Writing 1950s London: Narrative Strategies in Colin MacInnes's City of Spades and Absolute Beginners

Bentley, N

Abstract

<1> Colin MacInnes is a 1950s writer who has largely been overlooked in recent critical analyses of the period.[1] His writing represents a radical experiment with narrative forms and genres that corresponds to his investigation of the submerged worlds of London’s 1950s subcultures, a writing that sits uneasily with the dominant critical readings of the period. MacInnes's novels are also problematic for traditional literary criticism in that his fiction is closely linked to his non-fictional and journalistic writing. The novels need to be read in conjunction with the journalism and cultural theory that represents MacInnes's corpus. The novels are to be understood, in Roland Barthes's terminology, as exceeding the purely literary as they intertextually intersect with the rest of MacInnes's writing, with the wider debates in 1950s popular journalism, and in particular, the writing being produced at the time by the emerging New Left (or the lack of it) on the nature and cultural importance of youth and black subcultures (Barthes).

<2> This article discusses the deployment of narrative techniques in two of MacInnes's 'London' novels: City of Spades and Absolute Beginners.[2]It will identify the ideological implications of specific narrative techniques, including the strategic deployment of narrative structure, voice and linguistic experiment with Standard English. I argue that MacInnes's experimentation with the realist form is informed by what he considers to be the failure of contemporary critical writing to record and/or represent specific subcultural identities adequately and faithfully. His novels, therefore, represent a textual redress against the misrepresentation and lack of analysis of black and youth subcultures both in dominant cultural sites and in New Left writing. MacInnes's deployment of narrative strategies and experimentation with literary form attempts to represent and to empower these marginalized groups, and the use of idiosyncratic first-person narratives in both of MacInnes's texts constitutes an attempt to represent the 'other' or 'subaltern' status of a subcultural identity in the language and vocabulary of that subculture (Spivak). In this way, the formal techniques used in MacInnes’s narratives attempt to redress the tendency in competing 1950s socio-cultural writing to externalize the subcultural subject.

Citation

Bentley, N. (2003). Writing 1950s London: Narrative Strategies in Colin MacInnes's City of Spades and Absolute Beginners. Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London, 1(2),

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: 2003-09
• Deposit Date: Jul 7, 2023
• Journal: Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London
• Electronic ISSN: 1744-0807
• Publisher: Literary London Society
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 1
• Issue: 2
• Publisher URL: http://www.literarylondon.org/london-journal/september2003/bently.html