Abstracts

Jytte Holmqvist (Bio)

Clare Keegan: Expressing truths in the silence between the words

According to Stanley Kubrick,“[I]f it can be written, or thought, it can be filmed”. This is true for award-winning canonical short story Irish writer Clare Keegan (1968) whose sparse and effective prose has hit the core of audiences struggling to process the lingering impact of collective and individual national trauma. Keegan confronts it all head on, boldly highlighting social issues that loom large, in astute and evocative sentences told from third person perspective and where confronting thoughts, situations and scenarios spill over into the space between the words. What is left unsaid says it all. Open-ended, controlled, and graphic, Keegan’s style resembles that of Mariana Enriquez (1973) and her novellas are similarly filmic. Compared to the likes of Raymond Carver, Alice Munro, William Trevor and Anton Chekhov, Keegan acutely brings attention to the plight of the voiceless, the downtrodden, small, weak and marginalised in a system where the Catholic Church has unquestioning communities that turn a blind eye to the truth in its grip. Keegan is living proof of the power of ‘less is more’. The silence that reigns in a space of ‘NON-sayability’ in stories that keep it tight, is anything but opaque. As Keegan navigates treacherous territory, she demonstrates through words that speak volumes. This paper particularly analyses Small Things Like These, winner of the Booker Prize and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction (2022), whose focus on the Irish Magdalene laundries weighs heavy on our collective consciousness; Melbourne’s Abbotsford Convent across the world a direct accomplice to the abuse behind closed doors. How can we remain passive in the face of wrongdoings? How does Keegan invite us to scrutinise history? And how do we read her literature through the eyes of fellow Irish national Colm Tóibín, himself “one of the contemporary masters of silence, exile, and cunning”.