On Middle Class Guilt

A Goldsmiths creative writing graduate, Ross Raisin came to talk to us for the Critical Contexts component of our MA this week. Author of God's Own Country and Waterline, Raisin has a growing reputation as an astute observer of life at the margins of contemporary British society, be that through the eyes of a disturbed, obsessive adolescent ranging across the Yorkshire moors or a bereaved Glaswegian ex-shipbuilder down and out in London.

God's Own Country earned Raisin the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award in 2009 after reputedly being scrummaged at auction by a gumshielded pack of publishers.  Penguin turned over the ball. He has since been nominated for a range of prizes, including the Guardian First Book and John Llewelyn, with the Scotsman hailing Waterline as 'the definitive novel for our times.'

Raisin rejects the implied superiority attributed to him by those who insist he gives 'a voice to the voiceless,' suggesting instead that fiction is the lens through which he chooses to explore social and political issues, that writing and language is at the core of how he articulates himself as an individual in the world. Kicking off with an appeal to consider the idea of the writer's 'responsibility' – to the reader, to sources, to society at large, to yourself as a writer – I found Raisin candid, compelling and provocative.

Raising many of the questions I have faced in my own day job in international development, he asks us how we might write about 'social issues' without getting hoodwinked by a voyeuristic publishing industry or simply aestheticising 'the needy,' and how we might communicate about poverty, deprivation and 'deviancy' in a way that might meaningfully challenge what we think we already know. He reminded us that, as Orwell once wrote, the belief that 'art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.' 

This was right on the money as far as I was concerned – it spoke to my own preoccupations as I attempt to cobble together an entertaining book that explores consciousness raising and the roots of early feminism; it spoke to my current concerns about my responsibility to historical 'truth' as well as to my ongoing queries about whether anyone out there even cares about all this stuff anyway.

I gathered my courage to stick my hand up and ask Raisin how he'd lived with the subject matter of Waterline – loss, grief, alcoholism, homelessness - over the two or three years of drafting; and he responded that it was 'all in the process': focusing on your craft, your journey through the subject matter, 'getting it right' for reader and character(s). In the discussions that followed, there came the suggestion that Raisin was hostage to a bad case of middle class guilt, that all this talk of 'process' was just a pretentious cover for a grammar school boy who sought reparation for his background in 'healing the world.' For myself, process is at least partly about craft and craft is what you need to be damn sure you master if you're going to ever make a serious go of being a professional writer. As for dismissing the choice of the socially conscious to address difficult issues in fiction as a misplaced salvo of class war – well, it just seemed pointlessly flippant. Overtly political or not, I do think that our subject matter is 'determined by the age' in which we find ourselves living. I suspect that my compulsion to write about the early women's movement and its links to colonisation and slavery might be something to do with what I, and others see as the failure of Feminism (yes, with a capital F) to appeal to a popular audience beyond its second wave. I'm not yet sure why that might be the case but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have been writing this book in Greer's heyday.

That being the case, how am I supposed to deal with this question of responsibility? Am I just writing out of a very particular form of white middle class guilt about western feminism's rise and rise off the back of colonial oppression? If my book has a 'point' to it, if I am trying to work out – as Raisin puts it - 'where I stand on the subject,' then surely I have a responsibility to ensure that the details of my story are accurate and true? That my position is worked out on the basis of facts? But then what if those details aren't there, what if I have to make them up? What if the as-yet-unknown biographical truths that I do uncover in future research forays don't fit with the story I'm set on telling – what happens then? Do I change the character names – make them archetypal rather than historical/specific? Do I change the story? Or do I stick with my intention and trust the process to sort it all out in the end?