Cwmrhydyceirw and the Art of Resistant Otherness: The Everyday Spaces and Consumer Practices in Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim

When Kingsley Amis met the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko at Cambridge in 1962, he was told that Lucky Jim "had been well-received in Moscow" and that "in many countries . . . there is a conflict between the bureaucrats, the Philistines . . . ,¹ and the people who want to live ordinary private lives" (1954: 236).² Although Amis claims that Yevtushenko was simply "talking politics," the Russian poet's generalization is also certainly applicable to Amis's best-known novel. Indeed, to amend Yevtushenko's remark slightly, Lucky Jim appears to be concerned largely with the interaction between the qualities of the Philistine bureaucrats of Jim Dixon's college —the Welches and Barclays, for example —and aspects of Jim's own private space. However, Yevtushenko's observation on an important aspect of Lucky Jim anticipates a theoretical observation made by Michel de Certeau in his study, The Practice of Everyday Life. Building upon Michel Foucault's influential work on power-dominated institutional spaces and the inevitable effacement of the individual by authorities policing almost all spaces, de Certeau maintains that the resistant relationship between individuals and their societies (and systems of power) can often be glimpsed through the consumer practices of the private individual and the spaces in which these practices occur (1984: xiv-xv). If Jim Dixon were to be viewed as such a private individual, living inside yet simultaneously resisting the hegemonic structure of the university where he is employed, it soon becomes apparent that Amis's novel effectively stages a subverting of authority through a number of unique techniques, ultimately inviting the reader to resist as well. In fact, de Certeau's study of empowering social practices can become a handbook for coding political, social, and institutional spaces.³

Like some of de Certeau's everyman consumers, Jim Dixon may be referred to as an immigrant, a person who does not belong to the space he occupies (1984: xiv-xv). Richard Fallis has rightly pointed out his "fear of an alien environment, the university which is as foreign to him as Earth to a Martian" (1977: 67). Not an extraterrestrial but merely a transplanted northwest Brit and former Army enlisted man, Dixon clearly exists in a spatial zone that is unnatural to him and is both coupled and complicated by a specific temporal zone —a two-year conditional contract (or probation) which succinctly frames Jim's finite existence or eccentric space in an academic space. From a historical perspective, a number of critics have pointed out that Dixon is a typical product of the post-war British educational system —a system which sought "to include more working-class students, intending them to assimilate, and be assimilated by, the culture of the higher classes by whom the universities had been dominated" (Gardner 1981: 24).⁴ Thus, Jim functions as both a private alien immigrant and a fictional representation of a new historical type. Yet, in both respects he functions as a figure of resistant alienated otherness because of the hostile spatial and temporal zones which Amis has constructed for him.

Before analyzing Jim as a consumer and establishing the lesser spaces that he inhabits in the novel as a resistant character, he must first be foregrounded (through his literal actions) as a subjected, alien, immigrant figure of otherness. In listing Jim's non-conventional traits Dale Salwak has classified him as "a jack-of-all-trades, a skilled manipulator, and adept deceiver, [and] a fashioner of disguises" (1992: 64) —what Fallis has argued is a version of the classical "trickster" figure: "he relishes the multiple roles he can play on the telephone and the masks into which he can contort his face" (1977: 69). The nature of Jim's acting —the myriad appearances he assumes and actions he performs —is uniquely his own. For instance, he is the only figure in the novel to wound a professor of English by kicking a rock; at the Welches' artsy party, he is the only guest who is unable to read music; and he is the sole...