Chapter Five Conclusion
From the plays we have discussed, we get different pictures about Ireland: there is the 1833 Ireland fighting against the British colonial power for its intimidated language; there is the present Ireland where there are people clinging to the Gaelic past, and also people who feel no affinity with the past at all; there is also the present Ireland where the powerless is being oppressed by the powerful, and the powerless have no other way of resistance but to tell stories and sing songs to make themselves feel better. These different aspects of Irish lives give us a general picture of the Irish people, the Irish thinking and the Irish character.
Each aspect of the Irish life is authentic in its own way, and the combination of them all serves Friel’s purpose of representing Irishness in his drama.
In Translations, as I pointed out, Friel manages to show the destruction of the Irish society from within. This takes many forms in the play, including the physical appearances of the characters─like Gleitman says, “They are …a collection of cripples, mutes and drunks”
(Kerwin 236)─and also their inability to make their dreams come true: Huge cannot change the situation, Manus has to go to the western Ireland to secure his faith, Maire loses the chance to leave with Yolland, Sarah is struck dumb by Lancey, and even the double-faced Owen has to pay the price of betraying his own culture. The economic and social problems in Ireland also contribute to the colonization, since instability results from economic hardships and resistance movements and also the potato blight, as hinted in the conversation. On the other hand, the language itself is also eroding. In the hedge school, they use Gaelic to teach Latin and Greek, both dead languages. Also even Hugh has to acknowledge the fact that Gaelic has become a language that “no longer matches the landscape of …fact” (Tr 351).
This finds its example during the renaming process, from Owen and Yolland’s conversation, when we can see that even the Gaelic place names sometimes are even corruptions
themselves.
Also, Friel manages to present the hybridized state in Ireland. The hybridity takes place at different levels. For example, on the individual level, people in the hedge school, Manus and Owen for example, have different attitudes towards learning English. Even Owen himself is a hybridized role between two cultures. On the political level, the colonizer also see the colonized differently, since we can see how Lancey and Yolland react in contrasting ways to the Irish culture and language, which in turn leads us to see that it is not always easy for the British to see the Irish as simply one of its many colonies. And on the language level, the whole language environment in Ireland is also in a hybridized state, since a purely Gaelic society and a purely English society are both impossible. Also, in the translation process between two languages, we can see that there is never simple, direct exchange of words between the languages; rather, there is always the existence of mistranslation, the untranslatable, and new meaning generated from the process. Owen and Manus translate Lancey’s words differently, and there are Gaelic place names that, when translated into English, become “neither fish nor flesh” (Tr 343), and the relationship between word and meaning is even arbitrary when Owen can be called Roland and might as well be called Oland. Also, the love scene of Maire and Yolland raises the question whether their communication is a success because of love, or a failure because of the untranslatable elements in each language, or it is neither this nor that but the combination of the two, since language discrepancies have been the inevitable result in the Northern Ireland society. This also raises another question about whether or not it is possible for two races to cross the border and marry each other, as Jimmy Jack at the end of the play talks about his marriage to Athene. Friel sees the difficulty of crossing the border, but he also believes that new meaning comes about when the Irish people learn to make the new place names their homes, and this hybridized state is right where the Irish and the British can communicate with each other.
Once again Friel, like Hugh, is telling his people to learn English in order to communicate with the British and, what is more important, to reestablish new Irishness and identity through appropriation of English to their cultural heritage. Thus, recognition of the hybridized state in the postcolonial Ireland is the key to survival and to constructing a new Ireland. But while many critics agree that this is Friel’s main concern in Translations, there are as many critics that see the play as a purely nationalistic piece. This is why The Communication Cord came about. The Communication Cord is not only written to counterbalance Translations, but it is also for the purposes of reexamining the status quo of the present Ireland and denouncing the Republic for internalizing the images imposed on it by the British. It is also a sequel to Translations that helps shape the ideas explored in Translations, and serves as one of “the supporting arches” of Friel’s whole thinking. And no doubt, The Communication Cord is also Friel’s strategy to remain an independent playwright, free from the nationalist labels put on him by critics who misread Translations.
In The Communication Cord, two aspects of representation of Irishness are explored.
First, nostalgia for the cottage, or reproductions of Irishness, does not lead to anything, since the cottage is simply an image imposed on the colonized by the colonizer, and its authenticity is constructed for the sake of tourism and business. Therefore, the cottage is far from “the true center,” as Donovan thinks. At the same time, the peasant Nora Dan is also part of the whole tourism business, and she presents herself as a peasant woman to cater to people like Donovan and Barney, while she herself has no nostalgia toward the Gaelic Ireland. One thing worth noting is that in the present Ireland, 150 years after the Ordnance Survey, while the older generation worships the cottage, the younger generation feels no emotion about it. For Tim, the house is only a holiday resort with which he can impress his girlfriend’s father. For Jack, his words of worship to the house bear no significance at all to him. but Friel is not suggesting either attitude. In the end the cottage collapses on all of them, which indicates the
fact that neither searching in the past for Irishness nor parodying the past is the right attitude.
Only by seeing one’s place in the past and the present, can one establish his authentic identity.
While suggesting a new direction for his people to establish national identity, Friel is also making his point that the problems the Irish people have now are not fewer than what they had in 1833 when the Gaelic place names were Anglicized, and it takes a more critical mind to get out of the victim mentality and the limits of traditional heritage and to solve the problems.
The other aspect of representation is through the language issue. In the play Tim is a student working on his PhD thesis on linguistic studies, and through him we know that language functions on two different levels, when it is used to convey messages, and when it is used to share experiences and feeling. What Friel is suggesting here is that the first level of the language is not the kind of communication the Irish people should rely on, since the relationship between the signifier and the signified has always been arbitrary, as we can see from the confusing name and role changing in Tim’s lies about the whole plan. While language has its potential power to lie, we must judge the meaning from the context. For Friel what matters is not what language units have been exchanged, or how to enable a more precise translation between the Irish and the English, but the context. In all translation processes there must be meanings lost and meaning gained, and it is in this new context that new meaning is generated. With this, Friel is also defending himself against the criticisms on Translations, which regard the play as simply a threnody on Gaelic. The exemplification of this thought in The Communication Cord is Claire’s same lines uttered and interpreted in different contexts will great efficiency. Also as Tim analyzes Donovan’s line “this is the true center” as an example of statement transference, he is also putting the line in another context and excavating the new meaning from it. At the end of the play Friel makes the second level of language function in Tim and Claire’s conversation, where both agree that what matters in
a communication is not exchanging units but the “occasion” and the “reverberations.” They also go on to suggest that silence may be the best communication. This is not only Friel’s attempt to counterbalance his mistaken emphasis on the loss of Gaelic through the Ordnance Survey, but also his attempt to make his people think about what has been lost and what has been gained since the Gaelic place names were Anglicized, and also about the new meaning in the new context with which they can redefine the Irish identity.
While The Communication Cord is both a counterbalance and sequel to Translations, the third chapter goes back to Volunteers to find the origin of both plays. In Volunteers we can see the political problems presented in a more direct and tragic way than Translations and The Communication Cord. In the play the volunteers, or the political prisoners, are at the same time conscious of their fate, decided by the upper class of the society and also by the fellow prisoners back in prison, and attempting to fight and resist—though with the knowledge that they have little chance of changing anything─with their uncertainty, state of being unpredictable, creativity, and spirit, symbolized in their songs, banters, questions, and stories. The representation of Irishness in this era of IRA movement functions on many levels.
On the outset, the political oppression of resistance movements is obviously the overwhelming atmosphere, which is accompanied by indifference of the upper class to the lower class, and also by the indifference even within the same class. The dissolution of loyalties, together with the lack of consensus on the significance of cultural heritage, while causing the society to be seriously unstable, also show Friel’s attempt to question and challenge simple answers, values, and definitions. On the individual level, the similar attempt is also obvious, since Friel manages to present the volunteers in an untraditional way, with the multi purposes that while the plight of the volunteers is revealed, voluntarism can be redefined by their ability to fight against the hardship, with their creativity and imagination.
In their songs and banters and questions, the volunteers at the same time question the
status quo and recognize their doomed fate. Keeney sings songs about the victimization of Parnell and Leif by their own cultures, which links the fate of the past to that of the present.
Also he raises questions about the social class and authority in his banters about the kangaroo court that decides their fate, the song “The Bonny Labouring Boy,” and the authority over the restored jug and the whole archeological task. In the stories told about Leif, the volunteers, while relating the stories to an ancient time for the protection of the myth and for the pretension that they are not going to have the same fate like Leif’s, question once again one’s victimization in one’s own culture, subversive organizations bringing more meaning of life than the education by European knowledge institution, loyalties smashed in the relationship between the master and the servant, and the fact that while Keeney may not be able to sustain his passion for the digging job, passion alone cannot change the fate of the diggers, since they are doomed in whatever way. Leif is not only a means for the volunteers to raise questions, but also for Friel to illustrate the fact that history is written by the powerful, by the archeologists who have the authority over the life account of Leif, not by historical facts. As Leif is thus the casualty of language, Hamlet serves the function of futhur exploring the idea on the language level. While Keeney links his fate and madness to that of Hamlet’s, he is also making the point that everyone here, including Hamlet, Leif, himself, and all the diggers, is a casualty of language: while we learn about Hamlet from Shakespeare, Leif from archeologists, the nation learns about the diggers from the supervisors’ report of them, and from the kangaroo court that decides their fate. Once again, despite the overwhelming tragic tone, Friel does not give up representing hope from Leif and Hamlet─while the stories about them provide the volunteers with temporary escape and protection, they also serve to evoke thinking, promote reexamination and redefinition of the Irish cultural heritage, and open new possibilities. In the same way, new definitions of voluntarism also help us subvert the border among social classes, and thus establish new national identity.
Friel’s strategies are clear. By representing the political and social and linguistic problems on the stage, he grasps the whole picture of Irishness. He does not blame the instability and confusion on the colonizer, and nor does he have mercy on the victim mentality of the Irish people to search in the past for their pure past. He is urging his people to stay where they are, recognize the new context, the hybridized state, the coexistence of all the political and religious and linguistic conflicts, and build their Irishness and identity right from there. But at the same time, Friel also recognizes the difficulty in doing so, since there are political limits and mental trauma that can hinder the whole attempt. This is why the ending is always tinted with tragic tones in the three plays discussed in this paper: in Translations the cottage people fail to resist the Anglicization, in The Communication Cord the house falls on both people who are nostalgic and who are not, and in Volunteers the diggers cannot alter the fate with their creativity and imagination. For the Irish people, there may be no end to the quest for national identity, but it is essential that they stay where they are and go on with the quest, and it is this endless quest that best represents the Irish mentality. At the end of this paper, I hope to illustrate Friel’s strategies in representing Irishness with a song by the Irish rock band U2, who writes music not only for people in Ireland, but also for the world to see Ireland. In their 1987 album “The Joshua Tree,” they included the song “I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For,” which I think is well representative of Friel’s ideas, and of the Irish mentality as a whole:
“I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”
I have climbed the highest mountain I have run through the fields
Only to be with you Only to be with you I have run, I have crawled
I have scaled these city walls These city walls Only to be with you
But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for I have kissed honey lips
Felt the healing in her fingertips It burned like fire
This burning desire
I have spoke with the tongue of angels I have held the hand of a devil
It was warm in the night I was cold as a stone
But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for I believe in the kingdom come
Then all the colors will bleed into one Bleed into one
Well, yes, I’m still running You broke the bonds and you
Loosed the chains Carried the cross
And my shame All my shame You know I believe it
But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for
