“[The] immediate heft of bodily and civic catastrophe”: the body (politic) in crisis in Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones

ABSTRACT

Solar Bones encompasses several interlinked crises. Mike McCormack’s 2016 Goldsmith Prize-winning novel speaks to the 2008 financial crash, the environmental and health crisis that was the 2007 cryptosporidium outbreak, political crises such as the Eighth Amendment and Citizenship Referendum, as well as various personal crises which link the local and national body politic. Throughout, McCormack is concerned with the engineering and collapse of societal foundations, but also in the ways in which crisis is experienced and embodied. Within the corrupt political system of the novel, the common good – supposedly ensured by failing, patriarchal institutions – is outsourced to women. This is true of a number of contemporary Irish social ruptures, such as the 2004 Citizenship Referendum and the Eighth Amendment which are explored in relation to Solar Bones’s exploration of female embodiment. Crisis in the novel is a gendered, embodied experience, represented both by Mairead’s severe illness and Agnes’s art. Although Mairead recovers, her body remains a site of (male) political failures. Similarly, Agnes fails to evade woman’s role as symbol of nation/community and merely embodies the political machinations outside of her control.

KEYWORDS:

• Irish literature
• Solar Bones
• Mike McCormack
• contagion
• gender

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. McCormack, Solar Bones, 193. Hereafter, SB.

2. Doyle, “Solar Bones by Mike McCormack review”.

3. SB, 23.

4. De Loughry, 110.

5. SB, 117–9.

6. SB, 13.

7. De Loughry, “Conversation with Mike McCormack,” 109.

8. Rose, Mothers, 27.

9. This referendum inserted Article 9.2 into Bunreacht na hÉireann: “Notwithstanding any other provision of this Constitution, a person born on the island of Ireland, which includes its islands and seas, who does not have, at the time of birth of that person, at least one parent who is an Irish citizen or entitled to be an Irish citizen is not entitled to Irish citizenship or nationality, unless provided for by law.”

10. Article 40.3.3 of Bunreacht na hÉireann read, until 2018: “The state acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard for the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect and, as far as is practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right.”

11. SB, 9–13.

12. SB, 13.

13. SB, 13.

14. SB, 13.

15. Pine, Irish Memory, 55.

16. Ging, “All-Consuming Images,” 55.

17. Bracken and Harney-Mahajan, “Irish Women’s Writing,” 1.

18. Burke, “Claire Kilroy,” 15.

19. SB, 174.

20. SB, 175.

21. SB, 176.

22. Flynn, “Holding On,” 38–40.

23. Burke, 15.

24. Leonard, “Galway Water Crisis,” 67.

25. SB, 125–6.

26. SB, 42.

27. SB, 73.

28. SB, 149–50.

29. SB, 142.

30. SB, 36–7 italics added.

31. SB, 39.

32. SB, 39–40.

33. SB, 40.

34. Deckard, “Solar Bones is that Extraordinary Thing”.

35. Garner, “Making ‘Race’ an Issue,” 82.

36. Yuval-Davis, “Nationalism,” 127.

37. SB, 134–5.

38. SB, 135.

39. SB, 181; 142.

40. SB, 95.

41. SB, 117.

42. Mars-Jones, “A Little Village”.

43. SB, 120.

44. SB, 101.

45. O’Toole, After, 91.

46. SB, 122–3.

47. SB, 104.

48. SB, 111.

49. SB, 108.

50. SB, 196.

51. SB, 196.

52. Lentin, “Ireland,” 616.

53. Garner, “Making ‘race’ an issue,” 70–1.

54. Ibid., 70–6.

55. Rose, Mothers, 6–7.

56. Lentin, “Ireland,” 611.

57. SB, 36–7; Garner, “Making ‘race’ an issue,” 82.

58. Flynn, “Holding On,” 50.

59. Ibid; SB, 123.

60. SB, 15.

61. SB, 22.

62. SB, 41.

63. SB, 42–3.

64. SB, 55–6.

65. SB, 45.

66. SB, 45.

67. SB, 184.

68. SB, 184.

69. Dillane, McAreavey and Pine, “The Body,” 1–2.

70. Ibid., 15.

71. Ibid., 1.

72. SB, 185.

73. Boland, “Bedad”.

74. McDonnell and Murphy, “Mediating,” 3.

75. Ibid., 4.

76. Rose, Mothers, 23. Emphasis added.

77. Holland, Savita, unpaginated.

78. Berer, “Termination,” 9.

79. McDonnell and Murphy, “Mediating,” 2.

80. See note 74 above.

81. SB, 123.

82. Flynn, “Holding On,” 50.

83. Deckard.

84. SB, 200.

85. Petherbride, “Embodied Vulnerability,” 57.

86. Dillane, McAreavey and Pine, “The Body,” 15.

87. SB, 200.

88. Bakhtin, “Rabelais,” 686.

89. SB, 197.

90. Kristeva, Power of Horror, 65.

91. SB, 201.

92. SB, 20.

93. SB, 120–1.

94. Negra and Tasker, “Gender,” 25–6.