Part 5 – The Rise of the Far-Right and the Construction of the ‘Chav’

Part 5 of the novel is set in 2010 when Dean is twenty eight years old.

Media representations of the chav are generally very similar, regardless of the outlet (Adams and Raisborough, 2011). These tend to show the chav figure as irrational, aggressive, lazy and immoral, partaking in excessive consumption of alcohol, drugs and unhealthy food, all contributing to the general depiction of a flawed consumer unable or unwilling to make the ‘correct’ lifestyle and cultural choices (Haywood and Yar, 2006; Adams and Raisborough, 2011) ¹⁴. Through these representations, media elites make value judgements upon the white working class, as represented by the chav figure, ‘to assert distinction, recognition and distribute privilege, which in turn reproduces economic privilege’ (Raisbrough and Adams, 2008, p2.2). Consumer patterns become markers of class and uphold middle- and upper-class lifestyle and cultural choices as both normal and desirable, thus feeding back into blame narratives of low-income whites consciously choosing their perceived cultural deficiencies and their own self-induced cycles of poverty. Low-income groups are further marginalised from mainstream society as they are perceived to be unable to function as ‘meaningful…consumer-citizens’ (Haywood and Yar, 2006, p14).

Clothing becomes a visible marker of class in the public sphere. The chav’s ‘vulgar’ choices of attire become signifiers of inferiority, immorality and separation from the mainstream. Clothing and consumption patterns become ways in which individuals are recognised by those of other groups and as a result become determinants of exclusion or inclusion, acceptance or contempt (Haywood and Yar, 2006). Middle- and upper-class consumers not only use working-class cultural choices (e.g. clothing brands, supermarket chains, etc) to reinforce their own socio-cultural hegemony, they attribute judgements and value to working-class cultural and consumer choices to stigmatise them ‘as immoral, repellent, abject, worthless, disgusting, even disposable’ (Skeggs, 2005, p977).

In Part 5 of the novel, Phil Harris splits from the BFP and forms the extreme-right National Defence League (NDL). The group’s marches around Eldon and Addington attract media attention and Phil becomes the tacit spokesperson of the local white working-class community. Regardless of the low turnout for the NDL marches, the sensationalised media images become a symbol of the white estate residents, who, by association, are seen as supporters and drivers of the NDL’s xenophobic message. Georgina openly rejects the NDL and the fact that she should be seen to be represented by them in the public sphere. Yet with little or no access to the channels of representation, she, and all the other estates residents who reject the NDL, have no power to address mainstream perceptions of the white working-class community on Eldon and Addington, as racists and supporters of extreme-right groups. As such, Georgina and all the estate residents become homogenised into one single group, who are seen to be represented by Phil Harris and the NDL.

When Dean avoids an NDL protest, he is confronted by both a lone Muslim woman and a People Against Fascism (PAF) march. Although not part of the NDL march or in any way sharing the NDL’s ideology, Dean is recognised as being associated with racism and far-right support. The Police Officer, the PAF and the Muslim woman all identify Dean through the visible signifiers of ‘inferior’ consumer choices with regards to clothing and general appearance. The chav figure becomes emblematic of aggression, racism, degeneracy and inferior cultural choices. As such Dean is a symbol of fear for the lone Muslim woman and a symbol of disgust for the members of the PAF, one of which exhibits class contempt by spitting at Dean’s feet. Dean is recognised by his appearance and categorised instantaneously into the dangerous, deviant and inferior white working class. When seeing his image in the silvered mirror, Dean identifies the markers that determine his perceived socio-cultural value. He recognises the group that he is consciously and unconsciously associated with and rejects the idea that it represents him:
I’m so fucking white. Blotchy pink and white. Look at that crew cut hair. I scrape my hand over my head. It feels good, tight and cushioned. But it looks…I don’t know. I do know. It looks like all them other ones who hang out in the third courtyard in from the Prickworks. I’ve even got the same polo shirt and grey trackie bottoms. Even me white trainers ain’t different. I can’t move. The reflection holds me. It’s the face…The eyes are slant and the cheeks are puffed and pointy at the same time. And the mouth. I see my lips curl up to one side like an Elvis quiff. I’m sneering. Like I hate everything around me. Everyone around me. Like I hate myself. The face stares back at me and I know who it is. It’s Phil Harris. It’s all those fuckers in the NDL. It’s the BMX kids on Eldon and Addington. I’m them. I look like them and everyone in the whole fucking world sees me like it too…But I’m not like them. I’m not fucking like them…He isn’t me (Crewe, 2016, p226).
Both feared and loathed, by association to far-right groups and by adherence to media disseminated images and ridicule of the white working-class chav, Dean is marginalised through a process of racialization, where culture has been tied to his visible identity ‘in a hierarchical way’ (Garner, 2009, p48; See also Webster, 2008).
Part 6 – The England Riots and De-Racialisation

Part 6 of the novel is set in 2011 when Dean is 29 years old.

Entrenched working-class disengagement from mainstream politics, a result of mainstream political parties targeting middle-class voters, was one of the key drivers behind the violence of the riots, where political demands failed to be articulated or had been previously ignored (Sutterlüty, 2014). Rather than analyse the underlying causes of the riots, mainstream media and politicians chose to pursue their usual representational regimes by degrading the rioters and, by association, the working-class groups they came from, thus continuing a process of stigmatisation that labels the working class as aggressive, violent and criminal (Sutterlüty, 2014; McKenzie, 2015). In the aftermath of the riots, mainstream media and politicians repeatedly used terms such as ‘morally bankrupt’, ‘feral’, ‘scum’ and ‘scum class’, recycling negative ‘cultures of poverty’ epithets to homogenise low-income groups, and using the riots as proof of degeneracy to legitimise further marginalisation of the working class and provide just cause for austerity measures that disproportionately target low-income groups (McKenzie, 2015). It is clear that leading politicians have avoided any attempt to understand the motivations of the rioters, and British Prime Minister David Cameron’s dismissal of the insurgents as simply criminals in need of punishment, is an unsatisfactory analysis (Sutterlüty, 2014). The way in which media and political elites have talked about the rioters follows an historical pattern of dismissing genuine working-class concerns expressed through conflict. One such example is then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s statement about the 1981 England riots that occurred in multi-ethnic inner city locations including Brixton in London, Handsworth in Birmingham, Toxteth in Liverpool and Chapeltown in Leeds; ‘What perhaps aggravated the 1981 riots into a virtual saturnalia…was the impression given by television that…rioters could enjoy a fiesta of crime, looting and rioting in the guise of social protest’ (Thatcher cited in Dancygier, 2010, p89).

In Part 6 of the creative component, Dean takes part in one of the riots that have spread to Addington High Street. As part of his unconscious desire to be an active citizen-consumer in order to obtain equality in the eyes of the middle and upper classes, he targets the consumer products that he is unable to purchase due to his economic exclusion from mainstream consumption patterns. However, when he witnesses the attack on Ghalia’s uncle’s shop, he realises how misguided destruction shaped the outpouring of anger at economic inequality. Both Dean and Ghalia come to understand the underlying causes of the riots, that of socio-cultural, economic and political exclusion of all working-class groups regardless of ethnicity. This is embodied in the scene directly after Ghalia leaves in the ambulance and Dean is interviewed by a reporter. She uses the same rhetorical structures as politicians when describing the rioters, but on this occasion Dean is able to confront her about the hypocrisy of her word use and the actions of the media in general:

Who the fuck does she think she is interrogating me? She’s only about twelve and probably comes from Surrey. What does she know about round here? And she’s trying to tell me what to think…

‘[You] wouldn’t be down here talking to me if this was a peaceful protest, would you?’

…

That’s all they show, the bad stuff. Gang killings or those NDL cunts or Islams burning flags. They ain’t interested in real people. What life’s really like here. Just extremes. Never the middle…I stare her in the eye and then turn to face the camera.

Hegemonic systems of control utilised by the media and political elites uphold structures of inequality, which are the hidden drivers of violence and racially motivated conflict. Something that was significantly overlooked during the 2011 England riots was the fact that, ‘there is no indication whatsoever that ethnic categories were of any real significance in terms of the composition of rioting groups or the choice of targets…rioters exhibited such a diverse ethnic composition that they were linked with a process of deracialisation’ (Sutterlüty, 2014, p44). Clear evidence that the elite’s attempt to use inter-ethnic competition to account for the many concerns facing the white working class and, by association, all immigrant and minority ethnic groups, is misleading and an indirect, and to some extent direct, attempt to divert attention away from hierarchical structures that maintain economic and political hegemony centred in the white middle and upper classes.

The socio-cultural research discussed in this chapter forms the genesis of the plot and characters in the creative component. Tracing Dean’s trajectory from childhood through to adulthood allows the reader to follow his exposure to the development of counter-narratives amongst the white working-class community on Eldon and Addington. In Part One Dean experiences what he perceives as unfair treatment compared to that of Madu. As a result, he becomes disengaged with school and authority figures in general, feeding into the ‘unfairness to whites’ counter-narratives already present on the estates. In Part Two, these same counter-narratives, compounded with the mainstream media representations of estate whites as ‘social accessories’ to the murder, form the backdrop to his re-imagining of the murder he witnesses. Dean unconsciously tries to defend against the blame narratives that are being constructed by media and political elites, by providing a counter-narrative of black on black violence. In Parts Three and Four, the rise of the far-right party, BFP, on the estates coincides with increased ethnic tension and violence. The BFP’s prominence feeds into the counter-narratives of ‘preferential treatment for immigrant and minority ethnic groups’ and the mainstream blame narratives targeting Muslims. Dean becomes entangled in both, blaming Ghalia and, by association, all Muslims for barring his family’s access to social housing. The concerns Dean airs are constructed by both mainstream media and politicians, as well as far-right parties, as being caused by ethnicity, rather than as a result of poverty. Ghalia’s adherence to the construction of the homogenised white working-class chav, effectively affirms the ethnically charged blame narratives that sets up low-income groups as being in competition with each other. The racialisation of the white working-class subject through the construction of the chav figure is highlighted in Part Five when Dean is associated with the extreme-right NDL group because of the way he looks. The anti-fascist protest group’s members recognise Dean, which in their eyes justifies their outpourings of disgust for him. He is a chav, therefore racist. Part Six comes from the evidence that the 2011 England riots were not motivated by ethnicity, but by socio-economic exclusion. Poverty was the main cause of the riots and, to some extent, united low-income groups, regardless of ethnicity. The riots exposed hegemonic systems of white middle- and upper-class dominance, albeit limited and contained by the reiteration of simplistic blame narratives disseminated by media and political elites that posited the rioters as nothing but criminals, therefore avoiding any further analysis into the underlying causes of what can clearly be seen as political protest.

It is important to recognise that the novel does not claim omniscient insight or even the authority to accurately represent a white working-class community. However, by using opposing first and third person perspectives (discussed further in Chapter 3) it attempts to undermine and expose dominant groups’ representations of the white working class by juxtaposing expectations of homogenised white working-class lifestyles, with that of an individual actually living one. Thus the novel attempts to expose media and political elites’ construction of the white working-class subject as conveyed through the chav figure, therefore undermining the homogenising process that repetitive and narrow representations work to achieve. The novel, therefore, can be seen as a counter-narrative in its own right. It is not claiming to be representative of the working class, but rather a narrative that rejects the mainstream construction of a marginalised group and instead offers an alternative voice in the public arena. Rather than construction of the white working class being done by those at the top of the hierarchy, the novel attempts to look up the chain of power from the bottom, therefore exposing the foundations on which hegemonic structures stand. The creative component works with and against dominant forms of representation to expose their constructed nature and force a re-analysis of typified portrayals of marginalised groups as propagated by those with access to, and control of, channels of representation, leading public bodies and institutions. As such the novel attempts to refocus academic, political and public attention on the main underlying causes of political disengagement and far-right success, that of socio-economic exclusion; that all groups living in poverty share many similar concerns and the blame narratives constructed by those in power, do nothing but divert attention from the drivers of exclusion and racism. The novel tries to undermine the construction of the chav figure and reclaim individuality, respect and equality for members of the white working class, and, by association, all immigrant and minority ethnic groups living in poverty.

For the reasons stated above, this thesis focuses on commercially successful authors whose novels have been distributed by mainstream publishers. Their selection for publication, marketing budget and large potential network for distribution are controlled by the middle and upper classes. As such, the typified representations of (white) working-class characters that mainstream authors conform to are disseminated across the established networks and readerships of the major publishing houses, ultimately feeding back into political and media representations of the (white) working class. It’s important to note, this thesis does not suggest that non-mainstream or alternative authors and publishers are not part of this process, but acknowledges their ability to influence mainstream representational codes is marginal compared to that of the major publishing houses and mainstream writers. However, non-mainstream publishers are more likely to provide their authors a space to challenge mainstream representation and can therefore offer alternatives to middle- and upper-class controlled depictions of ‘other’ groups. One example, discussed later, is Courttia Newland’s Society Within which works to undermine mainstream representations of poor black communities. This thesis, however, is predominantly concerned with writers that have the potential to impact mainstream representation beyond literature, hence the focus on authors distributed by a mainstream publisher.

This chapter argues that literature, as opposed to some other forms of narrative representation, has been, and still is, complicit in the marginalisation of the white working class through typified portrayals of white working-class characters and lifestyles, thus feeding back into the cycles of representation and the socio-cultural, financial and political exclusion summarised above and discussed in the previous chapter. Tracing examples of typified depictions of working-class characters from Charles Dickens up to the white working-class characters of more recent writers such as Martin Amis, this chapter will then look at a selection of contemporary novels set in London during the study period and demonstrate how the same tropes of working-class socio-cultural identity, and more specifically white working-class identity, are still used in the construction of working-class and white working-class characters, and how Another London responds and engages with them. This chapter continues by arguing that there is a lack of rounded and developed white working-class characters in British fiction and that contemporary authors continue to rely on typified representations rather than interrogate them, therefore remaining complicit in feedback loops that work to marginalise the white working class, which contributes to the maintenance of the existing socio-economic and political hierarchy. To conclude this chapter, an argument is put forward in support of the creative component. The novel works with and against prevailing representations of the white working class in literature in order to expose the dominant politico-cultural class assumptions about the lifestyles of the white poor, and, to some extent, all groups living in poverty. In doing this, the creative component, it is argued, opens up space in the public arena for both imagined and real individual voices from marginalised groups to be heard. Thus providing more direct access to channels of representation and an interrogation of the blame narratives that are used to maintain these groups’ socio-economic exclusion. In essence, shifting the focus from the excluded to who is doing the excluding with the intention of exposing hidden structures that maintain white middle- and upper-class privilege (Mount, 2004).

Whereas the modern realist novel’s origins date back as far as the eighteenth century, both film and popular music are predominantly post-war phenomena. They each gained mainstream popularity in the decade that followed parliamentary acts in education and welfare, as well as the formation of the National Health Service, which delivered working-class families greater access to education, longer life expectancy, shorter working weeks and disposable incomes¹⁷. As such, the working-class population became mass consumers of film and popular music in a way that they had not been consumers of the literary novel a century earlier. Film and popular music became potential outlets for working-class voices, seen in groups like The Beatles or in movements like the British New Wave, and continued through to contemporary musicians such as Plan B and The Streets and directors such as Ken Loach, Andrea Arnold and Shane Meadows, who all interrogate mainstream representations of the white working class in ways that their literary counterparts do not. As Tew argues, ‘authors may explore a sense of localised community in an increasingly disjointed world, but mostly through a middle-class prism, often with undercurrent hankerings for Bloomsbury’ (Tew, 2007, p89). However, it’s important to note that visual media and popular music are still in the majority control of the elite. This can be seen in current mainstream representations of the ‘chav’ as ‘irrational and/or mindless,…inarticulate or confused’ (Adams and Raisborough, 2011, p84). Television and media programmers ‘dumb down’ their output and then shift the blame to the working-class consumers, criticising who it was made for rather than who made it, using this as a tacit excuse to further restrict working-class access to, and control of, media production (Mount, 2004). What makes film and popular music different to literature is the fact that a large proportion of the market for these products is made up of working-class consumers. This stake in the production/consumption cycle gives rise to indirect influence and the potential for working-class voices to filter through, such as the examples given above. Literature, on the other hand, has remained essentially a middle- and upper-class market, where ‘the centre of the naturalist narrative paradigm is the perspective of the bourgeoisie and its vision of the other (lower) classes’ (Jameson, 2013, p149; See also Jameson, 1988; Carey, 1992; Tew, 2007). As such, access to publication and distribution through traditional channels is restricted for socially excluded groups. Marginalised sections of society, such as the white working class, minority ethnic and immigrant groups, and to some extent women, are underrepresented. Thus, as in mainstream media and politics, representations of excluded groups in literature generally fall within the accepted and typified portrayals expected by the middle- and, to an extent, upper-class dominated readership.

It could be argued, given the relatively small proportion of products and consumers that literature contributes to the narrative-based industries, that literature’s power to construct socio-cultural identities and to maintain financial and political hierarchies, is limited. However, this thesis argues that literature’s status as a middle- and upper-class cultural product of the educated allows it to disseminate and recirculate ideological representational structures to the elite, those with access to leading public bodies and institutions, therefore influencing government policy, and mainstream media and political representations of excluded groups. Thus contributing disproportionately, in relation to its market share in narrative-based industries, to feedback loops of representation. By exposing these connections, this thesis aims to highlight, and put forward for scrutiny, the ‘middle-class method of repressing reality…of leaving out, of strategic omissions, lapses, a kind of careful preliminary preparation of the raw material such that certain questions will never arise in the first place’ (Jameson, 1988, pp118-119). In literature’s case, how the construction of character within a novel can feed back into class identity politics, socio-cultural status, financial and political hierarchies. As Adams and Raisborough put it in their study of representations of the ‘chav’ figure in mainstream media, how typified portrayals of white working-class characters are used to hold ‘them in place (physical, imagined, and symbolic) and at a safe distance, whilst simultaneously establishing the morality and social standing of the valorized in group’ (Adams and Raisborough, 2011, p91), i.e. the white middle- and upper-class elite.

Fredric Jameson claims that central to this paradigm is the elite’s, conscious and unconscious, fear of losing their socio-cultural status and the economic and political privileges associated with it. This anxiety of decline manifests itself in depictions of working-class lifestyles and the misery that accompanies them (Webster, 2008; Jameson, 2013). These portrayals of working-class characters and environments are more specifically reflections of a continuing identity crisis in the author’s own class. By adhering to mainstream media and political representations of the white working class as being violent, racist and culturally inferior, middle- and upper-class writers assume the opposite position of their own class existence, as nonviolent, anti-racist and culturally superior (Tew, 2007). In The Political Unconscious, Jameson posits what could either be seen as the root cause or logical conclusion of this phenomenon: Whoever is different constitutes a threat and is therefore evil, yet ‘the essential point to be made is not so much that [they are] feared because [they are] evil; rather [they are] evil because [they are] Other, alien, different, strange, unclean, and unfamiliar’ (Jameson, 2010, p101, original italics). By highlighting the underlying motivations for an author’s narrative choices when representing other, oppositional groups, Jameson suggests that any given literary text cannot be viewed as independent and autonomous in itself, but rather as being ‘rewritten’ as part of a set of traditional interpretative functions during the process of its reading (Jameson, 2010). As suggested above, literature is primarily a cultural output of the white middle- and upper-class educated elite and is predominantly consumed by those who share the same socio-cultural identity. Therefore, as it is the same group that writes and rewrites through interpretation, literature becomes a process of reasserting the primacy of one hegemonic class. As Jameson puts it, ‘the aesthetic act is itself ideological, and the production of aesthetic or narrative form is to be seen as an ideological act in its own right’ (Jameson, 2010, p64). In this way, literature can be seen as complicit in upholding hierarchical socio-cultural structures that maintain financial and political privilege for the middle and upper classes, justified by the apparent degeneracy of the working class who cannot be trusted with power due to their socio-cultural and intellectual inadequacies.

As discussed above, literature has a disproportionate influence on the way in which the elite make assumptions and judgments about working-class lifestyles. A further reason for this is the concept of literary realism, which claims that representation is achievable though mimesis. This assertion, perpetuated by the producers and consumers of narrative prose fiction, works to construct the sense of a shared system of belief or common-sense (Jameson, 1988). In the case of this thesis, that shared system of belief includes the premise that it is morally justified to exclude the white working class from positions in leading public bodies and institutions because of their immoral and culturally deficient lifestyle choices. However, as Jameson argues, realism is nothing more than a set of traditional and pervasive codes that work to mask the underlying hegemonic class structures that permeate literature (Wood, 2009). Therefore, claims of accurate or authentic representation can be viewed as artifice rather than real or true.

This conclusion forces a re-evaluation of the act of narration in the realist novel, specifically free indirect discourse. The writer claims, consciously or unconsciously, to have access to the thoughts of the character, the ‘truth’ of their essence. When this character is a member of a marginalised ‘other’ group, such as the white working class, the claims of realism as representative feeds into the writing and rewriting through interpretation process, whereby the middle- and upper-class producers and consumers of literature, consciously or unconsciously, reaffirm their shared sense of belief in their own lifestyle choices as being normal and desirable by projecting the opposite and inferior cultural behaviour patterns onto the character in question. By assuming the writer possesses objective knowledge of the subject when accessing the ‘truth’ of their white working-class characters, white middle- and upper-class readers reaffirm their own class identity through comparison, which confirms their shared knowledge of the cultural inferiority of the white working class. Which ultimately reinforces their underlying, if not apparent, belief in socio-economic inequality. It is this process that writer and director Pier Paolo Pasolini criticised as being essentially class-based when developing his own theory of free indirect discourse.

It should be noted here that the creative component of this thesis uses both first person and free indirect discourse in conjunction with distant third person techniques in an attempt to expose and interrogate the process highlighted by Pasolini above. There will be further discussion on this narrative technique in Chapter Three.

As argued above, realist literature has deployed a number of signifiers, such as violence, racism and cultural inferiority, in the creation of working-class characters, lifestyles and environments. The contemporary white working-class cultural identity, as discussed above and in the previous chapter, is constructed in mainstream media and politics through the same set of signifiers, which Webster claims are often associated with specific locations such as inner-city urban areas and estates (Webster, 2008). Both historically and, up to and including, the study period, novelists have reproduced these signifiers, as well as using free indirect discourse, to suggest ‘true’ working-class voices, in order to construct blame narratives that posit marginalised groups, such as the white working class, as the cause of their socio-economic and political exclusion.

One possible way to trace examples of this process in British fiction is to identify recurring ideologemes, what Fredric Jameson describes as ‘the smallest intelligible unit of the essentially antagonistic collective discourses of social classes’ (Jameson, 2010, p61). Ideologemes work as both a conceptual construction and as a narrative sign, a duality that incorporates concepts such as beliefs and opinions as well as minimal units of socially symbolic narrative acts (Jameson, 2010). As such, they can be seen as the inherited units of representation upon which the process of writing and rewriting through interpretation bases its narrative construction. As Jameson puts it, ‘by their respective positions in the whole complex sequence of the modes of production, both the individual text and its ideologemes know a final transformation, and must be read in terms of…the ideology of form, that is, the symbolic messages transmitted…by the coexistence of various sign systems which are themselves traces or anticipations of modes of production’ (Jameson, 2010, p61).

By identifying recurring ideologemes, the marginalisation of the lower classes in literature through conscious or unconscious typifications of character, lifestyle and environment can be traced from the present day back through to at least the nineteenth century (Mount, 2004). This chapter continues by selecting some key examples¹⁸ of recurring ideologemes of lower-class representation, starting with Charles Dickens (1812-1870) as one of the most prominent London based novelists to construct, interpret and portray working-class identities.

In a similar way to the stigmatisation of the white working class now, the Victorian working class that had emerged from the industrial revolution, were viewed as barriers to modernisation as a result of their physical and cultural degeneracy, attributes that were often associated with lower-income districts or slums (Webster, 2008; See also Chapter One). Many of Dickens’ novels contain descriptions of fictional lower-income districts such as this one taken from A Christmas Carol:

This ideologeme can be traced through to another later Victorian novelist, George Gissing (1857-1903), who oscillates ‘between an implacable denunciation of the reformist-philanthropists and an equally single-minded indictment of the "poor" who cannot…be rescued or elevated’ (Jameson, 2010, p180). John Carey, in The Intellectual and the Masses, summarises Gissing’s approach as condemning the working-class for their lack of imagination and intellect, but at the same time arguing that they could not, or should not be given the opportunity to, elevate themselves through education, even though he was committed to the idea that literature and poetry were capable of doing just that (Carey, 1992). Specifically, it is the concept of unassailable vulgarity that Gissing repeatedly includes in his working-class characters and environments. Like Dickens, there are many such examples in his novels, one of the most obvious coming from the description of the slum market and its inhabitants in the opening chapter of Workers in the Dawn published in 1880. What marks this section out is that Gissing is describing a real place, Whitecross Street in East London. Unlike Dickens’s imagined locations, Gissing firmly places the assumed middle- and upper-class reader in a real context, purposely working to confirm the educated elite’s expectations of slum-life as well as cementing the connection between his imagined characters and the real-life inhabitants of low-income districts such as Whitecross Street¹⁹. In each of the extracts from Workers in the Dawn below we see repeated and expanded the very same ideologemes present in the extract from A Christmas Carol (all excerpts from Gissing, 1880):

Gissing’s fear of poverty and disdain for the working class is echoed in many of the modernist writers who followed him in the early twentieth century, specifically the belief that education could not redeem the poor or raise them out of their vulgar lower-class patterns of behaviour and lifestyles (For further discussion and examples see Carey, 1992; Mount, 2004). One key example from this period can be found in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) in the way she describes Mrs Dalloway’s daughter’s tutor, Doris Kilman. Despite her working-class background and poverty, Kilman has managed to pass a degree and remain independent. Indeed, given the time the book is set, Doris Kilman seems much less a barrier to modernisation, than a driver of feminine modernity. Yet, Woolf depicts her as ‘a monster of spite, envy and unfulfilled desire,…plain’ (Carey, 1992, p19), criticising ‘how she dressed…so insensitive was she, dressed in a green mackintosh coat. Year in year out she wore that coat; she perspired’ (Woolf, 2008). Woolf implicitly ridicules her socio-cultural background, lifestyle choices and, more importantly, her aspirations to improve herself through education. Woolf makes it clear that all Kilman’s attempts to raise herself out of the slums have been fruitless. She has learnt to play the violin, but it always sounds awful. She has education, but lacks the intellectual capacity to question religion. Woolf feeds back into the recurring ideologemes of Dickens and Gissing by separating her own class and that of Doris Kilman’s, placing them in opposition (Carey, 1992). Woolf reaffirms that both she and Mrs Dalloway are everything someone from Kilman’s low socio-cultural status can never be. Thus reinforcing the idea that socio-cultural status is part of the natural order, which feeds back into the underlying belief in economic and political inequality between the classes.

Philip Tew argues that even in purportedly socialist writers of the mid-twentieth century there can also be seen a conscious or unconscious embedding of working-class stereotypes, as described in the ideologemes discussed above. In the major post-war novels, socio-cultural identities of characters are overwhelmingly constructed from a middle-class perspective, where ‘human personality…seems too often simply a series of middle-class co-ordinates’ (Tew, 2007, p54). This implies a normal and desirable central position from which all other identities can be judged and repressed, creating the impression that only one ‘correct’ cultural pattern of behaviour and lifestyles exists (Jameson, 2010). For example, Tew highlights Iris Murdoch as a writer unable to interrogate the assumption of a natural class hierarchy. She ‘is stuck in a world projecting a sense of contemporary crisis, but one where the intellectual and political class remain secure in their superior vision of the world’ (Tew, 2007, p55). Her exclusion of working-class culture from her writing works to exclude lower-income groups from society as a whole, almost to the extent that she refutes their very right to existence, in order to reaffirm socio-cultural and economic hegemony and middle- and upper-class privilege (Tew, 2007).

As with Murdoch, the sense of contemporary crisis, a cultural decline into degradation and banality, assumed by many twentieth century writers, is suffused with blame narratives that posit the lower-classes and their flawed patterns of mass consumption as cause and effect of this phenomenon, whilst, through the ideological act of narrative production, holding their own classed existence up as the potential solution (Tew, 2007; Jameson, 2010). As discussed above, where the Victorian ruling classes accused the working class of being barriers to modernisation, towards the end of the twentieth century these blame narratives shifted to the white working class as drivers of cultural decline (See Chapter One for further discussion). As it was for Victorian writers and elites, this is articulated in a ‘“chain of signifiers”: familial disorder and dysfunction, dangerous masculinities,…antisocial behaviour, moral decay and quick to resort to criminality’ as well as ‘backwardness, degeneracy, over-fecundity, fecklessness’ (Webster, 2008, p307; p302). As seen in realism, modernism and the post-war writers, this trend, and the ideologemes associated with it, continued through into the work of more recent writers. One key example would be the white working-class character, Keith Talent, from Martin Amis’s²¹ London Fields, who embodies all the signifiers mentioned above. This is how Nick Bentley describes Keith Talent in his book Contemporary British Fiction: ‘Keith is of limited intelligence and his cultural pursuits revolve around darts, football, pornography and TV. He is a violent petty criminal who preys on the weak and the vulnerable, mainly because he ‘failed’ to be ruthless enough to get into serious violent crime. He is a racist and abuses women’ (Bentley, 2008, p38). Taking examples from London Fields it is possible to trace direct parallels between Amis’s working-class characterisation and that of Gissing’s discussed above (All excerpts taken from Amis, 1989):

You cuold have a house so big you could have sevral dart board

areas in it, not just won. With a little light on top.

Or:

Or:

The charges of ‘typification’ and stereotyping levelled at Amis are usually countered with the claim that he is using irony to expose and question such stereotypes across society as a whole. One such argument is put forward by Nick Bentley: ‘All of Keith’s negative attributes can be identified in society (and more significantly within what is constructed as working-class culture by certain sections of the middle classes), however, Amis is…alerting the reader to the implications of uncritically accepting these stereotypes’ (Bentley, 2008, p39). However, if we take Jameson’s argument from The Political Unconscious as detailed above, then the reading of Amis’s work must go further than Bentley’s use of irony as a defence. Instead the analysis must consider the ideologemes that are embedded into his novels²² and how they function in the process of writing and rewriting through interpretation, how London Fields as narrative production is a socially symbolic act (Jameson, 2010). As mentioned above, Keith is never self-aware, never conscious of his failings or the low socio-cultural status he embodies, which is in direct contrast to the three other major characters, Samson, Nicola and Guy. Each of these are well educated and drawn from the middle and upper classes. They have their own failings and they each attempt to manipulate the other characters for their own ends, yet they are all given a level of self-awareness and perception that Amis denies the only major working-class character. Nicola, Samson and Guy are all conscious of their socio-cultural status and thus distinctly aware that Keith’s is lower. Underpinning all this is Amis’s suggestion that only those with education and self-awareness have the ability for self-expression, a vital component, implied by Amis, for being able to truly experience life. This concept parallels closely with Gissing’s own assertion that only through education, specifically knowledge of literature and poetry, can one feel the profundity of life (Carey, 1992). Insinuated by both Gissing and Amis is the idea that those without adequate education, most often found in the poorest groups in society, cannot understand or appreciate life. They stop just short of the logical next step; that these people do not deserve life.

Underlying Dickens, Gissing and Amis is the suggestion that the lower classes are unaware of their degradation, of their vulgar behaviours and lifestyles, but more importantly is that they have no desire to live any differently. They are the self-perpetuating cause of their socio-cultural status and economic and political exclusion. Amis, consciously or unconsciously, constructs the middle and upper classes as the only classes that can recognise, understand and interpret the contemporary crisis of society. In effect, the class of the writer and implicitly the assumed class of the reader. As Tew succinctly puts it:

Authors may explore a sense of localised community in an increasingly disjointed world, but mostly through a middle-class prism…Nevertheless, rather than being subsumed by the crisis of an increasingly complex culture, the characters and narrators in a range of contemporary writers…very specifically interrogate the crises of identity of their own class, its enculturation and the species of peculiarity liminal urban ontological existence that they at least imagine that they particularly have to endure (Tew, 2007, p89).

Turning to contemporary British fiction, particularly work published and set during the study period, on the surface there seems to be a shift away from novels that deal with class identity. Instead, the politics of race, gender and sexual identity have become more prominent subjects (Bentley, 2007; Jameson, 2012; Lott, 2015). When class is addressed it appears, as discussed in the previous chapter, to be conflated with that of ethnicity, where working class is often seen to mean white working class (Lott, 2015). The urban, inner-city, estate-dwelling, white working-class subject has become, at least in part, racially constructed (Byrne, 2006). The key point being that the whiteness in question is connected only to socially excluded, poor and deprived whites, whereas the white middle and upper classes maintain an invisible or implicit whiteness (Webster, 2008; Rogaly, 2011; See Chapter 1 for further discussion). As such, the ideologemes of lower-class representation traced through the examples above have also been conflated with that of ethnicity. White working-class characters are still created in terms of their geographic connection to spatialised poverty, most often inner-city estates, where their inferior and immoral lifestyles are interwoven with urban decay, and are constructed as the self-generated and perpetuated cause and effect of their socio-economic exclusion (Webster, 2008). Yet, now the white working-class are also portrayed as the main proponents of racism (Webster, 2008; Lott, 2015). To see this process in action, below is a selection of key examples from contemporary writers that include either the ideologemes of Dickens et al or the conflation of these with the added ideologeme of the inherently racist, lower-class, urban white.

In the extracts below, the typified portrayals of the working class are conflated with that of ethnicity in the construction of a white working class and white working-class characters. The first extract is taken from Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, first published in 2003. The book tells the story of a Bangladeshi woman’s life in London after coming to England to live with her husband. This extract is taken from the protagonist, Nazneem’s, early experiences of living on an east London council estate:

…I follow his eyes and see the courtyard. It looks the same as mine. They all look the same to me…

‘Why’d anyone wanna live here? It’s full of scum. Pakis and fucking niggers everywhere.’…‘If I could, I’d skin every black fucker alive and set ‘em alight.’…‘I’d blow their arms and legs off and tell ‘em to swim back where they came from.’

…

‘Dean.’…‘Don’t forget you’re white.’

The construction of the white working-class identity as a set of signifiers can be seen in this extract from Caryl Phillips’ A Distant Shore:

The policewoman who was on the walkie talkie has come up behind us. I turn my head to follow her finger. She’s pointing at the bundle of people on Addington High Street (Crewe, 2016, p218).

Most notable about the writers of the contemporary period is that although they are consciously interrogating racialised constructions of minority ethnic and immigrant characters and lifestyles, their, conscious or unconscious, embedding and conflation of racist and working-class ideologemes actually work to racialise the white working class. As such, contemporary writers feed back into the white middle- and upper-class hegemonic structures that keep narrative literature intrinsically linked to the socio-cultural construction of classed identities. The ideologemes that permeate contemporary literature work to construct the white working class as violent, culturally inferior and the main drivers of racism, are the same ideologemes that work to reaffirm the writer’s and assumed reader’s²⁵ class as ‘other’ to the white working class, nonviolent, culturally superior and anti-racist. Therefore, justifying the restricted access to channels of literary representation for marginalised groups, such as the white working class.

‘The NDL ain’t England. Don’t let it change you. It ain’t us. It ain’t like what it says on the telly. That’s not me’ (Crewe, 2016,

p252).

Chapter 3 – The use of first- and third-person narration in Another London
As discussed in the previous chapter, the creative component attempts to rectify the lack of white working-class voices in contemporary literature, specifically from the study period and location. By interrogating typified representations of white working-class characters through the use and exposure of the ideologemes identified in Chapter Two, the novel seeks to challenge prevailing assumptions about white working-class lifestyles and behaviour that are commonly held by the dominant politico-cultural class.

Before a more detailed discussion can be provided, it is important to acknowledge a potential criticism that could be levied against the creative component, that of its authorship from within the British university system. It could be argued that there is an inherent contradiction for an author writing about a social group who have limited access to channels of self-representation whilst the author himself is working from a privileged position within the dominant politico-literary hierarchy, a process which could be seen as an ideological ‘instrument to stabilize the political balance and to reproduce social inequality’ (Hakemulder, 2004, p196; see also van Dijk, 1993). In response, this thesis argues that the intention of the creative component is not to claim omniscient insight or authority to represent the white working class, but rather to expose the dominant narrative ideologemes within British literary fiction that work to homogenise white working-class groups. As such, the novel attempts to individualise members of a marginalised group in a similar way to Monica Ali in Brick Lane (2003), Courttia Newland in Society Within (1999) and Caryl Phillips in A Distant Shore (2003), by providing ‘a textual space…[where the writer] can produce a representative voice by adopting the marginalised position’ (Bentley, 2008, p85). By exposing and interrogating dominant forms of white working-class representation, and by presenting individuated portrayals of white working-class characters, this thesis attempts to force a re-evaluation of the blame narratives and class disgust that are used to justify socio-cultural and financial inequality. Thus the creative component’s aim, in common with organisations such as The Sutton Trust and Joseph Rowntree Foundation²⁶, is to open up public debate on access to, and control of, channels of representation, with the ultimate goal of developing greater democratic participation in modes of self-representation for members of the white working class, and, as a result, other marginalised groups.

In The Political Unconscious, Fredric Jameson argues that ‘the production of aesthetic or narrative form is to be seen as an ideological act in its own right, with the function of inventing imaginary or formal "solutions" to unresolvable social contradictions’ (Jameson, 2010, p64). As such, the process of writing the creative component can be analysed in terms of it being a socially symbolic act, whereby the inclusion and usage of ideologemes can be exposed and interrogated alongside the author’s interpretation of the socio-political order. The process by which the author approached the writing of the novel consciously acknowledged Jameson’s proposition. Before constructing the narrative or developing any characters, the author did extensive research into the socio-cultural and politico-economic background of white working-class groups over the study period and location, which culminated in Chapter One of the critical component of this thesis. From this vantage point, the author wrote the creative component, allowing storylines and characters to develop out of the research and to evolve through the writing process itself, in terms of plot and narrative technique, creating meaning through the relationship between the real world of the research and that of the fictional world of the novel. Narrative texts are not individual entities, but exist within the wider body of the literary canon, reflecting the social order in which they were written (Jameson, 2010). As such, it is possible to trace and identify recurrent ideologemes that have permeated literary texts through to contemporary authors. Analysing the creative component using the same technique allows this thesis to identify, expose and interrogate recurrent ideologemes within the creative component, whilst at the same time locating the text within the contemporary canon.

A parallel example of this process can be seen in Courttia Newland’s Society Within. In the first chapter, a gang of black boys who live on an estate are described when the female protagonist, Elisha, first encounters them:

‘What’m baybi! Baybi!’

‘Hello! Hello!’

‘Ay – ay, don’t go on like dat! Yuh lookin’ nice y’nuh star! Me only waan chat t’yuh, wha’ gwaan?’

Ignoring their cries, Elisha walked on…, but as she was a newcomer their hormones would be screaming at them to ‘try a ting’ (Newland, 2000, pp7-8).
The gang are initially constructed in terms of typified lower-class black characters; unemployed, lazy, sexually promiscuous, with poor consumption habits demonstrated through their alcohol and tobacco use, all intensified through the juxtaposition of the stereotypical lower-class black ‘street’ dialect and the ‘correct’ use of English in the descriptive prose. Yet, throughout the rest of the book, Newland works to undermine these signifiers by differentiating the boys, individuating their narratives to reveal a unique ‘subcultural community that has its own lifestyles, concerns and ethical and moral frameworks’ (Bentley, 2008, p75). Through the identification of the ideologemes that construct working-class characters, Newland is able to interrogate typified representations and force a re-evaluation of assumptions about the lifestyles of poor black communities living on inner-city estates. The creative component of this thesis attempts the same feat for white working-class communities living in comparable conditions. As with the characters depicted in Society Within, the creative component works to individuate the white working-class characters, most specifically Dean, the protagonist, in order to force a re-evaluation of the hegemonic social order that posits the white working class as a culturally inferior group, whose socio-economic exclusion is a lifestyle choice, rather than a result of systemic inequality.

Given the construction in media, politics and literature of white working-class lifestyles and behaviours as culturally inferior (see Chapters One and Two), the creative component consciously acknowledges, and works to counter, assumptions about white working-class characters held by the imagined middle-class reader. As Wayne Booth claims in The Rhetoric of Fiction: ‘If an author wants intense sympathy for characters who do not have strong virtues to recommend them, then the psychic vividness of prolonged and deep inside views will help’ (Booth, 1983, pp377-378, original italics). In other words, the individualisation of a marginalised voice moves the character beyond the sociological and into the psychological, the point where representational meaning can occur in narrative, in the sense that ‘the psychological impulse tends toward the presentation of highly individualised figures who resist abstraction and generalisation, and whose motivation is not susceptible to rigid ethical interpretation’ (Scholes et al, 2006, p101; see also Currie, 2010 and Jameson, 2010). The novel’s conscious attempt to shift perceptions from a typified reading of white working-class characters to a de-homogenised, individuated reading, works to exploit Jameson’s concept of rewriting texts through the interpretation process (See Jameson, 2010 and Chapter Two), where the reader’s ‘real-life’ assumptions about the lifestyles and behaviours of white working-class groups are exposed and challenged through their own interpretation of the characters’ lifestyles, behaviour and choices within the ‘fictional-world’ of the text.

An example of this process can be seen in Caryl Phillips’ novel A Distant Shore where the story of Solomon/Gabriel, an African refugee, is narrated in both the first and third-person. The formalistic shift augments the defamiliarisation that is induced by the sympathy and compassion that Phillips’ elicits from the reader by shifting their perspective/assumptions about refugees’ lifestyles, morality and choices from the external to the internal, thus forcing the reader to re-evaluate their pre-existing notions about real-life asylum seekers. Through first-person narration, Phillips allows a distanced reader to experience the trauma of war through the eyes of Solomon/Gabriel and therefore to understand why he wants to escape. He is shown to be hardworking and conscientious rather than the perceived notion of an asylum seeker who gets ‘something for nothing’. Phillips, through first-person narration, manages to elicit sympathy, compassion and understanding from the reader by allowing them to feel the discrimination Solomon/Gabriel faces from his point of view. Thus, Phillips potentially shifts the reader’s opinion of refugees and their plight.

The creative component exploits the nature of realist fiction by portraying aspects of a world familiar to the reader that are ‘perceived as part of a conceptual frame and ultimately integrated into the world the readers know’ (Fludernik, 2009, p55). Its narrative meaning is established though the relationship between a reader’s response, the author’s conscious and unconscious intentions, and the stylistic construction of the literary text itself (Nunning, 2008). In this way the novel works to create a connection between its fictional world and the real world of the reader, predominantly by eliciting emotional responses through first-person narration and defamiliarisation techniques (Sklar, 2013). That the creative component is a prose fiction literary text is central to this thesis in the sense that literature is a unique medium, compared to other narrative forms such as film or theatre, in its ability to portray thoughts and feelings from directly within the character through techniques such as first-person narration, which create identification with a marginalised, ‘outsider’ character, forcing a re-evaluation of a reader’s beliefs and assumptions about that character, and, as result, the fictional and real socio-cultural group to which the character belongs. As Miall and Kuiken (1999) conclude from the results of a number of empirical studies they undertook: ‘during literary reading, the perspectives that we have, perhaps unthinkingly, acquired from our culture are especially likely to be questioned…This points to the adaptive value of literature in reshaping our perspectives and providing us with greater flexibility, especially by impelling us to reconsider our system of convictions and values’ (Miall and Kuiken, 1999, p127). Through the de-homogenising of an marginalised group and the individuating of characters from that group, the novel aims to reshape assumptions and to force a re-evaluation of how that group fits into the socio-cultural and politico-economic hierarchy of a democratic country.

The creative component of this thesis consciously works to confront and expose ideologemes such as those found in White City Blue. Dean, the protagonist, grows up on the inner city Eldon estate which in many ways conforms to the identifiers found in other literary texts. It is uncared-for, messy and dilapidated, but in Another London the description of the estate, caused by lack of local authority investment rather than inhabitants desiring their neighbourhood to be in poor condition, is not used to reflect the residents’ behaviour and lifestyle choices. Instead, the novel works to represent an alternative culture that exists within its means and the systemic restrictions placed upon it by the elite. For example, Dean for the most part of the book is unemployed in the conventional sense, yet he is far from feckless. He rejects unfair and discriminatory ‘zero-hour’ contracts³³ that target those in poverty (yet are accepted by the UK government) and instead displays his entrepreneurial, and to an extent community-minded, temperament by doing shopping runs for the elderly estate residents to earn his living. When he works for the gang from Addington as a drug dealer, he doesn’t do so because he has a commitment to their ideology or because he purposely wants to break the law, rather it is because he has little opportunity to earn a living through legitimate means. It also shows Dean’s industrious nature, he works long and unsociable hours in order to earn money to contribute to supporting his family. From a middle- and upper-class perspective, Dean is an unemployed criminal, but viewed from the perspective of those living in poverty with few opportunities for social mobility, Dean is a hardworking and responsible father.

While writing the creative component, I had two major considerations. The first was the recognition of the complex and fluid nature of my own social status. Through the UK’s university system, I’ve managed to gain academic qualifications, culminating in this PhD thesis, which have given me the potential for a successful career, social mobility and the ability to move out of the working class. I’m currently employed as a University Lecturer, a far more middle-class profession than traditional working-class jobs. This transition in my socio-cultural and economic status is similar to that of Tim Lott’s who, although having written two London-based novels³⁶ set amongst the working class, now describes himself as ‘no longer working class… [with] little idea what life in the poorer parts of England is like any more’ (Lott, 2015). This recognition of class shift suggests that both myself and Tim Lott must re-evaluate whether we consider ourselves to be working- or middle-class writers. However, I would argue that these two positions do not reflect the state of flux writers such as myself or Tim Lott find ourselves in. Lott described this situation in an article for The Guardian: ‘In leaving the working class, I have always been living somewhat on the outside of the middle – no longer of the milieu in which I grew up, yet never quite fitting in to the social level to which I was "rising"’ (Lott, 2014). Yet, rather than ‘not fitting’ in either social class, I see myself as a writer - and Another London as a novel - bridging the gap between the two. Having grown up in a working-class family and environment, my experiences of working-class lifestyles and behaviours are first hand and, although the working-class characters of Another London are presented in a middle- and upper-class medium, they are not written from a middle-class perspective. I cannot claim to be the voice of the working class, but I can claim to be a voice from the working class, who is communicating within an elitist form. Although my social-cultural status has shifted and will continue to shift further, and my work as a writer and the subjects I explore are likely to reflect that change, the experiences and memories of growing up amongst the working class cannot be altered. As such, they will always offer a genuine and authentic working class voice, even if my social class is both fluid and complex.

The second major consideration I had, was the fact that I cannot claim authority to represent a particular group, even though I was born into, what would be categorised, as that group. One reason is that no group, such as the white working class, is homogenous. The concept of consigning people to a group is contentious at best and should be viewed with caution, hence the ‘fuzzy set’ definition of the white working class used by this thesis. As individuals we do not experience interactions with a group, we experience interactions with other individuals. It is this concept that I’ve attempted to address with the novel, to de-homogenise the concept of the white working class, to individuate members of this group and to show thsat as individuals they are not so different than any other individual from any other ethnicity, gender or class, particularly when it comes to non-monetary concerns such as hopes, fears, aspirations and internal conflicts. Typified representations obscure this and work to create difference between groups, resulting in demonisation, exclusion and the acceptance of inequality by those with the power to change the situation. Ultimately it enforces cultural assimilation as the only route to social mobility, rather than finding cultural similarities with which to work towards integration and a more democratic society.

Through the process of de-homogenisation, we re-humanise and individuate others. People who were previously seen as nothing more than an identikit member of a particular group, possessing only the characteristics assumed of that group, become individuals. And it is far harder to discriminate against an individual than it is a group who have been constructed as degenerate, undeserving, feckless, racist, criminal, culturally inferior and even disgusting. As such, this thesis works to question the exclusion of groups such as the white working class and to work towards removing the barriers to socio-cultural and politico-economic equality. It is important to note that this thesis does not argue that middle- and upper-class lifestyles and behaviours are wrong, rather that the lifestyles, behaviours and cultures of working-class groups are not inferior to them. The purpose of the creative component has been to open up this debate in the mind of the individual reader, to have them question their assumptions about the behaviours and lifestyles of the white working class, and to re-evaluate the socio-economic hierarchy that is re-enforced through negative, typified representations of those living in poverty.

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