‘Even in an era when capitalists went out of their way to destroy capitalism,’ Michael Lewis argues in Boomerang: Adventures of a Financial Meltdown Tourist, ‘the Irish bankers had set some kind of record for destruction.’
The Irish State’s catastrophic bank guarantee, and the country’s property and housing crashes, are two of Lewis’s primary foci, as he interrogates the causes and effects of Ireland’s economic demise. Yet this intervention 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 appraisals of the Celtic Tiger ought to be 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. 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.
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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, the perceived universality of Celtic Tiger excesses, expounded across a range of narrative fora, meant that the Irish public were in 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 taoiseach, Enda Kenny on the cover of its October 15th, 2012 issue, Ireland assumed a ‘model’ role in how to address economic austerity, a process they termed ‘The Celtic Comeback’.
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.
A fraction of the anxiety generated by jolting experiences of the uncanny nature of Celtic Tiger Ireland stems from the omnipresence of debt and indebtedness. The latter is far from being a modern form of social interaction and mutual obligation, and it 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, following David Graeber, ‘our sense of morality and justice is reduced to the language of a business deal’. And Graeber’s terminology neatly impresses the linkages between debt, morality and affects, such as guilt and shame, that animate many of the fictional reckonings with Ireland’s lapsed economic ‘boom’.
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. A 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. And there is an undeniable sense of the uncanny in many of the experiences and memories across the corpus of Celtic Tiger finance fictions, as the past involuntarily disturbs the seeming banality of the everyday.
Displacement is congenital to the nature of the mortgaged debt, given that ownership is consistently deferred into the future. This begets a further requirement that we consider the ways in which debt registers in the world around us, and not solely in relation to material precarity or physical dispossession. 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 characteristic of a national self-image grounded in the speculation of the global debt economy. Rather than retreat to transparent hectoring portraits of well-worn Celtic Tiger icons, we should pay more heed to narratives that 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.
In his autobiographical The Nearest Thing to Life, James Wood 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. Wood writes: ‘[w]hat 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.’
The matter of ratification addressed in Wood’s point relates to the faith-based nature 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. In the context of post-Celtic Tiger Irish fiction, for instance, Capital Sins by Peter Cunningham and Open-handed by Chris Binchy, taken together with Tanglewood by Dermot Bolger, evacuate this exchange of the ‘not-quite-belief’ lauded by Wood. 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. 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.
Of significantly more value are the kind of literary engagements that knowingly play with their own formal origins and possibilities, and that display a capacity to move beyond the confines of finance fictions that perform merely as latter-day ‘morality tales’. But such experimentation and formal licence is 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, narratives such as: Donal Ryan’s The Thing about December and The Spinning Heart; Anne Haverty’s The Free and Easy; Justin Quinn’s Mount Merrion; Claire Kilroy’s The Devil I Know; Deirdre Madden’s Time Present and Time Past; and Paul Murray’s The Mark and the Void are more instructive artefacts of post-Celtic Tiger fiction.
Without collapsing this micro-canon into homogeneity, these works are preoccupied with the contingencies of finance’s fictions, its fictitiousness, and its abundance of arcane idioms and algorithms. The fictions authored by Ryan, Haverty, Quinn, Kilroy, Madden and Murray provide evidence to suggest that they are attuned to the unsettling performances of indebtedness and global finance. Furthermore, their 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.
Eoin Flannery is the author of Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction: Ireland in Crisis, published by Bloomsbury.
