Wasted humanity and nonhuman materiality in Cynan Jones’s Everything I Found on the Beach

Cynan Jones’s Everything I Found on the Beach (2011) is a sinister portrait of human life, showing how ambition and the search for better opportunities crash against the brutal reality of our contemporary times. Jones’s second novel is a profound meditation on how certain human beings dwell on the borders of our developed societies, while the pernicious consequences of neoliberal economy and globalisation cause unbearable marginalisation and injustice, thereby recalling Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of “wasted lives.” In my essay, I will discuss how Jones’s characters epitomise the growing volumes of human waste as an inevitable outcome of modernisation and globalisation, while the nonhuman acts as a witness to this sense of human waste and precarity. I will first address how the excluded and the economic migrants carry the stigma of their wasted lives, incarnating Bauman’s wasted humanity. I will then engage with how nonhuman matter infiltrates the narrative texture of Jones’s novel. By juxtaposing human voices with nonhuman matter, Everything I Found on the Beach allows all voices to be equally heard, thus showing how the struggle to survive brings together human beings, animals and inanimate objects through a polyphonic assemblage.