UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN
HONORARY CONFERRING
Monday, 5 December 2011 at 3.30 p.m.
TEXT OF THE INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS DELIVERED BY PROFESSOR TONY ROCHE, UCD School of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin on 5 December 2011, on the occasion of the conferring of the Degree of Doctor of Literature, honoris causa on JOSEPH O’CONNOR
President, Distinguished Colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen
Joseph O’Connor was born in Dublin on September 20 1963. Raised in a book-loving family, he wanted to be a novelist, jointly inspired by Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and John McGahern’s short stories. From 1981 to 1986 he attended University College Dublin, where he took a BA in English and History and went on to write a First-Class Honours MA on the 1930s poet-activist, Charles Donnelly. He then began a PhD at Oxford which was soon abandoned in the decision to move to London to live and write. Like several other writers of his generation who attended this university, Joseph O’Connor could have been an academic and was certainly well launched on that trajectory. But the call to be a creative writer in prose increasingly proved too strong; academia’s loss was the world’s gain. His achievement to date is hugely impressive: seven novels, a book of short stories (with another on the way), and a number of successfully produced plays with a stage adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel at the Gate next year. He has always had a significant media presence and an outlet for his witty personality through his many articles, reviews and columns and his weekly Drivetime Diaries with Mary Wilson on RTE Radio. In the past year, he was Writer-in-Residence on the MA in Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama here, appropriately with the group of students being conferred today. He returns to UCD on this occasion to be awarded an honorary doctorate for a body of work which is both widely read and critically acclaimed. It has won many literary prizes world-wide and has been translated into almost 40 languages. One example will have to serve. His latest novel, Ghost Light, was chosen as this year’s Dublin: One City One Book. Next year’s is Joyce’s Dubliners.
Joseph O’Connor is the laureate of the Irish Diaspora. His first novel, the Whitbread-nominated Cowboys and Indians, very much reflected the Ryanair Generation. This was rendered in one of his short stories with the memorable acronym, NIPPLE: New Irish Professional Person in London. O’Connor’s first novel began where Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist ended: with its UCD-educated protagonist taking the Holyhead boat. The whole of his most acclaimed novel, Star of the Sea, takes place on the boat of that book’s title as it makes its way from Cobh to New York at the height (or should that be depths?) of the Irish Famine. Star of the Sea went to the top of the British Best Seller lists after it was chosen as part of the ‘Richard and Judy Book Club Selection’ on TV. Its most passionate advocate on the show’s panel was Bob Geldof, a fellow Dublin south-sider uniquely placed to draw a parallel between events in the novel and the contemporary devastation of famine in Africa. Star of the Sea was the first in a loosely bound trilogy published in the past decade, all three of which have placed their writer at the forefront of contemporary Irish and indeed world writing in English.
The second of these, Redemption Falls (2007), is his great American novel, one which manages to do justice to a country in the wake of a Civil War and to the complex allegiances of its Irish emigrants. The third, Ghost Light treats of the passionate, complex love affair between renowned Irish playwright, the Protestant JM Synge and his fiancée, the Catholic actress Molly Allgood. The novel has a biographical resonance: like Molly Allgood O’Connor’s father Sean comes from the Liberties in inner city Dublin while Synge lived a suburban life in Glenageary, where the O’Connor family was brought up. The brilliance of Ghost Light is how the story is told, its double structure: it is set not in Dublin but in London in the early 1950s, where an aged and alcohol-dependent Molly now lives. In some of the finest writing about London since Dickens, she is shown trudging her way across the snow-bound metropolis in December to record a small part in an O’Casey play for the BBC. As she does so, Molly revisits her love affair with Synge in a series of vivid and dramatic flashbacks. For this is how Ireland is most often encountered in O’Connor’s fiction: as memory.
If his characters bring their memories and their complex interwoven histories with them, they carry one other priceless legacy to their brave new worlds: music. In the opening chapter of Redemption Falls, a young impoverished girl is described as a ‘bag of tunes gone walking’; the chapter’s title ‘Motherless Child’ itself evokes a famous blues song. A character in Star of the Sea compares songs to ‘a secret language; a means of saying things that could not otherwise be said in a frightened and occupied country’. There is so much more than I have time to say about Joseph O’Connor’s musical prose, its attentiveness to rhythm, its rich mix of the various dialects of English found world-wide, all fed by the rich sub-soil of Hiberno-English. Among contemporary Irish novelists I can think of none whose next novel is more eagerly awaited.
Praehonorabilis Praeses, totaque Universitas,
Praesento vobis hunc meum filium, quem scio tam moribus quam doctrina habilem et idoneum esse qui admittatur, honoris causa, ad gradum Doctoratus in Litteris; idque tibi fide mea testor ac spondeo, totique Academiae.