Presentation topic
The role of the strike novel in working class politics

Key Terms
Strike, Lockout, Agit-prop

• Emile Zola, Germinal T
• Dorothy Hewett, Bobbin Up T
• Jean Devanny, Sugar Heaven PT
• Betty Collins, The Copper Crucible PT

Defininitions:

Strike:
an action in which workers deliberately and collectively withdraw their labour in order to protest about conditions, wages or more general industrial and even political issues.

Lockout:
an action taken by an employer in which workers are prevented from going to work � usually as a result of industrial dispute.

The big Mount Isa dispute (upon which aspects of the Copper Crucible are based) was in fact a lockout. There had been a long dispute over bonuses which was brought to a head one night shift when the hot water had failed in the showers. The miners decided enough was enough and they en masse worked to rule.

Yet the media and historians referred to it as a strike and that mistake is also usually made today.

Two ways to take that:

1. Blaming the workers for the disruption
2. Giving the workers a sense of agency

Strike novel does sound so much more active and powerful than a lockout novel.

I started this unit with a discussion criticising the absence of labour in the canon of great works of English literature.

Now come full circle to a point where I will be praising the deliberate withdrawal of labour from a work of literature.

It would seem from my reading that novels about strikes and lockouts are generally those works in which work is best and most thoroughly represented.

Not only do their authors generally see the faithful rendition of labour as being crucial to their writing and their credibility as working class writers, there is also a simple dramatic and aesthetic need to represent work fully.

The cessation of work can't be represented well if the actuality of this work has not been represented well.

Each of the strike novels we have looked at in the subject can be characterised in this way.

Germinal and The Copper Crucible are mining novels both of which go into great detail describing the actions and conditions of work. Bobbin Up takes us into the factory and Sugar Heaven takes us into the cane field.

Each man took his place at the head of a row of cane; the left hand grasped the thick stick; the broad-bladed short-handled knife was wielded to sever the stalk on a level with the ground. No time for waste motion. Another stroke with the knife severed the top; two downward motions cleaned the trash from the stalk. The fifth motion heaped the sticks. Bundles of wine-red Badilla were bedded down in rows on the green trash, to be loaded in due time onto the trucks sent out by the cane inspector from the mill. (41)

What happens in each of these books where tools are downed? I mean what happens in a literary or artistic sense.

• Narrative tension is intensified when the mill, mine, factory, workshop goes silent.
• when that which gives proletarian workers their income and in many cases their reason for being is abruptly halted forces an almost existential problem for the writer � what do the workers do now is not far from what do I [as writer] do now?
• a void is created in which the structure of class struggle can be examined minutely and a stage is developed on which its drama can be played out.
• A new (perhaps utopian) kind of society needs to be imagined and realised on the page.
• In a sense a whole new blank slate is presented for an author to create something new. In the case of Bobbin Up we as readers are left with our own canvas upon which we can imagine the outcome.

Possible structural characteristics of a strike novel.

• Well-developed industrial scene in which a number of characters are also developed
• An undercurrent or discontent around a general historical or specific local issue (or both) around which the workers and bosses are gradually being drawn into dispute
• A flashpoint or trigger which escalates the dispute to the withdrawal of labour stage
• The strike begins and the warring parties organise their campaigns
• The issue of scabbing emerges (scabs imported or converted)
• Escalation of violence in which someone is killed, maimed or assaulted which provides a spur to reconciliation
• Reconciliation in which the workers basically lose out in terms of wages and condition but win insofar as they discover new things about their own power and their capacities for struggle and organisation.

Incidentally This structure bears some relation to the mining novel which as a rule contains a strike of some kind but which exceeds the strike novel.

• Characters are introduced via their work relations
• There is a disaster that affects the community in a general sense
• Industrial trouble brews (usually leading to a strike narrative)
• Within this context the sensitive and artistic son (or daughter) of a central character reaches working age but has to �go down pit' and is invariably killed in an accident
• Narrative then takes the course of the strike novel.
• Ending depends on the historical context. Mining narratives (especially films) of recent years involve closures.

Though I probably need to put at least one rider on all of this. Not all proletarian work is performed in the factory etc, at least half of it is performed in the home. When the industrial work stops, the domestic labour only intensifies. The strike novel, to be convincing in this regard, needs to shift into the domestic realm.

This might well have some bearing on the fact that many strike/industrial novels in Australia have been written by women.

The beauty of a book like The Copper Crucible for example is that it is as strong on the domestic sphere as it is on the public.