Price - Memory, Narration@Brian Friel - Faith Healer

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Memory, narration and spectrality in

Brian Friel's Faith Healer and Frank
McGuinness's Observe the Sons of
Ulster Marching Towards the Somme
a
Graham Price
a
Department of English, Drama and Film, University College
Dublin, Belfield, Dublin, Ireland
Published online: 13 Dec 2014.
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To cite this article: Graham Price (2015) Memory, narration and spectrality in Brian Friel's Faith
Healer and Frank McGuinness's Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, Irish
Studies Review, 23:1, 33-47, DOI: 10.1080/09670882.2014.986930
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09670882.2014.986930
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Irish Studies Review, 2015
Vol. 23, No. 1, 3347, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09670882.2014.986930
Memory, narration and spectrality in Brian Friels Faith Healer and

Frank McGuinnesss Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the
Somme
Graham Price*
Department of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin, Ireland
This article proposes an examination of how Brian Friels Faith Healer functions as an
intertext in Frank McGuinnesss Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the
Somme. This shall be the first extensive consideration of Frank McGuinnesss debt to
Faith Healer, the play that convinced him that drama was the form most suited to his
vision. How both plays consider the relationship between history, memory and art will
be a key concern. Attention shall also be paid to the shared cultural and historic
traditions that unite both Friel and McGuinness. The essays that McGuinness has
written on Friel will be shown to be as valuable in interpreting McGuinnesss work as
they are to illuminating Friels. It shall be argued that McGuinness, far from merely
parroting Friels aesthetic, uses the earlier writers legacy to create new and original
works.
Keywords: identity; McGuinness; Friel; intertextuality; memory; narration;
performance; spectrality
In Frank McGuinnesss article on Brian Friels Faith Healer, published in the Irish
University Review on the occasion of Friels seventieth birthday in 1999 (an essay that
McGuinness specifically asked to write),1 McGuinness offers the following appraisal of
Friels play: Not since Rashomon has a work of art concerned itself so deeply with the
convolutions of narrative juxtapositions. Not since Glass Menagerie has a play
investigated the creative powers of memory. Faith Healer is Friels masterwork.2 In this
description McGuinness is giving an insight not just into Faith Healer but also into his
own preoccupations as a playwright. Like Becketts essay on Proust, this piece by Frank
McGuinness is as much about the author as it is about the writer about whom he is writing.
Throughout the course of his career, McGuinness has been concerned with the role that
memory plays in creating narratives that his characters live by, as a means of escaping the
trauma of their own existences. The act of remembrance, for both Friel and McGuinness,
becomes akin to artistic production and the people who inhabit their plays are thus
comparable to artists. Faith Healer was the play that convinced Frank McGuinness that
drama was the medium through which he could best express his artistic vision.3
In 1988, McGuinness was to publicly acknowledge his partiality for Friels plays by
directing Friels The Gentle Island for the Peacock Theatre. McGuinness has written
openly about the importance of The Gentle Island for the development of Friels dramatic
vision: More than any other play of Brian Friels up to 1971, The Gentle Island was the
most threatening, the most perplexing, the most far-sighted of all.4 It is arguable that
McGuinnesss 1999 play Dolly Wests Kitchen is in fact a more hopeful rewriting of the
uncompromising savagery that McGuinness detected in The Gentle Island. Both works are
*Email: graham.price@ucd.ie
q 2014 Taylor & Francis

34 G. Price
set in closed, static communities that are disrupted by intruding strangers who offer an
escape from the rigidity of essentialist identity categories, both national and sexual.
However, in Dolly Wests Kitchen McGuinness allows his anti-heteronormative characters
much happier endings than Friel does in The Gentle Island. McGuinness would then go on
to write the film script for Friels play Dancing at Lughnasa in 1998.
Despite McGuinnesss clear admiration for Brian Friel, very little work has been done
to illuminate the extent to which Friels texts (and in particular Faith Healer, his greatest
play) function as intertexts in McGuinnesss drama. This article shall examine the
intertextual presence of Faith Healer in McGuinnesss 1985 play Observe the Sons of
Ulster Marching Towards the Somme. In both plays, memory, both private and public, is
deconstructed as the characters on stage seek to imagine and re-imagine their existence in
their quest to find peace and to give their existences some sense of shape and meaning.
In the process, memory, history and imagination are collapsed into one another. For these
reasons, I would argue that Observe the Sons of Ulster is the play of Frank McGuinnesss
that can be regarded as having the most organic connections to Faith Healer.
In his extensive book on the drama of Frank McGuinness, Eamonn Jordan has offered
the following definition of intertextuality that is greatly relevant to how one should
consider the presence of Faith Healer within the text of Observe the Sons of Ulster:
Intertextuality leads to both the opening and compression of spaces, while leading to the
overloading of reality by ensuring that it is never a closed unit, filtering references and ideas
on both a conscious and unconscious level by making room for the repressed, blocking
interpretation and encouraging speculation. These intertextual pressures can be blatant as well
as subtle. Intertextuality benefits from the tensions between imitation and subversion or
inversion, repetition and alteration of the source text and finally through the location of
different or competing moral, cultural or psychological codes.5
This assessment of intertextuality by Jordan is useful in the context of this article because
Faith Healer is not an explicit intertext in Observe the Sons of Ulster. The cultural context
of these two works is certainly not the same. If the presence of Faith Healer in
McGuinnesss play is to be appreciated, then it must be through the examination of subtle,
coded references to Friels text in Observe the Sons of Ulster and via the detection of
formal and thematic similarities between the two dramas. While at times the arguments
that are raised by intertextual analysis can seem speculative, the encouragement of such
imaginative speculations is, as Jordan has asserted, one of the virtues of intertextuality.
Joan Fitzpatrick Dean has provided the following appraisal of the stylistic and
thematic similarities between Friel and McGuinness:
Friel and McGuinness place greater emphasis on human costs than geo-political events in
their interrogations of sectarian conflict. Both, too, have staged the punishing realities of
women working outside the home McGuinness in Factory Girls (1982) and Friel in The
Loves of Cass McGuire. Dramaturgically, both bear the mark of Beckett in creating theatre
from largely static situations . . . Like Friel in Molly Sweeney and Faith Healer, and perhaps
liberated by him, McGuinness accesses character through monologue in The Bread man
(1990) and Baglady (1985). McGuinnesss most memorable exploration of Frielian non-
realistic techniques, specifically direct address, is in Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching
Towards the Somme . . . where the narrator, Old Pyper, is split from his younger incarnation.
Like Gar Private and Gar Public in Philadelphia, two actors play Young Pyper and Old Pyper.6
From Fitzpatrick Deans analysis it is clear that McGuinness is happy to emulate the style
and trajectory of Friels drama. One of the most obvious connections to be discerned
between Faith Healer and Observe the Sons of Ulster is their usage of the four-part
dramatic structure. In Faith Healer we are given four monologues, two spoken by Frank
and one each delivered by his partner Grace and his cockney manager Teddy. In the case
Irish Studies Review 35
of Observe the Sons of Ulster the play is divided into four thematic sections:
Remembrance, Initiation, Pairing, and Bonding. In part three McGuinness gives us the
structure of the play in microcosm when the eight soldiers pair off into groups of two and
visit different places of unionist interest.
Despite his willingness to be indebted to Friel, McGuinness also refuses to passively
imitate Friels style and thematic concerns. McGuinnesss plays, such as Carthaginians
and Someone Wholl Watch Over Me, are willing to engage more directly in current
political events than Friels, generally speaking, are prepared to do. When Friel did write a
drama that was set in the present day (Freedom of the City) he felt that it was defective
because he was too close to the material as the event that inspired the work, the Bloody
Sunday massacre of 1972 in Derry, had just occurred and the memory was too raw.7 In
contrast, McGuinness did not write his Bloody Sunday play, Carthaginians, until 1988,
thus allowing some time to have elapsed before he engaged with that event. Having
already written Observe the Sons of Ulster in 1985, which examines the unionist
perspective on Irish history, McGuinness can also claim to have gained some level of
detachment and calm concerning the Irish Troubles. This amounts to a level of objectivity
that Friel felt Freedom of the City lacked. The importance of Frank McGuinness as a
political playwright is evidenced by the fact that Observe the Sons of Ulster was performed
in the Abbey in 1994 to an audience of Ulster unionists to commemorate the IRA ceasefire.
By attempting to write a dramatic depiction of Irish Protestant, unionist identity,
McGuinness may have been endeavouring to assert some measure of artistic independence
from Friel because, although Friel spent much of his early life in Omagh and Derry, his
work never really tackles the unionist mindset in Northern Ireland.
It is undeniable that both Friel and McGuinness have integral places in the Irish
dramatic tradition of the latter part of the twentieth century. Kathleen Heininge has
provided the following analysis of the key concerns of Irish plays from this period:
Within Irish drama of the late 20th century, the use of language as a marker for Irishness
begins to shift away from a focus on accents and Hiberno-English, towards a use of language
that attempts to actually establish new truths: truths about relationships and alliances, truths
about history, truths about memory, and especially truths about identity. Language becomes
the very means of change and hope, in drama that has become concerned with the use of
language not as a signifier of nation but as reiteration of stories that might be able to change
through that reiteration. What is true is no longer shaped by someone elses language, but by
the incantatory retelling and recasting of stories in versions particularized by individuals. The
words themselves become a means for an imposition of identity.8
Although Heininge does not refer to Faith Healer in this survey of contemporary Irish
drama, both that play and Observe the Sons of Ulster can be said to be united by the
dramatic preoccupations highlighted above. At the beginning of both works the audience
is presented with characters who are telling stories that they have clearly told before and
are compelled to retell again. The narrating of their lives is an occupation with which
McGuinnesss Pyper and Friels three monologists, whether they wish to or not, cannot
stop engaging.
Although Faith Healer was originally staged in 1979 it can be regarded as being the
representative example of Friels 1980s dramas as they are described by Richard Kearney:
Brian Friels plays in the eighties have become increasingly concerned with the problem
of language. So much so that they constitute not just a theatre of language but a theatre
about language. Words have become both the form and content of his drama.9 While
works such as Translations and The Communication Cord certainly do concern themselves
thematically with the role of language in creating external reality, there is a greater
36 G. Price
physicality to those plays in terms of elaborate stage design whereas Faith Healer
relies almost entirely on words to construct its world. Thus, language truly does constitute
its form and content which is not entirely the case with Translations and The
Communication Cord.
The importance of creating new narratives out of old and established stories was fully
recognised by the members of Field Day, the Derry-based theatre group that Friel co-
founded with Stephen Rea in 1980. Field Day director Seamus Deane admitted as much in
1982 when he wrote the following assertion in a production note for Field Days third
production:
If a congealed idea of theatre can be broken, then the audience which experiences this break
would be the more open to the modification of other established forms. Almost everything
which we believe to be nature or natural is in fact historical; more precisely, is an historical
fiction. If Field Day can breed a new fiction of theatre, or of any other art, which is sufficiently
successful to be believed in as though it were natural and an outgrowth of the past, then it will
have succeeded. At the moment, it is six characters in search of a story that can be believed.10
What Deane is asserting in this note is the power of language to create stories through
which people can define and structure their identities and the role of theatre in helping to
achieve this goal by creating fictions that can become established truths once enough
people believe in them. Although Faith Healer was first staged a year before the
foundation of Field Day, in many ways it was the play that encapsulated and realised the
aforementioned goals of Field Day, before it was ever founded, through its emphasis on
the power of language and its privileging of personal, self-created truths over so-called
natural reality. The stories that are told in that drama rely heavily on the audience
believing them while they are being told. As Richard Kearney has observed, Friel, like
Christy Mahon in The Playboy, is asking his audience to make his fiction true. He is asking
that the promise of Field Day be made real by the power of a lie.11
The medium of drama is obviously perfectly suited for the merging of public and
private realms through art. Friel himself has acknowledged the importance of an audience
for the realisation of a dramatic vision. In his 1999 paper Seven Notes for a Festival
Programme he made the following remarks about the public role of the dramatist:
The playwrights words arent written for solitary engagement they are written for public
utterance. They are used as the story-teller uses them, to hold an audience in his embrace and
within that vocal sound. So, unlike the words of the novelist or poet, the playwrights words
are scored for a very different context. And for that reason are scored in altogether different
keys and in altogether different tempi. And it is with this score that the playwright and the
actor privately plot to work their public spell.12
This fusion of public and private space constitutes the form and the content of much of
Friels drama. Friels early apprenticeship as a short story writer gave him a great
appreciation of the intimacy of private visions, and the movement from short stories to
plays offered him the opportunity, as Richard Rankin Russell has observed, to fuse the
private and public together.13 This need for a viewership in order to actualise the events on
stage is also implied in the title Observe the Sons of Ulster. McGuinness is commanding
his audience to view and thus make real his characters and their stories. Ironically,
Observe the Sons of Ulster was turned down by Field Day which perhaps reflects the
nationalist strand that ran through that group. The plays that were staged by Field Day,
while not being exactly dogmatic, certainly did not attempt to grapple with the alternative
to Catholic nationalism that exists in the North. As Anthony Roche has asserted: If there
was one play that got away from Field Day, it must surely have been Frank McGuinnesss
Observe the Sons of Ulster.14
The role of language in the creation of reality is emphasised at the very beginning of
Faith Healer and Observe the Sons of Ulster. Faith Healer begins with a recitation of the
names of Welsh villages that will never be seen onstage by the audience,15 which makes
clear that, in this play, words rather than stage designs will evoke its world. Frank
McGuinness goes one step further in Observe the Sons of Ulster when he makes Pypers
dead comrades appear onstage as Pyper is talking about them. Through Pypers memory,
and the language that memory depends on to be actualised, this plays narrative will
unfold. Although Observe the Sons of Ulster relies more on stage design and ongoing
physical action than Faith Healer does, it is the opening monologue of Pypers that haunts,
and seems to structure, the rest of the drama.
One of the mediating presences between the work of Friel and McGuinness (as cited by
Joan Fitzpatrick Dean in the above quote) are the dramatic texts of Samuel Beckett,
particularly with regards to their use of the monologue form and their invocation of
spectral presences. That these two writers are united by a debt to Beckett is supported by
Frank McGuinness in his essay on Faith Healer which is titled All the Dead Voices.
This quote refers to a scene in Waiting for Godot where Vladimir and Estragon are
complaining about being haunted by spectral presences:
Estragon: All the dead voices.
Vladimir: They make a noise like wings.
Estragon: Like leaves.
Vladimir: Like sand.
Estragon: Like leaves . . .
Vladimir: To have lived is not enough for them.
Estragon: They have to talk about it.16
As in Waiting for Godot, Faith Healer and Observe the Sons of Ulster have characters that
are ghostly entities, forced to live on in the medium of drama. McGuinness argues:
Beckett in Waiting for Godot spoke of dead voices, speaking together, each one in itself.
In Faith Healer, Brian Friel speaks not of dead voices but with them.17 Both the
characters of Frank Hardy and his partner Grace are dead and yet they continue to inhabit
the stage and tell their stories repeatedly. As with the dead voices in Godot, to have lived is
not enough for Frank and Grace, they feel compelled to talk about it. McGuinness seems to
be echoing the exchange from Godot quoted above in Act 3 of Observe the Sons of Ulster:
Millen: Walk to the other side. Theres people waiting for you over there. Who are they?
Moore: All the dead people.
Millen: No. All the living [my emphasis]. Do you see them? Who are they?18
This reconfiguring of Becketts dialogue can be viewed as McGuinnesss attempt to alter
and subvert Beckett in a manner that is characteristic of an intertextual approach to another
authors worth. For Friel, the debt to Beckett is most obvious in the structure of Faith
Healer which mirrors that of Becketts Play, in which three characters narrate the same
event ad infinitum. However, as with McGuinness, Friel refuses to merely copy Beckett
and instead introduces conflicting narratives of the same event whereas Becketts
characters all used the same words and told their story in exactly the same way. The
process of connecting with, while at the same time distancing from, previous writers is a
common feature of the artistic style of Friel and McGuinness.
McGuinness, then, has observed that Beckett in Waiting for Godot speaks of ghosts
while Friel in Faith Healer speaks with them. I would argue that, in Observe the Sons of
Ulster, Frank McGuinness performs the act of speaking both about and with ghosts as a
way of imagining an ethical future that respects traditions and generations past and
38 G. Price
anticipates those that are still to come. Jacques Derrida has written about the necessity for
communing with ghosts in a passage from Spectres of Marx which (possibly
unintentionally) McGuinness echoes in his distinction between Beckett and Friel at the
beginning of his essay on Faith Healer:
[I]t is necessary to speak about the ghost, even to the ghost and along with it, as no ethics, no
politics, whether revolutionary or not, seem possible, thinkable and fair without
acknowledging in its principle the respect for these others who no longer live or for these
others who are not there, presently alive, whether they are already dead or are not born yet.19
For Derrida, the figure of the ghost represents the deconstruction of stable notions of
presence and absence, past and present, self and other. To commune with ghosts is to be
open to a world that respects otherness and difference, even the otherness that resides
within oneself. Through the example of Beckett and Friel, McGuinness achieves this
spectral communion in Observe the Sons of Ulster.
The character of Pyper in Observe the Sons of Ulster is the figure who directly
experiences being haunted by the ghosts of his dead comrades who perished at the Battle
of the Somme. Although they do not talk directly, they insist on being remembered
through his words. When we first encounter Pyper, now an old man, he seems to be
remonstrating with these ghosts on their continued insistence on living on through him:
Pyper: Again. As always, again. Why does this persist? What more have we to say to each
other? I remember nothing today. Absolutely nothing . . . I do not understand your insistence
on my remembrance. I am being too mild. I am angry at your demand that I continue to probe
. . . I will not listen to you. Invention gives that slaughter shape.20
Much like Yeatss deferral of naming the 1916 martyrs until he absolutely feels compelled
to at the end of his poem Easter 1916,21 Pyper wishes not to partake in official
remembrance of monumental historical events as he feels that would be colluding in the
creation of a set, static version of history.
In Faith Healer there is no such danger of an absolute shape being given to the events
that take place in the lives of the characters since every story that is told by one character is
contradicted by another. Frank Hardy is able to tell a moving story about his reconciliation
with his father after his mother died22 and then Grace asserts in the very next monologue
that this never occurred.23 For Friel, fact is never as important as truth and he asserts this in
his talk from 1972 entitled Self Portrait:
What is a fact in the context of an autobiography? A fact is something that happened to me or
something I experienced. It can also be something I thought happened to me, something I
thought I experienced. Or indeed an autobiographical fact can be pure fiction and be no less
true or reliable for that.24
Whether or not Franks moment of connection with his father happened is ultimately not
as important as the truth that is expressed by Franks telling of this story about his desire to
connect with his father.
The characters in Observe the Sons of Ulster are equally unconcerned with objective,
factual accounts and far more interested in telling a good story in a compelling way.
As one soldier in the play asserts: To hell with the truth as long as it rhymes.25 This line
raises the comparison between imaginative lying and artistic production and asserts the
possibility that all these soldiers are, in their own ways, capable of being artists.
Pypers story concerning his marriage with a Catholic woman, who he supposedly
killed when he found out she was a man,26 is later contradicted by him when he says that
she committed suicide because she could not live without him.27 It is arguable that the first
account of his wifes death, if it was indeed factually inaccurate, was in fact expressing a
truth about his guilt concerning how he drove his wife to take her own life, which would
have been an indirect form of murder.
This Irish art of lying, a phrase coined by F.C. McGrath,28 has important origins in the
theatrical and critical works of Oscar Wilde, a writer that both Friel and McGuinness echo
in their own texts.29 In his 1891 essay, Wilde championed lying in art through inventive
language as being what distinguished the artist from the everyday man:
It is very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it. In the sphere of actual life that
is of course obvious. Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it. There is no
mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is only by
language that we rise above them, or above each other by language, which is the parent, and
not the child, of thought . . . [Action] is the last resource of those who do not know how to
dream.30
Wildes point here is that the role of the artist is to shape life, through the enabling tool of
language, into something that is greater than mere facts and verifiable evidence. The one
who constructs through art is thus considered greater than the one who lives only through
the real and actualisable. Like Becketts dead voices, Friels Frank Hardy, and
McGuinnesss soldiers, Wilde believes that to live is not enough, that life must be made
coherent and enhanced through artistic language. Roulston, in Observe the Sons of Ulster,
makes the indebtedness of existence to language abundantly clear when he asserts: In the
beginning is the Word. And the Word is within me. And the Word is without me. For I am
the Word and the Word is mine.31 While this line is certainly a biblical paraphrase, it can
also be regarded as referring to Wildes assertion that language begets human existence
and structures experience. One of Pypers great grievances against Irish nationalists is
their appropriation of certain linguistic formations: Sinn Fein? Ourselves alone. It is we,
the Protestant people, who have always stood alone.32 Pyper regards the words ourselves
alone as giving a more truthful account of the Protestant experience than it does for the
Catholics, and wishes to regain them for his people.
In the programme note for Friels 1988 play Making History, a title that may be a
reference to the above-quoted passage from Wilde, Friel made reference to another section
of The Critic as Artist: To give an accurate description of what has never happened is
not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man
of arts and culture.33 This quote, along with the previously referenced one from The
Critic as Artist, can be regarded as the credo for Faith Healer: a play in which words, as
opposed to action, construct the world and whose main character is a dreamer who prefers
to talk about things rather than do them onstage. Despite Friels earlier rejection of the
importance of Wilde to the history of Irish drama,34 Friels aesthetic can be seen as
adhering to many of Wildes artistic theories.
Unlike Friel, McGuinness has no qualms about admitting his admiration for Oscar
Wilde:
The master stylists are also those who contain most to think about, like the great Greeks.
Or the mighty Oscar. Wilde is a wonderful, wonderful host. And thats what I want to give an
audience: I want to give them more, give them more, give them more.35
In this quote, McGuinness is almost paraphrasing the subtitle for Wildes The Importance
of Being Earnest which is a trivial comedy for serious people. McGuinness sees in
Wildes humorous style concealed seriousness and weighty issues. For McGuinness, style
and content work with each other in Wilde to create layered and complex texts. It is
possible that one of the elements in Faith Healer that made it so attractive to McGuinness
is the Wildean strand that runs through that play.
40 G. Price
It must be noted that neither Friel nor McGuinness entirely subscribe to the notion that
language is an all-powerful agent of representation. In Faith Healer and Observe the Sons
of Ulster key moments occur that are outside the realm of linguistic description. In Faith
Healer that moment is the death of Frank Hardy. In Observe the Sons of Ulster it is the
Battle of the Somme itself. Frank McGuinness has offered this summation of the climax of
Faith Healer: Frank returns to the stage to die his death. As in Greek tragedy the violent
action occurs offstage, reported by a messenger. But here the messenger is the man of
action, the man of suffering himself, speaking from the grave.36 Like Frank, Pyper is also
the man of suffering and action whose job it is to be the messenger of death. While he may
not be physically dead, the impression that is given is that a part of Pyper did indeed die at
the Somme. Thus, it can be argued that while Friel and McGuinness do depict the creative
power of language, their art also wishes to allow for a part of life that is resistant to
linguistic representation. McGuinness has also noted how language has failed to
accurately encapsulate Frank Hardy by giving him a first name that implies honesty and
straightforwardness whereas Frank is anything but these things.37 Frank is certainly not
frank, just as Wildes Ernest never seems to act in earnest.
That Faith Healer is a drama about art and artistry is emphasised by Brian Friel in an
interview he did with Fintan OToole in 1982:
It [Faith Healer ] was some kind of metaphor for the art, the craft of writing, or whatever it is.
And the great confusion we all have about it, those of us who are involved in it. How
honourable and dishonourable it can be . . . I mean the element of the charlatan that there is in
all creative work.38
This conflation of art and falsity is one that Wilde explored in great detail in his essay The
Decay of Lying,39 and Friel provides a dramatic study of this idea in Faith Healer. Frank
Hardy is referred to by Grace as an artist in her monologue and certainly his gift for faith
healing and also for creative, and at times falsifying, language make him an apt metaphor
for the artist at work as Friel regarded him as being. The character of Pyper in Observe the
Sons of Ulster is also representative of art and the artist as he was a sculptor before the war
and is just as invested in inventive storytelling as Frank Hardy.
The dark, parasitic side of certain artists is not neglected in either Faith Healer or
Observe the Sons of Ulster. As Friel has observed, being an artist can be potentially
dishonourable. It is through their interaction with women that Frank and Pyper show the
potential for darkness and destruction that is latent in artistry. Franks relationship with
Grace is based on his desire to control and manipulate her very identity as if she were a
character he could invent and reinvent at will. As Grace complained:
One of his mean tricks was to humiliate me by always changing my name. It became
Dodsmith or Elliot or OConnell . . . and I came from Yorkshire or Kerry or London or
Scarborough or Belfast . . . and we werent married I was his mistress . . . [I]t seemed to me
that he kept remaking people according to some private standard of excellence of his own, and
as his standards changed, so did the person.40
While this description of Frank does endorse the notion that he is an artist, it also shows
how artistry can lead to destructive narcissism and dictatorial prescriptivism. McGuinness
has observed how unhealthy the relationship between Frank and Grace actually was:
They share a mutual violence, and the great violence they inflict is on each other.41 At
the end of her monologue, Grace conflates her role as partner to Frank with that of one of
his artistic creations: O my God Im one of his fictions too, but I need him to sustain me in
that existence O my God I dont know if I can go on without his sustenance.42 This
statement portrays the creation as the powerless victim of an unethical creator whose only
desire is mastery over his artwork.
In Observe the Sons of Ulster Pypers never-seen wife is created for the audience by
his description of her as Catholic, transsexual and whore. He also tells us that she died
because, like Grace, she could not live without her man. Unlike Grace, who at least
possesses the power of utterance, Pypers wife is only present when Pyper talks about her,
using words that present an extremely debased version of womanhood. McGuinness has
referred to Grace as a woman who is defined by the chains placed upon her through her
partnership with Frank.43 This is even more so the case with Pypers wife who is defined
wholly and utterly by him. Thus, Friel and McGuinness, through their two artist figures,
propose an ethics for art that insists on a responsibility towards the other that has been
created. This code of ethics could be encapsulated by the Wildean maxim: Selfishness is
not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.44 That
McGuinness regards himself as being more of an ethical artist than Pyper is clear by the
silence that McGuinness leaves over the exact details surrounding the death of Pypers
wife. The audience never hears Pyper telling the full story of her death to Craig. Thus,
McGuinness spares her from the full violence of representation that Pyper wished to inflict
on her. This is also comparable to Friels refusal to disclose the exact circumstances of
Franks demise at the end of Faith Healer. A kind of Beckettian silence is imposed on both
events which reflects both writers belief that language, even that of the artistic kind, does
not always do full justice to certain moments and circumstances.
Friel and McGuinness, through their treatment of remembrance, seem at times to
subscribe to what the character Cecily says in Wildes The Importance of Being Earnest:
[Memory] usually chronicles the things that have never happened, and could not possibly
have happened.45 Friel has provided an example from his own life of the creative powers
of memory in Self Portrait when he talks about a day when he was a child and he went
fishing with his father:
We are walking home from a lake with our fishing rods across our shoulders. It has been
raining all day long; it is now late evening; and we are soaked to the skin. But for some
reason, perhaps the fishing was good I dont remember my father is in great spirits and
is singing a song and I am singing with him. And there we are, the two of us, soaking wet,
splashing along a muddy road . . . But wait. Theres something wrong here. Im conscious
of a dissonance, an unease. What is it? Yes, I know what it is: there is no lake along that
muddy road. And since there is no lake my father and I never walked back from it in the rain
. . . The fact is a fiction. Have I imagined the scene then? Or is it a composite of two or three
different episodes? The point is I dont think it matters. What matters is that for some
reason . . . this vivid memory is there in the storehouse of the mind . . . For me it is a truth.
And because I acknowledge its peculiar veracity, it becomes a layer in my subsoil; ultimately
it becomes me.46
In this eloquent piece of pseudo-autobiography Friel is acknowledging how imagination
merges with memory to create factually inaccurate truths about oneself. Just like a
Wildean artist, Friel has succeeded in providing a valid description of what has never
occurred. This passage also resonates with Frank Hardys account of his tender
reconciliation with his father: an event that may never have occurred but has become a
layer in his subsoil and testifies to something that is true for him. Even before Self
Portrait was first delivered as a talk in 1972, Friel was offering audiences this insight into
the creativity of memory. Philadelphia Here I Come, Friels first dramatic success from
1964, delivers a variation of the same story when Gar insists upon the reliability of his
remembrance of a day spent out with his father in a blue boat. This memory of one of the
only cherished moments from his childhood is contradicted by his father, leaving Gar
distraught by what Matthew Arnold called the despotism of fact which has ruined the
finer version offered by illusion.
42 G. Price
In the opening section of Observe the Sons of Ulster Pyper offers his audience an
insight into the nature of remembrance as being a highly subjective and selective process:
Yes I remember. I remember details. I remember the sky was pink, extraordinary pink. There
were men from Coleraine, talking about salmon fishing. A good man who wanted to enter the
Church gave me an Orange sash. We sang hymns and played football. That is true, football.
Someone said the sky is red today. David said its pink.47
Pypers remembrance of the day of the Battle of the Somme centres on his own personal
impressions rather than on an attempt at historical retelling of the events of that
momentous day. The potential for misremembering is also raised by Pyper when he has to
question himself about whether or not they actually played football that day. It is also
unclear what colour the sky was that day, just as we are left unsure what the weather was
like on the day Graces baby died in Faith Healer, since she and Teddy remember it
differently. The fact that Pyper seems to believe the sky was pink may be his way of
signalling his attachment to David Craig, which we learn about later in the play, since it
was Craig who said that it was pink. Thus, Pypers version of events is designed to give the
audience an insight into him rather than a concrete account of a historical moment. Paul
Ricoeur has written about memorys dependence on images, and therefore imagination, as
constituting its unreliability:
A phenomenology of memory cannot fail to recognize . . . the pitfall of the imaginary,
inasmuch as this putting-into-images, bordering on the hallucinatory function of imagination,
constitutes a sort of weakness, a discredit, a loss of reliability for memory . . . In this way,
writing history shares the adventures of memories put-into-images under the aegis of the
ostensive function of imagination.48
Pypers recollection of history as a series of images enacts Ricoeurs theorising of memory
becoming imagination and calls into question Pypers authority as a chronicler of the
Battle of the Somme.
Emilie Pine has argued that the crucial questions posed by Observe the Sons of Ulster
is how to put shape on the Unionist experience of the First World War, culminating in the
Battle of the Somme, and how that experience should be remembered.49 McGuinnesss
answer to that question seems to be that there is no one way of remembering that
experience. Each person will have their own unique way of recalling those events and one
recollection will be as valid as the next. The idea of memory being a creative, potentially
falsifying process is emphasised by Pypers equation of remembrance with invention and
his fear that, through memory, he will give the slaughter of his companions a certain shape
and coherence. Such an action is certainly what Wilde would consider the proper function
of an artist but Pyper fears to engage in this process for fear of misrepresentation.
Both personal and communal memory is interrogated in Faith Healer and Observe
the Sons of Ulster, with the result that a view emerges of history as a succession of
personal stories rather than a grand narrative. In Faith Healer the event of Frank
Hardy curing a whole hall of people in Llanblethian is recounted in a local newspaper
with one notable error: Frank Hardys name becomes Frank Harding. Thus, the facts of
the event are altered for a version that will be widely distributed and will become
accepted as fact. Despite the inaccurate spelling of his name, Frank insists on keeping the
article because: It identified me even though it got my name wrong.50 This echoes
Friels assertion that a fact can be a fiction and yet still be expressive of a truth. It also
alludes to how the best historical accounts are those that contain personal truth rather
than merely factual accuracy.
In Observe the Sons of Ulster the soldiers attempt to re-enact the Battle of the Boyne as
a way of demonstrating their loyalty to their people and history. However, they have so
few men that they decide that they must instead perform the Battle of Scarva, which is an
annual re-enactment of the Battle of the Boyne. So the instability of myth is already
present within the fact that men are performing a version of a version.51 In this version of
the Battle of Scarva, which is a copy of the Battle of the Boyne, King Billy loses because
Pyper, who is playing Billys horse, trips and Crawford, who is playing Billy, falls to the
ground.52 Thus, history is rewritten in this attempt at communal remembrance. However,
there is a deeper reading of this inaccurate representation because the failure of King Billy
to win the Battle of the Boyne symbolises the soldiers fear of being beaten at the Battle of
the Somme. Thus, their Battle of Scarva identifies certain truths about the men who are
about to fight their own battle, even though some of the facts are inaccurate.
The conclusions of both Faith Healer and Observe the Sons of Ulster are united by
their shared representation of a moment of communion between private and public
identities. At the climax of Faith Healer, Frank Hardy goes out to meet the cripple
McGarvey, in what he knows will be a vain attempt to cure him:

And although I knew that nothing would happen, nothing at all, I walked across the yard
towards them. And as I walked I became possessed of a strange and trembling intimation: that
the whole corporeal world the cobbles, the trees, the sky, those four malign implements
somehow they had shed their physical reality and had become mere imaginings, and that in all
existence there was only myself and the wedding guests. And that intimation in turn gave way
to a stronger sense: that even we had ceased to be physical and existed only in spirit, only in
the need we had for each other.53
In this virtuoso piece of monologue, Frank Hardy is giving himself to others in a moment
of passivity that entails the co-becoming of both self and other. He is representing his own
community in a way that does not seek to dominate those who are being represented, as
had been the case with the violence of representation that he enacted on Grace. This is a
kind of ethical artistry that enables Frank to finally achieve a sense of homecoming54
and a feeling of being one with an entity that is bigger than any one person. This moment
of what Bracha Ettinger would call self-fragilisation55 is powerfully described by Richard
Pine in his wide-ranging study of Friels work, The Diviner: The Art of Brian Friel: In
destroying himself we see that Frank Hardy comes home. He has passed beyond identity,
beyond words, beyond madness, beyond chance, beyond fear, beyond the voices.56 The
sense of the world shedding its physicality as a result of Franks words symbolises the
rejection of a prescriptive, realistic account of this moment in favour of a more open
version that does not seek to fix the people or the place that are being narrated.
The finale of Observe the Sons of Ulster also dramatises a moment of communion
between self and other when Pyper accepts his role as private individual within a broader
community and tradition: Observe the Sons of Ulster marching towards the Somme.
I love their lives. I love my own life. I love my own life. I love my home. I love my
Ulster.57 Pyper is accepting that his existence, although separate and distinct, is also part
of the history of Ulster. He accepts his role as one of the narrators of that unionist identity.
At this moment, the elder Pyper appears and, like Frank Hardy, the younger Pyper
embraces his other in the form of the ghost of his future self.
It is no exaggeration to assert that Seamus Deanes ultimate assessment of Faith
Healer is equally applicable to Frank McGuinness and Observe the Sons of Ulster: The
anguish of the individual life passes over into the communal life through violence, borne in
language. The exploration of that difficult transition . . . is central to his [Friels]
achievement and part of the reason for his importance.58 McGuinness has himself spoken
of the private individual, isolated from the group but groping towards a sense of
communion, as being at the centre of Observe the Sons of Ulster:
44 G. Price
The one thing I see as being missed in it [Observe the Sons of Ulster ] is how lonely each of the
men are and what an enormous effort it is for them to become a body, a troop. I think that
productions have too easily fitted them into slots and too easily seen them as a unit whereas in
fact they are an extremely diverse set of individuals. The psychological pattern in the play is
the making of them into a body of men. Too often they are a body of men at the beginning.
It calls for an exceptional director to refine that process, to bring the ensemble to an ensemble
and then start to break it down . . . I do actually think that they are lonelier at the beginning
than youre aware of in a lot of productions.59
McGuinness is here expressing his belief that one of the movements in Observe the Sons of
Ulster is that from a personal into a communal narrative, without sacrificing the integrity
of the individual in the process. I would argue that this only occurs at the end of
McGuinnesss play, just as it does in Faith Healer. Declan Kiberd has also noted the
conflict between the individual and the group in Observe the Sons of Ulster: Even as the
men merge into a shared identity, they also recognize that each is on his own: and even
Roulston learns that his religious life makes no great difference to one who is no better or
worse than the others.60
In Observe the Sons of Ulster, Pyper gives himself to the past within the present and
the community within the individual. By doing so, Observe the Sons of Ulster orientates
itself towards a future in which people can live as they wish to live and at same time, in an
unconditional act of love, allow other people to live as they would wish to live. It is
possible to interpret the conclusion of Observe the Sons of Ulster as being a metaphor for
McGuinnesss acceptance of the Protestant other in Northern Ireland that he has reached
out to through the act of narration and representation undertaken in Observe the Sons of
Ulster. As Helen Lojek has observed:
If Sons of Ulster began in part as a response to iconography, the play itself has assumed
iconographic importance as an indication of increased understanding by Irish Catholics that
Irish Protestantism is also part of the islands culture and heritage.61
By speaking of Pyper speaking with ghosts, McGuinness is endeavouring to orientate
Ireland, both North and South, towards an uncertain but utopian future.
Frank McGuinness would go on to write many works that echo the central
preoccupations of both Observe the Sons of Ulster and Faith Healer. In Carthaginians the
trauma of recent history is exorcised by confronting memory as represented symbolically
by ghosts. Baglady is a play in which a spectral figure is forced to relive the violence and
sadness of her life through verbal repetition. Works such as Innocence and Mutabilitie
examine the creation of historical narrations and the role of myth-making in such stories.
Arimathea, McGuinnesss first novel, is structured around multiple narrators relating the
same story of an artist figure painting the stations of the cross and the effect he has on the
inhabitants of the Donegal village in which he is working. Thus, Arimathea can be
regarded as a work that moves the style (and partially the content) of Faith Healer out of
the realm of drama and into that of prose. McGuinnesss aesthetic is one that collapses
together history, myth and memory, and Brian Friels Faith Healer was certainly one of
the inspirations for this artistic project.
Notes
1. See Roche, Introduction, viii.
2. McGuinness, Faith Healer, 62.
3. McGuinness, unpublished conversation with Graham Price.
4. McGuinness, Surviving the 1960s, 27.
5. Jordan, Feast of Famine, xiv.
6. Dean, Dancing at Lughnasa, 24 5.

7. See Friel, In Interview with Fintan OToole.
8. Heininge, Observe the Sons of Ulster Talking, 25.
9. Kearney, Transitions, 123.
10. Deane, In Search of a Story, n.p.
11. Kearney, Transitions, 151.
12. Friel, Seven Notes for a Festival Programme, 173.
13. See Russell, Brian Friels Transformation, 467.
14. Roche, Contemporary Irish Drama, 266.
15. See Friel, Faith Healer, 12.
16. Beckett, Waiting for Godot, 62 3.
18. McGuinness, Observe the Sons of Ulster, 155.
19. Derrida, Spectres of Marx, xii. For an extensive consideration of the presence of Derridean
thought in Observe the Sons of Ulster, see Pieter Vermuelens Frank McGuinness Derridean
Mourning and the Translation of Nationalism, http://www.humanities.ualberta.ca/agora/

Articles.cfm@ArticleNo172.html
21. See Yeats, Easter 1916, 121.
22. Friel, Faith Healer, 16.
23. Ibid., 25.
24. Friel, Self Portrait, 38.
26. Ibid., 127.
27. Ibid., 163.
28. See McGrath, Brian Friels (Post) Colonial Drama, 13.
29. For an analysis of Friels debt to Wilde, see Price, An Accurate Description of What has
Never Occurred, 93 111. For a consideration of the importance of Oscar Wildes work to the
drama of Frank McGuinness, see Doody, Beyond the Mask, 69 86.
30. Wilde, Critic as Artist, 1121.
32. Ibid., 98.
33. Friel, Programme Note for Making History, 135.
34. See Friel, Plays Peasant and Unpeasant, 51.
35. Roche, Interview with Frank McGuinness, 23.
37. Ibid., 60.
38. Friel, In Interview with Fintan OToole.
39. See Wilde, Decay of Lying, 1071 92.
40. Friel, Faith Healer, 24 5.
44. Wilde, Soul of Man Under Socialism, 1194.
45. Wilde, Importance of Being Earnest, 376.
46. Friel, Self Portrait, 39.
47. McGuinness, Observe the Sons of Ulster, 98 9.
48. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 54.
49. Pine, Tyranny of Memory, 60.
51. Pine, Tyranny of Memory, 63.
52. See McGuinness, Observe the Sons of Ulster, 183.
54. Ibid., 54.
55. See Ettinger, (M)Other Re-spect, 2. Whilst Ettinger is referring specifically to the self-
fragilising that occurs through the encounter with the pregnant mother and the baby in the
womb, her theorising of such an event has relevance to the co-becoming and co-dissolving that
occurs at the end of Faith Healer.
46 G. Price
56. Pine, The Diviner, 149.

58. Deane, Celtic Revivals, 173.
59. Roche, Interview with Frank McGuinness, 19.
60. Kiberd, Frank McGuinness and the Sons of Ulster, 295.
61. Lojek, Contexts for Frank McGuinnesss Drama, 77.
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