Brian Friel and the Scene of Writing: Reading Give Me Your Answer, Do!

Abstract

Brian Friel's thoroughgoing concern with the nature of language has been attributed to several factors: his need to investigate the means of his own art; his political and cultural investment in a language inextricably bound up with Ireland's colonial history; and the impact on his work of Martin Heidegger's and George Steiner's views on language. In Friel's oeuvre, language is the field where all the practices that constitute the social totality and the self take place, so that narratives and discourses about ourselves and the world are constituted by language. Within this context of Heideggerian linguistic epistemology, Friel focuses on a language that is inventive, unstable, and speculative in its relation to reality, a sense of language as a slippery, ambiguous, and polysemous signifying system fully investigated in another of Friel's principal sources, George Steiner's After Babel (1975). Written language specifically is always defined by virtue of its untrustworthiness in conveying the reality to which it refers, a situation that has led to the conclusion that in Friel's work, "[w]riting and failure go hand in hand". The scripting of reality leaves a lot to be desired, since each act of writing leaves something that escapes writing. The "same" event is approached from different perspectives, constructing various contradictory, provisional, or interested narratives, a theme illustrated in several of Friel's plays, including Living Quarters (1977), The Aristocrats (1979), and Making History (1988).