Life, Death and the Pastoral: Metamodern Sensibilities in Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones

Abstract

Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones (2016) is an award-winning Irish novel that highlights the ongoing engagement of contemporary Irish fiction with its rich literary heritage. While its single-sentence, stream-of-consciousness form recalls Joyce, the novel’s thematic rejection of urban modernism aligns it with Oona Frawley’s concept of the Irish pastoral. Marcus, the posthumous narrator, returns as a ghost on All Souls’ Day to reflect on his life through a series of nature-infused memories that draw on both classical and Romantic pastoral traditions. This article argues that Solar Bones participates not only in a “metamodernist” aesthetics (James and Seshagiri, 2010)—through its revival of Joycean formal experiment, but also in “a metamodern structure of feeling,” characterised by the re-emergence of Romantic sensibilities (Vermeulen and van den Akker, 2010). By mapping neoromantic sensibilities in McCormack’s representations of the protagonist’s personal growth—mediated through his reflections on the natural world and his portrayal as a modern-age shepherd—the article posits Solar Bones as a work in which the new structure of feeling manifests primarily as an oscillation between the ordinary and the sublime, order and disorder, life and death, and the finite and infinite.