Marginalia as narratives of ordinary lives: Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall’s Down to This

Abstract

This article examines Canadian author Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall’s 2004 memoir Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shantytown through the notions of marginalia and the ordinary in order to question dichotomic representations of homelessness. It explores how the author moves beyond binaries, interrogating the dichotomy ordinary/out of the ordinary lives by narrating his ethical encounter with the other (Butler, 2004). The text is written as a journal where Bishop-Stall describes his personal journey through homelessness; and more importantly, it gives a voice to the other down-and-out people in notorious Toronto’s Tent City. The characters’ unreliable and fragmented storytelling uncovers the lives of the faceless others. I contend that in Down to This individuals’ life stories are connected to realities which question binaries through the re/mapping of ordinary experiences and affects; they disintegrate the opposition materiality vs abstraction, or as I argue, exclusion vs inclusion (out of the ordinary/ordinary). Down to These bridges the private details of the residents’ life stories, and the public perception of the problem of homelessness, illustrating how everyday moments of precarity intersect with wider political issues. In the process, the narrative also questions the binary attitudes of exclusion (disfranchisement) and inclusion (privilege). This literary strategy gives the constellation of stories a profound illuminating vision of the human condition. I show my point by drawing on the of marginalia (Kistner 2014), and by analysing the characters’ narratives of precariousness through the notions of editing and affective assemblage (Gerlach, 2015; Hamilakis, 2017).

Keywords

affects Canadian literature homelessness marginalia memoir Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall Tent City Toronto vulnerability

I need stories of Cosmopolitan hope — a dreaming forward —

In a world of often unbearable darkness…

I need stories of Empathy — my bridge to the others —

In a world of monologic terrorism.

I need stories of Human Flourishing — potential developed for all,

in a world of wasted lives.

– Ken Plummer, “A Manifesto for Social Stories” (2013: 219)

In this article, I wish to examine Canadian author Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall’s 2004 memoir Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shantytown from a point of view which interrogates the notions of marginalia and the ordinary in order to question dichotomic representations of homelessness.¹ The text is written as a journal where the author describes his personal journey through homelessness; and more importantly, it gives a voice to the other down-and-out people in Toronto’s notorious Tent City. In her online analysis of diary writing, José van Dijck muses that the genre is a way “of constructing life” in a social context that defines “individuality and collectivity” (2004: n.p.). Irina Paperno also observes that a diary recounts personal experiences “in historical and social contexts” (2004: 572). Drawing on Julie Rak’s words on the use of memoir in the Canadian political context, the genre “is a genre where problems with citizenship and identity are often worked on, worked out, and read about by others who want to understand what citizenship and belonging can mean” (2010: 11). So, a memoir communicates a reading of reality in a way that defines the writer’s identity (in progress) in relation to the surrounding world. Like Paperno, Jennifer Jensen states how a memoir links the writer’s inner life with the outer world in a determined historical moment (2006: 448). She muses that it is the use of “various literary techniques that can provide a complex glimpse of the historical reality of life” (2006: 453). In this sense, Bishop-Stall’s interactions and interviews with the other shantytown dwellers permitted him to connect emotionally with them, and reflect on his privileged upbringing. In fact, this technique — mingling journal entries and interviews — allows the narrative to focus on both the personal and the collective. As Zygmunt Bauman observes, “Stories are like searchlights and spotlights; they brighten up parts of the stage while leaving the rest in darkness” (2004: 17). In this sense, Down to These bridges the private details of the residents’ life stories, and the public perception of the problem of homelessness, illustrating how everyday moments of precarity intersect with wider political issues. In the process, the narrative also questions the binary attitudes of exclusion (disfranchisement) and inclusion (privilege). This literary strategy gives the constellation of stories a profound illuminating vision of the human condition.

For nine months in 2001, Bishop-Stall chronicled his experiences as a homeless person living in Toronto’s Tent City — alongside alcoholics, drug addicts, prostitutes, and violent derelicts. Although Bishop-Stall’s own detour into homelessness was voluntary, and temporary — unlike the other down-and-outs, who had no choice — he still suffered, as they did, from their everyday lack of shelter, warmth, security, privacy, food, and hope. Brian Bethune points out that alongside Bishop-Stall’s depiction of brutality, abjection, and social injustice is also what amounts to “a bizarre suburb, where babies were born and gardens tended, from which the inhabitants commuted daily to Toronto to work, beg or steal” (Bethune, 2004: 52). Tent City is in fact described as an organized, self-contained society where family bonds may still survive. By the end of Down to This, readers may feel that “the fixed and the unitary tale does not exist. Stories change, fragment, multiply, disperse” (Plummer, 2013: 211). The daily entries describe a fragmented and complex reality, a society with its own rules and organization and, as Plummer says, by narrating somebody’s life story, the teller transforms it into something real (ordinary); past and present experiences hold out the possibility of a future (2013: 211).

In my reading of Down to This, I have chosen to interpret the narrative by drawing theoretically on the concepts of marginalia and the ordinary. The literary concept of marginalia is usually understood as the annotations in the margins of a book (from the Latin adjective marginalis). Such addenda are not always unimportant. Heather Jackson’s work Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books includes a 1981 image from the National Archives of Canada, which warns readers that “underlining and marginal notations not only disfigure documents, but change their original meaning” (2001: 238; emphasis added). We might understand the idea of marginalia as literary spaces in progress: their narratives describe a shared worldview, an experience that is at once both personal and public. However, I also use the term as Ulrike Kistner does in the realm of politics, when she speculates that, socially speaking, marginalia can be viewed as “spaces and […] places no longer confined to margins or peripheries” (2014: 1). She transforms marginality into marginalia; into political spaces which confront the incapability of traditional politics to address effectively the rights of marginalized communities. In my view, merging the cultural and political definitions of marginalia make possible a version of reality consisting of many separate interpretations — some shared, some not, and none more important than the other.

Like the concept of marginalia, the concept of “the ordinary” can be a powerful one to analyse Bishop-Stall’s text. Kathleen Stewart describes it as “a shifting assemblage of practices and practical knowledges, a scene of both liveness and exhaustion, a dream of escape or of the simple life” (2007: 1). It was Stewart who pioneered the idea of “ordinary affects”, which she describes as “the varied, surging capacities to affect, and to be affected, that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergencies” (2007: 1–2). In this article, I intend to show how Down to This is able to move beyond the binary nature of identity (me/them; inclusion/exclusion) by effectively transforming Tent City, and the voices of its dwellers, into literary marginalia by reinterpreting the notion of the ordinary. The ordinary becomes a way of existing in the world which relies on connections and, as Stewart claims, it represents “a thing that has to be imagined and inhabited” (2007: 127). Through the reconceptualization of the ordinary, the narratives of marginalia are connected to an idea that undoes the hierarchical meaning of the opposition ordinary/out of the ordinary; marginalia write in terms of the ordinary understood as “a rubbing, a connection of some kind that has an impact. It’s transpersonal or prepersonal […] literally affecting one another and generating intensities” (Stewart, 2007: 128). The narratives of marginalia can also be understood through the lenses of Leticia Sabsay’s claim that “all our voices are mutually constitutive”, and the result is “a polyphonic palimpsest in which self and other can hardly be differentiated” (2016: 286). The question is, how can the traditional ontological connection between ordinary (privileged) and out of ordinary (disenfranchised) lives be viewed differently?

In Precarious Life, Butler describes the larger community’s lack of identification with vulnerability and precarity — “those who remain faceless” (2004: xviii). Such individuals suffer from “permeable borders, unexpected violence, dispossession, and fear” (2004: xii). The issue, she says, is not simply a matter of allowing the excluded to enter established society. Rather, what is needed is “an insurrection at the level of ontology”, a critical questioning of “Whose lives are real? How might reality be remade?” (Butler, 2004: 33). Butler calls this approach an “ethical encounter” (2004: 43), in which the others are humanized.

A related further social aspect that Bishop-Stall addresses in Down to This is the binary nature of identity (which I argue he is, finally, able to transcend); he never openly addresses the issue of privilege versus disenfranchisement. This is illustrated both in terms of “me” (the author) versus “them”; and (by extension) in terms of inclusion versus exclusion. I also choose to view it in terms of “ordinary” lives versus deprived lives (“out of the ordinary”). I argue that in Down to This, the ethical encounter blurs the distinctions between the ordinary and the out–of–the–ordinary, and helps the narrator to identify with the others. As Butler puts it, in situations when “we are addressed by s in ways that we cannot avert or avoid” (2004: 49), we are morally bound to respond appropriately. Through his ethical encounter with the other, as described in the book, Bishop-Stall is able to move beyond the binary concepts of inclusion and exclusion, ordinary and out-of-the-ordinary.

At the beginning of his narrative the author locates himself within the established dichotomy ordinary vs out of the ordinary, but by the end of the memoir he transcends this perception of reality through the narratives of marginalia. When he volunteers information about himself, he describes his past as ordinary in traditional terms. “My mother read to me at night. They gave my sisters and me names they would have liked for themselves, and trusted us to make of them whatever we wanted” (Bishop-Stall, 2004: 54).² By contrast, his homeless neighbours inhabit the “out of the ordinary”. They seem to live a timeless present of exclusion, apparently dispossessed of any sense of progress. Bishop-Stall’s worldview is at first defined by oppositions: he relies on the identity dichotomy of “me versus others” to make sense of his new reality. He maps the ontological borders between who he is, and who the shantytown dwellers are, the same way he delineates the physical borders between Tent City and the rest of Toronto. He views the shantytown as both a part of the metropolis, and at the same time far from it:

Tent City is on Lakeshore Boulevard, between Cherry Street and Parliament. It’s right on the edge of downtown, just a few kilometres from Filmores. But following the directions I got from someone on the street, it took about three hours and six miles of walking; and even then, I didn’t know I was there. (10)

But, as he comes to know these homeless people, he learns that they do in fact have life stories. This idea is voiced in the text, and announced to readers since the first pages. When Bishop-Stall describes the community in the introduction to Down to This (“Tent City. A Quick Explanation”), written by the end of his experience in the shantytown, he uses the pronoun “we” rather than “they” — marking his identification with the population. We might say that his ethical encounter with the other has blurred his initial identitary emplacement of “me versus them”:

Tent City is not a city, and we don’t live in tents. We live in shacks and shanties on the edge of Canada’s largest metropolis, where the river meets the lake. There’s a fence dividing these 27 acres from the rest of Toronto; and on this site we’ve built what dwellings we can with the rubble of scrapyard, a no-man’s landfill caught in confusion between the city and private business. Sometime it seems like a community, and sometimes like chaos. (1; emphasis added)

Because Bishop-Stall casts his net wide when telling the many stories of his strange new environment, the text is peopled with a sometimes confusing array of characters. Among these, five are most prominent: Jackie, Eddie, Karen, Calvin, and Hawk. The memories of their complex lives, unreliable and fragmented though they often are, uncover both their own personal miseries, and the wider social mechanisms of exclusion in a way that illustrates the connection between the two. Jackie is a drug addict who becomes “paranoid when she’s on crack” (232), and has lost all her six children to the Children’s Aid Society. The same is true of Eddie and his girlfriend, Karen, who are also junkies and whose newborn child, Caleb, was taken into custody too. Calvin, also an addict, “is always smiling”; he “looks like a leprechaun, and develops a Newfie accent whenever he gets drunk or excited” (60). Hawk views himself as the community’s enforcer. “I break legs. Break necks if I have to, if there’s somebody on the wrong side of the fence…. What about you? You on the right side?” (18). As Bishop-Stall describes the disenfranchised people he lives among, he gives shape to the stories of his characters. After all, as Ken Plummer points out, “stories tell us what it means to be living and human” (2013: 211). As shown in the quotation below, the narrator’s affectsphere³ comes to be filled by the new people in his life. Down to This enacts what Joe Gerlach would call a sociopolitical editing, that is, reinterpreting the cultural outlook of a neoliberal society by mapping onto it the reality of the other (2015: 280). In his view, such literature is a cultural space that chronicles “affects, attitudes, bodily dispositions, collective sensibilities, spaces and events” that may be transformative, but are often “in a register largely ignored” (2015: 274). In Down to This, the harsh realities of life for the homeless characters part company with ordinary experiences, forcing the readers to remap (or edit anew) their worldview:

I love Eddie coming over to “check on me” all the time, bringing drinks or bumming them […] I love my little brother, Calvin. I love his smiling shiny eyes and that he asks me if I’m doing okay whenever he is not […] I love Les’s constant babble, his cowboy walk and his silly-hay collection […] I love Violet, who is 6 years old and Brenda’s daughter. Her father brings her to Tent City to see her mother at least once a month, driving up in a nice new car. (152–153)

Down to This gives individual voices to its characters: they tell their stories in their own words, with their own interpretations. Hawk, for instance, is a manipulative character who peppers his tales with events that are most likely invented (“I haven’t verified his facts”, Bishop-Stall tells us drily (171)). Hawk claims to have been born in Sicily, from whence his family migrated to Hamilton, Ontario, when he was a baby. By the time he was nine, he was already a member of a gang, and later of the mafia. He also claimed that he won a world Kung Fu championship, and that he spent ten years in the Collins Bay Institution for murder. He chose to live in the shantytown for the sake of freedom: “All I have is just me, my trailer…. That’s a great feeling, [you] know what I mean? Nothing to look to, nothing I have responsibility to take care of […] Just me and God. That’s it […] You can’t beat that, brother” (179). Jackie, 32, came from Kingston, Ontario. She summarizes her upbringing in the following quote: “I guess it was like […] a lot of ups and downs. I mean, I didn’t come from a rich family, and I didn’t come from a poor family. My stepdad drank a lot…. We had to go to church every Saturday” (252).

Karen, Eddie’s partner, “lives on cigarettes, beer, crack and Zoodles” (196). She claims she came from a family with a bit of money, but ended up on the street due to her alcoholism. When the author commented that most alcoholics don’t end up on the street, her response was succinct: “Switched to crack” (205). These Tent City tales incorporate what Snow and Anderson see as the basic patterns of homeless identity: “distancing, embracements, fictive storytelling” (1987: 1363). Yet in spite of the characters’ lax relationship with factual accuracy, most of their narratives are neither static nor atemporal, but “change with the passage of time on the streets” (Snow and Anderson, 1987: 1364). Calvin’s disconnected and incoherent narrative (edited by Bishop-Stall) portrays a life marked by violence and addiction. He tells of his abusive stepfather, and of how he married at fifteen because he got his girlfriend pregnant:

I was only 14. All I did was kiss her and hold her hand, you know, fucking 14-year-olds, you know, b’y, good shit. I figured, okay, this is going to last, right. But I got drunk, pissed her off, so she didn’t want to be with a fucking drunk. (158).

Eventually, Calvin kills his niece’s rapist and spends ten years in prison:

Judge says twenty-five, no parole […] the sentence comes down, and all of a sudden my knees just went. I’ll never see my daughter, I’ll never see my wife, I lost everything I fucking own. Ah, it was scary at first […] I was in [prison] alone, on my own. But when I walked in, they’d all read the paper, they all knew who I was, right, so a lot of the guys were respecting me for what I did. (159–160).

These biographical narratives reconstruct what Christian Tileaga calls a “usable past”, using biography as a way of “coming to terms with the past” (2011: 198–199). It also permits a “reconstruction of personal history” (2011: 211) that helps people to redefine themselves. Their personal narratives bridge the identitary process: by telling their stories, Calvin and Eddie situate themselves as real social beings, with a historical aspect to their lives. Despite their mental issues or addictions, the characters display an assemblage of memories and feelings from their intimate affectsphere. For example, Eddie, the junky, tells Bishop-Stall about his suicide attempt, and his history of violence:

Set myself on fire, too […] And hung myself […] So after I got out of the infirmary, they put me in the nuthouse for three years — or it was supposed to be. But then I killed a guy with a shovel. And this was ‘78 […] I guess I just realized that I’d spend my whole life in jail, if I kept going at everybody who pissed me off. So, I learned to talk. (392)

Bishop-Stall comments that Eddie has in fact become “a good talker”, and “the most diplomatic guy I ever met” — which, considering that this man had “stabbed twenty-two people”, made him laugh (392). The point of such anecdotes, though, is that the recounting of events is their own interpretation of a diachronic process of identity formation: it tells who people were, who they are now, and how they got there. Despite normative ideas about hierarchies and social stratification, these down-and-outers are still able to touch readers with their essential humanity — resetting the boundaries of the self versus the other. Those stories could (with a few modifications) be anybody’s life story; and this fact lays bare what Sabsay calls the “boundaries of the vulnerable ‘I’” (2016: 286) — an innate permeability that is shared by all human beings. As Butler points out, this common trait of vulnerability is “understood as relational and social” (2016: 4) — as is the shared experience of homelessness.

Boydell et al. define the homeless person’s identitary perception of self as a “particular form of personal identity that the actor claims for the self, and experiences in terms of self-feelings” (2000: 28). Bishop-Stall’s delineation of each character makes clear their “felt-identity and trans-situational self” (Boydell et al., 2000: 28), so we may consider them as agents presenting their own identities. The stories of Eddie, Karen, Jackie, Calvin, and Hawk are not represented as being out of time, but rather follow their own discursive timeline. This includes a past self, often related to the loss of a previous social identity (Boydell et al., 2000: 30); a present self, who develops an “adaptive coping strategy” (Boydell et al., 2000: 31); and the perception that there may (possibly) be a future self. Calvin, for example, dreams of moving out West to run a horse farm and stay with his adult children. His son had sent money for a bus ticket, but “he had to stop in Sudbury to get it, so he wouldn’t just drink the money away in Toronto” (276). By the end of the book, he has in fact left the shantytown, and is living in Calgary with a new girlfriend (385).

As the author shares with us the personal voices and memories of the book’s characters, this process allows an editing of reality to take place, making visible new ethical relationships. These work to delegitimize the stigma of the marginalized, in which homeless people “are regarded as a social category” — even as a “superfluous population”, as David Snow and Leon Anderson put it (1987: 1339–1340). Roxanne Rimstead wrote that traditional narratives of poverty usually contain the poor “in ghettoized or stigmatized spaces” (2001: 8), allowing the dominant society to consider them as others. The marginalized are then further degraded by “insults, stereotypes, or euphemisms such as ‘welfare bums’, the ‘underclass’, ‘trailer trash,’” and so on (2001: 8). In general, homeless people are defined by what the collective imaginary of wealthy Western society views as fringe (out of the ordinary) activities. In a culture that values material possessions, the homeless own next to nothing; they lack the most basic comforts and conveniences, such as shelter, heat, light, and sanitation; and they also lack any sense of security or privacy. Their everyday lives revolve around the struggle to survive; and their emotional states are warped by drugs and alcohol. Their self-narratives tend to embellish a sad reality with fantasies and outright lies (McCarthy, 2013; Cronley, 2010; Beneventi, 2009).

Geoffrey DeVerteuil, John May, and Jürgen von Mahs claim that the homeless are usually represented in public social discourses as a largely homogeneous group (2009: 618) — faceless people, with any individual differences erased by social stigma. As a result, their unique personal stories are not acknowledged, and their distinctive humanity is denied. Down to This fights back against that view by focusing on the inner lives of the excluded subjects. Bishop-Stall, for example, also voices his own uneasiness with how the media portray the homeless using conventional images. At one point in one of the journal entries of his memoir, the narrator informs that he was invited to the premiere of a documentary about Tent City (which was actually made before he moved there). He writes:

Yesterday evening I went with Jane to a showing of a documentary on Tent City in the ballroom of the Hyatt-Regency Hotel. The screening was sponsored by the Ontario Nurses’ Union, and the heroes of the film are the members of the TDRC [Toronto Disaster Relief Committee], the head of which — Cathy Crow — is herself a nurse. It was surreal, sitting there among all these well-off, well-meaning professionals, listening to speeches and badly written poems about how we should all be nicer to bums and beggars. (143)

To his surprise, he saw that the film focused on two of the shantytown’s most disruptive inhabitants, Patrick and Karl. Patrick was an alcoholic and a drug dealer; Karl relied on violence to gain control of the community. One day he provoked a fight during a gathering in one of the shacks: “Karl’s sick soul began to swell. He turned, took a swing, and hit Karen across the side with a two-by-four” (46). The documentary, however, portrayed them quite differently. As Bishop-Stall wryly observed, “these two guys, who had given me a shit-kicking for Christmas, came across as politically aware, humanitarian hobos with hearts of dented gold” (144). Barbara Schneider believes that such media portrayals of homelessness help to promote a narrative “that marginalizes the people who experience it, and contributes to their social exclusion” (2011: 72). In a study of journalistic sources, she analyses how the information presented transmits a dichotomous image of either the deserving or undeserving poor. “Homeless people are not completely deprived of a voice, but they are relegated to a very specific kind of voice”, she writes (2011: 81). In a 2014 article on social inequality, Schneider observes that the public discourse on homelessness establishes a socially acceptable idea of what the homeless are — an approach that “reproduces social inequalities rather than interrupting them” (2014: 6). The public sympathy shown to the “deserving poor” usually vanishes when it learns of the wilder side of homeless life: “fights in shelters, drug and alcohol addictions, and interactions with police” (2014: 7). The Tent City film reproduced such a point of view. It was initially made with the laudable goals of detailing the efforts of the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee, and trying to give a face to what Bishop-Stall called “the hard-core homeless” (144). But by hiding the true abjection of homeless life, the documentary avoided posing politically charged questions about the role of neoliberal society; and by ignoring the desperate issues of addiction, violence, and destitution, it failed to present a true portrait. Bishop-Stall noted how “surreal” he found it — in the midst of his own shantytown experience — to be sitting in the ballroom of the Hyatt-Regency Hotel for the premiere. By pitching its message in this way to a well-intentioned, middle-class audience, the film essentially fostered a moral approach to the issue of homelessness. Sabsay observes that it is not uncommon for the media to fail to show the wider social context for those who suffer from marginalized life conditions. Such humanitarian evocations, she claims, “tend to cover up the murderous governmental logic” (2016: 280) of austerity policies such as neoliberalism.

In her review of the social construction of homelessness, Lindsey McCarthy says that the homeless become “objects of discourse” (2013: 53), with the homeless identity “foisted on them” (2013: 53). Neoliberal society sees the homeless as “others” because their lives are considered “outside the norm” (2013: 53). This reinforces a stereotyped view of homeless individuals as “passive, lazy, disaffiliated, and disempowered” (Cohen and Wagner, 1992, qtd. in Boydell et al., 2000: 26). The social stigma they suffer from victimizes them almost as much as their material problems. As Don Mitchell (2013) points out, civic authorities are tending more and more to enact punitive policies, such as limiting access to city spaces. The voiceless community of the homeless, on the margins of society, is effectively criminalized by current neoliberal policies. Courtney Cronley muses that neoliberal politics tends to ignore its own role in the gradual disintegration of the welfare state, shifting the burden of homelessness onto individual failure rather than society’s. She writes that the inability “to locate and retain housing becomes a matter of individual-level factors and personal choice. Those without homes are either deviant of dysfunctional” (2010: 324). As McCarthy points out, the homeless identity “is not something derived from within”; rather, it is “a set of behaviours externally imposed” (2013: 55). Bishop-Stall questions stereotypes and describes homelessness from within, the result is that those strict ontological categories are warped. When he turns his narratives of homelessness into literary marginalia, the community becomes both the subject and object of discourse. This means, as McCarthy muses, that the homeless identity can be then “negotiated” by the people who actually experience it (2010: 48). The book generates a new composite text that humanizes the people, and transforms them into the subjects of their own discourse.

As Bishop-Stall recollects in Down to This, a year after he left Tent City, in September 2002, the shantytown was demolished. “The 27 acres have been bulldozed. Nothing grows there now — it’s the most barren patch of earth you’ll ever see”, he wrote (381). The Toronto Disaster Relief Committee organized a social programme to relocate the former residents, and some were able to re-enter society; others did not want to change their way of living. Six months later, a meeting was held to examine the results of the initiative. Bishop-Stall attended this, and also a “reunion” for the scattered shantytown dwellers to catch up with one another. He learned that Jackie had been relocated, and planned to start studying social work. Not all the others were so lucky, however.

None of the dealers came to the reunion, and neither did Hawk, Pops or Karl. Everybody said that Karen and Eddie were going to be there, but they never showed up. Any day now, Karen was going to have another child […] I hear they’re living outside the city now, in some crack-fuelled housing project…. Although some of us were missing, the reunion [was] a celebration to the end. (385)

Down to This does not address homelessness as a mere spectral presence in the imagery of our culture. The characters’ lives that Bishop-Stall describes so vividly are not presented as excluded, or out of the ordinary; and as a result, they become, for readers of the book, ordinary lives. The ordinary is composed of a random assemblage of events and affective connections which are represented in the text by the narratives of marginalia. They produce maybe utopian ways to interconnect with other living beings, and the environment. The precariousness and vulnerability that we all feel, to some degree, in the early twenty-first century in contemporary society, is a common and shared element of life, and it sets aside the neoliberal dichotomy of the loser versus winner. Stewart describes this when she speaks of “the intimate impacts” of social forces, which can “pull the subject into places it didn’t exactly ‘intend’ to go” (2007: 40). For example, in Down to This, the narrator, who at first tried to maintain an emotional distance from the other dwellers of Tent City, grows more and more interconnected with them. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Feliz Guattari (1987), Yannis Hamilakis considers the assemblage of affective, sensorial, and political elements (including memory and temporality) as interconnected through ordinary affects, he says: “there are three further features of assemblages which hold special importance […] the affective/sensorial, the mnemonic/temporal, and the political. These should not be seen as independent, but rather as interconnected” (2017: 172). The narrative assemblage of the characters’ memories produces a new editing of the ordinary, a relational web of affects and meanings; in fact, the shared experiences of homelessness of the dwellers of Tent City intersect with their “personal stories” (Black, 2008: 95) and affectspheres. In this textual space, “disposable” subjects (Evans and Giroux, 2015: 46) are humanized (rather than perceived as mere collateral damage from neoliberal policies).

I draw on Marianne Hirsch’s words to interpret the narrator’s standpoint in relation to his characters’ life stories. Bishop-Stall is able to “retell them without appropriating them” (2016: 79); his narratives of marginalia “have offered a lens through which to recognize forgotten or disposable lives and stories, and also to acknowledge injury and injustice” (Hirsch, 2016: 79). Marginalia dissolve the dichotomy between the ordinary and the not-ordinary and also interrogate existing neoliberal interpretations of subjectivity — with their notions of disposability, and winners versus losers. In Down to This, Bishop-Stall’s real-life marginalized characters are able to claim the authority of their narratives, making them meaningful and relevant. The book becomes a process of deterritorialization; it presents a literary reality that suggests an alternative way to connect with the other, in the final lines of the text he claims that

Very few of those who were not born healthy and well-off, to a kind and loving family, can transcend the squalor without help — and for some, it will come too late. I had every opportunity in the world […] But when it came down to this, even I could barely make it through. So be good to people; be good to vagrants, beggars, winos, buskers, con-men and tramps. They are like you, or else you are like me, and I am just lucky. (387)

The book’s analysis focuses on the sensorial and affective elements of the homeless condition, and its necessary detour from reality. As Simon During points out, literature provides the means to perceive and understand precariousness (2015: 82). Down to This maps the protagonists’ lives — the assemblage of their memories, affects, and historical situatedness — in a way that enables them to establish their own identities. Their narratives describe traumas, violence, exclusion, addictions, mental health problems, and dysfunctional families; but they also disclose the characters’ most intimate feelings, and their fears and hopes for the future.

As Lewis Williams et al. suggest, for the homeless to tell their stories challenges “dominant social discourses” (2003: 34), since the public domain is usually the domain of the affluent. Different perspectives are not usually welcome, nor are possible attempts to influence politics (2003: 34). But speaking out, telling silenced stories, offers huge benefits to a community, giving it the chance to establish a common narrative: people can then see their lives as interconnected (2003: 36). As Butler suggests, this is “a trans-individual way to be in the world” (10). In Down to This, life stories represent a new social and personal cartography, in which the author deliberately limns a new kind of relational and collective literary space, what Gerlach calls “virtual and emergent spaces” (2015: 282). Leticia Sabsay muses that “we are radically dependent on others, and on the material and social world in which we come into being, and which might sustain us or fail to sustain us. To be vulnerable implies the capacity to affect and be affected” (2016: 285). Marginalia are, in fact, about writing a relational subject who opposes neoliberal individualism; it edits a literary reality which suggests an alternative way to be in the world that accepts vulnerability as a feeling shared by all humanity.

Footnotes

Funding

This work was supported by a grant from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (FFI2015- 63895-C2-1-R).

ORCID iD

Silvia Julia Caporale-Bizzini

Notes

References

Bauman

(2004) Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Beneventi

(2009) Exposed to the elements: Homelessness in recent Canadian fiction. In: Anctil

Loiselle

Rolfe

(eds) Canada Exposed/Le Canada à découvert. Canadian Studies/Études Canadiennes 20: 85–100.

Bethune

(2004) Kind hearts and crackheads. Macleans 117(18): 52–53.

Bishop-Stall

(2004) Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shantytown. Toronto: Vintage Canada.

Black

(2008) Deliberation, storytelling, and dialogic moments. Communication Theory 18: 93–116.

Boydell

Goering

Morrell-Bellai

(2000) Narratives of identity: Re-presentation of self in people who are homeless. Qualitative Health Research 10(1): 26–38.

Butler

(2004) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso.

Butler

(2016) Rethinking vulnerability and resistance. In: Butler

Gambetti

Sabsay

(eds) Vulnerability in Resistance. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 12–27.

Cronley

(2010) Unravelling the social construction of homelessness. Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment 20(2): 319–333.

10.

Deleuze

Guattari

(1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

11.

DeVerteuil

May

von Mahs

(2009) Complexity not collapse: Recasting the geographies of homelessness in a “punitive” age. Progress in Human Geography 33(5): 646–666.

12.

Docot

Hallenbeck

Patchin

Pickell

Ranslem

(2013) Review of Cruel Optimism. Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 20(4): 551–552.

13.

During

(2015) From the subaltern to the precariat. Boundary 2 42(2): 57–84.

14.

Evans

Giroux

(2015) Disposable Futures. The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle. San Francisco: City Lights Books.

15.

Fetherling

(2001) The Vintage Book of Canadian Memoirs. Toronto: Vintage Canada.

16.

Gerlach

(2015) Editing worlds: Participatory mapping and a minor geopolitics. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 40: 273–286.

17.

Glasser

Hirsch

(2014) Understanding homelessness: from memoir to pathways home. Choice 51(9): 1523–1531.

18.

Hamilakis

(2017) Sensorial assemblages: Affect, memory and temporality in assemblage thinking. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 27(1): 169–182.

19.

Hirsch

(2016) Vulnerable times. In: Butler

Gambetti

Sabsay

(eds) Vulnerability in Resistance. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 76–96.

20.

Jackson

(2001) Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

21.

Jensen Wallach

( 2006) Building a bridge of words: The literary autobiography as historical source material. Biography 29(3): 446–461.

22.

Kistner

(2014) The “political society” of the governed? Marginalia beyond “marginalization”. Theological Studies 70(1). Available at: www.hts.org.za/index.php/HTS/article/view/2618/525 (accessed May 2017).

23.

McCarthy

(2013) Homelessness and identity: A critical review of the literature and theory. People, Place and Policy Online 7(1): 46–58.

24.

Mitchell

(2013) Tent cities: Interstitial spaces of survival. In: Brighenti

(ed.) Urban Interstices: The Aesthetics and the Politics of the In-Between. London: Routledge, 66–85.

25.

Paperno

(2004) What can be done with diaries? Russian Review 63: 561–573.

26.

Plummer

(2013) A manifesto for social stories. In: Stanley

(ed.) Documents of Life Revisited: Narrative and Biographical Methodology for a 21st Century Critical Humanism. London: Routledge, 209–291.

27.

Rak

( 2010) Insecure citizenship: Michael Ignatieff, Memoir, Canada. Biography 33(1): 1–23.

28.

Rimstead

(2001) Remnants of Nation: On Poverty Narratives by Women. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

29.

Sabsay

(2016) Permeable bodies: Vulnerability, affective powers, hegemony. In: Butler

Gambetti

Sabsay

(eds) Vulnerability in Resistance. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 278–302.

30.

Schneider

(2014) Homelessness: Emotion discourse and the reproduction of social inequality. Canadian Journal of Communication 39: 1–13.

31.

Schneider

(2011) Sourcing homelessness: How journalists use sources to frame homelessness. Journalism 13(1): 71–86.

32.

Snow

Anderson

(1987) Identity work among the homeless: The verbal construction and avowal of personal identities. American Journal of Sociology 92(6): 1336–1371.

33.

Stewart

(2007) Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

34.

Tileaga

(2011) (Re)writing biography: Memory, identity, and textually mediated reality in coming to terms with the past. Culture and Psychology 17(2): 197–215.

35.

Van Dijck

(2004) Composing the self: Of diaries and lifelogs. FibreCulture (3). Available at: http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue3/issue3_vandijck.html (accessed February 2019).

36.

Williams

Labonte

O’Brien

(2003) Empowering social action through narratives of identity and culture. Health Promotion International 18(1): 33–40. Available at: https://academic.oup.com/heapro/article-abstract/18/1/33/895089 (accessed July 2018).