Colm Toibin Research Articles

‘It was not worth it’: Critical Reflections on Colm Toibin’s novella The Testament of Mary

‘It was not worth it’: Critical Reflections on Colm Toibin’s novella <i>The Testament of Mary</i>

МОВНІ ТРАНСФОРМАЦІЇ ПРИ ПЕРЕКЛАДІ АНГЛОМОВНОЇ ПРОЗИ УКРАЇНСЬКОЮ МОВОЮ (НА МАТЕРІАЛІ РОМАНУ КОЛМА ТОЙБІНА «БУДИНОК ІМЕН»)

The article deals with the peculiarities of transformations in the process of translation of English prose into Ukrainian. Despite the large number of works covering this issue, the problem of translating prose texts is not dismissed. There is a need to systematize and study the types of lexical and grammatical transformations, used in translating literary texts, in practice. To observe the process of formation of inter-language transformations, the novel by an Irish writer Colm Toibin ‘House of Names’ has been chosen. The various scientists’ approaches to establishing the transformation types are analyzed. It is revealed that due to differences in the syntactic, grammatical and morphological structures of the English and Ukrainian languages, lexical and grammatical transformations are widely used in translation. Lexical transformations are the deviations from direct vocabulary matches. The lexical transformations are mainly caused by the fact that the volume of the lexical units of the original language and the language of translation do not coincide. Among lexical transformations, the most common are generalization, concretization, compensation, lexical additions. Grammatical transformations are to transform the structure of a sentence in the translation process according to the rules of the source language. The transformation can be complete or partial depending on whether the structure of the sentence changes completely or partially. The article presents the examples of the grammatical transformations of inversion, replacement, addition and omission comparing the original text and its translation.

The Irish Female Migrant, Silence and Family Duty in Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn

Set in the 1950s, Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn (2009) traces the life experiences of Eilis Lacey, who is urged by her family to migrate to Brooklyn due to the lack of opportunities for young women in her native Enniscorthy, a small town in rural Ireland. Just as she begins to establish a new life in America, a tragic event at home calls her back to Ireland. During her visit, Eilis faces the terrible dilemma of having to choose between her sense of familial duty and the fulfillment of her own desires. In his novel, Toibin provides a subtle and complex portrayal of the socio-familial pressures affecting the life of the protagonist, whose unverbalised thoughts speak for the decisions she is not allowed to make. In this way, Toibin denounces the historical and cultural silences surrounding the subjectivity of the Irish female migrant.

Silence and Familial Homophobia in Colm Tóibín’s “Entiendes” and “One Minus One”

The present study focuses on two of Colm Toibin’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, Toibin 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 homosexuality 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.

The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín

Colm Toibin’s latest novella, The Testament of Mary (2012), forcefully critiques the process through which the Gospels were compiled by interrogating their patriarchal origin. By placing Mary in the centre of the narrative, Toibin simultaneously gives voice to the previously silent icon of the Virgin Mary and decentres the traditional Catholic narrativisation of the life of Christ. In what follows I will discuss how The Testament of Mary addresses our contemporary moment through the subversive way it revisits a foundational myth, and how, by giving voice to the voiceless, it tackles the unspeakable nature of a traumatic event.

Just Listening: The Equal Hearing Principle and the Moral Life of Judges

In Laird v. Tatum, 409 U.S. 824, 834 (1972), then-Justice Rehnquist famously declined to recuse himself in a case in which he had been intimately involved, and about which he had spoken publicly. In a spirited defense of his position, he wrote: “Proof that a Justice’s mind at the time he joined the Court was a complete tabula rasa in the area of constitutional adjudication would be evidence of lack of qualification, not lack of bias.” The point is an important one. Clearly, we do not think that judges should have minds that are totally unformed. On the other hand, open-mindedness or impartiality is universally recognized as a critical component of judicial decision-making. This essay seeks to explore a question at the heart of the judicial process: To what extent do we expect judges to have an open mind about difficult questions of law, or, at least, to be able to give a fair hearing to interpretations of law with which they might be predisposed to disagree? Or, more generally, what do we expect of judges in their decision-making?The essay proceeds to consider this question through a discussion of two novels: The Heather Blazing by Colm Toibin and The Children Act by Ian McEwan. The main character in The Heather Blazing is an Irish High Court judge who decides three significant cases in the course of the novel. The main character in The Children Act is an English High Court judge who also decides three difficult cases during the course of the novel. Through a close reading of the two novels, the essay explores what it is that we expect of judges, and, in particular, how we expect them to strike the balance that is inevitably required to be struck between open-mindedness and the (sometimes false) sense of certainty that comes from expertise. Among other things, the essay reflects on Justice Holmes’s observation that a key difference between his and Justice Brandeis’s approaches to their work was that Justice Brandeis wanted to know as much as he possibly could about a case, whereas Justice Holmes “wish[ed] to know as little [about a case] as [he could] safely go on.”

Introduction: art and action: authorship, politics and celebrity

In 2015, the Irish Marriage Equality Referendum campaign found a fiercely outspoken advocate in the internationally award-winning Irish novelist and essayist Colm Toibin. Throwing his full weight b...

Staging the Easter Rising: Plays by W.B. Yeats, Sean O’Casey and Colm Tóibín

Despite the fact that the 1916 Easter Rising has given rise to many critical inquiries and occasioned heated debate among nationalist and revisionist historians, this historical event has been revered almost as a creation story for the Republic of Ireland. This paper will examine three plays that revisit the Rising and feature the generally neglected participation of women in the events. By illustrating women’s quandaries and antagonisms, the plays either reflect on the causes and effects of remote English rule in Ireland or delineate the immediate impact of the Easter Rising on different social strata. Their alternative perspectives often feature the conflicting consequences of the Rising and illuminate ignored yet credible facets that may serve to rebut the received interpretations. Although there is a relatively long time span during which these works were produced, the social contexts in which the playwrights lived and worked give rise to diverse portrayals of the same political turmoil. More significantly, these plays initiate a debate on the Easter Rising yet produce healing effects by restaging historical traumas. The three plays are Yeats’s less discussed play The Dreaming of the Bones (1919), Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars (1926), and Colm Toibin’s Beauty in a Broken Plac e (2004).

A Life of Their Own: Women’s Mid-life Quest in Contemporary Irish Women’s Short Stories

Introduction: The Lonely Voice There have been some notable, if gradual, changes in many aspects of Irish women's role and life in general since other emerged in Irish society in the post-Eamon De Valera period from the 1960s. It is evident, possibly inevitable, that these changes in Irish women's lives are echoed in contemporary Irish women's stories, some writers of which are self-declared feminists or have engaged actively with the Irish women's movement. (1) Consequently, their literary works tend to be gynocentric, concerned overtly with women's issues and seek explicitly to give voice to women's quest for justice within male-dominated Irish society. This essay evaluates a recurrent motif in stories by Clare Boylan, Eilis Ni Dhuibhne, Stella Mahon, Mary Dorcey and Marilyn McLaughlin, the motif of quest. As opposed to the traditionally male genre of the monomyth or Bildungsroman, Irish women's quest motif is about a heroine who embarks on a different kind of adventure with the aim of achieving a different kind of goal. (2) This female quest involves subversion of the social norm, rebellion against a socially prescribed role and destiny, and reclamation of a lost place within Irish society. This essay argues that Irish women's stories serve both as a vibrant narrative genre within Irish literary tradition, and as a strategic device by Irish women writers who are seeking to engage with a collective, and evolving, Irish feminist awareness. Typically, such stories focus on women who start by accepting passively a socially imposed role and life as wife or mother, subsequently become bad by diverging from the traditional patriarchal view of women's role in Irish society, and undergo, ultimately, a transformative inner journey of self-discovery which leads them towards emotional independence and individuality. The short story genre as a strategic narrative device for Irish women has roots in Ireland's literary tradition and heritage. According to Frank O'Connor, the short story in an Irish literary context is a natural form deriving from the Irish storytelling tradition embedded in the Irish psyche (Casey 1990: 9), a genre associated closely with Irish history as well as with Irish women's writing. The short story is considered to be a natural progression of story-telling, letter-writing, diary-keeping, and even school essay-writing, forms of writing with which women were already familiar in their lives (Madden-Simpson 1984: 13, 18). The skills and techniques inherent in the short story medium are also relevant when seeking to reach a broad and diverse audience through printed, visual or social media. (3) Traditionally, the short story also plays an essential role in Irish culture and politics. (4) O'Connor argues also that the short story is a vital expressive tool for the population of a country, such as Ireland, in a post-colonial state (O'Connor 1963: 20). In the light of Frank O'Connor's view, Colm Toibin, echoed by Boada-Montagut, connects the prominence of the Irish short story to Ireland's status as a country with a broken and traumatic past. (5) Toibin's or Boada-Montagut's association of a political discourse with the short story genre may suggest a reason for the significant appeal of the short story genre within contemporary Irish women's writing. The short story serves Irish women's purpose of expression because, among the submerged population, Irish women as the Double Other have actually experienced the legacy of a double dispossession (Edge 1998: 215-6; Boada-Montagut 2003: 10). (6) Within the male-dominated Irish literary canon and tradition, women's writing has tended to be marginalised. (7) In this essay we suggest that Irish women may find the short story both an effective and also an instinctive way of expressing varied issues related to women as well as a medium which offers fresh scope for women to create a distinctive style of literature, a literature of their own (Boada-Montagut 2003: 38). …

Memory performance in William Golding’s “Envoy Extraordinary”

Marek Pawlicki is Assistant Professor at the Institute of English Cultures and Literatures of the Silesian University. He has published a critical study of J.M. Coetzee’s prose Self-Reflexivity in the Chosen Works of J.M. Coetzee (2013) and articles on the works of Nadine Gordimer, John Banville, Anne Enright and Colm Toibin. His current research is on memory and confessional discourse in contemporary British fiction.

West of Sunset

West of Sunset

Mourning Mothers: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Parental Relationships in Colm Tóibín’s &lt;i&gt;Mothers and Sons&lt;/i&gt;

Modern Irish literary criticism is routinely concerned with representations of gender and power, and the multitudinous forms that they assume within Irish literature. This paper examines Colm Toibin’s Mothers and Sons (2006) and its negotiation with traditional representations of the Irish mother and son, and how it challenges key assumptions about their role and function in Irish literature. In doing so, this paper argues for the primacy of a psychoanalytic reading, one which employs the theoretical framework of mourning and melancholy, as formulated, first by Sigmund Freud and, more recently, by Julia Kristeva. The paper proceeds to illustrate that the maternal and filial relationships, as represented in Mothers and Sons, exist as elaborations of repression, desire, and mourning, and thus can be understood as processes and metaphorical representations of the unconscious imaginary. The paper concludes that Toibin circumvents the traditional paradigm of Irish notions regarding domesticity, gender, and power, by proffering an alternative representation of mothers and sons, one which ultimately engages with concerns that are most commonly associated with the territory of the unconscious.

Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian gothic stage

Catherine Wynne, Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian Gothic Stage (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)A book which considers Bram Stoker's immersion in late nineteenth-century theatre both on the Dublin and London stages, and how this may have contributed to his gothic fiction, is long overdue. Catherine Wynne is ideally placed to write such a study. Born and raised in Ireland, where she took a BA and MA in English at University College Dublin, she moved to England to pursue a PhD at Oxford with Irish poet-academic Bernard O'Donoghue. Currently, she is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Hull. Her career, in other words, follows the same Anglo-Irish trajectory as that of Stoker himself, and her study is particularly nuanced with regard to that cultural background. Wynne has previously researched Stoker's theatre reviews, and published in 2012 Bram Stoker and the Stage: Reviews, Reminiscences, Essays, and Fiction, all of which provides a rich seed-bed for this current study. She cites Irish novelist Colm Toibin who, on the eve of Stoker's centenary in 2012, suggested that the gothic novelist occupies a space 'in between' Dublin and London and, like Oscar Wilde, that he found his 'space' in the theatre (p. 3).Born in Dublin in 1847 (during the Irish Famine), Bram Stoker attended Trinity College Dublin, and became a civil servant. In his twenties, his nights were spent at the theatre, reviewing plays for the Dublin Evening Mail. In November 1876, Sir Henry Irving, the most celebrated stage actor of the late Victorian period, came to Dublin with his production of Shakespeare's Hamlet. The event was to prove transformative in Stoker's life and career. Not only did he see and review Irving's Hamlet, but attended and reviewed separately all three performances. Interestingly, the first two, though extremely positive, also contained some criticisms. Irving was attracted by the second review in particular and asked to meet the author. The outcome was an offer for Stoker to relocate to London and to become the manager of Irving's Lyceum Theatre. He did so later that year and as manager, was intimately bound up in the staging of the melodramas that were the lifeblood of Irving's theatre and that were to feed directly into Stoker's imaginative writings.Wynne's book provides a close intertextual reading of Stoker's gothic fiction and the blood-boltered, spectacular melodramas he saw performed on the Lyceum stage. Her book is an invaluable and revealing index of just how often stage plays are explicitly invoked in Stoker's novels. In Dracula, for instance, Jonathan Harker reaches for a quotation from Shakespeare's Hamlet (the play Irving performed in Dublin) when deciding to write down what he has just seen - the Count climbing lizard-like up the walls of the castle:Up to now I never quite knew what Shakespeare meant when he had Hamlet say: 'My tablets! Quick, my tablets!/'Tis meet that I put it down, etc.' for now, feeling as though my own brain were unhinged or as if the shock had come which must end its undoing, I turn to my diary for repose. The habit of entering accurately must help to soothe me.1Hamlet, when he speaks these lines, has just had his own encounter with the supernatural in the shape of his father's ghost. The submitting and hence subduing of a supernatural encounter to the rational act of recording is an obsessive concern throughout Dracula.Given the explicit invocation of Shakespeare's Hamlet by Jonathan Harker and hence by Bram Stoker, it might be expected that a study such as Wynne's would explore in more detail the connections that have been made between the mesmeric onstage presence of Henry Irving and the uncanny figure of Count Dracula. The author, however, resolutely sets her face against following this line, declaring early on her opposition to 'the biographical over-reliance on the notion that Irving is the model for the vampire' (p. 3). In her closing pages, she reiterates even more emphatically that her study 'contests the prevailing reading that sees Irving as the model for the vampire' (p. …

&lt;em&gt;Brooklyn&lt;/em&gt; as the “untold story” of “Eveline”: Reading Joyce and Tóibín with Ricoeur

This essay uses Paul Ricoeur’s concept of the “(as yet) untold story” to consider the relationship between James Joyce’s 1904 short story “Eveline” (in Dubliners ) and Colm Toibin’s award-winning 2009 novel, Brooklyn . Although Toibin has denied the influence of Joyce in general, there are many similarities in the storyworlds of the two protagonists, Eveline Hill and Eilis Lacey: Eveline wishes to leave her father’s home in Dublin but stays, whilst Eilis would prefer to remain at home but is forced to emigrate. Both act according to their perception of their mother’s wishes and the rightness of their decisions has preoccupied readers. Through close analysis of thought and speech presentation, this essay shows that interpretive responses to the actions of Eveline and Eilis are inextricably linked to the formal qualities of each text.

(M)Others from the Motherland in Edna O’Brien’s "The Light of Evening" and Colm Tóibín’s "Brooklyn"

From the last decade, interest in the rewriting of received notions of the Irish diaspora and of the great famine in the literature produced in Ireland has notably increased, in an attempt to revise both Irish history and identity. Within this impulse in contemporary Irish literature, two enduring authors stand out, Edna O’Brien and Colm Toibin, whose novels, The Light of Evening (2006) and Brooklyn (2009), focus on the individual experiences of post-famine female emigrants to the United States in their unsuccessful attempts to find better living conditions either in the so-called “Promised land” or in their homeland. Taking O’Brien’s The Light of Evening as a predecessor of Toibin’s Brooklyn, I will argue along this paper that the stories of female emigration unfolded in the two narratives complement each other in ways that, by and large, have passed unnoticed by critics and reviewers. Considering the bond to the land as a metaphor of the bond to the mother, through the present discussion I will also explore O Brien’s and Toibin’s current discourses on emigration in light of their portrayal of the conflictive mother figures that mirror their own motherland.

Nueva (in)certidumbre en Dorian: A "Imitation", de Will Self, y "The Master", de Colm Tóibín

This essay aims at exploring how the controversy between postmodernist uncertainty and new movements claiming for a new certainty determine the discourse of Will Self’s Dorian: An Imitation (2002) and Colm Toibin’s The Master (2004). After revising how this controversy has its roots deep in the history of art discourses, the article draws on postpostmodernist theories such as Raoul Edelman’s performatism, Gilles Lipovetsky’s hypermodernism and Alan Kirby’s digimodernism. Although they help us understand texts at the turn of the millennium, they also prove eventually unsatisfactory in some cases. The analysis demonstrates that Self’s and Toibin’s novels apparently aim at a new sense of certainty to represent homoerotic desire and its manifestations, as a roman a clef and a biofictional text respectively. However, certainty soon proves to be unfeasible as both novels turn to the precariousness and irony characteristic of postmodernism.

„Brooklyn“ Колма Тојбина: Између домовине и егзила

This paper is an analysis of the Irish novelist Colm Toibin’s recent novel Brooklyn (2009) in which the author explores a string of intricate relationships between people and place while depicting the story of Irish emigration in 1950s. Toibin employs simple expressive sentences in order to mirror his characters’ struggles in understanding the distance between the inner and the outer selves. As he grippingly portrays the strangeness of a new place, the central character in Brooklyn is dislocated in time and space creating a sense of melancholy and depression. The heroine’s loneliness in an unfamiliar city is pictured so vividly that she represents the immigrant experience caught between two worlds.

STRUCTURES OF IMAGINATION: All a Novelist Needs: Colm Toibin on Henry James. Edited with an introduction by SUSAN M. GRIFFIN

The cover shows Colm Tóibín holding a pair of broken glasses, and presumably looking at the world with fuzzy vision, even though clear thoughts might be lodged in his head. There is a long-standing tradition of regarding literary practitioners as the best critics. Dryden, Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold, James, Lawrence, and T. S. Eliot are cited, and lesser fry too. In All a Novelist Needs one has the opportunity to examine the attitude once more, since Tóibín is the author of six novels, one of which, The Master (2004), as it happens, is about Henry James. Every time one reads criticism written by creative writers one is aware of the important caveat that there is an agenda, sometimes hidden and at other times apparent. There are agendas with regular critics too, but in many cases one does not have the resource of a creative work running alongside the critical one to reveal them. The best one can hope for, in many instances, is gossip and rumour, if it is hidden agendas in ordinary critics that one is looking for.

My Fair Henry?!

Henry James's seemingly misplaced fascination with the theater has long been recognized: so much so that both recent novelistic treatments of his life (David Lodge's Author, Author and Colm Tóibín's The Master ) choose to begin with the pathetic tableau of the author on stage after the première of Guy Domville , the bewildered target of catcalls and jeers from a disappointed house. Less appreciated, however, is the theater's (sometimes misplaced) fascination with Henry James. While a handful of successful adaptations of his works have been analyzed by James scholars—Ruth and Augustus Goetz's The Heiress (1947), for example, or Michael Redgrave's The Aspern Papers (1959)—the spectacular failure of the most astonishing of them has gone unremarked. The fantastic notion of employing The Ambassadors as the platform for a Broadway musical originated with no less a figure than James Thurber; but the ill-fated task of fulfilling that dubious dream was left to others now forgotten. This paper resurrects their remarkable ambition, their fleeting success, and their ultimate failure.

Art, Politics and Memory: a Conversation with Colm Tóibín

The participation to a literary festival in Florence gave the interviewer the occasion to meet one of the most prolific and best loved Irish writers of our days. In what immediately took the shape and flavour of an informal and multifarious conversation – more than a strictly academic interview – Colm Toibin, thus, shed an insightful light on his aesthetic beliefs and practice, but also on his political views, interest in current affairs and the impact of autobiography on his fiction. His relationship with John McGahern, one of the greatest twentieth-century Irish novelists, was also thoroughly addressed.