Broken Irelands: Literary Form in Post-Crash Irish Fiction — A book crammed with compelling but elusive ideas

Boom! Crash! Boom again! This four-word history of 21st-century Ireland is brought to you by contemporary economists, who like to throw around jazzy language in case anyone notices how boring and sinister economics actually is. Tiger economies! Zombie banks! Bouncing dead cats! Spare us. Professional defenders of language — that is, writers — tend to view these barbaric coinages with fascination and disgust. They tend also to view with scepticism any narrative history that comes pre-condensed into a single handy tag — the Roaring Twenties, the Celtic Tiger, the Secularisation of Ireland …

Mary McGlynn, Professor of English at CUNY, is a writer. She is capable of noticing “the lean argot of development” at work in a phrase like “new builds.” She is also an academic. She knows that repurposing a verb (“to build”) as a noun is a technique of rhetoric called nominalisation. “Such nominalisations abound in the twenty-first century,” she writes, “from reality TV’s climactic moment of ‘the reveal,’ to a request in corporate-speak, ‘the ask’”. Nominalising like this, McGlynn suggests, persuades us to imagine that certain processes “operate independently of humans”; the language, almost without our noticing, “speak[s[ to an absence of responsibility and causation.” Thus, our rulers bend language to delete the traces of their rule.

This is criticism in action. The critic compels the small change of daily discourse to give up its hidden messages. Who builds these “new builds”? Cui bono? What’s the context? What’s the narrative? If academic literary criticism did stuff like this all the time, it would perhaps enjoy a better reputation among non-academic readers than it does. As things stand, who kicks back with a new academic monograph for fun, or even for illumination? Stodge is assumed to be the rule. Linguistic obscurity a given. Useful insights are few and far between. Even academics themselves — whisper it — have been known to feel this way.

The key aspect of the neoliberal is the way in which […] it advocates for a devolution, destruction, or distrust of social institutions

—  Mary McGlynn

There is an old and ruthless axiom about academic monographs that goes like this: You only need to read the Introduction and the Conclusion, because that’s where you’ll find all the stuff you’ll need to quote. Academia, alas, being as vulnerable to careerism as any other middle-class profession — especially in the Age of Austerity, when governments encourage universities to behave like for-profit private enterprises, as if the transmission of knowledge, the generation of new ideas, and the cultivation of sensibility could be made answerable to the shareholder model of industrial capitalism.

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As McGlynn notes, “the key aspect of the neoliberal is the way in which […] it advocates for a devolution, destruction, or distrust of social institutions, valorizing instead the personal, individual, and private”. The university is a social institution or it is nothing. The erosion of its social mission has had many depressing and grotesque consequences. Careerism is one response to these consequences. Perhaps not the best response. But even professors are only human.

An ethic of publish or perish — as exemplified by the UK’s Research Excellence Framework, introduced by the Cameron-Clegg coalition to widespread dismay in 2014 — harms readers as much as it does writers. Around every academic monograph, in the age of the metrics-haunted Neoliberal University, hovers the suspicion that what it really constitutes is not a passionately argued intervention in an ongoing critical debate but rather a key line on someone’s tenure-attracting CV.

Then again, the academic monograph was in trouble long before the Age of Austerity. The problem with academic literary critics is, in a sense, that they are academic literary critics — that is, intellectuals. And intellectuals make two classic errors: they put the conceptual cart before the material horse, and they worry too much about what other intellectuals are thinking. These errors explain a few well-known difficulties with academic prose: its fondness for abstractions (all those long sentences without any obvious referents), its allusiveness, and its constant hedging.

Thus, reading Mary McGlynn’s (often rich and fascinating) monograph Broken Irelands, you encounter a phrase like “The attention throughout the book to Derksen’s long neoliberal present”. You nod. You think, “Ah, yes. Derksen.” You try to form a concrete mental image of the “long neoliberal present”. You are not helped by the context in which this phrase occurs; nor, in this instance, by the end notes (there aren’t any). You conclude that you are not, perhaps, the ideal reader of this book. You imagine that somewhere out there, such an ideal reader does exist. Someone who knows who Derksen is, and what a long neoliberal present might look like.

I don’t mean to snark. Merely to express my disappointment that a book crammed with important and interesting ideas should present these ideas in such an irritatingly coded and allusive way. McGlynn’s subject is ostensibly Irish fiction since 2008. Her actual subject is Ireland over the last half-century. She is knowledgeable, perceptive, scathing — when she is clear. Her argument about Ireland suggests that a “plutocratic class” has used policies of austerity to ensure that “privation” has not been “evenly distributed.”

McGlynn’s argument about post-crash Irish fiction suggests that an interest in ‘ungrammaticality’ has permitted Irish writers to critique neoliberal Ireland in new, and sometimes quietly radical, ways

She is, of course, absolutely right about this. But we don’t necessarily turn to a volume of literary criticism merely to find ourselves hearing about the moral insufficiencies of neoliberal Ireland. What we want is literary criticism. McGlynn’s argument about post-crash Irish fiction suggests that an interest in “ungrammaticality” has permitted Irish writers to critique neoliberal Ireland in new, and sometimes quietly radical, ways. Her examples include Kevin Barry’s City of Bohane (2011), Colum McCann’s Transatlantic (2013), Paul Murray’s The Mark and the Void (2015), and Melanie Uche Okorie’s This Hostel Life (2018).

Some of McGlynn’s choices bear scrutiny; others, perhaps not so much. Certain instances of what McGlynn calls “ungrammaticality” might, the reader reflects, more accurately be called mannerism, or pretentiousness. McGlynn has a lot of time for the sort of po-faced backwards-running Oirish prose that subverts nothing so much as its author’s claims to be taken seriously. No, I’m not going to name names. You already know who I mean, anyway. In the end, Broken Irelands does what a good academic monograph should: it shows us our world, and it tells us interesting things about the art that reflects, and sometimes changes, that world. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to Google “Derksen,” in the hopes of further enlightenment.

• Kevin Power’s latest novel is White City. He is Assistant Professor of Literary Practice at Trinity College Dublin