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

Ireland in Crisis

Eoin Flannery

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350166769
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Literatur
• Categoría: Englische Literaturkritik

Based on readings of some of the leading literary voices in contemporary Irish writing, this book explores how these authors have engaged with the events of Ireland's recent economic 'boom' and the demise of the Celtic Tiger period, and how they have portrayed the widespread and contrasting aftermaths. Drawing upon economic literary criticism, affect theory in relation to shame and guilt, and the philosophy of debt, this book offers an entirely original suit of perspectives on both established and emerging authors. Through analyses of the work of writers including Donal Ryan, Anne Haverty, Claire Kilroy, Dermot Bolger, Deirdre Madden, Chris Binchy, Peter Cunningham, Justin Quinn, and Paul Murray, author Eóin Flannery illuminates their formal and thematic concerns. Paying attention to generic and thematic differences, Flannery's analyses touch upon issues such as: the politics of indebtedness; temporality and narrative form; the relevance of affect theory to understandings of Irish culture and society in an age of austerity; and the relationship between literary fiction and the mechanics of high finance. Insightful and original, Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction provides a seminal intervention in trying to grasp the cultural context and the literature of the Celtic Tiger period and its wake.

Chapter 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 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 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 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.

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 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 t...

Índice

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Celtic Tiger identity parades in Chris Binchy’s Open-handed (2008) and Peter Cunningham’s Capital Sins (2010)
• Chapter 2 The possibilities of shame in Dermot Bolger’s Tanglewood (2015)
• Chapter 3 Relative values in Donal Ryan’s The Thing about December (2013) and The Spinning Heart (2012)
• Chapter 4 Bildung and temporality in Justin Quinn’s Mount Merrion (2013)
• Chapter 5 Debt, guilt and form in (post-)Celtic Tiger Ireland
• Chapter 6 Finance and fiction in Deirdre Madden’s Time Present and Time Past (2013)
• Chapter 7 Investing in fictions: Faith, abstraction and materiality in Paul Murray’s The Mark and the Void (2015)
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright