9 - Working-class fiction across the century

Summary

Toward a theory of working-class fiction

Since Ian Watt's groundbreaking work on the development of the novel, there is overwhelming evidence that the form has been from its inception the preserve of the middle class, despite its being extended or qualified to include subgenres. However, this chapter argues that working-class fiction can be distinguished from a dominant tradition in the history of the novel. Working-class fiction will be defined here by the way that it responds, in a peculiarly local and vital way, to a lived experience that middle-class novels have only been able to observe. Working-class fiction thus sees beyond the limited horizon of bourgeois knowledge to articulate the actual experience and the felt consequences of industrialization. Shaped and determined by the processes of production itself, working-class writing is a product of a distinct form of consciousness.

As the Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács has argued, such consciousness is able to perceive and hence disclose the true nature of a society which reduces all relations and values to those of the commodity, and insists that “the principle of rational mechanisation and calculability must embrace every aspect of life.” Commodification integrates social being and commodities into a “specialized process . . . in which [the worker] is no more than a cipher reduced to an abstract quantity, a mechanised and rationalised tool.” Working-class life-experience and consciousness embodies a dialectic - a consciousness of itself, the subject, as object - that comprehends the condition of “society as a whole” because the working class typically “reveals in all its starkness the dehumanised and dehumanising function of the commodity relation” (p. 92).