Роберт Тресселл – The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (страница 6)

Mitchell traces Tressell’s line of descent from John Bunyan through, among others, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding and Charles Dickens. Tressell himself said that he read Fielding and Dickens while he was writing The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists but it is the influence of Dickens which is most evident in the book, particularly in the way the reader’s attention is directed to the sufferings of children: how their bodies are deformed, how their minds are stultified and their sensibilities brutalised. But the children in the novel are not just victims, they also represent hope for the future: they disregard the class distinctions (pp. 77-8) and, in contrast to the selfishness which the system demands, they show themselves willing to share (p. 136).

In addition to signifying the contradictory qualities of pathos and optimism the term ‘children’ is frequently used of the philanthropists. This brings into relief the latent paternalism in the novel, present in such gestures as Barrington’s gift of £10 to the Owens. Here again Tressell shows his indebtedness to Dickens whose kind hearted capitalists, such as the Cheeryble brothers in Nicholas Nickleby, implied that the system did not need to be fundamentally changed.

Tressell’s novel can also be seen as belonging to the tradition of working class writing. The standard working class novel of the nineteenth century such as Thomas Martin Wheeler’s Sunshine and Shadows (1849) or H. J. Bramsbury’s A Working Class Tragedy (1895), was highly partisan but ‘failed to get inside working class life’ because it relied on the formula of the romance, mystery or adventure novel.¹¹ Tressell was able to overcome this limitation by recourse to the techniques of the realistic novel, those techniques themselves being modified by the commitment to socialism. Hence, unlike the bourgeois novel, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is more interested in the fate of the community than just the individual.

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and Modernism

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists was finished in 1910 – the year, according to Virginia Woolf, that Modernism began.¹² Hence it is not surprising that the novel has certain modernist characteristics, specifically an interest in the unifying power of symbol and a self-consciousness about the problems of artistic representation. The first is apparent in Tressell’s symbol of the house which gives a formal unity to a text riddled by contradictions, for example the conflicting notion that people are compelled to behave in certain ways while simultaneously being free to change that behaviour. In this respect Tressell’s symbolism operates like that of T. S. Eliot’s or James Joyce’s; it draws the fragments of modern experience into an ordered whole.

The novel’s self-consciousness about art, another modernist feature, is more problematic. One of the basic ideas of modernist art was that ‘the principle of reality [had become] peculiarly difficult to grasp.’¹³ This is registered in Tressell’s novel by Owen’s constant struggle to express reality in such a way that the philanthropists will recognise it (p. 267). At the same time, however, Owen is in no doubt about the nature of that reality; it is completely knowable.

The Modernists were concerned with the process of fiction making, and the political aspect of this is explored in the critique of newspapers, The Obscurer and the Daily Chloroform. Their fictions, or false pictures of reality, distract the reader’s attention from what is actually going on around them. Hence they are like those stories in which readers become so absorbed that they bump into things on the street (p.400). The irony is that the criticism of these fictions takes place within a text that is itself a fiction. Tressell may claim that he has ‘invented nothing’ (p.14) but this elides his huge debt to the tradition which posits the theory that the novel is a set of techniques for representing reality. Fictions, it seems, can only be exposed by other fictions and this complicates Owen’s claim to ‘know’ reality. At this point, the novel ceases to be a corrective of false consciousness and instead approximates to the modernist preoccupation with the nature of consciousness itself. Indeed it could be argued that The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists supplies the answer to its own question of why the philanthropists cannot see the truth – because there is none to see.

The implication that there is no single truth reflects the break up of a common culture. This opens the way to there being a variety of realities, something which is implicit in the frequent references to the philanthropists each ‘telling a different story’ (p. 140). These stories are never heard; they are occluded by Owen’s lectures on socialism which thereby devalue the philanthropists’ experience in much the same way that the system itself does. This is consistent with the operation of ‘high’ culture in the novel; it is identified with ‘humanity’ whereas the workers with their ‘beer, football, betting and, of course, one other subject [are] ‘wild beasts’ (p. 545). Owen’s lectures and the artefacts of ‘high’ culture are used to place the workers at the bottom of the social hierarchy. This is exactly how the bible is used by the ruling class in the novel; its authority is used to maintain the workers in a subservient role. Owen, too, does not really want the philanthropists to have their own ideas but to agree with him. Once again, the novel seems to participate in the economy of repression that it sets out to criticise.

Although The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists seems, at times, to be a demonstration of how the system uses fiction and its power to situate persons in order to perpetuate itself, it is also the case that the novel encourages a sceptical approach to these aspects of textuality. The hallucinatory power of fiction is criticised in Chapter 29, ‘The Pandorama’, which contains the same ideas found in the rest of the novel but which presents them in a way which anticipates some of the techniques of Brecht’s epic theatre. The very fact that they are presented as scenes is itself a disruption of the written word, as are those diagrams, charts and worksheets found throughout the novel.

The scenes are commented upon by Bert, whose commentary prevents the audience from becoming too absorbed in what they see. This is further prevented by the scenes being complete in themselves. Hence a storm at sea is followed by police breaking up a crowd in Berlin. Such sharp juxtapositions encourage a detached scrutiny rather than an imaginative identification with what is depicted. The discrete procession of scenes breaks with the novel’s linked sequence of episodes which stimulate the reader to want to know what happens next rather than concentrate on what is happening now. The use of song either as a direct comment or else an ironic contrast is also used to break the spell of immediacy and inhibit the emotional involvement that characterises the rest of the novel. And, in Chapter 21, it is further suggested that the philanthropists can break the spell of fiction if they act it out, so distancing themselves from it.

The power of fiction to define and place people is also criticised even as it is practised in the novel. This is apparent when a speaker, who claims to believe every word in the bible, is challenged to drink poison which will not, says the bible, harm one of Christ’s followers. In declining the invitation the speaker undermines the authority of the bible to legitimise social divisions. Owen’s adherence to ‘high’ culture is also interrogated in the novel, primarily through his having to consistently argue his case with the philanthropists. Moreover, Owen’s negative attitude towards the body expressed in his unease at the philanthropists’ interest in sex (p.141) and in his revulsion at their humorous indulgence in ‘downward explosions of flatulence’ (p.220) gives his position a strictly abstract appeal. The culture of the philanthropists, with its emphasis on physical activities, has a certain vital energy that is missing from the ‘rational pleasure[s]’ (p. 494) of socialists. Indeed, it is this energy that is the source of the philanthropists’ occasional acts of resistance mentioned earlier.

Conclusion

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists brims with ideas. Although written in the first decade of the twentieth century much of it still applies today. The economic revolution of the 1980s has led to an increase in poverty and greater job insecurity. There is fierce debate about whether ‘popular’ culture is a distraction from the ‘real’ problems or whether it can be a source of opposition to the dominant meanings in our society. Similarly, discussion rages over whether ‘high’ culture is elitist, or whether it answers the need for a felt depth in experience which is not catered for by the institutions of post-industrial capitalism. Tressell’s novel has much to say about all these issues. It portrays, in unremitting detail, the crushing despair of poverty, the brutality of labour relations and the blighting of hope. Its solution is socialism. But, like many of the ideas in the novel, socialism receives contradictory treatment and its relation to ‘high’ culture is certainly problematic.