Systemic Crime and Social Disaffection in Benjamin Black's Quirke Series: A Struggle for Difference

This chapter examines the literary representation of systemic crime in Ireland in two of the so-called “Quirke novels”, a collection of noir narratives published by John Banville under the penname Benjamin Black. My analysis draws on the postulates about “systemic violence” delineated by Slavoj Žižek and Sarah Ahmed’s view of “the circulation of emotions”. I argue that the existence of structural crime in Ireland is suggested in the series, as they portray the interconnection of the different agents of hegemonic power that controlled the social order of Dublin in the 1950s, where the actions are set. Similarly, these crime novels are constructed upon a multi-layered cluster of affective contacts that can be interpreted in a double way. On the one hand, the protagonist, Quirke, personifies the dialectics of indifference/care and the extent to which interpersonal relations may originate humane awakenings. On the other hand, Black’s fictional articulation of atrocities that had been absent from public discourse not only puts the reader in contact with concealed elements of Ireland’s past, but it also reveals his critique of the transhistorical indifference to victimization that have dominated much of the Irish socio-cultural order since that period. The chapter concentrates on the two novels where Ireland’s structural violence and the need to respond to social inertia are most clearly articulated:  Christine Falls (2006) and Even the Dead (2015). In order to demonstrate the writer’s re-thinking of the relation between systemic crime and affective (and indeed effective) action, I first examine the elements whereby the structural dimension of evil and victimisation is articulated in the two texts, and then describe the circuit of affects and emotions experienced by Quirke in his struggle for difference and on his way towards a possible, or perhaps impossible, but noticeably radical change of ethics and social order in Ireland.