CULTURE SHOCK:A remarkable photographic portrait exhibition of Brian Friel reminds us that the writer doesn't sit easily with pious tributes, writes Fintan O'Toole.
IN THE striking exhibition of Bobbie Hanvey's photographs of Brian Friel on show at the Magill Summer School in Glenties this week, the most arresting are the images of the playwright in his beekeeping outfit. In a stark white overall suit, with his face wreathed in protective headgear like a old-fashioned nun's cowl, he looks like an astronaut unimpressed with the planet he's just landed on.
The images are remarkable because they are so unexpected. At the heart of an event that rightly celebrates Friel in advance of his 80th birthday, in the Donegal community that has meant so much to him, they provide a bracing reminder that the writer doesn't sit easily with pious tributes. He may deal with a familiar world, but his job, like that of Hanvey's portraits, is to make that familiar strange.
It is lovely to see Friel celebrated, to enter packed halls where he sits quietly and impassively, listening to friends and contemporaries like Seamus Heaney and Thomas Kilroy mark his achievements. But it would be wrong to simply crown him with laurels. For one thing he is still very much a living writer - his superb new version of Hedda Gabler will be at the Gate in this year's Dublin Theatre Festival. More importantly, though, there is the paradox that Friel's great achievement has been deeply embedded in a sense of failure.
Something Friel wrote in 1999 about his translations of Chekhov and Turgenev gets close to his own sense of where he stands in relation to Irish society. He has been attracted to the 19th century Russian authors, he explained, "because the characters in the plays behave as if their old certainties were as sustaining as ever - even though they know in their hearts that their society is in meltdown and the future has neither a welcome nor even an accommodation for them. Maybe a bit like people of my own generation in Ireland today." That last line, typically qualified with the little "maybe" that makes it seem like a throwaway remark, is both poignant and noble. It points to the richly ambiguous relationship of Friel's achievement to the Ireland of his times. The great gesture of his work has been to carry on as if the world from which he takes his artistic bearings were not in meltdown, even while the work itself enacts that very implosion.
It has always seemed to me that a good way to place Friel is to ignore his own rather dismissive attitude to the short stories he wrote in the 1950s and early 1960s, and to go and read them. The shocking thing about them is how very good they are, how controlled and poised. They are the work of a young and successful author (Friel had a contract with the New Yorker) who is clearly in the process of becoming a great prose writer. His decision to stop writing prose and start writing plays reflected, surely, a much wider loss of faith in the traditional narrative. There may have been all sorts of reasons for this, but it is worth remembering that it was part of a much broader European cultural shift in which, in the aftermath of the mid-century catastrophes, narrative itself came to be seen as, at best inadequate, at worst a lie. Theatre, with its looser forms and ability to supplement or contradict words with sounds, gestures and physical images, offered the hope of restoring some authority to the act of telling stories. What's fascinating, though, is that for Friel those hopes were largely dashed. What he found was that the matter of Ireland which fed his imagination actually challenged the basic building blocks of theatrical narrative. The materials of theatre are space, time, language, story and character. All of them, in Friel, collapse in the "meltdown" that each of his plays enacts.
Space does not cohere because of emigration (the great early theme of Friel's plays) and because of the displaced status of the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland to which he belongs. Time, whose theatrical manifestation is memory, refuses to function. Gar O'Donnell in Philadelphia, Here I Come! remembers things that never happened; the unreliable and contradictory narratives of the same events in Faith Healer enact the slipperiness of the past. Language, the concern of plays like Translations and The Communication Cord, proves inadequate to communication. Stories, and those who write them (Lombard in Making History, for example) don't reflect reality, they invent it. And even characters do not cohere: Gar is split on stage into private and public selves, Michael in Dancing at Lughnasa into past and present selves.
Friel's genius, though, has been to make art of these very failures, inadequacies and incoherencies. He has done this partly by dint of his extraordinary gift for language and structure - he smuggled the short story back in to his theatre and made it strange and haunting. But partly, too, by having the guts to embrace the liberation implicit in knowing that things don't make sense but doing them anyway. He has been able, like those Russian characters, to "behave as if the old certainties" of language, story and character "were as sustaining as ever". The miraculous thing is that they have indeed been sustaining, not just for him, but for us. Because of that, his pessimism is surely unjustified. The world of his past may have melted down, but the future will have a welcome, or at least an accommodation, for a writer who taught us, in the words of Hugh in Translations, that "confusion is not an ignoble condition".
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