In colonial discourses, the first objective of the colonizer is to invalidate the culture of the

Chapter One Introduction

My dissertation examines how Brian Friel explores different aspects of Irishness in his drama. Irishness has been one of the favorite topics for Irish writers since Yeats’s and Lady Gregory’s times. For the past decades, Irish nationalists also tried to reconstruct Irishness from Irish folklore and myth, in the hope of reuniting the Irish people against British colonial influences in culture and politics. Friel also tries to depict Irishness in his works, but unlike his predecessors and contemporaries, he does not construct Irishness out of Irish tradition and the revival of Gaelic. He does not try to define Irishness, but instead presents the life of Irish people and the problems they encounter, from ancient times to the present, from foreign countries to Ireland, from the urban to the rural, and from various points of view such as history, language, family, and religion. Friel’s Ireland is not a fairyland in Irish myth, but an international society with multiple cultural influences and inner political and religion conflicts. However, it is difficult to grasp the whole idea of Irishness in only one play, and only by examining the whole body of his work can we trace Friel’s thinking and concerns and how he also shapes his own thinking in the process. This dissertation will examine how Friel represents Irishness through his three plays: Translations, The Communication Cord, and Volunteers, which, taken together, can help us see more clearly

what constitutes his idea of Irishness in terms of language, politics, and history.

Before we discuss Irishness, we should first find out what it means and why it matters.

In colonial discourses, the first objective of the colonizer is to invalidate the culture of the

colonized, so that the culture of the colonizer can be established. In Ireland, the colonizer

eradicated the native language and empowered English, so in postcolonial times nationalists

attempted to reestablish the identity erased by the colonizer. Therefore, nationalists

mythologized the Irish past, in order to establish a clean and pure identity, untouched by the

colonization. But does such an Irish identity really exist in history?

First, since Ireland and England have been close in geography and race, and England colonized Ireland in more cultural than political ways, it has been hard for people to come to the easy conclusion that England is the colonizer and Ireland the colonized, whereby to distinguish their difference and identities. Terry Eagleton says, “It is not, with Ireland, simply a question of some inscrutable Other, as an increasingly stereotyped discourse of stereotyping would have it; it is rather a matter of some unthinkable conundrum of difference and identity, in which the British can never decide whether the Irish are their antithesis or mirror image, partner or parasite, abortive offspring or sympathetic sibling” (Connoly 78). Since their relationship can be at the same time strangers, siblings, parent and child, spouse, and partners, the border between difference and identity and between alienness and intimacy has been subject to constant change. If Ireland wants to get rid of such relationship in order to be purely independent, it will have to reestablish its own parents, ancestors, and tradition, just like Terry Eagleton says: “Stephen Dedalus feels betrayed by his real father and so must either, like Jesus, become his own progenitor, or find a new parent in Leopold Bloom. Ireland, too, must throw off his false parent, Britain, and fashion its own forebear by reinventing its ancient past ─in which case it becomes, in a familiar Oedipal fantasy, self-begotten”

(Connoly 80).

The representation of this new parent, or invented past, has been a great task for Irish

historians and writers throughout the 20 ^th century. Seamus Deane points out that there have

been two dominant ways in Irish literature of representing the Irish tradition: one is the mode

of adherence, and the other is that of separation, and the best speakers for these two modes

are Yeats and Joyce, respectively. Yeats writes “the story of the spiritual heroics of a fading

class─the Ascendancy─in the face of a transformed Catholic ‘nation’” (Connoly 16). His

courtship for heroic figures produces such famous characters as Cathleen Ni Houlihan and

Cuchulain, and this act is, in Deane’s words, “an understandable form of anxiety in one who sought to find in a single figure the capacity to give reality to a spiritual leadership for which the conditions had already disappeared” (Connoly 17). On the other hand, instead of digging into the Irish myth, Joyce separates himself from Ireland to see the Irish reality. His Ireland is far from ideal, spiritual, heroic, but dark with paralysis, inertia, treachery, sexual and political infidelity. Some of the best examples are the Irish-speaking Myles Joyce murdered by the sentence of an English-speaking court in Finnegans Wake, and the alienation Stephen feels in The Portrait of a Young Man as an Artist to the English language in his conversation with the

Newman-Catholic Dean of Studies. For Seamus Deane, these show “Joyce’s sense of separation from both Irish and English civilization,” and because he is “betrayed into alienation, he turns to art to enable him to overcome the treacheries which have victimized him” (Connoly 19). ¹

While both adherence and separation are significant approaches in Irish literature to the writing of Irish mentality, Seamus Deane himself is more inclined toward the latter. He notes that although the former has its root deep in the Irish mentality, “the dissolution of that mystique is an urgent necessity if any lasting solution to the North is to be found” (Connoly 26). The problem with the adherence, or the nationalistic mentality of the Irish Revival, is that it forms a new kind of hegemony, repeats the colonial power, and represses the development of modern, global, and multi-cultural thinking. Also, the members of the Irish Revival are made up mostly of the Anglo-Irish, who fail to speak for the Catholic Irish, the majority of the population in Ireland. Also, the Anglo-Irish tend to go back to the pre-colonial Ireland to invent a pure national identity, an act that completely neglects the position of the

1

This dissertation has no intention of criticizing Joyce’s or Yeats’s approach. Like Deane said, “The great twins

of the Revival play out in posterity the roles assigned to them and to their readers by their inherited history. The

weight of that inheritance is considerable” (Connoly 24). What Friel inherits from them is not to be neglected. In

fact, Friel and Joyce have a great deal in common in their attitudes towards Irish nationalism and language. The

paper only aims to show how Friel makes modifications of his two predecessors in the 70’s and 80’s, 40 years

after Joyce’s time.

present and the development of the future. It is therefore that Seamus Deane─who became one of the founders of the Field Day Company in 1980─suggests rewriting the national identity: “One step towards that dissolution would be the revision of our prevailing idea of what it is that constitutes the Irish reality…Everything, including our politics and our literature, has to be rewritten─i.e. reread. That will enable new writing, new politics, unblemished by Irishness, but securely Irish” (Connoly 26).

While Seamus Deane suggests that the Irish people rewrite and reread literature, Gerry Smyth also points out the problems of constructing Irishness in the postcolonial discourse.

For him, there are two approaches to establishing the authenticity of national identity─one is liberal, and the other is radical. In the liberal situation, the colonized ask for equality, but the basis of equality is determined by the colonizer, and the language used to achieve equality is also that of the colonizer. Therefore, it is almost impossible to talk about equality in a non-ideological realm in which colonizer and colonized can converse in an innocent language.

The colonizer will always remain in the dominant position. In the radical situation, on the other hand, the colonized aim to construct their national identity, and by looking back in history, in the pre-colonial times, they manage to get rid of the image of inferiority that has been imposed on them by the colonizer. In other words, the colonized “embrace/construct instead a pristine pre-history which would serve as both Edenic cause and Utopian effect of nationalist activity” (Smyth 35). The problem, however, with this approach is that while constructing identity and otherness, the colonized fall into the trap of the colonial discourse,

“which constructs the colonial experience as oppositional in the first place” (Smyth 35-6).

And this opposition once again reinforces the difference between the colonizer and the colonized.

Gerry Smyth thinks that these two problems have existed in the process of Irish

decolonization. There have been efforts to seek a realm and a language in which the

colonized, or the subaltern in Spivak’s term, can speak and ask for equality, but there have also been the unanswered questions: Is there any discourse that establishes identity and yet does not invoke otherness and oppositional difference? Is there any discourse in which the colonizer and the colonized can speak to each other on an equal footing?

Smyth believes the Irish people cannot go “outside” or “beyond” the colonial realm to deal with colonial problems, “for although presence, essence and identity may be said to be at the root of the colonial problem, they remain the only available realm for decolonizing activity” (Smyth 38). For Smyth, the decolonization process must be performed right where the colonization takes place, where all the inequality and ideological control work, for there is no such a space outside or beyond of it. Since the “non-ideological realm” for conversation between the colonizer and the colonized is not found yet, the colonized have to go back to the colonial discourse, but with recognition of the state of hybridity. The idea of hybridity has been welcome by most critics since Homi Bhabha put it forth. He believes that while the identity of the colonized is constructed, that of the colonizer is also constructed. This fluidity of the colonial identity shows hybridization is bound to take place in a colonial discourse:

Hybridity is the revaluation of the assumption of colonial identity through the repetition of discriminatory identity effects. It displays the necessary deformation and displacement of all the sites of discrimination and domination. It unsettles the mimetic or narcissistic demands of colonial power but reimplicates its identifications in strategies of subversion that turn the gaze of the discriminated back upon the eye of the power. (Bhabha 112)

In this way, the hybridized state does not stand in favor of either side in the colonial power relations, and it is where conversation and equality can take place.

Of course the idea of hybridity does not go unchallenged. Nationalists consider

hybridity a kind of compromise, with the colonized giving in to the colonizer. Also, Ella Shohat thinks we should be careful about the context and objects of hybridity: “Celebration of syncretism and hybridity per se, if not articulated in conjunction with questions of hegemony and neo-colonial power relations, runs the risk of appearing to sanctify the fait accompli of colonial violence” (Mongia 330).

Hybridity, however, is viewed by most critics as the reality in Ireland’s colonial context and is actually applicable to all cultures. Declan Kiberd argues that the English “invented the idea of Ireland” (Kiberd 5), and constructed the Other in Ireland so as to define themselves.

Also, while Ireland is constructed as the Other, “the Irish notion of ‘England’ is a fiction

created and inhabited by the Irish for their own pragmatic purposes” (Kiberd 5). If the Irish

identity is created by the British and vice versa, then we cannot examine Irish identity

without considering the British in the state of hybridity. Kiberd even argues that “at root the

English and the Irish are identical peoples, who have nevertheless decided to perform

extreme versions of Englishness and Irishness to one another in the attempt to wrest a

material advantage from the unsuspecting audience of each performance” (Kiberd 12). Of

course such a viewpoint can sound unacceptable to people who explore the differences

between the two peoples, but just as Tim Gauthier says, “to ignore the presence of the British

in Ireland’s past is to create a false Irish identity…the old oppositional constructs are no

longer effective, and new concepts need to be put in place. The Irish situation is reaching a

critical stage, and a recognition of an irrefutable hybridity (in both Irish and English) is

essential to a resolution of the crisis” (Harp/Evans 354). Also, Richard Kirkland recognizes

the trend of hybridity as he points out that “the overall progression in recent cultural

theory…has moved beyond evocations of the hybrid as a way of destabilizing the authentic to

a position that finds all cultural formations essentially hybridized (with all the paradoxical

instabilities that such a conjunction suggests)” (Kirkland 214). Kirkland, like Smyth, believes

in the necessity to restructure our thinking mode, and reexamine old oppositions and power relations. The focus on hybridity is not the answer to colonial questions or the solution to political conflicts─it is what pushes us to question more and consider more in establishing any discourse. Hybridization also puts power relations in a constant flux, where the subversive force can be as strong as the empowering one. It is “not merely the acceptance of the inevitable cultural change and transformation undergone during lengthy colonial rule, but also the metamorphosis of that transformation into something uniquely indigenous”

(Harp/Evans, 343). Friel, along with other members of Field Day, not only recognizes the hybridized state in the current Irish society, but also manages to present in his plays the hybridized reality that the Irish people should try to make indigenous, authentic and Irish in their pursuit of a national identity.

Before we look into Field Day’s effort to make hybridity indigenous, we must first look

at what influenced and shaped the thinking of Field Day members. Critics usually compare

Field Day with the Abbey Theatre Company, which used to be the Irish National Theatre,

co-founded by W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, Edward Martin, and George Moore. Both theaters

contributed a great deal to the shaping of representation of Irishness in the 20 ^th century, but in

very different ways of thinking. The goal of most Abbey writers was to represent the Ireland

identity before colonial times, for Ireland had been labeled in colonial times as undeveloped,

barbaric, and in need of progress and civilization and therefore British dominance. Abbey

writers believed modernity and industrialization brought to Ireland more harm than welfare,

so they turned to the Irish history and tradition and local language in search of a spiritual hero

that represented the lost Irish essence. Therefore, in the works of the Abbey the prevailing

idea is that the ancient, oral, communal and Gaelic is good, while the modern, mass-produced,

profit-based, and English is bad. Besides, Yeats also managed to keep the language of Gaelic

from extinction, and the result was most evident in John Millington Synge’s works, where the

language used was Irish English and supposedly dear to the ears of Irish audience. However, though Synge’s plays do de-Anglicize Irish English, they fail to represent the real spoken language in Ireland. This problem at the language level foresaw the later problems of the authenticity of Abbey’s representation of Irishness, which the Irish audience found it hard to accept. “In his effort to create a national drama,” says Seamus Deane, “Synge revealed the difficulty of avoiding the unease in relation to native culture, which is a feature of all colonial literature. This is equally evident in the reaction of the audience to his plays. The belief in that which was authentically Irish and therefore acceptable was the ground of the dispute between the author and the denizens of the pit. The assertiveness about authenticity was a symptom of the insecurity which surrounded the issue” (Deane 154). Throughout the twentieth century, Irish theaters have had to deal with this discrepancy between the representation of Irishness onstage and the audience’s perception of the national identity. In the early years of the twentieth century, there were even audience riots in response to the plays performed at the Abbey Theatre. These plays included Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen, Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, and O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars. These plays, though, were replayed several times and came on the repertoire list in the later years of Abbey, evoking not protest but only nostalgia, after the Irish Free State was formulated and Abbey became the monument to Independence and the establishing of the Irish Free State.

After the colony’s independence, Abbey shifted its position and became more and more like an English theater. One of the founders of the Field Day Theatre, Stephen Rea, was disappointed to find the old Abbey was gone, and a more cosmopolitan and pluralist Abbey art took the place. Kathleen Hohenleitner also notes in her discussion of the Abbey Theatre that “[Rea’s] disappointment indicates that what had formerly epitomized Irish culture and nationalist resistance had come to symbolize rather a modern, Western European state”

(Hohenleitner 17). Within this context, however, reconstructing a theater that looks for

national identity would be considered nationalist and narrow-minded, and as the political conflicts between the Republic and the Union became more and more serious problems in the Northern Ireland, Field Day members took a turn in their direction and situated themselves in the metaphorical “fifth province,” where they would speak for all people of Ireland, North and South, Republicans and Unionists. They did not set out to provide definitions of Irish identity, but set out to ask questions that concerned all Irish people. In Hohenleitner’s words, Field Day intended to “resist potential codification as texts in the national canon, becoming instead Irish texts, but not specifically representing either Irish state. This shift away from representation moves rather toward imagining an Ireland unconstrained by the limits of the existing models of contemporary Irish states” (Hohenleitner 20).

It is no easy task, however, to write a play on a specific aspect of Irish way of living and make all readers and audience identify with it. The conflict in the North is not only on the political level, but also on language, history and identity; since it is unlikely to give a quick solution, the best way to depict Ireland is to depict the conflict. It is with this thinking that Field Day, rather than giving answers, raised questions about nationality, national culture, and national language. Field Day’s shift in the position of Ireland from the colonized to a postcolonial society with no stable identity is very clearly explained by another member, Seamus Deane:

One of the means by which this [cultural oppression] is achieved is by

persuading those who have been colonized that, in order to resist the

colonization process, they must, as a counter-agency against

colonization, stabilize for themselves an idea of being Irish or Egyptian

or Indian or whatever. The moment you stabilize your identity you

have done part of the job of the imperial system. Imperial systems are

about mapping, about geography, about stabilizing, about

characterizing people within certain fixed limits. Many people who think that they are reacting against imperialism by being, as in our present and immediate circumstances, as Irish as possible, are in fact not resisting imperialism, but conceding to it. (Mac Poilin/Lundy 28) For Seamus Deane, seeking a fixed, pre-colonial, and pure Irish identity not only does not get the Irish people out of the colonial mentality, but also deepens the hatred and opposition between Ireland and England. It is therefore that while Field Day endeavors to represent Irishness in the present Ireland─just like Yeats and Abbey trying to represent ancient Irish culture─Field Day does not believe in a fixed Irish identity that the Abbey does.

The most successful production of Field Day is Brian Friel’s Translations, which

asks questions about language, history, and culture. This play bridged the gap between

art and criticism in the production of Field Day, and became the direction for Field

Day’s concern. F. C. McGrath says of Friel’s overall concern in his works: “What

happens when individual narratives conflict with group narratives? What happens when

the narratives of two groups sharing the same physical space are mutually antagonistic

to each other? These are the central preoccupations of Brian Friel’s writing” (McGrath

14). This conflict theme has its origin from Friel’s personal background. Friel was born

in Northern Ireland as a member of the minority Catholic nationalist community, where

there were two sets of equally antagonistic social and political discourses, which

constituted their own history, geography, and identity. Besides, while births in Ireland

are recorded by both church and state, Friel has two given names and two birth

certificates. Therefore, naming became a key issue in Translations in both cases of

Owen being called Roland and the British naming of Irish places. Besides, language and

geography have always been conflicting to him, since Friel was “born in the North,

schooled in Derry, visited his mother’s family often in Glenties, and eventually settled in Donegal, all the while considering Derry his home” (Hohenleitner 31). Perhaps these facts all contribute to Friel’s concern about identity, history, language, and hybridity.

Friel once says of himself:

I first began to wonder what it was to be an Irish Catholic; in short this was when for the first time in my life I began to survey and analyze the mixed holding I had inherited─the personal, traditional and acquired knowledge that cocooned me, an Irish Catholic teacher with a nationalist background, living in a schizophrenic community, son of a teacher, grandson of peasants who could neither read nor write. The process was disquieting─is disquieting because it is still going on.

(Self-Portrait 19)

His hybridized background, both from the postcolonial environment and from the colonized situation of the Northern nationalist community, becomes a very important key to understanding his works, especially the plays to be discussed in this dissertation.

Friel’s early plays, including Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964) and The Enemy Within (1962), were mostly about exile, both mental and physical ones. Also, the issue of

memory, remembered and shaped by individuals, appeared first in Philadelphia and later

in Faith Healer (1979), while it also echoes most of Friel’s later plays about history and

language, in which history, like memory, is constructed not by historical facts but by the

powerful and the institution. In 1973 Friel put Freedom of the City on stage, which is

based on the Bloody Sunday march in Derry in 1972, and which deals with both the

Irish and British discourses that contributed to the tragedy. It is with this play that Friel

began to see how different discourses shape illusions, myths, and history. In the plays to

follow, Friel began exploring this theme, as in Aristocrats (1979) and Faith Healer.

Another play in the 1970s that echoed this issue is Volunteers (1975), in which an archeological site becomes the realm for Friel to examine how different discourses constitute different histories, to question who has the authority over history, and to present the inner social problems caused by social classes and indifference. In 1980, Field Day was founded by Friel and Stephen Rea, and Friel’s best known play Translations became the best speaker for the Field Day project. Translations has a very

explicit political surface, since it goes back into 1833, when Gaelic was being Anglicized and the Irish people were forced to learn English. What most critics fail to recognize lies under the surface: the hybridized state and the functioning of translation and language. As this play was regarded by most critics as a nationalistic piece, Friel composed The Communication Cord two years later to counterbalance and make his discourse more complete─and also, to give himself more freedom as a playwright. In this paper I will study Volunteers, Translations, and The Communication Cord, to examine how the three plays work together to construct Friel’s idea of Irishness through his questions and observations about language, history, power, and hybridity in different contexts.

The second chapter of this dissertation is on Translations. The play is set in Baile Beag, County Donegal in 1833, when new national schools were replacing hedge schools in Ireland. At the same time, the British ordnance survey was going on, which was to rename all the Irish place names into English ones. The “sweet smell” is also mentioned in the play, which suggests the famine has been there to make matters worse.

This setting clearly shows Friel’s attempt to demythologize the Irish myth and present

the “various factors which together were to bring about the destruction of Irish-speaking

Ireland” (Grene 34). However, this play does not suggest that Friel intends for an

Anglicized Ireland and that he supports the ordnance survey. Nor does the play suggest

that he prefers the Gaelic-speaking Ireland and the hedge schools to new national schools that teach English. Friel manages to show that, with the mapping and the construction of national schools, a Gaelic-speaking Ireland will not last, but as Richard Kearney says, “If history has deprived the Irish of their native tongue, this will not prevent them from recreating their identity in a new tongue” (Kerwin 100). It is in this hybridized context, in which English and Irish languages and cultures coexist, that Irish people should establish their Irishness and solve their problems. In this play we can see Maire’s effort to learn English, and also the love affair between Yolland and Maire, which indicate the possibility of communication between the two cultures, but the coexistence of the open-mindedness to learning English and at the same time the resistant attitudes of other villagers towards learning English, also “serve to raise the question of the degrees to which the English act of translation was an act of violent suppression and the extent to which it was openly welcomed by the Irish people”

(Harp/Evan 346).

My third chapter will be discussing The Communication Cord, which is generally

believed to be a farce to Translations, since the latter “offered pieties that [Friel] didn’t

intend for it” (1982 21). Friel felt that writing the play would help prevent people from

pigeon-holing him as a particular kind of dramatist. Doing the play is in some sense a

daring act, but taking such chances seemed important. In this way, ridicule and parody

become the overall tone in the play, but we cannot overlook the concept Friel tries to

convey. He ridicules the Irishness that was established by the Irish to cater to European

businessmen, tourists, and Irish people themselves─in this play, Jack’s father, and

Senator Donovan. The restored house where the whole play takes place is the best

embodiment of this Irishness. Even Friel’s own stage directions show very quickly this

attitude of parody: “Every detail of the kitchen and its furnishings is accurate of its time

(from 1900 to 1930). But one quickly senses something false about the place. It is too pat, too ‘authentic’. It is in fact a restored house, a reproduction, an artefact of today making obeisance to a home of yesterday” (CC 11). In the play, Tim wants to impress Senator Donovan─who holds pietistic attitudes of the traditional nationalism and loves all images of Irishness─with the purpose of winning his daughter’s heart, so he makes Jack lend him the house for a few hours, and learns from Jack all the necessary compliments for the house: “This is where we all come from. This is our first cathedral.

This shaped all our souls. This determined our first pieties. Yes. Have reverence for this

place” (CC 15). But Tim “feels no affinity at all with” the house, and he constantly feels

that the house hates him. With this, Friel makes his point: the authenticity of Irishness is

always questionable if the Irish poeple only go back in Irish history and tradition and

choose to overlook the British cultural impact and language domination. The language

problem is one other important issue in the play. Tim is working on a thesis on

linguistics, and in the play he constantly finds that the linguistic rules of communication

do not always work in real situations. This happens, for example, when Donovan makes

him agree that the house is the “true center,” and when in the last act Tim and Claire

both agree that keeping silence is the best communication. Also, as Hohenleitner

observes, “The Communication Cord complicates this assumption through Tim’s

randomly substituting names as the plot changes, a ploy that exaggerates the arbitrary

connection between words and what they signify. Language is revealed in this play to be

a complete set of random signifiers, given significance by the community” (Harp/Evans

381). This shows Friel’s attitude that context determines the text, and simply restoring

the native tongue would not help restoring a lost culture, since both language and culture

change with time, both within the native culture, and with the influences from other

cultures. This multicultural and multi-linguistic context is where Friel believes Irish

people should establish their identity.

The fourth chapter goes back to a play composed earlier, Volunteers. The play is written in 1975, five years before Translations, in the present Ireland. In this play I will examine the Friel’s representation of political and linguistic issues, which help set the direction and shape the ideas for Friel’s later Field Day plays. On the political level, the play presents the political oppression within the state─oppression from the powerful to the powerless, from the upper class to the lower class─and indifference even within the same class. At the same time there is the lack of consensus on the significance of cultural heritage and how much of it should make up the Irish identity. While the overall political and social environment is overwhelmingly tragic, it is under this uncertain and instable circumstance that Friel challenges simple answers, values, and definitions, redefines cultural heritage, and excavates the inner problem. In the same way, Friel presents the volunteers in an untraditional way, with the hope of crossing the border and class, and redefining voluntarism for new possibilities. Friel’s volunteers at the same time fall victim to the national power institution and to their fellow prisoners back in prison: while they volunteer for the excavation job for the state, the state is not recognizing their plight, and the purpose of the excavation job is actually to build hotels for promoting tourism; at the same time, since they work for the state, they are regarded as betrayers by their fellow political prisoners, who plan to give them execution when they are sent back into prison. But like Seamus Deane said, Friel’s attempt is to demonstrate “human capacity for producing consoling fictions to make life more tolerable” (SP 17-8). Friel’s volunteers exhibit their creativity, imagination, and spirit in their seemingly mocking but profound banters and limericks and songs and stories.

Keeney’s banters raise such issues as the victimization by one’s won culture, the

oppression of the upper class to the lower class, the indifference among the Irish people,

and the authority over the restored jug, the digging, the skeleton Leif, and history. The volunteers’ stories about Leif serve even more functions: the time of the stories is carefully kept in the ancient past, a strategy of the volunteers to provide themselves a temporary shelter from their plight, and while the stories go on with the excavation of such issues as victimization and loyalty dissolution, they also prove that Leif is a casualty of language. The language issue is furthur explored by Keeney with the allusion to Hamlet, who shares not only the superficial madness with Keeney, but also the fate of becoming casualties of language. While stories of Hamlet and Leif are both told by the powerful in the official documents, the fate of the volunteers are decided by the nation and the kangaroo court and the report their supervisors are going to hand in to the nation.

But then again, with all his tragic tones, Friel’s main purpose is not to present Beckettian emptiness of existence, but rather to, by questioning old systems of values and definitions and power relations, evoke his people to think about the raised questions and to redefine and reexamine their cultural heritage and national identity.

In this chapter, we see the difficulty of establishing the Irish identity. On the political level, Ireland’s relationship with England cannot be summed up simply as the colonized and the colonizer, which makes it harder for the Irish to define themselves─

either outside of the colonial site, back into the history, or inside of the colonial mentality in the present moment. On the literature level, the Irish people inherit from their literature two ways of reading their history: adherence and separation. But adherence is proved to be too nationalistic and narrow, while it takes a more critical and open mind for the Irish people to see the problems of nationalism that separation blames.

While some critics suggest that hybridity is the key concept, how do the Irish people

establish their identity out of the hybridized reality? How do they make the hybridity

fully representative of their Irishness? In the next chapter, Translations, I will examine

how Friel presents the difficulties the Irish people have had to face in their pursuit of

Irish identity.