[In the following essay, Pine elucidates the defining thematic concerns of Friel's short stories.]

Silence once broken will never again be whole

—Samuel Beckett¹

DIVINATION

Friel conveys the immediacy of ‘our’ world. It is not just the quotidian, workaday continuity of people's actions, but, as Seamus Deane observes, ‘that local intimate detail which emerges out of the author's knowledge of his society's moral code’.² Deane says that ‘each story is social in its setting, moral in its implications’ but this takes us only part of the way in understanding Friel's intentions. Beyond morality, beyond the social boundaries which the moral code dictates, there is a ‘quality of mercy’ which takes the form of a tenderness mediating between the wry and the grotesque. In the sense that Friel's stories have two dimensions, the actual and the metaphysical, the important factor is the way in which he translates each to the other: here he is most Chekhovian because he unites the reader with his intentions, and his intention is the subject itself, the simple relation of self and society.

Friel's main themes in the stories are: illusion; expectation (and the disillusion which comes with the failure of expectation), and the various types of dignity which interweave among the social and moral dimensions of our lives. His technique in drawing us into his world is to live vicariously through us in the illusion, disillusion, and attempts at dignity, so that when he resolves whatever crisis has been posed—loss of faith, disintegration of the family, failure of memory, displacement of affection—we become responsible for that resolution.

Friel's device, therefore, is to make us the medium of our own culture by translating us into the id of his world; we thus id-entify with the people and psyche of Ballybeg. In this he is divining not only himself and Ballybeg, but also the other participant in this private conversation, the reader. The technique is also applied in the radio plays, which possess the same intimacy of the word spoken directly into the ear. No other Irish writer is so adept at this form of divination except Heaney, whose gift of mediation is as great as Friel's; if Heaney wrote short stories and plays, one feels they would have the same texture and gravitas as Friel's.

The Swedish critic Ulf Dantanus refers on several occasions to Friel's ‘defining’: ‘his efforts to define and interpret the Irish psyche’; ‘to define its main characteristics’; ‘to unearth essential qualities of Irishness and to define the nature of the Irish past’; ‘to express and define the Irish identity’; ‘an effort to understand and define history and especially the spiritual past and various attitudes to it’; ‘these concepts are finally tested and defined’.³ This is of course the result of a mis-hearing which turns ‘divine’ into ‘define’, and which Friel would absolutely disown. The Irish psyche, and the nature of the Irish past, are subject to—and demand—divination, but not definition. Both Friel and Heaney divine and dig below the everyday surface to show us, like a cubist dissecting the inner frames of reference of planes hidden to ordinary view, the tensions which hold some parts of people, and society, together and keep others apart. Eventually, however, they return us to the surface in a closure which often resembles the coda of an archaeologist's exposition.

Friel refers to this as ‘the successful invention’. Discussing the accumulation of memory, such as that of the ‘fictional’ fishing trip already referred to, he says, ‘perhaps the important thing is not the accurate memory but the successful invention. And at this stage of my life I no longer know what is invention and what “authentic”. The two have merged into one truth for me’. And ‘Ballybeg’ ‘is a village of the mind, more a depository for remembered or invented experience than a geographical location’.⁴

This accounts for the private conception of Ballybeg. The ‘public’ reason for its existence is, perhaps, more significant, and will become clearer when we turn to the later plays. His emphasis on the parochial has developed,

perhaps because whatever literary tradition we have here—in the English language—doesn't derive from the confidence of an integrated nation. English authors work from an achieved, complete and continuous tradition. Maybe in lieu of a nation we place our faith in the only alternative we have; the parish.⁵

This helps us to understand why the Irish short story so often strikes English readers as being written in a foreign tongue; although the language is ostensibly the same it is being used in the service of a quite different set of perceptions, a series of ‘successful inventions’ predominating over the ‘authentic’. As Friel recounts in ‘Kelly's Hall’:

I heard the story so often from my mother and I grew so close to the man himself … that I can scarcely convince myself that I do not remember the scene although the baptismal water must still have been damp on my head that evening.

(Saucer [The Saucer of Larks] 91)

In the fiction, we notice, the child is ushered into the family and extended family, the private and the public culture of the tribe, in order to become both a participant in, and a means of relaying, that culture. There are two sides to this awareness of fact, and rejection of its tyranny: one is what Ulf Dantanus calls ‘the essentially private nature of truth’.⁶ The other is the essentially public nature of truth. The difference between them is the difference between language and silence, since private truth is unspoken whilst public truth is a text which must be uttered in order to have existence. One is thought, representing a paradigm of being, the other moves through the paradigm of absolute time, an affect of history.

Between these two, the characters, their author and, by the subtlety of his extension, his audience, move towards a discovery of their faith. Because there are no longer any certainities, either in the secret garden of Irish memory or in the wide world, that movement is bedevilled not only by the unreliability of words and other signals, but by dichotomies in the nature of the world itself, which we are seeking to make sense of by description.

‘The world of the senses was liable always to sidestep into sinister territories of the mind’ says A.N. Jeffares.⁷ It is a world which, however much we may resent it, may ultimately expel us into a much more painful and violent exile, the rite of passage in search of home. We feel this insecurity because ‘home’ can project itself not just as place but as character. This is distinctly Irish as it is essentially Chekhovian, because, in Patrick Kavanagh's words, ‘Parochialism is universal; it deals with the fundamentals.’⁸ Columba's exclamation, ‘what more do you demand of me, damned Ireland? My soul?’ (EW 71) takes on an extra significance as we see Ireland as a character in the fiction. Friel's ‘romantic ideal that we call Cathleen’⁹ is not simply a state of mind, but an epiphany of place. The ‘mother Ireland’, the poor old woman (shan van vocht), seeking the restitution of her four green fields, who dominates Yeats's ‘Cathleen Ni Houlihan’ and who haunts modern Irish literature, places Irish men and women at her disposal. The attempt to reunite the modern political states of Ireland is a fictive approach to the greater and deeper mythic needs of the Irish psyche.

If place can have personality, then our response to it cannot be impersonal, it signs to us and we sign to it, in a mythopoeic, rather than a logocentric, language. If we find fault with a place, the fault is similar to that we would detect in another person. In ‘The Diviner’ this is the essence of Nelly Devenny's resentment of the lake where her husband has drowned; the attraction of the place is the magnetism of a person, as in the silent virginal beauty of ‘The Wee Lake Beyond’, and the jealousy it engenders between father and son. If we resent place, it is because place to an overwhelming extent gives essence and meaning, forms our perceptions like a teacher, underwrites our earliest sensations like a parent, provides us with name, identity and purpose.

Friel's response in art began in 1952 with the publication in The Bell of his first story, ‘The Child’.¹⁰ It was an act of courageous faith for a young writer. Friel, however, neither wishes nor permits this story to be republished, so despite the fact that it is the seminal work from which flow all his insights into the question of love, language and freedom, I can only summarise it, no doubt quite inadequately.

A boy (‘the child’) lies awake at night. He hears the reassuring sounds of his mother at work in the kitchen below. The comfortable world is shattered by the one event which obviously lurks in the child's abiding dread: the entry of the father, a drunkard who can communicate only in the language of familiar hostility. The boy is startled into customary terror. He begs God not to let them fight. But God lets them fight: a ritual, symbiotic captivity of caged animals. He goes almost automatically to the head of the stairs to witness the spectacle: ‘the child knew the routine by heart … it was the scene he knew so well’. God is implored once more as the intermediary: promise God you will be good if only the beasts below can be separated. ‘Down below they were roaring at each other. Quietly he rose, and, blinded with tears, groped his way back to his room.’

This is not ‘the reality of rural Ireland’ as Dantanus suggests but it is a reality.¹¹ It suggests the personality of a thing called ‘home’ which, we know, Friel denies. It sets ‘pleasant memories of the day’—the Arcadian vision—against the ‘waiting black void’ of the night, the exit into sleep and our other, subliminal, self. It contrasts the outdoor freedoms with the ferocious domination of the indoors by the father, the fight between mother and father for control of the kitchen, the hearth. The child is outlawed from the adult world in which the tensions of village life are worked out privately; he is blinded both by his own tears and by the darkness.

No clearer proof need be furnished that Friel, by concentrating his vision on rural society and ‘Ballybeg’, is singing an Arcadian eclogue, to the exclusion of ‘reality’. ‘Reality’ in fact is a mixture of arcadian and infernal, of white and black, dexter and sinister. Friel records:

One's life in retrospect seems to be defined by precise contours and primary colours: all summers were arcadian, all winters were arctic, pleasures were unqualified, disappointments were total. This remembering, I imagine, is a conscious and deliberate attempt to invest mediocrity with passion and drama.¹²

The art of reconstructing reality lies in qualifying and reducing the absolutes in which children (and some adults) see the world in the light of retrospect, while maintaining the passion and drama of the situation being described. But the description is of course fiction, because it no longer exists. The return to one's past, whether it is purely through time or, as in the case of the revenant exile, also through space, is a recherche of a paradise or hell which, because it is no longer real, might never have been real.

Therefore, Friel is at liberty in these stories to construct representations of a reality which may never have been ‘authentic’. His travellers carry cardboard suitcases; his father-figures carry authority, usually schoolmasters or those in other positions of guardianship, reaching across space to admonish; and grandfathers, irresponsible and attractive, reaching out across time to subvert and amaze and reveal; all the stock population of a town like Glenties (Ballybeg) or Omagh (Ballymore). ‘Home’ is the hearth—literally the focus—around which they gather for their rituals. But in the stories and radio plays there is also the wife and mother, fretful, tense, warm, resourceful, beautiful, whose absence in the later plays is a continual reproach to Friel's ability to make life whole again.

In reviewing Friel's stories Robert Lacy commented on ‘the touching sense of loss, a clearly communicated feeling that something magical and grand has slipped away’.¹³ The dangers of such recollection are obvious, but, as I hope I have shown, Friel is not pursuing an arcadian vision. The reconstruction, which places the relation of time and memory at the centre of Friel's stories, is much more than the restitution to the disappointed child of his shattered paradise. Friel knows that the child also numbers hell among his realities, and that he voluntarily throws away the crown of ecstasy. Therefore he seeks to reconstruct not so much what was as what might have been.

In this the grandfathers are the perpetrators of a vicious and irresponsible hoax on the boys. In fact there is the suspicion throughout the stories that because of the effective elision of the father-figure where the grandfather is concerned, Friel is describing a world where all the boys are encouraged to grow old and already have an aged psychology. Boys, as if they were old men, are searching back into their own boyhood because they cannot recognise and grasp it as now, and are all the time sitting in the waiting room for death.

HOMECOMINGS

One slips back into one's place by the power of memory. ‘Baile’ means home and town. And yet the Irish have never been ‘at home’ in towns as the English understand them. ‘We have always feared towns’ says Sean O'Faolain.¹⁴ Yet the search for that powerful focal hearth goes on as surely in the private mind as that for the four green fields occupies, and persists in, the public conscience. In The Great O'Neill O'Faolain makes the point more strongly: ‘each centre is the centre only of its own locus. No hierarchy or predominance has been established. History is still a complete gamble.’ Once again the temperament is Chekhovian: Ulster was ‘practically bare of town life’; O'Neill and his folk were ‘men for whom the outer world existed only as a remote and practically irrelevant detail. Their interests were personal and local.’¹⁵ And they continue to be so when we start to explore the unease we feel with the encroachment of the outer world. Heaney becomes ‘Unhappy and at home’; Friel denies the existence of ‘home’ itself, but he encourages sons and fathers to explore what this particular avenue of memory has to offer. Of course they find that memory is only effective if they maintain their faith in history.

Thus in ‘Among the Ruins’, because his own childhood dream of innocence has been lost rather than confirmed, Joe wills his son to be a man, because, he now knows, the future at least holds no illusions: ‘It's a good thing for a man to cry like that sometimes.’ Joe wants the boy to ‘grow up’, to rush through the misery and disillusion of adolescence, so that he can join his father in a common bond:

Generations of fathers stretching back and back, all finding magic and sustenance in the brief, quickly destroyed happiness of their children. The past did not 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.

(Diviner [The Diviner: The Best Stories of Brian Friel] 136)

If such a Lawrentian resolution appears trite, it is due to the need to reaffirm a life-force in the face of the disintegration Friel sees in the familiar world, a need which endangers the first act of Translations in its apparent complacency. (Triteness, encouraged by the New Yorker formula, is also a reason for Friel's eventual dissatisfaction with the limiting conventions of the short story in favour of the more open possibilities of the play.) This is particularly evident in the conclusion of ‘Everything Neat and Tidy’:

Chilled by the sudden personal disaster, he drove faster and faster, as if he could escape the moment when he would take up the lonely burden of recollection that the dead had fled from and the living had forgotten.

(Diviner 155)

This fear of taking up ‘the lonely burden of recollection’ is precisely that fear which persuades the Irish to remember their future rather than their past.¹⁶ And it is one which Friel accosts only imperfectly in his stories. He has not been influenced by Chekhov in story-writing (unlike his play-writing) and this possibly accounts for the fact that his mercy, unlike Chekhov's, is too great, his tenderness mediates too far, in displacing horror with dignity. As a result they ultimately address themselves to the problem of individuation, which, as Seamus Deane notes, ‘with its emphasis on internal freedom … most often makes a virtue of alienation and a fetish of integrity’.¹⁷ Where Chekhov faced such a challenge by embracing fear, for example in ‘A Boring Story’, Friel prefers to resolve his crises by rushing into the arms of fate. Seldom in the stories is this technique fully successful, partly because Friel falls into the trap of triteness, and partly because he seems afraid to call the bluff of fate. His greatest success in meeting the challenge is an unjustly neglected story, ‘The Flower of Kiltymore’, which in many ways announces the ultimate resolution which he achieves in Faith Healer. In this story, Sergeant Burke, regarded by his late wife as lacking professional dignity (‘she had been a sergeant's daughter herself, and anybody below the rank of superintendent was a nobody’), finds that the ‘calm and peace’ brought by his wife's death conveys nothing so much as a sense of his own unease, perhaps impending death. He is mocked by his assistant guard, ‘a Kerryman, young and keen and cunning’, who has outmanoeuvred him socially by his alliance with the Canon; he is taunted by the local pranksters (‘the Blue Boys’), bewildered by the clean bill of health from the doctor, which is contradicted by his ‘unnatural tranquillity’. Thus excluded from peace, from social position, from professional authority, he asks in a Gethsemane-like appeal, for the ‘unnatural tranquillity’ to pass:

So this was peace, this terrible emptiness. So this was what in those odd moments of treachery, when Lily flogged him with her tongue, he had dreamed of, this vacuity that was a pain within him. Sweet God, he prayed, sweet God, if this is what I wanted, take it away from me.

(Gold [The Gold in the Sea] 138)

Finally he calls the bluff of ‘the Blue Boys’ who allege that they have found a mine on the beach. The message is no bluff, the mine explodes and the youngsters, ‘the flower of Kiltymore’, are killed.¹⁸ Now ruined and hated by the community, he faces a commissioner's inquiry which can only restore to him the natural tranquillity he seeks. The events of the tragedy, by making him an outcast, ‘assured him that he was still the centre of the pushing stream of life, and not floating, as he had been since Lily's death, in the peace and calm of some stagnant backwater’. Like Frank Hardy, he can face the firing squad of self-betrayal:

He got up from the bed, put on his Sunday uniform and his good boots, combed his hair, and straightened his tie. As he went down the stairs to meet his judges, the wretchedness of the last four weeks was forgotten, and he knew again the only joy he had ever known. The month of ghostly isolation was over. His prayer in the garden had been answered. Let the Superintendent and the Commissioner do their damnedest to him! He knew now he had the capacity to survive it, because his life had suddenly happily slipped back into its old groove.

(Gold 144-5)

Perhaps Friel succeeds in this conclusion because he is not afraid of pieties, he does not embrace them simply because they represent some Lawrentian life-force. There comes a point, which becomes clear, particularly in his later plays, where ‘piety’, in seeking to remain within the borders of the moral code, becomes absurd and grotesque. Here, however, Friel knows, more maturely than elsewhere in the stories, that the ‘enemy within’ is a devil, and that homecoming necessitates a death: it predicts the fate of Yolland, the alter ego revenant of Translations, and of Bazarov in Fathers and Sons, because otherwise the story could not continue.

DIGNITY AND RESPECTABILITY

Friel is at his most suggestive, and his writing exhibits the finest quality, when he combines the descriptive with the emotive. Thus in ‘Foundry House’ his characterisation of Mrs. Hogan: ‘She was a tall, ungraceful woman, with a man's shoulders and a wasted body and long thin feet. When she spoke, her mouth and lips worked in excessive movement’ (Diviner 78).

In fact, Friel's stories reveal a skill not only at characterisation, but also gesture and emphasis, which present quite different challenges in drama, and at which his stage directions are often less successful. Thus his ‘private conversation’ (confabulation) with the reader sometimes achieves a more affective result than the ‘public address’ which denies such finesse. In the passage quoted above, the words ‘ungraceful’, ‘worked’ and ‘excessive’ convey a personality and a neurosis which no actor could easily effect. At first the combination of ‘long’ and ‘thin’ seems de trop, but taken together with the woman's shoulders and her mouth-motion, it suggests a mediaeval effigy which Friel has manipulated into an uneasy recovery, a devilish creation. Similarly with the cadences in which he describes or recreates movement: as Nelly Devenny goes towards her particular Calvary, the divining of her second drunken husband's body in the lake, she ‘left the priest's car for the first time that day, and ran to join the watchers. The women gathered protectively around her’ (Diviner 28-9). Left, ran, gathered: a flight towards the fold, in this case the elusive dignity denied to Nelly by a fate she has not found the courage to confront. Another example of Friel's ability to combine the descriptive with the emotive is in the opening pages of ‘The Illusionists’:

Once a month Father Shiels, the manager, drove out the twisted five miles from the town, in one breath asked us were we good and told us to say our prayers, shook father's hand firmly, and scuttled away again as if there were someone chasing him.

(Diviner 91)

Not only is this a comical, clockwork-like figure but we can see how distastefully, almost fearfully, the priest performs his automatic, perfunctory and indifferent task.

It is by means of this emotive descriptiveness that Friel achieves a suggestion of what Seamus Deane calls ‘the co-existence of two realms, one clearly stated and social, the other amorphous and imaginative’, in which he says ‘the author's insistence on the actuality of event and on the reality of imagination is quite impartial’.¹⁹ I would add that the same assumption of the reader's common knowledge and intimacy that greets us in Chekhov's stories is taken a stage further by Friel in inducing a complicity in the moral code and, in his most successful stories, in the transgression of that code in the working out of individual salvation. This was Friel's reply to the situation of displacement of people within a fixed locale. The realisation that it did not go far enough was the reason for eventually abandoning the short story.

We can find that reason clearly spelt out in his approach to the problem of authority. As Deane says, ‘Authority in its most basic form grows out of a sense of mystery but in its more quotidian form out of awareness of status.’²⁰ That degeneracy is best expressed through differing attitudes to, or differing attempts to express, the idea of ‘dignity’; those who are ‘dignified’, who possess dignity, or whose internal explorations result in the repossession of a lost dignity, emerge from the stories as the ‘winners’, while those who scramble for dignity, for the acquisition of a quality which they imagine can be achieved through an appeal to some external authority, ‘respectability’, are the ‘losers’. Dantanus makes the valuable distinction between respectability, an acceptance of agreed communal values, and dignity, the individual's response.²¹ Tribal pressure to conform is exerted by means of respectability, whereas the divination of the individual seeking dignity can only be achieved by rejecting the collective insistence. Nelly Devenny, through her public humiliation, becomes ‘skilled in reticence and fanatically jealous of her dignity’ (Diviner 20), but in fact she was fanatically jealous of the ‘dignity’ she sees in others; her second attempt to achieve it, by marrying a second husband (and thus acquiring a new identity in her new name, Nelly Doherty) leaves her the ultimate appeal, to the external authority of her peers—‘the women gathered protectively around her’. The diviner discloses more in the waters of the lake than the body of Mr. Doherty who has no other name, and comes simply from ‘the West’: he draws up another way of confronting reality, another set of perceptions by which to test our received and time-worn responses to the climate, to land and our ‘community’.

It is remarkable that Friel is not especially aware of the pursuit of dignity, or the condition of being dignified in either his stories or plays.²² Yet Seamus Deane insists that Friel ‘never forsakes the notion that human need, however artificially expressed, is rooted in the natural inclination towards dignity’.²³ As we shall see in examining the plays, Friel often explicitly presents us with the fear which inhabits people when that natural inclination is thwarted. Thus in ‘Everything Neat and Tidy’ Mrs. MacMenamin suffers ‘anguish and indignity’ at her husband's death; to live with her married daughter is ‘the final, crushing indignity’. But her eventual achievement—not acquisition—of peace is in some way a redemption of dignity of a different order (Diviner 146-55). This is very effectively expressed in ‘The First of My Sins’ which also looks at dignity in two ways: ‘a slap on the face merely pricks one's pride, but cow-dung on new shoes shatters one's dignity’ (Gold 157). It would be easy to confuse a superficial tenure on respectability with the idea that one must act out the community's perception of oneself. In ‘The First of My Sins’ that ‘slap on the face’ is something we all endure every day in social exchange; that which shatters dignity is a breach of the family integer. We are told not of the narrator's boyish ‘sins’ but of his uncle's petty thieving, a ‘crime’ which hardly offends the criminal code but inflicts a moral disorder within the family.

Friel is also content to dismiss the search for respectability with wry and disdainful humour, in ‘The Queen of Troy Close’ (Gold: ‘We'll put manners on them!’) or ‘The Fawn Pup’ (Saucer: ‘he managed to carry himself with a shabby dignity, like a down-at-heel military man’) or the ‘grandfather’ whose ‘sufficient charity’ puts a name to a fatherless child in ‘Mr. Sing My Heart's Delight’ (Saucer).

The status of dignity as a tribal quality clearly vexes Friel: in The Enemy Within there is a distinct relationship between Eoghan's ‘gauche dignity’ and his ‘quiet power’ (EW 58). There is also a connection between dignity and the exotic as if the ultimate test of dignity is whether or not it can survive the challenge of the external. In ‘Kelly's Hall’ the debacle of Grandfather's wondrous gramophone as a source of income places his family at the hands of charity:

This new method of living, ‘charity’ she called it, imposed a great strain on Grandmother's virtue. She longed for the old days again when he went on binges and when her vanity had to weather only short, well-spaced storms … ‘God be with the days when he used to be carried home drunk to me’.

(Saucer 95-6)

Like Synge, Friel bows to the need for illusion, in Deane's words ‘in a society which so severely distorts the psychic life’.²⁴ This may be the illusion which is simply destroyed by the force of ‘reality’ as in ‘The Illusionists’ or an illusion which is reinforced in the flight from reality, as in ‘Foundry House’: Joe, having realised that the real Mr. Hogan ‘was not the image’ he carried in his memory, insists on relating to his wife an evasive version of the encounter, in which he claims Mr. Hogan is ‘the same as ever … no different’ (Diviner 89-90). The exotic, in ‘Kelly's Hall’, in the form of Grandfather Kelly's gramophone, leads him into the lie or illusion in which the exotic becomes bizarre: ‘He never played a disk without first prefacing the performance with an entirely fictitious history of the composer and the music’ (Saucer 94). In ‘The Gold in the Sea’ illusion is used as a tool of social engineering: Con, having admitted that the ship-wrecked gold has already been salvaged, maintains, in front of the younger fishermen, the pretence that it has not: ‘It is better for them to think it is still there. They're young men … You see, friend, they never got much out of life, not like me’ (Diviner 44).

Pigeon fanciers and breeders of fighting cocks are typical, and natural, victims of their own illusions, as in ‘The Widowhood System’ and ‘Ginger Hero’ (in The Diviner), but Friel's most immediate experience, as the pupil of his own father's national school, provides a most powerful example in the eponymous ‘The Illusionists’. In this story there are three illusionists: M. L'Estrange, Prince of the Occult (in reality Barney O'Reilly); the narrator's father, who is refusing to come to terms with the difference between his present circumstances and the image of his former self which he espouses; and the narrator, who expects by becoming an apprentice illusionist to reach some Chekhovian Moscow, and who is eventually forced not only to admit the illusionary nature of M. L'Estrange's past and therefore his own future, but also to embrace, or reclaim, a known, but equally illusory world, offered to him through the affective authority of his mother.

The exotic (in this case M. L'Estrange) is also used as an alternative to familiar disappointment. Friel, and much modern Irish fiction, turns accepted critical theory on its head, since he shows the wisdom of age and authority as a synonym for buffoonery and drunkenness. ‘In the analogy of innocence’, writes Northrop Frye, ‘the divine or spiritual figures are usually paternal wise old men with magical powers’.²⁵ Irish society tends to smile on, if not to extol, the alcoholic, that genetically disappointed result of psychological and environmental tragedy, in the same way as it invests the associated deficiencies of insanity or mental aberration with healing and magical powers: an illusion—a lie—that guarantees a tender, forgiving smile and recognises those affects in oneself. But the exotic, even though he is also master, and creature, of illusion, can dispel that atmosphere of tolerance and open a door into a more exciting darkness. In ‘Segova, The Savage Turk’ it is Segova's strength which attracts the child, in contrast to his father's weakness. Segova's thick dark hair symbolises his strength, ‘the supreme in manhood … the crystallisation of every hope and ambition I would ever have’. Even when he is beaten for trying to be like Segova, the child realises that ‘every stroke [was] alienating me more and more from the puny and the feeble and strengthening me in my resolve to join forces with the brawny and the mighty’ (Saucer 121).

In their treatment of expectation destroyed, or hope deferred, or the assessment of dignity, Friel's stories are more important in a modern reading than his attention to illusion per se, which is not in itself as central to his later work as these other elements. The psychic disorders of Irish society are not only served by illusion or illusionism; visually and verbally Irish people are being asked to reassess what they see and what they hear and thus to re-examine the architecture of their minds. Friel's contribution to this process—the German ‘Prozess’ seems appropriate here—has been characterised by a concern for tenderness evident in even his overtly violent play, The Freedom of the City, and the most covertly fierce, Crystal and Fox; while in The Loves of Cass McGuire Cass's outbursts are counterpointed by a poignant series of rhapsodies, culminating in Cass's own entry into a dream world. An illusion, yes, but more than that, a way of dealing with time and place rediscovered which reveals the sensibility more attuned to nicety, to tension, to heartache, to panic in the face of the grotesque or bizarre, than to the problems of self-deceit, however disturbing those may be. Friel, particularly in the stories, divines within us the frightened child. With his mixture of strictness and compassion, he exposes the near-brutality to which our psychic disorder has reduced us, and then shows us how to become whole. Through the private conversation of his stories and radio plays, he does this on an intimate level; since the appearance of The Enemy Within he has been working out how to achieve this through the public address system. There is a good deal of Eliot's intellectuality and spirituality in Friel's plays, because of his attention to the psyche. These are the stories Eliot might have written.

Friel's psychological techniques are those of recurring visions and appeals to past time. Chekhov's frightened children express the problem thus: Carlotta: ‘Where I come from and who I am I don't know’; Yepihodov: ‘I can't seem to make out where I'm going, what it is I really want … to live or to shoot myself, so to speak’; Liubov Andreeyevna: ‘What truth? You can see where the truth is, and where it isn't, but I seem to have lost my power of vision.’²⁶ Friel's characters, particularly in the stories, experience the same problem—If I can't speak my name, I can't be a person, so I can't go anywhere among men; if I can't see, I have no moral or aesthetic vision, so I can't find my way in the world; if I can't tell the real from the unreal, I can't discriminate, I lose the power of choice, so I am immobolised. Ordinarily Friel's people have names which delineate their role in society on both its physical and metaphysical levels: Flames Flaherty ‘who used to run before the fire brigade in the old days, clearing the street’ (Gold 80)—we can see him and his job; ‘Mr. Sing My Heart's Delight’ for the packman Singh, because he fills the lonely woman's fading memories with an exotic richness; and the qualifying names which we meet in ‘Sarah Johnny Sally’ (Tr.28) telling us seed, breed and generation. Then there are the nicknames—of description: Lobster O'Brien with the injured eye (in ‘The Fawn Pup’); of moral value: Anna na mBreag, Anna of the Lies, maker of bad poteen (Tr. 27)—and the series of names by which a single body has many personae in the family and extended family: ‘at home I was Joe or “Joey boy” or even in his softer moments “Plumb” but in school I was plain Hargan’ (‘My Father and the Sergeant’). Finally, there are the names that mislead, which give us a mistaken identity: Owen/Roland in Translations being the most poignant as well as the most treacherous. Beyond ourselves there are the objective/subjective names we give to places. Once again Translations provides us with the mental and physical problem of map-making, but a neglected story, ‘The Wee Lake Beyond’, tells us not only of the lake whose map-names translate that meaning into topography (‘Lough Fada, the long lake; Lough Na Noilean, the lake with the islands; Lough Gorm, the blue lake; Lough Rower, the fat lake’ Gold 69-70) but also of those lakes which ‘were nameless and inaccessible’. Nameless and therefore inaccessible: naming them would make them accessible, would add to their definition on the map, would open them up for discussion. Ordinarily we locate ourselves by means of vision, and only secondarily by other senses. In ‘The Gold in the Sea’ ‘the blackness was so dense that the three fishermen had identity only by their voices’ (Diviner 37). Their identity, it is suggested, is diminished by their invisibility; in ‘The Widowhood System’ the bird ‘suffered from mental blackouts, like blown fuses, so that it had to fly blind for periods until the psyche righted itself’ (Diviner 55), in other words it had to relocate itself by reference to the inner, not the outer, world. At the opening of ‘The Barney Game’ Barney Cole sat on an upturned box in the yard behind the poultry shop, killing chickens with his eyes closed. ‘It's the feel of them I know’, he explained … ‘If I looked at what I was doing, I'd only be all thumbs’ (Gold 103). More than an index to physical contact, vision can also act as a trigger to memory and imagination:

‘Very poor’, she said quietly, adding the detail to the picture she was composing in her mind. ‘And the oranges and bananas grow there on trees and there are all classes of fruit and flowers with all the colours of the rainbow on them.’

‘Yes’, he said simply, for he was remembering his own picture. ‘It is very beautiful, good lady. Very beau-ti-ful’.

(Saucer 68)

Finally, there is the use of time as an ordinary technique of story-writing. Friel's stories usually open with a statement of time, rather than of place or person. ‘The very day his mother was buried’ (Diviner 45); ‘November frost had starched the flat countryside into silent rigidity’ (Diviner 65); ‘When his father and mother died’ (Diviner 75); ‘I can recall the precise moment in my childhood’ (Gold 157). This last opening creates a flashback of the kind which triggers memory in the narrator, and imagination of time past in the reader/spectator. It is particularly effective cinematically in its combination of the visual and the temporal dimensions. The appeal is to a ‘state that was’, in illo tempore, as in ‘Among the Ruins’: ‘We're going to see where Daddy used to play when he was a little boy’ (Diviner 127); or ‘The Wee Lake Beyond’ in which the timeless landscape of mountains and lakes holds simultaneously the events of the holiday now and those of the holiday forty-five years earlier. This is partly ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ and partly an attempt to solve the ‘crisis recollected from childhood’ in the crucible of memory and thus isolate it from contemporary events.

It is of course noticeable that Friel's stories are non-eclectic. As D. E. S. Maxwell comments, ‘Friel rarely writes about the city, he writes about Catholics but not Protestants’ (even his ‘aristocrats’ in ‘Foundry House’ and of course in Aristocrats itself, are Catholics); most of his people are poor, they carry cardboard suitcases. Maxwell says quite rightly that ‘he is not an artist of the whole community’ and that he could not be, since neither of the two traditions of Ulster ‘has any real and natural intimacy with the other’.²⁷ But while Friel is not a spokesman for Catholic or nationalist viewpoints, and does not attempt to portray anything other than his own folk, the more serious imbalance in his stories is the lack of that intimacy which comes from mutual commerce between town and country. As Raymond Williams says:

The common image of the country is now an image of the past, and the common image of the city an image of the future. That leaves, if we isolate them, an undefined present. The pull of the idea of the country is towards old ways, human ways, natural ways.²⁸

To translate this into the Derry/Donegal context, we can quite distinctly see Friel in his stories addressing one side of the equation in his concentration on the past, on a traditional, Gaelic world, and therefore leaving the ‘undefined present’ dangerously unresolved. Conscious of writing in a genre that owed too much to the influence of a master like Frank O'Connor, and of being too easily seduced by the demands of the American market, once Friel had begun to extend the private voice with his radio plays he abandoned the short story form. But at the same time we cannot dismiss the elements of the stories simply because they tend towards the elegiac. (The danger of elegy has been underlined in The Gentle Island: ‘My God it's beautiful up there, Shane: the sun and the fresh wind from the sea and the sky alive with larks and the smell of heather’ GI 36.) The strengths of the pastoral are present in all his plays, even Volunteers and The Freedom of the City: the extension lies in the fact that he is now prepared to add into the equation the dynamic of the city, and the future tense. His tone continues to be lyric, but it now looks for external, as well as interior, freedom.

Notes

1. Beckett, Trilogy, p. 336.

2. S. Deane, Introduction to The Diviner, p. 9.

3. Dantanus (1988), pp. 84, 128, 132, 152, 202.

4. Interview with D. E. S. Maxwell, Images: Arts and the People in Northern Ireland (Belfast: Northern Ireland Information Office/Arts Council of Northern Ireland, n.d.).

5. ibid.

6. Ulf Dantanus, Brian Friel: The Growth of an Irish Dramatist (Goteborg: Gothenburg Studies in English 59, Acta Universitatis Gotheburgensis, 1985) p. 174: hereafter referred to as Dantanus (1985).

7. A. N. Jeffares, ‘Place, space and personality and the Irish writer’, in A. Carpenter (ed.), Place, Personality and the Irish Writer (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1977), p. 167.

8. Quoted in Heaney, Preoccupations, p. 139.

9. Friel, ‘Plays peasant and unpeasant’.

10. B. Friel, ‘The child’, The Bell, vol. 18, no. 4, July 1952.

11. Dantanus (1988), p. 23.

12. B. Friel, ‘A challenge to Acorn’, Acorn, no. 14, 1970.

13. Robert Lacy, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, vol. 7, no. 2, December 1981.

14. S. O'Faolain, The Irish (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), p. 143.

15. O'Faolain, The Great O'Neill, pp. 7, 23.

16. cf. Deane, ‘Irish poetry and Irish nationalism’, and ‘Remembering the Irish future’, The Crane Bag, vol. 8, no. l, 1984.

17. Diviner, pp. 15-16.

18. Meg Enright's mistaken perceptions about time future in ‘Winners’ provide a similar example of physical sense becoming metaphysically damaging.

19. Diviner, pp. 9-10.

20. ibid., p. 13.

21. Dantanus (1988) p. 57.

22. In conversation with the author.

23. Diviner, pp. 15-16.

24. ibid., p. 12.

25. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (New York: Cornell University Press, 1957), p. 151.

26. Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard, Act 2, pp. 354, 355; Act 3, p. 375, in Plays by Anton Chekhov (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954).

27. Maxwell, Brian Friel, pp. 38, 46; cf. also Maxwell's comments, ibid., pp. 17-18, 31, 46-7.

28. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973), p. 62.