NACIMIENTO Y MUERTE DE UNA BIBLIOTECA (1608-1934) La primitiva Librería Universitaria (1608-1765)

By contrast, Alan Sillitoe (at least partially) resists such tendencies with his 1958 novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning pushing at the limits of—if not always breaking entirely with—postwar working-class representational practices, both political and aesthetic. Sillitoe’s novel follows Arthur Seaton in his libertine adventures of heavy drinking and philandering, activities themselves facilitated by the increased living standards of postwar Britain and comprehended as part of a significant improvement from the prewar years. Arthur describes his father as being ‘happy at last [...] and he deserved to be happy, after all the years before the war on the dole, five kids and the big miserying that went with no money and no way of getting any’ (Sillitoe 2008: 26), contrasting it with his ‘sit-down job at the factory, all the

183 Woodbines he could smoke, money for a pint if he wanted one [...] The difference between before the war and after the war didn’t bear thinking about’ (26-27).

Yet such improvements in working-class living standards do not serve to negate class conflict, but at most provide a transitory truce in hostilities. Unsurprisingly, then, where the Angry Young Men novels by and large frame their narrative conflicts within the logic of welfare capitalism and the postwar consensus—Labour versus Tory, affluence versus traditional working-class values, and so on—Sillitoe’s novel is more in keeping with many prewar texts, such as May Day or The Furys, in locating antagonism as an ineradicable characteristic of class society and the capitalist labour process itself. For instance, when Arthur explains that ‘you got fair wages if you worked your backbone to a string of conkers on piece-work’ (27), what is expressed is not an eschewal of class antagonism but its

reconfiguration within the context of postwar welfare capitalism in which, as Panitch notes of the Attlee government’s 1948 White Paper, there could be ‘no justification’ for increased wages ‘unless accompanied by a substantial increase in production’. Arthur’s comment, then, satirises the idea of ‘fair wages’ linked to productivity increases as obtainable only through intensified workrates negatively affecting workers’ physical health thus reconfiguring the conflict between worker and capital in the welfare capitalist context.

This theme of class conflict runs throughout the text, such as Arthur’s resistance to scientific management whereby he explains how ‘the rate-checker sometimes came and watched you work, so that if he saw you knock up a hundred in less than an hour Robboe [the foreman]

would come and tell you one fine morning that your rate had been dropped’ (31). As such,

‘when you felt the shadow of rate-checker breathing down your neck you knew what to do [...] make every move more complicated, though not slow because that was cutting your own

184 throat, and do everything deliberately yet with a crafty show of speed’ (31-32). Arthur’s refusal of work, then, becomes the literary manifestation of the workers’ conflict with the alienated labour process imposed upon him, explaining how ‘you earned your living in spite of the firm, the rate-checker, the foreman, and the tool-setters [...] all through the day you filled your mind with vivid and more agreeable pictures than those round about’ (32). Just like the Langfier’s women continuing ‘with their private functionings’ in Sommerfield’s novel, Sillitoe depicts Arthur as similarly resisting absorption into the production process and, instead, reaffirming his proletarian subjectivity in conflict with capital.

Such class conflict also motivates Arthur’s dislike of the aforementioned foreman, Robboe, with Arthur explaining the more jovial than usual relations on pay day disappearing once the wages are in his pocket: ‘Truce time was over. The enemy’s scout was no longer near. For such was Robboe’s label in Arthur’s mind, a policy passed on by his father. Though no strong cause for open belligerence existed as in the bad days talked about, it persisted for more subtle reasons that could hardly be understood but were nevertheless felt’ (61). The recalibration of class relations for the postwar context nonetheless involves a continuation with the more overt forms of conflict ‘passed on by his father’ from his experiences of ‘the bad days’, something which ‘fair wages’ may mask temporarily but cannot eradicate. Class antagonism is therefore ‘presented, for all the muffling effects of Keynesian macroeconomic policy and the Welfare State, as an undisguised dialectic without consensual Aufhebung:

labour is still clearly recognised as struggle between capital and worker.’ (del Valle Alcalá 2016: 14). The way and extent to which this dialectic is “muffled”, and its concomitant continuity of its ‘subtle reasons’ for conflict which are ‘hardly [...] understood’ but

‘nevertheless felt’, speaks volumes about the expunging of conflictual lexicon from the discourse of postwar welfare capitalism. What Sillitoe succeeds in doing—where many of his

185 contemporaries failed—is to depict precisely the lack of space for such antagonistic discourse without succumbing to the narrowed political horizons which the limited capacity for such discourse erroneously implies. Thus, Arthur is allowed to not entirely comprehend the muffled dialectic underpinning his antagonistic outlook, but he can nonetheless feel—and, therefore, act—upon it.

This centring of the conflict between capital and the working class allows Sillitoe to

circumvent the limitations of a postwar consensus invested in the simple Labour/Tory binary.

Thus, Arthur expresses disdain for ‘big fat Tory bastards’ (Sillitoe 2008: 35) but also ‘them Labour bleeders too’ (36) as well as more radical left groupings and trade unionists implied by ‘the big-headed bastard that gets my goat when he asks me to go to union meetings or sign a paper about what’s happening in Kenya’ (132). Resultantly, Arthur—and therefore also the wider working-class youth he symbolises—is depicted in a decidedly ambivalent relationship with Communism, rejecting ‘mainstream politics outright, but also reject[ing] the main form of organised radical discourse against the dominant power group [...] indicative of the contemporary “crisis” in Marxist and communist politics in Britain in the 1950s’ (Bentley 2007: 201). According to Bentley, Arthur’s rebellion is ‘never contained within an organised collective movement of resistance, but is articulated as an individual and irresponsible rebellion against all authority figures’ (216). In a similar yet divergent vein, del Valle Alcalá views the texts’s radicalism precisely in its ‘rejection of integration and harmonisation as viable answers to the conjunctural changes undergone by the system’ (2016: 15). Against the backdrop of a working class integrated via its institutions—from the trade unions to the Labour and Communist Parties—into the imagined community of the nation via a combination of political consensus, collective bargaining and the residues of Popular Frontism, Arthur’s rebellion becomes

186 a direct response to the co-optation of collective agency by an ossified and ineffectual institutionality. This is not a retreat from mass politics, but an insistence that the fundamental lines of conflict need to be reassessed and revitalised if the notion of class is to retain its revolutionary valences (15).

As such, though Bentley is correct that Sillitoe is responding to the crisis in British

Communism during the 1950s—precipitated in particular by the 1956 events in Hungary—

del Valle Alcalá’s contribution is equally valuable, relating to the creeping integration of working-class organisations into the functions of national capital evident also in the CPGB’s trajectory—the discussion of which began in the previous chapter—in which the Party attempted to balance rank-and-file agitation against capital with an increasing preoccupation with its representational position in relation to capital. In Arthur’s rejection of party politics and ceaselessly antagonistic relationship to society, Sillitoe’s novel thus attempts to

reconfigure the lines of class antagonism in a period of widespread social peace in which even the CPGB—despite being ‘the main form of organised radical discourse’—was

implicated, integrating itself into the imagined community of the nation with its calls for ‘all true patriots to defend British national interests’.

Just as Sillitoe’s novel rejects the postwar framework of acceptable politics, so too does it distinguish itself from other novels of the period in its resistance to essentialist depictions of a positive proletarian identity constructed around traditionally “respectable” working-class values. Rather, Arthur and his family—and particularly his Aunt Ada and others in his extended family—eschew respectability, embracing instead ‘some “undeserving” elements’

(Haywood 1997: 103), such as when Arthur’s cousin Betty flirts with a man to encourage him

187 to buy drinks for the whole family only for her eldest brother Dave to then threaten to ‘smash him if he didn’t clear off’ (Sillitoe 2008: 74). Yet such roguish behaviour does not invalidate the status of ‘Aunt Ada’s ‘tribe’ as a ‘stalwart institution of class consciousness, [...]

provid[ing] Arthur with the resources to remake his working-class identity’ (Haywood 1997:

103). The most politically significant example of such resource provision comes in the backstory of Ada’s three sons refusing military service during the war and living off petty criminality. The significance here goes beyond the simple affirmation of working-class anti-militarism but also its relation to the aforementioned importance of the war as a historical moment of working-class integration into what Virdee calls the ‘imagined national

community’. Ada’s sons’ refusal thus places them in symbolic opposition to that process of integration, maintaining their proletarian autonomy and thus placing Arthur’s rebellious agency within a tradition of working-class resistance to absorption into the ossified institutionality highlighted by del Valle Alcalá.

In this context, Arthur’s philandering must also be understood as another manifestation of that proletarian eschewal of respectability and assertion of autonomy—albeit one mirroring the masculinist underpinnings of other Angry Young Men novels not to mention postwar social democracy more generally. As Bentley explains, this tension between the text’s radicalism and its sexism are, ultimately, never satisfactorily resolved (2007: 224-225). Yet while acknowledging its problematic nature as a textual strategy, it nonetheless remains one intended to symbolise Arthur’s resistance to integration within bourgeois society, his affairs with married women challenging the ‘dominant family unit that underlies both conventional middle and working-class culture of the period’ (218). Furthermore, the men to whom these women are married are also an illustrative aspect of Arthur’s challenge to society: Brenda’s husband, Jack, for instance, is a tool-setter and lay representative in the factory union who, as

188 Arthur notes in passing, drinks ‘the firm’s tea’ (Sillitoe 2008: 33), something Arthur refuses to do. As a skilled worker, Jack is the traditional constituency of social democratic trade unionism—such as the previously discussed AEU, who only began recruiting lower-skilled workers like Arthur around the time the novel was published—while his drinking of the firm’s tea, indicates precisely the integration of working-class institutions against which Arthur is rebelling. Even more illustrative, however, is when Arthur is eventually assaulted by Winnie’s husband, Bill, and a friend of his (both of them soldiers). They are assisted in this endeavour by Jack; the subtext being Sillitoe’s implication of working-class

representative institutions in reinforcing societal norms against a rebellious worker through collaboration with the strong-arm of the state.

Arthur’s rebellious spirit is thus apparent both inside and out of the workplace, the novel’s famous passages in which Arthur smashes a jewellers and overturns a car exemplifying actions against ‘emblems of the consumer society’ (Bentley 2007: 216). Moreover, they act as further examples of Arthur’s refusal of the kind of working-class respectability present in Barstow’s and Braine’s novels not to mention the positive working-class identity more

generally. However, as well as the sense in these acts of a celebration of roguish illegality and rebellion against consumer society, Arthur’s attack on the jewellers is particularly suggestive of radical intent with Sillitoe describing how in ‘the sound of breaking glass’ Arthur hears the

‘most perfect and suitable noise to accompany the end of the world and himself’ (2008: 108).

In this passage, the positive working-class identity evident in Braine’s or Barstow’s texts is eschewed in favour of a class identity more approximate to Marx’s previously-cited ‘negative side of the antithesis’ compelled ‘to abolish itself and thereby its opposite, private property, which determines its existence, and which makes it proletariat’ (1975: 36). The breaking glass, then, in its symbolic negation of bourgeois society, becomes the sound most suitable to

189 accompany the ‘end’ of a world based on private property and thereby its opposite, Arthur

‘himself’ as proletariat.

Moreover, while Sillitoe’s text shares some degree of what Stevenson mentions as indicative of a ‘reconciliation’ with society, such as Arthur’s termination of his libertine philandering and subsequent marriage to Doreen, any ‘reconciliation’ is, at most, only partial. Instead, the novel closes with a restatement of rebellion, explaining that ‘if he was not pursuing his rebellion against the rules of love [...] there was still the vast crushing power of government against which to lean his white-skinned bony shoulder’ (Sillitoe 2008: 203). Rather than reconciliation, Arthur declares,

Once a rebel, always a rebel. [...] And it’s best to be a rebel so as to show ‘em it don’t pay to try to do you down. Factories and labour exchanges and insurance offices keep us alive and kicking – so they say – but they’re booby-traps and will suck you under like sinking-sands if you aren’t careful (202).

Here, Sillitoe restates Arthur’s refusal of integration into welfare capitalism; but his comments also bear a Camusian quality in their valorisation of the rebel subject.

Furthermore, Arthur’s statement that ‘trouble for me it’ll be, fighting, every day until I die’

(219) is itself quasi-Sisyphean in its acceptance of such struggle’s open endedness. Mulling on the—again, unstated, though unquestionably male—proletarian condition, Arthur opines,

you sweat again in a factory, grabbing for an extra pint, doing women at the week-end and getting to know whose husbands are on the nightshift, working with rotten guts

190 and an aching spine, and nothing for it but money to drag you back there every

Monday morning. (219)

In sandwiching Arthur’s previously rakish behaviours (‘grabbing’ pints, ‘doing women’ etc) between the more obviously alienated activities of sweating in a factory and being dragged back on Monday morning, Sillitoe highlights Arthur’s previous activities as essentially futile and similarly alienating attempts at a life beyond alienation. The mention of Monday morning (particularly evocative at the end of a section called “Sunday Morning”) thus opens up the narrative beyond its title as the ‘rhythm of the week forms the structural framework of the plot and represents the inescapable world of manual labour for the central characters [...] the arbitrary structure of existence which is enforced by capitalist working practices’ (Bentley 2007: 214). Thus, Arthur’s chaotic ‘Saturday Night’ is followed by the peace of ‘Sunday Morning’ before he is ‘dragged back’ on Monday morning to restart the endless cycle of rebellion against ‘the arbitrary structure of existence’ imposed on him by capitalist working practices. Just as Camus explains that human rebellion ‘progresses from appearances to acts, from the dandy to the revolutionary’ (1956: 25), so Sillitoe closes his novel with his dandy transformed into a revolutionary; on the cusp of Monday’s recommencement of class

hostilities and another opportunity to ‘lean his white-skinned bony shoulder’ into the crushing power of society, Arthur relishes the opportunity, ending the novel in true Sisyphean fashion

‘with a grin on his face’ (Sillitoe 2008: 219).

It should be no surprise, then, that a novel such as Sillitoe’s, so resistant to the dominant forms of working-class political representation and their integration into postwar British welfare capitalism, should also be more resistant—at least, relative to the texts discussed in this chapter thus far—to traditional forms of realist aesthetic representation. As such, while

191 critics such as Haywood see in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning a fiction ‘reminiscent of nineteenth-century naturalism in its gritty portrayal of closed working-class communities’

(1997: 105), this sits alongside an engagement with avant-gardism which seeks to extend—if not quite break with—such naturalism. Stevenson, for example, compares Sillitoe’s writing to that of his Nottinghamshire compatriot, DH Lawrence, in ‘extensively’ transcribing ‘the inner thoughts of his characters, creating an inwardness with working-class life which sets him apart from other writers at the time’ (1993: 96). Bentley expands on these themes arguing that

‘debates around the ideology and commitment of specific literary forms in the 1950s are partly to blame for this placing of Sillitoe within a realist tradition’ (2007: 205), whereby within the dichotomy set up by critics such as Rabinovitz between commitment and formal experimentation, Sillitoe’s overtly left-wing politics leads critics to designate his work neatly as realist and neglect the novel’s more experimental tendencies. Countering this, Bentley highlights a range of techniques deployed by Sillitoe which highlight his experimental inheritances such as Sillitoe’s creation of a ‘fluid relationship between the third-person narrative voice and the central character’ as well as frequent ‘use of free indirect speech and internal monologue’ (206). In contrast to the use of such techniques common within realism, Sillitoe’s extensive use of free indirect style to transcribe Arthur’s inner thoughts function similarly to what Rancière notes in Woolf’s distension and contraction of temporalities, in that Arthur’s ‘continuous train of thought as he works at the capstan lathe, is detached from a specific temporal framework [and] represents the range of mental activity of the factory worker that resists the monotony of the physical task in which he is engaged (207). As with the Langfier’s women in May Day, Arthur’s ‘private functionings’ are central to his refusal of integration into the alienated labour process and are therefore afforded an emphasis not common to realism more generally, and certainly not the temporally specific retrospective narratives discussed in this chapter. In doing so, Sillitoe records ‘the mental processes

192 involved by an individual engaged in a semi-skilled manual job’ (206), thus functioning ideologically to ‘represent the internal thoughts of a class that had previously been under-represented in literary texts, and to counteract the externalised representation of the factory worker’ (207). Indeed, this function of representing under-represented working-class

subjectivities is particularly significant due to Arthur’s position within the working class as a semi-skilled worker, thus symbolising that fraction of the class—low/semi-skilled workers—

that had hitherto been under-represented even by the traditional organisations of working-class representation, such as the aforementioned AEU. Thus, Sillitoe’s focus on the antagonistic subject position of a low/semi-skilled working-class relatively marginalised section within its representative institutions sees the increased application of techniques which extend or challenge traditional modes of aesthetic representation to portray a class subjectivity largely excluded from traditional modes of political representation in a period of social democratic consensus.

Similarly, in contrast to the realist plot-driven narratives discussed in this chapter, Bentley notes that Sillitoe’s novel is marked by a ‘rejection of linear plot construction’ (206) in favour of a series of picaresque vignettes (in part due to numerous sections of the novel having their origins as separate short stories and even poems). For Bentley, this rejection of

Similarly, in contrast to the realist plot-driven narratives discussed in this chapter, Bentley notes that Sillitoe’s novel is marked by a ‘rejection of linear plot construction’ (206) in favour of a series of picaresque vignettes (in part due to numerous sections of the novel having their origins as separate short stories and even poems). For Bentley, this rejection of