Abstract
This article examines the rationale for definitions of the homeless in the public imagination and the kind of discourses used to create a physical, psychological, and moral distance between the domiciled and the destitute. In a society where the worthy individual is tied to an ideal of entrepreneurial, rational, homed, successful consumer, and where public space is solely destined for the unobstructed consumption of the privileged, street dwellers are naturally seen as a threat to the economic, social, and moral order as well as a visual blemish: an obstacle to safety and wellbeing. Drawing from a number of sociological, urban, and narrative studies on the survival tactics of homeless people, and especially from Nicholas Blomley’s (2010) insights about street mobility and Leon Anderson’s (2017) classifications of stigma management, this article describes how subjects defined as pathological, dangerous, or pitiful, negotiate street restrictions and create their own standing within a revanchist city. These individuals feature in two comic books published in Canada, Zanta: The Living Legend (2012) and The Dregs (2017), whose originality lies in the heroic role the street person assumes, a legitimate searcher for meaning that sees what most people overlook. In their different format as non-fiction comic and serialized fictional comic we find the expressive visual and narrative potential of the genre and become witnesses of the tribulations of two characters whom the world may consider as deranged but are, however, able to enhance their self-esteem, dismantle ideologies behind assumed notions of respectability, and actively contribute to the city as a place of encounter with difference.
Keywords
Representation choices for homeless people in the public consciousness
The political and symbolic measures used to put at a distance bodies that mainstream society considers anomalous or disgusting sometimes go unnoticed and are often difficult to extricate from popular beliefs about good citizenship. 1 This is particularly pernicious in the case of homeless people, whose very existence has been historically suffocated by selective definitions of person and of place that have impeded their access to both categories. It is in fact the merging of both concepts in common constructions of a worthy identity, that is, a self that owns or is entitled to live in a place, that turns homeless people into unworthy bodies excluded from their right to the city: “To be without a place of one’s own — persona non locata — is to be almost non-existent, as studies of the homeless imply” (Gieryn, 2000: 482). Being without a home is not only “a mere fact of material loss; it is a stigma, an erasure from social life” (Rennels and Purnell, 2017: 492). Such stigmatization involves enduring a number of identity diminishers: rejection, exclusion, arrest, prison, hospitalization, humiliation, violence, and so on (Anderson, 2017: 104).
Lacking a place to live carries a negative moral judgement, as Tim Cresswell notes:
While anachronism is a logical category (a thing out of time), anachorism is a social and cultural category — a thing out of place or without place entirely. Insofar as place is a morally resonant thing-in-the-world, mobility as anachorism is a threat to a moral world. (Cresswell, 2006: 55)
The fact that not only private space (a home) but also public space (the streets) are usually understood as “owned by a normatively enshrined ‘we’ of home-dwelling citizens” (Feldman, 2004: 3) shows the implication of space in exclusionary definitions of the subject as a domiciled organism (see Cook and Whowell, 2011: 615).
Within the context of the Safe Streets Acts 2 passed in Ontario and British Columbia in 1999 and 2004, Nicholas Blomley (2010: 335) contended that the legal and economic discourses that subliminally create animosity against street-dwellers rely on implicit notions of identity that do not often come into the open, concealed as they are under a rhetoric difficult to counteract: the appeal to safe, orderly, and clean environments. Notions of desirable identity are made dependent on the internalized rules we use to move about the city, where individuals comport themselves as detached agents with a purposeful agenda. Our mobility without hindrance in the streets has to be guaranteed at all costs, because mobility is regarded as personal liberty (Blomley, 2010: 335–336).
The rules we assume to share public space in a fluent manner take on a sinister significance when we view the pedestrian as a microcosm of the good social order. Within this order, the very existence of “street people” is understood as a danger in spaces desirably made up of successful consumers moving freely about a business-like environment. The consumer is regarded as an ideal form of self that has to be protected from the discomfort, fear, or revulsion of unwanted sights, someone that has to be insulated from the street’s physical or psychological obstacles that may jeopardize the right to business transactions and the access to aesthetically pleasing environments (see Cook and Whowell, 2011).
This understanding of identity is rooted in a general neoliberal context and it often comes together with reactions such as urban revanchism and compassion-fatigue (Roy, 2018: 290). These reactions are spread through stereotyping processes — often taking place in the media — that reproduce popular conceptualizations about street people, such as, for example, slackers, lackers, and victims, that is, idle, incapable, and unlucky. Most of the stereotypes are grounded in moral and hygienic languages — the deserving or undeserving poor, clean or unwashed bodies, normal and deviant, and so forth (Wright, 1997: 68; Cook and Whowell, 2011: 616) — that set in motion distancing processes that “consign [these individuals] to the periphery of public consciousness” (Daly, 1996: 8). Through visual prompts and lexicons, 3 these representations erect an almost insurmountable barrier between the commuter and the panhandler, mark policy responses to homeless people, and create a tension between the urge to provide shelter and the need to discipline the unhoused. Indeed, there is usually a twin reaction of pity and fear (Feldman, 2004: 6; Radley et al., 2005: 292; Bletsas, 2007: 65–66).
There is broad agreement that homelessness is constructed mainly in the media by speakers who do not challenge common preconceptions of the homeless: typically experts, researchers, or middle-class observers who reinforce the public’s views (Schneider et al., 2010: 166; Calder et al., 2011: 1–12; Zufferey, 2014: 525). This kind of journalistic communication that looks at the homeless as a problem and from an outside perspective extends to many other disciplines such as sociology, statistics, and ethnography. This eventually entails a reinforcement of the barrier between us and them through the reproduction of clichéd images in the social imaginary about beggars. When discussing journalistic engagement with homelessness in Toronto and Vancouver, Barbara Schneider claims that the “expert” intermediaries who translate the experience of homeless individuals actually displace them from their own stories and thus efface their public voice (2010: 166).
“Rarely have the voices of the homeless — indeed, of the poor in general — been allowed to speak for themselves. And to a degree I have been guilty of that in my work”, confesses Talmadge Wright (1997: 299), a researcher whose main material, paradoxically, is the conversations he maintained with homeless people over the years (see also Snow and Anderson, 1993: 229 and Roche, 2015: 228–233). It is difficult to integrate theory with praxis, he argues, because this dialogue wanders far beyond a scientific scrutiny of behaviours and speech into the alleged sui generis knowledges of homeless persons themselves. The effacing of their voices is, thus, not only provoked by an inescapable visual logic of identity, but by a common belief in the unreliability of their voices. According to Talmadge Wright:
the boundary work accomplished between academic disciplines, between types of knowledge and their practice, works to prevent crossovers, to prevent the sliding of one discourse and knowledge into another; it is the debasement of the poetic and somatic knowledge in favour or a rigid conceptual and normative knowledge that sacrifices the potential disruptive effects of utopic spaces for the false certainty of control and predictable outcomes. (1997: 299; emphasis added)
As we will see, rough sleepers and people who roam the streets, regarded most often as deranged, can engage in a doubling of reality, that is, the invention of another life to be able to endure their circumstances. This invention greatly helps them in their survival, although such behaviour is generally rejected and feared as a sign of sickness and insanity. It is the mismatch between attitudes of composure and self-collection, and a lack of propriety and predictability that disavows the speech of homeless people, shelter residents, and “city freaks”, whose knowledge is not thought to be truthful or grounded in reality.
Since homelessness is defined in the public conscience almost exclusively as an economic and welfare issue or within parameters that make morality and hygiene equal, it is necessary to turn to other communication venues that may cancel the distance, if at least conceptually, between the domiciled and the destitute. It is also necessary to pay attention to narratives that, unlike journalistic and sociological explanatory paradigms, deal with homeless people while taking their inner lives into consideration. We need to come across discourses, images, and narratives that originate in their own experience, first in order to redress popular discourses of revulsion and indifference and, second, to dismantle the belief in the unreliability of their narratives. Literature, photography, and film are other media with tremendous potential to debilitate stereotypes engrained in journalism and popular culture. They are not without their perils, though, as John Allen warns (2004: 140–146). Mainstream artistic and documentary works have often represented the homeless using either a romantic or a degrading lens, as glamorized freedom seekers or as abject others. Even when the transcription of the realities of homelessness is autobiographical, the first person often stands above, separate from the true “bums” (Allen, 2004: 15, 73, 140–141): incursions into that lower world are sometimes presented as purposeful and temporary.
This article is a response to the call, in homeless studies, to identify other communication venues and genres that may interrupt the ongoing public narrative of them by resisting “routinized patterns” of reporting and interpretation (Schneider et al., 2010: 169). 4 That call is also to focus on the measures for preserving the self-esteem of people who live on the streets: the “salvaging of the self”, in the words of David Snow and Leon Anderson (1993: 203). In order to do so, I will look into a form that communicates primarily through the combination of narrative and image. The comic book is a genre that for decades has shown a strong commitment to addressing human right issues and has provided a few books which tackle the representation of street people, either from a documentary or from a fictional standpoint.
According to Wright (1997: 71, 333), Allen (2004: 6), and Blomley (2010: 333), homeless identities are fixed in, on, and through the body, a body that becomes a symbol of irresponsibility and immorality: “[t]he homeless body in the public imagination represents the body of decay, the degenerate body, a body that is constantly rejected as sick, scary, dirty and smelly and a host of other pejoratives used to create social distance between housed and unhoused persons” (Wright, 1997: 68–69; see also May and Cloke, 2013: 897). In its depiction of stigmatized bodies, the comic’s visual component allows for a graphic display of surfaces, colours, and contours and literally permits a direct observation of the correspondence, or departure, from the visual identity markers usually thrusted on the homeless in the social imaginary. In addition to this rendering of allegorical corporealities, through the accompanying written narrative, homeless individuals can be represented, or represent themselves, as fully-fledged emotional beings.
In a number of recent comics the homeless individual was regarded (or regarded himself) as a victim who either overcomes or fails to hurdle the huge obstacles of street exposure and humiliation. 5 The characters in these books are sometimes real people and sometimes fictional creations, and they lost or achieved a worthy identity on the basis of their loss or return to a home. They internalized the status of living dead that society has arranged for them while in their placelessness (Roche, 2015: 230). In what follows, I will analyse two comic books published in Canada whose originality lies in the kind of role the street person assumes: Zanta: The Living Legend (2012) by Jason Kieffer, and The Dregs (2017) by Zac Thompson, Lonnie Naddler, Eric Zawadzki, and Dee Cunnife. In these two books, which can be roughly classified as nonfiction comic and serialized comic respectively, we do not find characters crushed by pre-scripted negative images of homeless identity. Their protagonists find resources to live a full life, which they do by mustering survival strategies that enable them to create their own standing within the city. They emerge as dissonant and even arrogant selves that seek a place on the foreground of a city’s culture, not in its hidden spaces, and see themselves as legitimate searchers for meaning, lucid enough to see what most people overlook. In their different formats and generic codes, both Zanta (extended interview) and The Dregs (horror noir) celebrate the capacities of the mentally ill and the indigent to subvert the taken-for-granted logic of a busy humanity that walks past them. They compose “unexpected spaces of responsiveness” (Darias-Beautell, Introduction), where homeless individuals challenge the one-way temporality of an expected future.
Wright’s previous reference to the disruptive effects of utopic spaces connects to Marianne Hirsch’s proposal to reconsider vulnerability beyond “a condition of weakness, victimhood, or stigma” (2016: 81) by newly perceiving the alternative realities that a temporal sequence may contain. This rigid linearity is precisely disassembled in the behaviour of people continually exposed to the look of passers-by in public spaces, since the former engage in a process of creating overlapping realities that offer visions of what the city should be like. These two comics are suitable texts to observe how street people, real and fictional, edit the narratives of their lives, handle survival tactics and manage to live outside mainstream systems of acceptance in two Canadian cities, Toronto and Vancouver. In them, the reader has the opportunity to observe how both documentary and fictional narrative modes position themselves when having to give expression to the stigmatizing practices occurring in the streets.
Zanta: The banished deluded hero
Zanta: The Living Legend consists of several interviews between Mr. Zancai and Jason Kieffer himself, who draws and records their conversations. Mr. Zancai explains that, after having an accident at the workplace and a family split, he feels compelled to act out on the streets of Toronto a character of his own making, Zanta: bare-chested and wearing boots, shorts, and a Santa hat, he will uninterruptedly do push-ups and other gymnastic frolics on the city’s sidewalk. His appearance, his slogans, his relationship with other citizens — amused, puzzled, angry, scared pedestrians — become a parody of the figure of Santa Claus, whom he deliberately seeks to subvert. In this manner, he makes the streets of Toronto both his home and his stage. 6
Jason Kieffer himself features as part of the story; he follows and questions his interviewee, while Zanta replies and performs his workout in the streets, yelling and greeting people, making sure he gets noticed by passers-by. As an interviewer, Kieffer faithfully records the hysterical as well as Zanta’s perspicacious comments on how he is treated by doctors, policemen, onlookers, and the media. Besides Zanta’s megalomaniac projects and obsession to appear in TV programmes, we observe the continuous attempts on the part of the city authorities to discipline Zanta’s unruly antics. He has been gradually banned from downtown Toronto and many other parts of the city, including public transport, and is continually harassed by the police, measures that Zanta combats ingeniously and undauntedly. His tribulations to evade surveillance and police control exemplify the enforced restrictions on alternative modes of habitation in a city: “the shrinking of truly public space”, in Blomley’s words (2010: 332). Blomley insists that breaking the pedestrian’s walking code implies a threat to social order and Zanta definitely upsets these rules and becomes a troubling and destabilizing other, an obstacle to understandings of the city as a space free from uncomfortable encounters with difference.
He admits that his bizarre attitude toward passers-by (including his obsession to appear in Toronto TV shows) is “NUTS”, “CRAZY”, and “INSANE” (2012: 12), 7 and the same applies to his recurrent reassuring exhortations “YES YES YES” and “MERRY CHRISTMESS”. At the same time, his fabrication of an outlandish personality is consistent with his mental recovery, if we can call it that. For while he acts manic and his speech is nervous, he is extremely articulate about the inadequate approach given to him by doctors, psychiatrists, policemen, radio, and TV programme anchors. The diagnosis given by such figures of authority and by some average pedestrians is: mentally illness. Zanta is a victim of the previously mentioned belief in the unreliability of first-hand accounts of street people. When utterances are contaminated by hysteria, they will be discarded as irritating, inconsequential, or marginal. Excited utterances “scandalise the conceit of analytic neutrality, the conventions of rational debate and dispassionate description”, as Al-Kassim argues in connection to people dispossessed of the right to speech because they are thought to be at the limits of intelligibility (2010: 10, 31). Judith Butler also insisted that speech manifestations where the speaker does not reflect a balanced mental state will always be discarded, doomed to become unofficial (1997: 15). However, Zanta’s unedited words — including a fully transcribed radio interview — is the material that legitimately sustains the narrative of Kieffer’s book; they give the reader a chance to appreciate the fairness in his complaints. The format of the direct report gives Zanta the opportunity of not being transformed into a story by an external narrator. He speaks; he is not merely spoken about. His agency lies in his ruling out of citizen predictability and betting on a world made to his size, the “utopic spaces” and somatic knowledge that Wright promoted when talking about the alleged illegitimacy of “poor people’s talk” (299).
Zanta uses his agile use of reasoning in order to dismantle authoritative discourses and disciplining criteria (medical, municipal, lawful) foisted upon him. He is aware of his “fast speech” but he considers it is a gift because he always “WANTS TO GET SO MUCH IN” (14). He explains how medicines made him apathetic, which he did not want to be, and even when he was having a “NORMAL” conversation with the doctor, the doctor still thought that he was “CRAZY”. He yearns for human contact without prejudice because of his strange outfit. Actually, he is expelled from his gym and from court just because he refuses to take off his Santa Claus hat: “AND IT’S THE
Social respectability is enforced through surveillance of public space. Accordingly, Zanta minutely describes the whole process of his dismissal from buildings and city areas. Kieffer, for his part, provides a map of Toronto, “Zanta Bans”, outlining the areas and institutions from which Zanta has been banned: from Duffering to Parliament Street, including The Toronto Star, Toronto Sun, Chum City TV, College Park, City Hall, Yorkville, Union Station, and Exhibition Place. This is indeed a map of coercive invisibility that does not only reflect the geography of Toronto, but functions as a moral and political topography, a diagram of worthiness that edits out the presence of deviance. Its lines trace the punitive measures taken against the inconvenient other. In spite of all this, Zanta, undomesticated, leans on this map’s straight lines and keeps doing his energetic push-ups. Big-sized words such as “IT’S SICKENING” ironically appear close to his body (105).
Zanta sees himself as an actor in an urban dramaturgical performance in which he is the formidable protagonist. By tampering with the neoliberal preoccupation with flow and obstruction, he contests the “normalized urban self” (Radley et al., 2005: 275). That self is one that deals with the strangeness of others by avoiding eye contact, keeping a distance, or entering into each other’s field of vision; in big cities we interpret others through glimpses of clothes, manners, and possessions. Repeatedly refusing to be removed from the public gaze, Zanta has become an “unsafe obstruction” (Blomley, 2010: 345): he is arrested and taken to Don Jail several times for mischief, disturbance, and interference with traffic. He attacks the rules of city space defined as a privatized view for the unobstructed consumption of the privileged; a space “of hermeneutic closure and suspicion” (Blomley, 2010: 342). 8
Far from adopting the tragic pattern of the isolated and ghostly beggar, he does not panhandle but makes people stop, look at him, and encounter their own sense of amusement, embarrassment, or shock. He summons them to touch him, write on his body, and play with him, facilitating a proximity that is usually unwanted in crowds, thus challenging the formality of city encounters. His muscular hyperactive body and his pretensions to celebrity can be read as psychopathic as well as interpreted as a liberation from the limitations of various discourses and social taboos imposed on the stray sick body.
Leon Anderson explains that those labelled as deviant follow different reactions to the stigma they confront: they may internalize negative images of themselves and become secret deviants or they may turn the alleged deviance “into a source of pride and power” (2017: xii). Zanta embodies particularly well the case of “deviance amplification”: he deliberately wants to become the “NUMBER ONE FREAK IN TORONTO” (21). “CUZ, SEE — I WANNA BE THE FIRST MAN — WHICH I AM — TO ACTUALLY LIVE OUT A CHARACTER FROM MORNING TO NIGHT, NO MATTER HOW TIRED I AM, NO MATTER HOW BURNT-OUT I AM” “YESYESYES!”. His delusions increase as the interview progresses: “AND NOW THAT I’M FUCKIN’ FAMOUS HERE, I’M READY FOR THE
His body becomes a palimpsest of words, signatures, and graffiti that people write on, something that takes him into deeper trouble, especially after one girl writes on his back “FUCK THE POLICE” (47). He could put on his baseball cap rather than his Santa hat in order to be given entrance to events, but he says that wouldn’t be him (49). His effort to be true to himself, which implies a parody of etiquette, manners, and normal walking, impedes his access to the city and has him constantly harassed and arrested by the police. He finds it impossible and improper to adopt the proper manner of the calm and quiet citizen. He is therefore deprived of the privileges associated with expectations about body types, dress, comportment, and communication styles (Wright, 1997: 68).
Nonetheless, the significance of his impersonation does something else than urging to leave etiquette behind. For him, an affirmation of freakishness opens up the possibility of agency, even when an external observer would take it as hysteria. The cluttered visual arrangement of the interviews on the page shows the inevitable connections between the hurried pace of Zanta’s speech and our assumptions of unreliability. This occurs in the drawings of the sidewalks and streets of Toronto and in the Molar Radio Interview, transcribed from the time that Zanta has been taken to solitary confinement (69–77). The crammed pages rarely leave a blank space and the comic strips are overloaded with thick black lines that trace the surfaces of the sidewalk and the contours of Zanta’s words. Strokes of black ink and scattered stains choke the space of the panels, a design that gives the impression of feverishness, filth, and haste. This also creates a sense of claustrophobia, which perhaps stands for the overburdened state of mind of the speaker.
However, far from regarding his presence irrelevant, as public opinion about him would have it, he constantly claims his usefulness in the production of the city itself. In his frenzied deliverance and acute awareness of curtailing street rules, he dilutes the dyad lawful pedestrian/illegal street-dweller, shifting our attention from his absurdity to the insanity of the punishing actions taken on those people that, like him, move about the city outside of the average citizen’s usual concerns (Blomley, 2010: 343). Ideally, public space, city sidewalks, should be “open-minded spaces” (Blomley, 2010: 336), (Berman, 1986: 482). They should allow us to come across forms of being, moving, and living that challenge our own identity shells and have the potential to make ourselves more permeable.
Thus, Zanta: The Living Legend becomes a manifesto articulated through the voice of a deluded and importunate speaking body that reveals the connections between public space regulations and restrictive definitions of the creditable individual. His efforts at resisting surveillance, at rejecting to be an object “of scrutiny, regulation and control” (Schneider et al., 2010: 168; see also Cook and Whowell, 2011: 612) appear to be comic and tragic at the same time. In spite of his playfulness, he cannot get over the shock of being constantly branded as deranged; it is the price to pay for his excitability. However, he does not negotiate becoming orderly.
The Dregs: The old bearded man as homeless noir protagonist
Like Zanta, the protagonist of The Dregs, Arnold, also seeks coherence and justice in a city that efficiently obliterates street-dwellers. Unlike Zanta, Arnold is a fictional character but he is also a disorderly, sick, and stray body, and he possesses a sharp sense of the unequal distribution of space in his city, Vancouver. In spite of its fictiveness, the book turns out to be a factual account of the economic forces behind urbanization processes that impede the poor from having access to housing and city amenities. Arnold, an old homeless drug addict, fights the stratagems of greedy city developers that plan to revitalize Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. In particular, they are intent on gentrifying the space taken up by a ghetto of filthy blocks called the Dregs, where the poor and homeless have taken refuge: “five square blocks, stuck between gray sky and gray concrete” (Thompson et al., 2017: n.p.). 9 As old buildings are being knocked down and erected as stylish apartments, 10 Arnold’s friends are disappearing, leaving no trace behind; the story follows him as he tracks down the scanty clues. While he does so, he finds himself trapped in two dimensions of his existence; on the one hand, his drug addiction makes him lie helplessly in the streets; on the other, his delusions of being a detective in the manner of Philip Marlowe have him trapped in a labyrinthian city full of criminal plots. The reader has intermittent access to these two parallel but merging experiences: we witness in all graphic detail how he shoots himself up with drugs — including the reactions of his weak body — as well as follow his errands into different parts of the city as the hero who pursues elusive clues in an urban maze that conspires against the homeless. As a Marlowe-like detective, he gets immersed deeper and deeper into a nightmarish atmosphere, trying to find homeless men like him, who live, or vegetate, in the only area of the city where the destitute are allowed to live. As the praise at the back cover of the book reads: “The Dregs is the first homeless meta noir ever made”. Indeed, it is a story that imitates the structure and mood of film and novel noir — and of gory horror movies — and this serves as a route to depict almost in literal factuality the effects of gentrification change in a Canadian city from the perspective of those that remain invisible.
While the citizens of the gentrified city line up in front of fashionable restaurants, Arnold yells at urbanization agents every time they summon people to announce their projects. Being violently expelled from the meetings as just another filthy and vociferous bum is not his only problem, as he also has to escape from another, more sinister, menace. A group of thugs are killing homeless people and using their flesh to cater the emerging restaurants in the area. Arnold manages by a whisker to escape from these ruthless underworld butchers who trade with the bodies of those no one will ever claim. In The Dregs, both the bodies and the habitats of the homeless are literally consumed for pleasure.
The imagery of the book impacts the reader with its yellowish and reddish shades. On the book’s front cover, we see an anonymous man dressed in jacket and tie eating a piece of underdone meat; in the dripping blood at the bottom of the page the face of an old man looms. Then, the story as such opens by presenting three panels of blue skylines of the city of Vancouver: 1950, 1990 and now. On the opposite page we see a dark green room in a slaughter house, hooks hanging from its metal structures, where three men wearing masks shave, mark, behead, and bleed a man who is promptly turned into minced meat. This meat is being served in the on-trend restaurant La Mancha. A medium and a long-distance shot is taken of the restaurant: in the former, behind the restaurant windows, people are enjoying their dinner; in the latter, a few steps from the restaurant, a drug addict is shooting up and a homeless man is pulling a trolley. On the next page, a punctured arm lies on the pavement, on one of its sides a half-opened shabby book, Raymond’s Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, on the other side, a used syringe. On this very same page, a quotation from Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal, the well-known passage on the nutritive flesh of a good fat child, augments the stress produced by the disgusting scenes of the cannibalistic comic noir.
In the introduction to the book, the West Coast Editor of VICE Canada describes the city’s problem with vacant property, the increasing number of deaths by opioid overdoses and the plans to regenerate its problematic Downtown Eastside. This journalistic introduction tinges Arnold’s fictional story with the pressing realities of the city’s actual problems. The storyline conveys the realities of homelessness and of addiction alongside a man’s efforts to fight the plans against those that are most vulnerable. At the same time, in a more allegorical dimension, he becomes, in his own mind and in ours, the archetypal lonely hero who fights against all odds.
The constant references to classic literary works lend moral weight and universality to his quest, and as in Zanta, the maps he draws to find the location of other homeless are imbued with the desperate ethos that the topographies of the non-consuming “others” represent. Arnold’s map replaces the name of the streets by the names of missing people and therefore he humanizes the city’s marginal spaces. The restaurant where all suspicions point to is called “La Mancha”, which in Spanish refers both to a “stain” and to the area that dreamer Don Quixote perpetually roams to fix the wrongs he encounters. References to stains become constant in the book, and not only as visual tokens, as the stain of the city’s neglect of their homeless extends to other aspects of humanity. Quotes from a number of classic authors further invoke the darkness of the human soul and expose the arbitrariness of wealth distribution. These include Oscar Wilde’s popular description of a city in The Happy Prince — the rich making merry while the beggars are sitting at the gates — as well as the existentialist stance claimed by Camus, who talked about the “unreasonable silence of the world” in the face of human need. Arnold realizes that he is living a story whose outcome belongs to someone else, that the city is driving him crazy in the same manner that the windmills in Don Quijote de La Mancha confounded the noble knight. Arnold’s alter ego tells him “It’s never about solving the case. It’s about your determination to find the truth. It’s about caring when nobody else does”. In a contrived visual metaphor, skyscrapers bend and merge with Arnold’s body while he is being swallowed further and further down by a whirlpool of bodies and streets. This image exposes the dream, or rather the nightmarish world, created as a result of extreme urban exposure: whereas his attempt to boycott greedy urban policies gives pattern to his life, the city crushes him for not possessing either status or authority.
The last pages of The Dregs contain a section entitled “Off Hours” that documents the leisure activities of people living on the streets of Vancouver. According to Thanh Nguyen, the photographer: “[t]he hope is to reveal a commonality: the desire to seek escape from the grind of daily life through small acts of enjoyment”. This photographer deliberately portrays his subjects at eye level and not from a high angle, the one we normally get when we walk past homeless people, in order to make it more difficult to look away. “Did you get my good side?” is the caption of the first photograph, where a man with a crumpled body and greasy hair is blowing bubbles. “I like to get lost in the narrative” reads the caption of the last photo, where a man sitting on the street is reading a book. These paratexts in The Dregs have the effect of subverting the potential separation between reality and storytelling. In fact, this comic depicts in different media — drawings, narrative, quotes, photos — exactly the same circumstances. The mixture of genres is startling and, through this mix, a pitiable homeless individual who suffers from hallucinations sees through the apparent harmless tactics of urban developers and becomes the hero of a blood-tinged detective cannibalistic story. After all, the circumstances experienced by homeless people are similar to the situations that the genres of noir and horror narrate.
Arnold imagines that his life is a book in order to make it comprehensible. He and an imagined Marlowe face each other when the story is coming to an end: “Now you’re getting it”, says Marlowe: “You’re one of us. We’re just lost between the pages trying to find a way out”. Arnold has literally filled the gutter (i.e. the blank space between strips in comics) with a universal story of frustration. This acknowledgement of common humanity, of common loss, cancels out the distance between “us” and “them”, giving entrance to “them” into a shared collective plot that shows all humans as lost and obsessed beings. The tribulations of an old homeless man are indeed compatible with a universal plot of seeking meaning in a confusing world.
Conclusions
The cultural work that these two comics carry out has to do with image transformation and narrative empowerment. Homeless people usually lack the interpretive power that comes with authority; they are not endowed, in the public imagination, with an articulate being for themselves and therefore “remain silently outside the articulate precincts of the law” (Baker, 1993: 39). Here they are imagined as having powers of defiance, they challenge the ideologies of respectability and use their bodies in startling ways to get introduced into the ritual knowledges of domiciled society. Their stories include elements of the imaginary of freedom, liberation, and existentialism; that is, the imaginaries that belong to all citizens, especially the underprivileged. They include plot structures widely popular, in this case of the genres of noir and horror — whose teleologies are far from being therapeutic — and apply them to those individuals whose life seems to be made up only of boredom and inaction.
The protagonists of these two comics do not consider their undomiciled status to be degrading, start actions that neutralize their hypothetical stigma, and act as if they were heroes or prophets. In doing so, they counteract current understandings of the worthy ego as an entrepreneurial, rational, homed, successful consumer. By changing their image from inactive, fragile, low-skilled grateful receivers to strong-willed generators of their own and other people’s stories, these two books become tuned to a recurrent demand on the part of ethnographers, sociologists, psychologists, social workers, and artists (not usually politicians), who insist that our focus should be on the abilities of homeless people to accomplish place and meaning.
Both Zanta and Arnold produce their own biographies in order to become valuable selves: they, the victims, are turned into activists. They negotiate street restrictions with considerable creativity and confront the powerful rhetoric of city revanchism (Davis, 1990; Smith, 1996; Soya, 2000; Mitchell, 2001) with a high degree of skilfulness and imagination. Thanks to the creation of other realities, of their fictive storytelling and dream making (Snow and Anderson, 1993: 223), they unlearn to view themselves from the perspective of others. From this productive angle, their survival tactics cannot be discarded merely as insane and pathological. They overcome the difficulty of giving life narratives structure in circumstances where pointlessness is predominant. In doing so, they manage to adjust their day-to-day existence on the streets to viable narrative frames where there is transformation and integration of past, present, and future.
According Robert Desjarlais, two of the most powerful systems of identity formation are the therapeutic and the capitalist self, and in these two books these two ideologies are not embodied by the protagonists (1997: 177). Rather, they show the shallowness of the premises of respectability: autonomy, foresight, coherence, and predictability. People outside the system of wealth cannot be mild-mannered, balanced, soft-spoken, clean (see Wright, 1997: 70–71; Cook and Whowell, 2011: 613). Beggars have been traditionally used as a trope for rejection and pity and been assigned the limbo space that lies beyond mainstream society (Allen, 2004: 139). However, these comics contribute to surpass the imaginative impasse of dominant cultural narratives where the body of the beggar or the nutcase is only a trope for poverty and degradation (Allen, 2004: ix, 101–102). The able, muscular, laughing body of Zanta and the mysterious, intelligent, and resourceful detective Arnold present identitary counterparts to ongoing interpretations of the homeless. And it is important, as mentioned in the introduction of this article, to think of street-dwellers, not just as a statistic, a political or a charity problem — as pitiful subjects — but in their participation in narrative configurations, of their own and of others’ making (Radley, 2005: 293). Homelessness has been analysed by numerous disciplines, but usually without taking into consideration how the perspective of homeless individuals fit into long-established narrative patterns. These two examples show how real and fictional subjects use these narratives to grab a sense of coherence and how they incorporate possible relationships with other street users. Doing so, they refuse to accept their vulnerability as something “to be overcome” and healed but rather explored as a vantage point (Hirsch, 2016: 81).
According to Robert Daly, “a more open, contextual, and dynamic conceptualization of street reality is needed […], one that reveals how they manage to live in isolation, anxiety, frustration and rejection” (1996: 11). In Zanta and The Dregs, attention is drawn to homelessness agency because their protagonists use their vulnerabilities to alert toward negative changes in the city. They represent a fantasy where citizenship should be granted to all members of society, regardless of their housing status, thus embodying the kind of somatic, even poetic knowledges that Wright refers to (1997: 299). However utopic the characters’ views, readers are given the opportunity of engaging with plots that do not give exclusive attention to processes that lead to submissiveness. People with stigmatized identities fight their irrelevance in public opinion, claim their space in the city, and draw attention to the consequences of the punitive approach. Zanta and The Dregs make us look at people we instinctively tend to consider strange or unpleasant in their efforts to achieve self-worth and therefore enable them to enter our own experiential zones, eliciting within us the vulnerabilities produced by aesthetic encounters that Marianne Hirsch proposed (2016: 82).
