In Praise of Small Things: Vulnerable (Yet Resilient) Bodies in Madeline Bassnett’s Under the Gamma Camera (2019)

Abstract

Drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy’s (2008) insights about the body as the place of existence, Karen Barad’s (2007) agential realism, Jane Bennett’s (2010) conceptualization of vibrant matter, and the lessons of material feminisms propounded by Alaimo and Hekman (2008), this chapter investigates Canadian author Madeline Bassnett’s collection Under the Gamma Camera (2019), a probing meditation on illness and the vulnerability intrinsic to human existence, which is depicted as singular, finite, and exposed. Bassnett’s poems are firmly rooted in her first-hand experience of cancer, as well as in the deep sense of vulnerability she felt in the face of indifferent corrupt cells and destructive processes operating within herself. As a result, her collection is pervaded with a sense of emotional urgency and authenticity, alongside a plethora of details that gesture toward homo sapiens’s sensory participation—or rather sensuous immersion—in a more-than-human world. Ultimately, this chapter argues, Bassnett finds out that the body is the medium through which we experience the world, and that states of distress and pain are powerful catalysts for an enhanced awareness of (non)human frailty and our earthly existence qua sentient bodies—that is, of the vulnerability shared by the human body and the natural world.