This panel seeks to continue the conversation around social class and mobility by focusing on this idea of a back and forth that is the prerogative of the “transfuge de classe” or the “parvenant” who is not only concerned with a potential arrival, but always also by a return – as seen, for instance, in the title of Eribon’s autobiographical essay Returning to Reims (2009). In this panel, the back and forth explored by panelists will be broadened to take into account the fear of downward social mobility [déclassement], various counter-discourses that take place within the political and literary spheres, and the choice of different social vantage points to examine struggles of resistance. Each panelist will present a 15-minute paper and the remaining half hour will be dedicated to open discussion.
Matt Trumbo-Tual considers how the analysis of intergenerational social mobility is complicated by economic shifts that render class positions unrecognizable through a reading of Pascal Manoukian’s Anderson’s Paradox (2018), the novel’s title, a reference to an observation by sociologist Charles Arnold Anderson that children who attain a higher level of education than their parents do not necessarily experience upward social mobility. In dialogue with sociological scholarship on the phenomenon of déclassement in France since the 2008 financial crisis, Trumbo-Tual argues that changes from factory to service work or in the percentage of the population receiving a high school or college diploma make class hierarchies less legible and undermine strategies of social advancement. Furthermore, Trumbo-Tual shows that lessons learned from previous generations’ academic and professional experiences are made dangerously obsolete by the reformulation of the capitalist economy.
Martine Wagner focuses on the political and literary responses to narratives of class defection through an examination of the reception of Édouard Louis’s Who Killed My Father (2018), in which the author names and accuses certain politicians of precipitating the death of his father and more generally of the working class through the laws they pass. One of these politicians, Martin Hirsch, published the novel How I Killed His Father (2019) to respond to these accusations, President Emmanuel Macron began a debate with Louis through social media, while Gérald Bonner, professor at the Sorbonne and a right-wing “transfuge,” published Origins (2023) intended to be a counter-discourse to the stories of left-wing transfuges Louis, Eribon or Ernaux that he judges “dolorists.” Wagner explores the concept of “false narrative” that is used in political circles and in the media to silence dissonant voices around the topic of class.
John Ashburn tuns to contemporary Quebecois writer Kevin Lambert whose most recent novel Let Our Joy Remain (2022), caused a stir after being longlisted for France’s preeminent literary prize, the Goncourt, over Lambert’s use of a “sensitivity reader.” Ashburn explores Lambert’s portrayal of labor, class dynamics, and the undercurrents of resistance that ripple through Querelle of Roberval (2018), a narrative grounded in the industrial region of Saguenay Lac St. Jean, where Lambert grew up, and Let Our Joy Remain, written from the vantage point of the affluent Montreal elite. Ashburn argues that Lambert’s dual perspective underscores the varying aspects of labor and the workplace but also contrasts the nuanced first-person narratives of disparate social strata, highlighting resistance as a pivotal element in both works. Despite the acclaim his work has received, even catching the attention of Quebec’s Premier François Legault, who praises Let Our Joy Remain and is called out for misreading it by Lambert, the complexities of Lambert’s fiction remain layered and deeply entrenched in societal commentary.