Rather than offer a solution, Sillitoe utilises Arthur Seaton’s unique perspective to question the perceived opposition of realism and modernism in literature. At the heart of the text is the tension between the individual and the community, which Georg Lukács styles as ‘the dialectic between man-as-individual and man-as-social being’. While the individualistic Arthur grinds down bicycle parts at his factory job on a capstan-lathe, he struggles against the social institutions trying to grind him down: work, marriage, sobriety. Playing with the mock-Latin aphorism Illegitimi non carborundum, Sillitoe reminds us that the phrase is a pun on a bastard file, a tool used for grinding: ‘Something about a carborundum wheel when he spouted it in Latin’. ‘Don’t let the bastards grind you down,’ warns Arthur Seaton, the rebellious protagonist of Alan Sillitoe’s novel of working-class life in postwar Nottingham, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958).
But does its innovative style cast off the label of ‘realist’? Alan Sillitoe’s 1958 novel has been praised for its authentic depiction of postwar Nottingham.
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