Abstract
The article offers an analysis of Underground, published by Canadian writer June Hutton in 2009. The main protagonist of the novel is a young Canadian, Albert Fraser, who suffers severe shock and disillusionment in the trenches of the First World War. He faces unemployment and destitution during the Great Depression and eventually joins the 1,700 Canadian volunteers who fought in the anti-fascist cause during the Spanish Civil War. My purpose is to analyse Hutton’s representation of the Canadian veterans’ difficult reintegration in the post-war years and the protagonist’s prise de conscience which ultimately leads him to Spain, despite his hatred of war. While discussing the veterans’ discontent and the Canadian government’s attempts to control this unruly population, I refer to Judith Butler’s conceptualization of precariousness and precarity, as well as Giorgio Agamben’s philosophical reflection on biopolitics and bare life. Central in my reading is the terrain of the camp — the hobo camp, the relief camp, and the POW camp — as a site of biopolitical exclusion, yet also a space of encounter that triggers ethical reflection. Furthermore, I demonstrate how the novel stages unexpected alliances between the protagonist and Chinese characters, which cause Fraser to revise his racist opinions. I propose the concept of multidirectional vulnerabilities to explore the parallels between these apparently disjointed geographies and temporalities. The article shows how Hutton represents the vulnerability of Canadian bodies in a historical period of socio-political upheavals, yet at the same time locates in their vulnerability the possibility of resistance and an alternative ethics.
Keywords
This article provides an analysis of June Hutton’s novel Underground (2009) in the light of political philosophy. Underground focuses on the life of Albert (“Al”) Fraser, who was born, symbolically, on 1 January 1900, and becomes involved in various national and international crises in the first decades of the twentieth century. Relying on substantial historical research, as documented in the novel’s End Note and Acknowledgments, Hutton explores the impact of the First World War, the Great Depression, and the Spanish Civil War on her protagonist, as well as the parallels between these political and social upheavals. While the Great War and the economic slump of the 1930s in Canada have been relatively well documented, the history of Canadian volunteers who participated in the civil war in Spain is not widely known. Hutton fills in an important blank spot in national memory, yet she depicts this particular history through its entanglement with other traumas of the twentieth century. Her novel can be thus interpreted as putting into practice Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory: it brings together various histories, highlighting their political specificities and cultural differences, yet at the same time disclosing fascinating similarities within these “asymmetrical constellations” (Rothberg, 2009: 263).
My reading of Underground largely relies on the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, the main proponent of the concept of biopolitics, referring to the management of life by the state or other forms of sovereign power (Mills, 2018: 5). Agamben sees Western politics as defined by the state of exception, an apparatus particularly useful during wars, which, however, in contemporary democracies entails “an unprecedented generalization of the paradigm of security” and takes the form of surveillance and population management (Agamben, 2005: 14). He identifies the opposition between zoē and bios, natural life and political existence, as fundamental to Western politics. For Agamben, the biological life of individuals is excluded from Western politics, but at the same time it is included as homo sacer or bare life, a life that cannot be sacrificed, but can be killed without punishment (Agamben, 1998: 8–9, 90). Homo sacer, a figure borrowed from Roman law, is a non-person, an outcast, who lives outside of juridical rule, stripped of every right, “at every instant exposed to an unconditional threat of death” (Agamben, 1998: 183). Agamben developed the theory of bare life in relation to the inmates of the Nazi concentration camp, defined as a zone of indistinction and “a space for naked life as such” (Agamben, 2005: 41). However, the philosopher emphasizes that the camp as a “dislocating localization is the hidden matrix of the politics in which we still live” (Agamben, 2000: 43). 1 In this article, I therefore propose to apply the Agambenian concept of bare life to a variety of historical and geographical contexts, in Canada and beyond. Additionally, while Agamben focuses on relations of extreme violence in which resistance is hardly possible, I define power after Michel Foucault, Jenny Edkins, and Véronique Pin-Fat as productive of subjects, not only as a static, oppressive mechanism in control of them. Such an approach allows us to conceive the forms of freedom and resistance available to those who are apparently powerless, and to inscribe Judith Butler’s reflections on vulnerability, precarity, and sociality into the biopolitical framework.
Trauma
Underground has a fragmentary structure and illustrates various formative incidents in the life of the protagonist. The most important of these is the Great War, which is encapsulated in the novel’s brief prologue. In 1916 Al volunteers for the front to run away from an abusive father and his job at a coal mine in British Columbia, which he finds deeply depressing and traumatizing. Like many young men at the beginning of the twentieth century, he treats the war as an opportunity to prove his manhood. During the First World War, Canadians were represented by propaganda as strong, courageous, intrepid men from the north, ready to fight in defence of civilization (Keshen, 2003: 4). The elite memory of the conflict, which gained prominence in the post-war years, promoted a vision of the Great War as a nation-building experience (Vance, 1997: 260–261). The battle of Vimy (9–12 April 1917), during which the four Canadian divisions fought together for the first time, provided “the emotional/sentimental foundations of nationhood” (Keshen, 2003: 20). Canada entered the war as a dominion of the British Empire, yet the remarkable performance of Canadian soldiers “had created a new, strong, and internationally respected nation” (Keshen, 2003: 11). The Fallen were glorified in collective memory as Christ-like figures, who sacrificed themselves for Canada and the world (Vance, 1997: 71–72). The mythologization of the conflict erased the brutal realities of the war — death, injury, trauma — which cost Canada 60,000 lives. However, Hutton challenges the national mythology by exposing the bodily frailty of the soldier and his lack of agency. Buried after a shell explosion during the Somme offensive, held underground in a tomb-like space, losing consciousness because of lack of oxygen, Al believes that he is more dead than alive. After he is miraculously rescued, his body is filled with sand and pieces of shrapnel. Spending days at the hospital, the protagonist spits, coughs, urinates and defecates sand; he struggles to move his legs, so heavy are they with the dirt clogging his veins. This image of the combatant’s body bloated with the detritus of the battlefield renders in a graphic way how the war has invaded his intimate self. His experience of live burial, deeply entrenched in his mind, resurfaces over the course of the novel in the form of flashbacks which shed light on his war neurosis. Like his memory, his body is forever brutalized by war; for years, he will have to cut the shrapnel out when it resurfaces under his skin, a tangible reminder of the traumatic imprint of the past.
According to Eric J. Leed, by transgressing boundaries — “between life and death, man and animal, or man and machine” — the First World War veteran became a liminal figure of abjection, whose reintegration was a difficult task (Leed, 1979: 19, 194). Al’s premature burial epitomizes for Hutton’s protagonist, as it did for many ex-servicemen of the First World War, his isolation from the world of the living, which removed him “further and further from the values, sensory certainties, and hierarchies of status that had once rendered his experience unambiguous and his ‘self’ identifiable” (Leed, 1979: 23). Having lost his basic civilized inhibitions in a world of unprecedented violence, having shared a subterranean existence with vermin and rats, and having been buried alive and literally fed with the debris of war, Al returns to Canada, “[a] cadaver in a khaki suit” (Hutton, 2009: 17). 2 When he travels back to British Columbia, the protagonist feels deeply estranged from civilians and is irritated by their celebration of war glory and heroism. His traumatic experience provides him with a form of “disjunctive” knowledge (Leed, 1979: 75), an insight which strips him of any illusions about the war. In his eyes it was “[a] rotten mess. It was all about sending over bodies to replace the fallen bodies. Bodies everywhere” (32). Rather than virile heroes, the soldiers became “laborers of death” (Leed, 1979: 206), homines sacri, or bare life.
The title of this part of the novel, “Afterdamp”, refers both to the traumatic sequelae of war and the toxic mixture of gases in a mine after an explosion, revealing the production of disposable lives in early twentieth-century Canada. Because of the incompetence of Al’s father, the Frasers struggle to survive in an abandoned cabin near Nanaimo, on the east coast of Vancouver Island. The only option for Al when he returns to British Columbia is to take back his job at the mine, which he is incapable of accepting after being buried alive in Europe. He knows that, while chopping coal in the dark tunnels, the workers can be killed at any moment, exposed to various injuries, drownings, cave-ins, gas explosions, and the fumes released after a blast. The underground space, in the mine and at the front, represents for him a shattering encounter with death, a radical exposure of the body, and an abject confrontation with his vulnerability. Finding himself in a cul-de-sac, with bitterness he realizes that the combatant/veteran is utterly dispensable, both in war and amid the realities of profit-oriented economics. War proves to be only an extreme form of exploitation, “a place where inequalities of wealth and status became inequalities of sacrifice and suffering” (Leed, 1979: 2007). Hutton’s protagonist is deeply angered by the senseless violence that he and his comrades-in-arms have been exposed to; his experience of humiliation and utter powerlessness fills him with profound resentment. Sadly, his parents are insensitive to his ordeal and expect him to go back to work immediately. He blames them for the death of his sister, who dies of lung disease, but also of destitution and neglect. Importantly, as Edkins (2003: 4) contends, traumatic events often involve a betrayal of trust, which breaks any illusion of safety and the bond between personhood and community. In Underground Al feels deeply mistreated by the nation and the family, the two groups that should provide human existence with meaning and dignity. Consequently, he finds shelter in an extreme individualism, distancing himself from others.
Bare life
The dehumanizing effects of the war and capitalism become more pronounced in the layers of the novel depicting Al’s life in the 1920s. After his parents’ death, he moves to Vancouver where he works as a painter of ceilings. He is determined to leave his abject past behind and aspires to a middle-class existence. Yet, the past keeps haunting him: sounds, sights, smells remind him of the war, and make him re-enter trauma time. Traumatic memory destabilizes his illusions of refinement and respectability. Pieces of shrapnel keep resurfacing under his skin, forcing him to confront the abject within. His proletarian condition is painfully highlighted in an encounter with the Gordons, the wealthy owners of the magnificent house which he is renovating. Having stepped outside, overwhelmed by flashbacks, he accidentally meets Mrs Gordon, who is enraged by his presence in her garden. When Al tries to explain who he is, she interrupts him by saying, “Who do you think you are? […] I don’t care about your name!” (43). Her husband then shoves past him and throws him off balance. Hutton thus emphasizes how the modern capitalist nation-state deprives identity of personhood, forcing into presence, to adapt Edkins, a being “as an object not as a person”, a being that “is missing, objectified, instrumentalised, disappeared” (Edkins, 2015: 7). Like the soldiers at the front, the workers in post-war Canada are perceived as docile cogs in the capitalist machine. As such, they cannot elicit individual attention or compassion.
The protagonist’s sense of non-existence deepens during the economic slump of the 1930s, depicted in poignant terms in the novel. For Canadians, the Great Depression still represents the most catastrophic decade of the twentieth century, associated as it is with the trauma of unemployment and loss of material security. The economic crisis, which began in the summer of 1929, paralysed the country for ten years and ended only with the outbreak of the Second World War (Horn, 1984: 3; Campbell, 2009: 4–5). While the rate of unemployment was two to four per cent in 1929, it ranged from 19 to 27 per cent of Canadian workers in 1933. In the years 1934–1935, approximately two million people in Canada received relief subsidies, which was considered “a humiliating stigma” (Horn, 1984: 10). In Underground, Al loses his job two years after the Wall Street Crash. While married men receive relief payments, he joins the crowd of disaffected single men, lining up at soup kitchens, sleeping in flophouses. Eventually, he moves to a hobo camp, where he shares a tent and whatever food they manage to procure with other men. Hutton represents unemployment as a profoundly shameful experience primarily because it challenges prevalent notions of masculinity. According to Lara Campbell, in the 1930s Canadians still connected masculine self-worth with paid labour, key “to being an active and respectable participant in the social and economic order” (2009: 59). For Hutton’s protagonist, who enlisted at the tender age of 16 and sent home all his army pay for two years, loss of work is particularly difficult to endure. Together with the other hobos at the camp, he realizes that “[w]ithout jobs we’re nothing” (69). In their eyes, masculinity continues to be defined in terms of strength, resilience, and independence. This is why it is difficult for them to accept what they see as their newly acquired weakness and passivity.
Whereas in the hobo camp the jobless men manage to maintain some form of agency, designing their own rules and cherishing whatever privacy is left to them, when the camp is attacked by the mounted police their existence is reduced to bare life. Underground shows that the state, which is supposed to protect the most destitute, becomes, quoting Butler, precisely that from which they require protection. To be protected from violence by the nation-state is to be exposed to the violence wielded by the nation-state, so to rely on the nation-state for protection from violence is precisely to exchange one potential violence for another. (2010: 26; emphasis in original)
Al and his companions are herded together and transported to a relief camp, where they are forced to work on the construction of a road. Such camps were created by the Canadian government for unemployed single men who were ineligible for subsidies. From October 1932 to June 1936 they offered refuge to 170,000 Canadians. Situated far from major cities, the camps were built to isolate this “transient menace” from law-abiding citizens, at the same time protecting the disaffected men from potential communist agitators. In fact, the camps were similar to prisons and subjected men to a biopolitical regime (Horn, 1984: 12; Petrou, 2008: 29–30). In Underground, the inmates of the relief camp are segregated, watched, and submitted to various forms of inspection and control. Initially, they develop an illusion of security, since, although exhausted by the hard work, they are at least fed properly. They soon realize, however, that the construction of the road is not important in itself; it is just to keep them occupied and thus to quell their discontent. The apparently humanitarian decision of the government, which designates the jobless men as vulnerable and in need of protection, denies the unemployed the right to self-responsibility and political action. Al learns how insignificant their lives are when the foreman feeds them with rotten meat. By depicting the abject bodies of the workmen in the throes of food poisoning, Underground situates the camp as “a space in which power confronts nothing other than pure biological life without any mediation” (Agamben, 2000: 40). The biopolitical governing strategies sustain privation, impose punitive violence, and suspend rights. Yet this governance does not sustain the law, producing a state of exception which fuses protection with repression and reduces bios to zoē.
However, while Hutton insists on her characters’ utter dispossession, she also depicts the workers’ increasing politicization in the harsh conditions of the camp. Relief camps saved unemployed men from hunger in exchange for hard labour, yet they did nothing to save them from frustration, despair, and discontent. Many felt that they would never be able to support themselves or their families (Horn, 1984: 12; Hoar and Reynolds, 1986: 27–28). As Victor Hoar and Mac Reynolds suggest, “Inevitably, the radical Left in Canada discovered in the inhabitants of these relief camps what it deemed flagrant examples of the abuses of capitalism and a reactionary government” (1986: 28). Braving the ban on unions imposed by the authorities, the communists created the Relief Camp Workers’ Union in 1932. For many labourers the union offered a chance to improve their lives. At that moment of social upheaval, communism seemed the only socio-political philosophy that promised hope and transformation (Petrou, 2008: 123). In Underground, owing to the communist agitators, Al and his companions realize that there are hundreds of relief camps in the country, and that thousands of men share their lot. This sense of community, however ephemeral, begins to empower the labourers. When the foreman forbids them to sing, Al and his friends continue humming their song, “the sound as soothing as the stirring of pine boughs, the rushing of creek water, but a hum of defiance nonetheless” (84). The derogatory term bum, referring to a man without a job, and therefore without dignity, becomes a source of pride in their mouths, an expression of rebellion which infuriates their guards (88). If these subtle forms of defiance do not free the men from oppressive power relations, they allow them to mark their refusal of hierarchies imposed by the status quo.
Hutton illustrates more radical forms of resistance on the occasion of the Union of Relief Camp Workers’ strike. On 4 April 1935, 3,000 labourers in British Columbia left the camps to travel to Vancouver. There they organized a strike, demanding better wages and conditions of work. 3 When the strike begins in Underground, the men down tools and return to the bunkhouses. Hutton emphasizes, however, that their decision to leave for Vancouver does not particularly affect the foreman, as he declares that they will soon be replaced by others. The protagonist understands then how disposable he and his companions are: “Al and the rest of them aren’t even worth chasing after” (90). However, while the authorities attempt to reduce them to bare life and negate their capacity for political action, the men manage to organize a network of communication and support for hundreds of hobos from many camps. Al and his friends travel on a freight train, and, on their way to Vancouver, are joined by dozens of others, whom they help on board. It is then that Al realizes that he has changed: his traumatic symptoms subside, and he feels happy in the company of other men, fighting for a common aim by their side. Importantly, Hutton thus reconceives life “as a conditioned process, and not as the internal feature of a monadic individual” (Butler, 2010: 23). Eventually, Al’s radical individualism gives way to feelings of commitment and solidarity.
Vulnerability and resistance
While the protagonist evolves towards a more communitarian philosophy of life, he also discovers new forms of agency, similar to Butler’s concept of vulnerability in resistance. The Snake Parade, an adaptation of a Chinese dragon dance performed by Al and his friends in Vancouver’s Chinatown, represents a form of nonviolent resistance, which leads, however, to a confrontation with the police. The strikers thus expose themselves deliberately to harm and take risks with their own corporeality. Yet, at the same time, they move through the streets of the city as a single body, “a mighty, invincible beast” (98). However momentarily, they thus overcome their vulnerability to protest against dispossession and insecurity. The Snake Parade is therefore an embodied enactment which “mobilize[s] vulnerability for the purposes of asserting existence, claiming the right to public space [and] equality” (Butler, 2016: 26). Importantly, vulnerability is not synonymous here with weakness and passivity, but becomes a way “of being exposed and agentic at the same time” (Butler, 2016: 24). The Snake Parade highlights the fragility of human bodies, but also becomes an embodiment of defiance and protest, locating agency precisely in corporeal frailty and exposure.
Furthermore, the Snake Parade and its consequences in the novel reveal Al’s profound racism. It is significant to note that from the age of 14, when he started to work at a mine in Nanaimo, the protagonist has developed a profound abhorrence of the Chinese. The older miners mocked him, suggesting that he was so short and his eyes were so slanted that he should work with the “monkey people” (13), “so many, so foreign, they were nameless” (101). When they got him drunk and shoved him into a Chinese tunnel which was so narrow that workers were forced to worm their way on their bellies, the young man lost control and vomited heavily. This somatic reaction proves that the Chinese represent the abject facet of the protagonist’s subjecthood, a kinship that he rejects by dehumanizing them. If abjection is conceptualized at “the threshold of body and body politic” connected with the threat of disruption that haunts the edges of the self and the community (McClintock, 1995: 72), in Underground the Chinese represent the epitome of the abject. Recruited to work on the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) in the Canadian West in the second half of the nineteenth century, the Chinese immigrants were ostracized and discriminated against, particularly in British Columbia. Forced to live in Chinatowns, they were perceived as a threat, the yellow peril, when job opportunities became scarce. 4 At the turn of the twentieth century, the Chinese diaspora functioned therefore in the Canadian imagination as a racialized group, marked with the “stigmata of exteriority and impurity” (Balibar, 1990: 284) necessary to conceptualize the contours of the white settler nation. In Hutton’s novel the Great Depression amplifies the protagonist’s tendency to dehumanize the Chinese; he believes that they are competitors in the labour market, stealing the jobs white men are entitled to. 5 Interestingly, although the unemployed, similarly to the Chinese, are now isolated in the abject zones of the hobo and relief camps, they still insist on racial superiority as a signifier of entitlement (89).
The protagonist’s stay in Chinatown therefore functions in the novel as an important rite of passage, during which he re-examines his xenophobic attitude. When the violent intervention of the RCMP breaks the serpentine line of men, Al struggles with a policeman and almost kills him. He is rescued by a Chinese man, who hides him in an underground tunnel. While the strikers leave for Ottawa, the protagonist remains behind, hunted by the police, to confront his deeply hidden obsessions. Initially, when he finds himself surrounded by the “dead-faced men” (102) in the dark hallways under Chinatown he is petrified with fear. Tormented by the traumatic memory of live burial, struggling to retain his sanity, he perceives the old Chinese men who feed him and attend to his wounds as repulsive beasts. With time, however, he gets accustomed to the darkness, the alien food, and the silent/silenced Asian immigrants who gradually lose their barbaric opacity to become human. Significantly, it is by working out the trauma that he suffered during the war that Al revises his ideological assumptions. According to Nouri Gana, It is as if only by becoming totally unrecognizable to oneself and one’s surroundings — only by undergoing, that is, a limit experience, such as trauma — does one aspire to be transformed and, most important, to transform the existing norms of intelligibility that grant and withhold recognition. (2014: 87)
Hiding underground in the community of illegal Chinese immigrants, mending clothes for a tailor above ground with them, Al realizes that, like his Chinese companions, he has become an illegal subject, deprived of any political and social rights. He arrives at the conclusion that the imagined difference between him and the Chinese was based on illusory racial and class privilege. In Underground trauma thus entails not only a transformation of the self, but also of the protagonist’s perception of the world, and ways of relating to others. Eventually, Al finds his companions’ language soothing, is moved to tears by the music they perform, and realizes that he feels safe in their “hidden world” (112). His wounded body heals together with his fractured self; simultaneously, exposure to the other frees Al from his racism. Consequently, the protagonist’s stay in Chinatown, as another form of burial, echoes his experience in the mine and at the front; being held underground is an embodied form of vulnerability, which proves shattering but also deeply transformative and illuminating.
The Chinese welcome and protect Al, even though they are disempowered by the nation-state. Their hospitality teaches Al to refuse to draw the lines demanded by relations of power: between inside/outside, member/stranger, white/racialized, and citizen/non-citizen. In this way, he contests the ideological manipulations that create hierarchies, a subtle form of resistance to the politics of bare life (see Edkins and Pin-Fat, 2004: 13). By confronting Al’s story with that of his Chinese companions, Underground brings into dialogue diverse histories of suffering, emphasizing their different historical contexts, yet at the same time exposing disturbing “connections in dissimilarity” (Rothberg, 2009: 18). Although the historical itineraries of the protagonist and his Chinese friends have been fundamentally different, Hutton creates a multidirectional vision, which, to use Rothberg’s phrase, “renders differences analogous” (Rothberg, 2009: 258). When, reluctantly, Al finally leaves this underground refuge, he has become another man.
The protagonist’s transformation continues in the Yukon, where he finds shelter with the Johnsons, an Indigenous man and his white spouse. They become a surrogate family to him, and he sees in their inter-racial companionship the ideal relationship that he dreams of. Hunting, trapping, and fishing by Johnson’s side, Al not only acquires a masculinity model that his own father was not able to provide, but also learns about Indigenous ways of subsistence. This encounter with an unfamiliar epistemology and ontology acquaints him with other ways of comprehending, and being in, the world. It also illuminates for him the pitfalls of capitalism, which reduced thousands of Canadians to hunger in the southern cities, while food was abundant in the north. Furthermore, Hutton illustrates here the connection between art and Al’s burgeoning political consciousness when, having learnt about Ezra Pound’s turn to fascism, her protagonist destroys his beloved book of imagist poetry (186; Marcotte, 2014: 3). Gradually, Al realizes that fulfilment means to him more now than it used to in the past, and he needs to get involved in grander action. The haunting trauma of war does not paralyse the protagonist any longer. His vulnerability can be defined now, after Marianne Hirsch, as “a radical openness towards surprising possibilities” and “a space to work from as opposed to something only to be overcome” (Hirsch, 2016: 81). The Spanish Civil War seems to provide an ideal opportunity to purge and prove himself.
Violence revisited
Among the International Brigades who fought on the side of the Spanish Republicans in the years 1937–1938 there were 1,700 Canadian volunteers, 400 of whom lost their lives in Spain. In contrast to the United States, where many volunteers were recruited among intellectuals, most Canadians who travelled to Spain to fight against the fascists were working-class men (Hoar and Reynolds, 1986: 35; Petrou, 2008: 16). They were the victims of the Great Depression; the Canadian government’s inability to deal with the economic crisis provoked their anger and resentment, and “the disposition to strike at oppression” (Hoar and Reynolds, 1986: 27). In 1937, the veterans of the relief camps were the first to respond when the Communist Party of Canada started to seek out volunteers for Spain (Hoar and Reynolds, 1986: 30, 37). Most of them were recruited in Ontario and the Canadian West, the largest single group being from British Columbia. 300 were from Vancouver, which “held a status among Canadians similar to New York’s among Americans as a centre for the politically radicalized” (Petrou, 2008: 20). More than 60 per cent were over 30 (in comparison with 28 per cent in the US) and, due to their age and experience, proved particularly resilient soldiers in Spain (Hoar and Reynolds, 1986: 32). About 80 per cent were recent immigrants whose ideas were radicalized in ethnic workers’ clubs and relief camps; they believed that the war in Spain reflected the injustices they had suffered from, and offered them an opportunity to fight back (Petrou, 2008: 38). The civil war in Spain thus played a significant role in shaping Canada’s political identity at home and on the global stage (Canada and the Spanish War, n.d.).
In Underground, Al’s determination to take part in the Spanish Civil War stems from his growing sense of social injustice and victimization. He feels personally outraged by the way the peasants and the workers are treated in Spain, and sees in their fate an example of the abuse that befalls the dispossessed of the world: “they might as well have been non-existent. Dead. Just like we were in the camps” (147). This multidirectional awareness is productive of solidarity and responsibility. It is important to emphasize that Al’s commitment to the war in Spain is not based on a communist ideology or an illusory idea of masculine agency established by vanquishing vulnerability (see Butler, 2016: 24). On the contrary, his decision results from his identification with loss and suffering, an acknowledgment of “a principle of equal vulnerability that governs all living beings” (Butler, 2010: xvi). His stance might be read in reference to the politicized ethics of Judith Butler, who proposes a vision of human community based on the fundamental fragility of human life. Since we can be injured or die at any moment, we must rely on others to survive. If there is anything humans share, it is the precariousness of life, which inspires a vision of indispensable sociality, a vulnerability to the other on whom our life depends (Butler, 2010: 14; Lloyd, 2008: 93). In Butler’s words, “to apprehend the precarious conditions of life” imposes “an ethical obligation on us” (2010: xvii). Significantly, the philosopher draws a distinction between precariousness and precarity. While the former is shared by all humans, “Precarity designates that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death” (2010: 25). The violence of the fascists in Spain highlights human vulnerability and responsibility for the lives of others. It is therefore on behalf of the dispossessed, exposed to unrestrained violence by the nation-state, that Al goes to war.
The Spanish conflict also provides the protagonist with an opportunity for private redemption. For Al is tormented not only by the systematic injustices of capitalism, but also the iniquities that he has committed himself. He is particularly haunted by incidents from the Somme offensive: the death of his friend Artie, whom he attempted to save by carrying him on his back in No Man’s Land, and the murder of a German soldier, whom he violently stabbed with his bayonet just before the explosion that buried him. With dismay, Al recollects his brutality and cruelty, when he kept plunging the bayonet into the dying young man, who was wailing like an animal: There was no need to kill the German after all. Not like that. No need to go down into that dark place, to awaken such evil in himself. The shell had blown the German to bits. The metal cup, the broken shovel handle — his. The solid boot — all that was left of him. The remaining bits landed in the dirt. And that dirt was blown into Al. Shrapnel in his legs, sand down his throat, grinding through his guts. (128)
This abject image of organic shrapnel, of pellets of the German’s flesh driven into Al’s body, epitomizes the brutal violation of boundaries in war. Similarly, Al cannot forget that he chased away a young boy upon discovering that he had stolen his bread in the hobo camp. Instead of condemning him, he should have taught him how to respect the other destitute men. His new openness to the excluded forces him to revise his past decisions, as he realizes his complicity in different contexts of oppression, and the dividing line between victim and perpetrator becomes uncertain.
Significantly, these interconnections are illuminated for Al in Paris, where he is confronted with Pablo Picasso’s Guernica. Inspired by the bombing of a small Basque town in Northern Spain, the painting was displayed at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne in Paris in 1937, and has become a symbol of tyrannical violence (Hoar and Reynolds, 1986: 89). Picasso’s aesthetics of vulnerable corporeality has a profoundly shocking effect on the protagonist. He memorizes every detail of the painting: the fluidity of shapes and bodies, the interlacing of pulsing life and death: The longer Al looks, the more he sees. The jagged edges, the jumble of shapes, chaotic and disturbing. Gradually arms and legs emerge, heads thrown back, as though an explosion has left images of their shattered lives embedded in the canvas. Al thinks of the Somme. Fields of limbs. Artie on his back, twitching. The bayonet in his own hands. The German blown to bits, and those bits in him. (152–153)
For the protagonist, Guernica becomes a testimony to human pain and the fundamental fragility of life; the epiphany he experiences strengthens Al’s commitment to equality. Guernica binds together the different spatial and temporal contexts of oppression depicted in the novel. These dynamic transfers encourage the protagonist (and the reader) to rethink in a larger perspective the politics of bare life. According to Hirsch (2016: 82), the aesthetic encounter elicits a specific form of vulnerability, exposing the self to powerful emotions and forcing us to acknowledge our implication in acts of abuse and violence. In Underground Al’s encounter with Guernica highlights an unexpected space of responsiveness, which opens between the protagonist and the painting, but also between the reader and the creative work — Picasso’s and Hutton’s. The artistic representation of bodily vulnerability works on the level of affect, revealing the trauma of the dismembered bodies, and inscribing its anti-war message in a visceral way.
Accordingly, while Al is initially elated by the cause he is fighting for in Spain, the line between friend and enemy, which shifted so dramatically for him in Vancouver’s Chinatown, becomes increasingly blurred. Al begins to question the meaning of the war when he is forced to shoot a prisoner on the run, even though he knows that this man is not a committed fascist but was forced to choose sides at gunpoint. Eventually, he sees more sense in helping the peasants with the harvest than in the armed struggle, coming to the conclusion that his own integrity as an ethical being is threatened by his violent acts. According to Butler, “If I destroy the other, then I destroy the one on whom I depend in order to survive, and so I threaten my own survival with my destructive act” (2010: 45). Al’s ethical transformation leads him to a rejection of violence per se, for it depersonalizes and dehumanizes both the victim and the perpetrator. At the same time, he contests the production of the biopolitical body as the object of power in warfare, politicized precisely in its capacity to be killed (Agamben, 1998: 89). He questions the dividing lines that define certain lives as not quite human, as “not quite lives”, and posit their loss in war as not really unjust and mournable (Butler, 2010: 41–43). His attitude is reminiscent of the perspective proposed by Butler, who claims “that the subject that I am is bound to the subject I am not, that we each have the power to destroy and to be destroyed, and that we are bound to one another in this power and this precariousness” (Butler, 2010: 43). Ultimately, Al affirms the importance and care of life in its corporeal dimension, helping the most vulnerable in their struggle for daily survival, and accepting the precariousness and interdependence of all lives.
Al’s experience at the fascist prisoner of war camp represents the climax of violence in Underground, which throws into relief the concepts of bare life, embodied vulnerability, and resistance. Hutton endorses the Agambenian approach to the camp as “the most absolute biopolitical space”, in which power decides when life ceases to be relevant (Agamben, 2005: 40; 1998: 142). The fascist camp in Spain pushes to the limit the biopolitical fracture by limiting human existence to pure biological life. The prisoners are deprived of food and water for three days. When they are finally fed fish soup, it makes them sick, an experience reminiscent of food poisoning in the relief camp in British Columbia. As in the Canadian camp, the guards eat different food, which reinforces the division between those in power and the dispossessed. The loss of control over basic biological functions denies the suffering bodies any possibility of agency. Moreover, Hutton depicts tortures and executions, as well as random killings when, for instance, the guards throw loaves of bread and shoot the famished prisoners who try to grab them. In these conditions of radical bodily deprivations and unrestrained violence, power operates through the production of homines sacri and seems to render any form of resistance impossible.
Nevertheless, Hutton creates an intriguing figure of resistance in a Moorish captive, a member of Franco’s Army of Africa, imprisoned for an unknown reason by the fascists. 6 Because of the colour of his skin, he is mistreated by both the jailers and the prisoners, who tear his regal cap from his shoulder and taunt him, matador-like, as if he were a bull. This animalization of the Moor reminds the reader of Al’s perception of the Chinese in Vancouver. However, the Moor remains indifferent, refuses to eat, and sits impassive in the yard, like a prince, unmoved by hunger, weather, or abuse. Eventually, he is taken away: “Bare-footed, bare-headed and filthy, he looks just like the other prisoners” — bare life (216: emphasis added). Deeply shaken by the man’s attitude, Al “considers that the Moor offered no resistance to the crowd, made no attempt to eat or fight. He did something wrong to land in prison, and he accepted his fate. More than that. He embraced it” (216). His (lack of) action is an example of a strategy of resistance that Edkins and Pin-Fat (2004: 12) locate in the assumption of bare life, namely the willing acceptance of powerlessness, which proves subversive precisely in its voluntarism. The Moor uses his body to draw attention to the surrounding violence. Paradoxically, he thus unmasks the complex relationships of power in which he has been placed, exposing both the brutality of the prison guards and the racial violence of the imprisoned volunteers. Inspired by the Moor, Al, who is on the verge of death himself, eventually understands that “Under certain conditions, continuing to exist, to move, and to breathe are forms of resistance” (Butler, 2016: 260). Consequently, he decides to run away, and manages to join his beloved Magdalena, with whom he later travels to Canada.
Conclusion: Multidirectional vulnerabilities
Underground illustrates Al Fraser’s growing awareness of human vulnerability and his commitment to fight against precarity. The politics of bare life that turns him and his comrades-in-arms into cannon fodder during the Great War causes in him a reaction of radical individualism. The post-war realities of poverty and discrimination, reinforced by the economic slump of the 1930s, generate in turn a profound discontent against the status of non-persons, defined as requiring protection and thus deprived of political rights. Al’s ideological awakening takes place in the relief camp, where he abandons his individualism, partaking in a precarious community. The rite of passage Al experiences in Chinatown, where he identifies with the most abject racialized group within the Canadian nation-state, allows him to work out his traumatic memories. Eventually, his participation in the Spanish Civil War causes him to radically rethink the concept of justice. His multidirectional understanding of vulnerability pushes him to voluntarily assume responsibility for an apparently remote war, for which he, and his nation-state, are not directly accountable. Hutton thus explores the vulnerability of Canadian bodies in a historical period of socio-political upheavals, yet at the same time locates in their vulnerability the possibility of an alternative ethics, the potential for protest and transformation.
Commenting on the power of aesthetic encounters, Hirsch argues that they elicit “a sense of vulnerability that can move us toward an ethics and a politics of open-endedness and mobility, attuning us to the needs of the present, to the potentialities for change, and to the future” (Hirsch, 2016: 82). In Underground, the body, shattered during armed conflicts, polluted through hard labour, famished in the hobo and the fascist camps, is central in the prise de conscience of Hutton’s protagonist and his determination to fight for a better future. The images of vulnerable corporeality that Al is haunted by have a strong affective potential, since they illuminate the Butlerian concept of precariousness of life, and inspire a social ontology that involves an acknowledgment of interdependency and responsibility for others. Significantly, Underground can be placed in continuity with other Canadian novels that situate military history as a point of departure for reflection on what it means to be Canadian and human in the contemporary world (see Grace, 2014: 16). 7 By depicting Al’s friendship with Chinese and Indigenous non-persons, as well as his interaction with the Moor in Spain, Hutton also illuminates a multicultural ethics, which turns the interracial encounter into a profoundly transformative experience.
Hutton’s juxtaposition of different histories — that of shell-shocked Great War soldiers, the victims of the Great Depression, the Chinese immigrants in Canada, as well as the oppressed Spanish people and the international volunteers who risked their lives to protect them — creates a complex ethics of memory. Set at a particularly traumatic period in history, Underground brings together various apparently disjointed geographies and temporalities, which accords with Hirsch’s concept of vulnerable times (2016: 82), “reveal[ing] the divergent vulnerabilities created by different forms of state violence and different possibilities of intervening in a present that is both retrospective and anticipatory” (2016: 87). Central in the novel is the terrain of the camp as a site of biopolitical exclusion, yet also a space of encounter that triggers profound ethical reflection. The effect of comparison is, to use Rothberg’s concept, a form of differentiated solidarity that allows us “to distinguish different histories of violence while still understanding them as implicated in each other and as making moral demands for recognition that deserve consideration” (Moses and Rothberg, 2014: 33). Underground exposes a shared logic of biopolitics in various historical and political contexts, and a subtle dynamics of resistance in vulnerability, which creates interracial, national, and international solidarities. The central image of underground functions in the novel as a space of oppression and bare life, as well as a more metaphorical hiding place for traumatic memories, both individual and collective ones. At the same time, it provides a space for transformation and unexpected coalition-building with the destitute, the unemployed, the illegals, and the other vulnerable non-persons of the modern nation-state.
