Impure and Complicated Truth: Brian Friel's Faith Healer and John McGahern's "The Country Funeral"

Abstract

Brian Friel and John McGahern belong to a generation of Irish writers that came of age well after the Irish Literary Revival; Friel was born in 1929 and McGahern in 1934. Oddly, little work has been done to examine affinity that existed between the two writers—despite their long friendship, and despite the admiration that Friel has openly expressed for McGahern’s work. Two texts that provide illuminating points of contact between the two writers are Friel’s play Faith Healer (1979) and McGahern’s short story “The Country Funeral,” which first appeared as the final story in his Collected Stories (1992). In general, contemporary criticism disdains the notion of “influence,” in which one work is characterized as derivative from an earlier one. Julia Kristeva distinguished “intertextuality” from influence in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (1980). There, she affirmed that intertexuality is the passing of meaning from a writer to a reader through the mediation of “codes” derived from other texts. Essentially, intertextuality, according to Kristeva, means the implied presence of a text inside another text—rather than the more obvious, overt presence that “influence” denotes. The formal and thematic similarities between the two works—though perhaps not immediately apparent—are such that Faith Healer can be regarded as an important intertext through which to read McGahern’s story. The authors’ treatment and representation of memory, place, and art in their respective works suggest useful and illuminating points of comparison. Both of these literary products probe the unstable nature of memory, and also consider the intimate connection between a person and the physical space he inhabits. At the same time, both writers champion subjective, imaginative truth over objective reality. Both writers refuse to allow their narratives to descend into purely mimetic, realistic accounts of people, place, and identity. Thus, Friel and McGahern in