https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2268-7259
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ABSTRACT
This article examines the role of temporality in Paul Murray’s The Mark and the Void. By exploring issues of time and financialisation throughout, Murray diagnoses the parameters of a new Irish subjectivity, delineates new forms of temporality and routines of the corporeal, and critiques Ireland’s role in upholding global inequalities. But as well as providing a robust critique, the novel offers a salve to the problems of temporality in post-Tiger, globalised Ireland. By suggesting competing forms of time, especially slowed-down time, Murray engages with aesthetic tactics that can aid in, if not dismantling, then at the very least calling into question the power of an accelerated, chrono-manic temporality linked with global financial structures. With its ethical commitment to probing the accepted parameters of financialised time, The Mark and the Void displays a diversity of approaches to time that, I argue, foreground a commitment to literature’s role in social change.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Cleary, ‘“Horseman, Pass By!’…”; and Angela Nagle, “Ireland and the New Economy.”
2. The question of temporality is often addressed in studies of contemporary Irish literature. Since the publication of Irish Times: Temporalities of Modernity by David Lloyd et al in 2008, more studies have followed. Notable among recent interventions on temporality in contemporary Irish literature are works by Eoin Flannery, such as his recent book, Form, Affect and Debt in Celtic Tiger Fiction, his article addressing “the relationship of past, present and future” in Deirdre Madden’s Time Present and Time Past, and another article of his,“Bildung and Temporality in Justin Quinn’s Mount Merrion” (Flannery, “Finance and Fiction,” 1). Elsewhere, Adam Kelly has read post-crash novels as a distinctly temporal genre of fiction (Kelly, “Ireland’s Real Economy”), while Maria Mulvany has explored queer temporalities in contemporary Irish writing, reading Emma Donoghue’s Slammerkin (Maria Mulvany, “Spectral Histories”). Finally, Yen-Chi Wu has addressed the place of temporality in the novels of John McGahern, suggesting that McGahern’s “use of temporal figures and narrative strategies, serves as a subtle critique of the globalizing modernity of our time” (Wu, “Broken rhythm and slow time”, 60). This is not intended as an exhaustive list, but a sample of the kinds of engagements with temporality and Irish literature that have been recently published.
3. Deckard, “Capitalism’s Long Spiral,” 85.
4. Martin, Financialization of Daily Life, 10. Yet see also the work of Wolfgang Streeck, who has suggested conversely that the premises of financialization were actually produced by a post-war capitalist temporal logic (Streeck, Buying Time, xiv).
5. Adkins, The Time of Money, 2.
6. Konings, 29.
7. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 5.
8. Reinhold Görling, Barbara Gronau, and Ludiger Schwarte, eds. The Aesthetics of Standstill. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2019. Publisher’s webpage blurb.https://www.sternberg-press.com/product/aesthetics-of-standstill.
9. Kelly, “Ireland’s Real Economy,” 198.
10. Cleary, “‘Horseman, Pass By!”,’ 163.
11. Murray, The Mark and the Void, 31.
12. Ibid., 20.
13. Ibid., 150.
14. Ibid., 14.
15. Murray, The Mark and the Void, 31–32.
16. Ibid., 38.
17. Ibid., 25.
18. Ibid., 36–7, 43.
19. Ibid., 38, 135.
20. For an exploration of the autonomous rationality of the organs in Joyce’s Ulysses, see Sara Danius’s Senses of Modernism.
21. Ibid., 49–53.
22. Ibid., 25.
23. Berardi, Futurability, 124–5.
24. Murray, The Mark and the Void, 15.
25. Deckard, “Capitalism’s Long Spiral,” 85.
26. Murray, The Mark and the Void, 191.
27. Ibid., 309–10.
28. Deckard, “Capitalism’s Long Spiral,” 85.
29. Murray, The Mark and the Void, 23.
30. Hand, “Dublin in the Rare Old Times,” 542.
31. Murray, The Mark and the Void, 280.
32. Ibid., 283.
33. Ibid., 23.
34. Ibid., 31.
35. Murray, “Interview: Paul Murray,” interview by Gill Moore, Totally Dublin. September 6, 2015. Accessed March 28, 2022. https://www.totallydublin.ie/more/features-more/interview-paul-murray.
36. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism,” 97.
37. Paul Murray, “Cogs in an Enormous Machine: The Millions Interviews Paul Murray,” interview by Mark O’Connell, The Millions, October 20, 2015. Accessed March 28, 2022. https://themillions.com/2015/10/cogs-in-an-enormous-machine-the-millions-interviews-paul-murray.html.
38. Murray, The Mark and the Void, 153.
39. Ibid., 155.
40. Ibid., 153.
41. Ibid., 54.
42. Ibid., 170.
43. Ibid., 245–6.
44. Ibid., 30.
45. Ibid., 56.
46. Ibid., 116–118.
47. Ibid., 165, 114.
48. Ibid., 150–1.
49. Ibid., 154.
50. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 4.
51. Konings, Capital and Time, 55; Adkins, The Time of Money, 2; and Murray, The Mark and the Void, 265–6.
52. Murray, The Mark and the Void, 266–7.
53. Murray, The Mark and the Void, 274.
54. Deckard, “Capitalism’s Long Spiral,” 85; Assman, Is Time Out of Joint?, 136.
55. Fuchs, Precarious Times, 68.
56. Koepnick, On Slowness, 3.
57. Ibid., 4.
58. Ibid., 283.
59. Ibid., 288.
60. I borrow the term “chrono-mania” from Anne Fuchs, who uses it to describe a “new temporal pathology” appearing in Europe in the leadup to World War I (Fuchs, Precarious Times, 82).
61. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 4.
62. Ibid., 199–200.
63. Murray, The Mark and the Void, 85–6.
64. Cleary, “’Horseman, Pass By!,” 146.
65. Murray, The Mark and the Void, 22, 252.
66. Joyce, too, had an experimental relationship with temporality in his writing. Finnegan’s Wake, of which Joyce suggested that the real hero is “time” itself, is often cited as Joyce’s most original engagement with temporality. Critical engagements have variously read the “evental time” and the “untime” of a “cyclical time-space continuum” in Finnegan’s Wake (Mansouri, “Evental Time and the Untime in Finnegan’s Wake”); co-conceptualised temporality and “ecological resilience” in the text (Barrows, “Joyce’s Panarchy: Time, Ecological Resilience and Finnegan’s Wake”); or explored it as presenting a new form of posthuman temporality (Borg, The Measureless Time of Joyce, Deleuze and Derrida). Ulysses, too, is constructed using a series of radical temporalities. A recent collection, Reading Joycean Temporalities, has addressed a range of “instances of Joyce’s preoccupation with time and temporal epistemology” (Wawrzycka, “‘An Ample Space of Time’ (SH 69): Introduction,” 1), particularly in Ulysses. Wawrzycka’s edited volume also contains readings of Homeric time (Nelson, “Telling Time: Techniques of Narrative Time in Ulysses and the Odyssey”), historical time, and “writing finitude” in Ulysses (Mihálycsa, “‘Weighing the Point’: A Few Points on the Writing of Finitude in Ulysses.”). Similarly, Arleen Ionescu has written about alternative temporalities in Ulysses (Ionescu, “Gifts of Time: Alternative Temporalities in Ulysses”). And finally, the short stories of Dubliners, as well as the bildungsroman A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, have been read through the lens of temporality, particularly in terms of epiphany and anti-epiphany (Sayeau, Against the Event: The Everyday and Modernist Narrative), and infinitude (Conley, “‘Endlessnessnessness’: Joyce and Time without Measure”).