The Acorn of Sadness Exploring Precarity in Critical Global Short Fiction

Ashleigh Synnott

Master of Creative Arts

University of Technology Sydney

2017

I certify that the work in this thesis has not previously been submitted for a degree nor has it been submitted as part of requirements for a degree except as part of the collaborative doctoral degree and/or fully acknowledged within the text.

I also certify that the thesis has been written by me. Any help that I have received in my research work and the preparation of the thesis itself has been acknowledged. In addition, I certify that all information sources and literature used are indicated in the thesis.

This research is supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.

......

Ashleigh Synnott

February 2017

i Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Amanda Jordan.

Thank you to Delia Falconer, for the guidance during supervision and for having such enthusiasm for this project until the last. Thank you to Jasmine Crittenden for the excellent proofread.

Love and thanks to:

Debra Adelaide, Jasmine Beth, Hasu Opa Clark, Rose Firmin, Emily Lees, Simon Joannou, Erin Gough, Nisha Brooks, Robyn Lowe, Annabel Stafford, Anna Denejkina, Karen Synnott, Michael Synnott, Sarah Mares, Matina Bourmas, Melanie Miller, Trish Mormanis, Sarah Barrett, Kathleen Hendry, Linda Ozers, Sue Gock, Natalie Costa-Bir, Chren Byng, Annabel Palfreeman, Amelia Westlake, Petra Winkler-Hirter, Mitchell Horton and Cassandra Yee.

Thanks to Corky, of Windsor.

ii The Acorn of Sadness Exploring Precarity in Critical Global Short Fiction

Abstract iv List of Publications v

The Acorn of Sadness: stories

The Other End of Cleever 2 Not the Sea 6 Greetings from the Happy Return 18 In the End, In the Head 24 There Was a Man Screaming on Broadway 31 The Strongest Man in the World 38 Between Elephant and the World 46 The Acorn of Sadness 51 The Baby on Enghelab Street 60 On the Road to Kuang Si Falls 69

‘The Bird You Are Holding: Exploring Precarity in Critical Global Fiction’

Introduction 81 From Disaster to Precarity 84 What We Talk About When We Talk About Precarity 89 The Emergence of Precarity in Literary Studies 94 The Moment of Address in The Acorn of Sadness 100 Conclusion 115

References 116

iii Abstract

Over the past ten years, writers and critics have increasingly noted the emergence of precarity as a literary sensibility in contemporary fiction. At the same time, questions are being asked about the capacity of literature to attend to the scope and breadth of global and local uncertainties and instabilities that affect people’s lives. This thesis, comprising an exegesis, ‘The Bird You Are Holding’, and The Acorn of Sadness, a collection of ten short stories, investigates and articulates precarity as a generative and structural framework for writing critical global short fiction. These stories are: ‘The Other End of Cleever’, ‘Not the Sea’, ‘Greetings from the Happy Return’, ‘In the End, In the Head’, ‘There Was a Man Screaming on Broadway’, ‘The Strongest Man in the World’, ‘Between Elephant and the World’, ‘The Acorn of Sadness’, ‘The Baby on Enghelab Street’ and ‘On the Road to Kuang Si Falls.’ The exegesis explores the theory of precarity and its relevance to discussions about contemporary literature, and offers a brief rationale for the generation and structure of the collection.

iv List of Publications

‘The Acorn of Sadness’ appeared in Issue 224 of Overland (2016) and was runner up in the Overland and Victoria University Short Story Prize (2016).

‘In the End, In the Head’ and ‘On the Road to Kuang Si Falls’ appeared in Issue 222 Overland (2016).

‘On the Road to Kuang Si Falls’ was runner up in the Overland Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize (2016).

‘Not the Sea’ won the UTS Writers’ Prize in 2014. It appeared in Sight Lines: The UTS Writers’ Anthology (2014) and Award Winning Australian Writing (2014).

v The Acorn of Sadness

stories

1 Production Note:

This collection is not included in this digital copy due to copyright restrictions.

2 The Bird You Are Holding

Exploring Precarity in Critical Global Short Fiction

80

Introduction

‘Once upon a time there was an old woman. Blind but wise,’ begins Toni Morrison in her 1993 Nobel Lecture at Princeton University. ‘One day the woman is visited by some young people who seem to be bent on disproving her clairvoyance and showing her up for the fraud they believe she is. Their plan is simple: they enter her house and ask the one question the answer to which rides solely on her difference from them, a difference they regard as a profound disability: her blindness. They stand before her and one of them says, “Old woman, I hold in my hand a bird. Tell me whether it is living or dead.” The old woman’s silence is so long, the young people have trouble holding their laughter. Finally she speaks and her voice is soft but stern. “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands”’ (1997, p. 51). This scenario describes the terrain my thesis explores. While the bird in the story represents the vulnerability and precariousness of life, as Morrison suggests in her lecture, it also stands for language. As writers, language is that thing in our hands. This is all we can be certain of: not if the way we use language speaks to others, nor if our work is good or necessary or living or dead, but only that we have language, that we hold it, that language is there for us, that it is in our hands. Over the past ten years, writers and critics have increasingly noted the emergence of precarity as a literary sensibility in contemporary fiction. At the same time, questions are being asked about the capacity of literature to attend to the scope and breadth of local and global uncertainties and instabilities that affect people’s lives. This exegesis, ‘The Bird You Are Holding’, and the accompanying collection of ten short stories, The Acorn of Sadness, together form my thesis, which explores precarity as a generative

81 and structural framework for writing critical global short fiction. The stories are: ‘The Other End of Cleever’, ‘Not the Sea’, ‘Greetings from the Happy Return’, ‘In the End, In the Head’, ‘There Was a Man Screaming on Broadway’, ‘The Strongest Man in the World’, ‘Between Elephant and the World’, ‘The Acorn of Sadness’, ‘The Baby on Enghelab Street’ and ‘On the Road to Kuang Si Falls.’ As opposed to a collection such as Nam Le’s The Boat or Ceridwen Dovey’s Only the Animals, which are certainly characterised by ‘distinct voices’ and ‘jolting movements between specific yet diverse locations’ (Brown 2015, p. 1), my collection includes stories that believe in their own unbelievability and stories that do not. The idea is that, read together, they do not aim to embed some totalising truth, but to highlight the problem – and explore the possibilities – of the narrative frame. This exegesis is divided into three parts. As I will outline in the first, ‘From Disaster to Precarity’, I started this project with the aim of writing short fiction that engages with global issues, such as exile, suicide and mass displacement – issues that, I feel, are thematically linked by their ‘unspeakability’, by the ways in which they represent that which is difficult to say. However, I quickly found my ambitions and hopefulness coming up against the ethical and technical difficulties of writing outside my own field of experience as a white, urban Australian woman. Conceived as descriptions of, or responses to, specific events, my short stories seemed caught between, on one hand, the risk of appropriating otherness and, on the other, reducing the breadth and complexity of contemporary experience into a set of ‘issues’. It was only when I discovered the theoretical field of precarity that I was able to think differently about these questions and the reach of my fiction. In the second part, ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Precarity’, I define the term ‘precarity’ and briefly chart its use since the 1970s. I examine the usefulness of broadening this concept and applying it to scenarios beyond the purely economic, to the transnational and the Anthropocene.

82 In the third section, ‘The Emergence of Precarity in Literary Studies’, I discuss ways in which academics, such as Jago Morrison, Paul Jay and Judith Butler, have explored precarity as a framework for developing an ethics of political non-violence and as a literary sensibility. Though in its early stages, there is a growing recognition of a new field of literature that attempts to find a form reflective of, or about, precarity itself. One example is what Joseph Darda calls ‘critical global fiction’ – an emerging genre that ‘goes beyond the discourses of transnationalism’ and ‘endeavour[s] to transcend national boundaries and imagine global community’ (2014, p. 108). I position my work tentatively in this emergent genre. While the writing process was more organic than can be adequately represented by a single label, finding a home for my stories was a critical step towards satisfying my need to produce engaged, affective fiction that could carry the burden of moral and ethical responsibility, which, I felt, strongly accompanied my act of writing. In the final part of this exegesis, ‘The Moment of Address in The Acorn of Sadness’, I explore how I have worked with, drawn from, built upon and responded to the theory of precarity through my writing of short fiction. I discuss the ways in which the collection explores various aspects of precarity and, in doing so, demonstrate my structural choices, conveying the ways in which the stories speak to each other. I also illuminate some aspects of the writing process. While I do not intend to conduct a critical analysis of The Acorn of Sadness, nor provide justification for my creative choices, I draw the reader’s attention to the ways in which these stories are explorations of the notion of precarity. They were written out of a deepening awareness, achieved through theoretical reading, of the importance of broadening our frames of perception, as we face urgent questions of agency and responsibility.

83 From Disaster to Precarity

Late one Sunday in 2014 I was wrapping mugs on the living room floor. I was preparing to move to my tenth share house in so many years when something on the news caught my attention. A young man, not yet thirty, had set fire to himself inside his apartment in Geelong. His name was Leo Seemanpillai. A nurse described seeing black smoke rising into the air and a pile of clothes next to a mailbox, still on fire. ‘All his skin was peeling off his limbs and he was really distressed,’ Esther Perrett told the ABC (Milligan 2014). She also said: ‘The fact that someone would rather do that to themselves than live probably means that there’s something very, very wrong with what’s going on with asylum seekers.’ Watching this news item, I felt a call to respond – I felt compelled to find what Butler describes as ‘a mode of response that follows upon having been addressed’ (2004, p. 129). There was the violence of a death of that kind. There was the violence of the language used: the description of the man on fire, yes, but also the affectless cadences of the news reader and reporter. For all the horror of this news story, there was also something so rudimentary, so familiar, so everyday, about another asylum seeker hurting himself; another refugee, another act of desperation. All these things disturbed me – I was moved, yes – but this is not the same as being moved to respond. The first thing I did was write a letter. I had the idea I could write a profile piece on the man who had died, Leo Seemanpillai. I had the idea I could do something with words. I thought, perhaps, I could write about Leo’s life and childhood, perhaps I could give a sense of the person, as opposed to the stereotype. In media reports following Leo’s death, Pastor Tom Pietcsche from St Paul’s Lutheran Church in Geelong described the man he knew well. So, I wrote to him – could he help me with some contacts? The pastor responded right away. He was happy to talk, but worried that

84 seeing Leo’s life through the ‘prism of politics’ was ‘ultimately limiting and dehumanising’. ‘You’ll find the more politicised people happy to talk,’ he wrote. ‘The Tamil community themselves are more circumspect, and know that Leo’s life was complex’ (2015, pers. comm. 10 March). I did not pursue the story. For one thing, I had no idea what the story was. I didn’t know what I wanted to write, or for what purpose, and yet there it was: the moment of address.

Fiction writers, no matter how good their intentions, are not absolved from the risk of dehumanising others. An awareness of the risk of misappropriation can be paralysing and 2016 saw concerns about cultural appropriation that had been gathering force since the eighties emerge explosively in response to Lionel Shriver’s (2016) keynote address at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival. Shriver told her audience: ‘Taken to their logical conclusion, ideologies recently come into vogue challenge our right to write fiction at all. Meanwhile, the kind of fiction we are “allowed” to write is in danger of becoming so hedged, so circumscribed, so tippy-toe, that we’d indeed be better off not writing the anodyne drivel to begin with.’ The speech caused outrage in some audience members and Australian writer Yassmin Abdel-Magied (2016) walked out. The following weeks saw an escalation of public debate about the role and rights of the white writer, which exposed many tensions and sensitivities around questions of art and cultural appropriation. In the Los Angeles Times, writer Viet Thanh Nguyen (2016), ‘contextualised the debate in terms of material realities’, stating, ‘It is possible to write about others not like oneself, if one understands that this is not simply an act of culture and free speech, but one that is enmeshed in a complicated, painful history of ownership and division.’ While I will veer away from this specific question and from contemporary debates about the ethics of writing the lives of others, I nevertheless acknowledge the risk. It is a strong current that runs through this thesis.

85 Before I heard of Leo’s death, I had written ‘Not the Sea’, which (in edited form) appears as the second story in The Acorn of Sadness. Set in a small fishing village in Sri Lanka, this story follows a young boy’s experience of the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, narrated from the perspective of his son. Embedded in this story are themes of exile, displacement, war and identity – and the last line hints at the protagonist’s arriving in Australia as a refugee. As often happens, I wrote first and thought later. After hearing of Leo’s life and death, I reflected on ‘Not the Sea’ and began writing other stories in the same vein. However, two major ethical dilemmas became clear. First, that I was at risk of using the lives and suffering of others to serve my own creative purposes. Second, that I was in effect becoming a writer who was writing about ‘issues’ – an idea that was suffocating because it goes against the grain of my every creative instinct. As well as this, I was struck by a sense of helplessness about the effectiveness of writing, especially in a global context of displacement and disaster. Similar doubts were expressed by Australian writer James Bradley (2016) in a paper delivered at the Global Ecologies Conference. Responding to the 2016 Living Planet Report, which declared that, between 1970 and 2012, close to sixty per cent of the world’s wildlife had disappeared, Bradley said, ‘There are moments when our stories fail us, moments when the world’s complexities exceed their power’. He talked about a sense of the futility of words – ‘a feeling one’s tools are not fit for the purpose’ – and wondered about the role and power of stories at a time when climate change, habitat destruction, extinction and pollution are ‘transforming our world in ways that would have seemed unimaginable only a generation or two ago’ (2016). By writing stories about ‘issues’, I was trying to respond to what I saw as urgent social situations and moral dilemmas. The problem was the more I wrote, the less satisfied I felt with my mode of response, the less confident I was about fiction's capacity to do the job and the more worried I became that I was somehow using

86 other people’s trauma to make myself look good. I was aware that writers in Australia, such as Maxine Beneba Clarke (Foreign Soil) and Ceridwen Dovey (Only the Animals), had written short story collections that explored particular issues, such as exile and war. But, while I admired this approach, I was wary of attempting to place what Adam Kelly (2010, p. 326) calls a ‘totalising schema’ over the events and scenarios to which I was trying to respond. I needed a new way of seeing and understanding what I was doing – as a writer and as a social actor. Pursuing this question of responsibility, I tried to find a way to write which would help me minimise the risk of cultural trespass. I read Edward Said (1983), who discusses the ethics of writing about a trauma one has not experienced firsthand. I read Maurice Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster (1980) and The Space of Literature (1989), which debate whether or not it is ever really possible to address the unspeakable (the Holocaust, for example) through language. I read ‘Writers and Responsibility’ by Nadine Gordimer (1988), in which she explores the role of the artist in accepting social responsibility. I also read American literary scholar Nicholas Birns (2015) and found particularly useful his idea that writers potentially using ‘concern’ as a strategy to write about the lives of others without subjecting them to social control in a sense bumps up against his point that ‘the same social concern that animates the altruistic thrust we so often value in fiction might also impede our awareness’ (2015, p. 124). In other words, I turned to these writers during a process of inquiry into how to write about disaster in a way that minimised the ‘terrible risk’, as Edward Said puts it, ‘of banalising exile’s humiliations and the horrendous losses it inflicts on those who suffer them’ (1983, p. 38). This exploration was certainly generative and an important part of the development of my philosophies about the act of writing, my writing itself and the role of the writer as socially responsible actor, but, ultimately, it missed the mark. Or, rather, I came all too soon, particularly through Blanchot, to what I had

87 known to begin with: that writing is ‘the most extreme’ risk, an ‘errant migration’ (1980, p. 238), ‘expresses nothing’ (1989, p. 22), and that a book is only a ‘mute collection of sterile words, the most insignificant thing in the world’ (1989, p. 23), yet writers must ‘just write, in uncertainty and in necessity’ (1980, p. 11). I began to see that mine was a question of reframing. At this point, I discovered the concept of precarity, which offered a way, not out of my ethical anxieties, but through them. By exploring the application of the term to questions of ethics and literature, I began to shift the lens through which I saw the problem, as opposed to trying to solve the problem itself directly. As I started to grasp the ideas underpinning precarity and its application by contemporary academics to discussions about literature, I wondered: could I use this theory, this concept, as a lens through which to think about writing? Could I use precarity as a framework within which to both generate and structure a collection of short stories? I wondered if the concept could potentially hold within its scope the disparate ideas, concerns and interests with which I was struggling. Rather than, for example, seeing my writing as being about an issue, such as asylum seekers or the experience of exile, I wondered about the imaginative and structural possibilities of shifting my frames of perception to an apprehension of the precarious life. Further explorations revealed that precarity could approach a deeper sense of danger, violence and uncertainty that runs through people’s lives – a sense that is not necessarily exclusive to people directly affected by global catastrophes, such as war, natural disasters or forced mass migration. It seemed to me that precarity offered broader potential as a way of seeing: my research investigation became, and has remained, an inquiry into the intersection of the theory of precarity with my creative practice.

88 What We Talk About When We Talk About Precarity

While the term precarity has been in use for several decades, and there has been recent theoretical interest in the ‘turn to precarity’ in fiction (Morrison 2014), it does not appear to have been applied to questions about the creative process. I offer my exploration as a framework. In doing so, I suggest imaginative and structural possibilities and draw on the work of Jago Morrison, Adam Kelly, Shameem Black, Joseph Darda and Judith Butler. Precarity, which is translated from the French, précarité, has been used by French sociologists since the late 1970s and has gained currency in both theory and application to literature during the past ten years. The term ‘refers to all possible shapes of the unsure, not guaranteed, flexible, exploitation’ (Iwata-Weickgenannt 2010). This explanation captures the sense I had of the word initially. I was drawn to precarity because it seemed to speak to, and extend, some sense of placelessness, mobility, insecurity and unpredictability that was so preoccupying me in my writing. The definition of precarity has changed over time. Originally associated with the trend towards a conversion of permanent employment into uncertain, lower-paid jobs, it describes the loss of stability and predictability that earlier generations enjoyed under the Fordist mode of production. While the notion emerged from changes in the work force, it has become understood and applied more broadly. Simon During (2015), for instance, refers to the precariat as a class within a first-world nation. He claims that neo-liberalism has produced a new social group which does not fit the class-based analysis applied to industrial and social capitalism. One major reason for this shift from discussing precarity solely in terms of its application to changes in the labour markets to a more inclusive application, accounting for a broader range of identities, is that neoliberalist ideologies have prompted a reconfiguration of the value of human life.

89 This is explored, albeit in a more expansive and integrated way, in Nicholas Birns's study of contemporary Australian literature (2015). Within a broader critique of the Australian literary landscape, Birns is interested in the way neoliberalism has led to changes in the valuing of human life. More than a belief that one can improve one’s lot through hard work and saving, neoliberalism goes so far as to render morally worthless those to whom no financial worth is attached, and thus amounts to ‘a financialisation of all human life’ (2015, p. 118). A question arises, which tells us something about the precarious life. What becomes of those groups of people for whom financialisation is out of the question – for those groups of people for whom money is not available, accessible? This is the group, according to During, who fall outside ‘totality’ – they fall outside citizenship, stable employment and state support, thus entering the precarious life. In Precarious Life, American philosopher Judith Butler (2004) expanded the idea of precarity as a framework for thinking about the value of human life and the expressing of this value through narration. That we are vulnerable to injury – from other humans or from forces of nature – is a shared human experience from birth. Butler suggests we must take this vulnerability – this precariousness – as a point of departure for political life, should we ever hope to formulate an ethics of non-violence in responding to grief and loss. The themes of grief and loss are central to this formulation. Butler draws principally from the US experience of the ‘War on Terror’ – the mourning, grief and loss which followed the events of September 11, 2001. The resulting display of grief and loss, she says, is ‘the thrall in which our relations with others hold us, in ways that we cannot always recount or explain, in ways that often interrupt the self-conscious account of ourselves we might try to provide, in ways that challenge the very notion of ourselves as autonomous and in control’ (Butler 2004, p. 23). The cycle of war and violence is well known to us, but what, Butler asks, might be made of grief,

90 besides a cry for war? This question runs through her investigation of the precarious life as an expansive framework through which to explore the problem of narration, the difficulties of hearing and the complexities of seeing the other. Butler offers a new way of seeing the ethical and moral complexities of writing about the other through her theory of how to live, act and relate. Heather Sullivan offers another perspective on precarity, drawing on Timothy Clark’s (2015) describing of the Anthropocene as the epoch in which human impact on the planet's ecological systems have reached a dangerous limit. Sullivan’s paper – ‘Dirty Traffic and the Dark Pastoral in the Anthropocene: Narrating Refugees, Deforestation, Radiation and Melting Ice’ – positions precarity as operating within the ebbs and flows of a world in crisis. She suggests precarity may well be a condition created by escalated flows within the Anthropocene, which produce unstable places, environments and experiences. She writes: ‘The Anthropocene is delineated not by stable places, but rather by escalated flows across land, time and bodies at an ever-faster pace, producing refugees, stolen timber, traffic jams, radioactive rain and melting glaciers in the fast-forwarding of the biospheric cycles’ (2014, p. 96). Sullivan, in turn, evokes Nancy Ettlinger’s point that such uncertainty inhabits the micro-spaces of all life: ‘Precarity crosscuts spheres of life; it infuses life’ (2007, p. 23). The idea that precarity is both produced by and the producer of uncertainty – and that the Anthropocene's features make precarity a virtually inescapable experience – is taken up by Emma Jacobs in relation to what she terms ‘pseudo-apocalypse’ and a ‘deeply ingrained and often unconscious ontological insecurity at the heart of the neoliberal psyche’ (2014, p. 49). Applying precarity as a ‘cultural theory’ (2014, p. 41) to two graphic novels — Charles Burns’s Black Hole and Daniel Clowes’s David Boring — Jacobs argues that the characters’ experience of pseudo-apocalyptic scenarios (in which the threat of catastrophe is strongly felt but no disastrous moment is ever reached) reflects the everyday precarity

91 of the neoliberal condition. In her discussions of the changing nature of precarity over time, Jacobs points to the simultaneous emergence of new media and technology. Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman's work, Jacobs suggests that, due to the globalisation of information and culture, and the growing ubiquity of television, mobile phones and the internet, ‘social interactions [are] rapidly becoming disembodied encounters’ (2014, p. 51). In Liquid Fear, Bauman argues that such fluidity, while it promises to make life easier and safer, cannot live up to its goal, and actually destabilises experience. He coins the term ‘the liquid modern world’ (2006, p. 6) to describe a state in which lifestyles are continuously changing and the pool of experience is relentlessly expanding. Within this state, suggests Jacobs, the individual develops an underlying and perpetual uncertainty – what Bauman describes as liquid fear, or ‘the sentiment of being susceptible to danger’ (2006, p. 3). It is not only theorists who are discussing precarity discursively. Writers, such as Butler, Jago Morrison and Darda, are also moving towards an apprehension of the term's usefulness as a frame, a way of seeing, a point of departure. In deploying her notion of the ‘dark pastoral’ to discuss how stories are told about seismically shifting natural and manmade phenomena, Sullivan suggests such narratives should be aware of ‘the frames that continue to shape our practices, including our own pastoral impulses, but combine them with some doses of scepticism, science and narratives of dirty traffic in order to engage but not capitulate to the dirty flows in which we all participate’ (2014, p. 97). In a similar way, then, I deploy the term precarity with an awareness of the economic and neoliberalist frames that have dominated the term's use and an interest in expanding it, as other writers and theorists have, beyond literary studies and into everyday life. As a writer of fiction, I’m less interested in the economic or even literary history of the term precarity and am much more curious about how the term can be used as a way to understand broad shifts in the way humans live with fear, behave towards one

92 another when in heightened states of vulnerability and respond to chaos. The term's affective potential is what energises me – the possibilities it lends to those thinking about how to make sense of the extraordinary cultural, social, political and environmental shifts taking place. Although I am approaching a less tangible, more imaginative application of precarity, I nevertheless proceed with a strong sense that I am moving along that same liquid and twisted path of Sullivan’s Anthropocene in the broadest sense: the landscape of this iridescent place is defined by absence, by not- knowing, by terrific instability, by the threat of theft, by the nearness of loss, by the endlessness of grief and by the possibility of violence.

93

The Emergence of Precarity in Literary Studies

Over the last decade there has been a growing interest in precarity as a theoretical framework for analysing literature. Jago Morrison suggests there has been a ‘turn to precarity’ (2014) in twenty-first century fiction, which can be best seen in the work of contemporary writers, such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Sarah Waters, JM Coetzee and Trezza Azzopardi. Morrison notes a ‘resurgence of affect as a central concern in fiction, together with a powerful reassertion of (often anxious) questions about our relationship to and responsibilities towards, the other’ (2014, p. 12). In such texts, the politics of ‘moral responsiveness’ (Butler 2009, p. 41) become inseparable from questions of signification, including narrative framing. As well as pointing to a renewal of interest in the flow and foreclosure of affect, this turn is marked by ‘a heightened awareness of the social dynamics of seeing’ (Morrison 2014, p. 2). Jago Morrison draws on Butler’s work on the dynamics of recognition and visibility. Framing her discussion in the context of the ‘War on Terror’, Butler considers the way feelings are evoked by certain public displays of mourning and grief, and how these have an impact on the ‘grievability’ (2004, p. 5) of certain lives. For Butler, ‘recognisability’ (2004, p. 5) refers to a set of social frames which determine what can and cannot be recognised as human life. Lives that fall outside of this frame are not understood as valuable lives, are not determined to be ‘grievable’. These interdependent concepts of recognisability and the grievable life are in turn supported by a ‘logic of exclusion’ (2004, p. 38) in terms of the stories of precarity that are narrated in public life. Failure to see or hear images of certain lives inevitably, writes Butler, postpones the ‘grievability’ (2004, p. 5) of those lives. In discussing the limits placed on the release of photos of Abu Ghraib for full viewing by the American public, for example, Butler suggests that those who sought to limit the power of the image – on the basis that they might inspire un-

94 American sentiment or a negative image of the war – also sought to limit the power of affect, of outrage, ‘knowing full well that it could and would turn public opinion against the war in Iraq, as indeed it did’ (2009, p. 41). Morrison claims that fiction which represents the turn to precarity can ‘help us begin to understand how our responses to exposure, vulnerability and violence are regulated by frames of perception and dynamics of affect that habitually remain unquestioned’ (2014, p. 28). He identifies ‘questioning’ as a key feature of such fiction through an exploration of how a novel such as Trezza Azzopardi’s Remember Me interrogates what we see, how we come to see what we see and how this seeing influences our understanding of ourselves and of others. In a post-9/11 context, writes Morrison, part of the usefulness of precarity for Butler is that, as a term of analysis, it moves the ground of debate over ideas of violence and loss away from questions of individual moral conscience and towards a consideration of the obligations that arise from the fact that we are ‘social beings from the start, dependent on what is outside ourselves, on others, on institutions, and on sustained and sustainable environments’ (Butler 2009, p. 23). Butler, writes Morrison, is interested in the ‘transfiguring effects of violence on the ways we perceive our own precarity and our responsibilities towards others’ (Morrison 2014, p. 16). In this view, what Butler calls the ‘politics of moral responsiveness’ (2009, p. 41) becomes inseparable, says Morrison, from questions of signification, including narrative framing. He reads Remember Me with these questions in mind and draws attention to how Azzopardi explores the ‘workings of the public gaze’, (Morrison 2014, p. 18) insisting that it is ‘fruitful’ to see Azzopardi’s work in relation to that of Butler, for whom the key to understanding precarity is ‘to move our focus beyond the plight of the individual, and onto those frames of perception and representation by whose operation certain lives are apprehended as valuable and grievable in the first place, while

95 others fail to reach the threshold of visibility’ (Morrison 2014, p. 27). Similarly, Adam Kelly gestures to an emerging interest in precarity in contemporary fiction, though he does not explicitly use the term. Analysing the fiction of Phillip Roth, Paul Auster and Jeffrey Eugenides in relation to the representation of key ‘moments of decision’ – such as Coleman’s decision to cast off his identity and family in Roth’s The Human Stain – Kelly claims that these writers confront readers with the ‘impossibility of mastery’: mastery, not only of the actual truth of the event, but of the means of representation of that truth. ‘Consigning the event and its interpretation to a totalising schema – whether metaphysical, psychological, historical or representation,’ he writes, ‘is no longer a straightforward task’ (2010, p. 326). In contrast to postmodern fiction’s emphasis on the singular and ‘readily visible’ event, the identifiable moment ‘when it all changed’, Kelly suggests, events in fictions of a post-postmodernist age ‘have an undecidable and paradoxical status: never certain, wholly visible or consignable to a past that is fully behind us’ (2010, p. 326). My choice to bring together, in The Acorn of Sadness, stories told in disparate voices – some sweeping global stories and others more limited or local in frame – is about extending the questions raised about narrative framing by Butler, Jago Morrison and Kelly. My collection is an acknowledgement of the absence of a ‘totalising schema’: of a single way, perspective or frame we can employ to understand and interpret events. All the attempts to define what we talk about when we talk about precarity discussed here tend toward an acknowledgement that the experience of precarity evades concrete description and definition. A certain unsayability is at the heart of so much discussion about the term – there is always playing beneath the surface this struggle for words to describe, this awareness about the limits and ambiguities and paradoxes of language, this sense that language is forever Flaubert’s cracked kettledrum. War, death, suffering arguably constitute the unspeakable and attempts by

96 critics to pin down some notion of what defines the contemporary in literature thus seems to me to work in the same kind of ebb-and- flow manner of Sullivan’s ‘dirty traffic’, invoking something murky rather than linear and tangible.

Part of the journey of this thesis has also been about finding a literary place in which to position my work. Most broadly, through the discussion of precarity in literary studies, I have been able to situate my project as part of what Paul Jay calls the ‘transnational turn in literary studies’ (2010, p. 98); and, more specifically, as an example of what Darda (2014) calls ‘critical global fiction’. In his study of the ‘transnational turn’, Jay suggests that, since the rise of critical theory in the 1970s, nothing has reshaped literary and cultural studies more than its embrace of transnationalism. While an interest in the transnational has ‘exploded’ under the forces of globalisation, its roots are in political movements outside the academy and theoretical developments date back to the 1960s. Like Kelly, Jay does not explicitly refer to precarity, but, instead, explores the work of creative writers in chronicling the experiences of people whose lives are being shaped by forces that are central to the notion of precarity – forces that offer unprecedented opportunity to some, and deepening poverty and desperation to others. Lachlan Brown’s discussion of transnational fiction in Australia has also been helpful for mapping my own work. Brown suggests that transnational fiction is marked by a thematisation of the global and ‘a predilection for distinct and distinctive voices, rapid or jolting movements between specific yet diverse situations’ (2015, p. 1). In citing such works as Nam Le’s celebrated The Boat, Ali Alizadeh’s Transactions, Maxine Beneba Clarke’s Foreign Soil and Ceridwen Dovey’s Only the Animals as examples of ‘ambitious, grand-tour collections’ which ‘organise themselves in ways that emphasise disparate locations across the globe’ (2015, p. 1), Brown suggests these Australian short story collections, while not

97 necessarily falling into a particular genre, do bear a kind of family resemblance. Similarly, I recognise the resemblance between these texts and The Acorn of Sadness. These collections also deal with themes of exile, displacement, death, grief and place – and in doing so, indicate a sustained (if not expanding, as Brown suggests) interest in transnational sensibilities. While there are other terms used to describe this kind of fiction – Shameem Black (2010) talks about ‘border-crossing fiction’ as fiction which represents socially diverse groups without resorting to stereotype, idealisation or other forms of imaginative constraint – I find Darda’s definition of critical global fiction most useful in coming to place and extend my work. In describing critical global fictions as ‘literary works that contest the forces inhibiting global understanding and build international coalitions through this struggle itself’ (2014, p. 108), Darda presents an alternative ontology to individualism and an alternative politics to one grounded exclusively in identity (2014, p. 11). Darda claims such fiction is an emergent genre that goes beyond the discourses of transnationalism and ‘endeavour[s] to transcend national boundaries and imagine global community’ (2014, p. 108). He cites as an example Mohsin Hamid’s 2007 novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which tells the story of Pakistani finance professor Changez’s withdrawal of sympathy/identification from America around the time of 9/11. Changez’s awakening is only achievable through ‘cognisance of one’s shared pain’ (2014, p. 120), rather than through instruments of war. The novel distinguishes precarity from the generalised condition of precariousness, Darda argues, by making it clear that the struggle against an arbitrary violence that endangers some differentially is not an outcome of the ‘War on Terror’ alone, but an enduring feature of the globalising world. Changez’s inability to derive comfort from the frames of American recognisability awakens him to the idea that they serve to rationalise war, thus inhibiting global community. Understanding life as always- precarious (as Changez comes to do in Chile) can break the frames

98 that create and mask precarity (2014, p. 119). When Changez turns his focus from his firm’s financial failure to the critical personal and political issues that affect his emotional present, he recognises social contexts that fall outside the norms of recognisability – outside, we could say, Simon During’s ‘totality’. Taking account of life in this way, Darda writes, as socially entangled and vulnerable from the start, The Reluctant Fundamentalist denaturalises the frames that fracture and fragment, and is ‘at once a method of criticism and grounds for advancing an international coalition against state violence’ (2014, p. 119). We can never fully comprehend another life entirely says Darda, but, we can, as Butler notes, ‘interrogate the emergence and vanishing of the human at the limits of what we can know, what we can hear, what we can see, what we can sense’ (2004, p. 151). Darda’s concept of critical global fiction is thus a call to shift focus and to pay attention to those forces that inhibit global community. While scholars such as Paul Jay and Shameem Black have also made claims for a similar kind of fiction, I adopt Darda’s critical global fiction as the umbrella under which to consider my own work because of its interest in contemporary fiction’s movement outside traditional generic spaces. With this definition in mind, I shall now turn to a brief discussion of my creative work and its exploration of what Butler calls the ‘mode of response’ (2004, p. 129) within the precarious life.

99 The Moment of Address in The Acorn of Sadness

The Acorn of Sadness is a collection of short stories that traces my exploration of the notion of precarity as a structural and generative device. Butler’s work on precarity in Frames of War and Precarious Life calls into question frameworks of representation that facilitate or evoke affective and ethical recognition of some subjects, while negating other lives as valuable. In this spirit, through the experiences and perspectives of the characters, I call into question ways of seeing that enhance life for the individual, while negating the relationship between the individual and the other. In this way, I consider the collection a work of Darda’s critical global fiction, in that it goes beyond the transnational to take an interest in forces that inhibit global community. I explore precarity as a frame through which to think about the subjects, issues, themes, feelings, and events I deal with in the stories. While neither critically analysing the stories nor justifying my creative choices, I offer a brief rationale for the stories' generation and the collection's overall structure.

In the first two stories, ‘The Other End of Cleever’ and ‘Not the Sea’, I establish the collection's scope and lay out key themes, which are taken up in various degrees in each story. Examples include the problem of seeing the other; how to reconcile memories of trauma with current reality; how to move beyond prejudice, fear and pain; how to bear witness to the pain of others in a way that is responsible; and the problem of reproducing instability through violent responses to grief. ‘The Other End of Cleever’ is the most recent story in the collection. I chose to place this story first because of how it explores what Emma Jacobs calls the ‘cycle of frantic restlessness unresolved’ (2014, p. 50). The narrator sees others, but is incapable of engaging beyond her own, limited lens. She is outside Butler’s ‘frame’ (2004, p. 48), and (for me) this is an essential starting point: not a

100 disclaimer, as such, but more akin to Nam Le’s bookending of The Boat with two stories that speak to the story of the writing of the collection. While 'The Other End of Cleever' is not pure autobiography, it does flag the kinds of ethical questions I take up. It sits comfortably with me to begin with it, as it is a local story which explores Bauman’s 'liquid fear'. The narrator grapples with an unsayable terror, all the while seeing the world around her, but incapable of finding a mode of address. Compared to ‘The Other End of Cleever’, ‘Not the Sea’ is a global story. Throughout the collection, the stories play with a sense of movement between the domestic/personal and the international/collective. ‘Not the Sea’ is the oldest story in the collection and, to me, it most broadly evokes Neilson and Rossiter’s encompassing application of the term precarity as ‘referring to all possible shapes of the unsure, not guaranteed, flexible, exploitation’ (Iwata-Weickgenannt, 2012). It seemed important to place ‘Not the Sea’ first because it explicitly deals with the sense of precarity as both a producer and a product of Sullivan’s 'dirty traffic'. In a slightly twisted, oblique fashion, the story grapples with the refugee identity and raises questions about how people who have lived through massive trauma deal with it in their later lives. I wanted to explore the sense of precarity as I had come to understand it through my reading: as an unstable and ever-shifting movement of experience and the flow of people, ideas and events, which can be perceived to be dangerous, even dirty. ‘Greetings from a Happy Return’ takes a satirical approach to questions of exile and responsibility and, again, the voice differs drastically from that of the first two stories. I wanted to set a contrasting tone and, in a sense, deliver three stories which, while perhaps not the three strongest in the collection, nevertheless bump up against one another in a way that establishes a certain reading terrain – one that is not necessarily safe or steady. Another important reason to place this story early was for the way in which Butler’s ‘grievable life’ (2004, p. 34) is at stake, an inquiry that runs

101 throughout the collection. What is the value of a life? To whom does a life matter and why? Why do we judge lives differently? What does the value we assign to life say about us? In ‘Greetings from the Happy Return’ I wanted to explore the forces that inhibit the consideration of an ethics of non-violence when approaching these questions. I wanted to explore the individual psychological forces that reproduce precarity – that reproduce alienation, loss and violence – and my frenetically self- obsessed Prime Minister narrator both sees and does not see the terrible events that are occurring before him. The Prime Minister is so bound up in his narcissism that when he does eventually see what is going on, the experience is so intense and painful that he flirts only with a brief self-hatred before returning to the safety and familiarity of his own violent agenda. The Prime Minister does not change, does not intervene in the events, does not have any agency beyond continuing Butler’s ‘logic of exclusion’; anything that does not fit within his frame of perspective – his narrative that he is morally responsible, popular and authoritative – is excluded. The Government covers up the suffering faces of the babies, perpetuating those frames that create and mask precarity, not only disguising the children’s pain but also protecting the Prime Minister and his government from really looking. Thus, they can all avoid responsibility – they can avoid what Butler calls the 'moment of address'. The fourth story in the collection is ‘In the End, in the Head’. It is, most obviously, a response to a news story about Leo Seemanpillai, but I am less interested in the protagonist’s final act of suicide and more interested in interrogating the masks that perpetuate instability and create one of Darda’s ‘forces’. ‘In the End, In the Head’ takes place in a primary school during Book Week, when all the teachers and children arrive dressed as their favourite characters. The protagonist, Mister Ogwaro or Mr O (we never know his first name or the name by which he calls himself) is tormented by memories of his childhood

102 as a solider in Sudan. For him, life is always precarious but those around him do not register this. For Jago Morrison, understanding life as always precarious can break the frames that create and mask precarity (2014, p. 19) – but what happens when the masks stay fixed? How do we tell what is truth, real, fact? The intersection of painful bodily experiences with the development of personal agency or what, as I have mentioned, Kelly would call ‘key moments of decision’ is something I explore throughout the collection and this inquiry is undertaken overtly in ‘In the End, In the Head’. I was interested in Emma Jacob’s idea that precarity can be reproduced through ‘the growing ubiquity of social interactions’, which create ‘disembodied encounters’ (2014, p. 51), and so, throughout the collection, I maintained a focus on the sensory experience – the way in which the body is connected to the cycle of the precarious life. How do our bodies limit our personal agency? How much of Bauman’s ‘derivative fear’ (2006, p. 3) is in the body? To what extent are our bodies themselves one of Darda’s ‘forces that inhibit a global community’, getting in the way of us answering to that ‘moment of address’? Butler says our understanding of the precarious life requires a ‘new bodily ontology’ (2009, p. 2) and I have pursued this new bodily ontology, through fiction. In ‘In the End, In the Head’ I wanted to explore this to its limit.

Butler also suggests we consider the ‘moment of address’ (2004, p. 130) as the moment we come to exist, as humans. She borrows from Levinas’s concept of ‘the face’, which offers a way of understanding both the precariousness of life and the ways in which we often respond with violence. Levinas argues that, when faced with another, we experience a sense of being called into question – the face of the other makes a demand upon us. This is a demand, of course, that we did not necessarily ask for, and Butler explores modes of response which follow the address, called to assume responsibility. The first four stories each explore the ‘moment of address’ from a distance. The protagonists either view,

103 or are viewed by, the other from a distance. I wanted to work with the sense of disconnection that can come to define our lived experience when we feel the call to respond without quite being aware of what it is. In ‘The Other End of Cleever’, the narrator is as if stuck behind a pane of glass, able to see the outside world but not able to connect with it in a way that can change her – the experience of that outside world is such a threat, she scurries away in a state of nameless terror. Himal in ‘Not the Sea’ is similarly trapped by his inner experience of himself and never quite resolves this, if we are to go by the narrator’s allusion to his father’s stories and lie. In ‘In the End, In the Head’, the muted exchanges between characters in the stifled context of a primary school are infantile at best and (at worst) fail utterly to connect one person to another. In ‘Greetings from the Happy Return’, the denial of the need to attend to the moment of address, and the failure to attend, is explored in a quasi- political landscape. The fifth story marks a shift in the collection – something of a return to the oppressed contemporary narrator of ‘The Other End of Cleever’, but with the problem of addressing the other at the forefront.

The cynical and ignorant narrator of ‘There Was a Man Screaming on Broadway’ registers the demand of the other. In this story, I wanted to explore the constant psychological oscillation we experience when faced with another person in a way that makes us uncomfortable. We can turn away entirely, or we can choose to see, but the problem of moral responsiveness is not answered just in seeing. Similar to Changez’s withdrawal of identification from America in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the narrator of ‘There Was a Man Screaming on Broadway’ experiences an awakening out of her narcissism that is only achievable when she bears witness to the man on the bus. But even this seeing, followed by this awakening, is not enough. The story explores Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of ‘the face’ as the collection prepares to pivot on the question of the ‘moment of address’.

104 Butler suggests that we think more closely about the relationship between modes of address and moral authority as offered by Emmanuel Levinas: ‘The approach to the face is the most basic mode of responsibility ... The face is not in front of me but above me; it is the other before death, looking through and exposing death. The face is the other who asks me not to let him die alone, as if to do so would become an accomplice in his death. Thus the face says to me: you shall not kill’ (2004, p. 134). It is worth noting that Levinas’s face is not always a human face, but is, instead, that in the other which demands something essential of us, which speaks to us. To illustrate, Butler quotes Levinas’s essay ‘Peace and Proximity’ in which he refers to Vassili Grossman’s Life and Fate: 'A woman awaits her turn: [she] had never thought that the human back could be so expressive, and could convey states of mind in such a penetrating way. Persons approaching the counter had a particular way of craning their neck and their back, their raised shoulders with shoulder blades like springs which seemed to cry, sob and scream' (Levinas, 1996, p. 167). In this case, the ‘face’ is not a face, but a back, and is an example of a method of utterance that is not ‘strictly linguistic’ (Butler 2004, p. 133), but still represents the ‘extreme precariousness of the other’. To respond to the ‘face’ (even if it is not a face), writes Butler, and to understand its meaning, means to be awake to what is precarious in another life or, rather, the precariousness of life itself (2004, p. 134). ‘There Was a Man Screaming on Broadway’ explores an awakening of this kind. The narrator in this story is tormented by the ‘face’ of the other. In this instance, the ‘face’ – the source of the other’s demand – is in the form of the residual part of an amputated limb. The narrator of ‘There Was a Man Screaming on Broadway’ does not want to look, yet cannot look away, and when the man is evicted from the bus, she feels some connection to him, some shared humanity, that she cannot understand. Like the Prime Minister in ‘Greetings from the Happy Return’, this woman is unable to

105 respond to the moment of address, to form real agency and to develop a ‘mode of response’. Her only attempt takes place in the realm of the fantastic as she imagines the man’s stump is communicating with her. ‘The Strongest Man in the World’ also demonstrates a marked shift in tone in its exploration of questions of place and placelessness. In addition, the story picks up and extends the problem of the narrative frame. Reading short story collections by writers such as Raymond Carver or Anton Chekhov, reading Dovey’s collection and Beneba Clarke’s, is to encounter texts which almost lay out a field, or terrain, and then keep us in it, exploring it from different angles. My collection differs in that each story, while bearing a family resemblance to the others, also bumps up against the rest. I want this to draw attention to the problems of the frames through which the stories are told. The protagonists in ‘The Strongest Man in the World’ are Australian kids living in an American-inflected reality. This is an Australian story, but the world is so utterly Americanised, that they are almost swallowed up in it and hardly know themselves. E.K. and Leila-Rebecca are half-brother and sister – but soon they will marry. The very climate in which they live is confused – indoors it is winter, but outside it is summer – and the two terrible deaths in the story are inseparable from one another. Central to ‘The Strongest Man in the World’ are themes of grief and loss, and the difficulty of dealing with both. This story continues the exploration of the tension between personal terror, agency and responsibility that is established explicitly in ‘Not the Sea’ and more covertly in ‘The Other End of Cleever’. Throughout ‘The Strongest Man in the World’, E.K. struggles with identity. This struggle with identity and the act of responding to the world is something I wanted to explore as one of Darda’s ‘forces’ that inhibit a global community. E.K., grieving the loss of his mother and baby sister, becomes reliant on, and entangled with, Leila-Rebecca, and thus caught in Butler’s ‘thrall in which our

106 relations with others hold us’. E.K. is not able to ‘recount or explain’ this bind in which he finds himself and his notion of himself as ‘autonomous and in control’ is challenged. It is only when he finds literature, in the shape of an abandoned copy of Albert Camus’s The Outsider, that he begins to recognise himself and starts to form some sense of himself as an agent, an actor with control. But the consequences of E.K.’s single act of autonomy – to get out of bed and finish the book rather than be manipulated by Leila-Rebecca’s narcissistic demands – are disastrous. E.K. is catapulted back into an existential no-place: he is held captive by his relations and cannot escape. The story evokes the ‘powerful resurgence of anxious questions’ (2014, p. 12) about our relation with, and responsibility towards, the other that Jago Morrison marks as a pre-occupation of contemporary fiction. We never do learn what it is that so enforces E.K.’s moral responsiveness to Leila-Rebecca, particularly in relation to the violence with which she manipulates him – but there is something that binds him to her, that makes him responsible, and in the end that becomes what defines him. In the collection, on the whole, I have avoided realist language. This is in keeping with my interest in exploring the possibilities and limits of language as a tool to respond to the precarious life: in each story, I use voice as a way to try and exceed the limits of the sayable. James Bradley (2016) talks about ‘those moments when our stories fail us, moments when the world’s complexities exceed their power’ and all the stories in this collection deal with these kinds of moments. ‘Between Elephant and the World’ perhaps challenges the reader most in its use of the fragment to tell the story from the perspective of a child. The use of language as a response to the broken relationships around the narrator reflects this brokenness, but it is also a shot at comprehension: an act of defiance. A central theme is the notion of secrecy, of hiding, of seeing, of believing. I wanted to explore, through this fragmented voice, the way in which language can itself act as agency – against even the pronounced silence of childhood.

107 The child narrator does not so much act in the story, but acts upon it, from the outside, with words. I wanted to offer this as one ‘mode of address’ – in the eponymous story of the collection.

‘The Acorn of Sadness’ is arch satire, largely told through the

‘relentlessly performative’ (Mills, Whan and Woodhead 2016, p. 26) interior monologue of adolescent Ainsley. This story explores the main character’s volatile internal world and the precarity of her identity – it is an attempt to capture the contemporary anxiety of the self as image and the image as self. In doing so, I wanted to explore the illusions of the protagonist and the ways in which her fantasies place her in danger of something far more disturbing than death: in constantly looking in the mirror, at herself, Ainsley fails to respond to the moment of address and in failing to respond, her very humanhood is at stake. The tone in the story when told from Ainsley’s perspective, is somewhat ecstatic, reflecting what Butler refers to as the ‘socially ecstatic structure of the body’ (2004, p. 33). The body is a social phenomenon, is exposed to others and vulnerable by definition, and its very persistence depends upon social conditions and institutions which means it must rely on what is outside itself. As Ainsley contemplates her own body, she is hyper-involved with the external world and repeatedly imagines her imminent fame, and yet her life is affectless: she does not feel, she cannot feel anything beyond what she invents as a feeling. She is aware of the other and in a sense is not aware of herself, but also, she fails to actually ‘come up’ against others – to be affected by them. And this ‘coming up against’ is one modality that defines the body (2004, p. 34). This ‘obtrusive alterity’, writes Butler, against which the body finds itself can be, and often is, what animates responsiveness to the world that may include a wide range of affects: pleasure, rage, suffering, hope, to name a few. Ainsley is protected against such affect by her frames of perception: in Darda’s terms, her frames inhibit her connection with the world beyond herself.

108 Butler argues that such affects are the basis, the ‘very stuff of ideation, and of critique’ (2004, p. 36). These stuffs are missing from Ainsley’s life: every feeling she has is invented, acted out for an imaginary camera, even when tragedy strikes she acts but does not feel. The violence that happens to Ainsley’s body in this story tests the limits of her absence of affectation and she fails the test, coming dangerously close to death. Her life becomes the responsibility of the other: Paul, who must choose to go beyond his own suffocating personal narrative to save her. In order to make his choice, Paul asks himself the same questions Butler asks herself, critical questions which emerge for her as she responds to the complex question of responsibility: Are there others out there for whom I am responsible? How do I determine the scope of my responsibility? Am I responsible for all others, or only for some, and on what basis would I draw that line? I would add to these questions one other – a question which is at the heart of Paul’s struggle for how he should respond and that is this: To what extent am I responsible for the other in relation to myself? Because taking responsibility for the other puts us at risk – we become vulnerable even as we consider the very prospect of the other’s vulnerability and our (possible) role in ameliorating conditions of vulnerability, of intervening. Paul is recovering from a drug addiction and has moved in with his mother. Paul cannot stand to look at himself let alone another person: for him the face reveals an extraordinary vulnerability, one which is, in his precarious state, nearly impossible to bear. When Ainsley screams and Paul is called to respond to this scream, he struggles because to do so will expose him to his own vulnerability: afraid of himself, afraid of his past failures and of further unbearable injury, he has to decide whether going to Ainsley’s rescue is worth the risk. Does he stay locked inside the house, when he hears screaming from next door, because that is the safest option? Or does he emerge from the house, to find out what is at stake, because that is his responsibility as a human

109 being? This is the dilemma at the heart of Paul’s journey. Even though Paul is in a vulnerable state and doesn’t want to be disturbed by other people, he is affected deeply by the self- involved Ainsley: he sees her, and once he has seen her, he can’t unsee her. As the story continues and Paul senses Ainsley is in danger, this triggers something in himself – a sardonic and cruel part of his subconscious is recalled to him, which ridicules him for being weak and spineless, based on a disturbing incident from his past where he did, indeed, fail to act and which has been a deep and recurring source of trauma. This story, then, is very much about the link between these two disparate characters: about how the life of one affects the other, yes, but, more importantly, about how Ainsley’s ‘face’ calls Paul to action. This call as much forces Paul to confront his inner world, as it forces him to confront the outside world – Ainsley and the danger she is in. According to Butler, the mode of response cannot be handled as something separate from ourselves – examining our mode of response must be done by understanding the relational nature of life, that we ‘come to exist in the moment we are addressed’ (2004, p. 130). ‘The Baby on Enghelab Street’ marks a return to a definitely global terrain, exploring a woman’s descent into madness as the moment of the birth of her child arrives. The story is set in Tehran, where Asha has returned after many years – to the city where she was tortured during the Evin Prison Massacre of 1988. While the timing is unclear, and the circumstances around her reasons for returning to are not made explicit, her connection to the place is visceral, as she experiences memories and trauma, which come at her like some form of Bauman’s 'liquid fear'. As Asha moves from a restaurant, along a street, and then becomes stuck, walking around and around a roundabout in freezing weather, she becomes trapped in the past and in herself. She is moving, but cannot move, evoking Jacobs’s sense of the frenetic passivity people experience when instability and an unnameable fear are constant. Memories appear and disappear, creating a residual pressure which eventually

110 climaxes in the birth of her child. I have chosen to place this story second last in the collection, because, in many respects, the inquiry I took up rests on it. Morrison writes that Butler’s politics of moral responsiveness (2004, p. 41) cannot be inseparable from questions of signification, including narrative framing (2014, p. 16) and, in this story, I have explored this explicitly. The narrator's conveying of meaning is inseparable from the way he frames the story: at once in Asha’s head and watching on, he must constantly adjust his frames of perspective. The Acorn of Sadness continually attempts to highlight the often tense relationship between the internal and external world, and how, as human beings, our understanding of this relationship in turn colours the narrative frame we apply to the precariousness of the events and conditions of our lives. Do we, in experiencing loss, turn on the outside world and those who have hurt us, in turn, hurting the world and the other for disrupting our otherwise safe, known world? Or do we – in being hurt, in feeling the full impact of loss and grief – take as our point of departure this notion of the precarious life: that we are vulnerable from the start, that we are all of us prone to injury, that we are each of us dependent, as Butler says, on those faceless others we may never meet or know? The theory of precarity does not provide any answers to questions of suffering, war, terror, violence. What it does is highlight the influence of the narrative frame on the way we respond to events. How does the way we perceive something, affect the way we act? What opportunities might bring a shift in perspective bring? The final story is ‘On the Road to Kuang Si Falls’. This is the most autobiographical of all the stories in the collection and it made sense for it to go last for several reasons. In Levinasian terms, ‘the face’ represents the ultimate paradox: ‘the face of the other in its precariousness and defencelessness is for me at once the temptation to kill and the call to peace’ (1996, p. 167). Butler says we must consider this dilemma

111 as constitutive of an ethical anxiety: ‘There is fear for one’s own survival’, she writes, ‘and there is anxiety about hurting the Other’ (2004, p. 177). In ‘On the Road to Kuang Si Falls’, I wanted to explore this paradox in a story about grief, betrayal, love and starting again. This story speaks back to the second: it is about the bind or ‘thrall’ in which we find ourselves in relation to the other. There is a metafictional element in the previous story, in that I named the Iranian character a version of my own name. Putting myself in the story, although the name is Persian, was some acknowledgement of the limits of my own mastery, as Kelly might suggest. It is a covert acknowledgement, too, of the problems of cultural representation and my own acceptance of the responsibility and consequences these bring. More importantly, it is an extension of Jago Morrison’s idea that signification cannot be separate from narrative framing: through this metafictional device of placing myself in the story, I am exploring the idea that it is impossible to ever make meaning of anything beyond how we see things ourselves. In ‘On the Road to Kuang Si Falls’, I explore the limits of this by shifting the narrative frame again once again, telling a very private story through the lens of a moon bear. I thought this was a fitting final story for the collection because, in it, I expand the notion of precarity beyond the human. The narrator is a moon bear valued by human harvesters as a life only in terms of the market value of his bile, used in the production of traditional medicines in Northern Laos. Whereas precarity is traditionally discussed as a human experience emerging out of changes in the workforce, I widened the discussion to include precarity as related to animals: these creatures live in a state of Thoreau’s ‘quiet desperation’, hunted as they are by humans, but also by their own desires and longings to escape the precarity of their existence. In his thinking about the key characteristics of contemporary writing, Kelly suggests that consigning the event and its interpretation to a totalising schema – whether metaphysical,

112 psychological, historical, or representation – is no longer a straightforward task. I wanted to explore this challenge in the collection by going beyond During’s idea of precarity as a ‘social class’ and Birns’s exploration of how neoliberalism has led to shifts in the way humans value life. Although ‘On the Road to Kuang Si Falls’ is the most overt example of my attempt to shift the frame away from an entirely human perspective, I have avoided relying on the human experience of precarity as a ‘totalising schema’ in all the stories. I have done this by paying close attention to the natural environment and how the non-human world effects change in the human world. ‘On the Road to Kuang Si Falls’ ends the collection because the story responds to the pervasive doubts and anxieties that themselves created, in me during this project, something akin to Bauman’s 'liquid fear'. This was the fear of getting it wrong. Of trespass. Of banalising the suffering of others to make myself look good. At the beginning of the research process, I inquired into how to write about the unspeakable, to write about disaster. I was haunted by Said’s impression that to write of another person’s trauma was to risk banalising exile’s humiliations and the horrendous losses it inflicts on those who suffer them. As I have mentioned, I came to Maurice Blanchot’s theory on the paradox of writing. He writes about approaches to writing the unspeakable: suicide, the Holocaust, the death of the mother. He speaks to the limitations of writing, what Kelly would call the impossibility of mastery, but he also writes this: ‘Any text, however important, or amusing, or interesting it may be (and the more engaging it seems to be), is empty – at bottom it doesn’t exist; you have to cross an abyss, and if you do not jump, you do not comprehend’ (1980, p. 11). As in ‘On the Road to Kuang Si Falls’ this is not the end, nor the beginning –

As a collection, The Acorn of Sadness is an attempt to avoid missing this ‘moment of being addressed’ through questioning those frames

113 of seeing that ultimately restrict a person’s capacity for ‘moral responsiveness’. Darda says critical global fiction moves ‘toward an ontology and politics of precarious life is, then, a challenge to all organised violence’ (2014, p. 116) and I hope The Acorn of Sadness registers this movement. Introducing Frames of War, Butler writes: ‘I am trying to offer something other than an act of war. My interest here is guided by a normative principle that the radical inequality that characterises the difference between grievable and ungrievable lives is something that we all must struggle to overcome in the name of an interdependent world and within the terms of a more radical and effective form of egalitarianism’. I offer The Acorn of Sadness in this spirit. Like Butler, I am interested in how aggression can be channelled towards something other than violence: towards discourse, perhaps, which challenges the ways in which we perceive precarity and perceive our responsibilities towards others.

114 Conclusion

Before we know what it even is, the bird is in our hands. We write before we can fully understand what this thing is – what language is. As a writer I was, and still am, driven to write by a sense of urgent alarm at what I see going on around me. I came to the project somewhat overwhelmed by this, and the notion of ‘precarity’ has been a useful framework, shifting my thinking away from being ‘concerned’ about ‘issues’ towards being instead interested in exploring the underlying uncertainty that shapes our relational lives. How do we live with, and respond to, vulnerability? How do we live with, and respond to, violence? What do we do with the aggression we feel in the face of our own injurability and the injurability of those we love? What do we do with the lives we’ve got? In drawing together a wide range of narrative voices this collection seeks to crack open the possibilities of ‘precarity’ as a way of seeing. The notion of precarity as discussed by many theorists I read appears to inhabit a deeper sense of danger, violence and uncertainty that runs through contemporary lives – a threat which is not an experience necessarily exclusive to people suffering trauma as a result of global catastrophes such as war, natural disasters or forced mass migration. It has proved useful to me as a way to approach the problems of address and the paradox of writing – in employing precarity as a frame, it became possible for me to both question totalising narrative frames and challenge them.

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