not, therefore, dependent on the
material circumstances of the individual but rather the degree
to which the individual possesses power within the labor
process. It usually follows that those who are virtually
powerless possess no material wealth of consequence. Though his
argument about “contradictory class locations” are unsatisfying
because they do not take into ideological factors that compel
people to commit to a class with which they are not aligned, in
formulating his position, Erik Olin Wright correctly cautions us
to consider that there are varying degrees of empowerment within
a given class (Classes 42).2 Thus, even within the working-
class, there is no homogeneous level of disempowerment, which,
in turn, implies that there are varying degrees of alienation.
The manager of a pizza parlor may possess more power within the
labor process and feel less alienated than the unfortunate man
whose job it is to put the pizza into a raging oven, but that
manager still works for a wage. The degree to which he or she

possesses power does not compare to the power possessed by the

35

majority share-holder of the multinational corporation that owns
the pizza parlor. The manager's power exists at the discretion
of the owner, and whether the manager uses this power for his
own benefit is debatable. One could argue that by using it, he
is, in fact, separating himself from those with whom he is most
closely aligned and, therefore, contributing to his own
continuing disempowerment on a more complex level. One must
also consider the extent to which his own sense of empowerment
is illusory. This feeling of empowerment might be the result of
an ideology that tells him he has power because his employers
want to keep him from seeing the stronger commonalities between
himself and his fellow wage-earners. Tom Bottomore points out
that the division of a class into “divergent interest groups at
one level does not preclude the existence at another level of
important common interests and aspirations” (71—72). Following
Bottomore’s thinking, one could also argue that the manager and
his fellow employee are merely competing factions of the same
wage earning class, vying for whatever modicum of control the
employer is willing to grant them.

Despite its centrality, power is Marxism’s most under—
theorized concern, and at the heart of many squabbles amongst
Marxist theorists is a tacit difference in approach to the issue
of power. Erik Olin Wright notes that sociologists who pre-
occupy themselves with class are in disagreement as to whether
class is descriptive of relations of domination or of
exploitation. He prefers to define class in terms of

exploitation because, “‘Exploitation’ is thus the key concept

36

for understanding the nature of interests generated by the class
relations” (Wright, Class Counts 10). Though Wright’s reasoning
is sound, economic exploitation is only half of the equation.

If we are not to be guilty of economism, and we should not be,
we must take into account the hegemonic that also emanates from
within the cultural realm and has the function of ideological
domination. The hegemonic ensures that existing practices of
exploitation will continue. In what seems to be a definitive
stance against the French New Left, Raymond William argues that
“hegemony is then not only the articulate upper level of
‘ideology,’ nor are its forms of control only those ‘ordinarily’
seen as manipulations or ‘indoctrination’. It is the whole body
of practices and expectations, over the whole of living.
(Williams, Marxism 110). Economic exploitation and ideological
domination are part of the same integrated hegemonic process.

It is impossible to discuss the deterministic effects of one in
isolation because one cannot be separated from the other. Those
who pursue the cultural and disregard the economic are probably
sufficiently removed from economic exploitation that they can
neither see nor feel the real effects of this pervasive
capitalistic practice, which takes place in realms outside of
language even if describing it is a linguistic act. The
expropriation of labor—power is a practice. It is something
that people do to each other. Exploitation could not exist
without the ideological domination necessary to ensure its
continuance, though Williams compels me to consider how

practices might be structured in such a way as to be self-

37

perpetuating. The negative effects of exploitation are real and
discernable. People are, in Althusserian terms,
“overdetermined” (Poulantzas 14). Though I will not employ this
Althusserian term because it invites confusion and associations
with Fruedian thought, I will concede to the thinking that
informs it. Social determinants arise from numerous sources, and
out of any of these sources a contradiction might emerge that
will spark revolutionary change. A pre-occupation with the
economic as the only determinant is reductive. Nicos Poulantzas
argues that “a historically determined social formation is
specified by a particular articulation . . . of [the] economic,
political, ideological, and theoretical”(15). The economic
maintains primacy “in the last resort,” as Engels famously says
in Anti-DUhrinq (104). This does not mean that all determinants
come directly from the economic, but neither does it mean that
their relationship to the economic is irrelevant or
indiscernible. The determinants of class alignment are knowable
and can be found in a complex hegemonic process that is
characterized by the continually evolving inter-relationship of
(economic) exploitation and (ideological) domination.

Since this deterministic hegemonic process is not static,
class is not static either. Everything is derivative of this
dialectical movement of history and is in a continual state of
becoming (Lukacs, History 203). The term working-class is not
descriptive of a particular fixed set of beliefs. Class is a
methodological categorization of human experience based on the

recognition of commonalities. Since all the people of a given

38

class cannot and do not experience the same social relations in
the same historical context, the members of that class will not
possess the same views and conceptions. There will always be
regional variations, and working—class people will even have
views and conceptions that will conflict. Trying to develop a
theory of class based on a commonality of viewpoint has never
been a satisfactory means of approaching the issue. It is,
nonetheless, one that is common among Marxist organizations that
engage in facile appeals to the “average worker” and that try to
validate their authenticity by claiming to understand what such
people feel. Often, their rhetoric is so far removed from what
the “average worker” feels that it alienates rather than
inspires. I reiterate Lenin’s admonition: “You, gentleman, who
are so much concerned about the ‘average worker’ . . . rather
insult the workers by your desire to talk down to them about
working-class politics and working-class organisation” (What is
to Be Done? 82). Unanimity of belief among working people
simply does not exist, and claims that rely on a presumption of
unanimity are reductive and simply provide support for those who
categorically reject Marxism without knowing its complexities
and subtleties. Marxists genuinely committed to ending
exploitation must not confuse their desire for a unanimous
revolutionary sentiment with the actual state of the working—
class. Doing so subsumes the reality of the present in a desire
for the future and, ultimately, makes the attainment of that
future less and less likely. Like Bottomore, Nicos Poulantaz

also reminds us that classes are divided into competing

39

factions, and though he applies this observation mostly to the
ruling class, it pertains equally to the proletariat (73). It
is absurd not to expect people to struggle for the meager scraps
of power and wealth that trickle to down them. These struggles
pit worker against worker, but their existence does not erase
deeper commonalities, even if they prevent the workers from
seeing them. One must also account for the contentious co—
existence of such antithetical political perspectives as trade
unionism and fascism because, though they are justifiably
unpalatable to Marxists who regard them as forms of false
consciousness, their existence is a real part of working-class
existence. Such variations and conflicts do not, however,
negate the methodological use of class in associating individual
experience with expansive groups. If they did, then the same
criterion of negation would have to be applied to all other
forms of group categorization as well. Grouping people into
categories such as “women” and “Blacks” would be equally
unjustifiable because political variations and conflicts are not
rendered meaningless by apparent biological commonality.
Variations and conflicts are real aspects of class identity,
just as they are with gender and race. They in no way undermine
the fact that people are subjected to the same far reaching
modes of economic exploitations and methods of ideological
domination that require them to engage in similar, if never
identical, social relations that, in turn, force similar
contradictions upon them.

Because working—class people are subject to similar

40

mechanisms of economic exploitation and ideological domination,
they are also subject to similar determinants that, given the
uneven development of history, are likely to produce different
results in different historical contexts. Their viewpoints are
never homogeneous, but their alignments do belong, to borrow a
concept from Georg Lukacs, to the same “social typology”
(History 51). In an attack on bourgeois philosophers in History
and Class Consciuousness, Lukacs claims, “However much detailed
researches are able to refine social typologies there will
always be a number of clearly distinguished basic types whose
characteristics are determined by the types of position
available in the process of production” (51). It is only on the
basis of this typological categorization of determinants that
one can make the theoretical and methodological leap from the
individual to the broader social context of class.

Marxism is, of course, predicated on the assumption that
everything, but most especially human consciousness, is socially
determined. Marx asks in The Manifesto, “Does it require deep
intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views and conceptions,
in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in
the conditions of his material existence, in his social
relations and his social life?” (Manifesto 492). Despite its
importance to Marx’s thinking, the most nuanced explanation of
how determination functions is in Williams’s Marxism and
Literature. He argues that “a Marxism without some concept of
determination is in effect worthless. A Marxism with many of

the concepts of determination it now has is quite radically

41

disabled” (83). It is difficult to tell from this passage which
conceptions of Marxism have disabled it by offering reductive
theories of determination. There is of course the theory that
is “systematized” in the writings of Plekhanov, who, in Art and
Social Life, attempts to demonstrate the direct correlation
between the social organization of production and the meaning of
art (52). Williams does mention Plekhanov in his introduction
as a formative influence on his Marxism (Marxism 3). One may
reasonably conclude, therefore, that much of what Williams
argues in Marxism and Literature is at least a qualification of
Plekhanov’s positivistic cause and effect formulations.

Williams also notes in the introduction that he is attempting to
bridge the gap between the classics of Marxism that he read in
his youth and the very different Marxism that was coming from
the continent (Marxism 4). Given his apparent attack on the
Althusserians for limiting their theory of hegemony to the upper
levels of conscious articulation, one may also conclude that he
is objecting to their equally fatalistic theory of
determination, which as expressed by Althusser in his theories
of interpellation, does not allow for human agency, an essential
concept in Williams’s thinking. You are hailed by Ideological
State Apparatuses, but there is not allowance for you to hail
back, unless you can somehow effect an epistemological break.

As I say above, Althusser is unclear about how this break will
develop, though his theory relies on belief that it necessarily
will. Williams begins his discussion of determination by

rejecting those positivistic formulations that reductively offer

42

“the ‘laws’ of an objective external system of economy”
(Williams, Marxism 85). Williams thinks that such a position
does not honor the subtleties of Marxist thinking. He begins
his argument by quoting (actually misquoting) Engels from a
“Letter to Joseph Bloch” where Engels says, “We make our history
ourselves, but, in the first place, under very definite
assumptions and conditions” (761). According to Engels, the
economic is one of these assumptions and conditions, but it is
not the only one. He wonders if Marx and he have been remiss in
not making this point clearer (“Letter to Joseph Bloch” 761).
The self-criticism of Engels aside, Williams sees that this
statement from Engels “ restores . . . the idea of direct
agency: ‘we make our history ourselves’. [These] assumptions
and conditions are then the qualifying terms of this agency: in
fact ‘determination’ [needs to be understood] as ‘the setting of
limits’ [on this agency]” (Williams, Marxism 85). People act,
and they make choices, something difficult to see from the
confines of Althusserian thought. Their actions and choices are
“limited” according to the historical situations that confront
them. People make their history, but their history also makes
them. The relationship is a dialectical one. If people have
the capacity to act, then they also have the capacity to think
about that action and to imagine themselves defying the
limitations that they face. As Williams says, “New social
relations and the kinds of activity that are possible through
them, may be imagined but cannot be achieved unless the

determining limits of a particular mode of production are

43

surpassed in practice, by actual social change” (86).
Imagination by itself cannot bring about a change in the limits
that individuals encounter, but it can serve as an actuating
factor in change. When the individual tries to move beyond the
limits he or she faces within bourgeois social relations, they
are likely to encounter reactive “pressures” that exist to
reinforce the status quo. Williams adds that “. . . in practice
determination is never only the setting of limits; it is also
the exertion of pressures . . . derived from the formation of a
given social mode: in effect a compulsion to act in ways that
maintain and renew that mode” (Marxism 87). Pressures both
reinforce and change the limitations according to the
circumstance. Analytically, we can distinguish pressures from
limits, but in practice the two are indissoluble. Limits and
pressures are complementary parts of the same complex process
that Williams calls determination. Capitalistic systems of
exploitation and domination attempt to organize the whole of
society in the interest of those who profit from them. People
who occupy similar positions within these systems confront
limits and pressures that are similar as well, though never
homogeneous or ahistorical. These limits and pressure structure
experience. Williams gives us the language to develop a theory
of class that recognizes the pervasiveness of certain limits and
pressure in the experience of people at a given point in
history.

While most critics of working-class literature are in tacit

agreement that a working-class text is one that has some

44

relationship to the experiences of working—class people,
important theoretical distinctions have not yet been made
between texts which relate to that experience differently. For
instance, “popular” texts are mass produced for working-class
consumption are significant in working-class life and play an
important role as bourgeois tools in the shaping of
working-class consciousness. I do, however, only accept with
reservations Michael Denning’s assertion that “while they [mass
produced texts] do not present accurate pictures of workers’
lives, they can . . . give valuable insight into workers’
thoughts, feelings, and doings” because “workers made up the
bulk of the dime novel public, [and] their concerns and accents
are inscribed in the cheap stories” (4). On the one hand,
Denning’s assertion about working—class reading habits-~he is
talking about the working-class in several countries--provides
me with critical ammunition. If the majority of people in
British society, do not read what Virginia Woolf calls “English”
literature, if it is not pervasive on all levels of that
society, then once again, it is inaccurate to call it “English"
literature without additional qualification. On the other,
Denning’s major conclusion is problematic. He contends that one
finds working-class consciousness, which is how I interpret
“thoughts,” “concerns,” and “accents,” “inscribed” in the texts
of a literature mass produced under the auspices of a class, the
bourgeoisie, whose existence of privilege and dominance is
predicated on the continuing exploitation of working-class

labor—power.

45

Working-class people do internalize many, if not most, of
the ideological assumptions expressed in this literature, and it
would be absurd to claim that popular literature is not consumed
on a massive scale by working-class people. As Jameson suggests
in his essay “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” to be
appealing to working-class people, mass produced literature
must, on some level, speak to the anxieties of working-class
people. Yet, if mass produced literature anticipates those
anxieties in some way, it can only, as Denning himself argues,
represent them partially and imperfectly. One should also
consider that this literature appeals to working people because
it presents them with fictive social relations in which they may
vicariously escape their real anxieties and imagine themselves
in situations free of the conflicts imposed by the limits and
pressures of capitalism. One could then argue that mass
produced texts appeal because the “cares” and “concerns” of
working-class people are not inscribed in them. These cares and
concerns may relate to the artefacts of mass culture only as
structuring absences, the discernability of which is not
impossible but does present analytical difficulties. To me, it
seems more profitable to search for the “cares” and “concerns”
of working-class peOple in the literature which they produce
themselves. Even if this literature reflects the
internalization of the values expressed in mass culture, it will
do so in a way that reflects the particular philosophical
complexities of the working-class mind.

My argument is based an a recognition and qualification of

46

Paulo Freire’s assertion that “[the oppressed] are at once
themselves and the oppressor whose consciousness they have
internalized” (31). This claim has been made by others in
different forms. In One Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse, for
instance, also suggests that “in speaking their own language,
people also speak the language of their masters, benefactors,
advertisers. Thus they do not only express themselves, their
own knowledge, feelings, aspirations, but also something other
than themselves”(193). Many of the ideas circulating in the
working-class originate in the ideologies of the bourgeoisie.

If working-class people did not internalize such ideas, they
would not concede to their own oppression. However, the process
of internalization is one of both adoption and adaptation. An
objective exchange of ideas is never possible, even
unconsciously. Though the internalized views and conceptions
may ultimately have the desired effect of causing workers to
adapt to exploitation rather than to confront it, working-class
people do not, because they cannot, internalize bourgeois
ideology exactly as the bourgeoisie would have them. As Terry
Eagleton argues, “No value is extended to the masses without
being thereby transformed” (Walter Benjamin 135). The
working—class is, after all, differently aligned, and the nature
of their internalization of what are initially bourgeois views
and conceptions will be determined by that alignment. The
internalized will, as a result, become a distinctive, though
possibly oppressive, aspect of working—class consciousness. The

other is collusive, but it is not a pure manifestation of

47

bourgeois thought in the proletarian mind. My concern with
Michael Denning’s contention is that those who do not possess
working-class consciousness cannot produce anything which bears
the mark of its inscription with the same ontological depth that
can be found in working-class literature. It minimizes the
formative importance of working-class experience to suggest that
people from beyond this experience can do so.

In an essay on the fiction of British miners, Graham
Holderness discusses another issue facing critics of
working—class literature: “Necessary theoretical distinctions
have been attempted but not yet carried through: between
working-class and proletarian literature; between
class-conscious and politically committed socialist literature

.” (19-20). Most critics have failed to acknowledge that
there are substantive differences between texts by people
capable of “inscribing” working—class consciousness and authors
who advocate the end of working-class oppression and fictively
explore its consequences but have never been subjected to the
mechanisms of capitalist labor exploitation. No matter what an
author’s political commitments, I would not, as many critics
have, define as working-class a socialist text written by a
bourgeois artist about the proletariat just as I would not
define a nineteenth-century American abolitionist tract written
by a white northerner as African-American literature. There is
value in texts about the working-class by bourgeois writers.
Trotsky reminds us in Literature and Revolution that

“revolutionary art [is] not produced by workers alone” (215).

48

In fact, one could argue convincingly that very little
revolutionary art has emerged directly from the working—class.
Whether socialist or not, politically motivated novels have the
ability to elevate consciousness and to help people understand
the exploitative nature of capitalistic social relations. It
is, nonetheless, important to distinguish between texts by
bourgeois and working-class writers because the consciousness
that they inscribe in their respective works must necessarily
reflect different alignments. Being sensitive to this
distinction is all the more urgent when the subject of the text
in question is the working-class. Only by acknowledging this
qualitative difference in alignment can critics begin to
appreciate fully both the particular qualities of a
working-class inscription of working-class consciousness and the
struggles that most working-class authors have gone through
simply to make their voices heard in a world which, too often,
still associates literature exclusively with the institutions
and intellect of the bourgeoisie.

The relationship between socialist and working—class
consciousness and the degree to which one should make
distinctions between them have been preoccupations of Marxists
for a long time. Lenin argues that working-class consciousness
by definition, “cannot be genuine [ie., socialist] political
consciousness” (What Is to Be Done? 42). A socialist
consciousness is a revolutionary “class consciousness,” and as
Lukacs notes, this entails a self-conscious awareness of the

nature of one’s own oppression (History 52-53). Were the

49

working-class to possess this self—conscious awareness as a
group, it would cease to be the working—class and would
transcend itself. The working-class’s continuing existence as
an oppressed group depends on the effectiveness of those
hegemonic forces in making the capitalist system seem natural
and beneficial. As I indicated in my reading of Trotsky’s
Literature and Revolution, the working—class is a particular
creation of capitalistic social relations, but not a creation of
the bourgeoisie. Though ideologically coerced to do so, it does
consent to its own exploitation. Karl Kautsky reminds us that
socialism “ . . . has its roots in modern economic
relationships, just as the class struggle of the proletariat
has. . . . Socialism and the class struggle arise side by side
and not one out of the other; each arises under different
conditions” (Lenin, What Is to Be Done? 28).3 The working—class
does have revolutionary potential. At moments, elements of the
working-class have embraced revolutionary ideals by refusing to
concede to their continuing exploitation, but not on the scale
needed to effect real revolutionary change. The working-class
is not alone in having this potential. There are committed
elements of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie who, despite
their positions of privilege, are also committed to the causes
of working-class liberation. Marx and Engels fall into this
category. The socialism that Marx envisions would, in Lukacs’s
terms, require the annihilation of the working-class as it now
exists. We should not confuse the potential to revolt for the

act of revolution, nor should we confuse the potential to

50

develop class consciousness with its actual development, which
has yet to occur on a wide scale.

A working-class author necessarily inscribes working-class
consciousness in a text. This definition privileges authorial
experience because it supposes that a working-class author is,
to quote Raymond Williams, either “born or still living in the

working-class” (Williams, “Working-Class” 114). While it
may seem obvious, the definition precludes writers such as
Elizabeth Gaskell from being identified too closely identified
with the working-class, which happens when critics like Mary
Eagleton and David Pierce suggest that she conveys “some
indication of working-class values” in Mary Barton (34). This
statement on its own seems innocuous, but it becomes dangerous
when they claim that Mrs. Gaskell “is objective and meticulous
in her description” (Eagleton and Pierce 35). There must
necessarily be qualitative differences between the
consciousnesses that working-class authors inscribe and those
inscribed by authors not of that class. To return to Freire and
Marcuse’s idea, the working-class is at once itself and a
collusive other, formed by that which has been internalized and
adapted. No matter how much working—class consciousness is
shaped by bourgeois ideology, there will always be “a class-
conditioned unconsciousnesS” that is specific to the working-
class and arises out of its experiences (Lukacs, Hisgpgy 52-53).
Hegemony seeks to totalize but is not total. The moment that it
achieves complete penetration of the human consciousness is the

moment that it renders itself superfluous. For all that the

51

working—class colludes with the bourgeois system, part of
working-class consciousness is capable of imagining relations
beyond the immediate oppression of real life. Hegemonic
pressures exist to keep the imagined from becoming the real and
to keep the working-class from expelling the limitations that
they have adopted through years of prolonged exposure to
bourgeois ideological forces. Authors exist in particular
social situations, and their narratives cannot be told in a
manner which is inconsistent with the views and conceptions
which they have achieved as a result of specific historic, and
in Marxist terms, class relations. Raymond Williams argues in
The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence, the fictive
“knowable community” of “people and their relationships” in a
given text is always, no matter how fantastic, in some way a
reflection of an author’s “known community,” the actual
community known experientially from direct interaction (15,
138-39). What we write, on every level, is informed by who we
are and what we have done. In arguing this I am reopening, and
taking a position that is currently unpopular in, the most
contentiously debated issue in the history of Marxist literary
theory. In short, literature reflects the reality out of which
it arises, and working-class literature, in particular, reflects
the contradictions of a bifurcated consciousness, at once
collusive and resistant.

In a little known but exceptional study called Pictures of
Reality, Terry Lovell argues that Marxism is a realism that

accepts “that there exists an objective and independent social

52

world, which can be known” (23). Lovell treats realism as a
philosophical problem rather than a formal one. I explore in
the next chapter why it is reductive to equate the concept of
realism with a particular type of literature. For the moment, I
want to suggest that Lovell reclaims the term and considers the
deeper complexities that most others ignore when using realism
to describe a particular form. In the process, he reminds us
that Marxism is a philosophy of reality. A basic position of
Marxism is that all literature has arisen out of class based
societies because “. . .all history has been the history of
class struggle,” (Marx and Engels, Manifesto 472). If we accept
this observation as true, then we must also conclude, as Marx
does in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, that “[the
producers of literature] do not get beyond the limits which the
[members of their own class] . . . do not get beyond in life,
that they are constantly driven to the same problems and
solutions to which material interests and social position drive
the latter practically" (51). According to Marx, literature can
be used as a means for understanding the “problems” (or as I
prefer “contradictions”) which arise in capitalist societies.
Many Marxist critics have taken this to mean that literature is,
therefore, an unproblematic reflection of a real against which
it can and should be judged. In his literary criticism, which
he wrote later in his career, Lukacs expressly values literature
that allows the reader to “re-experience the social and human
motives which led men to think, feel and act just as they did in

historical reality” (Historical Novel 42). He is not suggesting

53

that a text needs to be “historical” in the sense that it should
reproduce the actual events of history. He is, however, saying
that a novel should, in order to be of value, contain within it
the prevailing contradictions of real history. Lukacs’s
argument is problematic because his process of valuation is in
conflict with his attempt to be descriptive. While he concludes
that all literature reflects reality, he also wants to assess
the value of texts according to how well they reflect that
reality.

Within Lukacs’s system, a literary text is held against a
conception of history to which it is expected to conform. If it
does not, it is deemed to be the inferior product of an
historical moment in which the major conflicts of society have
not risen to the immediate consciousness of the people (Lukacs,
Historical Novel 209). Despite his attempts not to do so in
History and Class Consciousness, in his later works on realism,
Lukacs treats history as a static abstraction, and it is against
this abstraction that literary texts are valued. Pierre
Macherey says that this mode of literary analysis relies upon
the “Normative Fallacy,” where the relationships that are
expressed in a given text are held against another model to
which they are expected to conform (17). In Lukacs’s realism,
“the work’s solution also entails its disappearance” (Macherey
23-24). The text is subsumed by a reality that is outside
itself and that, according to Macherey, is something very
different from the version of reality which it expresses within

the process of its own unique configuration. For Macherey, a

54

text “is the product of a rupture, it initiates something new"
(51). He argues that a text, at most, contains a refracted
image of the reality out which it emerges, and he concludes that
this refraction is so great that one cannot discern with
certainty the complete nature of the reality in question by
reading this uniquely configured text: “the text is not directly
rooted in historical reality, but only through a complex
sequence of mediations” (118). The text “does not reflect
everything,” but even Macherey cannot ultimately conclude that
it does not reflect (120). If a text is a unique configuration,
something new, its synthesis still occurs within the confines of
real limits. The text may have, “its own logic,” as Adorno
claims, but it is a derivative logic, structured by existing
modes of thought (“Spengler” 72). What structures the text must
be visible, even if the image is a partial one as Macherey
suggests it must be. Ultimately, if the reality of history is
not visible through a text, then it is not visible at all.
Macherey’s error is that he consciously dismisses realism
even when he makes concessions to it. Lukacs’s mistake is that
he unconsciously ignores the structuring reality of a literary
text in favor of the idealized historical reality that emerges
from the textual traditions of Marxist thought. Though I
disagree with Macherey’s arguments about configuration and the
inaccessibility of the real, he does give us the language to see
a lacuna in Lukacs’s writing. Lukacs never identifies the
origins of his “historical” knowledge, and one could argue that

his assumptions are derived from the very texts which he judges

55

against his own, probably unconscious, extrapolations. To be
fair, this is not a dismissal of Lukacs’s claims about realism;
it is only a qualification based on a complexity to which Lukacs
seems oblivious. All texts are realist texts, a point explicit
in his argument. However, it is only through texts that a
knowledge of historical reality is possible. As Jameson argues
in The Political Unconscious, “History . . . is essentially a
narrative problem . . .” (49). All history presents itself in
narrative, and all narrative presents to us history, that is,
the story of real human relations.

Marx disapproved of this position. He claims in The German
Ideology that historical materialists “do not set out from what
men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought
of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh.
We set out from real, active men” (Marx, German Ideology 47).
The problem is that once agency has been carried out, once an
activity is no longer in a “state of becoming,” it becomes
historical, and is, therefore, only accessible through
narrative. I may observe, for instance, that I ate a banana for
breakfast, which in fact I did on the day that I am writing
this. If you accept that statement as true, then implicit in
your acceptance is the idea that narrative conveys and is shaped
by reality as a structuring determinant. Regardless, the only
way that you can know the reality of my morning is through the
narrative that I construct. You have no other access to this
moment of real history. As a matter of routine within literary

studies, certain texts are accepted without question as

56

reflections of real life. I have, for example, never been
involved in a course dealing with African-American literature
where African-Americans were not arguing for the authenticity of
certain texts and for their prerogative to speak with authority
about the correlation between those texts and real experience.
Claims of authenticity by their nature rely on the Normative
Fallacy, and claims of authority generally amount to a gate—
keeping that stifles real critical discourse. Therefore, I make
no claims for the authenticity of working-class texts, nor will
I acknowledge the interpretive authority of anyone on the basis
of class origins. Above I warned of the problem of speaking for
others and accused Marxists of doing so in a way that unjustly
silenced those who are capable of speaking for themselves. I
advocate an awareness for the discursive agency of others but
also contend that the discourse in question should be subjected
to outside interpretative perspectives. By disavowing
authentication, I am not dismissing realism. Realism cannot be
taken for granted, as it most often is. Critics who work under
the assumption that it exists need to approach realism with the
same care with which it is attacked by its detractors, one of
the most articulate of whom has been Terry Eagleton.

In Criticism and Ideology, Terry Eagleton argues that
literature retains a high degree of “relative autonomy” from
knowable reality, and in particular, from the economic as a
determinant of that reality in the “last resort”. Eagleton
argues that, if a society can be said to have a General Mode of

Production, then it also has a Literary Mode of Production which

57

may or may not bear a resemblance to what he calls the
“GMP”(Criticism 49-51). He argues that the GMP produces a
General Ideology, or “a relatively coherent set of ‘discourses’
or values . . . which reflect the experiential relations of
individual subjects to their social conditions as to guarantee
those misrepresentations of the ‘real’ which contribute to the
reproduction of the dominant” (Criticism 54). In these terms,
Eagleton’s definitions of ideology is not that far removed from
the classical Marxist one of false consciousness. Both entail a
belief that bourgeois thought contains within it conscious
misrepresentations of real human relations. Where classical
Marxism presumes an ability to identify ideological conceptions
as false, Eagleton, following in the traditions of Althusserian
Marxism, suggests that we cannot identify as false that which
structures our very understanding of reality. Like Macherey,
Eagleton argues that a literary text goes through several layers
of aesthetic mediation that remove it even further from the
General Mode of Production. The Literary Mode of Production
also involves the articulation of an Aesthetic Ideology which
may or may not resemble the General Ideology (Eagleton,

Criticism 60). A literary text within Eagleton’s system is a

 

“multiply articulated structure, determined only in the last
instance by the contemporary GI” (Criticism 62-63). A text is
so far removed from the General Mode of Production that this
aspect of reality remains, according to Eagleton, “by necessity
empirically imperceptible,” unknowable through an examination of

literary texts, the study of which can only yield information

58

about the modes of ideological production (Criticism 69). This
ultimately leads to the problem of how Eagleton can even bring
the concept of the General Mode of Production as something
historically real into his discussion. In essence, Eagleton
argues that we have nothing outside of the text against which we
can verify its claims except other texts, and to this position I
concede. When I say that I ate a banana, if you doubt the
veracity of my claim, you can only judge its validity against
the content of another narrative (someone confirming that I did
indeed do so). Rather than reducing this to the absurdist
position that we cannot know reality, I am arguing that this is
only way in which reality, as an historical manifestation,
presents itself to us. If we argue that we cannot know it in
these terms, then we are saying, in effect, that we cannot know
it at all. Marxism is a “realism” in that it presumes objective
reality to exist and to be knowable (Lovell 23). There is no
point in trying to change something that we cannot know.

My argument is that we can extract a sense of the working-
class from the working-class literature that consciously
reflects on working-class experience. On a superficial level,
my project bears a resemblance to those of Lucien Goldmann. He
says that “ . . . any scientific study of a literary work
must involve linking it with the social, economic and political
life of the group whose world view or vision it expresses” (99).
Goldmann’s dilemma is the same as Lukacs’s, for he too is guilty
of the Normative Fallacy (Macherey 17). His argument relies on

an abstract and static conception of a shared vision, the

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identity of which in his system characterizes a particular
class. That which does not conform to his expectations is
deemed unrepresentative. Acknowledging the diversity and
contradictions of working-class consciousness is a necessary
step toward understanding the nature of working-class
epistemology. The working-class is neither static nor
homogeneous. There is a distinct, ever changing, and
contradictory epistemology which is unique to working-class
writing and which cannot be inscribed by someone from outside of
that class, no matter what that person’s sympathies are.
Working—class people do not necessarily share specific cares and
concerns, though the pervasiveness of certain values is
inevitable in a group which is subject to the same far reaching
systems of economic exploitation. Working-class people do,
nonetheless, confront similar philosophical and political crises
on an ontological level as a result of these systems of economic
exploitation. It is the commonality of these crises, or what I
call contradictions, rather than the uniformity and consistency
of the cares and concerns which are responses to them, that
allows one to make Lukacs’s methodological leap from the worker
as individual to the worker as a “social typology” of
capitalism. Using Williams’s terminology, it is these crises of
the known world of actual human experience which inform and
shape the fictive, knowable communities of working—class
literature.

Marx argues in Capital that “the poorest architect is

categorically distinguished from the best of bees by the fact

60

that before he builds a cell in wax, he builds it in his head”
(Marx and Engels, On Literature 54). Human beings have the
ability to imagine. Before they attempt to move beyond the
limitations of their circumstances, people must first imagine
what other circumstances might look like, and yet, imagination
functions within determining limits as well. “The utopian
claims of imagination have become saturated with historical
reality,” says Marcuse in Eros and Civilization (156). One
might be able to imagine a new world that signifies the negation
of current modes of oppression, but the imagined will also be
grounded in the known. Revolution begins with an imagined
utopia in which the contradictions of capitalism have been
resolved. Working-class literature is a conscious, imaginative
construct that articulates multiple and contradictory desires.
These desires emerge in utopian longings that are often
“silently contained” in working-class texts (Adorno, “Spengler”
72). The utopian longings reflect the bifurcated nature of
working-class consciousness, both collusive and resistant. It
is the intersection of these contradictory longings that gives
working—class thought one aspect of its complexity. Jameson
argues that “. . . the production of aesthetic or narrative form
is to be seen as an ideological act in its own right, with the
function of inventing imaginary or formal ‘solutions’ to
unresolvable [?] social contradictions” (79). Why Jameson sees
these contradictions as unresolvable is unclear, but like
Marcuse, he is arguing that reality enters into a text through

its imagined negation. Marcuse cogently concludes that this is

61

where the student of reality should focus his attention. He
says, “The true judgment judges this reality not in its own
terms, but in terms which envision its subversion. And in this
subversion reality comes into its own truth” (One—Dimensional
Man 131-32). Thus, the contradictions to which these fictive
utopian longings are a response serve as the structuring element
of working-class fiction in the same way that they structure
working-class life. It is in these terms that literature
becomes an articulation of the real.

Reality does not emerge in the text as a one to one
correspondence to the sequence of events expressed in the
narrative. Yet, most who have defended realism have attempted
to establish just such a relationship, or failing to do so, they
have thrown up their hands in exasperation claiming, as Terry
Lovell does, that it is better to look for reality in the
“univocal language of science and history rather than the
polysemic language of art” (91). Science and history merely
present narratives with different formal considerations. They
are neither more nor less attached to reality than fiction, even
if they are usually read with the tacit belief that they reflect
the real without refraction. All texts are composed within
limits determined by the reality of a given historical moment.
No matter how much it is accepted to be a truthful depiction, an
individual scientific or historical text cannot say all that
there is to say about that moment. Likewise, no single work of
fiction can contain all of the social contradictions that

working-class people feel compelled to resolve imaginatively.

62

There will be “certain absences,” aspects of reality that the
authors could not know because they were not subjected to the
conditions that produced that knowledge (Macherey 85). A reader
can only recognize an absence in one text if he or she notices
its presence in another, and so by exploring the absences as
well as the commonalities, a partial but meaningful
understanding of working-class reality is possible for the
reader of working—class literature.

This is not to say that we can extract a coherent
historical narrative of working—class life by reading a
multitude of working—class texts. But the more works that we
consult the more complex our understanding of real structuring
contradictions becomes. Working—class cares and concerns find
their most complex expressions in literature produced by
working-class people. Studying this literature is necessary if
we hope to understand both the working-class and the profound
impact that capitalism is having on real human beings. This
becomes all the more urgent because we have assigned the
working-class such a prominent role in bringing capitalistic
exploitation and domination to an end. However, I do not
propose to study working-class literature in isolation because
it, like the working—class, does not exist in isolation. In
saying this, I am not suggesting that we should disregard the
distinction between working-class and other forms of expression.
Culture is a site of conflict, and the contradictions that
working-class texts propose to resolve imaginatively emerge from

conflict. Thus, I am concerned with the way that working—class

63

people represent themselves, but also with how they have been
represented by others. We can gain a deeper understanding of
English literary politics in the twentieth-century by studying
the competing representations of working-class people. When we
consider the utopian longings of working-class literature in
relation to the literature of other classes, we can begin to
develop a more complete knowledge of the real political
contradictions that have shaped both English literature and the

lives of those who have produced it.

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CHAPTER THREE: THE LONG REACTION

In his posthumously published book The Politics of Modern-

ism, Raymond Williams defines Modernism as both a “movement” and

 

a “moment,” as a movement because one can identify shared,
though not pervasive, aesthetic practices and as a moment
because the term, in one of its manifestations, describes the
literature that was produced from approximately 1900 to 1940
(32). Yet, the conspicuous diversity of aesthetic practices
makes it difficult to see any rationale for the collective
identification of the authors who produced literature during
this period. In his immense survey of the British novel in the
twentieth-century, Malcolm Bradbury points out that “the modern
novel came, but the Victorian novel did not entirely go away

.” (Modern British 5). During the “moment” of British
Modernism, as Bradbury usefully reminds us, many texts were
produced that, formally and politically, look more like the
Victorian or Edwardian works that the Modernists were supposed
to have rejected. A critical approach that defines Modernism by
its rejections, that is, merely by the formal experimentation
that marked an apparent movement from Victorian and Edwardian
“realism,” confines the concept of Modernism to a small number
of texts produced mostly during the 19203.1 Most critical
studies of the Modernist movement focus exclusively on this
decade, even when the critic is in fact generalizing about the
first half of the twentieth-century. Though this approach makes

it easy to find continuity, it does not answer the theoretical

65

difficulty of how to account for those authors who were not
engaged in formal experimentation, nor does it resolve the
question of whether non—experimental works are Modernist, merely
modern, or somehow untouched by the historical developments that
drove the Modernists into their positions. This latter point is
altogether unsatisfying because it suggests that authors can
somehow write with a detachment from the limits and pressures of
their historical moment.

In The Modes of Modern Writing, David Lodge argues that
Modernist fiction has definable formal attributes. He says that
“Modernist fiction, then, is experimental or innovatory in form,
displaying marked deviations from preexisting modes of
discourse,” and he adds that a Modernist text deals with the
“unconscious workings of the human mind,” has “no clear
‘beginning’ since it plunges us into a flowing stream of
experience,” and tends to eschew “the chronological ordering of
experience” (45-46). In the place of chronology, Modernist
fiction retreats into the ego and organizes events in the
narrative according to refracted perceptions, where past and
present, memory and immediate sensory experience, are
indistinguishable. If these are defining aspects of Modernist
fiction-—and it is safe to say that most critics would concede
that they are--then the problem of how much one must be invested
in these attributes to be considered a Modernist remains
unresolved. Lodge argues that Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf
wrote fiction that reflects an investment in all of these

concerns but that he can only “tangentially” link D. H. Lawrence

66

and Ford Maddox Ford to the Modernist movement because their
narratives follow more conventional patterns (46). On the other
hand, Randall Stevenson argues that Ford’s Parade's End is a
Modernist text because it yields the narrative to Christopher
Tietjens’s uneven perceptions and “moves through Free Indirect
Style and interior monologue into the interior space of
characters’ minds” (98). When discussing his future with
Valentine Wannop in Some Do Not..., Christopher Tietjens engages
in dialogue that mirrors the muddled state of his consciousness.
He says, “And I wanted to get some thinking done. It hasn’t

been often as of late that one has had a quiet room with a fire

and . . . you! To think in front of! You do make one collect
one’s thoughts. I’ve been very muddled until to-day . . . till
five minutes ago” (Ford, Some 239). His speech suggests that he

 

is still muddled. He has thoughts that he cannot verbalize
because he cannot place them within a clear chronological
narrative. He pauses and selects. The reader must then ponder
at the workings of his Unconscious mind and its impingement on
his conscious thoughts.

Through this concern with the mind, Ford does share a
preoccupation with many of his contemporaries, and one could
argue that Stevenson’s assessment of Ford is more plausible than
Lodge’s. However, Ford also has written a novel that is more
than the exploration of one person’s consciousness (Bradbury,
Modern British 169). As Bradbury says, “Ford uses modern
methods, but he sustains many of the nineteenth-century

interests of fiction: in public life, the social web, [and] the

67

state of the nation” (Modern British 165). In that same
exchange with Valentine Wannop, Tietjens defends his patriotism
in a rare moment of coherence. He says of England, “I Love its
fields and every plant in the hedgerows” (Ford, nge 238).
Ford’s concern with such “conventional” issues has led Bradbury
to conclude that he is the representative of a particularly
British manifestation of Modernism, one that is “indirect yet
social, complex yet accessible, [and that contains] large
cultural histor[ies] as well [as]. . . work[s] of consciousness”
(Modern British 169). This expansive view draws attention to
the problem that continues to plague scholars of British
Modernism. Working with a narrow definition of Modernism, most
critics——Lodge and Stevenson are examples--agree about its
(formal) practices and aesthetic assumptions. These critics,
however, leave themselves no room to discuss texts that reflect
different aesthetic concerns, so they ignore them.

Increasingly, because of this critical myopia, the history of
British literature in the first half of the twentieth—century is
becoming a history of experimentation, even though few critics
agree who the English experimenters actually were.

If one confines oneself to a consideration of narrative
form, which Stevenson and Lodge do, it is difficult see that
there was a substantive Modernist movement in English literature
at all. Malcolm Bradbury and Keith Tuma both note this problem
in their respective studies of Modernism (Bradbury, Modern
British 34; Tuma 245). Bradbury even says of British literature

in the first half of the twentieth—century that “it is a

68

literature that has been lit by lights from modernism, rather
than a modernist literature” (Modern British 34). This
inability to associate most texts with the principles of
Modernism is, perhaps, one of the reasons that Raymond Williams
found it inadequate to define Modernism merely as a movement.

In relation the expansive vision that his brand of “cultural
materialism” demands, conventional approaches to Modernism based
on generalized notions of technical experimentation disregard
too much English writing from the first half of the twentieth—
century. In fact, Virginia Woolf is one of the few English
writers who produced works that generally follow Lodge’s pattern
for the Modernist text. This observation even needs
qualification because much of her writing, especially but not
exclusively the earlier novels, does not fit Lodge’s model.
Still, Hugh Kenner cannot concede that Woolf is a Modernist
writer: “No ‘modernist’ save in sharing certain assumptions with
Lawrence, Virginia Woolf is a . . . classic English novelist of
manners” (Kenner 175). Terry Eagleton remarks in his
introduction to Exiles and Emigres that “with the exception of
D. H. Lawrence, the heights of modern English Literature have
been dominated by foreigners and émigrés: Conrad, James, Eliot,
Pound, Yeats, Joyce” (9).2 Within the context of British
literary history, those most closely linked to the international
Modernist movement were not English, even though James and Eliot
spent much their of lives in England. By the commonly applied
standards of experimentation, “Modernism seems hardly to have

happened in Britain” (Tuma 245). This assertion is not to

69

minimize the influence of James, Eliot, or Joyce on English
writing in the twentieth-century, nor am I challenging the
notion that English was the language of international Modernism,
as Hugh Kenner reminds us (3). Eliot in particular was
instrumental in articulating the political positions that came
to dominate English literary Modernism. However, any claim that
Joyce was part of the English tradition is tenuous. He was,
after all, an Irish writer living in self-imposed exile in
Europe, and as Kenner says, “Ulysses . . . , published in Paris,
does not ask for admission to the canon of English fiction”
(Kenner 176). Modernism was international, and authors such as
Ezra Pound readily crossed borders. Nonetheless, we should not
overemphasize European or American Modernism’s influence on the
English tradition by confusing writing in English for English
literature. There was an English literary Modernism, and it was
“lit by the lights” of other Modernisms. American expatriates
did exert influence on it, but its aesthetics and politics were
distinct.

This is not to say that English Modernism shared nothing
with other Modernisms, but we cannot be insensitive to
differences. Often, the movements of international Modernism
contradicted one another, but even in doing so, they were just
as often responding to the same far reaching social and economic
forces. Fritz Lang’s Expressionistic film Metropolis (1927),
represents twentieth-century urbanization and industrialization
as a post—apocalyptic hell where human beings are literally tied

to the mechanism of industry. Conversely, the American Futurist

7O

Joseph Stella saw the creations of industrial society as the
apex of human achievement. His painting Brooklyn Bridge (1917)
highlights the beauty of the symmetry in its lines and arches.
The British Vorticists, who were first organized by Wyndham
Lewis with the help of Ezra Pound, celebrate violence and
brutality in art and define the image as a vortex, a never
static swirl of ideas (Zach 237). In his Vorticist sculpture
Torso from Rock Drill (1913-14), on display at the Tate Gallery,
the American born Jacob Epstein presents a machine-like human
figure composed of sharp angles and geometric shapes with a
softly curvaceous human embryo growing in its abdomen. The head
of the mechanical figure projects forward threateningly on an
elongated neck, and its trapezoidal arm has the appearance of an
unsheathed weapon, poised and ready. Epstein draws our
attention to the modern symbiosis between the human and the
machine, and he celebrates the power that this symbiosis
entails. Such contradictory stances among the Modernists have
led many to suggest that Modernism is ultimately indefinable.
Arnold Kettle and P. N. Furbank make this claim in their study
Modernism and Its Origins (6). Unfortunately, Raymond Williams
echoes their sentiment in the Politics of Modernism (34). Yet,
the three artists that I discuss here are all responding to the
same socio-political phenomenon of industrialization, and the
fact that they respond differently, with dystopian and utopian
visions, in no way undermines the notion that Modernism existed.
It does suggest, however, that scholars could define Modernism,

in all its manifestations, more accurately by looking at what is

71

being responded to rather than dwelling on the diversity and
apparent discrepancies of form. Such an approach will yield,
first, a better understanding of the structuring real
contradictions that the Modernists attempted to resolve
imaginatively and, second, an awareness of how historically
distinct variations in these contradictions have led to the
diversity of Modernism’s movements.

The lack of English conformity to David Lodge’s model
implies that the model is too restrictive. One can even make a
compelling case that Lodge’s idealized model of the Modernist
text is European or American in origin and that he bases it more
on the writings of Proust, Joyce, and Stein than he does on the
British writers who are the focus of his study. In fact, its
application to English writing results in a type of Normative
Fallacy, where the English literature of the twentieth—century
is contrasted with the idealized conception of what Modernist
fiction should look like (Macherey 17). As Pierre Macherey
says, this critical stance results in the disappearance of the
text being studied. So much British writing--Ford, Lawrence,
Forster—only tangentially relates to Lodge’s model, although
critics have become adept at finding relationships and drawing
evidence from an apparent pre—occupation with the human mind,
which I would argue is possible to find in almost any text.

Leon Edel argues that a concern for the workings of the
human mind and the experiment with stream of consciousness by
Henry James provided the impetus for English literary Modernism.

He states specifically that The Ambassadors was the first Modern

72

novel (xi). Working with the same assumption, Malcolm Bradbury
notes that for James “the observed reality was no longer that of
a moral community, an agreed common culture” and that the world
of James’s fiction became a “refracted thing, seen through
angles of vision, through the evolving consciousness of its
perceivers” (Modern British 29). However, Bradbury also argues
that much of James’s writing was still saturated with the
conventions of Victorian fiction, which the later proponents of
Modernism supposedly rejected in their application by the
Edwardian writers Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy. Like the work
of these Edwardians, The Ambassadors is largely chronological in
structure, even if it does dwell on Lambert Strethers’ evolving
angles of perception. Bradbury usefully reminds us that much of
the English writing most closely associated with the Modernist
movement barely passes the acid test of form that critics rely
on to assess whether a work is indeed part of that movement.
Keith Tuma suggests that “any effort to identify an English
or British Modernist [literature] will eventually have to
confront the possibility that one’s claims about the nature of
that [literature] are the product[s] of the [texts] chosen to
represent it” (244). Most critics have yet to discuss the
particular attributes of English Modernism because they are
caught in a “circle of certainty” where they presume to know
what a Modernist text should look like. They have yet to
develop a critical language to account for that which does not
fit the model except to call it traditional or realist. Even

Bradbury confines himself to a consideration of form that is not

73

very satisfying because he never moves beyond the dichotomy of
experiment and tradition. The conventional division in theories
of Modernism between experimenters and traditionalists
reinforces distinctions derived from conceptions of form and
ignores the possibility that there are deeper connections
between the two types of writers.3 Lodge acknowledges the
dilemma that this distinction entails when he says that “we have
no term for the kind of modern fiction that is not modernist
except ‘realistic’(sometimes qualified by ‘traditionally’ or
‘conventionally’ or ‘social’). It makes a confusing and
unsatisfactory antithesis to ‘modernist’ because the modernists
often claimed to be representing ‘reality’ . . .” (46). Bernard
Bergonzi argues that much Modernist writing represents a
culmination rather than a negation of traditional realism (18).
In addition, those who wrote in a “traditional realist” manner
did not always claim to represent reality. In Aspects of the
Novel, Forster says, “When we try to translate truth from one
sphere into a another, whether life into books or from books
into lectures, something happens to truth, it goes wrong ”
(106). It is, however, irrelevant whether Forster believed that
a text could represent truth or not. All texts are realist in
that they are tied to the limits of the historical reality in
which they were written. As I indicate in the last chapter, my
approach is to treat realism as a philosophical rather than a
formal concern. To equate realism only with what is commonly
called the “realist text” is to accept without interrogation the

ideologically significant “wish-images” that those texts project

74

and is to ignore the structuring social contradictions that
these imaginative constructs attempt to resolve. The notion of
a “traditionally realistic” text comes from an idealized model
of what that text should look like. Much-—really too much-—
critical energy has been exhausted debating the degree to which
various texts do or do not fit the idealized model for a
Modernist or “traditionally realistic” text.

Such a fate usually befalls the writing of E. M. Forster,
who published his last novel, A Passage to India, in 1924, two
years after the first English edition of Joyce’s Ulysses and
three years before the publication of Woolf’s To The Lighthouse.
One would have a difficult time finding critics who feel
comfortable linking Forster to the same Modernist tradition in
which they might otherwise place Joyce and Woolf, unless of
course the critics are merely using the term Modernism as
descriptive of a moment that includes all writing of the first
half of the twentieth-century. Some critics have developed
clever ways of explaining Forster’s relationship with the
Modernist movement. Brian May, for instance, describes Forster
as an “anti—antimodernist” who saw “modernism in ideological
terms, as antimodernists do, and yet [sought] something
auspicious in it as antimodernists do not” (May 10). Malcolm
Bradbury does not see Forster as an antimodernist, and his
argument is less convoluted and more convincing than May’s. He
sees in Forster a move away from a humanist tradition toward an
incipient Modernism that never reaches full development because

Forster abandoned fiction after A Passage to India (Bradbury,

75

Social Context 34). In support of Bradbury’s point, one can
make a case that there are Modernistic elements in Forster’s A
Passage to India because, to a degree, it deals with the
unevenness of perception and fluidity of memory.

When, for instance, Dr. Aziz’s and his guests first enter
the Marabar caves, there is a retreat into the mind, and the
narrative follows the erratic perceptions of Mrs. Moore: “She
lost Aziz and Adela in the dark, didn’t know who touched her,

couldn’t breathe, and some vile naked thing struck her face and

settled on her mouth like a pad. . . . For an instant she went
mad . . .” (Forster, Passage 141).4 At this point, the reader

gets no other perspective of the Marabar cave. We are locked
into the consciousness of Mrs. Moore. The cave becomes a symbol
for the mind, and our introduction into the first real Marabar
cave has everything to do with the topology of Mrs. Moore’s
psyche and nothing at all with the cave’s geology. However,
Forster does not allow his reader to stay in Mrs. Moore’s
consciousness for long. Though not immediately, the narrator
soon qualifies her perceptions, and the reader learns that the
naked thing that struck her was in fact a “poor little baby
astride its mother’s hip” (Forster, Passage 142). Forster
momentarily places everything in the mind of his character but
then overrides it with the objective perceptions of his
narrator.

In A Passage to India, the omniscience of the narrator and
the chronological flow of the narrative might be disrupted, but

they are never broken. When Fielding asks Aziz for an account

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of Adela Quested’s disappearance from the expedition, the latter
extracts a narrative from his memory. He says, “We were having
an interesting talk with our guide, then the car was seen so she
decided to go down to her friend” (Forster, Passage 152). The
narrator immediately tells us that these events were
“inaccurate,” and unlike Ford or Woolf, who might invite us to
consider the psychological factors that led the character to
construct such a narrative, Forster tells his reader that Aziz
“already thought that this is what had occurred. He was
inaccurate but sensitive” (Forster, Passage 152). He readily
believes these inaccuracies because they are less painful than
remembering that Adela had asked him if he had more than one
wife. The narrator divulges the unconscious rationale for his
perceptions. For Aziz perception becomes reality, and in these
terms, Forster drifts close to a position held by those more
commonly associated with Modernism. However, he does not allow
his reader to forget that Aziz’s perception is false and that
there are concrete facts against which his account can and
should be judged.

The rest of A Passage to India functions as a corrective of
the false perceptions that have become reality to the
perceivers. When Adela Quested tries to work through the
details of the alleged assault at the Marabar caves, she says to
Rony Heaslop, “Aziz . . . have I made a mistake?” (Forster,
Passage 196). The elliptical dialogue parallels that of
Christopher Tietjens in Ford’s Some Do Not.... Adela cannot

present her thoughts in a coherent chronological narrative, and

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with the ellipsis, Forster invites us to consider the
unverbalized thoughts that motivate the question. He does not
give the reader a detailed account of what actually happened to
her in the Marabar cave. It is a metaphor for her mind, and
when she enters the cave, we enter her psyche. Forster is less
explicit about her unconscious motivations than he is about Mrs.
Moore’s or, later, Dr. Aziz’s. Nonetheless, the narrator does
indicate that her initial representations of the event are
incorrect. Even if he does not give us the details of her
unconscious mind, he never allows us to question that her
perceptions are not reality. He refers to her initial
accusation against Dr. Aziz as “Miss Quested’s mistake,” and the
subsequent retraction of her claims remains unchallenged through
the rest of the novel (Forster, Passage 288). Similarly, at the
novel’s end, Dr. Aziz renounces his friendship with Mr. Fielding
because he assumes that Fielding has married Miss Quested. He
later learns that Fielding has, in fact, married Mrs. Moore’s
daughter Stella. The narrator remarks that he had “built his
life on a mistake,” one that was born out of a growing contempt
for all things English (Forster, Passage 296). Forster
indicates that Aziz’s perceptions are mistakes, and he is
explicit about their psychological underpinnings. At infrequent
intervals, Forster does yield the narrative to individual
perception, but then he pulls back and nullifies it with the
certainties of an objective narrative voice.

Unlike the classics of Modernist fiction, the narrative

flow of A Passage to India rarely follows the oscillating

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perceptions of its central characters, but Forster’s treatment
of perception does indicate that he was concerned with questions
pertinent to the age. His narrative, however, never breaks from
its sequential unfolding of events, and its characters always
remain within the epistemological grasp of the present. Randall
Stevenson echoes the observations of David Lodge when he remarks
that “Modernist fiction seeks to place ‘everything in the mind’:
memory offers a means of including in it past and present
experience” (92). For Forster, memory might distort the past,
but it never impinges upon the present. Most important, he does
not treat time or reality as the products of perception. Memory
distorts, but its distortions are always overridden by the
ceaseless chronological flow of an objective narrative. In
Aspects of the Novel, Forster laments that his contemporaries
treated time as an abstraction. He applauds Gertrude Stein’s
motives and points out that Proust was more successful in
manipulating time, but he famously says of her that she “smashed
up and pulverized her clock and scattered its fragments over the
world” (Forster, Aspects 41). Forster concludes that, in her
attempt to “emancipate fiction from the tyranny of time

[Stein] fails, because as soon as fiction is completely
delivered from time it cannot express anything at all ”
(Aspects 41). Ultimately, this need to communicate something
concrete seemingly distinguishes Forster from those more closely
associated with Modernism and, in the context of a purely formal

analysis, justifies the claim that he should not be classified

as a Modernist writer.

79

Nonetheless, formal differences do not necessarily
undermine political similarities. If Forster’s novels do not
bear the formal hallmarks of Modernist fiction and if he only
brushes against the more conspicuous philosophical concerns
that are associated with Modernism, it does not mean that he
cannot share political pre-occupations with those more commonly
called Modernist. Form is ideological, but different forms can
share the same ideological purpose, just as the same form can
convey contradictory ideologies. Fascism and Marxism have both
laid claim to the novel, but neither can claim it exclusively.
An assertion, such as that made by Myra Jehlen, that the novel
inherently conveys (petty) bourgeois values of individualism
effectively invalidates the idea of cultural diversity and
implies that subversion of the dominant aesthetic ideology, to
use Eagleton’s term, is impossible (Jehlen 599). If the co—
optation of a form entails the adoption of the values that the
dominant class normally conveys through that form, then counter-
hegemony would be impossible and the dominant class would never
need to defend the culture that it puts forth as universal.
Forms exist and are real, but they can move across boundaries
and can serve different political functions. Though formal
experimentation was important, we cannot isolate it from the
shared social and political contradictions to which the English
Modernists were responding.

In the varying ways that it happened, the retreat into the
mind was an organizing principle of Modernism’s aesthetics, but

it had a political rationale. The Modernists were placing

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things in the mind, but they sought to validate only the
perceptions of the bourgeois mind. Forster may have been
appalled at the treatment of educated Indians like Dr. Aziz, but
he could not conceive that Indians of lesser social standing had
minds at all. Such people exist in the background as ciphers,
and only once in A Passage to India does such a character
receive narrative attention, the punkah wallah. He stands
silent in the courthouse during Aziz’s trial. His only task is
to pull rhythmically on a rope attached to a fan, but Forster
feels compelled to describe him, and more important, to convey
that he is of the class for whom such a degrading and
meaningless task is not an injustice. Like their British
counterparts, Indians such as Aziz are “cultivated, self-
conscious, and conscientious” (Forster, Passage 211). They read
poetry, discuss politics, and show a sensitivity to the feelings
of other. The punkah wallah does not possess such
sensibilities: “he scarcely knew that he existed and did not
know why the Court was fuller than usual, indeed did not know
that it was fuller than usual, didn’t know that he worked a fan,
though he thought that he pulled a rope” (Forster, Passage 211).
He does not deserve our empathy in the way that Aziz does
because he does not possess self—awareness. His intellect is so
low that he functions by animal instinct. What Forster objects
to is not the exploitation of the Indians, but rather that
sensitive and cultivated “Britishers” should treat sensitive and
cultivated Indians so badly, that one dominant group with higher

sensibilities should be incapable of seeing the same

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sensibilities in another. Ultimately, A Passage to India
expresses a utopian longing to see these two groups connect, and
through this “wish-image,” we can extract a conception of the
real social contradiction that Forster hopes to resolve
imaginatively. However, Forster’s new order does not include
the punkah wallah, who is already in his rightful place. Thus,
A Passage to India may ask us to envision the abolition of
certain colonial barriers, but it also projects the necessary
maintenance of others because Forster cannot imagine a
fundamental shift in the class structure. His utopian longing
is that the class divisions of capitalism should be maintained
because the worker is intellectually base and, therefore, only
suited to manual labor. In these terms, Forster was very much
an English Modernist because English Modernism was a cultural
and political movement rather than a formal one. It is
definable by its working-class subplot, the ideological thread
that ties the experimenters and non—experimenters together.
English Modernism is an entrenchment against the socialist
and working-class forays into culture that had been increasing
since the latter decades of the nineteenth-century. The retreat
into the bourgeois mind that became one of its organizing
principles was also a retreat from the mind of anyone who posed
a threat to the prevailing order. In asserting this position, I
am adding my voice, and a consideration of class, to the
observations of Gilbert and Gubar. They contend that the
Modernists shared a “sense of literary apocalypse set in motion

by the changing literary relations of the sexes” (Gilbert and

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Gubar 133). The literary and social relations of the classes
were changing as well, and there is ample evidence that the
sense of apocalypse had as much to do with class as it did with
gender. In her famous essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,”
Virginia Woolf argues that “in or about December, 1910, human
character changed. . . . All human relations have shifted—-those
between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and
children” (320-21). Woolf complains of servants coming into the
drawing-room to borrow the Daily Herald, but a multitude of more
significant historical events would support the claim that the
history of the twentieth-century in Britain until Thatcherism
was that of the working—class’s incremental political and social
enfranchisement (Woolf, “Mr. Bennett” 320). I base my
contention that this so, however, by considering the
contradictions that English bourgeois literature attempts to
resolve imaginatively. There is, as Samuel Hynes argues in 1Q;
Auden Generation, a discernible sense of “entropy" in the
literature of the Modernist moment (32). A feeling that the
known world was disintegrating is pervasive in bourgeois
literature of the period. Rae Harris Stoll attributes this
feeling of entropy to the increasing fetishism of commodities
and to the subsequent fear of bourgeois authors that their
positions of privilege would disintegrate under pressures from
the market. Everything was becoming mass produced and mass
consumed. He says that “fear of the growth of the anonymous
crowd in which one loses individuality, thus being thrown into

the extreme condition of anonymity was the common psycho-

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political experience of . . . [the bourgeois writer in the
early] decades of the century” (Stoll 29). For I. A. Richards
and the practical critics, this disintegration was the direct
outcome of the vulgarization of culture and the narrowing gap
between the best—sellers produced for the masses and the highly
valued aesthetic artifacts of bourgeois culture. Richards says
that “for many reasons standards are much more in need of
defense than they used to be. It is perhaps premature to
envisage a collapse of values, a transvaluation by which popular
taste replaces trained discrimination” (Richards, Principles
36). Yet, envisioning this “transvaluation” is precisely what
Richards is doing and why he is calling for the defense of his
standards. If the Modernists believed, as Ford Maddox Ford
indicates, that they were living in “the last of England” as
they had known it, they also had sense that the working-class
was threatening the stability of the social pecking order (ngg
218). To an extent, Stoll is right to point out the fear of the
commodification that pervades bourgeois writing, but this fear
rarely expresses itself in a resentment of those who control
production and dissemination of mass culture.

In Fiction and the Reading Public (1932) Q. D. Leavis does
concede that elements of the ruling class take part in this
commodification. She says, “it is only a world run by Big
Business that has produced a civilization whose workers must
have recourse to substitute living” (Q. D. Leavis 168). Yet,
she places the blame for the disintegration of standards on the

reading public that consumes mass produced texts rather then

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those who control the means of its production. By her account,
“righteousness and goodwill are accordingly arrogated to the man
who behaves like his fellows, the lowbrow, who accepts
uncritically the restrictions imposed by the herds, while the
highbrow, who does not, is vilified as a ‘superior’ or arrogant
person” (Q. D. Leavis 157). Despite her own admission that big
business produces the texts consumed by the masses, she asserts
that the masses are corrupting the elite through the pressures
of populism. She cautions her fellow critics that popular texts
are increasingly being “read by the governing classes as well as
by the masses, and they impinge directly on the world of the
minority, menacing the standards by which they live” (Q. D.
Leavis 65). Her great fear is that even the “educated [literary
critics] are . . . tending to substitute the easier reading
habit for that demanding a considerable effort” (Q. D. Leavis
150). The real danger is that mass produced texts pander to the
sensibilities of the masses, and therefore, the tastes of the
lower orders are likely to infect anyone who reads them. In
Leavis’s system, the lower orders represent the threat, not the
ruling “Big Business” elite, whose only real fault appears to be
that it is willing to pander to popular tastes. Her response is
to advocate the entrenchment of the minority against the
onslaught of the masses, and she specifically calls for the
establishment of professionals who can educate the ruling elite
and give them the panacea to defeat the cancerous effects of
working—class aesthetics (Q. D. Leavis 214). Like I. A.

Richards, Q. D. Leavis casually equates mass produced culture

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with the sensibilities of the masses because she cannot see it
for what it is, a tool for the manipulation and containment of
the class upon whom she places blame for the degradation of her
culture. Like Forster, she is not afraid of democracy, but she
does fear that it will be extended to people who do not have the
sensibilities to govern themselves.

Q. D. Leavis was not alone in seeing the working-class as a
threat to the established order. Ford Maddox Ford has
Christopher Tietjens, a member of the landed gentry which once
“administered the world,” suggest that “the lower-classes are
becoming vocal. Why shouldn’t they? They’re the only people
who are sound in wind and limb” (Sena 3, 18). Likewise, Ezra
Pound, who did more than anyone else to create an international
Modernism, writes in one of his shorter poems that “round about
there is a rabble/Of filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the
very poor./They shall inherit the earth” (Pound 93). Yet,
neither Ford nor Pound can provide a rationale for why this
should be so, because after all, a prominent feature of the
Modernist text is that it tends to silence working-class people
and denies them discursive agency, even when suggesting that
they are on the verge of taking control. Forster’s punkah
wallah never talks, and in Ford’s work, we never hear this
“sound wind” that Tietjens mentions. The only working-class
characters who appear in these texts are intellectually bankrupt
and usually incapable of carrying out the menial tasks of their
mundane lives without guidance from the members of the

“administering class.” Christopher Tietjens, for instance, must

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tell Joel, the servant and carriage driver of Valentine Wannop,

how to harness a horse (Ford, Some 109-10). Because of superior

 

intelligence, he performs this task better than a man whose
entire existence is based on his ability to do the job
adequately every day. This is more than a declaration about the
capabilities of two individuals. It is a justification of
Tietjens’ right to administer the working-classes. In Ford’s
imaginative world, the working—class may be bodily sound in
“wind and limb,” but like Forster’s punkah wallah, they lack the
intellect to administer themselves, and so the assertion that
they shall inherit the world is necessarily an apocalyptic one.
As I argue in chapter one, Stallybrass and White see this
recurring devaluation of working—class intellect as the basis of
Bourgeois culture since the industrial revolution. What marks
Modernism as a specific cultural and political development is
the urgency with which the Modernists sought to emphasize the
supposed inherent bankruptcy of the working-class mind. The
tendency to retreat into the bourgeois mind, and then sometimes
to use it as the organizing principle of their aesthetic, is
part of this devaluation. Even those, such as Forster, who did
not yield to the oscillations of perception still retreated into
the bourgeois mind, if only because they were so vehement in
pulling away from the minds of others. In the variety of ways
that they did so, they were in effect pulling into a realm that
was seemingly unassailable because only they could claim to know
it. To equate art and artistic sensibilities exclusively with

the bourgeois mind was to posit an essential relationship that

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others could not challenge because they could not presume to
have access to that mind. As Stallybrass and White establish,
since the ascendancy of the mercantile classes, bourgeois
ideology had been successful in asserting that those without
intellect, those who were primarily embodied (usually
grotesquely so), could not hope to access the minds of others
with elevated sensibilities (Stallybrass and White 93-94).
Forster’s punkah wallah cannot even access his own mind and has
little chance of understanding either the British or the Indian
classes that administer his world. If you could not access the
bourgeois mind, the English Modernists were asserting that you
could not access culture because the two were synonymous. Thus,
you had no right to ask for admittance to the arenas of culture,
nor could you presume to produce anything of real value. You
certainly could never hope to produce literature.

One should understand Virginia Woolf’s assertion in “The
Leaning Tower” that the working—class has contributed nothing to
English literature in this context. Even Woolf, who represented
herself as politically progressive, took part in an English
Modernism that was decidedly reactionary, and perhaps
reactionary in a way that other Modernist movements were not.
Here, I am directly challenging Stanley Sultan’s often quoted
claim that Modernism was not reactionary (457). Sultan is
correct to note that many Modernists were not reactionaries
Unfortunately, he uses socialists and progressives to generalize
about Modernism, describing an expansive international movement

in which he lumps everything pre-World War II. Brecht and

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Pound, for example, are part of the same movement in his
thinking. This is difficult to conceive. Yet, many critics
cite Sultan when trying to justify the claim that equating
English Modernism with fascism is facile, and to be fair, this
equation is facile if we stick to convenient political language.
Certainly Forster and Woolf were not “distinctly right-wing” in
the way that Ezra Pound or Wyndham Lewis were, and Sultan is
correct to make this qualification (459). Nonetheless, they
were still reactionaries. Like Q. D. Leavis and I. A. Richards,
Woolf reacted negatively to democratic changes in the culture.
English Modernism in general is a reaction to threats posed by
those who have been pushed to the margins of culture. Gilbert
and Gubar are successful at demonstrating the gender politics of
this reaction. Woolf certainly deserves to be read with this
dimension in mind, but we cannot ignore her collusion in other
forms of reaction as well.

Woolf sometimes enjoyed Ul sses, but she also fired at
Joyce the most derisive criticism that she could come up with.
In the August 16th, 1922 entry in her diary she says of reading
the novel that she was:

. bored, irritated, & disillusioned as by a queasy

undergraduate scratching his pimples. And Tom, great Tom

[, T. 8. Eliot,] thinks this on a par with War and Peace.

An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me: the book of a

self taught working-man, & we all know how distressing they

are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, & ultimately

nauseating (Woolf, piggy vol. 2 188).

If nothing else, her statement that they are nauseating suggests

that Woolf had read books by self—taught working—men.

Therefore, her claim in “The Leaning Tower” that these books do

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not count as literature is more an expression of valuation than
ignorance as to their existence. Like Q. D. Leavis, she equated
the working-class mind with illiteracy. She did not believe in
the value of auto-didacticism for working—class people, but nor
did she think that they could be educated by others. Quentin
Bell relates in his biography that, outside of the domestic
service they performed in her family’s house, the only sustained
contact that Woolf had with the working-class people came in
1905, when she took a teaching post at a private school (Bell
vol. 1, 105). She resented the working-class women whom she
taught there and lamented that her lectures were being dropped
among those who did not have the “power of receiving them” (Bell
vol. 1, 204). Alex Zwerdling remarks that for Woolf the
working-class was “terra incognita” (97). The narrator says in
Woolf’s first “traditionally realist” novel The Voyage Out
(1915), “Why do the lower orders do any of the things they do
do? Nobody knows” (306). That Woolf, despite toying with
socialism and progressive politics, was not sensitive to the
plight of working—class women is also evident in Three Guineas
(1938), where she suggests that the conflict of such women is
not the same as that of the “daughters of educated men.” She
says, “Not only are we incomparably weaker than the men of our
own class; we are weaker than the women of the working—class”
because they are engaged in production and can stop the
mechanisms of war by withdrawing their labor (Woolf, Ippgp 12).
The daughters of educated men cannot even do this, according to

Woolf, because they are shut off from the modes of ideological

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production that her class controls. It is important to note
that Woolf is resisting an entrenchment against the women of her
class. She wants equal access to knowledge and education, and
her demand for it is an act of political resistance. As I
suggest above, it is only fair to Woolf to acknowledge the
legitimacy of her claim. Yet, to suggest that working—class
women have such great power is to ignore the extreme deprivation
and dehumanization that they face. They too are shut off from
knowledge and education and have the added burden of often being
shut off from adequate food and shelter. It is also extremely
difficult to withdraw your labor when the sale of your labor
power barely returns the resources necessary to keep you alive
on a day to day basis. Quentin Bell says that Woolf actually
received a response from a working-class woman named Agnus
Smith, who informed her that, unlike the daughters of educated
men, working—class women cannot, while living on subsistence
wages, afford to turn down jobs in munitions factories on
principle, which is what Woolf advocates in her book (Bell, vol.
2 205).

It does seem unlikely that Woolf could have anticipated
such a thoughtful rebuke. As her criticism of Ulysses
indicates, she did not associate the working-class with
thoughtfulness. In the “Time Passes” section of Ig_ppp
Lighthouse, she says of Mrs. McNab, the working-class woman
employed to care for the Ramsays’ house, that “she was witless,
and she knew it” (Lighthouse 148). In a novel structured around

the deluge of meaningful perceptions, Woolf gives us a character

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who stands out for her inability to think. Michael Tratner
argues that Mrs. McNab’s presence in the house signifies Woolf’s
desire to establish working-class unity with the upper—classes
and that Mrs. McNab is a vehicle through which Woolf
“construct[s] new selves” (Modernism and Mass Politics 65).5
Mrs. McNab is certainly a different type of “self,” but she has
no substantive connection with the Ramsays. She takes on
thematic significance only in their absence and only when the
family has been decimated by untimely deaths. In particular,
she symbolizes the negation of the perceptiveness and bodily
perfection that Mrs. Ramsay represents. Mrs. Ramsay is
beautiful, and that is the extent to which Woolf describes her
embodiment (Woolf, Lighthouse 74). In contrast, Mrs. McNab is
grotesque. She is “toothless,” and she “leers” and “lurches”
like “a ship at sea” (Woolf, Lighthouse 148). The Ramsays and
their guests read books and write dissertations. Mrs. McNab
hums a tune but because of her limitations “robs" the music “of
meaning” and turns it into “the voice of witlessness” (Woolf,
Lighthouse 149). She represents intellectual decay, and under
her care, the family’s cherished books become moldy (Woolf,
Lighthouse 150-51). Outside of her embodiment, Woolf gives her
no identity. She either thinks about her body or about the
Ramsays, and she, like Forster’s punkah wallah, does not have
real intellectual agency, even if Woolf does allow for “some
cleavage of the dark . . . some channel in the depths of
obscurity through which light enough issues to twist her face

grinning” (Woolf, Lighthouse 149). Through Mrs. McNab, Woolf

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constructs a dystopian vision of the decay that is likely to
occur if those with real intellectual agency are no longer
there, and it is significant that this decay stops only when
there is a written direction from “one of the young ladies”--
presumably Cam Ramsay (Lighthouse 158). Woolf constructs a
complex “wish-image” in which she compels her reader to consider
the importance of such people and, in so doing, projects the
necessary maintenance of a social hierarchy in which the
“visionary” with higher sensibilities maintains order, preserves
established traditions of intellectuality, and explores profound
philosophical questions such as “what am I?” (Woolf, To the
Lighthouse 150). Woolf’s stance here is all the more poignant
because she wrote “Time Passes” during the General Strike of
1926 (Tratner, “Figures” 3). Far from forging connections,
Woolf actually projects the necessity and inevitability of
existing social hierarchies. In articulating this message
consistently, she colluded in the reactionary politics of
English literary Modernism.

Leonard Bast of Forster’s Howards End is not the
intellectual vacuum that Mrs. McNab is. In Marxist terms,
Leonard is certainly working-class. He works as a clerk for the
Porphyrion Fire Insurance Company, but Forster does not present
Leonard as totally “witless.” He actually has a wit that he
attempts to cultivate. Despite his meager income, he spends his
spare time going to concerts, and he attempts to teach himself
the masterpieces of English literature. Yet, Leonard “knew that

he was poor and would admit it: he would have died sooner than

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confess any inferiority to the rich. This may be splendid of
him. But he was inferior to most rich people, there is not the
least doubt of it” (Forster, Howards End 45). His inferiority
manifests itself in several ways. He does not, for instance,
trust people in way that the Schlegel sisters do. When Helen
Schlegel runs away from the concert with his umbrella, he can
only assume that she may have done so on purpose (Forster,
Howards End 35-36). The sisters, on the other hand, see the
event for what it was, an accident brought about because Helen
is “enwrapped” in music (Forster, Howards End 32). Later, when
they invite Leonard to tea so that they, following the advice of
Henry Wilcox, can advise him to leave his current position, he
can only assume that they have done so because they wish to
extract commercial information from him (Forster, Howards End
143). He does not trust people because he had “been ‘had’ in
the past--badly, perhaps overwhelmingly--and now most of his
energies went in defending himself against the unknown”
(Forster, Howards End 37). As we discover later, he was
overwhelmingly had by Jacky, a former prostitute who compels him
to marry her and takes advantage of his sense of fair play and
moral obligation. If part of Leonard’s inferiority to the rich
is his fear of the unknown, Forster at least invites his readers
to see that this fear comes from the circumstances of his life,
and in this case, his exploitation at the hands of the
unscrupulous “lower orders.”

Leonard’s real inferiority to the rich is his lack of

intelligence. He may read Ruskin and Thoreau in the evening,

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but he cannot see these texts for what they really are: “They
mean us to use them for sign-posts, and are not to blame if, in
our weakness we mistake the sign-post for the destination. And
Leonard had reached his destination” (Forster, Howards End 120).
His pursuit of beauty is ultimately meaningless to him because
he does not possess the acumen to obtain what he desires. His
discussions of art are uninformed and sound like meaningless
cant to the refined Schlegel sisters because “his brain might be
full of names. He might even have heard of Monet and Debussy;
the trouble was that he could not string them together into a
sentence . . .” (Forster, Howards End 40). Leonard’s “wit was
the Cockney’s; it opened no doors into imagination” (Forster,
Howards End 137). When Margaret Schlegel does make aesthetic
observations in Leonard’s presence, the narrator tells us, “For
he did pursue beauty, and, therefore, Margaret’s speeches did
flutter away from him like birds” (Forster, Howards End 40). He
simply does not have the sensibilities to enter the artistic
world that the Schlegels occupy.

For Forster, the real injustice is that he should feel
compelled to reach for the impossible. Leonard must maintain an
air of gentility so he will not slip into the “abyss,” where
nothing matters (Forster, Howards End 45). He only strives for
art because he has been displaced; he is “the third generation,
grandson to the shepherd or ploughboy whom civilization had
sucked into the town, as one of the thousands who lost the life
of the body and failed to achieve the life of the spirit”

(Forster, Howards End 115). His real connection is with nature,

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though even that has been spoiled by soft city living. On his
walking adventure, he only experiences hunger and depression.
His imagination is not inspired because he has the Cockney wit
to hold him back (Forster, Howards End 120). Leonard desires an
intellectual union with the Schlegels, but connection between
Leonard and them is impossible. He simply does not have the
sensibilities to communicate on their level, and Forster's
continual need to emphasize this lack in Leonard complicates the
symbolic role of displaced worker that he assigns to him. Mary
Pinkerton remarks that, in Forster’s “efforts to elevate Leonard
to mythic stature, he is undercut by his own assumptions” (245).
On one level, Leonard becomes a symbol for the unfairness of
modern commerce. His natural place in the order of things has
been disrupted by the machinations of businessmen such as Henry
Wilcox. Wilcox did not destroy Leonard with his careless advice
that he should leave the Porphyrion. He and his kind had
destroyed him long ago by pulling him into the city and exposing
him to a culture of which he could only master fragments.
Leonard simply is not suited for a life of the mind, and it
takes such a person to find a meaningful existence in London,
with its rapid change, relentless commercial activity, and
unscrupulous poor. In Leonard Bast, Forster presents a
character for whom he solicits both pity and contempt, and
Pinkerton is correct to note that he is at best ambiguous about
Leonard (237). Forster's liberalism demands that we pity the
injustice of Leonard’s displacement, but his elitism suggests

that we should abhor his knocking at the gates of culture.

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Whether Leonard intends it or not, he is an interloper in a
world to which he does not belong and in which he can only feel
pain. Forster is unequivocal in asserting this last point.

For the most part, Leonard Bast is an empty threat and
minor annoyance to those with artistic sensibilities, and he is
only this much because he lives in the upper echelons of the
lower orders. He is a clerk and dresses like a gentleman even
if he is inherently inferior and can only ever hope to work for
a wage. Margaret Schlegel understands something of him because
of his contrived mannerisms. Leonard's “class was near enough
her own for his manners to vex her” (Forster, Howards End 37).
Leonard was not “in the Abyss, but he could see it, and at times
people whom he knew had dropped in and counted no more”
(Forster, Howards End 45). Later, the narrator says of such
people, “We are not concerned with the very poor. They are
unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or
poet. This story deals with gentlefolk, or with those who are
obliged to pretend that they are gentlefolk” (Forster, Howards
Egg 45). Yet, if people of the abyss do not count and are
unthinkable, it raises the question of why Forster devotes so
much narrative space to Jacky and goes to such lengths to
establish her role of as the embodied other. If Leonard is
comical in his contrivances, Jacky is merely grotesque. She
“seemed all string and bell-pulls . . . a boa of azure feathers
liung around her neck” (Forster, Howards End 51). More
significant, her “throat was bare. . . and her arms were bare to

tile elbows, and might again be detected at the shoulder, through

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cheap lace” (Forster, Howards End 51). Though she does not have

the protuberant belly common to the grotesque, she, like Woolf’s

Mrs. McNab, does possess the usual gaping orifice: “. . . the
teeth were not so numerous . . . and certainly not so white”
(Forster, Howards End 51). As one might expect of such a

 

character, Forster denies her any association with
intellectuality. Leonard may have the “husks” of culture in his
brain (145), but to Jacky the names of authors are meaningless.
She hardly seems to know what a book is: “Then she said: ‘Is
that a book your reading?’ and he said: ‘That’s a book’”
(Forster, Howards End 52). Jacky’s identity is that of
sexualized predator. She entraps “Len,” just as she had earlier
enticed “Hen,” Henry Wilcox, during a moment of weakness when he
was separated from Mrs. Wilcox, the moral force in his life
(Forster, Hoawrds End 232). Mary Eagleton and David Pierce note
that “Forster can barely credit [Jacky] with humanity and no
sympathy is reserved for the misery of her life . . .” (126).
Jacky may be the unthinkable extreme, but like the punkah wallah
from A Passage to India, Leonard and Jacky are both primarily
embodied. Interaction with them invariably--and necessarily--
leads to sex. Ultimately, this dichotomy of embodiment and
rationality forms the basis of Forster’s class system, just as
it forms the basis of the capitalist class system whose
commercialism he mildly criticizes for its displacement of
Leonard.

Although his maxim is “only connect,” it is not part of his

utopian vision that Jacky and Leonard should connect with anyone

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(Forster, Howards End 187). Their brushes with the “gentle-
folk” who administer their world only lead to their demise.
Rationality and embodiment may unite in the form of Leonard and
Helen’s baby, but that baby will thrive only because it
represents embodiment returned to its proper bucolic context and
because it will develop under the auspices of artistic
rationality. Forster constructs a “wish—image” in which he
restores the natural order of rationality and embodiment. He
also demonstrates that the Schlegels are at the pinnacle of that
hierarchy because they have the sensibilities to make just
decisions. They can liberalize Henry Wilcox and give him a
sense of compassion and moral fair play that he had been lacking
before the climactic events at Howards End. Although they can
never bring Leonard into the realm of rationality, through their
guidance and benevolence, it may be possible for his progeny to
enter that world in a way that he simply could not. However,
for this to happen the class structure must remain as it
essentially stands. Though liberalized, capitalism is not to be
abolished because the sisters need and deserve their incomes.
Forster even projects that its abolition is impossible. When
Helen tries to divest her income, she actually ends up becoming
“rather richer than she had been before” (Forster, Howards End
256). She cannot help it. It is simply natural for her to do
50. Any desire to disrupt this natural order at its core is
futile because people such as the Schlegels are needed to
“humanize the servants” (Forster, Howards End 262). Howards End

is a reaction against the democratization of culture and

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working-class demands for access to its institutions. In these
terms, it presents an imaginative resolution to a real social
contradiction. It projects the necessary maintenance of a
social order that denies the majority of people access to
intellectual arenas. Like Woolf, Forster needs to foreground
the embodiment of others to make his own position as an
intellectual arbiter of culture seem natural and unassailable.
Just as Forster and Woolf were defending their positions of
privilege, D. H. Lawrence legitimated his role as artist by
inscribing this ideology of rationality and embodiment into his
work. In a short foreword for an anthology of criticism
celebrating Lawrence's centenary, Raymond Williams argues that
Lawrence “gives us the first major example of the English
working-class novel, extending the boundaries of fiction to
kinds of work and living conditions which the earlier tradition
had been unable or unwilling to reach” (Foreword vii). I am
baffled why Williams would call Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers
(1913) the “first” working-class novel when he knew of, and even
wrote about, others that came before it. I am not disputing
Lawrence’s origins. He did grow up in a working-class home in
the “Erewash Valley District” on the Nottingham-Derbyshire
border (Sagar 10). I am only surprised that Williams, with his
vast knowledge of the English tradition, places such importance
on a text that was obviously not the first working—class novel,
and more important, that spends so much time devaluing working-
class experience and working-class intellect. The working-class

is thematically central to Sons and Lovers only because Lawrence

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attempts to demonstrate that individuals who are “essentially”
not of this class can live among working-class people and remain
free from the deterministic effects of working-class social
relations upon their consciousnesses. The devaluation of
working—class intellect and the dismissal of the formative
nature of the working-class experience was part of Lawrence’s
attempt to legitimate his art in the dominant culture and to
inscribe himself into the reactionary politics of English
literary Modernism.

By cutting them off from formative social relations,
Lawrence reifies his characters. They belong to certain classes
not because of their relationships to the labor process, but
because there are innate aspects of their identities that define
class position. In Decay and Renewal, Jack Lindsay suggests
that the creation of such characters in Lawrence’s art is the
result of his “metaphysical idiom” or his consistent “.
treatment of the true being of a person as an absolute” (108).
This reified conception of the self is one which emerges
throughout Sons and Lovers but nowhere more clearly than in a
conversation between Paul Morel and his mother. Paul begins by
saying, “I like the common people best. I belong to the common
people,” and his mother responds by challenging this notion,
suggesting that Paul “knows he is equal to any gentleman”
(Lawrence, Sgpp 256). Paul’s response to his mother is
thematically significant because it indicates that an aspect of
his subjectivity is not part of a socially determined identity:

“In myself,” he answered, “not in my class or my education or my

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manners. But in myself I am,” and he adds, “. . . the difference
between people is not in their class, but in themselves”
(Lawrence, Sgpp 256). Despite his apparent class status and his
having lived his entire life in a working-class home, there is
something in Paul, that which he identifies as “myself,” that
separates him from other members of his community and places him
on intellectual par with the “gentlemen” who administer his
world. The implication of this equation is that the formative
social relations that have determined his class and educational
status are irrelevant to both his meaningful self and to his
social position. Consequently, Lawrence de-emphasizes Paul’s
relations with members of the working-class unless they are with
people who are caught in circumstances similar to his. The only
two women, other than his mother, with whom Paul shares any
level of intellectual or emotional intimacy are Clara Dawes and
Miriam Leivers. The narrator says of Clara that “she considered
herself as a woman apart, and particularly apart, from her
class” (Lawrence, Sppp 264). As Paul says to his mother, “But
she is nice mother, she is! And not a bit common!” (Lawrence,
Sgpp 314). The narrator makes a similar assertion about Miriam:
“For she was different from other folk and must not be scooped
up amongst the common fry” (Lawrence, Sgpp 143). Paul’s
consciousness is certainly influenced by his interaction with
selected individuals, but these people only reach him at all
because they are intuitively linked with him by their mutual
superiority. They help each other realize innate, and in Paul’s

case creative, potentials that are part of their authentic

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selves. The narrator claims that “Paul was only conscious when
stimulated . . . . In contact with Miriam he gained insight; his
vision went deeper. From his mother he drew the life-warmth,
the strength to produce” (Lawrence, Sgpp 158). Social relations
with the “common” people of the text have no such determinacy.
Among the common is Paul’s father Walter Morel, a miner.
According to the narrator, “There was scarcely any bond between

father and son” (Lawrence, Sons 264).

 

The dominant relationship for Paul is that with his mother.
There have been no shortage of psychoanalytical analyses that
interrogate the emotional and sexual dynamics between them.
However, there is also a psycho-political angle to their
relationship that warrants consideration. In Gertrude Morel’s
environment, “no other woman looked such a lady as she did,” and
her “lady like ways” set her apart from the other members of her
class, especially her husband and his family (Lawrence, Sgpp
4-11). To her husband, she is “that thing of mystery and
fascination, a lady” (Lawrence, Sgpp 9). Her “lady like ways”
represent an outward manifestation of her authentic self, which
reflects bourgeois sensibilities despite her lack of substantive
social relations with any one from the bourgeoisie. Her only
real connection with the bourgeoisie is hereditary. Gertrude
Morel “came of a good old burgher family, famous independents.

Her grandfather had gone bankrupt at a time when so many
lace-manufacturers were ruined in Nottingham” (Lawrence, Sgpg
7). As a result, her father “was bitterly galled by his

poverty. He became foreman of the engineers in a dockyard at

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Sheerness” (Lawrence, Sons 7). At best, her father held what

 

Erik Olin Wright calls a contradictory position within the labor
process. He had some power over other workers but did not
control the means of production (Wright 42). With her marriage
to Walter Morel, Gertrude continues the family journey into
working-class existence. The text, however, never associates
Gertrude Morel with the working-class and continually reinforces
the sense of displacement that she feels at having to live in a
community of mining people. If her authentic self is
inheritable and can be passed down through generations without
“suffering” adulteration from social interaction, then it is
conceivable that Paul inherits his essence, the real self with
which he identifies, from his mother.

Nothing better illustrates the essential connection between
Mrs. Morel and her son than their speech patterns. They speak a
form of standard English that, in Lawrence’s novel, is only
spoken by those who are either not working-class, such as
Minister Heaton, or those who are working-class but in their
essence somehow apart from it, such as Miriam and Clara. For
instance, when both Walter and Gertrude are asking the collier
Mr. Wesson to move into the arm-chair near the fire, Mrs. Morel
says first, “Then come to the fire,” and Walter adds, “Go thy
ways i’ th’ arm—chair” (Lawrence, Sgpp 199). It is not
implausible that Paul and Gertrude Morel would be cognizant of,
and even at times speak, this form of standard English. It is,
however, unlikely that Paul Morel could live exclusively in a

working-class community and never internalize the idioms of the

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predominant dialect, especially since his father speaks it.
Richard Lieth argues that Lawrence often uses dialect
thematically (24). He uses it in Sons and Lovers to underscore
the recurring idea that the de-emphasized working-class social
relations of the text have no deterministic effect on innate,
inheritable sensibilities, including linguistic habits.
Lawrence’s undercuts the formative nature of working—class
social relations with his adherence to what the British Marxist
critic Christopher Caudwell calls the “bourgeois illusion.” In
Studies in a Dying Culture (1938), Caudwell remarks that
Lawrence had “rid himself of every bourgeois illusion but the
important one” (Studies 71). He never frees himself of the
ideology that “counter-poises freedom and individualism to
determinism and society,” and according to Caudwell, he never
demonstrates an awareness that true freedom “involves
consciousness of the determinism of the environment and of man
and of the society . . .” (Caudwell, Illusion 66—67). Lawrence
presents a novel in which Paul Morel articulates the
contradictory positions that his identity is both innate and
subject to the deterministic effects of his individual will.
The narrator says of Paul, “He was to prove that she[, his
mother,] had been right. He was going to make a man[, himself,]

whom nothing could shift off his feet” (Lawrence, Sons 222). He

 

believes that he can create his identity independent of any
other determining social factors. Later in the novel, he
reaffirms his belief in a free and autonomously deterministic

individual when he says to Clara Dawes of her estranged husband

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Baxter, “Oh no! He made himself” (Lawrence, Sons 345). More

 

important, the novel ends with an affirmation of this bourgeois
illusion. Because of the death of his mother, Paul’s creative
self is subsumed by grief to the point that “he could not paint”
(Lawrence, Sgpp 409). Gertrude Morel’s death and the
termination of Paul’s relationships with Miriam and Clara
effectively end his sense of belonging to a group that could
inspire him to release his creativity. The intuitive
connections brought about by their shared sensibilities are
gone. Paul must subsequently live among working-class people,
with whom he shares no connection. He says that “he was most
himself when he was alone” (Lawrence, Sgpp 410). Consequently,
he must either rely upon himself or see his true self atrophy
for lack of stimulation. Near the end of the novel, Paul
declares that “he would not take that direction, to the

darkness, to follow her[, his mother]” (Lawrence, Sons 420). He

 

would live, in other words, by the deterministic force of his
own will and not allow his feelings of grief and isolation to
force him to his grave—-whether artistic or actual is irrelevant
because they imply the same thing for Paul. At the novel’s
close, Paul alone will determine the nature of his existence
because he is the only one left who can release his full
potential as an artist. This utopian longing of self-
determination, which overrides all others in the text, allows us
to extract a social contradiction that this imaginative work
hopes to resolve. If nothing else, the novel is about the

conflict of a misplaced artist who is born into a world where

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the inherent limitations of the working-class people are
supposed to stifle art. By asserting that Paul Morel is not
part of this working—class world, Lawrence legitimates his
character’s role as an artist and, in turn, invites his reader
to draw the same conclusions about himself.

F. R. Leavis argues that D. H. Lawrence was the first
English novelist to show that class is “an important human
fact,” but Leavis also suggests that Lawrence wrote about the
working-class in a way that conveys classless, universal values
(94). Thus, he effectively makes class an irrelevant issue in
the study of Lawrence. Graham Martin points out that few
critics have challenged Leavis’s analysis (35). Working in
Leavis’s shadow, these critics have not seen the self-loathing
that permeates Lawrence’s representations of working-class
people. Biographers and critics of Lawrence often attribute his
negative portrayal of the working-class to the unpleasant
experiences of his youth. Other working-class boys persecuted
him and, according to Keith Sagar, called him “‘mardarse’ and
chanted after him,’Dicky Dicky Denches plays with the wenches’”
(15). However, it is problematic to suggest that these moments
led to Lawrence’s representations. We cannot hold the working-
class responsible for an ideology that works to manipulate and
contain them. While such experiences might account for
lingering resentment, they do not adequately explain the shame
that saturates Lawrence’s writing. For instance, in an
“Autobiographical Sketch” he says, “my father was a collier, and

only a collier, nothing praiseworthy about him. He wasn’t even

107

respectable . . . “ (592). Nor do these experiences from his
youth account for the continuity that his representations share
with those of other English writers.

Lawrence often assigns to his working—class characters the
same grotesque embodiment that Forster and Woolf attribute to
theirs. In Sons and Lovers, Walter Morel “crouched at the knees
and showed his fists in an ugly, beast—like fashion” (58). In
Women in Love (1920), Ursula and Birkin meet a young
working-class couple to whom they want to give a chair that they
have just bought but no longer want. The narrator describes the
young working-class man as “a still, mindless creature, hardly a
man at all. . . . He had some of the fineness and stillness and

silkiness of a dark-eyed, silent rat” (Lawrence, Women 446).

 

Unlike Forster and Woolf, Lawrence’s repulsion at working-class
embodiment was often negated by a nostalgia. In “Return to
Brestwood,” he says of the miners he once knew that “they are
the only people who move me strongly” (264). Yet, they did not
move him enough for him to counter the bourgeois ideology of
English Modernism in his writing. That Lawrence himself crossed
so many barriers is support for anyone who wishes to challenge
the class—based hierarchy of rationality and embodiment that the
English Modernists so consistently affirmed. It is
understandable that he too affirmed this hierarchy, even if it
is inexcusable. He said to Lady Cynthia Asquith in 1915, “Let
us have done with this foolish form of government, and this idea
of democratic control. Let us submit to the knowledge that

there are aristocrats and plebeians born and not made. Some

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amongst us are born fit to govern, and some are born only fit to
be governed” (Lawrence, Letters vol. 2 379). Here, as with Spp
and Lovers, Lawrence seeks to legitimate his role as artist
within English literary Modernism by affirming the necessity of
the existing class structure. He was successful in doing so,
which explains why he, more than any other working-class writer
of the prewar period, found critical acceptance from Modernist
counterparts such as Aldous Huxley and literary critics such as
F. R. Leavis. He acquiesced to their reactionary politics, and
thus, he colluded in propagating the “wish—images” that defined
English Modernism’s reaction to the changing class relations
that his accomplishments represented. As Virginia Woolf
suggests in “The Leaning Tower,” he ultimately wrote himself
into their tradition, and as a result, remained the only
canonical working-class writer until the cultural revolution of

the late 19505 (Woolf 137).

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CHAPTER FOUR: THE ABORTED REVOLUTION

In his influential postwar study The Struggle of the Modern
(1963), Stephen Spender makes an important qualification about
the historical moment in which Modernism took place. He claims
that there were two concurrent, antithetical traditions,
“contemporary” and “modern.” He says that “the contemporary
[writer] belongs to the modern world, represents it in his
fiction and accepts the historic forces moving through it.

[H]e is quite likely to be a revolutionary” (Spender, Struggle
77). According to Spender’s system, the contemporary is
politically engaged and chooses to address the modern world from
a partisan perspective that calls for immediate change. He says

that H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett are early examples of the

contemporary and that . . . Kingsley Amis, and John Wain are
later ones (Spender, Struggle 76). In contrast, Spender claims

that “[t]o the modern [writer], it seems that a world of
unprecedented phenomena has today cut us off from the life of
the past” (Spender, Struggle 78). According to Spender, the
modern withdraws from the world of twentieth-century
industrialization and finds refuge in the fortified realm of
aesthetics, where art represents “the redemption of
life-experience in the perfection of form” (Spender, Struggle
105). Though Spender does not miss the political motives of
such a gesture, he does not think that the modern takes a
partisan View of the world. Instead, the modern becomes an

aesthete aiming to create a fusion with the past so that he can

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transcend the limitations of the commercialized present
(Spender, Struggle 78). He suggests that the moderns are
represented by Joyce, Eliot, Woolf, and Picasso, and he
concludes that the past and present are successfully “fused” in
great works such as Joyce’s Ulysses and Picasso’s Guernica.

In the case of Guernica (1937), Picasso’s painting that
represents the bombing of a Basque village by Hilter’s air
force, Spender argues that the painting fuses with the past
because it takes this contemporary scene and conveys it with the
imagery of ancient Greece: “In Guernica, . . . the terror of a
modern air raid is translated into the imagery of classical
Greek or Mithraic tragedy—-the sacrificial bull, the sword, the
flaming torch” (Spender, Struggle 78). Yet, it is difficult to
concede that Guernica is not a partisan work of art that
articulates an anti-fascist position, and to suggest that it is
not political is to reduce this powerful painting to an
amalgamation of overused tropological conventions. Spender
associates anti-fascism with the contemporary, but he does not
see Guernica as politically partisan because he thinks that its
formal properties transcend its political content. Thus, for
Spender in the later stages of his career, whether an author is
a modern or a contemporary has nothing to do with his actual
political involvement so long as one can see in his aesthetic
practices a desire to fuse the past with the present.

In effect, his classification of the moderns as aesthetes
allows him to turn a blind-eye to the partisan class politics of

Modernists such as Woolf and Lawrence, who regardless of their

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approach to aesthetics, were no less political than any other
writers working in the same period. There was, as I have been
suggesting, a political rationale for their experimentation and
innovation, but the ideologies that informed their work were not
exclusive to them. The retreat into the bourgeois mind that
became the basis of Woolf’s aesthetics and set her apart as the
most innovative of the English avant-garde also, albeit in a
different way, structured Forster’s representations of
working—class people and Lawrence’s insistent renunciation of
his own formative working-class experience. Spender is correct
to note that not all writers participated in the Modernist
movement, but his emphasis on the division between form and
politics could be better understood in terms that are purely
political. Just as there were those who contributed to the
political reaction of English literary Modernism, there were
also those who either did not take part in it or who actively
resisted the cultural entrenchment that characterized it.
Although I object to the logic of his distinctions, Spender does
force us to acknowledge that literature was a site of conflict
and contradiction and that no one movement represents the actual
diversity of the literary moment in which Modernism took place.
We cannot generalize about the twentieth—century based on either
the aesthetic practices or the politics of the Modernists.
Nonetheless, by minimizing the political aspects of the
bourgeois writing that preceded his, Spender invites his reader
to trivialize his own politically committed writing of the

19303.

112

The writing of the thirties poets and their allied converts
becomes all the more meaningful if we understand that they were,
on some level if not others, resisting the ideological positions
that their Modernist predecessors articulated. Where Woolf,
Forster, and Lawrence sought to maintain existing class
divisions, several younger bourgeois literati attempted to align
themselves with the class whose interests were seemingly in
opposition to their own both economically and culturally. In
his unsuccessful attempt to establish that Modernism was not
reactionary, Stanley Sultan points to the left—wing politics of
John Lehmann, George Orwell, and the poets of the Auden group
(457-58). Yet, he provides no rationale for linking them with
Woolf and Forster’s movement except that they wrote during the
moment that he associates with Modernism. If nothing else,
Spender gives us a compelling reason to see that Modernism is
not equally descriptive of a movement and a moment as Williams
suggests. Even working within Spender’s definitions of modern
and contemporary, one would have to concede that such blatantly
political writers wrote from a partisan perspective and, thus,
fall into his classification of contemporary, another word for
which in Spender’s lexicon is “anti—modernist” (Spender,
Struggle xii).

Certainly, John Lehmann stands out in this context because,
where the Modernists practiced the politics of exclusion,
Lehmann sought to bring together working-class and bourgeois
writers in his literal attempt to construct a new writing that

reflected the diversity of English culture and that affirmed the

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vague leftist values that he, for a time, espoused.1 He says of
the literary project that he conceived with Christopher
Isherwood that it was to reflect “a new awareness among
imaginative writers which transcended frontiers, and awakened
conscience and interest that impelled them to look for their
material in new fields” (In My Own Time 155). Thus, the first
issue of New Writing from the spring of 1936 includes a story by
Gore Graham, “a metal turner from Yorkshire,” shortly after four
poems by Spender, whom Lehmann describes as “a well-known young
poet and critic” (“About” x). Graham’s “Pigeon Bill” is about
an ironworker named Bill who, as it happens, raises pigeons.
Bill comes home from work one day to find his son dying. He
subsequently rushes around town trying to find a doctor, but
some are not available and some simply refuse to help. He
eventually calls for Dr. Johnstone, which he had resisted doing
because Johnstone worked as a “blackleg” bus driver during the
General Strike (Graham 154). When Bill returns to his house, he
discovers that he is too late. His son has died. When the
doctor arrives shortly after, Bill explodes in rage. The
feelings of resentment that he suppressed when fetching the
doctor burst forth, and in the tradition of thirties leftist

\\

fiction, he calls Johnstone a “bloody strike breaker” and a

greasy fat pig” (Graham 157).

This story is significant not because of this formulaic
awakening of revolutionary desire that was characteristic of
thirties leftist fiction, but because it consciously challenges

the notion that working—class people do not have aesthetic

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sensibilities. Bill raises pigeons because he “knew nothing so
beautiful as a young bird fresh from the moult and no observant
person could fail to notice the way he would hold that dappled
cock” (Graham 147). Bill has the “craving for beauty which
exists deep in human nature,” and his craving is satisfied by
caring for his pigeons and, although he is “not conscious of
it,” by the “comradeship of his workmates, the flowing feeling
of loyalty and oneness that existed among the mass of workers
herded together” (Graham 149). Bill’s desire for beauty is “no
product of book—learned notions that cultivate ‘taste’” (Graham
149). His lack of exposure to the bourgeois culture that the
Modernist sought to defend does not preclude him from having
meaningful aesthetic sensibilities that drive his existence.
Graham offers a different understanding of ‘taste,’ a word that
the practical critics of this period only associated with
cultural elites. Bill has taste even though his sensibilities
have not been cultivated or approved by the arbiters of culture.
More important, he has aesthetic sensibilities although he is
not free from the grotesque embodiment that characterizes the
working-class people in the novels of Woolf and Forster. Like
Woolf’s Mrs. McNab, Bill has “a short, misshapen body” (Graham
147). We also learn that he has the gaping orifice that
features so prominently on Mrs. McNab and Forster’s Jacky: “With
a second finger, which happened to have a long nail, he began to
pick a bit of corned beef from between two teeth” (Graham 150).
However, on Bill, this feature does not stand as a bodily marker

of witlessness.

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Although he downplayed its significance in his later
commentary on New Writing, by including works such as “Pigeon
Bill,” Lehmann opened a door to culture that Forster asserts
cannot be opened, regardless of the good intentions of the
person with artistic sensibilities. Not only did he resist the
Modernist politics of entrenchment by presenting working-class
writing alongside that of young but still established bourgeois
writers, but some of the chosen writings directly challenged the
class based divisions of rationality and embodiment that
structure the politics of English literary Modernism. Lehmann
attacked Modernism from within the comfortable confines of its
own literary establishment. We can, as David Smith does,
question the relevance of New Writing for the development of
socialism, but we should not downplay the importance of this
attack on the cultural establishment simply because Lehmann was
part of the volte-face at the end of the decade (Smith 2, 56;

Lindsay, After 47). At the least, his utopian longing to create

 

a “new writing” that included the working-class as producers
tells us so much about the contradictions that defined the
literary politics of his age.

Many of those who contributed to bourgeois radicalism of
the thirties were committed to abolishing the class structure
that the Modernists defended, even though they customarily
betrayed themselves as collusive through their own resistant
gestures. George Orwell, for instance, went to Spain as a
journalist in 1936, but by January of 1937 he was a

revolutionary fighting in the militia of the Partido Obrero de

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Unificacion Marxista (Williams, Orwell 7). While fighting in
the trenches alongside workers from all over the world, Orwell,
as he relates in Homage to Catalonia (1938), saw a true workers’
democracy in action. This vision heavily influenced his
political thinking. However, he also saw that democracy
undermined by the group which should have been helping it, the
Communist Party. For much of his life, Orwell was not openly
opposed to socialism, collectivism, or revolution, even if he
often (unconsciously?) undercut his own conscious political
commitments. Nonetheless, he vehemently objected to what the
Communists had done in the name of revolution. In Spain, they
managed to rewrite the history of the war while it was still
going on and to convince the people that the P.O.U.M. was a
“trotskyist organization in line with Franco’s fifth column”
(Orwell, Homage 171). For a time, Orwell was a hunted man
living on the streets of Barcelona while recovering from a
bullet wound in the neck, and he saw the persecution of
committed socialists by both fascists and people who pretended
to be socialists. Even if we ultimately question and dismiss
his version of socialism because of his snobbery and inability
to see the working-class as equal participants, it would be
unfair to Orwell to suggest that his politics were a false
facade, but we should not ignore the limitations and
contradictions of his thinking either.

Despite his willingness to lay his life on the line for the
advance of socialism, Orwell was, as Raymond Williams and David

Zehr suggest, a man caught between classes (Zehr 30; Williams,

117

Orwell 12). He rejected the class that he was born into, but
never felt at home with the class to which he committed himself.
At times, he celebrated working-class ingenuity and stamina and,
as Gerald Crick remarks, even idealized the working-class home
(Crick 188). Orwell says in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) that,
in a prosperous working-class home “you breath a warm deeply
human atmosphere that is not easy to find elsewhere” (188).
However, in the same book he indicates that he was repulsed by
working-class embodiment, and passages reflect an investment in
the bourgeois ideology that circulates in the writings of Woolf,
Forster, and Lawrence. For example, Orwell says that while
walking among the miners “in Sheffield you have the feeling of
walking among a population of troglodytes,” grotesquely embodied

and debased people (Orwell, Road 96). Later, he feels that it

 

is significant to point out that the “lower-classes smell”

(Orwell, Road 127). Samuel Hynes remarks that The Road to Wigan

 

Pier indicates that Orwell was “repelled by poverty but

 

sentimentally impressed by the workers, preaching universal
socialism but despising middle-class converts, desiring a
classless society but separated from the working-class by his
background, his accent and his ingrained prejudices” (Hynes 277-
78). Orwell was at best conflicted about the working-class, but
he did sympathize enough to question his own privileged status.
After visiting a coal-mine he says, “. . . it is even
humiliating to watch coal-miners working. It raises in you a
momentary doubt about your status as an ‘intellectual’ and a

superior person in general” (Orwell, Road 34). Still, one

118

cannot help but notice that Orwell’s doubt is only “momentary”
and that he ultimately regards himself as intellectually
superior. The compassion and respect that he has for working-
class people is under-cut by his belief in their limitations.
David Zehr says that such views haunt much of his writing. In
his portrayal of the oppressed animals in Animal Farm, for
instance, “Orwell makes it clear that their lack of intelligence
makes it impossible for them to act against the pigs”
(Zehr 35). Napoleon and Squealer are successful in re—inventing
the role that Snowball played in the revolution and in making
him the scape-goat for the problems of the collective because
the worker animals are not smart enough to remember their own
revolution. In particular, Boxer, the large work horse, could
easily defeat the pigs if he would forget his motto “I will work
harder” and mount a counter-revolution (Orwell, Animal Farm 60).
The animals are victims, but Orwell presents their victimization
as the product of their own limitations. He is stuck with the
same ambiguity that plagued Forster; he too expresses both pity
and contempt for the workers. He regrets the rigors of their
life and, in The Road to Wigan Pier admires their “belly muscles
of steel,” but he suggests that his own intellect makes him
categorically superior to working-class people, whom he
repeatedly represents as the embodied and intellectually debased

other (Orwell, Road 35). Whether he intended to or not, he

 

ultimately affirmed the same class-based division of rationality
and embodiment that was central to the cultural entrenchment of

the Modernists.2 Orwell could see the contradictions of

119

capitalism and present a wish-image in which he called for their
resolution, but he could not see his own collusion in
propagating the ideology that affirmed those contradictions.

The “middle-class converts" of the Auden group also
expressed an Anti-modernist sentiment in their desire to change
an existing social order. As David Lodge suggests, they opposed
the cultural elitism of the generation that immediately preceded
them and mounted a challenge to the politics of exclusion (Mgggg
190). A problem that they chose to resolve is that spelled out
by Louis McNiece in Autumn Journal:

To preserve the values dear to the élite
The elite must remain a few. It is hard to imagine

A world where the many would have their chance
without

A fall of the standard of intellectual living
And nothing left that the highbrow cared about.
Which fears must be suppressed. There is no reason for
thinking
That, if you give a chance to people to think or live,
The arts of thought or life will suffer and become rougher
And not return more than you could ever give. (iii.46-56)
Nonetheless, the working-class, at best, has a haunting absence
in the poetry of the Auden group. The general decay of society
is often expressed, and the need for practical political action
is a dominant theme. However, the working—class is rarely
discussed, seldom addressed, and almost never given intellectual
agency in the bourgeois poetry of the decade. This prompted
Christopher Caudwell to admonish Auden, Spender, and Day Lewis
in his “The Future of Poetry” section from Illusion and Reality,
where he says, “They know ‘something is to come’ . . . but they

do not feel with the clarity of the artist the specific beauty

of this new concrete living, for they are by definition cut off

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from the [proletariat] which is to realise it” (283). That they
were separated from the working-class by a gulf of experience
and belief is confirmed by MacNeice, who reportedly said to
Auden, “If one only knows about bourgeois one must write about
them” (qtd in Hynes 268). They represented the working-class as
the silent other, something observable but not approachable.
Spender says of the working—class in “Unemployed” (1935), “They
stare through with such hungry eyes / I'm haunted by these
images, / I’m haunted by their emptiness” (13-16). Still,
Spender is not haunted enough to make contact, and he reduces
the unemployed to images that function as catalysts for his
apparent sympathy. Spender’s poem is about the poet, and the
unemployed exist in the poem only as an extension of his guilt
and anxiety. Auden places himself in a similar situation in “A
Communist Speaking to Others,” his only poem that addresses the
working-class directly. He says:
We know, remember, what it is
That keeps you celebrating this
Sad ceremonial
We know the terrifying brink
From which in dreams you nightly shrink.
‘I shall be sacked without,’ you think,
‘A testimonial.’
We cannot put on airs with you
The fears that hurt you hurt us too. (8—16)
A. T. Tolley notes that “A testimonial” comes in a “comically
deflating short line,” and he suggests that further damage lies
in Auden’s inability to recognize that working-class people
cannot expect “a testimonial” because they are “just laid off

without ceremony” (Tolley 116). Auden cannot really imagine the

“fears that hurt” the working-class, and in his one attempt at

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doing so he comes off sounding shallow and aloof.

Hynes says of the Auden group that “it is when they attempt
to join imaginatively with the working class that they sink into
bathos and empty polemical gestures” (260). Their gestures are
empty because they, like Orwell, regard themselves as
intellectually distinct. Auden says to “Dear ChristOpher
[Isherwod]” in “To a Writer on His Birthday” (1936):

What better than your strict and adult pen

Can warn us from the colors and consolations,

The showy arid works, reveal

The squalid shadow of academy and garden.

Make action urgent and its nature clear?

Who give us nearer insight to resist

The expanding fear. The savaging disaster? (81-88)
They have “insight” and “adult” sensibilities, but working—class
people have bodies. They make bodily gestures; they “.
greet friends with a shrug, / And turn their empty pockets out,
/ The cynical gestures of the poor” (Spender, “Unemployed” 6—8).
In “An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum” (c. 1939), Spender
can acknowledge that one working-class child of many might have
an imagination: “One unnoted sweet, sweet and young. His eyes
live in a dream / Of squirrel’s game, in tree room. Other than
this” (7-8). Yet, for all that this is a meaningful image, one
cannot help but be aware that the child’s dream represents
nothing more than a primal expression of desire. He gains no
inspiration from the trappings of bourgeois culture that
surround him in the school room: “On sour cream walls,
donations. Shakespeare’s head, / Cloudless at dawn, civilized

dome riding all cities. / Belled, flowery, Tyrolese valley

.” (Spender, “Elementary” 9—11). The image of the “squirrel's

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game” is an indication from Spender that the boy has been
displaced from his bucolic context and longs to return to
nature. This longing is appropriate because his imagination is
more in tune with it than it is with the artifacts of bourgeois
culture. Spender tells us that “Surely, Shakespeare is wicked
.” to the denizens of this particular slum (Spender,
“Elementary” 17). Spender’s acknowledgment of imagination is
lost in a series of images that reinforce the perception that
these working-class children are primarily embodied. He refers
to “The tall girl with her weighed-down head. The paper- /
seeming boy, with rat’s eyes. The stunted, unlucky heir / Of
twisted bones, reciting a father’s gnarled disease,” (Spender,
“Elementary” 3-5). To his credit, he could see the need for
freeing these working—class children from their “foggy slum”--
“foggy” here representing both their physical environment and
the opacity of their intellects (Spender, “Elementary” 23).
Unfortunately, he could not accord the working-class equal
status in that struggle, and this is where his poem diverges
significantly from Graham’s story “Pigeon Bill.” Someone else
is needed to “. . . show the children to green fields, and make
their world / Run azure on gold sands, and let their tongues /
Run naked into books . . .” (Spender, “Elementary” 29-31).
Spender does not even address the working-class. He makes his
appeal to the “governor, inspector, visitor,” members of the
administering class who seemingly have the ability to initiate
change (Spender, “Elementary” 25). Ultimately, Spender and

Auden rely on the intellectual capabilities of people from their

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own class to, in Auden’s words, “make action urgent and its
nature clear.” They saw themselves as the intellectual
vanguard, and emphasized that they could know the contradictions
that the working-class faced. They engaged in a process of
speaking for others, and they created working-class subjects
that reinforced their perception that the working—class needed
someone from the outside to speak for it. Thus, by silencing
the working—class figures of their poetry and presenting them as
the embodied other, they validated the ultimate authority of
their own poetic discourse and upheld their position as
intellectual elites.

Arnold Kettle defends the Auden group, rejecting what he
calls the cold-war revision of their poetry and suggesting that
“the gains of the thirties [included] the appearance of a body
of poetry more wide-ranging, democratically relevant, and
humanly progressive than the bulk of British twentieth century
poetic production” (Kettle, “W. H. Auden” 86). There is value
in what Kettle argues, and a study of more self-consciously
radical poetry and fiction would add further support to his
claims. To be fair, the poets of the Auden group were Anti-
modernist in a significant way; they did express a utopian
longing that included the abolition of the cultural hierarchy
that the Modernists defended. Yet, they were too deeply
invested with the bourgeois ideology that informed Modernism to
mount a meaningful and lasting resistance to it. Despite
Kettle’s insistence on the contrary, they could not express a

“sense of solidarity with people battling against poverty and

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exploitation” (Kettle, “W. H. Auden” 87). In their attempts to
contest the politics of their literary predecessors, they, like
Orwell, helped to carry forth the ideological assumptions that
structured Woolf and Forster’s reaction to democratic changes in
the culture. Though she is probably not thinking in these
terms, Virginia Woolf is correct when she says of the thirties
poets in “The Leaning Tower” that “if you think of them . . . as
people trapped in a leaning tower from which they cannot descend

it explains the violence of their attack on bourgeois
society but also its half heartedness. They are profiting by a
society which they abuse” (145). Spender conceded this point in
his 1949 contribution to Richard Crossman’s The God That Failed
(1949), where he says, in the thirties he may have “secretly
supported the ills of capitalism from which [he himself]
benefited [sic]” (“Stephen Spender” 238). Spender is not
claiming to have been dishonest, and it would be unjust to
accuse him of being so. He is saying, however, that he could
not resolve his desire to see capitalism end with his wish to
preserve his elite status as an intellectual, even though he may
not always have been conscious of wanting the latter. At the
same time that they called for working-class liberation and
envisioned a resolution of the primary class contradiction that
defines capitalism, the poets of the Auden group silenced the
working—class and de-valued its intellect. I would even suggest
that Jack Lindsay’s assessment of Modernism is more applicable
to the authors of the thirties. He says, “Thus, forms of

expression which had at their original root a reaction of horror

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and indignation against dehumanising processes of our class-
society have ended as passive reflections of that process”

(Lindsay, After 21). The Modernists may have resisted the

 

commodification of their art, but there is nothing to indicate
that they were opposed to the class divisions of capitalism.3
They staunchly defended it, and they could not see the
connection between the class structure and the processes of
commodification that they bemoaned. In contrast, the Auden
poets did question the class basis of their society, but they
ultimately undercut their own utopian longings by “passively”
propagating the ideology of rationality and embodiment that
capitalism relies on to make its class divisions appear
necessary.

The common assumption is that English Modernism had run its
course by the end of the 19303. Malcolm Bradbury argues that the
deaths of Woolf and Joyce signaled a shift in the bourgeois
literary culture (Bradbury, Modern 161). Yet, there is little
evidence that a significant change took place by the end of the
decade. The values of Modernism may have been under assault
during the thirties, but that threat was never sufficient to
bring about the end of English literary Modernism’s reactionary
politics. Virginia Woolf’s essay “The Leaning Tower,” which she
initially presented as an address before the W. E. A. in 1940,
is an affirmation of the continuing strength of Modernism’s
dominant ideologies. By asserting that the working-class had
yet to produce anything of literary value, she was dismissing

much that had happened in thirties, but she was especially

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attacking those who sought to establish that the working-class
people in their current state of development could suppose to
produce anything that would count as literature. It is
difficult to imagine that her address was not directed at John
Lehmann, who was connected to the Woolfs through the Hogarth
Press. In “The Leaning Tower,” she does make some concessions
toward a future democracy where classes may no longer exist, but
she also confirms the position that emerges so often in her
writing. According to Woolf, a worker could only achieve an
enlightened consciousness when he has opened himself to the
values of bourgeois culture. She directed the working-class
audience of her address to “write daily; write freely; but let
us always compare what we have written to what the great writers
have written. It is humiliating, but it is essential. . . . Nor
let us shy away from kings because we are commoners” (Woolf,
“Leaning Tower” 153-54). She does not deny that a working-class
person like D. H. Lawrence can enter the world of letters, but
she makes it clear that, to do so, the person who enters must
leave the limitations of his or her own culture behind. While
pronouncing the failure of thirties radicalism, she was
reaffirming the cultural hierarchy as she saw it naturally
existing. She was reminding her audience that people like them,
with the exception of Lawrence, had never contributed to
literature and that people like her were the gatekeepers of art
and would continue to be so for the foreseeable future. She
was, in this sense, asserting the ideology of rationality and

embodiment that structured much of her writing. She even

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equates a working-class person with an “earth worm” (Woolf,
“Leaning Tower” 137).4 Though she laments the current state of
society, she cannot help but remind her audience that she is
categorically distinct from them because she understands how to
access the cultural arenas that they should strive to enter.

The radicalism of the thirties converts may have been a
meaningful expression of political desire, but it was not enough
to make addresses such as Woolf’s seem unacceptable or
irrelevant, as she reminded them in her bitter dismissal of what
they had tried to accomplish.

The volte-face of 1939-40 does not mean that we have
nothing to learn from the challenges issued by the Auden group,
John Lehmann, or George Orwell, limited as they were. These
writers did question the central class based contradiction of
English Modernism, and seeing that they did so gives us further
evidence with which to argue that class entrenchment was a
defining characteristic of Modernist literary politics.

However, in the end, we have to admit that the bourgeois
converts of the thirties could not even resolve this
contradiction imaginatively. The reactionary politics that
defined English Modernism remained largely unaffected by the
challenges posed and the questions raised during the thirties.
In contrast to what Bradbury asserts, there is, therefore, no
reason to suppose that English literary Modernism came to an end
with the death of Virginia Woolf.

One can even compellingly argue that, in their volte-face,

the bourgeois converts of the thirties contributed to

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propagating Modernism’s values on a more conscious level. In
“September 1, 1939,” Auden famously referred to the thirties as
“a low dishonest decade” (5). He says, in the foreword to his
Collected Poems, that for him, it was a dishonest decade because
he wrote poetry “which expresse[d] . . . feelings and beliefs
which its author never felt or entertained” (Author’s Foreword
xxv). He points out that he is ashamed to have said, “History
to the defeated” (Author’s Foreword xxv). He classified such
poetic sentiments as trash, and resisted their subsequent
publication (Skelton 41). After the thirties, it was customary
for the Auden group to assert their commitment to a culture that
they had never really successfully challenged, even when they
tried. Spender’s apolitical reading of the Modernists as
aesthetes in The Struggle of the Modern is ultimately a
concession to the class elitism that characterized English
Modernism. After the thirties, he exonerated his immediate
elders from the politics that he once attempted to question. In
his 1963 study, he largely affirms implicitly what he had said
explicitly in 1949: “The effect of centering art on to politics
would, in the long run, mean the complete destruction of art”
(Spender, “Stephen Spender” 270). By conceding to the idea that
politics adulterates aesthetics, Spender is signaling his
acceptance of the so-called apolitical values that T. 3. Eliot
was so influential in spreading through his own literary
criticism.5 Spender also says in his contribution to the
Crosmann anthology that “the artist is simply the most highly

developed individual consciousness in a society” (“Stephen

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Spender” 270). Eliot agreed; he says in the Sacred Wood, “We
assume the gift of a superior sensibility” (14). That Spender
made his claims in 1949 and then reiterated them in 1963
suggests that the politics of Modernism were still thriving well
into the postwar period and that he had become one of
Modernism’s later but most ardent proponents. This observation
is all the more significant if we recall that Spender was, in
fact, a powerful arbiter of culture in the 19503, when he
mediated “tastes” through his editorial duties at Encounter,
which as it happens, was funded indirectly by the “Us Central
Intelligence Agency” (Sinfield 103).

Spender aside, there is ample indication that those who
were most responsible for propagating Modernism’s reactionary
politics still had a dominating influence on the literary
culture well into the postwar era. Jack Lindsay in Afpgp
Thirties questions why “Eliot was elevated so pontifically after
1945,” and he was dismayed that “after the terrible years of our
national struggle against fascism, we were politely but firmly
told to take as our mentor a writer who had hailed British
fascism's policy as ‘wholly admirable’” (91). In his critical
biography of Eliot, Bernard Bergonzi suggests that Eliot had
emerged from his isolation of the thirties to become a public
intellectual in the 19403, who through his speaking engagements
and volunteerism, “participated in a sense of community and
common wartime purpose” (T. S. Eliot 153). Even if Eliot’s
poetic output had effectively ended with “Little Gidding” in

1942, he maintained a position of influence that seemed to be

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increasingly unassailable in his later years, when a younger
generation which may have once questioned his politics was
actively propagating them. Spender is just the most prominent
example. He also published one of his most influential books in
1949, Notes Towards a Definition of Culture, in which he
suggests that “the hereditary transmission of culture within
culture . . . requires the persistence of social classes,” and
adds later that “it is now the opinion of . . .the most advanced
minds that superior individuals must be formed into suitable
groups [and] endowed with appropriate powers” (13; 34). In an
age when education was being rapidly democratized by the postwar
Labour Government, Eliot responded by reminding everyone “that
education should help to preserve the class and to help select
the elite” (Nppgp 103). Although Eliot's public role and
publications are important in suggesting a continuity between
pre and postwar literary politics, it is also significant that
“practical criticism,” which he along with I. A. Richards,
William Empson, and the Leavises worked to establish, remained
the dominant critical method.

Yet, certain developments of the era may suggest otherwise.
For instance, the waning popularity of Leavis’s Scrgtiny and its
demise in 1953 might indicate that the practical criticism which
emerged from its pages had become less influential, but the slow
demise of Scrutiny in the 19403 as an organ of literary
propaganda did not necessarily signal the lessening of Leavis’s
stature as a mediator of literary standards (Hayman, Leavis 61).

Malcolm Bradbury, who received his literary education at a

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redbrick university in the 19503, suggests that the influence of
Leavis grew even as Scrutiny was in decline, and speaking from
first hand experience, he argues that Leavisism “began in the
late twenties but achieved its greatest power in the 19503

when the impact of Scrutiny and Leavis moved magically through
English departments of most schools and universities” (Bradbury,
Np 190). Leavis, who died in 1978, continued to produce highly
influential criticism into the 19703. More important, he was
responsible for training a battalion of younger critics who put
his theories into practice.

Moving this discussion from Eliot to Leavis is not an
attempt to gloss over differences in their respective
approaches, but one cannot deny that practical criticism is an
amalgamation of their complementary views of literature. This
is certainly how it was seen by many of their followers. In
1950 a young Raymond Williams, for instance, produced a handbook
for practical criticism called Reading and Criticism in which he
pays equal homage to the influences of T. S. Eliot, I. A.
Richards, William Empson, and F. R. Leavis (ix). He
inexplicably leaves Q. D. Leavis out of this list even though
her Fiction and the Reading Public obviously informed so much of
what he argues. Like Richards and Q. D. Leavis, Williams
expresses concern about the degradation of art and the
“levelling down” effect that increased literacy was having on
the general state of reading. He complains that “books, in
modern society, come near to being instituted as objects of

fetish,” absorbed indiscriminately “for pleasure” by the

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untrained masses (Williams, Reading 2). He adds that the
critics should be “increasingly concerned, the facts of mass
reading being what they are” (Williams, Reading 21). As a
response, he too calls for the establishment of a professional
caste who will ensure that traditional standards of evaluation
are maintained. He remarks that the critic “is the mediator
between the artist and the serious reading-public; his criticism
is the articulation of adequate response and trained evaluation”
(Williams, Reading 21). Like Q. D. Leavis, Williams fears the
commodification of art but also places the onus for its
devaluation on the masses who demand the commodities rather than
those who control their production and dissemination. What
presents itself as an objective summation of an objective
critical method is, in reality, a text in which Williams
reiterates the predominant wish—image of English literary
Modernism. He fears commodification, but his response is to
envision the maintenance of a social hierarchy that is the
direct result of the economic system that he opposes. Williams
does allow for the possibility of a more aware reading public,
but he does not move beyond the language of stratification that
he inherits from the Leavises and Eliot--a well informed public
will always be governed by an elite, the gatekeepers of standard
valuation. Williams’s first critical study represents a
significant postwar affirmation of the reactionary politics that
defined English Modernism and indicates a continuation of the
Modernist entrenchment well after the death of Virginia Woolf.

This reading is not an attempt to elevate the stature of

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Reading and Criticism. It is not one of the period’s more
influential texts and is generally only read by those who wish
to make a complete assessment of Williams’s work. It was
Williams’s first book and reflects none of the original thinking
that one can find in his later works. His Eliotic conceptions
of tradition bear no resemblance to the more expansive notions
of culture that emerge in his monumental works from the end of
the 19503. In Readin and Criticism, Williams defends the
notion of traditional valuation, and following Eliot, argues
that the goal of present criticism is to create a fusion of
traditional values with the present experience. He says that
the critic must work for “continuity in the values of criticism,
while sufficiently in touch with contemporary living to be able
to convert what might otherwise be a set of conventional rules
into an organic and contemporary body of judgement” (Williams,
Reading 29). Conversely, in his later works he establishes that
culture is a site of conflict rather than continuity. Thus,
Reading and Criticism is an aberration in Williams’s critical
oeuvre and should not be viewed as representative, but its
significance should not be understated either. As Fred Inglis
suggests in his biography of Williams, the thinking that
informed it came directly from his pedagogical approach to adult
education (Inglis 126). Through his teaching and earliest
writing, Williams actively propagated the Leavisite demand for
cultural entrenchment against working-class sensibilities. He
inexplicably acquiesced to the idea that working-class thinking

would lead to the corruption of artistic standards, even though

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his own working-class experience offered him sufficient evidence
to dismiss such a claim. That Williams, like Lawrence, conceded
to the devaluation of his own culture attests to the continuing
authority of the bourgeois ideology that equated working-class
sensibilities with a lack of intellectuality.

The positions of Reading and Criticism also imply that the
sense of social entropy which characterized English literary
Modernism during the inter-war years and led to its reactionary
politics had not dissipated as a result of the postwar
consensus. The political historian David Dutton writes that
“with government encouragement, the Second World War was seen as
being fought for the benefit of the common man. It was a
‘People’s War’ and it would be the people as a whole who would
gain from ultimate victory” (10). By most accounts, the people

did benefit significantly. John Montgomery suggests that “The

Labour Government of 1945-51 . . . bridged the postwar gap,
especially in economics . . . whatever wealth and prosperity was
available was shared as widely as possible” (34). Montgomery’s

claim has an element of truth but is also hyperbolic. Alan
Sinfield has challenged the notion that the re—distribution of
wealth and power was as dramatic as is commonly presented. He
argues that the British class structure remained largely intact
because welfare capitalism was still a form of capitalism, even
if industries such coal and steel had been nationalized as early
as 1946.6 After the economic disasters of the 19303, “.
capitalism needed some such bargain [as the welfare state] if it

was to survive” (Sinfield 20). Steps taken by the postwar

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Labour Government did, nonetheless, improve living conditions
for most people. The National Health Service Act of 1946, for
instance, made health care universal and “entirely free”
(Marwick, British Society 51). The Education Act of 1944
“ensured that all pupils would, around the age of eleven or
twelve, move on to some form of secondary education” (Marwick,
British Society 55). These developments had a material impact
on the lives of millions, but Sinfield makes a valid point when
he suggests that they did not result in a fundamental shift in
cultural power, and nothing indicates that they brought about an
immediate change in the political structure of English
literature. If increased access to secondary education meant
anything to the democratizing of postwar English literature, it
did not do so until the later years of the 19503, when working—
class authors like Alan Sillitoe and David Storey, who had
benefitted from these changes, became celebrated figures.
Sinfield argues that “ . . . the arts in [English]
welfare-capitalism . . . [were] presented as for everyone and
the situation may well [have been] better than before [the war];
but, nevertheless, structural privilege [had been] preserved”
(Sinfield 55). The established institutions of English culture
continued to function in the service of bourgeois interests,
catered to bourgeois tastes, and upheld bourgeois art as that
which should be most valued.7 The continuation of the status
quo in the arts did not, however, prevent “mediators of
evaluation” in the 19403 and 19503 from sensing that their

culture was threatened by the increasing enfranchisement of

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working-class people.

Just as Virginia Woolf had seen apocalyptic implications
when servants came into the drawing room and borrowed The Daily
Herald, the next generation of bourgeois writers often
considered the presence of working-class people in institutions
from which they had been previously excluded to be equally
ominous. Like E. M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh fears the corruption
of an organic social system that he presents as beneficial.
Randall Stevenson claims that Waugh sets out to “contrast an
idyllic [prewar] past with the shabby present” (British Novel
121). Charles Ryder, the narrator of Brideshead Revisted
(1945), complains of Britain in the 19403 that “it was not as it
had been” (Waugh 5). Waugh presents Brideshead, the English
country estate that Ryder knows through his youthful
associations with Sebastian Flyte and, later, his adulterous
relationship with Sebastian’s sister Julia, as a vision of
pastoral perfection, where human beings exist in harmony with
nature and where the overwhelming presence of beauty inspires
aesthetic creation in its bourgeois inhabitants. Brideshead
stands in direct contrast to the newer developments of society
that destroy that harmonious union between nature and artifice.
At the novel’s beginning, which is its chronological end,
Charles Ryder is at an army encampment near Glasgow, and he
notices that a new landscape is taking the place of a long
standing farm: “a half mile of concrete road lay between bare
clay banks, and on either side a chequer of open ditches showed

where the municipal contractors had designed a system of

137

drainage” (14). When to his surprise his regiment reestablishes
itself at Brideshead, he claims that it is “an exquisite man—
made landscape . . . enclosed and embraced in a single winding
valley” (Waugh 16). Unlike the new municipally constructed
canals, which symbolize the destruction of nature through
Waugh’s barren imagery, the man—made lakes at Brideshead reflect
“the clouds and mighty beeches” that prosper on their “margins”
(Waugh 16). That its “unravished” beauty complements nature is
further suggested in the phrase “neighborly horizon” (Waugh 16).
As Charles later tells us, “It was an aesthetic education to
live” at Brideshead, and while there, his artistic sensibilities
are heightened so that when he painted landscapes, his “brush
seemed somehow to do what was wanted of it" (Waugh 81-82). He
has a similar experience when painting the Flyte’s London home,
Marchmain House, which he calls one of the last houses in the
city “which could be called ‘historic’” (Waugh 179). It is
about to be torn down and replaced by a block of modern flats,
so the Flytes ask Charles to produce commemorative paintings,
which he does. Again, because of the inspiration that he draws
from his surroundings, he “could do nothing wrong . . . the
intricate multiplicity of light and colour became a whole”
(Waugh 218). Marchmain House is one of those buildings that
grew “silently with the centuries, catching and keeping the best
of each generation, while time curbed the artist’s pride and the
Philistine’s vulgarity, and repaired the clumsiness of the dull
workman” (Waugh 226). The emerging society that Waugh resents

places economics over tradition and short term need over the

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aesthetic gratification that slow development can produce.
Bernard Bergonzi says in The Situation of the Novel that “the
myth of the English . . . gentleman who is an inevitable victim
of the modern world came increasingly to dominate Waugh’s
responses” (Bergonzi 105). The injustice for Charles Ryder is
that an artistic creation should be destroyed despite the
desires of those who are capable of seeing its significance and
deriving inspiration from it.

The reference to “the dull workman” indicates that not
everyone who works in such a place has the intellect necessary
to understand its aesthetic value. For instance, the same
elevation of sensibility does not apply to Sebastian’s much
adored Nanny Hawkins, who spends all of her time encased at
Brideshead. When Charles gives her his painting of Brideshead’s
Italian fountain, she puts it “on the top of her chest of
drawers, remarking that it had quite the look of the thing,
which she had often admired but could never see the beauty of
herself” (Waugh 81). She does not share in his appreciation of
art, and in this, she stands out from the regular inhabitants of
Brideshead who are discursively present in the novel. That the
family cares for her and gives her a home long after her
services are needed is an affirmation of the social paternalism
that Eliot and Woolf advocated as well, and that Nanny Hawkins
does not share the higher sensibilities of the novel’s bourgeois
characters is offered as proof that bourgeois parternalism is
necessary for her well being and continued peaceable existence.

The Flytes are so magnanimous that they have “old servants doing

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damn all, being waited on by other servants” (Waugh 151). This
generosity is part of what drives the Flytes into debt and makes
them have to sell Marchmain House. They are willing to make a
supreme sacrifice to maintain the stability of this humane
social order. Like Eliot, who thought servants were best off
when they lived in the civilized surroundings of a well ordered
home, Waugh is careful to demonstrate that paternal capitalism
is ultimately humane, but in doing so, he denies the working—
class characters their full humanity. Like Forster’s punkah
wallah from A Passage to India, Nanny Hawkins does not have the
ability to govern herself, and like Woolf’s Mrs. McNab, she has
no existence except in relation to the bourgeois people who
administer her world. She does not wish to be bothered unless
she can indulge in memories of when she cared for Bridey,
Sebastian, Julia, and Cordelia: “Nanny did not particularly wish
to be talked to; she liked visitors best when they paid no
attention to her and let her knit way, and watch their faces and
think of them as she had know them as children” (Waugh 151).

Her inability to appreciate art is harmless so long as this
natural system is not disrupted. She simply disregards what she
cannot understand and lives blissfully with her pleasant
memories of Sebastian Flyte and his siblings.

The Army in Waugh’s novel becomes a metaphor for the new
social order. Waugh refers to the chronologically later parts
of the novel that frame Ryder’s memories as the “age of Hooper”
(Waugh 351). Hooper is, as Sinfield suggests, “an officer who

is not a gentleman" (13). He shows up to the officers’ mess

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with his hair uncut, uses words like “rightyo,” and does not
know how to handle his servants (Waugh 12-14, 348). In his body
and his manners, he symbolizes the decay of this paternal class
system and the encroachment of those with debased sensibilities
into the circles of powers that had previously been closed to
them (Sinfield 13). Hooper is a corruption of the elite, and
his presence in its ranks signifies the disruption of
tradition’s smooth progress. The new officer class, the product
of a more fluid and democratic society, does not even know
enough to appreciate Brideshead’s greatest treasure, its Italian
fountain. As much as anything in the text, the fountain
represents aesthetic perfection in the unity between nature and
artifice. Ryder describes the fountain as the “final
consummation of the house’s plan;” taken from Italy, it stands
in a “welcoming climate,” and like the man-made lakes, nature
thrives because of its presence: “an oval basin with an island
of formal rocks at its centre; on the rocks grew . . . wild
English fern in its natural frond” (Waugh 81). With his
“genius” and “artistic temperament,” Charles Ryder “lives for
one thing--Beauty,” and he has a worshipful admiration of the
fountain (Waugh 231; 267). In contrast, the younger officers in
the age of Hooper “lark about in it” with their girlfriends, but
their transgressions are mild compared to those of the working-
class soldiers who “throw their cigarette ends and the remains
of their sandwiches there” (Waugh 350). Cigarettes and
sandwiches are images that relate to bodily gratification, and

Waugh is pointing out that the working-classes defile art

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because their status of being primarily embodied prevents them
from understanding its significance and revering it.8 Thus,
Waugh reinforces the Modernist assumption about the distinction
between rationality and embodiment. In reality, just as Stephen
Spender does, he helped to carry forth Modernism’s reactionary
politics into the postwar era. Like Woolf’s to the Lighthouse,
Brideshead Revisted presents a dystopian vision that projects
the continuing decay of society. Through this vision, Waugh
articulates a utopian longing for the restoration of a paternal
hierarchy that he presents as imminently humane but that still
accords people certain positions within the labor process
because it regards them as intellectually inferior to those who,
by right, should be administering the world. Thus, Brideshead
Revisited is more than the title of a novel; it is also a
political slogan.

David Lodge is right to note that Spender’s use of the
terms “modern” and “contemporary” free those distinctions from
chronology. He then argues that Waugh is an example of a prewar
“contemporary” whose work lasted well into the postwar era,
which he says was dominated by contemporaries in general (Lodge,
Language 243). I am arguing just the opposite. Waugh
established himself in the prewar, and his fiction may not
resemble the experimental work that both Lodge and Spender
associate with Modernism, but that does not change the fact that
he was part of Modernism’s ongoing political reaction. He had a
political link to the Modernist movement that many critics have

been unwilling or unable to see because they associate him with

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different formal practices.

The same problem runs through the criticism of several
writers who, unlike Waugh, initially established themselves in
the postwar era. As I note above, Spender argues that John Wain
and Kingsley Amis rejected Modernism’s retreat from the
contemporary world into aesthetics and experimentation, and this
assertion about them has become widely accepted as valid.
Several critics have echoed his (somewhat casual) claim that
there is a formal link between Wain and Amis and the Edwardian
writers Bennett and Wells. Rubin Rabinovitz is the most
notable. In his book The Reaction against Experiment in the
English Novel, Rabinovitz takes the position that Wain and Amis
were part of a movement that “argued in favor of a return to
traditional forms,” and he adds later that “in their fiction the
novelists of the 19503 show the influence of the nineteenth
century novelist by their realistic style [form?] and their
concern with social and moral themes” (5, 16). This formulation
is too convenient. The idea of a clean return to the distant
past is complicated by Rabinovitz’s own admission that there
were many writers, such as Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, who
wrote during the moment of Modernism but did not take part in
the formal experimentation that he sees as being its defining
characteristic. He disregards the possibility that these
Modernist novels of experimentation, as few as they were, were
also engaged in pursuits that were “social and moral,” another
term for which is political. His explanation that writers of

Waugh and Greene’s time just ignored the experimentation while

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the postwar realists actively rejected it is altogether
unsatisfactory (Rabinovitz 5). Rabinovitz does not adequately
explain why there is a return to the Edwardian age and
nineteenth-century and not to the “realist” writers of the
inter-war years. One can make a compelling case that Brideshead

Revisited is very much a novel that deals with social and moral

 

issues. Yet, Rabinovitz does not attempt to establish a link
between it and writers of the 19503.

Like Waugh, writers of Amis and Wain’s generation, who are
often grouped together as “The Movement” but are also seen as
“Angry Young Men,” did not engage in the formal
experimentation.9 The cessation of experimentation, however, is
largely a myth fostered by those who want to see a clear break
between pre and postwar English literature. A tradition of
experimentation continued through the 19403 and 19503 and is
associated with writers like Malcolm Lowry, William Golding,
Iris Murdoch, and Lawrence Durrell. Nonetheless, Morrison
correctly notes that “the Movement writers were assigned an
identity which presented them as the ‘coming’ class. They were
identified with a spirit of change in postwar British society,
and were felt to be representative of shifts in power and social
structure” (57). An anonymous article in the October 1, 1954
issue of The Spectator that is usually attributed to J. D. Scott
was likely the first to make this pronouncement. Scott claims
that “nothing dates literary fashion so certainly as the
emergence of a new movement, and within the last year or so

signs are multiplying that such a thing is once again emerging”

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(Scott 399). The writers of this new Movement, according to
Scott, were opposed to the “lush, loose, fashionable, writing”
that came before them (399-400).lo Philip Larkin, for instance,
opposed Modernist writers such as Eliot and Pound who had
resorted to “an obscurity unlike previous types in being
deliberate and unnecessary” (Larkin, “No Fun" 4). Yet, we need
to be cautious about attaching too much significance to this
gesture because, as J. D. Scott reminds us, The Movement writers
had not rejected the critical methodology that Eliot had been so
influential in founding. This new Movement made “genuflections
toward Dr. Leavis and Professor Empson” (Scott 400). John Wain
echoes the elitist tendency that was so important to Leavisism
when he says that “any tradesman can do simple arithmetic. But
the tradesman cannot understand higher mathematics; only a few
people can do that and they are born with the right kind of
brain, and he concludes that “The number of people who can read
poetry as it should be read is equal to the number of
Mathematicians” (Wain, Preliminary 95). The Movement writers did
not embrace the obscurities of Modernist experimentation, but
nor did they offer a challenge to Modernism’s reactionary
politics.

Unlike the writers who dominated the earliest days of
English literary Modernism, The Movement writers did not come
from the upper-echelons of society. Yet, as George Watson
argues, “they were not underprivileged either” (6). Wain, for
example, was the son of a prosperous dentist in Stoke-on—Trent

(Allsop 67). Most got Oxbridge educations, and not as the

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result of the Education Acts of 1944. At most, the squabbles
between them and their upper-class predecessors were conflicts
between petty bourgeois and bourgeois factions, both of which
had access to cultural institutions that were only beginning to
be opened to working-class people through incremental
democratization. The Oxford of Amis and Larkin may not have
been that of “Charles Ryder and his plovers eggs,” but it was
still Oxford (Larkin, Introduction 10). Scott suggests that The
Movement signifies a conscious break from the “fierce—cold-bath-
Marxists” of the Auden group (Scott 399-400). His
characterization of the Auden Group is troubling, but Scott’s
point is generally acknowledged as valid. However, not all
critics would accept his reasoning. Some of the Movement
writers, such as Amis, were loosely (and misleadingly) connected
with socialism.ll As is the case with Woolf and Forster, Amis’s
association with progressive politics did not stop him from
adopting reactionary stances in his writing. Blake Morrison
makes the point that The Movement’s rejection of the Auden Group
had more to do with their sexual orientations and upper-class
backgrounds than it did their politics (30-31). There was a
shift in cultural power. The bourgeois dilettantes who
dominated the literary scene in the twenties and thirties were
challenged, though not entirely deposed, by a caste of
professional writers and critics who, like Amis and Wain, held
university teaching positions. This younger generation also
wrote novels set in provincial areas of the country that the

writers of Bloomsbury, for instance, had largely ignored

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(Bradbury, Np 204). Yet, on this last issue, The Movement
writers were not as innovative as critics generally suppose.
Their novels may have been set in the provinces, but that does
not entail a celebration of provincial life. Wain and Amis end
their first novels by having their characters leave conflict
filled situations in the north of England for prosperity and
stability in London. After a series of mishaps in the
provinces, fate returns the downwardly mobile Charles Lumley of
Wain’s Hurry on Down to what is seemingly his rightful place, a
high paying cultural job in London (Wain, ngpy 249).
Ultimately, I opposes the argument that these writers
started a new Movement, and more important, reject the claim
made by Morrison and Sinfield that The Movement writers were
“anti-modernist” (Morrison 193; Sinfield 183). They may not
have engaged in experimentation, but neither had everyone who
came before them. In their fiction and criticism, they embraced
the elitism that was central to Modernist politics. Just as
working-class encroachment was a concern for Waugh and the
Modernists who preceded him, it was a pre—occupation for The
Movement writers as well. Their novels did include working-
class characters, but the tendency to suggest that they,
therefore, embraced the working-class is a misconception and is
usually the result of the visceral reactions that their working—
class characters elicited. In his famous 1955 review for the
Sunday Times, Somerset Maugham remarks, for instance, that Jim
Dixon, the main character of Amis’s novel Lucky Jim (1954) is a

“scum” because he did “not go to the university to a acquire

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culture, but to get a job” (4). Amis lamented that Maugham
should perceive Jim Dixon as a legitimate challenge to the
cultural establishment. He says that Maugham “thought wrongly
on the whole that this character and what he stood for
represented a threat to [his] values. . . . later developments
have seen to it that the non-gentleman and the gentleman would
be standing together . . . holding off the even more
ungentlemanly people” (Amis, “Faces” 168). Lucky Jim, the most
influential and enduring of The Movement novels, shows the
ascent of a working-class person into provincial academia, but
Amis does not present Jim Dixon’s accomplishment as admirable.
He sets it up only to show that it must necessarily fail because
of Jim’s intellectual limitations.

Just as Waugh envisions the corruption of the elite, Amis
suggests that the postwar democratization of education has
resulted in the decay of the academic intelligentsia. One of
the symbols of this decay is Ned Welch, the professor in Jim
Dixon’s history Department at a provincial red-brick university.
The narrator tells us that “no other professor in Great Britain

set such store by being called Professor” (Amis, ngky 9).
He is pretentious and hosts “arty” weekends that feature
recorder playing and singing with multiple parts. True
intellectualism to Welch means being able to tell the difference
between a flute and a recorder (Amis, Lpgky 9). Lucky Jim is a
famously comic novel, and Welch is the vehicle through which
much of the text's humor is delivered. However, the novel’s

comic elements function in the service of serious political

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content. Welch’s limitations are meant to signal the decay of
British education in its postwar expansion into the red-brick
universities. Amis presents narrative commentary on this point
that is unusually straightforward. A fellow lecturer remarks to
Jim Dixon that education has become a self-serving bureaucracy:
“If we institute entrance exams to keep out the ones who can’t
read or write, the entry goes down by half and half of us lose
our jobs" (Amis, ngky 175). He notes that all “the provincial
universities are going the same way. [Though n]ot London

.and not the Scottish ones,” which like Oxford and Cambridge,
were established institutions before the postwar boom (Amis,
Lpgky 174). As Waugh does in Brideshead Revisited, Amis sets up
a dichotomy between the quality of an established tradition and
the potential corruption of what that tradition represents in a
modern bureaucratic age. The lecturers at Jim’s University are
often people who could not cut it at Oxbridge. Amis is careful
to note that the professor of English whom Jim accidently wounds
with a stone is a former fellow of some Cambridge college (Amis,
ngky 17). Welch is not a professor. He is a caricature of
one, and the fact that he “sets such store” in being called
professor is ironic. Through his wife, he is independently
wealthy (Amis, ngky 69). His presence in academia signals the
corrupting influence of bourgeois amateurism in an academic
world that, according to the traditions of Leavisism, ought to
be reserved to the professional elites who can safeguard the
standards that Welch himself does not maintain.

Welch and his son Bertrand are Jim’s nemeses. The former

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has the ability to destroy his career, and the latter embodies
the bohemian culture that Jim, with his working-class
sensibilities, despises. However, like Welch, Jim also
represents the corruption of the intelligentsia. One can even
argue that, as its next generation, he signifies a further level
of academic decay. Welch is a misplaced member of the
bourgeoisie whose manipulative and evasive character would
suggest that he might be more suited to commerce. He is an
expert at exploitation, as is indicated by the way that he
maneuvers Jim into collecting his library material (Amis, Lpgky
180). Jim, on the other hand, is a product of the postwar
welfare state who attended university on a government grant
after his military service ended (Amis, Lpgky 29). Welch can at

least read music, but despite his assurance to Welch that he

can, Jim cannot (Amis, Lucky 40). He tells Margaret, “. . . I
can’t sing, I can’t act, I can hardly read . . .” (Amis, Lucky
26). Even with these overwhelming limitations, Jim was chosen

by a bureaucratic board to be the primary lecturer in medieval
history for the department, but his choice to study the Middle
Ages was not based on scholarly interests. Jim confesses that
“the reason why I’m a medivalist . . .is that the medieval
papers were a soft option in the Leicester course, so I
specialized in them” (Amis, Lpgky 35). He teaches medieval
history but cannot accurately define scholasticism, although “he
read, heard, and even used the word a dozen times a day” (Amis,
ngky 30). The greatest indictment of Jim’s intellectual

abilities comes with the novel’s climactic comedic moment.

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Welch asks him to deliver a lecture on Merrie England, but Jim
has little inclination to do it. When Arthur Beesley, a fellow
lecturer, offers to give him notes on the Age of Chaucer, Jim
thinks that he might be able to “construct the rest of his
lecture out of the work of others” (Amis, ngky 174). Such as
it is, much of his presentation is not in his own words, and by
revealing this, Amis foreshadows what happens when Jim actually
delivers the lecture. To the amusement of the assembled
students, officials, and dignitaries, Jim begins his address and
unintentionally adopts “Welch’s manner of address,” and when
realizing this, “begins imitating the principal” of the college
(Amis, Lpgky 227-29). Ted E. Boyle and Terence Brown
characterize this point well when they remark, “In spite of the
fact that Dixon wants to play the Welch game, he simply cannot”
(105). Jim cannot speak the language of scholarship with his own
west Northern accent. It is not adaptable. When finally thrust
into a situation where he cannot evade engaging in academic
rhetoric, the best that Jim can provide is a corrupted
imitation. The stress that the presentation produces overwhelms
him because “Jim, when moved, was bad at ordering his thoughts”
(Amis, Lpgky 55). He cannot adopt the language of the
intelligentsia and does not have the sensibilities to produce
what amounts to a passable imitation, which for all of his
pettiness, Welch is at least capable of doing.

It would be obvious and correct to attribute Jim’s failure
at the lecture to his inebriation, but to leave it at that would

be to suggest that his drinking has no significance beyond

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propping up the comedic elements of the plot. Jim does drink
before his lecture because he is nervous and afraid. Yet, by
emphasizing his need to drink, Amis draws our attention to his
embodiment and suggests that Jim’s bodily pre-occupations cancel
his ability to engage in intellectual pursuits. This pattern
re-emerges throughout the novel. When Jim is at the Welch’s
“arty weekend,” he says to Margaret that “I’d give anything for
three quick pints. I’ve had nothing since the one I had down
the road” (Amis, Lpgky 45). Jim ducks out and gets drunk at the
local pub. He returns to Welch’s house and eventually falls
asleep while smoking. When he wakes the next morning, he
discovers that he has burned a hole in the bed clothes (Amis,
Lpgky 64—5). As much as the Welches stifle Jim’s desire to
satisfy his bodily urges through their insistence on
intellectual pursuits, Jim brings a sense of chaos into their
neatly ordered world of servants and madrigals through his
desire to fulfill those impulses. There is a mutual
incompatibility between the two. Through it, Amis suggests a
necessary division between rationality and embodiment. Welch’s
may be a misplaced intellect, and his ruthless manipulation and
exploitation of Jim may tarnish the spirit of academia, but he
still has a claim on rationality that Jim can never hope to
make.

When forced into a situation where he must match wits with
Welch, Jim does not have the ability to do so, and he reverts to
fantasies of violence or makes bodily gestures. Jim fantasizes

that he will pick Welch up and “plunge [his] too small feet in

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their capless shoes into a lavatory basin, pulling the plug
once, twice and again, stuffing the mouth with toilet paper”
(Amis, Lpgky 12). Later, when discussing their relationship
with Margaret, he also expresses a desire to “to rush at her and
tip her backwards in her chair, to make a deafening rude noise
in her face, to shove beads up her noise” (Amis, Lpgky 161).
Boyle and Brown remark that, in moments of stress, Jim reverts
to inarticulate bodily gestures and makes his famous faces
(101). While preparing his lecture, he “got up from his chair
where he’d been writing . . . and did his ape imitation all
around the room. With one arm bent at the elbow so that so the
fingers brushed the armpit” (Amis, Lpgky 209). When confronted
with an intellectually intense situation, Jim intuitively
retreats into his own embodiment. By having him do so, Amis
indicates that embodiment is the defining element of Jim’s
identity. He reinforces this notion by showing the ease with
which Jim thrashes Bertrand when confronted about his advances
toward Christine. Just as the Welches disarm him intellectually
when he enters their domain, Jim easily incapacitates Bertrand
physically (Amis, Lpgky 214). Through this episode, Amis
further draws our attention to what he sees as the necessary
division of rationality and embodiment.

The erosion of cultural barriers by the bureaucratic
machinations of the welfare-state compel people like Jim to
cross the boundaries that naturally define the limits of their
existence. In turn, this displacement opens them to conflict

and abuse that they would otherwise not have to face. For all

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that he represents the corruption of the intelligentsia, Jim is
still a victim in this novel. Like Forster’s Leonard Bast, he
has been displaced and exposed to a culture that he can never
hope to attain and does not really want anyway. He has a basic
“undiscriminating goodwill” and intuitive grasp of emotions that
the novel celebrates (McDermott 61). These qualities emerge
when he says to Christine in a rare moment of fluency, “
the love part’s perfectly easy; the hard part is the working
out, not about love, but about what they’re going to do” (Amis,
Lpgky 149). Amis sentimentalizes Jim’s naivete and suggests
that it is threatened by his growing cynicism. As a displaced
worker, his good qualities become perverted or abused,
especially by the emotionally manipulative Margaret, who uses
the appearance of psychological frailty to beguile Jim into
committing to a sexless and combative relationship.

Like Leonard Bast again, Jim is not entirely devoid of
intellect. He does grasp the husks of culture. For example, he
knows that the word scholasticism is important even if he does
not know what it means, but he ultimately cannot appreciate art
and history enough to understand what tradition has to offer.

It unclear to him why anyone would want to listen to a “violin
sonata by some Teutonic bore” when there is a perfectly good pub
just up the road (Amis, Lpgky 47). In Postwar British Fiction,
James Gindin argues that “Amis’ point of View is ultimately a
comic acceptance of the contemporary world as it is, a
recognition of multiple facts of experience” (42). However,

Amis does not ask us to accept Jim’s situation as displaced

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worker. Bruce Stovel argues that Gore-Urquhart is “a comic deus
ex machina” (71). He descends among the chaos of Jim’s life and
restores a sense of order by offering Jim a job. As Maragret
says, he is “quite the real thing,” a wealthy man with a
selfless devotion to art and an ability to assess the real value
of people (Amis, Lpgky 108). Gore-Urquhart rescues Jim from his
displacement and gives a sense of balance to his world. Keith
Wilson concludes that the “end of Lucky Jim [is] a triumphant
opening up of the future” (57). For Jim it also marks a return
to a social arrangement of a more stable past. At the novel’s
end, Jim is where he should have been all along, employed in the
service of a (wealthy) man who has the sensibilities needed to
“administer the world” in a way that the modern bureaucracy that
displaced Jim does not. This bureaucracy allows Jim to take the
“soft option,” whereas Gore—Urquhart recognizes his skills and
pushes him into his proper place in the labor process. If Jim
is “lucky,” it is largely because he has found someone who can
correct the decision that he was not capable of making for
himself.

Thus, Kingsley Amis projects the necessity of an
administering class, and like Waugh, asks his reader to
recognize that paternal capitalism is ultimately humane and
beneficial to those who necessarily allow their passions and
bodily urges to rule their intellects. Merritt Moseley is one
of the few critics who sees that Lucky Jim expresses “a fear of
democratization” (2). Amis’s utopian longing is that the class

divisions of capitalism should be maintained, and he projects

155

the necessary continuance of a social order that denies the
majority of people access to intellectual arenas because it
assigns them a primary role of embodiment. In his contribution
to the fifties anthology Declaration, the film and theater
director Lindsay Anderson accuses Amis of being “anti—idealist,
anti-emotional, and tepid or evasive about [his] social
commitments” (147). Yet, in Lucky Jim Amis advocates the
Modernist ideology of rationality and embodiment and takes a
reactionary stance against the democratization of the cultural
institutions that had largely been closed to the working-class
before the establishment of the welfare state. Whatever else
Amis was, he was not politically tepid, and like his Movement

counterpart John Wain, he was not an Anti-modernist.

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CHAPTER FIVE: LEGITIMATING MOMENTS

Part of what complicates any study of English literature
and politics in the 19503 is the way in which the notion of the
Angry Young Man has been employed by critics since the sixties.
Often, they use the term to describe anything produced in the
decade that seems to indicate some level of disaffection. In
her analysis of Lucky Jim, Angela Hague objects that Kingsley
Amis should be associated with the label, saying, “Anger did not
officially arrive in London until the first production of ngk
Back in Anger at the Royal Court Theatre on May 8, 1956,

.which appeared to herald a new character in English culture,”
three years after the publication of Lucky Jim (209). She
implies that the concept of the Angry Young Man is more
adequately descriptive of the works of John Osborne, Colin
Wilson, and the working-class authors who followed them in the
last years of the decade. Hague is right to suggest that the
phrase Angry Young Man came into existence some time after the
first successes of Osborne and Wilson, but she is wrong to imply
that it was not initially used by journalists and scholars to
describe Amis, Wain, and the other Movement writers. Also, her
suggestion that Amis and Wain “were not particularly enraged
about anything” is not an adequate justification for challenging
the idea that they were or should have been linked to the
concept of Anger (Hague 209). Both expressed a sense of
disaffection over the democratization of education and the arts,

and if they not were particularly “enraged” about postwar

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developments, they were at the least fearful that their
positions of authority were under threat from an encroaching
working-class that did not, by their estimations, share their
elevated sensibilities.

To be fair to Hague, there is a great deal of mythology
surrounding the origins of the phrase Angry Young Man. In his
book The Angry Decadg, published in 1958 but written in the fall
of 1957, Kenneth Allsop explores the origins of the phrase but
cannot provide a definite reference for when it might have
appeared as descriptive of the decade, although like Hague, he
too suggests that it became culturally significant following the
appearance of Osborne (19). Allsop is important not just
because he provides an informative first hand overview of the
decade, but moreover, because his use of the term Anger in 1957
suggests that it had become an established part of the critical
discourse before the majority of the working-class writers
achieved recognition. The first edition of The Angry Decade
contains much on Amis and Wain, but it makes no reference to the
working-class authors who followed Osborne and Wilson, except to
talk briefly about John Braine. It is only in a new
introduction to the 1964 edition of the Angry Decade that Allsop
refers to Alan Sillitoe, David Storey, or Arnold Wesker, and
even then, he only offers a passing acknowledgment of their
appearances at the end of the 19503 or beginning of the 19603
(Allsop 7).

That the Northern working-class writers who appeared at the

end of the fifties were not initially included in a discussion

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of the Angry Young Men is further indicated by Gene Feldman and
Max Gartenberg’s 1958 anthology The Beat Generation and The
Angry Young,Men, in which they assemble extracts from English
and American authors in an effort to present a contrived study
of the transatlantic situation. They conclude that “the crucial
difference between the Angry Young Man and The Beat Generation
is that the former still care, the latter are beyond caring”
(Feldman and Gartenberg 17). The Beats aside, this reading does
not adequately account for the politics of Amis and Wain, who
cared enough about the postwar decay of culture to join in the
reactionary positions of their prewar antecedents. In general,
the extracts from this anthology do not do justice to the works
from which Feldman and Gartenberg take them. It is of little
scholarly value, except that it further indicates that the
concept of Anger was established by 1958, before the appearance
of the working-class authors with whom the term is often
casually linked in what can be only described as an insensitive
revision of the decade. With some notable exceptions, such as
Mary Eagleton and David Pierce, scholars after the sixties
ignored what some earlier critics realized (Eagleton and Pierce
130). The literature of the Movement writers who were
identified as Angry Young Men bore little resemblance to the
working-class writers who followed them. William Van O’Connor
published an essay in the 1962 PMLA in which he asserts what so
many others seem to have forgotten about the protagonists of the
working-class novels of David Storey, Alan Sillitoe, and John

Braine: “Neither Arthur Machin, Arthur Seaton, nor Joe Lampton

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belongs to the Lucky Jim type” (170). Though O’Connor does not
acknowledge it, they are working—class characters constructed by
authors with an experiential knowledge of the working-class
life. Jim Dixon is not.

Every author to whom the label Angry Young Man has been
applied has steadfastly denied its significance. John Wain went
so far as to have his publishers advertise his books with
display cards that said “John Wain is not an angry young man”
(Hewison 130). The term invites us to dismiss the politically
diverse literature of an entire decade because it evokes
associations with youthfulness and irrationality. Yet, it would
be dishonest to suggest that fear, disaffection, and even rage
were not expressed in the literature of 19503. However, the way
that the phrase Angry Young Man has been applied as generally
descriptive invites us to ignore competing forms of anger.
Critics have not been willing to acknowledge that the Anger
expressed in different texts is done in response to the
different social contradictions that those works propose to
resolve imaginatively.

Hague is correct to argue that Jimmy Porter, the
protagonist in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, heralds a new
type of character in the English literature of the twentieth-
century. Arnold P. Hincliffe and Alan Carter both remark that
to link Jimmy Porter too closely to Jim Dixon is to miss
important differences between them (Hinchliffe 8; Carter 28-9).
Yet, Robert Hewison makes the point that “Amis and Wain prepared

the stage for the Angry Young Man, Colin Wilson gave him an

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identity as the Outsider, John Osborne gave him a voice”
(Hewison 135). But the progression here is too neat, and it
disregards the fact that Amis had Jim Dixon stumbling off the
stage before he could find a voice of his own. Jimmy Porter did
not emerge because of Jim Dixon; he came about in spite of him.
In a 1956 article in the Observer, the drama critic Kenneth
Tynan, one of the first to understand the importance of
Osborne’s play for the institutions of the mainstream culture,
remarks that Look Back in Anger “betokened something new in the
theatre--a sophisticated, articulate lower-class” (Tynan 14).
If John Osborne seems for the first time to have given voice to
an intelligent person with ties to the working—class, it is
largely because he was preceded by such a long tradition of
writers who were trying to keep that voice from ever being
heard.

Unlike Amis’s Jim Dixon, Osborne’s Jimmy Porter is good at
ordering his thought “when moved.” In contrast to the working-
class subjects of the thirties poets, he does not need someone
to speak for him, and unlike Woolf’s Mrs. McNabb, his is not the
voice of witlessness. He may lament that when “Old Porter
talks, . . . everyone turns and goes to sleep. And Mrs. Porter
gets ‘em going with the first yawn,” but his complaint is ironic
because he does not give them any choice but to listen (Osborne,

Look 11). In a world where people like Jimmy have been

 

silenced, he refuses to be, and he turns what he is not supposed
to have (words) into weapons of class conflict. Jimmy is, in

the words of Alison, “a spiritual barbarian” invader engaged in

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“guerrilla warfare” to undermine the sanctity and exclusiveness

of upper—class society (Osborne, Look 44, 67). She is his

 

upperclass “hostage” (Osborne, Look 43). Colonel Redfern,
Alison’s father, says “simply and without malice” that Jimmy

“has quite a turn of phrase” (Osborne, Look 67).1 In that

 

admission, Colonel Redfern asks us to believe what the Modernist
could not imagine. When Jimmy Porter shouts at the gates of
bourgeois culture, he has the discursive agency to do it.

Like Jim Dixon, Jimmy Porter attended a provincial
university. Alison says to her friend Helena, the bourgeois
friend who comes to stay and eventually takes her place, that “I
don’t think one ‘comes down’ from Jimmy’s university. According
to him, it’s not even red brick, but white tile” (Osborne, pggk
42). Yet, Osborne challenges the idea that place will are
necessarily associated with inferior intellects. Where Amis
opposes the post war democratization of education, Osborne shows
that a product of this newly expanded educational system can
have an intellectual prowess that frightens and silences the
play’s bourgeois characters. Jimmy Porter is the intellectual
center of Look Back in Anger, and the bourgeois characters of
the play “exist only in relation to him” (Hayman, Jgpp 17).
Leonard Bast and Jim Dixon may have had the husks of culture in
their grasps, but Jimmy Porter has a full command of the
bourgeois heritage. He uses the language of its tradition like
missiles to be hurled at Alison, the daughter of an upper-class
family that Jimmy associates with the illusion of an idyllic

“Edwardian twilight” (Osborne, Look 15). Martin Banham remarks

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that “Jimmy attacks Alison for what she is” (16). It would,
however, be more accurate to say that he attacks her for what
she represents, a dying class in the age of democracy whose
“authority is becoming less and less unquestionable” (Osborne,
ngk 63). Unlike Charles Ryder, Jimmy revels in this change:
“If you have no world of your own, it’s rather pleasant to
regret the passing of someone else’s” (Osborne, ngk 17).2 That
leaders of this “passing world” deprived certain people of their
full humanity motivates much of his aggression towards Alison,
and Jimmy attacks her in response to the way that she and her
class have trivialized and ignored the working—class people. He
says to Helena that Alison “thought that because Hugh’s mother
was a deprived and ignorant old woman, who said all the wrong
things in all the wrong places, she couldn’t be taken seriously”
(Osborne, ngk 73). In response, Jimmy derides everything that
is meaningful to Alison, and he cannot help but hurt her, which
he does physically by intentionally knocking the iron over so

that it burns her arm (Osborne, Look 32). It becomes apparent

 

that Jim does care for Alison, and through his sobering apology,
one of the play’s central conflicts emerges. Jimmy wants
everyone to “pretend that [they’re] human beings,” because they
have been denying each other’s humanity (Osborne, ngk 15).

Yet, Jimmy is culpable in preventing them from acting as humans.
As Frantz Fanon argues in The Wretched of the Earth, when given
the chance, the oppressed will become the oppressor (53). Jimmy
acts out his fantasy to be the oppressor when, for instance, he

refers to Alison as Lady Pusillanimous, “from the Latin

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pusillus, very little, and animus, the mind” (Osborne, Look 22).

 

Because Alison and her class have denied the “deprived”
something of their humanity, Jimmy cannot help but return the
gesture, which he does by belittling her intelligence and that
of her family.

As part of his assault, Jimmy also masters bourgeois
culture through his “white tile education” and turns it against
the play’s bourgeois characters. As in so many of his verbal
barrages indicate, the artistic tradition that the bourgeois
class sought to uphold is not inviolable. Jimmy says, for
instance, that he wrote a poem while at his market stall that is
irreverently “soaked in the theology of Dante, with a good slosh
of Eliot as well. It starts off ‘There are no dry cleaners in
Cambodia’” (Osborne, ngk 50). Jimmy further shows his
irreverence when the classical tradition that Eliot and Spender
so valued becomes a tropological vehicle through which he
discusses homosexuality. He says to Cliff that he almost envies
“Gide and the Greek Choir boys” (Osborne, ngk 35). Later, he
does something similar when he says of Alison’s friends that
“they’re a very intellectual set . . . They sit around
discussing sex as if it were the Art of Fugue” (Osborne, ngk
49). It would be easy to dismiss these statements as a
grotesque corruption of aesthetic discourse, but that would be
to ignore that Jimmy Porter has a mastery of that discourse that
no other character in the play can equal and that he alone
expresses an appreciation of art: “Oh, yes. There’s a Vaughan

Williams. Well, that’s something anyway” (Osborne, Look 17).

164

Jimmy Porter is not Jim Dixon with his “filthy Mozart” (Amis,
ngky 66). He uses the allusive language of art, but he does so
to discuss issues of embodiment. When he does, he demonstrates
that the higher domains of the culture are not sacred. Someone
who has a preoccupation with bodily matters such as sex can
still gain access to those domains and can use aesthetic
language knowingly. Through Jimmy Porter, Osborne interrogates
the division of rationality and embodiment and suggests that an
open identification with the latter does not imply a negation of
the former. Osborne takes the issue a step further by
challenging the idea that one can identify a person with ties to
the working—class as the embodied other. His continual
references to eating do not let us forget that Jimmy is embodied
(Faber 71). These bodily pre-occupations do not, however,
cancel the fact that he still has a formidable intellect which
he uses to its fullest in his attacks on Alison. With the
exception of the incident with the iron, Jimmy’s attacks are
purely verbal. When Helena “slaps him savagely,” he does not
return the blow (Osborne, L993 70). At this point, she becomes
identified with embodiment, not Jimmy, because he is “the type
who despises physical violence” even if he, like Helena, resorts

to it (Osborne, Look 57). Through this confrontation between

 

Jimmy and Helena, Osborne challenges a fundamental assumptions
of English literary Modernism. He refuses to identify a
bourgeois character exclusively with rationality. Jimmy disarms
Helena intellectually, and she responds physically. She does

not represent the bodily sublimation that writers like Woolf and

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Forster associate with the bourgeois women in their novels. By
undermining the class significations of rationality and
embodiment that were central to the exclusionary assumptions of
English literary Modernism, Osborne signals his unwillingness to
propagate its defining ideology.

Osborne ends his play by having Jimmy and Alison begin
playing their fantasy game of “bears and squirrels,” which they
do because it is “a way of escaping from everything . . . [of
becoming] little furry creatures with little furry brains. Full
of dumb, uncomplicated affection for each other” (Osborne, ngk
47). Simon Trussler argues that the “game is a brave attempt to
compensate for [their] failure by means of an extended metaphor”
(45). Compensation in this case implies evasion. They still
care for each other, but they can no longer confront the reality
of their lives because it is too painful. In retreating from
the conflicts of their relationship, they also retreat from the
very human class conflict that defines it. Through the death of
Jimmy and Alison’s baby, Osborne projects that this all
consuming conflict is destroying the future because it prevents
them from even pretending to be human and, thus, from producing
a human who is viable and healthy. Just as in the working—class
texts that followed Look Back in Anger, there is a unresolved
tension between Jimmy’s collusion in perpetuating the class
conflict through his desires for retribution, and the text’s
ultimate projection that these struggles are destructive.
Osborne rationalizes Jimmy’s behavior, but in the end, he cannot

concede that Jimmy’s behavior resolves anything. Osborne ends

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this play with a dystopian vision of unresolved conflict, one
which projects the indefinite continuation of destructive
behavior. However, like all dystopian visions, it implies a
utopian opposite. Larry L. Langford says convincingly that “the
anger of [Osborne’s] work is not only a rejection of things as
they are but an expression of bitter disappointment over how
they have never been” (241). If Osborne does not offer a
meaningful alternative to Jimmy’s treatment of Alison, and if he
does not show us how the class contradictions of capitalism can
be resolved, he at least presents us with an implied longing
that they necessarily should be. In this, he stands in contrast
to his the Modernist predecessors who actively sought to
preserve those contradictions. Thus, the Anti-modernist moment
of the 19503 began with John Osborne, not the Movement writers
who preceded him.

Saying that Look Back in Anger is Anti-Modernist is not the
same as saying that it is a working-class text, although one
could certainly make a compelling case that it belongs in that
tradition. Nonetheless, I am less comfortable than Ian Haywood
is in linking Osborne to the working—class tradition that
followed him (95). Some might object to this linking on the
basis of Osborne’s own alignment, a working—class mother but a
“middle—class” father who died when Osborne was 11 and whose
benevolent society arranged for Osborne to attend a low-end
public school (Osborne, “Cricket” 64—5; Better Class 130). Yet,
Osborne did live much of his young life in extreme poverty.

However, my reservations are based on Jimmy Porter himself and

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the somewhat ambiguous class alignment that Osborne assigns him
in the play. Simon Trussler says that “Jimmy Porter is self-
consciously proletarian and self consciously proud of it” (43).
Though Trussler’s assessment is generally accepted, it does
require qualification. Cliff says of Jimmy to Alison that “we
both come from working people” but adds that “some of his.
mother’s relatives are pretty posh, but he hates them as much as

he hates yours” (Osborne, Look 30). Osborne gives Jimmy a

 

strong experiential tie to the working-class, but he also
qualifies it with a reference to “posh relatives” in a way that
does not happen in the working-class texts that followed his.
Nonetheless, even if Jimmy has what Erik Olin Wright identifies
as a contradictory class affiliation, it does not change the
fact that Osborne is doing what so many before had tried to
assert was impossible. He links intellectuality to a person
with experiential working-class affiliations, but he does not do
it in a way that negates the formative significance of those
relations, as D. H. Lawrence had done with Paul and Gertrude
Morel in Sons and Lovers.

Osborne was only one spark of the “revolution” that began
in May of 1956. Colin Wilson was the other. It is not my
intention to perform a reading of Colin Wilson’s cumbersome tome
The Outsider, even though it was a “literary bombshell” when it
came out in the same month as Look Back in Anger (Feldman and
Gartenberg 202). The anonymous reviewer for The Listener called
it “the most remarkable book upon which the reviewer has ever

passed judgement” (767). Kingsley Amis even begrudgingly

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admitted that he felt “overwhelmed by the author’s erudition”
(Amis, “Legion” 830). However, as James Gindin notes in Postwar
British Fiction, by the appearance of Wilson’s second book
Religion and the Rebel in 1957, The Outsider had been dismissed
as “pseudo-philosophy” and nonsensical name dropping (222). A
reception study would yield important information about why
Wilson’s text was so quickly discredited after its initial
positive reception, and it may very well be that class based
prejudices were a factor. Nonetheless, the text itself is of
secondary importance in the phenomenon that Colin Wilson
created. As Kenneth Allsop says, the 19503 saw “the influx of
the new intelligentsia” (37). Wilson, the self-taught working-
class existentialist who grew up in Leicester, became its symbol
(Weigel 19). Through his initial popularity, he helped to
legitimate the idea of a working-class intellectual, and he did
so within the institutions of the mainstream culture in Britain.
Because mainstream critics such as Kingsley Amis, J. B.
Priestly, and A. J. Ayer were willing, at least initially, to
admit that Wilson had written a “serious [book] . . . that
deserved to be assessed on its own merits,” Wilson, whether he
intended to or not, mounted a challenge to the assumptions that
sustained the Modernist entrenchment against the working-class
encroachment (Ayer 75).3 He was being taken seriously by the
very institutions that the Modernists had sought to maintain as
their domains of privilege. Even if the same critics soon
rejected his book, Wilson validated the idea that someone with a

working-class background could produce a text of literary merit

169

and, along with Osborne helped to create a climate in which the
working—class became a suitable subject for art. That the
working-class was seen as such is further suggested by the
numerous films that were adapted from working-class novels of
the era by the bourgeois film makers of what Christopher Booker
calls the “new Oxford group” (100).4 Osborne and Wilson are
transitional figures who set the stage and opened the door for
the working-class writers and critics who followed them, but
they were not alone in changing the cultural climate of this
decade, and much of the credit for sustaining the intellectual
legitimation of the working-class needs to go to the working-
class academics Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams.

Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957) challenges
the Modernist tendency to link mass culture with working—class
sensibilities. He argues that, far from being responsible for
the abuses of mass culture, the working-class is in “some ways
more open to the worst effects of the popularizers’ assault”
because working—class people “are ground between the millstones
of technocracy and democracy; society gives them an almost
limitless freedom of the sensations, but makes few demands on
them--the use of their hands and of a fraction of their brains
for forty hours a week” (Hoggart 174, 249). Where Q. D. Leavis
in particular saw the working-class as the primary threat to
traditional standards, Hoggart remarks that the tradition of the
working-class is eroding as well, but he concludes that its
tradition has yet to be obliterated: “‘older’ attitudes exist

not only in the middle-aged or elderly; they form a background

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to much in the lives of younger people. What I am questioning
throughout is how long they will continue to be as powerful as
they are now, and in what ways they are being altered” (Hoggart
23). In the same way that Eliot and Leavis clamor for the
defense of their tradition, Hoggart calls for the preservation
of his. Yet, many of his assertions are objectionable because
they reinforce Modernist values. His total dismissal of popular
culture is at best facile. Although he admits that it holds a
great appeal to the working-class, he gives little account of
the way that it impacts working-class life except to says that
mass entertainments “kill [taste] at the nerve, and yet so
bemuse and persuade their audience that the audience is almost
entirely unable to look up and say, ‘But in fact this cake is
made of sawdust’” (Hoggart 197-98). He romanticizes and
fetishizes an idyllic working—class past when he says that
working class people live “intuitively, habitually, verbally,
drawing on myth, aphorism, and ritual,” but he provides no real
evidence except his own assurance that he is writing from the
“inside” (Hoggart 17, 33). However, he also reinforces the
Modernist idea that the working-class is the most debased in
British capitalism, even if he is unwilling to believe that
working-class sensibilities are “so badly affected” as is
commonly asserted by the defenders of the bourgeois tradition
(Hoggart 33). The Modernist notion of a progressive social
entropy survives in his study, but Hoggart, like the Modernists,
can provide no real evidence that this decay is actually

occurring except to say that he believes it to be so.

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Nonetheless, even if he affirms this key Modernist assumption on
one level, Hoggart still refuses to take the Modernist stance of
making the working-class the scape-goat for this entropy. He
fetishizes the working-class past, but he also strives to give
the working-class what Eliot and the Leavises sought to deny it,
a legitimate tradition which he presents as an appropriate
subject for scholarly inquiry. It more than coincidental that
just after The Uses of Literacy came that “books like Saturday
Night and Sunday Morning . . . began finding their way onto
station bookstalls” (Gray 216).

Above, I discuss how Reading and Criticism portrays Raymond
Williams’s early investment in Leavisism. I also suggest that
this early study is atypical of Williams’s later work. Stuart
Hall argues that, for Williams, Culture and Society (1958) is an
“engagement with [his] Leavisite inheritance” in which he is
“attempting to redress the appropriation of the long line of
thought about ‘culture’ to reactionary positions (Hall 58).
Williams says of Leavis, for instance, that his error was in
making Culture “into an entity, a positive body of achievements
and habits, precisely to express a mode of living superior to
that being brought by the ‘progress of civilization'” (Williams,
Culture 254). Eliot and Leavis fetishize culture by turning it
into a “fragmentary” abstraction to be protected by a governing
elite, and they do so because they equate democratic progress
with social decay and aesthetic corruption (Williams, Culture
234). Where Williams previously defended that minority, he now

calls it a “damaging formulation” because it allows the elite to

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construct a vision of culture entirely in its own image
(Williams, Culture 255). For Williams, culture is not the
domain of an elite, but rather “a whole way of life,” and he
adds that “the whole system must be considered and judged as a
whole” (Williams, Culture 242).5 Thus, in Williams’s later
thinking, culture is a site of conflict between competing
bourgeois and working-class factions which, because they exist
only relation to one another, must be considered as equal in the
history of the current epoch.

He elaborates on this claim in the conclusion to Culture
and Society, where he says that “in our culture as a whole,
there is both a constant interaction between [the factions]

and an area which can properly be described as common to or
underlying both” (Williams, Culture 327). Williams does not
develop this idea of a common area, and so it is difficult to
see what he means by it. Though he later regretted that he said
30, Terry Eagleton found it a disturbing notion, and in
Criticism and Ideology, he accuses Williams of advocating a
“populism and reformism” because of it (Criticism 34). I am not
in a position to defend the vagueness of Williams’s language on
this point. However, by giving the working-class equal status
in his reformulation of culture, he is, in fact, opposing the
exclusionary entrenchment that he once advocated. If there is a
“populism” in Williams's thinking, it is a refreshing response
to the elitism of others. Where he once expressed a fear of
democracy, he argues, in The Long Revolution (1961), that

western culture since the industrial revolution can only be

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understood in terms of a progressive struggle for it in all
levels of existence (121). To understand that culture, we need
to give equal consideration to the role of the working—class in
its defining struggle. At the end of the 19503, Williams and
Hoggart gave the working—class a scholarly legitimacy that the
Modernists sought to deny it. They helped to establish an
academic tradition of Cultural Studies. What was once the
defense of a fragmentary abstraction could then become the
analysis of a “whole way of life,” with a full consideration of
the working-class. Ultimately, Williams and Hoggart were part
of a broader cultural revolution that cracked the foundations on
which the Modernist ideological barriers were constructed.
Through their scholarly redemption of the working—class, they
facilitated a shift in the mood of the mainstream academic
culture. The response has been limited, and we still have much
work to do in making people understand the necessity of studying
working-class culture. Yet, it is essential to acknowledge
that, because of these legitimating moments in the 19503,
working-class writers and scholars could study their own history
and write fiction about themselves. Most important, they could
invest their working-class subjects with a complex
intellectuality that the Modernists, through their fear, had

sought to deny them.

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CHAPTER SIX: PARTY POLITICS AND COLLUSIVE RESISTANCE

Most social historians regard the passage of the Education
Acts of 1870 as the most important legislative development for
the British working—class prior to the enactment of those laws
that established the welfare state in the aftermath of World War
II. Eric Hopkins remarks that these Education Acts were
responsible for creating a working-class which was ninety—seven
percent literate by the turn of the century (130). Prior to
1870, the working-class had literacy rates that were, at best,
thirty-five to forty percent (Klaus 9-10).1 The purpose of
these Acts and the subsequent legislation which made elementary
education free for all was to “civilize” and pacify the masses
by indoctrinating them with values that would ensure the
continuation of a peaceable state. Nonetheless, these
legislative measures also had the consequence of creating a
working—class that even at its most disadvantaged levels was
capable of voicing in its cares and concerns in the established
forms of the dominant class. The authors of Rewriting English
remark that “literacy is a weapon . . . , a form of cultural
power, gained in struggle and, in the 18603 and 18703, conceded
as much as given” (37). As a result of this educational
expansion, a modern expressive working-class came into existence
in Great Britain, and with it came the working-class’s wide
scale adoption and adaptation of bourgeois literary forms.

The British working-class appears to have a literary

tradition that goes back much farther than the 18703. Stephen

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Duck, the eighteenth-century poet who spent most of his life as
a farmhand, wrote a book of verse (circa 1730) called Egg
Thresher’s Labour (Klaus 11). H. Gustav Klaus suggests that any
history of working-class writing in Britain should begin here
because Duck was one of the first authors to present in his
poetry “an intuitive recognition that work is a theme worthy of
literary treatment” (11). Duck does write about the rigors of
the rural laborer, and much of his poetry deals directly with
labor:

But when the scorching Sun is mounted high,

And no kind Barns with friendly Shade are nigh;

Our weary Scythes entangle in the Grass,

While Streams of Sweat run trickling down apace (Rpt. in

Klaus 11).
However, whether or not Duck’s rural laborer can be called
working-class in the way that Marxism defines it is debatable.
E. P. Thompson argues that the making of the English working-
class as a class with political agency was a process that took
place in the period from 1790 to 1831, following the mass
movement of people like Stephen Duck from farms to the urban
factories (887). Ian Haywood suggests that the history of
working-class literature began after 1832, but dating this
inception is complicated because many early forms of working—
class artistic expression are difficult to trace (1). For
instance, Raymond Williams argues that autobiography and the
ballad were important aspects of working-class life before the
adoption of the novel sometime in the nineteenth-century

(“Ragged-Arsed” 240-41). We also should not forget the

tradition of oral story telling, which has mostly been lost to

176

modern scholarship.

By most accounts, the advent of working—class fiction is a
nineteenth-century phenomenon. The first appearance of novels
by working-class authors came in the late 18403 and early 18503,
during the waning days of the Chartist movement, which got its
start in 1839. Martha Vicinus notes that most Chartist fiction
was written after 1848 as supporting propaganda for the People’s
Charter, which called for universal suffrage and equal
legislative representation for all regardless of income or
property (7). However, the Chartist novels were historically
isolated, and Chartist fiction had run its course by the mid
18503. In addition, Ronald Paul and Ian Haywood both
acknowledge that most Chartist fiction was written by people who
were not working-class (Paul 14). Haywood says that, of the
Chartist novelists, “Thomas Cooper and Thomas Wheeler Martin can
be singled out for our attention here, as they both came from
[financially] humble backgrounds” (4). For working—class
literature, there is a twenty year gap in the historical record
that follows. Thus, one can reasonably argue that the
substantive history of the British working-class fiction began
sometime after the 1870s--after the working-class had been
introduced to narrative fiction on a broad scale through the
newly implemented system of popular education (Paul 19; Klaus
86).

My point here is not to write a comprehensive history of
the working-class literature. I do, however, want to make the

observation that the history of British working-class writing

177

from 1870 to 1940 was dominated by works that were blatantly
proletarian-~written by working-class authors but ultimately
committed to a socialist agenda. With the rediscovery of
authors like James C. Welsh and Ethel Carnie Holdswoth, there is
increasing evidence that the earlier decades of the century were
prolific ones for proletarian writing, but most critics still
regard the 19303 as the most productive decade. Even if this is
not necessarily the case, it is reasonable to assert that
proletarian literature had a more diverse readership in the
19303 than in any prior decade, if only because a younger
generation of bourgeois literati, like John Lehmann, helped to
popularize it. During this decade, many left-wing organizations
also sponsored working-class writers in their efforts to
cultivate a tradition of proletarian literature. By doing so,
they sought both to agitate the masses and to subvert the
ideologies of bourgeois art. Because of the diversity of these
organizations, a socialist agenda can manifest itself in many
forms. Nonetheless, very likely because of their own
organizational affiliations, some Marxist critics have been
reluctant to locate certain authors in a socialist context.
Without exception, the few critics who have actually
written on Walter Greenwood have declined to read his work as
Marxist writing. Carole Snee argues most vehemently against
such a reading, and she says that, in contrast to the
proletarian novelists Lewis Jones and Walter Brierley,
“Greenwood may have been a working class novelist writing about

working class life, but he never challenges the form of the

178

bourgeois novel, nor its underlying ideology” (Snee 171). Yet,
Greenwood was an active member of the Independent Labor Party at
the time that he was writing Love on the Dole (1933), his first
novel (Greenwood, There Was 175). As late as 1938, five years
after the unprecedented success of the novel’s debut, Greenwood
felt comfortable identifying himself as a Marxist. He says in
an autobiographical sketch included in The Cleft Stick (1938)
that “a study of Marxian economics satisfactorily explained the
true cause of my predicament” (Greenwood, “Old School” 211).
Much socialist writing of the period is predictably formulaic,
like Gore Graham’s short story “Pigeon Bill” with its obligatory
awakening of revolutionary consciousness at the end. However,
not all proletarian novels of the 19303 are so blatantly
programmatic, but it does not follow that they are any less
committed. Although it shares their agenda, Greenwood’s Love on
the Dole stands out from the other proletarian novels of the
thirties for its subtlety and for the sophisticated way in which
it explores how economic depression and oppressive labor
practices impact the relations of its working-class characters.
Harry Hardcastle, the main character of Love on the Dole,
is a young man who initially has a job in a pawnshop, but he
longs for the opportunity to do industrial work because he
associates it with adult masculinity. He begs his parents to
let him sign on at Marlowe’s, which he sees as a “great
engineering works where an army of men are employed” (Greenwood,

Love 19). Harry fails to realize that this army of men is

 

actually an army of boys who have been recruited by the company

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to work as apprentice engineers--in reality lathe and drill
operators. The management wants an under-aged work force so it
does not have to pay its employees a full adult wage. As
happens to every other apprentice in the factory, the company
terminates Harry’s employment when he finishes his
apprenticeship. He then faces a long period of bitter poverty
when he is plagued by a persistent feeling that he is deviant,
even though his unemployment is not his fault. The narrator
says of Harry that “he trudged homewards staring, a strangulated.
sensation in his throat, a feeling in his heart that he has
committed some awful crime in which he is sure to be found out”
(Greenwood, Lgyg 159). He was assigned a place in the labor
process. Having been pushed out of it, he wants desperately to
return to it. Thus, Greenwood does a masterful job of
demonstrating the way in which capitalist ideology makes

working—class people long for their own exploitation.

\\

Sally Hardcastle, like many heroines of these novels, is a
gorgeous creature whose native beauty her shabbiness could not
hide. . . . A face and form such as any society dame would have

given three—quarters of her fortune to possess” (Greenwood, Lgyg
15). Gore Graham opposes the ideological associations of
grotesque embodiment by showing that Pigeon Bill has an
intellect and innate desire for beauty. Greenwood disassociates
this female character from the grotesque and, thus, challenges
assumptions that reserve bodily perfection to bourgeois women,
as Woolf does with Mrs. Ramsay. He also demonstrates that

Sally’s embodiment is a cultural manifestation, a product of the

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way in which the powerful men in her life fetishize her as an
object to be desired. Many men pursue Sally, including Ned
Narkey, an imposing thug, and Sam Grundy, the local bookmaker.
She rejects their advances in favor of Larry Meath, who is a
committed socialist and one of the few adult workers at
Marlowe’s. Sally wants to get married, but Larry does not want
to marry because he is afraid that he will lose his job like
virtually everyone else in Hanky Park. He says to Sally, “You
misunderstand me. It isn’t this marriage business that matters.
It’s this damned poverty. My wages” (Greenwood, Lgyg
140). Greenwood demonstrates that unemployment and the
organization of labor under capitalism pervert human desire and
prevent people from engaging in social relations as they would
wish. They are first and foremost married to their
circumstances. Harry says of having a job that “everything
depended on it” (Greenwood, Lgyg 158). Unfortunately for Sally,
Larry is killed by a policeman during a demonstration, and so
their marriage never occurs. In an act of resignation, Sally
finally gives in to the advances of Sam Grundy and becomes his
mistress. It is through him that she finally arranges jobs for
her brother and father on the local buses. Despite all that
these characters have gone through, their situations at the end
of Greenwood’s novel are largely what they were at the
beginning. Harry and his father are employed in dead end jobs,
and Sally returns to her place as an exploited woman, and her
exploitation is more severe than it ever was when she was a

millhand. Even though Greenwood associates her with sexual

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promiscuity at the novel’s close, he indicates that the
distribution of power and wealth force her into this role as the
embodied other.

To underscore the circularity of the story, Greenwood ends

the narrative exactly as it began. The beginning reads: “5:30

a.m. A drizzle was falling . . . At No. 17, Mrs. Hardcastle, an
old woman of forty, came downstairs . . .” (Geenwood, Love 13).
And the end: “5:30 a.m. A drizzle was falling . . . In Mrs.

II

Dorbell’s house, Helen came down stairs (Greenwood, Lgyg
255—56). For Carole Snee and Ronald Paul, a major failing of
Love on the Dole is that it represents the situation of the
working-class as static by virtue of its very form, and it is
for this reason that Snee associates this text with bourgeois
values (Paul 31; Snee 171). However, embedded in Love on the
Dole’s circularity is a sense of continuance. Greenwood
suggests that the circumstances of Helen’s new born child will
be similar to that which befell Mrs. Hardcastle’s children, and
he asks us to consider the responsibility that Larry Meath
shoulders for not working to disrupt this cycle when he has the
chance.

In her analysis of Love on the Dole, Pamela Fox contends
that Larry Meath emerges as the “true” hero of the text because
the shame that he feels over his working-class alignment
motivates him to adopt “middle-class” values as a type of revolt
against his subjectivity (134). She asserts that Larry Meath’s

“attention to ideological domination-~backed up by a seemingly

contradictory, but distinctly middle—class code of

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behavior—~emerges as the most authentic model of class
consciousness in the novel” (Fox 83). Although there is value
in Fox’s observation that working-class revolt can be both
collusive and resistant, she does not acknowledge that Larry
Meath is a failure as a revolutionary. Therefore, she does not
allow for the possibility that the novel is critical of Larry as
a leftist for adopting “middle—class” idioms that prevent him
from communicating his message of social change to other members
of the working-class. If anything, Greenwood indicates that
Larry’s “middle-class” values weaken his radicalism. The novel
offers Larry’s radicalism as the only viable means for
substantive social change. However, when in a moment of
revolutionary fervor the working-class is about to confront the
police, Larry, as a leader of the movement, attempts to impose
an order on his fellow protesters that will not threaten the
military apparatus of the bourgeois state (Greenwood, prg 202).
The revolt fails, and Larry is murdered by the superstructural
apparatus that he was unwilling to oppose. Far from endorsing
his class shame and the subsequent adoption of a “middle-class
code of behavior” as a viable or “authentic” mode of resistance,
Love on the Dole concludes that Larry’s shame, which is not
shared and seldom understood by the other working—class
characters, prevents him from helping the working—class to
resist the domination of the bourgeois state. If this novel
fails to show the successful culmination of a revolutionary
moment, it also shows us why a professed revolutionary has

failed. It is unusual for a socialist novel to conclude with an

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image of stagnation. However, in emphasizing Larry Meath’s
collusion in perpetuating the working-class exploitation, Lgyg
on the Dole projects a formula for revolutionary action. Its
ultimate utopian longing-—articulated through circumstance
rather than dogma-~for a revolutionary who rejects the
capitalist system as a whole and who will devote himself
absolutely to the concrete organization of the working-class
revolution is one that it shares with other prewar texts by
working—class socialists.

Unlike Greenwood, many of his contemporary proletarian
writers were active in the Communist Party. Lewis Jones, a
Welsh miner, wrote two novels, Cwmardy (1937) and We Live
(1939), which are about life in the Rhonnda Valley of Wales.
These novels trace the political development of Len Roberts, a
miner in the Welsh town of Cwmardy. Cwmardy shows the
development of class-consciousness in Len as he gains the
understanding that the only way for the miners to succeed in
their endeavors against the mine’s owners is through unified
action. In We Live Jones establishes that this action can only
be successful with the organization of what the novel
cryptically calls “The Party.” As Len says to his wife Mary,
the daughter of the reformist union leader Ezra Jones, “We must
not grieve our condition, but fight against it. That is the
way, and that is what the party is for. Forgive me, comrade,
for being so childish” (Jones 227). In this text, all human
relations are subsumed by party relations. Mary is no longer

Len’s wife. She is a comrade, and her commitment to the

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development of the party takes precedence over her personal
relationship with Len.2 Whatever individual desires the
characters have are ultimately rendered meaningless by the
novel’s overriding utopian longing for the establishment of a
party stocked with revolutionaries of unwavering commitment.
Though Jones’s demand is more blatant and the programmatic
language more obvious, this longing is the same that Greenwood
projects through his text. I want to suggest that this utopian
longing is the defining aspect of proletarian fiction, and the
concluding articulation of this longing distinguishes
proletarian from other forms of working-class writing.

If literary history is any indication, this longing for
party organization did not resonate widely after the 19303. A
significant development in the history of proletarian literature
was the apparent cessation of writing by its authors in the
period from 1940 to the mid 19503.3 Because of the Depression,
there was interest during 19303 in the circumstances of working-
class people. As I indicate in my analysis of the decade’s
bourgeois authors, many had embraced the working-class cause in
a way that they had not done before and would not do again until
the end of the fifties, when a group of film makers popularized
the working-class literature of that decade. Love on the Dole
did achieve a popular success that is noteworthy. It was turned
into a play in 1934 and staged at London’s famous Garrick
Theatre, where it had a run of 391 performances. Ray Speakman
notes that more than one million people saw the play by the end

of 1935 (Speakman 10). Yet, Love on the Dole is an aberration,

185

both in terms of its subtlety and its popularity. In the
history of proletarian writing, its success and popularity are
only exceeded by Robert Tressel’s The Ragged Trousered
Philanthropist (1914/1955).

Alan Sillitoe argues that “the whole proletarian movement
in literature before the war or between the wars really
failed—-with the possible exception of Walter Greenwood’s” novel
(Halperin 178). Sillitoe’s language is too harsh, but if we
understand failure in terms of revolutionary impact, we would
have to concede that there is some validity to his point. It is
easy for Marxist critics who need the sustaining myth of a
tradition to place undue significance on the socialist
literature of the 19303. The proletarian writing of the decade
is important for its revolutionary content and documentary
evidence, and I remind my reader that I am a Marxist. I share
the revolutionary desires that many of these texts articulate,
but it is dishonest to overstate the historical importance of
this literature by according it a greater role in society than
it actually held. At most, it existed as a much less
conspicuous alternative to the Modernist tradition that I
discussed at length earlier. For three years at the end of the
19303, the bourgeois and proletarian traditions did come
together in John Lehmann’s New Writin , but the result of the
bourgeois volte-face was the severing of those ties and the
shutting off of one of the few outlets that proletarian writers
had for reaching the larger audience of people who were not

already committed to socialism. While I do not question the

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revolutionary potential of proletarian literature, I do question
its actual revolutionary achievement in the face of the
bourgeois reaction that it prompted. It did little to break
through the barriers that were raised by the bourgeois cultural
elites who felt themselves to be under siege and who defended
themselves successfully against working-class encroachment.

Only Lawrence got through the barricade, and that is because he
acquiesced to the devaluation of his culture and the erasure of
his working-class experience. He was never part of the
socialist tradition that dominated working-class writing. I
want to suggest that, when Virginia Woolf gave her 1940 address
to the W. E. A. declaring the failure of working—class
literature and thirties radicalism, she was ultimately holding a
sort of victory celebration in the enemy camp.

The reasons for the stagnation of proletarian literature in
the forties are multiple and complex. One could attribute it to
end of the depression, when improving conditions likely restored
an apathy about the conditions of the working—class among those
who could actually afford to buy books.4 The decline in
literary production may be attributable to a working-class pre—
occupation with fighting World War II. It is conceivable that
many would-be proletarian novelists were too busy fighting the
fascist powers of Germany, Japan, and Italy to do much writing.
However, socialism also faced several crises as the decade
closed. The 1939 Hitler-Stalin Pact and the Soviet purges drove
many away from their affiliations with the left. It seems more

than coincidental that the proletarian movement in literature

187

came to a virtual halt when it was abandoned by John Lehmann and
the Auden Group converts, who like Spender returned to
comfortable places in the bourgeois establishment. After this
re-alignment of literary politics, many proletarian writers had
difficulty getting publishers to accept their work. As the most
successful, Greenwood’s failure is also the most dramatic. He
continued to write plays and novels after the success of Love on
the Dole, but with the exception of His Worship the Mayor
(1936), his later works reflect no trace of the commitment that
he so skillfully communicates in his first novel.5 After 1940,
he mostly wrote plays for theaters that catered to audiences on
the sea-side. The English proletarian novelist Harold Heslop
was immensely popular in the Soviet Union during 19303 and had a
lesser but still significant domestic following, although some
of his novels were never even published in Britain (Croft 22).
Heslop worked for the Soviet travel office Intourist as his
domestic publishing began to wane. Andy Croft notes that, like
most proletarian novelists of the thirties, Heslop could not
find a British publisher who was willing to accept his work
after 1940 (Croft 36). Most of his writing went unpublished,
and The Earth Beneath (1946), the one novel that he did publish,
went largely unnoticed.

It is also readily apparent that this period of stagnation
was followed by the emergence of a different kind of working—
class writing near the end of the 19503. Ingrid von Rosenberg
usefully suggests that working—class novels of the “19503 and

early 19603 fall easily into two groups: The smaller group of

188

political or socialist novels on the one hand and the greater
majority of . . . descriptive working-class on the other”
(“Militancy” 149). In the mid-19503, shortly after they
published the unexpurgated edition of The Ragged Trousered
Philanthropists in 1955, which had been in print in an
expurgated form since 1914, the British Marxist publisher
Lawrence and Wishart also published a series of novels by
communist writers. It is unclear whether this was a conscious
effort to revive the proletarian fiction of the thirties or a
move to capitalize on the success of The Ragged Trousered
Philanthropists, which Lawrence and Wishart keeps in print in a
hardcover edition to this day. These socialist novels, and in
particular Len Doherty’s The Man Beneath (1957), are unlike
their predecessors from the thirties because they make a
conscious attempt not to announce themselves as socialist
propaganda.

Lewis Jones’s We Live is an explicit celebration of the
revolutionary importance of “the party,” but that same “party”
has an understated role and is virtually invisible in Len
Doherty’s novel. The protagonist of this novel is Jim Harris, a
miner from the village of Thornton who is trapped beneath a
collapse in the mine where he works. After introducing this
fact, the novel then becomes one long flashback where Jim’s life
literally passes before us. We learn, for instance, that he,
like Jones’s Len Roberts, is a remarkable scholar who “for the
third time running had won a prize for being head of his class”

(Doherty 30). His education is cut short by the death of his

189

father, and at the age of fourteen, he has to enter the mine to
help support his family (Doherty 59). Because of these
remarkable intellectual attributes, he quickly becomes a leader
in the Miners’ Union and distinguishes himself as a tenacious
fighter throughout his career. He consistently refuses to
acquiesce to the Mine’s director when he feels that management
is making demands that will endanger the safety of his fellow
workers. Harris says that his “job is to protect them lads”
(Doherty 18). He resists letting the miners work in a dangerous
section until the government, which owns the mine after
nationalization, agrees to have it drained. Harris maintains
his position despite the opposition of Sid Arlott, another union
official who is a career bureaucrat and who always adopts a
conciliatory stance toward the management. Much of Doherty’s
novel dramatizes the battles that Harris and Arlott wage as they
attempt to take control of the Miners’ Union.

Arlott and his toady Joe Burke are eventually removed from
the organizing committee of the union because they refuse to
support striking miners. The miners are demanding that
“negotiations were to begin before they returned to work,” but
“for Arlott it was too revolutionary” (Doherty 108). In
contrast, Harris supports their efforts unconditionally.
However, in spite of his devotion to the cause of his fellow
workers, he does not affiliate himself with an outside political
organization. He tells Johnny Morgan, his friend and young
protégée, “they pestered me to join the Labour Party for years.

Didn’t want to, and never will. . . . We’ve our jobs to do

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without political finagling” (Doherty 129). Harris believes
that he can act as an independent agent, and he views himself as
the only person who can protect the workers. He says to Arlott
at one point, “I favour nobody and I’m scared of nobody. Those
blokes [the miners] need me and they know it” (Doherty 19). By
assuring the miners that he alone can protect them, he creates a
situation where he cannot even protect himself. His entrapment
in the collapse becomes a metaphor for the way in which his
reformist actions have entrapped him and his fellow workers
politically. The miners are employees who must always protect
themselves against the abuses of the state. When Davy Walker, a
young miner, is killed in the collapse, this becomes Doherty’s
way of showing the futility of Harris’s reformism and indicating
that it is destroying the future. The only indication that the
Communist party represents the correct path is that Johnny
Morgan, who is likely to take over for Harris, has joined it.
Unlike Harris, he is on the surface helping Harris’s wife get
through the crisis (Doherty 129). However, there are no party
rallies, and Communist dogma is absent. Where the proletarian
novels of the thirties were openly critical of reformist
politics, Doherty embeds his criticism of Harris’s reformism in
the tropological language of The Man Beneath.

Instead of having the mass demonstrations, Doherty
emphasizes the need for working—class unity by having Joe Burke,
Arlott’s toady, contribute the greatest effort in extracting
Harris from the collapse. Because of this unified working—class

action, Harris lives, and the workers as a class become his

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saviors. The Man Beneath marks a change of the proletarian
form. It mutes its revolutionary language in a cold war
environment that would have made such language unpopular.
Nonetheless, it still reflects a commitment to the socialist
ideals of mass organization and party politics, and it
articulates the defining utopian longing of socialist fiction.
It projects that all social contradictions are resolvable
through a commitment to a socialist organization. This longing
entails the devaluation of the reformist cares and concerns that
inhibit the development of the party. In its own way, the
proletarian novel projects the necessary negation of working—
class identity because it regards that identity as the flawed
product of capitalist social relations.

Ingrid von Rosenberg says that, with the exception of Egg
Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Lawrence and Wishart’s
proletarian novels of the 19503 only sold between 1100 and 1800
copies (“Militancy” 164-65). In contrast, Alan Sillitoe’s
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) won a Golden Pan Award
in 1964 for having sold one million copies (Gerard 4). The
first edition of John Briane’s Room at the Top (1957) sold
thirty—five thousand copies in the first year and earned fifteen
thousand pounds for the author (Allsop 23, 86). The Penguin
paperback edition that was released to coincide with the debut
of Jack Clayton’s filmic adaptation of Room at the Top sold
three hundred thousand copies and was one of Penguin’s leading
sellers for the next twenty-five years (Marwick, “Film and

Novel” 254). Unlike their proletarian predecessors, both of

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these novels were of immediate, though limited, interest to
literary scholars in both America and Britain. It is
conceivable that this was due to the legitimating influence of
Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart, who made the study of such
work acceptable. The Man Beneath was not the last example of
proletarian writing, but it and all other works like it were
overshadowed by a type of working—class writing that was almost
non—existent before the mid-century period of stagnation. The
majority of novels and plays that emerged in the period after
Look Back in Anger, when working-class writing had a newly
attained cultural legitimacy, do not reflect a commitment to a
socialist agenda of one form or another. Like its proletarian
counterpart, the working—class literary tradition that began in
the fifties still challenges Modernist assumptions about the
nature of working-class subjectivity, but it also represents a
shift in working-class literary politics. For the first time in
the history of working—class literature, the majority of texts
being produced were free of the mediating demands of left-wing
propaganda. The dominant working-class literature of the post-
war movement does not share proletarian writing’s defining
utopian longing for the establishment of party or mass
organizations. Proletarian writing absolutely negates collusive
behavior through a concluding longing for commitment. However,
as I will demonstrate in my analyses of Room at the Top and
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, the two most successful and
influential working-class novels of the 19503, working-class

writing concludes with an unresolved tension between the

193

collusive desires of the characters and the resistant utopian
longings that the texts project.

Like Osborne’s Jimmy Porter, Joe Lampton, the protagonist
of John Braine’s Room at the Top is the intellectual center of
the work, and the bourgeois characters who exist in the text do
so only in relation to him. Also like Jimmy Porter, he declares
war on the rich because “the rich [are his] enemies” (Braine
75). We meet Jimmy Porter in the aftermath of his invasion,
when he has already taken his hostage, but Braine provides a
narrative account of just such an invasion as it progresses to
the hostage taking stage. Joe comes from a working-class family
in the town of Dufton, Yorkshire. He longs to escape from what
he sees as the limitation of his working-class life, and Dufton
for Joe becomes a symbol of death, partly because his parents
were killed by Dufton’s only bomb during the war. He says that
“Dufton was Dead, Dead, Dead” and adds later that “no dreams
were possible in Dufton, where the snow seemed to turn black
before it hit the ground” (Braine 34). These barren images are
reminiscent of those that Evelyn Waugh’s uses to describe life
in the modern age of bureaucratic planning. For Joe, Dufton
represents the past, where the houses only recently acquired
bathrooms because, when they were built, “it wasn’t considered
that the working—classes needed baths” (Braine 14). Where Waugh
presents the past as idyllic, Joe associates it with poverty,
deprivation, and stagnation. He regards Dufton’s inhabitants as
figuratively dead because they have seemingly resigned

themselves to the limitations of what life there can offer. Joe

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and his boyhood friend Charles call these people Zombies,
because they cannot progress beyond the roles that have been
assigned to them (Braine 29). They have been denied something
of their humanity by the forces that control their lives and
make them live in an “atmosphere of poverty” (Braine 34). For
Joe, who works as a municipal clerk, Dufton can only offer
“security and servitude” (24). Fearful that he will become a
Zombie and ashamed to be associated with the filth that Dufton
and its working-class people represent, Joe leaves for Warley,
another town in Yorkshire. There, he takes a position as an
accounts clerks in the city’s town hall.

Joe’s move to Warley is a politically significant act of
resistance and, ultimately, an attempt to reclaim something of
his humanity by distancing himself from the limitations that he
associates with his own past. Joe is “moving into a different
world” where, as Charles tells him, “there’ll be no more
Zombies” (Braine, 11, 17). His gesture is, however, both
collusive and resistant. Above, I suggest that Pamela Fox’s
analysis of Love on the Dole is flawed because she does not read
it as a socialist text and does not see the text as critical of
Larry Meath’s failure as a socialist organizer. Nonetheless,
her argument that Larry’s adoption of middle-class attitudes is
a form of resistance is valuable because she suggests that an
action can have both collusive and resistant properties. She
remarks that “collusive strains of these narratives are not a
denial of or regression from working-class experience but

another legitimate part of it” (Fox 61). This is an observation

195

that one could apply to Osborne’s Jimmy Porter. Jimmy resents
that he has been denied a world of his own and that working-
class peOple have been deprived of their humanity, but by
turning the tables on Alison, he becomes the oppressor, denying
her humanity in the process of asserting his own. Thus, he
colludes in propagating the class conflicts whose effects he
resists when they impact him. Joe Lampton is in a similar
situation because, by removing himself from Dufton, he refuses
to accept his assigned role, but he also reinforces the negative
values that capitalist ideology assigns to working-class
identity and working-class culture.

Joe, for instance, gives an account of a grocery manager at
the top of Oak Crescent in Dufton who berates his working-class
customers about their lack of cleanliness by saying “a person
doesn’t have to be rich to be clean” (Braine 14). Thus, Joe
distances himself from this image of working-class bodies by
adorning his body with clothes that are expensive and well made
(Braine 12). He sublimates his body because he associates the
working-class with the filth, chaos, and the grotesque.
Virtually every description of Warley emphasizes that it and its
people are “clean,” but when he describes the bathroom of his
aunt’s home in Dufton, he remarks that “on the window-sill were
a dingy mess of toothbrushes, used razor—blades, face—cloths,
and no less than three cups with broken handles which were
supposed to be used as shaving mugs” (Braine 14). Yet, by
showing that Joe sublimates his body and by emphasizing his

desire for cleanliness, Braine invites the reader to see what

196

Joe himself cannot; the association between the working-class
and grotesque embodiment is not a necessary one. Even though
Joe is the narrator of his own tale, he does not see the
implications of his actions or the significance of his own
observations. For instance, noting that the wealthy Alice
Aisgill has a “speck of decay on one of her upper incisors”
gives him a sense of connection with her, but it does nothing to
disrupt his sense of inferiority about his own teeth in relation
to those of other rich people (Braine 78). He refuses to smile
with an open mouth for fear that he will betray himself as
working-class because his are not the perfectly white and
straight teeth of Susan Brown or Jack Wales (Braine 41, 78). He
cannot move beyond the image of himself as a “swineherd” among
royalty (Braine 58). Even if his bodily sublimation signals an
act of resistance through his refusal to accept the stigma of
those associations, Joe never really questions the bourgeois
ideology that equates working-class people with unsublimated
embodiment. If Joe cannot see the limits of the ideology that
informs much of his thinking, it does not follow that the reader
should be blind to them as well. Through his placement of
contradictory imagery, Braine puts his reader in a position to
do so, and that his reader might break free of bourgeois
associations and patterns of behavior is one of the utopian
longings that Braine articulates in this novel’s conclusion.

The Marxist critic Ronald Paul dismisses Room at the Top
because he argues that it merely valorizes “the mentality of

crass materialism and consumerism” (Paul 57). Joe is the

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product of a materialist culture, and Braine does not allow us
to forget that. He does not trivialize the impact of
consumerist and materialist ideologies on his main character,
but it does not necessarily follow that he endorses those
ideologies. Like Jimmy Porter, Joe Lampton vacillates between
wanting meaningful and supportive relationships and emulating
capitalist mechanisms of dehumanization. Stuart Laing remarks
that there is a “‘human’ quality” in the relationship between
Joe and Alice Aisgill that Joe does not share with the other
inhabitants of Warley (175). At first, Joe finds a “shabby
kinship” with Alice (Braine 78). She takes the place of
Charles, his friend from Dufton. As much as Joe claims to
despise Dufton and as much he indicates that he wants to start
over again in a “place with no memories,” there is still a part
of him that seeks what he had in Dufton, genuine friends and a
sense of security (Braine 96). Joe says, “I’d see Charles and
know that I would be able to talk away all my accumulated anger
and humiliation” (Braine 78). Alice fills this void, and she
comes to be both mother and friend to him. When he is near her,
he feels “reassured too, protected like a child” and he adds
later that being with her was “like having his mother and father
alive again” (Braine 77, 180). Symbolically, their first
meetings take place in Warley’s working—class district. Joe is
aware of this part of the town from the moment that he arrives,
but he leaves it out of his descriptions of Warley because it
invites associations with Dufton, at first negative but later

positive. After one of his meetings with Alice, he walks

198

through the district and notes that “each house was [his] home
and the blackened millstone grit looked soft as kindness”
(Braine 79). When he returns to Dufton for Christmas, Joe is
not altogether repulsed by what life has to offer there. He
takes comfort from the sense of belonging, and when his aunt
offers him a cup of tea he is “moved by an impulse of affection”
(89). It is only when his aunt pressures him for information
about Warley that his ambitions cancel his affection and the tea
begins to “taste like old sacking” (Braine 90). On one level,
Alice represents a more genuine human connection and a return to
values of family and security that Dufton still symbolizes for
Joe, even if he suppresses it. The fact that their relationship
is not entirely mediated by a fetishism of the commodities
should give us ample reason to question the degree to which this
text celebrates consumerism and materialism.

Despite the important role that Warley’s working-class
district eventually plays in Joe’s life, he does not associate
Warley with its working-class inhabitants or with what he
perceives to be the limitations of working-class existence.
Nonetheless, that it has working-class inhabitants and that the
Aisgills know Dicky Torver, a wealthy man from Dufton, suggests
that the two towns are not as different as Joe portrays them
(Braine 69). Ian Haywood suggests that Room at the Top “is
organized around Joe Lampton’s symbolic passage between [these]
Yorkshire towns” (95). If Joe assigns Warley and Dufton
symbolic values, Braine gives us evidence that he derives this

symbolism from the idealization that he encounters in

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advertising and other forms of mass produced culture. His
aunt’s home is a symbol of chaos that he associates with
working—class life, but when he sees the Thompson’s kitchen just
after arriving in Warley, he says that it “would, just as it
was, have served as a film set for any middle—class comedy”
(Braine 23). Thus, Joe derives his ideal of the “middle—class,”
a term that he applies to both the wealthy and moderately
wealthy, from representations of that class through the way that
it advertises itself. Haywood also argues that “Joe appears to
have complete control over his destiny” (95). Joe asserts as
much when he says, “I’m my own draughtsman. Destiny, force of
events, fate, good or bad fortune--all that battered repertory
company can be thrown right out of my story . . ." (Braine 124).
Yet, the text gives us sufficient reason to view this statement
as ironic. Braine demonstrates that Joe is a social construct,
one who is torn between an experiential knowledge that working-
class relations are nurturing and sustaining and an
ideologically instilled desire to move beyond those relations
because they do not match the idealized image that the
bourgeoisie equates with success and power.

If Joe finally yields to the ideologies of consumerism and
materialism over his experiential knowledge, it is more an
indication of the power of ideology than a signal that the text
celebrates the mores of bourgeois commerce. Alice gives Joe a
sense of community, and he values her for that. However, he
also views her against the idealized images of women that he

sees in the media. He likens her to a “Vogue drawing,” and

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because on a superficial level she fits this image of success,
he fetishizes her as an object that he wants to possess sexually
(Braine 69). Thinking of her in relation to Charles, he admits
that the difference is that he “never had the least desire to
undress Charles and, [he] realized with shock, [he] wanted to
undress Alice,” but he adds that “he was angry with [himself]
for the thought,” (Braine 78). If Joe is a sexual predator, it
is not because all working-class are driven by uncontrollable
bodily urges. He may be angry at himself for having it, but the
reference to ygggg indicates that the thought of sexual conquest
is the result of an ideology of which he is unaware and over
which he exerts no control. He does pursue Alice sexually and
wins her over, but he soon rejects her when he discovers that
she had once posed as an artist’s model-~although they later
renew the relationship. According to Joe, the act of posing was
“not decent,” and he cannot bear to think that another man had
seen her naked (Braine 116-17). On the one hand, he resents
that she should treat herself as a commodity and despises the
men who have colluded in putting her in that position, but on
the other, he is proprietary. Alice is a possession which he
has expropriated from a rich man, and so he in turn treats her
like a commodity. She correctly accuses him of seeing her as
his “own private dirty postcard,” which he had been doing ever
since he compared her to the drawing from yggpg (Braine 117).
Possessing her becomes an act of class warfare, and it indicates
how he intends to engage the enemy in his “irresistible method

of attack” (Braine 30). Joe emulates the patterns of

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exploitation and expropriation that he has learned from the
dominant culture and that he associates with power and self—
determination, even when this emulation negates the supportive
community that he desires and that Alice can offer him.

Joe is caught in a paradox. He resists his own
exploitation by trying to move up the social hierarchy to a
place where he will not be subjected to it, but in the process,
he affirms the values of a culture that exploits people and
fetishizes their relationships. Like Jimmy Porter, the
oppressed becomes the oppressor in Room at the Top. Joe’s
ultimate concession to consumerism and materialism is in his
pursuit of Susan Brown, the teenage daughter of a wealthy
industrialist. According to Joe, Susan is a “justification of
the capitalist system” (Braine 128). Although she is childish
and inexperienced, she meets his expectations for an idealized
woman even more than Alice Aisgill does. Unlike Alice, Susan
“has a young fresh voice and the accent of a good finishing
school,” and more important, Joe proclaims that “she was like
the girl in the American advertisements who is always being
given a Hamilton watch or Cannon Percale (whatever that is)
Sheets or Nash Airflyte Eight” (Braine 36). Again, Braine
reminds us that the image against which he judges her comes from
the mass media that is controlled by her class. Although she
offers Joe none of the support and companionship that Alice
does, Joe chooses to pursue Susan, and with the urging of
Charles, concocts a scheme to win her affections and get her

pregnant. As he says, he “was taking Susan not as Susan, but as

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a Grade A lovely, as the daughter of a factory-owner, as the
means of obtaining the key to the Aladdin’s cave of [his]
ambitions” (Braine 139). Yet, there is a part of Joe that is
left unsatisfied by his actions. When he and Susan engage in
childish foreplay, he feels a “loneliness come over [him], real
as the damp churchyard smell of the grass” (Braine 136). He
quickly negates this feeling by complimenting her with childish
cliches and quoting the poetry of Betjeman. Again, like Jimmy
Porter, Joe has the intelligence to use the language of
bourgeois art as a weapon against the bourgeoisie. He turns
their own culture against them, and he uses their methods of
expropriation to take possession of Susan. She is his hostage,
and at the moment of conquest, he believes that he has finally
achieved the full humanity that had been denied to him through
his life of “servitude and security” in both Dufton and Warley.
When he finds out that she is pregnant, he says, “I was a man at
last” (Braine 209). For Joe, this moment affirms that he is not
a Zombie because he has achieved the capitalist ideal for
masculinity.

Where the bourgeois people of Jimmy Porter’s world try to
prevent him from taking Alison away, in Joe Lampton’s Warley,
they reward him for having played the game of bodily
expropriation so well. Mr. Brown, Susan’s wealthy father, says
“I don’t give my daughter away to seal a deal” (Braine 210).
But that is precisely what he does when he offers Joe a
lucrative managerial position in his business and includes

marriage to Susan as part of his proposition. Mr. Brown says to

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Joe, “You’re the sort of young man we want. There’s always room
at the top” (Braine 212).6 James W. Lee says that Joe “is
perfectly aware that his humanity is slipping away from him as
he grows more prosperous” (61). Where Joe had first thought
that this moment would be a realization of his full human
potential, he soon discovers that, in fact, it signals the
beginning of his own figurative death. By winning Susan, he
loses any chance to regain the “shabby kinship” with Alice that
had sustained him during his lonely “maneuvers” (his word) to
get Susan (Braine 77). When Alice dies in a car crash after
Joe rejects her for a second time, he admits that his entire
scheme had been “designed and manufactured for one purpose, to
kill Alice” (Braine 221). She represents a type of sustaining
human relation that the novel associates with Dufton but that
Joe rejects in his attempt to satisfy ideologically instilled
notions of success. After she dies, he attempts to regain some
of this kinship by returning to a pub in the working-class
district of Leddersford, but after drinking with a working-class
girl, he has to fight her disgruntled boyfriend and his friend
just to get away. Christopher Dodds remarks that Joe’s venture
into the working—class district is a symbolic “return . . . to
his working-class origins which now, in their turn reject him”
(45). Joe also “kills” Alice by fetishizing her as an object to
be possessed. Although she offers him more, he denies her
humanity by her treating as an object to be consumed and
discarded. Peter Fjagesund correctly remarks that she is a

victim “left behind on the battlefield . . . of the main

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character’s ambitions” (249). Yet, Joe ultimately recognizes
his collusiveness in denying her humanity, and he despises
himself for it. As he says, “I hated Joe Lampton . . . but he’d
come to stay, this was no flying visit” (Braine 219). The
sudden tendency to talk about himself in the third person is an
admission that his subjectivity is the product of an ideology
over which he has no control. Although he survives and prospers
materially, he is dead to himself, and he despises the
materialist creature who is “sitting at his desk in his skin”
(Braine 219).

If asserting himself was a resistant act to reclaim his
humanity, then the collusive manner in which he does it re—
emphasizes the dehumanizing nature of capitalist social
relations. As a model of success, Joe is a “sort of sandwich-
board man” for capitalism but nothing more (Braine 6). John D.
Hurrell concludes that Joe has “exchanged his humanity for a set
of social symbols” (42). Though financially prosperous, he is
no less a Zombie than he was in Dufton, and at least while
there, he was not complicit in the exploitation of others.
Nonetheless, under capitalism, “nobody blames [him]” for his
part in this exploitation, and the narrative ends with the
admission that “that’s the trouble” (Braine 235). Like ngk
Back in Anger, Braine’s first novel ends with a dystopian image
of unresolved class conflict. The exploitative relations that
Joe resists are still in place, largely because his own actions
have reinforced them. However, the dystopian contains within it

an implied articulation of its utopian opposite. The novel does

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not provide a solution to the class conflicts that it presents
as destructive, but neither does it celebrate them as Ronald
Paul contends. Room at the Top ends with an unresolved tension
between the collusive desires expressed by Joe Lampton and the
utopian longing for an end to a system of exploitation and
expropriation. It is different from the proletarian fiction
that dominated the traditions of pre—war working-class writing
because it does not resolve all contradictions through a demand
for party organization, but it ultimately does not defend those
contradictions as necessary or beneficial either. Thus, it
carries forth the Anti-modernist tradition that began with Lpgk
Back in Anger.

Joe Lampton and Jimmy Porter are the intellectual centers
of their respective stories, and the bourgeois characters with
whom they interact are only significant in relation to them.
This in itself marks a significant challenge to the politics of
the Modernist entrenchment. Arthur Seaton, the protagonist of
Alan Sillitoe’s Saturda Ni ht and Sunda Mornin , has the same
role in that novel. He is a capstan lathe operator in a bicycle
factory, and it is in relation to him that the other characters
exist. However, in Sillitoe’s novel there are no bourgeois
characters, which is rare even for a working-class or
proletarian text. Yet, the bourgeoisie and its state still have
a controlling presence in Arthur Seaton’s life. He is aware
that he is subject to the limits set by the ubiquitous “them at
the top,” and Arthur acknowledges that “They’ve got you by the

guts, backbone and skull, until they think you’ll come whenever

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they whistle” (Sillitoe 140). In his Discipline and Punish,
Michel Foucault give us the language to see that capitalist
society is organized as a “Panoptican” (Foucault 200).7 Those
with less power feel that there are always being observed by
those with more power, who in turn, have the ability to punish
the weaker for transgressive behavior. In Foucault's terms,
working-class people are subjected to a disciplinary apparatus
that, through the invisibility of its omnipresent gaze, produces
“docile bodies” that discipline themselves for fear that they
may be punished (Foucault 138). Even when there is no direct
evidence that the gaze is present, those with less power act out
the roles that have been assigned to them, and they do it in a
way that does not threaten the prevailing distribution of
power.8 The weaker are productive because, through their
docility, they reproduce the system that keeps their limited
power under control. As a working-class man with relatively
little power, Arthur feels “a lack of security [because] no
place existed in all the world that could be called safe
If you lived in a cave in the middle of a dark wood you weren't
safe” because you would always be subject to the disciplinary
gaze of the dominant class and its representatives (Sillitoe
197). Much of WW—LJ—MLL—Wfl is about
Arthur Seaton’s struggles and negotiations with the disciplinary
forces in his life.

The rate-checker at the bicycle factory often watches
Arthur to see how fast he produces parts. Since Arthur is on

“piece work," being overly productive could mean a reduction in

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his rate, and he responds to this disciplinary gaze by
moderating his output. He says that when “you felt the shadow
of the rate-checker breathing down your neck you knew what to do
if you had any brains at all: make every move more complicated,
though not slow because that was cutting your own throat”
(Sillitoe 27). These moments give Arthur a sense of control
because he believes that he is working the system to his
advantage by earning the allowed maximum. Nonetheless, it is
equally clear that the system is working him. He is doing his
job with a deliberate thoroughness and is totally absorbed in
producing the results that the factory owners want, quality
parts produced efficiently. Like Joe Lampton, Arthur feels that
he is in control of his own destiny, but in reality, he is
merely working within the acceptable limits for someone in his
position. Arthur may be “filled underneath with a burgeoning
sense of his possibilities and always liable to erupt or implode
into violence,” but he is “tame enough on the outside and docile
at the lathe” (Roskies 182). The rate-checker exists, in
Raymond Williams’s terminology, to remind Arthur what the
“limits” are and to exert “pressure” on him to conform to
acceptable standards for nonthreatening behavior. Even if
Arthur thinks that his negotiation within these limits signifies
a type of resistance, he is in fact being a foucauldian docile
body. The increased remuneration that he gets for being so
productive is a reward for behaving as the system requires.
Robboe the foreman warns Arthur that he is making too much for a

lathe operator, but he does nothing to cut Arthur’s fourteen

208

 

pounds a week because Arthur is so productive (Sillitoe 60).
Despite his desire to do so, Arthur does not challenge the
bourgeois forces that administer his world and maintain social
order through their disciplinary gaze.

Yet, Arthur repeatedly fantasizes about destroying the very
system that he helps to reproduce through his docility. The
narrator notes that “violent dialogues flayed themselves in his
mind as he went on serving a life’s penance at the lathe”
(Sillitoe 222). Arthur dreams of blowing up the factory and
baling out “for Russia or the North pole where he’d sit and
laugh like a horse over what he’d done” (Sillitoe 37). When he
does his military training, he imagines that he is shooting at
the “snot-gobbling gett that teks [his] income tax, [and] the
swivel-eyed swine that collects [their] rent” (Sillitoe 141).
Nigel Gray correctly suggests that “Arthur can carry through a
revolution in his mind-~but the world remains unchanged” (109).
Arthur may dream about destroying the infrastructure of
capitalism because he is aware that it imposes such serious
limits on him, but he does not carry out any of his proposed
actions. His most significant moment of rebellion in the
factory comes when, as a young worker, he discovers that Robboe
has been sending him on errands to purchase prophylactics. When
Robboe is not around, Arthur mocks him in a “deliberately
brutalized Robin Hood accent,” shouting at the top of his lungs
that he is going to get Robboe’s rubbers (Sillitoe 39). This
derision may signify Arthur’s desire to act out against

authority, but it does not amount to a meaningful challenge to

209

the system. Robboe is a foreman, but he is not a member of the
bourgeoisie. Like the hypothetical pizza parlor manager that I
discuss in chapter two, he only has power within the labor
process because the factory owners have granted him some.
Though his power is real, one can question the degree to which
he uses it for his own advantage. He is the closest person in
the novel to the bourgeoisie, but even Arthur admits that he is
only the “enemy’s scout” (Sillitoe 61). Robboe reminds Arthur
that he is subject to the same disciplinary gaze when he says,
“I’ll get in trouble for letting you earn so much” (Sillitoe
60). Arthur’s denigration of Robboe is a meaningful expression
of desire, and it indicates the level to which he wishes to lash
out at those who exert control and disciplinary authority over
him. At the same time, as an act of resistance it is
ineffectual. He only carries it out when Robboe is no longer
present, and he does nothing to challenge Robboe’s limited
authority or to disrupt the more expansive relations of power
that structure life in the factory.

It is important to note that his attack on Robboe
exemplifies a pattern of behavior for Arthur. In his famous
analysis of the pervasive jungle imagery in SaturdayLNight and
Sunday Morning, James Gindin remarks that “Sillitoe’s characters
are always aware of the conflict of interest between workers and
management, the cold struggle that keeps class antagonisms alive
and allegiances firm” (“Sillitoe’s Jungle” 36). Although the
first part of Gindin’s observation is valid, the idea that

Arthur has an unwavering allegiance to other working-class

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people is difficult to see. Arthur ultimately desires to
annihilate the capitalist system that exerts a defining control
over his actions. Because he is incapable of doing so, he
attacks those who are subject to the same disciplinary forces
that he is. Robboe’s may have a greater degree of power within
the labor process than Arthur, which explains why Arthur is so
circumspect in his attack, but the foreman is still susceptible
to discipline from the bourgeois forces that employ them both.
Jimmy Porter and Joe Lampton wage war directly against the
bourgeoisie, but these people are not accessible to Arthur so he
turns on those from his own class, either because he associates
them with bourgeois forces and institutions or because he simply
believes that they are weaker than he is.

By moderating his production, Arthur feels that he is
manipulating the limits imposed on him by the factory, but he
never confronts the rate—checker or challenges his authority.
While at work, most of his behaviors arise from a fear that the
rate-checker might punish him. Yet, he does want to resist the
disciplinary gaze in some form, and his attack on Mrs. Bull
symbolizes his desire to do 30. She is the neighborhood gossip
who stands at the end of his street and monitors the factory
workers as they go to and from work. The narrator says that
“fat Mrs. Bull the gossiper stood with her fat arms folded over
her apron at the yard—end, watching people pass by on their way
to work. With pink face and beady eyes, she was a tightfisted
defender of her tribe, queen of the yard because she had lived

there for twenty—two years . . .” (Sillitoe 24). In role her as

211

 

 

defender, Mrs. Bull admonishes Arthur for running around with
married women and exerts pressure on him to live within the
limits of acceptability for a single male with his social
standing. Her disciplinary role in the community is a way in
which the working—class affirms the institutions of capitalism.
She defends patriarchy and the family. Where Arthur was unable
to use violence against the rate-checker and can only mock
Robboe behind his back, he is secure in assaulting Mrs. Bull
because he knows that she and her husband are physically weaker
than he is. Arthur shoots her with his air-rifle and bruises
her face (Sillitoe 124). However, in shooting her, he is also
aware that he opens himself to disciplinary measures from the
state. Where he has no problem confronting Mr. and Mrs. Bull
and admitting that it was an act of revenge, he conceals his
crime from the policeman who makes inquiries at Mrs. Bull’s
request (Sillitoe 134). Arthur is willing to attack someone
whom he associates with disciplinary pressure, but he does not
challenge the institution that sets limits and that has the
ability to deprive him of the material comfort that the
capitalist system offers him. Mrs. Bull can exert pressure on
Arthur to conform, but the type of punishment that she can
inflict does not approach that of state, which she ultimately
appeals to in her effort to see Arthur punished. She has power
because no one is ever without it, but she does not have the
sort of power that the legal apparatus of the state does.
Arthur’s attack on her signifies his desire to resist the

disciplinary gaze, but it also reinforces his inability to do it

212

 

 

 

in way that challenges the systemic divisions of power within
his society. Mrs. Bull merely reinforces the limits that have
been set by others. Yet, by attacking her, Arthur further
divides the working-class community in which he lives and helps
to perpetuate the divisiveness that keeps the working-class
focused on internal struggles. Arthur’s desire may be motivated
by a spirit of resistance, but the result of his action is a
collusion in perpetuating intra—class conflict that, in the end,
gives the state a reason to reassert its disciplinary control.

Like Joe Lampton, Arthur longs for the power of self-
determination. When he goes for his fifteen days of military
service they say to him that “you’re a soldier now not a Teddy-
boy,” but the narrator says that “he was nothing at all when
people tried to tell him what he was. Not even his own name was
enough, though it might be on his own pay-book” (Sillitoe 147).
But Arthur is a soldier, and though he refuses to conform to all
that the Army dictates, he still shows up for his service and
performs the role that has been assigned to him by the
government. While doing his fifteen days of military training,
he refuses to get his haircut (Sillitoe 147). This is a
significant gesture of resistance because it denotes a desire on
his part to resist the bodily sublimation that the state
requires of him, but ultimately, it does nothing to change the
balance of power. The feeling of control that results from his
act of resistance is meaningful, but the result is limited.
Though he is not punished, the risk of being disciplined

severely for his action is slight. One could also argue such

213

 

 

 

limited acts of rebellion actually help to reproduce the system.
Capitalism’s success depends on the ability of workers to make
decisions within limits that do not threaten the social
hierarchy but that still give them a sense that they have power
over their own destinies. Arthur makes choices and doing so
gives him a feeling of control, and although his control is
extremely limited, it temporarily satisfies him and stops him
from acting on his more violent and confrontational impulses.
Arthur objects that the factory and state can force him to
his use his body in ways that he opposes, such as “grabbin’” his
guts out at a machine (Sillitoe 228). In his drive to assert
himself, he attempts a politically significant reclamation of
his body from the system, and therefore, his own person becomes
a site of conflict. Arthur emulates the abuse of the body that
it experiences in the factory every day because he decides that
real possession involves disposing of it as he chooses. After
all, for most of his day his body is docile, functioning to
reproduce a system that perpetuates this cycle of docility and
self—destruction. Arthur declares that “piled-up passions were
exploded on Saturday night, and the effects of a week’s
monotonous graft in the factory was swilled out of your system.
.[by the] beer going beneficially down into the elastic
capacity of your guts” (Sillitoe 4). On Saturday night Arthur
pushes his body to the limits of physical endurance because he
can, but bodily indulgence does not signify a lack of
intelligence, as the Modernist sought to establish. Ronald Dee

Vaverka argues that “on a mental level the personal requirements

214

 

 

 

of his job are soon fulfilled” because Arthur feeds “the same
piece of steel that is cut the same way over and over again”
(237). Vaverka concludes that such work necessarily leads to
intellectual decay. Yet, there is no indication of this in the
novel. In fact, Arthur has a formidable intellect that grows
keener because he spends all of his working day contemplating
things other than work. He says, “But listen, this lathe is my
ever lasting pal, because it gets me thinking,” and spends most
of his time thinking about ways to establish that he has more
power than he really does (Sillitoe 221). Unlike Woolf’s Mrs.
McNabb, he even has the ability to pose the most significant
ontological question: “What am I?” (Sillitoe 147). In his most
violent moments, he wants power over others. Nonetheless, there
are times when all he wants is power over himself, and so he
expropriates his own body and abuses it, for the most part
harming only himself-~except when he vomits beer and gin on the
elderly working-class couple in the pub (Sillitoe 10—11).

While in the Army Arthur sneaks out of the camp to get
drunk, and thus defies an imposed limit in a way that gives him
a sense of control, but his action is not a meaningful attempt
to change the limit. For a time, he escapes the disciplinary
gaze of his superiors and does not have to face punishment from
them. However, one night Arthur returns in a state of extreme
inebriation. When he wakes the following morning, he discovers
that he has been tied to his bunk, as Ambergate claims, at the
order of the C. 0. We never find out if the C. O. has given the

order, but it does not matter. That the soldiers restrain

215

 

 

 

Arthur reinforces the idea that the working-class is conditioned
to discipline itself. They all stand to suffer because of his
delinquence. If Arthur does not strike at the bourgeois people
who make the rules, he does on occasion attack those who try to
enforce them, but only when he is fairly certain that the risks
of being substantively punished are minimal. When Arthur
demands to be untied, Ambergate refuses to accommodate him,
saying to Arthur, “You’ll only lash out . . .” (Sillitoe 151).
Again, attacking other working—class soldiers perpetuates the
intra-class conflict that capitalism relies on to keep the
working-class from developing a Lukacsian sense of class-
consciousness, which entails a working-class awareness of itself
as a class. Arthur’s restraint is both literal and symbolic.
Because of his tendency to lash out at other working-class
people, they literally tie him to the bed. Tying him to the bed
symbolically represents the way that Arthur’s actions bind him
to an assigned position within the labor process, one that
requires him to “sweat his guts out” at his lathe and perform
his yearly service as a soldier.

Through this episode, one of the novel’s major tensions
emerges. Arthur responds to his restraint by thinking that
there is “no better way to spend his fifteen days, provided they
gave him a drink of tea and a fag now and again” (Sillitoe 151).
Arthur resents the limits that capitalism places on his life,
but his resistance of this system is always tempered by his
desire for the material gratification that it has to offer. He

longs to “kick down his enemies crawling like ants,” but he also

216

wants to accept “some of the sweet and agreeable things of life”
(Sillitoe 222). His rebellious gestures are limited and
calculated to minimize the risk of punishment, and they never
occur in a way that jeopardizes his gratification and
sustenance. When Arthur and Fred see the man throw his pint
glass through the undertaker’s window, Arthur advises him to
break free of the female soldier who is holding his wrist
(Sillitoe 117). Being aggressively rude may signify a desire to
help the man, but calling the female soldier “Rat Face”
ultimately falls short of the physical violence that would be
needed to extract him from her grasp. Arthur may want to resist
the state, but at the moment when such resistance would benefit
someone else from the working-class, he stops short of acting
out because doing so would open him to punishment and threaten
his comfort and security.

The fact that he is living in an age of comparative
prosperity goes a long way toward explaining why Arthur feels
unable to attack directly the very system that he longs to
destroy. Yet, Arthur still desires to destroy something because
“it gave him satisfaction to destroy” (Sillitoe 148).

Capitalism may meet most of Arthur’s physical needs, but the
limited agency that it gives him does not ultimately satisfy his
desire for power. He longs, therefore, to attack that which
places limits his agency in some way. J. R Osgerby observes
that Arthur’s “life is a cycle of violent rebellion and imposed
conformity” (217). But most critics have failed to note that

Arthur’s violence is never directed at those with the most power

217

over his life. Stripped of meaningful control through
capitalism’s mechanisms of exploitation and expropriation,
Arthur turns his most violent attacks against those who are also
subject to exploitation and expropriation, such as Mrs. Bull.
In his desire to assert his own agency, like Joe Lampton, he
emulates behaviors that he associates with power and control.
James Gindin notes that Arthur’s society is a predatory one
which rewards people who victimize others (“Sillitoe’s Jungle”
42). In his desire to assert that he has power, he adopts the
predatory habits of those with power over him. Arthur the
oppressed becomes the oppressor, and he fetishizes women as
objects to be expropriated from weaker men.

Arthur does seemingly have a genuine affection for Brenda,
the wife of his friend Jack, and on rare occasions, he
fantasizes about how nice it would be to enter into a mutually
nuturing relationship with her. For instance, he thinks that
“it must be good to live with a woman . . . and sleep with her
in a bed that belonged to both of you . . .” (Sillitoe 137).
Yet, his desire for joint domestic ownership conflicts with his
tendency to see women as objects to be possessed and used for
his sexual gratification. In many ways, he faces the same
dilemma that Joe Lampton does. He longs for mutually supportive
relationships because he knows that communal effort is the only
way to survive when you have little control over your
circumstances. Nonetheless, he continually feels the need to
affirm his own power by trying to exploit others. Alan Penner

argues that “Silltoe’s heroes champion the poor and despise the

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rich” (Penner 21). While there is a certain truth to this
observation, it also needs qualification. For example, when
Arthur and his cousin Bert find a drunken Irishman, they help
him back to his boarding-house. Knowing what it is like be to
in that position, they are unwilling to let another working-
class person face the punishment that might follow. Yet, they
cannot help but steal the man’s wallet, which just happened to
be “stone empty” (Sillitoe 86). Arthur both pities and exploits
the Irishman’s weakness. He is conflicted between a need to
help his own people and a desire to confirm that he has the
power to be in control of his destiny, which he can only do by
taking something that someone else might value. This attitude
ultimately accounts for his pursuit of both Brenda and her
sister Winnie.

At times, when Arthur thinks of Brenda, he sees a
companion. Such feelings are soon negated by his misogynistic
perception that she is an object to be possessed and used for
his sexual gratification. He indicates that a wife of his who
had extra-marital relations as Brenda does would get “the
biggest pasting any woman ever had” because his wife will “have
to look after any kids [he] fills her with, [and] keep the house
spotless” (Sillitoe 155). Like Joe Lampton, Arthur is
proprietary. He believes that he has rightfully expropriated
her from the weaker Jack: “. . . if he was carrying on with
Jack's wife then it served Jack right” because he classifies
Jack as slow, and “he had no pity for a ‘slow’ husband”

(Sillitoe 41). Jack is physically weaker than Arthur, but

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Arthur also sees him as weak because he concedes so readily to
his own exploitation. He is the “type who never got mad no
matter how much the gaffers got on his nerve,” and he accepts
the inconvenience of working night shifts because he wants to
get ahead in the factory (Sillitoe 41). When Arthur sees him
later, he discovers that Jack had become a “chargehand,”
supervising “part of the bicycle assembly process” (Sillitoe
179). Yet, Jack is not so different from Arthur; both function
as the factory requires. Jack also has the domestic security
that Arthur dreams of at times. Brenda is appealing to Arthur
because, by being with her, he can indulge his fantasy for
domestic control without having to commit to the institution of
marriage. When he was at Brenda’s house, “knowing every corner
of the house and acting as if it belonged to him, [Arthur]
stripped off his coat and shirt and went into the scullery . .”
(Sillitoe 14). This moment of temporary possession gives him
conflicted feelings of comfort and rebellion. Keith Wilson
argues convincingly that “it is in part against the numbing
regularity of the cyclical mechanism that Arthur lashes out,
defining self by opposition to, as much as enjoyment of the
communal rites” (416). With Brenda, Arthur can play out his
domestic fantasies, but he does so in the context of disrupting
someone else’s domestic arrangement. He can have what he thinks
are the benefits of marriage, including having Brenda cook him
breakfast. However, he does not have to yield to the
restricting limits of the institution. That he is conflicted is

evident when he thinks that “I suppose I should keep on hoping

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that [Jack] gets knocked by a double decker bus so that I can
marry Brenda and sleep with her every night, but somehow I don’t
want him to get knocked down by a bus” (Sillitoe 33). Getting
married would signify to Arthur that he has given in to a system
which can only offer domestic complacency and tedious factory
work, which is what Jack has done. Yet, throughout the novel,
there is every indication that Arthur, despite his rebellious
desires, has already given into this system. He never
challenges those with the greatest power over him, and he
produces just as the factory owners want him to. He may want to
blow up the factory, but he also believes that they “look after
you” there (Sillitoe 160). It is apparent that Arthur can
envision no other way of life. He does not really dislike Jack,
but he dislikes what Jack represents. Jack symbolizes what
Arthur is, and what he is afraid to be, a worker who reproduces
a system that limits his agency.

Treating Brenda as an object is a deplorable act of
misogyny, but it needs to be viewed in its political context. I
want to make it very clear that I am not condoning Arthur’s
action, but I do want to understand it. In its destructive and
dehumanizing way, it is both resistant and collusive. Arthur
wants to be he “own boss,” and so he seeks to affirm that he has
the power and control that he equates with ownership (Sillitoe
235). The only way that he can get this power is by doing to
Brenda and Jack what the factory owners do to him, exploiting
their weaknesses. The factory owners take Arthur’s labor, his

time, and freedom, and all this happens in a world where Arthur

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does not even have the satisfaction of knowing that his vote
counts (Sillitoe 221). He longs to break out of the limitations
of his existence but wants to do so in a way that does not
jeopardizes his own relative comfort, and so he turns on those
who have no more power than he does. The abortion scene, where
Brenda and Arthur’s unborn child is killed, symbolizes the
destructive results that Arthur’s predatory actions are going to
have on the future of his class. He participates in killing his
own child before it ever has a chance for the self-assertion
that he desires. Through the intra—class conflict that his
actions generate, he is perpetuating the very system that he
wants to resist. He strives for a control that he does not
have, but in doing so, he emulates methods of exploitation and
expropriation that perpetuate divisions among the working-class.
And working-class people discipline him, not because he creates
intra-class conflict, but because they, like Mrs. Bull, have
been conditioned to defend the patriarchal institutions of
capitalist culture. The two soldiers beat up Arthur because he
has been having an affair with Winnie. Her husband Bill, one of
the soldiers, is defending what he sees as his own proprietary
rights. He and his friend punish Arthur and compel him to stop
his transgressive behavior, but in doing so, they reinforce the
system that controls them all. They make Arthur accept a
position that he wants to resist, and without saying so,
indicate that his rebellious tendencies are only hurting those
who are subject to the same far reaching mechanisms of economic

and ideological domination, which they, in response to Arthur’s

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aggression, help to reaffirm. The violence that takes place
only serves to underscore the fact that they are all docile
bodies, reproducing the very system that compels them to fight
each other as they strive for some sense of power and control.
In the tranquility that follows his punishment, Arthur
finally decides to marry Doreen, something that Jack had been
urging him to do (Sillitoe 180). Although he imagines that this
will give him the domestic stability that he wants. He also
says, “Once a rebel always a rebel . . . Ay, by God it’s a hard
life if you don’t weaken,” which Arthur does not ultimately want
to do (Sillitoe 239). He wants support and companionship, and
the novel is replete with images of him enjoying the sense of
community that exists among the working-class. The Christmas
that he spends with his aunt Ada’s family is just one example
(Sillitoe 216-18). When he thinks of marrying Doreen, he
envisions that “it might not be so bad” (Sillitoe 236). Yet, he
still strives for some kind of control and an affirmation that
he has power because to give up this struggle would be to
weaken, which would make life easier but would also leave him
feeling empty and unsatisfied. After they marry, Doreen and
Arthur plan to live with Mrs. Greaton, Doreen’s Mother. Arthur
thinks that “he would be able to get on with Mrs. Greatton,
because living there he would be the man of the house” (Sillitoe
237). He sees in this new domestic arrangement a possibility
for the control that he does not have in the factory, and the
novel ends with a projection that his struggle for power will

exist unabated into the future. Arthur believes that he will

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spend the rest of his life “fighting with mothers and wives,
landlords and gaffers, coppers, army, government” (Sillitoe
238). Thus, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning ends with a
dystopian image of unresolved intra-class conflict, one that
implies a longing for its utopian opposite.

Arthur’s desire for community and companionship will be
satisfied through his marriage to Doreen, just as they always
have been in his relations with other working—class people. For
all that Jack and Brenda become victims of Arthur’s quest for
self-determination, they are also Arthur’s friend. Jack is the
one person at work who reminds him that he is something more
than an appendage of the machine. Arthur feels conflicted about
trying to exploit Jack, thinking that his affair with Brenda was
a “rotten trick . . . to play on a mate for a bit of love”
(Sillitoe 56). At the novel’s end, this friendship may not be
entirely destroyed, but it is certainly tainted by Arthur’s
desire to affirm that he has a power that his place in the labor
process denies him. Arthur thinks that “every man was his own
enemy,” and on some level he recognizes that his own destructive
impulses happen because he is “caught up in his isolation and
these half-conscious clamped-in policies for living that cried
for exit” (Sillitoe 222). By acting on his desires for power,
Arthur not only undermines the meaningful relations that he has
with other members of the working-class, but he also hurts
himself in the process and, through his excessive drinking,
seemingly affirms a stereotype about working-class embodiment

that the dominant culture relies on to deny him the very agency

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that he wants. Like Joe Lampton, Arthur is a victim of his own
quest for power. Anna Ryan Nardella argues that by marrying
Doreen, Arthur is becoming “a ‘regular bloke,’ accepting a way
of life which he had previously viewed as stifling and narrow”
(472). But Arthur did not always see marriage as stifling.

More important, the novel gives us no reason to believe that
this self-destructive and combative behavior will end, but nor
does it indicate that conflict is inevitable. The uneasy truces
that develop between Arthur and Jack and Arthur and Bill
indicate that there is still a chance to resolve the intra-class
conflicts that divide them, even though the novel does not
present this resolution as imminent (Sillitoe 206, 228). By
projecting that divisiveness and conflict will be the result of
Arthur’s rebellious tendencies in the future, Sillitoe
articulates a utopian longing for a resolution to Arthur’s quest
for self assertion. Ronald Dee Vaverka correctly notes that
Sillitoe does not provide his reader with a ready—made solution
to this problem, and in this way, his first novel differs rom
the proletarian writing that preceded it (49). Like Look Back
in Anger and Room at the Top, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
ends with an unresolved tension between Arthur’s collusive
desires and the text’s ultimate projection that Arthur and
people like him should have a more meaningful and constructive

level of control over their own lives.

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CONCLUSION

Working-class texts are highly complex philosophical
ruminations about the nature of working—class existence. If
they deal with aspects of working-class life that are
justifiably unpalatable to those of us on the left, we still
should not ignore them. As Lenin reminds us, “We must not
regard what is obsolete to us as something obsolete to a class,
to the masses” (Lenin, ‘Left Wing’ Communism 581). Reactionary
politics, domestic violence, misogyny, and intra-class conflict
are elements of working-class experience, and there are multiple
and complex reasons for why they continue to exist. Critics,
and especially Marxists, must not fetishize the working-class to
the point that they fail to understand the complex philosophical
nature of its existence. Yet, as I argue in the first chapter
of this study, this is what has happened within virtually every
tradition of Marxism, including those that are generally thought
to be diametrically opposed as humanist and anti-humanist. We
have tended to disregard what the working-class is and have put
in its place a vision of what we want it to be. The working-
class has the most revolutionary potential of any class, but
there is a difference between potential and realization. If the
working-class were to realize its potential as those of us on
the left want it to, then it would cease to be the working-
class. We can only hope that this would, in turn, produce the
classless society that compelled us to be Marxists in the first

place. Arthur Seaton and Joe Lampton have as much revolutionary

226

sentiment as anyone in a proletarian novel. However, that
sentiment manifests itself in ways that ultimately reinforce the
limitations of the class alignments that they attempt to defy.
The working—class is the most powerful class in any capitalist
society, but that power is at best latent, kept in check by
bourgeois strategies of manipulation and containment. Though
coerced into doing so, the working-class does collude in its own
oppression. Thus, collusive behaviors are part of working-class
existence. If we disregard them, we run the risk of ignoring
the resistant desires that often actuate those behaviors. We
should not ignore these desires even though they lead to actions
that ultimately have the effect of re—affirming oppressive
relations.

Critics also must not duplicate the errors of Georg Lukacs
and Lucien Goldmann by setting the expressed concerns of
working-class people against static and abstract conceptions of
“authentic” class values. Yet, this is how Sillitoe and
Braine’s novels have been read consistently. John Dennis
Hurrell says of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning that “others
have given us novels of provincial working—class life. But
nobody has given us such absolute verisimilitude” (“Alan
Sillitoe” 6). Hurrell celebrates the novel because it conforms
to his expectations about the provincial working-class. His
claim about verisimilitude implies that he has a conception of
working-class life against which he is judging the Sillitoe’s
text. Nigel Gray does something similar. His influential study

The Silent Majority has a special place in the criticism on

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twentieth—century English literature. Gray attempts to write a
scholarly work in his own vernacular dialect, and he uses
working-class idioms to explain concepts and attitudes that
might otherwise be expressed with language that is Latinate and
technical. For instance, he notes that Arthur Seaton put a
mouse on a bench to scare the women at the bicycle factory where
he works (Sillitoe 27). Gray explains the significance of this
episode by saying, “I knew blokes who worked at Fords who used
to deliberately sabotage the work out of boredom” (107). It is
refreshing to see someone who is comfortable enough with the
descriptive qualities of his language to use a word like bloke
in a scholarly study, and there certainly is value in relating
literature so directly to your own experience. Nonetheless,
Gray is not performing a reading of Sillitoe’s novel. He is
using it as a platform on which to present a reading of himself
and his own experience. The text does not emphasize Arthur’s
boredom during his seemingly playful attack on the women in
factory. One could make a compelling case that disrupting the
routine of the factory has more to do with his desire to
establish a sense of control and power. Again, it is
significant that he directs his aggression at his fellow workers
and that he ceases his disruptive behavior the moment that he is
aware of Robboe’s disciplinary presence. Yet, Gray misses this
struggle because he reads it through another narrative, one of
own his making. For Nigel Gray to read Sillitoe’s text through
his own experience is for him to be guilty of the Normative

Fallacy. Although Gray’s conception of working-class life is

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based on an experiential knowledge, Arthur Seaton’s Nottingham
is not Gray’s own community. In Gray’s analysis, Sillitoe’s
narrative disappears, and he replaces it with the story of his
own life, which he, in the Lukécsian tradition, presents as a
reality against which we should assess the verisimilitude of
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Although he thinks that he
is confirming the realist underpinnings of the novel, he is, in
fact, preventing himself from seeing the real contradictions
that the novel proposes to resolve imaginatively through its
overriding utopian longing.

My analysis of working—class literature is not contingent
on its disappearance or dismissal. Even if we find aspects of
these texts disturbing, they offer too much information about
the world in which we live for us to dismiss them as the
degraded products of capitalist social relations. Yet, some of
the very best Marxist critics have done precisely that simply
because these novels do not present the working-class as they
want to see it—-in an advanced state of revolutionary
development. Arnold Kettle calls the working-class novels of
the 19503 “petit-bourgeois” because they seemingly endorse
individualism (“Anger” 6-7). Though Sillitoe and Braine deal
with individuals, they are also concerned with the way that
their working-class characters relate to their own communities.
I have shown at length that much bourgeois literature of the
twentieth—century sought to affirm a social hierarchy that
denied working—class people discursive agency and associations

with rationality. It is deeply troubling that Marxists would

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categorically dismiss literature that the bourgeoisie found so
threatening and that it fought successfully to keep it on the
margins of scholarship until the 19503. The entrenchment
against working-class forays into culture became the most urgent
part of the bourgeois literary agenda in the twentieth-century.
By ignoring working-class literature, Marxist critics affirm the
politics of that entrenchment, even when they are not aware that
they are doing so. Paulo Freire says that if we hope to
liberate the working-class we must learn the nature of its cares
and concerns, and to do this we must know where those cares and
concerns are being expressed (77). Most important, we must
understand something of the real social contradictions that led
to these cares and concerns if we hope to see them resolved.
Although I oppose her statement about authenticity, I mostly
concur with Ingrid von Rosenberg when she suggests that the
value of the fifties working-class novels, even for the
committed socialist, is that these so-called “descriptive
novels, which picture a small slice of social reality, but with
fresh observation and a great amount of authenticity in the
representation, probably prompted more critical thinking

than the CP novels, precisely because they avoid [trying (sic)]
to talk their readers into certain fixed political belief[s
(sic)]” (“Militancy” 164). Through their inability to resolve
real structuring contradictions imaginatively, working-class
texts open the door for us to consider how we can resolve them
in a way that does not condone or apologize for the collusive

actions of the characters but that does not dismiss them as

230

irrelevant either. When Marxists allow the working-class people
to speak for themselves, they do not deny them their rightful
place as equal participants in the struggle for their own
liberation. The collusive action is often the product of a
resistant desire, and our task as revolutionaries is to help
bring these things together as constructive and motivated
resistance. If working-class literature does not show us how to
do this, it at least indicates to us that we should do it.
English Modernist literature gives us an idea of the ideological
pressures that will be brought to bear against us as we try, but

in the end, we must try.

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NOTES

232

NOTES

CHAPTER ONE: THE MARXIST LACUNA (1-32)

1 Marcuse claims in One-Dimensional Man that “.
[industrial society’s] supreme promise is an ever-more-
comfortable life for an ever—growing number of people who, in a
strict sense, cannot imagine a qualitatively different universe
of discourse and action, for the capacity to contain and
manipulate subversive imagination and effort is an integral part

of a given society” (23).

 

2 In Essentially Speaking, Diana Fuss notes that “perhaps
it is inevitable that we turn to . . . labels ‘for
terminological convenience’ . . . [but such labels] can be

unsettling if what we wish to emphasize is not the fixed
differences between subject-positions but the fluid boundaries
and continual commerce between them” (34). Lukacs attempts to
address such appearances of fixity by foregrounding his belief
in the fluidity of class boundaries. I have yet to find a
better way of dealing with this concern in my use of terminology

describing extensive groups of people.

CHAPTER TWO: THE REDEMPTION OF REALISM (33-64)

1 Tom Bottomore reminds us that economism has several
different meanings for Marxist thought. When using the term
economism, I am referring to “a form of Marxism which emphasizes
(and in the view of its critics over—emphasizes) the

determination of the social life as a whole by the economic

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base” (Bottomore et al. 168).

2 Wright argues, “Instead of regarding all positions as
located uniquely within particular classes and thus as having a
coherent class character in their own right, we should see some
positions as possibly having a multiple class character; they
may be in more than one class simultaneously. The class nature
of the positions is a derivative one, based as it is on the
fundamental classes to which they are attached. Such positions
are what I have termed ‘contradictory locations within class
relations’” (Classes 42). Though he addresses a major
theoretical difficulty, Wright relies on anecdotal evidence to
locate people at contradictory class positions. In his
sociological surveys, he generally use his own questionnaires to
elicit responses. The replies are perceptions that may very
well be the result of ideological interpellation.

3

The passage is originally from Neue Zeit XX.1 (1901—02):

79.

CHAPTER THREE: THE LONG REACTION (65-109)

1 As I suggest in chapter one, the use of “realism” to
describe a particular form is unsatisfactory. Here, I am merely
noting the general belief that “realism” as a form was rejected
by Modernism. I do not, however, accept the definition implied

in the observation.

2 Whether Eagleton is referring to the Modernist movement

when he uses the term modern is unclear, but it raises the issue

that Modernist and modern function interchangeably for most

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critics and that this has led to much confusion, even to the
degree that I have heard the term “Modernism” (capitalized)
applied to anything from Romanticism on.

3 I base my observations in this chapter on a
consideration of fiction. However, the distinction between
experimenters and non-experimenters is no more convincing when
it is applied to the poetry. As with the fiction, formal
differences do not erase deeper political similarities.

4 The ellipses represent my omissions.

5 Tratner makes the same claims in his earlier essay

“Figures in the Dark: Working-Class Women in To the The

Lighthouse” (3).

CHAPTER FOUR: THE ABORTED REVOLUTION (110-156)

1 Lehmann says in the “Manifesto” to New Writing that
“though [it] does not intend to open its pages to writers of
reactionary or Fascist sentiment, it is independent of any
political party” (vi).

2 The editors of the Left Book Club, who commissioned
Orwell to write The Road to Wigan Pier, were so ashamed of his
comments about working—class people that they reminded their
subscribers that “Mr. Orwell is exaggerating violently” when he
says that lower-classes smell (Gollancz xiii).

3 It is impossible not to quote T. S. Eliot on this point.
He said in 1932 that “I should think better of communism if I

learned that there existed in Russia a decent leisure class” and

he added, “I think that under the present system the majority of

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those who have to work at all, have too work too long and too
hard. . . .I should prefer to employ a large staff of servants,
each doing much lighter work but profiting by the benefits of
the cultured and devout atmosphere of the home in which they
lived”-—but could never own (Eliot, “Commentary” 273-275).
4 Woolf claims that “a boy brought up alone in a library
turns into a book worm; brought up alone in the fields he turns
into an earth worm” (“Leaning Tower” 137).
5 Eliot declares in the Sacred Wood, “It is part of the
business of the critic to preserve tradition--where a good
tradition exists. It is part of his business to see literature
steadily and to see it whole; and this is eminently to see it
not as consecrated by time, but to see it beyond time; to see
the best work of our time and the best work of twenty-five
hundred years ago with the same eyes” (xv—xvi).
6 Arthur Marwick argues that the nationalization of
industries such as coal and steel did little to change the way
that they functioned. He maintains that “in one sense
industrial relations had been totally transformed by the war; in
another sense they had scarcely been changed at all” (Marwick,
British Society 104). The bargaining power of the Unions had
increased, but prewar interests maintained bureaucratic control.
Sinfield argues that the appearance of equality in the
arts became a way for cultural elites to justify their ingrained
notions about other classes. He says that subsidizing “high

culture” has resulted in “better resourcing for middle-class

consumers, and [the preservation of] cultural assumptions that

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freeze out and discriminate against the lower classes, ethnic
groups, women. The final twist is that when lower class people
do not take to the arts, it is said to be their fault” (55).

Sebastian Flytes too has an association with bodily
indulgence through his alcoholism, but his alcoholism is a sign
of the modern world’s inability to feed his spirit. He is, as
Cordelia tells Charles, “very near and dear to God,” and in no
way does his drinking signify an inability to appreciate beauty
(Waugh 304).
9 The writers associated with The Movement are Kingsley
Amis, Philip Larkin, Donald Davie, D. J. Enright, John Wain,
Elizabeth Jennings, Robert Conquest, Thom Gunn, and Thomas
Hinde. Morrison notes that, in so much as these writers can be
linked together, it is largely because “ . . . the Amis-Larkin-
Wain triangle might justifiably be thought of as the nucleus of
the Movement” (14). However, in his introduction to his novel
gill, Larkin suggests that his connection to Wain were not so
strong as the “triangle” image might suggest (16).

O Morrison argues that much of their opposition was aimed
at the surrealistic poetry of Dylan Thomas (145).
ll Amis published a work in 1957 called “Socialism and the
Intellectuals,” which portrays no investment in socialist
thinking. His strongest political stance is to remark that “the
best and most trustworthy political motive is self interest”
(315). Most critics think that, from his undergraduates days

until his death, Amis’s politics became increasingly

conservative (Fraser 784). I argue in the following pages that

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his conservatism showed itself much earlier than is commonly

supposed.

CHAPTER FIVE: LEGITIMATING MOMENTS (157-174)

1 The words “simply and without malice” are from Osborne’s
stage direction.

2 Nandi Bhatia, Terry Goldie, and Brian Murphy see this
statement as an indication of Jimmy’s longing for a return to an
Edwardian past (Bhatia 396; Goldie 205; Murphy 369). If we
emphasize the idea that Jimmy has been denied a world of his own
by those who have sought to preserve the Edwardian twilight,
then the second part of the sentence becomes ironic. He does
not regret the passing of the Edwardian, he takes a pleasure in
expressing that regret.

3 Priestly reviewed The Outsider for The New Statesman and
Nation on July 7, 1956.

4 The filmic adaptations of these books are important

aspects of what Arthur Marwick calls the “cultural revolution”

of the 19503 (“Room” 127), but we need to exercise caution when

 

linking them to the novels from which they were adapted. They
are, after all, different texts and, in their composition,
contain different emphases. They, therefore, project different
political concerns. For instance, John Hill remarks that the
stylized representations “of cities and factories in terms of
‘art’” allows the film makers to turn them “into objects of
‘comfortable contemplation’” (136). The films tend to minimize

the significance that the novelists attach to such places. In

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the novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, the factory is an

all consuming pre-occupation for Arthur Seaton, but in Karel
Reisz’s film, we only see its interior in the initial
establishing shot, and thus, Arthur Seaton’s relationship to the
labor process is de-emphasized in the film in a way that it is
not in Sillitoe’s book.

5 Williams gives Eliot too much credit for using the phrase
“way of life” in Notes Towards a Definition of Culture
(Williams, Culture 242). Eliot does use the phrase to describe
culture, but in the same paragraph, he says that the “repository
of this culture has been the elite” whose “function it is to
preserve group culture” (Eliot, nggp 40). He wants his
“culture” to be “a way of life” for everyone, but not everyone

can have equal access to it.

CHAPTER SIX: PARTY POLITICS AND COLLUSIVE RESISTANCE (175-225)
1 In The Long Revolution Raymond Williams provides an
excellent overview of the chain of events involved in the
expansion of popular education: “In 1870, school boards were
established, to complete the network of school and bring them
under a clearer kind of supervision, and in 1876 and 1880 this
extension was confirmed by making universal elementary schooling
compulsory. In 1893, the leaving age was raised to 11, in 1899
to 12, and in 1900 to a permissive 14. Thus by the end of the
century a national system of elementary schooling, still largely

confined to the provision of a minimum standard, had been set

going” (137). Yet, Williams also argues that the Education Acts

239

of 1870 were not as cataclysmic as most historians suppose. He
says that “we already know from the history of elementary
education that there was no sudden opening of the floodgates of
literacy as a result of the 1870 Education Act. The basic
history of literacy in the century seems to be a steady
expansion” (LQQQ 168). Most scholars do not accepts Williams’s
argument, and it essential to acknowledge that the rapid
increase in working-class fiction after 1870 indicates that
there was a different type of literacy than had existed prior to
1870.

2 Len eventually dies while fighting in the Spanish Civil
War and thus makes the ultimate sacrifice to the causes of the
party. Lewis Jones himself made a similar sacrifice in 1939.
Though he did not fight in Spain, he did die of nervous
exhaustion after conducting thirty street corner rallies in
support of Communist Party efforts in the Spanish Civil War
(Smith 1, 5).
3 In his recent study of working-class fiction, Ian
Haywood, an exceptional bibliographer, only identifies two
working—class texts that were published in the 19403, Sid
Chaplin’s the Leaping Lad (1947) and Willy Goldman’ East End my
Cradle (1940) (Haywood 170-72). To his list we could add Sid
Chaplin’s, My Fate Cries Out (1949) and Harold Heslop’s 1p;
Earth Beneath, which was published in 1946, but as Andy Croft
notes, was written ten years earlier (Croft 31). It could be
that our perception of stagnation has prevented us from looking

for other working-class texts of the 19403.

240

4 .
Stephen Constantine’s “Love on the Dole and Its Reception

in the Thirties” is a useful study of the early history of
Greenwood’s first novel. He notes, for example, that there was
a Hebrew translation of Love on the Dole in 1933, the same year
that the first British edition was published by Jonathan Cape
and a year prior to the first American edition (Constantine
233). Constantine’s main focus is, however, on the initial
readership of the novel, which he claims must have been
middle-class because “Love on the Dole cost 73 6d and even the
cheap ‘florin’ edition [1935] was a not inconsiderable outlay
for most wage-earners” (234).

5 His 1938 novel, Only Mugs Work, is a very poor attempt at
crime fiction.

6 The italics are Braine’s.

Focault takes this term from Jeremy Bentham, who
envisions a type of prison where those in charge can “gaze” at
all of the inmates from a centrally located position (200-28).
The Panoptican makes it possible to “perfect the exercise of
power” because “it can reduce the number of those who exercise
it, while increasing the number of those on whom it is
exercised” (Foucault 206).

In Foucault’s system, no one is entirely powerless. If
they were, there would be no need for a disciplinary apparatus,
which exists to keep power in check. Marxism relies on the
notion that the working-class has much more power than the

bourgeoisie. The struggle is to make the working—class aware of

its power, which is kept under control by bourgeois strategies

241

of manipulation and containment.

242

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