Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction: Ireland in Crisis 9781350166745, 9781350166776, 9781350166752

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FORM, AFFECT AND DEBT IN POST-CELTIC TIGER IRISH FICTION

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FORM, AFFECT AND DEBT IN POST-CELTIC TIGER IRISH FICTION

Ireland in Crisis

Dr Eóin Flannery

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Dr Eóin Flannery, 2022 Dr Eóin Flannery has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Rebecca Heselton Cover image: Radharc An Seascan, Meenmore, Dungloe, County Donegal, Ireland. 19th October, 2012. An entitre housing estate – dubbed the ‘Titantic site’ – which is sinking into the bog on which it was built in 2007 should be demolished according to property owners who have sued the builders and the engineers/architects. The case continues at the High Court in Dublin. Photo by: Richard Wayman/Alamy Live News All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-6674-5 ePDF: 978-1-3501-6675-2 eBook: 978-1-3501-6676-9 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Ruth, Derval, Niamh and Julia

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CONTENTS Acknowledgements

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Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Celtic Tiger identity parades in Chris Binchy’s Open-handed (2008) and Peter Cunningham’s Capital Sins (2010)

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Chapter 2 The possibilities of shame in Dermot Bolger’s Tanglewood (2015)

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Chapter 3 Relative values in Donal Ryan’s The Thing about December (2013) and The Spinning Heart (2012)

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Chapter 4 Bildung and temporality in Justin Quinn’s Mount Merrion (2013)

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Chapter 5 Debt, guilt and form in (post-)Celtic Tiger Ireland 127 Chapter 6 Finance and fiction in Deirdre Madden’s Time Present and Time Past (2013)

149

Chapter 7 Investing in fictions: Faith, abstraction and materiality in Paul Murray’s The Mark and the Void (2015)

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Notes Bibliography

203 225 Index235

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The writing of this book was as much a process of accumulating debts as the chapters here are focused on analysing literary fictional engagements with financial indebtedness. From a practical perspective, Mary Immaculate College is to be credited for granting me a sabbatical from teaching to complete this work. The Department of English Language and Literature is both a quintessential marketplace of ideas and a trusty bank of collegiality. Thanks are due to my departmental colleagues, Eugene O’Brien, Kathryn Laing, John McDonagh, Marita Ryan, Deirdre Flynn and Jade Dillon. Thanks also to Anne O’Keeffe for providing feedback on the sabbatical application. Thanks to the organizers of conferences and seminars where some of the material and ideas were exchanged and floated speculatively. Among these are European Federation of Irish Studies conference, University of Palermo, Sicily, 5 June 2015; Association of Franco-Irish Studies conference, Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, 22 May 2017; Department of English and Modern Languages Research Seminar, Oxford Brookes University, 25 April 2018; Ireland in Psychoanalysis 2: Irish Shame conference, State University of New York (SUNY), Buffalo, 28–9 September 2018; and Relational Forms V – Capital and the Imagination: Literature, the Arts, and Modern Finance conference, University of Porto, Portugal, 5 November 2020. Acknowledgements are due to Textual Practice, Etudes Irlandaises and Irish Studies Review where earlier versions of some of this material were first published in shorter form. Lucy Brown at Bloomsbury Academic has been of immense support throughout the writing process, and the four reports provided by the peer reviewers were invaluable in shaping the final product. My interest in economic ideas and practices, and how they are embedded within everyday life, in the politics of education, in the formalities of literary studies and in systems of moral adjudication was whetted in seminars led by Professor Tadhg Foley as part of the MA in Culture and Colonialism at NUI, Galway. With no little irony, we were introduced to the field of political economy and to figures such as Herman Merivale, Archbishop Richard Whately and John Elliot Cairnes, in late 1990s Ireland at the crescendo of the Celtic Tiger ‘boom’. Seán Tadhg Ó Gairbhí was one of my fellow-travellers in those memorable seminars, and I am grateful and fortunate that he has offered valuable comments on parts of this manuscript. Many other people have invested effort in supporting this project over the last five years. I wish to thank my family – my parents, John and Mary; and my brothers, Conor and Darragh; and to Emer, Melissa; to my niece, Elsie; and my nephews, Paddy and Billy. I am deeply indebted to my in-laws, John and Mary Clifford, for immeasurable support over the years. Of course, the entire Clifford family has always been on hand to offer their help and hospitality. In no particular

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order, thanks to Billy, James, Darragh, Aoife, Anna, Cathal, Meghan, Owen, Liam, John, Sean, Ellen, George, Sarah, Sinead, Eamonn, Shane and Siobhan. A significant tranche of the work on the book was undertaken during the Covid-19 global pandemic, over the duration of which stocks of enthusiasm, patience and energy rose and fell unpredictably. Work on affect theory, temporalities of indebtedness and narrative economics traded with efforts to master long division, to conjugate verbs and to climb the stairs for the first time. During this cycle of lockdowns, the shared economy of household knowledge expanded in ways that were simply unforecastable. Nevertheless, with the love and faith of my wife, Ruth, together with the inspiration and entertainment of my charming troika of daughters, Derval, Niamh and Julia, Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction is ready for roll-out.

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INTRODUCTION

The Free and Easy Shortly after arriving in Ireland from the United States, the central protagonist of Anne Haverty’s novel The Free and Easy (2006), Tom Blessman, explores the cityscape of Dublin, expecting to find a country in the grip of unremitting poverty. Fitted out with a mission and a battery of misconceptions about the economic and social conditions of his familial homeland, Blessman is incrementally disabused of his prefabricated version of the Irish and their society. Blessman’s great-uncle, Pender Gast, an elderly and wealthy Irish emigrant in the United States, precipitated the journey to Ireland. Concerned that he has neglected his place of birth for years, Gast commissions Blessman to execute an act of financial restitution on his behalf. It is hardly insignificant in the context of Haverty’s ironic engagement with Celtic Tiger Ireland that Blessman is a novelist tasked with delivering on his great-uncle’s financial speculation. The origins of Gast’s request lie in a recurring and unsettling dream about Ireland in which the Irish figure as a pathetically impoverished people. Recalling the dream to his personal assistant, Gast reveals: A crowd of people were coming up the road, walking towards him. There was rain falling on them, a mild but steady rain. As regards Ireland, the rain was dead on. But the weird thing was they were nothing at all like the Irish that he believed he remembered from his infancy. They were clad in trailing and ragged garments that he was sure he had never seen anyone wearing in the old country [. . .] Nothing edible on the hoof went with them, nor any baggage train of grain or fruit. Empty-handed, possessionless, wretched, they passed him by, noble of mien, not looking at him, but their expressions somehow beseeching. He got the impression that they were aware of his presence but were too dignified, too proud to speak of their need or the plight they found themselves in [my emphasis].1

Gast is not simply unsettled by the intrusion of his past into his non-waking life, but the form in which these displaced Irish materialize in his dreams redoubles his sense of disquiet. The recollected familiarity of his erstwhile home is suffused with a disturbing uncanniness as his remembered reference points no longer seem tenable or secure. The sequence of dreams endured by Gast are consistent in their content and form, and each arrives replete with a congregation of vagrant and haunting

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Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction

Irish. As Gast’s anxiety is progressively heightened by the dreams, they eventually determine both his decisions and the action of the narrative. Gast concludes that the dreams must mean something, and that, surely, they have some significance in the lived reality of his homeland. In a sense, these are figurative fragments of Gast’s fictionalization of his home country. The upshot is that he resolves to deploy his sizeable fortune in ameliorating, he falsely assumes, the penurious conditions in which his contemporary compatriots subsist. The irony suggested by Haverty is that while there is an irreconcilable gap between the pathos of Gast’s piteous Ireland and the relative wealth of the country’s reality during the Celtic Tiger, both versions overlap in terms of their respective excessiveness.2 Thus, The Free and Easy is initiated by a series of dreams. But, crucially, the central narrative catalyst is interpreted into existence. Gast’s decision is rooted in his translation of an unconscious sequence of images, and, with that, a contingent decoding of meaning determines the material course of his grand-nephew’s life. As we have noted, Haverty’s decision to locate the determining factor of the narrative in Gast’s dreamlife allows The Free and Easy to centralize notions about interpretation and provisionality from the outset. This has consequences for our broader study, which entail a series of analyses much concerned with the intimacies between finance and fictionality. Additionally, Gast seems to be plagued by a repressed sense of guilt at his own prosperity, which does not comport with his imagined version of contemporary Irish reality. His wish for Tom Blessman to utilize his accumulated financial wealth in support of worthwhile Irish causes bespeaks a will, and a need, for some kind of redemption. Gast, it appears, is haunted into an awareness of unredeemed debts to his native country. What he understands to be an unsolicited act of benefaction is in fact another form of inward investment into Ireland. The latter is underwritten by the presumption of certain prevailing conditions in Ireland. In fact, Gast ‘scripts’ a version of Ireland’s present in order to ‘script’ a version of Ireland’s future once his ‘seed funding’ has taken root. Fictionality and finance cohere in the imagination of the guilt-ridden business tycoon, as reality and representation are seen to diverge over the duration of the novel. Allied to this disjunctiveness is the fact that both Gast’s memory of Ireland and the country he imagines into existence in the present speak to the debt-induced experiences of uncanniness that mark contemporary capitalist societies. The reality of the present under conditions of indebtedness is never fully self-present, with the security and the stability of the ‘now’ always promised to the future. The narrative’s invocation of the unsettling permeability of historical time is suggestive of the shadowing presence of the unfinished business of unredeemed debts. As Blessman undertakes his initial sortie beyond his luxuriant recess at the Shelbourne Hotel, Haverty chronicles the disaccommodation of her protagonist: Along streets Tom wandered, lined with old houses built of brick, wine-hued, orange. The houses could look pale and ethereal or solid and grim as the light took them. Old but trim, the brasswork burnished, the doors painted . . . . The opposite of poor. At the outside tables of the bars, laughing groups of high-

Introduction

3

maintenance babes sat smoking and getting sozzled on expensive sundowners while the guys stood about in the pugilistic attitudes of high rollers, smoking, drinking black beers and doing swaggering high-volume talk. Any bar he looked into was lush with giant potted palm trees, stuffed leopards, tropical wood carvings. Or maybe there was only one such bar, only one leopard. In the exotic world of jet-lag still, brain cells zapped . . . . Might have been zapped before I ever left Manhattan, in fact. . . . Have to get some sleep.3

Unbeknownst to Blessman, his arrival in Ireland coincides with the halcyon days of the country’s Celtic Tiger economic ‘boom’. The mythologies that subtend his missionary intervention, then, founder on the apparent financial buoyancy currently enjoyed by swathes of the Irish population. In this protracted extract Haverty both juxtaposes and brings into closer proximity both the emphatic and the ethereal. Blessman encounters a gallery of excess and expenditure as he processes through Dublin, encountering the solidly present props and the physical performances of the different incarnations of twenty-first-century Irish identities. Haverty’s metropolitan cast do not emerge beyond types in this instance, but here the narrative stresses the visceral nature of their social interactions. We should be wary, however, of delimiting our reading of Haverty’s portrait of Celtic Tiger Dublin to little more than an ironization of a consumerist theatre of excess. In fact, with this sequence of set pieces, one gets a sense of a narrative that is aware of its own deployment of a series of exhausted Celtic Tiger tropes. As we will argue herein, the recognizable and the relatable are less provocative features of recent literary fictional reckonings with Celtic Tiger Ireland. It is with this in mind that we need to be attentive to the aforementioned notion of the ethereal. The emphatic physical and sensory world which greets Blessman allows for moments of uncertainty and ambiguity. At first glance, the streetscape rises up as a typically reassuring series of well-built and long-established homes, but Blessman’s view quickly dissolves into mirage-like instability and Haverty presents us with an elusive vision centred on suburban domestic properties. To Blessman these properties do not tally with his expectations of a country that is, according to his received understanding, devoid of any economic prosperity. The infusion of ethereality in the play of light on the houses, then, registers Blessman’s estrangement from the reality in which he is now embedded. But in a broader sense, and one that coheres with one of the core trains of investigation across this study, Haverty’s evocation of insubstantiality also speaks to the alienation and displacement of indebtedness experienced under the operations of global finance capitalism. In short, just as debt defers and displaces the stability of homeownership, these houses appear to be solidly present yet frustratingly elusive at the same time. Haverty’s account of Blessman’s immersion in Celtic Tiger Dublin is consistent with Marx’s assertion: ‘that everything is itself something different from itself.’4 Moreover, Blessman’s impressions of Celtic Tiger Dublin are punctuated with ellipses, the first of which is consistent with his difficulty in reconciling expectation with physical reality. This initial ellipsis is an instance of hesitancy for Blessman, at the same time as it marks a fragment of insight. The subsequent

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uses of ellipses are superficially attributed to Blessman’s transatlantic flight, but given the context of our analysis, the literal temporal disjunction of ‘jet-lag’ cannot be disaggregated from its figurative significance. The silences and the absences of the ellipses in Blessman’s focalization are more than symptoms of physiological exhaustion, and his transatlantic journey itself is never less than a performance of global circulation. Here both the linguistic erasure and the figurative mobility shadow the crass exhibitions of Celtic Tiger materialism. If the dreamlife of Blessman’s great-uncle Pender Gast is haunted by a fictionalized, and guiltinducing, conjuring of contemporary Irish history, then the reality uncovered by Blessman is, fact, haunted by debt. The repeated uncertainties regarding his physical surroundings articulated by Blessman together with the lapses in his capacity for linguistic expression gesture to the ways in which indebtedness is occulted in the throes of convulsive financial speculation and consumption. The ambivalence of the debt economy is captured in the narrative’s co-location of the materiality of consumerist expenditure and the abstracted, yet insistent, presence of promissory commitments that await redemption in the future. What remains unsaid, or repressed, in the midst of Haverty’s cursory depiction of unfettered expenditure and the unreflective adoption of consumerist identities is that within this financial system debts must be honoured.

Economics and narration For the French economist, Bruno Amable ‘it is totally wrong to believe that neoliberalism is devoid of any moral content to start with. On the contrary, one may say that morals play a central role in the establishment of a neo-liberal society.’5 Amable’s identification of the moral content of neoliberalism highlights the fact that any analysis of finance capitalism must contend with its suite of narratological forms and contents. Through the manufacture of moral consent and contingent notions of normality, workable systems of value are activated and perpetuated. This latter point gestures to the emergence and acceptance of more abstracted notions of ‘value’ in Celtic Tiger Ireland that informed and contoured, for example, individual desire in relation to consumption, educational and cultural priorities, renovated forms of faith centred on the allure of speculation, and attitudes attendant to the non-human environment.6 Of course, recourse to different lineages of morality was a feature of pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland, to the ‘boom’ years and their aftermath, the last of which will be exposed in more detail across our broader argument. If moral paradigms are founded upon the establishment and perpetuation of value systems, then the Celtic Tiger period saw the actualization of transvaluations in material and abstract terms in Ireland. Most explicitly the physical Irish landscape was comprehensively transvalued as a source and a site of wealth generation through property development. With a transfusion of novel systems of value during the Celtic Tiger period in Ireland, Irish society may have had something to believe in, but it did not really have the tools to understand fully the nature and potential consequences of its newly fashioned faith. This dearth of

Introduction

5

comprehension of, and one could even suggest basic literacy in, the languages and discourses of credit, debt and finance, is captured in retrospective accounts of the aftermath of the economy’s collapse. ‘Even in an era when capitalists went out of their way to destroy capitalism’, Michael Lewis argues, ‘the Irish bankers had set some kind of record for destruction.’7 Such is Lewis’s blunt conclusion, having traversed Europe in the wake of the serial, and interlocked, economic implosions that followed the banking collapse in 2008.8 Lewis’s Boomerang has its origins in a series of extended articles published in Vanity Fair, a sequence covering the cases of Greece, Ireland and Iceland.9 The Irish State’s catastrophic bank guarantee and the country’s property and housing crashes are two of Lewis’s primary foci, as he meditates upon, and interrogates, the causes and effects of Ireland’s financial and economic demise. Chiming with many of the critiques and appraisals of the end of the Celtic Tiger produced by scholars and commentators from within Ireland, Lewis underscores the ‘abnormality’ of Ireland’s drive to become ‘normal’.10 He suggests: ‘Not knowing why they were so suddenly successful, the Irish can perhaps be forgiven for not knowing exactly how successful they were meant to be. They’d gone from being abnormally poor to being abnormally rich without pausing to experience normality.’11 The principles of social and economic convergence, gestured to here by Lewis, echo equivalent sentiments expressed by Fintan O’Toole in his Ship of Fools, an earlier polemic on the failures of Celtic Tiger Ireland. As part of an altogether more unforgiving assault on the institutional facilitators and beneficiaries of the country’s economic prosperity, O’Toole reflects upon the fact that ‘For most of the twentieth century, Ireland had struggled to be like other countries. But between the late 1990s and 2008, other countries were told they must struggle to be like Ireland.’12 O’Toole’s latter point – that other countries were enjoined to pursue the pathways to economic buoyancy led by Ireland – takes the idea of Irish ‘exceptionalism’ in a dramatic new direction. Rather than continuing as one of the peripheral and impoverished constituents of the European Union, a perennial draw on centrally generated capital funding, Ireland, on the basis of its apparent talent for attracting and securing inward multinational investment, became a ‘model’ for other aspiring smaller continental economies, such as Greece, on the basis of its apparent talent for attracting and securing inward multinational investment. As Peadar Kirby, a trenchant critic of Ireland’s neoliberal model, concedes in an otherwise caustic account of the inequalities that were manifest in Irish society during the Celtic Tiger: ‘Ireland’s economic boom of the 1990s catapulted it from being a relative laggard in development terms to become the “Celtic Tiger,” achieving high growth rates, full employment and rising living standards in contrast to the sluggish growth managed by most of its European neighbours during the same period.’13 Of course with the benefit of hindsight such apparent prosperity was revealed to have been nourished and sustained by feverish speculation and mountainous debt. Returning to Lewis’s survey, we are in more sobering territory, as he invokes the shadowy, yet tangible, authority of credit rating agencies in his reading of Ireland’s economic status and prospects. At the time of his research on the Irish

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economy, according to Lewis: ‘Professional credit analyst firms now judge Ireland the third most likely country in the world to default. Not quite as risky for the global investor as Venezuela, perhaps, but riskier than Iraq. Distinctly, third world, in any case’ (my emphasis).14 Clearly, Ireland did not default and its ranking is not as depressed at the current juncture, but Lewis’s idiom is revealing. In this context of debt repayment, labelling Ireland ‘third world’ might seem crude and anachronistic given the general standards of living experienced by many of the country’s citizens. Poised between the pejorative and the empirical, Lewis’s wielding of ‘third world’ resurrects a term more familiar from ethical and economic debates associated with the period of decolonization during the post-Second World War geopolitical settlement. Yet Lewis’s interventions might legitimately be read as a breed of post-crash ‘dark tourism’, a titillatingly morbid rollcall of national economic failures. This is not to gainsay the starkness of the economic implosion within Ireland in 2008, but it raises several key points with which the current study is preoccupied, including the politics of narration, faith and investment, morality and accountability, debt and affects, such as guilt and shame, and the accruals of the speculative. Lewis’s Boomerang is just one ‘eructation of morality’ that appeared in the wake of the global financial meltdown from mid-to-late 2008 onwards.15 It is squarely symptomatic of the compulsion to seize the narrative centre-ground and to mediate the crash in popular, academic-critical terms or literary-aesthetic forms. As with any individual or series of seismic politico-economic events, the systemic failures of global financial capitalism could never be afforded the threatening ambiguity of silence. The complexity that might gestate within the financial rupture required urgent narrative simplification, especially in public and popular spheres, in order to prepare the way for moral adjudication and economic austerity. The notion of managing economic crises and expectations through narration is commonplace in economic history.16 Investor expectations can only ever be grounded in the empirical reality of the present, but they demand insight into future trends and returns. This might well be adjudged as irrational, but the circle is squared through recourse to narrative: ‘Needing to know but not being able to know the future – this conundrum is solved by the construction of narrative, a cultural story that has a beginning and an end, with the present tucked in the middle. The future can only be known via narrative.’17 Future successes in investment take care of themselves in terms of narration, as triumph is readily packaged and further invested in. But crises and collapses become more complex as the narrative responses try to negotiate accountability for failure while also accounting for the survival of the system despite that failure. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Shiller explains that it is not just that media commentators and politicians curate the fall-out from economic crises. With ready-made, but hardly cleanly objective, historical information available on previous equivalent events, individuals attempt to frame their own narrative interpretations of the events that are so acutely impacting their lives. Shiller suggests that one of the ways in which narrative has been mobilized is in constructing symmetries across historical periods. As he notes:

Introduction

7

The interest in the Great Depression in 2009 is confirmed in Google Trends search counts [.  .  .] This does not mean that people were suddenly more interested in Franklin Roosevelt or the New Deal. Counts show virtually no increase in interest in these details of history. It was more just a quick and easy way to communicate narrative: we have passed, by 2007, a euphoric speculative immoral period like the Roaring Twenties, the stock market and banks are collapsing in 2008 as around 1929, and now the economy might really collapse again like that; we might even be unemployed and on the street crowding around failed banks, yes really! End of basic narrative.18

Of course, as we have touched upon, it is not just economic downturns that require narration, boom-time periods are also dependent upon the marshalling and sustenance of narratives. With this in mind, it is noteworthy yet hardly unsurprising within the Irish context to see the variety and the quantity of ‘narrative’ commentary that emerged in the post-crash period. One of Shiller’s final points refers to the possibility that there might be a recurrence of street protests akin to those witnessed during the Great Depression. While globally such a possibility was borne out, this was very much the exception in Ireland, where public reaction did not manifest in large-scale street protest. If the Irish public were quiescent in their acceptance of austerity and loss of political sovereignty, part of the answer as to why this was the case surely rests in the manner in which the crisis was narrated and managed. At the height of the Celtic Tiger economic miracle, Ireland was feted as a paragon of globalized capitalist success and was touted as a model for other aspiring smaller economies. But, of course, being cast as an exemplar is a perilous existence, and once the decline of the Celtic Tiger economic ‘boom’ set in, Ireland mutated into a ‘model’ for economic short-termism, and the basis for much its wealth – a housing ‘boom’ – was dismissed as a warning against rampant greed and political corruption. Still, as we have highlighted, the perceived universality of Celtic Tiger excesses, expounded across a range of narrative for it meant that the Irish public was in an accepting mood when faced with austerity measures demanded by the so-called Troika of the IMF, the EU and the European Central Bank. Indeed, in the view of Time magazine, which sported an image of then Irish Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, on the cover of its 15 October 2012 issue, Ireland assumed a ‘model’ role in how to address economic austerity, a process they termed ‘The Celtic Comeback’.19 Such a bipolar framing of the Irish economy and its economic subjects is not conducive to measured or nuanced critique, and much of what has passed for critical and literary analysis of the Celtic Tiger, together with its aftermath, has been limited and recycled. What we have in mind with respect to the latter is the extent to which the rhetoric of complicity and that of affects, most notably guilt and shame, have been rallied to ensure the passivity of the Irish public. The unequal and punitive regime of austerity was translated into a measure of personal and national responsibility, as the Irish were collectively duty-bound to repay for the indiscretions of their excess. With the venerable nations and political institutions looking on, Ireland was morally beholden to fall in line with the standards and

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expectations of these benevolent peers. For such behaviour to take material form there had to be a constant narrative re-enforcement of its necessity, its stridency proportionate to the waywardness of the previous behaviour.

Debt It is hard to dispute the simple truth of Leigh Claire La Berge and Dehlia Hannah’s contention that ‘As a result of the 2007–8 subprime mortgage crisis and the subsequent expansion of that crisis into a global credit contraction and “Great Recession,” the language of debt has entered the public imaginary through reportage, fiction, and, not least of all, individual experience.’20 In fact, a scan of many of the resultant fictional interventions in the past decade reveals that authors have produced generically and formally promiscuous responses to the global financial crash. Indeed, the idioms and tones of investment-promoting media outlets also became significant targets of moral censure for authors critical of the ways in which language itself had been cynically co-opted and reified during the high points of the Irish property ‘boom’. But as the anthropologist David Graeber laid out expansively in his Debt: The First 5,000 Years, indebtedness is far from being a modern form of social interaction and mutual obligation. Indebtedness has underpinned social and religious communal formations for millennia. However, it is when debt is solely tied to the workings of financial credit markets that ‘our sense of morality and justice is reduced to the language of a business deal’.21 The freight of individual and public debts, not always inseparable during and after Ireland’s Celtic Tiger ‘boom’ period, is the very thing that demands that our literary analysis theorizes these texts beyond the exclusively national context. As is widely argued in the critical literature, the Irish economy was plugged into the increasingly profitable, but ultimately febrile, machinations of the global debt economy. Graeber’s aforementioned terminology neatly foreshadows our analyses of the linkages between debt, morality and affects, such as guilt and shame. If the spatial configuration of tracts of the Irish landscape was transformed as a result of their financial transvaluation, this alchemical process was enabled by the State’s immersion in the global debt economy as it intensified its operations within the temporal structures of indebtedness. It was as true for post-Celtic Tiger Ireland as many other ruined economies in 2008 that ‘all roads to the future lead through an immense pile of debt’.22 Though ultimately offering a fundamentally utopian roadmap out of financialized indebtedness, Richard Dienst’s analysis of ‘the contemporary global economy’ accents the structural nature of the modern regime of indebtedness. In his view: ‘[this] should not be viewed as the accidental product of bad luck or poor planning: as we have seen, it functions everywhere as a regime of top-down control and network discipline, designed to replace older forms of social negotiation and political autonomy.’23 Following on from Dienst’s identification of the politics of debt, our analysis takes it as read that the experience of indebtedness cannot be disentangled from how we imagine the future and is pervaded with the affective weight of potential precarity and/

Introduction

9

or physical and moral censure. Crucial to the futurity of indebtedness is the rate of interest attached to any given loan or credit arrangement – personal term loan, mortgage or credit card, for example. Interest is a form of compensation to the lender for investing rather than spending in the present, just as it is a prolongation of indebtedness into the future for the borrower as they spend in the present. In these ways, then, debt impinges upon, indeed conditions, the affective, material and the imaginative lives of the indebted. But the interest charged on a financial debt is just as much a measure of the riskiness of the investment; therefore, it is an open acknowledgement of the uncertainty of future economic conditions. Tellingly, it is the indebted who are installed as the guarantors against the volatility of an uncertain future. From another perspective the credit-debt agreement forms a bond between the respective parties, but, as before, this is not grounded in a parity of esteem. The imbalance materializes, again, in the form of the interest rate, which acting as a means of compensation for investment in the present abstracts the ostensible personal bond between debtor and creditor. Reduced to a function of financial calculus, the lender–borrower relation is absent of any trust or faith. In considering debt in these terms we alight, again, upon several of what we might designate as ‘keywords’ in our ensuing analyses: morality, affect, faith, trust and the imagination of the future. At a later juncture in his discussion, Dienst enquires: What does indebtedness look like? [. . .] Yet indebtedness does not exactly present itself as such: there is something not quite visible about it, as if the phenomenal world and the people in it could always be measured against their debts and found lacking. It is hard to see indebtedness at work in the world – although it exists nowhere else – precisely because it shows us a world where nothing ever really belongs to itself.24

Dienst’s point broaches the apparent irreducibility of indebtedness, but it really addresses the ambivalence attached to the experience of indebtedness. While the debt economy is too often read as a fraction of the broader conjectural sphere of finance capitalism, Dienst is alert to the fact that indebtedness is very much a lived and materially impactful condition. The pertinence of his suggestion that debt is difficult to pin down resides in its invocation of displacement. In the Celtic Tiger Irish context, the primary form of indebtedness manifested as mortgaged property loans, rafts of which lapsed into ‘negative equity’ on foot of the market’s implosion in 2008. Displacement is congenital to the nature of the mortgaged debt, given that ownership is consistently deferred and displaced into the future. Dienst’s opening enquiry earlier asks us to consider the ways in which debt registers in the world around us, and not solely in relation to material precarity or physical dispossession, although these are clearly germane. For our purposes, we might ask how authors of Irish literary fiction grapple with the registration of debt and indebtedness in the Celtic Tiger period and its aftermath. If the security of ownership and possession is displaced by the burden of debt in the Irish milieu, then it is worth investigating how literary fictions attempt to represent the sensations of estrangement

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Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction

characteristic of a national self-image grounded in the speculation of the global debt economy. Rather than retreat to transparent constative portraits of well-worn Celtic Tiger icons, as some of the texts under scrutiny here insist upon doing, the majority of our surveyed narratives eschew the opportunity for full-frontal objurgation. Alternatively, through formal experimentation of varying extents, the latter diversity of Irish finance fictions strives to register debt, together with its temporalities, its affects, its materialities and its promissory idioms.

Finance fictions Debates on and analyses of financial capitalism are characterized by a familiar conceptual vocabulary, extending from debt, credit, value and investment to notions of faith, confidence, speculation and trust. These latter terms are enduring features of global economic landscapes and the fiduciary nature of money economies. And, as we shall outline later, ‘fiduciality’ is a cornerstone term in the spheres both of finance and of literary fiction. In this context, then, it is worth recalling David Harvey’s contention that the ‘relationship between representation and reality under capitalism has always been problematic’.25 In other words, there appears to be an irresolvable distance between the abstruse abstractions native to the system of finance capitalism and the material realities of production and consumption. However, this does not mean that the exercises of financial abstraction are never consequential in the material reality of daily life. At once, then, Harvey’s argument raises the matter of representation, and it is equally suggestive of the inherent fiduciality of financial investment and speculation. As we noted, via Shiller, the speculation of financial investment is embedded within a narratology of its own, with the speculative act standing as an iteration of imaginative desire for a specific set of profitable future outcomes. Put simply, it is a desire for a particular future reality to eventuate, but the seeds of that future reality are already present in the contemporary moment. The speculative investor has already given over their imagination of present and future realities to the narratological codes of finance capitalism. Faith and belief, not to mention money in the form of credit/debt, are committed and are central to the financial capitalist market’s performance of its own reality. It is such a state of affairs that reveals the fictional elements of the financial sector, the agents of which are succinctly described by Arne De Boever in the following terms: ‘today’s financiers are close to fiction writers – and to terrorists, as DeLillo might have it. They are rivals in the psychotic, radical negation of what exists, and the substitution of another reality for it.’26 De Boever’s allusion to ‘fiction writers’ brings us closer to our more immediate preoccupation: the efficacy and variety of literary fictional engagements with Ireland’s Celtic Tiger economic ‘boom’ and the fall-out from its unceremonious conclusion. In a broad sense, just as both Harvey and de Boever, in discrepant ways, impress the intimacy of finance and fiction, our intention is to analyse the formal registers and thematic loci of what might be dubbed Irish finance fictions. Equally, we reject any sense

Introduction

11

that the Celtic Tiger economy and its aftermaths can be reduced to the frames of a ‘national’ reckoning in literary fiction or any other representational form. These positions are not irreconcilable as the very nature of finance capitalism brings indigenous cultural and social values into dialogue and tension with those of nonindigenous provenance. Furthermore, the theoretical and philosophical resources underpinning the analyses of our Irish finance fictions are necessarily international and interdisciplinary without being overdetermining or decontextualizing. In this spirit, George Saunders, the American novelist and short-story writer, recently provided prescient insights on what he perceives as the ‘real value of a work of art’.27 For Saunders such value ‘isn’t in what it stands for or in the meaning it spits out at the end but in what happens to the reader along the way – that dance between the reader’s expectation and the next thing that happens’.28 The figurative choreographed interplay between reader and author represents the dynamics of uncertainty and ambiguity on which Saunders’s notion of artistic value depend. There is an intolerance here for blunt didacticism and unyielding dogmatism, with a premium placed upon the narrative as an experience or event in itself. Saunders’s meditations on the currency of literary art might appear remote from a survey of post-Celtic Tiger finance fictions, but his invocation of readerly expectation and his rejection of the functionalist production of literary meanings are entirely connected to the post-‘boom’ literary landscape. From another vantage point, in his autobiographical The Nearest Thing to Life, James Wood also dwells upon the nature of literary fiction. In Wood’s case his reflection concentrates on the simultaneous kinship and distance that prevails between religion and fiction. As part of a personal encounter with fiction, Wood writes: What I loved, what I love, about fiction is its proximity to, and final difference from, religious texts. The real, in fiction, is always a matter of belief – it is up to us, as readers, to validate and confirm. It is a belief that is requested, and that we can refuse at any time. Fiction moves in the shadow of doubt, knows it is a true lie, knows that any moment it might fail to make its case. Belief in fiction is always belief ‘as if.’ Our belief is metaphorical and only resembles actual belief. [. . .] Fiction, being the game of not quite, is the place of not-quite-belief.29

There are obvious echoes in the terms employed by Saunders and Wood with several of the key concepts that feature in our analyses of finance capitalism, but for now we are less interested in those congruences than with their views on the possibilities of literary fiction. Put simply, despite utilizing an umbrella term such as ‘Irish finance fiction’, our study will track and scrutinize significant formal, thematic and ethical divergences across this particular constellation of contemporary Irish literary fictions. The matter of ratification addressed in Wood’s point relates to the fiduciality of the narrative exchange, as well as to the volition of the reader. But a problem arises when the reader is confronted with an unambiguously moralizing narrative. For instance, Chapter 1’s Capital Sins by Peter Cunningham and Open-handed by Chris Binchy, taken together with

12

Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction

Tanglewood by Dermot Bolger in Chapter 2, evacuate this exchange of the ‘notquite-belief ’ lauded by Wood. In many ways, these texts refuse to permit the reader to refuse the autonomy to believe in the fiction at hand, so heavily are they invested in the truth of their own narrative arcs. There is an asymmetry evident in the narrative transactions of such fictions, whereby the reader’s faith in the moral geometry of the text is unwavering. At root, this is facilitated by recourse to the comforts of recognizably realistic descriptions of Celtic Tiger Ireland and a readily digestible moral message. Saunders’s notion of expectation is just as crucial here, given that it speaks to the reader’s appetites for justice and/or for redemption, while also gesturing to the reader’s moral and affective responses to the narrative. Emerging out of a series of critical social, economic and political events, the fictions to hand in this study vary widely in their respective attentions to affect, to literary form and to moral responsibility. Most problematic are those addressed in Chapters 1 and 2, which unquestionably render literary form subservient to authorial moral agendas. They are representative of post-Celtic Tiger narratives that run aground under the weight of their moral cargo. It is equally the case that in this group of texts, affects, such as guilt and shame, are mustered within unyieldingly teleological narrative frames. As we delineate in Chapters 1 and 2, a felt need for moral adjudication became a singular feature of several literary fictional interventions on the Irish economic crash. Contrary to Saunders’s point, these fictions demonstrate an unblushing faith in the validity of their own ethical expositions of vernacular Irish guilt and greed. At formal and thematic levels, these narratives are rigid in their commitment to the satiation of readerly expectations. Part of our encounter with the fiction of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, itself a term that is open to negotiation, will be with fictions that activate affect for the purposes of didacticism and moralization. Formally conservative and thematically predictable, such fictions warrant attention not for their literary innovation but for their recapitulation of systems of affect, including shame, guilt and regret. Arced and plotted in terms that localize the culpability to Irish individuals and communities, they ignore the global systemic context of the economic decline while remaining insistent in their moral censure. Thus, the morally overdetermined messages on display are conveyed in the barest of uncomplicatedly linear narrative structures. Closer to our specific terms of engagement than either Saunders’s or Wood’s meta-reflections on literary fiction, Katy Shaw furnishes a broad summation of the literary phenomena termed ‘Crunch Lit’ by, among other points, dilating upon the affective and the ethical imports of these finance fictions. For Shaw, such fictions ‘offer representations of the impact of financialization on society and individuals, institutions and behaviours. Capturing the transactional reductionism of financialization and its impact on professional and personal relationships, Crunch Lit mobilizes male bankers as monstrous metaphors for the reality of financialization, and representations of its tyranny over twenty-first-century society.’30 Importantly Shaw emphasizes the extent to which financialization is a conditioning agent of everyday life and formative to so much of our individual and collective expressions of desire. Equally, and this is especially pertinent to the

Introduction

13

Celtic Tiger context, Shaw’s argument spotlights how debt-enabled consumption and exchange are the defining features of life under an overdetermining regime of financialization. Shaw’s isolation of a genus of singularly culpable financial agents bears on our survey also, part of which will attend to the fact that some postCeltic Tiger narratives offer up characters who may well be, after Shaw, ‘monstrous metaphors for the reality of financialization’. But in the Irish context such fictional displays potentially offer readers a way out of any degree of self-reflection as they score easy affective points. Put simply, if we rely exclusively on the representation of the arch-villain in the world of speculative finance in these fictions, such a myopic focus blinds us to the saturated realities of our financialized daily lives. While Shaw’s analysis earlier centres upon the social imprints of financialization, Nicky Marsh probes the relationship between the very notion of ‘fictitiousness’ and financialization. In fact, as Marsh explores the fictions of the financial sphere, she impresses the claims of literary fiction to critically appraise the financial forms that condition the world of money. Just as Shaw foregrounds the agency of the literary in representing and exposing the material and ethical failings of finance, Marsh expounds the abilities of literature as ‘a powerful site for unravelling the assumptions that are contained within the rhetoric of money’s fictitiousness’.31 Furthermore, Marsh insists that the ‘novel’s particular attention to the construction of fictitiousness has offered it a range of strategies for revealing, countering and qualifying the disabling mystification sustained by the apparent ability of money to be everywhere and nowhere, everything and nothing’.32 The key point is Marsh’s assertion that the novel has the potential to reflect self-consciously upon ‘the construction of fictitiousness’ in the context of financialization. Core to this formal reflexivity is a capacity to move beyond the confines of finance fictions that perform merely as latter-day ‘morality tales’. The latter are characterized by an abject inability to display any sense of self-consciousness, as they hold firm to dichotomized moral economies. Of significantly more value are the kind of literary engagements flagged here by Marsh, which knowingly play with their own formal origins and possibilities. But such experimentation and formal licence are not conducted for the purposes of frivolousness or self-indulgence. In defamiliarizing the literary text and exposing the bare architecture of its creation to interrogation and contestation, we move in chaptered sequence from Donal Ryan’s The Thing about December and The Spinning Heart to Justin Quinn’s Mount Merrion, Claire Kilroy’s The Devil I Know, and onto Deirdre Madden’s Time Present and Time Past and Paul Murray’s, The Mark and the Void. These literary fictions lend themselves to analyses of the contingencies of finance’s fictions, its fictitiousness and its abundance of arcane idioms and algorithms. The credit-debt arrangement is a performative transaction, as is the promise to repay a debt. In many ways, the distinction between the formally and ethically limited novels of Chapters 1 and 2, and those considered in the remaining five chapters, rests on this distinction between the constative and the performative. The objects of enquiry in the opening two chapters, Peter Cunningham’s Capital Sins and Chris Binchy’s Open-handed and Dermot Bolger’s Tanglewood, fail to transcend the confirmatory forms of the descriptive and, therefore, are simply unable to engage effectively with

14

Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction

the performativities of debt and of capitalist finance. By way of distinction, but without reducing the bulk of our study to a single idea, the fictions authored by Ryan, Quinn, Kilroy, Madden and Murray provide evidence to suggest that they are attuned to the unsettling performativities of indebtedness and global finance. As we shall outline in detail in Chapters 3–7, there is an assemblage of Celtic Tiger finance fiction that moves beyond reductive moralization.33 Furthermore, this disavowal of moral posturing is accompanied by a willingness, inter alia, to reflect upon the relationship between narrative fiction and financialization, to tease out the links between debt and affect, to test the capacities of realist representation in its engagement with finance capitalism and to take multi-generic approaches to narrating Ireland’s recent economic histories.34 Our scepticism regarding the novels interrogated in Chapters 1 and 2 originates in their collective insistence on furnishing the expectant reader with ‘a fictional perp walk’.35 Nevertheless it is important that the formal, thematic and moral limitations of these narratives are brought into dialogue with the more selfreflexive and obliquely figured fictions of the post-Celtic Tiger period. Accordingly, Chapter 3 argues that Donal Ryan’s The Thing about December and The Spinning Heart bring the history of Irish shame and shaming into constellation with Celtic Tiger economics. However, by way of contrast to Bolger’s Tanglewood, neither of Ryan’s narratives are narrowly concerned with eliciting shame in the implicated reader-consumer. In addition, the chapter suggests that The Spinning Heart, in particular, incorporates formal innovation in terms of its accommodation of a posthumous narrative. The significance of this formal selection is considered in relation to Ryan’s broader preference for straight narrative realism in his fictionalizations of pre- and post-Celtic Tiger periods. Chapter 4 demonstrates how Justin Quinn’s Mount Merrion attends to the deeper historical roots of Celtic Tiger Ireland, and, in so doing, contests the teleology of progress so often attached to histories of late-twentieth-century Irish socio-economic modernization. Crucial to Quinn’s formal engagement with the temporalities of modernization and economic development is his critical deployment of the bildungsroman. Claire Kilroy’s The Devil I Know is the focus of Chapter 5. In taking its structure from that of a courtroom interrogation, Kilroy’s narrative marks out debt and guilt as two of its primary themes. But it too withdraws from transparent literary representationalism, as Kilroy marbles her Celtic Tiger narrative with colourations from a range of literary pedigrees, including the Gothic and the Big House novel, and it derives its central structure from the Faustian tradition. Primary among the concerns of Chapter 6 are the ways in which Deirdre Madden’s Time Present and Time Past dispenses with an uncomplicated realist rendering of Celtic Tiger Dublin. While the novel is centred on the familiar temporal and spatial coordinates of ‘boom-time’ prosperity, the realism of Madden’s text lapses into hallucinatory interludes, conditional moods and counter-memorial reflections. In this context, Time Present and Time Past deals with issues such as debt and the uncanny; literary realism; the relationship between past, present and future; and the redemptive agency of the artistic imagination. Paul Murray’s The Mark and the Void provides a fitting capstone to our study in Chapter 7 with what

Introduction

15

is the most challenging and extensive example of Irish finance fiction. Assuming a meta-textual structure, the novel addresses the proximities and complicities of financial and literary fictions. Murray sheds light on the fictional within the financial sector, at the same time as he lays bare the contingencies of financial language and the moral vacuity of the financial world. Importantly, despite its concentration on the proliferating abstractions of finance capitalism, The Mark and the Void does not disavow the stark material accruals of labile speculation. While Murray’s novel signals the close of our survey, the study is envisaged as a starting point in the development of a nascent Irish branch of contemporary analysis recently dubbed the Economic Humanities. Itself part of a lineage that extends back to the publication of The New Economic Criticism in 1999, the Economic Humanities is conceived of as an interdisciplinary field that can contribute to the demystification of ‘the categories of economic knowledge that are all too often taken as natural. Doing so might involve, for example, investigating the ways in which economic wisdom is framed in seemingly incontestable narratives, or analyzing the fictionality of financial forms.’36 With this capacious methodological vision in mind, the Celtic Tiger period can neither be thought of as singular or discrete within modern Irish history nor should it be scrutinized in isolation from wider global critical resources. The book, then, suggests the potential conceptual and capacity-building impacts for scholars within Irish Studies willing to harness the burgeoning diversity of critical energies shaping and informing the Economic Humanities.37

16

CChapter 1 CELTIC TIGER IDENTITY PARADES IN CHRIS BINCHY’S OPEN-HANDED (2008) AND PETER CUNNINGHAM’S CAPITAL SINS (2010)

The blame game In his critical review of the 2008 global financial crisis, John Lanchester leans upon a literary-theoretical analogy in his explication of the apparent ineffability of finance capitalism.1 As a consequence of the ever-increasing deterritorialization of global capital and finance’s transcendence of the material ground of production, the causal agents of the global financial crash are invisible and elusive. ‘If the invention of derivatives was the financial world’s modernist dawn’, according to Lanchester’s literary-historical figuration, ‘the current crisis is unsettlingly like the birth of postmodernism.’2 Finance capital is epitomized by its elusiveness and its mobility, values that frustrate critics seeking to identify and to locate the authors and beneficiaries of its algorithmic transactions. Value is no longer incarnated in anything material or physical but is wrapped up in complex series of promises and future expectations. But as Lanchester surveys the post-crash landscape, the intangibilities of high finance are not damned as the sole culpable constituency. Those external to, even those exploited by, the hyperreal exchanges of high finance are not absolved of guilt or responsibility. In a conclusion that resonates with, even endorses, the default mantra of post-Celtic Tiger that ‘we all partied’, Lanchester maintains that Credit bubbles and asset bubbles don’t just happen without people joining in them, borrowing and spending more, betting on asset prices going upwards and the suspension of the never-untrue, never-popular rule that what goes up must come down. One thing which has been lacking in public discourse about the crisis is someone to point out the extent to which we helped do this to ourselves, because we allowed our governments to do it, and because we were greedy and stupid.3

Lanchester’s judgement has the merit of acknowledging the profound material outcomes of the vast financial implosion in 2008, but it is just as quickly

18

Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction

undermined by the sweeping nature of its generalized characterization of those who ‘participated’ in the orgiastic financial years. One aspect of this section of Lanchester’s analysis that bears upon the current chapter is the impulse to locate and to affix guilt. In other words, Lanchester’s adjudication here echoes in the demonstrable appetite for individual and/or national expiation of guilt associated with material excess in the aftermath of the demise of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger evident in both Peter Cunningham’s Capital Sins and Chris Binchy’s Open-handed.4 Though partaking of different genres of writing, Lanchester, Cunningham and Binchy draw upon and perpetuate narrative accounts of the global financial meltdown that have gained general consensus in Ireland. While all three vary in the specifics of their attribution of guilt, they are fractions of a broader production of narrative reflections upon and explanations of the financial crisis. As we will outline with respect to Dermot Bolger’s Tanglewood in Chapter 2, it is not merely a matter of financial recompense, it is also necessary to experience the searing affective exposure of shame. In another respect, austerity is narrated as atonement and the Irish public is co-opted into a morality play through which they might accrue redemption from the guilt of economic ruination. Just as we analyse the coalescence of morality and finance in terms of debt, guilt and indebtedness at the individual level, the austerity years in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland were also authored as a tale of moral responsibility. This is an issue picked up on by Nicholas Kiersey, who surveys how economic duty became interchangeable with national citizenship. Kiersey reiterates the argument that the Irish public was rendered receptive to austerity through a battery of recycled narratives centred upon behaviour and affect: Mainstream debate in Ireland has shown little if any deviation from this line, turning on a discourse of good citizenship, delineated in terms of economic responsibility and moral courage. Politicians and public figures regularly decry the hedonism which they believe was characteristic of the so-called ‘Celtic Tiger’ years, with Minister of Finance Brian Lenihan going so far as to declare in a primetime news interview that the crisis was nobody’s fault in particular because, as he put it, ‘we all partied.’ Elsewhere, editorialists like Mary Kenny, someone who has long lamented the deleterious effects of consumerism on the nation’s moral fabric, wrote hopefully of austerity as a mechanism that would auger the restoration of Ireland’s traditional Catholic values.5

Kiersey astutely pinpoints the discourse of ‘binge and purge’ that infiltrated mainstream commentary, as assent was sought for collective guilt and atonement. Though Brian Lenihan and Mary Kenny might seem like unlikely allies, both arguments enlist the past to justify future conditions in Ireland. There is an alignment of moral positions based upon the collective mismanagement of the Irish economy, and this sanctions financial restitution as well as a self-reflective affective response. Despite Ireland’s role as an exemplary globalized economy during the years of economic buoyancy, there is little appetite for identifying those that exemplify



1. Celtic Tiger Identity Parades

19

culpability for the implosion of the Irish banking system. In a rhetorical move not alien from Derridean Deconstruction, Lenihan, among others, decides to defer and to disperse accountability for the State’s bankruptcy. As far as Colin Coulter is concerned: ‘In striving to advance a systematically distorted vision of the era of the Celtic Tiger, mainstream commentators have conspired to conceal and defend the interests of that small body of individuals who have been the principal beneficiaries of the boom years.’6 It is as if there now exists an Andersonian ‘imagined community’ of shame, guilt and responsibility with the semiotic slippage from the ‘we’ to the localized shamed individual. This tallies with Kenny’s fantasy of a recrudescence of Catholic values in a secularized Ireland. The trauma of the economic collapse might well render Ireland vulnerable to a return to its erstwhile moral and spiritual subjugation under the Catholic Church. Kenny’s point is utterly disingenuous as it whitewashes the endemic violence and moral hypocrisies of the Catholic Church’s regime in Ireland. But Kenny’s argument intersects with Lenihan’s in its basis in affect to the extent that both are founded upon the agency of shame and guilt in navigating Irish society out of the economic crisis. Neither argument makes any effort to analyse how the Celtic Tiger succeeded and failed in a global context, as accountability is dispersed and localized at the same time. Belying the previously celebrated global fabric of the country and its thriving economy, the burdens of guilt and shame are to be weighted upon the Irish public. There is a natural segue from this brand of commentary to our literary analyses, as the novels under scrutiny in this chapter both advocate that the Irish are freighted with responsibility. Capitalism, according to Jeffrey Sklansky’s survey of the topic, can be, and has been, understood ‘as a form of selfhood or way of being, a system of representation or way of seeing, and a framework of trust or way of believing’.7 Critiques of finance capitalism that spotlight its dangerously cultic dimensions train their attention on the latter’s faith-based speculative teleologies and the irreducibly arcane rhetoric in which it is expressed. But capitalism also solicits the individual subject to invest in themselves as ‘a self-entrepreneur, responsible for his or her own existence and integration into the market’.8 The ways in which subjectivity is produced under the capitalist conjuncture bear some relevance to our analyses of the formal features and the ethical impulses of both Chris Binchy’s Open-handed (2008) and Peter Cunningham’s Capital Sins (2010). In what follows, then, our explication of both novels will address how the authors present representative figures of Celtic Tiger entrepreneurship, whose moral compass is waywardly guided by the prospects of financial enrichment at the expense of moral probity. Maurizio Lazzarato refers to ‘the ubiquity of entrepreneurial subjectivation, manifest in the drive to transform every individual into a business’, and Binchy and Cunningham appropriate the discourse of ‘homo economicus’ for the purposes of their morality tales.9 Notwithstanding the apparent universalism of Lazzarato’s assertion, there is no gainsaying the notion that the spirit of enterprise and investment saturated public discourse during the heyday of the Celtic Tiger in Ireland. With the increased accessibility of credit options and the fetishization of property acquisition, only the most high-profile indices of the financialization of

20

Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction

the ‘boom-time’ everyday, the form and content of Irish lifestyle expectations were radically altered for many but not all. Part of our argument will concentrate on the ways in which ‘the entrepreneurial’ subject manifests in the two narratives. Both novels centralize the morally compromised entrepreneurial spirit and speculative urges of their Irish protagonists. However, the deterritorialized character of capitalism’s ‘economy of possibilities’ is discernible in our analysis of Open-handed.10 Though limited in its moral adjudications of the Celtic Tiger, the latter novel offers a more dilated understanding of the speculative urges of the contemporary economic subject. If, as Arjun Appadurai explains, deterritorialization ‘is one of the central forces of the modern world because it brings labouring populations into the lower-class sectors and spaces of relatively wealthy societies’, then Open-handed is an acknowledgement of the ambitions of immigrant workers in Ireland during the Celtic Tiger period.11 As a result, Binchy’s narrative concerns itself not just with the culpability of vernacular forms of Irish speculative capitalism but is attentive to how deterrorialization vanquishes ‘the shared conditions of ethical behaviours’.12 Binchy’s novel addresses several key recurring thematics of global finance fictions, including speculation, trust, faith, betrayal, exploitation and corruption. Open-handed also continues a trend in such fictions where there is a coalescence between the formal patterning of the narrative and the rigidity of the moral economy evident therein. In contouring his characters and their actions in specific ways, in typifying certain individuals and their actions, Binchy lays down limits to the moral imagination of his narrative. As a consequence, Open-handed falls prey to a more general problem identified by Ian Bogost: ‘the problem is [.  .  .] with literature, whose preference for traditional narrative acts as a correlationist amplifier. Whether empathy or defamiliarization is its goal, literature aspires for identification, to create resonance between readers and the human characters in a work.’13 This is not just a facet of Binchy’s work, as Cunningham’s Capital Sins errs on the side of ‘identification’ also. But Bogost’s point is suggestive in terms of fictionalized reckonings with financial crises generally, together with engagements with the Celtic Tiger and its fall-out. As we shall detail, both authors adhere to a traditional narrative structure and pattern of characterization which facilitates a ready-made and dichotomized palette of moral possibilities for the reader. Binchy’s narrative is more catholic in its embrace of the lost opportunities of economic immigration into ‘boom-time’ Ireland. But the spine of the novel’s action, and its moral accounting, are centred on the less ‘open-handed’ than underhanded professional activities of the property developer Sylvester Kelly. Kelly and his associates, then, are primary among the familiar character types with which the reader can comfortably identify as the guilty moral actors of the narrative. By way of distinction, the cast of migrant workers from Eastern Europe – Agnieszka, Victor, Marcin and, to a lesser extent, Marcin’s friend, Artur – are portrayed as disposable and mobile subjects of globalization. Though there are commonalities of motivation between all of these characters, Irish and non-Irish, ultimately any redemption within the novel is accessible only to the latter. This is consistent with our refraction of Bogost’s broader argument through the lens of Celtic Tiger finance fictions.



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21

Open-handed – victims Marcin is a young male university graduate and his departure from his native Poland is the only such occasion that is dramatized in the novel, as the others have already decamped on the promise of relative prosperity and enrichment in Celtic Tiger Ireland. The outline of Marcin’s intentions once he arrives in Ireland is symbolic of the aggregation of prospects envisaged by the novel’s migrant characters: He would arrive in Ireland and get a job, maybe share a flat with Artur, and then he would just live for a while. Do his own thing. Not think too much or worry about the future or where things were going. He thought he would find he liked buying things. Clothes and shoes and books and televisions. A laptop. A stereo. He would dress better. Go out drinking and meet girls, bring them back to his place and listen to music with them, then take them to his own large bed. There was nothing wrong with these aspirations. He was allowed to have them. They weren’t the reasons he’d given his parents for leaving but they were as important.14

Most notable here is Marcin’s tempered insistence on the kinds of pursuits he wishes to engage in once he lands in Ireland. Though not strictly conditional, the statement lacks a measure of undiluted certainty and exhibits a tentativeness that is perhaps unavoidable in the imagined future of the migrant. Equally plausible is the idea that Marcin is wagering his future prospects on the promises of Ireland’s buoyant economy. In disavowing the reasons given to his parents we see a privatization of motivation, as Marcin, in essence, enlists in the speculative economy offered by the Celtic Tiger variant of finance capitalism. This is not simply a strike for youthful male independence, a rebellious break from the suffocating rites of familial life. Rather Marcin’s plans reveal his consumerist expectations that will be fulfilled in the most globalized economy in the world. Marcin’s move to Ireland is an investment in its economy and it chimes with the expectations of the financial speculator to whom, according to Jean-Joseph Goux, ‘what matters is not what the value of some share “really” is, at a certain moment, but what its value is going to be, later’.15 If, as Goux continues, ‘speculation gambles on novelty, surprise, difference’, the basis for Marcin’s faith in the Celtic Tiger is principally based on the assumption that it will be different to Poland.16 There is no concrete or intrinsic ‘value’ attached to Ireland by Marcin, and because ‘speculation [. . .] involves the creation of fictions’, it simply embodies the notional prospect of future satisfaction and happiness through its divergence from the normalcy of his family’s lives.17 He is a subject of Ulrich Beck’s ‘risk society’ in which mobility entails multiple contradictory possibilities, including precarity, isolation, violence, exploitation but equally economic prosperity, personal security and libidinal satisfaction.18 Indeed as Jason Buchanan astutely remarks in his critique of fictions of the Celtic Tiger, the economic ‘boom’ ‘was not a stable moment of national, cultural, and economic transformation, the boom now comes to represent how

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Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction

globalization incorporates risk and speculation as a part of everyday life’.19 Marcin’s speculative act of migration from Poland to Ireland is consonant with the thriving dominant disposition of the country, but its inherent basis in contingency cannot guarantee his desired outcomes. In addition to Marcin’s induction into the speculative economy of Celtic Tiger Ireland, there is a sense in which his eagerness to slough off the weight of his parents’ debilitating expectations for him is coded as a form of latter-day captivity narrative. Again figured in terms that accentuate personal liberation, Marcin’s imagination of future possibilities is starkly divergent from the belief systems that structure the lives of his parents: He was getting on a plane and going to a place where he could shake off all the pathologies that had afflicted his parents’ generation. He reserved the right to develop his own. Drunkenness, vapidity, laziness, chronic fatigue, rampant, proselytizing capitalistic urges. [. . .] None of these was his intended path, the future he would choose, but it was now, as the bus pulled away from the station, within his own hands.20

Nothing is clearer here than the certainty of uncertainty; Marcin’s exit from financial and imaginative incarceration is expressed in terms of an ambiguous yet resolute faith in the future. This faith is matched, at least in a superficial way, by an equal trust in his capabilities to secure a more prosperous future on his own terms. Marcin naively asserts his individual agency in authoring the plotlines of his life’s narrative once he has transcended the blinkered culture of his Polish homeland. But as we shall detail in our analysis of the later stages of the novel and of Marcin’s experiences, such a faith in the possibility of escaping dominant social and cultural strictures is not as easy as simply crossing national boundaries. The faith that he exhibits in the Irish economic ‘miracle’ to improve his life beyond recognition is misplaced and unjustified. Far from acting as an indiscriminating panacea, Marcin’s speculative investment ‘instigates a temporal dynamic that revolves around the possibility of actualizing the virtual claim’ and is revealed as just another form of oppressive and exploitative captivity narrative for those at the sharp edge of its operations and the margins of its wealth generation.21 Marcin secures employment as a night porter at a five-star hotel in Dublin, and the toll of the working hours and the discriminatory treatment he receives from his Irish co-workers are explicit indices of his entrapment. Having invested in his newly found liberation in Ireland, Marcin’s plans for his future seem incompatible with those of his Irish peers. He is reduced to a function of his migrant vulnerability in the illicit nocturnal economy of the hotel, and his difference is employed to redouble his alienation. Like several of the other migrant characters in Open-handed, Marcin is ruthlessly reminded of the unsentimental nature of contemporary capitalism. Binchy displays an awareness of the deterritorialization of the capitalist conjuncture, and Marcin’s experience of Celtic Tiger Dublin is figured as emblematic of the deterritorialized economic migrant. In a move that resonates with the lived reality of the migrant, Marcin takes on the menial tasks



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that the Irish hotel employees are unwilling to perform and he is cut off from the prostitution scheme run by several of his night porter colleagues. For the majority of the novel any sense of tangible shared purpose is inaccessible to Marcin – he lives alone, cut off from his Polish friend and he works alone, exploited by his Irish co-workers. As we see elsewhere in the novel, if the female bodies of Eastern European prostitutes and bar-workers are figured as commoditized objects, Marcin’s physicality is also overwritten by the duress of his debilitating personal and work routines in Ireland. As he nears the end of his time in Ireland, he has descended into alcohol dependence and gambling, navigating his route from home to work in zombified fashion. The degree of relative speculative intent that marked his departure from Poland has, like his physical body, atrophied under the demands and depredations of Ireland’s thriving and unforgiving Celtic Tiger economy. Marcin arrives in a drunken stupor for what turns out to be his final shift at the hotel, and as he begins to sober up: He came out and saw that the whole reception area towards the lounge was empty. His head was beginning to pound now. He could see no sign of Ray so he plugged the Hoover in where he was and kept going. How had he come to work this evening? He wondered. Had he walked? Got a taxi? And where had he been earlier when he was drinking? It was a blank, but not something to worry about, he thought. Because he was here doing what he had been told to do. That much he knew.22

The horizon of his imagination has diminished to the extents of following a menial instruction and to perceived concreteness of the immediately tangible. The sequence of self-interrogation is not simply symptomatic of a ‘lost’ evening but is clearly figurative of Marcin’s concussive sufferances. Both the hotel and his recent memory are voided here. The former is emphatic of the establishment’s role in Marcin’s utter estrangement from his investment in Ireland and the latter superficially refers to his journey to work but is legible as the duration of his stay in Ireland. Binchy’s invocation of emptiness at this moment suggests that Marcin is keen to, and close to, erasing his still-born future in Ireland. In a plot device that is rather forced by Binchy, the aforementioned Agnieszka preceded Marcin in leaving the same town in Poland. At one level her motivation for departing Poland and leaving her young son behind differentiates her from Marcin. However, Agnieszka and Marcin are of a piece in the act of risk-taking and speculatively investing in the prospect of Ireland yielding some form of future financial security. Agnieszka’s migration is underwritten by the need to provide for her child in the aftermath of a violent break-up of her relationship with the father, but she is soon disabused of any understanding that she could avoid further male violence and threats once she alights in Ireland. From the nocturnal uncanniness of the hotel turned brothel, we move to the raucous space of the late-night bar in the heart of Dublin. Again, Binchy is at pains to spotlight the murkiness of the environment in which Agnieszka finds herself and is dependent upon for the

24

Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction

realization of her financial plans. If the porters, together with Sylvester Kelly, are the agents of immorality in the five-star hotel, then the manager and the owners of Agnieszka’s bar warrant the same level of culpability. But in the latter context there is the added cohort of drunken Irish patrons whose expectations are trained on the female Eastern European bar staff. Buoyed by a novel sense of entitlement that is itself raised to a higher pitch by alcohol, these customers, as depicted by Binchy, embody a raw menace occasioned by the transvaluation of people into commodities. It is a fragile confidence imbued with an underlying violence and, for Binchy, in its worst excesses it manifests in the expression of otherwise repressed and unfulfilled sexual desires. As Agnieszka reflects upon the nightly diet of sexually expectant encounters, she accepts that this is precisely her function and that of her co-workers: All that groping, petting, patting, touching, brushing, sidling, passing, miming. The filthy comments they would gradually begin to understand. The threats and promises and wet entreaties panted into their ears. The casual sense of ownership that the guys had when they were in groups, goading each other to take it one step further before the manager could cop what was happening. But the manager didn’t care. This was what they were all here for. She watched the new girls smile through it and then, as the weeks passed, she saw how their smiles faded and how the ones that lasted toughened up.23

The landscape of the bar is marked by violations and solicitations that are expressive of a crude breed of proprietorship, with the latter derived from the agency of relative wealth. The pathos of the passage above is neatly staged by Binchy, moving in sequence through the apprenticeship of the female bar staff from a series of base physical encroachments to an eventual awakening to the reality of their working conditions. As the focalizing voice here, Agnieszka is privileged, while the background cast of co-workers are little more than fungible commodities. But despite anonymity their experiences resonate with those of the protagonists in the sense that they also endure the alienation of broken promises and the reducibility of dignity. The lives and narratives of the central and peripheral immigrant characters in Open-handed are sundered of their speculative ambitions and expectations in ‘boom-time’ Ireland. This is explicitly flagged by Binchy’s references to corrupted forms of ‘promises’ and ‘ownership’ in Agnieszka’s survey above. The nocturnal scene sketched here throws into relief the hidden violations indicative of a culture of entitlement. Again, these spectacles are suffused with expectation that demands satisfaction and they are revelatory of more endemic assertions of relative privilege. The behaviour of the punters that lasciviously ogle and molest the bar staff is analogous to the commercial predation of the bar owners. In the transactional sexual exchanges from the hotel bedroom to the late-night bar, Open-handed figures the Celtic Tiger as a species of corrupted desire-fulfilment, yet it is also sensitized to the materiality of these exchanges. The latter point is significant as Binchy attempts to restore a measure of dignity in the throes of



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25

sexual and physical violence. The narrative’s focus on the materiality, on the physicality of these mobile female bodies is an effort to dignify beyond the encroachment of predatory fantasies. Agnieszka is immersed in an environment in which the body is valorized as tradeable and accessible, in addition to which it is dematerialized and devalued as an object of exchange and of desire. Part of Agnieszka’s narrative arc, which is not unproblematic, is to escape such reification as a disposable sexual prop. Binchy showcases the uneven transactional relations that obtain between the opportunistic Irish and their immigrant peers in the heterotopic space of a fivestar hotel. If we return to the opening of the novel, we are parachuted into the lobby of the hotel to witness a typical performance of Celtic Tiger opulence: Two-thirds full. Four-hundred-and-fifty-euro rack rate, two hundred minimum for a walk-in, depending on who was around there might be room for negotiation. The open space of the lobby was shushed by the thickness of a sand-coloured carpet and populated by the kind of bodies you would expect – solid, expensive, a mix of foreign and local. Nobody out of place, all familiar, everywhere. Middleaged. Tanned. Jackets and ties. The smell of heavy perfume.24

As Foucault insists, heterotopic spaces are not equivalent to utopias, in that the former take on a physically material form in the world, and the portrait of the hotel space above affirms the physical presences roaming the lobby space. These might be generic and anonymous patrons that Binchy casts as emblematic of ‘boomtime’ Dublin, but they are no less real in this context. Outwardly the combination of visual and olfactory sensations is customary to such sites, providing reassurance and affirmation to the guests. That said, the suggestion that ‘there might be room for negotiation’ seeds the narrative’s opening with the possibility for tension, exploitation and speculation. Within a few lines the omniscient narration expresses itself in the idiom of financial transactionalism, bringing with it the freight of agency, power dynamics and trust in the consummation of the business exchange. Binchy thereby initiates the novel with a typical scene from Celtic Tiger, but, more importantly, the invocation of these financial thematics confirms the hotel as a Foucauldian heterotopia.25 As mentioned, the hotel is physically a real space, but it also reflects, and disturbs, the exterior reality of Open-handed’s stylization of Celtic Tiger Dublin. Over the duration of the novel the heterotopic space of the hotel presses us to reflect upon the conditions of its possibility as an icon of wealth, and the terms of its functioning as a site for exploitation, violence and degradation. It does not take long before the familiar luxuriance of the diurnal rhythms of the hotel yields to the nocturnal financial and moral economies of the establishment. Though these might be figured as mutually exclusive, they are pointedly not so, and, in aggregation, they form part of the novel’s engagement with the relative power dynamics of Celtic Tiger Ireland. Not for the last time in the novel, the late-night hotel achieves an explicitly uncanny texture that is immanent in the day-time alienations experienced by the exploited and the indebted under finance capitalism. As the night shift commences, the night porters that arrive for work

26

Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction

‘looked wrong, ghoulish, underground creatures who did not belong to the day, too addled and distracted to thrive in the light. Personal histories that you could see in their faces and that you would turn away from’.26 Though portrayed in Gothic terms as alien to the functions of daily normality, these porters are not simply deployed in figurative terms to evoke the spectral atmosphere of the latenight hotel. Under the cover of the nightshift, the porters profit from their own material incursion into the exploitative logic of the Celtic Tiger. Further impressing the heterotopic nature of the hotel space, the porters facilitate occasional prostitution in the vacant hotel rooms, and one of their regular clients is the Irish entrepreneur Sylvester Kelly. Kelly has an assignation on this evening where he meets with a Russian escort during which Binchy exposes the commonality of speculative motives across the entire cast of characters. Making idle chat with the escort, Kelly enquires about her background in Moscow to which she replies: ‘I live now in England.’ ‘Four years.’ ‘London?’ She hesitated. ‘Near to London, yes.’ ‘And you just come here for work?’ ‘Yeah. To work.’27 Notwithstanding the asymmetry of power relations evident in this exchange and in the broader demands of the sex industry, this is also the consummation of a business transaction. Both Kelly and the escort here are motivated by the pursuit of money, though clearly operative within different spheres and with divergent levels of individual agency. The exchange here is microcosmic of the unevenness of economic exchange as well as figurative of the commodification of desire and of the human body. Yet as we suggested earlier, there is a shared speculative urge embedded within so many of the relationships and interactions across Binchy’s novel. This is where Open-handed partially extends its view beyond the horizon of Celtic Tiger Ireland and gestures to the global context in which these separate, but often linked, acts of speculation unfold. It also attends to the precarity of individuals, most obviously immigrant populations, who are compelled into speculative subjecthood on terms and in conditions not of their own making. This goes some way towards explaining the novel’s default to heterotopic spaces in which financial exchanges play out, where dependence is exploited, and claims are made on individuals on the basis of asymmetries of wealth. Binchy implies that these situations and relations are not exceptions within Celtic Tiger Ireland but fundamental to the functioning of its nouveau riche economy of heightened expectations.

Open-handed – villain Sylvester Kelly is a recovering alcoholic, former local councillor and active property speculator whose greed for a ‘capstone’ property deal provides one of the crucial moral struts of Open-handed. Having squandered one business to his alcohol addiction, Kelly is now taken in by the fervency of belief in Ireland’s economic prowess and by the speculative opportunities presented to those with wealth and appropriate political connections. Though not possessing the same level of wealth as Albert Barr in Capital Sins, Kelly is an influential and effective operator within



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the Celtic Tiger’s nexus of political and financial interests. Akin to Barr, Kelly is willing to take advantage of his material and immaterial assets, within and without the law, to secure his future. In a manner of speaking, Kelly is enmeshed in an economy of trust and faith; for the business arrangements to progress he must trust in and be trusted by his clients. All involved, in turn, invest unwavering faith in the robustness of the property sector to yield a return on their financial speculations. However, through the investigative labours of a journalist, again chiming with Barr’s fall in Capital Sins, Kelly’s track record of corrupted business practice is on the verge of being revealed just as he is intent on bringing the aforementioned ‘capstone’ property deal to fruition. Despite years of relative success founded on insight and accessibility, Kelly’s eventual unravelling is catalysed by his own overexuberant trust in potential investors for a property scheme in Prague. Of course, Kelly’s demise is as inevitable and as necessary as that which befalls Albert Barr in Capital Sins, and their respective ruinations are integral to the moral structures of both narratives. Equally, these echoing downfalls contribute to the diminution of the efficacy of the novels, as they insist on furnishing the reader with the consolations of literary and moral relationality.28 Kelly’s misplaced faith in his own capacity to solicit and secure investment contributes to his eventual undoing. He is duped into facilitating a highly profitable investment in Prague by speculators who prey on Kelly’s desperation for conclusive remuneration. The upshot is that Kelly must physically transport 100,000 euro from Dublin to the Czech Republic, a prospect that he initially baulks at but, given his financial needs, it is one to which he ultimately accedes. It is at this point that there is a triangulation of moral reckoning and redemption centred on three of the novel’s protagonists: Kelly, Agnieszka and Marcin. At one level, Kelly is representative of a class that motored and profited from the economic ‘boom’ in Ireland and whose business interests and leisure-time activities exploited the financial precarity of migrant workers such as Agnieszka and Marcin. As we intimated earlier, these characters are differentially speculative, and all are hailed as ‘entrepreneurs of the self ’ within the capitalist conjuncture. Though their motivations are divergent, their respective imaginations of the future are conditioned by the possibilities presented by the global debt economy. Each one struggles with familial pressures to succeed but it is only Kelly who has the opportunity to avail of the moral and political corruption that Binchy sees at the core of the Celtic Tiger economy. Indeed Kelly is directly implicated in the immiseration of both Agnieszka and Marcin in that he avails of the prostitution ring at the five-star hotel, at which Marcin works and into which Agnieszka is co-opted. In this way Binchy aims to clarify the personal alienation and physical exploitation that was required to satiate the panoply of Celtic Tiger consumerist desires. But as earlier, the redemption afforded to Agnieszka and Marcin comes at the cost of Kelly’s abrupt demise. On the evening Marcin arrives to work inebriated, Kelly has arranged to meet with another prostitute at the hotel, which turns out to be Agnieszka. Marcin has previously seen Agnieszka at the hotel on the night of her first such encounter and they both recognize each other. As she is leaving, he notices the wound from

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Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction

her assault by her boyfriend, Victor, and assumes that whoever is in the bedroom now has attacked her and he must act. Of course, Kelly is oblivious to this turn of events and, in fact, has not had sex with Agnieszka but rather has given her a large sum of money to expedite her return to her young son in Poland. But what might seem a moral redemption on Kelly’s part is ultimately partial, once Agnieszka has departed the hotel room, Kelly thinks: By this time tomorrow he would know if he’d managed to get away with it. If he had, this would seem like the right thing to have done. He would be in another hotel in Prague tomorrow night and there would be cards with girls’ numbers on them put under the door of his room. He could make a call without leaving his bed and get one over and do what he wanted, knowing everything was all right in the world. It was a happy thought.29

Kelly’s thoughts while he lies recumbent in the privacy of the hotel room are firmly self-centred, as he engages in a form of personal moral calculus whereby a single tokenistic gesture sanctions further speculative illegality. Binchy offers Kelly the freedom here to be the voice of a corrupted moral relativism, as he displays the plasticity of values in the service of individual appetites. The conditionality of Kelly’s projections dictates the terms of his affective possibilities in the near future, and there is an intra-textual echoing and linkage in evidence here in terms of the register in which Marcin had earlier forecast his imminent arrival in Ireland. Thus, at a linguistic level there is an inauspicious premonition of Kelly’s looming ruination, an equivalent to the sundering of Marcin’s earlier conditional hope for the openings that Celtic Tiger Ireland would provide. Just as Kelly’s ascendancy is dependent upon the disaffection of precarious migrant labour such as Marcin, as we shall see later, the redemption of the latter character is inextricably linked to Kelly’s demise. But in Kelly’s case the conditions on which his ‘happiness’ depends are mired in deceit, and the materiality of the anticipated sexual experience is contingent upon the execution of an illegal act. Indeed, there is a globalized homogeneity, a continuity, to the projected sexual encounter in Prague which mirrors Kelly’s activities in Dublin. Once more this speaks to the implication of all the novel’s characters in the deterritorializations of capitalism. Symbolic of this economy is the reference to the ‘cards under the door’, offering details of the escort services at the disposal of guests such as Kelly. Just like Kelly and the cast of economic subjects in the novel, these cards are fractions of a circuit of solicitation that offers opportunity and gratification in the future. They are visual and verbal signifiers that are grounded in the capitalist conjuncture but that create and define forms of desire. In this context Kelly is lured to Prague on the promise of a decisive return on financial investment, and likewise the migrant characters from Eastern Europe travel westward to Celtic Tiger Ireland on the promise of free expression and financial security in the future. But the final cursory clause of Kelly’s reverie is revealing, specifically the notion of his concluding ‘happy thought’. Kelly manufactures this gratifying thought for himself with his imagination of the resolution of the proposed property deal



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in Prague and the personal reward he will afford himself as a result. In isolating Kelly’s happiness in this brief emphatic sentence, Binchy draws our attention to its significance with respect to the remainder of the novel and the role played by Kelly. The ‘happy thought’ is entirely social as it depends upon the completion of public and private interpersonal acts, and it suggests that the illicit conveyance of money, the property deal and the purchase of sexual gratification are of a piece. In sum, as Sara Ahmed proposes, these acts that culminate in Kelly’s ‘happy thought’ are ‘end orientated’.30 One thing leads to another with the eventual goal being the satisfactory experience of personal happiness. Fleeting in one respect, Kelly’s anticipation of his impending happiness is an outward-oriented act that is embedded within a teleology of progress. There is a commonality of intention to each of the actions that Kelly plans to undertake in the near future, and they are all consistent with the morality and the value system characteristic of his blunt entrepreneurial modus operandi. Given that Kelly’s happiness is ‘end orientated’ there is little thought devoted to the consequences or the costs of his actions, the legal and personal effects fade in comparison to the materialization of the ‘happy thought’. Though it might be missed as a minor reflection by Kelly in the midst of the frenetic drama of his undoing, it actually offers a telling insight into, and clarification of, the kind of crudely materialistic morality objected to by the novel. The social nature of Kelly’s ‘happy thought’, its parasitic and corrupted nature, then, has the corollary that no such affordances are available to Marcin or Agnieszka. So long as Kelly’s morally relativistic pursuit of happiness dominates the action, they have little scope for equivalent affective pleasures. In the end, Kelly is not outmanoeuvred by a competing investor nor is he broken by a misguided investment on his part. The object that eclipses Kelly’s ‘happy thought’ is a wound that is a legacy of an earlier act of violence in which he had no involvement. Agnieszka bears the scars of Victor’s assault on her when she meets with Kelly and, crucially, when she briefly encounters Marcin on her way to exiting the hotel. As we noted earlier, Marcin’s misapprehension of the source of the wound drives him to confront whoever is responsible and thus he arrives at Kelly’s hotel room to find the businessman asleep on the bed. But the fact that it is an act of physical violence and the resulting wound to which Kelly owes his eventual demise is consistent with the moral patterning of the novel. Though Marcin’s rush to judgement is misguided and the target of his retribution is innocent in this case, Binchy clearly implies that Kelly warrants punitive action. The wound on Agnieszka’s face is symptomatic of the litany of physical abuses and threats endured and witnessed during her time in Ireland, and, therefore, it is apt within the scheme of the novel that it is the catalyst for the narrative’s moral resolution. Equally, the wound engenders a form of solidarity between Marcin and Agnieszka as exploited subjects of deterritorialized capitalism. In the first instance, both wear the scars of their lives in Celtic Tiger Ireland on their bodies in the forms of violence, personal neglect and substance abuse. Furthermore, there is a dialogic aspect to Agnieszka’s facial injury when it elicits a concerned verbal response from Marcin that prefaces his physical reaction. In one way the sociality of Kelly’s affective ‘happy thought’ is trumped by the way in which Agnieszka’s

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Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction

wound provokes the combined physical and emotional pains of the two migrant workers into what Luke Gibbons terms, in an altogether different context, ‘the public sphere of justice’.31 The expressiveness of the wound finds Marcin in Kelly’s room and while the latter sleeps Marcin happens upon and purloins the 100,000 euro destined for the Prague property development. The narrative concludes, then, with the disparate prospects of the three characters who remain conjoined by the dubious cache of money. We witness a relative opening up and closing down of futures. Agnieszka makes her way to Dublin airport, relieved to leave her migratory interlude in Ireland behind her, which she describes as ‘a hard place’, as a place to which ‘she would never come back’.32 As she waits for an early morning flight: The sky was already brightening in front of her. By the time the sun went down again she would be with Jakub. She had time enough to think about where they could go next, what they would so and how they would manage it. Nothing had changed. All the things that had made her leave in the first place still held. But she would be with him and for a while that would be enough.33

This is Agnieszka’s prospective thought, as we have detailed it is foreshadowed by equivalent versions by Kelly and Marcin. But in this case what distinguishes the imagined future of this character is that they are actually consoled by the singular certainty of the physical presence of their young son. The atmospheric evocation of a new dawn is glaringly signposted by Binchy, but Agnieszka is not naïve enough to assume that leaving Ireland is the conclusive remedial action her life requires. There are further echoes of Marcin’s original ‘captivity narrative’ in Agnieszka’s urgent flight from Ireland, but her immediate future differs in so far as it possesses the anchorage of her reunion with her son, as well as the less consoling realities of her personal life in Poland. Marcin is less definitive in his resolve to return directly to Poland, though, having stolen Kelly’s investment funds, he is in no doubt about his need to leave the country. Despite cursorily debating whether to return the money or not, Marcin’s finds himself in a similar situation to Agnieszka. Though received by different means, the monies now in their possession are versions of the original investment fund that Kelly had targeted for his Prague project. Up to this point neither character had reaped any yield from their faith in the Celtic Tiger economy, but now, by direct and indirect avenues, they have been materially compensated. Not only that, given the source of the money and the dubious intentions attached to it, both Agnieszka and Marcin are in receipt of moral compensation. Despite the questionable means through which Marcin’s emergence from ‘captivity’ in Ireland is enabled, the narrative fully sympathizes with his need to be physically and imaginatively liberated. Reflecting the relative morality of the novel, Open-handed devotes the closing lines to Marcin’s resonant, yet more measured, vision of his immediate future outside of Ireland. Just as much as Agnieszka’s vision, Marcin’s is not without uncertainty, but it is marked by a grounded pragmatism that was absent earlier in the novel:



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The bus would go through Wales and England, then take the boat to Holland and travel on through Germany to Poland. He could get off anywhere, go anywhere. Disappear into some small town for a couple of months away from all of this until he got his head together and his story straight. And when he knew what to say to people, how to explain everything that had happened to him and all the things he had done, he could begin to think about going home.34

While the final word in the novel is ‘home’, there is no conclusive sense of arrival for any of the characters, indeed the novel hints at the impossibility of such an eventuality. As we leave both Marcin and Agnieszka they are symbolically placed in sites of transition and transportation, a bus station and an airport, respectively. The terms in which Marcin expresses his renewed intentions might echo the sentiments of his earlier plans, but the orientation is entirely different. Equally, his explicit assertion of assuming authorship of the next phase of his life speaks to the novel’s critique of the manifestly unequal and alienating narratives that sustained and celebrated ‘boom-time’ Ireland. From this perspective the trials of living in Ireland have left both characters unfulfilled but edified and the accidental acquisition of financial security has little to do with any positive accruals of life in Celtic Tiger Ireland. Rather, the novel intimates that the trauma of enduring these migratory experiences has re-enforced the value and the values of life beyond the opportunism, the cynicism and the ruthless materialism of Celtic Tiger Ireland. Of course, it would be facile to think that such characters can entirely evade the imprints and effects of deterritorialized capitalism once they are securely removed from Ireland. Kelly’s fall from influence and affluence is the moral centrepiece of the novel’s denouement, as he awakens in the hotel room not from a nightmare but into a financial and personal nightmare. Though the novel never affords the reader a view of how Kelly resolves the disappearance of the investment funds nor of the consequences of the investigative journalist’s search into Kelly’s history of sharp business practice, it furnishes a sequence of images related to a prevailing sense of unreality: ‘Sylvester woke, and for a moment, had no idea where he was. The light was on and he could see the room but just for a second he didn’t recognize it. There were no clues, a blank canvas of bed, table, chair, television without history. Words. Then it came to him and things started to move quickly.’35 The sensation of disorientation recalls that felt by Victor prior to his assault on Agnieszka, an instant where the familiarity and the stability of reality are fractured. This is amplified in Binchy’s description of Kelly’s reflected image in the hotel room mirror, in which ‘There was a ghost looking back at him, pale and scruffy and disturbed. He turned off the light and was opening the door when he thought about the bag and the hundred thousand. His heart stopped and his body went rigid.’36 The haunted and haunting face in the mirror again returns us to the expressive wound on Agnieszka’s face. The latter was a physical catalyst for materially consequential actions; here Kelly’s face registers the spectrality of the speculative economy of the Celtic Tiger. Certainly, Kelly’s professional and personal lifestyles are imprinted on his body;

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Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction

the gaunt and disturbing image that peers back from the mirror are consequences of the relative excess to which he is devoted. Yet, as we suggest, the series of descriptions and images are trained on the evocation of an atmosphere of unreality into which Kelly emerges. The stark fact of the disappearance of the cache of investment monies compels Kelly to confront the alienation of Celtic Tiger capitalism. The apparent certainty provided by wealth, by speculation and by rates of return and profitability is revealed as utterly insubstantial by Binchy’s default to a figurative expressionism. He now inhabits a space of desolate abandonment; the uncanny milieu of the night-time hotel is the appropriate location for Kelly’s appreciation of the helplessness and the futility of his circumstances: He left the room and made his way to the stairs, then went down, down, down into the basement and into the underground car-park. [. . .] When he turned the corner he saw only empty space. There was no car. There was no Dessie. [. . .] Dessie was gone. There could be no doubt. His ability to make sense of what was happening was breaking into pieces and floating away.37

The succession of negation in Binchy’s outline of Kelly’s descent coalesces with the disappearance of the cache of money, and it confirms the presiding sense of dissolution alive in the ‘new’ reality of the hotel. If there is a degree of solid anchorage to the futures imagined by both Agnieszka and Marcin at the end of the novel, Kelly finds no such fixity. The reality of his life under the sway of Celtic Tiger prosperity has become insubstantial and precarious, a fact that allies his current predicament with that of the disaffected and marginalized of the economic ‘boom’. In a manner that intersects with the fate of Albert Barr in Capital Sins, this is a pillar of the moral reckoning of Binchy’s narrative. But we do not witness the repercussions facing Sylvester Kelly; the last we see of him is when he is standing alone at the entrance to the hotel at dawn: He turned right and saw in front of him a huge sky full of yellow and pink and blue in the approaching dawn, the air completely still and clear and silent as if the day itself was holding its breath. He stood there not moving, watching this, and believed for a moment that everything had stopped. That he was alone in this beautiful world and that if he wanted he could stay standing there for ever and that nothing would ever change.38

At first glance Binchy evokes a scene of sensory immersion that is consistent with the turn to expressionism in our final dealings with Sylvester Kelly. The latter hints at the gestation of a new form of imagination here, distinct from the crass and cynical theatrics of his career in property speculation. The material future is put in abeyance for Kelly at the end of the novel as he seems have his second awakening of the day, the second proving to be far less traumatic than that experienced in the hotel bedroom. From the ‘happy thought’ mired in the squalid workings of capitalist speculation and sexualized exploitation, Kelly is afforded a cursory glimpse of a



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different brand of beatific future. Notwithstanding Kelly’s momentary rapture, the future is the property of capitalism and, in Kelly’s case, the legal institutions that buttress and sustain capitalism. Despite the temporary suspension of historical time here, Kelly will be held to account for his past actions. While bringing such protagonists to book in moral terms serves the narratological purposes of both the stories, it fails to take cognizance of the perpetuation of the very capitalist structures that enabled, and which will continue to enable, the moral failings of characters like Sylvester Kelly. Capital Sins As part of his analysis of ‘creative practice’ in Literature and Marxism, Raymond Williams emphasizes that ‘the “creation” of characters depends on the literary conventions of characterization. But there are evident differences of degree. In most drama and fiction the characters are already pre-formed, as functions of certain kinds of situation and action.’39 In short there is a plausibility and familiarity to such characterization that serves to ratify and to stabilize dominant cultural and political norms. Within this mode of literary production character creation involves little more than ‘the activation of a known model’.40 There is both political and aesthetic conservatism at the core of such literary reproductions, which strive to assert and to arrive at moral consensus. Cutting to quick of the issue, Williams presses the transparency of this aesthetic in which ‘persons’ are ‘created’ to show that people are ‘like this’ and their relations ‘like this’.41 This reading manifestly informs our analysis of Peter Cunningham’s venal protagonists and their relative moral symbolism. The arc of Cunningham’s narrative is reminiscent of several other finance fictions in the Irish context, as well as those that have appeared elsewhere in the United States and the United Kingdom.42 Typically centred on precisely the kind of male protagonist encountered in Capital Sins, and, as we have seen, Open-handed, these narratives are character-driven realist accounts of individual greed. Literary interventions that engage with the zenith and the unravelling of the Celtic Tiger in stark materialist terms divide critical opinion. The transparency of characterization and the realistic social commentary are variously lauded as politically efficacious or lamented as aesthetically conservative. Representative of the latter, Neil Murphy takes issue with Kevin Myers’s championing review of Capital Sins in which Myers endorses the unyielding morality of Cunningham’s novel. In Murphy’s estimation this constitutes ‘significant narrowing of comprehension of how literary art works, and raises questions of whether writers are even required to be socially responsive’.43 For our purposes the ‘sins of capital’ in Capital Sins are borne by Barr and his banking enabler, Eric Chester. In the end the intertwined fortunes of both of these speculators founder spectacularly, but the problem remains that the narrative exclusively spotlights their appetites and failings to the exclusion of any other contributory agencies. There are references to the sphere of international finance capital, but the action and the morality are principally located within the orbits of the individual characters. Thus, partaking

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of the formulaic process of characterization illuminated by Williams earlier, the prioritization of individual characterization and the fetishization of recognizable consumer commodities are essential to the narrative’s moral resolution. Despite pretensions to clinical satirical exposure, the narrative concedes any genuine analytical effect and merely provides satisfaction to an appetite for finality and the re-establishment of order. In identifying the guilty parties and establishing their materialistic credentials from their first appearances in the novel, Cunningham actually distracts from the systemic historical origins and contexts from which the action of his novel emerges. While claiming to recount the final year of the Celtic Tiger in Ireland, Capital Sins de-historicizes the economic and financial routing of the country. It accomplishes this partly through its failed efforts to satirize excess; the litanies of excess co-opt readers as accessories to the conservative moral denouement of the narrative. Though there may be a flurry of complicit guilt at the recognizable and identifiable proclivity to spend and to indulge, they render the reader passive through distraction and superficial humour. With its trenchant adherence to moral realism there is a failure to acknowledge the ‘destructive forces of a world economy gone wild and out of control’.44 The closest that Capital Sins comes to suggestive ambiguity is in its title, which plays upon various associations and connotations of the word ‘capital’. Embracing its geographical setting in the Irish capital city, Dublin, to its focus upon the world of finance capitalism, as well as the more implicit suggestion of capital punishment, the title also signals its concern with morality as a driving thematic per se, together with the relative moral priorities of its core protagonists. Quite apart from the inflexibility of the moral schema revealed across the narrative, the essential plot scaffolding is equally as rigid. The primary conflict is between two male characters: Lee Carew, an idealistic aspiring writer and journalist, who confronts the nouveau riche builder and property developer, Albert Barr. These characters, abetted and cajoled by a support cast invested with varying degrees of narrative significance, are installed as the moral poles of Capital Sins. In addition, both of the male leads are differentially in need of redemption, as neither is professionally or personally secure. The story centres on Barr’s efforts to secure financial and political assent for his career’s ‘capstone’ project at a site called Goose Point. Having extensively overleveraged himself, Barr is desperate to avail of any and all political and banking support in order to expedite the project. It is Barr’s desperation at the degree of his overleveraged finances that provides the catalyst for his openness to corruption and disregard for any form of value other than that represented on his company’s balance sheets. As the narrative unwinds, Carew becomes the principal antagonist to the culmination of Barr’s property portfolio. Over the duration of a single year, these characters who had previously never encountered one another progressively begin to occupy each other’s time and space. The temporal frame is another way in which Cunningham’s novel is inflexible in both form and thematic preoccupations. In essence, from the outset we are confined to a Dublin-centric narrative that showcases a moral face-off between two male characters, and this moral struggle unfolds over the course of just a single year. As we shall detail,



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such a prescriptive framework serves to limit the critical and creative possibilities in terms of shedding light on the workings of the Celtic Tiger economy. The canvass on which Cunningham chooses to portray his version of the Celtic Tiger is deficient in national and global contexts – both geographical and historical. Given this series of shortcomings, the upshot is that the novel’s moral economy is significantly diminished, and the reader is offered a superficial sense of moral resolution by the close of the story. The novel seems to suggest that if there appears to be little by way of material consequences in reality for the most negligent of Celtic Tiger bankers and speculators, then Capital Sins will provide such an outcome in literary form. Of course, this is a problem faced by all post-Celtic Tiger fictions, given that we know the outcome at the outset of each of them.

Apex developer Capital Sins opens on a Saturday morning in the summer of 2006, with the Celtic Tiger property ‘boom’ still in the throes of vitality, and the omniscient narrator introduces us to a reflective Albert Barr. Despite the ensuing accounts of Barr’s financial and carnal indulgences, the narrator offers an early hint at Barr’s possible redeemability. Barr’s personal and professional lives are inundated with demands for and worries about money, and on this morning he ‘wondered if he was ever going to be free. To soar beyond his worries and be truly happy, to wake up one Saturday morning and not have to think about the net-net, the bottom line. To be out; to finally escape.’45 There is a suggestion that Barr sees beyond the trappings and compromises of his business circles, and that he is cognizant of the perpetual production of desire that is characteristic of capitalism and consumerism. The itch to transcend his current milieu might seem as if Barr is, or could, arrive at a personal crossroads and disavow a career that has taken a heavy toll on his health and his relationships. Yet, as we learn, Barr’s pathway to liberation is exclusively dependent upon the cliched notion of ‘one final big deal’. Though he pines for an escape, his escape is inextricable from one final act of financial risk and moral compromise. The alternative future gestured to here requires that Barr liquidate the memories, lives and prospects of others; thus, this is far from an opening revelation or epiphany. In a way, by hinting at a vulnerability to Barr the narrative humanizes the character and makes the ultimate moral judgement delivered upon him all the more damning. Barr is not a faceless, nefarious hedge-fund speculator, but he is a self-made and politically canny entrepreneur. As such, it is the weight of the choices he has made on his way to the pinnacle of the Irish property market that eventually buries him and that stands as a salutary moral lesson by the close of Capital Sins. Barr’s momentary vision of a life outside speculative property development recedes as he turns his attention to financial news on the Bloomberg television channel. Once his attention is devoted to the morning’s developments and prospects, the narrative careers from a rhapsody on the robust nature of global, and

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the Irish, economies, to a crude inventory of Barr’s possessions and investments. For risk-takers such as Barr: Everything was up, the natural direction. Wall Street has broken new ground the night before; all the major European indices were soaring; the Irish stock market was on a winning streak that looked as if it could never end. In every little Irish town four millionaires had come into being, one for each of the four fields at the crossroads on which rows of houses and shopping malls had been built. Money making money, debt and property, property and debt; a magic formula; cash spouting like oil geysers.46

There is an explicit satirical intent to Cunningham’s opening panorama of the global financial markets, in which the inexorability of the market’s combined will is captured by the momentum of the prose style. The scene played out in Barr’s home is ubiquitous and one that we, in the Western world, find hard to avoid, as the ‘avalanche of business news is the main mechanism through which we have been resubjectified by the business world and turned in to compliant financial subjects’.47 The tentacular reach of global finance is progressively telescoped from its global epicentres to the opportunistic developments that pockmark the Irish landscape. As the satirical portrait alights upon the generic ‘locality’ of the Irish property scene, the narrative suggests that Irish national identity itself has been transvalued. Diagnosing this mutation of national identity with the advent of Celtic Tiger prosperity, Cunningham enlists both the enduringly trite nationalist iconography of the ‘four green fields’ of a united Ireland and the later puritanical nationalism of Irish ‘comely maidens dancing at the crossroads’ of rural Catholic Ireland. Rather than place their faith and trust any longer in old outdated mythologies, it seems to Cunningham that contemporary Ireland has sourced new icons of identity. Of course, as we analyse at length, this newly crafted Irish faith and belief is entirely wrapped up in the abstractions of indebtedness and the financial ‘magic formulae’ alluded to by Cunningham above. Barr is ranked among the premium players within the thriving property market, and it is worth attending to the way in which Barr and his peers are portrayed at length and in detail: He attended breakfast briefings in the Four Seasons with men like himself: broad-chested former block-layers and plumbers, chippies and plasterers who had made fortunes as if out of thin air; men who could scarcely believe their luck as they chewed black pudding and listened to analysts from London – cocky youngsters with actuarial degrees, but smart – tell them where the best returns lay. Private equity funds, hedge funds, contracts for difference. Twenty-six per cent per annum internal rate of return. So easy. They were a breed apart from ordinary people, from the PAYE workers they employed; they were the kings of the earth they spent so much time moving. So easy. The first generation of Irishmen to make money at home, to realise their true potential.48



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At first blush, the passage maintains the satirical impulse of Cunningham’s exposure of the transformation of Irish society, over the course of which a plenitude of investment options presented themselves to those with access to and knowledge of property development. This extract wheels out several familiar tropes of the Celtic Tiger, such as the distinction between the private sector risk-takers whose accruals dwarfed those of the pensioned public sector workers. Yet there is a palpable tension between the solidity and materiality of the erstwhile tradesmen, their physiques and their professions and the abstraction of the speculation in which they are now engaged. Equally, there is a clear divide between the natives of the London portfolio management industry and the opportunism of the accidentally wealthy Irish. The level of detail showcased here is designed to be a fraction of the satirical edge of the narrative – the listing of opportunities is supposed to be satirical, to expose the inequalities of the system. But it is really just a case that the novel is telling us what we already know, it is simply a matter of description here. Further evidence that the satire of Capital Sins is ineffectual is presented shortly after the outline of the Irish tradesmen in conference with their investment advisors, when we receive an inventory of Barr’s possessions.49 The sheer weight of accumulation is embodied by the extent of the list offered by Cunningham’s description. If the money seemed to appear out of thin air, as the previous extract proposed, then the next extract delivers the material incarnations of this spectral wealth: Tens of sites, from single plots to prairies beside motorways yet to be built and half-completed housing projects spread across eleven counties. Apartments that he’d trousered away in numerous schemes, units in shopping centres, bits of pubs and hotels, houses he’d have to look up the file to remember exactly where they were, a slice of a cinema, a sliver of a ballroom, ten per cent of a bowling alley. He owned one-third of a deep-sea trawler, a box in Old Trafford, a share in a private jet. Five Jack B. Yeatses, six Sean Scullys, a bronze sculpture by someone in Italy whose name he could never remember, just the price he’d paid for it. Locked in the vault of a bank with the paintings, Four serious cars; wines of sublime vintage. Blocks of season tickets for every kind of sport – he always gave them away to suppliers. A dozen racehorses in training.50

At one level this furnishes a recognizable checklist of Celtic Tiger purchasing priorities and conveys the extent to which those at the premium end of the property development spectrum hungrily accumulated material props to affirm their newly found status. Cunningham gestures to the widespread transvaluation of the Irish landscape and to the complacency with which that process of transvaluation was executed. Clientelism lubricates the operations of Albert Barr’s business world and facilitates a mutuality of access and opportunity to those of proven usefulness. The catalogue of Barr’s myriad investments and possessions assert themselves forcefully on the surface, but ultimately they represent little more than unfulfilled promises. Perhaps inevitably, given the literary context of his critique, Cunningham highlights the way in which Barr travesties the aesthetic and cultural values of his

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artistic acquisitions. While he can readily enumerate his assets, there is little in the way of qualitative value attached to them. Barr, it is implied, sees little beyond the future material values and yields of his investments regardless of their provenance and nature. There is a pattern of accumulation that reduces all artefacts to a financial denominator and views them as symbols of status. In this way, Capital Sins establishes a particular character profile for Albert Barr. He is both investor and consumer, and is rampantly engaged in both pursuits to the extent that he cannot account for all of his interests. Revealingly, there are some indications of the vulnerability of Albert Barr’s concerns. This is evident, first, in the allusions to the partial stakes he holds in a raft of diverse businesses and commodities, and, more generally, in the fact that so much of what Barr is purported to ‘own’ here is really a testament to his indebtedness, a reality that haunts him throughout the novel. The breadth of Barr’s portfolio is designed to satirize the excesses of Celtic Tiger Ireland, and, as we shall outline, this is just the first of several occasions where Cunningham keenly spotlights the rapacity of consumption of ‘boom-time’ Ireland. Additionally, the excess is not simply designed to contour our impression of the national capacity for material gratification, but, as earlier, it is part of the narrative’s initial colouration of Barr’s character. However, we can legitimately ask if either of these deployments of excess is effective? The previous itemization of Barr’s wealth is a satirical figuration of the nation’s fall into wild consumption during the Celtic Tiger years. Both the denoted specifics and associated patterns of consumerist behaviour are readily recognizable to any reader familiar with the Irish context. But questions remain about the effectiveness of this portrait and others of similar form. The putative ‘excess’ on display and under analysis is derived from a familiar menu of objects and places, and while Cunningham might believe that this constitutes an ironic commentary, it falls short of its primary intent. This failure is based upon the fact that it merely reiterates the language – admittedly in literary form – of consumerist voyeurism. Second, it eagerly fulfils readerly expectations and at the same time severely limits expectations of any literary engagement with Celtic Tiger Ireland, as Capital Sins. What we are presented with is not a clinical analysis of a crudely divisive economic system but a second-hand description of well-known commoditized types. Crucially, the novel offers us a housetrained catalogue of expenditure that accuses end-use behaviour rather than interrogating the system in which it is situated and that creates, sustains and benefits from consumption. There is no analysis of the system – its origins, its contradictions, the litany of excess is descriptive rather than analytic and is designed to create Barr as one exemplar through which we are all redeemed. As readers we can smirk at but also reprove the capaciousness of Barr’s compendium of possessions secure in the knowledge that ravenous entrepreneurs of this type will not prevail in the end. We are granted a measure of moral superiority to the principal, but not the only, ‘king of the earth’ that inhabits Cunningham’s ‘boom-time’ Dublin. The scale of Barr’s material desires for commodities and for carnal gratification guarantees and justifies the inevitability of his demise within this narrative. But Barr’s fall is not just inevitable,



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it is also absolutely essential to the moral economy of Capital Sins. Equally, this fall from affluence is actually a fall into redemption, whereby Albert is enjoined to confront his mortality and settle on the genuine priorities for his private life.

Finance, flesh and desire Eric Chester is the English-born chairman of Hibernian Universal Business Bank Ireland (HUBBI), the financial institution that underwrites Albert Barr’s myriad property projects. The milieu inhabited by Chester is portrayed by Cunningham in a fashion that is familiar from the extant corpus of contemporary finance fictions. Chester is a character that is fully convinced of his own infallible financial judgement, and, perhaps, his most significant investment is in the reliability of this talent. In a manner akin to our introduction to Barr, Chester enters the narrative expressing sexual hunger as he sits atop an exercise bike ogling a young female intern at his bank. As focalized through Chester, Inge’s athletic performance in the swimming pool is savoured and transformed into an explicitly sexual exercise: ‘He relished the power in her broad shoulders, the tantalizingly brief flash of her rump as she executed the turn at the far end, her devouring strength in the butterfly. What he would have given to have her lie on him and gulp him down? Subsume him into her! Swallowed whole!’51 As several critics have noted, the global financial crisis and the Irish iteration of ‘boom’ and ‘bust’ can be read as expressions of and ensuing crises of masculinity. The attention paid by Cunningham to the sexual appetites and impulses of the narrative’s protagonists is a clear acknowledgement of this trend in finance fiction. It is a feature that fully intersects with our problematization of the moral economy evident in Cunningham’s novel in the way that it shies away from any form of systemic critique or commentary. In highlighting the carnal desires of both Barr and Chester, Capital Sins embodies the hyperreality of finance capitalism, and this both aids and impedes the impact of the novel. Any finance fiction has to confront both the abstract calculus of finance capitalism and the uneven material accruals of this form of abstruse financial trading, and male sexual desire is one way in which Capital Sins gestures to the grounded physicality of those otherwise immersed in the recondite reaches of high finance. Of course, the extent to which attention is devoted to sexual desire is also legible as a figurative correlative of the undiluted financial avarice displayed by both Chester and Barr. However, the specificity of the sexual desires employed by Cunningham to materialize the financial chicanery of the Celtic Tiger returns us to the novel’s insistence on identifying the guilty parties. While it is important to note the novel’s consciousness of the materiality of finance, in this case the precise location of sexual appetite in the characters of Barr and Chester functions as part of the overall urge to ‘flesh’ out their characters as uncompromising and devouring personalities. In other words, the material embodiment of sexual desire loses out to the metaphorical function of sexual desire as financial greed and to the narratological and moral demands for character creation.

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If our initial meeting with Barr is one that showcases the cluttering of space with his possessions and his housing estates, Chester’s immediate significance rests in the global clamour for access to his precious time. As Barr populates the Irish landscape with residential and commercial properties, Chester doles out his advice in scheduled portions. Having mentally savoured Inge the intern, Chester reflects upon his upcoming day: Standing beneath the shower, post-tumescent, checking his Patek Phillipe watch that could give the time on four continents at a depth of 39,000 feet, the chairman began to worry about the day ahead. First the meeting of the executive committee at seven-thirty, at which fresh orange juice would be served. Then at eight-fifteen, a review of the preliminary figures for the second quarter over coffee and croissants, followed at nine-thirty by a meeting with the bank’s marketing and advertising people, plus a special PR firm from London, to discuss HUBBI’s bid to sponsor the 2012 Olympics (bacon butties would be served). At eleven the chairman needed to be at the International Financial Services Centre in the offices of an industrial conglomerate, a HUBBI client on whose board he served, where their upcoming billion-euro rights issue, underwritten by HUBBI, was being signed-off. Always a good four-course lunch at these meetings. The chairman patted his round, smooth stomach regretfully and stepped from the shower.52

Chester’s timetable is bookended by allusions to his physique, and both references underline his penchant for sensual gratification. The day’s schedule is worked over in his mind while, apart from his expensive timepiece, he stands naked in the gym’s shower, thus tying the daily exercises of the chairman’s business brokering with his voyeuristic daily exercise. But there is a temporal dimension to the invocation of his physicality also, as both his post-tumescence and protruding stomach can be figured as bodily incarnations of the aftermath. Yet as the detailed outline of his upcoming day indicates, the litany of commercial and management engagements will be seasoned with regular gastronomical rewards. In punctuating Chester’s account of his schedule with accompanying meals and drinks, Cunningham attempts to accentuate the voraciousness of Chester as a representative banking type. There is a clear satirical intent here, as the character is bluntly introduced as sexually predacious and who is sustained in his professional itinerary by the prospects of physical gratification. However, as we indicated with respect to Barr, the portraits of Chester are merely descriptive renderings of character types, or what Williams terms ‘typification’, that readily appease readerly expectations.53 The literal and figurative excesses suggested by Cunningham’s descriptions lose their satirical edge on account of their flat imitative form. Barr and Chester are immediately recognizable as stock characters from global finance fictions and from the sharp edge of post-Celtic Tiger commentary. It is this familiarity that actually disabuses such characters of any critical or ethical significance to the extent that they become strangely reassuring presences in the narrative. The reader is not prompted to



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account for themselves as they read Capital Sins, and there is little to excite any reflection on the system that facilitates these characters. While the particulars of physical satisfaction are detailed earlier, the meetings to which Chester is committed are loosely described, without any specific personal details. This is a feature of his post-lunch programme of engagements also, including ‘a three o’clock photo-call outside the bank with the ambassador of an African country whose name he worried he might not remember, whose new national parliament building HUBBI was sponsoring. At three-thirty he was opening the latest HUBBI branch in a Dublin suburb, then chippering directly to the Galway races where HUBBI was sponsoring the whole eight-race card.’54 Chester’s role as preeminent banking kingmaker in Ireland and as presiding authority at HUBBI infuses his mere presence with indelible import for those that secure a brief audience with him. The absence of details and the generality of the sketches that the focalizing Chester furnishes for the reader are indicative of this eminence – it is his presence that endows any of these occasions with significance, not that of any of the other attendees. He is the outsized arbiter of meaning and possibilities in this environment, whose financial intuitions are the dynamic agents of prosperity and opportunities. Cunningham gestures to the national and international reach of HUBBI’s and Chester’s influences above in the material edifice of the bank branch but equally in the soft political power of sponsorship. The latter also includes the Galway Race meeting, which became one of the more infamous instances of Celtic Tiger corrupted accommodation between banking and politics in Ireland. In a way this is an apt flourish in the flatly descriptive outline of Eric Chester. The aggregation of details from his schedule, as we have argued, is an accumulation of familiar features that have been recycled in media and popular cultural iterations of financial and banking cultures. The description of Chester’s routines is the novel’s gesture to ‘the closeness of “developers”, legislators, banking and media which underpinned the hegemonic tone of Celtic Tiger Ireland’.55 As Merriman continues, this ‘closeness’ ‘was not only not concealed, it was performed aggressively in elaborate displays of affluence, leisure and bonhomie’.56 The reference to the Galway races will be the most recognizable to an Irish readership. Indeed, any reader would be thoroughly disappointed not to have this event invoked, and Capital Sins cannot resist the temptation for the easy score here.

Theatre of investment Goose Point is launched with ceremonial excess at a five-star Dublin hotel, an event that is designed to burnish Barr’s public image and that of his project via the presence of the media. The spectacle is another instance where Cunningham pinpoints the passivity and cynicism of the Irish media in its uncritical celebration of an overheating economy. The launch event is a theatrical performance of the economistic value system embodied by Barr and Chester, and safeguarded in public discourse by a pliant and complicit mainstream media. Under this dispensation,

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Peadar Kirby surmises, economic growth was promoted ‘as an end in itself and equating social success with the enrichment and conspicuous consumption of wealthy elites’.57 Closely stage-managed and brimming with artifice, the launch of Goose Point is geared towards the generation of desire and the confirmation of faith in the Celtic Tiger success narrative. It is, as we have alluded to, a triumph of stagecraft and theatricality intended to rally investment and affirm the belief system that underpins the thriving property sector. Indeed, like so many of such events, it comes with its own object of adoration and a vision into the prospective future that is open to those willing to invest their money and trust in Albert Barr. Barr has enlisted obligatory scantily clad female models to perform as part of the theatre of desire, and he has commissioned a modelled version of the completed Goose Point site: Young men and women wearing headphones directed operations in the Grafton Suite of the Westbury Hotel. On a central dais the model of a town had appeared, spread out over an area the size of two snooker tables. Apartment blocks overlooked lakes and a golf course; a football stadium, complete with miniature players, could be found next door to shopping malls, schools, theatres and a grand-looking building with ‘Opera House’ scrolled above its façade were sprinkled throughout office blocks and towers of further apartments. A girl unwrapped plastic elephants and giraffes from tissue paper and placed them in appropriate locations within the zoo.58

The attendant staff bedecked with ‘headphones’ lend the scene an organizational urgency, as practicalities and, no doubt, positions are managed. Yet the model town around which the staff and patrons orbit betrays a lack of substance from the first reference made to it in the narrative. There is no account of how it has made its way into this situation; it is simply described as having ‘appeared’ in the room. So while it clearly takes a physical form as central to the drama of investment, its ‘appearance’ has intimations of a supernatural entrance that is unaccounted for by the narrative. This is fitting in the context of the flourishing debt economy in which access to the future incarnated in this scaled-down iteration is inextricably entwined with the abstractions of finance capitalism. The bathetic reference to the plasticity of the animal figurines that populate the proposed zoo at Goose Point speaks to this alignment of fantasies between the Celtic Tiger property investor and the hyperrealities of financial speculation. Ultimately the model offered by Barr is a signifier without a signified, as testified to by his own admissions below. The model is an index of a possible future that is cluttered with an array of props attesting to the prestigious nature of the development. It relays a story of prospects to those eager to invest in the chimeric economic ‘boom-time’ of Celtic Tiger Ireland. The account of amenities and adjacent facilities is rendered as one sentence by Cunningham and is a correlative of the future-oriented trajectory of the model’s symbolism. The impatience of the narrative to record the excessive opportunities on offer, of course, always takes us back to Barr, first as the architect of the enterprise, and, second, it recalls similar formal representations of Barr’s



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personal possessions and business concerns earlier in the novel. But as we have stressed throughout, such inventories of excess echo each other across the novel as descriptions, or ‘a realist mirror’, rather than as critically effective satire.59 They are feeding representative appetites within the action of the novel but also meet the literary expectations of the reader of post-Celtic Tiger finance fictions. The Goose Point project is Barr’s coronation as the apex developer in Ireland’s property ecosystem. Not only is the project physically sited on, and destructive of, a location that is replete with profound historical resonances, but Barr never fully intends to adhere to the promises he has made to those investing in the enterprise. It reminds us again of the extent to which Barr and his ilk are really engaged in the business of selling promises rather than actual realities. The Goose Point prospectus allows the prospective buyer to relish the extravagances afforded by their future indebtedness, but, in fact, they will be the only individuals expected to fulfil their promises with respect to Goose Point. While Barr believes that he will never be called upon to respect the promissory marketing materials, the investors will be enforced to endure and to fulfil the commitments of their debt-secured properties. By way of contrast to the scale of Barr’s own possessions and investments, the properties at Goose Point will be stripped of the details represented in the promotional catalogues once they take physical form. The abstract promises of marketing that are designed to solicit indebted investment dissolve once they meet the cold realities of construction: He calculated that since his in-built profit was understated by 20 per cent anyway, when it came to actually building the flats he could save a further 15 per cent by skimping on such specifications as the depth of foundations, the quality of concrete and steel used in construction, the finishes to doors and floors and the calibre of fire-escapes. When he added in the fact that he hadn’t the slightest intention in the world of completing the arboretum, children’s playground, miniature zoo, sculpture garden and ‘rose wilderness’ that formed part of the planning permission and whose cost had gone into arriving at the asking price of the flats, he reckoned he could give away three-and-a-half fucking flats for the price of two and still come out with a healthy profit.60

As we have maintained, Barr’s characterization functions as the primary moral gauge in the novel. At first, we are privy to the preponderance of material excess with which he has surrounded himself and bestowed upon his immediate family, while here we glimpse self-incriminating evidence of his thoroughly corrupted business practices. In these cases, of course, one leads to another – the capacity for indulgence is costed into the false promises of property retail. In addition to razing the expectations of the buyers, Barr is content to flout legal obligations and construction standards. Taken in sum, these are not unfamiliar tactics undertaken by property developers during the Celtic Tiger and, in that sense, once more confirm Barr’s consonance with non-fictional equivalents. The combined testimonies to Barr’s zeal for self-interested accumulation and deception, then, bear witness to his exemplarity as one of the foremost guilty

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parties in Capital Sins. The ease with which Barr amasses wealth and dissembles in business is matched by the ease with which the reader can recognize and accept his culpability. While our contention is that Barr and Chester are cast as transparently guilty in Capital Sins, on the evidence of the aforementioned extract Cunningham cursorily invokes the reader as a bit-part player in the more substantial morality tale. Barr is focused on minimizing his outlay on the structure of the apartments, whereas the buyer is lured with the promise of excessive content, and this latter point speaks to the expectations of the consumer-investor during the Celtic Tiger. The marketed version of opulence at Goose Point is specific to the novel and is offered to an anonymous and generalized public of consumers. But the combination of anonymity and the recognizability of heightened expectations implicates the readership of Capital Sins. The over-expectant property buyer in the novel is never personalized or identified, so the general approbation of such desires is easily reflected onto the reader. To an extent, the reader is tacitly encouraged to judge the indulgence of Barr’s duped investors but also to recognize the reality of such demands in their own experiences of the Celtic Tiger. This is a moment of potential readerly self-recognition, perhaps self-incrimination, with respect to the excesses of the Celtic Tiger property market. However, there is no unilateral apportioning of blame or guilt because that is reserved for Barr and Chester.

Myth, history and redemption Tailored into the central moral agon between the novel’s protagonists is an abiding concern with the agency of narrative as manifest in mythology, history and, for our current purposes, journalism. In the context of the economic transformation of Irish society during the Celtic Tiger, Cunningham is preoccupied with how each of these fields represents dominant or residual value systems. The novel teases out the narrative contestations that score the public life of the Celtic Tiger, as competing interests strive to wrest control of, and/or suppress, narratives that are contradictory of a specific politico-economic position. It is self-evident that both Albert Barr and Eric Chester are heavily invested in the panegyrization of their professional labours and of the accruals they reap, as well as those that permeate the broader economy. But as Capital Sins is a moral dramatization of the denouement of the Irish economic ‘boom’, the novel is transfused with the requisite dramatic tension by the redemptive journalistic crusade of Lee Carew. In grappling with the subdual of archaeological evidence that professes to reveal the true depths of Irish historical origins, Carew embodies a moral code contradictory to that regnant during the Celtic Tiger years. But, in a sense, Carew needs the origin story as much as the origin story needs him, and the novel dramatizes redemption stories at the national and at the personal levels. There is nothing remotely inevitable about Carew’s role in the exposure of Barr’s and Chester’s corruption of archaeological testimony about the artefacts unearthed at the site of the gargantuan Goose Point project. This is attributable to Carew’s own need for redemption from personal loneliness, alcohol abuse and professional



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failure. Having emerged from a failed marriage that ran parallel with his inability to succeed in the garage business inherited from his father, Carew’s life is marked by self-loathing and frustration. In essence, if Barr is an exemplar of Celtic Tiger cupidity and opportunism, then Carew is a prototypically down-at-heel writer– journalist waiting impatiently for material worthy of his talents. Both characters are entrapped in self-destructive cycles, both are in need of salvation and, to a large extent, they require each other to execute their respective redemptive liberations. Carew’s personal past is marked by serial abandonment given that his parents’ marriage collapsed on foot of his mother leaving his father and his own marriage ended with traumatic abruptness. His current journalistic work is populist and tabloid, motored solely by commercial considerations, and his only refuges aside from alcohol are his attentive pet dog and regular sessions with his therapist, Gwen. The latter’s work at a professional level fades into significance as the pair develop an enduring personal relationship and Gwen has a catalytic effect on Lee as a journalist. Rather than trade in cheap sensationalism, Gwen realizes that with the Goose Point relics, Carew possesses the raw material for a personal and professional redemption. It is here that Carew’s personal past blends with that of the nation, and through the authorship of an empirically sourced alternative national narrative the core moral thread of the novel takes shape. Carew must emerge from the squalor of the lowbrow commercial journalistic culture at the Sunday Trumpet newspaper, which is exemplified by his dissolute colleague, Eddie English. English is a failed, and deluded, devotee of Ernest Hemingway, with equivalent appetites for alcohol but devoid of the writing talent. In the schema of the novel Eddie English is another catalytic agent in Lee Carew’s transformation as he represents a possible future trapped in addiction and professional disappointment. English’s journalistic philosophy is summed up as follows: ‘Modern readers want sex, kinky relationships, fetishes, fashion! Did I say readers? Sorr-eee! We don’t have readers any more – we have consumers! Consumers are interested in brunch parties, boob jobs, bling! Interior design! Jeweller! What kind of clothes Elton John wears when he’s composing music! Celebrity chefs . . . anything but fucking news! We need sexy ideas!’61 While this a clear satirical reflection of a coarsening of popular culture, it also gestures to the broader significance of narrative agency as a thematic of the novel. Though couched in excessive terms, English’s point touches on the contest for narrative truth engaged in by Carew and Barr in Capital Sins. It is not just the physical reality of the Irish landscape that has endured a sudden and violent transvaluation, but the ways in which that reality is represented have also undergone startling processes of transvaluation. Indeed, there are echoes of Theodor Adorno’s analysis of popular culture in English’s dismal assessment of the role of the media in contemporary Ireland. In this respect Cunningham’s narrative is more on point than in his focus on the relative moralities of his chief male protagonists. There is no gainsaying the political and economic mutualities that characterized relations between the mainstream media and the political will to cheerlead the perpetuation of Ireland’s economic ‘miracle’. Carew’s role is in

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part to cast light upon the permeable thresholds that existed between the vested economic investments of political, banking and media constituencies. While Albert Barr’s model village holds centre stage at the Westbury launch event, artefacts from another erstwhile habitation at Goose Point have resurfaced with potentially ruinous consequences for the project. Having previously silenced the archaeological record during the process of securing planning permission, Barr is now confronted with a recrudescent campaign to give voice to the deeply historical settlement of the Fir Bolg. In reality the Fir Bolg are a mythical population who were the fourth group to settle in Ireland after arriving from Greece, and Cunningham co-opts the mythic form into his engagement with the politics of narrative. Carew acquires a collection of small arrowheads retrieved by his dog from the Goose Point excavations, the import of which is only revealed in dramatic and serendipitous fashion in a jeweller’s premises. Cunningham presents the revelation in a bluntly moralistic and quasi-heroic manner, with the jeweller assuming the role of villain guided by nothing more than venality and opportunism. As he attempts to procure the arrowheads from Carew at a cut price, they are joined in the discussion by one of Carew’s former archaeology lecturers, who confirms his own expertise and the priceless value of the artefacts: ‘I am Professor O’Dalaigh from the Department of Archaeology, University College Dublin, aye. I believe what my friend here has found are nothing less than the sacred decorations of the Fir Bolg. Another word out of you and I’ll have the Office of Public Works and the Fraud Squad in here to close you down.’62 The devious jewellery is a placeholder for the combined unscrupulousness of Barr and Chester within the moral economy of Capital Sins, and the micro-drama in his premises is merely a rehearsal of the larger moral confrontation that will, and must, eventuate between Carew and Barr. As myth enters history, indeed becomes historical, Carew is presented with the materials – physical and abstract – to craft his own and the country’s stories of redemption. With verification of the authenticity of the Fir Bolg artefacts, the alternative story of Goose Point must be told, but access to truth does not guarantee that such truth will be accepted or afforded widespread attention in a media environment dependent on the buoyancy of the Celtic Tiger. Just as the dispute with the avaricious jeweller was a staging post on the way to Barr, Carew’s next engagement is with the morally compromised mainstream media. Despite, even because of, the legitimacy of Carew’s claims for the Fir Bolg they cannot be published as they flatly contradict the narrative expectations and requirements of ‘the comfortable consensus [. . .] between government, the media and business interests’.63 Hoping that the Sunday Trumpet will afford an outlet for the contradictory claims and values of the archaeological record, Carew is edified as to the priorities and allegiances of the media. The story is forcefully dismissed by the editor, Dick Bell, who is another occupant of the exclusively male Celtic Tiger rogues’ gallery ranged against Carew’s moral campaign. Within the schema of the novel, Bell’s position is consistent with the reality of media dogma during the property ‘boom’, which ‘reflected the interests and viewpoints of political and economic elites’.64 Prior to soliciting Bell, Carew had shared a draft of the story with his former colleague,



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Eddie English, who in turn passed it onto another newspaper. Unbeknownst to Carew, the story has already been published and the meeting with Bell is actually centred on the latter’s insistence that Carew author a full retraction and debunking of the Fir Bolg narrative. The media nexus is thus portrayed as a context that is riven with disloyalty and opportunism, and once again it falls to Carew to endure and to transcend the vested interests and hypocrisies of a morally corrupted industry. In the service of financial speculation and political expediency, the media facilitates the fabrication of narrative versions of historical and contemporary realities. Carew is tutored by Bell on the irrelevance of his evidence and the obsolescence of the values that they might represent. In sync with the previous set piece at the jeweller’s premises, the exchange between Bell and Carew is an enactment of the novel’s morality. Bell assures Carew that the only story of his that will see the light of day is a thorough dismissal of his original Fir Bolg ‘exclusive’. The Fir Bolg will be safely re-consigned to myth, losing any problematic purchase on the historical reality of the Celtic Tiger and exiled from interfering with the contingent, but dominant, truths of the ‘boom’. From Bell’s perspective ‘the truth is simply a point of view. Truth is a flawed and dangerous concept that has created evil dictators and led to the deaths of millions. The word I prefer is trust. Trust involves people, whereas truth is like daylight – it’s forever changing. Trust is permanent. Get it?’65 Of a piece with the unabashed avarice of the jeweller and the undiluted materialism of Barr and Chester, Bell’s grandstanding exposition of the precariousness of truth doggedly adheres to the moral script of the novel. In addition, implicit in the breed of trust is the primacy of clientelism and cabalistic politicking that motored so much of the operations of the Celtic Tiger. But of course, as becomes clear as the narrative works itself to a conclusion, Bell’s investment in trust is just as disposable as Carew’s truth. At this juncture, Carew has faced down two opportunities to parlay his story and the artefacts into financial gain, and twice he has refused, thereby remaining free to progress with his personal and professional redemption.

Aftermath, fall-out and form Exemplary of the corrupted culture of trust namechecked by Dick Bell is Barr’s dependent and profitable relationship with his father-in-law and government minister, Kevin Steadman. Again in highlighting the integral nature of political coteries to the workings of the Celtic Tiger property ‘boom’, Cunningham confirms extant knowledge as well as the moral expectations of the reader. It is only when Steadman passes away unexpectedly that Barr realizes the extent of his vulnerability and exposure without his father-in-law’s shielding influence. Taking a moment to digest his new-found precarity, Barr reflects: ‘It would never be the same again, Albert realised as the Taoiseach went back into the safety of his huddle; the finality of death had never been quite so explicit. It was amazing that it had taken him all these years to appreciate that when a powerful man dies, his power dies with him.’66 This is the first instance late in the novel when Barr’s proximity to death

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provides clarity for him with respect to his imminent professional decline, and, later, the simplification of personal priorities. It is as if the immediate starkness of mortality launders out his corrupted inclinations to speculate and to consume. Deprived of political connection and on the precipice of financial ruination due to the ossification of the debt economy, Barr is ensnared by his own previous hubristic passion for investment. Without the insulating mutualities of financial self-interest Barr is now ‘Drained to a place beyond misery, cut off from cash, beset by medical complications, [and] he dimly realised that he was a tiny casualty in a worldwide drama that he was powerless to control. His lawyers promised a spirited fight to fend off the building society in the courts, even as they cautioned that Albert’s arrears were a problem.’67 The attention to Barr’s somatic deterioration is symbolic of the alacrity with which the lifeblood of the economy is depleting, and it foreshadows his more acute brush with death soon after. But, as yet his self-realization is skewed and incomplete given that he appears to absolve himself of immediate implication in and responsibility for his impending bankruptcy. Indeed, as far as the novel is concerned, the primary court at which Barr must answer for his precipitous fall into destitution is that of his status-driven wife, Medb-Marie. Painted as physically ravishing and insatiably materialistic, Medb-Marie’s retribution for his financial failure is Barr’s overriding worry once the realities of his situation become clear. As we will detail, in contrast to the abstract financial investigation that is little more than a gestural or symbolic pursuit of Chester, Cunningham affords Barr a solidly material reckoning with his insolvency. This reckoning takes the shape of an axe to the back of his head once Medb-Marie learns of their perilous financial reality. In blackly comic guise, Cunningham subjects Barr to a prolonged violent pursuit and eventual assault by an inebriated Medb-Marie. This is the sum of Barr’s restitution for his career of risk-based speculation and investment, as the only reference to the character after he is seen lifeless and bloodied is when Carew informs Gwen that after five months of unconsciousness ‘Albert Barr opened his eyes for the first time this morning. [. . .] He asked for his wife.’68 Though reported second-hand, Barr’s literal awakening is clearly of figurative import, as this is his second clarifying encounter with mortality. There is a measure of symmetry to the Barr marriage at this point, as both are guilty of causing the other suffering, so now both have the opportunity for mutual forgiveness. Barr’s life has been stripped to its barest essentials, a fact that he acknowledges and an experience that is required within the moral economy of the novel. This is not the case for his facilitator, Eric Chester, who absconds and is duly demonized with apparent retrospective insight by now rebellious media analysts and assorted economic commentators. The description of how Chester’s hedging of HUBBI’s future, in the face of almost inevitable failure, is significant in terms of the novel’s adjudicatory form. Chapter Twenty opens with an extended interrogatory exposition of the terms of inquiry into the bank’s implosion: ‘Media commentators and government regulators, law makers, law enforcers and a Dail Select Committee would take hundreds of hours to sift through the minutes of HUBBI executive committee meetings, searching for the moment when HUBBI



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ceased to be run as a bank and became an extension of Eric Chester’s personality.’69 The narrative unquestionably takes a jaundiced view here of the possibility of justice being served on one of the prime architects of the financial crash. The catch-all cast of investigators arrayed to pursue the singular truth of the demise of this financial behemoth echoes the aforementioned lists of possessions and props accumulated and promised at the height of the ‘boom’. But there are also resonances between the teleology of the government investigation and that of Capital Sins, in so far as both are preoccupied with the ‘characters’ at the centre of the economic ‘boom’ and its seismic unravelling. This is underscored by the final report into the banking scandal: ‘In the course of his three-hundred-thousand word report on the matter, the director of corporate enforcement would use the word “megalomania” thirty-two times.’70 The sheer scale of the report is a mark of ostentation rather than a recognition of it as a piece of forensic financial detective work. Furthermore, because Chester proves elusive the investigative tome dedicated to his megalomaniac culpability is, akin to the model village of Goose Point, a signifier without a signified. The object of the semiotic act is absent and unattainable. Just as the desires and the expectations of the property investors in Goose Point are deferred, so too material justice in the physical form of Eric Chester is delayed and deferred. But as we have argued, with its attention to and identification of guilty individual characters, Capital Sins ‘affirms the validity of the model [of characterization] it invokes’ and positions itself as a form of literary proxy for restorative justice.71 Carew is not just a chronicler-witness to the authentic heritage of the Irish nation; on the day that Barr reveals his ruination to Medb-Marie, Carew is working on the Barr property and witnesses the decisive violent assault. But due to unfortunate timing, the Polish au pair, Christiana, emerges from the house to a scene that implicates Carew as the assailant. This affords the novel the opportunity to cement his role as the singularly redeemed character by its resolution. Coinciding with Barr’s awakening from a coma, Carew receives news that the traumatized au pair will return from Poland and retract her testimony confirming his role in the attempted murder of Barr. Thus truthful witness will bear out the innocence of Carew and justice will be done. As the novel winds to a close, then, trust in truthful testimony is reaffirmed and the moral teleology of the narrative arrives at its endpoint. Chester is absent but presumed guilty, Barr is physically scarred and financially broken, while Carew will be released from his wrongful incarceration to a life of personal and professional promise. It is this final point that raises a last key issue with respect to the formal patterning of Capital Sins. During his five-month stay at Arbour Hill prison Carew has completed a chapter of his proposed novel based on his recent experiences but changing the relevant names. He then begins to read to Gwen: ‘Sometimes on those Saturday mornings Albert wondered if he was ever going to be free. To soar beyond the worries and be truly happy, to wake up one Saturday morning and not have to think about the net-net, the bottom line . . .’72 These are the opening sentences of Capital Sins, and, while this moment of return to the novel’s outset might be legible as narrative self-reflexiveness, it actually embodies the novel’s drive for moral restoration

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mentioned earlier. Though circularity is introduced here, it is overshadowed by the linearity of form and content that dominates the story itself. We can concede that Cunningham is openly alluding to Joycean historical circularity with this closing narrative pivot, but any flirtation with literary experimentation or moral ambiguity does not distract from the core morally dichotomized story of guilty excess, personal loss and redemption. From the plethora of competing and contradictory narrative voices and forms that punctuate the novel, this closing gesture is not just a moral restoration but a restitution of agency and authorship in the redeemed character of Lee Carew. There is a role for the writer of fiction ‘as a moral agent’, but the difficulty surfaces when the fiction evolves into moralizing and when the moral reflection is singular and direct.73 Susan Sontag elaborates on her vision of the writer’s moral agency, via the work of Nadine Gordimer, and she suggests that writers succeed in this vein when they ‘evoke our common humanity in narratives with which we can identify, even though the lives may be remote from our own. They stimulate our imagination. The stories they tell enlarge and complicate – and, therefore, improve – our sympathies. They educate our capacity for moral judgment.’74 Identification in these terms is not merely the recognition of sundry details of ‘boom-time’ consumerist excess, which at times can lapse into a form of Celtic Tiger literary tourism. Both Open-handed and Capital Sins operate on the bases of predetermined and overdetermined moralities, allowing for little breathing space beyond their own moral imagination. The net effect is that, at one level, the novels indulge the reader’s expectations of post-Celtic Tiger finance fictions. But, at another level, they do a disservice to the reader by evading the educational possibilities alluded to by Sontag.

CChapter 2 THE POSSIBILITIES OF SHAME IN DERMOT BOLGER’S TANGLEWOOD (2015)

Credit, debt and morality Drawing upon the pioneering scholarship of J. G. A. Pocock on the intellectual underpinnings of Britain’s eighteenth-century financial revolution, Peter Knight returns to Pocock’s contention that ‘the emerging genre of the novel did not merely provide representations of how everyday life was becoming transformed by market interactions, but actively taught its middle class readers how to think about and engage with a credit economy’.1 The imaginative ‘work’ undertaken by the reader of literary realist fiction, then, furnishes them with both an openness, and a capacity, to engage with and to accept, the ‘imaginative’ and ‘fictional’ work required of the emerging capitalist credit economy. Such arguments rehearse wellestablished arguments regarding the mutuality of literary realism and neoliberalcapitalist social relations.2 As Knight continues, surveying the current critical field on this relationship: ‘The wider contention of this recent work, then, is that cultural forms such as the novel do not merely provide epiphenomenal reflections of the pre-existing market, but through their imaginative work help shape the very forms of capitalism they narrate.’3 Knight’s assessment provides us with one side of ongoing debates on the role and the possibilities of literary fiction in broaching the material iniquities and ethical problematics of the global financial crisis. Representative of the other end of the critical spectrum is Shaw’s Crunch Lit, which, in part at least, divines redemptive critical qualities within a range of texts dubbed ‘crunch lit’. For Shaw, this genre of contemporary literary fiction mediates the ‘the paralysis of the global banking system as it ground to a halt during 20078’.4 Additionally, in Shaw’s view: ‘Crunch Lit employs fictional representations of real-life events to emphasize both the trauma of market dislocation and the impact of a breakdown in global economics on the life of ordinary individuals.’5 There is little that appears controversial with what Shaw articulates here. The analysis draws attention to the key foci of trauma and aftermath characteristic of many postcrunch narratives, as well as referencing the scalar relations that obtain between globalized capital and the indebted, mortgaged ‘local’ individual. Yet, Shaw, at times, seems to consecrate the cultural and the literary as educational and as uncomplicatedly redemptive agents in the post-crash period. As we shall discuss,

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Dermot Bolger’s Tanglewood (2015) is contiguous with the kinds of narratives surveyed by Shaw in Crunch Lit. Bolger’s novel is spatially and temporally located precisely adjacent to many of the British and American narratives addressed in Shaw’s analysis. Though Dublin-centric in its geographical context, Tanglewood circulates around the outer edges and closing stages of the Celtic Tiger, and it is a narrative of hope and ego being duped and blinded by their own equal selfabsorption. Bolger’s realist narrative simmers with shame, betrayal and gendered crises, and is always working its way towards a form of redemptive resolution. As we shall encounter, Bolger’s narrative gradually descends into a form of moralizing realism, embracing the formal conservatism of Knight’s argument, while aspiring for the corrective critical stance surveyed by Shaw in her review of ‘crunch lit’. In more specific terms, Bolger’s novel’s relevance for broader critical reflections on Celtic Tiger Ireland is its deployment of shame, first, as a thematic internal to the novel, but also as foundational to the ethical and political position of the novelist. The narrative tackles the affective impacts of consumerism and of staggering indebtedness during the Celtic Tiger, and it establishes a clear and problematic moral architecture of its own as it offers a representative tale from the annals of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger property ‘boom’. With its origins in English legal conventions of the Middle Ages, our contemporary notions of ‘mortgage’ revolve around the ideas of death and redemption: the ‘dead pledge’. The ‘pledge’ undertaken by the debtor concludes, or dies, when the obligation to repay has been fulfilled, or when the ‘mortgaged’ property is seized through foreclosure.6 Home ownership, then, fetishized in the Irish context as an incontrovertible assertion of economic agency, in fact, depends upon the investment of absolute faith in a documentary promissory note rather than any immediate assumption of ownership of the concreted asset. The house itself is the ‘pledge’; the bricks and mortar are the materialization of the abstract promise to repay the amortized debt. First and foremost, the assumption of a mortgage is the agreement to take on an amortized debt; it is a decision to locate oneself within the plot structures and narrative possibilities of long-term indebtedness. As the literature on the cultural and political uses of debt amply illustrates, debt has become a normalizing and moralizing agent within neoliberal and financialized capitalist societies. At root, debt is a promise that has taken on quantifiable proportions and ‘it is a promise that has become corrupted by both math and violence’.7 In the contemporary moment access to indebtedness and responsibility for the discharge of any debt undertaken have become new and powerful means of moral adjudication. As Fred Botting contends, echoing other interventions on the cultural politics of debt: ‘Debt establishes the foundation of morality and culture, both materially and economically [. . .] debt underpins the way those codes are inscribed and enforced. Breeding “an animal with the right to make promises” requires painful training to ensure that humans pay their debts, remember their desires, keep their word, and plan for and anticipate the future.’8 For Botting, as for others, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault and, latterly, Maurizio Lazzarato, the production of modern subjectivities under capitalism depends upon the



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inauguration of an indebted ‘subject’. Christianity impresses the indebtedness of humanity to its martyred Messiah. Likewise within the sphere of the normative family unit, cross-generational indebtedness for life and subsequent opportunities is one of the cornerstones of family relations. Thus, indebtedness reaches into myriad formative and conditioning recesses of, as Botting terms it, modern socialization. But under neoliberal finance capitalism the subject is heralded as a productive but also indebted individual; indebtedness is not just a matter of duty to those that bequeath to us in the past. Under the strictures of the debt economy the life narrative of the economic subject is thoroughly conditioned by the materiality of indebtedness and its associated affects. For Étienne Balibar: The life of the indebted subject thus appears as an endless race governed by the calculation of her debt’s interests: how much has been repaid, how much remains to pay – meaning how much lifetime can be expected before redemption if this is to be achieved before death. The question of the indebted subject is therefore not only a psychological one, it is also political. [.  .  .] Neo-liberal discourse and the language of financial advertising describe the individual not only as an entrepreneur of himself (valorizing his capacities as a ‘human capital’ and calculating his own profitability), but also as a micro-business whose rational behavior is to maximize the ratio of his revenues compared to his debts.9

Though referring to the American property market, Appadurai’s remarks on what he terms ‘the contemporary cosmology of capitalism’ could just as easily be applied to the recent Irish experience of amortization, given that it ‘has become part of the common sense of any homeowner in this country, [this] is a testimony to the depth at which the abstracting logics of contemporary financial capitalism have become naturalized as common sense’.10 When we survey several of the literary fictional engagements with Celtic Tiger Ireland, it is noteworthy the extent to which death, redemption, as well as affiliated affects such as guilt and, in particular, shame populate the macro- and microstructures of these texts. It is in this context that we will tease out how and where Bolger’s Tanglewood exploits such formal and thematic patterning, and we shall address the varying degrees of success with which Bolger mediates these combined themes and affects. Given that Bolger’s narrative is centred on exposing a dramatic transactional failure during the latter stages of the Celtic Tiger property ‘boom’, it is unsurprising that the novel’s structure takes on overtly spatialized pattern. Specifically, Tanglewood consists of four sections and thirty-two chapters, which is an unmissable reference to the geographical layout of the entire island of Ireland. Of course, this spatial arrangement itself is consequential on waves of long-term historical change, conflict and contestation. Thus space and time, geography and history are brought into alignment in the macro-form of the narrative. Such a design raises a number of pertinent issues for our argument, not least the premium placed on the politics of space, and the tendency to transvalue land according to varieties of economic and political affiliation and conviction.

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The durability of the Republic of Ireland’s vexed relationship with Northern Ireland is clearly implicated in Bolger’s spatial configuration of his textual narrative also, but this is less central to our discussion, though not entirely absent in terms of the text’s attentiveness to international ethnic violence. The central plot detailing private and public failure in the combustible Irish property frenzy is a fraction of the wide-ranging whole of the Celtic Tiger property ‘boom’ – a synecdochic figuration deployed critically by a highly sceptical Bolger. But Bolger also figuratively frames this textual fragment of greed within the spatial, and visual, metaphor of the map of Ireland. Bolger, then, underscores the local, ‘nationality’ of the crisis by way of combinatory figurations; yet Ireland is never entirely isolated in terms of its conspirators in greed, or in its potential saviours. Despite the figurative ‘locality’ of the novel, Bolger ultimately sites the action, and the Celtic Tiger, in the global context. From the perspective of our attention to the affective possibilities of Tanglewood, it will be necessary to unpack the affective relationships in Bolger’s moral economy, together with the role of shame within the debt economy of Celtic Tiger Ireland.

Shame and society Shame is an affect that affirms our humanity and the ways in which that humanity is rooted within, and itself dependent upon, shared values and experiences within broader communities. Not only is shame ‘an intimate human reaction but at the same time it has social pretensions’.11 The galvanizing potencies of shame rest in the fact that, as Walter Benjamin further states ‘shame is not only shame in the presence of others, but can also be shame one feels for them’.12 It almost goes without saying that shame and its frequent bed-fellow, guilt, have been recurring default characteristics of Irish society, particularly given the historically protracted influence of the Catholic Church in Ireland. There was a well-established pattern of the colonization of affect for conservative ideological and theological purposes. This is elaborated upon, via Freud, by Seán Kennedy in an analysis of shame, austerity and the Celtic Tiger. Kennedy writes that ‘Moral masochism stems from “shame and a sense of guilt,” and tends to proliferate where “cultural suppression of the instincts” is a dominant feature of social life. It would not be difficult to apply these observations suggestively in the Irish case, where guilt, repression, and Catholicism have been virtually synonymous.’13 In particular, shame is all too often laden with negative connotations when cited or mentioned in the Irish context. In this respect, the oppressive moral economy inflicted upon Ireland by the Catholic Church, as well as its alignment with and nourishment of a narrow-gauge patriarchal version of Irish national identity has dictated the theoretical and political conditions of possibility for shame as a revolutionary affective resource. In other words, from a historical perspective ‘the affective dimension to the transmission of cultural values’ in Ireland has been overdetermined and attenuated.14 Indeed, texts such as Tanglewood not only display their conservatism in the operationalization of self-loathing shame affects, but in representing rigidly modelled occasions



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of shame, the novel is symptomatic of a broader pattern of moral and affective hijacking, whereby shame makes us feel bad so that the nation can feel better.15 Rather than facilitating a comprehensive analysis of the conditions and systems that gave rise to the ‘shameful’ behaviour, the kinds of national atonement and shaming readily apparent in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland have been designed to let the country ‘move on’ from the economic crash. The emotional energy of potential protest has been siphoned off into the affective work of austerity.16 The demise of the Celtic Tiger, with the resultant expiation of the nation’s sins before the agencies of global finance, is a prompt to rethink communal and individual relationships with guilt and shame in the Irish context. For many this was an opportunity to exploit an apparent historically grounded capacity for shaming among the Irish population. One of the core arguments was that everyone had played a role in the ‘boom’, and consequently had to partake of the painful process of national shaming for such wildly excessive and irresponsible behaviour. For Kennedy this tactical diversion and ‘the move to moralize the debate was taken to obscure the real origins of the crisis in the deregulated frenzies of global financial capital, as well as structural problems at the heart of the single European currency’.17 In a sense our whole-hearted investment in the present and the future, as defined by the debt economy of global finance, now returned us to the past, with an ignoble retreat into familiar patterns of guilt and shame at such presumptuous actions. These considerations raise questions about the nature of shame, the functions of shame and the politicization of shame in given sociohistorical contexts. ‘Society’s shaming behavior’, as Martha Nussbaum cautions, ‘is not to be easily trusted, or taken at face value. It can easily get out of control. [. . .] Such reflections should make us more skeptical about even the moralizing type of shaming.’18 Of course, what is often lost in reflections on the Celtic Tiger and the post-Celtic Tiger period are the many shameful aspects of the Celtic Tiger period itself. While shame and guilt attach themselves to the condition of indebtedness, those who remained resolutely impoverished during the ‘boom’ should force us to rethink and broaden the reckoning with shame and the Celtic Tiger period.19 For our purposes, we will simply look at a representative literary text, one that acts as a wedge with which to open up considerations of the political and ethical possibilities of shame in the current climate. Bolger’s Tanglewood represents an engagement with shame and the Celtic Tiger and is thus of interest in this context. However, its relevance is also that it is consistent with the majority of critical engagements with shame and the Celtic Tiger in that it is moralizing and utterly ignores or is unaware of the liberating and creative capacities of shame. In the Irish context, using Bolger’s text as a philosophical interlocutor we can identify the common patterns of engagement with shame and the Celtic Tiger, and also introduce new theoretical and philosophical resources for future, more liberating conceptualizations of shame. Voicing the ways in which both shame and guilt form part of our convergence towards normative patterns of social interaction, and recapitulating the social elements of shame, June Price Tangney and Ronda L. Dearing suggest that ‘the

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experience of shame or guilt can guide our behavior and influence who we are in our own eyes. On the other hand, shame and guilt are inextricably linked to the self in relationship with others. These emotions develop from our earliest interpersonal experiences – in the family and in other key relationships.’20 These affective experiences, then, are constitutive of our early socialization into accepted codes of moral and ethical behaviour, as well as informative of our self-image as it is fashioned in relation to our intimate ‘others’. As Tangney and Dearing conclude, such emotional responses are foundational to the iterative construction of the self and, consequently, to the development, and maintenance, of broader moral economies; thus, ‘Shame and guilt are thus both “self-conscious” and “moral” emotions: Self-conscious in that they involve the self evaluating the self, and moral in that they presumably play a key role in fostering moral behavior.’21 Of particular concern to our discussion is the idea that shame involves ‘the self evaluating the self ’, the notion that some form of negative judgemental process is attached to the experience of shame. This certainly seems to be the implication across the empirical research undertaken by Tangney and Dearing in Shame and Guilt. From this perspective, shame, particularly, is focused on the self, and shameful affects target the failings of the person rather than any specific action taken by the individual. The experience of shame is painful and compels the individual to reflect, most often negatively and critically, on the very core of their personality. As Tangney and Dearing continue later in their analysis: ‘shame and guilt are self-conscious emotions. Each centers on negative evaluations of the self or the behavior of the self. In fact, one could argue that shame is the quintessential selfconscious emotion.’22 There is an interiorization of focus by the shamed individual, as they spotlight the fundamentals of their personality in the process of critical self-evaluation. Of course, this is most commonly a response to the actual, or perceived, transgression of enculturated social norms, and in this respect, ‘shame and guilt are moral emotions that arise from discrepancies between standards (morally or socially prescribed) and aspects of our behavior or ourselves’.23 Yet while shame and guilt might be legible as ‘moral emotions’, they elicit divergent forms of response in the critically self-reflective individual. According to Tangney and Dearing’s research, guilt opens up avenues of solidarity between subjects, whereas, in sharp contrast, shame is self-punishing and isolating. As they outline: ‘In contrast to the apparently synergistic effect between guilt and empathy, there is reason to suspect that feelings of shame may actually interfere with empathic responsiveness. Shame is an acutely painful experience, involving a marked selffocus that is incompatible with other-oriented empathy reactions.’24 Feelings of guilt with respect to a misguided action or expression are alleviated by recompense or restitution, whereas the burden of shame drives one inward and away from confrontation with the ‘other’. From ethical and political viewpoints, Tangney and Dearing’s argument renders shame almost without use, other than in the production of negative self-evaluation and the insistence on conformity – in sum, the portrait of shame detailed thus far is resolutely inflexible and furnishes little in the way of creative political or ethical thought on the experience or the history of shame. In this vein, our discussion needs to broaden its vision to include the



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alternative positions on shame, to explore, as our title indicates, ‘the possibilities of shame’, rather than the impositions of shame. Rehearsing the usual typology of shame in her provocative intervention, Blush: Faces of Shame, Elspeth Probyn touches upon some familiar notions regarding the destructive and alienating nature of shame. As she describes: ‘Shame makes us feel small and somehow undone. It’s no wonder that in most societies, shame tends not to be talked about, let alone vaunted. [. . .] shame lingers deep within the self. Being shamed is not unlike being in love.’25 In the opening part of her discussion, Probyn draws upon the seminal work on shame by Silvan Tomkins.26 For Tomkins, shame is integral to our humanity and when triggered and felt, shame ‘shows most clearly the human organism in its frailty’.27 Yet while shame is embodied and biological, it is also potentially political, and in these ways it can reach out beyond the mortified and shamed individual body – most commonly, as we have noted, in the cementation of cultural values. In short, shame and its bodily manifestation in blushing, for instance, are indexical of ‘infractions of social codes’.28 But of more pressing concern for our ensuing discussion are Probyn’s thoughts on one’s sense of belonging and feelings of displacement-induced shame. In her estimation the shame of the cultural outsider is fed by a deep desire to fit in and an abiding interest in being able to do so – to belong where you don’t belong. [.  .  .] But the disjuncture of place, self, and interest can produce a particularly visceral sensation of shame. It is felt in the rupture when bodies can’t or won’t fit the place – when, seemingly, there is no place to hide.29

Without making facile analogies between individual subjects and the nationstate, the aggregated Irish experiences of economic ‘boom’ and ‘bust’ seem to warrant investigation in terms of Probyn’s theorization of shame affects and the consequences of reimagining the political and cultural possibilities of such a process. If shame is social and socializing, then this raises the prospect that shame affects can be employed and re-cast in less oppressive and self-destructive modes. Can we rethink the ‘shame’ of our Celtic Tiger excesses in ways that are not selfharming and that do not commit us to repetitive and damning self-denigration, as well as, ultimately, political apathy? Are we content to digest singular patterns of individual and national shaming, while remaining devoid of the appetite for meaningful protest against our destructive shaming by our own government and other implicated exogenous political and economic agents? One of the effects of the economic recession is heightened levels of private, individualized indebtedness, and, for Silvia Federici: ‘what the new literature on debt has not sufficiently highlighted is the role that the new forms of debt play in the destruction of communal solidarity.’30 Thus in the context of our argument, we can correlate the atomizing effects of neoliberal capitalism (and its debt economy), and the affective, and isolating, experience of shame. The fetishization of individuality under capitalism lends itself to the exercise of oppressive shame affects. If shame is an attack on, or critical scrutiny of, the ‘global self ’, then the

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competitive atomization of Western society appears as an appropriate context for such experiences. However, in a reading heavily refracted through the writings of Gilles Deleuze, Aislinn O’Donnell delineates the ways in which shame affects can be productive of a politics of desire that is resistant to the ‘smooth’ surfaces and consensual norms of capitalism. Underscoring the capacity for shame to re-configure a less individualistic moral economy, O’Donnell suggests that [i]f shame reveals our inability to be solitary, isolated, atomic or disconnected, it can help to counter the individualism of liberalism and capitalism without falling prey to the nihilism of fascism by operating at the level of desire and affect. It begins with the moment that one sees the intolerable. [. . .] In this respect, shame has the potential to be a protopolitical and proto-ethical affect because it suspends and precludes the ready invocation of clichés and explanations.31

Deleuze perceives shame less as a stable emotion, rather as part of a rhizomatic configuration of affects, one that is consistent with his broader philosophical attentiveness to the flows that are constitutive of subjectivities. This is how O’Donnell’s understanding of shame affects can potentially produce a resistant politics of desire through an affective defiance of logic and in the form of a Deleuzean ‘becoming’ rather than a grounded and bounded subject or ‘being’.32 Of course, Deleuze’s politicization of affect is consistent with his critique of static emotional gestures, as in his view, emotion is party to the delimited representational logic of capitalism and reason. From a Deleuzean standpoint ‘affect is often distinguished from emotion, and in the most general terms used to signal investments in prelinguistic embodiment, generative intensity and the inassimilable relations of becoming [. . .] In the most optimistic readings, affect offers us a radical contrast to theories of emotion that conservatively bind us to an already coded world of objects.’33 Picking up on this notion of affective intensity, O’Donnell explains that shame may engender an urge to hide, an impulse to retreat from shared space and interaction, but the force of shame re-affirms our dependence on others. Shame is fundamental to our experience of difference and, as Jennifer Biddle outlines in analogous terms to O’Donnell’s, ‘shame also shapes and defines, and makes for the very delineations called self-identity. It structures, necessarily, we come to realise, the difference(s) we call cultural. Indeed, that shame and its visitations are highly individuated – in a sense, contentless and generalised, as I describe – is what makes for its very productivity.’34 The affective intensity of the shaming experience, instead of being apprehended as a debilitating and isolating experience, is decoded as a seedbed for the aforementioned politics of desire. In this respect, intensity is a disruptive agent, as it potentially subverts and challenges the linearity of our narrative present.35 The intense experience is a moment or condition of possibility and, as O’Donnell concludes: Instead, a politics of desire requires disruption at the level of affective life in order to create a space for different ways of seeing, perceiving and thinking. Shame can



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be a precipitative force for both art and thought as it interrupts, however briefly, the stupidities, cruelties and clichés that foster insensibility and indifference to life, to possibility and to becoming.36

Bolger’s artistic meditation upon Ireland’s economic ‘crash’ is, in the light of O’Donnell’s, via Deleuze, and Probyn’s work on the creative possibilities of shame, merely indicative of a repetitive pattern of destructive affective responses. In its adherence to a strictly realist form and in its attachment to an unsophisticated moralism in its narrative content, Tanglewood misses an opportunity in its attention to shame. Put simply, Bolger’s willingness to confront shame in the context of postCeltic Tiger Ireland is necessary, but, as we shall witness, the delivery is predictable and reductive. Rather than seeing shame as an ‘event’, there is a hypostatization of affect as Bolger insists on presenting shame as a ‘form’.37 The narrative arc of Tanglewood moves inexorably towards the shaming of its male protagonists, as it is impelled by an undeniable need to give form to shame in its resolution. The consequence of such a narrative pattern is a closing down of ethical possibilities and an abortion of ambiguity and complexity. In the parlance operative earlier, Bolger’s formal realism merely incarnates the rigidity and conservatism of its ethical and affective impulses – it does not accommodate the ‘intensity’ or ‘disruption’ that might habilitate ‘another way of thinking ethics and politics’.38 Thus the affective, the ethical and the literary coalesce in Tanglewood to produce a singular form of shame, a combination that is addressed by Timothy Bewes in his study of literary shame. He arrives at the conclusion that When it comes to literature, a practice that, in the modern period, involves the transfiguration of individual experience into an aesthetic form, the very presence of shame raises questions concerning the ethical, political, or representational adequacy of the text – questions that remain, therefore, unanswerable. In literary works, shame does not exist in some buried state, to be unearthed by the penetrating critic; rather, shame appears overtly, as the text’s experience of its own inadequacy.39

While Tanglewood eagerly represents the origins and exhibitions of material greed by its protagonists in order that they might be conclusively shamed at the novel’s culmination, it is utterly unselfconscious about its own formal adequacy to the task it sets itself. As we shall note with other post-Celtic Tiger finance fictions, in confronting the ethical and algorithmic complexities of finance capitalism representational transparency and moral rectitude should not be taken for granted. Consequently, our review of Celtic Tiger fiction suggests that a degree of self-reflexivity is warranted, though this is absent from Bolger’s intervention. Tanglewood Tanglewood opens at 1.00 a.m. Tuesday, 13 March 2007, and the narrative is initiated by an act of vandalistic violence. As we subsequently discover, the anonymous

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intruder of the first chapter is Ezal, an immigrant Balkan labourer. Bolger thereby displays a ‘local’ act of vandalism, which is committed by the unseen and unnamed foreign immigrant. The opening interior voice of the narrative, then, is not indigenous, and his actions presage the presences of death and failure that come to dominate the ensuing story. Furthermore, the building into which Ezal intrudes is a derelict Victorian relic, which must be read in both metonymic and metaphorical terms across a number of different times and spaces. The opening passage of the novel reads: The echo that reverberated from the high-vaulted ceiling, after he used a crowbar to force open the door of this derelict building near the seafront, reminded him of somewhere closer to home, a place he was careful never to return to, even in dreams. The stale air brought him back in time; the uncomfortable silence, the mildewed walls layered in cobwebs patrolled by bloated spiders, the judgemental sense of ghosts observing him amid the dissipated grandeur. [. . .] but when he entered these deserted premises and discreetly closed the door, the mouldy air conjured up memories from which there was no escape.40

As with many literary representations of the Celtic Tiger period, edificial dereliction is actualized as a default spatial conceit for the broader monetization of Irish space. But, equally familiar is the fact that these are metonymized spatial figurations. In other words, sites of decline such as abandoned homes are analogues and fragments across the literature that reckons with Ireland’s property ‘boom’. The act of vandalism described here is, of course, a correlative of the broader vandalism of the country’s property ‘boom’, and is an early indication of the politics and morality of the entire novel. The galvanizing political possibilities of the metonymic device are left unrealized by Bolger as his actualization of the affective for didactic purposes makes itself visible across the narrative. On the surface, the break-in described above is laced with suggestions of the personal trauma of the character here. Bolger generates a Gothic and haunted ambience, as Ezal, subsequently, recalls his personal experience of the horrors of mass ethnic cleansing during the Balkan war of the early 1990s. While the pathos of the narrative’s attention to the personal tragedies of the Balkan conflict relativizes the material excesses of the latter 1990s in Ireland, Bolger blunts the force of his authorial critique by retreating to a familiarly explicit anti-nationalist stance. Ezal reasons that the building into which he has intruded never witnessed the horrors of mass murder, and further, he dismisses the hollowed-out sentimentality of Irish identity politics: Irish history consisted of sporadic historical squabbles which bearded men in pubs droned on about, describing skirmishes in post offices and cowardly shots fired into the skulls of unsuspecting policemen as if such petty assassinations were battles that should fascinate him. Irish drinkers revelled in revealing these nuggets from their national narrative, like infants displaying turds in a chamber pot, anticipating exaggerated praise for the feat.41



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Such a turn in the opening narrative exposition is, then, in tune with the relative ethical poverty of the national story relayed by Bolger across Tanglewood. As we shall discuss, moral and ethical guidance and redemption seem to originate from exogenous agents rather than from the vernacular adherents to capitalism. In other words, the indigenous seems to be shamed into corrective action and selfreflection through exposure to non-native voices. However, as we shall further argue, Bolger’s deployment of guilt and shame in such ways is a missed opportunity given that his use of shaming overlooks some crucial ameliorative possibilities of shame affects. If shame opens up the possibility of new ways of thinking and living in the world, then deploying shame as a device for reproach and censure retreats to static and ideological iterations of affects. We are introduced to the central married couple, Chris and Alice, separately. On the same night both are awake as the symbolic burning of the Victorian edifice unfolds within eye-shot of their home. Tellingly this is the eve of yet another property auction in which Chris is fated to fail by agencies outside of his control. He is wracked with worry about the financial implications of success, but is equally wrapped in a cycle of shame and guilt centred on his inability to acquire a statement property for his dependent wife. Indeed, part of Chris’s anxiety stems from the masculinization of the Celtic Tiger economy. Property is seen as quarry, and the attendant guilt is not solely tied to imprisoning patterns of debt, but, in Chris’s case, a failure to burden oneself and one’s legatees with crushing indebtedness and accompanying guilt. Chris, then, is ashamed of his lack of success in loading himself with overwhelming debt, as his shame motors his journey to the guilt of indebtedness. Chris’s dilemma appears representative of the link between the financial and the affective – including guilt and shame – detailed by Fiona Allon, when she argues that ‘for many households (including many low-income households), debt was not simply a financial means to embrace risk, calculation and the benefits of asset-acquisition; it was also simultaneously affective, intimate and entrepreneurial, frighteningly personal and precarious, gut-wrenching, embodied and locked onto the anxious yet nonetheless hopeful promise of provisioning for the future’.42 While Chris dwells upon his impotent performances at previous public property auctions, it is in the first chapter focalized through Alice that the narrative spotlights shame and guilt most resolutely. Having discovered a packet of Viagra tablets in Chris’s clothing, Alice assumes that he is conducting an extramarital affair – a conclusion that is both misguided and destructive. But Alice’s discovery, coupled with her inability to confront Chris openly, means that the perceived betrayal conditions their subsequent interaction and communication. The circumstantial nature of Alice’s judgement, then, allows Bolger to introduce a narrative strand centred on the debilitating effects of betrayal and guilt. Indeed, Chris’s betrayal is historically symmetrical, as it was Chris who helped Alice to heal the wounds from her ‘first betrayal’ by her first boyfriend. Additionally, Alice’s stunted communicational skills are further attributed to her upbringing, again providing Bolger with a wedge to prise open ground on which to critique the stultifying legacies of the past in the Irish context:

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Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction Six months passed, and the evidence suggested that Chris’s liaison, if that was what it was, had passed. When trust breaks down in a marriage, however, you never get it back. Looking back, Alice knew that she should have challenged him at once about his lies instead of inventing excuses for locking the bedroom door. But Alice was raised in a family where no trauma was ever confronted by anything except evasive silence. Despite spending half a lifetime trying to liberate herself from her repressed childhood, she hadn’t known how to confront Chris beyond sniping at him in the hope that he would decipher the real intent behind her words.43

As the menopausal Alice reflects on her current life, and the actions and conditions that led to her self-imposed confinement within the limits of her bedroom, the culpability of religion in depriving Alice, and many others, of a language with which to express affect and emotion is detailed by Bolger. As adherents to the dominant Catholic faith, Alice’s family subscribed to an austere form of parenting; morality and the maintenance of outward propriety structure thought and action. Thereby Alice has arrived at a point where the possibilities of affect and emotion have been disabled for her. The joyless grounds of her upbringing are clarified as Alice recalls that she never really possessed much self-confidence: her parents had ensured this with their constant criticism of her personality. She had known moments of undiluted joy as a girl when out with her friends, but all girlish devilment disappeared when she returned home, to where any innocent expression of joy made her appear odd. The hardest thing in her childhood was the knowledge that she could do nothing right in her father’s eyes.44

In the idiom of empirical studies of shame, Alice’s ‘global self ’ is assailed by the remote, yet fully judgemental, attentions of a father whose own background is forwarded as explanatory of his treatment of his daughter.45 It is here that the strictures of an emotionally constipated Catholicism are registered as originary and consequential to our protagonist’s behaviour.46 For Alice, via second-hand sources, ‘[h]er grandparents’ house on Booterstown Avenue sounded like a mausoleum, where every unchecked emotion was subsumed into religious fervour, and the sole warmth came from the red bulb aglow on a Sacred Heart shrine on the wall’.47 Alice’s distance from Chris, her relationship with her thoroughly inaccessible father are narrated in sequence, and these relations are shadowed by guilt, betrayal and shamefulness respectively. Yet, it is shortly after her reflection on the origins of her father’s emotionless temperament that Alice recalls the most extreme statement on shame in the entire novel. Her father’s now estranged younger sister had entered a convent, but decided to leave her vocation and, on returning home is met with her own mother’s ‘curt remark: “It would be better for you to come back into this house in a wooden coffin than to bring shame on us like this.”’48 We can glean from these glimpses of her family history that shame takes the form of



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a punishing and divisive affective tool, and the deployment of shame in the past – though for specifically socially conservative reasons – presages the inducement of patterns of shame in Bolger’s contemporary Ireland. As we shall argue, the core implication of Bolger’s broader authorial argument is that the generation that fuelled, and that became enthralled by, the speculative alchemy of the Celtic Tiger property frenzy should feel shame at the profoundly destructive nature of their actions, as well of the legacies they have bequeathed to their children. In Bolger’s narrative, for instance, the central married couple spend much of the narrative at odds, separated by respective inabilities to communicate and to act, and in the context of the explicit attentiveness to shame evident in the novel, shame is viewed negatively – it is isolating, self-destructive, anger-inducing. In this regard, Bolger’s politicization of shame affects in the aftermath of the Celtic Tiger is lacking in imagination. Shame, in Tanglewood is associated with division, fracture and the past, and it is rarely, if ever, actualized as an affect pregnant with political possibilities. Instead, Bolger’s narrative firmly installs the youthful and non-Irish characters as the midwives of a more morally robust and catholic society. The transfusion of youthful and global imagination is diagnosed as a palliative to the past-burdened avarice of Alice, Chris and Ronan’s generation. Yet the past is not entirely barren for Alice, as seen when she painfully recalls her brief time as a naïve but energized young emigrant in Toronto, Canada. Typical of the opportunities imagined by Alice’s younger self is her recollection of journeying on ferry along Toronto’s shoreline: On icy weekends she was often the only passenger on the ferry that chugged out to the small islands hugging the city shoreline [. . .] She could envisage these islands filled with bathers when the warm weather came. Everywhere would reopen then, and there would be more possibility of meeting strangers who might become friends. Being abroad was harder than she had expected, but when spring came to these islands she would lose her shyness and emerge from her chrysalis.49

Compared with the incarceratory regime she fled from in Ireland, Toronto promises freedom of expression and the hope of some kind of re-birth untainted by the sterile morality of her home and of her homeland. Alice’s journey westwards is a bracing strike for liberation, an exercise in self-assertion, and potentially fulfilment through self-invention and transcendence beyond ‘the unspoken suffocation of home’.50 The somatic figurations employed across these passages highlight the familiar ways in which shame is read as embodied. In Bolger’s figurative economy the entrapped and neutralized body is symbolic of the spiritual and social atrophy of twentieth-century Ireland, a country that mobilized shame affects as means of social control. But in the context of the Celtic Tiger, at one level Bolger delivers a critique of contemporary Ireland through a nostalgic displacement of potential but unfulfilled personal happiness. Alice’s past – and present and future – hopes were strangulated by a society founded upon affective stricture and moral conformity. Bolger’s narrative, thus, touches upon one facet of the emotional and

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affective histories of the country, but fails to expand on this sortie into the past. In addition to its attenuated engagement with shame and nostalgia, Tanglewood fails to acknowledge and to critique the ways in which capitalism and financialization are connected with and exploit emotions and affects. Likewise, as we argue, the novel remains oblivious to the political possibilities of affects such as shame in the generation of communal identities and solidarities. But contemporary materialism also generates its own forms of shame, as Alice discovers when she enters into a business arrangement with one of the well-heeled and well-connected wives of Blackrock. This period of Alice’s life is narrated by her daughter, Sophie, and details Sophie’s emerging awareness and exploration of her homosexuality. This newly found outlet for Alice’s pent-up frustration is, in fact, a version of the materialistic pageantry characteristic of the Celtic Tiger ‘boom’. Re-enforced through mediatized reiteration, this domain is alluring, shallow and, ultimately, shaming for Alice. As Sophie recounts, property, gossip and consumption are the lifeblood of Alice’s re-emerging sense of inadequacy in Ireland: Mum’s customers lived in detached houses, with no street numbers but ornate name plates on pillars beside electronic gates, women lured into the boutique by curiosity, hoping to glimpse Vicky, whose name regularly appeared alongside her husband’s in the gossip columns. Good things happened to Mum in that year, but bad things too. Mum was naïvely innocent and easily swayed. She encountered women with a different version of what constituted ‘normal’ life. They impressed or overwhelmed her, they infuriated or amused her, they flattered and sometimes patronised her, they gave her a fragile new confidence, but also a new shame.51

Alice’s precarious emotions are exploited and assailed by her relationships with the nouveau riche of Celtic Tiger Ireland, and Bolger, once again, imports shaming as a motif in the narrative. On this occasion, it is in an alternative register to that seen previously with respect to Alice, but its introduction is a further indication of Bolger’s purpose in actualizing the force of shaming in Tanglewood. The occasions of shame in the novel are consistently isolating, exposing the character to the painful affective experiences of such circumstances. The aforementioned instance throws into relief Alice’s material and temperamental alienation from this particular peer group, just as she was emotionally adrift from her own family. One of the key contentions of our argument is that Bolger deploys shame in didactic and moralizing terms in Tanglewood, resulting in a rigid and overdetermined political position, one that rests upon outdated conceptions of shame and its possibilities. This brand of shame by Bolger is made explicit in Sophie’s extended account of her mother’s interaction with this social clique: On the first morning she set out for work she still viewed our small house as a love nest, but increasingly she began to see it through her customers’ eyes as a quaint terrace in which no normal person could live, especially when raucous



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tenants frequently occupied the rooms on the other side of the wall, or at least no normal person in the context of what passed for normality amid her wellheeled clientele.52

This is the dramatization of the new form of shame alluded to earlier by Sophie. Alice’s emotional perceptions, and the anchorage they furnish, are displaced by the explicit and implicit expectations of these newly acquired acquaintances. Alice’s new social outlet is a species of ‘external association’. She is included in this new circle, an inclusion entirely conditional on her business, and especially on her business partner. Yet she is confronted with barriers in the forms of their judgemental attitude to her home and her property. Thereby, shame not only alienates Alice from her peer group; more conventionally it is a form of selfalienation, under which, as we have seen, shame is centred on the self and the faults of the subject themselves. In this context, the house, property ownership become part of the measurement of self-worth – and this is precisely Bolger’s point. He is trained on exposing the destructive shaming machinations under which ownership and material instrumentalism became integral to the performance of, and evaluation of, selfhood during the Celtic Tiger, a fraction of what Randy Martin diagnoses as the ‘financialization of daily life’.53 Yet there is very little to be gained from such outright moralizing other than a diminished sense of self and further alienation from oneself and from those that populate our families and peer groups. At a national level, what is to be garnered from such shame affects other than to appease those who sit in judgement on our actions? Ronan, Alice’s and Chris’s neighbour, is a long-term addict of internet pornography, a legacy of the period during which his first marriage was in collapse. Since remarried to Kim, a Philippine migrant, the addiction remains and it is another, different, mechanism through which shame enters the narrative. Indeed, Ronan’s rationalization of this compulsive behaviour seems consistent with the ways in which our discussion has framed the consequences and effects of shaming experiences: Ronan was not trying to find something, but momentarily to lose something: himself. [.  .  .] These sites let him cruise in a comfort zone, an addict, whose conscience and bothersome moral compass was switched off. These images were heart-numbingly intimate, yet utterly impersonal. Amateur, home-shot galleries provided glimpses into mundanely bizarre lives, a network of loneliness, with everything revealed and nothing felt, with judgement suspended and emotion numbed by the public manifestation of intimacy that these couples needed to display. (my emphases)54

As the highlighted parts of the preceding passage make obvious, this is a sequence of negations and absences. Bolger, once more, configures the emotional experience of his character through that which is fractured and that which is alienated. From Ronan’s personal self-alienation to the figuration of these participants in his pornographic world as ‘a network of loneliness’, emotion is siphoned away through

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shared isolation. The internet clamours with sexual explicitness to which Ronan retires each night, but it is a domain of discrete exhibitionism and exploitation. In fact, the graphic sexual pornography to which Ronan devotes so much of his time and emotional energy, the terrain of aroused isolation to which he has no real tangible access chimes with the previous outline of Alice’s situation among the cosseted housewives of Blackrock. Both Alice and Ronan remain separate from their respective proxy worlds, even while they continue to ‘interact’ emotionally with these constituencies. Both experiences conform to the broader mobilization of shaming in the novel – both retain the didactic tone with which Bolger addresses Ireland’s Celtic Tiger generation. Ronan’s private indulgence in pornography, his entry into an anonymous virtual world seems discrepant from the ways in which he conducts his public business affairs. The apparent abjection of his private addiction appears as a contradiction of the assertive imprints he leaves on his property investments and transactions. He muses: Maybe he was two different people. When among other men, his competitive impulses kicked in. He was the competitor with a side bet on every hole in golf, the golfer who would sell his soul to win a ‘closest to the pin’ contest. People thought they knew him, even if they didn’t always like him. In the public world, winning and losing was clear-cut, but alone at his computer he was robbed of every persona he adopted with outsiders. (my emphases)55

Once more, Bolger’s idiom is replete with references to division, alienation and fracture, as we noted earlier, thereby re-enforcing the destructive and selfalienating version of shame to which the author is wedded. Ronan’s porn addiction is ostensibly the primary source of his shame and self-loathing, given that it is an easy narrative device to raise and to cement the shame endured by a character. In reality, there is no tangible moral difference between the public and the private, and this is precisely why they are brought into alignment by Bolger. The obvious implication by Bolger is that there is very little to separate conventional notions of pornography, and the materialistic self-gratification and fetishization of wealth and property in Celtic Tiger Ireland. In the context of the novel, Ronan’s shame at his secretive nocturnal online voyeurism is analogous to the way in which the broader experiences and legacies of the Celtic Tiger induce experiences of selfalienating shamefulness in those at the sharp edge of its aftermath. Bolger sets a scene of repeated and addictive excess in Ronan’s pornographic activities, and thereby implicitly endorses the view that excess must be curbed and condemned. Equally, the novel takes for granted that the (Irish) readership readily expects and demands the dramatization of excess so long as this excess is exposed and morally chastened once the narrative arrives at its resolution. As we contend, the novel is also part of an armoury of commentary that frames and perpetuates a discourse of moral censure, and, in effect, delimits political and ethical discussions. The day of the fateful property auction further impresses the public theatricality of the Celtic Tiger property ‘boom’. Nourished, as we have alluded to, by a compliant



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media sector, auctions and other varieties of property sales became transactional spectacles, which exploited, and depended upon, their affective impacts on prospective consumers and homeowners. Such is Chris’s desire, even need, to secure a more spacious property for Alice that it has become a defining aspect of his identity and of their marital relationship. In addition, the marketplace he repeatedly enters to satisfy his sense of self is riddled with hypocrisy, uncertainty and dishonesty, which only serves to intensify his disenchantment. Chris’s view of the property market is that it was a world of smoke and mirrors where nobody told the full truth. Even in the seeming transparency of this auction room, the vendors’ friends could be primed to kick-start the bidding. He had seen it before, competing hands eagerly nudging the price towards an undisclosed reserve, after which they withdrew, having panicked any real bidders into a feeding frenzy.56

Both victim and failure, Chris places his faith and his future in an unfaithful system, and the teleology of his marriage’s future is folded into the teleology of the overheated Irish property market. But, of course, the property itself is a displacement mechanism for the need for reconciliation within their marriage, and, additionally, it is symptomatic of the extent to which Chris’s own sense of self-worth can only be affirmed through a conclusive and decisive victory in the volatile context of the property market. Underlying all of the emotional stress and anxiety is the urgency Chris feels about winning ‘back Alice’s respect’, and it is noteworthy how affect and emotion punctuate the narration of the defining property auction of the text.57 As Chris recounts the myriad failures he has accumulated in his efforts to secure a new property, uncertainty and vulnerability congeal into fear. Recalling his experiences of private treaty bidding ‘wars’, we read: ‘Alice and Chris were convulsed with trepidation each time the phone rang, unsure whether the call would cause elation of despair.’58 It is this litany of unsuccessful bids that has led Chris to the decisive auction, with Alice silently in attendance, where once more his pride and masculinity will be tested in this unforgiving crucible of Irish capitalism. As the auction is about to commence, the familiar theatrics of such performances are made plain: ‘The auctioneer started to read out legal documents relating to the sale’, but in contrast to this staid procedural action, Chris is described in a state of heightened emotional distress: ‘Chris felt consumed by terror [. . .] Prices were rising by twenty per cent a year, but at some stage this madness had to stop. His irrational fear of negative equity had held him back in the past, watching houses change hands for what seemed like fortunes.’59 As the auction progresses, Chris’s affective responses to the promptings of the auctioneer together with the unknowns of the bidding drama itself manifest as he attempts to assert some control over his role in this pageantry: ‘In the past he had shown his hand too early. Let the auctioneer sweat for a change. If nobody else was interested he might get it for a knockdown price. His throat was dry, his body tense. Alice gripped his hand so tightly he knew she was scared. Their

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shared fear made them feel close.’60 Inevitably, Chris is once more outbid, and as it turns out, outmanoeuvred by a large-scale, disreputable property developer, and, once more, he is consigned to feeling ashamed and impotent in the ‘frenzy’ of the south Dublin property market. Bolger’s attentiveness to the affective costs of the Celtic Tiger in this instance, and elsewhere in Tanglewood, are prescient, and, while there is a glimpse of solidarity in the fear engendered by the auction and experienced by Chris and Alice, as we have been asserting, Bolger does not sustain this link between affect and community when he touches upon shame at other junctures in the narrative.

Morality tale As detailed previously, Alice’s aspirations to escape the shame-inducing burdens of her family with a life in Canada were thwarted by her mother’s death, and her anxieties in the present are sourced in her marriage, as well as in her responsibility for the death of child in a car accident a few years prior to the action of the novel. Yet there are lines of flight beyond such entrapment and despair evident in the novel, and, for Bolger, these are to be found in the young and the global. Redemption, hope and morality are embodied by Chris and Alice’s daughter, Sophie, and by Ronan’s second wife, Kim, an immigrant from the Philippines. Of the thirty-two chapters, Sophie narrates four, but crucially, Bolger affords Sophie first-person narration – the only character in the novel to which we are given such direct access. Thus, at the levels of both form and content, Bolger is keen to carve out Sophie’s ‘difference’ from her parents and from the Ireland they inhabit and, in some ways, represent. Indeed, from the outset of the first of her four chapters, Sophie is given free rein to establish and to re-enforce her essential remoteness from her immediate environments, in both private and public terms: Standing at that window, I felt disconnected from all that stress, realising that I was essentially grown up. Tomorrow’s auction wouldn’t affect my future. After years of dreading my parents moving, my life was moving on without them [. . .] I was preparing to leave home to find a summer job in Italy before commencing an Erasmus year at the Università degli Studi di Urbino. I was leaving the safety of my childhood bedroom for a walled medieval city, famed for its Gothic and Romanesque churches.61

Sophie’s globalized future prospects are well matched by the enduring values and the cultural capital attached to such a venerable institution. Her plans unite a past and a future that stand in contradistinction to the parochial materialism of the Celtic Tiger property orgy. As if to ratify Sophie’s innate difference from the context in which she has been raised and will soon transcend, Bolger hints at a degree of inevitability or fate with respect to this redemptive character’s narrative arc.



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Sophie underlines her long-term sense of displacement in terms of her neighbourhood, her education and her sexuality: During seminars in my first year in UCD, a lecturer mentioned how a certain Greek poet always stood at a peculiar angle to the universe. The phrase stayed with me. I realised it was how I had always lived – at a peculiar angle to everything in Blackrock. I recognised this divergence at fourteen when I first kissed a boy at the Wes disco and felt a peculiar sensation of emptiness [. . .] The boy stirred no emotion in me until I felt a stab of envy towards him after I saw him kiss another girl in a skimpy skirt. I realised that it was her lips I longed to kiss, her fingers I wanted to caress my naked back.62

By the end of the novel Sophie is in a relationship with Jessie, suitably, a Canadian exchange student at Urbino, and, tellingly, Sophie is given the final word, as she voices the closing chapter of the narrative. The final chapter resolves the narratives of our erstwhile protagonists, revealing the aggregated failures of Chris and Ronan, but, pointedly, of the country as a whole also. Sophie rehearses the principal action points of the economic crash, making appropriately disapproving references to ‘commentator[s]’, ‘the property bubble burst’, ‘a vast Ponzi scheme’, ‘speculators’’ ‘the International Monetary Fund’.63 At this point Sophie has graduated from UCD and she recounts her graduation day with her peers, when this tranche of qualified young people gather to celebrate their absolute lack of opportunities in their home country, a fact addressed directly by Sophie: ‘We had shared years of study, but also years filled with an expectation that we would inherit the earth. Now those of us who stay in Ireland will inherit an island of debt, but I’m not sure how many will be able to stay.’64 While Sophie has the option to stay, given that she has inherited ‘a small fortune’ from her maternal grand-aunt, she chooses to leave. In this respect she is the completion of her mother’s aborted future away from Ireland. Not only are mother and daughter linked by Canada, the maternal grand-aunt had also urged Alice to leave Ireland while she had the chance many years before. There is little awry with Sophie’s decision to leave Ireland; rather, it is her deployment by Bolger in political and sentimental ways that limits the efficacy of his ‘Celtic Tiger’ narrative. As we alluded to earlier, Sophie’s emigration mirrors her mother’s efforts to elude ‘captivity’ in Ireland. In terms of this family unit, Ireland is a site of frustration, shame, limits and, in the contemporary moment, indebted captivity. As Sophie reveals, it is only by leaving Ireland that she can embark on her ‘life’s true journey’.65 Again, this is not to belittle or demean such a choice by a character; rather, it is the authorial motivation to chastise the ‘national’ that seems disingenuous and unproductive. Sophie’s departure from Ireland into an international future of her choice has as its parallel Kim’s arrival into Ireland and her marriage to Ronan. Again, any critique of the character is not to impugn their motives; rather, Kim’s role within the narrative appears to be as an exogenous moral agent deployed by Bolger in tandem with his utilization of Sophie’s escape from indebted captivity. Not only is Kim plainly not Irish, at one stage, as Ronan remembers evenings

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early in their relationship when they would both attend karaoke events with her fellow Filipino emigrants, he recalls that after their marriage she attended such evenings less frequently. Despite his encouragement to maintain such links, ‘she went less frequently, and finally not at all [. . .] as if she no longer fully belonged to that world, or any world’.66 Akin to the treatment of Sophie, asserting Kim’s quintessential difference, in ethnic and temperamental terms here, is a key fraction Bolger’s patterning of these characters as viable and remarkable moral voices in the novel. While Kim is repeatedly viewed through or spoken about in relation to her sexuality and her physical nubility, as the plot of the novel descends into excessive greed, betrayal and, ultimately, death, she emerges from the confines of such an obviously reductive role to articulate further Bolger’s authorial critique of a particular class’s and generation’s moral failures. Once more, in chapter twenty-seven, the global context is used to shame the lapses of the national. It is in this chapter that Kim assumes a central critical voice, as she insistently chastises Ronan for his objectification of her ‘exoticism’ throughout their marriage. Across a heated argument she accuses him in terms of her reception as a sexualized ‘object’: You are too busy looking at other men, watching them eye me like meat. I know you care for me, but you cannot stop looking at other men. It’s how you enjoy seeing me best, reflected back in their eyes. You enjoy their envy at you possessing an exotic butterfly. It lets you feel good about yourself. [. . .] I lifted myself out of poverty by working hard to gain the chance to study, by making sacrifices for years before we ever met. I lifted myself up by finding money to come to Ireland and then sending home money to lift my sisters out of poverty too.67

This, first, builds upon Bolger’s earlier exoticization of Kim as a sexually alluring and desirable immigrant, and, second, it permits Kim the opportunity to detail her, and her family’s, genuine struggles against endemic poverty. Thus, Bolger damns the culture of consumerist acquisition and objectification characteristic of the ‘boom’ years in Ireland, and, of course, in his relativization of wealth and poverty between Ireland and the Philippines he exposes the shameful avarice of Ireland’s nouveau riche. With another echo of Sophie’s elevated narrative role, in chapter thirty Kim’s instrumental role in the resolution of the plot’s primary crisis is exposed, and it, once more, spotlights the inadequacies of Ronan, Chris and Alice. Having temporarily set aside simmering interpersonal tensions, Ronan and Chris enter into an agreement to build a small house on Chris’s back lawn. But, as the project enters its latter stages, a Polish workman dies on the site, and believing he has fallen to his death because of faulty scaffolding on their site, Ronan and Chris resolve to dispose of the body rather than compromise their property scheme with a criminal investigation. The nocturnal journey into the Dublin Mountains takes on the form of liminal journey of awakening for Chris. His rural nocturnal trek on foot through hills, scrub and swamp bring to mind the disturbed metaphorical wanderings of Gothic protagonists, and, of course, are part of the figurative



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economy of shame deployed by Bolger. But, predictably, the failings of the Irish characters are revealed and remedied by Kim. Subsequent to the disposal and disappearance of the workman’s corpse by Chris and Ronan, there is a showdown in Ronan and Kim’s back garden involving both couples. Herein Kim is delegated by Bolger as the character to test the morality of the self-serving Irish, specifically her husband, Ronan. Kim acts as the required ‘witness’ figure within the microdrama of shaming authored by Bolger. The suburban morality tale coheres with Ahmed’s contention that ‘shame as an emotion requires a witness: even if a subject feels shame when she or he is alone, it is the imagined view of the other that is taken on by a subject in relation to herself or himself ’.68 There is a complex of ‘witnessing’ in operation here. Kim is certainly the central ‘witness’ figure, but the reader also assumes a role in this drama. The reader is invited to bear witness to the shameful actions of Bolger’s protagonists but also to feel a portion of that shame under Kim’s gaze.69 As it transpires, Kim had seen the workman fall from the scaffolding and deduced that he suffered a fatal heart attack. As part of her function for Bolger, she decides to leave the workman where he fell and to gauge Ronan’s response when he uncovers the corpse. Again, in tune with the various other moral decisions undertaken by Ronan, he conclusively fails to live up to the expectations and hopes of his wife. As she reveals at length to the three others, and in quasi-religious rhetoric: My Christ is a carpenter with weathered hands. He told me there was nothing I could do for the workman, but I could do something for myself and for my husband. I could leave the body where I found it, to discover the true nature of the man I married. [. . .] I could set a test to make Ronan take responsibility. I had seen the safety inspector close down this site, and knew that when Ronan found the body he would blame the loose scaffolding. But if he found the courage not to duck and dive, an autopsy would clear him of blame and prove that the scaffolding played no part: that man could have died in his bed. [. . .] I was longing to go down and confess, but my God instructed me not to interfere in this test to see into the soul of the man I have wed.70

In this instance Kim is the exogenous voice of judgement – even the spatial configuration of the scene described is suggestive of her moral elevation within Bolger’s narrative. Her religiously grounded exploitation of a man’s death to test her husband’s integrity does not compromise her primary moralizing role within the text. Not only does she question and highlight Ronan’s moral weakness with respect to his willingness to conceal the death for his own benefit, but she also shines a light on Chris’s lack of character. Having had the reality of the situation revealed to him, Chris is understandably affronted at Ronan’s attempts to move the dead body physically into his property and thereby shift responsibility. Yet he is not permitted to retain any degree of moral high ground by Kim in an ensuing exchange: ‘Why didn’t I see the body when I came out?’ Chris asked, breaking the silence. ‘You were too busy peeping up at my

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lit window like a guilty schoolboy as you urinated against a tree. You were so eager for a flash of bare thigh that you missed the sight of Ronan quietly dragging the body across our lawn to deposit him on your property, transferring the problems onto your shoulders.’71 Kim’s objectified sexuality once more becomes the primary prism through which she is viewed by the culpable Irish property entrepreneur. The ways in which she is reductively perceived and judged in Bolger’s scheme reveal more about the superficial desiring gaze of Celtic Tiger consumerism, and Kim’s reference in the previous quotation to the fact that Chris ‘missed the sight of Ronan quietly dragging the body’ further invokes the trope of vision, a suggestion that Ronan, Chris and their peers were overtaken by a form of moral blindness. In the end, as we have outlined, both Sophie and Kim are the beacons of grounded morality and clear-sighted integrity in Tanglewood.

Conclusion Franz Kafka’s The Trial ends not, as might be expected with guilt, but with a suggestive attentiveness to shame. The novel closes with the protagonist’s execution, and with the following lines: ‘With failing eyes K. could still see the two of them, cheek leaning against cheek, immediately before his face, watching the final act. “Like a dog!” he said: it was as if he meant the shame of it to outlive him.’72 In this reversion to shame Kafka addresses the sociality of shame as well as the possibility that shame exists beyond the self. Our shame, in fact, outlives us. Far from shame withering once we expire, in Kafka’s representation of K’s demise he raises the possibility that shame extends its affective grasp beyond the shamed self and beyond the immediate context of shame. In other words, shame possesses a durability beyond the moment and the site of its immediate experience. This might seem an academic point, but as Benjamin later discussed in his essay on Kafka’s works: Shame is not only shame in the presence of others, but can also be shame one feels for them. Kafka’s shame, then, is no more personal than the life and thought which governs it and which he has described thus: ‘He does not live for the sake of his own life, he does not think for the sake of his own thought. He feels as though he were living and thinking under the constraint of a family. . . . Because of this unknown family . . . he cannot be released.’73

Benjamin acknowledges the innately embodied nature and experience of shame, its intimacy to and dependence upon the individual human body. But, as Kafka gestures to in the final line of The Trial, shame is an affective emotion that affirms our humanity and the ways in which that humanity is rooted within, and itself dependent upon, shared values and experiences within broader communities and histories.74 The somatic materialities of shame and shaming, then, remind us that the putative abstractions of ethereal finance capitalism are never without affective



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tolls. Furthermore, our reading of Bolger’s narrative foregrounds the fact that the competing valences of shame are ‘fundamentally connected to everyday sociality’.75 In his recent survey of some of the key literary publications of (post-)Celtic Tiger period, Joe Cleary concludes that there have been precious few serious interventions that have registered any form of radical critique.76 In assessing the merits of both Deirdre Madden’s Time Present and Time Past, discussed herein, and Bolger’s Tanglewood, Cleary concludes that both narratives are ‘reflective, social realist novels that examine the mood of complacency and underlying anxiety that pervaded the wealthy Southside of Dublin in the boom years. Critics might accuse both novels of reproducing some of the funereal bourgeois complacency they diagnose and suggest that this drubs the works of any kind of protest.’77 While Cleary does not pursue a close textual analysis of either of the novels, his allusion to the overall political conservatism of Bolger’s text is largely consistent with the argument set out here. Bolger’s formal, realist mode together with his selection of locale and protagonists in south Dublin is an obvious but not necessarily ineffective plot features. As we have emphasized, the singular failing of the novel is its problematic understanding, and exercise, of shame affects. Shame is clearly a primary thematic of the narrative, but Bolger merely enlists destructive forms of shame as he seeks to produce a heavily moralizing and didactic Celtic Tiger tale. Thus, given the still-born possibilities of shame in Tanglewood, it is still instructive to read such narratives ‘against the grain’ of their own agendas. Notwithstanding its ‘unproductive’ use of shame affects, Bolger’s narrative is, I would suggest, a prompt with which to commence renewed discussions regarding the possibilities of shame in the Irish context, whether that is confined to the Celtic Tiger period and its aftermath or not. Rather than perpetuating understandings of shame affects that are isolating and self-alienating, a counter-reading of texts such as Tanglewood remind us of the creative and regenerating possibilities of shame. As Probyn concludes, invoking the Holocaust survivor Primo Levi: Ideas and writing about shame seek to generate new ways of thinking about how we are related to history and how we wish to live in the present. This is the legacy that Levi has bequeathed to us: the gift of shame. It is an uneasy task, this writing shame. How could it be otherwise when it involves a body grappling with interests, hoping to engage others?78

Probyn’s ‘gift of shame’ does not inevitably translate into passivity in the face of, apparently, universal and naturalized moral adjudications. Contrary to Bolger’s moral scheme, it seeks to escape the hierarchies on which such systems are founded and in the Deleuzean terms invoked earlier, privileges ‘becoming’ over ‘being’.

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CChapter 3 RELATIVE VALUES IN DONAL RYAN’S THE THING ABOUT DECEMBER (2013) AND THE SPINNING HEART (2012)

Forms of investment – national and global ‘Fictionality’, according to Jens Beckert, ‘in economic action is the inhabitation in the mind of an imagined future state of the world. Actors are motivated in their actions by the imagined future state and organize their activities based on these mental representations. The mental representations of future states I call “fictional expectations”.’1 For Beckert, the creative bases of economic activity are fuelled by the imagination of continued or heightened prosperity and productivity. Such imaginative projections are incarnated in ‘narrative form as stories, theories, and discourses’.2 Beckert’s case touches upon notions of desire and, of course, belief, with the latter harbouring particular relevance to our analyses here, and across this study. Within the literary fictional context, Donal Ryan’s The Thing about December (2013) and The Spinning Heart (2012) engage with the so-termed fictional expectations of a slew of representative characters before and after Ireland’s economic ‘boom’. Necessary tension surfaces when competing and contradictory ‘fictional expectations’ collide, or when ‘fictional expectations’ of the future wither into anger and resentment. Taking a more combative approach to the narrativization of the capitalist financial economy, for Max Haiven the underlying ‘fictionality’ of capitalist finance enables a colonization of the social imagination. In his view ‘finance is a sort of shared narrative about social values that allows capital to allocate its economic power in ways that perpetuate and extend its power over social value’.3 As we shall detail, Ryan’s fictions probe and expose the financial and imaginative investments undertaken by a local community in rural Ireland. In doing so, neither The Thing about December nor The Spinning Heart anatomizes the macrostructures of Ireland’s financial rise and decline. Instead, akin to the critical work of Beckert and Haiven, Ryan trains his attention on the narratological and the semiotic, and, by extension, on the ways in which these are inherently linked to matters of economic faith and belief. But in attending to what might well be seen as abstractions of the finance economy in terms of semiosis and fiduciality, Ryan does not lose sight of the material cruelties and affective wounds inflicted and suffered over the duration of the Celtic Tiger’s emergence and disintegration. As we expand upon across

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this study, recent Irish literary fiction is acutely conscious of, and analytical of, the ways in which, and the extent to which, debt subtended one form of Irish self-imagination during the Celtic Tiger period. Ryan’s narratives are integral to this suite of fictions that differentially reflect upon how debt, and indebtedness, ‘invaded the structures of personal and communal meaning making’.4 Cutting against the grain of the majority of critical analyses of Ryan’s The Spinning Heart, Seán Kennedy provides a more sobering assessment of the text and about claims made regarding the text’s status as a clinical confrontation with the Celtic Tiger period. Kennedy does indeed pose several perfectly legitimate questions about the prescience of the narrative’s interrogation of the motivations and machinations characteristic of Irish society over the lifespan of the country’s economic and property ‘boom’. Pace the prevailing consensus that Ryan delivers a nuanced and revelatory narration of the economic excesses and privations of the Celtic Tiger, Kennedy proposes that ‘the reception of The Spinning Heart is symptomatic of Irish resistance to economic realities’.5 Contrary to the clamour that installed The Spinning Heart as the ‘urtext’ of post-‘boom-time’ Irish literary fiction, Kennedy’s analysis strives to disabuse us of the idea that the narrative harbours any credentials as a legitimate ‘finance fiction’. In this vein, Kennedy offers a series of queries regarding the ‘financial’ bona fides of Ryan’s text: As a perceptive account of 2007, does it matter that the book does not mention neoliberal governmentality (Coulter and Nagle 1-43), or the bank guarantee that brought Ireland to its knees (McCabe 175-218), or the so-called ‘bailout’ overseen by the Troika of the EU, ECB and IMF to rescue German and French banks (Blyth 51-93)? How then does it constitute a perceptive response to the crash? Would the book not need to include some reflections on Irish finance capitalism at the intersection of gender and class (Spillane 151-170), for example, to claim such status?6

This catalogue of lacunae cannot be contradicted when one surveys The Spinning Heart, as the narrative does not pore over the algorithmic operations of high finance, nor does it narrate the practicalities of supranational economic interventions. Yet in as much as Kennedy exposes germane omissions across Ryan’s narrative, this chapter will suggest ways in which Kennedy’s own analysis is limited, but not invalidated, by an insistence on the absence of stark pragmatic indices of finance capitalism. In one respect the comparative framework of our analysis will clarify the ways in which Ryan’s first two publications, The Thing about December and The Spinning Heart, can be read together and in sequence. As we have flagged already, such an approach will reveal how Ryan’s work limns an entire skein of concepts and problematics that animate the field of finance fiction studies such as speculation, shame affects, haunting, indebtedness, fictionality, deterritorialization, faith and psychosis. This is not necessarily to offer a blunt contradiction of Kennedy’s argument. Rather, the intention is to propose that such finance fictions do not always require the transparent historicity, or the overt moral framework demanded by Kennedy’s methodology. In other words, as we see elsewhere in this



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study, narratives that engage with the Celtic Tiger through overdetermined and overfamiliar plotlines, characterizations and narrative resolutions are ultimately ill-equipped for the task of interrogating both the materialities and the affects of finance capitalism. The latter are symptomatic of a form of crisis resolution that evinces a ‘desire for a narrative frame [that] is an integral part of the experience of the event itself ’.7

The Thing about December – shame and shaming Though published a year after The Spinning Heart, The Thing about December was, in fact, the first to be completed by Ryan, and its action precedes that played out in the later volume. The latter novel, in fact, recounts the prehistory of how the land on which the ‘ghost’ housing estate now stands became available for development. Johnsey Cunliffe is the vulnerable protagonist of Ryan’s narrative, and the story charts a single calendar year of his life across twelve chapters. The Thing about December provides us with the background to the scenes of financial aftermath in The Spinning Heart. Set almost a decade beforehand, Ryan dramatizes the conflictual and violent events in Johnsey’s life that led to his death and loss of his inherited land. While there are melodramatic notes to Ryan’s portrait of an embattled and intellectually feeble central character, he does convincingly convey the individual and collective avarice that may not have dominated, but certainly significantly punctuated, Irish society during the property ‘boom’. Johnsey’s relative intellectual simplicity is also suggestive, of course, of the simplistic financial calculus of those who prey on him. They unquestioningly equate land with property and profit, and instinctively jettison local historical ties in lieu of insubstantial promissory notes. Johnsey is consistently a victim of local, random taunting and violence throughout his life, and, eventually, is orphaned as a young adult, inheriting land that has been designated for development. But Johnsey’s instincts tell him that his affective relationships with the land and with those of his family, who inhabited and worked it, are stronger motive forces than the external pressures of grasping neighbours. Failing to yield to such pressures, Johnsey becomes a maligned local hate-figure, and his intransigence is adjudged as being entirely out of kilter with the opportunities and the demands of the zeitgeist in Celtic Tiger Ireland. Johnsey is caught in a cycle of vicious humiliation and unprovoked violence that manifests in both physical and verbal forms. Thus, for Johnsey the banal spaces of everyday living are mined with ever-present threats of physical assault and, crucially, the seemingly unrelenting possibility of crushing shame. In many respects, The Thing about December showcases these routine degradations in terms of shame ‘as the affect of indignity, of defeat, of transgression, and of alienation’, for Johnsey Cunliffe ‘shame is felt as an inner torment’.8 Importantly the community’s emerging senses of identity and value are irrigated by the chorus of public shaming endured by Johnsey at its hands. As clarified in Chapter 2, this latter point signals a divergence from Bolger’s mobilization of shame in Tanglewood. Relief for Johnsey is only located in either imaginative

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reminiscence or daydream-like fantasizing as both the material present and the anticipated future offer nothing more than further incessant abuse and alienation. While at one level Johnsey is drawn as a type of unwitting victim, as we shall outline, Ryan seeds the narrative with speculation, faith and trust, and demands of us that we relate these to the overwhelming communal devotion to destroy Johnsey by the end of the novel. Jennifer Jacquet suggests that shame requires a real or an imagined audience, and Johnsey’s feelings of personal inadequacy and failure are played out in both the public sphere at the hands of his disaffected peers, as well in the privacies of his mind and his home.9 Unsurprisingly one of the first, and consistently referred to, experiences of abject shame is figured in terms of Johnsey’s stunted sexual development. Devoid of either experience in or a language in which to articulate his emerging sexuality, Johnsey’s recurring reflex to both real and imagined sexual arousal is profound shame. In one of the earliest accounts of his humiliation, Johnsey recalls how a minor daily interaction remains imprinted upon his memory. In this case even the recollection of the encounter catalyses another somatic response to the erstwhile humiliation. Johnsey recalls an occasion when his employer’s daughter offered him a Rolo sweet, ‘and she held the packet out to him and the blasted Rolo got stuck in the packet and his hand shook like crazy and the Rolo was nearly melted before he got it out and now he could feel his cheeks burning hot again just thinking about it’.10 This minor juvenile episode pales in scale and effect in comparison to the later brutal emotional and physical assaults visited upon Johnsey, but it performs effectively as a telling keynote for the ensuing pattern of degradation and threat under which Johnsey lives out the remainder of his curtailed life. In the former case, Johnsey both recalls and re-experiences the shame of his inadequacy and, crucially, he is betrayed on both occasions by the physical response of his body. Thus, right across the narrative Johnsey is verbally reminded of his difference and of his failings, yet he communicates his own knowledge of these failings publicly through the physical symptoms of shame. As we shall see, he is also ready to verbalize the inescapability and inevitability of his personal humiliation in his private moments of self-reflection. Thus, if part of the narrative’s thematic concern is with shame, it is also variously preoccupied with the matter of faith. In this context, the novel dramatizes the ways in which ritual and habitual shaming firmly erodes the individual’s capacity for faith in themselves. Ryan details Johnsey’s gradual retreat from society and from his community as the accruals of unremitting shaming crystalize as the protagonist’s absolute loss of faith in himself to engage with that community in any meaningful or painless way. Shortly after the aforementioned memory of humiliation, the narrative presents Johnsey’s self-reflexivity on his own inability to perform the most basic of public communicative functions. This instance is one of several that clarify his gradual, but definitive, retreat from the social in the face of judgement and assault. Here we witness an indicative moment of shamed self-loathing, yet it is also an occasion on which Johnsey exhibits insight on his fundamental alienation from his local community. This motif of resounding alienation is not just confined to Johnsey’s intellectual and communicational limitations. These latter are deployed as tools to



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physically alienate Johnsey and to ensure his acute ostracization from the locality’s moral economy. In this case, we read that His bedroom was the best place to think about things. Too much thinking could balls you up rightly. Your mind could start acting like a video player, showing you your own thickness. It was worst when he’d talk to people, like one of the auld biddies quizzing him on the way home or in the bakery about Mother or someone stopping him in the street to know how he was and how as his Aunty Theresa and was Small Frank finished his auld exams and he’d stand there and feel his cheeks burning off him and he’d do his damnedest to try and answer properly and sound like a normal fella but words could make an awful fool of you. What use was talking, anyway? What was ever achieved with words?11

There is an apparent tension between form and content evident here, as Johnsey rails against the utility of language in a detailed litany of humiliating memories. Relatedly, the litany itself is sparked by the invocation of a precise literary figuration in the form of the similed ‘video player’. But the tension is resolved when we realize that it is the exposure of the embodied speech act that arouses Johnsey’s fear. Thus, it is the theatrics and expectations of the linguistic, communicative transaction that terrify and persist beyond Johnsey’s abilities. The banalities of passive conversation evade Johnsey and he lives in fear of the demand for basic communication and verbal interaction. The linguistic demands of the present prove beyond his capabilities and, as we noted earlier, achieve little other than exciting the somatic symptoms of affective suffering. Over the span of the narrative as the solicitations and ‘fictional expectations’ of the Celtic Tiger insinuate themselves into the locality, such aphasic responses become a measure of Johnsey’s alienation from the semiologies of the thriving Irish economy. Johnsey is consistently beset by the alienating and asphyxiating expressiveness of blushing to such an extent that it becomes a primary marker of the evacuation of faith in himself. As Joseph Valente confirms in this regard, ‘the skin effects somaticize social distance for the observer, sealing him or her off from real emotional participation. In other words, the communicability of shame as outward manifestation functions as a brake on the communication of shame as a felt affective state.’12 Following Valente, the affective articulation of the blush is insolubly isolating for the sufferer, and this is a consistent physical symptom through which Johnsey finds himself exposed in his public engagements throughout his life.13 While the encounters catalogued here by Johnsey might well be thought of as relatively inconsequential, in another way they are indicative of the ways in which he is unable to participate in the most basic interpersonal performances of communality. Johnsey’s interlocutors, then, are met with the silent address of the affective, an articulacy that is rooted in and that perpetuates a cycle of shamed selfhatred and self-doubt. From another perspective this extract furnishes an example of the text’s own self-awareness about the contingency and elasticity of language and representation, a feature that recurs across the narrative.

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Haunted by words, haunted at home Johnsey’s alienation from his community can be gauged by his distrust of language and his inadequacies in availing of language as a mode of communication and a means of understanding the changing circumstances of his world. As we shall analyse below, the silences of Johnsey Cunliffe are filled by the signifiers of Celtic Tiger property speculation, as well as their outriders: media manipulation and local rumour-mongering. This is where we can discern the bleak irony of the closing question in the extract above. Words, of course, their absence and, most tellingly, their presence in untruthful and skewed forms are at the forefront of the campaign to alienate and to shame Johnsey. In this respect The Thing about December is not just the tragic story of a set-upon and isolated bachelor who is victimized to the point of self-destruction. The novel also charts the ways in which linguistic and cultural forms mutate as they become complicit in, and formative of, re-aligned ethical values and ‘narratives of the future’.14 If Johnsey’s present is haunted by physical and verbal volleys of abuse, together with contrived accusations that his selfishness is thwarting the speculative advances of local property development, then he is equally weighed down by a fictional elaboration of his family’s genealogy. Typical of these ceremonies of self-loathing is when he reflects that ‘[a]ll about him in that house were the ghosts of heroes, and here lay he, a lonesome gom, letting them all down’.15 He ritually subjects himself to deeply unfavourable comparisons with the erstwhile cast of family members. These exercises are, naturally, further indications of Johnsey’s unremitting sense of inadequacy. He has inherited and imbibed a battery of familial narratives, and he has internalized a past that he now uses as the yardstick with which to judge the present – himself and those around him. He thus is confined by mythologization, nostalgia and sentiment, as he cowers in shame at the thoughts of the nobility and courage of his family in the past. As his irresolvable inadequacy in relation to his predecessors is continually ratified, Johnsey feels ill-equipped to repay the debt that he owes to the pantheon of familial heroes, especially his parents. This sense of failure spikes when the prospect of selling his landed inheritance is proposed as part of the anticipated property development in the locality: What reception would he get in the next life, he wondered, if he entered it landless? Would Grandad and Daddy and the great-uncles and beautiful Uncle Michael be above waiting, wanting to know what sort of blackguard was he? Would Mother even bother with him? Lord save us and guard us, it’s a solid fright knowing nothing, not even how to feel.16

At one level his life and his choices are still overdetermined by the deceased, the past, the inherited fictions and mythologies of past times. He is out of kilter with the press of the Celtic Tiger economy in his locality, which is keen to sanctify new heroes and new idioms, and to cultivate new desires and new values. There is an atavistic reflex spiritualism evident here, one that is no doubt passively received and defaulted to by Johnsey. But as we alluded to earlier, Johnsey indulges in his



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own fictive and speculative imaginings, and we note the conditional framing of this extract, which is actually a common feature of the narrative when we are witness to his lapses into fantasy. So, while Johnsey is expressive in a mode of possibility that resonates with the competing speculative idioms of his investor neighbours, it is a future conditionality rooted in the standards and expectations of those who are deceased. But as the final clause earlier reveals, and this kind of statement pockmarks the narrative, frustration courses through Johnsey Cunliffe. Unlike the enabling possibilities detailed by Adam Phillips, who argues that frustration is necessary and ‘reassuring’, for Johnsey it is at the root of his rising anger at and alienation from his community.17 However, frustration is also suggestive of a future, of wants, wishes or desires to come or that are possible, and in this regard Johnsey’s searing frustration echoes the growing desire of the broader community to colonize and to materially exploit the future in sync with the patterns of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger property ‘boom’.18 The image of the ‘unhomely’ house is intensified shortly after the previous quotation, as Johnsey feels increasingly out of place within and without the family home.19 An overriding conviction of one’s utter failure is marbled with Gothic colouring in this instance, and the inherited family homestead begins to mutate into, and to resemble, the vacant and failed homes that litter the ghost estate of The Spinning Heart. The Cunliffe house, with its cast of domestic ghosts and its landed legacy, however, must be devoured by the agents of capitalist property speculation. Johnsey’s futile resistance is set against a capitalist system that, as Mark Fisher asserts, ‘subsumes and consumes all of previous history’.20 In both cases there is no sense of ease and belonging in the face of differentiated, but equivalent, burdens of family and financial indebtedness, respectively: ‘He felt like he was being watched, and the watchers weren’t kindly ancestors but vengeful spirits who had taken occupancy of the empty house and were raging over his return. He slept on the couch with the telly on and the telephone ladies gesturing out at him with their pouty lips and winking eyes.’21 The solicitations offered via the television are grotesque imitations of the reality facing Johnsey and his sought-after land, and they are representative of second-hand mediated desire. Johnsey is ill-prepared in terms of intellectual capacity or lived experiences to process the speculative solicitations represented by either pornography or property development. Again, the deceased family is the arbiter of success, even adequacy, for Johnsey, and in the context of both The Thing about December and The Spinning Heart, they are just one of the ways in which the haunted nature of debt-burdened localities and landscapes are gestured to by Ryan. Under the duress of the speculative solicitations in the present and towards the future, together with his imagination of the moral judgements of his deceased family, Johnsey’s world begins to narrow and, in the end, he is all but confined to a reality of paranoic isolation. In Johnsey’s case, the incessant nature of his experience of shame ‘provokes a deep psychic emotional disturbance’.22 As the investment interests of the local community close in on Johnsey, the privacy of his farmyard is the scene for an increasing number of verbal and physical confrontations. The urgencies of financial opportunism are uncomplicated by

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personal loyalties and the certainty of economic gains trumps compassion for Johnsey. As a prelude to one of the final disputes that take place at the house, we are once more privy to the debilitating anxiety that afflicts Johnsey’s capacity to negotiate the demands of his present situation. Again, the narrative foregrounds conditionality as uncertainty of the self in living in front of the unseen audience of the dead and the absent. This uncertainty and ambivalence is the terrain of debt. But there is a sharp qualitative distinction between what we might term Johnsey’s sense of moral indebtedness to his familial precursors, and the increasingly intrusive solicitations of the Celtic Tiger debt economy.23 As we have emphasized, Johnsey offers an alternative array of speculations about his family relations, his parents and his future prospects. In this instance he moves from wondering what his parents would think of his life in their absence, to a lengthy and impassioned speculation on actions that would gain the approval of his deceased father. In essence Johnsey plays out an interiorized drama rooted in a sense of profound and disabling indebtedness. Of course, any assertiveness is entirely undone by the conditional register and the privately fantasized nature of the content here: Isn’t it a fright that Daddy and Mammy couldn’t have told him what he was to do after they died, before they died? Would Mother go mad with him if he had a woman in the house? Would she think Mumbly Dave was very common and not a suitable pal? Would Daddy think he was an awful useless meely-mawly if he could make no fist of life at all? Would he be proud if Johnsey could tell the McDermotts to shove their lease and take back the land and tell the auctioneers and the consortium and the newspaper crowd to shove it all up their holes and let them all go and shite and if he married Siobhan and had a big dairy herd and a rake of children.24

This extract extends even further, as it breaks out of the grammatically tempered structure of the initial questions to cascade down the page. The gradual breakdown of the integrity of the early speculative sentences becomes the register and the correlative of the affective in this instance. They are indicative of how the occasional violence of Johnsey’s youth will now become the defining violence of his life and its ending. Johnsey’s drift into the conditional and the speculative is abruptly ended by the arrival into the farmyard of a vengeful neighbour, and a violent confrontation ensues. The privacy of his consoling fictions and his speculations on his unrealized lives are inevitably cut short by the insistent intrusion of his restive neighbours. The irreconcilable historical teleologies and affective affiliations of the individual and the community are inevitably resolved by the violence inherent to the Celtic Tiger capitalist economy.

Betrayal and narration In the absence of any parental or direct familial support, Johnsey invests both his time and trust in an older couple, the Unthanks, retailers in the local town. Their



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business premises provide sanctuary and silence for Johnsey, and when he returns home having been hospitalized as a result of a savagely violent assault in the town, the Unthanks continue to provide physical necessities and emotional support. In a sense that is consistent with our readings of Johnsey, and of The Thing about December, the significance of the Unthanks is that they represent another facet of Johnsey’s faith. He commits to an undiluted belief in the altruism of the Unthanks, with their own investment of time and care in Johnsey seen as a measure of their personal attachment to the Cunliffe family. For Johnsey their virtue lay in the fact that they did not make demands on his inability to express himself, the easy and muted informality was a release from the increasingly predatory clamour orbiting Johnsey’s daily life: ‘[t]hat was the thing about the Unthanks: you could sit in their house for hours and barely two sentences might be said but it wouldn’t matter a damn. You didn’t have to feel any awkwardness at your lack of words in their presence.’25 This specific reflection is a prelude to a revelation about the Unthanks but is characteristic of the silence that Johnsey craves as a salve from the distorted and fallacious stylizations of his character, motivations and intentions that begin to circulate in other ‘narrative’ forms within and without the locality. The elderly couple appear to represent a micro-community or surrogate family in which Johnsey can entrust his faith and belief. But their exposure as accomplices in the impending property scheme, akin to the violence visited upon Johnsey, is another symptom of the regnant economic system. With the subsequent revelation that ‘the Unthanks were part of this famous consortium’, we witness the sloughing off of sentimentality by Johnsey’s erstwhile guardians.26 But more importantly it is another milestone in the erosion of his capacity to invest faith and trust in those around him. The unspoken faith that Johnsey invested in the Unthanks gives way to the material imperatives of economic progress, and the private ‘timeless’ sanctuary of their home and care is thus traded in for the futurity of promises of financial speculation. In the end, their betrayal is not just in action but also in words, as the justification offered by Mr Unthanks is little more than a redundant rehashing of the familiar tropes of progress narratives. He defaults to debunked myths in his half-hearted rationalization of the situation facing Johnsey: He said Yerra, your heart’ll be scalded, Johnsey, with blackguards blackening you up and down the country and making up lies about you and it’s an awful shame something so good has to be taken over by them that only has their own gain in mind, but that’s the way the world is now – you have to leave businessmen off to build those things and let them make their fortunes to hell, and in the long run their greed benefits all.27

While Johnsey bears no ill-will towards the Unthanks for their surreptitious opportunism, it is the most acute moment of confirmation that he resides firmly athwart the newly imagined community of anticipation. The unimaginative recourse to the inevitability of materialist progress acts as an alibi for greed, or ‘the icy water of egotistical calculation’.28 But it also develops the novel’s concern

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for the agency of narrative and for the tensions that condition the relationships between competing narrative forms. Mr Unthanks condescends to Johnsey with a plotline that will inexorably envelope the community and against which they have no resistance. Yet he also briefly touches upon a much more sinister and damaging narrative arc that will refashion Johnsey as the recalcitrant obstacle to the realization of the greater good. Though the exact details remain unsaid in the extract earlier, we are nevertheless alerted to the vulnerability of the linguistically limited Johnsey to repurposed narrativization. Any residual pity or sympathy for Johnsey as an orphaned victim boils off and he is left with the collective suspicion and bitterness of an expectant local populace. The ambivalent confection of haunted sentimentality that marks Johnsey’s relationship with his deceased parents and wider family unit contrasts starkly with the unsentimental insistence of the future-oriented developers and their investors. Indeed, the alacrity with which he is expected to jettison his familial homestead gives the lie to any cliched notion of an Irish ‘sense of place’, a concept, as Pat Sheeran suggested in the 1980s, was long since bartered for more pressing economic imperatives.29 It quickly emerges that one of the core tactics in the longer-term strategy to unseat Johnsey from his position of intransigence is to deploy an arsenal of narrative resources in order to publicly shame the remaining bulwark against progress in the vicinity. This scrutiny of self-worth on foot of public exposure is one staging post on the way to Johnsey’s eventual removal: Isn’t it a fright to God to say a man could end up being a bar to progress and could deny jobs to half the village and wealth to all by just being alive [.  .  .] Seemingly the whole village was all of a sudden looking out of their mouths at him to know what would he do about selling the land to this consortium of bigshots so that they may get on with their plan for houses, shops, a school, new roads and what have you. And none of it for profit – all them great men wants is to give employment, according to Herbert Grogan. The Creamers and the McDermotts and Paddy Rourke had apparently all already entered into agreement-in-principle with regard to their share of this famous land deal.30

Though often an uncomprehending and inarticulate protagonist, Johnsey is not entirely without insight; these are often personal and/or superficial insights. In this extended extract from the ‘July’ chapter, we can glean a sense of the isolation foisted upon Johnsey by the rising tide of greed and speculation afoot in the locality. But Ryan also gives us an insight into the relations that existed between private investment and the State, the linguistic and cultural mutations within Irish society at this time and the co-existence of impoverished vulnerability and opportunistic materialism during the Celtic Tiger years. Relative poverty actually increased during the so-called boom years, and the promises of these investors, while not explaining it in its entirety, do hint at the State’s abdication of social responsibility, particularly with respect to marginal constituencies in Ireland.31 In short, the State should provide such facilities, and relinquished the opportunity to make the accruals of elevated taxation revenues



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operative and beneficial for large swathes of the Irish working-class population. Johnsey, and several of the narrators in The Spinning Heart, are voices from marginal locations within Celtic Tiger Ireland that, historically speaking, they barely registered, hence their importance for Ryan. They chafe against the consented-to narratives of progress and affluence, and, again, in the extract earlier, Ryan expresses this relative alienation in formal terms. The first and the third italicized words belong to the new idioms of affluence, which predominated in popular and public discourse in Celtic Tiger Ireland. Ryan’s emphasis here suggests the ways in which capitalism is itself cultural as well as ecological. In this context, the rhetoric of capitalism further alienates the protagonist, even though they refer to the development of his property. Pointedly, the use of the term ‘consortium’, by Ryan, but also the corporate employment of the word, is a contemporary debasement of the original Latin meaning, which referred to ‘fellowship, society and participation’. The language of capitalism, then, is purely contextual and, historical sense or roots are traduced at the level of signification in the mid-west of Ireland. Johnsey’s alienation continues, and is intensified, at the level of discourse by the publication of damning newspaper articles detailing his apparent greed, alleging that he is holding the locality to ransom in his excessive demands for financial compensation on the sale of his land. Again, Ryan pinpoints the lack of agency of the individual in the face of local and, in this case, national scrutiny and misrepresentation. The invocation of the Irish media is deliberate by Ryan, as a large proportion of the news media were active cheerleaders for the unfettered expansion and speculation of the Irish property ‘boom’. Not content with conveying information and opinion, newspapers, in particular, fetishized the value and prestige of property, tantalizing readers with images of overpriced and unobtainable properties.32 Though, clearly not to blame, the media’s cultivation and propagation of desire, through verbal and visual signification, are targeted here by Ryan.33 The intrusion of the metropolitan journalist and accompanying photographer are references to the multi-scalar nature of the narrative, and suggest the ways in which localities became aggregated and normalized into a national narrative of progress and affluence. Johnsey’s resistance to such uniformity, then, legitimizes his demonization at the local level, but also on a national platform by the journalist. Accompanying an unflattering photograph of Johnsey, the first newspaper article reads: This is the young bachelor from rural Tipperary whose obscene demands are threatening to derail plans to transform the fortunes of an entire community [. . .] this young bachelor, who has turned a deaf ear to his neighbours’ appeals for sanity in his approach to the brokering of a massive property deal, was left the land by his late parents and has shown little interest in working the land, choosing instead to lease the farm to neighbours and live a life of luxury in the period farmhouse that his late parents spent tens of thousands of pounds renovating. Since being assaulted by a group of unemployed locals, angry at his cavalier attitude to their futures, he has become a virtual recluse, issuing his crazed demands through a firm of city accountants.34

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The content of this newspaper extract is entirely at odds with the character encountered at length by the reader across Ryan’s narrative, as Johnsey’s lifestyle could not be more removed from the excess depicted in the media report. In this isolated mediation of Johnsey’s attitude and behavioural patterns, Ryan draws on a familiar trope within modern Irish literary fiction: the vulnerable, abject loner. Johnsey is demonized as pursuing a lifestyle of unashamed individualism, basking in the inevitability of his own good fortune, insensible to the needs of those of his community. But, as the narrative reveals, the individualism attributed to Johnsey is, in fact, the conditioning feature of that community. Johnsey is portrayed as the ‘enemy within’, as being parasitic upon his fellow denizens, and the media report is an explicit ironization of both the role played by the media and of the governing mindset of influential constituencies within Irish society during the Celtic Tiger ‘boom’. In effect, read in the context of the entire narrative, the newspaper article functions as a simulacrum, demonstrating the emptiness of mainstream signification and discourse as they fomented crisis-inducing desire for property and profit. The newspaper article’s portrait of Johnsey lacks accuracy and substance, recreating its own ‘real’ version of Johnsey; in effect, the debt economy is operative as a concatenation of plotlines.35 On one level the representational self-reflexiveness of this poisonous narration gestures to the vacuity of the mythologies of finance capital with which Celtic Tiger Ireland had been transfused. Yet as the narrative progresses, we are not permitted to forget the material agency of such a distorted fictionalization of Johnsey Cunliffe, as it contributes to his cultivation as a viable target of a violent vendetta. More broadly this episode is a fraction of the role of the media as the purveyor of conjunctive narratives about the reality of the Irish economy.36 There is an underlying tactical logic to the media report here, according to which inheritance and indolence are adduced as evidence of the illegitimacy of Johnsey’s retention of the land. As we have mentioned, the individual is once more pitched against the community, with the former inured to the economic and affective needs of the latter. Within an utterly fabricated morality tale, Johnsey assumes the role of undeserved privilege whose actions confound the community’s indefeasible right to economic security. The media report harmonizes with the novel’s interest in shame affects to the extent that the report effectively weaponizes shame in its apparent exposure of Johnsey’s character. This repurposing of shame in the form of a newspaper publication is qualitatively different to those peddled by the Irish media about Celtic Tiger opportunity and excess, but it is similarly devoted to the affective mythologies of ‘boom-time’ progress. In this latter case we are exposed to a public dramatization of shaming that is designed to induce private shame and, thereby, consent to the wider demands of the community. As we unpack elsewhere in this study, it adheres to and exploits the inherent sociality of shame affects that ensure the sustenance of ‘social norms’.37 Likewise it reminds us of the extent to which Ryan’s work reveals tensions at the level of form. In The Thing about December temporal, spatial and narrative forms are thrown into contestation under the shadow of the emerging economic upturn in Ireland.



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The Spinning Heart – beyond the local Reflecting on the historical and contemporary nature, and variety, of Ireland’s immersion in the flows of global economics and cultural exchange, Fintan O’Toole writes: Over this period [the Celtic Tiger], after all, Ireland did not merely become more globalised. It became, according to the A.T. Kearney/Foreign Policy magazine Globalisation Index, the most globalised society in the world in 2002, 2003 and 2004 [. . .] There is a qualitative difference between being affected by globalisation, as Ireland was for previous centuries, and being its poster child, as it became in the recent boom years.38

Ireland’s historical implication in the global took the shape of its status as a colony of the British Empire, its exemplarity as a Catholic nation and society, and fluctuating patterns of enforced and voluntary emigration and migration across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Much of the country’s previous experiences of the global have been in the context of its uneven and coerced incorporation into British imperial modernity.39 As O’Toole maintains, the Irish voluntarily adopted the lifestyles and value systems of capitalist globalization, adopting consumerist values with alarming alacrity; importing and adapting neoliberal economic and social policies with little concern for resulting social inequalities; and playing host to a large and international community of immigrant workers from Europe, Asia and Africa.40 It is self-evident from both of Ryan’s texts that there are exacting human and communal costs to such willing self-abasement. With cruel historical irony, latter-day efforts to retain agency in the global context – previously unavailable under British imperial modernity – returned the Irish State, and its citizen taxpayers, to the roles of quasi-vassals of international political and economic institutions. From a literary-critical perspective, Sharae Deckard foregrounds the values of global experimentalism of narratives that trade in multi-scalar spatial and temporal settings, whose formal features enable a critique of capital’s linear mode of narration. For Deckard: ‘[w]hether as world-systems novels, novelsin-fragments, story-cycles, or composite novels, a variety of literary forms in contemporary world-ecological literature have emerged which attempt to move beyond realist metonymy and model systemic-relations in their very structure.’41 In the sense outlined by Deckard, The Spinning Heart is patterned as a story-cycle that displays the imprints of the national and the global, and that goes beyond the limits of locality and place. As is abundantly clear from Ryan’s texts, the immediate action may appear to concern itself with the micro-politics of local opportunism, but there is no failsafe prophylactic against the influences of globalization. Indeed, a later narrative, relayed by Kate, a nursery school owner in Limerick city, opens with a reference to the vagaries of depending upon the fluctuating fortunes and priorities of multinational capital: ‘One awful thing that happened since the recession started is Dell closing. Like, it nearly finished us all. They were bloody all Dell.’42 Across 2009 and 2010, the computer manufacturer shed 1,900 employees in

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Limerick, re-locating operations to Poland. Ireland’s open-door policy to foreign direct investment, which includes its contentiously low rate of corporation tax, has, historically, allowed it to compete on the global market, but also brings highrisk stakes, as such manufacturing closures and the parallel global banking crisis demonstrate. Ryan’s narrative intimates that these macro-crises are entwined with government policy and media discourse at national levels, as well as conditioning trends in communal and individual behaviour at local levels. The allusion to industrial-scale flight out of Ireland in the post-crash period, together with repeated references to the possibilities afforded by economic emigration, serves notice that The Spinning Heart is not solely a national or local morality tale. Our subsequent analyses cast light on Ryan’s engagement with the deterritorializing manoeuvres of financial capitalism together with the operations of, and dividends of, what Iain Sinclair denotes as ‘the occult logic of market forces’.43

Faith in fakes The Spinning Heart opens with Bobby Mahon’s first-person narrative. Two months after he has been made redundant, he is in severely reduced financial circumstances with a young family for whom he needs to provide. He recalls at suggestive length the revelation that the financial management of the building firm was corrupted, before giving a mordant account of the heyday of his professional life as the property bubble expanded relentlessly. There is a ruthlessness to his imagination of the future construction of houses that lays waste to landscape and that necessarily entails individual sequestration within a regimen of mortgaged indebtedness. Crucially, Bobby’s fantasied projection here echoes Johnsey’s erstwhile fantasies in The Thing about December. While the latter might be read as naïve psycho-sexual daydreams, at the level of form both are consistent with the disavowals of reality entailed by the capitalist debt economy.44 It is in the content and the temporal focus of Johnsey’s fictions that he is separated from, and eventually removed from, the contemporary Celtic Tiger context. But Bobby’s story is undistilled aftermath: And now I can’t pay for the messages. Christ on a bike. I had a right swagger there for a couple of years, thinking I was a great fella. Foreman, I was clearing a grand a week. Set for life. Houses would never stop going up. I’d see babies like our own being pushed around the village below and think: lovely, work for the future, they’ll all need their own houses some day too [. . .] Once they buried that boy of the Cunliffes years ago and his auld auntie grabbed that land and divided it out among the bigshots, we all thought we were feckin elected.45

Bobby furnishes a micro-history of the past, present and the aborted future of this locality, but also, in parvo, that of many communities across Ireland during the same period. The ‘Cunliffe’ boy mentioned here is the protagonist of The Thing about December, and, as such, there is a Gothic element to this local drama, with the sins of the past returning to haunt those who benefited from the original violent



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death. Thus, Johnsey joins the absconded property developer, Pokey Burke, as the twin spectres of The Spinning Heart. The latter is the consistent focus of bitterness and regret in the narrative, at the same time as he represents the deterritorializing patterns of finance capitalism. While Johnsey Cunliffe is occulted from the narrative despite his material centrality to the scenes and sites of aftermath. As the Irish property ‘boom’ is thoroughly derailed, Bobby Mahon and his colleagues attempt to substitute the private earnings of the building contractor with the State-supported income of social welfare. Yet, as we see in the ensuing extract taken from Bobby’s narrative at the outset of The Spinning Heart, there is far more to the encounter at the social welfare office than a mere financial transaction. We are quickly apprised by the narrative that the anticipated financial support will never materialize and the entire ceremony is reduced to an exercise in humiliation: I showed the little blonde girl at the hatch my last payslip. You could clearly see what was taken out: PRSI, PAYE, Income levy, pension. She held it in front of her with her nose wrinkled up like I was after wiping my armpit with it. Well? I said. Well what? What’s the story? There’s no story sir. I wasn’t on the computer as an employee of Pokey Burke or anyone else. Did you ever look for a P60 from your employer? A what, now? You’re some fool, she said with her eyes. I know I am, my red cheeks said back.46

While Bobby’s recourse to social welfare might well describe the conditions experienced by tens of thousands of equivalent employees in the post-‘boom’ period, it is worth unpacking in terms of its other implications. Specifically, in listing the spare mathematical deductions of the average payslip – ‘PRSI, PAYE, Income levy, pension’ – Ryan is also touching upon the underlying principles on which these are based. If Johnsey Cunliffe’s trust in the Unthanks was cruelly exposed as sentimental and disposable, Ryan deploys the workings of the social welfare and taxation system to similar ends in The Spinning Heart. At the surface level, their quondam employer, Pokey Burke, has fled and is revealed as never having fulfilled his obligations to the potential future precarity of his employees. Thus, a network of social systems ideally founded upon trust, shared burdens and the notion of communality is sacrificed in the name of profit maximization by Bobby’s employer. From the opening of the narrative, then, it is not simply a matter of narrating the individual micro-stories and traumas extant in this haunted locality. Rather, Ryan gestures to the betrayal of basic notions of communal solidarity and mutual responsibility – matters that were revealed as equally as ripe for rejection with respect to Johnsey Cunliffe in The Thing about December. The abandonment of the unemployed, the precarious and the indebted, all apparent in The Spinning Heart, embody what the economist Nouriel Roubini, among many other commentators, has dubbed a contemporary exercise in ‘socialism for the rich [and] the well connected’.47 The safety net of the social welfare system is relegated below the requirements of the sustained survival and liquidity of the globalized agencies of finance capitalism. In spotlighting Bobby’s experience at the social welfare office, Ryan metonymizes the widespread nationalization of

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financial responsibility in the post-Celtic Tiger period. The assaults on a more benevolent form of communality that are a feature of The Thing about December are reprised here in the form of the silent and emptied-out resources of the welfare system. Burke’s actions displace the communal with the individual, and they invest the combined future interests of that community in securing the profit margins of the entrepreneurial individual developer. Blinded by the literal and figurative concreteness of his present and future prospects, Bobby is fully taken in by the empty promises of Pokey Burke. But those empty promises return to haunt Bobby in the form of the ‘meaningless’ textual signifiers he holds as payslips. They are symptomatic of the fact that, as Karyn Ball stresses, under finance capitalism ‘[a] dislocation has occurred that annihilates referential value’.48 The lapsed visions of Bobby’s imagined future are as insubstantial as Pokey Burke’s payslips, the latter are littered with travestied promises and they are nothing more than worthless promissory notes. Once more we encounter futures hijacked, denuded of promise and certainty, and note the way in which faith, this time in a social system of communal and mutual trust, is reduced and discarded by the promise of individual financial enrichment. The faith that Bobby and his co-workers have in the system is genuine and inherited, yet it remains fundamentally abstract to them. Their futures are entrusted to a system to which they have limited access and limited understanding, and ‘Stamps’ appears as the single reflex indice of their grasp of the financial workings of their employment. But while the lack of substance characteristic of these ‘counterfeit’ payslips speaks to the abstruseness of a wider financial system, Ryan is just as much preoccupied by the affective and the material accruals of the collapse of the Celtic Tiger property economy. Indeed, the former takes on a material incarnation in the extract above when, under the dismissive gaze of the female social welfare worker, Bobby’s blushing face responds, affirming his abject shame at falling prey to Pokey Burke’s sharp business practice. This set piece is consistent with Kaye Mitchell’s contentions that shame is ‘both physiological and psychological’, ‘both innate and cultural’, ‘internal, individual, personal to all of us, while also being a feature of the (external) social relations that connect us to others’.49 The articulacy of the body outlined in Bobby’s case is of a piece with the affective and emotional dimensions of capitalism itself. Despair and euphoria are familiar emotional registers of the capitalist marketplace, and Celtic Tiger Ireland was not removed from these peaking and troughing affective experiences.50 In the throes of financial ruination Bobby Mahon is faced down by the accusatory glare of the absent State system, his public shaming is part of a broader campaign of national shaming in the postcrash period in Ireland. Not only is there a nationalization of risk and debt, but there is also a nationalization of shame and guilt, a renovated species of an Irish imagined community. Ultimately the redundancy of the payslips in terms of their exchange value gestures to the traction of the abstractions of finance capitalism in Celtic Tiger Ireland, but we are not permitted to forget that the payslips are also material artefacts in the hands of the duped building workers. While Kennedy’s argument insists that such moments are evidentiary of a specifically Irish crisis of



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masculinity and are not in any way linked to the economic crisis, as we consistently see, there is sufficient heed paid by Ryan to the dynamics of temporality, belief and affect that are inherent functioning elements of the prevailing financial capitalist conjuncture.

Displacement – global and textual The formal architectures of both of Ryan’s novels focus our attention on ‘place’, on interpersonal dynamics within a confined geography.51 In The Spinning Heart, the employment of twenty-one different narrators offers a wide plurality of voices and perspectives, but there is a loose coherence retained due to the limited spatial context of the narrative. The multiplicity of voices within a single community is also suggestive of the tentacular reach of global capital into diverse and peripheral physical and cultural ecologies. One of the voices encountered is that of a migrant labourer, Vasya, whose heritage is that of a Khakassian reindeer herder. Tellingly, Vasya’s narrative partly worries over the primacy of place and home, a function of his own displacement, no doubt. Yet, as he reflects upon the local topography to which he has become accustomed through a pattern of regular walking, his thoughts work counter to the labour of property development in which he was previously employed: ‘Houses are hidden at the end of long avenues [. . .] These people are fixed, rooted, bound to a certain place. I think of my father’s camp and the moving of the herds across thousands of miles of openness.’52 There is an element of wish fulfilment or fantasy about Vasya’s imaginative projections here, but, more importantly, he alludes to the vagrancy of his family and of his tribe. While there is a dignity to the historical itinerancy of his heritage, Vasya’s ‘mobility’ is within the networks of global capital. His presence in this rural Irish town is a testament to the reach and the contingency of these global agencies, and it is further evidence of the attention given by Ryan – across both of the texts – to the multi-scalar fabric of the community’s interface with global capital. Ryan sketches the ambivalence of Vasya’s migrant residency in Ireland; he is accepted among co-workers and the community due to his commitment to hard work and his inoffensive exoticism. On more than one occasion in this narrative Vasya refers to lapses in or partiality of vision, the reality in which he is physically immersed appears to distort and it confounds his capacity for comprehension: That light is a trick: if I were to swim to it or row out to put my hand upon it, it would be gone as I approached and there would only be dark, cold water in its place. Across the bay there is another place, identical to the one where I sit. [. . .] When it looks to be a distance that I could easily swim, I think of myself trying and of being seized halfway by a tightening of the muscles in my arms or legs. Or by the panic of realization that I misjudged the distance, and that I had been tricked by the landscape and the light. No one on the shore would see that I was struggling; no one would hear me cry for help.53

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The gleaming insubstantiality of the sunlit rural landscape is not merely a figurative rendering of the migrant’s sense of alienation. Vasya’s combined description of, and imagination of, the illusory solidity of the scene at the water’s edge betrays an inherent anxiety befitting the precarity of his migrancy on foot of the imploded Celtic Tiger economy. At this juncture Vasya’s imaginative resources are suffused with a sense of vulnerability and abandonment; he is emblematic of the mobile and disposable global subject. Yet that anxiety is equally suggestive of the systemic alienation characteristic of finance capitalism, whereby that which appears most grounded and enduring – the home – is revealed as an essentially spectral and haunting artefact of the global debt economy. The Spinning Heart is replete with such distorted visions of one’s reality as the community becomes increasingly alienated from itself and from the immediacy of their daily lives in the post-crash context. Having displayed the relevant documentation for his social welfare claim, and replaying Bobby’s equivalent encounter, Vasya is met with incredulity by the social welfare officer: Pokey Burke? She sighed. I looked at her in silence and shrugged. She rolled her eyes towards the ceiling. Then she smiled at me, but it was a smile that says I’m sorry. I didn’t understand the next words she said, but her voice was kind. Shawnee whispered loudly and slowly from behind me while the girl looked at her computer screen: Hey Chief, what she’s saying is you . . . don’t . . . exist!’54

The initial exasperated utterance of Burke’s name is another occasion where the signifier operates without the signified, with Burke having absconded he is now the subject of recrimination, rumour and regret across the locality. But between the ‘sighed’ articulation of the name and the closing reported speech, Ryan inserts a telling sequence of somatic and gestural expressions in addition to the mute incomprehension of Vasya. In place of the material absence of Pokey Burke, without a physical target of accountability, there is a brief but intense focus on the bodies of those mired in the aftermath. The gestural and somatic articulacy of the social welfare officer is wedded to the silent ignorance of the migrant worker, yet he is attuned to the form of her expressiveness while the content remains inaccessible to him. Vasya is capable of translating the mute performances of the body, as faith in the reliable transparency of language dissipates. As we established earlier with respect to Bobby’s reception by the social welfare officer, the narrative exhibits a wariness of language, particularly the idioms of economic progress marshalled during the Celtic Tiger property ‘boom’. But that does not mean that The Spinning Heart is unmindful of the material accruals of the stalled economy. In paying attention to Bobby’s carceral and affective response, in addition to gestural and embodied dialogue engaged in by Vasya, the narrative finds a material ground on which to play out its concern with the day-to-day aftermaths of Pokey Burke’s betrayal. The narrative’s focus upon absence and disappearance are centred upon the voided scripts of the labourers’ payslips and the closing clause of the extract above throws this into sharp relief. The grammatical



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selection of two ellipses emphasizes the non-existence of Vasya, and the others, within the abstract notations of the social welfare system. Once we aggregate Bobby’s and Vasya’s experiences we can discern the narrative’s awareness of the reductive abstractions of finance capitalism and what Baudrillard has referred to as ‘the death of reference’.55 These are not just isolated and discrete occasions of minor corruption but are symptomatic of the arcane semiotics of the financial networks to which Ireland’s economic ‘miracle’ was integrated. But the degrees of communication that are apparent, notwithstanding the attendant discomfort felt by Bobby and Vasya, are viable pulses of resistant communality threaded into the narrative by Ryan.

Relationality and responsibility Bobby Mahon is the resolutely physical masculine presence in The Spinning Heart; he is cast as the local embodiment of low-key heroism, though he is also beset with doubt and emotional fragility. Were we to confine our analysis of The Spinning Heart to Bobby Mahon, the centrality of his crisis of masculinity would form a cornerstone of our argument. However, in making a case for the relevance of Ryan’s fiction to our wider appraisal of Irish ‘finance fictions’ across this study, we need to address the significance of the absent, the bitter and the dead in the narrative. Namely why does Ryan not permit Bobby Mahon and his colleagues to confront the corrupted developer Pokey Burke? Why must Bobby be met with unsatisfactory answers from Burke’s father, from whom Pokey inherited the building company? Furthermore, can we account for the irreconcilable hatred that courses through the relationship between Bobby and his father, Frank, in terms of our ‘financial’ analysis? Is the latter linked to the fact that Frank Mahon speaks to us posthumously? And what are the effects of both the form and the content of Frank’s narration from beyond the grave? We might tentatively suggest that the aforementioned sense of absence and voided signification apparent in the failed social welfare transactions earlier tally with some of the ways in which Ryan deploys both Burke and Frank Mahon in the narrative. In our analysis of Peter Cunningham’s Capital Sins in Chapter 1, we made a case for the limitations of that novel’s moral vision given that it adheres to a narrow model of narrative relationality. Put simply, Cunningham furnishes an uncomplicated moral scenario in which the demarcation of guilt and innocence are patently apparent to the reader; as such the reader’s expectations are thoroughly satiated by the narrative arc of Capital Sins. The Spinning Heart does not pass on offering a clear moral schema either, but in both Pokey Burke and Frank Mahon, Ryan does deviate from the simplicity of Cunningham’s dichotomous presentation of culpability and victimhood. Bluntly, Pokey Burke is absent, he is a mere allusion, a guilty signifier and thus the moral relationality of the narrative is incomplete. Without the rallying presence of the irrefutably guilty party in the narrative, The Spinning Heart deprives the reader of a degree of consolation and satisfaction. Of more import, however, is the latitude afforded by absence, whereby the narrative

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acknowledges an awareness of the insubstantiality of finance capitalism. Though this does not come at the cost of an appreciation and dramatization of the concrete effects of the semiotization of wealth creation. An important point to consider is that if Ryan had allowed Pokey a voice and a presence in the narrative, not only would such a choice have offered a singular focus for readerly approbation, by extension the action would have been ‘localized’ and ‘nationalized’ to an extent that would have undercut its engagement with the Celtic Tiger economy. Absenting the focal guilty party is not an avoidance of confrontation; rather, it signals the globality of the deterritorializing structures that underwrite the hollowing out and abandonment of these local sites of ruination. Granted there are manifestly traumatic emotional and physical consequences on display in The Spinning Heart, but the roots and causes of financial impoverishment, personal shame and communal anger do not exclusively originate in the national context. Thus, Pokey’s absence is complicit with the dissolution of meaning played out in the social welfare office. The promise of future financial security invested in by Bobby, as Pokey’s on-site foreman, is exposed as a fiction, a narrative without purchase or prospect given that Bobby is excluded from authoring of such narratives. As we see, Ryan spotlights how faith, trust and belief in people, in language and in stories conditioned the rise and falls of these representative local communities. But also, we cannot understand these experiences outwith their implication in more globalized systems of speculation and signification. The attention devoted to father–son cleavage in The Spinning Heart is indisputable, but to confine analysis to unearthing the nationally inflected oedipal dramas of rural Ireland is to miss the ways in which we can read Ryan’s narrative in terms of finance and representation. Bobby’s fractured relationship with his father, Frank Mahon, is laid out in detail in Bobby’s narrative early in The Spinning Heart, as, in McGahernesque fashion, there are clear lines of distinction between his emotional attachment to his father and his mother, respectively. But Frank Mahon’s own distance from his father is recalled by Bobby in the way that Frank deliberately wastes his entire paternal inheritance: My Father never drank a drop until the day the probate was finished on Grandad’s farm [. . .] Then my father went to Ciss O’Brien’s and ordered a Jameson and a pint and drank them down [. . .] The day he spent the last penny that was got for the land he stopped drinking. It took him nearly five years to drink out the farm and when it was done he never took a sup again [. . .] He drank out the farm to spite his father. It was the one thing Grandad said he knew my father wouldn’t do, so my father did it.56

The passage raises a key question about the relationship between Frank’s methodical emptying out of his familial legacy, the minor site of residential dereliction in the locality and the material and financial ruination that followed the global financial crash in 2008. Is it possible to take Frank’s conscious pursuit of wreckage as an isolated act of volition within the narrative, entirely apart from the resonant disfiguring presence of the ghost estate? Or can we make connections between the



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bankruptcies of both? Can we confine our reading of Frank’s wilful squandering of his familial inheritance simply as an act of bloody-minded bitterness, an act typical and familiar within the Irish context? Frank’s campaign is fuelled by a desire to squander, an unremitting urge for catastrophe that will only be satiated by the final erasure of the inherited property and wealth. Or if the liquidation of the family farm shadows the stalled ruin of the ghost estate, can we read Frank’s determination to achieve ruination as figurative of the waste and destruction that inheres within global capitalism? From such a perspective, there are echoes of the inevitable and sought-after implosion of financial crisis in Frank’s conscious acts of economic sabotage. Is Frank an instantiation of the death drive of capitalism, as argued by Paul Crosthwaite? Reading the global financial collapse via the works of Bataille, Baudrillard and Lyotard, Crosthwaite makes the case that ‘for its participants and spectators alike, the crash is not simply an object of fear or anxiety, or even of mere fascination, but also of an inchoate but urgent desire’.57 In this context, then, Frank Mahon’s drive to scuttle the product of his father’s lifelong labour and investment is no minor familial footnote, but must be connected to the self-destructive urges implicit within financial capitalism and also linked to the remainders of property developments that scar both rural and urban Ireland after the crash of 2008. Energized by a desire to contradict his dying father’s belief that he would never squander his inheritance, Frank fully commits to such a project and comprehensively rejects participation in the productive agricultural economy. If the communal narrative of The Spinning Heart is set on bemoaning the dissolution of the speculative economy of property development, then Frank’s actions represent the attendant ‘countervailing tendency [. . .] towards waste, expenditure, and consumption: a “death drive” that culminate in the mingled despair and euphoria of the crash’.58 Frank rejects the speculative in favour of the certainty of destruction, yet his act of destruction foreshadows and reveals the inherent violence of the speculative under financial capitalism. Clarifying this tendency towards self-annihilation, Lyotard refers to the ‘consumptive hoarding’ of speculation that invariably occasions ‘between one part and the other of this “body” a more and more overpowering inequality of wealth [. . .] [and] between one piece and the other of the libidinal patchwork a more and more hateful jealousy with regard to intensities’.59 Secreted within the mythologizations of endless speculative returns, particularly within the property sector in Ireland, is the knowledge that the cycle will and must end in catastrophe. Indeed, the violent and deathly energies of speculative capital had already been made manifest in The Thing about December with the fatal shooting of Johnsey Cunliffe.60 Though divergent in terms of their respective temperaments, Frank and Johnsey are affiliated across these linked narratives as they tease out the inevitable implosion of the speculative property ‘bubble’ in Ireland.61 Pokey Burke’s employees are not the only characters directly impacted upon by his flight from accountability. Denis, a sub-contractor, takes to driving around the country for weeks looking for Pokey Burke and Conleth Barry and four or five more bollockses that owe me money. I’m owed near a hundred

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Denis’s physical search for Pokey Burke mirrors the desire for definitive justice that is the hallmark of corners of global and Irish finance fiction, yet Ryan insists on retaining Burke’s elusiveness. Just as Burke is fugitive and deterritorialized, Denis’s pursuit of payment will be perpetually frustrated and, in the end, he will indulge in the violence of finance capitalism in order to achieve a form of redemption. In the absence of Pokey Burke, Denis co-opts Bobby Mahon as the target of his debilitating disaffection and intends to intimidate Bobby into recouping some of his lost earnings. However, instead Denis encounters Frank Mahon at the Mahon homestead and viciously beats Frank to death with a plank of wood. Syncing with the father/son psychodrama of the Mahon family, and having been taunted by Frank Mahon, Denis rationalizes his act of murderous violence by saying: ‘I thought I was killing my own father, just for them two or three seconds, just for that time that’ll be the rest of time for me, I swear to almighty God.’63 The triangulation of paternal discord in terms of Frank, Bobby and Denis tallies with Kennedy’s psychoanalytical unpacking of The Spinning Heart, but, as we have intimated, this set of overlapping relations can also be productively wedded to the broader machinations of finance capitalism. Denis precedes his murderous outburst with a demand for justice; he is heavily indebted and is also owed money by other affected parties. In this context his aggregated actions are a search for redemption; he is at the centre of a nexus of transactions in which debts must be redeemed. Thus, his murder of Frank Mahon might well be a moment of psychotic violence ostensibly aimed at his own father, but the opportunity is initially spurred by his desire for a redeeming confrontation with Bobby Mahon. Ultimately redemption cannot be realized, debts cannot be redeemed and indebtedness perpetuates into the future.64 The ‘immateriality’ of the fugitive Pokey Buke, of the meaningless payslips and of the network of indebtedness underpinning the local and national economies, recalls De Boever’s suggestion that ‘the psychotic effect of money on human beings has intensified over time, with money’s development into finance, and in the context of a misconstrued philosophy of money that posited money as an actual, material value’.65 In our immediate context, the promises and expectations evinced by Bobby Mahon, and others, about the durability of their affluence are symptomatic of a faith in a fictitious system and a belief in a ‘reality’ that is just as fugitive as Pokey Burke. This is essentially what De Boever describes when he outlines the psychotic nature of the contemporary finance economy. Furthermore, the temporary psychosis alluded to by Denis transcends the redemptive energy of a local oedipal outrage and is consistent with the psychotic nature of the finance economy itself. For, in one respect, Denis breaks with the physical reality of his immediate surroundings in the Mahon house in an instantiation of psychotic displacement that is indicative of the ‘ultimately psychotic, reality-disavowing effects of money, capital and (ultimately) finance’.66 But he does commit an act of



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murderous violence, a stark reminder of the brutal and unforgiving materialities of the economic crash, and an act that facilitates the later posthumous narration by Frank Mahon.67 Relayed one month after his murder, Frank’s narrative obscures the relationality of Ryan’s text, thwarting the transparently realistic form that otherwise dominates The Spinning Heart. The focalizing asymmetry of Frank’s posthumous narrative with respect to the remainder of the text coheres with the structural asymmetries underlying the capitalist conjuncture at the root of the locality’s acute impoverishment. Thus, the formal selection by Ryan resonates with the critical potentialities of literary ‘irrealism’ expounded upon by Michael Löwy, which materializes in literary narratives as ‘a different, non-existent reality [. . .] another imaginary world either idealized or terrifying’.68 The disjunctive narration abets the text’s thematic preoccupations with haunting, speculation and futurity, as Frank opens with a summary discursus on the latter: The Future is a cold mistress. You can give all your life looking to her and trying to catch a hold of her but she’ll always dance away from your fingertips and laugh back at you from the distance. Them that says they know are liars and thieves. What was ever wrote down on paper that came true, that could be checked? Not one thing since Scriptures.69

Frank reveals that these were his thoughts moments before he was fatally assaulted by Denis, as again the narrative aligns the abstract and the material in sharp relief. Though general and non-specific in focus, Frank’s reflections are consistent with our attention to Ryan’s engagement with the commingling of the fiduciality and insubstantiality central to the sustaining myths of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger economy. Here the text performs an internally self-reflexive commentary on the fictions to which, as have detailed in part earlier, many of its characters were beholden. Likewise, if Frank’s erasure of his familial inheritance stalks the broader narrative of Celtic Tiger ‘boom’ and ‘bust’, and reminds us of the in-built self-annihilatory workings of finance capital, then this posthumous missive folds the speculative and the destructive together. Frank is afforded a voice to confirm his long-held, and jaundiced, view of the wealth that temporarily alighted upon his community. In addition to his opening address, Frank avouches: There were plenty around here thought they knew the future, thought they had her number, took her fully for granted. I even knew, long before that gorilla arrived in and did for me, that no man could be assured of what the next day would hold. There’s no man on this earth can even be assured he’ll have a next day.70

Notwithstanding the arrogation of prophetic gifts here by the deceased Frank, the statement offers confirmation of the critical linkages between the speculative and the destructive evident in the narrative. Tellingly, as the living are accused

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of acquiescing with the fictitious forecasts of unsustainable prosperity, the voice of hard-nosed realism emanates from the only deceased character in the book, who is housed within what might be termed ‘an unrelated narrative register’ that transcends ‘the novel’s social ground’.71 The unexpected intrusion of the supernatural into a predominantly realist portrait of ‘downturn’ Ireland also disturbs the referential ground of the readerly experience of the narrative. In doing so it returns us to the question of belief and narrative fiduciality and, in concert with the thematic priorities of The Spinning Heart, our faith in the narrative is tested at this juncture. Appropriately as Frank is ‘haunting’ his former home, to use his own words, as we noted earlier, Ryan portrays an equally uncanny array of homes in terms of the abandoned ‘ghost estate’. In orienting the narrative in the direction of an alternative register, Ryan addresses the ambivalence of mortgaged ownership within the global debt economy. As Mary McGlynn observes: ‘[t]he materiality of the home is in tension with its intangible monetary value, and the imaginary and intangible have the ability to destroy the real.’72 The value, most of the proposed residents, the futures and the absconded developers of the ghost estate houses are altogether elsewhere, and the unfinished estate stands as a monument to deterritorialized finance capitalism that ‘has no interest in the future well-being of the community’.73

Conclusion The aforementioned properties that populated Ireland’s ‘ghost estates’ have been read from a figurative perspective as partial, concreted icons representing stillborn futures, but they have also, variously, assumed metaphoric and metonymic functions. In simple terms they are invoked as metaphoric of the country’s dire economic condition, while at the same time they are metonymically operative as fractions of the larger overdeveloped whole of the country’s geography. Deprived of ever having functioned in the ways they are designed to, these houses stand adrift as reminders of lapsed possibilities, of bankrupted lives and unrealized relationships. Such concreted shells that ribboned stretches of the Irish landscape are hauntings of futures that will never materialize but that will remain indebted, and they are artefacts that testify to the cultural and economic investments made in advanced capitalism during the Celtic Tiger. These houses and estates can be read in relation to the personal motivations that once energized their unfettered construction, and in this way, they are also crumbling testaments to the speculative urge that underpinned Ireland’s Celtic Tiger property frenzy. As we have noted, the volatility of the speculative is braided into the tragic and fatal cost-benefit dynamics of communal life in Ryan’s The Thing about December. Reflections on these Celtic Tiger ‘ruins’ and ‘artefacts’ are not just suggestive of post-crash national penury but must also be considered as revelatory of the compulsions and motivations so widespread in Ireland during the Celtic Tiger years. The sole remains of human presence are scattered detritus, once more suggestive of post-apocalyptic abandonment, if on a localized Irish scale in this



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case. In an astute appraisal of how Irish photographic art has re-presented such scenes of abandonment, Justin Carville writes: ‘In a land littered with historical ruins, [Anthony] Haughey’s and [David] Farrell’s topographies of terror confront the viewer with Ireland’s newest of ruins drawn down to earth, not through nature’s power but through the speculative forces of capital. Many of these topographies have been formed through a series of leaps of faith into a future that seemed certain.’74 It is just such a ‘topography of terror’ that confronts the denizens of the small town in the mid-west of Ireland in 2010 in The Spinning Heart on foot of their re-imagination of their locality in The Thing about December. What manifests is an uneven engagement between the global machinations of capitalism and the misguided faiths of local actors in regional Ireland. Ryan’s narrative, and the recent history of the Celtic Tiger, cannot disguise the facts that many were willing investors in and victims of such ethereal financial faith. But in Ryan’s narrative we get a sense of the exhausting and divisive aftermaths of the collapse of capitalism’s exercises in one specific locality.75 Ryan’s narrative offers hints at the multi-scalar sources and implications of this localized manifestation of Ireland’s property frenzy, and it does so suggestively in another instance from the viewpoint of a single mother, Realtin, one of the few residents of the uncompleted and sparsely populated ‘ghost estate’: ‘There are forty-four houses in this estate. I live in number twenty-three. There’s an old lady living in number forty. There’s no one living in any of the other houses, just the ghosts of people who never existed. I’m stranded, she’s abandoned.’76 Here the failed past and the unrealizable future commingle amid the emptiness and dereliction in Ryan’s narrative. But the origins of, the agencies that manufactured, these local spaces of private grief at past mistakes and at bleak future prospects are always present as hauntings, though not as physical forces with which one can reckon, as the fugitive Pokey Burke exposes. We divine such absent presences in the retrospective portions of Realtin’s narrative. In the same opening section of her narrative, Realtin explains how she came about living in such circumstances, how fear of being left remote from the ‘inevitable’ durability of propertied prosperity was a primary motive force in her decision-making. Recalling her conversation with the estate agent: ‘He said he couldn’t promise us any of the houses would be available the next day [. . .] Daddy got all worried and flustered then, and drove like a madman back to the Credit Union to get me the cash.’77 But this is not only the instance of a fear-induced purchase. Working in a legal office, Realtin is witness to further demonstrations of this culture in which credit and profit have commandeered common sense, and the ownership of property is an end in itself, with little thought given to price or value. In short, absolute trust is placed in absent forces that guarantee the future value of a product one has been all but coerced into acquiring. As Realtin reflects later, and this was commonly the case across similar estates and in major Irish cities, homes became punishing financial burdens as their value had fallen away. There is a conspiratorial air to the exploitation and silence confronting the consumer, as financial numbers are seen as arbitrary, yet all too powerful at the same time. And, crucially, as in the extract detailing Realtin’s own experience, it is credit, and the ease with which

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credit for mortgages can be sourced, that is the unifying feature of these local lives. The properties, the builders, the estate agents, the legal firms and the mortgages provided may well be familiar and indigenous, but the lifeblood, the nourishing agent, of the entire system is the credit underwritten by the Irish banking system and its own indebtedness to international financial markets. Commentators of all political and economic persuasions and affiliations framed their diagnoses and prognoses for the current global capitalist conjuncture in multiple and contradictory ways. For some, nationally located missteps precipitated the worst legacies of economic ruination; while others apportion blame to the corrupted, and corruptible, machinations of the global market itself. Such polarities have been in evidence in debates pursuant to the demise of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger. As the economist Terrence McDonough points out: ‘A rancorous debate has opened up over who or what was responsible for the debacle, with the government emphasizing the international aspects of the crisis, while opposition parties sought to lay the blame at the feet of a domestic cabal of developers, bankers, and governing party politicians.’78 Yet such simple dichotomies are not sustainable within a nuanced explication of how the uneven exchanges between international global capital and finance, and the particularities of the Irish economic and political systems, eventuated in the seemingly unbounded economic growth during the country’s economic ‘boom’. In the current context, too, we are presented with such nuance across Ryan’s linked fictional narratives. Ryan presents the intense and claustrophobic fall-out from the collapse of the Irish banking system through narratives that teem with local voices, but, as Deckard argues, such story cycles are never unmindful of the broader global context and forces that condition the smaller scale economic ecologies. The Spinning Heart and The Thing about December represent what Edna O’Brien terms ‘a debt-saddened landscape’,79 a physical and cultural terrain that is specific and historical, but whose current condition cannot be unwedded from the past and present histories of global financial capitalism.

CChapter 4 BILDUNG AND TEMPORALITY IN JUSTIN QUINN’S MOUNT MERRION (2013)

There always remains an unrealized surplus of humanness; there always remains a need for the future, and a place for this future must be found.1

Time and literary form As our title indicates, the focus of this chapter will be on the ways in which genre, narrative and time intersect in readings of cultural responses to both the global economic crash of 2008 and the implosion of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger economy. Justin Quinn’s employment of the bildungsroman in Mount Merrion is telling in the context of the demise of the Irish economic ‘boom’, given that it references one of the classic realist narrative forms through which citizen-consumers were hailed and ratified, a mode that ‘conventionalized a narrative pattern for participation in the egalitarian imaginary of the new bourgeois nation-state’.2 While Quinn’s narrative does not ultimately fashion radical aesthetic or political alternatives to the prevailing neoliberal-capitalist conjuncture, it raises provocative questions regarding the possibilities of imaginative alternatives that are coeval with, and embedded within, dominant narrative forms. Of course, the signal importance of narrative is not confined to the post-crash management of the fall-out but is fundamental to the ways in which financial and property markets are structured and operate. As Jeffrey Alexander makes plain: Economic actors, whether institutions, markets, states, or individuals, engage in performances that project meanings. Because their decisions about investment depend upon confidence in a bright future, they need an optimistic narrative that structures the moment-to-moment interpretations of the meaning of economic life. It is via interest rates that such narratively structured expectations take a direct and concrete economic form. Interest rates determine investment, but they are themselves a sign and not only a determinant. Interest is a metaphor for confidence in the prudence of economic actors large and small.3

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In common with a broad school of economic criticism, Alexander’s analysis stresses the essential ‘fictitiousness’ of finance as it deploys explicitly figurative and narratological terminology. Temperament, desire and agency are impacted upon, indeed guided by, the essential fictions of markets. Consoling and persuasive narratives, then, aid in the perpetuation of consumption and investment. In fact, the latter term – ‘investment’ – is a fraction of yet another cornerstone metaphor of prevailing market narratives and was acutely effective at the zenith of the Celtic Tiger property ‘boom’. Aggregating temporality and spatiality, a powerful figuration during this period was the notion that purchasing a house was a secure ‘investment in the future’. In this respect, it was not alone that choices in the present were limited to immediate effect, but the future became a feature of the narrativization of the life-cycle of the globalized Irish economic actor. Thus, a semiotics of consumption and investment contours the palate of expectations and choices made available to the contemporary homo economicus.4 What we have been witness to in Ireland, and beyond, then, is the manufacture of a specific form of ‘financial subject’ through a retinue of narratives and stories. The storehouse of narratives authored by and paraded across a variety of media do not simply trade in content but, as these analyses detail, they impact directly on the performances of identities by consumers. At a basic level, people now see themselves as ‘consumers’ and ‘investors’, and value is now merely legible as an economic metric. Success, failure, prosperity are the cardinal narrative indices under such an economic value system. Progress, investment, efficiency and consumption were the most publicly touted ‘values’ and ‘virtues’ of the new displays of ‘Irishness’, and they are sited within temporal regimes that stress a future-oriented telos. Yet what was less commonly advertised was the extent to which indebtedness was an enabling agent of the Celtic Tiger ‘boom’. Though not at the heart of the current discussion, we must remain cognizant of the extent to which the temporality of debt did, and still does, shadow the economic activities of Celtic Tiger and post-Celtic Tiger Irelands.5 In short, without Ireland’s immersion into the global debt economy, the economic developments of recent decades, tracked in Mount Merrion, would not have been possible. From a literary perspective, our focus on the bildungsroman attends to one form of narrative of progression, but such progression is inalienably linked to the ‘time of debt’. Indebtedness becomes instrumental in the narrative trajectories and potentialities of individual life stories, seemingly offering limitless choice, while, in reality, making a hostage of future narrative choices. Thus, it is important to devote attention to an example of a literary intervention that wrestles with the inextricable links between progress, narrative and finance through a classic narrative form of development and teleology.6 In his analysis of Thomas Mann’s modernist classic, The Magic Mountain, Russell A. Berman attends to the novel’s concern with temporality – with respect to both its formal problematization of the conventional bildungsroman, and its modernist reflections upon the contextual ‘times’ of its genesis. In Berman’s estimation, Mann’s text

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might also be classified as a Zeitroman in a two-fold sense: it is a novel that – with reference to the immediate past – poses fundamental questions about its own time, and it is a novel thematically and structurally concerned with time and its duplicities. While the Bildungsroman typically took time for granted in order to describe the difficulties of growth, The Magic Mountain explores the character of time itself: it is a Bildungsroman concerned with the very possibility of the Bildungsroman after the shock of the Great War and given the new sense of time associated with modernism. The reader’s attention is drawn repeatedly to the question of time.7

It is not our intention to draw facile analogies between Quinn’s Mount Merrion and a raft of modernist novels – though in selected aspects of its form and content one can identify self-conscious allusions and debts to Mann, as well as to James Joyce, to F. Scott Fitzgerald, to Virginia Woolf and to T. S. Eliot.8 Rather, building upon Berman’s references to the ways in which Mann’s novel worries over notions of temporality and crisis within a particular narrative form, Quinn’s narrative offers an opportunity to think about another literary formal response to the postCeltic Tiger crisis period in Irish culture and society. Specifically, our discussion will address Mount Merrion in terms of its thematic concern with temporality, and we will consider the ways in which Quinn frames such a thematic preoccupation within the lineage of the bildungsroman – a form that Quinn effectively critiques within the novel. The relevance of bildung and the bildungsroman to critical and creative responses to the Irish economic ‘boom’ are wedded to the notion that Celtic Tiger prosperity was, in some way, part of the fated narrative of ‘progress’ heralded by the nation’s emergence into a species of self-directed period of modernization from the 1960s onwards. As Pieter Vermeulen and Ortwin de Graef detail from a general standpoint, ‘the main selling point of Bildung is that it offers a developmental pattern in which increased self-reflexivity does not come at the expense of self-identity; instead of leading to abysmal alienation, moments of reflexivity are continuously naturalized as part of a plan of self-actualization’.9 Clearly it is not viable to merely transplant a well-established, and widely critiqued, narrative form to a limited historical period in a single society, but faith in the teleological patterning characteristic of bildung was evinced by many of the architects and midwives of the Celtic Tiger economy. The stadial progress towards full maturation and, ultimately, social conformity, loosely evidenced in narratives of bildung, clearly echoes in equivalent narratives of emergence regarding Ireland’s realization of its economic potential within the global capitalist conjuncture. From this perspective, given the historical context of the novel, this latter narrative form will itself be interrogated with respect to its implication in the narrative codes of capitalist modernity and its processes of subject-formation and interpellation. As we have noted, with its attention to teleology and its structural affinities to the bildungsroman, Mount Merrion raises questions about competing and interlocking varieties of temporality.10 From a generic perspective, the narrative could easily find itself stabled as a form of Historical Novel regarding the recent history of

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Irish economic and social development. Quinn’s protagonists, Declan and Sinead Boyle, serve as actors and actants in what might be viewed as a newly minted tale of the blossoming nation-state, as they, individually and collectively, strive for roles in the nation-state narrative. In this sense, the novel partially furnishes a deeper historical contextualization of the roots and the development of the political and economic environments that eventuate with the Celtic Tiger ‘boom’. Within the wider Boyle family, time and continuity are flagged as significant markers of status and achievement. Declan diverges from his father’s expectations that he will follow his example and pursue a legal career, while Declan’s son Owen, in turn, veers away from the path envisaged for him by his own father. Thus, the novel primarily charts Declan’s emergence as both a political and an economic agent of the ‘new’ ‘pre’ and ‘high’–Celtic Tiger Ireland. While he fails to conform to the ‘narrative’ trajectory ordained by his father, in no way does this detour offer a compelling challenge to the normative fabric of his social milieu. Declan Boyle’s alternative bildung is merely a re-imagined renewal of the status quo, and it is never a revolutionary rejection of his social and economic inheritance. As we shall outline herein, Quinn’s scepticism regarding his central protagonist is embodied by Declan Boyle’s son, Owen, who dies tragically in his early twenties. The figurations associated with the unrealized potentials of Owen’s life provide a resonant antidote to the economic priorities, and associated temporalities, that shape Declan’s weltanschauung. Quinn’s concern with national and international, political and economic temporalities also manifests in the geographies of the narrative, and the ways in which time becomes spatialized.11 In a familiar suite of spatial figurations, the diverse geographies of Mount Merrion – Dublin, south Dublin, the west of Ireland, the German Democratic Republic, Berlin, Prague, Yugoslavia and New York – inter alia assume ideological significance, as well as representing alternate forms of temporality. Further underscoring the novel’s concern with narration and temporality, the story of the Boyle family’s role within the recent history of modern Ireland is delivered episodically within a narrative framework that works its way through seven chapters set in six different time periods: 1959, 1968, 1974–5, 1987, 1995 and 2002. In a sense we are offered an intimate, yet generational, backstory to the emergence of the Celtic Tiger economy. It is a story that gestures to the national and the international informants and architects of the latter-day economic ‘boom’ in Ireland. On the one hand, the episodic structure of Mount Merrion seems to afford degrees of continuity and teleological momentum to the stories of personal and national progress showcased therein. But the fragmentation of such episodic narration is equally suggestive, of the intra-familial and cross-generational discord that clearly courses through Boyle family relations.

Bildung and Irish economic modernization We first encounter Declan Boyle in the ‘New Hospital’ in 1959 as he recovers in Ardnabrayba, his paternal home-place, and immediately Quinn flags the novel’s

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core concerns with progress, novelty and temporality. As Ireland stands on the precipice of social and economic modernization, one of the future facilitators of its continued progress lies prone in a ward of the newly built county hospital in the west of Ireland: The county hospital was only a few months old. The nuns and doctors still got lost in its corridors and ended up asking colleagues for directions in loud, humorous tones. The nuns especially seemed to doubt the very feasibility of the building. For them, the place still had the air of an experiment, the ambition of which was too outrageous to succeed. They would not have been surprised to be sent back to the smaller health-authority clinics after a year’s trial, leaving the new hospital to rust like an impressive wreck on the wild rocks of the western coast.12

In this keynote opening paragraph, the narrative’s attention to temporality, as well as discrepant temperamental responses to the virtues and possibilities of linear temporal progress, is explicitly staged. The hospital is an early and decisive figurative incarnation of the emergent prioritization of economic and social progress. Yet, the co-location of secular and religious reactions to the new building is revealing. While not a crude juxtaposition of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’, nevertheless they furnish an initial instance of Quinn’s interest in the multiple attitudes to accelerated, linear temporal trajectories. This tension exposes the narrative’s offering of alternative perspectives on the temporal and narrative options available to Irish society. Equally, and in a similar vein, the architectural statement of modernizing intent is sited in the west of Ireland, a location more likely to be figured in terms of antecedent or backward temporalities. Again, at this early juncture, and, as we shall detail elsewhere, Quinn’s narrative disabuses the reader of any dichotomous acceptance of a unidirectional temporal logic or progressivist chronological simplicities. In this respect, Quinn draws upon, and seems to refute, historical notions regarding the temporalization of spaces along competing hierarchical lines – itself more often associated with colonialism. Disorientation and ambition culminate here in the resonant, and at this point almost familiar, similative reference to the crumbling, yet striking, edificial remainder of this modern monument. But it is not just the resolution of the paragraph in this quasi-Romantic figuration that is germane to our argument, the sentence in which the simile is situated changes tense from the present to the past conditional. The certainty of the present tense is replaced by the elusiveness of the past conditional, in this case by the articulation of an arresting, Hopkins-esque image delivered in conditional, rather than definite, terms.13 This early grammatical shift serves notice of the narrative’s critical complication of the easy certainties of linear temporal progress, as they are enshrined in the narratives of capitalist progress. Just as Declan Boyle enters the narrative from the confines of a hospital bed in 1959, Quinn closes Mount Merrion in 2002 with Declan again recumbent in the same county hospital. From a superficial perspective, and read across the entirety

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of the narrative, there is an obvious employment of circularity and historical repetition evident here. But there is a structural consistency on display here also, as such circularity was a feature of what Slaughter terms ‘the idealist bildungsroman’.14 For Slaughter such circularity had a politically conservative function, through which the narrative of development effected ‘a common transformation of the narrative grammar of first-person Bildungsromane, in which the novel concludes where it began after bringing the past into conjunction with the present and the earlier protagonist self into correspondence with the later narrator self, producing the Bildungsheld as the narrator-protagonist (citizen-subject) of its story’.15 Though Declan has been a midwife to Ireland’s economic success, firmly representative of the assertive linear timelines of capitalist temporality, he has returned to the site of his youth, but Quinn does not offer a sense of consoling resolution to the protagonist. Such a manoeuvre by Quinn does not alter the exertions and impacts of Declan’s life, but, rather, it re-introduces alternative temporal possibilities at the close of the narrative. The narrative does not permit a single temporal trajectory to succeed without question or qualification, but neither does it re-write recent Irish economic and social histories. From a structural perspective, then, repetition and recurrence are some of the key temporal notions, yet as we read Declan’s reflections at the close of the narrative, further temporal multiplicity is in evidence. This is part of the narrative’s self-conscious critique of its own form, and what differentiates it from the kinds of narratives alluded to earlier by Slaughter. In the ensuing extract, Quinn, first, attends to Declan’s sense of the accelerated way in which the events of his life have passed, and this reference to velocity is not entirely misplaced with respect to the temporal figurations associated with Declan and his business milieu in the novel. Immediately after this fleeting affective response to the apparent transience of life, Declan invokes another temporal regime: the habitual and routine functionalism of his previous hospital experience. In this brief passage, then, Quinn positions Declan Boyle within alternative temporal regimes, and, indeed, hints at the multiple ways in which one is subject to differential institutional temporal rhythms. As Declan reflects at length: His adult life had merely been the blinking of an eye between that first long stay in hospital and now. He looked around; he felt like the same man who had been taken up and folded into the rhythms of this institution, rendered powerless, woken and told to sleep at appointed times, fed, measured, talked to, moved about, considered, and eventually dismissed to go back out into the world. He looked at Sinead dozing in the armchair. That was the difference. That was the proof. She anchored him outside all this.16

Tellingly at the end of this extract, Sinead is cast as an enduring temporal and spatial marker in the topography of Declan’s life experience. The memorial elusiveness articulated at the beginning of this paragraph, together with the impersonal dynamics of the hospital’s temporal rhythms, is remedied by the consoling presence of his wife. Sinead’s emphatic and reassuring presence for Declan is, once again, rendered in stylistic and grammatical terms by Quinn. As

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we read the previous extract, the evasiveness of recollection, the transience of the life-cycle and the utilitarian temporal arrangements of the hospital take the form of longer, even meandering, sentences, whereas the definition of Sinead’s presence in Declan’s life is foregrounded by its articulation in short, assertive sentences. The narrative retreats to such a mode of expression as the novel reaches its conclusion. We witness a reversion to a stylistic selection that is entirely germane to the politics of temporality and to the narrative’s relationship with the conventions of the bildungsroman: When he woke again it was morning. The armchair was empty. Then he heard voices. At the end of the ward he saw his wife and his daughter talking to a doctor. Sinead glanced in his direction. Issie too. Further back was a young man. Could that be Owen? Could he have succeeded in calling back from wherever he’d been? But it wasn’t. The conversation was ending, and the two women began walking towards him. Issie said something to Sinead, but he couldn’t make out what. The two women were now at his bed and looking at him, their independent eyes full of love and worry. They were here.17

As we have noted, at the close of the narrative Declan’s voice is increasingly, and predominantly, rendered in clipped sentences, short clauses that variously express disorientation and lack, yet strive for the consoling presences of family and of intimacy. In these moments, and in both form and content, Declan Boyle struggles for definition and clarity in terms of his past and his present situation. In the previous extract, he strikes us as a vulnerable and exposed character, dependent on the actions of others – his wife and his daughter. Additionally, at an instant of uncertainty in the present, Declan reaches into the past and the narrative touches fleetingly beyond realism, before Declan corrects his vision and realizes that the male figure at the end of the corridor is not his deceased son, Owen. Again, from a stylistic perspective, the pair of questions regarding Owen are answered resolutely with clipped clarity. But, significantly, at this point of resolution in the narrative, Declan retreats to a dependence on his family. Owen briefly emerges from the past, together with the alternative temporal possibilities his life had embodied. While Sinead and Issie, characters that had been relegated from the capitalist teleologies that oriented so much of Declan’s public and private lives, now return as consoling and affective presences. Thus, characters that had assumed figurative significance as representatives of marginal temporalities in Declan’s life are given central narrative presence by Quinn at the close of the novel – a crucial authorial critique. In the end, Quinn also smuggles in another temporal resonance, as he aligns his own novel with a narrative that is significantly concerned with the advent of modern temporal regimes: Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway. As Clarissa Dalloway enters her party, again at the close of Woolf ’s novel, Peter Walsh famously asks: ‘What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with this extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.’18 The final clause of Woolf ’s modernist text uncannily chimes with the abbreviated statement

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of presence that brings Mount Merrion to a close. This precise intertextual allusion registers the narrative’s focus on the competing, and often contradictory, temporalities of capitalist modernity – though without collapsing the latter text and historical period into their predecessors. In fact, as we note with our introductory comments on Mann’s Magic Mountain, Quinn’s text alludes to and invokes a skein of modernist precursors that speak to the formal and thematic preoccupations with temporality and development.19 Declan Boyle’s initial career plans are not centred upon the pursuit of industrialization in Ireland, as prior to his decisive visit to the Communist German Democratic Republic, Declan is a civil servant in the Department of Finance, a vocation that is met with scepticism by his father, James Boyle. As with his own eventual distance from his son Owen’s disposition, Declan’s selection of public service over private legal practice is met with cynicism by his father. Yet there is a sense in which the career to which Declan devotes most of his working life is more proximate to that of his father’s wishes than the lifestyle chosen by Owen. In one of Declan’s early recollections from his hospital bed in Ardnabrayba, he recalls a striking conversation with his father about his own life choices. In yet another instance of cross-generational tension over the trajectories towards the future, James Boyle admits that he retained strong reservations about entering the legal profession, and did so on the insistence of his father. In this respect we see several layers of time coalesce in one memory. In fact, four generations of Irish men struggle, resist and make choices that are figurative features of the narrative’s contestation of historical fate, certainty and the inevitability of the present. The familial historical revelation for Declan occurs in his father’s car, and the collisions of the past, the present and possible futures play out as they drive around the city centre of Dublin. Tellingly, their journey is abruptly interrupted by ‘a horsedrawn cart [trying] to manoeuvre out of a laneway’.20 As the two Boyles wait for the horse and cart to clear from their path, the narrative voice shifts to an omniscient commentary on the unfolding scene: The saloon car idled as the rag-and-bone man once again led the two horses back, and then forward again, in an attempt to get the heavily loaded cart around a pile of rubble that builders had left on the corner. The horses were unhappy and reared their heads in protest, made nervous perhaps by the cars, still a rare enough thing in the late 1940s. The cart, like the man, seemed from another century, roughly used, bolts, rusting, the timber battered and worn.21

At one level Quinn provides a succinct dichotomized vignette here, offering a micro-drama of emergent and residual temporal regimes. Though this is the 1940s and Ireland has not entered into any tangible form of social and economic modernization, the set piece resonates as part of the figurative economy deployed by Quinn in his examination of the politics of time in contemporary Ireland. From the interior of the modern vehicle, the young Declan Boyle surveys what he can only decipher as the detritus of a fading era. He regards the man, his cart and his horses as objects washed ashore from another historical epoch. Yet, Quinn

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seems to impress that they persist, the residual co-exists with the Boyle men as they wait impatiently to progress at speed. Though a fleeting memory of Declan Boyle, the rag-and-bone man anticipates, and intersects with, resistant, alternative temporalities that shadow the core narrative of Declan Boyle’s development. Indeed, the temperamental nature of the horses, their skittishness in the face of the Boyle car, is in stark contrast to the mechanized efficiency of the vehicle that confronts them. Though preceding the country’s actual modernization, the passage converges with Paul Virilio’s account of the ‘cult of speed’ that has come to saturate much of life in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the Global North. For Virilio, ‘[t]he faster we go, the more we look ahead in anticipation and lose our lateral vision. Screens are like windshields in a car: with increased speed, we lose the sense of lateralization, which is an infirmity in our being in the world, its richness, its relief, its depth of field.’22 As we shall see, Quinn poses questions about the absence of just such ‘lateral vision’ in the Boyle family, and in Celtic Tiger Ireland, in the form of Declan’s children, Issie and Owen.

Frozen in time Quinn draws the opening chapter of the novel to a close with the suggestion of a highly resonant question. The question is never actually posed by a young Sinead Boyle, as she arrives to visit her future husband, Declan, in the new hospital in Ardnabrayba. Up to this juncture, Quinn has established the present of the narrative as 1959, Declan is a patient in hospital and the narrative recounts how Sinead and Declan first met, as well as providing details on the formative stages of their relationship. Given the symbolism of the newly constructed hospital facility and the expectant energies of the courting couple, the opening chapter gestures to the fecundity of the future at personal and national scales. Yet, as Sinead enters Declan’s ward in the hospital, the chapter ends with a note of discord relayed to us from Declan’s position as a bedbound patient. As Sinead and Sister Imelda process towards Declan’s bed there is a palpable tension between the two women. The religious nurse betrays her obvious distaste for Sinead, while Sinead exhibits but does not verbally express an irreverent vitality that is consummately summed up by her unarticulated question: On the last day of August, Declan slept after lunch, and when he woke he saw a young woman, not a nurse, entering the nurses’ station at the top of the ward. From the back she seemed smartly dressed. [. . .] It was Sinead. She must have come from Spiddal. But how did she know he was here? There was an ironic tilt to her smile as she caught Declan’s eye, whereas Sister Imelda’s own expression made it clear that her good opinion of Declan did not stretch to any of his lady visitors. [. . .] Sinead stood at the foot of his bed looking at him as the head nurse retreated to the office. She had an amused expression on her face as if to ask, ‘What kind of country is this at all?’23

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Sinead’s entry into the hospital ward in 1959 supplements the narrative symmetry alluded to earlier – she is also present in Declan’s hospital ward decades later. But the fact of her presence is added to by the ways in which her presence is described by Quinn. Sinead’s appearance here is unexpected and unannounced, but Quinn uses the uncertainty of her arrival to mirror Declan’s later ‘vision’ of his dead son Owen at the end of the novel. Not only are Declan and Sinead together in hospital rooms as we enter and exit the narrative, we get a sense of confused misrecognition on Declan’s part. In each case this is clarified, but it offers us a glimpse into the narrative’s political motivations and messages, as the solid certainties of linear progress and transparent reality are consistently problematized across Mount Merrion. Indeed, this is where the significance of Sinead’s unposed question comes into play. The question is never verbally articulated but remains as a physical figuration open to interpretation, and it embodies the capacity and the willingness of the youthful Sinead to trouble the certainties of such Irish institutions. In retrospect, the openness of the unexpressed question links Sinead to her future children, Issie and Owen, both of whom chafe against but never conclusively overcome the breed of liberal–capitalist society to which Declan contributed and cleaved. Though prompted by the immediate context of moral censure embodied by Sister Imelda, in the broader historical context, Sinead’s facial figuration might well be posed at the close of the narrative on foot of the scandalous revelations regarding property development and political corruption that mark Declan Boyle’s professional decline. Finally, Sinead’s physicality is telescoped in this set piece as she is ‘seen’ as ‘smartly dressed’ in the first instance by Declan. While subsequently the narrative refers to the ‘ironic tilt to her smile’, as well as the concluding facial expression. There is an aggregation of ambiguity and suggestive playfulness to the ways in which Sinead’s entrance and presence are established. The imaginative possibilities embodied by the irony of Sinead’s smile work in a similar way to the figurative ambiguity of her facial expression – both are visions of the future in somatic form. At a grammatical level, the conjunction ‘as if ’ foregrounds the aforementioned ambiguity but also inaugurates a subversive dialogic and interpretive relationship with the viewer, Declan, her future husband. The headline future detailed across the chapter and the majority of the novel is that mapped by Declan Boyle – a future of economic and social modernization that has the Celtic Tiger as its apotheosis. But, as with our discussions of Owen and Issie, Quinn’s narrative is seeded with more or less subtle resistant expressions of alternative futures, and for Sinead her vision is expressed in these physical gestures in 1959. Unfortunately, for Sinead, that is where they both begin and end. If chapter one closes with the unexpressed, yet pregnant question, the title of chapter two, ‘Confinement’, set in 1968, offers an unambiguous answer to Sinead as she finds herself ‘embalmed in respectability’.24 The intimations, and expectations, of full-blooded possibilities for her future that emanated from Sinead’s physical presence in the first chapter of the novel are still-born a decade later – as Quinn’s apt metaphor earlier confirms. Apart from the rote operations of marriage and recent motherhood, Sinead’s life is denuded of stimulation and sensation. The ironic arc of

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her smile no longer reaches out to a willing recipient; rather, she finds herself isolated by her ‘confinement’ within middle-class respectability. Yet, as Quinn outlines, the wit, the intelligence, in other words, the sources of her erstwhile ironic take on institutional and social conformity are not dormant. Of course, this is the cause of so many of Sinead’s frustrations and difficulties over the duration of the narrative. It was not until the awful early fog of new motherhood had dispersed that Sinead started to understand that something was wrong. She longed for company during the slow suburban days, preferably that of another woman who had also had a child and had some idea of the feelings coursing through her body. She ached to pour out her thoughts and have somebody receive them and help her make sense of them. The bubbling water in the central heating, the call of birds outside and a very occasional car or delivery van moving through the estate: this was what passed for silence in suburbia. These were the sounds that came forth when there was no one else there to divert your attention.25

If the irony of Sinead’s smile a decade earlier was directed at, and received by Declan, the exertions of motherhood and domesticity have left her devoid of a capacity for and outlet for communication. The idiom here remains focused on Sinead’s body, but now instead of the minor subversion of a facial expression, the bodily imagery expresses her profound feelings of entrapment and isolation. The sensory experiences of suburban Dublin are rendered in sibilant poetic form by Quinn, yet what they detail are not remotely satiating for Sinead. The ironic smile of her youth may have been a silent somatic signal but Sinead now finds herself cocooned in a suburban silence that is evacuated of all of the imagination and hope of her student life. Having spent a period of time living in Ardnabrayba establishing one of Declan’s initial industrial projects, the Boyle family return to suburban Dublin in chapter four, ‘The Royal Marine, 1974-5’. The children are now at school and Sinead’s days are structured by the routines dictated by Issie’s and Owen’s requirements. In this context Sinead’s sense of domestic emptiness returns and she retreats, first, into a functional alcoholism, which progresses and necessitates treatment for addiction. At the outset of her dependence, Sinead shares a glass of wine with other mothers, but gradually any sense of the sociality of her drinking is lost and it becomes a means through which she effectively disappears from significant aspects of the household’s life: At some point, Sinead realized with happiness that she didn’t really need to the excuse of Jackie or Bronagh in order to open a bottle in the afternoon and drink it all. She would hash up some kind of dinner and retire to bed while the children ate in the kitchen. Declan would often find her asleep when he got home from work, and this left him free to stay up late with his papers in the study.26

Thus, this is not merely a portrait of suburban domestic loneliness, but the household is also rendered as fragmented, with the suggestion that its residents

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occupy different spaces and different times. Sinead’s retreat into alcoholism, though unknown to Declan at this juncture, affords him the freedom to raze the boundaries between work time and home time. While Sinead herself abdicates much of her agency within the daily routines of the family’s timetable, the action described reveals a capacity and a willingness just to perform the minimum required. In another respect Sinead’s alcohol-fuelled absence here is facilitated by a combination of Declan’s complacency and rigidity. He complacently assumes, and rigidly believes, that the domestic duties and dramas are his wife’s sphere. Still further, from a temporal perspective, the productive time that Declan is afforded both inside and outside the home is effectively purloined from his wife. As she expresses at several points elsewhere in the narrative, there is now little or no prospect of her pursuing a career given the amount of her time that has been devoted to their family and their home. By no means exceptional by the standards of her generation of Irish women, Sinead’s experience, and the various ways in which she expresses frustration and disquiet about that experience, are wedded to the more explicit critiques of teleological narratives of capitalist modernity represented by the lives of her two children. The needs of the Boyle children and Sinead are subservient to the demands of Declan’s burgeoning career. This career trajectory appears to be imbued with a sense of the inevitable and the inviolable, and there is an assumed logic to the form and the content of Declan’s professional life that conforms to the temporal logic of capitalist modernization. Once more, any residual sense of future-oriented vitality and agency that might have marked Sinead’s youth is reduced to the limits of a series of regular gendered social and domestic performances as Declan’s wife. It is not just the mundane silence of middle-class suburbia that characterizes her life, but there is also the conclusive silencing of her erstwhile hopes and ambitions. In due course, Sinead’s alcoholism reaches a serious stage that impacts directly on her children and which requires intervention. In a telling passage that again reveals the silent, yet clear, articulacy of non-verbal expression, Quinn reveals the tragic circumstances under which Sinead is finally allowed to tell a version of her story: When she called out to him cheerfully from the kitchen, she saw the transformation in his face as delight came over it – delight at the fact that she was not in the living room with the curtains closed, lying on the couch drunk, with the world, including him, gone dark in front of her eyes. Many years later, after she’d attended hundreds of meetings like the one that lay ahead of her that day, she would tell this story. How she’d watched her son come in the door. How she’d seen the fear in his eyes. How she knew that she’d created that fear. How she then knew she was an alcoholic and that she would never touch a drink again.27

The contrasting emotions expressed on Owen’s face in this sequence actually take place in reverse order to the way in which they are relayed here, as Quinn invokes a series of temporal markers. Most explicit in this respect is the fact that there is

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an inescapable symmetry to the use of facial expression by Quinn as a means of uniting the mother and son in the broader figurative and ethical patternings of the narrative. Likewise, Owen’s face beams with ‘delight’ at the absence of his mother in an endarkened living room. It is the non-presence of a drunken mother that transforms his expression in as much as it is the sight of a sober Sinead in the kitchen. In his expectation of being met by his drunken mother once more there is a sense also that Sinead haunts the familial home, that she is a faded version of the younger Sinead and that she is out of kilter with the expectations of her society. It is this latter point that precisely links both mother and son. Neither is entirely content with, and content to inhabit, the roles they have had assigned to them under the auspices of Declan’s worldview. This compressed focus on the temporal is overt in the proleptic preface to Sinead’s moment of self-expression and selfreflection that brings the passage to its close. This sentence performs as a temporal pivot and as a linguistic pivot – these thoughts are expressed by a future Sinead and they are expressed in a more measured staccato fashion than the opening lines of the extract. From a temporal perspective we are exposed to a future Sinead that feels redeemed, who inhabits a future that is qualitatively different to the functional teleology of her husband. We get an impression of the labour invested in her recovery, and she reveals that the intensity of this labour is geared towards and motivated by the emotional needs of her son. Quinn figures Sinead’s investment in her recovery in his anaphoric repetition of ‘How’ at the beginning of the final four, relatively short sentences, thereby importing a technique that mirrors the stepwise approach of addiction recovery. But on closer examination we can also divine further insight into Sinead’s progress across the four sentences. In the first two she is referred to as ‘watching’ and ‘seeing’, while in the next two sentences the fact that she ‘knew’ is repeated twice. The step-wise method of the anaphoric form works with the developmental move from recognition to conclusive understanding and acceptance. Akin to our discussions of Owen and Issie, though less substantial in many ways and with less scope for potential change, the future detailed here by Sinead is remarkable in the context of the novel and our argument for the ways in which it is rooted in the personal and the affective. While it retains a temporally progressive form, it is laced with empathy, its yields are emotional and it is minted from a different value system to that which ultimately endures in Ireland.

Haunting the ‘boom’ ‘In the traditional bildungsroman’, according to Jed Esty, ‘youth drives narrative momentum until adulthood arrives to fold youth’s dynamism into a conceit of uneventful middle age.’ Yet in his study of narratives of ‘unseasonable youth’, Esty illuminates a suite of novels wherein such a naturalized plot of development is frustrated.28 Esty’s work focuses on ‘the perpetuation of adolescence’ and how such a temporal manoeuvre ‘displaces the plot of growth’ so structurally integral to the bildungsroman.29 So often adhering to an allegorical format, the bildungsroman

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retains a conventional temporal framework, as the telos of individual and national development mirror one another. In Quinn’s employment of the bildungsroman form, and its allegorical and temporal features, we can identify youthful characters that defy the allegorical form and temporal trajectories of the generic conventions of the bildungsroman.30 Indeed, it is plausible to suggest that Quinn’s generic selection is an entirely apt critical-creative mode with which to confront and to reflect upon the narratives of fate and inevitability that frequently attached themselves to celebrations of Ireland economic ‘miracle’. The central narrative of Mount Merrion is, as we have alluded to, a species of ‘national tale’, over the historical course of which we can trace the triumph of neoliberal capitalism across the variegated geographies of the nation-state. The employment of Declan Boyle as an allegorical character within this historical context, as well as the broader utilization of a historically complicit literary genre, is, in fact, an astute authorial critique of regnant contemporary temporal regimes at the levels of form and content. Returning to Esty, he further highlights the innate linkage between the literary form, allegory and supposedly progressivist conceptions of the ‘national’ and the linear temporal formation of such a polity. In his estimation, the bildungsroman’s ‘biographical form was for generations yoked to a progressive concept of national destiny, so that to emplot a nonprogressive version of national-historical time is almost automatically to trouble the inherited allegorical platform of the genre’.31 In the critical-historical background of Esty’s critique of the bonds that conjoin the bildungsroman and the nation here, there are resonant echoes of Benjamin’s cursory aside on the relationship between the development of the modern novel and the bildungsroman in his seminal essay, ‘The Storyteller’. According to Benjamin, first, the novel lacks the capacity to impart original and decisive wisdom with equivalent degrees of efficacy as the oral storyteller, and, as such, it does ‘not contain the slightest scintilla of wisdom’.32 In its turn, because in his view, the bildungsroman does ‘not deviate in any way from the basic structure of the novel’, it retains an inevitable social and political conservatism.33 As he concludes: ‘[b]y integrating the social process with the development of a person, [the bildungsroman] bestows the most frangible justification on the order determining it.’34 As we have intimated, Mount Merrion is, in part, a latter-day ‘national tale’. The novel follows the emergence of new forms of internationalized economic activity in mid-to-late-twentieth-century Ireland, and it does so through the lives of the extended Boyle family. At the outset, Declan Boyle is explicitly embedded within the economic and trading mechanisms of the Irish State in the Department of Finance. Thus, it is legitimate to follow his life and career as emblematic and fractional of the trajectory undertaken by the State as it emerges from autarkic economic policies, and into what became firmly globalized economic mores and cultural outlooks. In the context of our discussions of temporality within Quinn’s narrative, what we witness in Mount Merrion is the nation-state’s gradual alignment with the spatio-temporal paradigms and patterns of global capitalist trade and finance. But even within the apparently bounded spatio-temporal parameters of the nation-state, alternative temporalities blossom and persist. In

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these terms, Saskia Sassen highlights the complex historical specifics of the nationstate, a history that, in her estimation, belies the ostensible integrity of the nationstate. For Sassen: Much of social science has operated with the assumption of the nation-state as a container, representing a unified spatio-temporality. Much of history, however, has failed to confirm this assumption. Modern nation-states themselves never achieved spatiotemporal unity, and the global restructurings of today threaten to erode the usefulness of this proposition for what is an expanding arena of sociological reality. The spatiotemporality of the national, upon closer inspection, reveals itself to be composed of multiple spatialities and temporalities. (my emphasis)35

For our purposes, Sassen’s assertions regarding the relative disunity of the nationstate are pertinent to the figurative freight accorded to several characters in the narrative, specifically with respect to the competing temporalities in evidence across the novel. Naturally, one cannot generalize about the nature and viability of such ‘multiple spatialities and temporalities’, but from the perspective of Quinn’s narrative, it is vital to locate their presence as rejoinders to the dominant complacencies of recent Irish economic and social history. Subsequently in the same essay, Sassen addresses another knotty issue within the philosophy of temporality, when she discusses the relationship between the past, the present and the future.36 Reflections upon and/or posterior narrations of the Celtic Tiger period in Ireland attribute a degree of fate or inevitability to the country’s economic ‘boom’, rather than seeing the period as a specifically engineered singular historical trajectory among many others.37 In this spirit, Sassen reminds us that ‘The past is not a linear sequence that can be retraced and left behind. Nor is it present simply in the sense of having fostered path-dependence – that is, of having established the constraints of what will be possible in future.’38 Multiplicity is part of the fabric of any given historical moment – in the past and in the present towards unresolved futures. Yet, in Mount Merrion, Quinn suggests that Declan Boyle is a representative figure of a temporal regime that views itself as inevitable and incontestable. In essence, narratives such as Quinn’s contest the naturalization of such linear and oppressive forms of chronology, and they are formal and thematic representations of ‘the historical alternatives which haunt the established society as subversive tendencies and forces’.39 In the Irish context, most notably in the field of postcolonial studies, the temporal figurations of historicism, and their effects, have been powerfully contradicted as outriders of capitalist modernization.40 Irish social and economic development since the 1960s – precisely the period covered by Quinn’s narrative – is often narrated as the time frame during which Ireland emerged from the benighted ages of colonialism and its bed-fellow reactionary Irish nationalism. Again, such simplistic representations of the progress and possibilities of Irish history have been forcefully contradicted within Irish postcolonial studies.

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Emblematic of such critical historiography is that pursued by David Lloyd, whose work coincides with the political impulses evident in Sassen’s critiques, as well as the self-reflexive sociology of Avery F. Gordon. Though we are primarily focused upon explicating a work of literary fiction, Lloyd’s comments upon the unrealized potentialities of the past and of the apparently vanquished of history resonate with Quinn’s presentation of the younger generation of Boyles in Mount Merrion. Lloyd’s work has primarily concentrated on the sociocultural remainders of and persistences within indigenous Irish culture under the sway of British colonialism. But his interventions have equally stressed the value of attending to unrealized cultural potentials and formations, sociocultural practices that have been, and remain, branded as inherently backward, impractical and anachronistic. Aggregating dense theoretical discourse and a firmly materialist politics, Lloyd, nevertheless, prompts us to re-think the multiple possibilities for socio-economic and cultural development that exist at any given moment in time, when he argues that ‘the work of memory is not to preserve the past in its fixity, but to loosen from the truncated becomings of the past the fluid possibilities that defy the notion that the social formation in dominance is the only historical possibility’ (my emphasis).41 In a sense, such an historiographical agenda disabuses critics of the certainty of the status quo, and, in this regard, Lloyd’s work impinges upon our consideration of the figuration deployment of Declan Boyle’s children in Mount Merrion. In addressing his historiographical project and, echoing the work of Gordon on haunting, Lloyd concludes that ‘The work of history is not merely to contemplate destruction, but to track through the ruins of progress the defiles that connect the openings of the past to those of the present. For the dead are the contemporaries of every unfinished struggle against domination’ (my emphasis).42 Both of the highlighted portions here bear direct relevance to the character of Owen Boyle in Mount Merrion. Through a combination of his youthful death and his temperament, Owen Boyle represents a ghostly figurative alternative to the seemingly unassailable temporal dynamics of his father’s Ireland. As Gordon persuasively suggests: ‘Haunting raises specters, and it alters the experience of being in time, the way we separate the past, the present, and the future.’43 Quinn’s narrative enacts such a complication of the politics of time through the relative figurative significances of members of the Boyle family. The novel’s engagement with the politics of time in contemporary Ireland is further evidenced by the novel’s affinities with the bildungsroman, and its own affiliations with specific temporal structures. The importance of Gordon’s work for our interrogation of Quinn’s narrative in terms of its critique of the Celtic Tiger and its problematization of the bildungsroman rests on the manner in which Gordon brings the critical valences of haunting to light. Acknowledging the Marxist heritage of materialist deployments of ‘haunting’, Gordon frames her work in the following manner: ‘Ghostly Matters does attempt to describe, in homage to the viability of a Marxist concept of haunting, the ghostly haunt as a form of social figuration that treats as a major problem the reduction of individuals “to a mere sequence of instantaneous experiences which leave no trace, or rather whose trace is hated as irrational, superfluous, and “overtaken”.’44 The latter quotation is taken from the ‘Notes and Drafts’ section of Adorno and Horkheimer’s

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Dialectic of Enlightenment, where the authors reflect upon the effective assault on the past by capitalist modernity, an assault that conditions a schismatic relation between the living and the dead. The provocation of a dichotomous relationship between the living and the dead is a fraction of the pacification of the present. Alternatively, for Adorno and Horkheimer: ‘Only the conscious horror of destruction creates the correct relationship with the dead: unity with them because we, like them, are the victims of the same condition and the same disappointed hope.’45 The amnesiac condition of the modern subject under capitalism lives in an antagonistic relation with the past, and with the anachronistic that does not display functional and productive capacities. Thus, history is bleached from the consciousness of the modern subject ‘out of a fear that it might remind the individual of the degeneration of his own existence’.46 The dead and the past, in Adorno and Horkheimer’s view, are bereft of profitability and utility in the modern context, and, consequently, have little or no ‘market value’. It is at this juncture that their note on ghosts, as well as its legacies in Gordon’s work, bears on our elucidation of haunting and ‘living on’ in Quinn’s Mount Merrion, when they propose that ‘The respect for something which has no market value and runs contrary to all feelings is experienced most sharply by the person in mourning, in whose case not even the psychological restoration of labor power is possible’.47 In contrast to the future-oriented and solidly materialistic characterization of his father, Owen Boyle frustrates the linear teleology so formative of Declan’s life and career. Though the superficial coordinates of continuity mark Owen’s childhood and early adolescence, in particular his attendance at Deerpark – a private south Dublin school, he is temperamentally resistant to the ambitiousness of his father. On an evening socializing together, Sinead and Declan Boyle briefly reflect upon their two children, Owen and Issie, and it becomes clear that both children represent a set of alternative future possibilities. Declan reminds Sinead that Owen’s school rugby career is flourishing, and then he privately muses: He looked away, enjoying the prospect of his running up the steps at Lansdowne Road to take the cup. He normally had no great interest in rugby, but he’d experienced a moment of exaltation the first time he saw his son score a try by virtue of talent alone, [. . .] He was obviously a talent, but Declan knew that he frustrated the trainers by his lack of application. They were irked also by the knowledge that if they’d dropped him, Owen probably wouldn’t mind. Not that he was apathetic; it was more that he was extraordinarily equable. They had no power over him. This made Declan even more proud of his son, even as he shared their feeling that some central core of the boy remained untouched by all that went on around him – both a school and at home.48

In differentiating between Quinn’s use of Declan and Owen Boyle, we are not intimating that there is any internal animus between the characters within the narrative itself. Rather, as is made plain in the extract here, the linear instrumentalism of Declan Boyle’s economic career is in marked contradistinction to the ‘equable’ disposition of his son.

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Rugby is a suitable conceit at this point given the innate and intractable contestatory nature of the sporting arena. Not only is the openly competitive nature of the sport useful for Quinn’s figuration, beyond the metaphoric we can also read the sporting contest as a further site on which competing temporalities are ‘played out’. Owen’s sanguine nature works against the grain of the primary teleology of the sporting contest, and while in this instance this does not create any undue tension between father and son, it is an embedded alternative temporal disposition seeded within Quinn’s authorial critique of temporal and narrative linearity. Of particular note in this extract are the facts that Owen appears to exist outside of, or parallel to, the demands and the expectations of the various contexts in which he circulates. There is a sense of empowered coevalness to Owen’s navigation of the increasingly competitive and teleogically rigid milieu of south Dublin.49 Owen’s death is reported abruptly at the beginning of chapter five, and it occurs on the night on which his sister, Issie’s, Leaving Certificate examinations conclude. For the purposes of our argument, the end of Issie’s night of celebrations with her school friends is utilized by Quinn as a further way in which to spotlight the centrality of time to his engagement with the histories and narratives of Celtic Tiger Ireland. As Issie and her friend Aideen return home, their attention is drawn to the sound of an approaching car: ‘Down at the bottom of the avenue, about half a mile away, a car pulled off the Rock Road and swung towards them. They couldn’t hear the gear changes, but they watched the speeding vehicle, mesmerized by the headlights, until suddenly in a rush of noise it zoomed past towards Stillorgan, becoming a ghost.’50 This description immediately precedes a visit by the police reporting Owen’s death in a late-night car crash but does not guarantee that Owen was actually in this specific vehicle. However, within the context of our discussion, the extract above is telling for at least two reasons. First, and most obviously, Quinn appropriates a conventional Gothic figuration in referring to the ghostly qualities of the departing car. Indeed, it is noteworthy that Quinn does not revert to simile here; rather, the vehicle’s metamorphosis into metaphor is still in process before the eyes of the two young watchers. But the metaphoric selection is more significant once we address its temporal connotations and associations, as it clearly performs a premonitory function in this instance. The very nature of the metaphor of ghostliness is, of course, connected to our concern with the disruption of normative temporalities, as the haunting figure of the ghost is traditionally ‘out of time’ – its effectiveness at least, in part, accruing from this very temporal disjunctiveness. This does not mean that ghostliness is ahistorical however, as Derrida reminds us: ‘haunting is historical, to be sure, but it is not dated, it is never docilely given a date in the chain of presents, day after day, according to the instituted order of a calendar.’51 Equally the nature of premonition is akin to such subversions of linear, normative temporality – the roaring engine of the departing car is, then, a resonant note of forewarning from the future, albeit a future devoid of the equable disposition and creative possibilities of Owen Boyle. Yet Owen’s death occurs in the narrative’s past; consequently, it is not just that the future is affected by his sudden death, but the past is altered. Owen’s death, thus, signals an elongated continuum of lost possibilities, the series of presents

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that eventuate in the past after his death are devoid of the informing agency of his temperament. Once again, as we saw above, descriptions of and reflections upon Owen emphasize his difference, his temperamental divergence from those committed to linear teleologies. The distant car, heard careering in the present, is figured in terms of both the past and the future – the ghost has yet to be rendered as such in personal terms. Yet, there is the possibility that Owen, even in life, embodies unrealized possibilities from the past, his temperament is a correlative of social and dispositional alternatives to the burgeoning equivalents of neoliberal capitalism. This sense of apparent rudderlessness on Owen’s part is evoked once more at his funeral while Declan Boyle reminisces privately about his son’s life. Prompted by the sight of Owen’s former boss at the Pot de Vin restaurant, John Finnegan, we read that ‘Declan had found it impossible to shake off the unwelcome fatherly sense that his son had chosen an aimless path’.52 Declan’s latest meditation on his son is conducted in tragic circumstances, yet it echoes his earlier conclusion that Owen simply did not function within the same framework of priorities as so many others. Owen could not be corralled into fully subscribing to, and operating according to, the narrative possibilities of the dominant educational and economic teleologies in Ireland. Subsequent to Declan’s realization, he indulges in an extended recollection of Owen’s dismal academic performances and failures, which, naturally, preclude access to and participation within the kinds of social and economic circles frequented by Declan and his father before him. The ‘aimlessness’ alluded to by Declan is, of course, relative to a specific set of values and is beholden to a narrowly progressive temporal mindset. Ultimately Owen pursues a career waiting tables in the Pot de Vin, before moving out of his parents’ home. Again, Declan’s thoughts on Owen’s choices and actions underscore the gaps that existed between father and son: Before Christmas, Owen moved out to a flat in Northumberland Road, to share with two of his fellow waiters. He was, Declan knew, putting distance between himself and Mount Merrion Avenue, and all that the place represented. [. . .] Now, as he observed the stricken face of John Finnegan, Declan understood that what he’d hoped was a passing fancy had become a way of life for Owen. He’d never resat the Leaving Cert, never gone to university, never moved back home.53

Just as Quinn shuttles between the literal and the metaphorical earlier, Declan does so here, as Owen’s relationship with his material and cultural inheritances are alluded to here by his grieving father. Quinn condenses Owen’s, and by implication through metonymic figuration, his authorial misgivings about the roots of, and contemporary variations of, these materialistic teleologies into the representative space of Mount Merrion Avenue. This site of wealth serves as a temporal and spatial figuration for the triplet of absences and incompletions with which this extract concludes, and that are the markers of Owen’s divergence from the vectors of social conformity in Celtic Tiger Ireland.

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Mount Merrion Avenue is just one of the sites of spatial and temporal contestation evident across the narrative, and, as with the other sites, this space harbours alternate meanings, associations and experiences for the cast of characters. The politics of space and time of the emergence of and the contemporary reality of the Celtic Tiger are the primary focus of the novel, yet the narrative also addresses other implicated and informative political and cultural conceptions of space and time. Tellingly, we cannot forget that these paternal reflections occur at Owen’s funeral and, thereby, assume a haunting quality. Indeed, as we encounter Declan’s memories of his son here, and re-read them in relation to the close of the novel – where an apparition of Owen is mistakenly hinted at by Declan – the full figurative potential of Owen Boyle is legible in terms of Lloyd’s and Gordon’s writings on the persistence of unfulfilled potentials and social haunting. Owen Boyle dies quite early in life, and in the novel, but through the circularity of its narrative structure and by the ghostly return made by Owen in his father’s mind at the close of the narrative, Quinn affirms the validity and vitality of multiple still-born temporalities. As Gordon argues: ‘Following the ghosts is about making a contact that changes you and refashions the social relations in which you are located.’54 It would be reductive to posit that Owen Boyle is the solitary ‘ghost’ that haunts Mount Merrion. Rather, as Lloyd and Gordon would contend, he is representative of the plethora of alternative socio-economic and cultural possibilities that have been nominated as having ‘failed’, and that have been superseded because of inefficiency, or lack of productivity within the calculating frames of capitalist modernity.

Daughter of progress Esty maintains that ‘the perpetuation of adolescence displaces the plot of growth; the inability to make a fortune or stabilize an adult ego displaces the fulfilled vocational and sexual destiny’,55 and, while Owen Boyle’s short life and the possibilities associated with that unlived future are clearly cut short, remaining ‘unfulfilled’, his sister, Issie Boyle, assumes a similar function in the narrative. In the latter case, Quinn draws our attention to the spaces and contexts to which Issie is drawn, and, also, to the language through which she is described. The former locations are at least partially contradictory of the kinds of spatial imaginaries valued within the calculus of the Celtic Tiger economy, and that preoccupy her father. Issie’s proficiency with language, her aptitude for and interest in literary art, and the sensuous language used to evoke her character and temperament are signs of an alternative creative register within the novel. Though Quinn does not present us with a radical counter-narrative, or with a coherent subversive vision, of Celtic Tiger Ireland, in tandem with the still-born future possibilities of her brother, Owen, Issie Boyle also represents an alternative form of futurity. In other words, akin to her deceased brother, she intimates at a divergent temporal trajectory to the one dominant in Celtic Tiger Ireland.

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Issie is born in 1968, a decisive year in the economic and business plans of her father, who, on foot of a diplomatic visit to the Communist German Democratic Republic, formulates a strategy to establish a factory in Ireland with the aid of an East German colleague, Rolf Portsch, who will defect with his family on a flight with Declan. The flight lands in Dublin on the day of Issie’s birth, and Declan’s first and only response to his daughter’s arrival is revealing: ‘His daughter: As the nurse withdrew her fingers from under the head and back, and she nestled fully in the crook of Declan’s arm, it came home to him with full force: there was another woman in his life, when he still hadn’t got used to the fact of Sinead.’56 Issie is almost crowded out of the narrative as her entrance is shadowed either side, first, by Declan’s Cold War interlude that precedes her entrance, and the immediate description of his subsequent devotion to his new business venture. Though partly couched in initial tenderness and pride, the content of the preceding passage is plainly suggestive of innate distance. Both the immediate moment in which he responds to his first-born child, and her difference, as well as the frenetic national and international commercial activity are markers of Declan’s remoteness from his wife and daughter across significant sections of his life and of the narrative of Mount Merrion. In another way, it is as if Issie is a conundrum to be resolved; her sheer presence, her naked existence appear as challenges to Declan, though they are rarely given the attention they warrant. Indeed his incomprehension resonates with the fact that Issie ultimately emigrates, and not to a typically secure economic location with certain employment prospects. Her birth is marked by her father’s return from East Germany with a full-fledged capitalist vision, which anticipates, and is later mirrored by, her emigration to the same country but under, and to, vastly different circumstances. As we have gestured to elsewhere in this study with respect to other characters and narratives, Declan’s journey is also a form of captivity narrative given that he liberates the Portsch family from the temporal and spatial anteriority of the GDR, while Issie’s reverse journey is a retreat from the emergent consumerism of Celtic Tiger Ireland. Yet, as we know, Issie’s is not a narrative of triumphant alterity, nor can it be considered entirely conformist in the end. Quinn cannot permit Issie to escape from her father’s narrative, as, in the end, this is the basis of the novel’s historical critique. After the cursory note detailing his daughter’s arrival, in the next paragraph the narrative moves abruptly to Declan’s professional preoccupations: The following weeks were the busiest of Declan’s life. He took some days off, but spent most of the time on the phone. Mick Guilfoyle TD rang to warmly congratulate Declan on the birth of his daughter. He also said he thought the factory was a great idea, and he fully agreed with Declan that it should be built in the vicinity of Ardnabrayba. The area needed it, he said. Declan found the man likeable, and couldn’t square the voice on the line with the ruthless character of Sean Guilfoyle’s story.57

This extract is revealing in a number of respects, and it touches upon a selection of the key concerns germane to our argument. First of all, the key temporal

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trajectory of the emerging Ireland is signalled in the opening clause of the first sentence – an extended period of time is compressed into one brief sentence, and this has little to do with Declan’s devotion to his newly born daughter or recovering wife. The pressures of the imminent and expectant future of Ireland’s economy take immediate precedence, and this takes manifest form in the burgeoning relationship between the respective political and economic agents. But one of the possibilities afforded Quinn in his composition of a historical narrative is hindsight. As readers we are alert to the tragic irony of Declan’s apparent innocence regarding the bona fides of his political collaborator, the full import of which only becomes apparent at the close of the novel. In much the same way that Declan assumes figurative significance within the narrative, Mick Guilfoyle is cast in an equivalent role by Quinn. Ardnabrayba is not only Guilfoyle’s local constituency, but it is also Declan’s family’s original home-place. This confluence of economic and political interests is part of the broader spatial patterning of Mount Merrion wherein the local, the national and the global become necessarily intertwined. Of course, the manner in which this teleology is foregrounded at this specific juncture in the narrative is just as significant for what it occludes. As we have asserted, these present and future plans obscure Issie’s birth and its immediate aftermath. In other words, at this point of origins and beginnings, one linear and, seemingly, unproblematic temporal compact, or contract, erases the possibilities of another. Such temporal and narrative autocracy is not confined to Declan’s occlusion of his daughter’s birth from his vision of the future in the extracts highlighted earlier, but elsewhere they are apparent in his attempts to adhere to the formative narrative shape of a particular breed of national identity. Issie is not the only female character whose future is simultaneously dictated and discarded by the narrative priorities of Declan’s ‘Ireland’, the same is true of her mother, Sinead. Where the three combine is in the decision regarding the selection of Issie’s secondary school. On the surface the contentiousness of the conversation between Declan and Sinead is unsurprising, and is decipherable as another occasion of a patriarchal assertion within the Boyle household. Yet, just as Declan’s future vision at the moment of Issie’s birth focuses upon the viability and the establishment of an economic opportunity, erasing altogether the futures represented by his daughter’s arrival, Sinead’s reflection here represents an altogether different disposition towards her daughter’s future. From Sinead’s current vantage point her education offered little other than a preparatory ground for acquiescence to, and subservience to, a normative narrative of marital passivity. She had tried to argue against sending Issie to Roebuck, where the nuns had taught her and her fellow students that their accomplishments in life must be merely adornments to their lucky husbands. Declan answered that there was no other good girls’ school in the vicinity. [. . .] He came back to her with reasons she couldn’t now recollect – something to do with university places or the like – but she knew he wanted the children to go to a Catholic school, in the traditional

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way, without the distraction of the opposite sex. In so many respects Declan was impatient with the past, but on this he was immovable.58

As we note from Sinead’s experience of her marriage, it is a form of confinement in physical and imaginative terms. Obviously, Sinead’s critique of her convent education is far removed from the violent excesses uncovered during the Celtic Tiger period in Ireland, but there are clear political and economic consequences for this kind of pedagogical practice. In a sense, the narrative possibilities outlined by both ‘the nuns’ and, in turn, by Declan are in alignment. Though qualitatively different, both impress the need to adhere to a stable and self-perpetuating educational system, under which women such as Issie and Sinead remain subservient to the needs and the demands of the broader economic and political narratives. But the coalescence of a traditional Catholicism and Declan’s impatient drive towards the future is in no way self-contradictory. In terms of our discussion, it re-enforces the notion that multiple temporalities co-exist and persist at a given historical moment. Put simply, Declan’s aggregated modern secularism and traditional moral Catholicism echo the alternative imaginative and temporal possibilities represented in the novel by his two children.

Conclusion In combination, then, our review of the significances of the temporal figuration of the Boyle children chimes with Gregory Castle’s reading of the work of the Algerian writer Assia Djebar. Analysing Djebar’s work in terms of what he dubs the postcolonial bildungsroman, Castle suggests that She also draws on what can be called failing time, the temporality of not having become, of recalcitrance and abstention, of fluid, recursive, multiple, and simultaneous potentialities whose very excess militates against a determinate chronology or telos. Alternative temporalities of the sort that Djebar produces through tactics of anamnesis – remembering history ‘as an alternative archive’ – leave narrative, in Peter Hitchcock’s phrase, ‘poised on the abyss of form’.59

Castle’s notion of ‘failing time’ should not be exported unproblematically across these discrepant contexts. Nevertheless, the ways in which Declan and Sinead Boyle’s children are portrayed and figured across the narrative are consistent with the relegation of alternative temporalities, as indicated by Castle. Indeed, though concentrating on divergent time periods and geographies, Esty’s work on the resistant facets of modernist narratives of ‘unseasonable youth’ resonates with both Castle’s reading of Djebar’s temporal frames, as well as our elaboration of the temporal multiplicities evident across Mount Merrion. Quinn’s narrative is patently a critique of the ease and alacrity with which progressivist modes of temporality assumed precedence in Ireland, as dominant social, economic and political agencies and personalities fully subscribed to the logic of globalized

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capitalism, made manifest most injuriously in property speculation. At the same time the narrative of Mount Merrion is seeded with moments of unrealized hope and alternative routes. The implication is, of course, that such temporal multiplicities exist at any historical juncture, and even when not recognized or assuming material form, they are still present in times of crisis. In these respects, Quinn’s concentration of overlapping and competing temporal visions is as much a critique of the deleterious effects of adherence to one linear form, as it is a prompt to acknowledge and to prospect for alternative temporal visions in the contemporary moment. Again, when we review the ways in which the Boyle parents engage with the temporal possibilities of their children, we are taken back to Castle’s analysis of Djebar’s temporal imagination. In the first instance, Castle highlights that ‘Repetition in Djebar’s work frequently takes the form of a recursive narrative that emphasizes the way in which the contemporary moment repeats the trauma of a previous time’.60 As we have detailed, Sinead Boyle attempted unsuccessfully to protect Issie from the potential consequences of historical repetition in relation to her daughter’s education and its wider social functions in Ireland. While, as we have argued, Issie represents an alternative temporal register, she does not conclusively evade the effects of her ‘repeated’ education. Specifically, she returns to Ireland, becomes dependent on the financial success of her father, and deploys her authorial aptitudes in the service of property ‘porn’ supplements of Irish newspapers. In Issie’s case the alternative may have been forced into conformity, yet that is not the simple or sole message in the narrative. Potentially more utopian in its implications is Castle’s second interpretation of Djebar’s temporal vision. In addition to repetition he posits the political traction of her attention to the notion of a gendered ‘eternal’ time evident in ‘writing that seeks to transcend conventional temporal demarcations and limits’.61 In this context we might productively draw an analogy between Castle’s reading of Djebar and Quinn’s figuration of Owen Boyle as symbolic of a form of ‘eternity’. In life, Owen evades the assertive, wilful linear functionalist temporalities of his father and of his rugby coaches via his equable temperament. Yet, in the light of Castle’s allusion to the ‘eternal’, we might also suggest that Owen’s death might be retrieved from its tragic circumstances and effects by reading it as a continuation of his earlier evasion of oppressive and autocratic temporal regimes. Taken at a figurative level, the potentialities and validity of Owen’s attitude to productive time do not wane with his death. The insistent haunting memory of these alternatives remains crucial to the narrative as it progresses after his departure. Gordon is once again illuminating on Owen’s ghostly significance when she proposes that ‘being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition’.62 Owen contradicts the austere knowledge economy in which his father, Declan, is so invested, though there is a hint at ‘transformative recognition’ late in the novel as Declan recovers in hospital. Together the Boyle children remain part of Quinn’s authorial critique of Ireland’s contemporary history, and of the temporal logic most dominant across that history. Ultimately,

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Quinn’s deployment of both Boyle children in relation to the politics of time is consistent with a resolute scepticism regarding the modes and accruals of ‘developmental historicism’.63 In Quinn’s employment of the bildungsroman form, and its allegorical and temporal features, we can identify youthful characters that defy the allegorical form and temporal trajectories of the generic conventions of the bildungsroman. Owen Boyle does not survive and strive as per the normative bildungsroman. Rather he lives on as a haunting presence both within the narrative and to the temporal and formal logics of the genre.

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CChapter 5 DEBT, GUILT AND FORM IN (POST-)CELTIC TIGER IRELAND

Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt.1

Debt and literary form At a global level there has been a plethora of critical interventions on the nature of the credit/debt economies within cultural and philosophical studies since the global financial crash in late 2008, which illuminate the ways in which ‘the overexposed, overindebted neoliberal subject has become one of the most representative figures of financial capitalism’.2 Of particular relevance to the current discussion are the ways in which these engagements with the genealogies and politics of debt, and their relation to modern subject-formation, intersect with recent and ongoing representations of Irish economic affluence and subsequent austerity, specifically in Dennis O’Driscoll’s poem ‘The Celtic Tiger’ (1999) and, more substantially, in Claire Kilroy’s novel, The Devil I Know (2012). As we shall encounter in detail, emerging theorizations of indebtedness are heavily indebted to previous work in this area by both Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault. From a thematic perspective, our argument will spotlight the ways in which debt is, and always has been, married to systems of discipline, moral instruction, as well as the politics of time. As Tayyab Mahmud usefully synopsizes: Throughout history, debt both lubricated circuits of value extraction and acted as a disciplinary device. From Athenian debt-bondage to contemporary labour trafficking, debt-peonage has been part of labour management regimes of a variety of modes of production. The historical role of debt in moral discipline is evidenced by the fact that in all Indo-European languages, words for debt are synonymous with those for sin or guilt.3

For Mahmud, among others, debt is a fraction of Foucault’s theorization of contemporary systems of governmentality through which neoliberalism forms and regiments subjectivity.4 Dissent against and/or contradiction of the tenets and iterative demands of finance and market capitalism are confronted with the preventative realities of the widespread and enduring indebtedness of

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the contemporary economic actor. This ‘responsible subject called forth by neoliberalism’ is, according to Mahmud, ‘the atomized and self-sufficient subject of the market’. This fact is enough to forestall disruptive and communally-based ‘projects of solidarity, collective rights, and antisubordination’.5 Debt, like so much else under the current politico-economic conjuncture, is privatized as both material and affective experiences.6 Before we address the immediate context indicated in the remainder of the title, I want to take a temporal and spatial turn to eighteenth-century Ireland and to early-twentieth-century Trinidad. First, we will take a brief look at Jonathan Swift’s enduring and alarmingly relevant satire A Modest Proposal (1729), and then a glance at V. S. Naipaul’s biographically derived and indebted A House for Mister Biswas (1961). In combination the texts address issues pertaining to debt, guilt and form in differential ways, and they can act as ready wedges with which to open a discussion of contemporary Irish writing. Swift had long partaken of a staple form of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – the pamphlet of improvement, for instance his A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture (1720) or his 1728 commentary, Short View of the Present State of Ireland. But in A Modest Proposal, Swift performs a subtle satirical commentary not just on the wastefulness of his Anglo-Irish peers but equally on the form of the economic treatise or pamphlet itself. So while the content of A Modest Proposal is patently brutish, savage and monstrous, the form in which it is packaged is just as open to Swiftian mockery. Indeed, there is a level of self-satire embedded within this particular publication. Of equal relevance is the way in which Swift synthesizes morality with the calculative abstraction of arithmetic – what one might term, in fact, a political arithmetic.7 The imbrication of morality and a scientifically buttressed economic logic is presented as potentially savage in A Modest Proposal, and it is the extremity of this marriage of morality and economic prudence that seems to echo across the centuries to our time. In Swift, the sober and sincere tone, the arithmetical undergirding of the arguments, as well as the familiarity of the treatise form cohere as moralizing agents of a rationalist fundamentalism. The assertive tone of apparent self-evidence acts as the Trojan horse in which the lunatic logic of economic efficiency infiltrates seemingly sensible and common discourse. To re-acquaint ourselves with this idiom: I HAVE been assured by a very knowing American of my Acquaintance in London; that a young healthy Child, well nursed, is, at a Year old, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome Food; whether Stewed, Roasted, Baked, or Boiled; and I make no doubt, that it will equally serve in a Fricasie or a Ragoust.8

In many respects, we have much to learn from the anticipatory elements of Swift’s particular satire, but it is the revision of form that anticipates most acutely some of the key points of my core contentions in this chapter, together with one of the hanging questions of this chapter – what is relationship between form and crisis?



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How do literary forms – high, popular, low, etc. – respond to, or gain renewed prominence or vigour, in times of political, moral or social crisis? Towards the close of Naipaul’s 1961 magnum opus, A House for Mr Biswas, Mohun Biswas is in ill-health and in debt on the house at Sikkim Street – the house he has spent all of his life attempting to secure. Of course, the house is deeply flawed in its structure, but the debt on its purchase remains constant. In consecutive paragraphs in the ‘Epilogue’, we read: But the debt remained. At nights, with a clear view of the sky through the slightly crooked window frames on the top floor, he felt the time flying by, the five years shrinking to four, to three, bringing disaster closer, devouring his life. In the morning the sun struck through the lattice work on the landing and below the bar-room door into his bedroom, and calmness returned. The children would see about the debt [. . .] But the debt remained. Four thousand dollars. Like a buffer at the end of a track, frustrating energy and ambition. (my emphasis)9

There are two further mentions of ‘the debt’ in the final pages of the epilogue, as it seems to be a haunting presence in Biswas’s declining months. With a degree of pathos, the guilt of this enduring debt, one that will and does outlive Biswas, is laid upon the foundations of his previous frustration at not being able to secure such a mortgage debt. What is unsaid in critical commentary on the novel is that A House for Mister Biswas could just as readily be re-titled as A Debt for Mister Biswas, for that is what he seeks – a home in indebtedness. If a house is a structure within society, its enabler, debt, is what structures so much of that society. Naipaul’s novel is part picaresque, part Neo-Victorian tome – it channels humour, tragedy, ambition and frustration in its unsentimental depiction of Mohun Biswas’s quest for a ‘house’. But, of course, it achieves all of this with an adaptation of form, a transfusion of form with an altogether colonial content and context. We have already mentioned the structural foundations of Naipaul’s novel, in terms of its indebtedness to the Victorian social novel, and the earlier picaresque narrative. But in delving into the links between character, subjectivity, identity and social power – all centred on the acquisition of a house, a seat of integrity and an objective correlative of a fully realized subject-agency – Naipaul also invokes the unaccommodated figure of King Lear at a crucial juncture in the novel. Specifically, he offers the reader a twentieth-century, Caribbean re-working of Lear’s mental collapse on the Heath. Just as Lear is literally and figuratively unaccommodated in Shakespeare’s tragedy, Mohun Biswas endures a similar fate in Naipaul’s tragi-comedic renovation of and re-invention of homelessness in Trinidad. Both are refugees from productive time, Lear has aged beyond usefulness and is therefore scorned and abandoned by Goneril and Regan. Further akin to Lear, Biswas’s relationship with debt is firmly linked to his children, and by association with future possibilities. The two concluding references to debt are both directly related to his daughter, Savi and his son, Anand:

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Suddenly the world opened for them, Savi got a scholarship and went abroad. Two years later Anand got a scholarship and went to England. The prospect of paying the debt receded. But Mr Biswas felt he could wait; at the end of five years he could make other arrangements [. . .] Anand said he wanted to come home. At once the debt, the heart, the sack, the five years became less important. He was prepared to take on a further debt to get Anand home. But the plan fell through; Anand changed his mind. And Mr Biswas never complained again. (my emphasis)10

Mr Biswas, for reasons at least partly sourced in the politics of caste and race, is frustrated in securing the means with which to indenture himself to propertied debt, and its associated temporal logic, until late in his life, and even then this manifests in flawed form. In tandem, then, both Swift and Naipaul raise issues germane to the relationship between literary forms and crisis, to the ways in which older forms offer ways of confronting or processing apparently new forms of crisis. If Swift and Naipaul constitute a kind of literary backdrop to the texts at the core of my argument, then Friedrich Nietzsche and Maurizio Lazzarato furnish my contentions with their theoretical logic. Historically separate they might be, but the aspects of their works that I draw upon are united by their concentration on the relationship between debt, guilt/morality and subject-formation. Now, it would be reductive to ignore the historical space that exists between the two, but there are ethical and philosophical commonalities that can effectively inform our readings of the literary texts under scrutiny here. The latter – poetic and prose fictional – will be interrogated in terms of both their overriding thematic concerns, but significant attention will also be devoted to the matter of literary form. As we intimated earlier, one of the core questions animating our discussion is what precisely is the relationship between form and crisis in the context of the ‘boom’ and ‘bust’ periods of the Irish Celtic Tiger.

Debt and guilt In the second essay of his On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), Nietzsche brings two of our titular terms into alignment, when he poses the following question: Have these genealogists of morality up to this point allowed themselves to dream, even remotely, that, for instance, the major moral principle ‘guilt’ [Schuld] derives its origin from the very materialistic idea ‘debt’ [Schulden] or that punishment developed entirely as repayment, without reference to any assumption about the freedom or lack of freedom of the will?11

The framing terminology is illuminating here, with morality and materialism seen as rooted in the same idea. Nietzsche fleshes out the material experience of indebtedness with ethical consequence, and, in turn, with the capacity to influence, to direct and, ultimately, to mould human subjectivity. Here we see the



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encroachment of the materialism of the debt economy onto the terrain of affect and emotion. But Nietzsche proceeds further; later in the same essay he dwells upon a key feature of the morality of indebtedness: the production of the memory of that debt. He writes: Precisely here, promises are made; precisely here, the person making the promise has to have a memory made for him: precisely here, we may suppose, is a repository of hard, cruel, painful things. The debtor, in order to inspire confidence that the promise of repayment will be honoured, in order to give a guarantee of the solemnity and sanctity of his promise, and in order to etch the duty and obligation of repayment into his conscience, pawns something to the creditor by means of the contract in case he does not pay, something that he still ‘possesses’ and controls, for example, his body, or his wife, or his freedom, or his life. [my emphasis]12

The first highlighted section references the notion of memory, but, of course, it really speaks to the future, and this is the creation of future-memory. The subsequent highlighted portion of the quotation accents the links between indebtedness and morality – specifically the invocation of conscience – but surely there are equal temporal considerations to this invocation of human conscience. There are recourses to precedence in any exercise of conscience. Thus, time unites both memory and conscience in the active creation of the functioning moral subject in Nietzsche’s view. This temporal context is only further re-enforced in the final highlighted section. But what we also witness is the re-introduction of the materialism mentioned earlier. The material body, possessions, artefacts, affiliates are all mortgaged into the future through the assumption of the debt in the present. Thus, the politics of debt and morality combine memory, cohere the present, future pasts and future presents in the summoning and the shaping of the moral subject. What is worth considering is precisely where and how Nietzsche’s writing on such issues is relevant to recent discourse on indebtedness and responsibility following the global economic crash. How has this crash and the relative attributions of blame, guilt and responsibility been processed globally – and of course mediated culturally and artistically, specifically in Ireland? But guilt is not confined to the post-crash landscapes of Ireland. As Nietzsche indicates, the symbiosis of debt and guilt are endemic to any and every social and economic relation. But perhaps this is more acutely visible in a society/economy that rushes headlong into the grips and opportunities promised by indebtedness. As we shall outline, the new gilded forms of Irish identity, together with the re-branding of Ireland as an entrepreneurial global citadel of consumerism during the Celtic Tiger period, cannot be disentangled from the country’s implication in the global debt economy of the new era of financialization. The Paris-based, Italian sociologist Maurizio Lazzarato has produced two recent books on the contemporary relevance of Nietzsche’s writing on the creation of what Lazzarato has dubbed ‘indebted man’. Lazzarato’s work is also informed

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by the work of Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari, and their work on the body politics of capitalism.13 Lazzarato’s two recent works are successively The Making of the Indebted Man (2007) and Governing by Debt (2013).14 Early on in the former, Lazzarato, echoing Nietzsche, situates morality and economic responsibility within a protracted historical continuum. He writes: ‘We are no longer the inheritors of original sin but rather of the debt of preceding generations. “Indebted man” is subject to a creditor-debtor power relation accompanying him throughout his life, from birth to death.’15 Lazzarato operates on two different temporal planes here. The latter portion is confined to the limits of the human lifespan. The normative lifespan is burdened by the power relations extant in the world, and these relations are fundamentally and inescapably centred on the economic parameters of the debt economy. But the earlier point signals Lazzarato’s interest in more extended historical patterns, and also introduces the notion of haunting to our consideration of the relationship between the subject and indebtedness. In a sense we are not only shadowed and haunted by our own contemporary debt relations, but we are the legatees of previous cycles and relations of indebtedness. All things considered, in fact, there are Gothic overtones to the ways in which the Irish landscape and economy are haunted by our individual and combined indebtedness. As our ensuing arguments outline, such recourse to the spectral and the uncanny is readily apparent in the literature that deals with the zenith and the decline of the Irish Celtic Tiger. Thus the guilt of indebtedness precedes our births and outlives us after our deaths, and for Lazzarato, as for Nietzsche, is structural to the formation of the modern subject. We must operate and come to consciousness through the internalization of indebtedness, together with the moral and the affective demands of such indebtedness. As Lazzarato continues slightly later in The Making of the Indebted Man: ‘Debt therefore implies subjectivation, what Nietzsche calls the “labor of man on himself,” a “self-torture.” This labor produces the individual subject, a subject answerable and indebted to his creditor.’16 Lazzarato’s employment of the term ‘subjectivation’ is provocative, in the sense that it chimes, variously, with Foucault’s and, latterly, with Judith Butler’s use of the term in relation to the politics of gender performance.17 Lazzarato’s deployment of the term suggests that indebtedness is part of the iterative process through which subject identities and functions are brought to coherence. The debtor/creditor relational axis, then, is the basic unit of this process, which, to return to our temporal conceit, patterns consciousness and conscience in the present and into the future. For Lazzarato: ‘The debtorcreditor relationship [. . .] intensifies mechanisms of exploitation and domination at every level of society, for within it no distinction exists between workers and the unemployed, consumers and producers, working and non-working populations, retirees and welfare recipients. Everyone is a “debtor,” accountable to and guilty before capital.’18 Performance and guilt, then, are integral to the procedures of the contemporary debt economy. The internalization of a guilt relation between debtor and creditor establishes the ground upon which the contemporary subject of liberal capitalism performs and re-performs its identity. This relation configures the temporal and spatial terrains of subject-performance, harnessing desire,



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memory and agency, and commanding authority over the interpersonal and narrative relations of the future. Aggregating Nietzschean and Foucauldian registers, Lazzarato continues by showcasing the imbrication of debt, morality and futurity in the convention of the productive – the self-productive – subject, or what James Muldoon describes as ‘the production of a particular form of [. . .] subjectivities’ amenable to the biopolitical operations of capitalism.19 In the patois of investment banking: past performance must be an indicator of future performance, or in Lazzarato’s terms: ‘The debt economy is an economy that requires a subject capable of accounting for himself as a future subject, a subject capable of promising and keeping a promise, a subject that works on the self.’20 The capacity of the contemporary homo economicus to keep a promise operates within a debt economy that is founded upon trust and faith.21 Just as the circulation and operations of the paper-based money economy subsist on the combined faiths of its adherents, the debt economy requires that the debtor lives up to the trust placed in them by their creditor. If there are theological overtones to this concentration on faith then that is because, as Benjamin notes in his essay on ‘Capitalism as Religion’: ‘Capitalism is the celebration of a cult [. . .] the cult makes guilt pervasive. Capitalism is probably the first instance of a cult that creates guilt not atonement.’22 Benjamin suggests the violence that is embedded within the capitalistic juridical system, a system that assumes and manufactures guilt without offering any recourse to redemption.23

Debt, history and the Celtic Tiger Attitudes to the accruals and imprints of Ireland’s economic buoyancy from the mid-1990s to the middle part of the first decade of the twenty-first century are split between what Roy Foster terms ‘Boosters’ and ‘Begrudgers’.24 In other words, there are those critics who heralded the Celtic Tiger as a potential source of cultural high achievement, who saw the economic dynamism of the country as one fraction of a broader re-invigoration of Irish culture and society. In broader terms, a critical chorus emerged according to whose hymn-sheet the triumph of the Celtic Tiger is seen as fate. In other words, the utopianism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ revolutionary periods was the direct seedbed for the prosperity experienced by the country a century later. Characteristic of this constituency, and stressing one of the core axioms of the Celtic Tiger narrative, P. J. Mathews argues in his 2005 ‘In Praise of Hibernocentrism: Republicanism, Globalisation and Irish Culture’, that ‘Within a decade Ireland has been transformed from a relatively impoverished backwater on the periphery of Europe, whose indigenous culture was constantly threatened by the homogenising influences of mass global culture, into a prosperous First World economy whose culture is increasingly being recruited to the global capitalist enterprise’.25 For Mathews this transition can be productively mapped by attending to the global scale of Irish cultural success, beginning in 1990 with the opening of Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa. The year 1990 seems to be a key departure point in Mathews’s chronology, but in

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many respects it is as arbitrary and subjective as any other. One could just as easily predate Irish cultural success to the late 1980s with My Left Foot, The Commitments and the 1988 European Soccer Championships in Germany. The analysis also seems utterly dependent on a particular form of external ratification and/or legitimation. Nevertheless, for Mathews this point in time launches a swathe of Irish cultural achievements across film, dance, music, literature, comedy, which ‘serves to illustrate Ireland’s striking makeover on the global stage in the 1990s from unfashionable Paddyland to land of cultural vibrancy’.26 This latter transition itself depends on the author’s own assertion that Ireland was some species of antiquated ‘Paddyland’ rather than any objective evidence of the existence of such a phenomenon. Likewise quite what ‘a land of cultural vibrancy’ means, or did mean, is also excessively vague. In a more historically expansive argument, but drawing upon Mathews’s earlier work in Revival (2003), Declan Kiberd also equates ‘cultural vibrancy’ with economic wealth and prosperity.27 Providing a ‘Cultural History of the Celtic Tiger’, Kiberd suggests that the Celtic Tiger economy might well have facilitated and generated heightened cultural creativity. In his view this period was one of unprecedented opportunity for the arts, and in his estimation: ‘The great renaissances of national culture in the past have flowered right across the globe against a background of economic confidence [.  .  .] If only we could bring the revivalist tradition of self-help once again into alignment with cultural pursuits, then the unfinished project of national renewal could come to fruition, and economics and art might harmonise.’28 Both parts of Kiberd’s argument here coalesce with Mathews’s assertions in his essay earlier and in Revival, respectively. In essence, there is little wrong with aspiring towards a renewed sense of selfconfidence across Ireland’s national culture on foot of a more muscular economy. Yet what needs to be articulated and remains unsaid in any great detail in these arguments are the particular terms and complexities of Irish cultural and economic successes. In particular, Mathews does not address the possibility of, or in fact, the necessity for culture to act as a space for radical critique of or dissent in the face of a non-egalitarian capitalistic economic success narrative. Ireland might well have been a poster child of cultural and economic achievement during the Celtic Tiger – according to Mathews and Kiberd, respectively – but at what cost to the critical integrity of cultural resources and potentialities. While Kiberd does acknowledge that ‘good novels, plays or poetry’ can provide ‘corrosive criticism of these developments’, the celebratory narrative remains triumphant.29 Most alarmingly, Kiberd posits the following question: ‘But why did it take a further seventy years for economic progress to catch up with attainments in culture and politics?’30 What such a query reveals is a remarkable neglect of the politico-economic transformations undergone by a newly independent state, prone to the vagaries of international capitalism and financialization. There is also a sense of inevitability palpable in Kiberd’s idealistic connection of cultural and economic achievement, and it rather blithely accepts at face value the ‘achievements’ of the Celtic Tiger economy. It signally fails to account for the demoralizing human relations that undergird the cultures of indebtedness and obligation attendant to the kinds of



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economic activity regnant during the so-called economic boom. In essence, what is absent from such analyses is any appreciation whatsoever of the material, and affective, bases of Ireland’s co-option into the international debt economy.31 If debt, as James Muldoon suggests, ‘is the universal power relation to which every individual in capitalist networks of accumulation is subjected’, then Ireland’s economic buoyancy during the Celtic Tiger period must be legible in terms of this so-called power relation.32 From a baldly economic perspective the relevance of debt and indebtedness to our reading of a sample of literary texts that reflect upon Ireland’s ‘boom’ and ‘bust’ can be thrown into relief if we attend to a sample of the economic commentaries on the country’s burgeoning debt economy during and after the peak years of the Celtic Tiger. Broadly speaking, it is undeniably true that the period under scrutiny here saw a significant increase in household mortgage and non-mortgage borrowing and indebtedness in Ireland. For instance, a 2005 report produced by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) accepted that ‘(1) Personal debt in Ireland is very high relative to historic experience and (2) the pace of borrowing has persistently surprised on the upside and (3) there are few signs of an early turnaround in this trend’.33 As global wholesale money markets became more accessible to financial institutions in Ireland from the late 1990s onwards, the supply of credit, and hence the capacity for individuals to assume mortgage and non-mortgage indebtedness, increased.34 In fact, in his analysis of borrowing outside the property sector in Ireland, the economist Seamus Coffey has illustrated that there were staggering increases in the levels of borrowing. Coffey notes that loans to Irish residents rose from €83 billion in January 2003 to €195 billion by the end of 2008. This is still a rapid rise but is an increase of 135% rather than the 220% increase seen for all loans [including property and construction]. As a percentage of GDP loans outside of investment in the property sector rose from 66% of GDP in 2003 to 108% of GDP in 2008.35

The rapidity with, and depth to, which indebtedness became, and remains, a staple of everyday economic activity, and subsistence, in Ireland during the Celtic Tiger is of primary concern when one reflects upon the differential cultural responses to this period of crisis. While the Irish State’s public indebtedness also reached unsustainable heights, following Lazzarato, our immediate concern is with debt as a way of life, as an experience of everyday living and as an informing factor of individual performances of identity in Ireland during the short-lived, but now recrudescent, economic ‘boom’ of the Celtic Tiger era. As we have argued above, the lacunae in both Mathews’s and Kiberd’s respective celebrations of the renovated swagger of the culturally confident Irish abroad the global stage rests precisely in their neglect of the material foundations of much of this newly hewn brand of Irishness. In one sense, they are trapped in a misplaced understanding of the temporal logic underpinning the Celtic Tiger, as their readings assume a historical lineage rooted in the dynamism of the Irish past. Such perspectives are fundamentally blind to the immanence of indebtedness to the Celtic Tiger ‘boom’, and fail to comprehend

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how indebtedness is all too often: ‘a permanent condition of existence, to which subjects are tied by a succession of debts that they have to repay throughout their life, [.  .  .] The subject’s obligation to repay becomes the primary mechanism of dependency, before obedience to the Law itself. Its reverse side is a guilt imputation, conscious or unconscious, in case of defaulting on one’s debts.’36 Following Balibar, it is our contention that the displays and manifestations of economic and cultural assertiveness in the present are little more than economic fetters that persist into the future, beyond the fugacious plenty of the present moment. The debt coursing through the lifeblood of the Irish economic ‘miracle’ belies the quasi-Messianism favoured by Mathews and Kiberd.37

Poetry and prosperity Originally published in his 1999 collection, Weather Permitting, and sharing a title with Paul Durcan’s poem in The Art of Life (2004), Dennis O’Driscoll’s ‘The Celtic Tiger’ offers a sequence of set pieces from that period.38 Made up of nine stanzas, each of which is a full three-line sentence, the poem displays superficial accommodation with, even unself-conscious indulgence in, the bounties of economic affluence. But in crucial ways, in tone and form, the poem betrays a healthy disquiet with the material fortunes of the ‘boom’ times in Ireland. Apart from the interconnected yet discrete vignettes from Celtic Tiger Ireland, one of the more revealing formal, linguistic features of O’Driscoll’s poem is the fact that the poetic voice never once speaks in the first person. Indeed, not only is the first-person singular absent, the first-person plural is also omitted, which, again, suggests physical, financial or ethical distance from these scenes of copious consumption, perhaps even a sense of disembodiment in the midst of such firmly expressed and experienced bodily and material(-ist) plenty. The poem’s narrative is relayed entirely in the second and third persons, intimating a degree of removal or separation from the depicted theatre of conspicuous wealth. In aggregation these formal features of the poem, particularly given the historical context of the work, convey a sense that there may well be interaction and shared experiences of consumption, but these activities are devoid of authentic human relations or community. This simple tactic by O’Driscoll implies that the social sensibilities of the Irish have been altered under the sway of financial largesse – a trend that is further evidenced in the carnivalesque or baroque scenes depicted in the individual stanzas of the poem’s first half. Such scenes as crafted by O’Driscoll are, superficially, familiar set pieces that populate many of the retrospective critical and creative responses to the Celtic Tiger period in Ireland. Yet, while at one level, they are traces of new species of Irish consumerism, they cannot be disaggregated from the operations and exertions of the global debt economy. As Dienst contends in his survey of contemporary forms of debt: ‘the sheer proliferation of shopping spaces should be seen as the physical extension of the regime of indebtedness [.  .  .] Shopping embraces the basic contradiction of consumerism, offering a way to bear being in debt, turning



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endless obligation into fleeting enjoyment, staking a claim in a collective excess that would be inaccessible to mere individuals.’39 It is in this context that we shall unpack how O’Driscoll poeticizes the material and performative indices of Ireland’s immersion in ‘the regime of indebtedness’. Put in terms of our theoretical idiom, O’Driscoll’s vignettes are not just part of the theatrics of excess, at every moment they are iterations of indebtedness, they are performances and affirmations of their own future indenture to indebtedness. Indeed, drawing upon Lazzarato’s work in his engagement with the temporal politics of indebtedness, Simon Morgan Wortham argues that A key feature of the asymmetrical force from which debt-money derives is ‘a power to prescribe and impose modes of future exploitation, domination, and subjection’ (34–5). In other words, debt-money determines, delimits, commands and controls the future as much as the present. This allows control not only of the debtor’s present, but of all their time to come, establishing an ‘economy of time’ in which the future is reduced to the expression and experience of ‘a society without time, without possibility’. (47)40

Each of the metonymic performances on display in ‘The Celtic Tiger’, then, is the somatic enactment of a promissory note, an embodied promise and a bodily commitment to limited possibilities in the future. What is also remarkable about the extracts we will attend to are that they are cast in the present tense – lending a degree of immediacy, perhaps? But it seems more plausible that O’Driscoll’s is an ironic take on the eternal present of the economic excess of the Celtic Tiger, given that there was a widespread failure or inability to comprehend the future promised by indebtedness. The performances catalogued by O’Driscoll are consistent with Joshua Clover’s blackly humorous precis of the temporal relations of the credit/ debt economy. In Clover’s view: ‘Credit too is a kind of time travel; it is a way of spending in the present the value of labour still in the future. Debt, equally, is the thing that knows what you will be doing next summer.’41 Thus each and every vignette we will discuss is caught in the euphoria of a false understanding of time, and there is a myopia endemic to the physical and verbal performances poeticized by O’Driscoll. The poem opens with an unadorned statement, immediately immersing the reader in, and preparing us for, the subsequent sights and sounds of the cityscape: ‘Ireland’s boom is in full swing.’42 But while this opening line clearly sites the poem in a specific location, it also hints at the impersonality characteristic of the narrative arc of the remainder of the poem. As if to make this point even more starkly, the following two lines revel in the abstract facticity of the country’s economic ascendancy: ‘Rows of numbers, set in a cloudless blue/ computer background, prove the point.’43 Abundance in abstracted statistics proves abundance in material riches, with O’Driscoll here ironizing the impersonality of wealth creation and evaluation, an ironic gesture that is made all the more effective by the concluding plosives of ‘prove the point’. Both ironic and defensive, these plosives, then, are also intimations that statistics are inherently contestable.

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Indeed, the initial emphatic tone of this opening stanza firmly establishes the ironic register of ‘The Celtic Tiger’, and, in its reference to the statistical verifiability of Ireland’s copious wealth, reminds us of the counterarguments of critical voices in Irish society who have consistently highlighted the outrageous material disparities that accompanied the Celtic Tiger ‘boom’. Furthermore, this opening ironization of abstraction operates in tandem with the de-personalizing absence of first-person singular and plural across the poem – two telling gestures employed by O’Driscoll to undermine the debilitating individualism engendered by and creative of material wealth. The stanzas that succeed this abstract validation of the ‘boom’ portray a variety of performances of Irish Celtic Tiger identities, which are consonant with O’Toole’s argument in Enough Is Enough that ‘The Celtic Tiger wasn’t just an economic ideology. It was also a substitute identity. It was a new way of being.’44 Just as identity as performance changed during the Celtic Tiger, a significant fraction of this evolution manifested in linguistic forms and modes of verbal expression employed in the public and private spheres. ‘The Celtic Tiger’, attending to form, self-consciously ironizes and critiques the linguistic neologisms and mutations that contoured public and private discourse. As the poem displays, Irish citizens became adept at, even fluent in, new vocabularies of excess and consumerism. It is in the third, fourth and fifth stanzas of ‘The Celtic Tiger’ that O’Driscoll dramatizes the most explicit theatrics of Celtic Tiger identity. With a microscopic attention to diction and syntax, the poem utilizes compounds, vague generic titles, alliteration and half-rhyme to establish its critique of un-ironic posturing and re-invention. While the three stanzas stand apart, they could well describe a single spatial location, as the poet once more reaches for the generic to undermine the authenticity of such individual and communal performances of arriviste identities. The third stanza ironizes a postmodernist and consumerist appetite for mediated ‘culture’ as the nouveau riche prostrate themselves ‘Outside new antique pubs’, the oxymoron suggesting a crude commodification of Irish history in the service of consumption.45 We are offered a picture of simulated authenticity as national identity is given as a hostage to new-found fortune. The third stanza also sees the greatest concentration of compound adjectives, as the poet describes: ‘well-toned women, gel-slick men’, who ‘drain long-necked bottles of imported beer’.46 There is an erotic suggestiveness to these lines, with emphasis placed on physical appearance and on the sensuousness of physical consumption. The Celtic Tiger streetscapes possess a cosmopolitan feel, a globalized ambience, in which new identities can be shaped and explored. This progression into the erotic and the sensual is further apparent in the following stanza, which, beginning with another compound adjective, takes on a specifically gendered form of sexualized performance: ‘Lip-glossed cigarettes are poised/ at coy angles, a black bra strap/ slides strategically from a Rocha top.’47 Combining the generic with the specific – ‘Rocha’ – O’Driscoll suggests a level of liberated female sexual agency, and, at the same time, eroticizes, in contemporary form, a variant of national allegory. The coupling of the alliterated sequence, ‘black bra strap/ slides strategically’, connotes sexual boldness, as well as a sensual performance. In



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these two stanzas, then, it is action, physical, bodily action, that counts and that is privileged. Yet in the next stanza ‘talk’ enters, but is, first, centred on sterile property markets and, more significantly, is drowned out by another more insistent sound: ‘Talk of tax-exempted town-house lettings/ is muffled by rap music blasted/ from a passing four-wheel drive.’48 Again we see a concentration of compound adjectives and impersonal nouns, as the poet details the commodities accumulated and traded by the affluent. What is more telling, though, is the content of the ‘muffled’ ‘talk’, as O’Driscoll points to the re-calibration of language, of conversation topics and of personal priorities during the ‘boom’ years. Once more the ways in which language was employed and the contents of public and private discourse became conditioned by the props and potential accruals of economic success. Across ‘The Celtic Tiger’, language, together with the poetic form and content, are laced with both local and international markers of cultural and social change, and many of these are ironized as superficial features of depthless Irish identities during the period of the Celtic Tiger. For Diane Negra: ‘In the performances of sophistication and efficiency that are associated with the New Irishness an earlier set of representational codes that tended to stress emotions such as sentimentality, pathos, nostalgia, volatility and vitality are displaced and “a new economy of the emotions” emerges.’49 There is a similar awareness evident in O’Driscoll’s poem, as it targets the linguistic inventions and neologisms that accompanied the altered sociocultural sensibilities of the eternal present of the Celtic Tiger years. In the end, ‘performance’ seems to be a key issue for O’Driscoll in this poem, as new selfimages are formed that are firmly wedded to what he perceives as transient and insubstantial brands of consumerist identities. These ‘performances’, of course, are both spatial and temporal within the poem. O’Driscoll’s use of the metonymic [spatial] register through the succession of discrete but contiguous set pieces of consumption works in tandem with the temporality of the accrual of indebtedness that shadows each of the spatial iterations of Celtic Tiger identity. The poem returns us to the expansive public spaces and the dynamic, but debthaunted, temporalities of the younger generation in the concluding stanzas. In the final three stanzas O’Driscoll presents different models of bourgeois sociality, melding the domestic and the professional spheres. From the comforting aroma ‘of barbecue fuel across summer lawns’, O’Driscoll moves, again, to suggestions of the erotic or sexual opportunism afforded by, and entwined with, corporate wealth generation.50 The final two stanzas return us to the professional crucibles in which Ireland’s wealth was managed and manipulated, and in which many of its beneficiaries were employed. The focus of the poem gestures to the implication of debt-laden national and global financial systems in the creation and brief sustenance of the Celtic Tiger, and, presciently, given post-crash events across Europe, the power relations of these arrangements. ‘The Celtic Tiger’ touches upon some of the cynicism attached to the corporate domains: ‘Tonight, the babe on short-term/contract from the German parent/ will partner you at the sponsors’ concert.’51 Moving from the present tense, this is the only stanza that projects into the future, the immediate future in this case. While it is distinctive in its temporal

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framing, its default to generic, and reductive, terminology, ‘babe’, ‘parent’, ties it to the overall linguistic economy of the poem. As mentioned, the stanza captures a degree of combined sexual and business cynicism, but it also can be read in terms of the cynical imbrication of culture and economics, specifically the non-critical species of cultural achievement and performance that was fostered under the sway of national emergence and progress during the Celtic Tiger period. This vacuous twinning is well captured by O’Driscoll in the iambic, and off-rhymed, coupling of ‘sponsors’ concert’. Unusually in the poem, this ‘concert’ is cast in the day’s future, and captures the temporal nature of consumerist desire, a sense of time oblivious to the material and affective reckonings with indebtedness in that future. This obliviousness is part of the deliberate operation of indebtedness in its apparent ‘invisibility’ to the debtor and the displacement of the present from itself, because indebtedness does not exactly present itself as such: there is something not quite visible about it, as if the phenomenal world and the people in it could always be measured against their debts and found lacking. It is hard to see indebtedness at work in the world – although it exists nowhere else – precisely because it shows us a world where nothing ever really belongs to itself.52

In equal measure, O’Driscoll exposes the altered linguistic patterns of the globalized Irish workplace. There is a Yeatsian echo in the initial rhetorical framing of the final stanza, a sense that in this concluding stanza some conclusion will be arrived at, or that some insight will be forthcoming. But such gravitas is immediately undone as we read on, ‘Time now, however, for the lunch-break/orders to be texted. Make yours humus/on black olive bread. An Evian.’53 Convenience, internationalism and, inevitably, language are the core thematics of this stanza. Rather than any (semi-) profound consideration on the Celtic Tiger, the poetic voice returns to the faux urgencies of the working day. Just as the computer screens professed to the ‘reality’ of Ireland’s ‘boom’ in the opening stanza, O’Driscoll reprises the technological at the poem’s close and re-assures us of its centrality to the convenient and de-personalized performances of our everyday lives. This technology is, of course, physically imported into Ireland but so too are the idioms and rituals that convene around our engagements with this and other equivalent technological props. In addition, the diction and the syntactical arrangement of the sentence, ‘Make yours humus/on black olive bread’, is more akin to an American locution than typically Irish; thus, in both form and content (humus and black olives) this sentence reveals a profound level of novel but commoditized international influence on Irish life.54 Of course, we see this interrogation of the internationalization of Irish culinary culture reflected upon in other Irish poetry in recent years, notably Derek Mahon’s ‘At Ursula’s’ from Life on Earth, and there is little that is wrong with such intercultural culinary blending.55 But in O’Driscoll’s ‘The Celtic Tiger’, the language, form and content display both local and international features of cultural and social change, and many are ironized as superficialities of depthless Irish identities during the Celtic Tiger period. Performance seems to be a key question for O’Driscoll in ‘The



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Celtic Tiger’, new self-images are formed that are firmly cleaved to the transient, branded, labelled and fashionable of global consumerism. Posture and surface are inadequate modes for O’Driscoll, the forms in which they manifest in the Ireland of his poem are metonymic of the broader panoply of postures and idioms adopted and traded during the Celtic Tiger. But, as we have consistently maintained, while O’Driscoll’s poem critiques the garish showcases of consumerist affluence that were ubiquitous during the Celtic Tiger ‘boom’, nested within each of the portraits proffered is what Michael Cronin terms: ‘The logic of debt.’56 In Cronin’s elaboration this ‘logic of debt’ demands that because the present is mortgaged ‘to some future good means that the individual under the regimen of the entrepreneurial is subject to a form of relentless self-harrying where as a putatively sovereign subject they become the wardens of their own financial conscience’.57 For Cronin, via Foucault, the pageantry of consumerism, in fact, is a fraction of a disciplinary regime of indebtedness that wields both material and affective power.58 Experienced as liberation, at first, the realities of indebtedness are more forcefully manifest as material seizures of time and as exertions of politico-economic authority.

Devilled by debt Published in 2012, Claire Kilroy’s The Devil I Know combines straight literary realism with elements of genre fiction in its retrospective narration of the machinations and the decline of Ireland’s property surge. The narrative relays the events surrounding Tristram St Lawrence’s immersion in the nether regions of Ireland’s credit/debt economy at the outset of the twenty-first century. On returning after a prolonged absence from Ireland, Tristram encounters an erstwhile acquaintance from his schooldays, Des Hickey, who inveigles Tristram into partnering him in a thoroughly ambitious, and outsized, property investment. But Tristram’s decisions, and indeed agency, are guided by his AA ‘sponsor’, Mr Deauville, who is only contactable remotely by phone. It is through this narrative device that Kilroy transcends the conventions of literary realism, and invests her narrative with Faustian textures. Early in the novel, our protagonist and narrator, Tristram, is being driven on the coast road above Dublin Bay by his future business associate, Hickey, and he provides the following portrait of his environment: The truck ascended past ponied meadows and heathered slopes until the road crested and Dublin Bay appeared below, broad and smooth and greyish blue, patrolled by the Baily lighthouse. The whitethorn was in full blossom and the ferns were pushing through. Better to have been born somewhere dismal, I sometimes think. Better to have grown up shielded from striking natural beauty, to have never caught that glimpse of Paradise in the first place only to find yourself sentenced to spending the rest of your life pining for it, a tenderised hole right in the heart of you, a hole so big that it seems at times you’re no more than the flesh defining it, I rolled the window up to seal the beauty out.59

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What commences as a vision redolent of the conventions of Romantic lyricism – with its congregation of alliterative and assonant sound effects – declines into an introspective confrontation with humanity’s capacity for destruction and with the transience of human life. The latter is, of course, relevant to the present discussion, and with the ecological scars that disfigure the post-Celtic Tiger landscapes across Ireland. But of equal interest is the way in which time is figured in this brief section of Kilroy’s narrative. There is an association of such natural beauty and efflorescence with the past and but also with impossibility. But in this case we do not necessarily associate this with a mystification of the past and of landscapes attached to such anterior temporal distance. Rather, Tristram’s reflection is at least partly directed at the history of the recent past and with the history of the present moment. Equally, Kilroy sets up a traffic between the externalities of non-human ecologies and natural landscape and the machinations of human subjectivity, as the passage moves from outward-oriented observation to inward self-reflection. This can be figured in two ways at the same time; it signals the mutuality of landscape and humanity at physical and affective levels, but, also, gestures to the means through which we abstract and objectify the physical externalities of the non-human. We also notice from the previous passage that the narrative is presented in the first-person singular in the past tense, which at one level is continuous with our concentration on temporality thus far. However, of more significance at the level of form is that Kilroy’s use of such focalization is a necessary function of the broader narrative structure. The core narrative framework employed by Kilroy is that of the legal trial – a choice that explicitly coheres with our focus on the notions of guilt, debt and form. In addition to the framing form of the court trial, The Devil I Know also incorporates elements of and allusions to Gothic, Faustian, Kafkaesque and Big House narratives. A stable of narrative forms that clearly can accommodate confrontations with debt and guilt in their own rights. But, Kilroy’s novel can also be housed within the newly emergent genre of the ‘credit-crisis novel’.60 In Annie McClanahan’s view this generic development reminds us of the difficulty of representing the individual as an autonomous market actor endowed with infinite consumer freedom while also burdening that individual with full responsibility for his own reproduction in an economy fuelled by consumer debt. The radical contradictions that fracture this individual’s representation in a period of financial volatility underscore the fact that it is the economic subject’s ideological and material maintenance, as much as the economy as a whole, that is in profound crisis.61

The generic promiscuity evident in Kilroy’s narrative, then, is consistent with McClanahan’s assessment of why and how the conventions of linear realist narration are limited in or, even inadequate to, reckoning with the individual’s experience of the recent global financial crisis and the impacts of acute exposure to insuperable indebtedness.



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Indeed, as Marie Mianowski astutely suggests in her commentary on the relationship between Kilroy’s use of literary form and her representation of space and place in Celtic Tiger Ireland, the novel’s ‘introspective and mirror-like structure [. . .] the shows ironically and tragically how reality has in a way exceeded fiction’.62 The narrative of The Devil I Know is unmoored from a strictly realist account of Tristram’s dealings and actions within the Celtic Tiger property market, and Kilroy recognizes the legitimacy of, indeed the urgency for, engaging with the ‘fictions of finance’ with her own ‘financial fiction’. In this respect her novel intersects with contentions made elsewhere by McClanahan, and Hamilton Carroll, on how instructive the study of genre and speculative fictions can be in consideration of the global financial crisis. For McClanahan and Carroll, then: ‘To describe finance as akin to fiction is not to assume that it is merely an abstract figment of our collective imagination: rather, genre fiction limns a more complex ontology, suggesting the correlation between the spectrally virtual and the intractably material that also characterizes our contemporary moment of late capitalism.’63 In other words, while transparent literary realism was sufficient as a cultural outrider of industrial capitalism, we require novel modes of representation, including renovated forms of realism, in our efforts to mediate and to comprehend the imprints and effects of ‘the financialization of daily life’.64 As with any trial, the narrative is haunted by events from the past; the narrative is, then, a reckoning with previous choices made and actions committed by Tristram St Lawrence. Furthermore, the trial conceit offers Kilroy the opportunity to address directly, or to allude to, issues such as trust, truth, responsibility and, naturally, guilt. All trials are excavations of the past as well as interrogations of the self, of a self, which lead to the attribution of guilt, the acquisition of truth or the confirmation of innocence. But Kilroy’s adoption of such a form also plays with the pagination and the typographical consistency of the novel form itself. For instance, this is the only text that appears on the first page of the novel: ‘First day of evidence 10 March 2016’, page two is blank, while on page three we simply read: ‘Please state your name for the record.’ From Kilroy’s perspective, then, the novel is cast four years into the future, which in itself is a suggestive narrative strategy in terms of our titular foci. Combined with the satirical tone of much of the narrative, the proleptic form appears to imply that no such conclusive legal or even ethical restitution will occur in Ireland – a prescient conclusion by Kilroy. But of more relevance to our argument is the idea that the past, in the form of the period of the Celtic Tiger itself, and the future, in terms of political and economic fall-out, as well as continued individual, personal indebtedness, cannot be disaggregated, either in practical or in moral terms. Tristram answers what appears as a depersonalized request for his name, and the tone of his response to the sternly posed question demonstrates the manner in which Kilroy appropriates the architecture of the court trial for her satirical narration of the very absence of accountability during the Celtic Tiger property frenzy: Don’t be coy, Fergus. You’ve known me since I was yay high. I beg your pardon? Oh. It’s like that, is it? I see. Very well. As you wish. This is going to take longer

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than expected, but then, you lot are running on a pricey meter. Two and half grand a day, I hear. Well Fergus – I mean Justice O’Reilly – my name, for the record, is Tristram St Lawrence. Tristram Amory St Lawrence, the thirteenth Earl of Howth, Binn Eadair, hill of sweetness. I was – I am – the only son your old pal, the twelfth Earl of Howth, managed to sire, and not from lack of trying. People have been saying a lot of bad things about me in the press. I am here to say a few more.65

The reference to ‘Tristram Amory Lawrence’ recalls the novel’s epigraph, which is taken from Finnegans Wake: ‘riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. Sir Tristram, violer d’amores, fr’over the short sea, had passencore rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war.’66 Thus Kilroy’s protagonist is directly related to the opening of Joyce’s modernist masterpiece, as well as to the historical founder of Howth Castle, Sir Amory Tristram. At an allusive level this obviously coheres with the temporal foci of our discussion. But Kilroy’s allusiveness also flags up the novel’s interest in time, history and the past as kernel thematics. The first sentence of the same quotation reappears in the final chapter of the novel, this time with more darkly ironic connotations and associations: riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. Do you remember? It used to be written on the tenner back when we had our own currency. On O’Connell Street preparations were afoot outside the GPO for the celebration of the Centenary of the Easter Rising. One hundred years since the Proclamation of the Irish Republic and our sovereignty had been hocked.67

In repeating the quotation, Kilroy obliquely echoes Joyce’s own formal innovation in Finnegans Wake, where the opening sentence of the text is the end of the final sentence of the text, thereby drawing our attention to the novel’s concern for historical repetition and temporal circularity. However, it is the two highlighted lines that are of most importance in the current context, as they relate directly to the politics of debt, as we encountered in Nietzsche and Lazzarato. In this case Tristram refers to the stripping of national economic, and therefore de facto political, sovereignty – but the chapter, and the novel, quickly move to a close with the dramatization of Tristram’s own personal confrontation with debt, which, naturally, as we have seen, involves the denial of agency and freedom into the future. This is the point at which the Faustian, and less overtly the Big House, formal patternings of Kilroy’s narrative are rendered most visible, and where the idiom of indebtedness is clearly linked with guilt and punishment. As Tristram returns to his ancestral, family home for the final time, he describes the scene of aftermath that presages his imminent fate. Tristram’s home belongs to the architectural and novelistic genealogy of the Irish ‘Big House’, which was, in literary



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terms, an ‘end of empire’ literary phenomenon. It was the edificial assertion of colonial seizure and power transformed into a scar on the landscape, a persistent reminder of the usurpations of the past. Kilroy’s invocation of the ‘big house’ literary tradition manifests in such overtly Gothic fashion as dissolving remainders of a once aristocratic family, as well as the persistence, in ghostly, haunting forms, of people and memories from that fading presence on the Irish landscape. The ‘big house’ is, then, a mouldering incarnation of the unpaid debts of Ireland’s colonial history, and from a literary perspective, as Vera Kreilkamp maintains: ‘Certainly the political insecurity conveyed by Gothic conventions expresses [. . .] the reality of Anglo-Irish conditions during the long century of local violence accompanying the development of the big house novel.’68 In this respect the anteriority of the Big House narrative strand, and the attendant violence and insecurity of the genre, anticipate the imminence of the Faustian plot’s denouement. What was once secure, assertive and central to the socio-economic structures of colonial Ireland is atrophying in the neoliberal present of the Celtic Tiger: I crossed the road to the ribbed columns of the castle entrance. Sir Tristram has passencore rearrived. [. . .] Windows were broken and roof slates missing. A buddleia sprouted from the chimney stack and the garden was a poisonous ragwort thatch [. . .] the gatekeeper’s cottage was a derelict wreck and so was I. [. . .] I went around the back. The castle was boarded up like the rest of the country. A carpet of bindweed had smothered the sunken gardens. I paused at the tradesman’s entrance but continued around to the vandal’s entrance and climbed through that instead, seeing as I was the biggest vandal of them all. They had pulled off the plywood boards and broken the catch on a sash window. Cider cans littered the parquet floor like autumn leaves.69

In this extended fraction of the narrative, once again Joyce is explicitly invoked as colonial and contemporary histories are about to reach points of settlement. Indeed the use of the Joycean quotation is a moment of internal and external repetition – we have seen it before within this text, and it allusively reaches back to Joyce. It speaks, then, to both the past and the future within Kilroy’s novel, but, of course, it also does in Finnegans Wake, as Joyce’s original speaks to the future arrival of Sir Tristram. But this is also a quintessential site of dereliction, a fragmented and anachronistic edifice whose original purpose and proprietors have been superseded by the ‘Gothic excesses of Celtic Tiger Ireland’, and the machinations of Ireland’s integration into globalized liberal capitalism and the debt/credit economy.70 The reference to boarded-up properties is an explicit invocation of the blight of ghost estates across Ireland, but more poignantly it signals Tristram’s ultimate alienation from history. Through his actions, through his complicity with, and exploitation by, the alchemists of debt, he is compelled to witness the decline and abandonment of his familial home and the histories attached to that property. His inheritance has been rendered as a dilapidated legacy to future generations, along with the partially completed and now redundant site on which he and Des Hickey

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had planned to erect their hotel and apartments; it is a debt that must be met in the future. But in figuring himself as a ‘derelict wreck’, Tristram internalizes the dereliction of the country and of his ancestral home, and, therefore, it is also suggestive of the ways in which debt is internalized and is formative in processes of subjectivation. As we have seen with both Nietzsche and Lazzarato, the debt economy is not confined to external physicalities and operations, but performs work in the hailing and the formation of the subject, more pointedly, of homo economicus. So, while physical manifestations of the debt economy are readily identifiable, bricked and mortared signs of indebtedness, as we have just mentioned, we need to remain mindful of the more pernicious affective consequences of the debt economy. It is with such thoughts in mind that Kilroy draws the narrative to its resolution, with the Faustian pact made by Tristram bringing his life and career to an end. Speaking about the trials and excesses of Tristram, a character referred to as the historian – in fact the Devil – summarizes Tristram’s action and downfall: ‘The benighted fool had squandered everything, you see. Every last farthing and more besides. What past generations had laboured to create, destroyed just like that.’ The historian clicked his fingers. ‘A whole way of life gone. He racked up a debt that can never be settled. But a debt must be settled, mustn’t it? Isn’t that the nature of debt?’ [. . .] Deauville had come to collect. A debt must be settled. That is the nature of a debt. The Devil linked my arm and we began our descent.71

The initial highlighted text here tallies with the trope of decline seen earlier, from the decline of the Anglo-Irish from whom Tristram is derived, to the eminence and decline of the property merchants of contemporary Ireland. Kilroy’s use of Joyce is not to resolutely express her faith in the cyclical patterns of conquest and defeat, or to make a fatuous or facile analogy between the two historical periods. Rather, she gestures to the rhythms of history that structure the essential precariousness and transience of hubristic power, and hints at the combined senses of loss and aftermath in the wake of the implosion of the Celtic Tiger economy.72 The later highlighted sections above suggest that while the edifices and wealth of individual owners and speculators in any given historical period are transient and vulnerable, what does endure is debt and the requirement that it be paid in the future. The insistent pairing of ‘debt’ and ‘settle’ here is noteworthy; the etymological origins in Old and Middle English of ‘settle’ are associated with place, or a sense of rootedness or rest. Thus this adds a spatial layer to our already well-established temporal reading of debt. But equally, there is an incontestable inevitability to the so-called nature of debt here, as it outlasts and supersedes the actions and agencies of the subject that incurs the debt. Tristram, then, like us all, cannot elude the demands of his Faustian pact with the prevailing, dominant debt economy. The moral pole attached to sin and punishment ushers our protagonist to his fate.



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Conclusion On Wednesday, 4 July 2007, the then Irish Taoiseach Bertie Ahern made off-script comments during an address to the Irish Congress of Trade Unions conference in Bundoran. In response to economists such as Morgan Kelly, who questioned the sustainability of the Celtic Tiger economy, Ahern retorted in the following fashion: ‘Sitting on the sidelines, cribbing and moaning is a lost opportunity. I don’t know how people who engage in that don’t commit suicide because frankly the only thing that motivates me is being able to actively change something.’ Nested within Ahern’s comments, of course, are value judgements about quite what constitutes the ability to, and the nature of the, change to which he alludes. In the terms we have been addressing via Nietzsche and Lazzarato, the ‘cribbers and moaners’ cited here have not fully embraced or submitted to their roles as productive and consensual vassals of the debt economy. Quite apart from ethical issues raised, it brings us back to the matter of time, the future and the capacity of the subject to work on themselves in aligning with a consensus. But there is a quasi-Swiftian lunacy to Ahern’s remarks. Alas, Ahern was no Swift, and lacked the caustic edge of Swift’s satirical excess, preferring the insensitivity of misguided and intemperate spontaneity. Nevertheless the tone and form that Ahern’s outburst takes are symptomatic of a viewpoint that seemed addicted to the celebratory and passive energies of Ireland’s neoliberal economic ‘boom’ time. Time and language here are oriented towards the future, where there is only one condition of possibility and a single narrative register. As we have seen in theory and literature, such convergence appears in temporal and spatial forms, and must and can be hotly contested. Literary interventions such as those attended to here remind us of the urgency of interrogating the cult of quantitative rhetoric that has infiltrated public and private discourse with alacrity in Ireland since the peaks of the Celtic Tiger economy. The overdetermination of thought and language by the norms of the capitalist conjuncture recall the cultic values attributed to capitalism by Benjamin. They are symptomatic of societies in which, with relative geographical, gendered, ethnic and class differences, ‘to be in debt is the model of contemporary existence’.73 The primacy of such a cultic economic vernacular is represented in the ‘Introduction’ to their 2009 volume, Transforming Ireland: Challenges, Critiques and Resources, by Debbie Ging, Michael Cronin and Peadar Kirby. In this essay the editors of the volume highlight the linguistic contortions that were, and are, characteristic of public political debate in Ireland during, and since, the Celtic Tiger. They identify ‘the restricted vocabulary of the business studies vulgate [which] is applied indiscriminately to health, education, the arts, policing’,74 as inimical to the cultivation of radical and progressive critical debate in Ireland. Yet, in the same piece, they retain a utopian faith in the transience of such hollowed-out idioms, arguing that ‘it is important to bear in mind that languages have a past and future as well as a present. In other words, the present infestation of public language with the default rhetoric of the market is, in historical terms, relatively recent.’75 Among many others, the writers under consideration here have each, differentially attended to these transient languages of consumption and moral corruption. Both critics

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and artists are keenly attuned to the semiotics of excess that structured public and private discourse in Ireland during the country’s economic ‘boom’ times. But what is just as true is that much of this phoney discourse of acquisition and plenty was utterly alien to scores of lives and communities across Ireland. If public language has been ‘infested’, as Ging, Cronin and Kirby attest, then these artists avail of the creative contingency of language to expose and to critique further the legacies and the ruins of this recent, though apparently recrudescent, ‘debt imperialism’.76

CChapter 6 FINANCE AND FICTION IN DEIRDRE MADDEN’S TIME PRESENT AND TIME PAST (2013)

Realism and time With both its title and epigraph taken from T. S. Eliot’s ‘Burnt Norton’ sequence of Four Quartets (1943), Madden’s novel affirms its thematic foci on the nature and experience of time.1 As we have alluded to earlier, Ireland’s social and economic implication in the temporal regimes of financial capital during the Celtic Tiger period meant the continuation, even the intensification, of the pre-eminence of progressive linearity as the dominant figuration of time. While the thematic keynotes of the novel are derived from modernist poetry and the core content of the narrative is character-driven and character-centred, there is little doubt that there are explicit critical-philosophical engagements with the Celtic Tiger at broader social and economic levels. In this respect, and in summary, Eliot’s attention to history and time; the power of language; a sense of cultural crisis; and the performance of self-scrutiny and humility in Four Quartets are plainly evident in the form and the content of Time Present and Time Past. Indeed, the simple fact that the novel opens with a question, ‘Where does it all begin?’ as well as the nature of that question raises concerns centred on teleology, narrative development and narrative self-reflexiveness. In addition, the ways in which Madden focuses the narrative action on the interior lives of so many of her protagonists has implications for the author’s engagement with the Celtic Tiger.2 As we consider the novel’s critique of the Celtic Tiger, we must analyse the significance of its convergence with, and divergence from, strictly realist modes of representation, as well as question how such formal strategies relate to the economic and financial cultures of Ireland’s ‘boom-time’ economy. In a sense, our approach to Madden’s narrative is sympathetic to Patricia Drechsel Tobin’s argument that the ‘realistic novel convinces us, not because the contents of its fictional world resemble those of our own, but because it structures experience in the same way we do; what is essential to the illusion of reality is not what happens but how it happens’ (my emphasis).3 With this in mind, Madden’s novel considers matters that currently energize literary critics beyond Irish Studies, and whose work addresses such issues as the ‘character’ of capitalism, the ‘character’ of the realist novel and ‘character’ as reflection, as representation or as imposition.

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Beyond characterization, Madden’s interest in temporality extends into other areas of literary form, specifically through her utilization of anachrony, analepsis and prolepsis, and her suggestive deployment of tenses. Each of these accumulated technical innovations combine to problematize the apparent transparent realism of the narrative and, in fact, induce repeated moments of estrangement and uncanniness across the novel for a variety of the central characters. Therefore, while the narrative content of Time Present and Time Past only cursorily treats the specific history of the Celtic Tiger, Madden’s formal experimentations centred upon memory, subjectivity and the uncanny focus directly on the temporal regimes that condition the experience of time and the ‘time of indebtedness’ under financial capitalism. In the context of our broader analysis of financial capitalism and the Celtic Tiger, Madden’s narrative engages with Lazzarato’s characterization of the debt economy, which strives to lay claim to the ‘the future, manifests a force of prescription, and constitutes a power of destruction/creation that anticipates that which is not yet present. Financing flows are a deterritorialized and deterritorializing power, a power that does not emerge after the economic but is immanent to it. They affect possibilities and their actualization.’4Though most frequently preoccupied with the rememorative traffic between past and present, Time Present and Time Past is neither nostalgic nor sentimental in its engagement with the politics of time. Rather, it affords us a dynamic re-imagination of temporality in its critique of Celtic Tiger Ireland.

Realism and finance In his survey of finance fictions, De Boever articulates what appears to be a selfevident yet all-too-often repressed feature of economic structures. Aligning the apparently discrete fields of high art and social science, De Boever argues that ‘There is a fictitiousness that lies at the origin of our economies that has become forgotten, but that today – in the era of virtual money – has returned with full force. For that reason, it seems crucially important to think through finance in fiction, to give real content to the genre that calls itself finance fiction.’5 Of course, it is one thing to point out the essential fictitiousness of contemporary finance, as we shall detail, it is quite another task to represent the plethora of mathematical algorithms that fuel global financial markets in literary form. Without reneging on the catastrophic material fall-out of the global financial crash in 2008, critics, such as Alison Shonkwiler, now read the relationship between finance and fiction as a contest ‘over the deployment of representational forms’.6 Specifically, for Shonkwiler this is the case because The financial imaginary is not without its own forms (temporal, narrative, metonymic). But its ‘logic’ is a narrow one, ultimately directed toward one end, that of producing particular terms of value. The novel recapitulates the representational logic of this imaginary but adds friction, slows it down, expands



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it, subjectivizes it, adds data and history. The novel aims to resituate finance’s logic within its own formal terms.7

The question of value is of particular urgency to our discussion in this chapter, given the alacrity with, and the extent to, which the ‘logic’ alluded to by Shonkwiler was adopted in public and private spheres during Ireland’s ill-fated Celtic Tiger ‘boom’ period. Neither the analysis offered by Shonkwiler nor the discussion that ensues here idealizes the novel form as unproblematically redemptive in its engagements with contemporary finance.8 Shonkwiler clarifies the limitations faced by the literary form as it strives to represent the ‘logic’ of finance. In particular the realist novel is limited in this regard ‘because it shares many of the same narrative and temporal strategies, [and] its engagement with the terms of “realism” may ultimately offer capitalism another kind of alibi’.9 Echoing Shonkwiler’s suspicion that the realist novel is not best equipped to formally interrogate or to adequately represent the abstractions and obscurities of contemporary financial transactions, Paul Crosthwaite goes further in asserting the futility of recent realist literary responses to the financial crisis. The retention of faith in the formal conventions of literary realism in efforts to represent the unrepresentable, ‘results’, Crosthwaite argues, ‘in a fundamental contradiction between content and form, since the phenomenon to which the text gives narrative shape, the phenomenon of contemporary financial crisis – abstract, cryptic, phantasmagoric – is everything that realism, with its air of transparency and emphasis on the material, the tangible, and the apprehensible, is not’.10 In an adjacent argument to that voiced by Crosthwaite, but in the context of literary responses to the Irish economic crisis, Joe Cleary reprises a long-held scepticism regarding the political efficacy of literary realism in his aforementioned appraisal of a selection of novels. Included within this cursory survey is Madden’s Time Present and Time Past, along with Bolger’s Tanglewood. Without engaging in any substantial textual analysis of either text, Cleary dispatches both novels as inadequate meditations on the lapsed ‘boom’ in Ireland. In his estimation the novels ‘are both reflective, social realist novels that examine the mood of complacency and underlying anxiety that pervaded the wealthy southside of Dublin in the “boom” years. Critics might accuse both novels of reproducing some of the funereal bourgeois complacency they diagnose and suggest that this drubs the works of any kind of protest.’11 There is no indication of how the texts produce the ‘complacency’ attributed to them by Cleary, and the fact that they are both nominated as ‘realist’, it seems, predetermines any viable political and critical agencies. We might, then, bracket Cleary’s dismissal of such realist artefacts with Crosthwaite’s equivalent summary rejection of the critical agency of realist finance fictions. There is no disputing the necessity to attend to form in literary representations of ‘the debt economy’, and of the workings of its Irish iteration.12 Yet, as we shall argue, to discard realism entirely ignores the extent to which the formal conventions of realism are key structural features of finance. Madden’s Time Present and Time Past

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can certainly be stabled as a realist novel, but it exhibits crucial ambivalences at the level of form that are worth considering. Time Present and Time Past is, to draw on Mary McGlynn, an example of how ‘recent novels use such technical means to fault neoliberal ideology for its relentless focus on development’ (my emphasis).13 Despite evidence of formal, or technical, innovation in these fictions, for McGlynn they ultimately fall short of successful critiques because ‘they find themselves formally indebted to its subterranean structural premise, the philosophical framework of neoliberal immediacy which presents the status quo as natural and without alternative’.14 So while this analysis is more in depth and sympathetic to contemporary realist fictionalizations of (post-)Celtic Tiger Ireland than Cleary’s argument, it concludes that there remains a distinct lack in terms of the political imagination on view. This latter point will be a crucial feature of the concluding thoughts of this discussion. Returning to Shonkwiler, whose analysis here oscillates between outright veneration and rejection of realism: The point is neither to look back nostalgically out of a desire for legibility and moral guidance (although inevitably some writers propose exactly this), nor to assume contemporary realism is better equipped and less theoretically naïve in engaging the problem of abstraction. Instead, the imperfect and adaptive realisms in circulation today highlight realism’s paradoxical commitments: to a mode of indexical, referential representation and to a heightened emphasis on narrative mediation.15

Contrary to both Cleary and Crosthwaite, Shonkwiler’s approach to realism is not overdetermined by an assumption regarding its capacity to formally interrogate the Byzantine abstractions attributed to contemporary finance capitalism. In addition, remaining open to the critical valences of the realist novel in the contemporary context does not bespeak an idealization of the form. Rather, we should remain alive to the variegated ways in which contemporary realist novels reflect upon the narratological codes through which they are produced, and how such codes are equally structural to the workings of ‘fictitious capital’. As Shonkwiler suggests, the realist novel can alert us to the competing species of narrative mediation that we are exposed to as we act and interact as economic subjects in the contemporary conjuncture. Shonkwiler is not alone in rehabilitating and re-energizing realism as a potential site of critical agency in the context of the relations that obtain between finance and literature. If we take it as a cornerstone of Marxist readings that ‘reality’ – systems of value and forms of narrative mediation – is produced in the image of finance capitalism, then, for several critics this legitimizes the value of literary realism in engaging with just such fabrications. In this light and disabusing us of any sense that the form merely furnishes a readily available and transparent image of a stable external reality, De Boever argues that ‘Realism doesn’t just give an account of the world’.16 Instead, taking impetus from Anna Kornbluh’s Realizing Capital, De Boever proposes that ‘Realism’s value, therefore, is crucially a future-



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oriented one; it is driven by credit. It’s perfect for speculation, because it is virtual – it never fully arrives.’17 The realist narrative requires the reader to invest time and faith – ‘credit’. To the extent that realism trades in abstraction and narration, as De Boever highlights, it is primed for speculation as it offers itself as a viable form for the interrogation or exposure of the fictitious nature of finance capital. Rather than being mired in the present and offering little in the way of prospective critical voice, realism houses the capacity to think beyond the straitened circumstances of the financialized present – and this is certainly the case when we analyse Madden’s Time Present and Time Past. For the purposes of our discussion of Madden’s realism, particular focus will be devoted to the formal structures of the novel. In this regard, our analysis will take further guidance from the aforementioned work by Kornbluh in Realizing Capital. Kornbluh attends to the ways in which capital became naturalized during the Victorian period as booms, busts and consumption were attributed to the psychic life of capital. By way of contrast, the literary analysis proffered by Kornbluh illuminates how literary artists of the period, such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Anthony Trollope, endeavoured to expose the intrinsic fictitious characters of finance and capital. Broadly consistent with De Boever’s contentions above, Kornbluh emphasizes that Realism commences from the premise that reality is not self-evident – that the structuring metaphors of the world merit and indeed require elaboration of the sort uniquely afforded by literature. [.  .  .] Only by honouring realism’s innate desire to defamiliarize reality may we encounter the full force of realism’s astonishing capacity to, in the words of J. Hillis Miller, ‘bring into the open the imaginary quality of reality’ – to contravene the givens of the cultural symbolic world and invite new gifts.18

In assuming this critical disposition towards realism, both De Boever and Kornbluh distinguish their analyses quite starkly from those of Cleary and Crosthwaite, as they retain faith in a form adjudicated as impotent in the face of, even complicit with, the alienating and dehumanizing abstractions of global financial capitalism. Yet this is not to intimate that either De Boever or Kornbluh, or Shonkwiler for that matter, canvass for a realism that can ‘realize’ a transparent representation of the contours of fictitious capital. Rather, they impress the necessary and viable attention to form that realism offers as a means of confronting the formal patterning of our reality under the sway of global financial capital. Realism cannot be reduced to mere ‘documentary’, and, as such, its representational processes are creative and alienating at the same time. In creating fictional worlds, it mirrors the labours of finance, but in that act of creation it simultaneously alienates as it reminds us of the contingency – lack of self-evidence, to echo Kornbluh – of the world we apprehend as our reality. Kornbluh avers: ‘Realist fiction makes a world while highlighting the artifice of its making, in the process exposing the untenable opposition between real and made and the contingent fabrication of the life-worlds that parallel its own.’19

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Estranged geographies of the ‘boom’ One of the most obvious features of Time Present and Time Past is the tone, in the sense that there is not really a posture of didacticism, shaming and guilt-inducing intent from Madden in the ways that we note in other novels of the period. As we witness elsewhere, Irish literary fiction is well stocked in narratives that seem to revel in gorging on the erstwhile excesses of the ‘boom’, but that retain a puritanical streak in the background, subtext or foreground. While the novel showcases the contingencies of identities, it does not revel in or critique the adoption of ‘new’ crass identities of the Celtic Tiger period. From one perspective the novel is attentive to privacy, grief and intimacy, as well as momentary, fleeting yet intense effusions of emotion that are sometimes not fully thought-out or grasped by those involved. Yet, these affective concerns are, in fact, facets of Madden’s privileging of the partial, the involuntary and the fragmentary as alternatives to the crude materialistic certainties of economic progress narratives. One of the key recurring ways in which the text is transfused with uncertainty is through the variegated experiences of estrangement and the uncanny that are features of the everyday lives of the narrative’s characters. The patterning of uncertainty into the fabric of the narrative and into the lives of the central characters of the novel is evident from the outset of Time Present and Time Past, with the opening question of the novel: ‘Where does it all begin?’ Compounding the thematic keynotes sounded by the title and the epigraph, Madden’s self-referential, formal interrogation of the point of departure of the story immediately registers the narrative’s preoccupation with uncertainty. In fact, it raises the impossibility of the narrative having any certain ground at all. This point is consistent with Shonkwiler’s reading of Don DeLillo’s ‘finance fiction’, Cosmopolis, wherein failure is adjudged as being essential to both the political and ethical engagement of the novel. In Shonkwiler’s view, in DeLillo’s text: ‘The impossible relation between reality and representation is not simply assumed or incorporated into the novel but is constantly theorized by the text itself [. . .] [and] the narrative’s conspicuous failures and inadequacies of representation, does not simply mark the end or “exhaustion” of the novel but becomes the site of its most vital politics.’20 Such an analysis attributes a degree of dynamism to the realist text, removing any sense that the realist narrative is a form of representational stasis. What we are witness to, in other words, is a ‘tension between the formal and the representational elements of the text’, which transforms the literary text into an ‘event’, as Timothy Bewes has elaborated upon.21 With this mind there is an unbridgeable gap between the representational capacities and the ethical intentions of any literary intervention. But this does not necessarily eventuate in the neutering of the text’s political agency but rather signals ‘the status of the text as irreducibly an event, rather than, say, the representation or imagination of an event’.22 Conceptualizing the novel in terms of the ‘literary event’, whereby the realist narrative questions ‘its own status reflects its commitment to the ethics of representation’.23 As the opening paragraph of Time Present and Time Past proceeds, Madden sustains her clear signalling of the primary thematic and formal concerns of



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the ensuing narrative. While there is a gestural reference to a typically resonant geographical location of Celtic Tiger Ireland, of more note is the manner in which we are insistently introduced to a sense of the conditional; to the notion of alternative possibilities of unlived lives, and to the existence of imaginative alternatives to those presented by any given moment in reality. At length, in answer to the initial question, we read: Perhaps here, in Baggot Street, on the first floor of one of Dublin’s best restaurants, on a day in Spring. It seems as good a place to start as any. Fintan is sitting at a table before the ruins of a good lunch, with crumbs on the tablecloth and empty wine glasses, together with half-empty bottles of mineral water, both still and sparkling. There are two tiny coffee cups on the table, and a crumpled white linen napkin discarded on the place opposite. One might imagine that a disgruntled lover has just flounced off, but Fintan, as faithful as Lassie, is not that kind of man. His lunch companion has been a business associate and the encounter has not gone well; it has been both strange and unpleasant.24

The geographical allusion to Baggot Street is introduced speculatively – a telling and recurring appropriation of the ‘speculative’ for the purposes of literary imagination by Madden. But, likewise, with the narrative’s re-working of the multiple possibilities of ‘speculation’, together with its inherent uncertainty, Madden also raises the idea that all forms of representation are profoundly and irrevocably provisional and relational. From the perspective of so-called Celtic Tiger fiction, this reference to ‘Baggot Street’ and to ‘Merrion Row’25 might suggest that in what follows Madden will unleash a particular form of narrative of blame and shame regarding the excesses of the Celtic Tiger, but this is not the narrative we encounter. As the introductory details above attest to, the novel seems to impress the possibility of possibilities, imagination and alternatives. From a simple figurative perspective, the post-prandial scene is a site of aftermath, a reduced vista of satiated appetites that locates the scene in 2006 Celtic Tiger Ireland, but that points to the imminent economic ‘bust’. The figuration also contributes to the tonal register of the narrative, in that it exhibits a lightness of touch tinged with a degree of playful irony on Madden’s part. This sense of playfulness is equally apparent in the other dominant linguistic register of the opening paragraph. As we see in the passage earlier, there is a consistent invocation of the conditional with references to ‘Perhaps’, ‘It seems’ and ‘One might imagine’. The playful invocation of the idiom of aftermath is set in tension with the formal playfulness characteristic of these latter self-knowing enunciations. The concrete certainty of literal and figurative ‘remainders’ is trumped by the multiple possibilities of imagination, multiple possibilities and alternative narrative arcs. Finally here, but not for the final time in the novel, and taking a lead from her title, Madden mixes present time and past time in close proximity. This latter feature is evident across the narrative, as apparently clear memories mingle and blend with the half-recalled and uncertain recollections from childhood and youth.

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Having exited the restaurant, and briefly engaged in an unsatisfactory encounter with his domineering mother, Joan, Fintan again traverses some of the familiar topography of Celtic Tiger Ireland: ‘He walks up Baggot Street, up Merrion Row, past offices and busy shops, past other restaurants full of patrons like himself, businessmen in suits.’26 While there may be a flirtation with specificity here with respect to the locations, Madden does not concede too much ground to the microdetails of affluence, as we see an emphasis on the generic and the unnamed in this extract. Indeed, the primary attention in this section is devoted to Fintan’s temperamental discord as he ambles along these affluent thoroughfares: True, he has let Joan annoy him, but against that, he in turn has annoyed her and, perversely, this makes him feel better [.  .  .] Had he not already been in poor humour because of his unsuccessful meeting, he might well have found the encounter tolerable. But today he feels sufficiently bothered and dispirited not to want to go back to work immediately.27

The personal and the professional are balanced here as equally unsatisfactory emotional transactions, tellingly, Fintan’s interaction with his mother is figured as an unpleasant exchange that only yields minor gratification for either party. The landscapes of Celtic Tiger Dublin that are garlanded by high-end restaurants and shops are, then, implicated in the generation of uneasy and transactional relationships by Madden. It is only when Fintan exits the streetscape into St. Stephen’s Green that his emotional temperature alters, and the striven exchanges of his lunchtime dissipate. As Fintan enters the appeasing surroundings of the Green, Madden once again toys with the reader’s expectations in her opening portrait of the urban greenspace: ‘He walks along the lovely alley of lime trees and then turns towards the water. Up on the humpbacked stone bridge he looks left, to where a lone mallard is dragging a vast triangular wake across the still surface of the pond. There are more birds on the other side of the bridge, mallards and moorhens and swans.’28 At first blush, such a description recalls nothing less than a version of the pastoral or the quasi-Romantic, whereby the landscape becomes a source of redemption for Fintan. Likewise, it would be easy to decipher this portrait as part of a blunt dichotomization of Ireland’s competing dispositions to land and to place. Needless to say, we can certainly draw such a conclusion on foot of the larger narrative, but this is not the presiding function or effect of Madden’s turn to the pastoral. Subsequent to the passage cited earlier, Fintan begins to think about his youngest child, and only daughter, Lucy: He will bring Lucy here so that she too can throw crusts to the birds. He will take her to the playground in the Green; he will point out squirrels in the trees; he will lay down memories for her to enjoy in the years ahead, like fine wines maturing in a cellar. But when he tries to visualise Lucy as an adult, as the woman who will savour these memories, he cannot do it. All he can see is a pearly mist: something like ectoplasm.29



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Fintan bristles with purpose in the initial clauses, an intent made explicit by Madden’s anaphoric employment of ‘he will’. There is a singular focus upon the future here as, in Wordsworthian terms, Fintan wills that his daughter can share in the experience of the Green in addition to a later remembrance of such a gratifying immersion in natural effusion.30 This is another occasion where Madden blends temporal periods, as Fintan’s thought processes register the present, future and future past. But, as we can see, the viability of Fintan’s singular intention for his daughter’s future bank of memories is abruptly undermined by the unsatisfactory simile ‘like fine wines’. The latter verges on the clichéd, and it undoes the clarity and stridency of the aforementioned anaphoric statements of intent by Fintan. In fact, as the passage proceeds this simile competes with and is, ultimately, superseded by the second simile, and final clause, when Fintan’s imagination of his daughter in the future is devoid of any and all clarity or integrity. Thus, anaphoric certainty succumbs to similed uncertainty, as Madden convenes a formal agon that emphasizes the precariousness of recollection and projection. If Fintan’s imagination of his daughter, and her potential memories, in the future are frustrated as he strolls through St. Stephen’s Green, his experience of the present is no more tractable when he retires to a nearby coffee shop. Having ordered and received a latte and a piece of carrot cake, Fintan sits gazing at the packaging in which the cake has been served. Again, in a playful allusive reference to the catalytic powers of confectionary, Madden’s narrative engages in a sequence centred on the relationship between signifier and signified, and the nature of linguistic representation. Of course, the self-consciousness of the text is itself another instance of literary allusiveness, but in the context of the Celtic Tiger, Madden’s intention is to highlight the estrangement of Fintan from the reality of his immediate context. In this way, we encounter the first occasion in which the narrative seems to diverge from a transparent experience of reality, as Fintan appears to confront the uncanniness of his contemporary Dublin. As we will discuss later in more detail, this sense of the uncanny is catalysed on numerous occasions by his new-found interest in photography. But from a broader perspective it is vital to the novel’s, and to this chapter’s, concern with the relationship between indebtedness and temporality during the Celtic Tiger ‘boom’. Corresponding with Madden’s allusive titular invocation of Eliot’s Four Quartets, the transparency and the stability of linguistic representation are called into crisis by this most quotidian of events. Yet, as we shall outline, the narrative of Time Present and Time Past offers an accumulation of equivalent resonant moments, and these are fractions of Madden’s oblique critique of the relations that obtained between reality and representation, time and money, and desire and fictionality during the Celtic Tiger period. In this particular instance we read: As Fintan drinks his latte, he listens to the music and gazes absent-mindedly at the words ‘Carrot Cake’ until all meaning drains out of them. The letters are just

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shapes, random and arbitrary, and have no connection to what they describe. They might as well be written not just in a foreign language but in a different alphabet [. . .] But it isn’t just words and language that are becoming strange to him, it is objects too.31

The initial feeling of estrangement is part of the character’s broader re-visitation of discarded and forgotten family memories, as over the duration of the narrative Fintan’s attention is increasingly devoted to corners of his and his family’s past. Yet, moments such as that described earlier are not merely correlatives of the character’s newly prompted focus on his past; they are common enough across the novel to be understood as signs of the alienating context in which the protagonists are living. As the disorientation in the coffee shop recedes, Fintan recalls that this is the second such occurrence that day, his earlier lunchtime business meeting had been interrupted by a similar feeling: ‘The other man had stopped being a person with whom Fintan was communicating, and had become instead a kind of phenomenon which he was observing. It was [as] if the air had thinned out and the man was like something that had dropped out of the sky.’32 Again, from a temporal perspective, Madden blends past and present, as the successive experiences of estrangement accumulate and both take place in public spaces but within differing contexts. Yet there is a feeling that both experiences are adjacent in the sense that in the former we also witness Fintan’s estrangement within a crucible of consumption and commoditization. The contemporaneity and the fashionability of the location together with the alienating agency of the labelled object of physical and financial consumption echo the fact that Fintan becomes a stranger within his own professional business narrative. In these two moments, his immediate physical world becomes indecipherable for Fintan, as meaningful connections with objects and with people dissipate. In both physical and abstract terms, the experiences at the restaurant and the coffee shop are suggestive in terms of the alienating impacts of the Celtic Tiger economy in Ireland. The proximity of their occurrence highlights the intensity of the sensation of the uncanny undergone by Fintan, but also, Madden’s implies, by Irish society generally. Yet no sooner has Fintan reminded ‘himself to get a grip’, than his sense of ‘location’ is further disturbed when his attention returns to looking at the vintage photographs on the walls of the coffee shop: He looks again at the photographs. There is a dislocation between the familiarity of the locations and the strangeness of what is shown: the clothes, the transport. The trams in the pictures are packed and seem too small to be taken seriously, with people hanging off the top as if they could only be riding along for a lark, rather than for necessity.33

Not only are the past–present and the immediate present sites of alienation and strangeness, but Fintan also finds it difficult to grasp the ‘reality’ of the past of the most familiar of surroundings.



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Seeing things As we begin to understand, photography is utilized by Madden as a catalytic device to steer Fintan towards a reconciliation with the realities of the distant past and of his own personal past. But the medium is equally central to the emerging and insistent self-reflexiveness of the narrative, drawing our attention to the relationship between reality, representation and the workings of the debt economy. Of signal importance to this strategy for Madden is when Fintan arrives at his aunt’s, Beth’s, house to procure an old family photograph of an unidentified female ancestor. On viewing the photograph Fintan experiences a jolt of recognition and disorientation, as photography is now co-opted into the sensation of the uncanny and strangeness in the novel. The visual record is a prompt to uncertainty, with temporal linearity disturbed by the uncanny and startling likeness of the dead relative to his sister Martina.34 This is not simply a token reference to familial likeness, rather within the figurative and ethical economies of the narrative, photography wedges open the narrative to internal discussions on the nature of representation. Indeed, it soon merges with the increasingly ‘uncanny’ nature of reality experienced by Fintan, as his daily diet of business is increasingly subsumed by a developing passion for photography. Once more, Madden frames this revelation in terms of the temporal: ‘[t]o a casual observer, Fintan’s life throughout the spring would appear to be progressing in its habitual, unremarkable fashion [. . .] And yet while all of this is happening, another reality has overtaken his life.’35 From a figurative perspective, the narrative subtly gestures to the displaced experience of reality of the debt economy and the uncanny sense in which the economic subject is inextricably alienated from their material reality. This is articulated earlier in the novel, as Fintan leans on the expertise of his son, Niall, a student of Art History. During a detailed exchange on the relationship between photographic representations and the material ground of their referent images, Niall disabuses Fintan of his default assumptions regarding the ‘reality’ of these recorded images. Niall insists that ‘the whole illusion of reality is very attractive’, proceeding to clarify for his father the complacent collapse of represented realities into physical realities made by most viewers: ‘They’re just a construct, Dad. A kind of, like, an idea of reality, not “reality” itself.’36 As we have intimated such moments can be figured as fractions of the metafictionality of the text, as it stresses an ambivalence underpinning its realist representation of the wider Buckley family. But in the context of the Celtic Tiger and the global financial crash of the last decade, Madden’s attention to the relationship between reality and representation, as well as the explicit self-referentiality of the narrative, raises issues pertaining to the representational politics of finance capitalism. It is not just that, as we have noted, there is an inherent fictionality to the speculative economies of financial markets, but as Lazzarato notes, ‘[t]he individual subject, his sovereignty and rational behaviour, ruined by the real workings of the stock market, must literally be reconstructed, refabricated, by signifying semiologies.’37 This is not a matter of dusting off a structuralist approach to ideology but operate, according to what Lazzarato’s Deleuzean analysis terms ‘[t]he refrains of neoliberalism (be

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an asset, be a self-starter, get rich [. . .]’. These ‘refrains’, then, ‘do not hide a reality from us; instead, they endow us with a relationship to time, space, and others by making us exist somewhere in a world that refers every subjectivity which capitalist deterritorialization produces to the entrepreneur, individual success, competition, social Darwinism, and so on’.38 Madden’s narrative telescopes and interrogates the attenuated ‘refrains’ and ‘semiologies’ of the Irish context, in the first instance. But, of course, it must be situated within the wider network of responses to the fictions of global financialization. In this context, the photography in the coffee shop re-enforces overwhelming and recurring feelings of estrangement within contemporary Ireland. This is not to reduce Fintan to a simple figurative device himself, as such feelings of estrangement are common to a range of the novel’s protagonists. It is significant that the two ‘contemporary’ moments of disorientation undergone by Fintan are bookended by references to the vintage photography – the two instances of estrangement in the present are shadowed by the visual icons of and from the past. In both cases, Fintan ‘locates’ himself in relation to the action of the visual artefact, but the immediately familiar, though, is ultimately distanced by and distancing for Fintan. Yet, what is telling is Madden’s positioning of past and present in this brief everyday set piece, and what it reveals about the novel’s stance regarding the temporalities of the Celtic Tiger. In this case, the past reappears in photographic form, and while Madden’s descriptions of how that landscape has altered from Fintan’s present perspective are worth noting in relation to the novel’s broad concern with temporality, they also highlight the ways in which the geographies of Celtic Tiger Ireland are haunted in other ways. In short, Fintan’s experiences of estrangement regarding the past and in the present, and those of other characters, are, in fact, symptoms of Celtic Tiger Ireland’s relationship with the global debt economy. From the perspective of our argument, these initial promptings on the disturbed nature of Irish ‘reality’ are consistent with ‘the uncanny temporality of debt [that] becomes both the reappearance of the past and the promise of a coming future’.39

Debt and the uncanny If, as Miranda Joseph maintains, debt is internal ‘to social relations and subjectivity’, then part of the anxiety generated by Fintan’s jolting experiences of the uncanny nature of Celtic Tiger Dublin stems from the omnipresence of debt and indebtedness.40 From thematic and formal points of view, Madden’s narrative is exercised by the relationships between past and present. Yet given the historical context, analyses cannot be confined to the immediate familial drama. Returning to McClanahan, we can glean a sense of how indebtedness is fundamental to the material experiences of everyday living and is structural to conceptions of narrative and temporality under financial capitalism. Despite the apparent precedence accorded to the fulfilment of consumerist desire in the present and the achievement of financial security into the future traded as part of the narration



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of the Celtic Tiger, if we import McClanahan’s reading of post-crash American culture to the aftermaths of the Celtic Tiger, there are clear links to be forged. Part of McClanahan’s concentration on ‘the temporality of debt [.  .  .] concerns the continued presence of the past, its frightening inescapability’.41 Indebtedness might well facilitate an intensification of consumption in the present, but all indebted presents are haunted by the initial debt arrangement and by the deferred day of repayment. Thus, Madden’s insistence on the centrality of temporality to her narrative, together with the ways in which the narrative is marked by a diversity of moments of estrangement and the uncanny, aligns her critique with broader cultural and critical appraisals of the temporality of indebtedness. In a sense, is Fintan’s ‘ownership’ of his present undone by the proprietorial claim of indebtedness on his future? We witness the emergence of the latent anxiety and the all-too-real affective imprint of the debt economy. Of course, this can be grasped as a symptom of the condition of Irish society at large, and not simply confined to the characters at the centre of Madden’s story. This sense of being out-of-place, of lacking the capacity to apprehend one’s immediate context, a feeling that the world is becoming less comprehensible, that our grasps of language and objects are loosening if not fading altogether are widely diagnosed as common and necessary effects of financial capitalism. Indeed such notions date back to Marx’s writings on the alienation of labour and the commodity, and are broadly developed in the critical literature on debt and credit systems. Again when we turn to McClanahan, we can divine echoes of Madden’s literary rendition of her theoretical position: ‘debt and the uncanny exhibit a singular capacity to alienate us from private property while revealing property’s underlying antisociality, the antisociality that inheres both in our relationship to commodities and equally in our relationship to the world mediated by them.’42 And while Time Present and Time Past does not furnish a frontal dramatization of literal eviction of the kind that animates McClanahan’s materialist critique, the novel showcases the troubled relationships endured by several characters with both public and private spaces at the height of the Celtic Tiger economy. There is an undeniable sense of the uncanny in many of Fintan’s experiences and memories throughout the novel, as the past involuntarily disturbs the seeming banality of the everyday. While the capacity of the character to passively navigate the present-day of Celtic Tiger Ireland becomes intermittently fraught with anxiety. At textual and meta-textual levels, Time Present and Time Past registers the uncertainty of representation – in both visual and verbal media. As we have argued, such thematic and formal features must be deciphered with respect to the Celtic Tiger ‘boom’ period, despite the fact that this period is only peripherally attended to in any detail by Madden. In adopting this approach, the narrative finds commonality with Kornbluh’s reading of the potentialities of the realist novel which ‘engages economics neither via reference to economic content nor through its production and consumption in the market, but in its narratological, rhetorical, and temporal structures and the resonance, smooth or sticky, intensive or ironic, across those structures’.43 The legal scaffolding of the ‘boom’, in fact, ends the chapter analysed earlier, as Fintan is abruptly returned to the present

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by his secretary’s entry into his office with a sheaf of contracts. Intimate reality is returned by the solid figure of Imelda and the mention of contracts that require his signature, which are elusive figurations of the concrete and metonymic of the Celtic Tiger economy. There is something equally uncanny about the contracts and financial world to which they belong and to which they contribute and sustain. Presented with the documents Fintan ‘signs his name again and again, Fintan Buckley, Fintan Buckley. It soothes him. He feels the give in the nib of the pen. The black ink is wet as he loops the letters. Fintan Buckley, Fintan Buckley. That is me.’44 By way of relief from the disarming uncertainties of his recent memories, Fintan is restored to a form of concrete reality in the present in the functional space of his office, with the contracts taking on metonymic significance as fractions of national and global financial exchanges. With Joycean echoes, Fintan regards his signature as providing remedial personal anchorage from the disorientations of the spate of uncanniness seen earlier in the chapter.45 The metonymic significance of his signature for Fintan ratifies his investment and faith in the stability of language and representation that has been tested previously in the narrative. Indeed, the metonymic signature is, of course, part of another narrative – that of the economic-legal functioning of the Celtic Tiger economy. But the metonymic does not possess the same resistant agency in Time Present and Time Past as it does in Paul Murray’s The Mark and the Void, where, as we shall see in Chapter 7, the fraction becomes the materialized affront to the universalization of abstraction under finance capitalism. Yet, as Madden is well aware, akin to debt, linguistic representation is always a matter of deferral. While Fintan locates confirmatory sanctuary in the flourishes of his pen, from a figurative perspective it merely re-enforces the novel’s exposure of the provisionality of all representation, which in the context of the Celtic Tiger would include, contracts, mortgages, promissory notes and credit agreements. Even in the act of signing these binding legal documents, Fintan is not inured from the uncanny, as the uncanny persists in the gap between the signatory and the signature. In many cases, the signature returns at a later date to haunt the signatory; in the act of entering mortgage agreements, the signatory is always already haunted by the material and affective presences of indebtedness. In this sense, the apparent certainty proffered by the signature is fraught with deferred uncertainty, deferred responsibility and deferred guilt. Once more, McClanahan offers a useful gloss on just such arrangements: This return to the past, in turn, mirrors the temporality of debt, inasmuch as debt concerns the continued presence of the past, its frightening inescapability. In its anxious, backward gaze, debt, like uncanny doubles, reverses, and returns. This feeling of being haunted explains what might feel uncanny about being in personal debt: it is the experience of being followed by something we left behind, of carrying our past with us like a dead weight.46

There are explicit symmetries between McClanahan’s use of terminology here and the formal patterning and the thematic priorities of Madden’s narrative. When we



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read Fintan’s private personal memories of his uncanny experiences across this chapter in direct relation to the apparent relieving concentration on the solidity of legal documents at the end of the chapter, we can glean a precise sense of the terms of McClanahan’s argument. The past is a consistent intrusive presence in this chapter, and across the novel, but these recurring moments must be read in relation to the gestures made by Madden to the presiding political–economic conjuncture in which they occur. The overwhelming financial backdrop to these intimate episodes of recall in Time Present and Time Past is the reality of indebtedness – at national and personal levels. Therefore, it is clear that Madden is keenly aware of the ‘temporality of debt’ as well as the workings of voluntary and involuntary personal memory. Ireland is repeatedly and enduringly cited as a country that is haunted by its social and political histories, yet of more pressing concern in the context of Time Present and Time Past and any survey (post-)Celtic Tiger Irish culture is the way haunting has assumed new forms under the auspices of the global debt economy. McClanahan’s allusion to ‘uncanny doubles’ as figures of haunting the present takes a material form in chapter eleven, when, having agreed to take his daughter Lucy on a play date with her friend Emma, Fintan arrives at Emma’s father’s apartment to collect the child. Again, in a further intra-textual echo, the apartment is set within a typical and familiar Celtic Tiger development. Madden fleetingly offers some precise detail on the landscape of the ‘boom’ but swiftly moves onto explore the affective lives of her characters. The latter is, as we have argued, apparently at an oblique angle to the immediacy of Celtic Tiger Ireland, but, in fact, raises some key issues regarding debt and affect. At the apartment development Fintan and Lucy step ‘into the carpeted hallway’, and ‘Fintan has the impression of being in a slightly creepy hotel, where anything might be happening behind the rows of closed and numbered doors. There is a sense of the presence of others – muffled music in the distance, the sound of voices, but there is no-one to be seen.’47 There is continuity here with the ongoing elusiveness of the immediate physical world for Fintan. Likewise, in this case we have moved from the metonymic contract of chapter six to the unyielding environs of the metonymic apartment block – both are fragments yet are intimately bound to each other and to the same larger whole of the debt economy. Given the idiom employed here by Madden, it is easy to forget that these are all homes. However, it is emphatically suggested that transience, ghostliness and absence are the defining qualities of this array of homes. Redolent of the uncanny experiences detailed earlier by Fintan, Madden’s portrait of these representative Celtic Tiger homes resonates with our consideration of the ways in which the debt economy produces an alienating relation between the individual and their immediate material reality. While the description above might well be tinged with a Gothic suggestiveness, in fact, it directs our attention to the future. The sense of abandonment, of the absence of occupants, actually is a moment of prophesy. The future is haunting the present here; the sense of haunted absence is the return of the debt economy as a reminder of the impossibility of financial and propertied security and autonomy. What Fintan witnesses on entering the apartment block is a glimpse of the future. Whereas in previous instances he is

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haunted by effusions from the past, in this case it is the ghosts of the future that return to confirm the alienation of the present from itself. This acute sense of estrangement is confirmed when Emma’s father opens the door of his apartment to Fintan. Again in a motif that belongs to the formal arsenal of the Gothic, Fintan is presented with what appears to be his ‘double’. Emma’s father is for all intents and purposes identical to Fintan: Standing before Fintan is Fintan himself. That is, a younger Fintan, in his early thirties, dishevelled and unshaven, wearing a navy towelling bathrobe, but Fintan to the life: with his dark hair, blue eyes and slight paunch; his face displaying (although Fintan would not know to define it thus) the same combination of high intelligence and an innocence so incorrigible that it can sometimes looks like stupidity. It is, to Fintan, a horrible sight. It is like being forced to sit opposite a large mirror in a restaurant and watch oneself eat.48

The insistent repetition of Fintan’s name here echoes his earlier investment in the concreteness of his signature, yet, of course, reveals little more than the lack of substance inherent to these personalized signifiers. Tellingly, he is presented with a more youthful ‘double’, as Madden supplements her earlier gesture to the seizure of the future by debt with an uncanny haunting figure from the past. While the usurpation of the future and of narrative time by the debt economy is symptomatic of the deleterious upshots of the Celtic Tiger ‘boom’, we might speculate that the appearance of this younger double is an alternative appropriation of the uncanny by Madden. The stark relations between the uncanny and indebtedness are readily apparent across Time Present and Time Past; it is possible to isolate glimpses of resistance or signs of imagined alternatives to the teleologies or inevitabilities of the debt economy and Celtic Tiger narratives. As he follows ‘the other Fintan’, or ‘Conor/Fintan’ into the apartment, Fintan’s discomfort with the general air of neglect here becomes increasingly apparent. The acutely unkempt living space disturbs Fintan, and ‘like a man in a dream, Fintan observes all of this in dismay, but is powerless to do anything’.49 Though rendered in an alternative manner to the uncanny unease of previous occasions, the sight of the detritus of daily life that quite literally litters the apartment presents another ‘unhomely’ home to Fintan. Combined with the building’s atmosphere of ‘future’/anticipated aftermath and abandonment, the interior domestic space is no less disturbing, as both sequences work together to express the profoundly uncanny nature of this debt-burdened landscape. Yet, despite the dislocation felt upon entering such environments, by way of Fintan’s affective responses to this man’s broken marriage, and consequent curtailed access to his daughter, we can discern the equally arresting presence of resistance through the tentative, but no less affective, imagination of alternative life narratives. As Fintan departs the apartment with Lucy and Emma, we note his physical and emotional reaction to what he has just witnessed. He sits in his car ‘wondering if he is going to be able to drive, so overcome by what he has just seen’.50 But what follows is of more import to the political imagination of the novel:



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That a life might be so purgatorial and yet still have in it such things as Stuart Little DVDs and granite kitchen islands stuns him. He imagines seeing Lucy for only a couple of days every week, and that with a bad grace on Colette’s part. He thinks of what it would be to come home in his suit, with his briefcase and his BlackBerry, night after night, to that empty apartment, with its big telly and shiny appliances; with its deserted pink room. He fights the urge to go back to the apartment and give the other man a hug.51

On the surface this brief emotional interlude could be decoded as expressing Fintan’s sense of relief at not having to inhabit the life narrative left behind in the ‘other man’s’ apartment. However, in reality what plays out in the car is a recurring feature of Time Present and Time Past, whereby characters enter into imaginative reveries about how and why their lives assumed their current forms. Madden actualizes a version of what psychoanalyst, Adam Phillips, suggests when he argues that ‘Our unspoken lives press for recognition’.52 In this case, Fintan performs what might be termed an act of imaginative empathy. While he shudders at the imagined prospect of rarely seeing his daughter, by the end of this passage it is clear that Fintan’s imagination of a terrifying alternative reality is actually part of his affective embrace of ‘Conor/Fintan’s’ reduced life circumstances. In contrast to the isolating geography of the apartment building with its silo-like apartment units, as well as the loneliness of Emma’s father, Fintan’s imagination of his own ‘other’ life actually engenders a moment of community between these two fathers. While this is only operative at an abstract level in the narrative, nevertheless it signals a key ethical point at the heart of the novel. As we have seen previously, more than any other character, Lucy is at the core of Fintan’s affective imagination of the future, and, as seen earlier, the anaphoric syntactical form of this passage expresses the emotional intensity of Fintan’s response here. Of equal significance to Madden’s elicitation of affect in this passage is the trailing third sentence in which the bare list of corporate and consumerist props stands in for the emotional vacuity of the single father. Of course, there is more to be gleaned from this catalogue of devices and accessories in the context of our consideration of the narrative’s engagement with the Celtic Tiger. If the consumerist culture generated and facilitated under the financial regimes of credit and debt during the ‘boom’ were underwritten by the management of affect, then these props are part of this systemic manipulation of affect – particularly in the form of desire. In alighting on this inventory of accessories, Fintan is indirectly invoking the aforementioned debt economy, with its production of commodities, but he is also gesturing to the hijack of affect by such commodities. The inclusion of such a list of commodities in the context of Fintan’s emotional response to Emma’s father’s circumstances, in fact, represents a re-appropriation of affect within the novel. In the passage, Fintan’s emotional re-imagination of his life in relation to ‘Conor/Fintan’ is partly patterned by default to these objects, and this constitutes an effort to retrieve affective agency from the commodity back to the individual. Identities fashioned in terms of debt-fuelled purchases such as these, as well as property investments, then, are, as we have argued, sequestered within

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narrative trajectories into the future. Whereas with this reading of Madden’s ethical viewpoint, we can suggest that she is alive to the possibility and the viability of less materialistic loci of identity. Rather than accepting the inevitability of the commodity as locus of one’s identity and as the primary influence on one’s affective agency, Time Present and Time Past furnishes moments that give pause to reflect upon the transvaluation of affect palpable during Ireland’s economic ‘boom’. Fintan’s ‘imagination’ of what Andrew Miller terms ‘lives unled’ is consistent with our focus on temporality at both thematic and formal levels. In his survey of the realist fiction of Charles Dickens and Henry James, Miller identifies the presence of ‘optative reflections’ within the narratives under scrutiny. For Miller such reflections are integral to the formal architecture and moral purpose of such realist fictions. In his view, ‘To the extent that realism proposes to give us stories about how things really were, a space naturally opens up within that mode to tell us how things might have been, but were not.’53 Far from problematizing the linear narrative arcs of realist fictions, for Miller, gestures to unrealized possible lives instead re-enforce the centrality and the significance of the life that is being led and represented by the respective authors. Certainly contingency is introduced but only in so far as it can be thoroughly expelled by the resolution of the forward momentum of the life narrative that has been chosen and is being actively led by the protagonists. Again, for Miller: In regularly shadowing forth lives for our characters that we do not see, realism reminds us of the singularity of those lives that we do see: it is this life, lived thus, and not other possible lives, formed by other choices, other chances, that the author has decided to represent. But in giving us this reminder, the fiction tests its own economy: in it, ideally, no choice or chance need be changed; all should be of a piece and that piece accepted by the reader without regret. Acknowledging counterfactual possibilities within the story, fictions aim to expel them from the discourse; in this way, the ethical economy of characters provides an ideal for the aesthetic economy of the novels they inhabit.54

The lives on display within these realist fictions are shadowed or haunted by the life choices that may have resulted in alternative present lives for the characters. Of course, this also hints at the question of agency – whether or not and to what degree, characters have been authors, so to speak, of their own destinies. The extent to which they have had autonomy and authority to script and assume direction of their lives, of course, is fundamental to the dramatic dynamics of any fictional narrative. While ‘novels give us stories about how things really are’, at the same time fictional narratives open up spaces to articulate ‘how things might have been but are not’.55 Likewise, and in the current context, such formal attentiveness to ‘lives unled’ bears significance for Madden’s concern with the specific politics of time that were ascendant during Ireland’s economic ‘boom’. The echo of Miller’s ‘lateral prodigality’ is in evidence almost from the outset of Time Present and Time Past, specifically in the second chapter, which is focalized through Fintan’s mother, Joan. On foot of having her formidable character



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established by her son in the opening chapter, we quickly receive a first-hand insight into Joan as she makes her way around Dublin after her lunch with her sister, Beth. Once more, Madden permits a fleeting mention of the Celtic Tiger economy to surface in the thoughts of her character but, as before, it does not dominate the narrative in any significant way. Thinking about the lunch with her sister Beth, Joan reflects that ‘[t]here’s no point talking to Beth about topics that really interest Joan, such as the economy’. In fact, Joan is a robust critic of the ‘boom’ and its so-called cheerleaders: She reads every last little article in the business pages of The Irish Times every day and is convinced that the good times are going to end, and sooner rather than later. Anybody should be able to see it coming, she thinks. The problem is that people don’t want to know, they want to think that the money will keep flowing forever. Well, they’re in for a shock.56

There is rather more than a curt polemic evident here in Joan’s acerbic appraisal of the Celtic Tiger. It is another instance of the novel’s preoccupation with the passage of time, as well as its attention to narrative multiplicity. The extent to which the latter is crucial to the thematic and formal foci of the novel is re-doubled later in this chapter, when Joan reflects on the course her own life has taken, and might have taken had circumstances and opportunities been different. Indeed, this is another instance in which the national, international and the public are linked to the individual and the personal by Madden in terms of temporality. The second, later reflection by Joan centres on her memories of her youth, and the limited educational and career prospects that presented themselves to Joan and Beth. These recollections prompt her to ask: ‘What if my life had been different? she wonders now, gazing into her tea cup and staring at the leaves as if trying to predict her own future instead of reassess the past. What if I had never married? But in those days the only way for a woman to be respected was to get a ring on her finger.’57 In the first instance, both passages are linked by speculation – the underlying motor of the Irish economic ‘boom’ is the property speculation that is driving the economy to overheat and eventually collapse into brutal austerity. While in this latter case, Joan speculates on the unrealized possibilities of the lives she never had the chance to lead, due to her familial and national context. Joan’s conviction that the economy is bound for a shuddering fall is cast in temporal terms, but Madden also alludes to the role of competing desires, of people’s need for the speculative debt economy to remain buoyant. There is a sense from this passage that Joan and Madden are attuned to the contingency of the apparent vibrancy of the Celtic Tiger economy. As we have mentioned earlier, the extent to which the ‘boom’ was founded upon regimes of debt and credit mean that there might well be a ‘will’ to perpetuate the economic ‘boom’ period, but these times are inevitably haunted by the eventual time of reckoning or repayment. Likewise, the explicit and repeated use of questions in Joan’s later reflections draws our attention to the significance of contingency as an informant of both theme and form in Time Present and Time Past.

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Joan is not the only character whose thoughts turn to a life that never came to fruition. On a visit to Martina’s fashion boutique, Colette, Fintan’s wife, muses on her discomfort with dealing with fashion, her unease at coordinating clothes in the successful and effective manner managed by her sister-in-law. As she stands ill at ease in the boutique she begins to question why this is the case, when she considers ‘how good she is with her domestic space, for in another life she might have been an interior designer or a stylist’.58 Part of the reason for her discomfort with fashion is, as she admits, her lack of satisfaction with her own body. But of more urgency here is the invocation of the optative mood by Madden, creating a direct, and gendered, link between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. Indeed Fintan also engages in such counterfactual speculation later in the novel when the thought of life without Colette enters his head as he prepares to visit his mother.59 Feeling gratitude for the fact that his wife purchased gifts for his mother – flowers and fish – Fintan ‘thinks now of what his life would be without Colette, and has a sudden vision of himself walking around with no head, an image as compelling as it is ridiculous. He is still troubled by his encounter with Conor the previous week.’60 The imagined reality of life without his wife ushers in an image and a memory of unsettling uncanniness. The grotesque image of decapitation is allied with the disturbing hallucinatory vision of an isolated, disaffected single parent. It is equally significant that both members of the core couple in the novel engage in such optative speculation, a signal by Madden that the speculative is among the primary thematics of the Time Present and Time Past. In the same sequence cited earlier, Fintan recalls ventilating his anxiety about his encounter with Conor to Colette, and, again, revealingly, he is taken aback by her response. Colette dismisses his preoccupation with the marital separation of Emma’s parents: ‘telling him that every marriage is a law unto to itself, and that many break down for reasons incomprehensible to those outside the marriage.’61 Her blunt attitude to the realities of marital failure and the way in which she is instinctively attuned to the risk that must be factored into every marriage are startling to Fintan. Colette continues, remarking: That every marriage (‘And I mean every marriage, Fintan’) carried within it the seeds of its own possible destruction, and that the failure to recognise or admit to this increased the risk. Colette can still surprise him, even after all these years and three children together. Sometimes he thinks that is what is wonderful about her. Sometimes it worries him.62

Not only do we witness Fintan’s brief optative imagination of life without Colette as his wife, he recalls her direct allusion to the contingency that underwrites all marriages. In a sense, in this cursory sequence the narrative doubles down, so to speak, on the centrality of the contingent to its ethical vision. At another level, Colette’s views on the risk inherent to marriage is a clear figuration of marriage in relation to the prevailing riskiness of the Celtic Tiger economy. The ostensible durability and stability of marital commitment are perpetually shadowed by the possibility of its collapse. In this respect Colette underscores the precariousness of



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marital vows, a built-in uncertainty into the future that mirrors the fundamental volatility of the debt economy. This is not to equate or to reduce the affective bonds of marriage to the arid transactionalism of finance; rather, it is to underline the vital volatility of affective contingency. In an analogous manner to Fintan’s reclamation of the affective in his optative imagination of his life without his family, Colette’s assertions perform an equivalent function. The narrative impresses the fact our lives are replete with contingency and alternative possibilities – we are all ‘contingent selves’.63 Part of its critical intent is to highlight how such prodigality has been rendered in exclusively economic terms.

Conclusion If Time Present and Time Past is engaging with the economic doxa that informed and fuelled the Celtic Tiger economy in Ireland – as well as propels and justifies global finance capitalism – it is partially through this formal deployment of the optative. In each of the cases broached earlier, the characters dwell upon what might have been, how their lives might have taken shape in entirely different ways. This is not simply a means of soliciting an affective response from the reader in terms of the regrets of any individual character. Rather, it is part of a more sustained strategy evident across the novel to engage with issues related to narration, fate, temporality and agency as they impact upon its reflections on Celtic Tiger Ireland. The unwavering certainties of neoliberal economic progress became, and in many respects remain, major informants of conceptualizations of contemporary Irish identity. By way of contrast, Madden’s novel represents the importance and viability of contingency, but is equally alive to the underlying and cavalier contingencies of the debt economy of the Celtic Tiger. In effect, the recurring sense of the uncanny experienced primarily by Fintan and these indicative moments of optative speculation about the course of lives led and unled are aspects of Madden’s attempt to retrieve contingency and uncertainty from the domain of the debt economy. Under the auspices of the debt economy the individual – homo economicus – is hailed to perform as an economic actor within a dispiriting, overdetermined and functional context.64 All the while homo economicus bears the burden of uncertainty with respect to the vagaries of finance capitalism. Thus the life-cycle of homo economicus is conditioned by a reduction of value to its economic applications within an increasingly volatile economic climate. Time Present and Time Past thus seeks to reclaim ownership of the future beyond the horizons of indebtedness, while also questioning the diminishing transvaluation of the speculative and the contingent as simply economic tools. As Jason Buchanan details: ‘Speculation, and its consequence of massive debt, is more than just a description of the reality of Irish economic policy during the Tiger as it also played an overarching part in a Tiger identity through which individuals related ideas about their home to their nationality.’65 There is clear attention devoted to the precariousness of accepting, and ceding to, the idea of inevitability when it arrives cloaked in the form of material enrichment and apparent risk-

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free returns. In this respect, each of the examples of Madden’s turn to the optative mood is also a moment when the narrative raises the questions of who and/or what dictates the outcomes – major and minor – of any individual life, and of who and how future risk is managed and who obtains a ‘hold on contingency’.66 In short, the narrative is overtly concerned with the notion of agency and volition, as it impresses the need to interrogate the ways in which agency can be surrendered, perhaps unknowingly, when financial gain dictates the choices we make. In fact, when we remember the circumstances surrounding Joan’s and Martina’s lives, the novel suggests the subtle and overt exercises of violence that condition and curtail the life choices of women in Ireland, and, by association, contemporary economic actors. From a formal perspective, though Time Present and Time Past cannot be classified as experimental literature, Madden does attempt to capture the subjective stresses wrought by the entrenchment of financial capitalism and heightened personal indebtedness. Thus, this realist narrative strives to engage with the anxieties endured during, and indeed since the demise of, the Celtic Tiger debt economy. By dint of its scale and complexity, together with an apparent unfathomable level of abstraction, the crisis was possessive of such an immensity of agency that it disrupted the normative functions of subjectivity. Furthermore, in the current context, this has consequences for literature’s capacity to capture the obscurely financial dynamics in adequate representational forms. For Laura Finch these literary fictions are affective responses ‘to the experience of financial boom and bust, and the attendant debates over the reality and unreality of the economy’.67 Time Present and Time Past registers the kind of traumas and dislocations engendered by the global economic crash. Madden charts her characters’ struggles to navigate the globalized and volatile topographies of Dublin, and these can be read as symptomatic of a more generalized sense of alienation fomented by the necessary, but not always explicit, dislocation of indebtedness. At textual and meta-textual levels, Time Present and Time Past dramatizes the uncertainty of representation – in both visual and verbal media. Such thematic and formal features must be deciphered with respect to the Celtic Tiger ‘boom’ period, despite the fact that this period is only peripherally attended to in any detail by Madden. Pace the narratives analysed in Chapters 1 and 2, Time Present and Time Past is not overburdened by its moral freight. While it is not acutely refractory in its formal shaping, nevertheless, the novel bears witness to the ways in which the temporalities and idioms of the debt economy are immanent presences in the lives of economic subjects. Equally, the narrative expresses the ways in which the financialization of everyday indebted living displaces and disrupts experiences of apparent material certainties.

CChapter 7 INVESTING IN FICTIONS: FAITH, ABSTRACTION AND MATERIALITY IN PAUL MURRAY’S THE MARK AND THE VOID (2015)

Signs of the times In his manifesto, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi addresses the fictitious character of contemporary finance in claiming that Financial signs have led to a parthenogenesis of value, creating money through money without the generative intervention of physical matter and muscular work. Financial parthenogenesis sucks down and dries up every social and linguistic potency, dissolving the products of human activity, especially of collective semiotic activity. The word is no longer a factor in the conjunction of talking affective bodies, but a connector of signifying functions transcodified by the economy. (my emphasis)1

Berardi’s conclusions are a renovated form of Marx’s inaugural references to ‘fictitious capital’ in the third volume of Capital. Marx also terms this ‘interestbearing capital’, and these notions have been thrown into sharp relief since the global financial crash of 2008.2 The highlighted lines here indicate the immateriality of wealth creation and accumulation that was formative to both the most recent economic ‘boom’ and ‘bust’, and that persists today. Nevertheless, the gargantuan levels of abstraction invoked by Berardi do not eclipse the large-scale material impacts of such intangible exchanges.3 One of the defining features of the contemporary debt economy is the claim of ownership that financial capitalism makes on the future of the indebted. As we have maintained across this study, indebtedness is variously but consistently abstract and material, spatial and temporal, physical and affective. Indebtedness is characterized by a delimitation of possibilities and by a closing down of imagined futures, as financial capitalism, in the forms of hyperreal financial products and instruments, arrogates control of the imagination of the future. In Max Haiven’s terms: The metaphor of finance as capital’s imagination asks us to consider how financial speculation (and the global capitalist economy it drives) is predicated

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on diverting people’s everyday imagination and agency toward the perpetuation of capitalist social relations. So strong is the hold of finance on the imagination today that social problems seem to have few answers that are intelligible outside a market logic.4

According to this argument, the world of finance possesses irresistible imaginative agency, with which it routinely patterns the choices and desires of the consuming indebted. In Haiven’s estimation, individuals and groups might well prove to be critical of capitalism, but such is the conditioning saturation of the financial imagination that society cannot imagine beyond it. While the vast majority will never access or comprehend the impenetrable vernacular of ‘high’ financial trading, through the debt economy, with its ready availability of credit, consumers are hailed and moulded as financial subjects. Drawing on the work Randy Martin, Haiven concludes elsewhere that ‘this “financialization” of daily life fundamentally reorients our sense of possibility and futurity and works in tandem with neoliberal restructuring to instigate new forms of social relations and subjectivity based around individualized speculation and risk-management in an uncaring world’.5 Therefore in analysing The Mark and the Void we suggest that Murray is alive to the shadowy netherworld of algorithmic finance, but he is also conscious of the necessity to contest the finance’s colonization of our imaginations. In this respect, part of the effectiveness of the novel is its self-dramatization as an ‘occasion’ of representation, wherein the novel reveals a ‘heightened awareness’ of itself.6 From this perspective Berardi’s correlation of fictitiousness and finance intersects with Murray’s avowal of the self-reflexiveness of his narrative in so far as the novel is animated by the ‘occasion’ of its authorship. Equally, as we note in its opening prefatory chapter, the novel is aware of itself as a literary commodity, as an artefact or consumable that, given the appropriate terms and conditions, might have a material value for, or prove desirable to, a readership on the open market. Thus, from the outset, The Mark and the Void establishes its self-consciousness as both an abstract literary narrative and a material phenomenon. For Murray, then, the purpose of ‘finance fiction’ is not to confirm or further mythologize the fictionality of high finance. Rather, his novel engages with and exposes the arcane vernaculars of finance capitalism, while at the same time registering the inalienable materiality of their effects in terms of impoverishment, displacement and terminal indebtedness. Fundamental to the mythology of finance capital’s rootlessness is the burdensome obsolescence of material production. With its running costs, coupled with the changing demands of the labour force, and the limited returns offered by fixed capital, the latter, the narrative runs, is incapable of operating at the velocities and generating the returns required by contemporary financiers and investors. In these ways ‘financialization can be read as a flight from the material. The central fantasy staged by it is the material’s transcendence.’7 As Christian Breu outlines, one of the cornerstones of this process of mythologization is the belief in the fact that the financial economy ‘is a parthogenetic form of wealth generation



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that fully transcends the material’.8 This self-creating and self-sustaining system, then, incarnates a post-human economic model that is substantially driven by the globalization of indebtedness and the transformation of debt into a source of profit. So just as debt is one of the primary subjects of our literary analyses of Celtic Tiger Ireland, it is also at the core of discussions of globalized finance capital. Complex financial instruments such as collateralized debt options match the templates of obscurity and elusiveness traded by financiers, but this does not erase the material origins and repercussions of these immaterial iterations of debt and indebtedness. As Breu argues: ‘Debt, however spectral, is thus materialist in the specific Marxist sense in that it operates as a set of political-economic constraints and possibilities in relationship to human action.’9 Thus, debt is one of the crucial areas of analysis when we consider the relationships between abstraction and materiality under finance capitalism. However much debt is abstracted into the obscurities of financial modelling and speculative calculus, its physical manifestations are never far from view and are woven ‘through and around daily existence so thoroughly that they have become part of the atmosphere of the present’.10 Though precisely who or what one is indebted to might remain a matter of ultimate uncertainty, the lived reality of indebtedness is sharply experienced. Debt might well be considered a universal experience, but material experiences of indebtedness cannot be universalized. The regime of indebtedness is at once ethereal and purposefully obscure but is also part of the intimate structures of everyday subsistence. The debt economy of financial capitalism cannot survive without the materially embodied world of conspicuous consumption and mortgaged homeownership. Prior to entering into his quasi-literary contract with Paul-the-novelist, the narrator of The Mark and the Void, Claude Martingale, is fully ensconced in a vocation that facilitates and profits handsomely from ‘the circulation of hypermobile dematerialized financial instruments’.11 Echoing these sentiments, Martin avers: ‘Financialization is animated by the freeing of capital from its prior places of residence, [. . .] Through stock markets and their ilk, money seems to be made out of thin air (and to disappear back into the same ether).’12 Here Martin summarizes understandings that are popularly held and propagated, while he is keenly aware of the scorched earth that remains behind after financial crises. Retaining a focus on abstract financial mechanisms, Peter Knight condenses this field of responses to the global financial implosion in 2008: In the wake of the global financial crisis many commentators (e.g. Peston 2011) are now beginning to ask whether finance has broken loose from its moorings in the so-called real economy of manufacturing and, like modernist art, become entirely self-referential, a fiction of value creation that attempts to hoist itself up by its own bootstraps, the creation of value out of ‘mere ideas, concepts, fictions, and consensual hallucinations’.13

Knight’s figurative language impresses the degree to which self-referentiality and transcendence have become the defining features of this species of late capitalism. Reneging on any material attachments or responsibilities to the physical world,

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finance capitalism often appears to exist within its own self-perpetuating semiotic field. This passive acceptance of finance’s immateriality is one facet of Murray’s narrative, which accepts that there is unquestionably a fictitiousness to the workings of finance capitalism, but forcefully asserts that there must be an acknowledgement of, and interrogation of, its material dimensions. The aggregated abstraction and materiality of finance capital is astutely delineated by Peter Hitchcock, who argues that the financial collapse of 2007–8 was ‘more than a semiotic event [. . .] it shows that the integration and circulation of finance capital on a world scale freely integrates and circulates every material contradiction attending capital accumulation per se’.14 For Hitchcock the excesses of inequality occasioned by finance capital demand a twin-pronged analytic, and any attempt to merely disentangle and describe financial semiosis is insufficient without exposing its material inequities. He contends that ‘part of the answer to fictitious capital is not to read capital like fiction (despite its obvious semiotic profusion) but to address the ways in which such fictionality becomes hegemonic, in which liquidity returns to those who squander so much of it. It is the real power of money capital, and not simply its semiotic function, that is stifling necessary change.’15 What differentiates Murray’s narrative from other post-crash Celtic Tiger finance fictions is that The Mark and the Void strives towards this twin-pronged approach. In an equivalent vein, taking a proactive political view in an Appendix to The Violence of Financial Capitalism, tellingly entitled, ‘Words in Crisis’, Christian Marazzi reminds us of the perilous potencies of finance’s ‘linguistic opacity’. In Marazzi’s view the operations of finance capitalism are conducted in an ‘esoteric neolanguage [a language that is] not always accessible to the uninitiated’.16 The impenetrability of finance’s idiomatic complexity functions as a form of fetishization, under which the so-called uninitiated are supposed to marvel, and to genuflect, at the proficiencies of the initiated. According to Marazzi’s analysis, finance capitalism operates on the basis of untranslatability, which disenfranchises the vast majority of society. The notion of ‘enfranchisement’ is one of the core problematics of such heightened abstraction, as under the cover provided by ‘linguistic opacity’, ‘finance prospers, a situation which raises the question of democracy, that is the possibility of publicly debating strategies, procedures, and decisions concerning the lives of all citizens’.17 While Marazzi stresses the linguistic esoterism of finance capitalism, his analysis is also attuned to what is at stake beyond the algorithmic machinations of financial speculation. For Marazzi one of the key intentions of marketing and insisting upon the incomprehensibility of finance’s complex languages is to sidestep ethical and political accountability. In addition, the more that abstraction is the ground on which finance’s operations must be confronted, the further removed such debate is from the material impacts of financial transactions. Thus, in exclusively foregrounding the distance between the operations of finance capitalism and our capacities to understand those operations, the more we contribute to its political and ethical absolution. Following Marazzi’s reading we must be sensitive to the fact that apologists and evangelists for finance capitalism are, and have been, engaged in a widespread sleight of hand in setting the (esoteric) terms of critique. Marazzi alerts us to



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the fact that we are urged to believe in, and to accept, the existence of a semiotic economy above, and beyond, both comprehension and, thus, liability. The financial is ‘narrated’ to us and we are ‘narrated’ by finance in our daily financial interactions and relationships. As is abundantly clear, retailing the fictitiousness of finance is neither without consequence nor without motivation, and is designed to blind us to the profoundly material footprints of speculation via ‘lightspeed’ financial transactions. As Hitchcock reminds us, channelling Borges: ‘For all the talk of virtuality, clouds, and blissful immateriality, finance capital is doggedly dependent on physical space, as semiotic as a map. When we figure the abstraction of finance capital, we should also account for the concreteness of its activities, including its attachment to territory.’18 The reference to Borgesian playfulness in Hitchcock’s appraisal of the actual groundedness of finance points to the kernel of our ensuing discussion of the form, thematic content and ethical import of The Mark and the Void.

Promises, promises The Mark and the Void was reviewed in The Irish Times by the late Eileen Battersby. In her nakedly dismissive review, Battersby closes by referring to The Mark and the Void as ‘a struggling novel that feels as long as the recession, only twice as boring’.19 While this is a strikingly pithy way to put down the novel, one of her principal criticisms of Murray’s work is the paucity of characterization on offer throughout. As she observes earlier in the review: ‘Here he has two-dimensional characters who convey the desperation of sitcom actors dependent on canned laughter to fill the silences. But there is no canned laughter, and there are no real jokes.’20 Yet, for the purposes of our discussion, Battersby misses two crucial issues when confronting the contemporary ‘finance fiction’. First, Battersby betrays a common readerly trait, namely an addiction to realistic and recognizable characterization, the corollary of which in many finance fictions is that we require a villain – usually a banker, investor or speculator to whom responsibility and guilt can be attributed unambiguously. Yet, if we are asking writers to unravel, narrate or mediate the complexities of an apparently inscrutable financial market, why do we expect narratological transparency in their production of characters? The second issue with Battersby’s caustic criticism relates to the fiduciary nature of the narrative exchange. In other words, Battersby enlists the trust that the reader places in the author to deliver on expectations that the reader brings to any novel, and the expectations that the author fails to deliver upon in a particular novelistic context. At a general level the story told by Murray, one in which we encounter a struggling and deceptive writer named Paul, rehearses common enough questions regarding the role of the novel in the contemporary period. From a formal viewpoint, Murray’s work betrays an affiliation with the features and the spirit of what can be loosely dubbed postmodern fiction. The Mark and the Void also displays Murray’s interest in, and capacity to execute, generic porosity by ironically exploiting conventions usually associated with the Gothic and horror. Equally,

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in plotting the novel, Murray draws our attention to the role of risk, rumour, speculation in the accelerated operations of the world of high finance. But he is more than ready to interrogate the roles of risk, speculation and faith in the narratological transactions of literary fiction. The opening portion of our analysis will concentrate on the explicit self-reflexiveness of the novel. This is especially true of the prefatory chapter, which will be unpacked in detail for thematic keynotes, centred on propositions, possibilities, contingency, the role of the utterance and performatives in financial speculation and crises. These all foreshadow and anticipate the role of ‘reports’ and media briefings across the novel, and, crucially, are bound up with the novel’s awareness of itself as a product for consumption. But as the later section of our analysis will illuminate, Murray tackles the relative figurative valences of simile, metaphor and metonym as he delves into the material and embodied impacts of the financial crash on foot of the implosion of the Celtic Tiger economy in Ireland. For all intents and purposes Murray offers a realistic account of the dynamics of Claude’s vocation in finance, as well as the turbulence of his relationship with Paul. Yet, the realism of The Mark and the Void labours to give an ‘account of how that reality became caught up in its various representations’.21 As our analysis of the novel’s ‘Preface’ clarifies, part of the efficacy of Murray’s narrative is that it self-consciously stages itself as a novelistic ‘occasion’. This is both a key instance of its metafictionality, but, as we indicated, in a more material sense, it establishes the novel ‘as a financial instrument, a tool for speculative value generation’.22 The ‘Preface’ and, by extension, the novel are a series of promises that will never be satisfied; part of the novel’s critique is centred on the infinity of deferral that characterizes all forms of linguistic representation. But, as we shall argue, this selfreflexiveness does not eclipse the material accruals of financial capitalism, it simply functions as a means of highlighting the challenges of representing the algorithmic webs of Claude’s profession. One of the key problems that animated our earlier discussions of works by Bolger, Cunningham and Binchy was their commitment to delivering on their authorial promises. Another limitation is the overdetermined affective economies of these narratives that do not seem to trust the readership but instead must guide the latter in their ethical adjudications. This may seem counterintuitive but in the context of trying to represent the relationship between material ‘reality’ and the representational abstractions of finance capital, offering readily comprehensible literary representations is an exercise in passivity. As Crosthwaite emphasizes, novelists are confronted with a combination of difficulties when taking on financial crises: ‘because they demonstrate that capital – the intangible medium of social existence – not only possesses a destructive power comparable to all but the most cataclysmic material objects or processes, but also poses a unique challenge to apprehension and representation.’23 If we are interested in exposing the provisionality of systemic faith in abstract wealth and finance, then it seems imperative that the forms of representation through which we conduct such critiques must also be contested. But of equal urgency is acknowledging the thematic foci and generic strategies that distinguish Murray’s attentiveness to the material impacts of these financial belief systems.



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More detail on these issues, and their relevance to my argument, are readily apparent in the novel’s opening, prefatory chapter. This chapter is focalized through an omniscient third-person voice, presumably Paul’s, which is the only section to be narrated in this form, as the remainder of the narrative is delivered in the first-person by Claude. The novel opens with the words, ‘Idea for a novel: we have a banker rob his own bank.’24 Not only does this opening salvo resonate with the ambiguous opening of Madden’s Time Present and Time Past, but it equally situates fictitiousness, speculation, investment and futurity as key thematics of the ensuing narrative. Additionally it endorses Martin McQuillan’s conclusion in reading Jacques Derrida’s Given Time that everything is [an] act of faith, phenomenon of credit or credence, of belief and conventional authority in this text which perhaps says something essential about what here links literature to belief, to credit and thus to capital, to economy and thus to politics. Authority is constituted by accreditation, both in the sense of legitimation as effect of belief or credulity, and of bank credit, of capitalized interest.25

As mentioned, the ‘Preface’ courts the reader’s attention with intimations of a particular genus of story – luring the reader with the prospects of a certain generic code – all of which is roundly subverted over the duration of the actual narrative. We are given early suggestive clues as to the focus of the novel – perhaps only comprehensible in hindsight, as the speaker begins to sketch out the background of our putative protagonist: ‘The family doesn’t have much: the father’s job is precariousness, they’re constantly resorting to moneylenders, bailiffs come to take the car away.’26 Immediately we are immersed in the debt economy of endemic precarity, yet the narrative does not focus on or elaborate upon this recess of the economy in the opening chapter. Morbid materiality is less interesting here than the imbrications of fiction and finance, language and speculation, and the politics of representation. The prefatory chapter telescopes the life and the work of the protagonist, Claude, and the narrative begins to centre its attention upon the performative qualities of financialization, as it creates the conditions of its own possibilities through linguistic iterations. In this context, Appadurai offers an outline of the selfperpetuating life-cycle of financial capitalism. In his estimation: ‘the link between derivatives and language turns on the question of promises, which I view, following Austin, as one of the class of performatives, linguistic utterances that, if produced in the right conditions, create the conditions of their own truth.’27 From a literary-critical perspective, we anticipate the fulfilment of an authorial promise over the duration of the novel, but in drawing the nature of financial promises and authorial promises into constellation in the ‘Preface’, Murray casts light on one of the core thematic threads of The Mark and the Void. Any sense that the proposed novel would be a solidly grounded transparent narrative of beginning, middle and end quickly dissipates before the end of the novel’s first page.

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Appadurai’s analysis reveals the self-sustaining linguistic cast of the financial sector as well as that of its speculative accessories such as derivatives. Naturally, it is precisely these kinds of features that inform the mythologization of finance capitalism, or what Appadurai later dubs ‘the contemporary cosmology of capitalism’.28 These are forms of linguistic performances that Michael Kaplan has diagnosed as ‘iconomics’ and ‘the rhetoric of speculation’ and are essentially parthenogenetic in origin and propagation. Kaplan’s view is that such utterances appear to evoke a materially incarnated financial ‘market’ or global ‘economy’ but are, in fact, engaged in a self-referential and agamogenetic circuit. Kaplan’s analysis takes its impetus from comments made by the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan, in which the latter refers to the prospects of what seems to be an objective substantial ‘market’, outside and physically beyond his series of linguistic utterances. Investors and speculators, then, interpret and respond appropriately to the hints contained within Greenspan’s remarks. But for Kaplan, Greenspan’s speech act, and the associated financial decisions, constitute ‘a kind of reflexivity of the entire system of the market, the market “thinking” about itself through a discursive procedure that is itself inseparable from what the market is and does’.29 In this singular sense, according to Kaplan, there is no objective exteriority to the ‘market’, it is the aggregation of the linguistic utterances by its participants. Far from engaging with the lived ground of economic physicality, each of these speculative speech acts, then, is ‘iconically identical to the economic “reality” to which it appears to refer’.30 To the extent that Murray attends to the immaterialities of finance capitalism in The Mark and the Void, there is a clear overlap with Kaplan’s and Appadurai’s arguments on its self-creating linguistic performances. Though as we shall discuss later with respect to Murray’s narrative, and this is also explicitly acknowledged by Kaplan, this ‘specular self-reflection’ is not evacuated of material consequences.31 The banker in question, Claude, is highly successful and at the vanguard of global high finance, and epitomizing Kaplan’s reading of ‘iconomics’, he ‘watches money flow through the market, learns the secret influences at work on it, begins to understand how a speech made by an obscure politician in, say Guangzhou can send stock prices soaring, while a rumour about a change in the interest rate can spark a worldwide panic’.32 As we note here, the financier’s aptitudes are consonant with the abstract nature of contemporary finance capital. Within the ‘hyperreal, self-reflexive system of abstract commodities’ such locutionary acts, rather than resolutely material acts or phenomena grounded in concrete material production, are the agencies of change.33 This both demystifies and re-mystifies the world of finance at the same time, it re-enforces the linguistic basis of these transactions, as well as revealing the aforementioned premium placed upon faith and belief within the circuits of finance capitalism. In other words, at this early juncture, Murray is gesturing to the in-built narratology of finance, one to which this emerging character of the banker is attuned and immersed. It is a world of utterance, narration and performance in which one must be literate, and it is an economy of affect offering peaks of euphoria, lows of panic and dependent upon the perpetuation of desires that are ultimately insatiable.



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As the prefatory chapter proceeds, it becomes increasingly obvious that the narrative voice is less concerned with simply furnishing the reader with prefatory information, than actually pitching or selling an idea to us. The opening section, thus, is an act of solicitation in the viability of the future prospects of this story; the narrative voice, then, wants us to invest in the pitched plot he is revealing to us. As this brief section edges towards its close, we are given an up-to-date snapshot of our prospective protagonist’s daily routine: That’s how we find him as our story begins. It’s a couple of months later; he’s back in Dublin, passing his days in the service of money; passing most of his nights that way too. He has no friends, no pastimes, no life outside of the bank. He works so hard he doesn’t have a moment to himself, or, indeed, a self to have a moment. Someone observing might say he is depressed. He would say he wants only to be left alone. Certainly, at this point he has no intention of committing a crime.34

As we have mentioned the centrality of character is evoked here but it is entirely misleading. Character is satiating and reassuring for the reader, yet Murray profiles the shifting and provisional nature of ‘character’ throughout the narrative. In one obvious way this points to the ‘characterless’ nature of finance, as well as to the potential limitations of relying upon transparent realism for literary-critical engagements with finance capital. In other words, character-driven and moralistic narrations of the global economic crash – and Ireland’s implication in those events – can aid us in grasping individual motivation and other affective informants of finance, but often they do not illuminate or even address the macrostructures of how those systems work. As Shonkwiler astutely remarks: As financial activity destabilizes to some degree the boundaries and agency by which personhood is defined, the result is a formal tension over how character is constituted: what should be understood as internal or external, as belonging to it or not. These texts’ explorations of ‘financial individuality’ and provisional definitions of ‘finance character’ demonstrate how the work of character and characterization bear the formal pressure in the novel of new modes of capitalism that are increasingly difficult to personify.35

The character-driven plot can make us feel as if we understand the crash, it can reassure with clear lines of ethical demarcation, when in fact writers ought to be striving to make us appreciate the obscurity of finance, of how little we can grasp, how materially vulnerable we are, perhaps even the post-humanity of the world of finance. Thus in confronting the nature of ‘character’ in the fictionalization of finance, we are not just faced with a knotty formal problem, such considerations also bear upon the critical and the ethical ambitions of any given work of finance fiction. Yet if we return to the previous quotation, in describing the lifestyle patterns of this character, Murray actually offers a negative of a character: ‘It’s a couple of

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months later; he’s back in Dublin, passing his days in the service of money; passing most of his nights that way too. He has no friends, no pastimes, no life outside of the bank. He works so hard he doesn’t have a moment to himself, or, indeed, a self to have a moment.’36 Claude is portrayed as a passive vessel, or vassal, of the financial network in which he finds work; it is a role that eclipses all other possible outlets in his life, as the rhetorical triplet used by Murray emphasizes. Thus, Murray registers his ambiguous approach to novelistic characterization. In the apparent act of elaboration, we witness an erasure. This is consonant with our previous suggestions regarding the necessity to interrogate transparent realistic characterization in this narrative context. We are presented with a fundamental problem of representation given the complexity and the global scale of such an economic crisis. Murray’s series of refusals regarding the elaboration of Claude’s ‘character’ find common ground with this contention and strike a keynote that resonates throughout the narrative. In the final part of the ‘Preface’, The Mark and the Void explicitly conjoins its literary self-consciousness and its formal and thematic preoccupations with finance, once the prospective narrative is peddled to potential readers and consumers. The closing sentences read: Here’s the thing, though: someone is observing him. For a number of weeks, someone’s been watching from a distance – a man, dressed all in black. He makes no effort to conceal himself, nor does he make any effort to communicate; he’s simply there, a supernumerary presence imprinted on the scene. He never comes closer, just watches, eyes trained on the banker as if through a gunsight; but any day now, the banker knows he’ll step out of the crowd and call him by his name; and at that moment everything will change. That’s the set-up. What do you think? Would people buy it?37

The shadowing presence remains non-specific at this point – it will soon be clarified that this is the dissolute novelist, Paul. From a generic perspective, here we see the ‘Preface’ reiterate its engagement in the fiduciary act of promising the reader a story that is tinged with Gothic and thriller colourations. Furthermore, the insistence here on the shadowy anonymity of the watcher serves to compound the narrative’s concern with the unseen, the ominous, the insubstantial – all of which contour the netherworld of algorithmic finance capitalism. Yet in another related way, it is evident at the end of this quotation that the narrative is framed by a promissory act, explicitly invoking the futurity of all narrative transactions. Through the use of the word ‘buy’, Murray is again summoning our capacity for trust and faith in the context, and in the form, of this literary narrative. There is a deliberate and self-conscious shift into the rhetoric of financial transactionalism with the proposition to place our trust in the retailer of this narrative. With this in mind, Murray, first, reminds us that we not only place our faith in authors in the literary sphere, but he also reminds us that ‘trust is part of an economics of talk. The persuasive talk that establishes trust is, of course, necessary for doing much business.’38 As we have mentioned, it trades in the idiom of business



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and finance in its direct address to the implied reader, enquiring as to the viability of this proposed literary investment, can we have confidence in its success? There is a clear blending of the abstract and the material as the nascent fiction is the seedbed for future financial profitability. If the ‘Preface’ is figured as a breed of business pitch, it also extends the prospect of getting in at the ground level to the implied reader. The transactional nature of the question looks for readerly assent, as the employment of the interrogative implies negotiation and a desire for approval. In the suitably ambiguous deployment of the term ‘buy’, the speaker, once again, throws into the relief the mutual implications of belief, faith, commodification and purchase. Ultimately, as a fraction of a finance fiction, the ‘Preface’, and this pertains to the workings of the entire novel, foregrounds the variegated ways in which we fiducially commit and compromise ourselves in giving our trust and investing our faith and belief in the purveyors of contingent narratives across a myriad of spheres of daily life. As an opening gambit that signals the formal and thematic cornerstones of The Mark and the Void, as an ‘occasion’, the ‘Preface’ is equal parts business pitch and self-conscious literary speculation.

Figures and figuration Claude has been followed by a novelist named Paul, who enters the narrative and immediately intensifies the self-reflexive quotient of Murray’s narrative by initiating a protracted discussion on the purpose of the novel. Paul reveals to Claude that following his moderately successful debut novel and experiencing a bout of writer’s block, he ‘Started asking [. . .] some really hard questions – what’s the novel for, what place does it have in the modern world, all that. For a long time, I was stuck, really and truly stuck. Then out of nowhere it came to me. Idea for a new book, the whole thing right there, like a baby left on the doorstep.’39 Paul’s selfexamination is conducted in the shadow of the exponential spread of information and disinformation through virtual media, a world that is inhabited comfortably and profitably by Claude. Yet, in true entrepreneurial spirit, Paul is willing to invest his skill and time in Claude as a putatively worthwhile literary project. The former’s proposed project furthers the traffic between the literary and the financial that is initiated in the prefatory chapter. But the bona fides of this opportunistic author are surely questionable even at this point, given the manner of his approach to Claude, but more obviously from a literary standpoint by his employment of an utterly cliched and melodramatic simile at the close of the quotation above. Indeed, Murray’s narrative is not just interspersed with metafictional and selfreflexive commentary, but it frequently retreats to outmoded and cliched figurative language. In a sense Murray’s attentiveness to literary form in the context of the relationship between writer and financier draws attention to the fictive nature of the macrostructure of high finance. At some points, in fact, we might intuit that The Mark and the Void presents us with an amoral narrative, a self-reflexive narrative that offers little or no ethical standpoint:

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Well, in a way that’s the point. The stories we read in books, what’s presented to us as being interesting – they have very little to do with real life as it’s lived today. [. . .] Modern people live in a state of distraction. They go from one distraction to the next, and that’s how they like it. [. . .] They’re not looking for meaning. The whole idea of the novel – that’s finished.40

If we were to accept such an assertion at face value that neither literature nor the economy is nothing more than self-contained abstractions with little will or capacity to furnish subjects with meaning or substance, then the novel would be of little consequence. But Murray does not simply offer the reader a postmodern echochamber even though he engages with such themes and forms. In tying the fortunes of the novelist to those of the financier, Murray allows both of them to interrogate their respective lives, while at other junctures in the story we see the financier ‘create’ a version of the ‘novelist’, and vice versa. Earlier, Paul laments the obsolescence of the novel form but looking outward in a later conversation he turns the existential spotlight on Claude’s vocation: ‘So what’s the point of it?’ he asks. ‘The point?’ ‘Why put yourself through all this? What starve yourself of a life? Just to make money, is that it?’ ‘Howie says that if you have to ask why, then you are in the wrong game.’ ‘But what do you say?’ He waits, notebook in his lap. It is dusk: fluorescent lights stud the darkening sky outside like imitation jewels. ‘You’re right’, I say. ‘It’s just to make money.’41 Though posed as a question related to Claude’s role within the global finance complex, Paul’s query also revisits his prior statements on the demise of the novel form. Touching upon notions of teleology and purpose, and given that the novel set out with a highly speculative preface, the question can be legitimately read as a self-reflexive address to the structure of this novel. In this respect, there are frequent reminders of the centrality of ‘de-centering’ in terms of the narrative’s form and of its primary thematic foci, of which finance is a primary example. Claude’s bald admission that, in effect, ‘money chases money’ gestures to Breu’s and Berardi’s convictions on the parthenogenetic nature of value creation under finance capitalism. Paul’s question is potent with ethical implications, while Claude’s answer is deeply unsatisfactory and dispiriting. But the question is a valuable ethical prompt. The very presence of the question to begin with indexes Murray’s critical intent in framing the narrative as a series of creative and interrogative exchanges between the novelist and the financier. The posing of this question is a fragment of the interrogative patterning of the narrative in general. Neither the novelist nor the financier is ratified or sanctified as the ethical centre of the narrative. Furthermore, neither Paul nor Claude is figured as the locus of villainy or redemption. While they might appear to occupy alternate social spheres, their lives and careers are deeply intertwined. Paul is pursuing Claude for his life story and his cooperation to secure a measure of financial security for himself and his family. Hence the production of any novel is conducted with an acute appreciation of its material possibilities as a saleable commodity. Equally, Claude is habitually involved in authoring financial reports and prospectuses. Ultimately the actions of both



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characters are rooted in authorship, investment in the future and faith in their abilities to shape and secure that future. If we return to the previous quotation, once again we witness the utilization of a figuration as part of Murray’s critical arsenal. The earlier instance (‘like a baby left on the doorstep’) gave us a simile straight out of melodrama, and in this later instance we are offered another exhibit of simile by Claude that is not necessarily exhausted but that speaks to the ‘pointlessness’ alluded to by Paul: ‘It is dusk: fluorescent lights stud the darkening sky outside like imitation jewels.’ The obvious figurative intimation here is that Claude’s profession sparkles but is bereft of deeper meaning and value. The fakery suggested by the literary device points us to the chicanery of abstract financialization. But, at this point both Paul and Claude have delivered analogous similes suggestive of cliché and valuelessness. Neither simile is satisfactory, as Paul’s fails at the level of form, while the content of Claude’s hints at the ‘void’ of his daily professional exercises. If these two instances of simile conjoin the protagonists, then Murray doubles down on his use of this figurative device shortly after the aforementioned conversation. As Claude peruses a signed copy of Paul’s debut novel in the company of colleagues, he is entranced by the inscribed page. I have never seen Paul’s handwriting before. It is sprawling, straggly, like briars over a tombstone. Unprompted an image appears in my head: the author at a cherrywood table, his hand moving across the page, depicting the minutiae of our lives in thickets of ink. For the first time it strikes me: we are being narrated.42

The figuration on display here does nothing to bring us closer to the material reality of Paul. Quite the opposite, with dramatic irony, it is subsequently revealed that Paul’s professional and personal lives are both on the brink of collapse and he lives in a half-finished Celtic Tiger ruin. Thus, the individual specifics of Claude’s imagination are completely inaccurate as they depend entirely on stereotype and cliché, and they confirm his incapacity, at this stage, for dealing with anything beyond the abstract. Inevitably the sum of these figurative devices keeps the reality of Paul’s life and his intentions at a distance; the figuration of comparison is trumped by recycled cliché. There is a concentration of self-referentiality in Claude’s ‘entranced’ response to, and imagined incarnation, of Paul as a novelist. At first glance, he is bewitched by the signorial flourish that Paul has left in a copy of his debut novel. What might ostensibly be counted as an index of authenticity, a minor stroke of authorship, in fact, functions as a prelude to a naïve fantasy about the writer. In a deconstructive manoeuvre, the ‘sign’ of Paul, and the weight afforded to his signature by Claude secures no indexical meaning at all. Such an absence of meaning is flagged by the Gothic simile deployed to describe the patterning of Paul’s signature, which is ‘like briars over a tombstone’. Indeed, rather than work with the apparent stability and vitality offered by the signature, with its intimations of ‘death’, the simile used to describe it connotes nothing less than the ‘death of the author’. Claude’s selfindulgent fantasy continues with his imagination of Paul seated at his bespoke

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writing desk, and in a further flight from the reality of Paul’s life, Claude envisions the novelist handwriting the manuscript of his latest work ‘in thickets of ink’. Thus, Claude’s conceptualizations of authorship veer from absence to anachronism, from simile to metaphor, and neither vision is fastened to any plausible contemporary reality. While Paul inveigles Claude to permit him to ‘author’ his life, in this series of reflections the literary object, Claude, is fashioning his own version of Paul-thenovelist. Through a symmetry of similes and mutual imagination, Paul and Claude expose the narrow boundaries between their vocations. Despite the mis-directions of his fantasies, Claude finally arrives at a moment of revelation, though even this insight is tinged with ambiguity. While he states that ‘we are being narrated,’ the emphatic nature of the statement is matched by its generality. The solidarity suggested by the collective ‘we’ is weakened by the nonspecificity of the identity of that collective. Though we might read this plurality as simply referring to Claude’s coterie of financiers, in the context of the passage and the larger purpose of the novel this single verb, ‘narrated’, is freighted with more connotative capacity than the aforementioned figurations. But the plurality referred to is not merely Claude’s gathered colleagues; rather, it is the plurality at the level of form suggested throughout by the self-consciousness of Murray’s narrative. In the first instance, we might ask, is this a momentary instance of self-awareness by the character within the actual novel, The Mark and the Void? In other words, is this an occasion where Murray breaks with the author-reader contract and has he travestied the fiduciary bond in which we, the reader, have entered in good faith? At another level has Claude just reasoned out the nature of his relationship with Paul, whereby he has relinquished agency to the novelist, and Paul will re-create him and his peers as characters in his own narrative? But beyond these metafictional considerations, given the financial services context in which this insight has arrived, there is also the suggestion that both within and without the novel, we are all of us narrated as subjects of the daily financialization of our material lives. In the end, these options cohere around the contention that Murray is concerned with the possibility, the location and the activation of agency. These thoughts are abruptly crowded out by Claude’s colleague, Ish, who suggests that they bring Paul on a group night out, a prospect from which Claude recoils. But his reservations are summarily dispatched by Ish in the following terms: ‘“Sorry, Claude!” she declaims. “But no one person can own Paul! He belongs to everyone!” (. . .) “Like the air!” Ish hops back towards her desk. “Like birdsong! Like sunshine!”’43 The breezy insistence of Ish is expressed in equivalent figurative terms seen earlier in exchanges between Paul and Claude. Ish combines metaphor and simile here. First, she operationalizes the former in terms of proprietorship against Claude’s rejection of her idea. Subsequently, we are met with a flurry of natural similes that seek to underline the unfettered accessibility of Paul. Again, the swarm of similes is reductive, in a limp rhetorical flourish, Ish delivers a triplet of hackneyed similes, worn-out figurations, that blend with the use of such exhausted images earlier. Variously intangible and sensory, the content of the similes gestures to the intangible, the beautiful and the necessary, yet their import, in terms of their formal incarnation as simile, is blunted by the worn-out



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familiarity of this very content. If we consider the accumulated employment of figuration across these three characters, there is an undeniable vacancy to their use of literary form. In other words, the use of literary language here offers nothing more substantial or meaningful than the algorithmic forms and content of the idioms of Claude’s financial world. Even when presented with a ‘physical’ writer, the financiers, Claude and Ish, cannot imagine beyond the trite and the abstract, for all intents and purposes the material is rendered into a skein of vapidities.

Debt and the author Once the Irish economic miracle is exposed as a charade in the novel, one of its marquee lenders, the Royal Irish Bank, lurches towards insolvency, necessitating a further State bail-out. But rather than stage any of the internal theatrics of the declining banking institution at this point, Murray centres the action on Claude as both financier and financial author. The bank might well be haemorrhaging money, but its survival is vital to the legitimacy of the government and the basic stability of the entire speculative property market in Ireland. Claude’s firm is commissioned to author a report on the financial health of the Royal Irish Bank – a report that, according to Jurgen, Claude’s line manager, ‘will produce the most favourable outcomes for the major players’.44 Thus the outcome of the report is predetermined despite the fact that, as Claude reveals: Royal Irish was the centre of the great Ponzi scheme that was Ireland’s property market, with one hand doling out money to the developers who built the apartments, housing estates and mansions, and the other doling it out to the people who wanted to live there, neglecting at every point, to establish whether anyone was in a position to pay it back.45

Both Jurgen’s and Claude’s ambitions for the proposed report are centred on the notion of authorship. For Jurgen, the white-wash report will restore the required levels of investor and consumer faith in the terminally ill bank. In this respect, the report is consistent with the novel’s broader interrogation of notions of faith, belief and fiduciality across both the literary field and the world of finance. Yet, as the outcome is already forecast, any fiduciary yield of the report is entirely founded upon fictionality. The labour that is invested in authoring such a document speaks to Jean-Joseph Goux’s deconstructive contention that ‘it only takes the universal belief in an intrinsic value to get the same effect as that which would pertain if there genuinely were an intrinsic value. This was the case with gold in one historical era. Belief, an unfounded confidence, is valuable for the social reality of the moment.’46 The report is just a further layer of fictionally founded faith in Royal Irish. As Claude’s revelation clarifies, even prior to the current crisis, which warrants the new report, the bank’s trading activities were never rooted in any empirically secure financial decision-making.

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The moral and financial bankruptcy of this one bank, representative of systemic failing, is not the foremost upshot of the new commission for Claude. Having been discharged with authoring the report by Jurgen, Claude identifies an opportunity to abet Paul’s new novelistic project. Once he has enumerated Royal Irish’s failures, Claude resolves that ‘This report, directed right into the heart of the national folly, will surely give Paul what he needs to root his novel’.47 While this might seem crudely deterministic with one form of authorship nourishing another in an uncomplicated act of translation across fields, this is not the form of novel authored by Murray. Claude envisions that the financial report on Royal Irish will furnish Paul with the requisite insights into the machinations of a heretofore opaque financial world. In actuality, Claude’s suggestion is not directly self-reflexive because it does not directly reflect the intentions or the reality of Murray’s The Mark and the Void. The conflation of novel and financial report will, in Claude’s estimation, ‘direct’ and ‘root’ Paul’s novel. It is telling that the idiom associated with authorship here is so clearly that of precision, clarity and transparency, as the nature of the post-Celtic Tiger literary transaction is thrown into contestation. This is less a moment of internal self-reflection than an outward gesture to many other literary responses to the excesses of the Celtic Tiger period. In fact, it is a juncture where The Mark and the Void refers to the external literary marketplace of literary fictionalizations of the Celtic Tiger and sites itself within that marketplace. As we have seen elsewhere, it is all too easy to construct transparent moralizing narratives regarding the gross inequities of Ireland’s economic ‘boom’. In this respect Claude’s point refers to the narrowly instrumental forms of narrative that most often are character-driven and that construct simplified and dichotomized moral economies. Our earlier discussions in Chapters 1 and 2 confirm that such narratives satisfy readerly expectations and fulfil their fiduciary promises in terms of narrative shape, characterization and resolution. As if to confirm the redundancy of Claude’s intention to provide Paul with stark revelations on the Irish banking system, much later in the novel Claude is reminded of the plasticity of such financial authorship by a phone call from a journalist. Having authored the report and detailed the unviable nature of the bank, Claude is now disabused of his authorial agency. The journalist enquires of Claude: ‘“if you could expand on some of the recommendations your report makes. You advise the government to inject a further eight billion euro of direct liquidity to Royal Irish – ” “I – what?” [. . .] “Wait, I advise them to what?”’48 This unannounced and remote conversation is a direct counterpoint to the certainty expressed by Claude prior to undertaking the report. Earlier Claude expressed unwavering faith in the potential of his report to effectuate a stated outcome, in his estimation it would bear financial witness and midwife a literary analogue. In a sense, for Claude, the world and the word have been evacuated of trust and reliability. Estranged from his own authorship, Claude learns of the doctored, and fictitious, content of his report via a stranger. Having been summoned to the office of a senior manager at his firm in the midst of this journalistic ambush, Claude receives clinical confirmation that his version of Royal Irish’s prospects did not square with the needs of investors and the market. Speaking with Rachael,



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the senior manager, Claude remarks that ‘From the press conference it sounded as if they had ignored most of my suggestions’. Rachael, then, clarifies the firm’s position: ‘“That’s because we rewrote them,” she says. [. . .] After speaking to you, Jurgen had some concerns about your report’s content, so before releasing it I called it up here and went through it with him. What the Department saw was the revised version.’49 Notwithstanding the embattled nature of the bank, senior managers assume editorial responsibilities in fabricating a narrative that testifies to its robust condition. Clearly, the appropriation of authorial control is predicated on the need to retain faith in the marketplace and is an acknowledgement of the inherent temperamentality of investors. As a discrete linguistic utterance, the renovated report produces a more affirmative iteration of the market; it too is a speculative locutionary act, as we have noted earlier in the context of the novel’s ‘Preface’. In assuming editorial control over Claude’s report, the senior managers manifest ‘the market’s logic of epistemological enclosure’.50 From this point of view, it brings itself into existence, it sustains that existence through the agency of abstract linguistic utterances and it works to define the boundaries of social imagination. Claude’s report was a failure of semiotics in as much as it was an empirical review of the perilous financial condition of a ‘zombie’ bank. At a fundamental level, the re-shaped report is a curt reminder of the malleability, and the contingency, of language. Yet in this case, this familiar linguistic fact is underscored in the context of high finance. It is one of a number of times in which the narrative engages in effective translation across discourses, reminding us of the cultural and contingent natures of the literary and the financial. The report was commissioned to perpetuate a specific narrative arc and was not foreseen as a transparent reflection of an unpalatable financial reality. The Royal Irish report coheres with Beckert’s conclusion that in these contexts ‘fictional representations of future states shape expectations and provide justifications for decisions, reducing the ever possible disorientation of decision-makers due to the openness of the future. The concept of fictionality suggests an alternative not only to calculation-based models in economics, but also to the focus on social macrostructures prevailing in sociological approaches to the economy.’51 Once Claude’s draft of the report undergoes the required editorial amendments and is sufficiently ‘iconomic’, the future of the bank, of the bondholders and of the market are all secured. In this sense, the forms and the contents characteristic of financialization are designed and activated to secure and to take proprietorship of the future. The horizon of future possibilities is defined by the authorial agency of these senior financiers as the conditions for future speculation must be maintained. This episode brings to mind the brief prefatory section of the novel discussed earlier, re-enforcing the notion alluded to in the preface that investors and the market read and interpret the subtle and overt semiotics of financial and political systems. Crucially there are multiple authors and multiple drafts of the Royal Irish report, which not only constitutes a plurality of composition but also, as real-world events made explicit, there is a convenient dispersal of accountability. The plurality of authorship confounds the urge to locate

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responsibility once the financial instability of this bank, among many others, is finally revealed. The stress placed upon plurality and displacement of sole accountability are what differentiates The Mark and the Void from the other Celtic Tiger finance fictions under scrutiny here. Transparency, singularity and knowability are legitimately frustrated and thrown into contention by Murray in a fiction that attempts to engage with the workings of high finance. It is evident in another earlier episode in which authorship is frustrated. In clear distinction to Claude’s authorial vision of his original financial report as a literary catalyst, on this occasion Paul provides an unadorned summation of the raw materials with which he is confronted. As we have argued, Claude’s previous literary vision is not exclusively a self-reflexive commentary on The Mark and the Void but is more reflective of the kinds of narrative seen elsewhere. Paul’s sustained critique of the resources at his disposal elaborates upon Claude’s self-referential assay: ‘Right now I’m seeing two serious, two very serious problems with the book. The first is that nothing happens. There’s no story there. In the past a novel didn’t always need a story. You could just make it about a day in somebody’s life. But that was when life meant people, movement, activity. You guys in front of your screens all day long, selling each other little bits of debt – it’s a whole different order of nothing. I know there’s a big story behind it, I know the bank is expanding and growing and so on, but I can’t see any of that. It’s like a hurricane, you know? It’s this incredibly powerful entity, storming all over the world, levelling everything in its path, but at the eye of it, where you are, it’s just . . . it’s just a void. A dead space.’ (. . .) ‘And obviously that affects our Everyman,’ he says. ‘Which is problem two. Readers like to feel a connection with the characters they’re reading about’.52

Paul’s diagnosis centres on an authorial problem and a readerly quandary, and, to begin with, we should address the latter issue. Again, Paul’s insistence that the literary author has a duty or responsibility to generate a so-called connection between the character and the reader recalls the existence of an apparent contract between creator and audience. In highlighting this apparent problem Paul, once more, points to the widespread investment in the literary transaction between author and reader. The reader will invest their time, their immediate future, in the narrative that is presented to them but only in return for a pre-agreed, and expected, suite of satisfactions and sensations. This is a further example of Murray’s own authorial insistence that The Mark and the Void is expressly not this genus of narrative. By way of contrast to other Celtic Tiger texts, such as those by Bolger, Binchy and Cunningham, Murray does not place a premium on the integrity or development of his primary characters. As we noted earlier with respect to the plurality of authorship that went into the Royal Irish financial report, The Mark and the Void is more alive to the dispersal of authorship and to the possibilities that this form facilitates. Finance fictions that adhere to a character-driven structure lend themselves to the identification of culpable parties and are complicit in the



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perpetuation of a grossly reductive and simplistic moral economy. The Mark and the Void does not ‘sell’ itself as a narrative product that promises second-hand gratification at the expense of less virtuous characters. In the opening section of his inventory of authorial frustrations, Paul decries the emptiness of the lives of these financiers. Their daily routines are barren and incapable of providing viable raw material for the kind of action-filled narrative he has envisioned. At another self-reflexive juncture, the novelist character laments the paucity of creative opportunities or prospects presented by the characters and the settings of Murray’s novel. In doing so, Paul alludes to both Samuel Beckett and James Joyce, whose most famous works of modernist theatre and literary fiction cohere with Murray’s formal and thematic preoccupations. While Paul might adjudge the works of both writers as obsolete, in combination they gesture to Murray’s concern with both the linguistic and semiotic abstractions of finance, and with the everyday material imprints of financialization. If Beckett worries over and plays with the essential futility of linguistic expression, this echoes in Murray’s attention to the inherent vacuity at the core of financial semiosis. Likewise, The Mark and the Void also exhibits traces of a Joycean concern with the bodily and the sensory in its tracking of the material aftermaths of Ireland’s economic ‘boom’ and ‘bust’. To return to the extended aforementioned quotation, at one point Paul affirms that the world of finance is ‘a whole different order of nothing. I know there’s a big story behind it, I know the bank is expanding and growing and so on, but I can’t see any of that.’ What is of more significance here is that Paul’s authorial frustrations are actually dwarfed by the invisibility of the dynamics and the growth of the shadow world of global banking. The ‘nothing’ that begins as an allusion to a Beckettian dramatic world metastasizes into the entirety of algorithmic finance. The verbal conflict that patterns the close of this excerpt is revelatory of the key workings of this world, and it underpins Murray’s critique of the abstractions to which Claude cleaves in his daily life. Paul insists that he ‘knows’ there is action and motion but that it is utterly inaccessible to him, that he is unable to ‘see’ the action necessary to the completion of his own finance fiction. But the differentiation between knowledge and vision detailed here is precisely the point at which faith enters the equation. As a subject of a financialized world Paul ‘believes’ in the existence of its internal mechanics, but as an author he is unable to testify to, and to document, its material existence. Of course, this latter point raises one of the key notions on which the novel and our discussion are trained – namely, the centrality of fiduciality to literary and to financial transactions.

Bodies and buildings Keen to procure more detail on Paul and having failed to track down the novelist by means of the telephone directory, itself another micro-moment of textual self-reference and deferral, Claude settles on locating Paul at his home. In a sequence that resembles nothing less than a colonial excursion to the proverbial ‘interior’, once Claude’s departs the familiar climes of the IFSC, he is sensually and

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cognitively assaulted by the profusion of material life on the streets of Dublin. Beyond the serenity of his compounded professional milieu and ‘coming from the centre, with its clean lines and ubiquitous dress code, the chaos of the detail is almost overwhelming’.53 Claude’s allusion to ‘the centre’ is not simply a reference to physical orientation but affirms the hierarchical spatial arrangement of the cityscape. Political and financial agency resides within the boundaries of this selfproclaimed locus of influence. But as we have established, the very nature and location of this ‘centre’ prove elusive and profoundly insubstantial. Venturing beyond the self-ratifying spaces and idioms of the IFSC, Claude is accosted by a cacophonous and bracing material difference. The reassuring homogeneity of the office spaces of the IFSC means that Claude is unprepared for the jolting visceral humanity that peoples the streets of the Irish capital. Outside the routinized relations of his professional life, Claude’s most frequent previous exposure to naked physicality was in the controlled and sexually choreographed spaces of strip bars. The latter are part of the culture of material excess and exploitation that is charted by Murray, and they are signs of the broader pornographication of Irish society. Heavily gendered and passively consumed these female bodies are reduced to the roles of props in the lavishly curated leisure activities of Claude and his fellow financiers. However, the denizens of the city encountered on Claude’s pedestrian journey to Paul’s home are limned in lengthy anthropological detail as he navigates this disorienting geography: And here, on the teeming road, are the Irish: blanched, pocked, pitted, sleepdeprived, burnished, beaming, snaggle-toothed, balding, rouged, raddled, beaky, exophthalmic; the Irish, with their demon priests, their cellulite, their bus queues and beer bellies, [. . .] their dyed hair, white jeans, colossal mortgages, miraculous medals, ill-fitting suits, enormous televisions, [. . .] their buildingsite countryside, their radioactive sea, their crisps, bars, Lucozade, their tattoos, their overpriced wine and mediocre restaurants, their dreams, their children, their mistakes, their punchbag history, their bankrupt state and their inveterate difference.54

Claude’s catalogue of ‘the Irish’ ranges in focus from the physical and the behavioural, to economics and environmentalism and includes the country’s history as well as an implicit gesture to its prospects in the future. In the eyes of this French-born financier, the Irish – a phrase that is repeated – are physically repulsive, devoid of the smooth clean lines that shape the material and abstract worlds of the IFSC. Unaccustomed to such an excess of ill-formed and repugnant materiality, Claude’s description lapses into a form of caricature. He outlines a caricatured congregation in a single sentence over the course of fifteen lines, formally conveying this urban onslaught together with his own swell of distaste. In referring to ‘the Irish’ in general terms on two occasions, as well as invoking staple stereotypes of the population, this portrait de-individualizes the people in question. Claude’s reversion to such a caricatured portrait of ‘the Irish’ is symptomatic of



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his role and function within financial capitalism, and it is in step with the earlier sequence of flat similed figuration. He is overwhelmed by the proximity and excessiveness of such material difference and, consequently, resorts to the formal strategies of abstract impersonalization. Within Murray’s schema, this highlights both the inevitable tension that is sparked when financial abstraction and material reality intersect, and the inalienable distance that so often seems to obtain between the two. Despite Claude’s obvious discomfort with this spectacle and the difficulties he has in expressing its characteristics, Murray touches upon some of the material imprints of the Celtic Tiger ‘boom’. Packaged within Claude’s reel of cultural reductionism, we can discern some of the signs of the country’s consumerist zeal. But it would be facile merely to enumerate the artefacts of Celtic Tiger aspirationalism purely as a means of generating a form of readerly recognition and shameful affective response. Rather, as we can glean from the close of Claude’s survey of this mass of Irish humanity, it is tied to the in-built self-reflexiveness of the narrative. As Claude reflects: to walk among them is to be plunged into a sea of stories, a human comedy so rich it seems on the point of writing itself. For a moment I wonder, hopelessly, what the International Financial Services Centre can offer to compare – then I remember that this was his very point, that the storyless, faceless banks are the underwriters of all this humanity, that we are the Fates who weave the fabric of the day.55

There is a shift in tone evident here; we transition from the expression of visceral distaste to what we can gauge as self-satisfaction and condescension in both the form and the content of this later reflection. If Claude’s earlier array of material excessiveness defaulted to crude simplification and stereotype, this subsequent more inward-gazing extract is no less derivative in its structure. From its opening clause, Claude’s expression betrays a sense of apostolic patronage towards the fallen Irish. The opening phrase deliberately reverts to the words of the biblical St Paul to the Corinthians when he admonishes the latter to slough off their idolatrous ways and to devote themselves to the one true Christian deity. As we have indicated, Claude explicitly shifts gear yet cannot express himself in anything other than a derivative language. Buffeted by the frenzy of materiality extant on the streets of Dublin, Claude processes his response through inherited forms. This first instance is, at one level, a meta-textual allusion by Murray that alerts us to the thematic significance of the arbitrariness of competing systems of faith and belief. But within the specific context of the narrative’s action, it elaborates upon Claude’s consistent recourse to abstraction, and to the essential recyclability of all forms of representation within his world of finance capitalism. The pattern of allusiveness extends across this short passage; in the next sentence Claude figures the Irish throng as a form of Balzacian ‘human comedy’. Again, the allusion operates at the levels of form and content, with the latter palpable in one of the most enduring quotations attributed to Balzac in Père Goriot, specifically: ‘The

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secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was done properly.’56 Though the moral import of the intertextuality on display is superficially Claude’s response to the Irish, of course, his derivative use of form and the implied moral censures of the biblical and French literary texts suggest that we read Claude’s thoughts against the grain. The Irish were viewed through one kind of prefabricated linguistic prism, and now Claude’s later reflection is entirely figured through other forms of textuality and representation. Thus, from an ethical standpoint, the latter is utilized to indict Claude of the exploitative derivativeness so central to his speculative profession. Claude’s plunge into the sensory and physical excesses of Celtic Tiger Ireland confirms his belief in the untouchable transcendence of the financial stratosphere. The kinds of brute appetites and base desires embodied by the disfigured and deluded Irish are ‘authored’ by the Wolfean ‘masters of the universe’ that reside within the hallowed limits of the IFSC.57 Not only does the latter-day and displaced human comedy appear to be ‘on the point of writing itself ’, but the financiers execute their post-human financial transactions from an Olympian IFSC. Claude resolves that there is no discernible form of material agency operative outside the abstract algorithms of his cabal of co-workers. It is within their power to outline and to craft the lifestyle choices and consumerist desires of the ‘mere Irish’. Yet, as we have touched upon, in housing Claude’s reflection in derived, intertextual forms, Murray has undermined Claude’s claims to unfettered volition and agency. Here we witness a sequence where the novel exposes its limits and willingly adopts derivation to offer an ethical critique and addresses the hubris of finance. Once the overwhelming materiality of the Dublin streets is negotiated by Claude, he arrives at Paul’s home and it soon becomes clear that Paul inhabits a mausoleum of Celtic Tiger ambition and vanity. In describing the apartment building, Murray’s details sound familiar notes to those encountered in other Celtic Tiger fictions, including Madden’s Time Present and Time Past. There is certainly a commonality of intent and effect across these two narratives in the ways they figure such Celtic Tiger ruination: The entrance door to the lobby is flanked by two stone effigies, one of which holds an intercom. There is no response from 323, or indeed anything to indicate the intercom is working. [. . .] The lobby is full of silence and dust. Nymphs bathe in dust in an ornate fountain; dust cloaks the tall mirrors along the walls. Gaps have appeared in the Moorish tiling, and the nameplates of the metal letterboxes are empty. The lift is not working so I mount the stairs in intermittent light. No sounds can be heard anywhere. Reaching the third floor, I make a left, but after a short distance run into a thick plastic sheet that hangs like a filthy veil from ceiling to floor. Pushing it aside, I can just make out a lightless corridor studded by pockets of deeper darkness, doorways to rooms, or the shells of rooms.58

On the surface here we are privy to a profusion of detailed description of the material artefacts of this mouldering symbol of Celtic Tiger property speculation. The traces of Irish aspirationalism pinpointed by Claude earlier are registered and



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promptly reduced here in the guises of faux-classical installations. The assertiveness of verbs such as ‘flanked’, ‘bathed’ and ‘cloaked’ is resolutely upended by their combined pretentiousness and disuse. Yet, as we anticipate, there is little substance to be located here, neither in terms of the superficialities of the property nor in the system that has occasioned both their construction and their abandonment. The tawdriness of the neglected ornamental excess does not function solely as a transparent ironization of Celtic Tiger tastelessness; rather, Murray’s ambition is to accent the ruthlessness with which precarity and abandonment are experienced by people as a legacy of the Celtic Tiger’s speculative property market. Analogous to other propertied sites in Celtic Tiger fiction such as ‘ghost estates’, Claude stumbles upon a scene of aftermath, a disturbing site that teems with nightmarish menace. Rather than securely housing communities and standing as a testament to the economic ‘boom’ these locations are monuments to cynicism and greed. The garish props that garnish the apartment complex with a measure of fake classicism are coated in dust, but this does not just index their neglect but is a further example of the narrative’s self-reflexivity. Previously Murray invoked St Paul’s missive to the Corinthians in the context of false idolatry, but the repeated proximity of reference to the dustiness of the building is suggestive of human mortality and death. The imagery of humanity arising from and returning to dust is a recurring feature of the biblical books of the Old Testament such as Genesis, Job, Ecclesiastes and Isaiah. On the one hand, from a formal perspective this is another performance of the novel’s self-consciousness in the shape of intertextual allusiveness. As with previous examples, the world of Celtic Tiger Ireland is mediated through derivative discourses that are tellingly, in this case, centred upon faith and death. From another perspective the imagery of a dust settling upon the homes of these veterans of Celtic Tiger Ireland is suggestive of the deathly pall that hangs over this complex and re-enforces Murray’s generic deployment of the Gothic. It is another moment when both debt and death are collocated in the novel’s figurative economy, and instantiates a meeting of the immaterial and the material. Obscurity, incompletion and wreckage define the remaining metaphorical descriptions of Claude’s encounter with the edificial materiality of property speculation. While the apartment complex appears to be utterly lacking in human presence, the building itself is at once the material manifestation of the excesses of unaccountable financial speculation and of the burdensome indebtedness of its current and erstwhile occupants. Deliberately figured in Gothic terms, Paul’s apartment block is outlined in a variety of ways, with the accumulated effect confirming that these edifices are haunting material remainders of the rootlessness of financial capitalism. Murray explicitly flags the mutuality of these material remains and abstract speculation by linking this passage to the novel’s prefatory chapter. If we recall that Claude is initially introduced through a series of negations – ‘He has no friends, no pastimes, no life outside of the bank. He works so hard he doesn’t have a moment to himself, or, indeed, a self to have a moment.’59 There is an equivalent pattern of negation evident in the outline of Paul’s apartment complex above, ‘no response, [. . .] full of silence, [. . .] no sounds, [. . .] Gaps, [. . .] letterboxes are empty. [. . .] The lift is not

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working.’ Certainly, the decrepit structure and general state of disrepair on display here are pointed references to the fractured system that facilitated the saturation of Irish society by the false promises of property speculation during the Celtic Tiger. But if we are insisting that Murray’s critique goes further than merely describing the physical lapses of this erstwhile boom-time, then these negations and absences in the materialities of Celtic Tiger properties are necessary counterparts to those attached to the earlier delineation of Claude’s ‘characterless’ life under financial capitalism. The absence of sounds and the missing signs of life are the unfulfilled promises of financial speculation and are features of the fugitive futures of the debt-burdened residents of these unfinished ruins. The entire building reverberates with the empty promises of perpetually mobile finance, but the material burden of mortgaged indebtedness remains. In these cases, material and edificial decrepitude is parlayed into the intangibles of debt-based financial products. These are sites of material dereliction but equally bespeak the dereliction of responsibility and accountability occasioned by the ‘absence’ of financial abstraction. If there was an excess of material presence to ‘the Irish’ met by Claude earlier, there is an excess of material absence in the ways that the world of speculation has thoroughly abandoned these incomplete homes. While these apartments are habitable, they exist in a state of liminality, or of conditionality, on the cusp of outright ruination and abandonment but also with the possibility, however unlikely, of redemption through completion. There are resonances in the attention to ‘inbetweenness’ and the evocation of a Gothic moodiness with the protesting ‘zombies’ seen across the narrative.

‘The horror, the horror’ – zombification and debt As many of the critics invoked across this study have readily testified, there is a debt toll and, all too often, a death toll consequential to the hegemony of finance capital. Marsh identifies just such a correlation between the idioms and figurations of indebtedness, reading the debt undertaken as a form of snare from which the only escape routes are default or death. In Marsh’s account, and here she alludes to the work of John Forrester: ‘the languages for debt are routinely those of death or entrapment: if the images for credit speak of an abstraction, then those for debt assuredly do not. [. . .] Debt is a death dealt to us by the banking system.’60 Marsh’s general point touches upon specific formal and thematic aspects of Murray’s novel and of our broader analysis of debt, finance and representation. Linking the experience of indebtedness to death confirms the contention that haunting and horror are inalienable features of the global debt economy. Historically, via Marx, the most common invocation of generic horror to analyses of capitalism’s excess exploitation was the figure of the preying vampire. The vampiric figuration represents the tendency for capitalism to parasitically drain all life, value and profit from the mass of living labour. For Steve Shaviro: ‘the nineteenth century, with its classic régime of industrial capitalism, was the age of the vampire, but the network society of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries is rather characterized by



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a plague of zombies.’61 Thus, it is unsurprising that The Mark and the Void should mobilize the latter figuration as part of its engagement with both literary form and financial capitalism. In a sense, enlisting the metonymic figure of the zombie speaks to the undead nature of indebtedness, and it is an apt figuration of the past that continues to haunt in the present and into the future. Debt is the financial burden that refuses to die, and the literary zombie metonymizes the communities of individual debtors so evident in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland.62 What Fred Botting terms ‘zombie debt’ ‘is a debt that will not die, that cannot be repaid’.63 Such debt entraps the indebted while ‘it signals an almost total absorption into a world financial market carrying on without thought or concern for anything other than accumulation. Hence the horror: one can neither kill nor escape the global network that circumscribes planetary existence and the zombie effects of producing so many debt-bound automatons.’64 These indebted are haunted by the abstract insistence of the unpaid and looming debt, but the debt is equally immanent in their daily lives in the form of the ‘haunted’ homes in which they reside. Secured on the bases of mortgages or ‘dead pledges’, these homes are mausoleums in which the future is no less haunted than the present. The purpose of ‘the disquieting figure of the zombie’ to The Mark and the Void, is precisely because this ‘embodied, dis-spirited phantasm [is] widely associated, with the production, the possibility and impossibility, of these new forms of wealth’.65 Such creatures are symptomatic of periods of profound disruption in society and in terms of value dominant in the economy. We will elaborate upon the ways in which, and the reasons why, Murray transfuses the novel with this prime element of the horror genre. This is part of the novel’s generic playfulness, which in turn is consistent with its representational self-reflexivity. The zombie replaces the vampire figure in this contemporary engagement with capitalism for the stark reason that ‘zombies present the “human face” of capitalist monstrosity’.66 In effect Murray’s inclusion of the zombie trope is an acknowledgement of the human scale and of the materiality of victimhood, suffering and protest in the face of excessive and unaccountable financial complexity. Murray exposes the hollowed-out and haunted aftermath of the collapsed Irish economy in the metonymic guise of a group of ‘zombie’ protestors outside the IFSC. Within the action of the narrative, the protestors simultaneously draw upon the iconography of the horror genre and display an awareness of the zombified nature of the grossly overleveraged Irish banking system. Claude witnesses a site-specific performance of anti-capitalist protest on a daily basis but is barely able to relate to the concerns that animate the activists. The figure of the zombie is seen as human waste under the contemporary conjuncture of financialized capitalism, and the appropriation of such a horrific figuration by these protestors resonates with Deleuze and Guattari’s assertion that ‘the only modern myth is the myth of zombies – mortified schizos, good for work, brought back to reason’.67 As the first crisis within the banking sector documented in the novel begins to simmer in the background and out of the view of the general public, Claude is summoned to a strategy meeting with his bank’s senior managers, together

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with the Irish minister of finance and several civil servants. The purpose of the meeting is to devise an approach that will appease the market and remove any sense of vulnerability regarding the Irish banking sector, in particular the Royal Irish Bank. The meeting, then, is a prelude to Claude’s authorship of his financial report discussed earlier. But what is significant for our current purposes is Claude’s impression of the minister. Flanked by his advisors, the minister ‘seems actually to embody the country’s dire condition’.68 Having only previously seen the minister on television broadcasts, Claude is shaken by the minister’s withered physical condition: ‘Shadows devour his features, beads of moisture cling morbidly to the grey folds of his skin; his courtly, reasonable bearing is belied by great dark rings around his eyes. I had heard he was unwell: when I lean in to shake his hand I am hit by a stench so deathly I have to fight the instinct to recoil.’69 There is an uncanny feeling generated by the discrepancy experienced by Claude, and there is a gap between the mediated image and physical presence of the ailing minister. It is a moment where the memory of a visual, abstracted image proves to be irreconcilable, misaligned and out of sync with the declining materiality of the body. From a figurative perspective, in Claude’s view the minister appears as the embodiment of demise, an apt metaphorical substitute for the true condition of the country’s financial health. However, as we shall suggest, Murray’s use of metonym exceeds this superficial recourse to metaphor. On foot of the aforementioned meeting, the minister reappears on the TV to assuage any doubts about the liquidity of the Royal Irish Bank. While he strikes Claude as being physically re-energized since that meeting, Murray again portrays the empty performance of the press conference in a Gothic frame: ‘On the TV screen, he has regained his air of command, though he grips the lectern with both hands, as if anticipating the torrent of fury that will come back at him; sitting on the dais behind him I spot the little sallow man, staring at the Minister as before, like some horror-movie psychic demonstrating mind control.’70 There is an overt acknowledgement of the extent to which Ireland’s national sovereignty was compromised under the arrangements to re-finance the country in the post-crash era. The similed allusion to the horror genre is not just another example of the narrative’s self-reflexiveness, but precisely speaks to the process of zombification as the nature of wealth generation becomes immaterial and invisible under financial capitalism. As Botting argues, ‘one can neither kill nor escape the global network that circumscribes planetary existence and the zombie effects of producing so many debt-bound automatons.’71 At a general level ‘zombie tales dramatize the strangeness of what has become real’ under capitalism, as dead labour abounds and profit accrues via a complex of financial formulae.72 The minister is materially present, as his gripping hands underline, but agency lies elsewhere, and his function does not extend beyond the maintenance of the profit-making capacities of the banking system. The minister of finance reappears later in the novel as the perilous state of Ireland’s banking system become ever more acute. While he retained a veneer of vigour in his previous televisual appearances, at this point Claude describes the clarity of his ill-health as he watched government press conferences on TV. Once



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more the minister’s physical decline is explicitly figured in terms of the terminal crisis in the Royal Irish Bank. Tellingly, the minister’s ill-health, his material disease, is equated with the prevailing condition of the most zombified of Irish banks: It seems that the revelation of his illness has pushed the Minister past some point of no return. In his press conferences now he looks not merely sick but, for the first time, defeated. ‘The fundamentals are sound,’ he keeps saying, the same blanket denial to every question, in the same leaden, exhausted tone. His face is suddenly gaunt, wasted. I can’t work out quite what it reminds me of; then I look out and see the grey hulk of the unfinished Royal Irish headquarters, rain lashing in through the empty sockets of the windows.73

At one level, both the minister and the incomplete husk of the bank’s offices operate as appropriate metaphors for the hubris and the self-consuming greed of the Celtic Tiger financial ‘boom’. Yet there is a sense in which that the substitutive function of metaphor devalues the particular material experiences of the individual trials of indebtedness, dispossession and impoverishment that were also features of the ‘boom-time’ economy and its aftermath. Crucially it is the commonality of zombification across the narrative – from the minister, the banks and the protestors – that allow us to move from the metaphoric plane to the metonymic plane. We can suggest that the minister resembles the performative zombie protestors that form a visual and aural backdrop to the virtual performances of Claude’s global finance firm. In this regard the general use of the figure of the zombie in the novel is evidence of Murray’s recourse to the metonymic to impress the specific materialities of excessive and abstracted financial capitalism. There is, then, a lateral associative effect engendered by the metonymic figure of the zombie. Claude introduces Paul to the spectacle of the zombie protest outside the unfinished headquarters of the Royal Irish Bank. As they stand and watch, their attention is caught by one figure making his way towards his fellow protestors, ‘the gentleman in question, wearing a dark wool suit, has a bloody red socket where his left eye ought to be and a withered claw instead of a hand. We stop and watch as he lurches over the plaza and across the bridge, where is greeted by five or six other similarly cadaverous figures.’74 At first glance, the besuited figure could well be simply another financier akin to Claude, as Murray briefly wrongfoots the reader until he reveals the imitation disfigurements on his face and arm. Claude might well externalize the spectacle as he regards it from a safe distance, but there is the implied suggestion that the zombifying effects of global financial capitalism are endemic and unavoidable. At this point the zombie protestors blend into an anonymous collective from Claude’s vantage point, they are distracting and enigmatic, but their significance extends no deeper for him. But there are signs that they are making their material presence manifest on the streetscape, as Claude reports that ‘the zombies have raised a tent on the riverbank opposite, around which they stagger, gesticulating at the traffic with authentically decomposing hands’.75 This is significant to our reading of Murray’s use of the zombie figure

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in The Mark and the Void, particularly in the light of Botting’s contention that ‘zombies present a more material form of undeath than the specters or vampires conjured in quasi-spiritual or phantasmatic forms: zombies are dead bodies. Hence their link to economic and material conditions is stronger, as is their relation to material rather than symbolic connotations of debt.’76 As our attention to the declining physical health of the minister for finance reveals, the figure of the zombie gains its critical traction in the narrative because it is both material and metonymic. But there is a figurative tension at play in the various mobilizations of the zombie figure, and it is apparent as Claude continues to reveal the purpose and the form of the protest. Claude explains that ‘A zombie is what you call a bank that’s still trading even though it’s insolvent. The first revenant has produced a placard that reads DO NOT FEED THE ZOMBIES and is waving it about.’77 The allusion to the zombified and illiquid bank that still manages to trade speaks to the increasing abstraction of the financial sphere, which is characterized by an insatiable and parasitic drive for profit. In this context it is faceless, yet in Claude’s metaphoric explanation it also absolved of any specific culpability. The substitutive effect of the metaphor dehistoricizes the economic and financial ruination consequential to the ‘trade at any cost’ philosophies of such banking institutions. It is the performative ‘revenant’ that assumes the historical materiality of the zombified victims of finance capitalism, so that in this regard ‘zombies present the “human face” of capitalist monstrosity. This is precisely because they are the dregs of humanity: the zombie is all that remains of “human nature”, or even simply of a human scale, in the immense and unimaginably complex network economy.’78 Claude confronts this ‘human scale’ much later in the novel, when his love interest, Ariadne, steers them into the zombie encampment by the riverfront. Ariadne donates the daily leftovers from her restaurant to the community of protestors, which is a further telling reiteration of material remainders within the symbolic economy of the narrative. Once more Claude is disturbed by the materiality of the makeshift zombie base: The squalid tents – fewer in number than the last time I looked – are drenched with rain; rainwater puddles in every available surface. On the improvised fence, rain-bleached posters blare grim statistics of government and bank collusion, with crudely rendered images of pigs in top hats smoking cigars, and fists squashing euro signs. A whiteboard importunes passers-by for ‘Things We Need!’, followed by a list: tea bags, soap, batteries, and so on. Over the camp a banner hangs, declaring, damply, FIRST THEY IGNORE YOU, THEN THEY LAUGH AT YOU, THEN THEY FIGHT YOU, THEN YOU WIN. I feel some of my new-found suaveness escape into the cooling air.79

The minor occupation of public space takes on the form of a recognizably anticapitalist performance with its checklist of visual props, including the quotation from Mahatma Gandhi, which unsurprisingly goes unacknowledged as such by Claude. The quotation emblazoned on a banner and the poster declaiming the



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collusive corruption of state and banking institutions are forceful visual and verbal representations of the underlying motivations of the zombie protestors. But, as we have argued, they are also a central incarnation of materiality within the politics of the narrative and even here their physicality as a point of reference is emphasized vis-à-vis the virtual system they oppose.80 The prevailing inclement weather conditions relate to the physical exposure of the protestors, while the itemization of their needs confirms their physical embodiment. If it appears that the global system of financial capitalism has escaped the gravitational pull of material production, then ‘in a posthuman world, where the human form no longer serves as a universal equivalent, the figure of the zombie subsists as a universal residue’.81 The transience and precariousness of this protest, and its zombie actors, is another way in which the novel figures their associative significance to the larger constituencies of indebtedness and precarity in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland and elsewhere. On entering the encampment Ariadne and Claude converse with one of the zombies; initially they reflect upon the serial rioting taking place in Ariadne’s native Greece, as a result of severe austerity measures. Over the course of the extended discussion Claude cleaves to the punitive logic of his profession, while the zombie issues a riposte that Claude has difficulty in accepting or even comprehending. Claude is certain that the strictures inflicted upon the Greek economy are proportionate and, in the end, tries to assure Ariadne and the zombie that ‘Europe won’t abandon Greece’. Indicative of Claude’s worldview is his insistence that ‘[t]here are mechanisms in place. People won’t be allowed to starve’.82 The blitheness of Claude’s assurances is a provocation for the zombie to catalogue the global wreckages of previous economic adjustments by bodies such as the IMF. What follows is a blistering enumeration of the global and historical scale of capitalist exploitation: ‘Latin America in 1970s [.  .  .] Tunisia, Russia, East Asia.’ The abiding common denominator in each of these cases is debt, as he fulminates against Claude’s weak variety of benevolent capitalism: ‘It’s like this great big circle of debt, with the only result that the people with the very least get poorer and poorer and poorer.’83 From Claude’s perspective, the ragged theatricality of the zombie protest belies the cogency of the counterarguments he is subjected to by this protestor. Having previously viewed the zombies as merely a distracting spectacle, Claude is now face to face with the materiality of their encampment and engaged with an impassioned interlocutor who is emotionally and somatically exercised by his own argument. As the exchange continues, looking at the zombie Claude notices that ‘The heat in his cheeks is visible through the corpse paint’.84 The theatricality of the zombie protest is overtaken here by the affective expression of political outrage as Claude faces a further account of global inequality and human neglect: ‘In Indonesia they got rid of food supports for the poor’, the zombie interrupts. ‘In Madagascar they cut the mosquito eradication programme, and ten thousand people died of malaria.’85 As Claude senses his ‘own cheeks turn red’ he is faced with a moral argument that utterly conflicts with the moral calculus of his profession, which is overdetermined by financial considerations.86 The litany of inequities and exploitation divulged by the zombie protestor is a prelude to Claude’s high-handed insistence that

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‘The fact is,’ I persist, ‘Greece is deeply in debt. It can’t afford to pay its workers. It can’t afford to keep its electricity on. That is why the IMF is there, to stop the country from completely disintegrating.’ If they wanted to stop it disintegrating. ‘They’d just cancel the debt,’ the zombie says. ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘Write it off. It’s all imaginary anyway. Numbers on a piece of paper. So erase them.’ ‘You have to pay what you owe,’ I snap. ‘That is the cornerstone of civilization.’ Unless you’re a bank, right?’ The zombie returns.87

This is one occasion where Murray portrays Claude as a mouthpiece for financial capitalism, but it is also a fraction of his edification, particularly in the presence of his love interest, Ariadne. There is a set-piece framework to the heated dialogue between the two men, and it lays out the global wreckage wrought by capitalism in unadorned terms. For our current purposes, it materializes the protesting victims of such carnage as the ‘heat’ of the exchange registers on the faces of Claude and the protestor. There is an insoluble philosophical and political incommensurability on display here between the relative arguments on debt, reminiscent of the divergence between notions of civility and barbarism. Claude passively accepts the indefensibility of unpaid debts, while, in posing a question previously raised by Graeber, the zombie utterly subverts the dominant social contract of contemporary financial capitalism.88 At one level, the notion forwarded by the protestor is purely a matter of narration, but it is a refusal of compliance with, and participation within, dominant economic narrative norms. Murray enacts another moment of narrative self-reflexivity as part of the verbal exchange but moves from the literary to the agency of economic narratives in shaping sociocultural behaviours. As Shiller contends: ‘It seems that the human mind strives to reach enduring understanding of events by forming them into a narrative that is embedded in social interactions. [. . .] When in doubt as to how to behave in an ambiguous situation, people may think back to narratives and adopt a role as if acting in a play they have seen before.’89 The aggregation of verbal rejection and visual performance by the zombies recognizes the fact that ‘narratives have the ability to produce social norms that partially govern our activities, including our economic actions’, and stoutly protests their legitimacy.90 In tandem with the forceful verbal protest, the physical description of the zombie protestor’s enflamed facial features is a moment of human emergence and an expression of individual affect. The individual literally emerges from beneath the make-up of the performative protest, but also this instance figuratively embodies the metonymic relation of zombie to individual indebted citizen. Furthermore, Claude’s recitation of the staple values of the prevailing debt economy suggests nothing less than his own zombification, prompting the conclusion that the zombie and the financier are both metonymic fractions of the remorseless expansion of finance capitalism. Yet if there is an unbridgeable gap between the two in terms of their respective political understandings of debt, the physical registration of their emotional investments in such political positions flags a degree of commonality. The chasm between the zombie protestor and Claude exists at the level of ideas; it is an ethical discrepancy centred on debt. Yet, in drawing our attention to their



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common physicality, and to the materiality of their affective responses during the exchange, Murray intimates the possibility for reconciliation at a moral level.

Conclusion To conclude it is worth revisiting Claude’s encounter with the ruined materiality of Paul’s incomplete apartment building. Just as the algorithmic mechanics of financial capitalism have taken forms that are post-human in the velocity with which they complete transactions, the scene faced by Claude is ‘post-human’ in its evocation of material emptiness and abandonment. There is little apart from emptiness and silence facing Claude as he negotiates the desolate residential building, and this is precisely Murray’s point. The emptiness encountered in the material incarnation of the apartment block is a sign of the difficulty in trying to represent contemporary finance capitalism. As we noted in the previous chapter, Madden’s Time Present and Time Past is more oblique in its critique of the distorting effects of the representational paradigms of finance on reality. On the other hand, Murray’s The Mark and the Void, with its self-reflexiveness, addresses questions of faith, fictionality, literary form and the relationship between abstract finance and material sociality. Having accrued lessons from the works of Flann O’Brien and James Joyce, as well as Samuel Beckett, The Mark and the Void is global in form and content.91 In contradistinction to other Irish novels of the post-crash period, Murray’s looks outward, acknowledging and accepting the need to go beyond the simple attribution of blame and the provocation of guilt and shame. The foregoing analyses exhibited just how these ethical and thematic imperatives are built into the formal fabric of The Mark and the Void. The concentration that is afforded to language and to form, to intertextuality and to allusion, for example, then, are symptomatic of authorial struggles to provide representational shape to finance and its crises. But it is also a recognition of the impossibility of realizing this objective. Yet the critical effect is manifest in the novel’s performance of itself as an ‘event’ or ‘occasion’. The attention to form, and the struggle for form seen above, with respect to language, to figuration and to intertextuality, are key devices through which the narrative engages with its own provisional and derivative idioms and structures to highlight and to problematize those of finance’s immaterialities. But through its centralization of the metonymic figure of the zombie, such representational self-examination never comes at the expense of the narrative’s awareness of the acute material consequences of what Kevin Power facetiously terms ‘high-fructose capitalism’.92 Ultimately, Murray grounds the metafictional elements of The Mark and the Void in his staging of both the material performativity of the zombie protestors and the performativity of the novel as a process, as an event and as a saleable physical commodity.

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NOTES Introduction 1 Anne Haverty, The Free and Easy (London: Vintage, 2007), 5. 2 There are hints of intertextual irony with the description of Irish rain in the previous extract, specifically the ‘excess’ of Frank McCourt’s fictionalized misery memoir, Angela’s Ashes (New York: Scribner, 1996). 3 Haverty, The Free and Easy, 36. 4 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 cited in Reader in Marxist Philosophy: From the Writings of Marx, Engels and Lenin, ed. Howard Selsam and Harry Martel (New York: International Publishers, 1963), 304. 5 Bruno Amable, ‘Morals and Politics in the Ideology of Neo-Liberalism’, SocioEconomic Review 9 (2011): 4. 6 Amable continues in this vein: ‘In order to perform in an efficient and orderly way, the constraints of capitalism have to be internalized by individuals, who must then adhere to values that reinforce the social structures upon which capitalism is built. Such values and norms can be found in the various strands of economic liberalism.’ 5. On morality and the money system, see Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (London: Kegan and Paul, 1978) and Michel Aglietta, Money: 5,000 Years of Debt and Power (London: Verso, 2018). 7 Michael Lewis, Boomerang: Adventures of a Financial Meltdown Tourist (London: Allen Lane, 2011), 84. 8 Lewis’s article includes significant input from the Irish economist Morgan Kelly, who was a dissenting voice against prevailing economic practices during the Celtic Tiger: http://www​.ucd​.ie​/economics​/staff​/profmorgankelly/ 9 These case studies in Vanity Fair cover Iceland, Greece and Ireland: ‘Euro Disasterland Part 1: Iceland’ (April 2009); ‘Euro Disasterland Part 2: Greece’ (November 2010); and ‘When Irish Eyes are Crying’ (March 2011). 10 Representative of such publications are: Fintan O’Toole, Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger (London: Faber and Faber, 2009); Up the Republic!: Towards a New Ireland (London: Faber and Faber, 2012); Peadar Kirby, Celtic Tiger in Collapse: Explaining the Weaknesses of the Irish Model (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010); Debbie Ging, Michael Cronin and Peadar Kirby (ed.), Transforming Ireland: Challenges, Critiques and Resources (Manchester: Manchester University Press); and Caroline Crowley and Denis Linehan (ed.), Spacing Ireland: Place, Culture and Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). 11 Lewis, Boomerang, 88–9. 12 O’Toole, Ship of Fools, 9–10. 13 Peadar Kirby, ‘Globalization, the Celtic Tiger and Social Outcomes: Is Ireland a Model or a Mirage?’, Globalization 1, no. 2 (2004): 205–6.

204 Notes 14 Lewis, Boomerang, 85. 15 John Steinbeck, East of Eden (1952; New York: Penguin, 2000), 450. 16 On this idea see Deirdre McCloskey, ‘Storytelling in Economics’, in Narrative in Culture: The Uses of Storytelling in the Sciences, Philosophy and Literature, ed. Cristopher Nash (London: Routledge: 1990), 5–22; ‘The Literary Character of Economics’, Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 113, no. 3 (1984): 97–119; and ‘Metaphors Economists Live By’, Social Research 62, no. 2 (1995): 215–37. 17 Jeffrey C. Alexander, ‘Market as Narrative and Character’, Journal of Cultural Economy 4, no. 4 (2011): 484. 18 Robert J. Shiller, ‘Narrative Economics’, American Economic Review 107, no. 4 (2017): 994. 19 Catherine Mayer, ‘The Irish Answer’, Time, 15 October 2012. 20 Leigh Claire La Berge and Dehlia Hannah, ‘Debt Aesthetics: Medium Specificity and Social Practice in the Work of Cassie Thornton’, Postmodern Culture 25, no. 2 (2015). Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/pmc.2015.0009. See also Leigh Claire La Berge, Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 21 David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (New York: Melville House, 2011), 13. 22 Richard Dienst, The Bonds of Debt: Borrowing against the Common Good (London: Verso, 2011), 27. 23 Ibid., 101. 24 Ibid., 119. 25 David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 26. 26 Arne De Boever, Finance Fictions: Realism and Psychosis in a Time of Economic Crisis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 48. 27 Deborah Treisman, ‘George Saunders on Surprising Himself ’, The New Yorker 2 November 2020, https://newyorker​.com​/books​/this​-week​-in​-fiction​/george​ -saunders​-11​-09​-20. 28 Ibid. 29 James Wood, The Nearest Thing to Life (London: Jonathan Cape, 2015), 12–13. 30 Katy Shaw, Crunch Lit (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 89–90. 31 Nicky Marsh, Money, Finance and Speculation in Recent British Fiction (London: Continuum, 2007), 17. 32 Ibid. 33 Other noteworthy texts to which the ensuing analyses are relevant include Eilis Ni Dhuibhne, Fox, Swallow, Scarecrow (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2007); Caoilinn Hughes, Orchid and the Wasp (London: Oneworld, 2018) and The Wild Laughter (London: Oneworld, 2020); and Kevin Power, White City (London: Scribner, 2021). 34 An instructive critical intervention in this regard is Annie Galvin’s, ‘Post-crash fiction and the aesthetics of austerity in Kevin Barry’s City of Bohane’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 59, no. 5 (2018): 578–95. 35 Annie McClanahan, Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017), 23. 36 Paul Crosthwaite, Peter Knight and Nicky Marsh, ‘The Economic Humanities and the History of Financial Advice’, American Literary History 31, no. 4 (2019): 665. See also Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen (eds.), The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics (London: Routledge, 1999).

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37 Published by Oxford University Press, The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory publishes an annual review essay of the field of Economic Criticism that is especially helpful for Humanities scholars.

Chapter 1 1 Lanchester also published the fictional novel Capital (London: Faber and Faber, 2012). 2 John Lanchester, Whoops: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay (London: Allen Lane, 2010), 63. 3 Ibid., 187. 4 Peter Cunningham has also authored two other financial thrillers: The Bear’s Requiem (London: Michael Joseph, 1989) and Hostile Bid (London: Michael Joseph, 1991). 5 Nicholas J. Kiersey, ‘“Retail Therapy in the Dragon’s Den”: Neoliberalism and Affective Labour in the Popular Culture of Ireland’s Financial Crisis’, in Affective Economies, Neoliberalism, and Governmentality, ed. Anne-Marie D’Aoust (London: Routledge, 2015), 93–4. 6 Colin Coulter, ‘Introduction’, in The End of Irish History? Critical Reflections on the Celtic Tiger, ed. Colin Coulter and Steve Coleman (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 18. 7 Jeffrey Sklansky, ‘The Elusive Sovereign: New Intellectual and Social Histories of Capitalism’, Modern Intellectual History 9, no. 1 (2012): 234. 8 Amable, ‘Morals and Politics in the Ideology of Neo-Liberalism’, 5. 9 Maurizio Lazzarato, Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014), 9. 10 Ibid., 52. 11 Arjun Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’, Theory, Culture & Society 7 (1990): 301. 12 Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide (London: Verso, 2015), 201. 13 Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, Or What It’s Like to be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 40–1. 14 Chris Binchy, Open-handed (Dublin: Penguin Ireland, 2008), 16. 15 Jean-Joseph Goux, ‘Values and Speculations: The Stock Exchange Paradigm’, Cultural Values 1, no. 2 (1997): 172. 16 Ibid., 174. 17 Martijn Konings, ‘State of Speculation: Contingency, Measure, and the Politics of Plastic Value’, The South Atlantic Quarterly 114, no. 2 (2015): 253. For a similar reading to Konings’s analysis see Philip Mirowski, ‘The Rhetoric of Modern Economics’, History of the Human Sciences 3, no. 2 (1990): 243–57. 18 Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage Publications, 1992). 19 Jason Buchanan, ‘Ruined Futures: Gentrification as Famine in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Literature’, Modern Fiction Studies 63, no. 1 (2017): 51. 20 Binchy, Open-handed, 17. 21 Konings, ‘State of Speculation: Contingency, Measure, and the Politics of Plastic Value’, 253. 22 Binchy, Open-handed, 230. 23 Ibid., 11.

206 Notes 24 Ibid., 1. 25 Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, translated by Jay Miskoweic, Diacritics (Spring 1986): 22–7. These notes from a lecture given in March 1967 were published under the title ‘Des Espaces Autres’ by the journal Architecture-Mouvement-Continuite in 1984. They were reviewed for publication by the author, thus are not part of the official corpus of his work. The manuscript was released into the public domain for an exhibition in Berlin shortly before Foucault’s death. 26 Binchy, Open-handed, 2. 27 Ibid., 19. 28 On the need for non-relationality in finance fiction see De Boever Finance Fictions, 150. 29 Binchy, Open-handed, 233. 30 Sara Ahmed, ‘Happy Objects’, in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 33. 31 Luke Gibbons, Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics and the Colonial Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 55. 32 Binchy, Open-handed, 250. 33 Ibid., 250–1. 34 Ibid., 257. 35 Ibid., 251. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., 253. 38 Ibid., 254. 39 Raymond Williams, Literature and Marxism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 208–9. 40 Ibid., 209. 41 Ibid. 42 See Justin Cartwright, Other People’s Money (London: Bloomsbury, 2011); Sebastian Faulks, A Week in December (London: Vintage, 2010); and Adam Haslett, Union Atlantic (New York: Doubleday, 2009). 43 Neil Murphy, ‘Contemporary Irish Fiction and the Indirect Gaze’, in From Prosperity to Austerity: A Socio-Cultural Critique of The Celtic Tiger and Its Aftermath, ed. Eamon Maher and Eugene O’Brien (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 178. 44 Norman Denzin, Images of Postmodern Society: Social Theory and Contemporary Cinema (London: Sage Press, 1991), 83. 45 Peter Cunningham, Capital Sins (Dublin: New Island Books, 2010), 1. 46 Ibid. 47 Arjun Appadurai, Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 67. 48 Cunningham, Capital Sins, 1. 49 For a more sympathetic analysis of Cunningham’s satire in Capital Sins see Juan F. Elices, ‘Satiric Insights into Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland: The Case of Peter Cunningham’s Capital Sins’, in National Identities and Imperfections in Contemporary Irish Literature, ed. Luz Mar González-Arias (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 37–50. 50 Cunningham, Capital Sins, 2. 51 Ibid., 34. 52 Ibid., 34–5. 53 Williams, Literature and Marxism, 209.

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54 Cunningham, Capital Sins, 35. 55 Vic Merriman, ‘“Holes in the Ground”: Theatre as Critics and Conscience of Celtic Tiger Ireland’, in From Prosperity to Austerity: A Socio-Cultural Critique of The Celtic Tiger and Its Aftermath, ed. Eamon Maher and Eugene O’Brien (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 188. 56 Merriman, ‘“Holes in the Ground”: Theatre as Critics and Conscience of Celtic Tiger Ireland’, 188. 57 Peadar Kirby, ‘Contested Pedigrees of the Celtic Tiger’, in Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society and the Global Economy, ed. Peadar Kirby, Luke Gibbons and Michael Cronin (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 32–3. 58 Cunningham, Capital Sins, 138. 59 Murphy, ‘Contemporary Irish Fiction and the Indirect Gaze’, 185. 60 Cunningham, Capital Sins, 103. 61 Ibid., 27. 62 Ibid., 125. 63 Eamon Maher and Eugene O’Brien, ‘Introduction’, in From Prosperity to Austerity: A Socio-Cultural Critique of The Celtic Tiger and Its Aftermath, ed. Eamon Maher and Eugene O’Brien (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 5. 64 Julien Mercille, The Political Economy and Media Coverage of the European Economic Crisis: The Case of Ireland (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 174. 65 Cunningham, Capital Sins, 189. 66 Ibid., 222. 67 Ibid., 244. 68 Ibid., 254. 69 Ibid., 238. 70 Ibid. 71 Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992). http://ark​.cdlib​.org​/ark:​/13030​/ ft3199n7t4/ 72 Cunningham, Capital Sins, 255. 73 Susan Sontag, ‘At the Same Time: The Novelist and Moral Reasoning’, in At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches, ed. Paolo Dilonardo and Anne Jump (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2007), 213. 74 Ibid.

Chapter 2 1 Peter Knight, ‘Introduction’, Journal of Cultural Economy 6, no. 1 (2013): 3. See J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 2 In particular see Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 3 Knight, ‘Introduction’, 3. 4 Shaw, Crunch Lit, 68. 5 Ibid. 6 Similarly, Margaret Atwood argues: ‘With a mortgage, the house is the thing pawned – it’s put up as the gage – but the pledge becomes “dead” once the mortgage has been discharged. I like the word “discharge” here too – it’s what is said of an arrested

208 Notes

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

person when he or she is let out of jail.’ Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), 84. Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, 391. Fred Botting, ‘Undead-Ends: Zombie Debt/Zombie Theory’, Postmodern Culture 23, no. 3 (2013). Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/pmc.2013.0043 Étienne Balibar, ‘Politics of the Debt’, Postmodern Culture 23, no. 3 (2013). Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/pmc.2013.0049. Appadurai, Banking on Words, 61. Walter Benjamin, ‘Franz Kafka’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (London: Pimlico, 1999), 125. Ibid., 126. Seán Kennedy, ‘Fifty Shades of Green: Ireland and the Erotics of Austerity’, Breac: A Digital Journal of Irish Studies 8 (2017): np. http://breac​.nd​.edu​/articles​/fifty​-shades​ -of​-green​-ireland​-and​-the​-erotics​-of​-austerity/. Arnold Leonard Epstein, The Experience of Shame in Melanesia: An Essay in the Anthropology of Affect (Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Occasional Paper No. 40, 1984), 49. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 102. On the displacement and deferral of justice in relation to national shame see Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 120. Kennedy, ‘Fifty Shades of Green: Ireland and the Erotics of Austerity’. Martha C. Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 220. In particular, see work by Peadar Kirby on the economic inequalities that endured and were exacerbated during the Celtic Tiger ‘boom’. For instance, Peadar Kirby, The Celtic Tiger in Distress: Growth with Inequality in Ireland (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002) and Celtic In Collapse: Explaining the Weaknesses of the Irish Model (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010). June Price Tangney and Ronda L. Dearing, Shame and Guilt (New York and London: The Guildford Press, 2002), 2. Ibid. Ibid., 63. Ibid., 69. Ibid., 83. Elspeth Probyn, Blush: Faces of Shame (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 2. See Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, ed. Adam Frank, Irving E. Alexander and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). Probyn, Blush: Faces of Shame, 14. Rita Felski, ‘Nothing to Declare: Identity, Shame, and the Lower Middle Class’, PMLA 115, no. 1 (2000): 39. On this topic see Peter N. Stearns, Shame: A Brief History (Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2017). Probyn, Blush: Faces of Shame, 39. Silvia Federici, ‘From Commoning to Debt: Financialization, Microcredit, and the Changing Architecture of Capital Accumulation’, The South Atlantic Quarterly 113, no. 2 (2014): 234. Aislinn O’Donnell, ‘Shame Is Already a Revolution: The Politics of Affect in the Thought of Gilles Deleuze’, Deleuze Studies 11, no. 1 (2017): 7.

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32 For an introduction to Deleuze and affect theory see Darren Ellis and Ian Tucker, Social Psychology of Emotion (London: Sage, 2015), 62–4. 33 Barry Sheils and Julie Walsh, ‘Introduction: Shame and Modern Writing’, in Shame and Modern Writing, ed. Barry Sheils and Julie Walsh (New York: Routledge, 2018), 3. 34 Jennifer Biddle, ‘Shame’, Australian Feminist Studies 12, no. 26 (1997): 236–7. 35 On the possibilities of intensity see Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.) 36 O’Donnell, ‘Shame Is Already a Revolution: The Politics of Affect in the Thought of Gilles Deleuze’, 7–8. 37 See Timothy Bewes, The Event of Postcolonial Shame (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 38 Probyn, Blush: Faces of Shame, 73. 39 Bewes, The Event of Postcolonial Shame, 3. 40 Dermot Bolger, Tanglewood (Dublin: New Island Books, 2015), 3. 41 Ibid., 4. 42 Fiona Allon, ‘Everyday Leverage, or Leveraging the Everyday’, Cultural Studies 29, nos. 5 and 6: 700. 43 Bolger, Tanglewood, 18. 44 Ibid., 22–3. 45 The most influential study is this area is the seminal, H. B. Lewis, Shame and Guilt in Neurosis (New York: International Universities Press, 1971). 46 On shame and social convention, see Paula M. Niedenthal, Silvia Krauth-Gruber and Francois Ric, Psychology of Emotion: Interpersonal, Experiential, and Cognitive Approaches (New York: Psychology Press, 2006), 102–3. 47 Bolger, Tanglewood, 23. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., 27. 50 Ibid., 28. 51 Ibid., 46. 52 Ibid. 53 See Randy Martin, Financialization of Daily Life (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002). 54 Bolger, Tanglewood, 58. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid., 61. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid., 60. 59 Ibid., 62. 60 Ibid., 63. 61 Ibid., 38–9. 62 Ibid., 39. 63 Ibid., 269. 64 Ibid., 271. 65 Ibid., 272. 66 Ibid., 116. 67 Ibid., 212. 68 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 105. 69 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick uses similar language to Ahmed when she argues that shame is dependent upon ‘interpellation by a witness’. See her ‘Queer Performativity: Henry James ‘The Art of the Novel’, GLQ 1, no. 1 (1993): 4.

210 Notes 70 71 72 73 74

75 76 77 78

Bolger, Tanglewood, 244. Ibid., 245. Franz Kafka, The Collected Novels of Franz Kafka (London: Penguin, 1988), 172. Benjamin, ‘Franz Kafka’, 125–6. Ahmed insists upon the sociality of all emotions: ‘emotions are not “in” either the individual or the social, but produce the very surfaces and boundaries that allow the individual and the social to be delineated as if they are objects.’ The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 10. Felski, ‘Nothing to Declare: Identity, Shame, and the Lower Middle Class’, 39. For another recent and useful critical intervention on the literature of the period see Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory: Recessionary Imaginings: Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland and Contemporary Women’s Writing 28, nos. 1 and 2 (2017). Joe Cleary, ‘“Horseman, Pass By!”: The Neoliberal World System and the Crisis in Irish Literature’, Boundary 2 45, no. 1 (2018): 173. Probyn, Blush: Faces of Shame, 162.

Chapter 3 1 Jens Beckert, ‘Imagined Futures: Fictional Expectations in the Economy’, Theory and Society 42, no. 3 (2013): 220. 2 Ibid. 3 Max Haiven, ‘The Financial Crisis as a Crisis of Imagination’, Cultural Logic: A Journal of Marxist Theory & Practice 17 (2010) https://doi​.org​/10​.14288​/clogic​.v17i0​.191526. 4 Rosalind Petchesky and Meena Alexander, ‘Introduction: Life and Debt’, WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 42, nos. 1 and 2 (2014): 17. 5 Seán Kennedy, ‘Totem and Taboo in Tipperary? Neoliberal Crisis and Irish Shame in Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart’, in The Routledge International Handbook of Irish Studies, ed. Renée Fox, Mike Cronin, Brian Ó Conchubhair (London: Routledge, 2020), 393. 6 Ibid, 393–4. 7 Laura Finch, ‘The Un-real Deal: Financial Fiction, Fictional Finance, and the Financial Crisis’, Journal of American Studies 49 (2015): 734. 8 Silvan Tomkins, Affect Imagery Consciousness, Volume 2, the Negative Affects (New York: Springer, 1963), 118. 9 Jennifer Jacquet, Is Shame Necessary: New Uses for an Old Tool (London: Penguin, 2016), 9. 10 Donal Ryan, The Thing about December (Dublin: Doubleday Ireland/Lilliput Press, 2013), 10. 11 Ibid., 17. 12 Joseph Valente, ‘Self-Queering Ireland?’ The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 36, no. 1 (2010): 35. 13 On similar matters see Probyn’s, Blush: Faces of Shame. 14 Stefan Leins, Stories of Capitalism: Inside the Role of Financial Analysts (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2018), 12. 15 Ryan, The Thing about December, 28. 16 Ibid., 114. 17 Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life (London: Penguin, 2013), 14.

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18 Ibid. 19 Our reading Claire Kilroy’s The Devil I Know via Annie McClanahan’s work on the relationship between the ‘uncanny’ and indebtedness is relevant to our analysis here. 20 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2009), 4. 21 Ryan, The Thing about December, 115. 22 Ronelle Carolissen, Vivienne Bozalek and Tamara Shefer, ‘Productive Faces of Shame: An Interview with Elspeth Probyn’, Feminism & Psychology 29, no. 2 (2019): 325. 23 Atwood makes the pertinent point: ‘Like all our financial arrangements, and like all our rules of moral conduct – in fact, like language itself – notions about debt form part of the elaborate imaginative construct that is human society.’ Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, 203. 24 Ryan, The Thing about December, 176. 25 Ibid., 144. 26 Ibid., 145. 27 Ibid., 144. 28 Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, cited in Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 4. 29 Patrick Sheeran, ‘Genius Fabulae: The Irish Sense of Place’, Irish University Review 18, no. 2 (1988): 191–206. Sheeran makes the point: ‘The list of our sins of commission and omission with regard to the landscape (understood as the environment modified by the permanent presence of a group of people) is daunting, even if we omit the cardinal sin of pollution. Let us call them to mind: the destruction of field monuments (up to 60% in some areas), coniferization of marginal land, arterial drainage that flings up spoil heaps of raw earth, geometric forestry plantation on undulating hills, cavernous, corrugated steel farm outbuildings in glossy colours, the destruction of hedgerows and their replacement by brick walls, the use of bland asbestos on roofs rather than natural slate, litter and rubbish everywhere. Given all of this we might more properly speak of a sense of placelessness rather than a sense of place.’ 194. 30 Ryan, The Thing about December, 126. 31 See Kirby, The Celtic Tiger in Distress: Growth with Inequality in Ireland. 32 In The Devil I Know, Claire Kilroy touches on similar phenomena; her narrator describes his business partner’s cultivation of just such publicity about property. The relationship between property sale and voyeuristic media also crops up in Justin Quinn’s novel Mount Merrion. 33 On the role of the Irish mainstream media in this context see Mercille, The Political Economy and Media Coverage of the European Economic Crisis: The Case of Ireland. 34 Ryan, The Thing about December, 137–8. 35 Again, Atwood makes a related point on the proximity of narration and financial indebtedness: ‘Put another way: without story, there is no debt. [. . .] A story is a string of actions occurring over time [. . .] and debt happens as a result of actions occurring over time. Therefore, any debt involves a plot line: how you got into debt, what you did, said, and thought while you were in there, and then – depending on whether the ending is happy or sad – how you got out of debt, or else how you got further and further into it until you became overwhelmed by it, and sank from view.’ Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, 81. 36 See Lazzarato, Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity. 37 Jacquet, Is Shame Necessary, 35.

212 Notes 38 Fintan O’Toole, ‘Foreword’, in Cultural Perspectives on Globalisation and Ireland, ed. Eamon Maher (Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang, 2009), x–xi. 39 Relevant work in this area would be Joe Cleary, Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland (Dublin: Field Day Books, 2006); Luke Gibbons Transformations in Irish Culture (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996) and David Lloyd, Ireland after History (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999). 40 See O’Toole, ‘Foreword’, x–xi. 41 Sharae Deckard, ‘Mapping the World Ecology: Conjectures on World-Ecological Literature’, https://www​.academia​.edu​/2083255​/Mapping​_the​_World​-Ecology​ _Conjectures​_on​_World​-Ecological​_Literature. 42 Donal Ryan, The Spinning Heart (Dublin: Doubleday Ireland/Lilliput Press, 2012), 97. 43 Iain Sinclair, Downriver (1991; London: Penguin, 2004), 265. 44 On disavowal and the money economy see Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 18. 45 Ryan, The Spinning Heart, 13. 46 Ibid., 12. 47 Nouriel Roubini, http://www​.rgemonitor​.com​/roubini​-monitor​/253783​/is​_ purchasing​_700​_billion​_of​_toxic​_assets​_the​_best​_way​_to​_recapitalize​_the​_financial​ _system​_no​_it​_is​_rather​_a​_disgrace​_and​_rip​-off​_benefitting​_only​_the​_shareholders​ _and​_unsecured​_creditors​_of​_banks. See also Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (NY and London: MacMillan, 1962); Ha Joon Chang, Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007); and Dean Baker, The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer (Washington, DC: Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2006). 48 Karyn Ball, ‘Death-Driven Futures, or You Can’t Spell Deconstruction without Enron’, Cultural Critique 65 (2007): 12. 49 Kaye Mitchell, ‘Cleaving to the Scene of Shame: Stigmatized Childhoods in The End of Alice and Two Girls, Fat and Thin’, Contemporary Women’s Writing 7, no. 3 (2013): 311. 50 Fisher argues: ‘To a degree unprecedented in any other social system, capitalism both feeds on and reproduces the moods of populations. Without delirium and confidence, capital could not function.’ Capitalist Realism, 35. 51 See Battersby’s review of The Spinning Heart: ‘District with the Downturn Blues’, The Irish Times, 10 November 2012. 52 Ryan, The Spinning Heart, 39. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid., 37. 55 Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death (London: Sage Publications, 1993), 6. 56 Ryan, The Spinning Heart, 17–18. 57 Paul Crosthwaite, ‘Blood on the Trading Floor: Waste, Sacrifice, and Death in Financial Crises’, Angelaki 15, no. 2 (2010): 4. 58 Ibid., 5. 59 Jean-Francois Lyotard, Libidinal Economy (London: Athlone, 1993), 60. 60 Aligning death, finance and fictitious capital, Ball argues: ‘the conventional wisdom I want to reiterate is that the deconstruction of value attests to the dead-labor dividing tendency of fictitious capital as the horizon of all forms of valuation. This “death drive” is a force of socio-economic abstraction that displaces the vitality of socially necessary labor with the fantasy of a profit-saturated presence.’ ‘Death-Driven Futures, or You Can’t Spell Deconstruction without Enron.’ 17.

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61 Crosthwaite makes the argument that from a global perspective ‘there could be no clearer case of a period of speculation in which each transaction inevitably, and more or less knowingly, prepared the way for a colossal and pervasive write off of value, from which none of the major institutional players would emerge unscathed’, ‘Blood on the Trading Floor: Waste, Sacrifice, and Death in Financial Crises’, 13. 62 Ryan, The Spinning Heart, 121. 63 Ibid., 125. 64 Considering Walter Benjamin’s essay, ‘Capitalism as Religion’, Martin McQuillan and Simon Wortham note: ‘Here, capitalism’s [cultic] survival manifests itself according to an ingrained incapacity to acknowledge finitude. The twin figures of indebtedness and redemption [or, to push the term towards a more economic register, redeemability] together form a central part of the “economic theology” that emerges here.’ ‘Introduction’, Postmodern Culture 23, no. 3 (2013). Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/ pmc.2013.0046. These are expanded upon in detail in Samuel Weber, ‘The Debt of the Living’, Postmodern Culture 23, no. 3 (2013). Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/pmc.2013.0039 See also Fredric Jameson, The Benjamin Files (London: Verso, 2020), 154. 65 De Boever, Finance Fictions: Realism and Psychosis in a Time of Economic Crisis, 63. 66 Ibid., 13. 67 Two other chaptered narratives, relayed by Trevor and Lloyd, are also relevant to a consideration of The Spinning Heart’s attention to the relationship between psychosis and financial capitalism. These can be found between pages 62–7 and 103–7, respectively. 68 Michael Löwy, ‘The Current of Critical Irrealism: “A Moonlit Enchanted Night”’, in Adventures in Realism, ed. Matthew Beaumont (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 193–206. 69 Ryan, The Spinning Heart, 139. 70 Ibid., 140. 71 WReC (Warwick Research Collective), Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 95. 72 Mary McGlynn, ‘“No Difference Between the Different Kinds of Yesterday”: The Neoliberal Present in The Green Road, The Devil I Know, and The Lives of Women’, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 28, no. 1 (2017): 51. 73 Berardi, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide, 204. 74 Justin Carville, ‘Topographies of Terror: Photography and the Post-Celtic Tiger Landscape’, in From Prosperity to Austerity: A Socio-Cultural Critique of The Celtic Tiger and Its Aftermath, ed. Eamon Maher and Eugene O’Brien (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 116. 75 In a related vein see Luke Gibbons, ‘“The Wild West of European Finance”: Anachronism, Modernity and the Irish Crisis’, Field Day Review 7 (2011): 122–37. 76 Ryan, The Spinning Heart, 42. 77 Ibid. 78 Terrence McDonough, ‘The Irish Crash in Global Context’, World Review of Political Economy 1, no. 3 (2010): 442. 79 Edna O’Brien, Country Girl: A Memoir (London: Faber and Faber, 2012), 321.

Chapter 4 1 M. M. Bakhtin, ‘Epic and Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 37.

214 Notes 2 Joseph Slaughter, ‘Enabling Fictions and Novel Subjects: The Bildungsroman and International Human Rights Law’, PMLA 121, no. 5 (2006): 1410. 3 Alexander, ‘Market as Narrative and Character’, 484. 4 On homo economicus see Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979 (London: Picador, 2010). More recently see Peter Fleming’s The Death of Homo Economicus: Work, Debt and the Myth of Endless Accumulation (London: Pluto Press, 2017). 5 Petchesky and Alexander concisely suggest that ‘Whether seeking justice or imposing injustice, debt has its own temporality, compressing and bringing forward pasts, reconfiguring and elongating futures’. ‘Introduction: Life and Debt’, 17. 6 On the recent financial crisis and the politics of time and money, see Lisa Adkins, The Time of Money (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018). 7 Russell A. Berman, ‘Modernism and the Bildungsroman: Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Modern German Novel, ed. Graham Bartram (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 84–5. 8 The echo of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is explicit in the novel’s engagement with the bildungsroman, or the novel of development. Though Joyce’s text is more akin to the kunstlerroman. Eliot’s The Waste Land is alluded to at the beginning of Mount Merrion: ‘All their works and days gathered into Christ’s arms. All the farmer’s works and days as well. All Declan’s. He was sure that was true’ (23). In his fragmented and allusive verse, Eliot, in turn, is referencing Hesiod’s Works and Days. 9 Pieter Vermeulen and Ortwin de Graef, ‘Bildung and the State in the Long Nineteenth Century’, Partial Answers 10, no. 2 (2012): 243. 10 On Irish literary history and the bildungsroman, see Michael G. Cronin, Impure Thoughts: Sexuality, Catholicism and Literature in Twentieth-Century Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012); Richard T. Murphy, ‘A Minority of One: Francis Stuart’s Black List, Section H and the End of the Irish Bildungsroman’, Irish University Review 34, no. 2 (2004): 261–76; and ‘Monuments of Unageing Embarrassment: Brinsley McNamara and the Bildungsroman in the Irish Free State’, New Hibernia Review 17, no. 4 (2013): 73–92. 11 Useful guides in these areas are Robert F. Tally, Spatiality (London: Routledge, 2013); and Russell West-Pavlov, Temporalities (London: Routledge, 2013). 12 Justin Quinn, Mount Merrion (Dublin: Penguin Ireland, 2013), 3. 13 Gerard Manley Hopkins ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’. 14 Slaughter, ‘“Bildungsroman” and International Human Rights Law’, 1410. 15 Ibid., 1415. 16 Quinn, Mount Merrion, 262. 17 Ibid. 18 Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925; Ware, Herts.: Wordsworth Editions, 1996), 141. 19 Declan’s daughter, Issie, invokes yet another resonant novelistic ending that dwells on the relationship between the past and the present, and the passage of time, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, The Great Gatsby. Issie quotes from the close of Fitzgerald’s novel, Mount Merrion, 148–9. 20 Quinn, Mount Merrion, 18. 21 Ibid., 19. 22 Paul Virilio, The Administration of Fear (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012), 36–7. Virilio continues: ‘Speed, the cult of speed, is the propaganda of progress. The problem is that progress has become contaminated with its propaganda.’ 38.

Notes 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

215

Quinn, Mount Merrion, 45–6. Ibid., 53. Ibid. Ibid., 125–6. Ibid., 136. Jed Esty, Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 18. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 17 and 24. On related issues see Tobias Boes, Formative Fictions: Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Bildungsroman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 20–1. Esty, Unseasonable Youth, 24. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (London: Pimlico, 1999), 87. Ibid. Ibid. Saskia Sassen, ‘Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global: Elements for a Theorization’, Public Culture 12, no. 1 (2000): 215–16. A recent sociological intervention on the politics of time is Sarah Sharma, In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). For such narrations of the Celtic Tiger see, for instance, Declan Kiberd, The Irish Writer and the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Sassen, ‘Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global: Elements for a Theorization’, 223. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (1964; London: Routledge, 1991), xliii–xliv. See Lloyd, Ireland after History and David Lloyd, Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity, 1800–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). In addition to Lloyd’s work, see Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture and Conor McCarthy, Modernisation, Crisis and Culture in Ireland 1969–1992 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000). David Lloyd, Irish Times: Temporalities of Modernity (Dublin: Field Day Books, 2008), 72. Ibid., 71. Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (1997; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), xvi. Ibid., 20. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944; New York: Continuum, 1972), 215. Ibid., 216. Ibid. Quinn, Mount Merrion, 141–2. On the figure of the child and notions of futurity, see Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). Quinn, Mount Merrion, 150. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (London: Routledge, 1994), 4. Quinn, Mount Merrion, 155. Ibid., 156.

216 Notes 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

61 62 63

Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, 22. Esty, Unseasonable Youth, 15. Quinn, Mount Merrion, 109. Ibid. Ibid., 123. Gregory Castle, ‘My Self, My Other: Modernism and Postcolonial Bildung in Assia Djebar’s Algerian Quartet’, Modern Fiction Studies 59, no. 3 (2013): 633. Ibid., 634. Later in the same essay Castle highlights the distinction that Djebar makes between masculine and feminine temporal regimes: ‘Against the nation-time of masculine coming of age (which maps onto the larger process of national Bildung), we find, among Djebar’s “new and formidable interlocutors,” the women of Algeria, a form of woman’s time that subordinates history to the cultivation of self. “As for time”, Julia Kristeva writes, “female subjectivity would seem to provide a specific measure that essentially retains repetition and eternity from among the multiple modalities of time known through the history of civilizations”.’ 634. Ibid. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, 8. Lloyd, Irish Times: Temporalities of Modernity, 75.

Chapter 5 1 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, October 59 (1992): 6. 2 Fiona Allon, ‘Money, Debt, and the Business of “Free Stuff ”’, The South Atlantic Quarterly 114, no. 2 (2015): 284. Allon’s essay is part of a themed special issue on the topic of ‘Rethinking Money, Debt, and Finance after the Crisis’. Likewise, American Quarterly has recently had a themed issue on ‘Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime’, 64, no. 3 (2012); Critical Sociology published a themed issue on ‘The Legacy of Debt’, 40, no. 5 (2014); and PMLA included a themed section entitled, ‘Economics, Finance, Capital, and Literature’, in 127, no. 1 (2012). 3 Tayyab Mahmud, ‘Debt and Discipline’, American Quarterly 64, no. 3 (2012): 482. 4 Earlier in the same piece, Mahmud suggests: ‘neoliberal financialization dramatically expanded the scope and reach of credit in general and mortgage-driven home ownership in particular. Concurrently, neoliberalism opened up new frontiers for the disciplinary operations of debt: self-discipline by indebted masses engulfed by the financialized economy and refashioned governmentalities.’ 481. 5 Ibid., 485. See also Federici, ‘From Commoning to Debt: Financialization, Microcredit, and the Changing Architecture of Capital Accumulation’. 6 On related issues on debt and discipline see Nicholas J. Kiersey, ‘Everyday Neoliberalism and the Subjectivity of Crisis: Post-Political Control in an Era of Financial Turmoil’, Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies 4 (2011): 23–44. 7 On the latter term see Charlotte Sussman, ‘The Colonial Afterlife of Political Arithmetic: Swift, Demography, and Mobile Populations’, Cultural Critique 56 (2004): 96–126. 8 Jonathan Swift, ‘A Modest Proposal’, in The Essential Writings of Jonathan Swift, ed. Claude Rawson and Ian Higgins (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010), 297. 9 V. S. Naipaul, A House for Mister Biswas (1961; London: Penguin, 1969), 586. 10 Ibid., 86–8.

Notes

217

11 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 43. 12 Ibid., 40. 13 On Lazzarato’s work see James Muldoon, ‘Lazzarato and the Micro-Politics of Invention’, Theory, Culture & Society 31, no. 6 (2014): 57–76. 14 Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition (Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2012) and Maurizio Lazzarato, Governing by Debt (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotexte, 2015). 15 Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man, 32. 16 Ibid., 42. 17 Butler has written on the performative nature of the market economy; see Judith Butler, ‘Performative Agency’, Journal of Cultural Economy 3, no. 2 (2010): 147–61. 18 Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man, 7. 19 Muldoon, ‘Lazzarato and the Micro-Politics of Invention’, 66. 20 Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man, 88. 21 On the entrepreneurial subject see Miranda Joseph, Debt to Society: Accounting for Life under Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). Joseph argues: ‘Entrepreneurial subjects are made, not born. Over the past few decades, as numerous scholars have demonstrated, so-called entrepreneurial subjectivity has been promoted and incited through political rhetoric and through changes in policies and institutional practices.’ 92. 22 Walter Benjamin, ‘Capitalism as Religion’, in Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913–1926, ed. M. Bullock and M. W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 288. 23 On debt and guilt see Elettra Stimilli, Debt and Guilt: A Political Philosophy (London: Bloomsbury, 2019). 24 R. F. Foster, Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change, 1970–2000 (London: Allen Lane, 2007), 7. 25 P. J. Mathews, ‘In Praise of Hibernocentrism: Republicanism, Globalisation and Irish Culture’, The Republic: A Journal of Contemporary and Historical Debate 4 (2005): 10. 26 Ibid., 9. 27 P. J. Mathews, Revival: The Abbey Theatre, Sinn Féin, the Gaelic League and the Co-operative Movement (Cork: Cork University Press, 2003). 28 Kiberd, The Irish Writer and the World, 287. 29 Ibid., 276. 30 Ibid., 272. 31 One of earliest critical interventions on Ireland’s Celtic Tiger economy was Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society and the Global Economy, ed. Michael Cronin, Luke Gibbons and Peadar Kirby (London: Pluto Press, 2002). While an early literarycritical intervention is Susan Cahill, Irish Literature in the Celtic Tiger Years 1990 to 2008: Gender, Bodies, Memory (London: Continuum Press, 2011). 32 Muldoon, ‘Lazzarato and the Micro-Politics of Invention’, 68. 33 David Duffy and Austin Hughes, ‘Consumers and Debt; Are They Worried? Should We Be?’ 3. https://www​.esri​.ie​/pubs​/OPEA054​_Consumers​%20and​%20Debt​.pdf. 34 See Yvonne McCarthy and Kieran McQuinn’s 2014 ESRI Report, ‘Consumption and the Housing Market: An Irish Perspective’, https://www​.esri​.ie​/pubs​/BP201501​.pdf. 35 Seamus Coffey, ‘Who “Went Mad Borrowing”?’ http://economic​-incentives​.blogspot​ .com​/search​?q​=mad Coffey quotes the Irish Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, who at the World Economic Forum on 26 January 2012 concluded that ‘What happened in our

218 Notes country was that people simply went mad borrowing. The extent of personal credit, personal wealth created on credit was done between people and banks – a system that spawned greed to a point where it just went out of control completely with a spectacular crash. The country borrowed over €60 billion at excessive rates and the IMF eventually came in with the Troika.’ 36 Balibar, ‘Politics of the Debt’, Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/pmc.2013.0049. 37 For a thorough review of the Celtic Tiger ‘boom’ and ‘bust’ see Peter Nyberg et al., ‘Misjudging Risk: Causes of the Systemic Banking Crisis in Ireland – Report of the Commission of Investigation into the Banking Sector in Ireland, March 2011.’ http:// www​.bankinginquiry​.gov​.ie​/Documents​/Misjuding​%20Risk​%20-​%20Causes​%20of​ %20the​%20Systemic​%20Banking​%20Crisis​%20in​%20Ireland​.pdf. In this report the following conclusions are reached: ‘The way Irish households, investors, banks and public authorities voluntarily reacted to foreign and domestic developments was probably not very different to that in other countries now experiencing financial problems. However, the extent to which large parts of Irish society were willing to let the good times roll on until the very last minute (a feature of the financial mania) may have been exceptional [.  .  .] Lending growth was substantial in all covered banks and was largely concentrated in the property sector. In order to facilitate growth and make banks more competitive, credit and lending policies gradually became more relaxed and were frequently ignored or bypassed with exceptions to policy becoming commonplace. Furthermore, sector limits and individual exposure limits, where they existed, were regularly exceeded.’ ii and 90.

38 Dennis O’Driscoll, ‘The Celtic Tiger’, Weather Permitting (Vancouver: Anvil Press, 1999) and Paul Durcan, ‘The Celtic Tiger’, The Art of Life (London: Harvill Press, 2004). 39 Dienst, The Bonds of Debt: Borrowing against the Common Good, 129. 40 Simon Morgan Wortham, ‘What We Owe to Retroactivity: The Origin and Future of Debt’, Postmodern Culture 23, no. 3 (2013). Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/ pmc.2013.0052. 41 Joshua Clover, ‘Retcon: Value and Temporality in Poetics’, Representations 126 (2014): 16. 42 O’Driscoll, ‘The Celtic Tiger’, 15. 43 Ibid. 44 Fintan O’Toole, Enough is Enough: How to Build a New Republic (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 3. 45 O’Driscoll, ‘The Celtic Tiger’, 15. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid. 49 Diane Negra, ‘Urban Space, Luxury Retailing and the New Irishness’, Cultural Studies 24, no. 6 (2010): 838. 50 O’Driscoll, ‘The Celtic Tiger’, 15. 51 Ibid. 52 Dienst, The Bonds of Debt: Borrowing against the Common Good, 119. 53 O’Driscoll, ‘The Celtic Tiger’, 15. 54 Ibid. 55 Derek Mahon, ‘At Ursula’s’, Life on Earth (Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 2008), 50–1.

Notes

219

56 Michael Cronin, ‘Ireland’s Disappeared: Suicide, Violence and Austerity’, in Ireland under Austerity: Neoliberal Crisis, Neoliberal Solutions, ed. Colin Coulter and Angela Nagle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 140. 57 Ibid. 58 For a useful importation of Foucault’s work into discussions of the Celtic Tiger see Kiersey, ‘“Retail Therapy in the Dragon’s Den”: Neoliberalism and Affective Labour in the Popular Culture of Ireland’s Financial Crisis’. 59 Claire Kilroy, The Devil I Know (London: Faber and Faber, 2012), 16. 60 McClanahan, Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture, 54. 61 Ibid. 62 Marie Mianowski, Post-Celtic Tiger Landscapes in Irish Fiction (London: Routledge, 2017), 84. 63 Hamilton Carroll and Annie McClanahan, ‘Fictions of Speculation: Introduction’, Journal of American Studies 49, no. 4 (2015): 657. 64 See Martin, Financialization of Daily Life. 65 Kilroy, The Devil I Know, 5. 66 Ibid., n.p. 67 Ibid., 354. 68 Vera Kreilkamp, ‘The Novel of the Big House’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel, ed. John Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 67. See also Vera Kreilkamp, The Anglo-Irish Novel and the Big House (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998), and Julian Moynahan, Anglo-Irish: The Literary Imagination in a Hyphenated Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 69 Kilroy, The Devil I Know, 355–6. 70 Mary Burke, ‘Claire Kilroy: An Overview and an Interview’, LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory 28, no. 1 (2017): 17. 71 Kilroy, The Devil I Know, 360–1. 72 On this see Burke, ‘Claire Kilroy: An Overview and an Interview’, 24. 73 Stimilli, Debt and Guilt: A Political Philosophy, 7. 74 Debbie Ging, Michael Cronin and Peadar Kirby, ‘Introduction’, in Transforming Ireland: Challenges, Critiques and Resources, ed. Debbie Ging, Michael Cronin and Peadar Kirby (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 4. 75 Ibid., 5. 76 Melinda Cooper, Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (Seattle, WA: Washington University Press, 2008), 30.

Chapter 6 1 T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, 1943). 2 For an analysis of Madden’s other literary fictions and their response to the Celtic Tiger see Sylvie Mikowski, ‘“What Does a Woman Want?”: Irish Contemporary Fiction and the Expression of Desire in an Era of Plenty’, in From Prosperity to Austerity: A Socio-Cultural Critique of The Celtic Tiger and Its Aftermath, ed. Eamon Maher and Eugene O’Brien (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 89–102. 3 Patricia Drechsel Tobin, Time and the Novel: The Genealogical Imperative (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 6.

220 Notes 4 Lazzarato, The Making of Indebted Man, 85. 5 De Boever, Finance Fictions: Realism and Psychosis in a Time of Economic Crisis, 23. 6 Alison Shonkwiler, The Financial Imaginary: Economic Mystification and the Limits of Realist Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), xxv. 7 Ibid., xxv–xxvi. 8 On these issues see Alison Shonkwiler and Leigh Claire La Berge, ed. Reading Capitalist Realism (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014). 9 Ibid., xxvi. 10 Paul Crosthwaite, ‘“Soon the Economic System Will Crumble”: Financial Crisis and Contemporary British Avant-Garde Writing’, The Review of Contemporary Fiction 32, no. 2 (2012): 39. 11 Cleary, ‘“Horseman, Pass By!”: The Neoliberal World System and the Crisis in Irish Literature’, 173. 12 On the term ‘debt economy’ see Martin McQuillan and Simon Morgan Wortham, ‘Introduction’, Postmodern Culture 23, no. 3 (2013), and Simon Morgan Wortham, ‘Time of Debt: On the Nietzschean Origins of Lazzarato’s Indebted Man’, Radical Philosophy 180 (July/August 2013): 35–43. 13 McGlynn, ‘“No Difference Between the Different Kinds of Yesterday”: The Neoliberal Present in The Green Road, The Devil I Know, and The Lives of Women’, 36. 14 Ibid. 15 Shonkwiler, The Financial Imaginary: Economic Mystification and the Limits of Realist Fiction, 126–7. 16 De Boever, Finance Fictions: Realism and Psychosis in a Time of Economic Crisis, 17. 17 Ibid., 99. 18 Anna Kornbluh, Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 11. 19 Ibid., 4. 20 Shonkwiler, The Financial Imaginary: Economic Mystification and the Limits of Realist Fiction, 98. 21 Ibid. 22 Bewes, The Event of Postcolonial Shame. 23 Shonkwiler, The Financial Imaginary: Economic Mystification and the Limits of Realist Fiction, 98. 24 Deirdre Madden, Time Present and Time Past (London: Faber and Faber, 2013), 1. 25 Ibid., 6. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 6–7. 28 Ibid., 7. 29 Ibid. 30 This brief section explicitly echoes, and re-works, Wordsworth’s wishes for his sister in ‘Tintern Abbey’. It is the first of several transhistorical literary allusions in the novel. 31 Madden, Time Present and Time Past, 9–10. 32 Ibid., 10–11. 33 Ibid., 11–12. 34 Ibid., 56. 35 Ibid., 108–9. 36 Ibid., 77–8. 37 Lazzarato, Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity, 100.

Notes 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

221

Ibid., 100–1. McClanahan, Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture, 17–18. Joseph, Debt to Society: Accounting for Life under Capitalism, 2. McClanahan, Dead Pledges, Ibid., 129. Kornbluh, Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form, 13. Madden, Time Present and Time Past, 72. Specifically, Stephen Dedalus’s in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. McClanahan, Dead Pledges, 132. Madden, Time Present and Time Past, 134. Ibid. Ibid., 135. Ibid., 140–1. Ibid., 141. Adam Phillips, ‘The Telling of Selves: Notes on Psychoanalysis and Autobiography’, On Flirtation (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), 67. Andrew Miller, ‘Lives Unled in Realist Fiction’, Representations 98, no. 1 (2007): 122. Ibid. Andrew Miller, On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), xiii. Madden, Time Present and Time Past, 15. Ibid., 21. Ibid., 90. Miller, ‘Lives Unled in Realist Fiction’, 120. Madden, Time Present and Time Past, 162–3. Ibid., 163. Ibid. Adam Phillips, ‘Contingency for Beginners’, On Flirtation, 21. Sarah Comyn, Political Economy and the Novel: A Literary History of ‘Homo Economicus’ (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave, 2018), 101. Jason Buchanan, ‘The Home of the Tiger: Economic Speculation and the Ethics of Habitation’, Studi Irlandesi: A Journal of Irish Studies 3 (2013): 139. See De Boever, Finance Fictions: Realism and Psychosis in a Time of Economic Crisis, 41. Finch, ‘The Un-real Deal: Financial Fiction, Fictional Finance, and the Financial Crisis’, 752.

Chapter 7 1 Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance (Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2012), 19. 2 Karl Marx, ‘Credit and Fictitious Capital’, Capital: Critique of Political Economy: Volume Three (1894; London: Penguin, 1992). 3 For further analysis of fictitious capital and finance, see Cedric Durand, Fictitious Capital: How Finance Is Appropriating Our Future (London: Verso, 2017). 4 Max Haiven, ‘Finance as Capital’s Imagination?: Reimagining Value and Culture in an Age of Fictitious Capital and Crisis’, Social Text 108 (2011): 116.

222 Notes 5 Haiven, ‘The Financial Crisis as a Crisis of Imagination’, https://doi​.org​/10​.14288​/ clogic​.v17i0​.191526. 6 De Boever, Finance Fictions: Realism and Psychosis in a Time of Economic Crisis, 154. 7 Christopher Breu, ‘Debt and Sensuality’, in The Debt Age, ed. Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Peter Hitchcock and Sophia A. McClennen (London: Routledge, 2018), 42. 8 Ibid., 45. 9 Ibid., 47. 10 Joe Deville and Gregory J. Seigworth, ‘Everyday Debt and Credit’, Cultural Studies 29, nos. 5 and 6 (2015): 618. 11 Sassen, ‘Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global: Elements for a Theorization’, 218. 12 Martin, Financialization of Daily Life, 192. 13 Knight, ‘Introduction’, 4. 14 Peter Hitchcock, ‘Accumulating Fictions’, Representations 126, no. 1 (2014): 139. 15 Ibid., 141. 16 Christian Marazzi, The Violence of Financial Capitalism (Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2011), 123. 17 Ibid. 18 Hitchcock, ‘Accumulating Fictions’, 147. 19 Eileen Battersby, ‘Review of Paul Murray, The Mark and the Void’, The Irish Times, 11 July 2015, https://www​.irishtimes​.com​/culture​/books​/the​-mark​-and​-the​-void​-by​ -paul​-murray​-review​-1​.2277627. 20 Ibid. 21 De Boever, Finance Fictions, 28. 22 Ibid., 154. 23 Paul Crosthwaite, ‘Is a Financial Crisis a Trauma?’ Cultural Critique 82 (2012): 36. 24 Paul Murray, The Mark and the Void (London: Penguin, 2015), 1. 25 Martin McQuillan, ‘False Economy’, Postmodern Culture 23, no. 3 (2013). Project Muse doi:10.1353/pmc.2013.0041. 26 Murray, The Mark and the Void, 1. 27 Appadurai, Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance, 6. 28 Ibid., 61. 29 Michael Kaplan, ‘Iconomics: The Rhetoric of Speculation’, Public Culture 15, no. 3 (2003): 479. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 487. 32 Murray, The Mark and the Void, 1–2. 33 Kaplan, ‘Iconomics: The Rhetoric of Speculation’, 488. 34 Murray, The Mark and the Void, 3. 35 Shonkwiler, The Financial Imaginary: Economic Mystification and the Limits of Realist Fiction, 2. 36 Murray, The Mark and the Void, 3. 37 Ibid. 38 McCloskey, ‘Metaphors Economists Live By’, 230. 39 Murray, The Mark and the Void, 13–14. 40 Ibid., 14–15. 41 Ibid., 45. 42 Ibid., 47–8. 43 Ibid., 48.

Notes 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

63 64 65 66 67

68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

223

Ibid., 76. Ibid. Goux, ‘Values and Speculations: The Stock Exchange Paradigm’, 171. Murray, The Mark and the Void, 76. Ibid., 341. Ibid., 342. Paul Crosthwaite, The Market Logics of Contemporary Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 167. Beckert, ‘Imagined Futures: Fictional Expectations in the Economy’, 235. Murray, The Mark and the Void, 85. Ibid., 113. Ibid. Ibid. Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot Introduction by Raymond R. Canon (New York: Airmont Publishing, [1835] 1965), 95. Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities (New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1987). Murray, The Mark and the Void, 114. Ibid., 3. Nicky Marsh ‘“Paradise Falls: A Land Lost in Time”: Representing Credit, Debt and Work after the Crisis’, Textual Practice 28, no. 7 (2014): 1184–5. Steve Shaviro, ‘Capitalist Monsters’, Historical Materialism 10, no. 4 (2002): 282. Kieran Keohane and Carmen Kuhling make the point that ‘The zombie is the proletarian subject of the dawn of the dead as the age of global total capitalism [. . .] It is now a common view that post-Celtic Tiger Ireland is a haunted landscape of ghost estates and zombie banks cannibalizing the State.’ ‘“What rough beast”? Monsters of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland’, in From Prosperity to Austerity: A Socio-Cultural Critique of The Celtic Tiger and Its Aftermath, ed. Eamon Maher and Eugene O’Brien (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 140. Botting, ‘Undead-Ends: Zombie Debt/Zombie Theory’, Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/ pmc.2013.0043. Ibid. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, ‘Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants and Millennial Capitalism’, CODESRIA Bulletin 3 and 4 (1999): 18. Shaviro, ‘Capitalist Monsters’, 288. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 335. They employ similar terms when they argue ‘the myth of the zombie, of the living dead, is a work myth and not a war myth’, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Volume 2 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 425. Murray, The Mark and the Void, 50. Ibid. Ibid., 75. Botting, ‘Undead-Ends: Zombie Debt/Zombie Theory’. Comaroff and Comaroff, ‘Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants and Millennial Capitalism’, 23. Ibid., 196. Ibid., 54. Ibid.

224 Notes 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91

92

Botting, ‘Undead-Ends: Zombie Debt/Zombie Theory’. Murray, The Mark and the Void, 54. Shaviro, ‘Capitalist Monsters’, 288. Murray, The Mark and the Void, 241. Martin argues that despite the free-floating nature of finance ‘the social effects of this accelerating circulation are quite tangible’, Financialization of Daily Life, 192. Botting, ‘Undead-Ends: Zombie Debt/Zombie Theory’. Murray, The Mark and the Void, 242. Ibid., 242–3. Ibid., 243. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. See Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years, 1–19. Shiller, ‘Narrative Economics’, 972. Ibid. Adam Kelly makes the case that ‘The Mark and the Void – with its research into financial capitalism consistently informing its account of contemporary life – makes clear that we must move beyond this traditional realist or naturalist novel if we are truly to understand our present-day, neoliberal moment’. ‘Ireland’s Real Economy: Postcrash Fictions of the Celtic Tiger’, in The New Irish Studies, ed. Paige Reynolds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 200. Kevin Power, White City (London: Scribner, 2021), 137.

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INDEX accountability  6, 19, 92, 95, 143, 175, 187–8, 194 Adkins, Lisa  214 n.6 Adorno, Theodor  45 and Max Horkheimer  116–17 affect  12, 14, 18–19, 54, 58–9, 62, 67–8, 77, 91, 131, 163, 165–6, 178, 200 affective  8–9, 12–13, 18, 28–9, 52, 54–61, 63–4, 67–8, 72, 75, 77, 79, 82, 86, 90, 92, 106–7, 113, 128, 132, 135, 140–2, 146, 154, 161–6, 169, 171, 176, 179, 191, 199, 201 Aglietta, Michel Money: 5,000 Years of Debt and Power  203 n.6 Ahern, Bertie  147 Ahmed, Sarah  29 Alexander, Jeffrey  101 Allon, Fiona  61, 216 n.2 Amable, Bruno  4, 203 n.6 anachrony  150 analepsis  150 Appadurai, Arjun  20, 53, 177–8 Atwood, Margaret  207 n.6 austerity  6–7, 18, 54–5, 127, 167, 199 Baker, Dean  212 n.47 Balibar, Etienne  53, 136 Ball, Karyn  90 Battersby, Eileen  175 Baudrillard, Jean  93 Beck, Ulrich  21 Beckert, Jens  75, 187 Benjamin, Walter  54, 147, 213 n.64 ‘Capitalism as Religion’  133 on Franz Kafka  72 ‘The Storyteller’  114 Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo’  171–2, 182 Berman, Russell, A.  102 Bewes, Timothy  59, 154, 209 n.37 Biddle, Jennifer  58

‘big house’ novel  24, 142, 144–5, 219 n.68 bildung  103–9 bildungsroman  101–3, 106–7, 113–14, 116, 123, 125, 214 n.8, 214 n.10, 215 n.30 Binchy, Chris  11, 13, 18–19, 176, 188 Open-Handed  21–33 blushing  57, 79, 90 Boes, Tobias  215 n.30 Bogost, Ian  20 Bolger, Dermot  11, 14, 18, 77, 151, 176, 188 Tanglewood  51–73, 151, 176 Borges, Jorge Luis  175 Botting, Fred  52–3, 195–6, 198 Breu, Christian  172–3, 182 Buchanan, Jason  21, 169 Butler, Judith  132, 217 n.17 Cahill, Susan  217 n.31 capitalism  19–20, 22, 28–9, 31–3, 35, 52, 57–8, 64, 67, 85, 90, 95, 98–9, 114, 117, 119, 124, 127, 132–4, 143, 145, 147, 149, 172–3, 194, 196, 199–200 Carroll, Hamilton  143 Cartwright, Justin Other People’s Money  206 n.42 Carville, Justin  99 Castle, Gregory  123–4 Catholic Church  19, 54, 62 Catholicism  87 Chang, Ha Joon  212 n.47 Cleary, Joe  73, 151–3, 224 n.80 Clover, Joshua  137 Coffey, Seamus  135, 217 n.35 commodification  26, 138, 181 conditionality  28, 81–2, 194 conditional mood  14, 21, 28, 81–2, 105, 155

236 Index consumerism  35, 52, 72, 121, 131, 136, 138, 141 Coulter, Colin  19 credit  5, 8–10, 13, 19, 51, 99–100, 127, 132, 135, 137, 141, 145, 153, 161–2, 165, 167, 172 Cronin, Michael  141, 147–8, 203 n.10, 217 n.31 Cronin, Michael G.  214 n.10 Crosthwaite, Paul  95, 151–3, 176, 213 n.61 culpability  12, 19–20, 24, 44, 49, 62, 93, 198 Cunningham, Peter  11, 13, 18–19, 176, 188 Capital Sins  33–50 Dearing Ronda L.  55–6 death drive of capitalism  95 de Balzac, Honoré Père Goriot  191 de Boever, Arne  10, 96, 150, 152–3 debt  2–18, 127–41 Deckard, Sharae  87, 100 De Graf, Ortwin  103 Deleuze, Gilles  58–9, 132, 209 n.32, 223 n.67 Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari  195 DeLillo, Don Cosmopolis  154 Derrida, Jacques  118, 177 deterritorialization  20, 22, 76 Dienst, Richard  8–9, 136 Djebar, Assia  123–4 Drechsel Tobin, Patricia  149 Durand, Cedric Fictitious Capital: How Finance Is Appropriating Our Future  221 n.3 Durcan, Paul The Art of Life  136 ‘The Celtic Tiger’  136 Economic and Social Research Institute (E.S.R.I.)  135, 217 n.33 Economic Humanities  15, 204 n.36 economics and narration  6–7, 87, 115, 160, 178–9, 211 n.35

Edelman, Lee No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive  215 n.49 Eliot, T. S.  103, 214 n.8 Four Quartets  149, 157 Esty, Jed  113–14, 120, 123 faith  10, 12, 19–22, 27, 36, 52, 67, 75–9, 83 and economics  88–96 Faulks, Sebastian A Week in December  206 n.42 Federici, Silvia  57, 216 n.5 fictitiousness  13, 102, 150, 172, 174–5, 177 fiduciality  10–11, 75, 97, 185, 189 fiduciary  10, 175, 180, 184–6 finance and authorship  185–9 financial abstraction  10, 15, 36–7, 42, 72, 75, 90, 93, 151–3, 162, 171, 173–6, 189, 191, 194, 198 Fitzgerald, F. Scott  103, 214 n.19 Fleming, Peter The Death of Homo Economicus  214 n.4 Foster, R. F.  133 Foucault, Michel  25, 52, 127, 132, 141, 206 n.25, 214 n.4 heterotopias  25–6 futurity  83, 97, 120, 133, 172, 177, 180 ‘ghost estates’  81, 94–5, 98–9, 145, 193, 223 n.62 Gibbons, Luke  30, 212 n.39, 213 n.75, 217 n.31 Ging, Debbie  147–8 Gordon, Avery F.  117, 120, 124 Ghostly Matters  116 gothic  60, 70, 81, 88, 118, 132, 142, 145, 163–4, 175, 180, 183, 193–4, 196 Goux, Jean-Joseph  21, 185 governmentality  127 Graeber, David  200 Debt: The First 5,000 Years  8 guilt  2, 4, 6–8, 12, 18–19, 34–9, 53–6, 61–2, 72, 90, 93–4, 127–33, 143–5, 154, 162, 175, 201

Index Haiven, Max  75, 171–2 Hannah, Dehlia  8 Harrington, Michael  212 n.47 Harvey, David  10 Haslett, Adam Union Atlantic  206 n.42 haunting  11, 31, 76, 92, 97–8, 113–20, 124–5, 129, 132, 145, 163–4, 193–4 Haverty, Anne The Free and Easy  1–4 historical novel  103 historicism  115, 125 Hitchcock, Peter  174–5 homo economicus  19, 102, 133, 146, 169 Hughes, Caoilinn Orchid and the Wasp  204 n.33 iconomics  178, 187 indebtedness  2–4, 8–9, 52–3, 81–2, 127–41, 160–4, 169, 173, 194 inheritance  80, 86, 94–5, 97, 104, 145 International Financial Services Centre (I.F.S.C.)  189–90, 192, 195 investment  2, 5, 6, 9–10, 19, 21–3, 27–32, 37, 41–3, 47–8, 52, 55, 75, 81, 83–4, 88, 95, 98, 102, 133, 141, 162, 164, 177, 181, 183, 188, 200 Irish media  8, 41, 45–6, 67, 86, 88, 211 n.32, 211 n.33 irrealism  97 Jacquet, Jennifer  78 Jameson, Fredric The Benjamin Files  213 n.64 Joseph, Miranda  160 Joyce, James  50, 103, 146, 162, 189, 201, 214 n.8 Finnegans Wake  144–5 Kafka, Franz  72, 142 Kaplan, Michael  178 Kelly, Adam  224 n.91 Kelly, Morgan  147 Kennedy, Sean  54–5, 76, 90, 96 Kenny, Enda  7 Kenny, Mary  18–19

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Keohane, Kieran and Carmen Kuhling  223 n.62 Kiberd, Declan  134–6, 215 n.37 Kiersey, Nicholas  18, 216 n.6, 219 n.58 Kilroy, Claire The Devil I Know  14, 141–8 King Lear (Shakespeare)  129 Kirby, Peadar  6, 42, 147–8 Knight, Peter  51–2, 173 Kornbluh, Anna  152–3, 161 Kosofky Sedgwick, Eve  209 n.69 Kreilkamp, Vera  145, 219 n.68 LaBerge, Leigh-Claire  8, 220 n.8 Lanchester, John  17–18 Capital  205 n.1 Lazzarato, Maurizio  19, 52, 130–3, 135, 144, 146–7, 159, 217 n.13 Governing by Debt  132 The Making of the Indebted Man  132 Lenihan, Brian  18–19 Levi, Primo  73 Lewis, H. B.  209 n.45 Lewis, Michael  203 n.8 Boomerang  5–6 literary figuration  181–5 Lloyd, David  116, 120, 212 n.39, 215 n.40 Löwy, Michael  97 McCarthy, Conor  215 n.40 McClanahan, Annie  142–3, 160–2, 211 n.19 McCloskey, Deirdre  204 n.16 McCourt, Frank Angela’s Ashes  203 n.2 McDonough, Terence  100 McGlynn, Mary  98, 152 Madden, Deirdre  219 n.2 Time Present and Time Past  13, 73, 149–70, 177, 192, 201 Mahmud, Tayyab  127–8, 216 n.4 Mahon, Derek ‘At Ursula’s’  140 Life on Earth  140 Mann, Thomas The Magic Mountain  102, 108 Marazzi, Christian  174

238 Index Marsh, Nicky  13, 194 Martin, Randy  65, 172–3, 224 n.80 Marx, Karl  3, 194 Capital  171 masculinity  39, 67, 91, 93 Massumi, Brian  209 n.35 materiality  4, 24–5, 28, 37, 39, 53, 172–4, 177, 190–3, 195–6, 198–9, 201 Mathews, P. J.  133–6 Revival  134 Mercille, Julien  211 n.33 Merriman, Vic  41 metaphor  118, 176, 184, 196–8 metonymic, the  60, 98, 119, 137, 139, 141, 162–3, 195, 197–8, 200–1 Mianowski, Marie  143 Mikowski, Sylvie  219 n.2 Miller, Andrew  166 Mitchell, Kaye  90 morality  4, 6, 8–9, 13, 18–19, 29–30, 33–4, 44, 47, 51–2, 60, 62–3, 68, 71–2, 86, 88, 128, 130–3 Morgan Wortham, Simon  137, 213 n.64, 220 n.12 mortgages  52, 135, 207 n.6, 216 n.4 Moynahan, Julian  219 n.68 Muldoon, James  135, 217 n.3 Murphy, Neil  33 Murphy, Richard T.  214 n.10 Murray, Paul The Mark and the Void  13–14, 171–201 Myers, Kevin  33 Naipaul, V. S. A House for Mr. Biswas  128–30 Negra, Diane  139 New Economic Criticism  15 Ni Dhuibhne, Eilis Fox, Swallow, Scarecrow  204 n.33 Nietzsche, Friedrich  52, 127, 144, 146–7 On the Genealogy of Morality  130–2 novel as ‘occasion’  172, 176, 181, 201 Nussbaum, Martha  55 Nyberg, Peter  218 n.37 O’Brien, Edna  100 O’Brien, Flann  201

O’Donnell, Aislinn  58–9 O’Driscoll, Dennis ‘The Celtic Tiger’  127, 136–41 Weather Permitting  136 optative mood  166, 168–70 O’Toole, Fintan  87 Enough is Enough  138 Ship of Fools  5 Phillips, Adam  81, 165 photography  159–60 Pocock, J. G. A.  51 Poovey, Mary  207 n.2 postcolonial bildungsroman  123 postcolonial studies  115 Power, Kevin  201 White City  204 n.33 Price Tangney, June  55–6 Probyn, Elspeth  57, 59, 73, 210 n.13 prolepsis  150 promissory  4, 10, 43, 52, 77, 90, 137, 162, 180 property development  4, 30, 35, 37, 80–1, 91, 95, 110 Quinn, Justin Mount Merrion  13, 14, 101–25 redemption  2, 4, 12, 18, 20, 27–8, 34, 39, 44–7, 50, 52–3, 61, 68, 96, 133, 156, 182, 194 relationality  27, 93, 97, 206 n.28 Roubini, Nouriel  89 Ryan, Donal  13–14 The Spinning Heart  87–100 The Thing about December  77–86 Sassen, Saskia  115–16 Saunders, George  11–12 shame  19, 51–73, 76–80, 86 Sharma, Sarah  215 n.36 Shaviro, Steve  194–5 Shaw, Katy  12–13, 51–2 Sheeran, Patrick  84, 211 n.29 Shiller, Robert  6–7, 10, 200 Shonkwiler, Alison  150–4, 179, 220 n.8 Simmel, George The Philosophy of Money  203 n.6 Sklansky, Jeffrey  19

Index Slaughter, Joseph  106 Sontag, Susan  50 speculation  10, 15, 20–6, 32, 37, 42, 47, 76–8, 81–5, 94–7, 153–5, 167–81, 193–4 Steinbeck, John The Grapes of Wrath  204 n.15 Stimilli, Elettra  217 n.23 subjectivation  19, 132, 146 subjectivity  19, 127, 129–30, 142, 150, 160, 170 Sussman, Charlotte  216 n.7 Swift, Jonathan  130 A Modest Proposal  128 Tally, Robert F.  214 n.11 temporality  91, 101–8, 114–15, 118, 123, 139, 142, 150, 157, 160–3, 166–7, 169 Tomkins, Silvan  57, 208 n.26

239

trust  9–10, 20, 25, 27, 36, 42, 47, 49, 78, 82–3, 89–90, 94, 99, 133, 143, 175–6, 180–1, 186 uncanny, the  2, 14, 25, 32, 98, 132, 150, 154, 157–64, 196 Valente, Joseph  79 Vermeulen, Pieter  103 Virilio, Paul  109, 214 n.22 West-Pavlov, Russell  214 n.11 Williams, Raymond  33–4, 40 Literature and Marxism  33 Wood, James  11–12 Woolf, Virginia  103 Mrs Dalloway  107 Žižek, Slavoj  212 n.44 zombification  194–201

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