Quote:
Originally Posted by Mirabell
It's a realist novel, brilliantly evoking the streets where Roth was raised.
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Quite. But your next sentence begins with 'And' rather than 'But', in spite of the fact that the narrator makes a leap from realism to modernism, or simply that he's melding the two (which is of course the most interesting part). You note:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mirabell
And it's a linguistically inventive and sparkling novel, changing between yiddish, standard (american) english and ny dialect back and forth, invoking the confusion of someone stranded in a foreign tongue with only his ears to guide him.
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So what's happening here? I've spent a considerable time trying to understand British working-class literature (mainly about 30 almost unknown authors in the interwar years but many more outside that period too), and have a passing knowledge of American and French working-class fiction, but I won't go into more detail as this is not the place, and anyway I intend to put out a broader appeal for working-class examples of working-class fiction in other countries.
But – and this is the main interest for me – what you see in Henry Roth is certainly the influence of Joyce (as Steven G. Kellman notes in passing), but maybe most of this is by cultural osmosis rather than through reading the actual books. Who cares? It's still there.
It's generally still assumed that (British) working-class fiction is realist, almost by definition, and such is the case in the vast majority of British working-class books I've read (before the coming of the amazing James Kelman, please note), but in a number of works – notably those by Lewis Grassic Gibbon, James Hanley and perhaps above all Lionel Britton – there is an existence (huge or tiny) of modernist elements that work against the social(ist) realist norm. It doesn't seem to fit, but there are many reasons for this.
I just wonder if working-class literature in other languages operates under a different aesthetic, because the French model looks a little different to start with. Dunno, just feeling around.