| ACL 3016 Working Class Literature Semester 4 2010 Footscray |
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3.1 by Ian Syson |
The notion of aesthetics (the science of the beautiful) is one that has held my interest for a while now. When I was an undergraduate I was often mystified by the kinds of aesthetic judgements made by my teachers and other students. It was also apparent that particular kinds of stories seemed to be the ones determined most beautiful. Stories about class, especially the politics of class, seemed not to be beautiful. Choice to give up lit or work out a way to assert my own tastes as valid. During my phd I reflected:
Ultimately this was a specific institutional manifestation of the general bias implicit in the privileging of the works of Coleridge and Wordsworth and other Romantic poets over the largely anonymous working class ballads and broadsides published in the early nineteenth century. It cannot automatically be assumed that this implicit aesthetic hierarchy is somehow objective and therefore value-free. I'll be using a couple of terms today that need some explanation.
As Terry Eagleton and Tony Bennett have both argued, aesthetics is itself a component of bourgeois ideology that privileges certain formal and structural characteristics of literary works under the guise of identifying the beautiful. Regenia Gagnier has a very concrete example of this ideology in practice.
Bennett goes so far as to suggests that aesthetics is a waste of time. It is indeed 'Really Useless Knowledge' for those who are interested in literature for its political or sociological aspects. In bourgeois aesthetics the notion of objective artistic distance is usually privileged over what is constructed as subjective ideological commitment; as a result, works identified as propagandist or didactic are rejected in favour of those works that supposedly free themselves from politics. But, close inspections of literary works that are constructed as being outside politics can always reveal particular political and ideological positions, implied or explicit, within them. The works of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Wordsworth, Shelley and many other canonised writers are thoroughly political in their attention to, and symbolisation of, contemporary social movements and issues. In The Merchant of Venice, for example, Shakespeare is not merely writing an entertaining play about a greedy merchant who also happens to be a Jew, he is also intervening in contemporary debates about the supposed characteristics of Jewish people and making definite and ideologically loaded statements about them. As I suggested, i t is not so much that bourgeois aesthetics rejects politics; rather, it rejects specific kinds of politics. Politics like these:
Why is this anonymous broadside -- written in response to the Peterloo Massacre and venting the working class's anger about that event -- considered to have less literary significance than any number of Wordsworth's preference for the "Humble and rustic life" ( William Wordsworth: Selected Poetry 677) over the industrialised city or Keats's privileging of timelessness and stasis in "Ode: On a Grecian Urn" � both underpinned by definite ideological positions. What is being valued is their avoidance of particular kinds of politics � a particularly Romantic looking away from forms of contemporary political struggle.
There is of course another face to romanticism:
Moving to the C20 century, similar questions might be asked about the privileging of particular texts and the marginalisation of others. Why did it take until 1991 for The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, arguably one of the most significant literary works published in English in the C20 century, to be formally analysed at the University of Queensland? (Why has it never been set as a text at this institution, VU?) Again, there existed an adequate vehicle for this working class novel, Twentieth Century Literature, which contained the predictable line-up of
The Course's preoccupation with Modernism cannot be offered as a good reason for particular exclusions, because within this justification there is no rational reply to the implicit argument in the demand, "Well, do something else!" The situation at the University of Queensland is typical of academic literary studies' consistent tendency to focus on those twentieth century works that are labelled as Modernist � those that are read by mainstream critics as dealing centrally with moral and epistemological crises of usually middle-class individuals. But why are the various individual concerns of James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom or T.S. Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock, or Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, deemed to be more universally significant than those of Tressell's Frank Owen? Are the difficulties Owen experiences in cutting through an entrenched ideology, that leaves his fellow-workers announcing with vigorous certainty that many of the material and cultural products of capitalism are "not for the likes of us," really less significant than the concerns of Prufrock who ponders to himself:
It goes without saying that Tressell's philanthropists are thinking more about bread than peaches and strolls on the beach, and more about the ragged state of their trousers � especially around the backside � than whether or not they should modify their dress in order to conform to present fashion. Finished in 1911, the year of Tressell's death, "Prufrock" is, like The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, a response to the social degradation of pre-war Edwardian capitalism, and the kinds of social and cultural malaise that both Eliot and Tressell observed. But Eliot's is an observation and response that is very much limited by the narrative persona he uses � that of an alienated middle class individual overwhelmed by his own inability to come to terms with the world in which he lives. Malignant and overwhelming images dominate the poem resulting in the final image of humanity drowning. Yet academic criticism has constructed the works of Eliot and other Modernists as the best, and most important, if not the only, imaginative reactions to the various social and moral questions that arose in the early twentieth century. As a reading of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists quickly shows, there were literary responses to this period that were framed quite differently. ftp://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/gutenberg/etext03/rggdp10.txt Again the question of aesthetics needs to be raised. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists has been devalued, by those within traditional criticism who have actually read it, for a number of ostensibly aesthetic reasons � one of which is its `propagandist' elements. In 1956, the year after the publication of the unabridged text, Frank Swinnerton made the claim that, for all its relevance in the early part of this century, the book was now a little out of date. He suggests that in contemporary Britain:
Here Swinnerton is privileging human details over the propagandist harangues. He also mobilises a concept of timelessness, or universal historical application � also typical of bourgeois aesthetics � by reducing the novel to a period piece. I want to argue against this reading, primarily because the book's importance as a "transcript of human details" is inextricably bound up with the socialist harangues that are the products of those very details. Moreover, as discussed earlier, it is quite problematic to assume that the kinds of social problems prevalent in the early 1900s have disappeared.
The novel has also been ignored for other aesthetic reasons. One of the effects of the dominance of bourgeois aesthetics in academic criticism has been the construction of a canon whose works focus very much on one individual and (usually) his (occasionally) her existential dilemmas. Again Prufrock comes to mind. This aesthetic is derived from the individualist humanism that emerged at the onset of mercantile capitalism in Elizabethan England. The epic mode (narratives like Swift's Gulliver's Travels and DeFoe's Robinson Crusoe that represent one individual's journey across countries or continents) parallels the journeys of the sea traders like Drake and Raleigh. The tragic mode (narratives of one individual's moral and physiological demise) was very much a result of the ideological shift from the feudal absolutist world-view that saw all happenings on Earth as being controlled by God to a new humanist world view that was coming to see the individual as the basis of social theory and practice. This literary obsession with the individual subject evident in both modes is still with us, largely because it is a central aspect of the dominant (literary) ideology of the capitalist period. It is evidence of the dominance of this aesthetic mode that even a sympathetic critic like Alan Sillitoe who wants to promote The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists nonetheless feels impelled to judge it in terms of tragedy. He writes in the Introduction to the most recent edition:
In opposition to Sillitoe I argue that Owen neither succumbs to the jungle nor does he try to get out of it. In fact these issues are irrelevant. The power of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists lies in its representation of all the workers' lives as totally interconnected. The activities and views of Rushton, Misery, Crass, Easton, Owen, Philpot, Barrington, are meshed to create the very fabric of the novel. No one character can be extracted from the novel and analysed in isolation without breaking this fabric. Sillitoe's reading can only be made from a position that presumes the first task in criticising a novel lies in the identification of a central character who is of epic or tragic significance. If you remember I made a similar argument about Bobbin Up. As Klaus points out in The Socialist Novel in Britain: Towards the Recovery of a Tradition (1982):
A further aspect to the limitations of the tragic aesthetic lies in the editing of the first edition. Whatever can be made of the present edition's optimistic ending � it could, for example, be argued that its contrived nature renders it unconvincing � it remains an optimistic ending in which socialism is represented as plausible and inevitable. The pre-1955 editions had no such ending. They ended with "Owen, the consumptive hero, scheming suicide," (Swinnerton 26) a thoroughly pessimistic conclusion. This raises questions about the way in which the needs of tragedy might be in direct opposition to the representation of the working class and its political interests. Nevertheless, Sillitoe's point about the jungle raises the plausible suggestion that The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is merely one more representation of the working class as a dull and brutish people. As Raymond Williams points out,
At times the representation of the workers comes to resemble those in Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton and Zola's Germinal in its portrayal of the working class as passive objects of history, as ineffectual victims of a social system. But there are crucial differences. Germinal and Mary Barton Perhaps the least problematic thing that can be said about Germinal and Mary Barton is that they are written by Emile Zola and Elizabeth Gaskell, non-working class writers, about the struggles of the working people in a French mining village and an English factory town. Gaskell and Zola can both be read as constructing history as something that occurs independently of the people who really make it. Allan Gardiner has argued that
There is also a special significance in Zola's consistent use of beast-like imagery in his descriptions of the mine which holds the suggestion that the mine will continue to work irrespective of the miners' labour � though not without their bodies. This might seem to place both squarely in the tradition of treating the working class as an object of history. Indeed, Zola's writing is in many senses deliberately objective. Zola has been described as the high priest of naturalism, a literary movement founded on scientistic notions of objectivity
His intent was to focus with an air of scientific objectivity on the lives of the miners of Montsou. Left at this we could merely place Zola in the objective tradition. Yet I think also Zola was committed to the struggles and aspirations of the people he represented. Some recognition of this was made by the delegation of French miners who attended his funeral to pay homage. Germinal, perhaps because of its intensity, breadth and power of its detail, is a novel through which the awful and unjust conditions of working life speak irrespective of Zola's intentions or sympathies. But the question remains: do working people speak through Germinal? And this is the more difficult question. John Berger makes the damning claim that
For Berger, Zola could never hope to give voice to the working class because of the cultural, economic and epistemological gulf that exists between him and the working class. And perhaps he has a point. Working class anger and oppression are represented excessively and animalistically � which is also a characteristic of naturalism.
The two bourgeois children look at the rampaging villagers from a barn. They comments on how the scene before them has a kind of awesome beauty �The lovely horror of it all'. The bourgeois see the beauty but load it up with negative connotations. They also see the beauty from afar. It's an aesthetics of distance and disconnection. Like when Yeats responded to the Easter Uprising by suggesting that a �terrible beauty had been born', the upper class observer teeters on the edge of fascination and revulsion unable to comprehend collective political action as anything but a strange transgression of appropriate human behaviour � one which is necessary to figure in quirky aesthetic terms.
This can be contrasted powerfully with the suggestion in Betty Collins' strike novel, The Copper Crucible where the narrator lets us know that the children of the workers have realised that whatever else it might be, �a strike was a grand and beautiful thing�. The decision to go out is a moment of declaration of working class solidarity and community which even if fleeting is recognised by all present as a moment of beauty. The MUA dispute was not represented this way in the media. But there was beauty there: community arts project. From within the wc community the beauty is seen as a positive. Not only is it seen as a positive it is also a felt thing; something that comes from proximity and connection From this we can see that it is not true to say that aesthetics necessarily militate against working class writing. Rather a particular kind of aesthetics (applied from a distance and which fails to appreciate working class cultural forms on their own terms) can't do anything but reject working class writing. Some points on Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton in relation to working class literature. I don't want to formulate any concrete proposals at this stage because I think that this kind of discussion is better argued out in the tutorials. What I can do, however, is raise some suggestive points. As suggested earlier: it seems to belong in the tradition of treating the working class as an object of history. As Mary Eagleton argues,
While Eagleton raises the important issue of the largely middle class readership that Gaskell was addressing there is an implication in her argument that middle class writers can't write about the working class successfully. I think the novel is better criticised for the way in which it subscribes to middle class fears of violent revolution. Its year of publication, 1848, situates Mary Barton in a period of revolutionary activity in Europe and at the end of Chartism in England. Gaskell's sympathetic attempt to represent the objective conditions of working class life is compromised by her inability to construct a similarly sympathetic picture of class-conscious workers. In other words she is unable to construct the working class as subject of history without, as Raymond Williams points out, also dramatising, through the character of John Barton, the fear of working class violence that "was widespread among the middle and upper classes at that time". There is another aspect of Gaskell's inability to represent working class subjectivity in her use of excerpts from various poems and songs throughout the novel. In the initial chapters these excerpts are drawn from popular and worker songs of the kind that Vicinus focuses on, but gradually these excerpts come largely to be drawn from the works of Keats, Coleridge, Southey, Shakespeare, Wordsworth and other canonised poets--perhaps this represents a formulation of her desire for harmony between the classes. Nor does Gaskell use anything like the contemporary political poems that can be found on today's lecture handout. Even when drawing from the tradition of literature by the working class she baulks at the kinds of songs and poems that represent a class-conscious position. Ultimately, this would be to compromise her political manifesto which I think is expounded by Mr Carson senior on page 460 of the Penguin text:
If this brief analysis suggests that Mary Barton be firmly placed in the tradition of literature written about the working class I would like to finish with a quotation from K.C. Shrivastava that asks us to think about the certainty of this placement.
Any novel that can raise this kind of reaction from the ruling class at least deserves to be considered as an interventionist working class text. Nevertheless, I think we have to wait until Robert Tressell for the first truly working class novel.
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