Imagining Homelessness: Ethnofiction in Marc Augé’s No Fixed Abode and Mahsuda Snaith’s How To Find Home

This article compares two recent novels addressing homelessness, Marc Auge’s No Fixed Abode (2013) and Mahsuda Snaith’s How To Find Home (2019) to consider the extent to which contemporary homelessness literature is representative of an emerging literary form: ethnofiction. In light of the valid turn to real, true or life stories, literary forays into homelessness can seem tangential or redundant. But the French anthropologist Marc Augé thinks otherwise. Auge’s No Fixed Abodeis a novella about a working homeless man called Henri who sleeps in his car on the streets of Paris. Augé subtitles the book ‘an ethnofiction’, as a ‘narrative that evokes a social fact through the subjectivity of a particular individual’ and suggests that ‘he is using the novelist’s mode of exposition to suggest the fleshy totality of emotion, uncertainty or anxiety concealed within the themes he has picked out’ (Augé 2013). This article takes Augé’s claims for this experimental form and tests them in relation to Mahsuda Snaith’s novel How To Find A Home, which follows Molly’s journey from Nottingham to Skegness and back in order to ‘inhabit’ a person experiencing the social fact of being without secure accommodation. These novels raise the prospect of experiencing psychological and emotional proximity with imagined individuals through ethnofiction, as an effective means of observing real sub-cultures and examining pressing socio-political issues.