#30 - Close to Home: Transclass Irish fiction

Ireland, among European nations, may not be particularly famous for its articulations of overt class politics. Certainly, the perception may hold that class divisions in Ireland are considerably less rigid and decidedly more subtle than those found in the United Kingdom for example.

As Liam Cullinane was able to point in a chapter of Locked Out: A Century of Irish Working-Class Life in 2013 “[In Ireland] the vocabulary of class is a great deal more complex. Terms like working class and middle class… may not necessarily be a natural part of the Irish lexicon.” Instead, terms like “’grandies’, ‘big people’, ‘cottage people’, ‘money people’ etc. appear as indicators of social class”.

With discussions of social distinction so prone to euphemism—people have notions or they have nothing—it is unsurprising that it is in the field of literature that we see now in Ireland a new generation seeking to explore the differences between social classes.

I have written previously here on The Bookwheel about the concept of the “scholarship boy” in relation to Zeshan Shakar’s novel Tante Ulrikkes Vei, but I want to turn to a newly translated work of French social theory to ask questions about and try to better understand the class preoccupations in some new Irish fiction.

First published in France in 2014, Chantal Jaquet’s Transclasses: A Theory of Social Non-Reproduction, now available in English thanks to a translation by Gregory Elliott, might provide a useful key to understanding a phenomenon in Irish fiction writing in the past half decade or so: namely the rise of a literature that is familiar with and explores the problems that often attend social mobility, its effects on individuals and their families.

While the class politics of France and Ireland are necessarily of a different stripe given the significantly different histories of both countries, nonetheless I think that Jaquet’s book has some useful things to say about contemporary Irish fiction.

Jaquet’s term transclass is an attempt to correct the fact that in her view “no rigorous term exists for precisely naming those who do not reproduce the model of their social class.” Jaquet notes that nearly all such terminology for the process of leaving one social class for another – most often via the opportunities offered by higher education – has within it something pejorative: becoming ‘respectable’, or being a ‘social climber’. Ultimately, she notes that “whether mocked or pitied, such individuals are not located in a conceptual framework.” Thus Jaquet has coined the term transclass to “confer legitimate objective existence on those who do not reproduce the fate of their class of origin.”

Much of the most popular writing, both fiction and creative non-fiction, to have emerged in Ireland in the past number of years might readily fit into not the autobiographical but rather into Annie Ernaux’s term the auto-socio-biographical; this is a term which Jaquet describes as writing that “takes the form of a story where the point is not much rediscovering the self as losing it in a larger reality: a common condition or shared social suffering.”

Perhaps the first contemporary Irish novelist to spring to mind here is Sally Rooney and especially her two most recent novels: Normal People (2018) and Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021). In the former the character of Connell is a representation of the transclass par excellence. A sporty but introspective young man with literary ambitions, whose mother cleans the family home of the main narrator Marianne, Connell who is self-assured and certain of his place in his milieu of origin is – contra Marianne – at a loss when he moves from his hometown of Sligo into the long-desired but ultimately alien milieu of university in the capital city of Ireland, Dublin. As such, the trajectory of Connell encompasses the ways in which Jaquet notes that “non-reproduction is simply the continuation of reproduction [of social class] by other means” whereby “The social order is preserved by the expulsion of an element that threatens it, which introduces disorder, as it does not conform to the prevalent model.” Although he wishes to leave for bigger things, he is in a sense pushed, too. His exit from his home environment is contrasted with the dire consequences of a friend who stays behind and dies by suicide.

At university, Connell experiences the discomfort common to most people in his situation when he realises how lightly worn the accumulated cultural capital of those he shares the seminar, is. “He [Connell] knows that a lot of literary people in college see books primarily as a way of appearing cultured [….] It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so they might afterwards feel superior to the people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about.” Connell’s earnestness – and his uncertainty in offering his opinions reflect the fact that as someone who is transclass he perhaps, like the petty-bourgeois takes “culture too seriously to go in for bluff or imposture or even for the distance and casualness which show true familiarity; too seriously to escape permanent fear of ignorance or blunders…”As Jaquet points out “To penetrate the bourgeois world… is to make an incursion into a universe of objects that are the natural appendices of wealth, culture, and distinction”, putting as it does “the transclass into an abyss of perplexity.” This culminates in Connell’s depression and the scene in the therapists office where he says

And, I think I thought if I moved here I’d fit in better. I thought I’d be with more like-minded people but that just hasn’t … I left Carricklea thinking I could have a different life. But, I hate it here and I can never go back because those friendships are gone and Rob is gone and I can’t see him again. I can’t get that life back.

Connell then exemplifies – particularly towards the end of the novel when he is travelling with Marianne and his peers around Europe interrailing and staying at Marianne’s family’s Italian villa – “the full extent of the distance between those who ‘only have to take the trouble to be born’ and those who must win places in a hard-fought battle.”

Not a little ironically, in Rooney’s 2021 novel Beautiful World, Where Are You – a novel with an epistolary framework of emails between friends Alice (a successful novelist) and Eileen – the character of Alice in one exchange early on writes:

Have I told you I can’t read contemporary novels anymore? I think it’s because I know too many of the people who write them. I see them all the time at festivals, drinking red wine and talking about who’s publishing who in New York. Complaining about the most boring things in the world… Who cares? And then they go away and write their sensitive little novels about ‘ordinary life.’ The truth is they know nothing about ordinary life. Most of them haven’t so much as glanced up against the real world in decades.

While it is undoubtedly risky to conflate the author of the novel and the author in the novel, nonetheless it is tempting here to see the character of Alice as a kind of mechanism for Rooney to deliver her unrestrained opinions of the contemporary literary scene, in some places at least. As Alice goes on in this email to her friend to note “The problem with the contemporary Euro-American novel is that it relies for its structural integrity on suppressing the lived realities of most human beings on earth.” Alice suggests that “To confront the poverty and misery in which millions of people are forced to live, to put the fact of that poverty, that misery, side by side with the lives of the ‘main characters’ of a novel, would be deemed either tasteless or simply artistically unsuccessful.”

This is certainly a compelling argument and diagnosis of much of contemporary fiction. However, I would like to contend that—contra the character of Alice Kinsella—many of the novels that have been published in the past half decade in Ireland, if they do not quite reach the heights of putting “the fact of that poverty, that misery, side by side with the lives of the ‘main characters’ of a novel” many nonetheless do explore the dynamics of class in contemporary Ireland. There is an increase in the number of novels that do so from a position, from the viewpoint of someone who belongs to the transclass.

Take the novel Snowflake by Louise Nealon. Not unlike Normal People, Snowflake relates the trials of Debbie White as she makes the transition from life on a small family farm to attend university – like Rooney’s characters – at Trinity College, Dublin. For Debbie, coming from a small farm, she is keen neither to reject her rural roots in the urban – and at least nominally urbane – world of university in Dublin nor to deny her own desire to fit in. Debbie is intimidated by her surroundings and the more self-assured people she meets including characters like Griffin who she is introduced to by her friend Xanthe. Both Griffin and Xanthe laugh at Debbie when she mispronounces the name of famed Dublin bookshop Hodges Figgis as “Hoggis Fidges!”. When they laugh at her she rebounds with a self-conscious “’Or whatever the fuck you call it’”, a prime example of the kind of deflection practised by someone suffering the imposter syndrome of the transclass, pretending not to care about their faux pas but in fact wounded by it.

Nealon’s book is instructive too about the specific class dynamics at play in Ireland when the main character Debbie’s friend Xanthe—in the company of another distinctly middle-class character, Orla—chastises Debbie for not seeing herself as middle-class because in Debbie’s words “I’m a farmer” and anyhow, “…my family is not, like, considered well-off in the village or anything.” When trying to affect cool detachment while awaiting results of a college essay Debbie relays to us that :

We all seem to have forgotten that the only reason we got into the course is because we’re all overachievers who feed off external validation. A lot of people in our class got enough points to study medicine. We make jokes about our families mourning the fact that we haven’t the heads for a more useful occupation. Be a something, Orla’s mother told her. Go to college to be a something. I think of what my something could be and I hear Billy whisper professor into my ear. I cringe even thinking about it. It’s like saying I want to be an old man in a tweed suit reading Shakespeare and smoking a pipe.

Here Debbie reveals the gap between who is actually studying literature these days—girls like her from farming backgrounds and a great variety of others besides—and who it is literature is “supposed” to belong to. Debbie’s sense—despite her place at university—that dreaming of being a something, especially a professor, is not ‘for the likes of’ her is symptomatic of her sense of not fully belonging in her new environment.

Between 1997—2009, Ireland saw a massive expansion in the offering of third level university places with the introduction of fee-free university (a nominal registration charge remained) for the first time in the history of the state. 

This opening up of university to a much wider cohort of the population had a significant impact not only in terms of who attended university, but what they chose to study there. This event took place almost thirty years after the seismic shift that was represented in the late 1960s with the introduction of free secondary school education. While that change was arguably more significant in the context of 1960s Ireland, the opening up of third level education in the 1990s and 2000s has normalised attendance at third level for many people since. Without those changes, there would have been fewer Connells or Debbies (or me for that matter) in the Irish university system in the past two decades and counting.

 Since 2009, registration costs have gone up significantly (fees by any other name cost as much) and living costs for students have also risen astronomically (access to student accommodation, like all housing in Ireland, has not kept up with demand). There continues to be  a system of maintenance grants—pending a means test—that help cover to some extent the cost of attending third level institutions in Ireland, meaning that working-class Irish students still have some hope of attending university. However the combined pressures of increased fees, rising living costs and more competitive grant applications mean many will undoubtedly choose to study financially remunerative degrees over and above subjects in the Arts. Likewise, a decline in prospects for students who study general degrees like Arts, means that a unique moment in Irish education is likely already well-passed.

For instance for an EU student to attend Trinity College, Dublin to study English in 2023/24, if they are offered a place, it will cost €5,681 in fees meaning a cost of  close to €20,000 for a three year degree. While you can apply for the College’s own grants known as “Schols”, and which makes appearances in both Normal People and Snowflake, of course not everyone will get such a scholarship. The winning of a scholarship like this in fact fulfils the reality that “rare instances of social mobility are often brandished to conceal immobility and provide support for it” as Jaquet puts it.

A student availing of a full maintenance grant that also covers fees up to a maximum of €6,270 will be in receipt of anywhere between as little as €1,613 to a maximum of up of €6,971 for nine months of the year (there are ceilings for receipt of different amounts of the maintenance grant as well your proximity with a plus minus of 30km to your ‘normal place of residence’). Even those in receipt of the maximum sum would be in receipt of just €774.55 per month to attend an institution more than 30km away. The Technical University of Dublin publishes an annual cost of living guide. It’s guide for 2022/23 estimated that the cost of living out of home for a student is €13,305 while a student who can remain living at home has costs of less than half that of €6,159.

In my old university, University College Cork, the fees to attend the general Bachelor of Arts degree in 2023/24 are €5,823.

While there has been some discussion of the emergence of a body of fiction that emulates the “campus novel” in Ireland in the past few years a reading of these novels, one that privileges the setting itself over the affect that a change of setting induces in the characters, misses the most important aspect of this literary output. To greater or lesser degrees novels like Normal People, Snowflake, and from Northern Ireland, Michael Magee’s Close to Home are better understood as Irish novels of the transclasses and not solely or even primarily as “campus novels”. Even those early “campus novels” that would seem to fit a more general understanding of the term, like Kevin Power’s A Bad Day in Blackrock (2008), still ultimately hinge on a rupture in expected behaviour in a distinctly middle-class environment.

In Michael Magee’s Close to Home, his 2023 debut novel which recently won the Rooney Prize for Literature, we are invited into the world of Sean—a recent literature graduate and a child of the peace process, where the shadow of the Troubles in Northern Ireland hang over him, his family, and his community.

Recently returned to Belfast following a degree in English literature in Liverpool, Sean’s life is apparently rudderless, going from precarious bar job to bar job, engaging in escapist hedonism and reckless and violent behaviour in the absence of any clear future path to escape the weight of his  past, except perhaps emigration or oblivion.

What is perhaps most interesting about Close to Home, the setting in Northern Ireland rather than Ireland notwithstanding is how much it—like the work of Edouard Louis—tries to speak to the difficulties of fragile white working-class masculinity.

Sean clearly feels uncomfortable in a world of machismo, yet the defining and propelling act of the novel is his punching someone “posh” at a party when he felt he was being humiliated in an environment where he fulfilled the role of the transclass. The novel bespeaks to the failure of educational attainment alone to remedy problems in a society where all forms of capital have become so concentrated, that a love of literature and learning affords neither material betterment for those starting out at the bottom, nor even necessarily succour from the harsh realities of life.

Magee’s novel is about someone returning home to their old milieu a few years after the initial break with college is made, but the effects are much the same. It should also be noted that while different realities govern higher education in Northern Ireland, there is nevertheless important resonances with the situation in Ireland. The main character Sean finds himself attempting to navigate the problem of the one who has left and returns but who can never again be who they were before they left. The character of Sean like others of the transclass “is, in the strictest sense, a revenant. She no longer exists for those who stayed, unless it be in the spectral form of the one who left, or the revenant who sometimes wanders over old ground before vanishing again.”

Each of these novels represent different aspects of the experience of the transclass in twenty-first century Ireland. Where Rooney explores something akin to the alienation experienced by the classic narrative of the “scholarship boy” through Connell in Normal People, Louise Nealon explores the urban/rural divide through her characters in Snowflake while in Michael Magee’s very title Close to Home we see the summation of the fact that “The world of origins is evasive in its turn, for the nostalgic desire to re-join one’s class is as mythical as the dream of returning home dear to immigrants.” Sean is both close to home in that he retains his connection to it, while also being close to coming home, returning, achieving a nostos that is always just out of reach for the transclass.

There is a clear preoccupation in this diverse range of contemporary Irish writing with the feelings of alienation experienced by a range of characters who broadly fall under the designation of being transclass. That these novels should be emerging in an Irish literary scene that is undoubtedly more class-conscious than before should come as no surprise.

All of these authors were born in the early 1990s and were likely to have entered or have been in university around the time of the global financial crisis. This had some specific characteristics in Ireland insofar as it spelled the end of the “Celtic tiger” period—and saw Ireland reliant on a “troika” offering a “bailout” from the European Central Bank, International Monetary Fund and the European Commission. The effect of this “bailout” after 2010 was a period of austerity in Ireland that caused an increase in migration not seen since the 1980s and from which Ireland only began to recover before continuing demand for housing, coupled with the effects of the pandemic and other crises since has made for apparent and increasing social inequality.

Having writers attuned to the subtleties of class distinction is vital to providing us with a way of talking about class, power, and money.

It may be that just as a literature of the transclass is emerging in Ireland, the very conditions that allowed people from a range of backgrounds to obtain an arts education (whether or not they do so in Nealon’s words in order to be a something), to write novels and work as writers afterwards are disappearing just as rapidly as they appeared.

On The Bookwheel

David Convery (ed.), Locked Out: A Century of Irish Working-Class Life, 2013.

Chantal Jaquet (trans. Gregory Elliott ) Transclasses: A Theory of Social Non-reproduction, 2023.

Michael Magee, Close to Home, 2023.

Louise Nealon, Snowflake, 2021.

Sally Rooney, Normal People, 2018.

Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You, 2021.