The Work of Play: Anger and the Expropriated Athletes of Alan Sillitoe and David Storey
"At the same time that factory work exhausts the nervous system to the uttermost," Karl Marx observed in Das Kapital, "it does away with the many-sided play of the muscles, and confiscates every atom of freedom, both in bodily and intellectual activity" (422). Nowhere has this observation been better exemplified than in the English novels of workingclass life since the late 1950s. Whether toiling at lathes like Arthur Seaton in Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Arthur Machin in David Storey's This Sporting Life or at a milling-machine like Smith's in The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, the protagonists of such fiction typically find that their actions soon became automatic, reducing them as workers (and, more importantly, as human beings) to mere operative extensions of the factory's machinery in exactly the way that Marx described. For virtually all of these working-class protagonists, the body and its pleasures provide refuge from the workaday monotony, fragmentation, and dreariness of factory-bound life in a class-ridden world. At the end of the week, having received their pay packets, they leave behind the factory with its noise and smells, eager to have "the effect of a week's monotonous graft in the factory . . . swilled out of [their] systemfs]" in the "cosy world of pubs and noisy tarts" (Sillitoe, Saturday Night 7, 33) for which such novels are renowned. For many, however, sports provide