Education of the republic of uzbekistan andizhan state university named after zakhiriddin mukhammad babur

Problems the society in the novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

In Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Arthur Seaton, who works in a bicycle factory as a capstan lathe operator reflects upon the difference between the pre-war and post-war situation of his family: "The difference between before the war and after the war didn't bear thinking about. War was a marvellous thing in some ways, when you. thought about how happy it had. made so many people in England ...' But towards the end of the novel this sort of reference serves only to point out that present material benefits are not satisfactory at all: "They think that we are settled our hashes with their insurance cards and television sets, but I'll be one or them to turn round on 'em and let them see how wrong they art." In post-war society the dominance of the ruling class which is able to give a certain direction to the flow of the social order indicates the existence of the hegemonic structure. However, in the thirties, the economic crisis and unemployment had forced the working class into a subordinate position, but they did not leave their values and traditions aside. The working class which later started to become affluent during the post-war period still preserved some of the prevailing old values, and this made the potential class conflict and hegemonic struggle more obvious. Working class families became richer by virtue of the industrial system which needed their labour. This newly acquired affluence also changed the concept of authority and young people's perception of it.

If one considers the description of, and interrelation between, class and subculture in Dick Hebdige's Subculture, one can get a detailed idea about the "fundamental tension between those in power and those condemned to subordinate positions and second class lives." Different modes of expression can be observed in working class youth. In the social formation of working class communities the essential elements such as family, neighbourhood, education, gender roles, sex, political inclinations and leisure are negotiated in such a way that they seem to begin from an adversarial position, a rebellious mood against the ruling dominance. This subordinate class experience is a problematic issue; once there are some problems in society, like unemployment, education disadvantages, low pay or any threat of losing jobs, monotony or alteration from one's own society, the remedy is most of the time searched for in the ruling class sphere, because they are thought to have the power in their hands and hence responsible for all these. This tie between "them" and "us" is ambiguous, since they both complain about, and realise the necessity of each other's existence in the social hierarchy. This makes the co-existence and the clash of 'them" and "us" unavoidable. [16]
Among the working class the family has always been a tight-knit institution, a place where the gender roles have their fixed place, but in the post-war period when women started to work, the role of the woman as housewife seemed to exist alongside her role as a worker. Yet still the socially expected gender performances were to be fulfilled at home, even if glimpses of rebellion on the women's part threatened the conventionally allocated roles of men and women in the private sphere. Neighbourhood was another sphere which was almost as important as family in working class culture at this time. The people living next door or on the same street shared many common aspects being members of the same environment. People knew each other's day to day lives in detail, and privacy was hard to attain. Neighbours often worked in the same factory, their children would be friends, they would shop in the same place and all these factors increased the intimacy of the relationship among neighbours. Everyone knew everyone else's business. To discuss one's neighbour, one's child and one's financial position was perfectly natural in that microcosm. Neighbours could influence each other and young people especially shared a way of life, just as they had common education and leisure pursuits. If one attitude is encouraged in a family, the same attitude will most probably be encouraged in the neighbour's family. This was the sort of neighbourhood that Arthur Seaton has grown up in. When the novel opens it is in just such a community that Arthur is living and his family is representative of it. The attitude of the neighbours encourages his natural hostility against "them" despite. all the efforts of "them" to rehabilitate him. Thus, although Alan Sillitoe claims that his stories are not concerned "with class conflicts, but just "individual psychotic, psychological or whatever conflicts" the clash occurs between the representative figures of "them" and "us". This may be due to the collective attitude of "us" for rebellion, and the persistent attitude of "them" for the rehabilitation of the rebel. The attitude of the neighbours is actually close to a communal influence resulting from class solidarity. For a working class man, life starts at home and extends outwards in response to the common needs and expectations of a "densely packed neighbourhood". The ties or the bonds of affinity formed by the working class were extremely local.
In the novel Sillitoe shows us working class men of all ages, going to the local pub for a drink and also to play darts, billiards, cards or dominoes. On Sundays, the families, that is the husbands and wives together, come to the pub. Actually the activity can be regarded as a social issue. This offers people an escape from the harsh aspects of working class life and a reinforced sense of belonging to a particular social group. The club clientele in the novel are most of the time family men . They are regular pub-goers; it is a place where they can leave their responsibilities aside for awhile, after family life becomes settled and the couples face the difficulties or married life. [17]
In Saturday Night and Sunday Morning Arthur finds his work in a Nottingham bicycle factory quite pleasant. Also he can keep his money for his own pleasures including drinking, gambling and women, he does not care about education at all. In his work, he escapes from the monotony of the daily routine to another monotony; where he finds space to daydream and forget any troubles he may have. This is another way of contrasting working class people who are involved in manual work, with the middle class in bureaucratic work, in. terms of psychological state. Actually manual work was highly paid but boring, and a family man most of the time agreed to accept that kind 6f job to have a better standard of living. This can be seen as the juxtaposition of antipathy and mutual dependence. As long as one of these exists, the other one has to exist. It is a mutual accordance influencing all age groups in working class society, but especially the young male members of the working class.
Alan Sillitoe, coming from a working class background himself, is able to elucidate many points about working class attitudes and realistically exhibit certain types of behaviour and interests, which can be regarded as belonging to a certain group of people in this class. He gives voice to his own perception of reality and that of the working class when he asserts that (some] people think realism is synonymous with 'working class' whereas realism means showing people as individuals as well as the values they live by... Realism is necessary all the way, because it is only out of realism myths grow ...
While presenting working class characters, Alan Sillitoe mostly chooses male representatives who are strongly influenced by physical pressures, by the monotony of their work and the problems of economic fluctuations. He does not quite create types but, nonetheless the male figures, especially, do seem to typify certain working class attitudes towards life and ways of enjoying it. This can be seen in his Nottingham fiction and particularly in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Actually this link between working class and masculinity sometimes becomes slippery under sustained consideration.
For instance, Joanna Bourke, in Working Class Cultures in Britain, regards the issue realistically but from a different perspective. In a consideration of the inter-war years, she points out that the relation between waged labour and masculinity had become an unstable basis for masculinity, because there was the risk of either unemployment or insufficient salary. The stress of joblessness and economic deprivation were, in fact, a threat to the values of masculinity in terms of labour.
Both in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and in real life, the young generation should be seen, not as outcasts but as agents of the influence of middle class oppression on the working clan. In the novel, Arthur Seaton is rebellious both politically and morally. He seems to be a 'teddy boy' figure who is after any kind of pleasure no matter what the consequences, and spends his money hedonistically. He is a manual worker, which affirms the young male working class masculinity with the idea of potency and heroism. Manual work can be related to physical power. It is where the masculine strength can find a way to demonstrate itself and be productive. The irony is that this same manual work, that stands for potency and heroism, itself turns out to be very boring after some time. Thus, the concept of masculinity itself which is related to manual work loses by this association with the monotonous.
In Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, the central characters are credibly portrayed as those who oppose the established ideas and values of an oppressive social system which was the major problem of the working class. The tradition wherein the working class character operates is frequently characterised by two basic attitudes: one is the strong sense of solidarity, the other one is hostility towards the unjust treatment of working classmen.
Alan Sillitoe exhibits Arthur's personality as a whole, including his pride at being a man sharing the working class youth notion of hedonism. John Clarke and Stuart Hall define this notion as "a guilt-free commitment to pleasure and immediate satisfaction." Arthur's appreciation of the social status to which he belongs is quite care-free and expresses the notion of he do nism clearly: [18]

And so it was possible to forget the factory... (it) could go on working until it blew itself up from too much speed, but I, he thought, already a couple of dozen above his daily stint, will be here after the factory's gone, and so will Brenda and all women like her still be here, the sort of women that are worth their weight in gold.

Leaving everything aside, pleasure apart, is the basis of the masculine hedonistic attitude which is dearly selfish. Arthur can even justify his affairs with two married sisters. His, is another reaction against the moral values of the whole society including both the working and the middle class. In the novel, the men and women whom Alan Sillitoe focuses on, ignore the old and conventional standards of sexual morality. The idea of maximising pleasure pervades the whole tone of the novel and significantly characterises the novel as an outstanding working class work. One of the most important reasons for this attitude derives from the economic deprivations of the post-war period. Above all, there is an escapist tendency behind hedonism. Working class men found it hard to face the difficulties. Among men, Arthur's mood made the need to escape imperative; they had to take the advantages offered by all sons of pleasure and thus forget the other hardships in life. As mentioned before, when "class" is talked about, one cannot avoid considering the common traits which render the group unit. These traits can be the level of education, the accent, similarity of occupation and common values. Having a carefree idea of sexual morality and irresponsibility is not specifically related to class, but it is an outcome or the escapist mood of the working class. For instance, when Brenda, the married woman whom Arthur sleeps with, gets pregnant, the decision to get rid of the baby is hers, but Arthur is present during the gin and hot-bath abortion, but casual about it, "like watching the telly with no part in what be was seeing." He does not seem to care much about the pain Brenda suffers. On that night, when the woman he sleeps with regularly is not available, he takes the advantage of meeting Winnie, Brenda's sister, and sleeps with her without thinking of Brenda. This can be taken as a negligent attitude of Arthur's, but it can also be evaluated as an extreme form of defying moral values. He seems to be challenging his bad 'luck' through insisting on his own values though he knows them to be unacceptable to society. The ending of the story suggests some important prospects about Arthur's future. Towards the end, he meets another girl, Doreen, who is single. This time he is serious about his relationship with her, but his inner conflicts while fishing on the canal bank show that he has not yet solved his blurred anarchic thoughts: "There's bound to be trouble in store for me everyday of my life, because trouble it's always been and always will be. Born drunk and married blind, misbegotten into a strange and crazy world ..." These protests distinguish Arthur from his own environment and make him an individual coming to self-realisation and maturity at the end of the story.
For the male members of the working class, the reckless attitude towards sex, gambling, and drinking does not bruise "the myths of muscularity" as Atherton quotes from Michael Young's The Rise of the Meritocracy 1870-1933. Accordingly, this "mythos" refers to a sort of understanding and presumption that the rest of society needs the labour that the working class produces and this induction brings the feeling of pride in physical labour and hence in masculinity. When one considers Arthur's situation, it is clear that his motive is not positive, on the contrary he is motivated by the fact that he is a working class man who is in conflict with the dominating power of the middle class and believes that he is persisting in masculine values when he reacts against the hegemonic dominance of the middle class. The words and the slang he chooses have masculine connotations as when he shows his reaction against the political situation of the late fifties:

I ain't a communist. I tell you. I like 'em though, because they're different from these big fat Tory bastards in parliament. And them labour bleeders too. They rob our wage packets every week with insurance and income tax and try to tell us it is all for our own good.

Arthur does not trust anybody or any authority, as he does not feel secure enough to be dependent on any higher power. His primary conflict is between his own values and the repressive social order which does not satisfy him at all. This is like a vicious circle because he is not content with his status and does not think that a new system will succeed in reforming the social deficiencies. Interestingly enough, he earns fourteen pounds a week and for the conditions of those years this amount would be seen as "a comfortable wage".After he gives three pounds to his mother, he has plenty of money left to spend on women and drink. He protested against inflation by refusing to save any of his wages for a long period of time: "It was no use saving your money year after year. A mug's game, since the value of it got less and less." The reluctance to save money is a sign of negligence about making future plans, and characterises the hedonistic psychology of working class men.
He gives voice to his discontent also by saying, if they said: "look, Arthur, here's a hundred weight of dynamite and a brand-new plunger, now blow up the factory", then I'd do it, because that would do something worth doing. .... Me, I couldn't care less if the world did blow up tomorrow, as long as I'm blown up with it.
Just after this, he relates the fitness of the world to the strength, which makes one stand on one's own feet, thinking that, "It's a fine world sometimes, if you don't weaken, or if you don't give the bastards a chance to get cracking with that carborundum." He is haunted by the overwhelming image of people having more advantages than he has due to their social positions. For that sort of mentality, social order, even if it has novelties and improvements for working class conditions; cannot offer many hopes. Since Arthur has no chance of revealing his reaction directly, he fulfils his masculine values and ambitions by going out with married women without thinking about results. Bernard Lockwood calls Arthur's wanderings from adulterous bed to pub and back again "picaresque". He releases the tension of the week spent in monotonous factory work by drinking, and going out with women.
Arthur is a working class man, but with all the complexities and ups and downs in his life, It would not be right to label him as a mere working class character. As a matter of fact, Alan Sillitoe rejects this labelling and gives the reason of the misinterpretation of the character, Arthur, as a working class man as " ... people's getting pleasure from seeing working class being represented as irresponsible, anarchic and idle"For the writer, this can be the assumed attitude of the middle class against the working class.
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning provides an excellent opportunity for the reader not only to savour the vividness with which working class fiction represents the contemporary conditions of working class life, and its expression of masculine values and style, but also to grasp the conflict between the values of labouring men and middle class systems of belief.
Sillitoe, in an interview in The Guardian, 24 March 1970, says of his work: "... my stories are not class conflicts; they are just individual, psychotic, psychological or whatever conflicts". Still, Sillitoe is clearly intent on depicting social realism and writes from an oven political stance. His. heroes or anti-heroes individually, physically and psychologically have contradictions, doubts and failings that the characters in ordinary propaganda work do not exhibit. Nonetheless, they do articulate in a pleasingly complex way the socio-cultural conditions which helped form them. [19]

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