The Celtic Tiger, its phantoms, and Conor McPherson's haunted rooms
2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 28; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/0950236x.2014.955816
ISSN1470-1308
Autores Tópico(s)Irish and British Studies
ResumoAbstractCeltic Tiger economics are portrayed in a distinctive fashion in Irish plays of the 1990s; in the work of Conor McPherson in particular, reminders of the uneven circulation of capital and the hegemony of the free market proliferate, remaining entwined with familiar representations of the supernatural and the unearthly. Drawing on the rich body of work published on the Gothic and occultism, this essay focuses on the metaphorisation of fears related to housing, governance, and private property in McPherson's plays and interrogates their political tenor. I read these texts against recent analyses of neoliberalism and political conservatism and show that the significance of séances, supernatural occurrences, haunted houses, and doppelgängers to McPherson's writing is in itself indicative of the difficulties encountered by the contemporary imagination when apprehending the social transformations concurrent with the rise of neoliberal economies.Keywords: Conor McPhersoncontemporary Irish dramathe Celtic Tigertechnology and occultismthe Gothic AcknowledgementsThanks are due to Michelle Kelly, Michael McAteer, Nicholas Melia, James Watt and Claire Westall for their responses to earlier versions of this article.Notes1 Fintan O'Toole, ‘Can Irish Dramatists Tackle the Big Questions Again?', Irish Times, (7 June 2011), p. 12.2 Karen Fricker, ‘Same Old Show: The Performance of Masculinity in Conor McPherson's Port Authority and Mark O'Rowe's Made in China', The Irish Review, 29 (2002), pp. 84–94.3 Conor McPherson, Rum and Vodka, Plays: One (London: Nick Hern, 2011), p. 47.4 See Andrew Smith, The Ghost Story 1840–1920: A Cultural History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), pp. 17–23, 32–68.5 Conor McPherson, Port Authority, Plays: Two (London: Nick Hern, 2004), pp. 166–7.6 Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles with “The Adventure of the Speckled Band”', ed. Francis O'Gorman (Plymouth: Broadview, 2006), p. 204.7 William Butler Yeats, Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1983), p. 87.8 See Robert Tracy, ‘Undead, Unburied: Anglo-Ireland and the Predatory Past', LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, 10 (1999), pp. 13–14; Smith, pp. 143–67; Roger Luckhurst, ‘Knowledge, Belief and the Supernatural at the Imperial Margin', in Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett, and Pamela Thurschwell (eds), The Victorian Supernatural (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 199.9 Julia Briggs, ‘The Ghost Story', in David Punter (ed.), A New Companion to the Gothic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012), p. 179.10 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘A Reasoned Utopia and Economic Fatalism', trans. John Howe, New Left Review, 221 (1998), p. 125.11 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘For a Scholarship with Commitment', Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market vol. 2, trans. Loïc Wacquant (London: Verso, 2003), p. 22. For analyses of the Celtic Tiger that chime with Bourdieu's analysis, see Kieran Allen, The Corporate Takeover of Ireland (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007); Peadar Kirby, Luke Gibbons and Michael Cronin (eds), Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society and the Global Economy (London: Pluto Press, 2002).12 McPherson, Foreword, Plays: One, p. 4.13 Anthony Roche, Twentieth-Century Irish Theatre (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 220–1.14 On the historical relations between public infrastructure, industrialisation and Irish colonial history, see Michael Rubenstein, Public Works: Infrastructure, Irish Modernism, and the Postcolonial (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010). On the Celtic Tiger and public services, see Kieran Allen, The Celtic Tiger: The Myth of Social Partnership in Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).15 Emmanuel Terray, Penser à droite (Paris: Galilée, 2012), p. 153.16 James Watt, Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, 1764–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 8.17 See Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Pamela Thurschwell, Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Helen Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2002); Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-first Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).18 Thomas Alva Edison, ‘The Phonograph and its Future', North American Review, 126 (262) (1878), pp. 531, 533–4.19 Conor McPherson, The Weir, Plays: Two (London: Nick Hern, 2004), p. 51.20 See Roche, 228; Nicholas Grene, ‘Ireland in Two Minds: Martin McDonagh and Conor McPherson', The Yearbook of English Studies, 35 (2005), p. 309.21 Sconce, pp. 85–91.22 Robert Miles, in David Punter (ed.), A New Companion to the Gothic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012), p. 100.23 Conor McPherson, The Veil (London: Nick Hern, 2011), p. 92.24 For Moretti, the keenness of Stoker's Dracula to dispense from having servants signifies his intimacy with monopoly capitalism. Moretti also discusses the novel's reliance upon parataxic forms to foreground an ‘organic’ capitalism. See Franco Moretti, ‘Dialectic of Fear’, Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms (London: Verso, 1983), pp. 83–108.25 Yann Moulier-Boutang, Le capitalisme cognitif: La nouvelle grande transformation (Paris: Amsterdam, 2007), pp. 86–8, 158.26 Chris Baldick, In Frankenstein's Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century Writing (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 121–7; Judith Halberstam, ‘Technologies of Monstrosity: Bram Stoker's Dracula', Victorian Studies, 36 (1993), p. 346.27 Theodor Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth, trans. Stephen Crook (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 177.28 Conor McPherson, interview by John Kelly, ‘The View’, RTÉ Arts and Music, 13 July 2010. All subsequent quotations are from this interview.29 W.J. McCormack, ‘We Irish’ in Europe: Yeats, Berkeley, and Joseph Hone (Dublin: UCD Press, 2010).30 Conor McPherson, ‘Preface’ to Exiles, by James Joyce (London: Nick Hern, 2006), p. viii.31 See Patrick Lonergan, Theatre and Globalization: Irish Drama in the Celtic Tiger Era (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 176, 181.32 Andrew Ross, ‘The Mental Labor Problem', Social Text, 63 (2000), pp. 1–2, 13, 27.
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