Good evening!
I think it’s safe to say that autumn has arrived, thank God. I think I might be 85% novelty seasonal drink at this point.
In my re-introduction to myself last week I forgot to say that my handles on social media are jessf_white on twitter/X/whatever it probs won’t be around for much longer, and lunchpoems on instagram if you want to follow me there. I post a lot about books but also about whatever little obsession I’ve got going on, which is currently Leo Messi, a man I would go into battle for. I am a woman with range.
If you’d like to buy me a coffee, on Ko-Fi, you can do here 🙂 (Thank you to the person who gave me a substantial tip during the week! I bought a nice lunch and mug with it.)
What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
I left you last week having started an unexpected reread of William Morris’ News From Nowhere (1890) for my thesis. I like this novel a lot, despite how it does undeniably drag around the middle, when the protagonist is having a very long conversation with someone. It’s about a man called William who attends a socialist meeting in the nineteenth century, and then wakes up in the future, a few decades on from a successful proletariat revolution in England. He meets several people as he navigates around the south of the country, learning that money, standardised education and prison have been abolished, as well as a reversal of industrialisation and large cities. Most things are created by hand, something that Morris carried out for his company Morris & Co., and beauty and usefulness are prioritised.
I’m writing about this for the utopia/dystopia chapter of my thesis, which is on representations of textile labour and industry in nineteenth-century texts. I’m focusing on the act of making in this utopia, as well as how clothing aesthetics becomes a marker for a renewed society, and how all of this is a reaction to Britain’s declining place in the world market, which was largely built up by the industrialised and globalised textile industry.
I don’t really have any exciting thoughts on News From Nowhere that aren’t overly academic because that’s how I’m reading and talking about it. I did, however, have some renewed appreciation for Morris’ commentary on over-production, which is summarised by Old Hammond, who is an elderly man born in the early twentieth century with an interest in the nineteenth century and what it is exactly the revolutionaries were fighting against:
Since they had forced themselves to stagger along under [the] horrible burden of unnecessary production, it became impossible for them to look upon labour and its results from any other point of view than one, to wit, the ceaseless endeavour to expend the least possible amount of labour on any article made, and yet at the same time to make as many articles as possible. To this ‘cheapening of production’ as it was called, everything was sacrificed. The happiness of the workman at his work, nay, his most elementary comfort and bare health, his food, his clothes, his dwelling, his leisure, his amusement, his education…his life, in short… did not weigh a grain of sand in the balance against this dire necessity of ‘cheap production’ of things, a great part of which were not worth producing at all.
I think this nicely sums up much of the novel’s central message, as well as the issues that have carried on until the present day. Over production is inherently linked to worker exploitation, which is linked to a myriad of other social and personal issues.
News From Nowhere is not really a text that is taken seriously in socialist theory and honestly, I can see why. Morris wanted to make a rebuttal against those who said that if there was no promise of wages and market competition, people would not be drawn to making things or working to support their community. His argument is that people are naturally drawn to beautiful things, especially when that beauty can be imbued into useful items, and if society was reconstructed then everyone would make them of their own accord. Of course, it is his own conception of beauty that he uses in his novel -- the subject of taste is briefly touched upon but there is very little deviation from the Morris aesthetic. I do think, however, that the concurrent commentary on the reversal of industrialisation and stopping mass-production should very much be taken seriously, even if his solution to that is flawed. It’s also kind of ironic that Morris & Co., as it is now, produces some absolute rubbish.
I’m now more than half-way through Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Chain-Gang All-Stars (2023), which I am very much enjoying. I loooooved Adjei-Brenyah’s short story collection Friday Black (2018) (although I think I am correct in thinking that there was a story in there about abortion that I wasn’t keen on, but I could be getting that mixed up with another collection -- I read it in 2020 when everyone’s brain was fried). What I liked about his short story collection is that many of the stories had an uncanny likeness to our own society, but with hyperbolic effect. As an example, the titular story is about a man working the Black Friday shift in a store, who is tasked with cleaning up the dead bodies that pile up when shoppers fight over things that are discounted. You can read another one of the stories, ‘Zimmer Land’, about a theme park that allows guests to stimulate killing Black people that are ‘trespassing’ on property (a la George Zimmerman) on Lit Hub.
Chain-Gang All-Stars is similar in that the American prison system has been pushed to its absolute extreme. The demographics of prisoners is the same as it is now, with the same percentage of racial groups being convicted, meaning that the majority of prisoners within the system are disproportionately Black. Prison has become completely privatised, with experimental facilities popping up, as well as corporations providing items like clothing and weapons for prison officers. Prisoners are able to opt out of their sentences by joining a Chain Gang, which means they are put into a televised competition of death matches against other prisoners. When they are not fighting, which happens every week or so, they camp and march from place to place with their gang -- which is also televised in a 24 hour feed of reality television. On these marches, they might be forced into mass brawls by producers, or they may spend quality time with the other ‘links’ in their chain. If participants survive 3 years, or kill enough people to progress to the ‘High Freed’ status, then they are released. Competitors earn blood points by winning matches, which can be spent on improved weaponry, armour, food and tent amenities for when they are marching.
At first I thought that there might not be enough in this premise for it to last nearly 400 pages, because it does have echoes of quite a lot of his short stories. In actuality, I think what Adjei-Brenyah has shown is that his ideas -- the majority of which are very good -- do have longevity in them because he is very good at layering in sub-plots and characters that build up to what is shaping up to be a very successfully-rendered novel. I’m holding off complete judgement until I finish it but the reading of it thus far has been great.
Books on my radar
I always say that if you think about a book enough, you’ll find it in a charity shop -- which happened again a few days ago. My friend Sara told me about Jonathan Coe’s Mr. Wilder and Me (2020) because I love the director Billy Wilder, and lo and behold it appeared to me in Oxfam. I’m excited to read it because I’ve heard great things about Coe and he seems like a good egg.
I’m glad you’re loving Chain Gang! I read it in July and absolutely loved it. It’s so impressively written & executed. I had the same worries that there wouldn’t be enough pages for the story! But I was proven wrong