Mike McCormack’s style of post-mortem modernism

The legacies of modernism in Irish literature have frequently been approached through the prism of influence, as writers are often compared with James Joyce, Flann O’Brien and Samuel Beckett. This essay reconsiders how we can critically approach modernist legacies by closely examining the style of Mike McCormack’s one-sentence novel Solar Bones (2016). I argue that Solar Bones responds to the Irish economic crash of 2008 by performing a kind of ‘post-mortem’ on modernist forms of narration and temporality, which is reflected in how the novel is written. Building on David James’ framework for tracing modernist legacies in Modernist Futures (2012), I consider how Solar Bones self-reflexively explores various modernist styles through a posthumous narrator as a means to portray the social and historical fallout of the Celtic Tiger. Consequently, McCormack’s style of post-mortem modernism exemplifies how we can critically attend to the particular formal, affective and political qualities that animate contemporary engagements with modernism’s legacies, while also allowing us to consider the novel in relation to a ‘rejuvenated experimental pulse’, as McCormack puts it, in twenty-first century Irish literature.