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Field y Review d a 6. 2010 Cover: Detail of the ‘Bernal Picasso’, or Bernal 12–11–1950, drawn by Pablo Picasso on the wall of the apartment of John Desmond Bernal in Birkbeck College, London, 1950. Wellcome Collection, London. © Succession Picasso/DACS, London, 2010. Inside cover: ‘Wall Street Bubbles: Always the Same’; caricature of John Pierpont Morgan 1837–1913, American financier, as the personification of a ‘Bull’ market, blowing bubbles of ‘inflated value’ for hapless investors to catch, Puck magazine, 22 May 1901. Artist: Joseph Keppler, Jr. (1872–1956). 6. 2010 © The Art Archive / Library of Congress. Cultural History/Irish Studies 9 780946 755493 FIELD DAY PUBLICATIONS – UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME Editors Seamus Deane Ciarán Deane Copy Hilary Bell Cormac Deane Design Red Dog Design Consultants www.reddog.ie Fonts Headlines — Gill Sans 24/28 Body Copy Essays/Reviews — Sabon 9/12 Paper Stock McNaughton’s Challenger Offset Copyright © 2010 by the contributors and Field Day Publications Field Day Review is published annually by Field Day Publications in association with the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame. ISSN 1649-6507 ISBN 978-0-946755-49-3 Field Day Review Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies 86 St. Stephen’s Green Dublin 2 Ireland [email protected] www.fielddaybooks.com FIELD DAY REVIEW 2010 ESSayS Kevin Whelan 7 Between: The Politics of Culture in Friel’s Translations Michael Cronin 29 Kate O’Brien and the Erotics of Liberal Catholic Dissent Emer Nolan 53 Sinéad O’Connor: The story of a voice Paul A. Bové 71 Misprisions of Utopia: Messianism, Apocalypse, and Allegory Luke Gibbons 95 The addressivity of the Eye: James Coleman’s Connemara Landscape Breandán Ó Buachalla Alan Titley 105 Uamhnach Ultach ag moladh Muimhnigh Cathal Goan 109 Flaith na nÉigeas Thomas Bartlett 113 The Pursuit of Helen Landreth: Robert Emmet, Gender and Historical Scholarship in Mid-Twentieth-Century Ireland Catherine Morris 133 alice Milligan: Republican Tableaux and the Revival Terry Eagleton 167 Culture, atheism and the War on Terror REVIEWS Seamus Deane 179 ‘To See again The Stars’ Dictionary of Irish Biography: From the Earliest Times to the Year 2002 Essays FIElD Day REvIEw Triangulation point and cairn. © Getty Images 6 Between: The Politics of Culture in Friel’s 1 ‘Light troubles speak: the weighty strike you dumb’; Seneca, Phaedra Translations or Hippolytus. 2 Ironically, Friel moved Kevin Whelan ‘south’ by moving north geographically: although belonging to the South Curae leves loquuntur ingentes (i.e. the Republic of stupent.1 Ireland), the Inishowen peninsula in Donegal, to which he moved and in which his play is [This is the second of two essays saluting set, is actually further Brian Friel on his 80th birthday and north than any point in acknowledging the 30th anniversary of his Northern Ireland. He has lived for many years play Translations. The first essay, ‘Brian in Greencastle, opposite Friel’s Translations: The Origins of a Magilligan in Derry, Cultural Experiment’, by Ciarán Deane, where the base camp of appeared in Field Day Review 5.] the Ordnance Survey was located, and where its triangulation began. Brian Friel was born in 1929 3 Frank Curran, Derry: Countdown to Disaster at Kilclogher, near Omagh (Dublin, 1986), 37. 4 Partition created in County Tyrone, Northern marooned minorities on both sides of the Ireland, the son of a Derry border: substantial schoolmaster and a Donegal poor Protestant communities were exiled postmistress, a child of in Monaghan, Cavan, and especially Donegal. partitioned Ireland. He later They too were silenced post-partition. The moved just across the border into favoured trope in fiction and drama for the County Donegal in the Republic plight of the Protestant of Ireland.2 He belonged to landed class was the Big House as doomed the generation of northern remnant of culture and civility; the plight nationalists famously described of poorer Protestants found no comparable by the Derry MP Eddie McAteer representation. Friel (1914–86) as ‘the bastard has written ‘Big House’ plays, Aristocrats children of the Republic’.3 After (1979), with the twist that the proprietors the trauma of partition,4 and the are Catholics, and The Home Place (2005). brutal suppression of initial FIElD Day REvIEw 6 2010 7 FIElD Day REvIEw opposition to it in the 1920s, Northern state projects were being introduced: the 5 Cited from a 1973 Irish Catholics were cowed into silence. standardized mapping of the country by interview by Friel, in Tony Corbett, Brian Abandoned by both the British and Irish the Ordnance Survey, and the national Friel: Decoding the states, they became a subdued, silent, system of education to replace the existing Language of the Tribe watchful generation, internalizing their informal system of hedge-schools. Both (Dublin, 2002), 107. sense of historic betrayal. Friel taught had implications for the Irish language; 6 Paul Delaney, ed., Brian Friel in Conversation for many years in Derry, and he has the national schools were to be rigorously (Ann Arbor, 2000), 159. described ‘the personal, traditional and English-speaking, while the new maps 7 Christopher Murray, acquired knowledge that cocooned me: an would render the old place names in English ed., Brian Friel: Essays, Irish Catholic teacher with a nationalist orthography. Friel combines both of these Diaries, Interviews: 1964–1999 (London, background, living in a schizophrenic anglicizing projects in the setting for his play. 1999), 106. 5 community’. He diagnosed the Catholic Colonialism is never just a political and 8 Murray, ed., Brian Friel, population there as ‘a dispossessed people economic condition but also a psychic one. 106. living in a state they never subscribed to, Translations probes the psychodynamic 9 Brian Friel to K. Whelan. Sep. 10, 2010. with Donegal lying just across the bay. effects of colonialism as they play out in 10 On Field Day, see Janus-like, they had one head looking to the the linguistic realm, where the private and Marilynn Richtarik, north and one looking to the south.’6 Friel the public spheres meet. Masquerading Acting between the considered northern nationalists as being ‘at as a version of universalism, colonialism Lines: The Field Day Theatre Company and home but in exile’,7 and talked of them (and presented the acquisition of English as a Irish Cultural Politics himself) feeling like ‘an exile in your home’, liberation, the golden bridge that carried 1980–1984, 2nd edn. their birthright more a disinheritance than the native beyond localism into the world (Oxford, 2001). an inheritance.8 And yet lurking somewhere at large, rescuing him from provincialism 11 The most complete treatment of the in the Northern Catholic imagination at this by awarding full participation in British context of the original time was what Friel has called ‘the secret civic life. The toll required was the production is Ciarán notion we nurtured that in some ridiculous relinquishment of the native language, Deane, ‘Brian Friel’s way we were the true keepers of some true disavowal of native history, severance from Translations: The Origins of a Cultural notion of what being Irish meant. The Free native culture. Edward Said’s memoir Out Experiment’, Field Day State squandered and abused that idea. We of Place probes the meaning of a displaced Review, 5 (2009), 7–47. guarded it in suffering silence.’ 9 linguistic identity: 12 Edward Said, Out of Translations was the foundational play Place (New York, 1999), 15–16. of the Field Day Theatre Company, 10 The basic split in my life was the one 13 George Steiner, established in 1980 by Friel and Stephen Rea. between Arabic, my native language, and After Babel: Aspects Friel finished writing it at the height of the English, the language of my education of Language and northern conflict on 5 November 1979, and and subsequent expression as a scholar Translation (Oxford, 1975). Likewise, Friel’s it was first produced on 23 September 1980 and teacher, and so trying to produce a Molly Sweeney (1993) is 11 in the Guildhall, Derry. The play can be narrative of one in the language of the inspired by a case study read as both a parable about, and a diagnosis other — to say nothing of the numerous in Oliver Sacks, ‘To See of, the conditions of the post-partition ways in which the languages were and Not See’ in the New Yorker, 10 May 1993, Catholic community in Northern Ireland. mixed up for me and crossed over from 59–73. Field Day sought to deploy the communal one realm to the other — has been a effects of theatre to release Northern Ireland complicated task.12 in particular from its numbing violence and stasis. Friel identified his involvement in the The master text for Translations is George enterprise as stemming from dúchas/pietas— Steiner’s After Babel.13 Steiner emphasized ‘a sense of loyalty and dutifulness towards that a language constitutes a community one’s own home’. of shared history and aspirations, and The play is set in a Donegal hedge-school that, accordingly, each language remains in 1833, before the devastating Famine of incommensurable and opaque to translation: the 1840s, at a time when two controversial 8 BEtwEEN: tHE POlItICS OF CUltURE IN FRIEl’S TRanslaTions Etching. Thomas Frederick Colby (1784-1852). Director of the Ordnance Survey from 1820 to 1847. © Science and Society Picture Library 14 Steiner, After Babel, They are the instruments of storage and Friel’s borrowings from Steiner include 300. transmission of legacies of experience some of the best-known lines in the play: and imaginative construction particular ‘Uncertainty of meaning is incipient poetry’; to a given community ... Languages ‘a syntax opulent with tomorrows’; ‘Often communicate inwards to the native cultures seem to expend on their vocabularies speaker with a density and pressure of and syntax acquisitive energies and shared intimation which are only partly, ostentations entirely lacking in their material grudgingly yielded to the outsider.