The Interstitial Status of Irish Gayness in Colm Tóibín’s The Blackwater Lightship and The Master

Abstract

The impact of AIDS on gay writing in the nineteen eighties and nineties is undeniable. At both sides of the Atlantic, British and American writers bore witness to the traumatic phenomenon which for some years threatened with erasing the gay community and its hardly gained culture. If gays had been persecuted for decades, simultaneously invisibilised and visibilised under the pressure of a schizophrenic heteronormativity, things could only worsen with the coming of AIDS. In the nineteen eighties, (diseased) gays had to be easily spotted to be blamed for their sin and be ostracized from society; yet, too much visibility was difficult to abide. While this was happening in Britain and the United States, Catholic Ireland was a priori an even more hostile territory. In Ireland, a character in Toibin's The Blackwater Lightship (1999) points out, the problem 'did not exist' because we don't talk about sex (1999: 146). The pressure of tradition and an all-powerful church have made same-sex desire a taboo not to be mentioned among well-meaning Catholics. The Blackwater Lightship constitutes a reaction against--albeit from within--the Irish status quo. In an interview with Toibin, Angela Meyer points out and recalls the writer's outlook on the precarious condition of gayness in Ireland and (his) Irish writing: In many interviews Toibin does get asked about being an Irish writer, or a gay writer. I asked him how much he feels those aspects are integral to his work. 'Well, they're fundamental, but then the page is not a mirror. So you don't think about them.' Toibin said, in some ways, ie. if you're a man or a woman, it has an effect on the way the world deals with you, but it isn't as though it's what you think of as you wake up in the morning. 'It mightn't effect how you deal with the page,' he said, 'if you're writing a sentence.' In a way it's the writer's job, according to Toibin, 'to get involved in areas of self-suppression and self-annihilation ... whereby the page matters and you are the least burden on the page. But nonetheless, of course those things are important.' I mention, for example, how Kafka's context was important to the production of his work, it can't be left out (writing in German in Prague, Jewishness) but knowing the context isn't imperative to the reading of his work--it resonates through the internal states of his characters and the situations they navigate (2010). As happens with Kafka, Toibin's sociocultural context is not the key to understanding his texts. I do not intend to explore if/how his identity has made an influence on his writing. Yet, (homo)sexuality and Irishness will be addressed as fundamental concepts to understand his part in the literary tradition he belongs to. It is my main concern to analyse the interstitial discourse of gay Irishness in Toibin's The Blackwater Lightship and The Master (2004). The former in particular is deeply embedded in Irish culture as it stands at the crossroads between the country (Catholic) tradition and its re-articulation. This hybridity is particularly precarious with the outburst of AIDS which, for many religious and political leaders, only confirmed the equation gayness=punishment=disease=death. The complex process of (dis)assimilation of sexual dissidence into Irish matriarchy in The Blackwater Lightship recalls The Testament of Mary (2012). The Blackwater Lightship is set in rural Ireland where AIDS-victim Declan returns to die. After spending some years in Dublin as a liberated gay, he goes back home to spend his last months surrounded and nursed by the women of his family, namely his sister Helen, his mother Lily and his grandmother Dora. From the very beginning, the novel calls back the matrilineal tradition of Catholic Ireland. However, contrary to expectations, the relations between the generations of the women in the family are problematic, particularly since Lily's husband died years before. …