Freie Universität Berlin, Institut für Englische Philologie
Youth Cultures – Presenting Youth in Theory and Fictional Writing
SoSe 2002, 6. Semester

The representation of youth and youth culture in the novel
Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes

by

Phyllis Wiechert

Table of contents

1. Introduction 3

2. The novel Absolute Beginners 4

2.1 The main character 4
2.2 The main themes 7

3. Theories on youth and youth cultures  11

4. Is Absolute Beginners main character a typical teenager of the fifties?  12

5. Conclusion  14

6. Bibliography 16

1. Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the question to what extent a piece of art, in this case a novel, can serve as a basis for cultural studies. For this reason the representation of youth and youth culture in the novel Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes will be analysed.
In the second chapter this paper introduces the novel with its main characters and the main themes. The third chapter then focuses on the theories of youth and youth culture from Ogersby. To combine the results drawn from the first two chapters, the fourth chapter deals with the question whether Absolute Beginners main character is represented as a typical teenager of the fifties or whether he is just a construction by the author. All the results of the paper are combined in the conclusion to prove whether the novel serves as a medium for representing youth cultures of the fifties in England or not. This leads to the answer of the question how a piece of art can be taken as a basis for cultural studies.

2. The novel Absolute Beginners

The novel Absolute Beginners written by Colin MacInnes was first published in 1959. It is one of his most celebrated novels and ‘The cult novel of the year’ (Sunday Times). It is a novel about the new generation of the fifties: the teenagers.
The novel has no structured plot with a set frame, nor a beginning or an ending. It is rather an excerpt of someone’s life. The reader accompanies the life of the unnamed nineteen-year-old protagonist for the total of four month. With his eyes the reader gets an insight into the teenage world, their excessive lifestyle, their hopes and their struggles. The novel starts in June 1958 and ends in September 1958 shortly after the Notting Hill race riots.

2.1 The main character

The protagonist of the novel is the unnamed nineteen-year-old photographer. He earns his money with casual work as a photographer taking pictures from the high society and his teenager friends. He lives in a room in Napoli, a London district that attracts with its cheap housing poor and mostly foreign families. He probably could have afforded a different place, but he is longing for a life different from his parents and their class influenced society. He wants to live his own life, after his personal and new ideas and opinions. Living in Napoli gives his the opportunity to create his individual personality and his own identity away from the influence of his parents.

But the real reason […] is that, however horrible the area is,
you’re free there! No one, I repeat it, no one, has ever asked
me there what I am, or what I do, or where I came from, or
what my social group is, or whether I’m educated or not […]¹

He has hardly any social contact with his family. His father, an amateur historian, is the only person he talks to when he visits his family, mostly to use his darkroom to develop his pictures. He disrespects his mother who has turned their home into a boarding house against the will of his father. Most of all he dislikes his older half-brother Vernon who is a nobody in his eyes.

[...]

1 Colin MacInnes, Absolute Beginners. (New York: Allsion & Busby Limited, 1980), 48.