A C T A U N I V E R S I T A T I S L O D Z I E N S I S
FO LIA LITTERAR1A A N G LIC A 1, 1997
Michael Parker
STILLIN G ILLU SIO N S: BRIAN F R IE L ’S F A IT H H E A L E R *
M uch o f the charge given off by Brian Friel’s plays is derived from the intersections they create, and the translations that occur when the past collides with the present, the secular with the sacred, private expectation with public disappointm ent, art with politics. All these oppositions m eet together in language, and it is therefore not surprising th at his characterisations display a deep engagement with and suspicion o f language and its authority - its capacity to elude meaning, to chain and change. Born into and brought up in a fractured society and divided country, m uch of his working career as a writer has coincided with and been shaped by the “Troubles” . H ardly surprising, his work, both as a playwright and short story writer, has been preoccupied, as Seamus D eane has pointed o u t,1 with an Ireland where eloquence is intim ate with, rather than the obverse o f violence, an Ireland, in the words o f Brendan Kennelly, occupied by “ a garrulous people who cannot talk” .2
One of Brian Friel’s m ost im portant contributions to cultural and political debate has been his involvement in the Field D ay project, which was launched in September 1980 by Friel and Stephen Rea as a theatre com pany to m ount Translations, ju st over a m onth before the first phase o f the hunger strikes began and two years into the “ d irty p ro te st” .3 According to a retrospective statem ent from 1985, Field D ay’s directors
* E xtract from The Writers and the Troubles: Drama, Fiction and Poetry fro m the North
o f Ireland (M acmillan, forthcoming).
1 S. Deane, Introduction to Selected Plays o f Brian Friel (London: Faber a Faber, 1990), p. 20.
2 Brendan Kennelly a t a poetry reading at the University of Liverpool, 17 M arch 1994.
3 A fter the I.R .A . ceasefire o f 1975, violence escalated dram atically on the streets. A t the same time Provisional I.R .A . prisoners embarked on a campaign o f resistance after the withdrawal o f “ special category” in M arch 1976 and because o f the alleged brutality of their treatm ent. This resistance was in three phases - the blanket protest (September 1976 - M arch 1981) when R epublican prisoners refused to wear prison clothing; th e “dirty pro test” (M arch 1978 - M arch 1981) when prisoners smeared their cells with excrement as a protest against beatings by w arders which they said occurred on their way to the showers an d lavatory; and finally the hunger strikes of O ctober-D ecem ber 1980 and M arch-O ctober 1981.
felt th at the political crisis in the N o rth and its reverberations in the Republic had m ade the necessity o f a reappraisal o f Ireland’s political and cultural situation explicit and u rg e n t.... They believed th at Field D ay could and should contribute to the solution by producing analyses o f the established opinions, m yths and stereotypes which had become both a symptom and a cause o f the current situation.4
Both Field D ay and the hunger strike campaign could be interpreted as different attem pts at healing a divide, at authoring faith - the one aiming in an extended cultural project to interrogate a plural past in order to establish a “fifth province” 5 in art, the other seeking m ore immediate confirm ation through a narrative o f ritual sacrifice to achieve a unitary political future; both faced with an “ intractable” present strove to enter into negotiations with history to “negate a real world th at has grown intolerable in order to transform it into an imaginery w orld.”6
A lthough Friel’s plays are often concerned with the way political events and issues affect individuals, families and communities, he is “ n ot an engaged w riter” equipped with a set o f prescriptions which will heal the national wound. As F intan O ’Toole has pointed out, “The often anguished dignity of his work comes from its dem onstration o f the fact th at in a society where people are willing to kill for certainties and out of comm itm ent, confusion, as Hugh puts it in Translations, ‘is not an ignoble condition’ ” .7 Despite the fact that within Translations and the texts that hunger striker, Bobby Sands, is said to have admired - the writings o f F ran tz F anon, Che Guevara, Camilo Torres - there is a shared concern w ith the oppressor’s “destroying the self o f the oppressed, with m urdering his consciousness, erasing his identity, destoying his language, obliterating his traditions, emasculating his culture” , Friel’s play contains alternatives to violence as a means of expurgating “ the false consciousness the oppressor imbues the oppressed w ith” .8 Certainly Translations charts the journey from m ilitary resistance to the occupying power in the form of the 1798 rising
4 Preface to Ireland's Field Day (London: H utchinson, 1985).
s Friel, according to U. D antanus’ Brian Friel: A Study (p. 207), is said to have agreed with the description o f Field D ay as “ an artistic fifth province” , a concept b rought back into currency by R ichard Kearney in his articles for The Crane Bag. F o r the origin o f this proposed cultural intersection, see B. Purcell, “In Search o f Newgrange: Long N ight’s Journey into D ay ” , in R. Kearney, The Irish M ind (Dublin: W olfhound, 1984). “The old Irish nam e for M eath, A n Mhidhe, ... m eant ‘the centre’ or ‘central area’ ... T he provinces were know n as ‘fifths’, coicead, as it they were a fifth province ... Possibly this fifth was less a political area than a symbol o f cosmic order.” (p. 44) The quotation is reproduced in R . Pine’s Brian Friel
and Ireland's Drama (Routledge, 1990), p. 36.
6 R . K earney quoted in P. O’M alley, Briting at the Grave: The Irish Hunger Strikes and
the Politics o f Despair (Belfast: BlackstafT, 1990), p. 116.
7 F. O T o o le, “ Keeper of the F aith ” , The Guardian.
(eloquently translated/m ythologised by H ugh in one o f his last m ajor speeches) through to m inor acts of sabotage and theft in the play’s present and onto a future o f guerrilla warfare, but equally it presents the possibility o f cultural resistance in the form o f M anus’s hedge-school project in Inis M eadhon, and H ugh’s final Joycean resolution to take on the English language, to “ learn those new names ... We m ust learn to m ake them our own. We m ust m ake them our new hom e” .9
M uch m ore oblique in its focus on the national question, but similarly preoccupied with questions about language and fiction and their indeterminacy, is the play th at precedes Translations and which I would like to focus upon in this essay - Faith Healer (1979). It is a text which achieves both distancing and intimacy through its presentation o f the recollection of action, rather than action itself, and reveals Friel’s willingness to experiment with dram atic form, and his ability to identify the m ost effective structures to generate, disperse and defer meaning. By m eans o f four m onologues, delivered by three often contradictory narrators, F rank, G race and Teddy, Friel examines, as he does so often in his plays, the hum an preference for constructed “m em ory” over “literal happenstance” ;10 m ore significant than w hat actually happened is what is imagined to have happened. (M ost Republican and Loyalist version o f history, of course, depend on such a highly selective reading o f events.) In proffering their conflicting versions o f w hat they believed to be a com m on past, the characters seek a coherence and a satisfying closure th at is denied in the real world where “ flux is the only constant” .11 Each through their narratives reveals other things, the desperate hum an craving for a certainty and wholeness th at cannot exist, and the psychological and physical violence that often attends on unfulfilment,
and an addiction to stilling illusions - those fictions which sustain and
distort individuals and communities, distilled over a long period o f time to deadly effect.
F ran k H ardy, the title character, is a richly ambiguous figure, who both “m inisters” to and exploits the marginalised individuals and communities o f the Celtic fringe. Like so m any o f those embattled fip tres in T hom as H a rd y ’s novels o r in Seamus H eaney’s poems, he is a relij from an earlier phase o f hum an history, trapped in a doubtful, increasingly secular age,
9 B. Friel, Translations in Selected Plays o f Brian Friel, p. 444.
10 A phrase from S. Rushdie, Imaginary Homeland's: Essays and Criticism 1981-91 (London: G ra n ta Books, 1991), p. 24. Rushide discusses - like Friel in his autobiographical piece, “ Self-Portrait” , Aquarius, 5 (1972) - how the brain often clings “to the false m em ory, preferring it to mere literal happenstance.” Earlier describing his imaginative construction o f Bom bay in M idnight's Children, he com m ents on the w ay in which fragm ented memories, “ shards o f mem ory acquired greater status, greater resonance, because they were rem ains.” (p. 1 2)
trying to “keep/the wick of self-respect from dying ou t” .12 Initially, with his sadly dishevelled appearance, his m ournful litanies for “All those dying Welsh villages” , his nostalgia for the “ relicts o f abandoned rituals” , and his apparent candour, he appeals to the audience — in both senses — but, as the play develops, responses towards him become increasingly complex. I ouches such as the simple acts o f self-deflation and self-correction during his first confession are partly stratagems to win his listeners’ approval, and prefigure those o f Owen in the later play.13 His “ laying bare the device” 1“ is a device in itself:
When we started out - oh, years and years ago - we used to have Francis H ardy, Seventh Son across the top. B ut it m ade the poster too expensive and Teddy persuaded
m e to settle fo r the modest ‘fa n ta stic” ... As for the Seventh Son - that was a lie.
H ow did I get involved? As a young m an I chanced to flirt with it and it possessed me. No, no, no, no - that's rhetoric. N o; let’s say did it ... because I I could do it. T h a t’s accurate enough (pp. 332-33) (my italics)
His m otivation, he tells us, was not altruistic, “doing good, giving relief, spreading jo y ” , but rather sprang from a desire to again tem porary respite from the disturbing questions “ th at undermined my life th en ” - question o f identity and purpose - and to achieve a brief sense o f becoming “ whole in m y se lf’. In m any respects F ra n k ’s problem s of identity and lifestyle seem to bear affinities with that o f a dram atist or actor, whose “ only pattern o f ... existence”, according to Friel, is dictated by
the persistence o f the search ... the preaching o f the gospel to reluctant ears: and then, when the first converts are m ade, the inevitable disillusion and dissatisfaction ... A nd then the moving on; the continuing o f the search; the flux.ls
W hen one sets F ra n k ’s posthum ous attem pt to live up to his C hristian nam e and sit in judgem ent on his soul alongside the “evidence” o f G race and T eddy’s equally partial versions o f events and relationships, one senses th at m uch of w hat he says is indeed rhetoric. However confident he m ay have been in diagnosing the spiritual and psychological malaise in others, their
longing to open themselves and a t the same time fearfully herding the anguish they contained against disturbance ... They had come not to be cured but for confirm ation th at they were incurable; n o t in hope but for the elimination o f hope ... to seal their anguish, for the content o f finality, (pp. 336-37)
12 S. H eaney, “The H aw L antern” , The Haw Lantern (London: Faber, 1987), p. 7.
13 Owen in Translations deliberately tries to deceive his Irish listeners’ in an attem pt to gain their co-operation in the re-naming process. See T in SP , pp. 406-08.
A Term from Russian formalism, referring to the way in which an au th o r consciously draw s the reader’s attention to his/her artifice.
He was unable to “heal” or reconcile the contradictions in himself; like the protagonist in Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy (1990), Philoctetes, he is both “ wounded m an ” 16 and healer. The analysis F ran k offers above could be read as a projection onto others o f his own psychological m ake-up and his struggle with his incurable disease, his “ gift” , “Finality” and resignation hold for him an intense attraction, as can be seen in his last act, when, according to his account, knowing w hat awaits him, he walks away from “the charade” (p. 341) directly to his death.
Like the deceiving, self-deceiving Willy Lom an in A rth u r M iller’s Death
o f a Salesman, F rank H ardy “ never knew who he was” ,17 or those closest
to him. Self-obsession frequently reduces G race and Teddy in his eyes to stereotypes, mere support acts, and only tow ards the end, his and the play’s, does he seem capable o f viewing them with a degree of compassion. The very first reference he m akes to them brackets them together, leading one to assume initially th at they were partners. In a perhaps conscious attem pt to play down G race’s role and significance, F ran k m entions Teddy first, placing him as a mem ber o f the genus, “cheeky, cheerful, Cockney con” .18 W hen he does get round to Grace, it is to “fix” her as doubly Other; as wom an and English. He defines her initially in term s of her sexual function as “my m istress” , and then in relation to her role as surrogate m other, as the person who “fed me, washed and ironed for me, nursed me, hum oured me. Saved me ... from drinking m yself to d eath ” (p. 335). In each o f his m onologues F ran k blanks out her pain, m aking no direct reference to the still-born child at K inlochbervie,19 the “ two miscarriages in quick succession” (p. 346); instead he curtly inform s us, “ she was barren” (p. 372). The consistency o f G race’s love, w hat he term s her “m ulish, unquestioning” loyalty, he treats as a provocation, and responds to her endeavours to achieve identity and “wholeness” 20 through him, with him, in him, by distancing devices such as denying her a nam e and place, an origin.
W hereas in his opening m onologue F ran k is definite th at G race was English and th at they were never m arried, in both G race’s and T eddy’s
16 S. Heaney, The Cure at Troy (London: Faber, 1990), p. 46. R ichard H aslam o f Liverpool U niversity has suggested to me th a t both F ra n k H ardy and Philoctetes are “ w ounded surgeon(s)” to use T. S. E liot’s phrase. (Four Quartets, “ E ast C oker” , IV, line 1.)
17 A. Miller, Death o f a Salesman, in The Portable Arthur M iller (New Y ork: Viking, 1971), p. 132.
18 The m ost obvious examples in recent years in television dram a are A rth u r D aley from IT V ’s Minder, and D erek T ro tter from BBC’s Only Fools and Horses.
19 See Faith Healer in Selected Plays o f Brian Friel, pp. 344-45 (G race’s account) and pp. 362-65 (Teddy’s account).
20 G race’s account constantly emphasises his completeness because o f his gift. The play itself, of course, denies the possibility of “wholeness” .
accounts she is Irish and is referred to as “M rs H ardy” . He re-fashions her as a Yorkshirewom an, and even has her singing “Ilklej M o o r” on their last evening together, and claims to be uncertain whether she was “G race D odsm ith from Scarborough - o r was it K naresborough?” . One o f his m ost hum iliating tricks, according to his widow, was to re-name her constantly as “D odsm ith or Elliot or O ’Connell ot M cPherson” ,21 a translation which m ay suggest some knowledge about her th at he wanted to suppress, and an anxiety over his own origins. The sharp class divisions and social decline operating in Aristocrats surface strongly in Grace’s narrative, which foregrounds her wealthy, N orthern Irish patrician stock at the expense o f his relatively hum ble Southern background. His father was “ a storem an in a factory in L im erick” , according to her account, w hereas she was derived from “ a professional family with a long and worthy record o f public service” (p. 348). H er representation of the social and cultural gulf between them is supported by hints and admissions in Part F o u r and P art One. Successful perform ances m ade F ran k feel “perfect in myself, and in a m anner o f speaking, an aristocrat, if the term doesn’t offend you” (p. 348).22 T ow ards the end of the play he recalls receiving a letter from G race’s order-obsessed father, “the judge” , and speaks o f his “ envy o f the m an who could use the word ‘chicanera’ with such confidence” (pp. 371-72). Soon after, amidst the description o f the final m inutes of his life, a painful m em ory of his own father returns, one which caused him acute em barrassm ent. A lthough he places emphasis on the m outh “filled with rotten teeth” which his drunken boastful father exposed to him and their neighbour at the Ballinasloe horse fair one suspects that the “vulgarity” o f his father’s behaviour and language, “ Be Jaysus, Boyle, it’ll be hard for him to best his aul fella!” , m ay have been an additional source o f shame. O f course, no-one at a horse fair would dream o f buying such damaged goods as a horse with bad teeth; perhaps now he sees himself as having become the image o f his father.
In the self-deprecatory m ood o f P art One he had passed briefly over the hum ble ordinariness of his beginnings as “an only child o f elderly parents, Jack and M ary H ardy” , “ born in the village o f Kilmeedy in C ounty Limerick” (p. 333), living in a rented house. A lthough he claims that the m em ories o f hom e stirred by his retu rn were arb itrary and “ evoked nothing” , one can clearly detect links betwen them, a chain o f containm ent.
21 I t is significant th a t he employs English surnames first, perhaps to m aintain the pretence. W e never do learn w hat her surname really is. D uring her one visit hom e and attem pted escape from F ran k , interestingly she tries to regain entry into his dom ain and consciousness by proffering her earlier bogus identity as “Tim m ikins” , as D addy’s little girl. (p. 347).
22 F o r the im portance o f class as an increasingly divisive factor am ongst N o rth ern Irish Catholics, see F. O ’C onnor’s excellent study, In Search o f a State: Catholics in Northern
W hether recalling his father in proprietorial (“ watching me through the bars o f the dayroom window”) or servile m ood, yessing to his superiors from D ublin (“ Certainly, gentlemen, by all m eans gentlem en” ), his m o th er conjuring a kinder world in song (“ Heaven is the prize” ), or his own “ innocent” play, slipping his hands in and out the handcuffs, each image points tow ards a constricted present, anticipates a restricted future. His wry playing with the irony o f his naming, along with his reference to his father as a “ sergeant of the guards” ,
The initials were convenient, weren’t they? F H - Faith H ealer ... Perhaps if my nam e had been Charles Potter I would have been ... Cardinal Primate; or Palsy M uldoon, the fantastic Prime M inister, (p. 333)
serve as a reminder of the authority he lacks — spiritual, political and social - and indeed his failure to best the “ aul fella” (p. 373).23 The fact, according to his account, th at he never became a father himself weighs heavily upon him, and m akes even the treasured clipping from the West Glamorgan
Chronicle, a “ nothing” . Instead of the “ som ething” , the confirm ation, the
family continuity a son m ight have provided, F rank possesses only a “ piece o f paper” , and the dubious imm ortality of a few “ odd m om ents o f awe, of gratitude” , instead of the subjunctive m oods and conditional perfects, only past tenses.
I would have liked to have had a child. B ut she was barren. A nd anyhow the life we led wouldn't have been suitable. And he might have had the gift. A nd he might
have handled it better than I did. I wouldn't have asked anything from him - love,
affection, respect - nothing like that. B ut I would have got pleasure ju st looking a t him. (p. 372) (my italics)
In Faith Healer, ju st as in Translations, nam es function as m ajor signifiers within the text, denoting both presence and absence, concealing as they appear to reveal. W hen he was alive, reciting the names o f the “ indistinguishable” Welsh and Scottish villages they had passed through induced a soporific calm in Frank; rather than functioning as the defined and defining locations of his wandering career, they were savoured for their m usic and rhythm s.24 Now, in retrospect, they have acquired an emblematic status, as echoes o f a dying culture, and as loci for loss and guilt. Even
23 A recurring feature o f Friel’s plays is the struggle with paternal authority, the conflict and contest between fathers and sons. See Friel’s biting comments on his so-called teachers, “a succession of men w ho force-fed me with inform ation, who cajoled me, beat me threatened me, coaxed me to swallow their puny little pies o f knowledge and attitudes . (Self-Portrait, p. 18.)
24 One recalls H eanney’s delight in the “ erotic m outh-m usic by and out of the A nglo-Saxon tongue” in poem s such as “ B roagh” and “ A nahorish” . (Seamus H eaney, interview with Seamus D eane, The Crane Bag, I, 1 (1977), p. 65.) H arm onies figured rarely in F ra n k ’s life.
though the characters agree on the centrality o f certain key names, and voice them in order to return in spirit to them, “K inlochbervie” and “ Ballybeg” turn out to be contested sites, repositories of separate, painful, individual meanings. Both locations are associated with death and an illusory unity. In F ra n k ’s m emory, it would appear, Kinlochbervie was the idyllic, picturesque place where he heard the sad news o f his m other’s death; for G race and Teddy, however, it was the rem ote spot where the H ard y ’s only son was born and died. A lthough they concur on that fact, their accounts of the circumstances differ greatly, not only in superficial respects such as w hether it was shrouded “in a heavy wet m ist” or “ bathed in sunshine” (p. 344, p. 362), but in im portant details. G race’s narrative portrays a supportive, sensitive F ran k at her side, fashioning a cross and saying prayers over the infant’s grave, and barely acknowledges Teddy as a presence; Teddy’s longer version o f events, deeply affected w ithout doubt by his unrequited love for G race and recent discovery o f her suicide, focusses sharply on her, her courage and suffering, contrasting these qualities with w hat he at first sees as F ra n k ’s callous betrayal of her.
F o r C hrist’s sake to walk away deliberately when your wife’s going to have your baby in the middle o f nowhere ... Cause as soon as she starts having the pains, I go looking for him , and there he is heading up the hill, and I call after him , and I know he hears me, b u t he doesn’t answer me. Oh, Christ, there really was a killer instinct deep dow n in th a t m an. (p. 363)“
Anger at F ran k dissolves as his story turns to attend to the pathetic birth, death and funeral of “ the little wet thing with the black face and black body” , and how for his hum ble m inistrations he was rew arded by G race with a kiss “ on the forehead. Ju st once. On the forehead” , (p. 364) Perhaps this significant, limiting gesture of gratitude, of which G race m akes no m ention, prom pts Teddy to an alternative reading o f F ra n k ’s behaviour. Loyalty to a “ fantastic” client and a fellow male, along with his nervousness over exposing fully his love for Grace, enable him to check w hat he would regard as an “unprofessional” em otion - jealousy.26 W alking away from the bloody scene, ascending the hill like some Old Testam ent prophet, was
25 E. Andrews, in his essay, ‘T h e F ifth Province” (from The Achievement o f Brian Friel, ed. Peacock, Colin Smythe, 1993), states th a t “ there is the suspicion ... th a t Teddy and n o t F ran k m ay be the father of G race’s baby?” (p. 46) I can see no evidence to justify such a suspicion, however, in Teddy’s or G race’s narratives.
26 “ N one o f my business, was it? N one o f my concern, thank the Lord, except in so far as it m ight affect the perform ance o f my client. Listen to me, dear heart, I ’ll give you this for nothing, the best advice you’ll ever get - the one rule I’ve always lived by: friends is friends and w ork is w ork and never the tw ain shall m eet...” . H e ends his m onologue m aintaining against all the evidence o f his own “ dear h eart” , th a t his relationship w ith G race was purely “professional” , (p. 369)
m orally reprehensible, Teddy argues, but might represent “ his own way o f facing things” ; or rather not facing them. There are m any indications at the beginning o f P art F o u r th at something im portant is being suppressed; the toiling repetition o f the name; the authorial directions em phasising shifting, if no t shiftiness; the uncharacteristic hesitancy in F ra n k ’s speech; the producing o f the clipping as an attem pt to regain m om entum , and as a frequently resorted to source of reassurance:
F R A N K (Eyes shut)
A berarder, Kinlochbervie, A berayron, Kinlochbervie,
Invergordon, K inlochbervie ... in Scotland in the n o rth o f Scotland
(H e opens his eyes. A very brief pause. Then recovering quickly.)
But I’ve told you all th at, haven’t I? - how we were holidaying in Kinlochbervie when I got word th a t my m other had died? Yes, o f course I have. I ’ve told you all that. (Begins moving) A picturesque little place, very quiet, looking across to the Isle o f Lewis ... ab o u t as far n orth as you can go in ... in Scotland ...
(H e keeps moving, as he does so he searches in his pockets. Produces a newspaper clipping, very tattered, very faded.) (p. 370)
Interpretations differ similarly on the m eaning o f “ Ballybeg” , as do accounts o f the events that occurred there. In T eddy’s m em ory, it becomes the scene for recognitions, the place where he realised the depth o f his love for Grace, and where, w ithout words, F ran k diagnosed his “ trouble” and promised a cure. H ad “ those bloody Irish A paches” n ot intervened - an illuminating, not untypical English “reading” of the Irish - Teddy perhaps envisioned a permanent move from “outside the circle”27 into an acknowledged position within a loving triangle. In G race’s account, it is where the healer m ight have begun to be healed, if only he could have resisted the desire to hog the centre stage. H er version suggests that F ra n k imposed himself on the wedding party (“Y ou could tell they wanted to be left alone”), volunteered to cure D onal’s finger, and thus, to a certain extent, willed his own destruction. “T h a t’s the curtainraiser” , she has him smugly asserting. F ran k , by contrast, places squarely the responsibility for what happened a t Ballybeg on his future killers, and what he terms a com m on “need” (p. 376), theirs to still, his to be stilled.
Though vague about so m uch o f what transpired during his lifetime, F ra n k is able to evoke in exact, alm ost loving detail the place and m anner o f his demise. The brutality o f the killing is repressed in his narrative, only hinted at obliquely in the references to the “four m align im plem ents” , a piece o f personification which almost absolves the m urderers o f their
27 The phrase comes from G race’s narrative (p. 352) which tends to m arginalise T eddy’s significance, hence my final comm ent to note 25.
guilt. (The phrase unites the w eapons and those w ho wield them as agents o f some larger destiny, and discloses a way o f thinking ab o ut violence which would commend itself to m any a m ilitary and param ilitary m an.) Instead o f sordid butchery, we are presented with m urder as a m y stical, transfiguring experience, in which the confused and culpable figure he was is translated into a serene, Christ-like, sacrificial victim, offering him self to the “ death-dealers” .28 D eath comes biblically, rom antically, “ju st after daw n” , when “ everything glowed with a soft radiance” , and with a confirm atory symmetry. There are two yards, the second “ a perfect
square” , containing two m ature birches, a tractor and a trailer, fo u r tools
and fo u r wedding guests. The latter are framed under an arch, as chastely white as their carnations, fixed in a com forting pose with “ N ed ’s hand protectively” resting on their crippled friend’s shoulder. In contrast to their “white” tension - and F ra n k ’s “ trem bling” expectation - we witness the “infinite patience” , “profound resignation” of the old/young M cG ar- vey, who, like Sophocles’ Teiresias and the disabled “saviour” brought before him, is secure in the knowledge that nothing can be done; like the seer, he waits on an inevitable outcome. The scene, like its n arrato r, lies somewhere between the poetic and m elodram atic, the tragic and the stagey, the classical and the contem porary. The m om ent when the barm an disappears, while the “ hero” pours himself one last drink before stepping outside is pure W estern; the act o f passing through a w ooden doo r, a m odest proscenium, leading to the larger stage of death could be pure G reek.29
M aim ed by the irregular power o f his making, bewildered by his own complexity as a hum an “text” , F ran k shares in the predicam ent of the “ a u th o r”30 as a flawed signifier. Both in this play and in Translations Friel seems to dwell in disability as a m etaphor, in references which serve as a denial o f the possibility o f wholeness and certitude for the w riter or the
28 A phrase from M . Longley’s poem ab o u t a sectarian killing, “T he G reengrocer” , from
The Echo Gale (London: Seeker and W arburg, 1979), p. 12.
25 See also S. Heaney’s comm ents in “ F o r Liberation: Brian Friel and the Use o f M em ory” , in The Achievement o f Brian Friel, p. 237. “The conclusion o f Faith Healer has the radiance o f m yth, it carries its protagonist and its audience into a realm beyond expectation, and it carries the d ram a back to th a t original point where it once participated in the sacred, where sacrifice was witnessed and the w orld renewed by th a t sacrifice” . Some m ight accuse H eaney in his com m entary above o f aestheticising violence, a charge he levels against him self in his poem , “ Station Island” , V III, when the Heaney: The M aking o f the Poet (Basingstoke: M acm illan, 1993), pp. 200-1.
30 Cf. S. D eane, in “ Brian Friel: T he N am e o f the G am e” , The Achievement o f Brian
Friel, p. 111. “ Healing is n o t displaced to someone else; it is an action perform ed by the
healer on the healer; ju s t before he dies he articulates himself. He authors him self in a final act o f authority.”
audience.31 In his Introduction to the Selected Plays o f Brian Friel, Seamus D eane speaks of the Ireland to which F rank returns as a place “ o f the deformed in spirit” , while Richard Kearney in an essay th at appeared in the very first volume of The Crane Bag, in 1977, the year in which Friel was at work on Faith Healer, cautions against unrealistic, excessive expectations o f the artist as curer of society’s ills:
The artist cannot provide a solution for the simple reason th a t he has a m andate from no-one and receives his statute from no authority. T he artist is n o t a salvator
mundi but the most disarmed o f men. It is his renunciation o f pow er which convinces
and his vulnerability which impresses.32
Enabled and disabled by the unnamed and inexplicable powers he possesses, which surface only at certain m oments and in certain places, F ra n k resembles the artist to some extent. However, whereas the play wright addresses the individual and collective m ind in order to bring abou t m odest changes in consciousness, “new adjustm ents and new a r rangem ents” ,33 the faith healer acts directly upon the flesh in order to restore the “ sp irit” , and seems to belong to a m agical/m edical order which predates Christianity; he is akin to the title character in F riel’s short story, “The D iviner” , a shabby, equally suspect outsider, whose ancient skills bring success in reclaiming a missing body when conven tional m eans fail.34
Like the Gospel writers, who were similarly in pursuit of a text which would incarnate definitive tru th , Faith Healer’s three narrators, deliver differing accounts of each o f the key episodes in F ra n k ’s m inistry, but all agree that because o f his presence rem arkable events occurred. According to both m en, ten people were cured at Llanbethian in South Wales, and, to back up his history, F ra n k quotes verbatim from a local newspaper report o f the incident. This is clearly the occasion referred to in G race’s narrative when she speaks of a £ 200 windfall from a grateful old fanner
31 In Translations M anus is crippled from birth, while Sarah has spent her lifetime unable to speak; M anus in The Gentle Island, one may recall, has his “ left arm missing” and, like F ran k , employs a certain license in his narrative art.
32 R. Kearney, “Beyond A rt and Politics” , The Crane Bag Book o f Irish Studies (1977-81), p. 18.
33 B. Friel, “E xtracts from a Sporadic D iary” , in The Writers: A Sense o f Ireland, eds. C arpenter and Fallon (Dublin: O ’Brien Press, 1980), p. 43.
34 B. Friel, The Diviner (Dublin: O ’Brien Press, 1983). In the story, after the failure of the locals and expert British frogm en to locate the body o f a drow ned m an, a diviner is called in. T he parish priest, a m an o f little faith and less action, is dismissive o f this ousider, and his “ sly, knowing authority” , describing him as “ A fake! A quackl A charlatan!” , yet finally the body is discovered “directly below the diviner’s quivering twig” , (p. 30) F ran k H ardy, with his suspect gift, is clearly in the same mould.
near Cardiff, (pp. 342-A3)35 A t Ballybeg, before the m urder, both F rank and G race’s accounts describe how D onal’s finger was m ade straight. In contrast to the quotidian tragic - the succession o f failed dreams, bereavements, suicides - the play seems to amid the possibility o f the m iraculous. Its presence confers momentousness; its absence costs F rank his life.
Faith Healer has often been read as a parable about the ambivalence
o f A rt, and the artist’s redemptive and destructive potential, and m any com m entators36 have pointed out th at F ra n k ’s role as an itinerant healer is analogous to th at of the writer, citing G race’s description o f him:
It was some compulsion he had to adjust, to refashion, to recreate everything around him . Even the people who came to him ... yes, they were real enough, but n o t real as persons, real as Fictions, his fictions, extensions o f him self th a t only came into being because o f him. (p. 345)
However, her comments could equally be taken to refer to the universal hum an tendency o f using and abusing language to construct images of oneself and others. Like so m any o f Chekhov’s or H ard y’s characterisations, F riel’s are “illusionists” , who for a time attem pt to keep at bay the consciousness of present failure by fabricating narratives o f what m ight have been or what yet m ight be. A lthough G race’s m onologue begins and ends insistently trying to establish an order and imagine a sequence - “ But I am getting better, I am becoming m ore controlled ... I m easure my progress” (pp. 341, 353) - the repetition o f the tale breaks the teller:
O m y G od I ’m in such a mess - I ’m really in such a mess - how I w ant th a t door to open - how I w ant th a t m an to come across th a t floor and p u t his w hite hands on m y face and still this tum ult inside me - O my G od I ’m one o f his fictions too (p. 353)
H er only escape from that sense o f insubstantiality and dependence, for which both her parents and F rank m ust take a share o f the blame, is through a self-authored closure.
F riel’s concern with rhetoric and fiction has also and always a political dimension, I would suggest. Even when appearing to focus on “ private universes”37 as he does in The Gentle Island and Aristocrats, Friel keeps
35 G race does n o t m ention the num ber cured, focussing ra th e r on the all-too-brief experience o f affluence, rem inding us once m ore o f the opulence she has left behind by m arrying F rank.
36 See, fo r example, U. D antanus, Brian Friel: A Study, p. 174; G . O ’Brien, Brian Friel, pp. 100-1; S. D eane in Introduction to Selected Plays o f Brian Friel, p. 20; N . C orcoran in “T he Penalties o f Retrospect: Continuities in Brian Friel” , in The Achievement o f Brian Friel, p. 26, which sees Frank as “the Irish artist-in-exile-and-retum .”
coming hom e to larger political realities, to a divided hearth. (It is perhaps w orth nothing th at the year which preceded the writing of Faith Healer, 1976, witnessed a m ajor upsurge in violence; there were 297 killings, m aking it second only to 1972 in terms o f fatalities during the 1970s.) It is possible perhaps to recognise in F ra n k ’s and G race’s journeying and attem pted hom ecom ing a longing for “ a cultural unison, which would overcome, by overlooking, the actual social divisions which torm ent m odern Irish society” ,38 and the continuing political and spiritual divisions. “ H om e” , like “ Ireland” , in so m uch Irish literature and political thought, is a sliding signifer, yet speakers try to translate it into a transcendental signifed. The fictional Ireland th at accom modates the Hardys turns out to be a locus for violence, revenge, cowardice, confusion, and, like each of them, a highly unstable entity; an object for dream s o f success and wholeness, it narrow s down in scale into a kind of cock-pit, like the one in F riel’s early story, “ Ginger H ero ” , where creatures “spiked and speared and stabbed and savaged one another with all the concentrated fury that was in them ” .39 Instead o f the lyrical, prom ising “ four green fields” o f Cathleen ni Houlihan, F ra n k encounters “four malign implements” , and death at the hands of his com patriots. The walled-in yard, with its cobbles w orn and “ sm ooth with use”, looks forw ard to the closed-in-on Ireland o f Translations, set in “ a disused b a rn ” , littered with “broken and forgotten im plem ents” - words, words, words.40
English D epartm ent Liverpool Institute o f H igher E ducation
Michael Parker
F A IT H H EALER BRIANA FRIELA
Rozważając zagadnienie eloquence i przemocy we współczesnej irlandzkiej kulturze i literaturze, a u to r koncentruje się n a antytetycznym zestawieniu tem atyki w sztuce teatralnej pt. Faith
Healer B riana Friela. Jest to sztuka, w której bohaterowie, poszukują swej tożsamości i pragną
znaleźć jej potw ierdzenia. Jednocześnie odchodzą od ży d a jak o takiego i w swych m arzeniach tw orzą rzeczywistość iluzoryczną.
38 R . K earney, “ Heaney and H om ecom m ing”, Transitions, p. 101.
39 B. Friel, “ G inger H ero” , The Diviner, p. 121.
40 Shakespeare’s Hamlet, II ii, line 194. Like F ran k , the Prince returns to a corrupted state, where eloquence m asks violence.
