ABSTRACT
Whereas Trevor’s short story and Bolger’s novel displayed a tension between containment and openness, two key concepts Jeff Malpas1 denes as fundamental to any reection on space and place, Anne Enright’s novel The Forgotten Waltz2 illustrates the ontological shortcomings of the excesses of openness. In this novel it seems that by dint of too much stretching into virtual space, the extendedness of place has awed and disrupted the essential relationship to place as home, to the body as embodiment of home, and to time. The Forgotten Waltz was published in 2011, three years into the recession, but its narrative spans the last years of the economic boom and the years immediately following the bust, focusing on a moment of radical transformation in Irish society and the Irish psyche. Donal Donovan and Antoin E. Murphy open the rst chapter of The Fall of the Celtic Tiger: Ireland and the Euro Debt Crisis comparing two issues of The Economist dating, respectively, from 1988 to 1997. Strikingly, whereas the January 1988 survey of The Economist described Ireland as ‘the poorest country in rich north-west Europe,’ Donovan and Murphy note how ‘less than ten years later, the tone of The Economist had changed, contrasting the 1988 front cover with one in 1997 barred with the headline “Europe’s shining light”,’3 In the meantime, Ireland had experienced ‘high and sustained economic growth, a very low ratio of debt to GDP (…), current account balance of payments surpluses, falling unemployment, net immigration, and a budget surplus.’4 This economic frenzy, “the stuff of macro-economists” dreams,’5 translated into a rise in the housing market and the creation of a speculative property bubble. As Donovan and Murphy note in their introduction, the 2008 recession which marked the end of the Celtic Tiger ‘was not just a domestic Irish nancial crisis, it was part of a global ‘Black 2008.’6 And yet, even if, as they say, ‘the emerging nancial crisis crept slowly on the Irish psyche in 2008,’7 it eventually caused and is still causing considerable damage to the Irish society as a whole, plunging its roots in a metahistoric narrative of loss, dispossession and displacement.
