The portrayal of the working-class and working-class culture in Barry Hines’s novels TURNBULL, Simone Available from the Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive (SHURA) at: http://shura.shu.ac.uk/8637/ A Sheffield Hallam University thesis This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author. When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given. Please visit http://shura.shu.ac.uk/8637/ and http://shura.shu.ac.uk/information.html for further details about copyright and re-use permissions. The Portrayal of the Working-class and Working-class Culture in Barry Hines’s Novels. Submitted by Simone Turnbull A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Sheffield Hallam University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. August 2014 1 Abstract. Portrayal of working-class and working-class culture in Barry Hines’s novels. This thesis examines Barry Hines’s representation of contemporary British working- class and working-class culture. The corpus includes the writer’s nine novels: The Blinder published in 1966, A Kestrel for a Knave in 1968, First Signs in 1972, The Gamekeeper in 1975, The Price of Coal in 1979, Looks and Smiles in 1981, Unfinished Business in 1983, The Heart of It in 1994 and finally Elvis over England in 1998. The written work also comprises the play entitled Two Men from Derby which was first shown on BBC 1 on 21 February 1976 and subsequently broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 23 October 1976. Besides the scope of the author’s literary output has been enhanced thanks to the adaptation of four of his narratives to cinema through his collaboration with the film-maker Ken Loach. In 1969 the novel entitled The Kestrel for a Knave was adapted into the film named Kes . The Price of Coal was first written for a television series which broadcast in 1977 before being published in book form. The Gamekeeper , was adapted into a film in 1980. Looks and Smiles won the Young Cinema Award in the 1981 Cannes Film Festival. Barry Hines’s position as both a novelist as a scriptwriter has enabled his message to be more widespread. It is the tenor of his message that I study and analyse through the study of his literary output which spans the second half of the 20 th century. I wish to question his use of supposedly straightforward realism, verging on naturalism, through the delineation of the geographical, the human, the social and the cultural backdrop. The writer’s literary treatment combines up-to-date details with traditional tenets which conjure up a nostalgic backdrop in the face of the economic, historical and social upheavals of the era. The outlook which remains steeped in the past underscore the timelessness of the working-class according to the narrator. Yet is this definition still relevant as the recent re-shaping of the microcosm is acknowledged, yet downplayed. The overall feeling of everlastingness highlight the entrapment of the contemporary working-class members who cannot come to terms with the successive changes undergone by British society. The writer’s staunch empathy and his use of humour assuage the bleakness of the habitat and of the social conditions. His optimism contrasts with the current virulent contempt levelled at the working-class as he advocates active participation as the only way-out. 2 Contents Introduction pp.1-17 Chapter 1 Geographic Representations pp. 18-55 Chapter 2 Human Representations: Stereotyped characters pp. 56-93 Chapter 3 Social Representations pp. 94-128 Chapter 4 Representations of Popular Culture pp.128-169 Conclusion pp.170-175 Bibliography pp.175-179 3 Introduction. At first sight the portrayal of the British working-class and of popular culture in Barry Hines’s books may appear somewhat simplistic and naïve and as though it was written for a young audience. This apparently very simple depiction, however, succeeds far more forcefully than a more complex presentation. Realism is the dominant paradigm of the narrations under scrutiny and pervades the author’s whole literary delineation of this social group. It is precisely the author’s rendition of realist geographical, historical, social and human data that I endeavour to study and analyse. The novels include The Blinder published in 1966, A Kestrel for a Knave in 1968, First Signs in 1972, The Gamekeeper in 1975, The Price of Coal in 1979, Looks and Smiles in 1981, Unfinished Business in 1983, The Heart of It in 1994 and finally Elvis over England written in 1998. The scope of the literary output has been intensified thanks to the filming by Ken Loach of three of the above-mentioned narratives. The film Kes from A Kestrel for a Knave was produced in 1969, one year after its publication, and still ranks seventh in the British Film Institute’s Top Ten British Films. The Price of Coal was commissioned by the BBC for the Play for Today television series in 1977 before its publication in book form two years later. The adaptation of the novel The Gamekeeper was released in 1980. The collaboration between Barry Hines and the film director ended with Looks and Smiles. This film won the Prize for Contemporary Cinema at the Cannes Festival in 1981 and was shown on Central Television in 1982. The corpus is also composed of the play entitled Two Men from Derby first televised on BBC1 on 21 February 1976. The award-winning British television drama: Threads, written by Barry Hines and directed by Mick Jackson, is also included. This docudrama relating the account of a nuclear war on the city of Sheffield was shown in 1984. I have purposely chosen to include the different facets to illustrate the variety of Barry Hines’s artistic output. My selection also relies on the fact that these narratives span crucial decades in the history of the British working-class. The last decades of the 20th century encapsulate historical, economic and political upheavals which have affected all the components of the everyday living conditions of the working-class members. This era is synonymous with economic recession and its corollary: soaring unemployment. The changes also entail the feminisation of the work market and the de-industrialisation of Britain. This period therefore constitutes the backdrop to the outright re-shuffling of the traditional working-class culture threatening it with extinction. Barry Hines’s literary works occupy a 1 unique position against this historical background as they span the whole evolution – not to say, revolution. Barry Hines’s main motive lies in his political stance which he asserts through his novels and scripts. His awareness stems from his youth as he recalls in a partly- autobiographical anthology published in 2009. In the chapter entitled The Big Match he relates his memories as a working-class grammar school pupil. His discovery of the social inequalities is summed up thus: ‘What had been much more was the political experience, seeing the class system at work close-up.’1 The scathing censure of the British class-ridden society recurs throughout his works and structures his acceptation of the concept of class- consciousness. The writer intertwines different tiers of the definition propounded by Ira Katznelson and quoted by Dennis Dworkin in Class Struggles. Barry Hines’s stance combines the abstract ‘purely unequal relationship between capital and labour intrinsic to capitalism’ with the structural ‘social organisation of society (…) involving, for example, workplace social relations, the structures of labor markets, connections between home and work, and the organization of space, for example, working-class neighbourhoods.’2 The staunch socialist author lays the stress on the additional facet of class-consciousness set out by the critic, that is to say ‘the process whereby groups of people develop a common understanding of the social system or come to share a set of values as a result of their experience of class relationships.’3 Barry Hines hopefully advocates a further step which would result in active political participation. The prime importance laid on class-consciousness shapes the plots and the depictions of the characters. The literary treatment is redolent of the definition proposed by Raymond Williams in The Welsh Industrial Novel: The abstracted categories of “social” and “personal” are here, in these specific conditions, moreover, of the great majority of human beings – interfused and inextricable though not always indistinguishable. The privileged distances of another kind of fiction, where people can “live simply as human beings”, beyond the pressures and interruptions and accidents of society, are in another world or more specifically in another class.4 Barry Hines’s presentation of his protagonists vividly illustrates the inter-relations between the individual and the social microcosm they belong to. The overriding concept of class-consciousness is all the more acute as there are very few contacts with the other classes. 1 Barry Hines, This Artistic Life, Pomona, 2009, p. 90 2 Dennis Dworkin, Class Struggles, Pearson, 2007, p. 4 3 Op. cit., p. 4 4 Raymond Williams, The Welsh Industrial Novel, University College, Cardiff, 1979, p. 12 2 The writer’s literary realism complies with what Raymond Williams qualifies as ‘the realist tradition in fiction’ in The Long Revolution. The researcher’s analysis reads as follows: Neither element, neither society nor the individual, is there as a priority. The society is not a background against which the personal relationships are studied, nor are the individuals merely illustrations of aspects of the way of life.