ACTING OUT THE FRACTURED IRISH HISTORY

Abstract

This study focuses on the crucial decade of 1980 to 1990 in Friel's dramatic trajectory, during which he heavily involved himself with contemporary political and philosophical issues such as language and identity, (post)colonial subjectivity and discourse formation, and memory and history. The plays selected for the main analyses of this study are Translations (1980), Making History (1988) and Dancing at Lughnasa (1990). Friel's journey during the period first moves geographically from North to South and politically from the colonial state of Northern Ireland to the postcolonial state of the Republic of Ireland. Second and concurrently, his itinerary takes the transition in dramatic form, from action to narration and from stage realism to poetic dream-work. Finally, Friel's concern with the past finds its object first in history and then out of history in memory: we observe a radical separation and contestation between history and memory. Accordingly, Translations is a quintessentially Northern play with concerns of language and identity of the colonial subject. The play takes the form of stage realism in which the playwright re-imagines the past within the framework of historical narrative. Next comes Making History: a play which, in the course of dissecting the conflicting views of history that have had divisive and alienating effects on the Irish people in both the south and the north, ultimately rejects the self-claim of historiography to our access to the past because it has no more, no less validity to it than dramatic fiction regarding the remembrance of the past. Another important thematic feature in Making History centers on the essentially hybridized nature of Irish identity and how it comes to be suppressed and homogenized by the discourse of nation. Finally, Dancing at Lughnasa stands in the radical opposition to Translations in that it is a Southern play dealing with the post-independent, postcolonial state in the de Valera era. In this play, history, especially in its institutionalized form, is radically opposed to and separated from memory which, instead of being acted out, is narrated by a young man. It is an autobiographical play in which fragments of memory are precariously hung together by the Freudian processes of dream-work. Furthermore, the audience's natural desire to identify with the story so impregnated with nostalgic sentiment is constantly interrupted and left unfulfilled by complex and subtle uses of Brechtian technique. Dramatic performance for Friel offers a communal process by which personal memory becomes collectivized and collective memory is instantiated. To recuperate memory which has been usurped by history, it is necessary to revive the oral tradition which has long been replaced by written literature, to which history ultimately belongs. The opposition between orality and literacy can be overcome by dramatic story-telling into which orality and literacy are combined and speech and writing are married.