SOURCE: "Telling Stories and Making History: Brian Friel and Field Day," in Irish University Review, Vol. 24, No. 2, Autumn/Winter 1994, pp. 186-97.

[In the following essay on Friel's drama and his association with Field Day Theatre Company, Pelletier examines Friel's treatment of Irish history.]

As a short-story writer and as a playwright Brian Friel has been busy telling his audience stories; but as co-founder of the Field Day Theatre Company in 1980 one could argue that he has also literally been 'making history'. Whereas the early plays tend to concentrate on the individual's need for consoling or enabling fictions and the role of the artist as story-teller, the more political plays written after 1972 address another key issue which he felt he could no longer ignore in the light of the tragic events taking place in Northern Ireland at the time and of the debate surrounding revisionism in the South: the role of that other very powerful storyteller, the historian. The realisation that the workings of the fictions in an individual mind could be repeated in the collective mind of a country to the extent that a civilisation could find itself "imprisoned in a [fictional] contour which no longer matches the landscape of … fact."

For Friel, this reflection culminated in the portrayal of Hugh O'Neill in Making History (1988), with the playwright deliberately manipulating myths the better to demonstrate the shaping power of personal, cultural and artistic fictions. For Field Day, a more theoretical and comprehensive approach to the problems of history and literature led to their five series of pamphlets, their book Revising the Rising and to their most ambitious and controversial venture so far, the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing published in 1991.

The tension between the private realm of the individual story and that most public of realms, History with a capital H, has characterised Friel's work since the early days. Up to 1972 though, Friel was using history in a very free and unself-conscious manner as one can see in both The Mundy Scheme and The Enemy Within. In The Mundy Scheme, that play which many IASAIL members discovered or rediscovered at the Leiden conference, Friel was trying to accommodate more public concerns after his tetralogy of love plays and choosing the form of a violent satire of the political life in the Republic: "What happens when a small nation that has been manipulated and abused by a huge colonial power for hundreds of years wrests its freedom by blood and anguish? What happens to an emerging country after it has emerged?" Answer: while the Northern part of it is busy turning itself into a bloody battlefield, the rest agrees greedily to sell itself as a gigantic graveyard to America … A cynical and despondent view of Ireland in the late sixties. Friel never used that genre again and is very dismissive of the play today.

Before tackling politics, he had used history as a backdrop for the more private struggles of his main character, St Columba, in The Enemy Within (1962). Friel was careful to protect himself in the preface against potential attacks from the scholars, acknowledging that in portraying Columba, the inner man, he had taken some liberties with the historical facts known about the saint: "The Enemy Within is neither a history nor a biography but an imaginative account, told in dramatic form, of a short period in St Columba's thirty-four years of voluntary exile." That was 1962 and one senses that Friel did not feel particularly uneasy about his 'manipulation' of history. Neither did the critics. Twenty years later though, when the controversy surrounding Translations was raging, (Translations was attacked from various corners, partly for a lack of verisimilitude in its use of historical material: did the English sappers in 1833 have bayonets or not? Is it likely that British officers could not speak Latin and Greek at that time?) he had to reiterate more forcefully his belief in the need to recognise the freedom of imaginative literature:

Writing an historical play may bestow certain advantages, but it also imposes certain responsibilities. The apparent advantages are the established historical facts, or at least the received historical ideas in which the work is rooted and which gives it its apparent familiarity and accessibility. The concomitant responsibility is to acknowledge those facts or ideas but not to defer to them. Drama is first a fiction. With the authority of fiction. You don't go to Macbeth for history.

In this very balanced assessment can be found a lead into Friel's way of dealing with the problem of historical fiction. He craves and claims that freedom of imagination that any writer of fiction requires but over the years he has come to the realisation that when writing in Ireland and about history certain responsibilities could not be avoided.

A playwright of the private world, Friel has nevertheless 'strayed' into the public sphere too often and with too much talent for such plays as The Freedom of the City, Volunteers, Translations and Making History to be dismissed as unconvincing surrenders to the calls of the tribe or atypical concessions to the heat of the political moment. Differing assessments of Friel coexist, some seeing him as essentially a playwright of the family and the individual, others seeing in him the epitome of the committed writer, Ireland's leading "écrivain engagé" (Ulick O'Connor's pamphlet has to limit its corpus to three plays to try and make this point).

What confuses many is that Friel can be equally convincing in both these roles, (even if he may himself acknowledge a certain predilection for 'the personal, interior world of self-deception' he also knows that he is obsessed with the political) because he comes to history at an angle which allows him to see the interaction, the connections between the private mode of the story and the public mode of history. What he comes to realise as he looks into history is that the lure of fictionalisation which is so potent in the lives of individuals, also affects history as a form of story-telling. As a playwright, the stories he tells become coloured by larger public issues and politics in the wider sense of the word appear on Friel's stage, inaugurating a new and transitional phase in his writing in the seventies.

The Freedom of the City, widely acknowledged as a turning point, concentrated on immediate history and the distortions and oversimplifications people and events were subjected to when integrated into the wider pattern of history. The story of Michael, Lily and Skinner had to be shaped and altered to fit the differing versions of official or unofficial history depending on the mediators (the Army, the Judge, the balladeer, the RTE journalists, the Church …). In Volunteers, a step back was taken and history was used self-consciously as a point of comparison, setting Viking Ireland versus modern Ireland to try and understand how and why the stalemate in Northern Ireland had come about. The play offers little comfort: the official historian in charge of the archaeological site never appears on stage and seems to have precious little time for the hard work of digging into history. Soon a hotel will be built on the site (Wood Quay) and a part of history will be buried again, this time maybe for good. Again Friel emphasises the uncertainty of all 'historical truth', denying its objective claim to veracity the better to show its subjective, relative, imaginative wealth and relevance. "Certain truths [… may be] beyond [the historian's] kind of scrutiny" says one character in Aristocrats. Historical facts always depend for their ultimate meaning on interpreters, mediators who can or cannot be trusted: Keeney and Pyne offer various stories of Leif, the Viking skeleton, the value of which depends wholly on the relation the teller has to his story. Mimicking a schoolteacher on an educative outing with her pupils, Keeney declares:

And as I keep insisting to my friends here, the more we learn about our ancestors, children, the more we discover about ourselves—isn't that so? So that what we are all engaged in here is really a thrilling voyage in self-discovery. […] But the big question is: How many of us want to make that journey?

For Friel, history never ceases to be at least partly a personal issue, hence the trauma and the make-believe and the recurrence of those questions that haunt the individual mind. The struggle between the claims of history and those of fiction and Friel's growing fear that he might not be equal to his task are marvellously illustrated in his sporadic diary written at the time when he was working on Translations:

22 May. The thought occurred to me that what I was circling around was a political play and that thought panicked me. But it is a political play—how can that be avoided? If it is not political, what is it? Inaccurate history? Social drama?

6 July. One of the mistakes of the direction in which the play is presently pulling is the almost fully public concern of the theme. […] The play must concern itself only with the exploration of the dark and private places of individual souls.

In the end Friel managed to merge the public and the private most satisfactorily in Translations but the play was heavily attacked precisely for the reasons he had foreseen: 'inaccurate history'. Hence his spirited defence of the need to recognise the specific 'truth' of fiction. A perfect illustration too of [George] Steiner's point in After Babel, the main subtext for Translations: "It is not the literal past that rules us. It is images of the past" applied by Friel to the localised context of Northern Ireland:

In some ways the inherited images of 1916, or 1960, control and rule our lives more profoundly than the historical truth of what happened on those two occasions. […] For example, is our understanding of the Siege of Derry going to be determined by Macaulay's history of it, or is our understanding of Parnell going to be determined by Lyons's portrait of Parnell?

Here we come across the problem of the confusion of genres, an issue that has exercised many theoreticians and practitioners of both disciplines: what happens when a writer starts meddling with history? Is History's claim to objectivity to be taken seriously or is it just a delusion? Do historical facts matter more than or as much as their representations? If such issues are of particular relevance in Ireland today, they are also widespread concerns bearing witness to the need to question the nature of 'truth' and of 'fiction'.

Graham Swift, the English novelist, places the dispute between story and history at the centre of his powerful novel, Waterland. It is of particular interest to see a writer coming from the supposedly stable English tradition, (something that the Northern Irish minority feels it has been excluded from) being prey to the same unease about history and using in a work of literature a vocabulary and a rhetoric not alien to the Irish situation. The protagonist, Tom Crick, is a history teacher (again). Explaining how he came to his vocation he says:

So I began to demand of history an Explanation. Only to uncover in this dedicated search more mysteries, more fantasticalities, more wonders and ground for astonishment than I started with, only to conclude forty years later—notwithstanding a devotion to the usefulness, to the educative power of my chosen discipline—that history is a yarn. And can I deny that what I wanted all along was not some golden nugget that history would at last yield up, but History itself, the Grand Narrative, the filler of vacuums, the dispeller of fears of the dark?

Ireland, caught between revisionism and nationalism, still seems to be wondering whether her history is a yarn or the Grand Narrative. Friel was clearly influenced by this state of affairs when writing Translations in 1980. It was also then that together with actor Stephen Rea he decided to found his own theatre company in Derry. Field Day, as it was called, was soon to turn into a controversial politico-intellectualventure, putting history and literature at the top of their agenda. In his introduction to the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Seamus Deane, one of the directors, sums up his (and the company's?) conclusions, stressing that in Ireland, history had largely forfeited its rights to be accepted as objective:

In a country like Ireland, where nationalism had to be politically opposed to the prevailing power-systems, there was a serious attempt to create a counter-culture and to define it as authentic to the nation. In doing so, it used historical and archaeological scholarship in a tendentious and polemical fashion. For this, it was rebuked. It distorted the facts of history and reduced literature to propaganda. The rebuke came from groups equally anxious to assert some other position against nationalism—unionism, liberalism, internationalism. The political animus informing all these non-nationalist groups was concealed as much as possible, and the most frequently worn disguise was, in history, the pretence to 'objectivity' and in literature the claim to 'autonomy'. Both words had the magical appeal of not being polemical or political; both were against 'propaganda' which pretended to be either history or art.

Such a view is confirmed by Alan Harrison and Andrew Carpenter in their section on Ireland and Her Past: Topographical and Historical Writing to 1690:

However impartial he claims to be, no historian writes of the past without being strongly influenced by the age in which he lives. During periods of change and conflict, objectivity is not only difficult for the historian but is sometimes deliberately rejected so that 'history' can be written specifically to further the cause of one political group or another.

They also stress the mixing of history and literature in medieval Irish culture:

The Irish word for this traditional history, seanchas (ancient lore) embraces not only the formal recording of history—annals, regnal lists, genealogies and laws—but also much that, in later generations, would be considered literature—sagas, origin legends, hagiography, political propaganda, stories associated with place-names, and even romantic tales concerning mythical figures. The dividing line between 'history' and 'literature' was never clear or distinct in early and medieval Irish culture.

So much for history's claim to objectivity in this context at least: somebody's historical truth could be somebody else's grotesquely distorted or oversimplified fiction. Or, as Stewart Parker had it in Northern Star: "History's a whore. She rides the winners."

If Translations and the foundation of Field Day marked, temporarily, the culmination of the public strand in Friel's work, another play, dating from exactly the same period, followed on the more private vein, confirming the coexistence of these two domains and their interaction. The playwright's most complex and convincing statement on the "gentle art of story-telling" is to be found in Faith Healer. In that play, three characters, each in isolation, present their version of the events leading to the death of Frank Hardy, Faith Healer, illustrating what Friel once said: "Perhaps the most important thing is not the accurate memory but the successful invention." The three accounts often differ and blatantly contradict one another, the facts just refuse to fall into place and in the very discrepancies is to be found the 'truth' of the play. A 'truth' that reflects on the role of the artist since Frank Hardy is clearly a metaphor for the writer and his power to create fictions. As Gerald Fitzgibbon remarked in his article entitled "Garnering the Facts: Unreliable Narrators in some Plays of Brian Friel":

Observation of his characters suggests that the search for absolute 'fact and reason' is futile, that no individual narrator has access to 'the truth'. Within their systems of language, thought and feeling, and with varying degrees of integrity, the characters invent whatever versions of reality they can live with.

Or returning to [Graham] Swift and Tom Crick:

Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man—let me offer you a definition—is the story-telling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there's a story, it's all right. Even in his last moments, it's said, in the split second of a fatal fall—or when he's about to drown—he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.

Isn't that exactly what Faith Healer is all about? Isn't that exactly what Keeney and Pyne were doing in Volunteers? Interestingly enough Gerald Fitzgibbon's conclusion embraces both The Freedom of the City and Faith Healer, showing the links between two apparently very different works:

In Faith Healer and The Freedom of the City, Brian Friel completely exposes to the audience the process by which they surrender their own judgment to characters in a fiction. He does not merely show us characters who survive by making fictions; he repeatedly reminds us that the author too survives in this way.

And looking at Friel's Making History (1988), one is tempted to add and so do nations and historians. The human craving for a history that would put an end to all squabbling by establishing its undisputed truth is part of that quest for a transcendental value but can also be hijacked: isn't the 'true history' merely the most satisfying one? This question is at the heart of Friel's Making History and represents an effort on the part of the playwright to free himself from the continuing grip of history on his work, to reclaim some freedom as an artist by demythologising the role of the historian.

Making History could be seen as a very late companion piece to The Enemy Within. Another form of hagiography, with a difference … Its protagonist is none other than Hugh O'Neill, the last of the great Gaelic chiefs, whose biography by Sean O'Faolain Friel had read avidly many years earlier. In 1968 Tom Kilroy, a close friend of Friel's and also a director of Field Day, had written a play about this same historical figure who occupies a very prominent place in Irish nationalist history. Can Hugh O'Neill ever be anything but a public figure ensconced in a mythic image? As he had already done with St Columba, it is by turning away from the public image that Friel constructs his O'Neill, leaving a theatrical gap where the Battle of Kinsale should have been. Instead there is the death in childbirth of Mabel Bagenal, Hugh's English wife; and the replacement of a public event (a military disaster), by a private, intimate tragedy. The exiled O'Neill, a broken man, comes to the realisation that it was in his private life, in the person of Mabel that his salvation lay. The public myth turns into a private one, the flawless military hero is but a grieving husband. And thankfully, Friel is here to portray that other truth about Hugh O'Neill which Lombard will steadfastly refuse to acknowledge as relevant in his The Life and Times of Hugh O'Neill:

In Ireland, the period between the assumption of the lordship of Ireland by Henry VIII and the battle of the Boyne—a time of high tension between religious, racial and cultural factions—stands out for the polemic of its historians and for the bias of their histories.

Indubitably, Friel caught the spirit of the time in Making History in which he shows Archbishop Lombard busy putting the final touches to that "Grand Narrative" of the Gaelic world, the "dispeller of fears of the dark" that was about to engulf the native Irish in the wake of the Battle of Kinsale:

People think they just want to know the 'facts'; they think they believe in some sort of empirical truth, but what they really want is a story. And that's what this will be: the events of your life categorized and classified and then structured as you would structure any story. No, no, I'm not talking about falsifying, about lying, for heaven's sake. I'm simply talking about making a pattern. That's what I'm doing with all this stuff—offering a cohesion to that random catalogue of deliberate achievement and sheer accident that constitutes your life. And that cohesion will be a narrative that people will read and be satisfied by. And that narrative will be as true and as objective as I can make it—with the help of the Holy Spirit.

Disturbing echoes of Lombard's version of history can be heard in Desmond Fennell's pamphlet against revisionism, dating from 1989 in which he attacks 'revisionist' history on two grounds:

First because I believe that its moral interpretation is not correct; second, because such history does not serve the well-being of the nation. […]

The modern Irish nation—the new Irish nation formed from the late eighteenth century onwards—was provided with such a[n enabling] history by scholars whose aim was, often explicitly, to supply it with such a history in place of the nationally useless and undermining histories or pseudo-histories of Ireland written by Englishmen. And this new Irish nation would not have formed […] without that history-writing.

Obviously, I am talking about a science of history which is also an art: an art like that of those composers or musicians who, in successive generations, with meticulous dedication, and each differently than his contemporaries, rearrange an old tune or song. But this art comes easily, and without betrayal of self, but rather with affirmation and satisfaction of self, to those historians whose passion for factual truth, and for conscientious moral judgment, is equalled by their piety for their nation's pattern of historical meaning, and their regard for what their fellow-countrymen, and they themselves, need from their national history for their minds and hearts.

This last sentence takes up almost the same vocabulary as Lombard's argument against Hugh O'Neill's appeal for the truth to be told:

Think of this [book] as an act of pietas. Ireland is reduced as it has never been reduced before—we are talking about a colonized people on the brink of extinction. This isn't the time for a critical assessment of your 'ploys' and your 'disgraces' and your 'betrayal'—that's the stuff of another history for another time. Now is the time for a hero. Now is the time for a heroic literature. So I'm offering Gaelic Ireland two things. I'm offering them this narrative that has the elements of myth. And I'm offering them Hugh O'Neill as a national hero. A hero and the story of a hero.

While Friel apparently believed, with the revisionists, that Ireland was now ready to hear versions of the past that differed from the myth ("the received historical ideas"), Fennell rejects any history-writing that would alter Ireland's view of herself in any way, in the fear that the country has not yet grown out of its need for "the filler of vacuums" and suggesting that it might never do. I might add that Mr Fennell's interesting thesis is somewhat endangered by his resorting to the example of the former USSR's supposedly enabling history, a fiction that the dismantling of the communist empire has exposed for what it was.

Disturbingly enough, Seamus Deane seems to join in the attack against revisionism when he claims in a passage that corresponds exactly to the double time frame of Making History:

At times it seems that there is a link between the impulse to heroicize the past and the consciousness of present political weakness or defeat. Similarly, in those 'revisionist' periods, when the myths are dismantled and the concept of 'objectivity' rules, there is often an anxiety to preserve the status quo, to lower the political temperature and to offer the notion that historical processes are so complex that any attempt to achieve an overview cannot avoid the distortions and dogmatism of simple-minded orthodoxy. This is a powerful antidote against criticism and rebellion. Since rebellion is, of its nature, devoted to a simplified view of a complex situation, its proponents can be accused of indulging in historical fantasy, of intellectual narcosis and uneducated convictions.

Lombard would subscribe wholeheartedly to such a statement and claim that the time is not ripe for such a history … Deane continues:

There is a current of opinion that holds that we would mythologize less if we knew more. (That itself might be a myth.) But surely what is to be understood here is the felt need for mythologies, heroic lineages, dreams of continuity; in short, the need, expressed by different generations, in individual ways, to colonize historical territory and repossess it.

Friel's position however is not so clear-cut. He senses in himself too that need to repossess what he called "claiming the disinheritance" and to remythologize; he does not deride it but he remains wary of the consequences, especially after what happened to Translations, the pieties that were offered to the play as a result of misunderstandings:

I have no nostalgia for that time [The Gaelic Ireland of Baile Beag]. I think one should look back on the process of history with some kind of coolness. The only merit in looking back is to understand, how you are and where you are at this moment. Several people commented that the opening scenes of the play were a portrait of some sort of idyllic, Forest of Arden life. But this is a complete illusion, since you have on stage the representatives of a certain community—one is dumb, one is lame and one is alcoholic, a physical maiming which is a public representation of their spiritual deprivation.

After Making History Friel returned to a more limited use of history as a setting for other stories, stories of heart and hearth in his beautifully moving and deservedly acclaimed play, Dancing at Lughnasa. Fintan O'Toole was probably correct when he described Making History as "a wiping clean of the slate in preparation for a new beginning" adding:

Just as a friend and colleague Seamus Heaney, a fellow director of Field Day, gave himself in his long poem, "Station Island", permission to be free of the burdens of history and the demands of the tribe, so Friel is doing in Making History. The play abjures history, undercuts all political hero-worship. By dealing with the impossibility of ever constructing a narrative which is more than an acceptable fiction, Friel frees himself from any perceived need to be a chronicler of his times.

Two separate conclusions then, for two personae which make up the complete man: on the one hand, Dancing at Lughnasa, A Month in the Country (after Turgenev), and in 1993 Wonderful Tennessee which, taken together, definitely suggest a return to the more traditional role of storyteller; on the other hand, the attempt to stage a "reprise" of The Freedom of the City, Friel's most overtly political play (the most controversial too), by Field Day at the Guildhall in Derry in September 1992, was vetoed by the local authorities although this could have been a major attraction for Irish playgoers who had shown a certain disaffection vis-à-vis the last two Field Day productions, Seamus Heaney's The Cure at Troy (1990) and Tom Kilroy's The Madame MacAdam Travelling Theatre (1991). The company did not tour in 1992–93 and has officially taken a sabbatical for a year to review their critical and theatrical activities while Seamus Deane, who had become their spokesman as editor of the long-awaited Anthology, is in the United States. Friel definitely seemed to have resumed a working relationship with the Abbey in Dublin and his official resignation from the board of Field Day (now under the leadership of Stephen Rea who is, it would seem, planning a tour for September 1994 with a McGuinness version of Uncle Vanya) on the 1st of February 1994 came only as half a surprise in the light of the recent redefinition of his artistic priorities and his desire for more freedom. Today, more than ever, it might be worth remembering what Friel said over ten years ago in an interview when asked about Field Day, political nationalism and the achievement of a united Ireland:

I think they are serious issues and big issues, and they are issues that exercise us all, the six of us, very much. But you've also got to be very careful to retain some strong element of cynicism about the whole thing.

Could it be that, in Friel's eyes, Field Day had unfortunately proved it had come to lack that distance and cynicism? Or was it unavoidable that, at some point, Friel should feel that his artistic integrity was being threatened by the sheer (ideological/political) pressure that had accumulated within and around Field Day in recent times?