Weekly Worker 431 Thursday May 9 2002

Class reassertion

James Kelman - And the judges said … - Secker and Warburg, London 2002, pp486, £17.99

James Kelman is just about invisible as far as the bourgeois literary world is concerned, but he is arguably the finest writer produced by these isles in 30 or more years. Not only the witness to working class lives and voices, he is at once a philosopher and political activist and his work is a testament to the culture of our class and a validation of their historical experience.

At the same time his work is absolutely opposed to any orthodoxy of ‘socialist realism’ and is more resonant of his own literary heroes such as Kafka and Dostoevsky. He is one of those many intellectuals thrown up by the working class who have contributed to the documentation of the richness and complexity of that class and his writing is great.

Born in Glasgow in 1946, Kelman has been a picture-shifter, busman, philosophy student and general pain in the arse to the British establishment. His novels and short stories are experimental, deeply humanistic and resonate with that sense of alienation and fear common in much of European literature. Yet, as a committed revolutionary socialist, Kelman enriches our sense of the working class and does not retreat into a bleak scepticism or political paralysis.

His first novel The Busconductor Hines documented the inner life of a man hitherto relegated into silence by much of bourgeois literature whilst, his last Translated Accounts was a deeply complex novel about the ethics of resistance in political dictatorships. His plays such as Hardie and Baird have uncovered the history of labour and its suppression in history, and novels such as A disaffection and A chancer have tried to explore both how a writer can objectively describe a working class protagonist and how their consciousness can be described in prose.

Kelman’s writing, along with others such as Alasdair Gray, Jeff Torrington and Agnes Owens, subverts the whole project of contemporary metropolitan literature by reasserting the experience of the working class - an experience which is both culturally and sometimes physically exterminated. His art is a revolutionary art which transcends the old dialectic between bourgeois and proletarian culture by assimilating the great European (and African) literary traditions and then writing the truth from the standpoint of the oppressed.

The first thing to note about James Kelman’s second collection of essays is that this book is essential reading for all revolutionaries and not just those interested in the contemporary novel and the relationship between art and revolution. It really is a politically ground-breaking set of Kelman’s recent and not so recent literary and philosophical essays and serves as a fine commentary on and addition to the novels and short stories already mentioned. There have been some commentaries produced on Kelman over recent years such as those in a recent issue of Radical Chains, but there is nothing to compare to a new collection of his non-fiction prose.

There are some problems, however. Perhaps most importantly the collection is not a ‘collected essays’. Kelman’s first collection Some recent attacks: essays cultural and political is for all intents and purposes no longer available. Published by AK press in 1992, it is sadly out of print. This is troubling because the collection contains some of the author’s most important essays. These deal with the ‘workers’ city’ political struggle against bourgeois culture in Glasgow in the early 90s and Kelman’s consistent fight on behalf of victims of asbestosis refused compensation from the capitalists and councillors who killed them. One strength of these essays is the focus on solidarity and openness amongst the revolutionary left. It is dismaying then that they are absent from the new collection. Another minor quibble is the absence of further interviews previously conducted with Kelman, particularly the good one from Chapman 57 by Kirsty McNeill.

These problems do not overly detract from this superb collection, however. The essays are bitter, passionate, imbued with socialist consciousness and finely written. Particularly impressive are those dealing with the English bourgeois cultural milieu which display Kelman’s disgust for the elimination of the working class voice in literature. Other essays and lectures were produced for the Scottish Socialist Voice and in debates with the Revolutionary Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party. Many of the essays are deeply politicised critiques of imperialism and fundamentalism, racism, nationalism and ruling class politics. Some of the final essays deal with Turkish politics and Kurdistan and how revolutionaries should orient to these struggles.

Yet, as a writer, it is on the culture of the working class that Kelman is most engaging. In ‘Shouting at the Edinburgh Fringe Forum’ the Fringe comes in for some stick for speaking “with the accent of the cultural elite in this country, the middle to upper-middle-class RP voice, the voice of authority, the voice of power. As I’m from Glasgow, this festival isn’t my festival, although some folk argue that it belongs to the whole of the Scottish people. What a joke. It doesn’t even belong to the people here in Edinburgh. It isn’t a nationalist point I’m making - I’m a socialist, and I’m talking about class.”

Kelman’s bloodymindedness is not a simply the arbitrary anger of a disaffected, declassed intellectual, but is the real expression of distress and an attempt, as he says in his essay on Alex La Guma, to “work in the minutiae of existence, trying to gain access to, and make manifest, the dark areas of human experience and suffering”.

Two of the longer essays, dealing with Chomsky and Kafka respectively, are attempts to assess Kelman’s own political and literary ancestry, but the shorter interventions are equally impressive - whether writing on the opening of an unemployed workers’ centre or documenting the descent into barbarism of companies unwilling to compensate working class victims of asbestosis such as Pat McCrystal. The essays are also genuinely informative on the African and Caribbean genesis of his themes, particularly relating to the work of Alex La Guma, John La Rose and the Caribbean Artists Movement.

Internationalist, anti-imperialist, socialist and writer, Kelman is one of those artists of whom John Berger has described as the creators of an art which has “judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten”. This is the measure of what I hope will be Kelman’s lasting greatness - not that he writes essays and books as ‘socialist propaganda’, but out of the struggles of working class people he has found truths and experiences with which he has constructed great literature.

I can imagine Kelman’s self-deprecating response to that claim - ‘Aye. On ye go.’

Martyn Hudson

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