UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN
HONORARY CONFERRING
Monday, 5 December 2011 at 3.30 p.m.
TEXT OF THE INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS DELIVERED BY JAMES RYAN, 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 MARY GORDON
President, Distinguished Colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen
Mary Gordon is among America’s most admired prose writers. Currently the McIntosh Professor of English at Barnard College, New York, she is the author of many highly acclaimed novels. Final Payments, The Company of Women, Men and Angels, The Other Side, Spending ; A Utopian Divertimento, Pearl [set in Dublin] and The Love of my Youth . In addition she is the author of three novellas, collectively published under the title The Rest of Life. Her memoirs, reflecting on different phases of her own life, include The Shadow Man: a Daughter’s search for Her Father and Circling My Mother. A collection of essays Seeing Through Places: Reflections on Geography and Identity, also includes reflections on her own life experience. Many of her numerous essays appear in Good Boys and Dead Girls and Other Essays. She has written a biography of Joan of Arc and upwards of forty of her short stories appear in a collection titled The Stories of Mary Gordon
This author’s work constitutes a very important contribution to Irish-American literature, exploring as it does with impeccable integrity, Irish American Family life. She has often acknowledged the influence of Irish writers on her work, including UCD graduate Mary Lavin whose centenary will be celebrated by the college both here in UCD and in New York University in 2012. Her understanding of and insights into the links between Irish short story writers and major southern states short story writers –Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O Connor – are unmatched. This is but one of her fields of expertise, just one element in an exceptionally wide ranging literary career. Her work courageously explores the pathology and mechanics of human interaction from a whole spectrum of perspectives, moral, social, psychological, spiritual. The focus is often on everyday transactions, subtly amplified to present universal, sometimes uncomfortable truths.
Men & Angels, like many of her other novels, has the stature and sway of a classic nineteenth century novel, but the focus is on decidedly 20th century predicaments. Complex psychological and ethical issues rapidly rise to the fore as Gordon leads us, simultaneously, through several divergent quests for identity and self assertion. The pivot is justice; justice in all its forms. Typically her characters are neither noble or ignoble, neither all good nor all bad. And so it is in Men and Angels, the title itself laying out the coordinates within which the narrative takes shape. The characters bounce between these coordinates, fantastical perfection and lamentable imperfection, many of them striving against formidable odds, foremost among which are their own cultural and religious legacies, to take control of their destinies. The possibility of doing so in an absolute sense is ruled out. We are presented with survivors, not heroes, people who have learned to compromise judiciously, at least more judiciously than others. And so it is we find ourselves in that familiar twentieth / twenty first century place; grappling with questions.
If any single term applies to Gordon’s work it is courage; courage to confront the most troubling of questions, to delve into deeply conflicted spheres of experience, belief systems, received social and family values. This courage, patently on display throughout Men and Angles, takes on a different form in The Shadow Man; a Daughter’s search for Her Father. ‘Mary Gordon’ notes the Los Angeles Times in response to this book ‘is truly brilliant and fearless in her ability to look even when her eyes burn and her heart breaks.’ She is unremitting in her quest for understanding and we the privileged readers are the grateful beneficiaries.
Among the many awards, accolades she has received are The American Academy of Arts and Letter Award, A Guggenheim Fellowship, The O Henry Award, The Lila Acheson Wallace Award, The Story Prize, Nominated official New York State Author 2008, The Edith Warton Fiction Prize and many others.
I have long since marvelled at both the scale and the depth of Mary Gordon’s fiction, long since admired her masterly command of her craft, but above all I have, like so many others, enjoyed her unique, exquisite prose.
Praehonorabilis Praeses, totaque Universitas,
Praesento vobis hanc meam filiam, quam scio tam moribus quam doctrina habilem et idoneam esse quae admittatur, honoris causa, ad gradum Doctoratus in Litteris; idque tibi fide mea testor ac spondeo, totique Academiae.