Bildung and Temporality in Justin Quinn’s Mount Merrion

Abstract

The article focuses on the ways in which genre, narrative and time intersect in readings of cultural responses to both the global economic crash of 2008 and the implosion of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger debt economy. Justin Quinn’s employment of an iteration of the bildungsroman in Mount Merrion (2013) is telling in the context of the demise of the Irish economic “boom”, given that it references one of the classic realist narrative forms through which citizen-consumers were hailed and ratified. In this sense, the novel partially furnishes a deeper historical contextualisation of the roots and the development of the political and economic environments that eventuate with the Celtic Tiger “boom”. Additionally, with its attention to teleology and its structural affinities to the bildungsroman, Mount Merrion raises questions about competing and interlocking varieties of temporality. In Quinn’s employment of the bildungsroman form, and its allegorical and temporal features, we identify youthful characters that defy the allegorical form and temporal trajectories of the generic conventions of the bildungsroman. While Quinn’s narrative does not ultimately fashion radical aesthetic or political alternatives to the prevailing neoliberal-capitalist conjuncture, it raises provocative questions regarding the possibilities of imaginative alternatives that are coeval with, and embedded within, dominant narrative forms.