family in irish drama, a lecture

7/28/2019 Family in Irish Drama, a lecture

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Family

In this lecture I shall speak about the relation in three plays between

family structures and patterns of authority. In all the cases I shall

consider, the figure of the artist is an important, if sometimes unexpected,

mediator within this structure. The plays I shall discuss are first,

Bailegangaire, then The Pillowman, and finally Faith Healer .

In Bailegangaire family is pivotal, as literal fact, as structure and as

pattern of authority. Mommo has been looked after by her

granddaughters, successively. She tells a story about her husband and

herself in displaced (third-person) form, a story in which the

‘misfortunes’ of her own family, chiefly the deaths of her many children,

nourish the catalogue of the dead at the climax of the laughing

competition that has been provoked in Bochtán. The story is itself a

displaced articulation of her guilt over the death of her third grandchild,

and perhaps over the death of her husband too, the Stranger of the story.

She conceives herself as telling the story to her three ‘foundlings’

(grandchildren) – their mother and father being dead. Being demented,

she does not recognize the two adult ‘survivors’. Simultaneously, she is

anticipating, in both hope and trepidation, the return of her father with his



‘big stick’. (‘That’s where security lies’, Mary comments [30].) Mommo,

therefore, in her confusion – and indeed because of her confusion – has

an intense simultaneous perception of herself as both grandmother, wife

and child. (‘Childlike’ [10] is the stage direction at a couple of moments.)

Comprehending nothing, she nonetheless comprehends in herself the

whole family. It is, as is affirmed in the last line of the play, a whole

‘fambly’ of strangers (75).

Mommo’s rich and disturbing delusions trigger a shift in family roles.

Mary is not a biological mother, but her position is that of a grandchild

mothering her grandmother. Dolly is a mother, and only two years

younger than Mary, yet she is the one who behaves most like an unruly,

erratic, panicked child. Thus, when they end up in one bed at the end, we

feel that there are three generations there, not two (as is actually the case

– with a middle generation missing). Dolly’s pregnancy, explicitly

anticipated in Mary’s last speech, represents a virtual fourth.

And yet. In some ways it is Dolly who is nearest to Mommo. Think of the

moment when, with Mommo embracing Dolly in recognition, Mary

leaves the room dejected, Dolly discloses to the uncomprehending

Mommo that she is in ‘terrible trouble’ (21). Dolly has the sharper

insight: she realizes that Mommo is guilty, though she doesn’t know the

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extent of that guilt. Dolly, like Mommo, unlike Mary, knows the

experience of marriage. In this sense she is intimate with the play’s deep

concerns, which are with patterns of authority within the family and the

relation of these to gender and gender roles.

On gender Mommo is clear: ‘Oh, men have their ways an’ women their

places an’ that is God’s plan, my bright ones’ (25). This is wisdom passed

down to the young ones. It comes in the context of the acknowledgement

of paternal authority. But it goes along with a certain slyness, an instinct

for strategy. Men can be of use, but a woman’s crying only reduces that

use. The ‘imagined children’ are advised, with a wink: ‘Men long-

married to tearful women are no use to them, my bright ones. But are apt

to get cross, and make matters worse, when they can’t see the solution’

(34). This is Mommo the manipulator, who is well in evidence both in the

action we see and, as the Stranger’s wife, in the story we hear. It is in

relation to this Mommo that we encounter the motif of silence. (This

motif is presented most explicitly through Mary’s poem, which she

recites, misquotes and disagrees with [31]: ‘Silences’ by Thomas Hardy.)

‘She knew how to use the weapon of silence’, Mommo says of the

Stranger’s Wife. But this using vitally includes knowing when to break

silence. And her interventions in the laughing competition are such

strategic breakages. At the very moment when they could have left

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Bochtán, at the beginning of the thaw, she remembers the forty years of

silence and is prompted to commit the Stranger to the competition. And

then:

P. 68 (‘And now Costello’s big hand … “That’s what I thought,” says

he.)

Even as he claims the suggestion for his own, the big man is ‘frikened’ by

the woman breaking silence. Well may he be, for the breakage is

prompted by forty years of marital frustration and resentment. She

inferred her husband ‘hated her’, and ‘she hated him too’. Mommo the

narrator ‘ growls’, ‘eyes fierce’. Her involvement is plain. In the story she

cannot be pacified, and, in the story, ‘there-was-none-would assuage-her’

(68).

Mommo’s hatred serves to focus the emotions of others. Hatred is Dolly’s

forte. Of her husband Stephen, she declares: ‘Jesus, how I hate him!’ And

then: ‘Jesus, how I hate them! Men!’ Moments later: ‘Jesus, how I hate

them! I hate her ( Mommo) – I hate this house – She hates you – I hate my

own new liquorice-all-sorts-coloured house […] She hates you! […] And

I hate you!’ She lays claim wildly to a monopoly on negative experience:

‘You don’t know terror, you don’t know hatred, you don’t know

desperation’ (57-58). Mary’s reply, a few moments later, is all the more

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effective for being said ‘ gently’: ‘She may hate me, you may hate me. But

I don’t hate her. I love her for what she’s been through, and she’s all that

I have’ (60). A moment later Dolly, the great hater, has to admit the truth

about herself: ‘I don’t hate anyone’ (61). These conjugations of the verb

‘to hate’ – and the love too, as we see – are contained, as it were, in

Mommo-Brigit’s feelings against, and feelings for, her husband.

The four interventions of the Stranger’s Wife in the story, these four

breakings of her silence if not always of the silence of Mahony’s bar, are

key moments because they subvert gender-roles. They are arrogations of

the right to ‘decree’. However the subversion is qualified by irony.

Firstly, the empowerment of the woman is found where we should least

expect it: not in the modern (1984) dimension of the play – in which

Mary returns home defeated and believing herself a ‘failure’, is

unacknowledged by her grandmother and on the point of leaving again;

and in which Dolly is beaten and abused, spied on by another woman,

hating men, hating herself, planning to offload her unwanted illegitimate

child. Not here, but in the traditional world of the story (apparently 1950,

but in effect a pre-modern semi-mythical dimension), where women have

‘the weapon of silence’ and little else but their divinely ordained ‘place’ –

this is where the subversion happens. (But then, of course, the more

definite the oppression, the more definite, the more powerful, the effect of

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the subversion.) Secondly, the ultimate outcome of the empowerment –

the prolonged sojourn at Bochtán, the laughing competition – is guilt at

the neglect of the children and the death of Tom, as well as at the death of

the Stranger-husband, the guilt which impels the unending narrative in

the first place. Thus the woman’s subversive transgression of the

boundary of silence is hedged around with ironies which threaten to

render it self-defeating.

Women in this play are not merely powerless. On the margins of the play

there are two women, whom we never see; each of these is a distant echo

of Mommo – one malign, the other benign. On the one hand there is

arguably the most powerful woman in (or around) the play, Dolly’s

hypocritical mother-in-law, ‘Old Sharp Eyes’, whose control over her

brutal son and brutalized daughter-in-law appears virtually absolute. On

the other hand there is her benign counterpart: the terminal patient Mary

remembers nursing long ago:

P. 66 (‘But one day she said … and the book’)

The promise of the blessing bears fruit a little later as the story moves

towards its end. Dolly rouses from sleep, and Mary, regarding her

‘ gravely’, assures her: ‘You’re going to be alright, Dolly’ (73). The

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blessing is thus handed on, by the childless Mary in the role of mother, to

the mother Dolly in her role as child, along the female line – handed on

just as the teapot, the brush and the book, these icons of genteel

domesticity, were handed on to Mary herself. From the terminal patient (a

passing surrogate for Mary’s missing mother), to Mary, to Dolly.

Mommo is outside that line, but she makes the assertion of it possible. In

fact, she is the occasion of its assertion. These are forms of maternal

authority.

The play’s most obvious transgression of authority is of course the

laughter at misfortunes. This is not just a transgression but a conscious

defiance, a rejection and a refusal of divine authority. Insofar as this

climax is engineered and fashioned by the Stranger’s Wife, and therefore

by Brigit-Mommo, it is a double transgression of authority. For the

gesture is against divine authority, but it is also against the querulous,

resigned theology of Mommo’s father: ‘’Twas an insolence at heaven’

(71) is his remark on the Bochtán incident. In this sense, the blasphemous

defiance of divine authority in the paradoxical gesture of tragic laughter is

simultaneously a stepping aside from paternal authority which Mommo,

child-woman as she now is, would find otherwise unimaginable. God is

defied, and father unheeded, in these Dionysian moments in Bochtán.

Now, as punishment, they ‘don’t laugh there any more’, and ‘Bochtán is

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forever Bailegangaire’ (73). The punishment ensures that the defiance

will not be forgotten; but then it was unforgettable in the positive sense: it

was a necessary release.

A release for the Bochtáns, but also for the teller of their story, who acts

out so much of their ambiguous laughter, and thus partakes of that past

laughter even in the present of the storytelling. For this is the importance

of performance. The guilt recognized in Mommo by Dolly is not merely

the guilt of the neglectful grandparent over the death of a child. The story,

as I’ve tried to suggest, is charged with partially hidden, largely inchoate

but nonetheless undeniable elements – of hatred and aggression,

transgression, loss, guilt and defiance. The story is a permitted utterance

of these otherwise impermissible things; they are allowed, and given,

heavily-mediated voice, but voice nonetheless. The fund and energy of

personal emotion to which the story gives access for the demented old

woman is made all the more evident by the third-person displacement of

the narrative: unmediated first-person ‘memory’ would not allow this.

Performance in the fullest sense, then – a narration which is also an acting

out – is an existential necessity of which the performer cannot know,

being past (in her own phrase about the still-laughing children of

Bailegangaire) ‘the age of reason’ (73). Sometimes, as in this case,

performance knows little of reason, and gives access to those areas that

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do not function by or through reason. It is, perhaps, the authority of

reason which is most truly transgressed here.

I would suggest that Bailegangaire is another portrait of the artist, though

evidently a very different one from Faith Healer . Consider the Romantic

view of the artist as radically unconscious. In his ‘Defence of Poetry’,

Shelley famously describes poets as ‘the trumpets which sing to battle,

but feel not what they inspire’, and ‘the words which express what they

understand not’ (Wu, 2nd ed. 1199). The poet doesn’t use the trumpet but

is the trumpet; doesn’t use words but is words. The poet is conceived as a

medium to the extent of being, at least potentially, almost completely

unconscious of what is being expressed. This is similar to the position of

Mommo. Her illness makes her unaware of her true surroundings (though

her sensory perception is just fine!); she lives mostly in and through her

story-performance. But in this story she comprehends – that is, she

embraces, includes, without understanding, yet all the more thoroughly

for that – the family of which she is part, together with its woes and

troubles. She is the unwitting vessel or conduit through whom resolution

for all of them can be approached. Odd as it may seem, therefore, this

sick old woman takes on the authority of Shelley’s ‘unacknowledged

legislator’.

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All four of the plays we have read so far are haunted, even obsessed, by

children in peril, children threatened, dead or dying. The danger(s) to

children reflect on family role(s), for it is less strangers than parents or

responsible carers who are concerned in the dangers. (One of the most

telling passages of Bailegangaire is Mommo’s description of one

particular ‘misfortune’: the disposal of the bodies of unwanted,

unbaptized children in the lisheen [water-meadow] during the blackness

of the country night. In passing, the frenzied Dolly even seems to raise

this possibility for her unborn baby.) In The Pillowman every element of

the play is informed by this concern with children in peril.

Ought this to be thought of as a theme? In a mode of parody characteristic

of this play, Detective Tupolski refers to this as the ‘theme’ of Katurian,

the writer who is the subject of his interrogation: ‘some poor little kid

gets fucked up’ (15), usually by parent(s) or carer(s) or someone

solicitous of the child. Among Katurian’s fables, this is true of ‘The Little

Jesus’, ‘The Little Apple Men’, ‘The Writer and the Writer’s Brother’,

‘The Town on the River’, ‘The Little Green Pig’ and ‘The Pillowman’. In

the lives of the play’s characters, the theme figures in the treatment of

both Katurian and Michal by their parents, Katurian’s killing of Michal

and Ariel’s killing of his father. Tupolski drifts into its orbit with the

death of his son (a matter of paternal neglect). His story about the little

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Chinese boy and the old man on the railway fits in comfortably with

Katurian’s fables as a positive treatment of the theme.

We can’t miss this ‘theme’: that is the point. It’s obvious to the point of

parody. It’s as though the playwright is saying: no prizes for spotting this;

in fact, if you haven’t, you’re a half-wit. Pattern, then, as a mode of

reading, is here deliberately and self-consciously foregrounded. This

move crucially shifts our focus on the play. It shifts it away from

interpretation and towards the conditions of interpretation. Perhaps this is

predictable in a play about (apparently about) the relation of art to reality.

We are refocused on what causes us to think it means what we suppose it

means. The play invites us in (or, perhaps better, it lures us in) and entoils

us in conundra: it is clever, playful, sardonic, facetious, ironic, irreverent.

It always has its eye on us and our prospective responses; it plays with

these, twisting and turning, lulling us into a seemingly secure position

then springing something on us, flashing mirrors within mirrors and

keeping coolly out of reach. Our author is a tricky customer, as likely to

lead us up garden paths or to sell us a pup as Katurian is his inquisitors or

they him. We are being played with too, though in a very different spirit

from the lethal play of inquisitor and prisoner.

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The playwright’s choice of children in peril as subject-matter is a

characteristically provocative move: it sets up the most emotive

responses, and thereby enables the juxtaposition of an ironic, playful,

manner with unignorably emotional and (by general concensus) deeply

serious matter. It is a deliberate choice to juggle with hand-grenades,

daring us to assume that they aren’t live. And all the time we feel

ourselves being watched for our reactions. This is the playwright-as-

clever-teenager. But this one really is clever, and not just big. The shocks

here are not isolated sensations but part of a carefully-calibrated scheme

of electrode-jolts. Of course we adapt (it’s not physical pain, after all); we

expect the trickiness after a while; but then we expect the writer to expect

that, and he expects us (we expect) to expect him expecting it. And so on.

We can never quite situate ourselves comfortably in this relation.

Fundamental to the play is an analogy between the kind of art it is and the

subjects it deals with. This analogy concerns questions of authority, and

although it involves the alignment of something very important indeed

with something much less important, it will help us to think through what

is going on in the play. Any story about the harming of children by

parents or carers must invoke ideas of a betrayal of trust and an abuse of

authority. It is hard to conceive of more serious examples of such betrayal

and abuse. In the playful realm of art, what exists between playwright and

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audience (or between author and reader) is also a matter of trust and of

degrees of authority: our trust that he, as author, will exercise his author-

ity according to established conventions – that is, according to what has

been established as an unspoken agreement between playwright and

audience. In the plot of the play, Katurian, once he realizes that his

brother Michal has committed the crimes which he (Katurian) is being

questioned about, tries to outflank and outwit the totalitarian authorities

so as (ultimately) to preserve his stories. Even in the (progressively more

and more inevitable) event of his execution, his stories will therefore

survive. In the end their survival comes actually to depend upon his

execution, for he surrenders a solution to the murders (thus scapegoating

himself) in order to appease his captors, who in any case always have the

power to destroy his stories at a whimsy. The solution, his statement of

confession, is of course a fiction, another written fiction. It contains facts

(his murder of Michal, and of their parents), but then so does ‘The Writer

and the Writer’s Brother’, squeamish though Katurian is about

autobiography in his stories. So Katurian makes another fiction in order

to save his existing fictions. (Shades, perhaps, of Dolly’s fevered plans in

the Murphy play – a ‘saga’ that merely ensures the bigger saga goes on.)

Meanwhile the author ities, his interrogators, are also in a sense artists, as

they use, along with coercion, fiction: they place him in a locked room

and describe what they have done elsewhere and what they will do, what

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is in the next room, what they have done with his brother, and so on,

when none of this can be independently corroborated. They stage, blood

and all, the beating of Katurian’s brother – with Michal’s collaboration.

And all this fiction is elaborated in order to extract … what? In order to

extract the truth. I have used the word ‘fiction’; but if you were about to

say that I may as well have used the word ‘lies’, you are pursuing an

identification which the play would be happy to entertain. More of that in

a moment.

Still, in this hall of mirrors we are not completely abandoned. We can

hang on to the basic situation. When Katurian learns about the fiction of

Michal’s torture, he begins to catch on: ‘Why are we being so stupid?’ he

asks himself, ‘Why are we believing everything they’re telling us? […]

This is just like storytelling’ (39). From this he deduces the ‘[f]irst rule of

storytelling. “Don’t believe everything you read in the papers.”’ (40) But

when he twigs that the murder of the children was in the papers (‘Who

runs the papers?’), he is obliged to pursue this rule to its logical end:

Oh my God. ‘A writer in a totalitarian state is interrogated

about the gruesome content of his short stories and their

similarities to a number of child-murders that are happening in

his town. A number of child-murders … that aren’t actually

happening at all.’ ( Pause.) I wish I had a pen now. I could do a

decent story out of this. If they weren’t going to execute us inan hour. (41)

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This is the point at which the fiction turns inside out (as it were). The

imprisoned writer perceives his own situation (in the third person) within

a fiction and contemplates its promise as material for a fiction of his own.

In so doing he designs to turn the play he is in into a story.

Thankfully (for us, anyway) it isn’t quite like this, of course. The children

really were murdered. (Interestingly, we cannot disbelieve the artless

Michal – precisely because he is art-less.) These were copycat killings;

the cat was Katurian’s brother and he, Michal the copycat, copied

Katurian. But what the art-less Michal copied was art. It would seem that,

on this evidence, as another Irish writer, the lineal artistic ancestor of

McDonagh, told us, ‘Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life

(Wilde, Works 982). Oscar Wilde’s ‘final revelation’ in The Decay of

Lying was ‘that Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper

aim of Art’ (992). McDonagh might agree – though his idea of beauty

would be different from Wilde’s.

In smothering his brother, the artist Katurian becomes a pillow-man in a

rather more literal, if less fantastic sense, than the one in his story, even if

the paradoxically benign purpose – to spare Michal further suffering – is

the same as that of the pillowman in the story. This is the artist as

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pillowman. But then almost all of the central figures within Katurian’s

fables are artist-figures. Almost all of them are outsider figures, and some

of them are saviour figures – even if paradoxically so, as they save by

killing or disabling, as do the Pied Piper in ‘The Tale of the Town on the

River’ and the Pillowman himself. The story that gives the play its title

involves a redemption through annihilation. It also involves a potential

turning back of time and the possibility of alternative courses of life,

alternative endings. In this it mirrors a repeated trope of the play itself,

and in this sense can be said to contain the play in which it is contained, a

genuine post-modern mise-en-âbyme. Act I scene 2 acts out an alternative

(‘real life’) ‘upbeat’ ending to the autobiographical story of ‘The Writer

and the Writer’s Brother’, in which Katurian pillow-smothers his own

parents in retribution for their treatment of his brother. Act II scene 2 then

enacts the story of ‘The Little Jesus’, leading us to assume, with Katurian,

that Michal has copied this story in his third murder. But then Act III

provides an ‘alternative ending’ to this episode, as it is the benign ‘Little

Green Pig’ story which turns out to have been the model, and there is a

happy ending to that bit, at least. The idea of alternative ending enters

into the action of the play itself at its end when the dead Katurian rises up

and narrates potential alternative fates for both the dead Michal (who is

also in living attendance) and Katurian’s otherwise doomed stories.

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Levels of fiction and reality are here happily confused, and so are we

likely to be, despite the upbeat ‘alternative’ ending.

Art, then, is connected with the possibility of alternative outcomes. But if

the Pillowman is taken as a type of the artist, it seems that these

alternatives can only be created by acts of destruction. That art is

somehow complicit with destruction and death is implicit in all three of

these plays (and is indeed a not-uncommon assertion in twentieth century,

post-Nietzschean, European culture). The final turn of the screw in this

particular play comes at the end of the title-story, when the Pillowman

offers the familiar option of death to his own younger self. As he relaxes

into self-annihilation, fading away as he watches his younger self burn,

he hears something unexpected:

P. 47 (‘The last thing he heard … would be conducted entirely alone’)

What we have here is something familiar from Faith Healer ( where

Teddy asserts that Frank ‘had suffered all that she [Grace] had suffered’

[43]). It is the artist as scapegoat. (This, of course, is what Katurian also

does with Michal’s guilt, though for strategic reasons.) The suffering of

the saviour and the victims is reciprocal; it doesn’t disappear. It is a

quantum of energy in circulation. It is taken on by the Pillowman, who is

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therefore like a big Jesus, not just a little one: he suffers for them. But

when he sheds it by his own suicide it returns to its origins, the original

potential sufferers.

The artist in this fable, therefore, is a figure of quite awesome authority. It

is an authority which is imaged by his being always in the parental

position. Consider the dramatic context of the telling of this story: the

‘backward’ Michal’s responses – his demands and requests, his reception

and reactions, his gripes and his pleasures – are those of the child. He is

finally killed, like his parents, like Ariel’s father. The story-teller, parent

or not, is in the parental position. (This was true in Bailegangaire too, of

course.) He can exercise power by changing what ‘really’ happened, or

by giving alternative versions (just as mummy and daddy can always

make everything alright). But then if his aesthetic commitment to his art

is total, the authority itself, which is essentially a moral authority, is

negated. ‘The only duty of a storyteller is to tell a story’ (7), proclaims

Katurian in an act of self-preservation. Compare Oscar Wilde again:

‘Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. […] No artist has

ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable

mannerism of style. […]. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an

art. […] All art is quite useless’ (17). This from the author of ‘The Selfish

Giant’, a model (one assumes) for Katurian’s fables, in which the

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eponymous figure is saved from his selfishness by a Christlike child with

the stigmata. It is a dangerous form of play, one bound up with posturing

cleverness and paradox, in which art is simultaneously everything and

nothing. For this reason it makes us intensely aware of the question of

authority in art, through the figures of parents – or substitute parents –

and children.

In fact, this play gives us not just alternative endings but alternative

models of salvific authority. On the one side there is what we might term

the surveillance model, as embodied by the wise old Chinese man in

Tupolski’s story, ‘the Little Deaf Boy on the Big Long Railroad Tracks.

In China’ (86-9). In this model the wise man intervenes calmly and

discretely from above – literally, in this case, from his ‘strange old tower’

(87) – and remains there, unaffected, and even unmoved, by his own

successful intervention. On the other side, there is the artistic model,

represented in some form in all of Katurian’s stories, but typified by the

story of the Pillowman himself: he intervenes and saves, even though that

salvation means premature death for the child. But at the moment of his

own death, the essential truth of his transactions is suddenly borne in

upon him: his intervention had involved his own death (and therefore his

own life) in the pain of all these lives he had relieved. Despite

appearances, he was never above them or apart from them: all the time he

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was involving himself, taking on (as it were) the pain of the virtual lives

which all these children never got to lead. As a life- (and death-) artist,

the Pillowman can effect alternative endings, but he himself cannot

escape the endings he helped others to escape. This, the ‘artistic’ model,

projects what we recognize as the postmodern position of the artist (as

indeed of any individual subject): never above or outside; always inside,

involved, a prey to irony, and truly effective, gaining the status of

authority, only because of that. This model represents what the play

finally refers to as ‘the spirit of the thing’ (104): tricksy, paradoxical, hard

to grasp (the story-teller, as in Faith Healer , speaking from beyond death

and contradicting his own final story with a ‘fact’ that feels more like

fiction) – it is all these things, but yet not without affection, and not

without compassion. When the revived Michal says, at the very end of the

play, ‘I think I’m going to really like my brother’s stories’ (103), we hear

only affection. That suffering is necessary for art is a given of the play.

But it is not the artist who suffers. It is his split-off double, here

approving suffering for the sake of art, approving everything for the sake

of art, as Katurian Katurian himself does.

The conception of the artist in Faith Healer is close to that in the fable of

the Pillowman: in each case the central figure is both an artist figure and a

scapegoat. Questions of faith and authority are, as we noted in the lecture

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on Home, also evident here – even more so than in the McDonagh play.

These are effected not by post-modern play (as in The Pillowman) but by

the ordering of false or perspectival narratives and by the theatrical

experience which this produces.

It seems that the analogy we noted in The Pillowman, between narrative

authority and parental authority, is present at some level in Faith Healer

too, though it is far more embedded (as this is a more difficult play). The

failure of Frank and Grace to become parents is the most harrowing

memory, for Teddy if not for either of them. But their own parents are a

potent presence in memory too. Frank’s memories of his parents are

triggered by the narration of his return, even though these memories, he

says, ‘evoked nothing’ (10). What cross his mind are random fleeting

images of freedom and imprisonment, of contentment and social

deference (10). In his last monologue there is another image of his father,

this time of a man pathetically self-assertive in the company of a friend,

and equally pathetically competitive with his little son. Again Frank

asserts repeatedly that the memory returned, at this vital point in his life,

‘for no reason at all. […] Nothing to it’ (54). Like the other ‘haphazard

memory’, it is one that reveals paternal authority as a sham. Grace points

out that Frank repeatedly remakes those around him according to his

needs, and that at various times his father has been ‘a stonemason and a

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gardener and a bus-driver and a guard and a musician’ (19). The current

version has him a guard [a policeman]. His ‘memory’ of a visit home

twelve years previously is perhaps another fictional screen (to use a

Freudian term). He went home for the death of his mother, so he says (an

exact inversion of the circumstance of his own becoming the father of a

dead child) – even though Grace points out that his mother had been

‘dead for years’ (20). It was, she asserts, his father’s death that

occasioned that return. It is a scenario of non-recognition and of lateness.

His father has to be told who he is, and the mother’s death took place

seventy minutes prior to his arrival. Father and son both cry easily in

relief: a unique moment, in this play, of familial congruence, if not of

fellowship. And it is one in which neither man assumes the position of

authority. Frank’s reaction of panic when he sees his mother’s dead body

brings forth the identical reaction to Teddy’s when Teddy witnesses the

miraculous singing of Grace (‘as if the song’s just sort of rising out of her

by itself’) in the Ballybeg bar, feeling excluded at precisely the moment

of his intensest apprehension. Frank: ‘O my Jesus, what am I going to

do?’ (9) Teddy (addressing himself): ‘Oh my Jesus … What are you

going to do?’ (47). Teddy’s thoughts are immediately followed by his

description of the seemingly private gaze of Frank which cured him of his

panic. The shared tears of father and son supply the healing moment for

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Frank. Vitally, perhaps, the father here is not in a dominant position: the

sharing is on a basis of equality, not privilege.

And yet, for all we know, Frank has invented the scene of bereavement

between himself and his father. The phrasal echo between him and Teddy

is clearly deliberate on Friel’s part, but nonetheless puzzling. The

moments have the same rhythm: each character registers intensely his

own separation from those who might be closest to him, but is then

healed by a spontaneous gesture of contact (though these gestures are

very different). That rhythm, of wounded separation and curative

connection, has to be repeated, perhaps. Even if it means inventing, Frank

has to repeat it, for his own existential good. For his existence, as Grace

suggests, depends upon his ability to remake others according to his own

needs. And this is profoundly involved with his sense of himself as an

artist. Grace recalls:

P. 19 (Even the people … as if he had never existed’)

At the end of her monologue Grace becomes desperate again for Frank’s

healing, declaring: ‘O my God I’m one of his fictions too, but I need him

to sustain me in that existence’ (28). This is not post-modern tricksiness

but existential crisis: the price of her love for Frank (and Teddy’s too) is

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reliance on a narrative authority which is itself radically unstable and

rootless. It is life without father.

Where Frank’s relation to his father and to the paternal is enigmatic,

Grace’s is very clear. Frank’s reinvention of his father as a Guard situates

him within the legal system but on the lowest rung; Grace’s father is

towards the top: the retired, disabled and dying Anglo-Irish judge in the

decaying Big House. He is the image of the Terrible Father, who can

hardly be escaped even if rejected. According to Grace, the act of judging

shapes his personal, paternal behaviour as well as symbolising his

dignified public position. Grace’s long account of her return home stands

at the centre of her monologue. It is a scenario of defiance, and of a

rejection of paternal authority, together with all that characterizes it –

social class and culture, family, upbringing, education, professional

calling. The old word would be ‘breeding’. As in Frank’s account of his

encounter with his grieving father, it starts with a phase of non-

recognition. Grace’s father is authority with a vengeance; her rejection of

him and all he stands for (though standing is now apparently beyond his

physical capabilities) is absolute, as is her proud commitment to her

‘mountebank’. Yet, although the formulaic words of the judge on the

bench are uncontrollably ‘spilling out of him’ (22), her rejection is silent.

She says this – about what she didn’t say:

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P. 23 (‘I wanted to curse him … I just walked away’)

This is another silence, in this speech-filled play of nonetheless

unavoidable silences.

Do Frank, Grace and Teddy then form a displaced family of some kind,

in respect of the structures of authority? No, not at all. If we feel that

Grace’s rejection of her father is heroic, it is because it constitutes

something positive: a commitment, not just to another man, but to a life

which, brittle and doomed though it is, is a life lived outside conventional

structures of authority. Certainly Frank is the authority-figure, yet he is so

radically riven with, and driven by, doubt about his gift, that it comes to

control him and not he it. His authority, paradoxically, is founded upon,

and is subject to, chance. This is the chance that Frank, Grace and Teddy

have openly embraced in their itinerant way of life, and this is the chance

Frank is renouncing as he walks to his death.

Although not as clearly and explicitly as in Bailegangaire and The

Pillowman, family in Faith Healer stands, then, at the centre of the play’s

concern with authority. The correlation between narrative authority and

familial authority is not so apparent here, perhaps not even so strong, but

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the final indication of the difficult significance of family comes in

Frank’s final monologue. Between his account of the ‘Dionysian night’

(11) in the Ballybeg bar and the narration of his murder he recalls four

thoughts or memories. The first is ‘of Teddy asleep upstairs, at peace and

reconciled at last’ (53); the next two are of parents – his own and Grace’s.

Before the ‘haphazard memory’ of his father’s pub-encounter with

Eamon Boyle at the horse fair in Ballinasloe – ‘Be Jaysus, Boyle, it’ll be

hard for him to beat his aul fella!’ – comes the story of his only encounter

with Grace’s mother, ‘on her way back to hospital’. In Grace’s brief

absence, her mother confesses to suffering ‘from nerves’ but goes on to

speak of things that are ‘much, much worse’: her husband’s obsession

with order and Grace’s need for devotion (‘that’s worse still’, she says).

Before Grace returns she confronts Frank with, ‘And what do you want?’

‘And I never heard her voice again’ (all 54). It is this flash of maternal

insight that we are invited to think of when Frank comments on his fourth

and last memory – of Grace’s calm, smiling (and not at all ‘demented’)

assurance that if he ever left her she would kill herself. It is, for him, a

kind of revelation. Grace’s look is, as her mother’s was, directly at him,

but with face slightly averted, and smiling. ‘But’, he says, ‘whatever way

she looked straight at me, without fully facing me, I recognised then for

the first time that there was more of her mother than her father in her; and

I realised that I would have to be with her until the very end’ (55). ‘For

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the first time’ is the phrase which also comes in the story of his father and

Boyle: ‘for the first time I saw his mouth was filled with rotten teeth’

(54). Both moments carry the force of revelation. The one shows the

father to be other than ideal, to be, indeed, fallible and pathetic. The other

identifies Grace with her mother, the inescapable parent, and

acknowledges their fated connection.

The memories really do feel haphazard, yet they are powerfully resonant.

Frank sees through his father, in an implicit rejection; and he has already

rejected, narratively, the position of father for himself. His narrative does

not even acknowledge the birth of the dead son. He similarly rejects the

reality of his marriage to Grace. His death comes in the aftermath of a

celebration of marriage – the symbolic founding of a family unit. Grace

has rejected her father. They have cut loose, therefore, from the snares of

family. Yet both are haunted by the insight of the strange, disturbed

mother, Grace’s mother, and this insight is suddenly felt by Frank to

guarantee the linkage between them ‘until the very end’. And it is only

then that he moves towards his ‘very end’.

We are invited to contemplate this shabby self-deluder as a hero of the

spirit, paying the tragic toll exacted of the scapegoat, and paying it, as the

scapegoat always does, by his own consent. Perhaps this is because

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Frank’s mediation of his own life, and the lives of those around him,

through fiction, affords brief glimpses, for all of them, of a freedom,

delivered by a self-consuming authority, beyond any authority. This

freedom is hedged about and haunted by the ghosts of parents, the

representatives of the authority which has to be rejected but whose voice

will never quite be stilled.

family in irish drama, a lecture

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