‘Various pubs gave signs of life’: Of Drink and Time in Alan Sillitoe's <em>Saturday Night and Sunday Morning</em>

Abstract

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) famously begins with Arthur Seaton in a dizzy state of drunken high spirits. In an epic drinking contest with a sailor, he consumes at least seventeen drinks in rapid succession, falls down the stairs, vomits on a middle-aged couple, then adjourns to the bed of an older married woman. This kinetic opening has attracted a great deal of critical attention, usually reading Arthur’s excessive drinking in terms of his more pervasive class antagonisms, with his drinking behaviour and his working-class status often regarded as more or less synonymous. This is hardly surprising, but the apparently mandatory nature of a class-based reading of the novel does lead to a kind of critical cul-de-sac, one in which all other discourses are regarded as supplemental rather than self-sustaining. Lately, at least, the critical strategy seems to involve variations of the formula ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is not only a rebellious working-class novel, but also preoccupied with X’, with the X position occupied by, among other things, anti-modernist ‘realism’, urban geography, socialist modernism, narration and irresponsibility, Bakhtinian carnival, and positive existentialism.1