Celebrating the life and genius of Brian

Tag : Crown Headgear
FINTAN O'TOOLE
CULTURE SHOCK: A remarkable photographic portrait exhibition of Brian Frielreminds us that the writer doesn't sit easily with pious tributes,writes Fintan O'Toole .
IN THE striking exhibition of Bobbie Hanvey's photographs of BrianFriel on show at the Magill Summer School in Glenties this week,the most arresting are the images of the playwright in hisbeekeeping outfit. In a stark white overall suit, with his facewreathed in protective headgear like a old-fashioned nun's cowl, helooks like an astronaut unimpressed with the planet he's justlanded on.
The images are remarkable because they are so unexpected. At theheart of an event that rightly celebrates Friel in advance of his80th birthday, in the Donegal community that has meant so much tohim, they provide a bracing reminder that the writer doesn't siteasily with pious tributes. He may deal with a familiar world, buthis job, like that of Hanvey's portraits, is to make that familiarstrange.
It is lovely to see Friel celebrated, to enter packed halls wherehe sits quietly and impassively, listening to friends andcontemporaries like Seamus Heaney and Thomas Kilroy mark hisachievements. But it would be wrong to simply crown him withlaurels. For one thing he is still very much a living writer - hissuperb new version of Hedda Gabler will be at the Gate in thisyear's Dublin Theatre Festival. More importantly, though, there isthe paradox that Friel's great achievement has been deeply embeddedin a sense of failure.
Something Friel wrote in 1999 about his translations of Chekhov andTurgenev gets close to his own sense of where he stands in relationto Irish society. He has been attracted to the 19th century Russianauthors, he explained, "because the characters in the plays behaveas if their old certainties were as sustaining as ever - eventhough they know in their hearts that their society is in meltdownand the future has neither a welcome nor even an accommodation forthem. Maybe a bit like people of my own generation in Irelandtoday." That last line, typically qualified with the little "maybe"that makes it seem like a throwaway remark, is both poignant andnoble. It points to the richly ambiguous relationship of Friel'sachievement to the Ireland of his times. The great gesture of hiswork has been to carry on as if the world from which he takes hisartistic bearings were not in meltdown, even while the work itselfenacts that very implosion.
It has always seemed to me that a good way to place Friel is toignore his own rather dismissive attitude to the short stories hewrote in the 1950s and early 1960s, and to go and read them. Theshocking thing about them is how very good they are, how controlledand poised. They are the work of a young and successful author(Friel had a contract with the New Yorker) who is clearly in theprocess of becoming a great prose writer. His decision to stopwriting prose and start writing plays reflected, surely, a muchwider loss of faith in the traditional narrative. There may havebeen all sorts of reasons for this, but it is worth rememberingthat it was part of a much broader European cultural shift inwhich, in the aftermath of the mid-century catastrophes, narrativeitself came to be seen as, at best inadequate, at worst a lie.Theatre, with its looser forms and ability to supplement orcontradict words with sounds, gestures and physical images, offeredthe hope of restoring some authority to the act of telling stories.What's fascinating, though, is that for Friel those hopes werelargely dashed. What he found was that the matter of Ireland whichfed his imagination actually challenged the basic building blocksof theatrical narrative. The materials of theatre are space, time,language, story and character. All of them, in Friel, collapse inthe "meltdown" that each of his plays enacts.
Space does not cohere because of emigration (the great early themeof Friel's plays) and because of the displaced status of theCatholic minority in Northern Ireland to which he belongs. Time,whose theatrical manifestation is memory, refuses to function. GarO'Donnell in Philadelphia, Here I Come! remembers things that neverhappened; the unreliable and contradictory narratives of the sameevents in Faith Healer enact the slipperiness of the past.Language, the concern of plays like Translations and TheCommunication Cord, proves inadequate to communication. Stories,and those who write them (Lombard in Making History, for example)don't reflect reality, they invent it. And even characters do notcohere: Gar is split on stage into private and public selves,Michael in Dancing at Lughnasa into past and present selves.
Friel's genius, though, has been to make art of these veryfailures, inadequacies and incoherencies. He has done this partlyby dint of his extraordinary gift for language and structure - hesmuggled the short story back in to his theatre and made it strangeand haunting. But partly, too, by having the guts to embrace theliberation implicit in knowing that things don't make sense butdoing them anyway. He has been able, like those Russian characters,to "behave as if the old certainties" of language, story andcharacter "were as sustaining as ever". The miraculous thing isthat they have indeed been sustaining, not just for him, but forus. Because of that, his pessimism is surely unjustified. The worldof his past may have melted down, but the future will have awelcome, or at least an accommodation, for a writer who taught us,in the words of Hugh in Translations, that "confusion is not anignoble condition".
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© 2008 The Irish Times
This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times