Apparently, they’re making a movie out of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (starring Keira Knightley). If you haven’t read it, it’s about a group of clones in Britain bred to be harvested for organs. The clones make up a specific social class, and the appropriate ways in which they are and are not permitted to interact in British society is eerily familiar to, well, any regular class division. Which leads this blogger to the observation that:
. . . it’s the way the British class system works—it’s not got much to do with money, nothing stops people from going where they don’t belong except their sense that it isn’t where they belong. This is the inexorable pressure that keeps Ishiguro’s clones where they belong, and it’s a lot scarier than barbed wire and dogs.
And this blogger, responding to that one, remarks:
Living in the US is more interesting still. The Irish experience – a small country where you very nearly know everyone, and everyone very nearly knows you (or at least, can place your family and mutual connections within a few minutes of starting to talk to you – Kieran had a post on this years ago) is probably quite foreign to most Americans. And getting away from it is liberating – it’s nice to live in a place where nobody knows about your background, and nobody would care if they did know.
Wh-what?!?!
Now, we may not have India’s caste system or Britain’s social shame, but class is indeed around in America. From the ancient yet still persisting rigid divisions of the Old South (Wilkes’s (old money upper), O’Hara’s (new money land-owning ascendant), Yankees (new money working class), Slattery’s (white trash), black people (slaves); and see also: Atticus attempting to explain to Scout why her friendliness to Walter Cunningham must be tinged with condescension in order to be truly appropriate) to the stratification of neighborhoods in Manhattan and Chicago (which I won’t go into), class has been alive and well everywhere I’ve lived. And from The Official Preppy Handbook to Stuff White People Like, the curious trappings and poses of class have always made for entertaining tongue-in-cheek social criticism. And now we have The Return of the Player by Michael Tolkin, reviewed here in The Atlantic by Sandra Tsing Loh:
Fussell’s topmost denizens were “out of sight” in hilltop manses at the end of long, curving driveways. The billionaires in Michael Tolkin’s hilariously mordant The Return of the Player are even farther out, prow-jousting at sea in their satellite-technology-equipped yachts. Indeed, this novel is such a teeth-gnashingly precise class almanac, that Tolkin should surely replace Tom Wolfe as our modern-day high-society-anxiety chronicler (at least of the West Coast variety).
Successful artists and writers (although not dancers or actors, and musicians only sometimes) have always been curiously exempt from social class rankings, haven’t they? According to Loh’s article, a group of X individuals (basically, whatever current generation of the upper-middle class just graduated from college) are the new classless. . . which is interesting, since it used to be that real artists could escape class by virtue of their accomplishments, and now apparently, pseudo-artists escape class by virtue of their postures.
The first 3/4′s of Loh’s article are very funny, but she spends the last 1/4 mocking some strawman group of young snobs that she seems to feel are having way more fun than she is and deserve a good kick in the pants. As always, my living in New York might skew my perspective, but the members of the “X” group I know have always already been living just like Loh predicts they will be forced to since the downturn. And incidentally, among the many contributing causes to the economic crash, I do not think that the “prized self-expression and . . . embrace of personal choice” of Xers is even slightly responsible for “the collapse of capitalism.” Come on. My generation is hardly the first to have a little fun before it settled down to reproducing.
According to Richard Florida, there are three basic classes these days: working, service and creative. Florida studies the amount of each class in various countries to determine what affect stratification has on economic output, technological innovation, entrepreneurship and happiness. I won’t keep you in suspense: you’ll surely be shocked to hear that the “creative class” sweeps every category. Oddly, my own social class – the “bystanding class” – is not addressed.
Of course, one significant marker of social class is beginning to dissolve: we are all pretty much wearing jeans and Ts now, regardless of age, occupation or social station. This is absolutely horrifying to cranky old men like George Will, who now have no easy way to tell who’s important enough for them to pay attention to:
Denim is the carefully calculated costume of people eager to communicate indifference to appearances. But the appearances that people choose to present in public are cues from which we make inferences about their maturity and respect for those to whom they are presenting themselves.
Aw! If everyone wears jeans, how can George Will tell if people are presenting themselves to him with respect or with impudence? Just be glad they’re still presenting at all, George, that’s all I can say.
