This research explores how Brian Friel rejects traditional and normative concepts of history and national identity and how he reconfigures through his works postcoloinal alternative forms of histories and national identities. The key concepts this re ...
This research explores how Brian Friel rejects traditional and normative concepts of history and national identity and how he reconfigures through his works postcoloinal alternative forms of histories and national identities. The key concepts this research are mainly indebted to are various ranging from Homi Bhabha's theory of "hybridity, ambivalence, in-between and the third space," Hayden White's notion of "meta-history, the historical text as literary artifact," Walter Benjamin's awareness of "translation as an organic extension" to Spivak's account of "representation of the subaltern." Based on these concepts, this study hopes to interpret the problem of identity and history in postcolonial Ireland.
In this project, I reread Friel's oeuvre as both postcolonial drama and literary text for alternative cognitive mapping. The focus is laid on how Friel transforms his postcolonial milieu into alternative forms so that his works could provide an alternative perspective. By so doing, he dramatizes the process of postcolonial subjectification thereby reimagining and renarrating his nation/history/identity alternatively for a neo-colonial Ireland, one which endorses multiplicity, hybridity, and relativity instead of monologism, homogeneity, and essentialism.
Throughout the past history, Ireland has been marginalized to the colonialist view as a social and historical construct of 'an Ireland which is not England'. Not until the recent days of mid 1980s and 90s could Ireland place themselves at the center of their own history as the subject. After the independence of the Irish Republic in 1921, a sort of post-colonial situation in the Northern Ireland has still persisted. Living in both the Northern Ireland and Irish Republic, Friel cannot avoid the conflict between the postcolonial in the South and the post-colonial in the North. He tries to present that turbulent state of the Southern as well as the Northern Ireland. He wants to offer an option for confronting the never-ending and excruciating conflict between the Catholic Irish and the Protestant Anglo-Irish. The appropriation of language/culture is on servable in both Translations of the colonial Ireland in the 1830s and The Communication Cord of the postcolonial Ireland in the early 1980s. The act of translation and communication argued in the textual analysis is substantially indebted to the linguistic theory of George Steiner. Also Walter Benjamin's idea of translation has been adopted to illuminate political devices to hide and to reveal the colonial intentions as well as the post-colonial implications. The translated words which have transformed, displaced, misinterpreted and partially subverted the colonialist views create the possibility of the colonial hybridity between two cultures. In The Freedom of the City Friel offers a new perspective for history which can renarrate their history. They were concerned with major events in colonial history. Given the context in which the plays were written ― Northern Ireland was in a state of war at the time ― the playwright’'s choice of topics (the introduction of the National Schools and the Ordnance Survey in the nineteenth century and the Catholic residence Bogside ghetto march and riot that took place on January 30th, 1972 in Derry) was pointed and yet politically contentious. Yet, the argument of this essay is that rather than presenting versions of the past which conform to the ideological imperatives of a particular political stance, Friel’s plays are much more interesting and significant in that they provoke a whole series of questions around the issue of historical representation. One of the most important of those questions is the applicability of the criteria truth and falsity in historical and other modes of interpretation. He argues strongly that historians employ the “historical imagination” when depicting the past. In other words the historian relies on the narrative strategies of a literary writer. His idea is that HISTORY is a narrative prose shaped by literary conventions and the historian’s imagination. The essay concludes with a consideration of the politics of memory and forgetting in contemporary Northern Ireland.
In Dancing at Lughnasa, it is revealed that, from the viewpoint of the male narrator, Irish women in the postcolonial age still undergo the hardship chained by the partriarchial system and Catholic regulations. In this play, Friel exposes the social, political, religious mechanisms in Ballybeg which have constructed Irish female subalterns' gender role and constrained their life. In the patriarchal world of Friel's plays, the most subjected are the Irish female subalterns in terms of gender, sexuality, class, and situation. In other words, Irish women in Friel's plays lack their own voice. In conclusion, Friel's oeuvre can be regarded as a literary expression which recognizes a post-colonial necessity to transform from the traditional view into a new sense of cognitive mapping. By so doing, Friel plays an important role in the formation of a unified community in the divided Ireland. He creates the Irish guidelines, leading the Irish to build a new home. Focusing on the national integration and peace, his postcolonial plays may function as a blueprint or beacon for directing the future trajectory the Irish and Ireland have to follow.