History, Text and Society in Colm Toibin's The Heather Blazing

Abstract

Despite the widespread acclaim that greeted its publication in 1992, Colm Tóibín's The Heather Blazing has received remarkably little detailed critical attention. Discussion of the novel is conspicuously absent from Gerry Smyth's The Novel and the Nation (1997), despite the book's avowed concern with fictional mediations of change in Irish society, and from Christina Hunt Mahony's Contemporary Irish Literature (1998), which takes Tóibín's weaker debut novel The South (1990) as its representative text. Nor does it feature in recent special editions of journals devoted to contemporary Irish fiction. 1 This neglect is all the more surprising when one considers the high claims made for the novel by such critics as Neil Corcoran and Tom Herron, both of whom regard The Heather Blazing as an important work of Irish literary revisionism. In his compressed discussion of the novel in After Yeats and Joyce (1997), Corcoran praises Tóibín for his "measured and temperate, but still-vigilant portrayal of a society some of whose most cherished ideals are in a state of terminal collapse." 2 This is a view strongly endorsed by Herron, whose analysis of The Heather Blazing as "a revisionist attempt to debunk the nationalist meta-narrative" is the most sustained to date. He persuasively argues that the novel's "charged metaphors," especially those to do with language, the body and disease, "should be read as part of an understated but nonetheless damning critique of the republican nation-state and its effects upon discursivity, upon what may be said and what must be silenced." 3