Shades of Working-Class Writing

This article employs Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács's theory of realism to analyse Alex La Guma's social realism in In the Fog of the Seasons’ End, and to this end interrogates how far the novel leans towards socialist realism. I start with a survey of the critical commentary on the text and show why its reception in some quarters has differed so markedly from that of La Guma's early writings. Although In the Fog of the Seasons’ End is clearly rooted in South African social realities, my analysis draws parallels between this text and Maxim Gorky's novel Mother with the aim of identifying the latter as La Guma's intertext. I ask whether La Guma's work can be read as a working-class novel and if, on this basis, La Guma himself should be called a working-class writer. My answer engages with theoretical debates on what really constitutes a working-class text and, perhaps by extension, a working-class author. I conclude that rather than referring to him as a working-class writer it might be safer to see La Guma as an ‘organic intellectual’ in the Gramscian sense, in which his contribution to the working class was embodied in both his cultural production and his political activism.