Alienation and Hybridity. Patterns of Estrangement in the British Novels since the 1950s.

228 Pages·2017·1.85 MB·English

Alienation and Hybridity. Patterns of Estrangement in
the British Novels since the 1950s.
Inauguraldissertation
zur Erlangung eines Doktorgrades der Philosophie
im Fachbereich A
Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften
der Bergischen Universität Wuppertal
vorgelegt von
Remus Racolţa
aus
Timişoara
Wuppertal, im Juni, 2017
Die Dissertation kann wie folgt zitiert werden:
urn:nbn:de:hbz:468-20180711-092740-9
[http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn=urn%3Anbn%3Ade%3Ahbz%3A468-20180711-092740-9
Table of Contents
1. Introduction ................................................................................................................... 3
2. Alienation: Definition, Concept and Meanings .......................................................... 20
2.1. Etymological Background and Semantics ............................................................... 20
2.2. Philosophical Approaches ........................................................................................ 24
2.2.1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: A Philosophical Precursor of Alienation Theories ........ 24
2.2.2. Hegel’s Concept of Alienation ............................................................................. 29
2.2.3. Marx’s Concept of Alienation .............................................................................. 34
2.2.4. Fromm’s Concept of Alienation ........................................................................... 41
3. Models of Alienation in Literary Studies ................................................................... 45
3.1. Alienation in Literary Dictionaries and Handbooks ................................................ 45
3.2. The ‘Travelling’ of Alienation from Marxist Philosophy to Fiction ....................... 49
3.3. The Classical Alienation Model in Fiction .............................................................. 54
3.3.1. Alienation in British Postwar Fiction of the 1950s: Us versus Them .................. 54
3.3.2. The Angry Decade: British Working-Class Fiction in the 1950s ......................... 59
3.3.3. The Alienated Working-Class Hero of the 1950s ................................................. 65
3.4. The Multidimensional Model of Alienation ............................................................ 73
3.4.1. Alienation in Post-Industrial Fiction of the 1990s: North vs. South .................... 73
3.4.2. Alienation and Hybridity Post-2000: The Space of the Impossible. .................... 89
4. The Angry Young Men Movement (1950s): The Consciousness of Class .............. 102
4.1. Alienation as Inward Migration – Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar (1959) ............. 102
4.2. Permanent Alienation – Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night Sunday Morning (1958) 114
4.3. Alienation as (Un)Successful Embourgeoisement – John Braine’s Room at the Top
(1957) ............................................................................................................................ 124
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5. The Celtic Fringe (1990s): The Subordination of Class ........................................... 134
5.1. “Nay Point in Hoping for the Best” – James Kelman’s How Late it Was, How Late
(1994) ............................................................................................................................ 134
5.2. “Scotland Takes Drugs in Psychic Defense“ – Irvine Welsh’s Northern Scottish
Hero(es) of the 1990s: Trainspotting (1993), Porno (2002) and Skagboys (2012) ...... 143
5.3. The Angri(er) Young Man: The Northern Yob ..................................................... 154
6. Fictions of Migration (1980s-2000s): ‘Classless’ Hybridity .................................... 165
6.1. “Clowns in Search of Crowns”. Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) .... 165
6.2. “A Funny Kind of Englishman” – Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990)
............................................................................................................................... 182
6.3. “Half Blacky-White” – Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) .................................. 195
7. Conclusions ............................................................................................................... 209
8. Bibliography ............................................................................................................. 213
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1. Introduction
What is alienation and how can one define it? There are numerous possible definitions of
the term given by many thinkers over time, yet Jimmy Reid, the Clydeside trade union
activist, managed perhaps to put it best during his inauguration speech as rector of Glas-
gow University in 1972:
Alienation is the precise and correctly applied word for describing the
major social problem in Britain today. People feel alienated by society. In
some intellectual circles it is treated almost as a new phenomenon. It has,
however, been with us for years. What I believe is true is that today it is
more widespread, more pervasive than ever before. Let me right at the
outset define what I mean by alienation. It is the cry of men who feel them-
selves the victims of blind economic forces beyond their control. It's the
frustration of ordinary people excluded from the processes of decision-
making. The feeling of despair and hopelessness that pervades people who
feel with justification that they have no real say in shaping or determining
their own destinies. Many may not have rationalised it. May not even
understand, may not be able to articulate it. But they feel it. It therefore
conditions and colours their social attitudes. Alienation expresses itself in
different ways in different people. It is to be found in what our courts often
describe as the criminal antisocial behaviour of a section of the communi-
ty. It is expressed by those young people who want to opt out of society,
by drop-outs, the so-called maladjusted, those who seek to escape per-
manently from the reality of society through intoxicants and narcotics. Of
course, it would be wrong to say it was the sole reason for these things.
But it is a much greater factor in all of them than is generally recognised.
(The Independent, 2010).
The concept of alienation played a paramount role in the general political, social and
philosophical discourse in the immediate aftermath of World War 2 in Western Europe,
and the realm of fiction was no exception. Great Britain witnessed an unprecedented out-
pouring of alienation-related phenomena in the emerging working-class fiction of the
1950s, 60s and 70s, most prominent of all being the authors of the so-called “Angry
Decade”. Even though alienation continued to play an important role in working-class
fiction, Marxism as a whole seemed to be on the wane during the following decades, the
last important expression of working-class fiction being the works of Scottish authors
such as James Kelman and Irvine Welsh during the first half of the 1990s. The official
dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 26th 1991 sent shockwaves through the
entire world and was seen by many in Western Europe and the US as an irrefutable victory
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not only over the Soviet Union, but also over Marxism (or Marxism-Leninism) as the
official Soviet ideology as a whole. After the initial shock, the “end of history” was her-
alded by Western theorists such as Francis Fukuyama, a view that became very popular
during the day. As Terry Eagleton put it, the general misconception among theorists about
the beginning of the 1990s seemed to have been the idea that world history would expe-
rience an unparalleled process of ossification: “The future would simply be the present
infinitely repeated – or, as the postmodernist remarked, ‘the present plus more options’”
(Eagleton 2004: 7). Many cultural commentators did not consider at that time that it was
not the end of human history unfolding, but a major socio-cultural disruption, which was
set to redefine the realities of the new millennium and radically change and reshape the
old antagonisms of the past.
In the world of fiction, things were no different. Marxism, which, as previously men-
tioned, dominated the cultural discourse for the last four decades in which it experienced
a slow but steady decline, was faced with its own demise after the emergence and growing
popularity of postcolonialism, an academic discipline focused on the cultural legacy and
implications of colonialism and imperialism. The “New Literature in English”, as it was
called during the day, brought forward literary concepts which were different as well as
English-speaking authors who were “exotic”, either second-generation Brits or coming
from South-East Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and many other former British colonies. If
one concentrates on quintessential concepts within both literary Marxism and postcolo-
nialism, one can find striking similarities between the waning Marxist concept of aliena-
tion (which played a paramount role in British working-class fiction especially during the
1950s and 60s) and the concept of hybridity within postcolonial theory.
The hypothesis of my dissertation is that a shift has occurred in literary theory from the
Marxist concept of class to postcolonial concept of race/identity during the end of the
1980s and the beginning of 1990s, a shift which has led to the reconceptualization of
alienation under the guise of the postcolonial concept of hybridity. This hypothesis is at
odds with standard accounts of most literary theorists. The common view held is that
hybridity and alienation are completely unrelated to each other, both concepts belonging
to two different literary currents, namely Marxism and postcolonialism. The generally
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accepted view of contemporary literary theory is that hybridity succeeded and effectively
displaced the previously significant Marxist concept of alienation, thus engendering the
path within literary theory which eventually led to the disappearance of Marxism and the
emergence of postcolonialism.
At first glance, the comparison between these two abovementioned concepts might seem
paradoxical. However, writing as early as the 1970s about the renaissance of alienation
theories in postwar Europe and the world (despite the fact that Marx’s ideas had been
formulated centuries before the 1970s), Adam Schaff postulated a captivating assumption
on why certain concepts become ‘fashionable’ and the underlying conditions:
In order to answer the question why the theory of alienation became ‘fash-
ionable’ once more, why it proves useful in various fields of the social
sciences, we must examine the foundation of the contemporary social
transformations which condition this phenomenon. Otherwise it is difficult
to explain a ‘wandering of ideas’ when certain concepts and theories
forged in the past and considered outdated take on a new significance in a
new social context. Ideas, in my opinion, become ‘fashionable’ when they
offer a theoretical answer to some objective need; old and rejected ideas
are taken up and reanimated when, properly adapted, they make possible
a better understanding of contemporary life and a solution of its problems.
Herein lies the secret of the renaissance of the theory of alienation” (Schaff
1980: 85).
Applying this idea to the postcolonial concept of hybridity and analyzing the transforma-
tion of the seemingly dated concept of alienation, we should be able to establish not only
what the core characteristics of these two concepts are, but also whether there are over-
lapping characteristics or junctures between the two. The newly discovered insights could
lead to a newer (and perhaps more precise) understanding of both of these important
concepts within contemporary fiction and literary theory.
It remains to ascertain, then, if and in what way these two concepts are interrelated. Let
us discuss the question of how concepts suffer certain alterations when they are ‘adapted’.
Discussing the parallels between the concept of alienation and that of hybridity, we find
that one common feature linking these two concepts is their versatility and long ‘travels’,
not only within the same discipline, but also from one discipline or scientific field to
another. For instance, the concept of alienation ‘travelled’ from religion to philosophy
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(e.g. the Social Contract Theorists), within philosophy from Rousseau to Hegel and from
Hegel’s Idealism to Marx’s sociopolitical beliefs, from which it later travelled to the
realm of working-class fiction. Similarly, hybridity started out as a purely biological term
meaning the cross-breeding of two plants or animals of different breeds, varieties or spe-
cies; later on, it entered the racially charged colonial discourse of the ninetenth-century,
only to entered the fields of linguistics and fiction during the early 20th-century (cf. Bal
2002: 25). In fiction, postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha used the concept of
hybridity as a quintessential characteristic of multicultural diversity. As a result, we can
logically conclude that both concepts have significantly changed along the way, having
travelled from one discipline to the other and having suffered several ‘mutations’ between
historical periods. Thus, each concept has not only been ‘altered’ and ‘adapted’ by each
discipline or field, but both of them have also proven to be versatile, flexible concepts
that allow for more than one rigid definition confined to one scientific field.
Restricting the span of both concepts to fiction (especially working-class fiction and fic-
tion of migration) only, if one takes a closer look at the phenomena of alienation described
in many of the working-class novels of the 1950s (including its Scottish offshoots as late
as the 1990s) and novels of migration (which are mainly focusing on the concepts of
hybridity, becoming en vogue during the end of the 1990s / beginning of the 2000s), one
can recognize that the underlying phenomena manifest in both types of novels share re-
markable similarities. Thus, in both genres, a feeling of social or psychological alienation,
deep-seated disenchantment against an opposite ‘Other’, anger or frustration, feelings of
unbelonging, powerlessness, a general sense of ennui, are dominant features. Further-
more, the main character is usually portrayed not as an active subject in control of his/her
actions and in tune with his/her environment, but as a passive subject that is trying to cope
with various negative situations imposed on him/her from the outside by a social reality
or environment he/she cannot control or escape from. In both genres, we can ascertain
that these phenomena of alienation are rooted in a contested space, constantly negotiated
between two diverging constituents. It is the “third space of the impossible (cf. Acheraiou
2011: 79) in which a dysfunctional, unbalanced relationship between diametrically op-
posed constituents is constantly (re)negotiated that the main characters of both working-
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class fiction and fictions of migration inhabit. With both concepts of alienation and hy-
bridity being characterized by a flawed relationship between two opposing constituents,
we may conclude that, somewhat paradoxically, the concept of hybridity could be per-
ceived as the continuation of the concept of alienation under a new guise, due to the post-
colonial turn which led to the waning of the concept of alienation in the eyes of the pre-
sent-day literary canon.
However, my definition of alienation as a framework or model made up of two opposing
binaries is not comprehensive enough without taking into account the possible constitu-
ents of the frameworks models. Thus, we must establish what the precise constituents of
each binary framework are. I define alienation in working-class fiction as a hostile, in-
compatible, unbalanced relationship between the two constituents of ‘us’ vs. ‘them’,
where ‘us’ is the world of the working-class hero, and the ‘them’ the middle- and upper-
classes. We can easily detect that the common denominator connecting the two opposing
constituents is that of class. This also explains the great attention these novels received
in Great Britain during the time in which the Marxist concept of alienation was very pop-
ular (i.e. the 1950s) not only with cultural theorists and literary critics but also with the
general British readership of the time. Within the binary framework made up of the con-
stituents of working-class and the upper-class, there are what I would call dominant and
subordinate elements, which are essential if we are to understand how the binaries ‘mu-
tated’ during the last four decades and what role these specific elements played in the
‘mutations’ of the concept of alienation itself. In the case of the alienation binary frame-
work of the 1950s, the dominant element between the opposing constituents of working-
and upper-class is that of class, while the geographic location (invariably the North of
England) is to be seen as the subordinate element.
This model seems to ‘shift’ if we take a closer look at the newer Scottish version of wor-
king-class fiction of the 1990s, the last offshoots of the original (Northern) English wor-
king-class of the 1950s. The alienation binary model of the 1990s is made up of different
constituents, namely those of the Celtic North opposed to the Anglo-Saxon South, which
are also characterized by a deeply flawed and hostile relationship between them. The
novels of Scottish authors such as James Kelman and Irvine Welsh exhibit in my view a
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strong Scottish (national) element as dominant element, thus, in the case of the so-called
Celtic Fringe (Haywood 1997: 151) novels, it is the (northern) location that plays the
dominant role, while the previously dominant aspect of class becomes subordinate. This,
however, does not mean that class has been erased and plays no role whatsoever in these
novels; instead, we may easily detect that the previously dominant element of class has
become subordinated to Scottish identity and geographic location.
Interestingly, the same definition of alienation (i.e. a binary model made up of two op-
posing constituents) can also be applied to the postcolonial concept of hybridity, suggest-
ing that hybridity could be seen as a reconceptualization of the Marxist concept of alien-
ation under a postcolonial guise might be a valid point. In the binary framework of hy-
bridity, the opposing constituents ‘shift’ again, from the Celtic North vs. the Anglo-Saxon
South to the flawed relationship between the (traditionally Christian) British centre (i.e.
Great Britain itself) and the (Muslim) Black colonial periphery. In my view, hybridity in
the early postcolonial novels is to be seen not as the primarily positive feature described
by Homi Bhabha, but as an uncomfortable “third space of the impossible”, a space char-
acterized by deep feelings of alienation and estrangement for the characters that inhabit
it. Within this specific binary framework, we can easily identify the dominant aspect to
be that of cultural/racial identity (i.e. British vs. British Indian/Pakistani/Jamaican, etc.),
while the (previously) subordinate aspect of class seems to have completely disappeared
it being replaced with the aspect of geographic location (Centre vs. Periphery). Even
more interesting is the fact that the element of geographic location seems to connect the
concept of hybridity with the concept of alienation in the working-class fiction of the 90s
(i.e. the so-called Celtic Fringe), yet another aspect which connects not only the two con-
cepts per se, but also the literary movements of Marxism and postcolonialism. The dif-
ference between these two literary movements consist in the fact that geographic location
in the working-class fiction of the 90s is limited to Great Britain, while in postcolonialism
Great Britain itself becomes the opposed element in relation to its former imperial colo-
nies. As far as hybridity is concerned, the focus has moved on the post-racial, multicultu-
ral British society, globalization and on the idea of (postnational) identity during a time
characterized by mass immigration from the former colonies of the British empire to the
UK.
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