[In the following essay, Kearney speculates on the political and social dimensions of language as text and subject matter in Friel's Translations and The Communication Cord.]

Brian Friel's drama has sometimes been accused of engaging too directly in Irish nationalist politics. In a recent issue of the Belfast magazine, Fortnight, Brian McEvera offers a typical example of this accusation; "Friel's work is directly political in its implications," he charges, "and its 'awareness' is one-sided. The 'shape' observed is a nationalist one—and a limited partial view of nationalism at that." McEvera concludes with the hope that the "more overt political element will disappear from (Friel's) work."

Such charges of political propaganda are, I believe, quite mistaken. Several of Friel's later plays do indeed have a political content—in the sense that they address the nature of Irish nationalist ideology in both its historical and contemporary guises. But they do so in a way that is profoundly anti-propagandist. One of Friel's primary concerns in such recent plays as Translations and The Communication Cord is to explore the complex relationship between political ideology and the problematic nature of language itself. Like most artists influenced by the modernist movement, Friel is deeply preoccupied by the workings of language. And like most genuine artists he is aware that language does not exist in a timeless vacuum but operates in and from a specific historical situation. It is not surprising then that Friel should display a particular attentiveness to the ways in which different political ideologies—i.e. those of British colonialism and Irish nationalism in particular—have so often informed or deformed the communicative function of language. Those who accuse Friel of propagandistically supporting the cause of political nationalism are grossly misconstruing his work. For they fail to appreciate that his overriding concern is to examine the contemporary crisis of language as a medium of communication and representation.

I will confine most of my remarks to Friel's most recent play, The Communication Cord, for it is here arguably that the rapport between language and nationalist politics is most critically explored. Friel has stated that The Communication Cord should be read in tandem with Translations. While the latter highlighted the way in which language was used by the British to exploit (both culturally and politically) an indigenous community in County Donegal, the former shows how language may be used by this same Irish community some hundred years later in order to exploit each other. But it should be pointed out that already in Translations, Friel was aware that a narrowly nationalistic attitude toward language could be invoked as a refusal to communicate with others. The callous murder of the British officer, Yolland, by the Donnelly Twins is represented as just such a refusal. And the Gaelic hedge-school master, Hugh, recognizes the necessity of translating from the old language into the new when he agrees to teach English to his pupil, Maire, or when he declares, "We like to think we endure around truths immemorially posited, but we remember that words are signals, counters. They are not immortal. And it can happen that a civilisation can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of fact." Pointing to the Name Book of translations from Gaelic into English. Hugh concedes the need for historical change. "We must learn those new names," he soberly challenges, "we must learn to make them our own, we must make them our new home."

In The Communication Cord Friel satirizes the contemporary attitude of certain sentimental nationalists who seek to revive the old culture, which is now irretrievably lost, while at the same time employing the ad-man's language of opportunism and deceit.

If Translations set out to chart the transition of a language from the mythological past to the modern present, The Communication Cord operates in reverse order: it portrays the attempt to retrace language from its contemporary condition back to its pristine ancestry. Both plays conspire to present us with a fascinating genealogy of the process of human speech, the ways in which we use words to progress or regress in history, to find or lose ourselves, to confuse or to communicate. The fact that the former play is composed in tragic tones, while the latter is written as a farce, is in itself an indicator of Friel's tragic-comic realization that there is no going back in history; that the best that can be achieved is a playful deconstruction and reconstruction of words in the hope that new modes of communication might be made possible.

Both plays situate the conflict of language models in the specific context of Irish culture. Translations deals with pre-famine Ireland bracing itself for the final transplantation of Gaelic into English. The Communication Cord takes up the story more than a century later. It shows us modern Ireland taking stock of its linguistic identity and attempting to recover the ancient pieties of its prefamine heritage. While one play features the old language looking forward to its ominous future, the other features the new language looking back to its dispossessed origins.

The scene of the action in The Communication Cord—a restored thatched cottage in Ballybeg—is simply an inverted replica of the condemned school house in Baile Beag, The Donegal Village of Translations. In similar fashion, Tim Gallaher, the central character of the play—a university lecturer in linguistics preparing a Ph.D. on communication—serves as an inverted mirror-image of his ancestral prototype, Hugh.

The distinctively ersatz character of the restored cottage betokens the futility of any literal quest for the lost grail of our cultural past. Adorned with the antiquarian accoutrements of churn, creel, crook, hanging pot, thatched roof and open hearth, the cottage is described by Friel in a stage note as "false … too pat … too authentic." It is, short, an artificial reproduction, a holiday home of today counterfeiting the real home of yesterday.

This play about communication begins, significantly, with a failure of communication. Tim is saying that the door to the cottage is open, while Jack McNeilis, his friend, misunderstands him to say that it is locked. From the outset their language is at cross purposes. Jack is a successful, suave, and self-assured barrister from Dublin. He possesses all those qualities of the modern Irish bourgeoisie which Tim lacks—efficiency, sexual confidence and above all, since language remains the key, a remarkable felicity with conversational repartee.

Jack's nouvean-riche family bought the rickety cottage in Ballybeg and refurbished its rustic charms in order to experience the "soul and authenticity of the place." Jack's description of this romantic return to the land is presented as a saucy parody of Hugh's genuine pietas. "Everybody's grandmother was reared in a house like this," Jack quips, claiming it to be the "ancestral seat of the McNeilis dynasty, restored with love and dedication, absolutely authentic in every last detail…. This is where we all come from. This is our first cathedral. This shaped our souls. This determined our first pieties. Yes. Have reverence for this place." Jack's way of revering his "father's house" is, ironically, to recite a tedious inventory or "map" of all the objects contained in the cottage (fireplace, pot-iron, tongs, etc.) He employs naming according to the model of utilitarian representation in order to classify each thing as a use-item. For Jack, language is a filing cabinet of objects.

One of the central themes of the play is the conflict between Tim's view of communication as a genuine response cry expressing true feeling and Jack's view of communication as a commercial contract or sentimental nostalgia.

Friel has Tim expound his linguistic thesis in the opening act of the play, thereby establishing the conceptual coordinates for the subsequent unfolding of the plot. Tim argues that language operates on two levels—as information and as conversation. At the first and ultimately inferior level, words function as messengers transmitting information from a speaker to a listener. Language becomes a process of encoding and decoding messages. Where a common code exists messages can be exchanged, where not there is misunderstanding. Echoing the terms of [Claude] Lé'vi-Strauss, Tim explains that "all social-behaviour, the entire social order, depends on communicational structures, on words mutual!) agreed on and mutually understood. Without that agreement, without that shared code, you have chaos." It is surely no coincidence that the example that Tim chooses to illustrate his point is the absence of a common code of translation (when one person speaks only English and the other only German).

At the second but more fundamental level, language transcends its purely pragmatic function as a formal transmission of information and seeks a more profound sharing of one's existential experience: "You desire to share my experience—and because of that desire our exchange is immediately lifted out of the realm of mere exchange of basic messages and aspires to something higher, something much more important—conversation … a responsecry!" Response cries forgo all linguistic strategies of willful manipulation and commerce. But the difficulty is how to discriminate between genuine response cries which speak straight from the heart and the mere pretense at such speech. How is language to escape from the insincerity of role-playing? Tim's inability to resolve this dilemma is not only the reason why he cannot complete his thesis or decide whom he truly loves; it is the very raison d'être for the play itself!

The real villain of the piece is Jack's father, Senator Donovan. He is cast as an "amateurantiquarian," a self-made man full of his own self-importance as both doctor and politician, who fatuously extolls the "absolute verity" of the cottage. Donovan is a caricature of all that is sentimental and sententious in Irish cultural nationalism. His speeches are reeled off like farcical travesties of Hugh's desiderium nostrorum—the sacramental longing for older, quieter things. Arriving in Ballybeg he pretentiously muses: "This silence, this peace, the restorative power of that landscape … this speaks to me, this whispers to me … And despite the market place, all the years of trafficking in politics and medicine, a small voice within me still knows the responses … This is the touchstone … the apotheosis."

Donovan, while exploiting to the full the conveniences of the modern multi-national society, still clings to the craven illusion that nothing has changed, that Romantic Ireland is alive and well in a restored Donegal cottage waiting to be purchased by the highest bidder. In other words, Donovan would have it both ways. He is hypocrisy incarnate, a symbol of the very discontinuity in Irish cultural history which he refuses to acknowledge. But Donovan's charade of assumed pietas is finally scotched when, invoking the mythic shibboleth of Ireland as the "woman with two cows," he actually chains himself to a restored cow harness in the cottage and is unable to extricate himself. The myth becomes literal. As his rantings become more desperate, the entire stage is plunged into darkness. All the characters lose their bearings and stagger about in farcical mimicry of the cultural-linguistic disorientation which has befallen them.

When the light returns the truth begins to dawn; the aliases and alibis are debunked and the artifices of the confounding language games exposed. This enlightenment of consciousness is nowhere more evident than in the concluding love scene between Tim and Claire. Their masks removed and their real feelings made plain, the lovers move towards the most authentic form of language—the response cry of silence. As Tim explains: "Maybe the units of communication don't matter that much … We're conversing now but we're not exchanging units … I'm not too sure what I'm saying … Maybe the message doesn't matter at all then … Maybe silence is the perfect language." The employment of language for the exchange of women and property between the different individuals or tribes in the play (Irish, German and French), does not produce either communication or community as Lévi-Strauss's theory would have us believe. The existential secrets of the heart cannot be disclosed through the verbal exchange of informational units, but only through the "reverberations" occasioned by a genuine "response" of human feelings. Responding to Claire's genuine response cry—"Kiss me"—Tim embraces her. As he does so, the lovers lean against the fragile upright beam of the cottage causing it to collapse around them in a flurry of apocalyptic chaos. The local tower of babel is demolished in one loving stroke. And even Jack, the consummate wizard of word-play is compelled to resort to a response cry—"Omy God."

What does Friel's play tell us about the relationship between language and political propaganda? The conclusion to The Communication Cord is, equivocal. The hint of some salvation through silence is counteracted by the literal unleashing of darkness and destruction. While the abandonment of speech spells loving communion for Tim and Claire, it spells the collapse of the community as a whole. Silence is a double-edged sword heralding both the beginning of love and the end of society. While the departure from language may well lead to love, it may equally well lead to violence. So that Friel's existential optimism with regard to silence as the "perfect language" appears to go hand in glove with a pessimistic, or at least skeptical, appraisal of its socio-historical implications. The word "cord" itself conveys this double sense of a bond and an alarm signal.

Seen in conjunction with Translations, the ambiguity of Friel's conclusion becomes even more explicit. While the former attempted to show how language once operated in terms of a cultural rootedness and centeredness, the latter de-centers all easy assumptions about the retrieval of such lost, cultural origins. The Communication Cord affirms the irreversibility of history as an alienation from the natural prehistory of words; and this very affirmation exposes the impotence of language to save a community from the corrosive effects of time, from the mixed blessings of Modern Progress.

Seamus Deane, one of the directors of Friel's Field Day Theatre Company, states this dilemma with admirable concision in the preface to The Communication Cord. "Nostalgia for the lost native culture," writes Deane, "appears ludicrous and sham … Friel has presented us here with the vacuous world of a dying culture. The roof is coming in on our heads … There is little or no possibility of inwardness, of dwelling in rather than on history." Situating this crisis of language in the more specific context of Irish cultural and political history, Deane adds: "Irish discourse, especially literary discourse, is ready to invoke history but reluctant to come to terms with it … So we manage to think of our great writers as explorers of nature, as people who successfully fled the historical nightmare and reintroduced us to the daily nature we all share, yet this feeling is itself historically determined. A colony always wants to escape from history. It longs for its own authenticity, the element it had before history came to disfigure it."

By refusing to flee from history and from its complex rapport with language, Friel's drama is political, but in a sense radically opposed to political propaganda. Friel's art is political in a way which defends language against the abuses of political ideology.