Abstract
In his study on ordinary lives, precarious lives, French philosopher Guillaume Le Blanc alludes to the paradoxical necessity of finding a voice for the voiceless. Social vulnerability is synchronous with linguistic vulnerability so that precarious lives are sanctioned by inarticulacy. By selecting novels dealing with the hard and/or humdrum circumstances of growing up in dire straits, this paper examines how three novelists (Barry Hines, James Kelman and Stephen Kelman) have attempted to tackle the question of vocal and tonal authenticity. Barry Hines often claimed that in his stories he shunned the sophistication of literary experimentalism. To his metonymic logic can be opposed James Kelman’s raw, unmediated transcription of the long-winded monologue of a Glaswegian boy in the 1950s. Stephen Kelman, for his part, chose an eleven-year old boy recently arrived from Ghana in Pigeon (pidgin) Pigeon (pidgin) English published in 2011.
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