He shows the Irish people the need to find a new myth in the postcolonial European community, while never to stop renewing and reexamining it. Two,

Chapter Three The Communication Cord

The Communication Cord is written two years after the production of Translations, with a clear intention to mock the pieties aroused in the latter. The story takes place a hundred and fifty years later, after the ordnance survey in Translations, in a rural cottage in the Republic of Ireland. In this setting, Friel manages to present the status quo of the present postcolonial Ireland, but in a way more farcical than political. Two young men, Tim and Jack, come to a rural Irish cottage, which belongs to Jack’s father, and which is now being lent to Tim so that he can impress Senator Donovan, father of his girlfriend, Susan. Senator Donovan is a lover of the traditional Irish culture, and believes this cottage is the center of his faith, and a German businessman also hopes to buy the cottage to own real Irishness. For the younger generation, however, the cottage means nothing to them but a holiday resort. While Tim repeats words of worship of the place, he knows he feels no feeling about it, and thus sees problems with the communication theories he has been studying. The cottage, rather satirically, falls apart at the end of the play, on all characters of the play. While the play is obviously a satire of Translations, it reexamines the issues of Irishness and language in the latter. In this chapter I will discuss Friel’s representation of Irishness in The Communication Cord in two major aspects: one, nostalgia for the lost Irish culture, and search in the past for

true Irishness, are both inappropriate. Only by trying to negotiate between the past and the present, in a hybridized state within different languages, histories, and cultures, can Irish people find their new Irishness.

He shows the Irish people the need to find a new myth in the postcolonial European community, while never to stop renewing and reexamining it. Two,

1 This may sound familiar to those who read T. S. Eliot’s Tradition and the Individual Talent, which first appeared in 1919 in Egoist. In the last lines of the article, Eliot says, “The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.” We do not know if Friel got the inspiration from Eliot, but we can say while Eliot stresses the aesthetic role of the poet, Friel extends the thinking to the establishment of national identity in postcolonial times.

language alone cannot save a community or a cottage from collapsing, and nor does the loss of it destroys a community─as some interpretations of Translations assume. While Friel demythologizes and de-centers language in The Communication Cord, he is also suggesting to his readers that only by destructuralizing and restructuralizing language can the Irish people find a new mode of communication between the English and the Irish that truly works.

Before discussing the representations of Irishness in The Communication Cord, however, it is necessary to put the play and Translations together to have a clearer idea of why Friel composed the play in the first place. Despite the success of Translations and its place as the inauguration speech for the Field Day Theater, it has aroused responses from critics that misunderstood Friel and Field Day’s intentions. There are critics who think Translations is written from a traditional nationalistic attitude, which mourns over the loss of

Gaelic Ireland and thus its myth and culture. Also, there are critics who think Friel leaves out

the self-destructive factors that exist within the Irish community and that lead the country to

colonization. And there are even critics who go to historical facts and claim that the story

does not match the reality of Ireland in the 19

century. In response to this, one of the

members of Field Day, Seamus Heaney, defends Friel: “Friel knows that there were certain

inadequacies within the original culture that unfitted it to survive the impact of the English

presence and domination” (1980, 1199). This is why the people in the hedge school are not

promised a future; their economic difficulties and language barrier force them to give in to

the English domination: Hugh is going to the new national school to teach English, Manus is

going west to avoid the change but we all know that cannot save him, Sarah is struck dumb

by Lancey, Maire is more eager than any other one to learn English, and Jimmy Jack’s Latin

is already a dead language. Even Owen himself becomes a victim of his place as an

interpreter between the two cultures. From the ending of the play, we know very well Friel

does not intend to hide the fact that the Gaelic Ireland has its inner destructive factors, and as

McGrath says, “Friel…exhibits more awareness than his critics of how the native past functions in a colonial and postcolonial environment” (McGrath 197). McGrath goes on to claim that Translations is not a play of pure nationalism in that it is a preliberatory play:

“Friel’s characterizations of Lancey and Hugh effectively reverse the classic colonial stereotypes of the cultured English and the uncouth Irish” (McGrath 197), and that it is also a postcolonial play “in its acceptance of its hybrid Anglo-Irish heritage, in the linguistic sophistication that frames that acceptance, and in its performative role of rewriting Irish subjectivities and narratives of identity” (McGrath 197).

McGrath, however, also points out it is easy to see why Translations evokes misunderstanding:

Translations suffers from a rhetorical imbalance similar to the one that marred The Enemy Within, where the nationalist discourses of kinship and nostalgia for

the land overwhelmed the discourse of spiritual aspiration. In Translations the colonial politics are presented very clearly with considerable emotional impact.

The insights about language, in contrast, are much more cerebral and less obvious, often lurking in Hugh’s cryptic comments. (McGrath 197)

The prevailing emotion of kinship and nostalgia, which veils the language issue in Translations, are maybe what push Friel to produce a play like The Communication Cord.

Friel himself says, “I have no nostalgia for [Celtic Ireland]. I think one should look back on the process of history with some kind of coolness. The only merit in looking back is to understand, how you are and where you are at this moment” (1980, 61). And he says that

“The Communication Cord is partly an effort to escape any confines that might have seemed

implied by Translations” (Delaney 169), and that Translations “offers pieties that I didn’t

intend for it” (1982, 21). In this way, the play becomes a much less political and far more

individual and linguistic play, in which all nationalistic and nostalgic emotions are shattered,

and even language of worship about the cottage cannot save it from collapsing.

Echoing Friel, most critics believe the play is written as a counterbalance to Translations and the misleading responses it evokes. For example, Seamus Deane in his introduction to Brian Friel: Selected Plays calls the play an “antidote to Translations, a farce which undermines the pieties sponsored by the earlier play, a defensive measure against any possible sentimentality in its predecessor.” In the program notes to the play, Tom Paulin says the play’s conclusion shows the “comic pragmatism [that] redresses or counterbalances some of the more volkisch pieties which Translations inspired.” Kathleen Hohenleitner believes the play “successfully undermines any traces of apparent nostalgia for the Gaelic Eden of Translations; the effect is hilarious rather than tragic” (Hohenleitner 87). And for Richard

Kearney the play “satirizes the contemporary attitude of certain sentimental nationalists who seek to revive the old culture, which is now irretrievably lost” (1987, 511).

Some other critics see the play as written not just to undermine and satirize but to

reexamine the status quo of Ireland. McGrath argues that the play “suggests Friel’s

self-reflective cautiousness about his own work in particular and about the Field Day

enterprise in general. As Yeats once feared that one of his plays sent men out to die, Friel and

the Field Day writers are aware of their own responsibilities in wielding language to create

new myths for Ireland” (McGrath 198). Also, Seamus Heaney in his review of Translations

says Friel at the same time shows “a constant personal urgency upon the need we have to

create enabling myths of ourselves,” and is aware of “the danger we run if we too credulously

trust to the sufficiency of these myths” (1980, 1199). Therefore, The Communication Cord

may not only be a counter attack to misunderstanding critics, but also a new lens through

which Friel and the Field Day shape and update their ideologies. The play also meets the

need of the Field Day to offer its audience new points of view about Irish tradition and history,

just as Seamus Deane says in his essay and program note for The Communication Cord, “In

Search of a Story,”

Field Day is, in a way, an extension of a theater (that of Brian Friel) out of the tradition in which it has been understood into a new tradition in which it might be understood afresh. His plays are seen differently, as if someone had shifted the source and angle of light on a room. They reveal themselves and the audience (ourselves) to suffering from ‘the malady of history.’ (qtd. in Hohenleitner 101) Kathleen Hohenleitner extends this self-examination of Friel and the Field Day group to a denouncement of the Republic. She says, “…by characterizing Donovan as worshiping the phony ‘ancestral pieties,’ [Friel] denounces the Republic for internalizing British representations of Ireland as a rustic vacation spot and a breeding ground for healthy peasants” (Hohenleitner 91). The English have for centuries imposed upon the Irish the image of rural cottages, peasants, poverty, and the colonized, and Donovan is the kind of Irishman that benefits from the modernization and education of the British, while at the same time goes to rural cottages on holidays for authentic Irishness. As we know, in The Communication Cord the cottage is only a reproduction, something on display to cater to tourists and businessmen, and as Donovan later in the play gets stuck in a cow chain, all of his reverence for the place diminishes. The collapse of the cottage at the end of the play furthur shows Friel’s parody of the search for authenticity of Irishness in a rural cottage. The discussion of the cottage will be furthur explored in the first aspect of representation of Irishness in this chapter.

For yet another group of critics, the play is a sequel to Translations, and the two plays

will not be complete without each other. Friel himself wants the two plays to be read “in

tandem,” which means neither Translations nor The Communication Cord is sufficiently

representative of Ireland, and only when put together the two plays make up the whole

complex of Friel’s idea of language and culture. In his study of the language plays by Friel,

Richard Kearney makes a detailed list of the counterparts in the two plays. He observes, for example, “If Translations set out to chart the transition of a language from its ontological past to its positivist present, The Communication Cord operates in reverse order: it portrays the attempt to retrace language from its contemporary orphanage and uprootedness 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 confute 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 tragicomic realization that there is no going back on 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” (Kerwin 104, emphasis original). Kearney believes the two plays make up a history of human speech, and while the Irish people cannot go back to the 19

century to save Gaelic from being replaced, they also cannot assume they find their true national identity by speaking Gaelic in a reproduction of an Irish cottage in the present. This ambiguity may be what Friel intends for and what he wants his people to consider. In regard to this ambiguity, Kearney explicitly points out:

If Translations tended to mythologize language, The Communication Cord demythologizes it. While the former attempted to show how language once operated in terms of a cultural rootedness and centredness, the latter de-centers all easy assumptions about the retrieval of such lost, cultural origins. One sponsors the original fidelity of language to a timeless, ontological piety of nature, the other affirms the irreversibility of history as an alienation from the

natural pre-history 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. (Kerwin 110)

From Kearney’s observation, we see Friel presents the role of language in different ways: in Translations, language is, like nature, timeless, and well representative of Ireland from all times in history, while in The Communication Cord, language is unable to save a country from losing part of it in history, and it cannot help the country find its authenticity before colonization. This juxtaposition of different attitudes toward language is itself a typical approach of Friel’s: questions are raised without answers given, and questions are raised not for answers, but for his readers to never stop thinking about the questions. Kearney sees this as Friel’s creativity and the reason for his success: “Friel’s insistence that Translations and The Communication Cord be considered ‘in tandem’ suggests that their respective claims…are perhaps both valid in some sense, serving as two supporting arches of a mutually sustaining dialectic. The very tension created by their contrary approaches to language is in itself creative. It has certainly proved conducive to some of Friel’s finest dramatic work”

(Kerwin 111, emphasis original).

Like Kearney, other critics see both the two plays as “supporting arches” of Friel’s dialectic, but from viewpoints more political than linguistic. Richard Pine observes that while Translations and The Communication Cord have the same cottage house and the same language concern, one is made to be a tragedy and the other a comedy. The hybridization of tragedy and comedy shows the fact that different interpretations, or translations, can work together to represent a whole complex of authenticity. He says, “The same set which in Translations was the center not only of the house but of the entire known world, becomes, in The Communication Cord, a travesty of a ‘cathedral’ but one with a host of side chapels

(‘room down’, settle bed, loft) in which a Feydeau-type of bedroom farce, including distorted

morals, is enacted. By showing us how very nearly serious our misdemeanors can be, Friel

persuades us of the proximity of tragedy to comedy, and the ease with which one can be

translated from one ‘diocese’ to the other” (Pine 247). On the other hand, Tim Gauthier notes

that The Communication Cord, together with Translations, evoke interpretations that reveal at the same time the inadequacies of reviving national origins and the need to negotiate the present with the past with recognition of the limits in doing so. Gauthier says,

While The Communication Cord did not elicit the same level of response as Translations, its part in Friel’s ongoing discourse on neo-colonial identity in

Ireland is clear. The play illuminates the inadequacies of an argument based on binary oppositions that would place too much emphasis on any attempt to recover national origins. While Friel recognizes the resistant power in asserting a pre-colonial identity, he also perceives its limitations and the need to accept a compromise between an Irish past and an Anglo-Irish present. However, Friel’s use of parody…opens the play up to a number of other levels of interpretation. In parodying his earlier play and its concerns, he puts into question the very parameters through which Irish identity is defined. Friel adopts the language of the colonizer and through it focuses a light on the stereotypes that have contributed to some (false) notion of Irish authenticity. (Harp/Evans 359)

No matter what purpose Friel has in mind when he composes the play─whether to parody the pieties aroused in Translations, or to reexamine Irish people’s search for authentic Irishness, or to build up his dialectic with the two plays read together─one thing for sure is that Friel writes the play in order to preserve his own independence of choice as a writer, and not to be pigeon-holed as a nationalist writer, as he points out in his interviews, which are collected into the book entitled Brian Friel in Conversation, edited by Paul Delaney. Richard Pine also says Friel writes the play “for two reasons: to allow himself the freedom of speaking openly and in the vulgate which he had been denying himself in his earlier work;

and, with a flood of words, to free his work from the tightness of Translations and from the

trap of sentimentality; from the danger of being treated as consecrated testament” (Pine 246).

This freedom as a writer is especially important for Friel, someone who devotes himself to an enterprise that is engaged in the redefinition of Irishness and Irish freedom. This task is not only for his place as a postcolonial playwright, but also for a new form of Irish drama. Friel manages to combine nature and history, and present the ways in which different languages functioning in different cultures produce different communities. For example, Richard Kearney in his study of Friel’s language plays points out that “Friel refuses to accept the conventional policy of apartheid which see the cultural and the socio-historical as entirely separate spheres of discourse. His language plays represent a powerful evocation of the ways in which our cultural use of words determines our society and is determined by it in turn…Hence Field Day’s determination to foster a new dialectical rapport between the timeless images of nature and the transient facts of history. Such a dialectic, if successful, might not only project new possibilities for the future development of Irish culture, but might also liberate the dramatic tradition of story-telling from its more encrusted or stereotyped moulds” (Kerwin 111). Here we can see Friel writes The Communication not only to defend himself and deny the nationalist playwright label put on him, but also to reexamine himself and Field Day, to condemn the Republic for its internalization of the image imposed upon it by the English, and, finally on a larger scale, to contribute to the development of Irish drama.

The words by Friel as the preface to The Communication Cord, quoted in Kearney’s paragraph mentioned above, best explains this grand task:

If a congealed idea of theater can be broken then the audience which experiences this break would be the more open to the modification of other established forms.

Almost everything which we believe to be nature or native is in fact historical;

more precisely, is an historical fiction. If Field Day can breed a new fiction of

theater, or of any other area, which is sufficiently successful to be believed in as

though it were natural and an outgrowth of the past, then it will have succeeded.

At the moment, it is six characters in search of a story that can be believed. (qtd.

in Kerwin 111-2)

For the following discussion, I will discuss how Friel represents Irishness in The Communication Cord to make the play speak for him, and meet all his needs─whether to satirize, self-examine, to stay free, or to promote a new form of Irish drama. As mentioned before, one of the most important concerns in this play is the idea that a rural cottage that causes nostalgia and nationalistic emotions does not qualify as an authentic Irishness, and pursuing it in order to own the real Irish identity is doomed to be in vain. Only by placing oneself out of the past can one see more clearly the whole history of Ireland, the need to negotiate between the present and the past, the limits of the act, and the recognition of the present hybridized state of Ireland. The key figure in this discourse is of course the cottage, since it is through satirizing the pursuit of it that Friel makes his readers see his point. In the first place, it is very easy to see the intention of Friel’s characterization of the cottage from his stage directions: “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). While the cottage is being “too authentic,” we immediately see its artificiality. For Gauthier, the cottage symbolizes “an idealized past,”

(Harp/Evans 355); for McGrath, the cottage “has its psychological counterpart in the pietistic attitudes of the traditional nationalism [it] represents,” and the characters in the play who have these pietistic attitudes are Senator Donovan and Jack’s father, the owner of the cottage (McGrath 199). Therefore, for Donovan the cottage is “the true center,” “the touchstone,” and

“the apotheosis.” He says:

I was born in a place like this. Did you know that? No, how could you. in County

Down. A long, long time ago, Tim. Politics has its place─of course it has. And

medicine, too, has its place─God knows it has. But this, Tim, this transcends all those…hucksterings. This is the touchstone. That landscape, that sea, this house

─this is the apotheosis. Do you know what I am saying? (CC 32)

So when Donovan, in order to demonstrate milking the cow, gets chained to a cow chain that refuses to open, we see how he is trapped within his own nationalistic pieties. McGrath interprets this as the implication that “traditional nationalism is an anachronistic reproduction that chains the Irish unproductively to their past” (McGrath 199).

Echoing both Gauthier and McGrath, Hohenleitner sees the cottage as the idealization of Irishness caused by colonialism. For her the cottage “would be the legacy of colonialism which idealized the west’s rugged, barren countryside into a quaint tourist resort, and commodified the Irish language and culture into mere kitsch, identical and available to every tourist who can afford it” (Hohenleitner 90-91). And the idealized cottage differs from the hedge school in Translations in that the cottage “has not acquired significance from the community” (Hohenleitner 91). As we know, significance is given to the cottage by Donovan, Nora Dan, and the German businessman, while the younger generation sees nothing significant about the place but something that can help them impress girlfriends, get jobs, and make money. The cottage, thus, does not really represent Irishness but is only “an image of Irishness originally imposed by England and then internalized by the new Irish Republic”

(Hohenleitner 91).

Though David Lloyd never directly comments on the cottage, kitsch, as mentioned by Hohenleitner, would be the word if he did. Lloyd’s idea of kitsch in the postcolonial context is that it is easily constructed and reproduced as domestic, original, and familiar, and it is often idealized to represent authenticity, and to bring out the nationalistic feeling within people who believe in its authenticity─people like Donovan and the German businessman.

In this way, for Lloyd kitsch is the product of nationalism:

The reproduction of forms is directed less towards the homogenization of the economic than of the political sphere. This political purpose requires, nonetheless, the production of novelties that are always interchangeable, and the immediate, untroubled evocation of affects that are the sign of each individual’s identification with the nation…the products of kitsch and nationalism must, by the very logic of their economic and political raison d’etre, appear familiar.

Indeed, the sites that they occupy, often to the consternation of both their political and their aesthetic critics, are carefully domestic, those familial spaces in which national desires are safeguarded and reproduced. (Lloyd 148).

With its economic and political functions, kitsch becomes “a site of redemption” for people who go to it for recreation and the feeling that they are back to their origin where they can find warmth and piety. In this play, Donovan and Barney, the German businessman, become the best spokesmen for such kinds of people.

. Donovan is the kind of Irishman that at the same time benefits from the modernity brought by England, and goes to restored Irish cottages on holidays to feel closer to “the true center.” In Richard Kearney’s words, Donovan, “while exploiting to the full the commercial 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” (Kerwin 108-9). At one point when Nora Dan asks him

“Sure what would a gentleman like you want with a place here?” Donovan answers,

“Renewal, Nora. Restoration. Fulfillment. Back to the true center” (CC 46). And Donovan’s

repeated words of worship of the place, echoing the phony clichés of Tim, become the

constant reminder to the audience of his pompous love for kitsch:

Tim: This is where we all come from.

Donovan: Indeed.

Tim: This is our first cathedral.

Donovan: Amen to that.

Tim: This shaped all our souls. This determined our first pieties. (CC 34) Also, from the conversation above, we know Tim does not have the same attitudes towards the house as Donovan does; he is only repeating the lines taught by Jack to please Donovan. And this falsehood established by Tim is, in Gauthier’s words, “akin to those identities constructed on outdated perceptions of an idealized Irish past” (Harp/Evans 357).

Tim himself is very sure he has completely no pieties for the house, as he constantly feels the

house hates him when the fire in the fireplace keeps blowing soot in his direction:

“Did you ever have a sense that a place hates you?─That it actually feels malevolent

towards you? I think this house hates me….Maybe it’s because I feel no affinity at all with it

and it knows that. In fact I think I hate it and all it represents. And it senses that. And that’s

why it’s out to get me” (CC 43). Tim’s attitude shows the cottage does not have the same

significance that the hedge school has in Translations; for him and for people his generation

the house does not mean anything, and they have no feeling about the national identity. But

even so, at the end of the play the cottage still collapses upon all people under it─people

loving it and people hating it─and considering the fact that the house constantly blows fire

unto Tim, we may say Friel is again critiquing without giving any specific solution─rather,

he makes both Tim and Donovan to both become victims of the house to tell his readers it

might be wiser to negotiate between the past and the present. Sticking to either end of history

bears no good result. McGrath says of the conclusion of the play, “The play concludes with

the house, appropriately and symbolically, collapsing on Tim and the other characters of his

generation. Again the suggestion is clear: both chaining oneself to the past and antipathy to

that past are equally risky approaches to one’s heritage” (McGrath 200).

Like Tim, Jack is another character in the play that has no feeling at all for the cottage, even though this is his father’s place. His eloquence and wits produce the most pietistic words about the cottage and the Irishness behind it: “Everyone’s grandmother was reared in a house like this…The ancestral seat of the McNeilis dynasty, restored and refurbished with love and dedication…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).

And yet ironically, his way of having reverence for this house is, observes Kearney, “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 empiricist model of utilitarian representation in order to classify each thing as a use-item” (Kerwin 105-6).

One other character in the play that symbolizes yet another inadequate representation of Irishness is Nora Dan. In a way she is very much like the cottage itself. Friel’s stage directions of her also describe her as a peasant reproduced: “A country woman who likes to present herself as a peasant” (CC 22). McGrath says she, together with the cottage, “represent the Irish Ireland nostalgia that dominated nationalism from the days of the late nineteenth-century revival through the first several decades of independence” (McGrath 200).

On the other hand, Hohenleitner notes that Nora Dan has no real nostagia for Ireland; she is

only constructing her Irishness through the image and the stereotype of a peasant woman, in

order to present her as part of the living symbol of Irishness, to cater to tourists and

businessman like Donovan. The characterizations of Nora Dan, together with the cottage,

Donovan, Tim, and Jack, are all part of Friel’s discourse that neither clinging to the past, like

Donovan and Nora Dan, nor parodying the past, like Tim and Jack, is the adequate approach

to building new representations of Irishness in the present Ireland. And the images of the

cottage collapsing at the end, and Donovan lashing out“This determined our first priorities!

This is our native simplicity! Don’t give me that shit” (CC 75) as he gets chained to the cow chain, reinforce the fact that any attempt to pursue the Irishness embodied in the cottage is destined to fail─even a person like Donovan comes to find out the folly in worshiping a restored house─and that the collapse of the house shows Friel’s lack of faith in such an definition of authenticity. Friel writes The Communication Cord perhaps in the hope that he can get his people out of this quest for the traditional culture, and set his people a new direction where they can find their new Irishness. Also, the present time of the play illustrates the fact that the Irish people are not having fewer problems than they did in 1833 when the ordnance survey took place. In the present the Irish people do not have to worry about Gaelic being translated into English, but they have more problems finding an agreement on their national identity. And this also goes back to show that in 1833, the English perhaps translated more than just the place names. The power of cultural colonization carries its influence well into the 20

century.

Besides the cottage, one other approach through which Friel makes the play speak for him is language. Friel himself intends the play to be an entirely linguistic one, rather than political, so as to make up for the relatively smaller amount of the language issue in Translations. In the play, the language issue revolves around Tim’s unfinished PhD thesis on

linguistics. His knowledge on linguistics is exactly what makes him feel that it is necessary to reexamine his language theories and to even rewrite his dissertation. Also, his comments on the language phenomena in the play, together with Hugh’s viewpoints about language in Translations, also help us see a more complete picture of Friel’s insights on language.

Tim’s thesis is mainly on the functions of language of conveying information and of

communication. Richard Kearney in his study of Friel’s language plays gives a very detailed

introduction of Tim’s thesis. For example, he says, “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 message” (Kerwin 106). In Tim’s own words,

“All social behavior, the entire social order, depends on our communicational structures, on words mutually agreed on and mutually understood. Without that agreement, without that shared code, you have chaos…An extreme example: I speak only English; you speak only German; no common communicational structure. The result? Chaos” (CC 19). And at the second level, language becomes a tool for sharing more personal and profound experiences and feelings. This is when language operates on communication. Tim says,

Tim: But by the very fact of asking me as often as you do, you do something more than look for information, something more than try to set up a basic discourse; you desire to share my experience.

Jack: I don’t─do I?

Tim: 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.

Jack: God.

Tim: A response cry! And that’s really the kernel of my thesis. (CC 19)

Here we can see Tim’s concern is more on communicational function of the language than on the encoding and decoding of language, especially on the response cry, which is by Tim’s definition “involuntary,” but whose meaning you cannot tell exactly since its meaning is largely decided by its context.

In the play we can see how Friel also places more emphasis on the communicational function of language, rather than on the information transmitting. As the story goes on, we learn that Tim has to keep changing the names and plots so as to make his lie go on.

Therefore, the role of everyone in the cottage is constantly changed, including their

relationships and their accents. And this, according to Hohenleitner, reveals the fact that the relationship between the signifier and the signified is actually arbitrary. She believes The Communication Cord complicates the assumption that the language concern in Translations is simply nostalgia for the lost Gaelic culture as the British rename all the Irish place names.

“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.” It is, therefore, that Barney is constantly confused about what is going on in the cottage. It is not because he cannot break “the hermetic code,” but because Tim is unable “to stabilize the story long enough for Barney to comprehend even his own role in the ridiculous farce” (Harp/Evans 381). Because of this, Hohenleitner goes on the claim that the linguistic confusion is not really caused by cultural differences but by simply a failure of communication on individual levels. She says,

Barney’s confusion suggests that certain misunderstandings have very little to do with cultural difference, but in the context of contemporary Ireland, with its sectarian cultures and the occupation of Northern Ireland, cultural difference often gets blamed for violence and injustice. Friel’s altered perspective on language suggests that linguistic confusion might be more a symptom than a cause of some of Ireland’s socio-political problems. (Hohenleitner 96)

While shifting the focus from translation and the arbitrary relationship between the

signifier and the signified, Friel puts the focus on the importance of context. This is a

conscious act to escape from the emotional limitations he evokes in Translations. By putting

the emphasis on the context, Friel is suggesting more modes of communication, which

increase the possibility of recognition and understanding. And this in turn shows that during

the process of translation, there must be meanings gained and meanings lost, since we put the

source language and the target one into different contexts, which give the languages different significance. This also shows the difference between Irish English and the British English, since they operate in different communities.

That context is more important than words finds its examples in The Communication Cord in Claire and Tim. In the huge farce that Tim constructs, Claire is turned into a French

girl knowing very little English, and the only two English lines she knows are “I understand perfectly,” and “This is a lie.” Therefore before Donovan and other characters strange to Claire, she can only communicate with these two lines, but the audience has no problem understanding her in every different situation. For example, when Tim tells Donovan that Claire knows no English but these two lines, Claire whispers to Tim: “This is a lie” (CC 35).

And when the light goes out at the end of the first act, she again whispers to Tim: “I understand perfectly” (CC 64). And when Claire and Evette resume their identities in Act Two, Claire says, “I’m Claire. You’re Evette.” Evette says, “How do you know that?” Claire says, “I understand perfectly” (CC 84). In these different contexts the same line produces different meanings. From this we can see the power of language to convey truth, and the ease with which to construct language through lying, and, Hohenleitner observes, “The word ‘lie’

accurately implies a certain amount of irony to language’s power to convey truth, and consequently suggests the impossibility of anyone’s ability to ‘understand perfectly’”

(Hohenleitner 97). Therefore, while in Translations the focus is more on what is being lost in

the process of translation, in The Communication Cord the focus is on how different contexts

can provide different meanings, and how many new interpretations can arise from translation,

and thus make possible better and more complete understanding. Hohenleitner goes furthur to

point out that “Field Day takes ordinary parts of the cultural landscape─language, kitsch and

history─and by putting them on the stage, allows the audience to see them in a different

context, no longer as an aspect of Irishness that its community takes for granted…in the same

sense of ‘translation’ without changing integral properties of the artifact, Field Day aims to

‘re-present’ traditional narratives and descriptions of Irishness, by staging them in innovative contexts” (Hohenleitner 98). Another example in the play is Tim. At one point Donovan says his praise of the house: “Indeed. Excellent. You’ve no idea, Susie, how special, how very special all this is to me. See those posts and chains over there? Haven’t seen those since I was a child. I’ll explain them to you before we leave. You’re right, Tim, absolutely right. This is the true center.” To which Tim responds to himself: “An interesting discourse phenomenon that. Called statement transference. I never used the phrase ‘This is the true center’ but by imputing the phrase to me, as the Doctor has just done, he both seeks confirmation for his own sentiments and suggests to listeners outside the duologue that he and I are unanimous in that sentiment…which we’re not…not at all” (CC 50). Once again Tim takes the line “This is the true center” out of its common context and puts it in a new one, and see the connotations the line carries along with it. In The Communication Cord Friel puts the contemporary Irish culture on the stage to achieve the same effect that reveals new possibilities of a language.

At the end of the play, Tim and Claire engage in a love scene very much like that of Yolland and Maire in Translations. The difference is now Tim and Claire speak the same language, and have no problem understanding each other, but quite ironically, their new finding is that silence may be the best communication:

Tim: We’re conversing now but we’re not exchanging units, are we?…Maybe the message doesn’t matter at all then….

Claire: It’s the occasion that matters.

Tim: And the reverberations that the occasion generates.…And saying anything, anything at all, that keeps the occasion going….Maybe. Maybe silence is the perfect discourse. (CC 92)

This single scene evokes many different interpretations. For example, Gauthier says, “By

diminishing the significance of language Friel is in effect saying that the power of the colonizer is not to be recognized. If language is thus perceived as an inadequate tool for establishing Irish identity, it is just as ineffectual for imposing an alien one” (Harp/Evans 358). He sees the language as unnecessary, and while the language is not enough to establish Irish identity, a foreign language from the colonizer cannot do much in altering a country.

Kearney goes to more linguistic facts and comments: “The ontological secrets of the heart’s space cannot, Tim and Claire discover, be disclosed through the verbal exchange of informational units, but only through the ‘reverberations’ occasioned by a genuine ‘response’

of human feeling” (Kerwin 109). For Kearney the lies and farce that take place earlier in the play fail to make communication function, and silence and occasional “reverberations” are the only key to communication. But unlike Gauthier’s reduction of the language’s function, Kearney notes the optimistic and pessimistic ways of looking at the ending of the play:

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 ontological 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 term “cord” itself conveys this double sense of a bond and an alarm signal.

(Kerwin 110)

Personally, I prefer to see the ending more optimistic than pessimistic. In the end Tim says,

“But I think that after this I may have to rewrite a lot of it” (CC 91). Here Tim is referring to

his PhD dissertation. In the play his dissertation is always mentioned, but it is never finished,

and even it has to be rewritten to a large degree. If we look at it from a more optimistic point of view, then Tim’s thesis may be the quest of Irish people for their Irishness and authenticity

─it is yet to be finished, but simply relying on old theories and discourses is not enough;

Irish people must keep reexamining it, rewriting it, putting it in the new context of the contemporary Ireland, so that new meaning and more authentic findings can be found, and only by doing so can a real innovative Irish dissertation come about.

The Communication Cord overthrows the nostalgic pieties in Translations, and makes the Irish people reexamine how two different cultures may communicate in different contexts and produce new meaning. While Donovan, Barney and Nora Dan represent the nostalgic generation, Tim and Jack and Claire have no emotion about the cottage. As the cottage collapses on all of them, we see Friel is suggesting neither nostalgia nor alienation to one’s cultural heritage. People in Ireland must see their position in the past and the present, before they can build a better future. In the same way, Tim’s thesis on linguistic studies shows the Irish people that communication is not simply the exchange of language units. While there may be many language units that are untranslatable between Irish English and British English, communication is not impossible. When two cultures/languages clash with each other, new context is produced, and that is where new meaning comes about.

As different contexts produce different meanings in The Communication Cord, in Volunteers this idea is furthur explored ─ though in a more tragic way. In this play voluntarism is redefined by the volunteers’ creativity and imagination, the skeleton Leif is redefined by the volunteers, and Hamlet is redefined by Keeney. With borders thus crossed, Friel makes it easier for the Irish people to see the causes of their social problems: lack of consensus on the significance of cultural heritage, injustice and inequality as a result of the social classes, and the indifference among different classes and even within the same class.

The next chapter studies Volunteers, the 1975 edition of Friel’s Irishness, in which the focus

is more on the political instability and social problems within the Irish society than on what

influence British colonization has had on Ireland. It is with this problematic modern Ireland

that Friel makes his representation of Irishness more authentic.