An Irrefutable Argument of Alan Sillitoe

Alan Sillitoe was born in Nottingham in 1928 and was an enterprising young man, leaving school at 14 to work in a bicycle factory, and later working also at a plywood mill. Sillitoe began to write in Malaya, and lived about five years in Majorca. Though Arthur Seaton, the hero of his first novel (Saturday Night and Saturday Morning, 1958) Sillitoe  expressed  the frustration of the workers despite the prosperity of the working class of his times. He stressed that the factory is still a drab and ugly place far too “different from the plush board room or the book-lined study.”

The same implications can be found in other novels like Key to the Door, 1962, The Loniless of the Long-Distance Runner, 1966, and in a number of other tales. The dominant features of society as represented in Sillitoe’s work are selfishness  and oppression.  Organized society is the framework in which man’s violence and predatory instinct operate. It is a real jungle where the fight for survival is still going on in all its fierceness, and where “Man, the creature of the jungle, is determined by forces stronger that he” (Gindin).

Sillitoe’s works were written in the 1960s, and he was talking about a general “organized society”; however, he preconized the future, and a real organized society  called “Megalopolis”, characterized by “dissolution,”  “disintegration, ” and “absence of human dimension:”

“Megalopolis: which this picture of cities dissolving into an interminable mass of undifferentiated urban tissue, stretching from Maine to Georgia, and from Buffalo to Chicago […] In a small way, as I pointed out,  ‘the technology of Megalopolis’ had already exhibited its characteristic  absence of human dimension,” Lewis Mumford said. In 1980 Ulf Hannerz identified four ways of urban existence, namely four ways on how individuals experience Megalopolis: encapsulation, segregation, integration and solitude.

What is the gist of his speech?

“We will identify these modes of urban existence tentatively in encapsulation, segregativity, integrativity and solitude. Real lives, of course, may be crossed between these, ” Hannerz wrote. Megalopolis may offer a very broad relationship network; however, everyone is usually subject  to superficial relationships, and  has “ a very limited use of the opportunity of the city,” because “the individual moves within a tight network of relationships, like  the privileged social classes, ethnic groups,  and religious sects.” So “Solitude is a mode of existence by and large without significance relationships.” (Hannerz).

How will we get away from Megalopolis?  Sillitoes seems to leave this problem unsolved, or so seems to him, because Megalopolis is a “mystery” without any apparent solution. However, I heard it from a reliable source, and in strict secrecy:

“Happiness, in large part, is dependent on money, money that supplies food, drink, sex.” (Alan Sillitoe). Sillitoe is truth personified. Then he added another great truth:

“But, he told himself, we’ve no power to alter the circumstances that are unknowingly shaping our lives” (Sillitoe’s The General).

Taking one thing with another, I was convinced by the power of his words. We have in front of us an irrefutable argument, and unquestionable facts.

The full power of Megalopolis.

 

Sources:

 

James Jack Gindin, “Allan Sillitoe’s Jungle”, in Postwar British Fiction: New Accents and Attitudes, Berkeley & Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1963, p. 25, p. 28.

 

Lewis Mumford, The Urban Prospect: Essays, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968,  p. 170, 249.

 

Ulf Hannerz, Exploring the City. Inquiries Toward an Urban Anthropology, New York, Columbia University Press, 1980, p. 260.