British Working Class Fiction: The Sense of Loss and the Potential for Transformation

Abstract

George Orwell's image of the politically inert, indefinitely containable 'proles' is an early (and extreme) example of what was to become a persistent post-war representation of working class life. His idea that the proles could be controlled as much by popular entertainment as by direct state coercion anticipated by nearly a decade Richard Hoggart's qualms about the emergence of a new 'mass' culture. It should be said, of course, that Hoggart was not delineating a feasible totalitarian future, but examining the cultural consequences of an already-established welfare state. According to him, it was in a measure because of such improvements as mass literacy and greater affluence that working people were being diverted into a media-orchestrated consumerism. Close-knit communities, based on local industries and the extended family, were breaking up and traditional values were being either negatively reinforced (fatalism becoming mere inertia) or crudely displaced by the ersatz aspirations of the market economy. Arnold Wesker took this theme up in plays like Chicken Soup With Burley (1958) and Roots (1959) and campaigned, through his speeches, polemical writing and the 'Centre Forty two' project, for an appropriation by the working class of bourgeois culture alongside the recuperation of half-forgotten radical and folk traditions. Behind the arguments of Hoggart and Wesker lay a conviction that so called progress, under the post-war capitalist dispensation, exacted too high a price in cultural impoverishment from those most vulnerable, through lack of understanding or political commitment, to the blandishments of 'never-had-itso-good' materialism. It was a perspective without the theoretical sophistication which supported Herbert Marcuse's denunciations of mass culture in America, but it belonged nevertheless to a vigorous British tradition of social-sometimes socialist-criticism going back to the early days of the Industrial Revolution itself. From Carlyle, through Dickens and William Morris, to D.H. Lawrence there runs a rich vein of anger at the cultural deformations wrought by urban industrial conditions. A comparable antipathy to industrial society, coupled with a hankering after more organic or more hierarchic social structures, can also be found in the cultural criticism of T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis. However, what distinguishes Hoggart and Wesker from the others I have mentioned, is their location of the organic not in some preindustrial or de-industrialised gemeinschaft, but in older and still-surviving elements of industrial experience itself. They neither invoke an arcadian past, nor invent fables of pastoral innocence in the manner of more conservative writers. It is taken for granted by them (and the many left wing cultural critics who have followed them) that whatever of the past has been lost or whatever potential futures foregone, the focus of understanding and change must be the working class's own historically specific conditions of existence.