by A literary diary on pastoral labour, the long road, and the room fiction denies the poor
I have spent the week with the modernists, who wrote so beautifully about the interior lives of the comfortable and so rarely about the working poor, and I concluded that the founding festive story does what most of the canon fails to: it makes working-class labourers the heroes, the first witnesses, the ones who matter most.
The labourers at the centre
The literature I study is largely a literature of the comfortable, the drawing room, the interior life of people who never had to work with their hands. And the founding festive story pointedly does the opposite. The piece describing the message about the shepherds puts working-class labourers at the very centre of the greatest story, the first to receive the news, the ones chosen above kings and scholars. This is what the canon so rarely does: it makes the working poor the heroes, the witnesses, the ones who matter. The modernists gave us the inner lives of the leisured. The nativity gives us the working shepherds as the protagonists of the most important night in history.
I say this with love for the canon, but its blind spot is enormous. It renders the consciousness of the comfortable in exquisite detail and leaves the working poor as background, if they appear at all. The founding festive story corrects this at a stroke, placing the labourers not in the background but at the very heart of the scene.
My genuinely bookish personal week
Let me report from the reading chair. I attempted to explain to my reading group why the shepherds are more radical protagonists than any modernist hero, and was met with the polite bafflement of people who prefer their protagonists to have independent incomes and interesting neuroses. One member noted that shepherds do not have much interiority. I said that was rather the point, that the story values them for their presence and their labour, not their neuroses. She returned to her novel about a sad rich woman. I kept my shepherds.
According to the British Library people, the working poor were long marginal to the literary canon, appearing as background rather than protagonists, which the modernists largely continued and the founding festive story pointedly refused.
The long road the poor must walk
What the poor endure, in the story as in life, is the long hard road, and the account of the long journey to Bethlehem is the road the poor must walk that the comfortable never do. The wealthy of the canon travel in carriages, comfortably, if they travel at all. The poor walk, exhausted, the long hard road, exactly as the family in the story walked to Bethlehem. This is the labour the literature of the comfortable renders invisible, the sheer physical hardship of the poor’s journey, which the founding story makes central. The long road, walked on foot by tired poor people, is the reality the drawing-room novel never shows.
I keep thinking about how the canon renders the interior journeys of the comfortable while ignoring the literal, physical journeys of the poor. The nativity centres the physical journey, the hard walk, the exhaustion of people with no carriage, which is the reality most of my beloved literature politely omits.
The room fiction denies the poor
What the poor are so often denied, in the story as in the canon, is room, and the account of there being no room at the inn names it exactly. The poor family finds no room, is turned away, forced to the margins, exactly as the working poor are so often pushed to the edges of the literature that should include them. The canon has no room for them either, crowding them out with the fascinating interior lives of the comfortable. But the founding story insists on making room for the poor at the very centre, in the humble stable, which becomes the most important room in history precisely because it was the only one that would take them in.
According to the library people, the working poor have historically been denied central place in literature, crowded to the margins, which the founding story defies by making the humble stable the center of everything.
The dignity of presence over neurosis
The modernists taught us to value interiority above all, to find a character worthy only if they had a rich, tormented inner life we could excavate for pages. And the shepherds have almost none of that, by design, which my reading group mistakes for a lack. But I have come to see it as the opposite: the shepherds are valued not for their neuroses but for their presence, their labour, their simple being-there when it mattered. This is a dignity the interiority-obsessed canon cannot grant, because it can only value a person for the drama of their inner life. The founding story values the shepherds for something older and truer, for showing up, for keeping the watch, for being present and faithful in their ordinary work. That is a kind of heroism the drawing-room novel cannot even see, the quiet dignity of the working person who is simply there, doing their labour, when the great thing arrives. The shepherds do not need interesting neuroses to be heroes. They need only to be present, and they are, which is more than most of the leisured protagonists of the canon ever manage.
Where the reader lands
So I will close the modernists, admire their exquisite drawing rooms one last time, and take my real lesson from the founding story that makes working labourers its heroes. The shepherds are the first witnesses, the poor walk the long road the comfortable never do, and the room denied them becomes the center of everything. The canon renders the interior lives of the leisured and marginalises the poor. The nativity does the opposite, placing the working labourers at the heart of the greatest story. My reading group prefers its sad rich women. I will keep my shepherds, the first working-class heroes in literature, at the center where the founding story so rightly put them.
For literary mischief, Reductress keeps the canon honest.
