Alan Sillitoe e l’Universo Capovolto della Letteratura Trash
10.13125/2039-6597/2133
Nel Regno Unito la narrativa proletaria si pose sin dal principio come sottocultura in antagonismo con le forme espressive dell’egemonia letteraria. Nonostante la transitoria popolarità riscossa dalla slum fiction nel secondo dopoguerra, lo scrittore working class non godette mai dello stesso status concesso ai narratori che furono ritenuti capaci di onorare i criteri del canone. La loro marginalità finì col confondersi con quella di altre minoranze. La forte identità culturale, un tempo da essi vantata, fu progressivamente erosa dall’emergere di nuove e più audaci forme letterarie che spinsero lo scrittore proletario sempre più lontano dalla torre d’avorio della letteratura di alto profilo.Questo saggio propone una lettura Bachtiniana di Life Goes On, un romanzo picaresco pubblicato da Alan Sillitoe nel 1985, al fine di mostrare come l’universo carnevalesco dell’opera, in cui trovano spazio un manipolo di grotteschi scrittori trash, rappresenti, attraverso la profanazione del decoro letterario, una fugace sospensione della parola conforme, la liberazione dal limite, dal criterio selettivo che stabilisce la linea di confine tra l’arte canonica e quella che se ne discosta.
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2039-6597
2133
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en
Gabriella Assante di Panzillo
Between
Highbrow
Alan Sillitoe and the Topsy-Turvy Universe of Trash Literature
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between
6
Bakhtin's Keys to the Test of Modernity
2016-12-12
2016-04-04
2016-11-30
2016-12-12
1
Gabriella Assante di Panzillo
2016/12/12
10.13125/2039-6597/2133
Università of Rome "La Sapienza"
2039-6597
12
Highbrow
en;
Alan Sillitoe and the Topsy-Turvy Universe of Trash Literature
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/download/2133/2120
6
    Alan Sillitoe and the Topsy-Turvy
      Universe of Trash Literature
                    Gabriella Assante di Panzillo


                        The Few and the Many

     In the preface to the 1965 edition of Robert Tressel’s The Ragged
Trousered Philanthropists, Alan Sillitoe disclosed in no uncertain terms
his bitter appraisal of a class-oriented literary establishment prone to
marginalize proletarian novels and demote them to the rank of an
unsophisticated and lowbrow kind of art:

        Critics and reviewers often refer to such novels as “kitchen-sink
     school” with contempt, and to their authors as “the dark people”
     with derision or fear, and pontificate so glibly on “the angry
     young men”. The poor will never be forgiven for not having the
     same “civilised” values – but if they did have them perhaps those
     who criticise them now would be in their place instead. Such
     critics are, in any case, the people against whom Owen fulminates
     so ardently – so why should they condescend to be interested in
     him and his ilk, and even admit that his poor folks could be the
     right material for “art”? Their ivory tower is stuck up England’s
     arse forever it seems. (Sillitoe 1975b: 148-9)

     Only for a fleeting moment working-class fiction had enjoyed a
fair degree of popularity in the late 50s partly as a result of the huge
impact produced by the enticing pocket editions and the
cinematographic adaptations of its stories. A rapid decline followed;
the working-class ‘set’ of the Angry Young Men had reached a dead
end, for criticism was inclined to reproach them either the attempt to


Between, vol. VI, n. 12 (Novebre/ November 2016)
Gabriella Assante di Panzillo, Alan Sillitoe



explore new literary paths or the reiteration of the documentary
realism that had brought them to the fore (Laing 1986: 79). So much so
that in 1960, within a few years from his rise to stardom, Alan Sillitoe’s
fame was already declining. The General, his third work of fiction, was
deemed a flop. The novel, telling the story of a wartime orchestra
conductor, resisted conventional realist assumptions of historical and
geographical accuracy. In Walter Allen’s opinion Sillitoe had better get
back to «his factory hands and Borstal Boy»(Allen 1960: 765)1. Equally
preposterous was John Dennis Hurrel’s idea that Sillitoe suffered the
pressure of a demanding literary elite enforcing adjustments of his
debut realism along the lines of a less emotional and socially grounded
type of fiction. In order to comply with such subliminal intimations,
Sillitoe had «submerged his literary identity […] under the desire to be
significant» (Hurrel 1961: 3-16). The indictment of significance hardly
camouflaged the underlying implication that Sillitoe should have stuck
to his ‘inborn’ simplicity, which makes us wonder whether Hurrell was
not by any chance a worthy specimen of that circle of literary illuminati
whose flaws he seemed to contest.
      Those were the days in which the controversial views on culture
and society of a panjandrum like F. R. Leavis prevailed. Despite the
New Left’s crusade to bury class notions and Raymond Williams’s
objections to the «arrogance and scepticism» inherent in «the concept
of a cultivated minority, set over against a “decreated” mass» (1983:
255), the conviction that the demarcation line between high and low art
pertained to the elite and needed to be a solid one, was largely shared.
       In the aftermath of World War II and the ensuing decades, critics
addressed the question of whether the novel had come to a standstill or
was instead undergoing a transformation that while continuing
tradition, explored at once more daring formal and moral perspectives.
The mapping out of the literary landscape resulted in dogmatic
classifications based on criteria of originality and linguistic
sophistication that rather than marginalizing, in fact came to ignore a
whole set of post-war writers. John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, David Storey

      1
          Also quoted in Laing 1986: 80.


2
                                     Between, vol. VI, n. 12 (Novebre/ November 2016)



and Stan Barstow failed by the standards of what was considered to be
serious literature and were consequently expunged from the canon
(Laing 1984: 237). Emphasis was clearly placed upon:

        the selection of the few (texts, activities, people) from among
     the many – to ensure continuity of a certain set of values in the
     face of the threat of “mass civilization” (Leavis), “equalitarianism”
     (Eliot), and “the louts in the back row” or “proletariat groups who
     manifest not culture but cultural discontent” (Bradbury). (Ibid.:
     225)

      Postmodernism in its subversion of authoritarian structures
narrowed the gap between highbrow and popular art (Hutcheon 2000:
80-1) and yet John Fowles, one of the most remarkable British
exponents of that cultural enterprise and of its most distinctive
expressive medium, parody, took a rather disenchanted stance on the
masses: since chance, genes and environmental conditioning were
discriminating forces or agents of inequality among mankind, one had
to choose whether to belong to the Few or the Many. In 1963, in an
interview with Roy Newquist, Fowles declared that having been
influenced by the ideas of the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher
Heraclitus, he had explored the tension between the binary poles of the
Few and the Many in The Collector, his debut novel. He contended that
according to Heraclitus «[…] the Few were the good, the intelligent,
the independent; the Many were the stupid, the ignorant, and the
easily molded» (in Vipond 1999: 1). Miranda Grey and Frederick
Clegg, the central characters of his first novel, personified the
opposition between the Few and the Many, their story being essentially
a parable whereby he contested the idea «that there is something noble
in the inarticulate hero» (ibid.). Fowles was vitriolic about «James Dean
and all his literary children and grandchildren, like Salinger’s Holden
Caulfield, and Sillitoe’s Arthur Seaton (in Saturday Night and Sunday
Morning)» (ibid.). But more importantly, he added, «I’m against the
glamorization of the Many. I think the common man is the curse of
civilization, not its crowning glory. And he needs education, not


                                                                                   3
Gabriella Assante di Panzillo, Alan Sillitoe



adulation» (ibid.). Miranda voices Fowles’s objections, when in a page
of her diary, she confesses her utter dislike of Arthur Seaton and his
ilk: «It’s the inwardness of such people. Their not caring about what
happens anywhere else in the world. In life. Their being-in-a-box»
(Fowles 2004: 230).
      The contention went far beyond the contemporary glamorization
of the “inarticulate hero”; in 1974 in an interview with James Campbell,
Fowles deemed working-class fiction a genre intrinsically limited that
had soon run out of steam. Besides, it was his belief that its very
subjects lacked the complexity and the depth which middle class
people offered (Vipond 1999: 39).
      Sillitoe did not try to romanticize what Fowles referred to as
“Calibanity”; he rather provided dignified portraits of the people he
knew from birth allowing them to live on the fictional stage of his
stories and profess their own non-negotiable individuality in the face
of forces that conveniently categorized them as masses. In the author’s
note to Men Women and Children, (1973) he remarked:

         The problems of the simple are the problems of the gods. Those
      complicated people who are less down to earth are in many ways
      easier to describe, or at least no more difficult. […] The people in
      my stories have the same sufferings as kings and queens, but their
      daily problems are more fundamental and tormenting. Their court
      is a street-corner or a housing estate. (Sillitoe 1975a: 10-11)

     The Collector was just one of the parodies of the kind of anti-hero
epitomized by Arthur Seaton. Malcom Bradbury also created hilarious
travesties of the fiction produced by the so-called “louts at the back.”
“Room at the Bottom”, whose title patently echoes John Braine’s novel
(Room at the Top), subverted the codes of Saturday Night and Sunday
Morning, through the addition of a younger member to the Seatons’
clan. Eustace, as his mother Vera tells us, «e’s the runt o’ the pack, he’s
bin brought up soft wi’ all this beddy affluence» (Bradbury 1976: 186).
Unlike Arthur Seaton, whose days at the factory finance careless
weekends of boozing and social transgression, Eustace studies Classics


4
                                   Between, vol. VI, n. 12 (Novebre/ November 2016)



at university and spends his bus fare on «books about Spinoza and
Descartes and ‘umanistic rationalism» (ibid.:187). His feat is
reminiscent of the ambition of a more dignified ancestor, Jude Fawley
whose wish to embrace a world far removed from the one of his birth,
precipitates tragedy. Eustace’s diversity, instead, propels tragedy’s
antithetical domain, comedy, and lampoons the notion of the
uneducated proletarian underdog. His old father caustically remarks:
«’Yo’ allus was the mardarse. Right from the nipper. When all the
others wor on probation from nickin’, all yo’ wanted to do with yer
bleddy sen was to go to the grammar school and read Theocritus on
pastoral’» (ibid.).
       In fairness, Bradbury’s parody did not simply mock Sillitoe’s
illiterate downwardly mobile anti-hero but also the mannerisms of
other contemporary writers including Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark.
However, for all his parody’s side-splitting humour, we cannot fail to
notice that Bradbury ultimately denied the Angry Young Men’s fiction
the aesthetic resonance allowed instead to novelists that made it into
the canon with loftier subjects, style and themes.
       Between 1959 and 2004, Sillitoe produced thirty-two works of
fiction, four plays, fourteen collections of poems and ten non-fiction
books. Humble and unassuming, he shunned literary awards and
hardly uttered words of bitter discontent at the arrogance with which
the literary establishment denigrated or neglected most of the works of
such a wide writing career (see Bradford 2008: 330). The deep critical
vacuum in which most of Sillitoe’s writing lies today raises doubts
about the objectivity of critical judgement and urges a more careful
appreciation of his most under-researched works, regardless of
whether they enter the canon or not. This is the critical belief that
informs the present essay. After outlining the context that in the long
run undermined Sillitoe’s art, it narrows its focus to Life Goes On (1975),
in order to unveil the writer’s sarcastic grin. Finally, it looks at the
carnivalesque, nether universe of trash literature through the novel’s
violation of high-octane, established fiction.




                                                                                 5
Gabriella Assante di Panzillo, Alan Sillitoe




                            The Louts at the Bottom
       Sillitoe’s abiding fascination with roguish characters is perhaps
the quintessential hallmark of his fiction. Arthur Seaton and Colin
Smith, the prototypes of his anarchic rebel, will dissolve and resurface
in various degrees and permutations across a portrait gallery of
devious anti-heroes merging Camus’s ‘homme revolté’ with the
protean imprint of the Spanish picaro.
       A Start in Life, Sillitoe’s first truly picaresque novel, was published
in 1970 while its sequel, Life Goes On, appeared after a fifteen-year
gestation period. Sillitoe‘s fascination with the picaresque tradition
dated back to the 50s when he began to read such works as Mateo
Aleman’s Guzman de Alfarache (1559), Lazarillo de Tormes (1553),
Francisco de Quevedo’s El Buscon (1626) and Alain Le Sage’s Gil Blas
(1719) first translated in English by Tobias Smollett. He was of course
also deeply influenced by the British forerunners of the picaresque,
namely Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett himself
(Sillitoe 2003:18-19). Implicit reference to specific novels in the
picaresque canon informing his appropriation can be traced in A Start
in Life. As a matter of fact, the character of Gilbert Blaskin is evocative
of Le Sage’s Gil Blas (Donapetry 1986: 205), just like the intrusion of the
author upon the fictive space of the novel, aiming at warning the
reader that Michael Cullen mistakenly attributes the authorship of
Roderick Random to Fielding (Sillitoe 1970: 195), alludes to Smollett both
as translator of Le Sage’s novel and as an inspiring representative of a
less high-blown picaresque. Smollett and Sillitoe, albeit in different
ages, shared more than a mere interest in a genre suiting their
subversive views of society. Both found themselves competing with
literary giants and their fiction came to be unfavourably compared to
theirs. Like the picaros conceived by their imagination, they were
liminal figures, «sitters on the fence» (Malkmus 2007: 212), standing on
the threshold of their own society, never willing to trade in their
individuality and their own system of values for those acknowledged
by hegemonic powers.



6
                                  Between, vol. VI, n. 12 (Novebre/ November 2016)



      A Start in Life portrays the adventures of the picaro Michael
Cullen, a working-class orphan and a jack-of-all-trades, with an
inveterate penchant for lying. Constantly on the run from looming
disaster, Michael manages to escape the clutches of his girlfriend,
Claudine Forks, who wishes to trap him in a mediocre dream of
marital bliss, and sets off on a southbound journey to the capital. His
first-person narration becomes the outer frame of the stories told by the
people he will encounter while en route to London. A time of
vagabondage and delinquency follows during which Michael works
for Claud Moggerhanger, a dangerous crook, types up drafts of Gilbert
Blaskin’s novel and even improves the work he is currently writing by
plagiarizing Roderick Random, before turning to gold-smuggling and
being sent to prison. Eventually, upon his release, after years of
unrepentant debauchery, and having meanwhile become the owner of
an old railway station, he settles down for a mildly uneventful life by
the side of Bridgitte Appledore, in the Cambridgeshire village of
Upper Mayhem.
      A Start in Life’s dramatis personae feature again in Life Goes On.
Following the collapse of his marriage, Michael gravitates again
towards the London underworld. He is reinstated in his old job as
chauffer of Moggerhanger, who besides being a powerful racketeer is
now also a respectable lord. Blaskin too has been employed by the old
crook as his ghost writer and in such a role he is penning his memoir.
Michael, who as A Start in Life drew to a close, had come upon the
incredible news of being none other than Blaskin’s son, as a chip off the
old block, writes a trashy novel for his grotesque father, which earns
the latter the Windrush Prize. Furthermore, on Moggerhanger’s behalf,
he is to deliver a batch of heroin that after being produced in the Soviet
Union is laundered in Britain and finally sent back to the producing
country. This is the plot outline of Life Goes On.
      The novel does not simply pick up the loose threads of its prequel,
interrupting Michael’s idyll at Upper Mayhem and creating a new
stage for his picaresque undertakings, but also heightens and
exaggerates its constitutive comedy and underlying satirical pull by
shifting the axis of the sequel towards the grotesque.


                                                                                7
Gabriella Assante di Panzillo, Alan Sillitoe



      In Donapetry’s view, Life Goes On is essentially a parody of
Sillitoe’s earlier picaresque novel whereby the writer mocks his own
previous work through the exaggeration of its constitutive elements
(Donapetry 1986: 171). I beg to differ. Life Goes On is incontestably a
parody as, Spoof, the very trash novel that rests within its frame,
implies. However, it is my belief that rather than looking back to its
prequel, it targets more than a single work. In fact, it is precisely its
inherent debasement of highbrow literature that reveals the aim of
parody’s subversive thrust. By foregrounding the violation of the
canon, the novel leaves in the background high-minded literature, its
own opposite. The novel persistently, refers, alludes to and/or apes, a
whole series of classic texts. Many of them have been singled out by
Donapetry herself. She acknowledges for instance the following works:
Of Mice and Men, Little Dorrit, The Aspern Papers, The Hound of
Baskervilles, Heart of Darkness, The Return of the Native, The Collector
(Donapetry 1986: 177). I would add The Picture of Dorian Gray as well as
Jane Eyre to the above-mentioned novels. It is indeed no mere
coincidence that the last chapter of Life Goes On rehearses the opening
of the thirty-eighth chapter of Charlotte Brontë’s masterpiece. Life Goes
On, the novel Michael Cullen writes, ends with a final chapter that
“borrows” its first line from Jane Eyre. He exclaims: «Reader, I married
her», replacing Jane’s “him” with the feminine object pronoun “her.”
All of these works permeate the fabric of the novel but Sillitoe’s lens
does not magnify them. If anything, Life Goes On zooms in the nether
universe of trash literature, in which clownish rogues thrive.
      What is more, this no-man-land of writing pokes fun at the
satellite domain of publishing companies, book clubs, retail shops and
literary magazines. The publishing houses Harridan Press and Crone
Books are overtly travesties of the feminist press Virago.
Notwithstanding, lampooning need not have a precise target beyond
the text as is the case of such hilarious deformations as the Throwaway
Bookshop, the Dustbin Edition, the Flagellation Book Club, the Daily
Retch and the Soho Review.
      Parody is in Linda Hutcheon’s words «a form of repetition with
ironic critical distance, marking difference rather than similarity»


8
                                   Between, vol. VI, n. 12 (Novebre/ November 2016)



(2000: xii). My contention, as far as Donapetry’s reading is concerned,
is that the ironic distance between Life Goes On and A Start in Life, is not
necessarily evidence of parody especially because it does not entail any
violation or subversion of the codes embedded in the background text,
and parody does involve ironic inversion (Hutcheon 2000: 5-6). More
to the point, if we recognize that what Life Goes On actually parodies is
the canon, the picaro’s critique of the language of power and the
carnivalesque ingredients of the picaresque – scatology, banqueting
and the sense of utopian equality fulfilled by the obliteration of norms
– are put into perspective.
      It is Michail Bakhtin’s theoretical approach to the study of the
language of the novel and his notion of the carnivalesque that provide
us with an effective interpretive tool to break the code of a long
forgotten work. As David Lodge argues, while for Saussure the word
was a “two-sided sign”, for Bakhtin it was a “two-sided act” (Lodge
1990: 21). The language of novels is always dialogic as it does not
merely incorporate different types of speech but also a variety of
discourses both within and beyond the text. The ‘langue’ outside the
narrative space is conjured through doubly-oriented speech, which
includes the subcategories of stylization, ‘skaz’, parody and hidden
polemic (ibid.: 59-60).
      Krystyna Pomorska, in her foreword to the 1965 edition of Rabelais
and his World, stresses that Bakhtin constantly refers to the Socratic
dialogue as «a prototype of the discursive mechanism for revealing the
truth» (in Bakhtin 1984: xi). Dialogism and carnival counteract and
unmask the “authoritarian word” of hegemonic culture, its rejection of
the Other, its simulacra and values. Indeed «any official culture that
considers itself the only respectable model dismisses all other cultural
strata» (ibid.).
      Although Rabelais and his World concerns the folk culture of the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance, its significance lies both within the
historical perspective it embraces and beyond it, since, as Michael
Holquist remarks, the book is above all a «hymn to the common man»
(in ibid.: xviii). This is the spirit of my adaptation of Bakhtin’s
theoretical perspective to a twentieth-century novel that, in directing


                                                                                 9
Gabriella Assante di Panzillo, Alan Sillitoe



its attention towards the nonsensical underworld of thrash writers,
posits the transient liberation of the non-conforming word from the
shackles of closure and dismissal.
     In Bakhtin’s words carnival:

         […] celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth
      and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all
      hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions. […] We find
      here a characteristic logic, the peculiar logic of the “inside out” (à
      l’envers), of the “turnabout,” of a continual shifting from to top to
      bottom, from front to rear, of numerous parodies and travesties,
      humiliations, profanations, comic crowning and uncrownings.
      (Bakhtin 1984: 10-11)

      Bakhtin’s carnival and all its connotations smoothly intersect in
the texture of Life Goes On since the literary models on which Sillitoe’s
novel draws are deeply imbued with the carnivalesque in the first
place. Sillitoe simply derived them from those novels that resonated
with his own notion of individuality and his own view of a society
where inequality and ideological manipulation were deeply ingrained.
      The presence of a motely crew of writers in the topsy-turvy space
of the novel aims at imploding the authoritarian word of official
literary culture into its opposite: a triumph of semantic misrule,
convoluted plots with unlikely twists and absurd characters, an
explosion of illogical words meaning nothing. The acknowledged
citizens of this universe are the northern poet Ronald Delphic, Gilbert
Blaskin, the jumped-up novelist who writes under the pseudonym of
Sidney Blood, adventitious trashy storytellers like Bill Straw and
Michael Cullen himself, and, potentially, all the people whom Michael
runs into during his business journeys along the British motorways.
      Ronald Delphic is a flamboyant, working-class poet from Leeds
who lives in a cottage named Doggerel Bank, an amusing allusion to
the trivial and burlesque character of his verse. His poems may consist
of lines that rehearse slavishly each and every stop of a tube map or all
the entries of a pocket dictionary listed under the same alphabetical



10
                                    Between, vol. VI, n. 12 (Novebre/ November 2016)



letter. Michael stumbles upon him during one of Delphic’s itinerant
reading tours.

        Before I could climb into the car I was transfixed by the
     apparition of a man in a blue forage cap with flowing hair and a
     dayglo orange cape pushing a laden pram along the hard
     shoulder towards the layby. A pennant said POMES A MILE
     EACH, and as he came into the space which scented rightfully
     mine, with the tinny wail of music from a transistor, I saw that on
     one side of the pram had been aerosolled: POETRY COUNCIL
     ART-MOBILE and on the other RONALD DELPHICK’S ARTE-
     FACTORY. A huge black-and-white panda-doll in the pram
     looked as if it hadn’t had its nappy changed for a week. (Sillitoe
     1987: 160)

      How lower can one go in the debasement of the poetic aura?
Poetry is no longer the refined art of a supreme spirit but a ludicrous
fabrication, an unconvincing pretence of meaningfulness. The poet,
stripped of all his bardic dignity is dragged down from his ivory tower
and demoted to the rank of any itinerant street vendor, selling
“pomes” rather than poems. His art, now impoverished and vilified,
can be appropriately associated to a prosaic object like the kitsch panda
doll.
      Little is known about Gilbert Blaskin’s past, except that having
had a fling with Michael’s mother in his youth, twenty-five years later
he acknowledges Michael’s paternity and marries her. He is the most
representative specimen of a recurring motif in the novel whereby
dubious artistic creativity is coupled with an overflowing sexual
appetite and fertility. In A Start in Life, Michael describes Gilbert as a
travelling trickster and adds: «this sky-licker, this grub who rubbed his
prick along the bare earth so that wheat and sunflowers shot up in
abundance and gave him a great and lazy life, was my one and only
unsuspecting father» (Sillitoe 1970: 314). When we meet him again, in
Life Goes On, he is working at his new novel, The Hijacked Vampire. Like
Delphic he is no authoritative embodiment of a stately novelist, but



                                                                                 11
Gabriella Assante di Panzillo, Alan Sillitoe



rather its absolute negation: «He went into his study, and I heard the
clack of a single key on the typewriter. He came back smiling. “I wrote
a comma. Now I can go out again”» (Sillitoe 1987: 61).
      Yet, Blaskin has his flock of adoring readers. Kenny Dukes, «the
forty-year-old skinhead only half-reformed» (ibid.: 85), who works for
Moggerhanger, is an avid consumer of trash fiction. He indulges in the
reading of works like The Crimson Tub, The Running Gutter, and Orgy in
the Sky, a gory novel, rich in pornographic details, telling the story of a
criminal gang of robbers that page after page, is involved in endless
episodes of sex, bloodshed and violence. Dukes finds the experience so
engaging that he even underlines what he considers the most
momentous segments of the story: «He smashed his fists into his
smirking face» (ibid.), or leaves comments of thorough appreciation
like «That’s good!» (ibid.) on the margin of the book.
      The self-reflexive conflation of writing and reading in Life Goes
On, that typically metafictional involvement of the reader within and
without the text, echoes Bakhtin’s idea that:

        Carnival does not know footlights, in the sense that it does not
      acknowledge any distinction between actors and spectators. […]
      Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it and
      everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the
      people. (Bakhtin 1984: 7)2

     Michael Cullen, whose initials are oddly enough Claud
Moggerhanger’s ones in reversed order – possibly to suggest
antagonism between them – like many of the rogues that are centre
stage in Sillitoe’s novels, has a natural proclivity for lying. His lies are
masks he wears whenever he senses he is expected to be who he is not,
or when his lascivious drives take over. He has a «contra pathetic
nature» (Bakhtin 1981: 406) and epitomizes Bakhtin’s merry rogue, to
whom the dialogical category of “gay deception” is associated; indeed:


      2
          See also Linda Hutcheon’s study of parody (2000: 72).



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                                     Between, vol. VI, n. 12 (Novebre/ November 2016)



        Opposed to the lie of pathos accumulated in the language of all
     recognized and structured professions, social groups and classes,
     there is not straightforward truth (pathos of the same kind) but a
     rather gay and intelligent deception, a lie justified because it is
     directed precisely to liars. (Ibid.: 401)

      Michael’s lies are essentially told to contrast with the pathos-
charged seriousness of the language of power.
      Being a picaro, Michael is what Caludio Guillén refers to as the
«half-outsider» (1971:80), a man who is unable either to become part of
the society on whose margins he lives or totally estrange himself from
it. An emblematic image of his alienation is offered in A Start in Life. At
night, in the darkness of his bedroom, he stands by the window,
looking at the people living in the buildings across the road. Ranges of
lit up windows disclose fragments of a life from which he is cut off:

        A woman leaned in white underwear, and a man’s arms pulled
     her to him, out of my sight. Then the blind went down. […] In
     some, there was washing, because most of the rooms seemed to be
     kitchens. Light bulbs were often bare, a few were shaded. A
     shadow moved across the window now and again, too quick to
     see whether it was a man or a woman (Sillitoe 1970: 196).

     If he made himself visible to them he would symbolically
relinquish his diversity: «To join them all I had to do was to switch on
my own bedroom light, and stand there, imprisoned in the oblong of
window so that they on the other side could then see that I was a
prisoner like the rest of them» (ibid.:197). Ultimately he resolves to
remain true to his insularity: «I got into bed in the dark» (ibid.).
     Michael’s gay deception is no ordinary vice. Neither is it too far
removed from a storytelling inclination. He is a liar and a fabulist. His
open-ended first-person narrations are replete with self-contained tales
that foreshadow his future transformation into a writer of cock-and-
bull stories. After all: «literature itself is a case of licit lying which turns
again and again on the uncertain relation between appearance and



                                                                                  13
Gabriella Assante di Panzillo, Alan Sillitoe



reality» (Blair 1979: 11). There is, indeed, something extremely serious
in Michael’s lies revealing the cogency of modern concerns about
reality: «In times like our own when shared agreements as to what
constitutes the “real” are disappearing at an unnerving rate, anyone
who claim to speak the “truth” is suspect» (ibid.). Furthermore, one
cannot be a fabulist without being a reader of either other people’s lies
or of books. Although Sillitoe ridicules Michael’s youthful fascination
for books by telling us that what tempts his picaro to read The Divine
Comedy and The Way of All Flesh is a certain prurient curiosity, reading
is among Michael’s earliest pursuits.
      As a storyteller Michael plays the God game: «he is the God who
controls, who amuses himself by fabricating adventures and thereby
instructing and entertaining his readers» (Sillitoe 2003: 21). By the same
token he is also God’s puppet, one, however, that being beyond any
judgement and morality cannot know his grace: «God is for those who
believe in the superiority of the spirit, the necessity of ethics, the
comfort of morals. While they pray he preys on them, without whom
he would have no existence» (ibid.: 17-18). It is precisely his genuine
lack of morality that locates the story he tells on the far side of canon.
      When Michael sets about writing Spoof he is sitting at the kitchen
table, as Dismal, the dog that accompanies him in his adventures,
stands by his side, carrying the paper balls he occasionally throws at
him to the trash basket:

         It’s true, of course, that you bite the hand that feeds you, but
      usually there’s no other hand close enough. Langham ran away
      with his best friend’s wife, thinking that because he was his best
      friend he wouldn’t hold it against him. In any case his wife had
      led him a dog’s life, made his existence positively dismal, so he
      thought he was doing him a favour (Sillitoe 1987: 254)

     As the story unfolds, we learn that John Weems, the cuckold
husband, surprises Langham and his wife at Tinderbox Cottage. After
a pause of about sixty pages, Michael resumes his drivelling narration:




14
                                     Between, vol. VI, n. 12 (Novebre/ November 2016)



         The lover of Tinderbox Cottage now had the husband and wife
     prisoner at Peppercorn Cottage, and he proceeded to tell them his
     life story – in justification for his bizarre behaviour – which
     included three murders for which he’d not so far been
     apprehended, though the worst atrocity was when he’d held a red
     admiral butterfly captive in a cellar and forced it to listen to
     similar confessions before pulling its wings off and setting it free.
     (Ibid.:321-2)

      Sillitoe is clearly poking fun at The Collector. Fowles’s debut novel,
tells the story of Frederick Clegg, a butterfly collector, and Miranda
Grey, an ethereal middle-class art student, with a sensual «la-di-da
voice» (Fowles 2004: 10). Having suddenly won a huge sum of money
at the pools, Clegg decides to use his winning to buy a secluded
cottage in the Sussex countryside, formerly owned by a retired navy
admiral, with the purpose of kidnapping Miranda and keeping her
captive in the underground cellar. The novel offers a multiple view-
point narration in which Clegg’s confession is followed by Miranda’s
account of her captivity in the form of a private journal.
      Michael’s Tinderbox Cottage is a travesty of Clegg’s infamous
cottage, just like Weems, the name given to the cuckold husband refers
obliquely to Clegg’s cellar: “weem” is a Scottish word designating an
artificial cave used as lodging. Similarly, Weems’s first name rehearses
Fowles’s. Besides, funnily enough, Arthur Clegg, a character featuring
both in A Start in Life and in Life Goes On, has a name that merges
ironically the identities of Arthur Seaton and Frederick Clegg. While a
discussion of Sillitoe’s parody of Fowles’s collector is beyond the scope
of the present essay, for the sake of brevity, we can safely claim that
Arthur Clegg is a hilarious inversion of Miranda’s captor and that
Michael Cullen is a foil to Sillitoe’s travesty of Clegg.
      As Spoof unfurls, non-sense and absurdity vertiginously escalate:

        It was on television. The woman hostage began to have a baby.
     […] From the open vagina of the wife, I went into the mind, if you
     can call it that, of the TV commentator and filled a page of phrases



                                                                                  15
Gabriella Assante di Panzillo, Alan Sillitoe



      such as ripping the sky, tearing at the stars, clouting out of the
      way—until Baby was born. (Sillitoe 1987: 323-4)

      The reader is thus made increasingly aware that such idiotic
drivel, this good-for-nothing story, laughs at its own comedy as much
as it ridicules uplifting and morally sound literature.
      Life Goes On pullulates with many of the images of the grotesque
body Bakhtin discussed in his study of Rabelais:

         Contrary to modern canons, the grotesque body is not
      separated from the rest of the world. It is not a closed, completed
      unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits.
      […T]he emphasis is on the apertures or the convexities, or on
      various ramifications and offshoots: the open mouth, the genital
      organs, the breast, the phallus, the potbelly, the nose. The body
      discloses its essence as a principle of growth which exceeds its
      own limits only in copulation, pregnancy childbirth, the throes of
      death, eating, drinking or defecation. (1984: 26)

     Michael describes Blaskin as a «walking penis» (Sillitoe 1987: 59).
The narrative span of the whole novel abounds with graphic
descriptions of sexual intercourse designed to stir feelings of
uneasiness in the reader and the critic. The words Michael whispers in
the ears of a waitress are exasperatedly obscene (ibid.: 172); all the
convexities, the ramifications and the offshoots, mentioned by Bakhtin,
are involved repeatedly in encounters that seem to celebrate the
freedom of the body and its procreative energy.
     Sexual and food imageries tend to converge: «I had such a hard-
on that, if need be, I could have balanced a plate of black pudding on
it», Michael says (ibid.: 366). The unrestrained sexual prowess of Life
Goes On’s picaros and tricksters is only equalled by their insatiable
appetite. Bill Straw is undoubtedly the most gluttonous gourmand
among them, as the following scene demonstrates:




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                                    Between, vol. VI, n. 12 (Novebre/ November 2016)



        The man in front, who was certainly thin enough, took three
     apple pies, three custards and a cup of tea from the counter. Only
     Bill Straw could be so sweet-greedy, and I recognised him at once.
     ‘The pies are full of sugared turnip,’ I said, ‘and the custards are
     made out of mustard and brothel-come, and as for the tea, piss
     would be positively safe in comparison’. (Ibid.: 26).

      Creativity and copulation go hand in hand in the novel and
images of the pregnant body recur frequently. Michael aptly reminds
us that the creative process makes trash writers permanently randy
(ibid.: 366).
      Forgotten children of inconsiderate fathers, they perpetuate
endlessly the paradigm of orphanhood, that marked their existence
from the start. Bakhtin tells us, indeed, that the grotesque is concerned
with «the lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and the
reproductive organs. […] it knows no other level; it is the fruitful earth
and the womb. It is always conceiving» (Bakhtin 1986: 21).
      The carnival is only a temporary suspension of the pathos of
power, which never posits a permanent dismissal of its coercive norms.
Paradoxically it results in the sanctioning of the authoritarian word
rather than in its absolute repudiation, it produces continuity and not
enduring downfall. Still, by enabling a transient liberation from the
dogmatic truth that hegemony enforces from above, it also propels
renewal and emancipation, from the bottom of the social hierarchy.
Linda Hutcheon has drawn attention to the fact that Bakhtin’s carnival
and parody are permeated by the same logic: «Parody is normative in
its identification with the Other, but it is contesting in its Oedipal need
to distinguish itself from the prior Other» (Hutcheon 2000: 77). This
means that Life Goes On, being the objective correlative of Sillitoe’s
critique to the criteria underpinning tradition, only deceptively violates
highbrow literature. That gilded world of established literary
masterpieces adumbrated in the texture of the novel has still the
eloquence of a model. Nonetheless, by bending the rules, Sillitoe
pleads for renewal and continuity at once. The identification with the
Other and the complementary emancipation from it, are both


                                                                                 17
Gabriella Assante di Panzillo, Alan Sillitoe



formalized by parody and thematized in the father-son relationship
between Gilbert Blaskin and Michael Cullen. It is worth recalling that
Michael follows in the footsteps of his father but it is he who
eventually writes the novel thanks to which Blaskin is awarded the
Windrush Prize. Moreover, Blaskin connives with power; he agrees to
be Moggerhanger’s ghostwriter and tell lies on his behalf. Michael’s
gay deception, instead, serves the purpose of exposing the racketeer’s
illicit trafficking through the publication of Life Goes On’s truthful lies.
       This essay does not question the significance of the value of a
literary work but rather the idea that the judgements of value made by
the literary establishment are offered as absolutes when in fact they are
mere ideological constructions that only produce «catalogues of
examples of “excellence”» (Laing 1984: 242). In compliance with
Laing’s advocacy, we should pronounce the death of the novel again to
release writing from the trammels of official culture:

         The novel is dead – long live novels, writers, readers and
      students of literature, as long as they begin by asking all those
      questions which for the guardians of the tradition are “scarcely
      open to debate at all”. (Ibid.)




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                                 Between, vol. VI, n. 12 (Novebre/ November 2016)




                           Works Cited
Allen, Walter, “The Fable and the Moral”, New Statesman, 21 (1960):
    765.
Bakhtin, Michail Michailovič, “Discourse in the Novel”, The Dialogic
    Imagination: Four Essays, Ed. Michael Holquist, Austin, University
    of Texas Press, 1981.
_______, Rabelais and His World (1965), trans. by Hélène Iswolsky,
    Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1984.
Blair, John G., The Confidence Man in Modern Fiction: A Rogue’s Gallery
    with Six Portraits, London, Vision, 1979.
Bradbury, Malcom, Who Do You Think You Are? Stories and Parodies,
    London: Secker and Warburg, 1976.
Bradford, Richard, The Life of a Long-Distance Writer: The Biography of
    Alan Sillitoe, London, Peter Owen, 2008.
Donapetry, Camacho Marìa, Génesis Y Desarrollo De Las Novelas De Alan
    Sillitoe: Autoconsciencia Del Narrador Y Proceso Consciente De Los
    Personajes, Tesis Doctoral, Universidad de Oviedo, 1986.
Fowles, John, The Collector (1963), London, Vintage, 2004.
Guillén, Claudio, “Toward a Definition of the Picaresque” Literature as
    System: Essays toward the Theory of Literary History, Princeton,
    Princeton University Press, 1971.
Hurrell, John Dennis, “Alan Sillitoe and the Serious Novel”, Critique:
    Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 4.1 (1961): 3-16.
Hutcheon, Linda, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth Century
    Art Forms (1985), Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2000.
Laing, Stuart, “Making and Breaking the Novel Tradition”, The Theory
    of Reading, Ed. Frank Gloversmith, Brighton, The Harvester Press,
    1984.
_______, Representations of Working-Class Life 1957-1964, London,
    Macmillan, 1986.
Lodge, David, After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism, London,
    Routledge, 1990.
Malkmus, Bernard, “Picaresque Narratology: Lazarillo De Tormes and
    Edgard Hilsenrath’s Der Nazi Und Der Friseur”, Clowns, Fools and


                                                                              19
Gabriella Assante di Panzillo, Alan Sillitoe



     Picaros. Popular Forms in Theatre Fiction and Film. Ed. David Robb,
     Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2007. 211-229.
Sillitoe, Alan, A Start in Life, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970.
_______, Men Women and Children (1973), London, W. H. Allen, 1975a.
_______, ”Robert Tressel”, Mountains and Caverns, London, W.H. Allen,
     1975b.
_______, Life Goes On (1975), London, Grafton, 1987.
_______, “On the Picaresque Novel and the Picaresque Hero”, A Flight
     of Arrows: Opinions, People, Places, London, Robson, 2003: 14-22.
Vipond, Dianne L., Conversations with John Fowles, Jackson, University
     Press of Mississippi, 1999.
Williams, Raymond, Culture and Society 1780-1950 (1958), New York,
     Columbia University Press, 1983.



                                      The Author
Gabriella Assante di Panzillo

       Gabriella Assante di Panzillo is a teacher of English as a Foreign
Language with a tenure status at Liceo Statale Cornelio Tacito in Rome.
In 2015 she was granted a leave of absence and is currently a second
year doctoral student of English Literatures at La Sapienza in the
Department of European and American Studies. Her research interests
revolve around the fiction of Alan Sillitoe and post-war British
literature.

        Email: assgabri@gmail.com



                                        The Paper
Date sent: 15/05/2016
Date accepted: 30/09/2016
Date published: 30/11/2016


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                                 Between, vol. VI, n. 12 (Novebre/ November 2016)




                   How to Quote This Paper
Assante di Panzillo, Gabriella, “Alan Sillitoe and the Topsy-Turvy
Universe of Trash Literature”, Chi ride ultimo. Parodia satira umorismi,
Eds. E. Abignente – F. Cattani – F. de Cristofaro – G. Maffei – U. M.
Olivieri, Between, VI.12 (2016), http://www.betweenjournal.it/




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