On Politics
I recognise something in Rooney's writing that in the real world was hard to diagnose and pinpoint. Politics seems to have little impact on my day-to-day experience. And I have virtually no impact on the politics of my community or my country.
This was one of the absenses in my life that pushed me towards journalism - an urge to understand how the world works and why people aren't more motivated to be involved.
I learned two interesting things in journalism. And bear with me here. I think they're relevant.
When I started my masters, I became friends with the great grandchild of one of the leaders of the 1916 rising. Watching their life and interests, I had to get over a personal bias - some part of me had the expectation that their family history should be a major part of their personality. That they should be consumed by anger over what happened to someone so close to them by blood.
But that's not realistic. I have no understanding of the injustices that members of my family had to endure under British rule. But even if I did, I'm my own person. And I live in a society that values individualism.
So that was the first thing - that perhaps a break from history is inevitable in an individualistic society. And that perhaps that was understandable.
Rooney writes about individuals, living in a highly materialistic, modern capitalist society, where many people are a-political. Where the default state is alienation from politics. Her characters may state their political views, but they don't act in accordance with them.
The second thing I learned in journalism was that many of the people who do engage with politics do so for entertainment. And with clicks as the primary metric for success in journalism in the digital age, entertaining people was by necessity more important than informing them.
I didn't have a name for it then. Writing about America, the political scientist Eitan Hersh calls it political hobbyism.
Hersh writes, in *Politics is for Power*: "If you are reasonably well-off and white, and if you mostly live among other people like you, then you may have trouble seeing how your fate is linked to the fate of those less fortunate. Maybe you understand it intelectually but don't feel it day to day." He links this apathy to the relative comfort of modern middle classs society in America.
I might link it to capitalism, and Rooney might do the same. Ireland is something of a neoliberal poster child. The country's rapid ascent from impoverished colony to thriving global economy has created a cohort of over eductated and largely comfortable people who very much need to work month to month for a paycheck but who see themselves as safe. As above the fray. As middle class.
The flow of capital into the county since the 1970s ( facinating video here) has broken the typical Irish person's link to a struggle for self-determination that is only 100 years old.
Without that link and because of the comfort that captialism provides and the individualism that it fosters, fundamental questions of how we should live and organize our society are extremely abscent here. Concieving of an alternative way of life after capitalism seems almost impossible.
With my parents, in school, in technical college with working class people, in engineering with welthy business people, in journalism with socialists, human rights advocates, idealists, shrewd pragmatists and News Crop autotomons.
Across the full swathe of Irish life, in my 42 years on the earth, questions about how we should live have been almost entirely abscent.
But the fiction of our society does not reflect that reality. I read about heros, villians, struggles, freedom, challenging decisions and harsh realities.
Instead, Rooney presents a banal vision of everyday life where people have no political agency, and don't really desire it. It is a very recognisable world.
Rooney herslef has talked about her politics - a Marxist and a communist- and has asked what it might mean to writie a Marxist novel? She has talked about the contradiction of creating novels for commercial gain within the profit driven publishing industry.
I think her writing is her answer. She presents a version of Ireland as devoid of religion, politics and purpose as we observe in the real world. Her writing leaves out the stories that we tell ourselves about who we are.
And yet, in the backgorund of her work, a ghost estate, the transactional nature of an intimate relationship or a conversation about migration policy while on holiday. The real world is there - it's just not her protagonist's priority.
In Conversations, Rooney's two young leads regularly discuss polticis. To different degrees, they do so performatively, with each other, in their friend group or with the older couples they spend time with later in the book.
Francis is a self-declared communist. She never wants a job, to earn a wage. She's disinterested in her internship, in her studies. She's certainly not an ardent capitalist but the book doesn't give us examples of the actions she might take to bring about the kind of world she claims to want to see.
Bobbi, clearly well read and intelligent, uses political arguements as a weapon to show her superiority, to win. But we're not meant to see her as a political agent, and her family's wealth seems to undo in our minds Bobbi's view of herself.
So then, is this a cold, cynical view of Irish society. Is it a scathing critique of capitalim - that our scope to be political actor is irretrievably lost?
I don't think so. Rooney uses her characters then to critique society but does so while showing them a great deal of compassion - she is not contemptuos of them, even if she is contemptous of the society that created them. Speaking to the Louisiana Channel about Conversations With Friends, I think Rooney addressed that concern. She said:
"I don't' believe in the idea of independent people, I don't believe that anyone is independent from anyone because the more that I think about how our world is structured, we all rely on each other's labour all the time...
That's happening on one level... and to try and make that work in a microscopic sense, like it works in novels, is to try and observe just how much one person can change one person. To try and show that even on that level the individual is never really the individual. You're always the culmination of the influence of others."