1Considering ‘the humble’ as the spiritual, social or emotional state of an individual I start from the premise that experiences and places equally epitomise it. This essay therefore inquires into ‘the humble’ in female and male protagonists/narrators with an emphasis on the significance of bounded space.

2Jean Baudrillard writes on the importance of the local:

The universe itself, taken globally, is what cannot be represented, what does not have a possible complement in the mirror, what has no equivalence in meaning (it is as absurd to give it a meaning, a weight of meaning, as to give it weight at all). Meaning, truth, the real cannot appear except locally, in a restricted horizon.1

3Two novels by contemporary Irish writers exemplify a long-established figural representation of ‘the humble’: they focus on female characters from Irish small towns who embody the lowly existence marked by lack of independence and by deprivation—of comfort, wealth, education, endorsement and self-esteem. The combination of female protagonists with the humble has an even longer tradition in English fiction. Samuel Richardson’s influential first novel Pamela: Or Virtue Rewarded provides an early example in 1740, when the ‘humble’ qualities embodied by the heroine and her parents received appreciation and reward. The subtitle of Pamela points to important aspects of ‘the humble: ’ its link with religion, moral dimensions and modesty. From the lower middle-class perspective ‘the humble’ not only opposes pride but also splendour and grandeur. The social acknowledgment and exalted praise it gained by the 18th-century novel’s representation and from the bourgeois readership contrast with numerous 20th-century fictions where ‘the humble’ can be regarded as almost synonymous with ‘having no importance’ or ‘getting little attention’—except perhaps in narrative representations of femininity and the domestic which also address the effects of marginalisation.

4Disregard by society characterises the protagonist of William Trevor’s novella Felicia’s Journey (1994), which provoked critical appraisal mainly on aspects of migration, diasporic existence or dislocation and the portrayal of modern cityscapes, as the pregnant young girl’s lonely search for her friend goes on.2 That she is lost and in danger of being murdered by a mentally disturbed man who seems to lead an ordinary life and offers help in her unprotected situation after she has left home in Ireland, takes ‘the humble’ of her person centre stage, highlighted by the limitedness of her perspective and her in-between situation as somebody engaged in a continual transience. Felicia’s quest for the father of her unborn child who has found work in England fully reveals her simple-mindedness: ‘I thought I might run into him on the streets. I didn’t realize the town would be so big’ is how she summarises her futile odyssey during which she meets the psychopath who confirms her naïveté with ‘Of course you didn’t.’3 The narration shifts from the alternating internal focalisers Felicia and Mr Hilditch to an omniscient, often satirical third-person narrator, who for a considerable time conceals the stalker’s intentions and motivation from his innocent heroine as from the reader. The narrative also hides the unfaithful Johnny’s whereabouts and occupation; that he has joined the British army constitutes the conflict of national drama on the personal level. The narrative initially constructs the humble in the opening chapters, which, spatially as well as temporally, fluctuate between the narrative present—Felicia’s journey to the Midlands followed by her quest—and the remembered past at home (Trevor 18). Felicia’s world and her nature are dominated by the domestic situation with her mother long dead and her stern father preferring his daughter as a housekeeper instead of wage-earner, a bedridden great-grandmother with whom she has to share a room, three brothers and a life with only bleak prospects.

5It can hardly be overlooked that here as in a number of 20th-century fictions Ireland, with its colonial history, is symbolically represented by female characters even in a novel set in the early 90s.4 Like Barry’s The Secret Scripture, Trevor’s novel addresses English-Irish relations and highlights traits of crime fiction. The humble reveals itself as a condition largely pervading Felicia’s accustomed social environment which emerges as a state of paralysis and poverty because of unemployment, and of severe moral restriction, mixed with her parents’ faded but obsessive memories of the heroic deeds of Irishmen and—women during the fight for independence. ‘I don’t know will things improve here,’ Felicia opens one of the awkward conversations with her new friend Johnny. ‘He didn’t know either,’ the narrator tersely remarks (Trevor 30). Felicia’s low self-esteem is constantly reaffirmed by the men and women surrounding her, and her being humble in the sense of inexperienced intensifies after she has left the circumscribed and censoring surroundings in exchange for an industrial urban environment ‘north of Birmingham,’ where she roams among factories, evangelical gatherings, and homeless shelters. Mr Hilditch, labelled the imperial perpetrator by a critic who identifies him as the girl’s antagonist also in the symbolic paradigm,5 becomes her unwanted adviser and—ironically—her last resort. Hilditch in his informed reflection recognises her as a person as ‘Simple as a bird’ (Trevor 127), much more than the others who ran away from home and crossed his path. In the big city Felicia can barely understand either the language or the way of living. The humble is presented as an innate, unalterable condition resulting from her sex and culturally shaped gender, her background and her socio-geographical place of origin. The lowly and already humiliated young girl takes this state of marginalisation with her to a different environment, where she ends up only physically alive among the homeless, possessed by a serene equanimity after she has resigned and given up the purpose of her journey. The literalised ‘metaphorical homelessness’ (Harte 412) in Trevor’s as in Barry’s novel is exposed as the humblest way of life. Even though places and homes may be humble, it is the unbelonging placelessness that carries this condition to extremes. Considering the novel’s end, however, I wish to argue that Felicia is invested with another aspect of the humble which relates back to its conceptualisation in Christian religion: since the narration constructs this character as ‘poor in spirit’ and ‘pure in heart’ she is evocative of the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mountin the New Testament.6 At first credulous and ignorant of Hilditch’s true state of mind, which is mainly reflected in his free indirect discourse, she sympathises with him and later shows empathy for the psychotic serial killer who will hang himself. He is—in the words of the Bible—‘the least,’ because revealed as the most deprived among the humble.

6From alternating homodiegetic perspectives The Secret Scripture7 similarly portrays different stages from the life of an equally dislocated, deserted woman, a single mother whose child was abducted. As inmate of a psychiatric institution in Roscommon she retrospectively writes in a confessional mode what she calls her ‘testimony of herself’ (Barry 3).8 Roseanne suffered an ordeal first as the daughter of a father who remained loyal to the Crown (Barry 5–6), wore a uniform and in the early 20th century worked for Sligo’s municipal authorities—tellingly as superintendent of the graveyard; later he is downgraded to rat-catcher. During her marriage, she lived in a socially liminal space in the newly founded Republic, which one of the novel’s male characters, a nationalist later executed for joining the IRA, calls ‘a country composed entirely of strangers’ (Barry 199). As a Protestant woman from Sligo married to a Catholic she leads an insecure existence in the 1930s. Accused of adultery and insanity by a Catholic priest (Barry 232–235), she is consequently ostracised by her husband’s family and the local community because she continues to befriend Protestants. Left alone and isolated in her dwelling place—an involuntary hermit vegetating in a tin hut outside inhabited spaces—she offers shelter to a forlorn soul whom she would naturally have to consider inimical: her outcast brother-in-law Eneas McNulty who has joined the British army and is on the run from the bombed city of Belfast in 1941. When he approaches her abode, asking her who she is, she—the remembered self—answers ‘I’m no one’ (Barry 245), thus confirming that she has been deprived of any social identity. The narrating I, who decides to ‘testify,’ thereby somehow corroborating that she ‘is somebody,’ again states her depersonalisation: ‘I am only a thing left over, a remnant woman’ (Barry 4).9 By temporal metalepsis the authorial consciousness provides the insight that a change has taken place in the character’s view of her own self, though not in society’s awareness; only the novelist will on the metafictional level achieve an outsider’s revaluation (see below n. 3 on p. 116). The second (investigative) diarist, Dr Grene, can be considered a mediating figure between Roseanne and the historical author. Grene’s archaeological work of ‘excavation’ regards Roseanne’s biography as well as the traumas of Irish history during her lifetime, which covers all of the 20th century. The psychiatrist’s method can be considered as complementary and contrapuntal in regard to the ‘testimony.’

7The humble manifests itself thrice in Roseanne, the innocently suffering victim: firstly as an untaught young woman robbed of all protection, secondly as an individual hypocritically excluded from human company with the intention to dehumanise her on the assumption of religious and political reasons—a situation to which men also fall victim10—and thirdly judged mentally ill and banished for over 50 years to the heterotopian fringe of society,11 accused of an alleged crime she did not commit—that of killing her newborn son. Concealment, hiding and silencing of the victim of trauma play a crucial role in the narrated world:12 analogous to Roseanne’s locked-up person with her suppressed life story, and similar to the concealed origins of her kidnapped baby that is brought to England to grow up there with a veiled identity, her written testimony has to be kept secret and ‘buried’ together with the fading memories and stories she writes down: each time after a sequel has been added Roseanne stores her writing away under the floor boards of her room in the Victorian mental hospital that is soon to be demolished; yet she expresses the hope that her memoir will be read (Barry 24). A muted life and an individual towards whom the community acted as if she were non-existent combine in this portrayal of the humble character as destitute, but possessing an inner state of innocence and simplicity.13

8In both Barry’s and Trevor’s novels Irish history provides the substrate for the humble which culminates in the figure of the unsheltered woman who has always been denied autonomy.14 The incarnation of the humble culminates in the excluded homeless forsakenness that is disclosed in the unmarried mother as a precarious condition rendering the individual unable to take responsibility for him-/herself. The female protagonist’s endeavours to do so are thwarted by rigorous religious, cultural and social patriarchalism which Roseanne and Felicia, although rebelling against it, have largely internalised.15 They are further thwarted by the rule of masculinity in the afflictions of ‘the world at war’ in 1915–16, 1921–22 or 1940–41. The humble as a character’s attribute linked to humiliation, which Roseanne has almost constantly experienced, turns the ostracised woman’s universe into a ‘world as prison’ and the life-story into a misery tale. Yet Roseanne serenely expects paradise as a reward for her pains (Barry 24).16 To barely survive is the only perspective open to Barry’s and Trevor’s central female characters who are without power, influence or support, but become tentatively wrapped in the odour of sanctity through the male-authored narratives.17 That the humble protagonists are also poor with words silences their distress. ‘She was nameless, fateless, unknown’ says Barry about the old woman whose life-story became the model of his novel.18 Roseanne’s secretly written autobiography—her subversive insurrection—is of no use to her even in her old age; as a memorial it may save her from oblivion and the second homodiegetic narrator—who also acts as focaliser and diarist, the senior psychiatrist Dr Grene who is her lost son—from rootlessness. His detective work uncovers some of the cruelties and humiliating actions against those unable to defend themselves, while Roseanne is only able to document helplessness and ignorance. Against her descriptive confessional testimony her son’s scrupulous investigation and less moving professionalism, which end in an emotional upheaval, appear rationalising in spite of the disturbing effect they also achieve on the reader.

9Compared to the aforementioned novels, Colm Toíbin’s Brooklyn (2009), a story of Irish dislocation and diaspora set in the 1950s, seems to nourish the spirit of departure, because it thematises the problems connected to alternative ways of life for the younger generation of women. The image of the self-sacrificing Irish mother fades against the backdrop of the potential for change impersonated by her two daughters. The narrative tells of Eilis Lacey’s emigration—less tearful than hopeful—to the United States. The result of the plot, however, is the protagonist’s wavering between two equally encompassing humble backgrounds on either side of the Atlantic. Eilis’s world still consists of Church, work and family, but her life like that of her sister Rose shows an upward curve in an attempted social climb through education and a certain personal growth. Depending on the viewer it may appear as a great improvement or a humble one because it again leads to a modest and other-determined way of life. The narrative also makes explicit that the humble for this protagonist implies emotional security through belonging, established by the approval of her environment as long as she moves in accustomed social spaces. For a young female Irish immigrant this means female friends, church activities, a chaperone landlady, and definitely marriage. Conflicting dreams and wishes are abortive, as shown in Rose’s early sudden death and Eilis’s avoidance of alternative thinking during her journey by train when she is going back to her American husband.19 A paradox analogous to Felicia’s journey becomes evident in Brooklyn: the one woman is perpetually on the road, the other repeatedly on board a ship crossing the Atlantic, and yet ‘the local’ in the sense of contained space never loses its impact on the protagonist’s mindscape.

10In the following section I wish to demonstrate how the familiar link between female characters and the humble is challenged by recent British fiction, where the local—the accustomed limited space of the protagonists—acts as catalyst.

11While the significance of spatial restriction and the domestic is known from novels with female protagonists locality can in contemporary fiction also become crucial in relation to ‘the humble’ when the central male character reflects on masculinity and its assertion. One British fiction writer whose recent works epitomise the integration of the humble in the conceptualisation of masculinity is Graham Swift. I claim that he has achieved this innovative shift mainly through the importance which the author ascribes to the local in his narratives. The narration of Last Orders (1996) shows a moral ambition which, according to Irish writer John Banville, has elicited sympathetic response precisely because it emphasises the ‘essential dignity of humble people.’20 This includes the depiction of sentimentality as an emotional reaction of the main characters in Swift’s later novels as well as in some of his short stories. Subalternation and insignificance as the hallmarks of the humble in contemporary culture are expressed in the protagonists’ repeated statement ‘your life [is] cut out for you.’21 This other-determinedness links the humble in Last Orders more closely to class than gender. David Malcolm defines the author’s concern with characters from a socially humble milieu as a traditional interest of English fiction.22

12Swift’s latest novel, Wish You Were Here (2012), equally addresses this interest and focuses on the effect of dramatic events—9/11, the war in Iraq and developments such as the economic crisis—on a common man. The humble as a state and characteristic here results from the protagonist’s place—bound and tongue—tied identity and his limited mindscape that resists change. While in him the local is exposed as linked to the parochial he feels ambivalently bound to traditions or official records hard to ignore: self-sacrifice for one’s country or continuing on a farm which has been worked for centuries by the ancestors of a man who believes he faces failure and shame. During the period of narrated time, which only amounts to a few hours, his self is revealed and told through interior monologue and free indirect discourse.23

13Each of the humble characters in these two novels by Swift is an ‘Everyman’ of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, but, the narration by implication insists, they nevertheless and despite all limitations deserve consideration and regard as individuals. They share their fate with many other non-descript people who remain unheard, without a voice, and seem to have nothing to say. The narrative grants to them what they were denied during their inconspicuous lives—an ethical purpose which Sebastian Barry also pretended to in writing The Secret Scripture: ‘I felt I was almost duty-bound as a novelist to reclaim her [Roseanne] and, indeed, remake her.’24

14Swift’s short story collection England and Other Stories (2014) receives its coherence, I contend, from the idea of the humble. The volume lends the humble diverse connotations by creating a wide range of male and female characters of different ethnic extraction, social position or background who deserve the epithet ‘humble’ at the moment which the narration captures and portrays.25 Not all are inarticulate or desperate, but most are serious and withdrawn. The following quotation from a review in The Independent even reaffirms the same note of (ironised) depressiveness and mourning for the collection of stories which Swift’s two above-mentioned novels already communicated:

Graham Swift’s characters lead lives of quiet desperation. They are not rich or poor, unemployed or exceptional. This is middle management middle England; a crap-town, dull job, post-Empire, not-very-good-at football, boring postcard kind of country with only a few moments to alleviate the silent tedium before the final trip to the crem. Death, or the memory of it, is never far away.26

15Even though to me this appears too bleak and generalising an evaluation, yet it substantiates ‘Britain’s Postcolonial Melancholia’27 in-and outside narrative literature and in part characterises the mood the protagonists exhibit here also. ‘The best we can do is survive’ (Runcie) certainly provides a depressing bottom line expressing a collective frame of mind devoid of answers to fundamental questions. The review specifies why this is so: ‘These people expected so much more of their lives but here they are, rescuing a child from a dog in the park, shagging the next door neighbour’s Moldovan cleaning lady, or remembering their dead son, killed in Afghanistan, while standing by the pasta shelf in Waitrose.’ (Runcie) Narrative representation of ‘the drama in everyday life’ is the objective according to Anthony Cummins, who underlines the scepticism with which Swift has here as elsewhere dyed the heroic and heroisation.28 In the second sentence of his review Cummins meaningfully draws the conclusion that this community of protagonists consists of a society of ‘worriers.’29

16The title England and Other Stories piques the postmodern reader, because it ambiguously hints at the discursive quality of this ‘imagined community’ (Benedict Anderson): ‘England,’ the country and the nation, is also a narrative. Cummins criticises: ‘The collection works best in the everyday here and now. Its rather grandiose title might be an attempt to confer dignity but it’s not needed. Swift could have called it “Mick and other blokes” with no loss at all.’ The critic’s statement deserves reflection, because a number of these short stories in fact remind of T.S. Eliot’s poetry: ‘The broken fingernails of dirty hands. / My People humble people who expect / Nothing.’30 Yet Cummins’s comment on the volume is debatable as being too generalising, since in these tales the representations of the humble are effective through reductive situations of sorrow and powerlessness. Diverse protagonists are united irrespective of their social position, with a certain levelling effect. Therefore Lucy Scholes in The Guardian may rightly call the title ‘not too bold a claim.’31

17Since here I am focusing on male characters the exploration of the humble in women in these stories is eclipsed. The result of an investigation of the female figures would not be essentially different, but it proves more exceptional in today’s cultural context. ‘The everyday here and now’ affects individuals regardless of gender or class, because ‘Legends are felled, opportunities missed and secrets laid bare’ (Scholes). Even if Swift’s fiction does not offer solutions, the reflection on the place of ‘the humble’ in the context of masculinity in early-21st-century narratives has begun.

18Although ‘Tragedy, Tragedy’ is the heading of my first example from the volume, humour and dramatic irony emerge as the main impression imparted to the reader. The conversation between two ordinary men, a first-person narrator and the elderly Mick in the canteen of a factory in Stevenage, revolves around the latter’s incessant musing about the meaning of ‘tragic.’ The press has the term reserved for the fate of well-known contemporaries and not for ‘humble people’ like their former colleague, a fork-lift driver, whose fatal accident is merely unfortunate. For some reason ‘tragic’ seems to be connected to ‘heroic,’ yet is different, Mick proclaims. The impatience of the narratee throughout the story contrasts with the involvement of his dialogue partner. When finally Mick drops dead over his cup of tea the I-narrator pronounces the authentic redeeming word: the coincidence is ‘Comic. That’s what you ought to say. But you can’t.’32 Swift’s ordinary people who experience a moment of absurdity feel estranged from the ritualised expressions of mainstream society.

19This is also the case in ‘Fusilli,’ which consists of a nameless male individual’s free indirect speech. It demonstrates that the narrativisation of events is always ‘belated’ and tells the story from the end of what happened, thus bestowing new significance on originally or supposedly insignificant occurrences. The basic theme of the narrative is the contrast between the (mindless) then and the (mournful) now. During his weekly shopping in the local supermarket before Christmas the man approaches the very spot, fraught with new meaning, where some weeks prior to Remembrance Day, with plastic poppies on sale, he had received his son’s phone call from Afghanistan. At present he knows it to have been the last one since his son was killed afterwards: ‘He couldn’t think about it now. He couldn’t not think about it.’ (Swift 2014, 207) In the middle of his weekly shopping run he remembers the awkwardness of the conversation and his son’s nonchalant voice on the phone:

Doug had wanted to know all about his shopping list. He’d seemed tickled by the picture of his father pushing a trolley, holding his list, dithering by the shelves. And while Doug was so keen to know details about the situation in Waitrose, he hadn’t wanted to ask his son about the situation in Afghanistan. (207)33

20Instead of having addressed the contrast between here—the everyday—and there—the non-recurring—he had received his son’s amused advice on his parents’ preferred pasta: ‘ “You should stick with dried, Dad. Fresh is a scam.” Doug had said this in Helmand. “Try the fusilli for a change. The little curly ones.”’ (207) The protagonist’s inevitable return to this part of the supermarket evokes both the appearance of triviality at that instant a few weeks earlier, together with his ignorance at the time that it would assume an irrevocable momentousness seen from a later point in time. Again, the discrepancy between his states of mind ‘then’ and ‘now’ is overwhelming; by the diegetic use of temporal metalepsis combined with spatial stasis it becomes a confrontation of the comically banal with the disastrous. The memory of the anger the focaliser felt about his dutiful shopping tour at the very moment when his mobile rang, since it ought to have been his wife with yet another instruction, fuses with his present anger about two screaming children in the aisle where the pasta is stored. The Fusilli he buys now is not for eating any more, but symbolic of a moment and another token of the dead in a war—not unlike those plastic flowers. ‘The dried lasts forever,’ the son had told him from Afghanistan in the middle of the night there (201). The humble is contained in the absurd incongruity of ordinary small-talk in everyday life with danger, loss and mourning. In Last Orders and Wish You Were Here the humble contrasted with the national commemoration of the valiant; in ‘Fusilli’ it silences any gesture of collective memory by showcasing the mundane and its penetratingness.

21The final story ‘England’ addresses the experience of nationality in a comic mode. Graham Swift’s inclination to conceive of England as ethnically and culturally homogeneous—if only in imagination—has previously been observed by critics,34 but regarding ‘England’ I would argue that the implied author displays self-irony, first of all in using the ‘humbler’ form of prose fiction to attend to such a weighty subject. The narrative directs sympathy towards the humble focaliser of white English origin, a coast-guard on his way to work near Bristol on the edge of Exmoor at dawn. His encounter with the driver of a wrecked vehicle to whom he offers help in performance of his half-official role is brief, yet surreal for him. The man at the wheel of the car in the ditch is black, disoriented and, as it turns out, a ventriloquist speaking also on this occasion only with various accents in different dialects—Caribbean and Northern England—and a number of voices. He claims to be a comedian travelling on a commission—but his story about a deer that drove him off the road sounds as strange and unbelievable as his speech act and raises an ambivalent feeling in the protagonist, whose name, we hear, is Kenneth Black (a last name which he tries to conceal). They have black coffee after the car has been heaved onto the road, and the comedian’s old leather jacket ‘hung about him like a droopy black second skin, which was an unfortunate way of thinking of it’ (Swift 2014, 264). The uneasiness and embarrassment of this focaliser about his encounter and the comedian’s unceasing performance are alleviated by the act of lifting the rear of the car back onto the road. ‘The mere fact of doing together what couldn’t have been done by one man alone seemed to have put everything into a complete and, if just for a moment, composed perspective’ (264). When they join in hoisting the car both engage in the same physical effort which proves calming, while talk is strenuous. Though invited to the man’s show at night in the nearby town Kenneth Black decides that his narrative of the encounter with the other on a lonely road might even to his wife appear as a hallucination, and he decides to keep silence about the event. The last paragraph, which de-familiarises the idea of England and is charged with symbolic meaning through its locality and the focaliser’s posture, reflects Kenneth’s induced confrontation with his own self:

The familiar tower of the lighthouse appeared before him [. . .]. He sat on the edge of England, supposedly guarding it, looking outwards. He knew a bit about the Bristol Channel, its present-day shipping and its history. He knew a bit about Exmoor. But Exmoor wasn’t England—much as you might want it to be. [. . .] He knew what he knew about this land to which his back was largely turned, this strange expanse beyond Exmoor, but it was precious little really. He really knew, he thought, as he brought his car to a halt again, nothing about it at all. (274)

22It dawns on him that this familiar spatio-temporal horizon is indeed the imaginary. The narrative humbly conveys incomprehension in the presence of alterity.

23My last example is a humble albeit philosophical letter. With regard to narrated time it is the earliest example from the collection and epitomises the humble as resulting from the overwhelming experience of mortality and the evocation of the dead. The story ‘Haematology’ puts the word ‘humble’ in the set phrase of a fictional letter’s signature from February 1649: ‘Your humble servant and cousin, Will.’ The letter-writer is a Royalist whom the postscript reveals to be ‘William Harvey, Doctor of Physics’ who revolutionised medical knowledge on anatomy and blood circulation (Swift 2014, 42) and had been the personal physician of King Charles I. In his letter Harvey, an intellectual, also exposes the humiliating consequence of his recent positioning on the side of the losers. He addresses his letter to the new centre of power, a member of the military council at Westminster, from a provincial town whereto he had to remove from the court. The political overthrow reverses the definition of centre and periphery and subverts language too: shaken by the recent execution of King Harvey is no longer certain if he may use the heretofore common expressions of devotion to the late sovereign (32). But, since ‘I was charged with the King’s body, not with the body politick’ (38) the scholarly and calmly reflective author of this letter stresses that common humanity is based on every man’s fragile corporeality. Harvey also believes even now, though not without ambivalence, in the progress of science, whose patron his master had been: ‘I still hold faith in the advancement of learning, if I believe less that by learning we advance’ (42). This dialectic relation is not mitigated by history, but the protagonist, intensely aware of ‘the humble’ due to his knowledge about the physical frailty of every human being, is convinced of the individual’s dignity.

24The re-conceptualisation of ‘the humble’ in current fiction aligns with an attenuation of its gendering: it is not any longer primarily embodied by women. Swift’s challenging of strong or tough masculinity admits the humble as a characteristic of male protagonists, above all in connection with socio-political issues and developments such as wars past and present and the structural changes caused by the economy in recent decades. Globalised threat, social degradation and material failure, warfare and mortality in general are experienced as heteronomous and humbling by the protagonists, whose insecurity and vulnerability increases. In the two examples by Barry and Trevor the female protagonists, whose lack of spatial orientation is perilous, depict their biographies as a wandering between homelessness and confinement—literal and figurative. Linked to emotional and cognitive impoverishment the local can become another instrument suitable for the reduction of scope and opportunities—a situation that is also variously illustrated by Swift’s short story collection. Whereas Richardson’s mid-18th-century first novel elevated the humble, thereby contributing to the bourgeois and lower-middle-class striving for ascendancy, it is today represented as an ambiguous state or quality. If metafictionally acknowledged, it remains ineffectual on the story level, the barrier of a protagonist’s speechlessness being merely breached for the reader’s perception. S/he may follow a representation of the human in spatial terms and agree that ‘meaning, truth, the real [. . .] appear [. . .] in a restricted horizon’ (Baudrillard 108). A protagonist’s confession that ‘small and narrow all human things are maybe’ (Barry 4) would then correlate with the fiction reader’s gain in ‘moral imagination.’35