Quote:
Originally Posted by Mirabell
However. You conflate "realist" and "working class".
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I don't at all, I was talking about a (somewhat false) assumption, which has always existed with critics and readers, that working-class fiction should be realist: certainly in the British 1930s books I was mainly talking about, with, for instance, their endless descriptions of work in mines and mining acccidents, where some books tend to merge into one.
The
annus mirabilis of modernism came in 1922 (
Ulysses,
The Waste Land, etc), and by the beginning of the 1930s in England it had given way to the Auden generation, with more of an emphasis of realism and political reality. In the thirties, that reality was strongly left-wing, and modernism was considered by influential marxists such as Lukács to be bourgeois. To stand a chance in the market place, and perhaps of being translated into Russian, a 'proletarian' novel had to be realist: otherwise, it would be ignored or critically condemned. And to add to that, many English critics (such as Connolly and Swinnerton) thought modernism elitist, which was a slightly different criticism. The working-class modernist writer really didn't stand a chance, although a few books (or, to be more exact, small parts of them) slipped through the net and were accepted as towing the socialist line.
Yes, there are very strong realist elements in
Call It Sleep (1934), along of course with strong moments of interiority (not at all usual in a realist novel), and in my Noonday Press edition it's interesting that Afred Kazin, in his Introduction, describes this novel in general as 'written out of the full resources of modernism'. Certainly working-class modernist literary production in America wasn't subjected to the same scorn as it was in Britain.