Class, Embodiment, and Becoming in British Working-Class Fiction: Rereading Barry Hines and Ron Berry with Deleuze and Guattari

Abstract

This essay offers a new reading of two post-war working-class British novels, Barry Hines’s A Kestrel for a Knave and Ron Berry’s So Long, Hector Bebb , in light of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s ideas about the body and subjectivity. What is at stake in these narratives, as in the theoretical edifice constructed by Deleuze and Guattari, is a possibility of being—in this case, of social, class-marked being—that does not necessarily commence and conclude with fixed positions and functional roles, or with already formed subjectivities and identities. The class figures that we encounter in these novels call for a careful reappraisal of political agency outside of these sanctioned parameters, and for an alternative understanding of marginality in a context of crisis of Fordist social and productive relations.