Investing in Fictions: Faith, Abstraction and Materiality in Paul Murray’s The Mark and the Void

Abstract

One of the central contentions of this essay is that Paul Murray's novel, The Mark and the Void, addresses questions of faith, fictionality, literary form and the relationship between abstract finance and material sociality. The novel engages with and exposes the arcane vernaculars of finance capitalism, while at the same time registering the inalienable materiality of their effects in terms of impoverishment, displacement and terminal indebtedness. As we shall detail, for Murray, the purpose of ‘finance fiction’ is neither to confirm nor further mythologize the transcendental fictionality of high finance. In crafting such a literary critique of Celtic Tiger Ireland, Murray invokes an increasingly common trope – the zombie. In doing so, The Mark and The Void partakes of a figuration that acknowledges ‘the deadliness of financialized debt and credit crisis’. In a sense, enlisting the metonymic figure of the zombie speaks to the undead nature of indebtedness, and it is an apt figuration of the past that continues to haunt in the present and into the future. As the narrative suggests, debt is the financial burden that refuses to die, and the literary zombie represents communities of Celtic Tiger debtors metonymically.