POSTCOLONIAL SUB-VERSIONS OF EUROPE: BRIAN FRIEL’S FATHERS AND SONS

ANDREA P. BALOGH

What worries me about the play – if there is a play – are the necessary peculiarities, especially the political elements. Because the play has to do with language and only language. And if it becomes overwhelmed by that political element, it is lost.1

It is a truism to say that no language is innocent. It is more difficult to trace, within the rhetorics of political and literary discourses, the forms and varieties of incrimination, subjection, insurgency, evasion, and stereotyping that determine or are determined by our past and present interpretations.2

Over the last twenty years, one of the most heated debates in Irish Studies has been about the usefulness of postcolonial theory in analysing Irish literature, culture and society. The debate broke out as a reaction to the goals of the Field Day Company’s artistic and intellectual project. The Field Day enterprise was launched by the production of Brian Friel’s play, Translations in Derry City’s Guildhall in 1980. According to Seamus Deane, the founders of the Field Day Company (Friel, Stephen Rea, Tom Paulin, Seamus Deane, Seamus Heaney, and David Hammond), regarded the Northern Irish situation as a colonial crisis and set out to respond to the crisis by

1 Brian Friel quoted in Irish Drama 1900-1980, eds Cóilín D. Owens and Joan N. Radner, Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1990, 696. 2 Seamus Deane, “Introduction”, in Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature, ed. Seamus Deane, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990, 10. 244 Andrea Balogh providing a politically informed literature and cultural criticism, in the form of theatre, pamphlets and publishing.3 As a consequence of the professed ends, Friel’s Translations was received as a play with a political purpose and as an aesthetic formulation of Friel’s anti- colonial ideological position. From this perspective, Translations was conceived as Friel’s postcolonial reading of Ireland’s past and Northern Ireland’s quasi-colonial present. However Edna Longley argues in connection with Friel’s Translations, that the conception of the Irish experience as being decisively shaped by Ireland’s colonial history and by the loss of the native language and culture, suggests that Friel inaugurated the Field Day Theatre Company by rehearsing the nationalist notion of the Irish experience.4 The academic controversy over the Field Day Company’s objectives has gone in two different directions. It has led to a critical exploration of the relevance of postcolonial theory for interpreting Irish literature, culture, politics and their vexed interrelationship. At the same time, it has culminated in an anxiety about the appropriateness of politically and socially oriented arts and of politically and socially oriented critical approaches. The latter is symptomatic of Friel criticism which has made serious efforts to separate Friel’s oeuvre from the Field Day Company’s postcolonial enterprise associated with Seamus Deane’s name, as well as to purify Friel’s Irish plays from any concrete political and social implications and, ultimately, to acquit Friel of producing a nationalist aesthetic.5 Notwithstanding, Friel’s Translations has remained at the centre of the

3 Deane, Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature, 6. 4 Edna Longley, “Poetry and Politics in Northern Ireland”, Crane Bag, IX/1 (Autumn 1985), 26-40. 5 See, for instance, Christopher Murray’s article arguing for making a distinction between Friel’s and Rea’s Field Day, which is art-oriented and non-political, and Seamus Deane’s Field Day, which is politically oriented and too intellectual (Christopher Murray, “Palimpsest: Two Languages as One in Translations”, in Brian Friel’s Dramatic Artistry, The Work Has Value, eds Donald E. Morse, Csilla Bertha and Mária Kurdi, Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2006, 93-108). Richard Pine evaluates Friel’s Field Day plays aesthetically less valuable than Friel’s non-political post-Field Day plays. As he puts it, “In a sense, I do not think Field Day enriched [Friel’s] dramatic art, it diverted his dramatic art into the service of politics, cultural politics perhaps, but politics nonetheless” (ibid., 314).