Precarity: A Short Literary History, from Colonial Slum to Cosmopolitan Precariat

Abstract

In this essay I analyse fiction by New Zealand authors John A. Lee and Paula Morris to investigate the ways in which literary form might articulate “the precarious” – as an ethical philosophy most closely associated with the work of Judith Butler – with “the precariat” as a (re)emerging social phenomenon. Butler's concept of precarious life proceeds from the idea that apprehension of co-vulnerability in oneself and others can provide the basis for a non-violent, progressive politics. Situated near the beginning and end of a historically unprecedented phase of upward mobility and relative income equality in New Zealand, Lee's semi-autobiographical Children of the Poor (first published 1934) and Morris’s short story collection 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 shuffle individuals downward into positions of relative economic and personal disadvantage in a class-stratified social world. However, where the depiction of immiseration in Children of the Poor helped to galvanize prevalent social and economic anxieties into a concrete, 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, Morris’s 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 history from the mid-1930s to the turn of the twenty-first century, this analysis contributes to a belated but growing move in New Zealand literary criticism to address literary representations of social class.