>
> The problems I had with N&D were that she showed too
> much contempt for
> working poor people for failing to live up to an
> idealized fantasy about
> she had constructed.
> She glossed over the transportation issue but
> flippantly stating she
> needed a car because no one wants to read about her
> waiting for a bus,
> but that was dishonest. No one wants to read about
> her driving her car
[I deleted the rest for sake of saving the space rather than because it is
unimportant]
[WS:] This is a very thoughtful assessment of Ehrenreich's work or rather the genre it represents. But I think the fault - if it is a fault at all - lies not with BE, her honesty (or lack of it), quality of writing etc., but with a much larger phenomenon that human cognition is always grounded in specific social realities. Being determines consciousness, so to speak.
She and her audience are members of middle or upper/middle class who are trying to understand the world of the working poor. That fundamental fact cannot be changed, no matter how hard BE tries to disguise herself by adopting the props of the working class life. Since she writes mainly for the members of her own class, her prose works only inasmuch as her social relationship to the object of her inquiry is preserved. This is akin to a European or American anthropologist reporting on a native culture from a vantage point of an outsider being immersed in that culture and acting as an intermediary or a translator between these two different worlds. If she were not immersed, her story would be shallow, lacking important details, and fake. If she were immersed too much to the point of "going native" and becoming a part of the native culture, she would not be understood by her audience.
BTW, I recall a certain exercise in my cultural anthropology class many years ago, in which students were given a native story, as narrated by the narrator coming from that culture, and then they were supposed to re-tell that story to their fellow students. The point was that the students had a hard time grasping the essence of the native story and whatever they were able to get was merely a reflection of their own narrative schemata.
With that in mind, BE had to make sure to her audience that while re-telling the "native" story of the working poor, she had to do it selectively and from a vantage point of an outside observer who is a part of her audience's culture to be understood at all. Driving is an essential part of Homo Americanus cultural identity and cognition. Homo Americanuses have a hard time comprehending the world without cars.
This implies far more than moving from point A to point B - it involves the whole gamut of relationship between the self and the outside world. It involves the sense of self-reliance rather than being dependent on others or society as a whole (however deceptive it is), physical separation form others in a glass/metal bubble that creates an illusion of one's "own space" (as opposed to sharing the space with others on a bus), as sense of spontaneity and immediacy of action i.e. getting into a car driving as needed any time any place, as opposed to planning one's activity to make the transit time and effort more efficient, it also involves the perception of physical space an objects in that space from a vehicle moving at certain speed and confined to certain paths (as opposed to experiencing that space more immediately, as a pedestrian), and last but not least, the sense of social status bestowed by the type of automobile one drives.
If she decided to use transit and describe the hardship it creates - which is considerable in this country - her point would be easily lost on her audience. The middle class Homo Americanus could easily dismiss that hardship by attributing its source to what they see as natural, i.e. 'if they bought a car, as we do, most of their problems would be over." BE is skillful enough to avoid that story telling pitfall by showing that "they" do everything that "we" do, and yet they "ain't making it." Only then her narrative, addressed mainly for the middle class Homo Americanus, can work as intended.
To summarize, inasmuch as I value your comments about the elements of the working class life that are missing from BE's story, I also think that you miss the point that her job is to be an anthropologist not a proselyte. To be successful in that, she must immerse in the culture on which she is writing to the point of seeing its rich detail, but at the time she must maintain her immersion in the culture of her audience. Only then she can be an effective go-between. Not enough immersion would make her story shallow, too much of immersion would render that story misunderstood, if at all comprehensible. And to show that double immersion to both the subjects of her inquiry and her audiences, she must be selective in using cultural props that signal that immersion. That may explain why she did not renounce certain elements of her middle class status.
Wojtek