Marginalia as narratives of ordinary lives: Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall’s Down to This

This article examines Canadian author Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall’s 2004 memoir Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shantytown through the notions of marginalia and the ordinary in order to question dichotomic representations of homelessness. It explores how the author moves beyond binaries, interrogating the dichotomy ordinary/out of the ordinary lives by narrating his ethical encounter with the other (Butler, 2004). The text is written as a journal where Bishop-Stall describes his personal journey through homelessness; and more importantly, it gives a voice to the other down-and-out people in notorious Toronto’s Tent City. The characters’ unreliable and fragmented storytelling uncovers the lives of the faceless others. I contend that in Down to This individuals’ life stories are connected to realities which question binaries through the re/mapping of ordinary experiences and affects; they disintegrate the opposition materiality vs abstraction, or as I argue, exclusion vs inclusion (out of the ordinary/ordinary). Down to These bridges the private details of the residents’ life stories, and the public perception of the problem of homelessness, illustrating how everyday moments of precarity intersect with wider political issues. In the process, the narrative also questions the binary attitudes of exclusion (disfranchisement) and inclusion (privilege). This literary strategy gives the constellation of stories a profound illuminating vision of the human condition. I show my point by drawing on the of marginalia (Kistner 2014), and by analysing the characters’ narratives of precariousness through the notions of editing and affective assemblage (Gerlach, 2015; Hamilakis, 2017).