The Importance of Being Normal: The Circulation of Affects in Sally Rooney’s Short Fiction

When defining the short story, Ireland’s alleged eminent prose form, Frank O’Connor surmised that its fictional worlds orbited toward the incapacity to accept a “normal society.” In other words, he deemed it a vehicle for abnormal characters. To continue the dialogue fostered by this canonical study, I propose that what lies underneath O’Connor’s observations is not a clear-cut differentiation between the two sides of the spectrum, but rather a quest for normalcy, which I pose as a quest for belonging. The first decade of the new millennium witnessed the collapse of the Celtic Tiger, whose neoliberal promise became the dominant public discourse. Its crash left citizens, mainly those belonging to the lower-middle and middle class, unguarded against the predatory capitalism that governs today’s world. Contemporary authors are registering the impact of larger, systemic failures in their fictions and confronting their mechanisms. An exemplary case is Sally Rooney, whose brutally precise prose details how the magnitude of ephemeral circumstances feels too overwhelming to understand and, thus, to articulate. Her characters struggle with the intimate implications of the global world we inhabit and navigate a profound sense of isolation as a result. Drawing on affect theory, in this article I analyze the characters’ processes of becoming aware of their affects and the fact that they are not yet ready to be translated into speech, what I term quotidian unease, in order to illuminate their quest for normalcy in Mr Salary and “At the Clinic.”