Retromodernism: New "Structure of Feeling" in Mike McCormack's Solar Bones

For the last two decades, critics' attention has been turned, among many areas of literary studies, toward the New Modernist Studies, the emergence of which is symbolically ascribed to the year 1999.¹ Within the bounds of this resparked interest in modernism, some scholars argue against the idea of periodization, opting for a continuity of modernism in the second half of the twentieth century as well as in contemporary fiction, known as transhistoricism. A second contentious point revolves around an aspect of European modernism's hegemony. Thus, the New Modernist Studies promote a transnational turn, allowing literatures from other continents to be analyzed in terms of the development of their alternative modernisms irrespective of the European model.² The notion of modernism as an unfinished project is challenged by David James and Urmila Seshagiri, who detect a new movement in contemporary literature named metamodernism. The critics argue that a scholarly inquiry of the observable self-conscious and innovative re-creation of modernist aesthetics by twenty-first-century writers predetermines a precise definition of modernism as a period and as a paradigm.³

A similar phenomenon is noticeable among Irish writers of our times. Such novelists as John Banville, Sara Baume, Eimear McBride, or Anna Burns redeploy modernist aesthetics to comment on social and political aspects of Irish life.⁴ Among them one may name Mike McCormack, whose Solar Bones (2016) may be read as one of many epitomes of modernism's reemergence in contemporary Irish prose.⁵ As long as the regeneration of modernist discourse in twenty-first-century fiction is no longer questioned, the motivation behind the writers' reevaluation of modernist methods still requires scholarly scrutiny.

To further particularize the motivation for this active response to modernism visible in Irish contemporary arts and letters, especially in McCormack's case, the term retromodernism is proposed in the following article. The etymology of retromodernism resides in a conflation of the theory of metamodernism with a notion of retrotopia to amplify the meaning of the writers' need to "look back to the aspirational energies of modernism."⁶ In the case of Irish prose, modernism marks one of its greatest periods of literary development. One hundred years after the publication of James Joyce's fundamental works, McCormack creates a novel which to a certain extent appears to be a contemporary version of Ulysses. Whether Solar Bones in any way approaches the excellence of Joyce's artistry or if one hundred years is enough time for McCormack to avoid the Bloomian anxiety of influence does not fall within the ambit of this particular research. Instead, the article focuses on the role the re-creation of modernist aesthetics plays in the portrayal of contemporary Irish reality; analyzes modernist methods implemented in Solar Bones with regard to current political, social, and existential issues depicted in the novel; and argues that the theory of retromodernism best justifies the need among Irish writers, such as McCormack, to redeploy modernist techniques to tackle the question of the postmodern state of Irish society as well as individual human beings.

Joyce—on the one hand, an Irish writer; on the other, one making a literary career as a voluntary exile—is more often than not treated as a link between the Irish literary tradition and a European idea of modernism. To follow Nels Pearson's view of Irish cosmopolitanism, Joyce's modernism "arise[s] from a rigorous, nonhierarchical, and mutually transformative interplay of national and global consciousness."⁷ European centers of cosmopolitan literature such as Paris and Trieste allowed the writer to take a more reserved glance at the current situation in his homeland, by this token providing a more acute diagnosis of Irish society via the content as well as the experimental form. McCormack, with his allegiance to County Mayo, both in his works and in his life, appears to have a greater clarity from a closer distance. His locality results in his being solely compared to other Irish writers, Joyce inevitably being one of them. Specialists on Ulysses register many episodic similarities between the narration of Leopold...