Telling Truths

Foreword

Rebecca Solnit in A Field Guide to Getting Lost speaks of the enigma of proximity. Even when the closest of friends “arrives on the doorstep, something remains impossibly remote: when you step forward to embrace them your arms are wrapped around mystery, around the unknowable, around that which cannot be possessed. The far seeps in even to the nearest. After all we hardly know our own depths” (Solnit 2006: 31). Evelyn Conlon has spent a lifetime interrogating that mystery, teasing out the unknowable, trawling depths that others would prefer were left ignored or unspoken. From My Head Is Opening (1987) to Moving about the Place (2021), she has time and again returned to voices and perspectives that have been muted or distorted in the official stories of communities, the elite-friendly narratives of ceaseless progress. Maud in Skin of Dreams (2003) reflects that “there’s no way out of a past” (14) but for Conlon, this is a starting point, not an excuse. In detailing how pasts unravel in presents and inflect futures, she is concerned with the past as a site of possibility, not as an alibi for stasis. The young, orphaned women in Not the Same Sky (2013) are not the passive victims of the brutal algorithms of hunger and destitution. They actively draw on resources of resistance to negotiate an unstable present and an unknowable future. In this task, they are accompanied by the words of Evelyn Conlon, for whom justice is no mere legal abstraction but a painful reality that impinges directly on lives, from the most public events (state executions) to the most intimate (domestic violence). In one of the letters that make up Conlon’s A Glassful of Letters (1998), Connie describes a fireworks display in Dublin’s Phoenix Park and the unnatural mayhem of noise: “An occasional lone crow would fly across the sky bewildered, and then fly back again, like a vulture disturbing a beautiful painting” (105). The visual attentiveness, the sensitivity to disruption, the confession by Connie that, ←vii | viii→disappointingly, “nothing is left to the imagination in fireworks,” all point to Evelyn Conlon’s deep investment in the craft and necessity of writing. She deliberately shuns the didactic, wants the reader’s imagination to be freed from the identikit truths of punditry. If the letter-writing of A Glassful of Letters makes reciprocity explicit in the toing and froing between the various correspondents, it could be said that this is true of all of Conlon’s fictions, the reader always invited to react, reflect and write their own letters of interpretation.

The German writer Judith Schalansky in the opening pages of The Inventory of Losses (2021) wonders about the nature of truth telling, the words that ensure survival: “Writing cannot bring anything back, but it can enable everything to be experienced. Hence this volume is as much about seeking as finding, as much about losing as gaining, and gives a sense that the difference between presence and absence is perhaps marginal, as long as ←viii | ix→there is memory” (25–26). Evelyn Conlon’s writings acknowledge that debt to memory, but this is a memory that is troubled, uncertain, contested. In particular, she is drawn to those who have been denied memory, who have been forgotten because such amnesia is convenient; remembrance itself proves to be a radical act. If this collection has brought together writers, scholars and translators, it is because there is a shared community of interest in the richly varied meanings of Evelyn Conlon’s work. These meanings complicate any complacent notion of what might constitute Irish Studies, but they also speak to a global community of writers and readers drawn to Conlon’s unique understanding of the texture of discrimination and exclusion. The seriousness of intent in these essays and the range of reference and topic are testimony to a decades-long commitment to a body of work that has produced such rich and telling responses. Telling Truths: Evelyn Conlon and The Task of Writing is a fitting tribute to a writer who has made such a decisive and lasting contribution to contemporary Irish literature. Criticism, too, is a form of memory. It is important to be reminded – as we are here, chapter after chapter – of how much we owe to the uncompromising integrity of Evelyn Conlon’s art. For those familiar with her work, the essays bring fresh, arresting perspectives. For those new to the material, a world of interpretive promise.

Acknowledgements

As the editor of this volume I would like to thank the Spanish Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad and ERDF for the support of the research projects INTRUTHS (FFI2017-84619-P AEI/FEDER, UE) and INTRUTHS 2 (PID2020-114776GB-I00 MCIN/AEI).

I also wish to express my gratitude to the University of Vigo for having hosted author Evelyn Conlon in 2012 and, again, as a guest writer at the I International Conference “Atlantic Communities: Translation, Mobility, Hospitality,” in 2015.

I have benefited from a Salvador de Madariaga Scholarship for Senior Researchers during the school year of 2018–2019 and I am greatly indebted to scholars like Anne Fogarty, Margaret Kelleher and Michael Cronin for their encouragement when I first started to think about putting together a volume of essays on the work of Evelyn Conlon during that sabbatical year at University College Dublin. I would like to thank Nella Ní Neachtáin for her warm hospitality during my academic stays in Dublin. Thanks also to Róisín Conlon for collating the selected bibliography.

My gratitude extends to all the contributors, some of them busy writers and others hard-pressed academics, for their expertise and their solidarity and to the editor of the Peter Lang series Reimagining Ireland, Eamon Maher, for his patience and his enthusiasm. I remain most indebted to my Joycean scholar friend the late Professor Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli who first introduced me to Evelyn Conlon and her work.

To Martín Urdiales Shaw I owe his invaluable editorial assistance and his unconditional emotional support.

A special thank you to Evelyn Conlon for her kind availability and her extraordinary generosity.

Introduction: Nothing but the Truth

The writer’s first job is not to have opinions but to tell the truth.

– Susan Sontag, The Conscience of Words