Colm Tóibín’s “As Though” Reality in Mothers and Sons, Brooklyn, and The Empty Family

At the very end of “A Long Winter,” the last story in Colm Tóibín’s Mothers and Sons (2007), the author employs the phrase “as though” twice, in the course of making a connection between a vulture and the central character, Miquel:

The vulture saw them, and all its sullen hatred for them, its savage gaze, its fierce panic, caught Miquel, as though it was directed at him and him only, as though his secret spirit had been waiting all its life for such recognition.¹

The sentence is not easy to grasp; the careful reader must pause just to get the pronoun references right, and the construction that twice employs the phrase “as though” draws attention to itself—and, crucially, away from the critical moment in the story when Miquel’s father has shot the vulture “with the scaliest wings and the most rabid energy.” The bird has begun “to screech” (MS 269). But Tóibín attracts attention to the voice of the narrator just as the action is also demanding that attention.

Similarly, in The Empty Family (2011) Tóibín again draws our attention to the manner of his phrasing in a sentence that attempts to illustrate the meaning of a key story’s title—“One Minus One.” Right after explaining the difference between an absolute zero and a zero achieved by subtraction, Tóibín follows with a double usage of “as though”: “It seems as though Cathal and I spent that time in the shadow world, as though we were quietly lowered into the dark, everything familiar missing, and nothing we did or said could change this.”² Again, the “as though” phrasing stands out. The sentence might just as well simply read, “Cathal and I spent that time in the shadow world; we were quietly lowered into the dark, everything familiar missing, and nothing we did or said could change this.” A sophisticated reader would accept readily the metaphorical nature of the assertion without much trouble but would miss the head-scratching that the “as though” phrasing precipitates. Is there something else going on in Tóibín’s conspicuous use of this two-word phrase?

Present-day search engines and online texts enable readers and scholars to follow up their hunches with relative ease by counting the appearance of a particular word or phrase. Looking for the words “as though” throughout Tóibín’s fiction, we discover that he uses the phrase in truly startling numbers: sixty-eight times in The Empty Family; sixty-seven in Brooklyn; seventy-two in Mothers and Sons; one hundred times in The Master; and sixty-six in The Blackwater Lightship. Moreover, it often occurs in key sentences in Tóibín’s stories. It suggests a multitude of relationships: because “as though” is not as explicit a comparison as a simile, or as direct a correlation as a metaphor, Tóibín forces the reader to tease out the ambiguous relationships the phrase poses.

We may conclude that its use is a hallmark of Tóibín’s fiction; checks of other contemporary writers turn up very little usage of the two words. There are, however, some other writers who have used the phrase frequently. Bram Stoker used it fifty-nine times in Dracula; Ralph Ellison one hundred times in Invisible Man; and Alan Holinghurst forty-eight times in The Line of Beauty and forty-one times in The Stranger’s Child. That these three authors are openly gay, or may have been gay, encourages comparison with Tóibín. And it is not far-fetched to suggest that the work of these writers focuses on putative worlds that exist in their own and in their characters’ consciousnesses. But those worlds may be unfamiliar to readers unconscious of living “as though” the ordinary consensus about reality is tendentious.

In fact, the use of “as though” by a marginalized group is not unusual: Ellison is African-American, as are Richard Wright (who uses “as though” forty-seven times in Native Son...