David Hammond, 1928–2008 Reproduction of a page from Edward Bunting's A General Collection of Ancient Irish Music (London, 1796). In the bicentenary year of that famous publication, David Hammond's Flying Fox Films funded a replica of the original to be printed in a joint venture with the Linenhall Library, Belfast, and the National Library of Ireland. The page reproduced here contains the score of the tune The Parting of Friends. The Preface to Bunting's volume states that ‘Scarfuint na G[c]ompanach or the Parting of Friends, is considered as very ancient. It is often played by harpers when the audience are about to separate...' Editors Seamus Deane Breandán Mac Suibhne Ciarán Deane Assistant to the Editors Sean Mannion Copy Hilary Bell 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 © 2009 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 978-0-946755-45-5 Field Day Review Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies 86 St. Stephen’s Green Dublin 2 Ireland fi[email protected] www.fielddaybooks.com FIELD DAY REVIEW 2009 ESSAYS Ciarán Deane 7 Brian Friel’s Translations: The Origins of a Cultural Experiment Joe Cleary 49 Distress Signals: Sean O’Faolain and the Fate of Twentieth-Century Irish Literature Barry McCrea 75 Family and Form in Ulysses Catríona Kennedy 95 ‘Our Separate Rooms’: Bishop Stock’s Narrative of the French Invasion of Mayo, 1798 Juliana Adelman 109 Animal Knowledge: Zoology and Class-ification in Nineteenth-Century Dublin Giovanni Arrighi 123 Up for Grabs in conversation with Joe Cleary REVIEWS Ian McBride 141 The Whole People of Ireland? David Lloyd 151 Shadows of a Gunman Chris Morash 165 Theatre, Globalization and Recalcitrant Audiences Sean Mannion 171 Modernism at the Movies Carl Dawson 185 ‘A Different Grammar’ Francis Mulhern 195 Just Another Country? Seamus Deane 207 The Great Nation and the Evil Empire ESSAYS FIELD DAY REVIEW 6 Brian Friel, London, 1988. Photo: © Field Day Brian Friel’s Translations: The Origins of a Cultural Experiment Ciarán Deane [To salute Brian Friel on his 80th birthday and to acknowledge the 30th anniversary of his play Translations, we are publishing two essays on the play, of which this is the first. The second, by Kevin Whelan, will appear in Field Day Review 6]. ‘One must not build on the good old things, but on the bad new ones.’ Bertolt Brecht1 The original staging of Brian Friel’s play Translations marked a transitional moment in twentieth- century Irish cultural life, though the nature, extent and value of that transition have been hotly debated. The text of the play deals with concepts of cross-cultural communication, cultural origins and cultural shifts, but it was the first performance — at the Guildhall, Derry, 23 September 1 Brecht, quoted in J. 1980 — that gave particular Willett, Brecht in Context: Comparative intensity to the play’s governing Approaches (London, concepts and declared the specific 1984), 197. public role of art. FIELD DAY REVIEW 5 2009 7 FIELD DAY REVIEW The Field Day Archive, which was donated language (English); and because their 2 In the Field Day Archive to the National Library of Ireland in townland is being renamed, everything (hereafter FDA), it is Friel’s correspondence 2008, is both extensive and rich in new that was familiar is becoming strange.3 with Deane and Rea that information. Some of the earliest documents is the most revealing. in the archive are concerned with the Translations is set at a moment of Correspondence with creation of the Field Day Theatre Company transition, when the Irish-speaking society other directors is thinner in quantity and has less and with its foundational play Translations. of Ballybeg is about to be mapped into a to impart. They include previously unpublished different culture. It continues Friel’s long 3 Brian Friel, ‘Extracts correspondence between Brian Friel and preoccupation with the idea of language as from a Sporadic Diary’, Stephen Rea (specifically from Friel to a medium that actively shapes rather than in Brian Friel: Essays, Diaries, Interviews: Rea), dating to the late 1970s and early passively records human experience; with 1964–1999, ed. 1980s, in which the idea of Field Day is how the power of language to shape things Christopher Murray first mooted and then developed. They also is rooted in the process of naming, and (London, 1999), 73. include the minutes of the meetings of the how naming is an intrinsic part of private 4 Seamus Deane, ‘Introduction’, in Terry board of directors. The archive collates both and public self-definition. The implications Eagleton, Fredric unexamined documents and other valuable of this also preoccupied Field Day after it Jameson and Edward sources of information that are available expanded its activities into publishing and Said, Nationalism, elsewhere, but in a dispersed fashion, such criticism. Translations was not merely the Colonialism and Literature, ed. Seamus as press cuttings on individual plays and chronological starting point of Field Day’s Deane (Minneapolis, publications, or the programme notes for quest for cultural redefinition in Ireland; it 1990), 6, 17–18. each theatrical production. Rea has few also contained within it the core message written records in this archive, or indeed in of all of the group’s subsequent creative the Friel Papers already held in the National endeavours, a message derived from a Library of Ireland; he chooses instead to postcolonial interpretation of Irish history. express himself largely through interview. As Deane declared: However, his opinions are also alluded to through the Friel correspondence. These Field Day’s analysis of the [northern] new sources, and additional correspondence situation derives from the conviction between Friel and Seamus Deane2 (some that it is, above all, a colonial one ... [A of which is not in the archive), one of Field preoccupation with naming is evident] Day’s founding directors, whom Friel and in the first three pamphlets by Tom Rea invited in 1981 to expand the activities Paulin, Seamus Heaney, and myself and of the company, shed new light on the evident too in the plays by Brian Friel, context out of which Translations and the Thomas Kilroy, and Tom Paulin ... The Field Day Theatre Company arose. naming or renaming of a place, the naming or renaming of a race, a region, Antecedents a person, is, like all acts of primordial nomination, an act of possession. The Translations is set in a hedge-school in Field Day Anthology is also an exercise Ballybeg, County Donegal. The year in renaming, the resituation of many is 1833. The British army is engaged texts, well known and scarcely known, in in mapping the whole of Ireland, a a renovated landscape or context.4 process which involves the renaming of every place name in the country. Perhaps the first ever self-definition of Field It is a time of great upheaval for the Day to a person outside the organization people of Ballybeg; their hedge-school was delivered by Friel in a letter to Paddy is to be replaced by one of the new Kilroy, entrepreneur and brother of national schools; there is a recurring playwright and later Field Day director potato blight; they have acquired a new Tom Kilroy. In this previously unpublished 8 ORIGINS OF A CULTURAL EXPERIMENT 5 FDA: G/D/Friel/Rea/4. letter, written about ten weeks after the is a unique platform for the exploration Friel provided Rea with first performance of Translations, Friel is of these changes. This list is in no order a copy of this letter. All seeking advice on raising funds for Field of priority, nor is it exhaustive. But I hope FDA citations use the 5 reference system devised Day, and he hesitantly explains Field Day’s it gives you some idea of our motivation. by the archivist Cormac ‘principles’ in terms that indicate that he was Ó Duibhne, who still primarily concerned with the impact of After Translations, Field Day quickly provided the archive to theatre alone on Irish cultural and political expanded beyond its original theatrical the National Library in summer 2008. life. These principles reveal his intention to ambitions. Within weeks of the play’s 6 Atlantis, 1 (March challenge the metropolitan representation of premiere in Derry, Friel was looking to 1970), 5. Ireland past and present: take more people and ideas on board, and by 1982, the company’s three-pronged December 2, 1980 approach to the cultural redefinition of Ireland had been largely established, Translations box office returns brought in comprising theatre, the Field Day pamphlets, almost £40,000. The success of the whole and The Field Day Anthology. venture far exceeded our expectations. Translations expressed ideas that emerged Our next venture, THREE SISTERS, in from a cultural debate that had been a new translation by me, is planned for gathering force in the 1970s, and its next autumn. Again we will rehearse in precursors can be detected in the pages Derry and open there. And again our of the journals Atlantis, edited by Deane, tour will be similar to our first. Derek Mahon and others, and the Crane Bag, edited by Richard Kearney and At this stage we are hesitant to formulate Mark Patrick Hederman. What Field Day the ‘principles’ behind the founding of shared with these journals was a desire to Field Day. (Of course we hope to do plays reinvigorate Irish culture by promoting Irish of excellence and to do them excellently literary talent and placing it in a new and — but isn’t that the stated aim of every wider context.