ACL 3016 |
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Lecture 2 by Ian Syson |
| Earlier we looked at the marginalisation of work in literary novels and poetry. This session I want to start on those texts that do represent work If manual work is excluded from literary history, then the reality of work is also often absent in works of general history. In the mid 1930s Bertolt Brecht wrote the poem "Questions from a Worker Who Reads" or "A Worker's Questions while Reading" depending on your translation. And there are many written and oral texts throughout history that have been premised upon the implicit complaint in Brecht's poem. Of the many, one stands out as exemplary. Robert Tressell's Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (published in 1914). The workers are represented as holding power at the point of economic production — they are the ones who are responsible for animating the Cave�the house they are repairing. In the opening page we can observe a contrast between the previously unoccupied and inert house described in the first paragraph and the activity of the workers in the second.
Images of decay and dilapidation come to be replaced by images of renewal at the hands of the workers. Metaphoric possibilities? The opening page signals the book's difference from most of the modernist texts that are its contemporaries. The book does not let up either. It maintains this focus on work. Its plot and character development are almost always directly related to this work. I could go on giving you names of and examples from the volumes of poetry, short stories, autobiographies, plays and novels that have this emphasis. It would give you a chance to see the variety and extent of working class writing and it would certainly drive home my point. But it would not even begin to account for the reasons why these works endure what EP Thompson has called the "condescension of posterity". Arthur, a marginal character in Mena Calthorpe's The Plain of Ala (1989), is an ironic symbolisation of this condescension towards work and workers:
One of our main tasks in this subject is to fight the "condescension of posterity" and fill in the details of Arthur's role in history. What else does w c lit cover? Though it is an important factor, their representation of work is only one of the reasons why working class texts are marginalised. In fact there are more important or obvious reasons.
Often these kinds of writing don't get past first base. And even when published they have found structures militating against their wide dissemination. outright censorship
indirect censorship
Perhaps the main factor here is in the development of the institution of Literature and the kind of aesthetic demands that have been placed upon literary texts before they are allowed entry into the canon. Whether it be in
certain codes of correctness (on levels of form and content) have been used in judging valuable literature and in determining what will be taught. Good literature, for example, shall not be didactic or propagandist. A novel about a strike will only be acceptable if it presents a balanced view of the struggle and is not one-sided in favour of the workers. Good literature will be pluralist. Good literature will deal with universal and timeless themes and not specific issues. A poem about abortion will be acceptable if it also ponders of the deep impenetrable mysteries of life and death but not if it presents a pro-abortion stance that argues that abortion is an issue that centrally affects working class women. Good literature will obey structural and formal laws and tend not to be episodic, fragmentary or unbalanced in construction. And when it does have apparent structural or stylistic flaws, such as those that F.R. Leavis points out in relation to Heart of Darkness -- in that Conrad's language lacks precision -- then critics like O'Prey will argue that these flaws actually advance the theme (page 19). This might sound well and good, but
What is class? While I have been elaborating a kind of general argument about marginal literature, class has not been dealt with centrally. The analysis just made perhaps provides the basis for a general oppositional or marginal poetics but without bringing the issue of class to centre stage. Perhaps marginality is sometimes more an issue of representation than it is of actual demographics. It goes without saying that women are hardly a numerically marginal social group. Australians from non-English-speaking backgrounds make up a significant proportion of Australia's population that is underestimated by the media. The notion of marginality comes in when we look at the extent to which and the ways in which these groups are represented in the dominant mainstream media. Sport. Similarly the working class might be seen to be a dominant group that is not represented in mainstream media as well as it might be. However, I want to make an argument that the Australian working class is, in the 2000s, a minority grouping in demographic terms as well. This argument does not say that there are few workers left in some kind of world of automatic technology -- indeed as a percentage of the population there are more people than ever either working for wages or in the market for such work -- but is one that must pay very close attention to the terms of class. negative In answering the question "what is class?" it is important to be clear what class is not.
positive Class defined positively First I want to outline some classical Marxist ideas about class and class structure. More positive definitions of class are derived from economic relations of production. Visit glossary of Marxist terms. Because of the specific economic relations that have dominated throughout most of the world since the industrial revolution, the most determinate set of antagonistic human social and political relations has been and is still between those who labour and those who benefit most from that labour. Those who labour with tools and raw or secondary materials not their own in order to produce valuable goods (and their direct dependents) make up the proletariat. For this labour they receive wages much lower than the exchange value of their products. The bourgeoisie is that class which own the means of production and the raw and secondary material and which extracts the surplus value from the labour of the proletariat. In other words the income of the bourgeoisie is directly derived from their ownership of private property. The important point to come out of this is the notion of the proletariat. It is a term which describes, objectively, a group of people situated in an economic relation. It says nothing concrete about the way they think or feel, how they vote or whether they like sport and if they do what kind of sport they might like. In Marxism one term used to describe this grouping is also the concept of class-in-itself. Now given that Marxists believe that capitalism is an unjust system and that economic causes are the primary determinants of any society, then what needs to be changed are the economic relations of production. Moreover, given that the current structure serves the interests of the bourgeoisie, then the only group of people who can change society is the proletariat. In The Manifesto of the Communist Party Marx and Engels outline their program for revolutionary change:
What is crucial is the way that Marx and Engels do not see the proletariat as a class in the same way as they construct the working class. It is rather, a grouping of people which can become a class--a class-for-itself. With this idea in mind E.P. Thompson wrote The Making of the English Working Class. Download the Preface (pdf 357k). And it is in this sense that I would like you to try and understand the term working class. Not as a static grouping of people out there. But, rather, as something always in formation and never quite reaching 'full' formation. As Thompson says,
More than this, the notion of class entails the notion of historical relationship. Like any other relationship, it is a fluency which evades analysis if we stop it dead at any given moment and anatomize its structure. It follows that if the proletariat can start acting in its own interests and become the working class then the working class can stop acting in its own interests and become the proletariat once more. If the working class can be made then it can also be unmade, and remade. And in contemporary Australia the working class is probably as unmade as it has been in any other period in one hundred and fifty years. What is working class writing? This question can be broken down into three further questions:
1. By By necessity, this form of writing is a recent phenomenon. While work and workers have been around since the beginnings of society, the working class has only existed as a social formation since eC19. And its existence as an extensively literate social grouping is even more recent. Nevertheless, writers of proletarian origins have produced an extensive body of writing. Cf Martha Vicinus's Industrial Muse. She elaborates an extensive C19 British tradition of working class literary and cultural production. In the C20 writing by working class people has proliferated around the world. I mentioned earlier The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists -- a bleak, depressing but curiously comic novel of vicious class exploitation in Edwardian England. Its powerful message has ensured its continued transmission world wide. It has even been translated into Swahili. The mode of transmission is what's is essential here -- enables us to think about alternative modes of production as well Proletarian writers movements around the world. esp US. in Australia
In Australia there have been several authors of note whose origins could be described as working class. Charles Harpur, John Shaw Nielson, Jean Devanny, Jack Beasley, Frank Hardy, Merv Lilley, Herb Wharton, Ruby Langford Ginibi, Pearlie MacNeill, Jennifer Maiden, PiO, Christos Tsiolkas. Contemporary poets like Coral Hull and Sara Attfield also fit the bill. That they rose to any sort of prominence is something of note given the extent to which working class people are generally excluded from those structures and cultures which enable the high level of literacy necessary for producing manuscripts of mainstream publication quality. And this is the value of those works written by working class people whether a published mainstream novel or an article or poem in a community newsletter; each is a document of personal courage and struggle. But if we limit our definition of working class writing to this category we exclude too many powerful and valuable works from our view. A slightly absurd Illustration : We might ask "Do we limit detective fiction to those works written by detectives?" The point is that interesting and insightful stories about detectives get told by people who aren't detectives. Similarly. Indeed, many detectives would possibly be poor tellers of detective tales. So, without losing sight of the value of writing by working class people we need to try to expand our definition. 2. About Before the development of high levels of working class literacy in Europe and Australia, there were many examples of works written about the working class. Peter J. Keating's The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction. Perhaps the first important British example is Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton. (1848) Other works like Emile Zola's Germinal. Also Dickens, Gissing Middle class social commentators observe a rising social force and attempt to deal with it creatively. . . In Australia middle class writers like Francis Adams, William Lane, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Lesbia Harford, Kylie Tennant, Dymphna Cusack all wrote about class and class struggle. In the 1950s and 60s Dorothy Hewett, Mena Calthorpe and Betty Collins (who either proletarianized themselves or became proletarianized through circumstance or marriage) wrote important novels about the Australian working class. More recently Clare Mendes has written Drift Street a novel which has been criticised for exploring the negative aspects of working class life without really sympathising with or understanding the culture from the inside. And this is the limitation of this definition. It allows, in an undifferentiated fashion, any work which claims as its focus what it constructs as the working class and working class life. It also says little about the audience of such writing. Are we to take as working class writing that which is written about the working class intended for consumption by a middle class readership? While many writings about the working class are valuable works, many more are filled with stereotypical parodies of working class life, culture and world views. The work of contemporary writer, Edward Berridge comes very close to fitting this description. Parts of Patrick White's writing seem to be ignorant parodies of working class life as well. But I don't think White's works were addressed to working class people either. 3. For Perhaps then we need to shift our definitions to those works addressed to the working class. Those which claim to know, support and develop working class interests. Would we then include Mills & Boon novels which obtain a high level of working class readership? Would we include something as extreme as Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf which after all was addressed primarily to German workers? Without getting into notions of resistant reading, which are vitally important, works such as these are not usefully described as working class writing. Another illustration : If for example we surveyed the reading interests of Australian detectives and found that most of them read Westerns or romance novels or car magazines we would no doubt be remiss in calling that material Australian detective writing. But let's say we found that many of the detectives surveyed were reading a particular genre or form of writing because it spoke to their immediate experiences, gave them feelings of support and encouragement, elaborated and clarified their community relations and internal divisions, raised collective fears and hopes, then we might usefully describe the material as detective writing. Well perhaps we might transfer this sense over to working class writing. It is not merely writing which is marketed at and then read by the working class. It is also material which goes one step further. Not only does it get to the class: it also plays an active and positive role in class formation. Another way of saying this is that working class writing is more than just what is read. It is also ways of reading, what gets done with the writing. It is not just textual effects in certain novels or poems; it also refers, to those literary ways of acting in the world that positively affirm the working class and its various internal and external struggles. |