Liquid Lives: Solidifying Strategies in Jon McGregor's Early Novels

Abstract

© 2021 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System ccording to sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, the contemporary phase of globalized modernity means always having strangers at one’s door. These strangers cannot simply be identified with the outsider, the foreigner, or the refugee, for strangerhood has become the condition of all individuals in “liquid modernity.” “Liquid” is Bauman’s metaphor for the transformation of once-solid social orders and state institutions by highly mobile, highly unpredictable global capital flows, the outcomes of which have been “[p]rogressive deregulation of labour markets and ‘flexibilization’ of work . . . , growing fragility of social positions and instability of socially recognized identities” ( Strangers 29).1 The stranger is the bane of liquid modernity, but also its ubiquitous representative. Liquidity makes strangers of citizens by uprooting them from solid social structures while demanding that they re-embed themselves within personal and collective identities increasingly characterized by impermanence and weightlessness. Discarded by political authorities that no longer consider it their role either to ensure universal economic security or to entrench citizens in civic life, the stranger is “liberated” from duty to, and