Gardiner, Michael (2017) Spark's balladisation of work. The Bottle Imp (22).

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Abstract

First published at the end of 1960, The Ballad of Peckham Rye sends Edinburgh graduate Dougal Douglas to an unglamorous region of south London, and a world that has seen a large-scale rationalisation of work during the post-war consensus. Dougal succeeds a Cambridge Time and Motion man to unleash chaos into this environment, exasperating union man Humphrey Place by suggesting absenteeism to the workers, scandalising Humphrey’s fiancée Dixie with his sexualised and vaguely demonic presence, and puzzling his boss Mr. Druce, who had expected Dougal to concentrate on efficiency, whereas he encourages absenteeism and moonlights on another job by ‘doubling’ himself and reversing his name. In their own ways these three become comic foils in their tendencies to measure time by work: Druce struggles to explain the imperative of production, Humphrey earnestly obsesses over the fairness of work rates, Dixie, aspirational and hyper-aware of class gradations, dedicates her youth to saving.1 Within which environment of work rationalisation, Dougal lives an excess described in bodily and in poetic terms.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PE English
Divisions:	Faculty of Arts > English and Comparative Literary Studies
Journal or Publication Title:	The Bottle Imp
Publisher:	Association for Scottish Literary Studies
Official Date:	November 2017
Dates:	Date Event November 2017 Published 1 November 2017 Accepted
Number:	22
Status:	Not Peer Reviewed
Publication Status:	Published
Access rights to Published version:	Open Access (Creative Commons)

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