Gospels and Grit: Work and Labour in Carlyle, Conrad, and Orwell by Rob Breton

200 Reviews where Walter Scott isprimed by thismilieu toconform to the commercially prosper ous, new British superstate and itburgeoning imperial ambition. What, then, about JamesBruce ofKinnaird? His accounts ofEthiopia in thesecond half of theeighteenth century were received as fictionwhen he returned toBritain, and Bruce, aman re presenting the strong anthropological urge of theScottish Enlightenment, responded loudly about the complacency of theBritish Christian mindset in its incredulity over thatwhich did not fititspreconceptions. Bruce issurely a key starting-point in the en gagement between theScottish mind and Britain's attitude to 'inferior'peoples. Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Spartacus, strongly informed by thiswriter's colonial experiences serving overseas in theBritish forces in the I920S, does notmerit amention; instead there is extended discussion of his Sunset Song, which largely,and to no new effect, rehearses the cultural tensions between peasant Aberdeenshire and the incursions of British bourgeois values. Robin Jenkins is nowhere mentioned even though his fictionabout Afghanistan or theCatalans makes for some of themost powerful colo nial engagement inmodern Scottish fiction. Instead we have patchy observations on JamesKelman and writers of theScottish diaspora such asAlice Munro and Alistair MacLeod. 'Scottish Fiction and theBritish Empire' remains a topic to be tackled. UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW GERARD CARRUTHERS Gospels and Grit: Work and Labour inCarlyle, Conrad, and Orwell. By ROB BRETON. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2005. x+246 pp. C35. ISBN 978-o 8020-3888-3. The central theme of this book is that in the industrial age a significant gap opened up in attitudes towork. On the one hand, therewas amore or lessRomantic concep tion,which the author refers to as 'Work', thatwas not driven by economic necessity; indeed, in its attempt to valorize the processes ofwork as such, it is the opposite of thealternative concept of 'labour', which isessentially economically motivated and in the service of thedominant ideology.Neither of these attitudes, Rob Breton argues, is actually a description of the range of forces at stake:where 'Work' seeks toobliterate the specific disadvantages and indeed terrorsof industrialization, 'labour' rejects any possibility of the location of desire in the fieldof social relations. It is a complex argument, and one which, inmy own view, is only sporadically successful. This ispartly because the author is greatly attached to binary lists. For example, he produces in his introduction a structure inwhich 'Nonrationalism and Work' isopposed to 'Rationalism and Labour', and under these general headings are furtheropposed, interalia, 'Homo faber' and 'Homo economicus', the realm of free dom and the realm ofmaximizing or the realm of necessity, idealism andmaterialism, moralism and pragmatism, form and reform, finalityand conditionality, totality and variability,withdrawal and concession, intransitiveness and transitiveness, 'a priori' and 'a posteriori', and so on (p. 14). The firstfour of these oppositions seem tome to be clear; the others advance into a realm of abstraction where it is difficult to see exactly ofwhat use they are as heuristic categories. The argument ismade, as is evident in the title,chiefly in terms of thewritings of Carlyle, Conrad, and Orwell. Again in the introduction, theauthormakes itclear that he isnot really concerned with the biographies of these figures,but he does none the less characterize them as in some sense 'marginal', through theirbackgrounds, their various senses of exile, and their tangential involvement with theworld ofwork. But the material rangesmore widely than that,and there are sections on Dickens, Gaskell, Thomas Cooper, Ruskin, Morris, Wells, Forster, and Tressell. The quality of theana lysisof some of thesewriters is, tomy mind, superior to the frameworkwithin which theyare situated, and indeed they sometimes threaten tooverflow the central thesis. MLR, I03. I, 2oo8 201 There is also an interesting epilogue on 'postindustrial and postmodern work' which, the author insists, isnot a conclusion, 'not a summary ofmy argument J.. .] in some ways I am abandoning the themes discussed and even theparameters used in thebook' (p. 21 3). But perhaps this is todo the connections within the argument less than full justice. For ifthebook has been seeking todemonstrate collusive aspects of a systematic occlusion of thebrutal factsofwork inorder toprevent organized resistance to industrialism, then the furthercollusion towhich he points, between postmodern thought and postindustrial practice, and particularly itsexclusion of thedisplacement of labour into theunregulated factories and sweatshops of theEast...

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