Another London, another point of view: the use of defamiliarisation to elicit empathy in the reader for the white working-class protagonist in Another London and their ‘real-world’ equivalents

ABSTRACT

In literary fiction, white working-class characters are often represented as part of a homogenised group, complete with stereotypical behaviours and characteristics. Using Fredric Jameson's theory of the ideologeme to identify representational tropes of white working-class characters, this article analyses the juxtaposition of free-indirect discourse and first-person narration in Another London as a defamiliarisation technique to expose the ideologemes of white working-class literary representation. It then examines how, using practice-based research methodologies, the novel attempts to elicit empathy in the reader for the protagonist – an individuated white working-class character – and by doing so challenge the reader's assumptions about the lifestyles of members of this group. The reader's literary experience can translate into ‘real-world’ changes in their perception of, and assumptions about, the behaviours and lifestyles of members of the white working class, thereby challenging stereotypical representations in mainstream media and politics, as well as literature. Another London is a novel written as the creative component of a Ph.D. Creative Writing. Set on a council estate in East London, it follows the social and psychological development of a white working-class boy into adulthood as he lives through fictionalised parallels of real-life events, which force him to confront his own ethnic and class identity.

KEYWORDS:

• Working-class
• white
• defamiliarisation
• first-person
• narration
• empathy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Jonathon Crewe is a writer and director for film, theatre and radio. He founded the Human Factory filmmaking collective in 2004 where he wrote and directed a number of award-nominated and internationally exhibited short films. His debut feature film is currently in post-production, due for release in 2019. His debut feature screenplay was shortlisted for a David Lean Award and he continues to work as a freelance screenwriter. He has written and directed for radio, with three plays being produced and broadcast at Resonance FM. In 2016 he had his London theatre debut, writing and directing for the Brockley Jack Theatre. He completed his Ph.D. in Creative Writing at Surrey University where he investigated representations of the white working class in mainstream media, politics and contemporary literature. At Surrey he lectured in Screenwriting, Filmmaking and Creative Writing before moving to become a Lecturer in Film Production at the University of West London.

Notes

1 Loosely based on the murder of black teenager, Stephen Lawrence, by a white gang in Eltham, South East London in 1993 (see Macpherson 1999).

2 Mieke Bal (2009) describes focalisation as ‘the relation between the vision and that which is “seen”,’ (143–144). It is ‘the layer between the linguistic text and the fabula … The subject of focalisation, the focalisor, is the point from which the elements are viewed’ (149).

3 For an overview of studies that link narrative research to psychological and neuroscience, language processing and comprehension see Sanford and Emmot (2012).

4 ‘Whether a character speaks in his or her own name, as I-person, or is introduced as a “he” or “she”, whose words and thoughts are “quoted” directly or indirectly [third-person], rather than rendered “immediately” [first-person narration] … is something that emanates clearly and immediately from the surface structure of the text’ (van Peer and Pander Maat 1996, 144; see also Schlenker 2004; Bal 2009).

5 Joe Bray (2007) cites Pascal's (1977) claim that the dual-voice of free indirect discourse subtly fuses the two voices of character and narrator though structure, lexis and intonation.

6 See also Dench, Gavron, and Young (2006), Griffith and Glennie (2014), Griffith (2014), Kaufman and Harris (2014), Open Society Foundations (2014).

7 ‘Keith is never self-aware, never conscious of … the low socio-cultural status he embodies, which is in direct contrast to the three other major characters, … drawn from the middle and upper classes, … [who] are all given a level of self-awareness and perception that Amis denies the only major working-class character’ (Crewe 2017, 376).

8 Bal (2009) characterises free indirect discourse as ‘narrated at a higher level than the level at which the words in the fabula are supposed to have been spoken … ’ (54). See also Schlenker 2004.

9 The working-class character Keith Talent in Martin Amis's London Fields (1989) would be an example.