Irish studies and the adequacy of theory: the case of Brian Friel.

Richards, Shaun

Literary theory arrived centre stage in Irish Studies at the 1985 IASAIL (1) conference on 'Critical Approaches to Anglo-Irish Literature' at Queen's University Belfast. Theory, however, was already in the air. Delegates at the previous IASAIL conference at the University of Graz, Austria, in 1984 had demanded that the association become more alert to the impact of theory on literary studies. Two years previously Methuen launched the New Accents series with the collection Re-Reading English, a venture dedicated to 'stretch[ing] rather than reinforc[ing] the boundaries that currently define literature and its academic study.' (2) The series resulted in an almost unprecedented furore caused by Tom Paulin who stated: 'It's the term "English" which needs to be first deconstructed and then redefined. This involves arguing from and for a specifically post-colonial or post-imperial idea.' (3) The collection of essays in which that review was later circulated, Ireland and the English Crisis, was dedicated to 'Brian Friel and Stephen Rea, founders of Field Day'. Field Day had been founded in 1980 through the production of Brian Friel's Translations, and with its pamphlet series and annual theatre had, in W. J. McCormack's words, 'set the terms for the current debate in Irish criticism'. (4) But it was the Queen's conference which brought the debate to a head.

In Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland Since 1965, Richard Kirkland comments: 'The Belfast ISAIL conference of 1985, seems to me to be of significance. The academics there gathered [...] contributed to a literary conference at which post-structuralist and National questions were foregrounded, perhaps for the first time in Ireland.' This, he says, was 'a combative conference, the issues raised at which are still current'. (5) In view of Kirkland's reading of the conference as foregrounding post-structuralist theory it is worth being reminded of Tom Paulin's horrified, 1982 speculation: 'Perhaps, then, the day is not so far off when a conference of Irish structuralists will meet in Belfast to discuss the latest reading of Barbara Johnson's reading of Derrida's reading of Lacan's reading of Poe's The Purloined Letter.' (6) But what Paulin is opposed to is a form of theory as enclosed and self-referential as that nominally practised by 'traditional' criticism; the circle of reference may now be wider but it is still unremittingly textual--there is no space for the social or the political. That is the realm of theory. And it is this wider context to which Kirkland refers when he speaks of post-structuralist and National concerns being foregrounded. One might object to the reading of the conference as only, or primarily, foregrounding National concerns, for John Wilson Foster's plenary lecture 'The Critical Condition of Ulster' made a powerful and informed plea for theory to be directed across Irish Literature and culture as an analysis of nationalist as much as unionist positions. But Field Day, he still acknowledged, has 'helped us reach a critical point in Irish cultural understanding'. (7)

That 1985 conference might have been a watershed, but this does not mean that theory has now unproblematically found its place in Irish Literary Studies. Indeed Peter McDonald's 1997 study of Northern Irish poetry, Mistaken Identities, makes some harsh judgements on those who, in his terms, bypass the formal and rhetorical aspects of the text and go straight for its thematic content with all of its superficially attractive 'political' implications: 'Of course, poems are hard to write about, while cultural identity is very easy to discuss: so easy, in fact, that it tends often to write its own way through the kinds of critical discourse that accepts it as their subject. In literary studies as in political analysis, it is always easier not to think than to think, and it is quite possible not to think in academically profitable ways: whole schools of not-thinking about literature have established solid institutional presences by finding new ways to ignore the difficulties and perplexities of literary analysis and evaluation.' (8) In the following year, 1998, McDonald returned to this charge in the pages of the Irish Review where he declared: 'In Ireland there is very little real criticism: there is, in general, either celebration or gossip. This is not new, though what is more recent is the proliferation in much professional literary criticism of the international currency of time-serving academic jargon and circles of mutual citation.' (9)

Clearly, despite such criticisms, the position of theory has moved on substantially since 1985, and if it does not occupy all the high ground it has certainly set up some significant base camps. However, this is not to claim, with Catherine Belsey, that 'we are witnessing the end of literary criticism'. (10) As evidenced by the argument of Peter McDonald, there is still a tension at play between the relative position given to the text and the context, the signifier and the signified. But what has now become most marked in Irish Literary Studies is the tension(s) within theory itself, and most specifically within the theory which has progressively come to dominate the discourse of Irish Literary criticism, namely post colonialism. For, as recently noted by Richard Kirkland, 'It is clear that most considerations of theory and Ireland are now roughly reducible to postcolonial theory--a transition which would have been unthinkable ten years ago.' (11)

The main point to make initially about the term is that it is contested both from within and without. Peter McDonald's attack on those practitioners 'of the international currency of time-serving academic jargon' is echoed in that advanced by the historian Liam Kennedy in his 1996 collection, Colonialism, Religion and Nationalism in Ireland. While, he says, it would be invidious to name those ill-informed enough to use the term postcolonial in the case of Ireland, he does indict the guilty discipline: 'One thinks in particular of conference papers on literary subjects where the "post-colonial" adjective is applied liberally and in passing, seemingly with little relevance to argument or context'; and set against the inadequacies of the literary critics are the hard-headed historians who 'have generally found colonial concepts of limited or little value in charting the course of social and economic change in Ireland after 1800'. (12) Here we have the strict definition based on political structures not, as literary and cultural critics might be inclined to do, on structures of feeling and modes of representation. But this, for Kennedy, is only to demonstrate the shortcomings of literary critics: 'Like jackdaws to shiny objects, literary and cultural critics seem to be drawn to labels and packaging. Assertion becomes a low-cost substitute for evidence. Metaphors masquerade as theory'; and through a series of performance indicators across a range of economic and health issues Kennedy argues that Ireland is too advantaged to qualify as postcolonial and asserts that to insist that it is reflects what he terms 'The Field Day tendency in cultural politics' (p. 179).

The most recent critique of postcolonialism as a term within Irish literary analysis appeared in Stephen Howe's Ireland and Empire. Like Kennedy, Howe directs his criticism at the historical inadequacy and inaccuracy of the term postcolonial for Ireland. Yet, he argues, despite the lack of evidential underpinning, this 'postcolonial painting by numbers' has generated studies displaying a rigid adherence to 'an academic fashion involving rather rigid dress codes and strategies of self-presentation', and across a range of recent studies he finds that 'the passing assertions [...] about Ireland's colonial, postcolonial or neocolonial condition, and/or about Northern Ireland as "essentially colonial" [...] could be cited almost ad infinitum. In such journals as the Irish Studies Review, for instance, such invocations are the repetitively expressed orthodoxy of many contributors.' (13)

Within Irish postcolonial theory the winds are as chilly as those blowing from outside. Here it is not so much the historical legitimacy of the term in connection with post-1800 Ireland as the currency of the theoretical models utilized. While Declan Kiberd's Inventing Ireland is probably the most widely acknowledged attempt to read Ireland from the perspective of postcolonial theory, (14) the work is found wanting by Colin Graham because while Kiberd claims to be working within recent postcolonial theory, his sense of 'recent' for a study published in 1995 looks decidedly dated: 'Inventing Ireland offers no extension of the post-colonial in Irish criticism--if anything it might be a regression in these terms.' (15) Similar criticisms are directed at Terry Eagleton in David Lloyd's review of his Heathcliff and the Great Hunger. After listing a number of Third World critics including Ranajit Guha and Ashis Nandy, Lloyd says, 'This work, however, is absent from Eagleton's thinking'. (16)

As indicated above, the turn towards theory in Irish Studies is frequently associated with debates generated by and about the Field Day Company and Field Day has done much to make the term 'postcolonial' a central, if disputed, term in the analysis of Irish culture. Most strikingly, its final pamphlet series included a contribution by Edward Said whose Orientalism provided much of the inspiration for postcolonial analysis. Said's pamphlet 'Yeats and Decolonisation' is explicit in its reading of Ireland as colonial and the overall title of the collection of the three pamphlets, Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature is picked up in Seamus Deane's introduction to the US edition of the pamphlets where, speaking of Northern Ireland, he asserts 'Field Day's analysis of the situation derives from the conviction that it is, above all, a colonial crisis.' (17) In one of his own earlier contributions to the pamphlet series in 1985 Deane referred to Ireland's 'long colonial concussion'. (18) In that Field Day context both Brian Friel and his plays have played a pivotal role as Friel was the senior director of the company and Translations, the play whose production marked the company's founding, has been described by Deane as Field Day's 'central text'. (19) Friel, moreover, is the key contemporary figure in Declan Kiberd's Inventing Ireland where Kiberd asserts not only that Translations is a postcolonial work but that Friel himself is 'well aware' of this (p. 624).

Prior to developing a postcolonial reading of Friel's plays it is necessary to acknowledge some significant problems in reading his work through what might be described as an unreflective application of postcolonial theory. As noted above, the legitimacy of colonial/postcolonial readings of Ireland is refuted by historians. In this context even if Friel might stage an image of a colonial/postcolonial Ireland, the legitimacy of that dramatization is undermined by its historical shortcomings. And it is in this context of a mismatch between historical actuality and stage world that Translations itself has been found wanting. Edna Longley's critiques of the play as 'refurbish[ing] an old myth' (20) are well known. This suggestion that Translations dramatized a politically regressive backward look was reinforced by a series of judgements by Sean Connolly on the historical inaccuracies of the play. According to Connolly, Friel underplayed the complex reality of internal Irish demands for Anglicization, and instead portrayed the decline of Irish as 'a despoliation by conquerors' when in fact there were no grounds 'for presenting the enterprise as a whole as having been undertaken in the "Sanders of the River" spirit of colonial paternalism portrayed by Friel'. (21) John Andrews, whose study of the Ordnance Survey exercise, A Paper Landscape, was taken by Friel as one source for the play, was initially only mildly irritated by the liberties taken with historical actuality but revised his early equanimity because 'many people do accept Brian Friel's account of the Ordnance Survey as historically plausible', (22) and he went on to list a number of the play's historical errors. Despite Friel's assertion that these were merely 'tiny bruises inflicted on history', (23) the clear implication of these critiques is that his objective was to consolidate, through misrepresentation, a popular nationalist history which incarcerated audiences within their prejudices. This reading of Friel's partiality links with a more general criticism of Irish Studies as voiced by Brenda Maddox in a New Statesman article of 1996: 'Irish Studies is riding the crest of a larger, more sinister wave known as "post-colonial studies". This is a politically correct vogue for elevating the grievances of newly independent nations to academic status.' (24) This is a point amplified in Liam Kennedy's comment: 'There is an almost palpable sense of victimhood and exceptionalism in the presentation of the Irish national past [...]. It is a syndrome of attitudes that might be summed up by the acronym MOPE, that is, the most oppressed people ever.' (25) While these assertions, Maddox's in particular, verge on the extremism they claim to condemn there is a danger in postcolonial readings of Friel which do narrow things down into a regressive and exclusionary focus.

One of the most substantial studies of Friel currently available is Richard Pine's reworking of his 1990 Brian Friel and Ireland's Drama. The expansion of the study, The Diviner: The Art of Brian Friel, continues to read Friel through Victor Turner's theories of drama as ritual but now with the added dimension of Homi Bhabha. Postcolonial studies, says Pine, reveals '"truths" which have not previously been voiced'. (26) He follows this assertion with a reference to Subaltern Studies, the India-based historical project which has been so influential in the thinking of David Lloyd; this, argues Pine, articulates 'the identities of submerged imaginations' (p. 11). The substantial problem here is that Pine takes Turner's idea of drama as ritual and then identifies Friel as the shaman, the leader of the communal drama. In the realm of the purely anthropological reading of the plays that might be sufficient in its relatively apolitical dimension, but when this involves describing Friel as demonstrating a specific 'loyalty to his tribe' and defining that 'tribe' as the Northern Ireland nationalists (p. 11), then we are bordering on the reading of Friel advanced by James Simmons in which Friel is a 'Catholic Playwright' with all the exclusionary limitations that term implies. (27) With the postcolonial gloss that is added by references to Bhabha, Friel becomes a dramatist of a Catholic/Nationalist subaltern group set in opposition to a dominant British/Loyalist other. In such readings old binaries are reinforced with postcolonial criticism serving to do little more than extend the sell-by-date of outmoded analyses.

The fullest study to date of Friel which is nominally through this particular theoretical focus is F. C. McGrath's Brian Friel's (Post) Colonial Drama. While acknowledging that Ireland has a 'unique colonial history', (28) there is no real interrogation of the value, legitimacy, or problems of using postcolonial theory with regard to Friel. McGrath's concern is what he terms 'idealistic linguistic philosophies' as 'the means by which the colonised imagine an alternative to their condition' (p. 4). Implicit here, though somewhat obscured by the theoretical gloss, is a position similar to that of Pine: Friel is writing for and from those who have been 'submerged'. What is interesting is McGrath's concluding acknowledgement that he has 'deployed postcolonial theory primarily as a reading strategy. Ignored here is the realm of cultural politics' (p. 285). But to use postcolonial theory as a reading strategy alone returns to the fetishization of the text that the turn to theory was intended to displace. If there is no cultural political dimension to postcolonial theory then its function as a mode of analysis has to be seriously questioned, for little apart from a variant on existing textual appreciations has been achieved. The question as to the informing material base from which that text has emerged is unexamined and, perhaps more seriously, so too is the effect of the text's intervention in its moment.

There are, however, theories of postcolonialism which do not collapse back into worn cliches and dangerous binaries and, indeed, in their progressive and inclusive orientation correspond with a central impulse within the Field Day company. Joe Cleary provides a detailed reading of various modes of colonialism leading to the conclusion that 'for the most part, debates about whether Ireland was or was not a colony have rarely got beyond questions of geo-cultural location and constitutional statute. These are important, but not the decisive issues'; colonialism, as defined by Cleary, is 'a historical process in which societies of various kinds are differentially integrated into a world capitalist system'. (29)

Cleary's premise that the expansion of global capitalism is the context within which postcolonial theory must be properly deployed is the subject of extended analysis in Neil Lazarus's Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World. Setting himself against fashionable disparagements of nationalism, Lazarus argues that 'it is vital to retain the categories of "nation" and "universality".' (30) In other words the specificity of the national provides the base from which capitalism's global erasure of difference can be contested, not in an exclusionary manner but in a recognition of the legitimacy of other, alternative, specificities. Lazarus's argument, which draws on Said, leads directly into a consideration of Friel. For the intellectual contributes to 'the crystallising of memories and experiences as legitimate aspects of a cultural heritage' which 'could not have been provided by any other form of labor-power, by any other practice, in any other arena' (p. 141). The point of crystallizing memories and experiences is that they form a point of resistance to the thinning of historical depth, which Fredric Jameson has described as the particular effect of postmodernism. For Jameson, postmodernism is far from a liberating leap beyond stultifying grand narratives, rather it is 'the [internal and superstructural] expression of a whole wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world'. (31) Even while Jameson overstates the US's centrality given the 'decentering' of capitalism across the globe, the point about domination is well taken. And, as noted by Anthony Giddens: 'Globalisation can thus be defined as the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away.' (32) This process is driven by capitalism which, says Giddens, 'was from the beginning an affair of the world economy' intimately aided by colonialism, but, as he concludes, while 'colonialism in its original form [my emphasis] has all but disappeared, the world capitalist system continues' (p.184). It is this 'imperialism-without-colonies', (33) in Anne McClintock's phrase, which now dominates and, as she observes, multinational companies have the power to direct capital, commodities, and information in ways which 'can have an impact as massive as any colonial regime'. It is this 'that makes the historical rupture implied by the term "post-colonial" especially unwarranted' (p. 296), and perhaps also allows us to reflect on the historians' over-schematic fixation on 1800 as the year after which the term is not accepted in relation to Ireland. In such a context, as articulated by Simon During from an Australian standpoint, 'nationalism can retain a link with freedom in allowing us to resist cultural and economic imperialism', (34) and, in an implicit acceptance of the terms of debate as developed by Jameson, he suggests that this global, postmodern culture 'has been constructed in terms which more or less intentionally wipe out the possibility of post-colonial identity [as] post-colonialism is regarded as the need [...] to achieve an identity'. (35)

In 'A State o'Chassis: Mobile Capital, Ireland, and the Question of Postmodernity', Cheryl Herr suggested that Ireland was able to resist the overall homogenization effected by postmodernity: 'Ireland, paced by the global economy and subject to the demands of multinational mobile capital, retains its own semi-independent depths and peculiar surfaces. To be sure, there are ruptures in these surfaces, but [...] on-the-ground experience belies a theoretical effort to read into those ruptures a completed or even inevitable transition to the world of the endlessly superficial rhizome and the hyperreal.' (36) The crucial issue, however, is the nature and viability of those 'semi-independent' depths on which a resistance to cultural homogenization can be based. A potential way into a consideration of this is through Homi Bhabha's reference to the 'incommensurable' elements, 'the stubborn chunks' which are 'the basis of cultural identifications'. (37) It is this concept which provides a way into Friel's work and places it within the 'progressive' postcolonialism outlined above.

In Philadelphia, Here I Come! Gar's long-dead mother is recalled by him on the night before his emigration to the States, the 'vast empty place that doesn't give a curse about the past': (38) 'She was small, Madge says, and wild, and young, Madge says, from a place called Bailtefree beyond the mountains; and her eyes were bright, and her hair was loose' (p. 37). Both the location and the habit of walking barefoot to the boundaries of the village before putting on her shoes declare her indigenous 'otherness', most particularly in her desire for the dance which, in Dancing at Lughnasa, Friel described as being 'about the necessity for paganism', (39) paganism or, by extension, in the series of binaries through which Ireland was constituted in colonial discourse, that which is indigenous, incommensurable. The pressing psychic need to honour the incommensurable elements is also the central theme of Translations: a reading of the play which accords with the analyses derived from Joe Cleary and Neil Lazarus, namely that the central issue in postcolonial theory is about the integration of societies into a world capitalist system.

In his study of the development of newly independent states Clifford Geertz argues that a choice is effected between what he terms 'two rather towering abstractions: "The Indigenous Way of Life" and "The Spirit of the Age"', or 'essentialism' and 'epochalism' in which the former is concerned to look 'to "tradition," "culture," "national character," or even "race"--for the roots of a new identity' while epochalism establishes the state according to 'the general outlines of the history of our time, and in particular what one takes to be the overall direction and significance of that history.' (40) Translations is the dramatization of that fraught movement, located on one level in the 1830s but equally relevant to Ireland's twentieth-century engagement with modernity in the aftermath of T. K. Whitaker's 1958 report on economic development and its injunction: 'It would be well to shut the door on the past and to move forward.' (41) And the fact that Ireland did move forward into a dawning globalization is signalled in the fact that in the decade after Whitaker's report some three hundred and fifty overseas manufacturers located in Ireland. (42) In the play modernity is ushered in through the mapping exercise which positions Ireland in relation to empire. This ends 'ancient time', along with the Irish language which is judged to be 'a barrier to modern progress'. (43) Critics are fond of quoting Friel's diary lines about the play being only concerned with language as if this removed it from the political sphere. But as Friel said in that same sporadic diary, 'It is a political play--how can that be avoided? If it is not political, what is it?', and the nature of the politics concerns what Friel terms the 'alien future' which follows on from the ending of ancient time; (44) an English future already lurking on the borders of the parish where, as Hugh observes, that language is used, but 'usually for the purposes of commerce, a use to which [the] tongue seemed particularly suited' (p. 399).

Hugh's agreement to teach the language is taken with resigned pragmatism, a recognition, one might say, of the argument of epochalism. And as argued by Lionel Pilkington, Hugh's position is particularly disabling for Ireland: 'The major weakness of Hugh's proposal for cultural recovery, then, is that it does nothing to alter Baile Beag's, or Ireland's position of political and economic dependency; on the contrary it seems to concede the inevitability of this.' (45) But this is not to deny the powerful presence of incommensurable elements, most specifically in Owen's determination to keep piety with the dead and retain the name of Tobair Vree. Owen is certainly critiqued for a fundamentalism which sees him later decide to return to an original name forgotten even by the locals, and this, it is implied, is part of the drive towards joining the proto-military operations of the Donnelly twins. But this does not diminish the basic value of his commitment to the past as commemorated in 'the proper name'. For 'to forget the past willfully is to threaten the fragile links that, however tenuously, guard us from oblivion.' (46) Tobair Vree stands then for one of Pierre Nora's lieux de memoire, those sites where 'memory crystallises and secretes itself'. (47) Nora's point is an illuminating one for this moment in Translations, for 'there are lieux de memoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de memoire, real environments of memory' (p. 7). Specific sites of memory are required only by cultures for which 'an ancient bond of identity' has been broken, for 'if we were able to live within memory, we would not have needed to consecrate lieux de memoire in its name' (p. 8). Owen's holding to the original name of Tobair Vree in a landscape dominated elsewhere by Burnfoot, Whiteplains, King's Head, Fair Hill, Green Bank is an acknowledgement of the failure to retain that original relationship with 'ancient time', yet equally the need to do so. Through Owen, Friel dramatizes the psychological need defined by Stuart Hall: that in the face of globalization it is 'positioning' which 'provides people with co-ordinates [...]. Everybody comes from some place [...] and needs some sense of identification and belonging'. (48) For what may follow on from making a new home in the 'changing landscape of fact' is not necessarily 'material progress of the kind hoped for, but cultural confusion and a diminished sense of enterprise'. (49) It is this 'cultural confusion' which is summarized by Kate's realization in Dancing at Lughnasa that 'hair cracks are appearing everywhere; that control is slipping away; that the whole thing is so fragile it can't be held together much longer. It's all about to collapse'. (50)

While readings of Dancing at Lughnasa as offering 'consoling, nostalgic, unified images of Irishness' (51) are understandable, the essential question is 'for whom?' Audiences are made immediately aware that Lughnasa is a memory play in which Michael's is the controlling consciousness that reconstitutes the summer of 1936 he experienced as a seven-year-old. His reference to tracking down his aunts, Agnes and Rose, some 'twenty five years later' (p. 60) locates that event in 1961. And the fact that Michael, as adult narrator, is referred to in the stage directions as a 'young man' suggests that this too is the time at which the events of that lost summer are being recalled and staged. Setting the play in the early 1960s, the moment of post-Whitaker modernization, has then a particular bearing on what is being remembered, and why.

The literal destitutes of the play are Rosie and Agnes but Michael is also destitute, emotionally destitute, and so seeks some solace for his sense of loss in the memories of the incommensurable elements experienced as a child. While his location is not specified, the implication is that he is psychologically and geographically removed from Ballybeg, more successful than Rose and Agnes but no less displaced. Michael's adult time, the early 1960s, is also that of Gar O'Donnell in Philadelphia, Here I Come!, and as Gar commented in that play: 'Just the memory of it--that's all you have now--just the memory; and even now, even so soon, it is being distilled of all its coarseness; and what's left is going to be precious, precious gold' (p. 77). The final tableau of Lughnasa is 'lit in a very soft, golden light' (p. 70); the light of Michael's memories. But the reality is more disturbing. The mellowing effect of Michael's memory on the dramatization of the summer of 1936 does not completely elide the real hardship experienced by his mother and aunts. But their ability to survive those depredations is dependent on what Raymond Williams refers to as 'residual' cultural formations which 'still seem to have significance because they represent areas of human experience, aspiration, and achievement which the dominant culture neglects, undervalues, opposes, represses, or even cannot recognise,' (52) in other words, the incommensurable elements: the folk memory of the Lughnasa dance. However, participation in the public commemoration of the festival is frowned upon by Kate, the on-stage advocate of conventional, state morality who rejects the Lughnasa dancers as 'savages' whose 'pagan practices [...] are no concern of ours' (p. 17). But as the sisters' dance suggests, there is a strong internal compulsion towards the sustenance it provides. Williams identifies this 'reaching back' with the 'default of a particular phase of the dominant culture' (p. 123), a comment which has a particular resonance in Dancing at Lughnasa where the gradual projection into the changing landscape of fact brings with it the loss of income as a delayed industrial revolution destroys the cottage-industry economy of the sisters, and the emigration of Rose and Agnes leads not to a blissful state of hybrid harmony, but to drink and destitution. And Chris, Michael's mother, 'spent the rest of her life in the knitting factory--and hated every day of it' (p. 70). But the issue is not only the condition of the sisters, but also that of Michael himself for whom the incommensurable elements, even though now only remembered rather than experienced, provides some sustenance in a moment of 'default in the dominant culture'; namely the first onset of post-Whitaker globalization. While this reading of the play overlaps with that advanced by Catriona Clutterbuck, she argues that 'Friel is fundamentally not a political writer at all'. (53) However, it is precisely through his identification of the crises consequent upon Ireland's entry into the world of multi-national capitalism that Friel becomes a political analyst whose 'post-colonial' reading of the situation resonates with those advanced by Neil Lazarus, Joe Cleary, and Anne McLintock.

The extent to which this was a general Field Day position is clarified by reference to Seamus Deane's introduction to the collection of Field Day pamphlets by Said, Eagleton, and Jameson, which appeared, along with Dancing at Lughansa, in 1990. Deane castigated the Irish Republic for its abandonment of identity to the vagaries of the freeplay of the market: '[It] has surrendered the notion of identity altogether as a monotonous and barren anachronism and rushed to embrace all of those corporate, "international" opportunities offered by the European Economic Community and the tax-free visitations of international cartels' (pp. 13-14). As a result, said Deane, a 'genial depthlessness' masquerading as pluralism pervades debate and the beneficiaries of such blandness 'regards the rest of Ireland as the hinterland of its benighted past.' (54) The concordance between a benighted past, a hinterland, Bhahba's incommensurable elements, and Friel's back hills and 'pagan' dancing, is clearly suggestive--and far from regressive.

Fredric Jameson, whose definition and criticism of the post-modern has informed the argument to this point, has speculated that 'the memory of precapitalist societies may become a vital element [... in] the invention of the future'. (55) Or, as further elaborated by David Lloyd and Abdul JanMohammed, 'The very differences which have always been read as symptoms of inadequacy are capable of being re-read as indications and figurations of values radically opposed to those of the dominant culture.' (56) It is those memories and differences to which Friel has turned, the ten-year gap which separated the production of Dancing at Lughnasa from Translations seeing an increased sense of what was being lost and the viability of what remnants might remain. It is here that we find the greatest parallels between Friel's thinking and that of postcolonial critics such as Ashis Nandy and Aijaz Ahmad, particularly with regard to Nandy's 'critical traditionalism' which he advances as a point of resistance to what he terms 'the juggernaut of modernity'. (57)

Across his plays Friel has been developing a critique of postmodernism which has a very direct postcolonial inflection. In Deane's terms postmodernism is a particular threat because '[it] supplants the search for a legitimating mode of nomination and origin, [which] is surely to pass from one kind of colonising experience into another'. This, he suggests, 'is the concealed imperialism of the multinational'. (58) It is the stripping away of a grounded identity which, for Ahmad, 'subordinates cultures, consumers and critics alike to a form of untethering and moral loneliness'. (59) As argued above, this is the condition which drives Michael back to the reconstituted incommensurable elements of the dance in Dancing at Lughnasa. It is also the condition which drives the couples of Wonderful Tennessee back into 'The Bloody Indian territory' of Donegal, the play opening with a manifestation of Seamus Deane's point that the beneficiaries of Ireland's modernization regard the rest of Ireland as part of their 'benighted past'. (60)

Produced in 1993, the play is set in 'Time: the present'. And its opening line, 'Help! We're lost!', (61) echoes Ahmad's analysis of the 'untethering and moral loneliness' which is the consequence of stripping away historical identity. As Csilla Bertha usefully observes, there is no Irish music in Wonderful Tennessee, indeed the world of contemporary Ireland as figured in the play 'is further removed from the old Irish culture than the nineteen thirties in Lughnasa. The three couples in Tennessee have to travel to find the place that would inspire them.' (62) The separation, of course, is more strictly temporal than spatial, even though they travel to Donegal in an attempt to anchor themselves in some reality. What finally sustains the couples and allows them to exit with voices singing 'loudly, joyously, happily' (p. 78) is an accommodation with the previously rejected incommensurable elements. Indeed, the play functions in part as a contemporary coda to Dancing at Lughnasa, in that it too is set on a 'Lovely harvest day' (p. 71) and Frank's description of the 'Ballybeg epiphany' in which a dolphin danced for him (pp. 59-60) evokes the pagan dance of Lughnasa. It is this manifestation of the incommensurable elements that sets itself against the 'time and motion' rationalism of capitalism and, in Berna's terms, enables them to say 'Fuck you, reason [...] You haven't all the fucking answers--not by any means' (p. 46).

Each of these three plays by Friel marks a moment of crisis in the process of Ireland's entry into that expression of colonialism known as global capitalism: its onset in Translations when Owen's desperate commitment to the original names is swept aside by the power of Empire to which Hugh makes his resigned pledge to teach its language; its dawning discontents in Lughnasa, not specifically in the eradication of the cottage economy of the sisters, but rather in the post-Whitaker discontents of Michael; and its final expression in the depthless discontents of the couples of Wonderful Tennessee. Any doubts as to where Friel locates the source of the contemporary malaise are dispelled by reflecting on the fact that the music group for which George in that play has prostituted his talent, 'to make some money', is the 'Dude Ranchers' (p. 51). Here Friel's critique echoes an even more explicit denunciation in Tom Murphy's Conversations on a Homecoming, where Ireland's being for sale to 'to any old bidder with a pound, a dollar, a mark or a yen' is associated with its being in thrall to 'the real enemy--the big one! [...] the country and western system itself.' (63)

In a highly critical piece on 'The Post-Colonial Aura', Arif Dirlik comments that 'postcolonial critics have been silent on the relationship of the idea of postcolonialism to its context in contemporary capitalism', his argument is that the academic institutionalization of postcolonialism suggests that colonialism, as economic domination, is ended, 'as if the only tasks left for the present were to abolish its ideological and cultural legacy'. (64) Friel's work is certainly concerned with the cultural realm and issues of representation and identity, but the plays are grounded in an appreciation of the economic structures and their discontents within which those identities are formed and located. This is the essence of Friel's postcolonialism and of productive postcolonial readings of his plays and, by extension, of parallel readings into the expanding canon of 'postcolonial' Irish literature.

(1) The International Association for the Study of Anglo-Irish Literature. Now IASIL, The International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures.

(2) Terence Hawkes, General editor's preface, Re-Reading English, ed. by Peter Widdowson (London: Methuen, 1982), p. vii.

(3) Tom Paulin, Ireland and the English Crisis (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1984), pp. 15-16.

(4) W. J. McCormack, The Battle of the Books (Gigginstown: Lilliput, 1986), p. 55.

(5) Richard Kirkland, Literature and Culture in Northern Ireland Since 1965: Moments of Danger (London: Longman, 1996), pp. 117-18, n. 19.

(6) Paulin, Ireland and the English Crisis, p. 15.

(7) John Wilson Foster, Colonial Consequences: Essays in Irish Literature and Culture (Gigginstown: Lilliput, 1991), p. 223.

(8) Peter McDonald, Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 5.

(9) Peter McDonald, 'The Function of Criticism at the Present Time: Arnold and Irish Culture', Irish Review, 23 (Winter 1998), 94-104, (p. 98).

(10) Catherine Belsey, 'English Studies in the Postmodern Condition: Towards a Place for the Signified', in Post-Theory: New Directions in Criticism, ed. by Martin McQuillan, Graeme MacDonald, Robin Purves, and Stephen Thomson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), pp. 123-38 (p. 123).

(11) Richard Kirkland, 'Conference Report: Theorising Ireland', British Association for Irish Studies Newsletter, 23 (July 2000) 8-10 (p. 10).

(12) Liam Kennedy, Colonialism, Religion and Nationalism in Ireland (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1996), pp. 178, 167.

(13) Stephen Howe, Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) p. 263, n. 28, p. 260, n. 1.

(14) Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (London: Cape, 1995).

(15) Colin Graham, 'Post-Colonial Theory and Kiberd's "Ireland"', Irish Review, 19 (Spring/Summer 1996), 62-67 (p. 62).

(16) David Lloyd, 'Cultural Theory and Ireland', Bullan, 3.1 (Spring 1997), 87-92 (p. 91).

(17) Seamus Deane, Introduction, in Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward Said, Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1990), pp. 3-9 (p. 6).

(18) Seamus Deane, 'Civilians and Barbarians', in Ireland's Field Day, Field Day Theatre Company (London: Hutchinson, 1985), pp. 33-42 (p. 58).

(19) Seamus Deane, quoted in John Gray, 'Field Day Five Years On', Linenhall Review, 2.2 (1985), 4-10 (p. 8).

(20) Edna Longley, Poetry in the Wars (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1986), p. 191.

(21) Sean Connolly, 'Dreaming History: Brian Friel's Translations', Theatre Ireland, 13, (1987), 42-44 (p. 43).

(22) J. H. Andrews, 'Notes for a Future Edition of Brian Friel's Translations', Irish Review, 13 (Winter 1992/93), 93-106 (p. 93).

(23) Brian Friel, John Andrews, and Kevin Barry, 'Translations and A Paper Landscape', The Crane Bag, 7.2 (1983), 118-24 (p. 123).

(24) Brenda Maddox, 'A Fine Old Irish Stew', New Statesman, 29 November 1996, p. 21.

(25) Kennedy, Colonialism, Religion and Nationalism in Ireland, p. 217.

(26) Richard Pine, The Diviner: The Art of Brian Friel (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 1999), p. 11.

(27) James Simmons, 'Brian Friel: Catholic Playwright', Honest Ulsterman, 79 (Autumn 1985), 61-66.

(28) F. C. McGrath, Brian Friel's (Post)Colonial Drama (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999), p. 4.

(29) Joe Cleary, "Misplaced Ideas": Location and Dislocation in Irish Studies, in Ireland and Postcolonial Theory, ed. by Clare Carroll and Patricia King (Cork: Cork University Press, 2003), pp. 16-45 (pp. 44, 43).

(30) Neil Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 143.

(31) Fredric Jameson, 'Postmodernism: or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism', New Left Review, 146 (1984), 53-92 (p. 57).

(32) Anthony Giddens, 'The Consequences of Modernity', in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, A Reader, ed. by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), pp. 181-89 (p. 181).

(33) Anne McClintock, 'The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term "Post-colonialism"', in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, A Reader, pp. 291-304 (p. 295).

(34) Simon During, 'Literature--Nationalism's Other? The Case for Revision', in Nation and Narration, ed. by Homi Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 138-53 (p. 139).

(35) Simon During, 'Postmodernism or Post-colonialism Today', in Postmodernism: A Reader, ed. by Thomas Docherty (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), pp. 300-01 (p. 449).

(36) Cheryl Herr, 'A State o'Chassis: Mobile Capital, Ireland, and the Question of Postmodernity', in Irishness and (Post)Modernism, ed. John S. Rickard (Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell, 1994), pp. 195-229 (p. 223).

(37) Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 219.

(38) Brian Friel, Selected Plays of Brian Friel (London: Faber, 1984), p. 52. Further references to this edition are given after quotations in the text.

(39) Brian Friel in Conversation, ed. by Paul Delaney (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), p. 222.

(40) Clifford Geertz, 'After the Revolution: The Fate of Nationalism in the New States', in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic, 1973), pp. 234-54 (p. 240).

(41) Report on Economic Development, Pr. 4808, 1958, p. 9.

(42) Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, p. 565.

(43) Brian Friel, Translations, in Selected Plays of Brian Friel, p. 400.

(44) Brian Friel, Essays, Diaries, Interviews: 1964-1999, ed. by Christopher Murray (London: Faber, 1999), pp. 74, 75.

(45) Lionel Pilkington, 'Language and Politics in Brian Friel's Translations', Irish University Review, 20.2 (Autumn 1990), 282-98 (p. 292).

(46) Natalie Zemon Davis and Randolph Starn, Introduction, Representations, 26, Special Issue on Memory and Counter-Memory (Spring 1989), 1-6 (p. 6).

(47) Pierre Nora, 'Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire', Representations, Special Issue on Memory and Counter-Memory, 7-25 (p. 7).

(48) Stuart Hall, 'The Meaning of New Times', in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. by David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 224-37 (p. 237).

(49) Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, p. 652.

(50) Brian Friel, Dancing at Lughnasa (London: Faber, 1990), p. 35. Further references to this edition are given after quotations in the text.

(51) Anthony Roche, Contemporary Irish Drama: From Beckett to McGuinness (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1994), p. 106.

(52) Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 123-24.

(53) Catriona Clutterbuck, 'Lughnasa after Easter: Treatments of Narrative Imperialism in Friel and Devlin', Irish University Review, 29.1 (Spring/Summer 1999), 101-18 (p. 102).

(54) Seamus Deane, 'Wherever Green is Read', in Revising the Rising, ed. by Mairin Ni Dhonnchadha and Theo Dorgan (Derry: Field Day Theatre Company, 1991), pp. 91-105 (p. 98).

(55) Fredric Jameson, 'Reflections on the Brecht-Lukacs Debate', in The Ideologies of Theory, Essays 1971-1986, Volume 2: The Syntax of History (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 145.

(56) Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd, 'Introduction: Toward a Theory of Minority Discourse', Cultural Critique, 6 (Spring 1987), 5-12 (p. 10).

(57) Ashis Nandy, 'Cultural Frames for Social Transformation: A Credo', Alternatives, 12.1 (January 1987), 113-23 (p. 114).

(58) Deane, Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature, p. 19.

(59) Aijaz Ahmad, 'The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality', Race and Class, 36.3 (January-March 1995), 1-20 (p. 17).

(60) Deane, 'Wherever Green is Read', p. 98

(61) Brian Friel, Wonderful Tennessee (London: Faber, 1993), p. 1. Further references to this edition are given after quotations in the text.

(62) Csilla Bertha, 'Six Characters in Search of a Faith: The Mythic and the Mundane in Wonderful Tennessee', Irish University Review, 29.1 (Spring/Summer 1999), 119-35 (p. 122).

(63) Tom Murphy, Conversations on a Homecoming, in Tom Murphy, Plays: Two (London: Methuen, 1993), pp. 80, 67.

(64) Arif Dirlip, 'The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism, Critical Inquiry, 20 (Winter 1994), 328-56 (pp. 331, 343).

SHAUN RICHARDS

Staffordshire University