The Working Class and Twenty-First-Century British Fiction

Deindustrialisation, Demonisation, Resistance

Phil O'Brien

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000763287
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Working Class and Twenty-First-Century British Fiction looks at how the twenty-first-century British novel has explored contemporary working-class life. Studying the works of David Peace, Gordon Burn, Anthony Cartwright, Ross Raisin, Jenni Fagan, and Sunjeev Sahota, the book shows how they have mapped the shift from deindustrialisation through to stigmatization of individuals and communities who have experienced profound levels of destabilization and unemployment. O'Brien argues that these novels offer ways of understanding fundamental aspects of contemporary capitalism for the working class in modern Britain, including, class struggle, inequality, trauma, social abjection, racism, and stigmatization, exclusively looking at British working-class literature of the twenty-first century.

Part 1

Mapping Deindustrialisation

1 David Peace and the Strike Novel

Conflict, History, Knowledge

The Miners’ Strike of 1984/1985 remains a highly contested historical event; the doubts and suspicions which surround it have not been resolved by time. The forces which propelled the industrial dispute, what Raymond Williams described back in 1985 as ‘new nomad capitalism’, continue to evolve and shape in different ways the realities of twenty-first-century British life.¹ How that portentous year is understood is also unfinished. This chapter approaches GB84 as an attempt to open up the events of 1984/1985 for re-assessment and re-evaluation. Although part of Britain’s wider neoliberal turn, an economic and political process which began (as discussed in the Introduction) before 1984, the strike has become crystallised in the historical imagination as the moment when the logic of Thatcherism became dominant. According to Mark Fisher, ‘the fault lines of class antagonism were fully exposed’ during the dispute and, as a moment which is imbued with such transformative power (socially, economically, and politically), it is ‘at least as significant in its symbolic dimension as in its practical effects’.² So, 1984/1985 offers a site of active historical knowledge, one which is contested but one which continues to resonate as a source of understanding about both the past and the present. Katy Shaw has argued that GB84 directs ‘its narratives to an end point: a marked fictionalisation of events’. She adds: ‘In doing so, this counter-factual construction provides a neat closure to an inherently open-ended dispute’.³ In contrast, however, I argue that there is no tidy resolution offered by Peace’s text. Rather, it seeks to unlock the historical record in order to release the contradictory and incoherent mix of discourses present. It is a novel which Peace himself has described as devoid of ‘any neat tie ups’. ‘I wanted to leave the story in the mess it was in at the end of the strike’, he says.⁴ Using ‘new’ information about 1984/1985, the findings of retrospective investigations, for example, as well as revisiting overlooked narratives and neglected contemporaneous writings, the novel is an attempt to navigate within the enormity of one of the defining moments of the 1980s and demonstrate its wide personal and public reach. There are two specific reasons why there is no ‘neat closure’ presented by the book; these concern questions of literary form and of epistemology. The working class in the novel experience a profound and specific move away from knowing and understanding the strike as active historical actors to losing control both of its dynamics and of a collective knowledge of its increasingly convoluted developments.

So, GB84 is an attempt to trace the political, social, and historical forces operating within and released by the strike, what are figured as manifestations of the neoliberal turn, by directly engaging with the complexity and confusion of the year-long struggle. In doing so, there arises a problem of seeing, knowing, and witnessing, which ultimately the text does not resolve. This is one way in which the novel is unfinished. The aim of presenting what Peace has called the ‘whole “occult history” of the Miners’ Strike’ by examining the machinations and potentiality of the neoliberal state is both ambitious and necessary.⁵ To describe the text’s attempt to figure such forces as unresolved is not to argue that it is impossible to understand neoliberalism. Rather, the text’s failure emphasises the immense task, in the Adornian sense, of ‘representing’ capital. Further, what GB84 does is reveal the ‘occult’ nature of neoliberalism while plotting new ways in which to understand its dynamics as a project of right-wing intention. And it is with this Chapter One is primarily concerned. Therefore, it will be instructive to explore the term occult: a word frequently used by the writer himself and by seemingly every reviewer and critic of his work.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the origins of the word, the use of which in English can be traced back to before the sixteenth century, are from the Latin terms ‘occultāre’, meaning ‘to hide, conceal’, and ‘occultus’, as in ‘secret, hidden from the understanding, […] to cover up’.⁶ As a verb it implies ‘to cut off from view’ both ‘by interposing something’ and ‘as part of [a] cycle of light and dark’. And while occult can also be used as a noun to connote a ‘hidden or secret thing’, it is as an adjective that it has been most commonly deployed. ‘Not disclosed or divulged […]; kept secret; communicated only to the initiated’ is one set of meanings while another suggests something which is ‘not manifest to direct observation; discoverable only by experiment; unexplained; latent’. It also carries an implication of the ‘magical’ or ‘the supernatural’ but Peace has stated that for him its value is in the signification of something which is ‘hidden or occulted’.⁷ As noted, it is a description which is repeatedly attached to Peace’s fiction and yet the term itself has received minimal critical attention or pressure from critics.⁸ Matthew Hart provides one exemplary exception. He calls GB84 an ‘occult history’ of Thatcherism and argues that the occult is both a ‘language’ and a ‘style’ which works as an intensifying device in the novel.⁹ It operates on two levels: uncovering the ‘secret acts of violence and betrayal’ carried out by the government, according to Hart, and linking these events with an ‘under-mythology’ or ‘subterranean’ history of Albion, the English Civil War, and the struggles of the labour movement; what he describes as ‘a matter of bodies that will not stay buried’.¹⁰ In my reading of GB84, however, a different emphasis is placed on occult in order to stress its relevance to the problem of knowing and representing capital. At one level, it aptly describes the actions of those who are aligned against the miners as well as the experiences of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and its attempts to resist such forces. The intentions of the government and the state are ‘not disclosed or divulged’; they are ‘kept secret’. Attempts to figure out who the NUM and its working-class members are engaged in struggle with is unclear: is it the National Coal Board (NCB), the government, the intelligence services, the army, rogue individuals, a police state? Crucially, such forces remain ‘mysterious’ and therefore difficult to confront and overcome. However, it is what is ‘not manifest to direct observation’, to return to one of the OED’s definitions, with which GB84 is primarily concerned. Not only is it engaged in disclosing an alternative history of the strike but what the novel seeks to reveal – the forces of an emergent neoliberalism – is deliberately concealed, ‘hidden from sight; […] not exposed to view’, and ‘beyond ordinary understanding or knowledge’. Even though neoliberalism is now hegemonic as a mode of discourse, ‘the enigma of capital’, writes Harvey, is ‘what political power always want to keep opaque’.¹¹ We are not only confronted by new ‘faceless masters’, as Fredric Jameson suggests,¹² but with the difficulty of placing and gaining purchase on the structures and practices of a capitalist system which has become ever more abstract and impersonal. It is this notion of the occult which informs my reading of GB84. Finally, it must be stressed that a conception of the term as magical or supernatural is problematic. The emphasis here is on the forces operating within the Miners’ Strike as hidden and secretive, acts of concealment which are deliberate. This does not mean that they are part of the ‘realm of the unknown’, ‘not apprehensible’, and ‘inexplicable’, as the OED describes the occult. Rather, the challenge facing a contemporary British writer like David Peace is that such a profound sense of the occult is ‘discoverable only by experiment’.

To encompass the political and social complexity of the year-long conflict, Peace weaves his story through six main characters, their narratives intersecting with each other elliptically. The fifty-three weeks of the strike are represented structurally by fifty-three individual chapters which form the five parts of the novel. For the purposes of this study of working-class fiction, I analyse GB84 predominantly through the first-person accounts of Martin Daly and Peter Cox: two fictional miners on strike in the real-life village of Thurcroft in South Yorkshire. Their first-person narratives are told in two densely-packed columns on a single page at the beginning of each week: Martin during parts one, three, and five of the text, Peter in parts two and four. They are friends and work colleagues; Martin is a rank and file collier, Peter a delegate on the Thurcroft Strike Committee.¹³ The miners’ narratives do not provide the ‘authentic’ experience of the strike;¹⁴ rather, these sections allow the text to illuminate something specific about the class experience of neoliberalism – one of disorientation, of deliberate concealment, and of problems of knowing.

While Martin and Peter represent the everyday struggle of the striking miners on the picket line, Terry Winters and Stephen Sweet are symbols of the higher-level workings of the strike. Winters is the chief executive officer of the NUM, the highest unelected position in the union. Stephen Sweet is a Hayekian businessman and flamboyant freelance journalist, the self-proclaimed ‘eyes and ears’ of Margaret Thatcher.¹⁵ Sweet’s role is presented through the third-person narration of Neil Fontaine. He is Sweet’s driver and both himself and the third-person narrator refer to his boss as ‘The Jew’, suggestive of the anti-Semitism to which David Hart, Thatcher’s special advisor on whom Sweet is based, was subjected.¹⁶ However, Fontaine, a former police officer, also works as a quasi-agent for special branch and his narrative links in with that of two other central characters: David Johnson and Malcolm Morris. Like Fontaine, who is based on Hart’s chauffeur Peter Devereux,¹⁷ these two men are the secret foot-soldiers of the state. Morris is an Ulster-trained surveillance officer, covertly recording meetings and tapping phones. Johnson, referred to as the ‘mechanic’, is an undercover agent, acting in turn as both a strike-breaking and a striking miner, as a member of a paramilitary hit squad with extreme right-wing leanings, and as a police officer.

It is through this structural complexity that GB84 attempts to track the forces operating within the dynamics of the strike. It is, to use Catherine Belsey’s term, an ‘interrogative text’. Such a text ‘refuses a single point of view, however complex and comprehensive, but brings points of view into unresolved collision or contradiction’.¹⁸ In Peace’s novel, the reader is presented with six different narratives, none of which provide the definitive account. These multiple discourses, to use Patricia Waugh’s formulation, ‘question and relativize each other’s authority’.¹⁹ This occurs in GB84 throug...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Class, Culture, Politics
• Part 1 Mapping Deindustrialisation
• Part 2 Resisting Demonisation
• Conclusion: Class Matters
• Bibliography
• Index