Consider “Snowflake” by Louise Nealon

“Get – the fuck – up – you dirty – lookin’– bastard.” – Uncle Billy in “Snowflake” by Louise Nealon

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han holds the view that the ego, once one of the disciplinary-subject, is now one of the achievement-subject. The Achievement Society is characterized by excessive positivity, undiminished from external authoritarian dictates. This positivity arises from the societal shift from external command to internal demand. We should be doing this or that and we feel guilty if we are not achieving something. This disappearance of domination does not entail freedom. The resulting toll is being borne by subjects that illustrate an inability to manage negative experiences.

To quote Han from The Burnout Society,  “[T]he exhausted, depressive achievement-subject grinds itself down, so to speak. It is tired, exhausted by itself, and at war with itself. Entirely incapable of stepping outward, of standing outside itself, of relying on the Other, on the world, it locks its jaws on itself; paradoxically, this leads the self to hollow and empty out. It wears out in a rat race it runs against itself”. And this is what Debbie endures in Snowflake.

Snowflake is a story of exhaustion. The background  noise is that of a farm where cows literally get milked. Debbie is overproducing in order to support her family, overachieving in order to fulfil the expectations of society and overcommunicating to inform us as to what has all gone wrong. This is largely maintained by internal demands. It is the Achievement Society.

The reader is quickly made aware that Debbie has too many balls in the air and everything is moving away from her at a rapid pace. The incessant stream of turmoil represents an evolutional regression for Debbie. She is forced back into a reduced, animalistic state where her attention is distributed across many competing loads.  How does she complete any study? How does she do anything to any reasonable standard of quality when she spends so much time commuting and helping out at home? She’s stuck at the watering hole, using her peripheral vision in case a crocodile emerges, or a hedgehog decides to fall into the pit of a cattle grid. Debbie is condemned to live in the “society of tiredness”. Aside from her family members spending most of the time in bed, in one phase of the novel Debbie herself notes that she seems to be sleeping for many hours longer than expected all the time.

But the exhaustion and stress that Debbie endures are not just her own personal experiences. Is it more than a modest proposal to suggest that Debbie might be the personification of Irish societal depression that has persisted since the 2007 financial crisis? She leads a hollowed-out existence, an existence that is a real predicament for herself and those around her. Infrastructure fails her and interventions from officialdom are superficial at best. Debbie doesn’t properly participate in her studies, her social life is orientated around self-medicated misery. She has no self-expression other than to consume commodified, junk culture, such as the TV show The Gilmore Girls. These procrastination binges are insufficient.

One way to deal with the excessive positivity of the Achievement Society is to join the Doping Society. Debbie becomes to rely on “the immanency of vital functions and capacities, which must be maximized by any means”. Not alone, all the characters in Snowflake medicate themselves with alcohol or drugs or sustain behaviours that lead to some form of physical harm. Almost every character in the novel seems to have had, or maintains, a toxic relationship with the “drink”. Collectively, a dead body being hoisted onto a pool table or children doing laps of the pub at Christmas is nothing strange for the parish.

On three occasions Nealon invokes a Disney prince, one could wonder if there is a happily-ever-after around the corner? What mechanism can Nealon use to hoist Debbie out of the pernicious effects of the Achievement Society? Han hypothesises that “[D]epression is the sickness of a society that suffers from excessive positivity”. Therefore, a way to regain control in the Achievement Society is to invoke negative potency. Debbie has lots of positive potency, that is, she is not impotent. She can do things and this means she is in demand by everyone. However, Debbie lacks negative potency, she doesn’t seem to be able not to do something. In a sharp exposition, the alienation from the material reality that Debbie is experiencing bluntly confronts the reader when she can’t remember having sex multiple times over a span of months. In one climactic scene, Debbie struggles to say “No” and the other subject in the scene struggles to digest her message.

Again, is anything offered to the reader in terms of resolution? It’s not immediately obvious to me that Nealon offers any…except to survive and to seek some help, perhaps to go on a holiday? In the closing pages, we end up back where we started, on our backs, looking at the stars, telling stories. If Snowflake is some sort of mirror for our society, then what can be reflected in contemporary affairs that can point the way to a better world or a tamer realisation of the Achievement Society?

And who am I to ask anyway? Maybe I am the cow that Debbie’s uncle is cursing and beating with a length of Wavin pipe to get it into a milking slot? I stand in my reduced, animalistic state, as the milking machine pulls away on my udder, seeking the liberation of internal disempowerment via external directives, unfairly asking an alumni of the Trinity School of English Literature for direction on what to do in life. To paraphrase Meet the Fockers, I have an udder Louise, can you milk me?

Snowflake by Louise Nealon. Manilla Press, 336pp.

The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han, Erik Butler (Translator). Stanford University Press, 60pp.