"He's Been Wanting to Say That for a Long Time": Varieties of Silence in Colm Tóibín's Fiction (original) (raw)
Related papers
Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 2017
Colm Tóibín is one of the most prominent literary voices in Ireland today, but he had to face enormous difficulties in having his first novel, The South (1990), published. In this article, I will look at the 1986 manuscript of the novel—on file in the National Library of Ireland—and argue that after all his revisions, Tóibín softened the protagonist’s characterization as an “abject” mother and sanitized the language of her sexual feelings. Central to this essay will be the idea that when Tóibín wrote The South in the 1980s, the expression of sexual desire was often censored and seen as obscene, immoral, and shocking. As I intend to show, the sexual frankness that Tóibín’s main character displays in the earlier version of The South was unacceptable at the time, and this can be one of the reasons why so many publishers rejected the novel.
Silence and Familial Homophobia in Colm Tóibín's 'Entiendes' and 'One Minus One'
Studi Irlandesi, 2018
The present study focuses on two of Colm Tóibín's gay short-stories – " Entiendes " (1993) and " One Minus One " (2010) – in which the homosexual son meditates on his attachment to the dead mother. In both texts, Tóibín characterises the mother-son bond as being fraught with silence, resentment and lack of communication. In " One Minus One " and " Entiendes " , the son's closeted homosexu-ality coexists with familial legacies of shame, uneasiness and duplicity. The central characters in the two texts are similar, as they experience the same type of existential exile, solitude and alienation derived from their complex attachments to home and family. As shall be explained, the author dwells on the damaging effects of familial homophobia, highlighting the limitations of the dominant heteronormative family model to accommodate gay sensibilities.
Sexuality and the Culture of Silence in Colm Tóibín's The Pearl Fishers.
Atlantis: The Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies , 2015
Colm Tóibín’s narrator in “The Pearl Fishers” (The Empty Family, 2010) is a middle-aged homosexual man who shares dinner with two friends from school, Gráinne and Donnacha, a married couple and faithful representatives of the Irish laity. To the narrator’s surprise, Gráinne announces her intention to publish a book detailing her sexual abuse by Father Moorehouse when he was her teacher. Gráinne’s husband, Donnacha, is the man with whom the narrator had a passionate love affair during their adolescence. Donnacha enforces silence on this issue, so their story remains unspoken and consigned to secrecy. Tóibín’s short story deals with the consequences of an Irish legacy of ignorance and taboos concerning sex. This essay will thus delve into questions regarding Irish culture, the antagonistic but ambiguous connection between the Church and homosexuality, as well as the shame and silence traditionally attached to sex. Tóibín seems to adopt a critical approach to Irish society, complicating public debates surrounding Ireland’s sexual past and the Church scandals. As will be argued, Tóibín does not propose in his story a totalising and explanatory view on the nature of the Irish sexual past, but rather he offers a thorough exploration of its ambiguities and complexities. Keywords: Colm Tóibín; Catholic Church; Irish sexual history; male homosexuality; Church scandals; Ireland
Monstrous Silence: Abjection, Subjectivity and Alienation in the Language of Transgressive Fiction
The aggressive and violating content of Transgressive Fiction has driven numerous critics and literary theorists to try to examine the appeal of subversive fiction. Within these attempts critics find it necessary to justify the texts content by assigning it some value which is presented in the form of a cathartic logic; namely that Transgressive texts have explorative and cathartic potential. In her 2011 publication, Aggressive Fiction: Reading the Contemporary American Novel, Kathryn Hume makes the comment that when reading subversive texts, “To the degree that we are willing to let our conditioned barriers down, we can experience vicariously the sense of freedom that discarding that training might produce.”1 However, what readers respond to is not the monstrous content, but rather the texts confrontation with a monstrous silence. Silence and monstrosity are linked by a lack or void of information and Transgressive texts are filled with confronting voids which overwhelm and undermine the grotesque content. These silences are created by several areas of textuality. Firstly eroticism (the culmination of violence and sexuality), is silent and on the body and cannot be explored by the textual medium. This is followed by the fact that abjection and jouissance induced by the text are created by the symbolic order and therefore only relate to the level of the sign, rather than actual experience. Lastly, the silence that these texts highlight is the void created by the symbolic order which both constructs and alienates the reading subject.
OF THINGS NOT SAID: SILENCE AND WRITING.pdf
The Creative Manoeuvres: Making, Saying, Being Papers – The Refereed Proceedings Of The 18th Conference Of The Australasian Association Of Writing Programs, 2013
Of things not said incorporates prose and theory, non-fiction and interpieces, in an ongoing dialogue about writing and an author’s reflections on creating fiction. As a way of making sense of silence and of things not said this non-fiction essay looks at how a writer engages with silence when researching a person in their absence. The piece follows the author’s own writing process from the initial proposal to write about her father’s ‘immigrant journey’ (Hron 2009) and the difficulties of such a task as a result of past trauma and his death. Within the essay are interpieces of spoken and unspoken communications, of individual and familial memories which have been ‘shared’, ‘corrected … – and last not least, written down’ (Assman cited in Hirsch 2008). Re-examining silence is an empowering tool for second-generation immigrants and writers to observe what is and cannot be expressed. Being able to mediate her father’s silence and re-interpret ‘what is unsaid’ (Pinter 2003) this essay creates a space for creative thoughts to emerge in fiction.
‘Belonging without Belonging’: Colm Tóibín’s Dialogue with the Past
Estudios Irlandeses
Tóibín is not the archetypal 'revisionist' intellectual that some have made him into, but rather a sort of in-between, making a virtue of his own ambivalences towards notions of tradition, community and nationhood. In this essay some of these ambivalences are scrutinised with special reference to two essays from Tóibín's Walking along the Border (or Bad Blood). The assumption is that, intellectually, Tóibín's ambivalences are rooted in a humanism which may partly be ascribed to his personal attachments, affections and loyalties: to family, place and community. It is argued that his personal need to reconcile himself with the loss of his father, when he was a young boy, is connected with a theme of more general significance: how to come to terms with the loss of the "certainties" of the past-nation, family, church-while defining and asserting personal autonomy in a new order of things, bereft of paternal authorities.
Colm Tóibín and the Political Art of Queer Biofiction (MLA 2017)
Colm Tóibín's biographical novel The Master explores the inner life of Henry James--so it seems. But as I demonstrate, the biographical novel is less interested in representing the life of an actual historical figure than in using the life of a biographical figure in order to project the author's own vision of life and the world. In this paper, I do an analysis of Tóibín's The Master. But, contrary to what scholars say, I argue that Oscar Wilde is the primary master of The Master.
Estudios Irlandeses, 2017
By analyzing two novels The Story of the Night (1996) and The Blackwater Lightship (1999) by the Irish writer Colm Tóibín, this article proposes the concept of the sick body as an “organic allegory.” Although both novels are set in different places at different times (Argentina in the 1980s and Ireland in the 1990s), they build their stories around a main character who lives with AIDS. The “organic allegory” refers to a discursive-stylistic strategy that establishes a political connection between the personal drama of the dying body and the social framework in which the story takes place. In this way, this article aims to reveal the political-corporeal dimension of these novels and to empower the body as highly political device used in literary production, both conceptually and discursively. By addressing an individual physical tragedy as one of the elements of the parallel, Tóibín’s texts provide to the social drama a carnal dimension, a corporeal way to experience a political, cultural, and economic transition. Through a comparative analysis and close-reading, the examination of both texts unveils the potential of (sick) bodies as formal devices to “understand” and present a political statement
Introduction: Silences that Speak
Narratives of the Unspoken in Contemporary Irish Fiction: Silences that Speak, 2023
This chapter provides a critical overview and a theoretical introduction to Narratives of the Unspoken in Contemporary Irish Fiction: Silences that Speak. Drawing on a wide range of perspectives and considerations on silence through a broad diversity of themes and functions, this introductory essay reclaims an unprecedented attentiveness to the unspoken in today’s Irish fiction. The chapter argues that in Irish contemporary writing silence features as multivalent and multifaceted: it can function as a form of resistance, a strategy of defiance, empowerment and emancipation, but also a way of covering up stories which remain untold and invisible, thus distorting or directly concealing inconvenient truths from the public eye. Ultimately, as the book itself demonstrates, for contemporary Irish writers, the unspoken is not just a constraint but a productive site of enquiry, a silence that “speaks”.
DECODING SILENCE IN THE AISLE OF POWER ACQUISITION IN COETZEE'S DISGRACE AND KING'S GERALD'S GAMES
Veda Publication , 2023
Silence' refers to the forbearance from ambient audible sounds and writings. In a rhetorical context, silence can be seen as a gesture of the 'pregnant pause', where the moment of silence denotes the omission of noise and signifies a space left for ponderous thoughts. Silence itself is an expression well described by authors like Thomas Hardy, Maya Angelou, J.M. Coetzee, Stephen King, and Jay Asher. Since, the concept of silence is intertwined with violating women's honour, it finds its expression in the form of psychological trauma and incomprehensible emotions. In Disgrace, J.M Coetzee shatters the premonitions expected of women in a situation of brutal rape by depicting the power of silence to venture out for new options through Lucy's portrayal. Unlike Coetzee, Stephen King, in his novel Gerald's Game, portrays its offset by critiquing Jessie's silence, which thrust her into hard times. This paper aims to explore the nuances of silence in the selected novels of Coetzee and King and also tries to highlight the relation of silence with resilience as well as power acquisition associated with a promise of comfort.