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British Social Realism in the Arts since 1940

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British Social Realism in the Arts since 1940 Edited by

David Tucker

Introduction, selection and editorial matter © David Tucker 2011 Individual chapters © Contributors 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–24245–6 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data British social realism in the arts since 1940 / edited by David Tucker. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–230–24245–6 (hardback) 1. Social realism in the arts—Great Britain. 2. Social realism— Great Britain—History—20th century. I. Tucker, David, 1978– NX180.S57B75 2011 2011007807 700 .412094109045—dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

For Tatiana

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Contents

List of Figures

viii

Acknowledgements

x

Notes on Contributors

xi

Introduction – ‘an anthropology of ourselves’ Vs ‘the incomprehensibility of the real’: Making the Case for British Social Realism David Tucker

1

1 Tragedy, Ethics and History in Contemporary British Social Realist Film Paul Dave

17

2 Staging the Contemporary: Politics and Practice in Post-War Social Realist Theatre Stephen Lacey

57

3 Bad Teeth: British Social Realism in Fiction Rod Mengham

81

4 ‘this/is not a metaphor’: The Possibility of Social Realism in British Poetry Keston Sutherland

103

5 Re-presenting Reality, Recovering the Social: The Poetics and Politics of Social Realism and Visual Art Gillian Whiteley

132

6 Small Screens and Big Voices: Televisual Social Realism and the Popular Dave Rolinson

172

Index

212

vii

List of Figures

I.1

1.1 1.2

1.3

1.4

5.1 5.2

5.3

5.4 5.5

Humphrey Spender. Street Scene, Bolton (1937). Spender spies a man who might be waiting for the traffic light to c Bolton Council change colour. Robinson in Ruins (2010). The wandering Robinson tracks c Patrick Keiller the survival of life in a time of crisis. Photograph from the set of This is England (2006). Shaun (Thomas Turgoose) is shorn in Shane Meadows’ working c Dean Roberts class culture of mutual care. Photograph from the set of Dead Man’s Shoes (2004). Richard (Paddy Considine) and his brother Anthony (Toby Kebbell) make their way across England’s Midlands c Dean Roberts looking for revenge. Alfred Butterworth & Sons, Glebe Mills, Hollinwood (1901), from the Mitchell and Kenyon Collection. A new vision c BFI of the working class. Dame Laura Knight RA, Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-ring, c Imperial War Museum 1943, oil painting. Peter L. Péri, South Lambeth Council Estate, c. 1949. Péri created this large concrete mural relief on the staircase tower of a block of flats built by the London County c The Courtauld Institute of Art Council. Visitors passing Siegfried Charoux’s The Islanders at the Festival of Britain in 1951. Charoux’s large relief was at the end of the Sea and Ships Pavilion and was part of the c London River Walk at the South Bank Exhibition. Transport Museum Jack Smith, Mother Bathing Child, 1953, oil on board. c The Tate Collection David Stephenson, Conanby near Conisborough, Yorkshire. Photograph by Daniel Meadows from the Free Photographic Omnibus, 1973. ‘David lived with his father and his step-mother in a council estate at Conanby. When he was fourteen David was playing with a lemon-squeezer in a bus queue; some of the contents of the lemon-squeezer sprayed over an eighteen-year-old viii

7 21

36

38

42 139

141

142 145

List of Figures

sixth former who beat David up. He suffered a fractured skull and a brain haemorrhage and was confined to hospital for three months. David worked for a coach-builder in Rotherham and managed quite well in spite of a very pronounced limp.’ (Daniel Meadows in private correspondence with the author July 2010). c Daniel Meadows c Chris Killip 5.6 Chris Killip, Youth, Jarrow, Tyneside, 1976.

ix

157 159

Acknowledgements

The editor wishes to thank the following for their generous support: Dorothy Sheridan and James Hinton for their assistance with and insights into the Mass Observation Archive; Catherine Mitchell at Palgrave and Christabel Scaife for all their help in bringing the book to print; Blunt London for help with images; Perry Bonewell at Bolton Museum for help with and kind permission to use images from the Humphrey Spender collection. The editor, authors and publisher wish to thank the following for generous permission to reproduce copyright material: Daniel Meadows for David Stephenson, Conanby near Conisborough, Yorkshire (1973), Chris Killip for Youth, Jarrow, Tyneside (1976), the London Transport Museum for ‘Visitors Passing Siegfried Charoux’s The Islanders at the Festival of Britain in 1951’ (1951), the Courtauld Institute of Art for South Lambeth Council Estate by Peter L. Péri (c.1949), the Imperial War Museum Collection for Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-ring by Dame Laura Knight (1943), Tate Images for Mother Bathing Child by Jack Smith (1953), Dean Rogers for photographs from the film sets of Dead Man’s Shoes (2004) and This is England (2006), Patrick Keiller for a still from Robinson in Ruins (2010), The British Film Institute for a still from Alfred Butterworth & Sons, Glebe Mills, Hollinwood (1901), from the Mitchell and Kenyon Collection, Errata Editions for an extract from Walking Back Home, Bolton Council for images from the Humphrey Spender collection, Faber & Faber for an extract from Philip Larkin’s Collected Poems, and for an c Tom Leonard from outside the narrative: excerpt from ‘nora’s place’ poems 1965-2009, WordPower/Etruscan Books 2009.

x

Notes on Contributors Paul Dave is Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of East London. His publications include Visions of England: Class and Culture in Contemporary Cinema (2006) along with other contributions to journals and edited collections on British cinema. His current research is on British cinema and romanticism. Stephen Lacey is Professor of Drama, Film and Television, at the University of Glamorgan. His publications include British Realist Theatre: The New Wave in its Context 1956–65 (1995), Television Drama: Past Present and Future with J. Bignell and M.K. Macmurraugh-Kavanagh (editors) (Palgrave, 2000), Popular Television Drama: Critical Perspectives with J. Bignell (editors) (2005), and Tony Garnett (2007). From 2002 to 2006 he was co-director of the AHRC-funded research project ‘Cultures of British TV Drama: 1960–82’ and is currently part of another AHRC project, ‘Spaces of Television Drama: Production, Site and Style’ (with Jonathan Bignell and James Chapman). He was also part of a team researching the representation of Cardiff and Wales in Dr Who and Torchwood funded by the BBC Trust and has recently completed a monograph for the BFI/Palgrave on Cathy Come Home (2011). Rod Mengham is Reader in Modern English Literature at the University of Cambridge, where he is also Curator of Works of Art at Jesus College. He is the author of books on Charles Dickens, Emily Bronte and Henry Green, as well as of The Descent of Language (1993). He has edited collections of essays on contemporary fiction, violence and avant-garde art, and the fiction of the 1940s. He is also the editor of the Equipage series of poetry pamphlets and co-editor and co-translator of Altered State: the New Polish Poetry (2003) and co-editor of Vanishing Points: New Modernist Poems (2005). His own poems have been published under the titles Unsung: New and selected Poems (1996; 2nd edition, 2001) and Parleys and Skirmishes with photographs by Marc Atkins (2007). His most recent books are Thomas Hardy’s Shorter Fiction, co-written with Sophie Gilmartin (2007) and The Salt Companion to John Tranter (2010). Dave Rolinson is Lecturer in the Department of Film, Media and Journalism at the University of Stirling. He is the author of Alan Clarke xi

xii Notes on Contributors

(2005), articles on British film and TV for various books and journals including the Journal of British Cinema and Television and The Cinema of Britain and Ireland, and booklets for DVDs including This Sporting Life. He is writing a book on Stephen Frears, partly facilitated by AHRC research leave, some of the findings from which appear in this book. He edits the website www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk. Keston Sutherland is Reader in Poetics at the University of Sussex. His publications include Stupefaction: a radical anatomy of phantoms (2011), essays on poetry, philosophy and social theory, and several books of poetry, including The Stats on Infinity (2010), Stress Position (2009) and Hot White Andy (2007). He edits the critical theory and poetics journal Quid. David Tucker is Associate Tutor at the University of Sussex. He has published in the journals Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui and the Journal of Beckett Studies, and collections including Publishing Samuel Beckett (2011) and The Tragic Comedy of Samuel Beckett (2009). He has exhibited artwork in New York and Berlin, and is currently preparing a monograph on Samuel Beckett’s fascinations with the seventeenth-century philosopher Arnold Geulincx. Gillian Whiteley is a curator and Lecturer in Critical and Historical Studies at Loughborough University School of the Arts. Publications include monographs Assembling the Absurd: The Sculpture of George Fullard (1998) and Social, Savage, Sensual: The Sculpture of Ralph Brown (2009); essays in P. Curtis(ed.), Sculpture in 20th-century Britain, (2003) and H. Crawford (ed.), Artistic Bedfellows: Histories, Theories and Conversations in Collaborative Art Practices (2008), and co-editing (with Jane Tormey) Telling Stories: Countering Narrative in Art, Theory and Film (2009). She is currently completing a book Junk: Art and the Politics of Trash for IB Tauris. Earlier projects include conducting interviews for the National Sound Archives Artists’ Lives Project and contributing ‘Art for Social Space: Public Sculpture and Urban Regeneration in Postwar Britain’ to e-project Designing Britain 1945–75 (www.vads.ac.uk) Her curated exhibitions include Radical Mayhem: Welfare State International and its Followers (2008) at MidPennine Arts, Burnley and Pan-demonium at AC Institute, New York (2009). She is Associate Editor of the journal, Art & the Public Sphere. See www.bricolagekitchen.com.

Introduction – ‘an anthropology of ourselves’ Vs ‘the incomprehensibility of the real’: Making the Case for British Social Realism David Tucker

In 1930, at the age of twenty-four and unsure where his literary prospects lay, Samuel Beckett, the future Nobel Prize winner and leading figure of the twentieth-century literary avant-garde, gave a term’s worth of lectures on modern French literature at his old university, Trinity College Dublin. Notes to these lectures survive as fragmentary transcriptions taken by a small number of the students then present. One of these students, Rachel Burrows, recalls Beckett’s thoughts on the realism of Balzac: He hated what he called the snowball act, which means that you do something that has causes, causes, causes, causes so that it’s all perfectly consistent. (Burrows 1989, p. 5) For Beckett, such a ‘snowball act’ of cause and effect in Balzac’s realism fails because it falls too far short of recognizing what Beckett described to his students as ‘the incomprehensibility of the real’ (ibid.). According to Beckett, an author’s focus on the surface details of causal connections between one thing and another emphatically does not get anywhere near the heart of the matter. Beckett would later refer to fictional characters in works subjected to what he called this ‘anchaînement mécanique, fatal, de circonstances [mechanical, fatal, enchainment of circumstances]’ (Le Juez 2008, p. 28) as merely ‘clockwork cabbages’, unreal life-forms stuttering along, half-suffocating in a ‘chloroformed world’ (Beckett 1992, p. 119). However, Beckett also rejected wholeheartedly the option of refuge in extreme alternatives to naturalistic realism. One of these alternatives – a 1

2


formalized conceptual abstraction – came in for particularly sharp criticism. Beckett wrote derisively in 1948 of what he called the ‘estimables abstracteurs de quintessence [estimable abstractors of quintessence] Mondrian, Lissitzky, Malevitsch, Moholy-Nagy’ (Beckett 1983, p. 135). Yet, as Erik Tonning has argued, Beckett’s dislike of the abstract in these painters’ works does not necessarily exclude his admiration for more complex formulations of abstraction. Transposing the term ‘abstract’ into his own preferred vocabulary of the ‘metaphysical concrete’, Beckett commented in his diary, while visiting Germany in 1936, on Karl Ballmer’s painting Kopf in Rot (c.1930). According to Beckett’s note, Kopf in Rot instances ‘fully a posteriori painting. Object not exploited to illustrate an idea, as in say [Fernand] Léger or [Willi] Baumeister, but primary’ (cited in Tonning 2007, p. 22). What appears to be the case with Beckett’s critique of the ‘estimables abstracteurs’, as with that of Balzac’s realism, is that his arguments are at least partly directed against one-sided and simplistically inadequate genre conventions. Beckett’s arguments against Balzac’s realism might also benefit from their being thought of in relation to a broader literary–historical context; as was the case with a number of Modernist innovators, Beckett’s criticisms were in part a reaction against his more immediate forebears. In a famous letter to his friend Axel Kaun of July 1937, for example, Beckett imagines the formal literary stylistics he was so opposed to via images of nineteenth-century social gentilities: Grammar and style. To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit or the imperturbability of a true gentleman. A mask. Let us hope the time will come, thank God that in certain circles it has already come, when language is most efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused. (Beckett 1983, pp. 171–2) This might all seem a world away from British social realism. Yet what it helps to foreground is the possibility of realism, and critiques of realism, as historically determined, malleable and mutable. Moving towards historicizing Beckett’s arguments as a microcosm of broader Modernist aesthetics does, admittedly, rob this most individual of authors of some of his individuality. However, it also serves to bring into focus Beckett’s complex and ambitious polemic as one that is in part determined by its historical context, and it thereby warns us against certain dangers of rushing too fast to dismiss outright and for all time something that might openly call itself, perhaps even without shame, ‘realism’.

Introduction 3

Let us take a further refracted approach to an aspect of realism, namely that of the visible, verifiable details of a reality, via the Polish-born filmmaker Krzysztof Kie´slowski. Kie´slowski argues that the goal of art is ‘to capture what lies within us’ (Kie´slowski 1993, p. 194). This is something beyond or behind the surfaces of objects, something underlying the ‘fabric of things’ that we can physically sense, as Virginia Woolf dismissively described the ‘Edwardian’ novelist’s world in Character in Fiction (Woolf 2008, p. 49). According to Kie´slowski, ‘[g]reat literature doesn’t only get nearer to it, it’s in a position to describe it’ (Kie´slowski 1993, p. 194). That might be good news for literature, but literature’s poorer cousin – cinema – cannot, according to Kie´slowski, match literature’s access to such a ‘within’ ‘because it [cinema] doesn’t have the means. It’s not intelligent enough. Consequently, it’s not equivocal enough’ (ibid., p. 195). Cinema’s natural habitat, Kie´slowski goes on to claim, is a world of prosaic reality and concomitant surface detail, a ‘fabric of things’ that blocks access to anything beyond itself: For me, a bottle of milk is simply a bottle of milk; when it spills, it means milk’s been spilt. Nothing more. It doesn’t mean the world’s fallen apart or that the milk symbolizes a mother’s milk which her child couldn’t drink because the mother died early, for example. It doesn’t mean that to me. A bottle of spilt milk is simply a bottle of spilt milk. And that’s cinema. Unfortunately, it doesn’t mean anything else. (Kie´slowski 1993, p. 195) Even with such a sure sense of cinema’s grounding in the detail of visible reality, however, Kie´slowski describes his own continual, aspirational drive against these essential realist strictures. The filmmaker admits that he himself has never managed to escape cinema’s formal literalism. Yet he does claim that such an urge against the boundaries of cinematic form has come to succeed on a few occasions, and his list of the filmmakers who have managed to somehow make cinema ‘intelligent enough’ in this regard might surprise: Welles achieved that miracle once. Only one director in the world has managed to achieve that miracle in the last few years, and that’s Tarkovsky. Bergman achieved this miracle a few times. Fellini achieved it a few times. A few people achieved it. Ken Loach, too, in Kes. (Ibid.)

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Loach is the only director in Kie´slowski’s list who is given with a Christian name, an indication perhaps that few British filmmakers are normally considered alongside such estimable company. However, Kie´slowski’s comments are not quoted here as an invocation of authority for a British filmmaker by association with the giants of world cinema. More importantly, what they point to is the notion of an escape from literalism operating in one of the films most frequently cited as typifying genre conventions of British social realism, a film that itself tells a story about flights of freedom and struggles against constraint, Loach’s adaptation of Barry Hines’s 1968 A Kestrel for a Knave, Kes (1969). Kie´slowski’s conception of realist detail is one where no access is granted to anything beyond the surface displayed. It is realism without a capacity for metonymy or metaphor. In order to attain something approaching the full-blooded capabilities of literature, Kie´slowski implies, film must somehow move, or be pushed, beyond its own lack of intelligence. However, as is revealed with the reference to Kes, it is not necessary to simply turn one’s back on realism per se in order to achieve this. Kie´slowski’s comments, along with Beckett’s, pose challenges to simplistic categorizations of realism. These challenges point to the possibility of revealing what might be strange and different in the otherwise seemingly ordinary and usual, and of a need to seek precision in discussions of realism. They can be further focused with a comparison that places them in the context of an appreciation of social realism in its specifically British, twentiethcentury, manifestations. It is a comparison that reveals a strangeness and ineffability indelibly tied into an otherwise realist, and avowedly social, project, and that places us at the start of the historical period traversed in this volume. In 1937, Tom Harrisson, an anthropologist who had spent a number of years living with tribal groups in Borneo and claimed to have partaken in cannibalism, along with Humphrey Jennings, co-curator of London’s major International Surrealist Exhibition of June 1936 and a documentary filmmaker whom Lindsay Anderson famously described as ‘the only real poet the British cinema has yet produced’ (cited in Jennings 1982, p. 53), and Charles Madge, a poet whose editor was T.S. Eliot at Faber & Faber, together founded the organization they called Mass-Observation. Mass-Observation turned just such a transcription of surface detail, the surface detail that was rejected by the Modernist aesthetics of Beckett and Woolf, and was cited by Kie´slowski as evidence of cinema’s innate lack of intelligence, to incredible lengths into a proposal for a social science. What Harrisson called Mass-Observation’s

Introduction 5

‘anthropology of ourselves’ intended to reveal was nothing less grand than the ‘Mass’ of Britain to itself (Mass-Observation 1943, p. 7). The three founders had become disillusioned with what they saw as an entrenched political and media bias, and their frustration came to a head following media coverage of Edward VIII’s abdication crisis of 1936. They sought, in opposition to the dominant mainstream, to give voice to ‘the ordinary and non-vocal masses of Britain’ (Harrisson 1961, p. 14). To this professed end they followed a twofold route. In London, Jennings and Madge concentrated on recruiting a nationwide panel of what they referred to as ‘observers’. These recruits were invited to record their personal impressions of large-scale political and cultural events, beginning with the abdication crisis, in the form of answers to a questionnaire derived from Jennings’ and Madge’s ideas for ‘Popular Poetry’. As Nick Hubble describes it, ‘Popular Poetry’ was ‘a surrealist-inspired social movement that would map the collective mass consciousness of the nation through the establishment of factory- and college-based ‘Coincidence Clubs’ (Hubble 2006, p. 4). Observers also answered questions about day-to-day minutiae going on around them, and their personal beliefs about topics such as superstition. Mass-Observation considered the minutiae of personal, individual response to be the important and neglected context in which larger-scale events took place, and those early questionnaires became templates for what are now known as ‘directives’; sets of themed questions still sent out to volunteers in 2010. Recent examples have been concerned with such diverse topics as ‘Your Home’, ‘Quoting and Quotations’, ‘Public Library Buildings’, and ‘Genes, Genetics and Cloning’. A second approach to data collection was founded in the group’s northern outpost of the pen-named ‘Worktown’, so-called after Helen Lynd’s American study Middletown, and otherwise known as Bolton, where Harrisson was the group’s convenor. Harrisson was later to explain his choice of Bolton as having been determined by concerns of a global, as well as of a local nature. He wrote in a later reappraisal of Mass-Observation entitled Britain Revisited about his anthropological expedition to Malekula in the New Hebrides and how this had influenced his choice of and research in Bolton. It had struck Harrisson that a very specific and important ‘trail led from the Western Pacific to the south of Lancashire’ (Harrisson 1961, p. 26): What was there of Western civilisation which impacted into the tremendously independent and self-contained culture of those

6


cannibal people on their Melenesian mountain? Only one thing, significantly, in the mid-thirties: the Unilever Combine. (Ibid., p. 25) Having noted that ‘[e]ven the cannibals in the mountains of Melanesia were touched by the tentacles of this colossus, buying copra, selling soap’, Harrisson traced this supply back to Unilever’s beginnings in Bolton (Harrisson 1959, p. 159). Harrisson had seemingly located, in the birthplace of William Lever in Park Street, Bolton, nothing less than the nascent heart of global capitalism’s Victorian birth. Setting up headquarters only half a mile away at 85 Davenport Street, Harrisson proceeded to spy on, and to encourage others to spy on, or ‘observe’, those in most immediate physical proximity to this almost mythical centre – the working class of Bolton.1 Research in Worktown involved some even more curious approaches to data collection than the questionnaires being compiled under the auspices of Jennings and Madge in London. Harrisson’s group insisted that the information collected on members of the public must be gathered, at least for the most part, surreptitiously, and various covert observational and interventionist ruses were therefore contrived. According to these procedures few details were considered too insignificant to escape the prying eyes of the organization’s observers. For example, in some of their studies the observers would count the taps a person in a pub made on a cigarette to dispel their ash. They noted where exactly on a female partner’s body men placed their hands during public dances. Taking their apparent fascination with forms of intimacy beyond observation, members of the group would intervene on what they apprised as intimate moments, physically tripping into courting couples on Blackpool promenade and recording the results. All of this real detail was intended by the group to form the vital material needed in the new ‘anthropology of ourselves’. This was an anthropology that placed a particular emphasis on the importance of single images, of single instances of actual things happening, and being seen to happen. Accordingly, the photographer Humphrey Spender joined the Bolton group. Though Spender was only with the group for a short time, many of his images have come to encapsulate the experiences of MassObservation in Bolton. Spender would conceal a camera in what he describes as a ‘very shabby raincoat’, and take pictures of people who were unaware they were being photographed (Spender 1982, p. 18). Mass-Observation was in one sense a very realist project, a living archival collation where the details recorded were interpreted, if without

Introduction 7

Figure I.1 Humphrey Spender. Street Scene, Bolton (1937). Spender spies a man c Bolton Council who might be waiting for the traffic light to change colour.

strictly planned methodology, as a kind of cultural metonymic, the otherwise overlooked physical and psychological minutiae of Britain used to reveal the identity of a country to itself. In another sense, the early days of the project discussed here realized a much stranger aesthetic. Driven by Harrisson’s subjective associative procedures as they combined with the threesome’s broader remit for the organization, the Bolton group’s focus on teaspoons, hands, hats, cigarettes, walking, dancing, drinking, manual labour and socializing as images to be described, sketched or photographed, produced a kind of archive of the imaginary, a sometimes whimsical and playfully associative archive that tells us at least as much about the observers themselves and their own social–historical contexts as it does of the streets and people of Bolton. While it would be too simplistic to invoke Jennings’ credentials in the movement and call this imaginative impetus ‘surrealist’, nevertheless there is a collision of multiple worlds and world-views in the early days of Mass-Observation. Spender notes, for instance, how Harrisson imported his anthropological background into the Bolton work: I think Tom, having worked a lot in remote parts of the world, was perhaps anxious to find parallels in the life of this country. And so,

8


having observed ritualistic dancing, and the masks, the costumes and other art connected with it, he would constantly be on the lookout for the same sort of thing in Bolton. For example, at every possible opportunity the children used to put on paper hats and dance about: these were quite innocent, childish affairs, but Tom was inclined to put rather mysterious interpretations on them. He had a tendency to wish things on to events in that way. (Ibid., p. 16) In contrast to the way the realist cinema of Kie´slowski would view these dancing children, as straightforwardly just children, dancing, Spender reveals how Harrisson’s realist anthropology was sometimes compelled by an associative, logical yet strange and individual frame of reference. If the soap in Bolton and Melanesia is the same, the analysis appears to run, might the children of the two places not also be somehow the same? Mass-Observation has been criticized along these lines and many others ever since the project was founded. Harrisson himself notes one such line of detraction, for example, when he points out that the numbers of volunteers recruited to observe the working class in Bolton expanded greatly ‘during Oxford and Cambridge University vacations’ (Harrisson 1961, p. 26). Yet it is in its very contradictions, in its multiple concerns, contexts and aspirations, that the Mass-Observation project mirrors a number of the issues that are important to any critical reappraisal of British social realism. To take just one such issue, let us look a little further into this matter of the relative social positions of the observer and the observed. Such relative and relativizing positions are explored, for example, in Alan Bennett’s early and rarely performed play Enjoy (1980). In this play a typically Bennett-like working class elderly couple are to be rehoused to the suburbs by the local council from their Leeds back-to-back terraced house. The couple receive a silent visitor, ostensibly from the local council, who brings a letter. This letter claims that the council are concerned about the potential loss resulting from the rehousing of ‘many valuable elements in the social structure of traditional communities such as this’ (Bennett 1991, p. 271). These ‘valuable elements’ turn out to be clichés of working class life such as ‘self reliance, neighbourliness, and self-help’ (ibid). The council requests that the visitor is to be allowed to enter the couple’s home, and to silently observe their domesticity for the purposes of research, in order that their new housing can accommodate the rehoused residents with as little change as possible. The couple

Introduction 9

are instructed to ignore the visitor, whom they decide to let in, and this visitor will record secret observations of the couple and report back to the council in a manner not entirely unlike that of Mass-Observation, though here granted rare access to domesticity.2 At the end of the play the couple are moved to a zone on the outskirts of town where the entire neighbourhood will be rebuilt brick-by-brick, reproducing exactly the proportions and look of the original area. This zone, however, will be made economically viable by the council’s opening it, within designated hours, as a kind of working class theme park, where paying tourists will look around the relics of the terraced past. These relics, however, are only a nostalgic façade. The new suburban houses will have under-floor heating, but use of this is strictly limited to outside the park’s openinghours. During opening-hours residents are requested to use the more quaint, original, coal fire. There are a number of intriguing characters’ perspectives in Enjoy. First, there is that of the silent, observing visitor who arrives heralding change from a legitimating authority. Secondly, there are the imagined paying tourists trundling around the culture-park, around the suburban masquerading as urban. These tourists might be aware they are witnessing a façade, or they might labour under an illusion of authenticity. Thirdly, there is the elderly couple who are subject to these other multiple gazes, and whose own marginalized positions as observers of their own being observed drive much of the play’s dialogue, anchoring its ironies and pathos. The multiple perspectives of Enjoy, as of MassObservation, play out complex and shifting dynamics of social, political, economic and familial power, dynamics that are pertinent to the study of social realism in Britain more broadly. This volume avoids offering up for preservation nostalgic displays of dilapidation in an academic equivalent of Bennett’s culture-park. The histories that are on display in the following chapters are primarily historicizing rather than nostalgic, whilst they also have their eyes set keenly on the contemporary. British Social Realism in the Arts since 1940 seeks to open out, rather than close down and tightly define, social realism. As Stephen Lacey argues of social realist theatre, ‘the question is not “is this play social realist?” but rather “what is there in this play that is social realist?”’ This is a question that emphasizes the specificity and individuality of a given work. In a study of genre such emphasis is a complex but vital matter. The different approaches the following chapters take to the matter of definition reveal many divergent, surprising and significant trajectories of influence, of genealogy, and of legacy.

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There are, nevertheless, certain things that should be noted here of the term ‘social realism’ (and of what happens when we put ‘British’ alongside it). For one thing, ‘social realism’ denotes different things across a number of disciplines. In sociology, for example, the term derives primarily from criticism of Émile Durkheim’s views as expressed in Les Règles de la Méthode Sociologique (1895). As Robert Alun Jones explains in a study of how Durkheim derived and developed this aspect of his sociology, ‘social realism’ brings together ‘a constellation of ideas’ (Jones 1999, p. 1); primarily, for Durkheim, these ideas coalesce around claims about social phenomena being subject to scientifically discoverable and verifiable laws. They also, interestingly in the context of a study on realist aesthetics, seek to preserve complexity from reductive core theses. For Durkheim this is specifically from Cartesian notions of the ‘clear and simple’, from foundational knowledge that cannot cope with the complexities of modern society. Most recently, in the sociology of education the term ‘social realism’ has come to refer to a pragmatic and contextually determined paradigm of learning. As one recent study puts it, referring back to the title of a previous work, the contemporary usefulness of the term signals a shift from viewing knowledge in terms of construction – especially when this implies we can construct the world as we see fit, free of the consequences of how the world will react back on that construction – towards a focus on its production within relatively autonomous fields of practice according to socially developed and applied procedures that may have both arbitrary and non-arbitrary bases. It thus highlights a concern with the sociality of knowledge in terms of how knowledge is created (‘social’) and emphasizes that knowledge is more than simply produced – its modalities help shape the world (‘realism’). (Maton and Moore 2009, p. 6)3 The emphasis here too is on the possibility for mutable complexity, and the determining factors of context. Perhaps the complexity attendant upon a multiplicity of definitions for the contested term is one reason so few studies have been devoted to the social realism(s) discussed in this volume. Returning to the opening section of this introduction, however, it is more tempting to postulate that the major barrier for social realism is that it is a subset of the predominantly unfashionable, poor old problematic (but not problematic enough) realism. Yet as a number of recent studies have

Introduction 11

shown, realism itself is well overdue important reappraisals. Notable among these studies is Matthew Beaumont’s Adventures in Realism (2007, reprinted and expanded with a chapter by Terry Eagleton in 2010 as A Concise Companion to Realism).4 Beaumont’s volume makes a convincing case for its primary aim of putting realism ‘back into the critical picture, center-stage’ (Bowlby 2007, p. xvii). Part of the problem for realism, as for social realism, is one of definition. But whereas a lack of clear boundaries for social realism presents opportunities at the same time as it poses difficulties, the issue for realism is often one of too-simple definitions. Descriptions of realism, Beaumont argues, have been all too often subjected to a postmodernist caricature that tended to define realism as the naïve and somewhat embarrassing aspirant to transparency and meaning, against which subtler and more up to date isms might measure their own excellence. Realism is also not helped by its being historically stuck in a no man’s land between the more intoxicating highs of Romanticism and Modernism, and Beaumont points out the unfortunate consequence for realism according to which realism’s critical importance derives solely from a supporting role played in a literaryhistorical narrative that concentrates on its more extroverted relations. All this, Beaumont claims, ‘has made an impatient or apathetic attitude to realism seem acceptable’ (Beaumont 2007, p. 2), and it is surely time such attitudes were rethought. Beaumont quotes Fredric Jameson to make the case for newly invigorated approaches: It might be more productive, as Fredric Jameson has argued, “if we can manage to think of realism as a form of demiurgic practice; if we can restore some active and even playful/experimental impulses to the inertia of its appearance as a copy or representation of things” [ . . . ]. (Beaumont 2007, p. 7) In Signatures of the Visible Jameson describes the ‘excitement’ of Modernism as ‘demiurgic’, whereas realism ‘is conventionally evoked in terms of passive reflection and copying, subordinate to some external reality, and fully as much a grim duty as a pleasure of any kind’ (Jameson 1992, p. 162). It may be that learning how to reveal and revel anew in ‘pleasure’ is the most viable route by which realism will find its way back into the academy, and onto the bookshelves crammed, as Beaumont describes, with the myriad introductory critical theory books that marginalize realism, and that are so ‘assiduously marketed at students’ (Beaumont 2007, p. 3). Beaumont reveals such playful

12


realist pleasure, for example, in reading the opening lines of George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859),5 yet the problem of ‘pleasure’, when referred onto social realism, is a difficult one. While it would be overgeneralizing to claim that social realist works are consistently didactic, they are also rarely without concern for a specific, contemporaneous context, and are often educative and/or shocking. Even their humour is frequently of an excoriating kind. With this in mind, perhaps it should be proposed that Jameson’s hope for ‘pleasure’ in realism might be substituted by a willingness to engage with ‘the visceral’ in social realism. Here, then, might be one way in which social realism might take its own, different road. Some studies have addressed the genre, though they tend to limit their analysis to one medium or another. Samantha Lay’s British Social Realism: From Documentary to Brit Grit (2002), for instance, is a short film-based study that tracks the familiar furrows as an introductory text aimed at students. Lay’s arguments start out from convincing propositions, such as ‘[s]ocial realism is difficult to define not least of all because it is both politically and historically contingent’ (Lay 2002, p. 8). Yet Lay’s approach also has drawbacks, some of which are dealt with in Chapter 1 of this volume. Such studies, however, are few and far between. It is therefore hoped that British Social Realism in the Arts since 1940 will not only serve to further consolidate an exciting wider reappraisal of realism, but will reinvigorate the study of social realism specifically, whether this is in Britain or elsewhere.6 It certainly seems as though much critical work is available to be done. The chapters of this volume follow a structure based in the medium under discussion, i.e. there is one chapter each on film, theatre, fiction, poetry, visual art, and television. Yet it is easy to envisage a complementary approach that uses a thematic framework. One might well enquire, for example, into the frequently foregrounded figure of the child in social realist works. Are the children that these works frequently call upon more than just figures of innocence against which more sinister forces of economics, politics and sociality are contrasted? ‘Social realism and national identity’ is another potentially fruitful topic, as is a rebalancing look at works of Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish origin. As the reader will notice in the chapters that follow, this volume’s focus tends, through no preplanned design, to be on England. There are a number of important exceptions to this – Keston Sutherland’s close reading of work by the Glaswegian poet Tom Leonard, for example, and Gillian Whiteley’s arguments about the internationalism of 1950s social realist visual art. But the general emphasis remains.

Introduction 13

The subject of class, hinted at above, is also central to social realist works, as are gender dynamics. This volume, then, does not seek to be the final, exhaustive word on social realism in Britain. Rather it hopes to prize open this topic for those already interested, and to enliven the interest of those new to it. In Chapter 1 Paul Dave addresses the medium most frequently discussed in terms of social realist aesthetics – film. Dave focuses on recent and contemporary filmmaking, in particular that of Andrea Arnold, Nick Broomfield, Patrick Keiller, Gary Oldman and Shane Meadows, while also looking back at much older works such as the Mitchell and Kenyon documentaries. In provocative and theoretically-informed arguments Dave considers what it might be for filmmaking to engage with an ethics of the social as a response to ‘capitalist realism’, where a turn in the genre towards domesticity does not necessarily indicate, as some critics have proposed, an abrogation of political responsibility, but rather instances what Dave calls a ‘re-focusing, in the context of neoliberalism, on the crisis of the social’. Dave traces a lineage of criticism from Raymond Williams to Terry Eagleton in a concern with tragedy and the figure of the scapegoat, and views contemporary social realist filmmaking as focused on an economically and politically contextualized world of social spaces and personal encounters. Stephen Lacey’s chapter on theatre traces a lineage of theatrical practice that incorporates a number of hidden (because not available to West End critics) trajectories of experimentation and alternative movements. As Lacey points out, it did not all happen in 1956. While Look Back in Anger is undoubtedly a significant play for considering social realism in the theatre, Lacey’s genealogies of influence and appropriation reveal important elements of recent and contemporary theatrical practice deeply indebted to other earlier works. This chapter develops a central theme of this volume by exploring the boundaries at which explicitly anti-naturalist theatrical language can be seen to hold certain elements in common with more explicitly and avowedly social realist works. Referring back, as a number of the chapters do, to Williams’ ideas of ‘social extension’, Lacey focuses on works that engage with their contemporaneous contexts to chart changes to post-war dramatic form in the contexts of censorship, changing audiences and economics, cultural preoccupations with class and motifs of escape, and feminist theatre, in a breadth of reference that takes in over forty different plays. Chapter 3 turns to social realism in fiction, where Rod Mengham focuses on a seven year period of post-war fiction that includes established classics of the genre such as John Braine’s Room at the Top (1957),

14


Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), David Storey’s This Sporting Life (1960), Stan Barstow’s A Kind of Loving (1960), and Nell Dunn’s Up the Junction (1963). Mengham explores the implications of the social and political contexts these authors were working in and confronting to demonstrate how they responded to and reflected a complex rebuilding of national identity following the Second World War. Mengham explores how the language of war, violence, commerce and insecurity is laced through the emotional and familial entanglements that the characters of these works are subject to. These well-known realist works of fiction are then revealed to have surprising things in common with one another – a ‘fascination with the anti-social power of extra-marital relationships’, and the recurrence of what Mengham calls the ‘reveries’ of a loss of self-identity. In Chapter 4 Keston Sutherland probes boundaries of social realism in the context of recent and contemporary poetry. Sutherland addresses a number of significant theories of realism founded in Lukács, Brecht, Barthes, Mayakovsky and Adorno, before going on to discuss mainstream poetry culture, refracted through a particular focus on Philip Larkin’s ‘Wires’. Larkin’s poem is contrasted with a close reading of part of Tom Leonard’s nora’s place. By arguing for a social realism that is not defined according to simple formal criteria, Sutherland wrests back a marginalized realism from the mediocrity of the mainstream. Noting how expressionistic impulses traditionally thought to be at odds with realism often work in conjunction with certain political or aesthetic commitments in common with it, Sutherland provocatively asserts that ‘the nonconformist poets of today are the real inheritors of the realist project’. Gillian Whiteley continues the volume’s concern with locating social realist art ‘within distinct historical moments and locations, within particular social and political contexts’. Whiteley tracks back even earlier than other chapters to recover important socio-economic contexts for politically focused visual art in the 1930s, with the founding of the Artists International Association in England, and the strictures of Socialist Realism. This wide-ranging and detailed chapter then progresses through the 1940s and 1950s, with particular emphasis on the influential criticism of John Berger and the journal Realism. Whiteley then pursues a reconsideration of British visual art of later decades, revealing social realist elements common to many artworks often categorized and analysed without recourse to typical conventions of social realism. Finally, Whiteley argues that social realism as a critical category can

Introduction 15

productively be brought to bear on certain contemporary visual artists such as Lucy Orta, Alison Marchant and Jeremy Deller. Social realism has always had an important part to play in the development of British television. In this volume’s final chapter Dave Rolinson seeks to open up a number of important questions both for the study of social realism and for the study of television more broadly. Accordingly, Rolinson asks questions about how television as a medium both proscribes boundaries for social realism and simultaneously finds its own boundaries revealed and pushed against by that genre, and explores how social realism might interrogate itself utilizing the medium-specific resources television provides. In a rich and detailed chapter, Rolinson contextualises changes to television practice and traces the forms of social realism on television from very early incarnations to the present day, investigating how the history of social realism on television is related to that of film and theatre. Fundamentally, what the chapters of this volume engage with are the boundaries and possibilities of social realism in Britain, both as these find themselves situated within specific and divergent historical contexts, and as they are shaped by the specific mediums in which they operate. The chapters demonstrate that as a probing genre term, as political interjection, as a specific enterprise of realism, and as something much more formally complex and creatively viable than might be expected from first impressions, social realism in Britain has been well overdue a thorough and thoughtful reappraisal.

Notes 1. Harrisson’s stance towards Lever was not always one of free-minded anthropology. It did not take Mass-Observation long before they were employed by Lever; in 1937, Lintas, the marketing arm of Lever, commissioned Mass-Observation to record observers’ observations of Stork margarine. The organization’s preoccupation with Lever eventually came full-circle when a Leverhulme grant was awarded to finance the housing of the MassObservation material at the University of Sussex in the early 1970s. 2. The Mass-Observation images are nearly all of public, social spaces. Only one of the Worktown photographs is of a Bolton resident’s domestic interior. 3. The previous study Maton and Moore refer to is Michael Young’s Bringing Knowledge Back In: From Social Constructivism to Social Realism in the Sociology of Education (Young 2007). 4. Also recommended is Pam Morris’s excellent Realism (2003) and Peter Brooks’ Realist Vision (2005). 5. See Beaumont 2007, pp. 4–7.

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6. See, for example, Stacy I. Morgan’s Rethinking Social Realism: African American Art and Literature, 1930–1953 (2004) as an example of a work dealing with similar materials in a different context.

Bibliography Beaumont, Matthew (ed.). (2007) Adventures in Realism. Oxford, Blackwell Publishing. Beckett, Samuel. (1983) Disjecta – Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment. London, Calder. ——. (1992) Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Dublin, Black Cat Press. Bennett, Alan. (1991) ‘Forty Years On’ and Other Plays. London, Faber & Faber. Bowlby, Rachel. (2007) ‘Foreword’, in Beaumont, Matthew (ed.), (2007) Adventures in Realism. Oxford, Blackwell Publishing. Brooks, Peter. (2005) Realist Vision. New Haven & London, Yale University Press. Burrows, Rachel. (1989) ‘Interview with Rachel Burrows’, in Journal of Beckett Studies. No. 11–12, pp. 5–15. Durkheim, Émile. [1895] (2007) Les Règles de la Méthode Sociologique. Paris, Presses Universitaires de France. Eliot, George. [1859] (1996) Adam Bede. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Harrisson, Tom. (1959) World Within: A Borneo Story. London, The Crescent Press. ——. (1961) Britain Revisited. London, Victor Gollancz Ltd. Hubble, Nick. (2006) Mass Observation and Everyday Life. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan. Jameson, Fredric. (1992) Signatures of the Visible. London, Routledge. Jennings, Mary–Lou (ed.) (1982). Humphrey Jennings: Film–Maker, Painter, Poet. London, British Film Institute. Jones, Robert Alun. (1999) The Development of Durkheim’s Social Realism. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Kie´slowski, Krzysztof. (1993) Kie´slowski on Kie´slowski. London, Faber & Faber. Lay, Samantha. (2002) British Social Realism. London, Wallflower Press. Le Juez, Brigitte. (2008) Beckett Before Beckett. London, Souvenir Press. Mass-Observation. (1943) The Pub and the People. London, Victor Gollancz. Maton, Karl and Rob Moore (eds). (2009) Social Realism, Knowledge and the Sociology of Education: Coalitions of the Mind. New York, Continuum. Morgan, Stacy I. (2004) Rethinking Social Realism: African American Art and Literature, 1930–1953. Athens & London, The University of Georgia Press. Morris, Pam. (2003) Realism. London, Routledge. Spender, Humphrey. (1982) Worktown People: Photographs from Northern England 1937–38. Bristol, Falling Wall Press. Tonning, Erik. (2007) Samuel Beckett’s Abstract Drama: Works for Stage and Screen 1962–1985. Bern, Peter Lang. Woolf, Virginia. (2008) Selected Essays. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Young, Michael. (2007) Bringing Knowledge Back In: From Social Constructivism to Social Realism in the Sociology of Education. London, Routledge.

1 Tragedy, Ethics and History in Contemporary British Social Realist Film Paul Dave

For some, social realism in British cinema is a problematic tradition, one that is politically limited and aesthetically conservative. Boring, pious, out of date. ‘Miserabilist’ is the term often used in critical discourses to convey a combined impression of a political and aesthetic dead-end (Thorpe 2005). Certainly, many critics have been worried about examples of the form from the 1990s and early 2000s – such as Brassed Off (1996), The Full Monty (1997), and Billy Elliot (2000). Paul Marris, for instance, argues that The Full Monty and Billy Elliot are ‘Ealing in the North’ – conservative, backward looking elegies, steeped in masculinist ideologies of the past (Marris 2001, p. 49). For others, whilst recognizing the problems with the tradition, there remains a sense that significant social realist films are still being produced.1 For example, Samantha Lay views social realism as an open and evolving tradition, and still ‘an important part of British film culture’ (Lay 2007, p. 231). John Hill isolates what he sees as a more specific and worrying tendency that he tracks back to the New Wave of the late 1950s, early 1960s. This is the ‘narrowing down of social space’ in the representation of working class life, and its increasing identification ‘in domestic and familial terms’ (Hill 2000, p. 251). This dynamic is also noted by Lay, Julia Hallam and Margaret Marshment, who all point to diminishing associations of social realism with belief in progressive social change.2 It seems that social realism’s drive towards ‘social extension’ (Williams 1974, p.63) and its association with authenticity ‘where this is identified with the most extreme of social conditions’ has, in recent times, led to an increased focus on dysfunctions of the individual or family in areas where precisely the social is in jeopardy, giving us, typically, underclass dramas taking place in some infra-social space (Hill 2000, 17

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p. 253). However, rather than viewing this as a process whereby the connections between the domestic and familial on the one hand, and the ‘larger social context’ of ‘neighbourhood, work, politics’ are lost, one might equally see it as part of a necessary re-focusing, in the context of neoliberalism, on the crisis of the social (ibid.). This is perhaps something that needs emphasizing: that in the neoliberal moment of capitalist fundamentalism, working class experience registers head-on the impact of what Raymond Williams called the ‘defaulting’ of the capitalist order with regard to its older, post-war social contract (Williams 2007, p. 97). Part of this process involves precisely the reconfiguration of the connections between all classes and the stricken social sphere. I have attempted elsewhere to relate these developments to formal and generic shifts in contemporary British cinema.3 Here, using the same contextual framework of neoliberalism, I want to consider contemporary shifts in social realism in terms of what might be considered one of social realism’s tributary sources – the tragic form. In 1979, on the edge of the neoliberal storm, Williams spoke percipiently of a mutation in the tragic form in which ‘an inability to communicate’ becomes central: People still assemble or are assembled, meet or collide. A given collectivity is in this way taken for granted. But it is a collectivity that is only negatively marked. A common condition is suspected, intimated, glanced at, but never grasped. The means of sociality and of positive relationship are fundamentally discounted, but not as actual isolation; merely as effective isolation within what is still unavoidable physical presence. (Williams 2007, p. 101) After noting this distressing attenuation of the ‘means of sociality’ in which co-presence becomes a negative, brute, proximity rather than a positive mutuality, Williams goes on to characterize this form in terms of a kind of ‘wry’ rather than ‘desperate’ apocalypticism – as a kind of pleasure to be had in the anticipation of inevitable disaster (ibid., p. 102). He also adds that it offers ‘a reliable condition of remaining indefinitely inside just such a society’ (ibid.). This combination of a weakened social, with its disproportionate impact on the working class on the one hand, and the amused or exhilarated sense of an end amidst the wreckage on the other, accompanied by a deep reluctance to muster resources that can reach beyond such an impasse, represents a phenomenon which I have discussed elsewhere in ‘underclass’ social

Contemporary British Social Realist Film 19

realist film under the rubric of a contemporary ‘urban pastoral’ (Dave 2006, p. 84). Trainspotting (1996) would be a good example. Much in underclass films such as Trainspotting belongs to what Imogen Tyler refers to as ‘the dirty ontology of class struggle in Britain’, visible for instance in the taxonomies of class abjection and contempt evoked by terms such as ‘chav’ (Tyler cited in Biressi and Nunn 2009, p. 109). Such attitudes and representations indicate important changes in class relationships. However, they are not the whole story. Another aspect of this crisis of the social, as refracted through recent social realist filmmaking, has been the attempt to explore the dynamics of what might be called the ethics of solidarity, an ethics capable of reviving the social. It will be argued here that such an attempt has an important role to play in the complex and mutable relationship between left politics and social realist cinema. That is to say, there is a necessary political dimension to this interest in the ethical. As Terry Eagleton argues, it is a mistake on some parts of the left to insist on a rigid gap between the ethical and the political (see Eagleton 2009b, pp. 299–300). It is in this domain that some fascinating recent work in British social realist film has been done. For instance, a social and ethical narrative underlies a number of Shane Meadows’ films, in which a process of social contraction meets a limit and the resources of a counter-movement are sensed. Meadows’ interest in social realism is crossed with an interest in popular genres, particularly the gangster film with its dependence on a tragic motif of the suffering human body (see for instance Dead Man’s Shoes (2004)). As I will argue below, this emphasis on the qualities of vulnerable corporeality directs our attention to an ethics capable of sustaining a sense of solidarity. As we will see, for Eagleton there is a crucial relationship between a properly ethical sense of our ‘species-being’ (Eagleton 2003a, p. 158), as effectively represented in images of human corporeality focused on the tragic scapegoat, and the potential to realize Williams’ ideal of a ‘common culture’ (Williams 1984, p. 318). The latter’s account of the importance of a ‘common culture’ was inspired by the long history of the working class ethic of solidarity. First proposed over half a century ago, it remains, as Eagleton argues, an objective which, whilst apparently ‘quaintly residual’, nevertheless still lies ahead of us (Eagleton 2000, p. 122).

History and ‘capitalist realism’ Looking forwards and backwards will be an important part of what follows, for one of the propositions I would like to explore is that history

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has an important relationship with social realist film. Now on one level this involves the uncontroversial assertion that social realist filmmaking represents a tradition, however interrupted and diverse, and also that this tradition retains a vital relationship with contemporary efforts. Take for example Marris’s comments on northern realism. As Marris says: ‘any new imaging of the North will be developed “in and against” the persisting tradition of northern realism’ (Marris 2001, p. 50). Likewise, as David Tucker argues in the present volume’s Introduction, if we want to avoid perpetuating shallow oppositions between realism and modernism in critical discussion of social realism, a historical grounding is crucial. The historical view of the form opens up often surprising and ‘significant trajectories of influence, of genealogy’. None of this, as I say, should be particularly controversial – even though it is notable, as Tucker says, that such approaches have been rare. Most importantly, the use of history in our approach to social realism – and film generally – needs to go beyond ad hoc, often token contextualizations. And this need raises the more unfamiliar perspective of the historical longue durée. Seen in such a light, for instance, the tradition of British social realism might be brought into contact with historical materialist preoccupations, and in this way help to construct challenging historical narratives and representations of the social informed by an interest in the development of capitalism and class culture. This is a particularly significant possibility at the present precisely because of the influence of what has been called our contemporary ‘capitalist realism’ (Fisher 2009). For Mark Fisher, capitalism under neoliberal regimes has sought to present itself as ‘the only viable political and economic system’ and to generate the impression that it is now ‘impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it’ (Fisher 2009, p. 2). This is what Daniel Bensaïd refers to as the ‘naturalisation of the economy and a fatalization of history’ (Bensaïd 2007, p. 150). Patrick Keiller, whose fictionalized documentaries frequently explore national history – mediated through a historical materialist optic – as a force to be used against manifestations of this capitalist realism, claims, like Fisher, to have been struck by Fredric Jameson’s observation that ‘It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations’ (Jameson cited in Keiller 2009, p. 411). In Keiller’s work, which is very much constructed within the complex tradition of British social realism, history works to fortify us against this imaginative debility. Thus, as I have discussed elsewhere, in the first two Robinson films – London (1994) and


Figure 1.1 Robinson in Ruins (2010). The wandering Robinson tracks the survival c Patrick Keiller of life in a time of crisis.

Robinson in Space (1997) – it is the history of the ‘peculiarly capitalist’ English culture and past that is used to challenge the neoliberal present (Dave 2006, p. 164). This exploration looks, from Keiller’s next instalment of the adventures of Robinson (Robinson in Ruins, 2010) and from the collaborative project from which the film has emerged (The Future of the Landscape and the Moving Image), to have been pressed further by Keiller into a consideration of a key contradiction of neoliberalism – the historical role of state intervention in the market and its elision in neoliberal doctrine and ideology.4 Generally, those interested in the politics of culture on the left recognize the importance of constructing, as Jeremy Gilbert puts it, popular narratives capable of demonstrating the links between a ‘drive for limitless capital accumulation and the various features of contemporary culture which worry people’ (Gilbert 2009, p.199). On the feasibility of mobilizing political alternatives to neoliberalism in this way, Gilbert argues that one thing is certain; ‘such a politics could only emerge in conjunction with some mobilization of the groups, institutions and individuals who still, in large numbers, remain attached to, invested in and organized by the history of social democracy and the labour movement’ (ibid.). Precisely here the social realist tradition has roots. Sometimes these roots appear close to the surface – such as in the documentary tradition of the 1930s and 1940s – but there remain resources, largely

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neglected, which are more deeply buried. To refer to Keiller’s work again – one of the more explicit influences upon Robinson in Space was Humphrey Jennings’s A Diary for Timothy (1945), which is reinvoked as a founding text of hopeful post-war social democratic humanism by Keiller at a time when it might nourish the mood of political change and popular discontent with the New Right in the mid 1990s. Similarly, in the first Robinson film, London, some of Keiller’s references match those excerpted in Jennings’s posthumously published book Pandaemonium.5 Whilst Keiller has not systematically engaged with this text, Pandaemonium nevertheless represents an important earlier example within the tradition of social realism of an attempt to document the long history of capitalist development alongside the emergence of a selfconscious tradition of thinking about ‘culture and society’ in response to the changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution. We know it caught the eye of Williams, who is reported to have been considering editing Jennings’ manuscript in the late 1950s.6 We can perhaps best appreciate Williams’ interest in Jennings in the context of his own work of the time.7 Pandaemonium is exemplary in the importance it gives to the reciprocal patterns in which developments of the productive forces are linked to changing perceptions of culture and society. There is also a connection to be made here between Jennings and the work of the post war British Marxist Historians: although Jennings’ early death prevented him making any final preparation of Pandaemonium for publication, there is a clear echo in it of some of the key themes in the historical materialism of the Communist Party Historians Group.8 The latter shared an interest in a non-reductive Marxism, expressed by Jennings in a romantic trope of the original unity between the ‘means of production’ and the ‘means of vision’, a unity sundered by the development of capitalism (Jennings 1985, p. xxxviii). Bringing this tradition of historical materialism up to date, I have tried to show elsewhere how Peter Linebaugh’s histories of the Atlantic proletariat from the early modern period onward are useful in exploring contemporary films concerned with anti-capitalism and its relationship to post-colonial Britain – for instance South West 9 (2001).9 It might be added here that Linebaugh’s histories are full of what Walter Benjamin called ‘now-time’ (Benjamin cited in Löwy 2005, p.86) in as much as his accounts of this picaresque proletariat – ‘unrespectable’, multiethnic, male, female, of all ages, planetary – offer an invaluable resource with which to contest the idea of a ‘decline’ of the post-industrial working class into an underclass, a development which figures so prominently as subject matter in contemporary social realist films (Linebaugh & Rediker 2000, pp. 332–3).


It is also interesting to note that running through Linebaugh’s writings is a stress on an ethic of working class solidarity, sustained in the teeth of the manifold brutalities of the long development of capitalism. To take an example of a significant social realist film that might respond to an interpretation informed by Linebaugh’s work, let us briefly consider Nil by Mouth (1997). Gary Oldman’s film and Linebaugh’s book The London Hanged (1991) (and in particular the Punch and Judy allegory with which he concludes the book), when brought together create what Benjamin called a ‘constellation’ or a ‘dialectical image’ (Benjamin 1999, p. 462). That is to say, they bring the present and the past together in a moment of arresting, mutual illumination. Linebaugh shows in this book that the historical distinction between respectable and unrespectable working class formations needs to be related to the effects of the introduction of the wage during the eighteenth century. This deepened, and made more violent, the divisions within the working class between men/women, adults/children, slave/free, black/white. In some respects the making of the English working class (the national consolidation of a culture and politics of the working class in the first half of the nineteenth century) was premised on an earlier unmaking, specifically of the heterogeneous Atlantic proletariat so prominent as a political force in London up to the end of the eighteenth century. Crucial in this unmaking was the process by which waged, working class men became ‘active disciplinarians of the wageless’ (Linebaugh 1991, pp. 436–7). Thus, as Linebaugh says of the figure of Punch: ‘In exercising his murderous rage against women, children, beggars, and black people, Punch recapitulates in the little motions of the puppeteer, larger, actual divisions within the London working class as a whole’ (ibid., p. 441). Although there is not really enough space to do so here, I think it would be possible to show how in Nil By Mouth the central character Raymond (Ray Winston) belongs to a long lineage that includes the puppet Punch. Briefly, the conflict between Raymond on the one hand and the women in his extended family along with his younger underclass brother-in-law on the other, is part of Oldman’s exploration of the psychopathologies of a certain type of respectable, waged male working class culture (its homosociality), in an era in which this culture was changing fast. This makes the film resonate in unexpected ways with the historical narrative of working class experience provided by Linebaugh. However apparently marginal such conjunctions of historical materialism, with its long narratives of class struggle and capitalism, and the diverse tradition of social realism appears, they remain an important

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resource in helping to strengthen our sense of the finite bounds of capitalism as a historical social form and in contesting key contemporary ideologies of class and myths of capitalism. To take one more example from Keiller’s work, we can see how this interest in the history of the development of capitalism since ‘Defoe’s time’, as the narrator in Robinson in Space puts it, is continued in his recent return to the eighteenth century with the Future of the Landscape project. Here Keiller goes back to Karl Polanyi’s work on the rise of capitalism in order to explore the historical contradictions of the economic doctrine of laissez-faire as part of his broader objective – to unravel the ‘mythology of AngloAmerican capitalism’ in the light of the global financial crisis initiated by the events of October 2008 (Keiller 2009, p. 410).10 The value of such work and the historical consciousness it stimulates – an effect which does not have to be restricted to documentary influenced forms of social realist aesthetics – can help to counter the danger of a certain presentism in the latter. Thus, it is perhaps unfortunate that recent critical commentary has seen the work of Bill Douglas and Terence Davies as part of a problematic tendency towards autobiography and looking backwards, a tendency which Lay complains is undermining the contemporary and public view.11 This is not to say, however, that Lay’s account does not provide any space for exploration in social realist film of the historical dimension to the problem of the present. Thus, her discussion of the relationship between present and past in such films is in part understood in terms of a distinction between issues (often topical, and captured in the ‘rise and fall’ of ‘fashion’ (Lay 2002, p. 13) and themes (which possess deeper historical roots, and are ‘longer-lived sets of concerns’ such as ‘the demise of the traditional working class, changing gender roles, anti-consumerism, the negative effects of capitalism, and national identity’ (ibid., p. 14). This distinction, however, can be re-worked and enriched in terms of the Benjaminian couplet constellation/tradition, where constellations construct traditions. That is to say, the constellating or bringing together of past battles and defeats in the long history of class struggle with present emergencies in that same struggle, is the method by which we put together a tradition of the oppressed. Whilst it would be mistaken to assume some unproblematic availability of this tradition (as Eagleton puts it, some ‘unbroken continuity that “ghosts” official history’), there is in Benjamin’s model of historical materialism a clear sense of the persistence of class struggle in history and of its role as the ground on which past and present can be brought together (Eagleton 2009b, p.178). One must, as Eagleton warns, stay faithful to the idea of a tradition and resist any fetishizing


of the ‘present conjuncture’ or ‘presentism’ (ibid.) in which ‘the needs of the present become the index of the truth of the past’ (ibid., p. 152). In Benjamin’s account then, past and present come together in ways that are mutually illuminating. A similar note is sounded by Williams in his 1985 defence of naturalism where he talks about the simultaneous importance of representing ‘that world in which people live as they can as themselves’ (the subject matter of naturalism, its ‘real substance’) and of recognizing this world as inextricably entwined with ‘long histories of our peoples, in which movements and struggles, particular victories and defeats, reached their own moving crises’ (Williams 2007, p. 116). This historical dimension, as it erupts ‘within and across’ this ‘real substance’ is something the ‘serious’ socialist should be conscious of as that which enables us to speak of a ‘human history’ (ibid.).

Tragic realism The relationship between history and social realism can be viewed in ways other than as a means to challenge our contemporary capitalist realism with historicist denaturalisation. A historical materialist perspective – both conjunctural and long view – can draw our attention not just to the problem of the concealed contingencies of social forms such as capitalism, it can also set off the transhistorical, or what over the length of the human story has remained unchanged. Again, this is something that Benjamin’s sorrowful historical vision captures – the extent to which historical change is metamorphosed under capitalism into a hellish, pre-historical repetition of catastrophe.12 Eagleton, whose thoughts on history have been heavily influenced by Benjamin, is also interested in the transhistorical, and in recent texts this interest has taken the form of a discussion of human essence.13 As James Smith argues, such an interest is part of Eagleton’s critique of left-historicism and its giddy celebration of human and social mutability along with its abandonment of Marxist historical metanarratives. As Smith observes, Eagleton’s objective seems to be to offer a ‘commonality of the human as a deeper mode of historicisation’ (Smith 2008, p. 108). Such an emphasis might indeed serve as a valuable resource in resisting the priorities of capitalist realism. As Fisher argues, one of the key defining features of capitalist realism is what he calls ‘ontological precarity’ (Fisher 2009, p.56), in which a destabilized sense of the human essence fits with the ‘business ontology’ of neoliberalism (ibid., p. 17). In circumstances in which we are obliged to subordinate ourselves ‘to a reality that is infinitely plastic, capable of reconfiguring itself at any

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moment’ (ibid., p. 54) – what Fredric Jameson calls the ‘purely fungible present’ (Jameson cited in ibid.) – and in which the ‘dreaming up and junking of social fictions is nearly as rapid as [. . .the. . .] production and disposal of commodities’, any sense of a stable selfhood is undermined (ibid, p. 56). It is precisely this evangelical neoliberal discourse of burst limits and infinite possibilities, with its barely disguised intolerance of human or material limits, which Eagleton’s apparently perverse adoption of a conservative vocabulary of nature, essences, limits, and timelessness is aimed at. He appears to be seeking to arm the left’s political project of progressive social change against circumstances in which change is identified exclusively with the churning turmoil of neoliberal capitalism. Seen in this light, Eagleton’s recent writings are compelling because they help to extend the still in many ways crucial work of Williams. For both writers the process of progressive historical change is a complex one which they explore through positing a connection between tragedy and revolution. For Williams capitalist modernity produces a society ‘in which the incorporation of all its people, as whole human beings, is in practice impossible without a change in its fundamental form of relationships’ (Williams 1979, p. 76). This intolerable situation – tragic because ultimately, at this point in history, its supercession is possible – necessitates revolution. But revolution needs to be understood as a ‘social reality’ – it is already all around us as ‘action now in progress’ and as ‘an activity immediately involving ourselves’ (ibid., p. 74). That is to say, it needs to be recognized that what is called revolution is from one perspective simply the ‘disorder’, suffering and violence of the status quo, which we have become habituated to not seeing (ibid., p. 75). As Eagleton says, there is nothing more revolutionary than the status quo, especially as it is driven by the demonic, inhuman logic of capitalist laws (Eagleton 2005a, p. 59). But equally, understood as the effort to bring about a just society, revolution is not just some simple, punctual, heroic action. For Williams it involves unavoidable participation in disorder ‘as a way of ending it’ (Williams 1979, p.81). Revolution is tragic in origins (capitalism), and also in action (it necessarily pits humans against each other). Tragedy then may well be a critical form for social realism to engage with in so far as it remains concerned with the sense of any possible commitment to progressive, conscious change. Indeed, there are examples of contemporary social realist filmmaking that appear selfconsciously engaged with tragic social reality. Typically this involves a focus on the experience of those whose existence, like that of the


working class, is bound up with the suffering, frustration, waste and deadlock of what Williams describes as an arrested humanity trapped within the horizons of a class society that denies ‘full membership’ to all (ibid., pp. 77–8). Williams’ double movement of the tragic form – reproducing and struggling against tragic ‘disorder’, comprehended in ‘close and immediate experience’, is a good general description of the social realist films which I will explore here (ibid., p. 83). Necessarily, then, this ‘tragic’ process is complex. There is a searching out of the possibility of change, and the frequent recoil to be expected in contexts of oppression where actions often backfire, miss their target, and can even make things worse. Such situations are easily mocked as ‘miserabilist’, or deprecated with recourse to off the shelf paradigms of realism as determinist. But social realism’s relationship to the deep and tragic disorder of contemporary capitalism is often tenacious, and one important way in which we can further approach this encounter is via questions of ethics.

Ethics and social realism This is a turn that is reflected in Eagleton’s work too. The metaphysical, religious terms in which Eagleton chooses to explore the ethical does not represent a turning away from the political. Indeed Eagleton insists on their continuity (see Eagleton 2009b, pp. 299–300). Again, this has relevance to the current critical debate on social realism in which, as we have seen, a retreat into the politics of the personal and familial is posed against what seems to be considered a more properly political engagement with the public world. This way of reading the films, despite its undoubted accuracy in charting changes in emphasis, is in danger of confirming a conventional conception of ethics that leaves it confined to the personal and private realm.14 It might be interesting then to explore some of the most significant recent social realist films – the work of directors such as Andrea Arnold and Shane Meadows, for instance – with an attention to the ways in which the ethical and the political demand to be considered simultaneously. Just as Williams linked what is, from a conventional left perspective, the unlikely couple of tragedy and revolution, so Eagleton insists not on conflating the realms of ethics and politics, or on proposing a subordination of politics to ethics, but on exploring the nature of their interrelationship with a view to strengthening the resources of the political left in an era of deep crisis. But before we consider particular films that seem to be part of this contemporary encounter with such ethical questions, it might be helpful to

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review the terms of this ethical enrichment of left politics attempted by Eagleton, whose interlinked anthropological and ethical arguments are often exemplified in his discussions of the tragic form. In his recent work the tragic form is important because it enables a mediated encounter with aspects of our species-being. One of Eagleton’s most effective evocations of this human essence is through his discussion of the doubleness of the body and his deconstruction of the opposition between culturalism and naturalism. The body is both culturally constructed, its range and experiences historically changing, and at the same time it is marked by certain transhistorical universals. Crucially, the latter involve biological limits – those implied by weakness, dependency, suffering, and death – as well as, paradoxically, the inherent ‘transgressive’ (Eagleton 2003b, p. 146) ability we possess to ‘culturally’ and historically exceed these ‘natural’ limits both in the direction of ‘mutual injury and destructiveness’ (evil), and in creative and mutually fulfilling ways (such as love) (Eagleton 2009b, p. 310). Thus, it is ‘in our natures to be in excess of our natures’, and the upshot of this is that we are poised uneasily between destructive and creative potential (Eagleton 2005a, p. 17). Human ‘nature’ can ground a materialist ethics – we can respond to one another’s common vulnerabilities and needs, and in such tending of our shared material, embodied conditions of existence, friendship and love can flourish. However, the fact that love is a kind of ‘natural’ value does not make it easy to achieve (ibid.). Political love – the extension of mutual self-fulfilment to society as a whole – is arduous. At its most exacting, such love approaches the sacrificial, inner logic of the tragic. That is to say its redemptive possibilities are related to the actions of revolutionaries and martyrs whose extreme self-sacrificial acts are offered up so that others may live.15 Related to the revolutionary and martyr is the tragic scapegoat: ‘the guilty innocent’ whose horrific suffering (the transferred guilt of an inhuman society) indicts the social that has inflicted it (Paul Ricoeur cited in ibid., p. 134). In what is an allegory of Marx on the proletariat as the universal class, Eagleton re-writes the challenge of the scapegoat. The scapegoat’s derelict, abject, inhuman destitution, its body stripped of cultural self-fabrication, its ability to evoke a fundamental condition of dispossession, non-being, and death – all this can, if pitied and not thrust from us in fear, act to transform an apparently irreparably corrupted social order. This tragic scapegoat is today not the token criminal excluded from the city as in classical drama, but the ‘garbage of global capitalism’ (ibid., p. 133). Its very existence is a challenge so fundamental that its social inclusion (in the political language of liberalism) would


be an insufficient response. This world’s ‘most vulnerable’ victims, ‘innocent in themselves yet the most poignant signs of a more general exploitation’, signal the terms of ‘its potential transformation’ (ibid., pp. 134–5). Thus, for Eagleton, there are aspects of our human condition, brought home to us in the tragic form in the image of the piteous spectacle of the scapegoat, which set us what are simultaneously ethical and political challenges – those of political love or agape. As David Alderson puts it: ‘the imperative must be to be true to our nature by continuing to create history in ways which make that history fully respectful of our bodies, honouring their needs and making possible the full creative potential of all’ (Alderson 2004, p. 98). The ethics advocated here is a combination of liberal individualism and socialist reciprocity, as captured, for instance, by Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto. Eagleton is wary of an ‘ideology of the ethical’, derived from Kant, in which ethics are austerely viewed as a matter of ‘duty, obligation, responsibility’ (Eagleton 2009b, p. 299). Instead he seeks to revive a classical eudaemonism in which ‘ethics is about abundance of life, rich and diverse self-realisation’ (ibid). Crucially, such ethics are ‘ordinary, prosaic, everyday’ and thus presuppose the importance of the social (ibid.). One cannot ‘excel as a human being in isolation’, because to lead a good life one needs ‘a good society’ (Eagleton 2003a, p. 128). This adherence to an Aristotelian tradition of ethics marks Eagleton’s distance from a contemporary sublime discourse of ethics that he calls ‘ethical Realism’ (he is thinking of Badiou, Derrida, Žižek, Levinas).16 Like Levinas he seeks an ethics whose impact is experienced in terms analogous to the shocking encounter with that which is pointed to by the traumatic Lacanian Real (as glimpsed, for instance, in the horrors of the tragic form). For Eagleton what is revealed in this encounter with our embodied ‘creatureliness’ (Eagleton 2009b, p. 311) can help us move towards a redeeming love for others/strangers and an ‘inexhaustible attention’ to ‘finite, created things’ (ibid., p. 307). With the ethical Realists, however, there is too often a break between the awesome obligations of ethical duty and the everyday world of politics. An area of Eagleton’s work that is related to these arguments on human nature and ethics is his concern with the idea of a ‘common culture’ (Eagleton 2000, p. 119). Once again, this interest is part of his general project to revive modes of social solidarity in an era in which, as he bleakly puts it, the ‘sense of society’ itself has atrophied (Eagleton 2009a, p. 233). And again, Williams is a key figure. For Eagleton culture is ultimately a form of solidarity built on a communal, somatically

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based human nature – ‘sociality bears in upon us at a level even deeper than culture’ (Eagleton 2000, p. 111). Thus, it would be a mistake, from Eagleton’s perspective, to view Williams’ regulative ideal of a ‘common culture’, which is prefigured in the key working class contribution to the ‘long revolution’ – its cultures of solidarity – as a suppression of difference within an ‘organicist nostalgia’ (ibid., p. 121). Instead a common culture should be seen as providing a situation in which, with the material means of common unity secured, the loving protection and cultivation in common of our species-being enables the flourishing of cultural/individual differences, unimaginable to us now struggling as we are in the shadows of class society.

Social realism and the agonies of the working class: Ghosts How then can we see these reflections on ethics, politics and culture playing out in contemporary social realist film, specifically, in the latter’s proximity to the tragic mode? One of the most noticeable developments in recent British social realist film has been the inclusion of the figure of the migrant worker and the asylum seeker (see for instance GYPO (2005), Exodus (2007), It’s a Free World (2007), and Ghosts (2006)). This combination of international labour and the otherness of the stranger (not always but usually working class), places issues of working class solidarity in an ethical register. Take Ghosts, a film about the tragic drowning of eighteen Chinese migrant workers in Morecambe Bay. A key question posed by the film seems to be – who are the ghosts? On one level they are the dead Chinese workers who in the film’s narrative structure (the beginning is also the film’s end, with the workers trapped in the rising waters) are returned to life in order to endure their suffering again (in Benjamin’s work the classical experience of Hades as torturous repetition was used as a metaphor for history under capitalism as the eternal repetition of the same).17 These ghosts are the ‘guiltyinnocents’, they are icons of an inhuman system and the movement and suffering of their bodies traces its interlocking structures. The film gives us a picture of the intimate reliance of the national economy on sweated, racially oppressed, illegal migrant labour that is seemingly hopelessly ensnared within the informal networks of exploitation linking gangmasters, international organized crime, recruitment agencies and multinational corporations such as supermarkets. The classic scapegoat was an individual wandering in exile, whereas the modern scapegoat is composed of the vast majority – ‘whole sweated, uprooted populations’ (Eagleton 2003b, p. 296).


But the ghosts are also the white hosts (‘gwai lo’), who signify a history of imperialism in the difference of race. The imperial historical narrative is re-wound – from east to west – its racialized forms still active. Against this the film suggests the need for a culture of solidarity based on values implicit in the facts of our species-being. The ‘non-being of human deprivation’– the ghostliness of the ‘death-in-life’ existence of the economic migrant, its exhausting agonies, is to be contrasted with the vampiric life-through-death of neoliberal capitalism which is responsible for this draining of labour (Eagleton 2003a, p. 221). Capitalism attacks species-being. In a key scene, a native worker and the central character Ai Qin (Ai Qin Lin) are prevented from talking by the machinery of a supermarket food processing plant. Ironically the language barrier itself (cultural difference) becomes a distant promise, something that can only be truly accessed on the basis of a common culture of solidarity that is rooted in our shared creatureliness. One of the most powerful images of this commonality is provided by the relationship between the migrants and the van they travel in. Its windows provide balm for their eyes in the framed, tracking shots of a world in which their only other form of engagement is physical brutalization; its seats hold their lolling, exhausted bodies; its roof gives them their last refuge before the waves overcome them. It is their only true home, a securely moving point of easeful passage in a hostile world. At one point, we see it loaded with mattresses on the roof – a particularly striking reminder of its protective status in the inhospitable world of neoliberal capitalism. The opening and ending images of the film are a remarkable condensation of global capitalism’s sublime force. Cut off in the dark, with the tide swirling around them, the cockle pickers stand on the roof of the submerging van and from within the trackless maw of the sea send hopeless mayday calls on mobile phones.

A common culture: This is England Shane Meadows’ This is England (2006) explores the obstacles to a common culture and in doing so evokes the complexities of English working class history. The film is set in a transitional time, during the first Thatcher administration and the Falklands war, a moment when it had become clear that the working class faced an implacable assault on the conditions of its ‘common life’ (Williams 1984, p. 285). For Williams, the ‘idea of culture’ represents an attempt to explore such moments of change and to attempt to ‘reach again for control’ (ibid.). This is a process he describes in terms of different class logics and opposed ideas of

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‘the nature of the social relationship’ (ibid., p. 311). There are three such key ideas: individualism, service and solidarity. The latter is historically associated with working class culture, which, he argues, is ‘primarily social’ (ibid., p. 313). However, this culture of solidarity has been subject to two ‘difficulties’ (ibid., p. 318). First, it carries the scars of a ‘long siege’ concomitant with the working class’ protracted and traumatic experience of being transformed into history’s first mass proletariat (ibid.). Secondly, ‘the defensive attitude’ (ibid) fostered by this history of bitter struggle only compounds another key problem in the development of the idea of solidarity – that of ‘achieving diversity without creating separation’ (ibid., p. 319). A ‘common loyalty’ needs to be able to embrace difference (ibid.). However, for Williams the history of imperialism and English nationalism has ‘tended to limit’ the working class sense of community (ibid., p. 312). Finally, we also need to recognize the historical blurring of the difference between a collectivist working class culture and the idea of service. The latter was the ‘great achievement of the Victorian middle class’ (ibid.). Originally opposed to ‘laissez faire’ and ‘self-service’ it imposes a duty to serve a larger good (ibid., p. 314). However, despite the personal sacrifice such an ethic demands, it nevertheless confirms in its action the status quo (that ‘larger selfishness’ which its own admirable selflessness cannot get in focus) (ibid., p. 315). Historically, the reach of this idea of service has extended to the working class where it instils the ‘command to conformity’ and ‘respect for authority’ (ibid., p. 316). The authoritarianism of the idea of service is no ‘substitute for the idea of active mutual responsibility’ (ibid.). And one can appreciate the baleful historical intersection of this notion of service with the imperial/national restriction of solidarity. Despite these historical difficulties, for Williams a ‘common culture’ seeks to develop the valuable resources in working class culture. It can only be fully realized by ensuring ‘the means of life, and the means of community’ (ibid., p. 320). The two, interlinked metaphors Williams uses to summarize his idea of the progressive potential of a common culture are ‘tending’ and ‘natural growth’: ‘The idea of a common culture brings together, in a particular form of social relationship, at once the idea of natural growth and that of its tending’ (ibid., p. 322). This social relationship has the structure of Eagleton’s concept of political love (or ‘reciprocal self-fulfilment’) (Eagleton 1990, p. 413). That is to say, the expansion of the potential of the self (natural growth) is saved from ‘romantic individualism’ by a mutual encouragement (tending) that avoids the ‘dominative’ subordination of ‘authoritarian training’ associated with the commonality of service (Williams 1984, p. 322).


Crucially then, a common culture is committed to ‘equality of being’ (ibid., p. 323). How do these old arguments of Williams help to illuminate This is England? Meadows makes the remnants and resources of working class sociality central, exploring them from the perspective of the domestic, personal, familial and semi-autobiographical, whilst maintaining a sense of the immediate context of political crisis. The latter is signalled in the opening montage constructed around Thatcher’s Falklands war. As Jon Savage remarks, the images here remind us of the intense political struggles of the time.18 The film’s central character is the young boy Shaun (Thomas Turgoose) whose grief and isolation after the loss of his father in that war intensifies the sensitivity to others he possesses as a child. His need for others and his impressionability highlight issues of ‘tending’ and ‘growth’. It is the child’s experience that becomes the criteria by which to judge the quality of the community offered him by the gang of skinheads associated with Woody (Joe Gilgun). Meadows quickly establishes the exhilaration of belonging to a group which is open to the stranger. In central scenes detailing the outfitting and initiation of Shaun, a strong affect of solidarity is generated through music, the use of space and cinematography to the extent that when the skinhead Combo (Stephen Graham) appears, the soundtrack tunes out his racist provocations (Combo’s monologue fades, solemn classical music dominating in the mix) and we are left with a sense of the unspoken opposition of Woody’s faction to Combo’s encroaching racist nationalism. It is in these early initiation scenes that Meadows’ perspective on working class culture – the view from inside – is most marked. As critics have noted, it is important to recognise that Meadows works as a ‘native insider’ not a ‘sympathetic visitor’ (Hall 2010). This distinction can be explored further if we consider the relationship the film maintains to the forms of ‘moral realism’ and ‘poetic realism’ as distinctive components of British social realism. For Andrew Higson, the combination of these two forms in the Kitchen Sink films made between 1958 and 1963 signifies a contradictory logic of class. Higson sees a moral commitment to the ordinary (related to the Griersonian tradition) mixed with a certain aesthetic pleasure in the vision of the grim sublimity of the industrial landscape (the ‘poetic’ tradition associated with Jennings). Thus, in the critical discourse around these films, Higson points to the appearance of the idea of ‘beautiful tragedy’, which he understands as a response to the pleasure of a class-inflected position of spectatorship, in which spectacular and secure views of lowering panoramas of urban entrapment

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are navigated by the films’ lonely working class escapees (Higson 1996, p.142). Typically then, a subjectifying appropriation of the working class milieu gratifies a middle class curiosity with the exotic, working class other. But this aesthetic pleasure is contained within proper bounds – its implicitly reprehensible qualities muted by such films’ commitment to a moral realist engagement with the everyday. How then have the class contradictions of this aspect of British social realism changed in the intervening years? Moral realism has weakened, but not the opposition between individual and society, or the class-inflected pleasure of tragic or sordid working class subject matter. Trainspotting, for instance, as an example of what Murray Smith calls the aesthetic of ‘black magic realism’ (Smith 2002, p. 75), represents the same conjunction of a realism mixed with pleasurable fantasy, played out via a drama of individual entrapment and escape in an environment in which generational difference displaces and conceals class difference (the central character, Renton, belongs to a younger generation free of the ‘irredeemably tainted’ mass culture of his parent generation) (Higson 1996, p. 147). If social realism once sought to contain the contradiction that a pleasurable view of the ‘squalor’ of working class urban areas might be considered ‘reprehensible’ or sadistic (ibid., p. 152) when unaccompanied by a moral motive, then black magic realism self-consciously seeks out the potential of ‘garbage culture’ to offer a springboard for individualized, class thrills (Smith 2002, p. 25). Returning to Meadows, we can measure the distance between his use of the conventions of social realism and this tradition of poetic/black magic realism. For Meadows there is no underlying structure of class voyeurism at work, and this can be appreciated if we consider how he handles the views from inside and outside the working class milieu he evokes. Consider, for the purposes of contrast, this statement by Higson on the class dynamic in the New Wave: ‘It is only from a class position outside the city that the city can appear beautiful’ (Higson 1996, p. 151). I think Higson may be right about the New Wave films because here the view from within the city presumes the perspective of the escapee/victim – ultimately, the figure of the working class individual who seeks upward class mobility. Such a view from within is not one that could possibly join individual and collective perspectives – as it typically does in Meadows’ films. With Meadows, such situations are never just about the oppressiveness of the surrounding working class world that fuels the unhappiness of the Kitchen Sink escapee. Rather, what Meadows offers is something less legible from a bourgeois point of view, something that the escapee could not appreciate as it involves turning


what is understood positively from such a perspective (the individual experience) into something which is negative or lacking (individualism as the misery of isolation if it is not simultaneously connected to the experience of the collective). Generally in Meadows’ films the collective is in place – and therefore the view from inside can be beautiful. Also, and as a consequence, the aesthetic qualities of a de-industrializing working class environment (the view from outside) take on a different feel. However derelict, the landscape is socialized, it is lived in, rather than surveyed from a secure distance as a picturesque panorama of disengagement. Thus, the scenes of the gang promenading within dilapidated local spaces, as part of the ritual celebration of Shaun’s initiation, convey the utopian aesthetic and political charge of the grace of the group which contrasts strongly with both the ‘poetic realism’ of the New Wave, and the ‘black magic realism’ which has been its replacement/supplement, and even with the lyrical, convulsive realism of a director like Derek Jarman, who also uses the intense collision of subcultural style and social dereliction to evoke a frenzied anti-Thatcherism in The Last of England (1988). To return then to the contrast between Woody and Combo, it is Combo’s role to activate the fault line of historical weakness in the working class idea of the social – a brittle boundary whose origins are tangled up in the uniquely long national history of capitalism and the phenomenon of popular imperialism of the late nineteenth century. Combo further compounds this weakening of the idea of common loyalty in his confusion of solidarity with service. Thus, he can see through Thatcher’s war, but the idea of sacrifice to some deep England (the forbidden, forgotten England of the National Front, a dangerous amalgam of working class ressentiment and martial national ‘service’) seduces him. The potential for a common culture is, however, conveyed in the film’s representation of space. Woody’s gang inhabit spaces in such a way as to indicate that proximity to the stranger is welcomed. Woody’s opening speech to Shaun in the underpass where the latter is accosted contains the fundamental invitation: ‘Sit with me’. For Woody, social space is not empty or neutral (as it is in the tradition of liberal individualism) but charged with the possibility of fulfilling mutual engagement. Seen from the perspective of what Williams calls the individualist idea of the social, space is always congested, full of obstacles, and carries the potential of harm for the individual negotiating it. Placing the opening encounter between Shaun and the skinheads in an urban underpass precisely catches and reverses such expectations. As in many of Meadows’ other films, space, both public and private, supports individual and

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collective flourishing. One frequently repeated example of this is the squeezing of bodies into domestic settings. Meadows’ often cramped interiors radiate an informal ease – these are spaces in which the comfortable intimacy of many individuals creates an image of ‘equality of being’, which is something Woody, with his vehement opposition to bullying, also vocally insists on. Finally, it is important to note that the film’s interest in a culture of solidarity is working against an emergent culture of neoliberalism in which the social is absorbed into the taxonomic schemas being popularized as forms of ‘urban anthropology’ in the style culture of the period (Savage 2007, p. 40).19 Savage refers to the circulation of the discourse of national tribalism in 1983, the year in which the film is set. Meadows seeks to keep us aware of the common class roots of many of these sub-cultural styles – a commonality expressed emblematically in the New Romantic teenager Smell being paired romantically with Shaun the little Skin. To paraphrase Williams: diversity and difference (growth) is premised on our ability to ensure ‘equality of being’ (tending) – something impossible within a neoliberalism in which cultural differences grow vivid, but only against the background of an increasingly polarized social landscape of deprivation and luxury. Again, it is

Figure 1.2 Photograph from the set of This is England (2006). Shaun (Thomas Turgoose) is shorn in Shane Meadows’ working class culture of mutual care. c Dean Roberts


Combo’s role in the film to emphasize the dead end of any response to neoliberalism that disregards these truths. He lectures the gang about unemployment, immigration and Thatcher’s war, and seeks to enforce a martial ethic of service, with its ritual apparatus of terror, blood brotherhood and authoritarianism. What he offers his troops is training based upon the ‘command to conformity’ (Williams 1984, p. 316). His use of Shaun as a mascot through which his authority can be asserted over the others is part of this process.

Neoliberalism and the scapegoat: Dead Man’s Shoes Dead Man’s Shoes displays the generic inventiveness which has become associated with contemporary social realism. The film mixes motifs from revenge tragedy, horror, black comedy and satire, the western, and the gangster movie. However, as the narrative unfolds so the humour and formal liveliness appear more clearly mobilized around a serious exploration of the theme of the relationship between neoliberalism and the working class/underclass. It is this exploration of the social and class damage of neoliberalism which Meadows transfers from the mode of capitalist realism (with its brutal cynicisms and black humour – see for instance the work of Guy Ritchie) to one of tragic realism (with its concern to mark, in pity and fear, a shocking sense of the plight of our species-being, and to generate from this an awareness of the possibilities of renewing the social). In Meadows’ films generally, this awareness often hinges on the traumatic figure of the outsider: the prematurely aged child, the simple, the outcast. At the centre of Dead Man’s Shoes is a historically sedimented image of the technologies and related modes of power which worked to incorporate the working class into the social, an image that is central to expanding our perception of the significance of the scapegoat figure in the film. Seen several times in the background of landscape shots of the town; in the black and white flashbacks of many of the characters, and finally, in colour and shot from the air and at ground level, the Devil’s House is where Anthony, the mentally disabled brother of army veteran Richard, is taunted and tortured into taking his own life. A large, ruined gothic Victorian country house, which has in a previous incarnation been used as a zoo, the Devil’s House already suggests extreme confinement. Anthony’s fear of the building is linked thematically to the fear of the freak in the human menagerie/freakshow. Richard, who returns to avenge his brother, dresses in a gas mask to terrorise his victims – the gang of petty drug dealers and hangers on who abused Anthony

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Figure 1.3 Photograph from the set of Dead Man’s Shoes (2004). Richard (Paddy Considine) and his brother Anthony (Toby Kebbell) make their way across c Dean Roberts England’s Midlands looking for revenge.

in his absence – a disguise referred to as The Elephant Man, thus making the historical connection to previous regimes of power dependent on confinement and the spectacular control of the socially subordinate. That is to say, through their activation of popular cultural images of the socially marginal, Meadows and Paddy Considine (the latter as co-scriptwriter) bring to mind Foucault’s histories of confinement and madness.20 Anthony’s treatment by the gang is historically reminiscent of the treatment of the mad by their visitors in Bedlam – where they would be goaded, plied with alcohol, gawped at and mocked.21 Crucially, for Foucault this was a moment when madness was produced as a spectacle. With the shift into modern regimes of power-knowledge, the social visibility of madness – and of that related figure of social marginality, the criminal – is diminished. However, as Loïc Wacquant observes it is precisely Foucault’s prediction that the spectacular functioning of technologies of punishment will continue to fade which the neoliberalism of recent years has contradicted. Wacquant argues that neoliberalism pioneers a politics of poverty (Wacquant 2009, p. 287) in which punishment is post-rehabilitative (penal policy as ‘brute neutralisation, rote retribution and simple warehousing’) and aligned with a social policy of welfare retrenchment and


workfare in order to coerce more of the working class into the secondary labour market (ibid., p. 296). Crucially, the functioning of this politics of poverty depends on a ‘law-and-order guignol’ in which punishment is not sequestered from public view and in which society seeks to ‘dramatise moral norms’ (ibid., p. 298). In this way spectacular ‘authoritarian moralism’ underscores old historical boundaries within the working class between deserving/undeserving, respectable/unrespectable, wholesome, working families/fearful and corrupted underclass congeries (ibid., p. 311). This analysis of neoliberalism provides a useful framework to understand the character of Richard and the gang he ‘executes’. Richard’s rage is intra class violence that has been captured by neoliberal’s logic of the ‘remasculinisation of the state’ (for Wacquant a neoliberal ‘daddy state’ replaces the Keynesian-Fordist welfare ‘nanny’ state) (ibid., p. 290). That is to say, the convergence of aggressive penal and social policies – which the figure of the ‘underclass’ perfectly encapsulates – has been used to stoke popular resentments and fears of the derelict and deviant, welfare recipient and street criminal, whilst at the same time compromising the fundamental sense of ‘equality of being’ upon which democracy must rest. Again, the dirty class ontologies of neoliberalism – the social bestiaries of capitalist realism – are seen to be a vital aspect of this process.22 Richard then is in part a puppet figure possessed by a demonic logic of destruction, which in its black ‘poetic’ justice (the creative symmetries of revenge) reduplicates and inscribes the key neoliberal political gestures of ‘decisive action’ in the flesh of the ‘underclass’. By the end he has himself become what he sought to punish: the ‘beast’. But the searing encounter between the gang and Anthony retains its unanswered, tragic, ethical charge. As scapegoat, Anthony’s existence challenges the neoliberal attack on the social and the working class. That is to say, by embracing Anthony – as the abject, the ‘weak’ – those around him would be capable of rediscovering the ‘equality of being’ that can remake social solidarity. What needs to be noted in this respect is that there is a strong sense in the film of an ambivalence towards Anthony, shown in the flashbacks which capture the gang’s uncontrolled swerving between rituals of solidarity and love on the one hand, and a kind of demonic evil on the other. Let us first consider the evil of Sonny’s gang. In his discussions of evil, Eagleton views it as in part a form of embarrassed cynical nihilism.23 We might argue that as such it is key to capitalist realism, which seeks to reduce all value and meaning, for instance the idea of the social, altruism, and love, to ‘non-being’ (Eagleton 2003b, p. 261). It is Anthony’s naïve,

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childish belief in his ‘soldier’ brother as a paragon of civic/national value which seems to goad Sonny into acts of obscene cruelty. Likewise, it is the possibility/probability of Anthony’s sexual inexperience, metonymically his assumed innocence, which leads Sonny to sexually abuse him. This kind of ‘demonic’ evil, as Eagleton calls it, is nauseated by any sense of ‘obscene repleteness of human existence’ (ibid., p. 261) or bland belief in value itself: ‘Revolted by the over-stuffed meaning of the angelic, the demonic keels over into nihilism, levelling all values to an amorphous shit’ (ibid., p. 260). Richard and Anthony’s childhood, as seen through the nostalgic colour tones of Super 8 film stock in the opening sequences, might stand then for precisely the kind of infuriating blandness of the ‘angelic’ ideology of the family which appears to provoke the cruelty of Sonny. These family-films are contrasted with the equally informal black and white flashbacks of the gang’s sprawling domestic spaces in which analogies of familial relationships are suggested amongst the almost exclusively male group. But, as I will argue, even in such grotesque social space, Meadows retains an impression of a subsisting, if degraded and eventually broken, sense of solidarity. There is then something about Anthony’s child-like condition – his manipulability, his ‘vulgar vulnerability’, which only redoubles his tormentors’ disgust, rage and cruelty (ibid., p. 283). But this ‘weakness’ of Anthony, as Richard puts it, and the abject social status that goes with it, offers a ‘living image of injustice’ (Eagleton 2005a, p. 134). Anthony’s wretchedness and suffering (which in the final scenes at the Devil’s House Meadows self-consciously shoots in terms of Christ’s Passion), distils the general condition inflicted on the precarious segments of a post-industrial working class. There is, in other words, a moment in which the community around Anthony – Sonny’s ‘family’ – can recognize themselves in him, and in this moment Anthony stands for ‘all the discarded victims’ of neoliberalism, the ‘garbage’ of late capitalism, and the inhuman condition which must be confronted if the ‘social order is to be remade’ (ibid., pp. 138–9). Bullying, as something structurally integral to neoliberalism, is thus brought into poignant focus. It is evident that Anthony inspires in Sonny’s ‘family’ not just demonic cruelty, but also their love. The chaotic flashback footage of Anthony’s abuse does not prevent us from assuming that there is a genuine desire to make Anthony part of their lives – to initiate him into some male collective, to divert him from his family (he repeatedly mentions being on his way to see ‘Uncle Lenny’) into another world. Throughout these scenes, gestures of love (protective, implicating and incorporative gestures with hands, fingers, arms; along with


hugs, backslaps, handshakes, cheek pinching, homoerotic wrestling) keep switching into acts of evil (punches, exposure, derision, rituals of punishment and terror). The scapegoat becomes a blurred focal point around which the fate of the community revolves. The film builds to a moment of ethical clarity that is summarized in the final exchange between Richard and Mark who have returned to the site of Anthony’s suicide. Richard asks: ‘What did you do?’ Mark assumes this question is a quasi-juridical demand for an account of acts committed. But it is not. Although he is the innocent man (despite his presence, he did not actively participate in Anthony’s death), Mark remains guilty. He admits, when he realizes the implications of Richard’s question, that he failed to ‘stay with’ Anthony when the others abandoned him, terrorised and anguished. Therefore he is guilty because of what he did not do. The ‘family man’ – who has lifted himself out of the depraved ‘underclass’ – is indicted through his failure to act, and in this realization, the ethical power of the film is manifested.

Social realism’s dark matter: Mitchell and Kenyon In 2004/5, the lost Mitchell and Kenyon films emerged into public view after close to a century in a Blackburn cellar. My interest in these films, particularly the examples of the factory gate genre in which the sole focus was the mass industrial workforce captured streaming out of the factories, lies in how they represent the working class and its history in ways relevant to an assessment of the blockages and possibilities of the tradition of social realism. We might say that the films in the collection represent an inaugural moment in that extension of the coverage of the social, a moment which is so critical to the project of social realism. As Tom Gunning points out with reference to the factory gate genre, these films record the ‘entrance of the working class [ . . . ] onto a new stage of visibility’ (Gunning 2004, p. 49). How then do such films help us to address the enduring, general problems of social realism? Critics have assigned these problems to two main areas of concern: the ongoing weakening of the sense of the public, collective, and social conditions of working class existence in favour of the individualizing, domestic, and familial dimensions; and the failure to challenge the exclusions, inequalities and divisions that have scarred the working class, including those of race, gender and sexuality, region and nationality. It can of course be argued that social realism, in as much as it is identified with representations of the working class, is in part capturing enduring historical problems in

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Figure 1.4 Alfred Butterworth & Sons, Glebe Mills, Hollinwood (1901), from the c BFI Mitchell and Kenyon Collection. A new vision of the working class.

working class culture in these areas. Certainly, when we look at the Mitchell and Kenyon films, taken as a whole, they provide evidence of the existence of the injurious divisions of gender, race, and empire in Edwardian working class culture: the many films featuring popular imperialism and football for instance. The social rigidities, separations and exclusions discussed by Williams are all here. But overridingly, what one picks up from these films and in the factory gate genre specifically is the strong sensation of the social affect of working class existence. Or, as Gunning puts it, the ‘unpredictable vitality and motion’ of this Edwardian world (ibid., p. 56). Gunning underscores this by quoting a lonely bourgeois Freud commenting on the ‘community spirit’ to be found in the working class but absent from his own (ibid., p. 49). We might add that the films – for instance, Alfred Butterworth & Sons, Glebe Mills, Hollinwood (1901) – seem to offer brief glimpses of ‘intensive’ social totalities, mobile vortices of ramifying social, economic and familial relations between the working masses converging on and around the gates of the various factories (Lukács 1970, p. 38). In part this is a result of the liminal structure of the films which the working class participants are crossing, thereby marking social boundaries between work,


home, urban–public space and leisure sites (these factory exits were often filmed prior to holiday closures – Wakes Weeks – and thus the process started with the filming requires a journey to the holiday fairground, first home of the cinema, to be completed). Historically, an image of the British working class has been passed down to us fragmented and distorted by these social boundaries and their apparently sealed-off worlds – the male world of industrial production; the female world of the home; the mass cultural arena of modern leisure, etc. The factory gate films bring out, in intense, vibrant abbreviations, the interconnections between these worlds – very young children moving from the home into the factory at lunch time, carrying food for their elders; men, women and slightly older children emerging and mingling as co-workers, many of them taking the time, in the public space of the street, to express their curiosity about the new, mass entertainment technology of the Biograph: work, the reproduction of labour, consumption. Not the faceless masses; or the traditional, culturally intact community; or the prized figure of the toiling paterfamilias or the hearthside mother, but a genuinely new popular cultural image of the working class as some whirligig of energetic co-existences. In these vital, vivacious (despite the silence) images there is sufficient explosive force to blast open the representational solidities of the long-held English culture of capitalism and class. The complexity of working class co-existence demonstrated in the films helps then to break down the dominance of the monolithic image of male industrial labour conventionally associated with the period running from the mid nineteenth to the final quarter of the twentieth century. The challenge to such images is crucial to the renewal of historical materialism and the sense of the centrality of the working class in the process of historical change. Gunning’s essay shows its awareness of this view of history in an early reference to the working class as ‘putatively the driving force of any age’ (Gunning 2004, p. 49). Here, once again, we might mention the work of historians such as Linebaugh whose arguments about the social heterogeneity characteristic of the proletariat of earlier historical eras is connected to an argument about recognizing the continuity-in-diversity of the contemporary planetary working class – a recognition which forestalls any talk about its post-industrial disappearance or decline and which draws back into the frame ejected national fragments, such as the underclass.24 In this respect, social realism’s current interest in the underclass is not necessarily a sign of a problematic drifting away from wider social problems to blocked personal ones. On the contrary, it might be argued that the importance of

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this aspect of contemporary social realism resides in its challenging of old and disabling oppositions such as respectable/unrespectable; sedentary/mobile; national/international; young/old and domestic/social. But to leave our reading of the films here would be to miss another essential aspect of their contemporary significance. For it is difficult to watch these films without an impinging feeling of the tragic. As we have seen, such tragedy implies a sense of the importance of transhistorical solidarity. Indeed, the tragic humanism of Eagleton suggests a way to understand a tension implicit in Gunning’s essay between different models of history. As Gunning puts it, considered as ‘treasure trove’ the films contain all sorts of information potentially useful to ‘historians of daily life, of costume, of working-class culture and even the history of the body’ (Gunning 2004, p. 53). But such micro-historical, or New Historicist approaches sit uneasily next to statements such as ‘They [the factory gate films] address us directly; we participate in their humanity and their spontaneity. These workers still look us in the eyes [ . . . ] It is a filmic experience, which is also a moment snatched from history’ (ibid). Such statements, whilst compatible with Eagleton’s views on the transhistorical charge of the species-being, are harder to reconcile with the conventional anti-essentialism of left-historicism. Throughout Gunning’s remarkable essay the presence of Benjamin is to be felt. In the above quote for instance, the idea of something precious being retrieved from history in a chancy moment, echoes Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’. Again, Gunning talks of the faces in these films ‘calling on us to recognise them’ and argues that ‘we have a responsibility to recall and channel these departed voices’ (ibid.). Here too is Benjamin’s tragic, redemptive philosophy of history. And again: ‘Many of the people in these films look directly at the camera as if in anticipation of recognition to come’ (ibid.). How might we explain these features of Gunning’s response to the films? One way would be to look at the convergence between Gunning’s essay on the historical thesis of a ‘cinema of attractions’ and Benjamin’s last essay on history (Gunning 1990, p. 57). The ‘cinema of attractions’ refers to the period 1895–1906. This was a largely non-narrative cinema of spectacle that was exhibitionist in its address to the spectator. It was thus very different from the voyeuristic, illusionistic, storytelling cinema associated with Hollywood that was to dominate from the 1910s. According to Gunning, in the cinema of attractions, the curiosity and exuberance of the encounter between often working class audiences and the experiences of modernity were played out explicitly in the processes of filming and the reception of the films.


As contemporary viewers of these films, our look is inserted between two different moments of the original gaze of subjects filmed. That is to say, in so-called locals such as the factory gate genre, the films were advertised to the crowds being filmed. They could come back later, when the negatives were developed, and see themselves. Thus, we look back at them with fascination, looking into faces which once might have expected to be in our place, gazing on themselves as transformed by the Biograph. The peculiar mode of address in Gunning’s ‘cinema of attractions’ (with its direct appeal to the audience) finds us, makes a claim on us in the present, in the place of the original audience. Or rather, we are interposed between the original subjects and themselves, unable to extricate ourselves. Some kind of illusion is broken then by this exhibitionist mode of address, but it is not so much that of narrative diegesis. It is more the illusion of some complacent looking back into history, the past, with the contemplative pleasure of disconnection from the spectacle. Here we become entangled in a plea, which is all the stronger for being made by those who, caught within the immediate horizons of everyday working life, may not have had their eye on posterity. In this strange, accidental historical displacement, it is, as Gunning says, as if something was expected from us, some recognition. As Benjamin puts it: ‘The past carries with it a secret index by which it is referred to redemption [ . . . ] there is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one’ (Benjamin cited in Löwy 2005, pp. 29–30). Gunning’s thesis of a ‘cinema of attractions’ establishes a strong connection between early cinema and the working class, an argument he re-states in the essay on the factory gate films. But this is a connection based not just in the dominance of working class audiences in the cinema’s first decade. The form and style of these films, as examples of the cinema of attractions, matched the ‘subject of representation’ – that of the working class ‘masses’ in action, moving through modern public spaces (Gunning 2004, p. 50). Overturning the ‘principles of selection and hierarchy found in traditional images’ these animated photographs embraced the complex contingencies of the modern appearances of the mobile vulgus (ibid.). For Gunning they represented a challenge to ‘structures of social control’ and hierarchies of space, time and bodily function – a challenge captured in his felicitous phrase, used to describe the peculiar, liberating quality of these teeming images: their ‘democracy of composition’ (ibid.). In such a cinema the emergence of the classical cinema’s extras has not yet happened. For Georges Didi-Huberman, the extras or figurants represent the ‘dark mass’ against which narratives centred on

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the individual star/actor acquire their brilliance (Didi-Huberman 2009, p. 19). ‘Figurants’ is a word that captures the image of people in the plural, in comparison to the individualized image of the star/actor. It is a word, for Didi-Huberman, from the ‘labyrinths’, signifying ‘an accessory of humanity’ which serves as a kind of ‘base’ to the story (ibid.). It is a mass, a moving ‘mosaic’, comprised of the mute and undifferentiated, a ‘silhouette swallowed up by shadow’ (ibid., p. 20). It also carries an association of death – for instance, Didi-Huberman talks of the figurants in historical epics, on battlefields, playing dead and remarks: ‘They die forgotten, like dogs’ (ibid.). Certainly the Mitchell and Kenyon films suggest death, somehow intensified by the knowledge that the films were stored away unseen for a lifetime, whilst the people whose faces where imprinted on the emulsions faced a struggle for life amidst the dark decades of the first half of the twentieth century. To return to Eagleton’s arguments about the importance of a sense of transhistorical solidarity, here are images that shock us with recognition of species-being. What is on display is what Eagleton calls ‘[t]he suffering, mortal, needy, desiring body which links us fundamentally with our historical ancestors, as well as with our fellow human beings from other cultures’ (Eagleton 2000, p. 111). Thus, in the factory gate films we see the diminutive bodies of working children, their heads and shoulders wrapped in shawls, their feet shod in clogs. Cold, malnourished, tired, prematurely aged. And something perhaps just as hard to bear – we witness child and adult often excited and enlivened by the promise of novelty, displaying in their curiosity the unfocused but no less tangible impression of the transformative potential sensed in the apparatuses of modernity of which the cinematographic camera was so central an example. Tragedy then is appropriate here because we take in all at once this shared species-being, its mangled future in the coming century and the historical emergence of at least the possibility of another, better future. It is these ‘forgotten’ futures of the twentieth century that Gunning is particularly responsive to in his essay (Gunning 2004, p. 58). It is then hard not to see these films from the perspective of Benjamin’s Angel of History, turning its sorrowful gaze backwards at history as ‘wreckage upon wreckage’ (Benjamin cited in Löwy 2005, p. 62). In the same essay Benjamin talks about the messianic vision of the chronicler in which all souls find redemption (Michael Löwy, amongst others, relates this to Benjamin’s interest in the heretical doctrine of apokatastasis).25 This offers another way of viewing the Mitchell and Kenyon films as examples of the cinema of attractions. That is to say,


that quality of the image in these films which fits with Gunning’s thesis – its teeming, polycentric, democratic compositions – seems to demand a response which converges with Eagleton’s description of our attention to the ‘infinite’ as ‘not that which soars beyond [ . . . ] creatureliness, but as a quality of one’s potentially inexhaustible attention to it’ (Eagleton 2009b, p. 307).

Cinema of the figurants: Red Road If today we can entertain the idea that the historical vicissitudes of the Mitchell and Kenyon films suggests another cinema, a cinema of the figurants, perhaps we can also speculate that a social realist cinema might already contain qualities that converge with such a cinema. The latter has an interstitial, marginal relationship with mainstream film, both as an industrial practice (the struggle to get distribution/theatrical exhibition, the reliance on festival circuits and television) and as an aesthetic/political practice (the general avoidance of the star system, the episodic narratives in which individualizing classic narrative structures open up to the dispersive effects of the wider social context – DidiHuberman’s ‘dark mass’ from whose obscurity the actors can often be directly drawn. Thomas Turgoose, Katie Jarvis, David Bradley, Martin Compston. The list is long. To take this speculation further, Andrea Arnold’s Red Road (2006) is an interesting example of a social realist film which allegorizes the ways in which alternative narrative fictions can be drawn out of what constitutes the ‘dark mass’ of mainstream narrative. That is to say, here we need to take the figurants as a figure of the working class itself, in its key contemporary guise as underclass, or dark mass of the social. As we have seen, the underclass has been a key topic of social realist films in recent years, precisely because, it might be argued, it represents a view of the working class typical of neoliberalism – one in which those who find themselves periodically surplus to its economic order are deemed to lie beyond any ‘futile or misguided’ reach of the welfare state (Burke 2007, p. 183). Often the underclass is imagined as a feral population abandoned to decaying sites of post-war modernization – high-rise flats such as those featuring in Red Road. The Scottish location of the implied backstory of a failed modernity is also interesting, as it supports the argument that it is often the Celtic fringe which serves to focus the disillusionments of Britain’s post-war period. The film revolves around Jackie (Kate Dickie), a bereaved mother and wife who works as a CCTV controller. CCTV is a surveillance technology that fits well with the neoliberal experience of a typically

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fearful, segregated social, one split not just between classes but also within them. In this instance, the split is between respectable and unrespectable/underclass segments of the working class. As Harun Farocki argues in a text on his essay-film Workers Leaving the Factory (1995), CCTV surveillance cameras ‘automatically and blindly produce an infinite number of pictures in order to safeguard ownership of property’ (Farocki 2010). As a technology of social control it is well adapted to the social polarization of neoliberalism in which a threatening underclass thrives as a moral and political issue. In Red Road, however, CCTV is hijacked by the private melancholia of a woman who has lost her child and husband to a man driving a car under the influence of narcotics. With those deaths, Jackie’s life has effectively ended. The afterlife she is living is a haunted one and the precondition for any hope of recovery will be her ability to attach herself to other narratives, any of those unfolding daily in all their inconspicuous momentousness before her eyes. Under her gaze CCTV security technology acquires a benign form. She understands her job to be about rescue as she follows the tracks of the vulnerable, and directs the protection offered by the emergency services. However, with the appearance of a grainy image of Clyde (Tony Curran), Jackie’s use of the technology becomes driven by desires that she only appears to be in control of. That is to say, the revenge narrative she puts into motion – entering the CCTV image herself in order to act out the framing of Clyde for rape – is constantly being snagged, foundering in other stories. Clyde’s adopted friends fascinate her, especially a young girl from London, April (Natalie Press) and her troubled partner Stevie (Martin Compston). Ultimately, Clyde fascinates her too, but not just because of who he is, unwittingly, to her, but because of who he is beyond her sense of his past and his once deadly irresponsibility. Jackie’s life then depends on characters whose emergence is mediated through images that are conventionally steeped in the reproduction of the pathologized symbolism of the underclass estate of Red Road. But more than this, her will to live again leads to sex with Clyde, the inadvertent killer of her family. This scene is a difficult one, precisely because it is not clear what is happening. We cannot be sure that Jackie is putting herself through this sexual ordeal simply for the opportunity of revenge it offers. Indeed, the grief she feels appears to compel her to grip Clyde in shocked fascination. This is an intimacy verging on the revulsion that causes her to retch after an earlier physically intimate encounter with him, yet it also involves an intense desire. It seems that in part these scenes are not just about sexual desire or revenge but also involve


a self-sacrificial logic. She seeks to suffer for those who have suffered. Striking herself with a stone is part of this process – necessary perhaps to support her claim of rape, but also excessive in this regard, and directed by more purely self-destructive, sympathetic urges in the wake of deaths she cannot reconcile herself to. Some harrowing logic of loyalty to the dead is at work – traumatic sex with the man responsible for killing her family becomes a way of staying true to them. However, this interpretation does not seem to exhaust the implications of the scene and Jackie’s actions. As well as seeking vengeance, she is also giving up the dead to whom it is offered. This is made clear later when we see her reviving an image of her dead child from a box of clothes which she stuffs to make a ghostly dummy. The editing implies that this act is a prelude to her decision to exonerate Clyde and to meet him once more, this time in her own right rather than incognito. Crucially, I would argue that the world Jackie re-enters is lit up by political love. As we have seen, this phrase of Eagleton’s appears paradoxical in as much as it implies continuity between the personal and the social, the ethical and the political. It is designed as a fundamental challenge to both the cynicism of neoliberal capitalist realism and a certain ethical idealism that also opposes the status quo. For the cynic the social is a sentimental fantasy projected onto the brute reality of some Hobbesian base. This is an aspect then of the demonic, destructive evil of the culture of neoliberalism – its persistent negation of the social as unreal, a sham. For the ascetic idealists of the ethical Real, politics are always compromised in as much as such activity requires a sustained engagement with the everyday world after the necessary moment of impossible revelation or extremity (the traumatic rupture of the Real in the fabric of the ordinary) and this makes their ethics ‘too elitist and too unsociable’ (Eagleton 2009a, p. 298).26 Eagleton’s account of this encounter with the Real is variously described through the tropes of the tragic mode, Judeo-Christian teaching and revolutionary socialism.27 All are united by an experience in which ‘strength flows from the very depths of abjection. Those who fall to the bottom of the system are in a sense free of it, and thus at liberty to build an alternative’ (Eagleton 2003a, p. 221). The intensity and extremity of this ethico-political discourse might be viewed as a response to the pressure the left has been under in recent times. Indeed the flourishing of the ‘dirty ontology of class struggle in Britain’ out of which terms such as ‘underclass’ and ‘chav’ emerge and are sustained is met directly in Eagleton’s political rhetoric of liberating monsters/scapegoats as ‘dirt’, ‘anawim’, the ‘shit of the earth, ‘rotting’ human bodies, ‘the dregs and

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refuse of society’ (Eagleton 2003b, pp. 277–90), and ‘garbage’ (Eagleton 2005a, p. 133). For Eagleton then, how we respond to the discourse of class disgust is critical to our politics. He would appear to view a liberal refusal of the extremity of this discourse as a grave mistake. That is to say, in response to the conservative scapegoating of working class ‘monsters’, the liberal typically denies the existence of human monstrousness, whereas Eagleton seeks to focus on the inhuman as it is revealed to us in the vision of the body of the tragic scapegoat. The latter is inhuman/monstrous in being reduced to an abject state, and stripped of the ‘decent drapery of culture’ (ibid., p. 136). Recall that part of our human ‘essence’ lies in the cultural forms we provide ourselves with. The scapegoat’s body is ‘terrible to look on’ because in its obscene, broken and rejected nakedness, the fragility (and thus preciousness) of meaning, culture and difference are all exposed (ibid.). It is also a spectacle of the inhuman because it reveals that the human essence contains an inhuman capacity for evil destructiveness. This terrifying realm of the inhuman within the human is something Eagleton explores, as we have seen, through Lacan’s concept of the Real. The latter is that which is repressed in the symbolic. It covers, amongst other things, those tragic aspects of human existence which cannot be shifted, such as mortality, suffering, pain, but which can, nevertheless, have their baleful powers increased rather than mitigated in different social contexts. By confronting the terror of the inhuman, it is possible to release a redemptive power. It is not then a case of opposing the inhumanity of provocative neoliberal political discourses with the victim’s humanity, but rather of exceeding our conventional sense of our humanity. Specifically, in the context being discussed here, such a recognition might enable us to acquire the resources to challenge a political order based on the ‘nonbeing of human deprivation’ (capitalism) with a political order based on a reverent sense of mutual frailty, ‘dependency’, and suffering, which might lead to a social characterized by loving mutual self-fulfillment (Eagleton 2003a, p. 221). To return then to Red Road, if the film is a social realist tragedy, an example of a cinema of the figurants, then its boldness lies in its willingness to refuse the moralization of that tragedy, and a culture of ‘individual responsibility’ (a key aspect of neoliberalism for Wacquant), and to imagine what is strictly speaking unimaginable within a symbolic order which has seen a proliferation of discourses of moral autonomy, a culture of vengeance, and a political desire to use the state to punish the poor (Wacquant 2009, p. 307). That is to say, Red Road stages


an encounter, one which is fundamentally difficult to classify, between a victim and an underclass ‘monster’ (‘Red’ being the key signifier); a respectable mother and wife, and society’s shit, housed in society’s dumping ground. As Eagleton argues, the strength of agape is tested through our response to the stranger and the enemy, not the friend. The ethical position Jackie adopts puts her self in suspension by entering the sphere of Clyde’s life, and by seeking out his embrace. Her fascination with him, on some level, is not just pretence or solely sexual. It includes something else which we might call, after Eagleton, the unlovely compulsion of the ‘law of love’ (Eagleton 2003b, p. 165). That is to say, Jackie seems compelled to encounter her enemy in all his ‘rebarbative inhumanity’ and alienness (ibid.). The self-abandonment of this ordeal is very different from the listless, loveless coupling with one of her colleagues in an earlier scene. This is Eros as the erasure of difference, ‘ruthlessly indifferent to individual persons’ (Eagleton 2005a, p. 31). Jackie’s face is pushed up against the window of the van, separately framed in a close shot. The expression is unengaged, impassive, and as such is perhaps intended in its mechanical awkwardness to contrast with the romantic love felt for her dead husband, or Eros as the experience of the ‘irreducibly particular person [ . . . ] elevated to sublime status’ (ibid.). By contrast, in her meeting with Clyde ‘the personal and impersonal are interwoven in a different way’ (ibid.). Here, the obligation to engage with the other is of the order of an impersonal command: like, for instance, the Christian injunction to ‘Love one another!’ However, this attentiveness must not be indifferent to its object – one must attend scrupulously to the other in all their ‘existential unloveliness’ (Eagleton 2003b, p. 167). The love scene between Jackie and Clyde is not for her some elemental, contingent re-awakening of a desire to live fully through sex. It is traumatic, impersonal. But at the same time it reveals Jackie’s resolutely unflinching need to touch Clyde’s life. Jackie’s actions can be understood here as already coloured by a spirit of forgiveness. The forgiveness in the scene is of course a peculiar kind, because at this point Clyde remains unaware who Jackie is, and indeed, from Jackie’s perspective the moment is also one of intense ambivalence. However, in distinction to the earlier scene with her colleague, what makes the sex with Clyde so striking is that Eros has been led, in part, by agape. As Eagleton says, in a society that is structurally incapable of allowing agape to flourish, Eros too suffers.28 However, if there is agape and Eros here, then this helps to explain the end of the film. Emerging out of her melancholic state and revealing her identity to Clyde, Jackie succeeds in eliciting his account of the accident and helps him to re-connect

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with his own, also lost, daughter. This act helps her to rediscover her own life in ‘being the means of life for others’ (Eagleton 2005b, p. 11). Ultimately, Red Road seeks grounds of commonality. Death haunts the film as something that makes us all bystanders. Without diminishing his responsibility, this applies to Clyde also. The idea of the bystander captures something of the helplessness of the situation described in the film and it also points to the ‘ultimate unmasterability of our lives’ which death dictates (Eagleton 2003a, p. 213). This distinguishes the film’s position on contemporary juridical and political discourses of moral autonomy, supported across the spectrum of the political mainstream, which have worked hard to establish a culture of vengeance. In the final sequence of the film we witness the redemption of the world Jackie views through the CCTV camera. Two image formats are on display here: film, with its detail and colour and fluid movement (tracking shots at street level), offering an aesthetic analogy to a loving attentiveness to world; followed by the relatively fixed, high angle, stiff-necked position of the patrolling CCTV camera. We might expect a negative comparison here between film and CCTV along familiar lines – see Petit and Sinclair’s London Orbital (2002), for example. However, Arnold suspends these associations. The CCTV shot which is the film’s final image is one in which the camera is pointed in the direction of the sun. It is also an image which, although cropped, provides a perspectivally extended view not usually allotted to CCTV footage in the film, and whilst the electronic noise of the image is still visible, the view nevertheless creates an impression of an invitation to public space rather than a sense of alienation within a landscape haunted by decay, abandonment and the non being of deprivation. This is the world Jackie willingly enters, ready to live again.

Futures The ethico-social dimension of the class struggle which contemporary British social realist films have brought to our attention through their engagement with the tragic mode, is a critical aspect of what is a defining feature of the form’s commitment to contesting that general disregard of the ‘lives of the great majority’ in the arts (Williams 2007, p. 116). In responding to the crisis of the social under neoliberal regimes, social realism has focused on the working class. But what needs emphasizing is that this image of class is an open one. That is to say, the tragic inflections of the representation of the working class in these films, rather than constituting politically restricted, privatized, terminal views,


are helping to stimulate a sense of the historic centrality of the working class experience of the contemporary crisis of the social. This centrality is conveyed through an expansion of older, more limited conceptions of the ‘identity’ of the working class as figures such as the migrant, the child, and the unrespectable or rough underclass all get drawn into the field of vision. In this respect it is interesting that in the work of Eagleton drawn on here it is the potentially universalizing dimensions of the tragic scapegoat which features so prominently, rather than the more limited sounding discourse of the revolutionary proletariat. This makes Eagleton’s work intersect with the post-Marxism of figures such as Hardt and Negri.29 But this is a convergence which is not without its difficulties. As Matthew Beaumont points out in conversation with Eagleton, to identify the tragic scapegoat with the proletariat runs the risk of implicitly transforming the latter into an idealized lumpenproletariat and overstating the latter’s revolutionary potential. Beaumont appears to suggest a similar danger in Hardt and Negri’s celebration of the ‘multitude’, another concept which exceeds any narrow definition of the working class.30 Regardless of the position adopted in this argument, it is clear that social realism’s turn towards the underclass is a valuable part of this re-making of our sense of the contemporary working class, of the exploration of the widest ranges of its experience, and of the establishing of links, both in history and across the contemporary scene, that will support this process. It is, therefore, a form which has the ability, intensified through what we might call its tragic extremism, to take a significant place in an epochal debate around class, the politics of culture and the resources of resistance in the gathering neoliberal storm.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

See for instance Lay 2002, and Hallam & Marshment 2000. See Hallam & Marshment 2000, pp. 216–17. See Dave 2006. The Future of the Lanscape and the Moving Image is a collaborative research programe involving Patrick Keiller, Doreen Massey, Patrick Wright and Matthew Flintham. See http://www.rca.ac.uk/patrickkeiller and http:// thefutureoflandscape.wordpress.com See Jennings (Humphrey) 1985, p. 267. See Jennings (Mary Lou), ibid., p. xiv. See Williams 1984. See Hobsbawm 1978, p. 37. Eric Hobsbawm tells us that Williams was invited to the key CPHG conference held in Hastings in 1954 which sought to discuss ‘the entire history of British capitalist development’.

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9. See Dave 2006, pp. 18–26. 10. Karl Polanyi’s teaching with the WEA after the war, and in particular his pioneering interest in the historical concept of the ‘Industrial Revolution’, provides further points of connection between the development of British cultural studies, the work of the British Marxist Historians, and that of Jennings and Keiller. See Steele 1997. 11. See Lay 2002, p. 19. 12. See Benjamin 1999. 13. See for instance Eagleton 1996, p. 48. 14. Gary Watson’s book on Mike Leigh, for example, places an emphasis on the ethical dimension of the films - see in particular the chapter on All or Nothing (2002). There are some clear overlaps between Watson’s account of Leigh and the one given of social realism here. However, Watson omits Eagleton’s political perspective. See Watson 2004. 15. See Eagleton 2005a, p. 129. 16. See Eagleton 2009a, pp. 223–72. 17. See Benjamin 1999, p. 119. See also Buck-Morss 1989, p. 96. 18. See Savage 2007. 19. See Dave 2006, pp. 83–99. 20. See Foucault 1977 and 1967. 21. See for example Mullan & Marvin 1987, p. 34. 22. This idea of a working class imaged as a social bestiary is something that Andrea Arnold is clearly exploring in both Red Road and Fish Tank (2009). 23. See for instance Eagleton 2003a, pp. 208–22. 24. See Dave 2003. 25. See Löwy 2005, pp. 35–6. 26. Eagleton largely excludes Badiou from this charge of rendering the Real and the symbolic discontinuous. 27. See Eagleton 2009a, pp. 139–316. 28. See Eagleton 1990, p. 413. 29. See for instance Hardt & Negri 2006. 30. See Beaumont in Eagleton 2009b, p. 288.

Bibliography Alderson, David. (2004) Terry Eagleton. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan. Benjamin, Walter. (1999) The Arcades Project. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press. ——. (2005) ‘On the Concept of History’, in Michael Löwy Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the concept of History’. London, Verso. Bensaïd, Daniel. (2007) ‘Leaps! Leaps! Leaps!’, in Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Zizek (eds), Lenin Re-loaded: Towards a Politics of Truth. Durham, Duke University Press, pp. 148–63. Biressi, Anita and Nunn, Heather. (2009) ‘The Undeserving Poor’, in Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture. Issue 41, pp. 107–16. Buck-Morss, Susan. (1989) The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.

Contemporary British Social Realist Film 55 Burke, Andrew. (2007) ‘Concrete Universality: Tower Blocks, Architectural Modernism and Realism in Contemporary British Cinema’, in New Cinemas Journal. Vol 5, No 3, pp. 177–88. Dave, Paul. (2003) ‘History and the “Underclass”; A Review of Peter Linebaugh’s The London Hanged”, in Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture. Issue 25, Winter, pp. 133–40. ——. (2006) Visions of England: Class and Culture in Contemporary Cinema. Oxford, Berg. Didi-Huberman, Georges. (2009) ‘People Exposed, People as Extras’, in Radical Philosophy. 156, July/August, pp. 16–22. Eagleton, Terry. (1990) The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford, Blackwell. ——. (1996) The Illusions of Postmodernism. Oxford, Blackwell. ——. (2000) The Idea of Culture. Oxford, Blackwell. ——. (2003a) After Theory. London, Penguin. ——. (2003b) Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic. Oxford, Blackwell. ——. (2005a) Holy Terror. Oxford University Press, Oxford. ——. (2005b) ‘Tragedy and Revolution’ in Creston Davis, John Milbank and Slavoj Žižek (eds), Theology and the Political: The New Debate. Durham, Duke University Press. ——. (2009a) Trouble With Strangers: A Study of Ethics. Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell. ——. (2009b) The Task of the Critic: Terry Eagleton in Dialogue. London, Verso. Farocki, Harun. http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/02/21/farocki_ workers.html [unpaginated] (accessed 17 June 2010). Fisher, Mark. (2009) Capitalist Realism: Is There No alternative. Ropely, Zero Books. Foucault, Michel. (1967) Madness and Civilisation. London, Tavistock. ——. (1977) Discipline and Punish. Harmondsworth, Penguin. Gilbert, Jeremy. (2009) Anticapitalism and Culture: Radical Theory and Popular Politics. Oxford, Berg. Gunning, Tom. (1990) ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant Garde’, in Thomas Elsaesser (ed.), Early Cinema; Space, Frame, Narrative. London, BFI, pp. 56–62. ——. (2004) ‘Pictures of Crowd Splendor: The Mitchell and Kenyon Factory Gate Films’, in Vanessa Toulmin, Simon Popple and Patrick Russell (eds), The Lost World of Mtichell and Kenyon; Edwardian Britain on Film. London, BFI. Hall, Sheldon. http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/461763/ [unpaginated] (accessed 17 June 2010). Hallam, Julia and Marshment, Margaret. (2000) Realism and Popular Cinema. Manchester, Manchester University Press. Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio. (2006) Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. London, Penguin. Higson, Andrew. (1996) ‘Space, Place, Spectacle: Landscape and Townscape in the “Kitchen Sink” Film’, in Andrew Higson (ed.), Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema. London, Cassell, pp. 133–56. Hill, John. (2000) ‘From New Wave to ‘Brit-Grit: Continuity and Difference in Working-class Ralism’ in Andrew Higson and Justine Ashby (eds), British Cinema: Past and Present. London, Routledge, pp. 249–60. Hobsbawm, Eric. (1978) ‘The Historians’ Group of the Communist Party’, in Maurice Cornforth (ed.), Rebels and Their Causes. London, Lawrence and Wishart, pp. 21–47.

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Jennings, Humphrey. (1985) Pandaemonium: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers. Basingstoke, Papermac. Keiller, Patrick. (2009) ‘Landscape and Cinematography’ in Cultural Geographies. 16, pp. 409–14. Lay, Samantha. (2002) British Social Realism: From Documentary to Brit Grit. London, Wallflower. ——. (2007) ‘Good Intentions, High Hopes and Low Budgets: Contemporary Social Realist Film-making Britain’, in New Cinemas; Journal of Contemporary Film. Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 231–44. Linebaugh, Peter. (1991) The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century. London, Penguin. ——. and Rediker, Marcus. (2000) The Many Headed Hydra; Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. London, Verso. Löwy, Michael. (2005) Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’. London, Verso. Lukács, György, (1970) Writer and Critic. London, Merlin Press. Marris, Paul. (2001) ‘Northern Realism: An Exhausted Tradition?’, in Cineaste. 26, 4, pp. 47–50. Mullan, Bob and Marvin, Garry. (1987) Zoo Culture. London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Savage, Jon. (2007) ‘New Boots and Rants’, in Sight and Sound. Vol. 17, No. 5, pp. 38–42. Smith, Murray. (2002) Trainspotting, London, BFI. Smith, James. (2008) Terry Eagleton: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge, Polity. Steele, Tom. (1997), The Emergence of Cultural Studies 1945–1965: Cultural Politics, Adult Education and the ‘English’ Question. London, Lawrence and Wishart. Thorpe, Vanessa. (2005) ‘The British are coming, but this time we’ll be playing it for laughs’, in http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/may/15/cannes2005.film [unpaginated] (accessed June 17 2010). Wacquant, Löic. (2009) Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham, Duke University Press. Watson, Gary. (2004) The Cinema of Mike Leigh: a sense of the real. London, Wallflower. Williams, Raymond. (1974) ‘A Lecture on Realism’, in Screen. 18, 1974, pp. 61–74. ——. (1979) Modern Tragedy. London, Verso. ——. (1984) Culture and Society: 1780–1950. Harmondsworth, Pelican. ——. (2007) Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists. London, Verso.

2 Staging the Contemporary: Politics and Practice in Post-War Social Realist Theatre Stephen Lacey

The death of social realism has often been announced in the period since 1940, yet it is still very much alive and has been central to postwar culture in general, and to the theatre in particular. As is evident from this volume, it is a rich and complex term, able to absorb a variety of methods and ideologies. To call a play social realist recognizes that it has political or moral intentions, an engagement with the darker and more controversial aspects of contemporary society and deals with recognizable social issues. Social realism refers us to the world in which we live, and access to what a play is about is achieved often by a transparency of form. Social realism sometimes connotes mimesis and verisimilitude, (referred to as ‘naturalism’ and the ‘naturalistic’ in post-war theatrical debate) – an aesthetic that aims to reproduce reality by adhering to its observable, outward forms, and which may be traced across the means of theatrical communication and dramatic writing (colloquial language, for example, a compressed narrative structured into three acts, fullyrealized ‘box-sets’, ‘real’ characters, lighting and sound). When social realism is rejected, it is this sense of the term that is often meant. However, the terminology here, as with realism and naturalism generally, is often imprecise, or at least variable and evolving. The aim of this chapter is not to contain this profusion, but rather to trace some of its most persistent features across a seventy-year time span and along different paths. Although a rough chronology will be observed, the approach is thematic, and does not seek to be comprehensive. The focus is primarily on drama that has had prominence in the UK as a whole, and is therefore, reluctantly, metropolitan in its bias. In arguing that social realism remains one of the most important traditions of dramatic and theatrical representation available to writers and theatre practitioners since 1940, 57

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this analysis will recognize that it embodies a politics and an approach to form and method that casts a long shadow over apparently disparate plays and productions. It will follow current practice in referring to illusionist drama/theatre methods as naturalist, although older senses of naturalism will also be relevant. There is, however, no exact template that can be used to determine the outline of social realist stage drama. The diversity of plays that connect to it means that the question is not ‘is this play social realist?’ but rather ‘what is there in this play that is social realist?’ First, there is the question of realism itself. As Raymond Williams has argued (1977), realism has been linked historically to drama that engages with the contemporary world, as both setting and subject matter. ‘The contemporary’ is not simply a backdrop to the action, a necessary context for a narrative that is concerned with other things, but is rather the focus of active investigation; social realism is about the contemporary world in a direct way, and is seen to reflect, and reflect on, that world, which is, generally speaking, that of its first audience. Realism is also linked to the representation of the social experience of marginalized groups and classes (and here the ‘social’ in social realism becomes less an adjective than part of a compound noun). Williams calls this aspect social extension, arguing that it derives from a movement that is political and moral to enlarge the scope of the drama, first to the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century and then to the working class. Realism – social realism in the post-war context – was from its origins concerned with representing social experience that had not been seen on the stage before, and each new realist wave, each moment of realist innovation, has been achieved by remedying an absence; of the northern working class, of young people, of sexuality, of women, of ethnic minorities. Social realism, therefore, claims a greater command of the real than other representations, and asks to be judged in relation to them. Until 1968, such judgments were made in the context of preproduction censorship, in which theatre was the most regulated of the arts. Play scripts had to be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain’s Office before being produced, which had the power to impose cuts. The guidelines governing the criteria for censorship, in a manoeuvre typical of the British establishment, were not based in statute and were drawn up in 1909 and interpreted according to the discretion of the readers employed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office. References to sex were especially tightly policed, and the portrayal of homosexuality was forbidden. Realism implies a direct engagement with that which is suppressed, but

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censorship imposed limits on how much reality could be represented before 1968. After the Lord Chamberlain’s Office had its powers of censorship rescinded, social extension was equated with the breaking of taboos in addition to those of class – those involving the representation of gender and sexuality, for example – with considerable effect on post-war culture generally. Social realism foregrounds the relationship between individuals and groups and their social environment, and this is the source of its politics. The social becomes significant, since it is in social or environmental factors, as distinct from individualized personal attributes, that realism is interested. The distinction is not one of binary oppositions, however, but of emphasis and of causation, where the actions of individuals are shaped by the determining powers of broader social, political and economic forces. As Williams notes, realist drama reveals the ways in which human beings are constrained by the circumstances in which they find themselves, ‘showing a man or woman making an effort to live a much fuller life and encountering the objective limits of a particular social order’ (Williams 1979, p. 221). In fact, the sense of entrapment, of characters shaped by forces beyond their control, is central to nineteenth century naturalism, and is a recurrent motif of post-war social realism. The dramatic model is one which typically ends in the containment and defeat of the central character, which becomes in turn a challenge to the audience to resolve the situation after the play has ended.

The drama of the ‘new wave’: points of departure Discussion of social realism since 1940 has been dominated by the drama of the late 1950s and early–mid 1960s. Referred to almost immediately as the ‘new wave’, this realist drama has a spectacularly visible point of origin – John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, which was staged by the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre in May 1956. What followed has been much mythologized, although the lustre has since worn off (see Lacey 1995, Rebellato 1999 and Shellard 2000). In general terms, the history is a familiar one. The new wave was immediately cast in terms of its relationship to realism and to representations of the working- or lower-classes and contemporary Britain in its non-metropolitan settings, the epithet bestowed upon a number of predominantly young writers of mainly working-class origins. In addition to Osborne, whose The Entertainer (1957) was also important to the argument, there was Arnold Wesker (Chicken Soup with Barley (1958), Roots (1959), I’m Talking about Jerusalem (1960, completing the Trilogy) and

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Chips with Everything (1962)); Harold Pinter, whose early plays, notably The Room (1960) and The Birthday Party (1958) have a relationship to social realism that was not always apparent at the time; Shelagh Delaney (A Taste of Honey (1958)); John Arden (always at an oblique angle to the dominant realist forms, with Live Like Pigs (1958) and The Workhouse Donkey (1963)); Brendan Behan (The Quare Fellow (1956) and The Hostage (1958) produced, like A Taste of Honey at the Theatre Royal); and, more controversially, Edward Bond, whose Saved (1965), along with Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane (1964) are early examples of inversions of social realism under pressure of new intentions. There were a host of other, less well-known (and certainly less debated) writers, such as Bernard Kops and Frank Norman. The new wave was also associated with two theatre companies – the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre, and Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East. The two companies sat, geographically, aesthetically and politically, in uneasy tension at either end of London’s theatre culture. Social realism, even in its most capacious sense, does not adequately define all the drama that emerged in this period, nor does it make its first entrance with Look Back in Anger, even in the post-war context; the further away one gets from the ‘moment’ of 1956, the clearer this becomes. Some of the radical leftist political and moral intentions of social realism, along with its predilection for domestic living spaces as the location for action, can be found in J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls (1947) and The Linden Tree (1947), for example, written in the immediate aftermath of World War Two. Also, Rodney Ackland’s The Pink Room (1952, rewritten as Absolute Hell (1988)), set on the night of the 1945 General Election, is an early attempt to use the form of single-set, chronologically-compressed ensemble drama (with Chekhov as a reference point) to reflect on Britain at a time of historic change. Terence Rattigan covered something of the same emotional and moral territory as Look Back in Anger in The Deep Blue Sea (1952), with a similar squalid setting, although he was derided as one of the enemy by the post-56 generation (according to John Russell Taylor, for example, Shelagh Delaney saw Rattigan’s Variation on a Theme ‘and thought that if this was drama, she could do better herself [ . . . ] the result was A Taste of Honey’ (Taylor 1978, p. 131)). Social realism was also part of the theatre culture of (some) regional theatres with working-class audiences, such as the Unity Theatres in Glasgow and London. Randall Stevenson notes that Robert McLeish’s The Gorbals Story (1946) at Glasgow Unity was seen by over 100,000


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people in its first six months, appealing through its ‘accurate depiction of working-class tenement life; humour familiar from the music-halls; [and] a sharp edge of social commentary’ (Stevenson 1996, p. 101). Similarly, Ena Lamont Stewart’s Men Should Weep (1947) detailed poverty and squalor in Glasgow’s slums, with a focus on the situation of workingclass women (the play was successfully revived – indeed, re-invented – by 7:84 Scotland in 1982). Also, London theatregoers had seen an example of a different kind of post-war realism, this time from North America, in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire (1949), which brought the themes of sex and class together in a way that no British writer had done at the time. Look Back in Anger may not seem as revolutionary a play as it once did – there is little radical about its form – but it was clearly a historical and cultural phenomenon, dissected by tabloid and highbrow journalists alike, giving rise to a genuinely distinctive cultural moment. As David Edgar has argued, whatever the shortcomings of the play itself, a great deal of British theatre would not have taken the same path without it (see Edgar 1988, pp. 137–42). The same is true of the new wave in general. Although it did not create social realism, the terms in which the new wave defined itself, and was defined, in critical and popular discourse has had considerable effect on the subsequent development of social realist stage drama. The success of the new wave had much to do with its appearance at a particular moment in British history. Much of the drama of Osborne, Wesker et al was read as oppositional and of the liberal-left, ensuring that there was a critical disposition to read social realism as running against the grain of established values. From 1945 to the mid 1960s, British society seemed transformed, first by the actions of the Labour Governments of 1945–51, which established the Welfare State and the main architecture of the British state until the 1980s, and then by a period of unprecedented prosperity throughout the 1950s. Unemployment hovered around a mere 1–2 per cent throughout the decade, whilst earnings increased by 110 per cent, with the increased wealth spent on a range of newly available consumer goods (car ownership leaped from two and a quarter to 8 million between 1951 and 1964, whilst ownership of television sets increased from 760,000 in 1951 to over 13 million in 1964 (see Pinto-Duschinsky 1970, pp. 55–6). In a context in which this general affluence seemed to guarantee the end of traditional class divisions and the coming of a homogenized mass culture, social realism’s preoccupation with the working class was antihegemonic, challenging the consensus that dominated post-war public

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policy and debate. However, when one looks at individual plays, rather than critical and popular commentary, the working class is present in diffuse and various ways. Few of the protagonists of key plays are statistical averages in the sociological sense, however the broader critical context ensured that social realist theatre was aligned not only with social realism in other art forms but also with documentary and sociological accounts of the working class and its culture. Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957), for example, was a seminal and highly influential account of working class culture that defined it in terms of the ways of life of family, street and neighbourhood, which was also the narrative territory of much social realism. For this reason, new wave drama was often interpreted as if it were a form of sociology, or anthropology, a first-hand account from the front-line. Characters and settings, always potentially metonymic in social realism in its naturalistic form, are charged with an additional typicality, reflecting an entire culture from the inside. A contemporary review of A Taste of Honey made the anthropological framework explicit, celebrating the play as ‘being almost unlike any other working-class play in that it is not scholarly anthropology observed from the outside through pince-nez but the inside story of a savage culture observed by a genuine cannibal’ (Brien 1959, p. 251). This way of framing the play foregrounds its social and cultural context over the immediate concerns of its characters and suggests a transparent and fixed relationship between author, play and subject. The political allegiances of the new wave meant that it was somehow important to be writing about class and contemporary Britain. This linked theatre to a broad new left politics, in which to be a realist carried a moral imperative. Writing of British culture of the time, John Caughie argued this was a combination of political engagement and provincial non-conformism: [I]t is a kind of ethical seriousness, rather than simply formal realism, which seems to underpin the cultural movements associated with the 1950s and 1960s. This is what gives them much of their power and their value: the sense that these things mattered and that theatre or literature or television drama could do something about them. (Caughie 2000, pp. 70–1) To write about working-class culture was, therefore, a form of bearing witness to the daily struggles of ordinary people, a fidelity to the cumulative truth of everyday experience, which was often political in its


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implications. This has proved to be a powerful legacy for much theatre about class since. As a conclusion to this section, it is worth noting that some new wave social realism has an ambivalent attitude to its provincial setting, and a fascination with the possibilities of life in the metropolis. There is a recurrent narrative motif of escape, with protagonists having already moved away from their home territory (the central character in Alun Owen’s Progress to the Park (1961), for example, who is a writer in London) or where the possibility of escape is a source of narrative interest. The most obvious example is Waterhouse and Hall’s Billy Liar (1961), where the eponymous Billy Fisher plans, but does not enact, his flight to London, leaving Liz, his would-be girlfriend, to accomplish it for him. London as a place of fantasy and escape relates to its position as the cultural as well as the administrative capital of the UK. There is a point to make here about how the inexorable pull of London impacts on social realist theatre and its audiences. It remains the case that success in the theatre normally means success in London, and theatre remains amongst the most centralized of all art forms, with audiences for working-class plays often at some remove from the cultures being represented. The question, therefore, is who is social realism for? The need to engage new audiences, to broaden the appeal of theatre in an age dominated first by television and then by the internet is a permanent feature on the landscape of post-war drama, and has driven some of its most significant developments – of regional theatres in the 1960s and 1970s, and alternative and touring theatre after 1968, for example. Both the English Stage Company and Theatre Workshop were as much concerned with who the new drama was for as with what it was about. For George Devine, the Artistic Director of the ESC, a new and socially invigorating audience was to be found amongst the provincial young, reproducing the wider construction of youth as a metaphor for social change, who ‘came streaming into the tired metropolis [and] woke up everything they touched’ (Devine 1962, p. 12). For the writer John McGrath, who was associated with the Court in the late 50s, change flowed in the other direction; the ‘ “new” audience for this kind of theatre’ he argued ‘was, if not in origin, certainly in ultimate destination, merely a “new” bourgeoisie, mingling with the old, even indulging in miscegenation’ (McGrath 1981, p. 12). Theatre Workshop, however, aimed to attract a working-class audience to the Theatre Royal in Stratford East, some way from the heart of the West End, which was a continuation of its policy as a touring company. Paradoxically, the Company’s main successes – Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, for example – made

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their biggest impact after they had transferred to the West End (a move dictated by financial necessity, against Company policy). It is perhaps in the repertory theatres of Britain’s provinces from the 1960s onwards that social realist drama came closest to finding a working-class audience. Key examples would be the Victoria Theatre in Stoke-on-Trent, which, under Peter Cheeseman’s directorship, pursued a policy of commissioning and producing locally-oriented drama in either realist or documentary forms for over forty years, and the Octagon Theatre in Bolton, which throughout its post-war history has championed the plays and adaptations of Bill Naughton’s work to local audiences.

Dramatizing the domestic and the local: social realism in familiar places Social realism often attracted the epithet ‘kitchen sink’, which is an indication that it is associated with the domestic and the everyday. A corner of contemporary Britain is viewed through the microcosm of the living spaces of a particular social group, often a family, which functions as a metonym for other families and for the wider world – the city, class, and culture as a whole. The model is not new to the postwar context, and has nineteenth century antecedents (in A Doll’s House (1879), for example, Ibsen uses single-space, domestic drama to attack the rotten heart of bourgeois society at its strongest point, the family). Theatre space as metonym (and occasionally metaphor) is an important part of social realist theatre, yet how this theatrical function is negotiated varies, and there is no single dramatic pattern amongst post-1940s drama. The following gives an idea of how the possibilities might be marshalled. A plot outline of Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey gives a good idea of why it was so readily categorized as social realism. The play concerns Jo, a sixteen-year old teenager who lives with her mother, Helen (described as a ‘semi-whore’), in a flat in Salford. Helen leaves to live with a younger and more affluent man, Peter, leaving Jo to fend for herself. Jo meets, and becomes pregnant by, a black sailor, who leaves her. She is befriended by Geoffrey, a gay art student, who comes to live with her and support her through her pregnancy. Helen returns to resume her maternal role, and Geoffrey leaves. As one reviewer noted, A Taste of Honey was a play ‘ “about” a tart, a black boy giving a white girl a baby, a queer. The whole contemporary lot, in short’ (Worsley 1959, p. 252). Unlike many new wave plays, A Taste of Honey is female centred, with women as its main characters, as well as having a woman


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writer, and director (Joan Littlewood). The narrative stance of the play is what might be called observational, or objective naturalism (although both terms are not without difficulty). Delaney does not exploit the metonymic potential of the story, and there is no attempt to connect the immediate dramatic situation to the world beyond by argument or by investing Jo with a privileged knowledge of her situation, which would enable her to analyze and explain her actions with reference to a wider context. As Stuart Hall has written, in A Taste of Honey Delaney displays an ‘extraordinarily fine and subtle feel for personal relationships. No themes or ideas external to the play disturb its inner form: her values are all intensive’ (Hall 1970, p. 215). The play’s politics, therefore, lie not in its argument but in the way it offers complex and sympathetic portrayals of people who are socially marginal. The position of Geoffrey is particularly interesting, since the play had to tread a fine line regarding the presentation of homosexuality in order to obtain a licence from the Lord Chamberlain’s Office. Although the script is circumspect in its references to his homosexuality (and it was play scripts that the censor looked at initially), in performance the audience would have been in no doubt. A Taste of Honey, then, is social realist by virtue of the people it represents, and its refusal to adopt a moral stance towards them. In Jo, it also has a heroine who is not broken by her situation, who does not follow the naturalist trajectory from misery into defeat, and who is not a victim of her environment, or of anything else. Arnold Wesker’s Roots shows a different way in which social realist drama might reach out to a politics beyond its immediate domestic dramatic context. Roots is the second part of a trilogy of plays about the Kahns, a politically active Jewish family from London’s East End modelled on Wesker’s own. The central character across the trilogy is Ronnie Kahn, a young man in his twenties, who was in the mould of the new generation of post-war leftist intellectuals. In Roots, however, Ronnie does not appear at all, and the narrative switches to his girlfriend, Beattie Bryant, a working-class young woman from rural Norfolk who, like some of her real-life counterparts, now lives in London. The play concerns Beattie’s return to her parental home to prepare for Ronnie’s visit. At the close of the play, as the family assemble for tea Ronnie sends a telegram to say that he will not be coming. This is a narrative of the everyday, which explores Beattie’s fractious relationship with her family, and Wesker’s strategy is to use her as a way of debating the main theme of the play, which is the cultural impoverishment of the working class. Ronnie is not present, but his opinions are constantly quoted by Beattie. Ronnie’s values are those of an educated and politically and

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culturally aware intelligentsia, in which art has a central place. Roots is, therefore, very much a play of ideas, which are given full force in Beattie’s enthusiastic espousal of high cultural values to her resistant family. The central problem identified by Beattie is not so much poverty – although the Bryants do not appear to have shared in the general affluence supposedly available to the working class as a whole – but rather cultural impoverishment. ‘I’m telling you something’s cut us off from the beginning’ argues Beattie at one point, ‘I’m telling you we got no roots’ (Wesker 1973, p. 146). This disconnection from anything that might nourish the working class gives the play’s title its resonance. What fills the vacuum is a meretricious mass culture of pop music and tawdry television, and Roots voices an anxiety about the damaging effects of newer forms of culture on the working class that also surfaces in The Uses of Literacy and elsewhere. What prevents Beattie becoming simply an authorial mouthpiece for these arguments is that she is wrestling with the contradictory pressures of inherited cultural values and the pressure to conform to Ronnie’s idea of who she should be. At the play’s conclusion Beattie finds her own voice at last, although the opinions she articulates are in line with, and give final form to, the main argument of the play. The early plays of Harold Pinter, The Room, The Birthday Party, The Dumb Waiter (1960) and The Caretaker (1960) are rarely discussed now in the context of social realism. However, they look like social realism, that is they rely on the solidity of fully-realized box-sets, lower- or workingclass characters, and narratives that – at least in some respects – could have been wrenched out of everyday life. A few critics did, indeed, respond to these plays in this way: Kenneth Tynan noted the ‘prevalent dry rot – moral as well as structural’ of the floating population of London’s west suburbs in The Caretaker, arguing that ‘Mr Pinter captures all this with the most chilling economy’ (Tynan 1984, p. 280), whilst John Arden called the same play ‘a perfectly straightforward story that might almost have been overheard in a public bar’ (quoted in Scott 1991, p. 117). Both The Room and The Birthday Party begin with an everyday domestic routine, breakfast, and the solid familiarity that is conjured up by the plays’ domestic settings (outlined in selective detail in the stage directions) is as necessary as it is illusory. Pinter invests them with new, disturbing power: a birthday party becomes a terrifying, threatening ritual; a vacuum cleaner (in The Caretaker) becomes an instrument of psychological violence. Pinter’s dramatic practice springs from a particular view of the world. Social realism accepts that the world is knowable, that there is an


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external reality that can be represented and interrogated, and that the function of a play is to represent and interrogate. There are many different political and moral possibilities that flow from this assumption. For Pinter, reality is not as fixed or certain as the realist model allows. He once wrote ‘I suggest that there can be no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false’ (Pinter 1976, p. 11–12). The unknowability of social reality, and the sense of menace that frequently lies in the gap between the known and the unknown, is a recurrent theme in Pinter’s works. It is because the familiar elements of realist staging are realized faithfully, and signify so clearly the social world of the audience, that Pinter’s use of them has such disturbing power. A similar re-conceptualization of the solid domestic world is found in Joe Orton’s plays, although here it is not so much the setting itself as what goes on within it that is unsettling. Entertaining Mr Sloane, for example, concerns a ménage á trois in which Sloane, an entirely amoral young man, is the object of desire of the much older Kath, his landlady, and of her brother Ed. The play, which also contains a murder (of Kath and Ed’s father, to cover up another murder), is set in a living room, where the world of bourgeois gentility is evoked and then subverted, as is the traditional family. As Michael Billington has noted, ‘[t]he subversiveness lies in Orton’s vision of sex as a bargaining chip and of life as a series of tactical erotic manoeuvres’ (Billington 2007, p. 177). The realistic solidity of the setting is part of Orton’s strategy as a writer, which is to express the most outrageous ideas and situations through familiar conventions (all of his full-length plays are based on farce), a highly-formalized, elegant language, and a commitment to realism in all aspects of performance, including the acting. As in Pinter’s plays, the intention to subvert is most effective when there is a consensus as to what is being subverted – the solidity of social realist settings and the ideological underpinnings of the bourgeois family. The critical response to Edward Bond’s The Pope’s Wedding (1962) and Saved was similar to that which greeted Pinter – the familiar framework of social realism was used as a way of dispelling a general bafflement. The parallel is not entirely fanciful, since Bond also uses many of the expected ingredients of social realism to produce very different effects. Saved in particular can be seen as a hyper realistic description of a specific culture, that of the affluent working class of South London, mapped by a brutally restricted language and voiced by inarticulate but recognizable characters who are capable of sudden acts of violence. However, violence is much more explicit and extreme in Saved than in any Pinter

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play of the period. The infamous key episode, scene six, concerns the stoning to death of a baby in a pram in a park by a gang of young men, and its inclusion led to fist-fights in the auditorium during the first production and a court case brought by the Lord Chamberlain’s Office (the Court had attempted to circumvent the censor’s refusal to grant a licence by turning the theatre into a private club, a ruse which the Lord Chamberlain successfully challenged – see Elsom 1981). This is clearly not an everyday event, yet part of the outraged response to it was because it was presented as if it were, without authorial judgement. There is no Beattie Bryant figure to articulate a point of view on events, and no resonant metaphor that might connect the outrage to an explanation of it. The audience is not even allowed an emotional release, since the mother, returning to the park to collect her child, wheels the pram offstage before realizing what has happened. There is, as one reviewer complained, no ‘shaping power of art’ to give form to what is read otherwise as a flat, documentary account (Elsom 1981, p. 177). One criticism of Saved is that, despite Bond’s intention that the stoning is to be read as the product of a restricted and violent ‘way of life’ (see Hay and Roberts, 1978), the play does not provide the audience with a context in which the violence could be interpreted as being socially produced. Saved had few imitators at the time, but was an influence on the wave of provocative, ‘In Yer Face’ (Sierz 2001) drama that emerged in the 1990s, typified by Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995). Saved was performed on a bare stage, with minimal props and setting; and although both A Taste of Honey and Roots might be seen as conventional naturalistic plays, they are, like Saved, good examples of the ways in which social realist intentions might be expressed in nonillusionist theatrical forms, since neither received full-blown naturalist productions. Indeed, from an early point in the development of the new wave, naturalist box sets were under attack. Wesker’s plays were produced by the Royal Court, directed by John Dexter and designed by Jocelyn Herbert. The ESC at this time was keen to shake off the trappings of West End theatre, and was opposed to what it considered to be naturalism, which often meant abandoning fully-realized sets in favour of a more imagistic and metaphorical approach. Herbert’s design for Roots, for example, placed its single set kitchen in the middle of an empty stage, its walls only half constructed, with the cyclorama (which was standard for all productions at this time) visible beyond. Onto this were projected scenes of the countryside, out of scale with the kitchen itself. The approach has been termed ‘poetic realism’ (see Lacey 1995, p. 112), and the intention was to reveal the artifice of the


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setting, acknowledging its status as theatre (Brecht was an influence on the ESC at this time), and to look for resonant metaphors that would also celebrate their own aesthetic form. Joan Littlewood’s productions for Theatre Workshop at Stratford East similarly disturbed the norms of illusionist staging. Littlewood’s encyclopaedic knowledge of European theatre traditions, which informed all her work at this time, allowed her to draw confidently on both psychological realism and music-hall. The film and theatre director Lindsay Anderson enthusiastically celebrated her production of A Taste of Honey, commending Avis Bunnage, who played Jo’s mother Helen, for combining ‘the broadest eye-on-the-gallery caricature with straight-forward, detailed naturalism’ (Anderson 1970, p. 80). The published script, which is a record of Littlewood’s production (Delaney’s original script was developed in rehearsal), states that a jazz band is visible on stage and notes several points where the actors address the audience directly. Whilst naturalistic staging methods remained a possibility after the new wave, increasingly the ‘realism’ in social realism resided in narrative, representation and acting, rather than set. If the kitchen sink was once more banished from the stage, it was for aesthetic reasons, and never for very long.

Social realism and politics Social realism, as we have already noted, adopts a largely critical and oppositional stance in relation to the UK political and class system, and is associated, in general terms, with the left. Politics enters much social realist drama via an agenda of ‘issues’ – abortion, racism, the failure of the education system – which are represented metonymically and metaphorically within the dramatic action. By the late 1960s this agenda was becoming crowded as Britain entered a different historical phase, which produced a more politically aware and radical generation of writers and theatre practitioners. By the end of the decade, the consensus that had dominated post-war debate, and against which much social realism had railed, was under threat from different quarters. Internationally, there was active resistance to British support for the increasingly unpopular US presence in Vietnam, which fed the global counter-cultural revolution that was ‘May ’68’ (and which had its UK manifestations). Within two years, however, right-wing governments were elected in the USA and France, the liberal government of Czechoslovakia was crushed by Soviet troops, and the Conservatives were back in power in the UK. At home, there was a resurgence of

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racism and fascism in the UK, with the National Front taking an antiimmigrant agenda to the streets and ballot-box in the early 1970s, along with the eruption of virtual civil war in the streets of Northern Ireland as thirty years of ‘The Troubles’ began. Major economic crises returned in the early part of the decade, resulting in increased industrial militancy, culminating in the Miners’ strikes of 1973 and 1974. Much of the left, meanwhile, looked beyond established political forces, for example to the Women’s Movement, in its many cultural, political and economic forms. Perhaps more than any other art form, theatre responded to the swirls and eddies of counter-cultural energy after 1968 and to the politicization that followed economic and political crisis in the 1970s. The fringe, or alternative theatre movement, threatened to sweep social realism aside, an irrelevant product of a hierarchical theatre system wedded to broken dramatic and theatrical methods and outmoded political values. However, it is remarkable how, once again, social realism remained a possibility, one choice amongst many, for practitioners looking for appropriate forms for a new content. Feminist theatre is a particularly good example. Developing in tandem with the women’s movement generally, feminist theatre developed quickly from impromptu agit-prop sketches to complex drama (for sympathetic accounts of this history see Itzen (1980) and Wandor (1986)). Social realism’s concern with the domestic chimed with feminist politics. Women’s oppression was, it was argued, most clearly felt in the home, in the family especially, where women’s role as the sole bearers of domestic and familial responsibility was of particular concern. Feminism also ensured that these concerns would not be seen as outside ‘real’ politics, since the post-68 slogan ‘the personal is political’ took on a specific resonance, and was ‘taken up by feminists to mean that there is no aspect of “personal” experience which cannot be analysed and understood and changed’ (Wandor 1986, p. 14). Early 1970s feminist theatre was, therefore, often domestic in its orientation, and ‘home and family relationships were shown as the site of struggle in themselves’ (ibid., p. 44). The dramatic methods used borrowed both from social realism in its naturalist form – believable characters and recognizable situations, constructed as typical, though mostly without illusionist settings – and a more Brechtian, argument-driven analysis, accompanied sometimes by cartoon-like imagery. Later feminist drama, for example the work of Caryl Churchill, has become associated with formal radicalism and experiment. Yet even here social realism is not so much abandoned as refashioned and re-contextualized. Churchill’s Top Girls (1982) combines an


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extraordinary range of forms, from the imagined dinner party, in which women from history and art mingle, to the carefully-observed, sparse, social realist Act Three, which is set in a kitchen and centres on the confrontation between two sisters, whose contrasting attitudes to Margaret Thatcher define them personally as well as politically. Pam Gems draws even more heavily on social realism in Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi (1977), in which the four eponymous characters living in a communal house represent different kinds of contemporary female experience in a narrative that is set firmly and consistently in a recognizable present (of its first appearance). In this ensemble cast, the central character, Fish, becomes, like Beattie Bryant, a representative figure who carries the weight of the play’s argument. The use of social realism to pursue a more political agenda is evident in the plays of Trevor Griffiths, whose articulate theorization of his position makes him a particularly good example to consider. Griffiths, though politically very close to the socialist wing of the alternative theatre movement, was committed to what he called ‘strategic penetration’ of the main institutions of cultural power, which meant the bastions of subsidized theatre and television. The task was to reach the largest amount of people as possible in the struggle for ‘the popular imagination’. He was clear that this would mean working with social realism: I have to work with the popular imagination which has been shaped by naturalism. I am not interested in talking to 38 university graduates in a cellar in Soho. It’s my guess that we still have to handle realism. One of the things about realistic modes is still that you can offer through them demystifying, undistorted, more accurate, counter descriptions of political processes and social reality than people get through other uses of naturalism. (Griffiths 1976, p. 12) Griffiths’ first play to be performed (Occupations (1971)) was produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company at The Place, and The Party (1973) was produced by the National Theatre and starred Laurence Olivier. Comedians (1975) was commissioned by Richard Eyre for the Nottingham Playhouse. The Party is based almost entirely on argument. Griffiths’ solution to the problem of how to embody politics in a naturalistic framework was to create a drama that was about politically committed people, and The Party, which is set in the house of a left-wing television producer over the course of an evening, is staged as a debate

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between characters who embody different leftist positions. Although the play does not resolve the argument, it was Olivier, who played the old Trotskyite John Tagg, who commanded the floor in the first production. Comedians is perhaps the better play, using the main features of social realism to explore a contemporary response to the crisis of capitalism in mid-70s Britain at both a personal and political level. The play is about a school for comedians and takes place over the course of a single evening, during which the would-be comics prepare for, perform and then analyze their acts. It begins and ends in the classroom, with the second act set in a local club. Comedians is partly about different approaches to comedy and the political purpose of humour. The play’s form allows for a range of arguments to be established in Act One, and then tested in Act Two, when the audience’s response to each comic is framed by what we have heard. In Act Three, the central dynamic of the play, which is the relationship between the veteran comic, Eddie Waters, who teaches the class, and his most unpredictable pupil, Gethin Price, assumes centre stage. Price’s performance in the club is a mixture of Dada provocation and white-face clowning, and is deliberately unfunny. Waters is both appalled and impressed by it, and the argument between them is about two ways of responding politically to the need for change. For Waters, a liberal humanist who cannot trust his own responses, the way forward is dogged perseverance, in which the school for comics kicks back against the politics of accommodation. For Price, an instinctive anarchist, whose anger is barely containable, the only way of being in the world is to reject it, which could lead, the play suggests, simply to another form of inertia. Griffiths does not resolve the tension between them, but allows the contradictions of each position to lie open. Comedians’ concern with education is picked up by other socialist dramatists working in realist forms in the 1970s, notably Nigel Williams, whose Class Enemy (1978) is set in a classroom amongst violent and troubled teenagers, and Barrie Keeffe, who wrote a trilogy of plays performed under the collective title of Gimme Shelter (1977). The first play, Gem (1975), is set on the afternoon of the annual cricket match of a large, local company, and focuses on four of its young employees. Narrative interest hinges on an attempt by the play’s central character, Kev, to persuade the others to find ways to subvert the match as a gesture of class war. The second play, Gotcha (1976), shifts focus to a London school, where the protagonist is a sixteen year-old youth who imprisons three teachers in a storeroom by holding lit cigarettes over the petrol tank of his brother’s motorbike. The third, Getaway (1977), brings the


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protagonists of the first two plays together at the annual cricket match, a year on. It is important to the political and dramatic impact of the trilogy that the youth in Gotcha is never named (he is ‘Kid’ in the script). All three plays are rooted in the world of their first performance, and are saturated with references to contemporary music, television programmes and personalities (Kev constantly threatens his recalcitrant friends with quotes from Clive Jenkins, a left-wing leader of a Trade Union at the time, for example). Gimme Shelter’s overarching theme is the lack of life chances given to young people of the working class. School becomes a metaphor for the broken promises made by the comprehensive schools system, which cannot deliver on its egalitarian rhetoric. As the Kid tellingly notes towards the end of Gotcha: ‘You shouldn’t promise things what you don’t mean. That’s more wrong than what I done’ (Keeffe 1978, p. 76). Gotcha is the most successful play of the trilogy, and its central image of the Kid astride the bike is a startling theatrical device and a resonant, if deliberately ambiguous metaphor. The play does not explain why he chooses to threaten teachers, and himself, in this way; his entire life, Keeffe seems to suggest, has brought him to this point. It can, however, only end in defeat – either death or surrender, as the cigarettes run out. The political logic of the play returns it to classical naturalism, where the protagonist confronts the objective limits of his/her power to control the situation and the audience are left to resolve the question of what should be done. In the 1980s, the naturalist pessimism that is evident in Gimme Shelter takes a darker turn as economic crises return. A particularly good example of how this is played out on the territory of social realism is Jim Cartwright’s Road, first performed at the Royal Court in 1986. Road is set on the familiar terrain of an unnamed street (the street sign has been broken) in an unnamed northern town and follows the lives of its inhabitants over the course of a Saturday night. The audience is led through the evening by Scullery, a wild and exuberant narrator. Road is like a demonic Under Milk Wood, and also references television’s Coronation Street (ITV, 1960-present), although it is much bleaker. Road is written to be performed with a high-energy theatricality that is some way from mimetic social realism. It is conceived for a promenade staging, where there is no fixed seating and the audience are directed to follow the action around an open auditorium (this is how it was first performed at the Royal Court). The script also contains pre-show and interval scenes, to be performed in the bar where possible. There is a great deal of direct address to audience, not only by Scullery. The energy

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of the staging sits in tension with the bleakness of the play’s action, since the northern working class encountered here is very different to that represented in the new wave (with the exception of Bond’s Saved). This is a community that does not bask in the sunlight of welfare capitalism but one which has experienced the full blast of Thatcherite economic reform. Road is a response to its immediate political situation. By the early 1980s, Britain was experiencing a full-blown economic recession, engineered by the monetarist policies of the Conservative Government led by Margaret Thatcher. Coming to power in 1979, the Tories announced a wholesale restructuring of British society, which would include an assault on the welfare state and its ideological underpinnings, the trades unions and the mixed economy. Using the machinery of supply side economics, which argued that the state’s main contribution to financial policy was to restrict the money supply, the Government confronted near-record inflation of 27 per cent by engineering a massive deflation. The cost was the destruction of huge swathes of manufacturing industry, especially in the north of England, Scotland and Wales, which were driven to bankruptcy by high interest rates (see Gamble 1994). The result was that unemployment rose to three million in 1983, much of it concentrated in the older industrial communities. The desolation that this brought is etched into Road and occasionally commented on directly. In one particularly harrowing sequence, a young man, Joey, and his girlfriend Clare starve themselves to death in his bedroom, unnoticed and unremarked. Clare articulates the despair that being without a job creates: I lost my lovely little job. My office job. [ . . . ] I felt so sweet and neat in there. Making order out of things. Being skilful. Tackling an awkward situation here and there. To have a destination. The bus stop, then the office, then the work on my desk. Exercise my body, my imagination, my general knowledge. Learning life’s little steps. Now I’m saggy from tip to toe. Every day is like swimming in ache. I can’t stand wearing the same clothes again and again. [ . . . ] Everybody’s poor and sickly-white. (Cartwright 1986, p. 32) The language that Cartwright uses, here and throughout the play, is not that of everyday speech, although its vocabulary is familiar. Instead, he has created a demotic, poetic re-fashioning of colloquial speech that both roots the speaker within his/her locale and voices a sharp, painful


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response to it. The bone-hard directness of this language expresses the poverty of their lives. The play is classically naturalist in this sense, showing a group of people who cannot move beyond the brutality of their immediate situation. As the night progresses, violence and alcoholic stupor ensue. Road’s bleakness is rescued, partially, in the last scene in which a group of young people create a ritual choric chant of ‘Somehow a somehow a somehow – might escape!’. The image of a group ‘pressed together, arms and legs around each other’ is both an affirmation of mutual support in dark times, and a gesture of defiance flung against the brutal indifference of Thatcherite Britain (ibid, p. 80). Margaret Thatcher did not last long into the 1990s, but her spirit lingered, and Road’s bleakness was a precursor to other, more extreme, valedictions.

Social realism since the 1990s Sarah Kane once said of her 1995 play, Blasted, which was greeted by the kind of outrage that had been visited on Saved forty years earlier for its highly explicit and violent imagery as a means of political and moral provocation, ‘I suspect that if Blasted had been a piece of social realism it wouldn’t have been so harshly received’ (Sierz 2001, p. 96). The comment is an indication that social realism had become the most acceptable way in which contemporary Britain and supposedly difficult subject matter could be discussed, and the default position amongst critics and the choice of the main subsidized theatres. Griffiths’ strategic penetration seems to have worked, although it has not produced a socialist revolution. It has been argued that many of the new generation of writers who came to prominence in the 1990s, such as Kane, Mark Ravenhill and Martin Crimp, were consciously anti-political and in revolt against the dramatic models of the new wave and their successors (see Sierz 2001 and D’Monté & Saunders 2008). The latter judgement was truer than the former (although it was much more likely to be what Sierz has termed a drama of ‘personal pain rather than public politics’), but certainly the models of social realism, which were associated with the mainstream, were challenged, if not quite abandoned (Sierz 2002: 12). It is Edward Bond and Saved that is a point of reference, and not Wesker and Roots – still less Griffiths and Comedians. Rabey has argued that ‘[t]he 1990s wave of British dramatists was collectively characterised by a more widespread emphasis on challenging physical and verbal immediacy, and bleak (arguably nihilistic) observations of social decay,

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severed isolation and degradation into aimlessness’ (Rabey 2003, p. 192). It was, in Sierz’s terms, an ‘experiential’ theatre rather than a theatre of argument or metonymic representation (Sierz 2001, pp. 4–5), and one which relies on an aesthetic of shock and imagistic provocation. It is also connected to a postmodern refusal to countenance grand narratives and the left or liberal humanist certainties of an earlier age. When contemporary politics once again occupies the stage it is in a very different form, that of documentary or verbatim theatre. In verbatim theatre, reality is incorporated into drama in a direct form, often via edited transcripts of hearings, trials and interviews. High-profile examples would be the Tricycle Theatre’s The Colour of Justice (1999), which dramatized the transcript of the Macpherson Report into the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence, and David Hare’s The Permanent Way (2003), a dramatization of the enquiry into a train crash at Hatfield, in which four people died. Social realism did not, however, vacate the stage in the 1990s. Even though the politics might have changed, the representation of marginal, disaffected and rootless people in plays by Sierz’s ‘In Yer Face’ generation sometimes took social realist forms. London proved to be a particular touchstone for social realism in the nineties, especially in the plays of Joe Penhall, whose Some Voices (1994) explored the difficulties facing a young schizophrenic man, Ray, cut adrift in the capital. Ray is a victim of a government policy called ‘Care in the Community’, which closed many hospitals for the mentally ill, ostensibly to return them to a community of family and friends, but in reality often to the street. Ray’s struggle to maintain a semblance of ordinary living is both helped and hindered by the other, equally marginal and damaged people he meets. Only his brother, Pete, attempts to provide some consistency in his life. Some Voices is an example of what Penhall has called ‘London crisis drama’ (Sierz 2001, p. 210), and its narrative unfolds in scenes that contain startling and violent imagery. At one point, Ray takes a hammer to a wildly unpredictable and violent man, Dave, who has threatened Laura, one of the few people with whom Ray can form an attachment. In another, Ray douses himself with petrol and threatens to set himself alight with a series of disposable lighters (the appearance of one lighter after another is a source of black comedy). However, the final scene returns us to the healing effects of domestic routine, and demonstrates the enduring power of naturalistic detail to encapsulate complex emotions and possibilities. Pete, who is a chef, teaches Ray how to cook an omelette, in real time, on a portable hot plate. In this simple domestic routine, the possibility of some stability in Ray’s life is imagined. This


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echoes the final scene in Saved, where Len attempts to mend a broken chair, a similar gesture of hope against hopelessness. Elsewhere in the theatre, and especially since 2000, social realism has a decided presence, and not only as an unexamined reflex. It is not accidental, for example, that writers from minority ethnic backgrounds in the UK should often turn to social realist models in order to represent the specificity, density and complexity of their communities. Roy Williams, for example, a Londoner of Afro-Caribbean origin, writes about working-class, black people, mainly young men, caught up in the same reality of urban poverty and violence as Penhall’s characters, but seen from a different culture. His plays have been greeted in precisely the terms social realism has made its own – that they engage directly with a little-known social reality, and do so in a way that registers as more realistic than other drama, often using a street language and patois. As Miranda Sawyer observed, ‘[h]is characters speak like real people: in short sentences, rather than showy monologues, using modern slang (and swearing), rather than theatre speech’ (Sawyer 2008). Williams often uses sport as a metaphor. Sing Yer Heart Out (2002) is set in a pub during a notable football match between England and Germany in 2000, and Sucker Punch (2010), which turned the Royal Court into a boxing ring, examines the identity crisis that afflicts a successful black boxer and poses questions about racist exploitation of black success. Kwame Kwei-Armah has the distinction of being the first writer of Afro-Caribbean descent to have a play produced in the West End. The play in question, the award-winning Elmina’s Kitchen (2003) premiered at the National Theatre. Elmina’s Kitchen of the title is a West Indian fast-food restaurant in Hackney, London, and is the setting for the play, fully-realized in naturalistic detail. The stage directions reference its precise location as ‘Murder Mile’, a local term for an actual location that was popularized by the tabloids as the site for what they called ‘blackon-black’ murders, and the play is a direct response to a pressing social and political issue (Kwie-Armah 2009, p. ix). Kewi-Armah has written that the genesis of the play lay in his witnessing the aftermath of a fatal shooting, which was the product of inter-gang rivalry. ‘Now, young blacks were more afraid of being attacked by someone who shared their hue’ he observed ‘than by an extreme right-wing National Front member, or [ . . . ] BNP skinhead’ (Kwei-Armah 2009, p. x). Black West Indian male culture is under the microscope in the play, whose protagonist, Deli, is now the owner of the restaurant. The central dynamic of Elmina’s Kitchen is the struggle between Deli and Digger, a local gangster, for the allegiance of Ashley, Deli’s son. It is played out in a context where the

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attractions of easy money and status make young black men vulnerable to the seductions of gang culture. The narrative crisis occurs when Deli tells the police that Digger and Ashley have been involved in arson and murder, doing a deal for his son’s future. Digger demands that Ashley shoots his father as an informer, which he seems about to do, but in a startling denouement Digger shoots Ashley instead. The play replays the classic naturalist impasse, where characters cannot overcome the logic of their circumstances. Deli has behaved honourably, but more is required if the situation is to alter. A final example of the vitality of social realism in the contemporary context is Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem (2009). A major success, Jerusalem was premiered at the Royal Court, and transferred to the West End in 2010. The play was appreciated as a theatrical tour-de-force, not least because of a commanding central performance by Mark Rylance as Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron, its protagonist. Using the form of the singleset, compressed narrative, the play’s realism takes a naturalist form, with a detailed, fully-realized set (with a front-cloth prologue to each of its three acts). Unlike most social realism, Jerusalem’s setting is not urban but rural. Its narrative takes place over a single day, St George’s Day (23 April), in a wood adjacent to a housing estate, near a town in Wiltshire. The action concerns the anticipated eviction of Byron, a larger-than-life, middle-aged, ex-fairground showman, from his caravan on land that he does not own. As the preparations for the annual St. George’s Day fair gather pace, Byron’s futile attempts to stave off the inevitable take place against the background of a search for a missing teenage girl (to whom Byron has given shelter) and the gradual desertion of the friends and hangers-on that congregate around him. The action of Jerusalem is played out in a displaced domestic setting, where the familiar signifiers of a living room – chairs, a television - are scattered, ironically reduced largely to debris, outside the caravan. The young people who wander through the action constitute a kind of family for Byron, who is an unlikely, displaced father-figure to some of them. Jerusalem exploits the metonymic potential of the form, allowing Byron to be seen as embodying a way of life: Byron may be a dangerous and morally ambiguous figure, but the play suggests he represents something authentic in a world of ersatz rural nostalgia. In some ways, the play echoes a new wave play of 1958, John Arden’s Live Like Pigs, which similarly explores the destabilizing effect of an earlier, itinerant and largely rural way of life on a modern one. In Arden’s play, travelling family the Sawneys are decamped into a council house, with disastrous and comic results. The specific narrative incidents differ, but the underlying


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theme – that older, less civilized ways of living will eventually succumb to an urban culture, with a loss to both – is the same. Jerusalem records a moment of social transition, where the encroachments of suburbanism can no longer be resisted. The fair has little to do with the traditions of rural England. Instead, we are told, it is largely a commercial opportunity for the local brewery. Byron does not, however, represent an idealized view of what is being lost. He is a drug dealer and petty criminal, and the world of the motley collection of young people who are drawn to him is represented as mean and limited. In important ways, this rural way of life is no different from any other. This is encapsulated in the opening image, in which a young girl dressed as a fairy, front cloth, sings Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’: the action then cuts to the main stage, where a rave is in progress and the music is loud and urban. When the inevitable happens, and Byron’s friends have deserted him and the police have arrived, he appeals to his ancient family Gods, and the spirits of an older England. Jerusalem evokes not only a local history but also a national myth, which sits uneasily in the present. In one sense, Jerusalem brings us back near to where we started in this discussion of social realism: a recognizable social world, a fully-realized setting and a three-act narrative played out across a compressed time span. The history of the tradition has not been an even or linear one, and there have been many detours over the last seventy years. Formally, the dramatic structures have opened out, and the theatrical means of communication have moved steadily away from an automatic illusionism. However, engagement with the contemporary world is now part of the DNA of theatre, and the gains for social extension are not permanent, but must be defended and extended in each new historical period. For these reasons, social realism has not yet run its course.

Bibliography Anderson, Lindsay. (1970) ‘Review: A Taste of Honey’ in C. Marowitz, T. Milne and O. Hale (eds), The Encore Reader. London, Eyre Methuen. Billington, Michael. (2007) State of the Nation: British Theatre since 1945. London, Faber & Faber. Bogdanor, Vernon and Robert Skidelsky (eds). (1970) The Age of Affluence: 1951–64. Basingstoke, Macmillan. Brien, Alan. (1959) ‘A Taste of Honey’, in Spectator. 20 Feb., p. 251. Cartwright, Jim. (1986) Road. London, Eyre Methuen. Caughie, John. (2000) Television Drama: Realism, Modernism and British Culture. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Devine, George. (1962) ‘The Birth of the English Stage Company’, in Prompt, no. 1.

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D’Monté, Rebecca and Saunders, Graham. (2008) Cool Brittania? British Political Drama in the 1990s. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan. Edgar, David. (1988) Second Time as Farce: Reflections on the Drama of Mean Times. London, Lawrence and Wishart. Elsom, John. (1981) Post-War British Theatre Criticism. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul. Gamble, Andrew. ([1988] Second Edition 1994) The Free Economy and the Strong State: The Politics of Thatcherism. London, Macmillan. Griffiths, Trevor. (1976) The Leveller. No. 1, p. 12. Hall, Stuart. (1970) ‘Beyond Naturalism Pure’, in Charles Marowitz, Tom Milne and Owen Hale (eds), The Encore Reader. London, Eyre Methuen. Hay, Malcolm and Roberts, Phillip. (1978) Edward Bond: A Companion to the Plays. London, Eyre Methuen. Hoggart, Richard. (1957) The Uses of Literacy. London, Chatto and Windus. Itzen, Catherine. (1980) Stages in the Revolution: Political Theatre in Britain Since 1968. London, Eyre Methuen. Keeffe, Barrie. (1978) Gimme Shelter. London, Methuen. Kwei-Armah, Kwame. (2009) Plays: 1. London, Methuen. Lacey, Stephen. (1995) British Realist Theatre: the New Wave in its Context 1956–65. London, Routledge. McGrath, John. (1981) A Good Night Out. London, Eyre Methuen. Pinter, Harold. (1976) Plays: One. London, Methuen. Pinto-Duschinsky, Michael. (1970) ‘Bread and Circuses? The Conservatives in Office, 1951–64’ in Vernon Bogdanor and Robert Skidelsky (eds.), The Age of Affluence: 1951–64. Basingstoke, Macmillan. Rabey, David Ian. (2003) English Drama Since 1940. Harlow, Pearson Education. Reballato, Dan. (1999) 1956 And All That. London, Routledge. Sawyer, Miranda. (2008) ‘Taking the Stage’, in The Observer. 10 Feb. Scott, Michael (ed.). (1991) Harold Pinter: ‘The Birthday party’, ‘The Caretaker’ and ‘The Homecoming’: A Selection of Critical Essays. London, Macmillan. Shellard, Dominic. (2000) British Theatre Since the War. London, Yale University Press. Sierz, Aleks. (2001) In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today. London, Faber & Faber. ——. (2002) ‘In-Yer-Face Theatre: New British Drama Today’, in Anglo Files: Journal of English Teaching. No. 126, pp. 8–14. Stevenson, Randall. (1996) ‘In the Jungle of the Cities’ in Randall Stevenson and Gavin Wallace (eds), Scottish Theatre Since the Seventies. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press. Taylor, John Russell. (1978) Anger and After: a Guide to the New British Drama. London, Methuen. Tynan, Kenneth. (1984) A View of the English Stage. London, Methuen. Wandor, Michelene. (1986) Carry On, Understudies: Theatre and Sexual Politics. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul. Williams, Raymond. (1977) ‘Lecture on Realism’, in Screen. 18:1, pp. 61–74. ——. (1979) Politics and Letters. London, New Left Books. Wesker, Arnold. (1973) The Trilogy. London, Penguin. Worsley, T.C. (1959) ‘The Sweet Smell’, in New Statesman. 21 Feb., p. 252.

3 Bad Teeth: British Social Realism in Fiction Rod Mengham

Introduction A documentary style of realism was sponsored during the Second World War by magazines such as Penguin New Writing, where it was deployed in short stories that captured the unpredictable, interrupted, fragmented temporalities of the home front during aerial bombardment. The shrinking number of novels published during the war was owing partly to the suspension of cultural continuity and of an imaginable future (see Mengham 2001). When the post-war settlement allowed for the projection of a way of life that might integrate past, present and future, the novel responded by replacing the experimental temporalities of modernism with a restoration of the linear conventions associated with realism. But the realism that observed the socialist years of the late 1940s was also in place for the dramatic social changes of the conservative 1950s, with their redistribution of employment opportunities and expansion of consumer choice. The meritocratic eclipse of class privileges seemed like a spectacular reassertion of class structure to the majority who could not benefit from it. The emergence of social realism was coincident with the disillusionment of a populist culture that had both won the war and lost the peace. The social realist novels of the late 1950s and early 1960s documented new forms of alienation as a result of growing income inequality and the effects of mass culture on class, regional and gender identities. The anthropological dimension of these fictional studies of the condition of post-war Britain echoed the founding principles of Mass Observation and authoritative methods of the British documentary film movement, although the proleptic assertiveness of both was replaced with an elegiac inquest into the kinds of loss experienced in an era of affluence. In the terms proposed by Nigel 81

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Balchin’s factory novel, Sundry Creditors (1953), social realist fiction was in large measure an account of what was still owed to those whose needs were not comprehended by the materialistic criteria of never having had it so good.

Un-British asocial realism Near the beginning of John Braine’s novel, Room at the Top (1957), the protagonist, Joe Lampton, experiences a heightening of his senses, a sharpening of attention to his surroundings, which he himself regards as an authentic mode of realism: I’d been sitting there for at least an hour when the wind turned cold and I began to shiver. I left the park and crossed into the Market Square for a cup of tea. I’d been sitting too long in the same position; as I put my hand to the door of Sylvia’s Café I had a mild attack of pins-and-needles and one leg gave way under me. I swayed forward and put my other hand against the wall to steady myself. It was the most minor of mishaps and I recovered within a second; but the incident seemed, for the duration of that second, to jar my perceptions into a different focus. It was as if some barrier had been removed: everything seemed intensely real, as if I were watching myself take part in a documentary film—a really well-produced one, accurate, sharp, with none of the more obvious camera tricks. The black cobbles splashed green and yellow and red with squashed fruit and vegetables, the purple satin quilt held up in a bull-fighter’s sweep by a fat man in his shirt-sleeves, a giggle of schoolgirls round a pile of brightly-coloured rayon underwear, the bells of the parish church striking the hour sad as Sunday, a small girl wearing an apron dress with one strap fastened by a murderously big safety-pin—everything was immensely significant, yet neither more nor less than itself. There were no tricks with the lens or the microphone, the buildings steadily obeyed the laws of perspective, the colours registered without smudging, the sounds were neither a symphony nor a discordance. Not one inch, one shade, one decibel was false; I felt as if I were using all my senses for the first time and then, turning into the café, I returned to normality as smoothly as a ski-jumper landing. (Braine 1957, pp. 28–9) This passage aligns defamiliarization with authenticity, it is centred on a recognition that one can ‘sit too long in the same position’ and

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that this inertia can deaden awareness. On the other hand, it identifies accuracy of perception with technological modes of registration and recording, appearing to argue that one is most alive when most inhuman and mechanical. Above all it subscribes to the belief that the world of ‘things’, of objects and actions, is most real when these things are ‘neither more nor less than [themselves]’. The focal point of the paragraph is the concatenation of visual and aural details that are not linked to one another outside the viewpoint of Joe Lampton, or outside the language of his description. The realness of the real inheres in its autonomous existence, its independence of the relationships that come into being only with the activation of a consciousness intent on uniting what is disparate, on making sense of the world despite its resistance to the project of making sense. Joe Lampton returns to normality with aplomb, with his sense of balance, his sense of being human and social, restored and even enhanced, but the reader has been made aware of another dimension beyond the surface of things, beyond the barrier of conventional perceptions, a dimension where what is most real is what is meaningless, because it does not signify in the complex of relationships and transactions that composes a social reality. This confrontation with a world that seems indifferent and even inimical to human presence seems very un-British, and is more reminiscent of the lucid estrangement of Sartre’s writing in La Nausee (1938, English translation as The Diary of Antoine Roquentin, by Lloyd Alexander 1949) than of anything in British fiction of the mid-twentieth century. In all of the fiction discussed in this essay, Braine’s Room at the Top, Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), David Storey’s This Sporting Life (1960), Stan Barstow’s A Kind of Loving (1960), and Nell Dunn’s Up the Junction (1963), a manner of attention to British social reality is shadowed by a suspicion, sometimes amounting to a conviction, of its inauthenticity, its lack of depth and substance, as if it were a film of illusion covering over an unmeasurable emptiness in which nothing joins up and makes sense. Towards the end of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, the growing intimacy between the protagonist Arthur Seaton and his young fiancée Doreen seems to be pointing in the direction of conventional fulfilment in the established forms and institutions of British social life, but it is linked instead to a mood of withdrawal and regression, the surrender of consciousness: ‘Nobody’s lookin’.’ He held her fast round the waist, and was cast into sad reflection by staring at the water below, a rippleless surface

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where minnows swam gracefully in calm transparent silence. White and blue sky made islands on it, so that the descent into its hollows seemed deep and fathomless, and fishes swam over enormous gulfs and chasms of cobalt blue. Arthur’s eyes were fixed into the beautiful earth-bowl of the depthless water, trying to explore each pool and shallow until, as well as an external silence there was a silence within himself that no particle of his mind or body wanted to break. Their faces could not be seen in the water, but were united with the shadows of the fish that flitted among upright reeds and spreading lilies, drawn to water as if they belonged there, as if the fang-like claws of the world would come unstuck from their flesh if they descended into its imaginary depths, as if they had known it before as a refuge and wanted to return to it, their ghosts already there, treading the calm unfurrowed depths and beckoning them to follow. (Sillitoe 1958; 2008, p. 206) This paragraph is organized around the systematic confusion of surface and depth. Mental ‘reflection’ is invoked to examine the illusion created by physical reflections on the ‘rippleless surface’. Reflections of clouds lend an appearance of great depth (paradoxically ‘depthless’, ‘fathomless’) to what is only shallow, while the reflections of the characters’ faces, that would give a sense of scale and break the illusion created by the virtual images of clouds, cannot be seen. The willing suspension of disbelief, ‘that no particle of his mind or body wanted to break’, indicates the strength of the desire to see the world in terms of virtual images, to project depth where there is none, in a construction of reality that is largely imaginary, creating a ‘refuge’ to which the mind ‘returns’ despite an underlying knowledge of its illusoriness. Despite its allure, this investment in the imaginary is acknowledged to be without substance, ghostly, involving disembodiment; not so much a detaching of claws from flesh as a removal of flesh altogether. It identifies the merging of two selves in prospective marriage with a form of extinction. When Arthur and Doreen move away from the pool it is only to search out another recess, another ‘earth-bowl’, in which to inter themselves: ‘They followed his short cut towards home, and came to the loneliest place of the afternoon where, drawn by a deathly and irresistible passion, they lay down together in the bottom of a hedge’ (ibid., p.207). The young couples’ engagement draws them into a process of dematerialization where the dimensions of space and time are interchangeable, where the coordinates and conditions of individual presence seem to disappear.


Each of the novels seems to operate with a system of distractions from social life that has a compelling life of its own, drawing both protagonist and reader into a contemplation of the fragility and impermanence of all those conventional frameworks for meaning that are normally taken for granted. At the conclusion of This Sporting Life, the protagonist is struck by the irrelevance of his own sense of belonging to the environment in which he lives, and vice versa: I looked to the life that wasn’t absorbed in the futility of the game— to the tall chimney and the two flowering cylinders of the power station, half hidden by cloud, the tops of the buses passing the end of the ground, the lights turned on inside the upper decks, the people sitting uncommitted behind the windows. The houses were lit too, in their slow descent to the valley. I moved back to the centre, imitating the figures whose activity suddenly tired me. (Storey 1960; 2000, p. 251) The protagonist, Arthur Machin, experiences a sudden curiosity about the potential for other meanings and other stories that are centred in lives and situations he has no knowledge of. The irony of his own situation is that he is beginning to lose interest in his own story and its conditions for meaning. The rugby game, which offers a simplification of the demands and opportunities of the culture it is part of, depends on teamwork but rewards those whose participation in the game is the most aggressively competitive. Arthur’s chief motivation in pursuing his rugby career is materialistic; unlike his friend Frank, he is focused on the acquisition of money, status symbols, women as trophies and the adulation of the fans. In the process, he has lost irrevocably the woman whose own life epitomizes none of those things, and is left with a new understanding of the ‘futility of the game’. The paragraph distils the basis for the enquiry into British social life that is revolved in all these fictions, an enquiry that proceeds from the suspicion that British culture is sustained by nothing more than an ‘imitation’ game, a set of activities with rules and conventions in which individuals do little more than mimic the aspirations and achievements expected of them. Each of the three passages discussed above is concerned to disturb the habits of mind of its protagonist and foregrounds a moment of realization, even of revelation, with an effect of jarring or of visionary strangeness. But the texts also include multiple, fragmentary instances of irregular perception that are not foregrounded, and it may be that their composition of a persistent background noise is the more powerful for being pervasive

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rather than occasionally insistent. The realism of this writing does not rest content with the concept of social realism but is steadily addressing the relationship between individual and social existence and the very grounds of the social.

Sundry creditors The grounds of the social in so-called British social realist fiction are inescapably economic. The key texts were written just after a prolonged period of rationing and shortages, in a culture of scarcity documented in Nigel Balchin’s Sundry Creditors, a novel in which the factory-owner is animated by a ‘lovely dream’: ‘the dream in which there were no shortages, no restrictions, no licences, no jumble of old buildings, infinite capital and a staff capable of doing three men’s work each’ (Balchin 1953, p. 17). It is made abundantly clear that the war has been won militarily but not economically, with the majority of British industries under-producing and with no prospect of installing new plant. The scope of this crisis is indicated by the novel’s application of an economic vocabulary across a very broad spectrum of activities: ‘a national shortage—a world shortage—a deficit of civilization—must disappear’ (ibid., p. 18). The phrase ‘deficit of civilization’ captures the sense in which the world of British social realism is totally environed by the economic, making it inevitable that the ethical and emotional issues faced by the fictional protagonists should be accounted for in economic terms, and especially in terms of debts and credits. In Room at the Top, the action is backdated from the late 1950s to a phase in the post-war recovery when there are still coal shortages and clothing clubs and the most significant building in town houses the local Food Office. When Joe Lampton arrives in Dufton to start a new job and to occupy new lodgings, he comes equipped with a clamorous list of material ambitions: ‘I wanted an Aston-Martin, I wanted a three-guinea shirt, I wanted a girl with a Riviera suntan—these were my rights, I felt, a signed and sealed legacy’ (Braine 1957, p. 31). The crucial modifier of envy and greed in this wish-list is the insistence on the mechanisms of inheritance. Lampton employs automatically an economic vocabulary to express how his wartime service places society in debit to him. Conversely, he employs a military vocabulary in the context of trying to work out how the ‘material objects of our envy were attainable’: How to attain them I didn’t know. I was like an officer fresh from training-school, unable for the moment to translate the untidiness of


fear and cordite and corpses into the obvious and irresistible method of attack. I was going to take the position, though, I was sure of that. I was moving into the attack, and no one had better try to stop me. (Ibid., p. 32) The slightly hysterical defiance with which the decommissioned soldier attempts to transpose the skills learned in combat into a peacetime context is edged with resentment, and an impatience at having to assert a claim over what should fall to him by right. Solvency is a condition whose scope expands from its economic origin to cover every dimension of British social life. Contemplating the experience of leisure in relation to the class structure, Lampton reflects that ‘Time, like a loan from the bank, is something you’re only given when you possess so much that you don’t need it’ (ibid., p. 142). It is in the experience of time as much as anything else that the protagonists of these novels recognize the transforming value of love in a rhythm of factory shifts and time and motion inspections. Love is precisely what does not fit into the conventional measures, a quality that cannot be quantified: I had discovered what love was like, I had discovered not, as before, its likeness to other people’s but what made it different from other people’s. When I looked at her I knew that here was all the love I’d ever get; I’d drawn my ration. (Ibid., p. 199) But Lampton’s discovery is a contradiction in terms; he recognizes the unrepeatability of love – like a ration, it can only be drawn once – while also, at the back of his mind, imagining its exchange value. In the very next sentence he considers ‘it would have been more agreeable if she’d been ten years younger and had money of her own, just as life would be more agreeable if the rivers ran beer and the trees grew ham sandwiches’. He discounts the train of thought that connects love with economic partnership, but cannot efface it entirely. It is a train of thought that is submerged, but is nevertheless behind his eventual abandonment of the adulterous relationship with Alice, in favour of marriage with an heiress. In Storey’s This Sporting Life, Arthur Machin’s economic solvency encourages him in the belief that his life can be regulated by the spending of money, even to the extent of regulating the lives of other human beings. But the breakdown of his relationship with his landlady – a

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woman he still thinks of as ‘Mrs.Hammond’, despite the intimate terms of the relationship – undermines this belief, and forces him to realize that the practical loss of his rented room is an index of the total loss of his moral and emotional bearings. His seemingly secure position as a local celebrity is a mere imitation of security, and he is made aware suddenly of having no more sense of belonging in his own environment than a migrant worker: During the next few days nobody intensified this feeling of isolation more than the Lithuanian. I probably felt his exile more than he did. Three days on my own were enough to change the whole shape of things. It seemed as if the debt I’d accumulated had suddenly been shoved on me without warning, and I’d been told to pay, or else. The emptiness obliterated every other feeling I had for people or for places. (Storey 1960; 2000, p. 190) Although Machin’s bank balance is in a healthy condition, his status as debtor blots out every other consideration of his emplacement in the set of relations he has been inhabiting. And his emotional account remains in deficit for an unforeseeable period of time, since the novel ends with Machin surviving the death of Mrs Hammond without his having found a way to repay his debt. In the crucial exchange in which he reveals to Mrs Hammond’s doctor the nature of his relationship with her, the use of an economic vocabulary is pivotal to their reaching a common understanding of what is at stake: ‘How do you feel about the situation now? I mean, are you wanting to look after her because I’ve told you she might die? Do you feel guilty—owe her something?’ ‘You can call it that.’ ‘I’m not being sentimental about it, Machin, so let’s get it straight. Do you feel you owe her something now she’s in this condition, something you never gave her before—or does it go deeper than that?’ ‘I don’t know. You might be right. In any case—I feel I owe her something.’ (Ibid., p. 232) There is an historically precise sort of poignancy in the way that Machin grasps the weight of his responsibility in terms that derive from his life-long obsession with avoiding financial debt, while the nature of


that obsession has rendered him ignorant of how he might discharge this very different kind of debt, whose exact shape, size and substance remain unclear to him, no more precise than the frustrated inadequacy of his gesture towards ‘something’ can reveal. By the mid-1950s, factory workers had become fully aware of the extent to which the market value of their labour had risen steeply in the post-war period; and yet the precariousness of the post-war truce between opposing Cold War powers inhibited the desire to save: Because it was no use saving your money year after year. A mug’s game, since the value of it got less and less and in any case you never knew when the Yanks were going to do something daft like dropping the H-bomb on Moscow. And if they did then you could say ta-ta to everybody, burn your football coupons and betting-slips, and ring-up Billy Graham. If you believe in God, which I don’t, he said to himself. (Sillitoe 1958; 2008, pp. 27–8) The economics of spending and saving were conditioned by the past and future shadows of war. Both military and economic command structures interfered with the worker’s management of his own schedule for earning and disposing of his pay. The conditions of assembly line production allowed the employers to profit from the individual worker’s efficiency, by lowering the rate of pay per unit when the daily amount of units produced showed a significant rise. This reduced the incentive to speed up production and also reduced the level of trust between management and workforce: So when you felt the shadow of the rate-checker breathing down your neck you knew what to do if you had any brains at all: make every move more complicated, though not slow because that was cutting your own throat, and do everything deliberately yet with a crafty show of speed. (Ibid., pp. 31–2) This camouflaging of temporal rhythms, while it owes its inspiration to the speeding up and slowing down of film technology, represents a fundamental division between the interests of different classes for whom the management of historical time is governed by opposing attitudes towards the memory and anticipation of armed conflict.

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War talk The social imaginary in British fiction of the late 1950s and early 1960s was formed under the influence of post-war reactions to ideas of wartime social unity. In Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, nostalgia for an earlier phase of social relations by-passes the war and reaches back to an almost pre-modern set of conditions: The building—you had drawn your own water from a well, dug your own potatoes out of the garden, taken eggs from the chicken run to fry with bacon off your own side of pig hanging salted from a hook in the pantry—had long ago been destroyed to make room for advancing armies of new pink houses, flowing over the fields like red ink on green blotting paper. (Ibid., p. 205) The yearning for an ideal of self-sufficiency is coloured by its irrevocable loss, blamed indirectly on the war through the reference to ‘armies’ of houses that release a flow of metaphorical red ink resembling a flow of blood. However, this pastoral vision is adulterated by its overemphasis on ownership (‘own water’, ‘own potatoes’, ‘own side of pig’) that speaks to a post-war enthusiasm for middle-class priorities, in contrast to the wartime accommodation of socialism. It is during an extended meditation on his experience of military training that Arthur Seaton observes that ‘out of the army it was “Every man for himself”’ (ibid., p. 132). In contrast to the wartime ethos of solidarity and cooperation, Arthur announces his intention of turning his gun on his own superiors in the event of any future outbreak of hostilities: When I’m on my fifteen-days’ training and I lay on my guts behind a sandbag shooting at a target board I know whose faces I’ve got in my sights every time the new rifle cracks off. Yes. The bastards that put the gun into my hands. (Ibid.) Arthur’s anti-authoritarianism is not confined to his commanding officers but is extended to anyone with a modicum of power over his living and working conditions: the tax inspector, the rent collector, the shop steward. There are no discriminations of class or ideology to add any kind of refinement to this anarchistic rejection of hierarchy. The potency of this stance is what also renders it vulnerable; its fundamental


insistence on a tactical instability, a protean readiness to hide behind a succession of different disguises: ‘I’m me and nobody else; and whatever people think I am or say I am, that’s what I’m not, because they don’t know a bloody thing about me’ (ibid., p. 138). Seaton reflects the mixture of attitudes towards the Second World War typical of the immediately post-war generation. On the one hand, he is stirred by the patriotic rhetoric of Olivier’s 1944 film version of Henry V – ‘I saw it about six times’ – remembering many key phrases, although always in fragmentary form, while on the other hand he reacts cynically to Churchill’s wartime broadcasts: ‘Churchill spoke after the nine o’clock news and told you what you were fighting for, as if it mattered’ (ibid., p. 131). The final clause in this dismissal is an alteration of memory in the light of post-war disillusionment. Joe Lampton’s narration in Room at the Top is retrospective, recounting the events of 1947 ten years after they have happened. In 1947 his memories of the war would have been fresh: memories of the bombing of his house and the death of his parents; memories of his internment in Stalag 1000; memories of drinking in Berlin at the end of the war. But in 1957 what remains of his war experience is an indelible tendency to read the conditions of peace in military terms: ‘I wanted to sleep and not to argue, not to lie, not to promise, not to plot my future like a raid over the Ruhr’ (Braine 1957, p. 172). This unconscious template for the interpretation of the present extends to both central and peripheral objects of attention, whether it is behind the formulating of the end of his relationship with Alice – ‘I was retreating, I wasn’t fighting; but from where was I retreating, and who was I fighting?’ (ibid., p. 130) – or the afterthought which describes in passing ‘an electric oven which had a control panel like a bomber’s’ (ibid., p. 24). Even in the late 1950s, the urban fabric continued to reflect the impact of war, in the direct form of bomb damage or the indirect form of adaptation to shortages: ‘the asphalt paving had been dug up to make a V-for-Victory garden during the war’ (Sillitoe 1958; 2008, p. 72). In This Sporting Life, direct engagement with military destruction, or engagement with the industry that served it, is linked paradoxically with a heightened sense of being alive. Machin contemplates a photograph of the young Mrs Hammond, seen among workmates at a bomb factory during the war: ‘She’s there, the middle of the three, leaning back slightly, the sun on her face and mouth, her feelings unlocked and running free. A girl’s face, unmarked and spontaneous.’ (Storey 1960; 2000, p. 134) By contrast, the post-war settlement has an increasingly deadening effect on Mrs Hammond, to the extent that nearly one year before

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her actual death from a clot on the brain, Machin remarks to his friend Maurice, ‘She’s dead’. This is his way of trying to convince himself that she is dead to him, but a combination of social disapproval and economic hardship has already emptied Mrs Hammond’s life of reasons to live. War damage, whether from past or future conflicts, is constitutive of British social reality and of British social realism in the late 1950s, although the major part of the damage is invisible, pocking and scarring patterns of thought and language.

Reveries It is remarkable how many of the novels and stories associated with the idea of British social realism feature episodes in which the protagonist loses consciousness or experiences an alteration of consciousness, with a consequent rediscovery and reassessment of the relationship between the individual self and its bodily condition. The body becomes the focus for connection with, and disconnection from, the rest of the world; physical trauma forces the individual into a realization of his or her essential solitude, while the ritual consumption of meals and alcohol provides access to shared culture. Part One of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (the much larger of its two parts) begins and ends with Arthur Seaton losing consciousness: Her words trailed off and, with a grin, he slipped down in a dead faint, feeling the world pressing its enormous booted foot on to his head, forcing him away from the lights, down into the dark comfort of grime, spit, and sawdust on the floor. (Sillitoe 1958; 2008, p. 176) This descent into the dark is also a regression from a human to a merely animal condition, with an implied assimilation to a kind of semi-biotic soup that evokes the primordial mud from which life is supposed to have been formed. From these beginnings, evolution could go in any direction. For Seaton, it as if each renewal of consciousness offers a chance to rebuild life in a different way. This Sporting Life begins with a temporary loss of consciousness when the protagonist has six of his teeth broken on the rugby field. The ensuing visit to the dentist who extracts the remaining stumps, and the party that fills the rest of the evening, comprise the passage in time around which the narration is organized. Machin is faced with the necessity of rebuilding his teeth, just as he attempts to repair the damage to his


emotional life. The stark reality of missing teeth and the imitation of perfection in the substitution of false teeth bears on the novel’s discrimination between authentic and inauthentic forms of experience. In Room at the Top there is a corresponding obsession with registering the state of people’s teeth – both Lampton and his lover are afflicted with decay and toothache – and with seeing false teeth as part of a general construction of reality. Lampton reflects on his life in the present of 1957 as an attempt to conform to the conventions of a magazine advertisement, noting that ‘the room needs at least a small crack in the plaster and a set of false teeth in a glass’, which strikes a careful balance between the admission of moderate imperfection and the necessity to disguise its appearance (Braine 1957, p. 200). Toothache pulls the sufferer back into touch with reality, while the adoption of false teeth is associated with a form of cultural unconsciousness, with oblivion to the real conditions that underlie the façade. Many of the novels occupy an equivalent form of oblivion with regard to the movement of history. They inhabit a feeling of suspension, of historical abstraction, existing in a parenthesis between vivid memories of the last war and vivid anticipations of the next. In Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, the narrative is punctuated by moments of ellipsis, of stalemate, in which the sense of location and affiliation dissolves at a touch. An act of vandalism is committed by a drunk who is apprehended by a young servicewoman; neither has the strength to overpower the other, and this results in a prolonged impasse: He was neither young nor middle-aged, a man who seemed to have a stake in two generations without being cradled and carried along by either one. His face seemed marked by some years of marriage, yet his bearing branded him as a single man, an odd, lonely person who gave off an air of belonging nowhere at all, which caused Arthur to think him half-witted. The uniformed woman looked as though she also had never had a home and belonged nowhere, but she had aligned herself with order and law, and sympathy was against her. (Sillitoe 1958; 2008, p. 109) These two figures, like stock characters in a Morality play, are emblematic of historical uncertainty, of the uncertain legacy of the past being mishandled by a younger generation. The inertia produced by their confrontation seems eccentric, a bizarre sideshow to the main business of the novel, but is in fact at the centre of its preoccupation with historical indirection. By contrast, the major part of the factory

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worker’s experience involves an evasion of the present and its material circumstances, precisely as a means of escaping from the complexity of relations between past and future: Time flew while you wore out the oil-soaked floor and worked furiously without knowing it: you lived in a compatible world of pictures that passed through your mind like a magic-lantern, often in vivid and glorious loonycolour, a world where memory and imagination ran free and did acrobatic tricks with your past and with what might be your future, an amok that produced all sorts of agreeable visions. (Ibid., p. 39) The vocabulary of this celebration of irresponsibility mixes allusions to archaic and modern technologies of vision, confusing their differences in ascribing a form of civil disorder – ‘an amok’ – to a use of time that is also a distortion of time. In Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, the present moment is inhabited with a sense of release and relaxation only in the countryside, although this slackening of tension also involves a slackening of feeling, an ebbing of vitality: It was a quiet and passionless place to be, where few people passed, hemmed in by steep bush-covered banks of a cutting against which, by the towpath, lay his bicycle. There was no sign of the city. (Ibid., p. 129) The varieties of reverie that punctuate these fictional narratives offer temporal or spatial methods of withdrawal from the social. They have the same function as the passages of distributed attention discussed in the second section of this essay. Nell Dunn’s Up the Junction returns repeatedly to an aural equivalent of distributed attention, supplying chains of dialogue which consist of disconnected remarks with speech attributions either missing or merely desultory: ‘You work up McCrindle’s?’ ‘Yeah, I’ve had a scrub, so don’t go saying you can smell the butter on me.’ Sylvie whispers, ‘He undid me brassieres, so I told him to do them up again.


“You certainly know where the hook is,” I says.’ ’E believes in grabbin’ hold of yer and bitin’ yer ear-’ole. ‘I like it rough. You get more feelin’ out of it that way. ‘I was tuckin’ in his shirt for him and he says, “Don’t put yer hand down there or you’ll get a shock!”’ (Dunn 1963, p. 16) The centrifugal patterns of speech are paralleled by a narrative procedure in which the description of settings has the effect of discomposing, rather than composing, the scene of the action: We turn a corner past a giant bulldozer crashing through the slums. In the mud lies a split suitcase with a rag mat tied about by the Daily Mirror. Under the tunnel trains whistle and thunder above us and out into the Arcade. Four or five girls stand outside the shoe-shop admiring the latest creations: ‘Handmade shoes £3 a pair’. (Ibid., p. 22) Even the imagery of this paragraph combines splitting with stitching, demolition with rebuilding, variations on a theme of simultaneous dismantling and assembling. In some respects, Dunn’s compositional technique reflects the absorbency of recording technology, which does not discriminate between significant and insignificant sounds and images. Vivid details of partly seen or partly heard situations are given in quick succession to one another. The balance between narration and dialogue is tipped in favour of the latter, although it would be more accurate to characterize the relationship between separate utterances as one of intercutting monologues. The procedural basis of Dunn’s writing conforms to a poetics of overhearing. The parallel techniques of discontinuous narration and dialogue, and the resulting effects of omission and truncation, are confluent with an odd obsession in the text with instances of dismemberment: of heads, feet, arms, fingers: ‘Hear what happened to Jess? He robbed this bank and he was gettin’ away with the money over this dirty great wall when he slips and chops the top of his finger off on the glass. So he’s there on the ground lookin’ for it. He can’t go without it because they could get a fingerprint off of it and do him for the bank robbery.’ (Ibid., p. 98)

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In Dunn’s fiction, visible damage is the sensationally graphic correlate to the widespread psychic and social damage that both fills and limits the language with which her characters articulate their world.

Communing The social relations always struggling and failing to be born in Dunn’s fiction represent an extreme in British social realism’s account of the shifting sands of community in the post-war period. In one respect, the volatility of the fictional versions of community, their constant liability to violent performances of antagonism, involves a transfer of wartime conditions to domestic settings. In Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Mrs Bull, whose incessant surveillance of her neighbours’ actions and words functions as a perverse substitute for the ‘social glue’ validated by nineteenth century novelists, is at once a focus for the neighbourhood’s sense of unity and for its sense of internal friction: She kept a chock-a-block arsenal of blackmailing scandal ready to level with foresight and back-sight at those that crossed her path in the wrong direction, sniping with tracer and dum-dum from sandbags of ancient gossip. (Sillitoe 1958; 2008, p. 103) The climax of her role in the narrative involves her being sniped at with an air-rifle, which provides a literal corollary to her metaphorical ballistics while the relative harmlessness of the projectile used contrasts tellingly with the appalling harm inflicted by tracer and dum-dum. Arthur Seaton’s waging war with his neighbours is partly demonstrating the existence of a front line separating those whom he can trust from those he cannot. The front line begins and ends with family. Within the territory circumscribed by that line, there is a remarkable cameraderie, based more on clan loyalty than on the day-to-day obligations of life in the nuclear family. The efflorescence of a sense of belonging occurs in the context of Arthur’s prolonged visit to the home of his Aunt Ada during the Christmas period. The huge numbers of members of the family inhabiting the house on a regular basis are supplemented by cousins, friends and even new acquaintances, on the basis of a carnivalesque equality that is expressed in an unstoppable flow of anarchistic energy. Although loosely attached to the family structure, this powerfully unifying although ambivalent energy is identified less by its autonomous


construction of a temporary set of relations than by its destructive opposition to dominant ideas of a civil society. In This Sporting Life, Machin is resentfully aware that he has forfeited the trust of his own family in proportion to his absorption in celebrity culture and its alteration of the basis of personal and social relations. His unwillingness to come to terms with the ethical challenge of his parents’, and especially his father’s, disapproval of his new lifestyle accounts for his failure to even acknowledge the existence of his family until half way through his first person narration. The visit he makes to his parents’ home culminates in a mutual recognition of totally incompatible viewpoints and values: ‘Ideals don’t count where money’s concerned. It hasn’t got any right and wrong. Ideals! Where do ideals get you? Where have your ideals got you?’ ‘Where?’ He stared round him as if it was only too obvious where his ideals had got him, where Mrs Shaw’s ideals next door had got her, and Mr Chadwick’s beyond her had got him. It was only too obvious. Then, just for a moment, he saw that through my eyes there was nothing there at all. He saw the neighbourhood without its affections and feelings, but just as a field of broken down ambition. (Storey 1960; 2000, p. 112) The barrier of incomprehension is a division between generations, between a generation for whom scarcity was subsumed in a wartime egalitarianism validated by the need to defeat fascism, and a generation for whom scarcity is the penalty for lagging behind in ‘this sporting life’ of aggressive competitiveness. The incomprehension is described from the point of view of the younger generation making assumptions about the attitude of the older, but the reader can see through both sets of eyes. Where Machin emphasizes the failure of his father’s ambitions, the syntax allows the reader to give equal weight to the loss of affections and feelings that would count much more for the father. British social realism is precisely coincident with the growing affordability of television for the majority of the population. Television offers a means of homogenizing British cultural relations by instilling the desirability of uniform social goals. It comes as no surprise to find that television is dismissed and ignored by Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and decried by his father. It appears to offer to their creator, Alan Sillitoe, a model for social cohesion that extends the

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system of economic and temporal indebtedness; the former through the normalizing of hire purchase arrangements; the latter by analogy between communications and defence networks: ‘What will they think on next!’ Seaton said, after glancing upwards and seeing a television aerial hooked on to almost every chimney, like a string of radar stations, each installed on the never-never. (Sillitoe 1958; 2008, p. 28) In Up the Junction, the unifying factor in the lives of Battersea’s pauper community is the ubiquity of the Tally Man, the weekly visitor who imposes a uniform indebtedness on a clientele with little sense of money as the controlling element in temporal relations: ‘Most of ’em you can make ’em buy anything. Twenty-five per cent don’t know what they’re paying for and fifty per cent don’t want the stuff anyway.’ (Dunn 1963, p. 105) The last story in the volume, ‘The Children’, demonstrates the early assimilation – between the ages of five and ten – of its young characters to the facts of Battersea life, implicating in one another the conditions of parenting, indebtedness (‘HP’) and criminality. But it is not the case that community is simply replaced by consumerism, or that the mythical solidarity of wartime is replaced by the disaffection of the post-war settlement. In Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, the rejection of a common cause is backdated to wartime. The protagonist’s cousin, Dave, self-appointed member of the ‘Royal Corps of Deserters’, is forthright in his rejection of patriotic obligation: ‘Do yer think I’m going ter fight for them bastards, do yer?’ (Sillitoe 1958; 2008, p. 130) For Dave, public service is synonymous with the defence of interests that should be attacked; the history of his own experience has been one long chronicle of class hostility. The most common thread linking all the fictions is their fascination with the anti-social power of extra-marital relationships; adultery in Room at the Top and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning; a live-in relationship between the protagonist and his widowed landlady in This Sporting Life. In Up the Junction, the oblique relationships between the sixteen short stories included in the volume correlate with the structural divergences between individual sentences and paragraphs, but they also match the obliquity of relationships between the male and female characters, their constantly shifting attachments, and especially the looseness of their correspondence with marital relations. If the restless, aggressive non-conformity of the male protagonist in the works of Braine, Sillitoe and Storey naturalizes the resistance to historical continuity in the immediate post-war period, and its abandonment of


the wartime social contract, the break in transmission is even more graphically illustrated by the sterility of female lives in Up the Junction, where the conversational vitality and inventiveness of the female characters contrasts shockingly with the emotional poverty of their relationships with men. At the centre of the book is a gruelling account of an unsuccessful abortion followed by a premature stillbirth, which both counterpoints and puts in perspective the underlying vacuity of the male experience that only a feverish sexual energy will disguise. Rube, victim of this ordeal, is left in a condition that echoes the aimless belligerence of her male counterparts in other fictions: Gettin’ rid of that kid hasn’t half changed me. I don’t know what I want any more. I ain’t half quick-tempered. I go off at everyone around me. Christmas-time I smashed all the cups off of the table. . . (Dunn 1963, p. 68) As in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Christmas provides an obvious occasion on which to foreground social and familial dysfunction, while ‘not knowing what you want’ becomes both a symptom of, and a stimulus to, the exhausting but unproductive routines by which both male and female characters expend energy: I’ve got to go straight now. It just ain’t worth it. If they catch me I do five years. So I’ve got a job in a scrapyard breaking up old cars. I earn twelve pound’ a week. It don’t go far when you’ve bin used to havin’ a hundred pound’ in yer pocket. The trouble with me is I don’t really know what I want out of life except money, but I know I want money. . . (Ibid., p. 36) The insatiable appetites of the male protagonists of these novels, never sated despite the prodigious acquisition and gargantuan consumption of sex and money, seems always on the verge of metamorphosis into spectacularly anti-social forms of expression. Machin, protagonist of This Sporting Life, recognizes in himself a condition in which demand will always outstrip supply: But I was really bored. It dried me up. There wasn’t a moment when I was relaxed or satisfied. I even thought about killing somebody, holding a bank clerk up, chasing an old tart across the park. I felt like a big lion with a big appetite which had suddenly stopped being fed. (Storey 1960; 2000, p. 94)

100 British Social Realism in the Arts since 1940

In Machin’s vocabulary, women are ‘samples’, offering themselves as trial objects for consumption in a transaction from which the male customer walks away without obligation. By half way through the novel, Machin’s jaded palate is aroused only by the prospect of expensive samples, luxury goods, the well-dressed wives of wealthy husbands: I think about what it must be like to hold a rich sample like Mrs Weaver—the nice smells, the soft mattress, smooth sheets; the understanding it’s only a temporary arrangement. No clinging; the knowing of what it is: just a sample, a nice statement between willing people; no slush feelings; decent underwear. (Ibid., p. 127) However, his first opportunity to taste these fancy goods is mishandled: ‘I’d made it more sordid that it ever could have been. I’d been too clumsy. I was turning down a free sample, and she gave all the appropriate grimaces of the disappointed salesman’ (ibid., p. 107). The male consumer automatically attributes a commercial attitude to his female counterpart, a provider of goods and services. Of all the many pressures inducing cracks in the fabric of these fictional communities it is the economic basis of an astonishing range of predicates taken for granted that shows up the most tellingly.

Conclusion None of the novels so far discussed offers a compromise between the analysis of social failure and the imagining of a creative alternative. The most creative relationships they invent are lost in the past for the individual characters concerned or obscured to the reader by the uncertain future they address. Stan Barstow’s A Kind of Loving (1960) appears to move into the middle ground with the make-do-and-mend solution of its protagonist’s renewal of his half-hearted marriage on the basis of affection, shared experience of loss, and reduction of expectations: the embrace of a ‘kind of loving’: All this has taught me, about life and everything, I mean. And the way I see it is this—the secret of it all is there is no secret, and no God and no heaven and no hell. And if you say well what is life about I’ll say it’s about life, and that’s all. And it’s enough, because there’s plenty of good things in life as well as bad. And I reckon there’s no such thing as sin and punishment, either. There’s what you do and


what comes of it. There’s right things and there’s wrong things and if you do wrong things, wrong things happen to you—and that’s the punishment. But there’s no easy way out because if you do only right things you don’t always come off best because there’s chance. After everything else there’s chance and you can do the best you can and you can’t allow for that. If you say, well why does one bloke have all bad luck and another one have all good luck when he might be a wrong’un, well I’ll say isn’t that chance? (Barstow 1960, p. 285) Although literary history has often associated Barstow with the writers discussed here, this accommodation with ‘bad luck’, while it disavows a metaphysical scheme of explanation for the rationale of life as lived in 1950s Britain, is also at cross purposes with the fictional narrations of Braine, Sillitoe, Storey and Dunn, which monitor the stress-lines of British social malaise that join up the confusingly intersecting patterns of historical memory, economic policy, mass culture and public morality in a ferocious critique of the condition of Britain. Its removal at a stroke of the legacy of debts and credits, common bonds and deep divisions, local realities and abstract unrealities, that underlies the rapidly transforming landscape of British social relations seems like one more imitation of the ‘futile game’ that each of the other texts has already refused to play.

Bibliography Balchin, Nigel. (1953) Sundry Creditors. London, Collins. Barstow, Stan. (1960) A Kind of Loving. London, Michael Joseph. Braine, John. (1957) Room at the Top. London, Eyre & Spottiswoode. ——. (1962) Life at the Top, London, Eyre & Spottiswoode. Brook, Susan. (2007) Literature and Cultural Criticism in the 1950s: The Feeling Male Body. London, Palgrave Macmillan. Connor, Steven. (1995) The English Novel in History, 1950–95. London, Routledge. Dunn, Nell. (1963) Up the Junction. London, MacGibbon & Kee. ——. (1967) Poor Cow. London, MacGibbon & Kee. Gasiorek, Andrzej. (1995) Post-war British Fiction: Realism and After. London, Edward Arnold. Gray, Nigel. (1973) The Silent Majority: A Study of the Working Class in Post-War British Fiction. London, Vision Press. Head, Dominic. (2002) The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950–2000. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Kynaston, David. (2007) Austerity Britain 1945–51. London, Bloomsbury. ——. (2009) Family Britain 1951–1957. London, Bloomsbury.

102 British Social Realism in the Arts since 1940 MacKay, Marina, and Stonebridge, Lyndsey. (2007) British Fiction after Modernism: the Novel at Mid-Century. London, Palgrave Macmillan. Marwick, Arthur. (1991) Culture in Britain since 1945. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Mengham, Rod. (2001) ‘Broken Glass’ in Rod Mengham and Neil Reeve (eds), Fiction of the 1940s: Stories of Survival. London, Palgrave Macmillan. Morgan, Kenneth O. (1990) The People’s Peace: British History 1945–1989. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul. (1949) The Diary of Antoine Roquentin, tr. Lloyd Alexander. London, John Lehmann. Sillitoe, Alan. (1958; 2008) Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. London, Harper Perennial. ——. (1959) The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. London, W.H. Allen. Sinfield, Alan. (1983) Society and Literature 1945–1970. London, Methuen & Company. Storey, David. (1960; 2000) This Sporting Life. London, Vintage. ——. (1961) Flight Into Camden. London, Macmillan. Sutherland, J.A. (1978) Fiction and the Fiction Industry. London, Athlone Press. Taylor, D.J. (1993) After the War: The Novel and England Since 1945. London, Chatto & Windus. Waugh, Patricia. (1995) Harvest of the Sixties: English Literature and its Background 1960–1990. Oxford, Oxford University Press. ——. (2009) The Blackwell History of British Fiction 1945–Present. Oxford, Blackwell. Young, Michael. (1963) The Rise of the Meritocracy. Harmondsworth, Penguin.

4 ‘this/is not a metaphor’: The Possibility of Social Realism in British Poetry Keston Sutherland

‘Social realism’ is a name for art which insists on the complexity of social existence. Life is too often simplified by art, too often travestied by ideological routines that make spiritual and economic impoverishment into a raw material to be worked up into artefacts of defensive middle class sentiment. Social realism argues against simplification, against the sympathetic complacencies of the middle class, and against the use of sentiment to arrest inquiry into the causes of suffering. One purpose of this essay is to suggest that it is now uncommonly difficult to find British ‘social realist’ poetry, not only because the poetry with a strong claim to that title has for decades been pressed out of public view by the editors, reviewers, broadcasters and publishers with a controlling interest in the British literary establishment, but also for the more complex reason that ‘social realist’ poetry as I understand it is defined by the imperative to radicalize the mode itself. Poetry will not be ‘social realist’ unless it can make a more radically truthful picture of life than the forms of representation that are popularly considered ‘realistic’. It is difficult to find poetry which does that, because the poetry which may do it is always, as a matter of principle, uncertain whether it does or not; social realism is an intensely self-critical and sceptical mode. It is sceptical about the value and the tendencies of poetic artifice, it is sceptical about rhetoric, rhyme, versification and metaphor, and its scepticism is not logical or linguistic, simply – not just a professional scepticism about semiosis and the power of words to designate objects or ‘signifieds’ – but moral and political. Its fundamental insistence is that poetic artifice is not morally or politically trivial, but capable of determining moral and political attitudes, by accident and by sleight as well as by open and programmatic persuasion; and it takes a special, intense interest in damaging practices 103


of representation that make people insensitive to suffering or blind them to the extent of suffering and its complex material causes. Social realism has done and been all these things from its earliest beginnings. One of the earliest critics of le réalisme in French literature, David-Sauvageot, spelled out the conservative rejection of this art that was ‘ugly on purpose’ (to borrow a phrase of Philip Larkin’s that I will return to later) in his critique of realism published in 1889. Realists insist on describing impoverished life in all its miserable and offensive detail; they reduce art to a prurient and deliberately scandalous anatomy of the poor. But as the great tradition demonstrates beyond dispute, there is only one subject fit for art ambitious to know the human heart by scaling its sublimities and plumbing its recesses. ‘The man of the upper classes is more complex. To what he retains of his primitive nature, he adds what is given to him by education. His virtue is refined and complicated, like his vices: it is him we must know, if we will know man in his entirety.’ (David-Sauvageot 1889, p. 325; my translation) Poor men and women are not complicated, and so they are not substantial enough to be the focus of a ‘realistic’ art. Suffering may indeed be complex, but the suffering caused by impoverishment is simple. In British poetry, it was George Crabbe who first emphatically contradicted this prejudice in a realist rather than a sentimentalist attitude. What Thomas Gray famously called ‘the short and simple annals of the poor’ are neither short nor simple, Crabbe insisted; and ‘annals’ is in any case an offensive metaphor, since the lives of poor people have not been recorded.1 Crabbe’s The Village of 1783 first put the pigeon squarely among the cats, with its irrefutable diagnosis that ‘the Muses sing of happy swains,/Because the Muses never know their pains.’ The principled ignorance of the Muses is their warrant for issuing elegant simplifications of complex suffering. From this chief cause these idle praises spring, That themes so easy few forbear to sing; For no deep thought the trifling subjects ask; To sing of shepherds is an easy task: The happy youth assumes the common strain, A nymph his mistress, and himself a swain. (Crabbe 1988, p. 158: ll.31–6) The objections of the Tory critic Robert Grant in his review of 1810 are representative of the conservative reception of Crabbe’s work. As Grant

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saw things, ‘the realities of low life [ . . . ] are of all the others the most disgusting. If therefore the poet choose to illustrate the department of low life, it is peculiarly incumbent on him to select such of its features, as may at least be inoffensive’ (Pollard 1972, pp. 121–2). Crabbe, like John Coltrane and Ezra Pound in Larkin’s no-nonsense assessment, was being ‘ugly on purpose’. Crabbe is suspiciously motivated, envious and contumacious: he has ‘a contempt for the bienséances of life, and a rage for its realities’ (Pollard 1972, p. 128). Even the republican William Hazlitt was unprepared to accept that Crabbe’s realism was ‘realistic’. ‘He takes an inventory of the human heart exactly in the manner as of the furniture of a sick room [ . . . ] Almost all his characters are tired of their lives, and you heartily wish them dead.’ (‘On Thomson and Cowper’, Howe 1930, p. 97) The human heart merits an emblem, not an inventory; if, as David-Sauvageot maintains, the poet must ‘know man in his entirety’, he will only do it by having the good taste not to get too bogged down in detail. The contemptibleness of Crabbe and Zola was defined in defence of an image of universal humanity whose power depended on the exclusion of complex material detail from poetic accounts of suffering. That image was at once commonsensical and sublime, sentimental and ‘realistic’; Crabbe’s filthy peasants were by contrast an insult to reality, poetic instruments used invidiously to ‘rage’ after it. Without that distinction, without a limit to artistic interest in the minute particulars of suffering – a limit beyond which poets cannot transgress except by ceasing to be poets, or ceasing to be comprehensible – the image of universal humanity defended by conservative (and by some Romantic republican) critics would be immensely more vulnerable to the scepticism of levelling types, malcontents and socialists. The homology is of course not exact, but a careful reader of the discussions surrounding British poetry of the last 60 years may find some interesting indications that the conservative reaction against early social realism is still going strong, with poets of the ‘avant-garde’ or nonconformist tendency now occupying the stocks formerly donated to Crabbe. The twentieth century British reaction against modernism is similar in spirit and in purpose to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century reaction against realism. This is one bit of evidence that the nonconformist poets of today are the real inheritors of the realist project. Realism has always been defined not just by the scepticism and radical self-criticism of its practitioners, but also by the defensive reaction against it by critics whose concepts of art and universal humanity reflect the interests of the most powerful class in society.


I want in this essay to make a detailed case for the realism, and social realism, of ‘difficult’, ‘avant-garde’ or nonconformist poets, in three ways. First, by giving a very brief summary of some of the theories of realism that I think any serious realist art of the past 60 years has had to contend with, whether by conscious interrogation of its own theoretical commitments or just by occupying the same world; second, by describing mainstream British poetry culture, and the influential poetry of Philip Larkin in particular, and specifying how that culture has imposed a sense of what it means to be ‘realistic’ in poetry that I think has functioned as a defensive screen against true realism (the reader is warned to expect some contumacious arguing in this part of the essay, which is ‘ugly on purpose’); and third, by giving a careful reading of a poem that I think has a strong claim to be called ‘social realist’. That last section is the most important, in my reckoning, because it tries to define social realist art not by establishing formal criteria, or by specifying what sort of content must be included in it, but by experiencing the pressures on the moral and political imagination that a poem is capable of exerting through intense scepticism of its own artifice; my hope is that I will show how the poem I read keeps alive the possibility of social realism by refusing entitlement to the designation. ∗

∗

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‘There is no other true realism than that of poetry.’ (Cited in Brown 1981, p. 227) Schlegel’s pronouncement in his Ideen is characteristically eccentric. Poetry has not been the focus of many accounts of realism. Most accounts, since ‘réalisme’ in art was first debated in French criticism of the 1820s, if indeed they do not categorically exclude poetry, have little or nothing to say about it.2 The most important twentieth century theorist of realism, Georg Lukács, was so preoccupied with the novel, that Bertolt Brecht could retort, as if in answer to everything Lukács ever wrote, ‘What about realism in lyric poetry?’ (Brecht 1967, p. 109)3 Fredric Jameson implicitly recognizes this same limitation in Lukács: realism for Lukács is ‘storytelling and dramatization’, ‘narration rather than description’; it is essentially ‘antisymbolic’ (Jameson 1974, p. 196). Brecht did not go on to enlarge this criticism of Lukács by elaborating his own specific account of realist poetry, but only gave a general, partly speculative description of Realismus which rests on a principle— namely, the principle that ‘truthful representations of life’ must not only be ‘suggestive and intelligible’ to ‘the broad working masses’, but, crucially, ‘of use’ to them in their practical struggles for political recognition


and power—which arguably makes the great majority of poetry written in the two hundred years since the concept of artistic ‘realism’ was invented inadmissible to the category it defines (Brecht 2001, p. 107).4 Brecht’s account is surpassingly arduous, asking no less of the aspiring realist than that her writing should ‘represent the most progressive section of the people in such a way that it can take over the leadership’; the definition becomes emphatically speculative just at the point of its most rigorous insistence on practical effectuality (ibid., p. 108). Could any twentieth century British poet accept this obligation, or even recognize it? Hugh MacDiarmid wrestled with it, and with the gigantic historical evidence that no poet was ever likely to fulfil it, in his ‘Second Hymn to Lenin’ of 1935. After four quatrains of troubled but upright ars poetica, addressed familiarly to Lenin in the same brusque, colloquial manners of Pound’s apostrophe to Robert Browning at the beginning of Canto II (‘Ah, Lenin, you were richt’), the poem tilts into a trial by doubt in italics: Are my poems spoken in the factories and fields, In the streets o’ the toon? Gin they’re no’, then I’m failin’ to dae What I ocht to ha’ dune. Gin I canna win through to the man in the street, The wife by the hearth, A’ the cleverness on earth’ll no mak’ up For the damnable dearth. ‘Haud on, haud on; what poet’s dune that? Is Shakespeare read, Or Dante or Milton or Goethe or Burns?’ —You heard what I said. (MacDiarmid 1970, pp. 91–2) The poet’s protest is not allowed to fill out the whole of the last quatrain quoted here, but is made to climax prematurely in the third line, so as not to be allowed to set itself up as a lament by accomplishing the clinch of a rhyme; worse yet, the protest is set in speech marks which just short of scathingly imply that the thought they contain ought to seem a specimen of predictable melodrama. Why then should MacDiarmid the Leninist suffer the energy-sapping protest to be heard at all? For this reason: its bourgeois histrionics make it an instructively more plausible


and convenient candidate for ‘realism’ than the anguished confession of failure that prompts it: it is ‘realistic’ in the false, bourgeois sense of that word. If even Dante won’t cut it on the factory floor, then really, how on earth should I? So runs the familiar excuse, restoring us to common sense by mechanic adoption. But the last line of the quatrain is reserved for the pastoral last word, MacDiarmid’s and Lenin’s at once, a scold against the literati’s pretty skipping amphibrachs of the third line – di dum di di dum di di dum di di dum – and their melodious settlement into convenient despair. The scold arrives with the finality of an interjection by God in a Herbert poem, the last word that was also always the word in the beginning, stilling the mind caught up in the professionally restless vanities of self-suspicion with a reply that no-one who was ever a child could honestly fail to understand. The terminal italics of Herbert’s ‘Jordan (II)’ or ‘The Collar’ are not far off from MacDiarmid’s medial italics here: ‘But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild / At every word, / Me thoughts I heard one calling, Child!’ (Martz 1992, p. 139) Despair in self-suspicion, to the Leninist MacDiarmid as to the Christian Herbert, is an infantile disorder. That point blank monosyllabic scold, ‘You heard what I said’, not the clever resignation by appeal to literary authority that invited it, is the true realism, MacDiarmid stiffly maintains. A Leninist hymnody will refuse not only the opium of the masses, but the opium of the intellectuals, too. Brecht described practical effectuality not simply as the historical measure of the success of realist art, but as its a priori condition. The speculative element of his definition – that art must ‘represent the most progressive section of the people in such a way that it can take over the leadership’ – is not for Brecht a gamble or hyperbole intended to glamorize realism, but its only sufficient basis. MacDiarmid wrote lyric that took seriously the psychological anguish of accepting that speculative element for an iron necessity. The contradiction at the heart of the ‘Second Hymn to Lenin’ is that its serious anguish is both the testimony of its deep commitment to an effectual realism, and the measure of its failure actually to be it. Other major descriptions of realism, besides Brecht’s, have been, in different ways, just as difficult to reconcile with poetry. Roland Barthes’s influential account of ‘the reality effect’, the use of prolific descriptive detail without obvious narrative significance, what Barthes typologically called ‘détail inutile’, offers no direct comment on poetry, and seems ill adapted to explain it (Barthes 1984, p. 181). Barthes thought, fairly ingeniously, that the details about objects and appearances given in fictional descriptions ‘are reputed to denote the real directly’, but that ‘all that


they do – without saying so – is signify it; Flaubert’s barometer, Michelet’s little door finally say nothing but this: we are the real’ (Barthes 1989, p. 148). All the useless details are corporately eloquent, and the structure of their signifiant unanimity is realism. But that structure needs a story to hang on, or some other device acting as the indisputable focus for interpretation that lets the details be just details, so that they may appear useless. Poetry worth reading at this level of intellectual sophistication is increasingly unlikely to present a focus like that; a Simon Armitage or Carol Ann Duffy poem will present such a focus, and readers will call it the theme. As John Wilkinson has argued, poetry is usually (and prejudicially) conceived as the art in which ‘every linguistic scrap must be put to work, every participant phrase must earn its keep’ (Wilkinson 2009, p. 50); or as Hans-Georg Gadamer more overtrustingly and overbearingly put it, it is ‘obligatory’ that a poem ‘not contain a single word standing for something in such a way that another word could be substituted for it’ (Gadamer 1997, p. 130). The suggestion about poems is similar to Merleau-Ponty’s about the phenomena of perception in general, and paintings in particular, that the more we look into them, the more they ‘come to form a tightly structured arrangement in which one has the distinct feeling that nothing is arbitrary’ (Merleau-Ponty 2004, p. 97). Barthes’s infinitely substitutable ‘détail inutile’, the basic genetic building block of the ‘reality effect’, is incompatible with ‘poetry’ as most critics have liked to imagine that art, because the poem is conceived as the scene or act of language in which detail cannot, by definition, be or even appear useless or substitutable. There are plenty of reasons not to accept this concept of poetry, but none of them leads to the discovery that poetry after all contains ‘détail inutile’ in Barthes’s sense. Barthes’s theory can be made inapplicable to poetry from the other side, too: not by claiming that poetry is all work and no play, but by reasoning the reverse. Michael Riffaterre has argued, in a study devoted to poetry in particular that picks up where Barthes left off, that ‘semiosis triumphs completely over mimesis’ when ‘the text is no longer attempting to establish the credibility of a description’, and that poetic texts in general do not make that attempt (Riffaterre 1978, p. 10). This makes the poetic text, in Riffaterre’s reckoning, ‘text’ perfected, text per se. ‘In all cases the concept of poeticity is inseparable from that of the text. And the reader’s perception of what is poetic is based wholly upon references to texts’ (ibid., p. 22) Poems are semiotic, not mimetic; they are instances of the concept of poeticity; and only texts can be the foundation for poetic experience. As an ultra corrective to the ‘Romanticism’


of Hazlitt and Wordsworth, for whom poetry was passion and the sky, and ‘perception of what is poetic’ was sometimes possible even in minds ignorant of semiotics and its concept of the text, this is tolerably beguiling. It swaps infinite humanist universals for restricted structuralist equivalents; the validity of universals in general is preserved by the ruse. Riffaterre’s argument does supply a reason to think that the ‘reality effect’ which Barthes explains is the ‘connotation’ (but not the ‘denotation’) of the ‘pyramidal heap of boxes and cartons’ in Flaubert’s Un cœur simple will likewise be the connotation of the ‘parti-coloured obelisks of mixed ices’ in the café in Baudelaire’s petit poème en prose ‘Les Yeux des Pauvres’ only if we decide that Baudelaire’s text is en prose, not if we decide it is a poème.5 But Riffaterre’s triumphalist account of the ‘complete triumph’ of semiosis over mimesis in poetry, though absolument moderne, is of an order of explanation long ago dismissed by Lukács as ‘scholasticism’. For Lukács the dialectician and materialist, ‘realistic literature’ is literature in which ‘each descriptive detail is both individual and typical’, that is, roughly translated into Barthes’s general terms, both ‘denotative’ and ‘connotative’, never just one or the other (Lukács 1979, p. 43).6 In any case, as Tzvetan Todorov explained, Riffaterre makes poetry into a ‘genre without realist pretensions’ (Todorov 1982, p. 9; my translation). Vladimir Mayakovsky, arguably the greatest Marxist poet, thought that ‘the depiction and representation of reality have no place in poetry on their own account’, since poetry is ‘at its very root tendentious’ (Mayakovsky 1990, p. 48). Not only can poetry never be empirical or photographic (though Marx himself once praised ‘photographical truth’ in representation), but poets conscious of the historical meaning of their labour must not fall into the ideological fantasy that it might be photographic.7 If poetry may nonetheless be realist, it will be by engineering the correct ideological tendencies in language, that is, the correct exaggerations, omissions, amplifications and distortions of reality (at whose apex the ensemble of human relations is ‘a cloud in pants!’), not by making the incurably bourgeois claim to eschew ideology altogether, the better to settle things as they really are and always will be into their proper focus (Almereyda 2008, p. 80). The ‘realist’ in St. Petersburg in 1915 will not wipe clean the window in the house of language to get an unobfuscated view of reality outside: he will melt the glass with his forehead (see Almereyda 2008, p. 81). The ‘fundamental tenet of materialism’, Lenin wrote, is ‘the existence of the thing reflected independent of the reflector (the independence of the external world from the mind)’ (Lenin 1967, p. 110); this conviction arises


irresistibly from ‘naïve’ experience, and materialism in Lenin’s conception ‘deliberately makes the “naïve” belief of mankind the foundation of its theory of knowledge’; but the reflection of things in minds comes after the existence of things, and the reflection of things in poetry comes still later, after their reflection in minds, and that order of priority is for Mayakovsky, as for Lenin, an irreducibly historical sequence, complex and invariable, overdetermined by class interests and political loyalties (ibid., p.56). Realism is overdetermination by the right interests and the right loyalties, in an active enough state of waking, responsive not simply to real facts and objects but to real social crises and hidden developments. There is no description that is not also a prescription for Mayakovsky, not simply because values and norms resound under the apparently most literal or innocuous language, but, much more importantly, because there is a revolution to carry to the world. ‘It’s not enough to give examples of the new poetry, or rules about how a word should act on the revolutionary masses – one must ensure that these words will act in such a way as to give maximum support to one’s class.’ (Mayakovsky 1990, p. 47). ‘Realism’ defined on this basis as the intensification of already tendentious feeling and thinking in deliberate, but possibly complex and even obscure, fidelity to the naïve beliefs of the proletariat, may seem coherent and practicable to poets who believe in a revolution and who wish to put their work at the service of it, as Edward Upward and Stephen Spender once did, and as Sean Bonney does now; but it was a crucial point of principle to Mayakovsky that the contribution of the poet to the program of revolution should not be granted any special function or significance essentially different from the labour of railway or factory workers, so that his account of realism must programmatically have no special explanation reserved uniquely for poetry. Not only must ‘realism’ not be redesigned or specially elaborated to account for poetry, but every possible claim to exceptional status made by poets must be realistically thrown out and ridiculed. Only ‘sentimental-critical Philistinism’ is ever responsible for the idea that ‘only eternal poetry is safe from the dialectical process’; and every claim to exceptional status or power of insight by the poet, however apparently modest, is suspicious because likely to bolster this cryptoreligious idea, if not simply to be it in disguise (Mayakovsky 1990, pp. 42–3).8 Mayakovsky’s materio-realist attitude to poetry involves thinking, at the very least, that poetry will become realist only to the extent that it acknowledges that it must work to the same essential end, in essentially the same social medium, and by essentially the same inspiration to practical activity as a political speech.


Adorno’s most summary rejection of realism appeared in the essay ‘Presuppositions. On the occasion of a reading by Hans G. Helms’. ‘Realism in art has become ideology’, he asserts, a little as if provocatively making a specimen axiom while not believing in axioms (Adorno 1992, p. 101). Adorno understands ‘realism’ not simply as a concept, but always as a word used and misused in society, a cluster of moral connotations and attitudes: the special or esoteric meanings of the word are indissolubly bound up with, and change after the fashions of, its ordinary meanings in everyday conversation. ‘Realism’ as an art-theoretical terminus technicus takes on and increasingly becomes indistinguishable from an ideological function, blurring with the mentality of so-called realistic people, who orient themselves by the desiderata and the offerings of existing institutions, and do not thereby become free of illusions, as they imagine, but only help to weave the veil that the force of circumstances lays on them in the form of the illusion that they are natural creatures. (Adorno 1992, p. 101) Realism, in other words, is the set of uncritical postures and attitudes condemned by Kant and Marx alike: heteronomy, mystification, fetishism, intellectual timidity and the deep-rooted petit bourgeois disposition to compromise and make do. No longer the anatomist of those postures, the realist has shrunk into them by mechanical adoption; Pécuchet casts out Flaubert. The artist who resists fading into ‘realistic’ life, who will not mingle into the deceived mass but who will insist that her art must be autonomous, who knows ‘wrong life’ for what it is, and who will not be stupefied by her powerlessness to transcribe faithfully a world that cannot keep faith with humanity, – that artist will make a truthful representation of life only negatively. ‘When literature as expression makes itself the expression of a reality that has disintegrated for it, it expresses the negativity of that reality.’ (Adorno 1992, p. 101) Expressionism, rejected by Lukács as a decadent alternative to realism, as all immediacy and no totality, becomes for Adorno the last realism of a really decaying world. For Adorno, a fundamental fact for any artist who would try to make a picture of reality is that not only the world itself, but mimesis, too, has been radically corrupted by the violence of capitalist exchange. Art must compulsorily keep alive ‘the dream of a world unspoilt by ends and purposes’, or else capitulate to our waking catastrophe; but mimesis of the dream is a mere dream of mimesis, not ‘realism’ in anything like


Brecht’s sense but an immunization against it.9 ‘Foreignness [Fremdheit] to the world is an element of art’, Adorno wrote in Aesthetic Theory; and ‘Whoever perceives it [art] other than as foreign [Fremdes] fails to perceive it at all’ (Adorno 1997, p. 241).10 Not only is naïve confidence in verisimilitude a species of blindness, but, at the same time, the Brechtian artist who thinks to disrupt reactionary habits of perception through the violent and clashing introduction of foreign or alien material and contexts into the artwork (what Brecht called his ‘Verfremdungseffekt’) is likewise blind, to the extent that he misrecognizes how ‘foreign’ to the world all mimesis already is, and so exaggerates and overvalues the power of consciously engineered moments of foreignness to disrupt an artistic spectacle that is, in fact, more profoundly continuous with the spectacle of deception outside the theatre than he can allow himself to admit. The problem with Lenin’s materialism, which ‘deliberately makes the ‘naïve’ belief of mankind the foundation of its theory of knowledge’, is that mankind does not yet possess, and is certainly not yet activated by, naïve beliefs. ‘Realistic people’ indeed think that they are guided by such beliefs, which they like to call common sense; but for Adorno, life lived out under that guidance is what he liked to call stupefaction: not the life of a subject who has the wrong standard of objectivity, even, but the life of the subject become object, the person who, an object himself, mistakes for ‘objectivity’ the same sort of hypnosis and superstition decried by Lenin and Mayakovsky as the worst sort of bourgeois ‘subjectivity’.11 ∗

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‘The mentality of so-called realistic people’ has been much in evidence in British poetry of the past 60 years. In fact, that mentality, appearing very much as Adorno diagnosed it, has dominated British poetry ever since middle England embraced Philip Larkin as its preeminent miserablist. The embrace was consolidated to a grip by successions of editors at Faber, the most prestigious British poetry publisher because the most realistically committed to mediocrity; by the national press, the TLS, the LRB, and, most mortiferous of all, because most uncertain of its income from its subscriber base, Poetry Review;12 by trivial commercial stunts like the hailing of ‘New Generation Poets’ by the Poetry Book Society in 2004; by all of the pay-to-enter national prizes for pay-to-read-poetry; and by much of the teaching-to-exams of poetry in secondary schools, which too often goes on as if poems are meant to fit into a page and are meant to have a theme which we are meant to get out of an anecdote


which must have a twist or thump at the bottom that makes us say, after Don Paterson, ‘yes: that’s the way it is’. ‘Without that verification’, Paterson cautions, ‘you have surrealism or nonsense.’13 Paterson’s guide to no-nonsense satisfaction follows on from his realistically facile and reassuring definition of what a poem does: it ‘concurs with the reader’s experience of the world in an unexpected way, or shows them something they hadn’t noticed about it.’ A great part of Larkin’s legacy to British poetry is summed up in this remark. The poem concurs with an experience of the world which it implicitly assigns to a stencil outline designated ‘the reader’; real people who quickly see that this is what the poem does, and who are grateful not to have to question the transmissibility of experience or the concurrence of art with life, project themselves into the stencil outline, to be gratified by its confirmation of what they decide they already know; the sensation might in other circumstances feel like narcissism, and might profitably be examined as such, but with the sanction of art it can be just hospitality, or empathy, or fellow-feeling instead; the person who is now definitely coming up as ‘the reader’ savours the experience for its momentariness, then for its elapsing, and this gives rise to an indistinctly elegiacal sentiment indistinctly to do with the idea that life is ephemeral or things don’t change; definite pleasure follows, as the poem, which at first glance looked reassuringly short and easy to read in one go, is now, being finished, definitely short and easy to read in one go; and the sensation of gratitude which came from being told that he is right and from not being tested or contradicted is defined by ‘the reader’ as a new bit of knowledge or recognition, with some content to be sure (‘something he hadn’t noticed’), but nothing unwieldy or radically unnerving or accusatory or impossible to grasp in one go; and this morsel wraps up the consumer epiphany by satisfying ‘the reader’ that he has indeed got something out of the poem, so that his time has not been wasted, and so that he is not lacking the equipment or knowledge or experience that readers are remunerated for; and so ‘the reader’ may shut the book, let the brief high of projection fade, turn back into whoever he was, unchanged but satisfied that he has been advantaged, and get on with living in a world that art has again helped him to accept for what it is. This sketch which is not a caricature would be grounds for the accusation, which must seem improbable at first, that British poetry with a ‘realistic mentality’ is a sort of formalism, in the pejorative sense of that word as Lukács used it. It does the same thing over and over again, distils to a small spread of essential topics, counts on its natural appeal to natural sympathy, goes on in mechanic reiteration of cameo ideas


and plotlines, is invariable in the complacent modesty of its reality testing. What the content is need not matter all that much, so long as it quickly enough feels as though it matters, and so long as the feeling is not too deeply strange or uneasy, but is recognizably a feeling of the sort made by poems written by poets whose books are in the shops. As Simon Armitage has put it, ‘a personal response rather than a critical one’.14 Consider this poem by the most influential, most celebrated and best of these poets, Larkin. Wires The widest prairies have electric fences, For though old cattle know they must not stray Young steers are always scenting purer water Not here but anywhere. Beyond the wires Leads them to blunder up against the wires Whose muscle-shredding violence gives no quarter. Young steers become old cattle from that day, Electric limits to their widest senses. (Larkin 1988, p. 48) By the easygoing standard of not too obscurely theoretical discussion that passes for textual criticism in Poetry Review, we can say that the ‘form’ of this poem is two quatrains with a rhyme scheme that works like a mirror. The first line rhymes with the last, the second with the penultimate, and so on, so that the completed poem looks and sounds as if it ought to be folded up, one quatrain on top of the other, its end on its beginning. Its ‘form’ then is a sort of symmetry of ends, and appropriately so, since the lesson of the poem, which is reassuringly digestible and homiletic, is that the young steers had done better to stay where they were, and that, painfully, they do in any case. Through symmetry of rhymes the poem counts down to a mirage of freedom and then counts back up again (compare the more interesting first line of Tom Jones’s poem ‘The K Numbers’: ‘I’ll count down to your death, overcome, and count back up again’) (Jones 2010, p. 44). The metre is roughly iambic pentameter, and the lesson of the poem makes that rhythm seem to derive its familiarity from inevitability as much as from custom (‘Once you get the hang of it, you’ll hear iambic pentameter everywhere’, the Glyndwr Award-winning poet Gillian Clarke advises GCSE students in an online learning resource).15 What will or won’t count as the ‘content’ of the poem depends on whether we are willing to


accept that its lesson, or ‘theme’, fills up that category. If we are willing readers, apt to see ‘the reader’s experience of the world’ reflected in a poem that concurs with it, we may accept the lesson as ‘content’; in which case, the content of ‘Wires’ is a slightly awkward parable that aims to teach us that the restlessness and ambitions of youth are a seduction leading to momentarily violent, but not continuously violent, disillusionment. Every youthful ambition is a seduction, of necessity because by decree of metaphor; the purpose of metaphor in Larkin’s poetry is invariably to make a depressing idea seem inevitable by seeming moreishly solemn. The depressing idea in ‘Wires’ comes packaged with an analgesic believed to be superior to a cure, namely that we are not young for long, and that the really violent moment of disillusionment can only happen once, and that after that moment we are old, which condition means that we ‘know we must not stray’. Because the idea seems to be a parable, and so of general as opposed to pedantic application, we feel as though implicitly warned off from trying to make it fit too exactly with any experience in particular we may recall to mind. The structure of Larkin’s parables typically requires ‘the reader’ to conflate the particular with the pedantic (as ‘Home is so Sad’ effectively spells out in its adroit last phrase: ‘That vase.’). What that does for the poem in this case is keep it safely immune from being too decisively identified as a political lesson. We know of course that it is a political lesson, not simply a lesson about erotic naivety or intellectual ambition or careerism, but it would be pedantic to insist on it: the poem cautions us not to expect that a ‘truthful representation of life’ should be a literal one, and asks us to see that in this case it is better, all things considered, that the poem be broadly ‘suggestive’ than that it be strictly ‘intelligible’ (the terms are Brecht’s, from the start of this essay). As Larkin’s admirer David Timms put it, in a remark that he meant as criticism, but that seems to me treacherously benign, ‘ “Wires” is an intellectual apprehension of an emotional concept and no more’ (Timms 1973, p. 71).16 A pedantic reader, but not ‘the reader’ who qualifies as such by her aptness to see concurrence, might think that the political lesson of ‘Wires’ is an enormous one, that it is quite extremely reactionary, and that the device of parable is inadequate to foreclose that lesson, because none of the meanings we get from accepting that the parable is the content of the poem is anything like so important, not to say overbearing, as the political instruction to learn our place and expect violence in reply to transgression; but the moment we become that pedantic reader we are likely to want to throw the poem in the bin.


We do not, in any case, need to accept that the parable is the content of the poem. As realist readers, rather than as readers with a ‘realistic mentality’, we might want to do what this poem phobically gambles on our having no desire to do: we might ask what exactly is the fitness of its specific devices, where they are drawn from, and whether they make a truthful representation of the world, and not just a persuasive recitation of a moral. Do the widest prairies have electric fences, in fact? Do old cattle, or old people (their epigones), know they must not stray, or do they simply not stray? Would that sort of conditioned terror of transgression really be ‘knowledge’? Are young steers, or young people, ‘always’ scenting purer water, and is the condescending ring of that word ‘always’ not evidence that our instructor not only resents the young, as he elsewhere gruesomely admits in any case (‘High Windows’, and passim), but that he in fact resents a figment, sadistically generalized to a blur?17 Is it true that the young are never able to find their ‘purer water’ here, and that anywhere else will always do instead?18 Is it wrong to want purer water, even if it can’t be had? Is it always uninstructed lust for something indistinctly imagined that ‘leads’ the young into conflict, and do they always ‘blunder’ into violence, or do they sometimes see it coming and stand against it anyway? If the wires give no quarter, are we to imagine that they are capable of mercy or restraint, so that it makes sense to talk about them as withholding it; and if they are capable of restraint, is it not worth thinking about why they do not practice restraint, even if that question might upset the ‘form’ of the poem or make its parable inconsistent? Is it true that there is one crucial moment of violence in life, and that this moment is in every case effective in getting its lesson across? Does every young steer learn the same lesson, or do some refuse to learn, or simply not learn, or choose to think that the important thing is not to learn a lesson, but to change the world that inflicts it? The poem teaches us at last, as a sort of unappealing consolation, that the widest senses of the old cow are, at least, just as wide as the world she is stuck in: ‘widest prairies’ in the first line, ‘widest senses’ in the last. But is it true that the maturity won through pain and disillusionment makes our senses as wide as the world we live in, never any wider or narrower? Can electric limits conceivably be the limits of vision and hearing, as well as touch, or are these not among our widest senses? If we are supposed to think that ‘senses’ could mean ‘meanings’, so that the last line tells us that the violent wires are the limits of what we mean, not simply of what we feel or where we go, then do we ‘readers’ mean everything that is inside the wires, including all the other cattle, young and old, male and female, dairy and meat?


These questions may seem hot-headed or unfair to admirers of Larkin willing to take his parable on its own terms (if not nearly so virulent as Larkin’s own assessments of authors he disliked).19 My point in asking them is not only to explain that the poem is extraordinarily bathetic, and to suggest that its bathos is characteristically Larkin’s type of bathos, a type so influential on mainstream British poetry that ‘strangulating’ or ‘tyrannical’ may be a better word; I also want to argue that it is precisely by learning how to reject poems like this one, how to see through their cramping artifice of moral instruction, how to calculate their formal poverty, that we can become ‘realist readers’. Realist readers, in my sense, will take an interest not simply in the images, diction, rhythms and devices in a poem, but in the world of objects and social relationships they are drawn from; the correlation could hardly be exact, but in general I think it is true to say that the more complex those objects or relationships are recognized to be, the more ‘realist’ is the act of reading. Realist poetry not only sustains and progressively heightens that interest without trying to box up its emotional content into the form of a sentiment, but also (and this is the decisive thing) it passionately advocates interest in the world, in the critical expectation that the poem will encourage readers to outgo and transgress against the limits of its own analytic competence. Realist poetry advocates and invigorates interest in complex material relationships. Larkin’s poetry discourages and curtails it.20 The majority of recent mainstream British poetry is still profoundly obliged to Larkin’s antimodernism, and can be liked only on condition that realism in this implicitly political sense be abandoned and replaced by the sort of facile pop-up reaction made into ‘the reader’s’ assay of poetry by Don Paterson: the suggestible conformist’s ‘yes: that’s the way it is’. One payoff for that conformist intellectual frugality is a claim to possess and be ruled by Adorno’s ‘realistic mentality’, or rightmindedness; another is the entitlement to sneer at difficult art and make a withering play at being baffled by it. As Walter Benjamin said when still a young steer: ‘the philistine, you will have noted, only rejoices in every new meaninglessness. He remains in the right.’ (Benjamin 2004, p. 4)21 ‘Wires’ has one interesting feature. ‘Not here but anywhere. Beyond the wires’ – and then the line break and the division of stanzas, after which we might expect, as the poem’s otherwise ordinary syntax may lead us to expect, that the first line of the second stanza will pick up where this previous line left off and make a sentence that seems to flow on unambiguously to a period. Instead we get ‘Leads them to blunder


up against the wires’, and a jolt that for a moment feels disorienting. Has a word strayed out beyond the confines of the poem and made its escape? Beyond the wires something leads them to blunder? Perhaps the most disappointing thing about the poem considered as strictly as possible simply as poetic artifice, is that its most interesting feature will not sustain the interest which at first sight it seems to merit. The problem is that the ‘realistic mentality’ rammed at us in the crude, reactionary parable – the only ‘content’ admissible as such – is so oppressively settled on, so obviously not in question, and so dogged in admiration for the idea that an unquestioning life is the only sort in touch with our only and unquestionable reality, that by the poem’s own lights it seems impossible to accept transgressions in syntax for anything but trivial examples of trivial transgression in general. Only the pedant would make that line break the focus of her interest, the poem implicitly explains; but the pedant would as soon just black out the whole dreary homily. With some refitting, Barthes’s concept of the ‘détail inutile’ seems a useful description of this moment in ‘Wires’. Flaubert’s ‘pyramidal heap of boxes and cartons’ says ‘nothing but this: we are the real’; Larkin’s unexpected transgression of syntax says nothing but this: I am the trivial. ∗

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Recent British poems with a good claim to be called ‘realist’ have been written and published beyond the wires of mainstream, commercial literary culture. Perhaps no poet has so impressively confronted the difficulties of a specifically ‘social’ realism as the Glaswegian poet Tom Leonard. Sam Ladkin and Robin Purves are not just observing the limits of a poetical demographic when they say that Leonard ‘developed [in the early 1960s] a poetic language that incorporated expressive intensities and economies of information well outside the range of popular verse in Britain at the time’ (Ladkin and Purves 2007, p. 7). They are saying that the ‘intensities’ and ‘economies’ that distinguish Leonard’s poetry could not be found in popular verse because they were not welcome in it (they are still not). Compare Larkin’s poem ‘Wires’ with this one by Leonard, from nora’s place, ‘a poem in seventeen aspects’, as its title page describes it, first published in 1990 and since included in the selection of Leonard’s work published collaboratively by two small presses in England and Scotland, outside the narrative (Leonard dedicates the book to ‘the smallpress poet-publishers’).


only this particular street to walk the length of, this is not a metaphor, only being suddenly walking down a street in this place, having this particular sense not of anxiety, but ‘the fact of the presence of existence’ ∗

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each time it happens it seems that all the intervening times have disappeared and this is all that nora really is (Leonard 2009, p. 159) The usual way that poems not belonging to mainstream culture are dismissed by the guardians of that culture is by being called ‘incomprehensible’ (‘ “Incomprehensible” is how the intellectuals and ‘aesthetes’ described his work with genuine hatred’, Elsa Triolet recollects of Mayakovsky; ‘yet they understood enough to infer that it was somehow directed at them’); or in cases where ‘incomprehensible’ would be too weakly derisive, ‘difficult’ may be used, as a euphemism for either ‘meaningless’ or ‘elitist’, depending on whether the critic wishes to be to the right of the poet or the left (Triolet 2002, p. 19).22 Larkin set the pace of reaction with his essays on jazz and modernism. With John Coltrane, Larkin wrote, ‘jazz started to be ugly on purpose’ and could therefore only be comprehended as an insult; this happened because ‘the Negro stopped wanting to entertain the white man’ and started trying to make a militant, exclusive musical culture just for Negroes (Larkin 1983, pp. 293–4). Modernism in general, in


all the arts, was the same bickering and wilful falling off, Larkin discovered. Poets have stopped wanting to entertain the no-nonsense middle class reader, and have tried to make an exclusive, militant culture just for other poets. British literary culture has never fully recovered from this conceit, despite the manifest power and originality of the work of J.H. Prynne, Tom Raworth, John Wilkinson, Denise Riley, Douglas Oliver and others, for the good reason that lots of editors and reviewers are in prestigious positions because they continue to repeat the conceit, and they want to stay in their positions (‘Prynne is incomprehensible’, says John Sutherland, professor of modern English literature at University College London, in a consummately trivial article by Maurice Chittenden in The Sunday Times on ‘the baffling bard’).23 Tom Leonard’s poetry is plainly neither difficult, in the sense that conservative critics give to that word, nor ‘ugly on purpose’; it has been available for decades to anyone interested enough in poetry to look for it beyond retail outlets policed by their central managements; there is certainly no poetry in English or phonetic Scots more suspicious of and hostile toward coteries of educated literate snobs than his; yet it is nonetheless routinely ignored in the official British organs. It is, I think, the best – most moving, critical and technically accomplished – social realist poetry written in English in the past 60 years. The poem that ends nora’s place is interested in the power of simple words to specify the limits of existence. ‘only this particular/street’, ‘only//being’, ‘this place’, ‘this particular sense’, ‘this/is all’. Leonard’s ‘this’ is set down almost as if in a phantasmagorical headstone, carried about in mental draft. It is an emphatically simple word, elemental even, and more than usually incompatible with paraphrase. Its simplicity is neither apologetic nor polemical: it is not an easy simplicity.24 Leonard’s ‘this’ is uneasy, partly because it is difficult. It is difficult not in the sense that it hides its meaning or tries to confuse a reader whose intelligence it predicts, but in an emotional sense: it is difficult to accept. There cannot be only this particular street to walk the length of, unless ‘nora’ is just the figurine contained by this poem who does nothing but act out its story; if nora is real, she can always turn the corner. One tacit question already there in the first three lines is, do I want to accept that nora is nothing but that figurine? But I may think that there is ‘only this particular/street’ because a depressing life makes all streets seem identical, all of them only ‘this’ one. If I do think that, I still feel uneasy accepting it for a moral, or for an insight from despair, something I can turn to intellectual profit by deciding that it is a ‘general’ or ‘universal’ moral or


insight, because I do not know, and have not been prompted to imagine that I do know, which particular street in the world it is that might serve in that way for the basis of a generalization. That would not be a confounding or even a troubling lack of information in Larkin’s poetry, where ‘not here but anywhere’ is a good enough base from which to set out after a more broad, general view of things; but Leonard’s poem is, among other things, a meditation on the power of specifying which seems implicitly to recognize that specific situations in the world, like specific lives in those situations, cannot honestly be used as platforms for metaphors or for any other poetical device whose function is to sanction generalities. ‘Cannot honestly be used’ does not mean ‘cannot be used’, of course; and the poem implies that distinction too. This street then remains particular, ‘this’ one, and what it is by being ‘this’ is a street ‘to walk the length//of’: it is a particular street because there is a particular use for it. Not until the last line of the poem do we learn that it is ‘nora’ who walks the length of this particular street, that it is there so that she may do that; but rereading the poem it seems necessary to put her back into it from the start, to make that impersonal because infinitive verb ‘to walk’ as much as possible into a personal and definite act by this one person, nora. That is not an easy or decisive thing to do, either: I cannot put her into the start of the poem so effectively that she sticks there, reappearing to oblige my interpretation each time I reread it. She is there and she is not (nora’s place is there and not there). To begin with, and to begin again, and yet again, there is not even certainly nora, but ‘only this particular/street’. The second appearance of ‘this’ in the poem is complex, because the first two lines seem to establish, or to hint at least, that things will not change, but then there is a change in grammar. When the word ‘this’ first appears in line 1, we may feel some uncertainty as to whether it is a pronoun or an adverb, since it cannot yet be clear from the first line whether ‘particular’ will turn out to be an adjective or a noun: ‘only this particular’. In the turn down into the second line this ambiguity is resolved, quickly and slowly: ‘this’ is an adverb, ‘particular’ is an adjective: ‘only this particular/street’. The ambiguity is resolved in favour of a concrete object; but before it is resolved, the concrete object we expect may yet not arrive; and if it does not, we will have an abstract noun instead; and because we might have had an abstract noun, ‘this particular’, we do actually have it, albeit only as a possibility rejected by the poem that now shadows the concrete noun which the poem accepted instead (this feels curiously like a chance missed, a narrowing of possibility: as if the concrete object were arrived at not by distinction from


the abstract one, but by the loss of it). I think the poem asks us to expect that the second use of ‘this’ will be resolved in the same way, and that the turn from the third line into the fourth will make another concrete object appear, so that the sentence will begin to steady itself, despite the complexity of the interruptions in sense caused by the line breaks, into a series of concrete objects that will later on add up to a scene or a place. But the place does not come: ‘this’ – this what? this corner to turn? this body to walk with? this direction to go in? – ‘is not a metaphor’. We are struck with the first completed proposition of the poem, emphatically a whole grammatical unit: ‘this is not a metaphor’. For a moment that clause is a little stunning, partly because the poem seems to have switched from language that seems likely to develop into a graphic description, a tentative ‘scenography’, to the language of literary critical definition. A witty practitioner of practical criticism might ask where this street is leading us, and whether it isn’t a blind alley into a brick wall of metatext; but the poem doesn’t seem to elicit that sort of verbally witty variation on its theme, for the reason that it is careful not to have one (it would also smack, here, of what MacDiarmid in his ‘Second Hymn’ called ‘cleverness’). The proposition ‘this is not a metaphor’ is stunning for another reason besides the switch of languages. It seems to take up a definite attitude toward ambiguity, just as we are learning to expect that there will be lots of ambiguity in the poem. The poem seems to have said something decisive, a warning even, that sets conditions for the use of figurative language. But no figurative language has yet been used in the poem, we might think, as if in protest against being warned; but that is exactly what the proposition in ll.3–4 makes emphatically plain, as if to say that it may not be enough simply to avoid metaphor without also stating that you are avoiding it. But why should that be true? Should the poem not rather avoid explaining itself, than avoid metaphor? The lines are not petulant or upbraiding, they are patient; and yet they do suggest with force that it is no longer enough simply to be plain, and that plainness will be acknowledged as literalness only if the poem is careful to specify that that is what it is. They seem also to suggest that learned discomfort over the impropriety of explaining what you’re doing in poetry is a petty or even obscurantist reaction, especially in view of how serious the thing to be explained is (only the ‘realistic’ reader for whom it would interfere with the quick discovery of ‘concurrence’ will be offended by the warning not to identify a metaphor).25 It is difficult to decide whether the ruling out of metaphor in this case means the redundance of metaphors in general. One thing that makes


that decision difficult is that it isn’t clear what ‘this’ refers to: ‘this/is not a metaphor’, but what is ‘this’? It may be the lines preceding, the description of the particular street which is defined by its use, which may be its real use for nora. It may also be just and only what it is: the word ‘this’. Is the poem telling us that ‘this’ is not a metaphor, that it is not a fundamentally anonymous because infinitely transferable word for pointing at all objects (as Hegel found in the Phenomenology of Spirit), but a word that, ‘in this place’, sticks to the one object it points at? ‘This’ would then be an act of specifying, an act by a living person, specifically as opposed to a bare unspoken word. It would be a sort of basic guarantee for literalism, whatever the linguistic arguments outlawing unslipping signification.26 It suits the poem to bring in the perspectives of philosophy and linguistics for a moment, because the poem is not simply in plain language, it is in language that is defiantly plain. It is shadowed throughout by a language that it will not admit into its content. Not, at least, until the line propped up in quotation marks, ‘the fact of the presence of existence’. That looks to be a specimen of what the poem will not do, but what it knows someone else is likely to say about it (a critic, probably). Whether or not it is a direct quotation may not be a negligible question (I suspect it is not), but neither does it seem one to which the poem is particularly anxious that we should know the answer. It is enough that the language quoted should obviously be the sort of language designed to be quoted, that is, to be used in proof or disproof, or as a token of knowledge and learning. It invokes a higher sort of speculative accountancy, the sort that will be set over against what it names – ‘the fact of the presence of existence’ – as if by naming it in a locution with such a tidy professional appearance the ‘fact’ could be more impressively known or grasped. The poem suggests the opposite, of course, not simply by letting the language of quotation show itself for what it is, without comment, but by then immediately breaking for a bit of typographical light relief: ‘∗ ∗’. It is difficult to decide if those asterisks are really as comical as they might be, an emblem for cogitatus interruptus, or if they are more neutral than that, simply the recognition that a pause does come. ‘each time it happens/it seems’ By this point we know that this couplet makes an ambiguity: both ‘it seems that each time – nora? anyone? – does this, it happens’ and, letting ourselves look ahead, ‘each time it happens/it seems//that all the intervening times/have disappeared’. We have learned to accept that the line breaks will multiply sense by interrupting it; they will do that not only because line


breaks in general tend to do it, but because these particular line breaks, in this particular poem, do it. They do it slowly, not by a rush or overspill that makes meaning seem unstable, but by steadying meaning as they go. We know the type of ambiguity this is: it is not a metaphor for disorientation, but an opening on uncertainty that leads to a closing down into certainty. The intervening senses disappear as the poem goes on. Until at last we get to the only part of the poem that is certainly nora’s place: the end. ‘and this/is all that nora really is’. She is other things, perhaps, only not really; ‘this’ is all she really is. The pathos of the last couplet is the most difficult thing to accept in this poem full of difficult acceptances. It is not difficult to accept because it is overdone, garish or confabulated; nor because it seems a cover for a moral, a way of sugaring some homiletic assurance with the bitters of sentiment; nor because it is obscure. It is painful, and the pain of it is partly that it seems true by being not only simple but also simplistic. nora’s place is a simplification, ‘only this’. The realism of the poem shines in that last difficult acceptance, that to specify reality must compulsorily be to simplify it, not simply because language in general, or in this particular case, is somehow inadequate to the job of specifying reality, but because reality itself is complex precisely in how it coerces us into simplifying it. The poem advocates and invigorates interest in complex material relationships: what is it about the reality I only partly share with nora, whose place I will never occupy quite as she does, that coerces me into simplifying it? Do I simplify her, too? How does ‘this place’ get to be so decisively inhospitable or immune to metaphor? Who makes metaphor so inept, or so incompatible with what I do when I walk, or when nora walks the length of this particular street? What is it about society that makes times seem merely to ‘intervene’, and seem disastrously to have disappeared? The poem encourages readers, about whom it has no sense that they ought to be ‘the reader’, to outgo and transgress against the limits of its own analytic competence. ‘it seems’ this way, reality seems this way, only as this particular poem can know it; and all its difficulties of acceptance make the poem stand off from a reader, invite her to think about it and, if she likes, to disagree with it, without the least formal or rhetorical attempt to predict or manage her feeling. There is not a lesson to be learned, all set up and worked out in advance. Neither is there an ending of the sort reiterated with programmatic obstinacy in Larkin’s poems, and in the majority of British mainstream poetry from and for a ‘realistic mentality’: one that contrives an intimation of destiny by fitting all its intelligence into a sentiment. ‘Larkin’s endings are finely judged’, Christopher Ricks judges; ‘The Whitsun Weddings’


‘ends consummately’ (Ricks 1995, p. 274). nora’s place does not end consummately, but only by invoking consummation: ‘this/is all’; and the invocation is inordinately powerful because so ordinary in its specific inadequateness, so much just the simplification that reality coerces us to, ‘social realism’ at the end of its wit without end.

Notes 1. On Gray as a reactionary sentimentalist, see William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995, Ch.1. 2. On the earliest uses of ‘réalisme’ in French criticism, see E. B. O. Borgerhoff, ‘Réalisme and kindred words: their use as terms of literary criticism in the first half of the nineteenth century’. PMLA, Vol. 53, No. 3 (Sept. 1938), pp. 837–43. 3. Cf. George Bisztray, Marxist Models of Literary Realism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978, p. 44, where Lukács is described as having a ‘surprisingly deterministic, insensitive, simplified view of poetic language’. For an example of Lukács’s comprehensive indifference to the formal aspects of poetry, see his discussion of Rilke in ‘Marx and the Problem of Ideological Decay’ (1938), Georg Lukács, Essays on Realism. Ed. Rodney Livingstone. Trans. David Fernbach. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1980, pp. 131–2. 4. Brecht did write a short account of his practice of versification, ‘On Rhymeless Verse with Irregular Rhythms’, which describes his ‘attempt to show human dealings as contradictory, fiercely fought over, full of violence’ in terms that reassert the principle common to both his dramatic and poetic practices; but he offers no special or refined concept of realism in poetry. Brecht on Theatre, 2001, pp. 115–20. 5. T.J. Clark finds ‘various versions or echoes of Realism in Baudelaire’s work’ which now and then come close to ‘Courbet’s variety’. The Absolute Bourgeois. Artists and Politics in France 1848–1851. London: Thames and Hudson, 1999, p. 164. 6. Lukàcs always insisted that characters in realist fiction must be ‘typical’, and criticised what he called ‘formalist’ literature (Joyce, Kafka, the majority of ‘modernism’) for failing to create typical characters. Lukàcs is reusing the view of Engels. The only ‘clear-cut definition of literary realism in all the writings of Marx and Engels’, according to George Bisztray, is a remark by Engels in a letter of 1888 to the British author Margaret Harkness (the pseudonym of Joan Law). Engels wrote: ‘Realism, to my mind, implies, besides truth of detail, the truthful reproduction of typical characters under typical circumstances.’ Marxist Models of Literary Realism, p. 17. Cf. an earlier letter by Engels to Minna Kautsky from 1885: ‘Each person [in Kautsky’s story Die Alten und die Neuen] is a type, but at the same time a distinct personality, ein dieser as old Hegel would say.’ Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On literature and art. Ed. Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski. New York: International General, 1977, pp. 113–14. A useful summary of the meaning of ‘typicality’ in Marxist aesthetics is Jameson, Marxism and Form pp. 191–5.

Social Realism in British Poetry 127 7. Marx praised the ‘photographical truth’ of the scenery in a staging of a ‘deadly’ ballet he saw in Berlin, in a letter of 1861 to Nanette Philips. On Literature and Art, p. 113. 8. Mayakovsky of course loved to boast of his exceptionalism, partly because it was a principle for him that he must not. 9. The quotation by Adorno is from a letter to Thomas Mann of 3 June 1945, cited in Detlev Claussen, Theodor W. Adorno. One Last Genius. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 2008, p. 123. Cf. Kevin Nolan’s excellent essay on J.H. Prynne, ‘Capital Calves: Undertaking an Overview’, Jacket 24 (Nov. 2003), online at http://jacketmagazine.com/24/nolan.html [unpaginated]: ‘Prynne’s dialectic has sought, as high art must, always to recover the shining of this life, and has moved, consistently, avengingly, away from the underworld, towards the overview of our everlasting terra nullius. That this could not have been achieved without massive sacrifice, and that the purpose of the sacrifice is not vengefully exceeded by the arrogation of its power, is the first and final paradox of Prynne’s singularity.’ 10. Cf. p. 233: ‘All artworks, even the affirmative, are a priori polemical. The idea of a conservative artwork is inherently absurd. By emphatically separating themselves from the empirical world, their other, they bear witness that that world itself should be other than it is; they are the unconscious schemata of that world’s transformation.’ 11. The suggestion that capitalist society has caused the poles of ‘subjectivity’ and ‘objectivity’ to switch round appears a number of times in Adorno’s writing. Its most straightforward reiteration is in the seventh of his lectures on history, given on 1 December 1964. See Theodor Adorno, History and Freedom. Lectures 1964–1965. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann and trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: Polity, 2006, p. 64. 12. The exceptional moment was David Herd’s and Robert Potts’s interregnum as editors at Poetry Review from 2002 to 2005; normal service was resumed with the accession of Fiona Sampson. Potts’s criticism in the TLS and elsewhere has been consistently admirable for its unintimidated and useful accounts of Prynne and other ‘difficult’ poets. 13. ‘Don Paterson: Interview with Marco Fazzini’, online at http://www. donpaterson.com/interviews.htm# [unpaginated]. 14. ‘The Saturday Interview: Simon Armitage’, http://www.thefreelibrary.com/ The+Saturday+Interview%3A+Simon+Armitage+-+Funny+job+poetry%3 B+Caroline. . .-a0109236460 [unpaginated] 15. Gillian Clarke, ‘Iambic Pentameter’, http://www.sheerpoetry.co.uk/gcse/ gillian-clarke/the-language-of-poetry/iambic-pentameter [unpaginated] 16. Robert von Hallberg comments intelligently on this passage by Timms: ‘This formulaic reasoning does not take into account that abstraction and generalization are indispensable to Larkin, even though apologists for modernist poetry gladly dispense with them.’ ‘Review’ of David Timms, Philip Larkin. Modern Philology, Vol. 73, No. 3 (Feb., 1976), pp. 325–28: p. 327. 17. On Larkin’s ‘harsh and superficial’ representation of young people, see Robert von Hallberg, Lyric Powers. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2008, p. 84; but cf. his fondness for the ‘negro’s childlike beauty’, Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, 1940–1985. Ed. Anthony Thwaite. London: Faber, 1992, p. 20.

128 British Social Realism in the Arts since 1940 18. Elsewhere, ‘here is unfenced existence’. But alas, ‘out of reach’ too. ‘Here’, Collected Poems, p. 137. 19. For a useful roundup and consideration of Larkin’s exceptionally aggressive remarks on ‘modernist’ authors and others (‘Katherine Mansfield is a cunt’), see Joseph Bristow, ‘The Obscenity of Philip Larkin’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Autumn, 1994), pp. 156–81. 20. Andrew Duncan, himself a notable social realist poet, writes that ‘poetry is made up of information, and this information has an existence outside poetry’, so that ‘we can write part of the history of poetry by writing the history of the objects or the knowledge which poetry includes.’ Origins of the Underground. British poetry between apocryphon and incident light, 1933–79. Cambridge: Salt, 2008, p. 109. What Duncan calls ‘poetry’, I would call ‘realist poetry’. We would not get far in a description of Larkin’s poetry by writing the history of cattle, or electric fences, or for that matter the history of being fucked up by your mum and dad, or of ‘wearing’ diaphragms. 21. On right-mindedness and its poetical opposite, see Keston Sutherland, ‘Wrong poetry’, Textual Practice 24(4), 2010, 773–91. For a rich vein in rejoicing by sneering, see the literary roundup by ‘J.C’ on the back page of any issue of the TLS. 22. Drew Milne makes some astute comments on ‘the scorn shown to contemporary poetry by British academic literary critics’ and ‘demagogic disgust with the dreaded hierarchies of elitism’ in ‘Agoraphobia, and the embarrassment of manifestos: notes towards a community of risk’, Jacket 20 (December 2002) [online: unpaginated]; first published in Parataxis: modernism and modern writing 3 (Spring 1993), pp. 25-39. Cf. Mayakovsky, The workers and peasants don’t understand you (1928): ‘There’s all sorts of demagogy and speculation on the theme of Incomprehension.’ Cit. in Triolet, Mayakovsky, p. 21. 23. Maurice Chittenden, ‘Oxbridge split by the baffling bard’, The Sunday Times, 22 February 2004. Chittenden calls Prynne’s poetry ‘abstract’, Larkin’s ‘straightforward’; Roger McGough, a poet ‘praised for challenging convention’, very conventionally finds Prynne ‘difficult’, Larkin ‘accessible’. On Larkin’s reputation for being unabstract, see Robert von Hallberg, ‘Review’ of David Timms, Modern Philology, Vol. 73, No. 3 (Feb., 1976). 24. For an interesting description of ‘polemic’ as an uncritical mode, see Henri Meschonnic, La rime et la vie. Paris: Gallimard, 2006, p. 70ff. 25. Cf. ‘Ugly Poem’ by Douglas Oliver, another Scottish poet, fully as interesting a realist as Leonard, if not so obviously a ‘social realist’: ‘I am protected from the night by shining glass/but protection and shine refuse all metaphors./This poem has no poem within it. . .’ Douglas Oliver, Kind. London, Lewes and Berkeley: Allardyce, Barnett and Agneau 2, 1987, p. 166. 26. Mention of Phenomenology of Spirit makes me wonder if Leonard’s ‘particular/street to walk the length//of’ might echo a moment from Hegel’s ‘Preface’: ‘The goal is Spirit’s insight into what knowing is. Impatience demands the impossible, to wit, the attainment of the end without the means. But the length of this path has to be endured, because, for one thing, each moment if necessary; and further, each moment has to be lingered

Social Realism in British Poetry 129 over.’ G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977, p. 17. Later on Hegel names this path ‘the way of despair’ (p. 49).

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor. (1992) Notes to Literature. Vol.2. Rolf Tiedemann (ed.) and Shierry Weber Nicholsen. (trans.) New York, Columbia University Press. ——. (1997) Aesthetic Theory. Robert Hullot-Kentor. (trans.) London, Continuum. ——. (2003) Ästhetische Theorie. Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp. ——. (2006) History and Freedom. Lectures 1964–1965. Rolf Tiedemann (ed.) and Rodney Livingstone (trans.) Cambridge, Polity. Almereyda, Michael. (ed.) (2008) Night Wraps the Sky. Writings by and about Mayakovsky. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Armitage, Simon. (undated) ‘The Saturday Interview: Simon Armitage’, http:// www.thefreelibrary.com. Barthes, Roland. (1984) Le bruissement de la langue. Paris, Seuil. ——. The Rustle of Language. (1989) Rochard Howard (trans.) Berkeley, University of California Press. Benjamin, Walter. (2004) ‘Experience.’ Selected Writings. Vol.1, Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (eds), Cambridge, Mass., Belknap. Bisztray, George. (1978) Marxist Models of Literary Realism. New York, Columbia Univerisity Press. Borgerhoff, E.B.O.(1938) ‘Réalisme and Kindred Words: Their Use as terms of Literary Criticism in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century’. PMLA, Vol. 53, No. 3, pp. 837–43. Brecht, Bertolt. (1967) ‘Über den Formalistischen Charakter der Realismustheorie’, in Schriften zur Literatur und Kunst. Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, Vol.II. ——. (2001) Brecht on Theatre. John Willett (ed.) London, Methuen. Bristow, Joseph. (1994) ‘The Obscenity of Philip Larkin’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Autumn, 1994), pp. 156–81. Brown, Marshall. (1981) ‘The Logic of Realism: A Hegelian Approach.’ PMLA, Vol. 96, No. 2, pp. 224–41. Chittenden, Maurice. (2004) ‘Oxbridge split by the baffling bard’, The Sunday Times, 22 February 2004. Clark, T.J. (1999) The Absolute Bourgeois. Artists and Politics in France 1848–1851. London, Thames and Hudson. Clarke, Gillian. (undated) ‘Iambic Pentameter’, http://www.sheerpoetry.co.uk/ gcse/gillian-clarke/the-language-of-poetry/iambic-pentameter. Claussen, Detlev. (2008) Theodor W. Adorno. One Last Genius. Rodney Livingstone. (trans.) Cambridge, Mass., Belknap. Crabbe, George. (1988) The Complete Poetical Works. Norma DalrympleChampneys and Arthur Pollard (eds), Oxford, Clarendon, Vol.1. David-Sauvageot, A. (1889) Le Réalisme et le Naturalisme dans la Littérature et dans l’Art. Paris. Duncan, Andrew. (2008) Origins of the Underground. British poetry between apocryphon and incident light, 1933–79. Cambridge, Salt.

130 British Social Realism in the Arts since 1940 Empson, William. (1995) Some Versions of Pastoral. Harmondsworth, Penguin. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. (1997) ‘Who am I and who are you?’ and other essays. Richard Heinemann and Bruce Krajewski (eds), New York, SUNY Press. Hegel, G.W.F. (1977) Phenomenology of Spirit. A.V. Miller. (trans.) Oxford, Oxford University Press. Howe, P. P. (ed.) (1930) The Complete Works of William Hazlitt. London, Dent, Vol.5. Jameson, Fredric. (1974) Marxism and Form. Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton, Princeton University Press. Jones, Tom. (2010) ‘The K Numbers’, Quid 20 (April 2010) pp. 44–6. Ladkin, Sam and Purves, Robin. (2007) ‘An introduction’, Chicago Review 53:1, ‘British Poetry Issue’ (Spring 2007), pp. 6–13. Larkin, Philip. (1983) Required Writing. Miscellaneous Pieces 1955–1982. London, Faber. ——. (1988) Collected Poems. Anthony Thwaite. (ed.) London, Faber. Lenin, V.I. (1967) Materialism and Empirio-criticism. Critical comments on a reactionary philosophy. Moscow, Progress Publishers. Leonard, Tom. (2009) outside the narrative: poems 1965–2009. Exbourne, Etruscan and Edinburgh, Word Power. Lukács, Georg. (1979) The Meaning of Contemporary Realism. John and Necke Mander (trans.) London, Merlin. ——. (1980) Essays on Realism. Rodney Livingstone (ed.), David Fernbach (trans). London, Lawrence and Wishart. MacDiarmid, Hugh. (1970) Selected Poems. Harmondsworth, Penguin. Martz, Louis L. (ed.) (1992) George Herbert and Henry Vaughan. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich. (1977) On literature and art. Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski (eds), New York, International General. Mayakovsky, Vladimir. (1990) How Are Verses Made? Hyde, G.M. (trans.) Bristol, Bristol Classical Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (2004) The World of Perception. Oliver Davis (trans.) London, Routledge. Meschonnic, Henri. (2006) La rime et la vie. Paris, Gallimard. Milne, Drew. (2002) ‘Agoraphobia, and the embarrassment of manifestos: notes towards a community of risk’, Jacket 20 (December 2002). Nolan, Kevin. (2003) ‘Capital Calves: Undertaking an Overview’, Jacket 24 (November 2003), online at http://jacketmagazine.com/24/nolan.html. Oliver, Douglas. (1987) Kind. London, Lewes and Berkeley, Allardyce, Barnett and Agneau 2. Paterson, Don. (undated) ‘Don Paterson: Interview with Marco Fazzini’, online at http://www.donpaterson.com/interviews.htm#. Pollard, Arthur. (ed.) (1972) Crabbe. The Critical Heritage. London, Routledge. Ricks, Christopher. (1995) The Force of Poetry. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Riffaterre, Michael. (1978) Semiotics of Poetry. Bloomington, Indiana University Press. Sutherland, Keston. (2010) ‘Wrong poetry’, Textual Practice 24(4), 2010, pp. 773–91. Thwaite, Anthony. (ed.) (1992)Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, 1940–1985. London, Faber.

Social Realism in British Poetry 131 Timms, David. (1973) Philip Larkin. New York, Barnes & Noble. Todorov, Tzvetan. (1982) ‘Présentation’, in Littérature et réalité. Gérard Genette and Tzvetan Todorov (eds.), Paris, Seuil. Triolet, Elsa. (2002) Mayakovsky. Russian Poet. Susan de Muth. (trans.) London, Hearing Eye. Von Hallberg, Robert. (1976) ‘Review of David Timms, Philip Larkin.’ Modern Philology, Vol. 73, No. 3 (Feb. 1976), pp. 325–28. ——. (2008) Lyric Powers. Chicago, Chicago University Press. Wilkinson, John. (2009) ‘Mark Hyatt’s Poésie Brute’, in Armand, Louis (ed.) Hidden Agendas. Unreported Poetics. Prague, Litteraria Pragensia.

5 Re-presenting Reality, Recovering the Social: The Poetics and Politics of Social Realism and Visual Art Gillian Whiteley

In 1990, in a short essay re-evaluating art’s exploration of social reality and the multifarious critical approaches this has elicited through the twentieth century, John Roberts noted that much of the debate had been coloured by a fundamental flaw: the conflation of realism in art with a naturalistic rendering of the world of appearances. He argued that, whether we are considering painting or documentary photography, the linking of social realism with resemblance and truth needed to be seen as a mere convention. For Roberts, one thing that united a good deal of the artwork described as social realist in the exhibition he was reviewing was that, fundamentally, it shared a political understanding of a world capable of social transformation: a singular commitment to the view that art’s critical recovery of the external world needs to be linked to an understanding of that world both structured and differentiated and characterised by emergence and change. (Roberts [1990] 1992, p. 212 (my italics)) Any re-consideration of the usefulness of the term social realist for understanding and interpreting visual practices as cultural production since the 1940s must, as Roberts suggested, get beyond the idea that it refers to work which merely depicts, as this implies that social realists represent a static unchanging world, a status quo. Drawing on Roy Bhaskar’s emphasis on a ‘transformational conception of social reality’, Roberts provides us with a dynamic, and emphatically political, interpretation of the term.1 132

Social Realism and Visual Art

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Social realism needs to be viewed and understood within distinct historical moments and locations, within particular social and political contexts. Particularly in terms of the visual arts, the 1950s represents what we tend to think of as the classic period of social realism. During the Cold War, John Berger, then the Marxist art critic for the New Statesman, played a crucial role in the critical and political positioning of social realism as a humanist alternative to the aesthetic conventions of modernist abstraction. However, the partisan nature of these debates was shaped by earlier histories, and the 1950s social realism advanced by Berger and others needs to be situated within a broader context of international leftist politics. But if social realism is inexorably linked to a specific time and place, perhaps one consequence of such historicizing is that the genre could, and should, be dismissed as a redundant historical cliché, with little relevance for contemporary visual practices beyond that of historical curiosity. Certainly, since the 1950s, many British artists – and artists working in Britain2 – have used their practices, both individually and collectively, to explore the transformational capacities of social realities. In the decade or so post-1968, culminating in the Miners’ Strike of 1984-85, the UK witnessed a wave of oppositional activism and unprecedented industrial militancy.3 In his survey of radical art practices in Britain in the 1970s, John Walker traces the political contexts for cultural developments, outlining the ‘left shift’ in an artscene influenced – and in some cases, dominated – by a host of splinter groups of various leftist, Marxist and Maoist persuasions (Walker 2002). In addition, from the end of the 1960s, with the ‘dematerialisation’ of art and the inception of conceptual, interventional and performative practices, the emphasis on the visual within art practice became less important whilst at the same time it was dominated by explorations of the social.4 Explorations of social realities migrated from solely visual representations into multimedia, performative, text-based discursive and interventionist practices. Since the 1950s, photography in particular has continued to offer an ideal visual medium for the exploration of the social.5 In the 1980s, photographers such as Chris Killip were overtly concerned with social deprivation, whilst others, such as Martin Parr and, more recently, Richard Billingham, have explored both the kitsch and poetic banalities of everyday and anecdotal experience. These different, perhaps in a sense oppositional, perspectives open up vital questions about the position of contemporary photography and its capacity to be simultaneously poetic and political, even if sometimes the politics is ambiguous or noncommittal.


Despite the development of a plethora of interventionist art practices, conventional artforms including representational painting have persisted. George Shaw’s realist paintings depicting neglected council house estates produced a poetics of the mundane, poignantly evoking the inhabited spaces of working-class life. His paintings declare a disinterested but aesthetic curiosity in the ordinary and the everyday. But is this kind of poetics political? If there is a continual oscillation between these two registers, can we consider such imagery through the historical lens of a decidedly politically grounded social realism? Or in its aestheticization, does it eschew social interaction? Is it merely nostalgic? Is it apolitical? Such questions cannot be considered in isolation from postmodern sensibilities about authorship and viewer subjectivities for, of course, their answers depend less on who is doing the painting, but arguably more on who is doing the viewing.6 Victor Burgin, a key figure in the development of contemporary cultural theory and discursive forms of politically engaged photographic practice concerned with social realities, articulated this plainly in an interview in 1979: The meaning isn’t ‘in’ the work, like a lump of cheese in a wrapper; nor is the meaning somehow ‘behind’ the work: in the mind of the author, for example, or in ‘reality’. Meanings are the product of an individual’s particular biography and upon his or her social, cultural milieu. So it’s always a question of a shifting plurality of meanings which vary within the individual and between individuals. It’s an enormously complex process. (Burgin [1982] 1986, p. 81) Significantly, in the last decade or so, critics have identified a further ‘social turn’ in art and there have been many contemporary practices that might be said to reflect a singular commitment to ‘art’s critical recovery’ of the social world.7 Indeed, once we relinquish art’s link to resemblance and focus on its capacity to offer a critique of the social world regardless of figuration, the multi-media practices of contemporary British artists as diverse as Lucy Orta, Sonia Boyce, Jeremy Deller, Mark Wallinger and Grayson Perry – none of whom make visual representations of the world their central focus – might all be considered in the context of contemporary social realisms. But how valid is it to relate the term to these practices? Is there anything particularly useful in considering an ongoing specifically (or peculiarly) British form of social realism?


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This chapter addresses the historical roots and the contemporary legacies of social realism, focusing the term in its utilizations as a critical discourse in visual art. It concentrates predominantly on conventional forms such as painting, sculpture and photography, but also looks beyond those to the more diverse set of practices that constitute art today. Particular emphasis is given to the classic period of social realist art in Britain by exploring the intersections of art and politics through the lens of Berger’s criticism in the 1950s. It is imperative, however, that such mid 20th century social realist art also be situated within historical narratives of activist art and broader cultural (and trans-national) discourses of commitment. Tracing such a genealogy of the intersection of left politics and art must therefore go back to the Artists International Association (AIA) founded in the UK in the 1930s, and, crucially, must also contextualize this exploration in relation to the cultural dictates on Socialist Realism that emerged from the Soviet Union in 1934. The discussion will go on to consider a range of media, examining specific instances of art’s engagement with ideas of social purpose through the 1970s and 80s. Finally, giving consideration to related modes such as critical realism and dialogic realism, I will identify a diverse set of strategies and activities in contemporary practice, the ‘new forms of sociability in art’, that might, I argue, be considered legitimate heirs of historical forms of British social realism (Roberts 2009, p. 353).

A ‘new socialist art’: the historical polemics of realism in the 1930s A socially focussed form of artistic realism related to political radicalism, as distinct from the figurative tradition of the Academy, was firmly established in Britain well before the Second World War, and drew certain impetuses from even earlier. As new realist modes emerged in the 1930s, various leftist writers referred back to the radical realist traditions of nineteenth century artists such as the Belgian sculptor Constantin Meunier (1831–1905), the French sculptor Aimé-Jules Dalou (1838– 1902) and painter-sculptor Honoré Daumier (1808–1879). Anthony Blunt, for example, in articles for Left Review and in his contribution to a collection of essays edited by C. Day Lewis, identified a lineage of what he called the New Realism in art.8 In ‘Art under Capitalism and Socialism’, Blunt argued of Hungarian émigré sculptor Peter Laszlo Péri (1899–1967): An artist like Péri is in the straight line from Daumier and Dalou; [Diego] Rivera and [Gabriel] Orozco are doing on a grand scale what


Courbet tried to do for a few years and in a smaller way [ . . . ] real art of the socialist state will be evolved by the most progressive sections of the proletariat who will have shaken off the most vicious effects of bourgeois culture [ . . . ] The new art will be less sophisticated but more vital than the old. (Blunt [1937] 1972, p. 118–19) Although Blunt and others often carefully avoided directly promoting Soviet-style Socialist Realism, undoubtedly it was Andrei Zhdanov’s statement at the First Congress of the Soviet Writers’ Union in 1934 that provided the impetus for these major aesthetic debates about realism and abstraction which went on in artistic and critical circles in Britain. Socialist Realism, Zhdanov declared, was the ‘true and historically concrete depiction of reality in its revolutionary development [aimed at] educating the workers in the spirit of Communism’ (Zhdanov cited in Valkenier 1977, p. 166). Two years earlier Russia’s state apparatus had assumed increasing control over culture by banning all artistic groups and setting up the monolithic Union of Artists. Of course, some Soviet artists sought to circumvent and defy the Zhdanovite strictures, but the majority conformed by making realist art that was both political and easily read. As John Milner has noted, nineteenth century devices and techniques were harnessed here too to create an authoritatively optimistic, heroic and always successful image of Russian Soviet Realism.9 As Charles Harrison and Paul Wood have acknowledged, ‘the identification of Realism with Communism became a cliché of art-critical discourse on both the Left and the Right during the 1930s’ (Harrison & Wood 1992, p. 334). Britain was no exception. In particular, Artists International (AI), later the Artists International Association (AIA), founded in Britain in 1933, played a key role in setting up ideological and aesthetic debates surrounding Communism and Realism. In its first published statement the AI described itself as ‘the International Unity of Artists against Imperialist War on the Soviet Union, Fascism and colonial oppression’ (cited in Radford 1987, p. 22). In 1934, a manifesto at the AIA’s first major exhibition, The Social Scene, declared an equally uncompromising Marxist perspective: Today, when the Capitalist system and Socialists are fighting for world survival, we feel that the place of the artist is at the side of the working class. In this class struggle, we use our abilities as an


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expression and as a weapon, making our first steps towards a new socialist art. (Cited in Radford 1987, p. 23) Importantly, however, the ‘new socialist art’ AIA advocated was not necessarily realist, and AIA exhibitions showed a diverse range of work.10 Figurative sculptures of founder member of the AIA Betty Rea and the New Realist work of Péri featured alongside more academic painters of the Euston Road school such as William Coldstream and Claude Rogers, and modern abstractionists Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. Furthermore, AIA exhibitions, documents and publications such as the collection of polemical essays Five on Revolutionary Art (1935) provided a forum for the central question that was being asked: which art form was most revolutionary – abstract or realist.11 Alongside advocating New Realism in Left Review, Francis Klingender was one of these five voices represented in the AIA’s book. Later, in Marxism and Modern Art, Klingender made a point of condemning both Herbert Read’s modernist plea for the social significance of abstraction and Roger Fry’s formalism. Klingender believed that the artist had a moral responsibility to communicate with the layman, and that accordingly, the aesthetic value of a work of art was directly related to the effect it produced ‘whether it stirs to action, whether it soothes and refreshes, or whether, on the other hand it opiates’ (Klingender 1943, p. 9). For Klingender, ‘modern movement’ was a pejorative term. Using it to describe artists and critics pursuing and supporting abstract art forms, for him it represented a retreat from life, detachment from society and an abdication of social responsibilities. Broadly speaking, the debates of the 1930s in Britain were largely dominated by the quest for a politically progressive art, yet with the whole matter addressed somewhat narrowly as a formal problem with formal solutions. In short, the form-content dichotomy eclipsed many other issues, and the politicized artistic ‘left’ tended to argue for a kind of realism that was figurative in style, with a communicable subject or social content.

Being social and realist in the 1940s: documentary and the ‘symbolic reinstatement’ of community With the Soviet Union initially agreeing to a non-aggression pact with Germany in 1939, the Socialist Realist viewpoint of Communists


and sympathisers such as Klingender was problematic and unlikely to gain popular support. However, as Donald Egbert pointed out later in his flawed but useful historical survey of radicalism and the arts, Klingender’s persuasive little booklet Marxism and Modern Art was not published until 1943 – significantly, after Stalin’s pivotal volte-face.12 By that time there was widespread admiration for the Soviet Union’s role and perhaps this made the visual language of Socialist Realism more palatable. Indeed, through the 1940s, art in Britain that displayed social concerns and realist qualities played two vital roles that bore comparison with Socialist Realism. Firstly, it contributed greatly to the documentation of the social, cultural and industrial activities of a country at war. Secondly, particular art forms such as public sculpture provided a vehicle for what Margaret Garlake has called ‘the visual, symbolic reinstatement of a sense of community’ (Garlake 1998, p. 213). The Second World War brought unprecedented levels of destruction on the urban environment. Conscription, not just into the armed services but also into the Land Army, the coalmines and the bomb factories, along with enforced deportation and evacuation of communities, involved the dislocation of civilians on a scale previously unknown. Individuals, communities and society needed to integrate these dislocating experiences and their emotional and psychological legacies, and art played a key role in this. More specifically, the war invoked a heightened social awareness in the British art world, and many artists responded by producing accessible artworks that could speak to the traumatised and the war-weary. Yet the war also had conflicting consequences for the democratization of visual art in Britain. On one hand, access to artworks inevitably became more restricted. For safety and security reasons whole collections were dispersed across Britain to be re-housed in country houses, underground shelters and even quarries.13 At the same time, this dispersal of artworks greatly stimulated arts activities in the provinces. The Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) made a major contribution to this localized wartime upsurge of interest in the arts, organising popular temporary exhibitions and lunchtime concerts in galleries. Furthermore, the powerful imagery of Official War Art and projects like Recording Britain brought record numbers of ordinary people into provincial galleries.14 The war, then, developed a new thirst for accessible art that expanded art’s audience far beyond its pre-war elitist base. James Boswell’s slim volume, The Artist’s Dilemma, published in 1947, recognized what he called this ‘boom in art’:


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Something has happened in the last six years that has changed the artist’s world. The war has given him a public. Perhaps not as simply as that but it was only under the impact and the deprivations of war that the public became aware of their need of him. (Boswell 1947, p. 9)15 Essentially, Official War Art was commissioned to document, and so it tended to be realist in style and social in subject. Before the war, Henry Moore’s abstract sculptural forms had been subject to public ridicule, but his more figurative wartime drawings of coalminers and people sleeping in underground shelters attracted huge popular support, greatly contributing to his becoming a cultural ambassador for Britain from 1948.16 Works such as Laura Knight’s Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-ring (1943), commissioned by the War Artists Advisory Committee and now referred to as ‘a defining propaganda image of the era’, was similarly social in focus and realist in style.17 Designed to help the government recruit women for factory work, Ruby Loftus depicts a young woman in paint-spattered overalls, her dark curls tied up in a green scarf, working intently with heavy machinery. A Ministry of

Figure 5.1 Dame Laura Knight RA, Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-ring, 1943, oil c Imperial War Museum painting.


Information newsreel showed the real Ruby Loftus, a 21-year-old worker at the Royal Ordnance Factory in Newport, accompanying the artist to see the painting on show at the Royal Academy in London. Indeed, Knight’s painting has all the characteristics Milner allots to Soviet Socialist Realism, successfully producing an authoritative, optimistic, heroic and popular inspirational image. Of course, it might be expected that officially commissioned artwork such as this, which incorporated both the social and the realist, had a propaganda role, but it was also just one contribution to a range of envisioned models of national and social identity. Other forms of envisioning, such as the Mass Observation project18 and wartime cinema newsreels, played an important part in keeping the domestic population informed, similarly playing a sociological and ideological role in reflecting a positive image of the audience back to itself. A broadly social realist approach, then, had a place in documenting Britain at war. But, arguably, it also reflected the burgeoning anthropological and sociological interests of a population keen to see and construct itself through a multitude of mass media possibilities and public forums, including through visual art. In 1945, the incoming Labour government was tasked with capitalizing on the momentum of enthusiasm for the arts that CEMA had built up during the war. One of its first measures was to set up the Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB), which played a key role in the commissioning of artwork for new public sites. In 1948, London County Council (LCC) collaborated with the ACGB on the first of the open-air shows in Battersea Park, attracting over 170,000 visitors, and ACGB organized various open-air exhibitions in public parks from 1948 onwards. LCC also played a key role in the literal rebuilding process, demolishing bomb-damaged housing and redeveloping new communities around housing estates, schools, community centres and public spaces. In conjunction with the ACGB and other agencies LCC commissioned sculptures, outdoor murals and mosaics from prominent and lesserknown artists for a number of these public spaces. Later, under a special LCC scheme from 1957 to 1959, artists approached included Willi Soukop, Franta Belsky, Reg Butler, Siegfried Charoux, Robert Clatworthy, Karin Jonzen, Uli Nimpsch, Eduardo Paolozzi and Leon Underwood.19 Charoux’s huge cemented iron group, The Neighbours, sited on the Quadrant Estate in Highbury, was one of the earliest works acquired by the scheme. The British art periodical Studio praised the scheme for its Keynesian aspirations that art could recreate a ‘communal civilised life’, highlighting Charoux’s piece as a sculpture that fostered ‘social


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Figure 5.2 Peter L. Péri, South Lambeth Council Estate, c. 1949. Péri created this large concrete mural relief on the staircase tower of a block of flats built by the c The Courtauld Institute of Art London County Council.

cohesion’: ‘This rugged creation gives a sense of comradeship to the local inhabitants.’ (Sandilands 1960, p. 45) An interesting and pertinent point here, though, is that many of these commissions were carried out not by native British artists but by émigré artists who had settled in Britain. Significantly, these artists created works that were not just realist in an academic figurative sense but often reflected communitarian and realist concerns originating in other countries. For example, in 1945 Péri was held up as an exemplary realist artist capable of conveying the plight and suffering of native Britons at war. As a Communist and Béla Kun supporter, Péri had been forced to seek political refuge in Vienna, Paris and Berlin. Finally abandoning the Constructivist style of fellow avant-garde artists such as Moholy-Nagy, Péri condemned what he perceived as bourgeois aestheticism, and adopted a realist style before he left Berlin for London in 1933. There, Péri made coloured wall reliefs and small free-standing sculptures in the cheapest, versatile industrial material he could find – concrete. Aptly, Péri’s New Realist sculptures conveyed and documented the quotidian resilience of an ordinary civilian population on the Home Front.20


A major locus for a communitarian aesthetic at the start of the following decade was the Festival of Britain (1951). The Festival showcased British design for industry and the home, and introduced contemporary abstract art to a popular audience. It also commissioned a substantial amount of work from these same émigré artists. Despite the Festival’s

Figure 5.3 Visitors passing Siegfried Charoux’s The Islanders at the Festival of Britain in 1951. Charoux’s large relief was at the end of the Sea and Ships Pavilion c London Transport and was part of the River Walk at the South Bank Exhibition. Museum


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preoccupation with national identity and narratives of Britishness, artists such as Péri, Charoux, Anna Mahler, Hans Tisdall and Karel Vogel all contributed work to the Southbank site.21 Arthur Fleischmann, for example, who created Miranda, the mermaid fountain, had worked on various social housing projects in Vienna in the 1920s.22 One of the most iconic visual images of the Festival was Charoux’s The Islanders. Charoux was a Viennese sculptor who had sought political refuge in London in the 1930s. His enormous stone relief that dominated the riverfront was mounted on the wall of the ‘Sea and Ships’ pavilion. The Islanders purported to symbolize British resilience and defence of the family through the war years. It did so using a visual language not far removed from that of the Russian sculptor Vera Mukhina in her iconic Socialist Realist monument of 1937, Worker and Kolkhoz Woman. Topping the Soviet pavilion at the International Exhibition in Paris, Mukhina’s two heroic figures had represented an optimistic perspective of a future social reality.23 The Islanders too provided a vehicle for ‘the visual, symbolic reinstatement of a sense of community’. In this context, the politicization of a social realist aesthetic was compounded ahead of the beginning of its major decade, the 1950s.

Looking forward in the 1950s: the artistic ‘moment’ of Social Realism The realist is fundamentally optimistic [ . . . ] he may well face up to ugliness or injustice more squarely than most, but because he is concerned with dealing with the world as it exists, and not comparing it to romantic ideals, or with seeking consolation for its shortcomings in private dreams, he need never give way to despair. (Berger 1952) ‘There is something even more fundamental than sex or work,’ he said. ‘The great universal, human need to look forward. Take the future away from a man, and you have done something worse than killing him.’ (Berger [1958] 1976, p. 18)24 As indicated at the outset of this chapter, the 1950s was the most important era for British social realism in the visual arts. However, this is due less to the extent to which it was adopted as a visual aesthetic by artists working in Britain, and more to its centrality within critical debates in cultural circles and its relationships to political discourses and attendant world events. It is significant that, despite the ‘Kitchen


Sink’ painters’ acclaim at the prestigious Venice Biennale in 1956, up to the 1980s art-historical accounts rarely addressed social realism and continued to be dominated by Greenbergian readings of British art with a major focus on developments in abstraction and, subsequently, conceptualism. In 1980, Lynda Morris commented on this ‘modernist bias’, arguing that her research showed that realism was ‘not the minority attitude we were led to believe’ and she suggested there was an urgent need to research realist work of artists ‘who have long been in the shadows’ (Morris 1980, p. 3). Since then, postmodernity has replaced reductivist accounts, and ‘monolithic modernism’ has been substituted with a pluralist approach as histories have been revised and challenged (Wheale 1995, p. 27). Publications such as James Hyman’s The Battle for Realism (2001) and exhibitions such as The Forgotten Fifties at the Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield (1984) and Transition: the London Artscene in the Fifties at the Barbican, London (2002) have helped redress the historical imbalance and invited a revaluation of British realist art and its relationship to social changes in the fifties. A key political context of course, even in Britain, was the onset of the Cold War. Berlin provided a focal point for the tensions of a deeply divided Europe through which the fear of nuclear annihilation permeated. Entire generations grew up under the shadow of global nuclear battles which, it was widely believed, could break out at any moment, and devastate humanity. (Hobsbawm 1994, p. 226) Alongside the international military escalation, psychological and ideological weapons were waged against the ‘communist threat’ (Lindey 1990, p. 8). Although in Britain panic never reached the heights of American McCarthyism, there were still government purges of Communists from the Civil Service – employees were vetted and anti-communist pledges signed. With such economic and political polarization, the ideology of the Cold War pervaded all aspects of cultural life. The implications for art and criticism were considerable. The Soviet regime denounced Western modern art as decadent and glorified Socialist Realism without irony. Any Western artists associated with realism now risked being linked with the Soviet camp. Despite all this, and with the ambivalent asset of the critical and curatorial support of Berger, social realism had its euphoric celebratory ‘moment’.25 Briefly, for a few years in the mid-1950s, it triumphed amidst a flurry of curatorial activity, culminating in the British pavilion


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c The Tate Figure 5.4 Jack Smith, Mother Bathing Child, 1953, oil on board. Collection

at the 1956 Venice Biennale showing artists Derrick Greaves, Jack Smith, John Bratby and Edward Middleditch. However, the Soviet invasion of Budapest in the same year marked the onset of disarray amongst an increasingly divided political left. Communism had been failing for


some considerable time but the impact of Hungary was catastrophic for the British Communist Party and this had wider political, social and cultural reverberations.26 Viewing this period of British realism as a battle of the critics, with Berger ranged against David Sylvester, James Hyman (2001) has comprehensively outlined the aesthetic terrain in which, ultimately, neither side won. However, the adversarial emphasis on individuals obscures complex political contexts and associations. Equally, highlighting the way in which so-called kitchen-sink realism reflected the austerely rationed social life of Britain or connecting the ‘A.Y.M. cage’27 to the burgeoning power of a newly vocalised and envisioned northern-English working-class, offers only a superficial analysis of the relationship between art, society and politics. Undoubtedly, Berger played a central role in the British art scene as part of a disparate coterie of left-thinking artists, writers and intellectuals for whom, despite post-war disaffection and dissention amongst communists and sympathisers, the idea of commitment – in terms of the socially engaged artist and writer – continued to hold significance.28 Indeed, the role of the artist in post-war society was of widespread interest. Sartre’s polemical essay ‘What is Literature?’, first published in 1947,29 had addressed the role of the ‘committed writer’ and generally re-kindled the controversy about the idea of the politically and socially engaged artist amongst the intelligentsia. Furthermore, through the 1950s art critics such as Berger acquired a particular role in commenting on the responsibility of artists in society. The historian Asa Briggs, in an article entitled ‘The Context of Commitment’ published in the New Statesman in 1958, addressed this very issue. Briggs stressed that the moral commitment and emotional simplicity of critics in the 1950s was a key element and one that distinguished the debate from that of the pre-war period. Briggs pointed to Berger’s ‘obsession’ with the future as a crucial characteristic, citing Berger’s comments ‘for that future he must fight – above all within his assessment of his own responsibilities. Therein lies his famous commitment’ (Berger cited in Briggs 1958, p. 453). Indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of social realism in art discourses of the 1950s was the way in which this coterie of committed artists and writers commandeered the term ‘humanism’ and developed a rhetoric of hope as part of a redemptive utopian discourse. One of the most powerful uses of this particular leftist rhetoric was by the artist Paul Hogarth in his polemical article ‘Humanism and Despair in British Art Today’ published in 1955 in Marxist Quarterly. Referring to


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the ‘anti-humanism’ evident in the work of the eight sculptors who had been hailed by Herbert Read as Moore’s successors at the 1952 Venice Biennale, Hogarth wrote that over-personalised and socially irresponsible art is encouraged as never before, isolating the artists even more from the general public [ . . . ] re-armament and Cold War thinking has affected the very nature of art itself, replacing the qualities of accessibility and humanism with those of introspection and despair. (Hogarth 1955, p. 37) Communists and sympathisers were claiming ‘humanism’ for the social realists and counter-posing it against those who had effectively abandoned the human figure for abstraction and Read’s ‘iconography of despair’.30 However, Hogarth’s characterization of contemporary art as a struggle between abstraction and realism was simplistic. Artists such as Bernard Meadows and Lynn Chadwick may have replaced the human figure with animal and insect imagery but this by no means meant that they had abandoned empathy for humankind. Of course, alongside the leftist rhetoric of humanism, Berger’s critical positioning of a peculiarly British form of social realism was crucial as he championed it through exhibitions, and theorized and supported it through his writings. In a series of exhibitions of realist art entitled Looking Forward, Berger stopped short of overtly declaring his own political allegiances, but the implications were obvious. Indeed, the Cold War atmosphere of suspicion and plots was such that Berger felt it necessary to pre-empt his attackers by commenting that there was no such thing as a realist style. There is certainly no such thing as realist subject matter [ . . . ] Nor is there a realist conspiracy. (Berger 1956)31 The first Looking Forward show at the Whitechapel in 1952, featuring over 150 artworks, was followed up with an Arts Council touring show in 1953 and a further exhibition at the South London Gallery in 1956. These included realist works by a diverse range of artists, not all of whom necessarily shared Berger’s political stance, including Péri, Hogarth, George Fullard, Frederick Brill, Francis Hoyland, Harry Baines, Morley Bury, Derrick Greaves, Patrick Carpenter, Leslie Duxbury and Michael Ayrton. Some, such as Fullard and Hogarth, drew on specific political contexts. Fullard had northern-English working-class heritage, an early family


history of Labour militancy, and had been a member of the Young Communist League. Hogarth, a Communist Party member, had a long commitment to the radical left through various anti-fascist activities, including serving in the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War.32 Known for his documentary-style draughtsmanship – a kind of pictorial journalism – Hogarth travelled extensively in Europe in the immediate post-war years and had been described as social realist in an article in Studio in 1951: Paul Hogarth is one of a number of British artists whose work is characterized by a trend that could be described as ‘social realism’. In brief, its attributes are to see all aspects of the world without sentimentality and to transcribe them with honesty into direct pictorial terms. One finds it in contemporary pictures by Ronald Searle, James Boswell, Edgar Ainsworth, Ruskin Spear, Patrick Carpenter, Josef Herman, Carel Weight and James Fitton. It is no accident that their viewpoint is similar to those European and English artists whose performance is so admired by Hogarth – Daumier, Grosz, Kathe Kollwitz, Steinlen, Sickert, Cruikshank and the early Millais. (Whittet 1951, p. 54) Clearly, however, if the term social realist could be used to describe such a diverse set of artists, approaches and influences, it was an ambiguous and contradictory term. Berger was careful to emphasize progressive vision and humanist qualities but he was often vague about how he differentiated it from Socialist Realism in terms of form and content. So what exactly was Berger’s idea of a social realist aesthetic? In 1955, on the brink of the euphoric celebratory ‘moment’ of Realism, Berger turned one of his fortnightly reviews for the New Statesman into an impassioned defence of the work of a handful of ‘famously unacceptable’ artists. In the article, prompted by a visit to the exhibition Artists of Fame and of Promise at the Leicester Galleries in London, he commented: dealers complain that their work is unsellable because too large and too sordid; critics interpret it in terms of contemporary violence, a love of ugliness or (with a dab at their mouth with a white folded handkerchief) Social Realism [ . . . ] Their work described objectively is cumbersomely large, totally lacking in charm, raw, nearly always proletarian in subject matter and possibly somewhat aggressive. (Berger 1955, pp. 133–4)


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Berger’s young artists included Jack Smith, Derrick Greaves, Edward Middleditch and Ralph Brown.33 Alluding here, ironically, to the way in which other critics used the term to disparage their work, he went on to articulate what he saw as the work’s social realist characteristics. Certainly, many of the works Berger associated with social realism did indeed display the characteristics he identified. At the time, Fullard, Brown, Greaves and Smith shared some broad concerns with the details of everyday life, domestic surroundings and the grim realities of industrial areas such as Sheffield. It was often large-scale and had a raw energy. The extent to which their work was underpinned by any conscious political ethos, however, is difficult to assess. Smith consistently denied or underplayed any political message or social interpretation of his work, famously declaring that he merely painted whatever happened to be his surroundings at the time. Berger himself was highly critical of Soviet cultural policy and was emphatic in distancing himself from Muscovite photographic naturalism. However, his relationship with the British Communist Party was closer than it appeared. Although purportedly an independent Marxist, Berger had considerable involvement with the Communist Party through its Artists Group. His promotion of social realism was informed by his involvement with the Group’s short-lived newsletter Realism, which ran to six issues between 1955 and 1956. The journal, a re-vamped version of the Artists’ Group Bulletin, demonstrates the intimate nature of the group around Berger.34 The group recognised the shortcomings of Soviet-style orthodoxy, and criticised it openly in the first issue of Realism: We, who have become sick of Socialist Realism in subject matter, a so-called pictorial art, lacking in formal excitement and organisation, illustrative and passionless. (Berger 1955, p. 3) The second edition of Bulletin, dated October 1954, included an article by Berger entitled ‘Definitions’ that outlined his analysis of ‘the disintegration of art under late capitalism’ (Berger 1954, p. 2) and featured a piece urging the pressing need to have shows of realist art, such as his Looking Forward series, to ward off the ‘present attempts of reactionaries to cash in on the situation’ (anon., 1954).35 The third Bulletin, from February 1955, presented its programme for the year: the main aim was to ‘turn outwards’, to welcome non-party members to meetings and activities whilst expounding the continuing need to ‘oppose


degenerating bourgeois standards’ (anon., 1955). Whilst the promotion of realist art was obviously a central focus of Realism, the journal also acted as a broad forum for political discussions on art. Papers and correspondence provide evidence of the considerable political motivation behind the developments and support for realism.36 A policy statement, describing Realism as the ‘first art magazine within the Labour Movement’, agreed that the journal should, amongst other things, serve to ‘re-assess the visual arts from a Marxist standpoint’ and ‘provide a medium for popularizing new developments of Realist art.’37 Not surprisingly perhaps, the editorial in Realism’s final issue, which featured a drawing by Peter de Francia on the cover, made no reference to the invasion of Budapest of a few months earlier that had resulted in widespread disaffection and resignations from the party. Instead, euphemistically, it informed readers that a ‘better’ magazine with a ‘new editorial board’ was needed (anon., 1956).38 Evidently, neither funds nor sufficient will were forthcoming to carry this out. The hopes that Realism would become a popular cultural magazine were quickly foiled and it largely circulated amongst party members and sympathisers. But, briefly, it had been a crucial forum for aesthetic debate. Social commitment, political conscience, an ability to communicate universal aspects of human experience, an exploration of the human condition – these were the specific qualities of social realism for Berger. However, the debate about the kind of art that could embody these qualities was part of a wider European discussion about the social responsibility of the artist in post-war society. Similar debates were going on in France, for example, where the sides were even more polarized and issues were exacerbated by Louis Aragon’s rigid adherence to the Zhdanovite edicts. The group of painters L’Homme Témoin, which included Paul Rebeyrolle, were anxious to promote a socially and politically meaningful art. Peter de Francia recalls that the work of these artists, and also that of Francis Gruber, was in turn influential on the circle around Berger.39 Concerns about artistic engagement and the appropriateness of abstract and realist styles of art were conveyed by Alexander Watts in his regular Paris column in Studio magazine amid vitriolic attacks on the work of the French communist artist André Fougeron: ‘the squabble goes on more antagonistic than ever between the exponents of Realism and Abstraction’ (Watts 1950, p. 188). However, the greatest influence on British realist artists came not from Russia or France, but from Italy. Italian realism was a liberal amalgam of modernist styles, figurative and humanist traditions, with a distinct resistance to the Soviet line. These characteristics were epitomized, for Berger and others, in the work of the painter Renato Guttuso, a realist,


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communist, and a personal friend of Berger and Greaves.40 Guttuso’s ability to express intense personal feeling and convey this to a popular audience in a figurative style which was vibrant and plundered both historical and modern traditions was, for Berger, revolutionary: Obviously modern forms are needed to express contemporary reality. But what makes his work significant is his grasp of that reality – not just his style. It is Guttuso’s understanding of our historical position which finally enables his anger, his compassion, his sense of human dignity, to be applied to subjects which can fully justify them. (Berger 1955, p. 384)41 In attempting to appraise the kind of realism Berger was promoting, it is particularly important that the model was, essentially, a European one. It was not at all the kind of sentimental Socialist Realist work being produced in the Soviet Union. That said, to some degree, Berger’s views were inconsistent and although he stressed that his focus was not on content, many of his comments belied this and he frequently praised artists for their accessible subject matter – more often than not, a euphemism for the depiction of working-class subjects and environments. However, he certainly viewed his ‘famously unacceptable’ social realist artists as representing a progressive aesthetic that offered an alternative not only to what he perceived as an ethical emptiness of much of modernist abstraction, but also to the equally vacuous Soviet Socialist Realism. As already indicated, Berger was not alone in supporting realist artists. Other curators and critics also played important roles in promoting this work, often valuing different aspects. Helen Lessore of the Beaux Arts Gallery, for example, played a key part in Greaves, Middleditch, Bratby and Smith acquiring group status as the Beaux Arts Quartet by exhibiting them individually and as part of mixed shows. Lessore identified a diverse range of aesthetic characteristics in these artists’ work: Smith’s work had ‘a sort of Spanish, monkish austerity, combined with a generous grandeur; Middleditch was ‘gentle and lyrical’; Bratby was ‘violently and avowedly egotistical and expressionist’, whereas Greaves’ work has neither the slightly melancholy poetry of Edward Middleditch, nor the dramatic severity of Jack Smith. The dominant note in his work is a large-hearted optimism, a positive quality of gay courageous acceptance – a yea-saying welcome to the whole of life. (Lessore 1957, p. 112) However, it was David Sylvester’s article ‘The Kitchen Sink School’, published in Encounter in December 1954, which as Martin Harrison


indicates ‘stuck with the public, to the dismay of the artists in question’, soon becoming conflated in the press with the Angry Young Men of literature (Harrison 2002, p. 74). There is some debate about whether Sylvester’s epithet was meant to be disparaging or not, but the label was catchy and took some shaking off. At the apogee of the realist ‘moment’, the Venice Biennale in 1956, they were referred to more plainly as ‘Four Young Painters’. Paradoxically, the Biennale exhibits were selected by Herbert Read, who chose work that demonstrated the quartet was ‘moving away from the prosaic English subjects and settings that had first gained acclaim, towards the sun, light and colour of the Mediterranean’ (Hyman 2001, p. 179).42 Critics and curators had other agendas but, as Hyman notes, the artists themselves had no ‘shared aesthetic’ and ‘no common manifesto’: As their shaky camaraderie crumbled, so the artists of the Quartet began to use public statements to reject their presentation as social realists, their appearance as a group and their indebtedness to Berger. (Ibid., p. 182) As already emphasized, with knowledge of Stalin’s purges emerging in 1955 and the Soviet repression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, political allegiances switched and declarations in an art context became fraught with problems. Berger alienated artists and readers and exacerbated the situation with his various statements in the New Statesman and Nation, culminating in his ‘Exit and Credo’ piece.43 Artists quickly shied away from associations with a social realist aesthetic. Jack Smith, for example (the artist whose painting had led to the ‘kitchen sink’ epithet), made a dramatic shift from stylisation to abstraction. Others remained committed to the idea of communicating with a broad audience, but acknowledged the problems inherent in attempts to realize that. As Greaves resignedly commented in 1959: feeling a desire to lessen the gap that exists between audience and painting, I made attempts to form a pictorial language from nature which would be easily accessible to all who cared to look. To do this in England at the present time [ . . . ] is I realised, aesthetic suicide. (Greaves 1959, 82) Although many artists such as Rea and Gisha Koenig continued to produce work that might be linked to social aspects of realism and


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humanism into the 1960s, the quintessential ‘moment’ of British social realism in visual art had passed.44

‘Art and Social Purpose’ in the 1970s and 80s: the ‘unfinished agenda’ of social realism This is by far the most urgent and important challenge facing art in the latter half of the seventies: to restore a sense of social purpose, to accept that artists cannot afford for a moment longer to operate in a vacuum of specialised discourse without considering their function in wider and more utilitarian terms. (Cork 1976, p. 94) There is no doubt that, with the complex set of factors already discussed, the realist approaches of the fifties were driven underground, sometimes literally, by the sixties. As Jeff Nuttall indicated in his semiautobiographical book Bomb Culture, the ‘dark night of the kitchen sink’ (Nuttall [1968] 1970, p. 53), along with the ‘patronising idolization of the lumpen proletariat’ (ibid., p. 40) and the ‘desolate puritanism’ (ibid., p. 49) of places like the New Left’s Partisan Coffee House in London, was over. Now ‘sick humour’ (ibid., p. 105) anarchic happenings and festivals of protest and liberation were to be welcomed in. Grey interiors were replaced by radiant colour; the New Generations45 of British visual artists – sculptors, painters, muralists and graphic artists – manipulated Pop imagery and geometry, drenching their huge canvases, synthetic forms and found objects with vivid primary hues. However, the 1970s in particular also witnessed a re-engagement of artistic practices with the political. Indeed, sentiments expressed in the editorial commentary in the 1976 special issue of Studio International dedicated to ‘Art and Social Purpose’ could have been written two decades earlier. Significantly, the suggestion that there was a need to restore a sense of social connection implies it had been missing, even if this also reflected the particular viewpoint and prejudices of the editor Richard Cork. Notably, the special issue featured a whole series of art practices that might be considered to have some relevance here along with developments in a particular genre of British photography in the 1970s and 1980s, which David Mellor recently described as ‘continuing the unfinished agendas of Social Realism, documentary and the cultural promises of modernisation’ (Mellor 2007, p. 13). In a recent anthology of new research about the 1970s, Forster and Harper argue that it was a period of extraordinary cultural ferment, a


radical decade in which ‘there was a revolution in consciousness, as subcultural groups of the 60s became more vociferously counter-cultural’ (Forster & Harper (eds) 2010, p. 5). For Forster and Harper, the impetus for social change in the 1970s was an important driver on both a personal and collective political level. Certainly, there was just as much to be angry about as in the 1950s: as was evidenced, for example, by the prolonged industrial confrontations between the government, employers and dockers, engineers and miners, while political violence on a national and international scale continued with the troubles in Northern Ireland and the IRA and Angry Brigade bombing campaigns across the UK. Indeed, John Walker has argued that one of the key aspects of British art in the 1970s was its re-politicization. It certainly reflected, and contributed to, developments in society more generally. Walker’s survey documents the ‘often-acrimonious’ struggles caused by various leftist factional disputes within the art world: traditionalists and formalists versus left-wingers and feminists, abstractionists versus figurative artists, blacks versus whites, practitioners versus theorists and critics. These groups argued about the character, social function and future direction of art and its institutions. Even those who shared a leftist political perspective indulged in factional disputes: there were anarchists, Labour Party supporters, Maoists, Marxist-Leninists, Trotskyists and every shade in between. (Walker 2002, p. 3) In the early 1970s, various groups of artists banded together to form revolutionary organizations and radical collectives: the Artists Union, viewed as reformist by the League of Socialist Artists (LSA), also shunned by the Artists Liberation Front, was formed by John Dugger and David Medalla on May Day 1971.46 The LSA aimed to create a ‘Marxist-Leninist proletarian art’, issued manifestoes and pamphlets such as Class War in the Arts! and generally, according to Walker, ‘promoted the cause of socialist realism’ (Walker 2002, pp. 51–2). Clearly, hard-line minority groups like the LSA did not have a particularly nuanced approach to revolutionary political theory and their adoption of Socialist Realism was almost nostalgic in its naivety. However, if we are to move beyond the narrow focus of a social realist aesthetic linked to representation and expand the field to give consideration to work which demonstrates in other, perhaps more subtle or complex senses, ‘art’s critical recovery of the social world’, there were many activities and groups in the 1970s which could be considered – indeed too many to fully cite here. The ‘Art & Social Purpose’ issue of


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Studio International in 1976 provided a snapshot of some of the socially and politically engaged work going on in Britain at the time.47 Steve Willats wrote about ‘Art Work as a Social Model’, a theme he pursued through the 1970s as he explored the realities of living in high-rise urban housing through text, photography and diagrams. Walker documented the important Artists Placement Group, the project set up by John and Barbara Latham, Jeffrey Shaw and Barry Flanagan a decade earlier, which created artists’ residencies in industrial settings: placements included John Latham with the National Coal Board as well as in the Intensive Care Unit of Clare Hall Hospital, Stuart Brisley at Hillie Co Ltd, Leonard Hessing working with ICI Fibres Ltd, and Lois Price with the Milton Keynes Development Corporation.48 In the same issue, Victor Burgin, typically crossing the boundaries of theory and practice, contributed a theoretical critique on ‘Socialist Formalism’ and a two page photo-essay warning against the illusions of capital, urging As we move into this characteristic contemporary world, we can see the supposed new phenomenon of classlessness as simply a failure of consciousness. Class consciousness Think about it (Burgin 1976, pp. 146–7) Later that year, Burgin reprinted his now well-known poster, Possession, originally produced in connection with an exhibition in Edinburgh, and flyposted 500 copies of it across Newcastle upon Tyne. Created to look like an advertisement, it aimed to engage the public in a political dialogue about consumption under capitalism. All these activities and practices exemplified art’s purposeful engagement with social and political contexts but, in particular, specific photographic practices in the 1970s and 80s offer a richer resource for considering a social realist aesthetic. Historically, the medium of photography has been hampered by a series of assumptions involving its perceived objectivity and assumed passive capacity to represent a kind of visual reality. As Jane Tormey notes in her study of a range of ‘photographic realisms’ in contemporary practice, ‘photographic representation is complicated by contrasting attitudes to what is considered to be truth or realism’.49 In her discussion of ‘political realism’ Tormey highlights John Tagg’s emphasis on the photograph’s ideological existence both as material object and as a historically specific social practice. As Tagg indicates, when we deal with photography as ideology,


we are not dealing with something ‘outside’ reality.50 Hence, as Tormey explores at some length, the conflation of realism with what is thought to be a true document is problematic. Many contemporary artists, such as Jeff Wall, have used the medium of photography to expose these ambiguities. However, in the 1970s, whilst artists such as Burgin were as interested in the politics of representation as in the representation of politics, the contemporaneous genre of social-documentary photographic practice offered a prime site for the production of imagery that appeared to tell truths about social realities. Interestingly enough, it is important to return briefly to Berger here as his contribution to the discourses around social realities continued, if at a distance, through the 1960s and into the 1970s not only with his influential Ways of Seeing (1972), which dealt extensively and innovatively with the uses and abuses of photographic practices and their social and political functions, but also through his involvement in various photographic projects and creative writings. As Roberts comments, Berger’s dialogic account of photography at that time was deeply indebted to the philosophical debates on realism he first engaged with in the mid 1950s.51 However, for Roberts, Berger works with the notion of ‘photography as a form of social exchange’ (Roberts 1998, p. 128). With Berger’s A Fortunate Man (1967) and A Seventh Man (1975), for example, Jean Mohr’s photography is used as a challenge to the loss of historical memory. Narrative reconstruction of the photograph actively breaks with the de-historical circulation of images under the effects of capitalist spectacle. (Ibid., p. 132) Rather than the fetishization of the production of a single image that captures social reality, according to Roberts Berger works sequentially, reconstructing through a ‘process of narrative redemption’ (ibid.). In the UK there was considerable expansion in the development of photography as a social art form that told truths, however tendentious, both through the creation of a single image and through this kind of ‘process of narrative redemption’. These themes were explored by the 2008–9 touring exhibition of photographs from the Arts Council collection, No Such Thing as Society. The exhibition, and accompanying catalogue, taking its title from an infamous statement by Margaret Thatcher in 1987, focused on the strong documentary and community photographic traditions and explored how the advent of state support for independent photographers facilitated these practices. The


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exhibition included work by Homer Sykes, Tony Ray-Jones, Daniel Meadows, Brian Griffith, Chris Killip, Vanley Burke, Martin Parr, Tish Murtha and many others who produced ‘Realist, communal portraits’ (Mellor 2008, p. 31), ‘emancipatory community photography’ and a series of utopian photographic projects (ibid, p. 51).52 One of the most extensive early projects was Meadows’ Free Photographic Omnibus. From 1973 to 1974 Meadows travelled around Britain in a doubledecker bus taking photographic portraits and taping his interviews with his subjects. As Mellor notes, his Portsmouth: John Payne, Aged 12 with Two Friends and his Pigeon, Chequer, 26 April 1974, with its resonances of Billy in Ken Loach’s social realist classic film Kes (1969), produced an iconic image. The original photo-book that Meadows produced, following his thirteen-month, ten-thousand mile trip, provides a tender and fascinating narrative of individual working-class lives and the places in which they lived, worked and played.53

Figure 5.5 David Stephenson, Conanby near Conisborough, Yorkshire. Photograph by Daniel Meadows from the Free Photographic Omnibus, 1973. ‘David lived with his father and his step-mother in a council estate at Conanby. When he was fourteen David was playing with a lemon-squeezer in a bus queue; some of the contents of the lemon-squeezer sprayed over an eighteen-year-old sixth former who beat David up. He suffered a fractured skull and a brain haemorrhage and was confined to hospital for three months. David worked for a coach-builder in Rotherham and managed quite well in spite of a very pronounced limp.’ c Daniel (Daniel Meadows in private correspondence with the author July 2010). Meadows


In many ways, Meadows’ project was quite nostalgic: on the cusp of an avalanche of industrial decline – and, of course, pre-Thatcher – its declaration of protest was more poignant than revolutionary. In contrast, the work of Killip, with its bleak and intimate studies of disaffected unemployed youth and the ravaged post-industrial wastelands captured in the seminal photobook In Flagrante (1988) encapsulated, for Mellor, ‘the darkening social panorama of the late 1970s and 1980s’ (Mellor 2007, p. 109). Killip’s portrait Jarrow Youth (1976),54 of a skinhead crouched on a wall, which first appeared in Creative Camera in 1977, coincided, emblematically, with punk’s outrageous misappropriation of the Silver Jubilee: Killip emblematised North Eastern de-industrialisation and its abject legacy of waste, with visionary iconographies. These are reminiscent not only of Honoré Daumier’s urban migrants and Pablo Picasso’s Blue Period vagrants but also J.M.W.Turner’s enlarged and luminous landscapes with human industrial activity set beneath. (Ibid.) Certainly, Killip’s iconic photograph was dependent on the viewer reading the single image as telling or capturing a kind of truth, and, to some extent despite its intimacy it persists in an attempt to represent politics. Killip’s images – here married with texts by John Berger and Sylvia Grant – are powerfully affective but this kind of desolate truth telling was particularly bound up with an evacuation of political hope in the late 1980s. Rather than conveying a universal social reality, the images and text resonated with the multiple realisms of a fragmented and defeated society, emblemized by the impoverished travellers on In Flagrante’s cover, collecting coal on the seashore. An elderly man picks over rubbish. The sea shuts in and, on its beaches, washes up flotsam and jetsam. Kids sniff glue and find a way-out. Here there will be no more silver-wedding presents. [...] On these last reaches, people make love, children are born, grandmothers make pies, families go to the seaside. And they all know what is happening: the boot is being put into the future. (Berger and Grant [1988] 2008, p. 90)


Figure 5.6

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c Chris Killip Chris Killip, Youth, Jarrow, Tyneside, 1976.

Eventually though, this kind of aesthetic reached something of an impasse. The critical realist constructed-narrative approach to the political, characterized in US-born Allan Sekula’s The Fish Story, and the dispassionate avoidance of emotional engagement exemplified in the vernacular realism of the British photographer Richard Billingham, are just two of the many routes explored thereafter.

Contemporary social realisms: the new forms of sociability in art Any consideration of the visual arts in the new millennium has to start with a number of provisos. Whilst the visual generally dominates our encounter with contemporary art, it is not necessarily the primary mode of practice. Post-conceptualist art is no longer ocular-centric, with shifts into philosophy and text-based work, installation, performative and environmental processes and multifarious forms beyond and outside the gallery into the expanded field of the post-postmodern digital era. The visual now encompasses a broad spectrum of the arts including the patently non-visual, such as the haptic and the sonic. The rules of art have broken down. Contemporary art practice is now


characterized not by its visuality but by its multimedia, interdisciplinary and interventional natures.55 In 1996, Hal Foster argued that we had witnessed a ‘return to the real’ (Foster, 1996) as art and theory sought grounding in actual bodies and social sites. But what might constitute such a ‘return to the real’, and if there has been such a ‘return’, does it resonate at all with anything to do with the term or aesthetic social realism as discussed so far? Where might we turn for answers to these questions in such an eclectic and pluralist art world? Certainly, Alison Marchant’s artistic practice, for example, has continuity with earlier forms of social realism. Marchant has unfailingly addressed questions of political power, using oral testimony in her sitespecific installations to make visible working-class cultural and domestic life in Britain. Indeed, through the 1990s, there may even be ways in which the so-called YBAs (Young British Artists) might be associated with social realism, even if they are not purveyors of it. YBA artists such as Sarah Lucas and Tracy Emin took a vernacular approach and dealt with social class issues in their work. Tim Noble and Sue Webster’s punk-inspired trash shadow installations – Dirty White Trash (with Gulls) (1998), Wasted Youth (2000), The Undesirables (2000) and Real Life Is Rubbish (2002) – besides drawing on a growing obsession with urban detritus, also reflected the realities of social life in Britain at the turn of the century, resonating with a contemporary wave of social derision for youth in general and an obsequious obsession with a British underclass in particular. That said, merely embracing the social or exploring the realities of popular culture – a favourite subject for art through the 1990s and beyond – is insufficient for it to be linked in any meaningful way. For some critics, the banality of the activities of the Liverpool-based Common Culture Collective, with the ‘paucity and opportunistic cowardice of this kind of synthetic philistinism’, merely demonstrated the nadir in contemporary art’s giving up on ‘imaginative engagement’, and led many artists to ‘fill the void with the negation of culture per se.’ As JJ Charlesworth concludes, bleakly: The problem, not just for art but for all culture, is that when one is faced with the choice of being outside the box vomiting in, or inside the box vomiting out, it’s difficult to care much either way.56 However, in counterpoint, the recent shift to socially engaged practices, ‘the new forms of sociability in art’, may have some resonance. I want to frame my concluding remarks about the relevance of social realism


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to current art practice, therefore, by returning to where I started – with Roberts’ prescient and insightful comments made in 1990 that ‘art’s critical recovery of the external world needs to be linked to an understanding of that world as both structured and differentiated and characterised by emergence and change’. I want to mirror this with Roberts’ more recent references to the post-autonomous world of art being very much unsettled but simultaneously characterized by renewed interests in the social. Here, Roberts’ analysis reflects an ongoing recognition of recent contemporary art’s accommodation and appropriation of the social such that, with the influential field of relational and post-relational practices, he articulates a ‘new sociability in art’ (Roberts 2009, p. 353). Add to this a resurgent interest in a ‘communist imaginary’ and ‘commonism’57 and this, perhaps, is where we might begin to identify a coalition with some of the former practices and ideas associated with social realism. Many of Jeremy Deller’s projects, for example The Battle of Orgreave (2001), which restaged a momentous confrontation in the Miners’ Strike of 1984–85, although not purposefully part of any professed political programme, have created their own political momentum when encountered and experienced by viewers and participants.58 Another British artist, Lucy Orta, has extensively used participative artistic practices, working with communities all around the world, to critique a whole series of social issues from global ecology and environmental waste to the plight of the homeless and destitute.59 Other contemporary practices conduct a more surreptitious form of engagement at the edges of cultural activism, often operating outside the gallery space in the confrontational and agonistic site of the public sphere. The Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home utilizes the domestic environment, and the social life of the family itself, as a discursive and politicized space for action. The Institute, describing itself as a family activist cell, is located in a council property in Everton, Liverpool, and provides a platform to discuss homemade aesthetics, the private/public, the familial, class and money matters.60 The Institute’s practice draws on diverse and contradictory traditions in art but in its audacious re-thinking and re-presentation of the socialized and politicized circumstances in which we live our lives, it raises powerful philosophical and aesthetic questions about twenty-first century social realities. To end, I return to Roberts’ explanation of why such ‘new forms of sociability in art’ are significant: They may aestheticise their own conditions of production; they may fetishize the dialogic as transformative activity; they may devalue and


misconstrue the emancipatory potential of artistic autonomy (and, as a consequence, as Žižek puts it in his discussion of Hardt and Negri, mimic the frictionless ‘communism’ of Bill Gates’s virtual capitalism), but at a material level they strive to unblock the reified and dismal social relations of contemporary artistic production. (Roberts 2009 (ed.), p. 367) Art that declares its engagement with the social and with the political is problematic. All claims to reflect social reality in a world self-conscious of the impossibility of representation yet, simultaneously, obsessively attempting to perform and re-stage lived experience through endless ‘reality televison’ formats, are fraught. Contemporary art’s ‘critical recovery of the external world’ sits uneasily within a global economy that seeks to commodify all cultural production. Nevertheless, at the risk of reiterating Berger’s optimism in the fifties, art practice can have agency. Certainly we can no longer glibly refer to simple viabilities of social realism, for the quintessential time and place for that aesthetic and its politics is now historical, but art practice continues to develop strategies and forms based on ‘transformational conceptions of social reality’ and we should not be at all surprised if in drawing from these wellsprings contemporary art and its discourses resurrect the term anew very soon.

Notes 1. Interestingly, Roberts heads his essay with a quote from Roy Bhaskar: ‘Realists argue for an understanding of the relationship between social structures and human agency that is based on a transformational conception of social reality’ (Bhaskar cited in Roberts [1990] 1992, 195). Bhaskar’s original text gives ‘transformational conception of social activity’ but I retain Roberts’ misquoted version here. 2. Importantly, in this chapter I take ‘British’ to refer to both art practices produced by British-born artists, along with any art-making done in the UK, therefore encompassing non-native and exiled/émigré artists living and working in Britain. 3. For a useful survey of the intersection of cultural and political practices in the 1970s see for example Forster & Harper (eds) 2010. 4. See Lucy Lippard’s 1968 essay (with John Chandler) of this title in Lippard 1997. 5. For example, the 1970s witnessed the founding of the radical photo magazine Camerawork and the setting up of the Exit Photography Group amid a range of publications, exhibitions and projects explored ordinary life and everyday acts of protest and resistance through social documentary and community photography.


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6. I am inferring the much-rehearsed debates on questions of ‘authorship’ raised by Foucault and Barthes. For the classic texts see Barthes’ ‘The Death of the Author’ (Barthes 1977), and Foucault’s ‘What is an Author?’ (Rabinow (ed.) 1984). 7. See for example the extensive debates around ‘relational’ and ‘participative’ art practices instigated and reflected in Bourriaud 2002 and Bishop 2006. 8. Blunt, art critic during the 1930s for both the Communist-oriented Spectator magazine and the British Communist Party’s journal Left Review, was a key figure in the promotion of ‘New Realism’. This new aesthetic was also supported by A.L. Lloyd, Alick West, and Francis Klingender and other British Communist Party-oriented artists’ organizations such as the Hogarth Group, the Euston Road School, and the British Communist Party Artists’ Group. Recruited for the Soviet spy network, Blunt later became a reader in art history at the Courtauld Institute and went on to serve as art advisor to the monarchy and surveyor of the Royal art collection. For more on Blunt’s role see Rickaby 1978 and Antliff 2008. 9. See Milner 1993, p. 26. 10. Given world politics and social upheavals of the period it is hardly a surprise that the AI/AIA underwent significant changes of direction through the course of its twenty-year history (1933–53). As part of the general expansion of left politics across all social classes in the thirties, Robert Radford describes the inauguration of the AI as the ‘product of grass roots experience’ of a small group of largely London-based artists, critics and designers (Radford 1987, p. 15). Initially set up as a discussion group, the AI rapidly gained members and started to organize exhibitions and fund-raising events for various causes. Whilst some AI members were in the British Communist Party and promoted a more didactic approach, others were merely communist sympathisers. In the early years, the overall unifying principle was opposition to the Fascist movement although, of course, views differed enormously about how best to use art as a ‘weapon in the struggle’. In 1998, Andy Croft used this slogan for the title of his book about the cultural history of the British Communist Party, explaining that it was a term commonly used by Communists at the height of the Cold War to define their attitude to cultural activity (Croft, 1998, p.1). 11. In Rea (ed.) 1935 five oppositional positions were proposed by Herbert Read, A.L. Lloyd, Alick West, Francis Klingender, and Eric Gill. The archives for the AIA are held in the Tate Archive. For a history of the AIA see Morris & Radford 1983, and Radford 1987. 12. D.D. Egbert notes that, after the death of Christopher Caudwell in the Spanish Civil War, Klingender was ‘the best of the remaining Marxist-Leninist critics in England’ (Egbert 1970, p. 562). For a discussion of Klingender’s contribution to Marxist criticism, and that of other radicals including Arnold Hauser and Berger see Egbert 1970, pp. 551–80. 13. For example, the entire collection of the National Gallery, including the library, was deposited in the Manod Quarry near Blaenau Festiniog until the end of the war. See Richardson 1994, p. 89. 14. ‘Recording Britain’ was an ambitious scheme set up at the outbreak of the Second World War by Kenneth Clark as an adjunct to the Official War Artist scheme. It aimed to boost morale on the Home Front by employing artists


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24.

25.

to depict the effects of war on the urban, rural and industrial landscapes and changes taking place in the social life of the civilian population. See Richardson 1994, p. 93. Boswell, a frequent satirical illustrator for the Daily Herald and Left Review in the 1930s, was the President of the Artists International Association at the time when he wrote the first in this series of slim volumes published by Bodley Head on single cultural issues. 1948 was the year when Moore was awarded the prestigious International Sculpture Prize at the Venice Biennale. Numerous accolades and British Council exhibitions followed. See review of exhibition Witness: Women War Artists, Imperial War Museum North, Manchester, 2009 by Rachel Aspden, ‘War through women’s eyes’, New Statesman, 12 March 2009, available at www.newstatesman.com/art/ 2009/03/female-artists-war-women. Mass Observation was established in 1937 and involved the detailed recording and documenting of the everyday social lives of people in Britain. The Mass Observation Archive is now housed at the University of Sussex Library. See the present volume’s introduction. See LCC file ‘Works of Art for Housing Estates, 1957–1959’ and LCC Housing Committee minutes: London Metropolitan Archive ref. CL/HSG/1/99. See also Sandilands 1960, and Lapp et al. 1999. Author’s correspondence with John Lloyd, Ray Watkinson and Péri’s family, 1990s. An extensive Péri archive is held at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds. In a 1996 exhibition Robert Burstow surveyed the sculpture commissioned for the South Bank and listed 28 different sculptors. See Burstow 1996, and Banham & Hillier (eds) 1976. Fleischmann was born in Bratislava. He settled in London in 1948. The mermaid fountain was commissioned by Lockheed Hydraulic Brake Company. The gigantic pavilions of Nazi Germany and that of the Soviet Union confronted each other on the banks of the Seine at the 1937 International Exhibition in Paris. The professed aim of the exhibition was to encourage peaceful co-existence and co-operation among nations. Yet it was staged in a Europe dominated by competing totalitarian ideologies and at the height of the Spanish Civil War. See Ades et al. 1995. The central character, artist Janos Lavin, declares this in John Berger’s novel A Painter of Our Time, Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, London, [first published 1958] 1976. Berger’s novel was partly based on the life of the émigré realist sculptor Peter Péri whom he knew well and wrote about in various publications and exhibition catalogues. See, for example, Berger’s ‘Impressions of Peter Péri’ in the catalogue for Péri’s memorial exhibition at Swiss Cottage Library, London, 1968. On Péri’s work more generally, see Kay 1991. Building on Lynda Morris’s previous work (e.g. ‘Realism: the Thirties Argument, Blunt and The Spectator 1936 to1938’ in Art Monthly, 1980, No. 35, pp. 3–10), Deborah Cherry and Juliet Steyn’s essay ‘The Moment of Realism 1952–56’, published in 1982, was an important acknowledgment of the ‘silences, elisions, absences’ which hegemonic modernist art-historical accounts had effected up until the 1980s, marginalising and suppressing


26.

27.

28. 29.

30.

31.

32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

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considerations of realist art, and particularly its ‘moment’ in the nineteenfifties (Cherry & Steyn 1982, p. 44). By the late 1940s, the political divisions on the left in the Spanish Civil War, the ‘show-trials’ in Russia, the Nazi–Soviet pact and Stalin’s subsequent reversals of policy had all contributed significantly to the waning of the British intelligentsia’s flirtation with Communism. See Croft 1995, Croft (ed.) 1998, and Morgan et al. 2007. Tom Maschler blamed poor journalism and a ‘chain reaction’ for the widespread adoption of the catchy phrase ‘Angry Young Men’, arguing that the writers who had set themselves the task of ‘waking us up’ had been rendered harmless in the ‘A.Y.M. cage’ (Maschler 1958, p. 7). For more on commitment in this context see Whiteley 2003. Sartre’s influential polemical text condemned social indifference on the part of writers and proposed an aesthetics based on the notion of commitment. A wide-ranging debate ensued with subsequent responses from Theodor Adorno and Bertolt Brecht. Read’s comment about the ‘iconography of despair’ is taken from his introduction to the ‘New Aspects of British Sculpture’ at the Venice Biennale in 1952. ‘Here are images of flight, of ragged claws “scuttling across the floors of silent seas”, of excoriated flesh, frustrated sex, the geometry of fear. [ . . . ] These new images belong to the iconography of despair’ (Read cited in Burstow 1993, p. 119). Berger made these comments in the foreword to the 1956 exhibition of realist art, Looking Forward, which showed at South London Art Gallery from 18 April–5 May 1956 and then toured the provinces. The show was entirely selected by Berger. Its leftist credentials were underlined by its being officially opened by the General Secretary of the TUC, Sir Vincent Tewson. Author’s correspondence with Hogarth, 1990s. See also Hogarth 1986 and Ingrams 1997. On Berger and Brown see Whiteley 2009a and 2009b respectively. In Realism, June 1955, No. 1, p. 10, in an article entitled ‘Three Men in Search of Realism’, Ray Watkinson describes Berger as ‘with us but not of us’, implying that, indeed, Berger had a very close relationship with the party but remained outside it. Geoff Dyer maintains a similar view in his study of Berger’s work. See Dyer 1986. Another related initiative was the Geneva Club, set up by Berger in 1955 as an informal discussion forum for writers, artists, scientists and poets. The club, inspired by the temporary thaw in East-West relations at the Geneva summit conference and also by Ilya Ehrenberg’s influential novel The Thaw, initially met in Bertorelli’s restaurant but then move to the Argyll public house, near Oxford Circus. Regulars included Fullard, Middleditch, Smith, Greaves, Duxbury, Peter de Francia, John Warren Davis, John Willett, Randall Swingler, Ayrton, Hogarth, Evelyn Antal, Margot Heinemann, E. P. Thompson and Péri. Many of the articles in Realism did not name a specific author. Papers and correspondence relating to the Communist Party’s Artists’ Group and to the journal, Realism, are part of the Artists’ Group file, ref. 5/2–5/7, Labour History Archive and Study Centre, Manchester. Realism included reviews of exhibitions, interviews and feature articles. For example, reviews of Berger’s Looking Forward shows (1952 and 1956) and an interview with


37. 38.

39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45.

46.

Renato Guttuso at the Leicester Galleries were published. It also included articles on British art education, art in Eastern Germany, vernacular sculpture and architecture in England. Contributors included Berger, Hogarth, Clifford Rowe, de Francia, Ray Watkinson and Patrick Carpenter. Undated typed statement of the Realism Editorial Committee (Labour History Archive and Study Centre, Manchester). In the fifth issue of the journal (August–September 1956) Patrick Carpenter argued that the Communist Party Artists’ Group had been working towards a new approach to social realism but, he noted optimistically, they fully acknowledged that whilst the Soviet Union had ‘achieved socialism in an economic sense’, it had been ‘less successful in a spiritual and moral sense’, and he called for a new need to reappraise social realism (Carpenter in Realism, Nos 5, 6). However, Realism’s Editorial Board minutes indicate deep divisions over the aims, content and projected readership of the journal. The ‘new’ journal never emerged, suggesting that perhaps no consensus (or sufficient funds) could be found. Rebeyrolle’s work was shown, alongside the work of André Minaux, Ginette Rapp, Roger Montane and Jean Vinay, as part of the show Five French Realists at the Tate Gallery, London in the summer of 1955. For a discussion of developments in France, see the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Aftermath: France 1945–54, New Images of Man at the Barbican Art Gallery London from 3 March to 15 June 1982, and also Wilson 1991. When Guttuso had his London show in 1955, a special celebration party was thrown by Greaves. See Hyman 1996, p. 47. Berger also wrote on Guttuso for Realism in 1956 and published a monograph in German. See Berger 1957. See Hyman 2001 for an extensive discussion of ‘the Quartet’. Berger, ‘Exit and Credo?’ in New Statesman and Nation, 29 September 1956, Vol. 52, No. 1333, p. 372. For example, Rea organised the hugely popular Looking At People exhibition (Manchester 1955 and Moscow 1957) of largely realist art and was also part of the exhibition Three Humanist Sculptors at Zwemmers, London 1960. See Whiteley 2003 and ‘Betty Rea’, New Dictionary of National Biography. On Gisha Koenig, see Spencer 1960. This refers to a series of exhibitions of contemporary work by young British artists entitled ‘New Generation’ held during the 1960s at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London. David Medalla, born in Manila but mainly based in London since, has frequently brought together an ethos of Marxist agitation with Buddhist sensibilities. Guy Brett, writing about Medalla and Dugger in their Mao jackets, noted that they gave ‘a dated air to an incontestable conviction: that the legacy of colonialism in the Third World could only be effectively challenged by the national liberation movements’ (Brett 1995, p. 85). Significantly, given the comments on the 1970s as the ‘lost decade’, Brett recognised that the mid-1990s were not the best moment to ‘look again dispassionately at a movement in the 1970s in which many people were caught up (myself included)’ (Brett 1995, p. 85). Walker’s survey, published since, has made an invaluable contribution to that process but there is clearly much more to be done on social and political groupings and art practices from the period,


47.

48.

49.

50. 51. 52.

53. 54.

55.

56.

57.

58.

59. 60.

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some of which might be considered in the kind of context we are concerned with here. There were many contemporaneous publications, events and exhibitions worth mentioning here that dealt with art’s social and political engagement, but one show with particular associations with the Studio issue was Art in Society: Contemporary British Art with a Social or Political Purpose at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London May–June 1978. It had a public programme of events, talks and films and attracted over 14,000 visitors. See Walker 2002, pp. 223–4. See Studio International: Art and Social Purpose, March/April 1976, Vol. 191, No. 980 and also on APG see Tate Archive and information at http://www. tate.org.uk/learning/artistsinfocus/apg/default.htm I am indebted here to Jane Tormey for her thoughtful comments on this topic and for sight of the draft manuscripts for her forthcoming book Photographic Realism (Manchester University Press, 2012). Tormey cites Tagg 1988, p. 188. See Roberts 1998, p. 128. Mellor’s 2007 No Such Thing as Society was published in relation to an Arts Council Collection exhibition in London, Aberystwyth, Carlisle and Warsaw, 2008–9. In much limited form, an earlier exhibition covered similar ground In Search of the English, The work of Independent Photographers in Britian during the Late 1960s and 1970s, Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield. At the time, the Arts Council Collection of photographs was housed at Sheffield Hallam University. See Meadows 1975. The title given in Mellor’s book is slightly different from the caption provided to the author of this essay by the photographer himself, Chris Killip. See ‘Jacques Rancière and Indisciplinarity: an Interview with Marie-Aude Baronian and Mireille Rosello’, Art & Research, A Journal Of Ideas, Contexts and Methods, Vol. 2, No.1, Summer 2008, pp. 2–3, and Bourdieu 1996. See Charlesworth’s review of the exhibition of Common Culture at Gasworks 10th November-10th December 2000, originally published in Art Monthly 242, December 2000–January 2001 http://www.jjcharlesworth.com/reviews/ commonculture.htm. For references to some of this literature see Roberts 2009 (ed.). Key writers and theorists include Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou. Also see, for example, Grant Watson, Gerrie van Noord and Gavin Everall (eds) Make Everything New: A Project on Communism, Bookworks, London/Project Arts Centre, Dublin, 2006, which, on the back cover, puts itself forward as ‘a collection of partial and subjective accounts’ of various creative practices and an ‘experimental platform for ideas and an attempt to see in what ways the communist imagination can be materialised as art’. Deller’s The Battle for Orgreave (Directed by Mike Figgis, 2001) was originally shown on television but its subsequent life, through other screenings and accompanied by archive material associated with its making and the original dispute, has added layers of social and political meaning to the project. See Bourriaud, Pinto and Damianovic 2003. See http://www.twoaddthree.org.


Bibliography Ades, Dawn, Tim Benton, David Elliott and Iain Boyd Whyte (eds). (1995) Art and Power: Europe under the Dictators. London, Thames and Hudson/Hayward Gallery. Andrews, Geoff, Nina Fishman and Kevin Morgan (eds). (1995) Opening the Books, Essays on the Social and Cultural History of the British Communist Party. London, Pluto Press. Antliff, Allan. (2008) ‘Open Form and the Abstract Imperative: Herbert Read and Contemporary Anarchist Art’, in Anarchist Studies. Vol. 17, No. 1, pp. 6–20. Artists’ Group Bulletin (British Communist Party), No. 2 Oct.1954. Artists’ Group Bulletin (British Communist Party), No. 3 Feb. 1955. Banham, Mary and Bevis Hillier (eds). (1976) A Tonic to the Nation: The Festival of Britain 1951. London, Thames and Hudson. Baronian, Marie-Aude and Mireille Rosello. (2008) ‘Jacques Rancière and Indisciplinarity: an Interview with Marie-Aude Baronian and Mireille Rosello’, in Art & Research: A Journal Of Ideas, Contexts and Methods. Vol. 2, No.1, pp. 2–3. Barthes, Roland. (1977) ‘The Death of the Author’, in S. Heath (ed.), Image-MusicText: Roland Barthes. Glasgow, William Collins and Sons Co. Ltd. Berger, John. (1952) Looking Forward. London, Whitechapel Gallery. ——. (19 March 1955) ‘Guttuso at the Leicester Galleries’, in New Statesman and Nation. Vol. 49, No. 1254, p. 384. ——. (30 July 1955) ‘Social Realism and the Young’, in New Statesman and Nation. Vol. 50, No. 1273, pp. 133–4. ——. (1956) Looking Forward. London, South London Gallery. ——. (29 September 1956) ‘Exit and Credo?’ in New Statesman and Nation. Vol. 52, No. 1333, p. 372. ——. [1958] (1976) A Painter of Our Time. London, Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative. ——, with photographs by Jean Mohr. [1967] (1976) A Fortunate Man. London, Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative. ——. (1968) ‘Impressions of Peter Péri’, in Peter Péri: Memorial Exhibition. Exhibition catalogue, London, Swiss Cottage Library. ——, with photographs by Jean Mohr. (1975) A Seventh Man. Harmondsworth, Penguin. ——, and Sylvia Grant. [1988] (2008) ‘Walking Back Home’ in Chris Killip, In Flagrante, New York, Errata Editions. Bishop, Claire. (2006) ‘Social Collaboration and Its Discontents’, in Artforum. February, pp. 178–83. Blunt, Andrew. ‘Art under Capitalism and Socialism’, in C. Day Lewis (ed.), [1937] (1972) The Mind in Chains – Socialism and the Cultural Revolution. London, Folcroft Library edition, pp. 105–22. Boswell, James. (1947) The Artist’s Dilemma. London, Bodley Head. Bourdieu, Pierre. (1996) The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Stanford, Stanford University Press. Bourriaud, Nicolas. (2002) Relational Aesthetics. Paris, Les Presses du Reel. ——, Roberto Pinto and Maia Damianovic. (2003) Lucy Orta. London, Phaidon. Brett, Guy. (1995) Exploding Galaxies: The Art of David Medalla. London, Kala Press.


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Briggs, Asa. (4 October 1958) ‘The Context of Commitment’, in New Statesman. Vol. 56, No. 1438, p. 453. Burgin, Victor. (March/April 1976), ‘Socialist Formalism’, Studio International: Art and Social Purpose, Vol. 191, No. 980, pp. 146–7. ——. (1986) Between. London, ICA/Blackwell. Burstow, Robert. (1993) ‘The Geometry of Fear: Herbert Read and British Modern Sculpture after the Second World War’, in B. Read and D. Thistlewood (eds), Herbert Read: A British Vision of World Art. Leeds, Leeds City Art Galleries/Lund Humphries/Henry Moore Foundation, pp. 119–32. ——. (1996) Symbols for ’51: the Royal Festival Hall, Skylon and Sculptures for the Festival of Britain. London, Royal Festival Hall/Hayward Gallery. Charlesworth, JJ. ‘Review of Common Culture at Gasworks 10 November– 10 December 2000’, http://www.jjcharlesworth.com/reviews/commonculture. htm (accessed 5 July 2010). Cherry, Deborah and Juliet Steyn. (June 1982) ‘The Moment of Realism 1952–56’, in Artscribe. No 35, pp. 44–50. Cork, Richard. (March/April 1976) Studio International: Art and Social Purpose (editorial). Vol. 191, No. 980, p. 94. Croft, Andy. (1995) ‘Authors Take Sides: Writers and the Communist Party 1920– 56’ in Geoff Andrews, Nina Fishman and Kevin Morgan (eds) Opening the Books, Essays on the Social and Cultural History of the British Communist Party. London, Pluto Press. —— (ed.). (1998) A Weapon in the Struggle, The Cultural History of the Communist Party in Britain. London, Pluto Press. Dyer, Geoff. (1986) Ways of Telling, The Work of John Berger. London, Pluto Press. Egbert, Donald D. (1970) Social Radicalism and the Arts, Western Europe: A Cultural History from the French Revolution to 1968. London, Gerald Duckworth and Co. Ltd. Forster, Laurel and Sue Harper (eds). (2010) Culture and Society in 1970s Britain: The Lost Decade. Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Press. Foster, Hal. (1996) The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge Mass., MIT Press. Garlake, Margaret. (1998) New Art, New World, British Art in Post-War Society. New haven/London, Yale University Press. Greaves, Derrick. (March 1959) ‘Painter’s Purpose’, in Studio. Vol. 157, No. 792, p. 82. Harrison, Charles and Paul Wood (eds). (1992) Art in Theory 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Oxford/Cambridge Mass., Blackwell. Harrison, Martin. (2002) Transition: The London Artscene in the Fifties. London, Merrell. Hewison, Robert. [1981] (1988) In Anger, Culture in the Cold War 1945–1960. London, Methuen. Hobsbawm, Eric. (1994) Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991. London, Michael Joseph. Hogarth, Paul. (January 1955) ‘Humanism and Despair in British Art Today’, in Marxist Quarterly. Vol. 2, No. 1, p. 37. ——. (1986) The Artist as Reporter. London, Gordon Fraser. Hyman, James. (1996) Guttuso. London, Whitechapel Art Gallery.

170 British Social Realism in the Arts since 1940 ——. (2001) The Battle for Realism: Figurative Art in Britain during the Cold War 1945–60. New Haven/London, Yale University Press. Ingrams, Richard. (1997) Drawing on Life: the Autobiography of Paul Hogarth (intro.). Newton Abbott, David & Charles. Kay, J. (1991) Peter Péri 1899–1967, A Retrospective Exhibition of Sculpture, Prints and Drawings. Exhibition catalogue, Leicester, Leicestershire Museum and Art Gallery. Killip, Chris. [1988] (2008) In Flagrante. New York, Errata Editions. Kirkham, Pat and David Thoms (eds). (1994) War Culture: Social Change and Changing Experience in World War Two. London, Lawrence & Wishart. Klingender, Francis. (1943) Marxism and Modern Art. London, Lawrence and Wishart. Lapp, Axel, A. Graves, D. Taylor and M. Wellmann. (1999) Sculpture for a New Europe: Public Sculpture from Britain and the 2 Germanies 1945–68. Leeds, Henry Moore Institute. Lessore, H. in Whittet, G.S. ‘The Beaux Arts Gallery and Some Young British Artists’, in Studio. October 1957, No. 154, pp. 110–13. Lindey, Christine. (1990) Art in the Cold War. London, The Herbert Press. Lippard, Lucy. (1997) Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966–1972. University of California Press. Maschler, Tom (ed.). (1958) Declaration. London, MacGibbon & Kee. Meadows, Daniel. (1975) Living Like This, Around Britain in the Seventies. London, Arrow Books. Mellor, David. (2007) No Such Thing as Society: Photography in Britain 1967–87. London, Hayward Publishing. Milner, John. (1993) A Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Artists 1420–1970. Aberdeen, Antique Collectors Club. Morgan, Kevin, Gideon Cohen and Andrew Flinn. (2007) Communists and British Society 1920–1991. London, Rivers Oram Press. Morris, Lynda. (1980) ‘Realism: the Thirties Argument, Blunt and The Spectator 1936 to1938’, in Art Monthly. No. 35, pp. 3–10. —— and Robert Radford. (1983) The Story of the Artists International Association 1933–1953. Oxford, Museum of Modern Art. Nuttall, Jeff. [1968] (1970) Bomb Culture. London, Paladin. Rabinow, Paul (ed.). (1984) The Foucault Reader. Harmondsworth, Penguin Books. Radford, Robert. (1987) Art for a Purpose: The Artists International Association 1933–1953. Winchester, Winchester School of Art Press. Realism, issues 1–6, June 1955–December 1956. Rea, Betty (ed.). (1935) Five on Revolutionary Art. London, Wishart Books. Richardson, Robert. (1994) ‘Closings and Openings: Leading Public Art Galleries During the Second World War’, in P. Kirkham and D. Thoms (eds), War Culture: Social Change and Changing Experience in World War Two. London, Lawrence & Wishart, p. 89. Rickaby, Tony. (Autumn 1978) ‘Artists’ International’, in History Workshop. No. 6, pp. 154–68. Roberts, John. (1992) Writings on Art and Politics 1981-1990. London, Pluto Press. ——. (1998) The Art of Interruption: Realism, Photography and the Everyday. Manchester, Manchester University Press.


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6 Small Screens and Big Voices: Televisual Social Realism and the Popular Dave Rolinson

Introduction: transformations and the popular Although social realism on television has drawn some practices and debates from theatre, cinema and literature, it also exists within specifically televisual frames of reference. Indeed, developments in television’s social realist practices and theoretical elaboration have existed in a parallel and sometimes symbiotic relationship with television’s attempts to define its own specifically televisual discourses. In attending to these interweaving relationships, this chapter examines several programme types across a broad chronology, within their institutional and critical contexts. If realist innovations involve, according to Raymond Williams, a ‘movement towards social extension’ (Williams 1977, p. 63), and social realism in Stephen Lacey’s phrase ‘reveals the situation of the workingclass at the level of its culture and everyday practices’ (Lacey 2007, p. 5), it is understandable that television has been a key social realist arena, given its ability to address mass audiences in the domestic sphere. As Madeleine MacMurraugh-Kavanagh argued, ‘social television drama’ became ‘a most urgent social tool’ because ‘it had the means to saturate the nation’s consciousness in a way that, with their relatively limited audiences and inhibiting conditions of public reception, theatre and cinema could never achieve’ (MacMurraugh-Kavanagh 2002, pp. 151–2). The point is not only one of numbers, although Harold Pinter ‘estimated it would take a thirty-year run of The Caretaker’ to get the audience he got for A Night Out (1960) (Shubik 2000, p. 77). Rather it is that television, according to Irene Shubik, could ‘broaden the audience’s viewing experience’ in distinctive ways (ibid.). 172

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This chapter traces social realism’s impact on television, and television’s impact on social realism, through reference to single drama – often a distinctive form of authored, politically-motivated drama – and more popular forms such as soap opera and situation comedy, whose constraints in terms of production conditions, house style and genre requirements have made them less critically valued. However, in the popular medium of television, differentiating popular texts from serious texts presents particular challenges. Programme makers, in particular those from working-class backgrounds, have frequently sought to engage a mainstream audience. Attending to a range of programmes and approaches across different periods helps to focus BF Taylor’s point that social realism ‘is difficult to define owing to its being so politically and historically contingent’ (Taylor 2006, p. 3). One of television’s most popular programmes, the soap opera Coronation Street (1960-present), prompted an influential definition of television social realism from Marion Jordan: Briefly the genre of Social Realism demands that life should be presented in the form of a narrative of personal events, each with a beginning, a middle and an end, important to the central characters concerned but affecting others in only minor ways; that though these events are ostensibly about social problems they should have as one of their central concerns the settling of people in life; that the resolution of these events should always be in terms of the effect of personal interventions; that characters should be either working-class or of the classes immediately visible to the working classes (shopkeepers, say, or the two-man business) and should be credibly accounted for in terms of the ‘ordinariness’ of their homes, families, friends; that the locale should be urban and provincial (preferably in the industrial north); that the settings should be commonplace and recognisable (the pub, the street, the factory, the home and more particularly the kitchen); that the time should be ‘the present’; that the style should be such as to suggest an unmediated, unprejudiced and complete view of reality; to give, in summary, the impression that the reader, or viewer, has spent some time at the expense of the characters depicted. (Jordan 1981, p. 28) This chapter’s case studies variously subscribe to and deviate from Jordan’s definition, the longevity of which is illustrated by Lez Cooke’s observation that it ‘very comfortably’ fitted Clocking Off (2000–2003) (Cooke 2005, p. 187). It is important to note however that Jordan places


these broad social realist conventions alongside ‘the existing conventions of soap opera proper’, and finds that these ‘two sets of conventions fit neatly together’, resulting in a type recognisable as ‘Soap-Opera Realism’ (Jordan 1981, p. 29). I argue that we should look much more broadly than this at social realism on television, and accordingly the following case studies look at programmes that develop new genre-hybrids or suggest alternative, politically radical, modes of realism. More generally, I argue, television demonstrates John Caughie’s contention that realism has been a ‘broad church [ . . . ] happy to transform the new currents it encounters [. . . and . . .] to be transformed by them’ (Caughie 2000a, p. 68).

Realism and the ‘televisual’ to 1960 In television’s early decades its aesthetics and practices were being developed and contested in ways that necessarily shaped televisual social realism. The first regular television service began on 2 November 1936, with a public service imperative instilled by John Reith whose belief that ‘commerce is the enemy of any serious social or moral purpose’ made him television’s equivalent of John Grierson (Caughie 2000a, p. 28). ‘Social purpose’ in this context was unifying. According to Andrew Crisell, the BBC’s ‘cheerful and conciliatory’ coverage of the 1926 General Strike enhanced its reputation and facilitated its ‘transition from private enterprise to public institution’ (Crisell 2002, p. 25). This meant fulfilling the recommendations of the Crawford Committee, the first of several Royal Commissions that became ‘the standard procedure for regulating [. . .] public service broadcasting’ and ‘the positions it was asked to occupy in the national culture’ (Caughie 2000a, p. 79). Television’s capacity for social realist discourse seems ingrained even in what Anthony Smith calls the ‘pre-natal experience of the BBC’, an experience informed by the ‘drive towards working-class self-education which was part of the trade-union movement’ in the early twentieth century, and before that in ‘Self-Help, in William Forster’s Education Act (1870)’ and in a ‘public revulsion against the crude propaganda and commercialism of the early printed mass media’ (Smith 1979, pp. 84–5). Moreover, early dramatic style on television invoked particular kinds of immediacy relevant to social realist discourse. Tracing a full development of on-screen style is hindered, however, by the fact that early television was mostly live, and little survives from before the mid-1950s.1 What we can say is that technological and aesthetic developments that marked social realism in the cinema, such as semi-documentary exterior


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filming in real locations, seem distant from early television’s reliance on theatre, on live relays of plays from theatres (such as J. B. Priestley’s When We Are Married in 1938) and studio-based adaptations (such as Gogol’s The Government Inspector, watched by 9.5 million in 1959) (Caughie 2000a, p. 34). Early dependence on theatre led to concerns among some practitioners about a residual theatricality that inhibited television drama’s specific capabilities by tending ‘towards the literate rather than the visual’ (ibid., p. 43). Jason Jacobs has contested a description of drama as developing from an early ‘static, theatrical, visual style to a mobile, cinematic one’, as if television initially ‘did not develop its own aesthetic’ and merely graduated from imitating one medium to imitating another (Jacobs 2000, p. 1). It is important to observe that the television play was not simply a phase ‘through which television had, inevitably, to pass before arriving at its true destiny (film), but represented possibilities’ in its own right (Bignell et al. 2000, p. 38). Although it is important to debate the practices, modes and even academic methodologies that constitute the specificity of the televisual, my task here is to apply selected ideas specifically to the development of social realist discourse.2 For instance, from writer Nigel Kneale and director Rudolph Cartier’s debates on televisual form in the 1950s, we can isolate Cartier’s speculation that ‘it is only live programmes that comprise real television’ (Cartier 1958, p. 31). Although Cartier’s use of pre-filmed inserts extended television’s scope, the perception of such inserts as anti-televisual reveals a vital argument about early drama, namely that it, and the early relaying of live theatre, involved ‘the assertion of immediacy, liveness and the direct transmission of live action as both an essential characteristic and an aesthetic virtue of the medium’ (Caughie 1991, p. 23). Liveness remains a valued asset today, with reality TV, sport, entertainment and one-off live episodes from series such as E.R. and Coronation Street. Early television’s liveness created the ‘effect of immediacy, of a directness and spontaneity [which came] to signify authenticity’, and which became ‘one of the characteristics of the specific forms of realism in television drama’ (Caughie 2000a, p. 32). In terms of content, social realism can be traced across various genres, as in the science-fiction/horror serial Quatermass and the Pit (1958–59) which discussed race riots as openly as more celebrated realist forms; its writer, Nigel Kneale, joined the British New Wave with the screenplays of Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer. However, in terms of practice, variations on drama-documentary provide instructive examples of the development of television social realism. Just as cinema documentary


developed through reconstructing reality in a studio, as in Night Mail (1936), so early television, restricted by technological and logistical limitations upon location-recording bar all but major events, drew inspiration from pre-war radio journalism to dramatize in the studio. Early results included I Want To Be A Doctor (1947), a ‘how to’ guide which recreated observation of doctors at work and the difficulties of medical training, in part to dissuade unrealistic applicants (Caughie 2000a, p. 104), which demonstrated ‘the placing of educational or informational content into entertaining form’ (Kerr 1990, p. 79). Locating such relatively primitive programmes in Britain’s drama-documentary tradition, Derek Paget notes elements that were also vital to evolving realist discourses. That is, in order to delineate the documentary credentials of a dramatic presentation, ‘a realist mise-en-scène was now required’. The ‘ “look” of reality became an issue’ and viewers experienced the ‘novelty of a new kind of seeing – taking place in their living rooms’ (Paget 1998a, p. 143). The ‘enabling conventions of the dramatised story documentary’ were, therefore, not only ‘dramatic’ but also social realist (ibid., p. 145). Indeed, such a melding of different genres ‘was a given of post-war practice’ (ibid.). To take an example – A Man from the Sun (1956), a John Elliott play about West Indian immigrants’ experiences in London, which echoes mainstream social problem films such as Sapphire (1959) and Flame in the Streets (1961, adapted from Ted Willis’s stage and TV play Hot Summer Night (1959)), but has a different style: it is, in Elliott’s words, a semi-documentary piece ‘in the tradition of the pre-war GPO movies’ (Bourne 1998, p. 112). Dramatizing research as conducted like ‘a fly-onthe-wall [. . .] sinking into the background’ across Brixton and elsewhere, Elliott explored race relations and ‘the clash between this mythical Britain and the actual grotty real Britain, which West Indians would face when they got here’ (ibid.). The play’s reconstructions of observed experience display social realist emphases in prioritizing politicized everyday details and attitudes over plot, and yet these are combined with the use of telecine (the live playing-in of pre-recorded footage) that locates studio-based scenes within the real world (filmed material provides, for example, establishing shots of exteriors and wide shots of interiors, of which only small, metonymic sections are reconstructed in the studio). The film also overtly uses its narrative structure to critique bigoted attitudes via the edited transitions between scenes. Negative comments about immigrant workers in a job centre, for example, are followed by scenes of racial prejudice in a workplace, thereby devaluing those initial comments by juxtaposing them with


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practical obstructions to employment. Another mix attributes a union representative’s broad racial prejudices to his specific anxiety about a black man seeing his daughter, undermining his economic and political claims about productivity and community via reference to personal prejudice. For John Stokes, however, in realist dramas such as this and Hot Summer Night, ‘the risk is always that black people will become the honourable victims of white complexity’, and so ‘the plays are really about whites’. For Stokes, these plays are inferior to those of Pinter because they obey ‘the realist rule that an unquestioning focus on a previously identified – and prejudged – situation is the only starting point’ (Stokes 2001, p. 36). Therefore, although the actors welcomed then-unprecedented opportunities to insert their own attitudes into a television representation, feeling they would be ‘portrayed as real people, not as stereotypes’, the manner of their portrayal can be queried (Bourne 1998, p. 112). It is a specific instance of where Stokes’s criticism bears comparison with a broader ‘case against naturalism’ such as that of John McGrath. According to McGrath characters in naturalistic drama are not ‘allowed to be articulate’ but are only permitted ‘to emote, incoherently’, with ‘meaning’ made ‘implicit’ and the world presented as ‘static, implied and ambivalent’ (McGrath 1977, p. 102). Such criticism, however, should not detract from the progress made in social realist dramas of the mid-1950s. ITV’s commencement in 1955, which ‘brought with it a change of class address’, fed into concerns about the commercialization of culture that emerged in social realist texts of the period (Caughie 2000a, p. 50). The founding of ITV was hotly debated, from the Beveridge commission that began in 1951 to the 1954 Television Bill, but widespread concerns about the dilution of public service broadcasting were assuaged as the BBC and ITV initially shared core ‘Reithian values’ such as the drive to ‘inform, educate and entertain’ (Crisell 2002, p. 90). These values were particularly evident in ITV’s social realist dramas. Scheduled after the popular Sunday Night at the London Palladium, ITV’s Armchair Theatre (1956–74) featured a variety of types of drama but is often associated with the ‘school of “naturalistic realism” – that is to say, a realism based on experience and environment’ (Caughie 2000a, p. 75). Television improved the reach of New Wave works – Look Back in Anger’s theatre run ‘benefited considerably from exposure on television’ as the performance was relayed by the BBC in part on 16 October 1956 and by ITV in full on 28 November (Lacey 1995, p. 17). Television developed spin-off series from New Wave texts, including Man at the Top (1970–72) and the sitcom Billy


Liar (1973–74). However, as Caughie observes, this drive for ‘agitational contemporaneity’ that Sydney Newman brought to Armchair Theatre when he began producing it in 1958, and to BBC drama when he joined them in 1961, was inspired not only by attending Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court, but also by American television dramas such as Marty (1953) by Paddy Chayefsky (Caughie, 2000, pp. 73–4). Chayefsky and other American writers including Tad Mosel and Rod Serling wrote about subjects ‘that the kitchen-sink dramatists were about to tackle, though perhaps in a more sentimental way – strikes, working-class underprivileged misfits, boxers, etc., all speaking the language of the “working class”’ (Shubik 2000, p. 9). There were earlier landmark plays, such as Ted Willis’s Woman in a Dressing Gown (1956), but Armchair Theatre ‘introduced a new social space to television drama – the social space of class and region which it drew thematically from the New Wave in theatre and literature’ and, after the series had started, cinema (Caughie 2000a, p. 77). Examples include Pinter’s A Night Out, a ‘powerful drama, demonstrating how effective live studio drama could be’ while it also gained a large audience, and the inter-racial relationship drama Hot Summer Night, directed by Ted Kotcheff (Cooke 2003, p. 42). Other plays such as Alun Owen’s No Trams to Lime Street (1959) and Lena, O My Lena (1960), ‘created a new televisual space in which the dramas of social relationship and social situations could be acted out’ (Caughie 2000a, p. 77). Set around a Salford warehouse, Lena, O My Lena depicts the relationship between student Tom (Peter McEnery) and factory worker Lena (Billie Whitelaw), through which it ‘explores class difference, with Tom having a romanticised notion of the working class, from which he is removed as a result of his upbringing and education’ (Cooke 2003, p. 43). Ted Kotcheff’s direction aims to ‘use the camera as a way of breaking free from the stasis of theatrical space to the mobility of cinematic space’, making the studio ‘fluid and expressive’, but in a way that is ‘specific to the development of television drama’ and television’s ‘notions of realism’ (Caughie 2000a, p. 77). Caughie analyses sequences to argue that plays like Lena create ‘a performative space – a space for acting – rather than a narrative space – a space for action’, as the actors ‘invest’ the studio ‘with meaning’, creating ‘a reality which is watched rather than inhabited, a performed reality rather than the absorption into a narrative space’ (Caughie 2000a, p. 77). Such naturalistic plays operate within the ‘secular’, ‘contemporary’ and ‘socially extended’ emphases which are ‘often consciously described as realism’ in nineteenth-century texts (Williams 1977, pp. 64–5). These


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emphases include individual action, the location of actions in the present day, colloquial speech that ‘approximates the everyday conversation of its audience’, social extension through which ‘drama begins to represent an increasing range of social experience’ and ‘class experience’ (Lacey 1995, pp. 64–5). For many critics, televisual drama was limited by such naturalistic roots. With statements ‘mediated [. . .] to the point of triviality’ through ‘the situation of the character speaking’, naturalist drama according to writer-director John McGrath could be ‘a way of not saying anything’, revealing only ‘a small cluster of subjective consciousnesses’, and imposing ‘a certain neutrality about life on the writer, the actor and the audience’ (McGrath 1977, p. 101). McGrath felt that many of the acclaimed American and British television dramas were ‘still theatre’ rather than television: for McGrath, television has specific qualities that are emphatically not ‘conducive to naturalist drama’, but rather can be harnessed to oppose naturalism (McGrath 1977, p. 101). Resultant tensions began to emerge in the early 1960s, and this is the focus of the next section.

The 1960s – angry young men and dirty old men: Hoggart on television This section explores television’s engagement with social realist discourse in the years immediately following the literary, theatrical and cinematic ‘New Waves’ and the publication of Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957). Hoggart is a key reference: his book influenced programme makers, and they operated within broadcasting policy that Hoggart helped to shape. The results are manifested in a range of techniques and genres, including situation comedy, documentary, and – the section’s main focal points – authored single drama and soap opera. The varying attitudes of these programmes to social realist strategies, from allegiance to opposition, facilitate a consideration of television’s part in wider debates such as inhere in distinctions between naturalism and alternative modes. The Pilkington Committee illustrates broadcasting committees’ ability to shape television’s scope. Pilkington was established in 1960 to consider who should be allocated the new third channel, which ultimately became BBC2. However, the Pilkington report of 1962 also provided a forceful ‘language of values’ (Caughie 2000a, pp. 78–9). Resemblances between the report and The Uses of Literacy are unsurprising, given that Richard Hoggart was a key member of the Pilkington Committee. In particular, The Uses of Literacy’s anxieties about the effect of commercialism


upon traditional culture were articulated through forceful criticism of ITV for not fulfilling its public service obligations as required by the 1954 Television Act, and in a belief that ‘television is and will be a main factor in influencing the values and moral standards of our society’ (Crisell 2002, pp. 116–17). Between the book and the report’s publication, Hoggart asked, ‘What has happened to the old BBC ideal that the invention of television would make it possible to reunite our splintered modern society by giving it a common cultural background?’ (Sydney-Smith 2002, p. 155) This occurred in the speech ‘The Uses of Television’, whose title was ‘indicative of Hoggart’s belief that a culture of literacy would save television’ (ibid.). The Pilkington report described as ‘patronising and arrogant’ commercial TV’s claim to ‘give the public what it wants’ when its sense of a ‘mass audience’ underestimated audience complexity (McDonnell 1991, p. 42). The report claimed television had a ‘burden of responsibility’ in the dissemination of ‘information, education and entertainment’: it was essential to cover ‘the widest possible range of subject matter’, spanning ‘the whole scope and variety of human awareness and experience’ (Caughie 2000a, pp. 80–1). As a result, Hoggart’s ‘concern with working-class culture’ found ‘a new home and a mass audience’, but Pilkington’s influence went deeper (Lacey 1995, p. 76). The report ‘gave a licence to controversy’, an ‘invitation to test values’: if broadcasting was to be serious, it ‘must be challenging, controversial, and even transgressive’ (Caughie 2000a, p. 85). The 1960s in particular saw ITV and the expanding BBC both produce challenging work in a cultural climate that was very much ‘sympathetic to realist, socially critical drama’ (Lovell 1984, p. 27). That drama would be made by key realist practitioners such as producer Tony Garnett, director Alan Clarke and writer Trevor Griffiths, who had all been born into working-class backgrounds in the mid1930s and experienced educational mobility as a result of the 1944 Butler Act. Although it produced ‘the first working-class generation to attend university in any numbers’, for Garnett the class separation inherent in the Eleven Plus constituted ‘class villainy’ which ‘put the silver spoon in my mouth’ (Garnett 2000, p. 12). Hoggart documented how the ‘working-class boy who goes through the process of further education by scholarships finds himself chafing against his environment during adolescence. He is at the friction point of two cultures’ (Hoggart 1957, p. 242). Unsurprisingly, Garnett recalled that ‘Hoggart had influenced us all with The Uses of Literacy’ (Garnett 2000, p. 11), while Dennis Potter felt that ‘Hoggart’s name had become “something


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of an incantation” in undergraduate left-wing circles’ and described Hoggart and Raymond Williams as his ‘intellectual mentors’, according to Roger Smith (Carpenter 1998, pp. 58–9). Potter’s early career certainly shows Hoggart’s influence. Potter’s media appearances, which promoted his authorial vision, traded on autobiography (which his work problematized), from his psoriatic arthropathy to class mobility. Potter left his working-class background in the Forest of Dean to study at New College, Oxford in the late 1950s, and his early work explored his transit in Hoggartian terms. In the New Statesman in May 1958, Potter wrote about how working class undergraduates ‘cannot stomach the two languages that divide up the year, the torn loyalties and perpetual adjustments, the huge chasm between the classes’ (Potter 1958, p. 562). Potter developed this in a 1958 interview on the BBC programme Does Class Matter? in which he mentioned his father communicating with ‘contempt’, prompting the real-life headline ‘Miner’s Son at Oxford Ashamed of Home’ (Cook 1998, p. 12). Hoggart’s description of how ‘the older, more narrow but also more genuine class culture is being eroded in favour of the mass opinion, the mass recreational product and the generalised emotional response’ (Hoggart 1957, p. 203), encapsulated in phrases like ‘shiny barbarism’ (ibid., p. 285), was manifest in New Wave ‘anxiety about traditional forms of working-class culture’ and ‘the destabilising effects of newer forms of mass leisure’ (Lacey 1995, pp. 186–7). In Potter’s case, these divisions and animosities were thematized in his book The Glittering Coffin (1960) and documentary Between Two Rivers (BBC, 3 June 1960). In Between Two Rivers, whose title refers doubly to the location of the Forest of Dean between the rivers Severn and Wye, and the social worlds Potter must bridge, Potter discussed ‘the decline of working-class culture in the Forest, in the face of post-war social change and the rise of a consumer society’ (Cook 1998, p. 14). Such changes included the ‘juke-box boys’, who were ‘listening in harshly lighted milk-bars to the nickelodeons’ (Hoggart 1957, p. 203). The ‘impressionistic rendering of the Forest and its people’ achieved by Denis Mitchell’s use of ‘editing to counterpoint the thoughts of local people on the soundtrack with carefully selected images of Forest coal-mines, working men’s clubs and pubs’, is interrupted by Potter, whose voice-over critiques one interviewee in terms of a ‘status-ridden society’ (Cook 1998, p. 14). The resultant description of escaping the ‘drab and untidy’ area for a ‘more fertile and richer world’ was controversial. Potter felt that the ‘reality’ of ‘documentaries and current affairs could paradoxically conceal the truth’,


and he turned to non-naturalistic forms that would ‘draw the audience’s attention to the artifice of television’ (ibid., pp. 15–16). These multiple concerns are sharply focused in Potter’s drama Stand Up Nigel Barton (1965), about a miner’s son studying at Oxford. Like Potter, Barton too appears in a television interview in which he describes being caught ‘between two utterly different worlds’, and how he could feel his father ‘watching me like a hawk’: ‘It’s a tightrope between two worlds and I’m walking it.’ This upsets the father, who is worried about his workmates’ reactions. The father’s frustrated literalizing of metaphors (‘Here comes the bloody hawk, they’ll say! With his son on a tightrope!’) emphasizes that education makes Barton an outsider. Barton’s situation echoes the depiction of characters ‘dislocated from their origins’ by education which means they are rarely representative of class experience in the period (Lacey 1995, p. 79). However, Potter’s exploration of these issues foregrounds performance and authorship. Barton explains his interview’s betrayal of his family as his ‘acting it up a bit, over-dramatizing’ because he ‘wouldn’t mind a job on the old telly’. Given that the BBC offered Potter work because of his Does Class Matter? appearance, it seems that ‘the quality of Potter’s performance’ did indeed gain him ‘a job on the old telly’ (Cook 1998, p. 12). The play’s structure invites consideration of how the impulses discussed by Hoggart may have motivated what came to be seen as class betrayal – Barton’s present-tense at home and Oxford is intercut with scenes from his childhood. However, this too is rooted in performance and subjective creation rather than objective report. Barton’s performances at the Oxford Union and on television are related to his childhood storytelling, when he blames Georgie Pringle for an act of vandalism Barton committed and watches as others corroborate his untrue story. Barton was unpopular at school because of his intelligence. In the present, Pringle’s stand-up comedy attack on students is related to Barton’s Oxford Union speech about his background. Potter, therefore, ‘seeks to implicate this “working-class hero” as a self-publicising fraud who is a traitor to his class’, a ‘class comic’ with puns operating on ‘class’ (school, social class, breeding) and ‘standing up’ (childhood orders to obey, acting on principle, stand-up comedy) (ibid., p. 35). The play’s style signposts the subjectivity of the flashbacks: for instance, at Oxford, Barton sticks his tongue out at the camera via his shaving mirror; a mix replaces him in the frame with his childhood teacher telling us (repeating an earlier sequence) that ‘clever children from common homes like his have to be, shall I say, separated from their backgrounds. I say nothing controversial’. In profile, Barton begins to


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repeat his earlier statement (‘I remember, I remember the school where I was born’) but breaks off, turns to the camera and says, with excessive emphasis, ‘torn’. In a wide-shot, Barton sits alone at his desk but (due to a cut) is then seen with the rest of his class. All the children are played by adult actors, underlining that childhood formed him but also that these flashbacks are the adult Barton’s subjective memories: the ‘highly fluid structure’ is ‘governed less by narrative chronology than associative psychological connections’ (ibid., p. 40). This structure results in a characteristic Potter memory play, but in the context of the New Wave/Hoggart era adds an extra layer. As Caughie argues, the British New Wave films were ‘made from outside the class which they represented’, lending the working class ‘the romance of the Other’ (Caughie 2000a, p. 85). This, however, is in contrast to television drama, which more firmly ‘rooted itself in a particular experience of class from the inside’. This partly explains why so many dramas ‘took as their theme the dislocations of class mobility’ (ibid). Such divisions are of course not always so clear-cut. Alan Lovell noted the Hoggartian ‘structure of feeling’ of A Taste of Honey, an example of how New Wave films took as their ‘point of enunciation’ a view of ‘someone deeply implicated in and familiar with what is being observed: someone who has left that life behind, yet with a considerable sense of loss in moving through the educational system’, using ‘the knowledge of the insider combined with the distance achieved by the move outside and beyond’ (Lovell 1990, p. 370). As Cook observed, although practitioners’ attempts to ‘question received notions of the real, particularly those of habituated TV naturalism’ are often associated with the ‘documentary realism’ of Ken Loach, Potter’s particular ‘non-naturalism’ or ‘psychological expressionism’ is also very much part of this process. Potter’s ‘nonnaturalistic’ techniques are less ‘an evasion of the real’ than ‘an alternative means of “expressing” reality’ (Cook 1998, p. 30). Cook relates this to Williams’s discussion of how certain literary texts between 1890 and 1920 that tried to ‘show the physical world as a dynamic rather than a merely passive and determining environment’, were ‘described as moves beyond realism and naturalism’, but were arguably attempting rather ‘to realise more deeply’ the ‘original impulses of the realist and naturalist movements’ (Williams 1977/78, p. 2). The ‘desire to experiment’, which Laura Mulvey sees as ‘a thread running through the history of British television’, is keenly debated in this period, from the Langham Group to Studio 4 (Mulvey 2007, p. 1). Potter joined the debate on ‘non-naturalism’ generated by writer


Troy Kennedy Martin’s ‘Nats Go Home’ article of 1964. Kennedy Martin attacked naturalism and called for a new televisual grammar, describing television naturalism as a ‘makeshift bastard born of the theatre and photographed with film techniques’, which because it ‘evolved from a theatre of dialogue’ restricted directors who were ‘forced into photographing faces talking and faces reacting’ and would ‘retreat into the neutrality of the two- and three-shot’ (Kennedy Martin 1964, pp. 24–5). A new form of drama should ‘free the structure from natural time’ and ‘exploit the total and absolute objectivity of the television camera’ (ibid. 1964, p. 25). One manifestation of this project was Diary of a Young Man (1964), written by Kennedy Martin (with John McGrath, whose own later Brechtian work sought new forms) and directed by Ken Loach and Peter Duguid. Diary of a Young Man featured narration, ‘montage sequences of still images’, and a ‘degree of experiment and innovation’ amid a ‘collage of different forms’ that engaged with critiques of naturalism (Cooke 2003, pp. 65–6). However, such ‘encounters and transformations’ of realism are also marked in mainstream forms such as soap opera. Early episodes of Coronation Street, for example, addressed ‘class dislocations’ (Caughie 2000a, p. 85) and ‘tapped into the new mode of social realism’ through ‘iconography, character types and storylines’ (Cooke 2003, p. 33). Critics who felt that Stand Up Nigel Barton’s depiction of a working-class character ‘uprooted from his class through education’ had ‘become a media commonplace by 1965’ (Cook 1998, p. 32) had a point: Coronation Street’s Ken Barlow had been engaging with such issues since 1960. Set in an industrial working-class area, Coronation Street focused on ‘everyday life as realised in common-sense speech and philosophy’ and ‘commonsense [. . .] events’ (Dyer 1981, p. 4). But this common sense was also historically specific and private, being ‘of a particular description in a particular moment’ which was marked by Hoggart, who was ‘concerned to “discover” and legitimate a tradition of culture that could authentically be termed “working-class”’ (ibid., pp. 2–4). The ‘truth’ of the representation was ‘guaranteed by being based on personal testimony’ (ibid., p. 4). That testimony came from the programme’s creator, Tony Warren: A fascinating freemasonry, a volume of unwritten rules. These are the driving forces behind life in a working-class street in the North of England. The purpose of [working title] Florizel Street is to examine a community of this nature, and to entertain. (Warren 1969, p. 58)


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Soap opera echoed Hoggart’s concern with ‘a view of class that is essentially anthropological, in which it is primarily the sum of its cultural practices, its shared routines, values and habits, focused at the level of “everyday life”’ (Lacey 1995, p. 75). Various studies have compared the programme’s view of class with Hoggartian structures of feeling. Richard Dyer traced how ‘four aspects of The Uses of Literacy – the emphasis on common sense, the absence of work and politics, the stress on women and the strength of women, and the perspective of nostalgia – inform Coronation Street and indeed come close to defining its fictional world’ (Dyer 1981, p 4). Jordan related the programme to Hoggart’s ‘already wistfully nostalgic view of the industrial working classes of his childhood’, which results in a ‘group-centred, warm-hearted, matriarchal, faintly comical’ view of the social, with a ‘belief in the essential good-heartedness of “ordinary people”’ so marked as to epitomise Joan Rockwell’s argument that ‘the fidelity of Realism is a fidelity to the norms of a society rather than to its actuality’ (Jordan 1981, p. 29). Coronation Street’s earliest episodes, packed with Ena Sharples’ observational but poetically acerbic dialogue, establish this nostalgic domestic focus. If the programme’s strengths included its focus on ‘the role of women’, its weaknesses involved a rose-tinted nostalgia for ‘a selfcontained community that was in reality in the process of disappearing even as it was being established as a fictional TV community’ (Cooke 2003, p. 35). Reinforcing myths of non-metropolitan society ‘where blunt common sense and unsentimental affection raises people above the concerns of industrialisation, or unions, or politics, or consumerism’, Soap-Opera Realism’s conventions included explaining situations by ‘psychological make-up’ or luck, omitting entirely social or political explanations and contexts (Jordan 1981, p. 29). The programme depicted work environments predominantly only when ‘they affect people’s domestic lives’, because the ‘representation of personal relationships is its bedrock and the plot is character-driven’ (Vice 2009, p. 19). These criticisms echo responses to Hoggart’s own text, which described it as ‘more a reflection of rather than a reflection on class and its culture’ that marginalised working-class politics to focus sociologically on class identity at ‘the level of everyday practices and rituals’ (Lacey 1995, pp. 75–7). What is interesting, however, given Jordan’s definition of ‘Soap-Opera Realism’ as a specifically televisual form, is how the features of the continuing serial impact upon, and interact with, social realist discourse. The ‘interweaving of narratives, and of the personal lives of the characters’ in Coronation Street became ‘a distinctive feature of soap


opera’ (Cooke 2003, p. 35). Such techniques would later shape other social realist forms. For Lacey, such serials ‘offered the possibility of solving some of the problems associated with the dominant forms of realism/naturalism’ given the serial’s potential for ‘more fluid narrative structures’ and a lack of ‘closure’ (Lacey 1995, p. 118).3 Hoggart’s sense of ritual finds an echo in soap’s temporal structure and ritualistic transmission patterns. Soap has been described as inherently naturalistic, presenting an ‘unmediated, unprejudiced and complete view of reality’ (Jordan 1981, p. 28).4 The legacy of early practices was strongly felt: Coronation Street’s as-for-live techniques persisted even when live broadcasts were phased out after its first decade. A number of Coronation Street’s early narrative concerns had correlations with the New Wave. University student Ken Barlow clashes with his traditional working-class father as early as the first episode (9 December 1960, written by Tony Warren), displaying embarrassment at domestic details such as the sauce bottle on the table. Like Potter’s Stand Up Nigel Barton, this displays Hoggart’s point that ‘the test of [the scholarship boy’s] real education lies in his ability, by about the age of twenty-five, to smile at his father with his whole face’ (Hoggart 1957, p. 239). In another episode (12 February 1962), neighbour Martha Longhurst says of Ken, ‘I don’t think he likes us. Have you ever noticed the way he smiles and narrows his eyes?’ Other episodes revisiting New Wave themes include a Blackpool trip (16 October 1961, written by Jack Rosenthal) in which Ken displays an anger with the trivial that echoes Hoggart, along with Lindsay Anderson’s O Dreamland and other texts from the period: Masstopia here we come [. . .] they work hard for fifty weeks of the year to save up for this – a fortnight in Blackpool. Chipshops, stink of onions, lights, some imbecile sideshow, the dirty great concrete fairground, and they’re happy – or so they think [. . .] They don’t know any better, they live in dumps like Coronation Street [. . .] People deserve better than this. Sue Vice notes from Valerie’s reply that ‘Ken’s outlook is that of an educated white-collar worker’ who ‘does not value’ his father’s work as postman nor other street residents’ jobs as builder, publican, bus inspector or the ‘service industry jobs’ of the women (Vice 2009, p. 18). Ken considers the New Wave trope of escaping from the ‘limited ambitions and philistine cultural outlook’ of the North to the ‘new freedom’ of London and the South (Lacey 1995, pp. 79–80). In one episode


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(22 November 1961, written by H. V. Kershaw), Ken’s refusal to be a ‘little cog in a big machine’ in white-collar work, and subsequent family arguments, result in Ken contemplating leaving, though only getting as far as a smoke-filled train station before neighbour Christine persuasively argues that ‘it’s not home you leave, it’s people’. Soap’s open-ended narrative form lends these decisions retrospective pathos: the programme’s fiftieth anniversary year found Ken still resident. In an episode that foreshadowed Potter’s work (12 February 1962, written by Robert Holles), the local newspaper quotes Ken’s article for left wing political review Survival. To his neighbours’ fury, Ken describes them as ‘lazy minded, politically ignorant, starved of a real culture and stubbornly prejudiced against any advance in human insight and scientific insight’. Ken’s writing echoes Hoggart: while the British Empire bursts open at the seams the young people collect in shadowy coffee bars to discuss the latest discs. The middle aged are hunched complacently over their television sets and the elderly sit half-starved and shivering in damp terraced boxes [ . . . ] the regulars would still gather in the local pub, swill beer, throw darts, and discuss the usual topics – the quality of the bitter, the prospect of the 3.15 and the latest scandal from their own little corner of our smouldering national compost heap. The episode focuses on Ken’s neighbours’ responses to this. Explaining this situation with recourse to psychological rather than social factors reflects the New Wave’s ‘tendency to reduce social relations to individual characteristics’ (Hill 1986, p. 139), as Ken is either ‘a very nice class of boy’ (Annie Walker), a damn sight ‘too clever’ (Len Fairclough), or someone who ‘hasn’t had the experience of life that we’ve had’ (Albert Tatlock). Elsie Tanner suggests the others are ‘jealous’, while Annie thinks the article is ‘miles above their heads’. Ken’s criticism of those distracted by ‘pretty toys’ like ‘dishwashers and tellies’ clashes with his father’s view that ‘there’s nowt wrong [. . .] with being loyal to your own class’. Intriguingly, we first see Ken and his father together when sharing their bathroom, both in string vests about to shave, similar in their class-evoking habits (unlike Ken’s first-episode discomfort about a sauce bottle). The eventual showdown, in which Len Fairclough punches Ken unconscious in the local pub is an insider-outsider clash redolent of New Wave discourses: Len describes this ‘walking flaming dictionary’ as ‘the angry young man’. The idea of New Wave discourse as cultural tourism


is raised in subsequent episodes, when Ken’s article attracts sightseers to the street. This chapter’s focus on drama is necessary, but it is important to also note that other genres made a vital contribution to social realist discourse and the spirit of challenge in 1960s television. For instance, many episodes of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson’s Steptoe and Son (1962–74) invoked, and occasionally critiqued, New Wave tropes. The contemporary rhetoric of social mobility, generational tensions, the interrelationship of domestic and work spaces (symbolized in the Steptoes’ junkyard home/premises) and the stressing of practical limitations on narratives of escape are explored through the experiences of autodidactic rag-andbone man Harold and his traditionalist father, ‘dirty old man’ Albert. Its one-off pilot was as tough as much single drama, but by the early 1970s Raymond Williams, then a television reviewer, worried that the series form ‘prevents any full working-through’ (Williams 1989, p. 124). Self-contained episodes require a weekly return to the status quo, a narrative structure that has been described as ‘circular’, allowing ‘little room for progression’ in comparison with single drama or soap, prompting accusations that it is ‘a conservative form’ (Bowes 1990, p. 129). Coronation Street and Steptoe and Son demonstrate that series should not be neglected as an outlet for serious social realist engagement. However, it would be practitioners working in drama-documentary and single drama who were to emphasize the importance of finding a more progressive form.

Days of Hope: defining radical realism in the 1970s Play strands like Armchair Theatre, The Wednesday Play and Play for Today provided a space for original contemporary dramas, encouraging personal expression, aesthetic experimentation or political radicalism. Play for Today is a particularly useful case study because its ‘dominant aesthetic’ is often ‘perceived to be that of social realism’ (Cooke 2003, p. 95). However, its plays included many genres, styles and techniques, many of which were dominated by studio recording (the number of slots for all-filmed plays were limited), and naturalism. Its dramas tackled various social concerns and experiences, from Glasgow sectarianism in Peter McDougall’s Just Another Saturday (1975) to British-Jewish experience in Jack Rosenthal’s comic-realist Bar Mitzvah Boy (1976) and Black British experience in Horace Ové’s A Hole in Babylon (1979). The following discussion restricts itself to two forms of realist filmed plays deriving from Play For Today: those in a cinematic lineage (British New Wave,


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Czech social cinema, Italian neo-realism) combining observation and aestheticism, and radical drama-documentaries such as Ken Loach and Jim Allen’s The Big Flame (1969) which became ‘embroiled in a debate among left-wing critics about transparency, objectivity and realism, and the latter’s efficacy in promoting political activism’ (Leigh 2002, pp. 96–7).5 The extension of location filming was as valued in television as it was elsewhere. The movement was ‘out of the drawing-rooms’ and it made the ‘particular aesthetic and cultural mix’ associated with ‘Northern working-class realism’ seem like ‘a revolution in postwar British culture’ (Caughie 2000a, p. 95), paralleling realist cinema’s efforts to leave behind what VF Perkins called ‘the “phoney” conventions of character and place characteristic of British studio procedure’ (Taylor 2006, p. 17). In television, ‘the electronic studio with its historical dependence on the spoken word and a more theatrical form of naturalism’ was joined by ‘a new realism that was closer to cinema than the theatre’ (Cooke 2003, p. 77). This does not mean that television must lose its specificity and become like cinema to be social realist, however. Television was to generate its own distinctive practices. When Loach sought a form for Up the Junction (1965), writer Nell Dunn’s collage of observed experiences among working-class women in Clapham, the precedent set as it ‘breached the walls of the television studio’ would ‘change the nature of TV drama’ (ibid., p. 70). Its developments were hard-earned: the BBC resisted Loach’s use of 16mm stock in drama because it was seen as a stock for ‘news, current affairs and documentaries’, that is as inferior to 35mm stock (Hayward 2004, p. 60). Loach in consequence circumvented BBC rules about shooting at least 10 per cent of dramas in the studio on video, by shooting studio scenes in quasi-documentary style and editing on the 16mm back-up print, to match the look to the location footage. Social realism’s concern with observing everyday detail, creating as Jordan called it ‘a narrative of personal events’ and spending ‘time at the expense of the characters’ often results in narratives that resist conventional structure. Many filmed dramas between the 1960s and 1980s share the neo-realist belief, as explained by André Bazin, that cinema should capture the ‘dailiness’ of life through narrative that ‘unfolds on the level of pure accident’ (Bazin 1967, pp. 58–9), respecting the ‘phenomenological integrity’ of events rather than using characters as functionaries of narrative causality (ibid., p. 52). Given that, as Loach said of Up the Junction, ‘when you put together incidents and anecdotes from people’s lives, they do add up to a set of experiences that indicate


the way they live and why they live that way’ (Fuller 1998, p. 13), writers like Alan Plater resisted ‘conventional narrative’ by prioritising ‘people being’ themselves over ‘people doing’ or ‘inventing stuff to happen to people’ (Rolinson 2007, p. 31).6 In an example of dailiness manifested in repetition and ritual, Mike Leigh’s television debut Hard Labour (1973) depicted Mrs Thornley’s unceasing domestic duties as a char, mother and wife (in effect unpaid char). Garry Watson noted that ‘nothing much occurs in the way of external action’, but if this is undramatic (the style shares the ‘undemonstrative’ quality that Watson notes of Mrs Thornley) there are dramatic elements beneath the surface, including a ‘spiritual crisis’ (Watson 2004, p. 46). Raymond Carney and Leonard Quart argue that Hard Labour’s ‘sensory experiences’, which include Mr. Thornley’s hairy back which his wife rubs to alleviate rheumatism, ‘half-eaten food’, scraping silverware and ‘burps, belches, groans, and grunts’ (Carney and Quart 2000, p. 54), are a reaction against the ‘cinematic idealization’ by which ‘Hollywood film systematically dephysicalizes experience’ (ibid., p. 52). As I have noted elsewhere, Watson related Leigh’s early work to Andrew Klevan’s readings of Robert Bresson, Milos Forman, Yasujiro Ozu and Eric Rohmer as filmmakers who ‘disclose’ rather than ‘transform’ the ‘everyday’, depicting ‘a range of life experiences’ neglected by conventional cinema, ‘based around the routine or repetitive, the apparently banal or mundane, and the uneventful’ (Watson 2004, p. 19, cited in Rolinson 2010, p. 173). The style of rigorous art directors like Bresson and Ozu informs some of these films. In the repetition of static frames, for example, in which the movement comes from characters within the frame, in elliptical narratives downplaying causality, and the use of confining frames that isolate hands and feet working at repetitive tasks, and in unadorned performances indicative of submerged articulacy. In the 1970s, director Alan Clarke applied such techniques to themes of alienation, repetition and institutionalisation in topics including Sandhurst military training, prison life, incest and borstal brutality. Similarly, Czech social cinema influenced the (in its turn influential) placid style of Ken Loach, which he described as a ‘reflective, observed, sympathetically lit style of photography’ (Fuller 1998, pp. 38–41). Some of these plays use space in a way that engages with the rhetoric of realist cinema such as the British New Wave, for instance when the aforementioned elements of style are applied to industrial locations. For example, Stephen Frears’ direction of Sunset Across the Bay (1975) (from Alan Bennett’s script about a retired couple’s relocation from Leeds to


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Morecambe) includes highly formal extreme long shots. When these depict Dad walking home from his last day of work, the juxtaposition of visual style with Dad’s voice-over, recalling events from his working life, results in a much more melancholic journey than those of New Wave protagonists such as Arthur Seaton, whose assertions of masculinity are often depicted via more subjective and mobile techniques. Small in the frame, Dad enters and leaves shots that are composed in horizontal quarters or thirds. This establishes a contrast with the ‘open, sparse frames’ of sky-dominated landscapes he walks in Morecambe, just as retirement ‘destabilises [. . .] comfortable routine’ (McKechnie 2007, p. 60) and leaves the characters struggling to adapt to a life without work. If there is a play of nostalgia here, it is a variation on the nostalgia for a changing way of life that characterizes Hoggartian social realism. The bulldozing of slum housing in the Leeds of Sunset Across the Bay and the Hull of Land of Green Ginger (1974) reflects real alterations. Agreeing with Jane Jacobs’ writing on urban planning, the writer of the latter play, Alan Plater, argued that the enforced relocation of communities had negative effects and that there was a need for ‘walkable streets’ (Rolinson 2007, p. 296). Both plays juxtapose traditional community with comfortable but unattractive alternatives, where bulldozed properties serve as metaphors for fragmented communities, but also as breaches in the topography of social realism, a trope followed through in more radical terms in Alan Clarke’s Road (1987). If Coronation Street demonstrated the ‘absence of work and politics’, social realist plays often foregrounded their presence (Dyer 1981, p. 4). In Leeds – United! (1974) for example, workplace politics are central to the play’s female protagonists (some of whom are played by future Street actresses). Such plays were not alone in presenting a ‘sympathetic portrayal of unionised factory life’ (Wagg 1998, p. 9): a mainstream sitcom such as Ronald Wolfe and Ronald Chesney’s The Rag Trade (BBC 1963–65, ITV 1977) could too. That series’ female sweatshop workers are represented by Paddy, whose ‘Everybody out!’ catchphrase endeared affection as she voiced her identity as ‘a militant on behalf of her class, rather than herself’ (ibid.). The Rag Trade’s sitcom format provided (playful) restoration of the status quo, whereas Leeds – United!, despite writer Colin Welland’s wit and depiction of hope, provided damning closure in its depiction of the alleged betrayal by unions of the 1970 Leeds clothing workers’ strike for gender-equal pay. In a post-transmission discussion programme In Vision – a regular point of so-called balance for controversial material and a critically neglected forum for the popular interrogation of concepts such as social


realism, Leeds – United!’s ambitious large-scale reconstructions were compared with Look North news footage of the real incidents the play reconstructed. In Vision’s findings were positive, but posed questions to those who experienced the real events here dramatized – ‘How near to the facts was it? [. . .] Did you recognize yourself?’ – which suggested a view of social realism that frustrated some critics. Potter found it ‘downright insulting’ that In Vision was ‘discussing not the relevance, not the discoveries, not the insights of the play but its mere documentary “accuracy”’ (Potter 1974, p. 671). Indeed, although Leeds – United! intercuts footage of sweatshop conditions with workers’ testimony about these conditions, director Roy Battersby’s use of black-and-white film was a choice made less for documentary veracity than for aesthetic reasons. Producer Kenith Trodd noted cinematic influences such as Eisenstein, Pontecorvo and Pabst ‘which in aspiration [ . . . ] we wanted to relate more closely than many current models’ (In Vision). The play’s visual scope is established in its opening scene, a developing crane shot which follows a woman worker along noirishly-lit early-morning streets while a voice-over details her limited new contract. The texts discussed so far invite comparisons with the criticisms of the aestheticization of experience that were made of realist cinema, from the British New Wave to Humphrey Jennings’s poetic documentaries. For instance, while on the one hand the Hull filming of Land of Green Ginger demonstrated the creative vitality of BBC English Regions Drama’s reflection of the regions in national slots, The Times worried that ‘this was not so much a play as a montage of Hull [ . . . ] The setting was evidently more important than the plot’, while the Evening News wondered even more pointedly whether ‘getting the TV cameras out on full-scale location’ was ‘in danger of becoming a substitute for a good play’ (cited in Rolinson 2007, p. 293). Elsewhere, I have related these concerns to debates amongst VF Perkins and the Movie tradition, Andrew Higson and John Hill, regarding the functions served by locations in British New Wave films (ibid., p. 293). These debates disputed the ability of locations to ‘connect their characters effectively with their environments’, and considered the tensions arising between the needs to ‘authenticate the fiction by being easily read as real historical places’ and form a space for interesting narrative action (Taylor 2006, pp. 14–17). The Movie criticism of the ‘obtrusiveness’ of the display of place, which Higson later defined as ‘surface realism’ concerned with ‘iconography’, related that inability to penetrate the surface to ‘a correspondence between the form of a film and its actual content’ (ibid., p. 18). Such criticisms of neo-realist and New Wave filmmakers therefore posit the idea of a type of realism that


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could delve beneath the surface, equally radical in content and form, and several drama-documentaries would focalize this theoretical debate. Like television plays, drama-documentary has engaged with ways of suggesting ‘an unmediated, unprejudiced and complete view of reality’ (Jordan 1981, p. 28). Accordingly, its narrative and technical artistry has also been underestimated as art, and critiqued as deceptive. Drama-documentary is often accused of duping viewers by blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction – based on the problematic assumption that documentary is an objective form lacking the dramatic features of narrative, performance and subjectivity that would corrupt it. But Paget notes critics who consider drama-documentary to fail as drama because its ‘journalistic values’ and adherence to legal issues in depicting real situations override ‘dramatic values’ and creative invention (Paget 1998a, p. 198). For reasons of space, while we must not entirely elide the distinctions made by Caughie between drama-documentary types – ‘documentary drama’ (a dramatic fiction whose factual value resides in detailed research and quasi-documentary visuals), and ‘dramatised documentary’ (in which documentary processes are uppermost, but which also feature dramatization) – the following discussion will focus on the ‘documentary drama’ type (Caughie, 1980). Drama-documentary nevertheless contains hugely varied practices, from the dialectical force of Peter Watkins’ Culloden (1964) and banned nuclear piece The War Game (1965) to the Leslie Woodhead/Granada/World in Action tradition of journalism given a wider social reach in drama such as Who Bombed Birmingham? (1990) (a continuation of World in Action’s investigation into the Birmingham Six’s conviction). Despite being called a ‘bastard form’, drama-documentary has a ‘distinctive aesthetic’ and ‘particular dynamics of narrative’ that bear on discussions of televisual social realism (Corner 1996, p. 31). I will focus on the techniques associated with director Ken Loach, producer Tony Garnett and writer Jim Allen. Their productions, as a team and separately, are landmarks of drama-documentary and television social realism. These drama-documentaries are characterized by ‘a pronounced social critique [ . . . ] usually focused through “underdog” protagonists; filming techniques that place a premium on immediacy (from which authenticity can be inferred); and acting styles that stressed the underplayed and improvisational’ (Paget 1998a, p. 158). Cathy Come Home (1966) presented writer Jeremy Sandford’s detailed research as scripted drama, with actors playing fictional characters whose slide into homelessness delivered an emotional impact with stylistic immediacy. Cathy and Reg’s micro-story is located within the macro-story of


the social problem by voice-overs of real-life testimony and statistics (features only of Loach’s earlier work). Fiction is integrated with documentary references and factual content via real audio testimony playing over images of actors in the social environment, or shots of bystanders unconnected to the narrative, as in the devastating scene in which social workers take Cathy’s children from her in a train station. This scene begins with long-distance cameras of which real bystanders are unaware. The children’s removal is filmed with markers of reactive documentary style (the alteration of shot size, reframing, zooming and refocusing, panning, and apparently accidental camera movements and compositions, including shots in which our view is restricted). Dramadocumentary techniques can therefore be said to have ‘caught a real incident and filmed it within the limitations which such filming entails’, replacing the ‘composure of mise-en-scène’ (Corner 1996, p. 99) with the ‘rhetoric of the “unplanned” or “unpremeditated” shot – the camera surprised by the action’ as part of an ‘aesthetic of immediacy’ (Caughie 1980, p. 28). Other devices aiding Loachian immediacy include shooting in continuity order, withholding completed scripts, and valuing ‘actors who could pretend not to be actors, who could sound unrehearsed’: indeed, Cathy’s experiences with officials demonstrate a ‘reversal’ of norms in performance whereby ‘traditional skills of impersonation came to mean insincerity, and not quite knowing your lines meant you were speaking the truth’ (Caughie 2000b, pp. 165–6). Up the Junction and Cathy Come Home inaugurated what Cooke calls a ‘progressive, social realist tradition’ which can be traced through numerous works such as Jeremy Sandford and Ted Kotcheff’s Edna, the Inebriate Woman (1971), Roy Minton and Alan Clarke’s Scum (1977) and Jim Allen and Roland Joffé’s The Spongers (1978) (Cooke 2003, p. 95). The Spongers is an acclaimed example. Allen and Joffé researched care provisions and local government, observed the withdrawal of mentally-handicapped children from a home, and produced a drama on the effects of welfare cuts on the poor and disabled which was both compelling human tragedy and urgent social report. Its refusal of stereotypes of the poor as cheats or parasites is underlined by the play’s opening scenes: Pauline’s family being interrupted by a bailiff is juxtaposed with preparations for Jubilee celebrations outside, where hoardings of the Queen and Prince Philip appear. Over those Royal images, ‘The Spongers’ title frame is superimposed, a subversive touch added after BBC1’s controller had approved the play. Its social realist value lies in its presentation of the human impact of politics, both on those enforcing the system and on families such as Pauline’s, whose suffering as a result of welfare cuts and


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convoluted bureaucracy culminates in a resolution that is as tragic as the ‘because we were too many’ scene in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. Deborah Knight related this period’s ‘telenaturalism’ to Émile Zola’s literary naturalism: Like the experimental scientist, the naturalist does not set out merely to record or to document some aspect of the observed world; instead, in an attempt to explain what she has observed, the naturalist records in controlled conditions [ . . . ] something she has previously observed in an actual environment. (Knight 1997, p. 61) Directors positioned themselves as observers and presented characters in debilitating environments, creating a ‘naturalistic perspective’ and asking us ‘to recognize that, given the social and cultural contexts in which these characters act, things could scarcely have been otherwise’ (ibid., pp. 76–7). The following will consider complaints lodged against these methods by film critics, television executives and theorists. Sight and Sound criticised Riff-Raff (1990) on the basis that it demonstrated Loach’s ‘confusion’ of realism (a ‘literary/dramatic convention’) with real life (‘what you see is how it is’) (Wilson 1991, p. 61). The reviewer doubted that ‘television audiences, accustomed to seeing through the “realist” masks of Coronation Street or EastEnders’ would be ‘seduced’ by the film’s ‘unfocused naturalism’ (ibid.). Rather than trying to dupe viewers into accepting that dramatic events were real, however, Loach claimed he simply could not make his films in a wholly documentary style, and they were made as fiction films. Therefore, Loach said that ‘I shoot a scene from two or three angles’, and ‘repeat the action for each set-up’, so that he ‘can cut it together’, but uses ‘little tricks of the trade’ so that it might ‘look as though it is happening for the first time’ (Hill 1997, p. 169). As Bazin stated of neo-realism, ‘realism in art can only be achieved in one way – through artifice’ (Bazin 1971, p. 26). Rather than an absence of style, these techniques of realism were part of the highly personal style and shared values of Loach, Clarke and their contemporaries. The polarized political climate which gave much television social realism its urgency in the 1970s also narrowed institutional support, with bans and interventions that were blamed, not always convincingly, on drama-documentary’s discourses of immediacy. In 1969 the BBC warned that ‘well-acted dramas’ on ‘real-life material’ like Cathy Come Home and Tony Parker’s Mrs Lawrence Will Look After It (1969) troubled viewers’


ability to rely on ‘conventions’ to ‘distinguish’ fact from fiction (Anon. 1969, p. 4). In a joint reply, Garnett, Trodd, Loach and others argued that because accusations of duping were not made against the fictional Alf Garnett regarding his attending real football matches, ‘this is an argument about content, not about form’. They argued that broadcasters, while enjoying the occasional easily manageable controversy for preserving their post-Pilkington ‘liberal and independent image’, were all too ready to ‘censor or ban’ programmes on ‘social and political attitudes not acceptable to us’ (Garnett et al. 1969, p. 2). The BBC subsequently banned Scum, a violent account of abuses in borstals, and the BBC’s stated reasons suggest a resistance to techniques also vital to social realist discourses: naturalistic narratives compressing real events, a style that they found too convincing in its immediacy, and tough social commentary taking positions that lacked the balance which they saw as inherent in factual programmes (although factual programme makers disagreed).7 The single play’s presentation of radical work to mass audiences energized consideration of its impact. Trodd summed up the ‘heady fantasy’ of programme makers through reference to Loach and Allen’s The Big Flame as a ‘powerful “what if” parable about workers’ occupation’ which, because it was ‘seen by a vast unfragmented audience on Wednesday night’, might produce ‘a walkout around the country by Thursday morning’ (Trodd 1999, p. 16). The ‘Loach/Garnett innovation of taking television drama out onto the streets and making it look like news footage’ had been seen as a new development, and allied to theories about forms of realism that could effect political or economic change, their work moved to ‘the forefront of debates’ on political form (Cooke 2003, p. 76). Loach and Allen’s The Big Flame, The Rank and File (1971) and Days of Hope (1975) depicted working people in industrial disputes who were betrayed by their own union leaders or Labour Party, revealing ongoing political struggles and how, in Loach’s words, ‘England is founded on a violent past’ and ‘the forceful suppression of dissent’ (Lyndon 1975, p. 66). Days of Hope comprised four feature-length films, each of which involved a major historical event: wartime conscription in 1916, the miners’ strike of 1921, the short-lived first Labour government of 1924 and the General Strike of 1926. In these films Loach attempted to show how ‘the lives of individual characters [ . . . ] fitted into the larger canvas of events’ (ibid.). Those events shape the political consciousness its characters develop, from mainstream Labour to Communism, as the series explored, according to producer Garnett, the Labour movement’s


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debates about ‘the proper and most effective way of changing society – whether through Parliament or by revolution’ (ibid., p. 69). However, in theoretical debates on progressive form in the film journal Screen Loach and Garnett’s approach was itself queried as the proper and most effective way of producing change, and Days of Hope was particularly critiqued for adopting the bourgeois form of costume drama and the ‘closed’ form of the Classic Realist Text (Cooke 2003, p. 102). Colin MacCabe’s ‘Realism and the cinema: notes on some Brechtian theses’ (1974) delineated a position on progressive form which, according to Colin McArthur in ‘Days of Hope’ (1975/6), stopped Screen from ‘contributing to public debates about television programmes like Days of Hope which have acquired political importance as events’ (Caughie 2000a, p. 107). McArthur’s claims for Days of Hope’s progressiveness were critiqued in MacCabe’s ‘Days of Hope: a response to Colin McArthur’ (1976). Raymond Williams’s ‘A Lecture on Realism’ (1977) provided the debate with context, relating The Big Flame to a literary history of realism and naturalism. Away from Screen, McArthur contributed the useful monograph Television and History (1978). In related pieces, Caughie explored ‘Progressive Television and Drama Documentary’ (1980) in Screen while Sight and Sound published practitioner John McGrath’s lecture ‘TV Drama: The Case Against Naturalism’ (1977), lamenting television’s failure to answer former colleague Kennedy Martin’s call for non-naturalistic form. The ideological distinction between form and content dominated the debate. Authored drama – from Days of Hope and Scum to Law and Order (1978), GF Newman and Les Blair’s mini-series attacking police and judicial corruption – was more politically radical than the British New Wave. Defining an ‘aesthetics of immediacy’, Caughie noted that drama-documentary discourses involve ‘systems of mediation (handheld camera, loss of focus, awkward framing) so visible as to become immediate, apparently unrehearsed, and therefore authentic’, in contrast to the ‘classic paradox’ of the ‘dramatic look’ of conventional screen grammar, which ‘creates its “reality effect” by a process of mediation so conventionalized as to become invisible’ (Caughie 1980, p. 28). However, when Loach’s work entered the debate, MacCabe argued that it too was less progressive in its form than in its subject matter. Within realism’s conventions it is easier to show poverty than to show ‘how such poverty is the effect of a particular economic system or socially structured pattern of inequality’ (Hill 1986, p. 60). Days of Hope was contentious because its techniques “‘naturalized” the events depicted’ (Cooke 2003, p. 100); Loach’s work was related to naturalism


‘as a description of character formed by environment’ which could be ‘perceived as a passive form’ in which people were trapped ‘with no possibility of changing their social lot’ (Cook 1998, p. 27). Lacking Brechtian self-consciousness, Loach’s style was avowedly political, but was just ‘not political in the right sort of way’ (Knight 1997, p. 70). In MacCabe’s formulation, ‘radical political intentions’ were undermined when presented in a ‘Classic Realist Text’ (which Cathy Come Home was as much as was The Sound of Music or Middlemarch). This undermining occurs by virtue of ‘the illusion of transparency, narrative closure, a concentration on individual drama and, therefore, an inability to deal with the complexities and contradictions of a world in which ideological forces determine lives’ (Leigh 2002, pp. 13–14). In film, the camera, like ‘author-less’ third-person prose, ‘shows us what happens – it tells the truth against which we can measure the discourses’: therefore, classic realism’s ‘epistemology’ is ‘empirical’, as ‘it is basically through observation that the world is to be “revealed” and understood’ because ‘the unquestioned nature of the narrative discourses entails that the only problem that reality poses is to go and look and see what Things there are’ (MacCabe cited in Hill 1986, pp. 59–60). For Caughie, there is a ‘self-confirming discourse of truth’ at work in cinema’s own hierarchised discourses (Caughie 2000a, pp. 111–12). These hierarchised discourses include a ‘dramatic look’ in which spectators see the world through a character’s point of view (this is an active look ‘cut into the narrative space’ and with which characters both ‘look and are looked at’, gaining ‘reversibility’); by contrast, the ‘documentary gaze’ renders the object ‘passive’, a document gazed at (ibid). In Days of Hope, this gaze and its denial of point of view and reversibility produce a ‘self-authenticating discourse of truth’ whereby the integration of drama and documentary discourses ‘can only be achieved by failing to dramatize the class which is supposed to be becoming the subject of its own history’ (ibid., pp. 112–13). Instead, for MacCabe, radical filmmaking must engage with ‘contradiction’, the ‘motor which drives history’. The ‘revolutionary subject’ must ‘experience itself as being in contradiction, incomplete, out of balance, in order that the next step must be taken to progress towards a new position’ (ibid., p. 105). The classic realist text can show ‘the contradiction between the dominant discourse of the text and the dominant ideological discourse of the time’ (MacCabe 1974, p. 16) – MacCabe cites Days of Hope’s sympathetic presentation of the General Strike – but it cannot progressively probe contradiction because its ‘secure equilibrium’ places us in a position of superior knowledge’ (Caughie 2000a,


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pp. 105–6). McArthur cited a sequence from Days of Hope, in which a mine-owner talks about ‘non-violent social democracy’ while in the background ‘the soldiers who have been brought in to quell any disturbance are engaged in violent bayonet practice’ (ibid., p. 107), and was ‘not sure how such a scene fails to handle contradiction in MacCabe’s terms’ (McArthur 1975/76, p. 143). MacCabe responded that there was ‘a contradiction between what the mine-owner says and what the picture shows’ but that ‘is exactly the classic realist form which privileges the image against the word to reveal that what the mine-owner says is false’, presenting ‘a contradiction which it has already resolved’ rather than ‘a contradiction which remains unresolved and is thus left for the reader to resolve (MacCabe 1976, p. 100). According to this critique, ‘McArthur looks simply for contradiction in the text’ whereas for progressive form ‘we must look at how contradiction is produced in the audience’ (ibid). MacCabe’s formulation has been criticised as ‘brutal formalism’ (Lacey 2007, p. 101), which saw little difference between Days of Hope and The Sound of Music and failed to allow for the importance of circumstances specific to television such as matters of production and reception, and for the fact that viewers were surely both ‘textual subjects’ and ‘social subjects’ with their ‘own experience of contradiction’ and their own awareness of media texts and contemporary events, as a result of which the ‘conditions of progressiveness are highly contingent’ and difficult to identify (Caughie 2000a, p. 108). Arguing that classic realism could not produce political knowledge because observation alone cannot interrogate social and political relations (and so Loach’s techniques ‘effectively militated against an explication of the social and economic forces leading to the collapse of the General Strike’), denies viewers’ sense of contemporary developments (Hill 1986, p. 60). The ‘formal logic’ of Days of Hope was said to limit the argument to individual betrayal by trade union leaders (ibid., p. 61). Of course, that was partly its point – Allen described the General Strike as an ‘opportunity for the creation of a workers’ state’ which was ‘lost by the sell-out of the TUC, the Labour Party and the Communist Party’ (Lyndon 1975, p. 69). Contrary to those criticisms of its use of the historical genre, Loach stressed that ‘our motive for going into the past is not to escape the present: we go into the past to learn lessons from it’ and show how the 1970s’ ‘major crises of capital, trade union militancy, a threatened middle-class [ . . . ], inflation and wage restraint [ . . . ] has happened before’; for Allen the ‘message’ about the workers’ betrayal is ‘don’t let this happen again’ (ibid., pp. 66–9).


The debates’ preference for ‘avant-garde practice’ over ‘popular forms’ (as if, in McArthur’s complaint, work that challenged the Classic Realist Text ‘must of necessity attract a smaller audience than works such as Days of Hope’) has been described as ‘reactionary’ and not in keeping with Brecht (Lacey 2007, p. 101). Williams criticised the idea that realism was inherently bourgeois because although the bourgeoisie formed it, it was developed by opponents such as ‘working-class and socialist movements’ (Williams 1977/78, p. 3). McArthur cited McGrath’s Brechtian The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil (1974) as evidence that analytical work could pleasure a mainstream audience (McArthur 1978, p. 51). In television work such as Bill Brand (1976), Trevor Griffiths valued working with ‘the popular imagination which has been shaped by naturalism’, and felt ‘realistic modes’ facilitate ‘demystifying, undistorted, more accurate, counter descriptions of political processes and social reality than people get through other uses of naturalism’ (Millington and Nelson 1986, p. 17). Accusing these realist drama-documentaries of a ‘transparency effect’ and ‘constructing a unity in the viewing subject’, furthermore underestimated their formal radicalism (Tulloch 1990, p. 9). Williams discussed ‘the character of the realism in The Big Flame’, whose shift from strike to occupation to present a ‘politically imagined possibility’ displayed a ‘fracture, between the familiar methods of establishing recognition and the alternative method of a hypothesis within that recognition’ (Williams 1977, p. 69). There was a play between naturalistic dialogue and alternative views in voice-over; The Ballad of Joe Hill located events within working-class history, and a statement that students can have radical ideas ‘but if working men get them it’s dangerous’ (ibid., pp. 70–1) is made by a Judge so far ‘beyond the conventions of the naturalist method’ that the effect is Brechtian (Tulloch 1990, p. 118). Therefore, realist drama-documentaries of the 1960s can be said to have displayed a willingness to ‘explore issues of form’ (Bignell et al. 2000, p. 88) and to have moved between modes in such a way as to create ‘a degree of viewer disorientation’ (Corner 1996, p. 105). It was precisely the willingness of Up the Junction to stretch ‘the boundaries of representation and form’ that made it, according to Caughie, ‘much more inventive’ than Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, despite broaching similar subject matter (such as abortion) (Caughie 2000a, p. 123). When Dennis Potter praised non-naturalistic television drama as a form which ‘disorientates the viewer smack in the middle of the orientation process which television habitually uses’, he observed that the best realist drama, including ‘the Garnett-Loach-Allen school’, resists offering


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viewers a cosy ‘means of orientating themselves towards the generally received notions of “reality” [ . . . ] by the vigour, clarity, originality and depth of its perceptions of a more comprehensive reality’ (Cook 1998, p. 145). Williams’s call for a ‘counter-sense of realism’ could ‘complicate definitions of style [ . . . ] for if “realism” can be opposed to “naturalism”, realism could be seen as “non-naturalism”’ (Cook 1998, p. 27). The ‘aesthetics of immediacy’ that Caughie described in television ‘has an affinity with naturalism as Lukács describes it’, whilst ‘cinema has a similar affinity’ for ‘classic realist narrative’ (Caughie 2000a, p. 122). Even if we accept that the ‘Classic Realist Text’ label applies to television texts, it neglects ‘the different viewing conditions of television drama’ and ‘its place in the flow of an evening’s entertainment’ (Lacey 2007, p. 101). Realist practitioners were aware of meanings generated by their place in the schedules. Loach noted that ‘we were following the news so we tried to work in the style of World in Action [ . . . ] so that people didn’t think “we’ve had the facts and now we will have the fiction” but rather “we’ve had the facts – now here’s some more facts with a different point of view”’ (Hill 1997, p. 160). If ‘texts do their work in contexts’, drama-documentary ‘occupied a progressive role’ not only because it ‘introduced into the discourses of television a repressed political, social discourse’, but because it might in turn shape the audience’s ‘scepticism of the other representations which television offers’ (Caughie 1980, pp. 33–4). For McArthur, once forms ‘cease to be unambiguously “fictional” and begin to look like the “factual” production of the media’, filmmakers are ‘seen to pose a political threat’ (McArthur 1978, p. 294). To return briefly to the matter of the use of 16mm film stock, which profoundly shaped the realist aesthetic in television – allied to an ‘understanding of television’s flow and its characteristic heterogeneity’ – such stock imbued plays such as Cathy Come Home with ‘a specifically televisual textuality’ (Mulvey 2007, p. 12). If ‘the specificity of the televisual lies in the possibility of the immediate’, then exploring ‘an aesthetics of immediacy’ places the definition of realism in an interweaving relationship with televisual specificity (Caughie 2000a, p. 122). Such discourses have remained interlinked, but in recent years have become subject to profound transformations.

End of the road or ‘the new social realism’? This chapter has demonstrated how the provision, content and styles of television social realism are ‘politically and historically contingent’ (Taylor 2006, p. 3), shaped by the ‘enabling discourse’ of broadcasting


policy and television’s specific techniques, genres and forms (Caughie 2000a, p. 87). This is underlined by the profound changes that have occurred in the television landscape since the Screen debates of the 1970s. Thatcherite ideology shifted the ideological climate which made those debates central to television practice and theory, and the ‘reactionary 1980s’ saw a decline in single drama as a form ‘licensed’ for social comment (Bignell et al. 2000, p. 1). Legislation challenged the Pilkington consensus which had safeguarded radical social drama. Channel Four’s emergence in 1982 as a platform for diversity as a result of the 1977 Annan Committee and subsequent 1980 Broadcasting Act partly restated that consensus, but the 1990 Broadcasting Act sparked a wave of deregulation and cultural concerns. The BBC/ITV duopoly declined and both organizations were obliged to follow Channel Four’s lead and commission from independent companies. The proliferation of digital television channels fragmented audiences and restricted revenues, causing greater pressure on ratings and budgets, with deregulation reducing the public service requirements for ITV and other commercial channels. However, social realism persists in various forms, including a ‘new social realism’ which negotiates these changing institutions, forms and techniques in vibrant ways (Cooke 2005). Shifts in ideology and form can be measured across 1980s social realism. A serial of five linked plays, Boys from the Blackstuff (1982) condemned the impact of unemployment caused by Conservative monetarism. Aiming to ‘write about the Dole as seen from the point of view of those who are on it’, writer Alan Bleasdale opposed the stereotyping of those unemployed as ‘malingerers and rogues’ (Millington and Nelson 1986, p. 179). The final episode, ‘George’s Last Ride’, represents ‘Britain’s industrial decline and the “death of socialism”’ in the death of trade unionist George Malone, who has retained a ‘fighting spirit’ missing in younger protagonists who have been ‘ground down’ (Cooke 2003, pp. 132–3). George’s dying words, ‘I can’t believe there’s no hope . . . I can’t’, trigger a shot of Liverpool’s now-derelict Albert Dock. If 16mm determined the aesthetic of earlier drama, the fact that four out of the serial’s five episodes were shot on video (within cheaper Outside Broadcast recording practices) underlines the programme’s different sense of immediacy: these images served as ‘actuality footage of Liverpool’s devastation’ and ‘specific records of the concrete destruction of people’s working lives’. But this was ‘not a “documentary” drama in the tradition of Loach/Garnett/Allen’ (Pawling and Perkins cited in Cooke 2003, p. 133). Indeed, Alan Lovell noted its origins in Bleasdale’s ‘critique of the over-politicisation of working-class life’ in Loach/Garnett/Allen’s


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work (Lovell 1984, p. 28). Malone’s death mirrors the decline of that tradition, as he is played by Peter Kerrigan, who appeared in The Big Flame, The Rank and File, Days of Hope and The Spongers. Lovell contextualised Bleasdale’s drama in television’s social realist tradition but saw new developments. Its success was attributed to a ‘balancing of black comedy and sheer emotion’ according to producer Michael Wearing (Millington 1984, p. 17) and to its ‘eclectic style’ which drew from ‘various film and TV genres’ (Millington and Nelson 1986, p. 13). The play of forms is evident in episode ‘Yosser’s Story’, where a dream sequence of Yosser leading his children into a pond featured ‘none of the markers which separate dream from reality in film and television’, and according to Caughie conflated surrealist and realist perspectives wherein ‘dreaming has as much logic as reality’ (Caughie 2000a, p. 177). The serial therefore ‘seems realist in its apparent form’ but in its ‘lurches of subjectivity, of not knowing how to read it, whether to laugh or cry’, also somewhat paralleled, according to Caughie, ‘the modernist absurd’ (ibid., p. 178). Road (1987) provides another distinctive approach to social realist tropes in the depiction of a community devoid of work. The Stage’s unease that director Alan Clarke applied ‘technical flair’ to Jim Cartwright’s play and ‘social document’ (Smurthwaite 1987, p. 21) continues critics’ ongoing concern with social realism ‘simultaneously observing and aestheticising’ its subject matter, which Paget relates to Mass Observation, the documentary film movement and the Royal Court (Paget 1998b, p. 116). Indeed, Clarke’s style problematizes social realism even as it evokes it. Traditional signifiers of realism include a semi-hand-held camera following characters around actual locations (in this case streets near Easington Colliery) in what Hill calls a ‘knowable community’ (Hill 1999, p. 258); however, the camera’s smooth movement is attached subjectively to characters and the play is highly stylised (Hill 2000, p. 175). One character’s scream at the camera demonstrates a refusal to be gazed at as the object of ethnography or passive naturalism, and reverses the gaze in a form of active realism. The dynamic, subjective Steadicam walking shot was Clarke’s signature device in the 1980s, making him, according to David Thomson, a ‘poet for all those beasts who pace and measure the limits of their cages’ (Thomson 1995, p. 133). A monologue by Valerie combines expletives with rich poetic cadences, using animalistic language to describe her unemployed husband as ‘a poor beast’ or a ‘wounded animal’. She describes his enforced inactivity with numerous verbs (‘telling [ . . . ] eating [ . . . ] squeezing [ . . . ] pissing [ . . . ] missing [ . . . ] shouting [ . . . ]


sulking’), and this juxtaposition of stasis and movement is captured in Clarke’s style – in an unbroken walking shot which follows Valerie’s frantic circular walk around a block, ultimately going nowhere, for example. If, as Paget noted, the ‘sustained figurative language’ and ‘rhythmic resonances’ of the dialogue ‘run beyond’ what we expect from social realism, this is matched by the camera-style (Paget 1998b, pp. 114–15). Interiors, shot in bare houses due for demolition, are made strange through stark design and Clarke’s experimentation with lenses, as if embodying Brecht’s pronouncement that a town set ‘must look like a town that has been built to last precisely two hours’ as sets ‘need only have the credibility of a place glimpsed in a dream’ (Brecht 1978, p. 233). The desolation is physical, expressionistic and discursive: its interrogation of visual language meets Cartwright’s interrogation of spoken language to foreground articulacy and state discourses. Taking place in a structure of feeling concerned with ‘the dialogism expressed when language and experience are recognised and articulated as a site of class antagonism and struggle’ (Kirk 1999, p. 45), Road takes place in a discursive void in which the ‘new, militant conservatism’ has defeated the ‘organised working-class’ (Paget 1998b, p. 108). This results in a search for articulacy in the climactic statement, ‘I never spoke such a speech in my life [ . . . ] If I keep shouting somehow [ . . . ] I might escape’ (ibid.). More broadly, however, New Wave tropes were updated or rendered anachronistic in the 1980s: Hill noted how Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1986) inverted New Wave gender politics to re-gender public space (Hill 2000, p. 75), while Clarke felt that ‘you couldn’t make a film like [Room at the Top] now because unemployment had changed the landscape’ (Hutchinson 1987, p. 20). Coronation Street’s Rovers Return finds its dark echo in Road’s Millstone pub, a carnivalesque scene of fire-eating and stark design that ‘blows away the tidy referential codes of social realism, re-siting the scene beyond humour and beyond reality’ (Paget 1998b, p. 124). Not without reason has Clarke’s radical late 1980s style in television films such as Elephant (1989) been described as ‘a terminus for British social realism’ (Walsh 2000, p. 297). Yet while radical drama sought new forms, popular social realism remained robust. ‘Soap-Opera Realism’ particularly thrived as ratings and economic pressures drove a proliferation of soaps. Channel Four’s Brookside (1982–2003) began with writers like Jimmy McGovern tackling social issues such as union politics with a realist style nearer single drama than soap. Following Brookside’s social emphasis, EastEnders (1985-present) aimed, according to its originating producer Julia Smith,


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for ‘a realistic, fairly outspoken type of drama which could encompass stories about homosexuals, rape, unemployment, racial prejudice etc. in a believable context. Above all we wanted realism [ . . . ] we didn’t want to fudge any issue except politics and swearing’ (Henderson 2007, p. 39). Comedy continues to cover relevant content, from Dick Clement and Iain La Frenais’ Auf Wiedersehen, Pet’s first season (1983), a ‘requiem for the traditional working class community’ as declining heavy industry causes British building workers to become ‘migrant workers’ in Europe, to John Sullivan’s Only Fools and Horses (1981–2003), which played with Thatcherite values in the black economy (Wagg 1998, p. 29). Some comedies have gone further, however, and have approached a distinctive social realist form. Glasgow-set Rab C. Nesbitt (1988 – present) combines the settings and issues of the harshest single drama – from unemployment to drug addiction – with Rab’s non-naturalistic, poetic addresses to camera which range from caustic social commentary to satirising Scotland’s media depictions, including those of social realism. If social realism ‘reveals the situation of the working-class at the level of its culture and everyday practices’, The Royle Family (1998-present) develops a new sitcom-realist hybrid in its downplaying of narrative in favour of the observation of detail (as the titular family watch television in their living room) and the single-camera drama techniques used in its observation of detail. Police series have also served as a mechanism for social realism. As chairman of independent World Productions, Tony Garnett maintains his ‘desire to address the popular audience’, which in today’s climate seems more attainable in series (Lacey 2007, p. 7). In developing The Cops (1998–2000), Garnett felt that ‘a show about cops’ would sell whilst ‘a series about social workers’ would not. But in practice the format served as a ‘Trojan Horse’, in that ‘the uniforms will take us into parts of society that we usually don’t enter’ and take audiences into social drama (Lacey 2007, p. 145). Much landmark drama has used the same principle, from Jimmy McGovern’s Cracker (1993–1996, 2006) to Z Cars (1962–78), created by Kennedy Martin. Z Cars was as much a product of the Pilkington report, drama-documentary discourse and debates on naturalism as the case studies used in this chapter. For Cooke, modern drama could be simultaneously popular and serious, and the ‘blending’ of the Loach/Garnett/Allen tradition with that of soaps was ‘indicative of a postmodern shift in the representation of social realism in twenty-first-century television drama’ (Cooke 2005, p. 188). This does not mean the Loach/Garnett/Allen tradition should be viewed as a non-popular form, however – we have seen


radical practitioners’ desire to engage a popular audience – but Cooke’s point underlines modern television’s distinctions. Similarly, Cooke’s claim that Clocking Off ‘revitalised a genre that had seemed obsolete’ and put ‘the northern industrial working class back on to British television screens’, may neglect other achievements. William Ivory’s Common As Muck (1994–1997) combined harsh social realism, lively humour and episodes that displayed the narrative and stylistic variety of single drama. Peter Kosminsky’s Britz (2007), on British Muslims’ experiences of post-9/11 anti-terror legislation, is just one example of how drama-documentary remains a vital source of television social realism. However, Cooke has identified a vital development through which social realist programming maintains a regular place in the modern broadcasting landscape (Cooke 2003, p. 196). Hybridised narrative features have not simply provided Trojan horses, but contain their own strengths. Clocking Off ’s focus on ‘morality tales’ made it reject the ‘overt politics’ of television’s ‘classic social realism’ (Cooke 2005, p. 189), while its ‘emphasis on the collective experience of the workplace’ brought ‘a social dimension’ (ibid., p. 187). Glen Creeber sees the various narrative perspectives at work in Shameless (2004–present) in the context of an ‘insider’ view and a reflexive problematization of its own sense of authenticity, which brings into focus the ‘outsider’ positioning by which, Creeber argues, the working class had been seen in much previous British social realism (Creeber 2009, pp. 421–39). Social realism in Shameless and Clocking Off operates within the ‘flexi-narrative’ form identified by Robin Nelson: a ‘fast-cut, segmented, multi-narrative structure’ that ‘derives in part from soaps’ (Nelson 1997, p. 24); according to Cooke, this ‘new form for a post-modern audience’ has both ‘a faster narrative pace’ and stylistic features such as ‘handheld camerawork, elliptical editing, unusual shot transitions, montages, fantasy sequences and surreal inserts’ (Cooke 2003, p. 178). Clocking Off developed ‘stylistic innovations’ such as ‘faster cutting, mobile camerawork, a creative use of colour in the mise-en-scène [ . . . ] a lively music track and energetic acting’. Its techniques have been described as ‘the new social realism’, a solution to the perception that British television cannot ‘continue to tell stories using the old naturalist/realist forms prevalent in the 1960s and 1970s’ (ibid., p. 178). Social realism and television’s attempts at self-definition then exist in an interweaving relationship. Television’s mirror on the ‘encounters and transformations’ (Caughie 2000a, p. 68) experienced by social realism illustrates that, as Taylor argues


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it is the ‘conventionality’ of realism which makes its usage so vulnerable to change. As the conventions change (either in reaction to previously established conventions or in accordance with new perceptions of what constitutes reality) so too does our sense of what then constitutes reality. (Taylor 2006, p. 16).

Notes 1. Broadcasting was delayed by a wartime break between September 1939 and June 1946. On the difficulties of attending to pre-1960s television, owing to so many programmes either not being recorded or being subsequently wiped, see Jacobs 2000. 2. This chapter necessarily simplifies issues of specificity. For discussion of the possibility of a specific academic methodology for the study of television (as opposed to importing English or Film Studies approaches) and the problematic definition of the television ‘play’, see Caughie 2000. For a discussion of methodology for the study of television films as opposed to cinema films, see Rolinson 2005 and 2010. 3. John Hill has written compellingly on the ideological impact of narrative ‘closure’ in mainstream cinema. See Hill 1986. 4. The description of soap as inherently naturalistic is problematized by some 1960s episodes of Coronation Street which feature flashbacks, non-diegetic music referencing other genres, and psychological devices: for instance, a Jack Rosenthal episode from 9 September 1964 includes a piano-scored film sequence featuring angles and cuts reminiscent of the French New Wave, and Florrie’s impending breakdown is signposted by the subjective distortion of dialogue on the soundtrack. 5. For a discussion of the thematic and aesthetic continuities across television films of the 1970s as suggestive of a cinema movement see Rolinson 2010. 6. For further discussion of neo-realism’s influence, including how these dramas resisted causality in episodic narratives with repetitive scenes of characters wandering real locations, how directors favoured understated acting styles over studied performance, and how the neo-realist rejection of the star concept extended to the casting of non-professional actors, club performers and locals, see Rolinson 2005 and 2007. 7. See Rolinson 2005, pp. 74–93 for coverage of this ban.

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Television source In Vision, episode discussing Leeds – United!, tx. BBC2, 1 November 1974.

Index

7:84 Scotland, 61 Ackland, Rodney The Pink Room, 60 Absolute Hell, 60 Aberystwyth, 167 Ades, Dawn, 164 Adorno, Theodor, 14, 112–13, 118, 127, 129, 165 Ainsworth, Edgar, 148 Alderson, David, 29 Alexander, Lloyd, 83 Allen, Jim, 193, 194, 199–200, 202, 205 The Big Flame, 189, 196–7, 200, 203 Almereyda, Michael, 110 Anderson, Lindsay, 4, 69 O Dreamland, 186 Antal, Evelyn, 165 Antliff, Allan, 163 Aragon, Louis, 150 Arden, John, 66 Live Like Pigs, 60, 78 The Workhouse Donkey, 60 Aristotle, 29 Armchair Theatre, 177–8, 188 Armitage, Simon, 109, 115 Arnold, Andrea, 13, 27, 54 Fish Tank, 54 Red Road, 47–52 Artists’ Group Bulletin, 149–50 Artists International Association, 14, 135–7, 163–4 Artists Union, 154 Arts Council of Great Britain, 140, 147, 156, 167 Aspden, Rachel, 164 Ayrton, Michael, 147, 165 Badiou, Alain, 29, 54, 167 Baines, Harry, 147 Balchin, Nigel, 81–2, Sundry Creditors, 82, 86

The Ballad of Joe Hill, 200 Ballmer, Karl, 2 Balzac, Honoré de, 1–2 Banham, Mary, 164 Barbican, London, 144, 166 Barstow, Stan A Kind of Loving, 14, 83, 100–1 Barthes, Roland, 14, 108–10, 119, 163 Battersby, Roy, 192 Battersea, 98, 140 Baudelaire, Charles, 126 ‘Les Yeux des Pauvres’, 110 Baumeister, Willi, 2 Bazin, André, 189, 195 BBC, 174, 177–82, 189, 191–2, 194–6 Beaumont, Matthew, 11–12, 15, 53–4 Beaux Arts Gallery, 151 Beckett, Samuel, 1–2, 4 Behan, Brenda The Hostage, 60 The Quare Fellow, 60 Belsky, Franta, 140 Benjamin, Walter, 22–5, 30, 44–6, 54, 118 Bennett, Alan Enjoy, 8–9 Sunset Across the Bay, 190–1 Bensaïd, Daniel, 20 Berger, John, 14, 133, 135, 143–4, 146–52, 156, 158, 162, 164–6 Bergman, Ingmar, 3 Berlin, 91, 141, 144 Bhaskar, Roy, 132, 162 Bignell, Jonathan, 175, 200, 202 Billingham, Richard, 133, 159 Billington, Michael, 67 Billy Elliot, 17 Billy Liar (television), 177–8 Biressi, Anita, 19 Birmingham Six, 193 Bishop, Claire, 163 Bisztray, George, 126 212

Index Blackburn, 41 Blackpool, 6, 186 Blaenau Festiniog, 163 Blair, Les, 197 Blake, William Jerusalem, 78 Bleasedale, Alan, 202–3 Blunt, Anthony, 135–6, 163–4 Bolton, 5–8, 15 Bond, Edward Saved, 60, 67–8, 74–5, 77 The Pope’s Wedding, 67 Bonney, Sean, 111 Borgerhoff, E.B.O., 126 Boswell, James, 138–9, 148, 164 Bourdieu, Pierre, 167 Bourne, Stephen, 176–7 Bourriard, Nicolas, 163, 167 Bowes, Mick, 190 Bowlby, Rachel, 11 Boyce, Sonia, 134 Boys from the Blackstuff, 202 Bradley, David, 47 Braine, John Room at the Top, 13, 82–3, 86–7, 91, 93, 98, 101 Brassed Off, 17 Bratby, John, 145, 151 Brecht, Bertolt, 14, 69–70, 106–8, 113, 116, 126, 165, 184, 197–8, 200, 204 Bresson, Robert, 190 Brett, Guy, 166 Brien, Alan, 62 Briggs, Asa, 146 Brill, Frederick, 147 Brisley, Stuart, 155 Bristow, Joseph, 128 British Council, 164 British Film Institute, 42 Brixton, 176 Brooks, Peter, 15 Brookside, 204 Broomfield, Nick, 13 Ghosts, 30–1 Brown, Marshall, 106 Brown, Ralph, 149, 165 Buck-Morss, Susan, 54 Budapest, 145, 150

Bunnage, Avis, 69 Burke, Andrew, 47 Burke, Vanley, 157 Burgin, Victor, 134, 155–6 Possession, 155 Burrows, Rachel, 1 Burstow, Robert, 164–5 Bury, Morley, 147 Butler, Reg, 140 Butterworth, Jez Jerusalem, 78 Cambridge (University of), 8 Camerawork, 162 Carlisle, 167 Carney, Raymond, 190 Carpenter, Humphrey, 181 Carpenter, Patrick, 147–8, 166 Cartier, Rudolph, 175 Cartwright, Jim Road, 73–5, 203–4 Caudwell, Christopher, 163 Caughie, John, 62, 174–80, 183–4, 189, 193–4, 197–203, 206–7 Chadwick, Lynn, 147 Chandler, John, 162 Charlesworth, JJ, 160, 167 Charoux, Siegfried, 140, 143 The Islanders, 142–3 The Neighbours, 140–1 Chayefsky, Paddy Marty, 178 Cheeseman, Peter, 64 Chekhov, Anton, 60 Cherry, Deborah, 164–5 Chesney, Ronald, 191 Chittenden, Maurice, 121, 128 Churchill, Caryl, 70 Top Girls, 70–1 Churchill, Winston, 91 Clapham, 189 Clark, Kenneth, 163 Clark, T.J., 126 Clarke, Alan, 180, 190–1, 195 Elephant, 204 Road (film), 191, 203–4 Scum, 194, 196–7 Clarke, Gillian, 115, 127 Clatworthy, Robert, 140

213

214 Index Claussen, Detlev, 127 Clement, Dick, 205 Clocking Off, 173, 206 Cold War, 89, 133, 144, 147, 163 Coldstream, William, 137 Coltrane, John, 105, 120 Common Culture Collective, 160 Compston, Martin, 47–8 Cook, John, 181–4, 198, 200–1 Cooke, Lez, 173, 178, 184–6, 188–9, 194, 196–7, 202, 205–6 Conanby, 157 Considine, Paddy, 38 The Cops, 205 Cork, Richard, 153 Corner, John, 193–4, 200 Coronation Street, 73, 173, 175, 184–6, 191, 195, 204, 207 Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, 138, 140 Courbet, Gustave, 126, 136 Courtauld Institute of Art, 141, 163 Crabbe, George, 104–5 The Village, 104 Creative Camera, 158 Creeber, Glen, 206 Crimp, Martin, 75 Crisell, Andrew, 174, 177, 180 Croft, Andy, 163, 165 Cruikshank, William, 148 Curran, Tony, 48 Dada, 72 Daily Herald, 164 Daily Mirror, 95 Dalou, Aimé-Jules, 135 Damianovic, Maia, 167 Dante Alighieri, 108 Daumier, Honoré, 135, 148, 158 Dave, Paul, 13, 19, 21, 53–4 David-Sauvageot, A., 104–5 Davies, Terence, 24 Davis, John Warren, 165 Delaney, Shelagh A Taste of Honey, 60, 62–5, 68–9, 183 Deller, Jeremy, 15, 134, 161 The Battle of Orgreave, 161, 167 Derrida, Jacques, 29

Devine, George, 63 Dexter, John, 68 Dickie, Kate, 47 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 45–7 D’Monté, Rebecca, 75 Does Class Matter?, 181 Douglas, Bill, 24 Dublin (Trinity College), 1 Duffy, Carol Ann, 109 Dufton, 86 Dugger, John, 154, 166 Duguid, Peter, 184 Duncan, Andrew, 128 Dunn, Nell Up the Junction, 14, 83, 94–6, 98–9, 101, 189, 194, 200 Durkheim, Émile, 10 Duxbury, Leslie, 147, 165 Dyer, Geoff, 165 Dyer, Richard, 184–5, 191 Eagleton, Terry, 11, 13, 19, 24–32, 39–40, 44, 46–7, 49–54 Easington Colliery, 203 Eastenders, 195, 204–5 Edna, the Inebriate Woman, 194 Egbert, Donald, 138, 163 Edgar, David, 61 Edinburgh, 155 Edward VIII, 5 Ehrenberg, Ilya The Thaw, 165 Eisenstein, Sergei, 192 Eliot, George Adam Bede, 12 Eliot, T.S., 4 Elliott, John A Man from the Sun, 176 Middlemarch, 198 Elsom, John, 68 Emin, Tracy, 160 Empson, William, 126 Encounter, 151 Engels, Friedrich, 29, 126 English Stage Company, 59–60, 63, 68–9 E.R., 175 Everall, Gary, 167 Everton, 161

Index Exit Photography Group, 162 Exodus, 30 Eyre, Richard, 71 Faber & Faber, 4, 113 Falklands War, 31, 33, 37 Farocki, Harun, 48 Fellini, Federico, 3 Festival of Britain, 142–3 Figgis, Mike, 167 Fisher, Mark, 20, 25–6 Fitton, James, 148 Flame in the Streets, 176 Flanagan, Barry, 155 Flaubert, Gustave, 109–10, 112, 119 Fleishmann, Arthur, 164 Miranda, 143, 164 Flintham, Matthew, 53 Forest of Dean, 181 Forman, Milos, 190 Forster, Laurel, 153–4, 162 Forster, William, 174 Foster, Hal, 160 Foucault, Michel, 38, 54, 163 Fougeron, André, 150 Francia, Peter de, 150, 165–6 Frears, Stephen, 190–1 Freud, Sigmund, 42 Fry, Roger, 137 The Full Monty, 17 Fullard, George, 147–9, 165 Fuller, Graham, 190 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 109 Galton, Ray, 188 Gamble, Andrew, 74 Garlake, Margaret, 138 Garnett, Tony, 180, 193, 196–7, 200, 202, 205 Gates, Bill, 162 Gems, Pam Dusa, Fish, Stas and Vi, 71 Gilbert, Jeremy, 21 Gilgun, Joe, 33 Gill, Eric, 163 Glasgow, 12, 61, 119, 188, 205 Gogol, Nikolai The Government Inspector, 175 Graham, Billy, 89

215

Graham, Stephen, 33 Grant, Robert, 104–5 Grant, Sylvia, 158 Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield, 144, 167 Gray, Thomas, 104, 126 Greaves, Derrick, 145, 146, 149, 151–2, 165–6 Grierson, John, 33, 174 Griffith, Brian, 157 Griffiths, Trevor, 71, 180 Bill Brand, 200 Comedians, 71–2, 75 Occupations, 71, 75 The Party, 71–2 Grosz, George, 148 Gruber, Francis, 150, 165 Gunning, Tom, 41–7 Guttuso, Renato, 150–1, 166 GYPO, 30 Hackney, 77 Hall, Sheldon, 33 Hall, Stuart, 65 Hall, Willis, 63 Hallam, Julia, 17, 53 Hallberg, Robert von, 127–8 Hardt, Michael, 53–4, 162, 167 Hardy, Thomas Jude the Obscure, 195 Hare, David The Permanent Way, 76 Harkness, Margaret (Joan Law), 126 Harper, Sue, 153–4, 162 Harrison, Charles, 136 Harrison, Martin, 151–2 Harrisson, Tom, 4–8, 15 Hastings, 53 Hatfield, 76 Hauser, Arnold, 163 Hay, Malcolm, 68 Hayward, Anthony, 189 Hazlitt, William, 105, 110 Hegel, G.W.F., 124, 128 Heinemann, Margot, 165 Helms, Hans G., 112 Henderson, Lesley, 205 Henry V (film), 91 Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, 164 Hepworth, Barbara, 137

216 Index Herbert, George, 108 ‘Jordan (II)’, 108 ‘The Collar’, 108 Herbert, Jocelyn, 68 Herman, Josef, 148 Herd, David, 127 Hessing, Leonard, 155 Highbury, 140 Higson, Andrew, 33–4, 192 Hill, John, 17–18, 187, 192, 195, 197–9, 201, 203–4, 207 Hillier, Bevis, 164 Hines, Barry, 4 Hobbes, Thomas, 49 Hobsbawn, Eric, 53, 144 Hogarth, Paul, 146–8, 165–6 Hoggart, Richard, 62, 66, 179–87, 191 Holles, Robert, 187 Hoyland, Francis, 147 Howe, P.D., 105 Hubble, Nick, 5 Hull, 191–2 Hutchinson, Mike, 204 Hyman, James, 144, 146, 152, 166 I Want To Be A Doctor, 176 Ibsen, Henrik A Doll’s House, 64 Imperial War Museum, 139 Imperial War Museum North, Manchester 164 Ingrams, Richard, 165 The Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home, 161 In Vision, 191–2 It’s a Free World, 30 ITV, 177, 180, 191 Itzen, Catherine, 70 Ivory, William Common As Muck, 206 Jacobs, Jane, 191 Jacobs, Jason, 174, 207 Jameson, Fredric, 11–12, 20, 25, 106, 126 Jarmen, Derek The Last of England, 35 Jarvis, Katie, 47 Jenkins, Clive, 73

Jennings, Humphrey, 4–7, 33, 53–4, 192 A Diary for Timothy, 22 Pandaemonium, 22 Jennings, Mary-Lou, 4, 53 Joffé, Roland, 194 Jones, Tom ‘The K Numbers’, 115 Jones, Robert Alun, 10 Jonzen, Karin, 140 Jordan, Marion, 173–4, 185–6, 189, 193 Joyce, James, 126 Kafka, Franz, 126 Kane, Sarah Blasted, 68, 75 Kant, Immanuel, 29, 112 Kaun, Axel, 2 Kautsky, Minna, 126 Kay, J., 164 Kebbell, Toby, 38 Keeffe, Barrie Gimmie Shelter (trilogy): Gem, 72; Getaway, 72–3; Gotcha, 72–3 Keiller, Patrick, 13, 20–2, 24, 53–4 London, 20, 22 Robinson in Ruins, 21 Robinson in Space, 21–2, 24 Kennedy Martin, Troy, 184, 197 Diary of a Young Man, 184 Z Cars, 205 Kerr, Paul, 176 Kerrigan, Peter, 203 Kershaw, H.V., 187 Kie´slowski, Krzysztof, 3–4, 8 Killip, Chris, 133, 157–9, 167 In Flagrante, 158 Jarrow Youth, Tyneside, 158–9 Kirk, John, 204 Klevan, Andrew, 190 Klingender, Francis, 137–8, 163 Kneale, Nigel, 175 Knight, Deborah, 195, 198 Knight, Laura Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-Ring, 139–40 Koenig, Gisha, 152, 166 Kollwitz, Käthe, 148

Index Kops, Bernard, 60 Kosminsky, Peter Britz, 206 Kotcheff, Ted, 178 Kun, Béla, 141 Kwei-Armah, Kwame Elmina’s Kitchen, 77–8 La Frenais, Iain Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, 205 Lacan, Jacques, 29, 50 Lacey, Stephen, 9, 13, 59, 68, 172, 177, 179–82, 185–6, 199–201, 205 Ladkin, Sam, 119 Land of Green Ginger, 191–2 Lapp, Axel, 164 Larkin, Philip, 14, 104–6, 113–22, 125–8 ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, 125–6 ‘Wires’, 115–19 Latham, Barbara, 155 Latham, John, 155 Lavin, Janos, 164 Law and Order, 197 Lay, Samantha, 12, 17, 24, 53–4 Lawrence, Stephen, 76 League of Socialist Artists, 154 Leeds, 8, 190–1 Leeds – United!, 191–2 Léger, Fernand, 2 Leicester Galleries, London, 148, 166 Leigh, Jacob, 189, 198 Leigh, Mike, 54 Hard Labour, 190 Le Juez, Brigitte, 1 Left Review, 135, 137, 163–4 Lenin, Vladimir, 107–8, 110–13, 119–26, 128 Leonard, Tom, 12 nora’s place, 14, 119–26 Lessore, Helen, 151 Lever, William, 6 Levinas, Emmanuel, 29 Lewis, C. Day, 135 Lloyd, A.L., 163 Lloyd, John, 164 Lin, Ai Qin, 30 Lindey, Christine, 144 Linebaugh, Peter, 22–3, 43

217

Lippard, Lucy, 162 Lissitzky, El, 2 Littlewood, Joan, 60, 65, 69 Liverpool, 160–1, 202 Loach, Ken, 183–4, 189–90, 193–202, 205 Cathy Come Home, 193–5, 198, 201 Days of Hope, 188, 196–200, 203 Kes, 3–4, 157 The Rank and File, 196, 203 London, 4, 23, 48, 61, 63, 65–7, 72, 76–7, 140–1, 143–4, 153, 164, 166–7, 176, 186 London Review of Books, 113 London Transport Museum, 142 Look North, 192 Lord Chamberlain’s Office, 58–9, 65, 68 Lovell, Alan, 180, 183, 202–3 Löwy, Michael, 22, 45–6, 54 Lukáks, Georg, 14, 42, 106, 110, 112, 114, 126, 201 Lucas, Sarah, 160 Lynd, Helen, 5 Lyndon, Neil, 196, 199 MacCabe, Colin, 197–9 MacDiarmid, Hugh, 107–8 ‘Second Hymn to Lenin’, 107–8, 123 MacMurraugh-Kavanagh, Madeleine, 172 Malekula, 5 Malevitsch, Kasimir, 2 Madge, Charles, 4–6 Mahler, Anna, 143 Man at the Top, 177 Manchester, 166 Mann, Thomas, 127 Manod Quarry, 163 Mansfield, Katherine, 128 Marchant, Alison, 15, 160 Marris, Paul, 17, 20 Marshment, Margaret, 17, 53 Martz, Louis L., 108 Marvin, Garry, 54 Marx, Karl, 28–9, 110, 112, 126–7 Marxist Quarterly, 146

218 Index Maschler, Tom, 165 Massey, Doreen, 53 Mass-Observation, 4–9, 15, 81, 140, 164, 203 Maton, Karl, 10, 15 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 14, 110–11, 113, 120, 127–8 McArthur, Colin, 197, 199–201 McDonnell, James, 180 McDougall, Peter Just Another Saturday, 188 McEnery, Peter, 178 McGough, Roger, 128 McGovern, Jimmy, 204 Cracker, 205 McGrath, John, 63, 177, 179, 184, 197 The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil, 200 McKechnie, Kara, 191 McLeish, Robert The Gorbals Story, 60–1 Meadows, Bernard, 147 Meadows, Daniel, 157–8, 167 David Stephenson, Conanby near Conisborough, Yorkshire, 157 Portsmouth: John Payne, Aged 12 with Two Friends and his Pigeon, Chequer, 26 April 1974, 157 Meadows, Shane, 13, 19, 27 Dead Man’s Shoes, 19, 37–41 This is England, 31, 33–7 Medalla, David, 154, 166 Melanesia, 6, 8 Mellor, David, 153, 157–9, 167 Mengham, Rod, 13–14, 81 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 109 Meschonnic, Henri, 128 Meunier, Constantin, 135 Michelet, Jules, 109 Middleditch, Edward, 145, 149, 151, 165 Millais, John Everett, 148 Millington, Bob, 200, 202–3 Milne, Drew, 128 Milner, John, 136, 140, 163 Minaux, André, 166 Minton, Roy, 194

Mitchell & Kenyon, 13, 41–7 Alfred Butterworth & Sons, Glebe Mills, Hollinwood, 42 Mitchell, Denis, 181 Moholy-Nagy, László, 2, 141 Mohr, Jean, 156 Modernism, 2, 4, 11, 105, 120, 126, 133, 137, 144, 151, 203 Mondrian, Piet, 2 Montane, Roger, 166 Moore, Henry, 137, 139, 147, 164 Moore, Rob, 10, 15 Morecambe, 30, 191 Morgan, Kevin, 165 Morgan, Stacy I., 16 Morris, Lynda, 144, 163–4 Morris, Pam, 15 Mosel, Tad, 178 Moscow, 89, 166 Mukhina, Vera Worker and Kolkhoz Woman, 143 Mullan, Bob, 54 Mulvey, Laura, 183, 201 Murtha, Tish, 157 National Gallery, 163 National Theatre, 71, 77 Naughton, Bill, 64 Negri, Antonio, 53–4, 162, 167 Nelson, Robin, 200, 202–3, 206 New Wave (British), 17, 34–5, 59–64, 78, 175, 177–9, 181, 183, 186–8, 190–2, 197, 204 New Wave (French), 207 New Statesman, 133, 146, 148, 164, 181 New Statesman and Nation, 152 Newcastle upon Tyne, 155 Newman, GF, 197 Newman, Sydney, 178 Newport, 140 Nicholson, Ben, 137 Nimpsch, Uli, 140 Night Mail, 176 Noble, Tim, 160 Nolan, Kevin, 127 Noord, Gerrie van, 167 Norman, Frank, 60 Nottingham Playhouse, 71

Index Nunn, Heather, 19 Nuttall, Jeff, 153 Octagon Theatre, Bolton, 64 Oldman, Gary, 13 Nil by Mouth, 23 Oliver, Douglas, 121, 128 Olivier, Laurence, 71–2, 91 Orozco, Gabriel, 135 Orta, Lucy, 15, 134, 161 Orton, Joe Entertaining Mr Sloane, 60, 67 Osborne, John, 61 Look Back in Anger, 13, 59–61, 175, 177–8 The Entertainer, 59, 175 Ové, Horace A Hole in Babylon, 188 Owen, Alun Lena, O My Lena, 178 No Trams to Lime Street, 178 Progress to the Park, 63 Oxford (University of), 8, 181–2 Ozu, Yasujiro, 190 Pabst, Georg, 192 Paget, Derek, 176, 193, 203–4 Paolozzi, Eduardo, 140 Paterson, Don, 114, 118 Paris, 141, 143, 150, 164 Parker, Tony Mrs Lawrence Will Look After It, 195 Parr, Martin, 133, 157 Penguin New Writing, 81 Péri, Peter Laszlo, 135, 137, 141–2, 147, 164–5 South Lambeth Council Estate, 141 Perkins, VF, 189, 192 Perry, Grayson, 134 Petit, Chris, 52 Philips, Nanette, 127 Pilkington Committee/Report, 179–80, 196, 202, 205 Pinter, Harold, 66–8, 177 A Night Out, 172, 178 The Birthday Party, 60, 66 The Caretaker, 66, 172 The Dumb Waiter, 66 The Room, 60, 66

219

Pinto, Roberto, 167 Pinto-Duschinsky, Michael, 61 Penhall, Joe, 77 Some Voices, 76–7 Picasso, Pablo, 158 The Place Theatre, 71 Plater, Alan, 190–1 Play for Today, 188 Poetry Book Society, 113 Poetry Review, 113, 115 Polanyi, Karl, 24, 54 Pollard, Arthur, 105 Pontecorvo, Gillo, 192 Postmodernism, 11, 76, 134, 144, 159, 205 Potter, Dennis, 180–1, 187, 192, 200–1 Between Two Rivers, 181–2 Stand Up Nigel Barton, 182–4, 186 The Glittering Coffin, 181 Potts, Robert, 127 Pound, Ezra, 105 Press, Natalie, 48 Price, Lois, 155 Priestly, J.B. An Inspector Calls, 60 The Linden Tree, 60 When We Are Married, 175 Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, 194 Prynne, J.H., 121, 127–8 Purves, Robin, 119 Quart, Leonard, 190 Quatermass and the Pit, 175 Queen Elizabeth II, 194 Rab C. Nesbitt, 205 Rabey, David Ian, 75–6 Rabinow, Paul, 163 Radford, Robert, 136–7, 163 The Rag Trade, 191 Rapp, Ginette, 166 Rattigan, Terence The Deep Blue Sea, 60 Variation on a Theme, 60 Ravenhill, Mark, 75 Raworth, Tom, 121 Ray-Jones, Tony, 157 Rea, Betty, 137, 152, 163, 166 Read, Herbert, 137, 147, 152, 163, 165

220 Index Realism (journal), 14, 149–50, 165–6 Rebellato, Dan, 59 Rebeyrolle, Paul, 150, 166 Rediker, Marcus, 22 Reith, John, 174, 177 Richardson, Robert, 163–4 Rickaby, Tony, 163 Ricks, Christopher, 125–6 Ricoeur, Paul, 28 Riffaterre, Michael, 109–10 Riff-Raff, 195 Riley, Denise, 121 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 126 Rita, Sue and Bob Too, 204 Ritchie, Guy, 37 Rivera, Diego, 135 Roberts, Dean, 36, 38 Roberts, John, 132, 135, 156, 161–2, 167 Roberts, Phillip, 68 Rockwell, Joan, 185 Rogers, Claude, 137 Rohmer, Eric, 190 Rolinson, Dave, 15, 190–2, 207 Rosenthal, Jack, 186, 207 Bar Mitzvah Boy, 188 Romanticism, 11, 105, 109–10 Room at the Top (film), 204 Rowe, Clifford, 166 Royal Academy, 140 Royal Court Theatre, 59–60, 63, 68, 73, 77–8, 178, 203 Royal Shakespeare Company, 71 The Royle Family, 205 Rylance, Mark, 78 St. Petersburg, 110 Salford, 64, 178 Sandford, Jeremy, 194 Sandilands, G.S., 141, 164 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 146, 165 La Nausée, 83 Saunders, Graham, 75 Savage, Jon, 33, 36, 54 Sampson, Fiona, 127 Sapphire, 176 Sawyer, Miranda, 77 Schlegel, Friedrich, 106

Scott, Michael, 66 Searle, Ronald, 148 Sekula, Allan The Fish Story, 159 Serling, Rod, 178 Shameless, 206 Sharples, Ena, 185 Shaw, George, 134 Shaw, Jeffrey, 155 Sheffield, 149 Sheffield Hallam University, 167 Shellard, Dominic, 59 Shubik, Irene, 172, 178 Sickert, Walter, 148 Sierz, Aleks, 68, 75–6 Sillitoe, Alan Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 14, 83–4, 89–94, 96–9, 101, 191, 200 Simpson, Alan, 188 Sinclair, Iain, 52 Smith, Anthony, 174 Smith, Jack, 145, 149, 151–2, 165 Mother Bathing Child, 145 Smith, James, 25 Smith, Julia, 204–5 Smith, Murray, 34 Smith, Roger, 181 Smurthwaite, Nick, 203 Spear, Ruskin, 148 Socialist Realism, 14, 135–8, 140, 143–4, 148, 151, 154 Soho, 71 Soukop, Willi, 140 The Sound of Music, 198–9 South Bank, London, 164 South London Art Gallery, 147, 165 South West 9, 22 Spectator, 163 Spencer, Charles, 166 Spender, Humphrey, 6–8 Spender, Stephen, 111 The Spongers, 194, 203 Stalin, Joseph, 138, 152, 165 Steele, Tom, 54 Steinlen, Théophile, 148 Stephenson, Randall, 60–1 Steptoe and Son, 188

Index Stewart, Ena Lamont Men Should Weep, 61 Steyn, Juliet, 164–5 Stokes, John, 177 Storey, David This Sporting Life, 14, 83, 85, 87–9, 91–3, 97–101 Studio (periodical), 140, 148, 150, 153 Studio International, 153–5 Sullivan, John Only Fools and Horses, 205 Sunday Night at the London Palladium, 177 The Sunday Times, 121 Surrealism, 4, 7 Sussex (University of), 15, 164 Sutherland, John, 121 Sutherland, Keston, 12, 14, 128 Swingler, Randall, 165 Sydney-Smith, Susan, 180 Sykes, Homer, 157 Sylvester, David, 146, 151–2 Tagg, John, 155–6, 167 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 3 Tate, 145, 163, 166 Taylor, BF, 173, 189, 192, 201, 206–7 Taylor, John Russell, 60 Tewson, Vincent, 165 Thatcher, Margaret, 31, 33, 35, 37, 71, 74–5, 156, 158, 202, 205 Theatre Royal, Stratford East, 60, 63, 69 Theatre Workshop, 60, 63, 69 Thomas, Dylan Under Milk Wood, 73 Thomson, David, 203 Thompson, E.P., 165 Thorpe, Vanessa, 17 Thwaite, Anthony, 127 Tiedemann, Rolf, 127 Times Literary Supplement, 113, 127–8 Timms, David, 116, 127 Tisdall, Hans, 143 Todorov, Tzvetan, 110 Tonning, Erik, 2 Tormey, Jane, 155–6, 167 Trainspotting, 19, 34

221

Tricycle Theatre The Colour of Justice, 76 Triolet, Elsa, 120, 128 Trodd, Kenith, 192, 196 Tucker, David, 20 Tulloch, John, 200 Turgoose, Thomas, 33, 36, 47 Turner, J.M.W., 158 Tyler, Imogen, 19 Tynan, Kenneth, 66 Underwood, Leon, 140 Unity Theatre, Glasgow, 60 Unity Theatre, London, 60 University College, London, 121 Upward, Edward, 111 Valkenier, Elizabeth, 136 Venice (Binnale), 144–5, 147, 152, 164–5 Vice, Sue, 185-6 Victoria Theatre, Stoke-on-Trent, 64 Vienna, 141, 143 Vinay, Jean, 166 Vogel, Karel, 143 Wacquant, Loïc, 38–9, 50 Wagg, Stephen, 191, 205 Walker, John, 133, 154, 166–7 Wall, Jeff, 156 Wallinger, Mark, 134 Walsh, Michael, 204 Wandor, Michelene, 70 War Artists Advisory Committee, 139 Warren, Tony, 184, 186 Warsaw, 167 Waterhouse, Keith Billy Liar (play), 63 Watkins, Peter Culloden, 193 War Game, The, 193 Watkinson, Ray, 164–6 Watson, Gary, 54, 190 Watson, Grant, 167 Watts, Alexander, 150 Wearing, Michael, 203 Webster, Sue, 160 The Wednesday Play, 188 Weight, Carel, 148

222 Index Welland, Colin, 191 Welles, Orson, 3 Wesker, Arnold, 61 Chicken Soup with Barley, 59 Chips with Everything, 60 I’m Talking about Jerusalem, 59 Roots, 59, 65–6, 68, 75 West, Alick, 163 Wheale, Nigel, 144 Whitechapel Art Gallery, 147, 166–7 Whitelaw, Billie, 178 Whiteley, Gillian, 12, 14, 165–6 Whittet, J.S., 148 Who Bombed Birmingham?, 193 Wilkinson, John, 109, 121 Willats Steve, 155 Willett, John, 165 Williams, Nigel Class Enemy, 72 Williams, Raymond, 13, 17–9, 22, 25–7, 29–33, 35–7, 42, 52–3, 58–9, 172, 178, 181, 183, 188, 197, 200–1 Williams, Roy, 77

Sing Yer Heart Out, 77 Sucker Punch, 77 Williams, Tennessee A Streetcar Named Desire, 61 Willis, Ted Hot Summer Night, 176–8 Woman in a Dressing Gown, 178 Wilson, David, 195 Wilson, Sarah, 166 Winston, Ray, 23 Wolfe, Ronald, 191 Wood, Paul, 136 Woodhead, Leslie, 193 Woolf, Virginia, 3–4 Wordsworth, William, 110 World in Action, 193, 201 World War Two, 14, 60, 81, 86, 89–92, 98–9, 135, 138–143, 163–4 Worsley, T.C., 64 Wright, Patrick, 53 Young, Michael, 15 Žižek, Slavoj, 29, 162, 167 Zola, Émile, 105, 195 Zhdanov, Andrei, 136, 150

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