Electric Signs and Echo Chambers: The Stupidity of Affect in Modern Irish Literature

Abstract

Ireland was in a rush to embrace electrification in the 1930s and 1940s, as it was digitalisation in the post-Celtic Tiger age of Yahoo and Google. In the face of this state-led dedication to light and currency, Irish literature has consistently found ways to restore stubborn materiality to the semiotic field. This depends on what this chapter calls its tradition of stupidity. Reclaimed as a device within literary texts, ‘stupidity’ is an instructive and often comic mode of emphasising embodiment and drawing attention to a persistent lack of connection. Moving through several literary examples taken from the mid-twentieth century to the present day (Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls, Stewart Parker’s Pentecost, and Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones), this chapter suggests three themes by which this stupidity is registered as a complicating factor within an electric modernity set adrift on the neoliberal current: emigration, constitutional politics, and ecology. The purpose of the examples offered is to show how disconnection functions, thematically and formally, within a networked imaginary, and how it might be repositioned within new discourses oriented around ecological crisis.