SOURCE: O'Brien, George. “Storyteller and Playwright.” In Brian Friel, pp. 1-29. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1989.

[In the following essay, O'Brien underscores the unifying aspects of Friel's stories and traces his transition from short fiction to drama.]

Brian Friel was born near Omagh, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland on 9 January 1929. His father, a native of Derry, taught at a local primary school. Friel's mother was from Donegal, where the author-to-be frequently spent holidays that were to have a formative effect on his imagination, as his stories in particular suggest, and that no doubt influenced his view of himself as “a sort of peasant at heart.”¹ He has lived in rural County Donegal since 1969, and the generic village of Ballybeg where many of his plays are set is (to cite a typical reference) located “in a remote part of County Donegal”²—than which it is difficult to imagine a place more remote.

The appeal of the rural hinterland of Donegal was enhanced by the relocation of the family in Derry city when Friel was ten, his father having transferred to a teaching position in the Long Tower school there. Friel attended this school before completing his secondary education at Saint Columb's College, Derry. From there he went to Saint Patrick's College, Maynooth, the Republic of Ireland's national seminary near Dublin. Friel spent two-and-a-half years here, and has referred to it as “a very disturbing experience.”³ Instead of going on for the priesthood, as might be expected of a seminarist, he graduated with a B.A. and took a postgraduate teacher-training course at Saint Joseph's College, Belfast. By 1950 Friel's formal education was complete. For the next ten years, following in the professional footsteps of his father and two sisters, he taught school in Derry.

Since terms such as Northern Ireland, Ulster, and Border will recur throughout much of what follows, it seems appropriate at this point to provide a brief sketch of the larger sociopolitical background in which Friel grew up. The Irish province of Ulster consists of the island's nine northernmost counties. When juridical and administrative autonomy within the British Empire seemed imminent in the early years of the twentieth century, as a result of constitutional agitation for Home Rule for Ireland, the predominantly Protestant population of Ulster's northeastern counties resisted the possibility. The fruit of their loyalty to the British crown, and the reward for their political party, the Unionists, was the establishment of a parliament to rule the six loyal counties. Provisions for this state to come into being were made in the Government of Ireland Act, 1920, and the Northern parliament was opened in 1921, shortly before the signing of the treaty bringing to an end hostilities between Crown forces and the twenty-six nationalist, predominantly Catholic counties that made up the rest of Ireland. Thus Ireland was partitioned, and the Border between the island's two jurisdictions has remained a painful source of contention.

In addition, the defensiveness from which the Northern Ireland state originally arose became enshrined in its social policies and public institutions: “the course of events subsequently tended to perpetuate divisions and perpetuate allegiances.”⁴ Derry, Northern Ireland's second largest city, had since the state's inception suffered in a particularly blatant fashion from the ruling Unionist party's juridical and social inequities. Despite the majority of its citizens being Catholic Nationalists, they had virtually no chance of replacing the monopoly of Protestant Unionists on the city council, a monopoly maintained by careful gerrymandering of the city's electoral wards and by plural voting rights based on property holding. Friel's father was active in Nationalist circles in the town, as was Friel himself for a period. But the combination of social deprivation and political frustration had a strongly alienating effect, as Friel later recalled: “The sense of frustration which I felt under the tight and immovable Unionist regime became distasteful.”⁵

There is no evidence to suggest that Friel's career as a writer began as an expression of withdrawal from, and implicit resistance to, the atmosphere of Derry in the 1950s. As the subsequent discussion of his early stories will point out, the stories delineate stagnation and limitation and the occasional moment of bittersweet illumination. What is notable in the formative years of Friel's career is his commitment to writing, which cannot have been easy while carrying on a full-time teaching career and becoming a family man (he married Anne Morrison in 1954, and they have four daughters and a son). Clearly he was helped by a contract with the New Yorker, which had first refusal on his stories. By 1960, the year that Friel quit teaching to write full-time, he had published many of the short stories collected in The Saucer of Larks (1962), and he had had his first dramatic efforts—for radio—accepted. At this point, Friel was preeminently a short story writer, working in the essentially pastoral mode of the Irish short story in the interwar period, whose best-known exponents are Frank O'Connor and Sean O'Faolain, though Friel's work is nearer in tone and touch to the lesser known and unjustly neglected Ulster story writer, Michael McLaverty.

Two radio plays, A Sort of Freedom and To This Hard House, were broadcast in 1958. Both are not quite conclusive evidence in support of Friel's admission that, “As for playwriting it began as a sort of self-indulgence and then eventually I got caught up more and more in it.”⁶ Compared to the deftness of his stories, however, they are stiff and overearnest. Yet within five years Friel's theatrical entanglement had become so severe that to take charge of it he spent three months in early 1963 at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to observe Sir Tyrone Guthrie rehearse Hamlet and Chekhov's Three Sisters for that theater's inaugural season. This sojourn and the risky decision three years earlier to resign from teaching mark the decisive turning points in Friel's career.

The Guthrie Theater commemorates by name the rich theatrical legacy of its founder, Sir Tyrone Guthrie. A veteran of theater in England of the 1930s and 1940s, when he was closely associated with London's famous Old Vic Theatre and had directed all the luminaries of the English stage—Charles Laughton, Laurence Olivier, Flora Robson, John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson—Guthrie had an equally illustrious set of international credentials. One of his most enduring achievements is the foundation of the Stratford, Ontario, Shakespeare Festival, a landmark on the North American theater calendar since Guthrie began it in 1952. Guthrie also revolutionized postwar theater design with his innovative use of the thrust stage—a stage that breaks the conventional boundary of the proscenium arch by thrusting itself into the body of the audience, which as a result is more directly affected by and intimately associated with the drama. In all, Guthrie was a consummate man of the theater and ambitious in his sense of the theater's importance, as the confession of faith made at the close of his autobiography, A Life in the Theatre, makes clear: “I believe that the purpose of the theatre is to show mankind to himself, and thereby to show to man God's image.”⁷ These qualifications, together with the fact that Guthrie had Ulster connections (though he was born in England, his family home, to which he retired and where he died, was in County Monaghan), ensured that the four months Friel spent in Minneapolis were crucially instructive, particularly in view of his belief that “indigenous drama was a valuable element in both national development and international understanding; that art must spring from the soil; that to be authentic was important in speech and action, not just on the stage but always and everywhere.”⁸

The immediate result of Friel's journey to Minneapolis was his first and largest hit, Philadelphia, Here I Come!, which, apart from its innovative use of two actors to play two different aspects of the protagonist, enabled Friel to present a more vivid and complex set of perspectives on familiar material: “It was a play about an area of Irish life that I had been closely associated with in County Donegal. Our neighbours and friends there had all been affected by emigration …”⁹ (though Friel goes on to say that the play's subject is love rather than emigration). Friel's post-Minneapolis attitude toward his material is informed by the same affections and attachments as previously, but disciplined now by a much more sophisticated sense of theatrical possibility and aesthetic distancing. The plays immediately following Philadelphia (those produced between 1964 and 1968) certainly bear witness to Friel's rapidly developing dramaturgical mastery.

In 1969 Friel offered a new play, The Mundy Scheme, to the Abbey Theatre, Dublin—Ireland's national theater—which rejected it. The play marks, in Friel's words, “a completely new direction”¹⁰ in his work, and has for its subject the farcical, self-serving, self-aggrandizing character of contemporary Irish politics. At the same time, however, political activity in Northern Ireland was taking a decisively violent turn. Demonstrations and protest marches in support of civil rights for the minority population incurred a wrathful, violent reaction at the grassroots level of Unionism. This reaction led to the introduction of British troops to keep the peace between the two communities. In response to this move, violent elements on the minority side took arms against the troops.

The enumeration of atrocities and aborted political initiatives resulting from the violent polarization of Catholic Nationalist and Protestant Unionist factions is beside the point of the present purpose. It must be noted, however, that in the case of Derry, the climactic episode of civil disorder was the killing of thirteen civil rights protesters by British troops during a demonstration on 30 January 1972, subsequently known as Bloody Sunday. Prior to this event, Friel had said that because “I have no objectivity in this situation” and “I don't think there is the stuff of drama in the situation”¹¹ he could not envisage writing a play about it. This attitude changed substantially: The Freedom of the City, first produced in 1973, is based on the events of Bloody Sunday and its aftermath and introduces a more public, communal, cultural, and historical set of themes to Friel's work. The increasing intellectual complexity and dramaturgical finesse with which Friel treats these themes in his plays of the 1970s find their most elaborate expression in his most admired play, Translations, which had its first night in the Guildhall, Derry, a building that is a symbol of power and alienation in The Freedom of the City.

Translations was the first production of the Field Day Theatre Company, founded in 1980 by Friel and the actor Stephen Rea. The company has produced most of Friel's plays since Translations, has commissioned work from some of the finest contemporary Irish writers,¹² and has toured Ireland, north and south, with its productions, “adding to the artistic links which are being forged.”¹³ In 1983 a directorate of Field Day was formed, consisting of such prominent Northern Ireland poets and intellectuals as Seamus Heaney, Seamus Deane, and Tom Paulin. (Friel, Rea, and the noted Northern Ireland broadcaster David Hammond complete the directorate.) The immediate result of this development was publication of the first three of a series of controversial pamphlets.

It is unlikely that Friel believed that Field Day's purpose should be the same as the one he suggested to the editors of a local Derry magazine in 1970: “The editors of a little magazine must have one purpose and a total conviction of their ability to achieve it: their purpose must be to change the face of the earth.”¹⁴ Nevertheless, there is no doubting the commitment of Field Day in its pamphlet form:

In brief, all the directors felt that the political crisis in the North and its reverberations in the Republic had made the necessity of a reappraisal of Ireland's political and cultural situation explicit and urgent. All the directors are northerners. They believed that Field Day could and should contribute to the solution of the present crisis by producing analyses of the established opinions, myths and stereotypes which had become both a symptom and a cause of the current situation. The collapse of constitutional and political arrangements and the recrudescence of the violence which they had been designed to repress or contain, made this a more urgent requirement in the North than in the Republic, even though the improbability of either surviving in its present form seemed clear in 1980 and is clearer still in 1985.¹⁵

Initially concerned with literary and cultural topics, the pamphlet series has subsequently broadened its scope to deal with historical and juridical areas. The effect of these pamphlets has been considerable, and they have fueled the contemporary debate about past and future in Irish thought.¹⁶

Friel has received many of the honors that his country gives to writers. He was elected to the Irish Academy of Letters in 1972 and became a member of Aosdana, the national treasury of Irish artists, in 1982. The National University of Ireland granted him an honorary D.Litt. in 1982. In honor of his cultural commitment, and also, no doubt, his artistic achievements, Brian Friel was nominated in 1986 to a seat in the Irish Senate, the consultative lower house of the Irish Parliament. He accepted this unusual nomination and is the first Irish writer to serve in this capacity since the poet W. B. Yeats, whose term as senator came to an end in 1928, the year before Friel was born.

THE WORLD OF THE STORIES

Between the appearance of his first short story, “The Child”¹⁷ and the publication of The Gold in the Sea, Brian Friel had an extremely successful career as a writer of stories. Two collections—a total of thirty-one stories in all¹⁸—were published and received a generous critical reception from such notables as Sir Tyrone Guthrie and Edna O'Brien; and their judgment has been endorsed by the eminent English critic Walter Allen, who considers Friel “a natural story-writer” who “accepts his findings about life … without reservations and … transmits admirably the feel of ordinary life.”¹⁹ These books were reviewed in prestigious newspapers and periodicals, and both had British and American editions. Such attention was merely a ratification of the already high profile acquired by the stories as a result of their initial publication in such periodicals as the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly. In short, from the beginning Friel's work has won and held an international audience.

As The Saucer of Larks: Stories of Ireland (a selection of stories from The Saucer of Larks and The Gold in the Sea) makes clear, there is little sense of development in Friel's story-writing. He came to his world and its themes early and, rather uncritically, remained with them until committing himself completely to the theater. This is not to say that all of Friel's stories are alike, or that their world gains in blandness what it fails to attain in diversity. On the contrary, they contain a variety of themes and a reasonably broad spectrum of character. It is fair to say, however, that each bears a family resemblance to the others. Beneath their circumstantial differences and somewhat differentiated personnel, Friel's stories possess an essential kinship. And while on the one hand the stories' family likeness tends to blur their particularities, it also alerts the reader to the possibility that the combination of likenesses ultimately make up an articulate map of an integrated imaginative world.

Friel's primary source for this world, and a fundamental ground for its imaginative integration, is the landscape of his childhood. In D. E. S. Maxwell's words: “The ‘real’ world of Brian Friel's short stories reaches from Kincasslagh in the west of Donegal through Strabane, Derry City, and Coleraine to Omagh and County Tyrone.”²⁰ In fact, as Maxwell points out, Derry City, Friel's home town, does not feature very prominently in the stories; only Johnny and Mick” (SOL [The Saucer of Larks], 133-43) seems to be set in it (while Derry is undeniably the story's setting, the city remains unnamed).²¹ Thus, the stories' terrain is that of the author's preadolescent years. Broadly speaking, the landscape is that of the Northwest quadrant of Ulster, in particular the northwest corner of County Tyrone and the county to the immediate northwest of that, Donegal.

To most of Friel's readers, including many in Ireland, this stretch of country is virtually a definition of remoteness and unfamiliarity. Most Irish readers, however, would note that Friel treats it in a revealingly anachronistic manner by ignoring the Border, which divides it. County Tyrone falls under the jurisdiction of the British Government, and from 1920 to 1973 was within the remit of a parliament in Belfast. County Donegal, on the other hand, is in Eire, the Irish Republic. Friel in his stories remains as oblivious of the Border as the youthful narrator of “Mr. Sing My Heart's Delight,” traveling “the forty-five-mile journey by train, mail car, and foot across County Donegal to my granny's house which sat at the top of a cliff above the raging Atlantic at the very end of the parish of Mullaghduff” (SOL, 168).

Friel's apparent indifference to the Border has elicited a certain amount of critical comment: “In his Irish context there is no place for the Border, and it does not seem to exist in his writing, where his characters, especially in the short stories and early plays, move from west to east and from north to south without the Border being mentioned. … Friel frequently deals, both directly and indirectly, with the tragic consequences of Partition, but his subject matter is the whole island of Ireland.”²² This statement enlarges Sean MacMahon's comment, particularly apropos Friel's stories, that the Border “seems not yet to have affected his writing”²³ The alternative approach, of course, is that of John Wilson Foster in his Forces and Themes in Ulster Fiction: “It seemed best … to disregard the border as a precise cultural divide.”²⁴

Friel's exclusion from his fictional world of this basis fact of sociopolitical life may be interpreted in a variety of ways. There is a dearth of evidence for the assertion that the Border is sublimated by the author's all-Irish concerns. As to Sean MacMahon's point, it all depends on what affect means, as we shall see. Moreover, it is not true that Friel completely overlooks the Border issues. The stories “Johnny and Mick” and “The Death of a Scientific Humanist” (GIS [The Gold in the Sea], 55-68) examine aspects of a Border-influenced reality. The former story has at its core a sense of irreparable, unconscious social division, while the latter can be read as an oblique, vaguely satirical commentary on Ulster's religious narrow-mindedness. If, in general, Friel's stories studiously avoid the Border, they remain even more silent about the fact that their domain is almost identical to that of the ancient tribal lands of the powerful O'Neill and O'Donnell clans, the last of the native Irish polity to resist the Elizabethan colonization of Ireland. It is undoubtedly true that “the territory of Brian Friel's short stories and plays is that borderland of Derry, Donegal, and Tyrone in which a large Catholic community leads a reduced existence under the pressure of political and economic oppression.”²⁵

Ultimately, however, Friel speaks for a culture, not a polity. At the same time, there is a strong sense of division in the world of Friel's stories. Indeed, the existence of two worlds is evident in the actual landscape itself. Of Tyrone it has been said that, “though a large and pleasing area, [it] is lacking somewhat in special interests, topographical, biological, or archaeological … a curiously negative tract, with a paucity of outstanding features.”²⁶ The same author writes of Donegal, however: “there is nowhere else where the beauties of hill and dale, lake and rock, sea and bog, pasture and tillage, are so intimately and closely interwoven, so that every turn of the road opens new prospects, and every hill-crest fresh combinations of these delightful elements.”²⁷ Friel doesn't necessarily endorse these views: Mullaghduff, in “Mr. Sing My Heart's Delight,” for example, is “even on the best day in summer … a desolate place” (SOL, 169). For Friel, however, the issue is not topographical: the prominent foregrounding of character in his stories is much more to the point.

The divisions are between different areas of life. One area is the world of work, duty, and the discipline of family structure, and has the general label Tyrone. The other is a world of play and the relaxation of family constraints—an asocial world. This is generally known as Donegal. Thus while both worlds contain poverty, the repressive social character of poverty is examined in a story set in a field in County Tyrone (“The Potato Gatherers,” SOL, 79-89), while in “Mr. Sing My Heart's Delight” Granny almost in the same breath exclaims “We are poor people here! We have nothing!” and “A feast it'll be then. … A feast and be damned to Sunday” (SOL, 176), expressing a purely personal overriding of poverty.

In “A Man's World” (SOL, 106-15), the difference between the workaday Tyrone world and the Donegal world of holiday is made explicit. Here, however, the narrator learns that such demarcations are not permanent; neither world protects its people from their weaknesses. It may be argued that in Friel's Donegal stories, “poverty is presented as a condition of life, a natural and unavoidable part of the community,”²⁸ but clearly the poverty endured by Granny in “Mr. Sing My Heart's Delight” is less corrosive than that which seems the unhappy birthright of the child laborers in “The Potato Gatherers.” In the latter case, the impersonally mechanical source of their work (the farmer on the tractor) not only fails to yield an adequate wage but is also a symptom of cultural deprivation.

Nevertheless, “it may be dangerous to hazard too many generalizations about the differences between those of Friel's stories that are set in Donegal and those that are set in Tyrone or Derry.”²⁹ Not everyone in Friel's Tyrone is a settled member of society; not everybody in the Donegal hinterland is endowed with a romanticized remoteness. The stories in general confirm Tyrone Guthrie's view that “a close attachment to, and interpretation of, a particular part of the earth is an absolute essential to any work of art which can ever be of deep or lasting significance. It is one of the paradoxes of art that a work can only be universal if it is rooted in a part of its creator which is most privately and particularly himself. Such roots must sprout not only from the people but also the places which have meant most to him in his most impressionable years.”³⁰ Friel's fictional world, however, only superficially embodies the degree of homogeneity Guthrie suggests. Moreover, Friel has successfully disguised his own presence in his world by placing in the forefront of the stories “the submerged population groups,” which in Frank O'Connor's influential view denote a short story's typical social reality.³¹ Friel's stories communicate a variety of submergences that are as much cultural and temperamental as they are economic or political.

They present, then, two zones, one broadly speaking the domain of nature, of the natural, the presocial or asocial, in man; the other, generally speaking, the social. Thus, as in the case of the actual terrain on which they draw, the stories may be crudely divided into two kinds which seem in direct contrast to each other. In fact, the stories and their zones complement each other. Together they add up to a world, since together they subscribe to an essential condition of any inhabitable place, variety. Just as, for all the topographical contrasts, there is a basic, indispensable continuity in the land between Omagh and the sea, Friel's stories exemplify difference and cohesion.

However convenient it may be to group the stories into nature-Donegal and social-Tyrone, it must be borne in mind that an arguably more important aspect of the stories is that they resist facile categorization. Their resistance to generalization is also a feature of their inner particularity. Ostensibly dealing with stereotypes and stock situations, these stories reveal a restlessness, loneliness, and frustration beneath their typically even-tempered surfaces.

The significance of nature can be readily appreciated from the title story of Friel's first collection. “The Saucer of Larks” tells of a visit to Donegal of two German civil servants whose job it is to locate the grave of a Luftwaffe pilot lost in action during World War II. The pilot has been given a decent burial by the locals who found his body. Now, however, it has been decreed that all German war dead in Ireland must be buried in a commemorative mass grave in County Wicklow, not very far from Dublin. To assist Herr Grass and his colleague, the local sergeant of police and his deputy, Guard Burke, act as guides to the pilot's grave, which is in a remote spot named Glennafushog, the larks' glen, “a miniature valley, a saucer of green grass bordered by yellow sand dunes” (SOL, 12) at the end of a promontory fronting the Atlantic ocean.

The trip takes place on a beautiful day, through what the sergeant refers to as “my kingdom … the best of creation” (SOL, 9). As the group proceeds farther into nature, the sergeant becomes increasingly susceptible to the surroundings, noting in particular their fitness as a last resting place: “Dammit, there's so much good life around you, you haven't a chance to be really dead!” (SOL, 10). But pleasure is modulated into more profound feeling, and light-hearted banter gives way to unspoken intimations of mortality, when they reach the saucer of larks. Their arrival is climaxed by an ascension of singing larks, performing in the natural amphitheater that is their home a hymn to life and to the departed: “The air was a great void of warmth around them. Gradually the emptiness was filled again by the larks.” (SOL, 15).

The larks' performance is presented as a counterpoint to the sergeant's state of mind. He does not express his feelings directly, however: he communicates them by asking Herr Grass to consider leaving the pilot in his perfect resting place. Herr Grass replies that such a possibility is unthinkable, and back in the familiarity of the barracks and his daily round the sergeant implicitly agrees: “‘I don't know a damn what came over me out there,’ he said in a low voice, as if he were alone” (SOL, 17). Whatever it was, it denotes in the story a power, emanating from nature, sufficient to make the sergeant lapse from duty and glimpse areas of his makeup to which his social role cannot give access. In contrast to Herr Grass, who is not at all moved by what he sees or deflected for a moment from his sense of duty, the more the sergeant moves outside his daily round the more he is moved by the pulse of greater things. Considerations of life and death enter his consciousness to the extent that he is willing to overturn his professional code of impersonally obeying orders. At the same moment as the sergeant entertains such an idea, the historical casualty (the airman) is claimed, and nature is at its most expressive, the lift-off of larks acting as a confirmation of the spontaneous and unexpected scope of the Sergeant's humanity. Yet, as the end of the story maintains (and as the detached presence of Guard Burke and Herr Heinrich, Grass's colleague, underlines), the sergeant is alone in his intimations, so much so that he can hardly comprehend their significance.

A similarly restorative experience, with perhaps more permanent consequences, is felt by Joe, the protagonist of “Among the Ruins.” This story is also set in Donegal, among what Joe refers to as “my hills” (SOL, 22), and again a trip provides the story's narrative basis, even though Joe has been reluctant to accede to his wife's insistence that he take her and their two children back to see his rural birthplace.

His reluctance is understandable, since when they arrive they find the ruins of the story's title, not the homestead. In more general terms, physical evidence of the social unit which was Joe's family has given way to the purely natural features of the place. These stimulate Joe into recapturing the happiness of his childhood, the inexplicable laughter he and his sister shared. Yet when his own son, Peter, becomes lost in his own incomprehensible play, Joe treats the boy as violently as his own father treated similar breaches in discipline. The effect of that reaction, however, is to prompt Joe into appreciating his son's play: “The fact that Peter would never remember it was of no importance; it was his own possession now, his own happiness, this knowledge of a child's private joy” (SOL, 29).

As a result of this perception, Joe is enabled to repossess his own childhood and its naturalness, perhaps a more fundamental piece of psychic property than “my hills.” Its acquisition crystallizes the story's undogmatic but deeply felt interdependence of human nature and its impersonal counterpart. The story fittingly concludes, therefore, with a moving, knowing sense on Joe's part of what the trip has vouchsafed: “The past did have meaning. It was neither reality nor dreams, neither today's patchy oaks nor the great woods of his boyhood. It was simply continuance, life repeating itself and surviving” (SOL, 30). The experience of naturalness acts as a precondition for thought. The function of thought is to secure an accommodation between self and world, and to heal the effects of divisions made by time while in the very act of fully acknowledging them.

A similar sense of continuity emerges from “The Wee Lake Beyond,” again in the context of a father-and-son relationship. Here the independence asserted with typical adolescent surliness by the narrator's son evokes memories of comparable behavior by the narrator when he was an adolescent. This story's emphasis is more obviously psychological than that of “Among the Ruins.” Once again, however, the mediating factor that facilitates awareness in the story is nature. The narrator's youthful break from his father, his petulant sally into a remoter area of their fishing holiday, the “wee lake” in which he catches sight of the great fish—”I never saw so big a fish in any Donegal lake before or since” (GIS, 76)—that is the mythical, irrepressible, elusive symbol of his new-found autonomy, all denote the pattern of connections between natural and human phenomena, and the expressive capacities their relationship attains in Friel's stories.

In “My Father and the Sergeant” the local hills are referred to as sources of wealth (SOL, 191). Their value, and that of Friel's overall use of the natural world, is that they do not provide a passive backdrop. Nature acts in the stories as an authorizing presence, enabling those who come in contact with it to recognize dimensions of themselves to which they might otherwise remain blind. The revelatory moments—epiphanies, to use a term minted by James Joyce³²—give access to the unconditionally human, the human unmasked of its social conditioning. Nature's active presence—which is presumably what Walter Allen has in mind when he commends “The Saucer of Larks” for placing us “in the presence of something like Wordsworth's natural piety”³³—is commissioned by a seemingly natural, or fortuitous, or unplanned encounter.

Friel's characterization of nature as a further, relatively unexperienced dimension of the human is underlined in stories which use natural phenomena in a manner which is the reverse of spontaneous and fortuitous. These stories feature animals as the means of bringing about the degree of personal recognition necessary for life to attain “continuance.” The animals in question—a bantam cock in “Ginger Hero,” a racing pigeon in “The Widowhood System,” a greyhound in “The Fawn Pup,” greyhounds in “The Barney Game”—are devices intended, through training, to enable their owners to lay a firmer claim to their world than they otherwise can. Nature thus is anthropomorphized, adapted to a plan, domesticated, disciplined to direct its instinctual play toward specific, vaguely social ends.

The full implications of such adaptation are to be seen most clearly in “Ginger Hero.” Here, as in the other animal stories, Friel reveals his knowledge of local culture: cock fighting and pigeon racing are endemic to Ulster, and the former is a pastime particularly favored in the province's border areas. As is often the case in Friel's stories, the central characters in “Ginger Hero” are conceived in terms of opposites and unities. Tom, the narrator, is an easy-going laborer and father of a large family. Billy, his partner, is his superior in most ways—decisive, Tom's immediate boss at work, handler and trainer of the champion bird which gives the story its title. In addition to being partners in the cock-fighting venture, the two are brothers-in-law: Tom is married to the nagging, fertile Min, while Billy and the ample, good-natured Annie are childless.

On one level, the story narrates the illustrious history of Ginger Hero's career, culminating with his victory over Colonel Robson's Tiger, a victory for which Ginger, alas, pays the ultimate price. This final victory is obviously important, not only because of the honor and glory which it earns Ginger, but also because it earns substantial winnings as well (cock fights being traditional occasions for illegal gambling). On another level, however, which comes fully to the fore when Ginger is in his death-throes, the fighting encourages a natural intimacy between Tom and Annie (the latter, being childless, is free to accompany the men to the fights). While Ginger is dying, Tom and Annie are making love. Soon afterwards, Billy and Annie start a new life in England, and eventually Tom receives news that they are expecting a child. Meanwhile, Tom's own marriage improves: due to Ginger's earnings, Min has opened a shop (named Ginger Hero) and is blooming.

Billy may be the one to discipline the bird; indeed, they seem to be of a feather, judging by the details of his description—he's a former “bantam-weight boxer” with “two tufts of bright ginger hair that sprouted from the top of his high cheekbones” (GIS, 168). It is clear also that Billy needs the violence of cock fighting and the fulfillment and absoluteness of victory. Tom, on the other hand, is the man for more tentative and accidental human tasks. He is much less implicated in the machismo of the enterprise; thus, fittingly, he adds a human dimension to it. Since it is not Tom's way to espouse the brutal, direct, do-or-die ethos by which Ginger offers Billy fulfillment, he emerges from the story as the character who lets natural instincts take their unforced, disarming course—a course that would be far less evident without the ostensibly distracting but ultimately clarifying presence of Ginger Hero.

It seems relevant to see “Ginger Hero” in these terms, specifically, in view of the assertion that Ginger's final fight “invokes the conflict between the English landowners and the Irish peasantry.”³⁴ While it is true that both Tom and Billy work on Lord Downside's estate, this aspect of their lives seems to be mentioned in order to ground the characters. Billy is by far the more ardent aficionado, though he earns more than Tom. Just as “The Saucer of Larks” has a historical aspect, “Ginger Hero” has a socio-economic component. In both cases, material that could lend itself to conceptual analysis lies latent and underdeveloped, suggesting that Friel means to express solidarity with the image of the human that the story seems naturally to bring into being. It may be that the intense play of human emotions can have effects as lacerating as those inflicted by a cock on its opponent. But their mode of expression is not necessarily brutal and can be creative.

Similar issues are presented in “The Widowhood System,” though because the approach is broader (featuring, for example, a couple of “rude mechanicals”³⁵ from the village of Mullaghduff) the outcome is less affecting. The system in question has been perfected by Harry, the pigeon fancier, and enjoins his would-be champion bird to sexual abstinence prior to a race in the belief that this will cultivate his homing instincts. It doesn't, any more than Harry's allegedly Mendelian breeding system has produced a champion. The verdict delivered on both systems by Harry's unprepossessing sidekicks is that they are “not natural” (GIS, 26).

The way Harry treats the girl next door, Judith Costigan, is not natural either. (As is “Ginger Hero,” there is explicit paralleling between human and animal: Judith is “plump, smooth, hazel-eyed” [GIS, 14]. Again, the parallel is introduced to establish a conflict at a deeper level, a conflict between reason or “system” and instinct or “nature.”) Only when he's had a few too many drinks is he capable of expressing affection for her. Judith permits herself to be taken for granted in this manner, but only up to a point. Unlike a pigeon, whose homing instincts, Harry explains, operate “as simple as if he was running on railway lines” (GIS, 21), Judith can't function with such a mechanical degree of consistency, as her response, “Lucky bird … lucky, lucky bird” (GIS, 22) indicates. When Judith departs from her predictable round amidst rumours that she may be thinking of emigrating, Harry realizes the inadequacy of his approach to her, a realization that coincides with his acceptance that his “widowhood system” for the pigeon has also been misconceived. Ultimately, the pigeon can only go its own way. Permitting this to be the case finds, for its reward, happiness with Judith.

The genial vein of “The Widowhood System” is also that of “The Fawn Pup” (the stories even share a minor character, Fusilier Lynch, a dilapidated sportsman), where the eponymous animal has been so carefully looked after that, on its first night out, it shames its owners by deviating from the track to be by their side. The dog's indiscipline, its having never learned, parallels its owner's exuberant outlook. The initial impulse to train the dog comes from the fact that the owner, a teacher, has an exaggerated belief in the capacities of his former pupils, a number of whom are engaged as trainers. The hoots of a derisive crowd at the track and the unwholesome condition of the track itself bespeak the state of local society. For a moment, this state's reality and the dog's failure dampen the teacher's spirits. Before the evening is over, however, “he was in good humour again” (SOL, 51), this impulsive, credulous nature undiminished by his exposure to elements more wordly wise, less playful, less puppyish than himself. Like the dog, the man has not succumbed to the ethos of the track and its mechanical race.

Things are rather more serious in “The Barney Game,” where the nonhuman exemplars, the hounds and the hare, give piteous expression to the exploitative sport that Crispin, the insecure lawyer, plays with his good-natured slob of an uncle, Barney. It may be “all blood sports disgusted” Crispin (GIS, 106), but he is plainly unaware of how the phrase blood sport describes the way he treats his relative. And indeed, much as Crispin might wish to jettison the game (“He was sick of it all” [GIS, 111]) in favor of a more honest approach, when this approach is attempted, the quarry, uncle Barney, resents it: Barney needs the illusion that there is not a game as much as Crispin needs the hard cash which is the game's object. The relentless manner in which the hounds kill the hapless hare has the effect of confirming Crispin in his own game (surely Friel intends the reader to see the double meaning of game in this context): “After all these years it had now become part of his nature” (GIS, 114).

By doing so, the game has frayed the bonds of natural attachment that hold Crispin to Barney. Crispin cannot believe that his love for his uncle might be all Barney needs: Crispin has to have money too. As in the other stories where animals intervene, the capacity for doing the human thing in order to sustain relationships is seen problematically. The ulterior motive, ostensibly the enabling agent in these stories' various plans, schemes, and systems, turns out to have disabling results, usually because their initiators give human contrariness insufficient credit. The essentially unsystematic and unpredictable character of human behavior defines human nature in these stories. The point made about the protagonist's father in “The Fawn Pup”—“these were anomalies in his make-up that left him larger than any pigeonhole” (SOL, 41)—applies to all the protagonists of these stories.

Nature, however, in either animate or inanimate form, supplies the context in which this largeness may be perceived. The animal stories do not discriminate between the places in which this context appears: “The Fawn Pup” is set in and around Omagh, in County Tyrone (SOL, 41), “Ginger Hero” in Donegal, “The Barney Game” (unusually) in Coleraine (GIS, 104), County Derry. The stories of inanimate nature's influence are set in County Donegal. Place seems less relevant than what is revealed within it. The same may be said of character. Their names—Tom, Harry, Joe—may be as undistinguished as those of their locales. Yet it is from their virtual anonymity that their stories are made. The frailty, blindness, and imperfections that these characters reveal at the individual level are both revealed and relieved at the generalized level provided by natural contexts. D. E. S. Maxwell's observation about “Johnny and Mick” that “its representativeness depends upon its realizing a distinctive individual situation”³⁶ describes Friel's overall achievement in the nature stories.

One of the features of the nature stories is that they tend to deal with figures in a landscape, rather than figures in society. As Friel's social stories bear out, being in society means having an institutional life. In the nature stories, the characters' membership in institutions has either temporarily lapsed or has never been established. And in the social, or Tyrone, stories, the enlarging epiphanous moments nature vouchsafes are replaced as narrative objectives by instances of illusion and disillusion, confirming that society imposes constraints—constraints of duty, class, work, and family. Just as nature's epiphanies do not promise permanent enlargement, social constraints are not necessarily seen in an adverse light. The sergeant at the end of “The Saucer of Larks” implicitly wonders if he was not behaving in a deluded manner when asking the Germans to disobey orders, arguing for his dependence on the round of weekday duties that places him in a distinctive social role.³⁷ Nevertheless, a pattern of being blinded to the ways of the world and of coming to perceive such to be the case is discernible in those stories of Friel's which have an explicit, developed social setting. Moreover, this pattern has a reciprocal relationship to the nature stories. Thus, while in one sense Friel's fictional world appears to be a divided one, the complementary relationship between his family of nature stories and his family of social stories demonstrates its essential imaginative unity.

The theme of illusion is most fully and most satisfactorily treated in what has been called Friel's best story,³⁸ “Foundry House.” Since childhood, Joe Brennan has been in awe of the Hogan family, foundry owners and inhabitants of the big house in whose gatelodge Joe grows up. Given the chance to return to the lodge, Joe accepts with alacrity and moves in with his large brood and genial, level-headed wife, who is rather less enamoured of the Hogans. The Hogan family has by this time grown up, and only the bedridden pater familias, Bernard, and his wife still live in Foundry House. A family reunion of sorts is in the offing, however, prompted by the arrival of a tape-recorded message from the daughter of the house, Claire, a nun in Africa. To play the message, Joe's expertise in matters electrical is required. He supplies the tape recorder and installs it.

Joe's expertise means much less to him, however, than the fact that it enables him to see the inside of Foundry House for the first time. What the reader sees is a state of total neglect: what Joe sees, however (as he tells his wife later), is “very nice,” an untruth that is one of a tissue of misrepresentations about the events of the Hogan reunion. Thus, Joe does not describe the excruciating bathos of Claire's tape, nor does he reveal that at the sound of his daughter's voice old Bernard has an attack. He steadfastly maintains his claim that the Hogans are “a great, grand family.” The story ends: “‘The same as ever,’ he crooned into the child's ear. ‘A great family. A grand family’” (SOL, 67).

The presence of Joe's large family in the “chaotic” (SOL, 66) kitchen to which he returns after the reunion provides one of the main contrasts between his life and that of the Hogans. The Hogan children, Sister Claire and Father Declan, are obviously destined to remain childless. Their self-imposed condition of repressed fertility seems to be Foundry House's most obvious legacy, its version of “continuance.” Joe cannot accept for what they are the ruins among which he finds himself, unlike his namesake in “Among the Ruins.” But Joe's illusions of family grandeur are not based on his actual experience of the family. His halting speech in their company eloquently expresses his unease, his unconscious awareness of the extent of the cultural distance between them. What remains important to Joe is the idea of the family. The judgment that it is a story in which “the only true aristocrat is the imagination,”³⁹ points to Joe's latent, undemonstrative idealism.

In this light, the fact that both he and the Hogans are Catholics is noteworthy. As Catholics they are essentially detached from the larger context of the Northern Ireland state—the house is off “the main Belfast-Derry road” (SOL, 53)—and their religion ostensibly gives them common ground. The connection between Joe and the family, however, depends not on social enablement but on social disenfranchisement. Thus, it is only in his own mind that Joe can preserve and cherish the family's significance. His sense of the family is both real to Joe and disclaimed by the world upon which it is based. In other words, Joe's attachment to the Hogans is a real illusion, its very transparency articulating the layers of deprivation and obsolescence which Joe implicitly requires it to mask. It evokes sympathy for being so understandable in human terms, rather than condemnation for its social inadequacy.

The objective, disillusioning view of the Hogan family as a social institution seen over Joe's shoulder, so to speak, is the basis for Joe's subjective need to go on glorifying the family.⁴⁰ In “The Illusionists” there is a similar dispelling and reinstallation of illusion. The annual visit of M. L'Estrange, the magician, to the young narrator's school stimulates his desire to escape the narrow confines of school and home. It also stimulates his father, the schoolmaster and L'Estrange's host, to wax eloquent about putative professional achievement. The guest also is an eloquent praiser of his own past. The story focuses on the visit during which the two men, fueled as usual with whiskey, denounce each other's tall tales of glory. This does not deter the narrator from following through with his ambition to set out with L'Estrange. But this illusion of novelty and success is quickly dispelled. The child, having barely traveled beyond the first turn in the road, where he finds a drunk L'Estrange floundering, returns home disenchanted. By way of consoling the boy, his mother tenderly paints a verbal picture of all the bright days ahead in which the stuff of their daily lives are touched with an imaginative glow.

L'Estrange has been exposed for the “sham” and “fake” (GIS, 40) the mother has known him to be all along. The narrator's father has unmasked his pseudonymous claims to notoriety: “I know who you are, Monsieur illusionist L'Estrange: your real name's Barney O'Reilly” (GIS, 40). The boy himself has found the illusionist's theatricality to be wanting. L'Estrange's annual visit may be an overture of spring, as the story's opening sentence insinuates, but it is nothing like the real thing—nothing, that is, like “the great fun we'll have—oh dear God it'll be powerful—when the good weather comes” (GIS, 44). Immediately following those words of his mother, however, comes the narrator's acknowledgement that they too contain a necessary illusion: “I stopped crying and smiled into her breast because every word she said was true. But it wasn't because I remembered that it was true that I believed her, but because she believed it herself, and because her certainty convinced me” (GIS, 44). It is not the therapeutic powers of good weather that is the point so much as the fact that the mind needs to ascribe such potential to a future that it cannot control. Once again, it is not the existence of an illusion that articulates the story's substance, but the reality of and necessity for illusion.

The illusions that the illusionistic teacher-father cherishes about his professional achievements are matters of fact in the case of the teacher-father in “My Father and the Sergeant.” And perhaps as a corollary, the father in “The Illusionists” cannot, or does not, give his son an alternative world by which he might satisfy his imaginative longing, while the father who is also a “sergeant” devotes his professional life to directing the scholarship class (which includes his narrator-son) to a wider world so that he will not “rot his life away” (SOL, 191). The story examines the duality that its title expresses by contrasting the father's ambitions with the pedagogical style of Paul Desmond, hired as a substitute when the father falls ill.

The substitute's style is to dispense with the curriculum and appeal to the pupils' imaginations. His is the soft spirit of romance: the sergeant is the stern voice of reason. Yet, for all the eye-opening encounters with unfamiliar lore that Desmond effects, he does not seem in control of his own romanticism. His unstructured, institutionally subversive approach leads to his kissing Maire, the narrator's beloved classmate, and a hasty, scandalous departure. The sergeant leaves his sickbed to take over, and things in school revert to pitiless drill, while the narrator is restored to Maire. Reality, comprising the necessary doubleness of discipline and love, has returned.

Yet such an outcome is not necessarily a critique of what Paul Desmond provided. Rather it is a commentary on its insufficiency. More compelling, according to the story, is the teacher-father's suppression of romance in the classroom in the belief that this serves the purpose of the outside world—that is, the world of Boards of Education, prestigious secondary schools and the like: a world of complex social institutions, in fact. This is a world that has defeated the teacher-father; hence, for all his pedagogic gifts, his spending “the whole of his restless life” in a “one-roomed building” (SOL, 182) in rural County Tyrone.

It would be unkind to label as illusion the teacher's ambitions for his pupils. At the same time, however, that ambition has the same degree of psychological necessity and perfection of vision typical of the reality of illusion in “Foundry House” and “The Illusionists.” Once again, this story's central figure is characterized in terms of his poverty (which in this case is caused by the failure of his career to develop), and of the dignity with which he fashions the persona of “sergeant” to cope with his poverty. The fragility of such a creation is captured in the story's concluding vignette, in which the narrator, restored to things in their familiar arrangement, sounds as though this is the state in which he believes they will last. He doesn't know any better; hence has no need of a persona (or, rather, his narrator's persona does not influence the story's effect). The naive wish expresses the poignant desire.

The character of Desmond, and to a certain extent that of L'Estrange, brings to the fore an important type in Friel's social stories: the outsider, the interloper who unwittingly exposes or redefines the accepted codes and accommodations of the status quo. His influence in the social stories is comparable in its effect to that of animals in the nature stories, and his presence communicates a similarly complex ethos in which issues of freedom, discipline, and expressiveness are inconclusively but resonantly combined. The outstanding case in point is “The Diviner.”⁴¹

This story deals with Nelly Devenny, a charwoman, who having made a disastrous marriage to an alcoholic, remarries after his death a man who to all appearances is “the essence of respectability” (GIS, 116). Nobody can be sure of this Mr. Doherty's credentials, however, since he is not from Nelly's village of Drumeen and is the opposite from being sociable. It turns out that appearances have been deceptive. When, after a boating accident at a local lake, Mr. Doherty's body is eventually recovered, his coat pockets are found to contain whiskey bottles. Nelly's illusion of respectability is shattered.

Her husband's body would never have been recovered without the intervention of the diviner, the story's most obvious outsider, summoned from afar to work his uncanny skills where more physical methods have failed. But the recovery of the body and the subsequent shock to Nelly's social standing is not all the diviner accomplishes. His detachment from Nelly's social world is a precondition for her being detached from the status her new husband had almost brought her: “Hers … were not only the tears for twenty-five years of humility and mortification but, more bitter still, tears for the past three months, when appearances had almost won, when a foothold on respectability had almost been established” (GIS, 127-28).

Nelly's social loss, in turn, seems an act of divination, raising to the surface assumptions about the village of Drumeen and its social codes. The story concludes with prayers being said for the soul of the departed, a gesture that highlights how little Christian charity is being extended to his widow. In this context, Nelly's illusion of respectability is a more significant model of integrity than that suggested by the institutionalized response generated by the local priest. As for the diviner, his impersonal, pragmatic contribution has created ripples on the surface of Drumeen for which nobody is either willing or equipped to take moral responsibility. His arrival denotes the latent capacity for revelation that lies beneath the commonplace. It might even be thought that the diviner is, like L'Estrange and Paul Desmond (whose real vocation is painting), an artist manqué.

The role of the priest in “The Diviner” (and the possibility that the story's title may be a sly pun on the priest's calling) underlines the generally adverse social contributions made by the Catholic clergy in Friel's social stories. A priest is responsible for the shape assumed by the teaching career of the narrator's father in “My Father and the Sergeant.” Clerical attitudes are seen at a disadvantage in the matter of the burial of the narrator's Uncle Cormac, the eponymous outsider in “The Death of a Scientific Humanist.” In “The First of My Sins” the child-narrator's first confessor ratifies the rapid withdrawal of adult sympathy from Uncle George, whose petty thievery the narrator has betrayed. The result is the narrator's realization that it is with the outsider that his own sympathies lie, not with the moral structures that support those institutions seeking to define the scope and play of those sympathies, Church and family. And when spurned, outlandish Grandfather wants to embarrass the narrator's mother in “My True Kinsman”; he ironically inveighs against her religious punctiliousness: “Not off to confession, again, daughter-in-law? Heavens, woman, but you must lead a profligate life!” (SOL, 70).

“My True Kinsman” is a vivid example of how an outsider's presence reveals the confines of those institutions of which he is not a member. And the narrator's decision to give his grandfather the money meant to buy iodine for a minor injury incurred by his mother is clearly a decisive moment in his development. Not surprisingly, it comes on his tenth birthday. In addition, the money may be seen to be far less valuable than what the grandfather provides, a cultural tour of the village of Mullaghduff, with a commentary delivered in “wonderful words” (SOL, 75). Naturally and spontaneously—which in this case means, unprompted by the dictates of an institution—the youngster allows himself to be taken under the maverick's wing. The shelter from the rain provided by the coat his grandfather loans him for his return home is a reciprocal gesture—spontaneous and winningly improvident. The coat's smell, previously found menacing, now exerts a talismanic force on the child: “The smell was through me and all about me. And I knew that as long as it lasted, I would have the courage to meet my mother and tell her the terrible news—that I had no iodine and no money and that Grandfather had got me” (SOL, 78). Ultimately, however, this state of affairs has come about because at some level the narrator wanted it. Whatever label may be attached to this level—individualistic, rebellious, cultural—it exists in counterpoint to the mother's decorous, institutional orientation. Acquaintance with it enlarges the child's sense of the knowable, gives him scope to fantasize, adds color to staidness, and not only justifies the existence of outsider figures but ratifies the basis of illusion. For, as the social stories collectively state, the reality of illusion is the human need for and acceptance of alternatives.

Friel's stories have been criticized on the grounds that the author, “by refusing to test or breach the social and moral premises of the rural area in which his stories are set, is in danger of confining his work within a regionalist framework.”⁴² The stories surmount this risk by embracing it. Their regionalist framework is the basis and core of their achievement, a source of enablement rather than of disenfranchisement. Friel has produced in the stories a literature appropriate to its world of origin and as a result has created a world indeed.

The basis of this world is its integrity. An overview of the stories reveals how the County Tyrone pieces function as a commentary on their County Donegal neighbors, and vice versa. Supplementing this generalized standpoint is a sense that nature provides what society is deficient in. Nature offers instances of detachment, escape, illumination, and perspective. It confers on its unsuspecting visitors the unsettling and enriching otherness of its presence. In animal form nature passively provides a focus that unobtrusively highlights the narrative material's human dimension. What social life represses, nature sustains, as the sexual aspect of “Ginger Hero,” “The Widowhood System,” and “The Wee Lake Beyond” illustrates. Thus, while it may be that “the vibrant solidity of settings is perhaps the strongest single impression left by the world of the stories,”⁴³ it is difficult to overlook the characters who occupy the foreground of these settings and who, for all their failings, render the settings significant. It is Friel's people who occasion nature's amenability to discourse, thereby humanizing it.

Ultimately, however, people do not belong within the otherness of nature. Joe goes home with his family from the ruins of his childhood home; Tom and Min patch up their marriage by means of a familiar rural institution, the little shop. People belong with their own kind. Society offers the possibility of community and a refuge from what Pascal has called “the eternal silence of those infinite spaces.”⁴⁴ In particular, the family offers shelter from the uncertainties of a seductive but unknowable wider world. So the boys in “My Father and the Sergeant” and “The Illusionists” discover. For adults, their hope is to drown the menacing silence. Hence the commitment of “the Sergeant” and old Con's insistence on the reality of buried treasure in “The Gold in the Sea”: they mean to be saviors.

Thus, while nature and society are distinct environments in Friel's stories, their distinctiveness is less important, finally, than the fact that they are not opposed. Rather, they are understood to be equally revealing and instructive manifestations of what the world at large contains and are presented as alternative, complementary perspectives on the human continuum (“life repeating itself and surviving”). The success of the stories, taken as a whole, is to a considerable extent their gentle but insistent representation of reciprocity and compatibility between what might conventionally be considered irreconcilable categories—reality and illusion, nature and society, mountains and men.

Such harmony may also be found in other aspects of Friel's fiction. Thus the stories preserve the geographical reality of their origins as well as being at the same time imaginative transmutations of that reality: rural names, such as “the townland of Knockenagh” (SOL, 182) in “My Father and the Sergeant” have been invented, but the country—“a shelf of arable land buttressing the face of grey-black mountains that keep County Tyrone from County Donegal” (SOL, 182)—is real.

Another, more delicate, example of the reciprocity between absence and presence in Friel's stories is the character of the author himself. It is through his self-effacement that we become aware of him. Rather than fill the role of author as authority-figure, Friel obviates his own controlling interest in events, preferring to share the essential passivity of his subjects. As a result the stories seem to take their own shape, in their own time. Their evolution is articulated through the formation of delicate networks of implication and resonance. The author's supple patterning of general context and individual case, of details that are matches and details that are equally illuminating mismatches, is one of the principle disciplines of these stories that a theme-seeking, schematic reading is liable to overlook. And as though to authenticate their being underwritten, the stories lack overt drama, and potentially dramatic incidents expressly lack dramatic responses on the part of those affected by them (Nelly's private, unstaunchable tears at the end of “The Diviner” is a particularly moving case in point). It is this very lack of clamor, either in language or in plot, that enables the reader to hear the key in which Friel's plainsong renders, in Seamus Heaney's phrase, “the music of what happens.”⁴⁵

In his stories Friel has created an imaginatively integrated replica of the world of his early years. To require that the stories function as an interpretation of that world and “breach” its “premises” (as though it were a world under siege) is to risk misrepresenting the spirit of Friel's fiction. Friel's creation speaks not only to literature or in the idiom of literary criticism, it also addresses the world that is its origin and to which it has remained faithful in its fashion. Thus, while it is extremely doubtful that Friel wrote his stories to repudiate Winston Churchill's dismissal of “the dreary steeples of Tyrone and Fermanagh,”⁴⁶ it must be counted among his stories' achievements that they effect such a repudiation. The stories rehabilitate the alleged “dreariness” not by disguising it but by revealing it, by seeing in it an opportunity for honesty rather than a reason for rejection. In Seamus Deane's words: “The narrowness of the social life is bitter, but the complexity of the moral life within is generous.”⁴⁷

It is in the context of such loyalty to a world—a loyalty that is reproduced at the artistic level by the stories' many-sided integrity and urge to harmony—that the question of the Border in Friel's work may be considered. Rather than being invisible or having no effect on Friel's work, the Border between the North of Ireland and the Irish Republic makes a distinctive imaginative contribution to it. The stories implicitly accept the existence of a Border in the distinction they make between County Tyrone and County Donegal. But they also transcend that distinction by establishing reciprocal relationships between those two territories. Imaginative geography supercedes historical actuality.

To Friel the writer the Border is a word, a concept, a code, a criterion as palpable and invisible as any other cultural condition. As such, it does not exist in the world of his characters as a visible, objective, historical entity; it is a defining characteristic of their world that has been absorbed into the fabric of their lives. Friel's imaginative transmutation of geographical reality has effectively sublimated the Border as a physical entity. It has also allowed him, however, to insinuate the idea of the Border. Thus Friel has denied himself explicit mention of the Border so as to be imaginatively free to communicate its ethos.

Friel's characters, on the other hand, occupy positions that connote the opposite of such freedom. They are defined by constraint, limitation, and incompleteness. The majority of them are virtually anonymous. They experience various kinds of social marginalization. They are almost invariably Catholics, but neither their faith nor its institutions enlarge or alleviate their condition. Awareness of a wider world and a larger life comes from beyond the ambit of their daily round and through unfamiliar agents, human and otherwise. These agents, delegates of the absence at the center of the protagonists' lives, offer means of making deficiency admissable and containable.

In order to install those means firmly within the protagonists' narrow world, the need to cross borders must be articulated. Typically, Friel proposes no one way of articulating the need of making the crossing. In “The Saucer of Larks” the sergeant is obliged to consider an alternative to dutiful obedience. Tom breaks the barrier of marital fidelity in “Ginger Hero,” a triumph more worthy of his humanity than any made by the fighting cock. The narrator of “My Father and the Sergeant” allows Paul Desmond's influence: that enables him to live more securely than ever in his father's world. The alternative world—the world which the Border declines to admit—is the world that completes the actual world.

The willingness exhibited by Friel's protagonists to extend themselves in either thought or deed suggests their capacity to find the outsider in themselves, to inhabit a more natural and more complete edition of themselves than their restrictive, Border-haunted society can tolerate. Without borders there can be no outsiders. But without outsiders there is no alternative, there is no freedom to encounter an alternative. The spirit of freedom is what finally imbues the world of Friel's stories. It is this spirit that the reciprocity and harmony of his fictional world, considered as a totality, underwrite. (It is also this spirit, considered problematically, that animates Friel's plays.) Like so many other features of Friel's work, however, freedom has a dual character. By allowing his characters the freedom to exist defined by their own border mentality and that of their society he locates them precisely in geographical reality. They are real by virtue of their distinctiveness. Free to encounter alternatives to their restrictions, they inhabit imaginative geography. Thus they lapse out of their limitations and become unconditionally human.

FROM STORYTELLER TO PLAYWRIGHT

The republication of Friel's stories in The Saucer of Larks: Stories of Ireland (1969), Selected Stories (1979), and The Diviner (1983) has kept the author's reputation as a writer of stories alive long after he abandoned the form. Yet the finality with which the appearance of his second volume of stories, The Gold in the Sea, ends the story-writing phase of his career is somewhat deceptive. Friel abandoned the form, but remained faithful to the world of the stories. Indeed, his adoption of the theater could be interpreted as a clarification and a public avowal of that fidelity. Rather than denoting a discrete creative period, subsequently marginalized by his playwrighting success, the stories are a seedbed for Friel's theatre. The claim that there is an intimate, though by no means totally congruent, relationship between Friel's stories and his plays offers a means of presenting a preliminary description of the integrity of Friel's imaginative terrain and the development of his artistic vision of it.

Superficial connections between the stories and the plays are plainly evident. The issue of capitation—the educational authorities' ruling that schools will be staffed and funded according to the number of pupils attending them—is the basis of the tense dynamic of autonomy and social structure in “My Father and the Sergeant”; it is also the basis of the plot in Friel's second play for radio, To This Hard House. The threnodial litanies of locales in two of Friel's most celebrated plays, Faith Healer and Translations, evoke the more private but equally expressive round of postings to which Mrs. Burke subjects herself and her husband in “The Flower of Kiltymore”: “from Kiltymore to Culdreivne, from Culdreivne to Ballybeg, from Ballybeg to Beannafreaghan, from Beannafreaghan back to Kiltymore” (GIS, 133-34). The linguistic difficulties experienced by the sergeant in “The Saucer of Larks” anticipates Translations by being a subtle metaphor for the more elusive incompatibilities of ethos within whose framework the story takes shape.

In addition, and less trivially, two of Friel's plays are based on short stories. Reworked, “The Highwayman and the Saint” from The Gold in the Sea becomes Losers in the dramatic diptych Lovers: Winners and Losers. The differences between the basic ingredients of both story and play—cast of characters, plot, and denoument—are negligible; in both cases, the protagonist is the victim of an unholy alliance between religiosity and its moral soulmate, hypocrisy. Yet, the two pieces are decisively distinct due to the nonnaturalistic devices that give dramatic force and point to the play. By disturbing the rather naive chronological development of “The Highwayman and the Saint” the play brings to the fore the material's inner reality. Losers presents a series of tableaux depicting the completeness of the protagonist's defeated condition. “The Highwayman and the Saint,” however, does not succeed in overcoming the material's anecdotal novelty. (As will be discussed below, Losers also gains in scope from being presented in the context of a diptych.) Thus, without making extravagant claims for Losers—in fact, Lovers: Winners and Losers is not in the first rank of Friel's plays—a comparison of the play with its original demonstrates both Friel's continuing thematic and geographical loyalty to his world and the degree to which his artistic possession of that world is enhanced by the sense of presence, projection, and completeness of effect that the theater provides.

The other adaptation of material from page to stage is a more graphic illustration of the principle of fidelity and departure generally articulated in the relationship between Friel's stories and plays. “Foundry House” is more substantial, and so is the play in which it is recast, Aristocrats.⁴⁸ The relationship between the two pieces is illustrated by the story's most important scene, in which old Bernard Hogan's disabled condition takes a turn for the worse when hearing the tape-recorded voice of his daughter. The same scene acts as a turning point in Aristocrats, and to describe it as a turning point is to isolate the fundamental difference between the dramatic scene and its fictional counterpart.

In “Foundry House” the scene makes no difference either to the condition of the Hogan family or to the illusions of faithful Joe. The fact that old Mr. Hogan merely sinks further toward his end, without meeting it, underlines the essentially unchanging nature of things for all concerned. “Father” in Aristocrats, on the other hand, dies as a result of hearing his daughter's voice on tape, thereby releasing the rest of the family and its retainers into a more complex, more decisive, and more independent sense of who they are and what now they might do with their lives. If, as Seamus Deane has said, “the only true aristocrat” in “Foundry House” is “the imagination,” the achievement of the reworked material is to dignify the anachronistic aristocrats by endowing them with a reality principle. Not all the characters share this principle, or share it completely, but this does not invalidate it.

The revolution in perception indicated by a comparison between “Foundry House” and Aristocrats has a more general application when Friel's plays are considered in the light of his stories. Like many of Friel's stories and plays, both “Foundry House” and Aristocrats deal with families. Many of the families in the plays, however, lack the completeness of structure that the families in the stories possess. Partly due to the necessarily restricted child's-eye-view that communicates Friel's typical narrative perspective on them, families in the stories are generally seen as detached, discrete entities, tangentially if decisively connected to social structures more powerful than themselves. The plays, however, offer a different, more problematic sense of families.

A convenient way in which to outline the change—a change that exemplifies Friel's imaginative development—is to consider the relative status of mothers in the stories and in the plays. Broadly speaking, the stories have mothers, the plays do not. The role of the mother in, for example, “The Illusionists” makes her the voice of duty and practicality, bidding her son to attend to the chores instead of listening to the pair of male gasbags who drunkenly attempt to outdo each other with fantasies of rich pasts. Yet she is the voice also of containable illusion, encouraging the child to picture the year ahead, thereby implicitly easing the burden of the present. Thus, perhaps unwittingly, she participates, though in quietist and putatively realistic terms, in the activity of the two hopeless men. This power of influencing the child-narrator's conflicts, mollifying him by setting them in a continuum, is also evident in “The Death of a Scientific Humanist.” And while this regulatory office is not confined to mothers—as is borne out by, for example, old Con in “The Gold in the Sea”—it is more typical of mothers' behavior than it is of any other Friel character type. Therefore, the absence of mothers in the plays means the absence of a character who, in the stories, had a powerful integrative influence on the family—a presence that can keep the family more or less immune from the threat of other, more worldly, influences. So central is such a presence in the stories that it is possible to devote works—“My True Kinsman” and “The First of My Sins”—to accommodating alternative presences by which mothers might be challenged.

Perhaps because the plays cannot present a child's-eye-view it is impossible for them to ratify the gently ironic interplay between the reality of innocence and the illusion of safety that sounds the note of typicality in many of Friel's family, child-centered stories. In any case, the absence of such material from the plays seems consistent with the absence of mothers, and in turn these absences are consistent with deficient fathers, fragmented families, and the world at large flooding in upon indefensible homes. Friel's rejection of mother figures results in the family being considered more problematically in his work. The playwright's disinclination to be loyal to one of the crucial figures from the world of the stories results in dramas where family and other types of loyalty becomes a vital issue. A revealing reflection of this development is that while in plays such as The Gentle Island and Living Quarters natural families prove to be untenable, murderous institutions, plays like The Freedom of the City and Volunteers reconstitute a sense of family—replete with the pride, solidarity, and fondness for ritual long thought to be sources of cohesiveness in the natural family—from characters thrown together either by force of historical circumstances or for some other impersonal reason. Friel's reexamination of the family as an imaginative resource provides another striking illustration of the way in which the plays are both related to, and developments of, the stories.⁴⁹

Similar observations may be made about the plays' use of place. The geographical reality of the stories is once again evoked in the plays. The wild young woman described as the mother of Gar O'Donnell, protagonist of Philadelphia, Here I Come!, seems to be from the same family as the narrator's granny in “Mr. Sing My Heart's Delight”: “She was small—and wild and young—from a place called Bailtefree beyond the mountains; and her eyes were bright, and her hair was loose, and she carried her shoes under her arm until she came to the edge of the village.”⁵⁰ And both of them may well be blood relations of the eponymous heroine of “Aunt Maggie, the Strong One” (SOL, 122-32). Not all the plays are set in northwest Ulster, but there is a sense of hinterland in those that are that is quite as palpable as that provided by the natural settings of the stories. The big difference, however, is that virtually all the plays set in Friel country are set in Ballybeg. An anglicization of the Irish baile beag (small town), the name connotes a generic, archetypal, small, remote, rural community. In Ulf Dantanus's words: “In its social, economic and religious characteristics, in its implied political history, the village of Ballybeg is emblematic of Ireland and a part of Ireland rather than any one specific village in that area. In this respect Ballybeg represents an effort, on Friel's part, at the wider application of a place, towards some kind of local universality.”⁵¹

Regardless of this seemingly paradoxical intention, Friel has managed by creating Ballybeg to compress into one social and geographical entity the sense of place that is diversified throughout the stories. One of the effects of this act of compression is to render redundant purely topographical accuracy. The temptation of facile picturesqueness is resisted as completely as the temptation of easy sentimentality that mothers present. In addition, the crystallization of place that the invention of Ballybeg achieves means that nature is no longer available as the lieu theatrale of insight, as it had been in, for example, “The Saucer of Larks.” The role of nature is supplanted in the plays by that of culture.

This development does not mean that the characters in the plays are particularly cultured, at least not in the sense of high culture. In fact, those relatively few dramatic characters conversant with the classics—Hugh and Jimmy in Translations, Trilbe Costello and Mr. Ingram in The Loves of Cass McGuire—are just as doomed and deluded as those without learning. Culture, rather, should be understood as a vivid matrix of clichés, traditions, historical conditionings and misprisions, intellectual formulations, prejudices, and attachments that in the unevenness and contradictoriness of their interaction enact codes of affiliation between person and place in Friel's plays.⁵²

As nature did in the stories, culture in the plays offers a context in which the distinct and solitary promptings of individuality may be experienced and reflected. Nature is a model of continuity whose counterpart is inescapability. It is a tissue of properties communally available but appropriated and utilized primarily by means of individual perception. Nature is the world without man, in which man can find reflections of himself. Similarly, culture offers models of continuity and collectivity. For Friel it provides a common mind-set which can both provide an identity to those who share it and constrain that identity's freedom and autonomy. Thus culture, being exclusively the work of man—being, in effect, the world according to man—offers a more complex, more focused, more condensed optic through which issues concerning self and world may be perceived. It will be seen that culture as a source of drama is one of Friel's enduring preoccupations as a playwright, present in plays as different from each other as Philadelphia, Here I Come!, Volunteers, and Translations, to mention only three very obvious cases in point. As though to maintain a link between the stories and that area of the plays that seems most distinct from them, however, Friel makes the character who is most resourceful, culturally speaking, take the role of outsider, as he did in the stories. And as in the stories, this character is most adept at changing roles, accents, and demeanors—at being theatrical, in fact.⁵³

As though to confirm the salience of culture in the plays, language, culture's primary instrument, occupies a much more prominent place in Friel's theater than it did in the stories. In fact, language itself—its duplicities and resilience, its essential play—becomes one of the plays' subsidiary subjects. In general, there is greater verbal exuberance in the plays, an unexpected penchant for broad jokes, a marked increase in declaration and assertion, an obviously greater trust in conversation as an expressive device. The comparative paucity and generally nonproductive nature of conversation in the stories speaks eloquently of their protagonists' isolation. In the plays, however, the typical protagonist is inevitably a man of language, composing and recomposing his identity in the light of the cultural options to which his language provides access. Such activity does not necessarily cure the protagonist's isolation, but it does ensure that he is no longer the passive figure in a landscape typical of the stories.

The relationship between Friel's stories and plays, then, is complex and deep. On the one hand, it is clear that Friel's plays demonstrate how much he has rethought and outgrown the artistic origins revealed by the stories. The opportunities afforded by drama for both definitiveness of presentation and variety of approach to his material were clearly welcomed, and the material itself began to reveal nuances and potentialities of which the stories give little or no clue. Friel in his plays is a much more obviously individuated writer, intellectually committed and aesthetically adventurous to such a degree as to suggest that the theater was an artistic rebirth for him.

On the other hand, these advances are still very much in the service of the world of the stories, the modest characters who inhabit it, and the recessive culture that distinguishes and stigmatizes it. Moreover, Friel's development as a writer has not compromised the fundamental humanity that graces all of his work, and of which the stories remain the first, and not necessarily least, revealing articulation.

Notes

1. Graham Morison, “An Ulster Writer: Brian Friel,” Acorn, Spring 1965: 14.

2. Living Quarters (London: Faber and Faber, 1978), 8.

3. Morison, “Friel,” 10.

4. J. L. McCracken, “Northern Ireland (1921-66),” in The Course of Irish History, ed. T. W. Moody and F. X. Martin (Cork: Mercier Press, 1967), 320.

5. Hickey and Smith, Paler Shade, 221. For further information on Friel's early professional years in Derry and the effect of the city's atmosphere on him, see Maxwell, Friel, 18-31, and Ulf Dantanus, Brian Friel: The Growth of an Irish Playwright (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1985), 23-25.

6. Morison, “Friel,” 4.

7. Tyrone Guthrie, A Life in Theatre (New York: Limelight Editions, 1985), 349.

8. Guthrie, A Life, 344.

9. Hickey and Smith, Paler Shade, 222.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid.

12. Derek Mahon's treatments of Moliere's School for Husbands (entitled High Time) and The School for Wives, Thomas Paulin's version of Antigone, The Riot Act, and Thomas Kilroy's Double Cross come immediately to mind.

13. The Times [London], 8 September.

14. “A Challenge to Acorn,” Acorn 14 (1970): 4.

15. Field Day Theatre Company, Ireland's Field Day (London: Hutchinson, 1985), vii. The preface has the collective signature of the Company, and the book reprints the first six Field Day pamphlets. There is an afterword by the critic Denis Donoghue. For more on Field Day, see John Gray, “Field Day Five Years On,” Linen Hall Review 2, no. 2 (Summer 1985): 4-10.

16. A critique of Field Day may be found in Edna Longley, “Poetry and Politics in Northern Ireland,” in Poetry in the Wars (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1986), 185-210.

17. “The Child,” The Bell 18, no. 4 (July 1952): 232-33.

18. The stories are collected in The Saucer of Larks (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962) and The Gold in the Sea (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966). The source of quotations from individual stories are hereafter identified in the text by reference to either SOL, or GIS, followed by page number.

19. Walter Allen, The Short Story in English (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 389.

20. Maxwell, Friel, 31.

21. For a thorough discussion of this story and its Derry context, see Maxwell, Friel, 15-17.

22. Dantanus, Friel, 25.

23. Sean MacMahon, “The Black North: The Prose Writers of the North of Ireland,” Threshold 21 (Summer 1967): 172.

24. John Wilson Foster, Forces and Themes in Ulster Fiction (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1973), x.

25. Seamus Deane, “Brian Friel,” Ireland Today, 978 (1981): 7.

26. Robert Lloyd Praegar, The Way That I Went (Dublin: Allen Figgis, 1969), 101.

27. Ibid., 22.

28. Dantanus, Friel, 56.

29. Ibid., 52.

30. Tyrone Guthrie, In Various Directions: A View of the Theatre (London: Michael Joseph, 1963), 113.

31. Frank O'Connor, The Lonely Voice (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 18. O'Connor considered the concept applicable to the short story generally speaking: it has, however, a peculiarly apt application to the Irish short story.

32. Epiphany—defined by James Joyce as “a sudden spiritual manifestation”—is perhaps the most important term in the modern short story's critical vocabulary. See James Joyce, Stephen Hero (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969), 216-17.

33. Walter Allen, The Short Story, 389.

34. Foster, Ulster Fiction, 255.

35. This phrase comes from Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream (3.2.9.), where it describes Bottom the weaver and his companions.

36. Maxwell, Friel, 17.

37. For a similar example of the significance of this dependence see “The Flower of Killymore” (GIS, 129-44).

38. Foster, Ulster Fiction, 69.

39. Seamus Deane, Introduction to Brian Friel: Selected Stories (Dublin: Gallery Press, 1979), 13.

40. Another notable Friel story about the power and need—the apparently natural inevitability—of illusion is “The Gold in the Sea” (GIS, 91-102).

41. In this regard, it is interesting to consider the degree to which the poem “The Diviner” by Friel's friend, Seamus Heaney, may be considered a metaphor for his artistic practice. See Seamus Heaney, “The Diviner,” in Death of a Naturalist (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), 36. On the poem's origins, see Heaney, Preoccupations (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), 47-48.

42. Foster, Ulster Fiction, 72.

43. Maxwell, Friel, 31.

44. Pascal, Pensées, trans. W. F. Trotter (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958), 61.

45. Seamus Heaney, “Song,” in Field Work (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), 56.

46. Winston Churchill, The World Crisis (New York: Scribner's 1957), 5:336.

47. Seamus Deane, Introduction to Stories, 9.

48. For a fascinating, prescient discussion of the theatrical aspects of “Foundry House,” see Maxwell, Friel, 40-41.

49. My thinking on this issue owes a great deal to Professor Anthony Bradley's unpublished essay, “Filiation and Affiliation in the Plays of Brian Friel.”

50. Philadelphia, Here I Come! (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 25.

51. Dantanus, Friel, 14.

52. Cf. T. S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture: “The reader must remind himself as the author has constantly to do, of how much is here embraced by the term. It includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people: Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table. … The reader can make his own list.” Excerpted in The Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), 297-98.

53. A particularly good example of this type is Terry Bryson in the otherwise somewhat sketchy story, “Straight from his Colonial Success.” (SOL, 156-67).