Reclaiming the experimental novel for working-class writers

There is a tendency to treat social realism as the default and expected mode for working-class writers, while experimental forms are reserved for the elite. This distinction is reductive and oppressive; it further cements a boundary around what it means to be, to act and to articulate working-class experience. Isabel Waidner writes on their fiction, “People shouldn't be surprised if my work looks so different; instead, people should ask, why are other books so similar?” And Douglas Kearney says, “Most experimental writing starts with a dissatisfaction with the order of the world”.

This paper discusses how the experimental, in the hands of working-class writers, can be a method to destabilise, unsettle, and expand representation. Drawing upon a tradition of authors such as Waidner, Nicola Barker and Claire Louise-Bennett, I share how, as a working-class writer, such novelists have inspired me to use experimentation as a way of bringing the reader closer to the reality of working-class experience. Offering an extract from my unpublished novel, Composition, I explore how my child protagonist naturally draws upon innovative techniques to say: this is how experience feels, this is where language has not fit our lives neatly, this is how I've embodied the precarious feeling of existing between homes and identities. Also discussing how this protagonist and her artist single-mother have sought to carve their third space of being between cultural homes, how they have composed a communal art world beyond the London scene on their own terms, and nurtured their non-traditional queer family set-up. Paralleling the characters in my novel, I argue how methodologies of experimental working-class fiction can allow us to work towards emancipatory and proprietary representation, and note, importantly, why this act of representation matters.