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Introduction: Questions of Class in the Contemporary British Novel

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Introduction: Questions of Class in the Contemporary British Novel Notes Introduction: Questions of Class in the Contemporary British Novel 1. Martin Amis, London Fields (New York: Harmony Books, 1989), 24. 2. The full text of Tony Blair’s 1999 speech can be found at http://news.bbc. co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/460009.stm (accessed on December 9, 2008). 3. Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Perseus Books, 2003), 16. 4. Ibid. 5. Peter Hitchcock, “ ‘They Must Be Represented’: Problems in Theories of Working-Class Representation,” PMLA Special Topic: Rereading Class 115 no. 1 January (2000): 20. Savage, Bagnall, and Longhurst have also pointed out that “Over the past twenty-five years, this sense that the working class ‘matters’ has ebbed. It is now difficult to detect sustained research interest in the nature of working class culture” (97). 6. Gary Day, Class (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 202. This point is also echoed by Ebert and Zavarzadeh: “By advancing singularity, hetero- geneity, anti-totality, and supplementarity, for instance, deconstruction has, among other things, demolished ‘history’ itself as an articulation of class relations. In doing so, it has constructed a cognitive environment in which the economic interests of capital are seen as natural and not the effect of a particular historical situation. Deconstruction continues to produce some of the most effective discourses to normalize capitalism and contribute to the construction of a capitalist-friendly cultural common sense . .” (8). 7. Slavoj Žižek, In Defence of Lost Causes (London and New York: Verso, 2008), 404–405 (Hereafter, Lost Causes). 8. Andrew Milner, Class (London: Sage, 1999), 9. 9. Gavin Keulks, ed., Martin Amis: Postmodernism and Beyond (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 73. 10. Žižek, Lost Causes, 295. For more on the relationship between class and gender in contemporary theory see Skeggs. 11. Following Andrew Milner, by “postmodern” I am referring to “the combi- nation of Derridean deconstruction, Foucauldian genealogy and Lacanian psychoanalysis . which in many respects still continues to ‘frame’ theoreti- cal debate across the humanities” (9). 210 Notes 12. Eagleton, After Theory, 7. 13. Milner, Class, 9. While this book will focus on the British experience, I would suggest that the trends are also occurring throughout the Northern Hemisphere. For example, an interesting analysis of these trends in the United States can also be found in Timothy Brennan’s Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). As Bernard points out “Brennan advances a broad thesis on the state of contemporary theory . Brennan argues that mainstream cultural criti- cism, a category that for him includes both ‘middlebrow’ journalism and scholarship in the humanities (xi), has been a ‘secret sharer with American liberalism’ following the ‘turn’ to the right that took place in American cultural life between 1975 and 1980.” See Anna Bernard, review of Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right by Timothy Brennan, Textual Practice 20, no. 4 (2006): 777–816. 14. As Linda Zerilli points out there is “a growing consensus that poststructur- alist political theories are incapable of generating a viable alternative to the collective fragmentation that characterizes late modernity” (3). 15. Milner, Class, 163. Milner directs us to Altick’s 1962 study of 1,100 British authors from 1800 to 1935 in which the great majority were university edu- cated. While there will always be working-class exceptions, the vast major- ity of canonized authors come from within the middle classes, as I go on to demonstrate in the introduction. Milner reminds us that studies in America and Australia have produced similar findings. 16. Philip Tew, The Contemporary British Novel (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 67, 84–85, 183. 17. Ibid., 86. 18. Ibid., 87. Clearly, writers and academics don’t consciously “refuse” to deal with it, but I think it is a sign of ideology’s power that class bias passes by undetected, slipping through the critical border by passing itself off as an unquestionable “truth” or “nature.” 19. John Kirk, Twentieth-Century Writing and the British Working Class (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), 190. 20. Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern British Novel: 1878–2001 (London: Penguin, 2001), 519. 21. Ibid., 28. 22. Milner, Class, 9–10. 23. Ibid., 10. The same theoretical evasion of class is present also in the American humanities. As Rita Felski has recently pointed out: “There is a noticeable silence about class in much contemporary theory” (34). 24. Ian Parker, Slavoj Zizek: A Critical Introduction (London: Pluto Press, 2004), 89. 25. Milner, Class, 53. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., 10. 28. Ibid., 10–11. 29. Will Atkinson, “Not All That Was Solid Has Melted into Air (Or Liquid): A Critique of Bauman on Individualization and Class in Liquid Modernity,” Notes 211 Sociological Review 56, no. 1 (2008): 1. For more on the paradox of a “class- less” society, see Chapter Seven of Edgell. 30. John H. Goldthorpe and Michelle Jackson, “Intergenerational Class Mobility in Contemporary Britain: Political Concerns and Empirical Findings,” British Journal of Sociology 58, no. 4 (2007): 526. 31. Atkinson, “Not All That Was Solid,” 2. 32. For the full report see http://www.jrf.org.uk/knowledge/findings/housing/ 2077.asp 33. Another section of the report also concluded that “Over the last 20 years, a large and enduring majority of people (73 per cent in 2004) have considered the gap between high and low incomes too large.” http://www.jrf.org.uk/ knowledge/findings/socialpolicy/2097.asp (accessed on December 9, 2008). 34. Nicholas Abercrombie and Alan Warde, eds., The Contemporary British Society Reader (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2001), 67. I would concur with Westergaard’s definition of class as “a set of social divisions that arise from society’s economic organization” (67), and that people “may be said to be in different classes in so far as they occupy . distinct and unequal places in that economic organization” (67). For more on inequality in British society see Westergaard’s Who Gets What?: The Hardening of Class Inequality in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 1995). 35. Ibid., 67. For similar conclusions see also Mike Hout, Clem Brooks, and Jeff Manza. “The Persistence of Classes in Post-Industrial Societies” reprinted in Terry Nichols Clark and Seymour Martin Lipset, The Breakdown of Class Politics: A Debate on Post-Industrial Stratification (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 55–75. 36. Ibid., 70. 37. Ibid., 72. 38. Kirk, Twentieth-Century Writing, 3. 39. Ned Temko, review of Thatcher and Sons by Simon Jenkins in Observer (November 5, 2006). www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2006/nov/05/politics 40. Susan Watkins, “A Weightless Hegemony: New Labour’s Role in the Neoliberal Order,” New Left Review 25 (January–February 2004): 10–13. 41. Žižek, Lost Causes, 189. 42. Arthur Marwick, British Society since 1945 (London: Penguin, 2003), 382. 43. Ibid., 460. 44. David Cannadine, Class in Britain (London: Penguin, 2000), 1. 45. Abercrombie and Warde, Contemporary British Society Reader, 72. 46. Ibid., 73. 47. Ibid., 74. 48. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 3. 49. Ibid., 74. 50. Ibid., 75. 51. Milner, Class, 99. 52. Abercrombie and Warde, Contemporary British Society Reader, 75. 53. Ibid., 76. 54. Ibid., 76–77. 212 Notes 55. Ibid., 77. 56. Ibid. For more on the recent geographical class differences in Britain see Bethan Thomas in “Identity in Britain: A Cradle to Grave Analysis” (pub- lished by the Social and Spatial Inequalities Research Group). See http:// www.sasi.group.shef.ac.uk/ (accessed on December 9, 2008). 57. Andrew Adonis and Stephen Pollard. A Class Act: The Myth of Britain’s Classless Society (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1997), 19–21. Subsequent references to this text are made parenthetically by page number. 58. For more on the relationship between class and education see Ball, Stephen J. Class Strategies and the Education Market: The Middle Classes and Social Advantage (London: Routledge, 2003). 59. John Kirk, “Recovered Perspectives: Gender, Class, and Memory in Pat Barker’s Writing,” Contemporary Literature 40, no. 4 (1999): 607. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid. 62. Pierre Macherey frames this question as “What is Literature thinking about?” in The Object of Literature, trans. David Macey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 63. Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Class, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 2008), 6. 64. Ibid., 7. 65. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 19–20. 66. As John Kirk points out, this “constant reference to the proliferation of new identities [is] predicated on the postmodern condition . and this purported fluidity of ontological boundaries seemed to seal the fate of the working- class subject” (Twentieth-Century Writing, 14). Kirk concludes that identity politics thereby “disenfranchises class through its embeddedness in the dis- course of individualism” (16). 67. It is worth noting also that out of this list many of these authors have been knighted, or given various different levels of the Order of the British Empire, such as a CBE, an OBE, or an MBE. Recipients include Sir Salman Rushdie, Iris Murdoch (DBE), Hanif Kureishi (CBE), Jeanette Winterson (OBE), Peter Ackroyd (CBE), A. S. Byatt (CBE), Margaret Drabble (DBE), Sebastian Faulks (CBE), Pat Barker (CBE), and Ian McEwan (CBE). 68. Tew, Contemporary British Novel, 84. 69. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 52. 70. Ibid., 49. 71. Žižek, Lost Causes, 404. 72. Ibid. 73. Eagleton, After Theory, 2. 74. Ibid., 13. 75. Ibid., 18. 76. Ibid., 190. 77. Brian Finney, British Fiction since 1984: Narrating a Nation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 2–3. Subsequent references to this text are made parenthetically by page number. Notes 213 78.
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