Sillitoe, Alan: 1928 - 2010
Smith: A Winning Loser or a Losing Winner?
- The protagonist of Sillitoe's novel "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" embodies the icon of the young rebel and, at the same time, the archetype of the haughty intellectual and the over-ambitious megalomaniac. Smith isn't ignorant nor deprived of good sense; he's a man able to value men's actions without any prejudice, a kind of Byronic hero even though, for Byron's verbal brilliance, he substitutes, as it were, an eloquent muteness.
This makes Smith the spokesman for a generation that rejects their parents' inheritance: his strangulated murmurings are an impediment that would become, a few years later, a fully disclosed hip mannerism and part of the modernist liturgy. He is polemical against the post-war concepts of family, education and the look-at-me-I-behave-well way of life. He develops more and more the sceptical and disenchanted attitude typical of the people who, knowing men and life, are able to laugh at the right time. He's got something of the sly dog, whose trivial observations turn into revealing flashes and pungent thrusts. He keeps on finding faults with somebody, above all with those who lay themselves open to the ridiculous better than any other people.
Smith is no reckless young man: though not very evident, the eternal moral dilemmas peep through his green conscience. It seems as if he were haunted by unsolved questions about life in general, money, freedom and honesty.
This particular aspect comes to the surface through Sillitoe's narrative technique: in fact, the key point is that he sees himself as if he were acting a part even when he is dealing sincerely with what he recognises as his "real" state of mind.
The actantial quality of Sillitoe's prose is primarily and most conspicuously displayed by Smith's "running memories", which are certainly essential to the novel, but more of its phenomenology and kinesis is conveyed through the knowledge that the spoken language is sort of a knife-file in the hands of a prisoner.
Pouring rude remarks on his enemies, calling them names and showing their bad habits mustn't be considered an outburst of wrath end to itself but a complex elaboration of a simple organizing principle, identifiable on the basis of the sentence "cunning is what counts in life". It can happen everywhere in the world that he who wins is right. Winning as a swindler, hitting below the belt (another metaphor dear to Sillitoe), without any fair play, without honesty is the example set in front of Smith's eyes by the ruthless neo-capitalistic society.
Then, why shouldn't he create his own system, so as not to "be enslaved by another Man's"? He carries out Blake's piece of advice to the letter against moral slavery and subornation brought into being by laws and institutions.
Sillitoe is a reminder of our intelligence and his novel is a syrup against conformism and conventionality.
Alberto Meli
Liceo Scientifico Leonardo Da Vinci
Trento, Italy
February 1998