As I wrote in my previous post, working-class and proletarian writing are long-term interests of mine; most recently reflected by two publications. Working-Class Writing: Theory and Practice (2018), edited by Ben Clarke and myself, includes my chapter ‘Respectability, Nostalgia and Shame in Contemporary English Working-Class Fiction’ which examines gendered working-class responses ranging from shame to nostalgia for what Eric Hobsbawm called ‘the common proletarian way of life’ in novels by Pat Barker, Gordon Burn and Zadie Smith. I follow Stuart Hall’s suggestion that Thatcherism was a form of nostalgia for the bygone proletarian style of life displayed by those who were moving out of the working class and relate this to Raphael Samuel’s argument that a right-wing version of history from below contested the social changes instituted by 1960s liberalising legislation (on abortion, divorce, homosexuality, anti-racial discrimination) by privileging ‘ordinary people’. I link shame – as theorised by Helen Merrell Lynd in the 1950s and subsequently discussed by literature academics such as Pamela Fox and Rita Felski – to the notion of respectability – as discussed by Lynsey Hanley, Beverley Skeggs, and Carolyn Steedman – in order to suggest the mechanics of a transcultural movement beyond class consciousness (and the limiting concepts of ordinariness and nostalgia). I aim to expand this conceptual framework as part of my approach to analysing the relationship between self-reflexive narrative and class consciousness in the context of social change. In particular, I am interested in the relationship between narrative self-understanding and what is being called ‘National Populism’ and how this relationship has played out in the politics surrounding ‘Brexit’.
I have also recently written a book on working-class and proletarian writing, The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question (2017), which, in the words of a recent reviewer, redefines the category of proletarian writing ‘to refer to a particular way of figuring intersubjective relations of class and gender constituted by fantasy and desire, relations that by their nature overrun stable identities and point forward to the future transformation of social relations’. In this respect, proletarian writing has affinities with modernism but rather than limiting itself to individualist responses, incorporates those individualist responses into collective practice as proletarian modernism. The democratisation of self-reflexive literary practice by Mass Observation is a particular incidence of the proletarian-modernist project.
The above two paragraphs summarise my position coming into this project of ‘Understanding Social Change through Autobiographical Narrative’, but having gained the funding for this, I looked back to my first ever academic publication – a co-written (with William De Genaro) entry on ‘Working-Class Writings’ for the Encyclopedia of Life Writing (Ed, Margaretta Jolly, 2001) – and was surprised to see how many of my current concerns were directly anticipated. In discussing the question of what counts as working-class writing, I referred to Burnett, Vincent and Mayall’s introduction to their bibliography, Autobiography of the Working Class (of which a number of the examples of the source material are held in the Burnett Archive at Brunel University) and their claim that the autobiography of self-improvement is the most characteristic work of 19th-century life writing. In other words, class consciousness was channelled towards a conformist self-understanding in which the literate working classes anticipated sharing the status and prosperity of the British nation. However, following the collapse of such dreams with the First World War, self-consciously literary working-class writers eschewed autobiography as too complicit with 19th-century discourses of progress:
Instead, they wrote about their experiences in novels to produce a different kind of working-class life writing, which needs to be considered as such, despite its superficial ineligibility owing to its status as fiction. The obvious British example is D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913), but equally relevant are works such as A Scots Quair (1932-34), the trilogy by James Leslie Mitchell (writing as Lewis Grassic Gibbon), Jack Common’s Kiddar’s Luck (1951), and Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole (1933). In Britain today there are novels of working-class existence by such diverse writers from working-class backgrounds as Pat Barker, James Kelman and Jeanette Winterson, to mention only the most well known. This is the nub of the debate concerning what constitutes working-class life writing: if only the spare-time writing of those with dirty hands is accepted, then working-class life can only ever be the alienating experience of labour. The fear of incorporation into the bourgeois discourses of society that lingers from the 19th-century experience cannot be used as an excuse to abandon the finer points of imagination and sensibility: these too are acts of work. (De Genaro and Hubble, p.962)
I went on to discuss how the documentary and imaginative traditions became entwined in the 1930s. Today, following Max Saunders’s work on ‘Autobiografiction’ and how it represented a break from typical Victorian modes of writing, I would characterise work by writers such as Lawrence, Gibbon and Common as ‘proletarian autobiografiction’. In subsequent posts, I will discuss working-class autobiography and proletarian autobiografiction, in order to make this distinction clearer, before proceeding to consider the Burnett Archive in general and, then, some of the particular texts within it.
