Poverty in Contemporary Literature

Themes and Figurations on the British Book Market

B. Korte, G. Zipp

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137429285
• eBook ISBN: 9781137429292
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Poverty and inequality have gained a new public presence in the United Kingdom. Literature, and particularly narrative literature, (re-)configures how people think, feel and behave in relation to poverty. This makes the analysis of poverty-themed fiction an important aspect in the new transdisciplinary field of poverty studies.

1

Introduction

Abstract: Korte and Zipp establish that poverty and inequality have gained a new public presence in the United Kingdom. At a time of social cuts, new austerity measures and a rhetoric about “Broken Britain”, poverty is present in the public imagination, and it is visible in the streets of British cities. Literature, and particularly narrative literature, can (re-)configure how people think, feel and behave in relation to poverty. This makes the analysis of poverty-themed fiction an important aspect in the new transdisciplinary field of poverty studies.

Keywords: inequality; poverty studies; representation of poverty; social imaginary

Korte, Barbara and Zipp, George. Poverty in Contemporary Literature: Themes and Figurations on the British Book Market. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137429292.0003.

In the United Kingdom, as in other countries of the capitalist world, poverty and inequality have gained a new public presence and are no longer a phenomenon discussed primarily in relation to the Global South. At a time of social cuts, new austerity measures and a rhetoric about “Broken Britain”, they are visible not only in the metaphorical sense, but also in the streets. Images of looting during the London riots in 2011 and of Occupy protesters on the steps of St. Paul’s cathedral in 2012 have left a mark on public awareness, as has the number of homeless people, more of whom now appear to be recruited from those who have lost their jobs during the economic slump. The “new” poverty has affected other countries as well, but in 2013 the UK was still the country with one of the highest Gini coefficients (an indicator for social inequality) in the European Union. It stood at 0.34 in 2011/12 and has remained within the range of 0.33 to 0.35 in the years since Thatcher left office.¹ The fight against poverty and the new pauperism has been on the agenda of British politicians, attracting the attention of think tanks and organisations such as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation,² as well as becoming the subject of TED talks³ and a central topic in the news media. The Guardian, to name a prominent example, has dedicated online rubrics on “Poverty” and “Breadline Britain” and publishes tables and graphics such as “The Child Poverty Map of the UK”. Initiatives against poverty are usually accompanied by a flurry of activity on social media sites.

In accordance with current definitions, poverty is not only understood as (relative) material deprivation, but also as encompassing socio-cultural exclusion and a lack of agency, opportunities and access (to knowledge, traditions, rights and capabilities).⁴ It is further entangled with a new discussion about class (notably a newly identified “underclass”), and often accompanied by a critique of a neoliberal economy which is seen to have exacerbated these conditions. How the situation can be effectively changed is largely an issue for politics and social institutions. It is also, however, an issue of cultural representation because such representation affects the public imagination or “social imaginary”,⁵ that is, the knowledge, values, attitudes and emotions with which societies and individuals perceive poverty and take measures against it.

It is the aim of this book to explore the role which contemporary literature, and specifically narrative literature, plays in the representation and imagination of poverty in present-day Britain.⁶ Not all of the texts to be discussed are exclusively focused on poverty, but in all of them the depiction of lives in deprived circumstances is prominent enough to consider them poverty-themed. Poverty is also a “collateral” motif in much literature dealing with migration, race relations and class conflict without receiving detailed treatment, so that its presence in contemporary British literature is even more widespread than our examples suggest. We will consider the content and aesthetics of different kinds of literature, and the ethical dispositions and possibilities for social action they project. It is proposed that literature can (re-)configure how we think, feel and behave in relation to poverty and the poor. The literary representation of poverty thus has a potential to perform “cultural work”⁷ even though its social effectiveness, when it has any, will be indirect rather than direct.⁸ However, by articulating poverty and making it thinkable, literature about poverty certainly falls into the category which Alan Sinfield has designated as “faultline” stories: those stories that “require most assiduous and continuous reworking” and “address the awkward, unresolved issues, the ones in which the conditions of plausibility are in dispute” (1992, 47).

We share the proposition of other scholars that literary treatments of poverty possess special qualities of signification and can effect a special impact in comparison to other modes of representation and debate:

Shaped by aesthetic forms, rhetorical strategies, and linguistic slippages, literary texts place the signs of poverty before readers; and they demand that readers both interpret these signs and assess their ethical implications, in the same way that an almsgiver would evaluate the signs of need in the body and speech of the poor themselves. When viewed in this light, literature becomes far more than the repository of shifting historical attitudes toward poverty. Rather, a text’s complex use of signs embodies the very anxieties around representation that are at the heart of poverty itself. (Crassons 2010, 13)⁹

It is not only literary scholars who claim the importance of literary representation for our intellectual, emotional and practical engagement with poverty. The historian Gertrude Himmelfarb has also identified novels as key texts for her seminal discussion of the “idea of poverty” in the early industrial age:

If the novels had only a tangential, fantasized relationship to the reality, the fantasy itself permeated the reality, shaping the ideas, opinions, attitudes, and behavior of the readers, no less, perhaps, than the commission reports, newspaper accounts, tracts, and broadsheets, which were also, to one degree or another, removed from the reality. If the novel cannot be taken as historical evidence tout court, neither can these other sources; it might even be salutary if all sources were seen as, in some sense and in some measure, fictional, to be used warily, skeptically, critically, but also appreciatively. Whatever else may be said about the novels, they were undoubtedly one of the most important means by which the “anonymous masses,” in however fictionalized or fantasized a form, were brought to the attention of the public, assimilated into the social consciousness, and made the concern of an increasingly sensitive and vigilant social conscience. (1984, 405)

Indeed, the importance of literary representation has been acknowledged by scholars across the entire field of recent “poverty studies”,¹⁰ including philosophers and theologians as well as sociologists and economists. Amartya Sen, for instance, has cited George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara and concluded that Shaw was right “to point to the connection between poverty and evil and crime”. To Sen, the fact that this was noted by a playwright and not an economist supports his view that “[h]uman lives in society are interlinked through economic, social, political and cultural associations” (2007). Martha Nussbaum, another prominent voice in poverty studies, stresses the power of narrative literature to “wake people up to the human cost of poverty and to energize them with some urgency towards productive social action”. To Nussbaum, “[i]t is plausible to think what Dickens clearly thought: that you can’t really change the heart without telling a story” (2012, 3). The philosopher and theologian Clemens Sedmak assumes literature to have a special capacity to provide Geertzian thick descriptions that can give “a plasticity and urgency to the term “poverty”, which often has an abstract and remote feel to it” (2003, 3; our translation). Since literature is attentive to the particular and can render characters’ inner worlds, Sedmak considers it an important complement to the more abstract categories and statistics of the social and economic sciences. Literature gives faces and voices to poverty, and asks readers to “see situations from the perspective of those who are afflicted” (48). Precisely these features are also at the core of Pierre Bourdieu’s opinion that novels, and specifically multi-layered and difficult ones, should become a model for the sociological representation of social suffering because they can articulate the complex realities of such suffering “in terms that are different, and, sometimes, irreconcilable”: He therefore demands that observers and readers “relinquish the single, central, dominant, in a word, quasi-divine, point of view that is all too easily adopted” and “work instead with the multiple perspectives that correspond to the multiplicity of coexisting, and sometimes directly competing, points of view” (1999, 3). In the same vein, social scientists at the London School of Economics concerned with development studies claim that literary texts can “offer a wide-ranging set of insights [ ... ] that are all too often either ignored or de-personalised within academic or policy accounts, without compromising either complexity, politics or readability in the way that academic literature is often accused of doing”. Having a “stronger Geertzian ‘being there’ quality than certain academic and policy works” and being written more accessibly, they have a greater chance to reach large and diverse audiences and so may be “more influential than academic work in shaping public knowledge and understanding of development issues” (Lewis et al. 2008, 209).

As all of these scholars opine, the value of literature for poverty studies lies in its specific possibilities of representation in terms of language, form and fictionalisation. The present book will have to do justice to the aesthetic choices of individual works, but it will combine its close readings with the “distant” reading¹¹ of a book-sociological approach. Any individual text has the potential to affect the individual reader, but for an impact on the social imaginary, and for cultural work, literary representations of poverty require a more widespread visibility. Our discussion is therefore based on literature for which a significant circulation on the literary marketplace¹² can be ascertained and for which we may assume that it has reached a wider readership. On the side, this approach highlights the ethically vexed paradox that the representation of poverty can – and perhaps nowadays has to – become a commodity with economic value, if not usually for the poor themselves or the authors.¹³

The commercialisation of the literary marketplace in the UK since the mid-1990s coincides with a time when poverty awareness and the discussion of social inequality changed character in the UK and became harsher during the early Blair era (see Jones 2011a: 10). The mid-1990s are therefore a meaningful point to begin our discussion. We focus on fiction and lifewriting depicting poverty in the UK and consider only a segment – albeit a significant one – of the poverty books found on a market that reflects the many “new articulations and productive antagonisms between Britain’s literary culture and the wider world” (English 2006, 6). Indeed, some poverty narratives from outside Britain have been highly successful on the British market, including Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (1996), Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance (1995) or Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008). The non-fiction segment (see Chapter 7) offers an even wider array of books concerned with contemporary “global” poverty. Furthermore, the book market preserves a number of literary and non-literary poverty “classics” that have maintained a hold over the public imagination, including Dickens’s Oliver Twist and Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, or George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. Last but not least, we have to be sensitive to the fact that the li...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• 2  Premises and Concepts
• 3  Lifewriting
• 4  Popular Genre Fiction
• 5  Literary Fiction
• 6  Fiction for Children and Young Adults
• 7  Non-Fiction
• 8  Other Media
• 9  Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Index