Authors: Declan Kiberd
"To articulate the past historically", says Benjamin, "does not mean to recognize it as it really was ... It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger".
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This memory might be of a legend such as Deirdre and the Sons of Uisneach, or of a major event such as the Easter Rising. The greatest sin one could commit against such past moments, said Yeats, would be to bring the work of the dead to nothing. The other great sin would be to repeat that work exactly. Between these two extremes, it is nevertheless possible to form constellations, to perform translations. That was what Patrick Pearse did in linking the work of his generation to that of 1798, 1848 and 1867. Equally, it is what Friel means in connecting the Ireland of the 1830s with that of the 1970s. His plays show the audience how it must somehow grasp the meaning of the prior moment and learn how to make it also contemporary. No activity is ever more pressing or necessary than self-translation: by recasting its own words a people makes them its own all over again. Owen's reduction in
Translations
of circumlocution to terseness is one version of that need; another is
Friel's imaginative linkage of the 1830s and 1970s. This is why the critique of Friel's "escape" into language or into the nineteenth century is so banal. The playwright is ultimately less interested in the surface details of either past or present moments than in the new constellation between them which he has made. He
is
the angel of history
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caught in the storm that blows from paradise and propelled into that future to which his back must always be turned, while the mound of debris strewn behind him grows to the sky.
The collapse of the native language, like the great famine which followed it, is an event which remains remarkably unstudied by Irish historians: little research was done on either event for decades and even today there is no classic study by an Irish scholar. Much the same might be said of the Easter Rising and its aftermath: these also lack an adequate narrative history. Large elements of the Irish story need to be written before they can be rewritten. Just as great texts exercise a claim and cry out for translation, so also do great events. A serious translation is usually an indication of fame, of enduring value: such translations owe their existence to the prior work, much as modern Ireland (whether it admits it or not) owes its character to great events, including those neglected by its historians. Of such traumas, as much as of his own immediate fate – he killed himself in flight from the Nazis in 1940 – must Benjamin have been thinking when he wrote:
. . . One might, for example, speak of an unforgettable life or moment, even if all men had forgotten it. If the nature of such a life or moment required that it be unforgotten, that predicate would not imply a falsehood but merely a claim not fulfilled by men, and probably also a reference to a realm in which it
is
fulfilled: God's remembrance.
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Even if texts and events go untranslated, it is their translatability which is significant. Just as in the gospels which show the moment of Jesus in the New Testament as forming a constellation with the moment of ancient prophecies in the Old Testament, there is in this analysis a link between remembrance and redemption: but part of the point, as Patrick Pearse understood very well, is that many people will not notice it. This type of quotation without quotation marks is most exacting, for it rejects the notion of history as continuum, and prefers to unfreeze moments by placing them in suggestive alignments. Central to it is a need, often felt by the Irish, to translate the past, in the sense of displacing it, and to put it into a disturbing relationship with the present. Irish memory has often been derisively likened to those
historical paintings in which Virgil and Dante converse in a single frame:
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but for Friel, it is the
only
method, and so the denizens of his hedge-school quote not only Virgil and Dante but also George Steiner.
This is the same strategy by which James Connolly discovered Utopian socialism or Patrick Pearse a child-centred education-system in ancient Ireland. The technical problem posed for artists (as well
as apologists) in 1916 was the old one: how to express something unknown in a language dense with precedents? The answer, as has been shown in detail, was also an old one: use the known to express the unknown. This was another useful reminder that all progress depends on translation: even the child learning to speak is learning how to use known words in the attempt to acquire unknown ones. Translation within one's own language is arguably as important as that between languages, and no different in essence. Friel's play on the theme, dealing with the ways in which a child or an adult acquires language, demonstrates that reading and writing are equally versions of this act.
These activities are necessarily painful, fraught with possibilities of humiliation and even defeat: for the familiar word is invariably more confidently used than the acquired, the spoken word more easily summoned than the written or read one. Language itself may be no more than a pale translation of the ideal voices of silence. The translator is by very definition belated, secondary, dependent on the prior text: yet the prior text itself keeps slipping into unavailability. If spoken words are copies, then writing is a copy of a copy, and reading but a further copying. So where is the point of origin? In the exchange of Máire Chatach and Lieutenant Yolland? But
Translations
denies that there is any source text.
This problem is raised even more acutely in Friel's other masterpiece
Faith Healer.
There the protagonist, attempting to turn human pain to balm, is as often con-man as holy healer. A broker in risk, Francis Hardy knows that to be an artist is to fail, to experience only misery punctuated by rare moments of unexpected splendour and, in the end, to know ignominious rejection. Yet the strictures are implied also of the author, for the play is an occluded version of the
Fate of the Sons of Uisneach.
its theme of a well-brought-up girl, destined for a noble calling in the north of Ireland, then spirited away to Scotland by an attractive but feckless man to the dismay of an elderly guardian, is reworked by Friel. So also is its central narrative technique, the lilting listing of place names loved and lost; and so also its consummation, a return to predicted disaster. The play turns out to be about itself, since it, like the healer, veers between confidence trickery and brilliant
innovation. And the first audience which the artist must con is himself: for if he becomes overly self-analytical, he may kill his very gift and it will even sooner desert him.
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In
Faith Healer
an original text is neither reproduced or imitated, but set in vibration with the present – which is to say that it is decanonized in a free translation or "reverberation". By that act it transforms rather than merely reproduces the original legend, in keeping with the latest artist's expressive needs: but this is also a phase in the further development of the original, which depended for its survival over many centuries on just such translations. So also did Joyce remodel
The Odyssey
of Homer by his translation of it in
Ulysses.
In
Faith Healer
an ancient myth is creatively misinterpreted so that Brian Friel can redefine heroism for the modern Irish audience. According to the legend Deirdre's name meant "troubler" and she was remembered for the prophecy at her birth that many would die because of her beauty. Grace, the modern Deirdre, is heroic not so much for the suffering which she inflicts (though she has some of the cruelty of the old heroine) as for the pain which she must endure with her partner, the healer. Similarly, the manager Teddy is not allowed the easy "heroic" option of instant death in defence of the man and woman he worships, but is left behind at the end to pick up what pieces remain. The ultimate realism is to deny Deirdre the fake glamour of a romantic death she had in medieval versions, and instead to give her a lonely death as a nervous wreck in a bedsitter. In this respect, Friel returns to the oldest versions of the tale, which had Deirdre dash out her brains on a rock, the hopeless act of a woman crazed with grief, a year and a day after the execution of her lover. Perhaps most significant of all is Friel's decision to give Hardy the central role, just as Naoise was the pivotal figure in the oldest version of the legend in
The Book of Leinster.
Underlying Friel's depiction of Hardy as a modern Naoise, or for that matter Joyce's account of Bloom as a modern Ulysses, is the conviction that primitive myths are
not
impositions of a culture but innate possessions of every person, who professes to be unique but is in fact a copy, consciously or unconsciously repeating the lives of others. Hence the characteristic modern malaise of inauthenticity, which assails those sophisticated enough to sense the frustrations of a life lived in quotation marks. Hence also the supreme importance of those small differences with which history repeats itself, for they are the sole guarantee of individuality. What applies to persons and characters is also true of authors. Friel retells an old story, borrowing protagonists, situations, even phrases from the tale, and to that extent he is, like
Francis Hardy, a con-man. But like Hardy, he also remoulds his tale and his people to some private standard of excellence of his own . . . and to that extent he is indeed an artist. It adds to the poignancy of Hardy's life that he is quite unaware that he has reenacted the story of Deirdre and the Sons of Uisneach.
Friel's plays are implicit critiques of the value-free approach to history taken by most contemporary Irish historians: and reminders that it is human nature to name as truth what is usually the narrative most flattering to current ruling vanity. Many historians will not admit his implied claim that there is always a crisis of representation, that they (as much as any artist) are at the mercy of their chosen forms and genres. Friel's confrontation with them became most explicit in his 1988 play
Making History,
which asks whether there is any effective difference between a defective personal memory and a distorted public record.
In the play Archbishop
Peter Lombard is writing the life of Hugh O'Neill, but what he seeks is neither "interpretation" nor "fact" but "the best possible narrative". Being himself caught up in the events he is to record, he is too wary to define either the historian's function or his method: "History has still to be made before it is remade".
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This is, perhaps, a cynical reminder that all historians are revisionists, but it is a reminder which hints at a fundamental similarity between a recorder and maker of events. Both are
interpreters.
For the strategist O'Neill an action is an interpretation, an option for a single possibility out of a thousand others; and in seeking by imaginative action to shape a nation-state, he too is a maker of supreme fiction. Both men know, of course, that Lombard will have the last word, since history is not written by winners or losers but by historians. Yet Lombard has the wit to concede that there is no History, just histories, each one produced for persons who think they revere facts while secretly wanting a good story. So the story forgets that O'Neill at one point fought for the Tudors against Irish rebels, or that Kinsale was a one-hour rout. Instead, "the telling of it can still be a triumph".
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The problem with that is the problem confronted in
Translations
: of what value is a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of fact? Histories may get lost in the very act of being recorded and simplified into "narrative". Every interpretation is an imprisonment and an exclusion, an act of aggression against the multiplicity of life. O'Neill's history becomes Lombard's story, and the Irish historian comes to seem to him an enemy as deadly as the English colonizer, since both would imprison him in
their
fictions.
Many of Friel's earlier plays had enacted a similar dialogue between a high-minded narrator (perhaps a presiding judge, or a script-director) and the cries of those caught up in the fury of lived histories. For the latter official history became a kind of tragic net, and the more they struggled against it, the more it seemed to entrap its sad and laughable antagonists. In
Making History
there is, however, a sense that the net itself may be faintly ridiculous: the stubborn complexity of the person is asserted against social prescriptions. So the war between Gael and Gall seems a minor matter when compared to the struggle within O'Neill between native
pietas
and Renaissance self-fashioner. At times he can feel exhausted by his own versatility: but he knows that, while his "two pursuits" can scarcely be reconciled, yet the attempt must be made. The test of a first-rate mind is, indeed, its ability to hold opposed codes in the head without losing the capacity to function. The impossible, but nonetheless desirable,
fusion of Gaelic and English tradition, which characterized the central love-scene in
Translations,
is attempted again in
Making History
in the marriage of O'Neill and Mabel Bagenal.
Those who seek such a reconciliation may be, it seems, either ennobled or debilitated by it. Ennobled, as when one culture repairs the gaps in another in a mutual exchange of golden songs; or debilitated, as when two discrepant codes cancel one another out, leaving only suspicion and distrust to fill the ensuing vacuum. Yeats had called the two pursuits Reality and Justice, and had hoped to hold them "in a single thought". The gap is not fully closed at the end of
Making History,
but it has been bridged by an electric irony, which suggests that the choice is not between reality and illusion, but between one dream and another. The historians who reviewed Friel's play were not impressed, and neither were they amused by such a finding.
John Banville, however, would have understood Friel perfectly, for he had already constructed
Doctor
Copernicus
(1976) on a still more radical critique of academic claims to "truth". This novel shows that even a scientist will in the end choose to save the phenomena rather than admit that they have eluded him. Early in the narrative Copernicus discovers that each of his rival scientists is an unwitting artist: they know that
Ptolemy's theory is wrong but have too deep an investment in it to admit this, and so they devise working theories which are grounded in Ptolemy's errors, but which can nevertheless be made to account for the superficially-observed motions of the planets. By the end of the book, Copernicus too has opted for his own "superior" falsification. "The past doesn't exist in terms of fact", said Banville
himself in an interview shortly after the publication of his book: "It only exists in terms of the way we look at it".
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What holds a world together is nothing more than a
style,
but for Banville each style excludes far more than it includes: with every structuralization of chaos, chaos itself increases, because each structure detonates new reactions. Those intrepid souls who seek a better, or at least a more aesthetic, explanation are heroes of the mind.