Essay: Modern Life Is Rubbish

Where Sally Rooney meets William Morris

May 08, 2022

Dear friends,

I hope this finds you well and enjoying the weekend. Today, I’m pleased to share with you the first of my quarterly essays - this time exploring the connections between Sally Rooney’s latest novel Beautiful World, Where Are You (spoiler warnings!) and the socialist writings of Victorian designer William Morris.

Beautiful World, Where Are You. A question without an inflection, the title of Sally Rooney’s latest novel reveals the despondency of a generation promised the world but stuck in unfulfilling jobs and impersonal bedsits. Even Alice — a bestselling novelist made in Rooney’s image — loses hope as her public face twists into ugly celebrity. Alice and her best friend Eileen are emotionally disconnected from the world and each other. They spend most of the novel communicating by email, where the outpouring of their cluttered, anxious heads signals something deeply wrong with society.

“I think of the twentieth century as one long question, and in the end we got the answer wrong,” writes Alice. The two women are preoccupied with the concept of ‘general systems collapse,’ the idea that cultures grow and progress, becoming too complex, before ultimately failing and breaking down. They are convinced this cycle has perpetuated throughout history; and that the current moment is one of acute political and environmental crisis. “We are standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something,” writes Alice.

Was it inevitable then, that global crises would intensify since the novel’s publication? Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has certainly exacerbated the West’s sense of imminent catastrophe. Commentators have linked Putin’s mindset to the ideas of Lev Gumilev, a twentieth century ethnographer who spent decades studying the cyclical rise and fall of Eurasian tribes. In 2021, Putin told media leaders that, “In nature as in society, there is a development, climax and decline. Russia has not yet attained its highest point. We are on the way.”1

For Gumilev, the most successful societies were not those, “that led the world in technology, wealth and reason. Instead, they had something that Machiavelli described as virtù or martial spirit.”⁠2 Gumilev called it ‘passionarnost’ — a nation’s inner energy or life force generating collective solidarity and empowering it to achieve greatness. Gumilev theorised that passionarnost or ‘passionism’ was the ability to override the instinct for self-preservation. In effect, creating a supercharged, self-sacrificing nationalism; country before citizen; a kind of radical collectivism.

By contrast, Rooney explores the reality of everyday individualism. Interrogating the relationship between the individual and the global (capitalism, micro-plastics, climate change) is fundamental to the novel’s internal structure and its narrative tension. Chapters oscillate between epistolary brooding about the big issues and third-person observation in which the women’s daily lives are consumed by mundane tasks and fractious romantic encounters. The novel asks how it is possible to exist and be happy — to work, love, have a family — while the world is falling apart. And whether the world can be saved while we do.

“What if the meaning of life on earth is not eternal progress toward some unspecified goal — the engineering and production of more and more powerful technologies, the development of more and more complex and abstruse cultural forms?” asks Eileen, “What if these things just rise and recede naturally, like tides, while the meaning of life remains the same always — just to live and be with other people.”

This idea is a balm, but hardly a new one. Rooney’s novels are shot through with class politics, and Alice’s idea of the twentieth century as, “one long question,” sends us back down a wormhole to the dawn of Marxism. By the mid-nineteenth century, the machines that gave birth to industrial capitalism were already falling out of favour with social reformers hoping to improve the lives of the working class. The roots of the Arts and Crafts movement lay in the idea that social and environmental conditions could be improved by returning to simpler methods of production. Factory manufacturing was seen as dehumanising, not only because working conditions could be appalling, but because repetitive tasks and the separation of designing from making was harmful to the labourer’s wellbeing. Eileen embodies William Morris’ idea of the, “brain-sick,”⁠3 her mundane work as a copy editor, stifling her creative desire to write a book. In his job at an Amazon-style packing factory, Felix is so hand-sick that he frequently returns home with deep paper cuts.

Often seen as the father of the Arts and Crafts movement, Morris pushed for a return to interior goods as decorative arts — goods produced using pre-industrial methods by men in constant creative contact with their work. He turned his gaze back to the Middle Ages; the age of craftsmen and community. “His early attachment to King Arthur had led him irresistibly to Karl Marx,” writes historian William Gaunt, “The Round Table was a preparation for Communism - indeed a sort of communism in itself - for [Morris] contrasted to his lecture audiences the knightly hall in which the workers might banquet together with the misery of their single rooms in mean tenements. The art of the fourteenth century was a plank of political revolution.”⁠4

The past was a magnet for Morris, as it is for Putin, and for Alice and Eileen too. The title of Rooney’s novel is shared with a line from Friedrich von Schiller’s poem The Gods of Greece, which looks longingly back to antiquity, as if to suggest our idea of the ‘beautiful world’ might be illusory, located only in an imagined past. “The nostalgic impulse is of course extremely powerful, and has recently been harnessed to great effect by reactionary and fascist political movements,” writes Eileen, “but I’m not convinced that this means the impulse is itself intrinsically fascistic. I think it makes sense that people are looking back wistfully to a time before the natural world started dying, before our shared cultural forms degraded into mass marketing and before our cities and towns became anonymous employment hubs.”

In 1894 Morris declared that, “Apart from the desire to create beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been, and is, hatred of modern civilisation.” He objected to waste and riches, to capitalism that kept the labouring classes in poverty, trapped in lives devoid of art and beauty. That Eileen and Alice echo these feelings almost 130 years later is a painful indictment of our social progress.

When Morris joined The Democratic Federation in 1883, he was surprised to discover its members saw no connection between socialism and art. For Morris art was, “the expression of man’s pleasure in labour⁠.”5 It should be the activity of the many and not the few. Art was the beauty of life. Morris took his cues from the art critic and philosopher, John Ruskin, who soared to fame with his defence of J.M.W. Turner, Modern Painters, in 1843. Over the course of his life, Ruskin’s attention turned to political economy and social reform. In 1865 he condemned capitalism in a powerful address titled Of Kings Treasuries:

“A nation cannot last as a money-making mob, it cannot with impunity - it cannot with existence - go on despising literature, despising science, despising art, despising nature, despising compassion, and concentrating its soul on Pence.”

Ruskin’s ire was focussed on the middle classes who propped up this system of exploitation by purchasing cheap, mass-produced, factory goods. This was, “Don’t let us mince the matter. I say, in plain Saxon, STEALING — taking from him the proper reward of his work, and putting it into our own pocket. You know well enough that the thing could not have been offered to you at that price, unless distress of some kind had forced the producer to part with it.”

Ruskin could be speaking directly to us. Transforming into post-industrial nations, Western countries merely shifted these problems overseas. To the injustices of low pay, dangerous working environments and repetitive tasks, we have now added a level of waste that is rapidly fuelling the climate crisis. None of this is lost on Alice and Eileen who embody the kind of guilt and shame Morris and Ruskin might rightly expect from us:

“I was in the local shop today, getting something to eat for lunch, when I suddenly had the strangest sensation - a spontaneous awareness of the unlikeliness of this life. I mean I thought of the rest of the human population — most of whom live in what you and I would consider abject poverty — who have never seen or entered such a shop. And this, this, is what all their work sustains! This lifestyle for people like us! All the various brands of soft drinks in plastic bottles and all the pre-packaged lunch deals and confectionary in sealed bags and store-baked pastries — this is it, the culmination of all the back-breaking work on coffee farms and sugar plantations. All for this! The convenience shop!”

Alice believes beauty ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union; with the failure of the Marxist ideal. In this moment history died — life became meaningless. Morris made a similar prediction in 1894: if allowed to continue, capitalism, “would turn history into inconsequent nonsense.” Life would have no beauty, and therefore, no substance. For both Rooney and Morris, beauty in abstract is intimately connected with aesthetic beauty; the physical beauty of things. Capitalism is both physically and existentially ugly. “I know we agree that civilisation is presently in its decadent declining phase, and that lurid ugliness is the predominant visual feature of modern life,” writes Eileen. She dates the loss of our instinct for beauty to 1976, “when plastics became the most widespread material in existence” — the moment everything we buy became disposable.

Rumoured to have been so disgusted by the goods on display at the Great Exhibition that he staggered away to be sick in the bushes, Morris famously said, “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” He believed hand crafted products had more integrity — more inherent beauty — than mass produced goods which reduced the role of the labourer to demeaning, repetitive tasks. But the tragic reality was that handcrafted goods were expensive, out-pricing working class people. The products made by Morris and Co existed outside the mainstream, in the homes of a small group of middle class consumers — a fact that risked writing off the entire Arts and Crafts movement as elitist. Morris’ unique brand of socialism was inherently flawed.

The rise of middle-class consumerism inevitably co-existed with the rise of envy, discontent and a neutralising rhetoric about the ‘happy’ poor. In 1884, the Western Mail reported on a charity funded event for the impoverished Welsh residents of London’s East End. “It has been aptly called the Joyless City,” the newspaper writes, “a city of docks, of factories, of lofty warehouses, of stifling workshops, and of densely packed streets - a city inhabited by more than a million persons who lead lives of toil unbroken by any respite, unrelieved by any scenes of brightness or of beauty.” John Henry Puleston, a banker and Member of Parliament, addressed the gathering of, “abject poor,” to remind them that:

“Happiness was within reach of all. Wealth did not produce it, nor did the want of wealth make its possession impossible. It was in the power of all to resist temptations, to try to make their homes pleasanter, and to make themselves and those around them happy.”

Eileen echoes this sentiment when she asks whether the meaning of life is simply, “just to live and be with other people.” But the novel places her in an interstitial space — neither middle nor working class. At a local bar, a group of friends discuss what ‘working class’ means today. “Yeah, working doesn’t make you working class,” says Eileen, “Spending half your pay cheque on rent, not owning any property, getting exploited by your boss, none of it makes you working class, right? So what does, having a certain accent is it?” Rooney pokes at hypocrisy, exposing the complexity of class boundaries, when an acquaintance responds rather sourly: “Do you think you can go driving round in your dad’s BMW, and then turn around and say you’re working class because you don’t get along with your boss? It’s not a fashion, you know. It’s an identity.” Eileen struggles in low paid, unfulfilling work, but there is no denying that she also belongs, nationally and globally, to an educated and privileged group.

For his part, Morris was convinced that he, “could never have been such a fool as to believe in the happy and ‘respectable’ poor.” Alice might be rich and miserable, but it is both naive and convenient to believe money doesn’t make life more comfortable; something that Eileen herself points out. What the novel reveals, is how our employment status affects both our interpersonal relationships and our perception of ourselves. It was John Berger who, in 1972, diagnosed envy as a capitalist function. He defined glamour — the purview of beautiful Hollywood celebrities, models and muses bathed in designer goods — as, “the happiness of being envied.” Incidentally, it is the beauty industry that, according to Eileen, “is responsible for some of the worst ugliness we see around us in our visual environment, and the worst, most false aesthetic ideal, which is the ideal of consumerism. All its various trends and looks ultimately signify the same principle — the principle of spending.” John Berger explains how glamour and advertising keep us all in thrall:

“Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion. The industrial society which has moved towards democracy and then stopped half way is the ideal society for generating such an emotion. The pursuit of individual happiness has been acknowledged as a human right. Yet the existing social conditions make the individual feel powerless. He lives in the contradiction between what he is and what he would like to be. Either he then becomes fully conscious of the contradiction and its causes, and so joins the political struggle for a democracy which entails, amongst other things, the overthrow of capitalism; or else he lives, continually subject to an envy which compounded with his sense of powerlessness, dissolves into recurrent daydreams.”⁠6

It is hardly surprising that the source of Alice’s malcontent is her celebrity. She has become the very thing she hates: a symbol of capitalist culture.

“If serious political action is still possible, which I think at this point is an open question, maybe it won’t involve people like us — in fact I think it most certainly won’t,” writes Eileen, “And frankly if we have to go to our deaths for the greater good of humankind, I will accept that like a lamb, because I haven’t deserved this life or even enjoyed it.” In her lowest moments, Eileen accepts the injustice of her privilege and the implausibility of a socialist revolution; a revolution that, she believes, would return humanity to a happy state of equality. Keenly aware that her daily life is politically inert, she writes:

“It seems vulgar, decadent, even epistemically violent, to invest energy in the trivialities of sex and friendship when human civilisation is facing collapse. But at the same time, that is what I do every day… Maybe we’re just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn’t it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine?”

Predictably, the tension between global and personal resolves with the discovery that romantic love is the source of life’s elusive beauty; a state of being that makes Alice and Eileen invulnerable to the world’s ugliness. Bringing with it a sense of financial security, monogamy also fosters creativity and art. Eileen begins writing her book. In the words of Morris, “any one who professes to think that the question of art and cultivation must go before that of the knife and fork… does not understand what art means, or how that its roots must have a soil of a thriving and unanxious life.” The beautiful world of beautiful things requires happiness, safety and fulfilment.

Rooney is rarely sentimental and the conflicts between today’s choices and tomorrow’s reality linger heavy in her final pages. When Eileen chooses to have a child and resists, “mutilating my real life as a gesture of submission to an imagined future,” that includes the effects of climate change, she knows, “that in a thin rationalist way… what I’m saying doesn’t make any sense.” She has accepted the idea of ‘general systems collapse’ — that civilisation as we know it will inevitably end in political or environmental catastrophe — but, “women all over the world will go on having babies,” and the meaning of life, “just to live and be with other people,” will remain. Given the acute status of the climate emergency, her view is perhaps naive; an admission of our wider failure and impotence. Yet, it represents the kind of individualism that prompted William Morris’ own retreat from active socialism.

In his Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy, William Gaunt writes that Morris, “reasoned that the failure to overturn the system was due to the fact that there were not enough true Socialists.” The disappointment of the Bloody Sunday protests in 1887, soured him. The working classes did not fight hard enough, instead putting their everyday needs, their families and financial security, first:

“[They] did not know and would not or could not learn what Socialism meant… The British workman, moreover, was inert… When it came to the point, the worker had no stomach for resistance; his declared hatred of the upper classes was mere wind; the slightest exertion of his master’s authority put an end to his bluster and sent him home with his tail between his legs. This cowardice was not only due to oppression. It was due to an absence of belief. At heart they approved of the system. They loved to mouth vain words about ‘bloodsuckers’, ‘grinding the faces of the poor’, but, given half a chance, they would gladly join this same bloodsucking group… Sceptical and cold-blooded, they were middle-class at heart.”

Morris’ solution was to educate the working people; to create socialists, “it was a longer process, but it was, he thought, surer.” The mirage of social mobility continues to enchant us. It has been claimed working people don’t vote for higher-rate tax increases because, on the whole, they perceive they are closer to the middle income bracket than they really are.⁠7 To increase higher-rate taxes would make working people a victim of their own future success. On a micro level, we are all civilisations seeking the climax of our ambition.

If individualism is responsible for the lack of a Marxist revolution in the West, it is with collective solidarity and ‘passionism’ that President Putin now seeks to grab nostalgic territory in order to reach Russia’s, “highest point.” Six months on from the novel’s publication, Eileen’s belief that there is no meaning in the, “production of more and more powerful technologies, the development of more and more complex and abstruse cultural forms,” feels like a call for peace. Just as she predicted, we are drawn to reports of women giving birth in hospital basements as war rages around them; the hope of new lives tempered by fears about the world they will inherit.⁠8

*Sally Rooney’s ‘Beautiful World Where Are You’ is now available in hardback. The paperback is due to be released on 7 June 2022.

Thank you for reading. Please get in touch and share your thoughts in the comments, I’d love to hear from you.

Found Material

Discussion about this post