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23061057 No.23061057 [Reply] [Original]

Has the working class ever produced any notable, worthwhile literature?

>> No.23061065
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23061065

>> No.23061071

>>23061065
>Engels
>Working class

>> No.23061073

>>23061057
Louis Armstrong's autobiography is very good and it has a literary quality to it. I know he was a famous jazz musician, not exactly working class, but he comes from that background and never wrote anything else so. Closest thing I can think of.

>> No.23061075
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23061075

Orally transmitted stories from tribespeople can be pretty kino.

>>23061065
Marx was bourgeois, anon.

>> No.23061077
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>> No.23061079

>>23061057
Would Shakespeare count as working class?

>> No.23061086
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23061086

>>23061057
Only the greatest novel of all time

>> No.23061096

>>23061057
No. Proles are subhumans incapable of introspection and artistic greatness.
>>23061065
Written by two educated members of the bourgeoisie which is the only reason it is somewhat readable and marginally compelling
>>23061075
Tribespeople are not members of the working class in the sense in which Marx&Engels used the term. Just being poor isn't enough to qualify one as a member of the working class
>>23061079
No one born before the Industrial Revolution counts as a member of the working class
>>23061086
Melville was not a member of the working class

>> No.23061101

>>23061065
Anon, I'm a fullblown commie but Marx and Engels were not working class. They are very open and aware of this.

>> No.23061103

The working class is dogshit retarded
>you will never be a 1800s intellectual living the life with other intellectuals and your life itself is as engaging as a book

>> No.23061107

Doesn't reading orally transmitted knowledge and narrative totally defeat the purpose?

>> No.23061118

>>23061103
1800s the intellectuals were are larping as working class and bemoaning their lives.

>> No.23061125

>>23061096
>Melville was not a member of the working class
From Wikipedia:
>Melville was born in New York City, the third child of a prosperous merchant whose death in 1832 left the family in dire financial straits. He took to sea in 1839 as a common sailor on a merchant ship and then on the whaler Acushnet, but he jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands.
Is a sailor not a member of the working class?

>> No.23061127

>>23061118
So just like today, even writers back then laughed at these kinda people though. Especially the ones who were upset at how much the working class fucked.

>> No.23061128

>>23061057
DH Lawrence

>> No.23061129

>>23061125
>the third child of a prosperous merchant

>> No.23061134

>>23061129
>whose death in 1832 left the family in dire financial straits

>> No.23061140
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23061140

Joseph Conrad spent his life working on shitty merchant boats

>> No.23061141

>>23061129
That's absolutely irrelevant, if someone born in poverty becomes a businessman he is now a member of the burgeois

>> No.23061150

>>23061129
Retard

>> No.23061151

Would Charles Dickens count?
Epictetus should count.

>>23061134
Once you go burgher, you never go back.

>> No.23061163

>>23061057
Plenty of writers have come from the working class. The board has become full potato, hasn’t it?

>> No.23061165

>>23061057
Celine if you consider him working since he was a young boy as working class and Zola ofcourse

>> No.23061191

>>23061057
Probably. Probably almost all of it. Nothing that gets to publishing though.

>> No.23061196
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23061196

and shiro's man wit no talents

>> No.23061204

>>23061134
Temporarily embarrassed bourgeois are still bourgeois. Marx struggled with money issues all his life yet he never abandoned the bourgeois lifestyle, he lived in squalor and pawned almost all his belongings just to be able to send his daughters to piano lessons

>> No.23061205

>>23061127
Everyone shits on this behavior but you'd shit on them even harder if they just embraced being rich

Having money makes you disliked by everyone and judged by everyone

>> No.23061238

>>23061127
I am sure Tolstoy was laughing his ass off about it while he was out working the fields. Writers were the primary source for the whole larp, fairly big part of realism which is filled with it. Do you even read?

>> No.23061244

>>23061140
Yeah that's the one I also thought of

>> No.23061256

>>23061205
Sure but that doesn't mean their pretend play isn't gay af. I know what having money is like, that's not my point though.
>>23061238
Read zola's germinal, though tbf I didn't even say what you are arguing against lmao. All I said was how writers laughed about rich people pretending to be working class and how loads of them seethed at the amounts of sex poors had.

>> No.23061258

>>23061165
Celine was petit bourgeois
Father was an insurance clerk. Mother owner a shop.

>> No.23061268

>>23061258
His semi biography said how they were constantly on the brink of poverty. That's why I put the "worked since he was a young boy" part there. His mom had a shop for a bit but it was basically his grandma's iirc.

>> No.23061273

>>23061256
Zola was the start of the change and the 1800s were almost over by then, the larp was part of his problem with realism and he never passed a chance to take a swipe at it, like the manager in Germinal. For most of the 1800s writers were all about this larp and a major source of it.

>> No.23061283

What does working class even mean? People here are saying if you’re poor but send your kids to piano lessons you’re not working class. So is it a cultural thing? Well if you just define working class as alcoholism and vandalism then obviously no writers were working class. But in that case the question is meaningless.

>> No.23061288

>>23061273
Idk, balzac also made fun of these people in his short stories. I'm not saying all writers laughed at them and I'm not saying they didn't influence rich people to act this way, just saying that some did. I didn't say some earlier but I was eating something so I tried being more concise lmao.

>> No.23061293

1960’s bongs had a few
Sillitoe, Hines, Bond, Delaney, Pinter, Colin Wilson
And a few Scots
Kelman, Gray, Welsh
And a few Irish
Behan, O’Casey, Ford, Barry, Doyle

>> No.23061296

>>23061283
Working class usually means those who work physical labour jobberinos and didn't enjoy higher education. It has lost it's meaning slightly nowadays.

>> No.23061301

>>23061268
It’s not about income level. Dad was an educated insurance clerk. Celine was a doctor. They were middle class.

>> No.23061312

>>23061301
Celine became a doctor after educating himself though I get what you mean. I was hesitant to call him working class anyway.

>> No.23061321

>>23061288
Balzac also fed into it a fair amount, Balzac was Zola's primary target, it was the big flaw in Balzac's realism for him.

Which short stories? I remember Balzac having a weird line, there were pathetic larpers who did it just for clout but then there was the good larper who altruistic because they were virtue signalling and not just ineptly following the trends. But it has been years since I have read Balzac.

>> No.23061341

Once you become a professional writer don’t you become middle class?
Isn’t writer a middle class profession?

>> No.23061347

>>23061341
Does a professional writer make a combined household income of ~$230,000 a year? Someone fudged the numbers so the middle class wouldn't disappear and working slobs would think they aren't getting fucked, but middle class is lawyer salary or small business owners.

>> No.23061348

>>23061321
Oh yea for sure, Zola hated his guts. I like Zola but he had a tendency to be annoyed by almost everyone, even when they did agree like what happened with the l'empereur and the l'academie situation.
Been years for me too but I swear it's the study on women. Not quite sure though. But yea balzac also influenced these types quite a bit.

>> No.23061359

James Joyce grew up very poor but his family was middle class. His father was the educated son of business owners but he was an alcoholic who couldn’t hold a job.
The bong class system is pants on head retarded and Americans should pay no more attention to it than monarchy and soccer.

>> No.23061361

>>23061341
I think what matters more is everything before they hit it big. Some were able to buy villas after they got famous but that doesn't mean we should ignore their prole heritage.

>> No.23061364

>>23061347
What would anyone even do with so much money

>> No.23061369

>>23061359
They were poor because 10 kids and those are just the ones that survived.

>> No.23061372

>>23061296
Okay then William Faulkner was working class

>> No.23061417

>>23061348
>Zola hated his guts
? He loved Balzac and was his primary influence, just did not like Balzac's/realism's methods: the altruistic games and preaching. Zola and naturalism were all about removing the games and literary devices and preaching, the story itself should do all the work and the writer should try their damnedest to stay out of it.

>> No.23061419

>>23061372
He went to university right? Dunno anything about his family life though.

>> No.23061445

>>23061417
I swear I've read zola and balzac bro. Just meant ehat you said but like I said, I'm eating lol.

>> No.23061450

>>23061419
Never mind he was rich I somehow thought he did physical labour in between writing his books but I guess I misremembered

>> No.23061465

>>23061141
not true and you can see this with American zoomers and millenials born off white trash families that luck themselves into fame. Once working class plebs, always working class plebs. It's a mentality thing that doesn't go away until at least after 2-3 generations

>> No.23061482

>>23061057
Dickens

>> No.23061483

Some blue collar professions pay better than white collar professions. One of my friends’ father was a crane operator and he made more than my father who was a computer programmer.
Plumbers make pretty good bucks as well

>> No.23061492

>>23061483
Not really the case back then, perhaps if you were a machine engineer. We're talking about the mostly historical sense of working class people obviously.

>> No.23061506

>>23061445
You demonstrated having read Germinal (probably) with the mention of the manager, still on the fence about your having read Balzac. But it is all good, if nothing else Balzac realized one thing that Zola did not, we all larp. But this is not about having read them and more about having read about them, you did larp on the Zola hating Balzac or at least missed remembered. Zola definitely had a stick up his ass about Balzac but never denied the influence or that Balzac was a great writer, just felt he was flawed.

Not trying to prove you wrong or anything, just bullshitting on /lit/.

>> No.23061516

>>23061465
New money also tends to be that 4am raw eggs grindset self help seminar hustle crowd that is compensating hard for poverty and has never had a meaningful thought in their life. They don't know or care what culture is and the idea that a liberal education includes the liberal arts offends them.

>> No.23061534

>>23061506
I swear it was the study on women by Balzac but balzac's bit about le grande madame and their contemporary offshoots is a good bit about what you said in general about larping. Can go either way yes. I was mostly exaggerating with the hating his guts part. Though tbf I kinda did misremember balzac being a huge inspiration, I actually thought Zola avoided him.

>> No.23061537

>>23061057
I don't know what your personal standards for literature being "worthwhile" is, but Arthur C Clarke grew up on a farm.
Isaac Asimov was born to a family of millers and didn't even know when his birthday was. "Somewhere between October 1919 and January 1920".
Guy Debord's dad was a pharmacist who died when Guy was a kid.
Irvine Welsh grew up in Scotland (a grim shit-hole) where his mom was a waitress and his dad was a carpet salesman.
That's just a glance over my first bookshelf but, to be fair, I was surprised how many of my favourite authors were at least middle class growing up.
Perhaps I shouldn't have been, though. Level of education and knowing people of a "higher" social strata were very likely huge factors that affected whether or not you'd be taken seriously and immortalised by publishers, critics, scholars etc and blah blah blah.
Parents can and do buy private school educations, tutors, more books, even paper and pens.
Shit used to be a lot more expensive at most points in history. You couldn't just buy a 20p Bic if they don't exist yet and you're shovelling coal down at the workhouse or begging the head child-beater for more gruel at the despair factory in downtown Manchester.

>> No.23061553

>>23061205
Yeah, hoarding money when there's so much need in the world is cringe and fucked up

>> No.23061567

>>23061553
>hoarding
do you think rich people keep all their wealth in a giant swimming pool of gold coins or something?

>> No.23061572

>>23061057
Henry Miller

>> No.23061578

>>23061567
I would do that

>> No.23061591

>>23061567
Yes, like Scrooge McDuck. Exactly.

>> No.23061614

>>23061534
No need to prove anything, anon, ultimately you can not prove anything because anonymous. I did get The Study of Women opened up in a tab and waiting to be read later, mostly just to read some Balzac again since it has been years.

>> No.23061619

>>23061196
>shiro's man wit no talents
I just started this today. It's pretty good, it's so short I might end up finishing it today

>> No.23061632

>>23061614
Make sure you get a good link, I found some sites earlier that omitted certain parts when looking for the study on women. Enjoy though

>> No.23061711

>>23061057
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon,Ambrose Bierce,Bernard Stiegler,Brendan Behan,Eric Hoffer,Alan Sillitoe,Maxim Gorky,Jaroslav Hašek,Joachim Ringelnatz,Colin Wilson,Venedikt Yerofeyev,Yan Lianke

>> No.23061820

>>23061553
>hoarding
Being rich is paralyzing

>> No.23061823

>>23061820
Whoa, like that movie parasite.

>> No.23061911

>>23061820
Boo hoo

>> No.23062061

>>23061065
Said working class lit, not financially supported NEETs lit

>> No.23062066

>>23061096
>No one born before the Industrial Revolution counts as a member of the working class
This is the dumbest thing I've read all day, well done.

>> No.23062068
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23062068

>>23061057
Alan Moore

>> No.23062143

>>23061140
He literally was Polish royalty. He didn't work "shitty" merchant jobs, his uncle had contacts in the French government and that's how he was able to become a sailor despite not being French.

>> No.23062178

>>23061057
Working class doesn’t have time for this shit

>> No.23062785
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>>23061057

>> No.23062816

>>23061312
I wouldn’t see him as working class anon. Even though as you rightly say he did work such jobs, one can always get from his writings that he comes from a diverse background. He’s there more in the capacity of a sociologist. It does make for an interesting question though, how much relevant where you came from is VS where you stand to define your identity.

>> No.23063251

>>23062785
Yeah I was about to say. Post Office and Factotum are great books. Factotum used to be my favorite, but I've comes to really love Post Office. I guess I like that it's more focused than Factotum, which was very disjointed (by design) and not every section does wonders for me.
I will say that Factotum has perfect writing, even if the section itself isn't interesting me, I can't help but love the writing itself. It's kind of rare to find a book where each word that comes after the other is the perfect word, creating a great flow. And I love the ending too, I love how it's a story of someone's dream of writing dying a slow death, but that's not really shown at all. It's so non dramatic, in another story you'd have a big scene where the guy would tear all his pages apart and throw the typewriter out the window, but nothing like that happens in Factotum. You just realize that's what's going on as you go deeper into the book, and I hate that the movie recontextualized it to have a really hopeful and uplifting ending, which was not the point of the ending at all.

>> No.23063270

>>23061057
Jack London

>> No.23063271

>>23061537
Growing up on a farm can mean anything. I also grew up on a farm, but I played videogames all day.

>> No.23063591

>>23062785
ni

>> No.23063620
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23063620

>He concluded that his only hope of escaping the work "trap" was to get an education and "sell his brains". He saw his writing as a business, his ticket out of poverty and, he hoped, as a means of beating the wealthy at their own game.

>> No.23063643

You're all dags, did anyone of you use the "aristocrat genes" to write anything of value? Or you just jack each other off on internet forums about how your ancestors were men of worth

>> No.23063681

Do you write for a living?

Welcome to the working class, if anything in this modern world of constant spending the idea of not working class lost all meaning you all waste your precious time collecting currency

>> No.23064238

>>23061134
Education doesn't go broke.

>> No.23064316

>>23061057
Yes, but its rare, and for obvious reasons. If you have less access and exposure to great education, or are forced to expend your energy working most days, you've less time to gain erudition and put your energy to pen. By the time most working class men have enough stability to spend a good deal of time on literary pursuits, they've already formed the wrong habits and past the prime of intellectual activity.

>> No.23064319

>>23061096
You're fully retarded. Nice.

>> No.23064338

Horatius and Mo Yan.

>> No.23064369

>>23061191
And look who controls academia!

>> No.23064371

>>23061567
Some do

>> No.23064374

>>23061096
I bet you have ambiguous sexuality

>> No.23064376

>>23061065
Both of them were aristocrats

>> No.23064460

>>23061057
They’ve definitely produced worthwhile literature like with The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists or Jack London’s books as mentioned here but very little that’s truly been great. Closest I would say in the Anglosphere is DH Lawrence and he’s pretty controversial. But think about how borderline retarded a lot of the working class are now and then think how things must have stood 150 years ago when writing literature was more in vogue

>> No.23064636

>>23061057
>Has the working class ever produced any notable, worthwhile
Yeah pretty much everything, 99.9% of what you see around you and use day to day is -
>literature
Probably, depends on what constitutes working class. Middle class is mostly a meme term and basically just means "working class but uses their brain to work for the most part".

>> No.23064643

>>23061096
>No one born before the Industrial Revolution counts as a member of the working class
lol retard

>> No.23064654

>>23062816
if you have to work in order to eat, you're working class. I have no idea what you faggots think it means.

>> No.23064722

>>23064654
so everyone is working class then?

>> No.23065842

>>23061364
Start a family.

>> No.23065863

Jesus Christ wrote the Bible and he was carpenter.

>> No.23066307

>>23065863
He didn't write it, dudebro.

>>23061057
>>23061065
>>23061711
>>23062785
>>23063620
>>23064654
>>23064643

ERIC HOFFER

based UNION longshoreman

>> No.23066425

>>23061057
All great literature is the result of nobility.

>> No.23066433

>>23064636
>Yeah pretty much everything, 99.9% of what you see around you and use day to day is -
Wrong. Imbecile.

>> No.23067307

>>23066425
Exactly. And the only true nobility is nobility of the soul, of which only the working man is in possession.

>> No.23068192

>>23067307
Based

>> No.23068195

Bump

>> No.23068199

>>23066433
Cope.
>b-but engineers, muh programmers
Are working class. Clue is in the name retard.

>> No.23068244

>>23061057
>>23068199
>>23064636
the (OP) was thinking about those who
work with their hands and sweat while working?

W=Fs. THIS FORMULA

>>23064654
>>23061079

>> No.23069553
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23069553

>>23063620
He's literally me!

>> No.23069608

Fuck the poor.

>> No.23069718

>>23064654
in the uk it's a different genetic breed, even if they get rich they're still genetically of that class, much like the different indian casts, all the slags you see posted are of that category

>> No.23069720

that french self-taught farmer whose works are on par with Gabriel Marcel, forgot his name

>> No.23069745

>>23069720
Gustave Thibon was his name

>> No.23070085
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23070085

>>23061057
Son of a coal miner and greatest ever English novelist.

>> No.23070122

>>23063251
I read post office and ham on rye.ham on rye is on a totally different level. It is mature writing stripped of all the unnecessary.

>> No.23070131

>>23070085
You must be joking.

>> No.23070183

>>23070085
He's not the coal miner, so, ya, doesn't count.

>> No.23070212

>>23070183
Why not? Because he stole an aristocrats wife and made just enough money from writing to support himself? All his characters are from his working class roots.

>> No.23070220

>>23070212
W=Fs. WORK

this>>>23066307

>> No.23070224

>>23070212
>this>>23068244

>> No.23070306

>>23070122
I've still yet to read Ham on Rye. I'm going through his books in release order, and Women wasn't really grabbing me so I put it off.
In a way I kind of like that Post Office isn't totally perfect, it has unnecessary things and some needless detours, but I enjoy those aspects. The story is that Chinaski wrote all of it after over a decade of not writing anything, I'm not sure if that's reflective of how it went for Bukowski but it does kind of feel like a writer stepping back into those shoes after taking a very long break from it. And I don't know, it makes the book feel more "fun" to me, but I'm interested to read Ham on Rye.

>> No.23070557

>>23061065
le ebin trolepoast

>> No.23071109

>>23070220
Lawrence worked with his hands, he didn't dictate to scribe. A writer writes. Why would dabblers who write part time produce something great? If they did they'd become full time writers.

>> No.23071113

>>23071109
Lawrence also worked at a lace factory
https://www.dhlawrencesociety.com/blog/dh-lawrence-at-haywoods-the-nottingham-lace-market-by-stanley-chapman

>> No.23071122

>>23061057
19th century literature is full of them. Jules Vallès in France is the first one that comes to mind

>> No.23071198

itt: spoiled brats larping as aristocrats vs section 8 wannabe intellectuals

>> No.23071622

Bump

>> No.23071647

>>23071113
Lacy Lawrence it is.

>>23071109
OK. Perhaps

>>23061711
>>23066307
Eric Hoffer wrote and worked the docks,
ILWU LOCAL 10 San Francisco, before and after he was a published author

Lawrence drug up the lace factory job.

>>23061057
Eric Hoffer, is probably the only one that answers your question.

>> No.23071746

>>23061151
A slave is hardly "working class" but I agree with your sentiment

>> No.23071774

>>23061151
>>23061204
Wow. Marxists are retarded.

>> No.23071817

None, all of them are trash. One notable example for how bad they could be is Steinbeck's works.

Low-brow, peasant trash. It's like watching Chinese television series about how much their country is a shithole with barely a scrap on the ground to make anything out of it, and so their lives suck because of it. But acting like primitive brutes is always a fine sight because of muh familial love and honor and loyalty.

It's always lovely to see the very same bumpkins complain about how shitty life is on a daily basis while trying to portray their deserted homeland as beautifully as they can.

Non-fiction autobiography may not be considered literature, but as a good case in point for how nothing coming from any of those filths can ever be considered decent whatever it is is Hillbilly Elegy. Watching Mexicans butchering people for honors is just as good as reading about the people portrayed in it.

>> No.23071846

Robert Burns, the Heaven taught ploughman. No I will not listen to proof of the contrary