Can the working-class novel exist today? Maybe

The working-class struggle continues.* Today workers are being killed at work – in sweatshops, in brothels, in mines – and in search of work as they try to cross borders or oceans to find jobs that pay enough that they might not die.

Yet in the literature classroom, this struggle is mostly visible in texts from the early twentieth century. This point, mentioned at the start of Sonali Perera’s new book, resonated with me. The last four years I’ve been teaching a course called American Working Class Literature and, try as I might, my syllabus tilts hopelessly to the historical. My students learn a lot from reading about how many bobbins Johnny can spin in an hour in Jack London’s ‘The Apostate’ or how the Holbrooks suffer as they are blown across the Midwest in search of work in Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio. While I can always seem to find another Popular Front artefact I want to include, I try, each term, to bring in newer voices. But Bruce Springsteen and Russell Banks, my students have pointed out, are not exactly contemporary. And particularly within the field of the novel, I flounder.

So I was thrilled to discover Perera’s No Country: working-class writing in the age of globalization, which indicts my tendency towards the past and illuminates my problems identifying contemporary working-class writers. Near the start, Perera asks the fundamental question that underscores my own difficulties: ‘Can there be a novel of the international working class despite the conditions and constraints of economic globalization?’ (p. 4). Through an interpretive framework she calls ‘ethical historicism’, Perera finds that the answer is a highly qualified yes. Still, even after reading her provocative book, I tend towards a (perhaps equally qualified) no.

As I examine her arguments here I will explain her yes – and try to supplement her ethical historicism with some further materialist considerations that explain my no.

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Perera’s appraisal of working-class literature in the era of global capital is structured around four basic propositions. The first two push against long-held standards of literary criticism. National frames, she argues, are inadequate because, well, globalisation. ¹ Thus, the writers she studies have themselves crossed borders (Mulk Raj Anand, Ambalavaner Sivanandan, Bessie Head), and, if (like Tillie Olsen) they haven’t, Perera puts them in conversation with writers on the other side of the world. ²

Perera’s second move pushes against historical periodisation. To put it over-simply, as the world is more spatially integrated, time also loses some of its contour. The present and its history intertwine. Thus, Perera necessarily links writers whose work is separated by half a century or more.

Both of these moves are useful. Literature is a tool for bringing together disparate experiences. And for scholars and students, such connections illuminate both continuities (the persistence of sweatshop exploitation, just in different nations) and disconnects (how what’s good for one national working class may be bad for another).

Yet neither of these approaches really illuminates much about the essential features of working-class literature today – or the limits on its production. The book’s lens, I mean, is primarily interpretive. And that tendency – to remain in the scholar’s habitus – is even clearer in Perera’s two central arguments, which turn explicitly to literary form.

Perera argues against the reflexive alignment of realist (and other documentary) forms with working-class literature. Adequately representing global working-class realities necessitates a style of ‘elliptical marks, interruptions, speech interferences, and signs of heteroglossia’ (p. 9), ‘serialized poetics’, ‘uncompleted’ texts, and ‘repeated interruptions’ (p. 25). Her evidence is, I think, quite interesting, particularly the linking of worker periodicals from Sri Lankan Free Trade Zones with literary texts of more elite provenance. Yet, even with the examples, I wasn’t always clear what those descriptors really meant. How exactly is Tillie Olsen’s unfinished novel like completed novels (Sivanandan’s When Memory Dies, for instance) that are ‘uncompleted’ because they resist closure? And, more importantly, are these features really unique to global working-class literature? To me, they sound a lot like the sort of thing one can see in a wide range of literary writing after modernism.

Ultimately Perera’s formal argument proves a version of a familiar philosophical one. This argument would – in the tradition of Althusser, Spivak and Derrida – read Marx’s texts against the historical Marx to propose an ethical fix for historical materialism: ‘“ethical” perhaps replaces “historical” … a supplement to Marxism, beyond Marx’ (pp. 112, 114). Thus, the analysis of working-class literature becomes another chapter in the grand philosophical debate: ethics versus politics, poststructuralism versus historical materialism.

And in this framework global realities recede, quite often, to little more than close readings. Anand’s novel Coolie becomes ‘a densely layered palimpsest of citations and omissions’ and ‘a revision and challenging of its own form, that of the proletarian novel’ (p. 28). The narrator of When Memory Dies becomes a ‘“reader” (in the robust sense of the word)’. This opens up ‘questions of what reading is, who reads, who fails to, who is rendered illegible, and who is rendered illiterate’ (p. 62).

Everything becomes text, and the texts become, it seems, their own readers. Ethical historicism isn’t New Criticism by another name, but it lands a good distance from the material exigencies that shape reading practices around the globe. Good luck to the working-class reader with constraints on their time, their library access, or their knowledge of French theory.

Happily, though, that is not the whole of Perera’s argument. The book does offer an alternative – one where her Yes and my No look a lot closer to agreement. Throughout the book, the ‘everyday’ interactions between readers and texts are alluded to frequently. ³ For Perera, literature’s ‘everyday’ role is in a call – here again she echoes Spivak (who echoes Levinas) – for an ‘“ethical singularity”, a kind of “secret encounter” of imperfect communication … in something like normality, between equals – not subject and object of benevolence’ (p. 111). This description of reading is, I think, an admirable ambition. And one that is, importantly, not tethered to any particular ways of writing or any particular interpretive strategies.

This ‘secret encounter’ is one thing I can offer to students who come to my class seeking a way to make sense of a world in which ‘Class, especially in the context of the international division of labor, is ungraspably abstract, and the rules of political economy are invisible to a close-up view’ (p. 170). Through our reading and interpretation of working-class texts, I can help them try to make sense of class in its current global formations. That encounter between student and text – where they see familiar experience, humanness, perhaps even themselves in others – that’s a key step in creating a more equitable world. And that, it seems to me, is the seed of radical potential in working-class literature in the age of globalisation.

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‘[C]an there be a novel of the international working class despite the conditions and constraints of economic globalization?’ Most of Perera’s yeses point to the interpretive implications: how we read (or how texts shape our reading) under these conditions. But the international division of labour – and the ever-accelerating diasporic forces it unleashes – has material implications for the production of literature, as well. And these very material concerns push me more towards no.

Globalisation makes novels (especially traditional novels) hard to write. With national working-class publics constantly constituted only to be broken apart, jobs (or bodies) shipped around the globe, neither the room of one’s own nor the time presents itself for texts modelled on the great working-class novels of the last two centuries. This is one of the strongest implicit arguments in Perera’s book – and, I think, an essential point.

But when working-class books are somehow written – and, after all, books have for a very long time been written under brutal, dehumanising conditions – they seem to face more intense barriers to publication than at any time in the last century.

Publishing, once a complex ecosystem, has been consolidated into ‘the big six’, then the ‘big five’ with larger publishing companies gobbling up smaller ones and then merging together under larger, profit-driven corporate ownership. ⁴ While Bertelsmann or Disney claim they don’t engage in direct editorial control, the bottom line pressures of their corporate structure do just that. Why take a risk on a book that won’t appeal to the people who buy expensive books?

The books Perera and I prize, I’m afraid, rarely make this cut. Many of the books Perera examines are out of print. And the smaller radical presses that initially published them – Olsen was first brought out by the Feminist Press, Anand by Lawrence and Wishart – are also struggling. The latter, in 2014, enforced copyright on Marx’s estate against Marxists.org, citing their own struggles to stay afloat in the profit-seeking publishing environment. ⁵

Along a parallel track, there is an increasing body of work pointing out that working-class writing is discouraged by one of the strongest forces shaping fiction today: Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programmes. The tendency, towards works that explore an ‘apolitical’, white, middle- or upper-classed position (‘Cancer in Connecticut’, as one of my MFA friends describes it) has deep roots. Eric Bennett’s recent Workshops of Empire, shows such work was fertilised at Iowa’s ur-MFA programme and elsewhere with money from CIA Cold Warriors who thought fiction might be a useful tool in their twilight struggle against the strongest internationalist working-class movement in global history. Or, as Junot Díaz, with customary wisdom, sums up his MFA experience: ‘That shit was too white.’ ⁶

I’m not arguing chickens and eggs. The combination of these features – dwindling publishing opportunities, the dominance of MFA programmes, the punishing hurricanes of global capital flight that blast would-be writers and decimate working-class parties – constitutes a tightly woven mesh that would seem capable of stopping most working-class fiction from ever reaching a reader. Whether it’s cut off in the brain, at the pen, at the keyboard, during schooling or – failing all of these – is composed but unpublished (and, back to Perera’s scholarly context, unstudied), the blockade is quite powerful.

And even when working-class writing does sneak through, it lacks the revolutionary tendency both Perera and I value. Consider two recent examples. Karl Taro Greenfield’s The Subprimes traces the battle between some evil Koch Brothers-ish overlords and the subaltern poor squatting in abandoned California exurbs. Merritt Tierce’s Love Me Back has achieved notice for its brutal descriptions of high-end service work – drugs and sex and self-harm as means of survival.

Both books acknowledge the complexities of today’s economic crisis. They struggle with race and nation – Tierce, especially, in her depictions of the exploitation of economic migrants in US kitchens. They are products of the new complexities facing a working-class movement today. Yet as working-class literature, both books have very clear limits. Tierce’s novel ends with little more than a tarnished American dream: an alienated protagonist working for a better life for her daughter. Greenfield’s revolutionary promise, a slingshot versus a large robot seemingly borrowed from The Empire Strikes Back, borders on silly.

That Perera’s book doesn’t include any contemporary examples like these; that these are the best examples I can conjure – this is my best explanation of how I end up fairly pessimistic on the possibility of working-class literature today. The revolutionary potential of literature isn’t just about how we read, but about what we read, as my students’ requests for the novel of the Great Recession or post-NAFTA poetry indicate.

So can working-class literature exist today? I’m with Perera that if we hold up old literary models, today’s struggle, in its scale and its complexity, may seem unwinnable. Scholars (and teachers), as she reminds us, certainly need to widen the frame, and study the intricate links, both economic and aesthetic, that stretch across national borders. Fiction has the capacity to foment connections – of knowledge and understanding, of sympathy and love. It offers a communicative foundation for drawing together today’s disparate working classes across time and space and into a shared struggle against exploitation. So, yes, the working-class novel can exist today.

But, no, it seems not to. The crisis – for working-class literature, as for workers today – is real. And in attending directly to the material limits placed on it, I’ve hoped to provide another facet to Perera’s argument, one that widens the focus beyond scholarly reading and into the production and consumption of literature. Glancing at the few contemporary examples of working-class novels hints at just how powerful the new formations of class oppression can be. The struggle continues. But for now I’m afraid we’re still waiting for the right texts to help us adequately address our contemporary conjecture.