“A happy congruence of myth and politics”. Mike McCormack’s biopolitical dystopia in Notes from a coma

Ireland may be interpreted as the quintessential dystopia when one considers the constantly negative potentialities and frequently negative actualizations “of what is past, or passing, or to come” (W. B. Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium, l. 32) in its historical experience and its personal and communitarian implications: to mention just a few paradigmatic instances, the nightmarish consequences of a non-state, the cruel destiny of underrepresented or unacknowledged citizens, the often apocalyptic future of its deported and/or migrating communities, the catastrophic exploitation of its economic resources, both actual and prospective, by colonizers of any kind and origin, et al. As a consequence, autoctonous Irish literature and foreign writers’ literarization of Irish experience have often been genetically dystopian and/or dystopically-oriented. My contribution analyzes a twenty-first-century narrative actualization of the sub-genre of “biopolitical dystopia”, Notes from a coma, an experimental novel written by the Irish writer Mike McCormack (1965-) and published by Jonathan Cape in London in 2005, “in which deep comas are tried to replace prison”. As Liam Harte remarked, “like the best dystopian fiction, this “cross between Nineteen Eighty-Four and the X Files” “combines chillingly credible scenarios with acerbic political commentary”.