Critical Remembering: Reading Nostalgia in Contemporary Irish Drama and Film

Canadian Journal of Irish StudiesCanadian Association of Irish Studies

Critical Remembering: Reading Nostalgia in Contemporary Irish Drama and FilmAuthor(s): Len FalkensteinSource: The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 25, No. 1/2 (Jul. - Dec., 1999), pp. 264-276Published by: Canadian Journal of Irish StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25515274 .

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Critical Remembering: Reading Nostalgia in

Contemporary Irish Drama and Film

LEN Falkenstein

One of the first images in Into the West, the 1993 Irish film co-created by screenwriter Jim Sheridan and director Mike Newell, is that of an old traveler

driving a traditional horsedrawn caravan along a rural Irish lane. It's a postcard, Tourist Board image that evokes a chronologically indeterminate moment lifted

from a generic Irish past: while there is a chance the scene could be contemporary, it initially seems most strongly to suggest the 1940s or 50s, but could equally be

taken from the earlier 20th Century, or perhaps even the 19th Century. The sense of

quaintness and of historical distance that the image first evokes is broken, however, and the film's temporal setting fixed, when within moments a huge jumbo jet screams rudely into the sky directly behind the old man, shattering the pastoral

tranquility of the scene: as we soon learn, it is, in fact, the 1990s.

The juxtaposition of images of an older, simpler, rural Ireland with those of

today's modern, metropolitan, technologically-advanced Republic central to this

opening sequence is repeated throughout the film as part of Sheridan's implicit

depiction of Ireland as a country that has been traumatized by a violent cultural/his

torical rupture and that is consequently badly in need of spiritual and cultural

regeneration. Into the West both diagnoses this perceived national malaise and

offers a solution in its allegorical central plotline, which depicts the spiritual healing of one dispossessed family of travelers, the Reillys, a restoration notably brought about by the family's return to its roots. Once "king" of the travelers, Papa Reilly has abandoned his people in grief after the death of his wife and fallen into a life of alcoholic despair in a crime and drug-ridden neighbourhood of inner-city Dublin, where he lives in a bleak, decaying concrete apartment tower with his two young sons. When a magical white horse named Tir na nog (the name of the land of eternal

youth in Irish mythology) appears and spirits them out of the city and into Ireland's rural West, the boys, who have been raised on a diet of American movies and

television, initially view their adventure within the context of a Hollywood western

rather than with an awareness of its parallels to some of the stories from Irish legend that their traveler grandfather has told them. As the boys journey into the Irish

heartland, they begin to experience the culture they have been denied, while at the same time their father pursues them into the West, bringing him back in contact

with his people. After he is reunited with the boys at the grave of his wife, their

mother, Papa decides to rejoin the travelers, and the family vows never to return to the city again.

As this capsule plot summary suggests, Into the West resuscitates, albeit with a nineties spin, a number of the tropes central to the romantic nationalist ideology



Reading Nostalgia 265

that dominated official political and cultural discourse in Ireland for decades until

quite recently: the notion of the West as the country's spiritual and cultural

wellspring, the demonizing of urban existence as an impure and invalid expression of Irishness, and, as a corollary, the celebration of the peasant (or in this case the

traveler) who lives in harmony with the land in noble poverty, unlike the grubby materialists grasping after wealth and status in the fallen city. In doing so, the film

is one manifestation of a significant, although by no means naively simplistic, trend towards nostalgia that has emerged in contemporary Irish culture. My purpose is to offer a reading of this phenomenon that argues that its origins lie in the cultural and economic changes that transformed Ireland beginning in the late 1950s, that charts an evolution in formulations of and responses to nostalgia within the culture since that time, and, finally, that advances some provisional conclusions. My intention is not to suggest that the mere existence of expressions of nostalgia in

contemporary Irish culture is particularly unprecedented or unusual in itself ?

nostalgia does, of course, appear to be common to most times and cultures ? but rather to analyze certain manifestations of nostalgia peculiar to a specific moment in Irish history as the product of a set of unique historical, cultural and demographic factors, and as the constituency primarily of a specific generation of Irish writers. The growth and evolution of the nostalgia phenomenon can arguably be understood as intricately bound up with a tension that has been central to Irish cultural praxis of the last thirty to forty years

? one manifested in part in a generational divide in

contemporary Irish writing ? between the competing demands and impulses of a

post-colonialism that as part of an ongoing interrogation of issues of national

identity seeks in some form to forge a reconnection to lost origins, and a postmod ernism that rejects the foundational premises of such an aesthetic. In developing these arguments, my approach has been to sketch the evolution of the contemporary nostalgia phenomenon through brief readings of a handful of contemporary Irish

plays and films, culminating in a more extensive discussion of Brian Friel's

Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), probably the best known, and for my purposes most

compelling, example of certain current trends and complexities in Irish repre sentations of nostalgia.

As is also true of several other contemporary Irish plays and films, Dancing at

Lughnasa evokes a nostalgia that might be defined as a personal or collective

longing for a sense of wholeness or authenticity

? personal, cultural, national

?

located in the past, a longing that in some ways appears ideologically coded as

fundamentally reactionary, but which is equally almost always cognizant of the

futility of any attempt to recover what has been lost. A partial list of other recent Irish films and plays that might, according to these terms, be described as nostalgic could include, in film (in addition to Into the West), Sheridan's The Field (1991),

Gillies Mackinnon's The Playboys (1992), and John Sayles's The Secret of Roan Inish (1994), and, in theatre, Thomas Kilroy's The Madame Mac Adam Travelling Theatre (1991) and Hugh Leonard's Moving (1992) in addition to Friel's Lughnasa



266 The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies

(also recently adapted for the screen) and Wonderful Tennessee (1993). The

popularity many of these films and dramas have attained, together with the sheer

proliferation of manifestations of nostalgia on the Irish stage and screen, seems at

least somewhat surprising, given that the era that is the object of the nostalgic gaze most frequently in these works, the mid-century period of the 1930s, 40s and 50s, has come to be regarded with a considerable degree of infamy. As Luke Gibbons

has succinctly observed, for many, if not most, Irish men and women, these years

"[have] come to be seen as the Irish version of the Dark Ages, a period in which

the enclosure of Irish culture, so avidly sought by advanced nationalists since the

beginning of the Revival, was finally achieved" (954). Under the stewardship of Eamon de Valera, during these decades successive nationalist governments, heavily influenced by the Roman Catholic Church, pursued a series of notorious, well

documented economically and culturally isolationist policies (among them high tariff barriers, official neutrality during World War II, and vigorously prosecuted

censorship laws) that, coupled with a strongly anti-urban and anti-industrial bias,

conspired to make Ireland one of the poorest and perhaps the most closed and

inward-looking of western democracies. In the words of Thomas Kilroy, this, the

Ireland of his youth, was a society scarred by "isolation, repressiveness and

dreariness. An Ireland, then, that was a self-isolating place, timidly holding itself

inwards while the modem world rushed by, headlong and frantic, outside" ("A Generation" 135). Not surprisingly, then, the early works of Kilroy, along with those of Hugh Leonard and Brian Friel, all of whom became active as dramatists between the late 1950s and late 1960s, were frequently harshly critical of the

deprivations and repressions that had been the stuff of life in de Valera's staunchly Catholic and nationalist Republic for decades.

But even while Leonard and Friel, in particular, were writing plays that were

politically and psychologically located in the Ireland of de Valera, albeit not

temporally, the social, cultural, and political faces of the country were being fundamentally transformed, a process speeded and impelled by the incursion of

foreign popular culture via radio, cinema, and especially the new medium of

television, and by the sweeping economic reforms instituted by the government of Sean Lemass beginning in the late fifties, which invigorated the dormant Irish

economy in large part through the courting of foreign capital and new government incentives to native industry. As a consequence of urbanization and the opening of Ireland's economy and culture to foreign influences, the stiflingly homogenous vision of Irishness that had dominated official political and cultural discourse in Ireland for decades could no longer be sustained. Post-reforms conceptions of Irishness began to reflect the growing heterogeneity of an Ireland that, while still traditional in many respects, was eagerly embracing both American and British

popular culture and American-style capitalism, and in the process adopting the materialistic values which de Valera had fulminated against as contrary to the spirit of the ascetic brand of Catholic Irish nationalism he sought to promote. Within a




generation, Ireland had become prosperous, outward-looking, and secularized to

degrees scarcely imaginable scant years earlier. By the mid- to late sixties, Kilroy, Leonard, and Friel, in concert with other Irish writers, had begun to address the

transforming shape of the culture in their dramas, portraying the new reality of Irish life as a condition of uneasy suspension between a traditional past and an Ameri

canized postmodern future.

In responding to the new social formation with a marked sense of uncertainty and ambivalence, these dramatists reflected a popular sentiment within the nation.

Not surprisingly, the transformations of Irish society and culture were and have been widely experienced, at both an individual and collective level, as disorienting, even traumatic, as seen in the frequency with which terms such as "discontinuity," "disruption," and "transition" have been invoked in theoretical assessments of

post-de Valera Ireland. Richard Kearney has linked the changes to what he calls

contemporary Ireland's "transitional crisis" (14), a "conflict between the claims of tradition and modernity" that has been marked by a "prevailing sense of disconti

nuity, the absence of a coherent identity, the breakdown of inherited ideologies and

beliefs, the insecurities of fragmentation" (9). Fintan O'Toole has similarly argued that the changes fractured the notion of Ireland as a "unified concept" (Jesse James

12), forcing Irish writers to confront and record a new, variegated society and culture:

What the economic revolution of the sixties meant to Irish literature was ... a removal of the cultural reference points which

had shaped its earlier period.... in the Ireland of the sixties and

after, it was precisely the fixed cultural notions which were being called into question. New class forces, new divisions of urban and rural, new consumer choices were making themselves felt in

Ireland, so that 'Ireland' itself, as a fixed and coherent notion, ceased to exist, either in social life or in literature. What we are

dealing with in contemporary Irish literature is a series of vari ations on Ireland, a series of individual responses to discontinu

ity, disruption, and disunity. ("Saints and Silicon" 22)

Desmond Bell has framed his analysis of the same transformative period in Irish cultural history in terms of a divide between modernism and postmodernism, positing that owing to the rapidity of the changes, Ireland "never really experienced a form of socially engaged modernism" (228), but instead "prematurely entered the

post-modern era" (229), leapfrogging over modernism in the transition from a traditional to a postmodern society. Building on this premise, it might further be

argued that the speed and enormity of the changes magnified the disorienting effects of postmodernism's effacement of markers of cultural difference and historicity in a society which had for centuries been inward-looking and obsessed with the past, resulting, perhaps inevitably, in what Bell has called "a provincial flight into

nostalgia ... at the cultural level" (229).




A similar conception of the relationship between nostalgia and postmodernism has been advanced by Fredric Jameson. Postmodernism, Jameson suggests, has

been characterized by "the disappearance of a sense of history, the way in which

our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual

change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social formations have

had in one way or another to preserve" ("Postmodernism" 125). For Jameson, this

"weakening of historicity" is part of "the new depthlessness" (Postmodernism 6) that distinguishes postmodernism, and nostalgia, then, which he has defined in part as "the desperate attempt to appropriate a missing past," is a "collective and social"

(Postmodernism 19) response to the process of dehistoricization, an attempt to recover or compensate for the past that is missing, those traditions that have been

obliterated. The gesture is generally both futile and facile, however, as the "true"

past cannot, of course, be recovered, and, furthermore, typically the object of

nostalgic longing is not any "authentic" past, but rather various examples of

commodified historical simulacra: representations of the past created in the present and marketed, in keeping with the "cultural logic of late capitalism," for mass

consumption. (Following Plato and Jean Baudrillard, Jameson defines the simula crum as "the identical copy for which no original has ever existed" [Postmodernism 18].)

Although Jameson's theories derive primarily from his observations of the American context, his analysis of nostalgia as postmodern phenomenon can be seen as highly applicable to the case of contemporary Ireland; indeed, because Ireland's

passage into the postmodern era has been so telescoped and disorienting, and because Ireland's has been a culture so steeped in tradition and history (owing largely to its troubled colonial and post-colonial history), one in which remember

ing has been ascribed such critical importance, the processes that Jameson describes have been played out with particular clarity and intensity in Ireland. The plays and films of writers such as Kilroy, Leonard, Friel, and Sheridan offer an especially telling and insightful record of these processes, and, by extension, of the social

history of nostalgia in contemporary Irish culture, as the works of writers who share an engaged and, arguably, in certain respects privileged, perspective on their

subject. From a Janus-like position of suspension between the "old" and "new"

Ireland's, between the late sixties and early eighties, Kilroy, Leonard, and Friel, all of whom had grown up in the Ireland of de Valera, chronicled with fascination and often savage satire the emergence of a new form of nostalgia within Irish culture, one intricately rooted in the post-reforms transformations of the country. The Ireland depicted in plays such as Kilroy's The Death and Resurrection of Mr.

Roche, Leonard's The Patrick Pearse Motel, and Friel's The Communication Cord is a rapidly industrializing, urbanizing, and liberalizing society increasingly in clined towards nostalgia as it desperately, and rather dubiously, tries to shore up a

rapidly fracturing sense of identity by recovering a clearly irrecoverable past.




Kilroy's The Death and Resurrection of Mr. Roche offered in 1968 one of the

first critical examinations of the culturally unfixed condition of late 1960s Ireland

in the figure of the play's protagonist, Kelly. Like the older Ireland he represents,

Kelly has been unable to accommodate himself to the new shape of the culture, and

has in response retreated into a longing, somewhat desperate fixation on his past. A Dublin civil servant whose "large, peasant hands" (7) betray his rural upbringing, he is the sole member of his family to have escaped poverty and emigration. But

while he holds down a good job, he reproaches himself for having grown distant

from his family (53), indulges in flights of fancy about giving up his job in order

to "[work] on the land" (55), and reminisces fondly about his childhood home, which he idealizes in comparison to his tomblike Dublin flat:

A cottage you could hardly rum round in. With one bed between

four of us and a milk bucket to wash out of under the big kitchen

mirror. But it was a home, not like this chicken box of an outfit

here.... And a big fire roaring up the kitchen chimney. That was

a natural place to live in, boy, whatever you may say about its

appearance. (56)

Kelly's nostalgia can be seen largely as a defensive, reactionary backlash against the materialism of the new Ireland, the ethos embodied in the person of his

philosophical antagonist, his friend Myles. A car salesman who peppers his speech with Americanisms, Myles is Kilroy's satiric caricature of a 1960s Ireland which

is eagerly attempting to recreate itself in the image of America. Over the course of

the play it becomes apparent, however, that Myles's chosen image is patently counterfeit, his suave facade a strained performance, and he is finally exposed as a

pathetic poseur unconvincingly trying to live up to an unnatural, borrowed image. The image of contemporary Ireland that emerges from the play, therefore,

particularly if Kelly and Myles are regarded as representative of two contrasting,

yet complementary, faces of an Ireland in transition, one which has largely rejected and lost touch with its former identity but is insecurely adrift in search of a new

one, is of a society in which nostalgia has become a compensatory response to the

spiritual and cultural enervation created by rampant materialism. The same premise is central to Leonard's The Patrick Pearse Motel, a 1971 Feydeau-style sex farce

populated by a group of shallow, social-climbing arrivistes drawn from Leonard's

observations of the class of new urban professionals born of the post-reforms economic boom. The setting for their dalliances and misadventures is the Patrick

Pearse Motel of the play's title, the newly realized dream of nationalist entrepre neurs Dermod Gibbon and Fintan Kinnore. The motel is a fully modem inn that

boasts eighty-four units, each a historical theme room emblazoned with the portrait of a nationalist hero, as well as a restaurant called "The Famine Room" that features

specialties such as "Battle of the Boyne Salmon," "Black and Tan Pigs' Feet," and

"I.R.A. Bombe Surprise" (98) and a gift shop that sells "authentic" plastic Irish

shillelaghs manufactured in Japan. Leonard's satire suggests that while his charac




ters, (and, by implication, the "new" Ireland), express a superficial desire to root

themselves in the past as an anchor against the emptiness of their materialistic lives, in the multinational present the nationalist past is available to them only in the

crassly fraudulent form of the commodified simulacrum.

Just over ten years after The Patrick Pearse Motel, Friel's 1983 The Commu

nication Cord, which bears a number of similarities to Leonard's play, dramatized a similar premise about the origins of nostalgia in contemporary Irish culture, the

prevalence of the phenomenon, and the futility of the attempt to recover a lost essence that drives it. Like Leonard, Friel decided farce was the ideal genre to

portray contemporary Ireland's collective crisis of identity, and also like Leonard, Friel concretized the object of his nostalgists' doomed quest in the form of the play's

setting, this time a traditional thatched cottage in rural Ireland. But while the cottage is instantly evocative of the past and the rural idyll so central to post-independence Ireland's official mythologies about itself (think of Kelly's nostalgic veneration of

his childhood cottage home), Friel's is, like The Patrick Pearse Motel, a fake, another example of the historical simulacrum. Friel's stage directions indicate that "... one quickly senses something false about the place. It is too pat, too 'authentic'

It is in fact a restored house, an artefact of today making obeisance to a home of

yesterday" (11). (Note Jameson's observation that "In the postmodern ... the past itself has disappeared. Where its buildings remain, renovation and restoration allow

them to be transferred to the present in their entirety as those other, very different

and postmodern things called simulacra" [Postmodernism 309].) While the cot

tage's owner, Jack McNeilis, recognizes it as a false icon of a now vanished past and even takes delight in parodying the reverential, essentializing rhetoric of those

who would romanticize it as "where we all come from ... our first cathedral" (15), he thinks nothing of espousing the same sentiments in pretended earnest when using the cottage as a convenient spot for casual seductions. The readiness of Jack and

many others in the play to exploit the cottage's iconic and romantic associations for base personal gain, along with their frequent success in doing so, is, Friel

implies, characteristic of a society that has cultivated a knowing, even rapacious, indifference to its past.

Friel embodies this part self-deluded, part hypocritical, attitude toward the past in the figure of Senator Donovan, the most obvious and culpable target of the play's satire. Donovan, who grew up in a cottage like the one in the play, but who has

spent most of his life as a jet-setting Dublin doctor and European Community Senator, subscribes to a backward-looking nationalism and spouts in earnest the romantic platitudes about the cottage that Jack had parodied earlier. On his arrival, he proclaims it "the touchstone ... the apotheosis

... the absolute verity." "This

speaks to me," he says, "This whispers to me" (31), and, predictably enough, he soon announces his intention to buy his own cottage just like it. Over the course of the play, Donovan repeatedly invokes the admixture of romantic nationalism and chauvinist xenophobia that defined de Valera's Ireland, a rhetoric both dated in




itself and one that sounds especially ludicrous coming from a man whose very

profession as EEC senator signifies that the old nationalist and isolationist Republic whose foundational values he affirms has long since ceased to exist. Donovan's

self-delusion and hypocrisy, and the facile nature of his nostalgia, are exposed at

the end of the play when, in a fit of antiquarian enthusiasm, he tethers himself by the neck to a hitching post formerly used for cows, only to discover that he can't

undo the clasp securing him. He remains, as Friel's stage directions specify, on all

fours, "chained in such a way that he is locked into a position facing the wall" (56), his Myth of the Cave-like helplessness and limited range of vision and movement

a symbolically appropriate comeuppance that both reveals the illegitimacy of his

professed claims to affinity with the past and the dangers of the backward look he

espouses.

The image of Donovan, the self-deluded nostalgist, chained literally and

symbolically to an artificial, selectively remembered past is emblematic of the

relationship between contemporary Ireland and its history as depicted in The

Communication Cord, The Patrick Pearse Motel, and The Death and Resurrection

of Mr. Roche. In these texts, nostalgia is depicted as symptomatic of a gapped cultural inheritance, and, by extension, as a manifestation of related forms of failure:

in one sense, the plays depict the failure or unwillingness of contemporary Ireland to accommodate itself to change, to relinquish its enthrallment to the past. In another

sense, though, they underline the failure of postmodern Ireland to retain and sustain

historical memory and consciousness in any form more genuine than that of the

simulacrum; for the satire directed at the nostalgia phenomenon in these plays seems very much grounded in something of a lament for a lost past, or at least a

left-leaning denunciation of the perceived materialistic ethos of the new Ireland. As such, it is perhaps not at all surprising that in recent years Kilroy, Leonard, and Friel have all written works that themselves appear frankly nostalgic, in which

nostalgia is presented in a much more uncritical, even celebratory, light than in their earlier plays, as seems very much the case with Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa,

Kilroy's The Madame MacAdam Travelling Theatre, a play Kilroy himself has described as a "nostalgic" (Hassett 13) work inspired by his memories of the

travelling fit-up theatre companies that visited his childhood home in County Kilkenny, and Leonard's Moving, originally conceived as an Irish version of Thornton Wilder's Our Town (Murray 230). Many of the most significant trends in the treatment of nostalgia in these works are exemplified in Dancing at Lugh nasa, and a case study of the play as a paradigm of the contemporary nostalgia phenomenon suggests that both the representation of nostalgia in these plays and in the films of Sheridan can be read largely as the product of a generational and

ideological divide in contemporary Irish writing. Dancing at Lughnasa, a memory play frequently compared to Tennessee

Williams's The Glass Menagerie, marked a significant shift in Friel's work when it premiered in 1990. The overt emphasis on issues relating to the intersection of




politics, history, language, and cultural identity that characterized Friel's plays of

the eighties, including Translations, The Communication Cord, and Making His

tory, fades considerably in Dancing at Lughnasa, in which an adult narrator,

Michael, casts his mind back to his childhood and one particularly memorable and

pivotal year in the lives of his mother and aunts, five heroic, unmarried sisters living

together in a cottage in 1930s County Donegal. Rather, in its autobiographical element (the play's protagonists, the five Mundy sisters, were modelled on Friel's

maternal aunts, to whom the play is dedicated) and 1930s cottage kitchen setting

(a real cottage this time, which is notably subject to none of the satiric subversion

directed at the reconstructed cottage of The Communication Cord) the play is

deeply tinged with a nostalgic air. Indeed, Friel has described it as "written in

memory and out of piety" and acknowledged that "nostalgia [is] the first condition of the play" (Fusco 125). Dancing at Lughnasa hearkens back to a time when the

unchanging daily domestic routines of cooking, sewing, shopping, and running the farm are infinitely more important to the Mundy sisters' lives than politics or current

affairs both foreign and domestic (names such as Mussolini, Gandhi, and de Valera cross their lips only in the lyrics of a nonsensical children's rhyme) (3-4) and before

industrialization (a process that tears the family apart when the opening of a new

factory throws two of the sisters out of work, leading them to emigrate to London in a futile search for a better life ? the fate also of two of Friel's aunts). In making this return, the play captures Michael's ? and by association Friel's ? recollec

tions of his family's last moments of happiness and wholeness before it was

irrevocably split and broken, a tragedy that notably coincides with modernization.

Focusing on this dimension of the play, Christopher Murray has interpreted Dancing at Lughnasa as a rueful commentary on contemporary Ireland: "Our whole

experience of the play is in some respects a dream: almost, but not quite. For it is a dream of wholeness, of integrity, and only in the artistic consciousness can Ireland now be imagined as anything other than fragmented, fragmenting, and in disarray" (228). For Fintan O'Toole, however, Friel's retreat from public and national history into personal history and his nostalgic treatment of his subject matter is evidence of a persistent longing fundamental to Friel's dramas, a desire precisely to escape the chaotic present, to evoke and capture "a time that is outside history, a personal time.... Friel's plays are less about historical sweep than they are about the excavation of unchanging places, people, and dilemmas" ("Marking Time" 202

03). Shaun Richards has helpfully and incisively suggested another way of under

standing the essentialism that both Murray and O'Toole implicitly identify as inherent to the nostalgic impetus in Friel's recent plays, especially Dancing at

Lughnasa, seeing it not as a sign that Friel wishes simply to "[disavow]... history," as O'Toole asserts ("Marking Time" 208), but rather as the product of a "constant and committed interrogation of authenticity and origin" (Richards 55) rooted in a

post-colonialism inimical to most conceptions of postmodernism. In response to



Reading Nostalgia 2 73

Terry Eagleton's comment that "essentialism is one of the most heinous crimes in

the postmodernist book," Richards asserts, "yet it is towards essentialism that

Friel's plays of the nineteen nineties have been drawn" (56), an essentialism that

he equates with what he reads as Friel's assertion of "the sustaining aspect of

holding to origin and authenticity in the face of their absolute erasure, whether this

be through the cultural colonialism [practised in the past] or in the pervasive coca-colonisation of the contemporary moment" (58). Considered in this light, the

nostalgia of Dancing at Lughnasa might be regarded as a reformulation of, rather

than a retreat from, the polemics of Friel's earlier work; and the play as a whole can be read as another chapter in the series of ongoing attempts to formulate and

respond to the contemporary crisis of identity that has preoccupied many Irish

writers in recent decades, but one that figures nostalgia as a source of enabling

possibility and post-colonial resistance to postmodern neo-colonialism in a way that Friel and playwrights like Kilroy and Leonard previously had not. In this

respect, Dancing at Lughnasa can be compared to the work of Sheridan: Into the

West, with its allegory of a healing return to origins, and The Field, based on John

B. Keane's stage play, which Sheridan altered in one particularly significant detail

in his adaptation for the screen. While in Keane's 1965 play the rich foreigner who

threatens to seize ownership of the field farmed by the play's fiercely nationalist

anti-hero, the Bull McCabe, is an Englishman, the old colonial oppressor, in Sheridan's screenplay he is an American, a revision that seems intended to reflect

the perception of a new experience of colonialism that has been the product of

globalization. It is important to note, however, that the nostalgia of Dancing at Lughnasa is

by no means unqualified. Far from portraying the rural Donegal of his youth as a

lost Utopia, Friel repeatedly underlines the repressive social and political climate of the era. While the Mundy sisters strain against the restrictions that confine them,

they are repeatedly beaten down by them. And although they do experience one moment of freedom, in the form of a frenzied, primal dance in which they shed their inhibitions and violate taboos, this escape is isolated and brief, and also

explicitly circumscribed both within the private space of the sisters' home and the

memory of Michael, who conjures the events of the play. It is, moreover, significant that Michael freely admits to the audience that his "nostalgic" (71) memory of the summer depicted in the play, like all memories, has been coloured and distorted by time and emotion, and is therefore of questionable veracity: "In that memory

atmosphere is more real than incident and everything is simultaneously actual and

illusory" (71). In Dancing at Lughnasa, Friel thus readily acknowledges the prime danger and problematic of nostalgia: that it is impossible to ever truly "know" the

past, and therefore to access anything more than highly subjective renderings of

history through memory. Nevertheless, the play implies, a nostalgia that is cogni zant of this proviso

? a critical remembering ? is itself critical to the retention of

historical memory and, by extension, to the grounding and formulation of identity,




perhaps especially in the contemporary moment. While it is impossible to perfectly recover lost origins, it is vital to admit one's indebtedness to them and retain some

form of connection to them. What is important is not that Michael perfectly remember his past, but instead that he, as the alter-ego of Brian Friel, acknowledge, to use two of Friel's favorite words, his "fealty" and "piety" towards that past. If

this exhortation seems conflicted, the ambivalence of Friel's position may explain

why he has been described in seemingly contradictory terms by two leading critics

of his work both as "no nostalgic revivalist, no exponent of the dreamy backward

look" (as Declan Kiberd has put it) (652) and "the modem master of the nostalgia

play" (in the words of Richard Pine) (196-97). That Friel's work has also opened him to charges that he subscribes to an

insufficiently considered and to some degree idealistically impracticable post-co

lonialism, one that is overly fixated on abstract issues of cultural identity and that

places too great a faith in the possibility that cultural solutions can be prescribed for the historical wrongs of centuries of colonialism, might be seen as the product of the perspective unique to his generation of Irish writers. Friel and his contem

poraries have witnessed from their beginnings the dual crises of the economic and

cultural revolution in the Republic and the protracted conflict in Northern Ireland, which forced an Ireland rapidly shedding its old identity to readdress the most

significant unresolved legacy of its colonial past. While the Troubles have often

been an unspoken subtext more than an acknowledged presence in the works of

many Southern writers, they have undeniably contributed to the complexities and

confusions of identity formulation in the postmodern present, especially, it may be

argued, for those with a lived experience of earlier times. In a 1992 essay Kilroy argued that the playwrights of his generation, in large part because of the particular

experience of cultural transformation and dislocation they have undergone and the

cultural/historical memory they retain, are obsessed with the subject of tradition ?

social, cultural, and literary ?

in a way that younger Irish writers are not:

But is this matter of tradition of any interest any more? Certainly younger people in the Irish theatre today find it a bore. There is even the eerie sensation of watching some of the work of one's

contemporaries and, worse still, of one's own, becoming histori

cal while one is still alive. But that, precisely, is why the question of tradition is important at this time. The writer who is born into a traditional culture and lives to see it undergo massive change has a peculiar problem in bridging the present and the past. My own may be the last generation with such a sense of continuity with the past, particularly the immediate past. ("A Generation"

136)

Kilroy's concerns about the passing of tradition have been echoed by another

prominent member of his literary generation, Seamus Heaney, who in a 1993 essay on Friel expressed his philosophical antagonism to what he evidently perceives as




the enervating tendencies of postmodernism: "We refuse to abandon ourselves

totally to a relativistic flux even as we concede the inadequacy of older systems of order and authority, whether they were invested in a faith or a family or a

motherland" (240). While, following the lines of Kilroy's argument, it might well be argued that many younger Irish writers have tended to view what Heaney calls the "flux" of their times in a much more enabling light, for Friel, Kilroy, and other older writers, remembering has become a bulwark against it; and nostalgia, initially portrayed mainly as a satirically poignant marker of cultural disjunction, has been embraced as integral to the work of critical remembering crucial to the process of

forging (perhaps unavoidably, given the times, in the ambiguous sense of the word

Stephen Dedalus played on) identities that are rooted in the past in a way that is

meaningful, but not incapacitating.

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Documents

Critical Remembering: Reading Nostalgia in Contemporary Irish Drama and Film