Postmodern Conditions of England: Naked, Nice Work and Thatcherite Britain

Speaking on postmodern culture Jean Baudrillard reflects “it is no longer possible to

separate the economic or productive realm from the realms of ideology or culture, since cultural
artifacts, images, representations, even feelings […] have become part of the world of the
economic”1, while Fredric Jameson observes “every position on postmodernism in culture […] is also
at one and the same time, and necessarily, an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of
multinational capitalism”2. While both criticisms present differences, Baudrillard alludes to the
emergence of the Culture Industry while Jameson identifies postmodernism undistinguishable from
late-capitalism, both commentators do share a similarity in the fact that they recognise the mixing of
culture with economic systems within postmodern society. For the West the 1980s presented a
rightward shift within politics. In Britain Margaret Thatcher’s conservative government were in
power from 1979 to 1990, and in America Ronald Reagan maintained presidency from 1981 until
1989. Both political campaigns had significant effect on the economics of the West, Thatcher’s
monetarist values oversaw the deregulation of the financial market and Reagan’s ‘Reaganomics’ the
deregulation of the domestic markets, which in turn created cultures where the glorification of
material and economic wealth were dramatically increased. Mike Leigh’s film Naked (1993) depicts
British middle and working class characters living in the aftermath of the decade, and shows a
society swamped in the material values of late-capitalism. While David Lodge’s Nice Work (1988) is a
novel that presents academic and industrial life during the eighties, and reflects a Britain suffering
from the economic cuts of Thatcher’s government. Through their use of postmodern practises both
Leigh and Lodge create condition of England texts that portray Britain as suffering in response to the
ideologies of late-capitalism, which is presented as damaging to society and the individual, and are
able to take a critical approach to the politics of Margaret Thatcher and her effects within Britain.

The condition of England novel is a model of social-realist fiction which is defined by James
Richard Simmons, Jr. as functioning as “a method of teaching the middle and upper classes about
the ‘real’ condition of England”3 by depicting the lives and social interactions of those belonging to
the British working-class. Mike Leigh’s Naked is an example of social-realist cinema that presents the
lives of a collective group of mostly working-class and unemployed British characters. Throughout
Naked, Leigh uses a variety of postmodern and cinematic techniques in order to illustrate the
condition of England in the years following the 1980s and Thatcher’s economic practices. In a scene
1
Steven Connor, Postmodernist Culture: An introduction to theories of the contemporary (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1989). P. 41.
2
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), p. 64.
3
James Richard Simmons, Jr., ‘Industrial and “Condition of England” Novels’, in A Companion to The Victorian
Novel, ed. by Patrick Brantlinger and William B. Thesing (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), pp. 336-352 (p.
336).
where the protagonist Johnny converses with a night-watchman named Brian, Leigh uses his
dialogue to show late-capitalism as intrusive and alienating. When asked what it is he is guarding
Brian answers “Space”, to which Johnny replies “That’s stupid […] someone could break in there,
right, and steal all the fucking space and you wouldn’t know where it had gone would you?” 4.
Johnny’s reply is an example of postmodern irony and playfulness that is juxtaposed with the serious
themes of the social-realist narrative, serving to maintain the comedic aspect of the film. His reply is
also reminiscent of Jean Baudrillard’s ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’ in which he asserts that late-
capitalism is the era of connections and feedback, over production and consumption. Baudrillard
argues that a result of this societal shift is that “advertising in its new dimension, invades everything,
as public space disappears […] this loss of public space occurs contemporaneously with the loss of
private space”5. For Baudrillard, the shift into an electronic or high tech society allows for the
consumer culture of late-capitalism to merge into the everyday. Thus, Leigh’s ironic playfulness
employed through Johnny illustrates the encroachment of consumer-capitalism into the personal
space, while also showing the condition of England as anxious and disorientated from its being
engulfed by a capitalist and materialistic culture.

As well as representing a nation swamped in consumer culture, Leigh also uses Johnny’s
ironic remarks to show the loss of individuality due to late-capitalist and postmodern culture as
causing alienation for the individual. In the same scene involving Johnny and Brian, Johnny states
“It’s funny being inside, isn’t it? Because when you are inside you’re still actually outside aren’t you?
And then you can say when you’re outside you’re inside because you’re always inside your head”.
Johnny’s statement is an example of irony as it is a non-literal use of language, where what is said is
contradicted by what is meant6. Postmodernism’s attitude is predominately ironic as it allows for
double-coding, thus a realist narrative can be reflective of something other than what it presents at
face value. For Baudrillard, consumer-capitalism’s encroachment into the public and personal space
occurring simultaneously effaces the binary distinction between the exterior and the interior
(Baudrillard, p. 130). Therefore through its ironic double-coding Johnny’s comment refers to the
intrusion of consumer-capitalism into the personal space, as for him the binary has been blurred. His
notion of always being inside his head highlights a difficulty of communication, resulting from the
loss of individuality inherent in late-capitalist culture. Moreover, the schizophrenic symptoms
embodied in his statement reveal a contested identity that is also a result of a denied individuality.

4
Naked, dir. by Mike Leigh (Thin Man Films, 1993).
5
Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’, in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. by
Hal Foster (Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1985), pp. 126-133 (p. 129-130).
6
Brian Nicol, The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2012), p. 13.
 Indeed, throughout Naked Johnny’s identity is not presented as fixed. The protagonist
wanders aimlessly, which alongside the cinematography Leigh employs emphasises the
undetermined nature of his existence. Repeatedly throughout the film we are presented with shots
of Johnny that are shot using a steady-cam. For example the opening scene of the film where Johnny
is introduced in a violent sexual encounter, the scene where he departs from the characters Archie
and Maggie, and the final long distressing shot where Johnny returns to wandering the streets. David
and Gabriel Paletz have noted how “the camera movement in Naked mirrors Johnny’s feverish
speeches and flashing wit”7, establishing a relationship between Leigh’s cinematography and
Johnny’s character. Leigh’s use of a steady-cam alongside the fluid editing of his film accentuates his
character’s continual and unfixed state of being. Stuart Sim describes how in postmodern or late-
capitalist culture “the subject is a fragmented being who has no essential identity and is to be
regarded as a process in a continual state of dissolution rather than a fixed identity or self that
endures unchanged over time”8, allowing Johnny’s crisis of identity to be interpreted as a response
to the culture he exists in. Therefore the intellectual attacks Johnny makes throughout the film
become a compensatory effort towards hiding the despair he feels in his own alienated state. By
revealing the distressing social conditions of his characters, Leigh allows them to reveal the flaws in
the late-capitalist system they are a direct consequence of.

The dialogue of Naked also serves to depict England’s condition as a helpless state of
deprivation, in its response to the ideologies of late-capitalism, through an association with
postmodern anxieties regarding the future and an impending apocalypse. In the scene between
Johnny and Brian, the latter defends his job against Johnny’s claims that it’s boring, saying it gives
him time to think about the future. True to his almost lyrical attacks, Johnny responds “Has nobody
not told you Brian, that you’ve got this kind of gleeful preoccupation with the future? I wouldn’t
even mind, but you don’t even have a fucking future, I don’t have a future. Nobody has a future. The
party’s over. Take a look around you man, it’s all breaking up. Are you not familiar with the Book of
Revelations of St. John, the final book of the bible prophesising the apocalypse?”. Johnny then
interprets the prophesy, claiming that the mark without which anyone is forbidden to buy or sell is
the barcode. Continuing that the barcode will be tattooed on the international population to make
the world markets cash free and to eradicate debt. Johnny’s anxieties towards an electronic based
economy can be linked to the financial Big-Bang orchestrated by Thatcher’s government or Reagan’s
Reaganomics, both of which introduced the practise of free-market economics. Thus Johnny’s

7
David L. Paletz and Gabriel M. Paletz, ‘Mike Leigh’s “Naked” Truth’, Film Criticism, 19.2 (Winter 94-95), 23-39
(p. 30).
8
Stuart Sim, ‘Names and Terms’ in The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism, ed. by Stuart Sim (London:
Routledge, 2001), pp. 175-386 (p. 367).
anxieties towards the future, typical of postmodernism, link back to the culture of commercial
capitalism and its dehumanising aspects. In an interview discussing Naked Leigh describes how he
wanted to make a film that dealt with “the tension between the spiritual and material values and a
sense of impending doom”9, showing his awareness of apocalyptic anxieties. The tension to which he
refers can be inferred as a crisis of identity relating to a desire for autonomous living and the
eradication of individuality due to late-capitalism’s ideologies. Such apocalyptic anxieties could be
produced by a failure to envision a future for the individual, as everything is predetermined as
working collectively towards capitalism. Fredric Jamesom bridges postmodern millennial anxieties
with late-capitalism, which he believes signifies the end of “the autonomous bourgeois monad or
individual” and dissolves them into “the world of organisational bureaucracy” (Jameson, p. 15). Late-
capitalism reduces the individual to a faceless mass. Leigh uses postmodern apocalyptic anxieties to
create a sense of helplessness throughout England towards the encroachment of capitalism, while
denoting wider anxieties towards a loss of individuality at the sake of late-capitalist society. In this
scene, and throughout the entirety of Naked, Leigh depicts a condition of England that shows late-
capitalism as intrusive, reductive of autonomy, and as damaging towards the individual.

Many critics of the English novel have noted the attractiveness of the campus novel as a
condition of England text due to its universal accessibility, despite its peripheral positioning, which
offers a distanced view of society, and the hierarchies and relationships among staff which allow the
institutions to be read as microcosms for greater society. As the final instalment to David Lodge’s
campus trilogy, preceded by Changing Places (1975) and Small World (1984), Nice Work’s status as
an academic or campus novel should be indisputable. However through an intertextuality, typical of
postmodern fiction, with an array of 19th-century industrial condition of England novels, Lodge is
able to create an air of ambivalence regarding the specific genre of his text. The novel quotes in its
epigraphs a number of Victorian industrial texts including Dickens’ Hard Times, Disraeli’s Sybil; or the
Two Nations and Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, while the novel takes the structure of its plot from
Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South. The epigraphs serve to foreground the text as belonging to the
genre of industrial fiction, thus disrupting the reading of the text as a campus novel. Through his
intertextuality Lodge is able to bring together two separate condition of England novels, allowing
him to introduce two otherwise distinct social sectors. Robert Burton identifies that Lodge’s novel
works by “combining elements of the campus novel with the industrial novel, subgenres that have
existed separately on the British literary scene yet rarely have been integrated into one unifying
vision”10. By integrating the industrial and campus novel Lodge is able to unify British industry with
the Arts and Humanities, who were both suffering the recession through Margaret Thatcher’s
9
Howie Moushovitz, ‘Mike Leigh’s Grim Optimism’ in Mike Leigh: Interviews, ed. by Howie Moushovitz
(Jacksom, University Press Mississippi, 2000), pp. 51-54 (p. 53).
infrastructural cuts which as part of her monetarist policies were intended to reduce inflation.
Therefore Lodge unifies the two sectors in opposition to a government with monetary values typical
of late-capitalism.

The combination of literary sub-genres is made most explicit when the character of Robyn
Penrose, a lecturer specialising in the 19th-century industrial novel, gives a lecture on her chosen
subject. Coming only lines after Vic Wilcox tells his industrial peers “we must rationalise” and asserts
“If it’s profitable, Pringle’s will make it”, Robyn makes her analysis that “Mr. Gradgrind in Hard Times
embodies the spirit of industrial capitalism”11. The juxtaposition of the paragraphs within the extract
allows for both settings to come through, creating a hybridised condition of England genre. Timothy
Brennan links the novel form to production of national identity, as it mimics “the structure of the
nation, a clearly bordered jumble of languages and styles”12. For Brennan the novel embodies the
“one, yet many” (Brennan, p. 49) aspect of the nation. Lodge uses his intertextuality to merge the
many into one, which serves to create a new model of national identity in which both industry and
the humanities are united against Thatcher’s economic cuts.

Another central theme of Lodge’s novel is the definition of, and what constitutes as, work.
Lodge addresses the debate through a use of irony in Vic’s dialogue. In one instance Vic reflects on
the factory, saying “The foundry has a lot of potential. It’s a good workforce. They do nice work”
(Lodge, p. 20), and in another he almost contemptuously remarks to Robyn “Well […] it’s nice work if
you can get it” (Lodge, p. 249). The latter being ironic as what is said is contradicted by what is
meant. The ironic playfulness with the noun “work” serves to highlight the binary distinction
between valuable labour and academic idleness that the novel deals with. Rather fittingly to her
post-structuralist loyalties Robyn deconstructs the binary replying to Vic’s assumption that “reading
is the opposite of work”, when she says “In this place […] reading is work. Reading is production. And
what we produce is meaning” (Lodge, p. 240). Robyn disrupts the opposition between leisure and
the world of work, while her language, specifically the noun “production” and its capitalist
connotations, highlight the mixing of culture and economy identified within postmodern society due
to an increase of material values, typically seen as being caused by both Thatcher and Reagan’s
monetarist practices and economic policies. Moreover, Robyn’s later investment into Vic’s business
breaks the binary distinction between industry and academia. Robyn reminds Vic of his previous
business plan following his dismissal from Pringle’s factory, saying “I’ve got a lot of capital […] I’ll be

10
Robert S. Burton, ‘Standoff at the Crossroads: When Town Meets Gown in David Lodge’s Nice Work’,
Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 35. (1994), 237-243 (p. 237).
11
David Lodge, Nice Work (London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 1988), p. 47.
12
Timothy Brennan, ‘The national longing for form’ in Nation and Narration, ed. by Homi K. Bhabba (New York:
Routledge, 1991), pp. 44-70 (p. 49).
a – what do they call it? A sleeping partner” (Lodge, p. 274). Robyn’s use of commercial jargon
disrupts the binary by demonstrating the two sectors as not mutually exclusive. Steven Connor notes
how within campus novels of the 1980s “the period when British university life was under the most
economic and ideological assault – the conflict is between academic values and […] the industrial” 13.
Lodge defends academia from ideological assault by illustrating it as a type of work in its own right,
however instead of conflicting with British industry he creates a further unification via the mobility
of his characters between the sectors.

Finally, through a postmodern treatment of realism Lodge is able to produce an image of the
condition of England, in the late eighties, that is negative due to the mass unemployment that
resulted from Thatcher’s Tory government’s infrastructural cuts to British industries. Through the
descriptions of Vic and Robyn’s separate commutes to the Pringle’s factory Lodge offers his readers
fragmented images of Rummidge that are symbolic of wider Britain. In the section depicting Vic’s
commute we are told by the narrator that a younger Vic completed a school project on the history of
the area which is then related briefly to the reader, including quotations from Charles Dickens and
Thomas Carlyle which serve to blur fact with fiction thus giving authority to Vic’s description of the
area as “gloomy by day, fearsome by night” (Lodge, p. 16). Contrasting with this is Robyn’s
description of the area which she can only produce through intertextual allusions, for example “She
felt in a wave of terror the grey, gritty hopelessness of it all” (Lodge, p. 64) taken from Lawrence’s
Lady Chatterly’s Lover. Despite being shaped by the way in which they each relate to the area, both
character’s descriptions depict post-industrial England as harsh and dilapidated. In his critical work
Lodge discusses realist literature as a form of metonymy and experimental as metaphorical 14. Lodge
goes on to argue that “The literary text is always metaphoric in the sense that […] we [the reader]
make it into a total metaphor” (Lodge, Modes of Modern Writing, p. 109). Lodge’s treatment of
realism aligns him with postmodern as his assertion that the text is always metaphoric acknowledges
the text is not a complete representation. Therefore, the fragments of England offered to us are
expected to be completed by the omniscient reader to reflect a whole image of the condition of
England that is suffering in its contemporary economy.

Both Mike Leigh and David Lodge create condition of England texts that are reflective of a
Great Britain within the stage of late-capitalism and engulfed in its culture of economics. Leigh’s
combined use of postmodern and cinematic techniques allow him to reveal the flaws of late-
capitalism’s culture. His use of ironic double-coding illustrates material capitalism as intrusive,
alienating, and as damaging towards identity and society in its effacement of the individual. While

13
Steven Connor, The English Novel in History: 1950-1995 (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 72.
14
David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing (London: Arnold, 1997), p. viii.
his incorporation of anxieties towards the future portray the reduction of individual autonomy at the
sake of a collective late-capitalist society. In Nice Work Lodge uses postmodern literary techniques to
position his novel in an oppositional stance against Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government, and its
monetarist values which are characteristic of late-capitalist ideology. Through his intertextuality
Lodge is able to unify British Industry with the Arts and Humanities in the face of Thatcher’s
infrastructural cuts. Moreover his postmodern treatment of realism serves to present an England
that is dilapidated during the recession. By merging two separate condition of England genres, in
combination with his postmodern irony, Lodge is able to disrupt the binary opposition between the
two sectors, and provide a redefined model of national identity that is united against late-capitalist
principles. Through their postmodern approaches both Lodge and Leigh take critical approaches in
their condition of England texts, which reflect the ideologies and practices of late-capitalist society as
disruptive and damaging to, not only the individual, but society as a whole.

Bibliography

Baudrillard, Jean, ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’, in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern

Culture, ed. by Hal Foster (Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1985), pp. 126-133.
Brennan, Timothy, ‘The national longing for form’ in Nation and Narration, ed. by Homi K. Bhabba
(New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 44-70.

Burton, Robert S., ‘Standoff at the Crossroads: When Town Meets Gown in David Lodge’s Nice
Work’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 35. (1994), 237-243.

Connor, Steven, The English Novel in History: 1950-1995 (London: Routledge, 1996).

Connor, Steven, Postmodernist Culture: An introduction to theories of the contemporary (Oxford:

Basil Blackwell, 1989). P. 41.

Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), p.
64.

Leigh, Mike (dir.), Naked, (Thin Man Films, 1993).

Lodge, David, The Modes of Modern Writing (London: Arnold, 1997).

Lodge, David, Nice Work (London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 1988).

Moushovitz, Howie, ‘Mike Leigh’s Grim Optimism’ in Mike Leigh: Interviews, ed. by Howie
Moushovitz (Jacksom, University Press Mississippi, 2000), pp. 51-54.

Nicol, Brian, The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2012).

Paletz, David L. and Paletz, Gabriel M. ‘Mike Leigh’s “Naked” Truth’, Film Criticism, 19.2 (Winter 94-
95), 23-39.

Sim, Stuart, ‘Names and Terms’ in The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism, ed. by Stuart Sim
(London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 175-386.
Simmons, Jr., James Richard, ‘Industrial and “Condition of England” Novels’, in A Companion to The
Victorian Novel, ed. by Patrick Brantlinger and William B. Thesing (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing,
2007), pp. 336-352.