Abstract
This article examines the relation between affect and agency in Michael Christie’s short story collection The Beggar’s Garden (2011). It builds its argument on recent philosophical discussions about the oxymoronic nature of the relational subject. Many contemporary thinkers have emphasized the fundamental paradox that affective relations are as necessary as they are profoundly destabilizing of the subject’s supposed autonomy. Following this train of thought, a number of studies have appeared that explore the relation between vulnerability and agency. Would a focus on affective relations and the subsequently increased sense of vulnerability produce or foreclose action? The article takes this question to the field of the literary to provide a critical reading of the first two stories in Christie’s collection, “Emergency Contact” and “Discard”, both of which probe, in very different ways, the power of affect in the midst of highly precarious material conditions. Drawing on the work of feminist materialist scholars Sara Ahmed, Marianne Hirsch, Judith Butler, and Martha Nussbaum, who have explored how the experience of vulnerability may imply a radical openness toward surprising possibilities, I investigate how each of these two stories may produce unexpected spaces of human agency through the affective energy of compassion and love.
Contemporary thinkers have often emphasized the importance that a focus on affective relations has in challenging a purely rational approach to subjectivity, and in confirming the inextricable relationality of the process of subject formation. It is now widely accepted that the subject is relational; that is, it becomes so inasmuch as it is always developing, experiencing, acting, or knowing in relations to others (Thiem, 2008: 10). Exposure to others is thus the very condition for the subject’s emergence. Yet, by the same token, Judith Butler argues, that necessary exposure triggers “a form of responsiveness that implies a dispossession of the egological” (2012: 137). Emotions, Martha Nussbaum writes, are “geological upheavals of thought” in that they involve the acknowledgment for the person’s “flourishing” of “things that they do not fully control”, and the recognition thereby of “their neediness before the world and its events” (2001: 90). Affective relations are as necessary, then, as they are profoundly destabilizing of the subject’s autonomy. And that fundamental paradox imbues any ethical approach to the subject.
Crucial to this take on affect is the question of agency, since the less control the subject has of emotions, the more compromised the subject’s own agency would seem (Nussbaum, 2001: 12). What is the relation between vulnerability and agency, then? Would a focus on affective relations and the subsequently increased sense of vulnerability produce or foreclose action? Feminist scholars who have investigated this question have arrived at similar conclusions. Nussbaum (2001, 2013) proves how the workings of the emotions of compassion and love may somehow empower the subject. For Butler (2006), the experience of a shared sense of precariousness may generate powerful sites of affective agency. Thinking vulnerability through, and not against, resistance opens up multiple possibilities for action (Butler, 2016). Similarly, Marianne Hirsch approaches vulnerability “as a radical openness toward surprising possibilities” that might be engaged “creatively — as a space to work from as opposed to something only to be overcome” (2016: 81).
With those questions in mind, I attempt to read the relation between affect and agency in Michael Christie’s short story collection The Beggar’s Garden (2011), in which the homeless, the mentally unstable, the poor, and the drug-addicted share the neighbourhood of Vancouver Downtown Eastside with thrift-shop owners, bankers, social and medical workers. My discussion will focus on the first two stories in the collection, “Emergency Contact” and “Discard”, as they seem to thematize in two very different ways the affective power of compassion and love in the midst of highly precarious material conditions. In particular, I propose to look into how each of these two stories may produce unexpected spaces of human agency through the affective energy of compassion and love. In “Emergency Contact”, a lonely middle-aged woman takes to calling the city’s emergency number in the hope that they send a paramedic whom she has fallen in love with. In “Discard”, a depressed retired widower travels to Vancouver to locate and secretly follow his stranded grandson in his daily scavenging route through the city’s dumpsters, where the grandfather has previously left a trail of food and clothes. Subject to physical deterioration, extreme loneliness, and deep emotional scars, Christie’s characters reject the marginal position allotted to them by the social, economic, and institutional powers and are set on finding forms of agency beyond those apparatuses. Both stories, I will argue, show the possibilities for compassion, solidarity, and love.
The subject’s agency
Central to the development of what is now called vulnerability studies, Butler’s work locates a fundamental site of production of human vulnerability in the very articulation of the process of subject formation through subjection (to social norms) and relations (with others) (2005: 30–40). She dedicates most of her post-9/11 work to developing this idea, linking a general sense of precariousness to the very process of subject formation. At the same time, she insists that human vulnerability must always be addressed in its specificity, “as dependent upon the organization of economic and social relationships, the presence or absence of sustaining infrastructures and social and political institutions” (2012: 148). Attention to these specific forms of precarity remains crucial to Butler’s philosophical, and ultimately political, project. “Precarity only makes sense”, she argues, “if we are able to identify bodily dependency and need, hunger and the need for shelter, the vulnerability to injury and destruction, forms of social trust that let us live and thrive, and the passions linked to our very persistence as clearly political issues” (2012: 147). Additionally, Butler’s emphasis on the centrality of the body highlights the latter’s inextricable condition of sociality, since “bodies are bound up with others through material needs”, but also “through touch, through language, through a set of relations without which we cannot survive” (2010: 61).
What is the specific role of emotions in this embodied view of subjectivity, then? And, to what extent does a relational approach to the subject compromise the subject’s capacity to act? As noted above, Butler and others have argued for the agentive possibilities of thinking subjectivity through embodied relations. But the answer is still complex. For Nussbaum, the belief in the bodily nature of emotions does not necessarily reduce them to “nonintentional bodily movements” (2001: 25). Emotions are both bodily and political processes. However, in as much as they expose our neediness, they make us “vulnerable to events that we do not control; and one might hold that including a large measure of uncontrol in one’s conception of a good life compromises too deeply the dignity of one’s own agency” (2001: 12). It follows that the vulnerability produced through bodily relations would work somehow against the subject’s autonomy to act. Yet, at the same time, the opposite could also be true. To explain this paradox, Nussbaum looks into the connection between compassion and the idea of “tragic spectatorship” in literary texts:
As they mature, citizens must learn, in effect, to be both tragic and comic spectators of the varied predicaments of life. The tragic perspective gives insight into shared vulnerabilities; the comic perspective […] embraces the unevenness of human existence with flexibility and mercy, rather than hatred. (2013: 21)
Drawing on a relational logic, this approach to compassion implies a material practice and thus elicits a call to act. In the face of the other’s suffering, Lauren Berlant argues in a similar context that “compassion can feel like the apex of affective agency among strangers” (2004: 9). However, this process is limited by yet another predicament: that the practice of compassion also “carries the weight of ongoing debates about the ethics of privilege” (Berlant, 2004: 1). That is, the positions are not exchangeable, “the sufferer is over there. You, the compassionate one, have a resource that would alleviate someone else’s suffering” (2004: 4). Agency seems only possible in one direction.
Would the feeling of love, in its potential reciprocity, be free from such ethics of privilege? According to the online Oxford English Dictionary, love is “a feeling or disposition of deep affection or fondness for someone, typically arising from a recognition of attractive qualities, from natural affinity, or from sympathy and manifesting itself in concern for the other’s welfare and pleasure in his or her presence”. This definition implicitly emphasizes love’s embodied quality, to which I wish to turn briefly by looking at the work of Julia Kristeva. In Powers of Horror, Kristeva discusses love within a psychoanalytical framework as part of her conceptualization of the abject, defined in terms of “a border” or an inescapable “ambiguity” (1982: 9). Like love, Kristeva’s notion of abjection dwells on the margins of rationality and is often associated with the unclean or improper in literal and symbolic ways. Both abjection and love are embodied feelings, and this quality of embodiment is as inescapable (for the subject’s formation) as it is a constant source of paradox and ambiguity (in the body’s capacity to lure and repulse at the same time). 2 It follows that any definition of love is elusive, for as Kristeva writes elsewhere, “[t]he language of love is impossible, inadequate, immediately allusive when one would like it to be most straightforward; it is a flight of metaphors — it is literature” (Kristeva, 1987: 1). In its deliberate ambiguity and potential multidirectionality, the creative agency of love might be free, then, from the privilege associated to the practice of compassion.
Michael Christie’s stories provide a relevant literary exploration of these philosophical questions. Both compassion and love are active agents here, building the plot, structure, and tone and producing a potent readerly effect. A splendid exploitation of the tragicomic component of compassion, the collection also highlights the idea of love as a thoroughly embodied form of both vulnerability and agency. Christie’s characters take turns in inhabiting the terrain of the eroticized body, the sexualized body, the ageing body, the damaged body, the exposed body, the medicalized body, the unclean body, or the wasted body. Their intense physicality, I will try to show, is only matched by an acute sense of vulnerability through which affective agency takes place.
Published in 2011, The Beggar’s Garden received the City of Vancouver Book Award. The book was also longlisted for the Giller Prize and a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize in that year. Mostly set in Vancouver Downtown Eastside, and linked through a subtle rhizomatic pattern of cross-references, the stories chronicle the precarious lives of those who live on the limits of sanity, safety, family, company, economic stability, and good health. 3 As they do so, they also problematize the awkward daily interactions between those subjects and the visitors, neighbours, shop owners, medical, and social workers of Vancouver’s inner city. 4 According to S. W. Beattie (2011: n.p.), who compares Christie’s Downtown Eastside with Mordecai Richler’s St. Urbain Street or Michel Tremblay’s Plateau-Mont-Royal, it is the “intrusions” of the “world outside”, often provoking a “collision between the unfortunate denizens of the Downtown Eastside and more privileged figures who try to help them”, that bring Christie’s individuals out of their “eternal present” into some form of historical participation. Conversely, for David Chau (2011: n.p.), the strength of the collection resides in the focus on these characters’ internal lives, “disclos[ing] the personal histories that rustle through back alleys and hide beneath the ragged facades we pass on the street”. I would argue that Christie’s stories achieve both these effects, zooming in and out of the characters’ worlds to highlight different temporalities and conflicting truths, a literary practice that, according to Hirsch, might work towards the creation of alternative futures (2016: 80–81).
Each story provides a sharp individual study of the modes in which neoliberal hegemony places the city’s poor, homeless, ill, or addict bodies in the zone of the not-quite-human. Each story tells of characters that emphatically reject such positions of abjection or victimization, investing time and energy in remaining the agents of their destiny or regaining power over their lives. At the level of narration, the sharp contrast between the uncertain situation of characters and the cutting confident prose signals such intent. So do the surprising endings of many of the stories point in that direction, showing that these characters are “complex individuals”, as Beattie (2011: n.p.) states in this context, “fully capable of surprising the reader by acting in ways that are unexpected, yet wholly appropriate”. Indeed, as Beattie (2011: n.p.) concludes, the collection “takes the pulse of history by unsentimentally dramatizing the way a certain segment of society lives now, and in so doing stands as a sympathetic and compassionate examination of modern urban loneliness and disaffection”.
One of Christie’s notable assets is his destabilization of hegemonic conceptions of the neighbourhood, mostly restricted to media frames of representation. 5 Moving further in that direction, and while there certainly are drug addicts and sex workers in this collection, the two stories I have selected do not deal directly with those issues but rather represent the most part of low-income residents in need of social and medical assistance. 6 What both “Emergency Contact” and “Discard” do is invest heavily in the production of what Heather Love calls backward feelings, such as failure, repulsion, anger, fear, embarrassment, pity or shame (2007: 146). Accordingly, they narrate the details of people’s “skunk hours, or rather, skunk nights, when they hit the rock bottom of their lives” (Irmscher, 2013: 159).
Simultaneously, both stories are also rich in the production of the more noble feelings of compassion and love. I have already mentioned how compassion is linked to the literary by way of its connection with tragicomedy. Christie’s stories are deeply compassionate in that complex sense as they tell of “people whose lives are teetering on the edge of the abyss and of the remarkable things they do to keep themselves and others from falling over” (Irmscher, 2013: 160). My analysis will show how compassion may work textually both at the level of plot (between characters) and as a reading effect. But it is the narrative force of love, the love of one character for another, I will argue, that moves the plot forward with relentless energy and intensity. I use the adjective precarious in reference to the material conditions in which this love takes place in the two stories. Following Butler’s take on the relational workings of precariousness (2012: 148), precarious love may be said to intensify the necessity as well as the fragility of relationality and human contact. Love is also precarious in these stories because it carries with it a misnomer, becoming mixed up with selfishness, infatuation, or emotional deprivation. Finally, love is precarious in that it is unreciprocated (“Emergency”) or hidden away (“Discard”). Yet, despite all these predicaments, I will argue that love in the stories carries a prodigious affective agency: precarious love, then, but love nonetheless.
“Emergency Contact”
“Emergency Contact” implicitly juggles the inextricability of two Butlerian modes of vulnerability: a shared sense of corporeal precariousness, written through the narrator Maya’s medicalized body, and specific forms of social, economic, and emotional precarity. Both modes overlap and intersect to create the piercing first-person chronicle of an insane middle-aged woman desperately reaching for help by calling the city’s emergency number in the hope they send “her paramedic”: “The important thing was that they’d send one. Fate would handle the rest”, she states in one of her typically optimistic and funny moments (Christie, 2011: 4). 7 Maya, who, subject to an uncontrollable infatuation, has just faked a heart attack, is not free from guilt and tries to justify her whimsical attitude with surprising lucidity by having recourse to language and the inevitability of love: “I reminded myself that emergencies are things that emerge, out of nowhere, and that there’s nothing more out of nowhere than love, before raising the phone a final time” (4).
Suggestive of Nussbaum’s definition of compassion through the tragicomic, Maya’s predicament is hilarious and sad. The painfully desperate narrator takes to calling 911 “as if ordering emotional pizza” (Bartley, 2011: n.p.), and when they fail to send the paramedic that she loves, she proves highly resourceful, setting in motion a series of inventive and amusing strategies to achieve her ends. Skillfully juggling the tragic and the ridiculous, the story has a powerful readerly impact, for, as Mark Diotte writes:
Christie could have told a comical story of a woman who was seeking attention from a handsome paramedic and who was condemned and dismissed as ridiculous or unstable. Instead, he represents a series of actions in a woman’s life that reveals the depth of her utter loneliness, desperation, and humanity. (Diotte, 2011: 145)
And much of that compassionate effect relies on the narrative tone. The opening sentence is as stellar as it is abrupt: “They sent the wrong paramedic, one I’d never met before” (1). But the initial disappointment lasts just a few sentences, before the opposite emotion, an expectant form of excitement that often precedes disappointment, is introduced: “It had taken me a while to answer the door because I was on the toilet, unable to pee for nervousness. When I stood, my hamstrings went pins and needles and I steadied myself on the towel bar while taking a minute to arrange my hair” (1). It is that expectant excitement, and not the tone of disappointment with which the story opens, that characterizes the narration, highlighting Maya’s unbeatable will to survive.
What is the moving force of Maya’s relentlessness? As I will show in what follows, the answer is love, or, at least, what Maya thinks of as her unconditional love for the anonymous paramedic, expressed from the start through comic bodily mutations: “my heart felt like four different hearts who were all best friends, pumping away in unison for a good and noble cause” (23). Thus, after her faked heart attack fails to bring her the desired results, she decides to become suicidal, showing adept knowledge of the biopolitics of medical emergencies: “There are laws for this, for what I said. They were serious words, ones they couldn’t ignore” (10). Once in the hospital, she stubbornly works her way towards her objective: to find the beloved paramedic and give him the dollar-store greeting card that she has bought with the words Love is in the air! (we are also told that a picture of two teddy bears “riding a biplane with hearts painted on its wings” accompanies these words). Love in the story is explicitly associated with language, however ludicrously. Accordingly, in addition to the card’s text, and urged by the need to “really express [her]self”, Maya has added the following message:
Dear Paramedic,
You saved my life! (Just kidding) But I just wanted to say you are the best and most caring paramedic on the force (are you a force?) and I appreciate everything you did for me. I’m very interested in getting to know you better. Coffee? Airplane ride? (more kidding)
Maya
(11; emphasis in original)
In the context of the link between the process of subject formation and the production of vulnerability, it does not seem coincidental that Maya’s declaration of love for the paramedic is simultaneous with the first mention of her name. Her signature at the end of the farcical message identifies her as the acting subject, endowing her with the power of agency while exposing her vulnerability in ways that had only been guessed before. By this point, the reader has learned that all that had happened between Maya and the paramedic was that “[h]e’d spoken tenderly” and, being “a slow night”, he had “stayed for nearly an hour”. He had said that Maya’s “nightgown was an interesting colour, which meant he liked it very much”, Maya adds, “because people love to be interested, especially by the slumber-wear of the opposite sex” (3). Disproportionately flattered by this, Maya jumps at the opportunity: “He’d chosen to find my nightgown interesting, which means he must have loved at least some little part in me, and I couldn’t let that slip away” (22).
While the honesty of Maya’s first-person voice is disarming, the text spares the specific origin of her emotional deprivation (who is this woman? What is her story?), the details of her past as scarce and cryptic as strong and painful is the evidence of her deep emotional scars. Still, despite it being largely unexplained, her personal history intrudes in the present in key moments of the narration, signalling a meaningful absence, a “rumbling of something”, “almost a hush of a seashell”, “a train en route from a distant city I once knew as my home” (6). “Emergency contact?” the hospital receptionist asks (15); to which Maya sadly replies, “Can mine be 911?” (16).
In its representation of the biopolitics of medical procedures, the text explicitly discusses the process of subject formation through the ethical demands of others. There are rules that Maya is familiar with and performs dutifully in a medical emergency: body rolled to one side, breathing check, blood-pressure check; “I felt like an instrument valuable enough to be measured and checked”, she concedes (2). However, none of this makes any sense if there is no reciprocal action. For instance, when Maya is on the phone with the 911 operator, she wonders: “Him telling me what to do had me feeling essential, like he couldn’t do this without me, like he needed me, which was true — he couldn’t send an ambulance somewhere if there wasn’t someone there who was waiting for it”. Receiving and performing instructions constitute the means to reach “beautiful undreamt-of summits of personal fulfilments” (5). In this way, the subject is articulated through identification in a very literal sense. At the hospital, she recites her health number by heart (14) just before she confesses that she adores those ID wristbands, how they “are impossible to remove without destroying them, how for this reason you could never wear the bracelet of another, how they, and the belonging they bestow, must be earned” (16). Refusing the allotted site of abjection, Maya’s body is neatly defined by the hospital rules and aseptic smells.
At the same time, the text’s emphasis on relationality necessarily transcends the physicality of the body. A heavy rationalizing tendency imbues Maya’s discourse and clashes dramatically, in its lucidity, with her preposterous delusions and her performance act. For instance, at the beginning of the story, Maya dials 91 “at least thirty times” and then replaces the phone, wondering why there is nobody who picks up her “almost-emergency” call: “I just needed to see someone specific”, she writes, “but it was the sort of longing that could corrode something essential inside me if it stretched out for years” (4). If the very condition for the subject’s emergence is indeed exposure to the other, how fitting it seems then that the protagonist’s desperate attempt to reach out is accompanied by a rational lure and a sharp linguistic self-consciousness: “People say in hospital the same way they say in love, because you really are different when you’re there, that is, if they keep you, which means they think you need help, which is nice of them to care about you that much” (10; emphasis in original). Maya “indexes” different forms of suicide before she chooses a death by will (she claims she can force herself to stop breathing (9)), and even though she admits her suicidal plan is “technically a lie”, she also suddenly realizes, to her own shock, that she “wasn’t even completely lying”, that she “could want to die if [she] never saw him again and was unable to give him his card” (9; emphasis in original). “Maya’s voice is candid on her girlish romantic obsessions, aptly evasive on the fakery of her methods”, Bartley writes (2011: n.p.). “Christie burrows into Maya’s troubled psyche bit by bit, prepping us for a final integrating scene”.
In New Maladies of the Soul (1995), Kristeva takes us through the analysis of her patients’ symptoms to conclude that “depression denies the meaning of discourse”. Locating “women’s desire for affirmation” in literary practice, Kristeva explores how “literature intensifies the social contract by exposing the uncanny nature of that which remains unsaid”. Writing, she claims, has the power to boycott “the frustrating order of social signs”, and create “a place for fantasy and pleasure” (1995: 220). Maya’s first-person voice seems to be doing just that. She has two intertwined types of fantasies: her fantasies of love (of loving and being loved) and her fantasies of care (of being cared for and caring for others). Each of these fantasies relies on and relay each other. For instance, when she is in the ambulance, she fantasizes about providing the medical staff with free training for dealing with suicidal subjects, in the belief that “the performance of this good deed would detoxify any and all of the lies necessary to unite” her and the beloved paramedic (13). Fittingly, in the masterful final scene, in which the much-anticipated encounter with the paramedic takes place, her delusions of love overlap with an actual medical emergency, first of an unknown patient, then her own.
Is Christie’s tragicomic tale a contemporary parable of the process of subject formation through affective relations? Is Maya’s obsession an embarrassing reminder of our shared exposure to precarious forms of love? The story certainly puts into practice the affective energy of compassion and love, producing unexpected moments of intense awkwardness that remain powerful in the reader’s mind long after the reading act. Moreover, the naked representation of the protagonist’s ridiculous love intensifies the urgent need for human contact while insisting on the fragility of those relations.
“Discard”
If Maya’s preposterous love moves the plot forward and endows the narrative with a sense of urgency, in “Discard”, it is a grandfather’s love for his homeless grandson, mixed with a sense of guilt and duty, that propitiates their extraordinary re-encounter at the story’s climax. This story revalorizes the power of the Downtown Eastside street life, highlighting “its own dynamic history, its own set of rules, languages, and social knowledge, most of which celebrate survival” (Robertson and Culhane, 2005: 12). Making connections between life in the inner city and outside it and juggling the possibilities of existence beyond the social and economic apparatuses that conform such a division, the story’s emphasis is again on the affective agency of compassion and love.
“Discard” tells the story of the depressed recently widowed Earl, who, after recognizing his stranded grandson, Kyle, in the queue of a soup kitchen on a TV news show about Vancouver homelessness, decides to sell his own house and travel to Vancouver to find him. Once there, he settles in a motel room, buys a car, and follows Kyle’s scavenging routine at a distance, leaving a trail of food and clothes for him to find. Right from the start, Earl is described as an ageing man with mobility issues, wobbling knees, and circulatory disorders, for which he is comically wearing a prescribed pair of “tight nylon stockings” (30). Kyle, in turn, is portrayed as a “robust” and “healthy” young man (40) with a vision impairment due to a “lazy eye” (33) caused by a self-inflicted accident with a dart. There are no signs of drug addiction, which puzzles the grandfather. Gradually, he comes across as a person traumatized by the abandonment of both his parents, a tragedy that embitters Earl’s life too, contributing a sense of guilt. The interaction between the grandfather’s ageing body and the grandson’s disability, their shared traumatic experience in a prominent background, elicits a meaningful reflection of the relation between physical and psychological survival and foreshadows a certain reciprocity in the plot.
In order to tell this most unusual story, the narrative perspective skilfully replicates Earl’s search for meaning in Kyle’s street life: the reader follows the third-person narrator who follows Earl who follows Kyle, learning in the process the details of Kyle’s past and present existence as a tenant of one of the dilapidated single room occupancy hotels of Vancouver Downtown Eastside. 8 So far the story seems to contain the elements of a rescue narrative, but there are early signs that the reader is in for a surprise. In fact, as the story develops, the plot fails to deliver Kyle’s expected rescue and rather moves on in the opposite direction to witness Earl’s transformation until he “hits the skids” himself. 9
But “Discard” breaks the reader’s expectations in many other ways. If, as Nussbaum argues, emotions make us vulnerable in that they underscore our neediness and often entail a measure of uncontrol, “Discard” pushes the implications of that thought to the limit. Earl’s initial desire for control is expressed in his obsession with clocking both his and Kyle’s movements. The story opens as Earl is about to have what looks like a Sunday supper with his grandson. But the scene immediately abandons any glimpse of domesticity and becomes puzzling and intriguing. He buys two pre-cooked chickens in a supermarket, eats one of them in the car, and drives to the specific dumpster where his grandson will be to leave the other one. What Earl is doing is preparing for Kyle’s nightly scavenging trip and, despite this play with the reader’s expectations, his movements are planned and measured to the limit, creating the appearance of order and control: “He glances at the green digits of his dashboard clock: 8.30. He’s not late but should be going” (30). That sense of being in command persists even after the plan starts faltering. Feeling a sudden pain in his knee which makes him let go of the container too soon, the ageing man fails to deposit the chicken “in its plastic coffin” smoothly on the filthy bottom of the dumpster, part of the meat springing loose and touching the slimy floor. In the midst of this bleak and darkly comic moment, Earl maintains his composure, measuring his options: “Earl checks his watch. He’ll be here soon, the same time every night, much too soon for Earl to drive back and get another one” (32). The rest of the story unfolds in that same tragicomic tone as Earl, trying to reach the chicken, hoists himself over the lip of the dumpster, falls inside it and is eventually rescued by his unknowing grandson.
In her analysis of white masculinity in Christie’s closing story “The Beggar’s Garden”, Neta Gordon explains the various fictional ways in which marginalized white men “manage to reaffirm a sense of hegemonic masculinity via the staging of gendered settlement activity, or reterritorialization” (2014: 175). Drawing on Daniel Coleman’s notion of white civility (2006), Gordon writes about a “distinctively Canadian hegemonic masculinity, whereby the assertion of the ‘‘natural’’ right to control space is related to — indeed, ensues from — an ability to empathize with community, to perform modest economic and domestic aspirations, and to cope with loss in civil terms” (Gordon, 2014: 175). Having lost control over his own social, personal, or economic situation, this allegedly Canadian figure uses a combination of dynamic physical labour and anti-elitism to reassert his identity and claim a new space (2014: 179). Gordon argues that, by interacting with the local geography in ways that look for the subject’s reterritorialization, Christie’s protagonist evokes Canada’s history of colonial settlement “and explore[s] both the marginalization of the Canadian patriarch ‘in crisis’ and the apparent naturalness of his desire to control space” (2014: 181).
Building on these ideas, I would argue that “Discard” explores the relationship between labour and (white) masculinity against the background of the city’s homelessness and waste, which makes the story especially meaningful and intriguing. Earl is portrayed as an entrepreneur man, a person who has “no unkind words for anyone who took pride in holding down a job” (34), and would “always rather do a job himself, even if it took three times as long” (30). He looks down on “spectacle of any kind” (35), dismisses his wife Tuuli’s worries about Kyle’s increasingly difficult behaviour arguing that all the boy needs is “to take responsibility for himself” and find a job (36), and despises people who end up “rooting around in the garbage, eating at soup kitchens, and probably living off the dole” (37). It comes as no surprise, then, that, when Kyle appears on TV, Earl feels the ethical obligation to help him, moved to act by a sense of guilt and duty towards his grandson, but also out of a selfish need to put an end to his own process of bereavement. After all, “he needed something to do, a project. Work kept a person from wither, from rot, and he was wasting away in this place” (38). Once in Vancouver, he buys a map to trace Kyle’s daily itinerary, feeling “delighted” that he is able to control Kyle’s movements “at any time of the day” (41–42).
Ironically, it is precisely through this same code of hegemonic masculinity that neoliberal governmentality finds itself challenged. Earl’s initial rejection of Kyle’s street life gradually transforms into admiration and respect as he discovers that he likes to watch Earl at work,
because work was the only way to describe what he was doing, whether he was getting paid for it or not. […] He watched his grandson tether impossibly large objects to the rickety cart and push them great distances to the places they could be sold or stashed for later. The boy’s labour seemed to belong to another time. Earl thought of pharaohs, forced marches, treks across deadened earth in search of new beginnings. He found himself strangely proud of his grandson. (42)
Gordon argues that Christie “accords high status to the labor of the city’s most socially and economically disadvantaged underclass, the beggars and scavengers” (Gordon, 2014: 189). In “Discard”, this practice happens through Earl’s gaze: watching Kyle’s labour leads to the resurfacing of the love he still feels for him. Earl is happy to see that “Kyle values these items that appear magically each evening in his dumpster” and worries that he might not have enough to eat, “the thought of him going hungry […], more than Earl can bear” (43). Moreover, as the language of street labour becomes associated with Earl’s feelings towards Kyle, attention is redirected towards the power of love to question hegemonic social and economic orders. 10 Love literally makes things happen. Earl’s love for his grandson helps him overcome his initial prejudices to the point that he crosses to the other side of economic progress, where his grandson lives and where Earl ironically finds his life back. But nothing prepares the reader for the final scene, in which the anticipated family dinner takes place, only in quite different terms (51–53).
In hindsight, it takes Earl to relinquish his control and acknowledge the precariousness of his own situation, his physical fragility and emotional exposure, for the story to happen. In other words, it is through the awareness of vulnerability, and the working of affective relations in that context, that the action takes place. Earl has no choice but to acknowledge his neediness and lack of control, and this relinquishing moment is symbolized at the end of the story by the discarding of the clock: “Clouds are sweeping overhead and it must be later than Earl thought because the windows of the office towers have darkened except for a few. If he hadn’t fallen into the dumpster, he would have been asleep hours ago. It is turning into a fine evening, warm and fresh-smelling” (54).
In her study of the limits of compassion, Berlant claims that “if one blames the people on the bottom of so many social hierarchies for their residence there, one has not made the fundamental connection between the structural conditions that buoy some people and relegate others to treading water” (2004: 8). “Discard” is about making that fundamental connection, the consequences and the transformative potential of it. Furthermore, the process of avowal of Earl’s precarious condition happens in the context of the text’s discussion of the notion of “human waste”, defined by Zygmunt Bauman as the “excessive” or “redundant’”; that is, “the population of those who either could not or were not wished to be recognized or allowed to stay” (2004: 5). 11 “Discard” directs the critical gaze to the potential value of what is “left over” or “discarded” and foregrounds the meaning of those objects/people previously hidden from view because they are not deemed valuable. That is the case of the two characters. Kyle is associated with trash from the start. Marked by the abandonment of both mother and father, he makes of waste his own living grounds. Fittingly, the crucial traumatic scene, one in which he becomes injured for life, is associated with a dump scene (44–49). Earl, on the other hand, crosses the threshold that initially divides his conventional life from his grandson’s, and, by falling into the dumpster, becomes trash in a very literal sense. His plot itinerary, from clean to dirty living, elicits a profound reflection about “the ways in which we codify and add or subtract value to our environment by designating people, places, things, and stories as pure, clean, and natural or contaminated, dirty, and aberrant” (Bennett, 2016: 3).
Finally, there is yet another way in which the family re-encounter happens through the connection between vulnerability and agency. Earl falls into the dumpster because of the failure of his ageing body while Kyle finds him and saves him in a highly dynamic scene that implies that, due to his vision impairment, he fails to recognize his grandfather. The story thus contains the most extraordinary relay of responsiveness, powerful emotions connecting the physical and the psychological and compelling each character to act. What remains in the background of this odd tale is a reflection on the relation between compassion and love and the different modes of affective agency that they may allow for.
Creative exposure
Christie’s passionate narration underscores the ethical value of the literary, dwelling on a compassionate understanding of our human vulnerability that, as many contemporary thinkers have argued, might only be reached via the potentiality of literary discourse. As Hirsch notes in this context, “[i]n our acts of reading, looking, and listening we necessarily allow ourselves to be vulnerable as we practice openness, interconnection, and imagination, and as we acknowledge our own implication and complicity” (2016: 82). Christie’s incisive, non-judgmental, portraits of the needy narrator in “Emergency Contact” and the obsessive grandfather in “Discard” are bound up with an investigation of that connection between the literary and the ethical. In particular, both stories speculate on the relation between vulnerability and the feelings of compassion and love, exploring the possibilities for agency in that confluence.
In order to do so, the characters dwell on the border between what Étienne Balibar calls “life zones” — protected spaces where citizens feel safe as long as they locate themselves within the devised medical, economic, and administrative apparatuses — and “death zones” — areas of exposure where lives are necessarily “wasted” by physical or mental illness, addictions, accidents, wars, and so forth (2004: 126). In its intense humanity, Maya’s discourse of unrequited love holds on to a certain life zone, albeit precariously. Earl’s love for Kyle, in its turn, sabotages his obsession with “rescuing” him from the death zone where he thinks he is, twisting the plot in unexpected ways. Both stories draw compassion and sympathy, identifying human sites of creativity in vulnerability and endowing the narrative with a profound sense of the ethical.
Finally, each story represents the subject’s need for contact with others and the body’s search for “survivability in social space and time” (Butler, 2010: 61). While Christie’s characters are tragically exposed “through material needs, through touch, through language” (Butler, 2010: 61), they are also the active subjects of that exposure. Vulnerability is thus articulated through different modes of exposure, which in turn carry a tremendous affective agency. And, while compassion elicits important spaces of responsiveness between characters and in the reader, the most powerful source of that affective agency is love: the love of a grandfather for his homeless grandson; the love of a lonely woman for an anonymous medical worker. To love and be loved. What form of creative exposure is there more radical than that?
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Universidad de La Laguna through the research project Justice, Citizenship and Vulnerability: Narratives of Precarity and Intersectional Perspectives funded by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (Gobierno de España) and FEDER (FFI2015-63895-C2-1-R).
