Interventions

International Journal of Postcolonial Studies

ISSN: 1369-801X (Print) 1469-929X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/riij20

Precarity: A Short Literary History, from Colonial

Slum to Cosmopolitan Precariat

Jennifer Lawn

To cite this article: Jennifer Lawn (2017): Precarity: A Short Literary History, from Colonial Slum to
Cosmopolitan Precariat, Interventions, DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2017.1401944

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2017.1401944

Published online: 20 Nov 2017.

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 PRECARITY: A SHORT LITERARY HISTORY,
FROM COLONIAL SLUM TO
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COSMOPOLITAN PRECARIAT

Jennifer Lawn
Massey University, New Zealand

..................In this essay I analyse ction by New Zealand authors John A. Lee and Paula
Morris to investigate the ways in which literary form might articulate the
Lee, John A.
precarious as an ethical philosophy most closely associated with the
Morris, Paula work of Judith Butler with the precariat as a (re)emerging social
phenomenon. Butlers concept of precarious life proceeds from the idea that
Neoliberalism
apprehension of co-vulnerability in oneself and others can provide the basis
New Zealand for a non-violent, progressive politics. Situated near the beginning and end
Literature of a historically unprecedented phase of upward mobility and relative
income equality in New Zealand, Lees semi-autobiographical Children of
Precariat
the Poor (rst published 1934) and Morriss short story collection
Social class Forbidden Cities (2008) show an inverse relationship between the

................. apprehension of co-vulnerability and the ability to channel this sensibility

into political awareness. Although very different in tone and style, these
works both trace the intricate, mundane and seemingly casual erosions of
agency that shufe individuals downward into positions of relative
economic and personal disadvantage in a class-stratied social world.
However, where the depiction of immiseration in Children of the Poor
helped to galvanize prevalent social and economic anxieties into a concrete,

.......................................................................................................
interventions, 2017
https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2017.1401944
2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 ............................
in ter v enti ons 2

politically mobilizing sense of indignation against enforced poverty, the

portraits of anxious, disconnected workers in Forbidden Cities show the
gradual dissolution of this capability. Most particularly, Morriss stories
include a demographic of geographically mobile, creative-sector characters,
now drifting into the insecure and disconnected realm of the precariat. By
focusing on texts that foreground social class, and by positing the rise and
decline of social mobility in New Zealand as a coherent period of literary
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history from the mid-1930s to the turn of the twenty-rst century, this
analysis contributes to a belated but growing move in New Zealand literary
criticism to address literary representations of social class.

Precarious is not the rst word that would come to mind to describe the
world inhabited by the characters in the opening sequence to New Zealand
author Paula Morriss short story The Party. An homage to Chekhovs
story of the same title, the narrative opens with 30-year-old Olivia Sandford
fussing around the catering staff in preparation for a dinner party in an exclu-
sive gated community on Long Island, NY. But soon a series of small personal
erosions begins to gather into a sense of some larger, impending avalanche.
The evening is oppressively hot; August is hurricane season, Olivia thinks,
not at all the time for parties. Olivia is three months pregnant, and just six
months earlier, she had lost a baby in the stress of Hurricane Katrina, when
the foetus had surfed out on a rip tide of blood (Morris 2008, 77). At
the same time, her mother had died of an aneurism, but everyone knew it
was the hurricane that killed her (77). As Olivia feels the rst pangs of
another miscarriage, she becomes overcome by a sense of fragility, from the
inhospitability of her own womb to the destruction of a city at the whim of
the elements.
Life is precarious, then, in an existential sense of the term: insecure, liable to
be cut short from its very inception. But the story also draws attention to pre-
cariousness in another, now archaic sense of the term: the condition of being
subject to the will or decision of others. The evening is socially fraught, as
Olivia struggles to adapt to her husbands world. Born and bred in Southern
high society, Olivia is unfamiliar with Atlantic Coast manners. Since the party
is taking place at the holiday house of her husband Pauls family, should she
take on the role of Lady of the House, or leave that to Pauls sister? Paul
himself is obtuse to decorum. As the principal of a agging advertising
agency, he is meant to be networking hard, exploiting the occasion to
secure patronage. But Paul is screwing up, alienating his guests with his talk
of a new Gilded Age of luxury and excess. Olivias uncle pulls her aside, as
if she is to blame for failing to curb her husbands indiscretions: Everythings
business. Paul should know that (95). As a wealthy guest withdraws his
favour, Olivia nds that the caste system of the New York lite proves at
 PRECARITY
Jennifer Lawn
............................3

least as trenchant as the more transparent social hierarchies and obligations of

the South. The gated community is shutting on the Sandfords, and they are
about to be tipped down the social scale.
Paula Morris terms the story a dark comedy (2010, 189), perhaps
because Olivias own preciousness distances her from readerly sympathies.
She appears privileged, over-sensitive, foolish for marrying badly. Yet her
situation is tenuous, and the loss of her baby suggests that she is registering
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the precariousness of life at multiple levels: relational, emotional, biological,

somatic, elemental. As Judith Butler has inuentially argued, to apprehend
precariousness, in the full sense of the term, is not merely to acknowledge
that all life is contingent and that all beings are bound to die. Precariousness
also entails an awareness of co-vulnerability. Life requires various social and
economic conditions to be met in order to be sustained as a life, Butler writes,
and precariousness implies living socially, open to the fact that ones life is
always in some sense in the hands of the other (2010, 14). As Butler has
further argued, the concept of precarious life needs always to be held in
tension with two other, related terms. Precarity relates to the differential
distribution of resources that are necessary to sustain life; it is relative, and
plays out through political struggle between dominant and marginalized
groups. Without apprehension of precariousness, Butler maintains, the injus-
tice that some populations are routinely exposed to high levels of precarity
will not be fundamentally challenged. As the moneyed guests subtly but palp-
ably distance themselves from Pauls vulgar tinges of desperation, The
Party evidences the effects of the third term that Butler binds into the con-
ditions of contemporary life: the ongoing process of precaritization. Since
capitalism produces and thrives on both instability and inequality, precarity
itself is not new; but in the context of post-industrial economies in particular,
precaritization points to the rise of insecure, wearying and anxious labour that
now extends beyond the historical underclass to include a wider range of
people affecting creative-sector workers, professionals and even Southern
socialites.
I have foregrounded Morriss story, read in conjunction with Butlers phil-
osophy, because it anticipates both the questions and the method that I would
like to work through in this essay. How might a literary imaginary invoke,
and perhaps even cultivate, the apprehension of precariousness that Butler
and others have seen as essential groundwork for progressive politics
today? How might literary form bring into relief the subtle lines of social rec-
ognition and fracture that, in aggregate, form and reform patterns of social
class? At a granular level, how does precarity feel, with the sense of a trun-
cated temporal horizon, drifting life narrative, detachment from occupational
identity and search for security outside the workplace that Guy Standing
counts as aspects of a new precariat consciousness? (2014, 17).
 ............................
in ter v enti ons 4

To be sure, there is a considerable leap from apprehending what Butler

terms a common impressionability and violability ([2004] 2006, xiv),
through to effective political action against the forms of violence that
spread insecurity, dehumanize populations and even eradicate humanity.
Butler is trying to avoid the enclosures of other common ethical frameworks,
such as recognition of difference, with its requirement for reciprocity, or the
policy language of supporting at risk elements of the population, with its
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weighing of calculable inputs and outputs. In doing so, however, she seems
to place considerable faith on what might be termed a sensibility: the
capacity to perceive the human at the limits of what we can know, what
we can hear, what we can see, what we can sense (151). The reading of lit-
erature can hardly be a sufcient condition to develop this sensibility; yet
The Party does give an example of how the alternative account of causal-
ity enabled by the ctional arrangement of events can be used to reveal social
truths. This is, after all, the reason why the nal scene carries such a punch,
after the depiction of a series of refusals to apprehend co-vulnerability in the
course of the evening. For Paul, Hurricane Katrina largely presents an
opportunity to clutch at an insurance pay-out to rescue his business, while
others declare that Katrina gave black people in New Orleans a new start
(there are, of course, no black people at the event, even as serving staff).
According to this patterned, literary logic, this accumulation of slights,
and not just the whim of nature, becomes implicated in the literal abortion
of a human life.
To broach these issues, I will set together two works of ction that, at rst
glance, make an unlikely pairing: John A. Lees Children of the Poor ([1934]
1986) and Morriss short story collection Forbidden Cities (2008), which
includes The Party. Lee was a charismatic socialist politician during a
period of radical welfare reform in New Zealand, and his semi-autobiogra-
phical novel tells of growing up poor in the slums of the southern city of
Dunedin during the 1890s. Praised for its social realism in Britain at the
time of publication, the novel was seen as scandalous in the mainstream
New Zealand press but well received by other local novelists. Author Jane
Mander wrote that the novel had a vitality, power and force that quite
transcend its technical blemishes, the occasional sentimentality, and the
narrow range of sympathy (as quoted in Olssen 1977, 69). The narrative
is driven by the constant hunger of its protagonist (and author alter-ego)
Albany Porcello, and by the repeated message of the adult narrator:
Poverty is not a xed quality. Poverty also is relative (Lee [1934] 1986,
6). As the effects of the Great Depression wore on, Lee set out to convince
New Zealanders that they could and should alter the social structures that
spawned crime and misery. His ambitions were realized: Children of the
Poor shocked a nation, made headline news and helped to bring the
Labour Party to electoral victory in 1935 in turn setting the legislative
 PRECARITY
Jennifer Lawn
............................5

platform for what was, at the time, the most extensive social security
1 Children of the system in the world (Cooper and Molloy 1997, 36).1
Poor has been read as Where Children of the Poor helped to galvanize prevalent social and econ-
both autobiography
and ction. Lees
omic anxieties into a concrete, politically mobilizing account of precarity, the
mother, Mary Lee, stories collected in Forbidden Cities show the gradual dissolution of this capa-
wrote her own bility. Most of the stories are set in cosmopolitan cities around the turn of the
autobiography, Not
So Poor, presenting
twenty-rst century, where the central characters are migrants or interlopers
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an alternative in unfamiliar, socially stratied environments. Libidinally over-leveraged,

account of people and they are drifting off course in their sex lives as much as their careers. Forbid-
events. The factuality den Cities was published in the year of the global nancial crisis, and almost
of some key details
remains under all of the stories speak of a neoliberal world where the precariousness of life,
dispute by social as an awareness of social vulnerability and exposure, has been twisted politi-
historians (Olssen cally into a division between those who get richer in a world without guaran-
1977; Cooper and
Molloy 1997). I have
tees, and a remainder whose lives count for less. Most importantly for my
followed purposes, the central characters tend to act out the condition of what we
McEldowney (1976) might call cosmopolitan precarity; these are stories of slow crisis and
in treating the work
low-intensity hysteria. On the eve of global nancial meltdown, the charac-
as a novel.
ters haphazard sexual liaisons, banal conversations and drifting relationships
evidence a cognitive shutdown from the reality of their condition; as the nar-
rator puts it in the opening story, Like a Mexican, you and everyone you
work with are Scheherazade, staving off death with your endless evenings of
talk (Morris 2008, 8).
Taken together, the two works bookend a period of history in industrialized
economies broadly characterized by a compromise between state and
market in a system of high taxes and generous social transfers that is now
increasingly understood as exceptional in the longer trajectory of capitalism
(Gilbert 2014, x). Underlying my decision to put Lee and Morris in conversa-
tion with each other is a larger comprehension of the shaping of New Zealand
literary history in which the span of the height of the welfare state, stretching
from the mid-1930s to mid-1980s, can be seen as a coherent phase of social
history. The phase from 1984 to the present has, in turn, been marked by
the inuence of Rogernomics as neoliberal social and economic reform
was called in New Zealand, after the minister of nance who introduced
some of the most far-reaching measures. The widening split between rich
and poor that has eventuated from these reforms has not been ignored by lit-
erary critics; but in a critical context where the project of decolonization has
been the central and most urgent task, this disparity of life outcomes has
tended to be ethnicized (with the extended debates around Alan Duffs
novel Once Were Warriors [1990] and Lee Tamahoris lm adaptation of
the novel being the most sustained public example). Revisiting this period
through the lens of social class is a relatively new critical undertaking, requir-
ing not only an alternative selection of texts for analysis, but also a new set of
reading practices which place responsibility on the reader to locate the
 ............................
in ter v enti ons 6

political within the text (McNeill 2016, 293). In the wake of the global nan-
cial crisis, a wave of public concern over poverty in New Zealand, bolstered
by sociological, psychological and economic research data, has added salience
to this more materialist line of literary inquiry.
Some commentators have suggested that growing awareness of precaritiza-
tion in a neoliberal era can once again offer potential for new subjectivities
and new kinds of politics. Guy Standing has raised this anticipation into a
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manifesto, envisaging the emergence of the precariat as the new dangerous

class that has the potential, like the proletariat before it, to build collective
agency to change the next phase of capitalism back towards workers needs
(2014, xi). Although more pessimistic that such solidarity can be achieved,
Simon During has similarly encouraged those working in the Humanities to
choose precarity, meaning, in part, to apply a literary sensibility to the
analysis of a global process by which relatively geographically and culturally
stable relations of dominance and subordination are being replaced by rela-
tively unstable and dispersed conditions of deprivation and insecurity
(2015, 19). Lees novel is a reminder that precarity is not a new condition;
its recent rise in post-industrial economies is actually its discovery among a
class of people who had been accustomed to assume a higher worth in a
wage economy (Mitropoulos 2005). I knew we were poor more than a
decade before I asked myself why we were poor, writes Lee ([1934] 1986,
19), and the close dissection of consciousness in the eeting but telling
moments of life serve to help the reader, also, to know precarity prior to revi-
siting the question as to why and how it comes about. Morris, by contrast, is
writing in and about a time of relative afuence, and her task (as I interpret it)
is to make the reemerging structural conditions of insecurity more visible. Her
characters range across social and geographic demographics, but their co-
presence in the collection helps to draw out the ways in which we are differ-
ent in our common precariousness (Lorey, as quoted in Puar 2012, 172).
However, Morriss collection equally foregrounds the demoralizing, inten-
sive, negative facets of precarity for a class of individuals who have not yet
come to see themselves in these terms and, as the trajectories of the stories
seem to imply, never will.

Children of the Poor: harnessed humans

From the earliest memories of its central character, Children of the Poor is
marked by an insistent awareness of a poverty so entrenched that it separ-
ated us even from the poor (Lee [1934] 1986, 19). Young Albany Porcello
grows up fatherless in a home where every brick tells of hunger and grinding
poverty (18). Dark-eyed, lean, restless, hungry as an unedged bird,
 PRECARITY
Jennifer Lawn
............................7

imaginative (13), Albany sees the prostitution of his older sister and mother
and the death of his infant sister, and slides from truancy and social stigmati-
zation to petty thieving, dismissal from a series of workplaces, and eventual
imprisonment. Although Albanys life is exceptional, the narrative evidences
processes of labelling and social disapprobation that create, then and now,
what Imogen Tyler calls national abjects, produced and enmeshed within
the interpellative fabric of everyday life (2013, 9). Albany resonates to
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both his physical and social environment, and this sensitivity is heightened
by a religious grounding which populates the world with signs that speak
with singular import to the young boys conscience. An early experience
makes an impression that lasts into adulthood. Albany sees a chain gang,
harnessed humans, from the prison near his home, and becomes fascinated
by the clank-clank, chink-chink of the picks and shovels repeated for many
mornings (Lee [1934] 1986, 19). He is drawn by a sense of kinship with the
men, but whether in the form of portent, caution, warning or beacon, the nar-
rator remains unsure. The sight of the gang in fact pregures Albanys own
fate, but long before his body is conned, his vagabond fancy (153) is dis-
ciplined and conned through the grind mill of a series of institutions: church,
school, work, courts.
The narrative point of view is split between the child, who thinks and feels
intensely in the moment from his egocentric centre, and the analytical adult
narrator. This structure is by no means unusual in retrospective rst person
narration, but it does serve to reinforce Lees political purposes. One must
make a political programme attractive to the human family by relat[ing]
the abstract principles of a movement to the beating of a heart (Lee, as
cited in Olssen 1977, 701). The childs single focus on his primary needs
food, warmth and positive regard expresses the plain iniquity of withhold-
ing these needs through the enclosures of property and propriety. Children,
like the birds, the eld mice, possums, see fruit on the trees as something to
which they have proprietary raiding rights (Lee [1934] 1986, 142). The evi-
dence of Lees successes as a soldier and politician later in life showed that
every social ill could be retrieved. More intimately, it is also the adult narra-
tors role to absorb the childs pool of shame and frustration. Words that
young Albany could not say are voiced and treated tenderly: Albany believes
his dead baby sister to be in Hell because she was beyond salvation, but I
never told my [older] sister of my terrible discovery (99); he is red from
his paper round for stealing pennies to buy stale pies, but is too ashamed to
tell his mother and goes out at the same time each night to steal items to
make up the missing income; in another job, he is unclothed by co-workers
but cannot tell his boss; he is punished for not completing his homework,
but cannot tell his teacher that he spent the evening pilfering wood and coal
for the household stove.
 ............................
in ter v enti ons 8

The evil that is attacked in Children of the Poor is not simply the material
reality of the everlasting clamour for bread (14), but always, also, the clear
perception of a punitive social pedagogy of more or less subtle humiliation
and admonition, magnied in the childs susceptibility to the limitations
and disappointments of adults. The narrator presents his younger selfs life-
path as the outcome of a concatenation of formative moments, from the
small but lasting disappointments of a question not asked or a word of
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praise withheld, through to Albanys beating at the hands of a paedophilic

minister of the Church. The judgements of adults are preceded in conscience,
and perhaps amplied, by the judgement of God, the great Auditor who
records the debits of all sinners (67). The narrator is clear about the enemy
of human ourishing: it is society, which had given us sneers and aches
and old clothes and left-overs (217). But beyond the narrow frame of
respectability, what is society to a child, if it is not the sum total of encoun-
ters? What little things determine the destiny of our footsteps! (148), the
narrator comments, in the context of a teacher who stied Albany, not
because he failed to see his need for stimulus for mental energy (76), but
precisely because he did notice his talents and failed to nurture them: he
could drive but he could not encourage, and I could never be driven
except to Hell (146). To live in poverty is a form of material deprivation,
a condition that can be circumscribed and framed as a problem to be solved
by policy means. The more programmatic elements of Children of the Poor
hammer this point home, as part of Lees larger political vision. But the
novel also works on another register, as the tenderness and sympathy for
the life of the child draws upon an acute sense of co-vulnerability at the
heart of social being. This idea underlies Butlers point: to say that a life is
precarious requires not only that a life be apprehended as a life, but also
that precariousness be an aspect of what is apprehended in what is living
(2010, 13).
The judgement of subsequent generations of New Zealand literary critics
has not been kind on Lee. The relative invisibility of Children of the Poor
in canonical accounts of New Zealand literary history attests to the way
that the subsequent generation of writers saw themselves as forging the
nations struggle to achieve aesthetic modernism. In its narratorial intrusive-
ness, overt moralizing, episodic structure, sentimental passages and lapse
into Dickensian character sketches, Children of the Poor evidently lacked
the austerity of style that soon became the prescription for any literature to
be taken seriously as such. Yet for all the left-ish political leanings of cultural
commentators, this embarrassment about sentimentality in literary ction
may have revealed assumptions about social class as well as about literary
style. In a preface to his Brechtian theatrical adaptation of Children of the
Poor, playwright Mervyn Thompson comments that elements of Lees
novel, such as broad comedy, the hymns, the music, and the use of biblical
 PRECARITY
Jennifer Lawn
............................9

language that are classied as entertainment to middle-class audiences, are

grounded in the ordinary lived experience of the working class: For the
working classes, entertainment is not so much a leisure pursuit as a survival
kit. If you dont weep, you wither. If you dont laugh, you die (Thompson
1990, 9).
Lees political vision of social security came to seem as redundant as his
sometimes overwrought style in the decades that followed the publication
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of Children of the Poor. In terms of the critique of bourgeois life that was
one of the precepts of aesthetic modernism, the concepts of society and
security that were so central to Lees vision became dually demonized.
Through the literature and critical essays of the 1950s, insecurity became pri-
marily an existential condition and was seen, not as a constraint on human
freedom, but the fundamental disposition needed to achieve it. Reduced to
rounds of routine, security becomes regarded as a wall rather than a platform.
Society, in turn, becomes a largely invisible, and hence monolithically power-
ful, constraint on sexual, personal and verbal expression. Through this shift,
the concept of precarity also undergoes a reconguration, drawing more on a
long Protestant tradition of an ethic of uneasiness, or openness to lifes
ows, as During (2015) has argued in a comprehensive genealogy of the
term. The idea of precarity takes on virtually the reverse meaning: where
acknowledgement of subjective vulnerability and mutual need was fore-
grounded in Children of the Poor, precarity becomes valorized in terms of
openness to risk and opportunity a capability that becomes seen as necessary
to expand the eld of creative consciousness and authentic action.
In this sense, the concept of precarity could become an ideological resource
for the new Right, just as much as it might provide a rallying point for the pro-
gressive Left. During himself makes the case that an understanding of the
concept of precarity is important to relate an intellectual tradition of critique,
inuential in the emergence of cultural studies, to the decades that can now be
seen retrospectively as the prehistory of neoliberalism. In New Zealand the
lionization of precarity was expressed most concisely in former Finance Min-
ister Roger Douglass pronouncement, in his manifesto Unnished Business,
that although income is important, the provision of choice in life and
hence openness of outcomes is a higher value and central policy imperative
(1993, 2). Conceived of as a radical openness of experience, precarity gives the
appearance of enabling personal freedoms, while in actuality imposing
severely constrained choices upon a substantial underclass. It is in this sense
that Shaw and Byler (2016) point out that the concept of precarity can have
politically regressive consequences, if it results in apathy towards the suffering
of others, or belief that some people simply handle adversity and risk better
than others and get rewarded accordingly, in material terms.
Since at least Butlers ([2004] 2006) intervention in Precarious Life, the
term precarity is being clawed back to perform important conceptual
 ............................
in ter v enti ons 10

work for the Left. Gone, most clearly, is the sense of historical moment and
polarized political struggle between socialism and fascism that Lee enjoyed
in the 1930s, seeing his time as a bridge between yesterday and tomorrow
(as cited in Olssen 1977, 71). Precarity is now theorized as an unbounded
state: In contrast to the mid-twentieth century, when poets and philosophers
of the global North felt caged by too much stability, now many of us, North
and South, confront the condition of trouble without end (Anna Tsing, as
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cited in Allison 2016). Precarity resists a progressive temporality, or a revolu-

tionary one; instead, it captures a broadly generalizable feeling that the
present no longer works as well as it used to, and that it no longer segues
into the future that one was once encouraged to imagine (Bruce ONeill,
Precarity: Interview with the Authors, 2016). Precarity hovers on a
tipping point, ranging in scale from insecurity of personal income through
to ecological collapse, with a sense that the timing, as well as risks, cannot
easily be predicted or managed. To choose precarity as an ethic, however, is
to refuse false stabilization of this unease. Butler theorizes the apprehension
of precariousness precisely as an antidote to what she sees as a reactionary
desire, on various points of the political spectrum, to reinstall the postwar
good life fantasy. Contemporary politics, she observed in 2012, is animated
by a shared structure of feeling, a desperation about losing traction that is
now becoming explicit and distorted politically (as cited in Puar 2012,
166). It is this structure of feeling, I would suggest, that informs the stories
in Morriss collection.

Forbidden Cities: dont leave anything, will you?

If Lees instruments in Children of the Poor were shock and passion (Olssen
1977, 70), Morriss idiom might be described as the realism of lowered
expectations (Shonkwiler and La Berge 2013, 7). As in The Party, many
of the characters appear relatively privileged, not at risk in any evident
sense. The design of Forbidden Cities as an entire collection, however,
draws attention to the ways in which, not just individuals, but entire patterns
of life are under duress from geographical, nancial, existential and libidinal
instabilities. In Red Christmas, for example, the kids in a troubled Maori
family in South Auckland salvage domestic cast-offs for Christmas presents.
In Rangatira, Morriss ancestor, Ngati Wai leader and Christian convert
Paratene Te Manu, reects with both wonder and regret on how musket,
Bible and scribbles on paper have transformed the lifeworld of his people.
In Testing and Lonelyville, young men work in sectors (education,
public relations) that would imply a need for strong communication skills
and a high value placed on individuality; instead, they nd quite the opposite,
 PRECARITY
Jennifer Lawn
............................
11

becoming trapped in decontextualized, immaterial labour, cramped within a

pettily competitive, hyper-monitored work environment, distanced from the
larger social purpose of their vocation (Lawn 2016, 1949). Like seeping
tanks or slowly rotting boards, these forms of precarity are not obvious
and totalizing dramatizations of the thing in itself and are therefore not
metaculturally marked (Stewart 2012, 519); instead, they loom into visibility
through the kinds of juxtaposition and selection that Morriss collection
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affords.
The opening and closing stories of Forbidden Cities form a complementary
pair in many ways. In both stories a young woman has an affair with a weal-
thier, professionally senior man working at upper levels of the nance sector:
Nina and Carlos in Like a Mexican, Anna and Will in Chain Bridge.
Passive but not victimized in any clear sense, the women know they are
being used instrumentally by the men, but choose to go along with the lie.
In response to Carloss blandishments, Nina makes a conscious, but seemingly
not fully controlled, moment of self-abandonment: You dont know if Carlos
is married or not, as the second-person narrator observes, and in this
moment you decide not to care (Morris 2008, 12). The affair is con-
ducted, not quite as a patent faade though since Carlos is indeed
married, there is a need for discretion but more as if Nina were living her
life at one remove through a daytime soap or a pulp romance: It feels as
though youve invented him, as though youve invented each other. It
feels as though you are having an affair (19). For their part, the male
lovers have much less investment in the relationship. Dont forget me,
says Will to Anna after a tryst at his familys holiday house, and Dont
leave anything, will you? (257). Nina and Anna are one more unmarked,
exchangeable commodity in a chain of women, to be discarded like an under-
performing shareholding when they become a nuisance, by being indiscreet,
or clingy, or showing signs of actually falling for romantic platitudes.
Both Like a Mexican and Chain Bridge have a tripartite social order.
The lovers, Carlos and Will, respectively, work at senior levels in the nance
sector in New York City. At the other end of the social scale are manual
workers, who do not appear as named characters but are casually mentioned
in their absence and as an absence, in the sense that their work is invisible
because it is taken for granted. The protagonists themselves sit ambiguously
in class hierarchy. They are professionals, but operating within insecure
forms of work. Nina works as an A&R (artists and repertoire) manager for
a music production company. Online streaming is hitting the industry hard:
Napster has been reined in, but Ninas company is still struggling. She used
to go to clubs four nights a week, but now your iPod is more important
than your cell phone (10), and nobody goes into music stores when they
can download things for free (25). Anna used to work for Morgan Stanley,
and has recently been red from her job as an associate at the same rm as
 ............................
in ter v enti ons 12

Will. With her student loan mounting to the $200,000 mark, she travels to
Budapest to consider her next move. If not exactly impoverished, their lives
are conditioned by the unknown unknowns that Standing sees as character-
istic of the precariat uncertainties in matters such as income, nancial
outlook, residency and the ability to demarcate daily life into regular blocks
of time.
It might seem that the demographic of young professional women, the wry
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undercutting of cosmopolitan clichs, and the storylines of rocky, comic, yet

faintly desperate affairs are the stuff of chicklit, trivial compared to more
pressing arenas of human suffering. For these women, life is not unliveable
in any literal sense of the term. However, the stories are worth reading care-
fully, I would argue, to understand the representational codes of what During
calls the contemporary literature of precarity. Having diverted affect from
professional drift to illicit relationships, Nina and Anna are struggling to
re-attune, absorbing their situation but not able to address it. During
describes this body of literature as expressing intuitions and experiences of
new, more or less disaggregated, ows and moods, or as belonging to a litera-
ture of inconclusive illuminations (2015, 37). This mode stands in contrast
to social realism, which, with its typicality of characters and aspiration to a
totality of social representation, has no purchase on the precariat, just
because they have no identity as such and belong to no delimited society,
let alone community (37). Durings comment that the literature of precarity
is indifferent to European realisms inherited political stakes also nds echo
in Morriss stories: these are anti-romances, not just in the impossibility of an
enduring love match, nor in the womens self-conscious impression of banal-
ity, but also, more fundamentally, in the pointed denial of the social mobility
of middle-class women that underpinned the historical rise of romance as a
genre.
Who or what is Like a Mexican in the story of the same title? Becoming
increasingly unanchored from reality, the phrase initially announces Annas
misdirected urge for an exotic experience. The phrase is ambiguous in itself:
does it refer to typicality, pointing to the very essence of the way Mexicans
go about things (Mexicans make love just like a Mexican, to paraphrase
the lyrics from the Bob Dylan song, Just Like a Woman)? Or does it
raise a question of cross-cultural similarity: can anybody act like a
Mexican? This would seem a minor point, were it not for a series of commu-
nicative miscues around the term. Nina loves the idea of being in love with a
Mexican; they are virile, they seem to know the order of things in life, the
way things were done (Morris 2008, 11). Carlos certainly does know the
way things are done: in his view, wealthy Hispanic men have a mistress and
a wife, kept in their respective domains. He does not expect an Englishwoman
to acknowledge this simple reality, evidently, so he reassures Nina that he and
his wife are separating. Nina notes the use of the present continuous tense.
 PRECARITY
Jennifer Lawn
............................
13

Ninas friend Rico (a Mexican) warns her against falling in love with a
Mexican: Mexicans work at McDonalds. Mexicans bus tables at restau-
rants Keep away from them (27). Eventually just like a Mexican
Carlos tells Nina that he will rejoin his wife in Mexico City because the con-
servative Catholic community will not hear of a separation (23). The cos-
mopolitan third space of New York collapses, as Nina and Carlos retreat
to their respective habitats, he to Mexico City and she to London. Her new
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boyfriend, James, acts like an Englishman. They have sex the way some
people eat dessert: occasionally and furtively, as a special treat (34). Ulti-
mately, Nina can only forget Carlos by consigning him to his national stereo-
type: through a kind of retributive imaginative shift, she decides that he looks
like a brown-skinned man on a billboard that she sees on the roadside, a man
who looks like he works at McDonalds. In terms of the class allegory running
through the story, Nina has sutured her own sense of loss and vulnerability by
transferring the face of global capital (not always white, after all) to what
looks like the face of the underpaid migrant worker.
In Chain Bridge a failed affair forms the backstory to Annas visit to Buda-
pest. Anna seeks to escape recent painful experiences of the break-up with her
married lover, Will. Instead, she ends up repeating elements of the affair with a
Hungarian man, Zoltan, in ways that drag her back emotionally to the earlier
traumatic scenes. Anna is living a lie; she does not want to tell anybody she has
lost her job. Fortunately, she is used to a set of corporate rules where the
Morgan Stanley secret police monitored staff to ensure they were not
sending personal emails the penalty for which is being summarily red
(239). It is Annas Hungarian friend Eva who points out the obvious:
working in the nancial services industry is like this country under the Com-
munists (271). Anna is used to conducting business discreetly; Will ensures
that no photographs are taken of them together, or any other visible traces.
Fleetingly, Anna considers leaving an incriminating hair-tie under her lovers
pillow, to alert his wife to his indelity, but ends up deciding to maintain her
own erasure. After their tempestuous break-up in the rain on Brooklyn
Bridge, she changes her mind. She sends Will an email: Thanks for returning
my coat. But her effort at retribution is self-defeating: as per policy, she is sum-
marily dismissed. She is left to drift, lost somewhere between New York City
and Budapest, a cosmopolitan orphan, the other big cities around the world
emotionally forbidden to her because she once travelled there with Will.
Like a Mexican and Chain Bridge signal the extent of disaggregation
and political isolation that characterizes the would-be class of the precariat.
Characters who ought to be united by comparable positions in the economic
order are stymied by non-commutable codes of social caste and hierarchy.
Typical of many of the central characters in Forbidden Cities, Nina and
Anna do not make demands. Their work conditions are tenuous, subject to
arbitrary and quick dismissal. As both lovers and employees, they are
 ............................
in ter v enti ons 14

replaceable and fundamentally anonymous. No longer able to tell the differ-

ence between hope and delusion (270), they have become enmeshed in
various forms of social lie, from capitalist reality to illicit affairs. They do
not make any kind of effective protest; instead, they embark on another unsa-
tisfactory, dissociative liaison. And when they leave, nobody comes running
after them.
Finally, to place the vulnerability of Albany Porcello next to that of
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Morriss cast of downwardly mobile characters is to underscore the way in

which we are different in our common precariousness, to return to
Isabell Loreys vision of a bond formed through interdependency and vulner-
ability. But the common is nothing we can come back to, it has to be
assembled and enabled in political action (cited in Puar 2012, 172). Literary
history is one avenue for producing such assemblages. To read a present text
through one from an earlier era, as I have done here, is to claim the timeliness
of a literary work as an intervention into the current moment, and to histor-
icize the present by situating it within a larger social pattern. This method has
limitations, if the past moment is invoked to reduce the complexities of the
present. It may be dangerous to return to the 1930s in search of some
sepia-tinged wash of a simpler, happier time. Alternatively, it may seem specu-
lative to read signs of a gathering sea-change in class consciousness an econ-
omic equivalent of Hurricane Katrina in the hesitations and halting love
affairs of relatively privileged characters whose stories can only be told,
however negatively, because they are deemed capable of registering their
social environment. To claim precarity for the Left, from the intricacies of
texts as well as in the sphere of politics, is to gather energies and attention
for a much longer struggle.

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