My fellow class migrants and transclass authors: we’ve shared our personal memories. Is our “transclass” literature inherently political? No. Should it be? Not necessarily. Why, then, do we always read it as such?

Shame and Guilt

A third of the way into Great Expectations, the protagonist Philip Pirrip leaves home. For mysterious reasons, Pip, a blacksmith’s apprentice, is bequeathed a huge sum of money, kicking off a narrative focused not on the means of social reproduction but on the atemporal curse of getting what you wish for.

Even though Pip’s path is hardly comparable to the typical transfuge de classe (or “transclass,” “class migrant”) journey in contemporary European literature, the hero of Charles Dickens’s thirteenth novel shares much with today’s class migrants: he leaves the village, arrives in the city, learns new manners, and comes to feel estranged from his origins. But unlike the protagonists of contemporary transclass novels, from Annie Ernaux to Édouard Louis, Pip eventually returns. After losing his fortune, he settles into a modest life and relinquishes the dream of permanent social ascent. Contemporary transclass narratives rarely permit such a return. Their protagonists may visit their families—Louis has by now written a separate book on his father, mother and brother—but their new social position is presented as definitive and irreversible.

If social mobility is seen as a one-way-ride, transclass literature is often less concerned with its actual mechanics than with the moral emotions it produces: having escaped the milieu from which they emerged, narrators frequently cast themselves as impostors marked by shame and guilt. Their success—the condition of their literary voice—depends on a flight (as the French term says), conditioned on distance from, or even betrayal of, their original milieu, family, community, and often language.

This stain of shame and betrayal is mirrored by the guilt felt (or performed) by authors born into wealthier families. At both ends of the class spectrum, writers therefore seem to believe that their literature must be better because it exhibits its social positionality: working-class writing is assumed to be legitimate per se—more inclusive, more political—while upper-middle-class and bourgeois literature begs for legitimacy through prolonged martyrdom over privilege (especially in a Catholic country like Italy).

My question is: Do these stains of shame and guilt, betrayal and uneasy self-consciousness, still hold in a social order in which narratives of upward mobility are becoming less and less plausible and in which the big city—the locus of class emancipation from Balzac and Dickens to Ernaux and Eribon—has become so inaccessible that even the middle classes can barely afford decent housing? Working-class students of today may still “betray” their original milieu by going to college and meeting other intellectuals, but even with a solid degree and a job, they can’t compete with the inherited wealth of their peers.

This has a straightforward effect on one of the central tropes of transclass literature: the impostor syndrome can hardly be felt in a world where social classes do not mingle. It is unclear if the “class traitor” remains a valuable prism for social analysis in a world in which cultural markers of class, education, wealth and social inclusion are constantly subverted, politicized and reappropriated, to the point where the richest men on earth can style themselves as cultural outsiders or social outcasts.

Keeping up With the Class Avengers

Even if the forms of social mobility that provided the conditions for transfuge de classe literature to prosper seem greatly diminished, it is worth considering what these by now canonical texts have accomplished. On December 7, 2022, Annie Ernaux delivered her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, describing her writing as a way of “avenging her people”—the marginalized, the social defectors, the class agitators. Ernaux’s prize marked the ultimate consecration of a literary genre whose success had begun in France but spread to all its neighboring countries. It placed the socially mobile memoirist of lower-class origin at the center of the literary world’s attention. According to Laélia Véron and Karine Abiven’s analysis in Trahir et venger: Paradoxes des récits de transfuge de classe (La Découverte, 2024), the term “transfuge de classe” appeared only twice in mainstream Francophone newspapers and magazines in 2015. By 2022, the number had risen to 300, including 75 occurrences of “transclass.”