‘…a tiny part of that greater circum-terrestrial grid’: A Conversation with Mike McCormack

Abstract

McCormack's conscious rearticulation of the West of Ireland as a site of experimental modes of incarceration, virtual imaginaries, and energy regimes, addresses imaginative aporias around Ireland's production of nature. His fiction can be interpreted in light of a theory of capitalism as the 'force field' which connects the 'the accumulation of capital, the pursuit of power, and the production of nature'. 2 through often speculative literary modes that probe the interaction between culture, modernisation, and infrastructural modalities. The environments represented in his works are sites for the weird and uncanny, including near-future realities of offshore clone labour and robot citizenship, machinic fetishism, cloud seeding, and the technological sublime.McCormack's virtuosic explorations of the short story and novel forms open up new aesthetic and thematic avenues for speculative Irish literature, as they probe the interaction between underdevelopment, experimentation, and environmental crisis in the rural West. 3 His first short story collection Getting it in the Head (1996), is concerned with the ghastly and addictive psychopathologies of Irish men, who literally 'get it in the head' by abusive brothers and fathers, and his first novel Crowe's Requiem (1998) -a noir coming of age tale set in Galway City -combines Celtic mythology, doomed love, and gothic scientists.McCormack's fiction always take a generative critical stance towards Irish society and culture, and his second novel, Notes From a Coma (2005), with its combination of philosophical annotations, multi-perspectival form, and emphasis on the virtual and mundane, was in stark contrast to the mainstream Irish literature of the Celtic Tiger years. Notes From a Coma tells of JJ O'Malley, a Romanian orphan who enrols voluntarily on an experimental 'Somnos' penal boat colony anchored in Killary Fjord. Placed into a coma, JJ's biorhythms and brain waves are broadcast nationally, producing new modalities for national consciousness. McCormack's second short story collection Forensic Songs (2012), likewise emphasised the omission of hyper-modern technologies and the fantastic in Irish literature, opening with an ironic commentary on misery memoirs, before delving into highly imaginative tales of divinely-authored game consoles, murderous children, and humanmachine hybrids, grounded throughout in meditations on loneliness and alienation. However, in this interview McCormack expresses dissatisfaction with the 'forensic accuracy' of his writing, and Solar Bones, McCormack's much-lauded 2016 novel, takes on the challenge of merging the quiet domesticity with a ghost story set on All Hallow's Eve. As with

From toxic industries to green extractivism: rural environmental struggles, multinational corporations and Ireland’s postcolonial ecological regime

“…Perhaps it makes sense then that most examples of postcolonial and environmentalist analysis of Ireland come from textual and cultural analyses. Derek Gladwin, for example, has written extraordinary work on the literary representations and histories of boglands as a kind of "postcolonial gothic" (2016); Michael Rubenstein has unearthed the centrality of "utilities" in the work of James Joyce and other Irish modernist writers, showing the complex political ecologies of colonial and postcolonial infrastructural provision through their representations in literature (2010); and Nessa Cronin has performed literary, historical, and cultural geographies of Irish landscapes to draw out submerged environmental relationships, demonstrating that the ecological is central to, rather than an extension of, colonial and capitalist relations in Ireland (see Cronin 2012Cronin , 2014Cronin , 2020; see also de Loughry and McCormack 2019;Mercier 2022). These scholars foreground the work of Irish writers and their representations and implications for ecology, landscape studies and environmental issues across different historical periods, from the peat bogs to water politics to other issues of environmental justice.…”