Working-class Culture and Work as portrayed in Texts and Films of Alan Sillitoe´s "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" and "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner"

Resumen

My aim is to recreate from the texts and films the world which is shown, and then examine it in order to demonstrate a number of points. I hope to show that there is such a phenomenon as an English working class, and that this class has its own culture. This culture is different from, and in many ways opposed to, the “high” artistic culture of the elite, but is not a culture of lack, as in “lack of culture”. It is rather a creation of the working class themselves and serves as a positive force in their lives, which are again different from and frequently opposed to the lives of the upper and middle classes. It is also resistant to the mass culture and the ideology which this conveys, or is argued to convey, and these resistant attitudes form part of the working-class culture. Work plays an important part in the lives of Sillitoe´s characters, and this activity has been consistently neglected in English literature, at least as regards the working class. Despite views which represent the post-war working class in England as less cohesive and more individualistic, I argue that the way that Sillitoe´s characters live and think about their lives reflects the previous history of the working class, and the attitudes revealed had been developed over more than a century. Rather than being an isolated picture of two disconnected individuals, the works represent a point in a continuum of literature about the working class, a continuum which has been extended not least by Sillitoe himself. I include the films in this thesis for a number of reasons. The films are closely linked to the books not only through contemporaneity and the fact that Sillitoe wrote the screenplay for both, but also through the Free Cinema movement. This, I argue, can be seen as the cinematic counterpart to the Angry Young men in literature, and these two movements were and are closely interwoven in the cultural event of the late 50s/early 60s in England, and thus are considered from the same point of view as the books. The structure of this work is as follows: in the first part I give a brief outline of the Industrial Revolution in England, and the changes which it produced in society, especially in the political, educational and cultural fields. The key words in the title of this thesis, “work”, “culture”, “class”, are all complex, open to multiple interpretations, and all have their roots in the Industrial Revolution. This leads me to the development of the idea of culture and the development of cultural studies as a discrete field of enquiry. I examine the literature produced by and about the working class, with particular reference to the work itself. In the second part I look at the cultural production in wartime and post-war England, which includes the work of those writers usually grouped together as the Angry Young Men, to give the social and cultural background against which Sillitoe wrote the works to be studied. This takes me on to the books themselves, with particular attention paid to the role of work and culture, in its various meanings, which will include the ideology to which the characters are subjected. In the third part I examine the two films, both as a development of the Free Cinema movement and in the same terms as used for the books, namely in terms of the portrayal of the two main characters in their respective roles in society and their reactions to the ideology of that society, and also in terms of their portrayal of culture. Finally, some conclusions are drawn, in which the main point is that Sillitoe showed in these two works that the working class have their own culture and ideology, and that these are different from and opposed to the culture and ideology which are dominant in the society in which they live.