One reason is that it’s so cheap. I mean, I have a rooted objection to paying rent at all, it should be free like
air, and parks, and water. I don’t think I’m mean, in fact I know I’m not, but I just can’t bear paying more than
a bob or two to landlords. But the real reason, as I expect you’ll have already guessed, is that, however
horrible the area is, you’re free there! No one, I repeat it, no one, has ever asked me there what I am, or
what I do, or where I came from, or what my social group is, or whether I’m educated or not, and if there’s
one thing I cannot tolerate in this world, it’s nosey questions. And what is more, once the local bandits see
you’re making out, can earn your living and so forth, they don’t swing it on you in the slightest you’re a
teenage creation—if you have loot, and can look after yourself, they treat you as a man, which is what you
are. For instance, nobody in the area would ever have treated me like that bank clerk tried to in Belgravia. If
you go in anywhere, they take it for granted that you know the scene. If you don’t, it’s true they throw you out
in pieces, but if you do, they treat you just as one of them.
MacInnes's City of Spades and Absolute Beginners
Nick Bentley
MacInnes's fiction represents a hybrid form in 1950s writing that
can best be described as an 'experimental realism'. As such it
negotiates the philosophical and ideological frameworks associated
with different fictional modes in 1950s fiction. This was most
notably expressed during the period in the debate between the
supporters and practitioners of modernist experimentation in the
novel (for example Samuel Beckett, Lawrence Durrell and Alain
Robbe-Grillet) and the detractors of modernism and experimentalism
(William Cooper, John Wain, Kingsley Amis and C.P. Snow).
MacInnes’s novels are 'experimental' in relation to three
narratological concerns: plot structure, narrative voice, and the
subversion of Standard English. Nevertheless, they also have
connections with a realist tradition revealed in his aim to
document the existence and practices of specific subcultural
identities in the 1950s.
One of the reasons for MacInnes's combination of experimental and realist forms is the
journalistic and sociological impulse behind the writing. MacInnes is responding to what he
considered to be a misrepresentation of youth and black subcultures in both the
mainstream media and in New Left analyses and he is partly driven by an imperative of
recording unrepresented voices and positions faithfully.
In a 1959 review of Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey, he writes:
As one skips through contemporary novels, or scans the acreage of fish-and-chip dailies and the very square
footage of the very predictable weeklies, as one blinks unbelievingly at 'British' films and stares boss-eyed at
the frantic race against time that constitutes telly, it is amazing -- it really is -- how very little one can learn
about life in England here and now (MacInnes 1986, 206).
He goes on to stress how little 'we' know of:
working-class child mothers, ageing semi-professional whores, the authentic agonies of
homosexual love, and the new race of English born coloured boys . . . . the millions of
teenagers . . . the Teds . . . the multitudinous Commonwealth minorities in our midst . . .'
However:
Although MacInnes is attempting to 'record' a set of practices and identities
that he perceives as existing in the world, his writing, in fact, becomes part
of the process of constructing the very subcultures he is analyzing. Therefore,
the novels do not transparently 'reflect' an a prioriconcept, but are themselves
involved in the (re)construction of those identities.
In Absolute Beginners, this tension is foregrounded formally through a
negotiation between realism and experimentalism. The central character in the
novel is a nineteen-year-old unnamed teenager, through whose narrative voice the
reader is introduced to the subcultural world of London's youth. The teenage
hero is a photographer, which thematically foregrounds the 'documentary' nature
of the text: the photographer's job being to record and document events and
practices, but from a certain distance, from a point of detached observation
The text includes several passages which represent this 'sociological' or
'documentary' function of the text for example, the description of teenage
fashion and the specific and multiple identities within youth culture in the
long description of the differences in dress between the skiffle and trad jazz
uniform of the Misery Kid and his cultural opposite 'number' the 'sharp mod
jazz' Dean Swift (70).
The significance of this literary/methodological approach is foregrounded
towards the end of the novel, when the teenager is forced to confront directly
the racial violence evidenced in the description of the Notting Hill riots. At
this point in the text he ceases to be an external observer and becomes part of
the action, refusing to exploit the culture he is part of in favour of direct
action within it, represented through the rejection of his camera: 'I took up my
Rolleiflex, but put it down again, because it didn't seem useful any longer'
The sociological/journalistic aspect of the narrative is implicitly evaluating
the tendency in mainstream 1950s writing on youth that assumes a hierarchical
position of the observer above the studied subject. As suggested above, this is
most clearly seen in the representation of youth subcultures in New Left writing
of the period, especially in Richard Hoggart’s seminal 1950s text The Uses of
Literacy. In this book Hoggart was concerned to represent 1950s youth (mainly
the Teds, who seem to stand for youth generally) as passive receptors and
victims of an attractive but ultimately shallow and Americanized culture of
consumerism and anti-intellectualism, that he calls, ‘shiny barbarism’.
As a reaction to this externalizing and 'anthropologizing' approach adopted by
Hoggart and other New Left commentators on 1950s youth, MacInnes produces an
idiosyncratic narrative voice in Absolute Beginners that attempts to represent
the teenage subculture's style of speaking from the inside:
He didn't wig this, so giving me a kindly smile, he stepped away to make himself
respectable again. I put a disc on to his hi-fi, my choice being Billie H., who
sends me even more than Ella does, but only when, as now, I'm tired, and also,
what with seeing Suze again, and working hard with my Rolleiflex and then this
moronic conversation, graveyard gloomy. But Lady Day has suffered so much in her
life she carries it all for you, and soon I was quite a cheerful cat again. (2728).
Here, the incorporation of unofficial and unlicensed language, ('wig', 'sends',
'cat') and references to the insider's knowledge of a specific subcultural
interpretive community ('Billie H', 'Ella', 'Lady Day'), creates a disruption of
Standard English that acts as a performative statement of opposition to dominant
culture. The style announces itself as distinct from Standard English and
operates as a statement or proclamation of rejection and critique of dominant
cultural values.
Absolute Beginners rejects the plot-driven narrative associated with the
conventional realist novel in favour of an episodic form that allows the teenage
narrator to reveal different aspects of the subcultural world he inhabits.
Steven Connor has identified the episodic form as indicative of the fragmentary
nature of subcultural existence and representation, and this corresponds to its
function in MacInnes’s novel (Connor 90). This structural device works
ideologically to reject the form of the realist linear narrative in favour of a
structure that reflects an oral culture. MacInnes's deployment of this narrative
technique attempts to produce a public communication of the experience of youth
subcultures