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ABSTRACT
This article examines the relationship between neoliberal late capitalism and the climate crisis in Irish writing. It focuses on the imagined post-climate change Ireland of Danny Denton’s novel The Earlie King and the Kid in Yellow (2018), which shows a feudal society clinging to a Dublin sunk below rising waters. This analysis posits that The Earlie King employs “weird” methodologies to imagine an Ireland so wracked by environmental destruction that the transactional structures of capitalism which catalysed this destruction are rendered inoperable by it. It draws upon Mark Fisher’s work on “eerie” and “weird” modes of writing, and the partially overlapping theorisation of the “New Weird” fiction movement by participating authors Steph Swainston and China Miéville. Other fictional Irelands ravaged by the aftermaths of crisis are proliferating, in texts such as Sara Davis-Goff’s Last Ones Left Alive (2018), Oisín Fagan’s Nobber (2019) and David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks (2014). Collectively, these texts display a direct inheritance of the 2008–9 financial crash. Luke Gibbons writes that Irish modernists “did not have to await the twentieth century to undergo the shock of modernity.” This is echoed today, in post-crash Irish writers’ lived experience of the depth of suffering which follows capitalist collapse.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Fisher, Weird and the Eerie, 11.
2. Gibbons, Transformations, 6.
3. Matthew Beaumont has provided a convincing genealogy for this contested remark (Beaumont, “End Times” 79–80 and footnote 88) – in short, that Žižek quotes it from Jameson, who said that “someone once said” it, and Jameson himself is most likely misquoting an H. Bruce Franklin remark concerning J. G. Ballard.
4. Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 2.
5. Smart, “Review.”
6. Fagan, “Black Death.”
7. Mitchell, The Bone Clocks, pp.537–613
8. Brennan, “David Mitchell.”
9. Kidd, “Interview.”
10. Harrison, “Interview.”
11. Mitchell, The Bone Clocks, 551–2.
12. Ibid., 560.
13. Ibid., 566.
14. Davis-Goff, Last Ones Left Alive, 7–8.
15. Ibid., 35.
16. Ibid., 78.
17. Published in July 2023. “Silent City,” Hachette UK.
18. Denton, Earlie King, 60.
19. Ibid., 5.
20. Ibid., 61.
21. Ibid., 6.
22. Fagan previously had a short story collection, Hostages, published in 2016.
23. O’Connor, “Nobber.”
24. Cummins, “Nobber by Oisín Fagan review”
25. Barekat, “Nobber review.”
26. See note 6 above.
27. Fisher, Weird and the Eerie, 9.
28. Denton, Earlie King, 110.
29. Ibid., 83.
30. Hartland, “Earlie King.”
31. Denton, Earlie King, 185.
32. Ibid., 118.
33. Ibid., 114.
34. Ibid., 207.
35. Ibid., 278.
36. Ibid., 150.
37. See note 1 above.
38. Bledsoe, “Make it New.”
39. Which does not mean this cannot be done. B. S. Johnson’s unbound “book in a box” The Unfortunates (1969), for example, takes a decent stab at being an unbooklike book.
40. Fisher, Weird and the Eerie, 24.
41. Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” Section I.
42. Swainston, “New Weird.”
43. Miéville, “New Weird p5–04:07.”
44. Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy, 59.
45. Ibid., 63.
46. Ibid., xiv and passim.
47. Fisher, Weird and the Eerie, 61.
48. Ibid., 61.
49. Ibid., 61.
50. Ibid., 61.
51. Ibid., 61–2.
52. Fagan, Nobber, 113.
53. See note 1 above.
54. Ibid., 11.
55. Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 7.
56. McCabe, Money, 31.
57. Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 8.
58. Ibid., 15.
59. McCabe, Money, 7.
60. VanderMeer, “Climate Fiction.”
61. Denton, Earlie King, 181.
62. See note 30 above.
63. Denton, Earlie King, 61.
64. Ibid., 140.
65. Ibid., 33.
66. Ibid., 34.
67. Ibid., 91.
68. Ibid., 28.
69. Ibid., 61.
70. See note 43 above.
71. Ibid., 73.
72. See note 30 above.
73. Denton, Earlie King, 354.
74. Ibid., 354.
75. Morse, “Economics of idiocy,” 254.
76. Denton, Earlie King, 49.
77. Fisher, Weird and the Eerie, 20.
78. See note 30 above.
79. Denton, Earlie King, 15.
80. Ibid., 339.
81. Ibid., n.p.
82. Eliot, The Waste Land, 673.
83. Denton, Earlie King, 339–340.
84. Ibid., 340.
85. Franta, “Global Warming’s Paper Trail”
86. Denton, Earlie King, 340.
87. See note 42 above.
88. Merriam-Webster, “Multi-Spectral.”
89. Fisher, Weird and the Eerie, 97.
90. Denton, Earlie King, 326.
91. Ibid., 331.
92. Miéville, “New weird p5–11:34.” n.b. I have adjusted the emphasis here to reformat Miéville’s forum post for journal publication: I have italicised the preposition “pace” in line with standard usage, and replaced Miéville’s asterisks around “*not know*,” a standard way of providing emphasis in forms of typed media that do not allow for underlining or italicisation, with italics.
93. See note 40 above.