Ireland’s New Losers: Contemporary Irish Fiction and the Ethos of Failure by Michael Fontaine Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Dalhousie University Halifax, Nova Scotia November 2019 © Copyright by Michael Fontaine, 2019 To Mom, Dad, Danielle, and Luc ii Table of Contents Abstract v List of Abbreviations Used ivi Acknowledgments vvii Chapter One: Introduction 1 1.1. A Time of Crisis 1 1.2. What is a Loser?: Situating Loserdom 9 1.3. Losers, Irish Fiction, and the Question of Postcolonial Irishness 30 1.4. Chapter Outlines 45 Chapter Two: Liberation or Limitation: The Violence of the Celtic Tiger in Donal Ryan’s The Thing About December and Peter Cunningham’s Capital Sins 51 2.1. Introduction 51 2.2. “Caught on the Hop”: Adapting, Failing, and Failing to Adapt in Donal Ryan’s The Thing About December 61 2.3. The Threat of “Endless Possibilities”: Resisting Loss and Fighting Failure in Peter Cunningham’s Capital Sins 86 2.4. Conclusion 111 Chapter Three: Losers, Bankers, and Schemers: Figures of Failure and the Collapse of the Celtic Tiger in Paul Murray’s The Mark and the Void and Claire Kilroy’s The Devil I Know 114 3.1. Introduction 114 3.2. “More Comfortable Wrapped in Chains”: Economic Loserdom and Neoliberal Failure in The Mark and the Void 123 3.3. Powerlessness, Entrepreneurialism, and the Question of Masculine Responsibility in The Devil I Know 146 3.4. Conclusion 172 iii Chapter Four: The Shame, Regret, and Resignation of Living with the Legacies of Clerical Abuse in Roddy Doyle’s Smile and John Boyne’s A History of Loneliness 175 4.1. Introduction 175 4.2. “Part of What We Are”: Interrogating Institutional Abuse and Irish Inaction in Roddy Doyle’s Smile 190 4.3. “Rotten to the Core”: From Priests to Pariahs in John Boyne’s A History of Loneliness 212 4.4. Conclusion 235 Chapter Five: Being Losers, Finding Alternatives in Paul McVeigh’s The Good Son and Garbhan Downey’s Across the Line 238 5.1. Introduction 238 5.2. Subversive Difference and Submissive Power in Paul McVeigh’s The Good Son 252 5.3. Sectarian Soccer and Disputing Divisions in Garbhan Downey’s Across the Line 272 5.4. Conclusion 299 Chapter Six: Conclusion 302 6.1. Vivified by Failure 302 6.2. Beyond the Irish Loser 311 Works Cited 316 iv Abstract The figure of the “loser” has become something of a staple in recent Irish fiction, especially fiction dealing with the major sociocultural transformations and crises that have taken place in Ireland in the last quarter century—namely, the Celtic Tiger, the economic crash, the clerical abuse crisis, and the end of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. This dissertation examines why. In reading recent novels by Donal Ryan, Peter Cunningham, Paul Murray, Claire Kilroy, Roddy Doyle, John Boyne, Paul McVeigh, and Garbhan Downey, I contend that the loser figure proves particularly valuable in assessing the difficulties of self-evaluation and self-definition within the transitioning social matrix of contemporary Ireland. Following an introduction in which I define “loserdom” and establish the social, national, and gendered contexts in which the loser figure typically operates, I offer four chapters, each examining a specific sociocultural transformation. In the first two chapters, I analyse the economic boom and bust, respectively, and consider the ways in which Irish novelists use the loser to respond to Irish society’s problematic embrace of neoliberal ideologies as well as to challenge the narratives of blame that circulated after the economic downturn. In the later chapters, I explore Ireland’s clerical abuse crisis and the post-conflict period in Northern Ireland, respectively. In the first case, I argue that novelists deploy loser characters as a way of emphasizing the degradation of Irish society resulting from the abuse scandal and as a means of indicting the nation’s culture of inaction and uncritical deference to the Church. Finally, I contend that novelists dealing with the post-conflict North deploy the loser figure as a means of representing productive dissidence. The losers in these texts, I suggest, embody a potential alternative to identities rooted in those tribal narratives of ethnic pride that perpetually threaten to undermine an already tentative peace in Northern Ireland. Taken together, these chapters explore the various ways in which Irish fiction imagines contemporary Ireland as defined by an ethos of failure. v List of Abbreviations Used AI After Ireland AISC All-Ireland Soccer Cup AL Across the Line AS Anomalous States BOT Bank of Torabundo CAC Clerical abuse crisis CBI Central Bank of Ireland CBS Christian Brothers’ School CS Capital Sins DIK The Devil I Know GFA Good Friday Agreement GS The Good Son HL A History of Loneliness HUBBI Hibernian Universal Business Bank Ireland IFSC International Financial Services Centre II Inventing Ireland IT Information Technology IT Irish Times IWW The Irish Writer and the World MM Moral Monopoly MV The Mark and the Void PIRA Provisional Irish Republican Army PSNI Police Service of Northern Ireland Royal Royal Irish Bank RTÉ Raidió Teilifís Éireann RUC Royal Ulster Constabulary S Smile TAD The Thing About December UDA Ulster Defence Association UUP Ulster Unionist Party vi Acknowledgments I was fortunate to have many people supporting me throughout my graduate studies and as I worked on this dissertation, and I would be remiss if I did not express my tremendous gratitude for the kindnesses they showed me. I am incredibly grateful, first of all, to my supervisor Jerry White. His feedback and overall encouragement not only helped me see what this project should be, but what it could be. The other members of my committee—Carrie Dawson, Alice Brittan, Danine Farquharson, and Bart Vautour—also played crucial roles in helping me develop the ideas in this dissertation, and they were always generous with their time and unwavering in their support. If parts of this work have merit, it is as much my committee’s doing as my own. For this they deserve many, many thanks. I could not have completed this work without the support of the faculty and staff of the Department of English. Mary Beth MacIsaac and Pam Decker deserve special thanks for their generosity and willingness to respond to my countless, undoubtedly inane questions. I am also grateful to Jason Haslam for his readiness to help me deal with the logistics of finishing the program. This work would have been impossible without the financial support I received through the Faculty of Graduate Studies Fellowship and the Nova Scotia Research and Innovation Graduate Scholarship for Continuing Students. I also want to thank all of the friends I made during my time in Halifax and at Dal. In particular, though, I want to thank Shane Bryson, Georgia Grundlingh, and Jannaya Friggstad Jensen for their friendship. Whether it was through drinks at Freeman’s, breakfast at Mary’s, or Trivial Pursuit at home, these friends always got me out of my head when I needed it most. Likewise, though I only saw them a couple times a year, I could not have completed this program without my Regina crew: Marc Walker, Josh Vogt and Bree Hayes, Christian and Bailey Lepage, Alyssia Johannsen, Sam Sthamann, Justin Nenson, and my buds Bennett and Sawyer. Living in Halifax was only sustainable because I could always come home to see them. Graham Jensen, who I met on my first day as a graduate student, has been not only an unbelievable friend and source of distraction over the last 6 years, but something of a role model for me—if I have been successful in my time as a graduate student, it is only because I have followed his lead at every stage. Julia Schabas has helped me get through more crises of faith than I care to admit. That black hole of despair never felt too far off during the completion of this dissertation, but Julia always yanked me out by the shirt collar whenever I started to slip into it; for that, I’m very grateful to her. Thanks are also due to Paul Schabas and Alison Girling for not only giving me a place to stay as I settle in to a new city, but for helping make this transition while I finish my work as painless as possible. It goes without saying that I could not have started, let alone completed, this project without the support of my family. Whether they know it or not, my grandparents played a significant part in shaping how I viewed university and are, in this way, responsible for my having undertaken academic study at all. I share my successes with them. Spending even short periods of time with my siblings, Danielle and Luc, over these last few years always helped me get back to work with renewed enthusiasm, and for that they deserve a big thanks. Finally, although they may not always have understood every vii aspect of my research topic—or why I found these things so captivating—my parents regularly expressed an interest in what I was working on. More importantly though, they ensured that I periodically left my desk and took time to cultivate my much more frivolous hobbies. If I remained able to see the proverbial forest for the trees, it was only because of them. For that and so much more, I am forever grateful. viii Chapter One Introduction 1.1. A Time of Crisis “Irishness is not primarily a question of birth or blood or language: it is the condition of being involved in the Irish situation, and usually of being mauled by it.” (O’Donnell 78) “There is both hot anger and cold fury, but these emotions are almost crowded out by a host of other feelings.