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ABSTRACT
This article examines Sara Baume’s Seven Steeples (2020), Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times, and Caoilinn Hughes’ Orchid and the Wasp (2018) and The Wild Laughter (2020) as reactions against the capitalist expectation that human worth can be measured by an individual’s contribution towards remunerative labour. These texts are all recent novels by young Irish women writers in which the protagonists seek a form of work which elides participation in the neoliberal economic system – either as profit-making or salaried workers, or in the traditionally female role of providing domestic labour to a profit-making or salaried male partner. The article explores the fraught relationship between these novels’ protagonists and a globalised labour market which is simultaneously scarred by, and in continued denial about, the existential shock it faced in the 2008–9 financial crash, with a particular focus on the Republic of Ireland’s role as a key site of late capitalist deregulation, where the effects of the crash were particularly severely felt.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. McCabe, Money, 31.
2. Ibid., 31.
3. Ibid., 35.
4. O’Toole, Ship of Fools, 10.
5. Ibid., 33.
6. McCabe, Money, 58.
7. Lewis, Boomerang, 88.
8. Ibid., 96.
9. Ibid., 105.
10. McCabe, Money, 68.
11. Lewis, Boomerang, 115–116.
12. Little, “Don’t Rip Off … .”
13. Power and Nussbaum, “‘You Reap What You Sow’.”
14. Smith, “Athens Protest.”
15. O’Toole, Ship of Fools, 238.
16. McCabe, Money, 9.
17. McCormack, Solar Bones, 14.
18. McCabe, Money, 39.
19. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 8.
20. Waldman, “Self-Awareness.”
21. Darling, “Capitalism, the Internet and Depersonalization,” 539.
22. Ibid., 539.
23. Ibid., 541.
24. Ibid., 542.
25. Ibid., 549.
26. Rooney and Lockwood, “in conversation.”
27. Waldman, “Self-Awareness.”
28. Davis-Goff.
29. Baume, Seven Steeples, 71.
30. Ibid., 240.
31. Ibid., 240.
32. Baume, Handiwork, 196.
33. Baume, A Line Made by Walking, 157.
34. Ibid., 22.
35. Ibid., 31.
36. Kiberd, “Irish Writer and World,” 276.
37. Baume, A Line Made by Walking, 90.
38. Ibid., 172.
39. Ibid., 189.
40. Ibid., 213.
41. Ibid., 112–113.
42. Ibid., 239.
43. Ibid., 302.
44. Ibid., 134.
45. Ibid., 135.
46. Ibid., 135.
47. Dolan, Exciting Times, 57.
48. Ibid., 23.
49. Ibid., 61.
50. Ibid., 65.
51. Ibid., 110.
52. Ibid., 236.
53. Lee, “Unemployment-Related Assistance System of Hong Kong,” Exec. Summary point 1.
54. Dolan, Exciting Times, 20.
55. Ibid., 12.
56. Ibid., 174.
57. Ibid., 109.
58. Ibid., 189.
59. Ibid., 189.
60. Ibid., 68.
61. Ibid., 184.
62. Ibid., 46, 124.
63. Ibid., 119.
64. Ibid., 68.
65. Ibid., 187.
66. Ibid., 197.
67. Ibid., 22.
68. Ibid., 5.
69. Ibid., 9.
70. Ibid., 18.
71. Ibid., 26.
72. Ibid., 34, 268.
73. Ibid., 34.
74. Ibid., 34.
75. Ibid., 94.
76. Ibid., 190.
77. Ibid., 249.
78. Hughes, The Wild Laughter, 25.
79. Ibid., 11–13.
80. Ibid., 129.
81. Ibid., 130.
82. Ibid., 82.
83. Ibid., 137.
84. Ibid., 61.
85. Ibid., e.g. 30, 124.
86. Ibid., 37–38.
87. Ibid., 27.
88. Ibid., 58.
89. Ibid., 6.
90. Ibid., 137.
91. Ibid., 70.
92. Hughes, Orchid and the Wasp, 99.
93. Ibid., 138–139.
94. Ibid., 211.
95. Ibid., e.g. 167, 301.
96. Ibid., 86.
97. Ibid., 287.
98. Ibid., 336.
99. Graeber, Bullshit Jobs, xv.
100. Ibid., xxiv.
101. Ballantine, “Anti-Work Brigade.”
102. quoted in Ballantine, “Anti-Work Brigade.”
103. Frontpage Metrics, “r/antiwork metrics.”
104. Graeber, Bullshit Jobs, 19. In Adams’ novel, the protagonists find themselves aboard “Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B,” a ruse to rid planet Golgafrincham of all “useless” citizens: “Hair-dressers, tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, public relations executives, and management consultants” (Adams, Restaurant, 149).
105. Graeber, Bullshit Jobs, 21–22.
106. r/antiwork.
107. Graeber, Bullshit Jobs, xiv.
108. Dolan, Exciting Times, 236.
109. Samuel, “Basic Income.”
110. Gov.ie, “Basic Income Pilot.”
111. Hughes, The Wild Laughter, 25.
112. Ibid., 130.
113. Baume, Seven Steeples, 71.
114. Citizen’s Information Ireland.
115. Dolan, “Life & Novels.”
116. Ibid.
117. Baume, Seven Steeples, 185.
118. Ibid., 185.
119. Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 25.
120. Federici, “Precarious Labor.”
121. International Labour Organization, “Employment by Sex and Age.”
122. McRobbie, “Top Girls?,” 718.
123. Ibid., 721.
124. Dolan, Exciting Times, 67, 141.
125. Ibid., 172.
126. Ibid., 118–9.
127. Hughes, Orchid and the Wasp, 337.
128. Baume, Seven Steeples, 163.
129. Hughes, The Wild Laughter, 114.
130. Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 55.
131. Ibid., 55.
132. Ibid., 55.
133. Dolan, Exciting Times, 119.
134. Hughes, Orchid and the Wasp, 285–7.
135. Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 2.
136. Jameson, “Future City,” 76.
137. Beaumont, “Imagining the End Times,” 79–80, and footnote 88.
138. Darling, “Capitalism, the Internet and Depersonalization,” 542.
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